Ask HN: Review My App: SEOSiteCheckup.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.seositecheckup.com I developed a search engine optimization (SEO) tool targeted for non-programmers/small businesses, to help them easily analyze and improve their site for search engines. I haven't found many tools that do this (they generally seem a bit confusing), so I built an app that tries to do this in a more user-friendly fashion:
http://www.seositecheckup.com
I'd love to hear your feedback as to whether this is going in the right direction, missing some key features, or if the balance between SEO-speak/web terminology/simplicity should be tweaked. I've included explanations and links in the analysis where I thought it would be helpful, but I'm unsure of the right balance. Thanks for your thoughts! <comment><AUTHOR> I developed a search engine optimization (SEO) tool targeted for non- programmers/small businesses, to help them easily analyze and improve their site for search engines. I haven't found many tools that do this (they generally seem a bit confusing), so I built an app that tries to do this in a more user-friendly fashion:

<http://www.seositecheckup.com>

I'd love to hear your feedback as to whether this is going in the right direction, missing some key features, or if the balance between SEO-speak/web terminology/simplicity should be tweaked. I've included explanations and links in the analysis where I thought it would be helpful, but I'm unsure of the right balance. Thanks for your thoughts!

</comment><comment><USER2> I got an error when I tried to search

"Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Unknown modifier '/' in /home/jjoczpw/public_html/functions3.php on line 1702"

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm; strange - i don't seem to get any error? can you email me what URL you're checking? firstname.lastname@example.com. thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is good tool. How different it is from other tools such as websitegader.com or mysitegrader.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> My tool looks for a number of other factors which those sites don't, and specifically ignores other factors which they do (it's a matter of personal expertise/opinion as to which factors are really impactful/helpful for beginner/intermediate SEO analysis). It's also supposed to more clearly convey why certain factors are important to analyze, and just how important they are among the entire list. If that's not immediately coming across, that's good to know. Any other suggestions for better making that point/differentiation would be great.

</comment></comment><comment> onreact-com "Keyword tags are missing from this page. You should include meta-keywords to help indicate what your page is about to search engines."

No, it's not 1999 anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heheh, yes, definitely. That's why I've tried to indicate that it's only moderately important at best. Perhaps its best to remove that analysis entirely, but I think beginner's would be looking for that kind of analysis (just to see what keywords are being used - if anything, to check/avoid keyword stuffing there).</comment></comment>


Apple security rules leave inherited iPad useless, say sons - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26448158

<comment><USER2> I think the lesson here is not that Apple is overly cautious but that everyone needs to make sure that your important usernames and passwords are documented for your heirs to use when you die. Have your lawyer or trusted friend keep a safe copy. I once had a client who's husband had died and with him went all the critical usernames and passwords. I was able to get into his computer and retrieve the some files for the widow (it was XP) but she had a hell of a time closing accounts and making changes to account after he died.</comment>


Ask HN: Where Can a Non-Resident US Citizen Buy BTC and ETH? - <AUTHOR> both Coinbase and GDax require a valid US ID which i no longer have.. and sadly a valid US passport isnt enough.<p>i want to fund the purchase via US Bank transfer. and worst case a ccard. <comment><USER2> Most exchanges will ask US residents for multiple forms of identification to prove you are who you say you are. The best thing you can do is fix your ID issue and re-apply to GDAX or Kraken.

Also, secondarily, it is better to use a reputable exchange. I don't think you want to wake up one morning and find the exchange gone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use a different exchange.</comment>


AWS Free Trial Scam (Lets Help This Fellow) - <AUTHOR> To AWS:
I tried AWS "Free Trial" to explore your services but without any idea that I'll be charged $1,623 which is supposed to be a money for my family in the Philippines. I received an email this March 1,2019  saying that I exceeded the limit last January 2019 and to my surprise you guys deducted $ 1,623 from my bank account without my approval. How you get money from people is totally unprofessional, I felt like I became a victim of a SCAM/FRAUDULENT activity. It's not a "Pay-As-You-Go subscription" like what posted on your website. Can't believe that a huge company like you will do this to a common users like me.
I have tried MICROSOFT AZURE which is totally real free trial as you need to manually accept Pay-As-You-Go subscription otherwise your service will be stopped & you wont be get charged. They're honest and transparent to their clients. Hope you'll do the same to your customers. Please keep them safe from unforeseen charges.
It's been 3 days that I'm not getting a response regarding my refund. I hope you won't let my family wait that long for the money they badly needed back home.
Case ID  5848653751 <comment><USER2> This isn't the AWS support forum, I'm afraid you've taken a wrong turn somewhere.</comment>


Ask HN: Review our startup's relaunch, Browseology.com - <AUTHOR>

We had a preview launch of Browseology last week and got great feedback from the community.
Browseology is a real-time collaboration browsing tool with zero barrier of entry.
We've put together a shopping destination that has a strong focus on collaboration.  The site allows shoppers to connect with friends and experts without any setup or installation, instantly giving them access to real life recommendations in the form of action (browsing), rather than just discussion or chat.
What's new in this release?

  - New powerful and focused tools for getting connected

  - Homepage as a launchpad to make connecting easy

  - How this works page, which lays out some high level information on how the site works and how to use it

  - Real-time browsing experience improved with a Browseology feed, which shows the products you have visited and the chat context around them, giving you a reference you can go back to.

  - More focus on collaboration actions, to give better feel of what's happening.
 Try it yourself, it's fun:
http://www.browseology.com
We'd love to hear your feedback! <comment><USER2> <http://www.browseology.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> ah thank you for putting in a clickable link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I signed up to become an expert using my twitter account: nice seemless integration.

Next I added some profile info and hit the save button. The save registered, but I was left on the edit profile page. It felt like I was left hanging: what do I do now? You should funnel the user back (or at least show a prominent link) to another area of the site.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like how you now have a simplified, functional launchpad/landing page, along with a quick link to the "how it works" page.

Overall, the pages are less cluttered: you've cleaned it up and it shows. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Love browseology so much that i became an expert.</comment>


Ask HN: Do we need foldable screens or it it just another fad? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Just like prior buzz technologies, these things often start with no clear purpose outside of their inherent cool factor. Once the novelty of version one-point-uh-oh wears off, useful ideas emerge in the form of wish lists.

For example, VR/AR goggles and smart watches were ridiculed but now are starting to show real promise. A lot of the advancement is directly related to user response and 3rd party development after experiencing the clumsy beginnings.

As for bendy foldy screens, I've been thinking about the way my desk is lined with monitors with varying devel tools here, there and everywhere around me. How about one long seamless U-ish shaped surround screen instead? I'd never have to worry about trying to match colour temperatures etc again. I'll buy it!

</comment><comment><USER3> Define "need"?

For me, if it's a way to get back to phones that are small enough to use with one hand and fit into the stupidly tiny pockets of women's jeans, they can't come soon enough. But if they're a way to open a phablet into a mid-size tablet they seem pretty pointless.

Larger foldable screens might be kind of neat, too. Imagine a 17" or even 19" laptop that folds into the footprint of a 10" tablet. Suddenly computers with tons of working screen space become far more portable.

</comment><comment><USER4> I suspect they will never feel very nice because they can't be glass.

Any ideas on how to solve that?

<comment><USER5> There's no reason it can't be glass. Glass can be made highly flexible: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_radius#Fiber_optics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_radius#Fiber_optics) says a bend radius of 15 times the diameter of the glass typically is a safe assumption.

That factor 15 doesn't directly apply to plates of glass, and still might give too high a radius, but this is a hotly researched field.

For nice demos, look at [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=12OSBJwogFc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=12OSBJwogFc)

(And of course, there's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass), invented about 2,000 years ago.

<comment><USER4> I find that kind of hard to believe based on experience. I suspect a .3mm sheet of glass could make a bend radius of maybe 500mm, not 4.5mm.

The numbers just feel way off.

I suspect glass that can safely fold with a 5mm bend radius would be extremely thin and fragile.</comment></comment></comment>


rgb2cmyk – CUI tool for convert RGB image to CMYK image - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/azelpg/rgb2cmyk <comment><AUTHOR> More details available on its homepage.[0]

[0] [http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/linux/rgb2cmyk.html](http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/linux/rgb2cmyk.html)</comment>


Show HN: A platform for creating tutorials using Markdown - <AUTHOR> https://codeilm.com/stories/ <comment><AUTHOR> Its a platform for creating tutorials/stories only using Markdown.

You can \- Create step-wise tutorials

\- Embed YouTube videos on your posts

\- Add all your posts to your personal website with just one line of code

\- Measure how your posts perform over time with views/likes/location metrics

\- Suggest improvements for a tutorial similar to a pull request in Github (still in active development, will be released by this weekend :) )

\- Add projects and show it to the community so that you can find a partner to work on your project.

<comment><USER2> I clicked the top link, there was an animation, but no change.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a way I can make $10,000 before the end of December? - <AUTHOR>

I want to earn $10,000 before the end of December. I'm a student and an app developer (iOS and Windows Phone). I took the fall semester off to do some more work but my apps aren't really making much money.
My goal was to develop more apps which in turn would net me more money but I don't think it's a viable plan. I just want to make enough so I can get through school without any problems. That's how I settled on the 10K figure.
What do you guys think I should do? I'm open to any and all suggestions. <comment><USER2> Find businesses which require apps. Contract out your services in app development to them at e.g. $100 an hour or $4k a week. This gets you to $10k fairly reliably.

You'll eventually want to raise that rate substantially as $100 is rather below what the market is currently paying for iOS developers, but that's a decent place to start. (This assumes that you're capable of delivering on a level of professionalism commensurate with that rate. Your code should actually work, you should respond to emails, you should not miss deadlines because "lol partied hard last night", etc.)

<comment><USER3> This seems like it might be based on the assumption that OP is in SF. What about a place like, say, Chicago? Is $100/hr still below market rate for iOS devs there?

If so, well, I'll happily make you an iOS app for $120/hr. Wow. In fact, this is more than "Wow." Either patio11 lives in an alternate world, or I've completely missed the fact that devs have become _that_ valuable outside of SF. I mean, we're talking about someone who hasn't even graduated uni yet. Nothing against undergrads at all -- they're some of the most productive devs -- it's just that the world tends to pay more for grads.

Another question: how should one "find businesses which require apps"? Door to door?

EDIT: The more I think about this, the more absurd this advice sounds. Patrick, would you give a more thorough overview of the steps necessary to accomplish what you're suggesting, from the point of view of someone with zero experience except with the technical and artistic aspects of delivering a product? (I.e. no experience with the social aspects of landing a gig like this.) >$100/hr is roughly nine times what a college student working fulltime can expect to get at an average job, so what you're suggesting is no small feat, especially for an undergrad. What kind of social tricks are involved to pull this off?

<comment><USER2> I get this a lot, and I understand it, because when I was 20 and earning the princely sum of $12.50 an hour it was outside of my experience that any business anywhere would pay $100 for anything which was not e.g. a lawyer. I am now older and, knock on wood, wiser.

There are no "social tricks" involved -- well, not in the sense that you're thinking. You don't need a magic mind control beam to sell things to businesses. Here, I'm a geek like you're a geek. Can you (or J. Random Hypothetical Dev) outline how you would convince me, a fellow geek, that you could successfully program iOS applications? Showing me something you have made would suffice. Talking about the process of building iOS applications in a way which made it sound like you knew what you were talking about would also suffice.

Now pivot from the technical question to the business question. Given that I (or K. Random Small Business Owner) has a business doing $FOO, how does that business make more money or spend less money as a result of having an iOS application built for it?

I know exactly how you'd sell _me_ an iPhone app. You'd ask if any of my SaaS accounts had ever canceled because of lack of an iPhone app. I'd tell you that that happened X0 times. You'd say "How much was their aggregate spend per month?" I'd say "A few thousand bucks." You'd say "So, to a first approximation, an iPhone app being available is going to be worth a few thousand bucks per month to your company within a few months." (n.b. This is just an example rather than a request to get proposals, guys.)

How would you convince e.g. a financial adviser that he urgently wants to have an iOS app written? That might start with "How much do you make on your average customer account every year?" "A few thousand dollars." "How often do you get to talk to them?" "Mostly commonly, once or twice a year." "Do they ever cancel saying 'I don't understand what I'm paying you for." "That's my #1 cause of losing clients." "Wouldn't it be better if you were on their home screen every day?" "YES."

How would you convince a restaurant that they want want a delivery app? Fill in the blank.

How would you convince a plumbing company that they want something their plumbers can use to check-in and check-out of work sites? Fill in the blank.

As to where you find businesses: I suppose you could sell things door to door, but most people don't. One way which works for a lot of people is to throw an event with the local e.g. Chamber of Commerce about some technology topic (maybe an overview of how mobile is changing the Internet, a subject on which you're vastly more educated than the average owner of a firm with $2 million a year in revenue in your local community) and having business cards and a willingness to continue the conversation when people try to talk to you after the event.

<comment><USER3> Okay, so we've gone from "You can make $100/hr making iOS apps" to "You can make $100/hr making iOS apps if you happen to live in a city that lets you throw an event, figure out which people you need to convince to let you throw that event, have enough public speaking skills (along with presentation skills and "appearance skills") to wow the audience, _and_ you can somehow get local business owners to attend your event."

The overview is really excellent, it's just that I'm getting the feeling "connecting competent iOS devs to business owners" is a huge unsolved problem.

Could I persuade you to throw out some more ideas for how to connect with the right people to land a $100/hr gig?

(I appreciate that this thread is rather not-very-visible, so maybe your time is better spent elsewhere. But I figured I'd at least ask, since the advice would be so valuable.)

<comment><USER2> _Could I persuade you to throw out some more ideas for how to connect with the right people to land a $100 /hr gig?_

Write up a case study on how you made a business $MONEY using your iOS programming skills, submit to HN.

Contact other iOS freelancers, particularly those who appear to be doing well, and ask if they could provide you referrals for overflow work or work which does not fit their interest (wrong budget, wrong client pool, wrong location, etc).

Cold call or cold email people. Dirty secret: it works.

Work your offline and/or online social networks, asking people if they will warm-intro you to business owners who fit the general profile of "People who could conceivably write very small [+] checks."

[+] This goes against everything in my upbringing and what I believed about the world as a college student, but it is an important lesson for technologists to learn very early in their careers: $4,000 is _not a lot of money_ to many businesses.

<comment><USER4> Since you're current in college, you can actually use that to your advantage with certain people. You can now reliably cold call certain people all by saying "Hi $COLLEGE alumni! I'm currently in $COLLEGE" and people will talk to you. I'm sure there's a lot of people still local around the school. How do you find the people? LinkedIn or through your college, they always have things to connect with alumni.

You can then ask 'if they will warm-intro you to business owners who fit the general profile of "People who could conceivably write very small [+] checks."'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you really want to make $10000 be stupid.* Take a simple and successful app and do it better and sell it for less than the other guy. Don't try to be smart, innovative, or creative and hope that it succeeds, just be better. The stupider and more successful the idea, the more chance you have to get your cash by being better.

*@FAKEGRIMLOCK says it much better.

<comment><USER6> haha, yeah like the Samwer Brothers, they copy existing startups. [http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/the-samwer- brot...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/the-samwer-brothers-are- germany-s-titans-of-internet-entrepreneurs-a-833374.html)

To be honest, you probably won't make money with this until December.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's only about $18/hour if you're working full time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does that really matter? At least it's something.

<comment><USER8> He means you can make that much by working full time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh. Sorry. I'm a bit tired and I'm a bit out of it. While I could make that much working full time, there are no jobs that pay that rate around here. Most jobs I've found around here pay minimum wage. The most I've found for someone like me pays $11.50/hr.

<comment><USER6> $11,50? I am serious. You get 10Eur/h for cleaning floors in Germany. I can't believe that you'd get $11,40/h for coding an iOS App. No way! Even the cheapest company I know pays 50Eur/h for an iOS dev and they're currently valued between 120Eur/h and 200Eur/h here.

I know some law students, who clean floors, because they don't want to fill their head with useless stuff, when they can get along with 80Eur a day and concentrate on studying instead of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can develop apps on the iphone?

Well, look at craigslist, freelancer websites and hustle hustle husetle.

You can sell your ability to those with an idea who are posting.

However, you will only be studying/schooling/working/looking for work. No GF/BF, not much social time.

Be a freelancer, and the future is in your hands.

</comment><comment><USER10> Back when I was at university I did a lot of work on rent-a-coder, now vWorker. Initially it was hard to win business, the first few jobs I did were worth almost nothing. After I did those smaller jobs and built some rep I found that local contractors (I am Australian) preferred to hire me over some of the others due to language difficulties. Ended up earning more than $10K from projects, however not in such a short timespan.

In short, sell your skills and make sure to emphasise that you're a good communicator.

</comment><comment><USER11> How quickly can you throw together a website for a local business that lacks one? Say that you will set one up for a flat fee is they pay for Domain and hosting. Hundred bucks for a few hours right there.

As for app sales, marketing is incredibly important in ios sales. How are people finding your app?

Finally if you are going to school, reach out to alumni.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am in nearly the same boat as you. I am a college student, who makes iPhone Apps, and I've just recently become a freelancer/consultant.

Here's a tip. $10,000 might seem like A LOT now, but it is really just ($1,000 x 10 projects), ($2,000 x 5 projects), ($4,000 x 2.5 projects/weeks), etc. What I'm saying is that if you break it down, it isn't that much, and it becomes quite easily attainable in 2~3 months time.

First off, look at patio11's comment in this thread, memorize it, and make it your new business mindset from now on. His blog woke me up to the reality of doing business (If you haven't, check it out:[http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/)).

Ok, now onto what what you really want to know - how specifically do you make $10,000 in a few months?

1st, have a specific goal and a desire. Check!

2nd, set up a business to do your freelancing through. I set up a sole proprietorship for $52. Now make a website. I used SquareSpace to set up an already-designed website that I modified just a bit, and they provide the whole website-in-a-box package for $10/month. Now set up personal Twitter & LinkedIn accounts if you haven't already. This whole process took me 30 minutes online.

3rd, find clients that are willing to pay you for your services. AHHHH! This is impossible! No one is going to pay for MY skills, right? VERY, VERY, VERY WRONG. You say that you've already made apps. You can already prove that you can make an app and put it in the App Store. You're way ahead of a lot of people. Make a list of 20 local businesses that might like to have an app. I'm talking about locally-owned restaurants, dental offices, ice cream stores, etc. Now, make an overall script of what you would say to them, and modify it slightly to fit the business. Call them up in the morning when you expect them to be less busy, and sell them on the idea that they want an app for their business. I know what you're thinking - UGH... COLD CALLS? REALLY? Well, they work, and they're a great way to get started! They are just the first step! Soon enough, you will never have to do it again! Oh and, things will go wrong. Don't let that stop you, because you'll be the one that is laughing when you have reached $15,000 instead of your originally planned $10k.

Read patio11's example of an ideal pitch, as posted above.

 _How would you convince e.g. a financial adviser that he urgently wants to have an iOS app written? That might start with "How much do you make on your average customer account every year?" "A few thousand dollars." "How often do you get to talk to them?" "Mostly commonly, once or twice a year." "Do they ever cancel saying 'I don't understand what I'm paying you for." "That's my #1 cause of losing clients." "Wouldn't it be better if you were on their home screen every day?" "YES."_

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey, reach out to me. I might be able to help.

Do you have examples of iOS or Android apps you've made?

<comment><USER13> iOS or Windows Phone _

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> check out this --> [http://www.therightmarketingidea.com](http://www.therightmarketingidea.com) <\--

<comment><USER15> This is just ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How much money do you have now? Depending on your starting amount, the $10,000 number becomes more or less realistic.

If you have $0, it's not very likely. Your best hope is to find a job and re- evaluate in a couple months.

If you have $10,000, doubling it becomes more realistic, but not exceedingly so. Writing an app costs money (yeah, I know, it's amazing to think that you can't just do this shit for free!) and you still have to live while developing it.

If you have $100,000, that's a 10% growth. Betting correctly on the stock market should be pretty straight forward in this market.

If you have >$500,000, this is cakewalk.

If there were a manual to life, it'd tell you that having money is the easiest, most reliable way to make more money. Social climbing is still extremely hard in our generation, but at the very least computers have made it easier for the intelligent and dedicated.</comment>


How To Use Google Plus - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_start_with_google_plus.php#.Tia4sh5fOrY.hackernews <comment><USER2> Step one should be make sure you are not a longtime/loyal google apps/organization (whatever the term is) user.

I'm really surprised that you cannot use G+ if you host your email with google. Its mind boggling for so many reasons...

</comment><comment><USER3> The article lost me at "Waiting for a Google Plus invite?"

I'm not waiting for an invite and don't plan to use Google Plus. Won't use Facebook either. It's not like everybody who wasn't on FB is now jumping on the G+ bandwagon.</comment>


Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://cs007.blog/ <comment><USER2> So you've completed CS007. And graduated Stanford. You've even managed to save around $10K in cash from various summer jobs and gifts from relatives. The consensus advice investment management professionals would offer is to sock it away in a well-diversified set of Vanguard Funds. Which you keep adding to on a monthly basis allocated from your paycheck. As well as re-investing any dividends generated. Which will compound nicely over the next thirty years. Leaving you with a $1M nest egg that will provide stable yearly income during your golden years. As well as a decent inheritance left over for the next generation.

But I have a really hard time giving this advice to a 22 year old. I certainly didn't heed it myself. Instead I used the cash and spent 100% of it on my own professional and personal development. So, naturally, since this is Stanford and Silicon Valley. I'd include a section on Risk. Taking it. Managing it. What are the rewards. As well as the costs. But with the emphasis the post- graduation 5-10 year window may represent a unique opportunity in your life to take it. And that there are programs such as StartX and YC available to assist should you decide to go all in.

<comment><USER3> The advice I give to people on here is generally upvoted, except when it comes to investing. If you're in the top 1% or 0.1% intellectually _and_ you're active in the tech community as a software developer or other highly technical skill you are very well situated to beat the market.

Pick any decade where this wasn't true. In the 90s it was buying web domains or investing in personal computer companies. In the 2000s it was investing in platforms and social networks or even just building a company in the mobile space. In the 10s it was cryptocurrencies and AI.

All of these things were obvious and even if you didn't get in at the very ground floor (buying sex.com or 50 bitcoins for a dollar) you still make hyper, hyper gains.

100000% returns? Totally possible. Now go on and take all that knowledge you hard fought for at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, or Waterloo (or even on your own!) and use it too... Invest in low fee ETFs.

Great plan guys.

<comment><USER4> I'm a smart guy with a good degree. I still wouldn't represent myself in a court, or diagnose my own medical ailments, or file my own accounts. Why would I think I could pick stocks better than a professional?

<comment><USER5> Because if you can pick an index fund with low fees, you are already beating most professional stock pickers. Yes, you may find the one or a few active investors who are amazing, but unlike law or medicine, there is a fallback option that is consistently successful in both short and long term compared to most stock picking, even professional. Note that you may all lose if the market goes against you, even active stock folks with lots of "hedges against the downside" and whatnot.

<comment><USER6> I don't think index funds are what the parent meant by "picking stocks". Going with a fund, even an index fund, is still a form of delegating the low-level work to financial professionals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is really great but IMHO college is too late for this. Personal finance should be taught in middle and high schools just like health classes.

When I was 18 and a freshman in college I saw some crazy decisions including using student loans to put a down payment on a car or taking out private loans for spending money.

<comment><USER8> I was taught budgeting and basic finances in both middle and high school (I went to public school in NJ) and whatever I learned evaporated immediately because I had next to no use for it at the time. College (when people are getting more independence than they've had previously) is a much better time to teach people these skills.

In general, I chafe at the types of educational arguments that go "we should teach kids more useful skills, like how to file a tax return!". I think such arguments would benefit from the knowledge that some students are already being taught this, and need to relearn it when they get out into the work force anyway.

<comment><USER9> > I was taught budgeting and basic finances in both middle and high school (I > went to public school in NJ) and whatever I learned evaporated immediately > because I had next to no use for it at the time.

Absolutely. This is why, as a parent, I'm going to teach my kids about money early, letting them make consequential mistakes as early as possible, probably starting around 2nd or 3rd grade. We'll fund the roof over their heads, the food in the fridge, very basic clothes (shoes, socks and underwear, basic shirts and pants, basic outerwear) but anything else they'll have to spend their own money on. They'll get a fixed allowance plus they'll get extra money for doing things around the house. Initially this will be in "the bank of mom and dad" with a super high interest rate (like 5-10% per month) which will hopefully help make the concept of compounding interest stick earlier. Over time we'll transition to joint bank accounts with separate debit cards.

<comment><USER10> My parents taught me (most likely inadvertently) all kinds of financial lessons very early in life. I had a weekly allowance that was earned doing generic chores. There was a list of bigger spring-cleaning-style chores that had their own separate payouts. Most importantly, 50% of everything I "earned" was required to be saved in the bank. The rest was mine. Paying taxes and saving appropriately was never something I had a hard time doing as an adult.

<comment><USER9> Requiring 50% to be saved is a good move, I might steal that. I think I might also do a "match" to a Roth IRA when they're older and actually earning taxable income.

My mom never tied allowance to chores, we were just expected to do chores. The problem with tying them together is that at some point the kid will just opt out and you have no leverage. I had a bank account but we were never diligent about deposits so saving was harder for me as a young adult.

<comment><USER11> > and you have no leverage

What leverage do you have in making children do chores in case if you do not motivate them by earnings?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a class full of engineers from Stanford, many of whom are going to be making $100k+ straight out of college. Yet 92% aren't going to be responsible for any student loans.

Wealthy parents? Incredible student aid from Stanford's endowment? Both? Either way, I have a feeling this is one of the biggest advantages they will have in achieving a secure financial future.

<comment><USER13> Behavior determines successful outcomes far more than circumstances.

Saving $5.5k in an IRA every year for 40 years earning 7% ARR is a retirement nest egg of $1.1M dollars.

Median family income is $60k, making this 9% of the budget. Even if you earned say... $25k/yr ($12 per hour) for your entire life, you can afford to save $5.5k per year.

There is zero excuse for most people not emerging a millionaire at retirement.

<comment><USER14> I feel like you haven't lived on $25k/yr, at least not without the help of student loans or family.

You take FICA out, some federal/state taxes, you've got less than $2k a month. That doesn't stretch too far in some places.

Also, since you're lower working class, you're not going to be buying in bulk. You're not going to be avoiding late fees. You're not going to have economies of scale available to you on a $100k annual income.

So, the ability to save $5.5k is much different for someone earning $25k vs $100k. I'm not saying it's outright impossible, but it will have measurable impact on lifestyle for the lower income worker, whereas not so much for the higher income worker, since each marginal dollar you earn provides less and less utility. But the first $25k you earn really is your lifeline to meet basic necessities in life.

<comment><USER13> I live on 18k/year in a HCOL area. Don't tell me it can't be done.

<comment><USER14> So you earn 18k, save 5.5k, and live off 12.5k? Do you have any assets, such as paid off home, that would significantly reduce your monthly expenses? Context would be key here.

<comment><USER13> I mean my living expenses, including rent, utilities, food, transportation, health care, etc, add up to $1.5k per month (or ~18k per year).

As in, I could make $25k (at a level where the tax rate is effectively near-0) and still save > $5k per year.

<comment><USER14> Is this employer-provided health care? Sounds like you're receiving is subsidized. Living on $18k a year would be rough. Are you splitting an apartment? How much would you be paying if you had kids and needed another bedroom? Again, context is key. For a single person in their 20s, who will have the lowest level of responsibility and statistically the best health situation of their life, it's possible. But for other people, $1.5k/mo in a HCOL would not cut it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let me make this as simple as possible.

The most important thing in personal finance is the delta between how much you net, and, how much you spend. Period. Increase the former, or decrease the latter. Preferably both. You will 'earn' far more in savings by the money YOU contributed than the amount paid to you in interest; unless you have much money over a long enough period of time, and you likely won't.

<comment><USER16> Person A saves $1000 from each paycheck. She invests it in index funds, and nets ~8% returns over a 30 year period.

Person B saves $2000 from each paycheck. She behaves like the average investor, and nets ~2.5% returns over a 30 year period.

Who do you think is going to wind up with more money? Person-A by a long shot.

The amount of money you save every month is undoubtedly important, but it's only half the story, and it's somewhat common knowledge. The way you invest your money is the other half of the story, and this is where most people seem to trip up. Personally, my parents saved a ton of money because it's common sense that it will lead to future prosperity. However, their investment strategy and track records are abysmal. They buy near the peak, sell during the recession, and sit out of the markets entirely during the recovery. They could have easily ended up with a retirement portfolio that's 2-4x larger than what they ended up with. I've tried telling them numerous times to approach investing differently, but they still refuse to listen. If there's anything people need to be educated on, it's on investment strategy.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2014/04/24/why-the- aver...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2014/04/24/why-the-average- investors-investment-return-is-so-low/#6bf14d79111a)

[https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what- average...](https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average- annual-return-sp-500.asp)

[http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/retirement/investment- go...](http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/retirement/investment-goal- calculator.aspx)

<comment><USER15> You left out the part where the market 'corrects' every 7-10 years and you lost 10-30% of your portfolio. It'll likely take you several years to recoup your lost investment at 8%.

You had a 100K invested, you lost 30K of it, leaving you 70K. At 8% interest it'll take you 5 years to just get back to where you were. Thats a full 20% of your investment life span. Count on this happening to you at least every 10 years.

Ya ya, I know. But it's happened to me personally at least 3 times in my adult life. Just how much risk is a person is willing to take is a personal question. If your shooting for an 8% avg return. You're a stuntman in real life.

<comment><USER17> The usual 7% long term figure for the S&P500 includes crashes and inflation in that number. You don't crash at 30% and then grow back at 7%. You grow at 7% on average at all times.

The only difference is volatility. If you need to cash out after the 30% crash, you lost a lot of money. Most long term portfolios reposition themselves towards less profitable but less volatile assets towards the end of their expected lifetime.

For an example you can look at the Vanguard "target retirement $DATE" indexes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fantastic set of topics! As an engineering undergrad at UC Davis, I took a course in engineering law which was incredibly helpful. It's great to see a course in personal finance for engineers. As an entrepreneur building financial services for STEM professionals, I see a distinct opportunity to educate this demographic. While financial education for all demographics is desperately lacking in the US, the STEM crowd has the mathematical training to be presented with a more rigorous treatment of the topics. Moreover, STEM professionals quite often have compensation packages that include complex financial arrangements (e.g. deferred comp.) and/or derivatives (e.g. options) that are difficult to value and/or manage.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there any significant benefit of thinking tens of long-term/short-term goals and planning, and managing different funds for them (emergency, travel, house, card, kid's college education..). Why not just have a 1-2 funds to dump your savings in and be smart about withdrawing from it? One could consist of conservative investment vehicles, other could have more aggressive ones.

<comment><USER20> Because when you've got one big savings account it is a lot easier to look at it and say "Oh! I can afford a new car now!" and cash out your entire savings on one thing without taking the other things into account.

Having different accounts for different goals keeps a clean separation of concerns. When your car account has enough to buy a car then you can buy it and know you aren't taking away from what you have planned for your kid's college education. If you decide to take money from one account to pay for something else you have to actually think about what you are doing and are more aware of the trade offs.

<comment><USER21> I've found de-coupling to be the key to altering this sort of behaviour. The balance of my savings and investment accounts are separate from my budgeting. I allocate funds at the budget level, the balance of my various accounts being a secondary concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Question for hackernews: where did everyone else learn about this stuff?

Going through the material, I found I already knew 50-75% of it, but from bits and pieces of information I learned over the years, not one consolidated place. Is it the same for others?

<comment><USER23> None of this was covered directly at any level of school (well regarded public school system in Northern VA).

I'd guess 50% or more I learned from my parents, 25%-ish from other school work ("advanced" math in secondary school, economics major at university), and 25%-ish from experience (huh, how did I run up this credit card? I shouldn't do that again!).

I had the impression that as an honors student, enrolled in primarily advanced classes from middle school onward, and then attending a top-20 university, it was just assumed I would know this stuff, or figure it out before getting into financial trouble. That was mostly true, though it's hard to comprehend how hard it can be to manage credit until you have a large credit line and a stable income.

<comment><USER24> I think that university still expects its incoming students to pick up stuff from their parents - you can see this on sites like stack overflow where graduates who are the first in their family to goto Uni - they don't seem to know stuff that say mat parents taught me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's an interesting idea, a game environment for testing/building one's personal finance skills:

[https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/financial- empowerm...](https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/financial-empowerment- challenge/ideas/the-sims-personal-finance-life-simulation)

<comment><USER26> Perhaps one where you do bootstraping ?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_\(statistics\))

And you get to see the effects of random life events. You get cancer, you are laid off, you sell your startup, etc.

<comment><USER25> Yes. And it would be nice if we could train a reinforcement learning algorithm on top of it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am neither a professional financial analyst nor a writer, but I wanted to share what I've learned about financial management over the last 25 years with my 18 and 20 year old kids, so I wrote a series of posts called Hacker Finances. I take a lot of liberties with the Hacker notion, but all of the advice is painfully learned and hopefully the kids will read it and profit, or at least avoid major mistakes, when they are ready.

[https://hackernoon.com/https-medium-com-davisjames-hacker- fi...](https://hackernoon.com/https-medium-com-davisjames-hacker-finances- introduction-14b8283e8677)

</comment><comment><USER28> This is really cool, albeit a bit high-level and leaves you with the question: ok, what does this _actually_ mean for me?

I hate these startup plugs on random threads (genuinely), but here it actually might be helpful for people. At Finimize, we're basically taking all the stuff that Adam is talking about and we're putting it into an algorithm that will tell _you_ what _you_ should be doing – from savings to investments to debt.

Like I said, not trying to pitch anything here, but feel free to check it out www.finimize.com/mylife – or ping me an email to hello[at]finimize.com if you want to get a demo (we're still in closed beta).

Peace!

<comment><USER14> Can you really boil down all financial decisions to an algorithm?

For example, should I pay off a low-interest mortgage earlier with higher monthly payments, or should I invest each marginal dollar in a low-cost index fund?

There's certainly a psychological benefit (for some people) to have the mortgage paid off; it's one less bill to keep track of, but of course, over a long period of time such as a 30 year mortgage, it's quite possible that it'd appreciate more than your home (plus mortgage interest) will.

Or another question I see asked a lot: Should I take a year off work in my 20s to travel abroad, not knowing how hirable I may be in twelve months, or how the state of the economy might be for hiring early career individuals?

It seems half science and half art to me. You can graph and show what decision X vs Y will look like for your finances, showing which will leave you with more dollars in old age, but I do not think that is the difficult question for younger savers today. They wonder, is this marginal dollar I have more valuable spent on an experience today, or should it be invested for tomorrow? It's the opportunity cost of saving.

One of your most valuable assets is time, and enjoying the present sufficiently (but not gratuitously) is important for a balanced life. Saving too much or too little will lead to serious imbalances either earlier or later in life. Maybe an algorithm can hint you are savings are too low, or too high, but it can't tell you exactly what to do.

<comment><USER29> > There's certainly a psychological benefit (for some people) to have the > mortgage paid off; it's one less bill to keep track of, but of course, over > a long period of time such as a 30 year mortgage, it's quite possible that > it'd appreciate more than your home (plus mortgage interest) will.

This is such a great point. I've been switching off between student loan payments, investing in index funds, and investing in individual stocks I'm interested in.

Objectively, an algorithm would tell me to invest in index funds only because they are considered to have the best risk vs return ratio - my student loans have a low interest rate (3-4%) and individual stocks are hugely variable for an uninformed investor. You could imagine adding a couple more things into this mix such as gold, crytocoins, and property as well.

I have started to rationalize this behavior as implicitly "buying the ability to choose". Choosing where and how to allocate my money is surprisingly empowering and there is a hidden value associated with that which may be worth more than the difference between the marginal gains. Does anyone else see themselves rationalizig similar behavior that may be economically irrational through this route? I wonder how this could be exploited in some sense by a financial device that gives that same sense, but instead captures some of the value left on the table normally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is really an excellent intro to personal finance. I came to it expecting to see the standard "save 10% of your salary" rule that's so pervasive. But this is really thorough. I wish my school had a course like this. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER31> the key with money/investing is you want to stay alive long enough to get lucky.

if you sock away money every month, make sure you have 6 months of living expenses off to the side for emergencies, bet ~20% on crazy things with unlimited upside and the remaining 80% in a very traditional way, you stand a good chance over the very long term.

just make sure that when things get rocky you are one of the strong hands and only sell when you want to.

as for the dollar values etc ... totally tied to city-specific cost of living ... totally impossible to compare between individuals (e.g., family vs. single, country-specific tax codes, medium and long term financial goals).

</comment><comment><USER32> Is there a pdf version of the slides? slideshare blocked here.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been interested in a household finance visualiser recently, but also don't want to upload my bank statements to some random website.

This uses IndexedDB, and is pre-alpha and very buggy and feature-less still:

[https://github.com/opyate/fin](https://github.com/opyate/fin)

Just putting it out there if anyone's interested in Clojurescript/Hoplon and personal finance.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there an audio lecture that goes along with this? I'm not seeing anything but the slides.

</comment><comment><USER35> "Session 7: Good Investing is Boring" \-- excellent title!

</comment><comment><USER36> Can't they use something better than SlideShare? I can't even display it fullscreen on mobile. Even a stupid old PDF would be far better than promoting this commercial crap.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is great but I think a personal finance course should be mandatory for all high school students. It is much more important than the the other curriculum.

</comment><comment> manu-chroma No lecture videos on the link. Just the slides for now.

<comment><USER38> That's too bad. So other item courseware have videos?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Question for HN: do you recommend any book for personal finance?

<comment><USER40> For basics and a kick in the ass - Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover. (Or listen to the Radio show for a bit)

Also, the Mister Money Mustache blog for a anti-consumerist viewpoint.

Beyond the basics, I haven't read much, but enjoy the Radical Personal Finance podcast. It is a mix of really in depth content, like a multi-part series on disability insurance, and the more "radical" bits, like strategies for living out of your car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looks like a fun bird course :)

</comment><comment><USER42> Why is there nothing for lecture 9: Real Estate? That was the one I wanted to read.

<comment><USER43> Not happened yet?

>The next seminar will be on Tuesday, November 28th at 4:30pm in Building 200, Room 034.

<comment><USER42> i don't read so well apparently

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Step 1: Buy Bitcoins in 2010.

Step 2: Try not to cry because you failed at Step 1.

T_T

<comment><USER45> I've found the easiest way to battle FOMO is not to compare yourself between then and now but more like what you would do if you DID purchase the coins in 2010.

More than likely, you would sell in 2010.2. There would be about 100 price points where your body would say CASH OUT. Markets are all about taking money from the inpatient and giving it to the patient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Did "CMD + F" to search for "Bitcoin" and "crypto"... Your government is likely to fail, trust in numbers.</comment>


Early antibody test results reveal more Covid-19 infections than confirmed cases - <AUTHOR> https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-19-underestimated-16211/ <comment><AUTHOR> It looks that this is a bit better study than the Stanford one:

 _" With help from medical students from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, USC researchers and public health officials conducted drive-thru antibody testing on April 10 and 11 at six sites. Participants were recruited via a proprietary database that is representative of the county population. The database is maintained by LRW Group, a market research firm."_

<comment><USER2> All the serological studies have found 30-80x prevalence so far, regardless of methods. I saw a preprint metaanalysis that looked at six of them in different areas. The worst outcomes seem to be tied to places with severe NO2 pollution, but because the R0 is so high, it's been all over the place.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can you please change the URL to [https://pressroom.usc.edu/preliminary- results-of-usc-la-coun...](https://pressroom.usc.edu/preliminary-results-of- usc-la-county-covid-19-study-released/) ?</comment>


Lower Cost S3 Storage Option and Glacier Price Reduction - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-storage-update-new-lower-cost-s3-storage-option-glacier-price-reduction/ <comment><USER2> This looks like it would be perfect for Tarsnap -- the data Tarsnap stores is almost always kept for 30+ days, and it's almost always in objects of 128kB or more. The $0.01/GB for reads would be annoying (one of the reasons Tarsnap is hosted in EC2 is because it has free data transfer to and from S3; data is regularly retrieved and stored back after filtering out blocks marked for deletion) but it would be cheaper.

One thing concerns me however: _Standard – IA has an availability SLA of 99%._

If this is just a reduced SLA but the actual availability is likely to be similar, that's fine. But if the actual availability is not expected to hit 99.9% -- say, if the backend implementation is "one copy in online storage, plus a backup in Glacier which gets retrieved if the online copy dies" that would be completely inadequate.

Hopefully we'll get more details over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is online storage.

If a GET fails, just retry as usual (most higher-level libraries do this automatically, sometimes with a backoff mechanism).

<comment><USER2> _If a GET fails, just retry as usual_

Thanks! This is a very important detail which isn't documented anywhere: Retries are likely to succeed. A service where 1% of requests fail but failures are completely uncorrelated is far more usable than a service where 0.01% of requests fail but they keep on failing no matter how many times you retry them.

<comment><USER3> Additionally, assuming your block data is being hash-addressed, i.e. not changing the S3 objects once they are in S3, adding CloudFront in front of your buckets may go a long way to increasing that percentage.

However, its SLA is a little more involved (for better or worse): [http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/sla/](http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/sla/)

I'm not accessing S3 from EC2, though, so another benefit for me was it brought my S3 network costs way down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Updated cross-provider comparison:

[http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/](http://gaul.org/object-store- comparison/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that. After looking at that comparison, I came across [https://www.runabove.com/index.xml](https://www.runabove.com/index.xml) who provide a good deal.

Storage at 1c/GB/month, outgoing traffic at 1c/GB/month and no charge for incoming traffic. Data is replicated 3 times.

<comment><USER6> Run Above is managed by OVH. Very cheap but not the most reliable, at least on their dedicated servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does Amazon claime 11 9's of durability when the chance of an asteroid extinction event is roughly 1000x as high?

This isn't a joke: I can't find any documentation on the risk model that lets them estimate 11 9's and what class of risks it includes.

</comment><comment><USER8> With the cost per GB for Glacier Storage now. Any small to medium company would be fiscally irresponsible to not use it as a primary disaster recovery option. $84 per year per TB is ridiculous for geographically diverse storage.

<comment><USER9> Everything related to Glacier is ridiculously complicated.

The pricing is tricky (the per-GB price is cheap, but the retrieval can get horribly expensive). There's the fixed 4-hour delay for all actions (including listing stored files), which makes any interaction a pain. And there aren't really any good clients or high-level libraries that abstract away this complexity.

For a disaster recovery, I would certainly go for something simpler and easier to use. When everything is one fire, the last thing I need is dealing with a tricky API to restore the company files.

<comment><USER10> There are Glacier clients that allow you to manage the "Restore Speed" so you don't get hit with ridiculous price hikes.

Glacier is PERFECT if you just need to restore a photo or document, and not the entire repo.

<comment><USER11> But you have to store things in larger archives or the per-object overhead hurts your pricing. When Glacier first came out I really wanted to use it, but it had so much complexity over just treating it like an object store that I didn't use it. Then add the fact that S3 Standard kept coming down in price and Glacier just stood still (thus the name).

<comment><USER10> I'm currently storing my entire photo collection of about 50GB and ~20,000 photos. It cost me about $3 to upload the entire library. I pay around 50 cents a month for storage. YMMV, but I'm very happy with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> These prices make the new Standard-IA storage significantly cheaper than the Reduced Redundancy Storage, even if you end up reading the data back.

However, I find it interesting that in addition to the cost per GB to retrieve data, this new storage class also has a significantly higher per-request cost, too. Actually, it looks cheaper to upload an object as a different storage class and then transition it to Standard-IA, since PUT of IA costs $0.01 per 1000, but PUT of another class costs $0.005 per 1000, and the cost to transition another class to IA is $0.01 per 10000. It's a small difference ($0.04 per 10k objects), but if you store an obscene amount of data on S3, that seems like enough difference to matter.

<comment><USER2> I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Standard-IA is basically Standard except with slow disks instead of fast. Slow disks have lower $/GB, but higher $/IOPS.

<comment><USER12> Seems unlikely, given some of the other properties it has; more likely, Standard-IA has fewer copies of the data, and then a backup in Glacier, which explains why it has high durability but low availability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems like a smart response to Google Cloud Nearline Storage. Slightly more expensive, but with the S3->IA->Glacier lifecycle mapping the ultimate costs may be lower with AWS, certainly the flexibility will be there.

Amazon, staring at its mighty armory, goes on the hunt for a tiny chink to repair.

<comment><USER14> Just a clarification the difference in cost-per-byte stored is 25% (1.25 cents vs 1). The rates are all so small it's hard to see that but when you say $12.50 vs $10 per TiB/month, I think that makes it more "visible". As you get into the PiB range ($10k/month on Nearline) and then consider storage for a year you've got a difference of $30k/year/PiB. For individuals doing a small backup even 25% isn't huge in absolute numbers, but in the petabyte range it matters a lot.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine (and not GCS or Nearline).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just released a tool Yesterday to give an insight on your S3 bucket size: [https://github.com/EverythingMe/ncdu-s3](https://github.com/EverythingMe/ncdu-s3)

<comment><USER16> Can you say a few words about this. What's the advantage over doing a recursive ls with something like s3cmd?

<comment><USER15> Just like the difference between ncdu and regular du. It lets you drill down into the directory hierarchy and spot the exact dir/file that consumes a lot of space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Aren't these services still wildly overpriced?

At $0.0125/GB/month, that means it costs $75 for 6TB per month.

But a 6TB hard drive costs less than $300, which means that assuming the data is stored on 3 hard drives for redundancy, they break even in less than a year.

However, hard drives seems to last at least 3-5 years on average, so this service seems to be priced at least 3-5 times as much as it costs to Amazon.

And there is even a $0.01/GB charge for retrieval on top.

There are other costs, but they should be relatively small at scale.

Am I missing something? If not, why doesn't anybody compete with Amazon and provide more reasonable pricing?

<comment> ju-st Glacier isn't even using hard drives, so their per TB costs should be way lower (raw storage and infrastructure).

<comment><USER18> > Glacier isn't even using hard drives

That's still speculation right? Some have theorized they use offline harddisks

<comment><USER19> I would expect offline HDDs as well, possibly combined with tapes for secondary copies to meet durability requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would be nice to apply this to EBS snapshot storage too, that can add up mighty-quick.

</comment><comment><USER21> If I could have a git API to glacier I would be happy.

I have tried various glacier clients and they all seem to suck. So I have trouble tracking exactly what I have stored there sanely. :( Unusable.

<comment><USER22> Are you using glacier specific clients? I just use an s3 client and configure the bucket to put everything in Glacier.

For example, I have a cron job calling `s3cmd sync` for my photos on my iMac once a day.

<comment><USER21> I'm aware of that easy API of getting stuff to glacier, but once it "expires" to glacier, how do you check what's actually there?

It quickly becomes a nightmare for me. Hence I need git! [http://natalian.org/2015/04/13/How_I_organise_my_media/](http://natalian.org/2015/04/13/How_I_organise_my_media/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Spent the past 10 minutes just looking for a simple grid chart of pricing on S3 and gave up.

and "infrequent access" is not on the price calculator

wtf is it so complicated to compare

<comment><USER24> Did you see this?

[https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

It has quite a lot of info.

Edit: you must view that page with JS enabled, otherwise no prices are shown. Perhaps that was your problem?

<comment><USER23> Didn't show in Firefox, had to open it in Chrome to see the table, thanks

Firefox logs the dreaded

 _" Error: InvalidStateError: A mutation operation was attempted on a database that did not allow mutations."_

which is known bad coding problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> so..does S3 objects becomes IA automatically if it's access infrequently, or do we have to do the implementation on our side?

<comment><USER18> No, but you can configure your bucket to behave that way (and then after even more time move to Glacier if you wish)</comment></comment>


Why aren't more people investing in websites? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fernandopizarro.com/investing-in-websites/ <comment><USER2> So a 33% yearly return for soething as unstable and risky as website ?

Doesn't sound appealing.</comment>


How communism turned Cuba into an island of hackers and DIY engineers - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/isolation-generation-master-inventors-cuba/ <comment><USER2> It's just people hustling to get modicum of things first world takes for granted. We had this in Eastern Europe like 30 years ago and I can assure you - most wouldn't like to go back (even if then rather in spite of rather than because).

<comment><USER3> In communist Poland there was long-running (1959 to 1983) DIY TV program and it was one of the most popular things in TV. The person that did it (Adam Słodowy) was a celebrity.

Example show (in Polish but it doesn't matter): www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq8xiHZ_3nE

It was hard to buy anything except vinegar, so people did everything the Mc Gyver way.

It was huge waste of time, of course - DIY is fine as a hobby, but it's not efficient way to divide labour.

<comment><USER4> For complete from-scratch production, yes, it's not cost-effective. But for _repairs_? Many times, you can't get the parts for love or money, and it may well be worth the time.

<comment><USER5> The way things are, it's worth the time if your time is worthless. I find it hard to get out of that rabbit hole while my weekly budget could feed a family for a year on the other side of the globe. So all the DIY projects I undertake, I cannot justify them with economic efficiency.

<comment><USER4> Since you can't get that family on the other side of the globe to do your repairs for you, it doesn't compare.

Even if I have a well-paid job, I don't want to buy a new WizzGig 5000 because a dinky part broke in my old Wizzy 650, but if there are no spare parts to be found, it may well be worth it, _to me_ , to spend the time to make a replacement part. Someone else on the other side of the globe isn't going to make one for me, so I have to choose between buying a new WizzGig 5000, making a replacement part myself, or doing without it.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, the point is that working and buying a new device would net me more money than spending the time I could've worked on fixing the device. I agree with you, though, I'd also rather fix a broken part that cost a dime, instead of throwing the whole thing away. It's just not worth it, if I only look at the money angle.

<comment><USER4> You still seem to assume that it wouldn't actually be worth your time. My contention is that it _might well be_ , unless your pay is astronomical. Imagine that the old model is discontinued and they only sell a different, newer, larger, _much more expensive_ thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> DIY was common in India too during the socialist license quota raj.</comment>


In an era of face masks, we're all a little more face blind - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/health/covid-masks-face-blindness.html <comment><AUTHOR> >The COVID-19 pandemic masks the way people perceive faces

[https://psyarxiv.com/zjmr8/](https://psyarxiv.com/zjmr8/)

>Surgical face masks impair human face matching performance for familiar and unfamiliar faces

[https://psyarxiv.com/n9mt5](https://psyarxiv.com/n9mt5)</comment>


Why can't San Francisco stop it's epidemic of window smashing? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/san-francisco-crime-policy/479880/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> i.e. the market is telling you to leave San Francisco. Do it.</comment>


Test-driven infrastructure development with Ansible and Molecule - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2018/12/test-driven-infrastructure-ansible-molecule/ <comment><USER2> Nice post</comment>


Show HN: Rejected from kickstarter, so we forked selfstarter.us - <AUTHOR> http://www.bytelight.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> The company I work for got rejected from kickstarter so we decided to use the open source selfstarter.us platform instead. We're really happy with it, but it was missing a few key features for us, so I forked it, added the features/fixes and made a pull request. Curious what others think about building a stand alone site instead of going on kickstarter.

Here's what I added back:

* New "payment options" component, that creates a list of radio buttons on the checkout page for choosing from various packages/levels.

* Lots of IE fixes - the base selfstarter didn't really work at all in IE < 9

* Option to use an image file as a placeholder for the video - gets replaced on click with the video

* Numerous other small fixes

Here's the fork: <https://github.com/jes5e/selfstarter>

And here's our finished site based off of it: <http://www.bytelight.com/>

Thanks to lockitron for open sourcing selfstarter.</comment>


SCO's legal war against IBM and Linux comes to an end - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/scos-legal-war-against-ibm-and-linux-comes-to-an-end/ <comment><USER2> Not so fast. SCO still has a month to decide whether to appeal or not. Given history, I'm not betting against an appeal. It would be pointless... but so was the whole case.</comment>


Operation Yashima: TEPCO Real Time Power Consumption, with NERV interface - <AUTHOR> http://kanmisikou.net/lab/power/

<comment><USER2> For those who haven't seen the greatest anime series of all time, _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ , "Operation Yashima" is the name of a plan to drain power from all of Japan to fuel a giant weapon to defeat an invader.

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x659tv_roe-1-0-operation- ya...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x659tv_roe-1-0-operation-yashima- spanish-s_creation)

<http://wiki.evageeks.org/Episode_06>

<http://forum.evageeks.org/viewtopic.php?t=10924></comment>


How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/how-denver-is-becoming-the-most-advanced-transit-city-in-the-west/373222/ <comment><USER2> The Northwest suburbs (Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Broomfield, Longmont) got quite screwed over in this deal - we approved and paid into the 0.4% sales tax in 2004, but ended up with only years of disruptive highway construction leading to a privatized tollway and fake Bus Rapid Transit. We didn't even get real BRT as the buses run in the private toll lanes rather than their own grade and the buses board and deboard just like a normal bus (supposedly the "train style" buses couldn't make it up a hill on the highway).

The Denver area really does have good mass transit, though - the Southwest suburbs are now well-served by light rail, the airport will have rail service soon, and the bus system is reasonable (as bus systems go), albeit with extremely high fares.

<comment><USER3> The Northwest line is already under construction to Arvada, correct? I believe they are working westward right now.

As for the line up to Boulder, blame the expense of building a completely separate right-of-way along the BNSF Brush Subdivision, a very busy funnel for coal trains :-/

<comment><USER2> "South Westminster" \- basically, 72nd and Federal.

They weren't trying to build separate right-of-way - they were trying to lease the existing BNSF tracks:

[http://www.denverpost.com/ci_20782125/rtd-stunned-by- bnsfs-c...](http://www.denverpost.com/ci_20782125/rtd-stunned-by-bnsfs-charge- use-northwest-rail)

You're right that the busy freight corridor is a lot of the problem, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Will metro residents give up their cars?_

I wonder if the rise of Uber will affect this.

When I lived in Seattle, I noticed that a lot of people didn't commute to work via car but had one anyway, usually for one or two trips per week. Public transportation (buses and later light rail) were pretty good from about 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. or so during weekdays but were horrible the rest of the time. Bikes could be used intermittently.

Uber does an amazing job of filling in the gap. Last time I visited Seattle, I was struck by how some of my friends had given up cars, despite rising incomes, largely due to Uber. Uber may play a key role in getting rid of a lot of cars that are only marginally utilized, since it appears far more reliable and friendly than taxis—virtually all Seattlites who have to use Seattle taxis hate them. This has environmental and other implications.

<comment><USER5> The mountain states are car states. Denver is not a city like New York where people go without getting their license until they are in their mid-20s.

Having Uber or great public transportation will not change the fact that much of the draw of Colorado is that you can drive two hours and end up in the mountains or on the plains. Colorado self-selects for cars and they will not be going away any time soon.

<comment><USER6> Let me offer a concurring opinion - Uber seems incredible expensive for two or three trips a week, from my experience. It works best when you're with a group of friends/family members and you are all drinking or don't feel like dealing with driving and parking. I would never consider it as an option like a normal cab for when I just need to do the week's grocery shopping or run out to get something at midnight, when the light rail might have shut down for the day. The only city where I ever used it was Denver, actually. Is this different from others' experiences?

As a side note - can't you drive two hours to a mountain from most East Coast cities? The Catskills are only 2.5 hours from NYC. I thought mountains were much more accessible in Denver than a two-hour car ride.

<comment><USER7> The mtns in CO are certainly closer to Denver than 2 hrs, but most people are going deeper into the mtns (e.g. Summit county/Vail/etc.). You can get up to 8500ft in 25min from Denver if you want. IMO, the further one gets from Denver, the nicer it is (I live about 8hrs from Denver in the mtns of CO, and have lived in the state for 20 yrs.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Salt Lake City (also "in the West") already has ~45 miles of light rail track [1], 88 miles of commuter rail track [2], ~3 streetcar track miles [3], and 69 transit stations. It was named as one of the top transit systems in north america for 2014 [4].

This was approved in 2008 by voters in Salt Lake County [5]. Already under works are plans to expand the commuter rail beyond Ogden to Provo (from 88 to 135 miles) and expand the streetcar concept. Additional lines are also currently being studied [6].

Of course, when Fastracks is done, it may have more "track miles" but that will be mostly due to the airport being so, so far away from the city center (~23 driving miles from Denver to DEN compared to ~6 from Salt Lake to SLC).

I'm excited for Fastracks. Can't wait to never have to fill my rental car out at that single, lonely Conoco gas station by DEN again.

1 - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAX_(light_rail)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAX_\(light_rail\))

2 - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrontRunner](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrontRunner)

3 - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_Line_(UTA)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_Line_\(UTA\))

4 - [http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865605797/UTA-named- one-o...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865605797/UTA-named-one-of-the- top-transit-systems-in-North-America.html?pg=all)

5 - [http://www.rideuta.com/mc/?page=Projects- Frontlines2015](http://www.rideuta.com/mc/?page=Projects-Frontlines2015)

6 - [http://www.rideuta.com/mc/?page=UTAProjects](http://www.rideuta.com/mc/?page=UTAProjects)

<comment><USER9> To me, SLC is the ultimate counterpoint to the whole "Republicans are destroying transit!!" hysteria. SLC's core is definitely left-leaning, but just a few miles outside the city center it is pure Republican territory. And despite the heavily skewed demographics, they are voting in massive numbers to _extend_ rail transit to their cities. It is quite amazing what will happen to voting trends on transit investment when you consistently demonstrate fiscal responsibility, fast construction, and high ridership.

<comment> aaron-lebo Do you have any idea why this is the case? Some aspect of Mormonism?

<comment><USER10> There's a huge racial aspect in anti-mass-transit politics in many American cities that's missing in SLC. Transit is fundamentally urban, and in a lot of the country 'urban' is code for black.

<comment><USER11> Hmm. Transit in SLC isn't "fundamentally urban". Also, SLC doesn't have a very large black population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately, the satellite train tracks as they are now still require you to drive & park at an RTD garage, then wait for a train, and ride it with all the stops. For example, I used to take the W line from Federal Center station to Union Station. Without counting transit time to the station, it's about 40-45 minutes to Union Station. Car? 25-30 minutes. At that time, I still took the train.

I recently moved a little more south east, now it's a 5-10 minute drive to the Sheridan station (with lights) + parking + waiting, ends up being still 40-ish minutes. Only takes 20 minutes to drive, and I don't have people practically sitting on my lap.

And that's a good scenario. Denver lacks the simplicity I found in Portland's light rail and rail car system. It was quite clear how to get from place to place. Denver relies very heavily on buses.

Lots of transport? Sure. Most advanced? Don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome. I went to college in Denver back when the first light rail initiative tanked, and it was a nightmare to get around the city without a car. I've been back a few times since, and the transformation has been remarkable: almost everywhere I went back then is accessible by train now.

Now, if only San Francisco could follow suit and invest in greater transit -- instead of trying to increase the density of already-dense neighborhoods -- we might have a prayer of battling housing costs here. Housing density _automatically_ happens when people can get from cheaper places to more expensive places quickly and reliably.

(Or maybe people will just leave the ridiculous bubble of the bay area, and go to places like Denver instead. Even better.)

<comment><USER14> > _" the transformation has been remarkable"_

It's been great for my dad. He used to have to schedule the Access-a-ride to pick him up in his wheelchair. It was a huge pain, and he tried to avoid it as much as possible. Now he's got a light rail station a block away. He has an ease of mobility he's never had before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I've always wanted in colorado is a japanese style bullet train across the front range. It makes so much sense since most of the population in colorado lies in a pretty narrow north-south axis, and there is more than enough open space.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems no article can positively describe a city, without mentioning that it's also a tech cluster. Is there a city that doesn't claim to be a tech cluster? We need to recalibrate that term.

<comment><USER17> They're not exaggerating. Over the course of a decade.

DTC (Denver Tech Center) and Centennial Airport sprawled for miles around with tech companies and their employees who migrated from Southern California.

In the North West (Broomfield) around the Front Range Airport (or whatever they call it these days) tech companies and R&D centers started popping up all around Interlocken including Sun Microsystems.

Boulder is home to a number of smaller tech startups including SparkFun Electronics, and a Google facility downtown.

In the South West Lockheed Martin has a number of facilities that work on space systems (ie rockets, satellites).

Downtown Denver doesn't have much in terms of tech but the city is going through an urban revival and the light rail system is supposed to connect it all together (if they ever build the northwest rail line).

High wages and increased standard of living are a win/win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Downtown Denver resident here. I have to attest that the light-rail has been a tremendous win for Denver and surrounding area residents. Along with the bus system, Uber, and Car2Go, I started using light rail last December and never looked back. Even though there are hopeful plans to expand commuter rail to Boulder, I still think the FastTrack Program is a good decision. Boulder's been a stiffed by the new development but I can't imagine no commuter rail being implemented sooner than later.

<comment><USER18> I have to counter some of the comments regarding buses and light rail being empty. This is completely untrue. People are using the light rail and buses in large sums. It has its off peaks but certainly before and after working hours is extremely busy. Most people who say their empty are likely the same folks not using public transportation. I had the same consensus before trying out RTD.

<comment><USER10> Transit riders see mostly see full busses & trains because they're riding the heavy-ridership routes through dense neighborhoods. People driving in spread- out neighborhoods mostly see empty busses & trains because they see the busses mandated to serve sprawling neighborhoods to serve people who can't drive or to provide service to all of the transit system's tax base, even if those neighborhoods aren't built in such a way anyone would ride transit by choice.

Here's a paper & a couple excellent blog articles on the topic: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692308...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692308000586) [http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/08/14/jarrett-walker- empty-b...](http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/08/14/jarrett-walker-empty-buses- serve-a-purpose/) [http://www.humantransit.org/2009/12/yet-another-transit- isnt...](http://www.humantransit.org/2009/12/yet-another-transit-isnt-green- because-of-empty-buses-story.html)

From the paper's abstract: "Public transport faces an increasingly intense conflict between patronage goals and coverage goals. Broadly speaking, patronage goals seek to maximize patronage of all types, while coverage goals lead to the provision of service despite low patronage – to achieve social inclusion objectives for example."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've never been there, but from afar the Moscow Metro is a thing of beauty. [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Moscow_me...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Moscow_metro_map_en_sb.svg) In particular one thing Moscow has that the Denver map doesn't have much of is a ring line connecting the spokes.

A ring means that arbitrary trips don't need to go thru downtown. Not having a ring means that the transit system models the 19th century layout of having "farm roads" connecting into the "market" in the middle of the city.

Perhaps Denver uses buses to form a ring?

</comment><comment><USER20> All I know is that this car problem is growing rapidly in Colorado. As a Denver native, living in NY for the last decade I finally moved back to get away from the traffic. Unfortunately there are way more cars on the roads (and what feels like worse drivers) than I recall from a decade ago.

I won't even go up to the mountains during the weekend because I can get stuck in traffic on I-70 for 3-4 hours heading back to Denver on a Sunday afternoon/evening. It should take half that time.

I'm glad Colorado is investing in Infrastructure and passing laws to accommodate Uber, etc...

</comment><comment><USER21> Looking forward to being able to get to DEN via train.

</comment><comment><USER22> My question is when cars can drive themselves why will the non-impoverished population need public mass-transportation. I envision a grid of cars (belonging to competing private companies) that have no drivers and can take a person from A to B, for a set fee -- much lower than when you need a driver. Light-rail, why? We already have the infrastructure for cars. Give it 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny how Seattle was left out of the comparison to other PNW cities. I'm not surprised... Seattle's transportation situation is abysmal.

<comment><USER24> Metro/ST isn't that bad, I take it rather than rent a car when in Seattle, but I don't venture out of the West Seattle-Seattle-Bellevue core where service is pretty good.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, but you don't have to deal with it every single day. Metro offers pretty horrendous bus service especially considering their cost per passenger one of the highest in the country. Recently voters thwacked a measure seeking more funding for Metro and one of the main reasons I think (among others like aversion to car tab expenses) was anger at mismanagement.

<comment><USER25> My experience is that everybody (where everybody is defined as a significant majority but not everyone) tends to be at least fairly negative about public transportation that they're forced to use day in and day out. I could name a number of cities that I consider to have pretty good transit if you're going from the right point A to the right point B where I could still imagine it being pretty tiresome using it all the time for a variety of reasons.

<comment><USER10> NYC has by-far the best transit in the US, and people still constantly complain about it. I don't think there's any method of commuting people actually like, other than maybe bikes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> denver isnt a downtown oriented city, its very spread out. also the trains are empty whenever i see them running. just another expensive sinkhole from what i can tell.

<comment><USER27> Lived in Denver 5 years. Never driven to work, a pro sports game or a bar. Trains and busses have never been empty any of the times I've ridden them...which is daily</comment></comment>


70+ virtual companies share how to measure productivity in remote workers - <AUTHOR> https://remote.co/qa-leading-remote-companies/how-do-you-measure-productivity-of-remote-workers/ <comment><USER2> This trend can only grow</comment>