Surface Pro lands at Microsoft Store - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57567375-92/surface-pro-lands-at-microsoft-store/

<comment><USER2> I was going to get a Surface Pro until the reports of 4-5 hours battery life, instead I got a Samsung ATIV Atom tablet. I've had it for a couple of weeks now and I'm really liking Windows 8 in this form factor. I find myself switching to whatever form of input is best suited for the task I am performing, be it stylus, touch, mouse, virtual or physical keyboard.

I've had a few different Android tablets, going all the way back to the Gingerbread days and I currently have a tablet running Jelly Bean and I'm not looking back, the only thing I miss is my Unified Remote app.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure I'll be buying one in the near future, regardless of the battery. I have a full featured Windows 8 laptop (Samsung Chronos 7) for most of my high end uses, and the ability for the Pro to literally double as a Cintaq tablet is phenominal.

Granted, if the device suceeds, you can rest assured next year they'll have somehow magically doubled battery life and release a new model.</comment></comment>


VISC CPU 'Virtual Core' Design Emerges - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192858-visc-cpu-virtual-core-design-emerges-could-this-be-the-conceptual-breakthrough-weve-been-waiting-for

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8502256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8502256)

</comment><comment><USER3> "the company does not disclose if these results are for an entire run of SPEC 2006 or if they chose specific benchmarks."

Fuck, my bullshit meter just EXPLODED.

<comment><USER4> Not exactly uncommon

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Slides: [http://www.softmachines.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/Soft-...](http://www.softmachines.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/Soft-Machines-VISCtm-Architecture-Tech-Briefing- vF.pdf)</comment>


Himawari-8 is now operational over the western Pacific - <AUTHOR> http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/archives/18804 <comment><AUTHOR> Real-time image from Himawari-8: [http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/mscweb/data/himawari/sat_img.php?ar...](http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/mscweb/data/himawari/sat_img.php?area=fd_)</comment>


Shame that Microsoft and Tech Press doesn't know what a "sale" is - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2010/12/21/shame-that-microsoft-and-tech-press-doesnt-know-what-a-sale-is/ <comment><USER2> For them it may be considered a sale. It means the phone maker paid them for the WP7 license and, therefore, what happens to the phone is no longer Microsoft's problem.</comment>


How To Disrupt Technical Recruiting - Hire an Agent - <AUTHOR> http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2012/09/how-to-disrupt-technical-recruiting.html <comment><USER2> We're doing this at 10x Management (<http://10xmanagement.com>).

Long story short, I was freelancing as a full-stack (Rails) dev, and also playing in a couple bands. Through the music scene, I met some music managers in NYC. They've been in the biz for 15-20 years (managed John Mayer, Martin Sexton, Bruce Springsteen's tours, etc.). In talking, we realized what they do for music clients would be really useful for me as a freelance programmer.

Basically, a manager's job is to take care of the business side, so the talent can focus on what they're good at. So, in a strange experiment, I hired them to act as my agent for programming gigs. They started taking care of all my negotiation, invoicing, collection, scheduling, etc.

It worked out really well for both of us, so we partnered up and started 10x Management, to do this for more people. Essentially, we're bringing the concept of a talent agency to the tech world.

Unlike the OP, we focus only on freelance work (not full-time placement), but so far the model is working very well for all parties. The talent is happy (we've been described as a "virtualization layer" for freelancers), the customers are happy (we represent the best), and we're happy (it's very gratifying to help people with their long-term career and lifestyle goals).

We're growing fast, so if you're interested in representation, or you need a badass freelancer (web/mobile dev, design, data science/viz, PM, etc.), or you just want to learn more, get in touch via our website or hit me up at email@example.com.

<comment><USER3> OP here, and that's great to hear. My idea would be to represent careers regardless of the contract or perm hire scenario. Recruiters tend to handle a lot of that stuff for independents anyway (depending on corporation status and such). In past jobs I've had consultants work for me for a few years and we managed them from gig to gig, similar to what you describe it seems. Good luck to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, I found my first development job by attending one of this guy's JUG meetings in the suburbs of Philly, and speaking to a CIO who was attending. My understanding then was that Fecak was a recruiter and the JUG meetings were a way for him to get face time with developers and build credibility in the community. Can't really fault him for being opportunistic. At least he is TRYING to make the experience less painful for devs. The recruiter industry is in MAJOR need of a rehaul. I haven't posted a resume anywhere in over 3 years and I still get 5-10 daily junk calls. There have been times when I avoided departure from unfulfilling situations JUST because I dreaded the recruitment process. Fecak's idea is innovative but I think there are a lot of questions around how it would work. What's a reasonable fee? Will there be conflict of interest issues if he is submitting multiple candidates? etc?

<comment><USER3> I guess I know you? Glad to hear you found work through the JUG. I obviously am a recruiter and still lead that JUG, and it is a way to build credibility. You could call it opportunistic, or you could say it is a way of giving back to the community (if I were a true opportunist, I'd blast my open jobs to the group, talk about them at every meeting, etc - and I don't do that). But I could see how some might get that idea. It certainly hasn't hurt my business, but at this point I don't need the extra edge of credibility that JUG provides.

What is a reasonable fee? Good question! Perm placement fees range from 15-25% of base salary, but I wouldn't expect any engineer to pay that much. The key to think about is that even though an agent is getting some fee from the job seeker, there is nothing to prevent him/her from taking a few bucks from the hiring company as well - so in theory an agent could charge a low fee to the job seeker and a reduced fee to the hiring company, which would seem like a win?

Conflict of interest is something I also hadn't though about (glad a dialogue is starting and I don't pretend to have all the answers). I would think that in representing candidates (and not companies) there wouldn't be too many conflict situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI. In most European countries (and presumably elsewhere) the agency model is tightly regulated because the employee pays model (i.e retainer fees) is ripe for exploitation of people desperate for jobs.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its an interesting concept. But to be viable you really need a 'job lifetime' that is measured in months rather than years. If you work somewhere for 5 years what is the value add? And given that the typical ISO vesting period is 4 years ...

The stock model might be an interesting compromise. So represent me and I grant you x% of my ISO on a per-annum basis. So lets say you agree to a 10% take, and I go to startup X and get 100,000 share option. (vesting at 25,000 shares a year) so on my anniversary date I exercise and transfer to you 2,500 shares in the startup I'm working at. Could be hugely profitable, and a waste of time, but the risk is shared. Can't eat shares though, so there has to be a model for some cash.

What I like here though is exploring other models.

<comment><USER7> Ok, but don't pre-IPO stock contracts usually prevent sales of stocks outside the company?

<comment><USER3> True. Could be negotiated with company during the process perhaps. I know recruiters who have been given stock in lieu of fee by firms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The idea of an agent sounds fantastically attractive to me for the next time I'm job hunting and looking to break in to a new area/field/whatever. It's work, and it's not the sort I enjoy, so yeah, I'd be willing to pay for it.

Also, the idea of having an agent to negotiate salary, at least initially, sounds great since the agent will presumably have a lot more knowledge of other salaries in the area or even at that company and the information situation would be more balanced.

<comment><USER3> I'm the author, look me up when you're ready to talk.

<comment><USER9> You should put your e-mail address in your profile on HN. The e-mail field isn't publicly visible.

<comment><USER3> Done, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having lived with someone who worked in fashion for a long time, I can't agree more that the agency models work extremely well.

The agent would make sure finances are handled well, PR is constant and appropriate, negotiations are taken care of and much more.

In general when I deal with recruiters I even tend to treat them as an agent: I flat-out refuse to accept anything over 10% on top of my rate.

For a consultancy company my logic is the same: I find out what is being charged for me, deduct my salary + costs from it and evaluate whether the services that my company is providing me are worth the amount of money they are earning on me.

At some stages in your career they are but often times they aren't. At those times I would love to just get an agent I can trust, that I can work well with and that will get me the jobs I want.

<comment><USER3> Author here. There are quite a few services an agent could provide, and you mention a few. Handling incoming inquiries (forward LinkedIn requests from recruiters to your agent), help maintain and build your brand (speaking engagements, set up or recommend networking opportunities), negotiate raises when you are working and salaries for new jobs, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate to say it but the guy who wrote this article is nothing more than an opportunist himself.

If someone ever came to me looking for a job who had an agent, I wouldn't even bother. Just like I don't bother with 3rd party recruiters.

<comment><USER12> I read this with the same mentality. What kind of bubble are we in where programmers require agents along the lines of professional athletes and Hollywood stars?

It makes a bit of sense in the context of the latter two; the contracts are worth so much money that an agent can make a living off of a small percentage of the take. But if you're a programmer who can't handle your own finances, PR or salary negotiation, how well-rounded are you?

<comment><USER13> I don't love negotiating, I don't do it as a job so I'm not as good at it as I am at developing. If this guy can get me an extra $X per year doing a job I'd like anyway it's only sensible that paying up to $(X - 1) is a win, and that's disregarding time saved.

<comment><USER3> Well put. I actually thought about proposing a model where a candidate gives me a target salary, and agent bonus could be 1/2 difference between target and actual salary (where salary is above target obviously).

<comment><USER13> That would be a neat experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We had this discussion in the IRC channel a few weeks ago. It's largely unsustainable for the agents.

Agents work in Hollywood because if you're doing smaller work (commercials, etc) you might get 3, 4, 5 jobs a month. If you're doing movies, you might still do 2 or 3 or even 4 movies a year.

The average developer is at 1 job a year (or longer), or maybe 2 over the course of a year.

Additionally, all the Possible Solutions to Problems identified in this post are already being solved by GOOD recruiters. And many of the solutions proposed that are "opt in" are what GOOD recruiters already do... the problem with the industry isn't recruiters. It's BAD recruiters.

<comment><USER3> Author of the article here, and I agree that the problem is the bad recruiters. My business is doing quite well, but I could see where job seekers question the motives of recruiters mainly because of the fact that recruiters get paid by companies, and only get paid (generally speaking) when they take the job. So recruiters have the short-term incentive of convincing candidates to take jobs, and not necessarily to do what is right for their career.

Long term requires recruiters to be fully ethical or lose credibility. If I send you for an interview and it isn't the best fit for you, I'm financially motivated to try and get you to take it anyway. As your agent, I would tell you not to since you are my client.

The agent model would be advantageous to the tech community, but obviously more costly to them. Whether or not it would be sustainable is something I would be curious to find out. I'm not sure if an agent would only get paid during a job search, as there could be advising going on during your entire career that has some value (how to negotiate a raise for yourself, what is hot/not, trends) - some of this engineers are good at, and some they are not.

<comment><USER14> "Long term requires recruiters to be fully ethical or lose credibility. If I send you for an interview and it isn't the best fit for you, I'm financially motivated to try and get you to take it anyway. As your agent, I would tell you not to since you are my client."

That doesn't make any sense. My agent is still financially motivated to get me to take the job.

<comment><USER3> That depends on how you pay your agent. If you pay an agent an annual fee not tied to a job change or activity, that agent would not be financially motivated to have you move. I think the model works best with a long term relationship with annual fees instead of just some tax when you change jobs. There is quite a bit of guidance in between job changes that could be of great value in getting to that next job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the biggest issues I see from the developers side is that "tech recruiters" normally do not know much about technology.

The second issue is that most of the time I'm approached it feels like a template where my name was has replaced {{name}}. For instance, take DHH for example: <https://gist.github.com/1285068>

Now on to your question, would I pay for an agent. Sure, but they'd have to be like Ari from Entourage. If I suck, tell me. If I don't, pay me.

Anyways, my $0.02.

<comment><USER3> Author here, I appreciate your $0.02. It's more important for tech recruiters to know about what candidates are and are not qualified for than to know actual code and such, but we've all heard stories about back-end and server side folks getting submitted for UI design jobs. I think an agent would want to be sure to know enough not to represent his clients to jobs that aren't a fit, but also needs to know about trends and such that could be valuable career advice going forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How about we put a 1-900 number on the resumes? That way if a recruiter wants to get in touch, he/she has to pay a premium.

<comment><USER3> Author here. You think paying a buck or two will stop a recruiter that could make 20K? Small investment if the resume looks strong!

<comment><USER16> I dont mind talking to a recruiter if he/she is paying me $10/min to talk to me. In fact I can talk all day :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a contractor and have to deal with recruiters constantly, i've been saying for years it should be an agent style model and would even be willing to set this up myself for the UK contracting market as i know a LOT of contract developers and know how to find more.

The problem is, i've no idea how to go and find work for them, if i did, i wouldnt use recruiters myself. I'm not comfortable cold calling companies and i think thats a poor way to do things and most contract positions are only advertised online by other recruiters.

If i knew any UK companies that were looking for a contractor, i could absolutely place a highly qualified one in their company, but how do i find those companies?

<comment><USER3> Author here. In your case, probably through the network of your former clients and the networks of your candidate pool. It's tough to do without some cold calling, but when recruiters cold call companies they are saying 'I have a candidate, will you pay me to hire him/her?' whereas an agent would be saying 'I have a candidate that is interested in working for you, and it is free to hire him/her' (or close to free). It's a big difference - you are offering the same service as recruiters offered to companies, but you're giving it to them for free.

If you are making cold calls to tech companies starved for talent, telling them you can solve their problem for free (that they have been paying a LOT for historically), the cold calls will get pretty warm pretty quickly.

<comment><USER17> Thats good advice, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like the idea of an agent, mostly because I recently went through the finding jobs thing and its not fun. Its worth pointing out that you could probably convince a new employer to tack on to your signing bonus a significant percentage of what a recruiter would have cost to them. That would keep the cost of an agent fairly negligible.

On the other hand, what's an employer to think when they see that you have an agent? I would see it as a sign of flakiness. If you need an agent, you must be jumping around jobs a lot. That is not a good impression to make.

<comment><USER3> Author here. Good points you made here. As I mentioned before, I can't see there being any reason why the agent couldn't charge at least some fee to the company as well (which would be greatly reduced from what recruiters are charging now, so their cost to hire would be lower).

I'm not sure what a company would think. If it were to become more common, it would just be a way of doing business. I negotiate most of my candidates' salaries and packages now anyway, so having an intermediary would not be a huge leap for most companies that already use recruiters. The leap would be the term 'agent', but I think companies would respect the fact that someone takes their career seriously to have an advisor. We'll see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would love to have an agent - I am not very good at selling myself, and it could free up time and attention for other things. If you can help me come out ahead financially (while giving me at least comparably interesting things to work on) I'd happily part with a good chunk of that monetary difference in outcomes. In principle. In practice, figuring out what that difference is seems nontrivial, but I'm listening.

<comment><USER3> Author here, happy to have direct dialogue with you as well as others that have contacted me. I'm easy to find if you'd like to talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would absolutely hire an agent. I have a day job, but freelance on the side. I'd estimate I have about 20 hours a week of available time that I can use for freelance coding.

I would LOVE to hire someone to help me keep those hours full. I have a day job that pays me well, so I can afford to be generous if it means I never have to wonder "Barton, are you just being strung along by this lead?"

<comment><USER3> Author here. If you want to discuss, I'm easy to find.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a developer, I can't help but see 3rd party recruiters as parasites feeding off of my hard work and expertise. I see any money a hiring company pays to a recruiter as money that could have been in my pocket via a signing bonus or a higher starting salary if there was no recruiter involved.

I don't see anyone in this discussion questioning whether we, as job seekers, even need 3rd party recruiters. In my experience, we don't. Throughout my 16 year career as a developer, I've only been placed by a 3rd party recruiter once. That was way back when I only had a year of experience. I haven't needed 3rd party recruiters for the last 15 years.

If you want to disrupt technical recruiting, don't send recruiters your resume, and don't work with them when they contact you. Instead, do some leg work when you're looking for a new job.

Browse the job boards looking for positions posted directly by the company with the opening. Contact people in your network about open positions where they work. Find tech companies local to you, and look on their job boards. (This is how I found my current position, and it is the best job I've had yet.) If a recruiter contacts you about an interesting position and tells you the name of the company that's hiring, bypass them and submit your resume to the company directly.

Bottom line, they can't make money without us. We can make money without them.

<comment><USER3> That may be oversimplifying things just a bit, but if you are good at everything a recruiter does perhaps you don't need one. Some people do their own taxes, some don't.

What if I were to tell you that, in negotiating a job 15 years ago, you left say 10% of your salary on the table (you took 60 but were worth 66). And every raise you have received since was based on that number in some way, resulting in compounded earnings loss for your career in the tens of thousands? You don't have to believe this scenario is possible, but I talk to people every day who are substantially underpaid for what they do, sometimes for years. If they had an agent who knew their value, negotiating on their behalf, with inside information on what that company pays other people in the same job, they wouldn't have lost tens of thousands over the span of a career.

Your point about recruiters taking money out of your pocket is interesting. You would assume then, if this were true, that companies that use recruiters pay their engineers less? Or perhaps don't pay for hiring internal recruiters? I've never seen any evidence of companies that use recruiters paying less to engineers - have you?

I guess the alternate theory is that firms that use agency recruiters do so not at the expense of their own employees' salaries, but simply because they have the luxury (because they can afford both a recruiter fee AND to pay employees a fair market rate). If you believe this alternative to be true, is it a coincidence that firms using recruiters are in a better financial situation than those that can't afford it?

Just playing devil's advocate here. Recruiters often have access to jobs hat may not be in your network. Again, if you don't need them, don't talk to them and perhaps miss out on some jobs you didn't know about.

And I would warn you about bypassing the recruiter after he/she told you about a position. If a recruiter finds out about that (in small companies it is easy to find out), the recruiter could very easily call the company to claim they created your interest in the opportunity yet you applied directly, making you look a bit dishonest to a potential employer and possibly costing you the job. Recruiters have been paid by firms without sending resumes/referrals directly in situations just like the one you mention.

Firms that use agencies value the service and are willing to pay for it. I do list many of my client names on my jobs page, running the risk of people doing exactly what you describe. My model is different (primary services paid up front, usually exclusive searches), so I'm willing to take that risk to help publicize my clients.

My service is such that job seekers come to me, even when they already know who my clients are in advance in many cases, because they understand that I know how to prep them to be successful in interviews, which hiring manager will be good or bad cop, and how to negotiate at the end. I don't care how well networked most job seekers are, info on a wide range of companies only comes with experience with many.

Ever been turned down for a job you really wanted? A recruiter could have helped prep you with all that info you didn't have (you didn't know that white board exercise was coming, and you panicked). Even if you failed a first interview, a recruiter may have been able to revive your candidacy by advocating for you (references are good when that happens). I've done that as well for candidates, where companies get the wrong first impression, and I've had companies and candidates thank me years later.

Thanks for the comments and I'm glad to see dialogue with differing opinions.

<comment><USER20> I would assume that a company that has the money to pay a fair market wage and hire an agency recruiter would be able to give me that money as a signing bonus if they hadn't already spend it on a recruiter.

Also, if I was an employer using your agency, I'd fire your firm if I found out you were telling candidates what was going to be asked in a technical interview. You're doing them a disservice by giving out this information. At one of my jobs where I was interviewing new candidates, we had to make several tests with different questions on each one because recruiters were telling candidates what questions we asked on the test. This became painfully obvious when candidates could answer test questions perfectly, but fell short on other very basic technical question we asked. The recruiter cost us money since we had to dedicate team member time to writing multiple tests instead of working on developing our product.

This brings up another problem with agency recruiting. You can't represent both parties without there being an inherent conflict of interest. At the end of the day, most agency recruiters will misrepresent one party or the other to make a deal and get paid. This of course leads into your article's suggestion that job seekers have an agent who only represents them, but that begs the question whether any sort of middleman is necessary in this sort of transaction. Other industries manage to hire people without using an agency, but recruiting is accepted as a necessity, almost without question, in the IT industry.

Perhaps I am an anomaly because I can, as you said, "do my own taxes." To be fair, I know there are agency recruiters out there who really do manage to add value to both side of the equation. However, in my experience, they are the exception rather than the rule.

p.s. Regarding bypassing a recruiter, I only do this when the company has directly posted the listing themselves in addition to using a recruiter. If I don't see the position posted elsewhere, I assume they are looking exclusively through the recruiter, and I don't bother pursuing the position unless it's exactly the position I've been dreaming about. At that point I'll grudgingly work with the recruiter.

<comment><USER3> I would fire me too if I were telling people specific questions in an interview. I tell things like to expect a whiteboard exercise, even if I'm not sure it will be given. I would never give a interview question or something meant to surprise.

Regarding your thoughts on representing both parties, that is exactly what I'm saying. It would seem more 'just' to represent the candidate. I'd like to see that model - companies need the referrals and candidate flow, but they can represent themselves without much risk. Candidates mistrust recruiters because recruiters are given the wrong incentives (representing both sides in a deal, but only one pays?).

No explanation needed on bypassing recruiters, that is a decision job seekers are free to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A follow-up, let's keep the dialogue going <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4575909></comment>


Texas Instruments Cuts 1,700 Jobs and Winds Down Tablet Chips - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/11/14/business/14reuters-texasinstruments-jobcuts.html <comment><USER2> They are not shutting it down, they are refocusing on embedded. If you remember, that is the market the OMAP processors started in long ago.

<comment><USER3> According the the article, TI is "eliminating 1,700 jobs in their mobile processor business unit" and will "stop developing new chips." You call it refocusing, I call it to terminate with extreme prejudice. Either way, it's the end of the line for OMAP CPUs.

<comment><USER4> OMAP is not just mobile processors. "...TI wants to sell its OMAP processors in markets that require less investment, like industrial clients like carmakers." So no, they are not shutting down OMAP, they are shutting down the OMAP lines that feed consumer electronics.

<comment><USER5> Their future hardware IP design work is effective(ly) dead. Embedded on OMAP has always been a derivative of the R&D invested for the mobile market. You can also look at the Sitara products which are respins of OMAP IPs with a few needs for embedded.

<comment><USER6> that makes sense, because almost no application of OMAP really used all it's features (notably embedded DSP core), only significant consumer/mobile application I can think of are Nokia's phones based on Symbian EKA2, which are effectively dead now (and OMAP combined with EKA2 was significant competitive advantage for Nokia when they wasn't, as that enabled them to replace their ARM-based custom SoC with OMAP and build smartphones essentially derived from feature phone hardware without dedicated baseband CPU). Before that (early 00's) there wasn't any other real SoC solution, as most other mobile processors required some external (mobile-specific: touch screen, power management...) support circuitry and OMAP previosly filled this niche, now it seems that there isn't any real makret for OMAP SoC's as nobody is interested in building anything that leverages OMAP architecture, because random mobile SoCs paired with some generic baseband are cheaper and consumers does not seem to care about battery life.

It does not make sense to develop hardware which nobody really uses and try to be price competitive with cheaper designs that are adequate for most customers.

<comment><USER7> _that makes sense, because almost no application of OMAP really used all it's features..._

I'm not sure why you say that. All accelerated video encoding/decoding is done on the DSP. This is in contrast to the Freescale i.MX5 series, for example, which has dedicated hardware blocks for this.

<comment><USER8> The OMAP4 has dedicated video encode decode, dedicated "still image" processor, _and_ a general purpose DSP (which isn't used for the most part and would be a lot slower than the dedicated hardware units).

EDIT: The thing though is that its footprint is so small that it doesn't matter much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rumor mill [1] claims TI's trying to make the division more attractive to sell off to Amazon - so they can make their own chips to compete with Apple.

[1] <http://deepchip.com/items/0514-03.html>

<comment><USER10> Why would Amazon buy a division that has no employees?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow. That falls directly to NVIDIA and Qualcomm and... are there any other major players anymore, actually?

<comment><USER12> Samsung. Exynos 5 is powering the Chromebook and Nexus 10 after all. Allwinner is popular among the low end Chinese stuff, so there's always the chance that they'll expand into higher end SoCs.

AFAIK Freescale is taking the same path as TI, canceling i.MX7 and exiting application SoCs. ST-Ericsson has a nice A15/Rogue SoC in development, but it remains to be seen if it'll be popular among smartphones/tablets.

<comment><USER13> Do you have any hard news links discussing Freescale's roadmap? I'm about to commit a design to i.MX6 and if that's the end of the road, that's useful news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Garmin uses lot of OMAP chipsets

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know if this affects TI's Davinci line?

<comment><USER16> Not directly. Davinci is a different business unit than OMAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me a story of IBM's PC division..)</comment>


Cosine: The exact moment Jeff Bezos decided not to become a physicist - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnV6EM-wzY <comment><AUTHOR> See also:

> Wow! Jeff is talking about me. Amazingly he remembers interacting with me 34 > years ago. What a memory! Also no Amazon if it weren't for this, since he > decided not to pursue physics!

[https://twitter.com/yasantha62/status/1042052665893511168](https://twitter.com/yasantha62/status/1042052665893511168)</comment>


Ask HN: Would buying FB stock right now be a great idea or horrible idea? - <AUTHOR> Considering it. I don't like FB or what they stand for but I think I could buy low and sell high. I know a vocal minority are upset right now but most people don't care enough to delete their accounts or do care but are too addicted to delete their accounts. The government could regulate the industry but I think this is wishful thinking considering this is one of the largest corporations on the planet and is entrenched into the fabric of civilization and world history at this point. <comment><USER2> This is not investment advice.

It would be a bad idea, but that has nothing to do with Facebook specifically or recent news. Read a dozen of Matt Levine's columns, starting with [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-09/retail- vo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-09/retail-voters-and- insider-traders).

The gist: in 2018, an individual isn't going to have any insight about a security that isn't already priced in. Sorry. If this is a hobby, like buying a few lotto tickets, great, do whatever. Your question sounds like you're seeking an investment thesis, though. If so, go with "I don't know anything about any company that isn't priced in, so I should own a diversified basket (which generally means mutual funds or ETFs, not specific equities other than maybe for tax-loss harvesting) that is essentially the entire market."

<comment><USER3> Yes and no.

Market prices of securities these days are short term prices, especially with the amount of automated trading and day trading going on. The people with the funds to engage in arbitrage strategies are hoping to make a buck somewhere in the next second to next month.

A long term (as in, decades-long outlook) buy-and-hold investor can still get deals when a stock hits a local low. But the risk is different: in 20 years, will Facebook be more like Microsoft is now? Or more like Enron?

If you're confident it'll continue to grow steadily once the media cycle is over, buying while it's facing a short term scandal could be smart. Or the scandal could turn out to be more than a hiccup, and they could be out of business in a few years. Or they could just slowly fade to nothing over time.

I strongly agree that a diversified portfolio is a better long term strategy than picking stocks. However, if you're already doing that and have a bit of money left over that you're not afraid to lose, there's no harm in placing a few more-specific bets. You just have to remember to treat them like bets and have enough self control not to gamble with the rent money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FB is still very much in the news, and could drop more before it goes up. More bad news will emerge as legislative bodies around the world start issuing subpoenas for FB to testify about privacy violations, political meddling, etc. I don't think there's an end in sight yet, since politicians can still get publicity from beating up FB in the name of protecting privacy and democracy. Journalists can also score points by digging up new dirt about FB (especially if it's linked to politicians), and they'll continue to do so for a while.

Also, all the major stock indexes plummeted this week, and if they continue to go down, FB will go down along with them.</comment>


Removing Python 2.x support from Django for version 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/django/django/pull/7867/files <comment><USER2> The next release, Django 1.11, will be a long-term support release, and the one after that, Django 2.0, will no longer support Python 2.

[https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jun/25/roadmap/](https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jun/25/roadmap/)

I've grow to highly respect the Django project for its good documentation, its healthy consideration for backwards compatibility, security, steady improvements and all round goodness.

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, I have the exact opposite view on Django.

I hate their API and overall architecture, which I find to be the result of glueing features on top of features for many years. The internal code also is just like that: looks like every single method is riddled with out-of-band conditionals, which is the result of a community that prefers to hack things to work, instead of rethinking/refactoring.

<comment><USER4> Last time I looked a lot of the insides were terrible.

A project I was really impressed with the internals of is Celery (was expecting the worst having seen Django).

<comment><USER5> > Last time I looked a lot of the insides were terrible.

But is it really? Speaking from personal experience it is easy to compare project with large featureset (and one with heritage) to one with scope on doing single thing and come with conclusion that smaller, focused codebase is more consistent and better implemented. At the end of day what matters is if those terriblenesses actually bite back:

\- is this code changed frequently? Does it need to be changed frequently? \- is it written in a way that that makes fixes and improvement unbearably costful? \- is it written in way that allows it to be put apart? How costful are those individual parts to improve?

Django is large codebase that is worked on by different people and when time permits this, which means different parts differ in their age, practices, and ultimately, quiality. This eventually results in codebase that may give appearance of being messy.

Joel Spolsky explains this nicely in his article about old and large codebases appearing as hairy and messy to developers:

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you- should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never- do-part-i/)

Especially the part that follows below quote is valuable wisdom to keep in mind:

> When programmers say that their code is a holy mess (as they always do), > there are three kinds of things that are wrong with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This call has been made a while back, and it makes perfect sense. Python 2 is slowly being EOL'd and if you're starting a brand new Django project there's no reason on earth you should choose Python 2 anymore.

Sure legacy projects still need support and for that they get the 1.11 LTS, but otherwise it's really time to move on.

<comment><USER7> Easy to say when you don't depend on C extensions only compatible with 2.7.

<comment><USER8> How hard it is to port a C extension? I don't really know the APIs, but is it impossible to transform by a script?

<comment><USER9> Not hard. You can support 3 and 2 in the same file without much hassle.

Practical example: [https://github.com/zopefoundation/BTrees/blob/master/BTrees/...](https://github.com/zopefoundation/BTrees/blob/master/BTrees/_compat.h) [https://github.com/zopefoundation/BTrees/blob/master/BTrees/...](https://github.com/zopefoundation/BTrees/blob/master/BTrees/BTreeModuleTemplate.c)

There are a couple #if PY3K, but not much, really.

I ported a bunch of extension modules, total a couple thousand LOC, and it was pretty much a matter of reading the docs (see guide at [https://docs.python.org/3/howto/cporting.html](https://docs.python.org/3/howto/cporting.html) ) and adding a few #ifs. Total time maybe an hour or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm glad they are making a clean break from Python 2 and I hope this pushes other projects in the ecosystem to fix those remaining libraries without Python 3 support. It does get a bit frustrating when things break between Django releases, but they have a good system of deprecating things for a couple of releases beforehand. And at the end of the day, Django is for people who want to build websites, not life support machines... and I think they're doing a decent job of striking a balance between breakage and stagnation.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have a Python 2.7 project that has been running smoothly for many years now and I'm having trouble finding a reason to upgrade to Python 3. The project uses the unicode type to represent all strings, and encodes/decodes as necessary (usually to UTF-8) when doing I/O. I haven't really had any of the Unicode handling problems that people seem to complain about in Python 2.

Can someone explain what benefit I would actually gain from upgrading to Python 3 if I'm already "handling Unicode properly" in Python 2? So far it still seems rather minimal at the moment, and the risk of breaking something during the upgrade process (either in my own code or in one of my dependencies) doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

<comment><USER12> You gain access to continued language support in 2020. New features involving strings will have less risk of bugs. The "range" function is more memory efficient. Integer division automatically floors, reducing bug risk. Dictionaries with guaranteed ordering. Thousands separator in string formatting. Bit length on integers. Combinations with replacement on itertools. New, faster I/O library and faster json. Concurrent futures module. Ability to define stable ABI for extensions. New CLI option parsing module. Dictionary-based logging configuration. Index and count on ranges. Barrier synchronization for threads. Faster sorting via internal upgrade to Timsort. Async I/O. Support for spawn and forkserver in multiprocessing. Child context in multuprocessing. Has collision cost reduced. Significantly faster startup. Type hints. Faster directory traversal. Faster regular expression parsing. Faster I/O for bytes. Faster dumps. Reduced method memory usage through better caching. Dramatically less memory usage by random. Faster string manipulation. Faster propert calls. Formatted string literals (interpolated strings). Asynchronous generators. Asynchronous comprehensions.

How much faster might your code run just by upgrading to Python 3? How much memory might you save?

<comment><USER13> > Dictionaries with guaranteed ordering.

I don't think you're suppose to depend on the ordering of dictionaries. It's an implementation detail which might get changed, although it wont actually ever be changed because people will come to depend on it.

<comment><USER12> I'm specifically referring to OrderedDict in this case, which does have guaranteed, insertion-based ordering. It was introduced in 3.1, circa 2009, via PEP 372.

<comment><USER14> [https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#ordereddi...](https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#ordereddict- objects)

> New in version 2.7.

<comment><USER12> That's a good point. I didn't realize that it was also introduced into 2.7 at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good. I've been getting into python a bit because i have an interest in datascience. I'm mostly a Java dev. I have to say the python2/3 divide is a real turn off. Many of the science libs want to use seem to be in 2.7 with no signs of moving.

<comment><USER16> > Many of the science libs want to use seem to be in 2.7 with no signs of > moving

The most important scientific libraries have pledged to drop support before 2020, and are all python3-ready

[http://www.python3statement.org/](http://www.python3statement.org/)

<comment><USER17> Is there any hope of other libraries and OSes doing the same thing?

I used to work on a GUI app in Python. I ported it to Python 3, then switched OSes for various reasons. _5 years on_ , on Ubuntu Xenial (so new I can't even use it in Travis, but that's a separate whine), I install pykdeuic4 and it's using Python 2. So I've basically abandoned that project for 5 years now, because every time I looked at it I thought "surely Python 3 will be here in a few months, I don't want to port backwards to Python 2".

(Serious question: is there a PPA or anything I can use to get these things for Python 3? I need PyQwt as well as PyKDE)

<comment><USER18> Have you tried python3-pykde4? It seems to contain a pykdeuic4.py file.

<comment><USER17> No - but you've set me on the right track, there looks to be a pykdeuic4-3.4 executable (I had assumed if there were anything like that it would be a case of update-alternatives, but apparently not?). Will try that when I get home.

<comment><USER19> In general, I've found that Ubuntu versions of the last 1-2 years support Python 3 fine, you just have to use the "python3-*" packages.

<comment><USER17> Fair enough. E.g. I was assuming the reason PyQwt didn't exist for python3 was because Ubunty hadn't packaged it, but having looked further it seems the library itself is unmaintained.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A whole pile of people complaining about upgrading Django highlights two things to me:

Not enough people are using tests. A decent set of tests make upgrade super easy. The upgrade documentation is decent so you just spend 20 minutes upgrading broken things until it all works again.

People pick the wrong version. I've seen people develop and even deploy on -dev and it makes me cry inside because they'll need to track Django changes in realtime or near enough. Pick an LTS release and you get up to three years on that version with security and data-loss upgrades and no API changes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is anyone going to talk about what this means for Python and Django? I read the first 30-40 comments and they are all about off topic stuff related to Django, but still the core premise is the committed move to Python 3.x going forward.

What do people think of that?! I'm a newer dev and I'd really really love to hear what people think of that and what it means for the future rather than side conversations about how bad their API is, how good it is, how good their Docs are and how bad they are.... Blah blah.

Please!! This community is filled with some of the most brilliant minds and I for one don't want to miss out on this chance to hear what people think of this change.

Please please don't reply that you disagree with my POV. That's irrelevant, but please do if you are interested in the initial topic. I'd be be very excited to hear your thoughts.

So Django moving to Python 3.X Go :)

<comment><USER22> First, this is a good thing for the community. The ecosystem has been pretty well prepared for 3.x adoption for a while, but we just haven't done it. Still, when Django switched its default docs to use 3.x instead of 2.x, it noticeably increased adoption of 3.x. (Source: Kenneth Reitz on "Talk Python to Me" episode #6.) By pushing on with 3.x, Django is doing its part to drag the rest of us forward with it.

Second, this is necessary. Support for Python 2.x is supposed to end in 2020, per Guido's keynote at PyCon 2016, so Django is going to have to get in line in ~3 years one way or the other. A major version increment is a great time to introduce such a breaking change.

So ... "what this means" is that Django is doing what it has to do, which happens to coincide with the interests of the community at large. _shrug_ I'm glad it's happening, but there shouldn't be a whole lot of drama or hand- wringing here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a nice patch [1] to review for Python coders. Seems to me that most incompatibilities are provoked by the unicode transition.

[1] [https://patch- diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/django/django/p...](https://patch- diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/django/django/pull/7867.patch)

</comment><comment><USER23> There are only two possible opinions here:

A) You mostly have Python3 projects: Then you like it because you know more ressources will be spent on your pipeline and having more Py3 packages is also helpful.

B) You still have Python2 projects: You hate it, because it pushes you out of your comfort zone.

But I have to say, we want our langauges to develop as well. We want our packages to get attention. And there was lots of time to switch and experiment with switching. Ergo, it should happen. Even if you don't like it as much, that's where things are heading. Deal with it, move on. Let the community help you, if necessary.

</comment><comment><USER24> The related django issue is here: [https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/23919](https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/23919)

there are lots of other cleanups happening right now. It's a real pleasure to look at the diffs :)

</comment><comment><USER25> I hope they just find a way to support SQLAlchemy natively like they did with Jinja2 because Django ORM is really very restrictive and has numerous serious annoying bugs that have been open since I was in high school.

<comment><USER26> > Django ORM ... has numerous serious annoying bugs

Such as?

I've worked primarily with Django for years and I think if the ORM really had "numerous serious annoying bugs" I'd have a mental library of these things to watch out for. But I can't think of any ORM bugs off the top of my head, I don't really remember encountering any.

We all know SQL Alchemy is 'better' and there are things Django ORM can't do, but 99% of the time it's adequate.

Are you sure you didn't mean "features I wish it had"...?

<comment><USER25> such as

1\. multi-column primary key.

2\. annotate several counts for some query correctly.

that what I remember for now.

<comment><USER27> 1\. Would be a new feature, not really a bug. There have been multiple attempts to resolve which have all failed. DEPs exist to address this shortcoming.

2\. Yep. Still a crappy situation to be in, but one that's also tricky to solve due to not being able to control the joins across multi-valued relationships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> reddit discussion at /r/python : [https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/5otufg/django_20_no...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/5otufg/django_20_now_on_master_will_not_support_python_2/?ref=share&ref_source=link)

</comment><comment><USER28> Time to introduce Python 4.

<comment><USER29> I'm still waiting for Python 3.11 for Workgroups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is great news. It will help move people off their python 2 code bases even more. Kudos to the Django team.

</comment><comment><USER31> Oh boy. And here I am still using Py2.7 with Django 1.6

<comment><USER32> I'm in the midst of upgraded a 1.6 project to 1.10 and Python 3. Wish me continued success :-)

<comment><USER31> I've been trying that for the past 1 year with no luck. Product always takes higher priority.

Make sure you have dedicated time for the migration

<comment><USER33> This is not a sustainable position to be in. Migrations _are_ product issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Because incrementing version numbers is free, Django might as well bump the Python-3-requiring version number to Django 3.0.

Lots of beginners and low-attention devs will find "Django 3 needs Python 3" easier to keep straight than "Django 2 needs Python 3".

</comment><comment> mark-r I was surprised to see the elimination of the encoding comments, I thought that the default encoding would be platform dependent. After a little research I found PEP 3120 which mandates UTF-8 for everybody, implemented in Python 3.0. It also goes into the history of source encoding for 1.x and 2.x. I wonder why there aren't more problems with Windows users whose editors don't use UTF-8 by default?

<comment><USER10> Makes sense given Python 3 lets identifiers contain non-ascii characters, e.g. café=123, 变量="x"

<comment> mark-r I'm all-in on the usefulness of UTF-8, I wish there was a way to configure Windows to reliably use it as its default character encoding. If I create a file with Notepad containing the line café=123 and save it without specifying an encoding, I can't import it into Python. I spend a lot of time on StackOverflow and I don't remember seeing that problem come up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Good, it's about time this nonsense ends.

<comment><USER36> This is the beginning of the Python 3 nonsense, not the end yet. It will end when the Python 3 joke is scrapped and replaced with Python 4 as a SEAMLESS continuation of Python 2.

<comment><USER37> Don't know why you were downvoted: still waiting for a seamless Python X upgrade as well, without code duplication.

<comment><USER38> It already exists, as a Python2 fork: [https://github.com/naftaliharris/placeholder](https://github.com/naftaliharris/placeholder)

<comment><USER39> This is the greatest thing ever - for systems work, python3 is a nightmare. Thanks for sharing this.

<comment><USER40> What's special about "systems work" that makes python3 worse in your experience? (also, was is "systems work" for you, since I might be misinterpreting that -> I am assuming "low-level unix scripting" or something like that)

<comment><USER39> In my last three companies, the bulk of the infrastructure was defined and managed via Python scripts (a lot of this predated Ansible being great), so what gets forgotten is the literal billions of lines of custom wrappers and classes that are broken, usually on the print statement v function debate or how string formatting works. I can't justify hiring someone to dig through all that code just to bring it up to snuff and everything needs tweaking. Usually we end up just writing new code in another language and call it from python or the other way around. I can't seem to get comfortable handling both versions in one project without getting REALLY frustrated. So, yeah, a fork with the niceties from python3 that allow my tech debt to still run (and hopefully better), allowing me to replace bits (likely into non python languages - Go is growing on me) at a time and not en masse is pretty frikken awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can we expect the async/await introduced from Python 3 for async request handling or maybe some heavy operations ? Something like sanic: [https://github.com/channelcat/sanic](https://github.com/channelcat/sanic)

<comment><USER41> It seems like that'll come, but that it'll cause some issues with some WSGI implementations.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/5otufg/django_20_no...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/5otufg/django_20_now_on_master_will_not_support_python_2/dcmiiv3/?st=iy4izox8&sh=e27de429)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Say good bye to django.utils.six. yay

</comment><comment><USER43> So, after a poor evolution strategy that lead the Python world to be split in two and forces maintainers to offer two versions for the same library, and upstream maintainers to offer support for two different python versions, the same is happening for Django!

I speculate that the latest Django 1.x will remain used - and possibly the most used - for a lot, lot of time.

<comment><USER43> Please, don't tell me how "Python3 is good" \- I know everything. I just still don't approve the way the transition was made - if we got to Python 3 through progressive deprecation and evolution via python 2.8 and 2.9, we wouldn't be where we are now.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Or if they had called Python 3 a different name, and let both branches evolve freely and compete.

<comment><USER44> This sounds like a fork. Nothing need stop someone from forking and maintaining CPython 2.x. Open source is a do-ocracy.

But I doubt it'd be worth it. Python 3 is getting great traction and is a fundamentally better language.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Python 3 is already a fork.

The problem is that Python 2 cannot evolve freely alongside Python 3, because even if someone wants to maintain it and keep releasing versions, the Python Software Foundation won't let them use the name Python (there was a post some weeks ago about someone who actually tried). So there is no free competition between 2 and 3. 2 has been basically killed by a decision from above.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no Python 3 hater. In fact, I have some projects in Python 3 and I would leave Python 2 if I could. But I, like many people, have to code stuff that has dependencies on Python 2, and the way they have handled the update bothers us for no good reason. In fact, the whole schism fiasco is making me use less Python and more Java, where my stone-age code still runs, lately.

<comment><USER45> > the Python Software Foundation won't let them use the name Python

That's how trademarks are supposed to work; they must go after anyone using without permission or they lose it.

<comment><USER46> Or they could give permission.

<comment><USER47> And have a confusing set of different and incompatible languages with the same name?

People are complaining about Python 3 being named Python because some code breaks under it. That would be hell.

<comment><USER46> You already have Python 2. This is a continuation of it that is simply closer in semantic to Python 3. How could it be bad if apart from the Unicode semantics the two versions became equivalent?

<comment><USER47> There is no guarantee the two branches would converge.

Some things that are very useful are backported to 2, but others are just too much work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Seriously? The entire change to "unsupport" the majority of Python code is a mass delete of from __future__ import unicode_literals and utf-8 encoding? Is that really the extent of the "too difficult to maintain" code? There will be a split.

<comment><USER27> Just one step. [https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/23919](https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/23919)

<comment><USER48> Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification (actually 2 of those steps). This is a great reference.

<comment><USER32> Also factor in halving the on going QA, testing and environment dependent bug fixing efforts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Oh my god stop. You're all over this thread. _What bit you_?

 _This is the price you pay for staying on an old version_. You do not get to stick to an old version AND demand that others do too.

You CAN stay on Python 2. You CAN stay on Django 1.11. It's LTS. So is Python 2.7. You get to use both until 2020 with no issues. After that, not upgrading is a technical debt that will start to accrue, faster and faster as you can no longer use recent versions of various software.

You are free to make your infrastructure immutable; you then become responsible for it of course. And the money you're not willing to spend porting to Python 3 today will be money you spend on costs related to being on outdated infrastructure, years in the future. That's a tradeoff. Banks do it a lot I hear. A bunch of companies still use ancient hardware and technologies nobody would think of starting a business with today. These companies make billions.

You know what the employees of these companies aren't doing? They're not bitching on HN that the tech they're using is no longer supported.

<comment><USER50> > _Oh my god stop. You 're all over this thread. What bit you?_

As someone who has 6 comments in this thread yourself, I don't think you are in position to complaint.

I also find "what bit you" and "please stop" rude. You don't get to dictate what others opinion should be.

> _This is the price you pay for staying on an old version. You do not get to > stick to an old version AND demand that others do too._

7+ years on and the "old" version has more users than the new one. That's a fact supported by numbers. So maybe you want to recheck with reality whether the transition was a success instead of arguing with me?

Not all transitions go well, the Perl 6 transition killed Perl, the PHP 4 to 5 transition (another major one) went quite smoothly.

<comment><USER49> > _As someone who has 6 comments in this thread yourself, I don 't think you > are in position to complaint._

This isn't a numbers contest. Unlike yours, none of my comments are shitting on the efforts of volunteers that are doing their best to keep people like you happy and making money using a project you're not paying for.

> _So maybe you want to recheck with reality whether the transition was a > success instead of arguing with me?_

You completely missed the point.

<comment><USER51> > making money using a project you're not paying for

says who? It this the standard FOSS strives for?

<comment><USER49> Where do you get the idea that it's OK to "demand" things from a project when you're not paying for it?

FOSS gives you freedom to do these things on your own. Money gets you other people doing it for you.

<comment><USER51> Why is "demand" in scare-quotes? I never said that, and it's a loaded term.

The issue here is suggesting you shouldn't freely _criticise_ flaws in FOSS software. This is harmful, and goes directly to affecting information people have available to them in choosing whether or not to use a piece of software in the first place.

Do you actually know what money/time OP might be spending, losing, or making on Django?

> FOSS gives you freedom to do these things on your own. Money gets you other > people doing it for you.

What a cop out. A lack of being paid (money at least) doesn't imply no obligations, nor freedom from criticism.

Do you speak for every Django contributor?

<comment><USER49> > _Why is "demand" in scare-quotes? I never said that, and it's a loaded > term._

Because I was referring to coldtea's demands.

> _What a cop out. A lack of being paid (money at least) doesn 't imply no > obligations, nor freedom from criticism._

Excellent, then you should be fine with me criticizing the attitude that's been displayed here.

> _The issue here is suggesting you shouldn 't freely criticise flaws in FOSS > software. This is harmful, and goes directly to affecting information people > have available to them in choosing whether or not to use a piece of software > ion the first place._

Why is this the conclusion you draw from my posts? I said it before, the Python 3 transition sucked. It's something we kind of all agree on. There is plenty of criticism to be made.

However, I really want to recontextualize this: Django is an open source project, maintained by a non-profit. Python is an open source project, maintained by a non-profit. The projects in question, with "tens of millions of lines of Python 2 code" (only a tiny amount of which would need to be ported, but I disgress...), are most often for-profit projects. Yeah, it's a bit rich.

This is the same as the IE6 situation: Want support for it? Pay extra for it! You should not expect free support for technology for which the EOL was announced years in advance just because you're using a lot of it. And you will have _no issue_ finding paid support. Heck tell you what, if you do, shoot me an email, I do contract work sometimes.

You know why FOSS is great? It's great because the PSF/DSF do not get to revoke your license to use the software they're no longer supporting. You get to use it forever. This is your freedom and it's a _good one_. Make use of it!

<comment><USER51> Which comments are you interpreting as demands?

>> A lack of being paid (money at least) doesn't imply no obligations, nor freedom from criticism.

> Excellent, then you should be fine with me criticizing the attitude that's > been displayed here.

Great. Do you actually have a response to this point in context, then?

> This is the same as the IE6 situation: Want support for it? Pay extra for > it!

You did not argue this. You said "shit on", which doesn't translate to "demanding support". you are deflecting from the one thing I _actually_ criticised.

Your strawman is "support is being demanded" \- this isn't the case. Any further arguments on that topic are just beating the strawman.

Furthermore, _oficially_ changing the direction of Django also may affect contributions, changes to the roadmap or architectural design for example.

<comment><USER49> You're appropriating criticism that was not directed to you, but to coldtea. Here and elsewhere.

Edit: Yes, _appropriating_. You're taking criticism I specifically directed at coldtea, applying them to your comments and then complaining it doesn't fit. I am done talking to you.

Edit 2: This was not meant to sound as aggressive as it did, sorry.

<comment><USER52> You've been breaking HN's civility rule with bits like "I am done talking to you", "Oh my god stop", "bitching on HN", etc. That's not cool, regardless of how wrong other commenters may be. Please take greater care to be respectful in comments here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> A VERY GOOD NEWS!!!

Yea, I know, shouting is not the best thing, but this is a really good news.

</comment><comment><USER54> Django was designed for making content based sites and CMS's quickly. It wasn't designed for webapps and REST APIs, and it can be used in those cases, but it's not great. I'd look at other options.</comment>


Is India an over-ventured market? - <AUTHOR> Most B2C startups in India find themselves unable to expand beyond 20-30m real users. The effective size of the affluent consumer segment in India comes to 30m real users and perhaps 100m audiences. This is the size and income level of a Mexico. But when you look at VC investments, India is 22x that of a Mexico. What gives?<p>Why is India such an over-ventured market? What are the consequences of that? And how can startups build for the next billion users in India. I explore in my post - https://medium.com/@sajithpai/india2-english-tax-and-building-for-the-next-billion-users-198701f0a7a6 <comment><USER2> 97% people in India are poor by global standards [http://idronline.org/addressing-inequality-in- india/](http://idronline.org/addressing-inequality-in-india/)</comment>


5 Things I Learned about Psychology - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@iamkarandev/5-things-i-learned-about-human-psychology-70f3b2c81023 <comment><USER2> It's a good article for people that might be a bit socially awkward, however some of the points were difficult to understand, particularly number 4.</comment>


5 Things Microsoft May Do With Skype - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/05/10/microsoft.skype.users/index.html?hpt=C2

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a hard time believing that integrating Skype video chat into Hotmail will have people abandoning Gmail to go back to a somewhat dated service. Thoughts?</comment>


Why Vesper will Succeed (Or, Why Marco Arment is wrong) - <AUTHOR> http://www.trevormckendrick.com/on-why-vesper-will-succeed/

<comment> jack-r-abbit But Marco didn't say it would not succeed. So if it does, he is not wrong. He said it takes balls to launch Vesper as-is, today. He can be right and Vesper can still succeed. Those two are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have added that it doesn't take balls to do what they did. They could have done anything and it would have done great.</comment></comment>


World's First 'Fly and Drive' Car to Make Miami Debut - <AUTHOR> https://miami.cbslocal.com/2019/12/03/worlds-first-fly-drive-car-miami-debut/ <comment><USER2> It is neither the first (I see such concepts popping up here and there every few years since my childhood), nor a good idea at all. Constraints on a good driving machine and a decent flying machine are simply too different for this to be practical.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I organise my operating system to increase productivity? - <AUTHOR> I work in tech and I am struggling with my productivity.
I often find myself in deep rabbit holes of youtube and reddit.
I am not on social media and I have tried blocking websites.
But Have you guys done more than that?
Is there a way I can tell my Mac that I am only going to use X AND Y apps for this session. <comment><USER2> You need to work on _your_ operating system, not your computer's operating system.

People who struggle with other mental health issues often have to try for awhile to find something that works for them.

You might try cognitive behavior therapy _as a first attempt_. It might work for you, or you might have to keep exploring. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy)

You might also talk to your doctor to get an idea of what other types of treatment are available. A doctor can sometimes act as a project manager or initial consultant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks kind stranger. I am gathering courage to talk to a therapist.</comment></comment>


Building a Developer Cult - <AUTHOR> https://subvert.substack.com/p/stripe-building-a-developer-cult <comment><USER3> If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen.

Stripe's current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen's current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO'd amongst little press coverage). Most developers don't know about them.

So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses and has something many others, including Stripe cannot compete with efficiently: (far) lower pricing, higher market coverage.

The developer experience for Adyen is decent - no complaints, perhaps a bit less "magical". They will definitely have a fraction of the customers, but those customers are huge. They get and seek little to no publicity compared to Stripe, yet have built a similarly sized business from the Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which is remarkable.

It's a completely different market strategy, and company strategy. Read the Adyen values to see how different the two companies are[1] - Adyen putting "merchants" first, with a mention of support, while Stripe prioritizing developers and small businesses. And company culture could not be more different either - saying this as someone who knows both Adyen and Stripe employees. Both are companies to admire, and show that there is no "one" good way to build immense value.

It will be fascinating to see what happens as these two companies expand to compete with each other (meaning Adyen starting to go after small businesses, and Stripe after the largest merchants, with a differentiated pricing model).

[1] [https://www.adyen.com/about](https://www.adyen.com/about)

<comment><USER4> > Adyen only goes after large businesses and has something many others, > including Stripe cannot compete with efficiently: (far) lower pricing, > higher market coverage.

The reason is: larger businesses will require more payment options than Stripe offers.

India? Adyen got you covered: [1] Philippines? Yup, everything [2], including offline payments in stores [3]. Mobile payments in Africa? No worries [4] And so on and so forth. On their payment site they don't even list all payment methods, there are so many. You search for a country or a payment method, and they show what's available.

Stripe has a very long way to go to realistically compete with Adyen.

[1] [https://www.adyen.com/payment- methods#pmx=india](https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=india)

[2] [https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=the- philippines](https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=the-philippines)

[3] [https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=convenience- stores...](https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=convenience-stores- Philippines)

[4] [https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=mobile-network- ope...](https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=mobile-network-operator)

<comment><USER5> This is seriously lacking in terms of what's available on the market in Japan now.

No support for point payments (like RakutenEdy payment), neither Linepay, Rakupay, Merpay, Paypay and other QR payment providers, nor Suica or Pasmo pay, and this is still just the tip of the iceberg what's available in Japan and missing in Adyen (Nanaco, Waon, dPay, auPay, etc). Just saying, before you drink too much of that kool-aid.

I would assume it's lacking similarly in other markets too.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and how many payment providers provide all that _and_ all the rest that Adyen provides?

I'm drinking Adyen kool-aid because I worked for a company that needed payment methods in Japan, _and_ in India, _and_ in Korea, _and_ in Latin America, _and_ in Europe.

Adyen provides all that. Yes, they will not have 100% of local providers, but it's still 100% better than any competition.

<comment><USER6> GMO PG is famous option for EC but more enterprisey. [https://www.gmo- pg.com/en/service/mulpay/](https://www.gmo-pg.com/en/service/mulpay/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Look, I know that the idea of being customer focused might seem trite, but I wanted to focus on one thing: it's the little things.

"What actually differentiates stripe from the rest of the bunch though? It's the little things.Stripe obsesses over creating a seamless CX. Small annoyances in applications compound. A user might not churn immediately because you have a bunch of unoptimized functionality or crappy UX, but it's a recipe to create a grumpy user. And grumpy users aren't loyal users."

This is an idea I've been turning over in my head a bunch recently: the compounding effects of delighting your users. That cumulative innovation that comes from building for your customers....I sometimes get asked "what's the killer idea behind [company X]". But there isn't one big thing. There are many, many small things built on having a relentlessly customer-back attitude. You can't just copy the "idea", you have to copy the way of working and thinking. That's a lot harder.

Let's take Brex as another example. It's the segmentation, UX, marketing, rewards, underwriting, etc. It's each of those things broken up into a hundred subcomponents and iterated on. It's an entire ethos and operating model. That's cumulative innovation...not a single idea.

<comment><USER8> I'll warn against getting way too focused on this as an early company.

Getting something up and running is often waaaaaay more valuable then achieving Stripe level UX from the outset, and then as time progresses you must make a conscious effort to improve. Remember, Stripe has been an app for about a decade. That's a decade's worth of learning what users care about and what details matter. And clearly that's a decade to polish a product to near perfection.

A trap I've fallen in myself, and I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. Often you'll only learn that by having a product that works and customers need from the outset.

<comment><USER9> > A trap I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before > they even know what delights their users or what their users care about.

That's odd. The point of focusing on users is to discover what users want. If you're not doing then you're not really focused on users.

<comment><USER10> But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process.

Also, +1 to the parent comment. I worked at a startup where we made exactly that mistake - we delayed releases until it met a high standard of UX - <USER2> us more than couple of years. By this time, competitors that built a _much_ crappier product got userbase, and hence funding, and then used that to get their UX up to par (sometimes they wouldn't even have the features, they just faked it). We realized our mistake, adapted and stayed in business - but it was a difficult and painful process.

So basically - first get things up and running FAST, then worry about polish and laser-cut UX.

<comment><USER9> > But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is > the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the > actual "delighting" process.

If these two things are not equal then you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER11> I think the point is you can easily get so focused on making the experience "delightful" that you work on things that would delight _you_ , but that your users actually don't care about so much. And you need to take a step back, build something functional but not necessarily completely "delightful" & then figure out what your initial users actually do care about and iterate from there

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently built a Stripe integration, and can't say I'm especially impressed.

Unless I completely missed some aspects, it mostly just seems like an interface to their database. While this is great for some advanced workflows, the vast majority of use cases are all very similar: "create subscription and customer", "change subscription", etc. Common workflows require quite some coding, and there's no support for transactions! IMO a good API design should be more thoughtful than providing an interface to your database.

I don't think the documentation is especially well written, although it's not bad either. What's worse is that the stripe API docs hijacks my CTRL+F key so using my browser search is a massive PITA. This is such a fucking annoying fucking thing that I'll break my "don't say fuck on discussion forums"-rule for this. I fucking hate it. I tried disabling JS but that results in every navigation doing a full page refresh which easily takes over 5 seconds.

Also, browsing the docs isn't super slow or anything, but it's also not quite fast enough to feel "natural".

The checkout docs actually _are_ pretty meh. Much of it is written in "tutorial" form and unclear on details.

As for the site design ... it often takes >5 seconds to load anything after clicking and it easily uses more than 100M of memory per tab. I recently wanted to load a bunch of customers so I opened them in about 10 different and my entire laptop just ground to a halt. I've actually been procrastinating on some Stripe stuff I need to do for the last week because I dislike using the UI so much.

Is it all absolutely terrible? No; it's passable, I guess. But do I share any of the enthusiasm in this article? Not even close.

<comment><USER13> I think you're seeing what the benefit is, though: it feels like you're just using an API to some company's DB.

Payment processing is one area is that just a complete nonstarter to homebrew on your own. It's fucking awful. There's no choice. Bank's still require you to transfer them files via ftp to make transactions.

And god forbid the legal, and technical mess when you want to accept foreign currency, or even multiple CC providers.

<comment><USER14> Work in fintech, can confirm. Moving money around the global banking system is a pus-drenched no man's land of technological anguish and despair. Every time you think you've seen the worst of it, you find out you were wrong.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. I had to implement a transaction audit using SOAP in 2019.

<comment><USER16> We actively maintain multiple SOAP servers so an OEM can connect as a client, and send us data.

The OEM required us to stand-up the servers so they could send us the data.

We also still use FTP for some vendors (we host).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In my previous job, I implemented the backend integration with Stripe and also the frontend for iOS (Native Swift App). It was a piece of cake to get the whole implementation done across the stack. Six months later, our company decided to switch to Adyen so we could target more local payment methods in different countries. Back then, Stripe wasn't so flexible on that. With Adyen, we could for example offer "carte bancaire" in France and "iDEAL" in the Netherlands with zero changes on our accounting and backend infrastructure. I have to be honest, from the developer perspective, Stripe is light years ahead of Adyen regarding docs and simple to integrate (simple != easy). But once we deployed Adyen, our sales skyrocketed after we enabled local payment methods for specific countries across Europe.

If you are outside of the US, you should really consider Adyen instead of Stripe from the business standpoint. I am still a super fan of Stripe btw.

<comment><USER18> I work for Adyen in our developer experience team. It might have been some time since you integrated but we would love to hear about your experience integrating to Adyen and how we can make it more simple. (You can reach me at directly at firstname.lastname@example.com or reach out to our team at developer- firstname.lastname@example.com)

<comment><USER17> Hey Lucas, thanks for the kind response! It has been around 2 years since I implemented and honestly it wasn't that Adyen was bad or anything, but the mental model was different from Stripe. Back then, Adyen was already fully async but Stripe wasn't so it required some learnings. And once it was implemented, I was actually blown away with the flexibility. In my current company, I am actually advocating for Adyen and we had a few calls with the sales team already, so it will most probably happen for us next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What makes Stripe good now is what made it good way back when they first launched: Handling payments sucks and they make it suck less.

The design, etc. is the gravy on top of a successful runaway train.

<comment><USER20> The remarkable thing about the culture around Stripe is that they still get the credit for the things they did well in those early days, even though they are far from the same service now that they've scaled up.

Objectively, today's Stripe is often a relatively expensive and unreliable way to collect money from your customers. The API and developer documentation are no longer as simple and effective as they once were, particularly if you need things like PSD2. Something fundamentally changed about Stripe's support a few years ago, and it seemed like almost overnight they went from routinely having knowledgeable people replying with helpful suggestions to having people who can't even be bothered to read your message before hitting whatever button sends boilerplate reply #74 with platitudes #27 and #53 at the start and end.

Much of this is understandable. Obviously you're not going to get senior people from an organisation the size of Stripe today personally responding to messages the way they used to. Some of the complexity due to PSD2 itself has been forced on them. Appealing to a wider range of merchants with more diverse needs is inevitably going to make some parts of the system more complicated.

However, the hero worship they still seem to enjoy in various forums, including this one, _is_ remarkably cult-like now. Recommending the Stripe you remember from days gone by, particularly if you haven't recently used any of the other services now competing for the online payments market, might even be harmful to those starting small businesses today, who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them.

<comment><USER21> This is my experience too.

> who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at > least be considering the full range of options available to them.

Which alternatives should I consider, if I need PSD2? I've written about my experience with Braintree above; there's SagePay but every client has been pleased to move away from them.

<comment><USER20> PSD2 implies Europe, so my first question is whether to accept cards as the primary means of payment at all. The various direct payment schemes are typically cheaper, more reliable and, in some countries, much more widely used. If you are handling recurring billing via a Direct Debit scheme then you are probably also outside the scope of the SCA rules that are going to interrupt payment flows using cards whenever the EU member states finally insist on following them.

I've used GoCardless to do some of this, but depending on where you are based, there seem to be quite a few other services now that offer some or all of the relevant schemes.

<comment><USER21> UK based here, so for most projects I/clients want cards as the primary payment method due to the audience as they are one-off payments.

I've used GoCardless on one project; as the developer I didn't enjoy the experience at all. Setting up testing for all states was painful (as was getting items to the right state to use their scenario simulator). I see Stripe have rolled out UK Direct Debit support now; hopefully their documentation and testing story are better than GoCardless.

<comment><USER20> I certainly agree that testing these integrations is unnecessarily painful, but given that both Stripe and GoCardless offer much the same facilities -- a single sandbox environment, but without comprehensive simulation of all important scenarios and with nothing useful for either automated integration testing or offline simulation at the developer's desk -- I'm not sure I'd say either is much better than the other. The only major difference I can think of is that since they simulate roughly realistic timing as well, GoCardless can also take several days to complete a test run for a new integration or bug fix, which is obviously absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article read like a puff piece that I got little more out of than "value your users and build good software". It didn't seem like it offered much substantial or specific advice.

<comment><USER23> There has been a huge influx of articles from substack lately. I think they are trying to grow their brand.

<comment><USER24> Substack is just a publishing platform, it's not editorial.

<comment><USER25> Doesn't mean they're not submitting articles around to grow awareness of the platform/their brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There was a long time when Stripe was taking a significantly higher transaction fee than most other merchants for cc transactions yet there still was fervent developer push to use it anyways (Note, this hasn't been true for a few years and was only true during the first year or two of Stripe's life).

People made all kinds of rationalizations to themselves for using stripe at a much higher cost simply because they didn't want to spend a couple more hours using crappier API's or digging through crappier API documentation.

It made no sense to me at the time because while Stripe was nice, it was usually only a matter of a couple hours/days to implement any of the other big payment processors of the time. I guess that shows what the power of cultish developer zeitgeist can do.

<comment><USER20> My first business that used Stripe was with them from their early days in the UK, and my recollection is very different to yours. They were potentially a bit more expensive in terms of fees than getting a separate merchant account and payment gateway set up, but not hugely so and at least they were consistent and transparent about those fees.

Moreover, they were _vastly_ different in terms of the ease of integration. To take card payments via the traditional big banks and other established services, you didn't just have to put up with awful APIs and worse documentation, you also had to put up with onerous application processes that could take days to collect the required information to apply, then weeks to approve (or not), and even then often imposed severe restrictions for businesses with no trading history up to and including piercing agreements for company officers, large and long-lasting reserves being withheld, etc. The _only_ other game in town for setting up online card payments reasonably quickly and easily at that time was PayPal, which had a reputation somewhere between Satan and the devil even then.

Of course none of this is unique today, and there are now many other services available for taking payments via card or many other methods. But in those days, it truly was a game-changer. As much as I criticise Stripe for its more recent failures, I also give credit where it's due: many small businesses, including at least one of my own, would not have gotten off the ground as early as they did without Stripe.

<comment><USER26> U.K. was probably different, but in my mind both Authorize.net and PayPal were the established players in the US market for online credit card transactions before Stripe.

Authorize.net was (and still is) a "gateway" \- you pick the merchant and use Authorize.net for the actual technical layer of processing a transaction - which was kind of a confusing concept, but there were plenty of merchants on authorize.net's marketplace that had much better rates than Stripe. I don't recall there being an onerous application process or the restrictions you mentioned, but it could be that I was shielded from that side of things.

Both Authorize.net and PayPal had pretty gross API's (and documentation) but they were pretty solid once you got them working. Obviously it depends on the nature of your business, but saving even 10 cents per transactions goes a long ways for many and quickly justifies a day or even a week of additional coder time. It wasn't that onerous of a task to implement one of the non-Stripe options.

Paypal of course was it's own beast with it's insanely draconian policies towards account holders, but I never had to deal with that (luckily).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ah, the new Stripe design.

[https://dribbble.com/shots/13676278-Home](https://dribbble.com/shots/13676278-Home) covers it, and the comments on it are unanimously positive (and also shallow).

Yet I open [https://stripe.com](https://stripe.com) and observe a page mostly incapable of hitting 60fps in its animations, which doesn't scroll smoothly because of this, and which is intensely CPU-demanding (it immediately makes my laptop's fans spin up, and I imagine it'd be draining the battery far quicker than normal). And _that's_ what I end up focusing on, rather than any prettiness. I don't like websites that make my browser slow and my computer noisy, and will tend to close them far more quickly—either immediately, or go in, get the information, get out, rather than perhaps lingering.

They've focused on subjective prettiness at substantial and unnecessary cost. They could have implemented something just as subjectively pretty that didn't perform so terribly, but they didn't. (Fortunately it's only the front page that suffers in this way.)

And on Dribbble: this sort of response is pretty standard: when something popular and pretty comes up, people seldom make any critical comment on even _glaring_ usability problems. When something is _obviously_ a catastrophically bad idea, _maybe_ one or two people pipe up as dissenters, but even then their feedback will be muted. And don't get me started on how people _present_ their web design screenshots, framing them on a background that is essential to making key aspects of the design work, but which will be necessarily absent in the actual deployment—this is rank dishonesty, in my opinion, but it's also ubiquitous on the platform.

As with Stripe's popularity, these Dribbble things are a deliberate culture thing (problem, I'd say): the Dribbble community is interested in prettiness and doesn't want to hear about impracticality or any form of negative feedback. This has probably helped with the platform's popularity—it lets you feel good, everyone likes what you've made. Being largely invitation-only has also helped them create and sustain this echo chamber. ("Echo chamber" is a term too freely used, but it's quite apt on Dribbble.) Otherwise I might create an account named "Honest Critic" and make a habit of pointing out problems in shots—not to be a downer or to condemn their work, but to help them _improve_ it, and hopefully realise that they should care about these things.

<comment><USER28> You really think anyone looking for a payment processing for their business cares about CPU and frames per second on a marketing website?

<comment><USER29> As far as they care about anything on the website. Do they care about it looking pretty?

If the CPU load is high enough to impact scrolling, it will hinder people trying to get information from that page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is a PR release from Stripe isn't it?

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> > Anyone, anywhere can rebel against the system with Stripe.

If you consider working with a system that the government has perfect transparency into and that is deeply integrated into every major financial institution in the world rebellious, I just don't even know what to say.

</comment><comment><USER32> I liked this article. Is a prime example of how a shameless asskissing article should look like, this should be on top of every campaign manager as a must read for upcoming election battle.

</comment><comment><USER33> I love stripe and they really do have some excellent designs, but that one screenshot is pretty awful. The contrast between the text and the rainbow image is so poor that it looks like a mistake rather than an intentional design choice.

<comment><USER34> Agree, I think they accidentally swapped the layers in Sketch or Photoshop or something. Or maybe that's some cult thing!

<comment><USER13> It's one of those weird swirly gradient things, not really my cup of tea, but it looks _a lot_ better animated, on the page than the still.

[https://stripe.com/](https://stripe.com/), though I don't suppose anyone is going to have difficulty finding the stripe homepage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Building developer enthusiasm and passion? that's great. That's what Stripe is doing, and I'm happy about that.

Please don't call that a cult though.

<comment><USER36> Indeed. It is very off-putting. Developer cults do more damage to the developer community than not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A "cult" is an entity with blind followers who would go over the edge like lemmings.

Stripe is not that. They just built a good API, have made it more functional and easier to use over time, and have great developer support (go on IRC any time to chat with them). They accept criticism and fix problems. Cults don't do that.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's been some time I've worked with web payments (back in 2003 or so when 3DSecure/UCAF was new which would bring up your card issuer's site in an iframe within your shop site, which still looked fishy), but I've always thought a payment infrastructure/comprehensive standard should be mandated by government, on similar legal grounds that a currency is issued in the first place, and for protecting access to the market (the EU already puts strong and maybe disproportionate reporting duties due to MiFid/MiFid2 for deposits, with unclear benefits). Though I'm not very sure, as a payment provider has to do costly things for fraud/money laundering/deposit protection.

</comment><comment><USER38> Stripe is the most popular option out of not many options. So, when you ask a developer what's their favorite payments API, chances are they are going to say Stripe. Which isn't surprising at all.

It's just yet another post on how Stripe are customer centric.

</comment><comment><USER39> This actually reads more like a content marketing PR piece for Stripe than a summary of useful and actionable information for a startup.

</comment><comment><USER40> I stopped reading when the author described a feedback button as the epitome of customer obsession. Is that really the bar?

</comment><comment><USER41> I believe, that there are plenty of areas where you could succeed by literally just building what is already here but making it actually good.

Less features but better quality including with UX.

</comment><comment><USER42> dang - can you change the title on this? It's less about "building a developer cult" and more about "How Stripe builds for Developers".

</comment><comment><USER43> Was hoping to read about developers participating in Stripe themed rituals that resemble Eyes Wide Shut, a UFO cult, or an End-of-Days Revelation cult. Instead, it's just something about executing business processes with customers and good documentation. American business culture is something to behold.</comment>