Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach - neat0-ninj4 https://www.getboost.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> _Roll eyes_. I'm sorry but this is a ridiculous idea. I can see potential use for this once or twice a year, and even at that I wouldn't reach out to anyone unless I know them personally.

How insecure and in need of validation someone needs to be to seek career advice from a chatbot four times a month?

<comment><USER2> Hey! Founder & CEO here.

Love the emotional response. Hey -- some people have to think it's incredibly stupid for it to be a good idea, right? #vclogic ;)

Anyways, we don't see this as just an advisor/coach that you use once or twice a year. That's thinking by the old school rules of how career coaches work.

But Boost is very, very different.

The vast majority of our users use Boost to analyze internal workplace situations, such as those dealing with politics or trying to climb the ladder. Many users do this weekly, when they get new communications that confuse them and they want to ensure they put their best foot forward.

We started the company as an advice-giving system for those during job hunts, but found nearly everyone should have been talking to us 3-6 months before they were switching. Most people don't have online brands that exude quality, they don't land speaking engagements, they don't push themselves to hit goals, and much more.

The people who push, have constant feedback, and have social accountability end up achieving much more. They gain an edge over the people who only "need advice once or twice a year."

Tighter feedback loops = faster learning, which equates to faster career growth.

\----

Oh, and it's not a chatbot. Think of it more like Facebook M -- we have a full-time staff of career coaches who ensure every conversation is of the absolute quality. As of right now our chatbot tech is exceedingly limited and we're prioritizing quality over scale.

<comment><USER3> This was years ago now, but I said the same thing about that "milliondollarwebsite.com" (or something like that?), that sold pixels as advertising space on a single pahe. "What a bloody stupid idea" I said, and said to my flat mates at the time, that if it makes the money I'll run round the block naked.

Fast forward a year or so later, I got sent a link (by my now old flatmate) to a BBC article saying they'd made their million bucks. So, we got together, drank -a lot in my case - and all I remember is much hilarity and that it was a cold night that night.

<comment><USER4> The milliondollarwebsite idea was a much more stupid idea than OP. In fact, OP should probably add more stupidity, to increase success probability. I'm only half-kidding.

<comment><USER2> Only half-kidding you say?!

:) - legit curious what you mean by that.

<comment><USER5> add stupidity: anonymize user data, and crowdsource career advice. use text analysis to figure out how career advice close to official Boost advice to build up a network of advisors ranked from conventional to unconventional. Users feedback on performance of idea, this allows you to identify users who are likely to be helped by unconventional career advice. If you have data on users employers over time you identify unconventional employers or perhaps toxic workplaces. Add higher paid tier for users to see employer ratings.

After this point the stupidity will dissolve into blah blah blah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I also provide private career advisory/coaching and resume services to many in the tech sector, and I'm a mod on a Reddit sub that answers compsci career questions (r/cscareerquestions), so this caught my eye.

The biggest question I generally have with services like this is "who is providing the advice?". We have an issue in our Reddit sub, where there is little transparency (obviously due to anonymous accounts) as to whether your career advice is coming from someone with twenty years of industry experience or an intern. I think the source of the info is relevant, as the recipient may want to weigh the advice based on the source's experience.

It appears Boost is using some AI that might automate some of the response, which will hopefully provide some good answers and perhaps have a few kinks with advice that doesn't quite apply.

As a bit of advice for the founder (saw you commenting here), perhaps a bit of info on the source of the advice would be useful to users.

Best of luck with the service, and feel free to reach out.

<comment><USER2> Hey Fecak! Fantastic -- and important -- question.

We have trained career coaches on staff, an advisory board for coaching, and an extensive network of experts who are within reach.

Through all of this, each conversation acts as a knowledge base that we can pre-fill. We brought in tens of industry experts across product management, design, software engineering, marketing, and more to give crash courses, which were then put into the database as well.

We're still refining our coaching process, as what works for one individual doesn't always work for another.

I'd be interested in chatting in more detail. Can you reach out? :) -> firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER6> That's refreshing to hear that you've got some experienced team members in place or on call, and although career advice is clearly not 'one-size-fits- all' I've learned over the years that there are certainly many pieces of advice that can be applied on a regular basis without much need for customization (negotiation tactics perhaps) which is why AI will be quite useful to you.

Happy to discuss with you, will email directly. Again, good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the "Communicate Better" section, did the imaginary employee really attach business confidential information in a Boost topic?

i.e. "I've attached a PowerPoint full of sensitive information that I'd love you to read and profide feedback. Soon afterwards I'll be needing job search advice since my employer will fire me for having such terrible judgement."

Sounds like a terrible idea and a poor example of how to use the service. Do they really want to advertise Boost as a service which will provide unapproved consultancy of confidential info?

<comment><USER2> Boost is 100% confidential. People talk about complex power grabs and political situations all the time. For Boost to work well, people need to be able to trust it with Information thy want confidential.

<comment><USER8> > 100% confidential

Are your coaches licensed professional counselors, therapists or psychologists? If not, those conversations are not actually privileged; any disclosure of legally protected information (like a company's sensitive internal documents) would be highly improper.

<comment><USER2> We're thinking about putting in an NDA-like process that's more formal. People should feel secure that we have their back.

Interestingly enough, "licensed career coaching" is a complete sham. There's no real accreditation or regulatory environment: the largest career coaching programs that bestow certificates are private, for-profit orgs and give out their certs like candy on halloween. It's really sad.

I agree that there's a large amount of information that probably shouldn't be sent to us, but people also need to give us the full context for their personal problem. We don't encourage people to send us information we don't need, and often they can get by with indirect info... "we're raising $8.6m on a $100m valuation" -> "I think we're going through additional funding soon."

<comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensed_professional_counselo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensed_professional_counselor)

It's not called a 'licensed career coach' \-- privilege, in this case, is a legal protection that is not afforded to the type of relationships you're talking about. You're putting yourself, and your clients, in a very legally tenuous position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This might be just me, but the most important thing to me when I get advice is:

\- who am I getting it from

\- what do I know about their life/experience

\- under what circumstances

Because that let's me adjust how much importance to put on it. Getting advice is generally not the hard part, figuring out which advice to follow and which to discard is.

<comment><USER2> Totally agree.

We help people build external social support networks as well.

In addition, as is true with all good coaches, most conversations circle around introspection and talking through analysis rather than imposing our own advice. We still give plenty of advice, but we also are aware enough of the nuances that exist and we-don't-know-what-we-don't-know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> @dang: Are influenced submissions investigated? This post was submitted by an account with no other submissions/comments except this. I suspect some mischief, but have no proof. Is is possible to look at the first few votes made for this post?

<comment><USER11> The submission link has UTMs: [https://www.getboost.io/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=so...](https://www.getboost.io/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch)

This certainly smells.

<comment><USER10> That was something that tipped me off too. They're very specific.

<comment><USER2> It was posted by our head of coaching.

Suspicious? People self post all the time. We didn't run an upvote group, if that's your concern. HN algorithms are way too impressive.

<comment><USER10> I guess we'll have to take your word for it.

The account that posted was created about two months ago and this was the only submission which was the red flag. And this was the very first submission. Usually people have to repeatedly post to get the traction this post did because they get ignored sometimes.

<comment><USER2> So what's weird is she actually posted last week too, but only she can see that submission in her submissions page.

I can't see it -- I only see this one.

Maybe that's why this one was allowed to go up? Not sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really cool idea, but I don't know why I would pay a (relatively large) monthly fee for a service that I probably need twice a year, around both my performance reviews.

<comment><USER2> Hey dtft!

Boost can do things that help you daily or weekly such as:

\- Review communications (inbound and outbound) \- Help you develop new skills and stay up to date \- Assist you with targeted networking \- And much more.

Overall, this is a service that can refine every aspect of your professional life. People who only think about refining their habits and practices twice a year are not aiming towards their potential. The bare minimum is too often accepted as normal -- we want to change that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone that moved to SF from Sydney and didn't have a strong network here I think this would have helped.

One thing is that I have no idea who is on the other side of the chat. If they are giving me advice about one of the most important things in my life is there a guarantee on the quality of that advice?

Are you guys in the next YC batch?

<comment><USER2> Quality can been self-assessed quite readily, and for tricky situations we usually coach people to develop a supporting network outside of Boost. So far we have paying users who are VPs at large companies all the way to College Students.

And our tech revolves around surfacing quality advice, what works/doesn't work, so it will constantly improve. Still, we don't risk anything -- we do extensive training for coaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Quick question, trying to get my head around the product:

Say I just got an email from my boss that I think is passive-aggressively accusatory (e.g., perhaps it lays out the specifics of what she wants me to do tomorrow in a way that I think she's implying that I can't be entrusted to get things done without detailed instructions).

I paste the email into Boost, asking for feedback; am I crazy, or is this an accusatory email, I wonder, eagerly anticipating Boost's response. Perhaps I also want to hear Boost's advice on how to respond to the email.

After I do this, who is reading and interpreting the email on Boost's behalf, then giving me advice on how to respond? I'm sure you're feeding it into a sentiment analysis API, but apart from that, what human attention does the email get and what are the backgrounds of the humans doing it?

<comment><USER2> The humans are trained career coaches who are on our full-time staff. They are obliged to follow all privacy and confidentiality agreements that the company follows itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And I came here thinking this was about a C++ class library..

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool idea. I like it overall.

I don't know about the idea of having "experts" talk to you. I've spent a lot of time thinking about my career and talked to a few experts and it's a real mixed bag. In some ways I see this in the same way I see most formal mentoring programs - the best way to get an amazing mentor is to arrange it yourself. There's a way to do it, but it's hard.

That said, there's a massive amount of potential to change the way that recruiting is done. Traditional job boards suck - they don't work for candidates - it's a blind stab in the dark, they don't work for hiring managers because you get the same 100 applicants who didn't read the job description every time you post up an ad.

Getting people to front-load the work before they look for jobs and making that introductions to companies would totally change the game. Recruiters aren't suited for that (I am a sales recruiter). You'd eat LinkedIn's job postings for dinner as well.

If you were able to get a userbase of high-quality candidates, who you worked with to improve their careers and then put them into additional jobs you'd be able to charge thousands for each successful hire. There's a market for helping move the smart, overworked, underpaid millennials who are grinding it out at professional services firms from their first jobs at $50k to jobs paying $120k a year (which will more or less happen naturally for a lot of them as they move through their 20s). These people are likely to pay for it, plus their employers would pay on the other end.

The hardest bit is making it a habit for young professionals to check into your platform. Right now it's a weird concept, but hey, the idea of dating online amongst 22 year olds was weird until Tinder changed the entire game.

If you could turn Boost into a career coach firstly and then into a reliable pipeline of candidates for professional firms, I'm convinced you could make this massive.

Damn, I want to work on this now haha.

<comment><USER2> Hey! Message me -> firstname.lastname@example.com

We actually played that game before. We were arbitraging candidates for their job hunt -- taking a % of their salary upon successful new job. The issue was, most frequently, was that you'd have to invest a lot of time/money into people and there are a lot more "talkers" than "doers". So far, the recurring revenue model has been a lot more psychologically pleasing, haha...

But yes -- our goal is to really help people become better and move up the career ladder faster. If you're passionate about that, I do think we should chat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me a lot of StrongIntro's (YC W16) website

[https://strongintro.com/](https://strongintro.com/)

<comment><USER2> Hey! We are friends with Fouad (founder of StrongIntro) and he let us use the images. :)

<comment><USER18> Fouad is awesome. Always so helpful to everyone around him.

<comment><USER2> True that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> One thing I want to mention is our upcoming event! We'll be hosting Amjad Masad, Founder of Repl.it and former JS Tech Lead at Facebook where they built projects like React Native, BabelJS, and Jest.

Tickets are free. Event is in SF on June 1st!

[https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-fireside-chat-with-amjad- masa...](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-fireside-chat-with-amjad-masad- founder-ceo-of-replit-tickets-34638891858?aff=hackernews)

</comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for sharing. Some notes:

1\. Signups go right to waitlist, so it's hard to validate any of this. Is this vaporware? Why waitlist? Are you still in dev, or is this an artificial scarcity play?

2\. All I see here conceptually is headhunter lead-gen, so I don't understand why you're charging $708+/yr for chatting. Why not offer your service for free, register orders of magnitude more users, and make your money as an agency by placing users in new jobs? If they are engaged with your platform, you'll know it's time to do that before any other platform or agency does, and you have a qualitative advantage over other agencies because you will have counseled your candidates for a long time prior. Seems like the focus of Jobstart before you rebranded it, n'est pas?

3\. Your job functions in registration are constrained to tech and tech- adjacent functions only. Is that a limitation of the advisors you have on your platform, an unconsciously narrow scope, or is it related to your market designs for point 2?

4\. How will you not get obliterated in court for encouraging the transmission of proprietary or privileged information?

5\. Back to the $708+/yr point, so many alternatives could provide the same use for less. A private curated Quora, a user mentor network with perks (advise other users for incentives), even curated career resources in a newsletter or Amazon book-of-the-month club. I realize that a service like this might pay for itself in boosting one's earning potential, but many less- expensive incarnations of the same are at anyone's disposal.

6\. Why chat? Why not email? Why not Hangouts? I feel like chat is such a restrictive medium.

<comment><USER20> Disclaimer, I have gotten much value out of their previous project, jobstart.

1/ it's based on personal advice so needs to scale on both sides. I've spoken w the founders and they legit.

2/ I intend to get my work to pay for it under "high quality outsourced good management". I don't expect to use it for a new job, but to perform better in my current.

3/ it is my understanding that it's a scaling thing.

5/ in my job, a 10% improvement in efficiency Uncompounded is worth thousands of dollars in direct costs per month. Well worth it, based on my jobstart experience w the same team.

<comment><USER19> With respect to #2, why would any employer pay for their employee to use a service that has a strong financial incentive to place them in a new job?

<comment><USER21> If the service ($) actually develops an employee to a higher level of performance, the employer gets the benefit of a more senior hire who is already at their company instead of having to recruit ($$) and on-board ($$) one & hope they work out ($$$).

Even if they need to give the current employee a healthy raise ($$) to retain them, they'd still probably net save money.

(in theory)

If some high % of employees who use this tool discover they really ought to be working elsewhere, well, that's probably better for the industry's cost/productivity as a whole, so everyone wins in the end yayy!! But sure maybe it's optimal for an employer to hide this sort of tool if they rely on employees having inefficient market information to retain them & that somehow fits with their ethics...

(Looking at you, the giant companies that got sued for their illegal informal non-competes...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Have they thought about adding in Motivational Coaching? I would easily pay for that as I need to perform at a very high level for long periods of time with little advice. I would pay probably upwards of 300 a month for regular access to a motivational and strategic coach a la the main character in Showtime's Billions.

<comment><USER2> Boost does motivational coaching as well! We brought in some CBTs (Cognitive Behavioral Therapist) who recommended we train our coaches in it.

I can't guarantee it'll be as high quality as the Billion's actors though. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am usually very skeptical, esspecially when it comes to the pitfalls of exchanging personal advice, but this really is not personal advice. This is ethics training.

I think the difference changes Everything. This could solve a very real problem: the mysteries of navigating ethical standing.

I am concerned about the anonymity, particularly that the advice depends on the info provided while the user is representing not only themselves as a patient but also their ego. Ideally, the user would have comfortable assurance of their anonymity and the concept would have a unique value. If doable and manageable, I would believe in that.

Privacy would be a concern for many users (for various reasons) but not all. My thought about anonymity is about usefulness, not privacy.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hah—ironically, it's expensive enough it should be advising you to go with a cheaper option.

</comment><comment><USER25> I didn't look very deep beyond the main graphic at the top, basically did a quick 5 second test on it. Personally, even though I'm a typical person who avoids phone calls most of the time, I can't imagine texting some stranger for career advice. Some sort of network tool to match with a mentor for a long- term relationship sounds like something I might become interested in once in the shit storm as a founder. Ideally, the match would lead to phone and/or in- person conversations and advice.

</comment><comment><USER26> UTMs in the HN link: cheese-a-rific

</comment><comment><USER27> "Hi again Boost. So I've been working at my job now for about 8 months and don't think I'm getting paid enough as a Lead Designer -- barely making rent in SF isn't fun. Is it too early to ask for a raise?"

Would someone really want to confide that much of personal glimpse into their working life to community they barely even know, or even for their current employer or future employer to possibly see one day.

Not for me.

<comment><USER28> I have similar concerns, although I'm shocked the quoted question is where someone would draw the line. That in particular does not seem at all personal, or potentially damaging at all (if an employer regards an employee trying to gauge their value negatively they're probably a shitty company to work for anyway). Personally I wonder how effective any kind of general career advice could be without conferring with a level of intimacy I'd reserve for a therapist or close friend. I feel like only the most practical career advice (which is widely and freely available) could be offered up without delving into things like long term goals and personal motivations. I guess I could see this being useful if you have a well formed idea of where you want to go in your career and have trouble getting from point A to point B, or could use a little encouragement/social pressure, but I think the harder problem is figuring out that destination not the implementation details.

<comment><USER2> To both points: trust is earned over time and we have to actually design our onboarding flows and coaching processes around that idea. It's tricky, but it's how it should work -- we don't expect people to have implicit faith in any system, and actively coach them to question the world around them.

More people question too little than too much, so it's great to see you all are the opposite. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My first question on seeing this was "what does the advice look like?" Thanks for having so many examples right on the home page!

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a recruiter who's been a CTO, contract developer, consulted for most of the large international staffing companies, run (very) occasional courses on career development for developers, and have hired many people as a technical interviewer. I give a lot of free advice to developers I represent.

I will be curious to see if there's an actual market for this.

<comment><USER31> Do you work in or around the Bay Area? I don't actually know very many recruiters who are more than just salespeople.

<comment><USER30> Afraid not. While I've technically got global reach, I focus on London, and a particular niche in London.

<comment><USER32> Any tips for finding 'good' recruiters/filtering out bad ones?

And any tips for finding good recruiters in London specifically?

<comment><USER30> What area are you in? Possible I can make recommendations albeit unlikely. I've found a fairly strong correlation between recruiters whose company I enjoy and their competence. Also: look at the spread of the jobs they're in, do they sponsor conferences and communities?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sounds like this would be helpful for a lot of people. I would use it following the same rationale as hiring a personal trainer: some self-imposed level of accountability to push me forward. I know how to exercise, but having someone there to nudge me in the right direction helps me actually do it.

<comment><USER2> ^^^^ someone gets it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Good idea or not - I am worried about the security of this. Some of us have signed contracts that specifically mention that we shouldn't share company information with third parties.

Even if a person hasn't signed a non disclosure, how ethical is it to share in-company politics with others?

<comment><USER2> We are too -- that's why we are working close with our lawyer to understand all the implications.

We're also working on DB security. Our data isn't large enough yet to really be a big target -- it's pretty boring right now -- but we'll invest in it right when scaling hits promising Series A-style levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> How will you scale (if intended)?

Why I ask: Wondering if bots or customer support staff can really support this use case.

<comment><USER2> Hey there! We're looking to scale this in a similar way as Facebook M -- where our coaches on staff have control over specific bots with specific purposes, and can leverage an entire world of data/knowledge to quickly craft personalized responses.

At $59/month, unit economics should work as we develop better tech. But for now we're certainly prioritizing quality over speed. :)

<comment><USER36> Have you thought about freemium models? Maybe have bot-only engagements that are free and then pay for more personalized advice? I just feel like paying on a "session" basis would be more workable for me than a monthly subscription. If the product/advice works well, I should have less and less need of it! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've watched Zach and his team evolve their business and product over the past few months and years. I'm really impressed by their ability to adapt and build new products guided by user feedback and data. I'm excited to see how many people Boost will help!

</comment><comment><USER38> What is your legal protection on giving bad advice? It's all good to say something along the lines of it not being legal advice, etc. But what if some advice you give wrecks that person career? How are you and your mentors protected?

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm not totally convinced but sufficiently intrigued to give this a go.

Are you focussing purely on low to mid level employees inside a company or also catering to freelancers and such people who have similar though not exactly the same needs?

<comment><USER2> Hey! We have a wide variety of users and are trying to figure out if we want to niche, but so far a lot of the success has been against broad markets.

Low/Mid level employees are certainly much easier to help. Less complicated political situations, etc.

We have a couple freelancers on the platform... probably about 15 or so. Their discussions usually center around improving their external brand and customer pipelines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This looks very useful. But it's not clear to me what a "topic" is. Is it a single question from beginning to end? If it dragged on could it become a new topic? More clarity with this would be great!

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback!

There's actually currently an AB test where we remove topics. It seems that most people are confused by this, and it created a strange flow in the conversations.

A topic is basically an entire chat engagement, end-to-end, with a specific purpose.

As I said though, we're looking to gain data right now to possibly remove them. Appreciate the thoughts!

<comment><USER41> Maybe just call them "conversations"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How do you manage such an insanely low price point?

<comment><USER2> I always love when this advice contrasts with "Why does it cost so much" :P

Our entire engineering team is dedicated to building tools that make our career coaches super human. Unit economics can get healthy pretty fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Cool idea! Very much needed in this industry.

</comment><comment><USER43> Would this be suitable for money-making side-project advice and goals?

</comment><comment><USER44> Possibly useful for people who have lots of money and no friends.

<comment><USER2> Hahahaha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Here's a similar service for dating advice: [https://hermes.social](https://hermes.social)

Shows that this concept can span niches.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is awesome!

<comment><USER2> Hey Elfen! Founder here -- thank you. :)

We're always looking to hone in our pitch and improve the product. If you or anyone else here has feedback, let me know.

<comment><USER47> Can we get a shift + Enter to submit the main chat text field?

<comment><USER2> Shift+Enter is usually reserved to make a new line, wherease command or ctrl+enter is used to submit.

Does that work for you?

<comment><USER47> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wind turbines in Denmark reached record level in 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://energinet.dk/EN/El/Nyheder/Sider/Vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-2014.aspx <comment><USER2> Scotland does pretty well with regards to renewables with ~49.8% of energy consumption sourced from renewable sources (17.1k GWh wind/hydro out of 19k GWh total renewables).

This puts wind and hydro at around 42%.

[https://www.scottishrenewables.com/sectors/renewables-in- num...](https://www.scottishrenewables.com/sectors/renewables-in- numbers/#chart5)

[http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0048/00480365.pdf](http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0048/00480365.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Beware of double-counting pumped storage.

<comment><USER2> I don't understand what you mean by that. Could you explain?

<comment><USER3> Scotland (and other countries besides) has a lot of 'pumped storage', lakes at a relatively high point that are fed from lakes at a lower point by running pumps that push the water from the lower lake to the higher one when energy is cheap and then back into the grid when it is more expensive (when there is a scarcity).

The net effect of this is that electricity originally generated by nuclear plants and other fossil fuel plants gets 'converted' into (more expensive!) 'green' energy.

It's a kind of white-washing for electrons. The price difference can be substantial more than making up for the cost of the pumping and subsequent re- generation.

And of course it's the energy sold to the public that matters, not how it was originally generated so by double counting this energy it changes the balance considerably without there actually being more renewable energy to begin with.

<comment><USER4> No, pumped storage is not "white-washing" : energy storage is the key piece to making unpredictable energy sources viable, by storing during low demand and having a buffer instantly available to respond to peaks. It displaces having extremely expensive gas turbines on standby or lighting up fuel burners during peak loads, so it has a direct impact on reducing fossil fuel consumption.

<comment><USER3> Of course it is. The arbitrage is what makes it happen because that's what makes it _profitable_. If the energy so generated were labeled with the point of origin then it would count as fossil fuel and then it would yield less on the energy market. The load variations are not such that the generating capacity could not be reduced in time, but there is less money in that.

This is _not_ renewable energy though it masquerades as such. Note that before green energy became a thing this was already happening so it is simply a re- labeling rather than that these lakes suddenly got re-purposed for renewable energy storage.

If the source of the electricity is not originally renewable energy then it is deceptive to sell it as such. People pay a pretty premium for renewable energy.

<comment><USER5> > Of course it is.

Not necessarily!

It may be, it may not be. It depends on the time and place and whatnot. Pumped hydro today might be mostly "white washing" today in Scotland. It might not be "white washing" tomorrow in Germany. It depends on a lot of factors.

If the electrical rates do occasionally go negative in mainland Europe (from wind) and there are pumped hydro stations there then it's entirely possible that the wind electrons are the ones pushing the water uphill rather than the fossil fuel electrons, and then when that water eventually does generate electricity again, it's technically still renewable.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped- storage_hydroel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped- storage_hydroelectric_power_stations)

It sounds like the plant that you visited in Scotland was white washing, at least when you visited. But that doesn't mean that all pumped hydro everywhere in the world definitely, for sure, guaranteed, is also doing the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Extensive plots for Germany for comparison:

[http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf- files...](http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-files- englisch/data-nivc-/electricity-production-from-solar-and-wind-in- germany-2014.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Does that report mention consumption anywhere? This article is about consumption, not production, so it doesn't really make sense to compare this report to the article.

<comment><USER6> If you put it into the net, it has to be consumed somewhere. If there is too much production you have to take plants off the grid, and I think those are not included in the plots.

There is an extensive planning process with weather forecasts and peak consumption predictions (break in the football world cup finals for example) to prevent sudden surprising changes. Different kind of power plants have different timelines that it takes to power them up and down. Small peaks in demand can be covered with gas plants since they are very fast to power up and down, but they are expensive. Coal plants take a day, nuclear - forget it-, and solar and wind can be predicted fairly well with the weather (there are plots about the success of predictions in the pdf), water is fairly stable and biomass behaves like gas. You really only want to produce what is consumed, and then there's export and import. There are charts for that as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The big problem with this is oversupply of the grid. While Denmark has the ability to export to Norway, Sweden and Germany (amongst others) it's likely wind production will be at high levels in neighbouring countries. Germany often has a huge oversupply of energy, with electricity prices turning negative.

<comment><USER9> That surprised me a little, Germany oversupplying because of wind. Wind is about 10% of electricity there, but then I looked up variability and it explains why:

[https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jp...](https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jpeg)

Pretty crazy, it really calls for storage solutions doesn't it. Hell even if you had the same smooth wind every day, there'd be a huge demand/production discrepancy during sundown if enough wind is installed.

<comment><USER6> If you run the calculations you can see that the more you have installed over capacity the less storage you need (since you can also fully provide if there is less wind). It's a trade-off, really.

<comment><USER9> Of course, you don't need to run any numbers to see make the logical conclusion :-/

But wouldn't it be true to say that store is the cheaper alternative to installing excess capacity, the alternative with less local resistance (a political issue with both on and offshore wind), and the alternative with fewer maintenance issues versus e.g. offshore wind? Let me know if you have any numbers on that.

I've checked some numbers myself. For example, even domestic storage (which includes things like an inverter already) like the Tesla powerwall costs $3500, and has 5.000 full depth cycles of lifetime, and a capacity of 7 kwh. Meaning purely for storing and using 1 kwh, it's about $10c. That's more than the cost of onshore wind (about 7c or so, differs per country).

But we know that utility scale batteries can be much cheaper (I mean these Tesla powerwalls are quite similar to batteries that go into cars, their energy density is very high due to space constraints. If space and weight is not a concern you can build cheaper batteries), plus batteries as an industry are currently on a much steeper decline in cost annually than renewable generation technologies so going in to the future storage should become much more attractive, even as extra generation becomes more attractive, too.

One example is Alevo, found an interesting post about it I'll quote here: > Alevo is claiming $100/kWh and 40,000 cycles. That works out to $0.003/cycle. Financed for 20 years at 5% would mean a $0.022 price per cycle over the first 20 years and then the cost of storage dropping to roughly zero for 89 more years.

That's 2-3 cents per cycle. It'd be really hard to make the case for excess wind capacity over storage. Particularly because on some days wind generation is still near zero. The image I showed shows the top day generating 200x as much as the bottom day. To generate enough on the bottom day, you need a ridiculous amount of excess capacity generation to compensate, capacity that may be more expensive per kwh than storage, that overproduces the rest of the year (while still costing money, unlike storage which costs money per cycle, i.e. when used), and exacerbates the non-financial issues of wind (e.g. landscape changes that local people resist).

It's looking like storage is going to be playing a huge role.

<comment><USER6> I have some numbers from a basic simulation, but not on the political side. It has costs, though. (It's a bacholor thesis in German.)

Of course storage is going to play a huge role, that would be hard to deny. I just find the fact interesting that you can live with less storage if you have more capacity for energy production.

You only assume battery storage, right? AFAIK Norway has offered extensive storage by pumping water into high reservoirs (don't know the english name), which would be another option, and just one of many. Of course, that would require a lot of investments into infrastructure, and we're already fighting about that locally. (Nobody wants the power lines in their backyards.)

<comment><USER9> > pumping water into high reservoirs (don't know the english name)

It's just pumped storage! :) Easy to remember.

But yeah there's a lot of things. Pumped storage is a big one, The International Renewable Energy Agency in their roadmap for 2030 for example call for just 150 GW of battery storage, but a whooping 325 GW of pumped storage.

There's other ones, too. One of them is storing thermal, heat energy in caverns, or in rocks. You can then extract when you need to, so you could take wind energy at night when there is barely any demand and use it to electrically heat up rocks, and store the energy for the next day.

Molten salts is similar but different.

Ice, same thing for air conditioning purposes. At night you use excess electricity and essentially run a big fridge on your roof to create ice, and then use that to cool the air during the day.

Those are all thermal storage. Then there's say pressure based storage, like compressing air and releasing it when you want to.

Flywheels are also a thing, you have a wheel and rotate it really fast using energy, and then just slow it down and capture the energy when you want to. It sounds pretty ridiculous but it works and there's various ways to reduce friction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And what's the average price for kwh in Denmark?

<comment> bjelkeman-again Something I wrote in an earlier thread:

Denmark's electricity price is the highest in the EU "when you count in taxes and VAT, which go to produce other useful outcomes. However, Ireland together with the UK has the highest energy prices excluding taxes, closely followed by Cyprus and Spain. Interestingly enough, three of these are islands.

It would be interesting to see these prices without subsidies, as the energy market is pretty global and these big differences must come from something else, I think."

[http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/File:Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers,_second_half_2014_\(¹\)_\(EUR_per_kWh\)_YB15.png)

<comment><USER11> Looking at [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continen...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe) and combining that with your remark, I would guess the electricity market isn't _" pretty global"_. Yes, you can ship coal and oil about everywhere, but there seem to be economies of scale in larger networks, especially if your grid spans time zones (people switch on their stuff at different times in GMT), and Europe's does that.

Of the four you mention, three aren't connected to that grid, and I would guess the link with Spain doesn't have sufficient capacity to even out peaks and troughs in Spanish demand ([http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/power-system- modelling](http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/power-system-modelling) does show a fairly thin line between France and Spain, both large countries in population)

The above is 100% educated GUESS. Corrections welcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The text doesn't mention it, and it often is implied in these kinds of reports that this only is about domestic electricity use, so: does that include industrial use?

If not, what percentage of total electricity use are we talking about?

If or if not, what percentage of total power use are we talking about?

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm no electrical engineer (could be doing the math wrong), but I think there is a pretty glaring error in this page:

The author mentions a 400 MW wind farm, and then says that correlates to 400,000 homes. Unless homes in Denmark use only 3% of what homes in the US use on average[1], that number should be somewhere closer to 15,000 homes.

1\. [http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3](http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3)

<comment><USER13> You have not accounted for the difference between power and energy. 909 kilowatt hours (energy) divided by a month (720 hours) is an average of about 1250 watts (power).

So 400 megawatts might only power 300,000 US homes, but the scale is about right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2014/06/renewa...](http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2014/06/renewable- energy-renewables-generate-84-percent-of-uruguay-s-energy.html)

[https://news.vice.com/article/an-energy-revolution-is- underw...](https://news.vice.com/article/an-energy-revolution-is-underway-in- uruguay)

</comment><comment><USER15> In 2014 63% of Portugal's electricity needs were supplied by renewable sources [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Portugal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Portugal)

</comment><comment><USER16> But how much of this was overlapping power production with baseline fossil fuel production? Wind power often doesn't displace fossil fuels, it coincides with it, since wind is less predictable and coal plants take hours to ramp up/down.

If 39% of Danes' electricity completely displaced the same amount of fossil fuels, my jaw would hit the floor.

<comment><USER17> Not sure if its the same for the Danes, but in the US coal is being displaced by natural gas, which _can_ be throttled quickly for grid demand response (and is cleaner, and releases drastically less CO2 per unit of power generated, and can be moved across the country quicker via pipeline vs trains).

<comment><USER18> The cleanliness of natural gas is significantly overstated. Fracking is a dirty business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And the cost of electricity in Denmark is the highest in Europe:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity-prices- europe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity-prices-europe.jpg)

<comment><USER20> That is mostly due to extreme taxes.

<comment><USER21> Yes. Here is a breakdown

[https://www.energifyn.dk/privat/elhandel/bag-om- elprisen](https://www.energifyn.dk/privat/elhandel/bag-om-elprisen)

Orange is tax, grey is VAT, yellow also has some tax-like elements.</comment></comment></comment>


Thoughts on DynamoDB From a Netflix Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2012/01/thoughts-on-simpledb-dynamodb-and.html

<comment><USER2> Fascinating article. One thing I'd like to see more about is the cost of running everything on AWS, and how much the costs would increase if they moved from SimpleDB to DynamoDB.</comment>


Show HN: US H1B Worker Salaries Visualized for Easy Exploration - <AUTHOR> http://www.h1bsalary.info/ <comment><USER2> These are _not_ salaries, they are "Labor Condition Applications", which companies have to submit before they can submit any H1B application. The LCA actually has a range of pay (WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM and WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_TO), so the way it is displayed here is pretty misleading. And even then, they reflect the lowest possible salary the company might pay an H1B worker.

As someone who went through the process, I can say the salary attached to my LCA was lower than the salary I received, though I don't know why. Perhaps since LCAs can apply to more than one employee it's standard practise to set the bar low, allowing you to use the same LCA with a less qualified worker.

Either way, this is not a conclusive, reliable data set.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for clarifying. Do you have some more info about this. Some page where these ranges are listed?

I'm curious to understand how these numbers are derived as they seem slightly off to me.

<comment><USER2> The site links to the original data source, which has the raw data available as XSLS files:

[https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm#...](https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm#dis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know if H1B's are exempt from California's Labor Codes? Looks like there's quite a few that fall short of 2017's required $88k[1].

1 [https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and- samples/hr-...](https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr- qa/pages/california-minsalarycomputerexemption.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is rubbish, at least for my company, where we hire 2 Software Engineer IIs with H1B, so it's easy to reason about the numbers.

I was one of those 2 engineers until got promoted to a Senior a few months ago, and the number it reports for min and max are grossly inaccurate. My salary hasn't ever been nearly that low, I don't think any engineer of any rank in our company makes that little.

<comment><AUTHOR> data comes from department of labor based on company filings. May b I m not extracting from the correct field so I will check again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I want to sort by salary so I can see who pays best/worst.

<comment><AUTHOR> U mean to see which company pays the most? It's a little tricky since u prob want to based on average or median salary in tat case but then that will hide a lot of details without also separating by job/city/level etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The bottom salaries might sound low in this forum, maybe because no one who is getting paid this kinds of salaries hangs around Hacker news.. ;) (I've known plenty of warm bodies dev's that make that kind of money)

</comment><comment><USER8> I tried a few examples I know, the data is not accurate.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's an H1B at Google who makes $54k. Hard to believe Google's salaries even drop that low, contractor?

<comment><USER10> Tata Developer @ $15,222[0]

[0][http://www.h1bsalary.info/index.html?employerName=TATA%20CON...](http://www.h1bsalary.info/index.html?employerName=TATA%20CONSULTANCY%20SERVICES%20LIMITED&year=2016)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, these types of organizations are the ones abusing the visa system. Look at this salary distribution, and realize that many (most?) of these workers are staffed at tech giants like Apple, but employed by TCS: [http://www.h1bsalary.info/index.html?employerName=TATA%20CON...](http://www.h1bsalary.info/index.html?employerName=TATA%20CONSULTANCY%20SERVICES%20LIMITED&year=2016)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also: [http://h1bdata.info/](http://h1bdata.info/)

Seems to have more data.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am an H1B from India. I want to add one point.

My LCA says x salary. I get 3k more than that. Considering all yhe benefits, it comes to around y per hour. My employer charges the customer '1.76y' to '2.14y' depending on the project. So the customer is actually paying nearly twice of what I get paid.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Data has been updated. It should be closer to actual wage now.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why is Amazon hiring H1-B workers for Technical Program Management roles? :mindblown:</comment>


Ask HN: Simple database/key-value store web API for throwaway projects? - <AUTHOR> I realized recently it might be nice to use a single remote data store for all the disposable and not terribly data-heavy web things like landing pages. This way they could be just business logic, with no stored data to worry about preserving when you shut them down or move them from one platform to another. It would preferably be dead simple to use, cheap and have a good UI for viewing the stored data. Can you recommend any?<p>One service I like in this general area is webscript.io, which provides a sandboxed Lua interpreter you can use, e.g., for validation, but its focus is different and the built-in view for the stored data is bare-bones. <comment><USER2> Firebase is perfect for this. A lot of the big hackathons have been won using Firebase as it is so quick to set up and get started. But it is solid for production use as well.

[http://firebase.google.com](http://firebase.google.com)</comment>


GitHub was down again - <AUTHOR> https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/phnch1rww464 <comment><USER2> I was seeing PRs failing to update & webhooks failing to trigger upon pushing code for 30 minutes before GH's status page acknowledged anything. I'm surprised they don't have monitoring in place that would catch webhooks failing within minutes of the failure beginning.

<comment><USER3> At large bureaucratic organisations there's often political implications of changing the official status, so often it lags behind reality until it cannot be swept under the rug anymore

Not saying it's right, just an observation

<comment><USER4> As a CTO responsible for an often failing eCommerce website that lost millions when down and which I took over, I fell in the same trap of trying to sweep things under the rug.

Until I decided to no longer do that and my life improved considerably.

<comment><USER3> Yeah it's very frustrating - especially if your customers are technical, they are seeing the errors and the status page says everything is fine.

I've seen status pages and error counts tied to bonuses, which only caused a giant mess of bad incentive alignment and internal lies, customers are unhappy, developers are unhappy, management are lying to upper management, it's so much easier to focus efforts on real problems and just be honest and improve. Thank goodness I dont work there anymore (cough cough Google)

<comment><USER5> Do these companies not have live error reporting and tracing? Like surely github got alerts that things weren't working? Why don't they just hookup their status page and their alerts? Or is it a political/relationship thing, and they want to have a human give out the status page updates?

This could have been caught with a cron job and some curl requests :\

<comment><USER6> In all honesty they're typically just banking on people not noticing it and are trying to make it as little of a fuss as possible and get it up before it gets to twitter. The problem is when it's not just a small blip and they haven't addressed it and it goes mainstream and is still down, it just leads to concerns about transparency.

Building infra I have to work around all sorts of 3rd party services going out or having blips throughout the day, docker registries, caches, bgp, etc., it's totally an expected part of infra design but not every team has the time or need to build in the resiliency. I see tons of outages that never get reported or IMO aren't reported adequately enough.

With that said, I'm no angel, I get all my service down notifications through slack, so when slacks down..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> GitHub actions downtime is becoming painful for us. Having been lured on there with 10,000 included minutes which they shortly thereafter dropped to 3,000 I feel aggrieved paying for overages incurred from actions regularly shitting the bed.

<comment><USER8> Also having outages at Azure DevOps Pipelines every other month or so it seems. And that's paying - for hours there's no mention on the status page and we are stuck there, not being able to merge PRs or release our app in the standard way.

<comment><USER9> This is weird because we haven't encountered any real issues with agents in Azure DevOps pipelines. I think we maybe had a single downtime in last 6 months. They recently removed .NET Core 2.2 SDK without any notice and broke our builds but that's another thing.

<comment><USER8> Maybe it has something to do with us using the macOS hosts/agents? For deprecating things, I know that they sometimes do brownouts, see [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/removing-older- images-...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/removing-older-images-in- azure-pipelines-hosted-pools/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here we are again. Me taking a break on Hackernews because all my webhooks and pull requests are fucked and I have no idea where my devops tools are relative to what the real state of affairs is. I have pretty much had enough of this. It is too disruptive to our process. It is causing fragility and loss of confidence in our build pipeline.

At this point, we would probably be better off just bolting some lightweight git solution onto our devops tools (which are 100% custom in-house developed), rather than fighting with some more-durably-hosted offering of GitHub, et. al.

Anyone who posts that "but you cant make it more reliable than microsoft" line is not thinking about the dependencies between systems and the considerable impact incurred on a service just by virtue of it being a publicly-accessible platform without any cost barrier to entry. Sure, bringing it in house might bring additional difficulties, but I think I can eliminate a shitload of existing difficulties if we moved from webhooks across the public internet to a direct method invocation within the same binary image.

<comment><USER11> We've been self hosting Gitlab CE for a couple of years. Its been great. No downtime, upgrades are seamless, fast, works.

<comment><USER10> Gitlab is probably at the top of the list of candidates if we go down this road. I don't necessarily need it to be in the same binary as my devops tools, but certainly no further than localhost or another machine on the same network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://gitea.io/en-us/](https://gitea.io/en-us/)

[https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/](https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/)

[https://about.gitlab.com/install/?version=ce](https://about.gitlab.com/install/?version=ce)

<comment><USER13> The first two links miss the idea a bit, I'd say.

I don't often need a web interface to a git repo. I can pull and do everything locally.

What I _do_ use GitHub for is (1) code review and approval process, (2) CICD / actions, (3) releases to push stuff out.

The branch / tag / file browser is a nice addition, but it's not key. Rendering README.md is almost as important, if not more.

<comment><USER14> Gitea has a lot of those features already: [https://docs.gitea.io/en- us/comparison/](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/)

Issues with a green 'X' means they link to a feature on their issue tracker.

And, as far as I know, they are working on integrating CI/CD right now. They already have support for other non-integrated CI/CD platforms: [https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ci-cd/](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ci-cd/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There have been at least three major outages, e.g. git clone of a repo, in the past week alone. All three of which have been unreported (and NOT shown on their incident page), but I have email confirmation from GitHub support of these issues. It's almost time to switch to Gitlab. I have hundreds of repositories, organizations, and packages to transfer, while it will be daunting... I need reliability. I have several paid GitHub orgs and accounts as well.

<comment><USER16> To be fair they've been busy fixing the issue of slavery nomenclature in that time too. Respect where respect is due, important issues are being tackled here, you can't do everything at once.

[https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312)

<comment><USER17> I cannot say if this comment is being sarcastic, but for the record I found it hilarious. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> GitHub used to have a pretty cool status page, with all kinds of real time graphs. Does anyone know what happened to it? Since it makes me really sad that this status page is a plain lie, I had to visit HN to get the confirmation that they are having issues again, and that it just wasn't only me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I read an article about it, look for "status page evolution" [https://nimbleindustries.io/2020/06/04/has-github-been- down-...](https://nimbleindustries.io/2020/06/04/has-github-been-down-more- since-its-acquisition-by-microsoft/)

<comment><USER19> From the first two graphs it looks like they are a lot less liberal about using "down" instead of "warn".

<comment><USER20> The best triage policies I've ever gotten to work with had severity and priority separated.

Severity went something like this (sometimes the numbers flip which always confuses at least 20% of the team about whether things are almost normal or people are hunting each other for sport).

1: data loss

2: some workflows blocked

3: some workflows unavailable w/ workarounds (ie other routes)

4: Everything else except

5: Irritations

Having a UI break but the underlying functionality is still working is not good but people can still do their jobs, if more slowly. It's important to classify these separate from S2 and S4. There is urgency but don't panic. Go eat lunch or have your planning meeting, then go fix it. If data is getting lost ain't nobody doing nothin' until we figure it out, and then some people can go back to work but don't interrupt the people still working on it.

I think the problem is that so many metrically dysfunctional people, to the point of cliché, have rationalized that an S2 means that only 20% of our customers can't do their jobs so we are degraded but still working normally, when really a yellow status should be at S3, while S2 should be at least orange although those affected will be upset that it's not red.

Over time that 20% will shift around to most of your customers. Eventually several times, and then you'll wonder why everyone is talking trash about you on HN. It's not like that many people were affected!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The company I work for moved to Gitlab because we were pessimistic on GitHub in the past few years. I don't really have a strong opinion on which is better though, I still keep my private repositories on GitHub. However, I feel that Microsoft will start feeling the pain soon as more people in the development community get sour on GitHub.

<comment><USER22> Why do you think they will feel the pain ever?

<comment><USER21> Github had been in growth mode up until the acquisition. If Github stops being the nirvana for developers that it once was, it will be another dark mark in the history of MS acquisitions. Moreover, considering how sentiment influenced the stock market is at the moment, continued news of one of their products having outages could easily shed a considerable amount of Microsoft's valuation, ~1%. The say stocks only go up nowadays, but when everything goes up, whoever grows at the slowest rate is really going down. I'd assume that the Microsoft executive team won't be happy with the new perception of Github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why is outage history pre-acquisition removed from their history? If you try to go back in time it seems they only retain history up to a couple months after the acquisition. Is this just a 2 year retention policy or something being swept under the rug?

<comment><USER24> I can go back all the way to 2010: [https://imgur.com/DsSKcFV](https://imgur.com/DsSKcFV)

<comment><USER25> Wow, it used to be so much more detailed! I get they probably can't have that level of "casual" disclosure now that they are so big, but man the current status updates just feel so... useless and unhelpful in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What's the easiest way to duplicate all your Github repositories, with history, somewhere else?

Ideally, I'd like to have two synchronized repositories, for no single point of failure, organizational or otherwise.

<comment><USER27> Run git on a personal server[1]? It's not as complicated as you might think. Probably much more usable to setup gitlab.

Then set up the alternative remote on your repos.

[1][https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/how-run-your-own- gi...](https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/how-run-your-own-git-server/)

<comment><USER28> I posted this on another thread. If you only want the commits, something like this works,

        ssh firstname.lastname@example.com
        mkdir project-1.git
        cd project-1.git
        git init —-bare
        exit
        git remote add alternate firstname.lastname@example.com:project-1.git

All you need is SSH

<comment><USER29> All you need to get all commits and all tags/branches:

      git clone --mirror https://github.com/you/repo

Push those to another server:

      git remote add new https://gitlab.com/you/repo
      git push --mirror new

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Where does github publish post-moderms of downtime? I only see things like "We have deployed a fix and are monitoring recovery." in the github status history which doesn't provide details.

<comment><USER31> These posts contain some details about incidents over the last few months:

[https://github.blog/2020-07-08-introducing-the-github- availa...](https://github.blog/2020-07-08-introducing-the-github-availability- report/)

[https://github.blog/2020-05-22-april-service-disruptions- ana...](https://github.blog/2020-05-22-april-service-disruptions-analysis/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Latest commits don't appear in the commits tab

<comment><USER32> Yeah, I'm seeing the same. The branch reflects the new commit, but the PR open for that branch does not show it.

<comment><USER33> I've had this before. Closing and reopening the PR does seem to do the trick sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For free Gitea instance, You can try [https://codeberg.org](https://codeberg.org)

</comment><comment><USER35> Do I have to repeat this over and over again? If these non-profit open-source projects [0] are able to self-host a git solution like GitLab, Gitea, cgit or Phabricator instance somewhere, surely your team or open-source project can too.

Even a self-hosted GH Enterprise would suffice for some businesses but this would be overkill for others. I even see the Wireguard author using his own creation (cgit) to self-host on his own git solution for years. [1]

This is problematic since many JS/TS, Go and Rust packages are on GitHub, which many developers rely on. Thus, it would be risky to think about tieing open-source project to (GitHub Actions, Apps, etc).

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23818020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23818020)

[1] [https://git.zx2c4.com](https://git.zx2c4.com)

<comment><USER36> Wait, will you really repeat this until you no longer see a "github down" link on HN frontpage?

That is dedication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> That's it, I'm launching SubversionHub.

<comment><USER38> Come on, blue ocean.

CVSHub.

<comment><USER39> Why not MercurialHub?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> How do they not have a single update in over 1.5 hours? This is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ugh the last month has been pretty difficult. Hope they get better soon.

</comment><comment><USER42> So that's why my automated build wasn't triggered ~4 hours ago. I was like "no way github is having issues again, they were down just the other day, it's probably just docker hub's fault". If they decided to publish a blog post about these series of outages later, I bet it would be pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's been having issues all day. Wanted to show a coworker some changes I was proposing but the site wouldn't show the changes I'd pushed to my pull request. Ended up just having him pull the changes.

FWIW the git backend always seems rock solid in comparison to the front end they have displaying it.

<comment><USER44> I'm not sure this time. I had a PR update and kick off a build half an hour or so ago, only to see the build fail because git couldn't parse what it got from the clone operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I really want to move to GitLab but its UI is atrocious... like too mobile phone looking on desktop

</comment><comment><USER46> noticing issues on GitHub, CircleCI, and Launch Darkly.

</comment><comment><USER47> I had a problem with github a while ago when I tried merging a PR to the master branch, the merge commits reflected on master but the PR was still open.I would repeatedly click the merge button but the PR wouldn't show as merged

</comment><comment><USER48> Likely unrelated, but I recently noticed that GitHub stopped updating my activities overview for july. I definitely pushed commits, but they are not noticed. Anyone else having a similar issue?

<comment><USER49> Are you pushing to master branch?

<comment><USER48> Yes, I was. However, I was pushing to master of a fork. Maybe thats the reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> How is GitLab like in terms of downtime? I looked at their status history page and I'm seeing a lot of incidents but it's hard to figure out what it actually means.

<comment><USER51> Thats why the self hosted options are there -- and why GitLab has a competitive advantage in this sense.

Cloud solutions are great -- however they have a golden rule, don't go down ever. This is seriously damaging to GitHubs reputation.

<comment><USER52> > Thats why the self hosted options are there -- and why GitLab has a > competitive advantage in this sense.

GitHub has GitHub Enterprise

> Cloud solutions are great -- however they have a golden rule, don't go down > ever.

Oh where oh where can I sign up for this mythical unicorn cloud service?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Running your own git server is trivial. I have been doing it for years on a very cheap digital ocean instance. Set up ssh keys, lock it down with ufw, done.

If that is not enough, run your own instance of gitlab.

If that is not enough use Gitlab.

Microsoft is going to attempt to make a profit on Github. That's okay, but based on past experience and current issues, their business model is lock-in not service.

I suspect the same is true for NPM.

</comment><comment><USER54> At the current rate, Whatever you host will have a better uptime than Github.

</comment><comment><USER55> They're probably using the Facebook SDK /s

</comment><comment><USER56> Scaling Rails is hard ? Github needs to move to CDN, static site deployment instead.

</comment><comment><USER57> Git is distributed.

</comment><comment><USER58> Did Microsoft adopt Scrum?

</comment><comment><USER59> The Microsoft Effect

</comment><comment><USER60> Don't host yourself, it's impossible to meet the reliability of the professionals

<comment><USER61> No, it's not. Apart from scheduled downtime when nobody's using it (e.g. restarts in the morning to update the kernel), it's not that hard to beat GitHub's uptime for a small Gitea instance. My power's on more than GitHub is up.

A UPS and a tethered smartphone would get me three nines uptime-while-anyone- needs-it, which is _well_ in excess of what I need.

<comment><USER62> I think the OP was being sarcastic.</comment></comment></comment>


Hawaii's volcanoes: How George S. Patton took on the lava with bombs - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/05/17/hawaiis-volcanoes-how-george-s-patton-took-on-the-lava-and-lost/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.18c29ab37460 <comment><AUTHOR> "Years before gaining fame as the World War II general who helped liberate Germany from Nazi forces, Patton was given the responsibility of orchestrating the first-ever aerial bombing of a volcano, according the USGS.

On Dec. 27, 1935, 10 Army bombers, then biplanes with cloth wings, set out to defeat nature, according to Historic Wings, an online aviation magazine. Each plane carried two 600-pound demolition bombs."</comment>


You have lost: A 1980s Video Game Memoir, Reviewed - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/books/2015/09/gamelife_by_michael_clune_reviewed.single.html <comment><USER2> That review was pretty fun to read, actually. Doesn't sound like the book is any good, but I read 90% of the review instead of the normal 10% as I skimmed through and recognized all the games.

Normally I would have stopped as soon as I found out it was about an English professor who had nothing to do with games rather than a game producer. The resume was really disappointing since I still thought it might have something to do with games before I read that, afterwards I realized it was all boring prose and presentations.

I think the reviewer is a better author than the author, actually...

</comment><comment><USER3> If that was the less nasty version, I shudder to think how nasty the original was.</comment>


Attention and Memory in the Age of the Disciplinary Spectacle - <AUTHOR> https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/11/04/attention-and-memory-in-the-age-of-the-disciplinary-spectacle/ <comment><USER2> Who let the deconstructionists out?

The age of the spectacle was roughly 1900-1970, the years during which there were World's Fairs that captured the world's attention. The 1964 New York World's Fair was probably the peak. The 1960s had the Apollo program, probably the biggest spectacle operation in history. "We choose to go to the moon... Not because it is easy, but because it is hard." \- Kennedy.

Today, spectacle, such as it is, is on screens. Watching the CGI Marvel Overextended Universe doesn't really compare. We see some exuberance in Asia, with fantastic urban buildings. (What do we get in SF? The Salesforce Tower. Oh well.) Shenzen has a celebration going on where all the big buildings downtown are lit up with LEDs all controlled together. It's very Blade Runner.[1] The closest thing we have in the US is Elon Musk's Space-X stunts.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYh0UbTHvE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYh0UbTHvE)

<comment><USER3> > The closest thing we have in the US is Elon Musk's Space-X stunts.

these stunts are basically the only thing going today in the direction of extensive development of our civilization. Almost everything else is in the intensive direction, towards the ultimate imploded state of comfortable absolutely connected ant colony. I mean many people already seriously doubt whether we need to go to Mars. (It is my pet theory why we don't see much of other civilizations - because most of them end up in that state of ant colony and stop development, and probably wiped out by any significant change as they loose the ability to adapt)

<comment><USER4> Well, why _should_ we go to Mars?

We have a fully functional survival machine down here on earth that we don't seem capable of properly maintaining. Why would we do a better job inventing and maintaining an artificial survival machine from nothing on Mars?

<comment><USER5> > Well, why should we go to Mars?

Because it's _there_.

Sometimes the human spirit needs to be fed, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting and thought provoking article(s). They are a bit involved so I'll post some of my thoughts/notes on them here:

\-- The background reading article [1]

 _Disciplinary surveillance . . . was simple: the prisoners would stay in line because they had to assume that they were always being watched. No violence was necessary, the internalized gaze of the surveillance apparatus disciplined the behavior of the prisoner._

So general FUD of the capabilities of nation states keeping citizens in line. This seems to align with current trends.

 _In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord wrote, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images."_

A society of spectacle is one where interactions are not with the people themselves, but with their public image/representation (facebook, Instagram, etc).

Following, a society of disciplinary spectacle is one where individuals interact through lossy representations that are subject to FUD+surveillance. So not only does representation effectively become the self, the representation is subject to an insidious type of control in the form of disciplinary surveillance--meaning the self is subject to this control as well.

\-- The actual linked article

Memory, in the ways that historians tend to use it, refers to a group's perception of the past. The word memory is used because this perception does not necessarily represent historical truths--like individual memory does not always represent an individual's past.

Society of disciplinary surveillance is inherently at odds with actual historical truths. This is because of a need for representations to appear to be improving w.r.t. historical memory. This need is for keeping attention focused on the representation of individuals instead of individuals. So obviously the perception of improvement is easy if the memory is altered/controlled. This manipulation is done by individuals who want to show the merit of their representation w.r.t. peers and history.

This may not be the case if attention is controlled in ways other than the trap of representation hierarchy.

\---

These notes aren't particularly well written and might have missed the point. I haven't really finished playing with these ideas.

[1]: [https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/06/26/eight-theses- regardi...](https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/06/26/eight-theses-regarding- the-society-of-the-disciplinary-spectacle/)

</comment><comment><USER7> M</comment>


What I learned as a developer from accidents in space - <AUTHOR> https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/what-i-learned-as-a-developer-from-accidents-in-space <comment><USER2> At least the title was compelling!</comment>


Take music to a new dimension - <AUTHOR> http://www.deezer.com/en/

<comment><USER2> anybody can describe what makes this better then spotify?

</comment><comment><USER3> "....to a new dimension?</comment>


"Algorithms for programmers" full text - <AUTHOR> http://www.jjj.de/fxt/#fxtbook

<comment><USER2> Seems like nice reference. But is it really useful outside a programming marathon or something like that? I mean, most of the algorithms described are already implemented by libraries for the most famous languages.

Anyhow, if I saw it being sold on a book store on a reasonable price, I'd defenetely buy it.

<comment><USER3> "I mean, most of the algorithms described are already implemented by libraries for the most famous languages."

Not everyone's so lucky as to lack a Not-Invented-Here syndrome and a drive for using esoteric languages and know how the "non-trivial" librairies are implemented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome. It should definitely be converted to HTML and hosted publicly. I'll rummage through the .pdf in the mean time.</comment>


Skeleton: A CoffeeScript Node.js Project Generator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/EtienneLem/skeleton

<comment><USER2> It's bad news, running CoffeeScript without compiling it to JavaScript first. If your code throws an exception it won't print line numbers. Don't take my word for it: <https://github.com/isaacs/coffee-cleanse>

I also take issue with the name. Node is extremely popular among front-end devs and others have pointed out the popular skeleton CSS base library.

Finally sprockets is obsolete for JavaScript, with CommonJS/AMD and tools like browserify and RequireJS. It's also obsolete for stylesheets if you're using Less or Sass.

</comment><comment><USER3> The namespace for FOSS is getting crowded: <http://www.getskeleton.com/> Not a bad thing.

<comment><USER4> This is a killer HTML/CSS boilerplate. It's clean and simple and does just enough to get a responsive layout up-and-running.

<comment><USER3> I heavily prefer it for simple sites. Once you start needing all the bells and whistles, you can look elsewhere. Right tool etc... Don't need twitter bootstrap for every blog or repo site out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool; I'll be playing around with this a bit, looks like a nice and fast way to get started with a Node web app.

Side note: generally good practice to throw your name into Google (for example, "skeleton framework" or some combination of relevant words) to see what was returned before landing on your name (<http://www.getskeleton.com/>)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I did only check on <http://npmjs.org> to see if the bin script name was available.

Then I made the css only logo (See and inspect @ <http://heliom.ca/en/blog/skeleton>) and couldn't look back.

<comment><USER2> > Yeah, I did only check on <http://npmjs.org> to see if the bin script name > was available.

What you've just described is called _squatting_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using a quite different approach at structuring my Node.js applications: <http://bergie.iki.fi/nodext/>

With NodeXT you build the application out of multiple modules (extensions), which you then "mount" into the URL structure you want to use.

Helps keeping code more decoupled and reusable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I will take a look, thanks.

<comment><USER6> One additional possibility is making packaged NodeXT extensions that can be plugged into any website and configured. Here is an example:

<http://search.npmjs.org/#/nodext-create>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just yesterday I was searching for a decent coffeescript node.js generator, but the one's I've been using lately[1] haven't been up to date and this is exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks!!

[1]<https://github.com/jamescarr/coffeescript-express-app>

<comment><AUTHOR> So glad to hear. Feel free to contribute ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> why would you name something after an already successful project with the same name.

 _face palm_

<comment><AUTHOR> To tell the truth, I wasn't aware of the "other" Skeleton.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank you for this, very much needed. After generating a project I am getting a 403 'Forbidden' error from express. Anyone else having this issue?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that I'm aware of. Feel free to open an issue <https://github.com/EtienneLem/skeleton/issues> and we'll try to figure it out

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the distinction between controllers, helpers, and views?

</comment><comment><USER11> What is the justification for CoffeeScript?</comment>


PourOver: A library for simple, fast filtering and sorting in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.github.io/pourover/ <comment><USER2> So I visited one of the PourOver examples, this Academy Awards fashion feature published earlier this year:

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/02/02/fashion/red- ca...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/02/02/fashion/red-carpet- project.html)

I opened the dev tools to inspect the traffic and code, and this pops up in the console:

                  0000000                         000        0000000
                111111111      11111111100          000      111111111
                00000        111111111111111111      00000      000000
                000        1111111111111111111111111100000         000
                000        1111       1111111111111111100          000
                000         11       0     1111111100              000
                000          1      00             1               000
                000               00      00       1               000
                000             000    00000       1               000
             00000            0000  00000000       1                00000
           11111            000 00    000000      000                 11111
             00000          0000      000000     00000              00000
                000        10000      000000      000              0000
                000        00000      000000       1               000
                000        000000     10000        1     0         000
                000        1000000 00              1    00         000
                000         1111111                1 0000          000
                000          1111111100           000000           000
                0000          111111111111111110000000            0000
                111111111        111111111111100000          111111111
                  0000000              00000000              0000000

           NYTimes.com: All the code that's fit to printf()
           We're hiring: http://nytimes.com/careers

....You sneaky audience-targeting bastards

<comment><USER3> > NYTimes.com: All the code that's fit to printf()

This gave me a chuckle. I was at a hackathon that the NYTimes sponsored a few years ago, and my group used almost this exact joke for our project, an ncurses reader for browsing the New York Times in the terminal[0].

I don't know who thought to put this in the source code, but I'd find it very amusing if they got the inspiration from hidden slogan from a hackathon project. Kind of like the old competitions in the 50s/60s to create company jingles.

[0] [https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/ncnyt](https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/ncnyt)

<comment><USER4> I'd almost forgotten we made that joke. It wouldn't surprise me if that's where they got it from. The NYTimes employees at the hackathon seemed to like it. At least enough to tweet about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Half the comments so far are looking for a non-code demo, and I imagine they mean something visual, so here's a bare-bones visualized version of the Basic PourOver sample code:

[http://gojs.net/temp/pourover.html](http://gojs.net/temp/pourover.html)

It just takes the queries and uses the resulting data to make some nodes in GoJS (Disclaimer: a Diagramming library I develop. Not free, but easy to set up with this kind of data and see stuff fast).

If I had more time I'd make it prettier. The results are just visual representations of the data results getting filtered. Its very easy to take PourOver's example collections and data-bind some stuff to them (color of the nodes is data-bound to monster gender, etc). I'm sure it can't be hard to do the same in other data-bound visualization libraries.

This is very cool. I'll try to make a much prettier example tonight.

<comment><USER6> Oh this is great! I really should port something like this to the docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi, all.

A lot of folks are asking for a demo and, you're right. I should have included one. My apologies. I'll get to working on one as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I encourage readers to check out the source for [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/02/02/fashion/red- ca...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/02/02/fashion/red-carpet- project.html) That's probably the clearest "demo" of PourOver at the moment.

More to come!

<comment><USER7> Thanks for doing your 'open source gardening'¹ so exuberantly!

I didn't see any contact info on your profile to let you know that the proportion of folks here using Ghostery² or Disconnect³ is probably higher than normal. Installing one will reveal how things break when JavaScript libraries [usually orthogonal to page functionality] are blocked.

\--

¹[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593242)

²[https://www.ghostery.com/](https://www.ghostery.com/)

³[https://disconnect.me/](https://disconnect.me/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This page needs a giant "demo" button near the top. The examples are all code.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of crossfilter ([http://square.github.io/crossfilter/](http://square.github.io/crossfilter/)) by square. It has a killer demo, however.

<comment><USER6> Crossfilter was absolutely the inspiration. I just wanted to make a Crossfilter that worked with the arbitrary boolean composition, could be dynamically added to and updated, and supported some of the less numerical patterns I was encountering.

<comment><USER10> Coolies =).

Would you ever add some of the Crossfilter functionality, to make it easy for people to plug in their own data to PourOver?

<comment><USER6> I would absolutely like to add a Crossfilter Filter type. I'd even accept a pull request ... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Noice! Btw, the docs page is acting funky on an iPad (iOS 7.1). The layout seems to be alternating between mobile and desktop with each pan/scroll event. [ps: only happens in landscape orientation. portrait is unaffected]

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems similar to our Dynatable plugin [1], which is basically the functionality of this plugin with some additional table-read/write functions included. The main difference being that this library depends on underscore, while Dynatable depends on jQuery (which is mainly used for its browser compatibility functions).

Given both library's emphasis on speed, it looks like I have something to benchmark against!

[1] [http://www.dynatable.com](http://www.dynatable.com)

<comment><USER6> This looks really cool. I wouldn't say PourOver is focuses on speed as much as focused on being fast enough to get 60fps for 100k items. Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I much prefer a basic construct that makes it simple to do filtering and sorting that can be simply extended to any complexity. Sorting and filtering are really nothing more than set manipulation (which they state themselves) so with simple data binding this becomes a trivial exercise to build an impressive client-side search.

In Ember that might look like this:

        Ember.ArrayController.extend({
            filterA: Ember.computed.filter('fieldName1', function comparator() {}),
            filterB: Ember.computed.filter('fieldName2', function comparator() {}),

            joined: Ember.computed.union('filterA', 'filterB'),

            filtered: Ember.computed.uniq('joined'),

            sorted: Ember.computed.sort(function comparator() {})
        });

<comment><USER6> This is exactly what PourOver offers. You can chain filter results to any boolean complexity, as well extend the default filter types to optimize indexing and caching. Indeed, PourOver was trivial to make, an outgrowth of the very pattern you define above. PourOver is just an attempt to scrap that boilerplate, allow for the queries to be indexed, combined with sorts, and automatically rebuild when the collection changes.

<comment><USER13> Thinking about it more, I believe that my visceral reaction was to the imperative nature of the library. I was imagining trying to code something that _generated_ a filter (e.g. PourOver.makeExactFilter("mythology", ["greek","norse"]);) and it seems like it would be unnecessarily complex without data-binding propagation/invalidation.

If I wanted to add "roman" mythology to that filter I would imagine something like:

        var mythologies = ["greek", "norse"];
        // ... create a collection with filters
        mythologies.push("roman");
        PourOver.makeExactFilter("mythology", mythologies);

But you don't get that last statement for free, nor the one where you join it into a collection, nor do I see a way to replace the previous mythologies filter. Any time you need to reprocess a filter you've got to run it through a series of imperative actions triggered from one of the events, and possibly throw away the collection and regenerate it (if you can't remove disjoint filters).

I would be pushing for a Object.observe/dirty checking/get-set version of this to take PourOver to the next level of utility. (?/Angular/Ember)

<comment><USER6> I think I'm a little confused. Why wouldn't you have just added the "roman" possibility from the get go? Could you provide an example of a situation when you don't know the universe of possibilities in advance?

<comment><USER14> If the user adds one, or new data enters from an outside source (pub/sub, sockets, etc)

<comment><USER6> Alright, this is a great point. It would be trivial for me to add addPossibilities. I think I'll do that! Thanks. This will really help for using PourOver to power tagging selection fields where you can ... add possibilities!

<comment><USER13> Exactly what @rattray said. It's something you get nearly for free in data- binding world and is much harder to accomplish in imperative code. I wish you luck, and make sure you blog about it when it's done! (I want to see how it's implemented.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> More details at [http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/introducing- pourove...](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/introducing-pourover-and- tamper)

There are a few links to projects at the nyt that has used these two libraries.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the misspelling is intentional. (The idiom is "pore over".)

<comment><USER17> I'm sure it is - "pour over" is a way of making coffee, and its sister project is called "Tamper" which is also coffee related. The "pore over" double meaning is clever though.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, looking at the logo again, it appears to be a pour-over brewer - clever. (I am a coffee neophyte and wasn't aware of this brewing method.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Off-topic, but related.

Does anyone know of any JS libraries that allow for Excel-like interaction? However I am looking for something that just implements the presentation layer.

The problem I am running into is that the libraries that do exist conflate the presentation and data layers and try to do everything for you. In other words, they make the assumption that all data will be downloaded to the client and then manipulated on the client. These libraries do not fit my use case.

<comment><USER19> I am actually in the middle of an implementation of a grid view myself; I'm giving Handsontable[1] a whirl and going to look at using pourover for filtering my dataset. Definitely meets your Excel-like interaction though not certain that it doesn't try to do everything for you since I haven't made it that far yet. (Looks promising at least.)

1\. [http://handsontable.com](http://handsontable.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you going to handle that many obejcts in the browser wouldn't you use something like pouchdb? [http://pouchdb.com/](http://pouchdb.com/)

Also "Pagination strategies with PouchDB" [http://pouchdb.com/2014/04/14/pagination-strategies-with- pou...](http://pouchdb.com/2014/04/14/pagination-strategies-with-pouchdb.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> And here I thought I would be reading about the App.net PourOver posting service[0], which the NY Times Opinion account uses for posting[1]

[0]: [https://directory.app.net/app/255/pourover/](https://directory.app.net/app/255/pourover/) [1]: [https://alpha.app.net/nytopinion](https://alpha.app.net/nytopinion)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've used the [https://mixitup.kunkalabs.com/](https://mixitup.kunkalabs.com/) library for similar functionality in the past. I am not sure how well it works with hundreds of thousands of items, but it does work well for the 600ish items that I am using it for.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this basically what Google Refine[0] does with their facet filters? (but obviously open source and allowing anyone to build their own platform)

[0] - [http://openrefine.org/](http://openrefine.org/)

</comment><comment><USER24> It would be a great move to isolate the Views/UI part of this out from the rest of the code base, which would make it more usable inside other MV* frameworks like Angular or Ember.

</comment><comment><USER25> Benchmarks comparing PourOver to Backbone would be nice. Anyone?

<comment><USER6> There are some benchmarks against the base underscore filter methods in the tests. These are what Backbone uses by default. However, the real utility of PourOver is less in its raw speed -- I'm sure that it could be improved by smarter folks than I -- but in the patterns it abstracts. I hope you find it useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Having been recently exposed to the benefits (specially performance-wise) of lodash vs underscore, I wonder why it depends on the later.

<comment><USER27> From a glance of the source it doesn't look like PourOver is doing any heavy lifting with Underscore. PourOver works lodash.underscore build of Lo-Dash without issue though because it's not doing any heavy lifting you probably won't see a perf difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is awesome, and exactly the type of thing I've been looking for. Thanks so much for sharing! Can't wait to try this out.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love how New York Times has the coolest devs. Anyone here who works there? What's it like?

<comment><USER30> I do. It's pretty fun.

This might be a bit embarrassing ... but a couple of years ago, Dan Sinker came by and asked a few of the developers in the newsroom to talk about exactly that question.

Here's me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HanxEFFlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HanxEFFlk)

Here's David Nolen (although he won't be around for much longer ;) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOdoCqoqXlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOdoCqoqXlU)

Here's Tiff Fehr: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GOWLNWifxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GOWLNWifxc)

<comment><USER31> nice...but yikes that seems like an intimidating place to apply for a job...you guys are all heavy hitters...

<comment><USER6> I totally wouldn't be intimidated. We all just love what we do. The best way to get a job is often to get to know the folks on the team, hack with them on projects. I'd really hate to work at a place that I felt was exclusive.

<comment><USER31> Oh I didn't mean to imply it was exclusive, just that I'd feel like I was out of my league. Like I've built a few things with D3 but I still find myself getting confused sometimes, and I've gone through some of David Nolen's clojurescript posts / tutorials and I'm still not 100% clear on the advantages of core.async...but then again I don't use them all that often either.

<comment><USER6> Well, if you ever wanna chat about core.async or PourOver or jobs or life, I'm more than happy to do so: firstname.lastname@example.com Nolen's also a great guy and really serious about helping folks out with stuff like core.async. I'm sure he wouldn't mind jumping in an IRC chat to guide you along!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone have a demo?

</comment><comment><USER33> Similar to crossfilter?</comment>


Aviva Fires 1,300 Via Email...By Accident  - <AUTHOR> http://www.liquidmatrix.org/blog/2012/04/23/aviva-fires-1300-via-email-by-accident/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Liquidmatrix+%28Liquidmatrix%29 <comment><USER2> LOL.. and I trust them for some of my investments .. DRAT</comment>