Octopart helps nearly a half a million people find parts every month - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4213736/Octopart-helps-nearly-a-half-a-million-people-find-the-part-they-need-every-month

<comment><AUTHOR> Q: What has been the biggest surprise? What was one key assumption you made, perhaps even unconsciously, that has caused the most grief?

When we started Octopart, we were sure that within 6 months, we would have all the major distributors signed up and we would be overwhelmed with users. In fact everything takes longer than we expect it to. That includes building technology, building relationships and getting users. On the surface, it seems like the problems involved in part search are straigtforward: get the data, build a system to keep track of it, and build an intuitive frontend interface. But each of those problems have subproblems, and each subproblem needs to be iterated on quite a bit.

<comment><USER2> Octopart is the YC website I use the most. In addition to current revenues, I'd suggest there's an opportunity to build a marketplace for parts too. I'm often looking for parts online to buy that simply are not available or require custom manufacturing. An alternative to eBay and other consumer marketplaces for parts, components etc. Generally anything B2B/B2B2C is under-served in comparison to B2C.</comment></comment>


Very huge list of resources about bots (tools, books, events) and many more - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BotCube/awesome-bots <comment><USER2> Please use the orignal title.</comment>


Future of magazines - <AUTHOR>

Until someone invents a computer you can fold, roll up, hit a friend with, use as a telescope and just discard, I believe that printed media will never ever die. <comment><USER2> You're forgetting 'swap a spider' (garfield)... but I agree with you.</comment>


Dear Apple - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dear-apple/dear-apple <comment><USER2> It's absurd to have to beg the wealthiest software company in the world for what should be considered really basic stuff. Xcode is consistently unstable, slow, missing simple essential functionality (like refactoring), and Apple's interface builder is something that most experienced Apple devs know to run for the hills from.

<comment><USER3> Apple is not a big company. Out of the 116k employees they have 60k are in retail [1]. Another 6k are in AppleCare call centers [2]. So about 50k of them are at corporate. Contrast that with Google which has 72k employees [3] and Microsoft which has 120k employees [4].

Apple's organizational culture is meant to be about small teams. Steve Jobs once said "we're the biggest startup on the planet" [5]. This leads to complaints about various neglected features or products and calls for Apple to hire more employees or spin off divisions so it can have dedicated resources. Just like people will always complain about the quality of service at airlines, Apple watchers will always complain about whatever pet issue they feel isn't getting enough attention. That there are complaints doesn't in and of itself mean that Apple needs to change their organizational culture. These complaints always miss the opportunity cost of the changes they suggest: that Apple is Apple _because_ they are resource constrained.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2016/01/28/apple-retail-ahrendts- employee...](http://fortune.com/2016/01/28/apple-retail-ahrendts-employees/)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/how-apple- empo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/how-apple-empowers-and- employs-the-american-working-class.html)

[3] [https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20161231_alphabet_10K.pdf](https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20161231_alphabet_10K.pdf)

[4] [https://news.microsoft.com/facts-about- microsoft/](https://news.microsoft.com/facts-about-microsoft/)

[5] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60dheI4ARg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60dheI4ARg)

<comment><USER4> Did you seriously just try to convince me that a 50k employee (by your logic) company is not a big company?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what flaw you found in what he wrote, or why even ask.

Obviously it's not the absolute number (50k) that counts, but how it's distributed. (And those 50k are not even all programmers).

If you do an OS, a mobile version of it, an embedded version of it, your own language, several huge SDKs, your own mail app, your own calendar app, you own spreadsheet, your own word processor, a TV appliance, the biggest mobile app store on the planet, your own logic board and CPU designs, the biggest music store on the planet, another large desktop app store, your own DAW, your own NLE, your own compositor, your own broswer, your own javascript engine, your own AI, your own Maps, and several other things besides, then no, "50k" might not be enough.

Microsoft has 5000 programmers just for Office.

<comment><USER6> SpaceX has 5000 employees and they design, build, launch, and LAND rockets.

<comment><USER7> A much easier feat than having to deal with retail customers in shopping malls. Physics is much more rational.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, it's that bad for developers of their own platform? I do rails development and left OSX for linux a few years ago after finding all the custom song & dance to do things on apple was painful. Not a day goes by I am not grateful for doing that, i am much happier doing web dev on a linux box.

But I was under the impression Apple at least took care of the devs who work on their platforms.

As someone else has noted: vote with your keyboard. I do ROR web development in part because I am free of many of the constraints other devs must face on custom platforms.

If you don't like doing dev with Apple, don't do dev with Apple. Either pick better tooling (if available) or ditch the platform (if possible).

<comment><USER9> Can you give some examples of advantages of doing ROR development on Linux vs Mac?

<comment><USER10> Not the grandparent, but I can share one example: Our team deploys OpenStack and is developing a custom dashboard in Rails. I'm more of a backend guy, although I also do my fair share of frontend development. But I had a ticket in my sprint, just a tiny UI bug, but I was busy in the backend, so I asked a junior dev to take care of it. He cloned the repo, then proceeded to fight with rbenv and postgres and what not on his Mac for a full 2 days, until he gave up and spun up a Linux VM on OpenStack to work on the Rails app in there. Sure enough, he got up and running in there in under an hour.

Shit like this is why I do all my development in a VirtualBox with Arch Linux. While my co-workers argue about the best way to install Docker on their Macs, I just `pacman -S docker && systemctl start docker` and get on with my life.

<comment><USER11> He likely had some old Macports or whatever binaries lying around in his $PATH (it was that for me the last time some libs didn't compile). Would Linux be immune to that, if you had 2 concurrent pkg managers?

You could probably run vanilla macOS in a VM without running into any problems.

<comment><USER10> > He likely had some old Macports or whatever binaries lying around in his > $PATH (it was that for me the last time some libs didn't compile).

He only ever used Homebrew as far as I know.

> Would Linux be immune to that, if you had 2 concurrent pkg managers?

How would that ever happen?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apple works with their bug reporting system; instead of encouraging people to "sign" "letters" (on Google forms no less) - open a bug report at [https://bugreport.apple.com](https://bugreport.apple.com), post the bug number and encourage people to duplicate it. This is the only way to move something at Apple.

<comment><USER13> You're joking, right?

<comment><USER12> No, I am completely serious. This is how things work in big organizations.

<comment><USER14> As far as I've been able to tell, Apple engineers use "file a radar" to mean "I'd rather let someone else triage that, or even better yet I'd rather you get lost in the system, so here's a quest for you to go on so I can get back to work", particularly as we all know that at the end of that quest the result will be "marked as duplicate", past which point Apple refuses to give you any more information or even a follow-up. I would honestly rather there just be an e-mail address email@example.com to which I could shoot off random issues I run into, from which I _know_ I'd get no response, than Radar.

<comment><USER15> That's a rather insulting comment, and it's completely wrong. Apple engineers tell you to file a radar because if it's not in radar, _it won 't get done_. Period. Radar is the way Apple engineers track work that needs to get done, and if nobody files a radar, it can't be tracked, prioritized, assigned, and completed.

<comment><USER16> The problem is that _none of that is apparent to an outsider_. You can tell developers that filing radars is important until you're blue in the face, but as long as dealing with Radar from the outside is functionally identical to talking to a wall, you shouldn't be surprised when you get pushback like the parent's.

If you find that "insulting", consider how it feels to be told to go through the work of filing dozens of most-likely-duplicate reports simply because Apple won't deign to allow searching existing reports. Regardless of whatever excuses they give for that, it sends a very clear signal about how Apple values the time of third-party developers.

<comment><USER15> > The problem is that none of that is apparent to an outsider.

What exactly isn't apparent? How Radar is the way things get done and you need to file a Radar if you want anything fixed? I'd think that's crystal clear given that every single Apple engineer you talk to will explain this to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I made a conscious decision a while back to simply use a Linux distro (Ubuntu) with easily/cheaply-available commodity hardware for programming. Correct me if I'm wrong but other than iOS development, there isn't anything I can't do on Ubuntu with a 2010-ish laptop that I can do with a 2016-ish Macbook.

<comment><USER18> In my personal experience, with everything else being equal, iOS development yields on average 6x more income than Android development. I haven't found a decent alternative, yet.

<comment><USER17> Which is why I feel for a lot of us who don't own Macbooks, it's a major sticking point, and you get a lot of people trying out "Hackintoshes" (which I don't really have much of an opinion on).

I just wish Apple had taken the Google route and made development a lot more open, not sure what they stand to gain by keeping even iOS development a walled garden but hey it's their platform to do with as they please.

<comment><USER18> And they have every right to build a paywall and make the developers pay for it.

The only redeeming Apple product I found is the mac mini which gives low- budget developers an easy access to their expensive platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a developer who moved from Java and JavaScript (IntelliJ IDEA) to Swift and Xcode about a year ago, the experience has been horrendous. How is it okay for a company as big and serious as Apple to have an IDE and tooling as bad as Xcode? The IDE frequently crashes, there is no refactoring support at all, practically non-existant code completion, syntax highlightning frequently stops working, etc etc.

<comment><USER20> I've been using Xcode for many, many years now. In the past (~8+ years ago) I've used Visual Studio.

From my perspective Xcode is a really nice IDE. I prefer the lean UI compared to Visual Studio and Xamarin. The only thing that annoys me is that since Swift the syntax colouring and autocompletion breaks multiple times a day. This is a slight annoyance for me, but otherwise I personally think it's a decent IDE.

I don't experience the crashes like you do. And I've never really used much refactoring tools in the past, so I guess I don't know what I am missing out on.

But you might want to consider AppCode from Jetbrains. Apparently it supports both Objective-C and Swift and it's refactoring support -at least- should be good.

<comment><USER21> Yup, I agree. I think Xcode is not bad at all. I wouldn't call it great, but it's good enough. I get a hard crash every couple of weeks. Autocompletion breaks maybe 2 times a week, and this month, I haven't seen syntax colouring break.

It used to be worse, of course. Especially in Swift 1.x and 2.0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> @dang Can you add the repo name to Github URLs that point to repos? For example, display the title as "Dear Apple (github.com/dear-apple/dear-apple)".

I thought this was a letter from Github to Apple, but was disappointed to discover that it was a letter from some subset of the Apple developer community.

I recognize that this is sort of pulling at a thread, but since Github is so widely used, perhaps some sort of exception can be made?

</comment><comment><USER23> These letters always come off as sounding immature. The open letter, the why I quit, the why I switch letters all do. It is as if you need validation for something.

<comment><USER24> I develop in Xcode every day, and it's usually the least of my problems. Everything this letter asked for is an I don't care for me.

<comment><USER25> I guess you're lucky, because I fight SourceKit crashes every couple of minutes.

<comment><USER26> You can find SourceKit crash logs in Console.app; can you file a bug and attach some of them?

<comment><USER25> Sure, I'll have a look and file some bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> While I have slightly despised Xcode ever since 4.x when they integrated Interface Builder and everything else unnecessarily into one buggy app, it has only been _completely broken_ for me with the latest version. "Something" makes typing s...l...o...w......a...s......h...e...l...l... and I have never figured out what. The editor became utterly unusable no matter the project and I was forced to do every change outside of Xcode.

I am very thankful that they at least had the wisdom to expose "xcodebuild", etc. as command-line tools, because I have always set up my primary build to rely only on the commands. (Even when "building" from Xcode, the build that I click runs "make" underneath with xcodebuild.) That way, I never _need_ to be in the GUI and can work around its quirks or bugs that make it unusable, which has paid many dividends.

<comment><USER21> That's very interesting. What code editor do you use, and does it support good auto-completion, navigation and the like?

<comment><USER27> Just using "vim" in a terminal, although I install some plug-ins to give me a bit more power while editing code (like "nerdtree.vim" and "a.vim").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've given up on App store development. I wrote a handful of moderately successful apps in the 2009-2012 range, but the market is too crowded and the expectation of free, or near free software isn't profitable for the small team of "just me."

They do fascinating work though. Making a living with Microsoft technology at my day job(s) for two decades, Apple stuff was a refreshing change.

</comment><comment><USER29> The best way to build native iOS applications is in Visual Studio with Xamarin IMHO.

It pulls in the UI designer from XCode, and you get all of the advantages of Visual Studio which is hands-down just a better IDE than XCode.

<comment><USER14> Yeah :/... I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who _insist_ upon using Xcode even though we all know how bad it is... there are so many alternative toolsets you can use, including just vim+git+make, that are just so much more stable and easier to customize to get the optimal testing workflow, that to sit around and smash your head against Xcode over and over again while constantly complaining to Apple, as if that is really going to help, makes no sense at all :/.

<comment><USER25> > I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who insist > upon using Xcode

> there are so many alternative toolsets you can use

Actually no, if you want the latest, most supported tools, frameworks APIs etc. you have to use Xcode.

Most of us don't want to use Xcode, but we also don't want to use C#, (Swift is actually very nice), which IS NOT a native solution.

<comment><USER30> How does one define `native`? To me, native is using the platform API's exactly - 1:1 - with zero abstractions. With Xamarin you do exactly that, in either csharp or fsharp. When using Xamarin a UIViewcontroller still is a UIViewController, you'll be directly interacting/pinvoking the underlying APIs that you already know and potentially hate :p (cough Android).

See [http://continuous.codes/](http://continuous.codes/) for an example of what can be done with F# and Xamarin.

<comment><USER31> That is one way to define native. Another is to use the platform native source code and provide access to that. E.g. on Android Xamarin includes an overhead due to constantly passing thru the slow JNI bridge when it needs to communicate with the native UI widgets. It also includes a relatively large overhead because of standard C# libraries that need to be included on iOS/Android.

OTOH Codename One ( [https://www.codenameone.com/](https://www.codenameone.com/) ) has a very different interpretation of "native". They use their own widget toolkit like QT which makes them "less native" in that regard. But they are native to Android (being Java based) and translate directly to C/Objective-C which means you can literally write OS native code and use native widgets within the hierarchy.

I think native is a worthless word in that regard as it doesn't properly convey meaning in these sort of complex situations. Once PhoneGap started billing itself as "native" this all went out of the window...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just stop pushing apps for iProducts. When all the major apps stop adding features for a while Apple will focus on getting developers back or customers switch to Android.

<comment><USER33> Yup, that. Vote with your keyboards. Apple writes software with the same tools and languages - if they considered this stuff a problem, they'd have fixed it by now. Besides, Apple has mechanisms for feedback, and it's not open letters on GitHub.

<comment><USER34> > if they considered this stuff a problem, they'd have fixed it by now

It's not good but it's workable. Which Apple accepts as a reason to focus very few resources on dev tools.

<comment><USER33> Sure. My point is more if it's good enough for Apple at their scale - I mean, Xcode itself is written in Objective-C with Xcode - and they're willing to work around it, then 25 developers (at time of viewing) in a GDocs sheet and a readme file will probably not be the straw that breaks this camel's back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The one thing I'd really like to see is a more stable autocomplete. Having a decently working editor should be prioritised above everything else in my opinion.

<comment><USER25> Not only autocomplete, but syntax highlighting as well.

SourceKit seems to crash with every moderately complex expression.

<comment><USER26> SourceKit crashes are caused by bugs in the Swift type checker most of the time; it's not SourceKit itself that's at fault usually. We did a lot of work to fix architectural problems in 3.1, especially with generics, and there will be more improvements in 4.0. It's definitely a priority now that the language design has settled down.

<comment><USER25> That's great to hear & thanks for doing an amazing job with Swift. The language itself is great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It would also be an absolute joy if we could actually refactor with Xcode.

<comment><USER37> I immediately downloaded appcode when I found I couldn't rename variables in swift

<comment><USER38> But you _can_ rename variables in Swift 3 + XCode 8: move cursor to a symbol and press Command + Control + E.

Sadly, that's the only refactoring support available right now.

<comment><USER39> Sadly, that only renames within the current file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's kind of sad seeing developers beg for things they could build themselves if the tool was open source.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is what you get for relying on proprietary software, begging on your knees for crumbles while your supplier is busy pivoting themselves out of relevancy. It's always the same game, and we never learn; as soon as the next new shiny arrives, people get in the same old lines and beg for another round of abuse.

</comment><comment><USER42> [https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/](https://developer.apple.com/bug- reporting/)

For anyone who signs this, make sure you throw a report at em as well!

<comment><USER43> And see also [http://fixradarorgtfo.com](http://fixradarorgtfo.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> They should recruit the services of Miss Swift, who received a swift response from Apple when she tried this, albeit not on a Git repository. [http://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/122071902085/to-apple- lov...](http://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/122071902085/to-apple-love-taylor)

</comment><comment><USER45> Oof. This isn't good for Apple, and I say this as a fairly big Apple fan.

From my perspective as a programmer, Apple's success has hinged entirely on the quality and innovation of their OS and dev tools. For a long time, both of these have been ahead of the game (since NeXT came to Apple).

They lose this advantage, they crumble. Mark my words! Go on, mark them.

<comment><USER25> They did develop Swift fairly recently, which is actually very nice, so it's not like they're doing nothing for developers, but the Xcode team really needs to pick thing up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> As someone that has dabbled in Android development, I have to say that Xcode is light years ahead of its competitors re: developer friendliness. It's realistic from a complete novice to setup their environment and create a full app in a few hours. Just getting your environment setup for Android can take a whole day or more.

I'm surprised by how few of these comments actually touch on the suggestions in this letter. Overall, they seem like small improvements that won't really move the needle on Xcode's effectiveness... Breaking up targets to make 15sec compilation times to <1sec would be nice though

Things I do with every project: -Don't use the interface builder, easier to do all UI work programmatically \- Use Pods

<comment><USER47> This is an exageration. Setting up a clean install for Android development takes all of two minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I use XCode for the absolute minimum, and when done with it, go back to AppCode.

<comment><USER49> I'm surprised I had to scroll this far down to find mention of AppCode. The ESP edition is even free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I really don't know what Apple gets out of keeping XCode as closed source. Why not open it up?

<comment><USER46> There's always non-zero work involved with open-sourcing stuff. How would Apple benefit from this move?

<comment><USER50> In much the same way that Mozilla benefited from open sourcing Netscape's source. If they open source the code, then someone could work towards fixing the problems in this letter, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Since their tools and software is not improving and each version brings new bugs to enjoy, I am happy to see Microsoft support compilation of other platforms with Visual Studio. The best would be Apple stops their whole desktop lineup and focus on mobile Devices, making everything easily accessible from other platforms. Maybe the way the Macs are updated is a sign in this direction.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't think it's considered a problem by the team at Apple, or even by some developers, but I would love a more stable Swift language. The number of changes per version * the number of projects in the world is causing a large amount of work and instability. This is contributing to the low tool quality as well.

<comment><USER53> Swift 3 had a purposeful effort to prioritize syntax-impacting changes and API changes as possible with the idea that Swift 4 and beyond would have backward compatibility for Swift 3 code.

Swift 4/5 will establish ABI compatibility, so that binary swift libraries will work across compiler versions

<comment><USER52> Yes I know that's what Swift 3 was trying to do, that's what I don't agree with. In my opinion the tradeoffs are just not worth it.

Whatever happened to graceful deprecation of older language features an APIs? They invalidated all the related example code online and created a ton of mandatory work for all iOS developers within a 1 year timeframe, that's nuts. In my opinion :)

<comment><USER12> Why are you using a work in progress and unstable language? You should have known from the start that, implicitly, that would require a lot of rewrites. Developing a language, especially as all-encompassing one such as Swift, is a very demanding task; what is the added benefit of having to support deprecated language constructs and APIs? Tools are lacking as it is.

<comment><USER43> Agreed, but just anecdotally: I was job hunting over the last year, and I saw very few posts that said "We're sticking with ObjC for now because Swift is a huge technical risk" although I would have been happy to hear that.

There just seems to be a lot of momentum; everybody's excited about it, everybody wants to be on the bus.

<comment><USER54> That bus entails both good and bad, and everyone should be familiar with the risks of developing in a language in this state.

Personally, I wouldn't take any job application that only lists "Swift developer" seriously. Anyone serious enough about iOS development should know that you always need both. Also, not a big fan of telling people what technology to use forcefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Normalization of Deviance - this is a not uncommon problem with organization that grow as big and are successful. I'm curious on ideas on how a company as big as Apple and it's somewhat unfocused relation with the developer community can fix this? Maybe their CEO needs to call out to Developers.

</comment><comment><USER56> 74 signatures is hardly a blip. I would've waited for at least 5000 signatures before publishing this.

<comment><USER57> How do you get 5000 signatures without publishing it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> While we're at it, maybe we can put pbxproj out of its misery and get a modern project file format and module system

<comment><USER25> There's the Swift Package Manager, it should be part of Xcode sometime soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Signed. But is there some way you can hide the email addresses on the Google Sheet?

</comment><comment><USER43> Can we give this HN post a better title? This is atrociously clickbaiting. Granted it just goes to GitHub, but I would like to have at least an _inkling_ of what I'm about to read.

<comment><USER60> Especially given the length as well. It's a small, short list of issues that users of XCode/Apple Developer tools have. Why is this #1 on the front page?

<comment><USER61> Because it's by far one of the most annoying issues every developer has with Apple now. It's so frustrating to see the syntax highlighting and auto completion engine crash continuously as you try to figure out what line causes it just so you can rewrite it the more verbose way for the engine not to choke. You may think this has to be a beta version or a newly introduced bug, but no, these issues have been there in the official release for at least 1 1/2 years now. It got better over time, yes, but it's still far from being where it should be.

<comment><USER10> > it's by far one of the most annoying issues every developer has with Apple > now

Every developer on an Apple device who actually makes apps for Apple devices. There are a lot of devs on Macbooks who produce server applications that run on Linux, possibly more than create iOS or macOS apps.

<comment><USER61> Whoops, yeah that's what I meant to say

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Xcode is 14 years old and Swift is a new language with no baggage that really only needs to target iOS and has new APIs for graphics and more. Seems more likely their goal would be a much-more simplified IDE for iPads that anyone can learn that can only publish to iOS.

They also stopped making computer monitors and routers last year and haven't updated most of their computers in years.

Best reason to host WWDC outside of SF this year is so it won't be a building full of Xcode developers lol!</comment>


In pursuit of better JVM Futures – Kotlin coroutines - juliane-sander https://medium.com/@zohaibhassan/in-pursuit-of-better-jvm-futures-kotlin-coroutines-281a79211b09#.sc1g2ddw9 <comment><AUTHOR> Cool stuff. Coroutines are powerful.

Also...sigh. How many millions of man hours have been sacrificed to the god of async?

Is there an OS or system that provides cooperative threading as lightweight as futures/promises, rather than inventing tortured structures around it everywhere?</comment>


Ask HN: C/C++ remote maintenance jobs? - <AUTHOR> As someone who has a lifetime of system software experience, I feel there should be remote part-time/retainer based jobs to maintain or enhance some complex code base; how would one go about finding some! <comment><USER2> Sounds like a consulting niche.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is going to be difficult. Most companies aren't going to advertise that it's a maintenance job. Your best bet is to look for contracting gigs on craigslist and then find out through the interview process if it will be a good fit.</comment>


Interactive Workstations for 3D Visualization Based on Voxel CPU Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/3-D/ <comment><USER2> Have nothing to contribute, except: 'Oh! Whow!' because of interesting and detailed hard-/software history, applied in the medical visualisation domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I read this end-to-end, couldn't stop, super interesting story and in spite of the huge time difference very recognizable parallels with todays funded start- ups and the whole interaction with the funding side and acquisitions.</comment></comment>


Necessary Vitamin D intake is 10x higher than currently recommended by the NIH - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28768407/ <comment><USER2> I am weary of mega dosing vitamin D to 8000 IU as recommended in the article. I am currently taking a bit less than 3000 IU a day and don't plan to increase it unless more research is made.

From the book 'The Perfect Health Diet' :

> _25OHD levels after abundant summer sun exposure, as in lifeguards, peak > between 45 and 80 nanograms per milliliter. Outdoor workers in the tropics > typically have 25OHD levels between 48 and 80 nanograms per milliliter. > These tropical outdoor workers get too much vitamin D._

> _People in South India with 25OHD levels of 89 nano-grams per milliliter > have a threefold higher rate of heart attack._

> _Lifeguards in Israel develop kidney stones twenty times more often than the > general population._</comment>


I'm not real because my facebook profile is private  - <AUTHOR> http://meta.maxkle.in/they-say-im-not-real-because-my-facebook-prof

<comment><USER2> (I tossed my login details but i'm the same guy who posted this <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353050>)

The best lie is a half truth.

"Max" the reason people read your articles is because you've said you make $40K a month from niche iphone apps.

Mark (lets drop the pretense) you sound like you have read Positioning by Ries, A. and Trout,J ([http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al- Ries/dp/044...](http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al- Ries/dp/0446347949)). Your positioning this "Max" character as the idealized serial entrepreneur. Globe trotting, living in 5 star hotel, identifying markets, working out those niche products. I'm sure that idealized person is something many people here want to replicate.

That's only half the story though isn't it? The reality is your $40K a month is made from these apps ([http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/feather-moor- ltd/id3053457...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/feather-moor- ltd/id305345763?mt=8)) 1 star apps with content ripped from sites like ehow.com. Lets not forget that feather+moor are your creation as well.

Would people read 37signals in the same light if they actually made their money by running casino affiliate sites?

Would people read joel on software in the same light if he actually made his money from porn sites?

Would people read Paul Graham articles in the same light if he actually made his money selling teeth whitening ads?

You are not hiding your identity because of privacy, your hiding it because the reality of your success doesn't fit with the image you've created for Max.

"Max" is not real because he is only half the story.

<comment><USER3> > That's only half the story though isn't it? The reality is your $40K a month > is made from these apps (<http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/feather-moor- > ltd/id3053457...>) 1 star apps with content ripped from sites like ehow.com.

So what? HN also rabidly follows a guy that sells bingo cards. It's not about what you do, what's interesting is how you do it, and the story you tell doing that.

Project management and bug tracking software is pretty boring, if you ask me. But the lessons from joel and 37s are anything but boring.

In fact, I would be very interested in blogs from someone who runs a sucessful porn site, just because the challenges involved are emblematic of any startup -- how do you acquire customers in such a commoditized market? How do you keep them coming back, how do you monetize them? The technical side (scaling, etc) would make for good reading, too.

<comment><USER2> I completely agree, the point i was trying to make with those examples was that those people are up front in how they made their money. Mark is not, he either outright avoids the question or claims that he is doing niche applications and revealing them would destroy his business.

If he was upfront like patio11 (the bingo card guy) i would never of done any digging. However everything i've seen from Mark seems like a calculated manipulation to be viewed in a certain way.

patio11 appears to genuinely be here to share. Marks actions appear to be about building an audience for some unknown future purpose (ebook?,conference talks?,who knows).

<comment><USER3> Yes, Max/Mark/whoever is maddeningly vague sometimes. I'm not disputing that. I do think his paranoia is a bit unwarranted, but he does seems to value privacy.

Now, if he just outright lied, well then that's shameful. I think the digging that you have done is really interesting, but this whole thing is starting to feel like a witch hunt. He might work under pseudonyms, sure, but at least his apps/etc seem legit.

<comment><USER2> I think it becoming to feel like a witch hunt because "Max" has not directly address whether he is Mark Essien, so everyone is speculating.

His apps are legit, in that they exist but they do appear to contain content scraped from internet without any apparent attribution. Given the random mix of sources i don't think he has written permission from demand media (ehow.com) or the other random places the content comes from. His revenue claims may or may not be true, or may HAVE been true.

I will point out one last thing.

This app (<http://appshopper.com/education/paintings-you-should-know>) now deleted "Paintings you should know", was previously uploaded to the feather moor account. The one app that appeared on Maxs now deleted "Cube Of M" site was this "Art you should know" ([http://itunes.apple.com/app/art-you-should- know/id356153267?...](http://itunes.apple.com/app/art-you-should- know/id356153267?mt=8)) its obviously the same app.

Notice "Seller:Mark-Anthony Essien", so that links Max to Mark.

More importantly though his second name is Anthony not Max or Klein (like he claims in that blog article).

This combined with Marks willingness to actually meet people in real life as Max makes me question why he writes and his end goal with his writings and half truths.

I'll leave it there, people have the information that is out there and that was my only goal posting these messages, to inform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So... a) did you move to China; b) are you really doing 5 months work from home, one month work in a 5 star hotel; c) get in a knife fight?

I don't mind privacy at all, but I like to know if what I'm reading is fact or fiction or some combination thereof.

[a] <http://maxkle.in/giving-up-on-europe/>

[b] [http://maxkle.in/my-company-5-months-work-from-home-one- mont...](http://maxkle.in/my-company-5-months-work-from-home-one-month/)

[c] <http://maxkle.in/your-high-iq-will-kill-your-startup/>

<comment><USER5> I used to think the Max Klein posts were somewhat inspirational, but at this point I just assume he's pulled a '419' on everyone. There's a healthy dose of fiction mixed into whatever facts may be contained in his blog posts.

<comment><USER6> Why do you describe my blog as '419'?

<comment><USER7> In case you are not aware, '419' refers to Nigerian scammers.

419 = scam/fake/fraud (loosely)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just because he's figured out how to spam Hacker News with his navel-gazing, amateurish blog posts does not mean you should listen to him. If he's too chicken to post under his real name and stand by what he has to say, then he's not someone I'm going to listen to. His posts are very trollish in nature. Stop giving him the attention he so craves and the traffic that is fueling his profits.

Update: Looks like "Max Klein" is voting this comment down using his numerous HN accounts. How pathetic.

<comment><USER6> Don't be hasty to criticize people - it may feel good in the short term, but over the long term it always turns out bad. And upvotes and downvotes really don't matter, you know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry this is (well, somewhat) totally off-topic, but:

Has anyone else noticed that the HN news items now show the sub-domain in select cases? Or has it always done this for 'popular' blogging platforms? Currently I can see this for Blogspot, Wordpress, Blogs.com and Posterous.

And, peripherally related, for this item as well. Which confuses me a little...

<comment><USER10> It's done this for wordpress et al since the first public release of the source code: [http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/81576aed622d560fdb3c96a26bb5...](http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/81576aed622d560fdb3c96a26bb56691b1b9aa9c/news.arc#L1231)

Around last July's release it started showing subdomains anytime they aren't 'www'. Compare <http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/arc3/news.arc#L1550> with <http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc#L1556>

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the info, mate.

I believe you're slightly mistaken with your second line though - in this case it's showing the subdomain because the TLD is .in, and the 'www' bit is to just strip that particular bit from submitted links that might just be 'www.[blogspot|posterous|wordpress|blogs|etc].[in|jp|uk|za|etc]'.

[Further aside: I don't do much code any more, but it was fun to tickle that part of my brain! Thanks again!]

<comment><USER10> Ah, you're right. So crazy domain names get a subdomain to show up on HN. Very cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> By blogging regularly, you invite people to pay attention to you. It seems natural then that you would want to carve out a private "don't look at me" space on the internet.

Most people don't have this problem, though, because most other people don't care about them. They don't need to carve out a private space on the internet because no one is paying attention anyway.

Personally, I share very little on Facebook because my Facebook social network is very close to my _actual_ social network. My actual social network is quite varied, and there's little I have to say that is appropriate to every person I know.

</comment><comment><USER12> You can have a private facebook profile without using a fake name/identity.

</comment><comment><USER13> The "public" sphere is dead there is only the private sphere that is accessible by everyone. The notion of public is slowly eroding, see the death of print news media.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've seen this type thing before on the 'net and, to a lesser degree, been on the receiving end of it. Wondering if people would be willing to toss out their two cents worth concerning what signals "authenticity" to them and what signals "fake" to them in the online world (preferably without further trashing the individual in question, which is not a conversation I really want any part of). I can think of legitimate reasons for doing things like not posting photos on the 'net (and have, in fact, taken photos of me off the 'net to stop the influx of unwelcome, highly personal e-mails).

Any takers?

Thanks in advance.</comment>


Go Read: One Year with Money and App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://mattjibson.com/blog/2014/03/13/goread-one-year-with-money-and-app-engine? <comment><USER2> I would like to thank you for creating go read and making it open source, it's what I use as RSS reader, using my own free quota of App Engine. I hope I can contribute back some day.

      "30-day trial: This action cost me about 90% of my users. Many were angry and cursed at me on twitter. I agree that it is sad I did not say I was going to charge from the beginning, but I didn't know that I would be paying hundreds of dollars per month either."

Honestly I think the sense of entitlement nowadays is way too high, people use a product that is free and needed weeks or months of your own free time, and then complain about it when you change it.

If you decide to charge for it, you're a greedy bastard, instead if it's free, they say "if you aren't paying, you are the product". Other complain that the product doesn't work, when instead it's a case of PEBCAK. When it's not, it means you're going to say goodbye to a couple of night's sleep or a weekend or too, or maybe it's ONE feature away from being perfect (again).

...sometimes I hate people :(

<comment><USER3> People get to be mad (within reason) when a free service stops being free without prior warning. Because they too invested time and effort in a product, making it part of their life, only to have that wasted when terms change.

That is not to say, in any way, that you shouldn't charge - but don't expect users of a free application to change to a pay to use model en masse. Unless, of course, you don't have any competitors who do a similar thing for free...

<comment><USER2> True, but be polite about it: "Sorry, I'm disappointed because my expectations differ from yours. I'll found an alternative. Good luck with your project"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting writeup, thanks.

I'm a user and have been negatively impacted by the feed fetching optimizations - daily feeds are often a few days behind and come in bunches. Two examples:

\- Penny Arcade updates its comics Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, always at 7:01AM UTC, and then news other times during the week. It's Wednesday at 4:25PM UTC - 9 hours after - and goread hasn't picked it up.

\- Dinosaur Comics is updated weekdays. I'll eventually get all of them, but usually two or three at a time. For example, yesterday I marked all my feeds as read; today, I have entries from Monday and Tuesday, but not from Wednesday.

I had hoped that the move to the everyone-pays model would give you the resources (either developer or quota) to fix these issues, but they've gotten no better or maybe worse.

I haven't looked at what you're doing, but I believe Google Reader used pubsubhubbub where available to reduce/eliminate polling for many popular feeds.

I honestly didn't have a great experience with my last bug report, so I haven't tried again.

<comment><USER5> goread has pubsubhubbub support. penny arcade doesn't use it, though. The penny arcade feeds are indeed giving errors. I'll look into those.

<comment><USER6> At Theneeds we use a "sliding windows" approach to deal with polling. Say you run the scraper every hour. Each feed F_i is scraped once every n_i polls. If the feed returns more than his average news, then n_i gets decreased, while if the feed returns no news, it gets increased.

Perhaps with a similar trick you can run your scraper more frequently on some feeds, still keeping the cost under control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Second, it is impossible to meet Google's terms of service with an RSS reader. They dictate that ads may not be shown along adult or copyrighted content. Determining that for external sources of data was not going to happen. I got a few emails about violations and added a system to prevent ads on certain feeds. But I was playing whack-a-mole and it would never end. Eventually I made a mistake and they banned my site. I gave up on ads at this point."

I've experienced this myself, and I'm hearing it more and more from others. Maybe this is a market need that is going unfulfilled.

<comment><USER8> There's a great company that used to be called AdSafe, now called Integral Ad Science, that offers a service to identify adult or other non-ad-friendly content.

[http://integralads.com/](http://integralads.com/)

I don't think it'd be feasible to run an advertising company that was less strict on adult/copyrighted content. People that buy advertising are _really_ risk-averse on that subject, they don't want to see a meme on twitter or whatever of their brand next to porn.

<comment><USER7> Two things.

1) The content that got my site kicked off adsense was text only, and it was a girl writing about going skinny dipping. It was tamer than much of cable TV, but I'm guessing some word frequency algorithm thought it was more than that. We aren't talking ads showing up next to porn. The great frustration is that if you aren't a big player, google doesn't give a shit and maybe they will turn your ads back on, maybe they won't. I'm guessing there are a lot of people out there that would jump on any ad network that didn't make you fear this all of the time.

2) My assumption, and I could be wrong about this, is that there are a lot of companies willing to advertise that aren't as paranoid. They may be able to pay less per click for the same quality of traffic, due to less competition for opening up to content that is less than PG

<comment><USER8> RE: 2), the difficulty there is that you're now chasing the long tail of small dollars in a high-initial-touch business. Maybe a self-serve model could work, but the big corps and ad agencies representing the big money in the market are really really big on the brand safety thing. I'm not saying they're right, but as long as they're the ones signing the big checks, they don't really have to be.

I guess a self-serve business would be possible, but since your costs are the same for non-sketchy (for whatever silly definition of sketchy) content, you basically become a remarketer for the content that everyone else doesn't want to advertise on. You can sell it, sure, but it's a hard pitch.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure you're right, which is why I'm moving away from ads. The examples that give me some sliver of hope are reddit and tumblr, both of which have some form of ads.

<comment><USER8> Well, you'd think that Google could pro-actively not show ads on occasional 'bad' content rather than putting it on each individual website operator to avoid displaying the adsense iframe (or whatever it is) on content that might bother Google. They're already identifying it.. why not just not show the ad? And then only penalize accounts that have a really big % of unadvertisable content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that this article was written in March, about a week before google announced approximately %30 price-drops across its cloud offerings. I would have been interested to see the statistics for this year too, I don't think the chart tells us much about the sustained success (or otherwise) of your subscription model, due to only showing the 2 months after the introduction of subscriptions. The 2 months show rapid drop in income, has it stabilised this year?

I'm wondering, for the icons or other cacheable content, have you thought of using cloudflare or similar? What are your costs going to be this month, after getting onto the HN front page again?

After giving it a try, I noticed that this text is quite out of date now:

        We've just released! Read the blog post about it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations on an income-generating project! That's an immense achievement. Perhaps the infrastructure cost is worth the headaches you spare yourself by being on GAE but have you looked at dedicated infrastructure from the likes of OVH/Hetzner (on both providers you can get ~2TB storage/64GB mem boxes for around $100/mo)? I moved all my projects to a single OVH box and it's been a champ. It does mean slightly more maintenance burden (ex you need to roll your own backup/restore plan). Perhaps it is a poor fit but that seems like a possible path to get those costs way under control

<comment><USER11> Have to agree. Great article but it just confirmed my decision to stay away from app engine. What's the purpose of paying for something that's both harder to use and more costly than a traditional server? Datastore is great but I can get the benefits at a quarter of the price. At least with Heroku you have something that's easier to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> FWIW, original lack of discussion [0] and [1]...

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7402393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7402393) [1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408089)

<comment><USER13> I actually find this very interesting. How days and times and luck plays such a role. And submitter...

Having the same exact article submitted 3 different times and getting 2 votes, 4 votes, and then #1 front page. That's interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no idea why this took off. I just thought I'd try and re-post it as I really like goread.io and the blogpost. I don't think the submitter matters. Maybe a little if people see that it's self promotion. But there is plenty self-promotion on the front page. More of a timing and luck thing I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Small bit of feedback: I'd love to see pricing for Goread before I go ahead and sign up. From the landing page, it's not even clear the project is active or that it costs any money.

That might be a good way to increase revenue.

<comment><USER15> That's a big one.

It should be part of the pitch, can even be after the screenshot on the front page. E.g.,

"Sign in a give it a try for the next 30 days. If you like what we've built, the subscription is only $3/Mo or $30/Year (we'll give you 2 mo free for making that commitment)". Or something like that.

It would have bugged me if I hadn't read that there was a subscription and came upon the Account page while perusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm actually a little surprised it costs so much to run on app engine. Given that you've settled into a more predictable user model in terms of costs and probably growth, why not lower your costs by investing in dedicated server space or possibly reserved instances on AWS (unless there is a app engine equivalent).

Without knowing what your server load looks like, I would imagine you could save a couple hundred dollars a month in hosting, which would go right to your bottom line profit. A couple hundred dollars a month isn't huge, but at this point in your business that's say $2,400 a year. From the looks of it, that's at least 2-3 months worth of revenue or almost 5 months worth of profit.

I think it's at least worth considering with where your project is at right now.

<comment><USER5> AWS doesn't have the datastore. From the article: "When you compare to AWS prices, no one mentions the datastore."

<comment><USER17> Excuse my naivety but isn't data store just a managed nosql database? You could switch over to Google Cloud (AWS but from Google) and still use Data Store or you could switch to any PaaS and use something like mongohq.

<comment><USER18> > Excuse my naivety but isn't data store just a managed nosql database?

Yes, so what? Its still something you need to cost out for an alternative.

> You could switch over to Google Cloud (AWS but from Google)

App Engine is part of Google Cloud (the AWS-equivalent umbrella of offerings). You probably mean "Google Compute Engine" instead of "Google Cloud" and "EC2" instead of "AWS".

> and still use Data Store

You could (Google Cloud Datastore seems to be very much the App Engine datastore outside of App Engine) but its then a separate cost you have to include in the comparison.

> or you could switch to any PaaS and use something like mongohq

You could, but its then a separate cost you have to include in the comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great read.

This is especially interesting to me. My side project [http://www.longboxed.com](http://www.longboxed.com) was recently launched to a modicum of regular users (~300). My app runs on Heroku on the free tier with the 'Hobby Basic' level of the Heroku Postgres database. All told it costs me ~9 dollars a month. No big deal.

However, if I ever stepped the site up to another tier I'd be looking at ~50 bucks for the database and ~36 bucks for another process instance. These expenses can add up fast for a site that doesn't currently generate any money.

Anyway - it is nice to see examples of introducing a pay model into your app after it has launched.

<comment><USER20> Congratulations on launching. I've been following your development on tumblr and it's been great seeing your process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great stuff, Matt. I've always wanted to build something in the RSS space that could net me some extra cash. Write-ups like this let me know it's not a totally hopeless idea!

As for optimizing when to check for new feed items, I recently moved to the "moving average" strategy described here [1] for my personal feed reader [2]. Overall, more active feeds have really benefited from it while I still need to tweak the algorithm for less active feeds, I think.

Here's to another successful year for Go Read!

[1] [http://www.rn.inf.tu- dresden.de/uploads/publikationen/feedpa...](http://www.rn.inf.tu- dresden.de/uploads/publikationen/feedpaper_poster.pdf)

[2] [https://github.com/edavis/riverpy](https://github.com/edavis/riverpy)

</comment><comment> grey-area I wonder if the author has costed out how much running this app would cost using a VPS provider like Linode or Digital Ocean? You can get a lot of resources for under $100 a month and the needs of most apps are pretty basic (file storage+db+web server). Given the memory requirements and speed of Go, it shouldn't take much hardware to serve a lot of requests with a few go instances behind nginx say.

I'm not convinced that being locked in to one cloud provider's services and APIs is healthy long term - it means you are locked in to that ecosystem and it's harder to consider alternatives, even if your needs are quite straightforward, so you can end up in a situation where you're paying hundreds of dollars a month for hosting when you don't need to be.

<comment><USER5> What about the datastore? I can get thousands of requests per second (which I did when I released and it hit HN), and the site was as fast as if I had 1 hit per second. Traditional databases don't scale like that. If you want it to scale like that, it gets difficult and expensive. The datastore does all of this + multi datacenter replication + predictive performance regardless of load.

<comment> grey-area If you're caching feeds, would you require thousands of requests to the db per second, or just thousands of web requests?

It'd be an interesting test to try setting up a simple stack of psql/nginx/memcache and your go processes behind, and serving up the same data from it, to see what sort of performance you get, but I understand why you wouldn't bother if your app is somewhat tied in to the datastore already and works fine for you as is. Just out of interest, did you start on something else and move over to Google App Engine for performance, or start there?

<comment><USER5> Started on app engine. I've been using and happy with it for 4 years.

Yes, I could set up a simple psql stack. But I would lose automatic multi data center replication and infinite scaling, so that's not a win. My database hit 500GB in a few months. I don't want to deal with scaling up psql instances when it doubles in size over the next year again. See my first post linked below about when newsblur hit the HN frontpage and was effectively down for 3 days due to load. It's because psql doesn't scale in that direction.

[http://mattjibson.com/blog/2013/06/26/go-read-open-source- go...](http://mattjibson.com/blog/2013/06/26/go-read-open-source-google- reader-clone/)

<comment> grey-area Thanks for elucidating - I work on sites with a different balance of users vs traffic and data (maybe more users but less data and not so spiky), so it's interesting to hear about your experience on that and why you'd go for app engine, which compared to self hosting can seem like an expensive option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Again, it's free software so I'm not sure what the problem is. I learned from this experience that some people will never pay, and some will. I'm not opposed to alienating people who won't support all of the time, effort, and money I put into this product.

It's always surprising to me when devs are surprised by outrage at the change/removal of a free product. There is a non-negligible cost for a user to research/choose/setup/learn a new tool. In this case, a feed reader has favorited articles, read/unread state of articles, etc. When you pull the rug out from users that have made that investment who now have to start over, they are going to be mad, regardless of what they paid.

<comment><USER5> The software is free. They can just run their own. It takes about 5 minutes of one-time setup. I wasn't taking away anything they couldn't already get for free and with minimal effort.

<comment><USER23> That's not realistic at all. Maybe for the average HN reader, but not for average users, even RSS savvy ones.

I know plenty of people who use RSS that wouldn't be able to check if Python is in their PATH as per your instructions. Unless there's some friendlier instructions that I'm not seeing.

<comment><USER24> Then maybe if it's _too hard_ it's worth paying for.

I am always surprised (and dismayed) and the grotesque sense of entitlement engendered in people that they expect everything to be free, all the time, forever.

<comment><USER23> I agree completely, I was just offering a reason as to why people were reacting the way they were and that saying they lost nothing is just plain wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Congrats Matt. Well done on testing various revenue options, instead of eating the costs just to be the "nice guy", only to have to shut it down eventually.

Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch had a similar story about switching from freemium to paid only -

[http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans- dont-...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/)

</comment><comment><USER26> A long time user of your app, but from my own quota of appengine.

Thank you for such a lovely product. Someday I would like to contribute to your project(s) more.

</comment><comment><USER27> I understand how app engine takes away a lot of pain wrt data storage, uptime, etc.

But, $600+ is a lot of money. You can get a good number of very decent servers for that kind of money.

If you are not afraid of managing your own data, I think hosting stuff on virtual servers is way more cost effective.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nice article. Thanks for sharing!

btw: Lots of typos in the article, be sure to spell check !

</comment><comment><USER29> Did you consider grandfathering existing users in?

<comment><USER30> It seemed that he was trying to move the existing users from costing him money to at least a break even situation. In this case grandfathering existing users would have propagated a negative cash flow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Btw, what are some good options nowadays for [almost] free website launch? Until/(if ever) you get "big" of course...

<comment><USER32> For static websites, Github Pages is free, nearlyfreespeech is very cheap. For full-blown web apps, didn't you hear the guy? GAE has a pretty generous free tier to test out stuff. So does Heroku, and it's way more user friendly. I still prefer GAE because I can use Google's tools. If you want to rent instances, you're going to have to pay from the beginning afaik. AWS and GCE are the usual suspects here.

[https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

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

[https://developers.google.com/appengine/](https://developers.google.com/appengine/)

[http://heroku.com/](http://heroku.com/)

<comment><USER31> GAE looks interesting, but the main downside is that there is no free plan for SQL database (SQL Cloud service).

<comment><USER32> I didn't use GAE that much, I only know that whenever I needed to try something for free, Heroku's plugin architecture comes in handy, since most addons have free tiers. They even support neo4j, an amazing graph database I just started playing with (and it's in beta, so they give a shitload of space for free).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > number of users is not a factor for Go Read

You could charge users a fee per feed proportional to server cost (e.g., frequency of posts) and inversely proportional to the number of subscribers.

* Unpopular/infrequent feeds (like my friends' blogs) would be free

* Popular/infrequent and unpopular/frequent feeds would be cheap, maybe $1/year/user/feed

* Popular/frequent feeds would cost more, maybe $10/year/user/feed

This way you can peg your income to an exact multiple of your costs.

<comment><USER34> That's pretty awful from the user point of view though. It's bad enough to have to pay - much worse to pay a randomly fluctuating amount and feel like you need to count your pennies every time you add a feed to your reader.

Definitely would not advise this model for a feed reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Are there ways to get full articles of HN posts[1] through RSS?

[1]news.ycombinator.com/rss

</comment><comment><USER36> From the article:

"A simple rule in computers is to make something run faster, have it do less work. I remember reading about how grep works quickly. Instead of splitting a file by lines and then searching for the string, it searches for the string, then finds the newlines on either side. Thus, if a file has no matches, it won't ever have to do the work for line splitting. Done the naive way, it would always split by line even if there was no match. Do less work."

Good observation, but I doubt if that's remotely even the reason why grep works quickly.

<comment><USER37> Um, like, it _is_ :

[http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-Augu...](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-August/019310.html)

still, see also:

[http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and- treachery.h...](http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and- treachery.html)

<comment><USER36> I have seen those and those were what I was implicitly referring to. And if you did read them,"\- Don't look for newlines in the input until after you've found a match." is just one of them but not the major contributor for speed. It's Boyer-Moore.

<comment><USER37> Hm, there seems to be written like so there:

> Moreover, GNU grep AVOIDS BREAKING THE INPUT INTO LINES. Looking for > newlines would slow grep down by a factor of _several times_ , because to > find the newlines it would have to look at every byte!

(italics added, but uppercase original!) On my reading this sounds quite huge; I seem to understand the gist is that it's still a significant gain _after_ Boyer-Moore. But, whatever.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web - <AUTHOR> http://t37.net/why-link-shorteners-harm-your-readers-and-destroy-the-web.html <comment><USER2> > Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 > characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network > was almost impossible.

No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type; they also have tons of puncutation, and are at danger of being mangled by various transports due to line wrapping, escaping, and character mapping.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. They became popular on Usenet because of the 80-character line width limit. Because of the way text is wrapped and quoted on Usenet, link-mangling was a common and pretty annoying problem.

IIRC, makeashorterlink.com was the first popular one, but for reasons that seem obvious and ironic now, tinyurl quickly supplanted it. Bit.ly was the first to really take domain name shortening to the extreme and was also the first to be popularised by Twitter.

<comment><USER4> What is the _ironic_ reason that explains tinyurl supplanting makeashorterlink?

<comment><USER5> That makeashorterlink is unneccessarily long I guess.

<comment><USER4> I like my irony served with less inevitability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Link shorteners are bad for usability, but they're also a potential attack vector for targeted attacks. A link might go to the right site 99.9% of the time, and redirect a user to a malicious site the rest of the time.

You can redirect based on the browser fingerprint, IP address, or any number of things.

I have a proof-of-concept of this at [http://brokenthings.org/](http://brokenthings.org/)

It redirects to a "friendly" site for preview scanners, etc., and to a "bad" site (Youtube videos, with some stale ones) for users.

It's blocked by Facebook, but still works on G+.

<comment><USER7> Amazing. Thanks for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > t.co -> j.mp -> pocket.co -> getpocket.com -> bit.ly -> $PROPER_URL

Wow, so many different people tracking a single link.

These are super annoying once they changed to storing the actual URL on the server. The old "redirect?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com" style could be re- written on the client to remove the click-tracking, but by storing it on the server, you _have_ to be tracked to get the URL. These seriously need to go away - that's way too many tracking databases just waiting to get a subpoena or "national security letter".

\--

side note: The only time I ever used a url shortener was for a meme that unfortunately never went anywhere:

[http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless- imbroglio](http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless-imbroglio)

edit: typo

<comment><USER9> It seems really strange that the person would use this many link shortners, are you sure it wasn't a malicious link? Back when I used to clickjack we used to mask our website by using multiple link shortners and other tricks to hide the website from Twitters automated checker.

<comment><USER10> It's the Pocket to Buffer to Twitter workflow. Pocket adds getpocket.com and pocket.co, Buffer adds j.mp, Twitter adds t.co.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A useful service to "unshorten" links is [http://longurl.org/](http://longurl.org/)

Paste in a shortened link and it will tell you the original URL, listing all the intermediate steps on the way. It also has an API.

<comment><USER12> I couldn't find a working Chrome extension so I created a basic one [1]

[1]: [https://github.com/codrineugeniu/chrome- unshortener](https://github.com/codrineugeniu/chrome-unshortener)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's even more annoying on mobile (I'm using Android).

If I click an Instagram link in a tweet (since Instagram images no longer show up inline on Twitter), it loads the t.co link in my web browser, and then launches the instagram app to show me the photo. If I then press my phone's "back" button, it takes me back to my web browser, and I have to press "back" again to get back to the Twitter app. It also leaves the t.co link in my web browser's list of active tabs, so the next time I open my web browser, it hijacks me and launches me back into Instagram. It would not be difficult for the Twitter app to resolve t.co links before launching anything, mitigating this issue entirely.

<comment><USER14> The problem here is that Twitter has hijacked every URL posted on its service with the t.co redirector. Even if you post an already short link, it will be wrapped in a useless t.co, which causes problems like what you've described.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Long URLs hurt the user experience and destroy the Web.

If I want to send you a link to a washingtonpost.com article the link looks like:[http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-the- root...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-the-roots-and- lessons-of-memorial- day/2014/05/25/64a36fb2-e2ae-11e3-810f-764fe508b82d_story.html)

The same url could just as easily be user readable, and something that I could tell me office-mate verbally from 10 feet away. Most people just expect bad URLs now and have given up trying to remember the name of the page they want to see. I used to love NBC.com because they would let me type things like nbc.com/parks to get to [http://www.nbc.com/parks-and- recreation](http://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation), but that is no longer true. Now everyone just assumes that they need to google something to find it, and they can't even imagine that apple.com/ipad would be the page they are looking for.

<comment><USER16> user readable and user typeable aren't the same thing. your WaPo url is perfectly readable - it includes the author, the source, the name of the article, and the date. if you click on it, it takes you where you want to go. if you see it in a context where you don't want to click on it but want to read the article later, you can still find the article because it gave you all the information you need to google for it. if for some reason the link breaks, you can use the information in the link to find an alternate source for the article.

apple.com/ipad is a good URL because it describes the destination. so is nbc.com/parks. but there is a practical limitation to that sort of url scheme - you only get a couple hundred pages max before you exhaust your namespace. you couldn't use a URL like that for every single article a newspaper writes without an absurd number of collisions. so you have to start using unique IDs. and if you only use the ID, you lose the memorable/describable aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anything that silently sends informations about your users to a third party is nasty by nature, including google analytics, gravatar, disqus, +1/like buttons and many more. Please, web designers, think twice before selling all your users to gain little convenience.

</comment><comment><USER18> _They use a URL shortener to track trafic and « engagement » to their content: how much clicks were generated from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin… without an access to the site's Google analytics. That's because figures are more important than people who read their content. In other words: spam._

Okay, I know that ranting content beats happy or deep-thought-out content, but we got into hand-waving territory a little early here and without, well, knowing what the hell we're talking about.

I use bit.ly, and gad, I hope I don't spam. There are a dozen good reasons. I just like knowing in real-time how many people are re-using the links I share online. Gives me some idea if anybody is paying attention. Over time, I can go back and look at all the links I've shared, from my own stuff to MSM material, and see what my friends liked and what they didn't. That's great feedback for me -- just like a "like" on Facebook, except it's entirely passive on the consumer's part.

I'm not saying there isn't a problem. The problem here is that everybody and their brother want as much data as possible from the user, so there's this cascading thing going on where you almost never click on a link that actually describes where you're going. Many times the redirect can be several deep, as the author points out.

So yes, there's a problem. But please don't jump from "there's a problem" to "Spam! Spam! It's all about spam!"

No, it's not. There can be a problem with something without there having to be an evil villain involved.

</comment><comment><USER19> Another evil that roams interwebs are "farewell" gates for outgoing links; eg dA [1].

Unlike URL shorteners which could be in rare cases useful [2] I see not a single benefit of this.

[1] [http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.devianta...](http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing) [2] [http://tinyurl.com/selfcontained-editable- datauri](http://tinyurl.com/selfcontained-editable-datauri) (yes, this one is a misuse, but whatewer)

<comment><USER20> What's bad about them? Blocks referer and warns of phishing.

<comment><USER19> 1) Referrer obscuring: If I wanted not to enclose referrer, I'd have told my browser not to do it. (I don't want to disable this so I don't like some sites forces me to do something very similar by their design.) 1a) (Rhetorical question:) If you were site owner and were interested in incoming traffic, would you rather see 'someportal.com/outgoing?yoursite/page' or 'someportal.com/certainpage' referer header in access logs of yoursite/page?

2) Phishing protection: assuming such outgoing links are checked with Safe Browsing API or something similar (I doubt it), again, that's what my browser does by default. (Incidentally, sometimes I do not want my browser to do this either, so again I like to switch this off: things are a bit faster and free disk space bigger sometimes.) It might seem nice that some page makes this effort too, but again, I don't see a big deal in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not all link shorteners are evil and are destroying the web.

Here are some scenarios in which I like link shorteners:

1) Removal of the referrer (the anonymising redirect)

2) Redirects within a site when content moves, but the redirect service offers a permalink shortened URL. As only they can generate the URL you can trust that the destination is as safe as the source (the intra-site trusted redirect with vanity URLs)

3) Self-healing of the web, if a URL becomes broken the redirect service may be able to figure out or suggest a replacement, or offer a cached version of the destination or a link to the web archive (the self-healing redirect)

4) Protect users against malware and spam by cancelling a redirect if the URL is reported (the 'for the user' gateway redirect)

Not all redirects and shorteners are inherently bad. I suspect the author just dislikes the tracking side of things, but there's always [http://unshort.me/](http://unshort.me/)

<comment><USER22> 1, 3 and 4 almost never happen in real life.

2 is the only thing remotely useful.

<comment><USER21> #1 is used by a lot of sites, mostly torrents and the like to protect their users and themselves from obvious liability. But I even built one to help a forum that discussed philosophy and politics to help them avoid being invaded by trolls just because they discussed (and linked to) content on far-right sites, etc.

#2 was the one I couldn't think of a great example for, but thought that maybe the BBC were doing this (I have no citable source for this hunch but recall a page discussing programme identifiers and moving all existing URLs to this new structure using redirects).

#3 I agree does not happen in real life. Which is a shame.

#4 Twitter claim to do this [https://support.twitter.com//entries/109623](https://support.twitter.com//entries/109623) , and I believe Google are doing this.

Edit: Citable source for #3 [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/radiolabs/2007/11/urls.sht...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/radiolabs/2007/11/urls.shtml) . The BBC use a URL shortener in addition to the equivalent of mod_rewrite to normalise all of their content behind permalink short URLs.

<comment><USER23> #3 actually happens in reverse: link shortener dies or the shortened link expires, while the actual URL lives on. This way, shorteners are _accelerating_ link rot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why doesn't t.co (and, in fact, any URL shortener) follow the redirect chain first, before shortening the URL?

<comment><USER25> Consider what happens when someone decides to give it a URL that redirects infinitely -- it _is_ possible to make an infinite loop, as someone demonstrated 4 years ago while also complaining about URL shorteners:

[http://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/having-fun- with...](http://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/having-fun-with-url- shorteners/)

(The infinite loop in that example unfortunately seems to have broken, illustrating another downside to URL shorteners - they can go away rather quickly.)

<comment><USER24> Detect the loop and reject the URL. I'd rather twitter protect me from ever clicking on an infinitely-redirecting link, although browsers tend to handle that case fairly gracefully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So literally scheduling the automated sharing of links from a "read it later" app is a common enough workflow, but simply using a link shortening service is automatically indicative of spam? _Come on._

Another nit: j.mp and bit.ly are different domains for the same service. If you append a "+" to either URL you see how many times the destination has been shared, clicked, and by _all_ shortened versions of the destination. So it's like both of those are the same link.

Final nit: The Internet was designed to survive nuclear war. The "X destroys the Web" trope is popular, but getting incredibly tired. That's not to say there aren't totally legitimate criticisms of URL shorteners - there are! - but their use clearly pre-dates Twitter and obviously has numerous legitimate use cases as lots of comments here attest to.

<comment><USER27> I was a bit confused about the spam thing too. Was the intended meaning that URL shorteners indicate the link is spam, or that trading off user experience for analytics _makes_ it spam? (Or in the spirit of spam, or something.) I'd think they meant the second one, except that it doesn't actually make any sense.

I also got a really strong gut feeling of "spam" being used as a "boo!" sign, for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Pet peeve: articles that start with the word "why" where "how" is what they meant.

 _Why_ link shorteners do this is a completely different question with completely different answers.

<comment><USER29> thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If I have to repost content that contained shortened links, I always replace them with what they redirect to, and scrub out what's unneeded (e.g. session IDs, referer querystrings). I wish more people would do this, as it will help in reducing the amount of nested redirections. IMHO link shorteners are only for extremely space-constrained applications like Twitter.

As for some sites having extremely long _required_ URLs: Sometimes they are necessary, e.g. parametric searches, but many other times they could've been better designed to be either shorter or more informative. Whatever the form, I don't think link shorteners should be used to hide them, if there is enough space available to hold the full URL.

</comment><comment><USER30> In my experience, from working amongst marketeers, bit.ly is still used not because of its link-shortening abilities. It's used because of the analytics and insight it can provides.

Even on sites with comprehensive analytic packages integrated, bit.ly (and services like it) will be used because the people doing the "social media" work an the people responsible for the performance of the website online are sitting in different places and not talking to each other.

The result is this division of statistical data for each party to beat each other with.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not to mention it's a great way to spread other unwanted nasties.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have been in [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE...](https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F_-_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD) and [http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%8F](http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%8F) also I should note that I am [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%83%D1%80%D1%86%D0%B8...](https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%83%D1%80%D1%86%D0%B8_%D0%B2_%D0%91%D1%8A%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F)

<comment><USER33> Did you enjoy your stay in [http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя](http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя) ?

IRI FTW.

<comment><USER32> Yes, it had a pool with naked people. [http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя](http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя)

Edit: Oh, it needs some editing in the URL and done, cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There's a few more genuine use cases for shorteners, one of them is using links offline (e.g. print advertisements). I noticed my university does that and I kind of like it.

It definitely won't remember company.com/section/potentially_a_subsestion/page?someParamters=mayyybe if I see it somewhere. But I might remember bit.ly/CompanyCampaign.

Some might say that it's the developers/company fault, they should have made the URLs more friendly/configurable. Yeah maybe, but it's often easier just to use a shortener, let's be realistic.

I also use them when I know I will need to open some link directly (i.e. by typing in URL). For example, I prefer bit.ly/myPresentation to logging into google drive, getting 2FA text, finding the presentation...

So yeah, while they are evil in some cases, they have a bunch of genuine use cases.

<comment><USER35> Bog standard permalinks to the rescue: company.com/some-promotion

<comment><USER7> Right. This is the correct way to do it, with natural language related to the ad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> URL shorteners provide one of the two values.

\- short link that is easier to share/doesn't break in the process (when you send it via email, need to copy-paste on your mobile or just want a cleaner FB message

\- tracking that will give the poster insight on the number of clicks and other performance indicators of the message

No one in their right mind would use 302 redirect, because you then loose things like Twitter share counts, or card implementation.

There is an odd case of someone using the shortener for marketing purposes (I do it for my product), but it usually will be a by-product of something deeper that offers value to the user. And, as many of those services are free (as your referred Pocket), it's a small price to pay for an otherwise great product IMO.

</comment><comment><USER37> My favourite link shortener was mug.gd, which could also manipulate the page it was being sent. I remember seeing a version of a PG essay trumpeting the benefits of learning Visual Basic over Lisp :).

It's dead now, demonstrating another problem with URL shorteners.

<comment><USER38> A problem with _3rd party_ URL shorteners.

If you use and host your own, you've got things covered for as long as you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Link shorteners fix one apparent problem with Microsoft Outlook: people sending text emails with long links will typically break them for the recipient and the common workaround, setting the line length setting very high, is terrible too.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm not quite sure it's a URL shortener but [http://linkis.com](http://linkis.com) shortens the URL anyway (as ln.is). I never click a ln.is url anymore. It takes you to an intermediary page that only worsens your^H^H^H^H my life.

PS: Can anyone see what's the point of this service?

</comment><comment><USER41> Here's one reason for me to use an URL shortener in my (German-language) newsletter: URL length. When you send out HTML + plain text emails, some URLs will break the text layout.

So I shorten them sparingly, for simple layout reasons. But I don't track the clicks or anything. I might be in the minority here, tho.

</comment><comment><USER42> Wouldn't it be quite easy for a link shortener to find the final target url and just point to that instead of pointing to another shortener url? It could even heuristically try to search further if the pointed to url looks like an already shortened one (i.e. it's shorter than a treshold).

<comment><USER24> I also wondered this, and commented before I read your comment. The shortener can just follow the HTTP status chain until it gets a 200; no need for length heuristics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Short URLs are not just for the web - they are incredibly useful for sending links via broadcast SMS.

</comment><comment><USER44> This scripts [1] searchs for links in the user timeline and replaces shortned URLs with the original (stored in the data-expanded-url attribute).

[1] [http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/186801](http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/186801)

<comment><USER45> Userscripts has been down for months, as far as I know.

<comment><USER44> It can still be accessed on port 8080:

[http://userscripts.org:8080/scripts/show/186801](http://userscripts.org:8080/scripts/show/186801)

<comment><USER45> Good to know, thanks. Sorry to see it go that spammy route.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Link shortners are useful. There is possibly one other simple way to avoid the latency. t.co can resolve the link all the way to the end at the time a tweet is posted (ie run through 1-5). The latency hit is taken once and and not on every access to the shortened link.

</comment><comment><USER47> The problem is not the link shorteners but the amount of (often slow) redirects that come with them.

Getting users to long URLs is a good thing if done directly.

</comment><comment><USER48> It is true at least for me. I never click on a shortened URL, whatever it might be...

I tend not to trust it.

<comment><USER49> Why do you need to trust a website before clicking the link? If your computer has some vulnerability to virus/hack just by visiting a website then you need to upgrade!

<comment><USER50> Upgrade to what? If you're vulnerable to a 0-day exploit, you're screwed. If you're vulnerable to a known exploit that the vendor hasn't patched yet, you're screwed. If the page delivers a virus the vendors can't block[1], you're screwed. etc.etc.etc.

[1] [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/antivirus-is-dead-long- li...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/antivirus-is-dead-long-live- antivirus/)</comment></comment></comment>


Emergency Surveillance During Covid-19 Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/emergency_surve.html <comment><USER2> There is a town near where I live that floods sometimes. The police always take the opportunity to search all the suspected drug dealers houses during those floods, confiscating drugs and guns under some bogus pretence.</comment>


DragonFly BSD 5.6 - <AUTHOR> https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release56/ <comment><USER2> The impression I get is that DragonFly BSD is the most innovative BSD, especially in terms of HAMMER its filesystem. So where FreeBSD and Solaris/illumos have ZFS and people use those OSs to use a stable implementation of ZFS (e.g. Joyent), people might use DragonFly BSD for HAMMER. But is it just a research project rather than something practical? Is anyone using it or HAMMER in production? Why might people use HAMMER over ZFS or another filesystem? I'm saying all this as someone who uses Linux and is most familiar with OpenBSD when it comes to the BSDs, but that's about it, filesystems are really not on my radar when it comes to do the work that I do.

<comment><USER3> > Is anyone using it

of course, many people are

I make a point of "living" each day on a different virtual machine of my farm, and the days that it's the turn of DragonFly are the most pleasurable. While openbsd has a sweet spot in my heart, the slight divergences to posix become a bit annoying at times. On the other hand, DragonflyBSD gives you probably the cleanest streamlined unix experience.

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, can you give more examples?

<comment><USER3> Nothing really deep. I just want to test that our codes are portable on a large variety of distributions, so I run a few virtual machines. For linux distributions, I'm quite surprised by the bold simplicity of slackware and voidlinux.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hans Rosling: The Good News of the Decade? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_good_news_of_the_decade.html

<comment><USER2> This is really good, though I don't know what will stay with me. It's probably just good for people to see such a strong communicator talk about why statistics matters.</comment>


More Icons for Iphone and Android Apps - <AUTHOR> http://design.taabi.com/resource/interface/compact-icons-set

<comment><USER2> Advice: Use Amazon S3 for hosting your files. It would come out to about a nickel a month. You'd have more people downloading and less people going through the painful process of those download site cartels.</comment>