Learning by Association in Plants (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/srep38427 <comment><USER2> I heard about this study on NPR. While exciting, I got the feeling the plant biology field was waiting on further test to collaborate the claims on this paper. Does anyone know of any?

<comment><USER3> I'm not impressed. Seems a convoluted way to explain the history and a lot of troubles just to say that garden peas react to an undetermined stimulus and somehow remember it (as a first step to assign it the idea of some kind of conscience).</comment></comment>


Schrödinger's Shift Key - <AUTHOR> http://www.allenpike.com/2014/schrodingers-shift-key/

<comment><USER2> Good article, lame title. Schrödinger's cat reference are now about as irritating as "Stay Calm and XXX" references. We get it, Big Bang Theory made a joke, let's not repeat that "joke" ad nauseum.

As to the article, the author didn't REALLY explain why showing lower/upper case when on the respective shift was "jarring." I will admit that it is outside of Apple's design norms, but I just find showing me an accurate preview of what will be outputted to be rational.

Fortunately the shift issue is largely solved in iOS 8 simply because I don't picture many people sticking to the terrible default keyboard. Google's default keyboard (called "Google Keyboard") is damn good, Swype support, auto- complete, multiple dictionaries, different themes, the whole works. Apple's keyboard is simplistic, slow, and terrible. If I had an iOS device I would install Swype or SwiftKey.</comment>


Ask HN: How to secure an old android phone that is no longer supported - <AUTHOR> does anyone know any tips to update an older phone that is no longer supported by the manufacturer/carrier (I am not sure which)
I am still stuck on Marshmellow and find myself increasingly frustrated by the lack of updates especially when reading about the recent issues on the September Android Security Bulletin [0]
I am considering LineageOS but I think I am done with android in general and I do not think postmarketOS is developed to a point where I could make phone calls and texts or participate in data plans.
my preference in the immediate near future is to keep my phone without changing OS but know I will switch to postmarketOS type solution as soon as it is ready for general use (phone/data/work with carrier cell towers)
[0]https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2017-09-01 <comment><USER2> It seems you're on the right track. Using a postmarketOS is your only option, but depends very much on the device you have and whether the community is supporting it.

</comment><comment><USER3> It isn't clear to me what phone you have but it sounds like you are trying to save money. You can buy a Nexus 5 for $80 on eBay. Update it to your prefered version of LineageOS. I have found the Google phones to run much better and have better driver support then random Android phones.

Why don't you want to change the OS?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to change the OS, but lineageOS is based on android, I specifically am done with google.

I will see what I can do in my extremely low knowledge in how I can contribute to postmarketOS as I think that is the best route and will hopefully allow me to play with it in a similar way I play with a linux box.

<comment><USER3> That makes sense. To be fair I wouldn't call myself an Android or iPhone fan but it is the only thing that has Applications. Ok sounds like postmarketOS is your best option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm using lineageos aka cyanogenmod for years. There is no problem with every day use.</comment>


Dynamo and CouchDB Clusters - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudant.com/dynamo-and-couchdb-clusters

<comment><USER2> Isn't it a bit of an overkill to basically add a dynamo layer to couchdb? The only thing that made CouchDB separate from most other document stores are the incrementally generate views and maybe the MVCC append-only approach or the REST interface. Existing Dynamo based solutions like e.g. Riak already have a REST interface, Riak's "Bitcask" is an append-only storage engine and as far as I know, it also features MVCC. So the difference between this and RIAK are the incremental views? Something that could probably be easily added using its commit hooks

edit: don't get me wrong, I really like couchDB. It's pleasant to work with and the incremental views are a nice feature

<comment><USER3> The nice thing about this is that now you really can scale CouchApps up to the size of Facebook. Write once for your local laptop, keep it running smoothly for millions of users. :)

<comment><USER2> That's the advantage of having a hosted solution.But from a technical standpoint, wouldn't that work with e.g. Riak too?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are GMT{+,-}N timezones sometimes reversed? - <AUTHOR> So today I encountered a very strange "bug" in some code. I was converting timezones using a time and date library, and they were being converted totally wrong.
I probed a little deeper and discovered that converting to e.g. "GMT+1" from GMT was actually subtracting an hour.
I opened a ticket on the library, and the owner linked me to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Area
> " In order to conform with the POSIX style, those zone names beginning with "Etc/GMT" have their sign reversed from the standard ISO 8601 convention. In the "Etc" area, zones west of GMT have a positive sign and those east have a negative sign in their name (e.g "Etc/GMT-14" is 14 hours ahead/east of GMT.)"
Does anyone know why? <comment><USER2> It's the offset added to the local time to arrive at UTC. So basically just the opposite perspective.

I dream of the day where ISO 8601 is pervasive.</comment>


Ask HN: JavaScript Async/Await Experiences - <AUTHOR> In my nodejs projects I've still mostly been using the async library [ http://caolan.github.io/async/v3/ ]. I noticed that they (and everyone else?) has now moved to the new async/await syntax and the synchronous-looking syntax does look appealing. Especially since I worked with C# MVC for a bit where that pattern is heavily used and very nice syntactic sugar.
Most of the asynchronous code we build is for calling various APIs and databases and all manners of compositions built out of those blocks. So there's often lots of "do all these things, then do this when they are all finished and then return a response"
Question: How was your experience migrating to the new syntax? Good/bad/unexpected issues, examples of some non-toy-project using it, was it worth it, does it feel well designed/intuitive... <comment><USER2> I just experienced a feeling today looking at a tutorial of tensorflow.js that perhaps people were using async await to get out of having to think about asynchronicity and that as a consequence the asynchronous nature of JavaScript is not used to its full potential sometimes.

But I have also had feelings that anync await is beneficial when writing crawlers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm learning front end dev currently with a background in Python and C++. For me, it has been difficult.</comment>


The developer died 14 years ago, here's a print out of his source code - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/05/on_call_netware_hell/ <comment><USER2> tl;dr - just a horror story of a dev being asked to work on an old system, and the company being incompetent. In the end, they stiffed him $5,000. No resolution, so don't waste your time reading it.</comment>


Rock Rings Reveal New Insights About North America's Climate Past - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/rock-rings-reveal-surprising-new-insights-about-north-a-1752556296 <comment><USER2> Actual paper [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/01/05/1515478113](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/01/05/1515478113)

Basically, they analyze isotope ratios through the rock layers. Different weather patterns correspond with different isotope deposits. They were using this as a model to support an existing theory about a weather pattern that existed 70k to 55k years ago.</comment>


Ask HN: Should we demo a half-baked product? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working with an early stage startup, and one of the co-founders wants to demo our mobile app to potential customers in a focus group type setting. A few of the people we might demo to will have significant input into volume purchasing decisions within their organization.
However, our mobile app, iPad to be specific, is at best half-baked. UI is essentially non existent from a design standpoint. I would say functionality is about 30%, but enough to just barely get the point across. Design wise, it's less than 10%.
The co-founder is under the impression that if you're a startup, it's perfectly fine to demo with a "relatively half-assed" (his words) product, under the assumption that it will be refined at a later time.
In my opinion, if you are demoing to potential customers, you should have something that will impress them (even if not 100% complete), and not rely on them assuming it will get better (and by better, I mean getting to a point where it's actually useable).
My question is, am I wrong? Or is it worth it to take the extra time to create a great first impression? <comment><USER2> I know this isn't the best answer but it really depends on what your product does. If your product is the kind of groundbreaking technology that the potential customers will understand right away how it will impact their company (high efficiencies/lower costs/increased customers), then I would say demo the product...ONLY if the core functionality is built. If the main purpose of your product isn't working properly yet then you may want to hold off.

If you anticipate that it might take the potential customer some time to fully comprehend how it will benefit their company, I would wait until you can polish the UI some more. A better designed and thought out UI will make it much easier for a potential client to understand the true benefit of your product.

I know it's a little vague because I don't know exactly what it is you are building but I hope that helps

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with you. If the product is as flaky as you suggest, then by all means get them together for a concept discussion with some slides mocking up the functionality, but when they see the product, they'll need to be very understanding to be impressed by a half-baked demo, in my opinion.

'this is x' is more powerful than 'this will be x', because 'will' really means 'might' and introduces doubt, whereas 'is' is concrete and undeniable.

You know that adding pretty logos is simple stuff, and that the real challenge is in integrating the data feed quickly enough, but your customer very often just _assumes_ that the functionality will be there, and only worries about the flashy cruft. Get the flashy cruft right! I think it's easier to sell a product that looks great but does nothing than a product which does loads but looks terrible.

<comment><USER4> I have to agree with this. The customer/buyer is going to be looking at it from the perspective of their own users experience and will be mostly interested in how it will enhance their workflow. I'm in a similar position. I want some early feedback but don't have the whole backend settled yet. So I'm just going to dummy up some backend data and processes and present them onscreen to get the concept across. Once they've got the concept, they can be instrumental in designing what the processes and presentation will actually be. I mean hell, if I can't even explain/sell the concept, I've got the wrong idea or the wrong audience. Invaluable knowledge at this stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading about releasing a "Half Product" rather than a "Half Assed Product" at 37Signals Get Real book. It made sense to me at that time, maybe you should give it a look too.

</comment><comment><USER6> >A few of the people we might demo to will have significant input into volume purchasing decisions within their organization.

Based on this alone, I'd say it's a bad idea.</comment>


The BlackNurse Attack [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://soc.tdc.dk/blacknurse/blacknurse.pdf <comment><USER2> ICMP type 3 code 3:

"Destination unreachable: port unreachable."

This paper notes that many pro grade routers will fail under a DoS attack of these packets at only 15-18 Mbit/s (40K to 50K packets/sec). You can test from the WAN side, i.e. set up a laptop inside the company and generate this kind of DoS attack, and see if the router fails. The paper even includes sample commands for a Ubuntu installation while describing how to test from inside. It appears average users / infected hosts could DoS the router from inside the company!

It's probably because the packet is being processed by the host CPU in the router and not the switching fabric, and lacks proper rate limiting / DoS mitigation. In other words, it's a bug in most major routers, but fixable.</comment>


85% of Chinese international students say they don't have one American friend - <AUTHOR> https://www.34st.com/article/2018/03/chinese-international-penn-isolated-social-culture-alone-feature <comment><USER2> In my school, the Chinese students grouped together, and the Vietnamese grouped together. They stayed that way nearly exclusively, and picked on each other relentlessly, refusing to speak any language (including English) among each other except for their native language.

So at least with that experience, I'm not sure this is a Western problem. I can't imagine that any white person would try to infiltrate and make friends in either group considering how they were treating each other and being so exclusive to themselves. And the fact that they purposely made sure nobody "outside" the group could understand them.

Not only that, the Asians who _didn 't_ hang around in either of these tight- knit groups were labelled something akin to "banana" \- white on the inside and yellow on the outside - and taunted for trying hide their Asianness. It all boils down to a solid confirmation that mixing wasn't allowed in _any_ direction.

Friendships are two-way endeavours. I'm not saying everyone self-segregates, and I'm sure that even a lot of people who do actually wish they weren't doing it. But it is so common that I think it is unfair to blame it on Western culture.

<comment><USER3> In my work experience, immigrants were just waiting for a native, any native, to invite them. I've invited Engineer couples over for dinner from time to time, and if they originated in other countries the common thread is, it was the first time _ever_ they'd been invited by an American. Sometimes they'd been in America for years.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. There is a difference between people who come to the West on their own accord to live and work, versus their children who basically have to move with their parents, and are happy enough to take the path of least resistance when it comes to making friends and acquaintances.

I used to board ESL students, and they worked extremely hard at communicating with others without wrapping themselves in a cultural bubble.

Actually, we had lots of fun discussing similarities and differences for words and concepts. I learned from a Korean boarder that English has gerunds. Funny that I've used them all my life and it never occurred to me that there would be a word for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For whatever cultural reasons Chinese abroad tend to stick with other Chinese.

Since there are many Chinese students in the US (and Canada, UK, etc.) they often don't really interact much outside their circle of Chinese friends.

Now, of course it's not easy to move to a different country with a different language and culture, but I think that the cultural aspect specific to Chinese plays a significant part. I think Indians are somewhat similar in maintaining a strong community among themselves when abroad.

In general, I would say that the best thing that can happen to you if you go to study abroad is to end up being alone. That really forces you to integrate with the local people, culture, and language, which I think is the whole point of going abroad.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This has definitely been my experience. Language and cultural differences make close friendships with US students difficult and International students are often forced to associate with one another instead. A real tragedy when many/most of these international students go back to their home countries.

</comment><comment><USER5> Part of the reason is because the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSA) on most campuses, who work tightly with the local consular offices (read: CCP), dissuade Chinese students from mingling with foreigners lest they become "brainwashed".

See [https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/07/chinas-long-arm- reaches...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/07/chinas-long-arm-reaches-into- american-campuses-chinese-students-scholars-association-university-communist- party/).</comment>


Volkswagen's Electric Car Just Broke the All-Time Record at Pikes Peak - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/volkswagens-electric-car-just-broke-the-all-time-record-1827087085 <comment><USER2> Finally competition for teslas? If you took this drivetrain and put it on a street legal car maybe.

Teslas are awesome (I have one and so I can speak from experience) and you can cruise for hours comfortably on the freeway. But there's one limitation that might not be commonly known. Teslas and most evs have incredible torque, thus they can beat most (almost every?) car's 0 to 60 times. The tesla can go all day (200-250 miles of real range) on the freeway, driving aggressively. But the constant acceleration on a track, where you have to slow down and speed up catches up with the tesla's cooling system's capabilities and after a few laps or miles of top speed and slow down and top speed and slowdown around corners, it gets hot and the system slows it down. Teslas do have a limit on a track - because of the limited cooling capacity.

This never matters on normal driving, but at the famous Nürburgring track in Germany you need to make the corners, slow down, accelerate.

So there is room for other evs (even street legal eventually) to improve on tesla's already impressive technical acumen in this area. I'm hopeful the new roadster will do that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably hidden diesel

<comment><USER4> This was the exact same thought I had when I saw the headline</comment></comment>


Environment Texas Launches Petition to Stop SpaceX Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.environmenttexas.org/news/txe/spacex-attempting-launch-rockets-near-texas-wildlife-refuge

<comment><USER2> I am a supporter of Environment Texas - however as a Texan I strongly support SpaceX use of this private property whose commercial benefits far outweigh the risk to nearby wildlife.

This southernmost part of Texas is economically depressed and needs the investment. I can easily imagine that 40 more acres can be conserved somewhere else as an offset.

see: [http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&cp=12&gs_id=1h&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&cp=12&gs_id=1h&xhr=t&q=boca+chica+state+park&safe=off&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=904&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl)

<comment><USER3> Isn't an environmental study required before building?

<comment><USER2> Yes, see: [http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Texas- reache...](http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Texas-reaches-out- to-land-spaceport-deal-with-3586606.php)

"The company got a look at local enthusiasm for the project last week. During a federal environmental hearing in Brownsville more than 500 area residents attended, with most showing support for the company's plan to build a spaceport just north of the Texas-Mexico border on the coast."

Texas is in competition with Florida and Puerto Rico for the launch site.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Companies or startups that are *actually* changing the world? - <AUTHOR> I just read about another startup that wants me to "come change the world" by making some app that does nothing, so I started thinking:
Let's discuss companies that are actually changing the world, rather than Not Hotdog or Facebook for Cats.
We've got stuff like Boston Dynamics and SpaceX (and friends) which could very plausibly change the world in any number of ways (Giant satellite internet constellation? Robocop? Lunar Resort?).
We've got the big AI companies (for better or worse, surveillance, self driving cars, it's definitely changing the world).
There are I assume medical and sociological companies or nonprofits doing wild new things that I am not aware of. Paul Allen's research institutes (brain and cell) maybe.
What are some places (startups, corps, nonprofits) that are actually changing the world, for better or worse? <comment><USER2> Seems like you think something is changing the world only if it has some link to the physical / hardware world - go work or found a hardware related company then I suppose. Personally I think many software only companies change the world in ways that are just as important. Connecting ideas and improving processes gives human more time and part of their life back. I'm the founder of tesults.com and I think it's changing the world in its own small way but I may well sound delusional to anyone comparing this effort to a massively funded hardware tech company such as Tesla or Space X.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is absolutely the kind of totally pointless, already-solved, software- only non-product that causes no measurable change in the world that I was talking about.

I'm not saying software can't have an impact, it absolutely can, and a BIG one. Think Tor, Bitcoin, Signal, or maybe some AI or open OS or something that allows people to do something they couldn't do before at any price. Those things can cause some major structural or other disruption to society at large. Automated test results will not. People don't even test stuff most of the time (sadly).

<comment><USER3> Perhaps, you haven't worked in an environment where that kind of information is regularly and pointlessly compiled into Excel sheets.

Tesults certainly isn't changing the world as in "SpaceX is changing the world." but I suppose they have a few customers who think that their product is worth the price.

As for already solved problems: Remember Dropbox?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Facebook and Google have profoundly changed the way people connect and find information, respectively. It's quite a developer mindset to have incremental space travel improvements above those.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rigetti Computing

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigetti_Computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigetti_Computing)

If quantum computing happens, I wonder how long it will take the workforce and tools to develop -- it took some time for classical computers to get good tooling and a decent size workforce.

Definitely the potential to change the world, if it's actually possible to build working quantum computers.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone on HN know if this company is legit?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean? You're the one who suggsted them.

[https://blog.ycombinator.com/rigetti-computing- yc-s14-raises...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/rigetti-computing- yc-s14-raises-2-dollars-dot-5m-to-create-commercial-quantum-systems/)

it's a YC company, with a lot of nontrivial press:

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech- talk/computing/software/riget...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech- talk/computing/software/rigetti-launches-fullstack-quantum-computing-service- and-quantum-ic-fab)

[https://www.wired.com/story/quantum-computing-factory- taking...](https://www.wired.com/story/quantum-computing-factory-taking-on- google-ibm/)

and their own site: [https://www.rigetti.com/](https://www.rigetti.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Broad Institute. HHMI. CZI Science? They're pretty new.

<comment><AUTHOR> HHMI is a good one that I forgot about. For the reader's convenience: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute)

Howard Hughes really was Tony Stark -- he also invented the hospital bed? Of course he would start a world-changing organization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You could argue that Uber, Facebook, Google changed the world, but didn't start out very ambitious.</comment>


The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) - <AUTHOR> http://downlode.org/Etext/alicebob.html

<comment><USER2> All was funny until I reached this paragraph: "These enemies have almost unlimited resources. They always listen in to telephone conversations between Alice and Bob. And these enemies are very sneaky. One of their favorite tricks is to telephone Alice and pretend to be Bob."

Talk about ahead of its time...

<comment><USER3> This is a very old concept, what changed is mostly scale.

<comment><USER4> And the execution. It's much easier to impersonate somebody through a text message or an email than a voice call.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was really funny up until the prolonged domestic violence joke at the end, which kinda threw me off. Product of its times, I guess.

<comment><USER6> I think that was trying to be a pastiche of/homage to/rip off Woody Allen's bit on Mechanical Objects, which it's very similar to. (Excerpted and linked below)

> I have never in my life had good relationships with mechanical objects of > any sort. [...]

> About three years ago I couldn't stand it anymore. I was home one night. I > called a meeting with my possessions. I got everything I owned into the > living room. My toaster, my clock, my blender. They never been in the living > room before. And I spoke to them. I opened with a joke. And then I said "I > know what's going on, and cut it out!" I have a sun lamp, but as I sit under > it, it rains on me. And I spoke to each appliance, I was really articulate. > Then I put them back, and I felt good.

> Two nights later I'm watching my portable television set, and the set begins > to jump up and down, and I go up to it. And I always talk before I hit, and > I said "I thought we had discussed this, what's the problem?" And the set > kept going up and down, so I hit it, and it felt good hitting it, and I beat > the hell out of it. I was really great, I tore off the antenna, and I felt > very virile.

> And two days later I go to my dentist in New York. I had gone to my dentist, > but I had a deep cavity, and he'd sent me to a chiropodist. I'm going into a > building in mid-town New York, and they have those elevators, and I hear a > voice say "Kindly call out your floors, please", and I say "sixteen" and the > doors close and the elevator starts going up to sixteen. And on the way up > the elevator says to me "Are you the guy that hit the television set?" I > felt like an ass, y'know, and it took me up and down fast between floors, > and it threw me off in the basement. It yelled out something that was anti- > semetic.

[http://www.ibras.dk/comedy/allen.htm#Mechs](http://www.ibras.dk/comedy/allen.htm#Mechs)

<comment><USER5> Ah, given that context, that makes more sense / comes off a little less nefarious. I think it was mostly the references to forgetting an anniversary, trying to repair the relationship with a heart-to-heart by candlelight, etc., that took it to a kind of weird place for me.

Thanks for the link and the context!

<comment><USER6> To be fair, the Woody Allen joke is also allegorically about domestic violence and this updated version only reinforced those references, so I don't think your reaction was off base.

For even more context, around the same time as the Woody Allen stand-up Hunter S. Thompson gets confronted on CBC by a member of Hells Angels. It shows in stark contrast how much society has matured in 50 years (at least regarding public acceptance of domestic violence). You should really watch the clip, but I've again excerpted choice quotes from the Hells Angels member that the audience reacts favorably to.

(At 3:24 in the video) > Junkie George is beating his old lady. Junkie George's dog bit him. To me this is a personal feud. If a guy wants to beat his wife and his dog bites him, that's between the three of 'em. [Audience laughter and applause]

and a short time later (5:42 in the video): > To keep a woman in line you got to beat her like a rug once in a while. [Again, audience laughter and applause]

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo#t=204](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo#t=204)

<comment><USER7> Wow, that was a pretty surprising video. The audience's reaction especially surprised me. While maybe not quickly enough, times have certainly changed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


F# and the Dynamic Lookup Operator - <AUTHOR> http://codebetter.com/blogs/matthew.podwysocki/archive/2010/02/10/f-and-the-dynamic-lookup-operator-ala-c.aspx

<comment><USER2> I don't understand how this commenting system works

</comment><comment><USER2> abcdefg</comment>


Going Freemium: One Year Later - <AUTHOR> http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/going-freemium-one-year-later/

<comment><USER2> I use MailChimp for free right now but I can't wait until my list is big enough for me to start having to pay them. It'll mean that I have enough subscribers to actually monetize the list. At that point, I'll be more than happy to give them my credit card.

This is in contrast with Evernote and Dropbox, both of which I use for free but neither of which I plan of paying for in the future. They work well enough for my needs, and if I grow out of them, I'll probably just either cut back on my use or try to find another solution. Maybe that makes me a freeloader or cheapskate, but I imagine I'm not alone.

So, at least in my case, Freemium works best for products that either directly or indirectly contribute to making money.

<comment><USER3> I'd argue that freemium works best when the "premium" part has value for the user. But, making money (i.e. directly contributing to revenue/profit) is just one way to have value. Saving time is another.

So, I pay DropBox not because it helps me make money, but because it's worth the savings in time and frustration trying to come up with an alternative.

Many of the most popular freemium products have a price point that is low enough that large numbers of people can easily justify the price, if they actually use the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Profit up 650% in a year. Remind anyone of this the next time they start talking about particular business types having patent on rapid growth.

<comment><USER5> Beermat maths...

With 20% of their user base (450k) on 10,000+ subscribers per month ($150 pcm) I make that $13,500,000 per month.

And with that being 65% of their total revenue, they are making a cool $20m a mth. Not bad, not bad at all.

Edit - forgot that not all 450k are paying, their maths state that 13.33% (4,000 paying of 30,000) are paying. So actually they are making about $2,6m per mth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an amazing post. I've been at it for 7 years at FreshBooks...experience tells me patience is more valuable than most people building start ups want to believe.

<comment><USER7> At a risk of harming myself, you guys might be giving too much stuff away for free. I've been using Freshbooks for about a year for my small business, and got most of my business partners to send me invoices through Freshbooks.

We are all still using a free account, and never had a need to switch over. The free account just offers everything I need. I don't even know what would I get with premium account - I never felt a need to check it out.

<comment><USER8> What happens when you acquire your 4th client?

<comment><USER6> you are asked to pay a monthly fee. you can use up to three for free for as long as you like, but as soon as you need to manager four at the same time you are prompted to a paying account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like MailChimp a lot but always dislike the "monkey" talk. Chimps are apes, not monkeys.

<comment><USER10> I just came here to post in delight about his quote:

> I've worked in the stuffy corporate world. It was an extremely valuable > learning experience, but it was so — stuffy. It needs more monkey.

But it was a fleeting moment of delight. Damn you timf :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting.

I just flipped the free plan back on over at: <http://goodgecko.com>

I'll write more about this on my blog soon, but in a nutshell my reasons were thus:

1) It helps mitigate some marketing costs

2) I'd also rather the user tries out my app rather than the competition's :)

3) It shifts the focus of development slightly. I noticed that with the Free Trial (that kicks into paid after 15 days) I was so focused on feeding visitors through the funnel that all my time was being spent on the sales funnel; building a nice sales site, setting up A/B tests, worrying about my pricing etc. Changing to Freemium yesterday, I immediately got a bunch of signups and my mind started focusing on the app again. The onus is now on the app to be as awesome as possible in both free and paid versions. It's exposed to more people. I think this is a better long-term situation as it will help me focus on the right things, not just short-term funneling people into a Free Trial to make $$$.

<comment><USER12> Slightly OT--but how does your product differ from just creating a survey in Google Docs for free?

<comment><USER11> Fair question.

In terms of big differences, I'd say that my app offers more ways to get feedback.

You create one survey and then get multiple choices on how to use it:

1) web-based (this is like google docs)

2) mobile (optimised for iphones)

3) website popup - check out <http://goodgecko.com/tour/genie> for an example

and planning to follow it up with...

4) telephone surveys - created automatically and complete with robotic synthesised voice!

5) ???

That's the philosophy. Create a survey, automatically get a bunch of different ways to use it.

Thanks for the question though! Makes me think I should explain this better on the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great to read about success the "hard way" -- over the long term, and without using free as a "hook" to bring in the initial users. And despite taking a slow and patient route overall, they would have failed faster (if the idea crashed) than if they had have gone freemium from the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great article that provides invaluable insights into Mailchimp's experience with the freemium business model. We are using a freemium model with Domainer Income (<http://www.domainerincome.com>). Now, we are still in the throes of improving many aspects of the site and conversion funnel, etc but with regard to the freemium model itself, it occurs to me that we have - and anyone deploying a freemium model has - quite a few variables to play around with that will impact the 10:1 ratio as well as overall conversions, sales, profits, renewals, etc. For example, my experience and observations suggest that you really need to provide overwhelming value in the paid version to get people to upgrade. 'A little bit better' won't cut it. Also, you can experiment with the actual free/paid service you provide. One thing we're about to do is give everyone who signs up for a free membership a trial of the premium service before they are 'dropped' back to the free account. These are just two examples. On the other hand, having said this, I am also developing a theory that you really have three target markets: freebie users who will never upgrade, paid users who want the value-added services of the paid version, and a group in between that will upgrade if they perceive enough value in doing so. How big is the middle group, what will it take to convince them to upgrade, is it cost-effective to try to persuade them? These are all fascinating questions!

</comment><comment><USER15> I think there good business in helping other people make money, or at least attempt to make money.

</comment><comment><USER16> One thing I don't see people talking about is utilizing donations while bootstrapping. The article correctly mentions that you need income (that 10%) to pay the bills in order to develop a badass product. Donations can give you that, as well as social proof that your idea is worth the potential act of paying for it. Meaning, donors don't "receive" anything (subjective, I know), but are still willing to support your great idea.

<comment><USER8> You really think 10% of the users will donate? I'm thinking more like 0.01% will donate.

<comment><USER16> Bit late to reply, but we have had > 300 donors last I checked, with 21k or so users at that time. So, let's just say 1% - still good. Enough to give me ramen profitability for the last four months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of my favorite services, up there with Dropbox and Xmarks (which is now shutting down).

Slightly off topic to Ben's post but did MailChimp ever raise financing?

<comment><USER18> No. Unless you count a couple of small lines-of-credit with our local bank, which we took as backup in case some initiatives failed (hiring an API programmer, expanding the office, etc).

<comment><USER19> Kudos to you. It is nice to read about a long-term successful company not looking for an exit strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Congratulations on your success and hardwork.

</comment><comment><USER20> Impressive.</comment>


How this company is 98% certain you want that Parka - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/102191860

<comment><USER2> It seems quite unlikely to me that they'd actually be able to get 98% on anything involving what humans want. Especially with retail. You might be able to figure out from the other warm clothes I'm buying that I would like a parka if I don't have one - but how do you know I don't already have one. Fortunately this kind of accuracy isn't actually necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought the percentage dubious too, but even if the # is 5% likely (vs 0.1% in the general population) it's very valuable to an advertiser.

<comment><USER2> As long as they're not doing something stupid like saying "this person has a 98% probability of buying a parka, let's send them one and bill them for it, but let them return it with free shipping." Then you'd need the accuracy. (Also that's probably illegal, and even if I wanted something I wouldn't want a company sending it to me without my permission.)</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon S3 and Glacier Price Reductions - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-storage-update-s3-glacier-price-reductions/ <comment><USER2> Would really like to see some massive reductions in the operation costs and most importantly, bandwidth costs.

The bandwidth costs are so far out of line with what the network transfer actually costs, it just feels like price fixing between the major cloud players that nobody is drastically reducing those prices, only storage prices.

Charging 5 cents per gigabyte (at their maximum published discount level) is the equivalent to paying $16,000 per month for a 1 gigabit line. This does not count any operation costs either, which could add thousands in cost as well, depending on how you are using S3.

There are several providers that offer a unmetered 1gbps line PLUS a dedicated server for ~600-750/mo. Providers like OVH offer the bandwidth for as little as 100/month. ( [https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/bandwidth- upgrade.x...](https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/bandwidth-upgrade.xml) ) I am just not sure how amazon can justify a 160x price increase over OVH or a 30x increase over dedicated server + transfer.

For the time being, the best bet is to use S3 for your storage and then have a heavily caching non amazon CDN on top of it (like cloudflare) to save the ridiculous bandwidth costs.

<comment><USER3> That's exactly why I started Ploid.

A consulting customer came to me a year ago, with a growth from 200TB/year in data production to over 6PB/year and their budget couldn't sustain that jump (or anywhere close to it)

Having come from the mass-facilities and data center space with MagicJack, I knew the wholesale cost of bandwidth, power and drives were continuously falling.

There are certain clients and use cases that need access to their data all of the time and the very bones they are built on is based on collaboration (Genomics).

For example, this client is now storing 6PB of data with us, 3 copies in separate data centers. We are half the price of S3, and we include all the bandwidth for free, but limited to a 10GigE per PB stored. This has worked out extremely well - we were about 20% (!!!!) the price of Amazon after you factor in bandwidth.

There are lots of challenges we faced, like over zealous neighbors in the environment, storing lots of small objects and high usage of ancillary features like metadata but for customers of any size. By putting the "tax" on bandwidth, a lot of these business cases are solved. I see why Amazon does that.

AWS is truly great, but as you get into very high scale (specifically in storage - 2PB+), it becomes extremely cost prohibitive.

<comment><USER4> "By putting the "tax" on bandwidth, a lot of these business cases are solved. I see why Amazon does that."

However, S3 has the same egress pricing as EC2. Do you think it's really a "business case tax" they're applying across all services?

<comment><USER5> It makes a lot of sense to be able to run loss making products. Otherwise everyone would use S3 together with Google compute engine and Azure databases (let's assume they'd be cheapest). In this scenario all providers would lose out.

In the current world, they can keep prices for some products below costs but make their money with bandwidth and the other services people are forced to use to avoid egress traffic.

<comment><USER4> "In the current world, they can keep prices for some products below costs but make their money with bandwidth and the other services people are forced to use to avoid egress traffic."

Which AWS products are loss leaders?

S3 storage pricing is not exactly cheap. Neither is EC2 instance pricing.

"Otherwise everyone would use S3 together with Google compute engine and Azure databases (let's assume they'd be cheapest). In this scenario all providers would lose out."

No, S3 would do well, GCE would do well, Azure would do well. Providers only lose out to the extent their products no longer compete on merit alone.

<comment><USER5> I can imagine that this is a good reason. Otherwise they could make bandwidth cheaper so that people who cannot move everything can at least move part of their applications.

I think the three providers are smart enough to know why they charge that much for bandwidth. And this is the only reason I could think of why all 3 of them charge that much. And I'm pretty sure that some products run at a loss, they do for nearly every company. But AWS won't tell us which ones.

It's reasonable to think that S3 is loss making or about breakeven on its own but recoups costs due to bandwidth charges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, the costs are nicer, but mostly, Glacier goes from an unusable pricing model to a usable one. I was terrified to use Glacier. The previous model, if you made requests too rapidly, you might be hit with thousands of dollars of bills for relatively small data retrievals -- very easy to make a very expensive bug.

I had wanted Amazon to wrap it in something where they managed that complexity for a long time. Looks like they finally did.

Now the only thing Amazon needs to do is expand free tiers on all of their services, or at least very low cost ones. I prototype a lot of things from home for work -- kinda 20% time style projects where I couldn't really budget resources for it. The free tier is great for that. All services ought to have it -- especially RDS. I ought to be able to have a slice of a database (even kilobytes/tens of accesses/not-guaranteed security/shared server) paying nothing or pennies.

<comment><USER7> A t2.large costs 10 cents/hour, a t2.medium RDS instance costs 7 cents/hour. If you put in 50 hours/month on this side project, that's $8.50 for compute plus maybe $3 for ~ 30GB of storage.

$11.50/month doesn't sound too hard to budget for.

<comment><USER8> It might be more about bureaucracy than about cost. At my last job even small expenses would require printing forms and getting the CFO to sign them, so in the end it was pretty much not worth it for small tests.

<comment><USER9> Your work can't give you a few VMs in a lab somewhere that you can get free rein to prototype on? That is usually not too hard to get..

it seems the idea of the Amazon free tier is to give people a taste of AWS so they can decide to go in more or not. It's not really designed to be a free prototype for existing large customers product. Like the other poster said, you can host a tiny VM for $6 or so a month, not a big expense.

If you are asking for $4000 a month production cluster, yes that is harder to just get..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I'm not going to complain about a price reduction, I'd honestly be more excited if S3 implemented support for additional headers and redirect rules. Right now, anyone hosting a single page app (e.g. Angular/React) behind S3 and Cloudfront is going to get an F on securityheaders.io.

And even worse, there is no way to prerender an SPA site for search engines without standing up an nginx proxy on ec2, which completely eliminates almost all of the benefits from Cloudfront. This is because right now S3 can only redirect based on a key prefix or error code, not based on a user agent like Googlebot or whatever.

This means that even if you can technically drop a <meta name="fragment" content="!"> tag in your front end and then have S3 redirect on the key prefix '?_escaped_fragment_=', that will be a 301 redirect. This means that Google will ignore any <link rel="canonical" href="..."> tag on the prerendered page and will instead index [https://api.yoursite.com](https://api.yoursite.com) or wherever your prerendered content is being hosted rather than your actual site.

Not only is it a bunch of extra work to stand up an nginx proxy as a workaround, but it's also a whole extra set of security concerns, scaling concerns, etc. Not a good situation.

edit: For more info on the prerendering issues, c.f.:

[https://github.com/prerender/prerender/issues/93](https://github.com/prerender/prerender/issues/93)

[https://gist.github.com/thoop/8165802](https://gist.github.com/thoop/8165802)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you share your needs with me so I can pass them along to the S3 team?

<comment><USER10> Thanks Jeff, I just sent you an email:

[https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/QOU4DQDbS8e4tddfI22J0w/s3-prer...](https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/QOU4DQDbS8e4tddfI22J0w/s3-prerendering- issue-hacker-news)

Of course this won't yet show up in Google until we get that nginx proxy stood up or this feature gets implemented. :-)

<comment><USER11> OT: That fwd:everyone service is really cool. Damn :)

<comment><USER10> Thanks! Consider making an account, we're re-launching the site in the next couple weeks so there should be a lot of good content up there shortly.

<comment><USER12> Looks really good. Will sign up shortly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is anyone using either S3 or Glacier to store encrypted backups of their personal computer(s)? I've only used Time Machine to back up my machine for a long time, but I don't really trust it and would like to have another back up in the cloud. Any tools that automate back up and restore to/from S3/Glacier? What are your experiences?

<comment><USER14> I use Arq ([https://www.arqbackup.com/](https://www.arqbackup.com/)) and it works very well. I've only tested retrieving small amounts of data from it so I can't comment much on a large bill. I only wish it worked on Linux. I've been thinking about seeing if it would work with Wine.

<comment><USER15> Ditto. I've been using Arq for 4 years now to back up nearly a TB of data to S3 and Google Cloud Storage.

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity, why both?

<comment><USER15> I guess mostly to not have all my cloud backup eggs in one basket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This a really dumb question, but since I've never used Glacier what does the workflow for a Glacier application look like? I'm used to the world of immediate access needs, and fast API responses, so I can't imagine sending off a request to an API with a response "Your data will be ready in 1-5 hours, come back later".

<comment><USER11> Glacier is not for data you want readily available. It's for when you care more about storage than access.

<comment><USER18> Right, but if you want to retrieve some data through their API, how does it work? Normally you open the connection, ask for the data, then receive it and close the connection, does that change if there's a 5+ hour wait between the ask and the receive? Do you just leave the connection open? Provide them with a webhook to call when it's ready? I don't personally care about the answer but I'm pretty sure that's what they were asking.

<comment><USER19> Well the CLI gives you a job ID that you can use to check on the status and retrieve when it's ready. You can also ask to be notified by SNS.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/glacier/init...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/glacier/initiate- job.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is the outgoing bandwidth still the same price? Bandwidth cost is kind of high compared to other services.

<comment><USER5> Yes, they are high for all 3 major cloud providers. I guess it's to keep you from using the cheapest part of each provider. That way you have to use their whole ecosystem and they can offer some products below costs to lure people in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is the mechanism that makes it cheaper to take longer getting data out? Is it that they save money on a lower-throughput interface to the storage? Is it simply just market segmentation?

<comment><USER22> In theory, tape [1], optical [2], or spun-down disk [3] are cheaper but slower than spinning disk. Erasure coding [4] is also cheaper but slower than replication. One could even imagine putting cold data on the outer tracks of hard disks and warm on the inner tracks. In practice I suspect Glacier is market segmentation.

[1] [http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/3/how-google-backs- up...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/3/how-google-backs-up-the- internet-along-with-exabytes-of-othe.html)

[2] [http://www.everspan.com/home](http://www.everspan.com/home)

[3] [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/pelican...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/pelican-a-building-block-for-exascale-cold-data- storage/)

[4] [https://code.facebook.com/posts/1433093613662262/-under- the-...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1433093613662262/-under-the-hood- facebook-s-cold-storage-system-/)

<comment><USER23> it has more to do with clever uses of erasure coding than you might think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I currently use S3 Infrequent Access buckets for some personal projects. These Glacier price reductions, along with the much better retrieval model look really great.

However using Glacier as a simple store from the command-line seems horribly convoluted:

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli- using-g...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-using- glacier.html)

Does anyone know of any good tooling around Glacier for the command line?

<comment><USER25> If you don't want to mess with all of that, you could use the standard "aws s3" command to upload your files to your s3 bucket like normal, and just apply an archive policy to your bucket or archive/ prefix or whatnot and it will automatically transfer your files to glacier for you.

<comment><USER26> Yup, works great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Has anyone tried to migrate to Backblaze. Their pricing seems really aggressive but I am not sure if we can compare Amazon and Backblaze when it comes to reliability.

[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage- providers.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html)

<comment><USER28> I love the folks at backblaze but the single datacenter thing really worries me (and again, disclosure, I work on Google Cloud). If you're just using it as another backup, maybe that's less of a concern: your house would have to burn down at the same time that they have a catastrophic failure. But it is part of the reason you see S3 and GCS costing more (plus the massive amount of I/O you can do to either S3 or GCS; I'd be curious what happens when there's a run on the Backblaze DC).

Again, huge disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

<comment><USER4> "But it is part of the reason you see S3 and GCS costing more"

I bet that when Backblaze increase their scale by adding data centers they will decrease prices, not increase them.

According to Ford's laws of service: Price, volume (scale) and quality are never opposed.

1\. Decrease price and you can increase volume.

2\. Increase volume and you can increase quality.

3\. Increase quality and you can increase volume.

4\. Increase volume and you can decrease price.

<comment><USER28> Sorry if I wasn't clear: your bytes on GCS and S3 are stored across multiple buildings (GCS Regional, S3 Standard). More copies is more dollars not less ;).

<comment><USER4> "More copies is more dollars not less ;)"

As far as I am aware GCS does erasure coding across sites?

Backblaze could do multiple tiers of erasure coding and they would still be able to reduce prices given more scale, ceteris paribus.

It's not a question of number of replicas, data centers or technical implementation, but a question of pricing policy.

Does one want to use volume and scale to drive prices down (and cheaper prices to increase volume) or does one want to use volume and scale to bloat margins? Backblaze are arguably doing the former.

Does one want to lock customers into an ecosystem by enforcing excessive bandwidth prices or does one want to pass on bandwidth cost-savings to customers? Backblaze are arguably doing the latter.

Backblaze would continue to be cheaper because their pricing policy serves customers across all dimensions.

More scale is definitely less dollars not more (even if it means a fraction of a few more erasure coded shards across sites).

Disclosure: I do not work for Backblaze.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone else finding their S3 bill consisting of mostly PUT/COPY/POST/LIST queries? Our service has a ton of data going in, very little going out and we're sitting with 95% of the bill being P/C/P/L queries and only the remaining 5% being storage.

Either way, good news on the storage price reductions :)

<comment><USER29> What app/site are you using to upload to S3? I use a combination of CloudBerry Backup and Arq Backup on my Macs/PCs here and the requests aren't that high (on average about 30Gb of data per machine in around 300K files).

I am guessing it comes down to the algorithm used to compare and upload/download files. I believe the two solutions above use a separate 'index' file on S3 to track file compares.

<comment><USER11> It's more that we have a pretty high throughput system, using Lambda.

Users authenticate with an API gateway endpoint, we do a PUT to store a descriptor file, send a presigned PUT URL back so they can upload their file, we then process the file and do a COPY+DELETE to move it out of the "not yet processed" stage and finally do another PUT to upload the resulting processed file.

Despite a lot of data, the storage bill is barely scratching $40, but we're at almost $700/mo on API calls.

<comment><USER30> Heyo, sounds not quite right if you wanna shoot me an email firstname.lastname@example.com I'd be happy to try to figure it out. Your API calls shouldn't be that much more than the storage cost without a really strange access behavior. I don't know the answer off the top of my head but I'm down to try to find it out. GET's cost money and outbound bandwidth cost money but PUTS/POSTS should be neglible.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I'll shoot an email.

Edit: Sent!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great discount. I'm only surprised that Infrequent Access doesn't get any discount.

By the way, I wrote article, how to reduce S3 costs: [https://www.sumologic.com/aws/s3/s3-cost- optimization/](https://www.sumologic.com/aws/s3/s3-cost-optimization/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Do we know now how Glacier actually works? Tape robots, spun-down disks, racks of optical media?

Best source I could find was: [https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons- glacier-secret-bd...](https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier- secret-bdxl/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Any chance Google will match this price for their coldline storage? I was planning to archive a few TBs in Google coldline, but Glacier is now cheaper and has a sane retrieval pricing model.

</comment><comment><USER34> > For example, retrieving 500 archives that are 1 GB each would cost 500GB x > $0.01 + 500 x $0.05/1,000 = $5.25

Shouldn't that be $5.025? Or did I misunderstand?

</comment><comment><USER35> In our startup, the biggest cost is bandwidth. We live in an age where videos can be created and streamed in seconds to millions of people. With so high cost for bandwidth, it's very difficult for bootstrapped startups to grow as quickly as those who raise VC funding. I hope AWS can reduce the outgoing bandwidth cost by 50%.

</comment><comment><USER36> _EDIT:_ My mistake, this is the new S3 pricing! NOT Glacier pricing! Thank you res0nat0r.

Am I understanding this right? $0.023/GB/month for Glacier, so * 12 months/year = $0.276/GB/year, which means:

        10GB  = $2.70/year
        100GB = $27.00/year
        1TB   = $270.00/year
        ...

And this is only the _storage_ cost. This doesn't take into account the cost should you actually decise to retrieve the data.

So considering a 1TB hard drive [0] costs $50.00, how is this cost effective? I can buy 5x1TB hard drives for the price of 1TB on Glacier.

I understand there is overhead to managing it yourself. So, is this just not targeted to technically proficient folks?

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Cache-Desktop-Drive- WD10EZEX/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Cache-Desktop-Drive- WD10EZEX/dp/B0088PUEPK)

<comment><USER37> That's comparing apples and oranges - your hard drive doesn't live in a secure, fireproof data center in the cloud you can access from anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or eggs and omelettes...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If costs matter to you, e.g. for home backups, don't buy Glacier (and _heck_ don't buy S3). A 3TB drive costs about 110eur, so if you'd have to buy a new one every year (you don't) that'd cost 110/3/1000/12=0.31 cents per gigabyte per month. Glacier? 7 times more expensive at 2.3ct.

Hardware is usually not a business' main cost but it does matter for home users, small businesses or startups that didn't get funded yet, some of whom might consider Tarsnap or some other online storage solution which uses Glacier at best and S3 at worst. Now you could suddenly be 7× cheaper off if you do upkeep yourself (read: buy a raspberry pi) and if you throw away drives after one year.

<comment><USER39> There is value to having off-premises replicated storage on something more durable than home-user targeted drives.

Google cloud nearline costs $0.12 per gigabyte-year with prices that will continue to fall. For a typical 500g hard drive that saw perhaps 700g of unique data, that's $84/year to have an outside-the-house replicated backup using something like Arq.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> how does this compare to Google's Coldline storage?

<comment><USER28> The biggest difference is that Glacier is still a "suspend/resume" type of accesss. However, if you just want to compare pricin, it'll depend on your access pattern and object sizes.

Retrieval in all Google Cloud Storage is instant and for Coldline is $.05/GB (and Nearline $.01/GB). If you value that instant access, it seems the closest you'd get with the updates to Glacier is via the Expedited retrieval ($.03/GB and $.01/"request" which is per "Archive" in Glacier). Then you have to decide how much throughput you want to guarantee at $100/month for each 150MB/s. (It's naturally unclear since it was just announced what kind of best-effort throughput we're talking about without the provisioned capacity).

If you're never going to touch the bytes, and each Archive is big enough to make the 40 KB of metadata negligible then the new $.004/GB/month is a nice win over Coldline's $.007. Somewhere in between and one of the bulk/batch retrieval methods might be a better fit for you.

But again, it's still a bit of a challenge to go in and out of Glacier while Coldline (and Nearline and Standard) storage in GCS is a single, uniform API. That's worth a lot to me, and our customers. But if Glacier were a good fit for a problem you have, and you're talking about enough money to make the pain worth it, you should seriously consider it.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so naturally I'd want you to use GCS ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> With S3 Standard essentially getting S3 Standard - Infrequent Access storage pricing, where does that leave the latter?

<comment><USER42> Hey, did you mean Reduced Redundancy (not Infrequent Access)?

I just noticed that the new pricing for Standard (2.3¢) is now _less_ than the pricing for Reduced Redundancy (2.4¢)! So there appears to be no reason to use Reduced Redundancy anymore.

<comment><USER41> You're right, I mixed up after spending too much time on the different pricing pages yesterday. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Any EBS storage price reductions? Those are pretty high at this stage.

</comment><comment><USER44> That's both a good and a terrible change.

\- The price reduction on S3 is good! Kudos AWS.

\- The price change on glacier is a fucking disaster. They replaced the _single_ expensive glacier fee with the choice among 3 user selectable fee models (Standard, Expedited, Bulk). It's an absolute nightmare added on top of the current nightmare (e.g. try to understand the disks specifications & pricing. It takes months of learning).

I cannot follow the changes, too complicated. I cannot train my devs to understand glacier either, too much of a mess.

AWS if you read this: Please make your offers and your pricing simpler, NEVER more complicated.

(Even a single pricing option would be significantly better than that, even if its more expensive.)

<comment><USER45> I believe this __HUGELY __simplifies glacier pricing.

I don't think you understand just how insanely, incredibly, bizarrely complicated the old glacier pricing was.

<comment><USER44> There are 3 pricing models for S3, the 3rd one (glacier) having 3 sub-pricing models to be chosen at time of requests.

I don't think you realize how insanely complex the entire S3 pricing model once you get out of the "standard price".

Maybe I just have too much empathy for my poor devs and ops who try to understand how much what they're doing is gonna cost them. It's only one full page, both sided, of text after all.

<comment><USER46> Is that really that much different than hard drives? No hard drive manufacturer uses the same standards to determine how much space there will actually be on the disk. You can get hard drives that spin at many different RPMs. You can get hard drives with many different connector types. Drives with different numbers of platters. An 8TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, Western Digital drive is not going to have the same seek time as a 1TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, Western Digital drive.

There are so many combinations of hard drives that will result in different performance for different situations all with different costs. Then you start talking about cold storage as well and you've moved into other media formats.

Just because there is a page worth of a pricing model doesn't mean AWS or any cloud provider is doing anything incorrectly. You're paying for on demand X and engineers who are going to utilize that should understand it as well as they would understand how to build an appropriate storage solution of their own. On demand just means now they don't have to take the time to design, implement and operate it themselves.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I think TheDAO is a Success - <AUTHOR> https://jackgavigan.com/2016/06/17/why-i-think-thedao-is-a-success/ <comment><USER2> IMO, This post just has a click-baity title with almost no information within. TheDAO is a failure. There are a few of the other Ethereum DAOs like Augur, Digix and Maker have invested a lot of effort over the last one year and haven't launched yet to iron out issues like these. They didnt need to learn such expensive lessons. Maker Market contracts were hit by the same bug and they handled it very elegantly three days back.

TheDAO was convoluted from the beginning(code, incentives, purpose), and a lot of us within Ethereum were highly skeptical too but when mainstream media started covering it, our voices got drowned.

</comment><comment><USER3> > to tweet, blog and bloviate their hindsight-informed opinions

If you think these are merely hindsight-informed opinions, you weren't paying attention when people were saying the same thing as foresight-informed opinions.

</comment><comment><USER4> If every mistake is going to potentially cost $120 million then you might want to rethink your strategy.

I want decentralized blockchain based organizations to work, but haphazard attempts like this are only setting the technology back.

Honestly, it seems like you are willfully in denial about its failure.

</comment><comment><USER5> Getting valuable data doesn't mean a success if the cost is too high. Too much of the market and reputation was wrapped up in this experiment.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a good chance that all funds will be returned (thanks in no small part to the fact that the siphoned ether can't be moved on for several weeks, so that was a fortunate design decision).

The media love bad news. It's up to us to combat that negative spin.

<comment><USER6> If it's merely fortunate that this might be dealt with safely then that should strike you as a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If TheDAO is a success, what would a failed DAO look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> One that didn't teach us anything.

<comment><USER8> Arguably this taught (reminded) us that DAOs are mutable at the whim of the community majority.

<comment><USER9> And that nobody knows how to write secure code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry, I think your point is completely invalid after reading "I don't view TheDAO as a failure. I view it as an experiment that has reached its conclusion.". If you go to a doctor and he/she tries to cure from cancer giving orange juice he/she can't argue it was an experiment because this is malpractice.

The DAO was not scrutinized enough comparing to the funds it contained.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a really sloppy article - and I and many others disagree with your premise. You don't have to put this much money at risk to innovate, and failures like this have the potential to set the space back years (regulation may increase, consumers will be very wary).

Nearly every engineer who launches a product goes through a staged rollout with testing along the way (including the Ethereum network which took years to develop and test, and likely still has many undiscovered bugs). When the costs of failure are high (any financial services product, software at NASA, embedded software), this is especially important. DAO innovation could have been served by draft contracts passed around in the community, or a small POC with small deposits or toy money, as the design was worked out - and refined over months, and yes, even years.

Releasing a DAO contract (and marketing it, curating it), without any limitations on funding or substantial due diligence, was problematic at best - and gives a black eye to everyone who exercises due diligence in the space.

</comment><comment><USER12> By this metric, the Hindenburg was a success too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it flew, so one could argue that it was a success right up to the moment it ... wasn't.

<comment><USER6> But that's a tautology. Everything is a success until it isn't, even if it was designed to fail it succeeds in doing what it is designed to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with the Gretzky quote in this context is that in hockey, you don't lose points for missed shots.

</comment><comment><USER14> The title of this post is facile and ridiculous. Obviously the DAO was a disastrous failure and very nearly resulted in catastrophe for its investors.

</comment><comment><USER15> I sincerely hope you have also learned that writing "smart contracts" requires a suitable programming language.</comment>


Official Release of Google+ Pages - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect-with-all-things.html <comment><USER3> > you can build relationships with all the things you care about - from local > businesses to global brands

Do people in marketing even hear themselves? I'm going to be charitable and assume this is ad copy aimed at other marketers because no real human has ever wished they could build a relationship with a global brand. Now if you excuse me, I need to go like the Guinness page on facebook.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, this myopic view of the ad world is why there is such a disconnect between our industry and the ad industry.

While the normal computer engineer/entrepreneur is far too 'sophisticated' to have a personal connection with a brand, there are 'real-world' people that do have connections. It's not the cheap "let me play this memory game on their FB page" connection, but a deeper connection.

There are people who feel for brands like Khan Academy and what they're doing for education, there are couples who have a soft spot for their local restaurant where the guy proposed to the girl, there are even families that fondly remember their first beat-up Honda that was reliable through thick and thin.

Sure, we may not have these deep connections given our fast paced lives, but please realize that there are others who do have human feelings for non-human entities that have made their lives better.

<comment><USER5> Very funny that you suggest computing enthusiasts are not subject to personal connections with brands. The phrase "fan boy" was essentially created within the technology domain.

<comment><USER6> I thought it started in comics.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_(person)#Fanboy.2Ffangirl>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanboy_(comics)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So _this_ is what the + is for now. Go ahead, enter [+pepsi] in the Google Chrome omnibox.

This looks like the first time Google's fundamental search syntax has been changed to support a new product. Right? Wow.

So I guess now we know how meaningful the "plus" is. It at first seemed like a generic advertising term, like "Google Deluxe". Then when we started using G+, it seemed like it was just their riff on the @ syntax. Now we know it goes all the way to the input box on www.google.com, the very center of the Google user experience.

Now, queries starting with a plus basically shunt you to Google+ instead of web search. To the average Google user, it's like their country's phone company created new phone numbers that start with #. Can they do that? They just did.

The upshot is that Google has officially carved out part of the web search query universe just for a namespace of its own. Remember this day.

<comment><USER8> Entering "+pepsi" into my copy of Chrome, or into the Google Search page itself, just does a standard Google search for Pepsi. I'm in the UK. Is this US-only functionality?

<comment><USER7> I should clarify that it's not in quotes, my fault for not using bracket syntax (now edited).

But for me here in California, [+pepsi] entered in either box takes me to Pepsi's Google+ page — and crucially, _not_ to pepsi.com.

<comment><USER9> i didn't use quotes and still get a regular search

<comment><USER10> Worked for me with Chrome 15.0.874.106

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now we know for sure why Google removed the "+" operator: it's used for the "direct connect feature." E.g. if you search for +pepsi you're redirected to Pepsi's Google+ page.

<comment><USER12> It's like AOL keywords 2k11!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the NYTimes coverage ([http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/google- lets-in-the-...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/google-lets-in-the- corporations/)), Horowitz says:

 _"Over time, I expect '+Pepsi' to emerge on every can, on TV spots and on the Web site and become a cult phenomenon…Over a couple of quarters, brands will learn to utilize this."_

I somewhat doubt that, unless Google offers big cross-promotional subsidies. Which they might, but is sort of the antithesis of a 'cult phenomenon'.

I do find it interesting that Google, the infovore behemoth that killed various 'reserved keyword' schemes (as at AOL and RealNames, and even to some extent domain names) with flexible full-text-search is now reintroducing reserved keywords with 'Direct Connect'.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone find it a bit ironic that these page URLs are NOT search engine friendly? Just a long string id... seriously Google? Maybe not irony because they own the search engine... but still makes you scratch your head wondering why.

<comment><USER15> In what respect are they not "search engine friendly"? Being human-readable or slugged doesn't necessarily make URLs more search engine friendly, nor does it necessarily improve their rank:

[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-u...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic- urls-vs-static-urls.html)

<comment><USER16> Whether or not they're more search engine friendly, if you're looking for Japanese Astrophysics Vocabulary you're more likely to click `/japanese- astrophysics-vocab.html` than `/p?id=47`

<comment><USER15> That's true if you actually read and interpret the URL (I'd guess that most users don't.) But regardless, I was commenting on the earlier complaint that the URLs aren't "search engine friendly", not that they're not "user friendly." That's all I was trying to address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just went through the effort of registering a support account to create a page to be greeted with, "Google Pages isn't ready for everyone." (It did take me a good long while to find that tiny text at the bottom of the page.)

Meanwhile, the support account is now being added to a bunch of users' circles automatically and recommended to thousands of others. _Fabulous._

Only comforted by the fact that I used a Support Account to test this, instead of my real corporate account, thus angering the Google "Real Name" gods...so in good news, maybe the profile will be automatically deleted anyway.

<comment><USER17> Update: I went ahead and disabled Google Plus for my domain & users for now. I look forward to using Google+ from an Apps account once there's a way to exclude users' address books from the G+ suggestion engine (should be a check box on signup, no?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's no way I'll be 'Liking' things on my G+ account.

I've ruined my FB account by _liking_ every damn thing on the Internet that interested me, and since the FB Like button debuted I've accumulated over 1000 likes.

They now combine to fill my news feed with 99% noise, drowning out the posts from my real friends. Since I don't spend every second of the day monitoring my FB account, posts from real friends get pushed below the fold before the next time I login, and I miss them.

To make matters worse, FB has apparently disabled the Unlike button from the settings page that allows you to see all your likes in one dialog, which is apparently the closest thing to a bulk unlike available (you still have to click Unlike for each page, but at least they're all there in a convenient list).

So the only way to unlike stuff is apparently to visit each page, scroll down to the Unlike button in the bottom of the left menu, click it, then proceed to do the same for the next 1000+ pages. Not. I'm just switching over G+ instead.

Even with G+ I've made the mistake of subscribing to a bunch of shared circles, and there's an impedance mismatch between the topic of the circles, and the Public posts of the people in them. Even if I subscribe to say, a Python Developers circle, I still get people's public posts of pictures of dinner last night, etc., that is just more noise.

At least G+ makes it easy to fix the problem via unsubscribing, but what they could really use is the ability to add filters to circles based on hashtags. So if someone in my Python circle makes a public post that doesn't have #python, #pypy, #tornado, or some other python-related hastag that I've specified in my Python circle filter, that post won't show up in my feed.

But after having learned the hard way twice, I can guarantee I at least won't be adding more spammy businesses and whatnot to my G+ feed.

<comment><USER19> Just an idea, but wouldn't simply making a Facebook List of real people fix this? I never actually visit facebook directly, I just have a link directly to a list of people I actually want to communicate with. Better still, recently if you are viewing a list, status updates default to being sent visible ONLY to the members of the list.

<comment><USER20> would require all his friends to opt into posting to the list, no?

<comment><USER19> The main issue he was describing: news feed overflow; is solved by the list. I'm not so sure what the visibility is of people replying to things you said that were marked visible only to the list. Probably just the list as well, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Google+ sucks so far, and the stuff they are adding does nothing to improve it, just adds more cruft.

Lately I am seeing a big "What's hot on Google+" section on top of the feed, showing antiquated Youtube memes from people I don't know. No way to remove it.

They are obviously trying hard to appeal to the mainstream audience (Hang out with Kermit and Ms. Piggy!). It seems weird for Google, unauthentic somehow. Their core 'fans', if that word applies, are engineers - I wonder if they wouldn't be better served seeding Google+ with the geek community and letting that user base evangelize the service.

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, Google real customers are advertisers. They sure need to welcome their customers in their network.

<comment><USER23> That's right, and think about what that makes you, the consumer. Hint - you're the thing being sold to Google's customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pepsi's google+ id is: 111883881632877146615

I can't imagine them putting that in a subway ad.

<comment><USER25> Isn't that the point of their new "+" term in Google Search? Now the company can put "+Pepsi" in a subway ad. It operates under the same assumption of Twitter's "@Pepsi", where they assume people know what service to go to. In this case that service is Google.com.

<comment><USER26> Does that mean each "pages" name will be unique in the global namespace? Currently with "real names" they aren't unique which is one down-side compared to Twitter (although it has upsides as well).

<comment><USER27> From the Direct Connect help page:

> A page's eligibility for Google+ Direct Connect is determined > algorithmically, based on certain signals we use to help understand your > page's relevancy and popularity. In addition to this analysis, we look for a > link between your Google+ page and your website. To help Google associate > this content, be sure to connect your Google+ page and your website using > the Google+ badge, or by adding a snippet of code to your site, in addition > to adding your website link to your page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Dear Google, I'm not going to switch from Facebook to you if you copy what Facebook does! Google plus should give us experience which Facebook does not give. Google plus is just adding up missing features. Google, try to come up with a killer social experience which we have never seen before. That is how you get users stick to your social site. if you are again giving us the same old shit, you are losing to Facebook.

<comment><USER29> I don't know, I think the idea of Hangouts with the Google+ Pages is kind of neat. Maybe it won't work for giant corps like Pepsi, but smaller companies might find it an interesting way to engage fans? Maybe demo things? I don't know, seems interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> You can have a sneakpeek at G+ Pages' creation by deleting the overlaying elements with your inspection tools at

<https://plus.google.com/pages/create>

Looks promising, it integrates with Google Places

<comment><USER31> Can you tell what manipulations are needed exactly to make it work?

<comment><USER30> I think they just rolled it out for me, so I can't actually tell you which were the interested DIVs. Anyway, just point your cursor on the overlays and "inspect" them. Then delete the nodes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It will be _very_ interesting to see how, say, a given restaurant's Google Plus page appears in search results compared to its Yelp and/or Facebook equivalents. If Google highlights the + page in search results with rich page information (eg daily specials, updates, etc.), Yelp and Facebook have a problem.

<comment><USER33> Isn't this precisely the kind of thing that will trigger anti-competition lawsuits?

<comment><USER34> If Facebook or someone else is unhappy with this they can just make their own search engine. I don't see an issue with Google promoting another Google product on it's own search page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It is as if Google is desperately trying to become old Yahoo.

<comment><USER36> How long do you give before G+ _officially_ dies? I give it another year, tops.

I do think it's pretty much dead unofficially, credit to a mediocre product and a suicidal(or non-existent) adoption strategy.

<comment><USER25> I sincerely doubt the service will die in a "year, tops" with 40 million users, as of the last numbers we've heard. Do you have any actual evidence or data to back up your opinion, or are you merely spouting random personal bias?

<comment><USER36> I signed up for G+ when it launched. I haven't been on it in _months_. And yet I am sure I am one of those 40M members cited by Google. That 40M figure is garbage. 40M may have tried G+; but a very small percentage are hooked to it or like it. G+ won't tell us what percentage that is but it's a pretty solid bet when a company refuses to share engagement metrics, it is because they don't look good.

<comment><USER25> Exactly: random personal bias. Just because you haven't been back there doesn't mean anything about the rest of the user base. The same could be said about anyone that's signed up for Facebook or Twitter and are part of their 600 and 100 million user statistics, respectively.

I'm as curious to see engagement metrics as much as the next guy, but I'm not reading tea leaves to predict doom and destruction for not happening to release those numbers just 6 weeks after the site came out of beta. You're trying too hard.

<comment><USER36> I don't consider this as "reading tea leaves":

 _Despite the bullish talk about levels of engagement on Google Plus, I continue to find it strange that Google won't tell us how many of the reported 40+ million users are active, daily users.

Frustrated at not getting a straight answer to that, I optimistically asked Gundotra if he would at least give me the percentage of active daily users to total. But he wouldn't be drawn into that question either.

So I asked: what kinds of things are people doing on Google Plus right now? Vic Gundotra pointed to photo sharing.

"Since we went to field trial on June 28," he remarked, "we've had 3.4 billion photos uploaded to Google Plus."_

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_engagement....](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_engagement.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29)

"I sincerely doubt the service will die in a "year, tops" with 40 million users"

Naive much? That translates to _we have 40M rows in a database table, please be impressed and don't ask us for engagement_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face." That seems almost too touchy-feely. The possibilities do make the mind wander, however.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's about time but surely quite a bit half-baked ...

Right now, there's no concept of having page "administrators", so the person who creates the page is the only one who can post to it. Also, no transfer of "ownership". Both these things are "coming soon" apparently but make the whole experience a bit suboptimal right now.

</comment><comment><USER39> Anyone else getting a new favicon? I was just getting used to the + one, now its an orange g+ that does not look very nice.

<https://ssl.gstatic.com/s2/oz/images/faviconr.ico>

</comment><comment><USER40> I followed the link to create a page and after logging in I got a message 'the pages wasn't ready for everyone yet'. So I guess the marketers got ahead of the implementers once again.

</comment><comment><USER41> Would have killed them to come up with a name other than "Pages"?

</comment><comment><USER42> Google wants to become the WWW itself. Is this good?

<comment><USER43> People said the same thing about Facebook, but I very much doubt that's their focus. Some seem to confuse mass user bases with somehow "becoming the Internet itself." Frankly, that argument is bizarre to me and a tad hyperbolic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How does this differ from a Google Plus page? I am trying hard but I cannot see it.

<comment><USER45> Google actively removes non-individual Google+ accounts.

I'd imagine in the future Google+ pages will be like Facebook pages - <USER2> ability to add apps etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Admittedly off-topic, but when is Google going to improve the design of their internal blogs?

Yeah, I know that sort of thing isn't their focus, but this is just painful. At first glance it looks like an unprofessional, unpolished website. If nothing else, a bit more line-height and some strategically-placed padding!

<comment><USER47> I don't have an example handy, but some of the internal blogs were testing out a new set of templates for Blogger that were very slick looking.

<comment><USER48> And they don't work - at all - without JavaScript.

<comment><USER49> That's the Brave New Web.

Also, the company google pages linked to in the article only display here as empty white page without js, even though html source shows a lot of html and javascript. Or is it my adblock preemptively blocking entire company page? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Are brand pages necessary? I think I prefer G+ as a human only network, not sure products fit into the circles analogy.

<comment><USER51> Yes, they're necessary, so you can tell the difference.

Companies were already making G+ Profiles, even though it was against the terms of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Following is the signal of death.</comment>


Is software deskilling programmers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/?p=3984

<comment><USER2> To put this in another context and clarify how ridiculous it is:

Modern word processors are getting "helpful" enough that at times I feel like a word processor operator rather than a writer. They have support for spell checking. MS Word can now tell you about grammar and synonyms. The behavior all these tools encourage is not "think deeply about your report and write it carefully", but "just write a crappy first draft of your report, and then the tools will tell you not just what's wrong with it, but also how to make it better."</comment>


On Students Who Are Full of It - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/On-Students-Who-Are-Full-of-It/127755/

<comment><USER2> Having been amply full of it myself, I don't think that such a student is the worse for a pint or two of red ink all over the paper or exam. If you will be remembered as a good writer, it is because other people have managed to read through your work. A hard grader can be as good a friend to the budding writer as a smart tester can be to the programmer.</comment>


How to Ask Questions the Smart Way - <AUTHOR> http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

<comment><USER2> Where's the corresponding wake-up-call for developers who are tired of answering stupid questions about their software? I've dealt with more than one piece of software where the mailing list is filled with tons of unanswered questions from noobs because the interface or documentation is a mess. You start out asking stupid questions yourself, and everybody ignores you and keeps talking about their high-level expert problems, and you think, "What a bunch of assholes." Then after you figure out the answer yourself, the answer is so stupid and convoluted or just so depressingly retarded that you can't bring yourself to explain it to anybody else who runs into the same problem.

I wish developers would see chronic widespread noob frustration as a problem _with the software_ that needs to be corrected _by the developers_. There are always a few people who are willing to spend days experimenting and digging through your code before they can use your software. Not only is it a poor piece of software that can only be used that way, it's extremely confusing, because _that's not the way things are done anymore!_ New users are going to waste many days struggling with the overly charitable assumption that your software has a logical, well-documented interface that they are on the verge of figuring out. When they finally figure out that there _is_ no coherent interface and the user manual should be prefaced with a directive to "tinker for a week until you understand how it's implemented, then you'll know what's missing from this manual," they're going to be filled with hatred and rage and desire to kill you. At this point, if I mentioned the piece of software I'm currently working with, it might legally constitute some kind of threat, so I'll just say that I'm pretty fed up and it's a good thing there's no dog, wife, or child at home that I might vent my rage on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I prefer this one: <http://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html>

Targetted at UseNet, but the lessons are valid.

Interestingly, the advice is quite similar to that found in Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People".

<comment><USER4> Can you post this? I'd like it in my archive here, but I want you to get credit if others agree.

EDIT: I meant submit here to Hacker News (it hasn't been submitted before). I think of most of my submissions and upvotes as an archive.

<comment><USER3> Not sure I understand what you're asking. It's not mine, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to post someone else's work here. You can always pull a copy and put it in your archive, can't you?

EDIT: OK, understood, I'll do so ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I question the validity of posting this to HN for the following reasons:

1) As mattyb points out, it was already submitted as a link to HN over a year ago. 2) It's a fairly old article. 3) Most hackers have already read this. Thoroughly. Corollary to 3) Hackers generally know enough about asking questions the "right way" to invalidate the requirement of reading this except for the novelty alone. 4) The very individuals who _need_ to read this won't. Furthermore, they'll be offended if you link it to them. 5) The only thing more obnoxious than someone asking "can u plz halp me" is the person who maliciously links this article for the purposes of inflaming the clueless for their own enjoyment. Subsequently, "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" is one of the most over-linked yet genuinely-useful documents that can almost instantaneously derail an otherwise productive conversation.

On the other hand, fledgling hackers may not be aware of the mores and folkways of online interaction and this information may be valuable to them.

I have an example that has happened on more than one occasion. First, some background: I consider myself a rather helpful person from time to time (when I'm in a charitable mood, at least) and may lurk various forums in search of people asking questions that need answers. It entertains me.

Yes, there are indeed those people who aren't willing to do any work themselves. Conversely, there are some who are willing to do useful work but haven't a clue how to ask (correctly) or where to start. If I am attempting to assist someone who falls into the latter category with their dilemma, the absolute _most annoying thing_ someone can do is post a link to "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way." It derails the conversation and generally inflames the individual I'm trying to help.

So please, for those of you who haven't had any exposure to "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way," exercise restraint if you consider posting this to a message board. If the individual asking the question is a fool and has no intention of doing anything without outside assistance (i.e. they're asking in the hopes _you'll_ do the work for them), by all means--link it! If the person isn't asking a "smart" question but genuinely seems interested in solving his or her own problem--don't. The latter is especially true if you interject into an ongoing conversation populated in part by those of us who are attempting to lend aid. In such a case, by linking this article you _will_ be wasting _our_ time as well if the person asking the question grows increasingly more frustrated and angry.

Having said that, I'd encourage you to read the article in its entirety if you haven't already. Eric Raymond, IIRC, has a section on how to _politely_ point out the error of one's ways. Rather than blatantly linking the article the next time someone asks a stupid question, consider following the advice of the very article you contemplated linking!

</comment><comment><USER6> It never occurred to me that somebody would need a manual on how to do this, but it turns out there is some interesting information in here.

The section title "RTFM and STFW: How To Tell You've Seriously Screwed Up" Amuses me.

</comment><comment><USER7> More discussion here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175681></comment>


Mozilla JetPack: Lowering the Bar to Extend Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7350

<comment><USER2> Bears more than a passing similarity to Greasemonkey (which is awesome). Looks like it would let you do things in that gray area between stuff Greasemonkey can do and stuff you _really_ don't want to start messing around with XUL to do.

My big gripe with Firefox extension development was that getting started there were like 20 different source files and a dozen configuration files just to get something on the screen. With that said, the extension API is pretty robust and lets you play pretty deep into the core of FF.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a video over here: [http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/21/mozilla- jetpack-fi...](http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/21/mozilla-jetpack- firefox-extensions/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous announcement <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625958> and short tutorial <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619548></comment>


Show HN: Drinkups (my first iPhone app) - <AUTHOR> http://trydrinkups.com

<comment><USER2> Congrats on your first iPhone app! It's designed very nicely. Some feedback on the website, if you don't mind:

1) The profile image of the iPhone is a bit unnecessary. It takes away from the app you're trying to showcase. The skewed view of the app interface just looks... off.

2) What's a drinkup? Perhaps some explanation would help. To me, it sounds freakin awesome. But maybe it's only for a secret society which I don't belong to... ?</comment>