Rotting Apple  - <AUTHOR> http://mohaps.tumblr.com/post/52722032917/rotting-apple

<comment><USER2> Woe is me, Apple didn't come out with an iWatch that has been rumored since the first iPod nano came out. Waaaa.

I would call all day (12hours!) screen on time with 30day standby on a laptop pretty fucking awesome. Especially on that has a _real_ processor in it instead of some crappy Atom SoC.

I'm also _very_ happy that Apple is going to be catering a little more to its poweruser base while still making that accessible to my grandma (Granny understands what tags are and she understand what better graphical performance looks/feels like, even if she doesn't know that its OpenCL that's doing it).

This is just yet another blog bemoaning that Apple hasn't given them the reach-around</comment>


Ask HN: Hacking traction for Yoink.com (A free marketplace). What would you do? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN - I'd love to get your thoughts on how we might be able to gain some traction for our new startup, Yoink (http://yoink.com), launched last month in NYC.
The idea behind Yoink is that it's a trusted place to give and get things for free. Kinda like the free section of craigslist but without the creepers, and like Freecycle but without the multitude of daily emails, no-shows and hassle. We want to create a transparent gifting economy, where people can give and get things, whether it's passing on old furniture, lending a hand to a neighbor, or simply baking some muffins to make a stranger's day.
By launching in NYC, our aim is to start small, iterate & develop the product to meet user's needs - but getting traction is (as with most marketplaces) proving an interesting problem.
So whilst there are a number of interesting things we're working on, and a ton of great resources we're referencing to come up with ideas (some listed below) - I thought it could be fun to open it up for a discussion to see if you had any thoughts on how we might go about tackling this problem and kickstarting things - looking forward to hearing your thoughts! :)
P.S. Some great resources on traction include:
http://www.growhack.com/ http://www.startup-marketing.com/ http://andrewchen.co/ http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/ http://blog.adamnash.com/ http://www.quora.com/Growth-Hacking <comment><USER2> _Note: I previously commented on here[1] and I am reposting a similar response to what I posted earlier_

Having previously dealt with a chicken-and-egg issue when I launched an online advertising company, I understand some of the problems you are facing.

Similarly having visited Yoink, I noticed you asked immediately to signup via Facebook, I'd remove that and let users just browse (I did manage to skip the signup process by clicking signup by email as it didn't ask me for one) it would significantly improve the user experience. Moreover, I'd make it clearer the posts users are seeing are for "New York" as it is a little small.

Likewise, since you're initially targeting New York users I would place a landing page & ask users to signup via email to express their interest – you can use browser detection to ask them for their region OR simply just ask them.

In terms of acquiring users & growing Yoink itself then, I would implement the following strategies:

\- SEO

This is a HUGE section but, I would definitely look at your On Page SEO to making it more "Local" & to improve some issues. For instance I would probably have Yoink operating from /new-york or /nyc – you should have a look at how Gumtree.com (eBay owned) are operating their site structure for "Cities" in particular.

SEO should be driving a large volume of traffic to your website which is why, I was emphasising the importance of HUGE in terms of the depth for this comment & the importance to Yoink.

\- Social

Once again this is another strategy you should be using more effectively yet it feels like it's an addon to Yoink rather than fully baked into the product. You should work on making it more baked into the product by encouraging people to post to Twitter/Facebook/StumbleUpon etc when they're offering something, encouraging them to post when they've "Yoinked" something (in fact I don't know if you do this but you should offer to "integrate" the services & provide the option to auto-tweet when they post on Yoink or Yoink something but give users a Yes/No option) or offering a leaderboard or something "This Month's Top Sharers/User Referrers" etc you'd be amazed what people will do even for a $10-$25 voucher!

Likewise, you only have Twitter & Facebook – you should add Pinterest, StumbleUpon etc as well to encourage sharing & even a send via email to your friend's option as well.

These are two strategies that are extremely important to the success of Yoink however, there are others you should integrate because; if there is an algorithm update etc you don't want to be losing the bulk of your traffic overnight. As a result you should look to implement the following options into your growth & user acquisition strategy

\- Advertising & Partnerships With Sites In Your Niche

\- Bloggers & Other Webmasters Within AND Outside Your Niche

An example would be to use Guest Posting – since you're targeting New York only look for popular blogs related directly to NYC or read by a lot of NYC users.

\- Offline Marketing

Word of Mouth will be your biggest source of traffic which is why you need to encourage your friends to tell everyone about it as well as, even produce flyers & network with Students (the biggest lovers of all things free!)

\- Online Communities

Go to where your audience is and leverage them discover relevant forums, blogs etc and leave thoughtful comments and participate in their communities then leverage them to grow yours!

\- Social Media Channels - Twitter, YouTube etc

\- Email

You noted that Freecycle send too many emails but a daily/weekly email with site updates & cool favourite new postings etc will encourage people to come back to your site and us the service.

\- Effective Site Branding

\- Have a Blog

As well as guest post, create a blog & post interesting but relevant content which will have people engage with your posts from inside/outside of NYC (adding a landing page & getting their email address as highlighted earlier is another reason to try and grow this as large as possible). Posting posts such as "10 Things You'd Never Believe Are FREE But Are!" and highlight things offered by Yoink users would encourage it to be shared (it the things are cool or shown to be cool – I saw an "underground dinner" highlighted when I was browsing that sounded cool to users!) which will aid in the growth of your service.

[1] <https://twitter.com/Yoink/status/269142284522635264>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Nicholas, thanks so much for writing this up again! Really kind of you.

Good point about the FB stuff - we did have the option to browse, but that seems to have been missed in the latest update.

The SEO suggestion is spot on. It's something we've perhaps lost sight of a little in the throws of building the site, but in hindsight, it's something we should have been building in right from the beginning. Discrete geographic sections, as you suggest, could be great for this.

The social 'flow' too is something that's important which isn't fully developed yet. I agree with every post you should have the option to auto- tweet / post, in fact the app should lead you through this process & make it feel rewarding too.

The sharing buttons we have in there right now are (as I think you said in your original post) admittedly a bit half-baked - so also a great place to improve :)

In terms of community, it's a slow burn. We've been reaching out to a few local communities for whom Yoink really makes 'sense' - i.e. Burning Man, Freegans and Disaffected Freecyclers but as much as they've provided incredibly positive feedback, there's still a lot of friction to getting things listed. It's amazing how easy it is for someone to say they like something, but then the next step - taking an action - is immensely harder. Whilst some could see this as discouraging, we rather are trying to find out what the real 'mechanic' is for people who'd want to post. Ultimately I guess whatever we do it largely comes down to a lot of grunt work, which slowly builds inventory & traction.

I'll have more of a think about online communities, and potential ad partners.

Flyering has afforded limited success so far, Of ~500 flyers handed out to people, we calculated around 60 visits, 10 signups, 1 post.. So it doesn't seem to be the most efficient system just yet :) I wonder how effective it actually is.. if you think to yourself how many times have you ever taken a flyer and taken action...?

But a few interesting things to think about for sure! Really appreciate you taking the time to write this up again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Before you start with the growth hacking business, you may want to re-organize your site to provide clarity especially for first time visitors. IMO, your CTA here is to have people browse through things..that whole sign up business on the left hand side is just a distraction. I would present 2 columns with clear bold headings... "Things Offered" vs "Things requested" . I don't think there is any reason to have them as one continous stream. Why do I have to give good things to great people around me? Why can't I just give things to people for free? Whether they are great people or not is not my particular concern. Nor do I care if it is good stuff, as long as the person receiving it wants it.. Case in point, I want to get rid of an old TV..I'd give it away for free to just about anyone who wants it..my motive? To reduce cluster in my house.

You guys have a good thing going, but you may be overthinking it

</comment><comment><USER4> The niche you are trying to fill would probably be appreciated by religious communities, especially parishioners in mainline protestant denominations and "emergent" Christians primarily concerned with social justice and human need. If you create a way for groups to specify a push community (food banks, shelters, non-profits in X niche) that would periodically receive a list of the group's available items, it would automate part of their mission. Religious communities would also be likely to post a link to you on their website and encourage participation internally. Outside of cities, this demographic is older and would likely be those already afraid of Craigslist for security reasons but savvy enough to see the benefit in your system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - great idea! We explored the idea of closed groups a little while ago but hadn't thought of the 'push' angle.. could be a very interesting addition. Really appreciate the input :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gamification, badges, recognition, social profiles. Offer some sense of gratification when they complete a transaction and give something away. Integrate with Facebook, both for inviting more users and for posting on their timeline when they have given something. It highlights their generosity. Focus on having the recipient give feedback to the giver - recognition, express gratitude, how much they enjoyed what they got.

Craigslist has the audience but no sense of identity, community. eBay has the feedback loop and score but no social network.

<comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant perspectives, thank you. I think you're right - gratitude is SO important in the transaction. In time, we hope a focus on that will be one of the most remarkable things about Yoink - and we can really amplify the intrinsic rewards people get from giving.

To help virality, Facebook integration should roll out in the next week, and regarding gamification - I guess we just need to get a decent number exchanges happening before all of those feedback components really come into their own. Some good ideas in there - really appreciate the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A blog, as suggested is a nice way to attract some people, but you must write interesting things, please don't just write to get visits other way you will get the opposite effect. Also please don't try to force "virality" with social networks and other things. They are really annoying, focus on creating something that people will be genually willing to share. Word of mouth(and not virtual) is still the best way to go. Trying to force your website down the throat of users will just piss them off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree - the blog has to offer value on it's own. I As a reference, the Kissmetrics blog is probably one of the best examples I've found of a blog done 'right' - I get a small rush of excitement every time a new post arrives in my inbox because I know that their content is also so insanely useful :) Far too many bloggers now write just for the sake of writing, and I wonder who exactly they're trying to help, other than themselves. Your advice is duly noted, thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was in Prospect Park recently on a Saturday morning and saw some stands collecting people's clothes and stuff for recycling and thought of Yoink. There are probably lots of groups like that to collect things. I would imagine they are using physical stores to sell things, or have some partnerships in place to distribute it. Have you spoken to any of them about how they give it away now, and the challenges they face in finding good homes?

</comment><comment><USER8> If it were me, I would try to figure out which niche is being offered/taken the most and move your entire product towards it. It will be easier for people to identify and remember your site and easier for you to reach out to the organizations in that space. I don't want to be thinking day and night about what to give, but if whenever people think about volunteering OR moving furniture they think of your site, it might gain more traction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed - so I'm taking from that, the notion of 'give things away' seem a little too abstract? How about if we suggested a select few types of item you might like to give - could that help?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this Udemy course, called HypeBomb, could help shine some light on Growth Hacking - [http://www.udemy.com/hypebomb-growth-hacking-for- startups/?c...](http://www.udemy.com/hypebomb-growth-hacking-for- startups/?couponCode=HN50)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd go with physical presence if you've got a limited market.

I mean, you're talking gifting, going down to where people are helping with Sandy and organizing gift exchanges might be a good place to start.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe start a blog? Lots of sites use this to get traction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Cedric! A blog is a fantastic idea, one of the potential downsides is that we're focusing on a pretty tight geographic area - and blogs have a very broad reach. Inbound marketing is definitely something we're keen to develop over time, but with with limited resources, I'm wondering what might have the most impact right now in terms of kickstarting things..

I guess to clarify a little we see two sides of the equation: We want to reach people in NYC with a large volume of things to give away (movers might be a perfect example). We need to a) reach these people at a time when they're in the mindset for passing things onto others, and b) equally have enough people who're keen to pick things up so the transaction's as efficient as possible. Classic chicken-egg :)</comment></comment>


Flaw in GitHub OAuth logic allowed unrestricted access to private repositories - <AUTHOR> Many just received this email from GitHub support: --
GitHub has discovered an error in the logic used to enforce OAuth App access restrictions, which restrict OAuth integration access to an organization's private repositories. In certain situations, when a member of an organization granted access to a third-party OAuth integration, that integration could have been given more access to some of your organization's repositories than we intended to allow.
When an organization enables OAuth App access restrictions, GitHub generally limits OAuth integration access to private repositories.  This error in OAuth App access restrictions allowed third-party OAuth integrations, such as continuous integration providers, the same access permissions to certain private repositories within an organization as the user who implemented the integration had, provided they had authorized the integration for a scope capable of interacting with repositories.
-- Full email: https://gist.github.com/kailan/9f37ec2cd76314f945dda65e5beab241 <comment><USER2> Clickable link: [https://gist.github.com/kailan/9f37ec2cd76314f945dda65e5beab...](https://gist.github.com/kailan/9f37ec2cd76314f945dda65e5beab241)

Very interesting. I wonder if any private organisations setup a pseudo/canary repositories, that when pulled triggered an alarm? Or simply contained some monitored API keys or credentials to spot any activity/Insider threats.

Might be a neat idea for those businesses that are concerned about their private repos (either cloud hosted or self hosted).

May have picked up if anyone was able to exploit this.</comment>


Ack is a tool like grep, optimized for programmers - <AUTHOR> http://beyondgrep.com/

<comment><USER2> I tried switching from grep to this, but got burned too much by this tool defaulting to ignoring a lot of files with pretty common extensions.</comment>


Did Huawei Bring Down Nortel? - <AUTHOR> https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring-down-nortel-corporate-espionage-theft-and-the-parallel-rise-and-fall-of-two-telecom-giants <comment><AUTHOR> I had a co-op position at Nortel in the late 90s for three years. While I was in a sysadmin group maintaining 10,000 hp-ux and 10,000 sunos workstations (the servers were auspex's in the basement in rooms with a glass wall along the hallway) other friends were working in labs full of optical spectrum analyzers and cutting edge networking gear under development. There was an old room called an aneroic (sp?) chamber or something that had giant fiberglass spikes coming out of the walls and ceiling to absorb all sound in order to test the quality of phones. The one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling by the cord sounded like a swarm of bees. If you and friend faced back to back and shouted all you could hear was a library voice.

The sysadmin group taught me to program and many other life lessons that really helped set me up for success.

It is sad that so many lost their jobs, their pensions, and that other teens don't have the same opportunities that i did.

It is hard to believe all those buildings in Ottawa now house government workers, I believe nortel had 140,000 employees when I was there.

I am glad to see some more attention being paid to exactly how it all collapsed so quickly.

</comment><comment><USER2> Short version, YES, total successful theft by the Chinese government. Because of our dumb morality based "good guys win in the end" and "long arc of whatever" we are suckers and can't believe when the bad guys win, news flash, they do, much more than all those movies and religious indoctrination stories would have you believe. In fact, they win most of the time.</comment>


You're scaring us - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/issues/36 <comment><AUTHOR> The Reddit thread linked in the GitHub issue is interesting:

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7jh9rv/what_is_loo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7jh9rv/what_is_looking_glass/)

There are several scary things about this:

\- Unknown Mozilla developers can distribute addons to users without their permission

\- Mozilla developers can distribute addons to users without their _knowledge_

\- Mozilla developers themselves _don 't realise the consequences of doing this_

\- Experiments are not explicitly enabled by users

\- Opening the addons window _reverts configuration changes which disable experiments_

\- The only way to properly disable this requires fairly arcane knowledge Firefox preferences (lockpref(), which I'd never heard of until today)</comment>


Ask HN: how did you fix problems with bad sleep? - <AUTHOR> I am exhausted most of the time, because I never sleep well. Doctor diagnosed "restless legs syndrome" and wants to give me pills, but I wonder if there are any other things to try? Just interested in any stories of how people fixed their problems with bad sleep. <comment><USER3> Exercise is a cure for many things, including poor sleep. Take a brisk walk in the afternoon. 20-30 minutes is fine. It's not guaranteed, I guess, but it always works for me.

Also, if you're a coffee, tea or soda drinker, switch off to herbal tea or plain water after lunch. Caffeine has a 6-8 hour period of effect, with the peak effect happening at about the 4 hour mark. If you do drink things with caffeine, consider reducing or cutting them out entirely. I can drink 2-3 cups of green tea in moderation without any adverse effects, but more than one cup of black tea is too much (and one isn't _quite_ enough, so I don't drink black tea). Coffee and sodas aren't worth it, to me, as the caffeine in coffee is a jittery spike and all the sugar in sodas makes me sleepy by lunch time (which totally throws off getting to sleep when I actually want to at night).

</comment><comment><USER4> Hello! I used to have a lot of problems with sleep myself. In fact, there was a period of time where I would take Nyquil to force myself to sleep, because it causes drowsiness as a side effect. Obviously this is not recommended :)

I now have a pretty high quality of sleep without the assistance of any drug, and have for several years. I believe that in my case, most of the change can be attributed to making a regular habit of meditation and exercise.

When I say "meditation", please interpret that broadly as any activity that might be considered meditative. There are many forms that people describe as "meditation" that can help. In addition, I'd put activities such as yoga, qigong and taichi in this category. I practiced many of them at least a little and believe they all contributed.

As for exercise, I mostly did weight training, combined on and off with martial arts practice. I did not do much pure aerobic exercise, but that is only because I personally had a lot of difficulty with it and really did not enjoy it - I think if I had persisted and only done aerobics (walking, running, swimming, etc.) it would have had the same end result of improving my quality of sleep. I don't think you have to do it every day - so long as it's regular, like 30 minutes three times a week, that would be enough to notice the effect.

Finally, one other thing you might try: wear earplugs and a blindfold when you lie down to sleep. This may or may not help you get to sleep, but it's likely to help you _stay_ asleep once you do drift off :) I find that an empty pillowcase makes an outstanding blindfold - fold it a few times around its long diagonal axis, then cover your eyes and tie its ends loosely at the back of your head. Very comfortable and blocks out the light well.

This is what helped me. I really don't know if these will help you - I hope you do discover what works well for you. Good luck!

-Aaron

</comment><comment><USER5> You can get an SNP test for restless legs syndrome if you want to find out if you have a related genetic mutation

Also, and this is definitely not medical advice, anti-depressants might work but they also sometimes cause restless legs syndrome. Restless legs syndrome pills have gotta be under international copyright, but if you're personally comfortable going on happy pills with the knowledge that you need to carefully withdraw from them over 30 days that could also fix all of your sleep issues much cheaper than restless legs pills.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love how you assume we've "fixed" that problem :)

More seriously though, I suffer from the same problem. My issue is that I can't clear my mind - so I'm lying in bed and actively thinking (verses "passively" letting my mind wander) about people, events, projects, etc. until I get bored and get back up.

My only solution (more of a workaround) is to just do the same as LogicHole: stay awake for 36 hours - you'll force your body to go to sleep thereafter.

<comment><USER7> I sometimes cannot sleep because I can't stop thinking about things. For me the cure is reading fiction. I can't recommend it enough. It totally clears my mind of everything that excites/agitates/stresses. Non fiction won't do and can actually make it worse. Fiction!

<comment><AUTHOR> I always need a good book around for getting to sleep. It makes me nervous if I don't have one.

Of course one of the sleep hygiene rules is to not do anything other than sleep in bed, but I think there has to be an exception for reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Basic sleep hygiene is a good starting point. Sleep on a consistent schedule 7 days a week. Use your bedroom only for sleeping. Don't read, work, or study there. Avoid eating right before bedtime. Get away from bright lights, emissive display devices, and loud noises for about an hour before you go to bed. Exercise is great too, but not right before bedtime. Do note that once you start using this routine it may take 4 to 6 weeks to really see the benefits.

SwellJoe's comments on caffeine and sugar are true. My doctor told me that caffeine has about a 10-hour half-life. After noon it's generally something I avoid.

If you try these things (or at least a good portion of them) and you don't see any improvement it's time to start looking at health conditions rather than merely poor habits. Sleep apnea is a major cause of chronic exhaustion. Restless Leg Sydrome is another. With both of these you are constantly waking up during the night and never attain the deep sleep needed to rest.

My father had sleep apnea - when he did an overnight EEG sleep study the doctors determined that he was waking up over 80 times an hour due to airway blockage. He started using a CPAP about two years ago. The CPAP is a face mask which generates positive air pressure to keep airways open. The difference was dramatic. He's much more energetic, much less grumpy, and has in general been much happier since he started using it.

I personally had awful sleep for years. I was perpetually exhausted. The only way I was able to sleep was to stay awake for 24 to 36 hours and then pass out for 12 to 18 hours. I was miserable. I finally broke down my pride and went to see a sleep specialist. I implemented the sleep hygiene strategies and saw slight improvements but no major gains. I didn't have RLS or apnea, so the possible suspects were narrowing down. On a long shot we decided to try a medication called Rozerem. It's a synthesized melatonin available as a prescription. In most people the pineal gland regulates the sleep/wake cycle via the production of melatonin. As it turns out I have extremely low melatonin production, so my body never got the signal to shut down and sleep. With the introduction of melatonin in pill form about an hour before bed I was actually able to get a good night's rest. The difference was astounding. I had forgotten what being rested even felt like. Interestingly the melatonin had an immediate dramatic effect on me. It doesn't force drowsiness like a sedative does. It allows me to feel sleepy (rather than just tired or exhausted). Rozerem won't do anything for someone with normal melatonin production however. Past a certain level the body just metabolizes the extra melatonin and it is neutralized. For the same reason increasing the dosage of the medication won't have any effect.

For me the combination of improved sleep hygiene and the synthesized melatonin made a dramatic difference in my quality of life. Treating my father's sleep problems made him a much happier individual. If your doctor thinks that a medication for RLS will help you attain better sleep, I highly recommend that you at least try his suggestions. There is no substitute for being well-rested and you owe it to yourself to find out what will allow you to gain a good night's sleep.

<comment><USER5> Did you ever try regular melatonin?

<comment><USER8> I did not. I would if I did not have easy access to the Rozerem. Over-the- counter melatonin is not regulated by the FDA and is of wildly varying quality. The advantage of the synthesized capsule is that the dosage is consistent and effective.

<comment><USER9> Yes, OTC Melatonin is not regulated by the FDA, mainly due to the lack of studies on its long-term effects.

If you were going to try it, go for a low dose. Try 300 micrograms [1]. Most stores sell a minimum dose of 1 milligram, but you can find the lower dose stuff on Amazon.

1\. <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/melatonin.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had restless legs syndrome. My (herbalist) wife diagnosed it as a magnesium deficiency. There are a variety of reasons why habitants of western society can be magnesium deficient, which I don't have time to go into here.

Rather than waste time with potentially ineffective dietary supplements, the easiest way to get more magnesium is with a bath of Epsom Salts, which is actually just magnesium phosphate. Run a very hot bath with two cups of epsom salts diluted in it, and plenty of it gets absorbed through your skin.

The first day I tried this, I had the best night's sleep in years!

So in my case, I think her diagnosis was correct, and I took the baths every second night until I felt completely better and my sleeping patterns were back to normal. (My coding concentration improved too.)

ps. If you don't have a full-sized bath tub you can use a bucket and just bathe your feet, though I imagine you won't absorb as much this way. Just make it hot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. My family physician also wasn't happy about the restless legs diagnosis from the sleep lab and first wants to test Magnesium and Vitamin B (I went to the sleep lab of my own accord, it was not her recommendation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I sleep much better since getting a white noise machine that I have on overnight. I use the Marpac 980, which I'm very happy with: <http://www.marpac.com/sound_cond.asp>

I got mine from Amazon for $50.

</comment><comment><USER12> I know of two things that help. One is exercise, which lots of people have mentioned here. The other is meditation. My brother-in-law suffered badly from insomnia for years and says it made the biggest difference out of all the things he tried.

<comment> Xlp-Thlplylp I have chronic insomnia. Now that I'm walking home from work (about 35 blocks), I feel even better, and my insomnia is worse. I tried resetting my circadian rhythm by not eating 16 hours before going to bed: even worse insomnia. Anything I do to control my insomnia exacerbates it.

<comment><USER12> That sounds hard, and I'm sorry to hear it. If your point is that your experience contradicts my statement, I agree. Had I run the "comment" command with the -v option, it might have taken the following more accurate form: "I know of two things that have helped me sleep better, although I didn't have insomnia to begin with; somebody else I know who does, reports that both helped him too, but of course it doesn't mean they'll help you, but they might be worth trying."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks like there is some research leading to fixing sleeping problems by simply changing your eating habits. I dont personally know how easy it is to implement these ideas.

[http://parentingsquad.com/easy-way-to-reset-your-sleep- cycle...](http://parentingsquad.com/easy-way-to-reset-your-sleep-cycle-stop- eating)

<http://www.news-medical.net/?id=32333>

</comment><comment><USER14> I try to keep a regular schedule and if I can't get sleepy I read a book. Reading puts me RIGHT to sleep.

Note that reading things online (RSS Feeds, Twitter, whatever) do NOT work :) They'll probably keep you more awake. Grab a good, or boring novel if that's your schtik and read it for 20 min while in bed. Puts me right to sleep on the days I can't get tired (Or just have sex that works too)

</comment><comment><USER15> You'll also want to look at this recent NYT article on fatigue: [http://health.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn- chronic...](http://health.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn- chronicfatigue-ess.html?ref=health)

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh man, not the jimmy legs.

[http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=147536...](http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=147536&title=the- jimmy-legs)

Just don't start gambling.

<comment><AUTHOR> That link crashes my browser, any other sources?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm -- read this.

<comment><USER18> That boring? ;)

Edit: Actually the linked article seems quite interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some people do better without caffeine. There is also a condition called Mononucleosis that can cause fatigue, as well as other conditions. Lots of things from vitamin deficiencies to cancer can cause fatigue.

If you look up the pill on the web you can get information but they tend to list any side effect ever seen. Check out the list of problems with Tylenol and you'll see the kind of CYA exaggeration I'm talking about.

I've never heard of any treatment for restless leg syndrome beside the medicine.

</comment><comment><USER19> I had a tough time sleeping last year, mainly caused by anxiety about work, and the onset of mild asthma which caused me to wheeze as I fell asleep. The wheezing would wake me up, and the anxiety would keep me awake. Incidentally, it took me four doctors to get this point across: I told them my son has asthma, so does my mother, and I have hay-fever, so maybe I had asthma too? Finally, sure enough, it was diagnosed and I was given an inhaler which fixes the symptoms. My point being - whatever your doctor says, (s)he could be wrong, and your problem might lie elsewhere.

Anyway, during the three months or so of bad sleep, I often went for several days (the record being from Thursday until Sunday, ie 4 nights) without sleeping. That puts you in a strange state of mind, believe me. My first, regular doctor told me that I shouldn't worry about the sleep, since after a night I'd be so tired I could sleep through anything. Riiiight. Another doctor finally gave me sleeping pills, which were great - she even said she used them herself quite often. The only problem was getting off the pills after a few weeks, since they're addictive and coming off them causes anxiety and sleeplessness, which seems a bit circular and counter-productive...

Anyway, the lessons learned, the hard way:

* Doctors are fallible and overworked, just like everyone else.

* Alcohol is not the answer. I tried. Sleeping alcohol off is not the same as a good night's sleep, and you'll damage yourself in other ways by over-imbibing.

* Tea is better than coffee. I have one strong, tasty cup of real coffee per day (in the morning) then drink tea. I know many non-Brits complain that tea is a watery, flavourless drink, so I would refer you to George Orwell, who knew a thing or two about making a tasty cuppa: <http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm>

* If you are anxious about work, relationships, money, your big project, whatever - deal with that. It's quite possibly the true cause of whatever's troubling you. Find ways to relax, especially socialising, exercising, etc.

* Work out for half an hour each day. I do this and the endorphine rush is fantastic. I don't even work out particularly hard - I'm sweaty but not nauseous by the time I've finished. You'll look better, feel better, and probably sleep better too. I use a rower and a bike machine, so I can watch a DVD or listen to music if it gets boring.

* Most of the crap about relaxation exercises ("tense up your toes, then relax, tense up your legs and relax", etc) is just that - utter crap which probably won't help at all.

HTH. Don't just think about the immediate problem. Look for underlying causes and try your best to deal with those. And good luck.

<comment><USER20> Actually, alcohol has an enervating bounce effect that kicks in a few hours after intake.

<comment><USER19> Also followed by a depressant effect which can last for days. So overall, alcohol only "works" in the short term, after which it's all downhill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When my girlfriend has problems (studying for the bar... talk about anxiety) I will make her play cards with me for 30-45min or we'll both read our books awhile. As others have mentioned, the key for some is to clear an anxious mind from the days activities before you try to sleep. It would be nice if our bodies has a switch, but until then...

</comment><comment><USER22> Eugeroics. Use adrafinil when you need to be awake and alert, let the sleep take care of itself.

</comment><comment><USER23> As others have mentioned, regular physical workout helps one get in to a good sleep schedule (apart from it's various other benefits). e.g. an hour in the gym in the morning, makes me hit the bed at a very consistent time every night.

</comment><comment><USER24> Earplugs

<comment><USER18> They really help with some problems - especially snoring room mates. But they are not a cure-all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nothing has improved my ability to sleep more than quitting smoking and quitting or severely limiting my caffeine intake.

</comment><comment><USER26> Start working out and you will sleep well whether you want it or don't. Guaranteed.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with working out is that I am frequently too exhausted to do it. I do sports, but something on a regular basis in general was impossible to me so far.

<comment><USER26> Tylenol PM

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can't imagine cavemen having problems like "restless legs syndrome", and they managed to get by pretty well without CPAP machines too. The causes of these types of things can generally be found in modern diet and lifestyle factors.

The most effective things I've found in improving sleep and general wellbeing are:

\- giving up caffeine;

\- reducing anxiety and stress generally particularly before bed.... don't work long hours or work right up till bedtime as you can be running on adrenaline which is terrible for sleep and mental health.

\- avoid diet drinks and anything containing artificial sweetener (<http://www.google.com/search?q=aspartame>) ... I only recently discovered how terrible this stuff is, and giving it up has done wonders for my wellbeing.

\- If you snore, have sleep apnoea or any other respiratory condition, look into natural remedies like Buteyko or Pranayama... CPAP machines can help you get better sleep but are counter-productive in the long term as they reinforce your habit of hyperventilation.

\- Consider seeing an osteopath or similar type of physical therapist to straighten out your skeleton and attend to any muscle tension you have - <USER2> people, particularly desk-based workers - have lots of tension which restricts blood flow, contributes to stress and reduces quality of sleep.

\- Regular exercise is great but be careful if you are already prone to anxiety, as over-exercising can push you into depression (this is counter to what most people understand about exercise & depression)

\- Consider detoxing and liver cleansing - I've undertaken the lemon detox ("master cleanse") about every 6 months for the last year or two, and found it's done wonders for muscle tension, quality of sleep, digestion and mental health.

Some of these points - in particular the last one - are very contentious and frequently under attack from skeptics, usually who are practitioners of conventional medicine, vendors of costly commercial solutions like CPAP machines, or professional skeptics like Skepdic, which whilst often valuable, is often skeptical about things purely because they are unconventional.

Whilst I don't have any problems with conventional medicine, it generally focuses treating symptoms of clear-cut diagnosable illnesses, and is not particularly good at addressing the vague lifestyle-related conditions like fatigue, poor sleep, anxiety, muscle tension, digestion etc.

These types of conditions can generally be overcome by understanding the fundamentals of the way the body works, and doing everything you can to help your body to work as it was designed.

It's not easy, the world of "natural medicine" is a dangerous place but my experience is that with persistence, a willingness to experiment, and a healthy level of skepticism, it has much to offer to improve your life greatly.

Some helpful links:

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/9/83936/58483> <http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/16/81428/8007> (I know you didn't mention any issues with depression, but quality of sleep is closely related to anxiety and depression, and can be a warning sign, and many of the same principles apply in overcoming the problem.)

<http://www.buteyko.com/> \- if you have breathing/snoring problems.

</comment><comment><USER28> also try monitoring your body temperature, especailly head and feet (socks and a hat), this can also help.

</comment><comment><USER29> Alcohol. To quote Homer Simpson, it is the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.

<comment><USER12> Alcohol induces wakefulness in the second half of sleep, so this is a bad idea. (There are many sources on this. I found <http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/alerts/l/blnaa41.htm> in a quick search.)</comment></comment>


Flappy Bird by the Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://zachwill.com/flappy-bird/ <comment><USER2> What disturbs me most about this is the complete lack of empathy people have for the guy. Just look at the comments on the link explaining that Flappy Bird was removed from the app store.

Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. They hurl insults like "weak" and "fragile" as though someone isn't allowed to be shy ever since the internet happened. The sheer amount of _greed_ on display in debates about this game is deeply unnerving, and it seems as though modern culture has forgotten that there are many things that are more important than money. It seems as though our entire country is hopelessly addicted to accumulating more and more pieces of green paper, only to be puzzled when having a large number in their bank account fails to actually solve any of their problems.

<comment><USER3> I would say, given what money can do for you in this world -- how much easier it can make your life, the doors it can open -- that it is at the very least _surprising_ that anyone would turn down this kind of success. In fact, I'll bet you'd have trouble finding one person out of a hundred who would not be willing to suffer pretty significant pain for two weeks if it meant they'd make $50,000 a day. Given that people are willing to do this, they're shocked that this dev wouldn't just turn off his twitter, shut down his phone, book a trip to the beach and just ride it out there.

There may be a small handful of people in the world for whom taking the app down is the long-term rational decision. But I'd wager they are a fairly rare breed.

<comment><USER4> The possible subtext is that he is shutting it down in fear of bad repercussion - like being exposed for gaming the app store rankings - or to simply avoid such accusations.

<comment><USER5> That's my guess. For all, for the sake of argument, let's say this developer did hire somebody to pump up his numbers. They could even be extorting him to pay them more in exchange for their silence. It reminds me of the movie 'Office Space' ... where they rig their software to shave fractional-pennies off of each transaction for an eventual payday, only to have their plan work too well too quickly.

<comment><USER6> Could be covering his ass on a cease and desist, making it seem like his decision.

Most people who get one don't know if they can talk about it publicly or not and just want it to go away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's interesting about a by-the-numbers account of Flappy Bird's success is how starkly apparent the weaknesses of the app store model of surfacing and distributing apps seem to be in retrospect. Think about it: the app store organizes apps almost exactly like web directories organized websites in the 90's -- there are human-curated catalogs, and a single store acts as a directory for essentially all known apps. It's like Yahoo! was in 1994.

Considering that Flappy Bird was made popular by power users on other platforms (particularly YouTube), I think that this point is really important: the app store is probably not the best platform to surface new apps.

A good exercise for entrepreneurs is to think of a better model. If anything, the success of Flappy Bird is one hell of an incentive to find out.

(Also: if you have ideas about this, like me, we should have a chat.)

<comment><USER8> Google play annotates and highlights apps that you or your friends have downloaded or rated. 'similar apps' is also a more modern way of surfacing content.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but how do you deal with the long tail? Flappy Bird is not an app that would have surfaced until it was well on its way to becoming what it is today (or was yesterday, I guess).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find the endless accusations of a bot network quite tiring. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. Either way there is zero evidence to support such a claim. My favorite part of this whole saga is from the polygon article.

Nguyen via Twitter: "Press people are overrating the success of my games. It is something I never want. Please give me peace." Polygon: "We've reached out to Nguyen for comment and will update accordingly."

Good job everyone. Good job.

<comment><USER4> The article presents some (non-conclusive) evidence of a sudden, steady influx of reviews, and more is coming up: [https://sensortower.com/flappy-bird- scripted-reviews-analysi...](https://sensortower.com/flappy-bird-scripted- reviews-analysi..).

What kind of game developer doesn't want it's creations to succeed?

<comment><USER10> He's explicitly stated in an interview that he didn't do anything to game reviews, so do you stand by what you say, or are you calling him a liar? Not very game developer would resort to nefarious tactics for their own profit. Why does everyone have to look for a cause behind every event - can't you just accept that something might just have ... happened?

<comment><USER4> I'm not taking any conclusions yet. The episode is unusual, accepting that "things just happened" is not my cup of tea. As a developer I'm interested in the dynamics of the app store rankings, if it's still possible for an indie dev to succeed without "help"; and as a former media student, how exactly a little crappy game clone went viral and made it to the top spot in a month.

If it turns out it was just a fluke, still more interesting it is.

<comment><USER11> It was linked to by a major YouTuber.

It is a tiny simple free app. You do one thing, you get one number back.

A bit like nananca bike crash. These very simple games are great for the "just one more go" factor, and the bragging rights of "hey! I just beat your top score".

Over analysis could lead to incorrect conclusions so I'd be wary of any analysis that explained Flappy Bird without explaining the failure of all the other similar games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A few years ago I'd a much more humble experience with virality.

I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and make a landing page for people to play with it.

Nobody went to it. For months. Like not one person. It's still online today, although I've obviously broken the plugin at some point [1].

Months later my jaw hit the floor when I woke up to an inbox full of emails about this thing. The page had had thousands upon thousands of hits. Not from Belfast, but from NY and SF. It had been featured on a ton of blogs, discussions etc, all in the 6 hours or so I'd been asleep. Traffic had peaked, but it kept coming.

A friend we hadn't seen in a while called into our little co-working space to tell me "that thing you put on Hacker News" had been on the front page for hours. I'd never even heard of HN at this point!

There was no rhyme nor reason to any of this. The page had been available for months. All I can surmise is that something lit the touchpaper that started a chain reaction. And that I've a lot to learn about how virality works and what makes it function.

It makes me wonder did he really engage in some grey market stuff to push Flappy Bird a little. I kind of wonder why he would fork out for something like that when the precedent would indicate he wasn't onto a winner with this game.

In retrospect we know he had a great game, the potential for serious chain- reaction style virality was there, maybe the spark that lit the touch-paper was something innocuous that no-one would ever guess?

[1]: [http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/](http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the most interesting part of this is what the author points out: this is a story about a normal developer riding one hell of a roller-coaster.

On top of that, let's face it: the game ain't that much. It's not like there was some special secret sauce he put in there. I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there.

So this story, aside from the marketing moves (which I would love to find out about as long as my best 40K other HN friends do not at the same time), is just about winning the lottery. Guy writes app, wins the lottery.

This kind of lottery keeps poor schmucks writing apps for walled garden playstores. You get ten thousand people slaving away over little apps, each one hoping to be this guy. He's the guy in the casino who hits on the slots. The casino definitely wants to make sure all the rubes see the pile of money he gets.

<comment><USER14> "I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there."

I don't know that this is true. Or maybe it's true for "simple and playable", but maybe they're missing the "fun and addictive" qualities that made Flappy Bird work.

There's a lot of subtle things that made Flappy Bird a game people enjoyed- the exact responses of the control, the timing and spacing of the obstacles, the quickness of the games, the ease of restarting, and so on. If any of that had been slightly off, it might not have made it.

I'm not at all sure he got all that right intentionally, it might well be he just got the balances right through accident.

But I do think the precise qualities of the game did matter, and I don't think there's a huge number of games out there that could have done just as well.

<comment><USER13> It's a mistake to cast these things in absolutes. Hopefully I didn't do that.

Of course, all those things you mention are important. Critical, even. But appstores are not meritocracies, no more than the music industry is. You've got to be working at the top of your game, getting all the details right, and even then 1) you've got a small chance of making it big, and 2) somebody with less skill and execution might do much better than you do.

These aren't reasons to give up, just to understand the risks involved. This market exists to extract the maximum amount of developer work for the minimum amount of money. That way the consumers love their little gadgets more -- and will buy even more. It does not exist to make really great developers a decent living. (Although that's certainly possible)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I get it. Here you have a developer who just wanted to make games, and maybe a bit of money. He creates a hit, by accident, with a game that has addicting gameplay (and it is, I personally love it).

Then everyone in the media calls his game crap and accuses him of cheating the system (without producing any proof). I'd quit too.

<comment><USER16> I'm sure he was inundated with people wanting to buy it, license it, claim the made it, asking for tips, etc. I'd imagine this kind of thing basically ruins your email address.

Then when he said he didn't like the attention, _more_ hate came. Then when he said he was pulling it, _death threats_ came.

Reminds me of people who win the lottery. All their friends just want something, charities start bugging them, they can't be left alone.

I feel sorry for him.

<comment><USER17> I feel sorry for him too, but it seems like it should have been obvious that publicly pulling the game was not the way to make things better. It sucks, but the only way to make it go away is to just ignore it all for a while. The internet will find its new obsession in short order, and Flappy Bird's 15 minutes of fame will be over. Anything he does to try to avoid attention will just make it go on longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't know if I agree with this. I was just talking to my friend about Flappy Bird reviews. When I first got Flappy Bird in early February, the button to rate the game was in the same place where I usually tapped to make the bird fly. Since the "Rate this App" button appeared so quickly after losing the game, I almost rated the app like 5 times in just a couple of minutes. I would like to see the different versions of the app and when this feature / bug was introduced.

<comment><USER19> He's left handed ([https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/431336238985920513](https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/431336238985920513)).

<comment><USER20> ^^^ hey look everybody, here he is !

but seriously best of luck to you if it is you.

you should remake the game now with a black swan in place of yellow bird.

<comment><USER19> I'm not him. Just happen to be a Vietnamese with the same last name :) "Nguyen" is a common last name in Vietnam, like 40% ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bad/Funny Flappy Bird reviews became a meme on its own: [http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel- behin...](http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behind-the- success-of-the-1-app-flappy-bird/)

So I don't know if it's as simple to suggest it was a pay-for-review scheme, but rather just its own thing.

Same thing happened on Amazon milk reviews: [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09milk.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09milk.html)

<comment><USER22> I don't think it's being suggested that a pay-for-review scheme was what caused it to be a hit.

The game was available on the store for seven months without getting much traction. The developer probably thought he would try some kind of pay-per- review/promotion service to get a few more downloads.

This got the game into the charts, but it only really began to take off because unlike many of its peers using pay-per-review the game _actually had a hook_ that got people playing. In this case the pay-per-review was a tiny catalyst for vast growth.

Of course, this assumes the developer used some sort of paid promotion service.

<comment><USER21> But he denies that to be the case. And if it was his goal, then why is it pulling it off the app store?

Despite how rare it is to have a true grassroots viral hit, I think that's what happened in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the story of this game exemplifies the fact that content needs a minimum amount of attention to reveal it's true value.

The journey of Flappy Bird appears to me like this:

Stage 1: Almost no attention, almost no growth

Stage 2: Some kind of grey market paid downloads / ratings service

Stage 3: Attention of minimum critical mass of early consumers (increase in audience of 1 or perhaps 2 orders of magnitude)

Stage 4: Attention of influencers on other platforms, especially pewdiepie on youtube (increase in audience by a couple of orders of magnitude)

Stage 5: Attention by large community of enthusiasts (increase in audience by a couple of orders of magnitude)

Stage 6: Mass market attention

where each stage is dependent on the one before it, with the exception of stage 2, which is performed externally.

What's interesting to me is that the qualities the game possesses, which were sufficient to carry it from stage 3 to stage 6 without promotion on the part of the dev, were not sufficient to propel it from stage 1 to stage 3. We could say that the true quality of the game was unknown in stage 1.

My personal opinion is that the vast majority of content created languishes in the equivalent of stage 1 for its particular ecosystem. Of this content, the vast majority will be garbage, a small minority will be reasonable and a tiny minority will have the potential to be a widespread hit. But of this last group, most or all of it will never emerge from stage 1 because stage 1 does not provide it with enough attention to separate it from the rest of the (bad) stage 1 content.

Increasingly I think that the journey to stage 1 to stage 3 is the most important, most difficult and most overlooked part of the progression.

For example, when something is submitted to HN, from my anecdotal observation it will typically get something like 5-10 simultaneous visitors from the new page. If it gets a minimum critical mass of votes to hit the front page, this will increase immediately to something like 50-100 simultaneous viewers and increase from there. But often, it only takes 3-5 upvotes for it to hit the front page. So the relatively trivial actions of the small critical mass of early consumers has an extraordinarily large effect on the dissemination of the content. Indeed, as a content creator, it's often struck me that the actions of those first 3-5 people have an equivalent significance, in terms of the world's experience of my content, to me as the creator.

And if you create good content, then just getting to the front page is by far the most difficult part of the process, because once there you will naturally attract upvotes from the vastly increased exposure. But with only a few random bits of cosmic entropy set differently, the creator could create exactly the same content, fail to get those first 3-5 votes, and the number of views on the article/app/etc. could be 10 rather than 10,000 or 100,000.

In my experience, lots of platforms follow the same model. Reddit is a very obvious one, but the same holds to for trying to get press interest: so much depends upon the decisions of a few key journalists, and that decision may depend on how many other emails hit their inbox that hour, or whether or not they've had their coffee yet, or some other particle of background entropy. This isn't a criticism of the press, it's just a consequence of the current system. The same is true for people who run influential blogs or social media accounts with large followings, or newsletters.

The problem is that there is less attention available per item of content than the minimum quantity of attention needed to rate the quality of that content well. When I create something new, my worry is never "Boy, I hope that people don't simply dislike this," it's always "Boy, I hope that enough people see this to give it a shot of achieving its potential, whatever that turns out to be." If it turns out people don't like it, which is of course always a possibility, that's fairly easy to handle. If it disappears into obscurity, that's much more difficult to accept.

When I create content now, my promotion strategy is 99% focused on that first stage. If it reaches that critical mass of attention among a small number of early, influential people, I feel like my job is done and the chips should fall as they may. If it reaches that initial critical mass, people will _want_ to write press stories about it and post it on social media and ask for interviews and tell their friends about it, assuming its any good. This may be an obvious conclusion, but the interesting part, for me, is that the initial critical mass is much smaller, much more random and much more difficult to achieve than most people realize.

<comment><USER24> You should add the simpler, deeper issue of upvoting mechanically filtering out good long form content.

Say I found a link here and it's a really good long form story, I really got into it, even had a coffee break while reading it. Then I want to vote for it, but the link has fallen down and is hard to find back.

It is even worse on Google, Facebook or Twitter, because of the infinite scrolling. I always open seemingly interesting links in the background and continue scrolling, but then hardly ever even try to like, plus one or favorite good content.

It's like a perverse filter, selecting cat pics and crash gifs over really nice content that require more than a few seconds to digest.

The one who will fix this will actually revolutionize content selection and probably kill curation.

<comment><USER25> One simple change would be to replace time-based "gravity" dragging items down as they age. Instead, gravity could be based on the number of users who have "finished" consuming the content. Perhaps by just clicking "Back" to the aggregator, or by explicitly acknowledging the completion. There could be three buttons: Like, Dislike, and Saw But Don't Care. In the algorithm to drive items downward, time would be replaced by the count of all three actions. Long-form content would then not be penalized so much (but would still be disadvantaged by users who dislike or don't care about long-form content, of course).

A New page might also need to be sorted differently, e.g. by putting items with zero count at the top, and ignoring time as with the front page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This illustrates an important point:

Information costs nothing to replicate, but it's _attention_ that is the great scarce commodity of the information age. I expect to see extreme escalation in the sophistication of methods for getting peoples' attention in the coming years.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think people are unwilling to accept luck as an explanation. This might especially be true for the HN audience, because so many of us work so hard hoping to have a success like this.

<comment><USER28> Well, at least in the (indie) gaming industry, it seems to be generally admitted. It's called "app store lottery" for a reason. And there's certainly not much survivorship bias going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a good example of the "Lemming Economy" that mobile phones have created, and which I cannot heap on enough derision.

The Lemming Economy follows a model where dozens upon dozens up near pointless applications are created in an attempt find just something that will get enough momentum to drive an ever increasing number of lemmings over the cliff (purchase). Upon succeeding more lemmings scramble to create copy-cats of the game to cash in on the stampede. There's no point except to try and generate cash out of they prevailing whims of the lemmings.

This model neither creates a viable business model (because you can't rely on quality equaling sales) nor useful software (because that doesn't drive the lemmings over the cliff).

Maybe Flappy Birds isn't horrible, I don't know. But the developer obviously didn't like getting caught in the stampede and all of a sudden getting exposed to the general population. I would have taken down the app, too.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the main lesson here is that the App Store isn't immune to the bias that plagues most online communities, namely that suddenly popular content benefits from its high position in the system (be that a forum board or section of the App Store) and then it skyrockets as people trust the often naive equation number of users=quality. This either creates successful franchises or an endless stream of one-hit wonders that perpetuates the winner-takes-all mechanism we all have come to know. An ideal system would surface quality content while ensuring equal footing for up-and-comers and wannabe competitors. It looks to me that the answer lies in a complex ranking algorithm that makes heavy use of statistical analysis instead of a set of unproven assumptions and a devil-may-care attitude toward keeping things simple to meet the lowest expectations and nothing more.

<comment><USER31> A lot of the dynamics you're describing here on Hacker News also apply to Hacker News. It's the same problem: Surface quality content and don't allow the items on the front page to choke out new submissions just because they're on the front page attracting all the votes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If "getting famous" is such a devastating thing for an app developer, quit making games for popular devices. There is plenty of scientific computing projects that are far more interesting and have tiny audiences... lack of fame surely awaits you!

<comment><USER33> In fairness the whole app feels like someone experimenting with building something simple for the iOS platform rather than trying to make a mega- successful game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So removing the app from the store doesn't turn off the ad revenue unless he kills his ad account. Removing it could be kind of a shrewd way to boost downloads one last time before people move on.

<comment><USER28> Even then, I'm pretty sure his revenues from this will be insignificant in a short time. This certainly seems like it lives from new users trying it and accidentally touching ads. The few power users that will still be around one day after it's taken off the stores probably won't matter revenue-wise.

And I can imagine that he'd lose all his money if he killed the account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Flappy Bird is pretty much the definition of a black swan. I hope people don't take too much away from it other than: huh, that's weird.

</comment><comment><USER36> The nerd in me is curious about factors that lead to higher scores. With so many data points, I'd love to see how android vs iphone users scored and if the color of flappy (or "time of day") had any impact on your score. Or how many other people popped a bottle of champagne when they reached level 6...

</comment><comment><USER37> The most interesting question to me is what is you guys' experience with seeding app store reviews?

It seems that it definitely worked in that case (any many maybe more we don't know about). Are there some white hat review services, with people that actually download the app? Or is it all just black bot spammer'y?

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't hate the guy, but what does get me is that some unethical paid download service and a whole lot of luck seemed to be the deciding factors for success, certainly not the game's quality. I wonder if it's gonna get better or worse in the near term. Pretty discouraging if you make games.

</comment><comment><USER38> Flappy Bird's the first app with onscreen banner advertising I've happened upon for years and my god it's disgusting to have these crappy looking ads constantly sliding onto the top of the screen. I sincerely hope paid or otherwise bankrolled apps continue to be prevalent.

</comment><comment><USER39> In the linked article, the writer claims that by using AdMob, he left $1M on the table... I'm curious - where does this claim come from? The fact that he could have sold the app? Or is there a different untapped revenue stream?

</comment><comment><USER40> I feel that instead of taking the game down he could use the money that he was getting from the game and give it to charity. That way he could still live the simple life that he wanted while doing something positive as well.

</comment><comment><USER41> The most important number about Flappy Bird is 4.

From dying you can be back flying again in less than 4 seconds and be back at the first obstacle in less than 8 seconds. There are many games that should learn from that.

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting article.. but I'd be careful about scraping anything from iTunes. This could easily be classified as wire fraud in the US (and there is already precedent with someone being convicted).

</comment><comment><USER43> But the question is, what did he do in December that jump started his downloads? Or, if he didn't do anything, what happened that started the rise in downloads/reviews?

</comment><comment><USER44> I really doubt anyone really got 9999. Not being cynical but what is the odd of so many ppl getting that thigh score?

<comment><USER45> If a player can get one point a second that's 2.78 hours of continuous play that would be needed to score 9999.

<comment><USER46> 'Desert Bus' requires 8 hours to score one point...

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-w...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the- worst-video-game-ever-created.html)

...and people play it for days, for charity!

<comment><USER45> Wow. That is hilarious. I was going to comment that it should be an Apple/Android app just for shits and giggles but after a cursory search I discovered that it already is! And it costs $1!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Im convinced more people talk about this game than actually play it.

</comment><comment><USER48> Obviously, this is the ultimate conclusion:

1\. Make Flappy Bird 2\. 3\. Profits

</comment><comment><USER49> What was his marketing experiment?

</comment><comment><USER50> Some externals that had a _huge_ influence on Flappy Bird are Vine and then a couple of huge play along YouTubers (such as "pewdiepie"). I made the analogy before that Flappy Bird is the 2 girls 1 cup of games, and while I saved myself from ever seeing that video, it became famous in reaction videos. Exactly the same thing happened with Flappy Bird, first on Vine in early January, and then as the mega-YouTubers picked it up in late January. It was likely pewdiepie who yielded the enormous uptick at the end of January.

<comment><USER14> Interesting. So there were a lot of reaction-style vines of people playing Flappy Bird?

<comment><USER51> Typically when a product shows up all over Vine like Flappy Bird did, at least some of them were paid for. Any evidence of this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I love Flappy Bird. Period.

</comment><comment><USER53> To be honest like realy honest, i couldn't careless. The guy was making more money than me and given my current situation, i can't feel not even the most tiny drop of empathy for him. Don't even like the game.

</comment><comment><USER54> I would guess there was done kind of foul play and Apple said cut that out, here is a check for x amount of dollars. Just take the app down and let's forget about this.</comment>


Trump signs executive order stripping non-citizens of privacy rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/26/trump-signs-executive-order-stripping-non-citizens-of-privacy-ri/ <comment><USER2> Bad click bait title, but the actual event is pretty important.</comment>


Dell introduces 28" 4K Ultra HD Monitor for under $1K, shipping early 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/secure/2013-12-2-dell-ultrasharp-ultra-hd-monitors?dgc=BA&cid=271006&lid=4970696&acd=12309188680294295 <comment><USER2> Awesome. I say this is a sign that the incumbent manufacturers are finally adapting to the heat brought on by Korean and Chinese newcomers.

"Industry's most affordable Ultra HD monitor" is semantics. The Seiki 39" is still substantially cheaper, now at less than $500 on Amazon. Technically, that is a television, so I suppose "monitor" is a clever use of words by Dell.

If Seiki drops an HDMI 2 version of their monitor—excuse me, television—for roughly the same price as the current model, things start to get really interesting. Actually, scratch that, the desktop monitor industry is finally interesting again right now. This is the first time it has been interesting since about 2005.

I prefer the higher DPI that Dell is providing, but I prefer the size that Seiki is going after. My ideal is 200+ DPI at about 50" for my desktop. All steps toward that make me happy, so good going Dell!

<comment><USER3> But the Seiki 39" TV has its framerate capped at 30Hz while on 4k resolution, which makes it inadequate as a monitor.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I know. My wife is using the 39" and it's fine for her computer usage. She doesn't play video games on her computer.

"Inadequate" for gaming, yes. Inadequate for computing? Hardly.

But this is why I said that if Seiki dropped an HDMI 2 version of the same display, things get interesting.

<comment><USER4> > "Inadequate" for gaming, yes. Inadequate for computing? Hardly.

How about for watching movies? High framerates would obviously seem very important for gaming, but it's not clear how important they are to movies/shows. Your thoughts?

<comment><USER5> Displaying 24fps content on a 60fps screen repeats frames. If you repeat half the frames of the 25fps stream twice, and alternating half of the frames three times, then you get 60 frames per second, with a stream looking like:

AABBBCCDDDEEFFF...

This isn't perfect, since really each frame should be on the screen for exactly the same amount of time, which is why 120hz TVs came about -- 120 is evenly divisible by each of 60, 30, and 24. But it's also pretty much good enough, or else there'd be a lot more complaining about watching movies on computers or other 60hz devices.

A 30hz screen makes that harder, since you're going to have to repeat every fourth frame once, so the unevenness could be more noticeable since those frames are now twice as long instead of 50% longer. But I haven't tried one to tell you just how noticeable it would be.

Native 60fps content (sports is the most common one I know of) would require throwing away half the frames, but at least the remaining frames would all be shown for the same amount of time.

NTSC "video" content (stuff shot at 30 interlaced frames per second, so 60 fields per second, stuff like old TV shows) would work alright. You wouldn't be able to take advantage of deinterlacing methods that try to reconstruct 60 full frames, but it wouldn't be a _huge_ loss.

<comment><USER6> Is this also the source of the ultra-real "soap opera" effect that ruins movies on new televisions?

<comment><USER7> No. That's the TV interpolating frames. The effect described would introduce a stutter.

<comment><USER8> Ugh, I hate that effect. The frame rate dynamically changes based on when the algorithm can find frames to interpolate. It's so disorienting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know, are there any Macs that can drive this in Retina mode? Does OSX on Mac desktops support retina mode for arbitrary monitors, or does OSX tie Retina mode exclusively to Macbook Pro Retina screens?

<comment><USER10> This macbook pro spec page says hdmi port can output 4k at 24hz. [http://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-pro/specs- retina/](http://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-pro/specs-retina/)

<comment><USER11> And yet my MBP refuses to output HDMI above 1920 for me :/

<comment><USER12> Check your cable's version if you're using the latest MBP. Also, check if your output device can handle it. My dell u3011 can't handle even 2560x1600 through HDMI (which it has 2 for some reason).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a bit curious why both the 24" and the 32" are priced over 1k, yet they are able to get the 28" down below that mark. That's not to say that I'm not incredibly excited to see how this ends up! I've been looking for a sub-1.5k 28" monitor with high resolution for a while, and though I love my Apple Thunderbolt Display I use at work, I am hesitant that if I buy one for myself, I'll be buying right before a refresh.

I've been feeling that way for a long while though, so who knows

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately, the 28" is going to have the wrong pixel density to use with OS X in Retina mode.

Non-Retina MacBooks start at 110 PPI. Cinema Displays have hovered around 100 PPI for about a decade, with the 27" Thunderbolt Display topping out at 109 PPI (same for its sister 27" iMac).

At 28", a 3840 x 2160 panel has a PPI of 157, which, dividing by two to get the equivalent non-Retina PPI, comes to only 78.5, a reduction of over 20% from the lowest-PPI Cinema Displays. This means, on a Mac in Retina mode, everything in the UI will be 20% bigger than normal. Maybe that's something you could get used to, but it's far from the much more optimal 24" panel, with a PPI of 184 (92 PPI non-Retina, very close to a 24" Cinema Display).

<comment><USER15> Ugh. This is why true DPI independence in the OS is so important. There should be no such thing as a "wrong" pixel density.

<comment><USER16> Indeed. Acorn's RiscOS had resolution independence in the 80s with scalable fonts and icons being shipped as vector graphics; it's a pity everyone else is 30 years behind.

<comment><USER17> I'm afraid you're mistaken. RiscOS certainly had scalable vector fonts (anti- aliased too!), but the icons and interface elements were all bitmaps and the OS was not resolution independent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd just be happy to see a 2560x1600 monitor at 120hz or greater. I think we're going to have to max out resolution (to 'retina' or whatever levels where most people can't distinguish additional pixels) before we start seeing monitors commonly supporting greater than 60hz.

<comment><USER19> The cheap korean monitors can almost do it, but you run into ATI's DVI cap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone explain why monitor and TV prices are so vastly different for the same size? Could you not substitute a small flat screen in place of a monitor and save a few hundred?

<comment><USER21> Because [http://xkcd.com/732/](http://xkcd.com/732/)

<comment><USER22> For a 2013 update, that is the resolution of his cell phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm confused. Under $1000 for the 28"? It goes on to say that the 24" is available for $1399...

<comment><USER24> What's confusing about it? Apparently the 28" is cheaper to manufacture

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I foresee a 4K Thunderbolt Display coming our way within the next couple months. I have been wanting to get a new display for a while, so I am holding out for that. If not, I might consider a Dell. It's not unibody and it's not as thin as the newer Thunderbolt displays are going to be though.

</comment><comment><USER26> Now I'll be shocked if Apple don't release something similar with the Mac Pro this month.

<comment><USER27> The Thunderbolt display is desperately in need of a refresh. How do you think a new Thunderbolt will match up with this Dell UltraHD monitor?

<comment><USER28> I think it's likely that the new Thunderbolt display will be the exact same 23.8" panel, but with updated Thunderbolt expansion hardware (USB 3.0, &c.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Will a Macbook Pro Retina 13" be able to drive this?

<comment><USER30> According to Apple's website, the latest version of the rMBP will be able to drive a 3840 x 2160 display at 30Hz via HDMI.

<comment><USER31> 30Hz sounds like a 'No' to me.

<comment> quaint- Why? It's not like you're going to play graphically intensive games with it. 30Hz sounds just fine for many types of content, like text (and even videos).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This looks awesome. But I'm wondering, how long until we get an iMac using this panel? I guess the thunderbolt display will get it first, but anyway, exciting news.

<comment><USER33> I've been holding out. Seems silly to buy a Cinema Display right now for my rMBP. USB2 ports, TB1, no Retina, oh, and a Magsafe 1->2 adapter...

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So if I understand the tech specs correctly, this 24" monitor is 185 DPI. (24" diagonally, sqrt(3840^2 * 2160^2) = 4406 pixels, 4406px/24" = 185 DPI) By comparison, the MacBook Pro 15" retina has 220 DPI, so it's a respectable monitor. Although for "Ultra HD" I was kind of hoping for something "ultra impressive"...

</comment><comment><USER35> Being spoiled by apple retina, 32'' 4k does not sould 'ultra sharp' for me. 24'' maybe, so i'll buy one.

Can't wait until 8k monitors come about! These can be both truly ultra sharp, with invisible pixels, and sizeable.

</comment><comment><USER36> Unfortunately they aren't 3840 x 2400 (which would be 16:10) that is more convenient for coding or anything that isn't full-screen TV viewing.

But still... yay for finally reaching retina-like resolutions on the desktop! It was about the time.

</comment><comment><USER37> That's what I thought a 4k _monitor_ would cost, and I was actually very surprised Asus priced theirs at like $3,000 earlier this year. Hopefully Dell didn't cut a lot of corners, though.

</comment><comment><USER28> Even better: the 24" is $1399.

</comment><comment><USER38> For $1k, you can get /three/ X-Star DP2710s, which are 27" 1440p PLS monitors. A much better deal in my opinion. ([http://www.ebay.com/itm/Matte-FREE- EXPRESS-X-STAR-DP2710LED-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Matte-FREE-EXPRESS-X- STAR-DP2710LED-27-2560x1440-Samsung-PLS-Panel-Monitor-/330932578190))

</comment><comment><USER39> The 32" version is $3539 in Canada. [http://accessories.dell.com/sna/products/Gaming_Accessories/...](http://accessories.dell.com/sna/products/Gaming_Accessories/productdetail.aspx?c=ca&l=en&cs=cadhs1&sku=210-ACBL&baynote_bnrank=0&baynote_irrank=0&~ck=baynoteSearch)

</comment><comment><USER40> Any hope of getting full resolution at 30hz on a late 2011 MBPro? I'm using a 30" Cinema Display right now, but it's pretty banged up as I got it from an as-is liquidation auction. Would love to replace it with something newer, lighter and that doesn't raise the ambient temperature of my office by several degrees.

</comment><comment> quaint- I'm more interested in the 24" model, although the press release goes a long way to convince me it's actually 28.3" display despite the name.

edit: the tech specs page convince me the name is not ridiculously misleading. Seriously interested of this one.

<comment><USER28> It's a typo.

<comment><USER41> What part is a typo, though? The 24 or the 28.3?

<comment><USER28>
      Display
      Diagonally Viewable Size:
      60.47 cm
      23.8" (23.8-inch wide viewable image size)

From

[http://dcse.dell.com/us/en/gen/peripherals/dell- up2414q/pd.a...](http://dcse.dell.com/us/en/gen/peripherals/dell- up2414q/pd.aspx?refid=dell-up2414q&s=gen)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wonder how well various OSes will handle resolution jumps. The embarassing failure to scale GUI objects was acceptable in the technically-limited '90s, but in 2013 it seems ridiculous to have everything pixel-sized.

<comment><USER43> All the big ones (Mac, ios, win8, winphone, Ubuntu, android) support pixel doubling. And they're all a long way from dynamic scaling.

<comment><USER44> Ubuntu does???? I've been keeping an eye on HiDPI support for it for ages, did I miss the release?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm underwhelmed, the Lenovo yoga 2 has almost as many pixels and cost less.

<comment><USER41> It's a 13 inch screen. How are these even comparable?

Is it that you're holding out for an 8K desktop monitor?

<comment><USER45> the resolution is almost 1:1 comparable. Obviously the I sit much closer to a laptop than i do my 57" HDPC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd be interested in hearing about ways to drive this from an older (MacPro3,1) Mac Pro.

</comment><comment><USER47> Why are they announcing this now? Is it to tell people to hold off for Xmas?

<comment><USER26> My guess is either that, or they know Apple is about to release something exceptionally similar with the Mac Pro this month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Your eyes can't tell the difference b/t 1080p and 4k on a 28" screen

<comment> quaint- When you say "your", you mean "my", don't you? Also, you seem confused by these TV-related terms and only think of videos and games here; you'd have to be half-way blind not to see the difference between 75 and 150 PPI density with typical font sizes (computer fonts are usually a tad bigger than what's necessary just because of the lousy displays we have).

<comment><USER49> [http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57566079-221/why- ultra-...](http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57566079-221/why-ultra- hd-4k-tvs-are-still-stupid/)

Comment sections like this are why HN is called an echo chamber.

<comment><USER50> The original comment missed the point of the chart in the article you link: the increased pixel density is useless __at TV viewing distances__. When you go down to about 2 feet from the screen, 4k is pretty apparent on a 30 inch screen.

A clearer chart is at [1], and the Carlton Bale's original article even has a handy calculator that lets you verify this [2].

1: [http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html](http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html) 2: [http://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution- matter/](http://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/)

<comment><USER48> Thanks for posting this. It wasn't meant to be a snarky comment, but I did leave out some basic assumptions which I thought were obvious. "Usually" the larger the screen the further away most people will sit from there screen. Right now, I'm on a 21" monitor sitting about 3'2" (already out of the 2'6" for added benefit of a 4K screen if you take this chart as gospel) from the screen. If I went up to a 28" monitor, I would most likely move it back at least 6" so that I don't have to move my head and eyes around too much. That would put the screen about 3'8" from me which is within the range of full benefit of 1080p but outside the range of 4K for this size and viewing distance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Aging Process - Five guys take same photo for 30 years  - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/26/travel/friends-summer-photo-tradition/index.html?hpt=hp_c4

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to see how some people change immensely, while others stay pretty much the same. Weight gain and hair loss are probably the most obvious physical factors, but it seems to me being overweight really makes you age faster. Case in point, since I gained weight I practically became a totally different person and I believe if by some miracle (or act of will power) I lost it again I'd still carry around the physiological debt from that period indefinitely.</comment>


Hot in recession: Chocolate, running shoes, Spam - <AUTHOR> http://apnews.excite.com/article/20090516/D987IHO02.html <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who, when I saw that this linked to an excite.com address, thought, "Whoa - Excite is still around?"</comment>


Ripple20 Vulnerabilities in the Supply Chain - <AUTHOR> https://www.jsof-tech.com/ripple20/#HN <comment><USER2> Hey, this is the same people who wrote the HP firmware analysis article right?

> We also developed a script that companies can run themselves, to identify > Treck products in their own networks. This will not be 100% effective at > this stage, but can be an efficient, effective complementary approach, since > it addresses the difficulty in identifying relevant users in a cloudy supply > chain trail.

Would be useful to actually get a link to said script? It's pretty vague to get the reference.

<comment><USER3> Yep, same people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This goes beyond ripple20, but TCP/IP is like an old friend that has become a meth addict in their old age.

There are a lot of good memories, but trust as of late is non-existent for good reason.

The first nerd(s) to go TCP/IP'less will truely be living on a native 21st century infrastructure (without the baggage/exploitation/vulnerabilities of 20th century protocols).

Going TCP/IP'less is better than inbox-zero.. By far.</comment>


Is getting ahead about fate or free will? - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-to-get-ahead/?ex_cid=538twitter

<comment><USER2> Interesting because there is so much variation in the results and so much of that variation seems counterintuitive.

I have a major doubt though that this study may have been severely biased by the manner in which the questions were translated. A study like this should really publish the translated questions in all languages used (even though no single person could evaluate all of them), and I didn't see that in the full report.

A result I find especially strange is the large difference between France and the US/English speaking countries on the importance of hard-work and education. I've worked in both countries and I find it very hard to believe that so many French people would think that "working hard" was not important. The potential problem I see here is that "working hard" is such a common cultural idiom in the US that accepting that term would be almost automatic for many people. Depending on how this was translated though it could have been seen in French as being something like "doing hard labour". I have the same problem with the results for the importance of education. Education is probably more important to success in France than in just about any other western country and I think that is widely believed there. However if the question was poorly translated it might have been understood as something like having "a good upbringing" rather than education in the English sense.</comment>


Rails Shared Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=323

<comment><USER2> Nice post, Matt. I think that you're absolutely right. It doesn't do well for the mind share of the framework if it requires a CS degree to deploy.

But then, DHH has never really said that he was passionate about the users of his framework. For an example, see the image below.

<http://pocoo.org/~mitsuhiko/rails_motivation.jpg>

DHH has long said that he improves Rails based on what he and 37 Signals needs, and not what the community needs. His attitude seems to be that it's his framework and he can do what he wants to.

So, no. I don't really see the Rails hosting issue being fixed any time soon.

<comment><USER3> _His attitude seems to be that it's his framework and he can do what he wants to._

No. His attitude is that it is _your_ framework, so get to work!

People seem to think that Rails would run just fine on their $5.99 web hosts if the core team would deign to assert its magical force of will. Well, as my old boss used to say: "them" is "us". If _you_ know how to make Rails run, profitably and reliably, on a cheap-ass shared host, go start the business and enjoy your profits. If you don't know, stop assuming that it's because DHH and Ezra Z. are holding out on you. They don't know, either.

Rails is all of four years old, and (unlike PHP) was not designed with the explicit goal of supporting shared hosting. I like Rails, and am glad you like it too, but stop expecting miracles.

<comment><USER4> I don't think anyone is expecting miracles, or for DHH to make it his personal goal to adapt Rails for the shared hosting environment. The original blog was simply pointing out that if Rails wants to see the kind of widespread adoption PHP has, that's what the community is going to have to do. It's correct.

People keep misinterpreting or misunderstanding the argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think there's two separate issues raised by Dreamhost's post.

1\. Should Rails have better shared hosting support?

2\. Is it nice for a business that wants to make more money by having a new feature implemented to demand that an open source project make their desire a priority, without any offer of quid pro quo?

I don't see much room for debate in either. 1. Of course 2. Of course not.

<comment><USER4> 2\. is of course as well. Rails stands to benefit from having hundreds of shared hosting services promoting their product. The original post wasn't "Rails should support Dreamhost" it was "Rails should support shared hosting."

<comment><USER5> Rails stands to benefit from all sorts of things, but who's going to put in the effort to make them happen? Open source is all about scratching your own itch. If shared hosting support is itchy for Dreamhost they should be scratching it, not blogging about how they have an itch and someone else should scratch it for them, for free, and now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They definitely will say that they don't care how popular is, but that is complete bullshit.

37signals is popular because of Rails, the more popular Rails is, the better for 37signals products.

As a Rails programmer, the more popular Rails is, the more worth are your Rails skills. Simple as that.

For a similar reason, the infamous OS wars are not as pointless as they seem. If I invest in Linux or OS X, I also have an interest to protect that investment, which means the OS in question should keep a minimum level of popularity.

<comment><USER7> "As a Rails programmer, the more popular Rails is, the more worth are your Rails skills."

I know some COBOL consultants who'd disagree.

<comment><USER8> "As a Rails programmer, the more popular Rails is, the more worth are your Rails skills."

This is still subject to the laws of supply and demand. Your Rails skillz will be valuable at a time like now - where there are a healthy number of startups using the framework for development, and a sufficient shortage of experienced Rails devs to hire. However, if Rails became popular enough that everyone decided to learn it and the number of available jobs didn't shift in proportion, you'll find your skillz less of a commodity.

<comment><USER6> It hasn't really happened to Java, though, even though it has been popular for a while.

So how much does a Rails developer earn at the moment? Anybody want to hire me, for twice the salary of a Java developer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was going to just mention heroku, a service that I absolutely _love_ as a beta user, but someone beat me to it in the blog comments.

<comment><USER4> So I've looked at heroku a bit, and I have to say it's pretty promising. I assume eventually they'll allow you to run your own domains off of it, maybe offer you email, etc. I actually somehow didn't meet the guys at the first Y C dinner, but I think they're going to make a lot of money.

The problem is that it's only one company. Though I'm sure they'll have clones if/when they are successful, the barrier to entry there is a lot higher than simply supporting a language like PHP on a shared hosting system. (I suppose I'm only guessing here, as I've no experience with either building a Heroku like site or operating a shared hosting one, but the sheer numbers certainly imply that.) So there are always going to be 100x more hosting options for a newbie PHP developer, even if the Heroku model catches on.

I chose PHP because I found scores of web hosts for it, and I knew that if I ever wanted to switch, I had options. Also, I think brand new programmers (think high school kids) get in largely by Googling for web hosts, signing up an account, then coding in whatever is available. If 95% of the web hosts they look at are touting PHP, that's going to play a large factor in their choice.

Not to mention that Facebook, Yahoo, etc. are in PHP, as you can easily see by looking at a URL, and that no really large sites are in Rails, and even if they were you wouldn't know it at a glance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2007/12/1/they>

</comment><comment><USER11> "David Heeneymeeneymeineymoe Hansson"

I enjoyed that.</comment>