How I Made My First 100 Sales - <AUTHOR> http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/blog/my-first-100-sales <comment><USER2> > I spent a few days tracking down about 40 Photoshop bloggers, and sent each > one a personalized email with an offer of free products to give away. Only > one of them bothered to reply: "I'll do it if you send me $500 first".

Yeowch! chaosmachine, this has been the exact opposite of my experiences doing this. Maybe it is the way it works in Photoshop-blog-land, but most of the bloggers I've contacted have been happy to get a lead.

Just more proof that every situation is unique. You have to try _everything_ if you want to succeed.

<comment><USER3> I'd specifically track down 40 bloggers that weren't necessarily the largest in their space. And make it as easy as possible for them to participate. Plus, try to make your email as unformulaic as possible (sound like an underdog smallfry trying your amateur best to make an honest living).

I get emails to one of my sites offering deals and the reasons I ignore most of them are:

      - email reads like bulk spam
      - email is TL;DR
      - running the promo would require more than a few minutes work

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think in part you may be having issues getting sites to link to you because there isn't much of a "story" with just selling layers.

You might want to try posting "How To" articles to your blog, even for things that you think are really simple to do with Photoshop. Maybe even a link on the front page of your site that just says flat out: "Here is how you would use these layer styles" (with lots of screenshots).

Also, you seem to have done a large amount of work to generate the actual texture files, are you selling them directly? I would guess that the market for texture files for 3D work or whatever is larger than the photoshop layer styles market.

Thanks for posting such an inspiring and detailed analysis of your launch and first sales.

<comment><USER5> I agree with this. How-to articles showing ways to use the layers would increase the value.

The short tutorial on your support page is nice - maybe you could expand that further and make the link more prominently say it is a howto/tutorial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Feedback: your homepage could do a lot better in selling it. Have a look at 37sigs products. Also, let me quickly see what's on offer without having to scroll down.

The writing can be better too. For example, instead of saying "the unmatched beauty and unrivaled quality of MetalWorks Professional Photoshop styles" (bla!), say something like "I literally shot thousands of pictures, edited thousands of textures, and created thousands of styles." (as you do in your blog post). That gives me a much better feel for how much work this is gonna save me.

<comment><USER7> _Feedback: your homepage could do a lot better in selling it._

I agree, but I'm not in the market so am not sure if what I'm about to say is constructive criticism or not ;)

The first thing I see on the screen is "ULTRA DELUXE" and to my untrained eye those words look pretty cheap and nasty, along the same kind of lines of the 90s-era styles mentioned in the blog post. It's a shame as the more that I click through I can see quality (again though - untrained eye) but the first impression would make me click away without investigating further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "your site is ugly and you charge too much"

If reddit tells you that, it is a sign that you are probably doing okay.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a really terrific article, thanks for putting it out there. If I can make a comment about the "Everybody Loves Bundles" section: your idea of a discount for past customers is a great intuition. This is called an "upsell" - prove the excellence of your product line with a low-margin easy sell, capture the user data and permission, and use their high satisfaction to sell them on your high-margin, more difficult sell. Your most profitable future customers are the people you've already sold something to. Not all "build a list" advice is for shlocky affiliate marketers!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a follow-up to my launch post from a few months ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1589320>

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. Given what you learned about bundles, and your need for exposure, I wonder if there is a graphic designer equivalent to MacHeist? If not, why not start one - you could bundle your layer styles with brushes, fonts, other similar things for digital artists, offer them at a great price together to garner the exposure. You're probably not the only person in the game that needs help gaining exposure.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wish there were examples of what could be done with your layers. For the novice, not only would we benefit from tips but also find inspiration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you give me some ideas of examples you'd like to see? Something like this?

<http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/silver-layer-styles>

<comment><USER12> No, show them how the layer looks at first, then show them how it looks after you apply a syle.

I think a video would be perfect here... like, "Here's some bland white text on a black background in photoshop." then take 3 seconds to drag a metal style onto the text and a wood style onto the background. "Wow, Amazing!"

<comment><AUTHOR> _"Here's some bland white text on a black background in photoshop."_

I actually do have a page exactly like that: <http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/tutorials>

It's the "support" link in the main menu. It used to be labeled "tutorials", but I found it was distracting visitors and not helping sales. It's definitely something I should revisit.

<comment><USER13> So my biggest complaint is sorta like the other users. I just don't know what your offering and why it is worth my time to read further, and I am not sure how to find what your offering. Here is what I would recommend from a user perspective.

1\. A long word for example maybe "photosensitive", and break the word in half. The first part being untextured, and the 2nd half being textured with your new layers that come in such handy time saving abilities. Then id put a video (link) right beside it that says, Click here to see how you can do this in 60 seconds. Then on the video landing page, after the video id briefly explain how much detail went into every "layer/texture" what ever they are called. And compare how much time it would take for a user to do this himself. Then I would show top sellers(fav products or what ever), and some testimonials from people who have bought from you (who loved the time it saved, and maybe even show of their work with the layers you showed them. Then a browse all products button.

I think your product is great, but I find your site is really hard to even tell where to start shopping. I thought the page was about blog post. I kept looking for a shopping button or a place to view all products. Even harder is your add to cart button being in the sidebar and not listed again down at the bottom(or top) of the page. This is a big no no imo. Again these are just my honest thoughts from a UI perspective. Hope this helps. (first post on HN).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How long has it been since your first sale?

<comment><AUTHOR> About 4 months. I didn't sell anything the first couple weeks, which was a little scary. The Drupal.org case study really kicked things off, and it's been steady since.

<comment><USER14> Time to go take photoshoplayermasks.com and create a whole bunch of free tutorials there and then link to free tutorials about layer styles you will also make on photoshoplayerstyles.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congrats John! Thanks a lot for writing about your experience. It's good to see a hard-earned success.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a photographer and Photoshop user, I'd recommend getting the word out by targeting teachers of Photoshop / design / photography classes. I know the last photography class I took, the teacher probably inspired alot of the students to purchase denoising plugins (Noise Ninja or Topaz DeNoise), and he only talked about them for maybe 5 minutes. Probably not worth "I'll do it if you send me $500 first", but worth giving out some free copies. If not teachers, good idea to find out who the influencers are in your niche and target them. (Influencers =/= Google AdWords.)

</comment><comment><USER17> "I wasn't interested in signing an exclusive contract and giving up half my profits to join one of the popular digital marketplaces."

Do all of the marketplaces really demand exclusive contracts?

<comment><USER7> _Do all of the marketplaces really demand exclusive contracts?_

Not all of them, but often the payout then drops to an even more outrageous amount. For example, ThemeForest pay out 25% for non-exclusive themes:

[http://themeforest.net/wiki/account/money-account/payment- ra...](http://themeforest.net/wiki/account/money-account/payment-rates/)

<comment><USER18> Maybe there's a market opportunity for a theme marketplace that takes a cut closer to the apple-like levels without requiring exclusivity (à la Apple)...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good post, thank you for sharing!

How much of your traffic/sales has come from web searches? (you seem to hint that not much). What did you do for SEO?

</comment><comment><USER20> How much time did you spend creating the layer styles before you started selling them? It sounds like you put a lot of effort into it and I'm wondering if you considered yourself done once you launched the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Several months. I probably spent too much time on the product, and not enough on the site. I originally launched with just the wood and marble styles, the metal and glass ones came later. I'm still not done, I have a bunch of other style packs in development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Did you try referral marketing (like cj.com)? Did/would that help?

</comment><comment><USER22> Love this article, and the willingness to share hard numbers is greatly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER23> Loved this article. Thank you for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER24> I hope you don't implement any discounts for past purchases! People buying that without complaining means they value your product highly. Their valuation of your product probably _increased_ after they used their first pack.

You should take this into consideration and beef up your try-before-you-buy marketing - given the data, I think your bundle is probably supremely undervalued right now.

<comment><USER25> Coupons distributed to existing customers are quite effective. You have a list of people who are already very interested in what you have for sale and you know are willing to spend money for it. I have gotten offers plenty of times when I wasn't actively in the market for the goods in question, but then started browsing and purchased something. It's also a good way to keep mind share with your customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The offer of a discount to past buyers would certainly make a tempting offer to your email list I imagine.

Send them an email a month after their purchase and offer the complete collection on a discount.

Good luck!</comment>


Apple App Store stats: The power of "Free" & The Dutch really do "Go Dutch" - <AUTHOR> http://www.startuptrekking.com/2010/08/apple-app-store-stats-power-of-free.html

<comment><USER2> And the Dutch wonder why they have a reputation for being cheap...

[disclaimer: I am Dutch myself... :-) Now living in the US though.]

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW, I didn't mean to imply that the Dutch are cheap. I just thought that their overwhelming interest in an app that provides a more fair split of the check (versus an even split) is indication that they do indeed like to "Go Dutch" (ie split the bill according to what people ordered)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Get Active, motivate and build healthy habits - <AUTHOR> https://habit.world <comment><USER2> I get "Click the edit button to add Healthy Habits you wish to track." and no other content using Chrome desktop.

<comment><AUTHOR> And after you check boxed an activity, were you able to continue?</comment></comment>


DHH on the immediacy of PHP (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/posts/23-the-immediacy-of-php <comment><USER3> The biggest advantage PHP has is that it's easy to set up: either the hoster already has php, or it's a simple matter of apt-get install if you're developing on your own. No messing around with config files, server ports, ..., it just Works (tm).

PHP enables really rapid development: just save the file and reload in your browser to see a change, compared to Java/CGI-C which need recompiles.

And finally, PHP is written expressly for the web, not like Java, Python, Ruby or whatever the latest fad is these days - where web stuff was bolted on instead of baked in the design and operations of the language.

<comment><USER4> There is one other strength that PHP has which is not replicated by any other runtime on the web, with the partial exception of Perl: its execution model. PHP code is executed per-request only, as opposed to within the context of an already-running app server. This means your PHP app has _no state beyond what you explicitly build into it_ during each request, and this makes reasoning about state and control flow very easy. I love how this makes debugging, optimizing, and scaling, much more natural.

This is the reason why PHP is still my go-to first choice when it comes to request-based server apps (and together with Node.js it's also a good option for continuously-running applications). For me, the sore points of PHP are its syntax, scoping behavior, and the awkwardly structured standard library - <USER2> the point where I occasionally look elsewhere, or consider building an alternative myself.

<comment><USER5> This also leads to the rise of single tons and creating objects wherever you need them. It's hard to grok Dependency Injection when your objects live and die all the time.

It makes reasoning about state easy because you don't have to consider it. In my experience (which involves several large and mature PHP codebases), that's not a good thing.

You're right about the benefits, but the downsides are glaring too.

<comment><USER4> I agree, and I see every day that PHP apps are not written with both these pitfalls and advantages in mind. Instead, most "foreign" PHP code I look at today is either made to look like it was designed for a Java app server or is so ineptly cobbled together that no apparent thoughts were invested into the structure at all.

I blame both of these on the messaging and marketing coming out of Zend and the surrounding ecosystem, namely that PHP is supposed to be a language where big applications are constructed with convoluted EE-like class trees, and that PHP is supposed to be a beginner's language. Both of these constitute an outright failure to recognize where its strengths and weaknesses lie, in my opinion, by the same people who are maintaining the language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having moved to PHP nine years ago after being unable to find .NET work I have to say it was the right thing to do. The jobs are STILL bountiful, and I can knock out a prototype in PHP in no time flat. There have been a couple instances in the last few months where I built a prototype in a couple hundred lines of PHP then take what I learned and rewrite it as a several thousand line Go application.

I'd argue PHP truly shines on the command line, when I need a script that does what I need and quick. OS X comes with PHP built in and this is wonderful. The invention of phar's akin to Java Jars has made these even more portable, such that you can include all dependencies in a single file.

<comment><USER7> Why does PHP shine on the command line? OS X ships with Python, Ruby and Perl, Linux ships with Python and Perl (not sure about Ruby).

<comment><USER3> Because it's fast and easy.

Python is a nightmare especially when you copy and paste stuff together from the internet because spaces and tabs are a different thing, Perl is next to unreadable (but immensely powerful) and Ruby is exotic at best. Then there are bash scripts, a drama in itself and only to be used when you want cross- platform/cross-distribution compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> PHP - the early version of the 12 factor app.

</comment><comment><USER9> Problem is people start using it for this reason and end up with a mess.

<comment><USER10> You can make a mess with any language.

<comment><USER9> Mm hmm.</comment></comment></comment>


Preview of Mint.com Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/xN0QGNF.jpg

<comment><USER2> Love the full screen background image. Very innovative, you just don't see that very much nowadays. I don't even mind the extra bandwidth it takes as it's very useful, though not as much as the carousel.

</comment><comment><USER3> Remove the, dare I say needless, background and watch the design fall flat on its face.

But considering the padding issues on the darn CTA button, I'm inclined to believe this is just a fan's mockup. I hope so, at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'm inclined to believe this is just a fan's mockup

No, this is what I see when I go to Mint.com. I think I may have mistakenly been shown some incomplete page, or part of some half-assed A/B test, and now it's in my cookie.

Try this: [https://www.mint.com/t/fy14018c/](https://www.mint.com/t/fy14018c/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> kinda looks a tad oldschool...

<comment><USER5> Yeah. This kind of looks mid-to-late 2000s. As long as the product continues to work, whatever.</comment></comment>


How'd Sequoia Let Yuri Milner Grab this Sweetheart Y Combinator Deal? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/howd-sequoia-let-yuri-milner-grab-this-sweetheart-y-combinator-deal/ <comment><USER2> _We haven't talked to Sequoia, and it's possible the partners don't agree that Milner and Conway's deal is a no-brainer._

Come on Sarah. Seriously. Not only does the post not tell me how Yuri outfoxed Sequoia, it doesn't even make the claim that Sequoia was outfoxed or that they even cared. Every sentence is hedged. _But you know who might_ \-- _It seems_ \-- _it's possible_ \-- _Maybe Sequoia wouldn't_ \-- _Milner may have_.

This post actually made me a little angry. I feel like a fool who got hooked by headline bait and then had a minute of my life stolen from me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the title is misleading. There's nothing, even now, preventing Sequoia from offering all YC startups the same deal, with the same terms.</comment>


Instagram for Weddings - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone made an Instagram login thingy for wedding or events like a hashtag only you log in to Ted and Angels wedding and take pictures.... how would I do this?  They all go into a place and then later Mom or whoever moderates them then we buy the book or prints or hey money more money to spend on this.. <comment><AUTHOR> [http://applebrides.com/2012/06/28/how-to-instagram-your- wedd...](http://applebrides.com/2012/06/28/how-to-instagram-your-wedding/) This is to complicated.. I want an app and a login and a password that is numbers that we share with guests they all go into a profile it can be a hashtag but the app is an app.

<comment><USER2> I could easily build something simple like this. I've done a lot of work w/ the Instagram API recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Take a look at Wedding Snap <https://www.weddingsnap.com/>

I'm not affiliated nor have I used it just seen it around</comment>


Bjork Hopes Pirates Will Crack Her New Music App - <AUTHOR> http://drownedinsound.com/news/4143233-bj%C3%B6rk-trusts-pirates-will-crack-biophilia

<comment><USER2> I think I understand her sentiment.

With the adult site I've been working on for a client, we've put things like securing video downloads and preventing password sharing LAST (in fact, we haven't even implemented them yet), in favor of putting all of our energy into making the site and content as excellent as possible.

Our thought is that with the site just starting out, piracy and password sharing probably help a lot more than they hurt right now. We've even posted a good number of the scenes up on private torrent sites that have active discussion forums. Eventually we'll secure the downloads (no DRM, though) and prevent password sharing, but only once we can say that we're by far the best provider of our content.

<comment><USER3> Not that it will necessarily matter in the end, but for your client's sake I hope the people who are going to care that you are the best provider are the same people who might actually pay for it :P

<comment><USER2> Your typical porn customer will pay for even crappy porn and a crappy site, but we're trying to get at least some of the people who wouldn't normally pay and let the other companies fight over the people who click random junk traffic links. That's the idea anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So she's using pirates as an excuse to only release an app for iOS. And with that aim in mind, she had her developers write applications that would "transfer to other systems". That doesn't make sense. At all.

<comment><USER5> Maybe she honestly did underestimate the effort of porting software -- especially something that someone else has written -- to another platform. Or she just misspoke. It's hard to draw any firm conclusions from the little bit of information contained in that interview. And as usual, the title itself is very assuming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bjork is a bit confused. Pirates routinely break the copy protection on iOS apps which means that they will be available to install on other, appropriately prepared systems.

It's currently reasonably infeasible for pirates to reverse engineer the application, to the extent that they can port it to a completely different OS and architecture.

If that's what she wanted accomplished, the least she could do would be to open source the code and assets so that an enterprising Hacker could at least attempt an Android port.

<comment><USER7> > It's currently reasonably infeasible for pirates to reverse engineer the > application, to the extent that they can port it to a completely different > OS and architecture.

I mean you no offense, but your statement is factually inaccurate. If a talented and dedicated reverse engineer wanted to put in the effort to create a port from binaries, it is certainly feasible. However, it is reasonably _unlikely_ since it would require a good deal of work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does a "music app" mean that Bjork's album will not integrate with users' iOS iTunes library? No playlists? The article is not very informative.

</comment><comment><USER9> I prefer hir rhetoric of trust and encouragement, an interpretation remixing "not taking things away" into dispolar non-conflict.

Also, original page title is "Björk _trusts_ pirates will crack Biophilia", wonder why it got changed to _Hopes_? Just watching your language..

<comment><AUTHOR> "Also, original page title is "Björk trusts pirates will crack Biophilia", wonder why it got changed to Hopes? Just watching your language.."

It seemed to me that she was hoping that pirates would spread the app to other platforms, rather than just assuming they will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "She said that she fully expects the new software to become more widely available and end up on less expensive operating systems and devices."

She also apparently has no idea how software works. Pirates are not Magicians, they are Pirates.</comment>


Judy Mikovits' 'Plandemic': 'Plague of Corruption' Sells Out on Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/plandemic-judy-mikovits-plague-of-corruption-998224/ <comment><USER2> At a fundamental level, most american's don't think their government has their best interests in mind. They also think tribal membership affects your success and wellbeing. Conversly,US politicians have been reduced to entertainers and propagandists.

This will not end good, even without russia,china and everyone else that would love to see america burn, things look very dire. Fasicism ,civil wars, foreign occupation are things I expect as real possibilities within the next 5-10 years. The fragility of peace and liberty has been underestimated.

There is no way to stop this without blaming the people. It's not corporations,oligarchs, foreign countries,politicians,the media,the lef,the right,the center,the non-voters,etc... It's the people as a whole that are incorrect. It's "us" who is the problem not "them".

Make no mistake, it will not be as great and luxurious as the collapse of venezuela,the harsh rule of DPRK,or the cruel civil war of Syria. I hope I am so wrong. It's like cancer with it's different stages and spread,at a certain stage it's too late, your own body is against itself.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how you go from this documentary selling out, to foreign occupation.

You may dislike the current administration but they were elected democratically within the process set forth by the United States. If Joe Biden is elected next Nov the same way I have no doubts the "other side" will just accept it the same way. That's how democracy works. So again things like civil war, fascism, I just don't see it.

We'll be fine. And it's certainly this documentary selling out that will bring forth the downfall of our civilization.

<comment><USER2> Regardless of biden or trump the cancerous division thathas metastized. This documentary underlines how so many americans mistrust their government and each other so much that they'd rather abandon the most basic critical thinking. This documentary is not a big deal but it is a symptom of a terminal disease.

Democracy loses legitimacy when most of the country on either side of the divide believe their government is not for,of and by them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> anyone else ever think to themselves that there's no point in being honest when it's seemingly so easy to get ahead by being dishonest? like what is even the point of working hard and playing by all of the rules when people like this can just manipulate their way to success?

<comment><USER2> Because it is right. Why would you need any other reason, isn't that enough? Do you believe being honest is the correct and right way?

I think that's the only reason you need, just like you can't have a reason to justify doing what you believe is wrong. Of course these are goals I would aim for, I simply mean that if I fail to live up to these standards then I am failing,not that I claim to have succeeded.

<comment><USER4> Right and wrong are the rules we play by that "they" set so that we police ourselves

<comment><USER2> I guess then it depends on what you think is right and wrong. I personally have a very clear definition of what I consider to be a legitimate authoriry and under which clear and precise definitions of right,wrong ,justice and morality exist. Maybe you should explore what authority model you subscribe to.

There is always an authority,even if that is yourself. If you consider yourself as the final authority over all things then I suggest checking your ego a bit.

My perspective: As in any program or system of programs,the author has original and final authority over all things authored. Even if you leave absolute origin as a variable,it is clear that both natural and man made systems which have legitimate authorities.

But in the case of your question, I say ask and answer deeper questions. Who or What has authority over interpersonal interactions at the social , relationship,national,global and universal level. An authority that depends on your opinion of it's legitimacy is not legitimate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Geographic job market poll (May 17, 2013) - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to gather some data, which I think would be useful for a lot of people to have in the open, on trends in top-tier technology. Please, if you will, state:
1. Your city or location (e.g. New York, Bay Area, Austin, London, etc.)
2. Whether you perceive salaries as increasing, steady, or decreasing over the past 12 months.
3. Observed trends in job quality (i.e. is there more interesting work now than before) over the past 12 months.
4. Perceived trends in job availability over the past 12 months. Is it getting harder or easier to find good jobs?
5. Perceived 12-month trends in ability to raise investment.
6. Anything else you find interesting in your geographic location that you'd like other HN readers to know about.
7. How your region compares to other places in which you've lived (if applicable).
(If you have real data, that's obviously better than perception; but aggregate perception already has a lot of value.) <comment><AUTHOR> It wouldn't be fair if I didn't do this.

 _1\. Your city or location (e.g. New York, Bay Area, Austin, London, etc.)_

New York, NY.

 _2\. Whether you perceive salaries as increasing, steady, or decreasing over the past 12 months._

Seems steady, possibly a slow downward curve but that's largely with the upper end coming down (finance quants dropping from "trader bucks" to software engineer +50%). Software engineer compensation seems to be holding flat.

 _3\. Observed trends in job quality (i.e. is there more interesting work now than before) over the past 12 months._

Dismal but steady. There's a lot of talk about "data science" but few actual ML jobs even now.

 _4\. Perceived trends in job availability over the past 12 months. Is it getting harder or easier to find and get jobs?_

Seems to be getting slightly harder, but firms are still hiring. It doesn't feel like 2008, so that's good.

Some NYC companies are moving toward the prima donna stuff (3 phone screens + NDAs + full-day code tests before you even get on-site) and that's mildly annoying.

 _5\. Perceived 12-month trends in ability to raise investment._

Seems harder ("series A crunch") but I'm not personally on that front of the war.

 _6\. Anything else you find interesting in your geographic location that you'd like other HN readers to know about._

N/A. Still expensive. Great place to live except rent kills your savings. Nothing you haven't heard a million times before about this place.

 _7\. How your region compares to other places in which you've lived (if applicable)._

I spent a year in Madison, which I liked a lot, but I doubt anyone could raise money out there. That's my only comparable.</comment>


Plants Respond to Leaf Vibrations Caused by Insects' Chewing - <AUTHOR> http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2014/0701-plants-respond-to-leaf-vibrations-caused-by-insects%E2%80%99-chewing-mu-study-finds/ <comment><USER2> Don't feed the troll

[http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2014/0701-plants- re...](http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2014/0701-plants-respond-to- leaf-vibrations-caused-by-insects%E2%80%99-chewing-mu-study-finds/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought the Daily Mail mostly wrote sensationalized articles. Shouldn't we on HN be aware of that by now? Is there a Brit around who can confirm?

<comment><USER4> They do have that reputation, especially when it comes to medical study results. Here is a list of things they have said 'cure' or 'cause' cancer: [http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/](http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/)

I'm not sure you can write off a news source completely though - for instance Fox has a bad rep among some people, but I'd guess they get better interviews with Republicans than CNN, so if you want to know what they have to say, that would be where you look.</comment></comment>


Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2012/12/09/166665795/forget-extinct-the-brontosaurus-never-even-existed?ft=1&f=1007 <comment><USER2> IMO, while this is old news, the outcome is something I think we can showcase as why science is awesome. A mistake was found, and even though there was some huge investment in the idea, it was corrected. It took time, sure, but it was still corrected.

Had this been a religious idea, I'm afraid the new evidence would have been buried and we'd still have the old, wrong idea.

<comment><USER3> Religion has no use for evidence in creating or revising any idea. But I still get your point.

<comment><USER4> Let's try to be more tolerant then /r/atheism.

<comment><USER5> It's not intolerance, it's an airgap. Religion is a supernatural matter, not a tool by which one can gather objective evidence. To judge one by the standards of the other would be unfair (no matter whether a theist or atheist is trying to conflate one with the other.)

<comment><USER4> Regardless, religion wasn't part of the article, and it's completely irrelevant to the conversation. These two guys brought it up for no other reason than open mocking. That's not tolerance, that's Reddit.

<comment><USER6> Sadly, at least for Americans it's not irrelevant. In the USA paleontology, especially dinosaur paleontology, plays a huge role in the continuing political struggle over whether evolution should be taught in science classes. As a result the sources from which people learn about paleontology can often be quite partisan. A very large number of Americans learn their paleontology from sources whose approach to the subject is markedly different, which does play a part in the perpetuation of scientifically discredited ideas such as this one.

So while many of us would agree that the comparison ideally _shouldn't_ be relevant, certain cultural realities mean that it is. Though it's definitely still tangential in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article appears to be somewhat mistaken, judging by [http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=5fc8615c-3e1a-48a...](http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=5fc8615c-3e1a-48ac-b123-ae43a468174a%40sessionmgr4&vid=1&hid=2&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#), <http://www.unmuseum.org/dinobront.htm> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus#History> (the latter two which are barely more reputable). The artificial head wasn't put on the body of the _Apatosaurus_ (the first skeleton), which apparently was never put on display as a full skeleton at all. It was the second skeleton, which he named _Brontosaurus_ and mounted in the Yale Peabody Museum with the wrong head.

This story is also more consistent with saying the _Brontosaurus_ "never existed", since it was the _Brontosaurus_ that got given the wrong head. (Though one could well argue that _Brontosaurus_ was just another name for _Apatosaurus_ with the whole head thing just being an error in the visual representation of the dinosaur referred to by _Brontosaurus_.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Let's rename the thing a Plutosaurus. After the brontosauroid kicked out of the planets.

</comment><comment><USER9> This isn't remotely new information. I knew the brontosaurus was never a real thing as a kid.

</comment><comment><USER10> I enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould's books:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully_for_Brontosaurus>

</comment><comment><USER11> Relevant: [http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaur...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaurs.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> "It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, Lamanna says he used the head of another dinosaur — thought to be a Camarasaurus — to complete the skeleton."

Since the first Apatosaurus featured the skull of another dinosaur, meaning Marsh named a non-existent animal, couldn't you argue that the Brontosaurus was the right name since it was applied to a more accurate reconstruction?

</comment><comment><USER13> I prefer the Peppa Pig version:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfMYw33jph0>

<comment><USER14> Here's an interesting article about the production side Peppa Pig that people reading this might be interested in:

[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b7bcd9b6-9ab1-11df-87e6-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b7bcd9b6-9ab1-11df-87e6-00144feab49a.html#axzz2EdcCUJDJ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I enjoy about dinosaurs is how simultaneously we know so much about them, and yet so very little.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sure it existed. It just had two names.

<comment><USER13> One of the points of the article is the head/skull usually associated with the Brontosaurus was incorrect, as well as the body being a duplicate.

So with the usual headline sensationalism, it is fair to say "it never existed". More accurately, one could say something like "the dinosaur popularly known as brontosaurus, is actually a aptosaurus with a different head..." But as a headline, it lacks punch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This isn't actually news. I think I knew about Apatosaurus (vs. Brontosaurus) in the 1970s.

<comment><USER18> Heh, I remember learning about it and thinking, oh, I wonder when they figured this out.

I was pretty ticked off when I learned it was the 70's, and yet I still was taught about the brontosaurus in school a decade later. Makes me wonder if kids today still get taught about the ninth planet Pluto.

<comment><USER19> I think Pluto got a whole lot more press in pop culture. Arguably a good thing - pop culture has really improved in science coverage since the 70s.

<comment><USER5> "pop culture has really improved in science coverage since the 70s"

Increased the amount, but has the quality really improved that much? We've still got the latest free-energy, supplement/alt-med, cancer cure, and diet quacks making the rounds under the guise of "science" reporting.

<comment><USER19> Granted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Related: There's apparently a similar thing happening with the triceratops/toroceratops. It's likely that the former is just an young version of the latter, not a different species.

[http://www.newser.com/story/97112/triceratops-never- existed....](http://www.newser.com/story/97112/triceratops-never-existed.html)

<comment><USER19> My entire childhood is being retconned out of existence. First brontosaurs, then Pluto, now Triceratops - what's next, Count Chocula will turn out to have been a miscategorized lemur?</comment></comment>


Took me two years to get to a point I can make this in two weeks - <AUTHOR> https://wfh.team <comment><USER2> The email box shakes violently if you stick around for a bit. It almost seems like an easter egg, rather than a user-hostile plea for attention.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's really hostile at all. It's probably relevant to almost every visitor and so much better than a modal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> pretty snappy, nice job. may want to consider removing the vibrating email section though

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much. I will definitely consider that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't seem like a good title.

</comment><comment><USER6> What can wfh.team do that other remote-only job boards cannot? It seems pretty basic, which is great.

Do you have bigger plans for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently the unique features are limited to :

\- analytic section for jobs posted by you.

\- dark mode

\- cheaper price

My plan is to add new features such as a messaging platform between job seekers and recruiters and built-in application processing management. I would also like to make it easier to post a job ( like if it's already posted somewhere else, just copy/paste the url and job info will be extracted automatically)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whoah, Scrollbars abound!

Feedback: Have a look on a Windows PC once before soliciting a million eyeballs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I clearly didn't spend enough time to test this on every browser(specially IE). I will try to fix that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tldr; website to post and apply for jobs.

<comment><USER7> Looks like it's scraped or coming from [https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you think the data is scrapped? They are just some random remote jobs I posted to show other people what a job posting look like!</comment></comment></comment>


Researchers report 4,000 apps that secretly record audio and steal logs - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/android-users-bombarded-with-4000-spy-apps-three-land-in-google-play/ <comment><USER2> Why is this so much easier on Android than iOS? On iOS microphone access requires explicit user permission, so you have to use social engineering to convince them to give it. And app review theoretically can catch apps that leave an audio channel open.

<comment><USER3> Because Google still allows publishing of apps that opt out of having to ask for microphone permissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Android users should be wary of any non-Google app sources with the exception of Amazon's Android offerings

Personally, I trust f-droid more than either of those.</comment>


Will the high-tech cities of the future be utterly lonely? - <AUTHOR> http://theweek.com/articles/689527/hightech-cities-future-utterly-lonely <comment><USER2> The article seems like three disconnected stories. I'll try to do a better job of combining the stories:

When the automation eliminated the blue collar jobs, my friends, if I had them, would laugh because we are white collar.

When the automation eliminated the rural jobs, my friends, if I had them, would laugh because we were superior urbanites.

When the automation eliminates my white collar urbanite job, there is no one left to laugh at me, because urbanites are lonely and have no friends.

But on the bright side we'll spend the income we don't have, from the jobs that don't exist anymore, on fitbits to make us happy, instead of spending the money on other people. The progressive stack was to eliminate the family, no more babies, then eliminate the pets, no more fur babies, finally eliminate the jobs to eliminate the human-like machines such as fitbits. The last step will be eliminating the remaining people.

Devices becoming more human like, is good, because humans won't be able to afford living in the expensive cities without any jobs and no personal relationships. In the old days people worked and retired to a pension and were given a pocketwatch they don't need at a retirement party. In the new days people will be downsized as population only increases and the number of jobs only decreases, teased by being shown a fitbit they can't afford and don't need, and left to die under the freeway overpasses unemployed.

Although historical experience indicates the outcome will look a lot like Mogadishu shaken with the French Revolution and a sprinking of Detroit, we would like to think instead that our biggest problem will be solving loneliness, because lonely people are unproductive. People have to be productive, British Stiff Upper Lip and all that, even though we no longer have any jobs for them to be productive in. If they were not lonely they would not notice they are unemployed.

I like to think I did a better more serious and thoughtful job than the article. Its a little funny because the topic is of course ridiculous but I still think I made numerous serious points.

<comment><USER3> Your comment reminds me of Black Mirror ep _Fifteen Million Merits_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "By 2050, more than 66 percent of the world's population will be living in so- called "smart cities." These are metropolitan areas where everything will be digitally connected. ... we'll have smart hospitals, farms, and highways, and it's likely they'll all talk to one another. Connected devices will monitor everything from air quality to energy usage and traffic congestion."

While that might lead to efficiency that makes me feel it's more of a dystopia than a place I'd want to live.

To me says: there will be someone monitoring you to make sure you are a good little cog and don't disturb the status quo.

<comment><USER5> Yes, what are poor people really _for_ when we have full automation...

<comment><USER6> IIRC, this is explored in Soylent Green: furniture and food

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I doubt it. I spend my days looking at this "smart city" trend, it seems that in the future modern services will allow cities and city planners to focus on more things like community spaces and social infrastructure. As it stands today I'd hazard over 85% of the productivity within a city at the government layer is spend managing and dealing with existing infrastructure. Very bullish on cities. Highly recommend reading Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward Glaeser

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the claim made in the article, that minor social interactions like receiving a "Thank You" from the cashier instead of using a self-checkout booth, prevents loneliness is really dubious. In fact, the article also mentions shallow conversations as creating loneliness, so it contradicts itself there. I don't get what the article is trying to say.

Loneliness is a communication, information and anxiety problem. The first two, communication and information, are problems technology can easily help solve. Helping people getting over their anxieties is way harder of course, but technology used properly can help there too.

People/governments just needs to take the issue seriously and start doing stuff to solve it.

<comment><USER2> "Loneliness is a communication, information and anxiety problem. The first two, communication and information, are problems technology can easily help solve. Helping people getting over their anxieties is way harder of course, but technology used properly can help there too."

I find it utterly fascinating that this summer is the 50 yr anniversary of the "Summer of Love" where the problems of loneliness of young boomers was solved by contraceptives, weed, and music, and now that generation is in total control culturally and politically, the solution to the problem half a century later is obviously a really nice new fitbit.

(edited to add, and both solutions were the most "California" solutions imaginable in that era)

<comment><USER9> The boomers are only partly in total control now; the Xers also have a lot of control.

Regardless, the hippies who went to the Summer of Love are a tiny minority of the Boomers. Most boomers were rather conservative. The hippies either died out or faded into obscurity, while their mainstream peers are the ones who have taken control of society and given us a giant mess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can assure you that the loneliness is because of the clown city planners who think humans enjoy living in boxes.

People will organically cluster to optimize proximity to others + get personal space when they need it.

Hopefully we will reject the clown-car of urban design and return to our organic roots.

It is costing people their livelihoods, their soul, their spirit.

All because someone who dresses like a penguin has a broken model of the world.

</comment><comment><USER11> Off Topic: that site is doing something I've seen on a lot of sites: not correctly taking into account that menu banner overlay on the top when the user hits space to scroll a page.

On Firefox it works correctly. The page scrolls up just enough to make what had been the bottom visible line become the top visible line.

On Chrome and Safari it scrolls a few lines too far. If I go in to the inspector and delete that menu overlay it is then clear that it scrolled the amount that would have been correct had the menu overlay not been there.

As I said I see this quite a bit around the web. I'm curious why. Is there a bug in calculating the size of the visible region in Webkit browsers in the presence of overlays? Are the sites using some non-standard CSS that is only supported in Firefox? Is this one of those things that you just have to have separate code for different browsers and these sites didn't realize that and only tested with Firefox so didn't realize they weren't done yet?

<comment><USER12> I see that all the time too. It's extremely frustrating , but i think the solution is that browsers should implement some sort of visual indication of where the bottom of the screen moves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wait..cities aren't _already_ utterly lonely?

</comment><comment><USER14> Lately I don't seem to have time to feel lonely. Can't say that I don't miss it sometimes. I feel like being lonely every now and then is good for you. Being lonely all the time, that's a different story.

<comment><USER15> Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. - Paul Tillich

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am reminded of the videogame in Spike Jonze's "Her" in which the main protagonist after coming home from his day job ghostwriting hikes through landscapes with his AI buddy.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr7aI0RqtXc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr7aI0RqtXc)

</comment><comment><USER17> No, we'll still have Tinder... for our avatar-on-avatar VR sexcapades.

* Demolition Man sex scene - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs)

</comment><comment><USER18> > _But in a future where robots sound and objects look increasingly sentient, > we might be less inclined to seek out behaviors to abate our loneliness. > Indeed, one recent study titled "Products as pals" found that exposure to or > interaction with anthropomorphic products — which have characteristics of > being alive — partially satisfy our social needs, which means the human-like > robots of tomorrow could kill our dwindling urge to be around other humans._

So basically Chobits was right all along.

[https://youtu.be/aB50gL4rpiM](https://youtu.be/aB50gL4rpiM)

<comment> norea-armozel As someone who's fairly reclusive outside of work I'm frightened by this prospect. I'd rather be anxious and have to deal with people from time to time than be so utterly alone that I'm forced to treat my cereal box as a surrogate for a friend. That just sounds horrible on so many levels.

<comment><USER19> I'm always amused by people expressing alarm from future things that they won't be there to experience. Like a Victorian ranting about Tinder. Who cares what you think? You'll be dead, and the people alive then certainly won't share your reservations.

<comment><USER20> I'll be 75 in 2050.

<comment><USER21> Your Tinder profile: This isn't even my final form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> man, can't wait for tech to come out that chops out the need to socially connect, depression caused by the lack same is absolutely annoying

<comment><USER23> "Do you have serious loneliness and depression? I have an app for that! Friendsy, in which a cute little virtual kitten gives you points to spend at Amazon if you perform social interactions! remember, 1000 points is $5 off your next order. That's only 25 Hellos, or four Meetup meetings a month!"

<comment><USER24> That's still a better idea than juicera.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The key to making societies not lonely is communal dining areas for every 100 or so people.

<comment><USER26> It worked for Britain in WWII.[1]

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

<comment><USER25> Anthropologically, humans are primarily tribal creatures who form strong bonds with small groups. One consistent thing across most cultures is that although everyone goes hunting and farming during the day, at night they gather around the fire or table and share. It works because this is the way we have evolved to live.</comment></comment></comment>


PostgREST: REST API for Any Postgres Database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/begriffs/postgrest

<comment><USER2> This one looks superior to previous attempts in that you can write to the db, not just read.</comment>


Scientists Designed a Drug for Just One Patient. Her Name Is Mila - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/health/mila-makovec-drug.html <comment><USER2> It seems better to me to think of this as a method for creating custom drugs rather than to think of it as the creation of a single custom drug for one patient.

Maybe the first one is extraordinarily expensive and risky, but what happens after they do this for a dozen or a hundred or a thousand people?

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like great practice, despite being extraordinarily fraught with difficult decisions. If we attempt a custom solution to hundreds or thousands of these rapidly dying patients, we may learn a tremendous amount about each disease we attempt to treat. If we don't make strides on the diseases, we will at least learn to quickly iterate on drug manufacturing.

The quoted 7000 rare diseases won't be solved with traditional investment in each one. It seems reasonable that we attempt alternative techniques and learn from each attempt.

I worry about two things: That we will use custom drugs when traditional techniques would be more effective, and that money that would otherwise be effectively spent on traditional research is spent on the custom drug effort.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Even in rapidly progressing, fatal illnesses, precipitating severe > complications or death is not acceptable

Why not? If it was my life on the line, I'd take the risk.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, and in fact the FDA seemingly has already moved past that, they do support compassionate use[1].

1: [https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side- effects...](https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side- effects/clinical-trials/compassionate-drug-use.html)</comment></comment>


Designing a Collision Avoidance System by Watching Locusts Watch Star Wars - <AUTHOR> https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/collision-avoidance-star-wars-locusts/ <comment><USER2> Ooooh! Story time!

In 2005 and 2006, I worked in a biology lab that worked on similar things as Dr. Rind's lab. I don't recall if we collaborated directly, but there was definitely a lot of overlap and I think we shared papers back and forth.

When I arrived, the biologists had rigged up a pretty amazing setup. They had a system that was measuring locust wing-muscle activations, and feeding that in through a joystick port to Descent (yes, the game). This was a more closed- loop version of the "watching Star Wars" stuff talked about in the article. The system had a couple flaws, though. The biggest being that it was being projected onto a hemispherical dome that the locust sat in, but the scene wasn't perspective-corrected for the dome. It still worked, sort of though; you could watch the insect successfully navigate around obstacles, but it was pretty crude.

Over the two summers (I was a student at the time), I did the majority of development on a more controlled and perspective-corrected system for them. It included a simple scripting language (since I had, you know, just finished my compilers course) for the scientists to describe specific scenes to project for the insect, instead of just using the pre-made Descent levels. It did some really cool projecting mapping, such that, given a known position of the insect's eyes relative to the hemispherical screen, we could project perspective-correct 3D imagery. It had a USB device for more predictable input than the joystick port. And it included time synchronization signals that could be fed back into the muscle-impulse-capture hardware to more easily correlate events in the 3D scene with muscle events.

I haven't kept in touch with the lab much, but last I heard they're still using a derivative of the system I helped build there. The USB controller died at some point and was replaced with an Arduino, and I think some new summer students have tweaked this and that, but best I can tell the system is still mostly alive (even if it's been through a Ship of Theseus transformation).

The results were really cool too! You could watch the insect successfully navigate around obstacles by changing the timing differential between wingbeats!

Anyway... I'm happy to chat about this more if anyone's interested, with the caveat that I'm not a biologist and was way more focused on the EE and CS aspects of doing the measurements. I do recall that there was a particular neuron that was being investigated (the Descending Contralateral Motion Detector - DCMD) in our lab, but don't know a whole lot more than that.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be pretty unfortunate if suddenly my car was attracted to bright lights and bug zappers. /joke/

</comment><comment><USER4> That's kind of cool. But I hope we wouldn't be satisfied with a 91% collision avoidance rate.</comment>


Ask HN: Salary increase from Seattle to Bay Area - <AUTHOR> Software engineer contemplating a move from Seattle to Mountain View. I'd be coming in at the senior level to a company considered a "unicorn". When I do the math on the cost of living increase and what I currently make, the minimum salary that I need to make is 175K. Is this low, on target, or high for a Senior Engineer in the valley? Initial offer is in the mid-150K range.<p>I should note, I'd be leaving behind a job I'm not completely unhappy with, co-workers that I like, and friends and family, for what looks like a great job in a place where we don't know anyone. <comment><USER2> Think twice about it. Moving from middle of nowhere or from place where there is no tech is no brainer, but Seattle is a different story. First, consider that there is California income tax (unlike Washington where there is no state income tax). Second, if you want to live in decent place it's way more expensive than you'd be led to believe (check out craigslist + apartments.com). Third, consider that even if you join company and love your co-workers, those co-workers are most likely to be gone within 1-2 years. Engineers constantly switch jobs in Silicon Valley and average tenure at a company is pretty low ([https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-tenure-of-a- softwa...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-tenure-of-a-software- engineer-in-a-silicon-valley-company)).

Having said that, at a bigger company you can reasonably expect what you are looking for. But at a startup it might be a bit harder to negotiate to that level, also consider that if you don't perform within first couple of months then they'll most likely let you go.

</comment><comment><USER3> Somewhere between 150 and 180 seems reasonable. So you should negotiate up, but don't be surprised if they won't go all the way to 175.</comment>


QuirksMode - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Triggering_different_rendering_modes <comment><USER2> Ah, I remember this good ol' days with having everyday-sex with Opera, IE, Chrome, Firefox. Those prefixes and gradient syntax were awful.

Thankfully, It's 2016 year now, and we can just forget about.</comment>


Show HN: A Flask extension for accepting multiple API calls in one HTTP request - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dtkav/flask-batch <comment><AUTHOR> Author here - I was looking for best practice ways to support bulk/batch operations in RESTful APIs. Most ideas seemed really wrong to me [0], until I came across the way that google cloud storage API does this [1] (at the HTTP layer). I couldn't find a good implementation of this concept, so I decided to build one. I'm hoping to eventually try to get this project accepted as an "Approved Extension", so I'd really love your feedback. Let me know what you think!

[0] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/511281/patterns-for- hand...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/511281/patterns-for-handling- batch-operations-in-rest-web-services)

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/how- tos/ba...](https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/how-tos/batch)

<comment><USER2> Cool! Can we use this from javascript? The example shows python, but this would be helpful if I can use javascript.

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like there is a js library built for this purpose ([https://www.npmjs.com/package/batchelor](https://www.npmjs.com/package/batchelor)), but it's not 100% compatible. I'll work on getting them to play nice together next week. Thanks for the note =)</comment></comment></comment>


Google Chrome 3.0 - <AUTHOR> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-chrome-30.html <comment><USER2> "You shouldn't read too much into Google Chrome's version numbers. Just because you can now install Google Chrome 3.0, it doesn't mean that Google wants to appear more mature than it already is."

* cough(bullshit) _

<comment><USER3> Well, if you compare Chrome 3.0 vs Firefox 3.0 (or 3.5), what features does Chrome not have? As far as I can tell it's only missing Firefox's extensions so if you can live without Adblock, Firebug, etc you can trade the extensions for Chrome's outright speed.

<comment><USER4> It's worth noting that WebKit's "Web Inspector" is present in Chrome, which is roughly equivalent to Firebug...so you're not really having to live without that, even.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And still no full release version for Mac / Linux. I find this particularly interesting considering the Google "Operating System" is going to be a custom interface on top of a Linux kernel.

<comment><USER6> I've been using the Linux version for several month now and honestly cannot tell the difference between it and the windows version. Just as stable, just as fast, and flash works without any problems. I'm guessing there is a good reason why they're not comfortable releasing it yet, but as an end user I haven't run across that reason.

<comment><USER7> Chrome for Mac is similar. Firefox is my main browser, but I give Chrome a whirl once a week or so and have yet to notice any deficiencies.

<comment><USER8> Well, one obvious deficiency is the lack of integration with password managers. That's deal-breaker for me.

<comment><USER9> Printing doesn't work on OS X or on Linux yet either.

<comment><USER10> What is this "printing" of which you speak?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Will browser companies skip version 6? In the same way hotels skip the 13th floor?

<comment><USER5> Hopefully browser companies will be more rigorous about migrating their users to newer versions so that we avoid the issues IE6 has presented by still having a large install base even after two subsequent versions have been released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I realize there is probably no place for it in marketing banter, but it bothers me that they don't give the WebKit project any visible credit.

<comment><USER13> I feel the same about Safari and Webkit towards KHTML.

<comment><USER14> Back when Safari first came out, there was a lot of credit given to KHTML, and Apple quickly had public-facing Subversion repositories available with full product history so that KHTML could adopt any changes they wanted. Since then, WebKit and KHTML have gone radically different directions, to the point that I'm not honestly sure the latter exists anymore.

Apple, I thought, did the right thing by providing a full hat-tip to KHTML at the time of the fork. I also think their attitude towards KHTML since then has been completely fair.

<comment><USER13> For quite a while, Apple were jerks about contributing there changes back. The patches they submitted to KHTML were huge, undocumented, and full of OSX- specific code. It tooks many months of griping by KHTML, GPL advocates and the community before Apple opened up thier KHTML fork as a CVS repo, and some time later, simply open-sourcing Webkit itself. But at the beginning, it was quite a fight to get Apple to acknowledge Webkit's open-source roots.

The KDE project has now dropped KHTML and switched to Webkit.

<comment><USER15> This is inaccurate, KDE still uses KHTML. I've certainly seen the point argued back and forth amongst KDE developers, but all versions of KDE still use KHTML, and I assume it's still maintained somewhat. KHTML and WebKit aren't just interchangeable pieces of Konqueror, see <http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3998> .

thiago from #kde informs me that "the guy [who claimed that KHTML is gone] is completely wrong", "[KHTML] is happily in use and cannot even be dropped yet".

I was also informed that "there are plans [to change to Webkit], but they're slowgoing" and "nothing concrete has happened yet". If anyone has access to an official announcement to this effect, I'd appreciate a link, because last I knew there were just developers bickering back and forth about which to keep.

Also, I assume that with WebKit SFX would become the KDE browser's JavaScript engine instead of KJS, and that would be nice. KJS is much slower in my experience.

<comment><USER13> I stand corrected on the last point. Someone needs to tell Ars and update Wikipedia:

 _In July 2007, the Ars Technica website published an article announcing that the KDE team would move from KHTML to WebKit.[13]_

( From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#cite_ref-arsunfork_12-0> )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Chrome includes video codecs that allow you to embed videos without using slow and unreliable plug-ins like Adobe Flash."

Compared to quicktime/media player and the slew of plugins from the previous generation, flash is much much more reliable.

<comment><USER17> Compared to QuickTime _on Windows_. On Mac it's not so slow and doesn't load CPU that much (compared to Flash/Mac).

<comment><USER18> Bullshit. Load a hour long quicktime video from blip tv using safari. It will hang your browser every time. This is on a latest gen Macbook Pro

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I like Chrome, and the new version does a feel a tad quicker, but goddammit already how much longer until extensions are in the official releases?

<comment><USER19> They were recently enabled by default in the Chromium builds. Lots of features are still missing (all of the interface/toolbar stuff only works in Windows right now, for example, and installed extensions are purged with every restart of the browser on OS X/Linux). The extension API is lightweight and fantastic though, so I'm with you in hoping that they get make it into Chrome sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone find that chrome is just unnecessary? It seems like google got to the game just when all the other browsers hot a point when they are all good.

Not long ago, FF seemed like a real edge. Now I just use it cuz I'm used to it and it has extensions that I am used to. Safari is also good and even the new IE is good. I wouldn't mind using either of them or using chrome. The pace of improvement seems to be strong and even.

I have no beef with an extra competitor, but I am surprised to say I have a browser and its good.

<comment><USER21> I think we can fairly credit Chrome with dramatically raising the bar for javascript performance across the competing browser engines. The V8 virtual machine for Chrome compiles JS to machine code rather than interpreting it or running in bytecode. Mozilla has since responded with the TraceMonkey optimization for its javascript engine; WebKit developed SquirrelFish Extreme; and so on.

<comment><USER20> SUre. extra competition. An extra place for innovation to happen. All good. But it doesn't seem to amount to using the browser does it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Awesome! Extensions being enabled by default in the dev channel is great news. I've been semi-following the documentation for it all and it's been improving at a nice steady pace (just like the browser :-))

Also, as mentioned from others it runs just fine on Linux for several months now so go ahead and try it! You'll realize quickly how you don't need all those Firefox extensions.

<comment><USER23> Not all of them. But if you think I'm surfing without AdBlock then you have another think coming...

<comment><USER22> You can get Adsweep for Chrome which works pretty well.

<http://www.adsweep.org/>

It's discontinued, but it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't know if anyone noticed, the page has an ad link for IE 8.0 at the very top before the article begins. That looked funny.

</comment><comment><USER25> hopefully the back button will work more consistently now

</comment><comment><USER26> still waiting to try the official mac version...

</comment><comment><USER27> It is time for next-gen "no flash" browser games and "no java" web-apps.

<comment><USER28> Hell yeah! <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=825830>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You know what's still missing and I'm surprised...

there's no way to see raw headers sent/received in the dev tools!

<comment><USER30> Is the Resources panel not adequate? Granted, it does format the headers, but it does show the HTTP method, the request headers, and the response headers for the page and each resource.

<comment><USER29> D'oh! You are absolutely right. Somehow I've missed that little sub-menu all this time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Chrome + Firefox = one browser to rule them all.!

<comment><USER31> lol. To guys with 'good' karma: not LTR fans I take it?

It's worth noting that together these browsers will take significant market share from IE and Safari, especially when Chrome is released for mac later this year. Even more interesting is FF strong ties and history with Google.</comment></comment>


Why we moved to Linode - <AUTHOR> http://blog.superfeedr.com/linode/

<comment><USER2> I just want to add one alternative voice; I've been a slicehost user for about 2 years and I've couldn't be a happier customer. It's the first time I've used a VPS like this so I can't comment on how their service compares price/speed/functionality-wise with Linode et al., but I can say that:

\- My sites haven't once gone down.

\- I have found the whole interface and management backend very intuitive.

\- Their articles are fantastic. I went from pretty much knowing nothing about servers or linux to running 6 sites on my slice, with email server, FTP, securing it with iptables, django installed, installing postgres with remote access, etc etc, all through their articles.

\- The support is exemplary. Last week I accidently made a double payment (my stupid fault). I emailed them, a human responded within 40 seconds saying it had been forwarded to the billing department; 90 seconds later the billing department emailed me saying they had reversed the transaction.

(edit: formatting)

<comment><USER3> I have nothing against slicehost, but a key point in the OP was price. Ever since their June RAM bump, they (on paper) offer a much better value.

Its also worth pointing out that of the various benchmarks I've seen (a handful on blogs and there are some pretty key threads on webhostingtalk.com), Linode typically comes out on or near the top.

On top of that, you add their participation to things like Rails Rumble and their data center choice (just missing Asia), and it all makes a compelling argument.

<comment><USER4> Even before the Linode memory upgrade, Linode was more competitive for many uses because they offered 32 bit systems, whereas Slicehost only has memory- hungry 64 bit systems:

<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode>

After the ram upgrade, Linode is a _clear_ winner. I just hope they don't screw up the good service as they gain customers.

<comment><USER5> > whereas Slicehost only has memory-hungry 64 bit systems

[http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2010/3/1/32-bit-images- now...](http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2010/3/1/32-bit-images-now- available)

<comment><USER4> Good catch, I didn't realize that. Before writing my article and switching to Linode, I politely asked if that was going to happen any time soon, but they said no, and the rest is history. It took them, it looks like, over a year to add that functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was rocking with some dedicated servers from SoftLayer (who are awesome) but "downsized" to Linode about 18 months ago. I discovered VPSes weren't as slow or crippled as I imagined and I now serve much the same stuff for a fraction of the cost. Win win.

<comment><USER7> Linode is awesome and great for small- to mid-range server needs. Even an EC2 small instance is overkill (both in computing resources and in price) for many websites.

However if you do need lots of resources then the cost effectiveness of VPSes - or any virtualized system for that matter - goes down the drain quickly. For high-traffic websites nothing compares to good old dedicated servers. The pricing difference between a dedicated server and EC2/Linode/etc can be as much as 5x for the same resources.

Linode is also a bad choice if you need a lot of disk space, and with "a lot" I mean >100 GB. Expanding disk space on Linode is very expensive, an order of magnitude more than EBS.

<comment><USER8> How is the pricing difference for a dedicated server and EC2 5 times? Maybe if you only look at the physical hardware cost, but often that is the smaller component. You are comparing a capital asset with both fixed and variable cost components to a fixed-cost per-hour lease of resource.

<comment><USER7> If you really need to lease resources by the hour then by all means, go with virtualized servers. But for one of the web apps I'm building I know that there's a high chance that I'll need to keep the servers around for at least a year. The prices on e.g. hetzner.de (I'm not a customer, I just read about it on HN) totally blows EC2 Reserved Instances out of the water.

I don't know why you consider dedicated servers capital assets. Maybe if you're colocating your own servers, but I plan on renting dedicated servers that a hosting company provides. They'll be responsible for replacing the hardware if it fails.

Turns out that renting a dedicated server and colocating your own costs approximately the same, assuming that the hardware never fails. If the hardware does fail then renting a dedicated is cheaper.

<comment><USER6> "Renting" also has tax benefits in some jurisdictions since you can write off the full rent instead of depreciation over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've had a very similar experience with Rackspacecloud (makes sense since they're the same company as Slicehost now): Incredibly slow control panel, features sometimes work and sometimes don't, useless tech support (took 5 days to point our server to our domain because someone else had it pointed first for some reason, despite whois being obviously ours).

Meanwhile, I've been using Linode for my personal projects and it's night and day. The control panel is incredibly faster and easier to use, the prices and specs are better, and the community/documentation is noticeably more intelligent and better-equipped.

</comment><comment><USER10> My ping times from my server to Facebook's graph servers went from 40ms at my expensive ThePlanet servers to 2ms at Linode Fresno. I'm really, really happy with Linode, though the prices for bandwidth, disk and ram are ridiculously high. Best option is probably something like 10tb from ThePlanet for bulk assets and Linode for the front end.

</comment><comment><USER11> I moved to Linode recently from vps.net, nothing major just a few personal sites, but so far Linode have been great. If you're ever tempted to, _don't_ go with vps.net.

<comment><USER12> I've had a great experience with VPS.net so far. Why do you say that?

<comment><USER11> I signed up in September 2009 and I'm still _technically_ a customer but I won't be once renewal rolls around.

The problems are numerous, the management are great, they really care (Nick, Terry etc) _but_ the product and support team are pitiful. I assume as you're a customer you've got access to the customer forum? Take a look at the problems people face. vps.net is great when it works, but the second something goes wrong I've found myself nothing but screwed and personally how the system and team handle when things go wrong is what matters most.

"Self healing with automatic failover" is a joke. I've had 2 periods of 10 hour+ downtime on tiny servers, I've also had numerous "small" downtimes that lasted between 30 minutes and 2 hours. The reasons for these range from technicians making mistakes ("replaced ram incorrectly") to the technology just not being able to cope.

I _wish_ I could stick with vps.net, their flexibility isn't beaten by anyone but the stability and support is incredibly poor. If I were to totally ignore any times my server has been rebooted because of me (so assume 1 year = 1 year of uptime) the longest my server(s -- I used to run multiple with them) have been online is 90 days. They can't go 90 days without a problem, where problems range from 30 minutes to 10 hours.

The last straw for me was my server being inaccessible for almost 90 minutes, the reason? I had been nullrouted and that isn't the bad part... I submitted a support ticket explaining that my server was down (I originally logged in to the control panel after I couldn't get in via SSH and saw many disk errors) I got a canned "reboot plz" response, I sent a reply saying that didn't work, he replied "I can connect from here!" so I replied "Well I can't!" and included a link that showed it wasn't just me (<http://i.imgur.com/NtXi9.jpg>) then his next reply "oh, it appears you've been nullrouted!" (this was an hour after I first submitted my ticket) so I reply asking when it'll be back, they ignore me and then 15 minutes later it's accessible again and the ticket was closed...

...it doesn't end there. I head over to the customer forum and ask if anyone else is experiencing the same, surprise surprise another customer says "hey I'm experiencing the same!" so we compare IPs, he's on the same (subnet?) IP part as me, xx.xx.xx. __(where __is our specific parts and xx is the same) so he then submits a support ticket about it. So specific to this incident: Support are not told when blocks are put in place, support don't proceed to contact all the other customers with the same problem when it _is_ resolved and they don't offer any sort of "sorry" explanation. So either support doesn't have the facility to check for incidents specific to a client (why not?) or they just don't bother.

Anyway yes, that's just one incident but it was the final straw. vps.net have always been good on the customer relations side with Nick always talking to customers, but the product is poor (have a SAN die and then enjoy the wait time while it "self heals") and the support is just as bad. I'd love to pass issues off as one time, or things that will get better, but after an entire year of seeing it remain poor I'm finally moving on and it isn't just me, the customer forum is full of issues.

oh and don't even get me started on their inability to communicate, you'd think a product aimed at people with _important_ things would have people monitoring the network and hardware, but apparently not, because it often takes _at least_ 30 minutes for them to notify people of issues in progress via status.vps.net (which FYI a bunch of customers had to hammer them to get online, which they still don't publicise).

[http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only- forum...](http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum- private/3471-what-happen-to-slc-c) < A group of clients down, Managing Director says he's going to "look into it" and confirms there is an issue. He has to _look into it_? Don't they, you know, monitor? The problem? Licensing issue, a licensing issue took down hundreds of servers for over 4 hours? It's a joke. [http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only- forum...](http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum- private/2929-vps-stuck-consuming-30-nodes-and-not-responding) [http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only- forum...](http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum- private/3437-whats-your-current-uptime-on-vps-net-and-the-longest)

Summary: Unstable/unreliable product, poor support, good customer relations, terrible issue awareness. Broken promises.

Edit: I didn't realise how long this had become, apologies. I'm just very frustrated that I've stuck with them for so long (I was considering leaving after 3 months of nothing but pain) and they _still_ suck.

Edit edit: I figured an example of the horrible support where it caused substantial downtime would be good. Back story: Server went down, checked the client forums and many others had the same problems, after an hour Nick (MD) said via Twitter that anyone still down should contact support, so I'd _already_ been down for an hour:

09:34 EDT Submit ticket, say that my server is still down and this ticket is as instructed via Twitter.

09:38 EDT Reply from support, "Will check this and update as soon as possible".

10:07 EDT I replied asking where my update is, explain that I've now been down for 2 hours.

10:39 EDT I finally get a reply saying that my server is queued for being brought online

11:46 EDT Server still down I ask what's going on...

13:36 EDT Still no reply, server still down.

19:40 EDT Finally a reply from the MD (Nick) saying that my server is now back online.

So as you can see, between "Your server is now queued to come online" and the MD replying, I got nothing, all the while my server was down. It's laughably bad, especially because this is one of the many terrible instances with support I've had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently built a project (<http://www.coatapp.com> \- A simple weather forecast application with clothing suggestions) on Linode and couldn't be happier. The disk speeds are very impressive, and super useful for apps that deal with large amounts of data that gets updated frequently (i.e. weather data).

This previously posted benchmark shows some of the difference between Linode and a few other providers (from 2009): <http://journal.uggedal.com/vps- performance-comparison>

<comment><USER14> Cool project, would be really nice to have celsius support though.

<comment><USER13> Ok, I'll look into that too. The app only offers weather forecasts for the continental US so I originally assumed most folks were interested in fahrenheit, but I can see the appeal of celsius :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm very happy with my ARP Networks VPS. Their prices are very competitive, but it's definitely not a "managed" solution. They support just about any Linux distro as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Once your VM is spun up, you just log in and go. Support seems to be email only, but I've never had a second of downtime in the 9 months or so I've been there.

My only gripe is that web-based management of the VPS is almost non-existent. Basically power on/off and reboot are all you get. I'd like to see bandwidth, disk I/O, CPU utilization, and so on. They have a text-based management interface with a few more options, including VNC console over SSH. I suppose the end result is that you basically get a low-end colo server experience at a VPS price. (Which is fine if you're like me and that's what you want.)

I also want to tip my hat to Liquid Web's cloud offering, Storm. (I'm biased because I helped build it.) Their prices are certainly not on the low end but the support team beats the snot out of any other hosting provider, period.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish I could move to Linode from Slicehost, I have a slice with my personal/hobby sites on it but it's too expensive (I could have a Linode twice the size for that price). All my new servers are Linode, of course (including historious, which is breezing along).

Their London datacenter is the fastest I've seen, even faster than some dedicated servers I've used.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've got fond memories of Linode, as it was the first VPS I tried out. Having an always-on Linux box turned out to be a lot handier than I had anticipated, and these days I can't imagine being without a shell _somewhere_.

That said, I ran into a curious problem when attempting to run servers for a doom source port, where performance would be quite choppy at times. I never really figured out what was going on either, as their support just told me that the box my VPS was on was fine and they couldn't see anything wrong with it. I finally moved to a cheap Atom dedicated server which seemed to fix things, and now I'm evaluating a VPS hosted by interserver.net (prognosis is troubling, it uses OpenVZ and I seem to keep getting dgramrcvbuf failures under heavy server usage), but I'll always suggest Linode to people looking for a good VPS host.

</comment><comment><USER18> I moved from Slicehost to Linode, mainly for performance reasons. The pricing difference encouraged me to wait no longer.

One of my sites was having serious performance issues on Slicehost, which seemed to be due to low disk i/o. I was cleaning the database, optimizing, etc. and stressing out about it, wondering what to change. After moving to Linode I haven't had the slightest hint of a performance issue.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm in the middle of making the same move. My motivations were price (a 512 slice costs half as much on Linode) and locality (Linode have a London data centre; Slicehost don't). So far I've been very impressed.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Linode offers some kind of customization so you can make machines with more RAM, or more bandwidth if you need to." Any details on how this works?

<comment><USER6> Once you have a node you can upgrade the specs a little. Short of transferring to an entirely new node, you can boost your bandwidth, get some extra RAM, and add some disk space, within limits without changing what host machine you're on due to the slack they have.

Separate to that, Linode also appear to support significantly larger packages than their pricing table indicates. Once you're in the system, there are references to things like "Linode 16384" accounts, etc.

<comment><USER20> Ah, I see in the "Extras" page. The pricing seems dumb though-they want $20/mo extra for 360mb of ram, but for an additional $20/mo I might as well update my 512 to a linode 1024 and get an additional 512mb of ram, as well as more cpu power/disk/bandwidth.

<comment><USER21> I think that is exactly the point, if you look at all of the extras (bandwidth,disk,ram) the pricing all comes out to when you reach the amount for each (bandwidth, disk, or ram) upgraded server it is the same for both extras or upgraded server.

<comment><USER22> There's only so much resources on each physical host - when you hit the resource usage of an additional Linode, you've effectively used up the space that could have gone to another customer. So you have to pay their rent as well.

Although this really doesn't make that much sense for bandwidth... but when you look at the raw price for bandwidth it's not all that bad anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Linode indeed has great support,from my experience

</comment><comment><USER24> linode for dev, test and launch and then dedicated hardware at 100tb.com or the like when needed.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would have went with RapidXen instead of Linode. Better service, and the guy who owns it is a pretty well known FOSS coder.</comment>