Ask HN: How do you keep track of your ideas? - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes I have a bunch of ideas that I often forget. How do you keep track of all your ideas? I was thinking that I may be able to use the GTD system for ideas, any suggestion? <comment><USER3> I have a 20-year-old, 37K-line todo.txt file (edited in Emacs) of all ideas I've ever had over those two decades, plus notes & some contact info. (And most of the actual to-do items are deleted when I finish them, so it's actually contained a lot more info over the that time.)

I've tried a lot of other schemes, but this still seems like the best method for collecting and organizing my thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't, and neither should you. :-)

If an idea is worth pursuing, it reoccurs in several ways. For instance, with my current project I can have a casual conversation with someone around a pain point and instantly see how my idea could help.

Many of my ideas seem brilliant when I first have them, but then fizzle the more I think about them. Even if they are wonderful and viable, your motivation to build them out is also a factor.

<comment><USER5> I agree that many ideas seem silly after they've sat for a bit, but I disagree that you shouldn't keep track of your ideas.

I get a lot of ideas. I keep track of them. If they fizzle, I remove them from the list.

I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea. Also, keeping track of them means that I'll basically never have a point where I'm going "hmmm nothing to do, wish I had an idea!"

<comment><USER4> _I simply don't always have the time to jump on implementation of the ones I consider "good" when I have the idea._

An idea you can't execute is worth about as much to you as no idea at all. The concept of an idea being so timeless that it will be both relevant and somehow forgotten in the future if not recorded is not one I accept.

Either your idea is so great that you'll a)make time for it or b) remember it in the future, or it probably isn't as wonderful as you initially thought after all.

 _hmmm nothing to do, wish I had an idea!_

A person who generates so many ideas that he's considering recording them won't find themselves in this position: You'll always have more ideas than time to implement them, so don't sweat it.

Not recording ideas is both a way of validating them and focusing your mind on implementation. "Idea people" like us can easily lose ourselves in the mental masturbation that is the generation of "ideas". The last thing we should be doing is encouraging staying in that stage longer than we have to.

<comment><USER5> If that works for you, great.

For me, I jot down ideas, keep them in a file, and then implement the ones I want to when I have time to do so.

I forget shit all the time, and really -- I don't want to hear any philosophical fluff about how that must mean that the idea just wasn't all that good. It's an attribute of my memory, not the idea.

I'm not an "idea person". I'm a "getting shit done" person, who happens to have quite a few ideas, and who also happens to work full time and attend 12 credit hours a semester. I'd rather make a note of them, review them in my free time, and implement when I feel like I can, or when I choose to than rely on keeping some spark of inspiration kindled for an indefinite period of time.

 _Not recording ideas is both a way of validating them and focusing your mind on implementation. "Idea people" like us can easily lose ourselves in the mental masturbation that is the generation of "ideas". The last thing we should be doing is encouraging staying in that stage longer than we have to._

Yeah, luckily I'm not talking about just sitting around thinking of ideas and not implementing them. I _never_ sit around _trying_ to come up with an idea, and I get no satisfaction from just having an idea, which cuts out the masturbation.

I'll agree that we shouldn't encourage people to sit around thinking of hare- brained schemes, but please don't assume that everyones lifestyle and mind are structured the way yours is.

There's no universal truth to be had about tracking ideas or todo items -- it's too subjective of a territory -- and when you talk as if there is, it makes you sound like a jackass.

If _you_ never find yourself in the position of wanting to jot down ideas because you "remember the good ones", wonderful. Don't tell me that it's not a useful thing for me to do, because seriously -- if I _don't_ do things like that, I _do not_ remember them. I don't remember what's in my ideas file right now, but I guarantee you that some of those ideas I will start implementing later.

Yeah, I'll always have more ideas than time. That's fine. I'll also know that the ideas I've saved but haven't had the chance to work on are ones that I'm actually interested in -- and I'll know that I didn't just forget some bright idea that I've had.

<comment><USER4> I think you're taking way too much personal offence in my comment where none was intended. If you have a solution that you enjoy, then obviously you don't need the advice in my comment. The OP however is asking for a solution and I am assuming that he/she is open to options.

Look at the number of comments in this thread suggesting a personal favorite technique. My comment introduces the option of looking at the problem in a new way; one that removes the issue at its source.

I'm not assuming everyone has my lifestyle, certainly. However one thing I have learned in my 35 plus years is that most people overvalue their own ideas, and the concept of an "idea" in general and undervalue the execution. Not recording ideas promotes the things you do execute on over the actual ideas.

That doesn't mean you don't act on any idea, never write anything down or extend this basic model to ridiculous degrees.

The animosity towards this approach in your comment is curious.

<comment><USER5> I must have misread you, I'm sorry. I got the impression that you were trying to state that the way you think about ideas, and idea-tracking (or the lack thereof) was somehow "correct" in some more objective sense.

I got the impression that you felt that if someone had to write down an idea to remember it, or if someone wasn't immediately capable of implementing an idea, that the idea itself must not be worth saving or implementing. I didn't get the impression that you were saying "this works for me, this might work for you" -- rather, I heard (or saw) "the problem you're addressing is a non- problem. tracking ideas is a wasted effort. period.". If that's not what you meant to imply, apologies.

I don't think that your solution removes the issue at its source if the issue is remembering ideas that you want to examine or implement in the future, either. If the issue is only having those ideas on hand that you felt were good enough that you remember them no matter what, then your solution works fine. If that's not the issue, then your solution only works in the sense of repainting the issue as a non-issue, unless I'm missing something fundamental about what we've been talking about.

I don't disagree that most people overvalue their own ideas, that's pretty inarguable.

I probably overreacted a bit -- as an explanation, this is a bit of a personal topic for me. I struggle quite a bit with remembering to do things, or remembering things I want to do -- and I also don't have very much time to devote to pursuing what I think are good ideas.

Without a means for me to jot down stuff for me to think about or work on in the future, I wouldn't ever come back to scratch any of the things that were making me itch in the past -- and scratching those itches tends to be better for more than just me.

This is probably partially because I, like a lot of "hacker types" am ADD. I don't mention that as a crutch or anything, but it is something that went undiagnosed in myself for a long time, and that definitely contributes to the "problem". I can _not_ rely on my memory alone.

I can't really express the difference in how I'm able to "be productive" when I'm medicated and have a system for idea tracking versus whenever either of those are not present. It's a big, tangible difference, and this is the case for a lot of developers I know even when you take medication and ADD out of the picture.

Perhaps another semantic thing that should be mentioned is that the _vast_ majority of my ideas are "change functionality of library X to include Y", "write script to do Z", "little app that does this", "configure app FOO to work with input BAR". I'm not necessarily talking about larger ideas.

Anyhow, I hope that clears some stuff up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I keep a smallish (3x5"?) leather-bound mead journal (the ones with graph paper) in my cargo pants and a Pilot G-2 gel pencil in my left pocket. Everything goes in said journal. Ideas, information, sketches, IP information of the schools I work in...

It's batteries never run down.

It's memory never becomes corrupt.

I don't have to transfer the information when I perform a system upgrade.

I have access to it while in remote locations (hunting/fishing/hiking-- I have a lot of ideas in the middle of nowhere.)

It has a .5 second boot time and auto-loads notepad.

I'm very rarely without my cargo pants/shorts.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a really long list of business ideas in a .txt file 99.9% of which I'll never get round to implementing. An idea worth doing will stick in your head and eat away at you til you've accomplished it, a poor idea, not so much.

<comment><USER8> I do the exact same thing.

For ideas that reach the "tinker" stage, I create a folder into which I have "designs", "html", and "notes" subfolders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use Gmail. I have an email thread going (sent to myself) that's I reply to every time I have a project idea. It's pretty rare that I'm thinking about project ideas and also not anywhere near a computer. And if I'm not, I just remember it for a few hours until I am or write it down on a sticky note in my wallet.

I should note that I very rarely actually go back and implement these ideas--I just used to have a thing where I'd want to do something and I'd have no idea what to do. I've become a lot better at generating ideas and so it's no longer really an issue, but I still like keeping them around. It's fun to see startup ideas I've thought about appear here on HN in the form of companies and realize I'd had the same idea a while ago.

<comment><USER10> I do the same thing, but with one caveat. I have a subject prefix for different categories of ideas. Every idea email thread starts with "X idea:", where X is "Site", "Research", etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google Docs spreadsheet, with the following column headers:

Idea/Elevator Pitch, Value Proposition, Target Market, Unique Selling Proposition, Revenue Model, Exit Strategy, Barriers To Entry, Competitors, Startup Costs

<comment><USER12> You're not afraid that Google will steal your ideas? ;-)

<comment><USER11> alternate: Dropbox stored spreadsheet with a strong password protected file. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use the built-in notes feature on my iPhone. Before that it was a notepad text file on my desktop. The only reason the iPhone wins now just because I have it with me at all times.

Usually the act of typing it in is enough to get it embedded in my mind. Occasionally I go back through and read them and delete out the ones I don't care about anymore.

If I lost the whole thing, it wouldn't be a huge loss to me. I already know what's important and when you're mind is in the creative mode, inspiration is always striking. I would find a more "structured" approach to be limiting.

</comment><comment><USER14> For something new, I create a project in Omnifocus on my iPhone, then describe it.

For an existing idea, new items get added as tasks on the project.

I bought Omnifocus right when the app store opened, along with Super Monkey Ball etc., but whilst all those other programs fell by the wayside, Omnifocus recently migrated to the 'shelf' and has stayed there.

If you own a Mac, you can share sync between iPhones, iPad by simply pointing Omnifocus at a webdav folder on the Mac (easy to create by using the built-in Apache 2.0)

</comment><comment><USER15> Each idea is noted, some evolve into a long text file. The ones I really start to flesh-out get their own folder, and their multiple text files get C-tagged together with my own Vim format and tag system.

But I do want much more. Some of these notes become to-do items, reference items, fantasy user doc or rantings to myself. As they grow, they become different things.

I would love an "actionable" tag system. That is, an editor (web/wiki-based, I don't mind) that for each article I can drop certain smart tags onto. Drop a labelled Milestone tag on it and it becomes a to-do item. Drop a Due Date onto it as well, or perhaps a Dependency tag linked to another article and there's a mini-project manager.

If I don't feel as "projecty" right now with this set of notes I might just drop some regular tags on it. "OpenGL" or "Django" and now I'm collating notes across projects. A Parent/Child tag, just to give some articles some structure, if I want.

I've tried a lot of to-do apps and note-taking apps, but none of them quite seem to match how my brain just loves to note stuff down, but only organise how and when I want to. I've got a reasonably refined list of about a dozen such smart tags that I think would suit me well. _sigh_ Just got to find some time...

</comment><comment><USER16> I use notecards - I keep a stack of blanks in my bag. If they're not particularly actionable, they go up on my blog for such things(<http://mohrslaws.com/Lifein3x5>), otherwise, they go in the to-do pocket. If they don't fit in either, I fold them into an origami frog, draw a funny face on it and leave it by the wayside. (<http://tweetphoto.com/12387364>) - This is also the format I use for my business cards.

If I ever find myself wanting for something to do or ponder, I just go to the to-do pile and browse.

I like the physical aspect of this system. To me, the important thing here is getting the ideas the hell out of my head - it gets kinda crazy in there, it's no place for a delicate thing like an idea. Plus having a big, unsorted stack makes them more interesting to browse.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised no-one put a shout out for Remember The Milk. It's not perfect, but once you go through the GTD in RTM tutorial at [http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2008/05/guest-post- advanced-...](http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2008/05/guest-post-advanced-gtd- with-remember-the-milk/) , you can get something that works pretty awesomely.

I tend to write down ideas in the "someday" list, or in the project list if it's a project. It just won't get a due date, nor tagged with "next". Every week I try to go through the list, and remove ideas that I don't think are worth following up.

I also keep a research wiki where I dump links and ideas, but I haven't gone back there for a while. I think it's largely something useful to track back the genesis of an idea, and remember why you thought of it in the first place. I often remember the solutions to problems I have forgot!

</comment><comment><USER18> I love GTD for all thing I need to get done but ideas IMHO don't really fit that "mantra".

I keep track of my ideas in a Moleskine Notebook. They are available in many formats and are able to whitstand almost anything. What I love about having a small "book" of ideas is that I can take them anywhere, scrible and brainstorm around my ideas etc. All this is possible without being restricted by a given format. Its also very easy to browse through ideas if you store them this way and I found it very easy to find ideas again once you remember you had some solution or approach to something.

If I by chance don't have my Moleskine with me I email myself the idea and as soon as I get home or start emptying my mailbox the idea gets transfered into the notebook.

</comment><comment><USER19> Shameless plug: <http://scribld.in/>

I have this problem as well, and built the site for my personal use then added a few features to open it up to others. Hope you find it useful! E-mail in profile if you have any feedback.

<comment><USER20> I would use the heck out of your site if I could text ideas into it somehow (via twitter?).

Also if it recorded metadata about my location, that'd be pretty neat. (how many seconds/word I was writing, what the weather was like, astrological stuff, etc.)

The only ways I can think of making my journal.txt file better are text integration and useless metadata...because I really do want to know if I write more while Aquarius is prominent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have an Excel spreadsheet with various columns: rank, title, description, has-been-done, scope, etc

The rank is a number that I enter manually based on my estimate of how good the idea is. When I change that value for a given idea, the spreadsheet is set up to auto-sort the ideas.

For example: an idea may have been ranked 4th, but I find out some info that makes me think the idea is not worth pursuing that much, so I change the rank value and the spreadsheet immediately puts it in its right place (e.g. 35th).

The benefit is that ideas still stick around, but the ones that I find the most likely to succeed/worth pursuing are always listed at the top for me to see.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't bother. They're like buses: if I miss one, another will be along in a few minutes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ideas soak in your mind when written down. You will be proud as hell looking back at the ideas you have. They reflect your highest level of thought from your current mentality, and are great indicators of your growth.

Without writing them down, you give them little power to thrive and iterate. Think about how great businesses are made, or how code is made.. It's all iterative.

Write down every idea... Just try it for a few weeks and see where it goes. Like I said before, I use ActionOutline, which is a terrific program for managing all of the 'words' in your life that isn't in code.

</comment><comment><USER24> Any text editor will do, main thing is that it's super quick to write things down. GTD-stuff is overkill for me.

I found that keeping a list of ideas will clear my head to be open for new ideas. Otherwise my brain will use a lot of memory/CPU to keep the old ideas around.

Second thing I found useful is to expand on ideas when I have some time. I simply take one and write a whole document on it, detailing design, features, purpose, value, target market etc - anything I can think of. I keep revising those randomly. The good ideas stick and turn into documented project plans over time.

</comment><comment><USER25> I keep everything in Notational Velocity stored in plain text files, which I keep in sync between multiple computers with Dropbox. It also syncs with SimpleNote so I can view/update it from my iPhone or iPad or from the web. Simple, and I can access it from anywhere.

Within the text file, I usually group ideas by type and mark it with a '*' if I implement it, and a 'X' if I decide it's not a good idea/it's already been done/I've lost interest in it. Has worked well for me.

<comment><USER26> People who want to try this should see the FAQ about problems using note-level syncing with file-level syncing:

<http://wiki.github.com/scrod/nv/faq-synchronization>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't believe any idea is wholly worthless. Great ideas are on time, good ideas only feel late, and bad ideas are simply too early. For years I've kept two folders.

One I fill with concepts (if they can be called that) I plan to test, and the other is for those I think are too early. The good ideas have kept me afloat; the bad ideas however, have led to great things.

Always write it down. Circling ideas are an omen you're mastering the science but not the art.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use an emacs org-mode file that is in my github repo of configuration files and other things that go on all the machines I use. Org mode has a bit of a learning curve, but it's powerful and flexible. That's another way of saying it's a mature emacs library ;)

<http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgmode.html> <\-- article on using org-mode for GTD.

</comment><comment><USER28> Text file. Write it down and move onto something useful. Don't waste time trying to find a better way to do this. GTD, in particular, is way too much for just this.

</comment><comment><USER29> A hierarchical notes manager is great for this. My favorite is Zim Wiki.

Zim Wiki - <http://zim-wiki.org>

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm one of the few active users of Google Wave. I'm all about the tracking of history so I can see how an idea evolved. I used to use local text files, but I didn't like that they weren't available on the web and could easily be buried on my desktop/documents folder. Wave also has rich formatting and supports inline attachments. One caveat - you can't really export out of wave easily.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have a bound notebook, which I call my ideas book. Whenever I get an idea, I write it on the notebook, one idea per page. The rest of the page goes for details like features, implementation ideas etc.

Whenever I have some time to hack away on personal projects, I just flip through the notebook, choose an idea and go with it.

<comment><USER32> This has worked out well for me as well but mine has grid ruled pages for sketching out UI ideas and diagrams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Scattered all over the place... scraps of papers, text files, archived emails, notebooks, margins of books... Sometimes I try to go through them and pick something to work on, a few ideas which I don't want to pursue but don't see the obvious problem with them, I post at lkozma.net/ideas .

</comment><comment><USER34> Notational Velocity - <http://notational.net>, mainly because it's very easy to add a note in a few seconds using only the keyboard. I've tried a lot of note taking software, and this just stays out of your way. Also, it's open source.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've liked the idea of a delicious style app for plain text notes, I'm working on an open source HTML5 app that stores tagged notes as JSON and can be saved in local storage which can be upload to a couchDB instance. I'll upload to gitHub if anyone is interested?

</comment><comment><USER36> Freemind (<http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page>) is awesome. It helps me see patterns and sometimes combine ideas # 132 + 245 together.

</comment><comment><USER37> Google docs. I keep a list of one-line ideas in a document. When those ideas grow, they get their own document.

I appreciate Google docs because it's easy to share my ideas with my collaborators by dropping docs into shared folders.

</comment><comment><USER38> Shameless plug: <http://www.ppcsoft.com/iknow.asp>

Before this I used plain text files as many others.

</comment><comment><USER39> Email threads. Start an email with the subject heading of the idea. Add replies as it evolves. Use a gmail label to track them so they don't fill up your inbox

<comment><USER40> That's actually a pretty good idea. Chronological and everything. I may steal it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Most of the general ideas I will forget, but I take the ideas I am really interested in and store them in google docs in a bullet list.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes I find myself thinking about the same idea I had in the past because I don't remember why it was a "bad" idea.

</comment><comment><USER42> Evernote. In a bulleted list, with sub bullets if necessary or as inspiration comes so I can fill out the idea.

</comment><comment><USER43> Evernote as well.

I have a notebook about possible projects. There, every page gets its own ideas.

</comment><comment><USER44> I use my mobile, EverNote, GMail, whatever I have available to capture the idea.

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't. Anything good will stick around all by itself.

</comment><comment><USER46> OneNote + DropBox.

<comment><USER47> For the minimalists out there:

text files + dropbox

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Evernote.

<comment><USER49> I'm curious how you use Evernote to keep it effective. I use Evernote as well to keep track of ideas, but I find as I start to fill out the ideas with research and notes the "parent" section - the list of ideas - <USER2> overwhelmed.

I ended up moving to a Google Apps Spreadsheet for a list of ideas, and then fill out info on each idea in Evernote, but would love to hear about better methods...

<comment><USER42> I use a bulleted list first, add sub bullets as ideas come, and when I'm ready to work on it, I make it into a full blown note with all my details in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> ActionOutline</comment>


Type P R I D E in the first cells of a Google spreadsheet - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EI9QUuIBzdNQ462YB2MXsI9B7iatk7FNW0RgxJxWgeM/edit#gid=0

<comment><USER2> What I'm suppose to see here? [http://i.imgur.com/1FgiYhh.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/1FgiYhh.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Try upper case. [http://imgur.com/TIG7VqK](http://imgur.com/TIG7VqK)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, so fucking brave Google. All this SJW bs is just retarded and instead of focusing on advancing the technology or something else important these companies try to solve imaginary problems that only people who identify only by their sexual orientation have.</comment>


A Distributed Haskell for the Modern Web [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ekblad.cc/lic.pdf <comment><USER2> Read the abstract for now. Great stuff. Need more just like that. Here's some related work that's more mature if anyone wants to toy with or preferably build on this stuff:

Swift - Automatically-partitioned, secure web apps [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/swift/](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/swift/)

Opa - ML-based language for whole stack w/ type safety [http://opalang.org/](http://opalang.org/)

Ur/Web - Functional, safe language & framework for whole stack [http://www.impredicative.com/ur/](http://www.impredicative.com/ur/)

<comment><USER3> Urbit [http://urbit.org](http://urbit.org) is lots of fun

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, that is super cool. There are so many really interesting Haskell compilers. Besides those that target JavaScript, you have (on the other extreme) Haskell to hardware compilers like clash or Lambda-CCC.</comment>


Peeple – Character is Destiny - <AUTHOR> http://forthepeeple.com/ <comment><USER2> I can only think the reason this application of technology hasn't happened yet is because of common human decency.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dead.</comment>


GCC m68k port saved from extinction - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2019-11/msg01028.html <comment><USER2> About CC0: [https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/CC0Transition](https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/CC0Transition)

</comment><comment><USER3> What are all these regressions from Andreas Schwab, and why is no one else seeing them?

<comment><USER4> Based on the follow-up thread, Andreas is testing on ArAnyM, which is an Atari ST emulator that shares JIT code with the UAE family of emulators (although it's not immediately obvious to me what the differences are or who's forking whom). Someone probably needs to run the test on real hardware to settle this.

edit: The bug was apparently found in another subthread, and wasn't seen by others because it was UB at some level.

<comment><USER3> Looks like it was undefined behavior of the ISA when tickled by code emitted -- so, a real bug in the compiler. Lucky catch.

DeathStation 9000 emulators show their value.</comment></comment></comment>


Quietly, Congress extends a ban on CDC research on gun violence - <AUTHOR> http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-02/quietly-congress-extends-ban-cdc-research-gun-violence

<comment><USER2> Seems odd that the CDC is so involved with gun violence. This seems to be a better fit for the ATF or some similarly-focused organization.

Also:

> Rivara and his team discovered that having a gun in the home is associated > with a threefold increase in the risk of a homicide

Does this account for other factors (such as gun ownership correlating with an existing risk of violent crime)? Many Americans own guns to defend themselves, their families, and their property; it would seem like the elevated risk of homicide is the reason why guns are owned, rather than the other way around. Or perhaps it's a feedback loop. The article doesn't seem to go into much detail here about other possible factors.</comment>


We're Apple. We don't wear suits. We don't even own suits. - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/19/vogelstein-apple-att <comment><USER2> I don't normally like Apple, but I like their attitude here. Why should they wear certain clothes to a meeting with AT&T? Who cares what AT&T thinks of Apple!? If AT&T passes on Apple, Verizon or Sprint or T-Mobile would pick them up in a heartbeat. The only reason AT&T is still in business is because of Apple. Fuck wearing a suit!

I'm shocked to hear that AT&T is not showering Apple's execs with expensive champagne and corporate jets every chance they get!

<comment><USER3> " The only reason AT&T is still in business is because of Apple. "

That's a little over the top. Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile are all still in business without the iPhone and AT&T was a very large carrier before they had the iPhone. AT&T would probably be doing worse than they are now without the iPhone but I seriously doubt they'd be going out of business. I'd go so far as to say that AT&T's reputation would be somewhat better without the iPhone since it seems like most of their network problems were caused because of the demands that the iPhone created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It does seem that concessions were made. For example, the Facetime app is currently wifi-only. Also, I believe movie rental is wifi-only. Those are understandable restrictions for now, but this article rings a bit hollow in light of them -- It would seem that AT&T won a few of those battles.

<comment><USER5> Or more likely, the probability of a negative user experience is too high on AT&T's network.

To use a non-#attfail example: The little microwave ISP I use in a rural area gives me 10mbps, but they don't have enough backhaul to support that kind of bit rate in a sustained manner. If I start to watch a YouTube video at a better-than-awful bit encoding the first 10 seconds or so are great, then the routers notice my connection being a pig and fair-queueing or whatever mechanism they are using lowers my allowed bit rate to unwatchable levels.

I have a negative impression of YouTube watching because of my ISP. It is only because I have had experiences on other ISPs first that I don't associate this with YouTube or my browser.

Apple knows better than to let Facetime get a reputation as choppy, unreliable, or generally flakey, which it would on AT&T's network.

<comment><USER6> FTA, implied to be more of less AT&T's argument: "It didn't make sense to build phones and offer features that carriers couldn't support." Message: AT&T expects to solve user experience problems by removing or restricting features, and this is a bad thing.

Your post: "[T]he probability of a negative user experience is too high on AT&T's network ... Apple knows better than to let Facetime get a [bad] reputation[.]" Message: Apple solves user experience problems by restricting features, and this is a good thing.

<comment><USER7> _Message: AT &T expects to solve user experience problems by removing or restricting features, and this is a bad thing._

This is of course in contrast to Apple's usual product design approach, which is to solve user experience problems by removing or restricting features?

<comment><USER6> The double standard is exactly what I meant when juxtaposing the two quotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is the DaringFireball article here? and why does it have a 100 votes? The guy has just quoted the Wired article without adding anything on his own?

<comment><USER9> Because it highlights the most interesting points of a much longer article?

I'm no Daring Fireball fanboy (the 1st derivative of an Apple fanboy?) but there is sometimes value in aggregation and summarization.

<comment><USER10> > sometimes value in aggregation

What do you think of <http://kottke.org> ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not that I don't ♥ The Gruber™, but the link should probably be pointing at the original article, as all John is doing here is quoting from the Wired piece.

<comment><USER12> I made an HN submission to the original article 2 hours before this link to Gruber showed up here. The original article was on the front page of HN (and still is: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529931>), but for some reason this submission has twice the points. Guesses:

* Catchier headline.

* Short attention spans mean excerpts are more highly valued on HN (despite lack of context, such as bugs in the original baseband, as pointed out by cligner below).

<comment><USER13> Several reasons for this.

1\. DF sneezes and get's hits. 2\. Linkbait headline. 3\. Shorter post means people are back here faster and will remember to upvote. Wired article is longer, much better, and by the time you are done, you forget to upvote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do believe apple has given some opaque concessions. Note that this is anecdotal; I have not scientifically tested this.

I have the nexus one, running on att 3g - the same similar card I used to use in my iPhone 3g. A co-worker just got the iPhone 4.

We both picked up the FCC bandwidth test app.

Testing each phone in succession - not simultaneously - in the same spot, hands free, flat on the desk.

My N1 consistently benchmarked at 2-2.5 mbps down and 1mbps up with a 200ms ping.

His iPhone consistently benchmarked at 1-1.5 mbps down, .2-.4 mbps up, and a 2000ms ping.

Either there truly are antenna issues unrelated to the hand-holding-bars- dropped issue, or the I/O processor cannot handle high speeds, or Apple is throttling bandwidth usage based on geolocation. I don't know which it is Another coworker tested his bandwidth in Vancouver and got over 10mbps.

These tests were performed in Soho. Your miles may vary...

<comment><USER15> Tell him to reset network settings. If not fixed dial 611 to reprovision. Known issue with activation not setting right for iPhone 4 restored from iPhone 3, and some new iPhone 4 with glitch in activation.

I get 3 Mbps / 1.5 Mbps in SoHo and the Village.

<comment><USER14> If the activation didn't set right, wouldn't he not be able to even get on the 3G network? The phone works fine - just, in tests, the network is quite a bit slower than other phones.

Activation would seem to be a binary, not gradient, issue..

<comment><USER15> No, it's not binary. I saw this happen to several people, including me.

In my friend's case, for example, his data speeds were incredibly low, and he was unable to log onto the 3G Microcell base stations.

I suspect AT&T has custom settings on their end for particular classes of devices, and haven't matched those settings correctly. Could be as simple as not matching the IMEI number, or could be enabling HSDPA/HSUPA, I don't know.

But for me, him, and a couple others, AT&T had to push a reset (phone screen shows an unusual "Ok to power off" type message you only see if they push settings and a reset), and afterwards, speeds shot through the roof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From [http://putthison.com/post/833571254/were-apple-we-dont- wear-...](http://putthison.com/post/833571254/were-apple-we-dont-wear-suits- we-dont-even):

"We're Apple. We don't wear suits. We don't even own suits." — Steve Jobs (or a representative thereof, the citation is a little unclear), incredibly rich establishment capitalist businessman, on fighting in 2010 the anti- establishment battles of 1965. Because you know what the problem is? Suits.

</comment><comment><USER17> >we always said, 'Fine, we'll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.' I think history has demonstrated how that turned out."

Really? As far as I understand, the AT&T data network still sucks.

<comment><USER6> And, more tellingly in combination with this, the Iphone is still AT&T exclusive in the U.S., even though making a T-Mobile version would be essentially trivial (different UMTS band) and Apple already has a history of larger radio hardware customizations for carriers (no wifi in mainland China).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Jobs must not get invited to many weddings.

<comment><USER19> he was the photographer at ellison's, though:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison>

<comment><USER20> And yet strangely enough, this doesn't refute the thrust plusbryan's comment if you take it as a reflection on Job's suite owning status _or_ his general character.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I get the impression that Apple is not run by a bunch of MBAs, unlike a lot of the big companies around the world.

<comment><USER22> According to their bios (<http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/>), every senior exec who isn't doing hardware of software has either an MBA or a JD. More anecdotally, I know at least three people with MBAs working in middle management there. Apple does a good job of maintaining a counterculture image while remaining a pretty average place to work.

Of course, you could make the case that Apple is run by one person, and he didn't even graduate college.

<comment><USER23> It's way below an average place to work: these past years, Apple hasn't made it in the top 100 places to work a single time. Not a single time. In the Top 100.

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2010/fu...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2010/full_list/)

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/fu...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/full_list/)

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2008/fu...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2008/full_list/)

<comment><USER24> That's a strange list and I can't really see how I'd use it to choose somewhere to work. Would you enjoy getting a CS degree and then working at Men's Wearhouse rather than Apple?

<comment><USER25> You could come up with some cool inventory logistics algorithms.

Eh, Thinking about it again, I'd rather work at Apple

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Original article reeks of linkbait.

Counterculture versus The Man. Flippant startup versus entrenched corporation. Think different versus rethink possible.

And a bunch of hacker newsers get all excited about a quote about dressing nice.

I love the irony of counterculture groupthink. "we are apple, we don't even own suits." They should finish that with a "we are legion" reference.

</comment><comment><USER27> I originally misread the quote as "We don't wear suits. We don't even wear suits." I like my misread better. Seems more Apple, even.

<comment><USER28> You're not the only one. In fact, I went back and read it four or five times because I thought I was missing something. It wasn't until I finished the article that I realized I was wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That must be why Slingplayer and Facetime are wifi-only.

</comment><comment><USER25> A quick google reveals this: <http://www.cultofmac.com/steve-jobs-weras-a- tie/1566>

<comment><USER29> Also, Steve wearing a tux at the 2010 Academy Awards: [http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/08/steve-jobs-big- night-...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/08/steve-jobs-big-night-at-the- oscars/)

For what it's worth, the dramatic quote is attributed to "one of Jobs' deputies," rather than Steve himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If Apple are so concerned with user experience that they are unwilling to throttle the iPhone to meet ATT's network limitations, then why did they partner with ATT to begin with? ATT are pretty generally perceived as having the worst wireless phone service in the USA, and that certainly dovetails with my personal experience.

<comment><USER31> You have to remember what the carriers were like in 2006/2007 timeframe. Cingular/AT&T was the open carrier at the time. You would use any GSM phone. More importantly, they allowed you to use any feature on your phone. Conceding to Apple control of the apps on your phone was a very radical idea at the time. Typically carriers dictated what application would be on the phone. On Verizon, you had to use their phones (there was some lipservice around this time about allowing any _fully compatible_ phone on its network). In addition, included features such as bluetooth PC syncing, which had zero impact on the network, was disabled on my Nokia candybar. It was simply too much of a leap for Verizon to allow a phone as open as the iPhone (2007 terms, remember) on its network.

<comment><USER32> T-Mobile USA was just as open, perhaps a bit more because you could use European GSM tri-band phones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why did Apple decide to tie themselves to a single carrier instead of keeping the phone unlocked? Is it because AT&T would subsidize the R&D cost that went into making the iPhone?

And purely in hindsight, was that a good decision?

<comment><USER34> Unlike Google, Apple realized early on that they would need carrier support to get into the market at all. You only get that by having exclusives. Normally these only last a year. Why 5 years? I don't know but I've heard that ATT was paying Apple part of the data subscriptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> FACT: They have even fought about wardrobe: When an Apple representative suggested to one of AT&T's deputies that the AT&Ts CEO wear a turtleneck to meet with Apples board of directors, he was told, "We're AT&T. We don't wear turtlenecks. We don't even own turtlenecks."

</comment><comment><USER36> Ha ha ha! Nice! And in our company, only the suits get reimbursed for an iPhone. iRony!

</comment><comment><USER37> It's not just Apple. It's Silicon Valley. Yet another reason to love living here.

</comment><comment><USER38> "Fine, we'll escalate it to Steve and see who wins."

</comment><comment><USER39> Of course Gruber will quote the parts where AT&T is asking Apple to tweak the iphone (trying to shift more blame on AT&T for their network) and now all the parts about how Apple is extremely hard to work with or where the iphone's baseband radio is incredibly buggy and is arguably one of the main reasons for the constant dropped calls.

Gruber is nothing but a hack who's trying to glorify Apple in every way.

<comment> brown9-2 Actually I think these snippets reveal the gist of the original article pretty well, and also highlight some pretty basic differences between AT&T and Apple:

1) AT&T wants to cripple features and sacrifice customer experience because it won't invest in it's network fast enough

2) AT&T wants Steve Jobs to wear a suit to meet with it's board of directors. Not only is this something that AT&T seemingly desires, but it needs to have a deputy arrange and suggest the clothing choices of executives before they meet.

So on one side: a company that sacrifices customer experience and makes inane suggestions about clothing suggestions, because appearance matters.

On the other side: a company that releases some bugs in some of it's software.

You pick which is more indicative of an overall company culture. Perhaps Apple seems hard to work with when you come from an aging bureaucracy and an old way of doing business. I can understand how some people might find fighting for the customer and for good products "hard to work with".

<comment><USER40> >AT&T wants to cripple features and sacrifice customer experience because it won't invest in it's network fast enough

Alternately, AT&T makes mass-market products, and wants to insure a baseline level of usability for everyone, while Apple makes products aimed at the top 10%, and wants the absolute best user experience possible without regard for scalability.

Don't get me wrong, AT&T's network needs work, but I don't think that this sort of design philosophy can necessarily work if all handsets are designed to be 'selfish.' It only works if the expensive handsets/plans are allowed to do that sort of thing.</comment></comment></comment>


Reverse Engineering the Marijuana 'Munchies': What Causes Binge Eating? - <AUTHOR> http://healthland.time.com/2011/07/05/reverse-engineering-the-marijuana-munchies-what-causes-binge-eating/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if anyone will take this research and look at the appetite suppressing qualities of nicotine in light of this... perhaps a totally natural drug is already available to block CB1 receptors!</comment>


The Death Of Expertise - <AUTHOR> http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7081761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7081761)</comment>


In SV, some men say cosmetic procedures are essential to a career - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/In-Silicon-Valley-some-men-say-cosmetic-14962007.php <comment><USER2> There is selling your soul, and there is selling your body along with it. Jfc people.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it's actually true that having plastic surgery is essential to a SV career, that's another incredibly strong reason to avoid SV.

<comment><USER4> It's not. Better to take anything written about SV by the Washington Post and use it as toilet paper.</comment></comment>


Gitlab is down - <AUTHOR> https://status.gitlab.com/pages/5b36dc6502d06804c08349f7 <comment><USER2> Looks like it's a DDOS attack. I'm guessing the attackers figured out that there's a lot processing is required to generate a repo download (and thus using it as a L7 attack).

I'm surprised that the downloads aren't cached. Maybe the attackers are using cache busting or similar to bypass it.

Seems to be back up now.

<comment><USER3> We've just come back up and we're monitoring.

<comment><USER4> Does indeed seem to work again, good stuff! (9/10 times, still some sporadic 'whoops' pages).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably unrelated, but their status page shows Docker Web to be having issues as well, same on Docker's own status page, but it is up for me.

[https://status.docker.com](https://status.docker.com)</comment>


Ask HN: How many privacy extensions? - <AUTHOR>

I've been adding privacy related addons to my browser (adblock, Disconnect, Ghostery and now Privacy Badger).
With the addition of Privacy Badger I'm starting to think I need a more structured approach.
Does running multiple extensions make sense? Which combination?
Its getting to a point where I can no longer confidently decide on my own & would like to hear what HN thinks. <comment><USER2> The problem is as you add more and more security items you lose your ability to surf a lot of websites. For example a lot of websites that protect me from being hacked, or tracked. Make it impossible for be to banking from firefox, or even pay my phone bill.

The problem is you have to balance the loss of functionality (I.E.: Noscript which breaks half the web), for extra security and lack of tracking.

A lot of the functionality and adblock can be implemented in your host file via [http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)

:.:.:

Really a single easy to use option pane should be implemented by the browser not addons, but Google nor Microsoft nor Apple has any motivation to do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> > you lose your ability to surf a lot of websites

I must admit I've not encountered this yet [1]? I've literally never experienced any loss of core functionality? Like none...

Disclaimer: I'm in ZA...so its quite possible that the US guys are suffering from the bleeding edge effects here while I'm not.

1) Disqus comments aside....ghostery doesn't like those.</comment></comment>


Top best/worst states for doing business - TX #1 & CA #50 - <AUTHOR> http://chiefexecutive.net/best-worst-states-for-business-2013

<comment><USER2> If California and New York are the two worst states for businesses, then why are so many tech companies in California, and financial companies in New York? Yes there are more regulations in California, but clearly they are missing something in their rankings.

<comment><USER3> That's something I've often puzzled over as well. I've came to the conclusion that a business is made up of individuals, and individuals like to live in _nice_ places.

Nice places are often kept that way by means of regulation - Regulation of both the 'no strip malls' type and the 'no strip mining that mountain' type. Plus maybe they inspect fertilizer plants regularly so they don't explode.

Therefore, I'd posit that strong regulation can actually attract business simply by attracting the right types of people. [http://ordinary- gentlemen.com/blog/2013/03/republican-messag...](http://ordinary- gentlemen.com/blog/2013/03/republican-messaging-going-galt-and-a-tale-of-two- cities/) expands on this idea further

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> California: "Major income-tax hike in November hastens self-imposed economic decline."

How does an income tax hike lead to an economic decline? That's more an opinion than a factual statement.

Also the "Domestic Migration" figure is high, but not per-capita. A very populous state like California will obviously have a lot of migration. Alaska sure to come out on top in this department.

</comment><comment><USER5> This list is without context. Is it based solely on how business friendly the state is in terms of taxes and licensing requirements? Is workforce education taken into account?

Edit: Apparently they give you the ranking information if you click on the individual states.</comment>


This Is All Your App Is: A Collection Of Tiny Details - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/this-is-all-your-app-is-a-collection-of-tiny-details.html

<comment><USER3> Hold on a second, Jeff!

 _> Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don't obsess over all those details, if you think it's OK to concentrate on the "important" parts and continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis – you're not creating great software. Someone else is._

I think the true moral of his story contradicts his conclusion.

He and his wife had a problem: They didn't like manually feeding their cats. So they bought a couple of automatic cat feeders and enjoyed owning them—despite several small, annoying flaws. In fact, he and his wife dutifully employed those feeders for _five years_ until he noticed (and purchased) the company's newer, improved version!

I liked the essay, but I suppose Jeff and I disagree on what the story teaches us.

This story is about a company that identified a pain point (manually feeding cats is annoying) and created a product that alleviated the pain (an automatic cat feeder) despite several flaws (a bad color, an annoying button guard, and a difficult to clean food bowl, to name a few). Over time, the company resolved those flaws, but they didn't wait until all of the flaws were resolved before initially shipping their product. Instead, they shipped a useful, albeit imperfect product, and earned themselves at least two repeat customers.

<comment><USER4> I am not a marketing expert, but my reaction to this article was that it pretty much depends on what 'market phase' we are in.

In a new market with no competitors what matters is that someone created an automatic cat feeder at all.

In a more mature market with several competitors those small details matter more.

In a very mature market maybe several competitors get the tiny details right, so maybe building a brand matters a lot...

<comment><USER5> The product in the early phase was called a Dancing Bear in the book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". You don't need the bear to move like a professional dancer because "look at that, it's a bear ... and it's dancing!". The details start to matter when more dancing bears come on the scene.

<comment><USER6> +1. "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" is an excellent book and a must must must read for anyone in software engineering. It will open your mind and give you a new perspective on software.

The dancing bear analogy is on the money. It's like early computers: "OMG, word processing! I can "delete" my typos! I can reformat my paragraph!" Today's computers: "it's hard for me to figure out how to reformat the paragraph. Next app!" Also, early computers: "the computer crashed, I should've saved!" Today's computers: "the damn computer should not have lost my data no matter what happened."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > We never changed the actual feed schedule, but just changing the time for > daylight savings was so incredibly awkward and contorted we had to summarize > the steps from the manual on a separate piece of paper as a "cheat sheet"

Not really related to the point, but should you be adjusting the time for daylight savings at all? I mean, the cats don't care about the arbitrary 24 hours we humans use to divide up the day, so wouldn't adjusting the time for daylight saving just seem like an arbitrary change for no good reason to a cat?

<comment><USER8> I'm not a cat and it still seems like an arbitrary change.

<comment><USER9> I am not a cat either, but I do live 52.5 degrees North and quite often visit 57.5 degrees North. Daylight saving is not arbitrary for daylight liking non- cats

<comment><USER10> But daylight saving occurs during the time when you already have more daylight than the vast majority of habitable landmass does. You aren't "saving" daylight at all during the daylight poor months when you're inside at work during the entire daylight period.

<comment><USER9> Up here its British Summer Time and then just UT in the winter. The phrase 'daylight saving' is not used here.

<http://www.polyomino.org.uk/british-time/>

Besides, we have large windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Today I was designing wireframes for a web application, using a little prototyping app called Balsamiq mockups. It is a little, very focused application, and the detail level is nothing short of amazing. Typing a few letters and hitting enter will create a new control and add it to the canvas, already focused and ready for positioning. Creating a text paragraph and then writing the word lorem, will automatically create 3 lines of lorem ipsum text. There is a filterable icon gallery. One click export to PNG, and all other kinds of little nuggets.

I agree with Jeff Atwood, that it's those little details that makes makes an app enjoyable, where before it might have been merely tolerable.

</comment><comment><USER12> A vaguely related point to this is how the problems with getting details right are related to the simplicity or complexity of the product.

The more complex the product, the more details it has, and the harder it is to get all of those details "right". Sometimes it's impossible to get all of them "right" because different market segments have different ideas of what "right" is.

That's one of the core reasons I recommend that people start with smaller, simpler products. The easiest way of avoiding getting details wrong is to not have them in the first place.

It's much easier to delight a customer with a small simple product - <USER2> there are far fewer things for you to foul up :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> Nobody's mentioned the most important point here.

The improvements to this product were so substantial that all of Jeff's audience now has some degree of brand awareness and a positive bias towards it.

When was the last time an upgraded product -- one that you didn't even get discounted -- made you so effusive?

</comment><comment><USER14> I get where Jeff is going with this post, and I agree and disagree. It may seem like splitting hairs, but I find a big difference between details and decisions. My version: your app is a collection of decisions.

The details (and implementation) of an app flow from those decisions. Include or exclude a feature? That's a decision. Buttons on the left/right, top/bottom? Decision. Add a pluggable architecture? Decision.

Look at a rather successful product like the iPhone. Much of its success can be traced to getting lots of details right. But understanding what was going into the iPhone -- the decisions made about how to create it -- led to those details. Touchscreen, app store, glass cover, all of it were active decisions.

Executing details are absolutely critical, but making the decision of what to do (or not to do) is where it all starts.

<comment><USER15> That is a very good point, coming from the developer's view.

I think that Jeff's point is more valid if you look at it from the customer's view.

<comment><USER16> And from the customer's point of view, the first product did the single most important thing properly. Feed the cats with minimal human input. That's _still_ a decision on the creators' part i.e the creators could have sat down and bickered about colour options but they (presumably) took a decision to _fix the customer's problem_.

The fact that Jeff used the same feeders for _five years_ is a testament to how well the original designers were able to address the core problem _well enough_.

Edit: They also functioned _well enough_ that he bought the updated version _on faith_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Having owned both of those cat feeders, for all the improvements made, the new model has a fatal flaw not readily apparent from the pictures shown: The edges of the hopper are not at a steep enough slope to move all the cat food downward (depending on size/shape, I imagine). This allows significant amounts of food to pile up on the sides and not be funneled into the dispensing mechanism underneath. Worse than just causing the unit to have a much smaller usable volume that expected, it gives the appearance of still being full when, in fact, the cats are starving.

I'm not sure how any of that figures into his analogy, though.

<comment><USER18> With that said do you still prefer the new one to the old one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of the EVE Online player revolt. Those details your customers care about are the most important parts of your product.

</comment><comment><USER20> Or, Your app is the single function it does the best

Or, your app is the fundamental philosophy it its design,

or, or, or...

</comment><comment><USER21> This would not work in a multi-dog household.</comment>


Why Is the Startup Scorecard So Fucked? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mattmunson/why-is-the-startup-scorecard-so-f-cked-97eab9a70d04#.umhzajwdp <comment><USER2> Why not use your own score card? I would think someone would be more impressed by a savvy, honest answer that talks about the business than just a size comparison. But what do I know!</comment>


Square announces the Register, a $999 point-of-sale device for larger businesses - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/30/square-announces-the-register-a-999-point-of-sale-device-for-larger-businesses/ <comment><USER2> Square is a privacy nightmare. They track your purchases across stores and tie your email to your credit card. The worst part is there is no "opt in" either. There is no privacy policy or terms of service that I agree to. My only option is to either pay in cash or not shop there.

<comment><USER3> If privacy is that important to you then just pay cash. Otherwise your credit card company, your bank, Facebook, Equifax, Google and the store itself among others are all tracking you as much as possible across purchases in the physical retail world and across all your web traffic. All of these datapoints are being cross-correlated in a billion different ways.

"I'm not on Facebook" \- oh yes you are. There's a shadow profile built of you even though you never signed up for Facebook. Same goes for Google, and many other services you never explicitly signed up for.

So now let's talk about cash. So you pay with cash and you think your privacy is preserved? Nope! The moment you walk in the store, the wifi beacons are tapping into your smartphone and adding to the internal profile the shop has of you. They know when you walked in the store, they know when you walked out, and they probably know enough to correlate your cash payment with your profile.

I'm sorry but that's the world we live in.

<comment><USER4> Bunch of places near my work don't accept cash anymore (seems recent as of a year or so ago). Card only, no checks either.

<comment><USER5> Is this legal?

<comment><USER6> Yes. Cash is only required to work for paying debt. The store can request whatever payment method they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great, now they'll spin this huge register around so I can waste 2 minutes figuring out how to not accidentally tip at the grocery store /s

<comment><USER8> Please read the article before you add a non-value comment.

<comment><USER9> They bring up a good point. Existing square point of sale tablets often push the tip screen, even in situations where you wouldn't usually tip. It turns a normal quick purchase into a guilty one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What do POS systems cost typically? For example, what does a standard credit card reader cost, and is there additional transaction fees ontop of what credit card companies charge?

<comment><USER11> Pricing is fairly opaque in general, likely due to the sales structure and cycle. Probably the closest competitor here is Clover, which Google Search found with a cost of $999 for the first device (apparently subsequent ones are $1249). There's an additional software and service fee ($39/mo first device, $25/mo additional devices). So, comparable.

This is just for the hardware and software though, actual payment processing requires a merchant account that charges fees. Everyone has to pay these. If you're small, there's programs like these that are designed to get you your first merchant account. If you're big, this is a negotiation process where different sales departments will try to match or beat your current rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A cheap[0] entry into a market with a lot of outdated established players. This is a classic potentially disruptive move.

[0] new PoS systems can cost $3k and up. Seems like this is only missing a cash drawer (optional add on) and those _are_ cheap.

</comment><comment><USER13> Still no scale/scanner combo support, coin dispenser, or any way to use a non- overpriced receipt printer. Once again, Square is stuck doing a meh job replacing the cheap cash register and nothing more.

<comment><USER14> Are POS units actually cheap? Seems to me like one of those areas where things are potentially way more expensive than it seems they should be.

<comment><USER13> Yes, a Casio cash register can be had for $99 to $250 new, and has scanner support. Credit/Debit won't be integrated, but at least you get a cash drawer and a receipt printer included in that price unlike Square's offering.

<comment><USER15> Not having cash actually is a feature for some establishments. There's a bar in Berkeley that doesn't allow you to pay with cash, so they had no need for registers. We assumed the purpose was to prevent any incentive to rob the place (even by employees).

<comment><USER16> > "Doesn't allow you to pay with cash"

How? Once they've poured your drink and ask for money, they can't refuse your cash payment[0] (that's what "legal tender" means). I suppose they could forbid you from ordering another at that point, or ban you....

[0] ETA: or rather, they can refuse it, but only if they forgive the debt. If you try to pay a debt in legal cash, they can't tell you "no you need to pay us some other way".

(IANAL)

<comment><USER17> All debts public and private refers to debts by a creditor. A drink you haven't paid for isn't a debt. It's just an account payable. They don't have to take your cash.

<comment><USER18> >debts by a creditor

It's clearly not _all_ debts. I actually can't think of _any_ debts this applies to. Your student loan, credit card, auto loan, home loan, water bill, power bill, heck even rent if you're in a modern corporately owned complex... would never under any circumstances accept cash payment. It would be stunning if one even provided an address that isn't a PO box, let alone an address where you could get in the front door if you showed up in person, assuming you were willing to travel a few thousand miles.

At most there might be something like a retail bank branch where you could deposit cash and then request an electronic transmission of the same amount of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Philz in the dogpatch already has one of these and it looks pretty cool! They should keep their distinctive white design though because it was instantly recognizable as a Square reader.

</comment><comment><USER20> This thing in the second photo looks mechanically very unstable. Imagine what happens if customers are touching the base of your monitor all the time.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting, seems somewhat similar to a product the Commonwealth Bank (Australia) offers called 'Albert'. Basically just a tablet in a fancy case with various apps to fulfill various POS needs.

Also quite a lot more expensive than an Albert - 2.5% seems like a lot? Maybe I'm missing some info here though, POS isn't really my forte...

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a big pos card reader. How is this interesting and on the front page?

Genuine question

</comment><comment><USER23> No cash drawer?

</comment><comment><USER24> Is $999 an competitive price for a cash register? Just curious.

<comment><USER25> It is. I'm just disappointed as this doesn't seem mobile - I was planning to donate one for our regular festival. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Device is $999.

But cost of training personnels is probably thousands more than that..

<comment><USER27> That was the most valuable takeaway for me with installing and managing retail POS systems. It doesn't matter how much time you put into planning and inventory control, if the staff doesn't implement it correctly the POS will never reach it's true value as a tool. It's very important to not only have effective training, but re-training for the humans using the systems.

<comment><USER13> Depends on the POS system, but older products like NCR ACS, ISS45, Toshiba SurePOS Ace, etc all make huge assumptions that the cashiers will remember 100+ four codes, and can deal with all the curveballs that both systems throw at the user. There are better POSes out there, where you don't have to spend a few days training each new employee for them to be productive and competent.</comment></comment></comment>


TEDxBrussels organizer drags presenter off stage during anti-censorship talk - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/2018/03/06/tedx-censorship-drags-presenter-off-stage/#ig6BK7V6Wsqm <comment><USER2> The organizer should be prosecuted for sexual assaulting a woman by exposing her breasts in public.</comment>


Ask HN: How to avoid working in all-male work environments as a programmer?  - <AUTHOR>

My last three jobs have been all-male work environments, give or take minor contacts with women from time to time.
But I'm getting tired of it.
Any suggestions on how to find a programming gig where there is at least a possibility of encountering a person of the opposite gender from time to time? <comment><USER2> Get a programming job at a company that isn't in the software/services business. I've been the sole developer at a few small e-commerce companies and my co-workers were a mix of men and women.

Much larger companies also have other departments (sales, etc), which probably have women.

</comment><comment><USER3> Groupon Chicago is mostly blond sorority girls.

</comment><comment><USER4> Try companies that specialize in design or interactive media. The design field is split 50-50 male/female in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER5> I work at a Big Ten college. Girls. Everywhere.

and it seems that somewhere on campus they are always looking for devs.

</comment><comment><USER6> Lots of funny comments here, but in all seriousness, I think a lot of social game studios have more female employees.

It makes sense, considering the article on VentureBeat today that suggests that women play more social games than men: [http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/22/do-women-play-more- games-t...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/22/do-women-play-more-games-than- men)

Perhaps a place like Zynga or Playdom would be a good fit for you?

</comment><comment><USER7> A lot depends on the leadership style of an organisation, no so much its size or business. Diversity ultimately creates better organisations, but it's harder to manage every day (that's true for all diversity: gender, culture, language, orientation, religion, "mindset", etc.). So look for organisations where "people management" is recognised as a valuable skill set, not just something that people do after some tenure period at the company. A lot of tech organisations unfortunately fall into the latter category.

A good first-glance indicator is whether the management titles of the organisation are given based on tenure (older people and/or long term employees), domain expertise (e.g. the most experiences developers have management titles) or leadership skills. Try to find companies with the last type of promotion system and you are very likely going to have more gender diversity as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Take things into your own hands and get a sex change. Problem solved.

<comment><USER9> I hear expertsexchange.com is the place to go.

<comment><USER10> Yeah but the signup to see the answers is almost as painful as the operation itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would also be nice to have environments that were completely gender neutral. Not just for the gender binary.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for asking this! I've been wondering the same thing -- I don't want to spend the rest of my life only working with men, it's ridiculous. If I was skilled at another profession, I think it would be enough to make me go and do that instead..

The obvious answer, I suppose, is to get involved with projects that increase diversity in CS and the tech industry, and also to encourage your HR department to find places to advertise their programming jobs that will be seen by women. (Perhaps a women-in-CS group at the local university, or a more formal group such as LinuxChix.)

There's a negative feedback loop here, though, where women will probably be less interested in a team/company that's so far totally failed to hire technical women. :/

</comment><comment><USER13> Would you consider working in India? The M:F ratio in software development is 4:1.

<comment><USER14> Isn't that about what it is in the U.S. as well? Google claims their ratio is 4:1, and that the Valley overall is around 5:1 (source: [http://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/22/google-s-marissa-mayer- gi...](http://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/22/google-s-marissa-mayer-girls-can-be- geeks-too.html)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Use your programming skills to work as a freelancer and then move to a city like LA or NYC where you'll be surrounded by tons of well educated and attractive women simply by stepping outside.

If freelancing isn't an option I'd suggest getting a job at a company whose primary business is in the medical, entertainment, legal, or real estate industries. You'll probably be doing internal development at said companies and working with mostly male engineers but at least you'll get a break from that at lunchtime.

</comment><comment><USER16> Live in an environment where a lot of different start-ups co-exist. I have been having a better chances of a meeting a female each day at the kitchen, every so often. Not that I have a chance in the world with them, but I have my dreams, man. I have my dreams!

<comment><USER7> The attitude above is the easiest way to ensure that the environment stays all-male.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Go work for a big consulting firm, or spin-off. Usually lots of smart female devs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Try advertising or PR agencies.

</comment><comment><USER19> I use to do freelance inhouse work at design agencies, heaps of laudy mamas there.</comment>


Show HN: AutoMIDIFlip – An automatic MIDI flipper - <AUTHOR> http://automidiflip.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote AutoMIDIFlip based on the #midiflip challenge going around Twitter right now - basically, take a MIDI file, flip it so that the intervals are preserved but in the opposite direction, and see what it sounds like. It actually has some surprisingly good results.

Andrew Huang did the first one manually, as can be seen in the YouTube video linked on the front page. I figured I could write code to automatically do it even for people who didn't have the software to do it themselves.

I plan to add more features to AutoMIDIFlip - in particular, it'd be nice to have an optional feature to auto-shift the different channels up or down octaves in order to have them occupy the same sort of range as they did in the original MIDI, as that'd probably end up with more listenable tunes. (Bass notes become screechy notes of death right now.)

So far, AutoMIDIFlip is the only automatic MIDI flipper I know of that preserves everything about the original song except for the note positions. In other words, if you flipped a tune twice, then removed the 6 extra empty MIDI tracks that AutoMIDIFlip would have added (3 per run, basically just attributing AutoMIDIFlip so that nobody just runs a MIDI file through it and calls it an original), you'd end up with exactly the same file, hash checksums and everything. There are only three exceptions to this rule:

* If the original source didn't utilise MIDI's "running status" feature (which simply acts to reduce the file size by removing redundant information - more info at [http://www.midikits.net/midi_analyser/running_status.htm](http://www.midikits.net/midi_analyser/running_status.htm)), then the resulting file from AutoMIDIFlip will be smaller than the original. It'll still contain exactly the same information, however.

* For Format 0 MIDI files, AutoMIDIFlip will output a Format 1 MIDI file so that it can insert the empty attribution tracks. These tracks do not contain anything, and AutoMIDIFlip won't attempt to separate the file into tracks; you'll still just have one track containing all the data.

* If for some reason the input MIDI file has more tracks than are indicated in the file header, those extra tracks will not appear in the output file. This scenario should basically never occur; if it does, there's something wrong with whatever program generated the MIDI file.

I'm happy to answer any questions people might have!

<comment><USER2> I can't seem to play any of the example MIDI files from the homepage on my Mac, using either VLC or Quicktime. Are there any special tricks I need to do in order to get these playing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't really know much about playing MIDIs on a Mac, unfortunately, as I'm a PC person. The only options I know of are paid; for example, GarageBand ([https://www.apple.com/mac/garageband/](https://www.apple.com/mac/garageband/)) can open and play MIDIs. I also know there's a player called Sweet MIDI Player, but it seems very expensive.

There's a possibility you might be able to find TiMidity++ using brew.sh or similar. If you find it, you could try that - it's a command-line program, though. You'll also need a GM SoundFont to use it - you can find a list at [http://www.synthfont.com/links_to_soundfonts.html](http://www.synthfont.com/links_to_soundfonts.html) . Note that the page links both to GM SoundFonts and single-instrument SoundFonts - you want a GM (General MIDI) one if possible, as that will have all the instruments included in General MIDI.

I've been looking for some good MIDI players for Mac myself as I know other people who are looking for them. I'll let you know if I come up with anything!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of my favorite discoveries, thanks to a suggestion a teacher made, was how inverting a pattern can help you learn something really difficult.

I was learning Beethoven's Appassionata sonata and there's a section where the right hand has a series of five-note arpeggios that gradually decrease in register until the left hand takes over and continues down into the bass (while the right hand takes a climbing melody that originally started in the left).

Those five-note arpeggios were really hard in the left hand. So the technique my teacher recommended was to basically play an inversion of the left hand pattern at the same time as the left hand was playing. So when the left hand started on a Db, the right hand started on an Eb an octave up, and then basically play a mirror version - mirrored by the physical key, so E vs C, Bb vs F#, etc.

It sounded like crap, but it was very effective - since the right hand is stronger, the left hand would basically learn from the right. Pretty quickly, my left hand got very strong at that pattern and it became one of my favorite sections of the movement.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a good idea. Props to your teacher - I might try that myself, as there are a few things I've been interested in learning on the left hand but have had trouble with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the concept of 'Invertible Counterpoint'. Which is the extreme discipline of writing harmonies whos roles can be reversed and still sound good. i.e the bassline becomes the melody vice versa.

[http://www.music.ucsb.edu/faculty/rothfarb/courses/103/inver...](http://www.music.ucsb.edu/faculty/rothfarb/courses/103/invertible- cpt.html)

<comment><USER5> A bit late, but this is not an application of invertible counterpoint. It's closer to melodic inversion (which is also mentioned in the article you linked). Here's an example comparing the two:

          Source:       |     Invertible CP:   |      MIDI flip:      |
               .   .    |            ...       |               ....   |
      Voice A:  . . .   |   Voice A:           |   Voice B:           |
                 .   .  |               ....   |            ...       |
                        |                      |                      |
               ...      |            .   .     |              .   .   |
      Voice B:          |   Voice B:  . . .    |   Voice A:  . . .    |
                  ....  |              .   .   |            .   .     |

What we see is that invertible CP keeps each voice in its register and switches the melodies by means of simple transposition. Conversely, MIDI flipping forces low-register voices to play in a high register (and vice versa), and heavily transforms the melodies by flipping them (that's the melodic inversion).

And overall, invertible CP is rather easy to apply in a composition (I do it all the time!)

<comment><USER4> Interesting! Thanks for explaining it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If anyone is wondering how to play a MIDI file on a modern PC without a soundcard that implements the MIDI protocol natively (i.e. pretty much everyone), you need VLC (and on Windows, you need VLC 3.0 nightly build - [https://nightlies.videolan.org/build/win64/vlc-3.0.0-2017020...](https://nightlies.videolan.org/build/win64/vlc-3.0.0-20170203-0447/) ), plus the soundfont from here: [http://www.schristiancollins.com/generaluser.php](http://www.schristiancollins.com/generaluser.php) . Then, just configure it as explained in the wiki - [https://wiki.videolan.org/Midi/](https://wiki.videolan.org/Midi/) .

<comment><USER7> Built in Windows Media Player on Windows 10 plays MIDIs fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still want a midi tool that lets me re-do the timing manually:

Have a melody, discard all timing info, place/record melody by just tapping on the spacebar.

I wonder how synthesizer music sounds when it's all human timing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, flipping Bach's Prelude in C Minor gives it a more major sound.

Also inversion is a fairly common technique in writing developments so some fugues will sound quite similar.

<comment><USER10> The official way to invert intervals is to subtract the range from 9 (3rd becomes 6th, 2nd becomes 7th, etc) and flip the character (major <=> minor, aug <=> dim, octaves and unisons don't change.)

The range is defined by the relationship to the key root, so you need to know the key to do this properly.

You can invert at other intervals, which creates inversion plus transposition. See e.g.

[https://www.teoria.com/en/articles/BWV885/](https://www.teoria.com/en/articles/BWV885/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what a song will sound like if its overlay + its original are layered on top of each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> It probably wouldn't sound terribly great; the site doesn't make any attempt to make sure that the flipped version is in the same key as the original (and in fact that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible), so you'd get a rather dissonant-sounding MIDI.

I was curious though, so I tried it out on the Für Elise example. Here's the unedited version: [http://automidiflip.com/merge-experiment/furelise- merged.mid](http://automidiflip.com/merge-experiment/furelise-merged.mid)

As expected, it's rather horrible. I tried editing it so that they began on the same note but an octave down (as with Andrew's original video), but it wasn't much better: [http://automidiflip.com/merge-experiment/furelise-merged- shi...](http://automidiflip.com/merge-experiment/furelise-merged-shifted.mid).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I flipped the arpeggio from Stranger Things. Doesn't have the same umpf. Cool tool though.

</comment><comment><USER13> Are MIDIs still being used by any popular services, apps, OSs, etc?

<comment><USER14> Midi's are also used in streetorgans. (Which sounds way too 'computerized' in my opinion. Example[1])

[1] [https://youtu.be/U9dxscRz5ek](https://youtu.be/U9dxscRz5ek)

<comment><USER15> I prefer this one (no MIDI in action to see, though): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnb7EqfykF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnb7EqfykF4)

<comment><USER14> Ha! Nice! (After all the system used is a precursor of midi.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Is Giving People $100 Coupons For Standing In Line For The Surface - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-surface-xbox-music-giveaway-2012-10

<comment><AUTHOR> Only the first 100 persons to line up get the premium music service coupons.</comment>


Trouble in orbit: the growing problem of space junk - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33782943

<comment><USER2> For those of you interested in this subject, I subscribe to this quarterly newsletter and find it worthwhile:

[http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter.html](http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it not possible to just make satellite behave like comets so they burn up in the atmosphere? Say that you add a rocket thruster that thrust the satellite in a downwards path so it burns up?

<comment><USER4> Only larger satellites have active propulsion that would be capable of doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All of these problems can be solved with money. If a growing problem can be solved with money, it just hasn't grown enough yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you could figure out a way to collect it then you've got resources that have already been accelerated to orbit...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> lasers! [http://www.space.com/29271-space-station-laser-cannon- orbita...](http://www.space.com/29271-space-station-laser-cannon-orbital- debris.html)</comment>


Congress Hearing on Net Neutrality Putoff Because CEOs Didn't Want to Testify - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/congressional-hearing-about-net-neutrality-postponed-be-1798641335 <comment><USER2> Well, Netflix was too big to care until they told people and the public lashed out at them. Their private face is still the too big to care, because they aren't willing to go to the Hearing. Every other Corp obviously feels the same at the top.</comment>


How to Get Back to the Moon in 4 Years--This Time to Stay - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-to-get-back-to-the-moon-in-4-years-this-time-to-stay/ <comment><AUTHOR> Even granted the technical capacity (and there seems to be a quantity of magical thinking in this article) the core question remains unanswered: to what end? We get a moon base established and then...</comment>


Serverless LAMP stack - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-the-new-serverless-lamp-stack/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad people are realizing cgi-bin was the right model all along, but I'm sad it took ten years in the wilderness to get there.

All I want is user-isolated (suexec) shared web hosting on scalable web servers and SQL servers that someone else runs for me, where the extent of what I need to do is put PHP/Python/shell/whatever files in a directory on some network filesystem, and optionally wire up FastCGI if I want. It works well, and it's been doable for years because I used to run infrastructure like this. In the modern era you can even imagine extending suexec to create containers and not just switch user IDs if you want more isolation - as long as you have the container image locally, the individual steps of making a container (make some namespaces, make some cgroups, set a seccomp policy) shouldn't be noticeably more overhead than exec / process startup itself, and, again, FastCGI is an option.

That's "serverless" just as much as anything else is (i.e., the person running the website doesn't need to think about launching and operating servers, the platform takes care of it) and it's _way_ simpler than using all these fancy tools on top.

<comment><USER3> I definitely feel vindicated in my long-standing feeling that every server- side software deployment story I've seen since that of my early Perl and PHP work has been way, way worse than those were. The best anything else has managed is " _almost_ as simple to use and and reliable, but much more complex".

<comment><USER4> It still applies now. e.g. it's still trivial to deploy a ruby/rails app to a server (with rollback potential) using Capistrano. Capistrano itself just being a DSL over a shell script that runs scp and a few remote commands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting, but having been down the "serverless" road a number of times in different languages (mostly node.js and ruby) I've found it to be more complex to manage all the services rather than just using RDS and a container orchestrator (these days I'm all in on K8s. I'm happy to explain why if there is interest, but I'm not advocating using it for _everything_ so plz don't flame me) and all the framework features of my chosen platform (currently in love with Elixir/Phoenix).

It also wouldn't help much with the primary PHP challenge I've run across, that of a stateful Wordpress box (and to be fair, the article doesn't claim to help with that. It assumes a 12-factor app). Most PHP I've had to deal with is not stateless, thus making horizontal scaling a challenge. Luckily you can scale pretty far vertically with PHP as long as you haven't made Big O mistakes.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by "Most PHP ... is not stateless"?

Usually, the state of PHP app is in the DB. Other "state data" are: 1) sessions. By default saved in files, can be moved to DB, making PHP stateless 2) storage (i.e. user's attachments). To decouple from PHP server, - need to switch to object storage service.

So, it's not hard.

But most popular PHP application - WordPress if failing to be stateless, because of number 2: it uses local storage for plugins, media, user's data.

<comment><USER5> > _To decouple from PHP server, - need to switch to object storage service.... > So, it 's not hard._

If you are the developer of the app, that's true. If you're the ops guy to whom the app was lobbed over the wall to, it's not quite that simple without making code changes to the app. In the case of Wordpress also, it's been my experience that many of the "developers" are just marketing people and don't actually write code. These people are not equipped to remove state from the app either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aurora Serverless is an absolute nightmare to use from the perspective of Lambda. It's easy to flood the database with Lambda connections and the database layer doesn't scale automatically as described. So the result is that Aurora Serverless returns max connections errors.

The RDS Proxy isn't GA yet and has huge disclaimers on using it in production.

The only alternative is to use the RDS Data API which requires sending raw SQL queries over HTTP.

If you're using an ORM getting the actual bound SQL query from the database request can be a bear.

And to make matters worse the RDS Data API doesn't return JSON results with the tables column names. It puts the column names in a separate key that requires developers to map to generic column names using the index of the value.

AWS should be embarrassed about Aurora Serverless. No question in my mind.

<comment><USER8> Have you tried autoscaling on DynamoDB? Just curious how well that scales up. Clearly is not a drop-in replacement for MySQL.

<comment><USER9> It is best called "walletscaling." To run anything at scale you are looking at reserved capacity and provisioned throughput. Add extra fees for DynamoDB Accelerator (query caching), Global Tables (cross region replication), backups charged per GB, etc.

Most of the required addons aren't in the "cloud model" where you pay for usage, but instead you pay to have them on regardless of usage.

<comment><USER10> > DynamoDB Accelerator (query caching)

You don't need to use DynamoDB Accelerator though, and it provides value you won't automatically get for free by using another database. If you don't use it you will be managing your own redis/memcache instance with all cache invalidation logic.

> Global Tables (cross region replication),

Again, you don't get this for free in any other DB. Setting up your own multi master cross regional database is not free.

Dynamo DB works fine without any of the above two features.

>It is best called "walletscaling.

And which DB out of curiosity scales without any load on your wallet? What mythical DB can one run which needs neither horizontal nor vertical scaling, thus not impacting the wallet.

<comment><USER9> > And which DB out of curiosity scales without any load on your wallet?

BigQuery includes all these things "for free" in the base price. It is pretty straightforward, with a price for storage and a price for querying (which you can choose to be usage or fixed). DynamoDB started off the same way, and added nickels and times by the roll.

<comment><USER10> You can't be serious when comparing BigQuery to DynamoDB. BigQuery is an OLAP database, you can't use it for OLTP workloads. And BigQuery has no equivalents to DAX(very low read latencies), Global Tables(millisecond access to data globally). If you are using BigQuery as an OLTP database with reads and writes going in simultaneously, more power to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Turns out that PHP was "serverless" the whole time.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's a little odd -- Aurora Serverless seems to have received next to no updates for 2 years. It still only supports MySQL 5.6, for example.

I'm not sure why this product hasn't become their premier RDS offering, it looks like it has the foundation to offload a good deal of operational complexity.

<comment><USER13> The "Aurora Serverless" branding also applies to Aurora PG 10.7 edition, which was made publicly available in July last year, so I'm not quite sure what 'no update' you are talking about.

<comment><USER12> True, but that feels more like a new offering under the same name than an update, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Have they figured out how to make API Gateway not cost an arm and a leg yet? I absolutely adore Lambda for side projects, but every time I wire up API Gateway I'm worried I'm going to saddle myself with a huge bill.

<comment><USER15> API Gateway came out with a cheaper variant (called HTTP APIs, admittedly a poor name) that is $1 per 300 million requests (114 requests per second for a month): [https://aws.amazon.com/api- gateway/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/)

You can also hook up an Application Load Balancer to Lambdas if that works for you: [https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/)

<comment><USER14> That's $1/million requests for the first 300m requests each month, not $1/300m requests.

It still increases the cost of running Lambda a whole lot, but that seems pretty reasonable for the projects I'm running.

<comment><USER15> You are correct, I misread this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Laravel has basically this setup done for you at [https://vapor.laravel.com/](https://vapor.laravel.com/)

It's a really nice setup, and obviously has tooling on top of AWS to make the management and deployment process handled nicely.

<comment><USER17> The service is a bit pricey at $39/mo, but given that it appears to be geared toward enterprise/startups/teams and not individual/end users, I guess that makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> AppEngine also supports PHP which is also a serverless "LAMP" stack.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting to me that there isn't a serious competitor in the low-end Heroku-clone space. The Linode/DO of managed compute + database.

</comment><comment><USER20> If they would have implemented the interface with echo and superglobals, I'd been instanly sold.

</comment><comment><USER21> I know this is not what's happening here, but I just love the idea of a MySQL function where it spins up a new instance for every connection and promptly throws away the data after executing.

<comment><USER22> You can somewhat accomplish this with SQLite stored in S3.

Zappa (python) has a deployment configuration that allows this. It's basically a Lambda that keeps itself alive all the time and for each request, fetches the SQLite DB from S3, does its transaction, and then puts the modified database back on S3.

The upside is it's basically free for low traffic read-only apps, the downside is the obvious problem of write conflicts if you have more than one write- capable user at any given time.

If you were to use the django test framework to generate a new SQLite DB on each request, you'd have what you're talking about.

<comment><USER23> I've been contemplating pushing SQLite data files to my Lambda function via a custom layer. Individual executions can update within the scope of their execution, but you'd only get an update by pushing a new layer.

One fewer network hop compared to DynamoDB, and for something that might get an update once a week or even once a month I get low latency without having to oversubscribe to another service.

<comment><USER22> From playing with zappa/django and SQLite on S3, the first page load latency is still a thing even if the one Lambda is always alive, and I don't know why but have my suspicions. I didn't bother to performance test it much other than observation, since I was just using it for development to build an SES email newsletter system.

Comparing a read of a database driven app (going to the URL and getting the admin login in Django via Lambda/SQLite/S3) to an async javascript submission (submitting a form on a cloudfront static site that POSTs to DynamoDB), the javascript/DynamoDB round trip is faster by about a full second.

I suspect it's because of the simple bulk of the Django deployment. Putting the whole bundle on a Lambda with all of its dependencies was about 45-46 megs of crap, whereas a simple Node DynamoDB insert is a couple dozen lines.

So ultimately, while spiffy to play with, I didn't bother to use it much due to performance. Although it has been awhile, I heard that Amazon made some Lambda changes recently to address initial wake-up request performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And then back to Perl! (the original P in LAMP)

</comment><comment><USER25> Its never "serverless". Its compute outsourcing.

</comment><comment><USER26> Any ideas on how much this would cost to run?

<comment><USER27> The whole spiel of AWS (and GCP, Azure, etc.) is to hide the costs behind pricing tiers and service categories. You cannot pay a single price per service but you need to pay for bandwidth, requests, and disk space or computing time separately for each service.

Even AWS salespeople will not give you a price because it heavily depends on your usecase.

<comment><USER18> I don't know about AWS, but GCP has a price calculator tool.

<comment><USER27> All cloud providers have calculator tools to give you a feeling about being informed but you can theorize as much as you want, reality will be different. There are just too many variables to consider.</comment></comment></comment></comment>