Adobe caught lying to customers trying to cancel Creative Cloud subscriptions - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/apps/adobe-will-try-anything-to-stop-a-creative-cloud-cancellation-1644869/ <comment><USER2> <rant>Meta: This is not directly related to Adobe, but SaaS in general.

I do not want to pay a subscription for each piece of freaking software that I own. I do not want my cellular company claiming it owns my phone.

I understand that folks gotta make a living, and I feel for and support the little guys running niche SaaS businesses. But frack, not everybody can get on this bandwagon.

Adobe is a great example. You pay out the ass to buy their software -- which is great, by the way -- then use it a half-dozen times a year. Should you pay 50 bucks a month? If not, you got nothing. This seems like a terribly bad trade. (Yes I know there are alternatives)

Accounting software: last I checked, the ability to add and subtract was rather trivial for computers. Yet somehow businesses think I should pay a monthly fee for them to continue and add and subtract things from a ledger? Ring tones, simple note-taking, "renting" music to play...

The list is getting rather large. Looking at my monthly spend, I'm paying a lot of money each month for stuff -- whether I use it or not -- that I used to just buy and use when I felt like it. The old model worked in my best interests. The new model does not.

Something's gotta give. I can't imagine the online marketplace supporting everything like this. I also am getting extremely concerned for the poor people that we're effectively locking out of a huge class of software simply because they can't make their monthly vig.</rant>

</comment><comment><USER3> I am not a fan of Adobe, but this is hardly "Adobe caught lying". It is common practice for the support people dealing with cancellations to have incentives to try keep the client, and some scope on what they can offer, but this sounds like an employee going too far and lying in order to meet his internal targets.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's an actual chat transcript of me trying to cancel my membership. Yes I sound like a dick robot, but I become a dick robot when I'm forced to contact the company--instead of just clicking a button--to cancel my membership:

info: Hi, we are currently helping other customers in line ahead of you. We'll be with you as soon as possible.

While you wait, you can try our community forums where experts are online 24/7.

info: You are now chatting with 'Mahesh'

Mahesh: Hello! Welcome to Adobe Customer Service.

Mahesh: Hi there.

jalanco: Cancel my membership.

jalanco: Are you there? Cancel my membership. info: Your chat transcript will be sent to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx at the end of your chat.

Mahesh: I will check and help you.

Mahesh: I see that you have the Creative Cloud plan (one-year) annual commitment subscription with the monthly payment option under your account.

Mahesh: I am really sorry to see you go.

Mahesh: May I ask why you are choosing not to maintain your membership?

jalanco: Please cancel my membership. I don't have a lot of time.

Mahesh: An annual subscription requires a commitment for the full year and monthly payments.

Mahesh: If you decide to end a one-year membership before the 12-month period is over, you are charged 50% of the remaining amount left on your commitment.

Mahesh: In this case, if you are willing to cancel your annual subscription now, you will be charged an early termination fee of USD 250.00.

Mahesh: Is that fine with you?

jalanco: No it is not fine with me. Cancel my membership.

Mahesh: I see that you've purchased a subscription with an annual commitment with a monthly payment. Since you wish to cancel the subscription before the end of one year period, you will be billed 50% of your monthly rate for the remaining months in your annual commitment.

jalanco: Cancel my membership.

Mahesh: Okay, do you wish me to cancel the subscirption with the early termination fee of USD 250.00?

jalanco: No. Cancel my membership. I didn't agree to that.

Mahesh: [http://www.adobe.com/misc/subscription_terms.html](http://www.adobe.com/misc/subscription_terms.html)

Mahesh: Please view the above link to see the terms of the annual commitment subscription that you have under your account.

Mahesh: I understand that you would like to cancel your membership, and I will take care of that for you. However, would you be willing to maintain your membership through your annual commitment & avoid the early termination fee if I offer you the next month of your membership for free?

jalanco: No. Cancel my membership immediately.

Mahesh: I can understand your concern, please allow me a moment while I check for any exception for you.

Mahesh: I am happy that I was able to make an exception for you. I have successfully canceled your Creative Cloud membership (one-year) annual commitment subscription without any early termination fee of USD 250.00 as an one time exception only for you as goodwill gesture.

Mahesh: However this exception will not be done again for you.

Mahesh: Is there anything else I can help you with?

jalanco: Thank you. Nothing else.

Mahesh: Thank you for contacting Adobe. We are available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Goodbye!</comment>


Digg is Dead - <AUTHOR> http://forfraksake.com/post/43627508/digg-is-dead-you-heard-it-here-first-for-reasons

<comment><USER2> I've come to understand that sensationalist headlines like this one, "X is dead", actually mean "X is no longer interesting", once you take out the sensationalism. Even pg is guilty of this: <http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html>

If his essay was titled, "Microsoft is no longer interesting", would anybody still read it? We all know Microsoft is no longer interesting. But if you say 'dead', you can write an essay explaining WHY something is no longer interesting and still have everyone reading. Good job.

<comment><USER3> Nietzsche may have done it first.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, Nietzsche is dead.

<comment><USER3> Nietzsche's influence remains substantial. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's keep some perspective - Digg almost sold for $200,000,000 a couple days ago. Maybe they have some problems but it is still a very valuable site with lots of happy users.

</comment><comment><USER6> [insert name of company] is dead. You heard it first here!

<comment><USER7> Rumours of [insert name of company]'s death have been greatly exaggerated.

<comment><USER8> [insert name of company] is not dead yet.

[insert name of company] thinks it'll go for a walk...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> digg died several months ago when their comments slowly started looking a lot like youtube's

<comment><USER10> Despite my love for higher level discourse, both YouTube and Digg are doing fine without it. You don't die when the average vocal user is rude online. That's almost the definition of mainstream.

<comment><USER11> I think this says something significant about our "society." I think this reveals where our notion of community has gone.

<comment><USER10> Online communities are nothing like the still vibrant IRL communities. The best of both worlds is when they intersect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I stopped being a happy user a hell of a long time ago. Why do I like Hacker News? Because I have a snowball's chance in hell of people in the community reading my occasional submissions or answering questions I might pose. The last time I got a front-page story on Digg was 2005 when I posted about some dude faking a story about him giving out Ubuntu cd's at a McDonalds.

<comment><USER13> Bingo, there is something very attractive about a small community.

<comment><USER14> therefore every growing community is doomed to die?

<comment><USER7> I'd say it's more that the smaller the community, the greater the chance that the community as a whole can agree on what constitutes signal and what constitutes noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 200mm was fair for a site with 50mm uniques, msft currently has the text ad deal with digg, wonder if that was a major factor. i dont buy the :lack of culture line...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tumblr killed the story

URL - <http://forfraksake.com/post/43627508/digg-is-dead>

</comment><comment><USER16> No.

</comment><comment><USER14> i go to digg when i need hand relief</comment>


5 Year-Old Indian Boy wins the lottery and becomes a millionaire - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/A-millionaire-at-5-as-Indian-boy-wins-lottery-in-Dubai/articleshow/7768198.cms

<comment><USER2> Did I miss it .. what sort of millionaire, do they mean a [USD] dollar millionaire? 1000000 rupees is about $22k. I guess this maybe still makes the kid rich depending on his locality?

</comment><comment><USER3> I really hope they do a "whatever happened to.." 40 years from now so we can see what happened to that kid.</comment>


The Abolition of Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.primitivism.com/abolition.htm

<comment><USER2> Really ought to be "The Abolition of Labor," for work is something we do outside the basic human necessities in order to find fulfillment. Labor is the unfortunate realities of being an organism that needs energy to survive.</comment>


Amazon Allows For Reselling of Reserved EC2 Instances - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/marketplace/

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509514></comment>


FlOw clone released on iPhone, developer pleads ignorance - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/06/flow-clone-released-on-iphone-developer-pleads-ignorance.ars

<comment><USER2> From their re-revised web page:

 _Because the game seemed to be upsetting so many, we have decided to remove it completely. We will also make sure nothing like this ever happens in the future._

It's odd that they would be making a "fan remake" without mentioning the original or its creator. Although they weren't profiting from it at the time, one has to wonder if they were planning to monetize it in some way in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting story, but am I the only one who felt that the headline and story almost sounded like something pulled from The Onion? If there was an all-geek version of The Onion, I could easily something like this.</comment>


Github no longer blocked in China - <AUTHOR>

Github is no longer blocked in China. Perhaps other HNers in China can confirm. <comment><USER2> Why not just mirror the entire Github in China everyday so even though the original Github is down people can still survive with (stale) copy in China?

</comment><comment><USER3> haha, it's so great. i am chinese</comment>


Angry Birds on MacBook Air - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/11/01/angryBirdsOnMacbookAir.html <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I am an iOS developer.

Dave might be right in broad strokes, but the post is very muddy on what it would mean for "iOS apps" to run on the MacOS.

Fundamentally, it would be pretty straightforward for Apple to allow iOS apps to be easier to port to the MacOS: bringing some of the UIKit APIs to desktop Cocoa would make things very much easier. As it is, anything that touches images or the user interface has essentially zero overlap between the desktop and mobile APIs. Very frustrating.

However, the speculation about MacOS on the Air being a "compatibility layer" is utterly ludicrous and unfounded. A quick peek inside /System/Library/Frameworks will indicate that the build of 10.6.4 that runs on the Air uses exactly the same set of frameworks that Apple has built up for the MacOS as any other traditional computer they sell.

While the brief preview of Lion given the other week indicates that there will be significant cross-pollenation between desktop and mobile OSes for Apple, in both user interface and (one assumes) APIs, it's hard to exaggerate how off- base this particular item of speculation is, in the right-here and right-now.

I would be unsurprised to see a third architecture added to "Universal" iOS apps to allow them to be run on Lion desktops, but as any iOS developer can tell you, even porting an app from the iPhone to the iPad is hardly a set-it- and-forget-it affair. Winer snarks about the multitouch trackpad at the end of this article, but he's just as wrong about it now as he was when he first said it.

The iPhone is a fundamentally different user experience from the iPad is a fundamentally different user experience from the MacBook Air, even if 10.6.5 + Mac App Store includes all of UIKit.

<comment><USER3> _I would be unsurprised to see a third architecture added to "Universal" iOS apps to allow them to be run on Lion desktops_

Disclaimer: I haven't read the post; I can't because the site isn't loading for me. Instead, I'm replying to the OP.

I would be very surprised to see this. I contribute to Colloquy — An IRC client available for Mac OS X and iOS (iPhone and iPad). Having three separate UIs aside, the shared code between the projects doesn't go through the same build steps. It _cant_ , because iOS doesn't allow third party dynamic frameworks to be loaded; they have to use a static library instead.

In the case of Angry Birds, if you take the .ipa from iTunes and unzip it and then run _otool -l_ on the binary, you can look at the frameworks it uses.

The iOS-specific frameworks it uses are: UIKit, OpenGLES, MediaPlayer and GameKit. GameKit could likely be ported fairly easily. MediaPlayer with a bit of work, could be mapped to QTKit. OpenGL to OpenGLES, I can't say; I don't know anything about either. And UIKit? Mac OS X has to run on Mac Pro's and iMac's as well. Which may or may not have a multitouch device attached. UIKit would be a kludge with multitouch trackpads, and downright useless without one all together.

<comment><USER2> All very good points, and I think we agree on the major bits. Reading over my last post I think I might have been unclear on the main takeaway: desktop apps are fundamentally different from mobile apps.

If Apple lets us write apps that run on both platforms, I would expect the desktop versions to include substantially different resources and have fairly divergent codebases: different nibs, different build processes (perhaps with the disparate binaries packaged into one .app bundle), different interaction metaphors etc.

 _UIKit would be a kludge with multitouch trackpads, and downright useless without one all together._

This is largely true, but there's more to UIKit than touchesBegan:withEvent:. In particular, UIKit's view controllers/navigation controllers/table views could work quite well on OS X (and looking at iLife '09 and the preview of full-screen apps in Lion, this seems quite likely). Further, more iPhone apps use these classes than do advanced multitouch.

Again, this is not to say that writing one app that could conceivably run on both platforms will be at all easy; I still think the OP is way off the mark about that. But it's not unthinkable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No. No no no no. iOS was _created_ in the first place because a touch-oriented direct-manipulation user interface _demands entirely different solutions and paradigms_ than mouse/pointer-driven user interfaces do.

Apple is not going to lead any initiative in trying to pretend that these fundamental differences in user experience don't exist. User experience is something they tend to take seriously.

Apple may provide tools to make it easier for developers to port apps and games between the platforms, but absolutely no way are they going to suggest that developers should gloss over the differences in user experience offered by OS X and iOS.

Having iOS apps run directly on OS X would be to do precisely that. Apps wouldn't be optimized for neither touch/direct manipulation, nor mouse/pointer interfaces.

User interface elements, widgets and paradigms would be general purpose, rather than tailored specifically to the strengths and weaknesses of a particular device.

Just look at the differences between made-for-iPad apps and made-for-iPhone apps. The difference in UI can be astounding when you take the properties of each device into account when designing the app.

OS X isn't just a _little bit_ different than iOS, the way iPad is "just" a big iPod touch. It's _fundamentally_ different — which is why iOS exists at all.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't the new Air have a large (multi) touch pad? That might allow for a more transitional 'middle ground' to exist. Lion and it's feline ancestors will get more touchy over time, plus what Dave W is hinting at is more of a virtualization strategy rather than a sudden leap I think.

I too think that Apple cares deeply about UX, but you're probably discounting the enormous amount of money/users that could be made if this evolution could be made to fly?

<comment><USER6> I play Angry Birds by physically dragging the birds around the screen. How exactly do I do that when the trackpad is somewhere different than the screen?

<comment><USER4> Good point, though I think Angry Birds is one of the apps that would lend itself better to being ported from iOS to OS X. But like you pointed out, it would be quite different still.

Think about how different the official Twitter client would be for example. Refreshing the feed by dragging the list of tweets down; something that feels intuitive, _just right_ , on the iPhone and iOS; would seem weird and retarded on OS X.

Or how about when you swipe over a Tweet (or any list-view item) to manipulate it? Works great in a touch/direct manipulation interface. That would be _incredibly_ poor UI design on OS X. Astoundingly bad. Buttons and widgets would be oversized on OS X. Form factor and layout would be needlessly limited. Etc, etc.

<comment><USER6> That's my point. Do we really expect to merge iOS and desktop apps someday?

We've created a new class of direct-manipulation apps on the iOS devices that we just can't bring to the other machines without using a mouse...or turning them into iPads.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, as a matter of fact, according to Steve Jobs,we do expect that. They webcast his talk at the Back To The Mac announcement, anyone could have watched it. What you're saying directly contradicts what he said.

<comment><USER4> He said nothing like that, as I recall. Please provide a direct quote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's like clockwork:

\- a scripting.com link get submitted to hackernews

\- the first 20 people get to read it

\- the site crashes, leaving everyone else with nothing but the comments.

Dave, have you considered upgrading to a 56k modem? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I shouldn't go out after a discussion starts on YC. ;-)

Glad to see the smiley on your question cause it's a static site running on an EC2 machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something that people might want to keep in mind... The "Emulator" that is used to test iPhone and iPad isn't emulating the iOS hardware. It is implemented with MacOS APIs. Essentially the iOS that you use on the synthetic target is just the same graphics and system libraries that are compiled for the Mac hardware instead of the ARM. That is why the emulator works so fast, even on underpowered machines.

There is no porting for Apple, it is the same.

</comment><comment><USER9> How do they do this?

Do they use an x86 build or do they use an arm emulator to run the software?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe in the first rev the IOS apps are emulated. I bet in the second one it's the other way around. We've already started a transition. They haven't announced it yet, because they want to ease us into it, but I'm sure this is where they're going.

<comment><USER9> Would make sense. I wonder whether its feasible to emulate a 1ghz high end game on a 2.4ghz dual core macbook though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A lot of the comments here don't take into account things Jobs said at the Back To The Mac event. He said the oversize trackpad was there so the Mac could run IOS-like apps. So it's too late to say you can't run them on MacBooks. He said they could.

<comment><USER10> Conceivably you could use the new Magic Trackpad on the desktops (Mac Pro, mini and iMac). What I think would be needed, is better visual feedback that relates to where your multitouch actions as positioned. A single cursor is fine for a mouse, but it seems limiting for touch gestures.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dude, he specifically said that's why he shipped the trackpad. It's one thing if the reporters didn't accurately report the story, quite another when they broadcast the press conference so we call can hear directly what he said.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone use SolidWorks for web design? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone use SolidWorks for web design? <comment><USER2> I've used SolidWorks once for graphic that was used on a webpage. The only reason was having some shadows that didn't look like they were drawn by a 4yo. SolidWorks doesn't have any HTML/Code capability to create a webpage.

Curious or trying to figure if SolidWorks is a viable web design tool?

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding is that it is a tool for use with a very niche market: 3D CAD in a budget. I would think that such a use is not in their roadmap.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish I could imagine how this would even work for anything other than snapshots of render models. Maybe VRML could come back...

<comment><USER5> I seriously hope not.</comment></comment>


TrackDuck gets ready to soar - <AUTHOR> http://arcticstartup.com/2014/01/30/trackduck-gets-ready-to-soar <comment><USER2> It can save a lot of time and make a communication between project team clear and prompt.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool! I think it could be the default tool to give feedback for "Show HN" ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice startup. in my opinion it`ll make developer`s life easier</comment>


Ask HN: How do I escape the echo chamber? - <AUTHOR> I know my social feed is an echo chamber. I have tried to cultivate a varied group of friends so that I get to see alternative points of view, but it's not working. How can I see a wider variety of opinions in my social feed? <comment><USER2> The answer to this is trivial: find people with dissenting opinions and put them in your feed.

Apple fan? Find a pro-Android site. I'm an increasingly adamant progressive, but I make sure to read r/the_donald (if only to scan their vile talking points). I make sure to read twitter feeds of people deeply critical not only of Silicon Valley, but of capitialism entirely.

But be aware that lots of people engage in deliberately manipulative behavior in social networks these days. You need to be extremely critical of everything you read as you widen your social network, until you can safely weed out the bad actors you may have introduced.

<comment><USER3> >I make sure to read r/the_donald (if only to scan their vile talking points).

I did the same. It's easy to assume that Trump supporters agree with _all_ of Trump's wacky policies and so must be horrible people. Closer to the truth is that very often they only focused on _one_ issue that they thought was very important to them and think the rest of it is just as nutty as you do.

It's a good thing to understand their positions as best we can because the mid-terms are coming in just 2 years and we're going to need their help to reign in some of this guy's excesses. The US can (and has) survived unfortunate choices for president. Its built into the system.

<comment><USER2> Ugh.

The problem is that these people, while the majority, are just happy to ignore or go along with basically anything and anyone's talking points. Folks like VA-issue voters have a reason you can empathize with, but the harm they're causing to get the "single issue" that wasn't even promised on redressed is stunning.

Sorry to vent at you, I just think these single-issue folks are the worst. They're the ultimate selfish category of voter. In many cases, it wasn't even the democrats who dropped the ball on them, they just have this weird idea DJT is an outsider somehow and not a massively connected rich man with ties to the GOP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tend to be in a liberal bubble chamber. What I do is bookmark conservative websites in a bookmark folder and then periodically open all tabs into a new window to read. My conservative sites of choice for what it's worth are The American Conservative, National Review, The Spectator, The Federalist, The Weekly Standard and then a couple of religious sites for good measure, The National Catholic Review and Commentary (Conservative Jewish.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Same. I have some oddball climate denial sites I love to read. Doesn't seem to matter to The Feed.

Good suggestion on actually making a bookmark list and reviewing it every so often though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Go on Youtube. There are tons of opposing view points from left/right, liberal/conservative sides.

FB is echo chamber central. Your FB "friends" just freak out, start calling you names if you say something contrary to their beliefs. Many of the people I considered rather rational started making completely nonsensical arguments.

I've always considered myself rather liberal, but watching the recent developments, alt-right arguments make a lot of sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> this is my problem. I want FB to be less of an echo chamber. I'd like my posts to be places where people of all stripes can debate each other, because it's one of the few places they meet. But the algorithm seems determined to defeat me :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't forget to add alternative views from the left either (most have FB pages or Twitter feeds). Some of my favorite are: Counterpunch, Libcom, Mother Jones, Truthdig, and on the more "cheeky" side, I'd check out r/LateStageCapitalism.

</comment><comment><USER7> Start a subscription for two weekly newspapers with preferably different political standpoints. Read all of them, this forces you out of your search bubbles while simultaneous giving you the option of slowing down your news and information intake

</comment><comment><USER8> Close your Facebook account, stop looking at Twitter, start researching things independently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Meh, I'm an immigrant. FB is the best way of keeping up with friends and family I don't want to lose touch with.

It's a bit like saying the cure for heart disease is to not have a heart...</comment></comment>


IPhone 5 May Burn Through Excessive Cell Data on Verizon - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/iphone-5-cell-data-leakage/ <comment><USER2> Verizon specific patch is already to be applied and no charges are to be applied due to this bug.</comment>


When to look for investors? - <AUTHOR>

	I'm a 1st time entrepreneur who's got a great idea, and being my 1st time, not a lot of clue.
I've developed a proof of concept and have sourced hardware for a prototype and am creating a business plan to flesh out the idea (which as an IT guy is pretty tough going).
my idea is validated by friends saying they know people (and who are people) who have been looking for this specific solution but couldnt find any.
unfortunately for me i cant fund this myself and need to approach others for funding.
my question is, when is a generally accepted good time to get out there to start finding people who would be interested in looking at what i've come up with. If it makes any difference, i'm not in the valley, but in australia. <comment><USER2> Hey ryszard99 - drop me an email jacobaldridge at google's email service. I'm a Brisbane business coach so happy to offer any thoughts about your business plan, and I have some (some) connections into funding.

General rule is that it's best to look for investors when you don't need them, but for great ideas with a realistic plan that's not hard and fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> thx for the reply.. i'll send off something to your email now..</comment></comment>


Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces - <AUTHOR> https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 <comment><USER4> Previous outages:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912) \- 5 months ago (longer discussion)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461) \- 7 months ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431) \- 8 months ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815) \- 1 year ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743) \- 3 years ago

<comment><USER5> In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down.

Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm guessing because they have datacenters everywhere with huge fat pipes in between, and their SREs are probably top notch who don't take shortcuts.

Google gets a whole bunch of things wrong at times, but somethings I gotta say, they've nailed it.

<comment><USER6> Facebook springs to mind as well.

<comment><USER7> Facebook quite often breaks their stuff and/or goes down, however, their outages usually last for just a few minutes.

<comment><USER8> They recently pushed out an iOS update for Messenger that crashed to springboard any time you tried to resume it from background. It took a couple of hours to get a new build up, plus however long for affected users to all install the new version.

I'd love to hear the story of how that made it through testing.

<comment><USER9> What does "crashed to springboard" mean?

<comment><USER8> Sorry, should have just said "home screen" for clarity, but SpringBoard is the iOS application that makes the home screen. It's akin to Finder.

A fresh launch of Messenger worked until you switched out and put it in the background. When you tried to resume it (either from home icon or task switcher) it would immediately die and could be launched fresh on the second try.

Basically every time you wanted to use it you either had to kill it in the app switcher and then launch it, or launch it twice.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/15/17468136/facebook- messeng...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/15/17468136/facebook-messenger- ios-update-crash-bug)

My favorite part is that since Facebook doesn't do useful release notes (best guess because they're testing different features on different users and changes never actually land for everyone in a specific version), all the App Store said for the busted version was "We update the app regularly to make it better for you!" Oooops.

Though that's an interesting thought, I wonder if a feature had rolled out to a subset of users and it was crashing because it tried to pull some piece of account info that doesn't exist on accounts without it? Testing still should have caught that, but if the test accounts were all testing the new feature I could see it sneaking through. From my end it looked like a 100% reproducible crash on resume which is pretty sad to release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page!

This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company comms.

It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production- dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its outage...

ITT: Chat about decentralisation that will ultimately lead to no action.*

*Because we've had this discussion so many times before...

<comment><USER11> Yes it's a single point of failure, but so what? I don't particularly care whether other organizations fail at the same time as I do, I just care whether _I_ fail. Hosting my own chat system does not solve that problem. In fact, it may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration, and Slack probably has more expertise on that. It's likely that they can fix this problem for all customers faster than I can fix my problem for myself. And it's not like I'm crippled when Slack is down. If it's urgent I can use the phone, and my todo list is stored outside Slack.

<comment><USER12> I think it's inexcusable for a chat program to go down in 2018.

* your hdd failed? Use a raid

* your power went out? Use a UPS

* your DNS went down? Use a fallback (slack2)

* your whole datacenter flooded? Good thing you have multiple replicated cloud instances that seamlessly take over

See, these are the issues that "the cloud" was supposed to solve. Not give us the same problems as before, just with a recurring bill for "chat as a service".

And inb4 "chill Mike it's just a chat server not life support firmware" yeah but slack is the most trivial software you can think of: send _text_ from one computer to another. I see no reason this service can't be nearly as reliable as life support firmware in 2018. We've had over 30 years to get this right. Raise the fricking bar.

<comment><USER13> >slack is the most trivial software you can think of

This is like saying that food service at 30k feet in a passenger airline is trivial because all the server has to do is walk up and down a narrow aisle handing out food from a cart.

Since "you see no reason this service can't be nearly as reliable as life support firmware", one of two things must be true:

1) You know something nobody else knows. In which case great, you've stumbled on a huge opportunity to go put your knowledge to work and get stupendously rich by outcompeting this "trivial" software company. Get to it, genius!

or

2) The reason you "see no reason..." is that you're unaware of one or more relevant facts.

Which of these do you think is more probable?

<comment><USER12> 3) slack will get their "chat as a service" monthly fee whether the service actually works or not, so why commit to higher levels of service? We can get our users acclimated to outages and then sell them "slack Premium, for Serious Business", charge an even higher fee, and get stupendously rich all over again. This is the "growth" that investors demand, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hope Slack considers doing a post-mortem similar to Gitlab[1]. Sharing what they learned and giving customers context is appreciated.

[1]: [https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of- database-o...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database- outage-of-january-31/)

<comment><USER15> Yes, that way we can beat them up for years to come based on whatever mistake they made. It would be even better if they told us which employee made the mistake so we can incessantly mock that employee openly and publicly every time Slack is ever mentioned on HN. When GitHub was purchased by Microsoft, Gitlab came up quite a bit and we got to rehash that whole database outage over again many times over those few days. It was sad.

If it were my company, I would say a little as humanly possible.

<comment><USER16> It's not about assigning blame, it's about sharing lessons learned with the broader community and being transparent and honest with paying customers about issues that may have significant impact on downstream productivity.

<comment><USER15> I entirely understand what you are saying, believe me I do. But that is not the way some communities take it. We still see messages like "You could move to Gitlab but... you know they dropped their production database a couple of years back? Use them at your own risk!"

We learned a lot from the Gitlab outage. It was a simple mistake and not one they will have again, yet people still beat them up for it. I'm not sure the value is there for the company to be super open about their outages and issues.

<comment><USER17> On the contrary, I would trust them quite a bit less, not more, if they had an hours long outage _without any explanation_.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps - but would you even remember it, without the juicy details of what happened? I probably would forget if some service had a few hours downtime a year or two ago, if I didn't know any details to make it stand out from other outages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe unrelated, but my AWS-hosted websockets-using app had an outage starting at the same time. Also a third-party API provider we use for handling inbound phone calls. So this smells like a wider outage than just Slack.

<comment><USER20> That's interesting. More speculation: they haven't given any detail in 2 hours, perhaps if it's an upstream/3rd-party problem, they haven't been given any info.

<comment><USER19> I know it's not exactly scientific, but the front page of [https://downdetector.com](https://downdetector.com) shows a number of services that have problem spikes starting anywhere from 3am US/Eastern to 9am US/Eastern and continuing through now (11:24 US/Eastern): Google Home, Fortnite, Exede, Level 3, New York Times, AWS. Maybe totally unrelated to each other, who knows.

<comment><USER21> That certainly does look suspicious there - especially level3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but "We've received word that all workspaces are having troubles connecting to Slack." makes it sound like their internal monitoring didn't catch whatever is causing this. I was personally experiencing issues for about 20-30 minutes before the status update was posted.

<comment><USER23> I think that is just the tongue in cheek language they like to use.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it's really funny and ironic when you cost customers money!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's interesting to me that the update messages are posted every 30 minutes from 1st notification until resolution. Judging by this and every other outage I assume this is automatic, and probably implemented to appease the people who are probably frustrated by the outage.

[https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663](https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663)

<comment><USER20> We have a similar policy at $WORK (but manual). In our experience customers go mental if you say absolutely nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's times like this I wish there was a solid decentralized standard to pick from, but there's no clear choice between XMPP and Matrix.

<comment><USER27> It's not about the protocols, it's about having a client with a user experience that is acceptable to an entire company rather than just a team of engineers. Which decentralized protocol has such a client? (Speaking as someone who got burned trying to advocate for IRC at a company that eventually and inevitably switched to Slack.)

<comment><USER28> Curious why you got burned with IRC client UX given the multitude of clients available for it.

<comment><USER29> Technical people who haven't used IRC can barely figure out IRC their first time using it. Trying to sell IRC to a company would be hilarious. Bob in Accounting getting on IRC and feeling comfortable with it's UX?

<comment><USER30> Then you've never seen the 'hilariously' bad UX they already put up with, with things like Quickbooks.

mIRC is pretty straight forward compared to that.

<comment><USER31> A hypothesis I like is that when it's an application you use to communicate with other people, people are a lot less tolerant of a confusing UX.

The reason is that when you sit there clicking through a bunch of menus to find something in QuickBooks (or a typical atrocious enterprise app), nobody sees you; and if you screw something up there, you spend some more time fixing it and nobody sees the screwup. Frustrating maybe, as you waste time, but almost everyone has some frustrating wastes of time at work.

If you're on IRC and people are talking at you and you sit there fumbling to figure out how to respond, it's like you're in a conversation and tongue-tied and everyone's looking at you. And if you screw something up, like send a message to the wrong channel... now you've done it in front of all your coworkers, in real time. Humans _hate_ looking stupid in front of the group.

And if you screw something up on IRC in front of your coworkers, and you're someone with even a little anxiety about not being tech-savvy... that's going to flare right up.

Also, because now you're embarrassed, you're going to want something to blame. So you blame the tool.

<comment><USER32> Yes. Also, QuickBooks is accounting, which is supposed to be hard while "chatting" with people is supposed to be easy.

QuickBooks doesn't have to suffer in comparison to better UX performing similar tasks in people's personal lives while IRC can be compared (unfavorably) to texting apps, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, AIM once upon a time, etc.

<comment><USER30> mIRC offers a fairly good UX compared to all those.

If you're setting it up in a corporate environment, just change the ini files so it autoconnects to your server. It'll pop up a list of channels they can join. The server can SAJoin them to particular channels on connection too. The UI is very clean and lightweight: a channel scrolls messages and they appear, there's an input bar at the bottom, and there's a list of users on the side. It's written in MFC and Win32 APIs, so it's blazingly fast compared to most applications, and you can find a version that will run on every computer made in the past 25 years.

The united states military used mIRC extensively for battle field coordination. I think it's up to the task of handling bob from accounting.

<comment><USER32> An image search for mIRC shows that it is ugly as shit. It has a sidebar to list channels but the current channel window is still an undifferentiated mess of handles, commands, and actual conversation. Stored communication is mainly a server-side problem but I don't know if mIRC has an interface to show DMs you missed while offline or to indicate which part of a channel's conversation happened since you last looked.

Even if mIRC would suffice for Windows, you've not handled Macs, phones, etc. Who gives a shit if it runs on a 25 year old computer?

The US military has produced some specific examples of good design but isn't known highly valuing usability, let alone whether someone would enjoy using a tool. IRC is very functional and mIRC appears to add a little polish beyond a pure command-line interface, those are bare minimums and not good enough.

<comment><USER30> > An image search for mIRC shows that it is ugly as shit.

ok

> It has a sidebar to list channels but the current channel window is still an > undifferentiated mess of handles, commands, and actual conversation.

No.

Each channel and private message get their own MDI window you are free to minimize, maximize or layout however you want.

Notifications are turned on by default, but they can be disabled. You'll get a tray notification if mIRC is minimized, and inside the title bar of the window will flash. Notifications happen when your nick is mentioned.

There's a horizontal line that goes across the dialog window that indicates the location of the conversation the last time it was focused.

>Even if mIRC would suffice for Windows, you've not handled Macs, phones, etc. Who gives a shit if it runs on a 25 year old computer?

Other clients work on other platforms. mIRC is just what I brought up since it's desktop windows client and that the most common case for an office environment.

> The US military has produced some specific examples of good design but isn't > known highly valuing usability, let alone whether someone would enjoy using > a tool. IRC is very functional and mIRC appears to add a little polish > beyond a pure command-line interface, those are bare minimums and not good > enough.

It's a simple, light-weight way for people to send short text messages in near real time with tens of thousands of people. I think that's good enough, and it works at a scale that far surpasses the SaaS chat options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Despite having a vote increment velocity far exceeding other items, a publish time of only 25 minutes ago, and more points, this item just dropped from #5 to #7 on the front page.

How's that work exactly?

Edit: It's now droppped to #14 even with comment count also rapidly increasing.

<comment><USER34> Comment count is a factor.

edit: it's a negative factor...

<comment><USER33> Thanks for the clarity, this makes more sense now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This might be the longest downtime I've ever seen for Slack.

</comment><comment><USER36> IRC had uptime in the scale of decades. Why are our 2018 solutions so fragile?

<comment><USER37> Native emoji support, aesthetically pleasing front-ends, and clear product direction are some of the main positives I see, even if the combination of php on the backend and electron on the frontend aren't the most sophisticated technical components in history.

I prefer decentralized and open things, but a cohesive vision can sometimes provide a better user experience across a more restricted set of functionality than an army of hackers, each solving their own problems.

<comment><USER38> Offline messaging, mobile clients, push notifications, history, search, rich text formatting, message editing, file transfer, etc etc etc

<comment> rkuykendall-com ..., inline images, display names, deleting messages, editing messages, reactions, avatars, multi-user private messages, etc etc etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Spare a thought for the chatops crowd who may be blissfully unaware that their own infrastructure is down

<comment><USER40> I have little pity for the folks who decided that re-implementing a shell in a chat application was a well-conceived notion.

<comment><USER39> Hopefully they're learning this lesson.

I can just see it now. A company's app is dying from all the timeouts to a slack webhook, however they can't deploy because slack is down.

<comment><USER41> Oh god. Who would have a Slack webhook as a blocking part of their pipeline??

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Surely some of the Slack team are hiding on here? Any idea what's going on? ;)

<comment><USER43> If they are, I sure hope they're doing something more productive than surfing HN

<comment><USER42> Very much agreed. I meant it as a tongue in cheek comment. I am however deeply disappointed by the vague and useless updates on [https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663](https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663)

They might as well have written:

      - nope but maybe at some point a yep
      - still nope
      - <USER3>
      - <USER3>

... I know many companies don't like to give details in the heat of the moment (and the engineers that understand are likely working on it), so I really do hope they give us a good retro after it's all over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Downtimes happen, I get it, but this one lasts for 3+ hours already. Can't even remember the previous time when such a large service was down for so long.

</comment><comment><USER45> Seems to be fixed... with zero info on their status page about what went wrong or otherwise.

>We're happy to report that workspaces should be able to connect again, as we've isolated the problem. Some folks may need to refresh (Ctrl + R or Cmd + R). If you're still experiencing issues, please drop us a line

Hilariously, their "uptime in the last 30 days" still shows 100%.

</comment><comment><USER46> While I appreciate the timely status updates, it almost seems like Slack has built a random status update bot to post updates that don't say anything exactly every 30 minutes.

[https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663](https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663)

</comment><comment><USER47> Even Slack Enterprise is affected. So much about "this runs on your own infrastructure".

<comment><USER33> Slack Enterprise has never run on your own infrastructure.

<comment><USER47> It doesn't? I thought that was its only reason to exist.

<comment><USER33> It's pitch is a little different, it gives you 'Workspaces' which are somewhat connected, and tools to manage big deployments.

IBM, Oracle and many large companies use it because 100,000+ participants in one workspace is quite unmanageable.

Think channel namespacing whilst unifying user provisioning and enabling DM and MPDM across the entire company. Users can have access to one or many namespaces, they sign in once and it populates all enabled workspaces into that users client.

You can share channels between workspace within Enterprise Grid fairly trivially (although this now works between Slack tenancies owned by different companies too!)

Still runs on the same infrastructure in AWS as other Slack customers though.

From a policy perspective you can push down settings to all Workspaces in your SEG, and define whether you "centrally control" or "delegate to Workspace owners" on a setting by setting basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> for a decentralized alternative: [https://matrix.org/blog/home/](https://matrix.org/blog/home/)

<comment><USER49> They have too many 'decentralized', i.e. blockchain, things on their landing page for my liking. However, since blockchain 'technologies' are the wonder kool-aid for everything and given that messaging 'apps' are trivial compared to rocket surgery, how come that there isn't a messaging app that is decentralised with these wonder technologies, were it only costs you a few cryptokitties to get your messages and where you earn a few dogecoin to forward on other peoples messages?

<comment><USER50> Just to be clear, the Matrix protocol and technology does not involve Blockchains in any way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The issue I'm having is that I can't send messages. Reading them is fine. The dashboards on the walls at SlackHQ must be pretty interesting right now.

<comment><USER52> If you want to stop being able to receive them as well, just hit reload (then you won't be able to reconnect).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is a weird outage...

\- I am in UK

\- I had similar problems last night (around 2AM GMT) but status.slack.com was all green, and my colleagues in the US seemed to be using it okay

\- Currently it's completely down on desktop for me (waiting to reconnect...)

\- Connecting through a US VPN does not resolve the problem on Desktop, even though my US colleagues are using it on Desktop successfully right now

\- Mobile works for receiving and sending messages, but there is a delay

Anyone else seeing symptoms like this?

</comment><comment><USER54> What does Slack as a company use to communicate when Slack the product is down? :>

<comment><USER45> Almost definitely IRC, just like Google does. [https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/managing- incide...](https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/managing- incidents.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's really disappointing to get this update after ~2 hours of downtime

> We have no new information to share just yet, but we're continuing our > efforts. Your patience is truly appreciated. > [https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663](https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663)

</comment><comment><USER55> Does anyone know about any Slack alternatives that support bots, GIFYs and emojis ? And above all that is not ridiculously slow.

<comment><USER56> There's Google Chat if you use G Suite like us. [https://chat.google.com/welcome](https://chat.google.com/welcome)

Or Atlassian's Stride is really great too: [https://www.stride.com/](https://www.stride.com/)

If your org happens to be part of the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem, there's Microsoft Teams. All of the products support bots, gifys, and emojis. I personally think Google Chat and Stride are much faster than slack too. I haven't tried Microsoft Teams yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The funny thing is that sending normal messages just times out 90% of the time. But /me comments generate an error after timeout:

slackbot9:28 AM /me _throws shoe at slack_ failed with the error "ASSocket: timed out reading 4 bytes from adminserver-3wvr:10443"

We've switched to google hangouts as an ad-hoc workaround..

</comment><comment><USER58> Are there solid Slack-style self-hosted alternatives? (The gitlab of the slack world, to be clear.)

<comment><USER59> Atlassian, the folks behind bitbucket, jira, and (now) trello have a self hosted product: [https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat](https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat)

They also have a Slack alternative, called Stride.

<comment><USER60> And HipChat is horrible. Doesn't even sync which multiple devices and their mobile app doesn't support the iPhone X screen size which is a trivial update to make considering HipChat is used by some pretty massive customers. Code highlighting is still, (after years,) pretty bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> My team jumped onto IRC, which is working pretty well. No custom emoji, but that's about it.

<comment><USER54> Do you run your own server?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Fixed, but their status page is rather optimistically reporting 100% uptime this month.

</comment><comment><USER63> Slack and Chromecast having an almost simultaneous worlwide outage... have they something in common? Same enemies?

[https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=chromecast%20slack](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=chromecast%20slack)

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-home-and- chromecast...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-home-and-chromecast- are-down-affecting-users-worldwide/)

</comment><comment><USER64> This is why I like working on iOS apps, if all hell breaks lose I can't do anything. When something like Slack goes belly up, imagine those poor folks having to respond.

</comment><comment><USER65> Yikes. This one looks like a doozy. Herre's to hoping there's a post mortem this time around.

</comment><comment><USER66> Just as we sign a £100K+/annum contact with them...

At least it happened before we've migrated.

<comment><USER29> There are so many open source solutions, Mattermost, Rocketchat, etc, why are companies willing to pay $100k/yr for Slack? What was the defining feature that others didn't have? Even Discord feels like it has far more features than Slack.

<comment><USER67> Name recognition, employee familiarity (I've used Slack at every job I've worked since early 2015, I pretty much know what to expect from it always), and punting maintenance costs (this is probably the biggest factor).

I love IRC and XMPP. I'd love to run one of those, or some new service (Matrix?), at work. However, my time is arguably better spent doing anything _other_ than maintaining such services, and the same goes for most engineers at most companies, sadly.

Side factor: the mobile clients for IRC and XMPP almost universally suck, at least on Android. I imagine if those problems had been solved in a reliable way, more companies may consider them (assuming the allocation of engineering resources problem isn't a problem).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-squared Telegram was having an outage at about the same time, probably unrelated but still: [http://downdetector.com/status/telegram](http://downdetector.com/status/telegram)

</comment><comment><USER68> What backup methods of communication are distributed teams using when Slack goes down?

<comment><USER40> My group uses Roman fire signals [1].

[1] [http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_syste...](http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_systems.htm)

<comment><USER69> this is a greatly underrated comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> That's a lot of eggs in their basket. A major downside of the current way a lot of these companies work is that there's a huge incentive for them to never allow customers to self-host their product.

</comment><comment><USER71> I wonder who is writing those status messages. as a customer this reads like "please wait, ETA to fix unknown" in 10 different ways.

</comment><comment><USER72> Back online here.

<comment><USER73> Here too

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Thats the problem without self-hosting your essential stuff.

<comment><USER75> Reasons my self-hosted servers have gone down in the past year:

\- Scheduled electrical maintenance that facilities manager failed to disclose (even though they knew about it for weeks).

\- Emergency power-down because two of the four air conditioners failed at the same time.

\- Someone accidentally powered off the VM.

I'd much rather have an hour long outage here and there than incur the cost of defending against these circumstances (and still have it go down for some new unforeseen reason).

<comment><USER74> >\- Someone accidentally powered off the VM.

how is that self-hosting when you don't control the hypervisor in this case?

it usually implies that you at least have some sort of control. either having a real server somewhere (with ups and stuff) or at home, where you know when power is out.

while what you are doing is technically self-hosting, I would have changed the VM provider after the first incident like you described.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I imagine people felt more productive today without Slack

</comment><comment><USER77> Relaxing morning off on humpday!

</comment><comment><USER64> Still no work on the cause or fixes after 90 minutes. I wonder what kind of problem this could be.

</comment><comment><USER78> give them some slack guys

</comment><comment><USER79> Skype still up

</comment><comment><USER80> back up for me.

</comment><comment><USER81> And productivity is up!

<comment><USER82> Can confirm. No wait, the first thing I did was check HN and now am reading this and oh there's another interesting thing.

<comment><USER83> HN's noprocrast setting cures that.

<comment><USER84> It works all too well. This will be my last comment of the day before noprocrast kicks me off HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> If only there were a venerable, decentralized instant messaging system we could use, perhaps some kind of internet relay chat system...

</sarcasm>

You reap what you sow. Depending on Slack for your communications is a bad idea. I can't even remember the last time any of the IRC networks I frequent had a total outage.

<comment><USER86> Irc left out federation when the spec was crafted in 1984. It was deemed to bandwidth heavy.

Jabber/xmpp was a good step in the right direction. Too bad it overused plugins and bad extensions and XML abuse. Would have been loads better had they though far enough in advance.

<comment><USER85> It's not federated, but it is distributed and fault tolerant. The protocol is open and widely implemented and the implementations are mature and stable.

<comment><USER87> I mean, Slack isn't federated either. I don't know of any chat platforms that are federated except Jabber. _edit_ Gchat and AIM federated in 2011, but AIM is dead now, so...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tonight will be the longest night in the history of Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/12/21/7424371/winter-solstice

<comment><USER2> Those diagrams of the tides always show that there is a bulge opposite to the moon and sun, yet say that both bulges are due to the increased gravity being nearer to the moon and sun than is the center of the earth.

That never made a whole lot of sense to me.

Actually the bulge on the opposite side of the earth is due to the centripetal accelleration of the earth as it orbits the moon. Yes, the earth orbits the moon. Similarly, the sun orbits the earth. While quite small, I expect we could measure the earth's tidal influence on the sun.

I had to major in astronomy at Caltech before I was able to get anyone to tell me why the tides bulge on both sides. Even at Tech, no one seemed to grasp that the earth orbits the moon &c.

<comment><USER3> That's incorrect. I majored in CS at Caltech, but I think I can explain this properly. It doesn't have anything to do with orbiting or angular momentum.

Imagine that only the Earth and the International Space Station exist. The ISS is doomed because it has stopped orbiting, and is falling straight down. Inside the ISS, an astronaut has placed 5 marbles in the shape of a plus sign (center, left/right/up/down). For convenience, the "center" marble is also at the center of mass of the whole ISS. There's no air or anything to mess up the results. What happens to the marbles?

Look at the problem from the frame of the Earth. The Earth is exerting a certain force on the center marble, call it F. The "down" marble is slightly closer to the Earth, so it experiences a greater force, F + Something. The "up" marble is slightly further from the Earth, so it experiences a lesser force, F - Blah. The "left" and "right" marbles experience forces very very close to F (slightly less, if they're in a straight line, but much closer to F than F - Blah). However, those forces are directed towards the center of the Earth, so those vectors have small components directed towards the "center" marble.

Now that we've figured out the forces, look at the problem from the frame of the marbles. We're in free fall, so the "center" marble floats motionless. The "down" marble is going to float further away from the center marble (F + Something pulls "down" harder), and the "up" marble will also float further away from the center marble (F - Blah pulls "up" less than everything else). The "left" and "right" marbles float towards the center.

Using only Newton's laws, this reveals that gravity's behavior over a volume has a stretching effect in the up-down direction, and a squeezing effect in the left-right direction. GR confirms this. This effect is the tidal force.

When applied to the Earth and the Moon, this explains the two bulges. The bulge closer to the Moon is due to F + Something, because that water is being pulled stronger. The bulge away from the Moon is due to F - Blah, because that water is being pulled less than everything else.

<comment><USER4> I didn't go to Caltech ;)

It can also be described via a conservation law. If the Earth were frozen solid, and the Moon+Earth system started up to something like we have now, then they would be in a stable orbit.

Next, thaw the water. If only one lobe forms then there's a violation of conservation of angular momentum.

To really see the problem, use the planet "H2O", made entirely of ice, instead of Earth. Once the ice thaws, which water decides to form the single lobe? If all of it flows towards the Moon then it wouldn't be a stable orbit.

There can't be zero lobes because the system is asymmetric around the barycenter. If everything is in equilibrium then the result needs to be axially symmetric, giving two asymmetric lobes; one towards and one away from the Moon. (The asymmetry is due to the size of the Earth vs. the distance to the Moon. It's about 60 radii away, so not that asymmetric, but the near-side tides will be higher. As another example, a micro black hole orbiting very close to the water surface will only have noticeable local effects.)

Of course, in real life the system isn't in equilibrium. The Earth isn't tidally locked to the Moon, the orbits aren't perfectly circular, the bodies wobble and aren't spherical, etc. and the sea isn't deep enough for this lobe wave to travel, so it isn't true that there are two bulges. [http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/121858](http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/121858) gives a lovely explanation and [http://www.lhup.edu/~DSimanek/scenario/tides.htm](http://www.lhup.edu/~DSimanek/scenario/tides.htm) works through many "Tidal Misconceptions".

As a result, some places have more than two tides, like [http://www.southamptonvts.co.uk/live_information/tides_and_w...](http://www.southamptonvts.co.uk/live_information/tides_and_weather/high_and_low_tide_times/) , with High Water, Second Tide, and Low Water.

P.S. I hope I got that correct! The last time I did this sort of analysis was 20 years ago. And personally, my intuition is based on the stretching force interpretation. One of the mechanics problems I worked out then was to explain why tidal forces radially align the long axis of a spacecraft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It was actually the longest day in history where I am :)</comment>


Broadcom open sources wireless drivers - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/23786/BREAKING_BROADCOM_OPEN_SOURCES_WIRELESS_DRIVERS

<comment><USER2> Man, that article certainly is ungrateful. Broadcom does something we can all accept as "good", and kragil's response is "it's about time"?

<comment><USER3> No joke - ironic from the Linux crowd to bash how timely some corp releases their proprietary data.

The person writing the article has been in industry and realises what the proverbial "red tape" is, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Duplicate of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1677832>. Mine had original source as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> finally, a step in the right direction. These chipsets are in wide use, i have jumped through the binary-blob-download hoop many times in the past. For people wondering about the Linux community's attitude towards Broadcom: They certainly took a long time and much "encouragement" to realize the benefit of opening their drivers.

</comment><comment><USER6> I didn't bother to dig deeper into this, but, does someone know under what license the code has been released?

<comment><USER7> Here's the comment from one of the source files:

      /*
       * Copyright (c) 2010 Broadcom Corporation
       *
       * Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
       * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
       * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
       *
       * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
       * WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
       * MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY
       * SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
       * WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
       * OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN
       * CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
       */</comment></comment>


Nasa runs competition to help make old Fortran code faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39803425 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14265751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14265751)</comment>


Ask YC: What income-generating systems do you employ? - <AUTHOR>

I remember reading a Steve Pavlina article a few years back about income. His claim was that it's better to diversify your income in the sense of decentralization. That's why a salary could be a lot more risky than self-employment. If you set up a bunch of automated systems that generate you a $100/month, then a single system failure will only put you out of that $100; on the other hand, if you put all your eggs in one basket, you bankrupt if anything happens. The idea is that once you set up enough of these systems, you can essentially spend only a few hours each week or month tuning them, but otherwise sit back and let them generate income in the background.
Pavlina's example was his game website. He created a site (company) that sold games, and once he optimized his site to be easily found on Google and automatically process transactions by letting users download the game after payment, he could essentially put it on cruise control and let the income flow (and all the games would themselves be little "systems"--if one game was made obsolete by a much better competitor, he would not lose all his income).
I am curious as to examples of such income generating systems. Several blatantly obvious ones come to mind: ecommerce (what Pavlina did), writing a book/song/etc. and collecting the royalties, taking a tiny cut when providing a service (e.g., ATM fees, taxes, etc.). You might be using several of those right now, and that's great. But additionally, I've been hard pressed to find more creative examples that deviate from these formulas. Perhaps it is because they work so well (after all, write code once and sell it a thousand times is pretty damningly attractive), but perhaps there are also many others, simply unpopular due to poor implementation or too obscure for a guy like me to notice. <comment><AUTHOR> To continue this line of thought, consider one of the most powerful companies in the world: Walmart. Walmart creates stores which are automated systems: each store has employees which manage day to day operations, and thousands of different vendors provide their products that are shipped to each store, and sold with a small cut given to Walmart. Hence, Walmart employs a version of the "take a tiny cut" system.

An easily envisioned future store would completely automate this process with automated transportation (driving AI?) which took the products from the vendors and delivered it to stores, automated day-to-day operations (theft control systems, automated check out counters, etc.), and require only a small amount of tuning (a couple of "real" people in each store to accomodate any edge cases, like an unsatisfied customer who wants to complain to a live person). Such a store would require minimal management (occasional technical fixes and a couple of human managers), but each sale would take a tiny cut of profit for the company. The first company to successfully (without "bugs") engineer such a system would undoubtedly become incredibly rich.

</comment><comment><USER2> i have a full-time job.

edit: everything else i do is on the side</comment>


Always download Debian packages using Tor – the simple recipe - <AUTHOR> http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html <comment><USER2> I might be missing something, but how is downloading over HTTP via Tor more secure than downloading over HTTP otherwise?

<comment><USER3> I have the same question (by "secure", my meaning is "intact, without tampering"). I don't see a need for _secrecy_ that I'm downloading an innocent Linux package or other public ISO.</comment></comment>


FTP Must die the technical explanation - <AUTHOR> http://mywiki.wooledge.org/FtpMustDie <comment><USER3> Standards documents are created by people with a need. They then implement the feature and seek feedback, hence the term RFC.

Ideally rather than being negative, how about discussing how it could be improved in the form of an RFC document.

Also the section on comparing an FTP session to a HTTP GET is just misleading. One is an authenticated long running session where as the other is just a fetch with a connection left hanging (resources on the server are tied up).

</comment><comment><USER4> I loved the active/passive mode feature of FTP back before getting broadband. I had an FTP client that would put one server in active mode and one server in passive mode and transfer files directly between them with only status messages going down my 9600 baud connection.

</comment><comment><USER5> _" If security of your authentication credentials matters one iota to you, you'll use scp to transfer files, not FTP."_

If security maters then use a secure version of the FTP (SFTP or FTPS). FTP has a greater multi-platform support compared to SCP.

</comment><comment><USER6> I never had to use FTP at work in my career. Somehow I always got an SSH login.

FTP always was more of a private thing for me, like BitTorrent.

</comment><comment><USER7> As the author of an FTP server called Net::FTPServer, I must say this article is full of crap. All modern clients request binary mode and passive connections by default. All modern servers can restrict the range of port numbers used on the server side. Clients support encrypted control and/or data connections. You can checksum files using de facto standard commands (it's better than unencrypted http in this regard).

Now some benefits of FTP:

\- easy uploading of files

\- standardized file listings, delete, mkdir, etc

\- extensible protocol via "SITE" commands

\- wide availability of clients and servers

It's better to compare FTP to WebDAV. After comparing it you may still think FTP should "die" (whatever that means in the open internet where any two people can run any service they want), but at least you'd be making a sound technical decision, which you're not doing by reading this article.

<comment><USER8> > \- standardized file listings, delete, mkdir, etc

Isn't one of the rant's point specifically that these are _not_ standardised (in a de-jure sense)?

> It's better to compare FTP to WebDAV.

SFTP exists, has none of FTP or WebDAV's issues and (as far as I can tell) ticks all your boxes. Even extensions: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf- secsh-filexfer-13#sect...](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-secsh- filexfer-13#section-10)

<comment><USER7> Those commands really are standardized. The problem is that the rant didn't bother to look at any of the more modern RFCs, nor at de facto standards supported across lots of servers and clients.

SFTP is fine too, assuming you have support, which is not available on many embedded platforms, and even on Windows requires downloading extra tools.

I'm hardly claiming that FTP is the pinnacle of human achievement. The original standards have many obvious flaws, but those have long been fixed. What we have now is maybe not elegant, but it works and the problems with it are _not_ any of the things outlined in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ftp is still the fastest file transfer protocol , when you invent something better then you can moan otherwise plz go to fail.

<comment><USER10> Everything unencrypted will always be faster than the encrypted counterpart. Do you also deliberately avoid HTTPS? And is that minuscule performance gain really worth the risk with FTP?

<comment><USER11> Not convinced https is a simple substitute for ftp. Think of the new asp.net MVC framework. The http root directory is not the root directory of the MVC app, but a sub directory (which by the way is a good design decision, separating executable from static content). So with https you will only have access to a subdirectory of the application you need to deploy. Not sure you will be able to use https to deploy.

ftpes sftp and ftps are alternative solutions but I found them to be extremely incompatible between softwares. I never managed to get filezilla ftp client to connect to a secure IIS ftp server. And Visual Studio can't deploy to secure ftp, etc.

<comment><USER10> I did not mean to say that HTTPS was a substitute for FTP. You said that FTP was the fastest protocol, and the only reasonable explanation for why FTP could be faster than anything else would be due to the lack of encryption.

Therefore, I asked if you also avoided HTTPS (and only used HTTP), since HTTP clearly is faster than HTTPS.

But if you didn't mean to say that FTP is the fastest due to the lack of encryption, then why do you think FTP is the fastest?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently had a client order SFTP from me, I thought I had misread and asked if they meant FTPS (FTP with SSL) but they insisted that they wanted SFTP.

This was a case where the client was quite informed and knew that they wanted encryption but that it would never work through a firewall so they ordered SFTP.

I was pleased about this but then came other challenges, MITM protection.

My solution was to use DNSSEC with SSHFP records. Unfortunately I can't guarantee that the client software supports it.

<comment><USER10> Why would you assume they wanted FTPS? SFTP is both more common and very superior. Also, what MITM attacks are you afraid of with SFTP?

<comment><USER13> > Also, what MITM attacks are you afraid of with SFTP?

SFTP, like SSH, is "trust on first use". If you don't have some out-of-band mechanism in place to verify the server fingerprint, you're going to have a bad time.

While the CA system isn't perfect, rolling out your own CA to clients is easily automated and verifying certificates from that point on happens automatically.

<comment><USER14> If a client orders SFTP providing off-band fingerprints is a trivial step.

<comment><USER13> If that client is a single person, sure. If the client is a 500 person organization where half need access to the server, I can see why people would prefer FTPS with a certificate from their internal CA.

<comment><USER15> You can do SSH certificates that can sign and revoke keys. For some reason, most people assume TLS when you mention the word certificate. Read the CERTIFICATES section in ssh-keygen(1).

<comment><USER13> True, but you still need to build your own infrastructure to roll out the CA, vs. X.509, which is implicitly handled by all OSes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why we should kill all well know old technologies? FTP should remain forever and if somebody wish to use it lets allow it. I don't understand all these kind of hype for new technologies. Are you kidding about Dropbox? Drop an old, well know tech by a fancy new protocol with vendor lock-in? Most of the issues listed here are already fixed in modern clients. I am using FTP every day on local LAN and also on internet. Never had any issue with connectivity, or firewalls (this is why passive mode was added) or file corruption. Not to talk about the ascii mode problem (That was a problem only with ancient unix clients).

<comment><USER17> FTP is 40 years old and was designed for an internet where there was no NAT. Let it die already.

<comment><USER18> TCP is 40 years old and was designed for a world where there was no smartphones. Let it die already.

<comment><USER19> I've talked to people that earnestly hold this view and want everything to be on top of udp.

<comment><USER18> Well, there _is_ QUIC and Mosh seems to be working quite well so it is true that UDP may make more sense in certain use cases.

<comment><USER19> Yeah there are definitely use cases where UDP makes sense and they're far from rare, but that doesn't mean TCP should be thrown out since there are still many cases where a reliable connection based protocol is better.

<comment><USER17> TCP doesn't really provide the reliability that people assume it does. UDP is often used because it is expected that the connection will be unreliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To be honest, I'm surprised that anyone still uses _that thing_ in 2016 - <USER2> have rsync, bittorrent, and all the HTTP we can eat. What compels _anyone_ to think "I know, let's use the most broken tool I could possibly find"?

<comment><USER21> Hmm, the rant is just that - a rant. No solutions and many non-arguments such as outdated acronyms in the RFC.

I am with you that there are other solutions, but they are not easy to use for enterprise customers and that is where FTP still thrives. Rsync? Sysadmins maybe know this, but your marketing guy? BitTorrent? That's for illegal stuff and it is blocked on our company network.

You want to send a client (e.g. a newspaper) all your fancy videos and graphics (remember you are the marketing guy) to publish somewhere. The videos are of course 4GB per file.

What is the easiest way to share these files you have sitting in your "Marketing Campaign 2016" folder? Ask your IT department (just going by your suggestions): \- HTTP? Our server cannot handle file transfers larger than 2GB and times out after that. Also most clients don't have resuming capabilities. And don't even start with public file sharers our data is private. \- BitTorrent? Is blocked on our network. Also the client told us it is blocked by their ISP \- rsync? What is that? I'm a windows guy. Also I doubt that the newspaper will know what to do with some weird command line commands...

Just set up a quick FTP server (or use the existing one) and send the link to the client. Everything works. Resuming. Large downloads. Easy to use. Reliable. "Known" interface as the client just sees folders and files. Many clients available or just the web browser.

I am not surprised at all that FTP is not dying, I myself have often advised customers to "just use FTP" instead of whipping up a custom solution. It just works. The cost is low, the benefit high.

Sadly there currently is no run of the mill solution to replace FTP that "just works" for the average joe.

<comment><USER22> You're transferring private data over an unencrypted protocol that sends passwords in plaintext?

SFTP does everything FTP does, works in every FTP client I've seen this decade, and is even supported by some FTP servers if you need virtual users.

<comment><USER13> Virtually every current FTP client also supports FTPS, so security is good enough.

Meanwhile, SFTP does _not_ work with browsers and file managers (unlike FTP[S]), so FTPS works "out of the box" unlike SFTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is FTP _that_ heavily used in 2016? The only use I can see for it now that hasn't been replaced by either a better protocol (i.e. BitTorrent) or a service (i.e. Dropbox) is shared web hosting, even then many now support SFTP (and git).

<comment><USER24> Can confirm that as recently as 2012 most major banks, certainly in the UK, were using FTP for transferring their overnight batch payment files (some even over PSTN). Some have managed to move to SFTP (and FTPS), but i would say it's still heavily used in banking/payments.

<comment><USER25> We can't use SFTP internally because of policies around encryption, so a lot of our stuff uses FTP to move data around.

<comment><USER26> uh, is the policy that encryption isn't allowed? SFTP is encrypted, FTP isn't.

<comment><USER27> Many security groups in corporations inspect network traffic for malicious activity. Encryption prevents this, so policies or technical measures may be introduced to ban or limit its use.

As a side note, several years ago, I had a friend who worked for a small research company that had a ban on encryption software. Installing or using PGP on a company computer would be cause for termination.

I expect to see these ideas become more mainstream. In future, companies may only allow certain encryption technologies on their networks/nodes (ones which they hold keys for).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Tricks for Online Photo Editing: Seam Carving - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19580/?a=f <comment><USER2> Now that Adobe owns this I think it will more widespread technology.</comment>


21st Century Craftsmen: Winne Clement, Flutemaker - <AUTHOR> http://www.notechmagazine.com/2015/07/21st-century-craftsmen-winne-clement-flutemaker.html <comment><USER2> Wow, that's what you call a real craftsman!

And his flutes sound amazing!</comment>


Ask HN: JOBS Act. If you have 500 investors, are you still a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Well? <comment><USER2> Well, that depends on how much a particular investor invested and I think there's no limit on how much investor should a start up have. You can still be considered a start up no matter what but I guess this would lead to an overfunded startup considering the investors' head count and the amount that they will be investing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Essentially, if you don't have a proven business model you're still a start- up. Look at color.com for example, 41M in funding but a very bumpy start. Money and quantity of investors are just small pieces of the pie.

</comment><comment><USER4> I haven't really looked into this. But, is the same bill that allows crowdsourcing some sort of loophole that will allow big banks to get their best clients in on the next facebook, pre-ipo?

</comment><comment><USER5> Well if they all give you about $100. Yeah.

Remember, the limit probably won't be much higher than that per person.</comment>


Brain scans reveal a 'pokémon region' in adults who played as kids - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18531287/pokemon-neuroscience-visual-cortex-brain-information <comment><USER2> Wicked cool! It also plays for the theory of areas specialized based on the stimuli origin (center of vision)

EDIT: and for the low number of participants, when it comes to brain function, it's often unfortunately the case. At the same time, "hardware" differences are not very large within the human race: visual cortex is visual cortex.

</comment><comment><USER3> This study has 11 participants each in the player and non-player groups. It seems...hard to draw a reliable conclusion from that.

<comment><USER4> Sample size is too small to actually make any insights. I'll volunteer if they want to expand the data set. Maybe they only found 11 people who didn't play?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who owns received email message? - <AUTHOR> Here's a simple and well known scenario: You sent me an email.
Who owns it?
A) You do. (Why can I delete it without you knowing?)
B) I do. (If so, can I do with it whatever I want, like publish it publicly online or maybe sell it's content?)
How does this work? Who owns received email message? <comment><USER2> IANAL. I think that it is like a book. If I write it and I sell/give it as a present to you, then you can do a lot of things with the copy (like burning it) but I still have the copyright and you can't republish it (outside fair use).

<comment><USER3> But fair use includes things like criticism and parody - the main reasons why I might want to publish an email I received from somebody.

Also, if someone tries to sue me for damages for publishing their copyrighted email, they're going to have a hard time convincing a jury that they suffered any losses: Why would an email they sent to me have commercial value as a publishable work? (That makes it different from a book.) And they're going to have a hard time convincing a judge not to throw out the lawsuit, since the lack of potential damages makes it clear that the lawsuit is simply being used to harass me.

There may be things that somebody sent me, such as confidential business information or confidential personal information that I probably shouldn't publish. If I published something like that, however, they probably would sue me for damages based on something other than their copyright of the words they sent me (e.g., invasion of privacy[1]).

But if someone just sent me an email raving at me for something I said on the web, I see no legal obstacle to publishing that to criticize it.

Of course, when in doubt, consult a lawyer (which I'm not).

[1] [https://legaldictionary.net/invasion-of- privacy/](https://legaldictionary.net/invasion-of-privacy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The receiver now has the message and can delete it, forward it, copy it, etc. The sender may also keep a copy. Both the sender and receiver can do what they want with their copies.

(This ignores copyright. I don't like copyright, but with copyright laws, presumably the sender would be the copyright holder, I should think?)</comment>


Ask HN: News site for prescription lenses technology - <AUTHOR> I was wondering if someone knows a good news site for news about eyecare technology. I always wondered why, for example, photocromic lenses don't exist above 1.71 index. <comment><USER2> Actually they do, in 1.74 index. Thats the highest index lens you can easily find, not just in photochromic but in clear as well. Tokai make a 1.76 but they aren't as widely available and I don't think it's easily available in a photochromic version.

Lenses of an index higher than that are only available in glass but not many people will pay for or want to wear those because of weight issues.

Please keep in mind though that a higher index lens doesn't mean it's a better lens even though they're more expensive. As a general rule the higher the index the worse the optical properties. The only thing higher index lenses are good for is that they can be made thinner due to the way a higher refractive index material bends light.

Anyway to answer your question I'm not aware of any great site for optical news. It'd be nice if someone made one. I sometimes have a look at the following sites.

[http://www.optmagazine.com](http://www.optmagazine.com) //this one is a bit sarcastic

[https://www.opticianonline.net](https://www.opticianonline.net)

[http://www.optiboard.com/forums/](http://www.optiboard.com/forums/)</comment>


New Google search result page omits page content snippets? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/4PMjdRn.jpg

<comment><USER2> I've noticed this as well, pretty frustrating

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's part of an experiment, not everyone I know got it, and I don't have it on different accounts or when I log out.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you find motivation to teach yourself? - <AUTHOR>

I tend to have really serious problems getting motivated to teach myself new technologies and new things in general, even if the technology interests me. I've started MOOCs before but I've never finished. I similarly have trouble teaching myself new web/mobile technologies. This gets so bad that I've considered paying for in-person classes. What tips do you have for self-motivation? <comment><USER2> The problem with "learn x" from a motivational standpoint is that it is extremely open-ended. Say I want to learn more JavaScript. How do I know when I've met my goal? If the goal is indefinite, how do I measure progress? This is very demotivating.

Instead, try to find something _completable_ which requires the skill you want to get better with. Build something, even if it's mostly frivolous. You need a destination, a path from here to there, and the ability to measure progress along the path.

<comment><USER3> To add to this point, I personally find the smaller the goal the better. The quicker I can get gratification the more willing I am to continue working at it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To add more details to my question: Right now I'm trying to learn web development (having previously done mobile development). The way I'm starting off is by learning Django using online tutorials.

I guess my problem is exacerbated by two things: 1) the field of web development is huge, and becoming proficient in it requires knowing a little about databases, a back-end framework, front-end development (JS, jQuery, HTML,CSS), and eventually some devops stuff for when I move off Heroku; and 2) Django itself is fairly complex (i.e. takes a while to get running at full speed).

I try to approach this systematically, with my goal right now of groking Django/the back-end before moving on to learning front-end development and exploring databases (SQL, NoSQL) and devops. HN has definitely given me a good idea of where to start, but it's still a daunting task.

My eventual goal is to write mobile/web applications with a back-end. I want to learn all this because I have a long list of all kinds of ideas for services/apps I want to write.

</comment><comment><USER4> Given my slightly advanced age, my motivation seems to come from the desire to feed and clothe myself and those I care about.

Initially, I was motivated by the idea that learning certain technologies could make me valuable to employers in many industries and regions. Having previously studied business and foreign languages, it took my breath away to search for tech jobs and find hundreds of job openings across multiple continents.

I guess it can be summed up as motivation by a lingering fear of failure with a desire for freedom thrown into the mix. Classes can help, but if you hate what you are learning, why not find something equally valuable that you love?

</comment><comment><USER5> Try and apply the S.M.A.R.T rule. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time bound. Any learning objective should have most of not all of the SMART attributes. For example, if you want to learn a technology, figure out how you will measure whether you succeeded or not. How long ? Are you being realistic ? For example, "learn to code" is very abstract while "learn to code website in python in 6 months" is a lot more relevant.

</comment><comment><USER6> I myself have the same problem with MOOCs. I've found that it helps to chunk things up. So start off with the basic information and then look for online tutorials to complete. And of course the best way to learn is to use what you're learning in a project, whether personal or professional

</comment><comment><USER7> Decide why you wanna learn it. I consider this to be very important, because learning a new technology/language(or whatever) just because it's name is nice, wont take you far.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. There are lots of technologies and tools you can learn. It helps to step back, take a deep breath and ask yourself a few questions.

Do you want to work with the Web, with distributed systems, with software, or none of the above?

Once you narrow it down, it becomes easier to prioritize and pick your tools accordingly. I learned this the hard way, as I aimlessly spent a summer trying to learn Ruby, Python, and Java all at the same time, just so I could say I "knew" them.

It hurt my brain and my motivation suffered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hear you. Can you be a bit more specific and say what you are currently trying to learn? I'd like to help if possible.

</comment><comment><USER9> Profit, Fun, Community</comment>


Show HN: Need a quiet place to store your thoughts? Little app I made - <AUTHOR> http://www.gethermit.com

<comment><USER2> Just a thought, but have considered allowing an individual to start writing without an account? Then you might just set a delayed notification to encourage the user to register to save their work.

Seemingly like a "trial run", except it's free, and I think a user might feel way more inclined to register after they've used the platform for the first time.

As an example, although I'm not a writer per se, I find my best ideas come to me in periods of rapid succession, and if I don't write them down, well, you know the rest. I could imagine having a platform like this as a bookmark, but the "barrier" that is a login screen might pose as an additional mental barriers. Just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like it.

It should be more oblivious how to rename the "My First Book".

Add a way for me to save / export the data. I wouldn't feel safe to use it without a thousand backups.

Also, how can I create a new "book"?</comment>


Coinbase Is Opening the First Regulated Bitcoin Exchange in the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/25/coinbase-us-bitcoin-exchange/ <comment><USER2> Ben Horowitz predicted on 11/19/14 that Bitcoin is going to be one (of two) of the next massive disruptors in technology. He compares Bitcoin with the revolutionary impact of the internet.

It is gaining momentum.

[http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3369](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3369)

</comment><comment><USER3> As much as I wish Bitcoin would go away, I suspect that when the US has its first currency crisis, Bitcoin will find its long term footing. It has advantages over lots of other alternatives which are either not easily converted (gold, silver, etc) or subject to shenanigans (like JPY or Euro).

Seems unthinkable now, but I suspect this can't be more than 5 years out. I'm happy that the price has been coming down so I will be able to accumulate some at a more reasonable level. (I am still waiting, of course).

<comment><USER4> US had already plenty of currency crises. The most recent one is 2008 when there was a real risk of ATM withdrawals blocked and only HUGE amounts of bailout money kept that circus afloat. Another big one was in 1971 when Nixon basically showed a finger to everyone who trusted that USG would redeem USD for gold. Overall, since invention of Fed, dollar lost like 97% of its purchasing power (meaning, all that purchasing power was relocated to those who are friends with the Fed).

97% of people's savings were taken over the course of 20th century and spent for wars, inefficient social programs and private commercial enterprises. Bitcoin is all about opening eyes to _that_ shenanigan and not allowing it to happen again.

<comment><USER5> If Bitcoin would ever threaten the Dollar, rest assured that it will be declared illegal.

<comment><USER6> It's not much different than any given foreign currency wrt a local currency. In the U.S. it's not much different than using Euros, Pounds or CAD. Or for that matter holding stocks in a given company.

It's not legal currency for paying a dept or the government itself, but barter is legal. The implications are regarding hiding income and resources from the government. Also, exchanges as a business are highly regulated in general, which is the point of this, that they are operating an exchange legally...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Enjoy the ride :)

[http://www.gifmania.us/Animated-Gifs-Objects/Free- Animations...](http://www.gifmania.us/Animated-Gifs-Objects/Free-Animations- Toys/Images-Amusement-Park/Roller-Coasters/Roller-Coaster-77402.gif)</comment>