Ask HN: Is Digital Ocean safe enough for production? - <AUTHOR> I am in the late stage of developing application using Firebase, Google App Engine and some Compute for my application backend, primarily because it is less pain than managing own servers. But the post yesterday "Firebase Costs Increased by 7,000%!"[1] made me rethink my decision as I can not afford any surprise bills now. So the cheaper alternative would be to use Digital Ocean, but is it production ready and if anyone using it successfully for running a large production app ?
 [1]https://medium.com/@contact_16315/firebase-costs-increased-by-7-000-81dc0a27271d <comment><USER2> Keep in mind Digital Ocean doesn't offer managed database instances or services. So all the OS patching, security updates, deployment management, web server + DB configuration nuts and bolts and scaling will be on you, taking more time. You may save some cash but you will lose time.

If you're very comfortable managing servers and your goal is to keep costs very low then it go for it. If time is more important (likely) then stick to what you have, then migrate only when required and you have a real business case for the move.

<comment><USER3> This is the one thing that keeps me using AWS for personal projects. Sure I might not be getting as powerful of an instance for the cost in some cases BUT I really really love the power of RDS and some of the other services AWS provides.

I know DBs are not the hardest things to setup but in the back of my mind I am always concerned about the security of my DB setup along with any tuning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hello, I'm using it for not too big stuff.

Your biggest concerns, maybe:

\+ Bandwidth limitations (the $5 instance has 200m/s I think)

\+ Lack of additional services you get in other clouds (email sending with AWS SES, for example). It's ok if you just need instances, shared storage, shared IPs, availability zones, backups and an API.

\+ Response capacity. I'm not sure if it will be better or worse, but I think it's not the same team, architecture, core infrastructure, etc compared to your current providers... this may require some research to understand if it's a concern for you.

\+ The "private" IP of the instances, so you can talk with instances in the same region, is in a shared network with other clients (or at least, it was the last time I did check).

\+ Some services (balancers, ipv6) have been released recently, so maybe they are not so "mature" as in other providers. Didn't test any of them here, sorry.

\+ Some times, the kernel version in the repos, and the kernel version available for the instance from the API or web interface, are out of sync (at least in Debian instances).

Said that, the instances and the service, perform as expected.

You also have "cloud init" and an API in digital ocean, so you can hook your configuration management system, to automate actions, scaling-up, scaling- down, etc.

They notify for planed maintenance.

As in every cloud provider, sometimes you spin up an instance, and you see lot of old traffic and requests (crawlers, bad dns's, etc). This is no different here.

I think you should make a POC with a pre-production environment... this is cheap. How big is your app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great insight. App would serve close to 25k customers initially and will grow eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use DO for several one or two box production sites (LEMP and RoR stacks), and have minimal complaints. I'm a big fan of scaling up the CPU without having to also increase HD size (which is a Linode requirement).

The biggest issue we've faced was their use of Google DNS. A couple of months back, Google DNS had an outage, and all our calls to external services semi- silently failed. Because this wasn't technically a DO service outage, it wasn't reported by them, and because we didn't know they used Google DNS we didn't trace the issue to the outage. We could have done more, but they could have also been more transparent.

Overall, we are starting to move more projects to DO from Linode, because I feel Linode's previously excellent support has slipped dramatically (customer for at least eight years). We also leverage a lot of AWS services (particularly S3 and SES).

<comment><USER6> What have you done to mitigate the DNS risk?

<comment><USER7> Simplest thing there is to split zones across two providers - e.g. Route53 + DNS Made Easy, etc.

(DO do have their own DNS API, but it is terrible to program against.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What does that mean?

Go read [https://www.digitalocean.com/business](https://www.digitalocean.com/business) and [https://status.digitalocean.com/](https://status.digitalocean.com/) if that doesn't put you at ease send them an email.

However it shouldn't matter. Droplets are essentially just on demand "vps's" most of the operations work is done by your operations team(in this case I imagine this is you). Where your hosts(machines, containers, vps's whatever you want to call them) are shouldn't matter very much, what is important is that you have repeatable infrastructure, so that when you spin up a new VPS anywhere(AWS, DO, Vulcan, Your Garage) you can get up and running again fairly quickly.

[edit] Added status page

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're going to deploy on Digital Ocean, I recommend you rebuild your app within Flynn (so you can migrate if anything goes wrong with your bill). Take a backup of your cluster (or the individual apps) after you are done and if you get a surprise, just rebuild your cluster somewhere else from a backup file.

Your software is too precious and your small startup is too precious to be married to someone who just thinks of you as "a customer". DO has never done me wrong (I have used their platform for years) but having a plan is handy.

<comment><USER10> This is great advice. I'd go one further and select some DO competitor to deliver some part of your app. Even if it's just the backend for static assets that you're pointing a CDN at.

Then, if you run into issues with either DO or the competitor, you already have an account and familiarity with how things work.

Also, don't host the DNS records at either place. Put them somewhere else so that your DNS records aren't held hostage if there's an account issue.

<comment><USER11> I can recommend [https://dns.he.net](https://dns.he.net) for this. Free, no fuss, and backed by a major Internet backbone provider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not specific to DO but here are some checklist might helpful to you.

1.1. Elastic IP - Allow you to remap IP to another instance, this is very important for HA where you can bring up another server and remap IP to new instance.

1.2. Alternative to elastic IP is load balancer

2\. Bock storage - Allow you to use persistent storage with redundancy. Important to keep data safe when some instances down. You can bring up new instance and start using existing block storage.

DO support all of the above so DO is good enough for production usage. If you need latency sensitive services like RDS, maybe you can consider AWS. I know some people use RDS with compute on other provider like DO.

</comment><comment><USER13> > primarily because it is less pain than managing own servers

I would take a good, long, hard look at any decisions you've made on this basis.

You haven't avoided the pain, you've deferred it. Would it be better to deal with that pain now when you have no users and no critical data, or later when scheduled downtime is a major issue?

<comment><USER14> Another way to look at this might be - do you want to deal with this now as a sole dev/ops/etc person of many hats or later, when you can hire someone to look after this?

<comment><USER15> Also, for lots of things there is really no need to host your own servers. It's going to cost more and be less reliable unless you get to a much larger stage or have a lot of computational requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We are using it for a series of sites that get about 5K unique visitors/day if that helps.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have hosted my side projects at DO for four years, and am very happy with their service. I've served half a petabyte of data to 5 million users in that time. I have consistently been happy with their documentation and API. I haven't required much customer service, but the customer service I have had has been adequate.

When I've done the calculations for my use cases, I've found it would be significantly cheaper for me to have a second, redundant copy of my entire infrastructure at another provider as a failover in the event of a prolonged DO downtime than it would be to host my side projects at Amazon or Google.

</comment><comment><USER18> I recently deployed a wordpress site, using Trellis[0], on to Digital Ocean. The site has a pretty low traffic volume, but so far it has been working great. Considering switching all future sites I work on to DO but I'll be interested in seeing how this first one turns out.

[0] [https://roots.io/trellis/](https://roots.io/trellis/) \- If you have to work with Wordpress at all I strongly recommend you give Trellis and the other Roots.io projects a try. Coming from more "sophisticated" tools to Wordpress was a real struggle until I found roots.

</comment><comment><USER19> It is a lot more reliable than it used to be (back in the days of "welp, we are taking a router down in the middle of the day again").

I still run all my production stuff on Linode because I've _never_ had any unplanned downtime since 2009 (when I started using them), they've had issues over the years but always stuff away from the actual core thing I value which is _keep this online_.

Since they underwent a massive DDoS a while back they've really hardened their systems up and put in their own links to the backbone all that jazz.

<comment><USER20> So you weren't effected by the DDoS in January 2016?

<comment><USER19> No but more out of luck than anything, I'm UK based so my linodes are all in London region, it didn't get slammed the way the US ones did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's all relative, of course. I have only used DigitalOcean for side projects that served at most thousands of human users per day, and I didn't have any real issue with their stability. In the general case, I would say that DO works fine.

Since it sounds like you haven't even launched yet, DO should have no issue getting you started.

</comment><comment><USER22> Digital Ocean's internal support infrastructure has caused us a couple headaches over the years. They appear to have fixed some of these organizational shortcomings over the last 2 years. Still, you should not expect the level of support you'd get from an expensive managed provider from a self-serve more-automated startup.

About 3 years ago, our instance got shut down over the weekend because a spammer in Germany reported it for serving an 'infected' file while attempting to advertise their MX scanning service. Said file had a false positive in ClamAV (common for Windows EXEs) and only ClamAV. Digital Ocean shut down the production instance with no warning and then told us about it via ticket. It took hours to get a response and when we finally did, the instance could not be restarted (DO at the time had a bug where the kernel indicated in their admin had to match the kernel in the image or it could fail to start). Total downtime was 2 days if I recall correctly. The security spammer took out our instance 1 or 2 more times before DO finally either blacklisted them or correctly noted that it was a likely false positive. I got a few months credit for this issue at the time.

About 2 years ago, DO had an issue where they shutdown networking to our production instance because they detected a "Brute Force attack" originating from that instance. The detection was due to an increase in downloads because we'd released a new version of our software coupled with, yet again, a false positive in ClamAV (and only in ClamAV)... though in a separate copy of software on the same server that had been released a month prior. This also happened on a weekend and took hours and then a couple days to resolve due to the aforementioned bug at the time of DO instances failing to start due to the kernel in use within the Droplet not matching the kernel indicated in the admin.

In both of the above instances, a single support person killed the instance without pinging the customer first. This is to be expected from any mostly- automated lower cost provider. Contrast this to a Rackspace managed cloud instance where they will first contact the customer when a detection occurs or a false positive shows up in an antivirus scan. Of course, that's comparing our managed cloud instance at Rackspace to a self-serve low-end droplet at Digital Ocean. Why the difference? Likely because you'll pay between 3 and 5 times as much for the same level of server between the two providers.

As a result of the above, I kept our production servers at Rackspace but continued to use Digital Ocean for secondary services. We have backups for those services on DO and the ability for our product to fail-over to the backups automatically should an issue like this occur again. We have been considering moving more services to Digital Ocean as they appear to have ironed out the kinks of their first few years of operation now.

<comment><USER23> It's worth noting that when a similar issue happened to me and went on their "unofficial" IRC channel to raise awareness and ask questions; I was faced with arrogant staff members that didn't want to restart the servers or mitigate the DDoS attack. I was banned on the spot. Then the Customer Service tickets were ignored in a similar manner too. I had a growing startup at the time. Needless to say I've been doing everything I can to destroy their reputation ever since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have used DO for project for several years now. You do have to do all the maintenance yourself. Upgrading between Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 had some issues that forced me to take the site down for half a day. Other than that, it has been smooth sailing.

If you know how to do all the sysadmin stuff, I would say your fine in terms of using DO for production.

</comment><comment> awinter-py I think GCE has better support for encryption at rest than DO.

On the plus side, DO will make you jump through fewer hoops than GCE to get started. GCE had UX and logic bugs in their automated billing system when I used them last that ended up affecting uptime.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've had an side-project instance running for over 2 years without issue.

</comment><comment><USER25> No, they cut your service when you get too much traffic!!!

<comment><USER26> Some references?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> the easiest way to do this is using Docker Swarm mode. all you need is a docker-compose.yml and your dockerified application. you can have a quorum of master/managers so that even if a DO instance dies, you will have your requests routed to the failover.

</comment><comment><USER28> DigitalOcean is quite expensive compared to GCE AWS and Vultur, but to answer your question yes it is. I ran a website with 2M monthly active users on their 5$ VPS

<comment><USER29> That's a bit surprising, can you expand on the difference in price between the $5 droplet and GCE? Is it other costs not included in the monthly base?

<comment><USER28> DO is more expensive with their higher end VPS. GCE is cheaper if you don't use a lot of bandwidth

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Of course it is. They provide you hosting, since the very beginning of the internet there has been companies providing this kind of service with success and if you wanted and had enough time and funds you could even do it yourself...

Now there's only virtualization on top of that.

<comment><USER31> I'm 100% sure OP was looking for a yes no answer relating to uptime, how reliable they are, SLA's, policies, security. Not an explanation of hosting companies.

"Is this new make of car being manufactured safe to drive? How reliable is it?"

"Yes of course cars are safe, cars have existed for over a century. Many cars have been used since the beginning of cars being invented. You could make a car too if you had the money".

See how ridiculous and unhelpful your comment was?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's as safe as you are. I've been using DO for quite a while now, running droplets for DB, Web, cache (mem/redis) and plenty of other stuff, no issues - all downtime (maintenance) was minor and was pre-communicated effectively.

You can manage your own SSH keys, software updates, and you can enable 2FA on your DO account. It's definitely safe enough, if you're safe enough.

Happy to answer any questions, but tbh their support/docs section is some of the best on the web - I often find myself referring to some of their docs for non-DO stuff in my day job!

<comment><USER32> It's all about operational practices. DO is a DIY IaaS platform, so if you practice good operational hygiene you'll be successful. If your operational expertise is lacking, you may have a bad experience with the product.</comment></comment>


What Walmart, Facebook, and Credit Cards Have in Common - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2010/07/15/what-walmart-facebook-and-credit-cards-have-in-common/ <comment><USER2> So, in other words, what Walmart, Facebook and Credit Cards have in common is that in each case, many of the end-users don't understand the business model?

Put another way: to what extent is it a "hidden" cost to say that Facebook is ad-supported, or that credit cards charge late fees?

I'm also not sure the criticism of Facebook is fair. What does this paragraph mean, really?

 _The aggregation of user generated content is a well known maneuver for web businesses. Why fight to generate content when users can do a better job of entertaining themselves. While I believe this is a good idea in theory, the practice of taking the vast majority of that collective value is questionable at best_

Facebook is not pretending to generate content, any more than Gmail is. Facebook offers a channel for me to communicate with my friends. My friends and I supply the content, Facebook provides the pipes. I, for one, don't mind that it's ad-supported; if they had a "premium" ad-free version for a small fee, I suppose I'd consider it, depending on the fee, but I can't say it would be a big priority.

I'm also not impressed by the argument about data portability: _This is the equivalent of changing mobile service providers but not being able to call your friends._ It's not, really. It's more like the early days of the telephone (or email), where you could only communicate with those friends of yours who were already on the network. Complaining about the lack of portability is more like complaining "I am giving up my mobile phone. Why can't my friends still call me?"</comment>


China: Gmail Access Completely Blocked, VPNs Attacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.securethelock.com/china-enforcing-censorship-greater-heights-gmail-access-completely-blocked-vpns-attacked/

<comment><USER2> Wonder how people in china adjust with censorships at this height !</comment>


More states confirm suspected cyberattacks sourced to DHS - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/more-states-confirm-cyber-attacks-sourced-to-dhs/476227320 <comment><USER2> Are they reporting what is a mis-identification of automated vulnerability scanning?

We've been talking for weeks now about how NSA continually weakens the US by attacking encryption and infrastructure - and nobody is actually helping tighten our networks.

Could it be that DHS has some mandate to scan government networks?

<comment><USER3> It could also be that

a) DHS machines are compromised

b) They are just falsifying the IP

<comment><USER4> If they're all from the same IP address, it seems likely that it's a compromised machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm shocked that this story seems to be upvoted less than the Gimli Glider story which has been on the front page for more than a day.

One would think that the recent allegations of Russian hacking [0], as well as these allegations, would be of interest to the HN community. Whether either of the allegations is well-founded or not, they need to be investigated and understood by the public.

It's worth noting that the President spent a great deal of his final press conference discussing the Russian hacking issue [1].

Why is this not bigger news, especially here?

[0] [http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/19/politics/russian-election- hack...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/19/politics/russian-election-hacking- podesta-brazile-mccain/)

[1] [https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/12/18/obamas-response-to- rus...](https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/12/18/obamas-response-to-russias-hack- an-emphasis-on-americas-more-generalized-vulnerability/)

<comment><USER6> Could it be because it delegitimatizes the reports of Russia being to blame for election agency hacking?

<comment><USER7> Could be part of it. Also, election fatigue. The 2016 election has dominated every news cycle for more than a year. Everybody is just plain tired of it, for better or worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> my bet is on an assessor mis-scanning an ip range during a scheduled network assessment. having been in those trenches, this is how it was firmly explained to me every week when tasks were delegated: "double and triple-check all your target ip addresses. we don't want someone outside the network complaining about a scan, that's a reportable incident and makes us look like douches when we are trying to get new business with the fed client."

</comment><comment><USER9> Unrealistic, but fun theory: Maybe DHS was hacked by Russia and then used as attack-vector</comment>


Silicon Valley status symbols emphasize mind over material - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-silicon-status-20110618,0,7867801.story

<comment><USER2> Interesting quote from article:

The hacker ethos is also classically male. "Being concerned with appearance, shopping for clothes and decorating your house are feminine values. Tech millionaires see that type of spending as silly and frivolous," Marwick said.

"It's more important to have the freedom and the independence to build something for a huge audience."</comment>


Two Sigma rapidly rises to top of quant hedge fund world - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/dcf8077c-b823-11e7-9bfb-4a9c83ffa852 <comment><USER2> "Investor demand for algorithmic investing has exploded in recent years, even as the rest of the hedge fund industry has struggled with poor performance and outflows."

Is this machine learning?

<comment><USER3> Two Sigma use statistical arbitrage.

"How are the machines doing?

So far, not so great. Machine-learning has yet to deliver Earth-shaking returns. The Man AHL Dimension fund, which includes a machine-learning strategy, has returned an annualized 4.7 percent in three years through June, compared with a 2.5 percent gain for the average hedge fund.

The Eurekahedge AI Hedge Fund Index, which tracks 13 pools that use AI as part of their core strategies, has returned an average of 9.9 percent from the start of 2012 through 2016, and is up 8.5 percent this year through August.

That compares with an annualized gain of 14.6 percent over the five-year span, and a 11.9 percent rise this year through August, for the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested." [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/why- machi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/why-machine- learning-models-often-fail-to-learn-quicktake-q-a)</comment></comment>


Author of Patriot Act "Extremely Disturbed" by "Overbroad Interpretation" [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://sensenbrenner.house.gov/uploadedfiles/sensenbrenner_letter_to_attorney_general_eric_holder.pdf

<comment><USER2> No surprise there - his record shows him to be an outstanding champion of civil rights, as long as you're not gay, foreign a member of the media, a Muslim, or a woman. (Sarcasm warning.)

[http://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/27142/jim- sensenbre...](http://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/27142/jim- sensenbrenner-jr/13/civil-liberties-and-civil-rights)</comment>


The Amish health care system - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/20/the-amish-health-care-system/ <comment><USER2> I thought the most interesting part was the commentary on non-Amish care in the past

> I asked my literal grandmother, a 95 year old former nurse, how health care > worked in her day. She said it just wasn't a problem. Hospitals were > supported by wealthy philanthropists and religious organizations. Poor > people got treated for free. Middle class people paid as much as they could > afford, which was often the whole bill, because bills were cheap. Rich > people paid extra for fancy hospital suites and helped subsidize everyone > else.

In other words... allow rampant inequality in the healthcare system. The rich would pay for their designer surgeries, and let that subsidize the rest.

<comment><USER3> That inequality is still present, except that now, the system is:

* Poor people either get hit with huge bills because they're uninsured, or, if they know how to navigate the system, sometimes get these bills written off through "financial aid."

* Middle class people frequently have insurance, but get hammered by deductibles and out of pocket maximums, rarely qualifying for "financial aid." This can be ruinous.

* The rich still get what they want.

If the rich are "subsidizing" things anymore, it's not to a great enough extent to benefit the poor and middle class. The system has been broken over the past 40 years by medical and insurance costs that have risen much faster than the rate of wage growth for the average worker.

<comment><USER4> I currently believe rising administrative overhead accounts for most of the cost increase. Single payer is a straightforward proven solution.

Switching from fee-for-service to prevention (capitation) would give us another 25% savings.

But I'm newly interested in notions related to cost disease. Am keen to hear anything anyone has to say about mitigation.

<comment><USER5> The biggest administrative costs in health care are the insurance companies' costs. [0] To the tune of more than $200 billion dollars/year.

[0] [https://time.com/5759972/health-care-administrative- costs/](https://time.com/5759972/health-care-administrative-costs/)

<comment><USER6> You have to be able to see that the numbers do not add up, right? 200b is how much out of 3+ trillions? Also, just because Canadian adminstrative costs are hidden, does not mean they are proportionally lower than in the US

<comment><USER7> What do you mean, the numbers don't add up? From the article: "Insurers' overhead, the largest category, totaled $275.4 billion in the U.S. in 2017, or 7.9% of all national health expenditures, compared with $5.36 billion in Canada, or 2.8% of national health expenditures."

<comment><USER6> What I meant is that if insurance costs disappear completely, US healthcare will remain 5 times more expensive than Canadian. It is percentage based markup on already super overpriced system. Therefore, real reasons for why it is so expensive are elsewhere

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I've reluctantly come to agree with your conclusion. There is no silver bullet.

Repeating myself:

Another low hanging fruit is transition from free-for-service to rewarding wellness (capitation). Some are already doing this.

I'd like to understand if, how, why cost disease is a factor. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease) I have zero understanding, intuition about this. Feels like black magic. But some of the experts I've read say it's important.

There's no shortage of management efficiency and quality of care innovations to explore. In the spirit of Atul Gawanda's book Better, like specialized clinics for cystic fibrosis, diabetes, and whatnot. And whatever we're calling people traveling for procedures. Like USA people going to Thailand and Mexico clinics.

USA's R&D and regulatory overhead (FDA) carries the world. That first adopter expense might be easier to accept if the accounting was transparent.

Any way.

I designed, implemented, supported 5 regional healthcare exchanges. Even in our little corner of the problem space, there was so much room for improvement. Alas, most of it was prevented, because our participants were competitors, so the incentives were all wrong. A single payer system (or rough equivalent) completely moot most of those roadblocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why does nobody look at the medical profession as the racket it is? You don't need to be an MD to handle %80 of hospital visits, and you can train trades people to handle most emergencies.

Insurance companies are awful, but seriously, we can train field medics to do stitches and set bones, why should it cost $3000 to have an MD do it? Listening the hand wringing about it is infuriating when you realize that the reason you have to wait for simple procedures that barbers used to do is because there is a med school bottleneck.

<comment><USER9> Other countries have fully trained doctors yet they don't have this problem. Therefore fully trained doctors setting bones is not the problem.

It's another problem or set of problems that occurs in the USA.

<comment><USER10> The 250k+/year US salary of the fully trained doctor setting bones could be a problem. Many doctors are paid significantly less in many of those other countries.

<comment><USER11> It's not, though. It takes under an hour to set a bone, so that doctor's time is not driving the expense.

<comment><USER12> Why do I need to see a doctor to get a mole or skin lesion checked? Why is it necessary for someone to go through 4 years of undergrad, med school, etc etc just to examine a mole and remove it with a scalpel?

<comment><USER13> Are you trolling? Are you legitimately asking why you need a doctor to check something that might be, amongst the million other possible complications, Cancer?

<comment><USER14> The mole-specific training is probably a couple of months, max (if that's all the person needs to do). Division of labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think what he's getting at is the concept of a "trustful society". Essentially one like the Amish he describes: people act responsibly with the community's money.

You might well think this has broken down in America. There's both a lack of formal restraint in the form of laws holding down the price, like in the Swiss private health system, as well as a lack of informal rules like he's mentioned, preventing people who've hit their deductible from going nuts with their treatment. And the culture of suing doctors has led to even more issues.

The trustful society thing is interesting. A friend of mine lost a grand-uncle in Denmark a couple of years back. Now this guy had grown up before the welfare state, and took pride in not taking handouts that he didn't need. He lived on a family farm on an idyllic island called Bornholm. When he died, the authorities called and asked what to do with nearly 2M DKK of pension money he hadn't collected.

At the other end, you get people growing up having never seen what preceded the welfare state. You often get debates about whether the kids are spending their student allowances wisely, because obviously you see them around town and they are having a good time. This is a cash grant from the government that you don't even need to use for tuition. Are they being profligate with the state's money? It's a debate that keeps going.

<comment><USER16> _> The trustful society thing is interesting._

Yes, it is, but it doesn't scale. It only works for communities that are small enough that everyone can keep track of the trust relationships and how well everyone is honoring them. The problem we moderns have is that many of us either don't want to live in such a community (even Scott notices this when he says there is something to be said for not having your neighbors judging your lifestyle all the time) or don't have access to one. So we have a different set of priorities, and we therefore have to make different choices and tradeoffs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is comparing the per capita cost of healthcare to that of U.S. really fair, especially when advocating adopting certain elements of the "Amish system"? The U.S. is pretty _the worst_ example of keeping costs down; other first world healthcare systems cost much less than the U.S.'s with similar or better outcomes. I suppose it's reasonable because the Amish live in the U.S. but I guess the question is do the Amish do particularly well or does the U.S. just generally do particularly poorly?

I do think there are some interesting insights in the article though.

Edit: another observation is that the author is probably not putting enough emphasis on the additional cost of end-of-life care (though he does mention it), especially if he's correct that the Amish tend not to spend as much on prolonging the life of older people.

</comment><comment><USER18> This model already exists in other forms in the US. One of them is called a healthshare. Usually a religion-based scheme where you pay in a certain amount a month, and then you negotiate with the doctor yourself, pay the bill yourself, and then get reimbursed by the healthshare if there is enough pooled money.

This does a number of things:

1) It puts patient skin-in-the-game in that they have the direct incentive to shop around and/or negotiate lower bills since they have to front the cost.

2) it removes the costly middle-men referenced in this article and all the administrative cost that goes with that.

3) It puts much more of the administrative burden on the patient because they have to negotiate and pay, keep track of things, then get reimbursed.

These three things result in reduced monetary costs, but add other costs like the patient's time and stress level.

Healthshares previously could only exist if they had been grandfathered in via a special provision in the ACA. Since then enough of the ACA has been eaten away that new healthshares are taking advantage of the resulting loopholes.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm surely hopelessly naive and ill-informed for even asking, but is there a reason a hospital or clinic couldn't operate 100% without dealing with insurance? Do such places exist in the US? We always hear how the hospital sends a bill for $40,000, then the insurance company argues that down to $2000, but woe unto you if you DON'T have insurance because you'll have a hard time getting that same deal yourself. Couldn't a hospital just... send you a bill for $2000, and if you can't pay it you either ask about their low-income waivers, get into a payment plan, or I guess get blackballed as a deadbeat?

<comment><USER20> There _are_ cash-only doctors, or doctors who will accept cash as payment, and for what it's worth, the discounts for not using insurance can be substantial.

More importantly to me though was this less-talked-about perk of having a doctor who -- once he knows he's not just going to receive a negotiated rate from an insurer -- will actually take a little bit longer with you and hear out your complaints. Knowing that if you take longer, he can bill you more is actually a net good, IMO.

<comment><USER21> >Knowing that if you take longer, he can bill you more is actually a net good, IMO.

You can easily flip that around too. The healthcare system would become less efficient because time spend gets valued instead of results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their > health is fine. What can we learn from them?

Given this opener, it seems bizarre that the article doesn't use the word "diet" even once. The comment there by "Scoop" seems right on.

Google tells me the USA is estimated to have around 300,000 obesity-related deaths per year. Apparently [0] obesity is around 10% as common in Amish communities as in the USA as a whole.

Aside: this is compared to around 35,000 gun-related deaths, around 40,000 traffic-related deaths, and around 50,000 opioid-overdose deaths. Presumably the Amish are spared these too.

[0] [https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old- ag...](https://time.com/5159857/amish-people-stay-healthy-in-old-age-heres- their-secret/)

<comment><USER23> Both obesity in the "english" group and the healthier lifestyle of the amish group are discussed by Scott in this article.

<comment><USER22> No, they aren't. The article makes no mention of obesity, and does not discuss the Amish's healthier lifestyle. Unless I'm missing something here? Do please be specific if I am.

I'm seeing a single relevant sentence:

> As far as I can tell, most of the secret is spending your whole life outside > doing strenuous agricultural labor, plus being at a tech level two centuries > too early for fast food.

If that's what counts for improving health, why doesn't the article discuss that, rather than discussing only healthcare? (That's not to downplay the important issues the article raises, of course.)

I think my point stands here. There's an unfortunate trend to treat the healthcare system as the answer to health problems, and to dismiss the enormously important lifestyle questions. Compare the opening paragraph of the article with what the article goes on to discuss:

> Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their > health is fine. What can we learn from them?

An article that explores what we can learn from the Amish regarding health, should spend more than a sentence on diet.

<comment><USER23> I think you're right, but I'd slightly disagree.

Of course you point does stand, and diet and obesity are important topics to discuss, and perhaps scot should have gone into (a lot) more detail. But that is not to say that _every_ article should focus on those, it seems to me that having articles focussing on these issued as well is not a problem.

Like you said, more than a sentence should be spent on diet.

Perhaps you and I wouldn't be having this discussion if at the top Scot had given a disclaimer that he's only focussing on this one side of the situation and neglecting the other side for the purposes of discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > This is how I feel about the Amish belief that health insurance companies > are evil, and that good Christians must have no traffic with them.

That's not really what they believe. Here's a better description[1]:

> Amish commonly believe that commercial insurance plans undermine the > religious duty of community accountability

They don't pay social security tax (really, an insurance premium_ for the same reason, and were exempted from it on religious grounds.

1: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5198134/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5198134/)

<comment><USER25> > Amish commonly believe that commercial insurance plans undermine the > religious duty of community accountability

As an atheist I find the Amish's religious view quite attractive. Ignoring god, it becomes plain humanitarianism and about helping each other.

Aside: I suppose one could well argue that _non-commercial_ insurance plans would be just a formalisation of community accountability. Edit: and that's pretty much exactly what's described in the article, only without calling it insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Remember to question your assumptions. "The Amish health care system" is like saying "The Christian church system". Amish communities can vary greatly, as does their income, transportation, diets, lifestyle, etc. The only time I've ever gone to Fogo de Chão in downtown Philly on a Friday night, a large Amish family was eating nearby.

> For people who rarely leave their hometown and avoid modern technology, a > train trip to Mexico must be a scary experience.

You mean when they're not traveling all over the states to do business with the English, or carting themselves around in wagons with electric lights, or fueling their diesel generators to power batteries to run power tools and heavy machinery they use to create products for English customers? .... I'm pretty sure boarding transport technology that's been around since well before the 16th century to talk to "outsiders" is nowhere near scary to them (especially after Rumspringa, for example).

It's easy to get into a romantic, over-simplified idea of a general people based on some preconceived notions about them, and those can often cloud further ideas and lead to things like cherry-picking data to support a theory that "sounds right".

</comment><comment><USER27> " The Amish have had a life expectancy in the low 70s since colonial times, when the rest of us were dying at 40 or 50. Since then, Amish life expectancy has stayed the same, and English life expectancy has improved to the high 70s."

<comment><USER28> I found that curious. Why were the Amish living so much longer than others in colonial times?

<comment><USER29> They lead non-sedentary lives involving manual labor, keeping their bodies in good health. They also don't have frankenfood and tend to have actual food instead. I'm surprised people don't understand just how important these 2 factors are towards longevity.

<comment><USER30> This doesn't answer parent's question. In "colonial times", most people did physical labor and ate real food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In general, the healthcare profession could do the same double-blind studies they do on drugs -- but on substances that are not patentable, such as vitamins, minerals, fruits, vegetables, natural herbs and plants, etc.

They could even do double-blind studies on things that are not ingestable, like sunlight, doing enough exercise, getting enough rest, etc., etc.

But will they, ever?

No they will not.

That's because they will not make any money if these studies are successful.

Quite the opposite.

If there is any successful study in one or more of these areas, it could very well have negative and damaging economic impact to the medical community.

I like Doctors, and believe that most of them are good, honest, decent, hard- working (especially now, during CoronaVirus!) people.

They are not the enemy, quite the opposite!

But we really need to think about double-blind studies on non-patentable things that could potentially cure people, or at least alleviate their condition in some small way.

That, and the FDA needs to allow those things as treatments that Doctors may legally prescribe, if the double-blind studies prove successful...

<comment><USER32> > the healthcare profession could do the same double-blind studies they do on > drugs -- but on substances that are not patentable

But... they do? Pretty much everything you mentioned is well studied, although a lot of times it's hard to get conclusive evidence when the effect size is small.

<comment><USER31> Why are those things not prescribed then?

Why are only pills, pills with which pharmaceutical companies (and usually doctors, via commission payments) make money, prescribed, and nothing else?

Maybe it's not the Doctors' fault however.

Perhaps the mindset was taught to them via most Medical Colleges and Universities, who accept large amounts of money from big pharma to teach that prevailing, patented-pharmaceutical-drug-centered mindset... and perhaps it was regulated into them by well-meaning, yet exclusionary and limiting government regulations...

I hold Doctors harmless... but they could prescribe less man-made products for profit, and more that are made by nature for free, or pretty close to free...

<comment><USER32> Because prescribing them doesn't improve people's health very much.

<comment><USER31> How would this be known, without conducting double-blind studies?

<comment><USER32> Again, pretty much everything you mentioned has been studied quite a bit. Yes, even with double blind studies (e.g. [1] to pick one at complete random). Some of the things you mentioned (diet, exercise, sleep) literally have entire subfields of medicine devoted to them.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3514135/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3514135/)

<comment><USER31> If it's been studied a bit, and it helps people's health, then why isn't it prescribed?

<comment><USER32> When the evidence says they help they usually are. Losing weight, sleeping more, prenatal vitamins, etc, are all regularly recommended or prescribed by doctors. But, again, the issue is that most of the time the evidence is either inconclusive or says they don't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> one major reason why our health insurance is high is because of its wide scope.

When you take car insurance, it does not pay for oil changes, tire repair etc, since these are considered regular maintenance. If you don't do this, then your car will fall apart faster and again, you are on your own...

Not a straight analogy, but if we make people pay on their own for regular visits, mandate tha they must visit a doctor (their choice) etc which they pay out of pocket -- then only unexpected events are actually covered by insurance -- and the cost is lower.

The employer spends less, and hopefully, a substantial portion gets back to the employee's paycheck.

<comment><USER34> Regular office visits don't cost much to provide.

They are sort of like paying to fix chips in windshields, if you want an analogy.

(The actual billed cost for those sorts of visits is ~$100, which doesn't add up very fast compared to ER visits or any sort of complex care)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > For the [non-Amish], the "other people" are faceless insurance companies, > and we treat people who don't extract as much money as possible from them as > insufficiently savvy.

This is just a side comment in the post, but I think it's an important observation. People really, _really_ don't like feeling (or looking) like suckers. When we see other people breaking the rules, we're much more likely to break the rules. Some of this is that we're seeing evidence that breaking the rules won't be punished, sure. But I think the larger effect is that now we feel like suckers for following the rules.

</comment><comment><USER36> One of the most striking things in this article for me was the remark about Amish women having five to ten children. If this is the case and if all women have children then the Amish population should be increasing rapidly. Is it?

This page: [https://amishamerica.com/how-fast-are-the-amish- growing/](https://amishamerica.com/how-fast-are-the-amish-growing/) says that the doubling time is about 19 years.

How do they find enough suitable land to practice their way of life?

<comment> barry-cotter Agricultural land is cheap and plentiful if you don't want to live within commuting distance of a major city. The US is really big and comparatively empty. Wyoming is bigger than the United Kingdom and has less than 600,000 people and there are plenty of other states with an abundance of farm land.

<comment><USER36> But that doesn't seem to be motivating the Amish to move to such areas. According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Amish_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Amish_population) the Amish population of Wyoming was 130 last year. Mind you that appears to be 130 more than before.

It seems that, at least until very recently, they prefer to be where there are already substantial numbers of Amish people already (quite sensible of course). The biggest increase in absolute numbers 2010-2019 was Pennsylvania which is also the state with the highest Amish population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This article cites obesity, diabetes, and other health metrics that do not appear to be adjusted for differences comparing different population's age ranges. The Amish have very large families (6+ children per family) so they have as a percentage fewer old people who have more health issues overall.

</comment><comment><USER38> We have universal healthcare in most parts of Europe, either founded from taxes, either partly funded by mandatory low cost state owned medical insurance and partly by taxes.

I think Spain has one of the world's best health care systems. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Spain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Spain)

I guess US can apply the same principles. Some things might be more important than making money.

<comment><USER39> > Some things might be more important than making money.

Not to the people that run the US it isn't. They are pushing to fix the pandemic problem by just letting a couple of percent of the population die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Very interesting article. But wouldn't it make more sense to look at some European health care systems which outperform the US in many respects?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just read every word of the 220 comments on this post and not once did I encounter the word "rationing" when it came to debating the merits and negatives of single payer. It is the elephant in the room: people pretend it's not there by saying things like "there's a long wait, sometimes over two years for such things as elective hip replacement."

<comment><USER41> Except it's not rationing per se, it's demand outstripping supply. You'll still get your elective procedure, but since it's not life-saving in the strictest sense you may have to wait a bit longer for it.

But the flip side of that is a bout of cancer, a heart attack, baby needing to spend a month in NICU doesn't bankrupt you.

<comment><AUTHOR> a bit longer ≠ 2 years IMHO

>But the flip side of that is a bout of cancer, a heart attack, baby needing to spend a month in NICU doesn't bankrupt you.

>Cancer services may be rationed to those most likely to survive, says NHS report

>National Health Service insist limited care for cancer patients is 'unlikely scenario'

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/22/cancer- services-...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/22/cancer-services-may- rationed-likely-survive-says-nhs-report/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Frightening austerity being pushed

</comment><comment><USER43> >How do the Amish keep costs so low? R&D (plus a few other sources) identify some key strategies.

>...the Amish are honorable customers. This separates them from insurance companies, who are constantly trying to scam providers however they can. Much of the increase in health care costs is "administrative expenses", and much of these administrative expenses is hiring an army of lawyers, clerks, and billing professionals to thwart insurance companies' attempts to cheat their way out of paying. If you are an honorable Amish person and the hospital knows you will pay your bill on time with zero fuss, they can waive all this.

Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. But instead, we have to bulletproof everything (largely without success) from people who scheme and scam their way through life. We sink enormous costs into this, and it slows the progress and complicates life for everyone else.

I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable. What do we have now in their place?

<comment><USER44> _> Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. _

Granted, everyone in the world is suddenly moral and of utmost integrity and everyone gets used to this new reality. The economic upside in lying/cheating is now so high that a few minutes later the world is back to exactly what it was, except for the first few persons to decide that lying wasn't such a bad idea, who are now a few billion dollars richer.

 _> Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable_

This is your daily reminder that the Catholic Church is the organization with the most identified pedophiles in the world. (I'd have written "convicted", but they work really hard - and are really good - at preventing that outcome).

<comment><USER45> I think Islam may like a word with you on that one. There it's not just the priests. It's very common for minors to be married off, young boys to be sold as sex slaves (common in the turkic -stans areas although not sure about today), and the "it's only gay if you take it" reasoning I believe in one of the hadith's which condones pedophilia.

<comment><USER30> Religion was _created_ in order that priests, mullahs, etc. could perpetrate otherwise forbidden sexual acts on defenseless people. Some later offshoots have forgotten this, but Catholicism and Islam remember. What was the ISIS caliphate, if not organized sex crime? It seems the Protestants favor abuse of girls instead of boys, which in their minds is more moral...

<comment><USER45> However life back then was incredibly different. We can look at it in hindsight and judge it with the morality of today but that's somewhat unfair of how life was. I mean slavery was commonplace, death sentences for most crimes, and not really any "true" justice system.

Although as of today? Yes I totally agree.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


FolioSpace.me - Social Portfolios for Makers - <AUTHOR> http://foliospace.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought I'd share my latest project: FolioSpace.me

It's a little similar to geekli.st or swym, in that it allows you to show off a portfolio of what you made. It's a little different in that it focuses on adding everyone who contributed to a project (designers, engineers, producers, etc). It also helps you find media (images, music, video) to add to each project.

I'd love to hear what you think before I make it a public beta.

</comment><comment><USER2> Typo on the front page: everyting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch! fixed</comment></comment>


Getting feedback sucks only for a little bit - <AUTHOR> http://www.rorywalker.com/getting-feedback-sucks-only-for-a-little-bit

<comment><USER2> getting a MVP up and out, means that you don't have all of the bells and whistles. So it's a good idea to not do the things on your list, until you have a few people asking for the product. Or you can set up a wishlist, checklist that you have people check off. So they can tell that you are looking for future upgrades. You just would like for their input in the direction to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, I won't implement all 15 for the launch. I almost feel into the trap though. I have categorized the improvements into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and Coming Soon. I have knocked out the "1st" ones already.

Thanks for your feedback.</comment></comment>


Blind Soldier Uses Tongue to See - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/15/blind-soldier-tongue-sight

<comment><USER2> Fascinating, but the article doesn't really explain how the pulses help build up the images for the gentleman by relaying it to the tongue. Or did I miss something?</comment>


The web in 2011: HTML5 dominates Flash, trouble for data capped mobile surfers - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/110099-the-web-in-2011-html5-dominates-flash-trouble-for-data-capped-mobile-surfers <comment><USER2> It's absolute nonsense to say that 'HTML5' dominates Flash and many developers switched from Flash to HTML5.

It's more of a case that developers have become more accessibility and SEO savvy and now render things like carousels, galleries and news feeds through JavaScript and libraries like jQuery, which is nothing to do with HTML5.

HTML5 elements such as Canvas, Video and Audio will have minimal impact towards the direct switch from Flash, until developers fully understand their potential.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Between 2010 and 2011, the average amount of Flash content downloaded > stayed exactly the same — 90KB — but JavaScript experienced massive growth > from 113KB to 172KB."

So that's the criteria for which the headline was based on?

</comment><comment><USER4> HTML5 _is_ the future. The future isn't today.

Am I still excited about HTML5? Yes. Does it solve all my problems today? No.

Dominating means replacing and outdoing.

HTML5 can't do everything flash does in every browser, often without killing the computer. It reminds me of the Flash 1-3 days. Seriously. Look it up. I know it might sound crazy. HTML5 doesn't have the Flash quality development tools yet either (I hope someone makes it).

I think it's a bit premature to say HTML5 dominated Flash. Most of these types of statements are from people who actually haven't used HTML5, or Flash in the trenches.

HTML5 WILL do a ton inthe next few years, until then not much offers the one codebase / one execution on any platform.. unless RIM actually keeps building the Flash Player for mobile.

<comment><USER5> Are you considering that the web is going mobile?

700,000 Android devices are being activated every day. Apple is selling 10 million iPads a quarter and has hundreds of millions of iPhones on the market. If you have a website that you want people to view on mobile, you're either going to use HTML(5) or have a second site for mobile.

In short, we'll have a billion mobile Internet devices in a few years, and HTML(5) is the only web solution to reach all of them.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you. In a few years HTML5 will be a lot further along than it is today.

I'm ready to use HTML5 for everything, it's just not ready for me to use it for everything yet, and I'm looking forward to it.

Until then, Flash and HTML5 are not going away. If there's almost a million new android devices a day, they all run Flash too, in addition to HTML5. Everything except iOS runs Flash pretty okay. A pretty okay performance designation applies to HTML5 too in places.

The web is going mobile, but not exclusively. Flash might have one kind of quirks between desktop and mobile.. HTML5 will have it's own for the foreseeable future, and keep improving.

But the desktop isn't going anywhere either, neither is the web on the desktop. It might not grow as big or as fast anymore, but we work on computers, we consume on computer, we experience on computers, and most certainly, we create on computers.

The only thing I like having Flash for today on mobile is video anyways. :)

Hope that clarifies.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to make secure email convenient? - <AUTHOR> In every org I've worked for Email has been an issue, from requiring people to have two phones, to clumsy apps that sandbox corp email. The fall out is that users will simply go around these (supposedly) more secure hurdles. How is this not a solved problem? <comment><USER2> > How is this not a solved problem?

It's not because the big 3 (Apple, Google and Microsoft) do not want you to encrypt your email, so they can use it for data mining. If 70% of their gmail users used encryption, I'm sure they'd be turning the service subscription only or (as it's customary for G) shut it down.

So, if you need encryption you have use an external "add-on".

The problem of _secure email_ is _solved_ , it's just not _pushed_ as a standard because:

a) Users don't understand they're being tracked (or don't care)

b) It's not promoted (actually it's being demoted) by industry leaders

The fact that H. Clinton and her equip didn't use GPG is appalling, doesn't make sense. This group of people had big stakes on the privacy of their communications, they went as far as setting up a mail server and forgot to apply encryption? I just don't get it.

<comment><USER3> Apple specifically say they don't data mine users data, and for all but the most basic users iCloud _is_ subscription only.

Also note that macOS and iOS mail both support s/mime out of the box, you just need to supply certs/keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have witnessed several enterprises move from 100% email to 90% Slack and alternatives while using email primarily for scheduling purposes. I have a feeling corporate email will slowly die off over time.

Perhaps using a community messaging tool with built-in end-to-end Signal encryption will be the way to secure lines of communication in the near future.

<comment><USER5> Corporate email will become more about interacting with the outside world and less about team interaction. Which makes sense because inside the organization, you have a contained set of actors, whereas outside there are billions (and also apps, mailing lists, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > How is this not a solved problem?

Because we better understand the threat vectors that are imposed on the company from sloppy IT practices and as such are more willing to take security measures to prevent these things from happening.

We are also, at the same time, too stupid to realize that not everyone want's 5 applications just to encrypt their mail with a PGP key. When we make it so that by logging into a service with a password your browser can derive a private key and public key and use that to sign and send email we will have larger adoption. This will only be the case if it automatic.

Sure it's less secure but less secure is better then unused.

</comment><comment><USER7> Build end-to-end encryption into the gmail app for Android/iOS.

There's no real reason this is not possible, and the benefits are huge. The ease of use of end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp etc shows there's nothing technically impossible about this, and fundamentally, the gmail app is no different to WhatsApp when it comes to sending mail from one gmail account to another.

</comment><comment><USER8> The existing solutions all fail because they add friction.

There is a clear way forward. Add transparency to email clients. For example, i have two emails in my in box right now. Which one was sent in the clear? Which via ssl? I don't know. If i knew, then i might be annoyed by the one that was sent in the clear. And if i'm annoyed i might do something about it.

<comment><USER3> macOS mail identifies S/MIME signed/encrypted emails with a little icon.

Honestly knowing that the email traveled over a secure transport is less important than knowing its signed/encrypted.</comment></comment>


California seeks to tax rocket launches, which are already taxed - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/05/california-may-have-found-a-creative-new-revenue-stream-taxing-rocket-launches <comment><USER2> "based upon "mileage" traveled by that spacecraft from California"

Bad news for anyone hoping to launch an interstellar probe

</comment><comment><USER3> I can only hope this means SpaceX will soon be not only landing on a barge, but launching from one.</comment>


New reality TV show about startups: "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" - <AUTHOR> http://www.bravotv.com/start-ups-silicon-valley

<comment><USER2> It's pretty much unwatchable... I'd rather watch interior designers or socialites being horrible people.</comment>


Bump's Data Exchange API Goes Cross-Platform, Launches For Android And iPad  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/06/bumps-data-exchange-api-goes-cross-platform-launches-for-android-and-ipad <comment><USER2> Doesn't Bump for the iPad just seem like a bad idea? I certainly wouldn't want to have to bump my laptop against someone else's laptop (and sure, a tablet isn't a laptop, but the form factor is closer to a laptop than a phone). Once you get up to such a large device shouldn't the interaction be something more like flinging the contact info toward the device (like the scrabble tile interaction from iPhone to iPad)?

<comment><USER3> The bump is really just there to make the connection, you could interact in lots of different ways after the connection. And it may be that iPhone to iPad is more common than iPad to iPad. We are seeing lots of people use Bump to move photos from their iPhone to their iPad.

But Bump works pretty well on iPad. The extra weight makes the bump motion easier to detect.</comment></comment>


Arthur C. Clarke's eccentric and influential predictions - <AUTHOR> https://rossdawson.com/futurist/best-futurists-ever/arthur-c-clarke/ <comment><USER2> Many people under the age of 40 will probably not realize what an _incredibly_ insightful prediction this was for 1976:

"You can call in through [a console] any information you want: airline flights, price of things at the supermarket, books you've always wanted to read…

News, selectively; you can tell the machine I'm interested in such and such items, sports, politics and so forth, and the machine will go to the main central library and bring all this to you, selectively – just what you want; not all the junk that you have to get when you buy the two or three pounds of wood pulp which is the daily newspaper."

</comment><comment><USER3> It's sometimes hard for me to articulate to others why I read so much science- fiction, especially to those who see it as just another form of juvenile fantasy. Articles like this serve to illustrate that the writers who are carefully plotting out the future today may end up influencing the future of technology and culture more than they imagined. Clarke, Asimov, PKD, Gibson, they are all accepted as good writers, but I think some day a selection of such writers may be seen as visionaries who not only predicted much of what was to come but significantly influenced the course of that history. Personal computers were widely dismissed in the early days as impractical and unnecessary, yet I suspect it was those engineers who had been exposed to some of the possibilities science fiction writers were imagining for such devices that saw where they might end up. Once the idea of a globally connected network of computers became entrenched in enough people's minds, it was only a matter of time before the problems would be solved. TCP, DNS and HTTP were all important milestones in that path, but we could have converged on another set of protocols if things had been different. Good writers can lay out a vision of the potential in such a system in a way that private business and government usually can't, because they operate on a very different time horizon where they can look past the limitations of what's possible today and imagine what it might become.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the inclusion of his "no more cities" idea in this. A short story of his from the 40s, Rescue Party, includes this concept, where everyone lived far apart and flew around in their helicopters.

This is also the story where "a thousand points of light" originated. My conjecture has always been that one of Bush Sr's speech writers cribbed the phrase from Clarke, but it might just be a coincidence.

</comment><comment><USER5> Saw this on reddit the other day and was very impressed from how much on point his prediction was about modern computers/internet [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXxyCyDEaEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXxyCyDEaEg)

</comment><comment><USER6> Which Arthur C Clarke books would you recommend? Is there a preferred order?</comment>


Towards a Universal Code Formatter through Machine Learning (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08866 <comment><USER2> Great to see this picked up on HN - it's really interesting work. Terence is my colleague at USF (in fact he's the guy that got me to go there!) and it was great to see the journey from "could this possibly work" to "holy crap it does work!" over a period of many months. He's known for his work with parsers, of course (i.e. ANTLR), but recently he's been investing heavily in machine learning. This project is a great example of how domain experts can go into whole new areas by building on top of machine learning methods.

For anyone interested in getting into machine learning, I hope you'll consider the MSAN program at USF ([https://www.usfca.edu/arts-sciences/graduate- programs/analyt...](https://www.usfca.edu/arts-sciences/graduate- programs/analytics)). Terence is the guy that made this program happen at USF and it's turned into something really special.

Disclaimer: I'm a deep learning researcher and teacher at USF.

<comment><USER3> One possible angle for improvement of this technology: use a deep learning net to conjure up a different feature vector than the one I handcrafted from language/grammar expertise. I believe this was your idea. :) Glad to have you on board teaching and doing research!

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure this would work really well.

I've trained CharCNN on log files, and it generates really good examples files. To me that shows that even a comparatively simple model can capture syntax rules, so I'd imagine a LSTM would generate really good feature vectors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be spectacular to have a tool like this to enforce, and automatically revise, code style guidelines as languages evolve. Keeping up with something like the C++ Core Guidelines [0] can be a fair amount of work, as you need to respect existing idioms to keep your codebase coherent (a higher priority than respecting the "one true style", in my opinion).

A tool like this would be brilliant if it could automatically generate suggestions for "hybrid styles" that fit your existing codebase, and provide suggestions to migrate existing code patterns to "correct" ones over time.

[0]: [https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines](https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines)

<comment><USER3> First step to using CodeBuff would be getting an ANTLR grammar for C++ or at least a fuzzy version. It's still a prototype but should do pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a prototype anywhere? I want it!

<comment><USER7> This seems to be it: [https://github.com/antlr/codebuff](https://github.com/antlr/codebuff)

<comment><USER3> Yep, that's it. Somebody has ported from Java to C# as well. Next step is really to convert to use a Random Forest classifier. I'm stuck elsewhere at the moment.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Employee benefits/perks as a recruitment tool - <AUTHOR>

We are a small startup that is currently looking for a developer, locally. We are not having much luck and had a review of our recruitment process today where we decided that we need to "sell" our company better.
Right now our ads simply state that we offer a competitive wage, room for growth and a health/dental benefits package, but given the calibre of people we want to attract, I would think that people would expect those things at a bare minimum.
What are some other things that a small IT startup can do/offer to "attract" better talent? <comment><USER2> If you try to attract candidates with fluff perks you get candidates that want\expect fluff perks. Outside of good pay and benefits you need to show that you provide a good environment for that which you want to attract. Top candidates (I believe and could be entirely incorrect) want interesting work and the freedom to do a good job. Make your work environment explicit. Second it seems that wannabes talk about being rock stars, ninjas, or other BS so steer as far clear of that as possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> _What are some other things that a small IT startup can do/offer to "attract" better talent?_

Convince me that the work is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER4> \+ 1 on the "option to work from home"... also, i would want to work for a company that has flextime.

</comment><comment><USER5> option to "work from home" occasionally, at the developers discretion. But yeah (as Colin points out) the biggest "perk" is interesting work.

</comment><comment><USER6> some other thoughts:

offer equity. offer a competitive wage and then some (i'm assuming competitive = average -- which means you'll get average recruits). offer a serious office setup (good computer, big monitors, nice chairs, etc.). offer a flexible schedule and relaxed environment. etc..

most of all, though, the job itself needs to be interesting/engaging.</comment>


Demant Gamified Fundraising Process - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@demant/demant-gamified-fundraising-process-60ff9b19fc6a <comment><USER2> Every founder should follow this advice if you want to improve your chances at a successful raise.</comment>


Ask HN for Feedback: Twidl.it ver 0.5 - <AUTHOR> http://twidl.it

<comment><USER2> That's pretty neat actually. Simple idea, well executed.

Couple tiny points:

\- I was expecting to use my old tweets, instead of posting a new one. This way actually makes more sense, but maybe I could select from my recent tweets too?

\- The toolbar in the editor shows as soon as I mouseover the image, which makes it tough to get my mouse to the top of the photo.

<comment><AUTHOR> My idea on creating a twidl from a tweet is that is you type in your tweet in mind, then an image search button can be clicked that will instantly search for images based on the tweet you just typed. you click on an image and you get taken to the editor with the tweet already typed out and you just have to position the twidlBox and submit.

making a twidl from past tweets is a good extension of that. Thanks for that suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

We are 1st timers in the startup world and would greatly appreciate any feedback on our minimum viable product. I won't explain the product here as I also want to know how effective the current stuff on the website is in explaining the product. Anyhoo, Ill be here on HN as always, cause this part of the internet is awesome. :D

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @psranga thanks! a frontpage redesign is coming next week to REALLY explain the site at first glance

@george - thanks for the tiny points, :) 1. we have that in mind. 2. we are thinking of just displaying the toolbar all the time with an explicit collapse/expand button.

embed code and import from URL + webcam will be coming soon.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A primary use case is you can better promote products that need visual aid. like this one.

<http://twidl.it/8ms62>

I am anticipating tons of other use cases once we got some new features put in.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks promising.

I got on dailybooth recently and liked what it is. And one plus point for twidlit is it's based on twitter (The social network I use most). And the next best thing is, twidlit puts text on image itself :)

Kudos!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats the idea. No need to rebuild your audience and it makes Twitter more visual. I kept getting data that a significant portion of people who doesnt get Twitter is because its all text. Thats why we built Twidl.it to have a layer of visual engagement, fun activities and promotional tools without altering the core Twitter experience. we are closely listening to feedback on how to prioritize the next set of features to build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good idea and nice design.

I personally feel the name "twidl.it" is somehow hard to spell and sounds a bit strange.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reasoning is because its an unclaimed word. loosely based on the words tweedle (twitter and photo in harmony) or twiddle (idly play around in twitter).

It also is easy to say. "You should twidl that" after taking a photo that begs to made fun of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great site. Well done! I like it just the way it is.</comment>


Show HN: Animated Short Film Made in Unreal Engine - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/04Bjs53EtkM <comment><AUTHOR> Would love to hear any feedback on the piece. Wrote more about the development here: [https://sagar.substack.com/p/why-trailblazer-was- made](https://sagar.substack.com/p/why-trailblazer-was-made)</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any downsides to a Chromiumbook? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> What is a Chromiumbook? Do you mean a Chromebook? Then the downside is that you can't install traditional desktop apps on it. Other than that, it does everything you need it to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends what you're going to use it for. I ultimately picked the MBA instead because I need music software (Ableton Live).</comment>


The future is here, goodbye Rails - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/making-case-coldfusion/

<comment><USER2> keep looking for the tongue in cheek tone of this article but I can't seem to find it?

<comment><USER3> The article is from 2004.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite programming interview question? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for questions that are interesting from the candidate's perspective, but also provide the interviewer a good sense of the coding abilities of the candidate. <comment><USER2> a question/answer interview is not a good way to learn what the candidate knows or not.

just let him tell you about projects that he worked in the past, and interrupt from time to time with relevant questions. you'll get a better sense of what he knows/does not know from that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's some links of interest:

[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interv...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/interview?sort=votes)

[http://www.quora.com/Programming-Interview- Questions](http://www.quora.com/Programming-Interview-Questions)

</comment><comment><USER4> Anything that is relevant to what I would be doing. Please also explain WHY it is relevant.</comment>


Ask HN: Let's learn JavaScript together - <AUTHOR> Hey! Is anyone else starting to learn JavaScript?<p>I'm learning by myself, and it'd be great to have someone to talk through things with and work together with every now and then. Are you in the same situation? Let's help each other! We can talk on skype maybe every few days or so. If that sounds good, email danamenotrequired (gmail). <comment><USER2> Create a Github or Bitbucket account to share your source code with people you are learning with.

I'm 47 and haven't programmed in JavaScript for a long time. I have to learn all over again. You can email me at orionblastar at gmail.com and I am OrionBlastar at Github and BitBucket.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, followed & emailed!</comment></comment>


Network protocols, sans I/O - <AUTHOR> https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> here is the motivation for doing that: [https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/how-to- sans-io.html#why-write...](https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/how-to-sans- io.html#why-write-i-o-free-protocol-implementations)</comment>


Firefox Now Supports MP4 Video - <AUTHOR>

After today's auto-update to Firefox 21, MP4 video is now supported. <comment><USER2> About the damn time... Having to do SWF fallbacks was annoying at best for HTML5 video. This will effectively kill the need to host double encodes of audio and video</comment>


Amazon Launches 'Mac Downloads' Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000691231# <comment><AUTHOR> "Have to say, I didn't see this coming. Notable among the titles Amazon has but Apple's Mac App Store does not is Microsoft Office.

.

Interesting too, in the context of Apple's legal pursuit of a trademark for the term "app store", is that Amazon went with "downloads store" rather than the closed-up "appstore" they use for their Android store." [1]

\----

[1]: [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/26/amazon-mac- downl...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/26/amazon-mac-downloads- store)</comment>


Announcing LaserCutter ruby gem and MakeABox.IO web site - <AUTHOR> http://kiguino.moos.io/2014/11/21/announcing-laser-cutter-makeabox-dot-io.html?ref=hackernews

<comment><USER2> This looks interesting -- you wouldn't think that something like automatic box generation would attract so much attention from developers, but I think this shows a bit of evolution in the makerspace from just straight 3D printing.

The speakers he shows as example output are beautiful!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words, I too think that laser-cutter combined with maple wood is sort of like a home cooked meal :)

I haven't actually gotten into 3D printing, and I find laser-cutting much less intimidating, because you are dealing with 2D at all times. Of course it has it's limitations, but you can build very complex 3D structures out of 2D cut- out objects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> FYI, you have two "it's"/"its" errors on that page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Uh oh, you mean the blog post? I just fixed one of them, but couldn't find the second. Hopefully it did not distract you from reading the post, and you were able to focus on the content too :)

As a non-native English speaker differentiating between "its" and "it's" has been a bit of a challenge, but I do appreciate whenever an error is pointed out as it allows me to correct it now and be more attentive in the future.</comment></comment>


Slack down 20% on revenue miss - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/m/3f7aa922-b4fc-3d33-9e26-c1598a7832fd/slack-earnings-shares-plunge.html <comment><USER2> Slack in a small company can sometimes give you secret information about in inner workings of your company. For example, if you notice the number of messages being sent in private threads is increasing while the number of messages being sent in public threads is decreasing, it's a good indicator that there's drama going on.</comment>


Smalltalk ruined my life - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/smalltalk-ruined-my-life-aaf2190f6f16 <comment><USER2> From the author's LinkedIn profile:

> Leading a marketing and PR campaign to promote and popularize the Smalltalk > programming language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never made any bones about this. Of course, I'm an evangelist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Provably the most productive" seems to boil down to estimating that Smalltalk is more terse in statements per function point. Incidentally, by that metric Python is only half as productive as Visual Basic, which doesn't seem plausible. No comment about extra test coverage and prod bugs caused by lack of static typing.

"Image-based persistence" means your production-ready code and dinking around during prototyping (in a language with frictionless monkey-patching!) are all buried in one big mutable blob. It's often argued the impedance mismatch with version control is what killed Smalltalk.

<comment><AUTHOR> "It's often argued the impedance mismatch with version control is what killed Smalltalk."

Wrong argument. Here's the truth: [https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why- smalltalk-failed-to-do...](https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/why-smalltalk- failed-to-dominate-the-world-93e7e4195039)

Smalltalk does have version control. It's just not the same version control software that everybody else uses (eg, Git, Subversion, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> But where are the libraries? Compare the size of Smalltalk's ecosystem to Java's.

Not to mention the various competing flavors of Smalltalk, whose code bases may be incompatible with one another.

<comment><AUTHOR> The size of the Smalltalk user base isn't large enough to support a healthy ecosystem. Hence, the reason for my evangelism to grow the community!

Another issue is fragmentation: there are too many dialects. That's why I generally promote Pharo, which is the largest open source Smalltalk. If I can get developers to rally around Pharo, then we will have the best chance of developing a strong ecosystem.</comment></comment>


You may not view this video in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201302212041-0022562

<comment><USER2> It usually takes a while for YouTube to block the videos (Probably because they don't get immediately scanned after they were uploaded). At least I was able to watch all 5-6 videos I clicked the day after. YouTube tends to hide blocked videos from search and related videos, but doesn't remove then from playlists (pretty annoying because it will not skip to the next video automatically).

I'm still not sure who is the one who is wrong in this legal war between YouTube and GEMA, but Google does a good job of making GEMA look like the bad guys with the their message "This video is blocked in your country because GEMA doesnt allow it" (Sorry for the broken translation.)

</comment><comment><USER3> It has been a major annoyance for years in Germany. I've recently started using an IPv6 tunnel with an endpoint in the UK to route around this problem: <http://realpath.org/blog/2013/02/10/youtube-ipv6-tunnel/></comment>


Freakonomics » An Alternative to Democracy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/10/31/an-alternative-to-democracy/ <comment><USER2> Interesting read with some good links. I must confess that I read this headline initially as Freakonomics as An Alternative to Democracy. I clicked through to see what that would have been about. Could have been good times.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh yeah, I thought of it the other day. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4539954>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sure beats the atavistic system -</comment>


Redditor claims silkroad bust was an elaborate scam, other users seem to agree - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkroadUNcensored/comments/1p0ogt/time_to_let_the_cat_out_of_the_hat/

<comment><USER2> If this was all a conspiracy, how did they get the government agencies to press charges? Or was that faked too?

</comment><comment><USER3> No one is taking this seriously on /r/bitcoin or /r/silkroad.</comment>


Joss Whedon's Top Writing Tips - <AUTHOR> http://dannystack.blogspot.com/2009/01/joss-whedons-top-10-writing-tips.html <comment><USER2> This is basically why I enjoy Joss' work so much. I read the criticisms of Joss' work and to a certain extent I agree with all of them, but behind the sometimes too-clever wordplay (though I'll admit I usually enjoy it anyhow) and the girls-who-kick-ass fetish is one of the most solid stories you can find. I wanted to call out my favorite point or two here, but the truth is you walk into a theater and you're lucky to get competent execution of _any_ of those points from what's up there on the screen. Even if you don't _like_ his stories, he definitely knows storytelling like few others. (Brad Bird is one of the few others that leaps to mind.)

I particularly miss comedy movies that were written with these principles in mind, instead of being simply "'This'll lead to many fine set-pieces'" consisting of parodies with no love for their subject, nor anything interesting to say. Mike Myers was the last to do this (Austin Powers, at least the first one), and lately he's sucked pretty hard too, so...

<comment><USER3> Agreed about Brad Bird.

The other Pixar director I really like (actually more than Brad Bird) is Andrew Stanton. I think that Wall-E and Finding Nemo are Pixar's best works yet :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good advice. The key step if you want to write is to actually do the writing part. For in-depth, and practical screenwriting advice I really like Terry Rossios's columns on Wordplayer: <http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/welcome.html>.

<comment><USER5> For working up the motivation to write I recommend "Bird by Bird" by Ann Lamont.

[http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing- Life/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing- Life/dp/0385480016/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232631079&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER6> Personally I'd say put the book down and just do it, but then I've been writing since I was 15.

My best advice would be to read a really good novel while you're writing, because there's something about seeing a novel unfold whilst you're writing one that seems to help the process along. You'll likely get through 3-4 books (if you read like me) when writing a novel and this can really help in the beginning because you see something started in the beginning really unfold at the end and it's like 'holy crap, thats the best thing in the entire book', then you have a moment thinking 'well why the fuck aren't _I_ doing something like that!', then you do.

The other advantage in reading while you write is that I think it reassures you when you get blocked, because 99% of the time you'll think the story is going too slowly, however that's because it takes like 10-100 times longer to write something creative than it does to read it. I think it was Richard Curtis (Notting Hill/Bridget Jones/Love Actually) who made this point; he was asked why there's such a large gap between all his great award winning movies and he said quite simply, 'because it takes a lot of time to write something important to me'. This is quite well illustrated by his writing credits, he switches between writing a blockbuster movie and TV comedy (Mr Bean) with his friend from university.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "You have one goal: to connect with your audience. Therefore, you must track what your audience is feeling at all times. One of the biggest problems I face when watching other people's movies is I'll say, 'This part confuses me', or whatever, and they'll say, 'What I'm intending to say is this', and they'll go on about their intentions. None of this has anything to do with my experience as an audience member. "

I opine on this in poetry a lot. People have a tendency to write some super vague poem that completely washes over the audience, and so rather than fix it, they include a preamble that makes the subsequent poem pointless. Then you call them on that and they say "Well, I just write for myself."

If that's so, why are you reading it to a live audience and asking for feedback? If you're not writing it for the audience, save the audience the trouble. I'm sure it's the same way for movies, presentations and pretty much any performance.

In fact, I wrote a poem bashing this very practice recently. Allow me to explain all the clever allusions up front in case they are too obtuse.

<comment><USER8> This is something that occurs again and again in the creative arts. People say they want to write a poem or a novel, but they end up writing something that's actually best expressed as an essay, or the poem itself becomes a veiled essay (see also: screenplays filled with pointless exposition and explanatory speeches).

It's probably a consequence of the fact that we're all taught in school to write essays, but not to be creative. When we don't know what we're doing, we fall back on that way of expressing ourselves. To beat it, you have to unlearn what you've been taught.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your last statement; I've loved stories since I was tiny and I don't mean I found them entertaining, I mean I'd just be playing and I'd make up a whole story, my friend and I spent the better part of our pre-teen years playing games in a completely made up world and not 'cowboys and indians' or 'cops and robbers' like everyone else did.

Yet when I got into high school they really tried hammering in Essays to the point where no one knew how to write a real story. You'd get people screwing up, bunching 5 lines of different characters speech into 1 paragraph because it was dealing with one point. People didn't seem to understand that in a piece of creative writing you don't need to have a point to every line as long as every line helps make a point.

I'm working on a novel right now, which coincidentally illustrates this point. My chapters are actually titled as the point of the entire chapter at the moment, here are a few: Casual Subterfuge, The Truth Unveiled and The Advent of (important character). The chapter titles will possibly change, but right now they're as useful as any writing plan I could make because if it isn't setting up later plots and it isn't advancing the plot arc of the chapter, then it gets ripped out.

The biggest thing I noticed in novels when in school was that some people butchered it with a preface. Most SF/F/H writers it's sometimes just a page saying thank you (normally to their spouse, agent and publisher - in that order) however a significant amount do this in the afterword. Yet when I picked up books I was assigned in school the preface took 5 pages describing the purpose of the book and I just thought that was cheap and lazy.

<comment><USER9> Almost OT, but I hate literature with the criticism at the front. I find it almost impossible to skip without reading a few words and there are always spoilers (this happened to me on Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and The Pearl, and some Stephen King stuff). But if they were an afterword instead, no one would read them...

I hate soundtrack previews for the DVD I'm about to watch for exactly the same reason.

<comment><USER7> I hated the Crouching Tiger DVD. Since I didn't see the movie in theater, getting the DVD to play involved going through a few menus showing very critical development moments in the movie. Lame.

In case you want to read my mock Preamble and commiserate, I'll go ahead and be vain: <http://poetry.herokugarden.com/poems/38>

<comment><USER9> Crazy, the exact same thing happened to me recently.

At one point David Lynch wanted his DVDs not to have scene breaks, just a play button. I get it, I totally do.

I'm at work so your preamble is firewalled, but I'll get to it this evening.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pinboard.in alternatives? - <AUTHOR> Very early adopter of the service here... But simply tired of some things related to it:
— Chrome extension consistently failing to perform as it should
— Too much downtime, too many performance issues
— Pretty much no new features... ever
I've emailed Maciej about turning this into a subscription business (to support development, vs one lifetime payment) but he doesn't seem interested.
I would love another, more expensive but better and more reliable service for saving my precious bookmarks.
This is really my extended brain and I go back to stuff I save multiple times every single day... I want it to be great!
Does anyone have suggestions, please? Thanks! <comment><USER2> If you want it really fast, and as reliable as your local machine, have you considered storing your data locally, e.g. in a plain HTML file, sticking that in a git repo and uploading it to github?

> I've emailed Maciej about turning this into a subscription business (to > support development, vs one lifetime payment) but he doesn't seem > interested.

For new subscribers it's already subscription-based. Only old-timers like us paid a one-time fee.

> Pretty much no new features... ever

What are you missing? For me it does everything I need. And it has a pleasantly reduced/no-frills look.

Sorry, I don't know of a good alternative, as Pinboard does the trick for me, but if I had to think of something new, I'd really consider going a service- less way.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://larder.io/](https://larder.io/) ?</comment>


Ask HN: Bootstrap a small profitable product vs. chase large risky opportunity? - <AUTHOR> If you could build a small (1-2 devs working for couple of months), indie hacker style niche product that could guaranteed generate anywhere between couple of hundreds to few thousand $/month. Perks like total control over a small venture, joy of building, possibility of working on multiple of these type of projects etc.
And at the other end you have a typical VC style startups that would eventually require building team, raising capital and could fail or succeed in a big way.
What would you choose? Why? <comment><USER2> I'd choose the first anytime because I like to create useful products whose direction I can control rather than catering to the needs of VC investors.

While venture capital can be required for certain types of businesses or products having an investor requires time and energy for matters only indirectly related to your product and your customers. With venture capital investors onboard the question "How do I build a product that solves a problem for my customers?" becomes less important in favour of "How will it be able to scale?".

Venture capital also means that probably you won't be running the company yourself anymore in 5-10 years. Given your motivation that can be perfectly fine but if you love what you're doing this can be a downside.

</comment><comment><USER3> Small niche product. I wish I could focus to come up with one to put time into. Why? Full control and ability to hit a goal of side income type of profit. If it goes well enough then it becomes a "lifestyle" business I would work on, ideally having a work/life imbalance that favors the life side more.

Working for a startup means you are working for someone else essentially. Unless you have a serious percentage of options.

</comment><comment><USER4> @DHH's Startup School Talk has your answer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY&feature=youtu.be&t=6m50s)

For a VC startup the odds are tiny for success and will most likely fail.

Take the first jump and build a small niche product first.

You'll have a better chance at success and you can use that experience for your larger venture next time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good talk, thanks for sharing.

"... difference between having minus $10k vs $1M in your bank account is much larger than having a million vs a billion..." :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Building a niche product sounds mostly enjoyable and seems like a happier, less stressful lifestyle.

What's the person doing the startup working towards? A happier life? Why not just go directly to that?

</comment><comment><USER6> Do you want to chase targets or build products ?

</comment><comment><USER7> A small lifestyle startup is not necessarily easier than a venture startup.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have the exactly same problem with my nice product www.reviewshift.com

Guess I will take the path without VC but therefore I need some sale guy....

<comment><AUTHOR> You are this guy right? [https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/900-cold-emails- and-no-si...](https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/900-cold-emails-and-no-sign- up-41148aa3e6)

You need to get off of HN/Indiehacker and go actually talk to your potential users. You don't need "some sale guy", YOU are the sales guy.

<comment><USER8> Right. But I am inexperienced and tried so many things.... I need somebody to help my with the sales part, as a mentor

<comment><USER9> I actually do some weekly 1:1 sales coaching for this very problem. Check my profile and feel free to email me if you have any questions!</comment></comment></comment></comment>