Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-26/tesla-completes-l-a-to-new-york-electric-model-s-drive-chargers.html <comment><USER2> >> provide 170 miles of range in a 30-minute charge

That would have still sounded impractical to me when I was still able to just drive through the night to get where I needed to be. Now that I travel with a young baby and a dog, that's about how often and for how long I have to stop for breaks anyway. This is impressive progress anyway, but I'm especially impressed now that it really wouldn't alter my own schedule much.

<comment><USER3> Just doing some quick numbers (not related to current specific locations of quick chargers and gas stations), stopping 30 minutes every 170 miles would add a bit over 6 and a half hours of stopping to a LY->NYC trip.

LA -> NYC is about 2,800 miles. If you had to stop for 30 minutes every 170 miles, that'd be 16.5 stops, for a total of about 8.25 hours of charging stops.

If you assume 25mpg in a car with a 12 gallon tank, and 10-minutes per gas station stop, the same 2,800 mile trip would require about 9.5 gas stops, or about 1.5 hours worth of total gas stops.

In the real world for drivers not going straight through, you're going to be spending at least a couple nights in a hotel when you could (assumedly) plug your car in overnight, as well as starting out with a full charge and more like 240 miles of range in the mornings. So I expect the real world difference would be about 4-5 hours of additional time waiting around for your car to charge in a Tesla vs. a traditional gas car. Not a huge difference on a 46 hour drive.

However, the mental difference of being forced to stop 30 minutes every 170 or so miles might make it feel like much longer than an additional 4-5 hours.

You'd also save about $365 in fuel costs in a Tesla vs. a gas car, but that's probably not a huge concern when you've already purchased a $75K+ car to begin with.

<comment><USER4> I just drove from Chicago to Tampa, stayed for two weeks in FL, and then drove back over the last two weeks. I did both sprints straight through in a 2008 Infiniti G37, which has a six-speed auto, V6 engine, and 20 gallon tank. At an average speed of 85 mph, the car averaged about 24mpg, giving me a range of around 420 miles per gallon (with ~60 mile reserve).

This is an edge case of course. I'm 31, and drove the entire ~15 hour drive at once with breaks only for fuel/bathroom at the same time. If I owned a Model S, I'd just fly.

<comment><USER5> People seem to be missing your point, time is money. To those with lots of money time necessarily isn't as much money. Hence, the Tesla buyers have the luxury of time.

Going on a vacation for us means, the less time we spend getting there the more time we have on vacation since we have to work it in between what work allows.

Still I cannot believe even on this site all the people justifying stopping every couple of hours for thirty minutes. Even traveling with dogs that isn't necessary. Top it off, all those stops extend the trip which means yet another hotel.

Plus my number one issue, the supercharge network governs how you do your trip, which routes you take. That can simply put some locations out of practicality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A father/daughter team was first to make the cross-country trip:

[https://twitter.com/plugshare/status/427260624230309889/phot...](https://twitter.com/plugshare/status/427260624230309889/photo/1)

[http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/heading-cross- countr...](http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/heading-cross-country)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not the most direct route between the two cities [1]. It looks like there are at least two parts of the route that don't follow interstates. The excursion up to South Dakota to go past Mt. Rushmore makes sense, but I can't figure out the jog into New Mexico. Unless someone's really interested in a couple of National Monuments in that corner of NM, it looks like the only reason for that jog is to go to the Four Corners Monument with the minimum travel distance through an Indian reservation.

[1] [http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger](http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger)

<comment><USER8> If you look north of Flagstaff in Arizona, there aren't many places to stop. They need infrastructure to place one of these stations, and they're promising that each stop will have restaurants (and hotels?) nearby.

My first thought was local politics (offers of free land in places trying to attract tourists come to mind), but I'm now leaning toward the fact that they just routed around completely barren areas where they couldn't get the station spacing correct.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, maybe this explains why they didn't go up I-15 to I-70 in Utah, even though that route gives you access to Zion NP. That first part of I-70 is pretty empty.

<comment><USER9> They're going that way. Check out the 2014 map. Bryce might be tricky, but Zion should be easily reachable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most serious issue with electric cars isn't road trips, it's the fact that if you don't own your own home, or live in a dense city with no off street parking, you likely don't have reliable access to a daily recharge overnight. That's probably half the driving population of America. 30 minutes of quick charging is fine every so often, but not every day or even every week.

This is why fuel cells continue to be pushed as a viable alternative--quick, carbonless refueling. The closest equivalent that the EV world can offer is a battery swap station, but that has a host of issues.

<comment><USER11> It's interesting now that Tesla has answered the folks saying "the most serious issue with electric cars is road trips," now we get this.

I'm a little skeptical of the "half of the driving population won't be able to charge" claim. For example, you don't necessarily need to own your off-street parking spot for the owner to upgrade it to increase its value. And I doubt on-street overnight parkers constitute anywhere close to half of the population (I'd be interested in data that shows otherwise).

Anyway, it will be many, many years before even half the driving population switches to electric. That's a lot of time to figure out charging infrastructure in cities for the rest of us.

<comment><USER10> It's Tesla that has defined the problem with electric cars as road trip refueling. Most EV dealers offer free loaners for road trips, or you can rent a car. Even vampire loads at airport parking in low temperatures is of higher priority for most drivers. They're misdirecting from the main issue to one that they can solve cheaply.

I'm saying this as someone who owns _two_ electric cars. The infrastructure can be solved eventually, and some cities are looking into it, but even in the suburbs there are problems [2], which is why hydrogen is still out there as an alternative (albeit an immature and inefficient one), but for now, a large portion of the U.S. population cannot buy an EV.

[1] [http://www.commerce.wa.gov/Documents/Demand-EVSE-Access- Gara...](http://www.commerce.wa.gov/Documents/Demand-EVSE-Access-Garage- Orphans-Survey2012.pdf)

[2] [http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24947237/charge- rage-...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24947237/charge-rage-too- many-electric-cars-not-enough-workplace-chargers)

<comment><USER11> Valid points esp. about the vampire loads in cold weather. If you remember that NYT reviewer who stalled out, if you look at the details, maybe the biggest factor was parking overnight in the deep cold at a hotel without plugging in. I found it very distasteful how Musk attacked the reporter's integrity in response.

I am just saying "a large portion of the population can't buy an EV" is like saying "a large portion of the population can't buy a Macintosh" in 1984. If the biggest problem you see is that people don't park their cars near chargers _right now_ , that seems like a tractable problem. (And I would think much moreso than making hydrogen mainstream.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it fascinating how Tesla is approaching this from both ends, supplying both the vehicles and the power. If the electric vehicle trend goes their way, they'll have an enormous advantage in the market. But if Tesla goes belly-up for whatever reason and the charging stations had to close, Tesla owners could lose their primary fuel source.

<comment><USER13> Superchargers aren't anyone's primary fuel source. Most everyone lives 50+ miles from the nearest one -- they're located along interstates, between cities rather than within cities, which avoids people using all the bays to charge up as part of their daily commute. Supercharging too often also reduces the lifespan of the battery moreso than a regular charge-up.

<comment><USER14> I believe you, but note that the Tesla website only says this:

> How often can I Supercharge, is it bad for my battery? > > Supercharging > does not alter the new vehicle warranty. > Customers are free to use the > network as much as they like.

[http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger](http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger)

<comment><USER15> They do this to increase adoption, but it would probably still reduce the life of the battery. I doubt people would use their supercharger every day unless they happened to live next door to one. Their purpose of the supercharger network is to reduce the whole "distance-fear" that EVs have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> According to this [http://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of- trucki...](http://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of-trucking/) the average semi truck driver spends $70,000 a year on fuel. I have to wonder how this could change with a big rig sized version of the Supercharger stations. Nationwide trucking with (basically) free fuel.

The trucks could hold a lot more batteries.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious if I'd want a Model S (top model) or a BMW 535d or other mid- luxury diesel sedan in Germany in a couple years.

Around the city, sure, big advantage to the Tesla. For Autobahn trips at 150-250 km/h, stopping every 1-2h would get old fast, even if every service stop had a supercharger.

<comment><USER18> If you're going that fast, you'll have to stop every 1-2h to refuel in just about any car, ICE or EV. On the one hand, yeah you might have to stop for a little longer in a Tesla, but on the other hand you're going to save shitloads of money: driving that fast is massively inefficient, so you're going to spend a lot of cash on fuel in an ICE, whereas the superchargers are free.

<comment><USER19> Heh. The BMW 535d mentioned has a 70L tank, and even on worst-case drives (sporty behaviour, not highway), it's quoted (by users) around 15L/100\. On standard highway (not unlimited-speed autobahn, euro highway 120~130km/h) it's quoted (again by users) around 7~8L/100.

edit: and do note: your 5~10mn refuelling break on a normal car brings you back to full range, on a Model S it's 170 miles not the original 260-ish.

[0] [http://www.bmwblog.com/2011/03/16/the-diesel-driver- reviews-...](http://www.bmwblog.com/2011/03/16/the-diesel-driver-reviews-the- bmw-535d-sedan/)

<comment><USER18> Sporty behavior not on a highway is still going to get better consumption than extremely high speed driving, because wind resistance rises as the square of the velocity. If you double your velocity, then air drag increases by 4x, so if users are quoting 8L/100 on 120-130km/h then you can expect to get about 32L/100 going 250km/h.

With a 70L tank at 250km/h you may well exhaust the tank in under an hour. These are worst case numbers though, so if you drive a bit slower, then 1-2 hours between refueling seems like a reasonable estimate.

<comment><USER17> Actually it doesn't look that bad.

[http://www.automobile- catalog.com/economy/2014/1900655/bmw_5...](http://www.automobile- catalog.com/economy/2014/1900655/bmw_535d.html)

Fuel consumption:

in liter / 100 km

Estimated fuel consumption by constant speeds on top gear, steady ride without acceleration or braking, flat concrete or tarmac surface, no wind

by 50 km/h (31 mph): 8 l/100 km

by 60 km/h (37 mph): 6.8 l/100 km

by 70 km/h (44 mph): 6.5 l/100 km

by 80 km/h (50 mph): 4.9 l/100 km

by 90 km/h (56 mph): 4.9 l/100 km

by 100 km/h (62 mph): 4.9 l/100 km

by 120 km/h (75 mph): 5.2 l/100 km

by 140 km/h (87 mph): 5.6 l/100 km

by 160 km/h (100 mph):6 l/100 km

by 180 km/h (112 mph):6.5 l/100 km

by 200 km/h (124 mph):7 l/100 km

by 220 km/h (137 mph):7.6 l/100 km

by 240 km/h (149 mph):8.4 l/100 km

by 260 km/h (161 mph):9.3 l/100 km

Clearly around 200 km/h is where the wind resistance (and gearing) is starting to become a factor, but I think you could probably hit 280 or so without being over 12 l/100km.

The other factor is that when I've driven >250 km/h I've gotten tired much faster, as you need to be hyperaware. (I did almost 200mph in a "very nice" Corvette Dubai-Abu Dhabi for about 20 seconds, and could see the fuel dial dropping)

200-250 seems like a reasonable high cruise speed for parts of the Autobahn, though.

The smarter option is probably Berlin to Munich/Frankfurt/Prague/etc. by train, of course, but I like having a car.

<comment><USER18> Your link says that those are "estimated fuel consumptions", but I'm somewhat inclined to doubt the veracity of these estimates: between 120 km/h and 240 km/h wind drag is going to quadruple, and ICEs get lower efficiency at higher RPM. So if the efficiency falls by less than 50% when you double the speed, then that implies that tire drag and internal friction represent the majority of the force you're overcoming at highway speeds, which is definitely incorrect. Something doesn't add up.

<comment><USER17> Cars have geared transmissions. Cars designed for the Autobahn (most high end German cars) have gearing optimized for decent cruise range at 120-180 km/h.

The engine is sized for peak acceleration (and marketing). It has a turbo (in the 535d; the 550d has 3....), which helps somewhat without adding more fuel consumption, but still, a 300hp engine is pretty big.

Basically, to cruise along at 120kph in a reasonable car with reasonable Cd probably is about 20-30hp (yay for mixing metric and imperial units...). Wind is probably 20hp of that. The engine is less efficient at low output (specific output), so you won't get fuel consumption at 10% power which is only 10% of peak fuel consumption.

Wind resistance does go up, but your engine also gets to operate more within its power band. With the right gearing, you can stay within the optimal RPMs _and_ be close to the design power level of the engine at a reasonable cruise speed.

Empirically, I've driven big heavy cars fast for long distances, and gotten reasonable fuel economy; especially big German cars with big diesel engines. What kills them is stop and go, or when you have a smaller car with, say, 5 gears, and you are running it at redline to keep your desired speed.

What is awesome about electric cars is you could get much more efficiency in the motor across a range of power levels, plus regen. What is not at all awesome is the power density of lithium ion batteries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great progress on the supercharger buildout [1]! That said, traveling from LA to NY via New Mexico and _South Dakota_ is a pretty funny route.

[1] [http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger](http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger)

<comment><USER7> Looks like we were writing at the same time. See my other comment for some ideas about the route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone have any idea what the current bandwidth of the LA-NY route is? In other words, given how many chargers exist along the route, how many Tesla cars can make the trip per unit time?

Obviously, if you assume the optimal arrangement—each car being separated from the next by exactly 30 minutes—each charge plug can support 48 cars per day.

That's also assuming that the chargers are arranged such that each leg between chargers is less than 170 miles. The article doesn't indicate whether this is the case.

<comment><USER22> I think you also need to take into account how many Model S cars are making a cross-country journey at one time. I'd suspect it is less than 10 (how many people drive from LA-NYC or vice-versa?).

Strangely, this is a great example of not over-engineering and pre-selling the capabilities of your product. Tesla knows that the number of people who will make this cross-country journey is small. They are fairly certain that the stations can therefore handle the load. They are proving it is possible, and likely don't have to worry about people actually doing it.

<comment><USER23> This is true. Last week, the total number of Tesla vehicles using the superchargers was 450. Now, certainly the weather was a factor in that, and usage is much higher over holiday weekends, but it can be quite low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hope actually that Americans learn to drive _less_ , not more, as a result of these sorts of changes in the market.

It always amuses me that a majority of American life is lived on the road. For all the pleasures of the free and the brave, they love their little cages..

<comment><USER25> After moving to California 3 years ago I've seen stretches of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and of course California I'd never have seen without a car. Gotten to go to places impractical with any other transportation. I can't really imagine not having a car for my weekend trips.

I get not wanting to stay in a car for 40 minutes each way on a weekly commute, but being trapped in a city like LA or San Francisco with no access to the boundless natural beauty and adventure would cause me to go nuts. Hipster coffee shops and artisanal food only do so much for my sanity.

<comment><USER24> I'm not saying you shouldn't drive your car everywhere.

I am saying, you shouldn't be doing it every day. That, right there, is one of the unhealthiest lifestyles, for everyone.

The average American spends an hour a day in their car. This number changes over the years, of course, but generally Americans spend a large portion of their lives, consuming gas. Its just built into the nations life-lines at this point.

Weekend trips with the car would be great! Alas, thats not how America uses its cars ..

<comment><USER26> Can you share the source for the data on how much time the average American spends in a car?

<comment><USER27> A quick google search points to an even higher average (101 minutes), _in 2006_ : [https://web.archive.org/web/20100526113417/http://www.revolu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100526113417/http://www.revolutionhealth.com/blogs/drscherger/men- moderate-exercis-3815)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A perfect solution would be to switch your empty battery with a full one and just go. Let the charging station fill it up.

Are there any drawbacks to this?

<comment><USER29> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY)

Tesla already demoed this.

<comment><USER30> This is pretty cool. But the problems I see are infrastructural scaling issues. To get a 2min throughput, you'd need at least 15 batteries stored below. That may sound reasonable, but then you realize it's only Tesla. And probably only compatible with one _model_ of Tesla. Not very future-proof. I don't have audio at the moment, so maybe he discussed that.

Charger stations seem the better option. But I still think there could be bottleneck issues if electric cars really took off. You could reach some midpoint somewhere, say, Primm, NV, and be stuck there circling lots for hours waiting for a charger station to free up (assuming one could circle a lot for extend periods of time on a dead battery). The gas station there is pretty much hell on earth already.

<comment><USER31> Tesla have already announced that they will build multiple vehicles with the same battery form-factor as the Model S.

(I mean, you wouldn't even need a press release to know this - it's blatantly obvious that Tesla will do their best to capitalize on the massive investment that the Supercharger network represents).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's too bad you couldn't just hitch a secondary external battery pack to a mini-trailer hitched to the car for long distances. Roll into a station, unhitch the pack, swap for charged one, go on your way maybe 15 min later.

I know there are proposals for swappable internal packs, with automatic swap machinery at the station, but a trailer hitch and external plug requires a lower capital investment, and is much less intrusive to the vehicle design.

<comment><USER33> Or for reaching the distant city a gasoline generator in the small trailer. Making it a plugable hybrid.

<comment><USER34> Or build said generator into the car and sell the whole thing for half the price of a Tesla :)

[x] [http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric- car.html](http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is it reasonable to buy a Model S now hoping that within 6-7 years you can swap out the "old" tech batteries for newer / better / faster / higher capacity battery packs which will be introduced in 5-7 years?

If so, it wouldn't be a bad long-term car for those of us who like to keep cars more than 5 years.

<comment><USER36> Yes. The cars were designed with that sort of future compatibility in mind. That is how they were able to implement and demonstrate the battery pack swapping station. While I personally don't believe there will ever be as many battery swap stations as there are super chargers, it is quite believable that in 5 to 10 years I'd be able to drive somewhere and swap out my aging battery pack for a new one that will have a higher capacity than what my original pack had when new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> These superchargers are great but I think in many cases it would be more practical to fully charge overnight at a hotel. (not sure how likely a hotel would be to accomodate this) Hopefully hotels begin to build-out electric outlet access for some of their parking spaces. The beauty of charging overnight is you don't need to buy a special charger so the infrastructure would be relatively inexpensive.

Imagine if you could simply rent a fuel-cell (hydrogen?) for long trips and connect it in the trunk... Or even just renting extra batteries. (although quite heavy and inconvenient to carry)

I'm fully convinced electric cars are a big component in tje future of transportation but there are many challenges to solve. Also ET3/hyperloop seems promising.

</comment><comment><USER38> Unrelated: That pond / front water thing on [http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger](http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger) seems like it would be unnecessarily easy to drive or walk into.

</comment><comment><USER39> Good to see the network growing. I may still be sorta impractical, but at least Tesla is putting a foot forward and expanding their charging network. In the end, this alone could push their sales higher since no other vehicles (brands) can charge on the supercharger network.

So in, lets say, 5 years...would you rather buy an electric car with an established and easy to use charging network. Or a different brand electric car that is just launching their charger network? Tesla for the long term

</comment><comment><USER40> If I _needed_ to make a long road trip, I'd lease a car that is good for long road trips and rent my Tesla to someone (or not).

If I _wanted_ to make a long road trip, I might not mind more frequent stops.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is what the future looks like people!

</comment><comment><USER42> McDonalds or Cracker Barrel ought to get in on this at a corporate level.</comment>


Hidden work when launching a SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://workshop.kwoosh.com/post/the-hidden-work-when-launching-a-saas.html <comment><USER2> This is hidden work for running a function SaaS, not launching one.

The trick to launching a SaaS is picking the right things to _not do_. Some of the fun of a SaaS is iterating on everything from product features to pricing to support tooling. It's very difficult to get pricing, trial periods, and billing model right on the first try. So usually you're better off doing less of that, and figuring it out later.

And you really don't need a crazy sophisticated drip email setup. Doing email marketing for existing users and new signups right is something that will get you incremental gains. If you convert 5% better when you have 1000 signups per month, you'll be happy. If you convert 5% better when you have 10 signups per month you'll never even know.

Silly as it sounds, if you spend more than an hour or two thinking about sales tax before launch, you're wasting time. Screwing up sales tax at launch will not kill you. _Skipping sales tax entirely_ at launch will not kill you. In fact, very little that can go wrong will kill you. You're probably going to die because you didn't make enough go right.

<comment><USER3> You beat me to this comment by a minute!

I've run engineering teams in SFBA for years and have, with a friend, built Cronitor. I've come to believe the most valuable "soft" skill in an engineer is just a relentless drive to ship, to know how to be both tactical and strategic in avoiding over-engineering.

With Cronitor, we call it the JIT Mindset: Don't actually write code until you have to, and focus on solving most impactful problems first. My co-founder wrote more about it here -- [https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup- bb1a13381b0](https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0)

In one sentence it's simply: Over-engineering something can be hard which can trick you into thinking it's real valuable work -- it's not. It's a trap.

<comment><USER4> I totally agree. I just today shipped code that lets clients off board, nearly two years after launch.

It is really hard as an engineer not to complete a feature, but for a small scrappy saas product that's exactly what you have to do.

I liken it to building a bridge while your clients are walking across it. You want to be fair enough ahead that they don't fall in, but not so far you take them the wrong direction or build paths they don't go down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, these are the "features" that really bog down the excitement when trying to launch -- user invites, user profiles, billing, transactional emails, password reset, file upload, PDF conversion, free trial capability, coupon code capability, shared accounts, PERMISSIONS, etc. Then you get to the next level -- search, caching, deploying.

Not exactly in the same vein as the others, but I've never seen soft-deletes done really well either i.e. the user can "delete" something but it still lives in the database. It's one of those features that sounds good but when it comes time to implement, it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.

<comment><USER6> Another point I didn't see mentioned was "support and documentation" (not necessarily SaaS specific, but still applicable)

I was the lead developer of a greenfield new b2b web application that took several months to develop the MVP for, then another almost 2 years to develop support tooling and systems for.

We would get calls that it didn't work with no other information, calls that it didn't work with "my older samsung", emails with pictures taken with another phone of the login screen with no other information, users that didn't know the name of the company they worked for, or even their username in the application.

We found suprisingly that there was a subset of our users that couldn't even tell you if they were on iOS or android! But quickly we learned that it's not their job to care about that, it's ours. We spent the next almost 2 years writing in debugging code, shipping logs back to our servers, writing code to send errors back to us to avoid having to ask the user on the phone to "please read out exactly what the error message says" only to find out that it happened to them last week and they don't remember... We wrote code to be able to "playback" what a user is doing in the app before they have a problem so we could identify UX issues, and redesigned UIs to include important information so when users sent us screenshots or pictures of the device we could get useful information from it from anywhere in the app (like app version, os version, username, company, etc...). We wrote documentation for how to enable camera permissions that they may have inadvertently denied for several android versions and flavors and iOS versions because we found that some users would be confused if the images and names were slightly different.

If you asked me today what makes our app better than all of our competitors, i'll tell you that it's hands down the "support" capability of the application, and that if a user has a problem, we can track down what they were doing when it happened and figure out a fix (either procedural or technical) sometimes before they even call the problem in!

Also, it's a sure fire way to deflate the ego of the hotshot lead developer that thinks he's made the best thing since sliced bread when the most important part of the application is a glorified log shipper!

<comment><USER7> Spot on. That's something that's next on my roadmap: building out a help and documentation site/portal. There is so much more that goes into building and launching a SaaS app than just the app itself.

I'd to love to hear more about how you identified UX issues from pure logging data. Do y'all write anything up about this online anywhere?

<comment><USER6> No, we haven't really written anything up. I've always wanted to start writing about stuff like this, but never get the time (because I spend it all writing stupidly long comments on websites like this!)

But one example of how we use logging info to clean up our UX was just kind of "watching" what the users were doing by just following absurd amounts of logging (logs like "clicked x button" are short and cheap, as long as you can filter them out when needed, they are immensely valuable). Our application does a lot of barcode scanning, and we noticed just from browsing around individual paths in our log-shipping system that if some users had an error with the camera (lowend android cameras are a lot buggier than i would have imagined!), they would go into the settings, select the option to change the scanner to a wireless laser attachment, then change it back to the camera version before going back to what they were doing.

Overall the process took them a good 15-20 seconds, and when they should be scanning about 1 carton a second in the app, that added up in both time wasted and in user frustration. We added a "retry" button to the error screen, and instantly the long workaround stopped happening. Then we took it a step further and would attempt to re-grab the camera in the background before showing the error to the users, which cut down on the number of those dialogs significantly.

It was a matter of getting an alert that this "camera not readable" error was happening commonly enough to trigger an alert, and from there was about 10 minutes of browsing the "breadcrumbs" for a few users to see the pattern, maybe an hour of adding the "retry" button in the dialog box (and testing), and another hour to do the auto-retry a few days later.

3 hours of work when it's all said and done (of course, after the timesink of developing it all), and the product is better off. And that's something that i'm almost 100% confident that we would have never found out about without this kind of logging and reporting.

We use sentry.io [0] for a lot of this error logging, and we have found it incredible at being able to "walk in the user's shoes" for things like this.

[0] [https://sentry.io](https://sentry.io)

<comment> gm-conspiracy I really appreciate your comment.

I have been pushing hard for our team to implement sentry.

I have implemented JS logging for all of our AJAX interactions, but having sentry 'coalesce' everything into a single view, as you know, is immensely useful and actionable.

<comment><USER6> Well if it helps, sentry is incredibly easy to implement on a basic level, and the free tier is more than enough to play around with for quite a while before you need to step up to something more.

For us the process started with just including the script and getting a few crashes or exceptions here and there, and once most of us were comfortable that some time investment here would pay off, we really wired it in and the benefits just skyrocketed.

Now we even have it running on our server side code in one case because it's just such a damn good tool.

I will say that the downsides are that the search is fairly poor unless you self host and have access to the database, and forget about using it for any kind of reporting over time periods (it's actually really hard to see things like "number of times this error happened in the last week").

But overall it's a very easy system to layer on top of just about anything. I know nothing about your company or product, but see if you can get the approval to spend an hour or 2 to just try it out. As long as you don't have any PII its a pretty risk-free thing to try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why I always scratch my head when I hear about early stage startups say "Oh, yeah, we built our MVP and put it out there and got thousands of sign ups, then we started figuring out how to build a billing system to handle subscriptions..."

I call total BS on that. Trying to shoehorn even something like Stripe into an app that has existing tables for users and companies, and ensuring it WORKS (including handling webhooks for payment confirmation, invoice generation, failed payments etc.) in less than 3 or 4 weeks is setting your developers (and accounts department) up for failure.

If you are selling an enterprise level SaaS, then things like billing history, generation of invoices for your customer's accounts department, handling lapsed subscriptions gracefully, handling changing of credit card details, giving the option of purchase orders or using other forms of payment etc. ALL have to be factored in and built before you even sign up your first customer. (Yep, we even lost a customer during the trial once because we didn't have the ability to generate a PDF invoice for them 'in app').

<comment><USER9> I set up the payment page of my app in under a day with Stripe Elements and just didn't worry about invoices. If someone needs them I just send them thru the Stripe UI. I have been getting more requests for them recently, but I think it's going to be a while before it's worth building myself.

<comment><USER8> Most consumers would be happy with just the Stripe payment receipt as proof, but Enterprise level businesses want a formal invoice. Australian businesses for example, would want a formal "Tax Invoice" with GST (Goods and Services Tax) breakdown, plus our ABN (Australian Business Number) quoted on it to meet legal requirements. Other countries have similar legal requirements for the actual invoice document.

My point was specifically for B2B SaaS companies (especially those that operate internationally), as opposed to B2C where the requirements are a lot less stringent.

<comment><USER10> Our experience is quite the opposite. With B2B you have less customers, and especially enterprises have a designate email address where they want the invoice to go. They don't care about any of that in-app. And for us with just under a 100 customers it's easy enough to generate them through our accounting software and send with mailmerge or something like that (don't know what our financial guy uses :). We talked about building invoicing to make things less time consuming, turned out that a better overview of the plans and usage was enough for now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This part is so true:

 _" I've built and sold software for the Mac and iOS. Those products all had simple billing systems. But with a SaaS, you need to handle all of that yourself. You need to handle payments, and invoices and everything inbetween."_

Edit - both Spark (Laravel) and Bullet Train (Rails) will help with a bunch of this stuff:

[https://spark.laravel.com/](https://spark.laravel.com/)

[https://bullettrain.co/](https://bullettrain.co/)

<comment><USER11> > You need to handle payments, and invoices and everything inbetween

Isn't this pretty much why companies like Stripe exist?

<comment><USER12> We use ChargeBee for our SaaS product. Really great offering! They give you a customer portal where the customer can cancel, update, upgrade, ... his subscription. We have a custom checkout page where all options are listed. Then one API call and the user is forwarded and can fill out billing address, payment information, etc. on a ChargeBee page. They will handle taxes, issue invoice and everything else for you.

They have also an extensive API and webhooks.

<comment><USER13> Hey same here. The portal feature is incredible

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And now, if you're marketing or selling to people in the European Union, you're expected to have a deep understanding of data privacy law to negotiate GDPR, ePrivacy, and a host of other (often contradictory) regulations.

<comment><USER15> Good. It's about time start-ups started taking that responsibility seriously.

<comment><USER14> I sort of agree? I think it's important that people take data privacy and security seriously. I don't think someone, however, needs a nuanced understanding of what constitutes legitimate interest for data processing, or needs to have an attorney from every country or region they do business in on standby.

The issue is that vendors (CRM, marketing automation, etc.) are trying to offload too much of the risk and accountability to their own end users, which leaves startups piecing together tech stacks that are sometimes not even legally compliant in their default settings. Not OK.

<comment><USER15> That's definitely true, but I'm not too worried about it. It will be a short- term headache, but I think eventually processes will be refined and new models of responsibility will evolve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my experience, billing/invoicing/payments integration is the easy part of launching a SaaS. It's just code, and most of the work is already done for you in the form of libraries. Getting your product 'out there' and getting people to sign up, THAT is the hidden work if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER17> "focus on my product"? where do you draw the line around what is your product and what isn't? if you exclude everything around it, the actual nucleus of your product had better be pretty damn amazing to standout from all the other people with an idea.

This is not hidden work. These are decisions. In theory every part of an offering could be 3rd partied, but they will all want to be paid. at some point you have to write something yourself either so you don't have to pay someone or to do it better than what everyone else is using.

having said all of that, chargebee is pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER18> > You need to handle payments, and invoices and everything inbetween

Back to July 2017, when we launched PixLab[1], we opted for Paddle[2] since implementing billing, invoices, purchase orders, refunds, etc. was the last thing we want to code from scratch. We were a small team of C/C++ engineers and ML scientists with no clue on billings.

Not only Paddle did handle all the payment stack smoothly, they do also offer Paypal in the same payment modal which was a great boost for our sales since most Europeans customers prefer to use that method. One drawback is that they took 5% for each sale/subscription instead of the 2.9% that Stripe takes.

[1]: [https://pixlab.io](https://pixlab.io)

[2]: [https://paddle.com](https://paddle.com)

<comment><USER19> I second this, we use Paddle on [https://gimmeproxy.com](https://gimmeproxy.com) . It's really nice they handle VAT automatically on your behalf (EU VAT law for online is complicated) and setup was pretty easy.

<comment><USER20> Is GimmeProxy intended for blocking proxies or utilizing them?

<comment><USER19> It's for utilizing proxies. For blocking you can use something like [https://ip-api.io](https://ip-api.io)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use [https://www.chargebee.com](https://www.chargebee.com), they've been incredible

</comment><comment><USER21> This kind of thing is top of my list when I think about how little enthusiasm I have for taking our current on-premise, installed enterprise software, and trying to turn it into a SaaS. As a small company, we've barely got the horses to handle the much-lower levels of complexity involved in building and supporting a mostly monolithic application, where we can offload all of the ops and deployment and first-line support duties to our customer, once they've got it installed and running.

I just start checking out when the idea of creating a cloud-hosted, multi- tenant version of our product is raised. Scale, security, liability for data protection, 24/7 operations support, billing, and metrics for billing, all this stuff we don't currently worry much, if at all about, would become first- class concerns. Unfortunately some people seem to think you just wave your cloud wand at things, and _poof!_ everything is magical.

<comment><USER22> > where we can offload all of the ops and deployment and first-line support > duties to our customer, once they've got it installed and running.

I feel like this might become a burden later on when you have to support multiple versions of a codebase in the wild.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are there any SaaS that do all these things for SaaS?

Especially for Germany/Europe?

If not, why not? Sounds like a good business opportunity.

<comment><USER12> Yes, as mentioned in my other post, ChargeBee does this really well. We, as a German company, use it for our SaaS offering.

<comment><USER24> Do they also do revenue recognition for you?

<comment><USER25> Revenue recognition isn't something I know anything about (see my comment above about chargebee doing a bunch of stuff I don't even know I need) but here's their page on it

[https://www.chargebee.com/docs/revenue- recognition.html](https://www.chargebee.com/docs/revenue-recognition.html)

<comment><USER24> Awesome! Thx

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> These are exactly the pain points that Taylor Otwell (creator of Laravel, a PHP framework) tried to solve with Spark ([https://spark.laravel.com/](https://spark.laravel.com/)). It was actually just updated to v6.0 yesterday so it's definitely a good time for considering it.

I personally used it for a couple of projects and I'm really happy about it. It probably saved me a few weeks or a couple of months of tedious work!

Workstack [https://workstack.io](https://workstack.io)

BrandOn [https://brandon.video](https://brandon.video)

</comment><comment><USER27> These "features" are the whole reason you're building the app--so you can collect money (I assume). At my current company, we've spent the last four months rewriting just this part (moving to a different processor) and we're still not done. Our product lineup is not even very complicated, but working with payment processors is quite hellish. Considering this is _the most_ important part of the application, this should always be considered ahead of time and plenty of time budgeted for it. There's no way you can try to speed this up and still implement it properly.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems like a this could be a SaaS all by itself, like the backend of Stripe or something. You build the UI and this thing plugs right into it does all the nitty-gritty.

<comment><USER29> Shoehorning Shopify to your SaaS is probably quite straightforward. There are plugins for accounting stuff, too. [0]

[0] [https://apps.shopify.com/featured/accounting](https://apps.shopify.com/featured/accounting)

<comment><USER28> Excel can be your tax template, but people would still rather use dedicated software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The biggest challenge for us was a bunch of small tasks that we HAD to do. It was driving us nuts until we realized we could either find a service, make it dead simple (MVP style) or just not do it until we absolutely needed to do it. We worked on being customer obsessed with the absolute list. We ended up with a great product. I can't take full credit, took a lot of advice from great blogs and Lean Startup (the summary is better if you don't have the time. [http://amzn.to/2H8isRI](http://amzn.to/2H8isRI)).

</comment><comment><USER31> This is exactly right and largely why I have not launched any subscription webapp on my own (b2c, b2b). I haven't yet invested enough time for an adequately starter backend infrastructure.

I should look into Laravel Spark tho', I hadn't heard of it before and it looks like it might be just what I need.

<comment><USER32> I'm using Laravel Spark for the SaaS I'm building. It's fantastic, I highly recommend it. The one caveat is that if you're doing some odd billing scheme (e.g. aside from just one or more tiers at set prices), it might take a little extra work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> These SaaS stories are scaring me a little. Is there a non-BS guide that addresses these "hidden" issues associated with billing, tax etc?

I want to build a website with a paywall, accessible with annual subscription only. Let's assume around 5,000 users for the first year. I assume that I can put together a WordPress website with a bunch of payment plugins - sign up, add cart, PayPal, debit card etc - would be enough.

But maybe not? What am I missing here.

<comment><USER25> You need to think about the tax implications which depends on whether you're selling to businesses or individuals and which countries you and they are in, amongst other things. I'm basically banging the Chargebee drum on here because they'll take care of all that for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I used Laravel Spark for telointerview.com, I coded the base app in React so I use iframes for the spark pages. Couldn't recommend it enough, just dont be afraid to edit the vue files.

</comment><comment><USER35> There are lots of companies offer "bridge" kind of service between Payment Facilitators like Stripe and SaaS app.

Since all my products are #1 in their niche and I know how dirty businesses especially competitors can play, I do not use any of these bridge services!

There are concerns that these services might sell your customers' data to interested parties or at least roll their own with some insight into your pricing and market dynamics.

We started off using WHMCS. Lots of my friends who rolled their own SaaS got stuck for months changing payment gateways but we just enabled/disabled plugins a few click and kept sailing.

Customers love that we use proven/cheap solution to solve this problem and focus entirely on our app.

</comment><comment><USER36> Did this for our new product Construct 3: [https://www.construct.net](https://www.construct.net)

It was difficult, but built some good features that do give us a lot of flexibility:

      * region based pricing
      * region based billing cycles
      * multiple plan options per region
      * auto generated pricing based on live fx rates which ar
      rounded "nicely" which is harder than it sounds
      *% based discounts and account credit
      * ability to modify seat counts

Difficulties amongst many many others are:

      * VAT handling (it's different per customer type and country!) and generally having a solid grip on business finance
      * abstracting it to allow multiple payment methods (stripe and PayPal)
      * generalising it enough to support multiple products
      * dealing with fx changes during checkout
      * handling disputes, refunds, etc and their affect on product access
      * just PayPal in general god damn!  When dealing with b2c not including it is tempting but not really and option.  PayPal and stripe in my experience give 99%+ coverage

Easy bits are the generating of invoices (prefer to do this in house) and all the other trim like emails etc. That's just grind work.

I'm proud of it though and so far we've done 6 figures through it and is holding up well (tens of thousands of LOC and probably around 6 months dev time). We wanted it to do a lot and the design is quite sophisticated I think.

Second payment system with meat on it I've written (first cleared 7 figures but is no where nearly as well designed and mainly deals with one off payments). I enjoy making them!

Would definitely of bitten off more than I could chew if I was less experienced. Making it all scalable and reliable is another layer of complexity.

One gotcha which is hard to manage on a business level when dealing with sass accepting multiple currencies is forex rates that become very out of sync with your orginal price points. Can explain more but on phone!

Still to do is adding a system for accepting POS, a lot of the difficulties we face is we sell to the whole market, consumers, businesses of sizes and education. When selling to education specifically offering native currencies is a huge competitive edge especially for sass.

Also still to do in a more elegant way is b2b enterprise customers sometimes like paying for multiple years in advance - high value orders so another important case to cater for!

ALSO still to do is create accounts for resellers to buy at discounted rates. You can see how much work is involved on this sort of thing!

Winging it with "it works" won't cut it imo (9/10 I'm all for it!) - that is the gooiest technical debt you can take on. Imo you need to seriously invest time into a good design from day zero.

<comment><USER37> How do you deal with region based pricing knowing that anyone on the internet can pretend to be anywhere ? For example using a VPN

<comment><USER38> A lot of payment services can now provide much more useful verification of a customer's location, e.g., checking the country where a card was issued or knowing the country where a certain payment method works or a bank account is located.

This is becoming a necessity since various places, notably the entire EU, now require multi-point proof of customer location for tax compliance for at least some types of sale.

It's easy to pretend you're somewhere else until you need to pay for something. Then you have the entire financial sector's anti-fraud systems to deal with, and a VPN isn't going to fool them for a moment.

<comment><USER36> Iirc VAT laws require 3 sources of proof of country - that's what we tried to do (IP, billing address and processor reported address) although often it's only possible to get 2.

<comment><USER38> For the electronic B2C stuff in the EU, the requirement is two non-conflicting sources. Something like geolocation and card billing address should suffice in most cases (assuming you have access to the customer's IP address and they're paying by card, which is surely a fairly common situation for a SaaS).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Isn't there a front and back end software to deal with this kind of stuff easily ? Like magento [https://magento.com/](https://magento.com/)

<comment><USER39> Good point but have you tried using Magento? It's a beast into itself and typically requires an expert that knows how to configure and use it

<comment><USER37> Then what is the competition for Magento ? I would like to launch a SaaS in the future and I really don't want to spend my life building a client database, stripe stuff and support platform...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What about the _unhidden_ work, like "Describe your SaaS, i.e. what is kwoosh?".

Sry, that was snarky, but you really should describe your service, as I could not find out what it does.

<comment><USER7> Did you view our marketing site at [https://kwoosh.com/](https://kwoosh.com/) ?

Good point though, we could update the footer on workshop to be a bit more specific.

<comment><USER40> > Did you view our marketing site at > [https://kwoosh.com/](https://kwoosh.com/) ?

Yes, that's what I am referring to, the workshop-link goes to some kind of blog, but it seems to be more about tech and entrepreneurship in general.

Some kind of "About" section with screenshots would be nice.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for the feedback.

Yes - more screenshots / a properly filled out marketing site are on the list of things to do. Good idea about an "About" section. Workshop is the name of our blog where we show / discuss Kwoosh as we build it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Master and Margarita: a web-based multimedia annotation (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://cr.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/public_html/howto.html <comment><USER2> Russian state TV did a 9 hour long miniseries about it in the mid 2000s that was really good. It had good acting, special effects and production value and they included almost every single scene in the book. Some people complain that some of the subtitles are inadequate, so I recommend reading the book first.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was a superb adaptation at the Barbican in London a few years ago. It returned again the following year.

I've no idea if it will come back again, but it's more than worth catching if you can. One of the best plays I've seen, with an incredible cast.

[http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event- detail.asp?ID=13735](http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event- detail.asp?ID=13735)

</comment><comment><USER4> I first tried to read this as Mistrz i Małgorzata, the Polish edition, then switched to the English one when I got my hands on it. Still, after so many years, one of my favorite books.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is one of my favorite novels. Well worth reading. The background surrounding its writing is fascinating and makes you appreciate the novel even more.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thats definitely one of my favorite books. If anyone is interested in Bulgakov, "Heart of a Dog" is another book to read. Perhaps, even wittier than "Master and Margarita".

</comment><comment><USER7> _no one in his right mind would want to read a 300-page novel online in any language._

Ah, 1998...

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh, my personal favorite! Didn't expect to see it on HN.

</comment><comment><USER9> Read it in Russian, if possible.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's one of the best 20th century novels, but rather than a Wikipedia page about it, we should have an interesting article either about the novel or about Bulgakov. Anybody want to find one?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe [http://cr.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/public_html/howto.html](http://cr.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/public_html/howto.html)

(I could have sworn I had submitted it a few days ago, but it seems not)

<comment><USER10> Oh cool! And retro-web too. URL changed from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Should we post every book on HN now which is worth reading and appears on nearly every list "xyz books you should read"? Don't get me wrong, the book itself is very good.

<comment><USER4> Feel free to ignore it.

<comment><USER11> Feel free, to grab another book from "Top xyz books to read in your lifetime" and post the link to Wikipedia. Any other pollution is welcome as well.

<comment><USER10> Please don't post uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, even when you disagree with a comment or story that someone else has posted. We're trying for a higher quality of discourse here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask Y Combinator: How often can YC companies post jobs to the front page of HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For questions like this, e-mailing the mods is more reliable. Their e-mail address is in the footer

<comment><USER3> I think it's more a complain than a question. At some point, I got tired as well of all the "Muse" hiring post every week or so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a complaint at all, I was just curious if there was any sort of "rate limiting", even if informal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our recent experience has been approximately once every two weeks.

Job posts are submitted and go into a queue. Only posts from companies that have not recently had a job post shown are picked from the queue.

They appear near the top, and then work their way down over the course of 3 hours. Only one job post is shown on the front page at a time.

</comment><comment><USER5> The job postings would be more interesting if discussion was allowed on them.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure they're afraid that people will bash certain companies in them. But I'd like that too. They should let the company moderate the discussion in those posts. I don't care if they're highly censored, I think there would be a lot of value to being able to ask the company questions about the roles.

<comment><USER7> >They should let the company moderate the discussion in those posts. I don't care if they're highly censored, I think there would be a lot of value to being able to ask the company questions about the roles.

Ew no. The illusion that a company is good is way more harmful than just disallowing comments in the first place.

<comment><USER8> Maybe just a toggle to have them on or off then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get why ycombinator doesn't advertise on a sidebar to the right similar to stackoverflow or reddit ads.

There would be a lot more 'job ad' inventory and it wouldn't interfere directly with the user experience.

In fact they can also use it to advertise other initiatives like open applications/events/research grants/...

<comment><USER10> It would be less effective though. More inventory is useless if nobody is looking at it and, generally, people don't look at side bars often.

It would decrease the impact on UX, as you suggested, but I don't think the current experience is not significantly injured.

<comment><USER11> There is already an inventory: [https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs](https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs)

See the link on the menu bar at the top.

Also, constants ads would be a bad distraction. I'd definitely try to block it or leave the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last I knew it was about once a week or so, but there's also an absolute limit on the number of active posts across all companies to prevent Hacker News from becoming Job News.

</comment><comment><USER13> Additionally, does HN keep track of how effective these postings are? I mean, as in, how many quality hits do YC startups get from being on the front page of HN?

<comment><USER14> It is just one of many many places we utilize at Zapier. As a remote company, we are able to draw candidates from all over the world, so the top of the funnel is pretty wide. HN alone wouldn't provide the diversity we look for when we open a new role.

It'd be really interesting to dig into geodata about the HN community; I'd imagine as a job listing tool, it is less useful for YC companies that aren't based in California. That's assuming a much higher concentration of readers in tech hubs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think once a week, but I don't remember exactly and don't have the code in front of me at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER16> I posted recently about drchrono posting way too many Django dev ads.

The post was voted up rapidly and then killed assumedly by a mod.

It seems like some yc companies see it as a strategic advantage that they can spam hn to get cheap devs.

</comment><comment><USER17> That's one of the benefits of being accepted as a YC company. They have the distribution advantage with Hacker News :)

</comment><comment><USER18> How about infomercials? Is there a limit on those?</comment>


How I Took an API Side Project to 250M Daily Requests - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ipinfo.io/api-side-project-to-250-million-requests-with-0-marketing-budget-bb0de01c01f6 <comment><USER3> I'd like to point out that the things he says he's doing instead of marketing are, in fact, marketing. It's "guerilla" marketing, and it's being paid for with the writer's time. Nothing wrong with that, just don't confuse "marketing" with "advertising".

</comment><comment><USER4> The author does not say how much does maintaining the service cost and what is the long term plan. As others have referred to already, a similar existed before and ended for a simple reason – no point in maintaining it with constant loss and no clear revenue plan.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11010856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11010856)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh it generates revenue, and we have a lot of big customers! See [https://ipinfo.io/about](https://ipinfo.io/about) [https://ipinfo.io/customers](https://ipinfo.io/customers) and [https://ipinfo.io/pricing](https://ipinfo.io/pricing)

<comment><USER5> Yes but what's your revenue? Please consider going transparent (i.e. [http://www.transparentstartups.com/](http://www.transparentstartups.com/)) and making an interview with one of my fav websites indiehackers.com

<comment><USER6> I'm confused why you think you're entitled to this information?

<comment><USER7> Providing revenue and financial metrics are really get eyeballs as this info is rarely available for early stage companies. Balasmiq used this very well, they released early on monthly financial status blogs, which almost all managed to reach front page/top of HN. So, take it as another guerilla marketing channel.

<comment><USER8> Though the difference between Balsamiq and an IP address lookup service is that HNers don't think they can make Balsamiq in a weekend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good strategy! That's also what I did to get my side project (Cookie Inspector - Google Chrome Cookie Editor) project to having 80,000/daily users.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie- inspector/j...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie- inspector/jgbbilmfbammlbbhmmgaagdkbkepnijn?hl=en)

I solely marketed it at Stack Overflow and was getting upvotes and that was all my marketing.

[https://superuser.com/questions/244062/how-do-i-view-add- or-...](https://superuser.com/questions/244062/how-do-i-view-add-or-edit- cookies-in-google-chrome)

Also a big factor there are good reviews. When users like your project/product, they will market it for you.

<comment><USER10> HN users clicking through: take a look at reviews before installing. Appears there may be an issue with adware.

westoque - might want to check your code base, if the adware is unintentional.

<comment><USER9> Thanks. Yes, it has been an issue and the adware is definitely unintentional.

Will fix immediately :)

Adding to my answer above: users are more likely to install your product too if you provide good customer support.

<comment><USER11> Post-mortem would be appreciated. As someone who has Chrome extensions in the store, how did you get malware-infected?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure why people are proud to do things without spending money on marketing.

What if spending money on marketing had made you grow twice larger? Twice faster?

When people say "I didn't spend money on marketing", the only translation is "I knowingly overlooked massive growth opportunities."

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't be so quick to make that translation.

I think a more useful way to think about it is "Know your users, and your channel." There are some user populations - and developers are usually one of them - that are virulently anti-advertising. Any paid channel usually earns instant distrust from them. Putting money into marketing spending can have a negative ROI for them, because it has a signaling effect on the brand that says "Our product quality isn't good enough for us to get users without paying for them."

Then there are other user populations - most e-commerce is like this - <USER2> there is no such signaling effect, and they are happy to check out new products, regardless of how they hear about the product. For these markets, it's silly to ignore paid channels; you're just leaving money on the table.

<comment><USER14> I think Apple's paid marketing efforts are a counter example to your argument. Ineffective advertising is ineffective. As a tautology this statement is pretty unremarkable.

I first found out about ipinfo from a Google search looking to solve this problem. Haven't pulled the trigger on using it, but it's been on the back of my mind for awhile now.

For me, their marketing happened to be their placement on Google. I don't really know how you'd pursue paid channels on this one (outside of SEM and SEO).

It's a solution to a known problem. Unlike, say, the Apple Watch which has to first convince you have a problem... (This coming from a guy who's very interested in buying a watch as I train for a marathon.)

<comment><USER13> For developer tools? Apple certainly spends a ton on brand advertising for consumers, but most developers I know develop for Apple because they want to reach Apple consumers. (I spend a year doing smartwatch apps before giving up on the platform...the _only_ reason I was developing for Apple Watch is because that's where the users were.)

<comment><USER14> As a single example that immediately came to mind: WWDC. If that isn't a massive marketing channel directly targeted at developers I don't know what is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is super cool. I use a similar API to provide a client-side service called IP Request Mapper ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ip- request-mapper/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ip-request- mapper/ghhmhholmphdnpndngkhmpknekgicmbp)). Coming soon to a Show HN near you.

What it does is show where every asset on a web page is loaded from. It allows you to visualize how many different requests go into building just one web page. While it's gotten much better, the Houston Chronicle ([https://chron.com](https://chron.com)) used to make about 500 individual requests to build its home page. It's down to about 125.

It's best to run it across two different monitors, with IP Request Mapper on one monitor and your "normal" browser window on another. Then enter any URL and watch the map start populating based on the geolocating every request made by the page.

But it's projects like ipinfo.io that make these other things possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that...kudos to you, coderholic.

<comment><USER16> That's the same motivation that started me to build [https://urlscan.io](https://urlscan.io). I wanted an easy way for everyone to visualise the amount, size and destinations of the various HTTP requests that a single page-load triggers. Incidentally I also created a tool that is being used by a lot of Security / Phishing researchers. If you ever want some inspiration for additional IP / domain annotation sources, check it out. I should really do a "Show HN" soon ;)

Meanwhile, this is a scan for a particularly noisy German newspaper website (faz.net): [https://urlscan.io/result/f23e2e7e-e1eb-4591-9794-92f97957dd...](https://urlscan.io/result/f23e2e7e-e1eb-4591-9794-92f97957dd75)

 _This website contacted 35 IPs in 7 countries across 24 domains to perform 302 HTTP transactions. Of those, 51 were HTTPS (17 %) and 35% were IPv6. The main IP is 18.104.22.168, located in European Union and belongs to AKAMAI- ASN1. In total, 4 MB of data was transfered, which is 9 MB uncompressed. It took 2.51 seconds to load this page. 16 cookies were set, and 42 messages to the console were logged._

<comment><USER17> Very cool tool. Thanks for posting this!

<comment><USER15> Agreed. heipei, love what you did here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Happy user here. My GF came up to me and asked if I could somehow get country names for the ip addresses she had of her survey respondants. I Googled and found this neat little API. True, I could have downloaded the raw databases from elsewhere and worry about the SQL I need, whether the data is recent or ancient or even correct. I decided it was an overkill for my need, and just used this API in a throttled(1 req/s) mode and left it overnight. If I need this IP to Location need again, I'd happily pay for this API.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm baffled why anyone would use this, when you can import data in a database and run it on your own server?

I mean, you might spend 20 minutes more to set it up, but you are safe from having to rely on 3rd party service.

Anyway, kudos to coderholic for creating this and sharing the story.

<comment><USER20> \- Database needs to be purchased

\- Database needs to be distributed to your servers

\- Database can become out of date easily

\- Database lookup requires going to local disk and having a relatively fast access path/cache for lookups

\- In general, a local database requires a large amount of effort compared to just running a curl in your PHP code.

If you are actually going to use a database, the proper solution does not look like "put it on your webservers" anyway, it looks like "put it on a separate service with a fast caching layer" etc etc. So in other words, the proper solution to decouple yourself from a 3rd party API is to... build a 1st party API.

In other words, not a 20 minute job. For small shops, a quick curl during the page load _is_ a 20 minute job.

<comment><USER16> There are many ways to quickly get and use a GeoIP DB like MaxMind, most requiring way less than 20 minutes. This is just one example of something I started using recently:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -d fiorix/freegeoip curl localhost:8080/json/126.96.36.199

(Repo: [https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip](https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip))

<comment><USER21> Where are you going to host it, how will you cycle the container to keep it up to date, and will you need to load balance it?

Running a Docker container in production is not a 20 minute job.

<comment><USER22> Just put HAProxy in front of it. It's not rocket science.

[https://www.haproxy.com/solutions/microservices.html](https://www.haproxy.com/solutions/microservices.html)

<comment><USER21> Setting up HAProxy in a production environment with discovery for the docker container may not be rocket science but it's certainly not 20 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where did you get the IP DB from? My understanding is most you can't resell access to?

<comment><USER24> Do you think free IP DB providers insert "fictitious entries" [1] to identify breach of TOS like this, similar to what happened between Google/Bing a few years ago [2]?

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

2: [http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/02/google.bing.sting/ind...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/02/google.bing.sting/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great overview here on how you solved a problem and built a business around that.

I read that you use Elastic Beanstalk for your server config, but I wanted to ask: 1\. What programming language did you use?

2\. What, if any, configuration did you have to do to the Elastic Beanstalk config to deal with network spikes and autoscaling?

Thanks!

<comment><USER26> I was going to ask why _AWS Lambda_ was not used instead. Or any other serverless offering from the major cloud providers.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, that would be totally hands off. But I believe you'd have to ensure that your requests didn't timeout, (3 seconds in lambda) and in this example of 10ms response times I couldn't see any issue here. If you're into python, checkout Chalice, it's being built as a "flask" like interface on top of AWS Lambda. [https://github.com/awslabs/chalice](https://github.com/awslabs/chalice)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's great. Question: does it make money? The words 'profit', 'money', 'income' and 'revenue' do not appear in the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's profitable. See [https://ipinfo.io/pricing](https://ipinfo.io/pricing) for details of our paid plans.

<comment><USER27> Neat, congratulations! I know a few people that were active in that space and none of them managed to make it profitable and they all faded out again. It's important that services like these exist and even more important that they are viable businesses otherwise you are building on quicksand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ipinfo seems to have the exact same logo as Podio ([https://podio.com](https://podio.com)), a service owned by Citrix.

<comment><USER29> That's interesting. It's almost exactly the same. I did a trademark search, and although "Podio" is registered as a word mark, the logo design is not registered. So IPInfo is probably in the clear, but they may want to consider a new logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I see the author is posting the same thing every 20 days or so, so here is the 0 marketing...

</comment><comment><USER31> I use ipinfo.io mostly to see my own public facing IP address and for me, it's 2 reasons:

\- I somehow can remember that domain. I don't have to google "my ip" and dig through weird domains that change all the time

\- The design is clean and simple. Not too many information, no ads, loads fast.

<comment><USER32> When I google "my ip", I get a onebox showing me my IP. Dose that not appear in your search results?

<comment><USER33> Ok have a look at canihazip.com then! Love it!

<comment><USER34> Or the super easy to remember [http://ip4.me](http://ip4.me) (ip6.me is a thing too)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Crowded space. Quick google search of any of these keywords "ip address location api" , "ip lookup API" , "geolocation API by IP" etc. shows :

\- [https://db-ip.com/api](https://db-ip.com/api) \- [https://ipapi.co](https://ipapi.co) \- [https://freegeoip.net](https://freegeoip.net) \- ipinfodb.com \- [https://www.iplocation.net](https://www.iplocation.net) \- [http://neutrinoapi.com](http://neutrinoapi.com) \- [http://www.ip2location.com](http://www.ip2location.com) \- [https://www.telize.com](https://www.telize.com)

and a few dozen more. I wonder if collectively they are serving over a few billion requests per day. Microservices & API culture FTW !

<comment><USER36> I've been running [https://jsonip.com](https://jsonip.com) for years. Been serving millions of requests a day for most of that time. Doesn't really show up in searches well because it's just an API.

<comment><USER37> How do you pay for it?

<comment><USER38> I run a few small services, nothing of this scale, but one thing to bear in mind is that it's easy to pay for a lot of little side projects if they have virtually no costs.

The one cited simply echoes back your IP. That's it. How cheaply could you do that and how many requests per second could you handle on one small VPS?

Example, I recently ran [https://www.tactical2017.com/](https://www.tactical2017.com/) which is a tactical voting website for the UK general election. The cost for serving that whole website to 2.6 million people over 5 weeks, and 650k people in the last day and a half, was $20.

Just push costs down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Pretty cool man, use your site all the time for ASN lookups, although I find your carrier information wildly conflicts with digital element's DB.

</comment><comment><USER40> Related, some other adventures while running an API to retrieve IP addresses.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11010856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11010856)

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm employing a similar strategy for my library [https://github.com/joelgriffith/navalia](https://github.com/joelgriffith/navalia) as I couldn't find any solution to manage headless chrome (plus the API for that protocol is pretty heavy).

Building for what folks want, even developers, is so obvious that I think we often forget about it. It's also not as glamorous as self driving cars or rockets, so gets discredited easily.

Sound points though

</comment><comment><USER42> Kudos to you guys for building this. There is always a lot of scepticism from people on "why would anyone pay for this" . Reality is not everyone has the time or resources to build their own kit. There are literally 1000s of businesses on the internet that that are in the business of selling "time" or timesavers and removing the risk of maintenance, ongoing support.

Keep improving this and with the rise of web personalization, the demand will continue to grow.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone know how ipinfo compares to running your own instance of [https://freegeoip.net](https://freegeoip.net)?

<comment><USER44> I was wondering about this too.

The answers on the SO question [https://stackoverflow.com/q/409999/325521](https://stackoverflow.com/q/409999/325521) that OP refers to (in his blog post)

also has another answer using freegeoip.net => [https://stackoverflow.com/a/16589641/325521](https://stackoverflow.com/a/16589641/325521)

From the comments on this answer (not OP's answer linking to his API), it seems like freegeoip is not all that reliable (i.e. it's down a lot).

Funnily enough, 1 of the comments on this answers links to another free service, called "freegeoip2" which seems to work just fine as of right now.

<comment><USER43> That was my experience with freegeoip.net actually, which is why I host my own instance of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Congrats. I m not sure but ipinfo could be very interesting to startups and programmers. So a good idea could be writing attractive articles and posting them on HN and Reddit programming and some other subreddits. That would bring more customers with zero marketing.

See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ipinfo.io](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ipinfo.io)

</comment><comment><USER46> Such stories don't let me stay focused on my freelance work.

I got inspired and start researching and Building. ( btw failing yet)

</comment><comment><USER47> This has worked well for me, too. I saw an influx of "How to offer a time- based trial version on Android" on SO and developed a trial SDK as an answer: [https://www.trialy.io/](https://www.trialy.io/)

<comment><USER48> Very neat. How successful have you been with this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Given the fast lookup time, it would be useful if you could provide a JS API fot synchronous loading.

Essentially, a blocking script in the dom <script src="...api.js" /> that prepopulates the window object. With clever error handling, this could improve perceived performance significantly.

A few questions:

1\. What differentiates you from ip-api.com and other providers?

2\. Do you use MaxMind?

3\. Is there an option for no-throttling? 100s of simultaneous requests?

I aggregate multiple IP databases for my SaaS ([https://www.geoscreenshot.com](https://www.geoscreenshot.com)) and I need highly performant / reliable IP look ups.

<comment><USER50> Why would you _want_ a synchronous, blocking script in the first place?

<comment><USER49> For conditionally loading other blocking assets in JS.

For example, if IP is in China, local fallback for Google CDN as it will fail.

<comment><USER50> You can also do all of these things asynchronously, without blocking the whole page.

<comment><USER49> Yes but like all async ops not without expense to the UX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> >90% of our 250 million daily requests get handled in less than 10 milliseconds.

Minor nit, but with that level of traffic I'd expect you to be bragging about P99.99 latency, not P90.

</comment><comment><USER52> > Our servers use latency based DNS routing to serve over 90% of all requests > handled in less than 10ms.

What _exactly_ does that actually mean though?

Does it mean that processing time at your server is 10ms, or 10ms to time to first byte, or something else?

Giving it a quick test, I generally get the actual JSON result in around 400ms. The lowest I got was 200ms, the highest around 1000ms. It didn't seem to make any difference if I used the HTTP endpoint instead of the HTTPS one.

</comment><comment><USER53> I see it's still a thing. Back in high school, some ten+ years ago, I coded up an 'ip2country' website. Not sure why, there were dozens of those. I guess I had a free domain and a lot of time on my hands. I put some Google AdSense on it and let it go. I checked my AdSense account some six months later and found out I was cashing $20/month. Easiest money I've ever made.

</comment><comment><USER54> So what's your stack? Still running PHP?

</comment><comment><USER55> well currently my location is basically totally wrong. from [https://www.iplocation.net/](https://www.iplocation.net/) I've only seen one service that tracks my location 100% correct (correct village), all the others are 200 or more km away from my real location.

<comment><USER56> It just depends on the database they are using. Anyway, nowadays it's getting harder and harder to detect accurate location from the IP address (many users are on 4G or behind a proxy).

<comment><USER57> Yeah, and features like Data Saver on mobile Chrome will quietly proxy your requests through Google servers. Not sure if G forwards the proper X-FORWARDED-FOR headers (or if all IP detection services read them).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah Google does, and we take the first public IP from x forwarded for, so we'll show your actual details in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> The author says _I took_ even though this was pure luck and coincidence. Attribution bias is strong in this one.

However, it is important to acknowledge that he did put himself into a position where he was available to become lucky (= he built the API and linked to it).

</comment><comment><USER59> Checked one of our static IPs: the country is correct, but the city is 500 miles off.

</comment><comment><USER60> That's crazy the details like lat/long, what if proxy or where does that data even come from? ISP? Or you take time to build it out ie research. At any rate cool.

</comment><comment><USER61> Are you just using the max mind data?

What percentage of those 250,000,000 is from paid plans? Even if it's only 20% you'd be doing $xx,xxx per day. Is that in the ballpark?

</comment><comment><USER62> How much money do you make per api req?

<comment><USER44> See [https://ipinfo.io/pricing](https://ipinfo.io/pricing)

Although I must admit, I'm a bit surprised as to why anyone would pay for this, as several HN readers have listed atleast 5 other free (and some self- hosted) alternatives here...

<comment><USER63> Several HN readers have also pointed out that some of the free solutions have shutdown because of lack of funding. When money is on the table, user may expect that the provider is "more" answerable than a free service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Thanks for sharing.

I am ready to launch a startup and currently trying to figure out what to focus on (so many ideas!).

I posted an "Ask HN" earlier today. Wondering if anyone might have some thoughts or advice on this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14677939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14677939)

</comment><comment><USER65> Just some rough calculations. Assuming the worst-case scenario, everyone in the highest tiers (the cheapest per request), 250M daily requests means he makes

400 * 250M / 320K = $312,500 per month.

Or $3.75M per year.

Not counting the expenses.

<comment><USER66> The cheapest per request is $0. There is a free tier where, presumably, the long tail lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> You are great! My karma goes down, please!</comment>


Ability to Watch a project but only for major/minor releases [Feature Request] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1707 <comment><AUTHOR> there's not any official public github issue tracker site so posting here so that it gets a bit of spotlight and github guys would take it into consideration.</comment>


Things People Believe About Computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2013/07/22/12-silly-things-people-believe-about-computers/ <comment><USER2> Computers and especially software are really difficult to explain because of the sheer amount of abstraction involved, it doesn't help that software often presents abstractions to users that do not reflect the underlying mechanism.

You will tend to find misconceptions about things very commonly amongst even people who work in IT as their livelihood. If you ask 100 mechanics how a 4 stroke engine works you're likely to get approximately the same answer. Ask 100 IT people or developers what an operating system does and you'll get 100 different ones.

<comment><USER3> Ask them about the 4stroke and you get even more differences.

<comment><USER4> Suck squish bang blow.

<comment><USER5> Was hoping someone would say this. I would love for someone more clever than I am to come up with the OS equivalent.

<comment><USER6> Suck the money out of your wallet

squish 10 gigs of shovelware and trialware and just junk onto the hard drive

bang it crashes and needs reinstallation on a regular basis

blow. windows blows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > #9: Computer Science courses teach you how to repair computers

Oh god, this.

edit: People also think CS teaches us which computer brands are good or answers to the questions like "This computer has 4gb ram, should I buy it"

<comment><USER8> That may be one badly chosen name. However, it is not just the name. In my language, instead of computer science it is called "informatika" (which would translate to informatics [1]), and while that name does not even suggest computers, many people have the same thoughts.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics_(academic_field)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics_\(academic_field\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was a nicely written article, but missed a few pet peeves. Like how a full generation thinks the blue "e" icon is the internet, that they can close the internet by closing the browser, etc. Some of them even think Google home page is the internet itself.

And don't let me start on how people name files: sent you a Word file, have you received my Excel file?, gotta present you a PowerPoint... Hurts a little inside.

<comment><USER10> What's wrong with "sent you a Word file"? I say that all the time. It's a file I created in Word.

<comment><USER11> I meet you at the mall. I ask you how you got here. You say:

A) I drove here.

B) I drove here in my car.

C) I drove here in my Hyundai Accent.

If you say C (or even B) people will look at you funny because you've given them too much information. Why can't people say, "I sent you the spreadsheet" or, "I'm going to show you my presentation", or "Here is the text document"? Why when it comes to computers do otherwise smart people suddenly start spouting gibberish?

<comment><USER12> Bad habit, I agree, but probably due to certain companies' very-effective marketing. For example, in some areas of the country, people used to commonly refer to carbonated beverages as "Coke".

<comment><USER13> In some areas of the country, people still commonly refer to carbonated beverages as "Coke".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Actually, the "zoom and enhance" thing isn't necessarily quite as wrong as he suggests.[1]

True, this doesn't exactly generate new information, but it generates new _pseudo_ -information that can look awfully convincing, and in many cases is actually correct. See HN discussion here:[2]

Finally, the author omits the number one silly thing that people (well, people in Hollywood at least) believe about computers: that they go "beep beep beep" with every bloody keystroke. I swear I want to hurl things at the screen every time I see that....

1: [http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~vision/SingleImageSR.html](http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~vision/SingleImageSR.html)

2: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4241266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4241266)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm split on this article. On the one hand, I empathize with the author. It can be very frustrating dealing with non-technical friends/family who use computers all the time and are seemingly incapable of doing the most basic things. Especially googling their problems.

On the other hand, there are plenty of things that I do or benefit from about which I have no knowledge. I drive to work 5 days a week. I hate it. I don't even have a long commute, typically it takes under 10 minutes. But I treat it as a necessary evil and I have very little knowledge of my car. It's a tool that I use every day, but I'm sure there are many more than 12 misconceptions I have about it.

Put another way, I wonder if grilling enthusiasts write articles titled "Things People Believe About Grills" targeted at folks like the author.

<comment><USER16> This argument comes up in every conversation about non-computer people, and I don't buy it. I don't know anything about how my car _works_ , and I wouldn't be able to get a Formula 1 car out of the driveway, but I do know how to _use_ it for ordinary tasks. Moreover, if my lack of knowledge got in the way of my everyday life, I would learn something and use that knowledge.

The car equivalent of the sort of people the author is complaining about isn't you and me, it's someone who doesn't know where the steering wheel is and refuses to learn because all they need to know is gas pedal -> go forward, and the car should figure it out from there and/or is a Magical Voodoo Machine that they can't touch.

In short: complete and willful ineptitude vs. mastery is a false dichotomy.

<comment><USER15> But many of the things the author lists are _not_ as basic as using a steering wheel.

Why in the world would an average user need to care about when "www" should be in a url? Or even need to know when the term "download" is appropriate?

Yeah, if you work with word and double-space things a lot you should know how to do that. But I haven't encountered many people who don't know how to double space. And yeah, at this point people should know how to google things. That's a little more problematic, but I rarely run into people who don't know how to use google at this point either.

Some things on the list are important. A lot of things on the list are things that are minor annoyances that are likely similar to what my mechanic experiences when I try to describe my problem to him.

<comment><USER17> _Or even need to know when the term "download" is appropriate?_

If you use a word, shouldn't you know if it's appropriate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hollywood hacking: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ) Hollywood enhancing: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk)

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.terminally- incoherent.com/blog/2013/07/22/12-silly-things-people-believe-about- computers/&strip=1)

<comment><USER20> Readability cache, with images, good formatting, and images intact: [http://www.readability.com/articles/djg4qlyo](http://www.readability.com/articles/djg4qlyo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Literally writing a book right now where I try and slay some of these. Thanks for reminding me of a few.

</comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of when I was describing to my wife how the NSA was snooping on the internet traffic, and she had a "special" moment: "But how can they get the data if its floating in space". Talk about cloud computing!!!

<comment><USER23> 51% of people think stormy weather affects cloud computing, and a full 95% of people don't think they ever use cloud computing.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy- weather-a...](http://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy-weather- affects-cloud-computing-2012-8)

<comment><USER19> who even answers these questions? have you ever had the patience to stay on the phone and be interviewed about computer use?

I rest my case.

(oh, I should mention, I loved reading and will love quoting that stat, regardless)

<comment><USER23> They were answered by people who did an online survery who responded to an email invitation. It was right in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Terminally Incoherent is a great name for a website.

</comment><comment><USER25> Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.terminally- incoherent.com/blog/2013/07/22/12-silly-things-people-believe-about- computers/&strip=1)

<comment><USER26> There's some irony in an article about how normal people don't know how to use their computers getting taken down by a front page HN appearance.

<comment><USER27> Where is the irony?

<comment><USER26> If caching was set up on the webserver I might be able to read the article.

<comment><USER28> WP-Cache was in place, but HN hammered the server anyway. Typically it is not an issue but "dat traffic spike" was more or less way too much for the poor linode to handle:

[http://i.imgur.com/3jPD0iB.png](http://i.imgur.com/3jPD0iB.png)

I think Wordpress + Apache is just a beast - I've seen people talk about running Ngnx in front of Apache as a proxy serving only static content but I haven't gotten around to investigating that kind of setup yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: uPlot.js v1.0 – A fast, small chart for time series, OHLC and bars - <AUTHOR> Hello again!
5 months and ~400 commits since the initial prototype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207132
v1.0 has shipped! - https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot
A non-exaustive list of features/concerns that have been addressed since v0.1.0:

  - A terse, consistent API, (w/ plugins & hooks)
  - Timezone & DST handling
  - Point rendering
  - Bi-directional zooming
  - Dynamic data updates (streaming)
  - Numeric x scales (non-temporal)
  - Area fills & high/low bands
  - Dependent scales (°C -> °F)
  - Cursor sync across charts
  - Highlight closest series
  - Axis labeling & positioning
  - Bars & OHLC (via tiny plugins)
  - Feature gates for even smaller custom builds
 A bunch of demos: https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/index.html
About a dozen brave early adopters helped me weed out bugs, add features, refine the API and contributed demo code. Without them there'd be no v1.0, so thank you. So far there are some cool use-cases. One user renders several hundred hundred-point charts per page - something that's impossible with WebGL or heavier charting libs. There's been a prototype for Grafana panel integration. The author of Phaser [1] is currently taking uPlot for a perf-monitoring test drive while working on the new engine: https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser4-dev :D
Also, a shout out to the Chart.js guys, who recently tagged v3.0-alpha which performs 3x better than v2 on uPlot's benchmark, and is the only lib to have made any noticeable headway, let alone multiple factor!
cheers!
[1] https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser <comment><USER2> I've been following uPlot since that prototype; the performance metrics were always impressive, and now that the features are there, I think it can have an impact especially where other JS libraries hit performance issues.</comment>


Daniel Stenberg (creator of cURL) unable to enter the US again this year - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/bagder/status/1005922406802841600 <comment><USER2> I don't get why this keeps happening.

I can only assume it's some broken database/system that isn't able to internally concretely express "this person is safe". I'm imagining lots of conflicting signals, maybe from multiple systems that don't interact with each other.

Given the US travel system's reputation, I can't help but think some of the problem has to be because of utterly broken computer infrastructure. Said reputation certainly can't help make the environment seem attractive to would- be techs trying to avoid potentially-soul-crushing job positions/environments. So the people that _are_ left probably have all the innovation and inspiration worked/drained out of them (which sort of segues into an interesting fulfilling prophecy of a kind).

Without the necessary infra in place, my guess is that agents' responsibility is much higher than is let on, and the go/no-go decision is probably a lot more ad-hoc than everyone is comfortable with admitting. That could reasonably explain all the inconsistencies...

FWIW, I'm in Australia and have never traveled, so I don't honestly know.</comment>