Ask HN: What analytics do you use when Google Analytics reaches its limits? - <AUTHOR>

From Google's page on data limits: "Data collection limit: If you exceed 10 million hits per month, there is no assurance that the excess hits will be processed." - We are doing more than a million hits per day, so what now?
Right now Twicsy continues to use GA, and also Quantcast, but their numbers (on page views in particular) have started to diverge. On some days the page view counts are 60-70% different. We are not sure who to trust.
We have tried hosting Piwik ourselves and also a hosting provider, it just stopped working after a few days for some reason in both cases. Clicky doesn't support websites that get more than 1 million page views per day on one website. We can't find anything else appealing.
We don't have a lot of money to spend, at most we would like to spend a few hundred dollars per month. Is there something out there that is worthwhile at that price? If not, what are our alternatives? <comment><USER2> My suggestion would be to look into a workaround _inside_ of GA.

Eg: Create a new suite within GA (UA-XXXXX-2), and use the new ID for a subset of your page views. Look into how your page views are happening across your site and plan on distributing the analytics to fall under 10M. For instance, use your main ID for landing, top and trending pages and a second one for the rest of the site. If you are near or over 20M views you might want to consider a third or forth ID.

Good luck!

===

Edit: On a second thought, one of our sites reports over 10M a month and we never run into issues. GA doesn't process more than a small percentage of visits for the reporting, so your issue might not be related to the 10M cap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, but I see a few issues with this approach: 1\. You can't track the number of unique visitors anymore 2\. I will lose the data history I have now with GA. I am actually not sure that it is incorrect, I just am suspect at this point and need validation. If it is indeed correct then I don't want a break in the data.

But, something to think about, so thanks.

Re: Edit: Are you sure? I mean, really sure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you sure it's GA? Our numbers differ between GA and quantcast because google isn't tracking opera mini on feature phones but quantcast is. We are running 450m pageviews a month through ga and its typically a day behind processing. Outside of that its missing feature phones, but I don't believe it's because of our numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, I am not sure, so thanks for the input. The numbers are 60-70% different for us between Quantcast and GA, so I don't think opera mini would make up anywhere near that difference.

And, are you sure it isn't dropping data? I mean, really sure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reddit uses GA. There may be some special arrangements you need to make. <http://blog.reddit.com/2011/02/reddit-billions-served.html>

<comment><USER5> They'll use the GA Enterprise version which serves up to 1 Billion "hits processed per month" its £90,000[1]/$150,000[2] as a flat fee per year.

[1] [http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/analytics/premium/feature...](http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/analytics/premium/features.html)

[2] [http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_us/analytics/premium/feature...](http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_us/analytics/premium/features.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Server access log analyzers (awstats, webalizer, etc)? Those are free, and get you most of the same basic reports. I don't know of any SaaS analytics that aren't out of your price range at 30M+ data points per month.

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://clicky.com/>

<http://clicky.com/help/pricing#/compare/>

<comment><AUTHOR> They only allow up to 1 million page views per day per site. We are over that number.

<comment><USER7> On the register page it says

"If your site has more than 1,000,000 daily page views, please contact us before registering!"

I take that to mean they'll work something out with you, and based on their pricing it should be well within your price range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Consolidated logs + Splunk.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think that analyzing logs is anywhere near as effective as the javascript based solutions that use cookies to track users. We receive a lot of bot traffic and I don't think log analyzers do a good job of telling the difference.

<comment><USER8> It is trivial to filter out the bots IMO. You can also correlate system logs with application logs.</comment></comment></comment>


More H-1B visas needed because of skill or money shortage? - <AUTHOR>

You often hear entrepreneurs say we need more H-1B visas. Are we really facing a skill shortage in tech or is it the lure of having an employee who is tied to their employer for lower wages than older americans (who have a job shortage) the real reason? <comment><USER2> I was hired by TCS is US,when TCS could not get the VISA for so called skilled worked, later down the road TCS managed to get the visa and I was kicked out. The only reason to fire me was not skills but money. They replaced me with low skilled worked, who was paid a lot less money.</comment>


Stuyvesant Students Describe the How and the Why of Cheating - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/education/stuyvesant-high-school-students-describe-rationale-for-cheating.html?hp

<comment><USER2> I found one comment on NYT particularly interesting:

> There is a simple solution to this problem. You cheat, you get expelled. It > doesn't matter how serious the cheating is, you get expelled. As long as > schools, school administrators and parents condone cheating through > insignificant punishments, it will continue.

I think this policy, while nice in theory, would fall flat in practice. If a teacher catches a student cheating, they would be highly dissuaded from reporting it or punishing the student. Imagine if the accepted Ivy League student represented in the article was caught by the teacher with this policy in place. The teacher would know that the student would almost certainly be barred from the Ivy League school, and have his/her academic career severely tarnished. What kind of teacher would take this action? It might be the 'right thing' to do, but it's also pretty heartless, and would no doubt only strengthen the "fight the system" mentality the students already have.</comment>


The Day Facebook Changed Forever: Messages to Become Public By Default - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_day_facebook_changed_messages_to_become_pulic.php <comment><USER2> In case you didn't read the story, this title isn't accurate. ReadWriteWeb printed a retraction: Messages for those members with profiles that are already public will become public. Everyone else will have the option of making their statuses public.

<comment><USER3> In my little corner of FB people are already reporting seeing things that they never did before (e.g. status updates and photos from cow-orkers). If FB screw this up there will be a huge backlash.

<comment><USER4> If FB screws this up there will be a huge backlash for a few weeks, then FB will apologize. FB screws up with some regularity, but they check themselves quickly afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook: The Twitter wanna be.

<comment><USER3> It's exasperating to see Facebook flailing about like this. A corner of the Internet where there is no anonymity and you only get what you opt into all my intuition says could be an incredibly valuable thing. FB essentially solved the spam problem for example (app invites notwithstanding) - something not even Gmail has managed. They can do things with photos Flickr can only dream of, since Flickr can't assume that the people in the photos will be members. Same with events. They could be sewing up all sorts of commercial arrangements here. If I create a LAN party event FB should be handling ordering pizza through Papa John's website (and taking a cut). If I create a group trip event FB should be partnering with travel companies, cinemas, everything.

Instead they're dumbing everything down to become what exactly, a lamer Twitter than Twitter itself?

<comment><USER4> The retraction seems to be saying Facebook will make it obvious to new users just how privacy works. I've found that my friends tend to follow those notices, somewhat surprisingly. Facebook will let people know what's going on once it's happening, because you're right - a lot of people do care about privacy.

I don't see Facebook's going public as a bad thing, as long as it's not a mandatory change. Their feed system certainly works publicly: It's much more involved than Twitter, and it supports a lot of things people would use other sites for. I use it instead of Flickr for public photos. I'm thinking of switching my Vimeo videos over so I can close my Vimeo account and run most of my online activities from one place. I like writing private friend-based notes, but if I didn't then Facebook notes would make for an attractively minimal solution.

Facebook's been gradually simplifying itself. I don't see how it's dumbing down when they've been _adding_ features rather than taking them away. The new live feed is incredible, for instance.

<comment><USER3> The new live feed is a pain. Why should I have to block every damn application individually? I want to see 3 things: status, events, photos and _that's it_. In fact that and messages is all I want from FB, I shouldn't even need to be aware of any of the crap.

<comment><USER4> So you're really happy that Facebook offers right-off-the-bat filters for all three of those things, right? Because that solves your problem without your ever having to worry about seeing the other things.

<comment><USER3> 3 separate filters - no way to combine them and make the newsfeed like it used to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've said it elsewhere here before, but if there's one thing I can say for certain, it's that you're not going to beat Twitter (or any other dead-simple niche service) by trying to be everything to everyone. I am certainly painting in broad strokes here, but this feels a little Microsoft-y to me.

<comment><USER4> Normally I'd agree with you. In Facebook's case, I'll make the argument that Facebook's only trying to do a single thing, but that single thing is so ambitious that they're justified in taking this move.

The goal of Facebook is to let people make a profile of themselves online and keep in touch with friends. That's a widespread, two-pronged goal. Way back before the last two redesigns, Facebook focused a lot on the profile part of the equation. That's when they had the two-column approach with no theming whatsoever. Then they added apps and profiles became overspammed, and they made the slow switch over to the feed system. In the last few months, they've been adding public profile features, without sacrificing their original intent whatsoever. That's impressive. It means that my family can maintain its closed Facebook connections, but my public-minded friends can go public and not have to worry about managing other web sites. Furthermore, the options are granular, meaning you can make parts of you public and keep other parts private. I refuse to friend family members, but I can give them public photo links so they can still be involved in my goings-on. It's a terrific solution.

I have to wonder if all of the "Facebook=Twitter" critics use Facebook at all, because it's the most deluded thing I've heard. People are fucking _mental_ if they think Facebook's trying to supplant Twitter. It's taking some pages out of their book, absolutely, but if you can mimic a site without removing any functionality then you're doing something good. Now, my Facebook feed isn't a bunch of 140-character updates. People post links and photos and videos and they all show up. Any post can spark a conversation. Whereas on Twitter I post something into a void, on Facebook friends comment on my status updates. Conversations begin. Furthermore, because Facebook treats a user's wall like a continuous stream, if I post something to a friend's wall, all our friends see it. I've actually had friends meet up and become friends through talking on a post on my wall, which is one of those things where you can't help but think "Wow, this is really cool".

Facebook won't beat Twitter where Twitter reigns supreme. But they'll add Twitter-like features and make their users happier, and less likely to switch over to using other services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh good, a way to make it so people don't have to hack me and now everyone can see my details, well if I set it that way... Interesting way to deal with information being available, let your users THINK they want it. Then you don't have to fix anything.

Article on Facebook hack from June 22nd [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/22/is-privacy-an- illusion-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/22/is-privacy-an-illusion- facebook-fans-claim-hack-exposes-private-profile-information/)

<comment><USER4> From the article:

 _We have identified this bug and closed the loophole. We don't have any evidence to suggest that it was ever exploited for malicious purposes._

Yeah, it's not like Facebook already solved the problem. It's fun thinking of them as utter incompetents who don't spend years executing very subtle redesigns without alienating their hundred million users, because they haven't been radically changing the site since it first launched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note: if you trust any company run by Mark Zuckerberg with anything, you're doing it wrong.</comment>


Show HN:Non-Anonymous Chat - <AUTHOR> http://chatoften.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I hacked this together to see whether there is a group of people that prefer not to chat in anonymity. I tried out a few anonymous chat sites and most conversations involved male genitalia or some perverse comment. I hope people can start a better conversation when they reveal their name and picture.

Please check it out and give me your opinion.

<comment><USER2> Never actually connected me. Also says "Users Online: 0"

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll need to fix that. The user's is suppose to update once a session is established. I need to set that beforehand.

By the way, what browser are you using?

<comment><USER2> chrome, a refresh worked

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like my anon online when I'm chatting because I'm always making an ass of myself... ask rmah! #startups

</comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't decide if this would be awkward or not before I jumped in. After using it: kind of awkward, but totally fun and enlightening. I was impressed with every person I connected with.

One person called me boring, though. (I am boring)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just to let you know, if someone complains they can't see the registration box it could be that they have Ghostery blocking everything as that blocks Facebook Connect. That results in no box being shown below the text.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems to be having some issues on chrome for me, but it's fun. I rather like it. All people from HN, so I am guessing that helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, what issues are you having with it? I'll look into it. Can you please tell me the version of firefox you are using?

<comment><USER6> Well, it never connects me with anyone and it says n/a for current users online. I had to use FF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a bit surprised... I have found this to be far more entertaining, and intriguing, than I originally hypothesized...

</comment><comment><USER8> Amusing, but I had lots of failures... and kept connecting to the same guy after we disconnected.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't chat with anyone right now. I'll be forever alone.

</comment><comment><USER10> theres so many online video chat applications as facebook apps or using fb credentials.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had fun, talked to Mark Bao, a beautiful woman and a 7 foot dude from SF.</comment>


The missing Dictionary in Solidity - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sagivo/the-missing-dictionary-in-solidity-67b15e0c6d94 <comment><USER2> Nice, will be good idea to submit it also to the ethereum util library.</comment>


The Quackish Cult of Alternative Medicine - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114899/paul-offits-do-you-believe-magic-reviewed-dangers

<comment><USER2> The author seems a bit dismissive of what I would call a healthy scepticism towards the current medical establishment. He refers to such sceptics as conspiracy theorists, which is a great way to ignore people without any thought.

Is it that odd to think that there are well funded big pharma interests in making sure that only that which is patented is approved?

Sadly, most of the proof that treatments work are provided by the drug company that has a profit motive to produce that proof. There is no interest in providing that research for something that isn't controlled for someone's profit.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong at all with profiting from research done. It's also very important to understand the risks taken when using something that isn't well studied. Natural doesn't mean safe, of course that's true.

But it also isn't a conspiracy theory to say that people who have billions of dollars in profit at stake may occasionally give money to the right Senator, or fund only that which is in their interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be naive to think that people can only make money from validated medicine. In fact, many people find it easier to pursue a profit motive with "alternative" medicine, because it has much less research and development overhead than medical practice that actually has to prove its safety and effectiveness.

<comment><USER3> What you're saying is certainly true, but I don't think you're addressing the criticism directly. The question is not, "Is there money to be made by bypassing the scientific method?" The question is, "Are there systemic biases that result from money's setting the research agenda?"

It seems to me a virtual tautology that companies will only fund areas of research where they think they can make money, and so areas without apparent profit potential will be understudied. This is a reason why publicly funded, pure science is so important to me.

I just want to make it clear that not everyone who is critical of _the way science is practiced by human beings and institutions_ is "anti-science". One can still be a True Believer in the scientific method and its philosophical underpinnings, and yet still still believe that science as practiced has institutional blindspots.</comment></comment></comment>


ESR, Linus and the curse of the gifted (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3 <comment><USER2> That brings back some memories. I recall that a lot of folks were upset at ESR for showing off, or for speaking so disrespectfully to Linus like that. I'm glad Linus was able to change his mind; Git is working out pretty well.</comment>


Former Google exec: AI will replace 40 percent of jobs in 15 years - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-ai-jobs <comment><USER2> Person with vaguely relevant credential that probably has a financial stake in whatever they are about to predict:

"thing will definitely happen over the coming period of time"

</comment><comment><USER3> The book that is being pushed here is: "AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,"

Seems a little disingenuous to compare an entire country of 1.2b people (China) to a region of a state of a country. Or is it actually more telling about the ambiguous nature of "AI" and who the actual players are (in whatever it actually means, today) and who the wannabes are?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure about the % but i think it is a safe bet that at least over the next 20 years a lot of jobs will be replaced by AI. First are your drivers, cab, uber, lyft, truck drivers. Then you have your fast food employees. Then people delivering packages and probably most of the logistics behind that industry too, the list goes on. I'm sure at some point mid level management will also be automated to a large degree, as humans will come to rely on machines increasingly for decision making process.

</comment><comment><USER5> With 30% probability</comment>


US must tell defendants when spying is used to build case against them - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/us-must-tell-defendants-when-spying-is-used-to-build-case-against-them/ <comment><USER2> I'll keep repeating this on HN:

NSA is a symptom. Secret courts (and "state secret" legal defenses) are the disease.

Limiting NSA through policy or defunding won't do anything. They'll circumvent it and it will continue to happen in secrecy somewhere else.

The only solution to stopping mass surveillance is allowing the ability for the state surveillance to be challenged in court. Secret panels of judges are insufficient means to having judicial checks on state power. The only way this can happen is if 'state secret' laws are revised and FISA courts stop issuing warrants in secret.

<comment><USER3> Good job reading the article. </sarcasm>

<comment><USER2> I'm agreeing with the ACLU lawyer, this is a good first step, considering it's never been disclosed in ~5 years:

> In the nearly five years since the FAA was enacted, the government has never > once disclosed its reliance on material obtained through FAA surveillance to > counsel's knowledge.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you understand what is going on then.

The article is about the Justice Department (NSA is under the DoD). IE: This is about the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Eric Holder. NSA is an entirely different agency in a very different section of government.

<comment><USER2> FAA = "FISA Amendments Act". The FAA provides authority to the NSA for use of PRISM and other surveillance.

How would this legal precedent not effect the NSA if they are operating under the same policy as the other agencies you just listed? I don't see how being a part of a different higher level agency would change that.

<comment><USER3> Because the NSA doesn't prosecute Americans. They don't have lawyers, they don't bring forth evidence in front of a judge. They don't investigate Americans either, so they cannot in fact be affected by this decision. Its impossible to prove a negation btw, so if you wish to "disprove" my statement, bring me a single court case where the NSA prosecuted someone during a public trial.

It just doesn't happen.

DOJ on the other hand, controls the FBI, ATF, and other federal police forces. It is the _job_ of a police force to bring you before a judge. This article states that when this happens, the DoJ is now forced to tell the judge (and the public, in the public trial) whether or not they used FISA powers.

NSA is different. Its a military agency run by a 4 star general of the army. They are military, and as a military-run (civilian) organization, they are subject to different rules and regulations that the DoJ follows. In particular, they aren't supposed to be investigating Americans in the first place.

And the people the NSA does investigate (ie: Bin Laden), they are allowed to do in secret... by nature of being a branch of the military. Military targets do not have rights, they don't receive warrants, they don't check with judges. At best, they check with the FISA court to prove that their target is a legal target of the NSA, but beyond that, they are free to do whatever they want.

Its the difference between a Police and the Military. The military cannot and do not afford their targets any rights. (and as a result, in theory, military run organizations are not allowed to control the US Homeland. Military powers are supposed to be used strictly only on America's enemies).

For this particular story... what we have here is the Federal Police Force (IE: Department of Justice) declaring that they'll follow a particular regulation from now on. It says nothing about the NSA however.

To tie this story into the NSA indicates a misunderstanding on how the US Federal Government works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand, the first basic rule of intelligence services is you can't use any of their information in court. It's the basic premise behind giving them unlimited privileges.

<comment><USER5> Right, so the dragnet surveillance isn't good for regular, American-style, jury of your peers type of trials.

Dragnet surveillance is only good for guilt-by-association, which really has no place in US jurisprudence. That "voice of authority" type of guilt is un- American, and non-rational, when we get down to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You'd think they realized that at some point sanity and law would prevail and secret trials and evidence had no place under the Constitution.</comment>


Successfully Onboarding Remote Developers - <AUTHOR> https://andela.com/blog/3-steps-onboard-remote-developers/ <comment><USER2> I have worked remotely for 4 years. I posted this on another thread but it seems relevant here:

Start by creating a remote-first culture. Everyone should think "remote" first. Thus it should never matter if a local employee is working from home, the HQ, from the other side of the world. Make all work processes remote friendly. That should be step zero when considering hiring a remote person regardless of the reason. The goal should be to avoid a two-tiered culture. Some differences will always be there but if the spirit of the remote-friendly culture is there integration is pretty fluid. Thus (near) all communication happens in Slack/Hipchat/etc. Group meetings, when including remote people, happen in video conf / Hangouts. Shared Google docs to collaborate on. Have in-person meetups 2-4 x a year for beneficial face-time and for people to get to know each other better on a personal level. When a new person is hired, have them do 20 min 1-on-1's with all team members to get to know each other and their job role. Have monthly video conf/hangouts on non-work technical topics where people rotate presenting. The biggest element is the decision to be a fully remote team. Which honestly is a major retention benefit as well. Why should local employees not enjoy the same flexibility to work as needed remotely?

</comment><comment><USER3> Step 0: Don't call your employees "remote." You're either a distributed team, or you're not really trying.

</comment><comment><USER4> Groove has some good blog posts about working remotely. They were my inspiration to start hiring remote workers.

[https://www.groovehq.com/blog/being-a-remote- team](https://www.groovehq.com/blog/being-a-remote-team)

[https://www.groovehq.com/blog/remote-work- tips](https://www.groovehq.com/blog/remote-work-tips)</comment>


Show HN: FastBrowz [bigkittylabs]- Reddit, Hacker News browsing for the lazy - <AUTHOR> http://fastbrowz.com/ All, We are reddit/hacker new addicts like you and ended up creating these plugins that let you go through comments (which is the best part) when you're in a hurry. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know if you want the plugin enable browsing for other sites. BKL <comment><AUTHOR> All, We are reddit/hacker new addicts like you and ended up creating these plugins that let you go through comments (which is the best part) when you're in a hurry. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know if you want the plugin enable browsing for other sites.

\- BKL</comment>


Why the cloud isn't for your startup - <AUTHOR> http://bluescripts.net/2012/02/why-the-cloud-isnt-for-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> I think you might want to rename the post to: "Why the cloud isn't for my startup"

Seriously, people need to stop telling other people what to do. I very appreciate your input and in fact, I am exactly in that situation, but when you tell me what to do, it's less likely I am listening closely to what you say.

On topic: Sure I could learn how to do sysadmin stuff. But for some people and maybe me, the opportunity costs outweight the economic benefits of rolling out without PaaS

<comment><USER3> Yeah its different for all cases. Our monitoring company uses a bunch of providers, we started with AWS. Why? Because its cheap, quick to deploy...and i had no way of getting our servers in 8 global locations in a week any other way.

We spend under 1k / month (still - we're the masters of money saving...) and we're all around the globe. The truth is, we couldnt even get close to matching this price any other way.

The cloud is for a lot of startups, but only if you know how to use it properly.

<comment><USER4> Could you share a bit more how you do it? Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Besides a lot of profiling of our code, its amazing how many people dont ever do this...we rely heavily on micros in production.

A lot of people will tell you using micros in production is a bad idea, and dont get me wrong...for most people it is a bad idea. Our findings are that micros are reliable and if you use them correctly you are going to be OK.

Where we used to have 2 smalls, we can afford around 8 micros before the cost becomes an issue. This is a significant benefit in that it increases our availability (Basically we're in each region and every availability zone). We have two main systems, the web frontend and our monitoring nodes. Nodes exist in a specific region, and report back to the central storage system via API.

The main feature of our platform which enables us to scale using such small systems is that our CPU demand is very predictable. There are no "hourly jobs" or anything that would spike CPU, everything is done throughout the hour and if we need more work to get done, we simply add more servers.

We are going to do a big write up on this in a few weeks, check our blog (<http://www.verelo.com/blog>) or HN for the post when it comes out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate these articles. You write an article which claims to tell me why my the cloud isn't right for MY startup, and then conclude " If no one in your team has the experience, or time, to learn devops, then a PaaS solution like Heroku would be a more logical choice."

So really, you're not saying the cloud isn't right for anybody's startup at all. You're stating the obvious, which is "if you have someone with sysadmin skills, use those skills". Well, duh.

As a technical co-founder, I can either spend my time learning all there is to know about being a sysadmin, or I can outsource it for DIRT CHEAP. Even at $1500 a month for something like Heroku, it's still cheaper than spending as little as 10-15 hours of my own time managing a server.

Besides, for the first 6mths of your startup, the actual costs for Heroku are likely to be less than $100 a month for a couple of dynos. It's not even worth the time to read the manual at those rates. A couple of git commands, and you're done...even for a complete novice. By the time you're needing those 24 dynos, you likely have the revenue to support the cost.

You can always make more money, but you can't make more time. As a technical founder of a business, your job isn't to be doing something that you can pay someone else to do. You should be making magic happen in your product.

<comment><USER6> "10-15 hours of my own time managing a server"

That's a lot of time.

What is the most time consuming task when managing your own dedicated server? I thought that it takes max 1h monthly to run "apt-get upgrade".

<comment><USER7> I think he's including the time to learn what he's doing. If you have no clue then it is going to take more than a few hours to learn everything. Sure, once you're competent and everything is set up, it won't take much time. It is just getting to that point that could take a lot of time.

<comment><USER8> Cost of learning should be amortised over one's lifetime. It iwill work out to a handful of pennies or dollars on a per-project basis.

<comment><USER7> True, but it is more a matter of where you choose to invest your time. Hosting and sysadmin work have nothing to do with my startup's value add, and I personally can't add much value by doing it myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actually the cloud IS for our startup. We used Appengine to launch and have had no reason to even consider moving to bare metal. We've been successful and are growing nicely, generating six figures of annual revenue - and paying Google three figures annually.

For that, we've got a team of the world's best sysadmins working for us. And if we hit the express elevator, it'll scale as far as we need without us lifting a finger. We'll be popping champagne corks - not server cores.

And best of all, we can focus entirely on what we do best - developing great web apps. We don't have to take weeks out at a time to migrate to bigger machines or the latest operating system. Every time a new exploit comes out, we don't have to drop everything to check we're safe. I don't lie awake at night wondering what would happen if a disk drive crashed or a power supply blew.

Obviously your mileage may vary, depending on exactly what your startup does. But you'd be a fool to discount the cloud on the basis of one article on HN.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nitpick: EC2 (and AWS) isn't PaaS. It's IaaS. I think this is an important distinction. Most PaaS (like Heroku, App Engine, etc.) takes away the need to play administrator and lets you focus on your code, less your infrastructure. On the other hand, IaaS like AWS is closer to a smorgasbord of components you might want to use to build stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> GitHub's listed as an example, but I don't really think we should be. It was pretty reasonable for us to start on virtualized instances to start out. By the time we moved to bare metal, we had grown quite a bit and it was pretty clear what our growth strategy for the future was. To further complicate things, how we stored our Git repositories on the backend changed _dramatically_ during the move from virtualized to bare metal... a good move, to be certain, but one that took considerable up-front development time, and one that may have sunk the company had it delayed GitHub's launch by six months or more.

We're also just a weird case, since our bottlenecks are almost always a matter of IO and how-fast-can-we-access disk. That makes our use case a little more difficult to virtualize. I don't think this is something most startups generally experience, at least not to our extent.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I worked with Softlayer I found the support people made things worse rather than better -- every time I had them do something they broke something.

I upgraded the ethernet port on one machine to 100 Mbps/s and something happened to the trouble ticket system that made it impossible for me to put tickets in. At least I got the port upgrade for free.

To get to the point where I could put tickets in again I had to call on the phone and talk to three different people, finally one guy was a wizard who logged into SQL monitor and was able to fix my record.

Then there was the time that I had them add a new disk drive to a machine and they added the drive w/o a partition table. When the machine rebooted, the superblock got overwritten and I thought I lost the files.

I was able to recover the filesystem, and right after that I moved all of the files into S3.

My bill at Softlayer was $300 a month, I pay $600 a month now on EC2 but I'm running a much bigger operation. I probably could get that price down if I shopped around, but I'd have a hard time building a storage solution as durable as S3 at any price elsewhere.

Now, with EC2 I am doing sysadmin work, but I find I'm productive at it because I'm just doing stuff rather than talking on the phone with a bunch of dolts who'll just screw it up.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sure, for 1.5 grand a month, you can get a crazy amount of dedicated hardware, but then, that's one-half to one-third of one developer's salary. Heroku charges a premium to save on developer time (and hopefully benefit from economies of scale).

<comment><USER14> Yes! +1 Focus on your core competencies (not on running servers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Premature optimization.

It's not worth worrying much about what will happen when shit hits the fan if the fan isn't spinning yet. First, figure out how to get some power to the thing.

<comment><USER16> He's also optimized around his current setup and think that would carry over 1:1 to another platform. He has 24 unicorn workers now, so he thinks he needs 24 dynos on Heroku.

Whenever I've moved an app between platforms or server setups, I benchmark an individual instance and figure out your needs that way.

Also find it interesting how his current setup is all on a single server. So his entire service is one massive SPOF. On Heroku, he'd be highly available and horizontally scalable. How much does downtime cost him?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I missed the part where he convinced me that EC2s weren't for me. If I have to learn enough sysadmin to run my own box, then I'll have learned enough to handle my own AWS cluster without needing a support ticket answered within hours.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this post raises some good points but really misses the mark.

Firstly support. On dedicated hosting on some providers, yes you will get a quicker response than from Amazon or Microsoft or whoever your cloud provider is. However, when there is a problem with their service, by the time I find out about it I am normally looking on their site to see they have already been notified of the problem and are already looking into it. And Microsoft Azure does have phone support for any critical issues.

The 2nd great thing about the cloud is that, it isn't just your problem. They are hundreds if not thousands of companies affected and they are more likely spending far more money than me with them. Hence I get the rapid fix of any issues, without being the big client.

Benchmarks - not sure why that was brought up, you can benchmark on any cloud provider. On Windows Azure I can find out everything from CPU to memory usage and do remote profiling.

Dedicated will give you better costs, machine to machine wise but I would rather pay $1,000 + more a month to have someone look after all my hardware and the ability to scale as a I wish, rather than have to pay someone (who would cost far more) to monitor, upgrade and plan for it continuously. If $150 to $1,500 is an issue and you are prepared to spend a large part of your own time on this insignificant issues, then I suppose you are a startup and not a business yet.

I understand doing everything yourself at the start, staying as lean as possible, but if you are looking at that scale and hiring people then the costs of the cloud are FAR more attractive.

<comment><USER19> Saying that system administration is trivial is like saying your site being up/down is trivial.

Your level of concern can become more trivial when you pay someone else to worry about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This definitely contains a valid perspective for green web developers, but it's thin on actionable information. All these platforms have real upsides and downsides that should affect your decision more than raw cost. Heroku for instance is very stable because of the controlled environment, but they nickel and dime you for any services that are not part of the standard package. EC2 is easy to scale with, but IO throughput is bad, especially on smaller instances. EY gives you root access in conjunction with a mature suite of Chef recipes and some higher level services, but they charge a premium and some of their choices might not be technically ideal for you.

The bottom line is that dedicated hardware is cheaper because it comes with less. If you aren't making use of those value added services, then by all means go dedicated. If you know you don't know what you don't know and you want experienced support to take responsibility for a larger percentage of the stack, go Heroku or Engine Yard. If you have specific overriding requirements, let that guide your decision to a platform. There's no one size fits all solution, and cost is not the primary difference.

<comment><USER21> One advantage of "Heroku's" nickel and diming is that the money is actually being split with other companies in most cases, and those companies core competency is providing _exactly_ that service, whether that be a Redis server or email delivery.

You do pay more than just throwing another service on a machine you're already running, but you've got a fairly good chance of it being massively optimised.

<comment><USER20> > _you've got a fairly good chance of it being massively optimized._

... for the general case.

Is this good bang for your buck? YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My company just moved to the Rackspace Managed Cloud, which is about $350 a month for a 4GB dedicated virtual server, and it has been fantastic. Our team is savvy, but we definitely don't have any hard-core linux sysadmins in the group, so being able to call 24/7 and chat with an expert who has access to our box gives us most of the benefits of having an in-house admin at about 5% of the cost.

<comment><USER23> How many hours in a month do you use this kind of "sysadmin expertise" ? You could also use a freelance sysadmin (hourly based payments) that can remotely connect to your physical box(es) and do what needed.

<comment><USER24> Out of curiosity can you recommend anywhere decent (apart from the obvious freelancing/guru sites I guess) to find such a freelance sysadmin?

<comment><USER23> Nothing specific, apart for the sites you know. I have no experience on those sites but I've heard of people that have found good professionists there (of course they wont charge you 5$/hour but maybe 50$/hour).

NB I could probably add also anyfu.com for highlevel experts (in the 200$/hour range) but it has not launched yet (it's done by Justin Vincent and Jason Roberts of TechZing podcast fame)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The hole in the cloud offerings right now are in the "managed server" space.

There are plenty of (well grounded) people who aren't worried about having to double capacity every other week, but still don't want to be (or hire) a linux, nginx, memcached, and mySQL guru. Figuring out things like setting up a hot spare with automatic failover, backup, security patching and dealing with DoS attacks are not by any means things that can be picked up in a weekend.

GAE and Herko promise this type of thing, but bundled along are the cost, limitations, complexity and opacity of the autoscaling infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have all the sysadmin skills needed to run dedicated servers and in fact I was running and configuring most of our development and production systems for years. We did switch to Heroku for most of development and production projects lately and the difference in "time spent doing stupid IT" was enormous. literally tens of hours per month that I'm not spending now on starting, stopping, configuring, figuring out why the puppet install script fails thought it was working perfectly the last time, monitoring, etc, etc, etc. HUGE gains in productivity and totally worth the extra cost.

It all depends on how much you value your time. We are a consulting web dev house, so figuring out the price per hours is easy - its just what we bill our clients; but even for a regular startup it should be fairly straight forward. And this doesn't even take into account the opportunity cost. The cost of not doing something directly relevant for your startup outcome while you are fiddling with the servers.

<comment><USER27> How do you properly price out your database stuff? I have a little app with 2 gigs of data in Mongo that I'm running for $10/mo. on Rackspace.

I'm looking at migrating the whole thing to Heroku but the Mongo cloud providers seem to cost 2-5x more.

<comment><USER26> All our development and staging systems are essentially free, mongolab/Mongohq have free plans that are enough for dev. That being said I'm definitely not looking to save 20$ as I bill 110€/hour so one saved hour I can devote to actuall work pays for half a year of payed heroku dyno;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Depends on which cloud you're talking about -- there is no "the" cloud.

But since you're talking primarily about web app hosting options, I've found AWS to be just fine, others seem to like rackspace or linode or whatever. Heroku has struck me as pricey, and if you're a web developer I feel like you should be capable of setting up a web server on linux on your own. EC2 and S3 are both just really convenient, I'm not sure of an option that's more convenient, and that's really what I'm looking for--convenience and one less thing to worry about.

So, the cloud (or several clouds, really) is right for my startup, but it may not be right for everyone. Still, EC2, S3, and AWS generally really are great products, if you're a startup, something like it probably is for you, at the very least until you've figured out what you're doing and are making something people are paying for.

</comment><comment><USER29> The post seems to discount using EC2, for it being lumped together with Heroku's free tier as the same kind of a PaaS.

The post also does not talk about elasticity (the E in EC2) -- how easy is it to add (and later remove) that extra dedicated server to handle a spike of traffic from HN/elsewhere?

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the important thing to take away from articles like this is that the cloud isn't the only way (not that you should then title the article "Why the cloud isn't for your startup"). If you do know a bit of sysadmin stuff and/or you're running a bootstrapped company it's good to know you can pay about 10% of what you'd pay on AWS by using dedicated gear (particularly if you have predictable traffic, as a lot of sites do). "X hours of my time is the same cost as Heroku" only works if you have cash in the bank or each hour of your time directly brings in cash.

We do have a slightly special case with >100TB of storage and monthly bandwidth, though. When we started I assumed S3 (or another cloud service) was the only way and never dreamed of building my own distributed file system.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am of the school of thought where Heroku and other PaaS offerings are good for prototypes, where you'd throw up some simple apps on the short term. If you need to scale up, then you'd consider hosting it elsewhere and where you'd have more fine grain control. Does no one do this?

</comment><comment><USER32> My experience has been more big data management and analytics. Less on the startup angle. There are a lot of hidden costs associated with maintaining your own dedicated hardware. Our projects here invested quite a bit into several internally maintained clusters, and it hasn't been perfect. There is a lot of opportunity cost wasted in having developers forced to constantly flex their sysadmin muscles. My time is best served solving problems that leverage the cloud, not tuning and maintaining it. The context switching can be very distracting.

It's actually faster for me to use EC2 whenever I have major calculations than our internal cluster. I get on demand scaling up with the fine tune control I need to micromanage when necessary.

</comment><comment><USER33> The cloud worked great for IndexTank, thank you. We launched fast and our costs grew quickly, but our customers paid for the growth.

If your costs grow and your revenue doesn't, THAT is your problem. All the optimization in the world won't fix it.

<comment><USER34> That's good for you, because you flipped IndexTank, and then it died.

The point is, if you rely on profits to keep your company running, saving 11x on your infrastructure costs is something everyone should be at least evaluating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The author makes too many generalizations in this article.... My company uses Rackspace, which has been fantastic, and as far as I could find Rackspace has no demerits listed in the article. Common complaints like poor support or limited customizability have just not been issues so far. Maybe when we become huge and can afford racks of servers and such matters as hardware customization become relevant issues to us it will be time to make the switch to our own servers, but as far as I can tell, as long as the hosting company doesn't suck at certain critical service aspects like support, cloud hosting only helps small startups get off the ground more easily.

</comment><comment><USER36> In other related news, AWS drops prices for the 19th time [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/dropping-prices-again- ec2...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/dropping-prices-again-ec2-rds-emr- and-elasticache.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> I guess I should go invest some time learning KVM so that I can spin up VMs on my home computer until I can get some angel to toss me some money so that I can invest in some hardware.

All I have to do is learn how to spin allocate space on a disk drive to a virtual disk, should I use RAW, QCOW2, something else? I should probably figure out how to install an OS within this "container."

What's that honey, you need to do the budget? Hang on, I'm still working on my job.

Man, I seriously have to learn some sysadmin to get this thing up and running on my commodity box.

Wait a tick ...

<comment><USER38> This is where virt-tools actually works well. Point it at an LVM volume, tell it how much disk you want to give to the new virtual machine, let virt-install do it's stuff, done.

Your more general point is well made however :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> AWS plus a dedicated sysadmin company delivering the same service level as a good hosting provider always seemed like the sweet spot to me. Barring scenarios where you actually need your own iron to deal with performance bottlenecks, it's the best of both worlds.

The cost of hardware or cloud services is pretty much irrelevant compared to the cost of sysadmin hours, be it your own or hiring someone else. Unfortunately most people only learn that lesson when the shit hits the fan. Downtime is costly. Getting hacked even more so.

<comment><USER21> If you're hiring dedicated people to manage your servers bare metal becomes even more appealing, especially if they know what they're doing and can allow you to burst out to a cloud provider when you need extra capacity fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The cloud is using ECC memory. Your server is not. However, if you shop around you can find cheaper, faster, and better specced servers with ECC memory.

Use forums like webhostingtalk.com to your advantage.

</comment><comment><USER41> does it depend on what you define as a 'startup'. weekend projects should not be considered startups even though every man and his dog seems throwing the term around for every bit of code they hack together.

go dedicated when you commit to the project. Up until that point, you would be wasting money and effort and although service support is good with dedicated providers, that largely depends on 'who' you choose - i certainly wouldnt say a blanket 'great response times from dedicated vs cloud providers' on some (shall not be named)providers..

<comment><USER42> I'd go one more step - go dedicated when you are reasonably confident you're done rapidly pivoting, i.e. have found a business and growth model that work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Not convinced at all.

</comment><comment><USER44> "However once you're project starts growing, the costs can grow exponentially." [sic]

Exponentially, really? What exponent?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I phrased it wrong, but the cost per worker vs the amount you can fit per dedicated machine are drastically different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Everybody playing hacker bingo: "The Cloud".

<comment><USER37> "Thec" "loud"</comment></comment>


Yesterday, I Went to the American Idol for Startups. It Made Me Want to Die. - <AUTHOR> http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/08/09/yesterday-i-went-to-the-american-idol-for-startups-it-made-me-want-to-die <comment><USER2> Really enjoying the author's prose. This had me rolling:

>> _It's like watching some sadist work over a baby lamb with a rusty crowbar and a broken gin bottle. The names of these startups sound like the products of an aggressive brain tumor on the frontal lobe. Crowdegy, Placeling, Kouply, QuoteRobot, Appthwack, Makegood, Onthego, Nickler, Kahal, Tanzio, Taskk. They're all whimsical and unique in exactly the same way._

<comment><USER3> Actually, I quite like the name Appthwack.

<comment><USER4> For those of you who are too young to have lived through the original dot-com boom, I can't recommend this 1999 article on company naming from Salon highly enough:

<http://www.salon.com/1999/11/30/naming/>

Read the whole thing, it's hilarious.

As soon as I saw the parade of names in the OP I was reminded of one of the names the naming consultants in the the Salon piece devised -- "Jamcracker":

 _When Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don't know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."_

<comment><USER5> The Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) enables Service Providers to unify the delivery of disparate cloud services to their direct customers and through their channels. Key features include:

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

Oh goodness

<comment><USER6> Most of their Web site seems to consist of jargon and puffery--"across the enterprise," "enables" and "ecosystems."

<comment><USER7> They raised over $142M including $100M in one round in Oct 2000. Wired article:

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.12/jamcracker.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "These women and men have come together to do brutal violence to the English language, to leave the spoken and written word bloodied and victimized on a cold cement floor, wishing for the sweet relief of death."

I will read anything this author writes. Thanks for spotlighting this blog.

Tip: if you want your blog READ instead of skimmed for buzzwords and facts, make sweet love to the English language. Then worry about your content.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry but I completely disagree with that. I got a distinct feeling that the author of this blog is in deep passionate love with himself and his writing, and the topic he is writing about is remote secondary to the flourish of his expression. I personally don't care too much about this flourish, when I get craving for it, I can read classic authors that tell real stories about fascinating things in great language and not a bit of snobbery about some geeks naming their companies wrong. When I read technical or around-technical article, I expect a decent command of English, but I expect the author to worry about delivering his point and not about loving his own voice so much that he can't stop embellishing and loses he sight of why he's doing it. Reporting and opera aria are different genres.

In this article, what is the point of it? That all startup ideas suck because they think too small? And the author instead thinks they should be doing... well, he doesn't. He just thinks they are named wrong, think wrong, dress wrong, speak wrong, live wrong and their future is wrong. Everything is wrong except for the one shining light that is the author of the article and his perfect whimsical metaphor-filled style. Bleh.

<comment><USER10> I get both of those impressions (your's and one up). Just because someone is an egocentric narcissist doesn't mean that they aren't on to something. In fact, as they say, it takes one to know one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Hell, as I check my e-mail, I notice with a resigned shame that my coworkers—smart people I consider to be excellent writers—are unironically using the word "spearhead" as a verb in an e-mail thread."

Aaaaand this is where I dismiss the author as simply looking for things to complain about.

Complaining about names (as if that even matters). Complaining about the way they dress. Complaining about the way they talk.

Might as well end it with "get off my lawn!"

<comment><USER12> Buzzwords must die.

<comment><USER13> I feel like you and I have synergy on that opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The women have it tougher. Their business casual is neither business-minded nor all that casual, a confusing melange of sundresses and sensible slacks, gossamer sweaters tossed over spaghetti straps."

That seems weirdly sexist to me. I guess I really like working in tech because I can wear generally what I want, and often in the summer, that means sundresses, instead of a stifling business suit. And I guess I always assumed the tech world, particularly the start-up scene, wasn't judging me as less business-like because of it.

TLDR: yes, a lot of the startup world is full of shallow business-speak, but don't you dare insult my sundresses.

<comment><USER15> I think you have it backwards. The sundress is overly-dressy. The shoes are designed to be looked at and to impress, rather than for comfort.

I think that sort of misrepresentation (not you specifically, the event) is what the author resenting. Read me out.

Brute utility defines romance of 'startup culture'. Humans understanding their world, and interacting with it in a straight-forward way. I'm modifying the code to do this. These effects will alter this part of our business. You're attempting to account for everything. Money has definite purposes. Your time has value measured in the sort of excitement that makes your brain burn like you were lifting weights with it.

Those conditions do not include men spending their money on jeans, and women spending self control on culturally approved foot torture. At that point the focus has moved from interacting with the business to something about social status.

Buzzwords really give things away. I'm only now learning that buzzwords are the most important part of modern established businesses. They're fucking amazing. A buzzword represents an abstract concept.

Abstract concepts come in two flavors. Those that represent something very specific/complex in concise terms, and those which represent something very vague/simple in bombastic terms. In use, they are the guardians of understanding and agreement. Secrecy and manipulation and power with publicly spoken words. A stark contrast to the liberal sharing of knowledge and honest curiosity of the startup dream.

<comment><USER14> I suspect neither you nor the original author have worn many women's clothing or shoes. Sometimes things look uncomfortable that are not. And why does it matter anyway if my clothing accurately reflects some abstract startup ethos? Startups talk about attracting women, but what happens when women get criticized for doing things a lot of us legitimately enjoy like wearing pretty clothes?

Either way, nothing is less business-like than judging a tech event by the attire of the participants. In tech, it's a lose-lose situation. Dress in a baggy Defcon t-shirt and don't brush your hair...you are too ugly and you must not be a "people person." Dress nicely...oh you must have just chosen those clothes to impress people, so you must be superficial.

<comment><USER16> Or if you want to be taken seriously, as the target of such criticism you could roll your eyes and devote exactly as much mental energy to such criticisms as they deserve, which is approximately zero.

Finding sexism in absolutely any scenario where there is a reference to sex is an all too common skill that one might be better off not possessing, but that's just my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I bet these dudes were there [http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6507690/hardly-working- sta...](http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6507690/hardly-working-start-up- guys)

<comment><USER18> That is definitely one of the better CollegeHumor videos.

<comment><USER17> from the internet-themed, I prefer this one [http://www.collegehumor.com/video/2563451/internet- commenter...](http://www.collegehumor.com/video/2563451/internet-commenter- business-meeting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's the author's bio and picture if it helps put this article in context: [http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/paul- constant/Author?oid=...](http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/paul- constant/Author?oid=17693)

<comment><USER20> _> He became the 2009 I.D. Spring Roll Eating Champion after consuming 23 deep-fried spring rolls in two minutes. _

Pretty impressive if I may say so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >"You can do anything you want with an idea. It can be as big as you want. It doesn't have to solve a minor problem that nobody ever really realized was a problem. It doesn't have to fit into something the size of a button crammed into a "folder" the size of a button on a screen the size of a playing card. But everywhere I look, I see tiny little ideas,ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality."

This. This sums up how I feel about the whole startup scene. The lack of real innovation is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER22> The Stranger disappoints, as usual. Easier to poke fun at people's clothes and other shallow topics than provide something of substance. Don't get me wrong, I love the occasional quip, but the author has put zero effort into understanding the culture before casually ridiculing it.

</comment><comment><USER23> A very pleasant surprise seeing The Stranger on HN today.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was there yesterday, and we actually presented and ended up tied for second place. AppThwack (Not to be confused with a "brain tumor") is a rapid, automated QA service for testing Android apps on real, non-emulated devices in a massively parallel and fast way. I realize it's not a world-changingly noble mission, but I also don't think it's trivial or inconsequential. Regardless, here are my thoughts. I posted a bit more in the article comment, but thought I'd paste part of my comment here.

"This article is definitely entertaining. It's vapid and catty and well written, and accurately portrays an event from an outsider's perspective. Of course there are lots of things that look like "bad ideas" on their face. On the other hand, there are lots of ideas that seem dumb at first that grow into interesting companies that end up solving legitimate problems.

Overall I think the event was very well run and I met a lot of great people. I was there with the goal of getting something out of it, though, and that something was connections, potential partners/customers, and some more pitch experience. Obviously the author got what he was looking for as well.

I think it's important that the "startup community" (I hate that that's a thing people say) gets kicked in the balls every now and then. For example, this look at TechCrunch Disrupt: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/jackstuef/scenes- from-the-pounding-h...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/jackstuef/scenes-from-the- pounding-heart-of-a-tech-bubble)

</comment><comment><USER25> So those names were indeed terrible. But how the hell do you name things well? It's _really_ hard.

The second you write some code you have to call it _something_ , and I imagine that's the point where people think up janky cute names, and then it's in the codebase and that's that. I know for me I think up something stupid and then roll with that, presuming that if it ever makes it out of localhost it will be renamed to something sensible.

These people are just pitching, no wonder there names are like AwesomeSaucr and CakeBacon and what-not.

<comment><USER9> Names don't matter. Google is a terrible name. Yahoo is a terrible name. Do you think Facebook became what it is because of their name? Do you think MicroSoft got where it is because of the name? Do you think Linux and Apache took sizable chunk of their market afterward because their names were better?

Names are insignificant. You can pay millions for most awesome name on the planet and flop, and you can choose name like "git" and create awesome software that everybody uses. People would use anything under any name if they like it.

<comment><USER26> Possibly the worst names for the most popular software are git and gimp. Nobody cares. They use them, because they are awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Woah. How did this drop from #2? There are articles above this on HN that have less points and were submitted at an earlier time...

<comment><USER28> It may have been flagged. If a post gets flagged enough it will get pushed to page 2 no matter how many upvotes it gets.

<comment><USER29> Must have hurt someone's feelings

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't say I ever expected to see a Slog post on here. Slog's where I go for my daily dose of adorable animal videos at lunch, sex advice from Dan Savage, and Seattle/Washington state political news.

All that said, Paul Constant is a fantastic writer, and I'm glad to see he's found an audience here.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not to be that guy but it's like the author is writing a novel. What's the tl;dr here?

<comment><USER2> He went to Startup Riot, saw a bunch of consumer internet startups pitching their product.

Complained about the names, the language used to describe the ideas ("content" vs "text", "consume" vs "read", etc) and the ideas themselves.

Half of the article sounds like sour grapes, half is legit criticism.

<comment><USER32> Eh, I don't know. I think it's wise to take a step back and listen to yourself from time to time. When you set out to do something, you start by learning, then by doing, then you recyle that process over and over. You entrench yourself with like-minded individuals, and everything starts to become second nature.

This is the exact moment that you should take a step back and read a piece like this. In the process of trying to succeed, there's a very good chance that you're going to pick up some habits from those around you. Some of those habits are good and will contribute to your progress, but many of them are just useless baggage.

When I read this piece, I thought to myself, "My god, we sound just like the Six Sigma biz-ops guys we make fun of." That's an insight I wouldn't pass up, even if it means feeling a little sting of broken pride.

<comment><USER2> Yep, I'm right there with you. I enjoyed this piece, and that's why I said half was legit criticism.

If I hear a startup unironically use the term "leverage" or "pivot" one more time...

<comment><USER33> I think it is allowed if they are engineering some sort of giant pivoting lever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was one of the presenters at Startup Riot. Events like Startup Riot give early stage founders the opportunity to showcase their products and it is extremely important to keep this a safe place for newbies and encourage entrepreneurs to keep at it!

Two cents from a presenter at the event: [http://www.moonsovermyhammy.com/post/29112090592/if- youre-a-...](http://www.moonsovermyhammy.com/post/29112090592/if-youre-a- little-person-sharing-a-big-idea-do-it)

</comment><comment><USER35> Investors are so desperate to find the next homerun that they'll cater to the ridiculous that is speed dating for startup ideas.

<comment><USER10> I think that is a point missed by this article and many others. People are going after what they think they can get funded in large part. In the comments on the post there is a nice Peter Thiel quote about innovation in the physical world basically getting outlawed (his libertarian bent shows strongly here) driving innovation to software. And while I don't really agree with all of it, I really think that to a certain extent, be it through patents, super dominant companies, government prohibition, or even just cultural forces, it is really hard to go big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> When the dust settles, we all will remember those crazy startup euphoria days and this article would be one of it. Pretty soon we might need to ammend the Dictionary with new words or spelling corrections

</comment><comment><USER37> "tiny little ideas" - for me the best startup ideas are those that start with some small idea, but it is actually a trojan horse to get something into the market that is actually very large.

<comment><USER38> That's assuming that there actually is a significant idea bound up in the tiny idea, which is not generally the scenario that the author is complaining about.

<comment><USER37> Of course. It was just a phrase that jumped out at me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Some of the photos for 'Stranger Personals' that appear on the right of the article aren't really safe for work.

</comment><comment><USER40> Anyone else have a bunch of pop-up ads when browsing there?

</comment><comment><USER41> _"When the language you employ to communicate your ideas is small and boring, your ideas are going to be small and boring."_

That's how I felt reading this blog post. A long, pedantic, raging post that does nothing but demonstrate that the author has an inflated sense of his writing prowess. His post is basically one type of Hipster raging against the Hipsterisms of a different type of Hipster.

<comment> qu4z-2 That line made me think of the Hemingway quote:

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Two quotes from George Orwell spring to mind:

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."

nuff said...?

</comment><comment><USER43> Great writing, reminds me of David Foster Wallace's work.</comment>


Visualizing Garbage Collection Algorithms (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/09/03/visualizing-garbage-collection-algorithms/ <comment><USER2> While we're on the topic, can anyone share the tools and methods they use to visualize GC in their live environments? Back when I worked at a Scala shop I spent an incredible amount of time in the VisualGC plugin tab of VisualVM. This was fairly onerous because its a fully seperate java app connecting to a jmx port on each jvm you want to look at. It also required setting the refresh rate to 100ms to be able to see the consumption patters clearly in the graphs, which in turn required a fairly low latency and stable network connection to not be riddled with false-positives (meaning, our mac-mini driven tv's with wifi connections).

Does anyone have a better tooling story to share? (on any lang/runtime). I found that things like datadog and newrelic were completely useless because their time-resolution completely obscured the underlying behavior pattern. Like trying to measure the tide with one datapoint a day.

<comment><USER3> The Azul Zing inbuilt tooling was already very very nice 3 years ago when I got to try it for a bit. Of course in the trial with Zing GC was no longer something to worry about as that just worked :) I couldn't get the budget round and some other work reduced GC pressure so did not use in production. Now hoping the Shenadoah GC will bring some of the benefits of Zing for free or redhat included pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263811).

</comment><comment><USER5> After hearing about GC for well over 20 years now, I would have thought it would have been a Solved Problem(tm) by now! It's clearly a situation where every conceivable solution seems to have tradeoffs.

Interesting post, although I had to force-reload the page to get the animations to restart...

<comment><USER6> 20 years? John McCarthy proposed and implemented it in Lisp in 1960!</comment></comment>


Crobow – Handmade Crochet Bow Ties - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aton/crobow-handmade-crochet-bow-ties

<comment><AUTHOR> If any of you are into unique bow ties, you may dig this.</comment>


Creating domain-specific languages in Julia using macros - <AUTHOR> https://julialang.org/blog/2017/08/dsl <comment><USER3> Don't miss the video [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAxzR7lMGDM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAxzR7lMGDM)] of his ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for posting the link. David Sanders is an amazing speaker, and the best person to learn Julia from, if you get a chance.

There's a bunch of his videos in the Julia channel on Youtube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the chance of Julia ever reaching 1.0 realistically? It seems to be turning into another Perl6.

<comment><USER5> 1.0 is the next major version (there'll be an 0.7 to give us an extra deprecation cycle and start 1.0 without any depwarns, but 0.7 will essentially be identical to 1.0 otherwise). You can follow the 1.0-blocking issues here: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/milestone/4](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/milestone/4).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unrelatedly, have the Julia devs decided to require variable declaration yet? E.g. "local x = 1" instead of just "x = 1"? Or better yet, "x := 1"?

How many times does this mistake have to be repeated in various languages? It'll just be a matter of time before people are banging on for a strict mode, and rightfully so.

At least the default scope in Julia is local. :/

<comment><USER7> Python and Ruby do this without a problem. Many others do it too. If there's a set of complaints about those two languages, variable scope isn't in the top ten.

If you're gonna do lexical scoping or some variation of, defaulting to the current scope makes the most sense. Defaulting to global scope is what causes the issue, not choice of keywords.

<comment><USER8> Not entirely without a problem. Not being explicit about declaring variables means you need to be explicit about _not_ declaring variables when assigning to a variable in an enclosing scope, i.e. Python's "nonlocal" and "global" keywords. (Which is, if not a problem, at least a little ugly.)

<comment><USER7> I thought about this. I would just avoid the need of declaring a variable with the same name as one in the enclosing scope. That means minimisation of global variables, minimisation of lexical pyramids, etc. Generally good things with or without explicit declarations.

If you're creating a closure, that's inherent part of the enclosing scope. Just like variable reuse is discouraged for clarity, so it should in closures.

I think declaring a global variable deep in scope sounds like recipe for hell. I think declaring a global with a name as short as you'd use in function parameters is a mistake. I don't see how it'd be a problem if you follow practices that encourage maximum clarity.

If I could see an example, it'd make it easier to understand your point - <USER2> haven't seen the problem you describe so it's difficult for me to visualise it.

<comment><USER8> Try this:

      def f():
          def g():
              nonlocal x   #  change this line
              x = 3
              print("x == {!r}".format(x))

          x = 2
          g()
          print("x == {!r}".format(x))

      x = 1
      f()
      print("x == {!r}".format(x))

It will print (because g reassigns the x in f):

      x == 3
      x == 3
      x == 1

and if you change "nonlocal" to "global", g will reassign the global x, and you get:

      x == 3
      x == 2
      x == 3

and if you remove the line entirely, the assignments will be interpreted as declaring new variables in each scope, and you get :

      x == 3
      x == 2
      x == 1

<comment><USER7> I just looked up the nonlocal keyword, my python isn't strong. I'll hold my hands up - python wasn't a good example here. I was under the impression you could use and mutate outer scope variable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Julia macros are one of it's best features. They are every bit as powerful list macros. Something very few non lisp languages can say.

<comment><USER10> IIRC the macro engine is backed by lisp... tinylisp?

<comment><USER11> Femtolisp

[https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp/blob/master/README.md)</comment></comment></comment>


Melting with Tenderness: Vladimir Nabokov on "Apostrophes" - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/melting-with-tenderness/ <comment><USER2> This is Nabokov's written responses for a TV interview.

The language is sumptuous. Reading Nabokov is to me the linguistic equivalent of eating ice-cream.

> People of settled professions, calm oysters firmly attached to their native > mother-of-pearl

> A very strong bedside light, the lighthouse of my insomnias

> the fluted and sonorous song of the blackbirds

> Sometimes it's a digression that turns into a drama in a corner of the > narrative, or the metaphors of an extended essay that join up to form a new > story.

> I remember with what a shiver of delight, envy, and anguish I watched on the > television screen man's first floating steps on the talcum powder of our > satellite and how I despised all those who maintained it wasn't worth the > expense of billions of dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world.

> One must draw everything one can from words, because it's the one real > treasure a true writer has. Big general ideas are in yesterday's newspaper. > If I like to take a word and turn it over to see its underside, shiny or > dull or adorned with motley hues absent on its upperside, it's not at all > out of idle curiosity, one finds all sorts of curious things by studying the > underside of a word – unexpected shadows of other words, harmonies between > them, hidden beauties that suddenly reveal something beyond the word. > Serious wordplay, as I have in mind, is neither a game of chance nor a mere > embellishment of style. It's a new verbal species that the marvelling author > offers to the poor reader, who doesn't want to look; to the good reader, who > suddenly sees a completely new facet of an iridescent sentence.

</comment><comment><USER3> Visible (at least in part) on Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpjTgHMUbAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpjTgHMUbAk)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Apostrophes" being a French TV show. A-post-troff.

<comment><USER5> We've put some quotes up there. What does "A-post-troff" mean?

<comment><USER6> Presumably the French pronunciation of _apostrophes_.

<comment><USER5> Ahh bien sûr!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Draft law to require warrants for border device searches - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/draft-law-to-require-warrants-for-border-device-searches/ <comment><USER2> Senator Wyden had a town hall last night. In it, I witnessed a constituent share concern about device searches at the border. The Senator said he shared the concern, that he would investigate, and that he would introduce legislation if he did not like the results of that investigation.

This is the result of his promise, delivered that same night. Representative Democracy works. Talk to your representatives.

Edit - the letter: [https://www.wyden.senate.gov/download/?id=B947731A-2394-484B...](https://www.wyden.senate.gov/download/?id=B947731A-2394-484B-81E3-FDD49530EBF4&download=1)

<comment><USER3> So you reckon than in less than 24 hours the senator has completed a thorough investigation and also had time to draft a bill? Or maybe is it the case that this work has been ongoing for months...?

<comment><USER4> > So you reckon than in less than 24 hours the senator has completed a > thorough investigation and also had time to draft a bill?

No, I think on less than 24 hours, he's directed his staff to do so, and they have.

> Or maybe is it the case that this work has been ongoing for months...?

It may leverage background work that has been done in the past without being directed at a specific legislative outcome; finding that existing work, presenting a summary and recommended course of action, and then following through with drafting a bill is fairly routine legislative staff work, and there's certainly lots of work that's been done and is available on the issue from both government and non-government sources that staff could readily find, summarize, and present as the basis for an action decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The CBP's job is to control the movement of _people and physical objects_ across the border. They have neither the charter nor the capability to control _information flow_ across the border. All they are accomplishing by trying to do the latter is to harrass travelers, the vast majority of whom are innocent.

So if they want to verify that an object that appears to be a laptop is not actually filled with cocaine -- great, have at it. But if they want to log in to it and poke around the filesystem -- no dice.

(Forgive me if I belabor the obvious here. But it seems the distinction needs emphasizing.)

<comment><USER6> I think the overt intention is to identify undesirable travelers and exclude them from entry.

In reality it's much more of a "papers please" situation acclimatizing everyone to control of their movements. Things are progressing quickly towards the totalitarian state.

<comment><USER5> > I think the overt intention is to identify undesirable travelers and exclude > them from entry.

Well, okay. Ideally, in the case of non-citizens, we would figure out the ones we wanted to exclude before issuing them visas, but that process can't be perfect, and a case can be made for allowing CBP agents to take a closer look at them and exercise their discretion.

Two points about that. First, as koenigdavidmj points out, this can't apply to citizens. The only possible reason for examining information carried by citizens is to make the CBP an extension of the police, and once you've done that, Fourth Amendment protections have to apply. (Obviously this is my personal opinion only, not something the courts have said; but the argument seems very straightforward to me.)

And secondly, there are reasons to think this is not going to be a very effective filter, to the point that it's probably not even worth doing. Once word gets out among America's enemies, as it surely has long ago, of the need not to carry incriminating information across the border, sophisticated adversaries simply won't do it. You might catch some low-level criminals, but really, what do you think the false negative rate is? By their own admission, the CBP are searching a small fraction of electronic devices, so the chance of them catching even a stupid miscreant seems under 10%; for the smart ones it's probably under 1%. This is particularly true if all they profile for is dark- skinned men with strange names -- like Sidd Bikkannavar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there any evidence, other than anecdotal, that these types of searches have actually "gotten worse in quantity under the new president" as the EFF states?

And for Americans coming to Canada, be aware your phone and laptop are fair game at our border crossings too. No warrant required (yet). [https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/public-safety- and-l...](https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/public-safety-and-law- enforcement/your-privacy-at-airports-and-borders/#toc3)

<comment><USER8> I doubt they've gotten worse. BUT, they shouldn't have been legal in the first place, especially for American citizens. The whole notion of "Constitution- free zones" is ludicrous.

<comment><USER9> And from what I understand it's a 100 mile zone around the borders? [https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border- zone](https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone)

<comment><USER10> That looks to cover about 95% of the population.

<comment><USER11> They can only do a border search of someone who has recently crossed the border. So it doesn't apply to all the people in the zone.

It covers a bunch of Michigan because a boater does an entry process once they stop boating, not when they cross an imaginary line.

There are rumbles of plans to move to a different, broader standard going forward.

<comment><USER12> That may be the rule for particularized searches (I don't know one way or the other), but "papers please" road checkpoints are common[1]. U.S. citizens are theoretically not required to show papers. In practice, theory and practice diverge.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Border_Patrol_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Border_Patrol_interior_checkpoints)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This draft law is for show only. It's not going to be enacted; it's being pushed by Ron Wyden, a Democrat who's far more progressive than the rest of his party, and in a Congress that's totally controlled by Republicans, with an America-first Republican in the White House. There isn't a chance this law will be passed. He might as well be promoting a bill to introduce single-payer socialized medicine in the US along with a Universal Basic Income.

<comment><USER14> _This draft law is for show only._

Sometimes that's the best a representative can do. That doesn't mean it has no value. It raises awareness, keeps the issue on the public record and, hopefully, eventually, leads to a pull toward the center and some reasonable compromise.

<comment><USER15> It may also be used as campaign propaganda. Everyone who votes against your bill may one day see a campaign ad saying, "Rep./Sen. Whatsname voted _in favor_ of warrantless searches of your _personal electronic files_ , when all you wanted was to _come back home_."

Such is undoubtedly why bills of this nature are smothered in committee by politicians who are so secure in their gerrymandered districts that they could bite the head off of a baby on live television the day before election day and still win the seat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I opened it up, thinking to myself "what, in a Republcan controlled house? Am I going to do a 180 on which party a vote for?" But then it was a dem.</comment>


"The wasters of bandwidth will win..." - <AUTHOR> http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/10/gilder-at-his-p.html

<comment><USER2> Ah, good old Gilder. From prophet to almost forgotten. I remember reading some articles about him in some old web magazine.

High tech used to be more exciting when it barely worked.

Gilder was also connected to Milken, the king of junk bonds.

[additional] What Gilder was talking about wasn't YouTube. He was talking about Milken financing MCI to billions, to lay down fibre. Fundamentally connecting people to the Internet. YouTube assumes MCI existed and was well funded.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Chris Anderson meant that Gilder was correctly anticipating a company like YouTube: one that would "waste" bandwidth.

The people who could capture that revenue model would win, and did.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is almost certainly true, but the transformation is going to take more than a few years. It's probably not a great idea to start a company today that burns money with current bandwidth costs, but would hypothetically thrive in a world of dirt-cheap bandwidth. It could certainly pan out for you, but a lot can go wrong between now and some unknown point in the future.</comment>