The C++14 Standard: What You Need to Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/the-c14-standard/240169034

<comment><USER2> Using 'auto' for return types seems just awful to me. In the context of a collaborative project, I don't want to have to dig through the implementation of someone else's function just to figure out what type it returns. Having an explicit return type is a form of self-documenting code.

<comment><USER3> Agreed - the popularity of implicit typing is surprising to me. It seems to make code much less readable and comprehensible. In a good IDE I suppose it doesn't really matter because type information could be provided automatically, but code isn't always read in a good IDE.

<comment><USER4> Which is much less readable:

map<unsigned int, map<int, vector<string>::iterator> >::iterator getSomeIterator();

or:

auto getSomeIterator();

Function name and context usually is sufficient to know what SomeIterator refers to, there is no need for horrible STL constructs to try to explain it.

<comment><USER5> The first is readable and I know what it is. Not as readable, but at least I know what it is!

I believe you don't need the space between the > > any more, since C++11?

<comment><USER6> Readability is about how quickly you can figure out what's going on. There are only a few bits of syntax you need to know what's going on in the first example, but it requires mentally matching together the angle brackets correctly, and it emphasises the type over the function name.

In most cases you can scan over the type ('map blah blah...iterator') but that's not reading and in any case will quickly fail you with nested template types, if you're unfortunate enough to have those.

<comment><USER7> Functions that return iterators are never called getSomeIterator(). Instead they're called stuff like erase(), insert(), or even nonsense words like crend().

And whether a function returns an iterator is not consistent _even within the STL_ :

        auto loc = container.find("name");

What type is loc? If container is a std::map, then loc is an iterator. If container is a std::string, then loc is a size_t.

If you had used the explicit iterator type, you would at least get an error message immediately with the above line, instead of hoping your code does something that size_t doesn't support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only person who finds the digit separator syntax ugly and a bit unnecessary?

I love the rest of the changes, but that just doesn't sit right with me.

<comment><USER9> It just makes it easier to read the _magnitude_ of a number and get that extra visual reassurance that it's correct. It's not easy to (quickly) tell the difference between 1 billion and 100 million unless you count zeros (1000000000 vs 100000000). On the other hand it's very easy to discern 1'000'000'000 vs 100'000'000.

The standard can't use commas as a separator because using commas vs periods to demarcate components is locale specific. Apostrophes look like a reasonable compromise because lots of calculators already use apostrophes to separate digits:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=14+digit+calculator&source=l...](https://www.google.com/search?q=14+digit+calculator&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER10> I would've gone with spaces. Those are the official standard here in Canada as a pragmatic compromise between anglos and francos that have opposing usage of comma/dot.

So instead of 1,234.56789 (English) or 1.234,56789 (French) we do 1 234.56789 (international)

[0-9]+ [0-9]+ has no meaning in C++, so using space for magnitude decorations would have worked.

<comment><USER11> Have you considered if this would fit with C++'s grammar?

<comment><USER10> Briefly, but I think there are like three people in the world that fully grok C++ grammar, and I'm definitely not one of them. I just know that C++ generally has some kind of infix operator or delimiter between pairs of immediate data or variables, I'm pretty sure it's currently just a compiler error in every case.

<comment><USER12> Except this is not C++ grammar, this is simple lexical analysis. And separating by spaces would work fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _For example, if a function has multiple return paths, they need to have the > same type._

> ...

> _[Code sample that returns -1 or record- >id]_

> _Instead of using an integral type to identify the person in the record > object, maybe I have a new GUID type. Making that change to the record > object will cause a series of cascading changes in things like the return > types of functions. But if my function uses automatic return type deduction, > the compiler will silently make the change for me._

Yet when this happens, his example function can now return -1 or a GUID, so compilation should fail, no? Haven't worked with C++ in awhile so I might just be missing something on this, but seems like a contradiction to me.

<comment><USER13> No, the return type can change as long as all return paths return the same value for the same function call. So you can't, in the same execution, return two different types, but two different executions can vary their return type as long as its consistent.

<comment><USER14> The point is that -1 is not a GUID, though, so in the sample function, if record::id changes to a GUID, the find_id function is now trying to return -1 (an integer) and ii->id (a GUID).

<comment><USER13> Right. Thanks for correcting me, I missed that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can also check JD Garcia's view here:

[http://blog.biicode.com/cpp14/](http://blog.biicode.com/cpp14/)

</comment><comment><USER16> "Relaxed requirements for constexpr" is an item that I wish would have gone into C++11. Once have you multiple code paths and need to loop over variables constexpr functions get really unreadable.

One thing the C++ standard library IMO needs is a range library, e.g. something like Boost Range. I often would like to use the "range-for" but when I am not looping over all the elements of a container its useless in that case.

<comment><USER17> Eric Neibler is working on bring a range library into the standard. His blog is a good source of info on his approach: [http://ericniebler.com/](http://ericniebler.com/)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the pointer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not a fan of having attribute tokens like [[deprecated]] written between brackets instead of using the keyword normally like a regular attribute. It smells awfully like C99's _Bool and _Complex, which were created to support legacy code but ended up being an ugly headache.

<comment><USER19> The idea is that eventually you can use them in meta-programming just like in other languages that support attributes.

<comment><USER20> Can we expect to be able to write our own attributes (to be ignored by tools that don't understand what they mean), or will we get compiler errors/warnings there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _With the addition of generic lambdas, I can define a single lambda with > generic parameters. Although the syntax doesn 't include the keyword > template, this is still clearly a further extension of C++ generic > programming_

So what are the nuances when comparing this approach to using a template to create a generic function? Aside from stylistic differences, would using one over the other affect compile time or runtime performance in any (meaningful) way?

</comment><comment><USER22> > At this point you can get a free copy of the draft proposal here. > Unfortunately, when the final standard is published, ISO will have it > paywalled.

Since when was a language spec put behind a paywall? I can't comprehend the reasoning behind this, given that open source compilers exist for C++. How much is it to view the spec? Why do they need to charge at all?

<comment><USER23> ISO has always charged for its standards, which made more sense when they were distributed on paper. It's especially goofy for C++ as the (latex) source code for the final version of the standard is on Github now, so the only thing that's paywalled is the "official" pdf version.

<comment><USER24> Here's the GitHub link: [https://github.com/cplusplus/draft](https://github.com/cplusplus/draft)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> the article does not mention rvalues and move semantics (i think it's one of the bigest features).

here is an explanation [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6815685/move- semantics-wh...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6815685/move-semantics- what-its-all-about)

it is supposed to save extra copies like here

string a("a"); string b("b");

string c = a + b; // creates temporary object that is copied into C by value - the temporary is just a 'full copy'; so that for the temporary it needs an extra allocation and strcpy and free.

the fix is to add the following to the string class

string(string &&r) { ... }

string &operator=(string &&r) { ... }

so the operator with the && receives and 'rvalue' reference - which is a special reference to just this temprorary and the implementation of this is supposed to swap the data of the temporary with that of the this object; the temporary is then discarded.

<comment><USER26> This isn't new in C++14 though.

<comment><USER25> lambda functions and the auto keyword aren't new either - in C++11 already.

<comment><USER27> Yes, but the use of auto to auto-deduce the return type is new in C++14, as well as the use of auto as a return type for lambdas to produce generic lambdas - generic functions without having to use template syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think 'auto' may become a brain-drain like const-ness already is. You try to use it in one place - and it ripples throughout your base classes and libraries. It may be useful in some narrow set of situations (templates? lambdas?) but beyond that it remains to be seen.

<comment><USER29> You should look at "Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style" talk from Herb Sutter at CppCon 2014[1]. You'd have a great insight on why 'auto' isn't just some kind of "convenience" keyword and why it matters.

[1] [https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2014/blob/master/Presentatio...](https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2014/blob/master/Presentations/Back%20to%20the%20Basics!%20Essentials%20of%20Modern%20C%2B%2B%20Style%20-%20Herb%20Sutter%20-%20CppCon%202014/Back%20to%20the%20Basics!%20Essentials%20of%20Modern%20C%2B%2B%20Style%20-%20Herb%20Sutter%20-%20CppCon%202014.pdf)

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the link! Now I know what to tell my students next time. C++ is the language of choice for recognition systems development anyway, and with C++14 it's actually starting to become beautiful.

<comment><USER19> C++11 and C++14 removed many of my complaints about the language (I use it on and off since 1993). Still waiting for modules though.

The biggest problem are the pre-C++98 codebases or the ones full with C idioms instead of modern C++.

Those aren't going away anytime soon.

<comment><USER29> > The biggest problem are the pre-C++98 codebases or the ones full with C > idioms instead of modern C++.

Thanks for pointing that out. THIS is the real problem of C++. Not the language spec (though it can and has to be improved with time), but those codebases, which incidentally make perfectly sane people go nuts about C++... :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So now I need an emacs package that can parse my c++ and can replace all instances of the auto keyword with their actual types. That way I can develop quickly using auto but I can keep the code maintainable by having full type signatures.

<comment><USER32> As mentioned in another comment, the use of 'auto' isn't just to shorten an unwieldy type name.

> The primary use-case of auto returns is for templated functions where the > return type depends on the thing passed in.

<comment><USER31> Normally I feel the c++ standards committee has great ideas, however this is not one of them. If you want templated lambdas then you should use templates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Template variables are really interesting. I had a similar idea years ago, as a bit of "wouldn't it be cool if..." speculation, but never expected to see it in C++.

</comment><comment><USER34> Seems like some of these (including auto) can also work with C.

Anyone know if compilers will support that?

<comment><USER35> GCC 4.9 added __auto_type as an extension in C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The best thing that has happened in the last years is not having to depend on C++ anymore

Good changes, but too little, too late.

Of course, we still depend on it, but for an ever smaller set of use cases. Do what you have to do and "get out of there" as fast as you can to your favourite language.

<comment><USER29> This is still a matter of opinion. My favorite language is still C++.

This is of course personal preference, but also mostly because I realized (and it seems to me that some people haven't, just go around and ask what is C/C++, and people will tell you it's one language...) that C++ is not just anymore "C with classes", and the fact there is C-ish, or even just bad C++ code out in the wild doesn't make the language bad in itself (it can still be less appropriate/completely irrelevant for some applications, which is fine).

<comment><USER36> True, with STL and the recent changes the "C with classes" thing gets more distant.

But sorry, I don't miss the includes, the huge class hierarchies, the template madness, etc

C++ is good if you stick to a strict code standard and don't let people "go crazy" with it.

But the thing is that good languages end up limiting the amount of "bad code" that naturally emerges. (Java does it through lack of flexibility and enforcement, I prefer the Python and Go way)</comment></comment></comment>


When to sell your business, rather than raise more venture $$ - <AUTHOR> http://www.foundread.com/view/when-to-sell-your <comment><USER2> It depends, if you think you're getting worth what you have done till date then go for it - but then you're loosing your baby - but then you would be able to concentrate on next idea ... it's kind of give and take situation ...</comment>


Tutorial FTP: It's Easy as 1-2-3 - <AUTHOR> http://essentialkeystrokes.com/tutorial-ftp-its-easy-as-1-2-3/

<comment><USER2> A tutorial on using an FTP client? On "Hacker News"? Something is very wrong here...</comment>


Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxadvocates.com/2013/03/fuduntu-back-to-fundamentals-gets-it.html

<comment><USER2> I never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base.

Or, put differently: Given the relatively high dimension of preference space (desktop environment, window manager, file manager, icon set, web browser, editor…), it appears strange to me to assume that more than just a few users will be satisfied with the _default_ DE, WM, file manager etc. installed by a distro. Just five different DEs, five different WMs and five different file browsers already give 125 possible choices. How, then, is it sensible to judge a distribution by its default programmes, especially since these can often be easily swapped out against others.

Surely, the main points in considering which distribution to choose should be the low-level ingredients (package manager, for example) and update policies rather than the default icon theme.

<comment><USER3> "I never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base."

Because if you have to do it more than once, or, say onto 100 desktops in a work environment, the time spent searching for a distro will pay off. Besides that, some people want stuff to work the first time - and every subsequent time - without having to worry "oh I need to install this on another computer, but I can't remember all the steps I took" in order to get to real actual work.

<comment><USER2> If you just want the same programs on your laptop and desktop, use something like dpkg --get-selections and dpkg --set-selections (for APT, I'm sure RPMland has an analogue). If you also want the same configuration, copy over your homedir or the dotfiles therein and be happy.

Futhermore, testing n distros is not really my definition of 'work the first time', nor can you expect that what worked a year ago still works two releases later.

Your point about 100 desktops in a work environment also strikes me as slightly odd, given that I would consider using Puppet, Chef or possibly NFS mounts (depending on the exact setup) rather than configuring/installing 100 desktops individually.

<comment><USER3> Point taken about Puppet/Chef.

As far as same programs, I would still have to load them the first time and know what to look for. So in addition to stuff I need for work (e.g. LAMP stack), I would have to Google around (more than once) for stuff that I know comes with other distros (example of slight annoyance: vim vs. vim-tiny: thanks, Ubuntu). It's just a little bit less work.

But the beauty of Linux is that we can make these choices willfully :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounded great until I read that Fuduntu does not come with Apt or Deb and uses Yum/Rpm instead...

"Apt is not installed with Fuduntu. Yum (Yellowdog Package Manager) is the replacement. For more help on yum, "man yum" from a terminal, or google "yum howto"."

"The "debi" package installer is not included. Instead, the "rpm" command can be used to install .rpm packages. For more help on rpm, "man rpm" from a terminal, or search the internet for "rpm install howto"."

<comment><USER5> Speaking as a former Debian fanboy, current avid Debian/Ubuntu user, Yum isn't too bad. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had rollbacks. And with 3rd party repos, you can get just as current, if not more current than Debian Sta(b)le, software.

<comment><USER6> I'm a fan of pacman, but find apt/dpkg acceptable (barely). My biggest two beefs with yum/rpm are that it does not track "explicitly installed" vs "installed as a dependency" (dpkg does, but it's fuzzy), and that when processing dependencies, it does a brute-force recursive crawl instead of building a tree.

<comment><USER7> Modern Yum does track explicit vs. dependency installs, though this is not very visible in the UI. There are ways to query the Yum database for it, though.

Yum also has an option (disabled by default) to remove unneeded auto-installed dependencies when removing packages (set clean_requirements_on_remove=yes in /etc/yum.conf)[1]. This option does not remove manually-installed packages (though the docs are not clear on this point, unfortunately).

1\. <http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/56056>

<comment><USER6> That's good news! My latest experience was with CentOS and Fedora installs at my last job, but most of the installs there were a bit older.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That didn't sound "fundamental" to me. The author likes the distro, and it sounds good to me too. But I missed how any of his favorite features were fundamental to the Linux desktop.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely my feeling too. The review fairly swiftly turns into a list of what programs are installed. Let's face it, all of these are available in the repos of pretty much all distros. The rest of the features seem to be visual tuning and customisation.

I haven't tried Fuduntu, but may be tempted at some point, and I can appreciate the amount of work that has gone into it, but this review doesn't really sell it for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Under-the-hood decisions aside, this distro seems to fairly closely match the philosophy of Elementary OS [1] (which, admittedly, seems to be "follow OSX"). One main difference is that, whereas Fuduntu uses rpm/yum, Elementary OS is an Ubuntu fork and uses its repositories (dpkg/apt).

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

<comment><USER11> Wow, that's by far the best looking Linux distro I've seen. Judging from the screenshots, Fuduntu, like most distros, is pretty fugly. ElementaryOS actually looks like it has someone making UX choices and creating a consistent design language. The system font isn't great and type could really use some font smoothing, but that's the case with all Linux distros I know of.

They're even working on a curated App Store: <http://elementaryos.org/journal/introducing-appcenter>

I think this is exactly what Linux needs to become a platform consumers like to use. Once it's out of beta, I'm definitely going to install ElementaryOS.

Screenshots: <http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready>

<comment><USER12> >Wow, that's by far the best looking Linux distro I've seen

Have you seen any Window Manager only (without Desktop Environment) desktops? They're very nice, even nicer than OS X or Windows. Examples:

<http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/03/28/3BtzL.png>

<http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/03/28/dV2Ac.png>

<comment><USER11> Yah, sorry, don't like it one bit. I don't understand how you could think that works better for consumers than OS X or Windows. I do think the desktop metaphor is on its way out, though (see iOS and Win8)

<comment><USER12> >better for consumers than OS X or Windows

I didn't mean to imply that. I just said it looks nicer, but I guess it doesn't appeal to some people. I like a desktop-style workflow more than a mobile one, but I guess it may be worse for normal consumers, but that's not what I am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am pretty happy using Debian testing with xfce4. It also gives you a minimalistic and traditional desktop. It's perfect for me because I am actually too lazy to configure some fancy window manager and other stuff. Also, everything just works out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have an Aspire One Netbook (Edit: different model, mine is a 722 with 4GB Ram, 1.333 dual core processor, 320GB HDD) like the OP and run Xubuntu on it which works perfectly fine (in case someone is looking for alternatives to Fubuntu).

Might give Fubuntu a try some day for kicks, wasn't aware it existed. I'm perfectly happy with Xubuntu though, I also run it on my beefy desktop.

</comment><comment><USER15> The name choice seems bizarre to me. It's like a portmanteau of Fedora and Ubuntu, yet has very few of the features of Ubuntu. Judging by the default GUI, Facintosh seems more appropriate.

<comment><USER16> I keep reading it as FUDuntu -- Ubuntu for spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Distrowatch reviewed it a while back at <http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20130121#feature>

</comment><comment><USER18> Off topic, but Linux Advocates, your "Cloud Categories" widget is morbidly obese. It's a mass of swirling red letters that looks like it's straight out of a 4chan Zalgo-Text thread. It's using more memory than all my other Chrome tabs _combined_.

</comment><comment><USER19> Everyone has own opinion what is "right".

</comment><comment><USER20> This distro needs a better name. The current one is kind of unfortunate...

</comment><comment><USER21> My experience with the designs used by Linux desktop environments is limited, but haven't the dock and some of it's (folder-)icons shown in the article[0] borrowed a little too much from OS X?

I would much rather see them go about improving the GUI in their own way rather than trying to imitate another OS.

[0]: [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iQDB5aZg__U/UVHDwY33wAI/AAAAAAAAHb...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iQDB5aZg__U/UVHDwY33wAI/AAAAAAAAHbc/kk8H2Z7ZhzE/s1600/Workspace+1_008.png)

<comment><USER22> Cairo is a project to make a OS X-like dock. It's not enabled in any of the main distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu...), but you can add it if you'd like.

<comment><USER23> Not at all!

Cairo is a vector graphic renderer for X (and others, but i think only for X now)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)>

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry, the full name is 'Cairo-Dock' (<http://www.glx-dock.org/>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> why not replace the window manager?

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

<comment><USER25> Well, the first three letters _are_ FUD.</comment></comment>


Optimy.io: Optimise mathematical expressions - <AUTHOR> https://api.optimy.io/ <comment> d--b I'm sorry but this doesn't make any sense to me. Optimizing mathematical expressions is not a very useful thing to do, and whenever you need it, you'll likely have a derivable function, for which gradient based optimization is much faster.

But most importantly, this can't be applied to arbitrary computer functions that you can't have a closed formula for.

Also finding a library that does optimization where I can pass a function pointer is usually easy to find in any language.

Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I'm concerned, I'll never use that service.

<comment><USER2> This is a bit nitpicky, but so you're aware: the term is differentiable, not derivable. You differentiate a function, you don't derive it.

<comment><USER3> Essa é uma questão lingüística, não matemática.

Em português há uma diferença diminuta de sentido entre "diferenciável" e "derivável" (na Análise Matemática mesmo), mas não recordo mais qual.

O inglês sendo o idioma mutante que é, talvez acabe absorvendo essa diferença de nomenclaturas dessa forma: derivable x differentiable.

<comment><USER2> I understand that it is simply a difference of language and that the intent is the same, but in mathematics precision of language is incredibly important. This is a common error in English.

<comment><USER4> I just want to reflect on the irony of your having no trouble replying to a comment in Portuguese about how it's important to use the right term. This whole thing has brightened my day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > A (future) extension of this app is the optimisation of functions which > cannnot be writted as mathematical expressions (such as a PDE model) by > using user-input values of some points of the function to optimise. If this > is particularly interesting to you don't hesitate to send a mail.

This is an interesting venue, but how would you go about this without solving the PDE model, itself? I work in a similar area of manifold learning, where our objective is a functional of a solution to a PDE (which is, in some sense, a generalization of that idea), but there seems to be no obvious way of optimizing this program without solving for at least the eigenfunctions of the PDE. I'd be curious to hear what the author has in mind.

Additionally, I'm also curious as to what algorithms are being used; derivative-free (incl. subgradient-free) methods are usually quite sub-optimal for most classes of problems that I know of, but I'm not sure what the intended audience is, here, so perhaps this would perform quite well in those cases?

Anyways, I'd love to test it! But I think HN gave the page the hug-of-death so it's giving me an error...

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks good, but it is just another NLP solver in a sea of mature and tested solver implementations. It will be interesting to get the answers for the below questions:

\- What is the algorithm being used?

\- How does it compare with other mature optimization engines: e.g. IPOPT, Knitro SNOPT, NPSOL, etc,...

\- Has the results been published somewhere? Or does there exist a compilation of results on standard benchmarks?

</comment><comment><USER7> Can you please be more specific about the class of expressions you can optimize in the title?

It is CLEARLY not any mathematical expression, which means that this is clickbait.

<comment><USER8> I don't want to pour cold water on someone's hobby project if that is what it is.

It is quite obvious however that website's description was written by someone who has not actually studied optimization theory or numerical mathematics (my fields of study). I worked with large-scale nonlinear nonconvex problems for over a decade, and there is much more to getting it to work for practical real-world models than this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Neat!

There seems to be some slight bugs with the input being not read correctly but this is kind of cool.

</comment><comment><USER10> Getting errors trying to run the default expression. HN Effect already?

</comment><comment><USER11> Who are your target users?</comment>


Show HN: Air Miners – Index of Startups Mining Carbon Dioxide from the Air - <AUTHOR> http://airminers.org <comment><AUTHOR> YCombinator just posted a new RFS for "Carbon Removal Technologies" ([https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#carbon](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#carbon)).

We built Air Miners to catalog what exists so you can find the gaps in carbon removal and build new solutions :)

</comment><comment><USER2> It's a laudable idea, and I'm very interested in seeing the information, but because of whatever framework choices you've made (I'm assuming some heavy client side work), with no lightweight fallback, I see literally nothing on my mobile device. I can't read the data at all here. I'll have to wait until I'm in front of my Desktop later and I probably won't remember then.

I feel like I'm shouting into a hurricane but I wish people would give a good fallback experience in case an older browser is being used.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the bug report! What browser/OS are you using?

<comment><USER2> Ie mobile on windows phone 8.1. It's an edge case and I don't expect people to test on it. But at the same time, it would be nice if the page gracefully fell back to something that wasn't just a blank white page

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We'll get that fixed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jumpshare launched - <AUTHOR> http://jumpshare.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> The interesting thing is, this startup is from Pakistan. That's a pretty rare occurrence.

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised by the quality! Never associated Pakistan with cool new online services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Needs excel support.

<comment><USER4> We are working on it. We have disabled it temp for now until we can get a very good output. We are improving out engine at the moment. Let me know what else you would like to see.</comment></comment>


Finally – an elegant solution to Generics in Go - kris-nova https://www.nivenly.com/finally-an-elegant-solutions-to-generics-in-go/ <comment><AUTHOR> It creates a type called "G" which is simply "interface{}".</comment>


Plaid's Fintech Request for Startups (part 2) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plaid.com/rfs/ <comment><USER2> Even.com does income smoothing and just signed a partnership with Walmart. Cool company.</comment>


Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America's cutting edge - <AUTHOR> http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/silicon-chasm_768037.html?page=1 <comment><USER2> Interesting article. I wonder how much of the income disparity would be relieved if there was more room to build affordable housing, as in the "limitless" cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas where you can buy a nice 3 bedroom 2 bath for $150K.

In Phoenix, there are also rich people and poor people, but not the stark contrast of Silicon Valley. Fewer billionaires, I think and also the neighborhoods are so vast and more or less homogeneous in tract size that you don't really notice wealth disparity. The average family pretty much lives in a house with a yard and 2-car garage, regardless of income. You can get in your car and drive to tony gated communities in Scottsdale and peek over the walls, but who would? You have your job, your two cars, your Harley, and your flatscreen, and life is good.

Maybe California can find a way to build out onto the ocean as was done in Singapore, and relieve the housing pressure a little. God, I'd love to be making the kinds of software engineer salaries that they offer out there, but the housing -- yikes!

<comment><USER3> Even if there was room for affordable housing, who would build it? Home builders need to make a profit, and you do that by building $900K luxury townhomes, not by building $400K roach traps that need tax payer subsidy to break even. Do you think the tax payers lounging in their Atherton mansions give a crap about housing for poor and middle class people?

<comment><USER4> Whoa, wait. A $400K home is a "roach trap"??? Seriously? Seriously?

<comment><USER5> I think what was meant was a $400k building filled with roach trap apartments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Living in the Silicon Valley after reading this article might sound awesome; but it's far from the truth.

I grew up there. I feel like I was deprived of a childhood. I moved away a couple of years ago and am never going back. You have nothing but sprawled out office parks, rich internet tycoons, a police force with nothing to do, helicopter parents, and soccer moms. The thing that topped it all off was the super competitive vibe amongst the peers and parents. I would not recommend living there under any circumstances.

<comment><USER7> Plus leaf blowers 24/7.

<comment><USER6> Wow, that's kind of funny, because I didn't even notice that was gone until you mentioned it. I guess I was so used to it that I tuned it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Yes! Let them eat beans!

Preferably in their apartments.

No, seriously now. I've got a friend who 5 years ago decided that he needs "to straighten his life out", and now he has a huge house in SV and is lead engineer at Apple. That's really fine, and obviously not everyone can have such a life. And people will really have to look inside themselves, and ask themselves what it REALLY is they want. If they want status and big houses, then they better be extraordinary smart & disciplined and/or rich. Me, I just want an office where I can do my thing, not being responsible to anyone else but myself.

A solution to this dystopian future would be the basic income as proposed in Switzerland. This is the only way in my opinion to make sure that a master/slave relationship will not exist, and people are really paid what the job is worth, unpressured by the need to survive.

<comment><USER9> But how do you handle inflation in a base income economy? It seems that any extra freely allocated capital would immediately be nullified by the increase to inflation it would cause?

<comment><USER10> Basic income does not increase the money supply, which would bring about inflation. There may be an increase in the general cost of living for many, but that's not inflation, and it wouldn't absorb the entirety of one's basic income.

<comment><USER11> It seems that "inflation" has an equivocal meaning here. I presume he meant that the purchasing power of the currency would diminish and it's not hard to imagine why. Look at housing - if the credit wouldn't be cheap (or if it wouldn't be available on a large scale), the houses have to have a price between the basic price (the combined cost of land plus house construction) and the price that the market can bear. Given the credit, the housing becomes able to bear a lot more. The housing credit affects just housing, but a basic income would affect pretty much everything an average Joe would require. A basic income would rise both the basic prices for every human-involved activity (the payed work becomes more expensive) and the bar of what a vast pool of potential clients could bear/afford.

<comment><USER9> Correct. This is what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great article. I have been living in Silicon Valley for the last tree months because I accepted a contracting gig at Google. My wife absolutely loves Mountain View and she would like to move there. I resist because our home is in the mountains of Central Arizona - a very affordable area to live. My argument against living in high cost areas like Silicon Valley is that for a lot of knowledge work, location does not much matter. Remote work is very easy to get especially if consulting rates are adjusted for lower cost of living and no commuting costs.

I view Silicon Valley as a really fun place to visit and live for a while, but if I was not very wealthy I would not make it a permanent home.

</comment><comment><USER13> I get that this is a stark contrast and functions as a great example. But, isn't every place in America like this?

Maybe I've lived in Texas too long but I see it when I travel too. The immigrant labor class allows even lower-middle class families to live like "rich people". A lot of people now use a cleaning person and who mows their own lawn anymore?

In an economic sense, it's America's new version of slavery. Where once we provided food and shelter in exchange for labor. Now we exchange barely enough money for food and shelter in exchange for labor. At least the ugly parts are mostly gone. However, I can't help but thinking that will create a passive acceptance of this societal structure.

<comment><USER14> The rest of country has rich and poor areas, but most of it is 'middle class'. The idea is that in the Bay Area you're either paying ~$1M for a shack in a decent school area or you're in a slum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cowen bluntly predicted what he called "wage polarization." The increasing ability of computers to perform ordinary tasks will inexorably transform America into an income oligarchy in which the top 15 percent of people—with skills "that are a complement to the computer"—will enjoy "cheery" labor- market prospects and soaring incomes, while the bottom 85 percent, that is to say, 267 million out of America's 315 million people, will be lucky to find Walmart-level jobs or scrape together marginal "freelance" livings running $25-a-pop errands for their betters via TaskRabbit (say, picking up and delivering a pair of designer shoes from Nordstrom) or renting out their spare bedrooms (if they have any) to overnight lodgers via Airbnb. That is, if they'll be working at all. "There are many other historical periods, including medieval times, where inequality is high, upward mobility is fairly low, and the social order is fairly stable, even if we as moderns find some aspects of that order objectionable," Cowen writes in his new book.

In other words, what is coming is the "new feudalism," a phrase coined by Chapman University urban studies professor Joel Kotkin, a prolific media presence whose New Geography website is an outlet for the trend's most vocal critics. "It's a weird Upstairs, Downstairs world in which there's the gentry, and the role for everybody else is to be their servants," Kotkin said in a telephone interview. "The agenda of the gentry is to force the working class to live in apartments for the rest of their lives and be serfs. But there's a weird cognitive dissonance. Everyone who says people ought to be living in apartments actually lives in gigantic houses or has multiple houses."

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

So? Hypocrisy is hardly a new phenomenon. People really _are_ ought to be living in apartments, even if it is suggested as part of some supposed agenda. I really don't understand all the anxiety that pops up on HN every once in a while with regard to some imaginary utopia that is decades away if it will ever come at all - Inequality is entirely secondary to the Median, the article describes a high quality of life all around with the upper echelons of society a sort of step-function above "everybody else". That's supposed to be horrible?

What about the inequality between the US and the rest of the world? I guess hypocrisy is not exclusive to any one tax bracket either.

<comment><USER16> I guess they are pointing the fact that as soon as West Coast got access to the power through money, they did what the East Coast did: protect themselves from the plebe and create a new nobility with barriers to entry instead of using it for greater motives than simple personal accumulation.

<comment><USER17> And this is exactly why SV is not anything revolutionary, despite the insistence of PG and co. There is no Golden Age, just a bunch of old guys accumulating wealth by exploiting youthful naivete by cranking out a steady stream of technological toys designed to hook us, rather than serve us.

<comment><USER18> I liked this sidenote in the article: "made their founders billionaires (New Economy founders typically retain large blocks of their own stock)"

Histoically, founders gave up most of their equity to investors. "A" round? Investors take 50% for $3 million and set aside another 20% for an employee pool. "B" round? The founders end up with 4% of the company.

I think pg helped everybody realize "Hey, us founders have the power here. We're not giving up shit. In fact, pay us out at each round too. We need to be millionaires sooner than any possible 5-year-out exit."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The class divide is indeed huge, but I'm having trouble following some of the article's logic. The article seems to be saying that the upper class are the capitalists that have founded successful companies, and the middle class are all the engineers, and the lower class are the rest of society. A lot of the class divide seems to be most evident in housing costs.

Where do these $1 million tract house valuations come from, if the middle class engineers can't afford to buy them? It would appear that they're mostly owned by people that have been living in the area for the past 20 years? And because people have not moved, even though they are apparently no longer in the middle class, the supply has been constrained and the few houses that do go on the market go for extremely large amounts of money.

Anyway, I'm not sure what to make of the article. There are troubling comparisons, and glimpses at incredible wealth, but the parts of the article don't seem to fit together very well into a picture of what's going on.

<comment><USER20> _The article seems to be saying that the upper class are the capitalists that have founded successful companies, and the middle class are all the engineers, and the lower class are the rest of society._

This view of class division in an industrialized society is not particularly new. Kurt Vonnegut's novel _Player Piano_ presents this exact scenario (upper class of managers, middle class of engineers, unemployed masses), and it was published in 1952.

<comment><USER19> I agree that the class division is fairly standard (though the middle class also includes the lawyers, doctors, and other professionals that earn as much or more than engineers), but I guess I don't understand the connection to real estate prices. Who owns all these homes, and buys all these homes? It seems as though it's a bubble that's almost ready to burst, the way that it's been laid out in the article. Or that the wealthy have been buying up huge proportions of properties to turn them into rentals. But there should be numbers that would back up that latter case.

<comment><USER21> > It seems as though it's a bubble that's almost ready to burst

It's not a bubble if you already own and keep owning - California Prop 13 prevents the tax man from raising property taxes more than 2% a year.

It's not a bubble if you paid cash, which is majority of real estate purchases in Santa Clara County - unless you choose to go the HELOC route.

It's only a bubble if the buyer is taking out a mortgage to buy the piece of real estate, has very little as far as rainy fund, and needs to have a job to continue making payments.

I don't think Valley real estate prices are that reasonable (and have voted myself out of the market by selling last month), but it's not truly a bubble where you hope the greater fool will come around and buy the stuff from you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that an article that deals this directly with class is running in the Weekly Standard. Outside a couple swipes at green building codes and a pass at hypocracy vis a vis apartments, this is almost something I could see running in Mother Jones.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. This is not left vs right, this is old vs new. The author has (literally) a PhD in Medieval Studies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is rather surprising fare for the Weekly Standard, which is (to my understanding) a conservative magazine. Perhaps the American political climate is realigning in an interesting way.

<comment><USER25> I had the same thought. I used to read the Weekly Standard to see what the other side has to say but gave up on it. This piece was outside their usual sphere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I didn't know this... that the new "Knowledge Economy" is making the imcome gap _worse_.

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

</comment><comment><USER27> One important aspect of Bay Area wealth to keep in mind is that Silicon Valley has a very supportive entrepreneurial culture-- wealthy exited entrepreneurs generously funding seed rounds for up and coming startups, lending a hand to pull up those around them. The mentality of modesty and collaboration greatly detracts from the sort of dystopian and polarized picture this article paints.

<comment><USER28> > _" lending a hand to pull up those around them. The mentality of modesty and > collaboration greatly detracts from the sort of dystopian and polarized > picture this article paints."_

"Those around them" = those like themselves, who 99 times out of 100 aren't actually from around the Bay Area.

Hell, even the businesses supported by the Bay Area elite are not at all similar to those that already existed before. The wealthy exited entrepreneurs aren't lending a hand to pull up the taco stand or the nail salon, they are evicting them in favor of businesses they like better.

Which may simply be the natural order of things, but it's a far cry from this populist "floating all boats" story you're weaving.

More importantly, wealthy exited entrepreneurs are funding new generations of startups - but that's a far, far cry from "pulling up those around them". One of the things that really, _really_ bothered me when living in the Bay Area was how the tech industry literally does not give one iota of mind to anyone who isn't in the tech industry.

The tech industry helps itself and lets the world go to shit around them. The tech industry builds gated garages instead of helping solve crime in their neighborhoods. They invest in bigger and fancier buses in which to transport their own kind, instead of helping solve transportation in their cities. Even innovations like Uber are priced in such a way that there may as well be a "techno-elites only, kthx" sign on the door.

It's only non-dystopian and non-polarized if you already have membership to the ol' boys club that is Silicon Valley, in which case the entrepreneurial community is indeed supportive and has each others' backs. If you aren't lucky enough to belong to this club though, you're shit out of luck, even if you live just down the street.

Which, now that I think of it, isn't that different from how East Coast Old Money works. Funny how we keep making fun of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The silence is deafening.

<comment><USER30> This was posted on 2 AM PST. Give the discussion a couple hours.

<comment><USER31> It's already at the bottom of the front page, I imagine it won't be there in the next half hour or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have to think that it's always been this way in civilization. Some people figure out how to position themselves at the top where all the money and control is, a bunch of others can't figure out how to squeeze up there, but do figure out how to service the people at the top for scraps, and then there are the hoards who don't even know how to get into the game at all. I think of it as just mechanical positioning. It's exactly the same as if you sent a crowd of people running to touch a magic pillar. There'd be room for a few to reach the pillar, then a bunch who could see the pillar and imagine what it would like to be one of the ones touching it, then a mass of people on the outside, barely able to see it at all. The only difference in real life is that the crowd is structured by the flow of money, goods, and services, where the flow is wider at the middle.

<comment><USER14> I think the idea is that the valley has taken out the middle, leaving only the extraordinarily rich and the poor.

<comment><USER33> Let's define terms.

Rich == you don't have to work for a living. You might choose to, but you don't have to.

Poor == you're on government assistance of some kind, WIC, food stamps, welfare.

Can you think of anyone in SV that's in between those two extremes? A "middle class" of sorts?

There is a vast, vast middle in SV, it's just that the scale is different which never stops blowing people's minds. Instead of a $50k income being middle class, $150k is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> for some reason, the third page has most of the content.</comment>


Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business - <AUTHOR> https://producthabits.com/why-trello-failed-to-build-a-1-billion-business <comment><USER3> As far as I recall (and I've been a Trello user nearly since it was released), it wasn't necessarily Fog Creek's intention to build a huge monetized business out of Trello.

In fact, at some point, users started to get anxious that Trello was free and actually WANTED to throw money at the company. I suppose part of that was the perception that if you're paying for it, it will be more likely to survive and won't go away? This was what spurred Trello to create an offering of something (via Trello Gold) - simply so people could pay for something they liked and feel good about themselves, and get something in return.

Actually, I don't know this for sure, but I think they genuinely built Trello because it was a tool that they really felt should exist, and wanted to make it work as inexpensively as they could and support as many as they could, while staying permanently free. I think Trello was an experiment for them, one which succeeded at gaining the huge userbase with a simple tool (which I believe was their goal).

Once the realization that the huge userbase itself was valuable, it was inevitable that someone would buy it out. Atlassian wanted to be associated with that huge userbase, to help with Jira... maybe or maybe not to actually bring Trello into the fold with their existing products.

In any case, Trello is a huge accomplishment, before the buyout, and as a business, even moreso afterwards. I was thinking about building (and actually working on) something like Trello before it existed, but I didn't necessarily think the world needed something so simple. I would have been quite happy with this result!!! They made an absolute ton of users (self included) very happy with the results of their labor, and now they have a wonderful reward from it.

Trello did not fail to build a $1B+ business. Trello succeeded at building a $425M business through good faith and hard work. Bravo.

<comment><USER4> I don't buy that narrative since Trello received $ 10M in funding [1] and you must convince investors to put that sum of money.

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity)

<comment><USER5> wait, WHAT?

if the investors got 16% of the company they got $80m, a ~8x return in 3 years.

And more likely they did better. Twitter did a series C, raised $17.4m at $104m valuation, and it was a pretty hot company to give up a bit less than 17%.

A great venture fund gets a unicorn, a legendary one gets two. A 1/2 unicorn that maybe returned most if not the entire fund is a great outcome. If 50% of the investments did that well it's a top-tier fund.

People are a little demanding if only decacorns are seen as wins. It's like expecting your team to win the World Series every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> squeaky-clean "Let me tell you how you to build a $1B business. I've never done it, but take my word that I know how to do it better than someone who sold a half a billion dollar business."

Like really, if your advice is useful, why hasn't the author built a $1B business? It seems like they missed the point that Trello became giant for what is essentially networked sticky-notes, were they even trying to become a $1B Business?

Next week: Why Trello Failed To Be the First Company On The Moon (spoiler alert, they weren't trying to do that).

<comment><USER6> Yeah, "failed" in the article title is a really douchey move.

<comment><USER7> "How I didn't fail reaching the front page of HN using a clickbait title"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are some interesting points in this article, but I can't help but feel that the author takes the final value of hundreds of millions of dollars as a given. As a resut, there are several recommendations in this article that I can easily see having led to a _lower_ valuation!

> Trello could have created a stickier business product by making sure that it > was so deeply integrated with other tools, teams couldn't rip it out.

But if they had focused on having even more integrations, maybe they wouldn't have been able to focus on creating simple features with broad appeal, or creating a snappy app, or they would have had to spend more money and pivot away from a robust free product.

All of these things would have hurt the user base by ruining one of Trello's main value propositions: _it is free and simple._ I never would think about learning to use Asana for a personal project, but Trello is an easy sell to teammates for small/medium businesses and personal projects. It is even easy for one-person teams. If Trello wasn't _free and easy_ , then they would just be another Asana competitor, and I can imagine them fizzling with no buyout, let alone an IPO.

I think this sort of business case analysis can be useful, but even in hindsight, the consequences of various decisions are far from obvious.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is this article, I can't. In what world do we live in where we paint a $425m exit in a bad light?

> They built their servers on top of Node and used MongoDB to store data so > that the web app would load really fast.

I stopped reading here.

<comment><USER10> Trello is actually slow, because of that backend stack, I imagine. I thought the author was going to point to that.

<comment><USER11> Not at all. Trello is quite snappy and back when I first started using it in 2013, it was remarkably so compared to all other similar tools I'd seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Interesting, but I can't help thinking that this was fairly obvious, am I the only one? It already blows my mind that it is that big already. The app is a todo list with several columns. Todo lists don't make billion dollar businesses... and yeah, SMBs are fine with actual post-its!

<comment><USER12> Kanban boards have existed since the 50s. The "magic" of trello was the instant updates. It was a perfect example of software eating the world.

<comment><USER13> The trello UI is also great. If you don't need the back-end features of something like Jira, trello's limited functionality greatly reduced the friction to tracking your activities.

<comment><USER14> That they were bought by Atlassian fills me with dread because of precedents set by their other products. I use Trello (and pay for it) exactly because I don't want anything like Jira.

<comment><USER7> Hopefully they are smart enough to keep the products differentiated. Otherwise, a Trello clone will surely arise.

<comment><USER14> There is at least one, but I don't know whether it's any good. I'm a bit tempted to write one, partially because I have a thing about self hosting my data, but also because I _love_ the overall idea and design of Trello, but I'd love it to be more extensible/flexible/hackable.

E.g. being able to make layout changes(have lists that span columns for example, or cards that show more of their information on the cover). Or more flexibility in colour changes/background, or ability to style cards.

<comment><USER15> Checkout selfhosted.reddit.com there are a lot of self hosted Trello clones already

<comment><USER14> I'm not surprised... Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The idea of pricing a product like Trello should be taxing the added value it creates. What can indicate added value in Trello? Not emoji stickers, for sure. It's the number of cards and lists. If a user creates many cards/lists s/he clearly sees added value of the product. Trello should've limited the number of lists or cards in the free edition and charge a fee for an unlimited edition. Those users who don't see much value in Trello won't use many lists/cards anyway.

We've been using Trello as the main tool for project/product management for years and quite happy with it. I would gladly pay a reasonable monthly fee for it, but they didn't even try to charge me. I feel like it could've been a bigger business.

<comment><USER17> The integrations/powerups are an easy sell for me. Especially github integration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> While we're talking counterfactuals, how about the scenario where Trello chased that $1B dream, lost focus on what users liked about the product and ended up as an acqui-hire.

Which, I'll point out, is an extremely common scenario. The guys behind Trello stuck to their vision of the product and made an obscene amount of money. Good for them.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wish the author of such posts would start with a disclaimer about whether or not they have ever built a "$1B+ business". I did some quick searches, and it looks like the author in this case has tried several times (but I guess not yet come close).

<comment><USER20> It would be more interest to read too, why 'I' failed to make a $1B+ business might have some useful lessons in it, whereas whether Trello failed at anything at all depends to a high degree on what they were trying to accomplish. By any measure (except, perhaps the author's) Trello is a huge success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not a billion dollar business yet != failed to build a billion dollar business.

How do you keep scaling the revenue? Get bigger customers. Where do you get those big deep-pockets customers? The enterprise. How do you sell to big enterprise? With a big enterprise salesforce.

Ok. With that, you can either build your own enterprise sales machine (which takes years), or you can sell out to someone who already has one. Like, say, Atlassian.

<comment><USER22> There are plenty of companies who have scaled their revenue beyond this point without an enterprise salesforce - Trello's acquirer is one of them

Its not a hard rule that to reach beyond $x you need to become an enterprise

<comment><USER23> Google had no enterprise sales for a decade. They did fine.

<comment><USER21> Completely different business model. Atlassian and Trello are much more similar. Google was selling ads, not software.

<comment><USER23> Trello and Google are SaaS, they sell a service, not software.

They made it so that one could register easily and use the service quickly, without special training or any setup. That's how you grab tons of free users.

Atlassian is mostly shrink-wrap entreprisey software. They software with expensive licenses that also require extensive installation and maintenance by the client. They need a sale force.

<comment><USER21> That "no training or setup, tons of free users" model? You can't sell into the enterprise like that. And Trello can be very useful in the enterprise - <USER2> an environment that doesn't really think twice about paying $1000/year/user. Enterprise is a far more lucrative market than freemium. And if you need to keep doubling your revenue on a regular basis, that's how you get it.

Don't let the SaaS thing fool you about sales. Salesforce is SaaS too, but they're a lot more like Atlassian than Google, business-wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I mean, I get what the guy is saying, but look at the text vs subtext here:

text is "here is advice to take a burgeoning company to the stratosphere" But honestly, how many people in that position are going to read this blog post? 3? 10? If this was his true intention, he would have packaged this as some kind of super premium offering that only well-connected VCs could read or something.

subtext: "I'm really smart about what takes a company from success to HUUGE SUCCESS." Is this guy trying to gain a rep in VC circles as a CEO of late stage startups or something? What's his angle?

<comment><USER25> It feels like Trello was a HUUGE SUCCESS. Todo lists are notoriously hard, and target a very thin demographic; people who are trying to plan and track progress, i.e. middle managers or OCD contributors.

Reaching $N million instead of $2.4N million, where N > 200 doesn't really feel like an obvious shortfall.

<comment><USER24> I agree with you, and others in this thread have lauded Trello's success. But the author of the page is angling for another interpretation, and I'm trying to figure out what he hopes to get out of it.

<comment><USER6> What do you think that interpretation is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Because it's a todo app" is an obvious response to the title but the content is interesting.

Trello Gold with emoji support and custom backgrounds was a weak proposition and they could have moved into enterprise faster. Still, it's amazing they did as well as they did.

Kanban boards and Chat apps are the new todo lists - ten a penny - which makes people dismiss the notion of building a business around such a trivial feature.

This is a mistake. Most of those apps are badly designed, meaning for those looking to eke out a living rather than break $1 billion, there's still plenty of opportunities.

For example, Diigo the highlighting app is relatively unknown but is a hit with educators and so makes cash in a corner where few competitors are looking. The top stopwatch on The Play Store makes over $400,000 with in-app sales.

And Wunderlist sold for $125 million. And Todoist is profitable.

It's a big Internet out there.

</comment><comment><USER27> This article should be titled how an MBA could have ruined a wonderful product. There is absolutely no way to maintain a useful horizontal product - which is what Trello is, and what makes it so great - and to simultaneously build a deep vertical product targeted at the enterprise. That is an entirely different thing (which Atlassian has already built and it's called Jira...and it's a rabbit hole of complexity out of the necessity to serve enterprise customers.)

</comment><comment><USER28> You know I started this thinking it was idiotic, based on the headline, and it's actually quite interesting. I think it's totally the wrong way to look at the Universe, but it's rational and well articulated.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Failed"? Seriously?

Isn't selling a Kanban board for half a billion dollars amazing enough?

</comment><comment><USER10> Besides all the comments about his article being from a bizarro-world, it should be noted that once Trello infrastructure was in place it was impossible to move it.

Turning a todo-list app into "the single-source of truth for a company" would require monstruous schema changes and changes in all the live updates thing etc., and everything would be slower, heavier etc., all that and you couldn't have known if that would catch up or if you would end up losing your users that liked Trello just because it was a simple board thing. It would be better to start a new app.

<comment><USER30> did you work on trello, or is this speculation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> When did $425m exit turn out to be a failure?

I suppose the author built several multi billion dollar businesses?

By any metric, Trello is a huge success.

</comment><comment><USER32> $450M... for a todo list. #perspective

<comment><USER3> Seemingly simple things done well and actually used can be extremely valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Immediate thought, unchanged by the content of the article: how many people (a) know how to build a billion-dollar business, and (b) how to distill the "failure" to reach the billion-dollar mark into simple talking points? Something that big has so many moving parts and intangibles, I'd imagine a rigorous analysis would be very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER34> Because it is a trivial todo app?

<comment><USER16> Nothing at this scale is trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A couple of months ago there was another article about Trello here on HN that basically held Trello up as a model of disruptive success:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13485462](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13485462)

</comment><comment><USER35> I LOVE Trello and was an early adopter. At one of my companies I even hacked together some mission critical tools (KPI-related) that depended on Trello as a front-end, with the reporting generated on a custom Rails backend.

When I moved to an "enterprise" company, I wanted to bring Trello with me, but was immediately told NO because 1) we were already using JIRA and Asana, and a third option was not desired and 2) Trello is (was) not "enterprise-grade" meaning they didn't have sufficient security vetting or centralized user provisioning (and more importantly--deprovisioning.) It was demoralizing and stupid. RIP Trello.

</comment><comment><USER36> I love Trello, but they never got enterprise sales down. SSO isn't federated, and the ACL system is leaky (much like Google Drive).

It also is too religiously adherent to the card metaphor (understandable) which works in most contexts but falls down in others where more traditional tools (Jira, Github) shine. We use Trello for a ton, but not mainline work.

I use it as a contact manager, todo list manager, and we use it a lot for card sorting/brainstorming and more "people" type stuff.

</comment><comment><USER37> I love Trello and used it a lot (before we moved on to something different and easier to understand for most people). However, even when it was important to our business and we had around 12 users (I know, still relatively small) using it, we never once felt and pressure to pay for the product.

Trello didn't build a $1B business because they never forced anyone to pay for their product, even when they were extracting significant value from the platform.

<comment><USER38> What did you use after trello?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I definitely don't remember all of the cards loading in ~250ms. Maybe like 7 seconds [1]?

Either way, failing to hit $1bn doesnt sound like much of a failure where I live outside the Valley. $400 some million is pretty respectable.

[1]: [https://blog.fogcreek.com/we-spent-a-week-making-trello- boar...](https://blog.fogcreek.com/we-spent-a-week-making-trello-boards-load- extremely-fast-heres-how-we-did-it/)

</comment><comment><USER40> I think one of the most obvious and glaring reasons is also one of the simplest - my company uses Trello a fair bit, we have a lot of teams on it, tracking a lot of stuff. _And we 've never once paid a dime for it._ Never even been asked to pay for it. Brought us plenty of value, would have paid, but we never hit a threshold where that was a thing. I don't even know where that threshold is or if there is one.

</comment><comment><USER41> Counterfactual history can be fun but it's highly speculative. That's true even for well studied historical events - it's even more true for something opaque like a private company's growth. What were Trello's main customer acquisition channels? Without knowing that how can you hope to derive an alternative history?

</comment><comment><USER42> So, this is how you make it to the top of HN, with an outlandish clickbait-y claim. Good to know.

</comment><comment><USER43> Initial question that set me off upon reading the article is this: Was Trello actually aiming to get $1B off of it? I know more money makes sense for them and their investors, but the amount it already sold for is astounding to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER44> Almost everyone in the world failed at building a $1B business.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is hilarious. Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. Would a billion have satisfied the author or would it have then needed to be two?

<comment><USER46> _> Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion._

I can't speak for the author but selling Trello "for only $425m" is a failed outcome if the growth expectations was for it to become a massive $1 billion business.

How do we know that? Because Trello took $10 million in VC money in 2014.[1] So we can just work backward from the $1 billion goal using basic math:

VC firm Index Ventures buys 25% ownership of Trello for $10 million.[2] They manage several funds and I don't know which one they used to write that $10 million check but let's assume the money came from the 6th Fund of $442 million they raised in 2012.[3]

Over the 10-year life of that fund, they basically need to grow that $442 million into ~$3 billion. Since most startups in the fund will turn out to be money losers, they need at least one of their investments in the portfolio to become a $1 billion+ company. And keep in mind they only own 25% which means that even if Trello sold for $1 billion, they'd only cash out their position for $250 million. For Index Ventures to get to ~$3 billion, they need one or a tiny handful of winners from their portfolio to return ~$10 billion! (Assuming they take ~25% ownership in each startup and therefore cash out at ~2.5 billion.)

Yes, IndexVentures still gets ~$106 million (25% of $425m) from the sale to Atlassian but as you can see from the math above, $106m hardly moves the needle toward ~$3 billion. That's a $10 million opportunity cost that they could have put into a different company in 2014.

So, if you're a financial analyst, or one of the Limted Partners in IndexVentures fund, or possibly even J Spolsky, the failure to reach $1+ billion is indeed a "failure."

tldr: because of algebra, if a VC invests in a company, that means they expect the startup to reach a multi-billion market cap.

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity)

[2] [https://www.quora.com/At-what-valuation-did-Trello- raise-10M...](https://www.quora.com/At-what-valuation-did-Trello- raise-10M-when-it-was-spun-out-from-Fog-Creek)

[3] [http://vator.tv/news/2012-06-17-index-ventures- raises-442m-e...](http://vator.tv/news/2012-06-17-index-ventures- raises-442m-early-stage-fund)

<comment><USER47> That's only a failure on the VC overall _fund_ level, not the company or investor level. _That investment_ is not a failure, even if the fund is. If most the investments are money losers, but this one "only" paid out %1000, it's still contributing towards making the fund pay out, even if it's not doing well enough to account for the losing investments. You wouldn't classify a stock that tripled in price over a few years as a failure, even if overall your portfolio was a failure, and this is the same thing.

<comment><USER46> _> That's only a failure on the VC overall fund level, not the company or investor level. That investment is not a failure, even if the fund is._

I put that last "failure" in scare quotes to soften the label a bit because in many ways, Trello _is_ a success.

Nevertheless, the VC will frame it as a "failure" or "suboptimal outcome" because they use the framework of "opportunity cost" which means they missed the _other_ startups they could have invested that 10 million in.

If the VC knows ahead of time that investing $10m startup in will return just 1000% in 2 years, they'd rather ignore Trello and find "another Facebook" that can return 20000%+[1]

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/accel-partners-fund-ix- fac...](https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/accel-partners-fund-ix-facebook- extraordinary/)

<comment><USER47> > Nevertheless, the VC will frame it as a "failure" or "suboptimal outcome"

Sure, but that's in the context of the fund, not the company. It's meant to be consumed by people dealing with the fund in some way.

> If the VC knows ahead of time that investing $10m startup in will return > just 1000% in 2 years, they'd rather ignore Trello and find "another > Facebook" that can return 20000%+

No, any fund that _knows_ they will get a 1000% return will _definitely_ invest. The assumption will be that those dollars would have gone to one of the bad investments, because since the vast majority of dollars do, they're likely right. That investment will help the fund, because it doesn't it can be one large return, or a few slightly less large but still great returns. Not every fund that makes money does so because of a single great investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is basically clickbait. Pretty much all the comments have the same sentiment: $425M is a _lot_ of money.

</comment><comment><USER12> I look forward to the followup article: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1T+ Business.

<comment><USER6> "Why Star Wars is a terrible documentary."

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> 425M is a crime. Trello is a magnificent feature. It is a weekend project and should have been open sourced.

</comment><comment><USER50> Why? It's an enterprise software development tool without the ability to run it locally within the enterprise. Companies don't want to put corporate IP on remote servers as much as possible without very tight data protection guarantees. Trello didn't offer either one so many companies that could have benefited from Trello (and knew it) couldn't use it.</comment>


Hn.algolia and News.Y Combinator? - <AUTHOR> What's the difference between hn.algolia and news.ycombinator? <comment><USER2> One is the main website, and the other is the main search.

<comment><USER3> Algolia seems to be a search company. I guess they provide hn.algolia as both a gift to the community, and as a product demo.

<comment><USER4> Also, Y Combinator was an investor in Algolia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algolia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algolia)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 70122-_6 neither reveal snowflake very well.</comment>


Manage todo list in a text editor instead of a task-management software - <AUTHOR> http://mrfrisby.com/topmarks/index

<comment><AUTHOR> Stuart Frisby recorded a video shows how he manage todo list in a text editor instead of a task-management software. Cool idea!</comment>


Making WebGL Dance (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://acko.net/files/fullfrontal/fullfrontal/webglmath/online.html <comment><USER2> Seriously, this demo is amazing and quite informative.

I think the original title is a bit bland though, something like "WebGL: How, Where, and What to Draw" would have explained what the slides are about much better.

</comment><comment><USER3> How did this drop out of sight without barely a mention? :(</comment>


Dell's Canvas display is like a Surface Studio without the PC - <AUTHOR> http://www.windowscentral.com/dells-canvas-display-surface-studio-without-pc <comment><USER2> Surface Studio: 28" @ 4500x3000

Dell Canvas: 27" @ 2560x1440

<comment><USER3> For the price the specs are awful. The surface studio is marginally more expensive, much better quality, and you get the PC with it.</comment></comment>


Google falls from grace - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/04/16/google-bad-year/

<comment><USER2> > _" Facebook has always excelled on targeting. Google has really been trying > to catch up in that regard," says Jeremy Kressman, an analyst at eMarketer, > a market research firm. Just this week, The Wall Street Journal reported > that Google was looking to give advertisers a way to target existing > customers, mimicking a feature already available from Facebook._

I feel like this misses the point of Facebook's strength and Google's (and other competitors') weakness. Facebook is freaking terrible at targeting. Essentially every targeted ad or page suggestion they've ever given me has been laughable. It's not scientific but I've yet to meet anyone who's had a different experience. With Google's products, you either hear the typical annoyance associated with any advertising or you hear "it was freaky that Google knew to show me that!"

The reason Facebook is still huge and Google+ is niche at best is interoperability. Social networks (this style at least) aren't like email providers or cell phone carriers where even if there are a few main competitors, you can't just switch to the one you prefer and expect to keep communicating with people on the "established" service.

Facebook was lucky enough to be "the one" that got your mom to sign up along with your grandma, your boss, your doctor, and your ex. Friendster and Myspace and all of those were big but they never really shed that teen/tween association for a lot of people. Facebook came up when all of the rest of the public was mostly ready to see what this social networking stuff was all about.

And unlike AIM or Hotmail or any of the other big players in chat or email, you can't just use Facebook with a third party client or another compatible service. So unless you get _everyone_ to switch over to something else (or you maintain multiple profiles and sets of contacts) there is little to be gained by using anything but the single, big player on the field.

The relative failure of Google+ has nothing to do with how good Facebook is at targeting (or how good the service is overall). Hell, I would have switched over in a second. Way cleaner and faster mobile app. Nicer website, chat, voice calling, and all the other stuff Facebook has or added to compete with Google.

But even though I sorta hate Facebook's site and I sorta love Google+'s Circles feature, it doesn't matter. Because I'll never convince all of those people to move over and without them, a social network is worthless. It really is a shame because it's as if Facebook is the new email except email isn't a standard and you can only use one provider. It's as if AOL somehow made regular email incompatible back when they were a massive ISP in the US. If you had to have AOL to email other AOL users, who would dare switch?</comment>


VCs Also Succumb to Cognitive Biases - <AUTHOR> http://dbasch.posterous.com/vcs-also-succumb-to-cognitive-biases

<comment><USER2> _Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."_

Nope. He didn't. The line comes from a 1914 (or so) speech by a union activist named Nicholas Klein. It hopped to "Gandhi" for the same reason the wording got more jazzy over the years - better for propagation.

Interestingly, there are signs that the correct attribution has started to win the internet.

[http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy- ab&hl=en&site=...](http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy- ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=gandhi+%22nicholas+klein%22)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed, thanks.

[http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0603/Political- mi...](http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0603/Political-misquotes- The-10-most-famous-things-never-actually-said/First-they-ignore-you.-Then- they-laugh-at-you.-Then-they-attack-you.-Then-you-win.-Mohandas-Gandhi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Was Fred Wilson being literal, or just encouraging folks to be contrarian? Contrarianism does have some empirical support. (Low PE stocks have outperformed high PE stocks over long time horizons)</comment>


Big Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=336733 <comment><USER2> Python is used extensively in Big Science because it has some very powerful, very fast numerical packages such as NumPy.</comment>


Ask HN: What Makes an Ordinary Programmer a Great Programmer? - <AUTHOR> Anyone can learn and write to code but I want to become a GREAT programmer. I want to be good at problem solving. What recommendations do you have for anyone who wants to become a GREAT Programmer. I'm looking for some advice from like minded people here. I honestly love the hacker news community. Looking forward to hear from you guys. cheers <comment><USER2> Understand the true problems that need to be solved.

Often these have nothing to do with written requirements. It may manifest itself in the system's design, or in what you need to do to fight for time to work on a given area with management. If you're self-employed it may be to understand your customer's true needs, separate from what they think they want.

Writing code is straightforward... it's a skill that can be learned by anyone given enough effort and time. To get to that next level, you gotta learn the real issues that need solving.

That's what makes the great ones stand out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Working on high value products. It doesn't matter how hard or how smart you work if you work on something that has no impact.</comment>


HP laptops found to have hidden keylogger - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42309371 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15885206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15885206)

</comment><comment><USER3> > At the time, the company said the keylogger code had been mistakenly added > to the software.

Glad they cleared that one up.</comment>


A Beach Nobody Can Touch - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_beach_nobody_can_touch <comment><USER2> There should be a two-pronged effort to tackle over-tourism.

1\. For ultra-popular attractions (Venice, Maya Bay...), keep jacking up the prices until the tourist flow trickles down to what can be sustained at those places. In case that sounds elitist, have supplemental measures like first- come first-served permits (like the ones at Half Dome, Yosemite) or procedural barriers which only the most committed ones would jump through.

2\. Popularize hitherto unknown destinations. I am sure there are tons of gems in "the middle of nowhere". Spread the tourism everywhere around the globe, which will be appreciated by regions looking for economic boosts. Maybe, there are even known techniques like opening up non-stop flights from hotspot tourist sources (Beijing? Shanghai? Delhi?) or filming popular movies at such locations (like The Beach from TFA).

<comment><USER3> Please do not do #2.

Rather, unknown destinations need to remain unknown. (by this, I mean secret trails, waterfalls, beaches, etc). I think locals should take steps to protect them, including removing trail markers and trash, and refusing to talk about them. Erase trip reports from the internet, and actively fight to keep them secret and protected. Problem is, any possible "cool thing" is economically exploitable--and the economy absolutely _will_ exploit it in the end.

For #1, you realize that the same problem applies right? Economic incentives are all completely against this.

<comment><USER4> Security through obscurity, feels like it has been tried before...

<comment><USER5> In this very case that might be enough to delay damage a bit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Some of them told us they had come to Thailand just to visit Maya Bay and > did not realise it was closed.

There are 100 reasons to visit Thailand, and this is a shitty one. It's a nice beach, but there's plenty of nicer ones not even that far away from it

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm on the neighbouring island, Koh Lanta and there is a genuine, positive local push for better ecological policies. The country reached a tipping point with the Maya Bay incident and there's a realisation now that the country will head to financial disaster if they don't keep their prized assets safe.

<comment><USER8> My mother stopped by Maya bay yesterday on her boat, and had this to say:

——

I was there yesterday, and was devastated to see that the new rules re beach/boat access are being broken. Several longtails/speedboats had tied to the buoyed demarcation line... which has been moved closer to the beach btw, and were inside the exclusion zone. Also, tour boats that were on mooring balls were belching filthy diesel exhaust fumes, leaving an oily film floating on the water. Add to that the plastic debris floating around, and it's as disappointing as it has been for the 8 years I've known it. 2 boats actually landed on the beach, with the passengers walking around on the sand/in the water. Where were the rangers? Their boat was there, but not a ranger to be seen. They're usually very quick to appear, to ask for the National Park payment. I'm happy to pay, although I have questioned before why the rubbish is in overflowing sacks on the small adjoining beach on Maya Bay. I think this is just a PR stunt, not a real effort. Come on Phuket/Krabi, you could do so much better.

——

So, the ground truth seems to be that this is little more than a PR effort. For my part, I've seen the rangers just burning and/or just heaping up trash a few meters inland from the beach on multiple "pristine" islands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> All people want to do is go there to take selfies because there isn't enough beach or time to relax and enjoy... so, why can't we make non-natural things more interesting, and make nature super uncool so that people avoid it? a man can dream.

I'm glad they were able to nurse the coral back in a decade, but it just seems cynical to invest so much into 300 feet of beach and the comodifiy it. But if that is the only way to preserve it... It's like the hunter paradox: they claim hunting funds conservation. Or like the clearing the forest to keep it from burning paradox. Which forest rangers support. Maybe this is what sustainability looks like: having to just clean up after shitty humans day in, day out.

Did anyone else find the UI scroll reveals incredibly annoying?

<comment><USER10> >value instanceof LokationsRessourceGruppe

I actually liked the implementation in this case. Felt a bit more interactive.

<comment><USER11> Same here. I think most of it is that I've gotten somewhat used to the weird reveals and stuff- it's more of a tool than anything to me now, and this one was well done, as was the Reuters article [0] that introduced me to it.

[0][https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa- spyi...](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spying- raven/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was in Thailand last November and I spent some days in Krabi. It's so overly touristic that in most "paradisiac" beaches you cannot even take a decent nap with all the noisy long-tail boats going back and forth. Even though I contributed for the overexploration, I wasn't ready for this. I wouldn't be surprised if they start restricting access to other places like Railay.

<comment><USER13> How was Ao Nang? Is it bearable? (last time I went was 5 years ago).

<comment><USER12> I stayed a few nights in Ao Nang and even though is quite packed you can still find places to eat without reserving beforehand. I used it more as a base to visit the surroundings, as the beach there doesn't look that inviting with all the boats and the occasional sewer. I was expecting it to be more "Thai", instead as I walked down the street I heard the same radio hits I hear in Europe. But that's just my expectations hitting the globalization wall. On a positive note I really liked northern Thailand, the days I spent in Chiang Mai were definitely the best days of the trip.

<comment><USER14> I was shocked when I got a Thai massage there some years back and the woman asked me where I was from. 'Germany.' 'And you speak ENGLISH?!?!' That was very telling about the kind of people they usually get I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Those sharks look like the perfect deterrence against anyone who tries to sneak inside by swimming underneath the demarcation line. Good job, nature! :)

<comment><USER16> Sadly (in this case) blacktip reef sharks are "Timid and skittish, the blacktip reef shark is difficult to approach and seldom poses a danger to humans unless roused by food."[1]. Happily that means you can swim near them safely, they hang out in Ao Leuk (I think?) on Koh Tao as well.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacktip_reef_shark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacktip_reef_shark)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a huge irony in seeing a Hollywood movie about a deserted, tourist free beach. Then booking a package holiday to it, expecting the same, and dropping your crap on the beach anyway. Still, everywhere will be the same soon at this rate. Ruined.

I'm glad I experienced a few locations before they became commercialised and before I stopped flying.

<comment><USER18> Honestly it's completely understandable to be upset at large numbers of tourists (particularly if they do things like drop litter) but I can't help feeling this comment is lacking a little bit of self awareness

<comment><USER17> Not sure I see what you're getting at. I'm old enough that many places that are now heaving major destinations, with extensive damage, weren't terribly commercialised or even especially popular.

If I wanted an isolated, pristine beach I wouldn't pick one made globally famous. I'd actively avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I went all around there in 2005 and it was incredible. Especially the Krabi region and the nearby island (Koh Poda).

I resisted Krabi again 10 years later and was horrified. There was a McDonalds and Starbucks etc. Koh Poda was full of boats, dirty water and worst of all a literal rubbish dump of plastic further into the island. The Thais do not take care of the wonderful land they have.

<comment><USER5> The Thais or the masses of careless tourists?

<comment><USER19> I have never been there, but in my general experience, locals set the expectation for what happens with trash and nature. If there is no local interest in preserving nature, tourists won't take care of it either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That web page hijacking the scrollbar is clever but frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER21> When I was there (2008) we could still visit (we didn't) the locals told us that it was a complete mess before but the tsunami actually cleaned the whole bay. In 2008 it was supposedly quite clean and nice there.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hearing about the litter makes me aggressive, you go there to enjoy the beauty of nature and then you decide to make it a bit uglier and poison the environment?

<comment><USER3> Anger is just a stage. Carry some small trash bags and pick up a little. Hand some bags out. If you see someone litter, go pick it up _yourself_ and then look them right in their face and _smile_ , say nothing and move on.

I've found that people are reluctant to litter on a clean beach yet unthinkingly do it if the beach is already visibly trashy. So the strategy is to get a beach clean enough where it is obviously not OK to trash it. People will get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Having visited just the year before they closed it - I felt like the beach itself was pretty clean. The woods right at the beach line though had some tourist trash. Apparently the worry is the coral is mostly dead and it will imbalance the rest of the ecology. It was beautiful when I visited and definitely far from being "trashed". I don't know a lot about ecological conservation, so maybe there's lots of signs I didn't notice!

<comment><USER4> Coral everywhere is dead or dying, I have not visited a site in the past ten years that does not have an alarming amount of that going. Something I never, ever would have believed as a youth really is going to happen, coral will be gone in our lifetimes :-|

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thailand tourist places are full of mafia-style price controls (in phuket atleast it was mafia, so it's still in pattaya). They should be turned off and just suck up and go to do real work. All the moneys (which is big!) coming to tourist attractions goes to few large pockets, and not giving dam about the environment, education, health-care, people and so on.

</comment><comment><USER25> I went there in Sept 2017 and there were only a handful of people on the beach. I'm not sure how you restrict these places when you can pay a sailor $50 USD to take you to all of these places for the day. Overcrowded beaches are not a bad thing just have some sort of maintenance budget

</comment><comment><USER26> Good article on this subject (the example is Tulum, Mexico)

[https://www.thecut.com/2019/02/who-killed- tulum.html](https://www.thecut.com/2019/02/who-killed-tulum.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> Waiting for thisbeachdoesnotexist.com</comment>