Is Pop Music Getting Less Intelligent? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattritter.me/?p=45 <comment><USER2> I wouldn't think testing vocabulary would be a very good indicator of music's intelligence. In my mind, music has been getting less intelligent because the tools to make music these days have made the barrier to entry almost non- existent. No longer do you need to study and practice various musical/performance skills for years to be a musician and put out a record. All you need is a computer and some software.

It's hard to say if this is a bad thing, though. I think it's good that anyone can try their hand at making music, but at the same time, the saturation of poor-quality music seems to be having a negative effect on music quality overall.

Or, maybe I'm just getting old?

<comment><USER3> If anything, I think lowering the barriers to entry should result in higher quality hit songs. For a hit song to occur, it has to become popular, which means a certain amount of oomph.

So with 1000 songs to choose from for the hot 100, you'd expect OK songs, but with 100,000 to choose from, you'd expect in a meritocracy much better songs.

Of course, the hot 100 is hit and miss. An example of a song which was made using affordable DAW software is, I believe, Crank That by Soulja Boy which is a song I personally dislike, take that as you will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least the titles seem to have gotten less intelligent and... ruder.

[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RczjGgSu4VU/VIs3dccjucI/AAAAAAAAL...](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RczjGgSu4VU/VIs3dccjucI/AAAAAAAALes/XlZaGN81Ooc/s1600/billboard.png)

from [http://prooffreaderplus.blogspot.ca/2014/12/most-popular- son...](http://prooffreaderplus.blogspot.ca/2014/12/most-popular-songs- containing-most.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Pop music from 1959 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGgaZZl_GVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGgaZZl_GVg)

Pop music is stupid because it's catchy. It's always been that way, always will be.

<comment><USER6> If you ever want to get some perspective, look at the songs which were _actually_ popular, not the ones preserved in the playlists of oldies stations.

[https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1958/hot-100](https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1958/hot-100)

<comment><USER7> That song was actually popular though. It obviously wasn't as popular as any of the songs on that list but it did peak at number 3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the article may have provided evidence for the opposite of what the author seems to believe:

"My results confirmed what Briggs had described: unique words and total words have risen over time, but the ratio has gone down significantly. This would suggest that pop lyrics have in fact gotten less eloquent."

I'd have to disagree... this just implies that modern pop songs are more lyrically repetitive, which is not immediately a sign of "less intelligence". It may be less enjoyable to some of us or you might call it "more insipid", but _given the definition of intelligence_ (italicized because that's an important phrase in this paragraph) chosen at the beginning, it's still pulling from a larger vocabulary, and that still implies _higher_ intelligence by the definition.

"Smarter people putting out more repetitive/insipid music" doesn't seem too shocking a result to me... the intelligence of a songwriter puts an upper bound on the intelligence of the song they can produce, but no lower bound.

There are still some confounding factors that could be at play though: Increased ethnic/cultural diversity could simply be introducing significantly more slang vocabularies into the songs. Rather than implying that any one performer is using a larger vocabulary, that would simply imply a certain dialectal diaspora, which wouldn't prove anything about the individual musicians.

So, now the part where I question the definition of intelligence being used. "Vocabulary size" isn't a bad choice of proxy for at least a fun analysis, but perhaps instead of graphing the years as a whole, each song should be analyzed for things like word count, then we can look at the population statistics instead of the summed words. If the individual songs are as a whole using more vocabulary, I would consider that stronger evidence than if the songs all turn out merely to have dialect differences. In fact it's completely mathematically possible for the set of all Top 50 songs in later years to use more different words as a whole even as each individual song is simpler than the individual songs of the past.

And, if this really _was_ a real effect, if word gets back to the pop song creators, the very act of observing the vocabulary has gotten more difficult could well cause the pop songs to get simpler over the next few years....

</comment><comment><USER9> The article doesn't answer the question it set out to answer. The poster, being a (fellow) programmer, was (probably) more focused on working out how to scrape the data than on figuring out how to determine the intelligence of a song's lyrics reliably. The methods he came up with don't answer the original question at all.

<comment><USER10> Its been proven that repeating short phrases results in a catchier tune. The impact marketing has made on music is terrible to say the least. In recent years especially it has become more about what sells that what has emotional resonance.

Has pop music been getting stupider? Was it ever intelligent? Probably not. I think the issue is pop music is more common now than ever as only handfuls of artists can afford a solid marketing budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice job! :-) I think that music (melodies, riffs, combination of sounds and notes, etc...) are getting very stupidier. I don't have tools nor skills to test this assumption, just my hears. Try to listen MTV for some month and you'll see that a lot of new songs are _very_ similar to other ones. I mean, too much similar.

<comment><USER12> A musician friend of mine (classically trained, but works with pop music for decades now) says that's true, and the reason is that much music today is heavily rhythm centric, and everything else around it is ending up less complex or less diverse (don't remember which). I don't really know if it makes sense, as I haven't really been keeping up with mainstream stuff. Not that I don't like it, I just don't have as much time, and I found a suprising new love for older music that has kept strong and my music time goes towards it.

<comment><USER13> The idea that rhythm is somehow less "intelligent", "complex", or "diverse" has all kinds of terrible connotations. Does your friend wear a powdered wig and perform for the ladies of the court?

<comment><USER12> No, the idea is that _today 's_ pop music _is_ rhythmically less diverse. Where is this mainstream pop music with such complex, diverse rhythms? Let me know where to tune it. He compared contemporary jazz rhythm sections to contemporary pop as an example, vs. both genres in past decades.

<comment><USER14> I'll venture Radiohead's 'Reckoner': [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wCJPm19XYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wCJPm19XYQ)

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure it's fair to call Radiohead "pop". Their shtick is experimental stuff, very different from the bulk of pop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems like a topic that is really going to need a bit more research and analysis. I don't think a vocabulary test quite does it. Comparing something like Elvis Presley playing "Hound Dog" to Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" would make me think that modern pop is more intelligent.

<comment><USER6> > Comparing something like Elvis Presley playing "Hound Dog" to Taylor Swift's > "Blank Space" would make me think that modern pop is more intelligent.

And that would be the wrong answer because... ?

<comment><USER16> Oh, I would say Taylor Swift is the more intelligent writer and its right, but I'm not sure a simple vocabulary test and a large sample set is really the way to go. I do bet if you asked music critics, they would say Elvis's writer (not sure on that song or other) is more intelligent. Age polishes the fun history.

<comment><USER6> > Age polishes the fun history.

Whatever this means, it sounds like "The grass was always greener in the pastures of my memory" or some such, which is true but not relevant to, you know, _actual_ history.

That, and it seems axiomatic among the PC crowd that Kids These Days are getting dumber and dumber, which has held true so long that it's amazing that our great-grandparents qualified as sentient beings, as opposed to, say, slime mold.

<comment><USER16> You remember the fun stuff as more fun and deep the farther you are away from it. Its polished by age. This results in people believing that things were better then. I'm sorry, but I don't write formally on HN, and I doubt if I ever will.

As to the rest, I think my example was enough to say I don't think generation has much to do with deepness or intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Pop Music was ever Intelligent? Seriously

<comment><USER18> In this and everything pop, Sturgeon's law applies ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law)).

We're all looking for that other 10%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think unique-words/total-words can be used directly as a metric for intelligence of lyrics. In any body of text, I'd expect that ratio to go down as total-words increases. For some extreme example, if there is one total word, then the ratio is 1.0. If there are infinitely many words, then the ratio is 0.0. That doesn't really say anything about how intelligent they are. Without knowing anything specifically about it, I'd expect unique words to roughly scale logarithmically with total words for a constant "intelligence", whatever that means.

</comment><comment><USER20> Having less unique words doesn't mean anything. I'm sure Hemingway used less unique words than Dickens. Does that make him stupider?

</comment><comment><USER21> So, the post says that pop lyrics are getting stupider because the ratio of unique words to total words has went down, though both total words and unique words have gone up. I'm not very convinced. How do you know that the right metric isn't something like unique/sqrt(total)? Can we figure out the right metric from first principles?

<comment><USER22> No. The post says that this was Briggs' original claim. This post proceeds to "dig deeper" and concludes "I think it's difficult to definitively call today's music 'stupider'".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The mainstream part of pop has always been equally stupid. I have a hunch that i can't prove, however, that the 'eclectic' part of pop has become significantly dumber. We don't have as many distinct new genres as in the 90s for example, and that may mean that music is more homogeneized in general.

</comment><comment><USER24> I applaud the author for not succumbing to the superciliousness of William Briggs. The irony of the linked article "Proof That Music is Growing Worse" made me chuckle a bit, and then made me feel a little disappointed.

Thank you for providing an interesting, objective analysis without injecting unfounded opinions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Two words: The Monkees.

<comment><USER25> People say they monkey around.

<comment><USER26> something something coming to your town

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There has been terrible pop music since pop music began. Try and make it all the way to the end of this song from the golden 60s - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhYLz63csS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhYLz63csS0)

<comment><USER2> I'd argue that this is more of a subjective terrible-ness. Technically, this song more skillfully crafted than a lot of pop music today. Even on a basic level, no auto-tune = you actually need to be able to sing (to some degree).

<comment><USER28> Songs used to require more skillful performers. That skill and complexity has in large part been reallocated to engineers and producers who actually have to program and edit on a much more sophisticated level these days to do things like make the auto-tune actually sound good (whether or not you subjectively like the effect).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Popular music is the music listened to by most people by definition. Most people are not very smart (not to say they are stupid). Therefore, pop(ular) music will never be intelligent as it needs to attune to a lot of people that are not that smart. I got tired of the gimmicky pop years ago and switched completely to classical and folk music.

<comment><USER30> Indeed. It should never be surprising that the mainstream is mediocre. It has to be. That's what mediocre means. Mediocre people often prefer to refer to themselves as "average," but it's the same thing.

<comment><USER31> "Average" just means that, while "mediocre" means average + negative connotation.

You're the one who is using a word with more baggage than the straightforward, "by definition" meaning (probably to do with some statistical distribution). _Average_ is not always _bad_ , unless you think that being non-average is inherently good. And having _average_ music taste is about as harmless/inconsequential as average-ness goes - you like the music you like. That's it. Anything beyond that is more about social signalling and stratification than it is about the enjoyment of the music itself.

<comment><USER30> Contrast average with "Exceptional. Special. Distinguished. Excellent. etc."

The nature of these words show a clear bias that being non-average _IS_ inherently good, at least when you are talking about quality. Music is clearly a qualitative arena, and therefore, average means, "not exceptional," "not special," "not distinguished" and "not excellent"

Ergo, my point is, the parent to this discussion is correct, "average" music can never be exceptional as the difference between average and exceptional is what defines those very words.

I am simply trying to use the word mediocre to make more obvious what average means when it comes to quality.

To be fair, there is a non-average that is below normal as well, with related words: Poor, sub-standard, deficient, defective, inferior, etc. So, being worse than average is even worse than being average. Again, in terms of quality.

Of course, average in another arena, such as average height, for example, is neither bad nor good. But height is not a measure of quality.

<comment><USER30> In reference to why people call exceptional things weird, odd and strange, please refer to Albert Einstein's quote: "Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."

<comment><USER31> My point wasn't that "weird" are synonyms for "excellent". They are the other side of the coin of things that are _not average_ \-- the less desirable things.

Something being _average_ denotes that it is commonplace. Not everything that is commonplace is subpar to something that is _not average_. Sometimes those things are just weird, odd, subpar or undesirable. And sometimes, they are indeed _exceptional_. And no, something being "odd" or "weird" isn't always or solely average people just "not getting it". Sometimes it's just subpar, weird and odd. I know, I know, it's a profound-sounding quote by Einstein so that means it must be relevant in every situation..

In the case of music, people with peculiar tastes will sometimes think of the _mainstream_ music as being lame and uncultured. In reality, those mainstream listeners might get the exact same enjoyment out of listening to their _mainstream_ music, as those with more peculiar tastes get out of listening to _their_ music. But at least those with special taste get some kicks out of feeling superior, so they've got that going for them. You can call that the smug-hipster-bonus.

Tip: if you wait a minute or so you can reply to the actual comment. There is a short delay between a comment being posted and being able to reply to it, for some reason.

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the tip. It seems we agree that there is a subpar under average as well as an above-average.

Whether or not this applies to mainstream music seems to be where we differ.

I believe the Einstein quote is still relevant to this discussion, even if it is possible to misuse the quote. Similar to wine, art and other things of quality, when you first start to learn something the basic, simpler things seem better. Most people start by drinking fruity wines, enjoy simplistic art and like pop music. Also, while you are still enjoying simple things it's hard to understand why someone would want something more refined.

However, once you have experienced the basic level you will eventually want to move beyond it and enjoy things of higher quality. Higher quality wine, music or art requires that you move beyond average.

I believe a more refined musical palette will always move you beyond pop music. Again, similar to fruity, sweet simplistic wine, that doesn't mean you didn't enjoy the basic experience, it's just that you now want something better.

Whether or not the things one would eventually move onto are truly _better_ seems subjective to me, hence why I think "better music" is a qualitative thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> test

</comment><comment><USER32> Is the pope catholic?</comment>


Irregularities in LaCour (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/broockman_kalla_aronow_lg_irregularities.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> This is perhaps a confusing title, because the "(2014)" is part of it, as it is a reference to a paper.

I'm posting this because many of us here will have heard the media reports about this study's retraction. (NYT: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/science/maligned-study- on-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/science/maligned-study-on-gay- marriage-is-shaking-trust.html;) This American Life: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2015/05/canvassers- stud...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2015/05/canvassers-study-in- episode-555-has-been-retracted)). But this is the statistical detective work that other researchers did to convince themselves and one of the original study's coauthors that the data is fabricated. Their methods are clear, showing R snippets, graphs, code comments explaining where to find the data sets, and explanations of the significance of each step. I am impressed with this report.

By the way, the author who likely fabricated his results (which is a conclusion I feel confident in, based on this report), implied this report is not to be trusted because it is not peer-reviewed. ([http://www.mikelacour.com/5yxcfv8vmowjjyimtqkfb65i7owz7y](http://www.mikelacour.com/5yxcfv8vmowjjyimtqkfb65i7owz7y)) I find this position funny, because while this report has not gone through the peer-review process, it is thorough, and I see no room for them to hide any tricks. If there are problems with the report, we will know soon. But I doubt there are.

</comment><comment><USER2> Discussed a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9579881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9579881).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I missed that. I really wanted to point out the report itself, though, not just the conclusions. It's a great example of statistical detective work, independent of the larger issues going on (academic honest, peer-review, etc).</comment></comment>


Japan's zero-gravity space drone sends first pictures from ISS - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40640039 <comment><USER2> and no word on how it moves. even bbc is going downhill :(

<comment><USER3> Forgive the stupid question: what makes the use of reaction wheels and fans preferred over fans installed at different angles?

Energy efficiency or fan reliability perhaps?

<comment><USER4> Precision and speed, reaction wheels can go from start, rotate you one degree and then stop all motion. With fans your going to end up constantly correcting because you never hit zero rotation.

<comment><USER3> The robot is exposed to the station airflow so it has to adjust constantly anyways.

<comment><USER4> While non zero, the spherical shape and minimal ISS airflow generally makes this a non issue. You can use those reaction wheels to calibrate very precise adjustments over time, you can also just bump into something to get rid of excess rotation.

Note, space telescopes effectively use both approaches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Super excited! Another inch closer to more viable space missions!

Instead of arguing about robot vs astronaut effectiveness, let's just use robot to augment astronaut where it can, and go from there!

</comment><comment><USER6> Why the quality is so poor? Looks like taken from a digital camera from 2000.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't look that bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First thought: GLaDOS personality core.

> Fish shaped volatile organic compounds and sediment shaped sediment.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's great to see automation save on expensive human labor for taking picture. Now the trick is to automate a lot of the human labor up there. No need waste tons of money for what amounts to glorified lab assistants.

</comment><comment><USER10> First association [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afHt_1sVQ14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afHt_1sVQ14)

</comment><comment><USER11> Love the robot, but I'm uncomfortable at what I see as an implication in the article that now the astronauts should stop taking pictures and do more productive things instead.

I'm pretty sure there's values to that activity beyond having photographic registrations to show afterwards. (I'm also not convinced the little ball of cuteness is anywhere close to matching their choice of scenes yet)

<comment><USER12> They'll should still have plenty of time for taking photos. Astronauts usually work a regular 8-ish hour work day up in the ISS and have weekends etc...

2 of those working hours each day are blocked out for exercise, too, so this should be a real boon.

<comment><USER13> They work 8 hours a day _including_ exercise? That seems bizarre to me. I know we don't want them burning out, etc., but if we're sending astronauts up there at great expense I'd think we'd want to ask them to put in a little more than 8 hour days.

16 hours a day plus weekends seems like a ridiculous amount of free time given that there's no commuting, family time (other than calls), yard work, social engagements, etc.

<comment><USER14> Bear in mind that in space exercise is mandatory, because the lack of it considerably reduces the time a given person can spend there, which in turn would require more frequent launches, which are expensive.

Also - they're the best of the best. They sort of earned the privilege of not doing overtime.

<comment><USER15> Also, let's not forget that overworking them has literally led to a "mutiny" in space before ;) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab_mutiny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab_mutiny)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait they finally came out with the drone? I remember this was being teased when the ISS first launched. This is awesome! NASA / JAXA should make a plush toy or regular drone that could be used on the ground for fundraising.

</comment><comment><USER17> NASA is working on a similar (but more capable and larger) robot right now, with plans to open-source all the code. I'm curious what the internals of JAXA's robot look like. That thing is pretty small.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can understand how it rotates, but how does it moves? as in going from one module to the next one?

<comment><USER19> it needs an atmosphere (not mentioned what minimum pressure) to move using its propellers between the modules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is the astronaut wearing a belt?

<comment><USER21> If you put a fabric covering on any flexible structure and then flex it, the fabric has a tendency to gather at the joints. I'm surprised he has not elastic straps on his ankles as well as I'b bet without the usual forces in play I would think his pants would ride up his calves towards his knees as well.

There is an entire community of people however who collect "evidence" that the ISS is a hoax! This would be exactly the kind of "proof" they'd love!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Haro v0.1

<comment><USER23> First thing I did when I clicked the comment section is cmd+f to search for it. Thank you random person on the internet. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Squeal! I don't care what it does!

</comment><comment><USER25> So, they (almost) made a Kino? Now, if they can just get it to float on Earth, too...</comment>


Collecting all the cheat sheets - <AUTHOR> http://overapi.com/ <comment><USER2> Most cheatsheets I find when searching are subject to heavy devaluation of the term. For me, a cheatsheet is a __1 __-page physical document listing the most important possibilities of a language, api or technology in the most concise way possible.

Many cheatsheets I find are multi-page or even larger websites, have very verbose information on them and contain redundant information.

That being said, I really like your effort in this!

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't call the python page a cheat sheet. It's more of a concise index into the official docs.

</comment><comment><USER4> This seems like a project meant to produce money from advertising with a limited effort investment. Maybe I'm cynical, but that's the impression it gave me.

I hope it develops to provide more value than merely aggregating some links, which don't even seem to be vetted.

</comment><comment><USER5> Clicked on NodeJS cheat sheet. Got an infinite "loading" message. Checked console and found 3 "BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT" errors.

If your website breaks because I have an ad blocker, then I'm not interested in your "documentation"

<comment><USER5> Apparently, the issue was a Gateway timeout while fetching some JS file, because the list of links finally loaded after a minute or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Saw this on producthunt some years ago. Rarely might open it to look for something. Would be nice to be able to contribute to update old references/information, or to add what might be missing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool idea but I am seeing many broken pdf download links. For example, under Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. Thanks!</comment>


NIST digitized the bullets that killed JFK - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/12/nist-digitized-the-bullets-that-killed-jfk/ <comment> java-man Let's make it easier to falsify history.</comment>


5 Elevator Pitches: What Do You Think Of Them? - <AUTHOR> http://howtosplitanatom.com/startup-reactor/startup-reactor-the-elevator-pitch/

<comment><USER4> For elevator pitches, there's a lot of verbiage. Here's the Cliffs Notes...

 _transpondr_ generates popularity stats for your podcast

 _logobid_ lets graphic designers bid to work for you

 _publicitr_ pushe content to websites, and tracks the results

 _siphs_ is a button to submit to digg/reddit/etc simultaneously

 _zambino_ connects advertisers to online video producers

None of them sound earth-shattering. I'm not saying they're bad: some of them could do OK if they get the business side right. Zambino seems the most interesting of the lot, siphs sounds really slight.

And they could all do with streamlining their pitches.

<comment><USER5> May come across as negative, but hey. Almost all suffer from the same weaknesses. Although it's debatable, I reckon that elevator pitches (general ones anyway) should contain the following. A brief hook as danohuiginn has written. What's the product and who are the 'buyers'? What's the revenue model? Who is behind the company? Competition? Unique Selling Point(s)?

Transpondr - what is the product itself? Is it free analytics for your podcast? Who is the 'we' behind it? Is there competition and why is it different? it's first sentence/hook is good though.

Logobid - Should think about who they are pitching to. Why should I set the price? It's not as clear as so the above note. How are they making money - <USER2> share? Competition? How is it different? who are they?

Publicitr - the first sentence doesn't add anything. they are talking about a market, not what they do. again, who are they? competition, how different? not exactly passionate.

siphs - is it share-this or tell-a-friend? Does it matter which? Choose - bloggers or publishers? Try not to offer everything to everyone at this stage. Far too wordy. As above. How to monetise? Who are they? Competition - <USER3> else doing it, what is wrong with several submits?

zambino - nice hook. too wordy though. Second sentence - what does it mean? Again, who are they, competition, USP, revenue model?

<comment><USER6> The elevator pitch should not contain information that detailed. When you get into revenue models and such, unless its a USP then it becomes more than an elevator pitch.

Once you get a formal pitch then you can go into detail. Everyone should memorize their elevator pitch as it will be used VERY often . :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More interesting yet, how about some of the startup founders on this site make one of these and post them here? For both yourselves and for fun.

<comment><USER8> I use this elevator pitch formula. Can't find the original source.

For [customer-base], [startup] is a [category] that [main-feature]. Unlike [competitors], we [differentiators].

I strongly suggest putting such a pitch in your news.yc profile. Here's mine:

For people with many pictures and little time, ourdoings.com is a photo- sharing site that organizes them for you. Unlike conventional photo-sharing sites, we make it easy to create an illustrated story of what you've been doing, and to share your story in illustrated email.

<comment><USER9> GREAT formula.

Here's a short one, riffing on the "hollywood pitch":

"[Service] combines [reference point] and [reference point] to achieve [business objective of customer]".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Arpan from Siphs here. Thanks for the feedback so far, definitely appreciated! Looks like the elevator pitch is too wordy so we will work on clarifying. That said, the Siphs button does both (lets users either post to a social media site or send the web page to a friend via email). Regarding monetization, it's a subscription based model. Before you think, no way, that will never work, let me highlight that we've already signed up paying customers. Any experiences with scaling from here would be great! Thanks and kudos to Steve from howtosplitanatom for putting this together.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's another format I've seen suggested by a VC firm:

<XYZ corp> provides <category> solutions to <target-customer> for <purpose>, which allows them to <benefit> by leveraging <uniqueness> technology.

this is the example they gave:

Akimbi Systems provides R&D tools to ISVs and enterprises for automated provisioning of test configurations, which allows customers to deliver higher quality software faster by leveraging the company's automation platform.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> These are a part of a program that HTSAA is running to help new startups learn some of the nitty, gritty details of starting a business. These 5 startups have volunteered to act as case studies. What I am really looking for are your thoughts, as entrepreneurs, on their pitches.

</comment><comment><USER12> Love the concept. Over time can amass a nice archive.

Perhaps if a comment box were under each startup pitch?

I like danohuiginn's comment-- can each be distilled to a one sentence pitch? Sometimes an elevator ride is only 1 stop :)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the whole "dropping the vowel" thing is getting a little annoying with all these web startups. Transpondr? Publicitr? Come on...

<comment><USER6> find a better available url...hahahaa. Its tough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, very interesting.</comment>


Goodbye Heroku - <AUTHOR> http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/2014/06/23/goodbye-heroku.html <comment><USER3> I was always weary of Heroku because it's exactly what @hunvreus said: a black-box. Very appealing when you're strapped for resources in the beginning, but increasingly frustrating as you scale. Case in point: [http://rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret- annota...](http://rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annotated)

That being said, it seems like the model itself is not flawed, just the execution. I've met many developers, especially in the Node community, who fundamentally believe they as software engineers should not have to spend any time learning devops.

My position is that a good software engineer today should be familiar with the full stack from frontend (SPA, javascript, html, css) to backend (sql, basic db admin, db design) and devops. Obviously, you can't become an expert in everything, but the knowledge level required to become "proficient" in these areas seems pretty achievable if you're well-versed in software engineering fundamentals.

FWIW, it took me about 4 weeks to get a "startup-ready" fully open source 3-tier stack running in EC2 with full automation using Chef (which is a whole other topic) plus continuous deployment using Jenkins. Ultimately, we'll pay more for EC2 per month upfront, and I had to absorb the upfront time hit, but now that we're setup, it's extremely easy to tweak things, and we have complete transparency.

<comment><USER4> you mind sharing your chef recipes? did you use chef to automate jenkins too? there are too few good chef examples on the web....

<comment><USER3> @pswenson, I used Chef to automate setting up the server with Jenkins. This included automated security updates, awscli tools, nodejs, and even hubot so that we can trigger builds from HipChat (we still need to write a custom hubot listener to handle that, though).

I also took advantage of AWS IAM roles so that the server is pre-authenticated for certain S3 buckets.

PM me at josh dot padnick at gmail /period/ com with some background on what you're trying to do and I'll see what I can share. For many reasons, I can't make our Chef code repo public, but maybe I can share some code samples.

Edit: Regarding Chef, for more info you might check out [http://www.slideshare.net/JoshPadnick/introduction-to- chef-a...](http://www.slideshare.net/JoshPadnick/introduction-to-chef- automate-your-infrastructure-by-modeling-it-in-code).

As far as online examples, yeah, the learning curve does kind of suck. Also, if you're starting from scratch, SaltStack may very well be a superior technology (don't know enough about it). I think the key with Chef is to learn how to read the docs, using the application-cookbook pattern (where you never touch the cookbooks you download online and instead customize them by "wrapping" them with your own custom-defined cookbooks.

It's also helpful to use very thinly designed roles, and define special cookbooks as your actual roles. This way you can version-control them.

I basically learned by reading the same material in multiple places, especially in books on Safari Books Online, and IRC was also a huge help b/c the community was VERY helpful.

I think Chef is a classic case of where the technology is somewhat inelegant and perhaps bloated, but a mature community is there and it's battle-tested so once you suffer the pain of ramp-up you get a huge benefit.

HTH

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If our company was hosted on Heroku instead of AWS, we would have to shut down. Want a 50gb redis? $4k/mo. MongoHQ's largest heroku instance is 150gb at $2700 / month? We'll need at least 50. Want 300 workers? That's $20k / mo for less quality servers.

Heroku is great for working on your own project or if your data scale is small. Otherwise, the cost is just too high.

<comment><USER6> At that point, don't you have enough scale, money, and need to actually hire an ops person?

<comment><USER7> The size of your data and the number of processes you run have nothing to do with your available cash for hiring people.

<comment><USER8> The amount of money you have to grow your business is directly proportional to the cost overheads of running your app minus the revenue it generates. We are assuming that the larger your internet service is the more money you will make.

Of course that has yet to be empirically proved.

<comment><USER9> A service that processes tweets from the firehose in realtime. Assuming you decide to process everything day 1, thats a case where the overhead from running your app could greatly outweigh the revenue it generates.

<comment><USER6> I mean, I guess? I would question that business and processing model heavily, though. Most sustainable business models show growing from some kind of smaller MVP to a larger full-featured application.

Significant overhead costs to go from nothing to steady-state instantaneously would be enough to scare me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > When our customers email us during our vacation pissed off that we are not > around and we have nothing to show to them to prove that this is Heroku's > fault and not ours

Here's a tip. You are a black box. Your customers don't care if it's your fault, Heroku's fault, the power grids fault or a meteorite's fault. They just care that their service is up. If anyone from you all the way down to the silicon breaks, its your problem. Not Intel, not RealTek, not Western Digital, not ComCast.

Stop playing the blame game.

<comment><USER11> And that's what he's saying; Heroku's problems are his problems, but Heroku doesn't provide him a lever to solve their problems. So he's moving to somewhere else, where he has more visibility over the problems and can better communicate with his customers what the timetable is for repair.

<comment><USER12> The whole rationale of outsourced hosting is to have someone else take care of things, so it's a little comical to see the complaints when the pendulum swings the other way. What do people expect?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Heroku is a great way to get started fast without having to worry about anything related to operations. That being said, you're effectively outsourcing your entire ops/DevOps to a third party. You don't set the rules, you don't get to argue about the best scaling strategy, and overall your infrastructure is pretty much a black-box.

I've seen a fair amount of people who loved Heroku for ramping up apps only to feel trapped once they started scaling their service. PaaS definitely has its use case, but I wouldn't recommend it for anything beyond prototyping.

In fact (shameless plug), this is why I've been working on devo.ps, to lower the barriers of entries to managing your own servers (on AWS, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Linode...) using tools familiar to developers (Git + YAML).

@bcardarella happy to add you to our beta testers; we'd love to get feedback from a heavy Heroku user. Email is in my profile.

If there are other Heroku users affected, drop me a line and I'll see if we can help you get set up on your own infrastructure with devo.ps.

<comment><USER14> no blog updates since '13 tsk tsk. I was excited.

<comment><USER13> We've been busy building stuff and talking with users. We actually have the new landing page and a couple blog posts coming out this week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So how do you scale out to multiple droplets on Digital Ocean? Set up your own HAProxy instance?

What do you do when one of your droplets disappears or crashes?

Where do you host your database?

Not quizzing, real questions from someone also looking to drop heroku.

<comment><USER16> I'd suggest using Linode over Digital Ocean.

They already are the same price/performance [roughly, unless you are buying DO's $5 nodes]. They also have stuff like load balancers built out and are reasonably reliable [although only at the datacenter level, they don't have multi-DC load balancers]:

[https://www.linode.com/nodebalancers](https://www.linode.com/nodebalancers)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a big Linode fan and I hadn't realized they price-matched DO. Thank you for the info.

<comment><USER17> Be warned that Linode's status page is also borderline useless. Their website and web-based management interface (and API, according to customers on their IRC channel) were throwing 500 Internal Server Errors for >2 hours the other night, and their status page never had any mention of it.

<comment><USER18> In 4 year it's always worked for me.

edit: years _

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Deployment and maintenance should not happen in the middle of the night. We've known this for years.

You design your systems to degrade gracefully, hopefully transparently. Screwing up your engineers' sleep schedules is a terrible idea, so you deploy during the day when people are awake, clear-headed, and on the clock.

I'll take a 1PM outage over a 1AM outage any day. If that's bad for business, business should pay for the engineering time to build a more resilient system.

<comment><USER20> This is not how businesses are run. No sane person running a business will take a 1PM outage over 1AM. The whole point of heroku is that you are relying on them to do a lot of the infrastructure systems because you are low on manpower. The resilient system will be built over time and is being worked upon. But to put the blame on heroku's customer for the outage is nonsensical.

People do night shifts in so many industries. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just part of the job. My building security guard does a night shift and what he does is way more important and needs more attention than an engineer. Unless you think we should not have security guards in the night.

<comment><USER19> No one with half a backbone should be willing to do scheduled work all day and then during any portion of the night.

You need to build a resilient system, and that's gonna cost you. It's a lot less fun than adding features, which is why business people tend to put it off and instead manipulate the tech people into working crazy hours.

The 24/7 web culture is dying. Adjust your business plan accordingly.

<comment><USER21> You don't have to. You can take the prior or following day off after the overnight work.

<comment><USER19> I was never presented this option by any of my previous employers.

<comment><USER21> That sucks. Whilst we're able to do most work during the 9-5, there's the odd time I'll come in at 5 or the IT manager works a Saturday because we have to take down key infrastructure to work on it.

If your working environment is good, it's pretty easy to just say "I'll take tomorrow off and come in to do it on Saturday" without feeling like you're getting taken advantage of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Heroku does have it's problems but if I'm being honest I don't have the time to spend using anything else right now. Perhaps when I hit a larger scale/stage I'll reconsider that, but at this stage there really isn't anything better.

</comment><comment><USER23> We're working on switching from Heroku to EC2. To my knowledge there isn't a lot of documentation out there on this process - we're just looking for code snippets to figure out how to build AMIs, deploy, etc. It's a slow and error- prone process. Anyone know of good resources to make this migration?

<comment><USER24> I'd suggest looking at AWS OpsWorks, which is probably closest to what you're used to.

[http://www.stefanwrobel.com/heroku-to- opsworks](http://www.stefanwrobel.com/heroku-to-opsworks)

[http://artsy.github.io/blog/2013/08/27/introduction-to- aws-o...](http://artsy.github.io/blog/2013/08/27/introduction-to-aws- opsworks/)

<comment><USER25> I second this. I got up and running on opsworks in about 3 days without any AWS or Chef experience (I use puppet on our other providers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> All these companies leaving Heroku and other PaaS providers is definitely a blessing for the thousands of unemployed devops & sysadmins out there.

<comment><USER22> I can't say I meet all that many who are unemployed. Maybe that's just me.

<comment><USER26> Our last engineering job req we received about 10 sysadmin applicants almost all of which started with a "I know I'm not an exact fit but..." sort of line. Maybe it was just an oddity.

<comment><USER27> _> 'Maybe it was just an oddity.'_

I think there's a reason, but it's not outright unemployment - yet.

On the enterprise side what I'm seeing are traditional sysadmin positions being eaten up by aggressive VARs and software vendors. They all have XaaS plays now and they're targeting their existing customers first.

The pitch is literally...

 _" Hey, I can save you $350K/yr. Just fire your ________ team and use our PaaS. We'll perform the migration for free."_

Assuming the organization doesn't want to pursue their own internal or lower- level external service it leaves the sysadmins to either somehow make the leap to administering a provider system or diversify into other roles where they don't exactly fit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Buildpacks are just terrible."

Elaborate please? CF uses a variant of them, and they're ultimately just a simple three-script harness to build and run your app.

There are pros/cons vs. dockerfiles , chef/puppet/ansible, or just doing a Netflix style Aminator, I suppose, but "terrible" seems exagerrated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Customization. Ever try to add a command-line tool to a buildpack? I don't understand why we cannot make use of apt as the EC2 instances that Heroku uses are just Ubuntu AMIs.

<comment><USER28> It's a pain, but it isn't the end of the world or a disaster. I distribut some CLI tools with a NodeJS app I wrote. Here's the docs: [https://github.com/lookfirst/convert/wiki/Compile](https://github.com/lookfirst/convert/wiki/Compile)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am not a Heroku customer and maybe there is more substance to his complaints but I didn't see anything in the post that would cause him to want to leave his hosting provider with guns blazing like this. Reduce their prices because their service providers have reduced their rates? Seriously which company you know does that? Do we even know what arrangement Heroku has with amazon? Isn't it possible that as a large customer their rates are already discounted. On the subject of downtime he didn't actually say that his application was down as a result of the maintenance in this instance or any other.

</comment><comment><USER30> What are the alternatives to Heroku? I'm looking for something that makes it easy to deploy and launch services. [http://deis.io](http://deis.io) looks promising but it isn't production ready yet.

<comment><USER31> I literally just discovered Dokku ([https://github.com/progrium/dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku)) yesterday - a "Docker powered mini-Heroku in around 100 lines of Bash". You can roll your own PaaS infrastructure on your own VMs.

It took a few hours, but I was able to get my Heroku-based Rails app up and running on a Dokku droplet (to be fair, the most time-consuming part was getting the SSH keys right and figuring out that I needed a domain name - e.g., couldn't just set it up with a droplet's IP address - at least not with the DigitalOcean tutorial's instructions: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- use-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the- digitalocean-dokku-application)).

<comment><USER32> Dokku is cool, but it is very basic. Deployed apps don't have any sort of restart protection, for instance.

<comment><USER31> It looks like it's possible with a Dokku plugin ([https://github.com/statianzo/dokku- supervisord](https://github.com/statianzo/dokku-supervisord)). But agreed, definitely basic - but I think it has a ton of potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I work at an Brazilian mobile ad network running on Amazon AWS and our traffic is really intense. There are 13 developers in total in the team and none of them are DevOPS, which make me conclude that most often than not, you don't need a person specialized into server maintenance and infrastructure.

Like some people said before, Heroku is great for prototyping but just not a good deal in the long run. Too expensive, way to risky/unreliable for serious stuff

</comment><comment><USER34> Heroku's defining characteristic has always been that it radically reduces the sysadmin surface area of my app stack to something I can reasonably handle. So, while things like Dokku, etc. are really interesting they don't seem to be actually expanding the number of app-stack layers that I'd need to know to properly secure and maintain a server. Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm still in the startup phase, and the time saving of Heroku has been fantastic. I'm ever mindful of these types of stories and the scaling cost though.

I've not seen it mentioned so far: RedHat has OpenShift ([https://www.openshift.com/](https://www.openshift.com/)) out now, v3 will see Docker support too. With only a quick play, it seems to be a mix of Heroku and dedicated host.

On sysadmins: talking to a guy who managed AWS nodes for a popular iOS game you've probably played, he made the comment that it was great to have a new team member onboard now, dedicated to looking after all the VMs. I figure he's rediscovered sysadmins, just using different kit.

The risk I see with managing your own Dokku, etc is handling issues/maintaining uptime if it's not your only job/skill. When another HeartBleed comes along, can you react quickly and competently enough?

</comment><comment><USER36> I really like Deis so far. Can't wait for the Docker / CoreOS / Deis ecosystem to become more mature.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm a devops engineer and I never really saw the draw of Heroku or EY after you scale out to a certain size. EC2 is extremely easy to work with and there's tons of documentation out there. Once you setup your CI & CD, write your cookbooks and capistrano (or whatever), it's nearly hands off.

<comment><USER8> Heroku is the dreamweaver of devops... but you know developers often don't have the time to spend 2 months+ learning how to do it right (hence your job title :-D). And for my small app I'll wager that Heroku has infinitely better uptime than I would manage!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Personally, I really fell out of love with Heroku when reading their justification for not providing VPC compatibility. [https://discussion.heroku.com/t/deploy-failure-from- heroku-e...](https://discussion.heroku.com/t/deploy-failure-from-heroku- ec2-security-group-change/324)

In short, Heroku thinks that firewalls encourage people to be lazy about security, and leaves people crippled if the firewall is exposed. Due to this philosophical difference, they would rather force everyone to rely on SSL for all secure communication, and leave every machine accessible to the internet, including (for example) your database server.

</comment><comment><USER39> Easy. Just use deis [1]. Or CoreOS [2], if you're more hardcore. In any case, with the advent of Docker and 12-factor -- not to mention openstack [3] -- Heroku is a commodity or fast approaching it, and will soon face pricing pressure.

[1] [http://deis.io](http://deis.io) [2] [http://coreos.com](http://coreos.com) [3] [http://openstack.org](http://openstack.org)

</comment><comment><USER40> The idea that maintenance should not be done during the day is a bit antiquarian. Scheduled maintenance should take place during their company's workday when they have as many people as possible available, feeling awake, well-rested and not distracted by the things they might prefer to do with their evenings and weekends off work.

Of course, scheduled _downtime_ should be done in off-hours, but modern services like Heroku don't have scheduled downtime.

<comment><USER41> I agree with this argument, but there's plenty of work hours in the day, and 2 PM Eastern is just about the worst one to pick. We try to start scheduled maintenance around 8 AM - that way we have fully refreshed devs ready to address any problems, and if something does go wrong, it's a relatively low- traffic time for our application.

<comment><USER40> The reality is that there is no good time for a large-scale platform to go down. I'd speculate that 8am PDT would be worse for Heroku, as their business seems largely split between the US and Europe, so downtime then would upset everyone... but that's just speculation.

You can't build a company of developers selling products to developers while fleeing the working hours of developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If Heroku simply re-sold AWS, people wouldn't use them. The argument that AWS's falling prices should be passed on to customer's is logical only if you're ignoring that Heroku is using the savings to build and increase the performance of their platform.

It's really the complete opposite case, I think. For the value (time is money!) they offer, it's amazing they haven't increased their prices as they scale.

</comment><comment><USER43> We're actually busy doing a similar move.

fwiw, here's some resources i collected around docker.

[http://wayfinder.co/pathways/53619274d95a741100e7f203/docker...](http://wayfinder.co/pathways/53619274d95a741100e7f203/docker- based-paas-wip)

It's a few weeks old, but of those the one that came closest to our needs was Deis.

</comment><comment><USER44> Sound similar to why we said goodbye to Heroku as well: [http://blog.planforcloud.com/2013/03/from-paas-to-iaas- how-w...](http://blog.planforcloud.com/2013/03/from-paas-to-iaas-how-we- migrated-off.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> Bit surprised no one mentioning Cloudfoundry in the comments. It's pretty much opensource Heroku solution, run it againts AWS and it's almost exactly heroku, and with all the tooling around it quite easy to setup.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not sure, but is something like Divshot a viable replacement for Heroku - <USER2> both seem to be doing the same thing: developer webapp hosting, but there's probably a difference somewhere.

<comment><USER47> Seems like it's only for static sites? So if you mean someone's jekyll blog, sure, it's a viable replacement for Heroku. But then, so is Github Pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I do not believe Brian has a strong understanding of what it actually takes to do ops work.

1) Downtime.

This is such a huge fallacy, if you think doing this yourself means no downtimes think again. If you had a top notch ops team you are still going to have outages in the middle of the business day. This team of ops guys you hire, guess what? They are not going to be deploying at 1am every day, that is not sustainable. They are going to deploy in the middle of the day, and guess what, they will make a mistake. And guess who notices outages first most times? Customers.

Heroku's uptime is typically in the 99.9%'s, I don't think you can do the same with one ops guy, maybe you will get lucky, however it is more likely that you won't.

5) Buildpacks

Build packs are an AMAZING abstraction. Just think about how you would solve the following without buildpacks:

5.1) Install libgeos on all the hosts running a specific application?

5.2) Create and scale new worker instances on demand?

5.3) How do you setup logging for all these servers?

5.4) Health checks for these services (tcp, http)

5.5) Alerting and automatic failover

* pssh? That will work fine until you spin up a second server and forget all the incatations to get your software up and running. * Puppet? I am sorry but Puppet, chef and their ilk are horrible, who knows what state any machine is ever in at any point in time. humans will inevitably forget to ensure absent, or make an assumption about state in puppet land. Nevermind the slow feedback loop in puppet land. Oh hey you want to change all the servers running X to now run Y instead, good luck with that. * Mesos? Mesos is the best open source scheduler out there, Marathon makes it easy to deploy to and there are scripts to run easily on ec2. However if you want to install native dependencies (libgeos etc) you will still need to do one of the above things. * Docker? Docker is an amazing way to package your app up and ship it to run on Mesos, however how do you package docker apps and ship them? Guess what? Buildpacks.

Now consider this on Heroku (5.1) Add the [https://github.com/ddollar/heroku- buildpack-multi](https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi) (5.2) Change your procfile (5.3) There are plugin's for that

Oh hey you can also write your own language, write a buildpack for it, and deploy it to production without ever having to get an ops person anywhere to setup a server for you. I am sorry but that is nothing short of amazing.

2 and 4)

I agree 100%, it sucks to feel powerless and have no insight as to when things will be resolved, however if you work in any decent size org ops things will go down, and you will also have to wait to see any resolution. I agree it feels better to see people working busily in your office because you can see the sense of urgency. I

3) Pricing:

In regards to pricing: yes Heroku is very expensive. However for small and medium teams it is much cheaper than hiring an ops person. You also get an economy of scale when you use Heroku; Think of all the things heroku takes care of for you: automatic failover on hardware/software(segfaults)/vm issues. Disks filling up on some host (it is embarrassing how many times I have seen something as simple as this cause issues). Agility; You need to switch MRI out for JRuby or rubinius, no problem, just update your ruby "version" in your Gemfile. The Heroku platform is superior in almost every way for running small to medium size applications then any in house cooked alternative.

I am very familiar with the alternatives out there, I have contributed to dokku's buildpack repo [https://github.com/progrium/buildstep](https://github.com/progrium/buildstep), and have patched docker.

There is no good behind the firewall/on my vm/hardware alternative for heroku atm. People are making progress but you won't really get anything as full featured as heroku.

Best of luck to you Brian.

<comment><USER49> _> Puppet? I am sorry but Puppet, chef and their ilk are horrible, who knows what state any machine is ever in at any point in time._

I _always_ know what's on my servers all the time; I build immutable servers and throw away the old. And I'm not particularly knowledgeable or skilled at this; I just use a little good sense. I mean, your problems with devops may actually exist, but this is silly.

<comment><USER48> Sure, but the feedback loop is still slow, also adding support for a new app is much more time consuming, I would much rather have an api call and a git push and get back to delivering value.

<comment><USER49> You may rather have that, but then _it breaks_ or _it doesn 't scale_ and you're up the creek. Which is why people pay people like me.

At Localytics, adding a new Play 2.x (our current standard) app into our new deployment infrastructure takes one command and about 120 seconds. The only part for which a developer needs devops input is the first production deploy, which require a signoff and some (automated, but privileged) IAM permissioning. Adding a new app on a framework we haven't incorporated yet (Rails is probably next) would take a few days, but needs only be done once for all developers at the company. And we know it works with our entire ecosystem.

You might have had bad experiences in the past, but you're extrapolating from them to the state of the world. It's not what you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> delta-clu Hi guys, we're actually working on bare-metal PaaS, and we're a couple of weeks away from launching a beta.

</comment><comment><USER50> what's funny, I read it and didn't go to heroku's website - now all the ads I see are from them

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm wary about a lot of these SASS/PASS/IASS services. The "don't put all your eggs in one basket" cliche comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER52> Thank god you finally realized that :)

</comment><comment><USER53> s/mainteance/maintenance/

</comment><comment><USER54> Why don't you use a dedicated server ?

[http://www.kimsufi.com/en/](http://www.kimsufi.com/en/)

It's not that complicated... And it is far cheaper !

</comment><comment><USER55> Heroku support options have always worked to shelter their employees from customers and as has been pointed out, despite the steep decline in costs, their prices have not changed. It's a shame because they were a trendsetter, but they are quickly being surpassed by players like DO, Linode and Poppup.

<comment><USER56> Poppup?

<comment><USER57> The company that $parent is the founder of. Which, if you google for, you discover that their page is titled "Blog Logo" and contains no content. Check back in a week or so, I guess.

<comment><USER55> A frivolous addition with no facts to check. Admitted. Give it twelve weeks. The point is that Heroku can do better. No offense meant to sales force or it's employees, just honest feedback based in real experiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> > It has been heavily reported that AWS has cut their pricing quite a bit over > the past few years. Yet, how many times has Heroku reduced its price?

This is the bit which confuses me. It is easy to think that there should be correlation between Heroku pricing and AWS pricing.

However just because AWS drops their pricing does not mean the capex for Heroku is dropping.

<comment><USER59> Even if there is a capex drop, Heroku's focus is simplicity. 5 or 10 cents an hour is part of the value prop; it may be hard to translate a 55.4 to 49.8 cent/hour drop for an AWS instance into their pricing model and not lose that simplicity.

<comment><USER58> > and not lose that simplicity.

Very interesting point</comment></comment></comment>


IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude - <AUTHOR> https://apenwarr.ca/log/20200708 <comment><USER2> The people who make the decisions about IPv6 adoption are not users, they are ISPs. You get an IPv4 address on your router WAN port because that is what your ISP gives to you.

From an ISP's point of view IPv6 is a lot of No Business Case. Those three words are the death knell for any proposal to do anything in any business that expects to be here next year. It has exactly nothing to do with the geeky I-could-have-designed-it-better arguments about the technology.

If you are an ISP that is a going concern, with a bunch of customers sitting on IPv4 addresses, then handing out IPv6 addresses makes no difference, except when it breaks something. You still have to give your customers just as many IPv4 addresses. So why bother?

If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic. Its going to break stuff. Lots of websites don't exist on IPv6, and customers are going to notice. Also your customers have spent the last 20 years slowly picking up bits of IPv4 lore, like the vital importance of 192.168.0.1, and are going to be puzzled when this doesn't work any more. All of this translates into higher support costs and more customer churn.

Also, your allocated block of IPv4 addresses is a valuable asset in its own right; not only does it have real financial value (around $20 per address at present), but it also acts as a barrier to entry for competitors; if you want to set up in business as an ISP you are going to have to acquire some IPv4 address blocks from somewhere, and they aren't making any more of them. Managers are trained to look for barriers to entry to their industry, and the current IPv4 situation is exactly that. No sane manager is going to do something to make it easier for new competitors.

Eventually, of course, the dam is going to break and IPv6 will become ubiquitous. ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more than providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT for legacy IPv4 addresses. More website hosting companies will support IPv6 in response, and suddenly IPv4 will be _so_ last-decade.

<comment><USER3> > If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic.

Well...

Comcast made IPv6 on-by-default to all residential customers some time ago (IIRC) and available (not sure if on-by-default) to all business customers. [1] Verizon requires all LTE devices to support v6 [2] and achieved >70% penetration in 2016 [3] (I'm too lazy to find a more recent statistic.) T-Mobile launched v6only in 2014 [4] and hit >90% in 2018. [5]

> Eventually, of course, the dam is going to break and IPv6 will become > ubiquitous. ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more > than providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT > for legacy IPv4 addresses. More website hosting companies will support IPv6 > in response, and suddenly IPv4 will be so last-decade.

In short, that happened.

[1] [https://business.comcast.com/help-and- support/internet/comca...](https://business.comcast.com/help-and- support/internet/comcast-business-internet-learn-about-ipv6/) [2] [https://www.apnic.net/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/vzw_apnic_1...](https://www.apnic.net/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/vzw_apnic_13462152832-2.pdf) [3] [https://archive.today/20160719154102/http://www.worldipv6lau...](https://archive.today/20160719154102/http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/) [4] [https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/cas...](https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/case- study-t-mobile-us-goes-ipv6-only-using-464xlat/) [5] [https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG73/1645/...](https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG73/1645/20180625_Lagerholm_T- Mobile_S_Journey_To_v1.pdf)

<comment><USER4> > ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more than > providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT for > legacy IPv4 addresses.

This implies an ISP can do math. Frontier acquired lots of IPv4 addresses w/ it's $10B purchase of Verizon assets(in 2015 & $7B in 2010 & 2B of AT&T).

Frontier has no plans to ever deploy IPv6.

<comment><USER5> How long before someone (probably in Asia) decides that their IPv4 address is worth more than the few customers who get there on IPv4?

<comment><USER6> At some point (but probably in more than a few years), IPv4 users will be the new IE6 of the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article was worth it just for this gem:

'If we were feeling snarky, we could perhaps describe IPv6 as "the String Theory of networking": a decades-long boondoggle that attracts True Believers, gets you flamed intensely if you question the doctrine, and which is notable mainly for how much progress it has held back.'

<comment> Sean-Der This trend has been bothering me a lot lately.

In standards bodies you will have a 'True Believer' about a particular topic. They will push it for years and years, and eventually get their way. The idea isn't bad, and would be great if included in the spec from day one. Unfortunately adding it to what we have today causes massive breakage/incompatibility.

Maybe I am just being resistant to good change. It just is frustrating because in most cases the 'True Believer' isn't going to go worry about the real-world impact of the change.

This phenomena seems to be hurting a lot of programming languages as well. So much harder to say no, and idealistic people are always going to find a way :)

<comment><USER8> I think, like python 2->3, the chaos and confusion of trying to pull off a "clean slate reboot" is very rarely successful or worth it.

<comment><USER9> There wasn't really any way to avoid what v6 did though. v4 can't handle addresses that are bigger than 32 bits, and that's the end of it.

v6 also has pretty much every backwards compatibility mechanism that can work with v4. It's hard to see how it could've done any better, and nobody I've ever talked to has managed to come up with anything that a) would work and b) isn't already a thing v6 does or can do.

I've seen plenty of proposals that don't satisfy those two conditions (like, "just add an octet" or "just make the numbers go up to 999")...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IPv6 is great if you control lots of components that need to talk to one another. Life is much simpler when you can trivially have thousands of globally routable addresses. It provides great value without having to be 100% deployed and for that, I am grateful.

I liken it to a commercial kitchen. Large numbers of identical steel pans, everything measured in grams, Cambros, walk-in refrigeration. Ideas and tech that are unlikely to catch on in the home kitchen, but when you operate at a larger scale, invaluable.

<comment><USER11> > ...everything measured in grams...

> Ideas and tech that are unlikely to catch on in the home kitchen

Given the posting time I'd guess you were _likely_ not US based so I found this surprising.

Even if that _is_ so, then I continue to be surprised every time I rediscover the fact that the US hasn't moved towards metrification.

Edit: rereading this the wording is harsher than intended. So to add: Either way the wording tickled me for some reason. Whether intentional or not, thank you (genuinely) for the smile this morning.

<comment><USER12> Metric units are a mouthful. Centiliter <-> ounce. Kilometer <-> mile. Centimeter <-> inch.

I think having easy-to-pronounce names for the metric units would help. Kliks are much better than kilometers.

<comment><USER13> I've never heard anyone say Centiliter. It's milliliters or liters. You find cl or dl on bottles but I've never encountered it in spoken language.

Which is nice because having fewer units make it easier to compare, even if converting in metric system is easy.

<comment><USER14> Shot glasses are 2cl around here.

<comment><USER13> I believe they're 2cl in all of Europe, never heard anyone use it outside of refering to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This motivated me to bite the bullet and jump through the hoops to set up an IPv6 address for my personal server. I got all the way to the end and then just when everything looked like it was working, I tried to load the page and... nothing. Turns out my _home_ network doesn't currently have an IPv6 address. Comcast in the SFBA seems to alternate giving out IPv6 addresses and then taking them away again every few months or so.

Works on my phone, though, so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯...

<comment><USER16> My ISP doesn't support IPv6 either. I get 0/10 on WiFi _vs._ 10/10 on mobile using Test Your IPv6. [1]

[1]: [https://test-ipv6.com/](https://test-ipv6.com/)

I've considered emailing to ask them to support it but haven't come up with a persuasive reason for why they should.

<comment><USER17> > but haven't come up with a persuasive reason for why they should.

I don't know about you, but whenever I see an ISP, hosting provider, or website that supports IPv6 I think: These guys know what they are doing, they care about quality, and they actually plan for the future.

I'd much rather do business with someone that supports IPv6 because of the above impression.

If I was running my own business that provided network related products or services I'd make IPv6 support required because I don't want to seem like I'm incompetent/lazy/ignorant.

So in short the persuasive reason is that it would improve their reputation. Technical people notice these things and base their recommendations on these sorts of impressions.

<comment><USER18> This was one factor when I chose my current ISP, they have provided IPv6 for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Still some distance to go, but Google see 30% of traffic from IPv6 now. It's slowly getting there.

[https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

Also, with most cloud hosting (AWS et. al.) it's fairly trivial to enable dual stack support.

<comment><USER20> > Also, with most cloud hosting (AWS et. al.) it's fairly trivial to enable > dual stack support.

I say AWS IPv6 support is pretty atrocious. You still can not set up pure IPv6 VPC, even for internal use, afaik most AWS services are still accessible only through IPv4, IPv6 VPC has lots of weird limitations, etc etc. Somewhat sad, considering that one would think AWS would be one to benefit from v6

<comment><USER19> Agree, it's sad and strange that they can't provide that.

Still, hosting an IPv6 service on AWS is fairly simple (at least in my experience).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article demonstrates yet another way that Postel's Law is a terrible design principle.

The amount of damage adherence to Postel's Law has caused can never be exaggerated. It has made securing TLS extremely difficult. It makes every kind of migration or evolution difficult, and interferes with securing anything.

The way to enforce The Anti-Postel's Law is with tests that include requests and responses to be rejected, and fuzzers that explore the whole boundary of well-formed interaction. Such a test will never detect every improper toleration, but it will make equipment and programs that don't conform hardly ever work, until they are fixed.

People used to like compilers that were lax about syntax requirements and provided lots of extensions. GNU compilers obliged, for a while, and then stopped. Now, even users of Microsoft compilers have demanded Standard conformance, and have nearly got it. A compiler that won't report errors is a way to generate lock-in. That was fine with Microsoft until they understood that it was locking them in, too.

</comment><comment><USER22> IPv4 continues to exist because consumers are subject to ISP monopolies.

"Symmetric bandwidth" or "Running my own server" are not criteria that can be used to choose an ISP because there is _NO_ ISP that offers either one in most of the country (US).

Since nobody can run their own servers, there is no pull for a larger chunk of addresses that would drive IPv6 adoption.

<comment><USER13> Not offering symmetric bandwidth has technical reasons. You only have a limited amount of bandwidth with most technologies and the vast majority of consumers is much better off having higher download than upload speeds.

I'm actually glad that ISPs default to only giving one IP address per household. Not having most devices directly reachable from the internet is an extra layer of security. It should never be the only one but can be an extra step to make it harder for atttackers to introduce malware.

<comment><USER23> No technical reason today, except for ISPs not upgrading to modern technology (fiber optics) because of being short term profit cheapskates.

<comment><USER24> This is not true. With fiber, if you want to go full-duplex, you need to specify which frequencies you want to use per direction. Because 99.9% of users use much, much more downlink thank uplink, it does not make sense to reserve an equal amount of bandwidth for up and downlink, because that would reduce the uplink bandwidth per fibre. Symmetric bandwidth is wasteful for everyone but the content providers (who might even want asymmetric bandwidth but with more up than downlink).

<comment><USER25> I think you are thinking of coax (cable) and not FTTH. Fiber has a much wider frequency range and one tends to think in wavelength terms and not frequency. And rarely is more than two wavelengths used for connecting customers (leaving most capacity of the fiber unused).

With FTTH there are two common deployment strategies: dedicated fiber per customer (then there is no reason at all why it wouldn't be symmetric) or (G)PON. With GPON the issue is that multiple customers share the downlink and uplink. And while it's easy to make the downstream burstable (meaning you can use more than 1Gbit/N - with N being the number of customers sharing the upstream GPON port), since only the ISP transmits in that direction for the upstream each customer gets assigned a timeslot to transmit (since GPON only uses a single wavelength for transmit and another one for receive). This means that even if the connection is symmetric at the ISP end (1G down and 1G up) one customer only gets 1G/N uplink bandwidth while they might briefly be able to completely saturate the downstream.

<comment><USER23> NG-PON2 improves on that by a huge margin: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NG- PON2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NG-PON2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One terrible way to switch to Ipv6 faster is to make existing services available only on ipv6.

Or create some cutting edge application that will work only on ipv6

I know ipv4 users like author mentioned will still be able to access them because someone else will plug in. We are stuck with ipv4 for decades, aren't we?

<comment><USER27> > We are stuck with ipv4 for decades, aren't we?

This was always going to be the case, even with more speedy adoption op IPv6. It's also not really a problem.

Making services just available for IPv6 is going to be a recipe for disaster of the service, you've now made the service unavailable for 80-90% of your audience, and they can't do a thing to fix it (their ISP has to). You need to be better than start-up-era Google, Facebook, YouTube or Netflix to push through that and force ISPs to adopt IPv6 to support you. Basically impossible.

Forced adoption is a much better model. Apple forcing iOS apps to work on only IPv6 connections if they want to get into the app store probably is one of the largest drivers of adoption by businesses small and large, and IaaS providers especially.

<comment><USER28> You're locking out 67% according to Google's latest figures.

51% in the USA.

Still too many to make it practical, but getting there.

<comment><USER27> That's good to hear :) I had numbers from a good while ago in my head then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The 'noise' on this plot of Google IPv6 adoption is interesting: [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

It looks quite periodic when you zoom in: at first I thought it might be different adoption rates in different timezones, but there's only one sample available per day so that doesn't explain it. Anyone know what might be going on?

<comment><USER30> It's higher on weekends and holidays, which is presumably connected to mobile devices having a significantly higher rate of IPv6 adoption.

<comment><USER31> You can see on the graph between March 10 and March 24 the significant increase in the number of people working from home by the proportion of ipv6 usage

<comment><USER32> You can also see the much higher utilization of IPv6 at the end of December that's pretty consistent for the last few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > That is, the ability for your connections to keep going even if you hop > between IP addresses. If you had IP mobility, then you could migrate > connections between your two internets in real time, based on live quality > feedback.

This bit is solved pretty well by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP), but of course, both ends of a TCP connection have to support it.

</comment><comment><USER34> In 2008 I was asked in one company to add ipv6 from a network stack because it was going ot be a government mandate to support ipv6. That came and went. In 2015 I was asked to add VLAN support to another network stack [https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5517.txt](https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5517.txt) to allow duplicate ipv4 address to co-exist in the same network. Ipv4 is not going anywhere, it doesn't have to. IpV6 is an effective way to segment your network at the hardware level.

</comment><comment><USER35> What I am severely disappointed about is Microsoft restricting Teredo to their Xbox services.

Previously it was quite easy to get IPv6 connectivity at home when your provider only offered IPv4. In fact you'd get IPv6 connectivity by default. But at some point 1 or 2 years ago that just stopped working altogether, and my recent attempts to get IPv6 over Teredo back failed: you can establish tunnel, but it does not transmit packages to IPv6 hosts.

Now I am at the hands of my ISP.

</comment><comment><USER36> A lack of fail-over is a problem at almost every level. Like how if my home internet has gone out and I've connected over wifi to my phone's hotspot, I have to disable my ethernet adapter before I can get at the outside world over wifi.

</comment><comment><USER37> As long as Reddit is ip4 only, ip4 won't go anywhere...

<comment><USER9> NAT64+DNS64 works fine for Reddit. I run my desktop without a v4 address and have no problems with it.

I'm running the NAT64 myself, but it could be done by the ISP just fine, at which point they wouldn't need to provision me with a v4 address. There are major ISPs out there that do exactly this (for example T-Mobile in the US).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Honestly, having worked for a hosting company in the past that was fastidious about IPv6 support, I can say a couple of things:

* It is almost definitely not worth it commercially, unless you've carved out your space in the community of people who specifically want IPv6

* It is much, much harder to work with than IPv4 and I don't believe this is only a lack of exposure

* Dual stacking is expensive and requires staff to pursue training with very uncertain levels of reward

IPv4 address space shortages.. could have been addressed by doubling the number of bits in an IPv4 address, rather than throwing out the many tools that already worked.

The last point in particular is heresy to network engineers, but perfect sense to commercial types. Adoption should be cheap, if not free. The huge up front human cost of training people to operate IPv6 is uneconomical. A 64bit IPv4.1 would be fine for decades.

<comment><USER39> There is a weird persistent idea that all anyone really needed to do was "extend ipv4 addresses" and everything ipv4 related would have remained compatible.

No, it still absolutely would have completely broken everything and anything that used ipv4, all the tools would still need to be thrown out.

There is basically no way such a proposal could work and maintain any sane level of compatibility.

Its evident right on its face, how exactly would an ipv4 only tool connect to a 64 bit "ipv4.1 address" ?

<comment><USER40> There were proposals for backwards compatible addressing schemes. But they were rejected for a "clean slate" approach. Almost 30 years later, we can see how successful that was...

EIP (Extended Internet Protocol) [0] was proposed in 1992 as a replacement for IPv4:

"EIP achieves maximum backward compatibility with IP by making the extended space appear to be an IP option to the IP hosts and routers.

When an IP host receives an EIP packets, the EIP Extension field is safely ignored as it appears to the IP hosts as an new, therefore an unknown, IP option. As a result, there is no need for translation for in-coming EIP packets destined to IP hosts and there is also no need for subnet routers to be upgraded during the transition period."

[0] [https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1385.html](https://www.rfc- editor.org/rfc/rfc1385.html)

<comment><USER25> IPv6 can do that too though! 6in4 is exactly equivalent to the proposed EIP extension. EIP still splits the internet into the old legacy v4 internet and the new EIP internet that cannot communicate with the old internet, since while you can send packets to a v4-only host it won't know what to do with it. You need to preserve this extra information - and IPv4 simply cannot do that. You cannot fit more than 32 bit of information into 32 bit..</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The HTTP Archive tracks how the Web is built. - <AUTHOR> http://httparchive.org

<comment><AUTHOR> this chart is kinda depressing

<http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#flash>

48% of all (measured) pages - still - use flash....

<comment><USER2> There's nothing wrong with using Flash unless you happen to be on iPhone/iPad and let Jobs make decisions for you. The rest of the internet and mobile & tablet has an ok-to-great (and gradually improving) chance of being able to access that content.

It's no less of a crime then javascript abuse [1], css abuse [2] and image abuse [3] - the other Flash charts show there's just 1.51 average flash files averaging a mere 60 kilobytes.

The problem isn't Flash it's that anyone can create a page on the internet, so they do, and the results do any and every technology they use an injustice. But the flip side of that is it's also a big reason our startups exist.

[1] <http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#mostjs> average 131kb average js, sites with over a _megabyte_ of js!!

[2] <http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#mostcss> sites with over 1/2 a meg of css (that's just wow)

[3] <http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#mostimages> average 51 images!!

<comment><USER3> "There's nothing wrong with using Flash unless you like your browser crashing, and also hate blind people or accessibility" - FTFY.

People have many legitimate reasons to not like Flash other iOS. It's about technology that appears to be fundamentally broken, hasn't been fixed in years even though Adobe has poured money into it, still doesn't run ideally on non- windows platforms, and excludes people with disabilities.

<comment><USER2> Adobe sucks at performance, that's a given. But Flash isn't automagically inaccessible, just like HTML/CSS/JS you're given the means to make something accessible, but probably won't (esp for more complicated web apps and interfaces).

<comment><USER3> Unless your site is pictures of text ( _cough_ Amazon front page any time an announcement is made _cough_ ) a screen reader will be able to pick up the majority of the content. In that way, HTML is pretty much accessible by default

Flash, to a screen reader, is just as opaque as a picture, unless extra steps are made to enable screen readers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The First 10 Apple Employees: Where Are They Now? (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-early-employees-2011-5?IR=T

<comment><USER2> #3 Mike Markkula was the money man Markkula was an early Intel employee and became a millionaire by the time he was thirty when the company went public. According to "Return to the Little Kingdom," his investment in Apple was less than 10% of his total worth at the time. He stayed at Apple until 1997, overseeing the ouster and return of Steve Jobs. When Jobs came back, Markkula was left. He has since invested in a few startups and donated money to Santa Clara University, for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

#2 Steve Jobs was given the number two just to irk him Why is Jobs employee number two? Michael Scott says, "I know I didn't give it to Jobs because I thought that would be too much."

#1 Steve Wozniak was the technical expert In the book "Return to the Little Kingdom" it says Wozniak told his parents with "steadfast assurance that Apple's bigtime investor would lose every penny," which indicated to use he lacked faith in Apple's success.</comment>


Yahoo accelerated stock options to retain employees - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/yahoo-accelerated-its-stock-options-to-try-to-retain-employees-2016-1?op=1?r=US&IR=T <comment><USER2> Quicker vesting of stock options should achieve the opposite I.e. lower employee retention - not increase it.

<comment><USER3> This new deal should make Yahoo more attractive to new hires who are afraid they might hate Yahoo and quit. It won't help retain anyone who is already hired who hates their job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> TLDR: Yahoo is allowing new employees to vest their RSUs after a month.

Apple is allowing to vest after 6 month now.

Source: I got an offer from Apple.

<comment><USER5> It would be nice to see this be the next form of comp companies start to compete on.

<comment><USER6> I'd rather have cash

<comment><USER7> RSUs in a highly liquid publicly traded company are pretty close to cash

<comment><USER8> But still not cash. Cash is king.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


27 Million Slaves - onreact-com http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-simmons/27-million-slaves_b_290057.html

<comment><AUTHOR> 1.Don't know about the numbers, do know that it is a serious concern.

2\. "A few months ago, I was appointed the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Permanent Memorial to Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which will be erected on the grounds of the UN in New York City." Frankly, a commission in the Coast Guard, or a job with the Department of Labor or the vice squad, would be likely to accomplish a lot more.</comment>


Why mobile developers should pay attention to Flutter in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://flawlessapp.io/blog/why-ios-developers-should-pay-attention-to-flutter-in-2019/ <comment><USER2> Strange, no mention that flutter is the main language used for Google Fuchsia's UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh, I didn't know that!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tulipan – a cryptocurrency portfolio balance management tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.tulipan.io <comment><AUTHOR> I created Tulipan (née Tulips) as webappification of an excel sheet that I used to update my cryptocurrency portfolio balances.

I have used Tulipan for over a year now and find it perfect for my own requirement but have not really managed to get many others to use it. Maybe there are issues discouraging others.

The front page is perhaps not clear enough as a landing page.

I tried Google Adwords but my whole account suspended immediately for still unknown reasons.

I tried Microsofts Bing ads but that was just an expensive experience with no conversion.

I might try Coinmarketcap ads but worried it is very expensive.</comment>