"Authentic" is dead - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/authentic-dead.html

<comment><USER2> _______ enables you to connect, interact, and engage in powerful new ways. Streamline how you work, collaborate more easily, and create high impact communications. Designed to meet the needs of today's business, ______ helps you get more done — easier, faster, better._

Can you guess which popular product is this?

<comment><USER3> Just for the humor value, I'm hoping it is Microsoft Office.

 _searches_

The true answer is _even better_.

<comment><USER4> Spoiler:

It's Adobe Acrobat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Taking a stance against marketing speak is just another form of marketing speak.

<comment><USER6> If you believe that, it's impossible to have a discussion.

<comment><USER7> I don't mean to be harsh, but your article made me think that you were more interested in making strident, overly assertive statements than in having a conversation.

<comment><USER8> Are you talking about the headline or the article? Because the article appeared to me to be rather nuanced and not at all strident.

<comment><USER7> More the article than the headline, actually. To me it's written in a kind of "broadcast" mode -- choppy sentences and paragraphs, overly abundant typographic emphasis, etc. Reminds me of people who try to win arguments by being loud -- not amenable to conversation.

I really don't mean to attribute these characteristics to the author, who I'm sure is a fine fellow; just that the article brought them to mind.

<comment><USER9> The article is written very calmly. Short sentences and small paragraphs are a writing style that says nothing of the author except a will to be readable.

Moreover, he uses classic rhetorical techniques, including concessions and common places, in a very reasonable way to show that he understands the other side of the coin.

You just don't like the content. Stop trying to pin the blame on the style, and admit it.

<comment><USER10> It also came off as an example of what the author was advocating. Don't be wishy-washy, don't skirt around things, say what you mean and back it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of undergrad discussions of Heidegger, if you are reaching for authenticity, then you are always already inauthentic by definition.

<comment><USER6> I didn't say reaching for authenticity is inauthentic.

In fact, I explicitly said these ideas are worthy and should be pursued.

Rather, you can't just invoke well-worn phrases because they've been misused so much that people don't know what they mean anymore. You have to do the thing, just say it in a new way.

It's a shame, just like it's a shame that the word "gay" can no longer just mean "happy," but it's a fact that you have to deal with.

<comment><USER11> Some goals recede further into the distance the harder you try to reach them. You can't work at having an authentic relationship with your customers, you have to talk to them like a real person.

In it's practical application it's a bit of a jedi mind trick; you can't force yourself to be more authentic than you are at any given point in time; you just have to relax and be, authentically.

I'd agree with you on the overuse of certain tropes, pretty much any community has a few terms that are never precisely defined that are used as shorthand to frame a loose group of ideas "lean startups", "social media", "agile"; they'll be used and abused and everyone involved will have a slightly different piece of the elephant in mind when they use the term. But within the community they aren't used as precise technical terms, but rather as signals of allegiance to one sub-group or ideology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Seamless Integration" should be added to that list.

</comment><comment><USER13> A useful metric for me: when someone says X is to be disregarded, disregard _them_. The problem is not with the word. The problem is with how individuals and companies use the word and how well they understand and apply the underlying concept.

Buzzwords come in and out of fashion. Real substance sticks around.

<comment><USER14> But if you disregard them, should we disregard you? It can be a big disregarding circle!

<comment><USER15> Disregard this statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can we add "foo is dead" to the list?

<comment><USER17> That's not scheduled until next year.

<comment><USER18> Bar is the new black!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The reason these words are abused is because they work -- rather than admonishing that they "should no longer be used, ever, in any context except derisive mocking," it seems a bit more productive to recognize that there are times and places when customers are more receptive to (and even prefer) being told something is "powerful" than that it "processes 6,253,427 requests daily." (A lot of sites have front-page hype backed up with buried numbers and figures for those who really want to know, anyway.) Being a savvy consumer means knowing what words to dig deeper on, but let's face it, all consumers aren't savvy -- and most of them don't need to be.

<comment><USER20> "The reason these words are abused is because they work..."

Isn't this just an example of a bandwagon effect cognitive bias? How does the ubiquitous nature of bad copy make it any more effective? If anything, that's 180 degrees from true.

If every marketing statement could be taken at face value, this would work fine. Unfortunately, everyone has access to the same thesaurus I do. How am I distinguishable from my competitors if both our sites read like a checklist of abstractions?

Your point about the request processing number really drives this home. Whether someone prefers the word "powerful" as a stand-in for a demonstrative figure depends entirely on whether they're already inclined to believe whatever you say. If that is a good description of your average first-time visitor, then, um, I wouldn't waste much time on writing copy anyway. Just have a headline reading "This is exactly what you need." and a sign-up button.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've only got one caveat about this article - in a competitive space where money is being raised, being 'the leading provider of' or 'the market leader' counts for a lot. There's therefore a lot of incentives for the less-than- ethical to exaggerate numbers that can't easily be independently verified.

If you go out the door with hard stats, be prepared for someone else to use those stats and claim they're doing better than you - and their claim will have a bit more verisimilitude because they won't have to guess about _your_ performance. Frustrating, but it happens.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is it? My marketing copy doesn't agree. And that has worked out pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER22> A suggestion to overcome this: if your sentence's meaning relies on an adjective, it needs a better verb.

<comment><USER23> There are dragons down that path too unless you buy-in to the idea that by rationalizing adjectives you're somehow going to synergize the language.

<comment><USER22> haha very true and well demonstrated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Clearly the author is not very familiar with the vocabulary of the hipster subculture. There are people who can argue for hours whether some band is still 'authentic' or not.

<comment><USER25> This is what the author is saying: _authentic_ isn't binary

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One of my favorites is QuickSSHD - dead simple, starts an ssh server on your phone so you can ssh in and browser around or even better, scp files to / from it (no need to plug in your phone to put files on it any more ...)

</comment><comment><USER27> "Foo is a fast, easy way to bar." makes it clear what Foo does, and on what dimensions it's supposed to excel. That's clear and useful.

Please don't bog me down in details right out of the gate. Give me the 30,000 foot view, with an option to drop down lower if I like the lay of the land.

<comment><USER28> But neither "fast" nor "easy" carries any semantic weight in the sentence—no one will ever say "Foo is the _slow, difficult_ way to bar." Just say that "Foo helps you bar" or even "Need to Bar? Try Foo."

<comment><USER27> This is why I wrote that it indicates "on what dimensions it's supposed to excel". Here's a non-abstract example:

\----

Mercedes CLS550: the safe luxury car.

BMW M5: the sporty luxury sedan.

Toyota Camry: the reliable family car.

Hyundai Sonata: inexpensive, practical transportation.

Jeep Wrangler: fun off-road vehicle.

\----

Nobody is going to refer to their car as unsafe, not sporty, unreliable, impractical, or not fun, but that doesn't make the brief descriptions unhelpful. It tells me why the creator thinks their car is different than the others.

And while nobody will say "the slow, difficult way", they might well say "the most powerful way", "the fully-customizable way" or "the environmentally responsible way" all of which indicate to me that they are differentiated by something other than speed or ease of use.

Your proposed alternatives tell me absolutely nothing except what market the product is in. You're making me work to discover why your product is different than others in the market, and that can't be a good thing for you.

<comment><USER28> You make a good point—I was assuming, though, that the product was in a market where speed and ease-of-use were the _only possible dimensions_ by which to evaluate the product. This happens a lot—tax preparation companies, for instance, aren't going to say they're the "most powerful" or "most eco- friendly" way to do your taxes; they're going to say they get you out of the building as quickly as possible and back to your day. They're _all_ going to say that. And so, in those cases, it's meaningless. Many segments of the web application market that those around here like to target have the same problem.

<comment><USER27> I absolutely agree that one should, at a minimum, test meaningful statements before resorting to pointless or tautological verbiage.

That said, if it turned out that 'Infiniti G37: car.' was split testing better than 'Infiniti G37: the high-performance luxury sedan', I'd double-check their work, then roll out the new slogan. After all, at some level it's more to do with what works than what is elegant and satisfying.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Workers Lost a Leader, but the Fight Will Continue - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/google-workers-lost-a-leader-but-the-fight-will-continue-c487aa5fd2ba <comment><USER2> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19154012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19154012)

Thanks for sharing my article though!</comment>


Tell HN: Our startup is improving online advertising - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
We have been quietly working on a new online advertising platform called Deckeo.  We're getting really close to conducting a private beta and wanted to offer the HN community a chance to participate.
The goal of Deckeo is to provide website owners with a better solution for selling their own ad space. Inspired by forward-thinking ad networks like The Deck Network, Fusion Ads, and Zerk Media, we set out to create a platform that would enable anyone to sell ad space on their website using the cost per influence model.
If you would like to get on the list for our private beta, or would just like to know a little bit more about Deckeo, head over to http://deckeo.com/beta_signup.php
Cheers, Tim, Matt, & Eric (The Deckeo Team) <comment><USER2> Hey guys, I run Zerk Media and we also happen to be working on something similar (<http://adzerk.com>). It will be interesting to see how they stack up when we both launch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey James, glad to hear from you! Ad Zerk does sound similar, seems like we both had the same itch to scratch :) It is good to hear of another HN'er working on the same problem space. I am sure that our friendly competition will only lead to better products for the both of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> And what exactly separates Decko from the other numerous ad serving platforms who are already up and running?

The only thing I got from the page you linked to is that Decko has 40% more love in it than others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Deckeo (pronounced deck-e-oh) is a platform that enables you to simply sell ad space on your website, or go big and create your own advertising network if you wish. We are focused on targeted, quality, advertising using a cost per impression model. We think that the The Deck Network and Fusion Ads are on to something with their advertising model of having only one highly targeted, well designed ad on a page. We found that there were not any great solutions for emulating that style of ad serving for our own sites so we set out to create a platform to allow ourselves to do this.

We give you the tools and the infrastructure to create an ad network that targets a particular demographic without you needing to write any code or host any applications. For instance, you could create your own ad network to target a home and garden demographic in the same way that Fusion Ads is a network that targets a design professional demographic. We aren't Fusion Ads or The Deck Network, rather we enable you to be the "Fusion Ads" for your particular demographic or niche.

We just put up our public facing site yesterday and I am sure there is a lot more we can do to better explain how we are positioned in the market or what makes us different. If you have any more questions or comments, we'd love to answer them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the url to the beta signup page: <http://deckeo.com/beta_signup.php>

</comment><comment><USER4> Nicer than usual signup form, like the way you can add a note along with your email address</comment>


Why is America so rich?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/11/growth <comment><USER2> One way to help answer this question is to imagine what would happen if, around the same time Larry & Sergey started Google, two identical grad students were working on the same thing at a university elsewhere in the world. The second story would have played out a lot differently.

This thought experiment isn't a complete answer, but it's not irrelevant either.

<comment><USER3> That's really interesting thought.

In the US and specifically Silicon Valley, they got a check for $100,000-ish to help them in the early years. In most any other country (or even most other parts of the US), that money wouldn't have been available to 2 unknown people, regardless of how smart they were.

That's not the only piece of the puzzle, but it's significant.

<comment><USER4> There are other factors.

For example, Linus went to a university in Finland, it was free so he stayed there for 8 years or so. If he was in the US at the time, would he have had the time and freedom to work on a Free kernel full time? He would probably be in a deep debt like most students.

The point being, there are many other things that other countries have that America doesn't have.

<comment><USER5> It could be argued that he is the exception that proves the rule. He did something great, but he did not start Linux, the company, and make billions. Also - Linux would be useless without the GNU project - which is arguably very American.

<comment><USER4> GNU is very anti-capitalism.

RMS talks about valuing "community and freedom" over "features". That's pretty much what the "communism" ideal is all about, right?

Not saying GNU is communist, that's very taboo, but the ideals and motivation are definitely not "very American".

<comment><USER6> GNU, and FOSS in general, is neither capitalistic nor communistic. It is academic.

It works in exactly the same manner that Western academia has for much of its recent existence, in which discoveries are published, shared, collaborated on, and built on, albeit at a pace much accelerated by the ability to collaborate in real-time over the Internet, instead of having to wait for the publication of monthly journal articles and expensive lab experimentations (like the LHC).

Just because the people involved in FOSS are not doing this directly for money does not mean they're giving away the fruit of their labor for free, or being coerced as Soviet Communism was known for. While creating things that directly improve their own lives (scratching their own itches), they also gain the opportunity to spend their lives living their passion doing stimulating work, gain recognition amongst a group of peers spread all around the world, become known as experts in their field (leading to paying gigs from commercial outfits), and create things with the potential to advance the human race and make the world a better place. All of it 100% voluntarily, uncoerced. If that's not Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, I don't know what is.

Go reread what Ayn Rand says about trading value for value. Whether you're trading the fruits of your labor and talent for money, or for something else of value to you, either fits just fine with her philosophy. Ultimately, she was an advocate for the creation and fair exchange of value and real wealth, of which money is just a store, and without coercion. There is absolutely nothing about FOSS that is incompatible with her beliefs.

This is one of the biggest problems with the Conservative movement these days, a misunderstanding and misapplication of their own ideology. Too many seem to have merely a superficial understanding of it, a worldview that if corporations, direct profit motive, and consistent % improvements in quarterly statements aren't the driving force behind something then it can only be the antithesis of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Be it FOSS, Net Neutrality, movements to reduce corporate spending in politics, if corporations are against it or orthogonal to it, then it must be anti- American.

Einstein once advised that 'everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.' I think the right would do well to reconsider their world view with that in mind.

<comment><USER4> GPL is not designed for academic research. MIT and BSD licenses are, but the GPL is certainly not.

> Just because the people involved in FOSS are not doing this directly for > money does not mean they're giving away the fruit of their labor for free, > or being coerced as Soviet Communism was known for

Read my reply to PG. I wasn't trying to imply that GNU has any similarity to the USSR; that's very silly.

I actually support the ideals of GNU, but I'm not ideological about it. I'm fine with selling closed software, so long as one is not just leeching off open source without contributing anything back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They neglect to mention Bretton Woods establishing the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Monetary_and_Fin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Monetary_and_Financial_Conference)

>the IMF insists that the foreign exchange reserves maintained by other nations are held in the form of dollars, so no matter how much debt the US accumulates, its economy will not collapse.

</comment><comment><USER8> _Why was Britain so wealthy in 1922?_

Well, it wasn't really, it was only formally wealthy and really in decline.

The simple answer today for why America _looks_ wealthy on paper that our currency is chronically over-valued from our historical position as the last super power. From this, all the things we produce seem more valuable than they are. Of course, we aren't actually _selling_ these things to that many people in other countries. Instead we coast on the credit China is willing to conveniently advance us to buy their goods. We're "so productive" we no longer need to produce ... that much.

The world's overall currency and trade relations are amazing unbalanced with both US and Chinese policy makers apparently willing to feed the illusionary value of the dollar for as long as it suits their mutual policy interests.

Silicon Valley is a huge source of innovation but it's one of last things of value to the world that the US has. There are other things on that list but the list hasn't gotten longer for a while now.

Also, US government spending is on-par with Europe (~33%+ of GDP!) but the US somehow provide little to no "safety net" to its citizens. The US still a large manufacturer - it's just that a large portion of it's manufacturing goes directly to the defense sector.

<comment><USER9> Web apps don't register, but actual silicon does:

[http://www.suite101.com/content/top-us-imports-- exports-2009...](http://www.suite101.com/content/top-us-imports-- exports-2009-a204269)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because they control the medium of exchange: the American Dollar is the de- facto standard for all currencies of the world.

I've heard (or maybe read?) a quote to the effect that the US dollar is one of the top things that America exports.

It's also the reasons Banks are rich, even though they don't practically produce anything. If they were simply accounting firms managing people's money and doing nothing other than book-keeping, without the ability to "create" money out of thin air, they wouldn't have become so rich.

Japan and China on the other hand, became rich solely due to their hard work.

I'm particularity fascinated by how Japan raised from the ashes, _literally_ , to become what they are. The quantity and quality of creativity over there is just amazing.

<comment><USER10> Both of them were tremendous beneficiaries of the Marshall Aid plan. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Aid_to_Asia>

I know that US bashing is popular, but the US has in the past done tremendously generous things for the world.

<comment><USER4> From the random things I've read about Japan post WWII, they were basically forbidden to produce anything by the occupation government.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan#Industrial_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan#Industrial_disarmament)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the the tenacity and perseverance of the American character results in a nation that is better equipped to produce wealth than any other nation. It is founded on entirely different principles than the rest of the world. Americans are optimists and that leads them to have the courage of conviction to do things like a Marshall Aid plan. America realizes that it stands on top of the world and thus the only way to lift itself up is to lift everyone else up with it.

For many years America was one of the freest places to do business. Because of that and their geography they were able to leverage massive industrial power to fuel the Allied war machine while charging a large portion of that back to their allies. After WW2 they correctly realized that they needed a plan to get the rest of the world on track, because they were the only ones left with functioning industry, they gave and sold the world the means of production. (Marshall Aid plan)

From these acts they became the worlds reserve currency and leveraged that into massive monetary expansion and reaped the rewards of seigniorage.

The problem is that American has adopted a very anti-business climate (Sarbox, Dodd-Frank, etc) and is still acting like it represents 60% of world GDP.

It's pretty much Silicon Valley that is still keeping the US in the game.

Also, not to forget is the Americans were smart enough to offer to pay the Sauds their bribe to be able to protect them. The British scoffed at this offer and the rest is pretty much history. Basically, the Sauds said 'someone pay us for the privilege of protecting us'

I'm not American but hold a deep respect for the things the country has done for the world.

<comment><USER11>
      > It's pretty much Silicon Valley that is still
      > keeping the US in the game.

While there may be some truth to it, I think that statement is a bit bold.

<comment><USER10> Bold ideas are what change the world. I don't think that it is the companies or the particular ideas that are keeping the US in the game, it's the spirit and the character.

It's having the courage to dream, the passion to execute, and the friends and colleagues who will offer a hand up after you fail.

No where else have I seen this spirit so embodied and embraced than in SV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nothing to do with OPEC using the dollar as its only accepted currency, meaning if you want to buy oil you need to get dollars by selling things cheap to america?

</comment><comment><USER13> It's actually a hard question to answer. Being a good place for innovation (as pg suggests) is definitely part of the answer. But if you look at a list of rich countries (excluding mineral wealth & havens eg Qatar,Norway & Luxemberg,Andorra), it's hard to put a finger on _a_ cause. If you asked the residents of those countries why they're rich, you'd probably get few commonalities.

US: freedom, innovation

Singapore: extreme k-12 education, trade center

Switzerland: dunno

Netherlands: Progressive culture, social justice

Ireland: Intelligently designed & centralized tertiary education system, bribing key companies to set up shop

France: Liberte, egalite... ( just kidding, sort of)

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone have a mirror? The link isn't working and Coral Cache doesn't have it.

<comment><USER15> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gfz3dS3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gfz3dS3UOyAJ:www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/11/growth+http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/11/growth&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

For those wondering what the Economist site runs on, the error message is:

Pressflow

Site off-line The site is currently not available due to technical problems. Please try again later. Thank you for your understanding.

If you are the maintainer of this site, please check your database settings in the settings.php file and ensure that your hosting provider's database server is running. For more help, see the handbook, or contact your hosting provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The real questions should be: "...and yet, so blighted, and so plain ugly to look at in most places? And why, despite all this wealth, are the standards of living and general education levels so shockingly low?"

</comment><comment><USER17> Why WAS America so rich? Most of the competitions were wiped out by WWII.

But now they've all rebuilt and caught up. Now the US is in trillions of debt, the largest debt holder in the world.

<comment><USER18> Why was the competition wiped out? Why did the USA win WWII? I think you'll find a circular reference here.

People act as if American Imperialism is responsible for it's economy, when it's the opposite. We are by no means great war fighters. We just build more than anyone else.

<comment><USER19> I would imagine being on a different continent helped tremendously. South America was pretty much untouched too.</comment></comment></comment>


RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software - <AUTHOR> http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/10/rethinkdb-sagemath-andreessen-horowitz.html <comment><USER2> To understand what happened to RethinkDB, you want to contrast it with MongoDB.

RethinkDB is amazing software and a real breakthrough. And the audience of deep thinking people who can really leverage the event model is ... limited. Today.

MongoDB is no breakthrough, but there are legions of people who just want to plug something together with PHP or Node. Given what they're doing, it works fine.

I sincerely hope Rethink can turn into a vibrant open source project and I'm willing to donate money to that. Given sufficient time, the world will learn to use it. And until then, it will grant superpowers to people willing to invest a little effort to understand and leverage it.

<comment><USER3> I admit I don't have a lot of experience with MongoDB, but RethinkDB was _really_ easy to plug into Node. While we didn't support PHP officially, the PHP RethinkDB driver was maintained by RethinkDB's engineering manager, Daniel Mewes, and it looked pretty solid.

When I started at RethinkDB, it was before changefeeds were a thing. I always thought the "killer feature" was, well, ReQL. It had the qualities of an ORM/DB Builder in your native language of choice. There was a poster on the wall that said "Databases should be indistinguishable from magic"; I always thought that was a perfect pitch to the RethinkDB audience. I understand why they canted toward pitching the realtime aspects first and foremost after changefeeds came about, but I thought it had great power even if you _weren 't_ focused on realtime/event-driven aspects, and perhaps that should have been emphasized more.

<comment><USER4> In my opinion rethinkdb is super easy to get going and use. The low touch maintenance is what drew me originally.

However, learning to live without transactions takes some rethinking of the approaches taken. It's totally doable but it may not come easy if you're used to transactions in an RDBMS.

Of course in today's distributed multi service multi database world, learning to live without transactions is becoming more and more important anyway.

<comment><USER5> if "Databases should be indistinguishable from magic" then somehow you should be able to get transactions

<comment><USER4> You can get transactions, but at a cost. Distributed transactions exist, they're just slow (and network-chatty). RethinkDB decided not to go that direction, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Several interesting ideas to ponder due to the RethinkDB shutdown.

1\. Business model / strategy is as important as the technology. Way too many people believe that all they need to do is build a great product (by all accounts it seems RethinkDB did) and the rest will take care of itself. Enterprise software is a very difficult business and at the moment going through tremendous change and while there is good opportunity it takes much more than good tech.

2\. I would put RethinkDB in the "hard tech" category - the category that YC recently said they'd like to fund more of. Given the success of the technology but failure of the company it raises the question of what value YC brings to the table for a hard tech company? Many hard tech companies are very different than the companies that appear to enjoy the most success from YC (e.g. very different than AirBNB, Dropbox,...).

<comment><USER7> We're an open CORE (caps for emphasis) deep tech company YC has funded in the deep learning space.

We have proprietary software we sell as well as helping people go closer to the applications. We spend a lot of time on relationships with fortune 2000 vendors with existing channels for distribution.

As the CTO of a startup like this I spend my time on coding, leading an engineering team, and managing partnerships with technology companies that help us sell an integrated solution.

We focus on the fortune 2000. One of the things that concerns me is: "My startup bought a support contract from rethinkdb"

No offense to the founders of either, but usually such things are in the 6 figure category or later and require something larger than what a startup can pay.

Selling a cloud version which is easier to scale with more users and less costly on the engagement side (vs say: high touch enterprise) may have been a problem with the business model.

Other plays in the space (maybe gitlab can comment here) tend to minimize support costs to make it easier to work with smaller entities. This may work for data base companies and I hope this is not interpreted as "what I'm saying works for everyone"

What we're doing by default requires some high touch and what might essentially be touching more sensitive problems with a wider variety of applications.

Where deep learning and databases line up is the wide applicability of problems and data types vs say: source control which I won't comment on here (due to lacking knowledge in the space beyond being a user)

My cofounder and I met slava when we were in YC and I have to say we learned a lot from him. He clearly had experience in the space. This space is definitely hard though. I wish them and their community the best no matter what.

Focusing on the customer base from day 1 here is definitely a must.

One of the distinct things we do (other open source startups do this) is figure out which features belong in an enterprise version and a community version.

You can't be everything to everyone and every feature has a price. Boiling the ocean will kill you here. A lot of the engineering team's job is to figure out ROI for certain kinds of features and what kind of problem the feature solves "community" vs "enterprise". It sounds like the enterprise version started later which is a shame. I can say for us, community feedback has been crucial and quick feedback loops help keep us tied to real problems. There's always a certain ratio of engineering time spend on customer problems vs "core features everyone can use". I think a lot of startups have to measure those trade offs.

<comment><AUTHOR> > " but usually such things are in the 6 figure category or later and require > something larger than what a startup can pay."

RethinkDB's support prices depended on the size and needs of the customer, so were very reasonable for my company.

<comment><USER7> Right but that's likely the crux of the problem "reasonable" might not be enough to build a sustainable business.

If I was doing support for startups that weren't paying me very much, I would have to question the return on investment there.

I was trying to say, that startups as customers are a bad idea and that support contracts if you DO have them as a business model should be in that range.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The open source project that has really stood out to me in terms of funding is vuejs.org who's funding is almost entirely public at [https://www.patreon.com/evanyou](https://www.patreon.com/evanyou)

In the case of RethinkDB I wish they had started Horizon much sooner. Having plugins like for Stripe will make Horizon usable in the real world. I certainly like the goal set for Horizon that it be easy to extend a Horizon app by embedding it in a Node app. I just found the lack of step by step tutorial and several examples frustrating.

I've just started learning about business stuff. I've gone to three Seattle Lean Startup events. I've learned a lot. Two key things I've learned that are helping me are make a working engine before raising money so that money is just gas and focus on making something that people pay for.

Being involved in SMC I'm very glad that VC hasn't been taken. I'm not convinced that VC would make things much better.

<comment><USER9> What differentiates Vue from all the other client rendering libraries out there? (Angular, Polymer, React, Ember, Knockout, etc).

At first glance it looks kinda like Knockout.

<comment><USER10> It seems like a full framework, easy to start with, yet doesn't feel bloated or confusing (personal opinon).

Here's an obviously biased (obvious biased since it's from the creator of vue himself), yet pretty good comparison: [https://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html](https://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html)

<comment><USER9> Oh no. This: [https://vuejs.org/guide/reactivity.html#Change-Detection- Cav...](https://vuejs.org/guide/reactivity.html#Change-Detection-Caveats)

        Vue.set(vm.someObject, 'b', 2)

This is exactly the kind of gotchas that drove me away from the likes of Angular, Knockout, and Polymer to the simplicity of "Just re-render everything" that is React.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I often use React or a more react-like library because of this reason.

That said, I feel Vue does offer some things that, say, Angular/Knockout/Ractive don't to offset this, so I could see myself using it in some cases where I would otherwise go for React.

I rather like the documentation, for one, as well as the tooling that offers single-file components (js/css/markup) and plays well with the editors I use (Sublime, Atom).

I've also found that it's often easier for others to learn the angular-like markup compared to learning React.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems new users and people who saw the ease of querying, distribution, good docs, solid architecture jumped on board. Lots of HN articles were written. The technology is really solid. Come to think of it, don't recall seeing a single negative RocksDB article on HN, ever.

However databases are hard and they are a bit like operating systems. They are so important that people expect them to have a long track record of stability, and that they should also be be completely open, or have someone like Oracle behind it.

If it is open and completely free it doesn't make money.

And large support contracts are lucrative with enterprise customers, but they will not buy into a relatively new database product and entrust its crown jewels to it.

Another, probably the most important, element is timing. MongoDB was there first and it made a huge difference. They shipped with really terrible defaults, lost and corrupted people's data. And they are still around. Had RocksDB come at that time, it would have been a different database market today no doubt...

It is really painful to see this because technology is there, people working on it are really smart, it is just this market is fickle.

<comment><USER13> Interesting that you make the comparison to operating systems, since Linux is open and completely free and doesn't have a big company behind it. (Granted, I think the big difference is that Linux doesn't have as many competitors as exist for DBs today.)

<comment><USER14> > Linux is open and completely free and doesn't have a big company behind it

Only small companies like IBM and Google who have put hundreds of millions of dollars into it.

<comment><USER12> The important part is it doesn't have "a" big company behind it. Contrast with Android. It is free and open and Amazon and others have forked it and used it. But the situation is not the same.

If Google tomorrow drops out and doesn't want to contribute to Linux kernel, no big deal. IBM and Redhat will. If those don't want, others will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm watching this very closely since I am a founder of another OSS-based company doing something very hard and trying to monetize via things like services, support, etc.

(Ironically we just ported the new version of our SaaS code base to RethinkDB! We plan to stick with it. It's too nice, and I'm optimistic it'll find an OSS home.)

I'm anxiously awaiting the postmortem, but my _sense_ (albeit from a distance not knowing anyone involved) is that their failure resulted from an underlying assumption that they'd always be able to raise more money as easily and quickly as they had in the past.

As a result they deferred marketing and monetization strategy too long and ran a burn rate that was too high. When the money didn't come they couldn't sustain what IMHO could have otherwise been a fantastic business. If they'd had a little more time to build out Horizon and some of their other efforts, I think they would have made it.

It makes me feel a little bit vindicated for taking the contrarian (to some) position of hugging "default alive" instead of hiring for what feels like the sake of hiring. A good fraction of the Silicon Valley people I talk to (founders, VCs, etc.) have consistently encouraged us to spend more and increase head count, etc., sometimes on the argument that this would make us look better to investors.

Personally I'm concerned more with looking better to customers and surviving. The whole thing just seems bizarre and irrational to me even when I try to put myself in a VC's shoes. If I saw two companies with roughly equivalent stacks and growth and one was burning cash at half the rate of the other, would it make sense for me to choose to invest in the more expensive of the two?

Of course not being in Silicon Valley also helps us keep our burn really low... and I've had people say there's no way we can possibly succeed without being there. So hey, we're either smart or doomed. We'll see.

<comment><USER16> I'm a long ways from being a VC, but I see one reason they might prefer the larger, higher-burn-rate company. I think one of the hard jobs for a VC-funded startup is growing really fast (to become big enough to be worth-while when the VCs cash out). The company with more head count may have a head-start on that growth (assuming they actually hired the right people). So if you're a VC looking to place a bet on a company becoming huge enough to offset all your other failed bets, a company that's being very cautious about growth might not be what you're looking for.

<comment><USER15> Cautious about hiring and spending, not growth. That is pretty decent, though we are working on ways to increase.

Hugging default alive means that when our growth goes up in a sustained reliable way, we can hire.

To seen a model try: [http://growth.tlb.org](http://growth.tlb.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >They were also worried about how small the total market cap

>I do not think it is impossible to build an open source business (I think Wordpress is an example), and I do not need to raise VC.

Is the right market here not _everything_ like A16Z told you? The market for wordpress is crazy large with several blog platforms seeing 100+ million dollar exits and it seems no one who gets in this space fails--clearly the market is large.

I also look at other open source projects that have "made it" and they just seem to be tackling bigger markets than you are. Is there a chance the market of what you're doing just seems big to you because of personal interest in the product? (Not trying to be inflammatory with that comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see the market I am targeting as huge, and I agree with you that it is probably easier for Wordpress to succeed than SageMathCloud. I'm perhaps too realistic about the potential market for SageMathCloud, which was a reason why A16Z wasn't interested. If I took VC funding I might not have the option to focus on a smaller market.

<comment><USER18> Just curious, what kind of resources you have and efforts you make in the area of marketing, business development, and sales of SageMath and SMC? Have you taken any external funding for SageMath and SMC beyond grants?

The market may not be large enough and opportunity may not be as fast growing that VCs expect, still it may be possible to build a decent size business with SageMath.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding SMC, right now we are growing our sales slowly but very consistently. Some universities tried SMC last year, liked it, and are significantly expanding their subscriptions this year. However, our top focus right now is on fixing every bug, implementing key features that users demand, and dealing with issues that become clear from support requests, while working hard behind the scenes to build better technical foundations for growth. We have enough users (e.g., often 500 simultaneous _active_ users, and we hit about 1150 simultaneous running projects this week) to give us a good sense that what we are building provides value and is working (or not). Our business model is freemium, and the conversion rate for students using SMC in courses is high.

> Have you taken any external funding for SageMath and SMC beyond grants?

For SageMath, all funding is via grants, and I have almost no such grants these days (I used to get grants in the early days). There's a grant in Europe called OpenDreamKit that provides substantial funding right now. There's also one new NSF grant that will provide some funding for free open source textbooks built with lots of example using Sage.

For SageMathCloud, I did a round of Angel investment about a year ago in order to "bootstrap" things, and hopefully give us the time we need to build the business to be profitable. The Angel investors are a small group of people I know from the mathematics world. Right now the company is not profitable, even with a small number of low-paid developers, so it's critical to have this money to make up for the slack until we have more customers.

We can and should do a lot more marketing when the time is right. I hope that time is very soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >I think Basecamp itself is mostly closed source, so they may have an advantage in building a business.

I think it's the exact opposite. Basecamp is mostly open source. Ruby on Rails is basically extracted from the Basecamp application. They've open sourced even their Trix Editor ([https://github.com/basecamp/trix](https://github.com/basecamp/trix)).

Edit: capitalization

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very cool that Basecamp is mostly open source. I really appreciate their leadership and the example they set.

<comment><USER20> The difference is that the stuff they've opened source is not stuff they're directly in the business of selling; this is quite different than trying to sell support or enterprise versions of an open source product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone do an ELI5 explaining the significance of RethinkDB shutting down? I've seen numerous posts about it in the past week, but don't know anything about it more than RethinkDB pushes data in realtime and is scalable.

<comment><USER22> I think several aspects of it have disturbed the HN community and elsewhere--

(1) The founders are extremely nice and thoughtful people, as well as everyone I've ever met from there (seriously, top notch). Seeing someone like Uber with their poor ethical reputation succeed and a company like Rethink close down is disheartening.

(2) It's more ammo for the "open source can never make money" crowd which I think is frustrating for HNers like myself who enjoy the idea of running or working for such a business.

(3) Rethink did things the right way engineering and UX wise and had a great reputation for this compared to, say, MongoDB. So as another commenter noted, "worse is better" is still holding true in 2016.

<comment><USER23> Excellent post, that sums it up my concerns quite nicely.

To expand on 3, and what others have said, RethinkDB is solid technology, and is a joy to maintain, and even scale, compared with MongoDB. To those of us that have used it and depend on it, losing it would feel like a step backwards. It really does feel like the good guys have lost, in that respect.

The story isn't over yet, and hopefully it lives on as a popular and well- maintained open source project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think Rethinkdb although having quite a lot of ambition and delivering on a lot of that ambition just wasn't compelling enough compared to the strides made by competitors.

One example I keep referring back to is postgres. Postgres is soon going to be getting distributed capabilities, and I think it corresponds to the need in having highly available systems.

Now, this was what was missing from postgres all along as postgres already has LISTEN/NOTIFY, so if you slap on a system that can properly replicate and shard it, then what you have is a product that is open source, free and has years of strong engineering to back it up.

Its hard to compete with that.

<comment><USER25> RethinkDBs changefeeds were a lot more powerful than LISTEN/NOTIFY.

Some of it is just nicer abstractions (like limit/offset changefeeds, where you get notified if say a high score list changes). But there are a bunch of subtleties in that space that RethinkDB had to solve. Like enabling you to fetch the existing results and receive the new ones without gaps or duplicates. RethinkDB 2.0 didn't have that, but 2.1 added it. They had to iterate many times to improve the changefeed semantics, and to get LISTEN/NOTIFY to the same place you'd have to solve a lot of those same problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is true that there were a huge number of subtle issues with exactly what you're describing above (involving changefeed semantics). Many of the RethinkDB bugs I reported (all of which the team fixed!) were related to these edge cases, which I hit when pushing things hard in production. RethinkDB is amazing in a way that is not interesting to an academic researcher, but matters very much for production use. I really, really hope a couple of key people realize this so that RethinkDB can have a second life as an open source project without a company home.

<comment><USER25> Under a successful support driven model, engineering costs associated with fixing bugs and quirks in the product are amortized across all clients. Fixing a bug for one user fixes it for another, as well as future users. However, if the paid user base is not sufficient to cover support costs, VC money is effectively subsidizing support.

In the spirit of analyzing your business model, how much of your success has come about because you had access to a subsidized team fixing bugs for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm going to defend the issue raised by the (deleted) slide:

> Why do you fund ... companies ... which have no clear (to me) business > model?

It's a great question and I used to wonder it myself.

Consider it in the engineering domain: companies get investment to do development. Some may have only an idea, some may have a prototype, some may have a product and need money for growth (these get the highest valuation as they have the lowest risk, but also tend to have the lowest returns). I don't think any of that should surprise anyone.

Well; companies appear in the same distribution of states in the business domain. Some, like Google, have _no_ business model in mind and almost fail because of it. Some have a business model which does't look well baked but the entrepreneurs seem to understand it, so can probably develop it into something worthwhile.

And of course there are there ones where the investors want to know more about the sector. Open Source <insert XXX here> was like that back in the late 90s.

</comment><comment><USER27> Open Source is really just a check mark in a list of things required for developer tools these days. It doesn't sell a product by itself. What people pay for these days in primarily service and not the software. If you want to sell software, the only place left is the enterprise. Enterprise sales is really about networking and connecting and not whether a product is technically good.

This is also why I am worried about things like CoreOS. Not sure who uses it. I hope their enterprise sales keep them ticking, otherwise they are screwed since they have taken so much funding.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also very much wonder what CoreOS's business model is.

<comment><USER27> Same goes for docker. Many monetization options for docker (like the registry) have been duplicated by Google and AWS in their cloud centers. The good news is docker is in bed with Microsoft now which has very deep pockets.

<comment><USER14> Docker has been baking in more and more of the infrastructure (see all the musings about a potential fork)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder what will happen to products like SageMathCloud using RethinkDB now that the company is gone away.

Will support contracts end? Will people run into new problems and be stuck without help when this happens? Just curious to see what happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> The answer to "Will support contracts end?" is "Yes". The email they sent me says "Unfortunately the shutdown of the company is abrupt. We won't be able to service your contract but we'll try to provide a list of contractors who might be able to help support you. We're also working hard to find a continuity plan, and to rally the community around the open-source project. We don't know for sure how active RethinkDB development will be going forward, so you should make appropriate preparations."

> I wonder what will happen to products like SageMathCloud using RethinkDB now > that the company is gone away.

Unlike my first year of using RethinkDB, during the last six months, my RethinkDB cluster has been __rock solid __stable and I have NOT hit a single noticeable issue. It seems like the last "the devil is in the details" bugs got ironed out a few months ago. So fortunately there is no pressing need to make a decision. My plan is to do what I can to support the open source project, and if it takes up, stick with RethinkDB longterm. If the open source project does not take off within a year, I will probably spend __about 2-3 months fulltime __(my estimate) to rewrite SMC to use Postgresql and RabbitMQ. Anyway, that 's my plan. After this experience, I personally can't imagine rebuilding everything on top of a database that is substantially less proven than Postgresql.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> RethinkDB was a case of putting product before sales and marketing, which is how you build a nice project but not a business.

I love engineering as much as anyone else but learning how to actually go to market and create customers is the most important thing if you want to build a company.

</comment><comment><USER30> Other successful companies have used this business model.

Mobile is the most common use case for a real-time DB. They didn't provide good iOS and Android integration. Technically Rethink is superior to Firebase, but Firebase is more successful.

<comment><USER24> I believe the thinking was that rethinkdb would always sit behind an API, and if you think about it, its not a bad assumption.

<comment><USER30> The plumbing around a real time DB is non trivial especially if you are primary a mobile developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why didn't rethinkdb offer a paid scaleable hosted solution similar to Amazon RDS? Seems like a straightforward business model.

<comment><USER32> That's what I'm wondering as well. Having done amazing work to make replication and sharing work the right way, it would've been a straightforward way to make it run reliably (managed) on AWS and such to productize it and make some money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> William, you never mentioned why you decided against starting to close some of the source.

Are you are trying to strike some sort of balance between capitalism and altruism?

</comment><comment><USER34> The business model that the SageMath guy failed to consider was the "Money at the End of the Rainbow" model used by Spring, JBoss and MySQL.

His comment about licensing was also interesting:

"At a bare minimum, I think they must switch to a very liberal license (Apache instead of AGPL)"

<comment><USER35> Could you elaborate on what "Money at the End of the Rainbow" business model is? Thanks!

<comment><USER36> Acquisition

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> SageMath is an open-source alternative to Mathematica.

If it goes closed source, what's the point?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main commercial (but 100% open source) product I'm talking about in the post is SageMathCloud. To clarify, unlike SageMath, SageMathCloud is a web- based realtime collaborative environment for editing LaTeX files, writing code, using Terminals, and distributing and grading homework, which tightly integrates SageMath and Jupyter notebooks.

Regarding "If SageMath goes closed source, what's the point?" there's absolutely no possible way SageMath itself could go closed source, since the copyright is spread across over 500 contributors, _and_ SageMath depends on many other GPL licensed libraries. In my opinion, SageMath also has much greater depth and breadth of functionality than Mathematica for many areas related to pure mathematics research, especially coding theory, number theory, algebraic combinatorics, graph theory and group theory. To a mathematics researcher such as me, the functionality of Mathematica for elliptic curves and modular forms (my area) is very basic compared to what is in SageMath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Sad to see RethinkDB going this way, I think I'm one of its biggest users (see previous comments). Don't really want to switch away from it either

</comment><comment><USER39> Phusion co-founder here (creators of the Passenger app server); just wanted to chime in and say that this article resonated a lot with our experiences with VCs and our ventures in open source. Even down to the "lifestyle business" remark. Like OP, I'd encourage first-time founders to talk to VCs when starting out just to get an idea of how they perceive your business. Yes, even if you don't plan on raising. You may walk away learning a thing or two :-)

As for RethinkDB; we loved it, and even wrote an article about it a few weeks ago, outlining how it could be awesomely used with Rails 5 [1]. Having tried to bootstrap a company solely around an open source product ourselves as well[2], we can't help but share their pain here a bit. For instance, and I'm just going on what OP has shared about RethinkDBs business model, we tried to build our business solely on support contracts initially too. That didn't work out great for us.

And it kind of makes sense if you think about it: the support contract is available in case your software is failing during critical operations, yet your main efforts in product improvements are to minimize those chances. So you may have two conflicting interests, and I think you will find yourself having a hard time satisfying both. Through product improvements, you're basically minimizing the probability that such a support contract is needed. That might make it more enticing to only get the contract whenever you _actually really need it_ , and that moment might never come. Especially if you consider how many hoops customers have to jump through to procure something within the enterprise. I can imagine something similar happening for RethinkDB.

This was an important realization for us though: rather than charge for the probability of problems, consider charging for the product's merits instead. As much as it pained us to introduce a closed source premium version of Passenger a few years ago to do this, I can confidently say that it was the best choice we could have made for our open source users as well; it allowed us to have a sustainable income and allowed us to rapidly improve Passenger's open source core alongside the closed source version as well. So even though I commend OPs determination into keeping things strictly open source, I'd encourage him to look into a hybrid option as well. We wouldn't be around here today as a company if we didn't.

Lastly, seeing as OP is a fellow bootstrapper and a fan of Basecamp as well, I think Jason Fried put it best when it comes to VC monies: "if you start out by raising money, you get good at spending money, but if you start without money, you get really good at making money", or something like that :-)

[1] [https://blog.phusion.nl/2016/08/04/using- rails-5-actioncable...](https://blog.phusion.nl/2016/08/04/using- rails-5-actioncable-and-rethinkdb-to-build-a-reactive-websocket-app/)

[2] [https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/10/30/bootstrapping-a- business-...](https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/10/30/bootstrapping-a-business- around-open-source/)

</comment><comment><USER40> There seems to be some common blinders here about open source models, venture capital as a tool, and startup risks:

* 100% open source models: Why 100% open source everything? What's the real goal, and what's a slogan? Even Mozilla hides a lot. Open _what you can_ and _what is really important to you_ , and if you really want it to be everything, you can do that on a defensible delay. (We're starting with our non-differentiating framework layers, and now that we're starting on our next layer of differentiating tech, are considering how to open the previously differentiating stuff.) If the choice is slow open growth vs massive partially-open growth, the total amount of open source is actually SMALLER in the 100% open approach. Likewise, if the choice is death over partial open source, not dying means you can do more open work.

* Use of venture capital: The risk of going on the treadmill of always needing the next round is real -- we went slooow on spending ours to avoid that. It's not inherently a bad idea though: companies have successfully bought their way into success. Pay enough great execs for enough time, and cheapen the cost of product enough to avoid competition, and something real will pop out. HOWEVER, a conservative way to think about it is (A) there is a step function to getting to a real worthwhile & sustainable product, which requires capital (sweat, time, VC, whatever.) And (B) _after_ you get there, and revenue growth gets predictable, it's worth increasing spending more this year to have bigger revenue next year. If you bet wrong, you simply slow hiring and wait for natural revenue growth to catch up (it's math!). This is hard, and if you fail at (A), that means layoffs while you try again. It's not necessarily death -- RethinkDB called it quits instead of going to a skeleton team.

* Risk: For the same reason as above, I actually view not reaching the point of a sustainable product as risky in the short-term, and not reaching a maintainable competitive position risky in the long term (esp. in tech, where the world changes every 2-3 years!) It's worth considering why, if you fail getting to point (A) above _with_ VC, how you'd have succeeded _without_ VC. (Taking VC != going all out on a single marketing & sales blitz)

With that view, what Github and Jupyter are doing is (arguably!) leading to better and more sustainable software than Sage's approach, and leading to more open source code than Sage.

(And more a throwaway: A VC is a buyer of a chunk of your company and needs to turn it into a different sized chunk based on the size of their fund. If they're a big VC, they will only buy it if they see it turning into a $1B+ return. Your job as a company builder is to know what revenue you can get & when; it's weird to approach it as some sort of laissez faire random walk. Likewise, as a salesman to a VC, your job is to show you're selling what they need to buy. Not being aware of what the customer wants is a bad start. Doing my best to understand this stuff is part of my obligations to my team.)</comment>


The Free to Play Bible - <AUTHOR> https://mobilefreetoplay.com/bible/ <comment><USER2> I honestly though this was going to be about a P2W bible app somebody found with in app purchases to get the different books or something ridiculous...kinda glad that's not what this is about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, well I hope it's a more thrilling read than the good book...

<comment><USER2> Haha it was definitely better than what I was expecting.</comment></comment></comment>


5G Phone Won't Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-health-russia.html <comment><USER2> Its very sad when what used to be the most prestigious paper in the world is pushing corporate propaganda with the new Red Scare. Citing deranged conspiracy theorist Molly McKew as some sort of an authority on anything brings just more disrepute to The Times.

<comment><USER3> Dude...the second paragraph of the article is a link to RT's YouTube channel where RT posted a video making the bogus claims that the Times is reporting. There are other links within the article to other RT reports making more such bogus claims.

I don't see how you can claim it is corporate propaganda to claim that Russia is doing something and back that claim with cites _directly_ to sources funded by the Russian government making the claims that the article claims they claim.

I've also done some Googling and can find no backing for your claim that Molly McKew is a deranged conspiracy theorist. Furthermore, she is only one of numerous people cited. You make it sound like the brief mention of her in the article is somehow crucial to the entire article.

<comment><USER2> Who says those claims are bogus? Why would you take the Times claims at face value, but not RTs? Intelligent people don't take any claims at face value.

Mollow McKew is a career neocon and registered foreign lobbyist for the former Soviet country of Georgia.

The NYT also cited in this article employees of New Knowledge. New Knowledge is the company that create fake bots to influence the Albamma election. The scheme involved New Knowledge creating bots that appeared to be Russian and then spreading fake stories in US corporate media that the Russians were attempting to influence the Alabama election.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy- jon...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones- russia.html)

These are the sources that the NYT uses to "debunk" claims about 5G? A conspiracy theorist who is a registered foreign lobbyist and a fraud who tried to influence an election using fake Red Scare tactics?

What's even worse, at the bottom of this bit of corporate propaganda using the Red Scare to squash questions about 5G, the NYT admits:

"In January, The Times announced a joint venture with Verizon to build a 5G journalism lab."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel like I've seen some negative safety coverage about 5g, and now I'm wondering if it was influenced by this campaign. Are there any legitimate safety concerns, or is pretty much all of it bunk, as this article indicates?

<comment><USER4> This is the issue. There will be billions spent on 5G but no one wants to invest in doing an extensive reliable study that would perhaps cost 0.1% of total cost. Lobbyist have already convinced government that there are no health threats due to 5G. I would ask how you can make that kind of assertions when 5G isn't even deployed or no reliable citable studies have been done. Now Russia factor will make things even more worse because US will vehemently assert that there are no threats only because Russia is saying other way. There is a low probability of health issues but if there is one the cost would be huge and effect large part of generation. It's like selling radioactive toothpastes in late 1900s. No one thought there was a health threat in putting radium in something you brush your teeth with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Russia is one of china's biggest allies. Why would russia push an agenda that 5G, one of china's biggest products via huawei, is harmful to anyone. See how that NY times news story makes no sense.</comment>


Finally, a cruise line sets reasonable Wi-Fi fees - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/10/09/cruise-line-wifi-costs/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that "social channel" with Facebook, Instagram, etc. will be $5 and the basic web browsing connection will be $16 per day.

I wonder if Facebook is subsidizing the social channel option, or if Carnival just assumes the social channels are free advertising as people post about their cruise in real-time.</comment>


Meer Meer: Cross browser testing all through your one browser - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/meer-meer <comment><USER2> A fancy overlay add-on to browsershots.org</comment>


AWS App Mesh – Service Mesh for Microservices on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-aws-app-mesh-service-mesh-for-microservices-on-aws/ <comment><USER2> I am looking forwards to digging in to this a bit more and figuring out how this compares to Istio. I am guessing integration with AWS services such as X-ray and Cloudwatch/logs are the selling point. Still, I am a bit weary about configuring things that run inside your Kubernetes cluster through amazon apis, and not k8s resources. However, you could easily create a custom resource for this. Maybe that is to come? EKS is still young and they are yet to figure a lot of things out, from what i've seen, the roadmap is promising though. I have been working with it a lot, kops still wins for small/medium workloads in production, but I doubt for much longer.

<comment><USER3> IS it Istio? Someone on Twitter mentioned it uses the same ports and MIGHT just be Istio...

<comment><USER4> The ports that are common are the envoy ports. In the roadmap it's mentioned that support for istio mixer is planned implying that mixer isn't supported now which, if it was istio, it would be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if this integrates with AWS Certificate Manager to provision HTTPS certificates so that traffic can be end-to-end encrypted. That's one of the reasons I've stuck to Application Load Balancers in front of services instead of using ECS/Route53 service discovery.

<comment> shubha-aws Not yet. On the roadmap. Leave us your inputs [https://github.com/awslabs/aws- app-mesh-examples/issues/33](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-app-mesh- examples/issues/33)

<comment><USER6> Does App Mesh mirror how amazon internally communicates between the services they build at all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would this be suitable for an actor-based system (where we want to think of each actor as a routeable microservice)?

<comment><USER8> Assuming your actors use queues, as they traditionally would, I don't think so. You don't really need service mesh if your communication is a queue, right?

<comment><USER7> I was wondering more about orchestration of the actors... something needs to be responsible for spawning them onto machines and something needs to be responsible for tracking where they are or where their queues are. I love MSFT Orleans but I'd love even more something that fit easier into a conventional node.js and docker kind of world (C# is great but when I look at adoption curves Typescript seems to be growing fast while C# seems to be at best holding steady)

<comment><USER9> Aws step functions? That's their solution for tracking long running state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good timing since Envoy just became a graduated project at CNCF.io

[https://blog.envoyproxy.io/envoy- graduates-a6f71879852e](https://blog.envoyproxy.io/envoy- graduates-a6f71879852e)

</comment><comment><USER11> like Istio?

<comment><USER12> Perhaps you can help me out. I'm wondering where Istio (and other meshes) fit into the picture when deploying to k8s. The Itsio docs mention it is deployed as a side car, but is that within each pod? And are Service objects still required?

Here is my mental model of a traditional deployment (EKS):

Service[Type: LoadBalancer] -> Deployment[Pod]

How does Itsio fit into this scenario, or what does it replace?

<comment><USER13> Generally traffic is defined as north/south (into and out of the datacenter) or east/west (between servers in the datacenter).

Istio is for east/west traffic within your K8S cluster, designed to connect your services together by moving all the network traffic through the Envoy proxy. It is usually done by wrapping your deployments with an extra sidecar pod (automatically using K8S APIs) that intercepts all the networking to other services and pods. You would still use a load balancer or ingress to route external traffic into the cluster, although there are options like Heptio Contour that also use Envoy for this.

This provides a single data and control plane to centralize all network reliability, security, service discovery, and monitoring.

<comment><USER14> GP asked about Service objects though. k8s natively provides name resolution, traffic routing and load balancing to your defined service objects. So what does Envoy do for me that k8s does not do itself?

<comment><USER13> More protocol support, retries, rate-limits, circuit-breakers, traffic mirroring, better load-balancing, faster proxy performance, complex routing, fine-grained security policies with pluggable authentication, and in-depth monitoring with integrated tracing.

Smaller clusters or services don't need it. The docs overview page is worth a read: [https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is- istio/](https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is-istio/)

<comment><USER12> Thanks! I was wondering if mesh effectively replaces services and why, and you've answered that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The service mesh landscape will be updated soon - [https://layer5.io/landscape](https://layer5.io/landscape)

</comment><comment><USER16> Just wonder how this could connect with Fargate and possibly support scale- down to zero with power of firecracker?

<comment> shubha-aws You can use app mesh with fargate services, support coming by GA

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds similar to Consul, which has a similar architecture.

</comment><comment><USER18> AWS is totally killing it this week. This is like the 10th major release I've seen since monday.

<comment><USER19> Well, it's Re:Invent this week (AWS' major annual conference), so this is fairly typical. Expect another handful or so of announcements tomorrow during Werner Vogel's keynote as well.

<comment><USER18> Doh. duh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> More cool stuff you probably don't need whatsoever.</comment>


Wapp – a single-file web framework by the creator of SQLite - <AUTHOR> https://wapp.tcl.tk <comment><USER2> One of the things I like about Mojolicious (a pretty full-featured async web framework in Perl in an incredibly small amount of code) is that it has a Lite variant, which allows building your whole app (routes, app functions, helper functions, models, data, etc.) in a single file. Once you've gotten it off the ground and the one small file starts to become one big file and it starts feeling hairy, you switch to the full version, and break out all the pieces into the usual directory layout (which can be done mostly automatically).

With regard to Wapp and some of the comments here disparaging Tcl...I've often said Tcl gets much more hate than it deserves. For a lot of tasks, it's fine. I wouldn't pick it for anything, but I understand why some folks still do. And, I did build my current companies first website with Tcl (OpenACS+AOLServer) more than a decade ago. It was more enjoyable to work with than all of the PHP CMS-based sites I've built for the company since then. I wouldn't rule it out, if there were some project I wanted to use that happened to be written in Tcl.

<comment><USER3> Mojolicious is fantastic! A plus is that its complete and has zero dependencies on other modules. So its very quick to install.

It is good to see mojolicious be mentioned here at HN.

Mojolicious::Lite docs [http://mojolicious.org/perldoc/Mojolicious/Lite#SYNOPSIS](http://mojolicious.org/perldoc/Mojolicious/Lite#SYNOPSIS)

<comment><USER4> Mojolicious is beyond fantastic! I have a hard time touching anything else, as every step of the way I think "damn this could have been so much easier with mojo..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that Hipp before working on SQLite was a member of the TCL core board and wrote something similar in the early 2001: A database-driven web server in a self-contained executable named TWS where dynamic content is served from TCL.

[http://www.hwaci.com/sw/tws/index.html](http://www.hwaci.com/sw/tws/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I love Tcl. The community is great. I watch the TCT (Tcl Core Team) and they are very meticulous about what changes are being made in the language. Tcl has added some things in the last few years as well. It has an object oriented framework built in (TclOO) now, which most people don't know about. I think I love it because it IS so different.

<comment><USER7> I really enjoyed working with it when I was writing Expect scripts (a long, long time ago) and found myself writing some Tcl scripts alongside the Expect- specific bits. What sorts of things are you using it for?

<comment><USER6> I use it for sysadmin scripts and quick Tk gui utility stuff.

I have some ideas that I want to express in Tcl as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the idea but I'm not quite ready to learn a new language at the moment. Can anyone recommend something similar in Python? The single-file part is less important to me than the simple API. I'm a simple guy and my app will be simple as well :-)

<comment><USER9> I'd say Flask will literally let you do that. Though CherryPy will as well if you really want to. I usually don't do CherryPy that way unless I'm building something small and contained enough. If you need templating I used Mako with CherryPy as well. Just look at the "Hello World" for CherryPy you only need that one file to run a web server, supports also running under WSGI and hosting other applications that need WSGI hosting.

CherryPy:

[http://cherrypy.org/](http://cherrypy.org/)

Mako:

[http://www.makotemplates.org/](http://www.makotemplates.org/)

<comment><USER10> I've used cherrypy + mako in a few projects ([https://github.com/kakwa/dnscherry](https://github.com/kakwa/dnscherry) and [https://github.com/kakwa/ldapcherry](https://github.com/kakwa/ldapcherry)).

It's quite easy to pick-up and does the job very well. It supports running directly over http, but you can also run it in wsgi or fastcgi modes without issues.

And it's also quite stable in term of APIs, my projects are now 4 years old, and I didn't have any breaking changes in their API. It makes it quite easy to support various distributions and version without kludges in the code to handle different versions or having to bundle cherrypy with the application. Even my monkey patches of the framework (slight change in the configuration parser) are not breaking ^^.

<comment><USER9> My project is 1 year and 6 months old or so and yeah I've had a similar experience. CherryPy is a great framework, and Mako not sure why I chose it was also an equally great choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate to be the young whippersnapper parrotting buzzwords, but CGI is theoretically supposed to lend itself really easily to deployment onto serverless runtimes, right?

<comment><USER12> CGI is one of those "simplest thing that could possibly work" tools: for every request to a specific url path, the webserver runs an executable. Headers passed in the environment, stdin and stdout plumbed to the network socket.

Back before serverless, we called it shared hosting.

Of course, fork() is not especially fast, so people came up with Fastcgi: persist the process and let it handle multiple requests. Then people started writing java where the startup time was prohibitive, and "application servers" like Tomcat came into being.

<comment><USER13> > Of course, fork() is not especially fast

fork itself is pretty fast, relatively speaking (unless you have a large virtual address space and 4K pages or similar). fork+execve+process-runtime- initialization is much slower.

On my X201 (anno 2010), with 10000 iterations, sequential fork+exit(0)-in- child+wait takes:

        $ /usr/bin/time ./forkfest
                2,49 real         0,38 user         2,19 sys

while sequential fork+execve("/usr/bin/true",...)-in-child+wait takes:

        $ /usr/bin/time ./forkfest2
               10,99 real         3,10 user         7,94 sys

EDIT: also, My X201 is clocked at 1199 MHz (50%) for power saving reasons

<comment><USER14> On paged systems fork() is usually reasonably fast, but for CGI you do fork()+exec() and while exec() is also reasonably fast, the stuff that the happens in child process between it's start and entry into main() (ie. dynamic linking, libc initialization) is somewhat on the slower side. (Not to mention interpreter startup for interpreted languages)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are two versions, one with SQLite built in. The choice of TCL is super interesting given its pedigree and could easily bring TCL back from its quiescent state.

<comment><USER16> I worked for the company that powered most of the world's (legitimate) online gambling companies.

We had a C application server and used TCL as a business logic language. It was a great fit for writing code fast and ease of maintenance.

You can hear me get a laugh when I say we use TCL in a talk I did here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUPmmUU3yY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUPmmUU3yY)

<comment><USER5> Curious to know if this C application server is an open project or home crafted closed code?

<comment><USER17> If the company in question is Openbet, it's closed source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The "everything is a string" mantra Will be back!?! The Millenial programmer will try to comment out a line of code while the TCL interpreter Will insists that is a validade code...

Come on guys, let some technologies dies peacefully, Ok? We don't want those days back :)

<comment><USER19> [http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html](http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html)

<comment><USER20> I skimmed it _very_ quickly, but quite a bit of that 'defense' of Tcl seems to be assuming that the problem with "everything is a string" is performance. It isn't.

There are very good reasons that stringly typed programming is frowned upon and 'performance' is very seldom one of them.

There's also seems to be a weird assumption that everthing-is-a-string means that you don't have to think about types. It's actually the exact opposite since now you don't have types for the compiler/runtime to help you to combine values in well-defined ways.

(I realize that the thing was written ages ago and we/the author may have learned a thing or two in the mean time.)

<comment><USER21> "What is Tcl"

[http://wiki.tcl.tk/299](http://wiki.tcl.tk/299)

<comment><USER20> If you take issue with my post, then please be specific rather than throwing a link to a big page at me.

Seriously, am I somehow supposed to divine your criticism of my post from that link?

<comment><USER21> I'm sorry you interpreted my attempt to provide you with additional information about why some people might see Tcl in a positive light as criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Our savior, save as from bloated package management, API inconsistencies and Server-side Javascript.

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm not a web developer but the times I tried to do some web development I found all the things cool kids talked about overly complicated and fell back to simple things like simple scripts on the server side and simple javascript on the client side or even semi dynamic/static webpages.

I always found interesting how the Tcl community solve things, using simple and powerful Tcl metaprogramming features (see beautiful examples on wiki.tcl.tk).

I've done a couple of small business solutions in Tcl/Tk as desktop applications. Now I feel more encouraged to try to develop new ones for the web :-)

</comment><comment><USER24> Aolserver's legacy lives on?

<comment><USER25> naviserver! It's also being actively developed.

[https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver/commits/all](https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver/commits/all)

<comment><USER8> As an ex-AOL employee that makes me grin :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's a bug on the site, if you click "files" then scroll down and click one of the links under "Further Information", you get a 404

<comment><USER27> Thanks for reporting this. It is an interesting problem, that I'm not sure how to solve (being yet early and I without coffee).

The README.md file is the homepage. It is intended to be displayed using the URL [https://wapp.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/trunk/README.md](https://wapp.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/trunk/README.md) and the hyperlinks are relative to that URL. When you click on the File menu, it shows the README.md file using a different URL - [http://wapp.tcl.tk/index.html/dir?ci=tip](http://wapp.tcl.tk/index.html/dir?ci=tip) \- and the hyperlinks don't work for that URL.

Perhaps the right solution is to rename the README.md file to something different so that it is not displayed by default from the Files menu...

<comment><USER28> Perhaps a ``<base>`` tag (set to directory of the included file, i.e. that of README.md) would suffice, since all other URLs on the page seem to be anchored to the site's root?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I get it that TCL is often the tool of choice with programmers that want to build a simple UI that gets things done. It's easy and cross-platform.

But I have yet to see a beautiful TCL application. Web apps today can't just work, they have to be user-friendly and familiar to a wide audience. Would love to be proven wrong, but TCL does not seem to fit the bill.

<comment><USER30> This is more or less a TCL version of Node's Express.

I'm not necessarily advocating for that... but what on earth does anyone's choice of server-side framework have to do with the "user-friendliness" or "familiarity" of the client-side UX?

You can serve up a bleeding edge Vue.js app from a PHP backend, or you could serve up a bowl of jQuery spaghetti from Rust or whatever new language comes out next week. These matters can sometimes be tangentially related, but are largely orthogonal.

<comment><USER29> I'm probably misreading this article. I've always known TCL as the quick-and- dirty user interface of choice. I guess that's not the focus here.

<comment><USER30> I honestly doubt you clicked the link at all before commenting, and likewise doubt that you've actually had any first-hand exposure to Tcl in the past.

You SEEM to be referencing the "Tk" portion of Tcl/Tk. Tk is the _desktop_ GUI framework that comes with most distributions of Tcl. But it has no apparent relevance to this or any other Tcl-based _web_ framework.

This is kinda like dismissing a Java server-side web framework because Swing is ugly, or dismissing C# on the web because you don't like WPF.

<comment><USER29> Okay, happy to admit when I'm not fully informed, and this is one of those times. I have interacted with TCL/TK and have made small programs with it, but I have not used TCL directly in the past. In fact, did not even realize TCL was a full language. When I read this article, given my background with TCL/TK, I understood it to be a web framework using a weird desktop GUI... which would be quite odd.

<comment><USER31> Yes, when I did something like that nearly 20 years ago it was quite odd! But turned out to be terribly useful for us at the time. (Google 'proxytk' if you're curious)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How I Made a Home Alarm Using Google Cloud and Twilio - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@irtefa1/how-i-made-a-home-alarm-using-google-cloud-twilio-c7cb78f6b929 <comment><USER2> Good read until I got to the spot about $1200 Google vision and nothing to solve this issue.

I was expecting a portion to be like, "But we can do better!" and then go into using serverless with opencv to reduce the cost.

<comment><USER3> This is still a good read as it sparks ideas for others. Yes it's expensive but the author went well above typical blog posts and shared the financial costs.

It's nothing more than a proof of concept and obviously it could be improved to drive the cost down but what exactly do you expect by someone who took their time to write this and share it with the rest of the community?

Everyone is a critic...</comment></comment>


GitHub supports now issue templates - <AUTHOR> Can't find an official announcement on this yet but check https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/new.<p>It prefills the issue with the content of the file "issue_template.md" (https://github.com/owncloud/core/blob/master/issue_template.md). Seems like we luckily chose the right file name two years ago. <comment><USER2> If you need some inspiration for these templates, check this awesome curated list: [https://github.com/devspace/awesome-github- templates](https://github.com/devspace/awesome-github-templates)

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been happening for quite a while with git-splanin

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice! Not seeing anything on the Github blog yet either.

### Steps to reproduce 1\. 2\. 3.

### Expected behaviour Tell us what should happen

### Actual behaviour Tell us what happens instead

### Server configuration __Operating system __:

 __Web server: __

 __Database: __

 __PHP version: __

 __ownCloud version: __(see ownCloud admin page)

 __Updated from an older ownCloud or fresh install: __

 __Signing status (ownCloud 9.0 and above): __

``` Login as admin user into your ownCloud and access[http://example.com/index.php/settings/integrity/failed](http://example.com/index.php/settings/integrity/failed) paste the results here. ```

 __List of activated apps: __

``` If you have access to your command line run e.g.: sudo -u www-data php occ app:list from within your ownCloud installation folder ```

 __The content of config /config.php: __

``` If you have access to your command line run e.g.: sudo -u www-data php occ config:list system from within your ownCloud installation folder

or

Insert your config.php content here (Without the database password, passwordsalt and secret) ```

 __Are you using external storage, if yes which one: __local /smb/sftp/...

 __Are you using encryption: __yes /no

 __Are you using an external user-backend, if yes which one: __LDAP /ActiveDirectory/Webdav/...

#### LDAP configuration (delete this part if not used)

``` With access to your command line run e.g.: sudo -u www-data php occ ldap:show-config from within your ownCloud installation folder

Without access to your command line download the data/owncloud.db to your local computer or access your SQL server remotely and run the select query: SELECT * FROM `oc_appconfig` WHERE `appid` = 'user_ldap';

Eventually replace sensitive data as the name/IP-address of your LDAP server or groups. ```

### Client configuration __Browser: __

 __Operating system: __

### Logs #### Web server error log ``` Insert your webserver log here ```

#### ownCloud log (data/owncloud.log) ``` Insert your ownCloud log here ```

#### Browser log ``` Insert your browser log here, this could for example include:

a) The javascript console log b) The network log c) ... ```</comment>


New Keepass release - <AUTHOR> https://keepass.info/news/n180109_2.38.html <comment><AUTHOR> Still no native Browser Integration(without plugins). Still no native favicon downloading (without plugins). But it uses ChaCha20, and Argon2 (compared to keepassxc). But keepass2Android can also utilise both these algorithms.

And would still love to see it in github instead of sourceforge. But this is just my preference</comment>