How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/disruptivehq/how-to-build-the-next-trello-and-sell-it-for-425-million-or-more-589045c9bd64#.5ukm4vabe <comment><USER3> I really wish people would stop abusing the term _" disruptive innovation"_ in ways it was never meant to be used. Making a product that's overly complicated, beyond what the market is demanding, is just bad management. It doesn't require any disruptive innovation to correct for this - <USER2> something that better matches your customers' needs is bread-and-butter business management, which every competent company is already doing.

The whole point of disruptive innovation is to build something which most customers _do not want_ , with the bet that due to technology/market trends, market demand will grow exponentially in the future. Unlike the above, this is a real dilemma because if you're an established successful company, it's hard to justify pouring energy and resources into something for which the demand doesn't exist. If you're building something to meet a market demand that already exists, that's not _disruptive innovation_ , that's just _innovation_ , period. It's something people have been doing for millennia, and there's no dilemma here.

Sorry for sounding like an angry old man. It just annoys me when I see specific terms with specific meanings get bastardized into meaningless buzz words.

<comment><USER4> I would add that the disruptive innovation _also_ cannibalizes your existing market business in addition to being something that customers do not want now but will want in the future. If you build something that customers do not want now but will want in the future and it does NOT impact your existing business, that's also just regular old innovation.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, and an obvious example is Apple cannibalizing the demand for it's personal computing systems, by offering mobile devices that nearly replace and obviate key features offered by personal computers.

Had somebody else beaten them to the punch, they'd have suffered from the same disruption, _AND_ lost business.

Because they were early, and had the muscle to withstand the temporary discomfort of being ahead of their time, they could land ahead of schedule and wait for everyone to catch up. At which point they were able to guide a massive avalanche in their favor.

It's not a requirement that the cannibalized market should be held by the disruptor. The market that gets destroyed doesn't have to be your own, but 'tis better to be the disruptor than the disrupted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm. I don't think I can get behind the idea that Trello "disrupted" Atlassian, and certainly not that it would have killed them (no more than Medium killed WordPress...). At most, it may have killed Jira, but Trello seems to capture a slightly different market. Could there be a slimmed version of Jira that could fit in place of Trello? Sure, but I don't think Atlassian would have gone that route (thus the acquisition, right?). Then, when their big product paid off, they bought the sub market as well.

Re:integration, I also think he shortchanges Atlassian. I like Atlassian, so I'm biased, sure, but I think that they could successfully integrate without "killing" Trello. Time will tell on that, I suppose. Also, to say that "Android isn't incorporated into Google" just doesn't seem right. It's also completely different. Google acquired Android, which is a mobile platform, where they're a web company. Atlassian and Trello both offer web based services, and in this case even the same type of product.

<comment><USER7> One way to look at this is that companies go upmarket from a firm base of downmarket customers. There's a lot of uncertainty in upmarket enterprise sales: the engagements can involve RFPs or bakeoffs and involve dogfights that incumbents can lose to upstarts. A company can do really well in the high-end markets without ever having a stable, defensible customer base in it.

So if Trello grows to the point where it seriously threatens Jira's downmarket base, Atlassian has two problems: first, that Trello is sapping their downmarket revenue, but second, that Trello then has a beachhead from which to start attacking their high-end prospects as well.

"Killing Atlassian" is surely easier said than done, and probably hyperbolic. But buying Trello to prevent the emergence of a credible competitor to them across all their important markets? That sounds like a pretty plausible explanation for the valuation.

I'm a little skeptical, though, if only because I think Trello has a lot more potential than Jira (and of Jira's value proposition in the abstract). I think Atlassian just bought the next Microsoft Excel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The authors advice -

>Make something the mainstream market doesn't want now, but will want later.

seems rather different from the thinking of the Trello team when they actually made Trello, as described by Joel Splosky:

>After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction was "why the hell are you working on THAT?" So one of the teams started working on finding better ways to keep track of who was working on what. It had to be super simple and friction-free so that everyone would use it, but it had to be powerful, too.

>...led us to the idea that became Trello. Pretty soon we had four programmers and two summer interns working on it. We started dogfooding the product when it was only 700 lines of code, and even in that super-simple form, we found it incredibly useful.

So basically they built it to scratch their own itch, not as some disruptive masterplan.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/09/13/announcing- trello/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/09/13/announcing-trello/)

<comment><USER9> I have a hard time believing anyone promising you success, instead of going on to get it themselves. Its exactly like selling Agile; mostly people who can barely build working products in the first place, but will happily teach you how to run your projects. Its "one weird trick" all over again with different demographics.

I firmly believe you need to dogfood your own product in order to fully understand its potential. How can you solve a problem you don't understand and what better way to understand a problem than to experience it first hand?

A product can be shiny and "awesome" all it wants; if it doesn't solve an actual problem, or isn't convenient enough to solve the problem, it just wont last.

<comment><USER8> He seems to be giving his strategy a go with his trello rip off like startup clever.do

Dunno how well - 470 views in 3 months on the demo vid [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEL06gDIBw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEL06gDIBw)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Trello will never hold a candle to Jira for users with complex needs. Trello is deliberately simple while Jira is deliberately complex. Also the screenshots comparing a Sprint board to a Kanban board is like comparing apples and oranges.

<comment> some-guy I work in enterprise, and our use case for JIRA is so utterly complex to meet all of the requirements / standards that I cannot even imagine how a migration to Trello would work.

I see this acquisition as both a) a smaller alternative to JIRA that is much easier to use (but fundamentally different) and b) a way to prevent Trello from growing into something bigger, more complex, and become a big competitor to Atlassian.

I use Trello with my fiancé to organize our wedding planning, house chores, and projects, but I cannot even imagine how awful it would be for my work's use case.

<comment><USER11> It is also a good marketing channel for Jira. If someone uses Trello and need something more complex the easy way is a board in Jira, perhaps make something which converts your board or 2 way sync. Marketing departments like Trello but would never use Jira. But after using Trello for a while they might be more comfortable using something more complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a Software Developer, working with Jira is just a pain for me. I just don't like much about it, the less time I spend using it the happier I am. There dozens of views of the same information, but just different enough to get me lost. I have to admit, I did not buckle down to 'tame' the beast. It feels like hiking a steep hill on a rainy day.

Trello, on the other hand I introduced to some colleagues, and the simplicity and ease of use is very satisfying. Feels like surfing on the perfect wave.

<comment><USER13> > As a Software Developer, working with Jira is just a pain for me.

Said every software developer ever about every bug tracking/ticketing system ever.

> Trello, on the other hand I introduced to some colleagues, and the > simplicity and ease of use is very satisfying.

Said about every new bug tracking/ticketing system ever. Until you need to do X, and we need to track Y, and Z needs to sign off before ...

The real problem is that most developers write shitty bug reports. The reason for all those annoying fields in the bug reporting system is that most developers won't include them without it.

There is a fine line between having a bug reporting system which is just sufficiently annoying enough to the end users to give just enough information to the people fixing the bugs.

<comment><USER14> > Said every software developer ever about every bug tracking/ticketing system > ever.

Trello is not a pain for me to use. It would be for others, with different needs, but it's perfect for me.

> Until you need to do X, and we need to track Y, and Z needs to sign off > before ...

For many people these don't necessarily get in the way. I've been using trello for a few years on some projects from start to launch, and a winding down of development. It doesn't get in my way, and the lack of features hasn't caused problems.

Sure, we could have gone with Jira just in case things got massively more complicated, but we were easily able to deal with the odd edge case by talking to each other, assigning cards or putting notes on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well there's also no mention of the following and general goodwill Joel has accumulated over the years (mostly by being awesome, honest and also working hard on other products). Pretty sure he/his company could indeed build the next Trello by building a simpler X of something. People without that channel...that's going to be a tiny bit harder.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, step one to building the next Trello is _be Joel Spolsky, or possibly 37Signals; failing that, be [otherwise] exceptionally good at marketing and generating goodwill_. Because the reality is that "it's simpler to use, more general and has less bloat than the market leader" is not a unique selling point, it's something pretty much every new entrant into a market achieves by default. So you have to do a lot more than that for your KISS general productivity/collaboration app to stand out, particularly if starting from the significantly disadvantaged starting point of not being Joel Spolsky

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The picture comparison of boards is a joke. Why would you show the Trello board view compared to a list of tickets in a sprint? The author must not know how to use Jira and create a Kanban board.

I actually prefer Trello over Jira but, I have to use Jira at work. Still I couldn't take this article seriously after seeing that picture comparison.

<comment><USER7> I feel like this comment literally makes the author's case for him.

<comment><USER18> Not really .. The boards are a very basic feature in Jira. It's like not knowing that there are drawing tools in PowerPoint :)

<comment><USER7> That's the whole Innovator's Dilemma argument: simplistic, minimal versions of the value propositions of larger products, produced by upstarts, have an uncanny way of stealing the entire market from incumbents. The key thing you said was "I actually prefer Trello over Jira".

The reason that happens is that the incumbent --- along with their most vocal customers! --- is blinded to what 80% of the market wants by the demands of the high-end 20% of the market. Yes, Trello hasn't duplicated the entire Jira product. But it might not need to to capture 80% of the revenue of the market.

<comment><USER17> Yes I prefer the simple Trello over Jira but, only for my own personal projects. Trello is completely useless where I work and, is in no way, disruptive to the Enterprise.

My point was that, if you can't figure out where a Kanban board is in Jira you should probably stick to Waterfall development. The author either didn't spend a few minutes looking at Jira or has no clue what the real difference between the two products are.

I highly doubt Trello would have replaced Jira at the pace the article suggests. Either Trello would become overly complex or Jira would adapt and become simpler and add even more needed features. I don't believe Atlassian bought Trello out of fear that Trello would innovate them out of market. That dilema just doesn't apply here IMO.

<comment><USER19> We experimented with Trello at our company before we bought into Jira, and the attempt fell flat on its face because of Trello simplicity. It's hard to describe the difference, but in a nutshell Jira was better at supporting collaboration, capturing knowledge, and supporting subtly different workflows that different teams required.

Based on that, it's kind of a neat move by Atlassian. Now they have an instant base of potential new Jira users. As these Trello customers grow and find out that their needs can no longer be met, now there is a clear upgrade path.

Presumably they will build some migration tools to make the upgrade seamless/convert the database of tickets. Or they could even build in cross- product integration so you can embed links to Jira tickets in Trello cards, or vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article was well written and surprisingly did give a plausible reason why Trello grew and was later acquired.

<comment><USER21> Trello grew because it was very KISS. The features were so-so but everyone could use it easily. Atlassian just purchased the bottom segment of the project market, the segment that would never use JIRA in a million years because of it's complexity.

<comment><USER22> Yep, they're consolidating the market and becoming a bigger monopoly. At almost every company, and especially the large ones, JIRA is the "tool" that is used.

I keep wondering whatever happened to all the other tools out there because everyone in corporate life has consolidated on this big complex tool. Maybe all other project and task management tools were too open/open source? Didn't _feel_ enterprise-y enough for managers?

<comment><USER23> youtrack is alive and well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Obviously I wouldn't look at this as a recipe for success, but the author does provide some pretty interesting insights. I do think that it is easy to look back at sparse events like acquisitions and try see patterns, whereas in fact there is a fair amount of luck, timing and personal connections involved in the acquisition game.

<comment><USER25> > I wouldn't look at this as a recipe for success

I think it is a recipe for success, but that doesn't mean it's easy. You can't just find a successful product that's overly complex and remove a bunch of features and succeed. You need to spend time understanding the market and the customers, figure out the sweet spot to aim for and then what features are actually necessary for that sweet spot and then ruthlessly say no to everything else. Many products have multiple sweet spots in the market and an up-market product can obscure the fact that there's another, more down-market product opportunity. Identifying that opportunity and then executing well is a pretty sure recipe for success, but it's really hard to do.

The people who should take heed of this advice are those who are less creative and visionary but are disciplined and skilled enough to build a quality product. There will always be product opportunities for people who can see 5-10 years out and either predict the future or lead people to their vision of the future. But that's not most people and there's no shame in admitting that. For those of us not in that visionary group, the strategy presented here is a pretty good alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article is making the obvious comparison, but it falls down on the slightest inspection because Trello and JIRA aren't really even in the same space. Yes, Trello can substitute for JIRA if your needs are simple, and yes JIRA has boards to meet different kinds of planning workflows, but the actual overlap of usages is pretty small.

What made Trello successful is that it is an incredibly simple SPA that never wavered in its vision. The minute Trello designers try to go down the road of meeting the needs of a ticketing system then the magic and broad utility of Trello will be poisoned.

There's probably some truth to the claim that Trello was eating some of the low-end of JIRA's market, but it would never credibly kill Atlassian, at least not without branching out into a lot of other products first.

The acquisition makes a lot more sense to me in the portfolio building aspect, Trello can satisfy a very wide array of business needs that go well beyond traditional dev tools. I put it more in the category of Dropbox Paper—simple, modern, real-time-collaboration-based, mobile-friendly tools with a very strong essential vision leading to extremely broad utility.

</comment><comment><USER27> For anyone interested in reading more about this, Clayton Christensen covers this area in The Innovators Dilemma.

[https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary- Chan...](https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change- Business/dp/0062060244/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1485379404&sr=8-2&keywords=innovators+dilemma)

</comment><comment><USER28> With SaaS, there's almost always room for better. Better to the value of $435m plus? Depends. But enough potential returns to make it worth the effort if you're able and willing.

Another thing Trello had going for it was a decent brand. It didn't (and doesn't) feel project management-y.

 _Ooh, nice colors. Aww, taco the mascot. And look, not 100 bells and whistles_. This initial conditioning is super-valuable. I had the exact same feeling moving from Google docs to Quip (mentioned in the article).

Choosing to add more feeling instead of more features has benefits.

</comment><comment><USER29> What if we all did this and got hundreds of millions of dollars! Think of the inflation! ;)

</comment><comment><USER30> So much BS in this article but let's start with these 3: 1) "Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient to use." How many more benefits can he put in that sentence? He's basically saying disruptive tech is typically cheaper or better. 2) "Make something the mainstream market doesn't want now, but will want later." Trying to predict the future is just betting on luck. 3) That random functionality vs time graph. What is 200 Functionality?

Bonus: "If you want to get ideas for your $400 million startup, subscribe to my newsletter."

<comment><USER7> Since this article is basically a straightforward blog-sized recap of Clayton Christensen's _Innovator's Dilemma_, which is one of the more important business books in technology, it seems unlikely to me that the whole piece is "BS".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> not sure if the takeaway is

\- no way to improve a software product without increasing cost and complexity

\- no way to protect your franchise with e.g., a lower cost entry-level product, market segmentation, a simplified freemium, etc.

\- so the incumbent always has to buy up upstarts that threaten it

(which anyway you can't do once the market prices in that the upstart is going to kill you)

overall the blog post seems a bit cargo cult-y ... if there are lazy incumbents with overpriced, bloated products, yeah, you're doing God's work by disrupting them. But it's sometimes harder than it looks. Don't spend your $425m just yet.

</comment><comment><USER32> The article makes some excellent points. However I'm not sure I understand how acquiring Trello would save JIRA.

First off, I'm not sure that JIRA is in need of saving. IMHO it has grown to become a very bloated product which very few people really know how to use. If I were to pick a tool for project management, I wouldn't consider JIRA for one second. On the other hand, they have a fine game going in the enterprise segment. Enterprises value a bloated feature set because they pay up big money and because Bob in purchasing needs something semi-substantial to justify the high cost. Besides, Bob won't be using the product anyway.

Trello, on the other hand, would be favored by different types of customers. Small projects, small companies. It offers low pricing, has a small sales department and a large customer base.

According to Joel Spolsky, in his "Camels and Rubber Duckies" blog post ([https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and- rubber-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber- duckies/)), there is usually no middle road. There is rarely a segment for a mid-range product with half the feature set of the enterprise product and a far higher price than the simple product.

Which begs the question: What does Atlassian hope to achieve?

1) create some unified product which will cater to both the garage startup and to Bob in purchasing? Good luck with that

2) turn off Trello? That's what Darth Vader would have done but there is a certain amount of negative publicity to using the death star ray

3) Make Trello rot, either by

3a) stopping funding of Trello and let it become slowly obsolete

3b) sprinkling with bloated features, such as JIRA integration or what have we

Probably 3b).

Anyway, move Trello too much off its current trajectory and boom, some new startup will pop up, offer an "Import Data from Trello" feature and do things right. Trello is pretty simple by design, and the APIs are open. There is really no customer lock-in. I think Atlassian is smart enough to know this.

</comment><comment><USER33> No matter how good your JIRA-alternative is, persuading people to manage a project in a different way is _exceptionally_ hard, and has very little to do with your tech. Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like to deviate from known methodologies. My startup was in this space (managing projects, with a focus on requirements and change), and we failed because we underestimated how hard it would be to get customers to even _try_ a different approach.

<comment><USER34> > Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like to deviate > from known methodologies.

It's treated more as a set of religious rituals justified by received wisdom (which, to be fair, gives even less flexibility for change than if it were viewed as a science, in which case practices would be based on systematically gathered evidence and change in response to new evidence, rather than changing mostly when people indoctrinated in a different tradition come to power in an organization.)

<comment><USER33> Actually yes, that does seem to be a more appropriate analogy. A lot of the time people follow a system without testing whether or not it's working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It wouldn't of killed Jira, I've tried using trello as a replacement for Jira, it was sort of okish, but was kind of awkward. Then moved to Youtrack, and never looked back really, seemed to have a nice blend of trello and Jira

</comment><comment><USER35> "I'm sure many of Altlassian's employees don't understand this decision. Because it makes no sense for them. In their minds, Trello is a shitty product compared to Jira."

everyone inside thats not a manager thinks jira is shit too

</comment><comment><USER36> > Atlassian bought Trello for $425 million. Because Trello was on trajectory > to kill Atlassian.

Please write complete sentences. Some people in the tech community seem to think that sentence fragments can replace clear, simple sentences.

<comment><USER37> As this is a comment on a grammar point of the submission article, directed at the author itself, it would likely be better as a comment on the article, which Medium supports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't think the author used Jira. Stopped reading at "Trello created a cheaper, simpler, and smaller version of Jira."

<comment><USER39> I use Jira. Trello is a cheaper, simpler, and smaller version of Jira.

<comment><USER40> Sounds like you're using jira wrong.

I suppose you can encode anything onto index cards. This doesn't mean it's usable.

<comment><USER25> > Sounds like you're using jira wrong.

So are 90% of Jira's users. That's the point.

<comment><USER10> Jira used correctly will triumph over Trello used correctly any day of the week. But for the lazy with simple needs, sure use Trello.

<comment><USER40> Hmm, I can definitely see that. JIRA can be the slowest, awkward, non- intuitive piece of crap web app out there.

<comment><USER41> Sounds like you've never used Target Process

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Its product had less features. It was simple. And it was fucking cheap. It was disruptive!"

I feel this is the wrong way to describe Trello's success. i can build an app with a blank white space and charge $0 for it - that has less features and is very simple but it aint gonna sell for a million dollars.

</comment><comment><USER43> So, what startup ideas can we create from this?

<comment><USER44> Same as always: take a complicated, expensive product, strip it down to an MVP, put it online for free with a SaaS price tag for premium features, and market it like hell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> so is Spolsky still blogging, or is he too busy counting his money?</comment>


Ask HN: As a recruiter, would you prefer traditional resume or social resume? - <AUTHOR>

As a recruiter myself I frequently receive 2 page format resume. However, they fail to show insight of a candidate. I am more interested in getting to know about candidate's online contribution as well such as on github, stackoverflow, dribbble (if designer) and so on.<p>What do you all think? <comment><USER2> As a worker (not a recruiter), I found the same as you. I used to send CVs (that's what they asked for), and they replied me with more info, because the bullet list wasn't enought.

After that, I don't send CVs anymore. I write a text (like a blog post) about what I know, what I did, how I did, what I enjoy, etc. Like a letter talking about myself. It worked perfectly everytime. I know recruiters may find boring to read a lot of them, but that's what I do now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's better than paper resume. It is very difficult to find right candidate when you look at hundreds of CVs and practically they all look same. Since few months, I started to ask online activity of candidates which is working quite well for me. We are happy with recent hires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I prefer structured text (aka CV). Even in case of free text, you just parse it to extract that structured information - experience, past employers, skills, etc... but you just compare other irrelevant part of the text to other candidates irrelevant part of the text. It becomes more like a gambling rather than objective justification. Who's text is original? personal? better arranged?

And you'll surely miss many great minds just because their text was not that touchy... Please also don't overemphasize on online activity, be it blogs, github or stackoverflow. Again, you'll miss many great minds.

</comment><comment><USER4> You need both. There's many red flags which will only be apparent on a resume (candidate doesn't have work authorization for the country, large unexplained gaps in work history, rapid turn-over of employment), plus it's much easier to quickly process large number of resumes, etc.

But as you say online presence can often add colour to a candidates profile.</comment>


Plenty, Indoor Farming Startup, Raises $200M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/19/billionaires-make-it-rain-on-plenty-the-indoor-farming-startup/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook <comment><USER2> See previous recent discussion of indoor/vertical farming (1).

As discussed on that thread, vertical/indoor farming is great for leafy greens, but much harder for other plants.

See this video [2] - "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet: Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)".

A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead - correct link[3]).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347288)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw)

[3] [https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787](https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787)

<comment><USER3> This is absolutely crucial. I love indoor farming, I've built some hydroponics systems before, automated a bunch and spoke with my municipality about urban farming projects.

But anyone who looks into it long enough finds that indoor-farming only works for leafy greens. Not because they're leafy greens, but because they're low- caloric plants.

i.e. a whole head of lettuce is about 50 calories. No wonder you can grow it under artificial lighting in water.

That works for a commercial solution: a (hyper) 'local' head of lettuce, produced without any pesticides, by turning a shop or office or otherwise urban environment into 'nature', is lovely and can (with some ignorance on the part of the customer) sell at a premium. But indoor farming still does nothing to impact our ecological footprint at any scale. Once you can produce our _staple_ foods in a manner that's less energy intensive inside than outside, that'd be amazing. But I haven't ever seen anything like that proposed on a major scale.

<comment><USER4> I don't think growing staples within cities will be economically viable within our lifetimes. As a general rule, agricultural land use orders itself around it's markets according to transportation. The more delicate the produce, the closer the producers must be to a city. There's even a (very simple, it's from the 19th century) model for this, which is the Von Thünen's model of land use.

I wish I had some actual data easy at hand to show you, but this is more or less observable from history. Until active refrigeration, spoilage losses associated with the more delicate agricultural products pretty much put them outside of the reach of the majority of urban dwellers. If you wanted any sort of fresh dairy, fresh meat, fresh vegetables or fresh fruit in say, the early 19th century, you'd better live on a farm. So whereas a farmer might have had fresh milk, a city worker would have cheese, and instead of fresh meat, cured meat, and so on.

But anyway, in short of the whole world becoming one huge city, it's unlikely that staples would ever be grown inside them.

<comment><USER5> >There's even a (very simple, it's from the 19th century) model for this, which is the Von Thünen's model of land use.

Fun fact, Von Thünen's model was the original inspiration for "zone planning." [https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-...](https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture- design-principles/4-zones-and-sectors-efficient-energy-planning/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The short article doesn't provide info about the technology to be used in "indoor farming", so I can't say too much about it.

However based on past experience with growing crops under artificial light, I wonder if the investment makes sense. There are a number of issues that have to be addressed, the most urgent is providing enough light for plants to grow. Sunlight is _very expensive_ to replicate with human-made light sources, the energy requirements are steep even with the most efficient illumination available.

Indoor culture is still subject to "standard" problems like insects, plant diseases, nutrient and water supply requirements. These are handled routinely in growing "under glass" so probably nothing novel in it for indoor production.

Except for human interplanetary travel, the applications for "indoor growing" are hard to imagine. It used to be people would grow cannabis indoors where doing so was illegal, the priced fetched for the product justified the expense of the operation. For food crops, who would pay the high cost that has to be charged just to break even?

One year I successfully produced a small bounty of tomatoes in the dead of winter under artificial light. When all was done and said I calculated the 5cm tomatoes were worth about $25 each ($30 adjusted for inflation). Even with economies of scale and better technology, who would pay $10 or more for a mere tomato when it's readily available at a nearby grocery for a tenth the cost?

If I'm somehow missing the boat, I'm sure someone will lend me a clue.

<comment><USER7> What kind of light were you using?

I currently use 5w LED grow lights for garden vegetable hydroponics. They are very cost effective. At about 12p/kwh, make it easy and say lights on for 10 hours a day, that would be 1 kwh every 20 days per light, so 12p per 20 days per light.

From what I understand from people who need to also provide heat to their crops, what they save in electricity cost with LEDs, they end up spending in heating costs. So in some cases it can be a bit of a wash

<comment><USER6> At the time I was using metal halide/HP sodium lamps. Not as efficient as LED to be sure (LED gives >1.5 times the output per watt) but at scale, even with LED, the energy input required remains substantial. LED does have advantages, e.g., easier to supply illumination at plant level, but indoor growing is still not a cheap or easy thing to accomplish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since indoor farming is best for low caloric leafy greens, I assumed the long term strategy of these companies was based on the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana. As in, grow leafy veggies or tomatoes in vertical, urban farms for now to work out the logistical and scale issues, then switch to substantially higher value crop as the political situation changes.

Given the new administration in the US and the Attorney General's push on marijuana, if this was the endgame of these start ups, it will be a bumpy ride.

<comment><USER9> I can't believe I had to scroll all the way down here to find this comment. If true, then this is a variation of land banking, but I agree with you on how unstable the political picture is at the moment for pot legalization, hence making this business model a little dicey.

However, I've yet to run across an explanation that squares the "they're positioning themselves for growing pot" hypothesis with the question, "why indoors?". If pot is legalized, why grow it more expensively indoors, when it can be another cash crop for far cheaper outdoors?

<comment><USER10> More control over the product. You can grow "clones" of a plant which effectively make them identical to each other but if one gets more light, more humidity, literally just about anything, it can alter the resulting trichomes and terpenes. By controlling more variables you can have a slightly more reliable product.

And people can get very picky about their weed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I haven't heard of Plenty before. At first I thought they wanted to build indoor farms _in_ cities, but I guess you could still build them someplace else (where real estate is fairly cheap) and make turnaround _faster_ by taking advantage of indoor technology instead of using fields. [The articles mentions LocalGarden and FarmedHere, which I guess is where my impression came from.]

Is that where they hope to make their money - getting consumers to pay for fresher food? Or else, can they grow better produce indoors? Just trying to understand their value proposition.

Not long ago I was reading about a different thing called Farmbot. There's a discussion online about how much area you'd need to grow all your own food. They calculated something like 250 square meters using black beans. I was really impressed by how much _space_ food production takes up. It's funny to think that just to survive, each of us living in a city depends on a big chunk of land somewhere else.

[https://farmbot.io/2015/10/14/how-much-food-can-farmbot- grow...](https://farmbot.io/2015/10/14/how-much-food-can-farmbot-grow/)

<comment><USER12> A few things make this a good value prop:

\- It's much easier to grow plants inside because you don't have to worry about weird weather like frost or insects or fungus etc.

\- You can claim organic status and that puts you in a higher price bracket

\- You don't need to spend anywhere near as much on transportation so that saves you lots of cash

\- You can have much tighter control of supply/demand dynamics (for instance ship smaller batches) because of local proximity

I'm sure there are more but those are the ones that spring to mind.

<comment><USER13> A few things that make it less good value:

\- Its not new tech, its greenhouses with indoor lighting

\- Its an enclosed large monoculture of plants, which means you are prone to pest and fungus. [see note]

\- It has a very large electricity demand (heat and electricity)

\- It is labour intensive.

[note]

growing plants in the city is difficult, mainly because the food triangle is so distorted. In central london there are loads of aphids from the lime trees, and lots of powder mildew.

Now considering these setups are aimed at green leafy rapid growth plants, you're going to be spending lots of importing ladybirds. (not much you can do about powder mildew though)

<comment><USER14> I've been led to believe you'd be best served with a clean room setup of some level, clean clothes and all.

edit: anyway, _within the city_ is a ridiculous proposal at scale, if housing is scarce already. Except for huge price differentials as from cannabis.

<comment><USER13> The clean room would explain the cost. if the yield is really 500x traditional farms, that explains why its still more expensive than "organic" produce

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's no shortage in players in this space: Alterrus (built Vancouver's vertical farm, filed bankruptcy), infarm (Germany), aerofarms (US), growup (UK).

There are lots of issues to settle with vertical farming. One is organic labelling, which is N/A for detached soil in most (all?) countries. They can't compete in the non-organic market.

There's currently nothing "sustainable" or "ecologic" about these indoor farms. They are used to grow leisure low-calorie high price ingredients for hipsters.

<comment><USER16> Assuming they manage the convince a large player in the organic retail biz to play they can create some sort of a "label" and go from there. Not that big of an issue.

<comment><USER15> This is not how food labelling usually works.

For the current state of hydroponics in the US: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/04/18/usda-to- we...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/04/18/usda-to-weigh-in-on- whether-organic-farming-means-using-soil/#60724cf046be)

<comment><USER17> The article says the USDA would make a decision on April 19th of this year but I can't find what that decision was. Do you know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am amazed and wish them luck, but it's almost impossible to imagine the economics of this. Whatever equation you write up there are at least two impossible factors: indoor land vs. outdoor "land" price is like 4000-10000 times higher, and growth time / logistics time is like 1000? I can imagine this in a fine restaurant though, picking a tomato in front of your eyes and chopping it, not too shabby!

<comment><USER19> As others here have pointed out, it undoubtedly only makes economic sense in a few niche scenarios right now. Premium hyper-local urban boutique veggies used in small quantities, or perhaps supplementing MREs in very remote, isolated military/industrial compounds (possibly including Mars?).

However, if we were facing the specter of a global nuclear winter - or similar effects from a large asteroid impact, ground/water pollution, etc. - I think something would be worked out with regard to the 'cost of renting' large indoor spaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This round is likely to be a combination of equity, debt and non-dilutive capital like project finance -- and it is not the first 9-figure deal in indoor ag, just the first made public this way. Indoor ag is growing quickly and investor appetites are up.

I am co-founder of a venture-backed indoor ag company. Here is a good summary of the "on the ground" view authored from the woman who runs Indoor Ag Con where Plenty presented a couple months ago: [https://agfundernews.com/will-2017-bring-indoor- ag.html](https://agfundernews.com/will-2017-bring-indoor-ag.html)

The calorie problem is true. You can't feed the world on leafy greens. Many startups are trying to combine aquaponics to provide protein with leafy greens. Those startups are not as far along as Plenty.

Cannabis is great but the cost and price are both on an almost inevitable path to commodification. It's high-value now but it will not always be high value.

Insects may be the greatest area for advancement in indoor ag. Insects can be used for protein, vitamins and nutrients and calories from fat concentrations.

The real advantage is something analogous to alternative energy's advantages: distributed infrastructure with lower risk and lower volatility.

</comment><comment><USER21> SoftBank is on a rip, wow.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank/timeline#/t...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/softbank/timeline#/timeline/index)

<comment><USER22> The country has negative interest rates. That money has to go to work somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There was a question posted in the techcrunch comments section regarding Nitrogen fertiliser from natural gas being used heavily in vertical farms such as this. I understand thats the case for a lot of agriculture regardless. That having been the case, regardless of how 'green' these companies try to go, aren't they really just using fossil fuels en mass the same as everyone else ?

<comment><USER24> It's no different than shipping your product in plastic containers.

Sure, there's a dead dinosaur somewhere up the supply chain but unless whatever your company's industrial process is is incredibly inefficient it's not a big deal.

<comment><USER5> >Sure, there's [fossil fuels] somewhere up the supply chain but... it's not a big deal.

It is if you want sustainable food production.

An unsustainable system is _by definition_ in the process of destroying itself. I don't know about you, but I want humanity to continue having food for generations to come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This smells like a long play on cannabis. As it becomes further legalized across the country the demand will grow for suppliers.

</comment><comment><USER26> Farming startup that literally raises money is kinda fun.

<comment><USER27> Growing money on... leafy plants?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Their idea is very cool. their logo looks like a toilet paper brand.

</comment><comment><USER29> Indoor farms makes sense to me as a dual-use house plant, i.e. if I'm going to have house plants, they may as well be edible.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you currently learning in your spare time? - <AUTHOR> HNers, what are you currently learning in your spare time? Some new js framework? Machine learning? New devops technics?<p>:) <comment><USER3> I'm learning German. I've never learnt a non-machine language before and having just moved to Berlin I thought I'd try not being that jerk foreigner that only speaks english, even after living here for 2 years. So far it's been quite fun. Last week I finally cracked the level where I understood a conversation of a Couple passing me on the street.

<comment><USER4> Nice! I am also learning German. I've just moved to Heidelberg about 10 months ago. It is a difficult language... :/

Did you take classes?

<comment><USER5> Hey, I'm also located in Heidelberg, born here, if you ever want to get a coffee and practice a bit let me know.

<comment><USER4> Hey that would be great. I am a bit new to HN, is there a way to PM someone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm about to start the assignment for the 5th week of Machine Learning on Coursera [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning)

<comment><USER7> That's awesome! I hope to go through that course soon. I just finished 2nd week assignments of Algorithms- Design and Analysis on Coursera - [https://www.coursera.org/course/algo](https://www.coursera.org/course/algo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Meditation.

Oh, and how to consume large amounts of ethanol without it tasting like anything. That's mostly a weekend project with a couple of mates.

</comment><comment><USER9> Clojure! And I'm absolutely loving it so far. =)

I've been working through the HackerRank Functional Programming challenges lately and have found it to be a great resource for getting accustomed to solving problems in a functional mindset. I suspect it'd be just as useful for any other functional language that they support.

[https://www.hackerrank.com/domains/fp/intro](https://www.hackerrank.com/domains/fp/intro)

Next step is to actually build something with it. I have a rough idea for my next project but before starting on that I should probably release my current project and get a job...

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been reading bits about Erlang and Lisp-flavored Erlang ([http://lfe.io/](http://lfe.io/)). I ported Norvig's Lispy ([http://norvig.com/lispy.html](http://norvig.com/lispy.html)) to Java as a weekend project and now I'm curious about Pixie ([https://github.com/pixie- lang/pixie](https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie))

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been digging into Haskell in the time I have to program at home. Im going through the course at [http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html](http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html).

In addition to the classes, I've been trying to use it to write small programs and whatnot.

While I can't use Haskell at work, I can say working with it more regularly has definitely improved the JavaScript code I write on the job.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been picking up a skill that's probably best described as "living as a body" (as opposed to identifying with and being the thoughts in your head). To borrow terms from Thinking Fast and Slow, it's deliberately acting more from a System 1 kind of place.

Recommended reading - "The Inner Game of Tennis" and "Impro" by Keith Johnstone. These are pretty easy reads and have helped me out tremendously in unexpected ways.

</comment><comment><USER13> Although I already have my finance degree and wouldn't so much need it, getting my CFA is a near-term goal.

Learning wise, trying to completely re-learn mathematics, starting with books like the Mathematicians Delight and beginning with the most basic arithmetic, hopefully up through diffy q's, linear algebra, and intermediate stat. If anybody has any good tips on completely teaching yourself math from start to finish, please send them my way!

<comment><USER14> Good luck with the CFA! It's a great program. I didn't expect it at first, but the best lesson I got out of it was that it taught me how to study and teach myself a subject comprehensively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> After several years of wanting to play an instrument, and wanting to draw, I'm sitting down and actually doing both of those. It's been a bit liberating, doing something so different from my day job, yet it's helping me look at programming in a new light.

</comment><comment><USER16> UML. Technically this is for a master's, but that's my spare time. I do find it interesting to see why it's not really used. So verbose, but not detailed enough for great communication.

<comment><USER17> _UML - Unnecessary Management Lingo._ \- @iamdevloper

 _UML - I know next to nothing about UML - but what I do know is the language was invented first and then people came around and tried to give semantics to the language. Well, in other words what that means is that the language was invented first and it really didn 't mean anything. And then, later on, people came around to try to figure out what it meant. Well, that's not the way to design a specification language. The importance of a specification language is to specify something precisely, and therefore what you write - <USER2> specification you write - has to have a precise, rigorous meaning._ \- Leslie Lamport

 _UML: a language that was invented first and then people came around to try to get semantics._ \- Leslie Lamport

 _UML: fuzzy pictures of boxes and arrows._ \- Leslie Lamport

 _People use UML, things like UML, to model programs, but it 's not clear how to translate them in to sequences of states, for concurrency. If you cannot translate them in to sequences of states, it means you don't understand them, and it may mean that there's nothing there. You know, there are lots of people selling snake-oil, drawing boxes and arrows that make you feel good, but ultimately have no real meaning. If something is really meaningful you should be able to express it in mathematics._ \- Leslie Lamport

... ie. it's not used much because it lacks precision of expression, and its main competitor is informal diagramming: a couple of boxes and a line on a whiteboard are 90% as effective as UML, and actually function for a general audience. (Quotes from [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup))

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice thread. Gotta say, listing all this makes me feel a hell of a lot less lazy! (In southwest China...)

1\. Classical Chinese, by translating old texts on Wikisource: [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu)

2\. Just brushed up on technical drawing and woodworking to get new office furniture built.

3\. Fatherhood.

4\. Event planning. I'm trying to set up a community event to take ~40 party people down to a nearby lake to spend a day in the sun on the lakeshore and go sailing on two Weta Trimarans I transported here last year. [http://wetamarine.com/](http://wetamarine.com/) \+ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuxian_Lake](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuxian_Lake) ... brushed up on sailing a year ago, it'd been 20 years.

5\. Winemaking. The focus is on arriving at a process and set of inputs that result in a scalable and commercially viable range of non-grape based wines (cider/perry type drinks, but not limited to apples and pears), then flip it and registered IP to a large and established distributor, and use the knowledge and cash gained to do some small-batch, higher-end organic type stuff.

6\. Improving my poetry: I am part of a very international poetry group which meets once every week or two and reads and discusses poetry in English and Chinese, with occasional additional languages.

7\. Modern history. I joined a Marxist reading group and am learning a lot about the history of late 19th century/early 20th century Europe as well as various shades of communist/socialist ideology. (Previously, living in China, I have stayed consciously ignorant of such things, which I had never found particularly interesting.)

8\. Philosophy of mathematics. Currently reading _Pi in the Sky_ which is an awesome book which I would particularly recommend as a very readable, tangent- laden ponder for programmers without a significant background in formal mathematics who like history, mathematics or philosophy.

9\. Documentary filmmaking + new software. Currently working on a social documentary of foreigners living in this corner of southwest China. Although I'd done some since analog days, this is my first major project and I'm using the new Lightworks software on Gentoo Linux: [http://www.lwks.com/](http://www.lwks.com/) .. also planning to finish by end of year.

<comment><USER18> Cool. Kunming? I am in south Taiwan =)

<comment><USER17> Yep. Kunming. I cycled down the Taiwanese coast years ago - [http://pratyeka.org/bike/eastern- taiwan.html](http://pratyeka.org/bike/eastern-taiwan.html) ... very interesting country, I've been back maybe 5 times, but not enough wilderness for my liking. Almost forgot - starting a maker space [http://cave.pratyeka.org/](http://cave.pratyeka.org/)

<comment><USER18> Ah, I think you missed the mountains in the middle =). I spent a month in Yunnan a couple years ago and hope to revisit. Not enough freedom of speech for my liking.

Your maker space looks awesome! I have the same idea to open a shared hacking space in Kaohsiung

<comment><USER17> True, I only crossed a little of the mountains. Nice but nothing on Yunnan.

Freedom of speech is something I am quite skeptical about in many so-called democracies given the very centralized state of media ownership how many people can stand on the street protesting and still be profoundly ignored by the government. It seems that while you nominally have the right to say almost anything, reaching any size of audience is virtually impossible, and influencing politicans is nigh-on rainbow pony territory.

Good luck with your hacking space! You are very welcome to come visit us next year once we're set up. Email in profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Trying, and mostly failing, to learn some game development methods for collision detection. Currently, working on a SAT implementation, quad trees and GJK.

I was taking game development courses at Coursera but they decided to lock everyone out of being able to actually finish the courses without paying for them (which is their right - but still annoying) so i'm also looking for some good 2d tutorials for Unity.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been learning more about lease-option contracts. My goal is to understand how to determine interest rates for lessee's who lack a formal credit history. But have a year or more of lease payment history.

Also, studying the growth of suburbs in Santa Clara and Alameda Counties during the post war period. It really helps in understanding some recent urban planning policies.

</comment><comment><USER21> Working through MacLane & Birkhoff's Algebra. I used to study Japanese, but Ive been slacking on that pursuit.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm watching a lot of videos and tutorials trying to learn how to build social networking site. [https://www.livecoding.tv/video/enfrbuilding-a-social- networ...](https://www.livecoding.tv/video/enfrbuilding-a-social-network-with- laravel-150/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Improving spoken Spanish, learning Cryllic script, post-structural philosophy, contemplating dance lessons. Learning to run without getting tired or dizzy quickly, and trying to learn a better game of tennis but there doesn't seem to be indoor courts where I live and it's rainy season.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's a coursera session on digital signal processing going on right now, figured I'd take a crack at it: [https://www.coursera.org/course/dsp](https://www.coursera.org/course/dsp)

</comment><comment><USER25> Not really in my spare time since I took a couple months off from working (have to go pound the pavement this month,) but machine learning (UofW Coursera's specialization) & pandas. Also, spending time in the mornings on math (currently probability.)

</comment><comment><USER26> CockroachDB. I've been writing about it as I learn: [https://www.grockdoc.com/cockroachdb/alpha/articles](https://www.grockdoc.com/cockroachdb/alpha/articles)

</comment><comment><USER27> Learning Crystal and making useful stuff with it. E.g a Sinatra like web framework with 10x performance [https://github.com/kemalcr/kemal](https://github.com/kemalcr/kemal)

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been taking chemistry courses, online, with some labs in person. Oregon State ($$) and Coursera. I've finished general chemistry, took a little analytic, and now I'm making my way through an organic chemistry sequence.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm digging into Android Wear and writing an app. It's nice but it needs a lot of boilerplate code to set up communication between mobile and wear. Once set up and understood it's pretty straightforward

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been doing the [http://open.kattis.com/](http://open.kattis.com/) problems in Go.

</comment><comment><USER31> Rust, and base system call interfaces that Linux provides. Hoping to write up a simple composable user land someday.

</comment><comment><USER32> reviewing japanese (after living there for 2 years, don't wanna forget it :) )

looking up bitcoin and finding it hard to see what I can do as a developer, it just seems like there's a lot to learn before I can even get through the basics. Reading a cryptography book though, pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER33> Improving my Dutch language skills.

</comment><comment><USER34> Learning to solve more twisty puzzles. I recently learnt the Megaminx, and it was awesome.

</comment><comment><USER35> Doing what I can to learn Java.

</comment><comment><USER36> Shell scripting. I did not realize how powerful it is until I only started with it.

<comment><USER37> I've been planning on taking the plunge to learn that as well. Do you have any useful links I should check out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Clojure

</comment><comment><USER39> converting political order into set theory [http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmset.html](http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmset.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> Rocket League skills :)

</comment><comment><USER41> C, and taking a course on algorithms and data structures.

</comment><comment><USER42> Udemy courses about business and lean startup method

</comment><comment><USER43> Ruby. And some days I feel like a complete idiot

</comment><comment><USER44> Elixir and Rust, and brushing up on C++11.

</comment><comment><USER45> Sales and Marketing.

Close.io has been really useful.

</comment><comment><USER46> Handstands

</comment><comment><USER47> Calculus and chemistry.

</comment><comment><USER48> Javascript and golang

</comment><comment> jags-v AWS & Ansible..

</comment><comment><USER49> metaethics and the thought of John Wesley

</comment><comment><USER50> Tableau

</comment><comment><USER51> lojban

</comment><comment><USER52> Learning to solve more twisty puzzles.</comment>


Four In Five Consider Web Access A Fundamental Right  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/03/four-in-five-consider-web-access-a-fundamental-right/ <comment><USER2> And yet these people would probably give a thumbs-down to the Bill of Rights.</comment>


Why computers have two zeros: +0 and -0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/06/15/why-computers-have-signed-zero/

<comment><USER2> It should be added that this of course only concerns floating point math.</comment>


Nearly 5M of GMail accounts leaked - <AUTHOR> http://en.ria.ru/world/20140910/192810241/Nearly-5-Million-Gmail-Passwords-Leaked.html

<comment><AUTHOR> These passwords where probably not stolen from GMail but come from reusing passwords from other websites.

To check out if your account has been leaked: [http://isleaked.com/en.php](http://isleaked.com/en.php)

To search through the ASCII file (only addresses, no passwords): [https://mega.co.nz/#!b5lREBgS!LnC9yfR3RC-- iMeNMWdQP7m1j4nUf9...](https://mega.co.nz/#!b5lREBgS!LnC9yfR3RC-- iMeNMWdQP7m1j4nUf9RTmI_RhAUjzD4)

The discussion on reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/2fz13q/5_millions_of...](http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/2fz13q/5_millions_of_gmail_passwords_leaked_rus_most/)</comment>


Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Theme_Refinement_and_Evolution_%28Australis%29 <comment><USER2> Here are some very detailed mockups(?) on major platforms whose links are kind of tucked into the parent link:

Linux: [http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- design...](http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- designSpecs/australis-designSpecs-linux-mainWindow.html)

Windows 7: [http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- design...](http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- designSpecs/australis-designSpecs-windows7-mainWindow.html)

Windows XP: [http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- design...](http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- designSpecs/australis-designSpecs-windowsXP-lunaBlue-mainWindow.html)

OSX: [http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- design...](http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- designSpecs/australis-designSpecs-osx-mainWindow.html)

I personally think it looks nice and welcome the update. I haven't really been using Firefox all that much mainly due to how busy the interface is, so maybe leaning it out will make me a regular user again.

<comment><USER3> > I haven't really been using Firefox all that much mainly due to how busy the > interface is

Firefox UI is as busy as you make it[1]. It's very customizable without much effort. Not that it couldn't use a refresh but I quite like it the way it is.

EDIT: The commenters below get it right. Tree Style Tab[2] add-on is responsible for the tabs and you can remove the clutter by right-clicking the refresh button for example, choosing "customize..." from the context menu and just dragging all the unused stuff away into the box (a window that will appear). Toolbars can be hidden from View → Toolbars. Enabling integration with Ubuntu also thins it a bit.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/zdIy63Q.png>

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

<comment><USER2> Oh snap, now _that's_ a UI overhaul. How's that tab interface working out?

At a glance I can imagine how much more effective it is at displaying a large number of tabs in the same window.

In fact, I'm finding it quite brilliant. The web at large takes advantage of vertical scrolling, so why shouldn't browsers? All of my bookmarks are already arranged in vertical lists.

Even when faced with the input procedure of navigating my cursor to a browser tab, vertically stacked tabs have a clear advantage (for trackpad/thinkpad nipple users like myself):

To move my cursor up and down (again, with a trackpad) all I have to do is bend a finger at the knuckle. When moving the cursor a substantial distance left or right, I torque my whole wrist slightly or reposition it entirely.

Maybe that's splitting hairs... I'm rather starry-eyed at the moment seeing your Firefox interface. Perhaps I'm missing some disadvantages?

<comment><USER3> > Perhaps I'm missing some disadvantages?

Drag and drop sometimes stops working and you lose the ability to move those tabs around (change their order). Some pages will be too wide, at least on a small screen like mine, forcing you to scroll horizontally. Also, after every (major) update you need to (re)move the new buttons.

But those are all very minor. Otherwise, it's smooth sailing.

<comment><USER4> When was the last major update where buttons got re-added? Are you speaking from actual experience or just postulating?

<comment><USER3> > When was the last major update where buttons got re-added?

Not so much re-added as just added. The download button (arrow) for example was added in Firefox 20.

Add-ons also tend to insert their buttons. Or even reactivate the add-ons bar. But it takes seconds to fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And Firefox continues the inexorable march towards Chromeness by _removing the actual title of the page_ from the window chrome.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer Firefox. This just strikes me as wrong; the rest of the new UI is fine.

<comment><USER6> Is a title bar really necessary, though? The vast majority of the time, the exact same sentence is repeated again in the page as a h1. More prominently. With better styling. When I have the browser open, the favicon and the few characters on the tab are usually enough to figure out what the page is, and when it's minimized, the text shows up in the taskbar and alt+tab... I'm curious, what's missing?

<comment><USER7> I have three tabs open, all of which begin with the title of the site. How do I distinguish which is which?

<comment><USER8> How does having the page title in the title bar help with that, though? It only shows the full title of the currently selected tab, but can't you usually tell which tab that is from its content?

<comment><USER9> No, not if they're all the same website. Take 3 comment pages on hacker news, for example, you'd have to look around the page for context to know which was which if you had several open at once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hi I'm Firefox and I'm trying to be just like Chrome. Maybe if I try hard enough I will eventually be indistinguishable from Chrome and then I can just give up and let Google push me out of the browser scene entirely.

<comment><USER11> Except they can't seem to emulate Chrome where it counts: The snappy page loads and heavy heavy caching. Regardless of benchmarks, Chrome is noticeably faster loading existing and new pages for me. Everyone else I know has the same perception.

<comment><USER12> I agree, this is one of the most absurd things about Mozilla's actions over the past few years.

Time and time again they've gone out of their way to bring the worst of the Chrome experience to Firefox. Much of this revolves around the awful UI changes starting with Firefox 4 that have made it harder and far less efficient to use. It's pretty sad that we now have to manually enable the menu bar, and install extensions to get a status bar, for instance.

Yet at the same time, they just haven't managed to implement any of the truly beneficial things that Chrome offers. Like you mention, Chrome clearly does perform significantly better than Firefox. While the Firefox supporters like to trumpet how Firefox is "comparable to Chrome" in the arewefastyet.com micro-benchmarks, this just isn't observed under real usage patterns.

If the users are going to get the Chrome experience while using Firefox, but not Chrome's better performance, then what's the point of using Firefox these days? They might as well just use Chrome, and at least get some decent performance along with the rather bad UI.

<comment><USER13> >Chrome clearly does perform significantly better than Firefox. While the Firefox supporters like to trumpet how Firefox is "comparable to Chrome" in the arewefastyet.com micro-benchmarks, this just isn't observed _under real usage patterns._

Not under my usage patterns. I rarely have fewer than 30 or so tabs open, and Chrome is simply useless for this.

<comment><USER14> Concur. I had to switch away from Chrome _because_ of its heavy heavy use of cache that slows the entire browser down when you have several dozen tabs open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you want to see the work being done done on this, <http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/> has nightly builds of the Australis UX overhaul. It's still hugely WIP though

</comment><comment><USER16> And jwz gets proven right again [0]. I don't use Firefox as my day-to-day browser but every time I drop into it, I find that I have no idea where anything is. Hopefully they'll stick with the new changes (which do seem to be mostly cosmetic, instead of location).

[http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead- of-...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/)

<comment><USER17> Firefox may be changing things, but comparing it to _Safari_ must be sort of a joke. Just my opinion, of course, but I never found myself as lost in FF as the article describes. Conversely, every time I'm stuck with Safari I am frustrated beyond any hope of redemption by all the tiny things that are weird. It's nice to have things consistent, but to me, in Safari things just don't make any _sense_.

(Since I'll probably be asked to qualify that, my go to example - The address and search bar. Basic search is confusing already, but typing ahead in the address bar is as if the advances of the past ten years of browser technology never happened.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They've had this planned out for a long time now. Thunderbird received this UI refresh in August last year(the change log said it was to "match the new Firefox UI"), so I wonder why they delayed adding this to FF for so long.

Personally, I much prefer the current UI. It's very concise, no space wasted with curves, perfect for people like me who tend to have 10 tabs open at once. I would rather they update the current style with a few of the nice hover effects and bolder colours, rather than change the shape of tabs and the menu location.

<comment><USER19> The curves are only on the current tab according to the mockups, the rest are still square.

Here's a comparison using the latest UX Nightly branch with two windows at the same width that have enough tabs to switch to "scrolling tab mode" (notice the arrows on either side):

Old: <http://cl.ly/image/221j3J1j3R2Q> New: <http://cl.ly/image/1b1j1m2K2k24>

The new one shows 12 tabs and the edge of the 13th, the new one shows 13 tabs, the last one being cut off a tiny bit. The new one looks cleaner to me what with the lack of extra noise with the boxes around the tabs.

(Of course the rest of your comment may still be valid, but the curves/wasted space in the tab bar in general doesn't hold up IMO.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm actually kind of sad they're moving away from "square" tabs, as that was one of the design choices they've made that I always really liked. I'm hoping they'll provide an option in the new release, or at least that there will be an add-on that allows me to revert back. I'd love to be able to have my tabs in the title-bar with the current style.

Current setup that I'm happy with: <http://i.imgur.com/lf99vO3.png>

<comment><USER21> Same, I prefer either square tabs or trapezoidal ones with the just slightest of roundrect corners, like Chrome/ium.

FF's heavily rounded ones seem to waste too much space in the in-between areas.

Minor nitpick though, won't affect my use of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It looks beautiful in Windows and OSX.

It looks less awful than the current theme in Linux, thanks to the menu button (which usually occupies the position of the leftmost tab in Linux and isn't even orange) being moved to the same location as where Chrome has it. But there still seems to be a lot of wasted space in the titlebar of the Linux theme.

I remember reading that this is because certain opendesktop UI guidelines (can't remember which one) prohibit apps from encroaching on the window chrome. But Chrome doesn't care and puts tabs at the top of the chrome anyway, and this is quite useful because you can just push the mouse to the top edge of the screen to click on a tab. With a thick titlebar occupying the edge, on the other hand, you need to aim more carefully.

<comment><USER23> To be honest, I really don't care about the UI on Linux so much as the terrible lag. For whatever reason, Mozilla just can't get its shit together when it comes to fixing lag on Linux. For this reason alone, I continue to use Chrome, even though I'd love to move back to Firefox and get all the customizability that it's known for.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure what you mean by lag, chrome has preloading, possibly that's what you're seeing (negative lag?). I use Ubuntu 12.04 and don't see any "lag". FF is snappy. I use chrome most, but mainly because I prefer it's developer tools and memory footprint, but neither of them are very economical with memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You can download the UX nightly for all platforms at <http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/>

I'm using it now as my primary browser.

</comment><comment><USER26> Whenever I download a new browser, the first thing I do is remove as much UI as possible. This saves space, removes clutter and generally makes it more robust.

My Firefox currently looks like this: <http://i.imgur.com/93yRvie.png?1>

A browser is the software I use most often, every UI change has great impact. Can't wait to see what they are bringing.

<comment><USER27> Hmm, makes me think there should be a way to keep the taskbar when you press F11. Sounds like that'd be an easy solution for what you're doing.

(Offtopic: Oh wait nobody wants a taskbar anyway, ain't it so Windows 8? :P)

<comment><USER28> I'm on Windows 8 right now and I have a taskbar. Perhaps you were referring to the start button?

<comment><USER27> No I'm referring to the app mode they're trying to get every application to use. The desktop mode is only for legacy and backwards compatibility purposes. Though they might have changed their mind on that now that Windows 8 pretty much flopped, I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The page itself doesn't make it sound like an overhaul at all- just a collection of minor tweaks.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yet after Lion, Mountain Lion, and in a few month the new Mac OS, they still haven't implemented the native scrollbar and bounce scrolling... Mozilla is doing a lot of stuff, but I don't see any focus.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, how dare Mozilla not instantly implement the constant stream of random UI modifications Apple makes on a whim that require every developer to overhaul their UI and potentially make the UX worse?

From my perspective, not making that nonsense priority #1 _demonstrates_ Mozilla's focus on features that actually matter.

Also, patches welcome, write an extension, etc etc etc.

<comment><USER32> In this case it is not change made on a whim, it's system-wide, and UX not following your system-wide settings is worse for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The UI feature I will miss most is tabs-on-bottom. I have an address bar, a bookmarks bar, and a row of tabs. Quickly scanning tab titles and switching between them with the mouse is more important than knowing the current page's URL. So the tabs should be closer to "the action", the web page my eyes and mouse are interacting with (Fitt's Law).

The "Tabs on Top" menu item has been hidden since Firefox 15. The about:config pref "browser.tabs.onTop" is the only way to toggle this feature.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well, Great, how about more snappy and perf bugs land on 25 as well. Still waiting for SuperSnappy or e10s, or the new Necko work.

Firefox is slow ( Comparatively ) , I hate opening Chrome from time to time keeps reminding me how fast Chrome is ( Although that have gotten slower in recent release ).

Edit: And God they drop the Firefox Menu Button! Do they have to copy chrome on every god damn thing? What the heck is happening with Opera and Firefox UI design team?

<comment><USER35> Work on Electrolysis is underway again. <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes>

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Submission not "easy" to see the new UI changes</end-of-workday-tired-rant>

Detailed mockups broken for me, or perhaps I fail at grok-ing it. Here's what I found easier:

<https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/0/0c/Australis-i02-Tabs.jpg>

And menus:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Desktop/Panel_Menu#Stage_2...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Desktop/Panel_Menu#Stage_2:_Design)

</comment><comment><USER37> Actually for some reason I cant prefer all that flashing buttons at all, visually its good to have some highlight of what is/will be selected, but I cant imagine messing around with the interface if the UI is like that.

Just swipe over the menu, its simply to much contrasts and far away from being gently to the eyes. I also don't want to imagine that with a darker theme (if it cant be customized).

And again minimalistic and ribbon like menus what was the worst feature introduced in some more or less modern applications (on windows). I want to see a menu for several reasons (perhaps a long time user habbit) but, please, dont remove that if I dont ask for that. Just noticing the min, max and closing button on the top left(?) of the main window - I really really hope that this is only for preview.

In addition, will there by any chance a way to customize the colors used for general UI elements (browser textboxes, find dialog, titlebar) besides the system one? For example to allow the use of theme colors over the system ones. Changeable dialog colors would also be warmly welcomed.

</comment><comment><USER38> If Firefox takes away the ability for Add Ons to create several rows of tabs, I would have lost the only reason I stay with Firefox rather than use Chrome.

I currently use Tab Mix Plus [1]. It's awesome.

[1] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> They've also made a CSS mockup of the new interface: [http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- design...](http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- designSpecs/australis-designSpecs-linux-mainWindow.html)

<comment><USER39> Which doesn't work in Chrome. heh

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm always afraid when such UI changes are announced for Firefox. Thing is, I love how I currently configure Firefox and I don't want to loose the ability to do it.

So wathever new defaults you choose for Firefox, please always provide a way to revert to what we prefere (even if that requires to use about:config).

Here's my current Firefox setup : <http://i.imgur.com/PwiPeDM.png> . I'd like to be able to keep it that way. I seriously don't care about round corners and stuff like that if that means I loose some control over how I can configure Firefox the way I like.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wouldn't hold the release target listed on a wiki page as binding. Remain skeptical until we see some aspects of Australis actually land in Nightly (which moves to version 25 on June 24).

<comment><USER42> There's a different nightly channel for Australis. [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/lates...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest- ux/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Native tab on the left, please please please.

<comment><USER44> This new layout actually breaks the tree tabs plugin. It relies on tabs-on- the-bottom (which are then pushed to the left), and the new layout drops support for it.

Of course, the authors could figure out a new way to do it, but for now it breaks the add-on.

<comment><USER43> God damn, this was one of the huge reason I was still sticking with Firefox...

<comment><USER44> It's still a few months out; I assume someone will find a workaround by then (if they haven't already).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I started using Firefox for the past couple of days.

I find it slower than Chrome, not page loading but in terms of being responsive.

Sometimes there is an issue when I drag a word into a new tab, I would like it to search google, but it tries to go to the site.

I had to reload the page a few times to listen to the changelog today and gave up and just switched back to Chrome.

<comment><USER46> Firefox will be less responsive than Chrome until the Electrolysis project makes some progress. FF runs everything in a single process, so a few heavy HTMl5 pages make the whole browser unresponsive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Can I please have a working bookmarks window or PgUp/PgDn keys that don't stop working randomly?!

</comment><comment><USER48> Here's a working web demo of the new interface [https://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- desig...](https://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis- designSpecs/australis-designSpecs-linux-mainWindow.html)

</comment><comment><USER49> sooo we move the main menu around in completely NON-obvious places every year, just to piss off long time users.

I feel like a problem with UI designers is that once they made something they feel like they have to change it else they're useless. So they change stuff for the sake of it or something.

Real changes in australis: \- tabs around more round. \- main menu move from far left to far right, slightly lower, and has a new icon

arbitrary much? Save 3px?

I can tell you, all the non-techies will be lost (there's no point even arguing tat), and many of the techies will be pissed (you can argue on that, but im pretty sure it'll be a large amount)

<comment><USER50> > I feel like a problem with UI designers is that once they made something > they feel like they have to change it else they're useless.

It could just as well be the growth team, experimenting with different designs to see if retention of new users picks up.

<comment><USER49> So... if everyone goes to chrome, it means the user didn't pick it up, right?

Because I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, that's what the choice is when you test on release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I like what they're doing to signify trust here: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:PanelMenu-i01-CustomizationMod...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:PanelMenu-i01-CustomizationMode.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER52> I never used Chrome because I hate those tabs. I also hate them in Thunderbird but I don't use them much.

The rest seems fine, although I didn't see the personal bar ?

</comment><comment><USER53> Redesign away, as long as pentadactyl keeps working.

<comment><USER54> Thae addons page says that pentadactyl does not work on FF 21. What is the deal with that?

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/>

<comment><USER53> The addons page hasn't been updated for a while. The nightly works fine on version 19.0.2. Haven't tried with version 21 though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Isn't this the theme update they've been working on for over a year? I seem to have heard word about this a long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER56> I wonder if in some deep recess of Mozilla people are giving serious thought to re-skinning Chrome like Opera have done.

</comment><comment><USER57> I think it looks nice. The only thing Firefox misses for me(OSX user) is the character menu you get on a long keypress.

</comment><comment><USER58> Misleading title. Refined theme, rather than a UI overhaul.

</comment><comment><USER59> Still waiting for a joke on Firefox's version number.

<comment><USER60> You may be waiting a while. This thread is reserved for griping about change, I-use-chrome and why-aren't-they-fixing-bug-x-instead posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I know most people hate IE, but I like IE's UI.

</comment><comment><USER62> Yet another GUI rewamp without vertical tabs.

 _sigh_

</comment><comment><USER63> can they make it obey osx keyboard shortcut overrides like for Select Next/Previous Tab and Zoom?

</comment><comment><USER64> Oh no, not again....</comment>


Decentralizing Docker: How to Use Serf with Docker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ctl-c.io/?p=43 <comment><USER2> Nginx will use all of the cores if you configure it so I dont see creating a bunch of containers in the same machine as a great way to scale WordPress. I don't see why you don't just include mysql in the container/image. As far as I can tell people don't want to do that because it just makes things too simple. Anything that is easy can't possibly be a "Best Practice".

<comment><USER3> I think you're jumping to conclusions about nginx.

The author clearly means to have one nginx container in front of a bunch of wordpress containers, which can be hosted on a number of different machines, if needed.

The problem he's trying to solve is how to hook all the bricks together, e.g. how to let the nginx component know that there is a new backend (wordpress component) running and where.

This problem is orthogonal to the way you deploy the component, whether as classical applications running on a bare machine, a VM, or a lightweight container.

The advantage of using docker is that the exact same configuration can be used in a wide range of set-ups ... well assuming you can run docker :-p

<comment><USER2> OK I didn't see a way for his system to work across machines. Nice username by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i was trying out serf, but one issue that killed it for orchestration is behavior around network partitions or transient net issues, namely messages get dropped on the floor. which would need a layer on top to query out distributed eventually consistent state for a node rejoin to replay orchestration. using etcd (or even zk) is considerably simpler to reason about failure recovery for transient issues.

</comment><comment><USER5> OT: @cesar your account is [dead] and looks like it has been for some time.</comment>


Learn Python for Finance in NYC in April - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lambdafoundry.com/the-inaugural-class-learn-python-for-finance-in-nyc/

<comment><USER2> This is great. Do any HN'lers plan on going?

<comment><USER3> Yes - the class is being taught by wesm, and I'll be in the audience as well.

<comment><USER2> Cool, I signed up and will be there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're a student and the cost is prohibitive, shoot me a message - I have a few free passes for HN'ers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would love to make it out to this, but am in another class on Mondays. Looks worthwhile though.</comment>


Power grid change may disrupt clocks - <AUTHOR> http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110624/ap_on_hi_te/us_sci_power_clocks

<comment><USER2> I don't think they appreciate just how screwy this can make things. A lot of embedded controllers use zero crossing detectors in their power supplies to provide the time signal.

Its been such a good thing for so long that I am not sure people really internalize the assumption they are making. I see this when I put things (like embedded controllers) on 'pure sine' UPSs (this is where the AC power charges the battery and the load always runs off the inverter). Since they do _not_ accurately track 60 hz things like my NetApp filer lose and gain time sporadically (only kept sane by some NTP work which is poorly supported in the StoreVault series but that is another rant).

</comment><comment><USER3> "anything that flashes "12:00" when it loses power "

Not true. That anything could as well be a battery-less quartz driven clock that doesn't rely on grid frequency but needs power.</comment>


Journey – The Unofficial Path Client for OS X - <AUTHOR> http://journeyformac.com/ <comment><USER2> And what is Path? What is Journey? The website looks nice, but I have no idea what the product is and the website doesn't bother mentioning this.

edit: Oh wait, I see it now. At the very bottom, last thing. I'd consider bumping that part up.</comment>


How Realm Is Better as Compared to SQLite? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.quovantis.com/how-realm-is-better-as-compared-to-sqlite/ <comment><USER2>
        Realm performance is faster than SQLite, almost 10x faster according to the benchmark results.

Protip: you want to follow a statement like this with graphs that show what you claimed, not a set that show Realm either _half_ as fast (on inserts) or only twice as fast (on queries).

</comment><comment><USER3> _How Apples Are Better as Compared to Oranges?_

Seriously, from what I can tell of Realm it'd be better to compare it against something DBM like with a table interface. Tokyo Cabinet perhaps might be more appropriate than SQLite but I suspect this is some kind of link bait.

<comment><USER3> So looking at Realm a little deeper this article examines the very least interesting bits of Realm. Looks like Mobile dev focused, has remote backup and sync capabilities, API authentication providers, realtime data sharing between two clients... looks like some interesting features but actually hard to get an easy to understand feature list.

[https://realm.io](https://realm.io)</comment></comment>


Hello May I Assist You in Taking on a Lifetime of Debt? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/sunday/cost-college-financial-aid.html <comment><USER2> If young people learned useful skills in their elementary and primary school years, college wouldn't be such a rat race. The only reform that can make college more affordable is to make it unnecessary for the vast majority of occupations.

College programs are what you make of them. Some people make good use of their college programs. I learned a few useful things, but mostly felt trapped.

<comment><USER3> College programs aren't being made required in the modern economy because you learn useful things in them. How many jobs in the US actually require that you know things learned in your major?

They are being made required because they are a free filter for hiring departments in companies. Between that and a combination of the facts that most hiring departments seem too understaffed or lazy to actually try and vet candidates, and that if a dud is hired you can use "But they had a college degree" as a defense, you get situations where companies are requiring you to have a college degree just to work in a call center at 12/hr

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finally people are waking up to what I have been telling friends and family. If you don't say "no" to the financial heroin dealers, you will become a slave.

<comment><USER5> What is "financial heroin" in this analogy? Student debt?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not OP, but I think "financial heroin" in this context is any kind of loan or debt, being advertised and sold like a fancy product.

Ex: At Apple stores, the associates tell you This new iPhone X is just 33$ a month, and then I ask them "But it's 1000$ though, so I'll be paying 33$ / month for 3 years?" and they say "Yes."

Also credit cards are advertized so much but every credit card charge that you incur swiping the plastic is a loan you take from the company for the amount you are charging on the card. Lot of people don't realize this..</comment></comment></comment>