Work for post-materialists  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/07/unemployment-and-jobs <comment><USER2> >But it would be truly pathetic if the legal/economic organisation of our society was optimised for government surveillance and tax collection and not for the exercise of autonomy in pursuit of a meaningful life.

Unfortunately, it already is. Bureaucracy is essentially an approach where the 'server' (government/business/whatever) forces the 'clients' (individuals/employees) to change their behavior for the benefit of the 'server', with no clear benefit for the 'clients'. When considering it in these terms, words like 'oppressive' seem to have some significance. After all, the definition of the word is:

>Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner.

In the case of bureaucracy, the 'burdensome' and, arguably, 'unjust' components of the definition are fitting.

Either way, it's inspiring to see these issues finally being discussed in mainstream mediums.

<comment><USER3> Author uses the terms government surveillance and tax collection as if they are inherently bad things.

There are some things I want the government to watch, at both a local and federal level. And keep in mind Oliver Wendell Holmes's Jr's adage about taxes: they help foot the bill for civilization.

As for bureaucracy: it's a burden, but the alternative in many societies is systematic corruption. The author writes:

 _Less obviously, but at least as importantly, we need to eliminate the insane patchwork of regulations that keep folks from legally cutting hair for money in a kitchen, or legally making a few bucks every now and then taxiing people around town in a 1988 Ford Escort._

If it's an insane patchwork, perhaps. But if it's a sensible patchwork that helps keep schools funded and slows society for a dispiriting race to the bottom, why the hell would we want to do this?

<comment><USER4> The last paragraph of the article reminds me of recent closures of kids' lemonade stands by government inspectors:

[http://reason.com/blog/2011/07/18/lemonade-stand- crackdown-c...](http://reason.com/blog/2011/07/18/lemonade-stand-crackdown- conti)

There's something perverse about a government that cuts away people's autonomy and forces everyone to rely on its handouts. I'd rather live in a society of free people than a society that can't imagine life without the government telling them what to do. I could do with a little less "civilization" when it comes to closing down a 5 year old girl's lemonade stand because she didn't prepare her pitcher in a kitchen with a 3-basin sink.

Regulations aren't made with the good of society in mind. They're usually made by self-interested businessmen looking to keep out competition. When you realize this, you will reach political enlightenment.

<comment><USER3> I would say that that was a more a case of individuals police officers being pricks. But then again perhaps they were trying to conscientiously apply the same law with which they just harassed an immigrant street vendor on the other side of town.

 _They're usually made by self-interested businessmen looking to keep out competition_

Is "regulatory capture" the latest buzz phrase from Frank Luntz? Powerful business interests are going to try to influence the regulatory process anyway, so let's just let them run amok.

<comment><USER4> >Is "regulatory capture" the latest buzz phrase from Frank Luntz?

Beats me. But you're delusional if you think regulations are created by disinterested people contemplating the public good.

We live in a world where Fannie and Freddie debt was regulated as Tier I capital, for goodness sake. We live in a world that requires (black) hair- braiders to pass a 400 hour course on cutting (white) people's hair to open up shop. We live in a world that caps San Francisco taxi cabs at approximately 1% of the number demanded. The evidence demands at least a slightly cynical evaluation of the regulatory state.

I don't think I've ever watched Fox News or listened to Limbaugh, by the way, at least not for more than 5 minutes in a waiting room. You can leave the ad hominem at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When writing software, the goal is often to take some task which a human once did manually, and to partially or completely automate it. I automate as much of my daily work-flow as possible. If I could, I would automate myself right out of writing software all together.

I think this attitude explains why I loath the employee-employer fixed pay relationship so much. Selling your time, day-in, day-out, to write software, is antithetical to the very act of writing software, because, as the developer, you haven't automated yourself out of any future work.

<comment><USER2> I think that the reason for what you describe is essentially a paradigm mismatch. Automation aims to reduce the amount of work while businesses have the goal of making as much money as possible and, by extension, since money can only be acquired by working, essentially attempt to automate as little as possible. Personally, I think that this is an old and outdated way of living. It's the same thing that simple biological organisms do - go towards pleasure and away from pain. It explains why, for example, so many software houses only look at the short term and don't take time to design decent systems which are adaptable to change, even though they know that requirements are always shifting. I call this approach 'dumb-lazy', whereas the automation approach is 'smart-lazy'.

<comment><USER6> "businesses have the goal of making as much money as possible and, by extension, since money can only be acquired by working, essentially attempt to automate as little as possible."

What? If a business gets paid $10 for something that costs them $9 to do, they have lots of profit incentive to automate the work. If they can make it cost $0.01 to do, they will be rolling in profit. Nearly every business understands this.

Maybe they don't want their _clients_ to get this automation, but that's a different question.

<comment><USER2> I completely agree with your last point and half-agree with your first one. If we were talking about Vulcans then, yes, the optimizations would always be implemented. My personal experience is mainly with technology companies and in that field, at least, the optimizations are more often not implemented, even if they will indeed save money in the long run. I think that these problems are reflected in the general population where only a fraction of people make investments and the vast majority tend to chase after quick profit rather than lasting wealth. Business has a higher percentage of the latter but there is still plenty of the former.

Edit: Also, we might be talking about slightly different situations, I'm mainly referring to optimizations which require a time investment up front, not 'free' ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ""The country is ready for the five day week. It is bound to come through all industry. In adopting it ourselves, we are putting it into effect in about fifty industries, for we are coal miners, iron miners, lumbermen, and so on. The short week is bound to come, because without it the country will not be able to absorb its production and stay prosperous.

"The harder we crowd business for time, the more efficient it becomes. The more well-paid leisure workmen get, the greater become their wants. These wants soon become needs. Well-managed business pays high wages and sells at low prices. Its workmen have the leisure to enjoy life and the wherewithal with which to finance that enjoyment.

"The industry of this country could not long exist if factories generally went back to the ten hour day, because the people would not have the time to consume the goods produced. For instance, a workman would have little use for an automobile if he had to be in the shops from dawn until dusk. And that would react in countless directions, for the automobile, by enabling people to get about quickly and easily, gives them a chance to find out what is going on in the world-which leads them to a larger life that requires more food, more and better goods, more books, more music -- more of everything. The benefits of travel are not confined to those who can take an expensive foreign trip. There is more to learn in this country than there is abroad."

<http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/ford.htm>

Henry Ford knew the answer 90 years ago, the key to keeping consumption up is to give people time to spend it. Think about it this way, a 5 day work week is 25% longer than a 4 day work week but most importantly gives people 50% more leisure time. During this leisure time people will consume more. Transitioning to a 4 day work week (with 5 days pay) would result in 50% more time to consume and would eliminate unemployment almost immediately.

The best thing the government could do to solve unemployment problems is to make a 4 day work week standard and institute overtime for the 5th day. The reality of the situation is that large numbers of unemployed people lead to instability in the political realm.

<comment><USER8> I think this is a fantastic idea. I was curious though what you think about this leading to the work week getting overly short? Isnt this a step in the direction of making the work week shorter. But nonetheless I really like this well thoughtout comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess I don't read the economist blogs as much, but this article has a _completely_ different feel from their magazine: much more laid back and curious, if a little rambling. Its a nice change, though

<comment><USER10> I had the exact same thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I ironically used to work for McKinsey and was among their top performers, then I dropped out of the rat race and have been doing just enough freelance work to stay afloat. I didn't know there was a term for my type, but "threshold earner" gives me a sense of legitimacy. I like it.

</comment><comment><USER12> The last paragraph ties into business models like AirBnb and UberCab: where people just do some work or offer something and get paid for it, without a lot of red tape and hassles and registering as a business.

It would be great if business and labor laws were streamlined to make this as easy as possible, but its disruptive to larger corporations and current stakeholders, so I suspect there's vested interest in trying to keep the status quo, unfortunately. But the success of AirBnb, etc is a great sign.

<comment><USER13> > _It would be great if business and labor laws were streamlined to make this > as easy as possible, but its disruptive to larger corporations and current > stakeholders ..._

Certainly that's one part of the phenomenon. But keep in mind that regulations exist also because there are always people who want to take in as much money as possible while doing as little work as possible, leaving others---possibly meaning the public---to pick up the pieces when things go wrong.

(A recent example: Wall Street investment bankers, playing the heads-we-win, tails-the-public-loses game with bank bailouts. A recurring example: Polluters.)

<comment><USER4> It's a good thing that we have regulations so those bad things never happened.

Less snark version: who do you think writes regulation?

<comment><USER14> Granted that was meant as a rhetorical question, but I think regulation is often written by young consultants because everyone tends to back the buck on to someone else. However, when it comes to the process that actually choses which regulation to go with that's often a range of special interests each fighting to protect their individual pieces.

Conceder cap and trade which is clearly less efficient than simply taxing carbon. While it might seem like a terrible idea for anyone with a few lobbyists and the assumption that they can specify an exception for their industry it can become a huge boon at the cost of those with less influence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My brother likes to say that America is an adolescent, while Europe is the adult. According to the article, it sounds like the America is growing up and it's manifesting as a desire for job autonomy in the labor market.

However, the author misses an important link between job autonomy and the question posed, _"What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation?"_...

The fundamental reason that "job autonomy" is more viable today, is thanks to the internet and free-flowing information. If there is one thing the government could do to jumpstart job creation, it would be to improve the regulatory structure surrounding the internet, bust the monopolies that are gouging us for awful service and give incentives for startup ISP's to take their place.

</comment><comment><USER5> Mark Mills writing is a tad more jocular and Wall-Streety than a good HN article's level of nuance, but he has some very good insight into American and Chinese manufacturing and employment levels in this Forbes article:

[http://blogs.forbes.com/markpmills/2011/07/05/manufacturing-...](http://blogs.forbes.com/markpmills/2011/07/05/manufacturing-3d-printing- and-what-china-knows-about-the-emerging-american-century/)

</comment><comment><USER16> _David Ellerman [...] argues that the employer-employee relationship is more like the master-slave relationship than we are inclined to believe._

Me too! (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287346>) I've never heard of David Ellerman. Anybody here read him?

</comment><comment><USER17> What is 'post-materialism'? Any relationship to post-scarcity economics?

<comment><USER18> He appears to be using it in the sense of people whose aspirations involve things other than material prosperity, at least past a threshhold of "comfortable, Western middle class".

If you achieve comfortable Western middle-class, what do you aspire to past that? A traditional and quite common aspiration is to move more into the upper class: to make enough money to regularly travel the world, buy a large house, buy a sports car, or perhaps even move into the higher tier of owning a beach home in Hawaii, yacht, private jet, etc.

"Post-materialists", on the other hand, tend to be satisfied with the Western- middle-class level of prosperity, and once they reach it start aspiring to things like greater autonomy, fewer working hours, greater proportion of time spent on creative endeavors, etc. I don't really like the phrase "post- materialist" (feels judgmental), and sort of prefer Tyler Cowen's phrase "threshold earners" (which this article also cites), as a more neutral description of people whose monetary aspirations are to reach a comfortable threshhold and stop there.

The article is a bit rambling, but what I take as the takeaway is that accounting for those kinds of aspirations requires something more than just "economic grwoth", since it's not really a linear scale of move up in the economy --> move up further in the economy. Instead it has more to do with flexibility of work arrangements, barriers to self-employment, etc.

<comment><USER19> If there's any positive from our current economic situation, I think it's that some people are realizing that money doesn't bring you happiness. It can bring you comfort, as you mention, but buying things beyond the basics isn't going to make you happy.

The problem is that the wealthy don't accumulated funds just to buy things. They use it for power. And increasingly in this country, money equals political power that affects all of us. In a weird way the "good guys" should become money hungry, but use that money in positive ways that benefit society.

<comment><USER20> This is absolutely true. There is an article in my head about this subject that I have been putting off writing...

<comment><USER21> I would be very interested to see some thoughts on this subject. I go back and forth agreeing and disagreeing with the grandparent's last paragraph.

Its easy to make yourself feel moral and just this way (and elitist and morally superior), but I think it can also be the beginning to an easy loophole around "money doesn't buy happiness." Once you've decided that more money will allow you to do others good, you're in the same structural problem that materialists are, which is that once you meet goal X, there goal Y will be, just out of reach, and with it, your happiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think once you're in a certain income level, it doesn't matter how much more you make... until you hit that next income level. As long as you meeting your survival needs, and not stressing out (live paycheck by paycheck), and of course don't have a disease/illness, then it doesn't matter if you make $80K, or $200K, or even $400K/year... it's not until you hit the million dollar mark where things get interesting. That's when you have financial freedom, and options open up. So I agree with the threshold thing to an extent.

<comment><USER23> Financial freedom isn't about how big your income is, but how long you could live without that income. If I'm making $1m a year, but I'm a dumbass and spend $995k, I'm just as tied to my paycheck as the guy who only earns $50k and spends $45k. A guy who earns $100k a year and still only spends $45k is much better off than either of those two. Having a larger income impacts your financial freedom only to the extent that you're able to sock more money away and live off of that (or the proceeds if you invest). Otherwise, you're just a wage slave with nicer toys.

Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy options.

<comment><USER24> I cannot agree more strongly.

Most of the folks I know from my generation tend to spend almost all of their disposable income as soon as they obtain it. I have tried to explain to them that by doing so, they are selling their own freedom. You are forever at the yoke of he who employs you if you are living from paycheck to paycheck.

For the first three years of my career, I scrimped on almost all expenditures in order to accumulate a savings allowing me to be out of work for a period of at least one full year. I call it the FYF (the Fuck You Fund). I wouldn't trade it for anything but a true emergency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I believe the primary responsibility of any govt is to create jobs in the society.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not? Or are you seriously saying that a government has control over how many jobs are created?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help with a file conversion - <AUTHOR>

I've tried everything else I can think of, so I finally come here to HN in something akin to desperation.
I have a sound file from a dead Psion 5MX (RIP) and I'd very much like to convert it into a format that I can play on my Windows XP laptop, and on my SuSE 10.1 desktop.  On my SuSE 8.1 (yes, yes, I know) machine it plays with this command:

  play -r 8000 -s b -c 1 -t raw -f A filename
 However, on every platform I've tried, sox segfaults, or the software I have says it doesn't recognise the format.  This, despite listing the Psion A-Law format specifically.
I've spent a couple of hours with Google trying to find utilities specific to the purpose, and reinstalled and recompiled sox, but, as you might guess, I've made to real progress.
I've written a small utility to convert the file using the conversion functions from A-Law to raw as given on Wikipedia, but that produces noise with a barely audible sound track underneath.
Advice welcome.  I'm not, at heart, a computer person, but I program and I devise algorithms. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822789 if you're interested in what I can do.
Questions for clarification also welcome.
So assuming you got this far, thanks for reading, and sorry if this has wasted your time. <comment><USER2> In case anybody else ever needs this:

mv file file.wve

sox file.wve -2 -c 2 -r 44100 file.wav

lame file.wav file.mp3

Enjoy. If you have more of them send them over and I'll convert them in case you can't get the recipe to work.

I mailed you that one mp3. And I messed up the recipe, the first line of course should not have the .wve at the end of the first file argument.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks - it's worked fine. I can even get the recipe to work on my machine, although I ahve to hand insert the path the the executable I built from source. That's a mystery, since I did do a "make install" but it seems that the version found on the path isn't that one.

Don't you love computers?

Anyway, the result of this should be announced here in a few days. I hope it's worth the time I, and indeed we, have wasted.

Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://jackaudio.org/> claims to take the PCM output from your audio player program and save it in any of a number of formats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Forgive me, but I can't see how to use that to read the file I have and create a file in a different format. Maybe I'm missing something, although most likely what I'm missing is the background to understand the documentation.

It's probably a useful package, but I can't see how to make it do what I need. I am feeling slightly embarrassed about this ...

<comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, the easiest way would be to install the library, and one of the applications using it that does what you want it to. The simplest one looks like jack_capture(1), "a small program to capture whatever sound is going out to your speakers into a file." Start capturing the data and playing the sound file at the same time, and the result should be a good copy.

(1) <http://www.notam02.no/arkiv/src>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like there are good software suggestions made, but if they fail a last ditch effort would be to run line out from your SUSE 8.1 machine to line in on another machine (or with a sufficient soundcard the same one).

</comment><comment><USER5> Try Psiwin 2.3.

<comment><USER5> Or: <http://www.bioeddie.co.uk/Psion/main/Programs/pc_tools.html>

Rec2wav

<comment><AUTHOR> That might be the best option - I'll investigate tomorrow.

More ideas still welcome - thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Why the SEC will force Facebook to go public - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-sec-will-force-facebook-to-go-public-2011-1

<comment><USER2> Facebook can simply move out of the US, can't they?</comment>


Doom co-creator defends his code against ZeniMax copying accusations - happy-go-lucky https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/doom-co-creator-defends-his-code-against-zenimax-copying-accusations/ <comment><AUTHOR> > "As for the denial of wiping, the Court's independent expert found 92 > percent of Carmack's hard drive was wiped—all data was permanently > destroyed, right after Carmack got notice of the lawsuit, and that his > affidavit denying the wiping was false. Those are the hard facts."

Lines like this are why the expert reports from the lawsuit should be public. Carmack would naturally have very unusual computer use patterns.

It's easy to picture him creating an editing tool that accidentally used up almost all available swap space. Or filling up almost all of his drive space with generated textures and immediately deleting them.

That would look like use of obfuscation tools to a mediore expert.

<comment><USER2> I strongly agree. Although Carmack's usage patterns might seem unusual for an average office computer user or even an average developer, the scenarios that you mentioned are common in AAA games, even if you aren't a programmer.

A new feature or bug in a AAA asset pipeline can cause a wipe and rebuild of hundreds of GB of generated data. Compressed textures for multiple platforms, compiled optimized level geometry, platform encoded audio and baked light maps are standard culprits.

<comment><USER3> He also searched on how to format a drive[1] (presumably securely) after receiving notice of litigation. I know that the folks here really, really love Carmack, and want to give him every benefit of the doubt; but, for most people, that's pretty damning evidence.

[1] [http://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-statement-reveals-john- carmac...](http://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-statement-reveals-john-carmack- googled-how-to-wipe-a-hard-drive/)

<comment> loup-vaillant Who _wouldn 't_ perform a search on secure wipe when they learn they're being sued for computer related stuff?

Pretty much nobody in my opinion. From that premise, probability theory says this is a _tiny_ piece of evidence.

Then again, most people are very bad at probability theory.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure if I'm interpreting you correctly.

Do you mean "Most people aren't paranoid enough to be afraid to search for 'secure wipe' after being sued for an unrelated matter"?

Or do you mean "Upon being sued, most peoples immediate reaction would be to search the web about how to destroy evidence"?

My guess would that most people who believe they are innocent would have no interest in destroying evidence, and that most people who considered themselves guilty would have already taken care of hiding the evidence before being sued.

 _probability theory says this is a tiny piece of evidence._

In which direction? Slightly more likely to be guilty, because why else would the person be searching? Or slightly more likely to be innocent, because any guilty person would know not to search?

<comment> loup-vaillant > _Or do you mean "Upon being sued, most peoples immediate reaction would be > to search the web about how to destroy evidence"?_

That one, but not exactly. It's not just about destroying _evidence_ , but about destroying unrelated stuff such as the porn collection or downloaded movies. Or that "non-commercial" shareware you installed but did not bother to pay just yet. I bet everyone here have a couple such skeletons in their hard drives.

> _In which direction?_

Frankly, I don't know. I haven't consider how a guilty person would have covered their tracks _before hand_. I just figured most people would just panic and search for various way of covering their asses, regardless of their guilt.

\---

My point was more, while most people would see guilty-looking behaviour as strong evidence of guilt, it is not necessarily so. And in this particular case, I don't think it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't realize expert testimony could be non-public. That seems to undermine the entire idea of a public trials, IMHO. Is there some justification for it that I'm not seeing?

<comment><USER6> According to the article, it was the expert report that wasn't public, not the expert testimony. An expert report is not evidence, it is not reviewed by the jury. What is presented to the jury is the expert's testimony, which is subject to cross-examination by the other party. That testimony is almost always public.

The expert report is prepared before trial, and explains to the other side what the expert's opinion will be and the basis for that opinion. It is used to help prepare cross-examination when the expert ultimately testifies at trial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Substantial similarity" can result in a copyright violation? How is it possible there is more than one cookbook describing how to make a peanut- butter-and-jelly sandwich without "substantial similarity"?

<comment><USER8> "Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients."

"Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe"

[https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html](https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excuse my French, but what the fuck does "non-literal copying" mean?

<comment><USER10> Given other comments in this thread, it means (1) viewing the original work (in this case, the source code), (2) making superfluous changes to avoid literal copying (changing variable names, find-replace company name, etc), and (3) passing this off as original.

It sounds like it's not "You made a knockoff, that's 'non-literal copying,'", it's "You made a literal copy, changed a couple of things, and called it yours."

<comment><USER11> No.

Structure, sequence, and organization of a computer program -- not just code -- is subject to copyright per _Whelan v. Jaslow_. Note that the _Whelan_ standard became relevant again after _Oracle v. Google_.

<comment><USER12> I'm certainly not a lawyer, but I would definitely like to know what's the difference between "structure, sequence and organization of a computer program" and the algorithm behind that program? As I understand, algorithm is in the realm of ideas, which are not copyrightable.

It would be sad if courts accepted a technically ambiguous approach effectively deciding arbitrarily which case is what.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Demystifying SEO with experiments - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/109318939139/demystifying-seo-with-experiments

<comment><USER3> "Figure 4 shows the result of an experiment we ran to test rendering with JavaScript for better web performance. . . [The test failed and] even after we turned off the experiment, it took almost a month for pages in the enabled group to recover..."

This is the incredibly frustrating part of White Hat SEO w/Google because:

(a) At nearly every SEO conference, by Google's own actions in releasing Page Speed Insights, and by Matt Cutts engaging and talking about page speed being an important indicator it seems like speed is pretty !@$!@% important to Google and worth pouring resources into. (1) (2)

(b) As a result a well equipped and well connected organization like Pinterest launches tests designed to improve this important signal. I'm going to assume they're organizationally smart enough to not damage or ignore other important Google signal ranks like usability, time on site, etc that you have to balance w/the JS page speed test.(3)

(c) Google penalizes them.

WTF!

My frustration as a customer acquisition guy - encompassing CRO / SEM / SEO / etc - is that I try to discuss and push best practices for my own projects, for clients, and for public facing blogs / presentations / etc.

I get that they don't want people gaming / pushing - but when they push out a "best practices" methodology like page speed, and then execute a penalty as described by Pinterest, I just want to throw my hands up.

(1) [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

(2) [http://www.webpronews.com/today-on-the-matt-cutts-show- page-...](http://www.webpronews.com/today-on-the-matt-cutts-show-page-speed- as-a-ranking-factor-2013-08)

(3) I'm going to add the disclaimer of not having seen the JavaScript that pinterest used and perhaps they're not properly weighting / aware of other important SEO signals that GOOG penalizes when using Javascript, but I'm sure they are. Happy to answer more on that directly via my profile or this thread.

<comment><USER4> While I too couldn't comment on the actual JavaScript they put in place for the test and how it might have impacted other factors I just wanted to make a quick comment on the idea of a page speed penalty.

1\. I have never in my life seen evidence of this happening before (enterprise consultant in this field). I am positive in my mind that it was not a case of "page is faster = drop in rankings".

I would be willing to bet that it had a lot more to do with the "rendering content in JS" which has traditionally been a huge issue for search engines (despite what they claim).

But every single time I have seen someone claim this or something like this there has been many other factors at play.

2\. It is highly likely that the amount of impact that any given variable (in this case pagespeed) is not the same across the board. In fact it is much more aligned with the kinds of industries you are in and the keywords relating to that search.

As an example page speed is MUCH more likely to be a bigger factor for an e-commerce website and keywords showing any kind of transactional intent than it would be for someone looking for detailed information on a medical condition for example.*

*This isn't a confirmed fact that I know of at all but it seems to be a relatively well established theory in some more advanced SEO circles I believe.

<comment><USER5> The main issue with JS and SEO is that most JS Frameworks we are talking about are used to create SPAs (Single Page Applications). Usability-wise, these are great; everybody hates page loads. SEO-wise, there is a problem because the search engines can't see all the HTML because everything is being rendered client side.

Basically, with a traditional web page written in PHP, the HTML is constructed from a template. The template spits out HTML from the server to the client. Every time you click a new link to load a new page, it's delivered to your client via a GET request (EDIT: Your client/browser "asks" for the file from the server, the server sends the requested document back to the client).

With a SPA, JS is doing some DOM manipulation, and you're not making round- trips to the server to display new content. For example, if you were to look at the source of a SPA written in Angular, you might see some <div ng-view> </div> elements, but almost no actual html. The web crawlers would see something similar.

There are several tactics for circumventing this issue, and Im curious if the Pintrest team considered them during this experiment. Anybody on the team here?

<comment><USER6> Angular.js, courtesy of Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately this only reinforces the mystical nature of SEO. 1\. Why does Webmaster Tools tell you duplicate titles are a problem but changing them has no impact? 2\. Why does repeating pin descriptions improve traffic drastically when we're told not to duplicate content? 3\. Why do some changes have a lingering impact while others revert back to pre-change behavior?

That said, I applaud the scientific approach to coping with the black box.

<comment><USER8> What makes you think that the solution they implemented was a good one, and should have worked?

<comment><USER6> I agree. I took one look at their test and thought: That's missing the point. They actually don't care if the title tags would hash differently, they care if the title tags are descriptive of the content in such a way that the pages can be distinguished by a human or nlp bot.

But then again, what more could they do? Likely adding the board's owner would have had a much higher statistical relevance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Think they could have had more fun experimenting with image indexing. Say you Google a nice location, for example: Edinburgh, Scotland. On that SERP there is two locations for images, the 5th and the knowledge box to the right has a map and image.

The first image in the 5th position image area is Wikipedia (hard to beat that), but the last three are local blogs and Flickr (easier to beat). The very last image is the same image used in the knowledge box which sits nicely in eye line with the 1st position SERP link.

After a quick bit of detective work I've found that in Google Images, Pinterest link back to their page but are not the image source.

Type into Images search: site:pinterest.com intitle:Edinburgh, Scotland

Back to the Edinburgh, Scotland SERP and looking at those images in the 5th position we can see that all images are both the page and source.

We can use the Flickr image that's third in the 5th position image area as grounds to warrant even a small experiment to test if the theory is correct. The theory being that if Pinterest was the page and source could they see a benefit from it reflected in their organic search traffic.

What Pinterest lack is content, which they stated in the post. What they don't lack is images and titles.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm presuming the negative results they saw from "rendering with JavaScript" meant, specifically, they moved certain page rendering tasks to the client side vs. server side. (It wasn't explicitly clear that was the case, but implicitly so).

If so, that's a big reinforcement of the importance of server-side rendering for SEO purposes or, for you JavaScript fans, isometric applications.

I know this is talked about a lot anecdotally, but it's interesting to see it so starkly laid out in an experiment by a major site.

<comment><USER11> I'd love to hear about that experiment in more detail. People often cite Google's Understanding web pages better[1] as evidence that it's now OK to render everything with JS, but this is the first time I've seen someone publish actual evidence.

[1]: [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understan...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding- web-pages-better.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I spoke with some senior Google search guys, this is what I walked away with:

Be a good player. Provide good content that your users care about. Positively add to the Web. Google will find you.

<comment><USER13> Not all sites are about content. A friend of mine recently struggled with this. He is able to get top quality swords and has a cool selling platform. Problem is that this does him no good on search rankings.

<comment><USER14> That's an interesting point conceptually: the best result for some purposes might be best for a reason that comes from the offline world. For example, if you want to buy rare things, you want to find the dealer with the best expertise and access to sources of those things. That dealer might have an incredibly minimal web site with almost no content -- maybe just contact information.

The original link-structure analysis idea in PageRank was meant to address issues like this a little bit: if everybody links to that dealer's page, it's a good suggestion that that dealer is important, regardless of the content of the page. But there are also things that people don't talk about on the web that much, or don't link to on the web that much (especially if they relate to a secretive, insular, or otherwise not-heavily-web-using community).

You could say it's no fair expecting search engines to know about social facts they can't possibly observe, but in any case it's a reminder of how complicated the idea of relevance or the best result really is!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On the duplicate title test, I wonder if they saw no difference because they put the unique element after the pipe (e.g. "... on Pinterest | {pins}" ).

Maybe google ignores after the pipe because that's where people always put branding: {title} | {meaningless company name}.

</comment><comment><USER16> This doesn't demystify SEO. There are just so many factors involved in SEO, and unknown factors. Something that works today may not work tomorrow. The only true guideline to go by is to create great content for humans, period.

<comment><USER6> I agree with you about the great content for humans bit, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't still aim to maximize your current traffic through technical means.

If it gives you a whitehat traffic increase of even a few percentage points, that can still mean a big deal, hundreds if not millions of dollars.

<comment><USER16> Here's the crazy thing about SEO - specifically SEO in relation to Google. This is a gut feeling based on over 10 years of building sites primarily with organic traffic:

I don't think you should try to do "best practices" with SEO. Over the past couple of years, I feel like Google is penalizing sites that try to dot all the i's and cross all the t's. And why shouldn't they? White hat SEO is still gaming the system in a way. In google's eyes, the pages that contain the very best content for humans should show up higher in search, despite them not being optimized for SEO.

I've been seeing more success with pages that are not optimized, pages for which I didn't pay any attention to SEO. The content on those pages are geared for humans and contain great info, that's it. I don't pay attention to URL, title tags, meta tags, etc. Google is getting very good at filtering this out, not sure if they have a team of humans that are whitelisting sites now, but I've given up on trying to optimize for SEO and it's worked wonders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good to see AB testing applied to SEO instead of just UX changes. The tl;dr version:

A/B testing is:

      bucket(hash(experiment, user identifier))

A/B testing for SEO is:

      bucket(hash(experiment, url))

<comment><USER18> > bucket(hash(experiment, url))

Unfortunately it often seems to be per domain, and not per url. And then you have to factor in backlinks...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think I have ever come across PInterest by searching. Am I just searching for the wrong things? I thought PInterest was largely a glorified bookmarking service - what original content is there that the search engines could pick up?

<comment><USER20> Personal guess, as I never have either, but I'd hazard a guess that they show up for a lot of recipes, fashion, and interior decoration queries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are they comparing two URLs on the same domain? Is that really worthwhile? How much is it about the domain and how much about the single URL on the domain?

If I link to a specific URL, do I give PR to that URL or to the domain itself?

<comment><USER22> To that URL. PR is always url-specific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there a chance that a site as large as Pinterest might have their search rankings dominated by some hand picked value rather than the many other factors that might affect a typical site?

<comment><USER24> The time to index is certainly dependent on their size, but I don't see how this sort of a/b tests on SEO wouldn't work on other sites.

The sample size of pages they have to play with, and the fact that they get indexed within a couple of days does make it all the more viable though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is pretty meaningless in context, when you visit pinterest the site is login gated. Sure that might look good on paper but it's a short term strategy.

<comment><USER26> The homepage might be, but they have 184,000,000 pages indexed in Google: [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apinterest.com&oq=site...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apinterest.com&oq=site%3Apinterest.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2341j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whoever wrote this doesn't understand what a strategy is or a tactic is. Makes reading on difficult.

</comment><comment><USER28> Pinterest likely cloaks traffic. Internal site traffic to a pinboard will require a log-in/register to continue viewing the board. Traffic from the Google index is allowed to continue viewing the board. That is treating search engines differently than human users (unless they throw up this log-in wall for crawling Googlebots too, which would severely hamper crawl-ability of the site).

You do not change the page titles of a site so you can get a few more visitors from Google's algorithm, you change the page titles of a site, because they are ambiguous for all your users. If you want to create more unique page titles you can credit the username that created the board to the pagetitle, instead of a meaningless and everchanging "number of pins on this board". For example "Mickey Mouse on Pinterest by John Doe" or "Mickey Mouse | John Doe | Pinterest".

You run A/B tests to test if user engagement with the site increases. If you run A/B tests to test if certain changes increase your search engine rankings/Google visitors then you are reverse engineering Google. Especially with a large site like Pinterest this may gain you some ill-gotten benefit over sites that do play nice:

"If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly." [1]

Even on a site like Pinterest I see low-hanging on-page SEO stuff that could be implemented better. For instance the header for a pinboard starts at line 788. Proper content stacking/HTML code ordering ensures that information retrieval bots do not have to wade through many menu's of boiletplate text, before they get to the unique meat of the page.

There is basically one single way to do legit SEO and most of the tips and techniques for that are transparently written in the Google Webmaster Guidelines [3]. The good news is that this has not changed much at all over the years, so one can stop algo chasing, and start improving the site for all users and all search engines.

BTW: The blog has no canonical tag [2] and puts the _entire_ article inside the contents of '<meta name="twitter:description"'.

[1] [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2012/08/website- te...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2012/08/website-testing- google-search.html)

[2] [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2009/02/specify- yo...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2009/02/specify-your- canonical.html)

[3] [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en) "Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site."

</comment><comment><USER29> first: i will not comment on the actual findings teased in this blog post, because we miss lots of information, data and context (javascript to make rendering faster, was it really the first pageview that was faster or was this aimed at the second, client side rendering actually makes rendering of the first pageview slower (please, proof me wrong))

second: this is the way SEO should be done - a systematic analytics dev. dirven approach - and they solved one of the challenges big sites regularly face SEO wise: running multiple onpage (SEO is just one aspect) tests simultaneously over chunks of their sites.

most of the time you are stuck with setting a custom variable (or virtual tracker) in google analytics of the pages you changed (and a control group) the issue with this approach is that GA only reports a sample of data (50 000 rows a day) and for big sites this sample becomes insignificant very fast, especially if you run tests. additionally it's not easy to compare the traffic figures of the tracked page-group with log-data like crawling, so you need a custom built solution to connect these dots.

this leads us to a serious limitation of the GA and pinterest approach: connecting their data with google serp impressions, average rankings and clicks. yeah, traffic is the goal of SEO, but it is pretty late in the funnel, crawling is pretty early in the funnel, you can optimize everything in between. for the in between we are stuck with google webmaster tools for reliable data (at least it's data directly from google and not some third party). so to get most out of such tests you must set them up in a way that they traceable via google webmaster tools.

and to make something traceable in google webmaster tools basically means you have to sice and dice them via namespaces in the URL.

simple setup

       www.example.com/ -> verify in google webmaster tools
       www.example.com/a/ -> verify in google webmaster tools to get data only for this segment
       www.example.com/b/ -> verify in google webmaster tools, ...
       ...

make tests on /a/ -> if it performs better than the rest of the site, good

the issue there is that to have a control group you need basically move a comparable chunk of the site to a new namespace i.e. /z/ and site redirects are their own hassle but well on big sites most of the time are worth it. also you don't have to move millions of pages most of the time a sample on the scale of 50 000 pages is enough (p.s.: every (test) segment should of course have it's own sitemap.xml to get communicated / indexed data)

one more thing: doing positive result tests it actually quite hard - <USER2> negative result tests is much easier. make a test group of pages slow, see how your traffic plumbles. make your titles duplicate, see your traffic plumble, ... yeah, these tests suck business wise, from an SEO and development point of view they are a lot of fun.

shameless plug: hey pinterest, check out my contacts on my profile. the goal of my company is to make all SEO agencies - including my own - redundant. we should do stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> This reads like a poor attempt at a software engineer dabbling with SEO. 'Growth' team indeed.

Hire an SEO - or at least a digital marketer with SEO credentials - and do some proper optimisation.</comment>


Hello productivity - <AUTHOR>

contents of /etc/hosts, ready to :w right after I submit this:
127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com 127.0.0.1 reddit.com 127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com 127.0.0.1 techmeme.com 127.0.0.1 www.techmeme.com 127.0.0.1 slashdot.org 127.0.0.1 www.slashdot.org 127.0.0.1 theregister.co.uk 127.0.0.1 www.theregister.co.uk 127.0.0.1 news.bbc.co.uk
of course, undoing it is trivial as well, but seeing 'unable to connect' will hopefully take me off auto-pilot and remind me there are better ways to spend my time. See you around YC <comment><USER2> I have found pomodoros [1] to be more helpful than hiding hosts. It's easy for me to focus on putting 25 minutes into a task. It's not easy for me to just stop using my browser for anything other than dev/test work.

[1] <http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> For when you get back from your self imposed exile: In future, try using 18.104.22.168 (from: <http://www.marco.org/244246945>)

More user friendly.</comment>


On Conference Speaking - <AUTHOR> https://hynek.me/articles/speaking/ <comment><USER3> On the whole, this is excellent advice. The introduction is completely true for me: I give many talks every year and it is, without question, a _lot_ of work. I suspect that everybody is a bit different as to how they prepare, but like the author, I do the cold rehearsal in my hotel room a half-dozen times (at least) before I actually go to give the talk.

I also break my talk into logical chunks - say five or six sections. I practice each of those individually, timing them. This gives me an average for how long each section takes, so I have a schedule written down. This lets me know how far over or under my time allotment I am so that I can adjust on the fly, either adding some additional explanation to some areas or subtly truncating something.

I always know my "bail out" slide - if I end up running out of time, what's the "thank you!" slide number? If you simply type in that slide number in PowerPoint or Keynote, it will jump to that slide without fanfare. Don't ever tell your audience that you ran out of time to get to all your material, or flip through the slides to the end that they won't get to see. They'll feel like they were ripped off. (Also, make sure to structure your talk so that the special bonus material is at the end, so they're _not_ actually ripped off.)

<comment><USER4> > I do the cold rehearsal in my hotel room a half-dozen times

How do you prevent getting bored? And how do you prevent your audience to notice that you're bored giving the same talk for the Nth time?

These are actually my biggest problems giving presentations.

<comment><USER5> [author of the linked article here]

I get bored while practicing (and it's getting worse as I get better) but the audience changes everything for me. In the absence of special talents, plowing through boredom and practice anyway is what separates good talks from mediocre ones.

<comment><USER6> To quote Dr. J: _"Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've not done nearly as many conference talks as many people here (I do about one a year) but just for entertainment here is how it usually goes for me:

1\. Come up with a proposal, send it out to as many conferences as I can find.

2\. Wait.

3\. Most reject it. Some times (often, actually) all of them reject it. Go back to step 1 (You lose 3 or 4 months when you are waiting, not knowing if any will accept your proposal).

4\. If one of them accepted, be overjoyed!

5\. Tell myself I'll start working on the talk super early so I'm extra prepared.

6\. Actually not start until 1 to 1 and a half months before the conference.

7\. Be super stressed. Not get anything else meaningful done.

8\. Day of the talk I am angry at myself for agreeing to do it when I get little out of it.

9\. Do the talk, it goes way better than I expected! I didn't totally embarrass myself and people seemed engaged.

10\. It's over! Oh my god, it's over! Thinking of all of the things I can get done now, I'm never giving another talk and putting myself through that again.

11\. 3 or 4 months pass and I see people I know are giving talks and I get the itch to do it myself again... back to step 1.

<comment><USER8> So what are some reasons to do any of this? Sounds unpleasant.

Does it really increase your salary or your network that much?

<comment><USER7> Being seen as an "expert" in your field does positively affect your salary and giving talks is one way to help there. To what extent it helps I'm not sure. But that's not really the reason why I do it. I do it mostly because of ego. I see people tweeting about giving a talk at X convention and I feel like I should have that status.

As jrauser said, though, the more I do them the less inclination I have, as it really does negatively effect my ability to achieve other goals. And the older I get the other projects become more important to me.

<comment><USER9> Even more than affecting my ability to achieve other goals, I think it might actually affect my health. After my last talk I tweeted[1]:

"In the days before my recent talk, my resting heart rate was ~50bpm. The morning after, it's ~45bpm. Be kind to your speakers, folks."

Long term low-level stress is pretty bad for you.

[1] [https://twitter.com/jrauser/status/867055469700849664](https://twitter.com/jrauser/status/867055469700849664)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having spoken at ~20 international conferences I'm pretty certain people underestimate the work that goes into giving a great talk you'll remember.

This also bugs me when people say "Oh, that person's given this talk at that conference before". Preparing a good talk is a lot of work, and after that's put in why should you not be allowed to give that talk more than one time?

Also only very few people watch conference videos. Giving the same talk a dozen times, by the 10th time maybe a handful of people in an audience of hundreds will have seen the talk before. I'm honestly surprised conferences still record the talks because I'm fairly certain it's not worth the money for them. (there are outliers to this when somebody gives the most amazing talk ever that gets watch millions of times, but how often does that happen?)

I'd much rather conferences invest money into a better experience for the attendees and speakers.

<comment><USER5> [author of the linked article here]

I'll have to disagree here. Using PyCon US as an example since it ended recently:

1\. My talk video has already been watched more than 650 times. I don't think I had that many people in the room.

2\. I rarely go to actual talks because as a European, being able to meet my American friends and being able to discuss things IRL is sadly a once-per-year issue. Open Spaces/BoFs are also more valuable IMHO by being present. IOW: now I'm back I've started to catch up by watching conf videos. :) _As a speaker_ , I'd prefer people going to talks too of course. Last year I spoke to a 1/3 filled room and it sucked so hard I wasn't sure I'll submit another talk.

3\. PyCon sells out. Always. It would be a pity to limit all the work to a small minority. Some great talk videos end up iconic too.

4\. Plenty people can't afford conferences at all. Be it money, job, or family responsibilities. Talk videos are a great way to democratize knowledge.

<comment><USER11> I think point 3 cannot be overstated. Iconic talks can be hugely informative or simple and brilliant in their execution. Two that come to mind and I regularly recommend to people are:

[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat) "Wat" [https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro-- 2/1](https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1) "F*ck You, Pay Me"

<comment><USER12> That Mike Monteiro video literally changed my life, helping me go from charging $15/hr for PHP "development" (sigh) to charging real money and getting real checks.

Wat is a great talk two, they're probably my top 2 talk videos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I admit I am one of those conference speakers that doesn't prepare a lot. I tend to discuss the topic beforehand with the organisers, go inside the venue to get a feel for the audience, go on stage and just deliver. IMHO it is all about creating a bond with your audience and interact with them as spontaneous as possible. Works for me, but I know it's not for everyone.

I also rarely use slides nowadays. That helps a lot. Sometimes I use a whiteboard. The way I deliver keynotes and presentations is maybe best summed up (and definitely inspired by) this article from the late Pieter Hintjens:

[http://hintjens.com/blog:107](http://hintjens.com/blog:107) Ten Steps to Better Public Speaking

<comment><USER14> >I admit I am one of those conference speakers that doesn't prepare a lot.

I've been running meet-ups and speaking at and attending conferences of all shapes and sizes all over the world for years and I assure you, unless you're exceptionally talented and experienced at public speaking (which you may be), then a lack of preparation is painfully obvious to the audience.

I completely agree that building a bond with the audience is the key difference between a good talk and a great talk but to anyone relatively new to public speaking, I promise you that there's no such thing as too much preparation.

<comment><USER13> I'm in the speaking circus now for 12 years, so I will happily admit that I have a solid pool of experience and knowledge to build upon. Preparation as in learning and practising the stuff I talk about is my daily job anyway, so in that sense I prepare a lot.

Some people call my style "storytelling" because that's the new buzzword, I guess. To me it comes very natural to be on stage and entertain the audience while delivering my content.

My main point is that speaking in public is not a one-size-fits-all thing. So what works for most doesn't have to work for all and vice-versa.

As long as the audience feels they learned something and were entertained, I'm happy.

<comment><USER15> You can do a lot of preparation and perfection, over years, and finally get up there and suddenly realize that you are not an entertainer, or even a teacher, and don't want to be either of those, even though the assumption was that this was a good idea, or the main idea. Then what, you're the guy from the Advanced Bashing The Shell talk, or a like guitar player who does not want to play for an audience, what do you do?

<comment><USER13> Not everybody can become a good speaker, granted. Training and experience helps a lot, though. But if you don't feel comfortable on stage then by all means, don't force yourself to.

There are loads of other ways to share your knowledge. Maybe you want to try podcasting, blogging, vlogging, writing articles for relevant magazines/web sites?

Heck, you could even make funny songs to get your message out :-) As a speaker though, I feel at home on stage and the feedback has been positive over all the years, so I feel comfortable with being a speaker.

As always, do what you makes you feel good, don't force yourself into something you don't like. The audience will notice immediately and some audiences can be very hostile. Most of the time though they are very forgiving in my experience.

<comment><USER5> Kind of depends on how you define a "good speaker", right? Your style and mine style are obviously very different (lots of it is also due to English being my third language of course) but people still have expressed that they consider me a good speaker.

It's like with everything: talent or grind. Or both if you want to be an _amazing_ speaker. :)

<comment><USER13> The different approaches and results of speakers is what makes a conference interesting, when the mix is right IMHO :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I spoke at my first conference about two years ago, and it was a huge learning experience. Here's how I'd do it again, if I did it again:

1\. Expect this gig to take a huge amount of time. As such, make sure that you allocate 1-2 weeks of full time work to prepare. Will it take this much time? Probably not, but its good to prepare anyways and know what you're diving into.

2\. Speak at a conference as part of a much larger communications strategy. What does that mean? Its waaay easier to speak about something that you're already talking about on your blog, with customers or with your colleagues. Then, you can just develop that existing conversation into something that works well in front of a live audience. Developing an idea is a lot easier than creating an idea from scratch.

3\. Test ideas first on your blog, HN or Twitter. Generally, what people want to hear and engage with at a conference is similar to what people want to read and engage with online. So, write a bunch of articles and share a bunch of articles, and see what people like from that.

4\. Practice, practice, practice. Talking at a conference is like giving a performance. Would some violin player just wing it on stage? Definitely not, unless they have 10,000 hours of experience. So, practice giving your talk at home in front of the mirror. Hire someone to watch you while you practice. Per point one, this stuff takes time, and like any piece of work, you need to develop your skills.

</comment><comment><USER17> Lots of "I give a lot of talk" folks on here. I'm a listener, and I just want to thank all of you. Being brave and sharing your knowledge to help empower others is no small thing. So, again, _thank you_.

</comment><comment><USER18> Glad to see I'm not the only one who relies on scripts.

After having recorded 36 hours worth of video training courses, I've written over 150,000 words of scripts because explaining technical information in a concise way usually depends on thinking about how to word your sentences beforehand.

I'm really envious of people who can wing in depth tech talks amazingly well, but at the same time I'd also be surprised if those people even exist. Winging it "decently" and "amazingly well" are so much different.

<comment><USER19> William Bialek has given week long seminars (4 hours a day over 4 days) in biophysics with just chalk and blackboard.

amazingly well

<comment><USER18> I just spot checked about 10 minutes of his stuff on Youtube. Yeah this is top notch.

Has he been lecturing since 1986? That's when he joined up with Berkeley on his Wiki page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I speak at a lot of local meetups and from one of those got invited to speak at a pretty big conference (M3AAWG). It was really intimidating since the speakers consisted almost entirely of Facebook, Google, Comcast, Microsoft, Rackspace...and somehow me.

I enjoyed it but was really nervous and had some serious imposter syndrome going on. I generally like giving talks but for me, it was a very different experience knowing that you were speaking for people who were paying to be there. The speaking invite allowed me to attend the conference for free though and I learned a lot.

My talk was basically a practitioner's experience of using/implementing a lot of different anti-phishing/anti-fraud techniques that people were deeply specialized in throughout other parts of the conference. I had what I hope, for others sake, was a very unique experience of combating a lot of fraud and seeing things come from all angles where a lot of larger targets will tend to deal with different parts of attacks in entirely different departments. I couldn't go deep on anything, but mainly got to share my experience.

</comment><comment><USER21> This guy basically prepares his "Hour" the same way a stand-up does, though without that all crucial audience feedback you need for comedy.

That's a great way to do it if you are focusing on one specific thing at a year turnaround rate.

If however you are asked to present a wide range of topics then it doesn't work quite the same and you need to be better at improvising and speaking off the cuff.

I probably speak 15 times a year on 3 different topics:

Augmented Reality

Applied Machine Learning

Leadership

Each time I am asked to speak, I pull slides or structure from previous talks, and then update them with the latest from the field or my own constant research/learning.

Generally speaking though I don't start prep more than a week in advance - which is different than most people I think because I have so much experience here.

The day before, I will spend a few hours going through a routine where I just present several times to my hotel room. If it's an hour long presentation I won't typically walk through the whole thing each time, just the transitions usually. Once done I'll distill the points I'm making into bullets and write them onto a notecard. If there is a podium I'll use the notecard, if not then I just gotta memorize the bullets and go from there.

The reality here is also that a lot of conference speaking is about building momentum from previous talks and building relationships with the conference organizers. You need to have a great relationship with the organizer because things will go wrong and being able to show you can go with the flow is important.

Almost as important as what you present is being able to present it. Being prepared for contingencies (slide backups on dropbox, thumb drive, laptop with HDMI and VGA), knowing how to wear a pin mic, talk into a handheld mic, knowing how to use a clicker, doing pre-show prep for wonky videos or sound issues where necessary, know how to answer questions, give space for panel members to talk etc... are all parts of the equation that make you a good speaker or not and thus get invited to speak or not.

Most people miss all of these things or ignore them assuming that the staff has everything covered. Generally speaking conference staff are run ragged so anything you can do to help make their lives easier is appreciated and will be remembered.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great article. Reminds me of Damian Conway's great conference talk on giving tech presentations - that one changed my approach on preparing for talks forever. [https://youtu.be/W_i_DrWic88](https://youtu.be/W_i_DrWic88) and [http://damian.conway.org/IBP.pdf](http://damian.conway.org/IBP.pdf) are the notes. Well worth watching.

</comment><comment><USER23> I speak as part of my job and have spoken at probably 20+ events that are 3rd party to my employer in the past 2 years. Currently I am averaging about a conference a month in 2017.

I thought this was a really great list. Some big ones I like to call out:

#9: Travel - This gets me more than most things. I have on occasions bumped into other speakers completely unprepared for their travel for or for things that might go "boom" such as: laptop failure, presentation corruption, display adapters not existing (or breaking which is harder to prepare for) and my personal favorite Immunity Boosters. Hell yes. A coworker turned me on to these two years ago after coming down with the plague after speaking at a few too many events in a short period. Now its a must for me and whether its placebo effect or not I haven't gotten sick while traveling/speaking since.

#10: Showtime - No one is born a great speaker. Flat out no one. I know people who speak weekly at public events and they used to suck at it too. Don't be afraid/stress too much before a talk. That said, I have seen people bite off more than they can chew and give a first talk at a major tech event such as AWS's Re:Invent where rooms average 1k people. If you're going to choke at your first event, don't have it be that big/visible of a one. Start with local meetups!

#5/6: A big one that I always recommend is peer review your content before you even start dry runs. Presentations often live longer on sites such as Slideshare than they do in the minds of those who have seen them live. It is in sites like Slideshare that your spelling, grammar, and even design issues will stand out the most. Get someone who is detached from your presentation to read through it, maybe even two people, take that feedback and then move forward. For me, my wife who was a journalism major reviews almost all of my content despite not knowing much about the technical nature.

</comment><comment><USER24> I haven't given as many talks so I can't really contribute, but I see a very different pattern already: I tend to apply when I already have researched a topic and have some slides. Maybe I should re-think my approach :)

Also I would never drink coffee (or any caffeinated drink) before a talk, and rather wake up late to get a goooood night of sleep. Also eat really light.

> If you watch the talk, you may notice that I don't do Q&As. That has two > reasons

Never really understood Q&As after the talk. We can always have a private discussions or use different ways to ask questions.

</comment><comment><USER25> Great blog post and certainly a lot to take away.

I've spoken quite a few times and several different conferences/events and love it. However, the thing I struggle with most is coming up with a topic. I find it incredibly hard to think of something I believe people will find interesting. However, I expect this is simply down to lacking industry experience and not having spent extensive time working with any particular language/tool.

</comment><comment><USER26> Are conference speakers paid ?

How do you keep earning money when giving talks all the time ?

Do they pay the airfare and accommodation ?

Does their work sponsor them or do they take personal holiday ?

<comment><USER27> It depends on the conference. I've spoken at a lot of conferences. This is my experience, both from my own presentations and from chatting with other speakers:

Very few conferences pay speakers - even keynote speakers. The exceptions seem to be conferences explicitly organized around a particular proprietary technology, and sponsored fully by the company that makes that technology. Most community-organized conferences or conferences around a particular language or piece of software do not. I only know of one exception to that rule.

Some will, however, cover your hotel and airfare. You may have to ask for this, and they may only cover it if your company does not already. (Airfare may be capped, or may be limited to people traveling from the same country/continent).

As for whether work sponsors your or not, it depends entirely on your company and their relationship with speaking. I've been pretty lucky - even though I'm not in a role that explicitly requires speaking as part of my responsibilities[0], I don't have to use my vacation time when speaking at conferences. Not all companies take this same approach, though.

> How do you keep earning money when giving talks all the time ?

This is the main reason why I feel that all conferences should pay speakers, even a small amount. Preparing properly for a talk takes a _lot_ of time, and providing speakers some share of the proceeds from a conference is a way of offsetting the amount of time it takes to prepare and give a good talk.

If more conferences paid speakers, the quality of talks would go up dramatically. However, I only know of one community-organized conference that pays speakers a share of the proceeds.

[0] ie, "Developer Advocate"

<comment><USER28> > _This is the main reason why I feel that all conferences should pay > speakers, even a small amount. Preparing properly for a talk takes a lot of > time, and providing speakers some share of the proceeds from a conference is > a way of offsetting the amount of time it takes to prepare and give a good > talk._

I've organised a few conferences covering different languages and platforms, and there's two things which prevent organisers from giving more than a token sum to speakers.

1) Most of the "proceeds" from a conference come from an abundance of sponsorship for that year. For the community-organised, non-profit conferences I've been involved in, the per-attendee cost is often much more than what we charge for tickets. (This also depends on the overall sentiment within the organising team. Personally, I'm for charging as high as reasonably possible and offering scholarships and discounts where needed.)

2) The sponsorship climate changes every year, depending on the marketing budget of the various local companies, and the conferences that are taking place in that year. It's very important for conference organisers to maintain a healthy balance for the next year, if only to cover the large deposits that we have to put down for the various vendors.

<comment><USER27> > Most of the "proceeds" from a conference come from an abundance of > sponsorship for that year. For the community-organised, non-profit > conferences I've been involved in, the per-attendee cost is often much more > than what we charge for tickets. (This also depends on the overall sentiment > within the organising team. Personally, I'm for charging as high as > reasonably possible and offering scholarships and discounts where needed.)

While I'm sympathetic to that, I'll note that the one conference I'm aware of that _does_ do this, on a matter of principle, is also the most generous with scholarships and assistance, and also the most diverse in both speaker lineup and conference attendees.

It's not easy, but definitely possible to run a conference this way; the main problem is that very few actually try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been running a software company, working on and managing various software projects, and launching/running software products for 10+ years.

The timing of this article is excellent as I was just about to start the search for conferences I could share some of my knowledge with. I've spoken at universities, colleges, and small business conferences a bunch of times and my talks are usually well received.

However, I'm still not sure about is where to _find_ conferences with audiences who might be interested in what I have to say.

</comment><comment><USER30> A lot of good advice, but I personally disagree with the slides not standing on their own. For me, slides + speaker notes should be able to stand on their own. It requires extra work and effort, but I believe the results are generally better because people can then consume the material the way they want.

However, like your guidelines, this is my personal one.

<comment><USER5> [author of the linked article here]

It's obviously a matter of style, however I'd like to point out, that it's not about extra work for me _at all_.

I probably spend as much time on my slides as you do (if not more), I just have a very different goal in mind and optimize for it relentlessly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fantastic article and wonderful tips. You could package it as an e-book, and maybe even sell it ;)

A shameless plug: I'm working on a side project which aims to help tech speakers get the most out of speaking engagements: [https://eventil.com/for/speakers](https://eventil.com/for/speakers)

<comment><USER32> Your Site looks like something I tried for my area. What are you using to build it? I like it.

<comment><USER31> It's a Rails 5.1 application. We are also in the process of migrating some parts of UI to Vue.js

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm curios about travel arrangements: i have spoken in many many events locally where I live, but never abroad. Thinking to propose a talk for a conference abroad, is it acceptable to expect them to cover travel expenses? (Not talking about pay for the talk itself, just flights and hotel)

<comment><USER5> Only if they explicitly offer that. I've never got compensation for anything unless I got invited. And you only get invited if you've built a name for yourself.

Bigger conferences also usually offer financial aid that is always worth trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm quite envious of conference speakers. I would love the experience but I never have any solid ideas that I think I could turn into a good talk.

<comment><USER35> You could always start with poster sessions or tutorials if a conference you like/are interested in has that.

<comment><USER36> Or lightning talks. I guess that the worst case scenario if something goes wrong is not that bad there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone maintain a directory of conferences that accept proposals grouped by technology?

<comment><USER37> Nice list of frontend conferences [https://github.com/benmvp/frontend- confs](https://github.com/benmvp/frontend-confs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If a speaker should specifically train him/herself for a talk, the talk is not worth listening.

<comment><USER39> _So athletes shouldn 't practice before the game?_

I've given close to 300 sessions at about 100 events over the last 10 years.[1][2] The top three things you can do are practice, practice, practice. There are nuances to the material that you don't even think about at this point. Saying it out loud makes you think about them.

There are jerks in the audience who will say "do you know about X?" which is semi-related but not completely.. you need to respond and either a) connect back to the topic or b) shut it down and redirect back to the topic.

When someone asks "that's great but I need to worry about B instead of A, what do I do?" you need to either punt to something like "catch me after" or "Oh, there's a setting/plugin/tool for that!"

Finally, there are transitions and a flow to the talk that you don't know about until you try it. And sometimes you'll need to look up things - <USER2> tools or even your projects - to refresh your memory.

Admittedly, I go lighter on practice because I was a theatre geek (only 3-4x out loud before the first time) but it is _still_ the most important step.

1 - [http://lanyrd.com/profile/caseysoftware/past/](http://lanyrd.com/profile/caseysoftware/past/)

2 - [https://joind.in/user/caseysoftware](https://joind.in/user/caseysoftware)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Check the Pagespeed of all your pages instead of one URL at a time - <AUTHOR> https://wulfdeck.com <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, didn't think of that. Should i re-submit it you reckon?

<comment><USER2> Or change the title if you still can

<comment><AUTHOR> Done! :) Cheers buddy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> After scratching my own itch I decided to launch this as a free webservice.

Fill in your domain, and it will find and scan all your pages for pagespeed.</comment>


Angel Investor Ron Conway Adresses His Portfolio Companies Over Financial Meltdown - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/angel-investor-ron-conway-adresses-his-portfolio-companies-over-financial-meltdown/ <comment><USER2> Great advice. I think the $10MM number for needed "cash in the bank" seems a bit high. I think this is better looked at as a "months of runway" number (which he also refers to).

I'd say that you should either be extremely cash-efficient (burn is almost inconsequential), or have 12-24 months of cash in the bank to weather the storm. Or, of course, being profitable is great too (but then, you essentially have an infinite amount of runway).

</comment><comment><USER3> If Silicon Santa is worried, I'm worried too.

I can envision internet ad execs dripping sweat reading: _"...even if it means staff reductions and reduced marketing expense..."_

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious to hear what PG and others may think, is it worth it to take the hit for early stage startups now. Give up more equity than normal to get guaranteed money in the bank- even though these same startups still had the same leverage they had 3 months ago?

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if TechCrunch got permission to publish this. The subject line reads "IMPORTANT PLEASE READ ASAP ...REGARDING CURRENT MARKET CONDITIONS...Confidential". It's not confidential any more.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most of his "advice" is just stuff you "should" be doing anyway. If you can "scale down" costs, then you were already "spending" too much.

Also, he sure "loves" quotation marks.</comment>


Bcachefs – A general purpose COW filesystem - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/8/21/22 <comment><USER4> He doesn't really mention how this relates to the current bcache code. That one is brilliant. I run a 4 drive raid with slow spinning 2TB drives and a 100G SSD drive as a writeback cache top. It detects strides so reading and writing large files stream directly to the raid, but little reads and writes got via the SSD. By filtering all the little traffic, the actual traffic to the drives is more efficient and spends less time seeking. In that setup bcache effectively creates a cached block device and I format that with ext4. It seems now it includes the filesystem. Not sure I like that, but it seems to be the trend in filesystems since ZFS.

<comment><USER5> I've been considering using bcache on one of my systems, last time I checked it seemed a bit unready in terms of all the steps needed to set it up and keep it working. What has your experience been?

<comment><USER6> I've run bcache-backed databases in production for about a year or so - it's been absolutely rock solid, and I'm very happy with it.

We spent a lot of time prototyping basically every SSD caching tech that existed at the time and bcache was the clear winner (note that dm-cache, the tech underpinning lvm-cache was pretty immature at the time).

You do need a workload with a fairly reasonable cache hitrate to get the best out of it, but that's obviously true of all such technologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another file system pursuing the lofty goals of ZFS/btrfs on linux (the other being tux3). It is a catch 22 situation for these guys. If they do not release it early there will be no users to test and report bugs, if they do release it early it is half baked. I hope the guy has a large stash in his bank. File systems take notoriously long to stabilize.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it's great to see new FSs targeted to SSDs. There's an alpha version to try out: [http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/](http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/)

</comment><comment><USER9> The performance is so close on all filesystems right now on Linux, why not just contribute to the code for one of the existing solutions and make it more mature?

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_rai...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_raid_fs4&num=2)

F2FS is looking really promising for SSD

ps. Kent's benchmark numbers struck me for one particular aspect I haven't seen in other benchmarks - max latency - and EXT4 is looking darn good in that aspect - I still use EXT4 over XFS, I simply do not trust XFS enough yet

<comment><USER10> > I simply do not trust XFS enough yet

You should give it another look. My team's used it for a mission critical project for over a decade. It's older and more mature than ext4, IMO. For sustained write throughput, it does much better than ext4. That said, many folks have utilization which looks more like random I/O than sequential.

<comment><USER11> I'd also like to hear any rationale for why one would trust XFS _less_ than EXT4. There might be arguments against using XFS -- but trust/maturity sounds like a very strange one to pick?

<comment><USER12> I don't know how it is now, but XFS was at one point, almost by design, setup to lose your data on power-failure.

<comment><USER11> Refering to this?: [http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_FAQ#Q:_Why_do_I_see_binary_NULL...](http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_FAQ#Q:_Why_do_I_see_binary_NULLS_in_some_files_after_recovery_when_I_unplugged_the_power.3F)

Are you sure it was worse than ext2/3?

[ed: Looks like it might be better/as good as ext2, but somewhat worse than ext3/4 -- apparently xfs jourunals only metadata: [http://superuser.com/questions/84257/xfs-and-loss-of-data- wh...](http://superuser.com/questions/84257/xfs-and-loss-of-data-when-power- goes-down)

Still doesn't seem like it destroy's data on powerloss -- just the usual - <USER2> data isn't written to disk, then it's not written to disk.]

<comment><USER12> Yeah, still better than ext2. I think part of it is that many people expect the file to either not have grown, or have the data you wrote to it.

IIRC (and I'm a bit hazy) here were other issues too that have been since fixed. The long delay between write and commit meant that a lot of bugs that would otherwise have been vanishingly rare got exposed. Likely the ext systems have/had similar bugs that just have only happened a single digit number of times in the past 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > PLANNED FEATURES: erasure coding

Now that is something I'd really like to see in Linux filesystems. AFAIK the GNU/Linux implementations of ZFS do not support ECC. Only the Oracle version.

<comment><USER14> The problem with the erasure coding implementations: patents. An example:

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141115/07113529155/paten...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141115/07113529155/patent- troll-kills-open-source-project-speeding-up-computation-erasure-codes.shtml)

<comment><USER15> There are a few different profiles offered in the Ceph Erasure Coded Pool support, afaik they are based on research papers. Assume due diligence done to ensure they can be used openly (ianal etc).

[http://ceph.com/docs/master/rados/operations/erasure-code- pr...](http://ceph.com/docs/master/rados/operations/erasure-code-profile/)

edit: Indeed, checked jerasure site and that's gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And just today I was wondering what happened with this btrfs patch set which introduces some of the benefits of bcache to btrfs: [http://marc.info/?l=linux-btrfs&m=129622115023547](http://marc.info/?l=linux- btrfs&m=129622115023547)

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like a really cool alternative to aufs, would love to see a Docker storage driver added to support this, once stable. [https://docs.docker.com/reference/commandline/daemon/#daemon...](https://docs.docker.com/reference/commandline/daemon/#daemon- storage-driver-option)

Any chance this might get added to the mainline kernel? aufs was never able to get merged in. OverlayFS was merged in, but IMHO isn't as good as aufs.

<comment><USER18> This isn't a union filesystem; it's a primary filesystem that happens to use COW internally for better reliability. It's comparable to ZFS, btrfs, or tux3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks very interesting. Would be cool if it was also compared against my favourite "dark horse" fs: nilfs2[1]. I always thought it'd make a great fs for flash storage -- but in the end I've generally ended up running ext4 over LUKS on my SSDs so far.

[1] [http://nilfs.sourceforge.net/en/](http://nilfs.sourceforge.net/en/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Does it outperform F2FS on flash storage, too?

<comment><USER20> Interested in that too, I was following F2FS progress a bit as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > It's taken a long time to get to this point - longer than I would have > guessed if you'd asked me back when we first started talking about it - <USER3> > I'm pretty damn proud of where it's at now.

This seems true for most of the non-trivial projects. :)

</comment><comment><USER22> the guide for bcache mentioned raid/erasure coding isn't implemented yet - anyone know if that is up to date and/or when it could be expected to be integrated?

<comment><USER23> > anyone know if that is up to date and/or when it could be expected to be > integrated?

If btrfs is used as an approximation, approximately three weeks after the heat death of the universe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anybody else just see this? [http://cl.ly/ccI0](http://cl.ly/ccI0)

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately lkml.org is quite buggy. Try again in the future, or find a different mailing list archive, subject "[ANNOUNCE] bcachefs - a general purpose COW filesystem".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> ext4 seems always to be the best.. no?

<comment><USER27> ext4 has it's place - and deservedly so. But picking the right file system really depends on your requirements. For example if you're building a storage server then ZFS would be a better fit.

XFS is also worth taking notice of since the benchmarks I've read rate it for having faster read and write speeds than ext4. However I don't have extensive first hand experience running XFS (something which I'm currently addressing).

<comment><USER28> I've set up several hundred storage servers with XFS (up to 250 TB per FS) in the past 15 years. There were sour times, 10 years ago or more, but in recent times it's been rock solid and beat the crap out of other FS. Notice that XFS always hated crappy hardware, because it pushes it to the limits.

<comment><USER29> Unsurprising given it was built by the same people who built these:

[https://www.sgi.co.jp/features/2001/dec/fleet_numerical/imag...](https://www.sgi.co.jp/features/2001/dec/fleet_numerical/images/lg_origin.jpg)

And more recently this:

[https://www.sgi.com/pdfs/4555.pdf](https://www.sgi.com/pdfs/4555.pdf)

Because pushing the envelope of HPC awesomeness was just another day in the office for folks at SGI. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Are acl and xattrs active by default?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes

<comment><USER30> Nice. I will be keeping a close eye on this fs for future use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is the support of O_DIRECT available or planned ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep - it's been done for awhile, works fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ken imo you should rename bcachefs to something else maybe bcfs?

</comment><comment><USER33> This guy should rush to write documentation first...He will probably "build to budget" exhausting money and his time in coding.

If he does so and finishes his project with a burnout there is a huge interrogation on how production people will be able to fix without a good knowledge of the design during the recovery time (burnin =~ burnout time).

Read the source luke is nice. But 10 pages in natural languages speaks louder than 10K lines of codes even with comments.

I dislike these kind of coders that goes for the beef and despise the grunt works like not for them.

Documentation should come first. This code will have to be maintained since he -like a good drug dealer- is trying to hook people to use his code.

<comment><USER34> You may check [http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/BcacheGuide/](http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/BcacheGuide/)</comment></comment>


I Quit Liking Things on Facebook for 2 Weeks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@schmutzie/i-quit-liking-things-on-facebook-for-two-weeks-heres-how-it-changed-my-view-of-humanity-29b5102abace

<comment><USER2> After reading this I did the same, one of the results was that I haven't been on Facebook as often. It's not as fun if you can't like things.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never liked anything on Facebook. Perhaps I should write an article.</comment>


Mac Developer license falls to $99/year, Mac App Store coming? - <AUTHOR> http://www.9to5mac.com/99-mac-app-store-coming-3546093465

<comment><USER2> Wait, you need a license to make software for Mac now? Can't people just download your software from the internet?

<comment><USER3> Not required (yet, anyway) simply to distribute software, but Apple's had the Apple Developer Connection for years, and membership in it was required to get some SDKs, early releases of products, some technical support, and listing in the Macintosh Product Guide, among other things.

<comment><USER4> In short, it provides next to nothing unless you want/need to be on the bleeding edge. If you or your company has a product that needed to be compatible with a new OS rev on the day of the general release then it is worth it so that you had a pre-release version to build and test against, otherwise there is not much there that you need. I don't think there are any SDKs that you can't get via the free ADC membership.

<comment><USER5> I'm not a member, but don't you get a hardware discount once per year or so that basically makes the membership free, at least once? (and maybe more if you upgrade frequently)

The benefits may not be huge you at least get dev builds of OS X, which is actually useful if you sell certain types of software for OS X.

edit: I see there are no more hardware discounts. Unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Except that you are kinda forced to pay for the iPhone developer portal unless you want to jailbreak your iPhone since you need those certificates and provisioning profiles.

But to develop for the Mac you just sign up for free and download XCode (or get it from the install DVD, albeit outdated).

The only advantage is probably getting access to pre-released versions of OSX so you could test your app but I somehow doubt there is such a large number of people that need to do this that badly and couldn't afford the previous $500.

</comment><comment><USER7> The app store model is largely a success. it seems logical they would use that model elswhere.

<comment><USER8> I know! It's a wonder that no one thought of building an operating system with a central repository for apps and their updates, that perhaps shipped with a corresponding tool that was apt wrt getting those updates, and also finding new software!

<comment><USER9> I dont think anyone is claiming Apple invented the model.

Though perhaps they can get it right for once.

<comment><USER10> Hopefully. Every time I use apt-get, I wish it charged my credit card money and gave Apple 30%! Maybe they will add that feature for me!

<comment><USER9> I love Linux package managers (most of the time).

However:

\- if you need the very latest versions it can be a pig

\- no one has yet built a nice, usable and _newbie_ friendly UI yet

If Apple can fix the second of those, all power to them :)

<comment><USER11> > no one has yet built a nice, usable and newbie friendly UI yet

The Lindows Click'N'Run store (from 2004 or so ?) didn't look too bad, what with "product aisles" and so on. It mixed the free and commercial apps, too, using the Debian 'apt' tools underneath.

It may now be run by Xandros, who bought the company; I haven't looked. (I bought a couple of Xandros releases back in 2003 or so, but didn't like the tight leash they seemed to intend for the customers ;-)

<comment><USER9> Looks like they still run it

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

Actually that fixes the UI problem quite nicely. I have some engineering gripes too... :P

<comment><USER11> Thanks, took a look and it seems a bit dusty ... (e.g. latest client for Ubuntu is for 8.04)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hope they never put a price on XCode and the other tools.

<comment><USER13> Apple is well aware that the make-or-break aspect of software development on the Mac is that the only barrier is programming skill. If they started charging money for the tools, people would just go elsewhere.

The iPhone App Store is so popular and lucrative that Apple can pretty much do whatever they want and we'll put up with it (by and large), but the Mac indie software market is so small and yet so important that they would never do anything to threaten it. If anything, I see this as them opening up their resources via one lower, universal price point, rather than locking them off behind a paywall.

<comment><USER14> Yet Microsoft sees no problem charging customers outrageous amounts for Visual Studio. I am appalled at just how much Microsoft is charging for the top-level VS2010 (try 20 - 40% of the salary of a good software engineer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I forsee iPhone app developers needing to get separate approval for their apps to port over to the Mac/iPad platform.

<comment><USER16> We've already seen the iPad App Store. Its demoed by Steve Jobs in the iPad unveiling. It is basically the iPhone app store, with a UI that's more suited to the iPad.

<comment><USER15> _basically_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just took my morning dump, shit store coming?

<comment><USER10> Your shit will only be approved if it has rounded corners, is polished, and doesn't smell offensive.</comment></comment>