What They Don't Tell You About Starting a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.adeologue.com/adeologue/2008/04/what-they-dont.html <comment><USER2> As women forget the pain of childbirth once they hold their babies in their arms, so it is with startups. New life is awkward, messy, and painful. The antidote and the amnesia for startup pain is the creation of a product or service that people like enough to pay for.

<comment><USER3> (1) Women don't "forget the pain of childbirth" when they hold their babies. Giving birth, I'm told, really fucking hurts.

(2) In contrast to giving birth, where the pain at least (mostly) ends after the main event, the pain of running a company _continues_ long after launch.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it really hurts, and women really forget just how bad it was, otherwise they'd stop at one child. Hormones somehow alter their memories. Kinda Orwellian, actually.

<comment><USER5> Just wondering, are any of you female that are commenting on this?

It just reminds me of the male pundits sitting around debating abortion (assuming yall're male).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi all, I wrote that article because I'm experiencing few things that I wanted to share. I'm working on starting a startup, handling all marriage and day job responsibilities. I find it very challenging, but I still push myself because it's my character flaw - that I want to start a startup. To make this happen, I'm also looking for building a founding team. For that, I'm talking to few people who shared their interest of starting a startup.

Whenever I talk to some young professional, the most common observation I have seen is - almost everyone wants to start a startup, literally almost everyone. But the fact is - they just don't know what it takes to make it work -- the insane hard work at initial stages. They just talk about success stories, but when it comes to put the time and build stuff, they disappear. And that's how I got inspired to share this thought on my blog.

I am not saying we should take that advice seriously and stop working on our dreams. That advice was more for those people who "think" they want to start a startup, but probably don't understand the reality to make it happen.

-Aditya (Adeologue.com)

<comment><USER7> Aditya - good luck. It is possible to have a great family (I have same wife for the last thirty years and we have two teenage kids) and do startups at the same time. Pick you teammate carefully. I wrote about my own criteria in the following ("turn off the light and see if you run away from them").

<http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/03/team-building.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why does it have to be painful? Maybe he's just doing it wrong.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps painful is not the right word. It is extremely challenging and demanding, and it can take over your life and take a toll on your health. This is because you have to constantly inject energy into a startup or it will fade away. You get used to making tough decisions all the time with incomplete information, and uncertainty is the norm. Even when business looks great you know that things could change overnight for a number of reasons (market conditions, Google giving away what you are selling, etc).

I've been running a successful (as in, quite profitable) startup as a solo founder for the past three years. If my today self sent a fax to the past letting my old self know what it would be like... Well, that probably wouldn't change anything. Maybe we are just masochists.

<comment><USER7> Pain is definitely not the word. Pain is a very good excuse not to do it. Startup is in fact sort of like child birth. It is very emotional and no one can describe the experience (especially not men) unless you have been through it. I think few woman would recommend against having a child because of the pain even though there is tremendous amount of pain involved. They would tell you that you shouldn't be a mother if you are nor ready to be one. And like motherhood, entrepreneurship turns out to be a responsibility as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> W. Edwards Deming observed "Nothing happens without personal transformation."

I think it's this personal transformation that's one of the hardest things about a startup. You start out wanting to change the world and end up at 3AM wondering what's gone wrong and realizing that it's you has to change first.

Barry Moltz wrote a great book "You Have To Be A Little Crazy" that addresses the emotional roller coaster that every entrepreneur faces, observing "Entrepreneurs start businesses because..they have no choice. Passion and energy drive them on good days and sustain them on bad days." Some references follow:

[http://www.amazon.com/You-Need-Be-Little- Crazy/dp/079318018X...](http://www.amazon.com/You-Need-Be-Little- Crazy/dp/079318018X/)

<http://www.barrymoltz.com/>

[http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/12/27/you-need-to-be-a- lit...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/12/27/you-need-to-be-a-little- crazy/)

</comment><comment><USER7> No one could've said it better than this. Read the following ...

"I've often told people that this thing [startup] is worse than heroin. I've also told people that I think I've proved that entrepreneurism is deep in my soul. I've been away, but inexorably I come back. It started when I was younger than ten – I can recall the emotions such ideas generated then, and I know I still work the same way."

[http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace- rejecti...](http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejection-to- succeed/#comment-7582)

</comment><comment><USER11> What if you are doing it the second time around, and are already rich from the first time? Is it still painful, and will people still spend as much time on it? Somehow I can not imagine they would. Seems to me the first time is painful because of the pressure: financial worries, the worry to be a failure in life, stuff like that. Would not be so much the case if you already made it?

Also, isn't it amusing how such links are inevitable called "what they don't tell you about..." rather than simply "It is painful to do a startup"?

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, more advice from people that failed at least a few times instead of know- it-alls who think their anecdote is the huge secret to success.

<comment><USER7> Actually very few entrepreneurs do one startup and become an overnight success. So even if they talk about their success, they are implicitly talking about their failure (or recovery from past failure which might need to future success). I think the mistakes that most of us make is to think that there is a formula, a formula for success or a formula for failure. There is no formula.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The other thing they don't tell you is that you can fail. And that it hurts when you do.

</comment><comment><USER14> Entrepreneurship is about not caring what anyone else is or is not "telling you".

<comment><USER7> My own experience is that entrepreneurship is an obsession and an addiction. It is a character flaw. It is the deep desire to create and destroy at the same time. It is worse that a disease because disease at least has a curl, or the potential for a curl. The following are my recent articles on how to accept such a predicament and deal with setback and rejection, and how to recover from them.

[http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace- rejecti...](http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejection-to- succeed)

<http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/riding-a-bike.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Top startup tip: Never take advice from someone who doesn't know the difference between "advice" and "advise."

<comment><USER16> "Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers." [1]

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite RSS reader? - <AUTHOR> I'm open to paid or free. I know of Feedly and haven't been crazy about it; wondering if there's something better to check out. <comment><USER2> When Google Reader got shipped off to the farm upstate, I switched to Feedly briefly, but wasn't very happy with the web client.

Once I found Feedbin though, It's integrated seamlessly into my daily routine, becoming something that I use _all day_ but _almost never_ think about. I consider that the greatest praise I can bestow upon software. It's been worth every penny to me.

(FWIW, I use "Press" reader on Android, which syncs with Feedly, Feedbin and other services, too).

</comment><comment><USER3> I like NewsBlur. The site training system is very effective at filtering out stuff that I don't want to see and it has reasonable mobile apps for both android and iOS.

It's probably one of the more expensive of the hosted options though.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been a happy Feedly user since GoogleReader shutdown, and i've recently built Aktu: [http://aktu.io](http://aktu.io)

It already has some nice features, and many more to come :-) \- Rss feeds \- news aggregation from thousands of feeds (like Google news) \- content categorization \- entity extraction \- personal dashboard / master feed for all your rss feeds etc...

</comment><comment><USER5> ReadKit [1] for macOS is still pretty nice. You can pull in feeds from Feedly, Feedbin, etc and also send articles to a read later app like Instapaper or Pocket. I prefer the native app approach over a web app for this use case. It's also a one-time purchase. Reeder [2] is pretty similar as well.

[1]: [https://readkitapp.com](https://readkitapp.com)

[2]: [http://reederapp.com/mac/](http://reederapp.com/mac/)

</comment><comment><USER6> BazQux Reader: [https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com) .

$20/year, and absolutely worth it. It just works.

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks appealing; my only hesitation is the sign up methods are Google/FB/Twitter (or OpenID, which I honestly don't know how to use. Is it a pain?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like Feedly, been using for like a year.

Only thing I really want at this point is to be able to filter out for certain keywords, but it's a pro feature. Does a different app offer this for free?

</comment><comment><USER8> I use [https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/)

The UI is kind of similar to google reader.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like theoldreader.com. It's very similar to Google Reader and worth every cent of its annual fee for premium access ($25 IIRC).

</comment><comment><USER10> I like to use Thunderbird for reading RSS. It makes sense to me to have RSS in my usual email program.

<comment><USER3> Thunderbird works really well as an RSS reader. It's only because I read my feeds on multiple devices that I use a hosted service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://quiterss.org/](https://quiterss.org/)</comment>


In the weeds, being overwhelmed and finishing things - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/7f67b791d2b0

<comment><USER2> Asking for help only works in environments of acceptance, inclusion and respect.</comment>


Ask HN: Who among you have started/understand starting a WISP? - <AUTHOR> I have an opportunity to start a WISP (Wireless ISP) in my area - and while I have done homogenus corp networks in the past, I dont have deep experience in how to manage/bill paying users...<p>What are some must-knows or pitfalls to be wary of?<p>(Think of this as a small scale Common Networks implementation...) <comment><USER2> I would think the RIAA and MPAA might be of concern.</comment>


Windows 8 Pro Upgrade to cost $39.99 - <AUTHOR> http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/07/02/upgrade-to-windows-8-pro-for-39-99.aspx?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER2> I wouldn't chalk this up as just a competitive response to the relatively low price Apple charges for its OS upgrades. I think Microsoft really wants/needs to accelerate the adoption of Windows 8 even if that means taking a hit on license fees. Whatever they can do to accelerate adoption of W8 in the enterprise and consumer markets will more than pay off in the long-term. A major reduction in legacy support requirements, enables them to innovate faster and will help improve the Windows brand that has been tarnished over the past decade. They essentially bet the farm on W8 being multi-platform at the core and need people to upgrade.

<comment><USER3> My guess is that it will take a long, long time for enterprises to move to Windows 8, with most sticking with Windows 7 for as long as Microsoft continues to provide security patches for it. If you're an enterprise with 10000 or 50000 non-technical users running Windows 7, the cost of moving to Windows 8 will be primarily IT staff hours, including all the support questions from users puzzled by the new user interface. What compelling benefits would there be for a bank or insurance company to move to Windows 8 that would offset the steep costs?

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Our law firm is almost -- _almost_ \-- ready to roll out our Windows 7 build. And we only have about 650 users.

<comment><USER5> Can you describe a little bit about what all goes into preparing for a Windows 7 deployment for a company of your size? I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER6> The number one thing is to make sure that all of the software is compatible without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. Law firms are notorious for using OLD software.

<comment><USER7> Are law firms still using WordPerfect ?

<comment><USER4> I can't say my knowledge is global, but in the US I'm fairly comfortable saying no law firm of any consequence still uses WordPerfect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a hard time imagining that many Windows 7 users are eager to upgrade to Windows 8 on their desktops and laptops, given the drastic changes catering to touch interaction, bringing them little apparent value at best, and significant lost productivity and frustration at worst. My Windows 7 box is for gaming and productivity (not necessarily in that order), and after all I've seen of it, I wouldn't touch Windows 8 for that with a ten-foot pole. I'll wait for Windows 9 Classic Desktop Professional Edition (Win7 tarted up with a new skin including 30% more alpha blending effects for some reason).

<comment><USER9> Have you actually _used_ Windows 8? I don't make much use of the metro apps, but there are lots of smaller improvements that I appreciate, like the new task manager, file copy dialog, login screen, etc.

The sight of the new start screen incites revulsion in most power users, but try to remember that you won't be spending much time there. Treat the start screen like what it really is: a fancier start menu.

Like me, you'll probably spend most of your time on the desktop, so Windows 8 really feels more like Windows 7.2. So I think your "ten-foot pole" proclamation is a little unjustifiable.

<comment><USER10> I'll upgrade when they give us more than 2 inches to edit the PATH environment variable.

<comment><USER11> Does anyone have any answers why this has not changed over the years?

<comment><USER12> I'd assume it's some variant on: "if you need to edit / knows what the PATH environment variable is, you're likely not the sort of user who's going to be scared away by an unfriendly UI".

<comment><USER11> And you would think they would have launched a fancy editor environment editor that was easy to reach and use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this the "new" Microsoft? I generally like what I am seeing them do. Surface looks incredible. Not completely sold on the Metro interface on the desktop but understand what they are trying to do. In general there seems to be new energy and focus coming out of MS. I wonder what's going on inside.

<comment><USER14> For the first time in a long time, they are becoming underdogs. The surprising thing is that they are smart enough to start acting like one! [http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/15/2874513/microsoft- internet...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/15/2874513/microsoft-internet- explorer-loved-to-hate-video) Most huge, old companies finding themselves in such a position prefer to pretend nothing changed no matter what.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Competition is great! I'm very glad that Apple has managed to exert some pressure on Microsoft here. I really don't think that this would have occurred otherwise.

<comment><USER16> I don't think it's related to Apple at all. I can't believe people are trying to give Apple some credit for it.

Two real things:

1) No one ever buys Windows upgrades, so this is a motivator to shift to Win8. Consumers and businesses just buy a new PC and large businesses get licenses automatically.

2) They now have the opportunity of upselling inside the operating system (which they've been playing with for a long time - since 2007!).

That is it. No pressure from Apple.

<comment><USER17> If #1 is true in terms of past behavior, then expecting this price point to change that is doubtful. In my experience, the reason no on upgrades is because they then inherit all the cruft from their old install. I'm not sure that upgrading will ever be popular with the Windows crows.

#2 is also doubtful for the same reason. If users are faced with 900 versions of Windows to choose from while upgrading, they'll choose the cheapest. And if they find out that Feature X requires them to pony up more money through the MS Store, they'll be supremely irritated.

And you haven't really given any evidence to show that it's not related to Apple's pricing.

<comment><USER16> Correlation does not imply causality. The burden of proof is on the inclusive case.

Windows upgrades allow fresh installs so that's rubbish.

<comment><USER17> So if a user is going to do a fresh install, they need to back up their existing data, perform a fresh install, restore their data, find all the old install disks from their existing software, install those. Look for the license keys for this software, fail since they bought the software ages ago, or pirated it from a buddy. Then throw their hands up in the air and get mad at MS.

It's a fact of Windows in the consumer market that upgrades just don't happen. Consumers almost always run their computers into the ground, then get the latest version of Windows when they purchase a new PC. This is something you stated in your post, yet you seem to think that MS will magically change this behaviour with this price point. I see no evidence to support that.

Additionally, the MS Store is almost a direct response to Apple's App Store on OSX.

<comment><USER18> The experience you described regarding upgrade is grossly outdated. Have you upgraded recently? The transfer wizard (forgot the actual name) does such as awesome job of moving your data to new OS that I have seen even the cookies persist after OS upgrade without me having to do any tweaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lets be clear; this has little/nothing to do with apple. You can't spend $40 to switch to the latest OSX on your regular PC, so it is just not direct competition.

I can only assume they think this way is how they will get most money from selling to end users, and I wouldn't be surprised at that being the case. No doubt they make most of window's licence money from OEMs.

<comment><USER20> > Lets be clear; this has little/nothing to do with apple. You can't spend $40 > to switch to the latest OSX on your regular PC, so it is just not direct > competition.

I can't use Chevy parts in my Honda, but if Chevy started charging 1/10th of what Honda is charging for similar parts, Honda would need to lower prices if they wanted me to stick with them for my next car, or to use genuine Honda parts instead of third party parts to repair my current Honda. That's because Chevy's price would help recalibrate my expectation as to what kind of prices are reasonable, making Honda look overpriced.

OSes aren't as interchangeable as cars, but a Microsoft upgrade price significantly higher than Apple's upgrade price might convince more people to stick with what they have until it is time to buy a new PC and get Windows 8 bundled, rather than buying an upgrade, because Apple's prices lower the expectation of what an OS upgrade should cost.

<comment><USER19> I completely reject that anyone who would have paid $x for a windows upgrade has then decided not to _because of the price of OSX upgrade_. It's either worth it for them, or not. Lowering the price simply increases the number in the first category.

And your forced car analogy is seriously flawed.

<comment><USER21> The analogy went some way to showing how the argument based on there being "no direct competition" is a fallacy.

I find it very hard to believe that MS hasn't had a good look at Apple's OS X pricing strategy before making this move. It mightn't be that they feel pressured into lowering the price so much as they've just seen what Apple has done and think it's a good idea to get as many people to upgrade as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is huge for webdevs. With MS making upgrades to Win8 (and therefore IE10) so cheap/easy, the death of OldIE is that much closer.

<comment><USER23> _If_. Enterprise and Chinese pirates[1] might not be able to upgrade anytime soon.

[1]: [http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/08/aye-pirates-be-reason- ie6-ju...](http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/08/aye-pirates-be-reason-ie6-just- wont-die.html)

<comment><USER24> When the Chinese pirates upgrade their system to pirated Windows 8, they will still have IE10 preinstalled, so it's even going to work for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is all about the app store. Remember Microsoft can make a good chunk of profit from each app purchase and nobody will be developing let alone buying apps if Microsoft cannot get eyes on it.

<comment><USER26> Citation needed? Apple's app store isn't a huge revenue source by any means [1], let alone profit. I've seen no evidence that App Stores can be any kind of profit center.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apple- revenu...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apple- revenue-2010-10)

<comment><USER17> Sure, Apple doesn't generate a lot of earnings or revenue directly from each of their app stores, but the indirect revenue is what matters. Apple is a hardware company first, a software company second. App store purchases reinforce user stickiness as well as improving the overall purchasing experience. The bottom line is what matters, not the line item profitability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What no-one has mentioned that I find interesting, is that Microsoft are calling this a 'promotion'

"This upgrade promotion for Windows 8 Pro both online and at retail runs through January 31st, 2013."

I wonder why this price is only temporary, and what the price will be afterwards?

<comment><USER28> They can say that the retail price of the upgrade is $139, then with each sale they can take a $100 "promotional" expense off their taxable income.

<comment><USER29> I was under the impression the value of the promotion is based off production and transport cost, not equivalent sale price. Is this not true?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Apple has historically made its profit through selling hardware, investing into the software to make the hardware and software work well together but extracting negligible returns on software. What would pursuing this type of upgrade pricing mean for a company like Microsoft, which relies primarily on software for revenue?

<comment><USER31> Historically Apple (remember Apple from 1985 to 2001) has been a severely under performing company, in the last 10 years they've made boatloads of cash by optimizing their supply chain and extracting huge volume discounts on the latest technology.

Microsoft needs to figure out how to get its hardware and its OEMs hardware prices inline with Apple. If MS and their OEMs put pressure on manufacturers they'll no longer be able to offer the same discounts to Apple.

OEMs, VARs, volume licensing holders already pay close to this price for windows and make up the bulk of purchases. Making Windows available to retail at ~$40 will not have a significant impact on revenue.

Not dealing with Apple's competitive prices on phones and tablets will spell death for MS. MS at this point could give a shit about cannibalizing Windows retail upgrades for desktop operating systems. The key is to leverage their desktop OS, developer base and corporate relations into something thats competitive in mobile and tablets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good price. I genuinely can't argue with that!

</comment><comment><USER32> The more I think about this, the more the protestations that Apple had nothing to do with this seem bizarre. A price drop of this magnitude - $120 for the cheapest Win 7 upgrade to $40! - does not occur without competitive pressure. Can you imagine Adobe doing this kind of upgrade price drop on their (essentially competitor-less) creative software? If the iPad were not taking a serious bite out of the consumer PC business, Microsoft would be in no such hurry to spread the platform to existing PC users (who they've been happy to not-so-subtly push to a whole new PC in past years).

PC makers can't be too happy - OS upgrades might not represent much of a buying cycle, even in the consumer sphere. If anything, Windows 8's improved performance across the board might extend the life of old PCs.

I don't say any of this to damn Microsoft, who are doing good work but are against bigger forces. It is fascinating watching the sudden commoditization of a once revered, culturally central product.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's great to see Apple really sticking it to MS. Apple has no need to make money off their OS upgrades since the cost of the OS is already built into the hardware, but for MS, Windows is over 25% of their total revenue.

Plus this is great news for web developers. Hopefully this means that IE6-8 will be going away much faster than was previously anticipated.

<comment><USER34> Why is it great? Apple is worse than MS in so many other ways. In a few years you are going to see Apple being the person that everyone hates. Now, people seem to like it.

<comment><USER35> Because Apple's cost cutting has increased competition. Increased competition is usually better for consumers.

<comment><USER36> While I agree that increased competition is better for consumers, Apple hasn't cut costs for the consumers -- they've merely absorbed the cost of the OS into their hardware.

<comment><USER35> If the average price of hardware hasn't gone up, which it hasn't, then they have cut costs for consumers.

Regardless of where they handle the accounting on their end, cost of ownership has gone down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's a smart price but I suspect that Microsoft has burned too many bridges for most people to ever consider upgrading their computer's operating system. For the average person a (Windows) operating system upgrade has traditionally been cost prohibitive and often not a smooth process. That's going to scare a lot of people off even at $39.99 I'm also not convinced Microsoft has found a compelling way to sell Windows 8 yet. There's no one button buy/install option here. People will have to go seek out the software and justify the price tag to themselves. That's going to be an up-hill battle. I'm betting the percentage of users upgrading will be about the same as previous Windows releases.

<comment><USER28> _For the average person a (Windows) operating system upgrade has traditionally been cost prohibitive and often not a smooth process_

I'm firmly in this camp. I've done clean installs of Windows 7 on both VMs and physical hardware and it was flawless every time. I have no doubt clean Windows 8 installs are also easy. But I would be afraid of an in-place upgrade.

My PC at home is an old HP with an AMD Athlon. It runs XP. It does everything I need it to do. I will never upgrade the OS, even if Windows 8 were free I would not consider it. When the time comes, I will buy a new computer and migrate my files, but until then it will keep on as-is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This price feels to me like a lack of confidence in the product. Microsoft needs adoption rates of 8 to be high. $40 might not be much, but anything is too high when the OS feels like a UI downgrade instead of an upgrade.

<comment><USER23> Look at the lessons learnt cutting the prices of videogames in the Steam store. Lower prices can spur people to buy your videogames in ways that are actually much more profitable than pricing it higher.

Pirates will always try to rationalize themselves to a reason to pirate software. Microsoft is doing a great job of making Windows 8 an attractive upgrade to people.

I was personally planning to hold off on buying it, but that price tag is extremely compelling, so I'll probably buy it, shortly after any launch kinks are sorted out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> You have to figure that people who are running XP and Vista weren't going to spend much to upgrade so this part of it doesn't cost MS much in lost revenue.

For users running Windows 7 I don't see the rush to upgrade even at the low price. You have a good OS in W7. Most will figure if it's not broke, don't fix it.

It's a nice gesture from MS that won't cost it much. For myself, I have an old dual-core Vista notebook that may now get an SSD and Windows 8 just so I can have the latest OS available. That's one more developer that stays current with the latest Microsoft OS which is where I think they see the payoff.

<comment><USER40> Outside of enterprise, I suspect that a lot of people still running XP may be short of the hardware to run Windows 7/8. So it's largely a feel good gesture in those cases - and perhaps an indirect marketing boost for Microsoft's hardware partners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Here's the thing: if the Windows 8 upgrade was _free_ I wouldn't take it.

Not because I have any great hatred of Windows 8-- I got bored one night and played around with it in a VM, it seems nice enough-- but Windows 7 works fine already.

Windows is the thing that I have to run on my computer so I can run the things I _actually_ care about using. As long as it stays out of my way and doesn't have lots of bugs or security issues, I'm happy with it.

Until I'm forced off 7 due to incompatibilities I see no reason to switch.

(for the record, I still run Snow Leopard on my mac for similar reasons).

<comment><USER42> Different people, different wiggles I guess.

I'm running the Release Preview as my main OS now, and I'm just amazed at how much faster and smoother everything is.

When this preview expires and I'm forced to go get Windows 8 proper if I want to keep using it, I'm pretty sure going back to Windows 7 wont be an option for me.

Just like going back to Ice Cream Sandwich isn't an option once you've tried Jelly Bean. There are just so many small (and some major) incremental improvement all over the line.

For me, I'm getting Windows 8 for sure, and I like the news about it not going to cost me a fortune.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This might actually make me upgrade!

</comment><comment><USER44> That's a lot go charge for crippling my desktop UI by trying to turn it into a mobile UI.

</comment><comment><USER45> Everyone remember to wait for SP1 to be released before using this on important systems.

</comment><comment><USER46> should we upgrade, or wait for the initial reaction from the public? So far, its only the tech crowd that has commented on Win 8, and it seems that people either hate it, or love it

<comment><USER47> Unfortunately, negative public reaction is heavily influenced by word of mouth. Will you lose anything by not upgrading? Not immediately, but over time yes. Will you gain anything by upgrading? Possibly, depending on your needs, leaning more towards yes over time.

I've been using it 100% for a few weeks and spend 90% of my time in desktop mode (due to using Chrome, AIM, and Media Player Classic). Most of the time I forget I'm in Windows 8, it feels just like Windows 7. The only time I see Metro is when I hit the windows key, type "chro" and hit enter to launch Chrome. In this use case, Metro isn't anything more than a bigger start menu.

<comment><USER48> "The only time I see $UI is when I hit the windows key, type "chro" and hit enter to launch Chrome. In this use case, $UI isn't anything more than a bigger start menu"

      $UI = [Metro|Ubuntu Unity|DWM/dmenu]

Strange how these changes all come along at the same time. Does Mac OS have a text based launcher at all?

<comment><USER49> Spotlight?

<comment><USER48> Thanks all three parent posters, I had tried to put Spotlight out of my mind (iBook G4 with the appropriate upgrade). I imagine it works a lot faster now.

So that is all three main end user desktop/laptop OSes using type and go interfaces.

<comment><USER50> In addition to hardware improvements, Leopard also brought speed improvements for app launching in particular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The pnly plus for me is that MSIE6 installation base will be contracted. For those who already paid over $100 for WinXP->Win7 upgrade, this $40 figure looks ugly.

</comment><comment><USER52> Can you upgrade if your computer doesn't support "Secure Boot"?

If so: 1) Buy a box with no OS 2) Install an older Windows 3) Upgrade.

Permanent path to 8 without secure boot?

<comment><USER25> Why wouldn't you?

Secure Boot is a root-kit protection mechanism; and Microsoft has required OEM partners to provide a way for users to disable it in the UEFI/BIOS.

I think you're either trolling or hugely misinformed.

<comment><USER53> "As currently proposed, Secure Boot impedes free software adoption. It is already bad enough that nearly all computers sold come with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In order to convince users to try free software, we must convince them to remove the operating system that came on their computers (or to divide their hard drives and make room for a new system, perceptually risking their data in the process).

With Secure Boot, new free software users must take an additional step to install free software operating systems. Because these operating systems do not have keys stored in every computer's firmware by default like Microsoft does, users will have to disable Secure Boot before booting the new system's installer. Proprietary software companies may present this requirement under the guise of "disable security on your computer," which will mislead new users into thinking free software is insecure."

[https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted- boot...](https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted- boot/whitepaper-web)

<comment><USER54> If you're technical enough to be buying old computers to work around it, I bet you could figure out how to disable it when the option is right there. :)

<comment><USER53> That still hinders FOSS's world-domination / year of the linux desktop plans.

<comment><USER55> Fedora will support booting on secure boot hardware: <http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Have they announced the price of a new copy? Would be nice if it was similarly priced.

</comment><comment><USER57> My bet is that someone's bonus is tied to licenses sold rather than sales revenue.

</comment><comment><USER58> "$39.99 in 131 markets" - sounds to me like this is for emerging markets only (?)

</comment><comment><USER59> The main complaint I hear is the change of start menu behavior, but most people I know use a keyboard based launcher anyway. If you're typing the name of the thing you want does it matter if it's going into Launchy, the Win7 start menu or the Metro interface? As long as you quickly get to the app or file you want, the interaction (typing) is pretty much identical.

<comment><USER60> It's not the most frequent method for launching. According to MS, their metrics indicate pinned task bar items are, or are trending to be, the most frequent method.

When I don't remember the name of the thing I want to launch (which is quite frequent), I rely mostly on positional navigation through a customized start menu. That is, I don't remember programs by name, I remember them by where I left them. Windows Vista / 7's start menu was a major regression for my use case (the scrollable treeview with expandable items destroyed absolute screen positioning); I had to replace it with Classic Shell to get usability back.

<comment><USER61> For most people the "All Programs" menu quickly turns into a circus. Curating it is a chore.

They are messing this up in Windows 8, as every time you install a application, including desktop applications, all of its start menu items get pinned onto the start screen. I'm afraid most users will never bother to unpin them.

<comment><USER60> I used to curate the All Programs menu. What that did was mess up uninstallers, because they could no longer find shortcuts to delete them, so I ended up with lots of dead shortcuts that needed clearing out.

So now, I create a bunch of category folders (Work, Development, Entertainment, you get the idea) in the Start Menu profile folder (rather than the Start Menu\Programs folder), and copy the handful of app and applet shortcuts that I actually need in. I leave the All Programs menu to fester and ignore it. With Classic Shell, this works well; the classic start menu, in XP mode, shows my folders as top-level expanding menu items.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's Not A Redesign If You Don't Cut Features - <AUTHOR> http://www.w2lessons.com/2011/06/its-not-redesign-if-you-dont-cut.html?ref=hn

<comment><USER2> This seems a little too black&white for my taste.

You can re-design for many different reason.

If you wanted to redesign for better visual structure that would be one thing where you aren't necessarily cutting features but layouting them better.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there's a good point in there, but it's hidden by the linkbait headline.

You should be willing to cut out features that aren't used. They cost money to maintain, they make the system more complex (which costs money) and they confuse customers (which prevents money from coming in).

<comment><USER4> > You should be willing to cut out features that aren't used.

How about the features that everybody wants but weren't marketed / made accessible well?

In other words, I think such a statement (as well as a fair part of the article) are too simple. How do you know people just don't want the feature, but can find it and understand it?

The extreme example of this is an entire product. If a product has few users, because it has recently launched or was just badly marketed, does that mean you should cut all features, i.e. the entire product?

<comment><USER3> I actually did touch on that in my other reply. You should investigate unused features and find out why they aren't being used, and react accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "a story of two startups"

once upon a time there were two startups. both launched a so-so product. users liked it, kinda. both startups analyzed their product after the start phase. both saw: hey, users aren't using 90% of our features. one startup decided two ditch 90% of their features, the other said: but hey, we already invested so much work in it, we don't want to throw it all away. lets make a reDESIGN (with DESIGN in UPPERCASE letters).

one startup was bought 1 year later, the other is now (3 years later) switching their strategy to mobile (as their website stuff ... just ... did ... not .... work ... out).

hope you like the story. you can decide for yourself which startup was bought?

</comment><comment><USER6> Feature-cutting can be a dangerous process, and should be done with _EXTREME_ caution. No one wants to be another Microsoft, who intelligently decided that the timeline "was not a vital feature" in its Movie Maker.

I would argue that if useful features that can definitely improve an user experience is not being fully taken advantage of, it's likely a case of poor implementation. In one of my projects, I remember adding a feature near the launch - but I (wrongfully) assumed people would be amazed and tell each other how great it was. A year and a half later, I had a giant thread on my forums with +1's asking for the exact same feature I had already implemented.

</comment><comment><USER7> Fairly common-sense, an actual example would have helped. It's pretty obvious that you should kill features that _no one_ uses. But it's never the case. In practice, a handful of users use it, so now what, do you do?

<comment><USER3> In the example given, it was only used a couple times in as many years... And their answer was to kill it and wait for someone to complain.

For something that's used a little more, I would say survey the customers who use it and find out why and how they use it. Maybe they use it because they actually want something else, but it's the best they could find. Maybe they use it by mistake, thinking it does something else. Maybe it's actually quite useful, and nobody knows it exists!

If none of your customers uses it for what you think is a good reason, I'd push hard to get rid of it.

At a previous company, every few months someone would write up a bug report saying feature X didn't work. (Different each time, of course.) After investigation, it would turn out 1 of 2 ways every time:

1) The feature works just as intended, but is so seldom used that the CSRs didn't understand how it works, and neither did the customer.

2) The feature has never worked properly, and nobody had tried to use it before.

The time spent dealing with those 2 situations cost the companies about 10 hours of my time every couple months. I have no idea how much CSR time it cost, but it was probably quite a bit more than my time. They didn't bring any customers in, and they didn't keep any existing customers. The features only ever cost money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why you always ship the minimum viable product!

</comment><comment><USER9> what product are you guys building? Had no luck finding it on your blog or your HN profile.</comment>


We are the outsiders. If you don't bet on us, you're fucked - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Joanwestenberg/we-are-the-outsiders-if-you-dont-bet-on-us-you-re-f-ked-2bce6e71c04e <comment> core-questions There's nothing I love more than someone dictating to me what I need to do or else be "fucked". How pleasant.

> hat's my somewhat indignant way of saying: only 10% of all startup > investment goes to women, and an estimated 1% goes to founders who are > black, while 37% of queer founders have not felt comfortable disclosing > their identities to their investors and the ones who have, have raised over > 10% less funding, and the statistics around transgender people in the > startup ecosystem very simply do not exist.

This is an experiment without a control. There's absolutely nothing that guarantees that the ideas these people came up with were equal on average to the ideas that got funded. What if they were just bad ideas? What if the pitch sucked? What if the idea was good but there was no confidence the team could actually implement, based on reasonable inquiry and analysis?

The moment you come into the situation expecting some perfect, 1:1 mapping between every single identity group in society and the people who make up some subgroup, you're going to be disappointed. Sorry. Did you check to make sure that there were enough people from Lichtenstein, Andorra, and the Vatican represented among the founders? If the group of people isn't big enough to include one of every group, which groups do you drop first? If you implement a quota, would you artificially make sure you hire 60% white people to remain representative of the larger society even if you have more qualified BIPOC candidates?

At some point, even when a person is doing their utmost to not be prejudiced, they're going to end up in a situation where they turn down the proposal or idea of a person in an Intersectional Identity Politics Group like your own. If that is immediately met with "they're prejudiced" instead of some introspection, then what you're doing is joining the big club of outsiders who use their identity as a cudgel to beat others. Something tells me that's not going to be a winning strategy.

> Pride is recognizing the unique worth and value that you have. Pride is in > pitching that value, not apologizing for it, making excuses for it or trying > to offset it with respectability overtures. Pride is owning that being > different gives you power and that power gives you what it takes to build > your own path, your own future, your own way. Pride is what sets us apart > from the mainstream as much as who we are sets us apart, because we have > earned pride in the identities and lives and livelihoods that we have fought > for.

If I posted that same exact statement as my own words publicly under my real name, I'd lose my job and be blackballed from ever working again. Intersectionality sure is fascinating.</comment>


Kindergarten coders can program before they can read - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929275.800-kindergarten-coders-can-program-before-they-can-read.html#.UfLVScX2UgQ <comment><USER2> My eldest was already doing amazing things with his arduino when he was 7, well before his reading and writing skills caught up. I deliberately held back with help on certain things to force him to RTFM. His fierce desire to figure it out did wonders for motivation.

It is gratifying to hear an 8 year old correctly use "instantiate" in conversation. We did have to warn him about using "magic" words amongst his "muggle" friends.

<comment><USER3> > We did have to warn him about using "magic" words amongst his "muggle" > friends.

Probably a good idea. I've on occasion realized that I was talking to someone about killing orphaned children in public within earshot of assorted people who are unlikely to understand the context, and having to hope that the mention of daemons and zombies in the same conversation makes it clear we're not actually planning murder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A kid near my house was being excessively naughty. So his mom asked him "how old are you?" to remind him to be a bit sober.

He had answered that question many times before, so this time he answered it a bit differently: "I am birthday number old". Mom says: "Huh? That doesn't make sense. What did you mean?"

He says: "I mean, I am as old as the number of birthdays I have celebrated".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's disappointing that the environment mentioned does not appear to be generally available:

[http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/ScratchJr/ScratchJrHome.asp#tec...](http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/ScratchJr/ScratchJrHome.asp#technology)

I would have loved to try it out with my daughter.

<comment><USER5> It is included in the default OS distribution for the raspberry PI.

<comment><USER6> I think that's just regular Scratch, not Scratch Jr.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't learning to read and learning to program basically the same thing? You're putting direction to syntax to complete a statement in either case. I don't see what the big leap is. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER8> No, far from it. I continue to be bemused by many programmers' fetishization of text.

This is the sort of thing I like to work with: [http://www.recordjob.de/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/Reaktor5_...](http://www.recordjob.de/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/Reaktor5_Screenshot_interface.jpg)

This one is aimed somewhat more at roboticists, and has a Ruby interface: [http://www.dsprobotics.com/flowstone.html](http://www.dsprobotics.com/flowstone.html)

This is a flatter (non-nesting) system, but the one which I use most because it's so fast to prototype in (and these days I care more about composition than systemization): [http://bagger288.com/goldenmaster/wp- content/uploads/2009/12...](http://bagger288.com/goldenmaster/wp- content/uploads/2009/12/granpatch.jpg)

<comment><USER9> This is the sort of thing I've worked with: [http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/201104/labview.jpg](http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/201104/labview.jpg)

Get 5+ of those controlling a robot and you can have a terrific time debugging. I think it's scarred me for life; I'd rather use Java than write a program in a graphical language again.

<comment><USER8> That looks like a good time to me! I like to see the structure of what I'm working with, and that's something that gets lost with text. But I agree that it makes debugging more demanding, since you can't just set breakpoints and so in the normal way; synchronization problems can be a headache. I think it's got a lot more in common with breadboarding/circuit design/

I do recommend checking out Flowstone, or its earlier incarnation Synthmaker, which allows programming in C and assembler as well as blackboxing modules. This seems like the best of both worlds in many respects.

<comment><USER9> That's interesting, do you have a background in hardware? I find it much easier to build a mental model from text, but I guess its because I'm not very familiar with graphical tools.

I try to stay away from closed source development tools as a general rule, are there any open source graphical tools you would recommend?

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry that I can't suggest anything open source except for DSP hacking, and that would Miller Puckette Pure Data system - but like a lot of open- source tools, especially in this space, it's about as friendly as a leopard. Very powerful, but also hideously ugly. Most pro users use a commercial iteration of the concept called Max/MSP which also has a steep learning curve but is quite interoperable with other platforms such as Processing.

I'm largely focused on audio processing because I'm into synths, but also on sequencers which I find endlessfascinating in much the same way as wind-up toys :) The problem is increasing complexity on larger projects, of course; I tend to use the Nord Modular platform for preference because otherwise I could spend all my time building and never get around to making music.

One commercial application that you might find interesting is the IDA debugger. I found after I'd been doing this for a while that I developed a strange affection for assembler and low-level debugging.

<comment><USER10> I don't think Pure Data is as scary as people make it out to be. It's certainly quite plain looking– similar to writing code with no syntax highlighting– but once you settle in it's enormous fun and very straightforward. The help browser in Pd-extended has enough examples and tutorials to keep you interested. Considering how much similar applications cost, PD should get a hardy recommendation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, fancy that. As a young child, I liked to play King's quest, but I couldn't quite read yet—so my mother wrote down the text commands on a sheet of paper, for my reference.

And before that, I got my computer time in by way of a baby sling in my father's lap. He said it seemed to calm me down and stop me from crying.

Start 'em young, I say!

<comment><USER12> Those games were brutal for a 12 year old that barely could read or understand english. One mistake and you lost days of work.

<comment><USER13> Getting started early on life's lessons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am going to be working with my small child (almost 3) to teach him how to read and program at the same time using:

[http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/658960/](http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/658960/)

Hopefully my "tests" will go well and will video document.

<comment><USER15> Be quiet.... a child of 3 is not fully ready for that.

<comment><USER16> Depends how it's done. It could be just play, and the child is learning at the same time.

Learning to read is intensely political, with fierce arguments around it. At the moment "synthetic phonics" is recommended.

An app that correctly teaches parents the sounds used would be great! (Also, apps that teach parents 'new math', eg chunking, would be handy.)

<comment><USER15> (I am being downvoted in my previous comment)

Yes, depends how it's done but one thing is to know programming and a very different one how to teach it. I expanded my approach in a new thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6112737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6112737)

I think Scratch and Alice 3D are complex for a 3 years old. For that age I would recommend to move something real/a-physical-object like a car or a robot instead of watching exclusively the computer screen.

<comment><USER3> You're presumably being downvoted for the combination of "Be quiet" and making categorical statements without explaining your opinion.

Yes, they may be complex - my son was not really interested when he was 3 and I showed him Scratch. I'm frankly more inclined to go with pure text or my next try (he's 4 now; I started at 5; I'm not assuming he's guaranteed to show the same interest I did, but I'm certainly going to ensure he gets the opportunity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe it's possible to teach Kindergarteners ARM assembly, this way they could write super efficient ARM compilers before they are proficient in a human language.

Just kidding. I remember a story about a French Mathematician (Lagrange?) and while he was young someone saw his great talent. He recommended the mother not to give him a math book before he turns 17. Obviously because he feared that he would have done nothing else in life than math...

</comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn I wonder about kids who can read at that age, like I could. Would they be surpassing those who couldn't, or does the graphical layout really offer that much flexibility?

In addition, it seems like a wasted opportunity to not throw some text in to help teach kids to read at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER18> What are the long term implications to how one thinks if they learn to program before they learn to read a language such as english?

Will the actual way they think be different? What will their thought processes be like when they are teen/adult?

<comment><USER19> FWIW, I learnt a couple of programming languages when I was very young, and immigrated to the US shortly thereafter. I find that I really struggle having a conversation with anybody who doesn't use very precise language, and I easily get caught up on little details of what someone says if it doesn't seem consistent. I blame the coding.

<comment><USER20> Interesting, makes sense though that that would be the case.

<comment><USER21> Going off anecdotal data here I wouldn't assume cause goes one way or the other. It's certainly possible TallGuyShort was able to/wanted to learn to program as a child because he enjoyed precise language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a cool startup that's making a toy out of this concept. They're using physical blocks (connected to an iPad) to teach kids sequencing: [http://digitaldreamlabs.com/](http://digitaldreamlabs.com/)

<comment><USER20> That's really cool!</comment></comment>


BlackBerry users hit by third day of problems TODAY - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/mobile-wireless/3310325/blackberry-users-hit-by-third-day-of-problems/

<comment><USER2> "If a company relies on providing a service to millions of customers from a single data centre, with no separate back-up site with its own individually tested architecture, it could face difficult questions."

This is key if you ask me. Making Blackberry reliant on a backend system for any internet usage (Browser, BBM, etc.) without a fallback isn't smart. Letting the service/system then be offline for serveral days...

I'm guessing one of the problems now is that everyone BlackBerry is retrying often, and when it does come online there'll be a huge backlog to handle, meaning more capacity is needed all round.

</comment><comment><USER3> Despite the fact that it's really pissing me off, it would take a lot worse to get me to switch from BlackBerry. Sadly I don't think that will be the case for a lot of people, and this couldn't have come at a much worse time for RIM.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ohh blackberry, my lovely 9000 bold is standing in the drawer for 6 months already because i use my android, wish at least you succeeded in the enterprise game; such downtime really came in bad times.

</comment><comment><USER5> My work Blackberry is still down in Uganda. Pretty brutal.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend an SMTP service for infrequent sending to a large list - <AUTHOR>

A client of mine runs a site with around 30,000 members. I need to find an SMTP / mail service for this site. Mostly it will be used to send single 'notification' type emails to the users, but on occasion (max 4 times a year) they need to send an email out to the entire user base.
So far I haven't found a service that would be cost effective for this kind of use. Services like mailgun seem to require a large monthly subscription for bulk mailing of that kind of size, which would be pointless when most months they won't be sending to the whole list.
I've tried Amazon SES, which seems to be ideally priced, but it's just so damn slow, and also has a 10,000 emails per day limit.
Can anyone recommend a service that would suit this usage? <comment><USER2> Mandrill is pay as you go - so you could use the free plan and then just pay by the email when you send large bursts: [http://mandrill.com/pricing/](http://mandrill.com/pricing/)

The only issue you will run into is that Mandrill has a per day limit that only increases as your sending volume increases, so they first few times you might have to spread out the 30k over a few days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, I've gone with Mandrill and so far it's working perfectly - their rails gem is beautifully simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We use Mailgun for the crypto challenges (tinyurl.com/mtsocrypt) and are very happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem here is that they are in-between two distinct needs

1) low volume transactional email

2) high volume (but very intermittent) distribution.

Most service cater to one or the other (and for #2, most cater to non- intermittent use). I would almost say that your best bet here is to roll-your- own SMTP delivery server. It's going to be a pain though because you'll have to delve deeply into email delivery/anti-spam issues (what you pay someone like mailgun or mailchimp to manage for you).

If I was doing this and had to do it on the relative cheap, I would probably use SES. When it came time to send that 30,000 recipient email I'd build some sort of queuing system that talked to SES and delivered the email at a lower rate, over several days (say, 10,000/day for 3 days, or something like that). That may seem like an ugly way to do it, but then you do get to take advantage of that $0.10 per thousand (plus bandwidth) price.

You could also contact AWS and ask for a higher daily limit, they do specificity state "If you need to send more volume per day than your current sending quota, please contact Amazon Web Services and we will evaluate your request promptly." on the page.

</comment><comment><USER5> Never used it myself but I have heard good things about sendGrid

<comment><USER4> Sendgrid is OK if you don't care about the ethics of the company management.

Everybody remember when they fired a female employee for speaking out about sexual harassment at a conference?

[http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/sendgrid-fires-adria- richards...](http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/sendgrid-fires-adria-richards/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> PHPlist? You can run it on your own server.</comment>


Interview with Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader - <AUTHOR> http://pcper.com/news/Editorial/Interview-Jared-Smith-Fedora-Project-Leader

<comment><AUTHOR> Would anyone like to add any questions to this interview?</comment>


The FCK DRM initiative - <AUTHOR> https://www.gog.com/news/the_fck_drm_initiative <comment><USER2> I agree that DRM is bad. But proprietary software is also bad. And GOG sells a lot of proprietary software. So I won't join the FCK DRM initiative.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh I Love it! I'm not sure it's going to be effective but it certainly captures my sentiment.</comment>


Expanding Signal GIF search - <AUTHOR> https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/ <comment><USER2> You should call that Privacy Aware Gif-As-A-Service and monetize just that :D

<comment><USER3> You joke, but I'm looking for a way to pay Signal / OpenWhisperSystems something. Having an excellent, secure, n00b usable, cross-platform, privacy- first messaging service this good is worth paying for. I understand they are funded largely by licensing the Signal/Axolotl encryption protocol to Facebook and Google. I don't mind that business model until I consider that those are the very services I'm specifically avoiding when I use Signal. As I work to move more of my contacts to using Signal over FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Google Allo, etc. doesn't that (at the extreme case) create a conflict for Signal/OWS?

Signal/OWS: now that you've beat the chicken/egg problem will you find a way to take my money, please? Thx

EDIT: replaced Hangouts with Allo

<comment><USER4> This is Signal's donation page: [https://freedom.press/crowdfunding/signal/](https://freedom.press/crowdfunding/signal/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why?

<comment><USER6> Because people like the feature and enabling it in a way that preserves privacy is pretty cool.</comment></comment>


Designated Initialization With Compound Literals in C - <AUTHOR> http://nickdesaulniers.github.io/blog/2013/07/25/designated-initialization-with-pointers-in-c/

<comment><USER2> The nesting can be taken care of:

        typedef struct list {
            int value;
            struct list *next;
        } list;

        #define cons(head, tail) ((list[]){{.value = head, .next = tail}})

        list *xs = cons(0, cons(1, cons(2, NULL)));

It isn't very useful though. Lifetime issues mean that such lists can't be mixed with dynamically allocated structure, returned from functions, etc.</comment>


Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement - <AUTHOR> http://pipes.yqlblog.net/post/120705592639/pipes-end-of-life-announcement <comment><USER2> Pipes was the first service I ever owned from an ops perspective (circa 2008). We had two clusters, one on each coast. I thought we had capacity to take one offline to do a full upgrade, turns out we didn't.

By the time I turned the west coast back online, the east coast was failing health checks, and the LB failed everything over to the west coast, which then proceeded to be overloaded, and everything flipped back to the east coast... Ping ponged for about 2 hours until they finally settled.

Fun times.

Another fun story: For the longest time the front page had an example pipe that merged search results from various online sites (amazon/ebay/cl). It was made by a former employee and was easily one of the most popular pipes. One day we found out he had his affiliate id in all of those links. We chuckled and moved on.

<comment><USER3> Did your remove the affiliate ID?

<comment><USER4> _We chuckled and moved on._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked on Pipes briefly, shortly after it launched. It was really two distinct products rolled into one. The visual interface was groundbreaking and stunning-I think half my team was hired on the strength of that demo. No one could believe Javascript could do that.

The backend was an extremely useful tool for munging RSS feeds. With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful. It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise.

Hats off to psadri and the other Pipes creators for a really stellar piece of work.

<comment><USER6> _It took a lot of active mismanagement and folly to keep Pipes from living up to its promise._

I would love to read a blog post about how exactly it was mismanaged. It would be great for others to learn lessons from the mistakes.

<comment><USER7> The first rule of Mismanagement Club is you never talk about how you got into Mismanagement Club.

<comment><USER8> Incorrect. The first rule of mismanagement club is to never know exactly how you got into mismanagement club; but by god you are going to do a bang up job of it now you are in!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> pipes creator here: sad to see pipes shutdown. i am surprised it lasted this long -- it was abandoned years ago. on the positive side, it is nice to see it mentioned in the same sentence as y! maps which used to be a big deal back in the day.

<comment><USER7> Pipes has long been a sort of monument to the faith of a bygone age -- the first flush of Web 2.0 optimism, when standard formats and open APIs were going to let us mix and match and mash up services of all kinds at will.

That faith is dead now, of course, scoured from the earth by walled gardens and VC money. But like Catholics in Elizabethan England, some of us quietly tend our secret shrines and pray for its return.

(Hopefully that will work out better for us than it did for them.)

<comment><USER10> Love your analogy, sure made me laugh (visualising a geeky dev like myself tending a weathered gnarly monument in a secluded English glade... in real life, that is, not in an RPG).

However, why such pessimism? I hardly think that standard formats and open APIs are dead. Sure, there are some nasty blights upon cyberspace in this regard (ahem, Facebook, Apple), but other players are still keeping the dream alive to some extent (e.g. Google, Yahoo).

<comment><USER11> I'd count google mostly as an example of deprecating or limiting useful interfaces. Yes, you can feed them stuff in "open" formats, but getting stuff out is harder. First example that comes to mind is youtube APIs, which offered easier access to stuff. Now try to get a feed of someones videos or similar...

But it is possible that it's confirmation bias + uncommon sample on my part.

<comment><USER12> _Now try to get a feed of someones videos or similar..._

What do you mean? Channels have an element linking to an RSS feed. In fact, just pasting a channel URL to an RSS reader should work.

Example of a channel feed: [https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCr4soU_...](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCr4soU_LrJyGBxhvdVy3qtg)

<comment><USER11> .... true. So they deprecated the methods for it in the API, but it is right there on the page. Strange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In an alternate universe not too dissimilar from our own, Pipes is an independent startup and this announcement is Yahoo buying it for 8-9 figures

<comment><USER14> There was IFTTT but looking at their page now it seems like maybe they have pivoted, at least I can't tell that it works like it used to: [https://ifttt.com/](https://ifttt.com/)

<comment><USER15> If you sign in all the previous functionality is still there. Seems their landing page is only advertising their new "Do" apps (which are a one-button extension of the old IFTTT recipes). Installed it, but never used them much.

<comment><USER16> Many see tools like [http://Zapier.com](http://Zapier.com) or [http://elastic.io](http://elastic.io) (disclaimer - I'm a founder) as alternative to Pipes and IFFT.

<comment><USER17> But all of them seem to miss the focus on RSS, or even just the ability to manipulate feeds.

<comment><USER18> The whole internet misses the previous focus on RSS...

<comment><USER19> It's amazing how much a shift of management focus can change things... Google embraces RSS, develops the premiere online RSS reader, so good that even stand alone readers are largely abandoned... then google nukes RSS support from Chrome, and shutters Reader. And the world is worse off for it.

It definitely inspires a "never forget" kind of mindset, such that I don't trust relying on a SaaS that I don't have a personal exit strategy for.

<comment><USER20> Twitter took RSS as a concept and humanized it

<comment><USER21> RSS is an open format, Twitter is a walled garden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Most of what Pipes did can be done locally, in a library. FeedReader for Windows did this.[1] Unfortunately, they recently announced _" Get ready for the brand new FeedReader! ... Check our site later this March for a new amazing web service, featuring industry-best RSS search and analysis."_, which means it's becoming "cloud based" and probably has ads or worse. "rss.com" already went that way; they charge $6/month to read RSS feeds.[2]

Following RSS feeds on a continuing basis takes a lot of RSS polls. Most RSS feeds do not implement RSS in a way that allows getting only new items reliably.[3] The RSS "etag" mechanism is not reliable. Some sites with multiple servers and a load balancer have different etag values on each server. The "guid" field sometimes changes when the content hasn't changed. My experience is that nothing short of full text comparison eliminates duplicates properly. I wrote an RSS reader which does a MD5 of the text of each incoming message to throw out duplicates. Presumably the "pipes" system did something similar.

If RSS feed servers complied with the standard, there'd be less need for feed aggregation services.

[1] [http://feedreader.com/](http://feedreader.com/) [2] [https://www.rss.com/](https://www.rss.com/) [3] [http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2006/08/rss-dup- detection](http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2006/08/rss-dup-detection)

<comment><USER23> I think your first paragraph speaks to a real tension in the world of software: web applications have enormous discoverability, immediacy, upgradeability, and (often) social collaboration advantages over native applications, but they have ongoing costs proportional to their popularity, so it's harder to run them without ulterior financial motives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yahoo pipes was obviously influenced by UNIX pipes and as such is one of the best demonstrations of flow based programming to date. I really loved Yahoo pipes and it influenced the way I think.

Pipes was a basic web "agent". It made basic programming available to the everyman much like HyperCard. Perhaps is just needed a runtime UI that matched the excellence of its design time interface.

Yahoo is focussing on mobile yet here they had this custom agent building tool that could easily be re-purposed to mobile to make a killer platform for Yahoo users.

Hopefully they will opensource the first generation perl version.

Some of my favourite flow based programming links follow.

Surprised nobody has mentioned noflow node.js workflows:

      https://github.com/noflo/noflo

Also this (untested) will convert your yahoo pipes into Node.js

      https://github.com/neyric/pipes2js

and this one (also untested) will do the same in python:

      https://github.com/ggaughan/pipe2py

There is also python pypes which has a yahoo pipes like frontend with a stackless based backend.

      http://pyvideo.org/video/400/pycon-2011--large-scale-data-conditioning--amp--p
      https://github.com/fullscale/pypes

Other python flow based programming tools

      https://wiki.python.org/moin/FlowBasedProgramming
      http://www.kamaelia.org/Home.html (BBC research)
      http://www.ruffus.org.uk/index.html

Wireit is a javascript pipes like frontend

      http://neyric.github.io/wireit/docs/

As you can see I loved pipes and I can

<comment><USER9> Correct and thanks for those links.

Pipes was influenced by unix pipes (hence the name). The UI was influenced by National Instrument's LabView and Apple's Automator.

I wish Pipes was launched in the age of containers (e.g. Docker). We had the idea of one click deployment to what we today call a container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Aw man - that is sad. We at Zapier took great inspiration from Pipes, it was such a cool and powerful product! It was a shame to see it languish.

I'd sure love to pick the brain of anyone formerly involved in the project - it seems like there is a lot we could learn from the trail it blazed. My email in profile, obligatory beers/coffee/etc. offer.

<comment><USER26> You guys are fantastic. I use Zapier for several of my organizations and companies, and I cannot understate how incredible of a service you guys have created. <3 for days.

My only wish would be for a paid tier between 100 and 3000. If I went hog-wild and did everything I want to do, I'd probably use 200-300 a month. I would love to pay for that. But there's some loss-aversion psychology happening that makes me not want to pay for 3000 if I know I'll only use 300.

I'd give you my cc number right now if you did a 1000 zaps at $10/m.

That being said - you know your business better than I do. If it would hurt conversions of $20/m more than it would help, I get that. :)

<3 you guys though.

<comment><USER27> I actually had the same query last year when I pushed a place I work at to use a combination of Yahoo! Pipes and Zapier for our Facebook postings. I asked for a smaller plan (we only need about 600-700 zaps/month at the most) and was just instructed by their support to utilize their reward program[0] which offered an extra 50-100 zaps/month based on what you 'complete,' and it included things like (IIRC) liking them on Facebook or following them on Twitter.

It seems like that program has since been limited, however, as it now redirects to a referral page[1] only. A combination of a couple referrals around the office and performing the required tasks gave us about ~650 monthly "zaps" at the time and we haven't needed more than that so far. Still, I would have happily paid $5/month or something to avoid the hassle (and be able to pay them for their wonderful product).

[0] [https://zapier.com/rewards/](https://zapier.com/rewards/)

[1] [https://zapier.com/referral/](https://zapier.com/referral/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yahoo Pipes was the backbone for ProPublica's first news web application in 2009: [http://www.propublica.org/article/changetracker- howto](http://www.propublica.org/article/changetracker-howto)

> _ChangeTracker watches the White House's web site so you don't have to. > Whenever a page on whitehouse.gov changes, we'll let you know — via e-mail, > Twitter, or RSS. But ChangeTracker is not a piece of software. It's the > output of a series of powerful and mostly free Web-based tools, lovingly > connected over the Internet. Here's how to do it yourself so you can track > changes on any Web site on the Internets._

</comment><comment><USER29> I used Yahoo Pipes to find my apartment.

One pipe would grab data from Craigslist, strip out irrelevant items, and send me a text if anything new and interesting appeared. Ditto for Westside Rentals.

This combination worked great. If a lame apartment appeared in CL, I'd edit my Pipes regex to strip the same thing out of WR. In this way I'd get only texts for awesome places.

Vaya con dios, Yahoo Pipes!

<comment><USER30> Ah, I did this too! I'd forgotten about it. As I was looking, I'd continually update it to block out streets I wasn't interested in, then eventually I was only getting notifications for exactly where I wanted for exactly how much.

I also used it with Freecycle and got a fridge-freezer! (you had to be quick to get them)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've used this pipe as my Hacker News RSS feed for the last 5 years, which flips the link structure so the main link for each entry is to the comments.

[http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0e19519adf0515251...](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0e19519adf051525192d459e8249e833)

Thanks to whoever made it. I guess I'll have to find a way to do it myself now.

<comment><USER30> The main one I made was to switch the actual link for the Reddit RSS feed to be the main link, set the true article title as the item title, use the submitted title as the item body and add a link to the link's domain in the bottom.

[http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedditArticles](http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedditArticles)

And another where I put the pictures inline (though the 3rd party API I was using isn't handling things too well anymore)

[http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedditPicturesWithPictures](http://feeds.feedburner.com/RedditPicturesWithPictures)

I still have 146 subscribers to keep happy, though Feedburner should make any transition transparent. I'm disappointed it's going. Thank you to those who made it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I used Pipes as the basis of data mashup classes, with non-developers students that were mostly afraid/bored of anything related to programming. Using Pipes, in just a few hours they would make small, custom data apps. A typical example would be a student building a pipe gathering the weather from one source and trying to fetch the relevant clothes from a retailer with pictures and links. I had a student using the location entity extraction to geocode his favorite street art blog that cited cities in the text but didn't use rssgeo, and then output the augmented feed to a map view.

It was an eye opener for some: they could get, transform and repurpose data, and it could be fun.

Pipes wasn't without its flaws: V1 was buggy and gave us a lot of trouble when 30 students were trying to use it from the same IP, the interface was plagued by the usual issues of visual interfaces (clutter…). Some things were odd, some a little too hard for what they achieved and other were magically easy!

But at a moment when every tech company is saying that "learning to code" is important, it's sad to see a tool that had real educational value disappear. It was a really effective tool for non-developers to learn about data markup standards, to think in term of data flows, to get introduced to the idea of a data or web API. For this particular use in education I'm not sure there is a replacement.

</comment><comment><USER33> Who is working on a pipes replacement and where can I sign-up? Maybe this will be like when google killed Reader and RSS replacements became a hot area...

<comment><USER34> I was looking into doing a Pipes 2.0 sort of project. If you live in the bay area i'd love to get coffee and chat about it. There are a number of the pieces to pipes that are opensource, but none of them are strung together.

I also thought that pipes queries were amazing, but slow, so it was hard to use them as part of an application.

<comment><USER35> I'm too far away for coffee, but my email address is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Just a shout out to the awesome Pipes community and some people that really helped it along the way. All the original creators (pasha, JT, ed, daniel), community members and team: hapdaniel, dawnfoster, kentbrewster, mirek, spullara, janluehe, dspark, kevink, brettp, lolo, laurencecoates, earth2marsh, psychemedia, davglass, ssaine, sadaf, ido, nagesh, ameya. I know i'm missing tons more, but just top of my head. You are all awesome.

<comment><USER36> Thanks guys, it was such an exciting product to work with, create with and help all the community members. I learned the most from this product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Oh man, I use 3 or 4 pipes to filter various RSS feeds. Ugh. Good suggestions for replacements (especially those that don't require my own server) would be much appreciated.

<comment><USER38> Are they also shutting down YQL? I think YQL queries can do everything pipes can, you just have to write little scripts to do it instead of the UI.

Still has the Yahoo problem, but it might be the easiest short term.

<comment><USER39> _YQL queries can do everything pipes can, you just have to write little scripts to do it instead of the UI_

Argh! The UI _was_ the innovative part. The whole point of something like this is that you don't have to learn a bunch of syntax - when you add a module, it _tells you_ what sort of data it needs to know (such as a URL or...) and when you connect modules together it _tells you_ what sort of inputs and outputs are available. This allows you to focus on the actual problem domain instead of the morphology of the query language, which is _not important_ to the user.

I keep encountering this attitude among programmers - 'I type code all day, so why don't you want to do the same thing?' If people wanted to type stuff all the time the command line would still rule, but the majority of people prefer graphic user interfaces because they don't want to write code, they want to make selections from available options and use the computer to take care of the plumbing. This is a Good Thing. It's easier, more fun, and yields greater productivity, for the same reason that handing someone a box of Lego is better than handing them a few blocks of wood and a set of carving tools. The existence of Lego hasn't led to a collapse of sculpture or mechanical engineering. On the contrary, the simplicity, consistency, and interoperability of the different components has made a massive creative, educational, and commercial success.

I don't mean this as a hit on you personally, but I find comments like the above frustrating. Imagine you went into a police station to report the disappearance of your bicycle and the person behind the desk shrugged and said 'you're still able to run around on your legs, what's the problem? Your bicycle may have allowed you to go faster down the street but it's not like you could ride it up and down stairs so you should be happy with walking on your feet.' The problem is the loss of a tool that offered substantial efficiencies on some common tasks even though it wasn't ideal for every situation. You'd probably be equally pissed off if your favorite high level language went away and you were told you could just go back to writing assembler. I personally love doing things in assembler because it makes me feel smart but that doesn't mean it's better than high level languages.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that YQL was equivalent to Pipes, just that it might be able to replace the functionality. Which is why I made sure to mention the significant difference...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> While working for YDN I was the one who spilled the beans about the top-secret Pipes _callback parameter, which turned your JSON reply into JavaScript. The service fell over instantly, of course, but far from being upset with me, the team was thrilled with the exposure. Viva Pipes!

Any word on whether YQL will live or die?

</comment><comment><USER41> I use Yahoo Pipes to get around Netflix's walled garden.

Netflix does not believe in RSS, even though their Influencer content is not behind a subwall. I use Pipes to parse Netflix's json content and then turn it into a feed. I even created a Pipe that took any influencer ID and automatically created an RSS feed.

The idea was started because Daniel Tunkelang of Netflix was very anti RSS. I showed him, but alas, no more.

I never figured out how to use IFTTT. How can you grab any content from the web, like Netflix's json content? There is no HTTP input as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER27> I used a combination of Yahoo! Pipes and IFTTT personally. I'm not sure how people are using IFTTT on its own.

For me, I would do the data parsing on Yahoo! Pipes and prepare everything to be triggered, and then the actions would be performed on a service like IFTTT (where the instruction was to just post whatever new item came in the feed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm a big fan of Yahoo Pipes, and sad to hear it's being shut down. Pipes and Visual Basic shaped my view of how fun and easy programming can be.

We're trying to build on this legacy with Weld(.io). See a sneak peek of our programming UI at 0:40 here: [http://youtu.be/faG3uuOnqxY](http://youtu.be/faG3uuOnqxY)

If anyone in the Pipes team would like to be involved somehow, ping me on firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER43> I remember well using and playing with Pipes when it came out early 2007. The service worked. I mostly played around with my twitter and flicker feeds. Here's some screenshots of what it looked like.

cloning twit user: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385441178/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385441178/)

multiple feeds into one: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385433038/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385433038/)

extracting flickr data: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385101700/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385101700/) and flickr backend [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2789198106/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2789198106/)

extracting twitter data: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/)

clogged pipes: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/384133421/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/384133421/) and [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/384128224/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/384128224/)

Read the comments on this link to get an idea of how I used Pipes and the logic behind it: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385101700](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385101700)

</comment><comment><USER44> I have been a fan of Pipes for a while. Kudos to @psadri and others who made it possible with the state of web tech back in the days. It was a very well made tool both frontend and backend wise!

I have a emotional connect with Pipes as a tool. Right out of college, and before the whole API thing was pervasive, I had leveraged pipes for so many small projects and hacks. Infact I used it in a Yahoo Hackday hack and it landed me a gig at Y!

More relevant to the present, It has been something I have mentioned to so many people who have come to me discussing UIs for automation/control systems/or to manage workflows, processes. In a way it was what noflow's UI looks like, but years in advance. In a different parallel universe, it may be the way people use APIs, or right big Haddop/Spark/Storm jobs/topologies, and the front end was open-sourced back in the day, with full integration with hadoop for job management.

</comment><comment><USER45> One of the truly powerful services, I will really miss. Mrs. Meyer squeezes out things at Y! like a lemon.

EDIT: added OSS & Commercial alternatives

free or commercial:

        [1] http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
        [2] http://www.feedsapi.com/
        [3] https://theenginuity.com/search/
        [4] https://zapier.com/
        [5] http://www.elastic.io/
        [6] https://ifttt.com/

open source:

        [1] https://github.com/olviko/RssPercolator
        [2] https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick/
        [3] https://github.com/cantino/huginn
        [4] https://github.com/fullscale/pypes
        [5] https://github.com/jparkrr/ISyTT
        [6] https://github.com/atask/shifttt
        [7] https://github.com/KLVN/F7_T7_RSSFeed

</comment><comment><USER46> This a disappointment if not an unexpected one. I used pipes again just a few weeks ago to do some simple modification of feed but thankfully ended up taking another approach (not a pipes replacement I just wrote some code for it). Pipes was a really cool tool and it will be missed. Does anyone know of/use any alternatives?

</comment><comment><USER47> As some deeper comment posted, Huginn [0] is awesome, an open-source connector-of-things like Zapier or IFTTT, but on your own server.

[0] [https://github.com/cantino/huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn)

</comment><comment><USER48> In the enterprise space this concept is thriving and doing well. For example, SnapLogic has been building enterprise integration technology that can easily tie hundreds of different data sources together using pre-built or custom components using a GUI or programmatically. In order to become a critical part of business infrastructure it needs to be a professionally supported and maintained product. Yahoo Pipes was just an experiment and not a serious business so people never built anything serious on top of it that would pay for the underlying maintenance and infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER49> My website is partially powered by pipes. Looks like I'll have to rewrite.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I figured this was going to happen years ago. Any suggestions for a replacement?

<comment><USER50> Platforms like IFTTT Zapier have worked well for me, though they're certainly not direct 1:1 replacements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> So sad to see Pipes go! I absolutely love Pipes and was just raving about it to a coworker this week. Terrific UI and a fantastic idea. When development fizzled out, I tried to find another service as a replacement, but everything I've tried has fallen short. I'm really disappointed as Pipes is definitely one of the best ideas that never caught on line it should. Popfly, while short lived, had the advantage of being able to modify the code behind, but it didn't come close to the fantastic ease of use and tremendous potential for reuse.

</comment><comment><USER52> I always knew this day would eventually come. It's kind of sad.

I had created this years ago to display Twitter data using Pipes, YQL and Google Charts. I haven't had to touch it in years but it's always just quietly worked, and some people seem to like it:

[http://xefer.com/twitter](http://xefer.com/twitter)

; e.g.;

[http://xefer.com/twitter/xefer](http://xefer.com/twitter/xefer)

I liked that Pipes allowed services to be chained together driven from the browser.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sorry to see Pipes being sunset. It had a major design and UX influence on a number of us during the early Web 2.0 days. Kudos to the Pipes folks for a seminal creation.

On a related note, a couple of us have been hacking on a Pipes like user experience around Data Integration and Analytics with Web feeds and APIs -- we had been planning a separate announcement but thought this might be a useful place to post if there are others who are looking for alternatives. Please message me directly - my contact info is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER54> If I was looking for a replacement, maybe I'd look for an RSS aggregation plugin for WordPress? Personally, I have my own PHP code that will slice and dice feeds however I want.

I got about halfway through building a "news blend" app where you tap just the categories you want and it would blend all the latest articles from just your categories into one news feed and email that to you daily. But we never finished it.

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm really motived to create an opensource alternative as I was a big pipes user. I set up a repo (obviously empty for now) ,I'll try to come up with a minimal working app before yahoo pipes gets frozen:

github.com/interactiv/pipes

didn't decide yet what serverside tech i'll be using but quick deployement is a priority for me. If anyone's interested.

EDIT: a lot of useful information here about existing projects, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER56> I loved yahoo pipes. I used it to filter high-traffic RSS to do a trivial word-match on content. I am now in the process of moving this to Newsblur, which allows filtering RSS content on tags, authors, or any word in the title. It's actually quite good, although we can't use the same filters for multiple feeds; at least it does the job.

</comment><comment><USER57> I can understand why Pipes would be shut down by Yahoo, it was a impressive technical feat but it definitely appealed to very small developer focused crowd.

I feel like IFTTT is our best bet, while it doesn't do the "Unix pipe" that pipes offered it at least provides some usability to the process.

</comment><comment><USER43> Using pipes was interesting and certainly did what it reported. I always capture what

Showing operators: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/385194782/)

</comment><comment><USER58> back when pipes came on the scene it was so out there but it was amazing. We couldn't fathom what kind of magic was making it all work and there seemed to be so many possiblities. Future bright etc. Of course, landscape changed etc...but it was / remains a display of what is possible with the web and kind of the 'idea' of an open web/apis/all that jazz.

I am still using it to repurpose an XKCD feed into a fully formatted feed with images that then is picked up by IFTTT and tweeted out as a tweet with images when new comics go up. I used Pipes just because it was point'n'click and seemed to have all the key components I needed to do the task without worrying about the code-route.

</comment><comment><USER59> Sad but not expected. It was really powerful but, like most people, I stopped using it years ago. It kept breaking either due to the sites I was using it with changing things or the service being neglected (and my limited ability to understand how it worked!)

</comment><comment><USER60> Yahoo Pipes was probably one of the best examples of letting non-programmers be developers. I created a lot of useful pipes back in the day for friends and family. Used a particular craigslist one for years.

</comment><comment><USER61> Disappointing news. But, if you're just looking at creating custom feeds for webpages, then try out Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com)

</comment><comment><USER62> Pipes was certainly an inspiration behind what we've been working on at tray.io - sad to see this come to a close.

Hats off to all those that worked on the product - great to see it remembered so fondly.

</comment><comment><USER63> Aw damn, that kinda sucks, but the project has been dead for a while now. I used it for content aggregation, but moved on to custom scripts, which were way more powerful...

</comment><comment><USER64> As the one person still using Yahoo Pipes, I'm rather saddened by this. Does this also imply an eventual end to YQL I wonder?

</comment><comment><USER65> Pipes gui was revolutionary when it came out and to me is invaluable. Shame to see it and rss die out from mass appeal :(

</comment><comment><USER66> There was an awesome pipe which allowed you to get a rss feed of commentators you want to subscribe to. Sadly no more

</comment><comment><USER67> I wonder how many people still use pipes?

<comment><USER68> One data point:

I used it for the first time 2 weeks ago.

Meetup.com has calendar feeds. You can get a calendar feed for all the events you've RSVPed "yes" to. You can get individual calendar feeds for each group's events. But there's no way to get a calendar feed of _all_ the events happening in _all_ of your groups.

I'm a member of something like 40 groups. The thought of manually adding each feed as a separate calendar in Thunderbird - and the thought of Thunderbird then trying to cope with the result - was... unpleasant.

So I set up a pipe to combine all the feeds into one. Very cursory googling suggested that Yahoo Pipes was the easiest way to accomplish this.

Fairly slick UI. Unfortunately it turns out that meetup.com apparently serves 503s to requests coming from Pipes.

<comment><USER39> _Unfortunately it turns out that meetup.com apparently serves 503s to requests coming from Pipes._

That's _really_ interesting. I think it exemplifies a problem that has been bothering me for a while: for many sites, scripting and design are antipatterns designed to corral rather than enable the user and leverage branding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Sad to hear that. I guess Pipes was the first and probably the last innovative product ever shipped by Yahoo!

</comment><comment><USER70> Pipes was awesome. But was there ever a credible strategy to monetize it? Does anyone on HN have any ideas?

</comment><comment><USER71> First Google Reader and now Pipes? What's the problem with RSS and please tell me what's better?

</comment><comment><USER72> please open source it, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER73> in 2010 I attended Yahoo Hack Day in Bangalore/ India. Thats where I learned about Pipes. This was the only tool needed to create a tech mashup.

</comment><comment><USER74> Thanks for your service! You've done great!

</comment><comment><USER75> Web mashup! Hey, remember the late 2000s?

</comment><comment><USER76> This is why I just roll my own data mining tools.</comment>


Windows Phone overtakes iPhone in world's largest smartphone market - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/18/windows-phone-market-share-china-apple-iphone/

<comment><USER2> 7% of the market in China? I wish that were true!</comment>


Do.com says goodbye, Blimp says hello - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getblimp.com/2013/10/do-com-says-goodbye-blimp-says-hello/

<comment><USER2> So, it was perfect timing for me, when I jumped from do to Blimp few weeks ago!</comment>