Ask HN: How do you keep track of the articles you want to read? - <AUTHOR> I'm always gathering links for articles, be it a blog post, or an academic pdf article.
Currently I've been using pocket, but it seems that I've been losing some articles.
Also, there are some features I'd like to have such as searchable content, or the means to save tweets and facebook posts.
This kind of sounds like Evernote, but since the changes to their payment scheme I haven't been following them.
But custom solution ideas are also nice... <comment><USER3> My approach has always been now or never. I don't have a read it later list. Sometimes this gets stressful to me if I want to read through a lot of content, but it motivates me to just burn through all of it quickly.

If I don't have time to read it, I'll skim it. Same with youtube videos, if I don't have time I'll skip through it or play-it-back faster. I use pinboard though after I've either skimmed an article I found interesting, or read it. Exception is with reddit and medium, I don't use pinboard for those sites, rather I use their built in tools.

For ongoing projects / links I use often, those go in google chrome bookmarks. I don't really have a searchable archive except for my note's app, pinboard, and google.

If you want to save tweets or posts, just put a like on them so you can check your profile → your likes. If you want to take it further, go scrape yourself.

</comment><comment><USER4> My approach has always been to open them in a new tab and then ignore them until I finally decide it's time to clean up my browser session and discover the article doesn't exist anymore or has become irrelevant.

I never said it was a good approach.

<comment><USER5> You are not alone. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Contrarian thought here - but I stopped saving things. I was a very heavy user of pocket, pinboard, delicious et al for web articles. For academic papers I use Mendeley.

I now make an active effort to read the article as I discover it - the point being (for me) that if I'm in the process of "discovering" an article, I'm not "working" on anything else that leads me to have to save it for later -- I'm in the zone, read it and not worry about coming back to it! It's been quite a pleasant change. I don't read as many articles as I'd have saved before, but I'm ok with that!

<comment><USER7> As my list of "articles to read" grew, I felt guilt and a touch of anxiety because it was yet another thing I didn't have enough time to do. Then, when I finally made the time to read some articles off the list, I was usually disappointed... Here was this thing weighing on my mind for months, and now that I read it I see it's not that useful.

Now I read things on an "as needed" basis: I find and read articles as I need them, for instance if I'm learning about Kubernetes that's when I'm going to go and read 10+ things in one sitting.

Another thing I realized: If I found it once, I can find it again... When I need it. The article isn't going anywhere.

<comment><USER8> I know the anxiety you're referring to. I eventually started aggressively pruning my to-read list every once in a while, deleting articles that looked appealing when I came across them and impulsively hit "read later" but on more sober inspection no longer seemed worth the effort. No more anxiety, and this way what I end up reading tends to be worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the most part I use Pocket because my Kobo ereader supports it. However if it supported Instapaper I would swap in an instant.

I've found Pocket often skips bits of text, usually bullet point items which I'm assuming it thinks are navigation menus or something. Really annoying. Instapaper does much better with this.

Every now and again it also finds an article it cannot extract the main content from. In that case it never ends up on my ereader, and there's no obvious indication that there is a problem.

For either of those cases I save with Instapaper and use Erudite[1] to convert it to an epub.

To track my readying habits, I wrote a little PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API (and the hn.algolia.com API). Once I've read an article I archive it. Then when I'm back at my computer I run my app, which lists the archived articles, any related Hacker News pages, and lets me manage the articles (delete, save locally, etc.). It makes it easy for me to follow up and read the HN discussions after I've found the time to read the article.

Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

[1] [https://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/](https://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The best thing about Pocket for me is the Kobo integration. I can seamlessly send articles I might find interesting from my laptop or phone, then read them while on-the-go or in bed with the lights off using a device meant for reading.

<comment><USER11> That's exactly what I do. Save to pocket then read later on Kobo. It's the first setup I've ever had where things I intend to read later actually get read later.

I just wish I could clip highlights from pocket-on-Kobo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pinboard.in. Very simplistic but it works: I use it through a bookmarklet, the form to add links has a "read later" checkbox. Later you can see the tagged list of links to read in chrono order.

Also, the [https://www.one-tab.com/](https://www.one-tab.com/) extension can help managing many open tabs in the browser and can create a list of links web page that you can "share with yourself", and add to pinboard.

</comment><comment><USER13> On Firefox I use great extension Totally not Panorama [0] which gives old tab- groups-like feature. This gives me ability to group tabs around interests. It's like multiple workspaces in a desktop environment.

However most of the time I just open a lot of tabs. First I read some low- effort click-bait that I do not deeply care about. Then I read something that I'm actually interested in, but it's somewhere in the middle. Then I'm left with articles of perceived high-quality or high interest. I will read a few of them within a week or so. The rest will remain for even a couple of weeks. After a while I will either read them or just close the tab when I finally see that I don't care much about it. Also I read too many comments on HN.

I'm not proud of this.

One should always remember Strugeon's law [1] - "ninety percent of everything is crap". It may be worth it more to aim higher or just go for a walk than read crap.

While I'm at it, I was thinking about a title filter. I would like to filter out all content titled "N things you should know" or "N apps for something" entirely. Also personally probably all content about corporate machinations - be it Google or Apple.

Another thing would be from around the top of my too long todo list. An HTML- only browser that would index and possibly store all retrieved text - <USER2> full-text search through whole local archive. Then I would not worry about loosing some potentially relevant information. Bonus for it being HTML-only - no more position:fixed or sticky bars at the top, no GDPR or cookie fluff and no more JS tracking or otherwise.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/basic- panoram...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/basic-panorama/)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

<comment><USER14> Well for the indexing stuff I recomend Worldbrain[0]. I use it for some time now and was able to find a lot of stuff that would be otherwise lost in my browsing history. It helps mo out when there is this "I know I read something about functors and javascript like two weeks ago". Turns out it was 5 weeks ago but since Wordbrain indexes every page I visit I do not have to scroll through 2k history entries.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Open a million of them in tabs, then click One Tab: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en)

>Privacy assurance

Information about your tabs are never transmitted or disclosed to the OneTab developers. The only exception to this is if you intentionally click on our 'share as a web page' feature that allows you to upload your list of tabs into a web page in order to share them with others. Tabs are never shared unless you specifically use the 'share as a web page' button.

Then share as a web page and send myself the link.

</comment><comment><USER16> Be it Pocket or anything else, I learned that processing and reviewing is just as important part of the reading process.

I try to commit time on the weekends to read 15 articles/PDF per day (saved on Pocket). I take down notes on articles I find useful (usually 4-5 of the 15 articles).

At the end of the month, I review the notes again and see if there's anything actionable or should be filed/stored in my long term notes (e.g. things to cook, books to read, tools for work to try, resources I'll need later, etc).

This works okay for me but I'm interested if other folks have ideas of what to do after you've read the articles?

</comment><comment><USER17> My typical web pattern is to open a page, read it's content, open any interesting links in background tabs, then deal with them either immediately after reading the current page, or in bulk at my next idle moment. Dealing with them depends on the content. Generally, I'll take one of 3 paths:

If it's something I want to action against soon (IE - a really neat ESP8266 project or very cool VIM trick), I'll add the URL to ToDoist. I'll review all my links in that every week or so and either discard, take action, or move to the next two options. I've managed to keep my ToDoist URL queue fairly short - under 100 items.

If it's an article or long form journalism I want to read later for recreational purposes (IE - the history of the ESP8266 or how VIM has made the ESC key the battleground of the technical elite), I'll generally add it to Pocket (which captures the article text) thinking I'll go through and catch up on them the next time I have an hour to burn (usually a plane flight). This never happens though. My Pocket list is huge and untouched.

If it's a link in reference to something I'm interested in doing/exploring (IE - something about ESP8266 projects or VIM tricks), I'll add it to Pinboard.in and pull it up when I start messing with those projects again. I actually refer to my Pinboard.in account frequently, but never expire anything. There's ~12k links and it's a bit of history of what I've been interested in over the years.

</comment><comment><USER18> I use org mode, together with org agenda. It doubles for taking notes, too! Helped me write my thesis and keep notes accessible. Unfortunately, there are no good solutions for using org from a phone.

<comment><USER19> [https://github.com/orgzly/orgzly-android](https://github.com/orgzly/orgzly- android) with [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/) works great for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most articles go in a tab in my browser, either I read it eventually or I realize I don't really care and close it.

Academic papers that I read and figure out I might wanna re-read or reference later goes into Paperpile (using their browser plugin).

For projects I work on I keep working notes in markdown using Typora. Some links to libraries or articles might find their way into these working notes if I think I need to come back to them later. The markdown documents are then usually committed to some git repo.

</comment><comment><USER21> I use zotero both for all my references, bibliographies, document citations, and also tracking interesting articles I see on the web or hacker news. Very easy to use with the browser plugins, I just hit the save-to-zotero icon and it not only save the page but a snapshot of it so I can also read it offline (or if it goes away). Highly recommend.

[https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Evernote, I have a notebook specifically for that. Then when I go to read the article if I find it particularly useful I'll add notes/tags to the bookmark so that I can recall at a later date.

Even if I'm not looking for a particular article I've read it's so helpful being able to search a topic like "functional programming javascript" and have a list of resources that I have already screened for quality.

</comment><comment><USER23> Pocket is pretty good. It keeps the copy of the page so even if it's gone, you can still read years later. Plus you can use their app to read things offline or do search (where had I saw that?). One big issue is no support for pdf. So if you are in to reading research papers, try Diogo. It allows highlights and annotating and they stay in their server copy. Unfortunately diigo has turned out to be pretty buggy.

</comment><comment><USER24> I used to rely heavily on pinboard.in but I noticed two things: most of my devices are iOS & MacOS (Safari & iCloud everywhere) and I almost never went back to re-read articles I had already read. So now I track everything through Reading List [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT200294](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT200294) and prune as I read.

</comment><comment><USER25> I just started using Mix.com, they have a mobile, chrome, and firefox extension that lets you save from around the web. It lets you organize the articles you want to save into collections you can customize. Also it seems if I add articles about a certain topic it will give me more recommendations. You can save any link, including tweets. I do not believe it works with Facebook posts.

</comment><comment><USER26> I recently started using [https://www.emailthis.me/](https://www.emailthis.me/)

It's like Pocket but the articles are cleaned and stored in your email inbox instead. I was a big fan of RSS feeds but recently stopped using any RSS services at all since the signal to noise ratio was generally too high.

</comment><comment><USER27> Pocket for me, but I've been very lazy with it over the past few years, to the point where I almost operate it like a stack which gets bigger over time.

I was thinking of writing a thing to surface the older/not touched articles near the top so they have more of a chance of being read but in reality that's probably just a fools errand

</comment><comment><USER28> I've stopped trying to remember things to consume. So no lists. To echo others here, read it now, or if you forget about it, it wasn't worth reading probably.

Where I think it's important to flip this is "keep track of all the things you want to produce" instead. All the article ideas, product ideas.

I keep a list now of hundreds of things I want to write or vlog about. I'm constantly surprised by how many good ideas I forget because I forgot to write them down. "What was that great anecdote I wanted to share?"

And it's this insanely important list now. When I'm in the inevitable i-couldnt-be-creative-to-save-my-life state, there's this giant list of things I came up with when I was in a much more creative mood.

Saving a list of all those threads has been the only way I could have kept up making a new video every single day for so many stretches. It's maximized my creativity.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's a self-hosted clone of Pocket, Wallabag: [https://wallabag.org/en](https://wallabag.org/en)

Can't vouch for it, not having used it (yet), but it ranks pretty high on Alternativeto, which is a good sign.

<comment><USER30> Looks pretty good. Did anyone already try it?

<comment><USER31> I use it since ~4 Years and i love it. Its also my personal archive. You can tag articles and there is an app (for reading and sharing articles directly to wallabag) and a Firefox addon which lets you quickly add articles and tag them immediately.

But its a rather big php app which did not perform well on my bananapi which i used until half a year ago. Now whith a little bit more hardware (udoo x86) its running really fine.

<comment><USER29> May I ask, what did 'not perform well' entail in this case? The reading interface, capturing, or something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm mostly using a RSS reader, tagging articles as "read later" and/or starring the ones i want to save. For quite some time i used Feedly, it's a great tool, but i was missing some features so i've built Aktu ([https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io)): I can follow twitter users and Facebook pages as RSS feeds, and soon Quora topics. Everything is automatically categorized, with names of people, companies, etc... extracted, same story articles are grouped together as in Google News even for the items in my own feeds. And i'm adding a pdf export feature available in the next few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have this problem too. I used to bookmark, but nothing really ever triggered me to go back through and read them. So I started leaving tabs open on my phone to read on the bus, but eventually started closing them when I realised they'd been sitting there unread for a week. Finally I built a tool for myself [0] that takes the URL and your email address, runs the page through Mozilla's reader-mode and emails the result to you in 15 minute (3000 word) snippets - which I've found to be a manageable sized piece for a bus trip.

[0]: [https://lusmo.re/dripfeed](https://lusmo.re/dripfeed)

</comment><comment><USER34> Pinboard has been one of the best paid services I've ever used -- though I bought it back when the lifetime fee was <$10 [0]. The Chrome bookmarklet is great, and the search/listing page is so straightforward and useful that I haven't even begun to look at the API. My main complaint is that not only are the iOS plugins costly (I've paid more for the plugins than for the entire service), the ones I've had have inconsistent/obsoleted support.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751170)

</comment><comment><USER35> I either read it right away, or I send the tab via Firefox Sync to my phone, so I can read it on the bus/train the same day. I very rarely keep anything longer than that. I tried using pocket for a while, but I just ended up with a gigantic long list of stuff I never got around to reading.

There's just way too much stuff out there.

My only exception is Spotify, where I have a bunch of "check this out" playlists. I'll generally pick one at random for my commute, and then either save my favorite tracks and delete the playlist, or upgrade the playlist to "favorite album" status.

</comment><comment><USER36> For me, it's a hopeless endeavor to keep track of stuff I want to read. So, if ever want to read something, I do read it right there, right then, or just hope that I'll remember that I bookmarked it somewhere and will be able to get to it at some point in the future when I have to. Depending on the device/site I am on, I do one of the following, and then end up never really coming back to it.

\- bookmark the page

\- add to "read later" on Chrome

\- add to "reading list" on Safari

\- clip to Evernote

\- click "favorite" on HN

\- (edit) (forgot to add) OneTab Chrome extension to save dozens of open tabs

</comment><comment><USER37> I used to use the Firefox extension Scrapbook. It saved items to a local archive (not "local storage", but user-definable and in the normal local filesystem).

Then the Firefox rewrite killed it.

In addition to news that I'd like to be able to refer back to, I've found more and more "perennial" Web resources disappearing.

The Web is _not_ a library. If I want to be sure I am able to refer to something more than a week or a month later, I'm finding I need to ensure I have a local copy.

Scrapbook made this easy and convenient.

</comment><comment><USER38> Inoreader is the absolute best for me, although I usually use it for discovery.

I just have over 200 rss feeds, mostly from blogs, but from Twitter and Facebook too, and then tag and star everything I may be interested in.

They also have this chrome extension for adding websites from the web, but I haven't found myself using it much.

It has a pretty good search functionality, but I think you do have to pay for some of it.

It also has a lot of automation tools like "auto send to one note" sort of stuff, integration with ifttt, among others.

</comment><comment><USER39> I print to pdf, email them to firstname.lastname@example.com, and then turn on my website blocker so that I'm not tempted to keep scrolling HN and facebook. Then, when I feel like it, I email the pdf to the email address for my kindle here: [https://pdfblog.com/2012/03/12/email-pdf- kindle/](https://pdfblog.com/2012/03/12/email-pdf-kindle/)

</comment><comment><USER40> I just open them then OneTab them, there already are myriads in the list and I have only read ~10. Although I happen to be intrigued by some subject all the time and feel constant urge to learn everything I find it extremely hard to read anything longer than a single display (900px-high) page and containing any amount of "water". I dream brevity was taught at schools and encouraged by publishers and not the opposite...

</comment><comment><USER41> I create a bookmark on the Chrome bookmark bar. More than a couple articles and it looks ugly so it triggers a read/process cleanup. Seems to work.

</comment><comment><USER42> My main input streams are an RSS reader and Twitter, both on a dedicated device. The RSS reader has a "Read later" queue and I add articles to that. From Twitter I click the link to open a browser tab directly.

One of my last tasks every night is ruthlessly filtering the browser tabs and "Read later" entries. It's rare that I hold onto an article overnight.

</comment><comment><USER43> I keep the most important ones opened in a Chrome tab until a read and save it to Pocket. The less important ones I save to Pocket until it comes the day I get to read them on spare time or by necessity. The ones I know I'll repeatedly query for info (like tutorials/technical articles/documentation) I save in a categorized folder on Chrome's bookmark bar

</comment><comment><USER44> I got tired of bookmarking & forgetting about the articles. So I just started to email them to myself but with a filterable address <myhandle>+firstname.lastname@example.com

This way I could redirect it to a sub folder while having it unread. I could also jot down notes in the same email thread for later reference. It has worked well for me so far.

</comment><comment><USER45> Good part are articles in sites that I read with an RSS reader (Newsblur), so on it I can save articles for later reading. For others it depend on where I read them (i.e. phone, work computer, etc) and may have very different approaches, from keeping tabs open for months to send me links by mail, google keep or even send them to kindle.

</comment><comment><USER46> If it's something I _want_ to read, I usually just use Safari's Add to Reading List function. Then it syncs to the reading list on all of my Apple devices and computers.

If it's something I've just read and want to save, I save the page as a PDF in iBooks and it also syncs to all of my devices and computers.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have been using Google bookmarks, but I am not happy with the solution.

Things tend to get lost of forgotten or the context of why I saved them is lost.

I think eventually I will write a simple custom solution that helps me recall the reason and context of why I saved the article along with the key takeaways I got out of it once read.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've been downloading articles and longer form texts as PDFs and then just deleting them when I'm done. I could put them in directories when I finish them, but I rarely reference old articles (and they're easy to find again anyway). Standard Unix tools work pretty well for searching within files.

</comment><comment><USER49> I used to save articles to read in the future, but not anymore. If I want to read something, I can usually open HN or reddit and find something I'm interested in. However, I think this says more about the general low quality of articles published today (that they're not worth saving).

<comment><USER50> I'm usually using the 'save' button on reddit or the 'favorites' on HN. If it isn't on either of those sites, I'll then try to submit it to the appropriate sub and save that.

It works because I'm logged into reddit & HN on most of my devices.

That said, I rarely look back at the stuff I've saved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Consider the service, [http://www.lasso.net/go/index.jsp](http://www.lasso.net/go/index.jsp)

It is terrific for saving collections of content. It is even better if you want to publish a collection or collaborate privately.

</comment><comment><USER52> Safari Reading List. No need to keep tabs open and it's seamlessly synced and available on all my (iOS) devices. The bad thing about this is that's only on Apple devices and it's one of those things keeping me part of their ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER53> I use Trello for basically everything, so I've linked Pocket and IFTT to place an article on my Master Task Board in a list called "Articles to Read"

I usually don't read them steadily, I tend to sit down and clear the list in groupings when I've got time.

</comment><comment><USER54> I just hit "Send to..." in Firefox and send it to a different device than what I am currently using. If I'm using my tablet, I send it to the desktop. If I'm using my desktop, I send it to my tablet.

Eventually many things get tagged in Zotero anyhow.

</comment><comment><USER55> Pocket is pretty good. I use it as my reading queue, but it also lets you strip out all the cruft that most modern news sites and blogs tend to have. Pushbullet is also great if you just want a stripped down way to share links and small files across your devices.

</comment><comment><USER56> Every morning, anything remotely interesting in Feedly or HN goes straight to Pocket.

I mark at hour (at least) each day to look at the list. Usually more.

* news items: skim, share if needed, trash

* resources: skim, then save to color-coded Google Keep card if valuable.

* code: download & add a to-do item to Remember The Milk.

</comment><comment><USER57> All links that I want to read in the future I save in Notes on Macbook or iPhone. I know it looks a bit old-fashioned, but I haven't found a more convenient solution for myself yet. This list reminds me that there is always something to read.

</comment><comment><USER58> As I look at the header for this post, I see an "instapaper" link just to the right of the "7 comments" link. Click that and select a category I've previously set up. (Naturally, I have an Instapaper app on my Mac Air.)

</comment><comment><USER59> I have been using ggather.com for the past few months and liking it quite a bit, especially it's bookmarking and organization interface as well as performance, as compared to pinboard. The only thing I miss is having an android app.

</comment><comment><USER60> Email - searchable, taggable, no app needed per se, cross-device.

Agree with read now or never, but sometimes I still want to save it for weekend read.

To actually read something I found printing it out very helpful - you won't forget and can highlight stuff.

</comment><comment><USER61> I mostly send it to my kindle with the browser extension push to kindle. [http://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/](http://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/)

</comment><comment><USER62> Slack, just send a link to myself. If you are running MacOS, then you could use the Notes App. It works great, sync's content between devices, and you can password protect notes as well.

</comment><comment><USER63> A text file full of urls and book titles. When I want to pick something I open this file in Sublime and go `Edit -> Permute Lines -> Shuffle` and go with whatever is on top.

</comment><comment><USER64> I use Instapaper to actually read articles so I can highlight and annotate.

It Instapaper can't parse it, I'll save it to Pinboard or download as a PDF and highlight as I read in Preview.

</comment><comment><USER65> I simply use browser built-in bookmarks folder and place it in my bookmarks bar, just to keep it in front of me all the time to remember to read them later.

</comment><comment><USER66> I used to use instapaper, but I find that I almost never actually read the articles that I saved so I don't do it much anymore.

</comment><comment><USER67> A plain old text file synced across my devices with Dropbox. Dummy, but it works. ps. I use this approach for my notes in general

</comment><comment><USER68> I use a Trello board. I have my to-do today column, to-do soon, future project ideas, and a read at some point column.

</comment><comment><USER69> Tools like Diigo may be helpful for you not only to read, but annotate what you want to remember about everything by topic.

</comment><comment><USER70> Zotero - [https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)

</comment><comment><USER71> I save a list in vimwiki. Since it is a file, I can easily sync it across multiple systems/OSes using git.

</comment><comment><USER72> a) most of the stuff I read instantly, even if just skimming. If important, bookmark it.

b) looks interesting, very long - bookmark it.

c) semi-interesting and/or semi-long - browser tab, to be revisited this week. Sometimes next week.

I use Pinboard for my bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER73> Stick em in Evernote, 'till they fade away or become shitter reading.

</comment><comment><USER74> open tabs in chrome I never close... hundreds of them

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm gonna save this thread for later reading!

</comment><comment><USER76> Strategy #1:

\- Open in new tab

\- Repeat 5,000 times

\- Session is lost, all tabs are lost

Strategy #2:

\- Save to Pocket

\- Repeat 20,000 times

\- Never read any

</comment><comment><USER77> getpocket

Works on pc/mac works on mobile, Can extract content from web, Has content suggestions

</comment><comment><USER78> 3M Post-Its

</comment><comment> ur-whale Instapaper

</comment><comment><USER79> pinboard.in

used to use instapaper or pocket and just archive read articles to pinboard

</comment><comment><USER80> Pocket.

OneTab.

Those are my go-to options.

</comment><comment><USER81> Larder

</comment><comment><USER82> Pocket.

</comment><comment><USER83> I use Instapaper ; one action and keep article I wanna read later…

</comment><comment><USER84> Sorry to learn about these missing articles in Pocket. We'd like to try and help you track them down if we can. If you're interested, just click "Contact Pocket Support" at [https://help.getpocket.com/](https://help.getpocket.com/) and reference this post, and someone on our team will take it from there.

Regarding your other comment, Pocket offers basic search (title and URL) for free, and Pocket Premium includes full-text search so you can find text throughout all of the articles you've saved (with support for operators if you want to get fancy).

In addition, you can save any URL to Pocket, so feel free to try saving those Tweets or Facebook Posts. How they'll appear in Pocket depends on a few factors, though, including whether they're public or private.

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER85> Appreciate you responding to this thread. Now that you're here:

I love Pocket, but I feel the "Discover" feature could be greatly improved. I do find great articles in there, but you could spare your users some scroll fatigue by giving them more options on the Context Menu's "Hide This".

Right now the options aren't great, because when I hit "It's not Relevant to Me" on yet another Medium.com article about Gary Vee and "the hustle", it doesn't seem to change the number of low-quality recommendations I get on this topic from similarly low quality domains like "forbes.com" and "huffingtonpost.com". Letting users filter out certain domains (like how you can filter subreddits using RES extension) would be a great way to restrict the "Discover" feature to high quality stuff. That alongside the original unfiltered, content (called "Top Reads" for example) would give me the best of both worlds.

I hope you'll consider it!</comment></comment>


CastAR: the most versatile AR and VR system - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/castar-the-most-versatile-ar-and-vr-system

<comment><AUTHOR> I realize this is a little behind-the-times. I saw it mentioned by AceJohnny2 here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159395)

<comment><USER2> no need to repeat [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6546774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6546774) (100 days ago)</comment></comment>


What is a Start-up CEO's Real Job - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-early-stage-startup-ceos-real-job-noam-bardin

<comment><USER2> I asked this question to a MD from Techstars, their response was the following:

1) Keep the blood pumping - Ensure you have enough money in the bank to sustain the business as you grow or until you raise.

2) Attract top talent - Create a story so that you attract top employees who are willing to make your business succeed.

3) Shared Vision - Make sure each employee knows the overall objectives of the company so that they can execute without your direct oversight.

</comment><comment><USER3> Separating investors from their money?</comment>


French politician promises refuge for U.S. scientists in age of Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/04/french-politician-promises-refuge-for-u-s-scientists-in-age-of-trump/ <comment><USER2> Invitations are nice, but low taxes are more important.</comment>


Everything wrong with Silicon Valley culture in one gross presentation - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/4/19/11451092/alex-st-john-tech-recruiting-millennials-women <comment><USER2> SYAC: It is the Alex St. John presentation...which is years old and he didn't even live in Silicon Valley

</comment><comment><USER3> There seems to be a contradiction in this article. It is "everything wrong in Silicon Valley", but at the same time, it acknowledges that "tech culture is trying diligently to correct its overwhelmingly white male demographic and calling for diversity as a necessary infusion of fresh perspective".</comment>


Origami Studio – Design Prototyping - <AUTHOR> http://origami.design/ <comment><USER2> The thing I dislike about most prototyping tools -- and Origami is no exception -- is how so much emphasis is placed on polishing micro-interactions before the app flow is even in place. It's like trying to produce a movie by doing color correction before you even have a screenplay.

The mobile previews from Origami-like tools will show a refined "golden path" through the app with beautiful stock photos in every screen, but more boring use cases tend to be ignored. This tends to lead to usability problems down the road, when users discover those "dead ends" that the design unconsciously avoided.

It's also frustrating for programmers when you are handed a high-gloss prototype that has no relation to the actual platform UI classes and guidelines. Implementing all those fancy little triggered animations takes so much time that no one has time to peek at the iOS guidelines and notice how the design actually breaks 80% of Apple's rules.

Companies like Facebook have enough resources and actual UX competence to get these things right (eventually), but I've seen this happen too many times at smaller agencies and startups.

<comment><USER3> This is a strong argument for prototyping the workflow with index cards and pen; deliberately rough to deter people discussing whether it should be cornflower blue.

(I think there was a tool that offered this, XKCD style, but I've no idea what it was called)

<comment><USER4> Your comment reminded me of balsamiq: [https://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/](https://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/) is that the one?

Early on at my first appdev job, I was showing off all the changes I had made in functionality of the website. The response I got: "make the box bluer"

<comment><USER5> I think the way to go is to create a mood board / app style guide / (whatever you like to call it) that shows the design of elements. So you will have the design of buttons (all states), fonts, font sizes margins, and maybe even only one fake page design.

When you present this next to the interaction design customers can understand what is going on and most can imagine what the end product is going to look like.

And imho it's also a managers job to guide the customer away from (for that moment) distracting remarks like 'make the box bluer'. You can simple fix this by saying something like "Ok, we will note your remark about the color".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This piece of software is amazing. Great job on this, Facebook! And thanks a lot for open sourcing it. I'd easily have paid a lot of money for this. I was actually looking into Flinto before seeing this. Thanks!

<comment><USER7> I'm not seeing a license anywhere. What gives the impression that it's open source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm really curious how this was built. Quartz Composer got a lot of things right, but it's showing it's age. Was this rebuilt from the ground up?

<comment><USER9> Engineer on Origami here: Yeah, it's rewritten from scratch as a native mac app in ObjC++. Happy to answer any question you have :D

<comment><USER10> This is, quite simply, incredible. My team was looking for something to replace Pixate even before Google announced they were shutting it down, and just having watched the first tutorial, it feels like we're done looking.

I feel silly jumping to a nitpick at this point, but I see one obstacle for my team: There doesn't seem to be a way to enter custom screen sizes, apart from eyeballing it with the resizable window setting (we're designing for a custom- built Android device). That's probably not enough to stop us from using it, but it would be great to have the option.

<comment><USER11> custom devices? Elsewhere in the thread this was posted... might be what you're looking for. [http://origami.design/documentation/workflow/CustomDevices.h...](http://origami.design/documentation/workflow/CustomDevices.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This has popped up as a recommendation for me several times. Each time I spent like 2 minutes looking for non-app examples. Is Origami phone app only, or can you prototype browser/desktop experiences as well?

<comment><USER13> [http://origami.design/tutorials/getting- started/Previewing-a...](http://origami.design/tutorials/getting- started/Previewing-and-Sharing.html#content) shows templates for desktop :)

<comment><USER14> to use these "templates", add the "browser chrome" patch to your document [https://facebook.github.io/origami/documentation/patches/Bro...](https://facebook.github.io/origami/documentation/patches/Browser- Chrome.html)

<comment><USER14> It's a little confusing because some of the official example files don't use the "Browser Chrome" patches and instead implement that content with multiple "Chrome" layers. Just delete those if you are starting from one of the tutorial files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> i really wonder why facebook did not build something cross platform .. maybe using something like Electron to build something like Figma.com

It would have been brilliant for Linux desktop users.

<comment><USER16> It's pretty clear that they are targeting designers with this product, and that audience is very largely on macOS.

<comment><USER15> That is an unfortunate case of chicken-and-egg.

And even more so, when you look at Facebook pushing education and internet.org in developing countries.

India uses Linux much more than the Mac.

<comment><USER16> Education and internet.org don't really have anything to do with this product.

<comment><USER15> not directly.. and I also realize I dont have any right to angst in this case as well.

It would have been so much better to have a cross platform solution though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Origami looks interesting but, I just deleted my Facebook account. I got into a tat with some Facebook Product Designers in a FB Design Group, went to bed, woke up, and discovered I was kicked from the group (couldn't even see the page any longer). I would rather not associate myself with products where the attitude is: Listen to what we say - otherwise, we will drag your name through the coals and ban you.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really wish there was a prototyping tool that could serve as a learning tool to jump from being a designer to a programmer.

The problem with tools like Origami (and Framer.js) is that you need to know coding and many designers just don't know it. Thus, they stick with easier solutions like Principle. It would be great if a tool could start off looking like Sketch and slowly become Xcode as I learn more features and become more experienced.

<comment><USER2> Try Neonto?

[https://neonto.com](https://neonto.com)

It is essentially a bridge from designs into Xcode and Android Studio. There's a Sketch import plugin too that preserves elements: [https://neonto.com/sketch](https://neonto.com/sketch)

<comment><USER19> wow.. looks too good to be true!

Ive been searching for something like this..and never heard of this!

Thanks a bunch!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great, another mac-only prototyping tool.

</comment><comment><USER21> This looks like a very powerful tool just by browsing through the examples for few minutes on the site. Minor issue with the documentation, however, is that there seems to be issues with pages of the site rendering incorrectly on both Safari and Chrome on the iPhone.

[http://imgur.com/PRDR2j1](http://imgur.com/PRDR2j1)

<comment><USER9> Hey, looking into it. I tried visiting [http://origami.design/examples](http://origami.design/examples) on my phone but it looks fine to me. Try refreshing?

<comment><USER21> Nope, refreshing doesn't seem to help. examples seems ok but [http://origami.design/learn](http://origami.design/learn) seems to have the issue like the screenshot I attached above.

<comment><USER21> [edit] the link that seems to have issues is: [http://origami.design/tutorials/](http://origami.design/tutorials/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This looks cool... but I have to admit I was a twinge disappointed it wasn't software for designing paper-folding origami. :-)

</comment><comment><USER23> Brilliant! Flow programming applied to ui state & design.

Edit: And by "Flow programming" I mean something like : [http://noflojs.org/](http://noflojs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER24> The critical issue with prototyping apps is that you're designing for a mythical mobile platform only semi-related to the main two. As such, you end up mastering code, tricks, and techniques for a fake platform when you could've been learning practical fundamentals of UI design directly in Xcode or Android Studio... or both!

</comment><comment><USER25> It is Mac only. If you don't have one, no need to spend time following the link

<comment><USER26> That's just not true.

<comment><USER27> Would you spend money buying a Mac just for this software?

<comment><USER28> Maybe a virtual-machine ?

<comment><USER29> Installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the EULA. Sure, Apple don't seem to care about it at the moment, but it's still technically something you can be sued over.

Downloading macOS in the first place is also a violation of copyright law if you don't own either a Mac or a copy of OS X 10.7. It's also probably a violation of the Mac App Store TOS if you don't own a Mac, which I guess could lead to getting kicked out of the Apple Developer Program if they ever start cracking down on Hackintoshes.

<comment><USER30> Sierra works alright in VMware, even w/ design apps.

The showstopper for most is that you can't really use anything > a 1080p monitor w/o squinting, b/c of some peculiarity with macOS ui scaling.

<comment><USER29> I do apologise - looks like the big issues have actually been fixed since I last tried this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For anyone who's used both, how does this compare to Sketch for design and prototyping work?

<comment><USER32> Complement is a better word than compare. Do your mockups in sketch, copy- paste them into origami, then use origami to test user interactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is it going to be open source by any chance ?

</comment><comment><USER34> Another tool from FB that they believe everyone needs. However, it's just useful for FB. :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Anyone have experience with how Origami compares against InVision?

<comment><USER8> Invision is great for prototyping a general work flow, how the user moves from screen to screen, but it's not designed around building individual interactions. You upload a bunch of screenshots and create clickable areas that link to another screenshots with some basic transitions. Origami is designed around building out individual interactions and transitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> haha, from the title I thought this was for prototyping origami designs. It still looks awesome though!

</comment><comment><USER37> Is Origami Studio Open Source?</comment>


Ask HN: How would you build YC from scratch today? - <AUTHOR> Imagine YC didn't exist today, and you just had the idea to build it.<p>How would you build it differently than the YC we know today? <comment><USER2> Accelerators are a bubble now, but only because YC has sucked up all the talent. It's hard to imagine a what-if scenario, especially since YC has paved the way.

But as someone from a nation relatively low in talent and funding, what I'd like to do is a "bottom feeder" accelerator. Instead of trying to build unicorns, we'd aim for ideas that are too small for VCs. Ideas that can take $10k and aim for a $50k exit.

This would reduce the pressure on trying to build unicorns, and instead encourage them to build small, tight communities and good service, which ironically gives them resistance vs giant corporates.

It would probably cover things like Evernote, Trello, Slack, Zenefits, CRMs - hyperfocused small ideas that don't need a lot of talent to get off the ground, can hit a global market at low cost.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/AlexMasmej/status/1181560926882779136](https://twitter.com/AlexMasmej/status/1181560926882779136)</comment>


Petition to Honor Robert Ebeling, Who Tried to Stop the Challenger Launch - <AUTHOR> https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/honor-engineer-robert-ebeling-and-his-colleagues-warning-their-employers-and-nasa-about-challenger-crash <comment><AUTHOR> Let's ask the US Administration to confer some kind of honor on Robert Ebeling, the engineer at Thiokol who spoke up right before the space shuttle Challenger the night before its ill-fated launch.

Please click the link to sign the petition.

We know Thiokol and NASA went ahead in spite of his warning, and we know how well that worked out.

Recently it has come out that he was isolated by his company and colleagues after he spoke up.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/01/28/464744781/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still- blames-himself)

Why honor him? Out of respect for him, and respect for engineers and quality- assurance people everywhere. Sometimes it stinks to be right, but part of engineering is being right and saying so.

<comment><USER2> > Why honor him?

Another reason: encouraging more people to speak up when they see a problem.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's unfortunate that's not working out so well for Snowden right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great effort. I'm not American, but the story of Ebeling (and others at Morton-Thiokol) is taught in engineering schools throughout the world.

I saw there was a great public reaction to the recent NPR article, with an outpouring of sympathy for Ebeling. [http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/02/25/466555217/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/02/25/466555217/your-letters-helped-challenger-shuttle-engineer- shed-30-years-of-guilt)

</comment><comment><USER5> It is good to see a petition that is actually within the power of the executive branch rather than being a legislative power.

</comment><comment><USER6> My father was working at NASA when Challenger was lost, and I work there now. I'm happy to sign this petition.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's heart breaking he spent so long without hearing confirmation from those above. I'm happy in the end he got the closure he needed.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think we need this petition. The current and last administration have always honored and protected whistleblowers. It's not like they would take their passports and run them out of the country or anything.

</comment><comment><USER9> This was a no brainer. Only 32 signatures? We engineers can do better!</comment>


Scientists Have Designed Tiny Robots That Can Clean Your Teeth - <AUTHOR> https://curiosity.com/topics/meditation-and-yoga-might-just-inflate-your-ego-according-to-a-study-curiosity/ <comment> non-entity Wrong link?

<comment><USER2> Yeah I know, now they got me searching google for tiny teeth cleaning robots.

Here! [https://curiosity.com/topics/scientists-have-designed- tiny-r...](https://curiosity.com/topics/scientists-have-designed-tiny-robots- that-can-clean-your-teeth-curiosity/)

> _Scientists Have Designed Tiny Robots That Can Clean Your Teeth_</comment></comment>


DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/20/digitalocean-raises-100m-in-debt-as-it-scales-towards-revenue-of-300m-profitability/ <comment><USER2> This article had more detail and substance than I usually find on TechCrunch or startup coverage in general. I do want to point out two things that bothered me in the article:

1\. Using the word "raise" when talking about financing via debt seems inappropriate and very start-upy. This is a low cost of capital line of credit, is it not (due to their infrastructure and broad customer base)?

2\. Why in the world are statements like this not met with scorn? _"... scale to $1 billion in revenue in the next five years, and it will become free cash flow profitable (something the CEO also referred to, loosely, as profitability) in the next two."_

On point #2 - thats NOT profitability. Thats called "Cash Flow Positive", and its an incredible achievement, but definitions matter. In my opinion, "cash flow profitable" isn't a real thing (its "cash flow positive"), but the real issue is - cash flow positive ≠ profitability.

 _Edit: On why definitions matter, recall WeWork "Community Adjusted EBITDA"._

 _Edit #2: The Author knows that the CEO is making stuff up, which is why this bothers me. It's evident by the parenthetical disclaimer, "...(something the CEO also referred to, loosely, as profitability)".... Then call the CEO out, Alex Wilhelm (author), if you think its BS!_

<comment><USER3> Regarding point #2, many in the finance world (which I work in) consider cash flow positive a better representation of actual profitability than the actual net profit/loss reported on the P&L. In short, cash flow shows if the actual core business is bringing in money or losing money, while the net profit includes a lot of "noise" (probably not the best word to use but can't think of how to phrase this). For example, depreciation is an expense reported on the P&L but the company isn't actually moving money out of their accounts to pay someone for depreciation. This is known as a non-cash expense and effects the overall net profit reported on the P&L. Also, companies can be motivated to show 0 or negative profit on the P&L to avoid paying corporate tax. Amazon was notorious for this as any profit they had, they would re-invest back into the business.

Whenever I look at the profitability of the company, I don't look at the P&L number but jump to the cash flow statement and look at Net Cash Flows from Operating Activities (the first of three). First, I look if this positive, and second, if it is growing over time.

Hope this helps

<comment><USER4> Not counting depreciation as part of your loss in a business is about like all of the Uber drivers who don't take into account the wear and tear on their cars when calculating how much money they are making. Depreciation is a real expense. If you depreciate an asset down from $1000 to $0 in 3 years, you're accounting for the fact that in three years you are going to have to replace it.

There is a reason we have GAAP, to keep crap like WeWork's "Community Adjusted Ebitda" and Uber from saying that their financials _really_ aren't as bad as they look if you ignore a dozen expenses.

<comment><USER5> Imagine you're a growing startup, and you have a yearly recurring investment (you're growing, after all!) of $1000 that's linearly depreciated over 5 years.

Let's say your income is 1100$ each year.

Your profit, according to accounting, would be 900$ for the first year, counting only $200 of the investment, then for the following years you'll see a profit of $700, $500, $300, and $100, as the investments accumulate. Oh no! A downward trend!

The cash flow, however, will simply show $100 profit each year.

Which one is more representative of the growing business with recurring investments?

<comment><USER6> In year one, you're generating $1100 of income with $1000 of capital invested (that will last 5 years).

By year five, you're generating $1100 of income with $5000 of capital invested (that will require $1000 each year to keep up).

You're _way_ better off in year one here, so it seems the GAAP approach is actually showing the decline accurately. This isn't a growing startup, it's a startup needing more equipment to make the same money each year.

<comment><USER5> You're right, growing capital but not growing income... I made a poor example.

(Imagining a bottom pricing scenario, while keeping a positive cashflow.)

Good point. At year 6 this logic breaks down. (Then again, no longer a 'startup' at that point.) Better hope the replacement equipment is double worth it's money. :)

Should make some spreadsheets with more scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have some personal stuff hosted on DO. I really like their options, service, their branding, UX/UI, etc...but they are kind of in a weird spot. Halfway between being good for cheap personal projets, and being good for enterprise.

If I want a simple VPS there are cheaper options.

If I am an enterprise spending millions/year on cloud infra I am probably only looking at AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.

How does DO get out of this spot? I want them to succeed and I will continue to support them as the big guys need the competition, but I fail to see how they compete against the likes of Amazon without undercutting significantly...and that won't bring profits. I think the margins on cloud infra is already pretty thin.

<comment><USER8> You hit the nail on the head, we are best for SMBs and teams that want to get things done quickly and don't need the hyperscale and added complexity of AWS. Our focus has always been on simplicity and as our customer needs and our own internal needs have grown we've added additional products to continue to allow customers to scale with us. We launched with just Droplets in 2012 and have since added block storage, Spaces object storage, load balancing, kubernetes, managed databases, firewalls, and more.

Our goal isn't to be bigger than AWS or Google, but simply to provide a great service to our customers and to continue to expand our offering as those needs grow.

<comment><USER9> What I really wish for is a simple way of running docker containers (like AWS Fargate, or at least ECS), because I want to run docker containers across multiple droplets, but I don't want the full complexity of Kubernetes. Also something akin to auto-scaling groups. If DO had those, I'd use it a whole lot more than I do (currently I only spend use approx. $140/month on DO).

<comment><USER10> I just led a migration for my small team from Zeit Now to Render ([https://render.com/](https://render.com/)). It has filled this need pretty well. There are some features that I wish existed but overall the simplicity has been great for our use case. They do not have auto-scaling but it's planned ([https://feedback.render.com/features/p/autoscaling](https://feedback.render.com/features/p/autoscaling)).

<comment><USER11> How is Render different from Heroku? It seems like a slightly more expensive than Heroku with slightly fewer features?

<comment><USER12> Render is more flexible than Heroku: you can host apps that rely on disks (like Elasticsearch and MySQL), private services, cron jobs, and of course free static sites. You also get automatic zero downtime deploys, health checks and small but handy features like HTTP/2 and automatic HTTP->HTTPS redirects.

It's considerably less expensive as your application scales: a webapp that needs 3GB RAM costs $50/month on Render; on Heroku you'll pay $250/month for 2.5GB RAM, and $500/month for the next tier (14GB RAM).

And you get free chat support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Spruill told TechCrunch that DigitalOcean will scale to $1 billion in revenue in the next five years, and it will become free cash flow profitable (something the CEO also referred to, loosely, as profitability) in the next two."

I find this to be incredible. DO is not a speculative e-business ... they are not a social network. They are the proverbial sellers of picks and shovels during the gold rush:

"The way to get rich during the gold rush isn't mining gold - it's selling the picks and shovels."

Here is a pick and shovel seller that can't make a profit and is going into debt ...

<comment><USER14> Did they miss their window? Would this business make more sense during the 2001 dot-com craze? Are startups currently afraid to go with anyone who isn't AWS/GCE/Azure because they understand the cost of moving platforms is high?

<comment><USER15> No. Compare Linode and DigitalOcean. Linode bootstrapped, took very few financial instruments to aid the journey, had a few missteps along the way, completely reinvented the entire business more than once, and still serves a niche that makes them a successful (and profitable, as in real profitable, not imaginary profitable) company. Their margins are quite good. Slicehost had a solid business when Rackspace bought them, too, despite Rackspace subsequently burying that business in their wandering-through-tech mass grave.

DigitalOcean, on the other hand, took a Sand Hill approach and is throwing money at becoming an AWS unicorn without realizing they are never going to be AWS. Read this carefully, DO: you will never, ever, _ever_ be AWS. Full stop. You are not in the conversation, nor is Linode, nor is prgmr (but lsc knows that), nor is Vultr, and so on, and so on. Ask IBM about trying to take on AWS.

DigitalOcean is an incredible waste of capital and appears almost as if they didn't bother to look at Linode's story at all. The companies are nearly identical behind the scenes and are pursuing the exact same addressable market, but one is a VC darling intent on burning capital on a _completely_ solved problem and therefore gets VC ecosystem attention and expands to fill that attention. Seriously, you can address this market with Excel and some Python scripts; I exaggerate, but not much. The amount of money DigitalOcean spends given my intimate familiarity with the problem space has been baffling to me for the last decade.

DigitalOcean should buy Linode with this debt so the Linode people can come in and fire the right people at DO and shed about seven hundred pounds of weight. When, not if, when DigitalOcean collapses, Linode will continue on and enjoy a sudden inflow of DO's market share. Linode long predates DO and will postdate them, too.

I have a poor opinion of Linode in a lot of ways, by the way, so.

<comment><USER8> Our original business was bootstrapped with no outside investment so we know that growth model very well. In fact that bootstrapping allowed us to build DigitalOcean when no VCs were interested in funding us by self-funding through the profits from our original business.

The problem with the approach you detailed is that it is based on growth rate. If you have more customers coming to you than you have cash on hand to buy servers, you will be forced to turn customers away.

So if you are growing rapidly you will need outside investment, whether equity or debt, in order to grow the business.

In our case we raised equity that helped us to secure additional debt terms and also due to our high growth after product market fit we also needed additional cash to continue to build out our operations.

I'm a fan of bootstrapping businesses and not raising outside capital unless it is necessary, but in our case the choice was to raise capital or turn away customers.

<comment><USER15> I'll reiterate the margins. Based on your account, my suspicion is only reinforced, actually: if you had big enough capacity problems to need a $3 million round to buy gear at the size you were in 2013, I'm mystified that your margins were that low. Was that the $10/month decision biting you (notice Linode waited) or the far bigger headcount? How far Linode got on basically two technical employees, including the founder driving gear to the datacenter in the back of his Ridgeline, would seemingly surprise you, as would when the revenue was sufficient to sustain ongoing server spend. Linode ran out of capacity ALL THE TIME. It's a HUGE market. Turning away a customer is not fatal in the slightest.

One server, three months, paid off. Two months profit, next server. Linode _leased_ in the beginning! I'm not arrogant enough to assume I could do it better, but I do know the technical side very well, and with an American Express and a decent funnel of people you know you can be profitable in under a year at this. The fundamentals of what is basically a rack-and-stack game, and what is possible with $400 million of capital... it just doesn't align with how I'd expect a VPS provider to operate, but you've convinced the checkbooks to keep it going, I guess.

I actually compare DO and Linode's approach all the time as an example of VC methodology versus patience. The $400 million raise game is not appropriate for the VPS space. It's a market literally defined by bootstrappers.

If you hit $1 billion ARR in that market, by the way, I'll shut up. Knowing what I know about the market, that sounds about as likely as DigitalOcean colonizing Mars, but I'll applaud you if you do it.

<comment><USER8> I apologize. I'm confused - is the point that we should have raised less debt? Or not used debt?

Linode was founded in 2003 and grew to $100MM in revenue in 16 years.

DigitalOcean was founded in 2011 and launched in 2012 and grew to $250MM in revenue in 7 years.

Stands to reason we would need more money over a shorter period of time to achieve that.

The $3MM seed round wasn't used to buy equipment but to fund the business. It improved our balance sheet which allowed us to obtain more leases from vendors which were getting worried about how much exposure they had to us without much of a financial history.

Secondly, we went from signing up 5 customers a day to 250 customers a day after product market fit. When we signed up 5 customers a day I could do most of the customer support myself along with one employee and some backstop from our original company. But at 250 customers signing up every day we obviously needed a dedicated support team, so there were immediate necessities to hiring more people as we went from an "idea/product" to a complete company. We didn't need to hire one more support person, we needed to hire an entire support team over night so that we could have 24/7/365 coverage. Again hard to do that if you don't have capital available to pay salaries. And that's just one team/function of the company that underwent tremendous stress pre and post product market fit.

As for the financial health of the business:

The debt terms require repayment as you yourself know. Whether you use leases or have a single larger structure like debt, either way this isn't "burn" money. You need to repay it with interest.

With an equity raise you can "burn" the money because you never have to repay it, as investors received stock in exchange for the funds.

When you look at the equity side of the business we have raised a total of $123MM to date and the last raise was in July 2015. We haven't raised any outside equity capital to fund the business since then.

Meaning that we are capital efficient and not losing $50MM/yr or some outrageous amount. Otherwise we would have been forced to raise an additional round of funding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does DO still disconnect your droplet from the Internet for three hours if you get DDoSed?

That's what made me switch from DO to AWS a few years ago. I used my droplet as an IRC bouncer to hide my home IP address. I'm an op in an IRC channel and someone started spamming racial slurs, so I banned them. They responded with a DDoS. I could tell my connection was a bit slow, but nothing crashed, but then it dropped offline and I got an e-mail from DO saying they're taking my droplet offline to protect their network.

Made me realize that I could never use them for any sort of game server, since the skids love to fire up LOIC whenever they get upset.

<comment><USER17> Did you continue to get DDoS after moving to AWS? I figure that AWS would take similar steps if you are not using Shield or one of their other products that would help mitigation.

I'd like to know if anyone has experience there.

<comment><USER18> All instances use shield by default IIRC.

<comment><USER19> There are two levels of AWS Shield, "Standard" and "Advanced". You are correct that all instances receive "Standard" protection from Shield by default.

[https://aws.amazon.com/shield/](https://aws.amazon.com/shield/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Raising $100M in debt is the same as borrowing $100M, right?

<comment><USER21> Those are two ways to phrase the same thought, yes, but there are things about raising corporate debt which don't necessarily line up 1:1 with expectations consumers might have about borrowing money.

One example, which is de rigeur for raising debt via bond issuance or for very large loans from banks, is "covenants" (restrictions on your future behavior for the duration the debt is in place), which may foreclose your ability to do things you'd otherwise want to do or may cause those things to become more costly than you'd otherwise expect them to be.

A few trivial examples of covenants: "Here's $50 million, but if you ever have less than $5 million in the bank, you're in default." or "Here's $50 million, but if your net cash burn ever exceeds $5 million in a quarter, you're in default." or "Here's $50 million, but if you need any more money, it has to come from us at whatever pricing we decide to make available. If you issue debt or equity elsewhere, you're in default."

You very urgently do not want to default.

One can imagine other features. Historically, the downside protections for debt investors in startups were _extremely_ toothy [0]. This is one reason startups have been askance about raising debt historically. (Another reason is that VCs, who invest to get equity, tell founders "Please don't get money from my competitors", generally not in exactly those words.)

[0] This is a polite way to say "They routinely were written to wipe out all common equityholders like e.g. employees and founders."

<comment><USER22> Is there a hypothetical situation where I could broker a deal where some new investor with extremely deep pockets makes that loan go away and gives me extra money all in one transaction?

'default' means 'pay us back now or give us your collateral', right?

<comment><USER21> You might or might not be allowed to do that.

US consumers generally expect there to be no pre-payment penalty. That isn't a universal feature of all loans. As to particular features of particular loans ask the really expensive lawyers or investment bankers who negotiated them, but plausibly "I owe you $45M; here's a new equity investor; we're done after the wire clears right." might lead to "We agree you owe us $60M."

<comment><USER22> I remember when I was just out of college, I was warned that there was such a thing as a mortgage that did not allow for extra payments, and that you should check for that when applying.

If you couldn't, or even if you did the payment incorrectly, anything extra would just be treated as if you sent your payment in for the subsequent month a little early. I've heard of the latter happening to friends, but I've never seen or heard of the former.

<comment><USER23> Many loans you have to be careful that you don't pay them like that. If you don't specify that you're paying down principal with the extra, it just goes toward next month's payment. So next month you might only owe $50 instead of $500.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I host my websites on DO. Their UI and API is really cool. Linode and Scaleway both lost my data. DO is far more reliable than Linode and scale way. It's always good to have options to choose from. I hope they succeed.

Companies like Netlify, Zeit and Heroku are also doing good but I don't see any Enterprise applications for such services.

One thing I especially like about DO is that they are not stagnant in terms of features. They continuously keep adding new features.

<comment><USER25> How did Linode and Scaleway lose your data?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> To raise a material amount of debt, lenders generally require there to be collateralized physical assets against that debt. Compare that to equity financing which firms can use on literally anything (eg. marketing spend, hiring, etc).

So my guess is the $100M is going to go towards expanding their data centers in some way. We might see new regions from DO in the coming years or additional server types/services that run on top of those new servers.

<comment><USER2> The first part of your comment I'd say is accurate, but why would they have to spend a meaningful part of the $100 mil debt on infrastructure?

DO likely collateralized their existing infrastructure to get the $100 mil line of credit/debt, but will spend the $100 mil on other things in addition to some infrastructure (as the article suggested)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used them for my private VPSes but they became too big and business-like.

I moved to Scaleway now, it's still in a much earlier stage, cheaper and with unlimited bandwidth. I like the way you can still talk directly to their guys on slack to ask questions. However they're becoming big too. I hope they'll still love us and I don't have to move again soon :)

<comment><USER28> What's your experience with the service? I'm with Linode at the moment, primarily because DO doesn't have an Aussie region. Seems like Scaleway is much better value for money; however reviews on Reddit don't seem favourable.

<comment><USER29> Try binarylane if you're in aus

<comment><USER30> BinaryLane are amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A lot of complains here but I don't understand why is that worse than raising the same amount of money from VC ?

<comment><USER32> A VC does the deal in exchange of a part of the company. They will make their money once you exit, either by becoming public, or by an acquisition. The deal can be different and could certainly include some kind of repayment, but that's not the norm for a VC deal.

A loan has to be repaid though, whether the company exit or not. The terms are fixed and you need to pay them. This can be quite hard when you get a few bad months, while a VC will just get sad if that happens.

<comment><USER33> Assuming a successful outcome, VC deals are actually more expensive. They cost founders and common holders much more in potential returns. Don't forget about the dividends associated with preferred shares. Those shares are basically earning interest, just like debt.

Given that nobody expects to fail, why wouldn't a company do debt _if_ they can afford it and are credit worthy?

And the bad outcome for both is the same: the company goes broke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> DigitalOcean has always had loads of debt, it's how you build such a capex heavy business, you use lease lines and credit.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if they would have if they didn't have to cut prices to compete with Vultr.

<comment><USER35> First time I'm hearing of Vultr...they look like a carbon copy of DO. What does Vultr have that they don't?

<comment><USER36> > What does Vultr have that they don't?

According to multiple HN users, a more unreliable (internal) network.

<comment><USER23> Ironically I moved from DO to Vultr because their network was more reliable

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Echoing a lot of other comments here. I don't get why DigitalOcean exists. I would never use them over AWS, GCP, or Azure. They can't beat anyone on cost or functionality. I'm not convinced on simplicity. The other platforms aren't that difficult to use and for some you have to deal with regardless. For example, if you want to use Google Maps, then you need to use GCP to get access to the API. Since you're already in there, it's not much further to setup a VPS.

<comment><USER38> I'm a DO customer. I tried to figure out what running a windows server would cost on Azure once (since DO doesn't provide windows). I didn't manage to figure it out after like 20 minutes, and the complexity was just mind blowing. I literally got a bit of a shock, and felt pretty stupid that I couldn't figure out such a simple thing. The thought going through my head was something like "does people actually use this?". So that's a radically different perspective for you :)

<comment><USER37> I haven't used Azure much. But because it's Microsoft, it's going to be a default option for a lot of customers who are entrenched in the MS world.

AWS is complex also, but I remember when you're only option to launch an EC2 instance was through the command line. And it's still easier to figure out than most of my tech stack. Not that I need to be adding anything with needless complexity.

I do actually like DigitalOcean, but in an AWS / GCP / Azure world I feel it's best to learn one of those well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> DigitalOcean has raised a total of $305.4M in funding over 11 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Dec 27, 2018 from a Secondary Market round. [1]

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/digitalocean#section...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/digitalocean#section- funding-rounds)

<comment><USER8> Crunchbase lumps together everything including debt as funding. DigitalOcean raised $123MM in equity and the last raise was an $83MM Series B led by Access in 2015. There hasn't been a need since to raise equity investment and instead debt is being used to continue to grow the business and expand our infrastructure footprint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I prefer Linode. Same level of service, if not better and cheaper. Linode does 100 million in revenue and as far as I can tell they aren't borrowing against their future to get it.

<comment><USER41> My guess is that a company like Linode with 100 million in revenue is using lines of credit to make large purchases of servers that will pay off over time as their revenue grows. I'm not sure what's scary about D.O. borrowing 1/3 of this year's revenue to continue growing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What happens when one of these mini-cloud providers like DO, Linode, and Vultr folds?

What are the consequences as a customer?

Does all your data just evaporate into the aether?

<comment><USER43> Yes, which is why no matter who your provider is, you should have an off-site backup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> What stopped me from using DO is that they will null your server IP address if the server got DDOS. I never heart aws/gcp did this.

</comment><comment><USER45> I was at fireside chat with the DigitalOcean CEO. Not once did he mention this. Very interesting though. I have always thought that debt would be the only way they grow and remain relevant in a crowded cloud space.

</comment><comment><USER46> My company recently moved all their hosting to DO and we couldn't be happier. It's some of the best hosting we've ever had, especially their Spaces product.

</comment><comment><USER47> What is their current valuation? I wondered if google or microsoft would buy them, amazon can't due to anti-trust issues, but the others might be able to.

<comment><USER48> I'm interested to hear how the reasoning is behind thinking that Amazon would be hit by any anti-trust issues and not Google or Microsoft. As far as I know, all three of them are in the cloud/hosting business.

<comment><USER49> Google and Microsoft don't have a dominant market position in cloud hosting; and their other dominant positions don't seem to be impacting the cloud marketplace (well, maybe Microsoft is doing some tying)

<comment><USER50> Google and Microsoft actually do have dominant positions in cloud hosting, just not in the "traditional" sense of webhosting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I was reminded about the "debt is coming" post that was shared a couple of weeks back. This is a good example of that, I think.

<comment><USER52> It seems from what I've read here that digitalocean has always carried relatively higher debt than other, similar companies. It might not be a good example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Didn't they just have layoffs recently?

<comment><USER46> For restructuring purposes.

<comment><USER54> Isn't that every layoff?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I don't see anything about the structure of the debt. Wish we could see more details.

</comment><comment><USER56> I love DO justo no GPUs

</comment><comment><USER57> This company has always been a joke.

<comment><USER46> No.</comment></comment>


Craig Federighi & Dan Riccio Join Apple's Executive Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/08/27Craig-Federighi-Apples-Vice-President-of-Mac-Software-Engineering-Dan-Riccio-Apples-Vice-President-of-Hardware-Engineering-Join-Apples-Executive-Team-as-Senior-Vice-Presidents.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting bit:

      > Apple also announced that Bob Mansfield,
      > who announced his retirement in June, will
      > remain at Apple. Mansfield will work on
      > future products, reporting to Tim Cook.</comment>


Babar: A Small Language for Speech Acts Inspired by McCarthy's Elephant - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gigasquid/babar/blob/master/README.md

<comment><USER2> This looks pretty awesome but I am truly interested in its' real-world applications? Writing chat bots perhaps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Carin Meier was trying to fly drones with it:

[http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2014/02/11/carin-meier- cognic...](http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2014/02/11/carin-meier-cognicast- episode-049)</comment></comment>


3D Dimensional Network and Security Operations Center with Built in AI Assistant - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/3data_3data-analytics-activity-6693533020328210432-EYyD <comment><AUTHOR> Check out what 3data.io is cooking up, disrupting the cyber security and IT world with a 3D dimensional data platform with built in AI for visualizing and interacting with your networking and security data.</comment>


Show HN: RapGenius API as a Service - <AUTHOR> http://genius-api.com/

<comment><USER2> Totally not working, but if you want to make an AngularJS service that accesses the data check this out.

angularjsservices.com

I added the genius-api to the music section (for rap genius).</comment>


A picture book written in C code - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/914595512/a-day-in-code <comment><USER2> If this baby doesn't SIGSEGV or SIGBUS, I'm not getting it.

I thought the artwork was going to be ascii images made with C programs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was hoping the pictures would be procedurally generated by the c code</comment>


Electric cars grab 44% market share in Norway in January - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-electric-norway/electric-cars-grab-44-market-share-in-norway-in-january-idUSKBN1ZX27U <comment><USER2> Yes Norway has invested in public charging infrastructure, has tax incentives that penalize ICE's, cheap plentiful renewable energy, etc. etc. etc.

But still, seeing stats like this shows the electrification of transportation can be done if a country makes it a priority. The technology is different, not inferior.

In the US where infrastructure investment to create a conducive environment is shouted down in favor of "well, customers aren't demanding this so we're not going to build this", what's promising is this Sunday was the Superbowl of the EV ads:

\- GM Hummer EV teaser: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t6EPPJHaCtw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t6EPPJHaCtw)

\- Audi E-Tron: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WvEAklsAAts](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WvEAklsAAts)

\- Porsche Taycan: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=92sXWVxRr0g](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=92sXWVxRr0g)

\- (Apparently some markets also saw a Mach-E ad)

When car companies are finally spending millions on their EV offerings at one of the largest automotive advertising debutant balls, sentiment is beginning to change.

<comment><USER3> > has tax incentives that penalize ICE's

You can seriously distort the competitive landscape if you are willing to put a 100% tax on one of the alternatives. A lot can be achieved with unlimited amounts of other people's money.

<comment><USER2> I completely agree -- the competitive landscape gets seriously distorted when you play with the tax code and shift costs onto someone else:

[https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel- subs...](https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a- closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs)

<comment><USER3> Oil is the lifeblood of the US economy.

In times of economic recession, we often blame the government and get rid of them.

We've clearly signaled with our voting patterns what we want and government has delivered on it - a reliable supply of oil to power the economy. Hence subsidies.

On the other side the Norwegian government has managed to implement the world's highest tax on ICE cars and survive re-election so presumably that's what the electorate wants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those unaware, ICE vehicles are taxed at something like 100%+ their sale value. Whereas electric vehicles don't pay that and don't pay tolls and many other fees that are common in Norway.

It's not a surprise that electric is taking over there. They're incredibly cheap compared to ICE.

<comment><USER5> Is it actually higher than Singapore's at least 100% import tax? Granted, Singapore charges that tax for both petrol and electric cars.

[https://www.dollarsandsense.sg/no-nonsense-explanation-on- wh...](https://www.dollarsandsense.sg/no-nonsense-explanation-on-why-cars-in- singapore-are-so-expensive/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 2015: A Chevrolet Camaro (3.6 litre V6) is over 156,000 dollars here in Norway (if I were to import). Why?

        Value-added tax = 9,000 dollars
        Tax for the weight of the car = 15,000 dollars
        Engine tax (horepowers mostly) = 27,000 dollars
        CO2 tax = 72,000 dollars
        N0x-tax (nitrogen oxide) = 1000 dollars
        First-time registration (to get license plates, don't know what this is called in us) = 115,000 dollars
        In case you want-to-scrap-your-car-tax = 400 dollars

Total taxes for a Chevrolet Camaro V6? 125,000 dollars.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/2iql6h/how_and_why_ca...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/2iql6h/how_and_why_cars_are_expensive_in_norway_tax/)

<comment><USER6> $72k co2 tax! That's epic, _this_ is how you deprecate ICE vehicles.

<comment><USER3> That's a specific car but if you are interested you can use the government calculator and do your own numbers:

[https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/duties/cars-and- other-...](https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/duties/cars-and-other- vehicles/importing/calculate/)

<comment><USER6> Is the co2 tax only applicable to imports?

<comment><USER3> I don't believe Norway has an indigenous car manufacturing industry, at least not one that makes ICE cars, so all cars are imported.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Car_manufacturers_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Car_manufacturers_of_Norway)

<comment><USER6> So is there no co2 tax paid on used vehicle purchases?

I'm mostly curious how this impacts lower income folks who won't likely be able to afford a shiny new EV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like the country has a new name, "oil-producer Norway".

Look, oil production is going to be around for a long, long time. Even when 99% of new vehicles are EV and 99% of power production is renewable, we will still be pumping and refining oil. There are use cases where oil-based products will be necessary basically forever, even after global warming has been neutralized. This doesn't mean Norway doesn't care about the environment.

</comment><comment><USER8> For those who don't follow stocks very closely Tesla is up another 17% today to $757. This has almost tripled in a few months. Insanity.

</comment><comment><USER9> Meanwhile in the Netherlands Tesla sales dropped from ~12000 in December 2019 to ~36 in January 2020 because the tax advantage disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER10> Electric cars are always doing that in Norway:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=electric%20norway&sort=byDate&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, nice. Ever closer to a tipping point with electric cars and infrastructure.

Certainly confidence is increasing. Tesla's stock still soaring, breaking another milestone today (>$700).

<comment><USER12> It's hard to understand why the stock is soaring. I don't think it has to do with sales.

Is it from inflation of USD due to the federal reserve? Is it a bubble with current owners fomo?

I really don't think it's Tesla being Tesla. They just aren't competitive in the luxury market or for a 35k USD car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how the colder climate effects vehicles in this market.

<comment><USER14> Colder climate hurts range on electric vehicles.

On the plus side for EV adoption in colder climates, they've got outlets _everywhere_ for people to plug in the block heaters on their cars, so they're totally ready in terms of public slow-charging infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't it hurt range, but increase battery longevity?

ISTR hot climates being more problematic for EV owners in terms of premature battery wear.

<comment><USER15> No, batteries do not like to be too hot, nor too cold. There is an operating range. This is why Teslas keep their packs cool in the heat, but will also restrict charge rate from regeneration or charging (yellow dotted line on energy consumption graph) until the pack has been brought up to operating temp.

Hot climates killed Nissan LEAF packs faster because of poor (air cooling) thermal management. Tesla packs use liquid cooling, and aggressively manage the battery pack to ensure longevity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This underlines the observation that internal combustion engine is officially dead. It's just waiting to be buried.

<comment><USER17> I mean, with ICEs being taxed at something like 120%, it's not a surprise, is it?

<comment><USER15> I think it's only a surprise that other countries don't force drivers to pay the externalities of a combustion vehicle. EVs are still making a great showing globally, and market penetration will increase as costs come down. Combustion vehicles aren't "dead", but it wouldn't be outrageous to call the peak; China is one of the largest markets in the world and they are pushing _hard_ to go straight to EVs. Legacy automakers will follow or die.

You wouldn't sit in the garage with a combustion vehicle running; the planet is simply a bigger, shared garage.

Now that EVs are proven, perhaps it's time people lean harder on their governments to sunset unnecessary combustion vehicles. Norway intends to prohibit new combustion vehicles purchases in 2025. Several other countries 2030. I expect this trend to ramp as EVs get cheaper and climate change accelerates.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase- out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase- out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles#Jurisdictions_with_planned_fossil- fuel_vehicle_bans) (Jurisdictions with planned fossil-fuel vehicle bans)

<comment><USER17> Correct me if I'm wrong, but none of these are actually banning petrol/diesel car sales at all. A hybrid/plug-in hybrid cars are exempt - so pretty much every manufacturer has a "mild-hybrid" version of every model, with something like a tiny 1kW battery to help with the initial movement, and that's enough to get around this ban. No?

<comment><USER15> True! But it's likely you see these sorts of hybrids phased out, similar to how Chevy killed the Volt in favor of full battery electric vehicles. The ban can change to be more onerous at any time, and manufacturing capex decisions are decided on decade timelines. It would be a _shame_ if you attempted such a compliance hack only to have your manufacturing line lifetime profitability nuked with the stroke of a legislative pen.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>