Android Fragmentation Visualized - <AUTHOR> http://opensignal.com/reports/fragmentation-2013/ <comment><USER3> I'm not an Android app developer, but can someone explain to me what the big deal is? I've been developing Windows desktop software, Linux desktop software and Unix server software for years. The hardware diversity on all those 3 platforms is _huge_. Heck, if you're developing web apps, it's like every user uses a different machine. I've never seen anybody claiming that Windows is fragmented. So what's so special about Android that people put the "fragmented" label on it, and why is that a big deal?

<comment><USER4> You don't hear people claim that Windows is fragmented because everyone has become used to it, so much so that it seems like such a normal thing. When you develop for Windows, worrying about which version of .NET Framework might be installed on the user's machine or whether or not a certain feature of the OS might be turned on or whether their drivers might be outdated is a normal course of events.

The iOS development philosophy is that developers should not have to worry about any of this, and their apps should just _work_. I mean, when was the last time you tried to install an app on iOS and it gave you an error message about such and such prerequisite missing, or you installed it and the user experience was broken because the phone had an older version of the OS or a wacky manufacturer UI?

<comment><USER5> I find that devs have a far harder time dealing with apple's policies and fees than with android's fragmentation. One particular case is one startup where all the people involved use iphones but they moved to android to launch their app because they couldn't afford the complications of doing it for iphone, which was originally their plan.

I can find a way through a code problem, but when it comes to bureaucracy sometimes there is no alternative, or they shut it down the moment you find it.

<comment><USER6> Apple's fees are $99/year which is hardly prohibitive.

And I doubt you would see any difference between Apple's bureaucracy and Google's. Anytime you try and embarrass the company, try and take money away from them or be anti-user then of course you will have problems.

<comment><USER7> I don't remember having to 'hope' that Google accepts an app through a human review before allowing it on their store.

I like neither Apple nor Google but I believe we shouldn't overlook facts that clearly differentiate one from the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of people here seem to be asking "so what?"

In my small experience, the "so what" is that, for example, just today I get an email saying that feature X of my app doesn't work on tablet Y.

So now what? Do I go and buy that tablet to see what the problem is? Hardly worth it for the money I make from Android.

This sucks for developers for obvious reasons and it sucks for consumers as it's pot luck whether an app will work for you, especially if it's not one of the top 5 devices.

I've read it's terrible for 3D programmers as often devices just flat out lie about the GL capabilities they support.

Exhibit A: Apportable's android device library [https://twitter.com/chinmaygarde/status/349809877176156160/p...](https://twitter.com/chinmaygarde/status/349809877176156160/photo/1)

<comment><USER9> While Apportable is a very nice example, they're also doing something rather crazy - "cross compiling" apps into a wildly different set of hardware, software, and OS targets. And trying to be efficient about it, for graphics performance.

That isn't simple _anywhere_. I'd call it flat out _amazing_ that they have apparently mostly succeeded, and a massive testament to the level of consistency that _does_ exist.

<comment><USER6> Cupboards like that are very normal.

The last three places I've worked at had similar cupboards in order to support the array of Android devices. And they were just run of the mill web companies. The problem really isn't Android but everyone's screwed up implementation of it.

<comment><USER9> From everything I've seen, that's still an exceptionally large cupboard. High- performance uses (games) have big cabinets because, yeah, that's where fragmentation can be extremely damaging. The fragmentation there is real, and can be very painful, and I totally agree that it sucks.

But in "run of the mill web companies"? Where I work, we have ~6, but 99%+ of the time we just use our Nexus 4s because 99.9%+ of the time it "just works" everywhere, especially if you stick to an older API / support library and know the quirks. We support 2.2+, have a few 3.0+ and 4.2+ features, and it has been terrifically easy to handle our range - much easier than iOS. The other devices are to see how using the app feels on different sizes / performance classes. Getting that feel is important, but it just requires a couple "token" devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone complaining about Android fragmentation should ask themselves if they would prefer if every device would go the "Apple way" and make their very own operating systems for their device. Would this really solve fragmentation?

Here is how I see the "Fragmentation issue": My customers are using one of maybe 800 or so different devices, with maybe 100 different software systems powering them. That number was about the same before and after Android came about.

Now if I want to write a program for all my customers, I need to theoretically write at least a hundred different applications. That sucks. But today, thanks to Android, like 95 of the available operating systems are based on the same development kit, Android, and so instead of writing 95 different applications, I make one and then adapt a little if necessary.

Android is a defragmentation platform. What we call "Android fragmentation" just means that the defragmentation works 90%, not 100%. People can use Android to build lot's of different operating systems, which are either very similar or very different that what is available in the Android open source project. But because it's all based on the same code base and runs against the same compatibility test suite, a developer like me can target many devices and many operating systems with a single code base. That's awesome.

iOS and Windows are fragmenting the market for me. They are not compatible with Android, so I have to write a separate application for these systems. Often from scratch.

A few notes to further explain this position:

"operating system" is a very generic expression. For most people today an operating system is the software that is installed on the device minus applications that the user installed himself.

E.g. the app store, itunes, Location Services, the User Interface and the push notifications system are considered features of the iOS operating system. But on Android based devices there are independent from the Android system. You can make your app run Holo no matter what Android version is installed on your customer's device.

When speaking in iOS terms, you can say that 90% of all Android devices get updated once per months or so, when another update for Gmail, Google Voice Search or GCM arrived.

You do not need to depend on Google if don't want to make your software compatible with Android. There is no dependency from Google in Android, all their influence comes from the fact that they own the most popular third party app suite that every OEM wants to license on their device. If and OEM wants to go their own way, like Amazon, Google has no way to stop them.

<comment><USER11> > Anyone complaining about Android fragmentation should ask themselves if they > would prefer if every device would go the "Apple way" and make their very > own operating systems for their device. Would this really solve > fragmentation?

I, for instance, would prefer that the industry adopt six or eight standard screen sizes and stick the fuck with them. Google is in a position where it can mandate that, actually.

There are many excuses one can make in Google's favour, but this does not take away the fact that their development environment is very poor, _primarily_ due to fragmentation (and then there's development tools and documentation, but those have been traditionally been a stumbling point).

Also, it's intelectually rude to try to rest your arguments on words for which you construct your own meaning. That's what salespeople do and it's a marginal improvement (in technique, not in correctness) of the straw man sophism.

> "operating system" is a very generic expression. For most people today an > operating system is the software that is installed on the device minus > applications that the user installed himself.

"Operating system" is a very clear expression that means exactly one thing.

Fragmentation can mean more things, and this article claims one of them. People who want to write software for the iOS operating system have a small set of screen sizes and resolutions to target. People who want to write software for the Android operating system have a fuckload of incompatible APIs, screen sizes and resolutions to target, _which is exactly what fragmentation means_. This is especially problematic for small apps: if you need 3 weeks to write the core of your application, and 1 day to tweak each combination of obscure resolution and screen size, strange device, hardware configuration range _and_ API version you can easily end up doubling your development time.

Also, if you actually try your hand at writing an application with a decent UI, you'll find that the "a little" you want to tweak it is "a lot". In my experience, if you try to target a full set of platforms, ranging from small phones to full HD tablets, you actually end up designing 3 UIs from scratch (unless you want at least two of them to feel like someone stretched or compressed the other one to fit a screen it wasn't designed to). This includes entire sections of the UI logic (e.g. redesigning navigation flow), and while there are tools to help you with it (such as Fragments), it doesn't take away the pain.

<comment><USER12> > "Operating system" is a very clear expression that means exactly one thing.

That's not correct at all. An "Operating System" can mean many things and there's tremendous debate in the OS and Systems community over the definition.

<comment><USER11> Being part of the "OS and Systems" community, I think I'd know :-).

There are a lot of debates about whether X or Y should be a function of the operating system, but that doesn't justify OP's position. Applications that come with the operating system are not part of the operating system, you know, on account of them being separate applications. Unless I missed the debate on whether grep and emacs are essential parts of Linux or not.

The questions you quote are much like the heap paradox, but that doesn't make the concept of operating system so flexible that you can bend it to mean anything. Also, let's be honest here -- quite a few of those questions are there only because at some point in history, fanboys of one platform wanted to rest their fanboyism on some sort of technical grounds, which is how we ended up with fundamentalist-like questions of the "should the OS provide a GUI" sort.

<comment><USER12> You _should_ know then!

Here's GNU's definition of a Unix-like, "A Unix-like operating system is a software collection of applications, libraries, and developer tools, plus a program to allocate resources and talk to the hardware, known as a kernel." This is a very heavy idea of an OS and grep and emacs sound like "developer tools" and "applications". Most OS people involved in unix-like OSs would be aghast if you didn't at least include some basic userspace applications like cat and ls.

GNU isn't specific about what needs to be in the collection of things to constitute a unix-like OS, but it looks like that agrees in most respects to bookwormAT, "'operating system' is a very generic expression. For most people today an operating system is the software that is installed on the device minus applications that the user installed himself."

GNU's concept is miles different from very light concepts of an embedded OS's like Femto OS which near as I can tell is pretty much just a kernel and some libraries.

WP on the other hand says, "An operating system (OS) is a collection of software that manages computer hardware resources and provides common services for computer programs." So strictly speaking, by this definition an OS doesn't even need to provide disk access like the old DOSs!

Although of course it later contradicts itself and says "Access to data stored on disks is a central feature of all operating systems." which anybody involved in the OS community knows is not a central feature of "all" operating systems. I've used OSs where useful file system access was provided via userspace applications (a la FUSE).

Palantir takes the position that an OS doesn't need to be interacting or managing the hardware stuff, just providing the ability to run different hosted applications is enough, making things like web browsers operating systems ([http://www.palantir.com/2009/11/palantir-like-an- operating-s...](http://www.palantir.com/2009/11/palantir-like-an-operating- system-for-data-analysis/))

bookwormATs position is that not only are OSs heavy things, but that "Android" is not just an OS, but a meta-OS description of what an Android OS should be (just like XML is a meta-language for describing XML compatible file formats).

So if GNU's definition is correct (and lots of people subscribe to GNU's position), bookwormATs position, "'operating system' is a very generic expression. For most people today an operating system is the software that is installed on the device minus applications that the user installed himself." is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the report could benefit from dropping the lowest 1/5/10% of devices by market share. As can readily be seen from the first diagram, Android has a long tail of obscure devices. Dropping that would make many of the other graphs more readable and more insightful. I guess it'd also be interesting to exclude devices by other characteristics, e.g. exclude all <4.0 devices because maybe you don't want to support them anyway.

I was first puzzled and am now intrigued by their choice to use physical screen size as a basis for that diagram, as opposed to screen resolution. Very appropriate in our resolution-independent times. Of course either way you do it, Android is going to have more variation than Apple. That diagram is also kind of difficult to read; what shade of blue corresponds to what market share?

Finally, it's awesome of them to share the source data! Maybe I'll actually get around to implementing my suggestions.

<comment><USER14> > I guess it'd also be interesting to exclude devices by other > characteristics, e.g. exclude all <4.0 devices because maybe you don't want > to support them anyway.

Android 2.3 has around 40% of the Android market. I doubt many players can do it. Some companies still want IE7 or IE6 support.

<comment><USER15> Depends on what countries you are targeting. In the US, 2.3 is more like 15%.

<comment><USER16> 15% is still a lot. do you want to take a 15% pay cut?

<comment><USER17> Not so simple -- if it means you are better able to support your market, features are faster to develop, etc, there may be a net benefit. Hell, if dropping Gingerbread support raises your average review from 4 to 5 stars, you might be in the black.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The fact that the screen sizes and dpi are fragmented is in my opinion a feature and not a bug or problem.

Actually, Android UI design (if you follow the guidelines) is comparable to responsive web design, and that isn't surprising, considering that Google is a web centric company.

You have layout XML files (HTML), seperate XML files for styles (CSS) and then your code that manipulates the layouts dynamically. And most of the time you work with relative positioning of UI elements (like you do on webpages) instead of absolute positioning. Even Androids Intent mechanism is based on the idea of web links. (but here you link to another "page" of your app, or other apps) Also, Android apps behave like web pages with stacks of Activities (comparable to pages), and a dedicated back button to browse back.

Yes, it would be easier if you had only one screen size and therefore could design everything statically, but with so many different screen sizes on current iOS devices (3 sizes for different iPhone revisions, at least 3 for iPad and I don't know how many for iPods) I don't think it's a painless process there either, and I expect that Apple will introduce changes in the future.

Also, you probably will never have pixel perfect design on Android that works across every device (it was never intended to do that), but you don't have that on the web either, and no one's complaining here that the web ecosystem will collapse because of that.

</comment><comment><USER19> Imagine a similar article about vegetable fragmentation. They all have the same operating system (DNA, ribosomes, cells, etc.) but gosh, look at that horrible, awful variety! And all the different manufacturers! What a disaster.

<comment><USER20> Or the web, even. All those users! So many browsers! So many screen sizes! It's so _fragmented_!

Why does everyone only ever complain about Android?

<comment><USER21> [Why does everyone only ever complain about Android?]

Only Press Complains. I haven't met a serious Android Developer who complained that fragmentation is in top 5 of their problems. I say this as some one who run Android Game/App Development company.

<comment><USER22> > I haven't met a serious Android Developer who complained that > fragmentation...

Yeah, but you'll meet lots of iOS/WP developers who complain about Android fragmentation :P

<comment><USER23> So the question is - is it Stockholm syndrome on the part of Android developers or do iOS developers just think it's a bigger issues than it is in reality? That's the core of the debate, right there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is pretty remarkable but it is to be expected. The world is large and diverse, and if there is going to be an OS that satisfies the mobile computing needs of the entire world, it is going to have to run on many different devices.

Apple, the poster boy for non-fragmentation, is consistently losing market share. They are now starting to realize that their only chance of continued growth depends on releasing more devices with different screen sizes and different price points. (Gasp -- more fragmentation).

It is up to Google to try to make programming across different devices as easy as possible. I am not sure how successful they are in this, I am not an android programmer. But fragmentation is not a choice or the result of a strategic error by Google. It is a fact of life when you are programming for hundreds of millions of users.

Think of it this way, if Google had chosen to go the Apple way and only used Android on their own Nexus devices, would there be more or less fragmentation? There would certainly be less fragmentation in Android, but there would be much more in mobile devices in general. Because Samsung, HTC, Sony and every other Android manufacturer would come up with their own wacky OS.

<comment><USER25> 1\. By all reports Google is shying away from Android.

2\. Apple losing market share to hoards of cheap spam-ware phones? I'm sure Google isn't as excited about this as you think.

<comment><USER26> Could you substantiate any of the claims? I'm surprised to hear that Google is shying away from Android or that they don't want Android to be used on as many devices as possible.

<comment><USER24> They are not shying away. I listen to Google earnings reports, and they are as gung ho about Android as ever. I did not reply to the grand parent, because I did not want to go off on a tangent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> People are forgetting the state of mobile OS ecosystem before Android came along.

Samsung, Sony, Motorola were using Java ME but you cannot build just one app that works for all manufacturers.

If Android doesn't exists, we'll have 1 OS for each manufacturer because Apple would not share their OS with others.

I'll take a fragmented Android ecosystem over a fragmented mobile OS ecosystem any day.

I develop Android apps for a living. For a lot of devices (e.g. HTC One, Nexus 4, S3), there is very little differences in code, if at all.

Highlighting different versions is also misleading. Not much difference in the APIs between 4.0 and 4.3

<comment><USER28> > If Android doesn't exists, we'll have 1 OS for each manufacturer because > Apple would not share their OS with others.

I'm sure Microsoft would have been more than eager to take up the slack, or perhaps Palm would have pivoted that way.

I cannot remember what the update cycle was like on Microsoft phones. Perhaps the OS version would have still been an issue. I do seem to remember some upgrade blocks on the 7 version.

<comment><USER29> > I cannot remember what the update cycle was like on Microsoft phones.

For Windows Mobile? In almost all cases, they never got upgrades at all. The iPhone was pretty unusual in its day as a non-computer consumer electronics device that got substantial software changes after release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When personal computers were just coming into the mainstream, particularly when GPUs were just coming about, there was a similar fragmentation issue. OpenGL sought to resolve this with a crap-ton of manufacturer bits and a difficult to use API, but DirectX came along and (for the most part) solved that.

Nowadays we hardly think twice about the fact that there are millions of combinations of monitor and GPU brands and models and configurations. Has anyone ever thought to do a similar comparison of desktop and laptop "fragmentation"?

<comment><USER31> Google's main goal for Android should be to achieve something similar for Android, like it was achieved for Windows. I think it's doable, but it requires some technical expertise (the easy part), and a lot of _will_ to do it, to convince other OEM's to get on board and support the standardization of hardware and software (the really hard part).

I'm also not sure Google wants to do that so badly. I think they're pretty content and comfortable with how Android is working right now, generally speaking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Who cares? Google make a good job maintaining API compatibility. The tools are also (mostly) the same from the very beginning (while with iOS you actually have to learn and adapt much more with each version change) ...but otherwise the graphs looks fine :)

<comment><USER33> But for various reasons (also known as carriers) google does crap job of pushing updates. The moment google wrestles back control from them and begins pushing updates chrome style we will live in a better world.

Otherwise we will be in situations like a friend was cursing me yesterday about how I dare have android 4.2 (and wait for 4.3 rom) on my unlocked 2010 device and he is stuck on his HTC with 4.1 and no signs of incoming upgrade soon.

<comment><USER30> They've definitely still got some kinks to work out on their update pushing. I've got a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 7 and despite my checking for updates several times a day neither of them have received 4.3.

I understand the necessity of the "rolling update" model in general, however in the case of Nexus machines it should not be necessary. At any rate, I should be able to opt out of the rolling update model and put myself at the front of the line without having to manually flash a factory image.

<comment><USER34> Just side load it. You can download the official OTA ZIP which won't factory reset the device. You don't need any 3rd party mods for this because the ZIP is signed by Google.

[http://www.droid-life.com/2013/07/25/android-4-3-update/](http://www.droid- life.com/2013/07/25/android-4-3-update/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The screen size diagram misses an important extra complication: the same pixel counts and screen sizes do not always match up. In this room right now there are ~7" devices with resolutions of 800x<whatever> (where "what-ever" varies depending on aspect ratio), 1024x? and 1280x?. When the G2 Nexus 7 turns up there will be at least one at 1920x? too. Similarly resolutions of 1280x? can be found on devices with physical screen sizes from 4.3" to 10.2".

Of course for many apps, if written properly, this simply doesn't matter - <USER2> if you try cram too much on-screen assuming 1280x800 means a 7" device your app may be difficult to use on 4" one.

Most of the people you see complaining about Android fragmentation are people that are avoiding Android because they are scared of it (rather than having tried to deal with it) or people who would prefer you to buy an iOS device that their app is already available for instead of an Android one that drops you out of their target market until such time as they port to Android.

<comment><USER36> Like you say, for a well built app the pixel density does not matter because you design in dp.

> if you try cram too much on-screen assuming 1280x800 means a 7" device your > app may be difficult to use on 4" one.

For the reason above, this just doesn't follow. A 7" device would be about 600dp wide (in portrait), while a 4" phone would be about 320dp, regardless of pixel density. That's not too different from iOS – the original iPad and the iPhone 5 have a similar number of pixels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> All these graphs are BS except the one about OS fragmentation. Devices and screen sizes are not "fragmentation" any more than people viewing their browsers on different screens or resizing windows represents fragmentation. That is just the reality of a viewport that potentially has many sizes. It is a FEATURE. Is it harder for developers?? Of course, but blaming it on fragmentation is a cop out.

The OS thing is real and really worse than what is depicted because depending on the APIs you are using even OEM specific tweaks introduce additional variables.

</comment><comment><USER38> Web Fragmentation Visualized :) [https://plus.google.com/110412141990454266397/posts/1j8be9w3...](https://plus.google.com/110412141990454266397/posts/1j8be9w3oLa)

</comment><comment><USER39> Of course there is going to be many devices and many sizes. That's the whole point of android.

The most important trend to notice is that Android operating system breakdowns are getting better.

4.x accounts for 60%~ market share. 2.3.x accounts for 34%.

Those are good signs.

</comment><comment><USER40> If you peek into the dataset (fragmentation_model_July_2013), these are some of the first few entries:

      DIGMA iDs10 3G
      !QU SMILE advance
      \002\""
      (MC605CH)
      *#? (^?^)=?
      001DL
      001HT
      003Z
      007HW
      009Z
      06_v89_hjy1
      06_v89_jbla768_asx

How on earth is a firm supposed to make sense of nonsense like that to inform their device targeting?

</comment><comment> mkr-hn > _11,868 Distinct Android devices seen this year_

> _47.5% - Samsung 's share of those devices._

It seems implausible that Samsung has made 5,934 distinct Android devices.

<comment><USER41> Yes, the data is inaccurate, some of those devices are in fact ROMs (ROM is basically a custom Android build).

<comment><USER42> And a custom ROM should be treated as a different device.

<comment><USER43> In that case we should also have iOS 6, 6.0.1, 6.0.2, 6.1, 6.1.1, 6.1.2, 6.1.3, 6.1.4. Suddenly there are a lot more versions of iOS.

Also many of those ROMs might only run on a dozen devices, trimming the long tail, remove say any ROM used by < 100 people, might be a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> In my experience, the UX expectations on mobile are higher than for desktop apps. It's hard to get the UI to be tight/efficient/performant/attractive across such diverse devices and operating systems with Android. It's not insurmountable, it's just something that works against you in producing a good app.

</comment><comment><USER45> It appears that the source data download at the bottom of the page is broken, it gives an XML file with two fields saying AccessDenied.

edit: it's working now

This is some great information to think about concerning Android fragmentation, and how, perhaps, it's not actually a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER46> The promise of Android was to be free and open. Did you not expect fragmentation?

</comment><comment><USER47> Why do HTC, HTC Europe and HTC Asia form distinct categories? Put together I think it would be pretty high. Also, Motorola (which has the exact same colour as Huawei and is next to it) and Moto.

Great diagrams anyway.

</comment><comment><USER48> Observations: in the bottom right quadrant of devices, one can find the iPhone5 is a device with an Android installbase. Also, it seems silly to degroup carrier-branded phones in the branding section (A 'Verizon S3' is not listed under Samsung).

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't remember to ever read an article about DOS or Windows or Linux fragmentation...

In other news, "DOS vs. VMS fragmentation", Only 5% of PC are manufactured by IBM, Digital manages to capture 100% of the VMS market!

</comment><comment><USER50> As a word of warning, the visualizations on this site managed to lock up Firefox on my MBP to the point where the only thing I could do was force power off the whole laptop and reboot.

<comment><USER51> Worked perfectly in Firefox 22 on Windows 7....

<comment><USER52> Desktop fragmentation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Anyone did a visualization of browser window size fragmentation ? I'm wondering how the web can even work with all this fragmentation.

</comment><comment><USER54> Looks like open signal has become part of Apple's PR arm. I will be uninstalling iOpenSignal...

</comment><comment><USER55> Android is Samsung - more than Google. With its market power Samsung can now dictate terms.

</comment><comment><USER56> only 5% of pc users are on windows 8% and 25% are still on xp = dead platform obviously too fragmented to develop for.

Linux is even more "fragmented" than windows why would people even use it with all that scary fragmentation!

</comment><comment><USER57> Can I just say that D3 and its underlying concept is just beautiful.

<comment><USER58> Was my first thought. A beautiful showcase to D3 capabilities. Really well done.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best blogging platform? - <AUTHOR>

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to start blogging, but I have no idea what blogging platform to use. A free one would be great, but I could pay if needed. What blogging platform do you think I should use? <comment><USER2> WordPress - it has excellent usability as a core product, but its real power comes from the large library of free plugins - there's pretty much always a plugin for everything.

You can sign up for a free hosted version of WordPress at <http://wordpress.com>, though it has paid upgrades, or you can download the self-hosted version for free at <http://wordpress.org>.

You could even go with a webhost (like <http://dreamhost.com>) and use their one-click-install for WordPress (feel free to use the coupon code JACOBWG for $97 off one year of DreamHost... disclosure: I do NOT receive any referral money or benefits from that code - all benefits have been rolled into that code's discount).

If you're the "hacker" type, then check out <http://jekyllrb.com/..>.

<comment><USER3> Wordpress had 6 "mandatory security update" releases in 2011 alone - <http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Versions> .

It doesn't seem to have had a secure design from the outset. Worse still, ordinarily one might advise "keep up to date", but wordpress had a release backdoored (<http://www.cgisecurity.com/2007/03/wordpress-websi.html>) once, so keeping up-to-date isn't without its risks too.

I've been giving tumblr a try, and so far - so good, but the functionality is pretty minimal.

<comment><USER2> You're going to have security holes with every piece of software, though it is true some software is more secure than others.

I personally view having security updates as a plus - it shows that the WordPress team (open source community) supports their software. The fact that WordPress is running on 70 million plus websites [1], about 15% of the web [2], means that if a security hole is found, it will be fixed, and it can be fixed by anyone without having to wait for a limited amount of employees of a particular company to write the patch (one of the benefits of open source).

What you do get from Tumblr, though, is the fact that a 3rd party is responsible for keeping your website up and keeping it fast - you basically trade ownership of your website's software for a 3rd-party guarantee. This also means that if Tumblr is down or is hacked or you want to customize something beyond the theme, you are dependent on Tumblr...

So, while each may have its own use-case (Tumblr is great for the following/reblogging stuff), the fact that WordPress is regularly updated is not a reason to avoid using it as a platform.

[1] <http://en.wordpress.com/stats/> [2] <http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/>

<comment><USER4> In addition, WordPress has a built-in updater, so it's incredibly easy to update, unlike many other platforms which require reuploading or obscure update steps.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't WordPress' built-in updater require write permissions to the PHP files? That's considered an insecure configuration by many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to host my own Wordpress blog, but it got hacked after I hadn't updated my blog in several months and, as a result, failed to install the security updates. I then decided to switch to Tumblr, which I liked overall, but this was back when they were having erratic downtimes, so I ended up switching to Posterous. I was pretty happy with Posterous for a while, mostly because it let me just email my posts in from anywhere. However, I really don't like the control panel in Posterous. It's such a pain to use for various reasons. I recently switched to running my blog with Jekyll on GitHub, which I am so far very happy with. It's simple, fast, and secure. I can write my posts in any text editor, and just push the changes to github.

Overall, if you're a hacker, definitely look at Jekyll (<https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/>). The easiest way to get started is to fork an existing jekyll blog and start customizing.

If you're not a hacker, I'd probably recommend Tumblr. It offers the best balance of features and ease of use, and they seem to have solved their downtime problems. If for, some reason, you don't like Tumblr, check out Posterous. If that still doesn't suit your needs, Wordpress.com would be my third recommendation.

I would not bother with self-hosted blogs unless you really have a need for that level of control, since the cloud-based or static options are so powerful these days.

I also recently discovered OhLife (<http://ohlife.com/>), which is a great way to keep a private journal. It'll send you an email at your chosen frequency (daily or weekly) asking "How did your day go?" and you just reply with your journal entry.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't use any 'blogging platform'. Use a static blogging system. The best one currently is probably Octopress[1] which is based on Jekyll[2]. But you could roll your own, and it would still be much better than blogger, wordpress, walmart.com, google+, facebook, tubmlr, etc.

Such systems just render your conveniently created post content into a static HTML website than can be published on various free systems (github pages etc) or $2/month VPS. Or an Amazon S3 bucket.

Why?

1\. It is not anyore significantly harder or more inconvenient than using a 'platform' like wordpress.com

2\. A static site is 10000000% more resistant to idiotic exploits (which unless you are some kind of PROFESSIONAL blogger, keeping up with is more trouble than its worth on any dynamic 'blogging platform' type of system)

3\. A static blog system can serve your blogs with any web server in 2012, and will be able to in 2112, whereas none of the free or even for-money 'blogging platforms' is likely to exist in 2112. Which in terms of your life (unless we are lucky and get the gerontological life-extending technology soon) is essentially 'forever.

4\. Why on earth would you cede control of your personal output to walmart.com or google+ or similar?

[1]: <http://octopress.org/>

[2]: <http://jekyllrb.com/>

EDIT: meant to mention somewhere in there that comments, one of the raisons d'être for these dynamic blogging systems, can now be superbly handled by off- site add ons like disqus.

<comment><USER7> re: comments, I strongly disagree that they are handled "superbly". For many important blogs, the comments are central to the whole endeavour. Why on earth would you cede control of your comments to disqus? Why do you keep your content and your comments separate? Will disqus be around in 2112? This is what I mean when I say that a "static blog system" is not a blog system at all. It is a partially thought-out solution which doesn't have the required functionality.

<comment><USER6> I guess that's a good point if comments are truly important to you. Which they perhaps are, for a tiny minority of blogs.

(I personally don't find comments important at all, and even take advantage of the various browser extensions[1] to hide them on various sites that do have them.)

[1]: e.g. <http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup.css.html>

<comment><USER7> I claim that comments are integral to the activity of blogging. In fact, most bloggers are chomping at the bit to get more comments, often they will do anything to get more comments, and not necessarily because there's a financial incentive.

If you look at the best blogs, I mean top blogs in their niche such as

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

<http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/>

<http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/>

<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/>

<http://terrytao.wordpress.com/>

you will see that they are comment heavy. In fact there are very interesting discussions __in the comments __.

You may think comments are "unimportant" for most blogs, but that is not up to you, it is up to the blogger, and I guarantee that blogger would rather have some comments. And it might help to have a half-decent comment system.

<comment><USER6> I hear you, and I more or less understand the arguments for your position, but I don't agree.

I personally am not much of a blogger, so my own proclivities as a blog writer ('fuck no I don't allow comments on any blog for which I am responsible for picking up the dogshit and spam') aren't too relevant. But many of the blogs I find most valuable do not feature comments, or if they do, they are 99.9% what you'd expect: utterly worthless, time-wasting digital turds.

I think the whole comment thing is misguided. If you really had something worthwhile to say, why on earth would you entrust that to whatever crap-ass 'blogging platform' that blogger in question happened to be using at the moment?

Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the web works.

Of course, I _have_ seen worthwhile comments (especially on blogs where the author takes the time/effort to aggressively police them). But that's far and away the exception, and not the rule.

<comment><USER7> The fact that you don't allow comments because of "dogshit" and "spam" means that your comments system is broken. That's like saying "I don't do email because of dogshit and spam". Spam is manageable in email, so the fact that it's out of control in comments means that noone has thought through a proper comments system.

When you say "Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the web works." I understand where you're coming from, but this is simply not true. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it so. The web is not made of a collection of interlinked static HTML files. But the root of your complaint, that by commenting on someone's blog you give away your worthwhile thoughts, is also a failure of the bad comment system.

Comments should work a lot more like email does. Imagine if each blog entry had an email address (or sub-address of the blog's email address) and sending a "comment" was really sending an email to that address. The comment box below the blog entry is really a small email composing window which sends the comment to the blog. And it can also send it to your own email address (as a cc for the purposes of the thought experiment). Then it would be in your email archive and not lost, but you would still be contributing to the discussion happening at the blog. A further benefit of this is that the spam filter for the email address would function for comments on a blog. Why reinvent the wheel? /end example.

I have come to this issue from the experience of working with bloggers with quite long-running substantial blogs on Wordpress or Blogger. They have a huge laundry list of complaints and annoyances with the software but I cannot in good faith recommend a jekyll-octopress solution or a wikified solution, or a "static--html" solution etc. These "solutions" are poorly thought out and would represent a severe reduction in functionality for the sake of "that's how it should be done". It is the result of developers who look at a hard problem (how to best implement all these required features) and decide to get rid of the problem by disparaging the features or the requesters themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tumblr, if you are really interested in the ability to share other blogs quickly and be shared as well. It is also very easy to set-up, maintain, and can work on custom domains as well. You can even add Disqus to most themes if you want feedback and comments. I also love the +Follow feature, as it means that people are more likely to consume your content over just bare RSS feeds. Overall, it's a more expansive Twitter.

Wordpress would be the way to go if you want to have more control over your blog, but I always ended up tweaking the function of the blog more and writing less. Tumblr basically breaks that tinkering distraction and allows you to focus on your content.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rambling, possibly-helpful non-answer: whatever you can get up and running with the fastest, and can use with minimum of friction. Blogspot, wordpress.com or posterous would probable all fit the bill.

Seems like about half of the most productive people/ most interesting blog posts I read are hosted at *.wordpress.com or someplace similarly humble.

But I mostly post this because I'm just finally finishing up a migration from self-hosted wordpress (which was working fine, but I wasn't happy with for various reasons) to octopress. This has taken me several months to get around to almost finishing (during which time I've gotten out of the blogging habit), and many hours of fooling with ruby environments, converting my old posts, etc., etc.

Hopefully the payoff for me will be simplicity, a better work-flow, new blog format that fits what I'd like to do better, etc. but it might have been a lot of wasted time and energy.

<comment><USER10> Blogspot/Blogger is a poor choice. Original founders are long gone and middle managers destroyed the team. They are not able to deal with spam efficiently, so they overreact and delete innocent blogs. \+ commenting requires CAPTCHA even for authenticated users, which is silly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using octopress on cnnr.me/b (just started it 2 days ago, so we're in the same boat), and I've really enjoyed it.

<http://octopress.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for your help! I will definitely try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since you are just starting out, I'd say go for Tumblr. It's incredibly easy and quick to get set up.

If you are still going strong after a few weeks and feel the need for something more powerful, then look into switching to something else. I personally switched to wordpress after a couple of weeks on Tumblr, but I have a lot of friends who still use Tumblr for everything.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised nobody mentioned Squarespace (<http://squarespace.com/>), popular for portfolio sites but also good for blogging, and really powerful suite (not free, though).

A geekier alternative is Calepin (<http://calepin.co>), amazing concept: you write your posts in multimarkdown, in a Dropox folder, and you publish by clicking a button that automatically checks that folder for new stuff (no template customization yet but Disqus integration). I am seriously thinking about switching to Calepin, Tumblr feels heavy on the browser.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'll +1 everyone who is recommending Jekyll. I've rolled my own blog engines (first one was Java/Struts 10 years ago) but I'm loving the zen of blogging via creating and pushing Markdown files to GitHub.

It's simple, provides me with a versioned and easily portable archive and doesn't require constant security updates. Here are some tips from migrating from WP: <http://decafbad.com/blog/2011/06/08/moved-to-jekyll>

</comment><comment><USER15> [http://techpolish.com/best-blogging-platform-sites-and- softw...](http://techpolish.com/best-blogging-platform-sites-and-software) \- here's a comparison of some popular platforms that you can personalize to get a recommendation unique to your need.

I'd say it depends on your purpose (e.g. personal blogging for your day-to-day realizations, philosophical epiphanies, etc.).

(Disclosure: TechPolish is my website.) EDIT: fixed typo. moved link up.

</comment><comment><USER16> Depends on whether you want to handle your own bandwidth and admin, or farm it out to someone else.

Personally, I'm very happy to be <http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/> because I have control over whether things are public or just for a personal audience, lots of control over comments - and most importantly, threaded comments. I loathe non-threaded comment systems with a fiery passion.

</comment><comment><USER17> The blogging platform you choose will be as much about you as it is the software.

* Are you a developer?

* How comfortable are you with the command line?

* Do you intend to display a lot of media on your blog?

* Do you intend to display code examples on your blog?

There is no "best" tool in any parlance. The tool you choose will have a lot to do with your preferences.

WordPress: Lots of plug-ins available; common, thus easy to get assistance for; supports a wide variety of blog types; requires diligent attention to security patches and performance tweaking (caching).

Hosted platform (like Tumblr): Zero maintenance; great community; easy to apply themes.

Static site generator (like Jekyll/Octopress): Very hackable; provides some level of street cred for devs; extremely minimal hosting requirements; easy to use your favorite flavor of markup (HTML, ERb, HAML, Markdown, Textile, you name it).

</comment><comment><USER18> Besides full content plays like Drupal, I've enjoyed working with Textpattern (<http://textpattern.com/>). It's easy to format content with textile, and it has a nice mix of plugins and template atomics that give you great power over the look and feel.

<comment><USER19> TextPattern is fantastic, and really encourages separation of content from presentation. That said, we use Posterous for company and personal blogs, so the hassle barrier is essentially zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I second the recommendations for Wordpress, but only if you're committed to maintaining your own domain. If you don't mind spending a little bit of money on hosting, the platform is simple, flexible, and pretty powerful. Plus, you'll have total control.

If you want to farm out to someone else, tumblr is good because it's inherently social (people will follow you, share your posts, etc), but it's largely visual and a bit spammy at times.

Posterous is another good platform because it's simple, has some social features, and tends toward the more content driven format.

Wordpress is still my vote though, because it can grow with your blog/site and vary from the fairly simple to as advanced as you want.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is a blogging "platform"? For that matter, what exactly does "blogging" consist of? Many answers below don't provide what I would call a platform - many aspects of what one might call "bloggin" have not been thought through (e.g. archiving and exporting of entries and comments, how are comments integrated, security features, hosting...) These are all part of the design of a platform. Whatever you think of it, Wordpress is certainly a platform. Many of the answers (e.g. jekyll, rolling your own...) are not.

It would be good to actually define "blogging" and "blogging platform", which I think would be somewhat difficult to do.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been using Wordpress for a couple of years. It's easy to use and extensible. If you aren't afraid of dipping your toes into some HTML/CSS/PHP than you can find a really good free/premium theme and some good plugins to make a good blog.

Just make sure you backup not only your database but themes because if you get malware, its really difficult to find out the source. Easiest thing to do is to revert to a clean copy, change passwords, and protect yourself!

</comment><comment><USER22> I use Armin Ronacher's RST blog (<https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rstblog>). I even wrote a guide for its use: <http://mattdeboard.net/2011/05/09/more-tips- on-rstblog/>

minimal static site generator. Worth it if you just want to put your content up and don't need or want pre-packaged bells and whistles.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you're learning a web framework, you could always roll your own with Rails/Django/Sinatra/Flask. I think it's the most fun option.

Then you get to implement things like a sitemap, categories, comments/Disqus, page caching, and anything else you're so inspired to add. Makes for good blogging material.

No slower than any static content generator like Jekyll if you just cache everything to a static directory, too.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have been also looking for some blogging platforms for some time (before I did some writing on wordpress and posterous, never liked them). Recently, I started using Jekyll+Github Pages, it is more simple. For me blogging should be as effortless as writing some text on your favorite editor. If you like learning something new you should try them.

</comment><comment><USER25> I use nanoblogger. (<http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net>)

It's pretty primitive, not actively developed, and has no native commenting system. On the other hand, its exactly as secure as your HTTPd of choice, unlike Wordpress.

</comment><comment><USER26> The best blogging platform is the one you actually use.

Pick any of the free platform WP, posterous, tumblr, etc. Most of these tools are inter-portable. It really does not matter, the one thing that really matter is the blogging platform that you actually use.

</comment><comment><USER27> Calepin[1] seems pretty neat. I have been meaning to give it a spin. Haven't yet though.

If you (or anyone else) end up giving it a spin, let me know how it goes.

[1]: <http://calepin.co/>

</comment><comment><USER28> Blogger in Draft - <http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/> <http://draft.blogger.com>

</comment><comment><USER29> github.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wordpress.

</comment><comment><USER31> ownzee.com</comment>


Why Not a Three-Day Week? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/three-day-week <comment><USER2> Why not? Because capitalism. New technology will continue to automate away more and more jobs, from manufacturing to the service industry. This _could be_ one of the greatest achievements in human history, leading to that so- called "leisure society" futurists talked about, but that would require a massive overhaul of most countries' economic systems.

All those gains in productivity mostly enrich the owner class while the rest of us have to fight even harder for the jobs that haven't (yet) been eliminated by technology.

In the U.S., it's hard to imagine getting a single conservative lawmaker to sit down at a table and have a frank discussion about wealth redistribution or a minimum income or public ownership schemes, possible solutions to this problem. That makes me worry that the inevitable transition away from our obsession with the free-market and pursuit of capital will be painful rather than celebratory. And that things will have to get worse before enough of us can consider implementing solutions that make things better.

<comment><USER3> I perceive this as one of a species of comments that is well-intentioned and valuable in isolation, but that when introduced to the thread has the effect of making it harder to discuss the article on its own terms.

It's easy to see the subtext of the article that indicts unrestrained economic competition. So it's hard to ding a comment for surfacing that subtext and engaging with it.

But at the same time, having been on HN for a long time, it's also easy to see how the result thread will simply litigate capitalism, and how unlikely it is that anyone will learn anything from the ensuing debate.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Comments like this are stronger when they stay with the _specific_ content of the article. They're weaker when treating it merely as a platform for some generic position ("obsession with the free market").

It isn't that the rhetoric is false, it's that it's impossible for it to be substantive here. Grand claims need grand substance, which there isn't room for in a mere comment post. People compensate for this with ersatz things like getting louder or angrier.

Tangents don't have to be bad. Ira Glass-style "I had an uncle who wore that kind of hat" tangents can be great. But _generic_ tangents go somewhere uninteresting. The gravitational pull of the large, familiar topics has to be resisted because once the discussion gets stuck on one of those planets it is never getting off.

<comment><USER5> I don't care to post this, but meta begets meta...

Your (and tptacek's) meta comments seem unhelpful and clearly favor HN's status quo.

I've successfully demanded a shorter workweek from capitalist bosses, and helped coworkers fight theirs. And that comment you both meta-criticize is pretty sensible, in my view. If you're going to hack a system, it's worth getting familiar with the subversive lit.

(Though their last paragraph may indicate a lack of familiarity with that subversive lit. Because politicians will naturally fight/coopt revolutionary changes to the system they administrate. Post-capitalism is a revolutionary change, and a capitalist state would attempt to respond violently. But whatever.)

<comment><USER3> The story about how you helped workers organize shorter work weeks would be interesting.

The framing of advocacy for post-capitalist society isn't, because of the nature of the site.

The only people who will pay attention to the latter conversation either (a) are doing so because they are intractably opposed to your idea and enjoy pushing back on it or (b) are already on your side.

That doesn't mean there's no group (c) of receptive, persuadable people, just that the venue you've chosen doesn't reach them effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find the whole economic system to be quite bizarre. Nobody's salary seems to correlate with much except their skill at getting a high salary. For instance, my sister (elementary education) makes even less than I do as a grad student. The difference is that she wakes up at 5:00 AM and works all day teaching and taking care of little kids until 7:00 PM, whereas I wake up whenever I feel like it, head to a coffee shop and work on research (which is basically a computer game for me), and mix in bike rides and whatever else as I please. The difference in salary will be even more extreme once I get my PhD.

It really doesn't seem fair, and when I think about the vast majority of the world population in other countries, it seems even less fair. I used to have a more conservative stance that if you want to get more, you just have to work harder, but now I've reversed my stance completely: I think it's mostly luck -- where you were born, who you know, what your social skills are, and if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Many jobs seem like they exist solely for the sake of creating more jobs. We have managers of managers of managers. A lot of people don't put a lot of effort into their work (they spend their day browsing the internet), and the ones that do put in an honest effort don't seem to be rewarded for it. The hardest-working employees are rarely promoted into administrative positions. And the best way to increase one's salary is to job hop instead of remaining loyal to one company ([http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees- that-stay-in-companies-longer-than-2-years-get-paid-50-less/)).

I feel like many people have this ingrained notion that you're just "supposed to work" for so many hours a week, and no one is seriously pursuing the goal of creating leisure time (or at least work that's personally enjoyable). We have more than enough technological capability to provide basic survival needs to everyone on the planet, yet we're nowhere close to achieving that goal.

Again, I don't know why it's this way. But it is, and it just seems wrong to me.

<comment><USER7> I think there are two separate issues in your comment...

You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly.

Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree more. We're RAPIDLY approaching the point where most people are employed to do basically nothing of value. How many people's jobs could be replaced by the mythical "script" written in a day by a good dev?

I'm glad to see us get to this point. People should learn and practice useful skills. So as not to cause a violent revolution, I think we do need some form of basic income though. That would also enable creatives to experiment and produce without economic pressure which I think is great. I also don't care if 99% of people mooch off this model as most people are just wasting time at work as it is anyway.

<comment><USER8> It's a horribly short-sighted viewpoint to not take into account the effect teachers (are supposed to) have on whole new generations of people! Teachers _raise_ people who may get billion-dollar ideas in the future, and should be paid accordingly.

<comment><USER9> They should, but they aren't and this is the reality.

Capitalism sucks at valuing things that don't give immediate profit. Education is such a thing - it has extreme ROI... 20 years down the line. Which is too long a time and it gets valued less than small changes that will bring in a little bit of money next month.

<comment><USER10> How is capitalism the thing valuing teacher's salaries? If referring to the US and public education, aren't they a branch of the government?

And even ignoring that(for example, at private schools), the 'consumer' here is really the parent. The child isn't in a position to choose schools, so it's really about selling to the parent. I imagine it has to be hard to get a sense of any 20-year projected ROI if you can only indirectly measure teaching quality by what your child says and standardized test scores.

<comment> mkr-hn > _How is capitalism the thing valuing teacher 's salaries? If referring to > the US and public education, aren't they a branch of the government?_

The tax base that funds the schools depends on the whims of capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would love some kind of job board for "lifestyle jobs". Thats jobs with 2 or 3 day work weeks and a 9-5 schedule. I might go as low as $60k (+ benefits) if it was offered.

The closest thing to achieve that now is freelancing.

<comment><USER12> Yeah -- and it's way easier to pack out 4 or 6 solid months of work than it is to find work that trickles in regularly at anything like "2 days a week," at least for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> w/r/t The Protestant Work Ethic:

The book only gets a one-sentence mention in the article, but much, much more could be said. Particularly, it presents overworking as a form of paranoia.

Working was framed as a duty to God and since we didn't know if God existed, we were to work hard, _just in case_. Now that we've (largely) shifted our beliefs from a Christian god to more diffused spirituality, we can stop justifying overwork in this way.

<comment><USER14> > Now that we've (largely) shifted our beliefs from a Christian god to more > diffused spirituality

Where did you get that from? A quick google search says about 3/4 of Americans identify as Christian, and about 62% are members of a church congregation.

<comment><USER15> I'd guess about half of that identify as Christian because it's socially unacceptable to be agnostic. Church communities have more uses than simple religious worship. Ask any salesman.

<comment><USER16> On this topic how many days a week do pastors work?

<comment><USER14> My dad was a music director and assistant pastor. He worked about 5 days a week, and also had another job on the side. Choir practice, church functions and services, preparing sermons, visiting sick church members, counseling members, and doing charity work add up to a good bit of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the biggest thing I miss from my consulting days. I would never work a 5-day week. It would either be a 3-day or 4-day week, leaving lots of time for travel, family and hobbies.

Sadly, I could never see our clients accepting any business day where we are not available during regular business hours.

<comment><USER18> Clients are _surprisingly_ willing to deal with that. It may be less of a hard constraint than you think it is, particularly if you train your clients to expect that type of working relationship.

I had an interesting call with a doctor client recently. "I didn't notice a number on your website." "That's correct." "So how am I supposed to get in touch with you?" "I recommend email." "But you only respond to email a day later." "That's correct." "Shouldn't you make yourself more available to your customers?" "With respect, doctor, I'm exactly as available as I wish to be."

You would think she'd be mad after a conversation including that, but she actually left happy, because I was able to fix her problem.

<comment><USER19> Kind of ironic that a doctor would say that to you. Just try getting a doctor's direct line or cell. It's almost impossible, they have receptionists because they'd be overwhelmed with patients calling them with stupid questions all day if they didn't.

Of course, you could also just hire a remote assistant to field phone calls for you if you wanted.

<comment><USER18> Working on it, but since I don't have one yet and was not returning voicemail reliably I hid the number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've always thought a four-day week makes a lot more sense than five... 4:3 on/off is a much nicer ratio than 5:2.

<comment><USER21> It's exactly what I'm thinking about lately. A lot of colleagues of mine work 4 days a week, from Mon - Thu, and have 3 days off. It is a HUGE difference compared to the 5:2 ratio.

It's not that I don't enjoy my job, but it sound so much sane to me. I hope next year I'll have saved a little bit of money I currently need so I'll be able to do a 4 day working week.

<comment><USER22> If you ever have the opportunity to work 4 days a week, choose Tuesday to Friday, rather than Monday to Thursday. The reason is that everyone else will be in a good mood on Friday so it will be much less stressful working Fridays rather than Mondays. For the same reason, don't burn your floating holiday on a Friday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Haven't tried it myself, but I like the idea of working a 9/80 with every other Friday off. One interesting effect is that those who are in the office on Friday end up feeling more productive or relaxed since there are fewer people around. I also wonder if every other Monday off might be better in some cases.

<comment><USER24> My sister did 9/80s. They were pretty nice when she first moved to the area, but the problem is that you have to take them off on a Friday and it's use-it- or-lose-it. Now that she's married, it's pretty rare that her husband gets time off when she does, and so the extra Friday was basically just a "sit at home in front of the TV day and veg", while the 9 hour days meant that it was an hour less time to spend with her husband in the evenings. I think she's switched back to a regular schedule now.

I have some former coworkers that effectively did 9/80s as well, since they maxed out their vacation and started taking every other Friday off so they wouldn't lose it. It usually worked better, ironically, for people without many hobbies, since they were okay with just sitting at home and vegging for Friday.

4-day weekends could be great if all of society moved to them, but they're tricky when it's just some employers because the people you love aren't around to hang out with. I actually tend to prefer taking Wednesday off; a veg-day to break the week in half seems much more relaxing than a 3-day weekend where you can't do anything fun for one of the days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Economists of yore were wise to see that productivity would increase dramatically, but they were wrong in believing that surplus productivity would translate into leisure time.

I look at Google and Ycombinator as the model for the future economy, if economic systems are left unchecked by the threat of physical force.

How many people are working at Google everyday on a product that will never produce one red cent? Hundreds? Thousands? How many funded YCombinator startups will never provide a return on investment? 60%? 80%?

These days, the smart money is taking all their surplus productivity and putting it into long-shots to create even more surplus productivity. This explains why industries like software development, that have such an enormous productivity surplus, are paying such high wages right now. One could even argue that the shortage of skilled individuals in such an environment will lead to an increase in demand for those who can train such people - leading to something like a more organic education system.

<comment><USER26> "paying such high wages"

High wages? Not compared to doctors or lawyers or mid-level business folks. My friend is a marketing manager (a glorified secretary/copy writer with an MBA, by her own admission) and she makes more or less as much as a senior developer.

Enough already with the "high wages" myth. It is the exact cause for the shortage of software engineers in the US - most young people in the US don't want to pursue it because the reward is not commensurate with the effort and risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> George Jetson: "These three day work weeks are killing me." (wikipedia: "George's job primarily requires him to repeatedly push a single button")

That is, isn't this a product of a far more optimistic (cartoon) past view of the future? and/or "where's my flying car?"

</comment><comment><USER28> Why not half a salary?

<comment><USER29> Because two 20 hour employee are worth considerably less than one 40 hour employee for all but the most menial jobs.

<comment><USER30> [citation needed]

<comment><USER29> Have you worked anything other than menial jobs?

<comment><USER30> yes. and the science is very exhaustively on my side: time and time again, it's been shown that workers (especially knowledge workers like programmers, designers, etc.) are more productive when working less hours.

* [http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/\---ed_protect/\---pro...](http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---protrav/---travail/documents/publication/wcms_187307.pdf)

* www.eurofound.europa.eu/pubdocs/2002/07/en/1/ef0207en.pdf

* [http://sciencenordic.com/we-should-only-work-25-hours-week-a...](http://sciencenordic.com/we-should-only-work-25-hours-week-argues-professor)

* [http://news.illinois.edu/WebsandThumbs/Lleras,Alejandro/Ller...](http://news.illinois.edu/WebsandThumbs/Lleras,Alejandro/Lleras_sdarticle-17.pdf)

* the list goes on...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yes, let's work 3 days a week in the West. China will continue to work 6 or 7 days. Fast forward 10 years and the reserve currency will be the yuan.

<comment><USER32> > China will continue to work 6 or 7 days [...] and the reserve currency will > be the yuan.

You suppose that wealth production is proportional to the number of hours worked. This used to be an oversimplification, and now becomes simply false. Countries lead by people who keep counting on this falsehood will fail.

<comment><USER31> Western workers are very productive per hour work but we still have to work some hours.

<comment><USER32> To paraphrase Bill Gates, measuring wealth production by hours of work is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

The "production per hour" metric gets more and more meaningless and deceitful for more and more jobs, mostly for the most productive ones. Obsessively measuring $/hours misleads us into thinking that spending more hours will get us more $, which is false for most jobs which actually creates significant amounts of wealth.

I've automated away dozens to hundreds of menial jobs (hard to count): what sense is there in comparing my one-shot engineering hours to those of the technicians I've definitely made redundant? Each of my hours will have saved thousands of technician hours over the years: does that make me and my time worth thousands of time more than them?

> we still have to work some hours

Some of us have to work some hours, but there are more and more poeple whose hours simply can't be converted into wealth. And that's good news, not a tragedy, because we don't _need_ those working hours. What we need is a way to distribute wealth complementary to, and less obsolete than, salary.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ChartMogul:  Analytics for Stripe, Braintree, Chargify and Recurly - <AUTHOR> https://chartmogul.com/blog/2014/11/chartmogul-launches-beta/

<comment><USER2> Looks very nice, good luck! As for feedback, I like the monsters, but you should really show people more details about what they'll get (show graphs!). And, "Signup" should say free, if that's the case.</comment>


Ask HN: Are these personal projects worth open-sourcing? - <AUTHOR>

Hello all,
I have a couple of small personal projects I've been working on over the years and I was wondering if they would be of use to anyone:
1. nginx configuration generator

  N.new('annotalia.com') { proxy(2666) } >> gen[:machine1]
  N.new('.eshao.es') { pppr } >> gen[:machine2]
  N.new('research.dsoglobal.org') { doku } >> gen[:machine3]
 Ends up as a fully configured proxy to port 2666, a domain that supports perl/python/php/ruby, and a doku configuration respectively. It only generates the nginx configuration, but I've found it really helpful to setup my multiple sites. Currently, it supports most normal use-cases (like subdomains, specifying log locations, etc.) as well as specific applications like Wordpress, Rails, and Mailman. And of course, extensible.
An example configuration file can be found at: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/146184/config.rb>, just so you can get an idea of how concise it is.
- -
2. Puppet configurations
I use puppet extensively to manage all my machines and have a ton of configurations which are accompanied by documentation on setup and any miscellaneous gotchas. Although FreeBSD-exclusive, I put a lot of thought into each file and code elegance (using macros, etc.) which might be helpful to others.
An example manifest can be found at: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/146184/mailman.pp>.
- -
3. Blogging platform using Etherpad as a backend
I love writing in Etherpad. So much, I made an entire blogging platform which is controlled from within Etherpad. You edit configuration, tags on posts, and posts themselves (in Markdown) in Etherpad and everything gets cached locally as static HTML on the backend.
An example "Etherblog" can be found at <http://annotalia.com>.
- - - -
My assumption is that (1) would be suitable for github, (2) should go somewhere in the puppet wiki/github, and (3) should be discussed with the Etherpad folks first. But I honestly have no clue where to start and even less of an idea of whether these are valuable enough to bother open-sourcing. I do know that all of this needs to be cleaned up and I am only willing to do the work if someone will benefit.
So HN, please lend me your advice on:
* If you would find any of these projects personally interesting or useful?
* How you would go about open-sourcing the projects? Any good guides out there?
* Most importantly, if any of you would be willing to mentor me through the process, I'd really appreciate it. My email is in my profile. Would be great to have someone comment on my code quality and guide me through brainstorming anyone I need to contact, putting something up on github, and publicizing the projects.
Sorry for the long post and thank you for your time! - Edwin <comment><USER2> Maybe a stupid question, but what would be the altternative?

Recently I started to think along these lines: code not being used and/or worked on is slowly decaying (due to bitrot :) ). Personally i would opt to share even if it's not perfect. Practice makes perfect and that's what you can do by making your work available to others and thus allow them to 'judge' your work. Your question seems to imply that this is part of why you're considering sharing your work. From a practical viewpoint: it might be good to think about maintenance and support, although i presume most open source project first need to be used at all before this becomes problem. I hope this makes any sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is exactly why I'd like to open-source my work. My concern is more about the practical question of how and/or seeing if I persuade someone to walk me through the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> hey Edwin,

(1) Absolutely!

(2) I don't know puppet, so no comment

(3) same

Please post about the nginx configurator if you decide to do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Jacques,

re: 1, do I just put it on github and hope people find it by themselves? Do I advertise it? If so, how?

Thanks for the interest, I'll work on cleaning it up now.

\- Edwin

<comment><USER3> Github or sourceforge or your own homepage it doesn't matter, that depends on where you want to go with it.

If you plan on just releasing it in to the world ('fire and forget') then your own homepage would be good enough, if you plan on long term collaboration with people using your code then sf or gh ?

As for advertising, please post it here, probably reddit and /. are also teeming with people that would have an interest in this.</comment></comment></comment>