Launch HN: Paragon (YC W20) – Visually Build API Workflows - <AUTHOR> We're Brandon and Ishmael, co-founders of Paragon (https://useparagon.com) - we're working on a platform for visually building API workflows.
As a frontend engineer and product manager, I've always wanted a way to quickly build out backend services without having to manually spin up a server, manage database connections, or write a ton of code. We wanted to create Paragon to make it easier to build and manage some of these services without being an expert backend engineer.
Paragon is a visual workflow builder that provides "steps" like API requests, database queries, and conditional logic that you can drag and drop to build microservices or integrations. Many workflows can be built without writing code, but we also provide Cloud Functions as a native step type in case you need to add some custom logic to your workflow. You can deploy workflows in one click and visualize the flow of data through each execution for easy debugging.
Today, we're focused on helping build integrations between your product and 3rd party APIs. We know there is a history of visual programming tools that promise more than they deliver. Paragon isn't designed to build your core product or replace your API, but we do hope to make it easier to extend functionality and microservices that integrate your product with other services (especially if you're not a backend engineer).
For example, our users have built workflows that sends weekly Twilio messages to their Firebase users, or that parses user file uploads via an OCR API and saves them to MongoDB. Here's an example workflow that finds your inactive users in Postgres and sends them re-engagement messages with Twilio or Sendgrid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVU8GCBMZj4
We launched Paragon in beta about a month ago and we charge a monthly subscription based on usage, starting at $30 for 1,000 tasks per month. If you're interested in trying Paragon, you can sign up on our website and and I'll fast-track you to the top of our waitlist!
We'd love to hear your experience building API integrations. Thanks, and looking forwards to your thoughts and feedback in the comments!
Edit: We don't currently offer a free tier or trial. The reason is that we currently provide custom onboarding for every user where we help setup your workflow(s) over a Zoom call, then add you a Slack channel where we provide realtime support. We invest a lot of time and effort to ensure each user is successful and are happy to offer a full refund if we can't. That said, we do plan to add some free version of Paragon in the future. I hope this clarifies some people's comments about our pricing, thanks! <comment><USER3> Waiting for BaaS solutions to become mature for a long time now.

Big fan of the direction Hasura is taking. Maybe this could also cover some of the BaaS aspects? E.g. enabling frontend devs to deliver fully-fledged products without much knowledge about backend and databases?

One thing which disturbs me: I have to fill out an entire typeform just to get told that there is no free-tier and I have to pay 30$/month before even testing if this thing covers my most trivial needs. I think that's a dark pattern, I am out, sorry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely - our vision is that one day frontend devs will be able to spin up entire backends on Paragon, and just need to plug in their database / email provider / etc. of choice.

Appreciate your feedback on our onboarding flow, you're right and I apologize for any misunderstanding. We'll update our flow to better reflect our pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on the launch! What would you say differentiates you from competitors in the space, such as Integromat, Tray, n8n, and Zapier?

Also, if I may offer you a piece of advice based on my experience at an org offering a similar product: make it frictionless to bring in/import snippets/templates for Cloud Functions (think code snippet search function you'd have on your workstation as a dev). Your users are likely to be non- technical, and the more hand holding you can perform, the better.

Wishing you much success, I love this sort of tooling!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you and great question! Zapier is great for simple tasks like sending data from one app to another, but isn't well designed for more complex operations like handling large arrays of data, or writing custom code. More broadly, Zapier and other tools like Tray and Integromat are more focused on RPA, which typically means automating internal business processes.

Our focus is specifically on developers and product teams, and on helping build integrations between their core product and 3rd party services. Paragon is designed to handle use cases like building custom endpoints, fanning out arrays, and writing custom cloud functions - we even expose access to npm, so developers can do some pretty heavy lifting if they need to.

I love your suggestion to allow importing cloud functions. One of our goals is to eventually allow you to sync functions directly from a Github rep - <USER2> example of how we aim to cater more to developers.

<comment><USER5> > but isn't well designed for more complex operations like handling large > arrays of data, or writing custom code.

Even though they support writing Python and/or Javascript code in zaps? How is Paragon better at supporting writing custom code?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No Code / Low Code skeptic here.

I fail to see how using this GUI mixed with raw code approach would make my development workflow any faster.

For example, I've posted below a Node.js implementation of what you created in the YouTube demo linked in the OP, and it took me less time to write than it did for you to create the same "workflow" using the GUI in the video demo.

And the best part is I can run this JS code on my own server, or as a cloud function on AWS Lambda, etc. I retain complete control and avoid vendor lock in. And there is no way you and your team can compete with AWS on cloud function pricing. So where is the value for developers in your offer?

It seems like you are offering a managed compute service at a much higher price point than AWS, and then trying to justify that price point by tacking a GUI onto it. At best the GUI will be able to abstract away a little bit of boilerplate code, but inevitably the interface it exposes will not be as flexible, fully-featured, expressive, or IMO, as easy to reason about, as the interface exposed by any modern programming language.

const { Pool } = require('pg'); const pool = new Pool(); await pool.connect(); const accountSid = 'ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'; const authToken = 'your_auth_token'; const twilioclient = require('twilio')(accountSid, authToken); const sgMail = require('@sendgrid/mail'); sgMail.setApiKey(process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY);

const res = await pool.query(`SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE "lastSeen" < (now() - INTERVAL '4 weeks')`) res.rows.forEach(row => { let message = `Hi ${row.name}, we haven't seen you in a while`; if (row.phone) { twilioclient.messages.create({ body: message, from: '+15017122661', to: row.phone }) .then(message => console.log(message.sid)); } else { const msg = { to: row.email, from: 'firstname.lastname@example.com', subject: 'Come back', text: message, }; sgMail.send(msg) .then(() => {}, error => { console.error(error);

                    if (error.response) {
                        console.error(error.response.body)
                    }
                });
        }

}) await pool.end()

<comment><USER7> Writing the code yourself is always going to give you the most flexibility. This comes at the cost of complexity and domain expertise.

If you wanted to run something like this on a schedule, monitor execution results step by step, ensure your credentials are stored securely, etc, the barrier to entry to building this in terms of time and expertise suddenly jumps significantly, as well as the services / infrastructure required. We provide all of this out of the box with Paragon.

However, if you have all the domain expertise of the variety of languages, services, etc and prefer to spend the time writing the code yourself and managing the infra, that's okay. If you prefer to code, no code's just not for you and it doesn't have to be ^__^

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 10 questions' animated form just to learn there is no free tier nor free trial? not too cool.

<comment><USER9> Agreed.

I went all the way to Question 9 and then closed it out.

It's fine to ask for money — but this felt misleading :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who are your audience here? I'm trying to figure out whether this is some Zapier/Integromat type of tool, but the emphasis on more "high volume" integrations and scenarios is interesting.

I'm personally just doing some simple workflows with Gitlab-to-Telegram etc, and I have to say that I find it quite difficult to accomplish that what I consider "medium complexity" stuff: one Gitlab push event has multiple commit messages, I want to iterate over them for formatting, and then collect all of them in a single Telegram message.

Unfortunately, the sheer fact that I'm not "allowed" to write any code makes the solution so much more complex; debugging what's wrong is a nightmare, and generally it all just leaves a bad feeling behind.

Don't get me wrong; I'm paying for this service because I get value out of it, but it feels as if the devil is in the details if you want to pull this off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our focus is on helping developers and product teams build integrations between their core product and 3rd party services. "Medium complexity" is a good way to describe it - you can accomplish a good amount on Paragon without writing code, but if you need to write a custom function to go the last mile, you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats on the launch, neat idea!

You guys have thoughts on automated testing? My experience with visual programming in the wild (zapier, iterable, mailchimp) is that you end up with a lot of orphan and broken "scripts" deployed only to the production environment by well-meaning operators who can't really test or maintain them. It's interesting that this is geared towards devs, but I worry that you'd have a bunch of the same problems as the system grows unless there's a good way to rig up functional/e2e/integration tests the way we usually with cypress, capybara, etc.

Seems like there must be a solution, but my first idea of just setting up a "test" environment that points to other test services seems really costly if it's running on every commit that gets pushes like we often do with CI.

<comment><USER7> Heya! We have given some thought to implementing CI, reviews, and a sandbox environment.

We've built out some testing functionality that allows users to test their workflows and steps, and we're going to continue down this road to eventually provide our users version control and sandbox environments. It's currently seen as a "nice-to-have" for even our production users, so the timing of when it's implemented is still unclear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Brandon and Ishmael are awesome people, y'all. I remember sitting down with them in the early days; excited to see all the progress made since.

<comment><USER7> ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks promising and a neat landing page.

Have to agree with others that $30 is pricey for 1000 tasks. On lambda you can do thousands of them for free.

How do you plan to standout and survive as so many others are in this space ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, edited our post to clarify why we're charging $30/mo - we do plan to offer a free version or trial in the future.

I think that most other "low-code" players are focused on RPA (helping ops automate internal business processes) whereas we're focused on helping product & engineering build integrations between their product and other services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Firstly congrats on the launch! I am super excited about this I just signed up hoping to get my hands on it and experiment on different things

At $30/month I think its a steal the reason I say this is because for someone to do this with no-code they would probably have to hire a freelancer who would charge them way more than $30 for setting it up and probably no/little support. Love the idea I really think it fills a gap here.

There are several side projects I'm going to try with this

</comment><comment><USER15> Great product! I was part of a team that wanted to rapidly test different marketing approaches using data in Salesforce etc. My colleagues were mostly non-technical so I had them try out Zapier and they loved it! I can see how Paragon can be useful to them.

Quick question - are you using some kind of UI library to power the graphical builder? I recall coming across a JS library in the past that looked very similar but I can't remember what it was called.

<comment><USER7> Thank you! We built it ourselves in React, though we used the styled- components and react-beautiful-dnd packages for building the components and helping with the dragging functionality. \- [https://styled- components.com](https://styled-components.com) \- [https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful- dnd](https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful-dnd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would this be something I could use to facilitate integration between my SaaS and 3rd party tools used by our end-users? I.e., they provide the key through an admin panel and then we can 2-way sync with SalesForce? Or does that require additional auth steps that require native integration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question! Not yet, but this is very much on our roadmap and something we're looking to support soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Love it. I dream about this all the time. Hook them up w Kafka? How is Swagger/OpenAPI used? Airflow?

<comment><USER7> Hey! We're not exposing anything like Kafka to our end users. We think all of the underlying technical infrastructure should be abstracted so the users can focus on their core logic.

We're also not currently exposing any external Swagger / OpenAPI docs for a similar reason, but it's simple to integrate and we've considered generating it for our more technical users.

If you're interested in joining the team as an engineer, we're hiring! [https://www.notion.so/Paragon-is-Hiring- ab5739dac1c4490db920...](https://www.notion.so/Paragon-is-Hiring- ab5739dac1c4490db920775088c618dd)

<comment><USER18> +1 for Swagger/OpenAPI

I'd be interested in providing a way for PM's to control/maintain business logic, exposing it to external technical users.

<comment><USER7> Noted, adding your use case to our internal board

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Congrats on the launch! The product looks amazing and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Congrats on launch. Looks like a great platform. I went through the typeform and would consider paying $30/month but not without a free trial. Have you considered offering a free trial, even for a very limited time frame?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we've edited our post above to clarify why we aren't offering a free trial right now, although we do plan to in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks promising. The pricing seems like it only works with tasks that are very rare and high value though. Do users have the ability add their own building blocks?

</comment><comment><USER22> Congrats on the launch.

RPA & low/no-code tools are a very crowded market right now and I don't believe that focusing on selling to developers will get you very far.

Best of luck tho.

<comment><AUTHOR> Luckily, many other people believe this too which is why we think there's a big opportunity no one has addressed here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Love your landing page -- was it designed by a professional?

<comment><USER7> Thank you! Our cofounder @fooly_wk did it himself. We've built everything in house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Quickly this looks like something similar to Azure Logic Apps - you probably know about it too. Why should I use Paragon instead of Logic Apps? Educate me! :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks similar to [https://pipedream.com/](https://pipedream.com/), which is a pretty neat tool.

<comment><USER26> No pricing and no self-hosting option (either/or would be fine of course). A pretty neat tool for hobbies, maybe...

<comment><USER27> Hi there, Pipedream co-founder and engineer here. Paid plans are coming soon. We launched with a free tier during our beta to let developers experiment and solicit feedback improve the product for the longer-term.

Would love if you had a chance to give it a spin. We're always eager to hear what can be improved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This looks great! How do you define a "task"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We consider a task to be an "action" that's performed in your Paragon workflow, e.g. a function execution, database query, or API request.

<comment><USER29> Would that include things like the conditional in the image on your landing page? From the image on the landing page there are two boxes labeled action but I would think you also charge for the Requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is interesting but pricey. How are you guys planning on distinguishing yourselves from similar self-hosted solutions like NodeRed or Huginn?

<comment><AUTHOR> I made an edit to the original post to clarify the reasoning around our pricing. I think that many people want a fully hosted solution so they don't have to manage their own servers, performance, etc. and we can take care of all of that for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Congrats on the launch! I especially liked the Typeform for early access!

<comment><USER7> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Isn't 30$ per 1000 tasks too much, considering the competition?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, $30/mo is for access to Paragon and the your first 1,000 tasks. We provide additional pricing tiers for higher usage where the cost/task drops significantly.</comment></comment>


If you watch porn, don't use Safari - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2zk0b6/if_you_watch_porn_dont_use_safari/

<comment><USER2> Oh the irony. I watch them ONLY on Safari. I don't like its UI, so I use the other browsers for serious work.

<comment><USER3> I never really understood the value, nor need of using a second browser for porn.

I've also failed to find any useful information on this either.

<comment><USER2> I allow myself 1 useless post once in a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to original article: [http://www.macissues.com/2015/03/17/safari-bug- saves-web-pag...](http://www.macissues.com/2015/03/17/safari-bug-saves-web- page-urls-in-private-mode/)</comment>


Get a job or continue startup? - ben-lee

Hey I'm a software engineer and recently started my first company but unfortunately ran out of money. I'm contemplating going back to work I make some quick cash, preferably at a startup with learning opportunities. I've learned a lot from my time as an entrepreneur and can honestly say it my passion. So of course getting a job is a little sad but right now I need money and with the right opportunity it can help make me a better founder. I'd really like to gut it out but right now I have no resources and no money. I'm also in a city where startups aren't as popular so it was hard to build a team. Would love to move to the valley, maybe take a job out there for relocation. Anyways, any advice? <comment><AUTHOR> You know when you get older you only get more responsibilities. So I'd say to use this as an opportunity to go to the valley. If you go to work at a startup it will be like getting a postgrad degree in business, and you can take that with you anywhere in the world.

<comment> ben-lee So true, for a long time I didn't think I needed to be in the Valley. My current location is lacking resources, funding, etc. Being in San Fran would put me at a tremendous advantage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Think of it as a paid/free post-grad degree! And I say this to you as someone sitting in NYC...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I went through a similar situation. My case was finishing the product. I ran a decent consulting company while bootstrapping the product production.

I was going to look for a job and got a lot of interviews through angel list.

It came down to one for me. I got flew out to san francisco and had a nice time for the founders. In the meantime while waiting for some references to get back to me. I actually finished the product and started getting customers.

In the end, the founders came to the conclusion I wasn't looking for a job, but more mentorship and I launched the product instead. Regardless of what happens, networking is your best asset.

<comment> ben-lee Great info, I could also do contract work to hold me over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It sounds like you need money to live on. You're going to have to bring it in somehow = debt or work. No shame in having a day job especially in your field, to do that. You'll always learn something working with new people. One place I think you're less likely to learn much is in a big corporation.

If your own company is eminently practical, say less like twitter and more like ditch-digging then you should be able to bootstrap it eventually if there's a demand already out there. For a long shot where you have to monetize something secondarily to the product, I'd be less inclined to go into debt for example.

<comment> ben-lee I red this article about entrepreneurs getting a job [http://www.startupremarkable.com/five-reasons-why-every- entr...](http://www.startupremarkable.com/five-reasons-why-every-entrepreneur- should-get-a-job) I have toile the decisions of I can take on more debt, it's tough entrepreneurship is my absolute passion.

<comment><USER3> If you're young with low overhead, have a tangible product or service and have some kind of revenue coming in already, say at least $3000+/mo the debt route is what I would've done under those circumstances. Your slide into debt would presumably be slow (since you're young and have low overhead) and debt is cheap if you keep your credit score tight. Timing and luck play a big part but IMHO the road from 0-$3K/mo is harder than the road from $3-10K/mo for instance. If yours is a product, you might have to work more like a service at first: "yes we'll add that for you," make the sale and add the feature hoping to be able to say "yes we have that" next time. That's following the money.

<comment> ben-lee Also, what age is considered young? I'm not relatively young but not old.

<comment><USER3> Bad choice of words on my part - youth itself is barely relevant; your overhead and how many people you're responsible for or answer to is. Those things tend to increase as you age.

In my opinion, a spouse and especially children would be indicators against taking bigger risks in the form of debt. I also recommend against relying on a working spouse to support your effort for more than about a month - too much at risk.

Ask yourself how far have you come and where is the business headed? If it's consistent month-by-month and headed in the right direction that's certainly a big plus.

<comment> ben-lee Ok thanks for clarifying. I'm 33, no spouse or kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It'd help to have a little more info on what stage you were at with your company. Do you have a defined business model? Have you developed a MVP yet? Whether to fold or push the stakes higher really depends on exactly where you stand with your company.

<comment> ben-lee Sure thing, yes I had an MVP but I'm pivoting pretty majorly. Our business model is still being tweaked. Also, I'm a solo founder which completely killed me.</comment></comment>


Ageing is a disease. Gene therapy could be the 'cure' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elizabeth-parrish-bioviva-gene-therapy <comment><USER2> "Big if true."</comment>


Meet Cheetah, Boston Dynamics' Fast Running Robot  - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/05/meet-cheetah-boston-dynamics-terrifyingly-fast-running-robot-video/

<comment><USER2> I'm for one is limbering up to outrun our new robotic sprinter overlords</comment>


A globalised solar-powered future is wholly unrealistic - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/a-globalised-solar-powered-future-is-wholly-unrealistic-and-our-economy-is-the-reason-why-118927 <comment><USER2> I don't understand: I believe that per-planet eternal growth is unsustainable, so I guess I am in the "degrowth" group mentioned, but that does not take away my belief that a globalised solar-powered future is realistic? It just means we will have to step away from unbounded growth based reasoning as well.</comment>


The tragic end of Telltale Games - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17934166/telltale-games-studio-closed-layoffs-end-the-walking-dead <comment><USER2> Don't work in the games industry. This is the par story for game companies. Every little detail of this story I saw repeating on loop in a decade of working in games. The artists grabbing assets to stuff into their portfolios before two years of professional work disappears into a black hole, the ppl moving families across country to be laid off months later, the crunch, the over promising, it is all text book.

The games industry preys on young ppl who don't know what a healthy work/life balance looks like. The pay is lower because employees are passionate. Passion doesn't pay rent. It doesn't provide stability for your partner and children who all will suffer because you chose to work in games.

Your passion will be compromised endlessly by marketing and management who can air drop in and change a game's entire direction in one meeting. Because they saw a Minecraft commercial and their kid responded to it. They'll make you work weekend after weekend to fit their pivot into the original schedule and stop in for an hour to drop off donuts. Oh good, eight hours of work for a donut. Donuts also don't pay rent. They don't fix your marital problems.

Games is an industry stuck in a groundhog day loop of misery. This is my warning to anyone who thinks they like games enough to make them. You won't like them after making them. It isn't worth it.

<comment><USER3> Just as a counterpoint - I've worked for 4 years now as a programmer at one of the biggest publishers in the industry, and honestly, the work life balance is great, the pay is ok for the region(plus I get decent amount of shares every year), the work is varied, interesting and I like both what I do and people I work with. I think the last time I did overtime was 2 years ago, and even then it was only for a week around launch of the last project(in fact in every studio meeting we are constantly reminded that managers can NOT demand us to work overtime, if they do we need to report it higher up). Normally I get in at 8am, leave by 4pm, never work weekends or anything like that. Plus the usual for EU 25 paid days off(plus the studio is closed christmas to new years), unlimited paid sick leave, private health insurance.....really, it's pretty good.

But then again, I am aware that most studios are _not_ like that.

<comment><USER4> > Plus the usual for EU 25 paid days off

Sometimes I really hate living in the US. -_-

<comment><USER5> Obviously we pay for it with lower salaries. Or, well, actually I don't know what US gamedev salaries are like but for other programming jobs, the difference is significant, also outside the SFBA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sometimes you simply got to let the data speak for themselves:

[https://imgur.com/a/2tR4WVX](https://imgur.com/a/2tR4WVX)

It's so strange how the prestige around the brand was not correlated to the sells numbers. It so strange how their demise was so unexpected by the press and gaming communities when the writing was on the wall long ago.

<comment><USER7> The gaming press is more press than gaming; they're often people with writing degrees who are disproportionately fond of "literary" games compared to the buying public.

<comment><USER8> This is very true.

Gaming journos have very little influence inside the gaming community. Many of them do not quite get that "fun" is the most central reason for playing a game. Their articles often read like someone who is hoping for a regular media house to notice and hire them, rather than a gamer writing for other gamers.

Gaming's biggest personalities are on YouTube and Twitch. ACG, Angry Joe, TB (rip), Dunkey have a significantly better say on whether a game gets played or not. Brothers a tale of sons, is one such game whose success can be in part attributed to TB pushing it very hard, on his YT channel.

Among the younger generation, let's play and streamers are the bigger influencers. At least that is what I feel like looking at my younger cousins.

There are a few good gaming review websites, but the likes of IGN, Polygon and GameSpot feel like surrogate marketting agencies at this point.

<comment><USER9> I have been gaming literally my entire life save for the first couple years, spending thousands of dollars on games every year, and I have never watched any of those "gaming personalities."

<comment><USER10> If it helps add another data point to the mix, I can confirm parent's comment on these personalities and their influence within the gaming community. A number of them often provide in-depth critiques and unexpected insights on game design that take the form of comedic video quasi-essays, and they rack up huge subscriber counts.

<comment><USER9> Skipping through a "No Commentary" playthrough usually tells me all I need to know about a game before purchasing it, without any subjective opinions of someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel sorry for the employees and apologize in advance if what I'm going to say sounds too negative or blunt, but anyway here is one opinion. Telltale games wasn't a very innovative company. It shouldn't surprise anyone when a company goes bankrupt that primarily produces bad game adoptions of blockbuster movies as a franchise.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm only a gamer and not an industry expert, but it seems to me that too many managerial constraints on creativity and fear of innovation are the #1 game company killers.

<comment><USER12> "bad game adoptions"

At least their "Wolf among us" was an extremely enjoyable adaptation of an existing comic book franchise with a novel story.

<comment><USER13> Batman series was also excellent and it surprised me how far it went away from canon Batman representations.

Not to mention Tales from the Borderlands being one of the funniest games I've ever played.

On the other hand, the new Walking Dead seasons and Game of Thrones were exceedingly dull.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" years of nonstop crunch culture, toxic management, and frustration from developers who believed the company's refusal to diversify gameplay had led to creative stagnation"_

I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...

<comment><USER15>
        > I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...

I feel the same way. One often hears the statistic that the games industry revenue (~36 Billion) exceeds that of the film (hollywood) industry.

It makes me wonder, given that there's probably fewer workers in games, who is making the lionshare of the money? Is it just a tiny sliver of investors? How did it get that way? One would think that talent could just walk away from toxic workplaces and be paid handsomely elsewhere.

<comment><USER2> Once a game company has a hit they become their own angel investor and try to find the next hit. The odds are really low though so most die before finding it. It doesn't help that most companies have no idea why the first game was a hit.

It's easy to hide for a long time because a hit can be so profitable. Look at Riot Games. League of Legends remains their only product even after trying to find another one for a decade. Zynga is still around because in a few short years they got a couple billion in the bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having been in this exact situation before, its very hard to deal with. One of my employers died at 4:30 on a Thursday, we had 30 minutes to get out of the office before the building management locked the doors, there was no health insurance or severance for anyone (in fact as a contractor I was owed $8000 I never got). At least we all had some idea things were bad so it wasn't a complete surprise. This of course was during the Dotcom collapse so finding another job took me a long time. I've been in company ending situations since then but no matter how many you never feel good. It's easy to feel like you didn't do enough to keep things running (of course its not true) which doesn't help your attitude much. Your job is almost like a family sometimes and that makes it harder. If the employment market is hot its much easier to get over the shock but if its hard to find another job then its much more depressing.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can not understand how it is legal to dismiss a worker with less than 14 days notice. Those are great workers rights! Thanks god we still have some of them here in Spain (although some have already been diminished).

<comment><USER18> If the company ceases to exist, then many of its usual responsibilities don't exist either

<comment><USER19> The company didn't cease to exist; they still had (have?) employees finishing existing contracts. They also tried to raise money to staff back up and finish off the Walking Dead games.

<comment><USER18> It sucks but if there is literally no money left then the company is simply not able to fulfill its obligations. Like if pay is owed where will that money come from?

I don't excuse management for a second; they must have known the coffers were bare while they were still hiring.

<comment><USER20> If I'm not mistaken, here in Belgium first the assets of the company are sold off and from that money, first the employees are paid out their contracts.

After that the money goes to other instances (like the loan by the bank etc).

EDIT: They are paid out their outstanding wage for their performed work, not to the end of their contracts _

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "/../ hundreds still tumbled into unemployment with no safety net from their company."

To be honest a company that can "barely keep its head above water" wont be in shape to provide a lot of support. That is kind of the point, if they could do that then maybe they could keep the company afloat which is a bit paradoxical.

It would be nice situations like these to have some form of safety net in form of financial aid or something. I have no idea what they do in the US but in Sweden you can get a lot of help since these things happen with companies from time to time.

<comment><USER22> Typically most states will let you file for unemployment benefits if you are laid off, these vary from state to state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > These sources [...] paint a consistent picture of a company desperately > struggling to keep its head above water.

No? Manager start doing this when their profits dwindle, not when the company has no cash left. The basic idea is to get one or two more bonus checks while the others lose their homes. You can be sure that some people still made a profit.

> "[Hawley] came into a situation where the staff needed a strong leader with > a clear vision," says a former employee.

Does anybody remember how Dunder Miflin tried to pursuade the stockholders by presenting Michael Scott as the hero who would turn things around?

And one thing I don't really get is why one brings oneself in a situation where one works ones ass off in exchange for living paycheck-to-paycheck. You should have a decent amount of spare time (or time for personal projects at least) and turn a profit, otherwise why work this job at all? I mean gaming industry is not a career you work in because you need to feed 3 children and don't have another choice.

</comment><comment><USER24> You can tell a lot about how a game is doing when you pay attention to the "let's play" videos on Youtube. People have been complaining about how short telltale games were, how they always look the same etc. for a while now. I'm surprised the company didn't try to do things even a little bit differently.

The gaming industry is a tough place to be. I have so much respect for game designers, 3D artists, animators. Because it takes a lot of time, skill, rendering and sleepless nights to get something good out. Unfortunately, most game companies are controlled by mediocre people at the top, who run things like a sweatshop.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ultimately most of these game studios are working for Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Valve.

More pressure should be put on those mega-corporations to reduce the commissions they charge developers who release games on their platforms - currently 30%.

The consoles are not supercomputers anymore like the PS3, they mostly use off the shelf (AMD) hardware and x86 architecture. Soon they will just stream the game directly to a thin client which will only handle time-sensitive calculations like input and collision. On PC this 30% commission is even less justifiable since the platform is open and there is no hardware for Valve to get involved with.

Cutting this commission would immediately put money into the hands of games studios and improve conditions for workers, whilst still leaving the platform holders ridiculously profitable. Its a shame no one has been first to move on this - Microsoft with Xbox would seem a good candidate given their desperation to attract devs to the platform and away from PS4/Sony.

I think Telltale is just classic bad management. Not much different from other industries. I think the industry can make for a good career - find a small-ish studio with a string of successful releases and low overhead (no crappy legacy engine to maintain, cheap location).

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't get how there is not a general insurance system for people losing their jobs unexpectedly which pays out three months of similar or something similar.

<comment><USER27> There is "Unemployment Insurance" in America, and companies have to pay into it for their employees by law. Any employee who no-fault loses their job can draw from it.

This company used a "cheat" in the legal system in America for labor where they illegally labeled their employees as "independent contractors", which are treated differently under the law. These contractors aren't "employees" and aren't eligible for unemployment (because they were not 'employed', they were contracted).

For example if you were to hire someone to work on your kitchen for 1 week, you wouldn't pay unemployment insurance on their behalf. If they were self- employed doing remodeling/contracting, they would be expected to pay their own unemployment insurance.

It is unfortunate how the illegal abuse of "independent contracting" in America has created these terrible situations though.

<comment><USER28> The employees had to have known they were contractors though.... at least in my expense that is no mystery.

<comment><USER29> Well then you have to choose between turning down the job for the chance you'll need unemployment insurance or taking the job because you need a job. The rational choice is to take the job regardless.

<comment><USER28> Depends on your options.

The game industry seems pretty terrible to their workers.

Either way the employees had to know.

<comment><USER30> This kind of 'be a contractor or gtfo' thing is not in any way limited to the games industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "These sources, who were granted anonymity in order to speak freely and > without fear of retribution,..."

What retribution? They were fired with no severance or time to prepare. Why don't they just speak out against the company that doesn't exist anymore and left them on the street?

<comment><USER32> Because then you seem like a complainer or a troublemaker. You get an interview at another company (where there are dozens if not hundreds of other people applying) and they google you. Would they hire the person who complained about terrible work conditions or one of the other people who hasn't?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I hear about game studios going under like this a lot.

Is it just that games companies suffering the same fate get more coverage in the media, or is it something about game studios that seem to make them more likely to crash and burn like this?

I know that games are quite consumer's-whim-driven and you're never really sure if you've got a hit on your hands or not until you release. I guess it is the same for movies, yet I've never heard of any movies spectacuarly just going bust half-way through filming and just abandonning what they are doing and packing it in (although I have heard of some near-misses). Yet it seems to happen a lot for games comapanies?

What gives?

P.S. sucks for the people working on this. Hope you all find something new!

<comment><USER34> The comparison to movies seems apt. Games industry has the same problems that Early Hollywood had (high crash rate and a lot of employee anguish), and a lot of these stories match early days histories of Hollywood. The solution to that was strong unions. Film companies still have a high crash rate, though now it is much more intentionally controlled (Hollywood has organized development companies to very specifically be only for the scope of a single film project), and more importantly employee anguish from the intentional turnover is mitigated by strong union protections and safety nets.

The interesting part is that Hollywood is dealing with a cycle of this sort of suffering currently with Special Effects houses. The CG special effects companies are often contracted for only a single set piece at a time in a movie, as companies they currently last about at most 2 years and involvement in scenes in two and a half films, and there is a lot of employee anguish because a lot of the artists involved have generally not been allowed to unionize (or heavily discouraged from unionizing), especially in the smaller contractors. Most of the Oscars presented for Best Special Effects in the last few years have involved at least one firm that was dead by the time of the Oscars award. It's not making the news as much as game studio suffering, but it's a similar problem in that both industries feel that they can afford to burn through talent cheaper than it takes to protect it, as there are always excitable young kids happy to get their shot in Hollywood or Videogames.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I can only hope that the call for a union takes hold. Although I'm not overly optimistic.

</comment><comment><USER36> Previous threads on this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061453)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066920)

</comment><comment><USER37> Absolutely sh!tty way to treat people. Won't those left demand massive retention bonuses?

How fungible are game dev skills? At least folks are getting released into a hot tech market.

<comment><USER38> > How fungible are game dev skills?

That depends on the role taken. Artists are fairly fungible (probably unfairly) because they can be shown a bunch of examples and told "make something that fits with this". Coders are fungible only if you're comparing wizard-level coders who can read, understand and fix / improve a game's codebase.</comment></comment>


Quebec government adopts controversial religious symbols bill - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-government-adopts-controversial-religious-symbols-bill-1.5177587 <comment><AUTHOR> > The government also added a number of last-minute amendments to the bill, > including changes that would allow for surveillance and enforcement of the > law.

> Quebec's majority government has pushed through a controversial piece of > legislation that will bar public-school teachers, government lawyers, judges > and police officers from wearing religious symbols while at work.

This legislation has invoked the "not withstanding clause" which means this legislation cannot be challenged in any court.

Law 21 : [http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parlementaires/projets- lo...](http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parlementaires/projets-loi/projet- loi-9-42-1.html)

<comment><USER2> > enforcement of the law

Enforcement as in like the language police of Québec ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes something similar to OOQLF ([https://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/accueil.aspx](https://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/accueil.aspx)). Specifics of enforcement are not clear at this point though.</comment></comment></comment>


Experiment Shows Conservatives More Willing to Share Wealth Than They Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/upshot/trump-supporters-experiment-inequality.html <comment><USER2> This experiment is extremely flawed. Most conservatives I know don't disapprove of redistributing wealth wholesale. They disapprove of the government doing the redistributing

They believe redistribution should be voluntary otherwise it is stealing.</comment>


Avast sees single software license used illegally 774,651 times - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/news/avast-sees-single-software-license-used-illegally-774651-times-2010126/ <comment><USER2> "Over the course of 18 months that single Avast! Pro license was shared and used on 744,651 different machines. At the current cost of $34.95 per pro license, that's total lost revenue in the region of $27,074,052.45."

No no no no no! You cannot prove that every single one of the illegal users would have bought the software legally had they not found the key. This is the same confounding logic the RIAA/MPAA keeps trying to use and it's still wrong.

Anyway, it is an interesting little statistic though I have to wonder if they can actually litigate anymore given they let this go on for 18 months. It is really illegal anymore?

<comment><AUTHOR> Later in the article:

"You can't count all those users taking advantage of the license as lost revenue, like the music industry does with song downloads. The Avast! Pro license was there to be used, so people used it. If it hadn't been on P2P sites then the vast majority of users would have gone elsewhere for protection."

<comment><USER3> Right, but with free alternatives available such as the fantastic Microsoft Security Essentials, so you can't say that the industry lost $X in sales because of the license.

<comment><USER4> That's literally the next sentence.

>You don't need to spend any money to keep your machine protected, especially if you run Windows. Microsoft offers you a firewall as part of the Windows default install now, and Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus software is free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What an opportunity! Those pirates obviously like your software but might not be willing to pay for it. Rather than simply killing the key (turning off the user base) they are trying to slowly convert these people to paying customers! I like it and thank goodness they had the sense to do it.

<comment><USER6> Yep, it's actually very interesting. In fact, it's possibly a great marketing technique, if a polite offer to upgrade to the paid version converts at all.

<comment><USER7> I think it's brilliant. Thinking about it, I'd do it intentionally at least for AV. Once a typical AV customer has chosen one specific product and is willing to buy it, I think it's very unlikely they will first look for a pirate version of it. I dare say a large amount of their profits come from retail or pre-installed trial conversions or high priced renewals. The mass of 1st tier AV available for $0-$10 after competitive upgrade rebates etc. clearly shows they expect most of their money in the long run.

But imo someone looking to pirate AV is mostly going to choose a product out of the options available for downloading. They may have a preference but if it's simply not available they'll go for #2. Also, they may choose partially based a reputation for working consistently - eg people report product x has worked flawlessly for a year but product y is always being broken and needing new cracks. Legit free versions may be option C.

If you accept my presumptions - AV makes most of their money in ongoing or addons - and pirates are cost conscious but rather brand agnostic - any one firm likely loses very little in sales by having their product copied.

On the other hand the firm gets the chance to have the user grow comfortable with the software and all of the highest tier features if they don't cut it off. Obviously there is a non-zero conversion rate here and importantly they may no longer view free options as feature rich enough.

So by this logic it's actually in the best interests of the company to make sure their product is widely available in pirate circles instead of fighting it. Why let your competitor get a chance at a piracy conversion instead of you? Not only that but you'd want to make sure it was a good experience - trojan free - no bad cracks - up to date signatures - so the user had the best impression of it.

It's the ultimate in price discrimination - giving it away free to those who wouldn't pay anyway in hopes of future conversions - something they do anyway with free after rebate deals - while ensuring the illicit nature of the distribution keeps it from cannibalizing most legitimate sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They _did_ advocate piracy ... <http://www.avast.com/lp-talk-like-a-pirate>

More seriously, I wonder what the numbers are for the second most popular pirated key?

And more generally, what is the frequency distribution of users per key like? Is one pirated key dominant, are their competing rivals? What proportion of users share their key among only a few extra computers?

Also interesting is the approach they are taking to handling this. It will be very interesting to see what the conversation rate is, if they share that information as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't Avast have a free version? (in fact I'm using it)

Why bother with Pro, seems unnecessary.

I guess the logic is those people wouldn't bother to pay anyway but I am surprised they would allow their IP to ping the server in the first place.

<comment><USER10> > I guess the logic is those people wouldn't bother to pay anyway but I am > surprised they would allow their IP to ping the server in the first place.

Stopping an anti-virus from phoning home means you're out of date and every day it has less value. That said, I suspect the vast number of computer users would have no idea to prevent said ping (or even know it was happening). Especially those in the market for AV software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's actually kind of a good sales tactic since they can now contact each user and tell them to pay up or switch to the free version. Like a viral trial ...

</comment><comment><USER12> _Rather than killing the license code, the team at Avast decided to watch what happened and how many users would break the law by using it._

Which law are the users breaking?

<comment><USER13> In short, copyright infringement. Wikipedia has more information on specific laws: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement_of_softw...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement_of_software) and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement>

<comment><USER14> They're probably in breach of contract too, I expect there is a click-through.

In the UK they could probably be got for "hacking" (ie cracking) as they are using the computer from which they download updates without authorisation and breaching a security feature in order to do so this puts them in contravention of the Computer Misuse Act (or at least on a naive reading, mine, it does so).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Switch to AVG Free.

<comment> wh-uws Switch to Microsoft security essentials.

faster. smaller. no spy/spam/ad/junkware

better

<comment><USER16> And corrupts SVN checkouts, and who knows what else:

svn: Checksum mismatch for 'servers/dev/jboss/jvspoc_dw_loader/lib/jboss- serialization.jar'; expected: 'f26ddb52dc01622d93625264f104b142', actual: '838620288f1f8089176d015930a152dc'

No thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


3 Terraform tips that will save you from terrible mistakes - ish-xyz https://ish-ar.io/terraform_blog_series_3_tips/ <comment><AUTHOR> Clickbait title aside, a good and reasonable post about using terraform. Point 2 about the evils of a monorepo is not unique to terraform, but also a more subtle problem of service boundaries generally.

I've seen what I would term a distributed monorepo which has all the headaches of a monolith combined with all the deployment coordination headaches of microservices, managing to exacerbate the worst problems of both. Enforcing boundaries is hard, and the most natural architecture state without a firm guiding hand is the Big Ball of Mud.

<comment> ish-xyz Apologies for the clickbait title ;) Thanks for sharing your opinion !</comment></comment>


Airbnb Hosting Horror Stories - <AUTHOR> I had a guest ruin a rug with coffee this week. When I asked him to partially pay for the rug he responded with "You are sending me this now. It's Friday we left on Tuesday. Really." Airbnb is impossible to get in touch with. As a host, I feel we are stuck with these issues to deal with on our own. For a 25 billion dollar company, they pay pennies to help their "independent contractors" who ultimately are providing the homes for their guests. Any other horror stories from Airbnb? Hosting or Staying. <comment><USER2> If you count a coffee spill as a "horror story" then you're doing pretty well so far on guests.

I'm just a guest, not a host. No horror stories on my side. All the hosts have been awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're an independent contractor, pay for your own supplies and build their replacement costs into your rate.

When I do contract work and my computer breaks, I don't expect a new one from whoever I'm working for at the time.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just started and have had all good experiences, would be very interested in real horror stories too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lesson learned: don't have a rug.

<comment><USER6> Lesson learned: don't use Airbnb.</comment></comment>


TV shows and movies that featured the Amiga 500 - <AUTHOR> http://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=36 <comment><USER2> I'm always reminded of this odd movie...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Dreams_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Dreams_\(film\))</comment>


What should I ask for when negotiating a CTO position in a funded start up? - <AUTHOR>

A new start up that is receiving funding has offered me the opportunity to take on a role as the CTO.  The opportunity could be the largest for me, as the players are well established in the industry they are selling to.  What kinds of things should I cover in making the opportunity a good one in terms of compensation? <comment><USER2> (1) How easy will it be for the startup to find your replacement? If they can they list a position on Craigslist and get a bunch of qualified candidates at $80/hr, that will likely be the compensation.

(2) What is your opportunity cost? If you can get easily get a contract developer job for $125/hr, that is what you "should" be paid.

In the example scenario, a smart startup will try to get somebody with $125/hr talent at $80/hr. The cheapest way to bridge this is by stroking your ego and offering you BS title like "CTO". WTF is a contractor CTO? They will probably not let you attend "real" executive team meetings and vote on important decisions.

My suggestion: (1) Let them know that your time is wort $125/hr. and you'd take $50/hr in stock (and CTO title). It becomes a good deal for both of you. (2) Work smart and work hard. Make them offer you a great compensation package to be the permanent CTO.

</comment><comment><USER3> Frankly, you shouldn't wait for the equity portion because of the cliff. You won't vest any shares in the first year, so if it is for a "contract" CTO position initially, why the trepidation from them for the stock right away?

They will pay more for you without stock, and they won't lose any stock if they don't keep you longer than 1 year, so they shouldn't be reluctant to issue options to you. If they are, they sound as if they are gun-shy in issuing their option pool, which is suspect. Not only for you, but for other future employees as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I should note that these are preliminary talks and there are some missing bits of info on my end - they have approached me to do this, but we haven't talked details yet, so a follow up with probably come out of the discussion we have in a couple weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Forward vesting... you want it. When/if they sell the company you do not want a bunch of unvested stock options disappearing. Has happened to several folks I know, and myself in the past. Forward vesting causes all of your options to vest in the event of a change of control, or sale of the company.

<comment><USER5> Good point, but I still think he should figure out how much equity he is going to get. Right now from his commments he is getting zero equity with the possibility of a small percentage sometime in the future. Hardly worth giving up anything else during negotiations.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll come back with details and probably a follow-up question in a couple weeks after our discussion about the long-term opportunity. I haven't had any offer yet, only an invitation to consider joining them since they have secured funding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You're going to be vested over a long period of time, possibly with a cliff.. so don't forget that in your negotiations. Beyond that, ask for what you deserve

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't fully understand the cliff concept, if you could enlighten me? Thanks!

<comment><USER7> In that case, I highly recommend you take hours and hours and hours and read and learn everything you can find about startup options, payouts, and historical stories of how people got screwed!

Don't walk in there unprepared.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's why I asked the question in the first place, here, and I haven't been disappointed with the excellent advice and points from others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To learn about the CTO stock options, vesting, and employee pool of options, this is the best book I've read on the subject: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson.

<comment><USER9> This is definitely a great book. But be aware that every lawyer and VC worth their salt has read this as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, then I'll get it! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have everyone agree to a definition of your role in the company. Are you a cofounder acting as CTO with cofounder equity, or are you an executive employee?

Once that question is answered the rest is pretty straight forward.

<comment><AUTHOR> The position begins with contract CTO work and then a discussion about equity.

<comment><USER10> So it's basically a high end contract with a chance to go full-time?

If that's the case, I'd go $20k-$30k /month as a good starting rate for an executive level technical contractor.

<comment><USER11> Are people really making that in this situation? Sounds awfully expensive in my experience.

EDIT: I get that people can rationalize that amount, but are people you know of actually _getting_ it. I, for one, would have a very, very hard time paying someone $60k in cash for two months of early stage "CTO" work (and a very, very easy time taking it). But I'm more interested in the facts: are people actually paying short term contrators at early stage startups $20k-30k/month?

<comment><USER12> Contractor implies that you're getting no benefits and you're paying up the self-employment tax instead of the company.

For a CTO-level position, at a startup that's raised a Series A? You bet I'd want that much money. Assuming a typical start-up level workload, that works out to somewhere around $80 and $120 an hour, which is pretty reasonable for CTO-level talent, considering the higher tax burden and the need to secure your own health insurance.

EDIT: Yes, certain (funded and/or profitable) startups will pay this much (or the equivalent in salary and benefits) for a talented CTO. Note that this implies actual CTO-level work and not "oh, I'm just going to call my first developer hire the CTO to flatter his ego because he's the only technical guy on staff." (That sort of title inflation you should run from - it's just going to cause HR trouble when the company grows and needs a _real_ CTO, and it's usually offered in lieu of an appropriate salary.) If you're putting "CTO" in quotes, you need to hire a developer, not a CTO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't just think of compensation in terms of dollars and equity today.

Also consider: \- What are the benefits implications? \- How much will this increase your future marketability through connections and learning? \- How will this impact your ability to do things outside of work? (10 hour workday? 12? 16?) \- What will the work environment do to your mental health?

As items with current and future $ implications, this is part of the compensation discussion.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can share details from a previous startup: Co-founder position. CTO title. Board seat. $120k, 5% equity up front, 5% vested over 2 years. VC backed.</comment>


Some dead bodies donated to research in US end up in warehouses of horrors - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/how-much-for-your-head-unregulated-us-brokers-make-killing-on-donated-bodies/ <comment><USER2> This came up when I signed up for cryonics. Interestingly, Alcor requires that you donate your body on death to their organization for research purposes, and they will not operate on you (what they believe to be a life-saving procedure) until you are legally declared dead. The reason is precisely that cadavers for medical research are basically entirely unrelated and are classified as private property, not human remains. So Alcor (a cryonics organization that strives to preserve its 'patients' for future revival) insists on having its patients declared dead and and donated so as to not be considered human remains, so that they can save the essence of what makes you human. A clever trick.</comment>


Chrome team to remove 'blacklist' and 'whitelist' to be more inclusive - <AUTHOR> https://9to5google.com/2020/06/07/google-chrome-blacklist-blocklist-more-inclusive/ <comment><USER2> All this speech-policing is only empowering the wrong kind of people. Personally I never even made a connection to race when using words like 'blacklist'. Allowing activists to decide which words are improper or not- inclusive makes communication like walking through a minefield. I live in Germany, public communication in Academia has become unreadable at times with application of 'inclusive' speech and 'proper' pronouns.

Remember this story?

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle- jokes...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-got- two-people-fired-and-led-to-ddos-attacks/)

It won't stop with 'blacklist' or 'whitelist'. How many people stopped contributing to open source projects because the "Code of Conduct"-politicos (on a powertrip) started to politicize everything and harassing anyone that is not 100% politically aligned until they left?

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no inherent strong opinions on terminology, so I'll roll with it. But I am concerned that this might be a symptom of a larger trend toward whimsically inventive "solutions" that have ill defined or undefined MOEs.

What does this get us? Is there any evidence that these terms are harmful to racial minorities? Do fMRIs or glucocorticoid sampling indicate that the use of these terms causes a stress response? I'm skeptical, but I don't know.

By all means, we should question conventions that might be ill suited to an enlightened society. However, every change costs political capital, and we should be spending that political capital on _actual_ change rather than self- congratulatory tinkering.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This kind of change does more harm than good to the society. It's a distraction to what really matters. Big corp just wants more brownie points. It's just gimmicks and it's rather pointless.

<comment><USER4> I think this is a good change for an entirely unrelated reason though.

Blacklist and Whitelist aren't intuitive terms. Blocklist and Allowlist make way more sense from the user friendliness perspective, particularly so when it comes to usability for non-native speakers.

I think generally this type of change makes sense so that meanings can easily be determined from the terms' etymology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought blacklist was related to 'black out' meaning to censor something by blacking it out. I don't know, it's a cool word, words with colors in the names feel richer. Banlist/allowlist is simpler I guess, which is still nice.</comment>


The scary truth about TSA's PreCheck security vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hawley-tsa-precheck-vulnerabilities-20161223-story.html <comment><USER2> TSA precheck is working exactly as it is supposed to. The purpose of airport security in general isn't to make anyone safer. It is security theatre. Precheck allows people to opt out of the pointless security screening for a cost. It is just a racket. I'm sure a determined attacker could get around precheck, but that missed the point. TSA screenings were never intended to be secure in any meaningful way anyway.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad this is the only comment on this article, the TSA is an inane joke. It's easy enough to slip weapons etc. through airport security. (I've brought a pack of blades for my safety razor on almost every flight I've taken since around 2010, and never been questioned about it.) Even if security were actually tight, the fact that pilots are armed and behind blast doors during flight means it would be pointless anyway.

<comment><USER4> No, that would only be "pointless" if someone wanted to hijack the plane. If they wanted to blow it up, then armed pilots behind doors wouldn't make a difference.

<comment><USER5> If they're going to blow something up, why not a bus or a train or a bridge or a cruise boat or something? There's not so many people on an airplane that it's like it's your only opportunity to kill a lot of people.

The only (rational) reason I can imagine that makes planes different is that you can use it as a missile to attack a larger target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know much about Kip Hawley other than he worked at TSA and was the brain behind disallowing liquids, for whatever that is worth. This is a nonsense piece. Not sure who he's shilling for now.

> Just to be clear, unless a PreCheck passenger is randomly tagged for a more > thorough check, he or she need only avoid setting off a metal detector to > gain access to the secure areas of airports. In other words, these travelers > could carry a pound of C-4 plastic explosive in their pockets and get onto > any airplane in America.

Let him. We could hand out C-4 to everybody during boarding. Without a detonator, the terrorist would have to gag each passenger his pound of might- as-well-be Play-Doh.

<comment><USER7> Given how easily independent auditors have brought guns and knives through security, why would a detonator be difficult? It's just another wire on the x-ray scan among the normal chaos of portable electronic devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "PreCheck, however, is ... a security hologram — it looks plausible, it's > pleasing to the eye, but its protective value is illusory."

...making it utterly consistent with the rest of the TSA process. Its sole function is to allow rich people to reduce their inconvenience and therefore not agitate to have the TSA procedures simplified.

Where, then, is the problem?

<comment><USER9> Rich? You can get any of the trusted traveller programs for less than $122 for 5 years. If you live near the canadian border you can get Nexus for $50.

[https://www.dhs.gov/trusted-traveler-comparison- chart](https://www.dhs.gov/trusted-traveler-comparison-chart)

Thats $23/year. You pay more than that in airport taxes on a single flight. Or like 2 meals in airport. Meals you might skip if you were pre-check :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is just another "Boogie, Boogie, Boogie" scare piece. Kip Hawley is the same genius who got us the full body scanners and then was unable to get them back out after the luggage scanners improved to the point they were no longer needed.

</comment><comment><USER11> There may be valid concerns about this program. However this article smells partisan.

Starting:

> When President Trump's nominee for Homeland Security secretary, John Kelly, > takes over,

Ending:

>For everyone's safety, however, let's hope that with this change in leadership, PreCheck gets a hard, fresh look.

>Kip Hawley, the author of "Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American Security," was TSA administrator from 2005 to 2009.

So she was leading the TSA before Obama and now claims Trump could save the day.

Bruce Schneider wrote in response to this article and that has more context and perspective: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/12/security_risk...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/12/security_risks_12.html) . The current program has real problems but then what was there before was also not golden either.</comment>


Sony Announced Death of the Floppy Disk - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/sony-announces-the-death-of-the-floppy-disk/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

<comment><USER2> _"Sony sold a jaw-dropping 12 million floppies in Japan during 2009"_

Who is still buying floppies in 2009? Maybe legacy systems where the only way to get data on or off of the device is via a floppy. I've see oscilloscopes like this ( i.e. <http://www.atecorp.com/equipment/tek/TDS794D.asp> )

<comment><USER3> Grabbing data from an o-scope was the last time I used one.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I still remember using my 5.25" floppy disks on my Commodore PC.

I haven't seen a blank pack of 3.25's in a while and thought they were already "dead".

<comment><USER4> I thought it was only the 5.25 disks that were called "floppy" (because they were at least flexible, if not quite floppy). The hard-shelled 3.25's were always just "diskettes" to me since they weren't floppy at all.

<comment><USER5> Nah, "floppy" was a reference to the media, which was quite flexible for both 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks, despite the different casing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> About time, wouldn't you say?</comment>


Do what defines you - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=596

<comment><USER2> "Wealth comes in many forms, including both money and time. Consider that most of the world spends the majority of their time trying to acquire money, viewing it as the key to doing what they want to do. In reality, all they're doing is spending wealth (in the form of time) only to earn it back in the form of money, so they can then use it to buy back time."

The author assumes that people spend the majority of their time trying to acquire money without any other motive than acquiring money to further other goals. This argument fails when you do what you do not only because it brings you money but also because you like doing it per se. You may want to do the activity and at the same time get an objective measurement of how much wealth you create for other people by getting paid money for it, in some way or another.

<comment><USER3> It's certainly not true that the amount of money you get paid is "an objective measurement of how much wealth you create for other people". It's quite possible to make money in lots of ways, some of which also create wealth for other people, some of which are relatively neutral for other people, and some of which take it away from other people. I'm not aware of any general formula for determining which is which, except perhaps in the extremes (obviously, various kinds of scam artists fall into the 3rd category).

<comment><USER2> I think it's actually the most objective measurement there is. How else do you get paid other than by people voluntarily assigning your services or product a certain monetary value they would like to pay you?

<comment><USER4> We had this long debate when some people claimed that the only objective measurement of the value of your work how much you get paid.

It's true that's highly objective, but that doesn't mean it's right. Compare this to objective metrics for programmers. Lines of Code? Hours at the desk? Bugs assigned to them? Whatever metric you use, somebody will find a way to game it, proving that the metric may be useful in some cases but it is not strongly correlated with anything other than the desire to score highly.

I have a theory that metrics are best when secret. If somehow we had money but nobody thought it was important, you might get very valuable information by seeing how has the most of it. But the moment people start valuing a high score, then they start gaming it and the next thing you know you've given Bernie Madoff a high score.

To respond directly to your point, people do voluntarily assign a high value to your services or product when they pay you. The trouble is, they do so with highly incomplete information in an environment where the people playing the game manipulate the information to obtain the highest valuations. In the end, money often ends up being highly correlated with an ability to manipulate who receives what information rather than any underlying service or product.

<comment><USER2> You raise interesting points. I disagree on keeping metrics secret though. Keeping the value system for evaluating people's performance and the wealth they create secret, only leads to subjective standards and gives the keeper of the secret far too much power. To the contrary, I think that only metrics as known and objective as monetary value can ever be useful, as otherwise lots of productivity would be wasted in pursuit of the wrong (secret) metrics.

It may be true that at any given point in time, there may be some wrongfully inflated monetary high scores. I think they always get detected over time, though. Are there any wrongfully inflated high scores over the course of time? I think not, as there is wealth to be created in detecting the frauds. Ultimately, I think, over time there are not as much incentives to manipulate information in order to wrongfully inflate your wealth as there are to produce sustainable wealth.

<comment><USER5> One of the best ways to improve your wealth is imperialism, i.e. taking what isn't yours, but on a grand scale. It has worked for royalty forever, and while it's out in the open, nothing was ever done about it.

What did the royalty do in Arab countries that the common person didn't? Lay claim to the land containing oil. Scarcity can create value, but it's hard to argue that the person who claims it is really "creating value," as anyone else who owned it could do the same. At least not in the same sense that an artist creates something new out of nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think it should necessarily be said that a person who chases money, chases wealth. Trying to aquire _an excess_ amount of money is a form of chasing wealth yes (which the author is mainly addressing). But to say that spending Time making money is somehow not an ideal trade off is pretty nonsensical. Surviving is pretty important. And thus having food, water, clothing, and shelter is pretty important. Should we all grow and prepare our own food? Sew our own clothes? Build our own houses? Society as we know it has made survival, in its raw sense, pretty trivial, so long as we align ourselves (more or less) within the system. I don't see how that's necessarily a detrimental or even less-effective/efficient/optimal use of ones life, regardless of whether or not _how_ you make your money is "truly one's calling".

 _"If your calling in life is to be a musician, what are you doing wasting your life as a store clerk? Isn't your life more valuable than your job? Part of walking in who you are is being bold enough to throw away the parts of your life that aren't valuable, in order to chase after what is."_

Surving is a waste of life? Survival is not valuable?

</comment><comment><USER7> Saying that money buys time is not really true. It can buy, but it all depends on how you want to live. For example, if you are fine with living on the streets, you don't even need money: become a homeless and you will have all the time you ever needed. To live as a middle class person you need some more money, but how much money you need to live like Michael Jackson? Not even him was able to make that amount of money.

So, basically what you are buying with money is a lifestyle. You shouldn't think in terms of time you are buying, but what kind of life you want to live.

</comment><comment><USER8> Money is fungible; time is not. Not all wealth is time. Thus it makes sense to trade time for money, and money for other forms of wealth.

But yes, ideally way you trade your time, i.e. the wealth you create with your productive time, should involve the things you want to do in life. But we are not always so lucky - and it is not always a good thing, as doing something for external reward can destroy intrinsic motivation.</comment>


How a Kelly Kettle works - <AUTHOR> https://www.kellykettleusa.com/how-the-kelly-kettle-works <comment><USER2> Is cleaning the chimney and base difficult?</comment>


ICANN security advisor predicts "hundreds" of new gTLDs will "go dark" - <AUTHOR> http://domainincite.com/19667-icann-security-advisor-predicts-hundreds-of-new-gtlds-will-go-dark <comment><AUTHOR> Explanation: new gTLDs = new generic top-level domains = new domain extensions

The article means the new gTLDs introduced in the last couple of years</comment>


10 Ingenious Hacks That Helped Facebook Take Over the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/facebook-hacks/

<comment><USER2> 100 Buzzfeed style headlines that make you want to drill a hole in your skull!

<comment><USER3> I actually found the content an interesting look at the things most people don't hear about facebook.

I was expecting stuff like 'the like button', 'successful single sign-on', 'news feed', etc. etc. But this is actually about the back-end systems Facebook had to create in order to support such an incredible system.

I'd like to see a similar right up about Google.

Though if we're doing the obligatory 'first post on HN has to be negative, snarky, I'm too cool for this', then I guess you win. Though a better title would have been 'Technologies that allowed Facebook to take over he web'.

<comment><USER2> Wasn't meant to be snarky. The title is tiresome. I expect good content from Wired and they deliver, but after all the effort put into the article I hold out hope that writers can construct thoughtful headlines without giving in to the admittedly viral bottom of the barrel.</comment></comment></comment>


Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee <comment><USER2> The GitHub UI is so broken by this. Reported it.

<comment><USER2> The UI issue, not the repo — which, while silly, si perfectly "valid".</comment></comment>


Almost all Collatz orbits attain almost bounded values - <AUTHOR> https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/almost-all-collatz-orbits-attain-almost-bounded-values/ <comment><USER2> Those who are upvoting: Why is this interesting / important?

<comment><USER3> The Collatz Conjecture, which the paper described in the blog works toward proving, is taught in introductory computer science and discrete math courses. Many people on this site who have gone through a university CS program will have heard of this problem and its notorious difficulty, so progress would be familiar and potentially exciting.

<comment><USER4> It's a particularly good example of memoization: both simple and without a suitable DP solution.

       int collatz(int n) {
         return n == 1 ? 0 : 1 + collatz(n % 2 ? 3 * n + 1 : n / 2)
       }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there any special significance to the Collatz function, besides the sportive aspect of the Collatz conjecture being difficult to prove?

<comment><USER6> I'm not a mathematician, but I'd say that it's one of the simplest and most elegant instances of its kind, and that in general we don't seem to have good ways of dealing with iterative processes that can both lengthen and shorten (or increase and decrease) the size of the output in relation to the input. A generalization of the proof of this might be quite illuminating for a lot of hard problems in number or complexity theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A recent "Full stack engineering" interview duo presented me with a prompt related to a bounded version of the Collatz conjecture.

<comment><USER8> Proving something, or coding something?

<comment><USER7> Coding, bounded to 1M. 'Twas the first time I heard of Collatz. This article is the second in as many weeks</comment></comment></comment>


LibreSSL Will be Portable  - <AUTHOR> http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140509092303&mode=expanded&count=0

<comment><USER2> Given how big the changes/cuts to OpenSSL so far this seems like a positive step towards making it a future credible alternative.

As for the vitriolic LibreSSL rhetoric. I for one hope that both projects continue to improve and thrive in the same way Chromium has since forking Webkit.

Not least because of the webs increasing dependence on TLS though changes like HTTP2/SPDY.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was the strategy right from the start, as far as I read:

Step 1: simplify as much as possible, while only retaining OpenBSD compatibility to keep things easy.

Step 2: reintroduce portability to a more conservative set of OSes than OpenSSL.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't this planned from the start?

<comment><USER5> Lot of people made noise about it not being portable "right now" which to them meant "never". Someone had to explicitly say it was.</comment></comment>


In depth comparison of the APIs of iOS 5 and Ice Cream Sandwich - <AUTHOR> http://www.alpheccar.org/content/95.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not posted for self promotion nor to start a flamewar. I made this comparison for my own understanding. But both systems are huge, complex and not always very well documented. So, I am pretty sure there are mistakes and I think there are even a few big ones.

The post is long but I hope some people may help me to improve it by giving constructive feedback.</comment>


State lawmaker says bicycling is not good for the environment - <AUTHOR> http://seattlebikeblog.com/2013/03/02/state-lawmaker-says-bicycling-is-not-good-for-the-environment-should-be-taxed/

<comment><USER2> There is actually a bit more to this line of argument than the idiotic one the lawmaker takes.

The primary thing that makes a bicycle more efficient than a car is that it weighs around an order of magnitude less than the passenger, rather than the other way around. The second most important factor is that it travels at (and is optimized to travel at) relatively low speeds.

The fact that it's powered, essentially, by food calories is actually one of its least efficient aspects (raw food vegan locavores potentially excepted).

The cool thing is that means you can power a small electric vehicle essentially for free (both financially and environmentally). So people who are unwilling or unable to work up a sweat on the way to work can still take part in most of the benefits of cycling.

<comment><USER3> In terms of environmental cost (not just CO2) a bicycle is actually 3 times as expensive as a really good car: [http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/09/is- a-bicycle-really...](http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/09/is-a-bicycle- really-more-efficient-than-a-car/)

And if you put 4 people in that car, it wins easily, even with a somewhat more average car.

People like bikes mainly because people eat and exercise anyway, so they might as well do some useful work for it. But purely from the environment, and assuming people only bicycle for need, not exercise, it's not an automatic win.

<comment><USER4> This article's argument is, in a word, crap. The author wants to compare efficiency of cars vs. bikes on the basis of fuel costs (after a scattershot discussion of CO2 emissions from those aerobically respirating vs a bus spitting out fumes), then cites fast food as a baseline fuel source. We can game this anyway we want: why not eat 7 bananas, which are $0.20 at my local market, and claim differently? And let's conveniently forget that EVERYONE needs food, regardless of how they expend or conserve their caloric "fuel". I'd like to see a more scientific analysis of carbo emissions of bicyclists vs cars vs public busses. I strongly suspect bikes come up with high marks in the average case.

<comment><USER3> Go ahead - use bananas, the math is easy.

It's obvious that a cyclist will use more calories than someone not moving. The calculations are done using only the extra calories, not the baseline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's also the matter of the effect on the _urban_ (and suburban) environment, something which more directly effects most people.

Widespread car usage is _enormously_ destructive in this sense, because of _insane_ amounts of space it requires (and the degree of danger it introduces). The bicycle, well, not so much (and pedestrians even less, of course).

The negative environmental effects of cars is well-publicized (and apparently politically effective) but it's hardly the only, or even the most significant, problem with widespread car use.

</comment><comment><USER6> See also Toronto mayor Rob Ford for further brilliance on bicycles as an obstacle to transportation [http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/03/mayor- ford-defends-s...](http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/03/mayor-ford-defends- spending-300k-on-bike-lane-removal-it-never-should-have-been-built-in-the- first-place/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This argument is specious. Most people _need to expend more calories than they do_ in the first world, hence the growing obesity epidemic.

You are saving gym time/portion control willpower by biking more and driving less.

</comment><comment><USER3> He's not completely wrong. Human power is by far one of the least efficient ways of powering transportation.

But most people ignore it because people need to eat anyway. And people exercise anyway.</comment>