Enter the MassChallenge competition - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupamericapartnership.org/blog/enter-masschallenge-competition <comment><USER4> I see there's a $199 entry fee. In the music industry there's some controversy over pay-for-opportunity style services (Sonicbids for example, although they say they're phasing that out). For a business this isn't a huge amount, but it's enough to make me stop and think. Maybe there's a better use of my money when I'm bootstrapping already. I guess it helps eliminate those who don't think they have a chance...

How do others here feel about it?

<comment><USER5> With endorsements entry fee can be waved, we paid nothing to enter last year because of endorsements. If you think you have a good idea write to me at ib [at] taskpoint.com and I will give you diamond endorsements 8 points and $50 off application fee.

<comment><USER6> this all sounds ridiculously convoluted

<comment><USER7> It should be easier. Agreed. We have not yet mastered the operations side of MassChallenge (and I lose significant sleep over it).

But it really isn't that hard, and there is explicit logic in every step. If you are even remotely serious as an entrepreneur, you should be able to get 4 diamond endorsements with a handful of emails/phone calls - each of them with an expert in your industry who has an opportunity to publicly support you without spending a dime. That process encourages startups to network/pitch and is intended to create or strengthen bonds with helpful resources. These resources are not isolated to MA by the way.

Likewise, if you are even remotely serious about your startup, you should be able to get your friends/network to rate your company profile 5 stars very easily. This encourages you to promote your startup and seek support from your community. Easy stuff. No cost. Something you should be doing anyway.

Keep in mind, the endorsements and team ratings are worth only 10% of the judging score each. We had teams enter and win last year with zero endorsement points and zero ratings. (I don't recommend that as a strategy, but it's possible).

The application form itself is very basic: 10 questions, with short character limits. All standard stuff.

<comment><USER6> a comment here was offering 'diamond' to whoever emailed him, which should be a big hint to you just how much these endorsements are worth.

<comment><USER5> The matter of fact I endorsed only 1 team so far at platinum lvl out of 6 who emailed me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a founder of a (now) VC backed Boston startup who participated in MassChallenge. My team though it would be worth the time to pitch and get some no-strings cash in the bank. Even paying for our $5k/month office would have been awesome.

We made it to the first round (got enough votes online and whatnot). The tough part is you can get stuck with judges completely out of your industry that are clueless. Our judges were 2 lawyers and someone with a similar idea to ours ten years ago who thought his was superior. We didn't make it to the second round. I hope this year they make some changes based on everyone's feedback.

A couple friends of mine won $50K from this competition. Important to note that it's not $1M awarded to one person/team, it's split however the judges/board like.

<comment><USER9> As a semi-finalist last year, I too had a similar experience with the judging, however after getting feedback from those that completed the surveys, MassChallenge hired software entrepreneur Karl Buttner, who also served as a mentor last year, as Chief Mentorship Officer. He's helping to combat cases like ours, and improve the judging/mentorship experience. I think he's even somewhere on this comment thread...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _We don't think it's fair to take equity from early-stage startups. Our goal is to help the world's most promising entrepreneurs win, not to profit off their hard work. Period._

What? Phrasing is very naive.

Everybody wants something. They want people to _help the world's most promising entrepreneurs win_ in Boston. Taking money adds constraints. Insisting on a move to Boston adds constraints.

<comment><AUTHOR> MassChallenge does not require you moving to Boston - only for certain parts of the competition. They believe that if they can connect you to the right network (in Boston) you will want to stay.

<comment><USER11> Nobody is required to move. To get value out of the program, we expect at least one founder to spend significant time in the accelerator during the summer. We aim to make it as frictionless as possible for startups to enter and win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After viewing the MassChallenge site and perusing the complex application process, I am reminded why I'm not excited about applying anywhere outside of Y Combinator.

I don't care about the money I care about the experience.

Will I learn anything from these people? From the other startups that are accepted? Outside some seed money, what is the upside?

 __*EDIT

My initial thoughts may have been harsh - and perhaps I'm being a hipster - but I don't get the feeling that this is something truly special/cool. I believe there are talented business people involved, but for me it doesn't appear to be a life-changing event as much as a cash prize.

That being said there is obviously a lot of support from those involved - <USER2> represent the bulk of the dialog here.

<comment><USER7> Mentors and speakers last year included the founders of billion dollar companies (Desh Deshpande - Sycamore/Cascade/A123, Josh Boger - <USER3> Pharmaceuticals), billion pageview websites (Alexis Ohanian - Reddit), and successful entrepreneurs from all fields, including consumer web (Jeff Taylor - Monster.com), B2B software (Dharhmesh Shah - Hubspot), energy (Tim Healy - EnerNoc) and life sciences (Ken Bate - Archemix).

What makes you think you can't learn from these people?

Last year's finalists raised well over $30M in outside funding in the 7 months following day 1 of the accelerator program ... with 100+ startups on one floor, there is a lot of opportunity to learn (and teach).

<comment><USER13> I don't think his assertion was that he couldn't, but that he didn't know who would be there.

The first part of your post was very informative, but I downvoted you for the snark. If it wasn't intended the way I read it, please accept my apologies.

<comment><USER7> No worries. I was intentionally a bit snarky and deserved the downvote.

I have essentially poured my entire heart and soul into launching and running MassChallenge and I believe deeply in our mission and philosophy, so I took a little umbrage to the phrase "these people" -- they are, after all, my people and they are enabling something deeply important to me and many others.

I do believe that what we do is transformative and outstanding. But I also recognize that it isn't for everyone. Even if you don't end up entering, I encourage you all to come visit us at least once this Summer. I am sure you will find value in the experience and I promise to personally give you a tour and answer any questions you may have.

<comment><USER13> It's a brilliant mission, which I of course stand behind. The seed funds and accelerator programs which do mentoring are of incalculable value -- to offer them with no equity as recompense is as noble as it gets, though I don't think an equity stake is 'molestation'.

I'm ignorant to much of it, so I'm glad to see the discussion here where I can learn more. The website really is quite hard to follow for those just wanting to learn more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't worry about the registration fee. It serves to eliminate people who are not serious about participating/developing their startup plans. You should register (with $199), and if you are serious about your plans you'll have many, many opportunities to get your full $199 back from MassChallenge. They make it easy to get reimbursed (e.g. give an informal pitch in one of the early pitch practice sessions, etc.). Last year we got our registration fee back very quickly (we could have gotten back even several times that). Olivier Boss, Energesis Pharmaceuticals (a MassChallenge 2010 award winner)

<comment><USER15> It's still creepy.

<comment><USER7> Is it as creepy as taking 6% equity from a company that is still young and strategically weak?

To me that is molestation.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't be surprised to see this sort of comment from a random troll on HN, but I'm surprised to see it from one of the organizers of the program.

It suggests that as well as having rather bad judgment, you don't understand the math of equity. A "free" alternative is no bargain if you end up net worse off.

<http://paulgraham.com/equity.html>

<comment><USER7> But if we offer a free alternative with equivalent benefits, then 6% is way overpriced. And that's what we do.

Paul omits a discussion of opportunity cost. Sure, buying a coke for 50 cents is great ... but getting it for free is much better.

Remember that at 6.4% improvement, you end up _even_ with ycombinator. At 6.4% improvement with MassChallenge, you end up 6.4% ahead.

<comment><USER17> Do yourself a favor: wait until you have a track record and reputation that's at least 5% the quality of YC's before you start bragging about how much better you are.

<comment><USER7> This isn't about me. I don't do this. MassChallenge is a community supported by literally thousands of volunteers foregoing value capture to support value creation.

After year 1, we asked our finalists this survey question:

How likely are you on a scale of 0-10 to recommend MassChallenge to another startup?

79% answered either 9 or 10. (Just about 60% answered 10). One person answered 6 -- the lowest score.

For perspective, that means that our finalists are slightly more enthusiastic about MassChallenge than Apple customers are about Apple Computer ... see here for more details and other metrics:

<http://www.masschallenge.org/2010_metrics>

Again, please visit some time. I'm sure you will understand why we are so excited about MassChallenge if you do.

<comment><USER18> I'd be curious to know what the results of this survey question were from companies that made it to the first round but were not selected for the incubation phase. I had the entry fee waived through endorsements last year, but had an experience during the pitch round similar to others who have commented here-- judges who had nothing resembling a clue. I've heard this story over and over and have no intention of participating this year.

<comment><USER9> Again, I'll reference my aforementioned post above:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2388691>

I guarantee that the judging has been drastically improved from last year. It's still too bad that you feel the way you do. I wish you continued success in your venture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a few questions and their website is spare on details:

1\. What is the typical size of the check? I paused the video (<http://www.masschallenge.org/>) at the end to note that most checks were $50k and one was $100k. Are there smaller/larger amounts?

2\. Getting votes and endorsements: They want startups to get votes from general people to improve their chances of getting selected. This is a bad idea. _It is crowd-sourcing herd mentality._ I think that is a waste of time for the startup. I saw a post (<http://www.masschallenge.org/blog/how-make-it- masschallenge-...>) about the things a company did to get those points and I would rather spend that time on the business. So if we get a 0 on each of those is there a chance that we will get through?

Thanks. I think that what they are doing is fantastic barring [2].

<comment><USER19> I was in last year's class. I don't believe the endorsement points matter that much in the application. I spent almost no time on them and we got in. I think they're really more of an excuse to engage with people you otherwise wouldn't. If you have a good idea and traction, you'll get in with 0 points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think that these two programs offer starkly different things. A focus on the money alone is very short sighted.

ycombinator has established itself as the "Harvard" of tech startup incubators. MassChallenge is... well... MassChallenge.

As an analogy, when I was deciding between business schools, I had the opportunity to take a scholarship to a lesser MBA program. Or I could pay full price and go to a much higher ranked program. The difference was minimum $50-60k of my own money.

I chose to go to the higher ranked program, because of the network that I would be able to build and the long term reputation that came with attending that program. Part of me wishes this wasn't the case; that one's success in life is purely based on their talents and how far they are able to propel themselves on their own steam, regardless of their affiliation with universities or other organizations. Unfortunately, that's not the real world. People care about which organizations you are affiliated with, regardless of whether the education at one is truly better than another. In truth, if you're motivated, you can probably get an equally good education at a community college as you can at an Ivy League school. However, the network you build at these different institutions is vastly different, and I would argue can't be replicated between the two.

ycombinator has a track record of producing successful tech startups. This leads to high demand, and the ability to set its own terms. Likening that to "molestation" is not only insulting to the program, but also to all the people who applied to the program (like me). It implies that we don't know what we're doing, and that we are suckers for giving away equity to Y Combinator. I would counter that, contrary to this assertion, I am fully aware of the equity stake that is taken, and believe that it is worth having the Y Combinator organization on my side, as well as the cache with future investors that comes from having participated in the program. I will admit that this decision was not taken lightly, however, and I talked with many founders and funders in the startup world before deciding to apply.

</comment><comment><USER21> Everyone should breathe for a moment.

According to the Angel Capital Association, 60% of their members charge ~$400 to pitch. Also, no one complains about the $18,000 for 3 minutes at Demo. That's a pretty hefty fee, but many get value out of that event. The entrepreneur HAS to be the one to make that value judgement for themselves.

The MassChallenge team and others like them are providing a great service and it's up to the entrepreneur to figure out if their making the right decision, not some self appointed guru.

I have a hard time understanding those self appointed guru's who claim to have the interest of the poor struggling entrepreneur at heart. Entrepreneur's are a pretty tough lot. If an entrepreneur can't make the right decision about who they should work with, they will likely fail anyway.

After all, being a CEO is about making the right decisions. If you can't do that, it's better to find out early.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have endorsed two companies each of which I've worked with for over a year as part of the Boston University Kindle Mentoring program. One of the founders told me this morning that -- in his "networking" to get more endorsements -- he's met some "movers and shakers" in Boston who will be a big help for his business. This is exactly the intended result when the MassChallenge Team added the "endorsement" step to the process. If nothing else, MassChallenge is well thought out. And last year it was well executed by a hoard of people volunteering their time and energy.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm participating as an entrant this year and think it's a fantastic program for start-ups! Great to see it in Massachusetts, too.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's one of many opportunities around Boston, but compared to TechStars and others who "graduate" a dozen or two at most, this program actively accelerates 100+ companies who get to that phase. I've applied and am looking forward to the great learning and networking experience.

</comment><comment><USER25> In general, I think the more incubators, the better it is for the whole start- up eco-system. Talk is cheap. Thus, there is no need to quarrel online. Let the success of MassChallenge and Y-Combinator start-ups speak for themselves which program is the best.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mass Challenge? Is that like some kinda "Guess the Weight" competition?

<comment><USER9> Also "Mass" as in "the world's largest" (play on words I guess). Funny though, maybe someone should start a LeanChallenge based on Eric Ries' methodology.</comment></comment>


Google Cloud Platform Free Tier - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/free/ <comment><USER2> The _Always Free_ requirements are Google help page copy in a nutshell :

      You are eligible for Always Free if you meet the following requirements:

      Not on a custom rate card
      Have an upgraded billing account
      Account must be in good standing

I know English is not my first language, but reading this, I feel like I know what each word means but the words makes no sense in aggregate.

It doesn't seems like there is more information on the current page either.

Also I have no idea why the fact that you're providing servers for free forever is not the first and most prominent paragraph, but is actually buried in the middle of the doc page.

Except if it's just a terrible attempt at upsell?

<comment><USER3> You are also out of luck if you ever used a trail with your account before.

Got this message: "Sorry, you aren't eligible for a free trial at this time. The free trial is for new customers only."

The specs:

Always Free Usage Limits

As part of ... Free Tier, Compute Engine offers an amount of usage that is free to use, up to a specific limit. If you go over these usage limits and are no longer in the free trial period, you will be charged according to the price sheet.

1 f1-micro VM instance per month (US regions only).

\- f1-micro: 600MB memory, 0.2vCPU that can burst up to a full core.

30 GB of HDD persistent disk storage per month. 5 GB of snapshot storage per month.

1 GB egress from North America to other destinations per month (excluding Australia and China).

\- not sure what that means, you have to pay for traffic from Australia/China? 1TB is 119€ through.

[https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#internet_egress](https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#internet_egress)

For f1-micro instances, you receive free usage equivalent to the number of total hours within the current month, enough to run one instance without interruption for the entire month.

<comment><USER4> > You are also out of luck if you ever used a trail with your account before. > > > Got this message: "Sorry, you aren't eligible for a free trial at this > time. The free trial is for new customers only."

That's just for the $300 free credit though, right? You can still use all the "Always Free" services.

<comment><USER3> Not sure, I have a credit card there and 0€ balance, can't find the knob for the free tier, when I create a f1-micro I'm billed. Maybe I have to put up money?

<comment><USER4> According to [the FAQ][1] it seems like you just use the instances like normal and you won't be billed as long as you don't exceed the free usage limits...

[1]: [https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked- question...](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked- questions#always-free)

<comment><USER3> let's try and see :) - thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this is a big deal. This is enough to run personal or PoC projects just on the Always Free Tier, but the fact that you can stack the $300 credit on top of the free tier is crazy:

> You are eligible for Always Free usage amounts during the free trial period. > Always Free usage does not count against your free trial credits. For > example, only the portion of your Google App Engine usage above the App > Engine free daily usage limits is charged against your $300 credit. In > addition, if your App Engine usage is below the free daily usage limits, > your app will continue to run even after the free trial ends.

</comment><comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I work at Google (on Firebase).

I knew about the free tier, but until I saw this page I had never really thought about all the free tier offerings together.

We live in a really cool time to be programmers. 5 years ago most of the services on that page were unimaginable to the average dev. Today they're not only easy to deploy but free for lightweight usage. Makes me really excited to build things over the next few years.

<comment><USER7> I agree. I can't wait to see what people do with Cloud OCR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Finally! I've been making the point for years now that the reason new developers start with AWS is because of their much more useful 12 month free tier. People from GCP would come to our university every couple of years and ask us "Why don't you use GCP?" and be told by countless computer science undergraduates that they didn't NEED $300 for a couple of months, they needed at least a year of time with a cheap instance or two. It seems they finally listened.

</comment><comment><USER9> This page is awesome. It's so much easier to read vs. AWS. The pie chart explaining why they are cheaper is well-designed (the use of layering to group the breakdown, numeric labels, aligning the important segment to 12 o'clock) and effective (uncommon for pie charts.)

I've always appreciated how their time-limited free tier is based on dollars rather than some proxy (e.g. how AWS limits which kind of things you can use/sizes of things/quotas etc. for their time-limited free tier) and this page helps clearly separate the "free trial" vs. "free quota" which AWS makes a mess of in their documentation in my opinion.

Minor gripe/idea for the future:

I didn't realize (maybe it's new?) that you can get a free f1-micro. It's too bad that the minimum container engine cluster size is 3 with f1-micros.. it'd be cool to have a hosted/managed k8s cluster that was free by default until you scaled up (with some effort (e.g. node pools to use larger instances/pre- emptible instances when scaled) it could work very well for personal projects that receive very little load/mostly receive load when I'm actively using them.)

That's not to say that I don't appreciate what is free today or that I can't afford a small personal K8S cluster :)

<comment><USER10> The f1-micro is new: "New additions include Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions, bringing the number of Always Free products up to 15." [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/Google- Cloud-Pl...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/Google-Cloud- Platform-your-Next-home-in-the-cloud.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunately, you're still not allowed to use Google Cloud Platform for personal usage if you're based in Europe.

Several years ago they emailed (presumably) everyone without a tax number in their account, saying so: [https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602](https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602)

Trying to add a billing account just now from a European country doesn't give the choice of account type; it's fixed to "business" and can't be edited.

So without a billing account, it seems nobody in Europe can use the free tier for personal use.

</comment><comment><USER12> To be clear, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has offered "always" free tiers on a lot of their services for a long time now. I assume there must be diffs here, or else this is just a PR move to remind devs that GCP has free tiers.

I do want to express my gratitude to GCP for their free tiers. It has enabled me to offer a various online tools to help some of my teacher friends. It makes it easy to just throw together an app like I normally do, but not incur the costs for these lightweight situations. The alternative is to spend my time finding ways to run and manage the stuff for free using local servers or something, which is usually more pain than the simple tools are worth.

The free tiers are also one of the reasons I tend to throw all my hobby projects at GCP instead of AWS. GCP services also tend to be easier to use than the equivalent AWS services. Mostly because GCP has a lot less to customize. That's both good and bad, but for hobby projects it comes out net- good.

AppEngine is also amazing, if your workload can fit within its limitations. Again, for me it's about reducing hassle so I can focus on tinkering with ideas and projects, which is what AppEngine lets me do.

All that good stuff said, I would _never_ recommend GCP for big projects, companies, etc. The platform is rife with instabilities, bugs, backwards incompatible changes, etc. This is from personal experience running a service at a small company, and from my friend's experience running a huge service at a large company.

EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects). Databases. There's no free tier on Cloud SQL. Without a free tier it's something like $10-$20/month to run a managed SQL server. So I end up doing everything with Datastore, which is their NoSQL offering. What a huge pain to munge all my data patterns to fit within the limitations of NoSQL. I really wish there was a similarly pay-as-you-go alternative but with real relational queries. Or, you know, a free tier on Cloud SQL... :)

<comment><USER13> Have they always given away a free GCE VM instance, though? This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for personal tinkering (which in turn feeds Google more business if your personal tinkering turns serious, or if you favor Google for professional work later because that what you've grown used to).

There are a lot of other things on that page for which I've likewise never heard of a free tier. But the raw VM instance one is what jumped off the page at me.

<comment><USER14> > This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean > droplet for personal tinkering

DO gives you 1TB of transfer for your $5, Google gives you 1GB for $0 and 12c/GB after that. Depending on how much egress traffic your VM generates, the Google "free" tier could be very, very expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15>
       Always Free* products to keep you going.
       *Subject to change

That's not quite what "always free" means, but I'll always take it _.

_ *Subject to change.

<comment><USER16> Logically, I agree with you. In practice, I believe that this is in fact exactly what "always free" usually means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, looking at this numbers I think you can run small production ready things with that.

<comment><USER18> Ya no kidding. This free tier is actually pretty generous. I imagine they found that these limits enables most people to start on GCE for free and only start paying when things become real. I do wonder, however, how much that long tail will cost them. 1GB storage / day can quickly add up, for example.

<comment><USER4> > 1GB storage / day can quickly add up, for example

Are you sure? To me that sounds like it'll let you store 1 GB indefinitely, or 0.5 GB once a day for 12 hours; not 1 GB for a day on day 1, 2 GB for a day on day 2, etc...

<comment><USER19> "1GB indefinitely" is the case I think. The legacy GAE datastore allows you to store 1G of data for free over the course of a month. Datastore I/O is charged separately after free limits are exceeded. If I understand correctly the Cloud Datastore _is_ the legacy GAE datastore with a different API (no NDB) and the free tier for both is essentially the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have used AppEngine for many years, and occasionally spin up very large compute engine instances as needed.

Am I reading this correctly: even though I am an existing customer, I am still eligible for the always free f1 micro instance, and other always free services?

<comment><USER21> Yes, it looks like this applies to existing, paying customers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes, now I don't have to buy a reserved EC2 instance for my web site. This will finally push me over to the Google ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER23> Do they finally accept prepaid cards? I chose AWS mainly because I don't have a credit card.

<comment><USER24> Even with regular cards, in my case they wanted proof of address sent to them.

<comment><USER23> And I have just read you can link your bank account. Uh, no thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great, the only account type available in Finland is "Business" so that's a no-go for me.

Is there a reason why? Pretty much every other provider out there (amazon, azure, ovh to name a few) have no problem giving out accounts to individual users.

<comment><USER26> Yep, same problem trying to get the free tier here in Germany: I have to create a business account. Well, no GCP for me. I hope they reconsider this unfortunate restriction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whoah, this is really cool! I've been looking to begin exploring and learning GCP for awhile, and this is an excellent reason to get started! I'll deploy something on there right away!

</comment><comment><USER28> So is the Compute Engine basically a VPS? If so, is it roughly equivalent to the base-tier DigitalOcean offering? Sorry for the stupid question; it just seems like I'm missing something!

<comment><USER29> Thinking of it that way for single-node configurations (or static collections of multiple nodes) makes sense, yes.

A lot of the promise of GCE and GCP generally come from on-demand scalability, autoscaling, serverless, etc. Those become much more relevant as projects scale from a small set of fairly static resource requirements to larger and more dynamic usage. Take a hypothetical online retailer -- they might need few hundred cores at night while their users are asleep, a few thousand during the day, and tens of thousands on, say, black Friday. GCE lets you do that kind of scaling as-needed rather than having to provision far in advance (although there are pricing advantages if you can commit to cores and RAM over the long term).

(note: I work on GCE)

<comment><USER30> so this free* f1-micro instance of GCE, with the most basic usage of say, running a slack bot/nginx/random test projects, without the need for dynamic scaling, would be functionally identical to a VM anywhere else? can I keep it on 24/7? can I ssh to it, or do I need to use this cloud shell thing? can I have one of every free tier thing or does free tier mean choose one from the set

*subject to change

<comment><USER31> You can do everything the same as a regular instance f1-micro. There is no functional distinction. It is simply that you do not get charged for the equivalent of 1-instance month worth of usage.

You can use the free tier of every product listed in conjunction with one another. No need to pick and choose.

I work for GCP and was the lead for the Always Free launch.

<comment><USER30> I noticed that GCE instances only offer 1GB of network egress, and then $0.12/GB thereafter, which seems rather steep. Is GCE only meant for use as a CPU engine/internal node of some kind? Is there a different product meant for edge servers that would handle external requests with outgoing traffic?

<comment><USER32> > Is there a different product meant for edge servers that would handle > external requests with outgoing traffic?

For some workloads, using Cloud CDN will save money, since cache egress is $0.08/GB (to North America.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm confused by how they're presenting the "Always Free" tier of Google App Engine. I've used the free tier of that for years and "instance hours" have never been a thing that I'm aware of. I'm also wondering if the GAE free quota will require a billing-enabled account now, as these other offers seem to require, which would be disappointing.

<comment><USER34> Instance hours come into play when, for example, you run multiple versions of an app that get traffic, multiple instances for handling high load, or if you have separate front- and back-end instances. A typical user only has one instance going at a time, so no more than 24 instance-hours. (Instance hours have been a thing for at least a couple of years.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was excited for a second, but nothing has changed from what was there already...$300 credit that can be used within 12 months. Am I mistaken?

<comment><AUTHOR> The $300 previously only applied for 60 days.

<comment><USER35> Even a toy project will burn through this in less than 60 days...I was expecting a free tier as in free up to 1GB or something like that...a little misleading because the site makes it sound that.

<comment><USER36> That's exactly what the Always Free Tier is. 1 free micro instance with 30GB storage for free always. The App Engine is 28 hours per month for free.

<comment><USER4> It actually says 28 instance hours per day, not 28 instance hours per month. So you can run one instance indefinitely, and still have 4 instance-hours left over for testing or whatever.

<comment><USER36> Totally that was a typo

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've never used GCP. Does anyone know at what granularity the Always Free service limits apply? Is it per Google account, per credit card, per billing name & address, something else?

Obviously they shouldn't be in the business of handing out unlimited f1-micros (etc), but I'm curious how you'd go about having more than one small project.

</comment><comment><USER38> I noticed this morning (UTC) that my 40 something days of trial had turned intp 300 something, but there had been no announcement and the docs were still at 60 days.

I obviously attributed it to the extremely cool stuff I had been doing there but apparently not:(

</comment><comment><USER39> Calling it "Always Free" suggests to me it will be free forever.

The little asterisk saying "subject to change anytime" quickly dispells this myth.

Why choose such a misleading name? Why not just "Free tier"?

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't know this might be off topic , but what is the difference now between google compute engine and google app engine flexible now.

<comment><USER41> That's explained here: [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine- enviro...](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine- environments#comparing_the_flexible_environment_to_compute_engine) Most important difference; the app engine is fully managed by Google (so they do security updates etc), with Compute Engine you have to do it yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Meta question, what did this article do to get driven off of the front page so mercilessly? It's in free fall at this point!

</comment><comment><USER43> Oh this page mentions the Australian location, guess we're getting closer to the region finally launching :).

</comment><comment><USER44> I was wondering how long until Google would try to one-up Amazon in this case.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is really confusing (perhaps deceptive).. after "upgrading" a billing account it appeared to create a new account showing $300.00 remaining, but the new account is closed and there is no way to open it, so no projects can be linked to it..

</comment><comment><USER46> This is awesome. I can finally really get into machine learning. I was afraid of the potential cost on aws + I can't afford a gpu. Game changer!

</comment><comment><USER47> My free credits expired years ago :(

<comment><USER32> But you are just as able as anyone else to use the free tier.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Drupal EngineHack Detection Website - <AUTHOR> https://ma.ttias.be/drupal-enginehack-detection-website/

<comment><USER2> Can anyone weigh in on whether the threat is a legitimate one and the detection works?</comment>


Mars: AI powered personalised discounts for e-commerce conversions - <AUTHOR> https://producthunt.com/posts/mars-5 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I posted here a couple days earlier asking for feedback for our beta product MARS. It's an AI powered marketing tool that sends out custom discounts for maximum conversions within an allocated budget. We just went live on Product Hunt and we'd love if you guys could try it out and let us know what you think about it :slightly_smiling_face: We also have a special launch day offer today. Cheers!</comment>


TOTP: Time-Based One-Time Password Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6238.txt <comment><USER2> How does it prevent someone whom knows the password from resetting the clock?</comment>


Accepting payments is getting easier - <AUTHOR> https://gear.mycelium.com

<comment><USER2> Detailed description here [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35b2vo/mycelium_ann...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35b2vo/mycelium_announces_mycelium_gear/)</comment>


Symlinks in Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/12/02/symlinks-windows-10/#uJAvfC1AmXcoG48o.97 <comment><USER2> Discussed three days ago, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13092944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13092944)

</comment><comment> X-Istence Can we get file deletion in windows without raising an error because the file happens to be opened by some program?

<comment><USER3> Not without breaking every program under the sun. Currently, programs on Windows can assume that the file associated with a path won't change while the file is open (at least I hope so or some of my code is a bit racy...).

<comment><USER4> Same goes for directories, yeah. The linux approach can create some _really bad_ user experiences and weird bugs. It's sysadmin-friendly but no good for regular people.

<comment><USER5> I don't see what "regular people" has to do with it... you either know how your filesystem works or you don't. I you don't, the Linux way (I deleted a file but it's still in my editor) can be just as confusing as the Windows way (I can't delete or move or rename this file because it says it's in use, but I don't have any programs open that use it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why create a new util when Mark Russinovich already created 'Junction'. Aren't these the same thing? [https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/bb896768.as...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx)

<comment><USER7> Junctions and symbolic links are very different things on Windows (NTFS also supports hardlinks, distinctly from these other two. You can think of a junction point as a hardlink, but only for a directories, with some other differences dealing with things like network shares. Ordinary hardlinks/symlinks support files as well as directories, however.)

The `mklink` tool in Windows is also by no means new; it's been around for many years. It just wasn't very useful since you needed to be an admin to use symbolic links, anyway.</comment></comment>


YouTube announces it'll no longer allow videos containing "hacked information" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/FluorescentGrey/status/1293986702621437954/photo/1 <comment><USER2> Impossible to enforce consistently. Feels like a way to exclude Wikileaked info in particular.

<comment><USER3> Oh no, not the site that's been a crowd sourced psy-op since day one.

<comment><USER4> Conjecture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this also against foreign governments like China committing abuses against peoples?

Just claim anything bad against you was hacked.

Or does this apply to videos Google doesn't like?

<comment><USER6> According to the statement, it doesn't require that the information was "hacked." It's only used as an example of something they would ban. It also doesn't limit it to one country. If the information would interfere in an election, perhaps even China's democratic centralism, according to this statement, it should be banned.

So any secrets that politicians have been trying to cover up should not be shared on YouTube. Any disclosures of corruption in any government should be kept to another platform. It seems that this would exclude all news organizations from using YouTube to broadcast if enforced fairly, but I would guess that they would use a more narrow definition of "interfere."

<comment><USER6> I've seen elsewhere that this may be related to the Google Ads policy here:

[https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9991623?hl=en&re...](https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9991623?hl=en&ref_topic=29265)

This policy explicitly allows discussion and commentary, just not direct access to information. So news is perfectly acceptable, as long as it doesn't direct people to its sources. This is likely how YouTube will implement the policy as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if policies like this are being put in just to cover platforms' liability coming up to the election, but carries no real teeth.

</comment><comment><USER8> When are they going to start disallowing imposter Bitcoin scams?

Or is that their bread and butter now?

</comment><comment><USER9> so if Snowden had waited 7 years and leaked today instead of 2013, then the 100's of thousands of videos about it with billions of views would all be censored by Google?

would every teleconference video with Snowden also be banned?

Google is EVIL and this is all going to backfire in the most spectacular outcome of unintended consequences.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is ridiculous.</comment>


What You Need to Know About MOOCs - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/What-You-Need-to-Know-About/133475/ <comment><USER3> I am a high school teacher, and I am quite happy to see the availability of some of these courses.

I have a student taking the Intermediate Web Development course from Udacity, and it has had a significant impact on this student. He is learning much more quickly than he could if I was directing his content, but he is still benefiting greatly from having me available to answer questions. To be honest, I am also learning by being exposed to some of what he is doing. For example, I have not used google app engine myself, but I am getting to see how gae compares to heroku, which I am more familiar with.

It is also a good introduction to some of what is expected of people in post- high school education. I definitely intend to steer more students towards some of these courses.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a big problem with edx and coursera courses. As I have a need to work a day job, sometimes rushed projects come in, and these two platforms are offering courses with tight schedules. It would be nice if they would adopt Udacity model, which is more loose. Also the same applies for 10gen education of mongodb which is also made into tight schedule.

<comment><USER5> I just finished Udacity's CS101 course and the lack of deadlines was good for me. I started it months ago and only found time to finish it over my Christmas break, because just watching the videos took me a whole evening per section, and then there are quizzes and homework. And that's to someone who wasn't new to CS but was doing it mainly as an introduction to Python.

I was somewhat surprised, though, to find that the final exam also has no time limits. I couldn't get one of the 12 exam questions right, but apparently I can come back at any time I feel like another go at turning that last question into a green tick. I'm not even sure if there's anything to stop me reading the "spoiler" forum questions about it first.

The course has been excellent and has some respected names behind it, so I had thought that the transcripts and certificates offered had some sort of credibility, but I guess I was wrong expecting my end grade to be any more credible than how many Codecademy badges I have. (Codecademy is good fun too!)

<comment><USER6> > I'm not even sure if there's anything to stop me reading the "spoiler" forum > questions about it first.

There isn't, except your own drive.

> I had thought that the transcripts and certificates offered had some sort of > credibility

The certificates as they are now are more for your self as a proof of accomplishment thing. I have heard that they may be moving towards a real closed exam provided by something like Prometric, like any number of IT certifications, that would be something that could be pointed to in a more credible manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've just finished Udacity CS101 and am about to finish edX 6.00x (both are intro to cs courses).

I've done a lot of thought and research into MOOCs and normal CS bachelor's programs. Initially I was really excited about getting a CS BS for free, online. The savings would be about $40000 compared with going to my local state school.

But the luster soon dulled once I realized that it will be some time before Universities accept MOOC certificates as credit (or never). So my self-study CS degree is really nothing more than cracking open textbooks and watching youtube videos as far as an employer is concerned.

We're at a strange impasse where MOOCs are free but are limited by the weakness of being no-credit, and Universities are outrageously expensive but provide the value of being for-credit.

Up until a week ago I had signed up for 7 or 8 courses, excited to further my CS education. I've since decided to cancel them all. Coursera's Data Structures course doesn't even give you a certificate! Even if you ace the course you get nada. zip. zilch.

Sorry but that's just too much of a downside for me. If you're going to spend 10 hours a week for 3 months (what's that.. 100-120 hours) you might as well get credit for it. Sad but that's how this world works. Either University prices need to be cut in half or MOOC certificates need to count for something. Something has to give. Until then I will be wary about putting my time into MOOCs.

The good thing is that with the flood of students to MOOC education, employers will soon be forced to take note of the courses these MOOC students have taken. This change in attitude will take some time to effect - 10 years before significant attitude shift and then 20-30 years before a complete attitude shift.

I'd rather not wait that long, but I may not have a choice, like many other people. The strange thing is that it's rational to eschew university and study MOOCs, but it's also rational to bite the high university tuition costs and get the degree. It's a very, very interesting time for education.

<comment><USER8> For what it's worth, in my experience with programming jobs, no one really cares what your credentials are. Obviously, some places will, but you absolutely could get a job on skill alone. When I've been involved in hiring, no one paid much attention to the applicant's school - it was a side note, followed by the question, "Okay, so what can they actually do?" It's well known among developers that a lot of people with degrees are actually worthless, and many self-taught people are amazing.

<comment><USER9> It's extremely difficult to judge a software development candidate's abilities from a short interview. Every company I've worked for has used the school/degree/GPA as filtering criteria. Otherwise, it would be impossible to interview every candidate that applies for a job. This is most true for candidates without experience -- a university degree essentially becomes a proxy for ability.

<comment><USER10> With programming,the self-taught are wonderful. MOOCs are a place for those with motivation to start their learning journey. The continuity and application of that learning comes from individual drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone on HN, a more fitting title would probably be "Everything You Already Know About Massive Online Open Courses" -- the info is pretty basic.

The most interesting part was the article linked at the top of their timeline: "The False Promise of the Education Revolution" [http://chronicle.com/article/The-False-Promise-of- the/136305...](http://chronicle.com/article/The-False-Promise-of-the/136305/)

</comment><comment><USER12> University is not about learning. Learning tends to be a means to an end to most people who attend. The end being networking and a diploma. People cheat all the time to get ahead in University, this is antithetical to learning.

MOOCs are great learning tools. However, they generally don't provide you with networking or a diploma. You can cheat doing an online, not-for-credit course, but that undermines the only benefit you get from it.

I personally think that they are great, because I can afford to value learning more than certification. However, if what you are looking for is a way to prove you're an ideal employee, I don't know if they can ever take the place of the social benefits of a flesh-based university.

I think that the discrepancy comes from the idea that University student's goal is to learn, and a University's goal is to teach. It's not. A student's goal is to get a degree and meet smart people (while learning). A University's goal is to make relationships with smart and influential people and secure funding (while teaching). The quality of teaching is a measure of prestige which attracts the smart and influential people: The cost of tuition is a filter to try and discourage any but the wealthiest (this more influential) students. The existence of scholarships are to make exceptions for the smartest students.

If you want to simply learn a subject, you have a lot of opportunities outside of a University degree structure. Auditing courses, Online courses, Self- study, work experience, non-university teaching, etc. But if you were to ask a typical university student if they would give up the possibility of earning a bachelor's degree, however they could go to school and not pay tuition but not be allowed to use University facilities outside of attending lectures, I'd wager most would turn you down.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In my view, MOOCs are really revolutionizing education because they provide options for smart willing people that are locationally or financially disadvantaged to learn from top tier professors/institutions.

<comment><USER13> This is right. The best thing MOOCs have going for them are their prices. And it gets more compelling every year as traditional universities continue to price more and more students out of the market.

<comment><USER14> A lot of people use MOOCs at work. Even though some companies offer tuition reimbursement, it's usually partial and very few companies allot working time for coursework, and most working professionals are more time-poor than cash- poor. With MOOCs, people can usually sneak away 1-2+ hours per day on education and no one needs to know.

More: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/moocs- disrupt...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/moocs-disrupting- work/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using MOOCs to supplement my coursework for over a year now. Here's my experience [http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2012/11/using-moocs-while-in- gr...](http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2012/11/using-moocs-while-in-grad- school.html?m=1)

<comment><USER15> That page is terrible. I'm zooming in but the font size stays the same.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the feedback. I've changed the font settings, hope that helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Slightly off topic - sorry.

Whoever coined the acronym MOOC is clearly not from the NYC area or has not heard the term "mook", which is all I see when I read this article.

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mook>

This is an acronym that should be killed quickly.

Maybe something like MMOE (Massive Multiuser Online Education)? Or MOOE (Massive Open Online Education) or OEOE (Open Enrollment Online Education)....

<comment><USER7> This is the first time I have heard any complaints about the acronym. Not that I particularly like it myself, but I don't think it's a big deal. The world does not revolve around NYC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm in my third year as an undergrad at Yale. I have to say, all the talk of MOOCs "disrupting higher education" is a bit misleading. Top universities are not going anywhere, nor is their prestige. If that were the case, why would MIT/Harvard/Stanford/Yale publish their courses in this manner? They wouldn't.

The reason top universities are not only willing to publicly release their courses, but _competing_ with each other to do so, is simple. The mission of these universities is to educate. Publishing courses as MOOCs accomplishes enables that mission. It also has the added benefit of creating publicity for the school.

To say that MOOCs are "disrupting higher education" implies that the universities are commoditizing their education. They are not. They are commoditizing the _academic_ portion of their education. In my experience at Yale, the academic portion of my education has accounted for no more than 10% of it. Academics are not what universities are in the business of teaching. That's why you can't replace a university education with a set of online courses.

My daily life consists of no more than 2 hours of class. Yet I wake up at 9 and go to bed at 12. That's 13/15 hours in the day NOT spent in class. During that time is when I'm reaping the benefits of a Yale education. They are largely intangible, but very obvious in retrospect. They are skills for navigating through life. Yale teaches you strong social skills, encourages you to step outside your comfort zone, introduces you to what can only be described as an absurd network of people, and how to manage all of that in the course of a day. I've learned more about myself the past three years than I ever could have through online courses. And THAT is why MOOCs will never disrupt the traditional higher education system.

<comment><USER18> Yale, Harvard, and MIT don't need to worry (for now, anyway). The universities that need to worry are the Southeast Directional States, particularly the ones that try to do undergraduate education on the cheap. A MOOC isn't really that much different from a lecture class with 1,000 students. In both cases, your interaction with the professor is going to be minimal.

<comment><USER19> > The universities that need to worry are ... particularly the ones that try > to do undergraduate education on the cheap.

this is a good thing - bad universities that suck up money should be replaced with "free" ones that perform a better job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is something very interesting to me about the rise of these courses. Everyone I've heard is expecting the jobs of the future to require higher order thinking skills: creativity, analytics, etc. Another way to put it would be thing that are on the higher end of [Bloom's Taxonomy](<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blooms_Taxonomy>)

On the other hand, these courses are aimed at the opposite end of the taxonomy: remembering, recalling, etc. There are a few conclusions I can draw from this:

1) There is an upper limit on the possible effectiveness of purely technology driven education.

2) That ceiling will remain in place until there is an proven method of scaling up assessment of creativity and other higher order skills.

3) If you can solve 2, you're going to be very, very rich.

<comment><USER21> I think that by their nature, things like creativity are not easily assessed in a fast standardised way. These skills are usually assessed by their application - if someone produces good creative and analytical work then I can count on them having those skills. That's why artists have portfolios and hackers have GitHub accounts, right? Of course the issue is that hiring people with those skills is harder because you can't screen them so easily - <USER2> requires people with skills equal to or greater than the applicant to spend considerable time evaluating their work product. That costs a lot more than just giving HR a minimum GPA for graduate hires.

<comment><USER19> so instead of hiring an employee, you should be putting out RFP (request for proposals), which outlines what you want produced (creative things, a film, a game, or an application for your business). You also show your budget, and you ought to get proposals, and you pick the "best" one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really like how The Chronicle has organized this web page about MOOCs by (a) using the timeline as the central way of ordering content and (b) providing an overview/FAQ about MOOCs on the left.

<comment><USER23> Same here... anyone know of a rails engine/plugin that will do that for your e.g. blog posts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have done CS101 program in python @ Udacity. It was really good.

<comment><USER10> Same here

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For my parents' generation, the way you showed ambition and competence at work was, after you finished your assigned stuff, to go to your boss and ask for more. If you were good, you were always asking for more things to do. This was inefficient, because it usually meant you were putting 100% CPU into grunt work for 4 years, and if the company turned on you and fired you mid-climb, you would have gained no real skills in that time.

Ambitious people don't do that anymore. They don't give their surplus time back to the boss and ask for more work. It's the mediocre, clueless ones who do that. The ambitious people use surplus time to learn the skills that will help them advance. Having a Library of Alexandria at every desk means that ambitious people can get a high-quality education and no one has to know.

I don't believe that MOOCs will obsolete the traditional liberal arts education, which is about a lot more than lecture, but MOOCs are another step, and a powerful one, in bringing through this transition in the workplace. More on this: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/moocs- disrupt...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/moocs-disrupting- work/)

<comment><USER6> > bringing through this transition in the workplace

God I hope not. I hope that we can as a society, move beyond the idea that if it doesn't have an application in the workplace or if you can't make money from it, it is not worth while. There is no real difference to asking for more grunt work and spending your free time to be able to do different grunt work for someone else somewhere down the line.

I do Udacity and Coursera courses for my self, for my own benefit. I'm a system administrator. I do programming courses for fun, I'm doing Introduction to Astronomy for fun. The astronomy won't help in my job, ever. The vast majority of the programming ones, though tangentially related to my job, by and large won't help there either. It doesn't matter, I didn't do them to be a better worker. I did them to enrich myself.

Work, your job, is something you do to enable you to enjoy life. Don't make it your life.

<comment><USER14> I am with you most of the way on this.

However, work is a fact of life. It can be enjoyable, or it can be drudgery. Generally, the more skills you have, the more leverage you have to push it toward the "enjoyable" end of the spectrum. If I'm going to be spending 45 hours, or even 20 hours, per week on something, I'd rather push the situation to one in which I can enjoy that time and have some autonomy. I don't mind working hard, but I don't like being subordinate, and that's what happens when you have no leverage.

Much of what inspires me to study advanced CS at 5:30 am is workplace-agnostic intellectual interest, but part of it is also the intention of qualifying myself for much better work than what I've been doing for the past few years.

I also think that there's an defeatist attitude that a lot of people take that Work Sucks because, in most jobs, it does. It doesn't have to be that way, though, and if the disproportionate leverage held by top-tier technologists continues to grow, we'll be able to build a dramatically better world-- one in which most people will be able to work 500 hours (or less) per year instead of 2000, and have 1500 more to enjoy.

If Work is going to be with us for the near future, we might as well do what we can to improve it.</comment></comment></comment>


Reddit's Terrorists Have Won: Ellen Pao and the Failure to Rebrand Web 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/11/reddit-s-terrorists-have-won-ellen-pao-and-the-failure-to-rebrand-web-2-0.html

<comment><USER2> The title itself labels Reddit users as terrorists (seems harsh), but it continues to label people as:

Toxic, Misogynists, Poisoned, Racists, Haters, Trolls, Pedophiles, Basement- dwellers, White supremacists, Obnoxiously biased, Sixth grade bullies, Conspiracy theorists, Unrepentant sex criminals, Seething underground pool of excrement and bile, Not belonging to "normal, decent portion of the human race"

To quote what the writer, Arthur Chu, wrote elsewhere:

> "In a war, a real war, a war for survival, you use all the weapons in your > arsenal because you assume the enemy will use all the weapons in theirs. > Because you understand that it IS a war."

This, is what he believes is war, and this is how he thinks it should be fought.

Personally I'd prefer niceness and civility.

<comment><USER3> Niceness and civility are worthy goals, but that'll never happen at a place like Reddit. The poison is too culturally ingrained.

That's not to say there aren't nice people there, just as there are nice people in war zones, but they're not in charge and they get pushed around by forces beyond their control.

<comment><USER4> HackerNews is the only website that has had somebody call my employerer... because of a comment I made on an article that was later linked here. He made sure to let us know that he made a lot of hiring decisions in tech and wondered why I would upset him so much. That kind of toxicity isn't allowed on Reddit.

<comment><USER5> Did you email HN to let them know?

<comment><USER4> ...the threats were e mails from HN. When trolls threaten you the appropriate response is to ignore them. Now I just don't know if the reason I can't find a job is because I am on a blacklist somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reddit calling their users terrorists? And they wonder why all their userbase are leaving in doves.

<comment><USER7> I personally left because it became highly approved / encouraged to call Ellen Pao a cunt every other post followed by all manner of racist bullshit. Lo-and- behold, the idiot neoreactionary mob was wrong again and Ellen was trying to protect the reddit culture, but there will be no apology, they'll just move on to the next faux-outrage that justifies their intense racism and misogyny.

When thinly veiled stormfront posts regularly make it to the front page of your forum, it's time to jump ship and watch the burning mess from afar.

<comment><USER8> People where mad at her because she obviously is a scammer, along with her husband.

Her rap sheet and her actions were the things that brought her animosity from the users. I do not support the view that it was because reddit users obviously hate women, all women and since Pao is a woman, they must hate her too.

I think that position is inane.

<comment><USER7> Her rap sheet? Obviously a scammer? Why is everything so dramatic?

Neither accusation had any bearing on her management of Reddit, and both are highly spurious. As far as I can tell, the entirety of the complaints against her are that her husbands hedge fund blew up and that she sued KPCB.. I'm glad that a mob of Internet trolls knows exactly what happened in both cases.

Have you actually read the Kleiner transcripts? She had better performance than many of her peers, faced actual harassment from senior partners but it didn't meet the threshold that the courts demand for her suit, so she lost. It was probably a good decision from the courts and she negotiated a settlement for not appealing -- this happens _all the time_.

I have no idea how any of this justifies literally thousands of people calling her racist and misogynist names.. And then having everyone of those comments upvoted to the hundreds or thousands of points. Talk about inane.

<comment><USER8> That's as far as you can tell. You are entitled to your opinion. If you opinion is that she was right in her lawsuit, that's fine. But the opinion a big part of redditors is that she made a frivolous lawsuit to cover the losses from her husband's scam. This is partially validated by the fact that the jury did not believe her claims.

It doesn't matter whether you think your opinion of her is the right one. I'm explaining to you that the reason why redditors hate her is not simply because she has a vagina and redditors hate all women.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tokamak Energy exceeds target of 20 Tesla with HTS Magnets - <AUTHOR> https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/tokamak-energy-exceeds-target-of-20-tesla-with-hts-magnets/ <comment><AUTHOR> There's also a video that covers it in a bit more detail: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Tl39CYhNM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Tl39CYhNM)</comment>


Tesla Repays Department of Energy Loan Nine Years Early - <AUTHOR> http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/tesla-repays-department-energy-loan-nine-years-early <comment><USER2> The reason why Tesla is able to pay the Dept of Energy loan early is because of a secondary stock and bonds offering worth about >850+ million. In another words, Tesla is raising funds by generating more debt (from bondholders) and diluting share value (from shareholders), roughly about 3.5 mil out of 40 mil float, and using that money to pay the US govt.

TSLA rose on the news despite diluting shareholders is because coupled with the announcement, Elon Musk mentions that he will personally put an additional 100mil into the secondary offer; and general exuberance that TSLA will use the cash for more infrastructure build-out, a la Google, Yahoo during their heyday's. Make no mistake, this is as much a PR ploy by Tesla to pump up their offering.

It's incredibly smart for Musk and company to raise money in a very favorable environment as TSLA climbed from 45 to 90 after earnings. However, it remains to be seen if they can be still profitable. Note that they are still selling each car at a material loss; and only managed to show a profitable quarter by trading green credits they gained from their manufacturing. To truly scale, they need to either drive down the production cost of their cars down and broaden their market as there are only so much supply of carbon-emission credits on the market.

Disclosure: I trade TSLA options on volatility, without any directional bias.

<comment><USER3> It's these type of posts that make it to the top of a thread that make me not want to check into HN.

Can't we celebrate a company, that was called out as a bad stimulus target during the presidential debates actually paying back all their loans ahead of time? If there was one place I hoped I could go to celebrate an innovative company's success, it would be HN.

I take particular issue with, "Make no mistake, this is as much a PR ploy by Tesla to pump up their offering."

Paying back $450mm in loans isn't just a "ploy" - it's actually raising the money and sending it back to the taxpayers. And, at the same time, doing something innovative and forward looking - building electric cars - which, (look at Fisker) - is NOT a slam dunk, even with green credits.

I, for one, am applauding Tesla today. We can do that without saying that they will be successful in everything, and in the future. But today they are.

<comment><USER4> > It's these type of posts that make it to the top of a thread that make me > not want to check into HN.

Posts that provide insightful explanation about the story? Yes, less of that and more unqualified positive gushing, please. There is nothing wrong with offering an informed opinion, even if (especially if) it's not in full alignment with the prevailing attitude of the hivemind.

<comment><USER5> Man, I'm really not sure that you could have missed his point any more. How could you read what he wrote and POSSIBLY think he was arguing that we need "more unqualified gushing"? You pretty much just made up a strawman and beat the bejesus out of it for no reason...

I'll be the first to call out unqualified gushing, but if that's what we're calling a factual account of a company paying back a loan I simply have to disagree with you.

<comment><USER4> > It's these type of posts that make it to the top of a thread that make me > not want to check into HN.

> Can't we celebrate a company, that was called out as a bad stimulus target > during the presidential debates actually paying back all their loans ahead > of time? If there was one place I hoped I could go to celebrate an > innovative company's success, it would be HN.

It's right there in black in white: "I don't like that we have posts that aren't strictly celebratory in nature" (at least about Tesla). For the record, I'm most definitely a fan of Tesla and have utmost respect for the company, but that didn't stop me from appreciating the critical view of this story that was offered by noname123 (in which I learned some things I didn't know about).

<comment><USER6> Wait a minute did you just make up a quote out of thin air and misattribute it to someone else saying "it's right there in black [and] white"?

<comment><USER7> I don't see the quote anywhere, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I usually don't comment, but I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone mention what I think is the most important part of the story.

The DOE loan was an attractive low-interest loan. Why would they repay it early? Because the DOE loan had restrictive agreements that prevented Tesla to stay competitive.

From page 44 of their May 10th Quarterly Report SEC Filing:

"Our DOE Loan Facility documents contain customary covenants that include, among others, a requirement that the project be conducted in accordance with the business plan for such project, compliance with all requirements of the ATVM Program, and limitations on our and our subsidiaries' ability to incur indebtedness, incur liens, make investments or loans, enter into mergers or acquisitions, dispose of assets, pay dividends or make distributions on capital stock, prepay indebtedness, pay management, advisory or similar fees to affiliates, enter into certain affiliate transactions, enter into new lines of business and enter into certain restrictive agreements. These restrictions may limit our ability to operate our business and may cause us to take actions or prevent us from taking actions we believe are necessary from a competitive standpoint or that we otherwise believe are necessary to grow our business. In addition, our DOE Loan Facility also contains a variety of customary financial covenants, including covenants related to current ratio, leverage ratio, interest coverage ratio and fixed charge coverage ratio. We modified certain of these covenants in February 2012, September 2012, and again in March 2013."

<comment><USER9> Not terribly surprising. I've seen HUD loans up close, and if DOE loans are anything like HUD loans, they are a nightmare. Audits, escrows, and complexity 'til the cows come home.

Thanks for digging that up though, I was wondering why they refinanced it, as I assume the interest rate was pretty good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I own Tesla stock and I'm glad to see this. Tesla has been a highly politicized stock... largely because Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin called it a "loser." My hope is that this will help get rid of that stigma and help them with their image and political battle with dealerships in red states, like North Carolina and Texas. This also removes some strings attached to the DOE loan. For instance, Tesla could be acquired (although I find that unlikely).

<comment><USER11> Don't forget, we tried to make Tesla dealerships illegal first here in Mass. NC was late on that one, so let's not make it a "Red State" matter.

<comment><USER12> It's a preservation of money and industry matter.

<comment><USER11> Ever heard of the Tucker? It was the Tesla of its day. So Detroit sued them out of existence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The subtitle says: "ONLY AMERICAN CAR COMPANY TO HAVE PAID BACK GOVERNMENT"

Assuming that's true, I'm not sure whether I should be proud of Tesla, ashamed of our Government, or angered at other car companies. Probably all three...

<comment><USER14> I'm not an economist, but this is how I understand it. GM paid back it's debt in full, but it paid most of it back in stock. The US government has sold some of it, so it's gotten about half of it's bailout back in cash. But, it still has a ton of GM stock. It's selling the stock slowly to avoid disrupting the market.

That being said, the government needs to sell at something like $75/share to make their money back, but it's at $33 as I write this.

Source: [http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/05/09/when- will-g...](http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/05/09/when-will-gm-pay- back-its-bailout.aspx)

<comment><USER15> This announcement doesn't really have anything to do with GM (or even apply to them) in anything but the "we gave them a loan" sense.

From the linked article:

"This program is often confused with the financial bailouts provided to the then bankrupt GM and Chrysler, who were ineligible for the ATVM program, because a requirement of that program was good financial health."

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I thought that was confusing. "We're the only", "but in some circumstances we're not really talking about everyone". I thought it was worth answering the question "did GM pay back it's loan" because GM is the largest and most notorious recipient of US loan money.

Maybe Tesla really did mean "We're the only American company who received an ATVM loan to pay it back." But, if so, they're being intentionally misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tesla's early repayment of their DOE loan has prevented the U.S. government from exercising three million warrants, which would have netted America around $250 million at the current stock price. Smart move for Tesla, _almost_ a huge boon for U.S. taxpayers.

<comment><USER17> Oh, they had stock warrants? That explains it. Trading the low-interest debt for stock wouldn't make any sense otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "This program is often confused with the financial bailouts provided to the then bankrupt GM and Chrysler, who were ineligible for the ATVM program, because a requirement of that program was good financial health."

"ONLY AMERICAN CAR COMPANY TO HAVE PAID BACK GOVERNMENT"

I'm not so sure Elon isn't writing his own copy.

<comment><USER19> Both can be true at the same time. The second statement you quote does not specify the program which was paid back.

<comment><USER18> I'm just referring to the tone :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Didn't Tesla repay this loan back with another loan:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/15/us-tesla-stock- idU...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/15/us-tesla-stock- idUSBRE94E18W20130515)

I'm not a market economics kind of guy but I don't see how this is any kind of special achievement. Surely any other car manufacturer could have done precisely this?

<comment><USER21> The story is that they paid it back via the private market, meaning that the financial community believes in the company enough that they no longer need public support.

Incidentally, they did issue corporate debt (a form of a loan, sure), but also issued more equity as well.

<comment><USER20> I guess it probably made sense financially in that the private market believed in Tesla enough to provide a better rate than the original loan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know if the DOE is able to recycle the funds back into loans for other electric vehicle manufacturers? If so, this may have been an extra smart move on Tesla's part because it could help competitors access capital and start investing in some of the shared technology behind electric cars and help bring the whole industry to scale.

<comment><USER23> IIRC the DOE still has billions of electric vehicle loan money that they haven't awarded because there are no companies worthy of receiving it. They're also gun-shy about another Solyndra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Finally a company with a sense of integrity and responsibility.

Regardless of how they raised the money the had a debt that they needed to pay and they did which is more then i can say about most companies. "Tesla will be the only American car company to have fully repaid the government."

All other companies only care about their stock and how to make more money the last thing on their mind is paying back their debts and the government lets them get away with it because their "too big to fail".

Let me tell you something ...there's no such thing that is the result of their bad decisions and if they don't fail they will repeat the same mistakes again and again because they can.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't know if Elon should be so quick to thumb his nose at the other auto manufacturers. For one, he's facing a pretty substantial uphill climb WRT dealership laws in a lot of states, and rattling the snake cage won't win any friends.

On the other hand, when brand value (save Ford) for the domestics is strikingly low, maybe he's throwing punches exactly when he needs to.

<comment><USER26> He's not fighting car makers, he's fighting the (generally very independent) dealers in those states. Playing nice isn't going to have them withdrawing their complaints.

At this point better PR, and a mention on the six o'clock news seems worth it.

<comment><USER25> I'd agree with you, on the most part -- but I've worked with folks at the Big Three on their dealership strategies, and trust me: they're strange bedfellows.

Look no further than how TrueCar had to pivot their business model in a short period of time in order to comply with the cold backhand of dealers. It's a juggernaut, sadly.

I'm rooting for Elon to turn it on edge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Mitt Romney must hate Tesla - it is a textbook example of why governments should sometimes mess with free markets.

If the government had not provided this loan Tesla would have gone bankrupt and the US would have lost a significant high-tech asset. 99% of the time the market is more efficient than government, but that other 1% counts for a lot.

<comment><USER28> The right wing argument against government meddling isn't that it doesn't work sometimes (broken clocks being right twice a day and all that). The complaint is that, in aggregate, for every Tesla there are countless Solyndras. Governments aren't good at picking investments for the exact same reason individual _people_ are not good at picking investments: predicting the future is hard. It's doubly hard when governments do it because of the distorting influence of constituents and politics. Let the private sector keep that money and if Elon convinces enough people to lend him cash, he can move forward. I have no doubt he could have done everything he has without a loan from Uncle Sam.

<comment><USER29> "The complaint is that, in aggregate, for every Tesla there are countless Solyndras"

The problem with that argument or complaint is the evidence against it...

"The Energy Department has said that losses in the $34 billion loan portfolio amount to about 2% of the total."

 _This_ program might be a success so far, I cannot speak to past government investments which might back the "right wing" view better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What about Lee Iaccoca? and Sergio Marchionne?

I thought they fully repaid the government too. Maybe I'm confused?

</comment><comment><USER31> like a BOSS

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't remember getting a check from tesla nor was I asked permission to loan them money . The whole absurdity of "greater common good"

<comment><USER33> What's absurd about it? If pollution has bad and expensive effects (asthma, flooding, crop loss), those creating it should pay to help deal with it. It's like paying to have your own trash picked up instead of dumping it in your neighbor's yard.

If you doubt that pollution is bad, that's another story, but you're in the minority and outvoted.

<comment><USER34> And you really think the best way to do that is to subsidize toys for rich folks?

<comment><USER35> As far as I know, the subsidy is the same regardless of the price of the vehicle, so it doesn't apply only to "toys for rich folks". Also, I wouldn't say that a Tesla is a toy for rich folks. Many reasonably successful software engineers could afford one if they didn't want to spend their disposable income on other forms of entertainment.

<comment><USER29> "Entertainment for the upper middle class" there fixed it for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Monthly HN Office Hours - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/monthly-hn-office-hours <comment><USER2> I like the idea of monthly HN office hours. However, Ive been to a YC office hour previously, and one of the most important aspects was the back and forth dialog. I question the effectiveness of the format.

For example, after hearing a response it seemed the follow up questions were more important than the inital engagment. Is there room for dialog or is it more just a Q&A?

Also, I would recommend keeping a list of all office hours as to avoid repeat questions (Although many answers are crafted to the situation).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not ideal and it won't be as good as in person office hours, but we think there's value even in this format. I believe there was some back and forth in some of the threads the last time we did it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The link in "...reviewing Show HN projects..." is broken, looks like a typo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed now. Just went to rules for Show HN. Thanks for head's up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is slightly off topic, but what determines when a YC announcement is posted on Posthaven as opposed to [http://themacro.com](http://themacro.com) ? (Same question about sama's essay today)

<comment><AUTHOR> Official news from YC will show up on the blog. Announcements about and from our organization. We also put launches of new YC companies on the blog.

We won't be breaking any news on The Macro. The Macro's content is not meant to be time sensitive at all and we want it to incorporate lots of voices from the YC / startup universe.

Sam's post could have been put on The Macro, but I think he just wanted to get the ideas out there quickly since we're just starting a new batch and everyone has goal setting on their minds right now.</comment></comment>


Tidal Lock: optional static type checking and inference for Lua - <AUTHOR> http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2013-02/msg00403.html

<comment><USER2> I'd also add to this that PureScript[1] is soon to have a Lua backend[2]. PureScript is a statically typed language with row polymorphic types, algebraic effects and type inference.

[1]: [http://purescript.org](http://purescript.org) [2]: [https://github.com/osa1/psc-lua](https://github.com/osa1/psc-lua)

</comment><comment><USER3> People interested in experimental Lua type systems might also want to check out Typed Lua, André Maidl's ongoing dissertation project. He will be doing a presentation soon at the Dyla workshop:

[http://www.lifl.fr/dyla14/](http://www.lifl.fr/dyla14/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks good, but the syntax is ugly, and sol uses a much nicer type syntax and allows definitions of subtypes already.

[https://github.com/emilk/sol](https://github.com/emilk/sol)

</comment><comment><USER5> Serious question, why link to a year old email to an email list?

I get that type systems and type checking have been a hot topic recently... but why this?

<comment><USER6> Well, its interesting is it not? Fabien has some nice language .. I was comfortably reminded of a stack of stuff from Felleisen that I still haven't got through, and should read instead of reading HN .. and actually Lua has a few fronts in the effort to make type- systems of different variety available to those that need it, so why not discuss it?

From that perspective, its an interesting article. If, like me, you're a fan of Lua as a general purpose platform for a lot of things, seeing the ease with which the grand masters tackle thornier issues .. its interesting, but also inspiring.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you suffer from imposter syndrome? - <AUTHOR> I've been in the tech industry my entire adult life. My grandpa taught me to program when I was six years old (QuickBASIC!). I'm self-employed and do well for myself. I've worked remotely my entire life and have never had a month where I didn't have paid work.
But month after month, I continue to have this feeling that I'm not good enough. That the industry will inevitably leave me behind and that I'm doomed to eat dog food out of a can in my old age or something.
I'm 31 now, so I definitely have a slightly less euphoric view of the working world than I did when I was 21. I'm more experienced and less willing to take work I know won't be a good fit. But I also feel, well, "old".
How many of you suffer the same delusions? What do you do to cope? <comment><USER2> I used to on a daily basis; nowadays it is mostly gone. I got to a point in life where I took over my own narrative from my insecurities a little before turned 40 (about 9 years ago). So empowering.

I have a friend from college who is a former therapist and now life coach who recently wrote a book about this very thing, taking back your narrative. I've been reading it and realize that this is more or less what i figured out how to do.

Her book is called "StoryJacking" and is available free on Amazon Kindle for the next few days. Maybe it will help, who knows?

[https://www.amazon.com/Storyjacking-Change-Inner-Dialogue- Tr...](https://www.amazon.com/Storyjacking-Change-Inner-Dialogue- Transform/dp/1944335323)

</comment><comment><USER3> EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

The only comfort, so far, is learning that this seems to be very, very common among us tech types.

I have coworkers that ask me for help with infra/virtualization stuff that I know well, and they know the programming side of automation better than I do. I'm working to learn it, and deal with the inadequacy feelings all the time.

They tell me they couldn't get by without my knowledge, and to keep going on the automation coding, that I'll figure it out.

Sometimes, I say to myself, "They can say it until they're blue in the face; if I don't believe it, it doesn't matter. It's in one ear, and out the other."

I don't know if I'm really coping. Just continuing to try to learn, and move forward.

My apologies, if it's not the upbeat answer you may have been hoping for. Just trying to be _real_ about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! No no, if I were looking for upbeat answers it'd be a bunch of responses saying "Nah, I'm awesome. Every day I know it."

I think it's easy to forget how much knowledge we've gained over the years through our experience. And too, it's difficult to quantify your true potential. Am I part of the top ten percentile? Top fifty? It's pretty vague.

It's probably best to remember that everyone brings their own skills to a project, like you say.

Thanks for responding!

<comment><USER3> Kinda bummed that I'm the only one that responded to you, so far. I'm sure others are dealing with it, as well.

I'd figured others would be more willing to talk about it.</comment></comment></comment>