Nokia: "We will not adopt Windows Phone environment as it is seen today" - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/04/29/some-more-on-the-nokia-microsoft-partnership

<comment><USER2> Seems like there are a lot of Nokia people doing a lot of rationalizing about whether Nokia's the top or bottom in their new relationship with Microsoft. Exhibit A:

"In this question [Kai Öistämö of Nokia] revealed that Microsoft has actually partnered with Nokia to include Nokia Maps in all their service platforms."

 _Sure_ it did.

Regarding the UI customization, this is just delusional-slash-magical thinking that is par for the course with makers of commodity products under the thumb of their commodifier-master. They're always thinking that their "value add" is going to make them stand out when in fact it makes them like one more art student with dyed hair in the oh-so-individual clone army: interchangeably weird.

<comment><USER3> "Interchangeably weird": that is a great description of extreme individualism!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My take on this- how much can they really modify here and make sure they don't break compatibility with the 3rd party apps? If things were not so dire that they needed to dump a platform they have years invested in, is it really smart(arrogant?) to think that the OS that has actually shipped and seems to be pretty good is not good enough for them?

<comment><USER5> Since Windows Phone is based on .NET, a lot of changes can be made by Nokia without breaking compatibility with third party applications, e.g. .NET allows multiple versions of a library to exist simultaneously for different applications because it was architected with backwards and forwards compatibility in mind.

<comment><USER6> .NET isn't what allows that to happen, though, since, AFAIK, MS has not committed to binary compatibility between .NET versions. While the framework makes it easier to leverage these features(you can still use it with non- managed C++ but it's quite annoying to get working), the Windows kernel is what allows the multiple versions to exist.

In the case of .NET, it's the side-by-side deployment of the .NET runtimes that allow multiple versions to be present on the system at the same time.

<comment><USER7> > the Windows kernel is what allows the multiple versions to exist.

I don't think you know what the Windows kernel does. Multiple library versions have nothing to do with the kernel because 1) the kernel doesn't know anything about libraries, 2) the kernel doesn't do userspace binary loading (even for completely unmanaged code), and 3) the kernel does nothing at all with .NET.

Side-by-side deployment of binaries is actually completely separate from the functionality in .NET that allows multiple versions, which is the GAC (Global Assembly Cache); SxS binaries (which are used by unmanaged code) are completely separate, although they both reference their respective binaries via manifest files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Secondly, another big client of the company, the operators, unanimously voted for a partnership with Microsoft as this will bring a third contender to the marketplace."

That sentence stood out the most from that article. For Nokia to say they choose this partnership because the operators want another choice seems insane to me. Basically I am interpreting that to mean the operators want more platforms to help give them leverage when negotiating with phone manufactures. Which could potential hurt Nokia in the future too.

Am I reading to much into this, or does Nokia's logic there strike anyone else as funny too?

<comment><USER9> No what this means is that the operators don't want to be stuck with Android vs. iOS; they would prefer a _strong_ third option, which would be Nokia/MS.

Back in 2006, operators used to have dozens of manufacturers of smartphones at their disposal each with relatively weak OS platforms (RIM/Blackberry being the top at the time).

Then the iPhone came out and disrupted that market by offering the iOS platform. Then Android matured (using some iOS cues) and became the 2nd leading platform.

Right now, the third platform (Blackberry) is getting weaker by the day, while WP7 is not gaining traction. So a combined Nokia/MS could provide a strong 3rd option for worldwide operators.

None of this makes sense unless Nokia is the preferred manufacturer for Microsoft and not just another commoditized handset maker of Windows phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> WP7 UI/UX looks very good. I don't think UI is the strongest strength in Nokia phones so I don't know how they can improve on that... Probably better integration with OVI apps/maps ? Or they can make it worse to be more Nokia- like?

</comment><comment><USER11> Given that Nokia owns Navteq, my interpretation of "Microsoft has actually partnered with Nokia to include Nokia Maps in all their service platforms" is that Microsoft will use Navteq data everywhere.

Microsoft's big sell to developers has been freedom from device targeting. I'd be very surprised if they allow Nokia to change any fundamental elements, including Live Tiles and Notifications.

</comment><comment><USER12> What many people probably don't know is that Nokia started as a company manufacturing paper in 1868, it moved into electricity generation, footwear, etc before creating the first phone in 1960s (100 years after it started). It is hard to find a company that survived this long in business.

I wish they do well, but the MS path does not seem right.

<comment><USER13> Now that's what I call, "pivoting"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My first phone was a Nokia. My subsequent phones were Nokia too. All these phones predate the iPhone era. Nokia's phone were rock solid. One even survived a fall from the first floor with minor scratches. But their interface was one of the clumsiest; inconsistent, not very user friendly and sometimes not very usable. The only two things I remember doing is messaging and phone calls. I haven't got my hands on a WP7 yet. But judging by my ZuneHD I'm sure the interface must be very good. So far I was hoping that the deal would bring a solid phone with a pretty interface to the market. But now it's obvious, it's going to be another superb phone spoiled by the OS and the interface.

</comment><comment><USER15> > In the video Öistämö goes over once more why Nokia decided to partner with > Microsoft ...

A couple $billion reasons come to mind right off the top of my head.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand the negative and suspicious comments. How is this different from HTC Sense and Samsung TouchWiz in Android phones?

<comment><USER17> People have positive feelings toward W7P even if only because it is novel UI- wise. People don't have positive feelings toward Nokia's UI work... let's just say that.

<comment><USER16> Oh yes I agree, the UIs are horrible. I think Nokia wants and needs to make current Nokia users happy with the new phones by implementing "Nokiaisms" (even though the underlying OS will change).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nokia, an agonizing downward spiral into irrelevance.

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't consider 30%+ percent of the global mobile phone market irrelevant. There market share is, in fact, up in the 4th quarter of 2010 according to Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This won't end well. If they can't communicate a clear focus that doesn't change or require expanding on the details further, they probably don't have one.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> These are interesting comments from Nokia in the light of their partnership with Microsoft. Most likely this would mean Nokia will change the UI of the Windows Phone environment to their taste.

Secondly: According to Nokia, Microsoft will be adopting Ovi Maps to all their services in the future.

</comment><comment><USER21> This should be clarified as I would like to invest on the WP7 platform due to Nokia being pushing it on their upcoming mobile phones. I was expecting them to have some success if they didn't change anything at all on WP7 but this makes me think otherwise...

</comment><comment><USER22> Umm.. Live tiles are a huge part of windows phone dev environment. Not sure you could change much on the home screen.

Maybe rounded corners? But why bother?

</comment><comment><USER23> What Nokia needs right now is to get phones out into the market now. The more they delay the more they lose mind share. They are not letting go of the "we know how to write an OS" mentality. Sure they can do it but they went with Microsoft because they don't want to. They should just slap the OS on to their phones and start pushing them out.

Also the current Windows UI is pretty damn good (from what I heard) so not sure what they want to do more.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, I don't mind much as long there's no fragmentation of the developer experience. But given Nokia's previous forays into UI development, I think it's best that they leave it to MS.

<comment><USER25> > I think it's best that they leave it to MS.

If they do it, they'll be a commodity phone maker and will have to compete in price with other WP7 phone makers. All three of them.

<comment><USER26> If they don't, past experience suggests they'll end up with smartphones that no one in North America will want to buy.

<comment><USER25> > they'll end up with smartphones that no one in North America will want to > buy.

It's not like everyone in NA wants to buy a WP7 phone now. If they change the UI enough, maybe someone will want it.

<comment><USER26> I don't disagree. I just haven't seen any evidence from Nokia, based on their own UIs, that they can make the WP7 UI _more_ desirable, rather than less or the same.

<comment><USER25> Having the choice between 100% certain doom and 95% certain doom, I'd go for the second. Just not very enthusiastically.

<comment><USER27> I think this argument could go either way. As a "commodity" WP7 phone maker, Nokia might be able to get 20% of the WP7 market on brand recognition alone. But a crappified version of WP7 might earn them 0% of the market instead.

<comment><USER28> As someone who values a fairly broad oligarchy of phone ecosystems, I'm frightened that Nokia will have 20% of a WP7 market that is perhaps a little more than one or two million devices per year, and stagnant.

WP7 (or 8 for that matter) isn't going to be helped in this kind of scenario by a bleeding vendor that can't sell more than a few hundred thousand devices. As consumers, we're not going to be helped by the death-by-a-thousand- downsizings of Nokia (a business that has a good record otherwise of innovation in technology and market development, at least until the last few years) and a side show of a user community that can't support development of innovative software and business models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> SO in other words Nokia gets to screw up another mobile interface, SWEET!

<comment><USER25> If nobody uses it, will it really be screwed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> At the moment, I believe it is only the Android phones which sport GPS. (Although Nokia feature phones already have Ovimaps). Bringing maps to the table means WP7 will be on par with Android on such a basic feature.

Does this mean MS has basically bought themselves a mapping company for a couple billion dollars? On top of it, they've secured a solid brand with a good distribution channel and pre-existing relationship with carriers. It sounds like a good deal for MS to me.

As for who is going to be dictating who, I believe Nokia is mistaken. MS will drive the relationship because MS owns the platform, not Nokia. This is something even HP and Samsung realizes. I'm surprised Nokia has palmed off Symbian to Accenture so quickly. Perhaps this is to shake out the management tree a little bit.

<comment><USER24> >At the moment, I believe it is only the Android phones which sport GPS.

Huh, almost every smartphone from the last 4 years sport GPS. What the agreement means is that Bing maps will be able to use Ovi maps in places where it's currently lacking, i.e Europe and Asia.

<comment><USER31> I think what 'teyc' meant was that Android is the only platform that offers free turn by turn navigation among the major platforms.

Nokia has provided this recently with their version of Ovi Maps as well (not sure if it's free on all S60 devices). So it is possible that the Ovi Maps & Bing Maps integration may include bringing the free turn by turn navigation to Windows Phone 7.

<comment><USER30> Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The lost art of total recall - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/13/memory-techniques-joshua-foer <comment><USER2> > there is nothing sadder than someone who has lost their mobile phone and who > finds they cannot even phone home or call their parents or partners because > they cannot remember a single telephone number

Well, I guess if you don't know a _single_ telephone number you can't do much. But if there is one phone number you should memorize (beyond 911 or equivalent), it is the phone number of the number service that will connect to you where ever you want.

I believe that we are largely beyond the age of recalling anything more than how to get to information we want quickly, and I like it.</comment>


DHH: Being at the right time at the right place is not the secret ingredient. - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ISOSyr_dMU <comment><USER3> He's absolutely right. The problem is that people buy their listeners some temporary comfort with their false modesty, but at the same time disempower them in the long term by saying that success is a function of luck.

Few people say their success was all luck, but many give it a bigger role than it deservers. It you are successful on a 10% play, it's easy to pass that off as luck. But if you made 10 plays like that, it's not really luck, now, is it?

Of course, sometimes the magnitude of the success is mostly luck.

<comment><USER4> I think the last part might be why some big winners are modest about it. They don't think of the question as, "was it luck that I was successful?", but as "was it luck that I made $2 billion?". The answer's probably a lot closer to yes on the 2nd question, which can make it tempting to say that you succeeded due to luck.

<comment><USER5> The size of the opportunity you choose to go after has a significant role in the maximum success you may have, and that choice should not be discounted. Founders of billion-dollar companies such as PayPal and YouTube foresaw that the world was changing, and given many industries to choose from, they picked a couple of the largest possible markets where they could have an impact.

If you decide to spend the next four years of your life making, say, appointment scheduling software (first thing that came to mind), that is a conscious choice not to go after a billion-dollar market, and right off the bat, the potential magnitude of your success is constrained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What he's trying to say, I think, is that you can only benefit from "being at the right place at the right time" if you have put in the effort to be ready to capitalize on that moment. If you put in the hard work, then there are many right moments and right places, otherwise they're just another moment that passes you by. DHH seems to be very angry lately, no?

<comment><USER7> Luck comes to the prepared mind. --Louis Pasteur

<comment><USER8> luck = preparation + oppurtunity

\- Jim Greco

<comment><USER9> opportunity = preparation - luck ?

<comment><USER10> Can you not math? Opportunity is luck minus preparation.

<comment><USER9> I cannot math :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let's take Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Smart? Yes. Hard working? Yes. But are they 1,000 or 10,000 times harder working and smarter than the average techie? No way.

They were indeed working their asses off in the right place at the right time.

<comment><USER12> but maybe finding that right place and time is also one of their learned skills

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know about that. It seems to me that luck is one of the secret ingredients. It's not what turns an abject failure into a success, but it is what sets apart the thousands of above-average individuals who are doing fine from the roaring successes.

Ability is a necessary ingredient. Luck gives you the initial break, and lets you set up a feedback loop of success. At least, this seems to be what I've observed.

</comment><comment><USER14> quick byte: -(37signals before DH) During a job interview in which JF wasnt very serious about landing the job, he randomly met an acquaintance. This person agreed to work for 37signals as a designer. This person brought a former client with him to 37signals. This client spent atleast 200,000 in services from 37signals.

Who knows how 37signals would have turned out without that 200k during its early years. This was 37signals big break, not saying it "made" 37signals, just saying that 200k obviously helps and luck was a factor. Source: a mixergy interview with JF.

</comment><comment><USER15> The reasoning reminds me of the Carol Dweck stuff (kids praised for their talent are disempowered; those praised for their efforts are empowered), where she was talking about the specific subset of luck that is natural talent.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think that luck can be manufactured. Being in the right place gets easier if you can be in more places and get a sense for when to not be in the wrong place.

Also, a LOT of entrepreneurs do stuff that minimizes their chances - not doing that allows any luck you might actually get to shine through.

<comment><USER16> _a LOT of entrepreneurs do stuff that minimizes their chances_

Could you please give some examples of what you're referring to?

<comment><USER9> Terrible communication. Story-based reasoning. Lack of planning. Betting on low-odds outcomes, etc. Not being persistent. Being too persistent. Being distracted. List goes on and on and on.

<comment><USER16> _Story-based reasoning._

I find it easy to get wrapped up in this as an entrepreneur, and it took me a lot of time and energy to fight this inclination.

Basically, it's so easy to visualize mass adoption of your product and how your customers are going to benefit, you end up drinking your own Kool-Aid. Then, when trying to explain your product you get caught up and end up doing a poor job selling it to potential customers.

I think the best way to get over this this is to really listen to what the customers are saying. What works for them, what doesn't work for them, and then address these points. This means at times ignoring your visions and focusing on reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When in doubt, apply Occam's razor. Consider a room full of 1000 coin flippers. Each flips his coin, and if it comes up tails, he must leave the room. After ten flips, there will be likely be one player who has flipped 10 heads in a row. He will be hailed as an expert coin flipper and make millions writing a book about how he did it.

What's more, unlike coin flipping, money has memory. Having money makes it easier to get more. Capital provides interest income with no labor required, and more significantly, investors are much quicker to invest in someone with a track record.

Hard work and intelligence can buy you the opportunity and provide a good standard of living, but they alone cannot make you rich, at least not in the short time frames we tend to think in.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wrote this comment: I completely agree with the spirit of what DHH is saying. However, I think the most important message as he states is that people shouldn't blame lack of success due to not being lucky. That's where the emphasis on this topic should be placed. Those that say "I just go lucky" or "I was in the right place at the right time" might just be trying to be humble. At least that's what I take from Jim Collins book "From Good to Great"

To recap: let's emphasize the message that luck is bullshit and that it's not necessary for success.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Audentes fortuna iuvat" ('Fortune favors the bold') - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER20> "The harder I work, the luckier I get" -Samuel Goldwyn

</comment><comment><USER21> Whom is he arguing against? Does anyone say any of those things that he impersonated?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe to a lesser extent on Hacker news, but I have definitely heard people attributing success to luck or just being at the right place at the right time more then a few times.

<comment><USER22> Isn't it the whole thesis of the Outliers book?

<comment><USER23> Hard Work + Luck. The right circumstances let Gates have access to the right technology where he could then put in 10,000 hours of hard work etc.

<comment><USER24> Luck is a necessary but insufficient condition.

<comment><USER17> I think most lottery winners find luck to be quite sufficient. I think what you mean to say is that luck is by definition scarce, so depending solely on it showing up is likely to be a losing strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "the more I practiced the luckier I got" - golfer Ben Hogan.

</comment><comment><USER26> It was for you, David.

</comment><comment><USER27> ...you also need to be prepared (have a rich parents with good connections, in the first place, plus some character and perhaps some experience =)

The 'Catch the moment!' saying is a several thousands year old.</comment>


Internet Archive's Wayback Machine starts adding warning labels to its archives - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Link: [https://reclaimthenet.org/internet-archive-wayback- machine-w...](https://reclaimthenet.org/internet-archive-wayback-machine- warnings/amp/)</comment>


Lockheed Martin Proposes Manned Mission to the Dark Side of the Moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-11/lockheed-martin-proposes-manned-orion-mission-dark-side-moon

<comment><USER2> There is no Dark Side of the Moon. The _far_ side receives as much sunlight as the other hemisphere.

<comment><USER3> If we're going to be pedantic about it... surely the far side of the moon recieves slightly more sunlight than the near side, because the near side occasionally has its sunlight blocked by the Earth (in what we could call an eclipse of the Moon and moonmen would call an eclipse of the Sun) whereas the far side never does?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Alternative services to gmail? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This question pops up fairly frequently here. I suppose you checked already, but I will offer the most recent/commented post anyway for your convenience: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14727014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14727014)</comment>


Reusable plastic shopping bags are making the problem worse, not better - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1759150/reusable-plastic-shopping-bags-are-making-the-problem-worse <comment><AUTHOR> My neighbor's wife was kicking his ass for single using the 10 cent bags,he had just chucked a huge pile of them in the garbage and she made him take them out to be recycled!

At least she gets it!</comment>


David Rumsey Map Collection Adds Nearly 1700 Historic Maps and Images - <AUTHOR> http://infodocket.com/2011/06/27/digitized-maps-david-rumsey-map-collection-adds-nearly-1700-new-maps-and-images/ <comment><USER2> Give the guy credit for making some effort to put the maps up. Maybe when Stanford gets them, they will become readable. Currently, they are in some weird, proprietary, patent encumbered format and essentially unusable.</comment>


Intelligence committee urged to explain if they withheld crucial NSA document - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/nsa-intelligence-committee-under-pressure-document

<comment><USER2> With respect to national security, it's very clear that our elected representatives are split into two groups: a handful that know what is going on and all the rest that are kept in the dark. There is no way that the members of Congress kept in the dark can possibly represent the interests of their constituents on these issues. This alone should be very worrying to everyone. I would imagine that most Americans were under the impression that being elected to Congress came with it the right to know a lot more about what is going on with respect to national security than they actually do. I never would have guessed that there we effectively have a praetorian class within Congress.

A few questions arise from this situation:

(1) What percentage of Congress is kept in the dark on these issues?

(2) Are there any other areas besides surveillance and national security over which Congress governs which is also operating with a few that know and many that are in the dark? I'm not talking about issues where a member of congress is willingly unaware because they don't educate themselves or read the bills and reports related to that area, but where the Congress person does not even have permission to view the information.

(3) Are there any provisions in place to prevent or at least mitigate a revolving door between the committees and the agencies they are supposed to provide oversight over?

Out of curiosity, how does a member of the house or senate get on the Intelligence Subcommittee? Do the members of the committee choose who gets to join? Does the process allow for those who are likely to dissent or have an adversarial position to join the committee?</comment>


College Grad Sues Father to Recoup Tuition Costs - <AUTHOR> http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202463109522&College_Grad_Sues_Father_to_Recoup_Tuition_Costs

<comment><USER2> Key detail: she got him to sign a contact (this was after her parents divorced).

Evidently he didn't initially intend to welsh on the commitment, he didn't until her senior year. Needless to say, parents who have absolutely no intention of paying their children's college expenses won't be signing contracts.

Divorce is bad news for college, the pattern of a divorced father not paying for his children's college is all to common. I don't know about other expensive schools, but one thing a friend of mine who's an administrator at MIT has noticed is that it has _very_ few students from broken families (for whatever reasons).</comment>


Science Reform in China - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/06/11/science-reform-in-china <comment><USER2> This may be more about providing the appearance of reform than actual change, depending on whether or not the actual incentive structure changes.</comment>


Error Handling in RUBY: Part II - mehdi-farsi https://medium.com/@farsi_mehdi/error-handling-in-ruby-part-ii-f26c6a575c68 <comment><AUTHOR> The title accidentally changed the language name "Ruby" to all caps.</comment>


Chess grandmasters use twice the brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19940-chess-grandmasters-use-twice-the-brain.html

<comment><USER2> And sled dogs can poop while running. Very task-specific abilities.</comment>


Show HN: Percy.io, a continuous visual integration tool - <AUTHOR> https://percy.io/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a really convenient way to watch for front-end changes, but how do things like margins work? Will my whole page be red because everything has been shifted around or squished?

Responsive capabilities will really improve usefulness, and the absence is somewhat of a deal-breaker. On responsive sites developers will have to eyeball each change even when using Percy, so checking the desktop resolution wouldn't be much additional effort relative to checking all other resolutions for each page.

On the biz-dev side, if it's going to be a paid product it might be a good idea to start charging ASAP!

<comment><USER3> Based on the screenshots, yes if you changed margin on say body, or something high up it would cause everything to shift and be "red".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A coworker has has a small tool for accomplishing this: [https://github.com/LesterTheTester/dfrnt](https://github.com/LesterTheTester/dfrnt)

It has been integrated with Travis CI and GitHub pull requests so that non- passing diffs are appended as a comment to the pull request by a bot account.

If there's an intended diff, a pull request can also automatically be submitted against the original pull request which, on merge, updates the "gold master" images and allows the original pull request to pass.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've used gatling on a few redesigns with success

[https://github.com/gabrielrotbart/gatling](https://github.com/gabrielrotbart/gatling)

I have some tweaks i was going to merge in that gave the diff's as %'s (so you could ignore small differences like fonts being different) as well as animate between the two versions. On my TODO was grabbing the actual element style attributes and then actually just diffing that, so the differences would be more or less spelled out.

Still, cool stuff!

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are interested in how something like this was made, there was a good talk about building something like this at RailsConf this year: [http://youtu.be/Q4ttqkIEM7g](http://youtu.be/Q4ttqkIEM7g)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an awesome talk! Jessica Dillion has actually helped me with Percy a bit. :) She's great, you can see her slides here: [http://www.slideshare.net/jessicardillon/implementing-a- visu...](http://www.slideshare.net/jessicardillon/implementing-a-visual-css- testing-framework)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been working on VisualReview ([https://github.com/xebia/VisualReview](https://github.com/xebia/VisualReview)), an open source project for visually reviewing a (web-)application as part of a pull-request, very similar to percy.io.

We're releasing our first version somewhere next week which includes a basic comparison GUI and testing api's. PR workflow planned in the release after that. Interesting to see we're not the only ones with this idea.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks really great. The integration with Github and CircleCI makes it a very attractive option for us as it would slot right in to our existing workflows.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wasn't a fan of giving you github permissions _just_ to sign up for an invite.

<comment><USER10> I would have agreed with this, but the permissions they ask for are pretty benign and clearly relevant to their mission.

<comment><USER11> I'm a member of organisations that may not be comfortable with me giving permission by proxy.

I couldn't find a way to sign up and exclude private repos or organizations.

<comment><USER10> Fair enough, but I think that's a limitation of Github rather than a problem imposed by Percy.

<comment><USER9> Percy.io's Invite Request system is tied to github.

How is that not a problem imposed by Percy?

I'd feel more comfortable having a different mechanism to request an invite.

While the permissions don't grant Code Access, it does ask to read Organization and Team membership. I'd expose data for every member of my companies github organization to Percy, _JUST_ for an invite.

<comment><USER10> Percy is a tool that integrates with Github to set build status on Github pull requests. Of course it needs to tie into Github.

<comment><USER9> 100 %.

However:

Sign up for Service != Sign up for Invite.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, but it seems reasonable to me that they wouldn't need to make two systems for storing user information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congrats @fotinakis

Check out also [http://shoov.io/](http://shoov.io/) \- there are a few blog posts, that explain the concepts and point to examples. Apart of the visual regression testing it also allows monitoring the live sites with your preferred functional testing frameworks (e.g. casperJS, Behat, etc').

Open source of course :)

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks promising. Our project has a plethora of selenium tests, but they're focused on functionality only, not appearance. We can tell there is a table, button, link, form, etc. and click it. On that side we're reliable.

But we really let ourselves down sometimes with regressions to the look and feel of the application.

Are there any competitor tools for this visual testing ?

<comment><USER14> We (Harry's) have released a tool called Kontrast: [https://github.com/harrystech/kontrast](https://github.com/harrystech/kontrast), [http://engineering.harrys.com/2014/09/24/kontrast.html](http://engineering.harrys.com/2014/09/24/kontrast.html)

It's written in Ruby but is not really dependent on Rails or anything to run. We use it to compare a list of URLs between the version we are currently testing in CircleCI and our production site. Any differences are highlighted in a nice gallery and we get a message in our Hipchat room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Percy.io seems somewhat similar to BBC's wraith[1], albeit easier to integrate.

1.[http://bbc-news.github.io/wraith/index.html](http://bbc- news.github.io/wraith/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is neat. Recently started doing Selenium tests with Scrutinizer CI, but we've had issues where the UI is broken and we find out a day later... I'll definitely keep an eye out for you guys

<comment><AUTHOR> Woohoo! Glad to hear it. :) We have an annoucement-only mailing list if anyone doesn't want to sign up with GitHub: [https://percy.io/#updates](https://percy.io/#updates)

<comment><USER17> Are you an one man army? Congrats! :) This is great. How do you plan to react to potential changes in rendering engines? Would those be shown as test failures as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question! And yes. :) My plan at the moment for that is, because I know which browser exactly it was rendered in originally, I can put a notice at the top of the page to say something like "We just upgraded our rendering browser! The diffs below might because of that and not because of a change you made." \-- and then after that one build, things would be back to normal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My favorite in this space is Applitools eyes ([https://applitools.com/](https://applitools.com/)).

Eyes has really advances image processing capabilities, which meant two huge advantages over everything else I looked at:

1\. It's not prone to rendering differences. I can set a baseline in one browser/OS combo, run it on other combinations and set it to only consider real regressions as a failure.

2\. It can validate the layout of the page even with dynamic content.

</comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't say what it does. I can deduce from the title and landing page that it has something to do with UIs and CI. From the FAQ it seems it is web only, as it mentions "the page" (assume that is an html page).

Is this an appropriate summary?

"It can help you visually review changes made to a web front end as part of CI/QA"

Would be neat if you could plug any kind of front end screenshot rendering and not just web.

</comment><comment><USER20> I signed up. Clicked on the survey, clicked back, got a blank page. Did it again, got a live page. Did it one final time, got a blank page. Tried it again just now, blank page (but there is HTML in the page source).

</comment><comment><USER21> There's another tool out there that does something similar called Screenbeacon ([https://www.screenbeacon.com/](https://www.screenbeacon.com/)).

</comment><comment><USER22> There's no mention about pricing... any rough idea/estimation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Good question, we're still working out the details on pricing but I want it to be very reasonable, simple and transparent for people. Just need some time to work through with a few initial beta testers. Stay tuned!

<comment><USER22> Great, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Devil's advocate - won't this tend to bolster the outdated attitude that the front end must be pixel-perfect?

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure I consider that to be true. Why is pixel perfection out-dated?

<comment><USER25> Perhaps because rigid constraints are useless with the number of different devices out today, and layouts should instead be highly adaptive?

<comment><USER3> No that's wrong. The screenshots are not based on one device looking like another. It's based on one device looking like X all the time.

For example this uses Firefox, if all I change is something in the backend. My front end should look the exact same before the change and after.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Really interested how this will work with responsive. Does it test a set size each time? Multiple sizes?

</comment><comment><USER27> Has anyone used visualdiff.com? The services seem pretty similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think they might only do live sites, the thing about Percy is that it can be integrated earlier into your feature/browser tests for all pages, even those behind logins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting read! Bummer to hear the news though.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder, does it handle responsive UIs?

</comment><comment><USER30> would pixel by pixel diffs be an overkill?

</comment><comment><USER27> Has anyone used visualdiff.com?

</comment><comment><USER31> So.. is this just a lot of wrappers around wraith? Or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it's all home grown, right now it renders the page and screenshots in Firefox 38 ESR and then the actual diff image is produced by imagemagick's compare function, with some special things around it to handle edge cases with width/height differences and some others.</comment></comment>


Freight Startups Attract Silicon Valley's Attention - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/freight-startups-attract-silicon-valleys-attention-1438875678 <comment><USER2> I'm involved extensively in logistics, and although I'm not Flexport's target customer nor involved in their specific space of logistics, I can easily say that they are the most exciting new thing in logistics since the container.

The thing is, they aren't doing anything revolutionary. They are doing the same exact things that a lot of companies have done for decades. What makes them revolutionary is 1) They are doing, in one point of contact, a variety of tasks that normally requires 3-10 points of contact. Tracking, quotes, customs, forwarding arrangements, carrier connections, contracts, and payments, all in one stop. 2) They are doing it faster, better, and cheaper than anybody else around.

<comment><USER3> Regulations are the hard part about freight. Each state has different rules on things, it's really crazy.

<comment><USER4> That was true in the container revolution also. Malcom McLean (inventor of modern shipping containers) had to sell his trucking business when he bought a shipping business because because the regulator at the time did not allow anyone to operate a trucking company and a shipping company at the same time. There were also rules in the US at various times which prevented people from operating a trucking/railroad company across multiple states as an anti- monopoly measure. Madness when you consider that this means shipments have to be unloaded at state lines!

<comment><USER5> I know that the history of shipping containers might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but The Box is a great book [http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container- Smaller/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container- Smaller/dp/0691136408)

Shipping rules used to be crazy

<comment><USER6> This book had a profound impact on my life for a span of 1.5 years

<comment><USER7> How so? I read it too, but I didn't see much impact..

It could have done with a few illustrations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Many freight veterans and analysts are skeptical of these efforts, saying forwarding is too complex and too dependent on longstanding relationships for new online entrants to compete."

Because that's never been a problem technology has overcome.

Any industry with veterans stating this sentiment is ripe for change. Not because an online app is going to solve all the worlds ills, but because there are people resisting progress, keeping entire industries in a holding pattern.

<comment><USER9> The veterans aren't "resisting progress", as much as protecting their own interests by using their experience. It may be at the cost of other people, but I think it's short-sighted to call them luddites. Currently, they have no incentive to invest in tech in the way of a silicon valley startup backed by VCs.

If the aim is progress to everyone's benefit, tech will make its mark once it's in the hands of some of the established players through acquisition or other means. Until then, I think startups will have a hard time winning over customers from established firms, as their inexperience will cause errors, which will cost their customers more than any markup of a less efficient company.

<comment><USER10> For what it's worth, the historical Luddites also were protecting their own interests, rather than fundamentally motivated to resist progress. (I mention this with no judgement one way or another of their actions)

<comment><USER9> Very true!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I work for a large NVOCC/freight forwarder that has a large IT department and builds nearly all it's software in-house. My part of it has been building migrated applications for various customer service functionalities and the kinds of systems we're migrating from are beyond shockingly bad.

Today, moving a shipment requires the operator to go between 4-6 different applications and fill out the same information in multiple places. The data doesn't go anywhere and is often recorded in terse 3-letter codes that result from ancient databases that can't be upgraded. In fact, it's a custom database server running in an emulated environment because none of the hardware has long since stopped being supported. It's pure insanity.

Flexport looks like they're making a lot of the right moves and I've been following them with equal parts interest and trepidation for my company's future with competitors like that on the rise.

If I lived in San Francisco, I'd apply there in a heartbeat because I think this industry is overdue for some serious competition and I'd rather be the disrupter than the incumbent. So many of the processes are done manually because of 25-30 years of process cruft building up and the pain of doing it differently isn't greater (yet) than building a proper system to do it.

The bigger the ship, the slower it is to turn and I'm not sure the solution is more tugboats.

</comment><comment><USER12> I guess this is the next upheaval in shipping. I think the last upheaval was with the introduction of the shipping container. A fascinating read on the subject:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container- Smaller/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container- Smaller/dp/0691136408)

<comment><USER13> It's also interesting in that it touches on many of the factors that can inhibit the adoption of new technologies: lack of standards, regulations, entrenched interests like labor agreements, and limits imposed by existing infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I spent a decade working with and writing software for LTL freight and 3PL companies on the receivables automation side and all I have to say is I hope these companies are successful.

There are tons of opportunities for efficiency gains all over these companies as they are some of the most low-tech back office operations I've seen. There's a definite gap between the biggest companies and the rest. These companies are notoriously conservative on all facets of their business, and they are a very tight knit industry. They all know what each other are up to, and they're leery of being the first mover on a technology.

This is one of many "old school" industries that are going to see some of the biggest innovation in the coming years. That will only be accelerated if we see fuel prices start to inch up again.

<comment><USER15> Wow, want to come in and take a look under the hood at Flexport? email me: email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007) I learned how hard it is to do anything in this field.

None the less, if someone find a way to solve it, it's truly going to be transformative.

<comment><USER17> I think the trick will be to create a digital version of a _part_ of the system that already exists and then gradually simplify down to something more sane.

Otherwise it'd be really easy to drown in the almost endless complexity (a lot of which doesn't need to be there but accumulated).

<comment><USER16> From what I understand a lot of the problem isn't tech dependent but rather legal, standards, union etc related.

<comment><USER17> Absolutely, which is why if I was doing it I'd focus on a small part of the industry until I had some traction then simplify that part before moving in to the next.

If you try to eat the whole pie you'll choke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Flexport's hiring for basically every role under the sun

If the idea of revolutionizing one of the most important industries in the world interests you, reach out!

[https://learn.flexport.com/want-to-revolutionize-global- trad...](https://learn.flexport.com/want-to-revolutionize-global-trade- flexport-is-hiring/)

</comment><comment><USER19> My dad ran a freight forwarding business for 25 years. They still use paper and fax. Half the office space is dedicated to cabinets of storage for paper files. Their main technology is an ancient IBM mainframe. Flexport is really going to change things.

<comment><USER15> Last year a job applicant then employed by a competitor told me the reason he wanted to work at Flexport was that he was sick of using a typewriter at work. For real, not making that up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was the entire IT staff for Linescape (linescape.com) for its first 4 years. I was somewhat flabbergasted at the level of IT the industry was at in 2008 - 1990s at best. The industry was still trying to decide if XML was useful vs EDIFACT (straight from the 1970s) for transmitting shipping schedules. It was interesting work though, I had some very good insights into where the industry could go / was going to go and we could had made some bleeding edge improvements in terms of IT (e.g. the use of graph databases to model shipping routes and calculating various things) We could have been the first to market with a SaaS / API for dealing with shipping schedules, but management fiddled around and Maersk beat us to the punch.

Unfortunately the founders of Linescape have absolutely zero ethics and ripping off customers (and those working for the company) was more important than anything else. I only later found out about the criminal record of one of them which explains the reluctance to go find investment money. It was a classic cautionary tale about the startup ecosystem (vet the people you're doing business with / working for very carefully) and the lack of business ethics so prevalent (aka Uber et al) The CEO and his now ex-wife are now fighting over the company...

The thing was, none of the drama was necessary! We could have really made something of the company. But capitalism these days...

</comment><comment><USER21> I fondly remember interning at major freight forwarder during university. The main input interface was paper which was them keyed into the mainframe application. Only the biggest partners have been integrated via EDI. So just putting sensible API in front of all this sounds like good idea.

I have been working on operations data mart most of the time (and saving cca 30 000 dollars on carrier volume discount on shipped containers) but I always felt my most appreciated contribution was stitching together few Excel macros to make Request For Quotation evaluation easier.

So here are my two free ocean freight startup ideas:

\- precise container reporting for carrier disputes (10 FCL 40 footers from HKG to HAM), including error detection when port is incorrectly filled in just because it has similar code

\- RFQ evaluator - as simple and accessible as excel, but capturing the specifics of ocean freight (tens of port pairs, container specifications, splitting price to freight, terminal and surcharges etc).

Did you know you could have your container shipped for free - only for cost of terminal handling (on certain routes, at certain times)? Fascinating industry.

<comment><USER22> Re: last point. I did not know that. Could you provide some more information?

<comment><USER21> Sorry for the linkbaity cliffhanger.

Occasionally there exists a situation when there is huge demand for shipments in one direction (e.g. Hong Kong to Singapore) while there is not much traffic the other way round.

Shipping companies then need to get those containers back to origin, so the prices go down (better ship full container where at least handling is paid rather than empty container where carrier has to cover all the costs).

Not sure how often this happens currently, I got the information from friendly trade lane manager few years back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This could be pretty huge. I've dealt with several freight forwarding companies while building a previous startup of mine and it definitely struck me as an antiquated industry (this was 2007ish). Maybe a good benchmark for "disruptable" industries is that you have to actually make a telephone call to get something done. Time to get out the yellow pages and do some research!

<comment><USER24> > Time to get out the yellow pages and do some research!

The.... what?

:-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> An oddly written story. Claims significant money invested in these companies ("$1 billion since the start of 2014") and proceeds to name only two -- Flexport and Freightos. The latter of which doesn't seem to fit the central disruption-of-established-industry theme because they sell software to the incumbents.

<comment><USER15> Yeah that confused me too. The $1B must be referring to the money raised by XPO.com from private equity backers to roll up a bunch of old school freight forwarding businesses. There's no tech involved in that play though, so it's a bit misleading to call it venture capital. In fact it was mostly done as a private investment in public equities (PIPE) deal, where PE funds put cash into a listed freight forwarder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Flexport's prices look too good to be true .. truly disruptive technology

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Since the start of 2014, venture-capital firms have pumped over $1 billion into startup freight-forwarding companies, twice the amount invested in the five years before that..."

<comment><USER15> I have no idea where they got that stat but it's not true.

<comment><USER15> Ah, it includes XPO.com -- hard to call a leveraged buyout firm doing a private equity rollup a "venture capital investment" but okay

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's a list of startups in the logistics market:

[https://www.freightos.com/the-ultimate-list-of-top- logistics...](https://www.freightos.com/the-ultimate-list-of-top-logistics- startups-blog/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Is this like an Uber for freight?

<comment><USER29> Bloomberg called us that[0], but the ocean / air / rail freight business has a fundamentally different set of constraints and challenges.

[0] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-11/flexport-w...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-11/flexport- wants-to-be-uber-of-the-oceans)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Flexport is hiring engineers: [https://jobs.lever.co/flexport](https://jobs.lever.co/flexport)

As an engineer starting at Flexport in a couple of weeks, here are some more interesting resources that shaped my thinking:

Interview with Ryan Petersen (Flexport CEO) [https://theblueprint.com/stories/ryan- petersen/](https://theblueprint.com/stories/ryan-petersen/)

Office hours at startup school 2013 with pg & sama [https://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=1167](https://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=1167)

I also happened to have recently read Zero to One.

Plus, Flexport has an appealing mission. Removing friction in something as basic as shipping makes pretty much everyone in the world better off.

<comment><USER31> How do you differentiate yourselves from FreightOS?

<comment><USER15> FreightOS is a software company building tools to make incumbent freight forwarders more efficient--so it's more of a supply-driven marketplace.

Flexport is a freight forwarder that builds our own software, with the goal of providing better customer experiences with lower transaction costs--so it's more of a demand-driven marketplace.

Probably we will meet them in the middle someday and have to compete with them for customers. They founders seem very smart and accomplished, and they appear to have solved many hard problems already, so it will be a fun challenge when it happens.</comment></comment></comment>


A Cure for Digital Addicts' 'Text Neck'? - T-A http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-cure-for-digital-addicts-text-neck-1464019660 <comment><AUTHOR> I think what would really work is a neck electromyography device.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you get to sit down with European Family Offices? - <AUTHOR> A bunch of startups get funds from family funds which are primarily in Switzerland. Is it exclusively thru connections? How do they even get deal flow if that's the case? Unlike VCs they don't build a brand and stuff.. <comment><USER2> Check [https://www.sictic.ch/](https://www.sictic.ch/)

<comment><AUTHOR> much appreciated</comment></comment>


VMware Engineer Confirms macOS 10.15.6 Bug Causes Crashes with Virtualization - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/27/vmware-confirms-macos-virtualization-bug-causes-crashes/ <comment><USER2> That's why I use Windows 10 -- an operating system that's built from the ground up to support virtualization, and includes a Linux Kernel environment with first-class support.

It's only going to get worse on ARM, where virtualization support is nowhere near as mature as x86_64</comment>


DigitalOcean launches its container service - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/11/digital-ocean-launches-its-container-service/ <comment><USER2> DO's kubernetes release is an an example of why I am a big fan. As a sole developer, I can't afford high technical debt, but DO packages tech in a way I can manage. I hope they keep on and wish other services (here's looking at you AWS) would package their services as well.

<comment><USER3> I am a mechanical engineer who dabbles in web development from time to time. I am forever indebted to DigitalOcean for creating a super easy platform for someone who has no clue about VPS starting out. I know how to operate a linux machine but not the slightest idea about how to host a website myself until I came across DigitalOcean and their LAMP/LEMP tutorials.

Once I was comfortable with DigitalOcean, I tried launching a VPS on AWS and holycrap it was so insanely complicated. Within 10 mins of creating an AWS account, I was out. I understand that there is nothing wrong with AWS - it is not for me, but DigitalOcean has fullfilled my needs in the most perfect way with a huge knowledge base and detailed tutorials.

DigitalOcean is absolutely _incredible_.

<comment><USER4> Hi! I'm a member of the Community team at DigitalOcean. I wanted to thank you for your kind words about our tutorials. This kind of feedback means a lot to us. We're glad we could help you get your web site set up.

<comment><USER5> Just want to add on to this. Whenever I'm looking up a piece of software and I find a Digital Ocean tutorial on it, I know I'm in good hands.

Have yet to find a tutorial that wasn't great!

<comment><USER6> Amen. DO gets it when it comes to docs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Been a user of DOs beta kubernetes service and it works well.

Though I would say the title of the linked article is a bit misleading. It is a Kubernetes as a service, like EKS, GKE and AKS.

But not vanilla container service a la ECS, Fargate, the former Docker Cloud, etc.

<comment><USER8> Maybe this is a dumb question, but couldn't/shouldn't a KaaS (and other orchestration systems) just be a layer on top of "vanilla" CaaS?

<comment><USER9> CaaS-es (i.e. "things that present themselves as a Docker daemon or something like it") don't allow you to provision IaaS-level resources like VMs or disks, merely connect your containers to existing resources. When CaaS-es do allow you to provision stuff (like e.g. Hyper.sh does), they do it through a direct IaaS-level API that is separate from the functioning of the CaaS itself.

The major cloud providers' deployments of Kubernetes (and other server-side persistent-orchestrator systems, like the venerable CloudFormation) are deeply integrated into the cloud platform they're running on, such that the orchestrator itself can provision resources for a container to run on as part of deploying the container. This becomes important when elastically auto- scaling a container, because each container might need e.g. its own disk, and you can't create them ahead of time if you don't know how many you'll need.

This also means that, unlike a CaaS, k8s _et al_ can manage the very cluster that k8s is running on, scaling it out to suit the size of the current/estimated workload.

Theoretically, you can bootstrap k8s on top of a vanilla CaaS—this is how minikube installs "using" your local Docker install, and this is how deployable PaaSes like Flynn and Deis work. But this approach _doesn 't_ supply k8s with the cloud-specific integration it needs in order to provision stuff. It might work if you're deploying against something with a standardized API like OpenStack; but none of the major cloud providers are compatible with such APIs, and so they need to build their own k8s plugins that call _their_ IaaS-level APIs, to make k8s work on their clouds.

Or, to put all that another way: if there were standard IaaS-level APIs for k8s to hook into, Docker (and the CaaSes that either use or emulate it) would just hook into those APIs itself, and there would be no need for a higher orchestration layer.

<comment><USER10> tl;dr CaaS doesn't orchestrate the underlying infrastructure whereas k8s primary purpose is to create a cloud agnostic way to orchestrate containers and the infrastructure that they run on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> link this instead?

[https://blog.digitalocean.com/digitalocean- releases-k8s-as-a...](https://blog.digitalocean.com/digitalocean- releases-k8s-as-a-service/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Off topic in terms of the article itself, but I just wanted to give some love to DO. We are very data and processing heavy startup, using DO for more than 2 years. We did not experience any issues, super easy to manage, great performance, and super important for us - predictable cost.

<comment><USER13> Their tutorials are also great. Half the time my googling about Ubuntu server stuff end up on their pages

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm happy to see DO get some attention. I hope this means that really good hosting services like DO can still thrive in the age of AWS. DO seems to be doing well.

<comment><USER14> I agree. I like that Digital Ocean takes their time to get a new product offering right. It shows. Especially when you compare it to AWS, which we're in the process of moving away from.

<comment><USER15> Just wondering which provider did you choose to go with instead of AWS?

<comment><USER14> Digital Ocean. We compared AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Digital Ocean. While the latter isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison like the other two are, we found that the price, ease of use, and reliability made it the best choice.

I'm not yet sure about support since they don't offer any phone support. But it can't be worse than Amazons where I once literally had to yell at the support rep to stop talking because he just kept repeating himself, over and over, and wouldn't let me move on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm a long time happy DO user, this is exciting.

I've been managing multiple docker apps (using docker-compose) on DO for years. Is there a guide I can use to transition my apps from docker-compose to k8s? I've dabbled in k8s, but am not an expert at all.

Any suggestions?

<comment><USER17> Kompose has been around for a little while, which essentially "compiles" your docker-compose.yml into K8S config files. However, Docker recently announced ability to deploy directly from docker-compose: [https://blog.docker.com/2018/12/simplifying-kubernetes- with-...](https://blog.docker.com/2018/12/simplifying-kubernetes-with-docker- compose-and-friends/)

My understanding is that you'll still need to do some work, especially if you are building via compose instead of pointing to an image on a registry.

<comment><USER16> Yes, there is still a lot of work that requires a lot of knowledge about k8s. Kompose up does not just work, but it seems like DO could make that a simple set of commands with better documentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Serious question: Is there an emerging cross platform workflow language to just write stuff to run on any cloud/container hosting setup?

The idea would be to be portable, avoid vendor lock-in and take advantage price differences or quickly route around a system failure in one of the providers.

<comment> mark-ruwt We rely on bash.

Each machine that's spun up is built from scratch via one command-line call. The first half of the process interacts with each hosting API (we rely on DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr primarily), to build a clean slate machine with all of the packages and libraries that we expect.

The second half of the process runs the actual build process, building the instance step-by-step on top of the clean slate, blissfully unaware of which hosting provider it lives on.

This model allows us to be portable and avoid vendor-lock in, and a cross- provider infrastructure lets us gracefully handle system failures while keeping costs down.

<comment><USER19> I made something similar and turned it into a service [1] focused on WordPress, but unfortunately there hasn't been much interest from people as I thought there would be, though that could be due to my lack of marketing.

My goal was the same, to make hosting more portable with features like snapshotting and restoration of WP sites across servers and to even eventually expand beyond just servers, to bring in domain registrars and cloud storage to be able to move things around easier. For example: you have a site hosted on AWS EC2 with DNS at Namecheap and nightly backups at Dropbox and let's say the AWS Virginia region goes down. You create a new server in Digital Ocean and restore the snapshot from Dropbox and the linked DNS at Namecheap is auto updated.

The more I thought about this though, I began to realize that maybe these features wouldn't be useful to the audience I wanted to target, which was people who wanted to grow from shared hosting and have something reliable and less noisy neighbors, but still more affordable than managed WP hosts and lastly more control (bring your cloud/server provider).

[1]: [http://pagefog.com](http://pagefog.com)

<comment><USER20> some unsolicited feedback: your name is terrible(unrelated to your product in any way) and your website doesn't communicate the problem you say you're solving all i get from your sites landing page is "wordpress hosting" which is not exactly uncommon scrolling to the bottom shows me some cloud providers. makes me think you just help people host wordpress in the cloud

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So now that's managed K8S, managed databases, load balancers, a cloud firewall that's partially VPC like, object storage and block storage.

Curious what's next. Lambdas maybe?

<comment><USER22> We have a big roadmap for 2019. Queues are interesting and so are functions in general. Nothing to share today but those are items we are assessing for future roadmaps :)

<comment><USER23> Is application hosting (heroku, app engine, elb) on the roadmap?

<comment><USER24> Dokku is somewhat similar to all of them.

<comment><USER25> It's not multi-node though right?

<comment><USER24> I don't think so, at least not by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I use DO for my personal website and pet projects and it works well.

However, I am curious if any medium to big-sized tech companies are using DO in production. As far as I know, everyone is using AWS, GCP or Azure. What's DO's target audience?

<comment><USER27> [https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/](https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/)

A pretty decent list of high profile tech companies are listed on their customer page.

<comment><USER26> Ah nice. Didn't know about this page. Impressed that ghost is on the list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am kinda confused... On the one hand, most people here seem to be fans of the DO services and praise their simplicity, on the other hand, I see their page an wonder what they are offering...

The names of their services seem to be equally confusing as the AWS names. Yes, overall their portfolio is closer to the actual use-cases (as in 'I want to have a blog' -> they have an offer for that), but I am still wondering what a droplet is (looks somehow similar to a Virtual Private Server).

When Hetzner released their cloud service earlier this year, I tried it, loved it and still do. Sure they don't offer the same products (e.g. no S3/Spaces), but at least they use established technical terms instead of some made up marketing names you have to learn for again for every new cloud hoster you want to try.

<comment><USER29> When you say "Hetzner Cloud", what exactly do you mean? I have checked their marketing pages and they only seem to offer IaaS - is this correct?

<comment><USER28> You are probably correct. Their product range is quite limited and probably qualifies as IaaS. But on the other hand, everything fits very nicely together (e.g. adding a backup plan for your servers is just a matter of a few clicks and if you don't like clicking through a Web interface: Their API is quite reasonable and easy to use too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hear great things about DO and I really want to try it out but DO doesn't accept payment from our country. The same $5 droplet costs $25 here. I really hope you guys expand to the developing countries.

<comment><USER31> Waiting on Japan region. Most major ones have presence in Japan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been a huge fan of digital ocean ever since I started renting a 5 dollar vps several years ago.

Their UX consistently is easy to navigate, has great documentation, and looks great as well.

I may not be in the category of users that requires or needs many of the features they've released, but I'm consistently impressed by how easy it is for me as a non devops engineer to grok exactly what each new feature they release is.

This looks super neat, I don't have any need for kubernetes as a small time vps consumer, but always happy to see them move forward in this manner.

<comment><USER33> Usually, I'm never satisfied with products/services and always wonder how they managed to screw up. To counter this behaviour I created a list with things which just work and I have nothing to complain about. DO is on this short list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> As someone that got the k8s invite and have been experimenting with it on DO, I just want to say that I like and this was the main reason I decided to stay instead of leaving for GCP

</comment><comment><USER35> Meanwhile, Linode fails to innovate.

<comment><USER36> Well, Linode fails at basic security, so...

<comment><USER35> Can I have more info on this?

<comment> barrow-rider Basic google search will show lots. Short version is they've been hacked notably at least once.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=linnode+hacke&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...](https://www.google.com/search?q=linnode+hacke&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Do I understand correctly that they provide the manager nodes for free?

<comment><USER38> Yes, this is the pricing model for everyone except EKS/AWS as I understand it. Manager nodes are bundled with whatever you spend on your worker nodes.

Google has gone so far with GKE as to offer HA masters distributed across availability zones at no extra cost. (On the day that Amazon announced EKS general availability, if I remember correctly, which is priced at $250/mo base cost, before you even get around to spend anything on worker nodes.)

<comment><USER39> Eddie from DigitalOcean here.

Just want to call out that our worker node pricing is the same as our Droplets (servers). There is no price markup on using our managed service. In fact it's cheaper than deploying it yourself on DO because you don't have to pay for the master node.

<comment><USER38> Yes! Hi Eddie, I'm Kingdon we met at RailsConf :D

I've been using Kops with Digital Ocean for some time on-and-off, comparing it to the new managed offering which I've been using in limited release, and it works great (either way).

The main disadvantage of Kops being (besides that it's Alpha only, and not managed), I will pay for all of the nodes I use. It should be clear that managed k8s offers a direct cost savings pretty much everywhere it's offered.

(It would be clear, if AWS was not currently leading the broader market and offering EKS with a price model basically contradicting every other vendor's.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Love Digital Ocean! I've been a member since early '13 and I still use it monthly to host my projects as an open-source developer.

I love everything from their clean design, great tutorials and easy of use for everything VPS related.

I hope the best for them.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm just sitting down to do a new startup, but I've been out of the devops game for a few years. I feel behind.

What tools/platforms/hosts should I use?

The system will be your standard API+Database+Event bus+workers. I'm a fan of digital ocean and I've never bothered to learn AWS (besides S3). I'm very familiar with docker compose, but I've never gone deeper than that.

This is a first year startup, we aren't cost constrained but we are extremely time sensitive.

Should I use Kubernetes? Or Is there something easier that will better serve us the first year?

<comment> duncan-donuts I think it kind of depends on what you're familiar with. If you're a rails dev and you can build something crazy fast with rails vs anything else I'd just do that. If you're used to working in event-driven microservices environments, then do that. I'm working in an environment using node microservices, mysql, rabbitmq, with k8s and it works really well. I wouldn't say we're _faster_ because of k8s, but k8s really helps us move quickly once we get a service deployed to the cluster.

I'm also working on a start up, and chose to start with heroku and a PHP monolith (with a handful of microservices to do some of the heavy lifting) because those are the things that allow me to move fast. If we ever make some money and the product does find market fit, we'd probably move to something like k8s, but it definitely isn't a part of the early stages for us. YMMV /shrug

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hopefully they offer easy upgrades and high availability. I always loved the simplicity of their services. Would also love a way to deploy 1 app to multiple locations with ease

</comment><comment><USER43> Sorry if off-topic: How does DO compare to Linode? I have lots of experience with Linode but since I hear good things about DO I would love to try it out.

<comment><USER44> In my (personal) experience, you trade linodes customer service for digital oceans ssd speed.

Neither have very good CPU stats.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14055243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14055243)

<comment><USER31> Where does it say Linode's perform isn't good? Any source DO has better disk speed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It is good and all that they provide more services but why can't they provide the bread and butter of IAAS: virtual networking (aka VPC) - the ability to set up a virtual router and other nodes inside a private network. We are DO customer currently and need to hack around this limitation for quite a while now and it is the main reason we want to switch away.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/private- network...](https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/private-networking/)

<comment><USER45> DO's "private" networking was not even truly "private" previously as it was shared among its customers. Only recently did it get to the point that the "private" network is separated from the rest. Anyway, even the new "private" network does not allow for something like installing a custom DHCP server and configuring custom subnet for the nodes inside. One of the most common use cases is to route outbound traffic from all the nodes inside a private network through a public gateway and DO's current configuration does not allow that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> They are by far the simplest cloud platform one can use. They for sure honor the best principal (KISS) in Software Development community.

</comment><comment><USER47> I wish DO implement something like Upcloud [1] flexible plan.

I could get 20x Core, 20Gb Ram, 50GB SSD for $250 / Month or $0.35/Hr. This truly allows you scale up and Scale out with all the flexibility.

[1][https://upcloud.com/pricing/](https://upcloud.com/pricing/)

</comment><comment><USER48> i wish they would launch gpu instances :(

<comment><USER22> We are working on this but don't have a date to share today. I know many of our customers want it and we may be able to offer it in later 2019.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> How do people do HA with DO? Coming from the AWS world I'm used to running in 3 or more AZs.

</comment><comment><USER50> I used to view Digital Ocean as kind of a play toy, good for experimenting and not much else, but these days they're a key player for sure and they've been a super reliable VPS host. Can't wait to try out some container stuff.

</comment><comment><USER51> Is Kubernetes now accepted as a way to deploy reproducible single servers, or is it for projects at scale?

I've worked on the assumption it's for clusters (10+) but if DO now support it - an alternative to puppet/ansible?

<comment><USER52> with the complete control plane managed by DO it gets more appealing for projects with smaller scale.

personally, for single servers i still use just plain docker or docker- compose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> DO is great, I like it very much for personal project. But it's worth give a try Google cloud as it will remind me there is a cutting edge cloud service there, just in case I will need them someday.

</comment><comment><USER54> Hmm, now all it needs is just a comprehensive tutorial for somebody who ignored the whole container fuss so far (happy with Ansible). How to get from 0 to 100 to use Kubernetes?

<comment><USER55> It's a hard nut to crack. What I've done myself is to jump into any book published about Kubernetes and to do some online training through a couple of different MooCs. This may be a good starting point:

[https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome- kubernetes#books](https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome-kubernetes#books)

[https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome- kubernetes#interactiv...](https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome- kubernetes#interactive-learning-environments)

<comment><USER38> > A curated list for awesome kubernetes

I've seen this list before and it is super comprehensive. Thanks for linking it; I need more like this for my "extreme breadth of choices" slide, when I present to my coworkers who are not using k8s yet, to emphasize how many choices there actually are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Having the workers on public droplets is very inconvenient. Are there plans to put them in private networking? (VPC / private subnet in AWS terms)

</comment><comment><USER57> Folks who have tried this: how does it compare to GKE in terms of ease of use? (my impression is GKE has the best offering of all the public clouds)

</comment><comment><USER58> Maybe I'm too cheap but I don't see an option for 5/mo nodes in any DC, they're starting at 10 or 15.

<comment><USER38> Hmm! I think this has changed since the beta.

Why not try a cluster with a smaller scaling group? You can create a cluster with only one node in it, but what is it that you are trying to do on top of your Kubernetes? In my experience with growing clusters, you probably want to scale your per-each individual node size up before you want to scale up the number of nodes in your cluster. (You might even find that you really need only one big node, say for your databases, and want to build a heterogeneous cluster with an autoscaling group of little nodes and that one big node. That's a possibility with node pools on DO K8s.)

An ideal cluster size for me is probably 5 nodes with ~8-16GB RAM each. You could make it still worthwhile to do the cluster thing with probably only 2 nodes at ~1-2GB each, but that'd be pushing it.

I am practiced at making clusters cheap, actually I once was published in the Deis blog, an article about how to deploy Deis v1 PaaS in a highly available fashion for as cheap as possible.

Many of those lessons from nearly a year of research that I did on the topic prior to that publishing, still apply on modern Kubernetes clusters; but many of them don't, and still others are out the window completely on these managed environments, where now it seems possible to get pretty much the same idea of "High Availability" as I was aiming for, but for much cheaper and with better guarantees.

For instance, since you are not running etcd for yourself (it runs under the hood, on the management plane) there is no specific rule that says you must have at a minimum 3 or preferably 5 nodes to keep a stable cluster anymore. This was the basics of learning to wield CoreOS and Fleet 101!

Consensus is handled on the masters, and that consensus is subject to split- brain problems, so this knowledge is still important, but you don't need to have it yourself. In many more basic clusters with managed systems like GKE and DOK8s, this knowledge is practically reliquary! Two nodes may ensure that one is there to pick up the slack when the other has a fault. Exactly how you'd imagine it should work without a Computer Science degree. But with two nodes, ... since you'll probably never see a fault like that ... and the whole environment is self-healing, even if one happens on your watch, might never even have to know about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Every other service has had containers for years. I'm not sure this is an exciting product announcement.

</comment><comment><USER60> Great job! Maybe now they'll have time to adjust their ssh-keygen documentation to fix their password cracking vulnerability. ([https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/08/03/the-default- openssh.h...](https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/08/03/the-default- openssh.html))

<comment><USER61> Yeah, how dare a company do two things at once!

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> DigitalOcean has always been behind the curve of these things. All of the other big cloud platforms have had this for at least a few months.

I haven't actually seen anything 'new' come out of DigitalOcean in years.

<comment><USER63> Were they ever 'new' in anything? I use them for small personal projects (they've gotten a lot more stable recently). I never thought of them as an innovative cloud provider but just one that was cheap and easy.

<comment><USER64> Same here. IME, DO is a great choice for many projects, because it's inexpensive, straightforward and reliable. I wouldn't trade any of those 3 attributes for "innovative".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This would be nice if the company didn't ignore all of the spam which comes from their network and the spamvertized sites they host. They deliberately ignore reports sent to their abuse address and attempt to avoid responsibility by making people who want to report abuse jump through hoops to break down spam and submit it in a web form.

Companies which protect spammers will never get any business from me, plus their email reputation is already pretty crappy, so why would I ever want to run containers on their networks?

</comment><comment><USER66> Digitalocean also should produce and sell chairs, sofas, yoghurt, car tires etc...

<comment><USER67> Thanks for the feedback, but we aren't Amazon =]

\- DigitalOcean cofounder

<comment><USER66> But you started to compete with your customers. Good luck.

-DigitalOcean ex-customer

<comment><USER68> Did you try to launch your own cloud offering on someone else's cloud? Did you expect the other cloud would never expand their offering?

I doubt they ever tried to compete with you, and probably didn't even know you were doing something similar. You were just able to come to market before they felt they were ready with a similar product.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can you become ok with being just average? - <AUTHOR> There are so many great people achieving great things. How can you be okay with just being one simple average individual? <comment><USER2> So so so so soooo many posts on HN that are similar to this.

This is the top post in another thread. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9337863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9337863)

>> It's been getting better.

> It's not, it's getting worse.

> You are in a cycle of slave-driving yourself. You remind me of Jiddu > Krishnamurthi's assertion that "Influence acts strongest when you don't > realize that it is acting". I would venture that most of your > accomplishments are a result of being told what you should do, what you > should be.

> You will NEVER have the energy that the people whom you compare with have. > Because they are being themselves, and are connected to the natural > wellspring of motivation that comes from genuine interest, while you are the > salmon swimming upstream, aping societal ideals and trying to be someone you > are not.

> Choose the opposite for a while : stop doing things that don't motivate you. > Find out what motivates you. Be spontaneous. If you find a small plant at > the roadside that you want to water, do it. Observe that absolutely no > effort was required in this action. This is the mark of genuine flow : you > will not feel the effort. If you chance upon some project which you execute > in this natural state of interest, you will not feel tired.

> Almost no one takes my advice because it's so threatening to be natural. > What if you are not naturally ambitious? That's a horrific thought to have > while being in the company of achievers, isn't it?

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACHIEVE TO ENJOY LIFE. YOU ENJOY LIFE BY ENJOYING IT.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to figure out who you are. There is _something_ at which you are considerably better than average. Find it. (There are other things at which you are below average. That's OK. It can be useful to know what they are, but don't dwell on it.)

The thing(s) at which you're better than average, _work to get even better at._

And if you're never _the best_? Well, _that_ you need to learn to be OK with.

</comment><comment><USER4> How do you define a simple average individual?</comment>


Erik Meijer and Rich Hickey – Clojure and Datomic - <AUTHOR> https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Expert-to-Expert-Erik-Meijer-and-Rich-Hickey-Clojure-and-Datomic <comment><USER2> Interview was in 2012</comment>


New Venture Capital Fund Gives Entrepreneurs a Cut of the Profit - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/dealbook/2014/07/10/new-venture-capital-fund-gives-entrepreneurs-a-cut-of-the-profit/?smid=tw-dealbook&seid=auto <comment><USER3> Fun idea, but holy conflict of interest: the founders want to take an investment from this fund in order to get a personal cut of the fund's returns, but the other common holders (think early employees) want the fund that provides the best value to the company as a whole. Maybe there's a way to manage it, but otherwise this seems to put the founders on one side and early employees on the other.

<comment><USER4> The obvious solution (which I'd recommend) is that the cut should go to the funded company, not the founders. The majority of the cut would still go to the founders, since they own a majority of the stock. But this gets everyone (founders, employees, investors) on the same page.

Overall, this is a great idea. The point of a value added investor is to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes. This is a great way to do that.

<comment><USER5> I don't know. If they give a founder a sliver of a point in the fund, that's motivating. If they give it to the company, then the employees are getting... what? 0.1% to 2% of a tiny sliver of the fund? The more you spread this around the less motivating it is... Might be a nice benefit, but their goal is to change behavior (motivate potential founders to be interested in their fund and motivate portfolio founders to help each other).

<comment><AUTHOR> The other problem is that it's founders who invest time to support portfolio companies, not shareholders/employees of the company, so the incentive seems appropriate and aligned IMHO. I can personally speak to the fact that the best support, in my experience, seems to come from founders currently operating their own company, currently in the trenches, and they usually have the least time to offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a founder myself, I would love to have exposure to the other startups in my investors' portfolio and more importantly, I want other founders to have exposure to my company!

Upside offers an attractive option to gain a small amount of exposure and to recognize the help that founders provide other founders. I know a number of other founders who have helped me get where I am, but unfortunately they don't have any exposure to our stock. Typically, the logistical headaches and liquidity needs would stop most people in their tracks but Upside simplifies that process substantially.

Regarding the conflict of interest concerns, I don't agree at all. I personally help the other founders in my network generously and most CEOs that I know are very generous with their time as well. To have a formal recognition of that would be awesome and if any of us are successful, it's nice to know that we played a tiny piece in it.

Compared to typical VC arrangements, Upside offers something new that aligns interests of everybody involved. It's an innovative approach to an old-style business and delivers real value to entrepreneurs.

Most importantly though: Founders should always pick a VC based on the partner with whom they'll be working. Kent is one of the best, smartest, hardest working, and most importantly fair and honest. Not all VCs are alike and Kent is a class act.

Full disclosure: Kent was on my board of directors and I endorse him so strongly that I am LP in Upside VC.

<comment><USER7> That's really interesting, but to be fair, did you need that financial exposure to help out? From what I saw on the VC side, the solution was usually an advisory role or sometimes an explicit board one to recognize a particularly valuable individual. Beyond that, I wonder if the incentives here run into the "Israeli day care" problem - by putting a financial price on what was previously help, more freely offered, you might have the adverse effect of making it more transactional.

That being said, best of luck to Kent - experiments are a good thing, and the marketing alone is a good start.

<comment><USER8> This is kind of tangential to the submission, but I just read through the "Israeli day-care" paper[1], and thought it was quite interesting. The existence of the fine clearly shifted the equilibrium, but I wonder whether or not the introduction of the fine partway through the start of the year contributed anything to the increase of late parents. Redoing the experiment with the addition of a third group of daycare centers, where the fine is specifically laid out at the beginning of the year, might shed some insight into that?

[1][http://rady.ucsd.edu.prx.us.teleport.to/faculty/directory/gn...](http://rady.ucsd.edu.prx.us.teleport.to/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While the stated goal of this is "to build a really strong founder community", this structure looks like a marketing ploy designed to boost dealflow.

I can't help but question, however, whether it will bring _good_ dealflow. As an entrepreneur, the notion that I could profit from the fund's success even if my own company fails is not at all attractive. Additionally, the fact that this structure offers a formal incentive to focus less than 110% on my own company would be a huge turn-off. The conflicts of interest abound.

Personally, I'd be wary of a founder who didn't recognize this and who wasn't concerned about the effects, perceived and real, of having a personal stake in the venture fund that had invested in his or her business. Incidentally, given the lackluster returns of the vast majority of venture funds, I'd also question said entrepreneur's savvy.

<comment><USER10> Dealflow comes from doing great work with and being supportive to founders. Period. That's what I hope will drive introductions for Upside as well.

I'd also be wary of founder's who only wanted to work with us for an economic stake in the fund. I want them to want to work with us because the partnership as a whole, is the most supportive in all of venture.

<comment><USER9> That's a fair response, but if I was looking to raise capital, this structure would result in me avoiding your firm regardless of your track record and reputation. The conflicts of interest that this structure creates, perceived and real, would be deal-breakers.

Even if you made participation in this structure optional, having to address it as part of a capital raise would add unnecessary complication to what already tends to be a time-consuming and distracting process for entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER11> Without know actual number seems like its hard to rule it out right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its a neat idea, but I suspect its primarily value is in marketing and the actual number is limited. That being said, the fund gets interesting if there's a unquestioned fundmaker (a Dropbox / Pinterest / AirBnB / What's App); do founders want to pick the firm because they hope to get a small share of that upside?

<comment><USER10> There are much more cost effective ways to get marketing value. A material portion of the fund's carry is being set aside. It's pretty well into the double digit percentages. Spread across multiple founders it will have less impact - founders will not be distracted from making their own businesses successful.

Treating founders as partners is something in which I genuinely believe. Investors ask founders to help guide other companies in the portfolio, they ask for founders for introductions to new companies, they ask them to help with diligence on prospective investments. So founders should have a stake in the fund.

For everyone's sake, I do hope there is a Dropbox type outcome in the fund. The idea was inspired in part by the way in which other classmates in Dropobox's YC class dis well by investing a small amount into the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always thought it would makes sense for Entrepreneurs to join a shared pool to spread the risk around a bit. This way instead of 60-90% getting nothing when their startups fail, they can all share in the top successes. This fund is helping them do this, which seems like a good idea.

<comment><USER13> I've had this idea too. I think this can be more than a VC perk though - <USER2> a marketplace that fosters equity swaps between early stage startups.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I wondered about that too but I'm not sure about the legal issues involved. Though once they allow regular people to invest in startups, founders can sell some equity and use the money to invest in a pool of startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a serial entrepreneur, I find this model very interesting. Nowadays I prefer to go it alone without outside capital, but there are times I wish I could pool my risk and upside with other vetted entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. Do the returns to the founders get taxed at capital gains rates, or as ordinary income?

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting take, it's in many way similar to the highly successful Japanese Keiretsu strategy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this regionally focused?

<comment><USER10> No hard and fast geographic limitations but at the seed stage, I think it's important for founders and investors to build a strong working relationship and rapport. Because of that, the focus will be on California and mostly the Bay Area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congrats, Kent!</comment>


Show HN: Python script for deploying static websites to aws - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/HeyImAlex/s3tup

<comment><AUTHOR> So it's not particularly pretty, not yet well tested, and written on top of boto which has plenty of problems of its own, but I'm hoping this is something that will help people cross the gap between deciding to use a static site generator and their website actually being available online. Hosting static sites on aws is cheap, reliable, and practically infinitely scaleable, but understanding aws enough to be able to run one on top of it can be hard, especially if you're less of a dev and more of a designer. I just wanted to make using the aws architecture to host static sites a little more accessible.

I'm kinda new to python and setuptools so sorry in advance if there are any glaring issues. Please tell me what you think!

And merry Christmas eve!</comment>