Ask HN: Have you lived abroad for an extended period of time? Was it valuable? - <AUTHOR> Seems appealing to me but curious to hear others' experiences. Please share the details! Where were you originally based + where did you move to? What's been good/bad about it? In what ways did it change your perspective on various parts of your life? <comment><USER2> 7 years and counting. Italy to Germany. Not going back. Everything works. You get hired simply by having the right skills and coming forward - no need to "know someone influential".

Weather sucks as bad as I had imagined (but this year's being amazing so far)

Food was a nice surprise - way better than planned.

Cost of living is actually lower, opposite of what I thought.

People.... many are much warmer and friendlier than I was preparing for. Very nice surprise there too. Language may be harsh and many have this perma-grumpy air about them, but when they wish you a good morning you can see in their eyes that they actually mean it.

<comment><USER3> Berlin?

<comment><USER4> I doubt: "everything works" certainly cannot be said about Berlin.

<comment><USER5> I think it may need to be judged from the baseline of Italy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in '94 I was hired by Sony to be a developer for the first PlayStation, during it's OS development. I was in Toyko for a few weeks with another role at Sony, which I quit due to personality conflicts with my American boss, but was rehired by Tokyo of Japan to join their OS team, and I spent 6 months doing crunch time with their OS development team - I was the only Gaijin.

That was the experience of a lifetime: total immersion in a foreign culture while having a serious duty to accomplish, plus a complete lack of Japanese language or culture. Luckily, in my previous Tokyo stint the PSX OS team met a series of game developers from various game companies around the world - a PSX preview series of meetings, where the Sony team saw first hand some of the odd personalities (goth / 90's super geek) the game industry had. So I, being a fairly normal dude, was given a lot of latitude with my lack of Japanese manners.

Overall, the perspective I gained was a great foundation for confidence to pursue my dreams. There is so much human activity, practically anything one wants to do can be found if one is willing to leave your culture for one pursuing that dream without the American infrastructure we take for granted.

<comment><USER7> OT, but any way we can read stories about early PS1 OS development? That would be some fantastic reading

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> US American living in Europe since 2009, this being at least my third time round depending how you count it. Originally from Northern California and have lived in different parts of Germany and in Budapest, Hungary.

It's incredibly rewarding but also sometimes frustrating. If I can give anyone any advice, it'd be:

1\. Learn the local language.

Nobody respects an expat who doesn't make a proper effort to learn and use the language. You might still have local friends but they will, and should, think less of you if you lean on English too much.

2\. Go back home regularly.

It's easy to lose perspective, especially if you're often confronted with distorted opinions (positive or negative) about the place you come from. I go back to California every six months, and I recommend going at least once a year, even if home is very far from where you live.

3\. Stay humble.

It's natural to form opinions about your host country but it's important to remember you're a guest, and that you don't understand everything about the locals no matter how well you speak the language or how long you live there. That doesn't mean you never get to complain about the obstinance of the Elbonians, just keep it light. And try not to tell people how to vote. :-)

4\. Manage your expectations.

If you're from the US and in tech you will most likely be making less money and have fewer career opportunities than at home. That's ok: you should be aware of what else you're getting from the experience and be satisfied with that bargain. Techies live pretty well everywhere, so avoid thinking about dollar figures or Gooface interviews. Unless you're super into Gooface, in which case go where they have offices.

My life has been greatly enriched by "going international" and I recommend it to anyone with an open mind. I could imagine living in the US again, but I can't imagine viewing that as a permanent arrangement.

</comment><comment><USER9> South Africa to Seattle, almost one year.

The week that I landed my sedentary life ended. I don't think it was necessarily the location (although the Seattliltes' active lifestyles are certainly inspiring) but rather an excuse to grow. This has had the expected knock-on effects, especially in terms of clarity of mind and mood. The important things just work here - I want to deal with 1st world problems (equality, rights, etc.) and not what I used to deal with ("gee there have been many violent crimes in my neighborhood lately").

The bad has been friends. School and college are the best opportunities to make friends and it's tough once you leave. I've been trying meetup.com, but it's slow progress.

If you're on the fence, I say go for it! Put yourself in the mindset of growth and make it happen when you land.

<comment><USER10> > If you're on the fence, I say go for it! Put yourself in the mindset of > growth and make it happen when you land.

This is a very good point. When you move you have a blank slate and you get the opportunity to turn your life into what you want it to be without having to fight against your status-quo

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah (from US/Indiana), living and traveling. I spent a year on a "round-the- world" air ticket, then a year teaching English in Korea, and then another year traveling by bicycle with a couple 2-month stops (studying Arabic in Yemen, Russian in Kyrgyzstan, Chinese in Taiwan).

And I'm not an "adventurer" in the normal sense at all. Just a computer dork who wanted to try different things. I actually hadn't ridden a bicycle in a decade prior to the moment I booked a guesthouse in Krakow that just happened to be right next to a bike shop and I took it to be a sign. (I'd been salivating over other people's bike touring blogs for a year or two but thinking I'm nowhere near "adventurer" enough to do something like that).

Did it change my life? No, not really. I'm back in software at US big corp and raising two ordinary kids in a house bigger than I need and griping about taxes. I'm also the oldest person I know at my level at work (age 42 at level 64 msft).

Would I rather be at a higher level at work and miss out on those experiences though? Not a chance. Do I wish I hadn't come back? Oh sometimes, but oh well. Honestly being on the road is not all rainbows and unicorns either. There are plenty of days you're sitting around wondering why you're there in some guesthouse doing nothing and not back home "changing the world through technology" or something.

I mean, it's a privilege. You're presumably above average IQ and born into a wealthy country to less than horrible parents. It's not an opportunity most have. But, we all live a few years and then die. So it's a bit of whatever. Just try to spend some time doing what you enjoy. Don't die wishing you had.

Some random person once told me when I was young, "the purpose of life is to make memories". I still haven't found anything wrong with that statement.

<comment><USER12> Your story is awesome. I just answer to say that I didn't like the "ordinary" you used to define your kids. Grow them not to be ordinary, even if they are just not ordinary to you.

<comment><USER11> I don't either. But fact remains, they're totally ordinary. Love princess costumes and glitter and Disney no matter how much I try to nudge otherwise. I just roll my eyes.

But I've found I can reconcile that by switching a word: "Grow them not to be ordinary, even if they are just not ordinary to _themselves_ ". And that's probably what it should be anyway. I guess....

<comment><USER13> But you can inspire them, your kids. Tell them your stories. Your adventures. Your mishaps. How things are different in other countries.

Tell them about mountains, rivers and the seas. About different animals that they can't see anymore. Tell them about how mankind came to be.

You can be their, potentially, biggest inspiration at this age (presuming they are quite young).

PS: Sigh, I'm a hopeless romantic.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I just had to inspire one about how we shouldn't eat all the toothpaste straight from the tube.

<comment><USER11> ... Apparently wasn't inspiring enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm much less anxious and more self confident since moving abroad. I now feel like I could fairly easily move to- and live anywhere I choose to, which is incredibly empowering. It's also given me some new sense of perspective, and introduced me to some really cool people, foods, and customs.

I'm originally from The Netherlands; I've spent the past two and a half years in Prague, Czech Republic. I moved to Canterbury in the UK two months ago because I was becoming annoyed at not speaking the local language very well, and simply needed a change of environments. I'll probably move somewhere outside of Europe in the future.

I think the destination isn't all that important - I've mainly just gone to places I found interesting, and ideally had friends near. I'd absolutely recommend the experience, but do be aware that loneliness, isolation and stress are real issues many expats encounter at some point when moving somewhere new, and it's not talked about as much as it should be. I've found it to be very much worth it though.

</comment><comment><USER15> Went to China at 30, became fluent in mandarin, saw the unbelievable transformation of the nation, started 3 businesses, studied martial arts, met hundreds of new people, including well known luminaries, and met my wife and had a kid before I came back to the US after 8 years. The experiences there forged me into a much better person, with the skills to land a very rare job opportunity here in the states.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes. Mostly in different parts of Europe and Asia. Incredibly valuable.

For me, I think of myself as fairly open to people and cultures, but after stays in many countries I realized how closed my previous attitude really was. Meeting and living in many places seems to have helped me be much more open to differences in people, personalities and cultures.

If you stay longer than a long vacation, a very common experience (especially in countries with very large language/cultural differences), is a weird phenomenon where you start to _hate_ where you are and every tiny difference or minor inconvenience becomes meltdown inducing. And then you'll get over it and settle into your new life. This psychological wall is a make-it/break-it moment for many expats and some people simply can't get through it and give in. Don't! It's very character building and upon reflection a huge growth opportunity that most people don't get a chance to develop.

Finally, I think it's given me a much better sense of perspective about how and where my home country compares to others in various ways - favorably and unfavorably. It's impossible to convey this to people who haven't experienced living elsewhere themselves, so it can a bit frustrating to come back home and hear the same ill informed opinions. Likewise, it can be frustrating to hear about your home country being described by ill informed people in the countries you are in.

</comment><comment><USER17> The farther/further u go (and for at least 2-3+ months, better 6-12+, relying mostly on your self), the more you will know about yourself and your compatibility with the new, and the old place. Things that have been protruding a lot, in your "eyes" (both as negative and positive) at old place might later seem negligible, and other things to become the true highest mountain peaks. Same for the the new place, but only after u move elsewhere/back.

Note: "farther" is not just geographical notion, cultural distance might be a lot more overhelming. Think

[https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan- ho...](https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan- hofstede/6d-model-of-national-culture/)

[https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare- countries/](https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/)

(Where to and from : .bg .au/3.5yr .bg/10yr .au/3m .bg/+, with few 1-3month stays in other places in asia/europe)

And beware, after staying 3-4+years elsewhere it seems difficult to move back. Some psychological frontier i guess.. YMMV.

have fun

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm half Swiss half Finnish, working in Colombia for a bit over 3 years now.

The first year was a semi-sabbatical. I was traveling while on and off working as a freelancer for companies back home. Needless to say, you don't need many billable Swiss hours to have a good life in Colombia. So personally it was an incredible year. All the beautiful places, meeting tons of people, reading the books i didn't found time for before and most importantly not being tied to daily business matters. But professionally I was stagnant for the most part. Because I wasn't willing to commit too much time nor other things clients expect like availability or short deadlines, I was mostly working on rather trivial generic web development tasks. Code monkey work under palm trees. Also I realized being a Freelancer is not for me. It basically means you are running a business with everything that entails: Communications, marketing, legal, accounting, project management, etc. Many of those I don't have particular interest in or patience for. The year aptly did what it meant to do. Taking a year off from 9-to-5 jobs while not having to spent savings. But career wise I was pretty bored by the end of it.

The last two years I have been working for a startup in Bogotá that is part of a company builder that creates businesses from scratch for the growing middle class in Latin America. While I don't have that many exciting adventurous stories about my personal life to tell at the moment, I do thoroughly enjoy living here and work wise I have never learnt as much in so little time since I started my career 10 years earlier. Exclusively communicate in foreign languages. Vastly different market and mindsets than my country. Having to re- assess things I though where "universal truths" just because I saw them over and over again in Switzerland or similar nations. Balancing tech budget for cloud services whose pricing is aimed at rich western countries. Dealing with much lower end mobile devices and low quality networks.

So the whole 3 years have been extremely valuable personally and professionally in terms of experience and knowledge gained. Money wise less so. But I'm young enough and don't have family to take care of, that this is not much of a worry for now.

<comment><USER19> Check out Medellin if you haven't done so already. There are quite a few offices there of funded start-ups in the US and the EU.

<comment><USER18> I have been living 6 months in Medellín in the first year. While I love the people, the climate and things being much better organized than elsewhere, culturally I prefer Bogotá by quite a margin.

But the former is probably better to start in, if one wants to live in Colombia or just work from here for a couple of months. The grey, rainy and cold capital takes a bit more time to appreciate :)

<comment><USER19> I loved Bogotá, it's the largest city I've ever spent time in but it didn't feel at all like that. At the time it wasn't the safest place to be in, it should be much better today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm from southwestern Virginia, but I spent a month at a time for several years with my family in Italy in my teenage years, mostly in the same small town, and later lived in Lausanne, Switzerland for five years while working for the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Mind you, my parents are from the US, went to grad school in England, spent a lot of time on the continent, and my (homeschooled) education reflects that, so it's hard to say the effect on me.

I think the most valuable aspect has simply been experiences and viewpoints that serve as counterexamples when I am thinking about how society is organized.

</comment><comment><USER21> Russia to New York

I lived in New York for 5,5 months (the max period allowed on one continuous stay on a B1 visa in the USA).

Cons: I wasted ~3000usd on rent

Pros: I, never having been outside former Soviet Union, flew straight to another part of the world, without any connections, without friends, alone, with some money that only appeared to be sufficient to be spent on rent and food. I managed to rent a room (never done so before in my life), I tested if I could find a job in NY (yea, guys, don't be hurt by this, this is illegal, and I never actually worked while staying in the USA, so i didn't breach visa terms, I was only testing the possibility of finding work there - and that was very easy, I found a low-paid position on the second day of looking for it). I was amazed by how much people in America respect your privacy, talked to some people, developed a daily routine - not too sophisticated but still I managed to survive some 7000 or so miles from home, and it wasn't too difficult and I came to one of the main conclusions in my life - the world is much smaller than I thought, and in order to fly anywhere and live anywhere you just need some rather humble amount of money. This 'global thinking' replaced rather depressive 'local thinking' framework I was thinking in previously and in that regard now I am happy that I have realized that.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm Italian, from a very small village.

I had two 6 months period in the US and they definitely reshaped my way of thinking and gave me a more pragmatic approach.

Now I'm living in the UK, mostly because London has a way better job market. This is giving me the opportunity to live in a truly international environment, to work on more interesting problems and with a better compensation. The Brexit debacle is also giving me more perspective on why being part of the EU is good and how having really bad politicians is not only an Italian problem.

</comment><comment><USER22> Moved from U.S. to Netherlands 6 months ago, and will stay for at least another year.

I moved for work, and I gained a cool new project to work on and new adventures, but didn't have my family, friends, or any familiarity of the culture.

It quite accustoms you to leaving your comfort zone, which is powerful and awesome. And it forced me to really value my relationships, and I found myself deliberately making an effort to catch up and keep in touch with some friends that I really valued.

<comment><USER23> What made you choose the Netherlands?

<comment><USER22> I didn't, I was looking for a specific kind of work (Ethereum related) and it just so happened to be in Netherlands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was born and raised in the Suburbs of Chicago. I lived in the city through University. I studied abroad in Luzern, Switzerland, where I met the woman I would later marry. I moved back after my degree, first to Schaffhausen for a spell, then to Bern.

I've worked for a number of agencies across the country, and I've also freelanced quite a bit. I have a studio down by the river with some good friends of mine, where I build various apps and platforms with the various web stacks. I've been lucky enough to make some cool things with some cool people.

It's pricey here. I've taken up work at a startup here in town to cover my costs. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning Swiss German and its various dialects – I'm told I still have an eastern accent from time to time. The river is beautiful during the summer.

I do think about Chicago often. I miss it dearly. The startup scene is burgeoning here, but it's still Switzerland. Bern is somehow too nice to leave. Small government, applied correctly, is a lovely thing. We pay through the nose in taxes, but the system is there for you when you need it.

Still, I'm a stranger in a strange land. And simultaneously at home. A part of my own cyberpunk novella with mountains.

</comment><comment><USER25> There is a general principle that exposing yourself to new environments will improve your perspective, whether it is spending time in a different country or spending time with a different socio-economic group.

It is of utmost importance that you do this at least once because it will show you the things you considered constant but aren't. And after having that experience you might be more open to understanding other situations.

<comment><USER13> Have you done this? What is your experience?

<comment><USER25> When I was younger I lived in Brussels for 3 years, it gave me both different language exposure (French/Flemish vs English) and different cultural exposure. But more recently I spent 6 months living in Denver which, although it was still US based, helped remind me of things which living in the Bay Area does differently, from driving to politics to governance to industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Grew up in California, after college moved to DC. 2 years into that, I decided the path I was on wasn't for me, and moved to South America to study Spanish for a few months. Ended up loving it in Buenos Aires, and lived there for about 9 months. I interviewed at startups there, but the pay was so low relative to other countries, that I couldn't stomach it, and ended up finding a job in Amsterdam. Was there for 4.5 years, and really loved it. My girlfriend at the time really wanted to live in London, so we moved, and I ended up getting a job at a SV-based BigCo. When we split, after 4 years, I figured it was time to try the US again.

So almost a decade in total! Hard to say if it's "valuable" as honestly it just felt like life. I have dual citizenship though (US / Euro), so moving around was much easier than for some. I am really glad I took advantage, and do believe it opens you up in a unique way.

You learn how to get along with people from all over, get good at identifying accents (like making friends just because you can tell that person is from Manchester, and not just English), and hopefully pick up a language or two. My Spanish is thankfully still pretty good, but my Dutch is awful.

I'm in NYC now, and while I am enjoying it, I can definitely see myself moving again. Maybe Australia, or somewhere else in Europe? Gets harder with kids I'm sure, but I know people from oil households who moved around a lot (Nigeria, Bahrain, Norway) and are still normal, well-adjusted adults. Itchy feet? Who knows. But a big benefit of working in tech is that the job doesn't really change, regardless of where you are. It's much harder for friends of mine who are lawyers, or even doctors (building a practice is very local), to consider moving internationally.

<comment><USER27> Wow very cool story. I'm in NYC now too. I've been working for almost 3 years now and I'd like to do the same, to go down to South America and learn spanish for a few months. Did you have a lot saved up and anything endgoal in mind when you did it? Did you work during that time? Or did you just let it rip and go with the flow? I just need some time to get a fresh mindset, so sick of my job and the day to day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yes, five years and counting, and it has been a great experience.

I presume that HN being more USA-centric makes the question interesting; but I feel that if you ask people in most other regions, the answer would be "obviously yes".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. Would love to hear the details — where were you originally based + where did you move to? What's been good/bad about it? Has it changed the way you think about things?

<comment><USER28> South America -> Scandinavia, came here to pursue the PhD; however, If I had decided not to pursue a PhD I still wanted to live abroad.

There are different aspects that make the experience different, like, whether you learn the local language or not (in many places you can get away with english).

But, regardless of that, the "cultural gap" will be always there, obvious things for everybody that for you are a total mystery... and by being in such a different context, you start to realize that things that were "a fact of life" for you, or "the way things are", it was just a feature of your culture at a given time.... So yes, you learned a lot about yourself, your culture, and people.

The bad ? you will find that each culture has great things and terrible things, and then, weherever you are, there will be something missing...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> At 18 I spent a year living in the UK and a few months in Italy. I remember being depressed after leaving Italy and landing back at Gatwick through a blanket of thick clouds.

It was a super valuable experience overall and in many ways I came back to the US with a newfound appreciation for this country.

If I could do it over again I'd go somewhere way more outside my comfort zone (non-English speaking). Probably Japan or Korea.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm currently in my final week of a semester exchange program in Singapore (from Midwest USA). Even though I'm a student I might have a little different perspective.

As background I've already traveled quite a bit with 15 countries and 45 states so I knew a little what I was getting into.

I generally have loved to travel, but this 6mo period has actually made me find some limits and has been pretty tough. I really found some things that make me very uncomfortable culturally and realized I can't live anywhere I want like I thought I could. I've ad some not as good experience here due to several factors, but I'd do it again even knowing that. You really find your limits and the world opens up a lot more. One of the major things for me is even though you can make friends anywhere, if I lived abroad longer I'd have to go where I know at least a friend or 2 already to help me establish roots there. Friends really make or break wherever you are.

<comment><USER31> I'd be interested in knowing more about the limits you hit in Singapore, if you're willing to share! Singapore is a really interesting city and as someone who moved to Hong Kong a few years ago, I've always wondered what life in Singapore is like.

<comment><USER30> Well they aren't related to Singapore specifically, more or less Asian culture as being more conservative than American culture. It can be really hard to meet locals here, as many stick to themselves and find talking to a stranger somewhat weird, much less making friends for no reason. This can be seen especially at clubs, where you go and hang with your group of friends rather than meeting new people. I was just in HK for a week and really liked it, it seems more vibrant than Singapore as far as the energy of the city.

Many limits I ran into were personal including health conditions and it turns out humidity really makes me sweat which I never realized. Also in India for some reason eating with my hands made me so uncomfortable, whereas eating with chopsticks was fine and I learned it quickly. The language barrier wasn't too bad since Singapore is English speaking, although the accent can be really difficult sometimes so speaking slowly is sometimes needed. I knew Asian culture was more conservative as I've been to South Korea before and have a lot of friends there from research at my home university, but I really thought I could make local friends anywhere despite a quieter culture and that turned out not to be the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> British National here: Making use of the EU's freedom of movement, I lived in Finland but after a 3yr stint back in the UK (London) I now live in Sweden and have for the last 3.5~ years.

I feel like I haven't assimilated as much as I should but! to answer your question: it was/is very valuable, to see how other peoples approach life, to see subtle differences between how people handle things commonly- you pick up life tips that make being human a little easier. Simple things that are obvious in retrospect.

However, I'm not sure what the alternative would have been if I had stayed in London.. Without a frame of reference it's hard to know if it's was /more/ valuable than the alternative.

<comment><USER33> Hope you can get Swedish citizenship in time! I grew up in Germany, but am British, but after spending enough years here I am so glad I can apply for German citizenship before Brexit day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I lived in China for a year right after my undergrad degree at Iowa State, taking a manufacturing QA job in Shenzhen on a whim.

It was valuable in that I formed lifelong friendships. A few others had also done the same and being in this unique boat --- no language skills, first time in China, first job ever --- formed really tight bonds.

I also learned enough Mandarin that I can comfortably roam China on my own, even 6 years later, when I went for two weeks this January.

Oh, and this is how I got into building software as well. We built our own ERP system for manufacturing audits.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes and Yes.

I've written a bit about it here:

[https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-western-kid-living-in- communis...](https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-western-kid-living-in-communist- poland)

Later followed by a 5 year stint in Canada that I've yet to really write about and another 2 years in Bucharest, Romania.

Original base is NL.

What's been good/bad about it could fill a book, and it changed my perspective on life in so many ways that each and every day it still surprises me.

For one thing: in every country people take stuff for granted that elsewhere is hard to impossible to achieve or come by. Those things are simply 'normal' and nobody thinks twice of it. And elsewhere in the world people are dying or hardly able to function for lack of those 'normal' things.

Remember this whenever you turn on the light, up the heat, open a tap and clean water comes out or go out to vote on election day.

</comment><comment><USER35> From Sydney. Before leaving at 19 I had already been sent on business to India, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, etc. Following that, I have since lived in China on and off for 18 years, in at least six cities. In that time I also spent one year each in London, LA, and Bangkok. Lots of travel. Chiefly, moving to China as a young person allowed me to afford to invest time in developing my skills and provided a platform for me to gain experience launching a business from scratch with limited capital in a foreign environment, while learning a language. The key challenges have been finding mentors and maintaining a professional network with all the moving around. I've had amazing experiences: long distance cycle touring in many countries, the Tunisian revolution, sailing trimarans at night on vast Himalayan lakes at 2000m altitude, months solo in India, made documentaries, the great art museums Europe, the US and the Chinese imperial collection (with some background to appreciate them), studied ancient history and slowly built a small art collection, etc. Met my wife. Now running the most interesting venture of my life, for which everything prior - linguistic, cultural, business, technical, financial, personal - has prepared me. It hasn't been all rainbows and unicorns but I would definitely do it again.

 _Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"_ ― Hunter S. Thompson

 _The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page._ ― Saint Augustine

<comment><USER36> >Before leaving at 19 I had already been sent on business to India, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.

Interesting, and unusual, maybe? except if you were working in a family business. Were you?

<comment><USER35> Haha, fair line of reasoning, but no. I was working for a listed company...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Originally I am from Eastern Europe, and I lived in the UK for a while. Positive: I stopped smoking soon after I moved, as the price of cigarettes in UK was crazy high. Negative: I gained some weight, as I very much enjoyed local chickens, burgers, bacon, beer.

Jokes aside, it helped me to improve my English, see other ways of living, experience different work culture, and learn that very indirect, not straightforward way British people communicate.

</comment><comment><USER37> For me, the value came from learning the customs of the others. Challenging what I took as obvious opened my eyes to the lines along which societies can vary.

One example was to see different ways universities operate in respect to undergraduate students, for example the amount of socializing they are, incidentally or on purpose, forced into. The differences in prestige boils down not to the level of teaching, but to opportunities students are given, becoming a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Living in another country means that sooner or later one will crash into beaurocracy and the health system, which works differently everywhere, giving appreciation to things that one might have hated before.

And finally, there's the pure "feel" of the place. Admittedly, it's possible to live in places with different "feels" without going abroad, and get most of the variation, but it's even more pronounced when the demographics, general approach to the world, weather or legislation are different.

In the very least, moving around helped me understand what is important to lead a happy life. Totally valuable.

</comment><comment><USER38> Orig based in Arkansas where I grew up, now I live in Colorado. I've done a lot of stints diff places: \- A year in Cairo. \- A year in Melbourne. \- A year in Dublin. \- 1.5 years in Europe \- 6 months in South America

The good IMO opinion is everything, the only downside is building a community and meeting people takes a lot of energy. But looking back I think it takes a lot no matter where you live, it is just easier if you are there all the time.

How did it change my perspective? I am a lot more confident in general as I realized I can navigate a huge swath of different cultures and challenges. Knowing you can land just about anywhere in the world and take care of yourself is a good feeling. What else? I see a lot of what other countries are doing well and doing not so well at, when I go home it helps me see what we could be doing better.

</comment><comment><USER39> Moved from the west coast of the US to France for a year. I would unreservedly recommend living in another country for an extended period of time, preferably before you're 30 or 35. I was in my 50s when I did it, and it was a little too late. My ability to acquire language skills was much better when I was younger.

I think the most valuable lesson I brought back with me was that I sometimes speak in vague sound bites. I didn't notice before living in France because everyone around me seems to do the same thing. I'm not going to call it 'an American cultural trait' but it might be. Noticing that has inspired me to focus on clarity in my thoughts and communication.

Other useful lessons: people are pretty much the same all over; ease of travel between EU countries is so much better than when I backpacked around Europe in the 1990's; a lot of things we take for granted in the US are full of incomprehensible friction in many other countries (e.g. opening a bank account). And vice versa, to a smaller degree.

<comment><USER40> > I sometimes speak in vague sound bites

Interested in what you mean by this. Could you give an example?

<comment><USER36> Yes, I'm interested to know about it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 11 years and counting. Born in Germany, I've been to the US, UK, Spain (and short 3 months in Mexico), now again in the UK. It has absolutely been valuable, though I feel the question does not really apply to me as I always felt I had to go abroad. Everything has good and bad parts, but the one thing I can say for sure is that I am much more "alive". The thought that I might have stayed in my home town (Hamburg, which is one of the nicest cities in Germany) for my whole life truly horrifies me.

However, now with wife & kids priorities change significantly. We are planning (though it is not sure we will do it due to wife's job) to bring our kids to Germany while they're in school and then retire in Spain once they have grown up. Let's see if that works out ;)

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm currently in my 6th year living in Thailand, having grown up in South Australia and then spent a few years in the eastern states (of Australia).

I moved because my (then gf, now wife) had been away from her home (Thailand) for ~10 years and wanted to come home for a while. I worked for a remote company at the time, so it was no problem work wise. I've since started my own company and work independently but still remote, so no issues there.

The low cost of living is nice, but I definitely appreciate some of the western cultural/lifestyle aspects more now that I've lived here.

I also appreciate things like government more now - people often claim Australia has become a "nanny state" due to regulations - Thailand is a perfect example of what can happen when government says "eh fuck it do what you want". I realise that won't mean much to those who haven't lived here, but that's the whole point of this thread, isn't it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Lived and studied in Scotland for 9 months (I am from Germany) when I was 22. Dunno if that counts as "extended". It certainly helped me to become a bit more adult and a lot more independent and confident. 10/10 would recommend :)

Positive side effect: I now understand Trainspotting without subtitles, which did it not before :)

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm interested in hearing from those in the US who have spent significant time abroad as nomads / not committing to any particular place for long. This website always inspires me to give it a try: [https://nomadlist.com/](https://nomadlist.com/)

</comment><comment><USER45> I grew up in the Canal Zone and spent a lot of time in Berlin. It was valuable to me. Gave me perspectives I wouldn't otherwise have. There are downsides. Coming to the U.S. from the Canal Zone took a lot of getting used to. Going in the reverse direction is no different. However, English is widely spoken and American movies and TV are ubiquitous and this helps with coping to a new place.

Every place has its nuances. In Berlin if you walk on the sidewalk and 4 people are walking abreast toward you they will not make way for you. On whatever side you are walking the person closest to you will do a half turn and it's expected you do the same.

I met a German in Turkey once who lived in a village for 20 years. He said he will always be an outsider there. Depending on where you go you may not ever feel part of the society.

</comment><comment><USER46> in between undergrad and grad i did peace corps in rural africa (uganda). for two years i lived in a village 30km from the nearest flushing toilet. it was simultaneously the best and worst thing i've ever done. we in the west live in a theme park. it's been about 5 years since i've returned and i still occasionally reflect on how many light years ahead we are when i drive down perfectly paved roads in my tiny little college town (let alone wrt metropolises like nyc).

ironically it inspired me to work harder to secure some wealth for myself and go into software (because to squander the opportunity would be an insult to all of the people i met that will live out the rest of their lives growing corn).

i'm a cofounder now and there's a lot of commonality in at least the grit/resilience necessary.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was born and raised in Columbus, GA. I briefly lived in Germany as a toddler, but I don't remember it.

My mother is a German immigrant and my father was career military. He retired when I was three years old and bought a house where I lived until I married and moved out. I graduated high school with people I had gone to kindergarten with.

I was married to a soldier for a long time. In my twenties, one of our stints was in Germany. We were there more than 3.5 years.

I got to meet some of my German relatives and got to be exposed to my mother's culture. I had always felt I was missing something in that regard and it helped me feel whole.

</comment><comment><USER48> Absolutely it was valuable. I'm Finnish, lived in China for a bit over one year (almost 20 years ago). It certainly changed the way I look at the world, was an invaluable experience, and I recommend anyone to take a bit of a leap. Most likely you will appreciate it. Since then I've had shorter stints elsewhere but not for longer periods.

I got paid better at the assignment than at home, learned a lot about how differently people think in other parts of the world; my two older kids started school there (in English) and gained excellent language skills. I'm very thankful for the opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER49> Currently going on two years in SE asia. Midwest -> North Africa -> PVD/NYC/Boston area -> SE asia.

Good: Cheaper cost of living, meeting people from all over the world, observing/learning the ways of people and cultural feedback loops.

Bad: always takes some adjusting to, esp language.

Hasn't really changed my perspective of various parts of life, even through the differences, people don't really behave imaginably different esp wrt most going along with the status quo of their local environments.

Valuable? We all have different functions for evaluation of such when it comes to anything in our lives.

</comment><comment><USER50> Absolutely. I lived in China and Spain, and am about to move once again. Those experiences have given me perspective on the world and on myself, gave me self-confidence when I was able to succeed in a foreign environment against international competition, built my character and drive. It ultimately gives me a non-negligible advantage over my peers when it comes to job-hunting. It does have downsides because leaving Family & Friends is tough at times, homesickness, etc.

My personal 2 cents is, think about your motivations. Don't do that just because of a calculation.

<comment><USER19> > Don't do that just because of a calculation.

I'd say that doing it is more important than what your motivation is. Your motivation will last for a very short while once you are confronted with the reality of life abroad, you will need to be able to adapt and find your groove even absent whatever your motivation was or you'll be back in your home country before the week is out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I lived in Italy and a bit in Austria over the course of about 15 years.

It defined my life in many ways, not least of which marrying a woman from Italy!

I can't recommend it enough - it gives you a much broader perspective on the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Could you elaborate on the "broader perspective on the world" point please?

<comment><USER51> Seeing how things are done, how people think and what they regard as normal. Here's a simple example about windows, and how they're done differently in different countries:

[https://blog.therealitaly.com/2007/08/09/window- technology/](https://blog.therealitaly.com/2007/08/09/window-technology/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Valuable in what sense? For most people, it will probably be very valuable as an experience. But it might also hurt your career a bit, depending on what you are trying to do. Read the biographies of the most successful entrepreneurs, and I think you'll find they were too focused on building their companies to spend a lot of time roaming the earth. The main exception would be people like Sebastian Thrun and Elon Musk who moved to the US as a way to pursue their ambitions.

</comment><comment><USER53> I was born on an island in the Caribbean, lived in Australia for over 10 years then lived in Russia, Netherlands, UK for about 6 months each and now I'm in Germany.

I think that living in many different countries does change you significantly. It makes you more aware of subtle cultural differences and also about human psychology at a fundamental level. I think it also probably made me a bit cynical overall. It gives you a general feeling of instability.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just yesterday I read this article that an acquaintance of mine wrote on her experience as an American who lived for a while in the UK and then went back to the states [https://www.girlabouttheglobe.com/where-are-you- from/](https://www.girlabouttheglobe.com/where-are-you-from/)

</comment><comment><USER54> I became a Dad before I had the chance to fullfil my dream of going abroad longer.

My wife has done the opposite and spent most of her 20s as a backpacker/work&travel. She wants to go travelling again but my job & financial situation just make it not possible to make the jump. Are there any other parents with long-term travel experience?

<comment><USER19> There is a couple that is living on a small boat with kids.

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct- sun-0802-balanci...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct- sun-0802-balancing-act-20150731-column.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> From USA. Lived in Canada for nine years. Does that count?

</comment><comment><USER56> Yes, I have. 5 years in Spain. I was studying there and as someone who was born, raised and now living in eastern Europe, I can tell you that this was one of the most valuable experiences of my entire life.

First things first, I grew up in a large city that was torn by protests up until the late 90's, despite the collapse of the soviet union. Even though I was a kid in the 90's, I grew up with the idea that I'll emigrate. And So I did the moment I got the chance in the mid 2000's. I am not sure if things had changed at that time or I had but life was nothing like I would have expected. First off, coming from a poor country with no financial support is extremely difficult. Second, Eastern Europe is a pretty non-secular place so foreigners are not something you see every day. I wouldn't say the foreign kids(as few as they were) in school were bullied in any way or left out but they were almost always pushed a bit off to the side. Something I did not experience in Spain. Students, professors, random strangers on the street - everyone, no exception was very friendly and welcoming, helpful and friendly. I did my last year of school there and at the time my country was not in the EU and I was an illegal immigrant by all means. I was concerned about this when I enrolled and I asked the secretary of the school if that is a problem. Her reaction blew my mind: "We are not immigration services. We are an educational institution. What kind of animals do we have to be to say no to a kid that wants to study?". I truly had no idea what to say, I think I stood there for a good 5 minutes with my mouth wide open. For years I was trying to figure out where the catch was, but there really wasn't one. I studied software engineering and I did extremely well, graduating second in my class by a tiny fraction behind the guy that was first. When I started university I was 18 and I had been writing code since I was 10 so everything was very natural to me. Which in addition made me even more popular since I could help the others and I gladly did. I guess one of the most valuable experiences was that I used to live in the south of Spain, which besides giving me plenty of opportunity to make Spanish almost a native language to me, also made English a native language due to the large British diaspora. 2 years down the road the Spanish couldn't tell I wasn't Spanish and the English couldn't tell I wasn't English. So on that front alone it was all worth it. I suppose I was never a fan of hot weather but I could easily picture myself spending the rest of my life there. However a few life changing events happened(lost my best friend, along a very bitter experience I had with a girl over there), so I figured the best way to cope with it was to move back home and start over. Was it worth it? Totally!

<comment><USER57> "We are not immigration services. We are an educational institution. What kind of animals do we have to be to say no to a kid that wants to study?"

There you go, hope in humanity restored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> 3 years and counting, it has been difficult but i would do it again in a blink.</comment>


Microsoft Azure Outage - <AUTHOR> http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/#current Is Azure down?
Status: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/#current
Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=azure&src=typd <comment><USER4> Azure support is probably the worst one I had ever deal with. When my account (and service itself) stopped working, I haven't received any email. When I tried to sign in, all I got was some generic error saying "There's something wrong with your account". My services of course were down and I couldn't do ANYTHING. I've contacted the support to learn that my account has been blocked (!) because there was some suspicious (!!) activity going on. What the... No, they couldn't tell me what exactly it was. I've exchanged emails back and forth with the support for several days to learn nothing new, my account and services were still disabled and I was more than pissed off. From that day I hate Azure and I advise anyone against using it, because such situation is absolutely unacceptable.

<comment><USER5> Days? What do you "days"???? Azure was down for like 9 hours.

<comment><USER6> I love how deleted comments actually never disappear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like an idiot. MS featured my Azure startup today, quoting me about overall stability etc (which has been the case for us, until today). They then proceeded to go down, taking all our production systems with them.

(yes we do have AWS, too)

Sigh.

<comment><USER8> Azure has had quite a few outages this year. I'd say it's already lower than that 99.999 percent uptime or w/e they are advertising.

<comment><USER9> 0.001% of 365 days is 8.76 hours. So yeah, shot for the year; but of course they'll do some "hollywood timekeeping" (or just ignore the matter altogether) and keep advertising...

<comment><USER10> 0.001% of 365 days = 5.26 minutes ([http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.001%25+of+365+days](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.001%25+of+365+days))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The idea of cloud storage being down is less of an issue - I don't like it, but I understand it. What bothers me about this is:

1\. I was never notified of the outage. I noticed it myself when attempting to log into one of my VMs and then started looking for status updates. Sadly, the best status updates I got were here on Hacker News.

2\. When my servers did come back up, at least one of my IP addresses had changed, which meant I had to update all of the relevant DNS entries (which, as everyone here no doubt knows, can take up to 48 hours to propagate). I was never notified of this change in any way.

<comment><USER12> 2\. Azure does not guarantee that you keep your ip address by default. You should configure a cname if you use Azure Websites or get a reserved ip address, available with Cloud Services

<comment><USER11> Actually, I am supposed to have a fixed IP. And I have CNAMES configured. I will review to determine if there is some other way I can set this up, but my issue is that I would never allow my products to be offline for hours without notifying my customers.

<comment><USER13> First, I am really sorry about the impact the incident had on your service. Specifically, for your changing IP, are you currently using the reserved IP feature. You can reserve both your external IP and your internal IP.

External IP: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/azure/dn690120.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/azure/dn690120.aspx)

Internal IP: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/azure/dn630228.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/azure/dn630228.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, the worst part about this is that zero communication has come out of Microsoft - we first started seeing issues on Sunday and filed a ticked, had an open ticket while this larger outage happened, and haven't gotten a single email saying there's an outage. I found out about it from, sigh, buzzfeed.

Question - are AWS or GCE better at proactively messaging when there's an outage?

<comment><USER15> I've never ever received a message from AWS when they've had outages that have been affected us significantly. On the contrary, there's been multiple cases where we've experienced issues, contacted them and it's taken a few hours before they realize they're actually having infrastructure problems. Many of these don't even get an entry on their service status pages. So there's still a lot of room for improvement on AWS's side of things as well.

<comment><USER16> I can confirm this. I remember once when half of the Internet was down and the status reported for EC2 was yellow - experiencing some minor issues :-)

And I find out about it by yelling at Heroku - they told me that Amazon is having issues before Amazon's status turned yellow.

<comment><USER17> Usually when AWS has an outage they have a nice green circle but with a small blue "i" next to it that you need a loupe to see. Extremely dishonest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I run a site that monitors cloud service availability. Based on VMs and Blob storage containers I maintain and monitor, the outage affected every US Azure region with 1-2 hours of downtime: [https://cloudharmony.com/status-for- azure](https://cloudharmony.com/status-for-azure)

<comment><USER19> Wow, comparing that to AWS is staggering!

[https://cloudharmony.com/status-for-aws](https://cloudharmony.com/status-for- aws)

<comment><USER20> It's not as if AWS has never gone down ([http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/](http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/)). It just hasn't had a major outage in the last 30 days.

<comment><USER21> Comparing [https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for- azure](https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-azure) with [https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for- aws](https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-aws) tells a different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That status table with all the randomly located green checks is painful to look at... I guess a green check in the 'Global' column implies a green check in all location specific columns? But what about all the rows which have no Global green check, but most columns are still empty? Are those regions where the service is not deployed? Can we gray out those boxes or something if they are 'N/A'?

Also, funny if you try to zoom out in Chrome to see the whole thing, the row headers get out of alignment.

Why would I want to 'X' out specific rows/columns in the table? It was so complicated to begin with, someone thought adding more complication through end-user customization was a good idea? I just noticed, you can even expand some of the rows...

Seriously, a status page should tell you either "It's up" or "What's down". It's not even showing history over time, this is just a snapshot. The text at the top directly contradicts the icons in the table, making the whole thing even more ridiculous.

The footnote at the bottom is the best, "The Australia Regions are available only to customers with billing addresses in Australia and New Zealand." Thanks for that useful nugget! /s

<comment><USER23> Running Chrome 38.0.2125.111 m, zoomed out row headers look fine

<comment><USER24> Are you confusing row headers and column headers? I have the same version as you and the row headers got funky when zoomed out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The most damaging part to me is that "All good! Everything is running great." message on the status page.

Mistakes happen, services go down, I can get over that. What matters is how its dealt with. At the moment I would not want to be an Azure customer dealing with 9 hours+ downtime whilst MS are saying everything is great. At the very least change it to "Having some issues" or similar!

</comment><comment><USER26> The postmortem for this should make for a good read. How does storage go down in eleven regions at once?

<comment><USER27> Just apply same buggy network patch to all DCs at once? They use software networking so causing something like this should be easy. Or mess up network routing for *.blob.core.windows.net which pretty much all of Azure relies on.

<comment><USER28> Isn't applying the same patch everywhere at once a major anti-pattern?

<comment><USER27> Turns out this was exactly what happened - they applied a buggy patch to all data centers at once by mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Our sites have been down for more than 3 hours now.

EDIT2: Now the databases are down, this is costing us a lot of money. EDIT: Just went up again.

It would be great if anyone knows how to mitigate these in the future - <USER2> can I do to protect myself against this in the future? (Except leave Azure)

<comment><USER30> Major outages should absolutely weigh into your decisions as to what platform to use. That being said you can mitigate the effect of instability by engineering your app to failover to other availability zones or even to another cloud platform (depending on your app) if the entire platform goes down.

Obviously there is a segnifigant cost associated with engineering this level of cross platform redundancy which is why reliability is an important factor in making your platform choices. If you can tolerate some downtime, you can be more flexible, otherwise it will costs one way or the other.

In any case you should consider having a user notification site setup on a completely different service (or two) so that _when_ things go wrong you can redirect everyone to that site to keep your customers informed. This is especially important when you have partial outages that could create inconstancies in your database or application state if you where to continue to allow users to interact with it in a degraded state.

<comment><USER29> Thanks! This is very helpful.

Our big hosted site is hosted in Europe is actually working but our blogs and a news website are both down. We offer a paid service at 600$ a year and if the main site was down it would be very bad for our reputation.

Our DNS points to Azure on all these domains and things are hosted as "Azure Web Site" \- how would notifications work if Azure itself is failing? Would I need to proxy the traffic through elsewhere?

Are there any services that solve this problem for me? I really don't mind paying a few dollars every month and not worry about this.

<comment><USER30> There are any number of uptime, and ping services that you can google for. This can raise the alarm in a timely fashion when your site, or parts of your site go down, and then you decide how to handle those issues.

You may also want to google for DNS failover services, to help you automatically redirect traffic in more catastrophic failure cases. There are offerings from google[1], AWS[2], and others.

[1]: [https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs](https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs)

[2]: [http://aws.amazon.com/route53/](http://aws.amazon.com/route53/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So much for the idea of 99.999% uptime with the magical "cloud" buzzword. I noticed during this downtime in North America that Word Online wasn't functioning as my daughter tried to use it to do some homework.

<comment><USER32> _So much for the idea of 99.999% uptime with the magical "cloud" buzzword_

Who was selling that to you? Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't Microsoft…

<comment><USER31> Oh its 99.9% from Microsoft see [http://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/support/legal/sla/](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/) which means they get 9h a year to hit the SLA see [http://uptime.is/](http://uptime.is/)

<comment><USER33> Except most people use monthly periods for their SLAs

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You should try Google's App Engine (paid premium account) tech support when your critical files disappear. Can't be any worse than this ... That's the problem with these hosted cloud solutions, your systems are at the mercy of the bad tech support. Try explaining that to your own customers ...

</comment><comment><USER35> Actual link to status page: [http://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/status/#current](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/#current)

(not that convenient to copy paste the OP link from a mobile device)

</comment><comment><USER36> Microsoft are refusing to help us with our downed servers because we don't have a support contract. The outage is their issue not ours!!

<comment><USER37> If your app is down, it sounds very much like it's your problem.

While you're obviously going to be unhappy with downtime, this is a genuine part of calculation you should have made when you decided to outsource all your eggs into one basket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> As more and more services and apps depend on 'the cloud', I'm wondering, how many of them would survive a major cloud outage: the cloud company going bankrupt, stock market crash or economic meltdown, a malware exploiting a major server-side bug (like heartbleed or shellshock, but worse) wiping or encrypting the data on the infrastructure/user machines.

How much of the user's data would be forever lost in such an event ?

The other aspect is privacy - in theory, all user's data can be stored and accessed forever, eg. 20 years from now, when the reincarnation of someone like Stalin comes to power.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that we should design our services or apps with this in mind - the cloud can and will fail from time to time, maybe forever. So, if possible, use the cloud as a 'bonus' feature, a means to back up data and store user's data offline for when the dark day comes at least the user still has his data.

<comment><USER39> > The other aspect is privacy - in theory, all user's data can be stored and > accessed forever, eg. 20 years from now, when the reincarnation of someone > like Stalin comes to power.

Is havin your stuff stores locally any more secure in that situation. If someone wants your data they'll knock on your door and beat you and your family until you give it to them

<comment><USER40> If you have the only copy, you can destroy it.

<comment><USER21> They will still beat you up until you produce the data you have destroyed, which is until they get tired of beating you up. You could keep some decoy data you produce in such situations, preferably before the beating starts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Reality call: ANY and ALL Cloud services, be it Google, Azure, AWS etc, will be down for hours at some point every few years.

<comment><USER42> Reality call: ANY and ALL services, be it local or remote, will be down for hours at some point every few years.

<comment><USER43> If it's my own fault, I can at least curse my own lack of knowledge and expertise, and I can strive to do better in the future.

When the cloud is down, all we can do is fiddle our thumbs and hope it doesn't happen again. Or maybe we could send an angry letter to Microsoft, and hope somebody reads it.

<comment><USER44> It's about abstracting away the cost of it being your own fault. Realistically the cost of employing enough people, and buying enough hardware, to provide anything close to 99.X% uptime is much more than punting that over to a Cloud Provider.

<comment><USER45> I've found very few cases where "punting that over to a cloud provider" has been remotely cost effective for base load. It's gotten closer over the years, but the gap is still massive for all but some very specific types of workloads.

It's great for convenience, and it's great for managing without certain skillsets that may be hard to obtain, and it's great for temporary capacity, but it's not cheap.

<comment><USER44> It's not cheap to have any confidence of any uptime realistically at all. The thing is that most people either live without that guarantee, or just get lucky enough not to care. It becomes problematic if you've made promises to others about uptime that are built on a house of sand.

Unless your base load cloud costs are more than the cost of full time, ready at a moments notice, experienced ops people you don't get close to any guarantee of uptime by non-managed hosting. The salary cost alone of that is substantial, let alone hardware spread across multiple locations. My firm pays at least 7 figures a year on IT ops and don't come close to 99.9% uptime across everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Regretting the decision to go with Azure. Talk about terrible timing. We have media outlets interested in our site, we send info and the site is dead. Talk about a crap first impression.

<comment><USER47> It is totally frustrating, but at the end of the day similar outages happen with all cloud providers.

<comment><USER48> Can you point to an example of this happening on AWS in multiple regions simultaneously?

<comment><USER49> Yes. The day half the internet seemed to be down. It took Amazon more than 24 hours to recover, and having your services in multiple availability zones did not shield you from the failure.

[http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/](http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/)

<comment><USER50> This seems to have only affected one region. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER49> Yes. It started as a failure in one region, and propagated to others as it overloaded the "control plane" \-- the stuff that runs "the cloud", and EBS tried to replicate "failed" disks to the point that Amazon ran out of disk space in the cluster. At the time, I was paying for RDS Multi-AZ which runs your database in multiple availability zones at once with hot failover if the primary goes offline. It failed to fail over despite that. Many large sites went down for a very long time that day, and people couldn't spawn replacement instances even in other AZs than the one the failure started in.

<comment><USER51> You're confusing region with AZ. They've never had a multi-region outage (yet).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Our VMs and websites on USEast are unreachable, however our storage seems to be working fine. There is something very backwards with how they are communicating this outage.

</comment><comment><USER53> This may be greater then just west Europe. I personally have servers in US East that are unreachable, and there are a few reports of others in US region reporting partial unavailability for the US based servers.

I wonder how many customers Azure just lost do to their unexpected 2 day fiasco

<comment><USER54> > I wonder how many customers Azure just lost do to their unexpected 2 day > fiasco

Amazon had a number of EBS fiascoes and survived just fine. I'd expect Azure to do the same.

<comment><USER55> Each of Amazon's high profile failures did have many people formulating previously non-existent escape plans though, and there are now several alternatives in this space that can offer the same scale.

It's obviously not going to destroy anyone's business, but there is a lot more competition than there used to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We've been noticing ups and downs for the last few hours of our VM powering an important database in West Europe.

Seriously considering another layer above azure to mitigate this in the future. Very disappointing to see.

At least initially their status indicated they're handing the problem but lately it's just been "All Good" and they said they resolved it on twitter but it's not at 100% yet: [http://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/status/](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/)

<comment><USER56> Someone else mentioned routing to divert traffic to working data centers. That might be an option for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Oh no, did we break the status page too? Sorry Azure team, really didn't mean to pile on!

<comment><USER58> keeping the load light? The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Yup! Azure websites and Storage are down in multiple regions.

<comment><USER60> VMs too... At least for western europe

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Storage, Websites and Visual Studio Online - Multiple Regions - <USER3> Service Interruption 5 mins agoStarting at 19 Nov 2014 00:52 UTC we are experiencing a connectivity issue to Azure Services including Storage, Websites and Visual Studio Online. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well, their status page is telling lies.

</comment><comment><USER62> Storage is the source of the outage, and most of the services rely on it, so they are all impacted.

</comment><comment><USER63> Still down even 2 hours later, regardless of the status page saying its OK.

</comment><comment><USER64> Judging by how cloud services "frequently" go down when everything is normal, it makes me wonder what would happen in case of a real problem (volcano eruption, social unrest, nuclear disaster, alien invasion ...). I still don't get the cloud infatuation, and no you don't have to get off my lawn, I'm "only" 36 (yeah I know, in IT I'm already a dinosaur).

<comment><USER65> What would happen to your own datacenter in case of a similar disaster? Your servers would go down and you would spin up from your disaster recovery site. Cloud doesn't mean you don't need a DR plan anymore.

Put your servers in different regions, use Azure/Google, BlueMix/AWS, or even hybrid cloud, do something. Have a DR plan.

<comment><USER64> I'm thinking as the little guy here : not data center but personal computers.

If the disaster strikes my region, I probably have better things to do than IT things (like running for my life :-).

But with the cloud the disaster could be thousand of kilometers away and still affect me. That's the problem with the cloud : why should I stop working in my remote French town because there's a landslide in Ireland (or wherever they put the European cloud data centers) ?

I don't say the cloud doesn't have it's uses (especially as a redundant backup far far away) but the all cloud model has way more risks than what people think ... and vendors don't rush to explain that.

I'm one of those guy that think the future will be more and more harsh for the western civilization (think collapse of the Soviet Union). There will be less money for everything, infrastructure in particular, things will fail and you will have to deal with it locally and the DIY way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8627630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8627630)

</comment><comment><USER67> My VMs are down. This much be something major.

<comment><USER63> I think because the disks are backed by blob storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Seems to be back up now, my site ([https://ian.sh](https://ian.sh)) was down for a while.

</comment><comment><USER69> There really isn't anything I can do either. My VM isn't back up yet. I'd go to sleep and just expect it to be online in the morning (when it really matters), but I'm afraid a drive won't reattach or something like that. Meanwhile, twiddling thumbs...hit F5...twiddle thumbs...)

</comment><comment><USER70> _The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred._

Their error pages are less graceful than mine.

</comment><comment><USER71> come on! give them some slack.. they probably aren't very experienced at managing their linux servers! ;)

<comment><USER72> Clearly neither did the developers of these apps which are now down who thought of spending as few pennies as possible and save a few other pennies with load balancing failover, and then expecting magic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> This is why i have server class refurbished machine handy as working backup so that you can restore if ther service is not restored with in few minutes. Or have another copy of vm/db in other provider like rackspace or something

</comment><comment><USER74> Do you run multi-region or maybe multi-provider setups? How do you migrate your instances from failed regions to healthy ones? How do you route users to the healthy regions? DNS? Do you think anycast could be an alternative?

</comment><comment><USER75> My website, my webapplication for member management + my clients are down :s, i really don't like this...

Didn't receive any calls yet, but i don't think that will take long.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is nice. My web site server IP was changed when the server came back up. So now I have to update all of the site DNS settings.

<comment><USER27> Hmm. You should be using CNAME records rather than IP addresses. Or are you using the new fixed IP features?

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Disgusting Virtual service

Disgusting management interface

Abysmal support

Way to fuck up a mustard sandwich Microsoftie

We moved everything we had away from that Virus named Azure.

</comment><comment><USER69> My VM is still down (US East). Is anyone else still experiencing issues?

<comment><USER7> My VMs appear to be up mostly, but they are primarily in North Central.

<comment><USER69> Thanks, I just restarted it and it took a while (5 minutes or so), but after that, it appears fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> "Everything is running great"

<comment><USER78> It's obviously "All Good!"

<comment><USER42> Just a data dump for the NSA. Nothing serious!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> So did anyone receive a call "The cloud is down"? Or at least an e-mail?

</comment><comment><USER80> Every time this happens, ask yourself... Are you outage-proof? Do you have a rational reason to believe that internally-managed infrastructure would never have a problem like this?

</comment><comment><USER81> I'm guessing the reason that this site is down I was trying to load ... [http://www.dotnetrocks.com/](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/)

</comment><comment><USER70> Maybe they unknowingly upgraded to Intel's latest SSDs in their storage array. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8626928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8626928)

</comment><comment><USER82> This outage exposes the clowns that actually chose Azure as their cloud provider. If you use AMZN and it goes down, at least you're in good company, with the likes of Netflix, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. It's like yeah, I'm big like they are. So what, it went down, so is Netflix.

What does your client/customer think of you being on Azure? That you chose the crappy solution because your low-tech infrastructure still uses windows, which does not carry a lot of tech cred.

<comment><USER83> Over 80% of the Fortune 500 run on Azure.

20% of Azure VMs are Linux.

You are not well informed.

<comment><USER84> "run on" \- I suspect you're being fed a unicode pile of poo here.

More likely the have _something_ which runs on Azure. Fortune 500s are, pretty much by definition, quite large - and probably have tons of departments and sub departments. And at least one of those departments probably has a task of trying out new things, like Azure, by running something on it.

What surprises me is that nearly 20% of Fortune 500s _don't_ have something running on Azure.

(I wonder what percentage "run on" Amazon)

<comment><USER85> Ignoring the fortune companies, most of Microsoft's own services like Office 365 run on Azure. That's a pretty big bet right there.

<comment><USER86> Actually I don't think they do - to the best of my knowledge Office 365 didn't have any downtime as a result of this outage. And Yammer stayed up, so I assume they haven't yet migrated from AWS...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest - <AUTHOR> https://www.tides.org/impact/awards-prizes/pizzigati-prize/ <comment><AUTHOR> Taking submissions for 2016. Please apply or nominate someone for the $10,000 prize.

Application link: [https://tools.tides.org/forms/view.php?id=19109](https://tools.tides.org/forms/view.php?id=19109)

Nomination link: [https://tools.tides.org/forms/view.php?id=10988](https://tools.tides.org/forms/view.php?id=10988)</comment>


Show HN: Communication Board with Text-to-speech in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://shayc.github.io/cboard/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a work in progress, it's a Communication Board for people with disabilities (autism, cerebral palsy), it supports Text-to-speech and multiple languages. We're looking for contributors!

[https://github.com/shayc/cboard](https://github.com/shayc/cboard)

<comment><USER2> Please put a simple about page. It is difficult to get the idea behind the project in the first glance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment, will do this asap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does this work on iOS devices?</comment>


False Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/820686/obvious-theorems-that-are-actually-false

<comment><USER2> An _n_ -dimensional shape can always be cut by _n_ cuts into pieces of strictly smaller diameter. E.g. if you cut a circle in half you get two semicircles of the same diameter as the original circle, but with two cuts you can make three pieces which are all smaller than the original circle. If you cut a sphere with two cuts, you'll always end up with a piece at least as wide as the original sphere (e.g. if you slice it into quarters like an orange, each segment still has the original diameter). It seems intuitively obvious that this is true not just for spheres but for any shape. And indeed it is... up to something like n=7, possibly more. But in e.g. n=2000 the "theorem" is massively, massively false.</comment>


Show HN: Beautiful Visualization of Agreement Groups in the US Senate - <AUTHOR> http://friggeri.net/senate/

<comment><USER2> "However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

\- GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address, Sep. 17, 1796

Our democracy has evolved into what Washington had prophesied in his farewell address ... a system where diversity of thought and political compromise are rejected in favor of the strength of a unified political party and the power that brings with it.

When political positions consolidate into just two choices, so do the proposed solutions to the world's problems. These solutions are artificially constrained for the sake of political loyalty. Ultimately, party loyalty requires individual politicians to sacrifice their personal beliefs on individual issues ... and once those values have been compromised, the only thing worth clinging to is control.

<comment><USER3> Political parties are the weakest they've been in 200 years. The driving factor in American politics are Internet-powered movements like MoveOn.org and the Tea Party...these groups are capturing the the traditional party structure, and they are highly issue-driven. Even in fundraising, the traditional party committees are outflanked by the new Super PACs.

There is more diversity of thought and action in the U.S. today than at any other time in our history.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Op here, this is part of my PhD research. Please bare in mind that I'm French and that my knowledge of U.S politics is limited to what I can read online.

If you find any errors in my analysis or have any tips or other interesting pieces of information I'd be really happy to discuss with you.

<comment><USER4> The visualization is totally cool, though I don't claim to understand the analysis.

...but if it helps, you made a little English error. Wouldn't even have mentioned if you hadn't said you were French :)

> [Republicans.] Most of which are either moderates or closer to the Democrats > than to their own party.

> Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are the two Republican Senators from Maine > which are both regarded to be leading moderates within their party.

Should be "Most of whom..." and "...who are both...".

"Which" is only ever[1] used in relative clauses to describe inanimate objects (as you do correctly five other times in the article). Humans and animals are always either "who" (more personal) or "that" (more impersonal).

Note that's only in relative clauses-- "Which senator is yours?" is fine, but "The senator which represents me" means that I think my senator is a card table.[2]

[1] Outside of the odd dialect, of course.

[2] Not necessarily out of the question.

<comment><USER5> I'll assume you're correct in your explanation. I've never heard it explained that way.

But as a native speaker "that" sounds slightly more correct than "which" because it seems less formal, however, if I heard a non-native speaker say "which" it wouldn't sound weird nor would it be something I would have corrected them on.

<comment><USER6> In American English, _which_ is normally used in non-restrictive clauses (offset by commas), and _that_ is normally used in restrictive clauses (not offset by commas).

Using _which_ in a restrictive clause like _The senator which represents me..._ or _The road which runs from X to Y..._ is somewhat uncommon. Both of those examples sound better in American English using _that_ in place of _which_. If the subjects didn't need disambiguation, though, _that_ would no longer be appropriate, e.g., _Senator Jones, who represents me, ..._ or _Foobar Street, which runs from X to Y, ..._

As Cushman points out, though, _which_ used on a person doesn't quite work. _That_ can work on a person, though, but _who_ / _whom_ can work for people in both restrictive and non-restrictive clauses.

See <http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/645/01/> if you want to read a well-structured and thorough explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would be interesting to see PCA and CA* applied to the same data.

On a quick google trip I found

[1] Principal Component Analysis of Senate Voting Patterns (<http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xm9z62w#page-1>)

[2] Shlomo S. Sawilowsky, Real data analysis; Chapter 28, Principal Component Analysis of Senate Voting Patterns (on Google Books)

* Principal Component and Correspondence Analyses respectively -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_analysis>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure this would give the same kind of results, it was shown [1] that Kleinberg's HITS algorithm is PCA, and HITS gives [2] hubs (nodes linked to many others) and authorities (nodes linked from many hubs). I have the intuition that this would qualify the floor leaders as authorities, but I'd have to run the numbers.

Anyway, in order to obtain groups from PCA (that is, groups which are not only "visual"), one would have to run some kind of clustering algorithm on the reduced data.

[1] [http://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/iag/documents/WP125_Saer...](http://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/iag/documents/WP125_Saerens.pdf)

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It does look nice... and it does raise interesting questions. I'm particularly intrigued as to John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman's presences in that anomalous 108th Congress. Can you tell us any more about how you define an "agreement group"?

Visually, the result reminds me of [<http://xkcd.com/657/>] - is this sort of diagram a recognised concept in data presentation, or a new idea?

[edit - hmm... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/108th_Congress>]

<comment><AUTHOR> I was not aware of this xkcd comic, funny how things seem to pop out. My inspiration was more in the line of Sankey diagrams. Among others, the famous map of Napoleon's invasion of Russia by Minard (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png>). I've called this representation a "groupflow" but any name would do.

The notion of agreement departs a little bit from the classical fraction of common votes/total votes and instead is based on a vector model of votes, using cosine similarity as a value of agreement. The agreement groups are computed by heuristically optimizing a quantity called the cohesion and which turns out is really correlated to the way people perceive social communities (the old preprint of the first paper: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.3231.pdf>).

<comment><USER9> Minard's graph is brilliant.

On my to do list: a graph that shows the loss of voters casting ballots. I needed a way to show how postal balloting disenfranchises voters (what it gives, it equally takes away).

Voting age population -> registered to vote -> voter received ballot -> returned ballot -> elections rcvd ballot -> signature verification -> challenged ballots -> overvotes/undervotes, voter intent, adjudication -> tabulated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks really great and seems like a useful tool. My only real complaint, is that I use a high sensitivity on my mouse and I found it difficult to highlight a line. If you could make the lines slightly thicker, it would be easier to select them.

</comment><comment><USER11> For what it's worth, I thought the gray background bars were far too light - it took me a while to find them. I also couldn't intuit what the branching lines were all about.

Also, Chrome had some difficulty with typesetting, though it's possible that's a localized issue.

*edit: I figured out why the boxes seem so light - it's because I view my screen at a slight angle. From a straight angle they show up fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, I should have clarified that each Senator could be in different groups, hence the branching. I'll add a little darkness to the background bars.

What kind of typesetting issues did you have, and with which version of Chrome?

<comment><USER11> Here's a screenshot from my Chrome 18 on Linux: <http://i.imgur.com/vPwl8.png>

The visualization is quite nice, and it would be useful to link to or include some kind of short description about the algorithm and visualization - to give a different example, it looks like the groups are scored numerically but the senators are simply ranked, so I wonder if the algorithm found more than two groups per congress.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have absolutely no idea why it renders this way on your Chrome, maybe an issue with TypeKit?

About the visualization, it was done semi-manually with a tool I've developed to heuristically minimize the crossings, but their is no way to obtain this kind of layout purely algorithmically (I'm pretty sure it's NP-hard).

      it looks like the groups are scored numerically but the senators are simply ranked

Not quite sure what you mean. The groups were positioned in order to have the one with most Republicans on one side and the one with most Democrats on the other one. There were consistently two groups for those sessions, this I can assure you. The order of the senators inside the groups is arbitrary, in order to attempt to minimize the number of crossings and provide a readable output.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I assumed each senator was placed according to some measure of extremism, though in hindsight that alone should have produced crossings.

To support this interpretation, I noticed that the groups are not aligned - see for example George Allen's swerve in the 108th Congress. I suppose I was expecting it too, from having seen some visualization that tried and failed to find a tea party cluster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Simon Jackman calculates ideal point estimates based on non-unanimous roll calls: <http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentSenate/x1.pdf>

I think his R source is available too.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good stuff. Can you talk more about the algorithm?

Can you use this to detect issue clusters rather than voting clusters?

I have tried to build subgroup-in-graph detectors with only partial success.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, the algorithm is a heuristic which optimize a quantity I've called social cohesion (<http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.3231.pdf>), the article presenting the algorithm itself is currently under review, but basically: first it computes the best possible group for selected edges in the graph, then it merge groups which overlap too much. The whole difficulty is to identify how to select those edges, how to expand around them and then what does "too much overlap" means. I'll link to the preprint as soon as I upload it to arxiv.

What do you mean exactly by "detect" issues? C^3 should work if there is a notion of transitivity in the network (that is, if A and B are similar and B and C are similar, then with very high probability A and C are similar).

<comment><USER9> Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.

It'd be great to apply your algorithm per issue.

During Camp Wellstone training (grassroots political organizing), they taught us a tool called a Power Map. The two axis are yes v no and influence. You graph each person voting. Then you draw arrows to show who influences who. It helps to identify where you should focus your lobbying.

One point that stood out is that a Power Map is needed to be done for each issue, because many many votes don't come down on partisan lines (eg local and state, ymmv).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Best use of SVG I have seen yet!

</comment><comment><USER15> 1) Many senators shift to the left side (more conservative) as time goes by

2) It's especially true about republicans</comment>


We are all living inside the notification hell - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/02/03/we-are-all-living-inside-the-notification-hell/

<comment><USER2> Pavlovian Polling

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree. Even me, I can't live without checking my emails and social networking sites. We have been all addicted. I guess no one is exempted.</comment>


How Houston has become the most diverse place in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-houston-diversity-2017-htmlstory.html <comment><USER2> Whites are now ~8.3% of the global population and declining, even in absolute numbers, and soon to be a minority in their own countries [1]. Odd that this is so celebrated, but diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks I guess.

1: [https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/sep/03/race.world](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/sep/03/race.world)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you look down on startups that use a template? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking of using a specific template from ThemeForest. It's really nice looking, and I've personally never seen it before, but I'm sure some other have, and I'd hate for that fact to damage the perception of my startup.<p>Do you guys think less of a company that uses a template you recognize for their site? <comment><USER2> I evaluate sites on two levels -- as a designer/developer and as a customer. In the former mindset I will "look down" upon you if I notice it's a template. In the latter, not at all. In my "getting things done" mindset, I'll applaud you for identifying an nice clean template that enables you to work on other stuff.

The only one of those hats you should care about is your customer. Esp if you're consumer targeted, they will never notice that you used a template. Heck, most of them wouldn't know what that means even if you told them.

Don't worry about it. Worry about your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's a helpful response. In response to your second paragraph, I'm targeting web professionals (i.e., the group of people most likely to recognize and look down on it), hence my worry.

<comment><USER2> Sounds like there's a chance you'll be hurt because you've used a template.

How does that compare to the damage / delay suffered because you had to take the time to design the site? Generally, I'll start with a template to get things running quickly, then do a redesign later. Plus, I've found that redesign a great time to re-architect for the pivots I've experienced, so I have a fairly clean layout post-redo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Template first, redesign later sounds like a plan to me. I'll try and pick a template that isn't very common and doesn't look templatey in the meantime. Thanks for the advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it's fine, unless you're targeting visual designers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you building for your peers or your customers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this supposed to be a rhetorical question? If so, then I'm not sure of your point, and if not, then I'm obviously building for my customers. I don't want to lose any customers by not being taken seriously for using a template.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes. But it may be worth the trade off in time and effort saved. Plus, for what it's worth, I'm a pretentious dick.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you a designer type? I'm wondering if designers would look down on it more than developers, since my target audience consists more of developers.</comment></comment>


Introducing FB's Canvas - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/business/news/introducing-canvas <comment><AUTHOR> "But the website that opens after someone clicks on an ad is often slow to load and not always optimized for mobile, creating a disjointed and frustrating experience for people. And website pages are only growing in file size. In 2015, the average website page was three times bigger than it was in 2011,1 and slow load times are a top reason people abandon a website."

translates to : "Let's keep the traffic on FB ..shall we?"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well at least it doesnt cost more than their regular ads.

How To Create a Canvas: [https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1659484897658040](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1659484897658040)</comment>