Bit.ly and Viglink Adding Affiliate Cookies on Shortened Links - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesempost.com/bit-ly-viglink-quietly-adding-their-own-affiliate-cookies-on-shortened-links/ <comment><USER2> This is right in the same vein as cookie stuffing, which Shawn Hogan went to prison for [1] [2]. Keep in mind that there is no "cookie stuffing" statute - he was charged with Wire Fraud - and using your position in the link chain to steal revenue from other affiliates seems to definitely fall under the definition of wire fraud. I can't imagine what lawyer told Bitly that this was a good idea given this precedent, but both they and Pinterest are doing it. I guess it's only illegal if you aren't a multi-billion dollar startup.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/ebay-the-fbi-shawn-hogan- and-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ebay-the-fbi-shawn-hogan-and-brian- dunning-2013-4?op=1)

[2] [http://marketingland.com/top-ebay-affiliate- sentenced-5-mont...](http://marketingland.com/top-ebay-affiliate- sentenced-5-months-prison-wire-fraud-82553)

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's really the same. The cookie stuffing case was about generating affiliate revenue from people who never actually clicked on a link to eBay. This is just about making non-affiliate Amazon links into affiliate links.

Also, Bitly and Pinterest probably got approval from Amazon for this scheme. Shawn Hogan misled eBay about what he was doing.

<comment><USER2> We have no idea if they received approval or not, but IMO the conduct is very similar. I also can't imagine that Amazon would say "sure, divert revenue from our affiliates into your own pockets without telling them". That sounds like an idea that any affiliate program manager would vehemently object to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The real issue here is that bitly is doing these affiliate conversions without the FTC mandated disclosure¹. If I create a non-affliated link for a amazon product for a blog post and use bitly to shorten it and dont disclose it as a affiliated link (after all, I shortened a unaffiliated link), Someone is liable to be sued by the FTC.

IMO, Bitly may be putting every publisher at risk for legal action. Even though such legal action may never happen nor be likely, its still pretty shitty to do and as stated, illegal.

¹ [https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/ftc...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/ftcs-revised-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking)

<comment><USER5> > _I'm an affiliate marketer with links to an online retailer on my website. > When people click on those links and buy something from the retailer, I earn > a commission. What do I have to disclose? Where should the disclosure be?_

> Let's assume that you're endorsing a product or service on your site and you > have links to a company that pays you commissions on sales. If you disclose > the relationship clearly and conspicuously on your site, readers can decide > how much weight to give your endorsement. In some instances, where the link > is embedded in the product review, a single disclosure may be adequate. When > the product review has a clear and conspicuous disclosure of your > relationship – and the reader can see both the product review and the link > at the same time – readers have the information they need. If the product > review and the link are separated, the reader may lose the connection.

> As for where to place a disclosure, the guiding principle is that it has to > be clear and conspicuous. Putting disclosures in obscure places – for > example, buried on an ABOUT US or GENERAL INFO page, behind a poorly labeled > hyperlink or in a terms of service agreement – isn't good enough. The > average person who visits your site must be able to notice your disclosure, > read it and understand it.

As seen in the text above, this doesn't quite apply. The person placing the link is presumably _not_ actively promoting the product for a commission. Bit.ly is the one converting it into a monetized link, and Bit.ly receives the commission split with VigLink.

This is a very important distinction here. The FTC is basing their guidelines on a person that is compensated for actively endorsing a product/service on their web site. This wouldn't qualify and as such looks to be a use case not considered previously. It is also no t that different than Pinterest doing the same with links on their site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I called this in 2009. URL shorteners are the gift that keep on giving.

> We hope the shortener never decides to add interstitials or otherwise > "monetize" the link with ads, but we have no guarantee.

[http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url- shorteners](http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners)

<comment><USER7> Its the easiest way to monetize them. I'm really surprised it took this long. One of the interesting things to look at is CTR and affiliate payout, you may find that only 30 - 40% of the affiliate links "stick" only because so many people between where the link is and the vendor end up trying to stomp on the affiliate tie in.

It is an affiliate eat affiliate world out there.

<comment><USER6> Sometimes I wonder if you are just a ramblebot that looks for keywords and finds a semi-relevant story.

<comment><USER8> Seeing that he is a member of the watson group at IBM, it just might be true ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a clear violation of the Amazon and eBay affiliate programs. These shortened URLs were already clicks being sent to Amazon or eBay (or whoever the affiliate is). No overt attempt at promoting a sale or purchase of a product is taking place.

We contemplated this kind of thing for about 2 milliseconds when OpenDNS had an ad revenue business and we couldn't ever wrap our heads around how it's even remotely acceptable behavior.

<comment><USER10> Is stackexchange also violating the terms by inserting affiliate links to amazon for outbound links?

[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26964/auto- insertin...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26964/auto-inserting- stack-overflow-affiliate-into-all-amazon-book-links)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Guess this explains how they became profitable [https://medium.com/@markjosephson/why-profitability- matters-...](https://medium.com/@markjosephson/why-profitability- matters-62e9fc8427fc) , through shady tactics

<comment><USER12> "Behind every great fortune there is a crime" \--Balzac (after a fashion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One does not anger one's users in a market where one is replaceable with zero effort.

So long, bit.ly

<comment><USER14> Let's just hope that when they do die, their link database is given to archive.org - [http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam#Dead_or_B...](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam#Dead_or_Broken)

URL shorteners are a terrible idea.

<comment><USER15> URL shorteners are a great idea, but for very limited use cases. I think they only make sense when run by a particular service for use with that service's URLs, like t.co or db.tt, and live and die in tandem with the underlying service.

General purpose URL shorteners are just time bombs waiting to go off. They'll die and break all of their captive URLs or they'll realize they need to make some money and do something like this (or much worse). There's no third option.

<comment><USER8> Well third party URL shortners can be useful when you are sharing the URL via SMS or an IM, i.e., just for a quick share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> You can still use Bitly, but have the bitly point to your own site first, then redirect to your affiliate link from there. With a bit of work you can do the same with any post you make to Pinterest, so that they don't hijack your affiliate links either.

<comment><USER16> ...but then why use bitly?

<comment><USER2> Because its unlikely that you own a domain that short. They also own j.mp ...a 1 letter domain. Good luck getting one of those on your own :)

<comment><USER17> You could probably get a complete URL of equal or shorter length though because your new shortener domain could start counting from single-digit IDs again. Bit.ly is up to 7 characters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This was discovered months ago: [https://www.schaafpc.com/bitly-viglink- publisher/](https://www.schaafpc.com/bitly-viglink-publisher/)

As @DanBlake had mentioned, there is a serious FTC issue where individuals that were casually linking to a merchant are now unwittingly becoming advertisers. There's a decent snippet in the comments of the above link about that.

They claim that they are just turning non-affiliate links into affiliate links.

They also claim they are not overwriting other affiliate links.

So do they automatically recognize all other affiliate network redirects? What about direct linking affiliate programs? What about Pay-Per-Call programs? There are a number of ways this can go wrong and take money from other affiliates by hijacking the links.

Not to mention the fact that there is very little benefit to the merchant here - that is traffic that quite clearly they were getting anyways. There is complete intent to link to them, so why must they pay VigLink and Bit.ly for shortening the URL? That's a service being used by the individual linking to the merchant. It's not worth commissioning on, there's very little value to the merchant.

If you have an affiliate program with Viglink, please contact them and request they remove ALL URL shorteners from their program - it's not just bit.ly, it's tinyurl as well, and a couple others that I cannot recall at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER19> > However, to stay within the character limit constraints of the social media > platforms, you use Bitly to shorten the URL.

Why are people still doing this? The only major platform with such limits is Twitter, but using a shortener no longer does anything - Twitter runs every link, bar none, through t.co and counts _that_ URL length against you (which leads to fun situations like the 11 character link [http://j.mp](http://j.mp) being treated as 22 characters).

<comment><USER20> See also: [http://qntm.org/twit](http://qntm.org/twit)

<comment><USER19> "I expect it'll be rectified in a day or two..."

Heh.

<comment><USER20> Sam can be optimistic at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Quite interesting to see so many commenters claiming this is "cookie stuffing", this isn't cookie stuffing. Essentially non-affiliate links are being turned into affiliate links and quite a few people do this.

A couple weeks ago on Shark Tank Australia there was some lady trying to get funding for her website "Rich Gurl" ([http://richgurl.com/](http://richgurl.com/)) essentially what she does is goes out and scrapes sales from all of the major retailers, then when someone clicks a product and heads to that website a cookie is saved on your machine for a few weeks. Any purchased you might make in that window is counted as an affiliate sale and it is NOT illegal. This is essentially what Bit.ly are doing with their shortened links.

What Bit.ly are doing here is not illegal, it might be a bit deceptive but not illegal. The best course of action here would be for users of Bit.ly to stop using it and perhaps find an alternative. Eventually if enough people leave then Bit.ly might get the hint and stop what they are doing.

<comment><USER22> It's cookie stuffing because the visitor was already going to amazon before bitly appended their affiliate link. This is different than when an affiliate promotes a specific product and convinces the visitor to click a link with an affiliate code. Bitly did not convince anyone to buy a product.

It may not be cookie stuffing by strict definition, but it's definitely affiliate fraud and I cannot see how any advertiser would be happy to pay bitly for adding zero value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Back in 2008, the owners of digital point forums got sued by ebay for something similar, dropping cookies on people visiting their forums for amazon. I wonder if bit.ly will be sued for this.

Shameless plug: Check out [http://www.tracker.ly](http://www.tracker.ly), where you can create every type of redirect link in one place.

<comment><USER24> URL lengtheners are a good way to examine a URL before clicking. LongURL is my favorite. [http://longurl.org/](http://longurl.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Stack Overflow does it too on Amazon-links etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> Easy way to get this fixed: Every time you buy something online, create a bit.ly link and follow it prior to purchasing. Flood retailers with bit.ly affiliated links until they refuse to pay bit.ly for their wire fraud.

They'll either get sued and/or the backlash will give them the hint to stop trying to be scammers.

<comment><USER24> Quick, someone make this a browser extension. We'll kill it the way we killed Amazon's ebook monopoly.

[https://torrentfreak.com/chrome-addon-turns-amazon-pirate- eb...](https://torrentfreak.com/chrome-addon-turns-amazon-pirate-ebook- site-140802/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Isn't this cookie stuffing?

Did bit.ly partner with merchants who are aware of this practice?

</comment><comment><USER27> Really really shady ... I was wondering how bit.ly was going to make some money. I never thought there was any business in link shortening.

</comment><comment><USER28> Really shady stuff.

>Apparently Viglink said they would not be overwriting other affiliate links, however in the comments at Practical Ecommerce, it seems to indicate that it is happening in practice, and affiliates driving the links are not getting credit for doing so.

So basically bit.ly is cookie stuffing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Rule #1 of the internet - if you're not a consumer and you're not paying for something, you're actually the product.

<comment><USER19> [http://powazek.com/posts/3229](http://powazek.com/posts/3229)

> We should all stop saying, "if you're not paying for the product, you are > the product," because it doesn't really mean anything, it excuses the > behavior of bad companies, and it makes you sound kind of like a stoner > looking at their hand for the first time.

<comment><USER30> Also, because its _wrong_. In the usual case, you are the supplier of the product, being paid for the supplied product with the "free" service, and recognize that -- rather than viewing yourself as the product -- is more useful because it frames what you should be evaluating: is what you are receiving for the product you are providing worth the cost to you of providing that product.</comment></comment></comment>


Developing Software on Time: The Developer - <AUTHOR> http://mustw.in/ethos#/Team/developing-software-on-time-the-developer

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure that OP's use of DRY (which seems to be about setting requirements) is the same as is referenced in the CodingHorror article (which is more about coding style and avoiding multiple modules that accomplish the same task)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's kind of the idea. Reappropriating the coding best practices into higher level project management ideas is the premise of the post.

<comment><USER2> Ha. I totally missed that. Makes sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Corp-2-Corp vs W2 Work in San Francisco / Bay Area - <AUTHOR> I have over 20 years experience in over 10+ languages, tools frameworks. Active on github and open source also.
Trying to make a lot of $$ in next 5 years and quit the rat race.
Everywhere I apply for contract jobs, the recruiter / person with job says they can only do W2 and not independent 1099 or corp 2 corp contract.
I don't need benefits (have it from my partner) and W2 rates are much less than Independent 1099.
So what's the deal ? Why do recruiters and firms insist on W2 in Bay Area?
Also how do I set my W2 rate vs my C2C expectation.
Ex: If my 1099 / Independent rate is 100 $ / hour, what would the equivalent W2 rate be, so I don't lose money? <comment><USER2> I don't know why W2 is so common over there, but you should be hitting up LinkedIn and reaching out to recruiters that way. There are plenty of 1099 opportunities to be found. Ensure that you get contracts with fixed time periods so that you can plan your cash flow a little easier. (It's not a hard and fast guarantee, but a six-month contract is much easier to plan around than some flexible contract scenario where the client can fire you at literally a moment's notice.)

Also, $100/hr for 1099 is really low for your experience. You'll get work easily, but will need to work literally all of the time to make ends meet. You should aim for at least $240/hour.

Think about it like this. Your experience would probably net you a $175-200k/year salary in the Bay Area. That's the money you take home (before taxes). This _does not_ include offset compensation (equity, bonuses, VACATION) and benefits (401(k) with match, health insurance (medical, dental, sometimes vision, HSA, FSA, etc.), commuting discounts, etc.). I don't know the exact numbers, but after factoring all of this in, I would wager that the company is actually paying $500k/year for your services in the W2 scenario. That's ~$240/hour assuming a 52-week business year at 40 hours/week.

Additionally, your experience makes you a premium product depending on how you sell yourself. If the talent pool for one of the languages that you know (say, Delphi) is dying but is still used for critical business functions that make companies serious amounts of money, you can increase the margin on your rate even more. 20 years of experience is a lot.

Lastly, for the businesses that you're probably trying to go after (big institutions with beefy IT budgets), trying to sell yourself short will actually make you appear to be _less_ experienced than you really are. These businesses are used to paying top-dollar for quality and/or insurance, so you should play the game in kind.

TL;DR: Pay for LinkedIn; use competing salaries PLUS BENEFITS to calculate your rate; add some margin to the top; get the fuck out of the rat race.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are plenty of businesses that would prefer to pay you or your small corp directly without a w2. They are usually the smaller companies or individual people. The w2 is common when a contracting company is managing all of the contractors for a medium to large company. It could be that those contracting companies want uniformity between their Human Resources but I'm not sure. I think you just need to branch out and talk to a few new recruiters or contact businesses directly. Sell them on yourself and then just tell them you always do 1099. Someone will bite if you pass the interviews.

Lastly the w2-- it could be at least 15 percent less to be equivalent to 1099 since you don't have to pay he employer share of social sec, but you should still shoot for as high as possible given that a contract (even w2) is more volatile than a long term gig and the employer should pay a premium for that over a regular hire.

</comment><comment><USER4> Clients prefer W-2 because of the so called assumed "risk of liability". They don't want 1099s on their payroll because of fear from IRS that they could be tagged as employees and hence needing to pay fines and extra benefits that they don't want to. I personally think that is bullshit but that is what it is. In fact, some large clients force their vendors to only hire W-2 even if the payroll is run by the vendor company and not the client. So that is why a lot of these clients have started preferring W-2 and it is increasing difficult to find direct contracts with large clients who offer 1099 (many still do but rare these days).

Now to your question about the rate between W-2 and 1099. It depends. Generally, a W-2 rate is usually going to be less than 1099 due to factors such as Payroll tax, benefits etc. AT the end of the day, someone has to pay for those regardless but in case of 1099, you the contractor is responsible to figure that out (risk is on you) vs W-2 where the employer has to figure that out for you.

You first need to ask these questions to ANY recruiter you talk to:

1\. Are you a direct/preferred vendor to the client ? This is critical because if they middleman to the actual vendor, they will take their own cut thereby reducing the size of the pie for you. They are of not use to you and never deal with 3rd party recruiters. Only deal with direct vendors who talk to clients directly.

2\. If they only offer W-2, is it with Benefits or without benefits. Yes, you can get W-2 with some benefits (health insurance etc) even if you are a contractor. This is important to know because if you don't necessarily want benefits, you could potentially negotiate a higher rate even on W-2 by asking them not to pay for benefits .

Once these 2 questions are answered, then you can start playing with numbers to figure out what you should ask for at the very least to even break even. Items to consider:

\- Your current salary

\- Do you receive any bonus on average every year ?

\- Vacation days you take in a year

\- monetary value of benefits like Health insurance, 401k etc

\- How much Payroll taxes are paid by your employer ? Remember, as an employee, you only pay your portion (about 7.5% SS + Medicare) but as a contractor, you will have to handle that part yourself (if 1099).

You need to figure out all these and then get to a daily/hourly rate.

MOST IMPORTANT: Your daily/hourly rate must consider the number of billable hours/day you will work in a year. You need to factor in downtime. Contracts can end quickly at times. So you need to factor the extra month or so that you may be in transition.

Finally, in Bay area, my general assumption is that $100/Hour on 1099 is low for a skilled and experienced developer.

Shameless plug: I wrote a simple calculator to convert salary to a daily rate in the US. It is a general estimate but should give you an idea:

[https://codegeek1001.github.io/salary2consultantcalc/](https://codegeek1001.github.io/salary2consultantcalc/)

<comment><USER5> Quick question, how do you feel about a long term contract (never ending) at 125$ per hour. Assume highly in demand skills (ML, Big Data Architecture, stream processing) with 5 years experience in NYC/SF.

Is that too low? Just right?</comment></comment>


NexDock – The World's Most Affordable Laptop - <AUTHOR> http://nexdock.com/ <comment><USER3> Describing something that doesn't include CPU, RAM or storage as "The World's Most Affordable Laptop" seem disingenuous.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's not a laptop, it's a dumb terminal.

</comment><comment><USER5> Return of the Folio: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Foleo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Foleo)

None of the dead dot-com's were bad ideas, just too early. Same for the "subnotebook"?

<comment><USER6> The folio was more potent than this. It could have actually worked on its own if not for Palm leadership being fearful of undermining their handset sales.

Frankly the Foleo may well have been the first Netbook, to more of a work device than the Asus EEEPC was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The world's most affordable laptop that doesn't suck is the Thinkpad you buy on eBay for $95 and install Debian + xorg + openbox on.

</comment><comment><USER8> I ordered one for RPI projects, hope it get's the goal.

<comment><USER9> This is honestly the more interesting answer. Having a little device with a portable screen, keyboard and mouse that you can attach to various RPI as needed. As for price how about a nexdock that has a port where you can stick a Pi Zero in or even just include a Pi Zero, I would be happy to pay $5 more for it?

Scratch that: Motorola Lapdock 100 is the same thing as this laptop [http://hackaday.com/2016/01/26/turning-a-lapdock-into-a- lapt...](http://hackaday.com/2016/01/26/turning-a-lapdock-into-a-laptop-with- the-pi-zero/)

Edit: Just wanted to call out this line from the above article.

> The Lapdock 100 has long been a useful accessory for the Raspberry Pi

The market has a problem and this was a solution. The phone /laptop isn't really a problem that people need solving. But the Pi owners have a problem they need solved.

Just imaging a Pi with a USB-C port connected to one of these laptops via just 1 wire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can buy a MHL adapter and a Bluetooth keyboard for $lessmoney, if you are looking to hook an Android phone, though it won't have that laptop form factor. I've done that, and the Android interface doesn't translate well. There's a reason all their screenshots show Windows 10, because there's actual specific accommodations for that in the operating system.

I'm not saying this to be down on their project; I think it's neat. You can run other things on an Android phone, so I am nitpicking.

</comment><comment><USER11> If I could run a Linux virtual machine on an iPhone, and then connect to it with NexDock, that would be extraordinarily useful.

<comment><USER6> Or you could get an Android, where such things are possible...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TN lcd 1366x768 screen? I know it's a low price point, but that's a turn-off.

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nexdock-the-world-s- most-...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nexdock-the-world-s-most- affordable-laptop--2#/)

</comment><comment><USER13> These windows mobiles need portable screens - basically a screen in a tablet form factor with some kind of kick stand.

I was looking for a product like this a while back to pair with a laptop - <USER2> multi screen coding in a hotel room. Couldn't find much. Anyone seen something like this?

<comment><USER14> Well you can use a tablet as a second monitor. There are apps out there advertised as "second screen" apps for both android and apple tablets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You could have had the SysAdmins on board if you just added a way to connect the touchpad and keyboard via USB and maybe VGA in.

Cheap and portable crash cart? I'd buy it.

</comment><comment><USER16> An intriguing idea, but the information on the website is sparse.

What is the screen's resolution? How big is battery? How much does it weigh?

<comment><USER17> All of those were stated on the indiegogo page: 1366*768 (possible improvement if they hit $1M), 10000mAh, and 1.46kg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's describe as using the power of smartphones but the video doesn't play on a smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER19> it's a cool idea but it's not a laptop, just a keyboard, battery, and display

<comment><USER11> I wonder if it presents itself over USB as a USB hub with all of those things plugged into it. It seems that you would get maximum compatibility that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm sure all 3 windows 10 phone users are excited about it!

</comment><comment><USER21> No trackpoint means I personally cannot use it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Palm Foolio, um, Folio?

</comment><comment><USER23> I love this idea!</comment>


Porn, gore, and gambling habits aired in Virgin Media breach - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/virgin-media-breach-outs-some-customers-porn-gore-and-gambling-habits/ <comment><AUTHOR> >Virgin Media said in a post that unauthorized access was to a marketing database that included "limited contact information such as names, home and email addresses, and phone numbers" for about 900,000 subscribers.

If I have your name, address, email, & phone number, my efforts to contact you won't be "limited" in any way.</comment>


GitHub is making me lazy but I like it - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hipchat.com/2010/10/15/github-is-making-me-lazy-but-i-like-it/

<comment><USER2> So, I'm not a huge GitHub fan for open source projects. Why? Because while it's a great site and tool (don't get me wrong, I can understand the attraction), GitHub can be a pain in the ass for end users. How so? I don't know how many times I've found some code I wanted to use only to find a dozen or more forks, none of which have been merged back together and a handful of which have patches I'm interested in. It's way, way too easy in GitHub for the community to get _lost_ in the forks. There's no clear mechanism for communication (mailing list, forums, etc.) and not enough pressure to merge code back into a common repository. Sure it democratizes contributions, but it also makes a mess.

There's a real need and advantage to having a canonical, master repository - something users can trust that's been properly vetted, tested and debugged. There's a lot of value in a single place for discussion with public, searchable archives so that users can learn the project history, why decisions were made and, if necessary, ask new questions. There's nothing worse than having to use Google to search blogs for outdated documentation and discussions split across little more than tweets.

GitHub encourages _forking_ but it doesn't necessarily encourage _merging_. Successful open source projects which a large, invested user base require a bit more structure, stability and developer support than GitHub encourages. It may be a great place to start a project, but at some point, I can see projects graduating to their own infrastructure and a real, organized community.

<comment><USER3> You core complaint seems to be that maintainers don't maintain their software. This is sadly true in many cases, but I would argue that GitHub has actually improved the situation.

First, by making it trivial to get patches to the maintainer. Prior to GitHub, if you wrote a patch for a project, you would have to track down the appropriate channel to submit the patch, then jump through any hoops required. Whether it be mail directly to the maintainer, a patch on a bugtracker (probably also requiring signup), mail to a mailing list (again probably requiring signup), patch having to be in a particular format, etc.

The second problem is what to do if the maintainer doesn't respond? Sometimes you might end up forking the project and hosting it in yet another random web page. Sometimes you might just end up dumping the patch onto the net, in the vain hope that someone else would find it if they had the same problem. I have done both, a number of times. With GitHub, the patches are clearly there as forks.

At least with GitHub, the barrier to writing a patch and getting it in the face of the maintainer is almost zero. This is an improvement. If they don't respond, at least it's obvious to users from the proliferation of forks, and if they're lucky they can find the particular fork that fixes their issue.

Solving the human problem of maintenance is a big challenge. If GitHub solves that as well, I'll be amazed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its pretty much identical reasons to why CPAN also became such a success. CPAN's infrastructure and tools is what made the telling difference and Github seems to be heading on a similar tract.

</comment><comment><USER5> I do worry about GitHub on some levels. I'm an avid user and I love it --- but there's the part of me that's really worried about it being the only real option for hosting. Would the community leave GitHub if their policies changed and it was less of an awesome place to work with your code, or would we feel trapped because it's still what everyone uses?

<comment><USER6> How easy is it to get information out of GitHub? Not just the repositories -- cloning a git repo is easy -- but the issues, wiki pages, and so on. If that's made as easy as possible, then escaping from GitHub-gone-wild shouldn't be too hard.

That in itself should provide an incentive for GitHub to avoid alienating its users. It's like bringing an umbrella so it won't rain, in a world where such things actually worked.

<comment><USER7> The wiki pages are just another Git repo; you can just clone it and get a full copy. Pages simply turn into files containing Markdown markup (teehee).

Not sure about the issues or other things, though.

<comment><USER8> Issues are accessible via the API: <http://develop.github.com/p/issues.html>

<comment><USER6> So _that's_ how the Cappuccino guys made their slick issue tracker GUI:

<http://githubissues.heroku.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If only GitHub could solve OSS politics too. :) This 6 year old ticket asking for better logging support in Twisted is just scary: <http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/638>

<comment><USER9> There's a ~3 year old bug in WebKit[1]. It just doesn't happen because rewriting the rich editing handling code doesn't sound fun or sexy.

<https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15256>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I actually wasn't involved in much open source in the past but I've been contributing something nearly every day for the past couple of months because of GitHub.

Another great contribution from GitHub is the way it's founders help push better standards for coding: TomDoc, Semanic Versioning, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you seen 'Calendar About Nothing'? It's a fun way to keep your contribution streak going.

Link: <http://calendaraboutnothing.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's called progress, mate.</comment>


Learning PHP/Car Engines - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know if my learning PHP code would better my chances of being or learning how to be an effective Car Mechanic? I'm stuck on this. <comment><USER2> I suppose that in terms of modules interacting, dependencies, information flow, etc. there are analogs in car mechanics.

Troubleshooting is always the same, regardless of the technology: Look at the symptoms. Observe the system to see what it's actually doing. Analyze any residue left behind as the system operates/fails. Start with the most obvious potential sources of error. Eliminate things as you go. What's left at the end is the root cause.

However, keep in mind that computers are vastly more complex than engines. Add networking and it gets even more complicated. One way to think of it is that a computer running a LAMP stack (as an example) has hundreds of 'engines' all interacting with each other. The result is that what's wrong with one 'engine' affects the others in ways that aren't always obvious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you suggest learning networking a better more relevant alternative? or any other "methodologies", "technologies", or "computer systems"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe learn something about embedded dev.

That is, there is a CAN bus plug on modern cars, shouldn't you learn how to access it? This is easy to do in Python

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-can](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python- can)

but I don't see drivers to do it from PHP.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why one or the other? Learning to be a mechanic is probably more difficult, time consuming and requires a greater investment, but you could still do that and teach yourself PHP on the side.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does WordPress dominate the market? - <AUTHOR> WordPress dominates the CMS market with overwhelming numbers (61%: http://www.opensourcecms.com/general/cms-marketshare.php).  I know very well the strengths and weaknesses of WP - I worked on a single WP site for 2 years, pushing its limits every day.
My general understanding is that PHP is being surpassed by Node and Rails.  I'm jumping on the Node bandwagon:  the synergy between JavaScript on the front and back end seems like a game-changer.  Add web sockets and its unbeatable.
So maybe a better question is, why aren't there any contenders?  Clearly WordPress thrives on its massive community, and maybe its just a matter of time until a worthy opponent emerges to gain the necessary momentum.  I'd like to help make this happen, and I have a lot of great ideas to do so.
Why doesn't Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc. etc. make their own Open Source CMS / web platform that competes with WordPress?  You might say they have, and I'd be interested in looking into these alternatives, yet WordPress + Joomla + Drupal have 86% market share, which is ridiculous.
Sidebar: This is my first HN post.  Comparing to the heavily-moderated Stack Overflow, I'm wondering what kind of posts are NOT okay here.  Let's say I have big plans to create the next Google-scale company, and need help to get started.  I need to find people who can help me discuss, collaborate, design, and develop.  Is HN an appropriate place to do this?  If not, is there a better place? Another forum? An IRC channel? <comment><USER2> Wordpress dominates, I think, for a number of reasons. Primarily, low technical debt for users - it's as close to a plug and play application as i've seen, and nowhere are you expected to understand 'arcane' concepts like version control or the terminal. Want a plugin? Done entirely through the web GUI. Want to upgrade? Same thing. New theme? Same thing. The vast community also helps, obviously, but that community is only as big as it is because the barrier for entry to setting up and modifying a Wordpress install (assuming all you want is to use existing plugins and themes of course) is so low.

Also, many existing webhosting accounts come with an option to install Wordpress on the account. Wordpress even has its own self-hosted service. Many of the alternatives i've seen, in terms of frameworks and CMS software, haven't been able to replicate the relative painlessness of Wordpress' model.

A contender would, first, have to deal with the network effect of Wordpress which is considerable, but also (if it's written in a language other than PHP) the network effect of PHP. Since the UX in Wordpress generally works pretty well, switching to another CMS would be a difficult sell to the general user (why switch from something that's easy and works and you can hit a developer for by throwing a rock out of the window?) meanwhile most of what is terrible about Wordpress is only apparent to coders, who frankly don't really matter in this dicussion, since they're probably using Octopress or something anyway.

<comment><USER3> I think this is the crux of it. All the objections to WordPress are from a developer's point of view. But when you scoot around to the user's side of the table, all of those issues are invisible. WordPress dominates because WordPress addresses its users' needs well enough that it's _really, really hard_ to be so much better that you can overcome the network effect. In order to beat WordPress, you need not just a better technical foundation or some whizbang design — you need something that makes it so much more attractive that people who aren't developing for the platform say, "You know, this is worth the extra effort compared to WordPress."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Disclaimer: Not a Wordpress expert. I don't know much about Drupal or Joomla. But what I noticed was back in the early 2000's PHP was the craze; a simple language for the web, it was those one-click LAMP/XAMP installers. All in all it was just a bunch of small circumstances drawn together that snowballed into enough momentum for the mainstream spotlight.

A ton of budding 'techpreneurs' whose $family_relative_or_friend 'knows PHP, therefore can wrangle Wordpress' could get them a site up and running when they 'come over to their house for some snacks and chips over a weekend'

"Why aren't there any contenders?" Those entrepreneurs are now successful businessmen who have enough budget to keep being on Wordpress, because 'it just worked'. That battlecry spreads like wildfire for a large amount of time, hence "production-ready/polished" comes into mind.

Moreover, depending on the businessman, it's not much about 'the synergy between JavaScript on the front and back end' or other technical detaiils. It's more of the can I get my $son to do that for me on a saturday afternoon given the following X things I need.

"Clearly WordPress thrives on its massive community, and maybe its just a matter of time until a worthy opponent emerges to gain the necessary momentum." Yes, empires rise and fall. It won't be sudden, like any piece of software, Wordpress will also slowly lose relevance in the course of time depending on the amount of people working on it.

</comment><comment><USER5> PHP is a big reason for WordPress doing so well, because it's everywhere, it is cheap to host (as in you can stick a whole heap of PHP sites on one box and it will generally be fine) so it's cheap to get hosting.

My product ([http://grabaperch.com](http://grabaperch.com)) is a CMS - I guess a competitor to WordPress, although we're certainly not trying to be WordPress. We're PHP and MySQL because that's what our target audience has available. We would not have been as successful as we have been had we written it in Python, Node, or Ruby or anything else.

The content editors using the CMS, and the website users do not care what the software is written in. Most of our actual customers (web designers and front- end developers building client sites) do not care what the software is written in as long as we make it easy for them to get it installed.

Successful with a CMS product doesn't have to mean that you kill off the competition. There is plenty of space out there for products targeting a bit of a niche, or just those who want an alternative for whatever reason. If you can figure out what that reason is, what problem isn't being solved by the main players, it's possible to build a product that serves it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Users and businesses doesn't care if it's PHP or Node or Rails or whatnot. They want something that allows them to achieve what they want, no matter how custom or complex the thing they need.

Wordpress allows to build very customized web portals at close to zero cost. Zillions of free and pre-existing plugins helps.

If something really custom needs to be created - there are plethora of el- cheapo programmers bidding to do Wordpress stuff for you.

</comment><comment><USER7> WordPress is where it is because the core team puts users first. They've taken on tons of technical debt in order to maintain backwards compatibility with themes & plugins. PHP 5.3 reached end-of-life a year ago, but WordPress continues to support _5.2_ because so many shared hosting and un-maintained VPS servers use it. Even cleaning up some of the PHP3-style code in wp-admin needs to be weighed against the risk of breaking some five year old plugin.

From a UX standpoint, it's easy to use, install plugins, find themes, and get help. If you spend money on a commercial theme, you can be assured the platform is going to support it for years even if you don't have all the cool new features. It runs on PHP, from a $2/mo shared hosting account to WordPress VIP.

The community is great. WordCamps cover a variety of technical and non- technical topics. Most people are welcoming. It's just a great bunch.

Could you create a CMS with a cleaner codebase? Easily. And the people who make WordPress want to, too.

<comment><USER7> Ok. That was my WordPress cheerleader post. Now, here's the snark I edited out of that because it didn't fit the flow.

If you want people to adopt a different CMS, here are pain points I've heard repeatedly from users. Address all of these and you're golden:

* It should have perfect security. Vulnerabilities should be patched immediately, not the next day.

* There should constantly be new features to enhance my site.

* It should never need upgrades.

* It should do everything out of the box instead of needing plugins.

* It shouldn't be bloated. Keep the core code base small.

* It should be easy for me to do anything and everything from the admin interface.

* There shouldn't be a lot of options because it's overwhelming.

* 24/7 phone support should be included. Or, if I have to use a support forum, I should get an answer in 5 minutes.

* Everything should be free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Re: the "what is appropriate on HN" see [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

The basic idea is to share things that satisfy one's intellectual curiosity. If you share links like that, or contribute comments that help others intellectual curiosity you will find lots of fellow souls.

And that is I guess the answer to your second part - if you want to build the next Google you need fellow souls - talented people who also fit in with your brain. You can find them here, and even discuss the finer points of arranging servers or compensation

What I would avoid doing is shouting "who wants to join my startup?"

Got an idea? Great - make a prototype and a bazillion of us will tear it down for free to help make it better. One or two might jump on board. apart from that you will just make a few friends, gain some respect and have us cheering you on from the sidelines.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER9> Even if PHP is being surpassed by Node and Rails, the typical users of the CMS don't care. Wordpress does what it is supposed to do very well, and the typical (non-technical) end-user just doesn't care (or understand) what technology it is based on.

Now, if you design a "better" (I'm not sure what that means, but you seem to know) CMS, would you be able to take away WP's market share? Probably yes. Does it matter what language the product is written in? Not directly. It only helps you indirectly in that the technology may be able to help you build a better product faster, or allow for new features that aren't easily implemented with PHP.

Why hasn't somebody done this? My personal guess is because it would take a lot of time (=money). Wordpress has gazillions of features and is very polished.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the kind comments on WP, folks who made them.

In terms of Node, at Automattic we also think it's the bee's knees and have a number of projects that are built in it. But it's pretty weak for distribution, PHP/MySQL is still tops.

I think to the extent WP has been successful over the past 11 years it's because we've always been gradually rewriting and refactoring things, and have listened to our users and been driven by a community rather than just a company. We have a vision (democratize publishing) for more than just money, and it drives efforts from education to localization.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wordpress has a huge ecosystem of plugins, including a wide variety of powerful and innovative anti-spam plugins. I chose wordpress (twice), in large part because I am confident that the anti-spam offerings will continue to evolve at a rapid pace alongside the webspammers.

Yes, PHP sucks, but an easy-to-use, well-tested, flexible platform > a brand new ruby on rails framework.

<comment><USER12> Which of the available antispam plugins are you using, or would you recommend?

I wrote [http://blogspam.net/](http://blogspam.net/), and a matching plugin for Wordpress but it's been a few years since I seriously investigated the alternatives..

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Check out [http://www.webhook.com](http://www.webhook.com). It's not launched yet, but I've been playing with it as an alpha tester for a few months. It's pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER14> Regarding your sidebar, a good filter would be whether the topic and ensuing discussion are likely to be of general interest to the community here (vs. specific to helping you).

</comment><comment><USER15> Have you checked ghost.io? I don't know what is their business model, but it looks really close to a new Wordpress, based on Node.js

<comment><USER16> I'd say the primary differentiator of Ghost is that it's meant for blogs, and nothing more. Wordpress has evolved to the point where blogs are just one of the many uses.</comment></comment>


How Google Is Challenging AWS - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2016/how-google-cloud-platform-is-challenging-aws/ <comment><USER2> Having worked at both places for ~4 years each, I would say Amazon is much more of a product company, and a platform is really a collection of compelling products.

Amazon really puts customers first. Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics. All profits are reinvested, so resources and perks are scarce, efficiency matters, and management is tight. The platform emerged because internal teams thought of their infrastructure services as products with customers.

Google really puts ideas (or technology) first; it aims to hire the smartest people and rewards them for launching new things and solving complex problems rather than optimizing UX or making customers happy. Resources are ample and management is loose, so individual contributors can try new things with greater leisure. It's been compared to grad school. But simplifying customer experience is less of a priority, so the internal infrastructure was notoriously complex and hard to use. They're now learning to prioritize customers, but it's hard to change culture.

Of course, both companies are huge and diverse and evolving, so you'll find plenty of variance.

App Engine wasn't evidence of Google being a product company, nor does it exemplify the company's strategy. It was a grassroots project that for years didn't receive much leadership support, but was still allowed to launch and grow.

<comment><USER3> I would state the tradeoff very differently.

Amazon gives each team independence. Therefore it is virtually impossible to insist on consistency between what different teams do. Each team makes sense on its own, but the whole can be very, very confusing.

Google has a process that results in much greater internal consistency. It may not be a great UX, but it is consistent. Inside and out.

For small systems, Amazon is going to give a better UX. But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce.

<comment><USER4> > But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce

Having worked there in teams near to their tablets I really think Amazon would have a hard time producing software of the complexity of Android or Chrome.

<comment><USER5> I have a question. Do you think this Amazon culture is the cause or the result of service-oriented architecture at Amazon? Or maybe am I completely off the mark here.

I found this quote from SEC filings. Jeff Bezos says:

> Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building > abstraction for Amazon technologies.

This was in 2010. [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511110797/dex991.htm)

It sounds like they have been committed to it at least since 2005? [https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws001/trailhead/MigratingAmazonCom...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws001/trailhead/MigratingAmazonComToAWS.PDF) I'd imagine internally it'd have to be a lot sooner than that because I think they were ready to release AWS by 2006.

Sorry, I don't mean to start a holy war. I just wonder if there's any connection... What do you think?

<comment><USER6> If we use Steve Yegge's famous rant for reference, it goes back to 2002.

[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

<comment><USER7> Great read, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think Ben (who I generally think is right on) in this post misapprehends the effectiveness of generalized data for machine learning services and thus the effectiveness of this approach in Google's strategy here. Perhaps the slide makers in Mountain View have the same misapprehension.

1 - Prediction API - you provide your own data there, so no data advantage from Google there.

2 - Cloud Natural Language API - the effectiveness really depends on what type of text you want to understand. If Google's training data includes information about my type of text application great, but if it doesn't then what? How do I know that?

3 - Cloud Vision API - likewise. Can I subset the training set? Provide my own examples? If they subset, can I inspect the examples?

4 - Translation API seems like the exception here, mainly because the odds are that customers of translation service are unlikely to have collected language pairs and this collection is more highly specialized. But it's unclear that this one API would be the deciding factor for many companies choosing which cloud vendor to use.

ML services as a differentiator have yet to be proven out. I am highly suspect. Yes, some big general data sets will be better on some applications than others, but an enterprises' own data about their problem will always be better than a huge, general data set. And if you're using your own data anyway, you're going to care about all the platformy things Amazon has already been winning with.

Barring proprietary breakthroughs in unsupervised learning, I don't believe that this strategy as outlined will work in practice.

<comment><USER9> I don't think Google is marketing their Cloud NLP/Vision APIs for big enterprise customers that have very specific needs. Those APIs are meant for people that have common needs ( = want to identify which items or people are on a photo, understand queries in commonly used languages, etc.)

If you have specific needs, then you can use TensorFlow running on the app engine (as they will soon be providing hosted and GPU-accelerated instances), which at worst makes it equal to Amazon offering... but something tells me the vast majority of Google Cloud customers will be satisfied with pre-trained models that can be applied on a very large swath of problems.

<comment><USER8> I guess that's kind of my point about Ben's argument. Are pre-trained models going to be the "sustainable advantage" against AWS. I don't think so.

<comment><USER9> They definitely are for most customers: it is extremely expensive to gather and label enough data for a deep learning model to work correctly. It's very unlikely that you'll manage to configure and train your models + generate input data that Google lacks to make your model work much better than what Google already provide with their "generalist" API.

<comment><USER8> Say you are an insurance company and you want to use build a model that uses damage photos and meta data about car as a backstop to make sure that your repair shops aren't ripping you off.

In this case you already have a bunch of historical labeled data and a pre- trained model is useless to you application. It doesn't help you that the pre- trained model can recognized 10 different types of cats, you need a model trained on photos of damaged cars. Obviously the insurance companies own photo data will be more useful here because it's data about the application domain.

Google has collected a ton of photos for the purpose of image search and consumer photo organizing and that models utility has been tuned to those application area.

The key question is what is the overlap between all applications of images models and what photos Google has collected.

There will be for some but my guess is that those are the mission critical, I can only get this performance from Google cloud are few and far between.

I'm not saying there aren't any. Ben's article suggests that Google's data is somehow going to be a mission critical asset for all applications areas. Which I think is a terribly naive idea when it comes to ML.

<comment><USER10> What about combining your own model with what Google offers you, especially when you might not have enough data or expertise?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Amazon's AWS strategy sprang from the same approach that made the company > successful in the first place

I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that won't die. But then again I'm biased.

As far as Amazon's AWS strategy, I can't comment (I worked in the retail business side). But I can comment on a relatively small aspect of management that I witnessed. At one point in time I had a very strong need for PostGIS, and I lamented on an internal email list about AWS not having a Postgres version of RDS. I received an email directly from Raju Gulabani, VP of databases in AWS. He scheduled an appointment with me, him, and two product managers. He asked me pointed questions about why I wanted Postgres over the other options, how I would be using it, what extensions I wanted, and what features were important to me. He thanked me for my time, and less than a year later it was released to the public.

In the retail business side, I never had more than 2 minutes at a time with someone at the director level, and not once had I spoken to someone at the VP level. Literally zero communication from the bottom up, everything was top down. Whether AWS had already been working on it or not I don't know, but they definitely took the time to hear my case, and when it was released it was almost perfectly as I had asked for. And that, IMO is waaaay more important than anything regarding the size of a team or whatever the fluff pieces have attributed.

<comment><USER12> > I'd argue that Amazon isn't a successful company, they are a popular company > with a few large successes surrounded by decaying and decrepit failures that > won't die. But then again I'm biased.

Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not?

Creating the largest retailer in the world and the largest cloud services platform in the world seem like two pretty big wins. Either one on its own would be an extremely successful company IMO.

<comment><USER13> >Couldn't you say the same thing about Google, or Microsoft? I think the point of 'success' is that your big wins outweigh your failures as determined by your revenue. Is it not?

Of course it is. And by that definition, Amazon isn't successful, and nowhere in the same league as Google or Amazon. Not yet, at least. They've managed to break even more or less, but it is still yet to be determined if they can become the wildly profitable company that their stock price suggests they can become. My opinion after working there is that AWS is to Alibaba as Amazon is to Yahoo.

<comment><USER12> Their gross profit in 2015 was 35 billion. Google's was 46. The difference in final profit comes down to how much they reinvest in R&D and future growth. I'd call that the same league.

<comment><USER13> You are sorely mistaken as to the difference between gross and net profit. R&D is in there, sure...along with a billion other things that also don't get accounted for in cost of goods sold.

<comment><USER12> Ya, but Amazon doesn't break it down any further than that. I'm aware that there are other things in there, but it is well known that the primary contributor to that figure is R&D.

<comment><USER13> Not a single programmer, manager, or any other central office employee gets paid out of COGS. There are _at least_ 50,000 of those. Same goes for real estate costs, legal costs, etc. Servers and their operations costs might go into COGS on the AWS side, but definitely not on the retail side.

Breaking out investment vs administrative cost is actually very hard to do. Is a programmer working on a new feature an R&D cost, or an administrative cost? What if it's a new service? What if it's a new product? What if it's a bug fix? What if it's a critical vulnerability? What if your programmer does all of the above at different times of the year? It's pretty much impossible to separate administrative overhead from research and development in tech companies, which is why they tend to not do it unless they are forced to. It's up to their shareholders or the SEC to force them to do it if it happens, which hasn't been the case for Amazon yet.

It is _assumed_ that they would be turning a profit if they decided to just keep the lights on and not invest in the future. That's what they tell us, and that's what we see (new product and service announcements tell us as much). What we don't know from public information is whether they would be 10% more profitable or 10,000% more profitable. And that's before we know if their investments will pay off or if they become another perpetually subsidized program like Amazon Fresh. That's why Amazon stock is considered to be a speculative investment, whereas Google and Microsoft are more in the blue chip camp. My experience and hunch tells me that Amazon stock prices are at least 50% undeserved hype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's always the simpler explanation to why Google is getting traction:

\- Price/performance is better in some/many cases for VMs

\- It's easy(ier?) to use

\- Clear technical advantage with some of their other services e.g. Load balancers

\- Customers prefer when there are multiple companies competing for their business

I get that there are long-term strategies that involve the likes of container services. But just the fact that they are better in some areas will help them get traction. Plus they have a fantastic brand name.

</comment><comment><USER15> Frankly I still like the Heroku model the best. Do one thing and do it well. Have third-party plugins handle the other things. It fits the "cloud" vision better, than consolidating all your functionality with one provider. _That_ seems like a regression. I just wish Heroku was cheaper at scale. I don't understand why it's not. It _seems like_ they could reduce prices and still remain profitable, while increasing their visibility greatly.

<comment><USER15> The article mentioned kubernetes multiple times and I think it's providers like Heroku that actually stand the most to gain there. With kubernetes in theory they should no longer have to make you choose between providers, and be able to run on spot instances of whatever provider is cheapest at the time. You just choose your max latency at certain geo areas and a budget to balance by, some AI to help you determine the tradeoffs, and it does the rest. If Heroku isn't working toward that then there _has_ to be _someone_ doing so soon. If not it seems like there's a pretty big opportunity there.

<comment><USER16> Cloud Foundry is closest to this vision, in my entirely biased opinion. We're already able to mount standalone installations on AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack, vSphere and others.

Distributing apps across multiple clouds is easy to say, hard to do. Each IaaS has peculiarities and wrinkles, different tradeoffs in performance and cost and so on. It takes a moderately tricky scheduling problem and turns it into a much gnarlier one.

What's easier is using high-level tools like Terraform and BOSH to manage installations on different IaaSes, and pushing apps to whichever one you like as you like. I can easily imagine setting up round-robin deploys.

That said: data has inertia. Any sensible architecture has to bear that in mind; typically apps will wind up living close to their datastores.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're the majority donor of engineering to Cloud Foundry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >> Microsoft did the same with its Win32 API. Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS ...

The author loses his creditability since here.

</comment><comment><USER18> I want to try out Google, but they need to make it easier to try it out. I have petabytes of data in S3 that I would need to move first (at least some of it).

<comment><USER19> You can try "Cloud Storage Transfer":

`Transfer data to your Cloud Storage buckets from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), HTTP/HTTPS servers or other buckets. You can schedule once-off or daily transfers, and you can filter files based on name prefix and when they were changed.`

[https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/](https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/)

<comment><USER18> It would be nice if they managed the transfer themselves via AWS Snowball. Sure, they would have upfront costs, but based on what I spend on AWS monthly, it's probably worth it to them.

<comment><USER20> Why would you want to move data between AWS and GCP using a hard drive? The networks between the two cloud providers are immense.

<comment><USER18> I didn't realize that they have direct connections. The AWS data center down the street (Virginia) is directly connected to some google cloud datacenter? Sorry - I'm generally ignorant of datacenter technology.

So a back of envelope calculation says that it would take around 10 days to transfer 100 PiB over Gigabit ethernet. When you say immense, do you mean faster than that?

<comment><USER21> Google's new NoVa DC will probably be in/around the equinix right down the street from AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the > end user experience than, say, Mac OS, but it was far more powerful and > extensible, an approach that paid off with millions of line of business apps > that even today keep Windows at the center of business.

Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible?

<comment><USER22> To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338)

<comment><USER23> That's not really an OS level thing, though. That's an application level thing. Finder was chosen not to be extensible, and Explorer was. There are Finder replacements that are.

<comment><USER24> OS is usually taken to mean kernel + core applications.

Are Explorer and Finder "core"? Probably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would like to try out google cloud due to its lower costs, but don't trust them with my data--partially perception I know. Also Amazon has never failed me over the last 15 years I've been doing business with them, so I'll probably continue despite the clunkiness of their products.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure if Google's commercial products are as bad as their consumer- facing offerings, but if we can't get someone on the phone when a support issue arises then we'd never consider using them for any cloud services.

<comment><USER27> [Disclaimer: I work on GCP at Google]

GCP Gold and Platinum support packages include phone support: [https://cloud.google.com/support/](https://cloud.google.com/support/)

<comment><USER26> Thanks rrdharan for pointing that out, I should have spent a couple minutes researching first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nothing can beat the 1 year free for AWS free tier.

<comment><USER29> Full ack. I don't understand why GCE doesn't have the same offer there. Their free trial is too short to really test it. If you're a developer and experimenting with cloud offers on side projects, AWS is often free. That way a lot of people have some experience using AWS. I'm sure the free trial pays off well for Amazon.

<comment><USER30> The AWS free tier is useless imho. If the thing you want to test fits into the AWS free tier then a AWS or GCloud solution would be overkill anyway.

<comment><USER29> But it's good if you just test a bit as a developer. Not to check if a project is valid, but to gain some experience. That way, if you hire as a company, developers more likely have AWS experience than GCE/Azure experience.

<comment><USER31> I don't agree on the free trial. I think it lets you play around a lot more than the AWS free tier -- as I said in my comment up the thread, go ahead and move the slider to the right and scale up a bit (a little -- the free trial is still quota limited to prevent abuse), see how things perform, slide it back to the left and have only used a tiny fraction of your credit.

I think you get a lot more "kick the tires" flexibility with a moderately large up-front credit.

(affiliation: I'm an engineer on Compute Engine)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is how Amazon is challenging Google as of today. [https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-launches-amazon- ai-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-launches-amazon-ai-to-bring- its-machine-learning-smarts-to-developers/)

</comment><comment><USER33> very nice article. well articulated. not just tech but also the different business models(futuristic)

<comment><USER34> I can highly recommend subscribing to [http://exponent.fm/](http://exponent.fm/) the weekly podcast Ben is hosting with James.

<comment><USER35> I concur. In fact, I find the podcast better than articles. I'm not sure why though. I think the conversational tone of the podcast is better. They attack the problem from different area and then hone in on the main point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Denk aan

</comment><comment><USER37> If Google released an IDE with tight integration to Google Cloud like Azure + Visual Studio, that's a potential killer app that lowers the perceived switching cost.

If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. _that 's some powerful shit_ and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as their edge.

By introducing a layer of learning curve, you lock in your customers but eventually the other guys will race to lower that curve.

<comment><USER38> Only a few months ago Amazon bought Cloud9, arguably the best online IDE. [1] Perhaps they might beat Google to the punch?

[1]: [http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/07/14/amazon-buys- cloud9-aws/](http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/07/14/amazon-buys-cloud9-aws/)

<comment><USER39> Doesn't Google already have a web based, but internal only, IDE? I don't know if that'd be easy to make external, but my understanding is that they've got a lot of internal users on it.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, and Cider was getting surprisingly good at the point I left Google (I was initially a skeptic). But so much of what made it good came from its tight integration with other internal tooling. I'd be surprised if it's ever externalized in a form that captures most of that value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> tldr; competition is good.

Google Cloud UI is vastly superior to AWS. It's clear to me AWS didn't put a lot of effort into their interface, Google console is nice too in order to quickly experiment with the platform. On the other hand, it seems to me that AWS is still cheaper than GCloud right now.

<comment><USER42> UI doesn't really matter for people with enough instances to care about money. Nobody is going to blow $1,000/mo because the interface is nicer.

<comment><USER43> Really? Because slack is IRC with a nicer UI. There are many examples of this.

Executives love slick UIs and flashy dashboards. Executives have a lot of power.

<comment><USER24> Are your executives launching servers? Do they care about their IDE's UI too?

<comment><USER43> Executives play with all kinds of tech and have all kinds of power.

What world do you live in that a random dev picks the cloud provider for a company?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I disagree with the central thesis of this article that Google is a product company rather than a platform company. I think that's wrong because throughout its history Google has asked itself "what if we had this?" first, and built the products around that later. Essentially the company believes that products will naturally emerge if you hire tens of thousands of engineers and deploy an unholy number of computers. I said this before on this site: Google's core product is dirt-cheap computing. Everything else follows from that.

<comment><USER45> Is company's business model based on what they use to create their Widgets or what Widgets they sell (and how)? I agree its hard to paint Google solely as a products company, but its also more than the sum of dirt-cheap computing.

<comment><USER46> Dirt cheap computing is like the life line of Google. W/o that, nothing Google did can sustain at all.

<comment><USER45> Just curious on your thoughts, are not most modern companies (startups) dependent on cheap computing (+ smart folks)?

<comment><USER47> Not at all.

Most modern companies don't need cheap computing. They have a lot of users generating revenues, and they usually need little computing resources.

Google always worked by giving everything free to people. (Google, Gmail, Maps, Youtube, Android, Chrome). And they have extremely infrastructure intensive applications to run (e.g. just gotta copy the entire internet to index it + serve years of videos per second :D).

For every paid click/page a user will see, he will go through hundreds of page paying nothing, and Google will have to make thousands of pre-computations to be able to serve it in the first place.

That's the world Google lives in. They had to be hyper efficient since day 1 or they couldn't survive.

(Also note that they started > 15 years ago. The available hardware was 2^5 smaller at the time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> What's good for the goose is good for the gander. How about criminal penalties for false arrest due to bugs?

To be serious this is a catastrophic failure. We can not deprive people of there freedom because of a glitch. This system doesn't have fail safes.

<comment><USER49> You must've replied to the wrong article, this one is not the one about the California court's new computer system.</comment></comment>


Signed HTTP Exchanges (SXG) - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/signed-exchanges <comment><AUTHOR> While reading through [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729160), discussions around Signed Exchanges came up. This is a really neat idea (that's been around for a while); however, a lot of it depends on the user experience in the browser. Users cannot be expected to know the technical details to get (or understand) the benefits—and we must be wary of some major drawbacks like the cache site seeing the traffic instead the origin.</comment>


Ask YC: Aquisition Advice - <AUTHOR> My partner and I run a sports website. We were recently contacted by a major sports network that is interested in integrating our functionality into their site. Their are a few ways a deal could play out, with one scenario being a potential acquisition.
They have asked for a valuation and if we would want to become full time employees. We've never really thought about a valuation for our company, and are not sure the best way to come up with the figure. We have an idea of what we'd like from the deal but are not entirely sure what the company is worth.
We're also curious about employment deals that have worked for other startup acquisitions. Are there founders at YCnews that have become full time employees after acquisition (like reddit)? Have these deals been just a salary on top of acquisition price, or is there potential for a vested interest in the site continuing to be successful. <comment><USER2> #1) Get a mergers and acquisitions attorney NOW. It will be expensive, but you don't want to not get something you don't have coming. There are many ways to structure these deals, and if you throw employment into the equation, you are looking at even more ways to come out ahead or get screwed.

Talk to a speclialized attorney NOW. Why so urgent? You do not want to appear dumb to your potential purchaser. To appear prepared, you need to present a professional face and let them know they are not going to get away with a steal (which is bad for you). Let them know they will get away with a fair deal.

EDIT: Talking about ALL the possibilities will involve many, many pages of text, none of which is any good (better to google it) since we are not your attorney. (and only listen to your attorney, none of this friend of a friend thing).

Congratulations, by the way :-)

<comment><USER3> The flip side, which anybody who works with lawyers on a weekly basis knows, is that lawyers can complicate stuff enough that people will walk away from the deal. This isn't advice, just an observation.

<comment><USER4> I agree with this sentiment. Lawyers have a much lower risk tolerance than entrepreneurs for obvious reasons. Yes there are horror stories of underrepresented entrepreneurs getting screwed, but what gets mentioned less is the opposite situation that tptacek alludes to, where deals are killed because too much control is given over to the lawyers, and the forest is lost to obsessive focus on the trees. As nice as it would be to turn over control and wash your hands of all legal decision-making, lawyers must be managed, just like any other employee or contractor. It can be intimidating for young entrepreneurs to override the recommendations of older, more experienced attorneys, but that is exactly what is sometime required to make deals like this go through.

As has been mentioned on this forum many times, there are plenty of law firms (in the Bay Area at least) who have emerging business practices that will defer your fees until an acquisition or an investment event occurs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my opinion (I'm in the process of selling my startup) before spending money on lawyers there are a few things you can do, some already mentioned:

\- Do your homework on M&A.

\- Study the guys who have approached you. Based on your knowledge of the market try have an understanding of your value to them.

\- Important: This is a SALES job. It does not matter how much your cost has been or even how much money you are making (well, it matters, but it's secondary). The key valuation factor is how much you are worth to them, i.e., what would cost them (resources _and_ time) to build what you have built and take to the levels (revenue, pageviews, registered users) you have taken it.

\- Which also means it's important to understand _why_ they want to buy you: Your technology? User base? User engagement?

\- If you have done sales before, or you're good at negotiating, meet with them and _listen_ to them. You don't have to commit to anything, but it'll be good to hear where they are comfortable and where they are not. It's ok to initially give them ranges rather than concrete numbers to get the ball rolling - again it's sales and don't look at it from a hacker's perspective! While to an engineer a price range of, say, "10 to 20 Million" sounds too vague, in negotiation it's a good starting point. Do not limit yourself, just give them enough so that they start talking and giving you ideas.

\- Whether to do it or not is a question that goes back to your goals and dreams. If you're looking for a job that pays the bills, you can gradually grow it, and you can be your own boss and work on your own schedule then why sell (I'm assuming you are making money). If you want to make a bigger chunk of money, say to buy a house, and at the same time have a good salary, then sell and become their employee.

\- The employment agreement itself is also subject to negotiation. You can promise that you'll stay at least a year, so that you have the flexibility of getting out later. Or you can ask for special arrangement such as moving or not moving, keeping your site independently managed, etc. Again, think of what you would like to happen and talk to them. If they have approached you they will be willing to listen, and good negotiation will get you where you want to be.

\- When you're ready to make promises hire a lawyer :-)

Good luck, and congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER6> Before you do anything else, you need to read up on M&A. Buy some books. A lot is on the Web. Some of the things you should know about off the top of my head (to get a sense whether you are reading the right things or to help you search for stuff): earn-outs, holdbacks, escrow, non-competes, indemnification, capital gains taxes, stock vs asset transactions, arbitration clauses.

That being said, there are numerous ways to value a company, e.g. multiples of revenue, users/customers, traffic, assets, etc. What makes sense is very case- by-case and industry specific. But what it comes down to is that valuation is just a tool to make a case for deal terms. In the end, a deal is an agreement between two parties about what the terms of the deal are worth to them.

They probably already have an idea in mind about the minimum they will pay, and they are probably trying to draw an initial # out of you. I'm not going to tell you how to negotiate, but just be very wary of this, i.e. throwing out an initial #. It can set the stage for the whole transaction, and since you obviously don't already have a well thought out valuation, you may come to regret whatever you throw out.

Whether to work for them or not and how that would look like, is again, very case by case. For example, it could be structured in a way where if certain targets are met you get more money (earn-outs), or it could be a short transition consulting contract, or simply a salaried position not otherwise tied to the deal. I personally would make sure whatever you get up front can not be influenced by your behavior as an employee, i.e. are completely independent.

</comment><comment><USER7> "They have asked for a valuation and if we would want to become full time employees."

As another poster said, it's a sales process. You should appear delighted at the prospect of working there. You can always say no later, but they should be wowed by your enthusiasm.

Regarding valuation, make them offer a #. A good way might be, "for a company at our stage, a formal valuation is pretty hit and miss. We kinda feel like the market should set our value. You guys certainly have more experience buying companies than we do selling them-- and we'd like you to make an offer." If they push you could always make noises about the best way being to see what a couple of other buyers might pay. ;-)

I'd avoid a lawyer for a bit-- they aren't going to help much with valuation.

The variables in the deal we did was:

1) stock options (part of employment agreement), vesting over 4 years 2) cash 3) cash signing bonus (just a way for them to put it in a different budget line) 4) relocation allowance 5) salary

Treat the employment stuff as separate. My buyer laid off 40% of the company in 6 months... I made the cut, but as easily couldn't have and would've lost my options and salary. Assume that'll happen to you (which means focus on cash, signing bonus, and relo variables).

</comment><comment><USER8> I love this question and hope somebody has some useful information or at least that you post your experience once the issue has played out. This is a very common scenario, rookie founders of small companies getting approached for acquisition, but there simply is not enough info on the sell side. The buyers know a ton and you have no info.

We were approached early on and I asked everyone I knew for advice (founders, corp dev friends, former EIRs) and nobody had anything concrete, especially about the part which was most important to me: how do I value and sell the company.

Another hard part for me was determining if I wanted to sell. What I really needed was for them to give me a price so I could think about it. What I ended up doing was having the meeting and telling them both that I wasn't sure and that all my friends in the company had told me not to work there. What I figured was best case they'd give me a hard sell and worst case the conversation would end. I ended up with the worst case.

What people have told me afterward was that taking $1M at this age is a golden opportunity since you'll have a lifetime of ideas so you should go into this meeting selling. Tell them how big of an opportunity you open up for their business.

As for value, this is what I've heard. As a baseline start with $1M per employee (so for you $2M) and then let that number vary wildly. If you are essentially broke and they're bailing you out you might expect as little as $200k. If you're a high flyer you might expect as much as $10M.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your valuation is a multiple of your revenue. If you grossed $500,000 this year, expect $750,000 next year, and want a 2x forward valuation, you're worth --- do the math.

If you're really small, and that number is really low, remember that the bottom side of the valuation is probably what an "awesome signing bonus" would be for a big company. As in, you wouldn't accept a buyout that equated to nothing more than a plausible signing bonus, because you can get that now and not give up the company or the site.

<comment><USER7> "Your valuation is a multiple of your revenue. If you grossed $500,000 this year, expect $750,000 next year, and want a 2x forward valuation, you're worth --- do the math."

When I sold a consulting business, this was a good starting point, but how many online startups are valued this way? I'm not saying that it's not ridiculous that some properties get sold for gazillions with no revenue (and no prospect of it), but if these guys tie to a multiple of revenue (which I imagine is pretty close to zero) they are probably priced to low.

<comment><USER3> There's no magic formula that produces valuations. But one way to think of them is as a negotiation about what the multiple is.

Consultancies commonly sell for 1.5x-2x, because staff turnover means the acquiring company is really only getting a pipeline, some relationships, and maybe a few staff.

Enterprise product companies commonly sell for around 5x. Security valuations oscillate between 5x and 15x (on the wildly successful side). Sometimes new, small startups sell for ridiculous high multiples because otherwise the total number would be too low.

I'm not saying, "take your revenue and multiply by two". I'm saying, "think about the value you provide your acquirer in the abstract", and then put a multiple to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> First thing: get over it. Companies "sniff around" like this all the time. You're likely far away from an actual acquisition. It's to the point now where we almost don't talk with anybody without them asking for financial details of our company (to suss out the possibility of an acquisition).

Get them to give you an offer before you spend any significant money or time on this thing. If they're serious about it, the should give you numbers.

</comment><comment><USER10> All I can suggest is, do everything you can to get them to give you a number first. Otherwise, you're just bidding against yourself. It can only hurt you to give a number first.

</comment><comment><USER11> if not confidential, i'd love to check out your site.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, cammon, give us a link... It will not hurt anything to do so.

<comment><USER12> If anything it will only add uniques thus valuation thus offers on the table thus better deal

<comment><USER13> On the other hand, it will cause this thread to come up in a Google search for "<site_name> acquisition", which could have a negative impact on the deal. (Although putting a link in a user profile might not have the same consequences...)

<comment><USER14> Add a tinyurl (actually use another service that let's you delete links), then delete that link in like a day :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congratulations!

Once you have bitten the apple, it's tough to go back to a world where you have a boss. Do you really want to hear someone give you a 'performance review'?

Performance metrics are ok, but now that you don't have full control over your future, you might not be able to hit them because the 'marketing department' got it's budget cut. I would take as much possible up front, and keep the 'required' time to be there as short as possible.

Insist on a lot of vacation so you can be working on your next gig. Depending, of course, on the weowneverythingyouthinkof contract they'll want you to sign.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nobody is more qualified to value your company than you are.

Ultimately it's your call. Think of a price you can live with, and don't take a penny less.

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats but remember deals fall through.

</comment><comment><USER18> Your deal doesn't have to be exclusive. Indeed, it may be in your interest to supply content or functionality in a non-exclusive deal. (A good example of this would be Microsoft licensing MSDOS to IBM on a non-exclusive basis.)

If you've got good content and functionality which is wanted by one website then there exists the possibility of others wanting it too. Getting the first sale is the hardest and one customer has already "beaten a path to your door".

A licensing deal would allow you to remain independent and it would reduce the legal complexity of an acquisition to that of a simple business deal.

Tags: [business] [licensing] [acquisition] [Microsoft] [IBM] [MSDOS] [content] [website] [sales] [legal]

<comment><USER19> what's with the tag spam? Do we need those?

<comment><USER18> I'm working on tag search. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227184> and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227932>

Tags: [search] [tagging] [meta]

<comment><USER19> Tags: [irritating] [extra] [redundant]

<comment><USER20> Tags: [witty] [sarcastic] [funny]</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


This week in KDE: polishing the System Tray and more - <AUTHOR> https://pointieststick.com/2020/03/14/this-week-in-kde-polishing-the-system-tray-and-more/ <comment><USER2> I've used Kubuntu as a normal every day desktop for some time and there are two simple annoyances that popup in my mind:

\- when I get a notification in the systray that there is an update I click on it but nothing happens. Then I have to click on the Update Manager which also presents itself in the systray as having an update to start the actual update process. Why can't the program giving the notification be started directly from the notification popup window?

\- the restart/shutdown dialog is infuriating!. When I click on restart or shutdown I get presented with a full screen overlay in which I have to click again on restart or shutdown. Ok: I understand the need for a confirmation. But the click area is very sensitive and I you accidentally just outside of the icon area you will be dropped back to the desktop. ARGH! Why do UI designers always think that everyone has some sort of FPS aiming capability with the mouse and can repeatedly click with pixel accuracy?

<comment><USER3> I agree the UI for the second point is annoying. There's a workaround though: The option you wanted is preselected. You can press enter and get the action you wanted without a mouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my personal experience, I've found KDE to be technically more interesting than Gnome, but Gnome to be better designed in terms of user experience.

I wish Gnome could match the power/performance of KDE, or KDE could match the user friendliness and visual consistency of Gnome...

</comment><comment><USER5> Polishing is something the KDE taskbar desperately needs. Glad to see it happen.

<comment><USER6> That mouse pointer in particular. It is hideous and distracting.

<comment><USER7> You can change the mouse pointer in KDE.

<comment><USER8> Just wanted to point out that this kind of response puts off many would-be users of any software.

<comment><USER7> I honestly don't see how the default mouse pointer in KDE is hideous or distracting.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Kubuntu_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Kubuntu_18.04_KDE_5.12.7-el_Screenshot_20190306_221603.png)

[https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.12/kdeconnect.png](https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.12/kdeconnect.png)

<comment><USER8> Never seen it before so tbh it looks kinda .... Obese?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is the progress of subsurfaces clipping bug in the Wayland session? It takes a really long time.

Is there any public info on the progress?

<comment><USER10> Do you mean [https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-54888](https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-54888)? That's a Qt bug, not in KDE software.

<comment><USER9> No, I mean this one: [https://phabricator.kde.org/T10530](https://phabricator.kde.org/T10530)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Did they already add "turn off all animations and needless movements, fades and transparencies" option? I guess not, and I'd really appreciate it. KDE would became useful for me again. Seriously, I've booted live USB on thinkpad x240 and there was some current KDE running. For a few minutes I thought there was something very wrong with laptop, but it was KDE making feel core-i7 like lowend celeron. It makes me wonder if authors use that environment on very high-end machines exclusively. Also "start menu", sorry for the naming, feels like unstoppable carousel to me (those sliding tabs). All this is a pity because I really do like QT for development, but unstoppable animations are no-go

<comment><USER12> >Did they already add "turn off all animations and needless movements, fades and transparencies" option?

Yes, ~10 years ago.

<comment><USER13> This highlights the difference between defaults and options.

Options that would solve a users problems often go unused leaving the user with a negative opinion.

Maybe as part of first run it ought to set a default useful based on current performance.

It might also be worthwhile to think about how it degrades under pressure. Is it possible to notice frames dropped or delayed and degrade more gracefully.

<comment><USER14> I think there are some blacklisted video cards. I assume is is not as easy as you think to write the code that detects the perfect thresholds where animations are smooth all the time. I would like to assume that most KDE users are competent enough to at least google the answer on how to turn the animations off and desktop effects too (I mean somehow they installed a KDE distro finding a checkbox should be much easier).

<comment><USER13> In theory but never overestimate human competence or underestimate the value of good defaults.

<comment><USER14> There will always be some people that will disagree with the defaults. plus metrics/telemetry is disliked by many users and is not built into the software. Knowing what settings are changed often could help, though it depends on project, I see many GNOME users changing defaults with adding a system tray extensions and nobody cares.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Project Review, What Would You Want To Know? - <AUTHOR> http://compositecode.com/2010/11/12/project-review-what-would-you-want-to-know/ I've worked more than a few projects in my career. One thing that I always find sorely missing throughout many Enterprises is a follow up report of what went well and what went wrong on a project. In other words a list of successes and a list of things to improve. With that in mind I've put together the following survey questionnaire for the end of a project. What other items might you add that you'd want to know? <comment><USER2> I would want to know two things that aren't always clear at the beginning of a project;

1\. A 50-words-or-less summary of what the project is all about _when it's finished_. Scope creep and lack of clarity often prevent this sort of thing at the outset.

2\. A summary of where the requirements ultimately derive from. For instance on a credit card processing system I worked on (I was in the 3rd "generation" of programmers to work on it), it _seemed like_ requirements came from 6 main drivers:

(1) Real time authorization of payments. (2) Search for previously authorized and settled payments. (3) Refunds of payments (4) End-of-day "batch" payment settlements (5) Crediting settled payments to customer accounts (6) The boogey-man named "PCI DSS".

Organizing requirements under "main drivers" would really help maintenance, and people reviewing the project.</comment>