My thoughts about editors in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://phaazon.net/blog/editors-in-2020 <comment><USER2> My thoughts after coding for 15 years now... I still can't be bothered to learn emacs or vim. I've tried and it just never sticks. I remember fewer commands in vim than I knew 10 years ago.

I really like smart IDE's like IntelliJ and pycharm. I'm doing a typescript project in VSCode and the refactoring and code understanding is just... not enough. I agree with James Gosling's opinion of heavy IDE's. They help me. I'm not out to prove any my manliness

Also, I feel like I do more reading code and debugging than writing nowadays, and I am not bothered by my speed at writing code.

<comment><USER3> It's always seemed silly to me not to use tools that make your job easier. JetBrains products are the most powerful software I have to get my work done.

<comment><USER4> Those things are often huge, slow, and take a long time to learn—not all sunshine and roses. When the control panel has search you know you're in one. All a tradeoff of course.

<comment><USER5> Huge but not really slow. They automate a lot of common tasks, super fast searches/navigation, refactoring etc. Code analysis is just there. Often my fellow non-IDE users struggle to find the piece of code when we're chatting whereas for me navigating or finding things anywhere in a really large code base is pretty much instant. I stopped pointing it out unless it's a good friend I just want to rib a little.

<comment><USER6> Most non-IDE users I meet IRL don't take the time to beef up their tool and actually learn how to properly use it. There are also those who flat out refuse to install any plugins, for example, plugins that could make searching large codebases very fast. I don't understand these people, but to each their own! <3

Of course, the whole reason many people chose an editor over an IDE is because they don't want to learn an IDE so, not much you can do there. I've worked with plenty of people who use an IDE and barely using any of its features.

<comment><USER4> Searching can be handled with ag or ripgrep and used anywhere with any text files, with only a terminal.

<comment><USER5> I've never used ripgrep... Does it do offline indexing? because that's what my IDE does and why search is instant. Tools that actually have to go and search everything will never be as fast. Obviously that sort of functionality can exist outside an IDE... And functionality can be added via plugins to any editor...

<comment><USER7> Not yet. But offline indexing isn't going to matter much until the amount of code you need to search is many GBs and/or doesn't fit in your page cache.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting that none of all this is really the reason why I use what I use ... I use vim simply because it is ubiquitously installed on every linux and Mac system no matter what or where, including keybindings in every other editor or IDE I would ever encounter, including the bash command line (after set -o vi) and FireFox (with SurfingKeys).

The fact that it happens to be powerful enough to do everything I want is of course necessary, but there are dozens of editors that satisfy that requirement. Simply not having to switch out of Vim navigation or move my hands off the keyboard for the whole day across the dozens of different tools that I use is what makes it a winner.

<comment><USER9> > I use vim simply because it is ubiquitously installed on every linux and Mac > system no matter what or where

This was also my initial reason for learning Vim so that I could comfortably write code on any machine I encountered, but the editing experience was actually really fast and enjoyable so I stuck with it ever since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using emacs or vi for a long time.

emacs is my primary editor.

I used to use vi/vim more, because it is available just about everywhere and it's great for quickly editing a config file on a remote system.

But once I started using tramp, I now use emacs for all systems.

Tramp is a built-in way of editing files on remote systems using ssh as the transport. I can edit remote config files on dumb iot devices that don't run much more than busybox - with highlighting and undo and all the full-featured stuff.

open /ssh:foo:.profile to edit your profile on remote system foo.

You can also mix files - local and remote - all in different buffers. copy/paste between them, etc.

One thing he mentioned I haven't tried is LSP. anyone have any tips?

<comment><USER11> > But once I started using tramp, I now use emacs for all systems.

> Tramp is a built-in way of editing files on remote systems using ssh as the > transport. I can edit remote config files on dumb iot devices that don't run > much more than busybox - with highlighting and undo and all the full- > featured stuff.

> open /ssh:foo:.profile to edit your profile on remote system foo.

Vim does it through scp:

      vim scp://user@host//path/to/file

I don't usually use it (since vim is pretty much guaranteed to be installed remotely anyway), so I don't know what pitfalls/weirdness may exist, I just know it has the functionality.

<comment><USER10> thank you, I learned something new today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a big fan of the JetBrains ecosystem which I think has won the IDE wars (given its ubiquity). Once you get comfortable working in one of their tools and configure it to your needs it's easy to carry that over to the next tool.

What I was never sold on was their DB offering Datagrip which never felt intuitive for my work. There I was a big fan of SequelPro for MySQL but when it comes to other RDBMS the jury is still out (have tried Navicat, TablePlus, and a myriad others)

</comment><comment><USER13> During the period of about 10 years that I was using Emacs as my main editor, I invested countless hours in mastering Elisp, configuring this and that, writing custom functions, fixing abandoned minor modes that I still found useful... It was literally all over the place.

At some point, the list of things that were broken/didn't work well for me got quite long, and I became dissatisfied enough to stop what I was doing and start going through various elisp packages, trying to understand what was really happening.

Let me say first, that I really admire and respect the potential of Lisp. When the code is well written, it is elegant, reasonably comprehensible, and malleable. However, when the code gets sloppy or unnecessary levels of abstraction are added to 'just make things work', it quickly becomes inscrutable. I kept running into package after package of this kind of poorly written, inscrutable Elisp. One package was using EIEIO (object-oriented Elisp) and there were excess levels of indirection all over the place, across thousands of lines of code.

Org-tables are pretty neat, but ultimately a fancy gimmick. I had a 7 column table, and after 200 rows, the reformatting became ridiculously slow. After looking through the tens of thousands of lines of org-mode Elisp code, my main question was, "Is all this code really necessary?" I know that org-mode does a lot, but Elisp is a dynamically typed scripting-level language. With macros. What went wrong?

<comment><USER14> Did you try to see what made the table unusable? If you feel want, you can report this to email@example.com and maybe we can do something about it. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've sunk a pretty substantial amount of time into learning vim (neovim) and imo it's paid big dividends in taking the monotony out of text editing tasks. But, I don't limit myself to one tool. If I need a graphical debugger or the language doesn't have a fast lightweight language server, I use an IDE.

I switch between neovim and an IDE pretty frequently. I use yakuake to open up a terminal when I need it. best of both worlds! Plugins like comrade[1] make this pairing delightful. If your definition of a VIM mode only includes text objects and navigation, than an IDE with VIM bindings is plenty to replace it, but it doesn't cut it for me. My workflow has become reliant on VIM macros, global commands, buffers, and filters. I also haven't found a compelling reason to replace Fugitive[2] for another Git GUI.

None of the stuff I do in neovim is necessary, but it's fast, flexible, a bit obtuse, and pretty dang fun.

It's tough to fill the editing niche VIM fits because of the peculiarities that make it VIM. Doesn't mean that it's the de facto editor for every situation.

[1] [https://github.com/beeender/Comrade](https://github.com/beeender/Comrade)

[2] [https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive](https://github.com/tpope/vim- fugitive)

</comment><comment><USER16> > Even though it could be seen as a positive point, I think that all the great > plugins emacs has make it very bloated, and that's a problem to me. For > instance, Org-mode, which is a wonderful piece of software, should have > benefited much more people if it was a standalone application. To me, it > feels like starting using emacs will lead to using your computer to run > emacs, and all your applications inside emacs. It even has an IRC plugin and > an email reader plugin!

That's the point, yes.

Emacs' philosophy isn't so much text editing as it is using text as a convenient representation of something else and then having a powerful set of text-editing primitives you can use to manipulate whatever it is you're using text to represent. Living inside Emacs means always getting to use those customized, "slick" (in the author's words) text editing commands to do everything.

Emacs has gotten to where Web browsers are going, except Emacs isn't evil unless you actively make it so. ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> I spent some time learning emacs, and I use it every time I'm in the terminal and need quick access to a file, or SSH into a machine, but there's no way I'll ever spend the time to make it my main editor. The learning curve is not steep, it's fixed to a "hard" mode: every new plugin you want to try, you'll have to figure out how to use and there'll be some time adaptation to learn new shortcuts.

While I don't see them dying, since editors in a terminal is still a thing, but I'm wondering if we're going to see alternatives popping up at some point, or perhaps VSCode will have a "ssh into this machine and open the file in the editor" flow at some point.

Realistically editors like VSCode and Sublime text are the future: easily extendable AND it's fast to try new plugins. If you don't remember a shortcut just cmd + P, fuzzy type what you want to do, remember the shortcut displayed next to the name for next time.

<comment><USER18> Good news, you can do remote development in VSCode: [https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote- overview](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview)

<comment><USER17> holy shit! Thanks so much, this is awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love my emacs commands and I have a .emacs file with various snippets and packages like any good user, but I've been finding myself using it less and less.

First it started with front end development. I couldn't get emacs to play nice with syntax highlighting modern front end. I could get JSX highlighted OR I could get TypeScript highlighted. Not both. I started using WebStorm and discovered that the emacs keybindings were pretty good! Not perfect but the best I've found outside of emacs. And the refactoring! So nice, so convenient.

I still used emacs for various languages. Ruby, Python, then some Rust. I wrote a solid amount of Rust in emacs. But then my Rust projects started growing, I started wanting automatic refactors and good type info. A couple times setting up language servers on emacs had chastened me. So I switched to IntelliJ Rust. And damn, it's really nice. Same decent emacs keybindings, with really good language tooling. I can see the inferred type of a variable while I'm typing it out. I can refactor without having to run cargo all the time.

At this point I use emacs for writing blog posts, Python/Ruby, and config files. That's it. Oh and debugging wasm binaries. Hexl-mode is still unrivaled. It's a little sad though. I learned to program as I learned emacs. I like the idea of having a powerful, text crunching editor. But it's so damn inconvenient. Everything feels a little tacked on. Language servers are super brittle and hard to get right. Multiple cursors mostly work but aren't the first class citizens of IntelliJ.

If I had to provide a thesis on why emacs is failing me, it's because emacs was designed to manipulate text. It's incredibly good at that. But code these days isn't text. It's hypertext. It's a code graph that is automatically formatted, refactored and linked. Emacs can certainly treat code that way, but it's a lot of work and a lot of suffering that IDEs provide out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have a tendency to switch between VSCode and Neovim on a semiannual basis-- mostly to come back to the speed and native vi in Neovim, only to switch back after going through plugin hell for weeks.

Neovim could be a great editor if they spent more time adding core plugins to the main program. I see it's starting to happen a little with the built in LSP and package manager, but it should do more. The docs are a mess for configuring some of these bleeding edge features (like the floating windows), and it definitely impacts my workflow without them.

On the flip side, VSCode has too many "non sensible" defaults for my liking, especially between versions. Nothing grinds my gears more than making a big edit, only to look at the diff and realize some plugin decided to autoformat everything. VSCode also has a tendency to hang, especially with vim mode for some reason

</comment><comment><USER20> I realised that the reason why I haven't bothered to learn powerful keyboard- based navigation controls, is because I'm almost totally distanced myself from using a normal mouse. I love using MacBook Pro trackpad more, and I feel restrained every time I use mouse.

This also affects the amount of hand movement: the trackpad is a lot closer to the keyboard, so navigating with it doesn't bother me that much. In the long run, I'm sure that learning stuff like the author would be a nice boost, but I don't simply feel the need.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's funny how people who know vim expect every other editor to have support for it's keybindings too, while I as a non vim user am expected to love and learn vim keybindings

<comment><USER22> Not entirely sure how true that is.

I'm a heavy vim user and I love it, but that's me.

I work with people who can navigate codebased absurdly swiftly and debug things faster than I ever could, and they use visual studio keybindings.

It's all about knowing your tools; I'm a sysadmin so vim (Or, vi) has a high value for me as learning the keybindings makes me more powerful on my entire fleet.

For developers though? Debugging and codebase navigation is significantly more valuable- you read more than you write.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Things look quite different in biostatistics research and adjacent fields. I personally use vscode, nano, and rstudio. But I am still mostly wetlab. People in my research group use some combination of these, maybe atom, and I am sure some of them like vim or emacs, but I haven't asked. The python guy uses vscode instead of intelliJ. I haven't seen anyone use vscode over RStudio, for R. But some of us will occasionally preference R intepreter in the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER24> His "types of navigation" doesn't include searching as navigation.

I use emacs with C-s (isearch-forward) more often than left and right.

<comment><USER25> Ace jump has become a very welcome nature for jumping to a spot.

<comment><USER24> But it only works on what you can currently see, right? Or does ace jump work differently than I recall.

isearch moving you along further in the buffer interactively as you type is far more useful than searching what you just see, and typing rando letters that appear. If it's on the wrong entry with the same word, I just hit C-s again - which is very fast to type repeatedly (rather than ace's find the right letter combo, and type it).

<comment><USER25> Fair. ace-search which has a delay to turn into ace-jump is what I actually use. With enough characters, defaults to helm-swoop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I just wanted to note for the author, if they're here, that VSCode has a newish plugin called neovim I think that actually uses neovim itself to handle movement and editing, so it should work no matter how odd the config.

I currently use VSCode and Doom Emacs, after being a fairly long time vim user, fwiw.

</comment><comment><USER27> I stopped reading when they wrote that they preferred modal editors because they hate navigating with arrow keys. Uh, I use to live in Emacs and now I use VS Code, and you could remove my arrow keys for all I'd care (or notice). Those are entirely orthogonal, like "I prefer cars to bikes because I like tires."

<comment><USER28> How do you navigate text in VSCode without arrow keys (and equivalents such as Pg Up/Dn, Home, End)

I'm not sure about the author, but I consider emacs essentially a modal editor. The vast majority of actions are preceded by a combination of modifier key presses, which is essentially modal, except you can't (or can you?) keep it sticky.

So, for example, next line in Emacs is Ctrl+N whereas in Vim is Esc+J. The only difference in VIM is that you don't need to hit ESC the next time want to go to the next line whereas Emacs reverts you to "insert" mode requiring you to press Ctrl again. But in both you can type out a number to allow you to jump 5 lines instead of just 1 with each key press.

Of course, those are only the in built modes. In many ways, emacs is even more modal than Vim, since there are so many packages that shift you into different custom modes With different behavior (e.g. org mode, magit, etc).

<comment><USER29> That's not modal though. You could make it modal/sticky with e.g. god-mode, evil-mode, or others, but essentially its a single shortcut (yes, it uses two keys instead of one, but that doesn't make it modal: try pressing Ctrl and afterwards pressing n like with esc h for vim, I don't think it'll work...)

Org-mode and magit are modes in the sense that they are different environments, not input modes. You won't have a good time trying to update your calendar using magit, and reverting the latest commit is going to be a challenge from within org-mode. These are different tools.

I'd say once again, emacs _can_ be as modal as you like, more or less exactly like vim, or it can be non-modal.

<comment><USER14> Well, of course you can revert a commit from org-mode.

Simply create a bash source code block that goes in the right directory and does the git revert. \o/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'll crosspost what I wrotw about Doom Emacs on Reddit:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

> The killer feature of Atom to me is its ability to tell you what commands > are associated (or erased) for a keybinding you are pressing, live. It is > very practical to debug keybinding issues and I wish more editors had it. > Other editors feature _similar_ stuff, but not quite as good as this _echo > mode_ for keybinding.

Btw, for Doom Emacs this is accessible through the help interface.

`SPC h k <key combo>` will open up the manual page for that function, with a description, list of keybindings, argument list, and at the bottom, full code listing where you can jump to references including callers/callees and examine the code in-situ if you need.

`SPC h b b` will allow you interactive search through Doom Emacs bindings and bring up the same as above, and `SPC h b` exposes other neat things like keymaps for the current major-mode, etc.

\---

Honestly, I have been using Vim constantly in various forms -- GVim, Vim, Vi, ex-vi, Neovim, etc. (Even ex and ed(1) for a little period) for about 8 years. I discovered Doom Emacs this July, and gave it a few hours. Then I kept on giving it a few hours. A week later I hadn't boot up vim for a week. With Vim, there was always a barrier around writing extensions -- it never really felt like it was _meant_ to be integrated with them. The single best Vi experience I've had wasn't with Neovim, it was with ex-vi. There were some sharp edges but the interface felt orders of magnitude more clean than I was used to.

I had tried Emacs before but Spacemacs was poorly integrated -- I tried using package-install and I was dumped into a buffer with no evil-mode bindings. And learning Emacs was a hilarious nightmare. Just look at these amazingly terrible commands to know how horrible that was[0], the last straw was when I tried to undo using `C-x u` (I think?) and it undid one character at a time!

Two things sold me on Doom Emacs - the support, and the feeling I get when using it.

* The support is amazing, I can't even begin to comprehend how much the maintainer, Henrik, works at it. He has a well-developed system on the discord where you can hit up one of the assigned channels (how-do-i or troubleshooting are the main ones as a newbie), tag \@helpme, and you will get seen quickly. He stays up until 2 am some nights answering support requests, and has put a lot of work into `doom doctor` so there are some rudimentary diagnosics included. It is by far the most pleasant and memorable support experience I've ever had with any piece of software in the 10 years I've been programming, and I have a _huge_ amount of respect for him.

\- The feeling I get when using it is harder to quantify. I'll attempt to quantify the 4 or so years I spent digging into hacker history in the following comparison: \- Vim - Editing becomes _muscle memory_ , so you don't need to think. You can sit down at a computer and be sure it has some variant of Vim that you can use almost like normal. \- Emacs - The editor grows around you, as you customize it to your taste. You're taking an editor built on a language, and altering the code, patching in improvements. Each Emacs instance is totally unique, and can rarely be used by another Emacsen (I actually vaguely recall reading/hearing of a joke where it was implied the Emacs instance and the beard grew into each other).

Doom Emacs, for me at least, is the perfect blend of the muscle memory interface power of Vim, and the "block of clay" feeling I get from Emacs.

[0]: [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ch...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Change- Window.html#Change-Window)

<comment><USER29> That feeling while using it is very recognizable to me. It's like the cliché about swordfighting: the tool is an extension of your arm, rather than something you interact with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> No Sublime Text in review; huge omission

<comment><USER32> What about `cat > file.txt .... [Ctrl]-D' and `sed'?

(Joking, but for very small files, I'm doing this more and more.)

<comment><USER31> Oh, nothing like 'cat <binary> | base64' , copy, paste in another terminal to cat <<_EOF_ | base64 -d > <binary>

extremely useful in locked down environments</comment></comment></comment>


OxyContin billionaire has patented a drug to wean addicts from opioids - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/09/08/the-man-who-made-billions-of-dollars-from-oxycontin-is-pushing-a-drug-to-wean-addicts-off-opioids <comment><USER2> The patent is for sublingual buprenorphine, which has appears to have been available since the early 80's, while buprenorphine has existed for 50 years.[1] It seems like we're getting the exactly patent ever-greening behavior we have incentivized.

*[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buprenorphine#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buprenorphine#History)

<comment><USER3> I disagree that this is not novel. It's an _immediately_ dissolvable buprenorphine. I discussed this in my top level comment, but subutex has been abused because it does take some time to dissolve, so patients will sometimes take it out of their mouth when the healthcare provider is not looking in order to inject later. This version avoids that to some extent, which is novel enough to be patentable.

<comment><USER4> Eh. Bupe isn't that abusable, so you very quickly get a couple weeks of take- home doses. So if you're going to IV it, this new patent makes zero difference.

<comment><USER3> sublingual buprenorphine like Subutex is only indicated for take-home if the patient can not tolerate suboxone (oral buprenorphine/naloxone). If you're prescribing subutex take-home just because, you're not following the preferred prescribing practices. Suboxone and subutex are not used the same way, as I described in my top level comment in this thread.

Subutex is for patients that are not clinically stable, so they get daily doses from their treatment center and are watched as they take the medicine. You could argue that the providers should watch them until they have dissolved it, and thus this patent is over-engineering a solution, but that's not what you argued.

Suboxone is for patients that are clinically stable, compliant, and/or are unable to make frequent visits to their treatment center, so they are able to take-home their medication and take it as prescribed. These are patients that you as the healthcare provider are relatively certain wouldn't abuse it.

And yes, while buprenorphine isn't as abusable as most other medications, and is far more forgiving than methadone, it's not perfect, and there is still some liability for abuse, especially with subutex. So while I agree that this patent makes very little difference (again, check my longer comment), it's not all that bad of an idea, hence why Purdue likely patented it.

<comment><USER4> Which is why I said "bupe" instead of naming either formulation. Suboxone is just as IV-abusable as Subutex itself. It makes little difference in practice. (I'm on Subutex, but that's because I'm on 0.8mg daily -- down from 32mg originally. I've never abused mine, because I really don't see the point, but I've seen enough people who have). Subutex is barely prescribed at all in Australia, where I'm from, but it makes effectively zero difference in IV usage -- the naltrexone does nothing compared to how strongly bupe itself binds to your receptors.

<comment><USER3> Sure, they're both IV abusable, but my point was that for the patients that are still addicted to opioids the more immediate dissolve of the patented formulation would make it more preferable to subutex for providers, simply because they know that a patient couldn't take the tablet out of their mouth since it would have dissolved immediately. It's those patients we're trying to get back on track with something better, not the patients we know are able to manage on take-home regimens.

> the naltrexone does nothing compared to how strongly bupe itself binds to > your receptors.

What? First of all, it's naloxone rather than naltrexone that is found in suboxone. Subutex doesn't have either of them. And secondly, it's very, VERY well known that naloxone/naltrexone have far more binding affinity to the mu- opioid receptor (the type that we think causes euphoria/analgesia) compared to any sort of opioid we have on the market (maybe not sufentanyl, but even that I'm fairly certain is weaker affinity). That's exactly why we can use Narcan effectively to combat opioid overdose.

<comment><USER4> > What? First of all, it's naloxone rather than naltrexone that is found in > suboxone. Subutex doesn't have either of them.

I always get them mixed up, but it really isn't changing my point. And yes, no kidding, you brought up Suboxone as well as Subutex which is why I'm discussing it! I'd really prefer if you read my comments with a little more charity. Anyway, it doesn't appear as if you're listening to my point here, and that's okay :) Have a good day

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People will abuse anything that helps to numb painful emotions. Demonizing the drug isn't helpful; if you get rid of one, people will lean on something else. The solution to drug addiction is very simple: give people better ways of dealing with their emotional pain. Of course, actually accomplishing that is the hard part.

My personal belief is that we need a two-fold attack:

1) Harm reduction: provide people with less harmful emotional anesthetics (like Kratom)

2) Fix the underlying problem: provide people with better mental health care, better coping strategies, more community and more human connection.

Most people agree that #2 is needed, but #1 is controversial. I think that we should treat emotional injuries like physical injuries. When someone breaks their leg and they ask for painkillers, we don't tell them "sorry, but you know that painkillers aren't going to help you heal any faster."

Sometimes people need palliative treatments, but we're unwilling to provide these when it comes to psychological pain. As far as I can tell, this unwillingness is based entirely on an aphoristic assumption: "if you want to heal it, you have to feel it." Okay, great, but where's the science? Where's the research? Do you have to feel it completely to heal it, or can you take a drug that helps you feel it a bit less? What's the exact relationship between experiencing distress and healing that distress? We can't allow slogans to guide the treatment of psychological trauma.

<comment><USER6> Addiction is physiological. You're describing psychological dependence. You can die from drug withdrawal. Given that, medicine which aids in weaning off addictive drugs seem useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you read the patent, this is simply a faster dissolving suboxone, which is already an extremely common form of substitution therapy. This isn't anything radically new. I would say it doesn't deem itself worthy of patent, but I know nothing of patent laws.

<comment><USER8> This is the type of "research" Big Pharma often does that needs all of those billions of dollars and 4,000% price increases of life-saving drugs, according to some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The correct course of action is to charge the manufacturers of addictive drugs for the recovery costs.

It would discourage pushing over prescription, encourage more work into accurately identifying addictiveness (and presumably reducing it), and if all else fails would encourage them to develop cheap drugs to recover from addiction.

<comment><USER10> A more abrupt correct course of action comes to mind followed by seizing all assets even tangentially related as inadequate compensation for horrific damages. ya know, to make an example, like we do with the little people.

<comment><USER11> So if a manufacturer produces a drug which saves tens of millions of people from suffering and a few million of those don't follow manufacturer or doctor instructions and abuse it, the drug manufacturer should be shut down?

<comment><USER12> If a drug dealer sells a drug that people enjoy and use to improve their quality of life, but a few people don't follow his advice and become addicted and die as a result, the drug dealer should go to prison for manslaughter?

<comment><USER11> No, I don't think they should, if what they're selling is what they claim to be selling. If it's laced with fentanyl or some other adulterant, that's another story (regardless of whether they were aware it was adulterated or not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hate this profit seeking marketing BS and I think it's kind of evil. They must know better. I can't believe they don't have data on actual use of Buprenorphine specifically the number of patients who take it long term and have huge issues tapering off Buprenorphine itself.

Getting off suboxone itself is very difficult. It seems most users describe the withdrawal as harder than heroin because it lasts a much longer time. [1] [2]

I'm perfectly fine with the idea of replacement therapy. And in fact I actually think we should just provide pure morphine to users for free it would actually be pretty safe for long term use (and WAY cheaper).

Long term Suboxone replacement therapy also sounds like a great tool if it weren't for the marketing lies and profit. That's where my huge beef is.

Yet again making big profit by marketing the (at best not the whole truth, I think truth is closer to false and morally corrupt) idea that this is temporary. Maybe after they make a few billion and get people hooked on subs they will pivot to sell another expensive patented drug to 'wean off' suboxone and continue the profits. Of course there are examples of users being able to taper off. But there seems to be far more examples of users not being able to wean from Buprenorphine itself.

1: [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/health/in-demand-in- clini...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/health/in-demand-in-clinics-and- on-the-street-bupe-can-be-savior-or-menace.html) 2: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5398454/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5398454/)

<comment><USER14> There was a prominent doctor here in Topeka who was fired from the hospital for keeping folks on Suboxone. The idea of course is that you can have a nice gentle taper, same with methadone, but the reality is you can't "beat" withdrawal. So people stay on it. The euphoria from these drugs doesn't come close to heroin, so people are continually going back and forth. There's an added danger because buprenorphine binds tighter that if it's in your system it takes a lot more dope to kick the buprenorphine off the receptors, so lots of overdoses. This, I believe, is the reality.

Of course Suboxone and methadone are so much safer to use than street heroin. And doctors will help those who want to, to taper. I just don't think that describes most sub/methadone users.

I don't think the issue is a lack of safer alternatives. It's whatever is driving the person to seek out the effects produced by those drugs in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Very few of us want to be on subs or done, and even fewer enjoy being an addict. Even if it is safer than H. Your "I think" doesn't really align with my experience at all, at least here in Australia. Shout out to Biala, they saved my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also, all forms of buprenorphine (aka Suboxone) often end up being a heroin substitute rather than weaning the addict from heroin. Kinda like how Oxy functions in real-world application.

The difference is, Suboxone is mandated in alternative sentencing programs by the judiciary of certain states. And in some states, with no consideration of whether the addict was addicted to opiates/opioids.

<comment><USER16> plenty of people successfully use buprenorphine to taper off heroin. some people do end up going on long term buprenorphine maintenance, but the harm there is radically less than an active oxy/heroin addiction. even in the worst case scenario, any day that an opioid addict takes buprenorphine is a day where they have far less risk of fatal overdose.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. Additionally, methadone increases cardiac mortality by increasing the QT interval, so the drug with better efficacy and safety profile should fully replace it.

Buprenorphine is good. And someone can't get on it if they're too addicted to opiates because as a partial agonist it can precipitate accelerated withdrawal, which acts as a protective mechanism, I imagine.

<comment><USER18> Buprenorphine also increases cardiac mortality by increasing the QT interval. Buprenorphine is used over methadone mostly because its a partial agonist of the mu-opioid receptor which basically limits how high you can get.

<comment><USER17> You're right! I hadn't known that buprenorphine also caused it, but it seems all of the drugs used for that purpose. I did find a 2013 study stating that the effect was significantly less than that from methadone, but it's good to know that both come with cardiac risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be an interesting use of civil asset forfeiture to seize the patent on this drug and make it free for anyone to produce.

<comment><USER20> Economic incentives were likely the only reason for this development, though. Claim civil asset forfeiture on drug patents and watch how quickly the well dries. Oxy won't be the last dangerous, addictive drug that society faces.

<comment><USER21> Buprenorphine has been a drug for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "We believe it is inappropriate for the state to substitute its judgment for the judgment of the regulatory, scientific and medical experts at FDA."

If this doesn't tell you all you need to know about regulatory capture and the FDA...

<comment><USER23> To be fair I wouldn't want that either - especially depending on the state. The state positions are far too subject to demagoguery for the sake of career advancement. An appointed and tenured agency like the FDA is at least better in that respect that they are more likely to act based upon actual problems with some degree of caution and attention to evidence instead of stirring up panics for the sake of advancement. Unlike literally every 'tough on crime' politician and the abhorrent historical trends. Precisely the reason why they are appointed instead of elected officials.

<comment><USER22> You are right, of course, generally speaking. It -- corruption -- seems to be one of humanity's most intractable problems. But just talking only about the FDA specifically, they are clearly in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. The FDA makes policy decisions that are highly influenced by pharmaceutical companies and completely counter to the body of scientific evidence. Just go read Scott Gottlieb's Twitter feed. Or do even the most minimal, cursory research on the FDA's history. This may not mean anything to you, but I personally believe that regulatory capture is _greater_ in the FDA than it is in the CPUC, California's hilarious "public" utilities commission.

<comment><USER23> Yeah it is all heuristic at this point. There is one radical theoretical solution for regulatory capture that I can see which could have its own issues both economically and incentive wise: regulatory jobs are the last job one takes. In exchange for a lifelong pension they can never work or accept any form of compensation ever again. This would include running their own business and indeeed all forms of compensation including speaking fees and even amenities. You are free to go speak at every Ivy league after retirement but that is essentially just a hobby. It would no doubt be expensive in itself but it could pay off in reduced corruption costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Archived copy without GDPR nag screen:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180908213017/https://www.washi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180908213017/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/09/08/the- man-who-made-billions-of-dollars-from-oxycontin-is-pushing-a-drug-to-wean- addicts-off-opioids)

</comment><comment><USER25> "We share the state's concern about the opioid crisis. While our opioid medicines account for less than 2% of total prescriptions, we will continue to work collaboratively with the state toward bringing meaningful solutions to address this public health challenge"

This is such a scummy spin.

<comment><USER26> I wonder how they count that too. Number of script letter? Number of pills charted, or boxes shipped? Number of dollars earned?

You can bet it's a carefully chosen statistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> >"And it comes amid news that the company's former chairman and president, Richard Sackler, has patented a new drug to help wean addicts from opioids"

For those who aren't familiar with Richard Sackler or the Sackler family. I highly recommend this piece:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family- tha...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built- an-empire-of-pain)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd support a political platform to create a legal framework to execute high- level corporate criminals like the Sacklers and their henchmen.

<comment><USER29> Slippery slope. Reminds me of that one poem.

"First they came for the big pharma capitalists that caused opioid epidemic, and I did not speak up because I was not a big pharma capitalist that caused the opioid epidemic." Etc.

What if I work real hard and become one of those guys one day. I don't wanna get executed.

<comment><USER28> Don't knowingly create a mass death epidemic and you won't be executed.

<comment><USER23> That sounds literally identical to 'If you're not doing anything wrong do you haven't anything to hide.' or 'Don't commit crime if you don't want to be raped in prison.' "Lets just throw out civil rights." is an incredibly dangerous notion.

<comment><USER28> Don't see anything anti "civil rights" about using a punishment often given to people who kill a single victim to people who kill hundreds of thousands, just because the more efficient killers do so from an office building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was prescribed Oxycondon (the generic) for kidney stones and it really helped me get through excruciating pain. (My stones are not seriously enough to require surgery but you gotta sit through the pain to wait for them to pass through).

But as soon as the pain become remotely manageable I stopped it and just used NSAIDs.

Because it doesn't take a genius to look up online what you're taking and know the side effects (I'm counting addition as one)

To this day I keep the unused pills close just in case but I honestly never once tempted to use them for recreational purposes.

I guess my point is that it takes two to tango and let's not throw personal responsibility out of the window when talking about opioids.

<comment><USER30> for people downvoting this: did you have something to add to the discussion?

or do you just have to downvote anyone who shares a first hand experience that happen to not fit into your narrative?

<comment><USER31> I thought the judging was a bit much and highly ironic when coupled with early addict behavior ("let's keep those opioids around _just in case_ ").

<comment><USER32> I think by "just in case" he meant in the case of needing them therapeutically not recreationally.

If you have the self-control the idea is having some in case you fall and break your arm or something(Obviously only for serious injuries).

<comment><USER31> If your problem warrants opioid painkillers you'll get them as part of your _hospital visit_ to fix the actual problem.

<comment><USER16> i'm curious whether you experience chronic pain yourself. opioids are a dangerous class of drugs, and the decision to use them is based on weighing the severity of a person's pain against the inherent risks of using the drugs. in a certain sense, i find it quite inhumane that this decision can only be made by someone who has no accurate way of knowing how much pain the patient feels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> village-idiot While I'm interested in anything to halt or stop the opioid crisis, anything from the owners of OkyContin must be treated with a _large_ grain of salt. OxyContin was nominally supposed to be a slow release low risk opioid for chronic pain sufferers. Not only has that not worked out so well, it's pretty clear that they understood the risks and basically straight up lied to doctors about the risks. They have the capability to create these compounds, but they also have very low trustworthiness.

</comment><comment><USER33> If you understand who Richard "Dirty Dick" Sadler is, the story makes a lot more sense:

Sackler joined Purdue Pharma in 1971, as assistant to the president.[8] He became head of R&D and head of marketing before becoming president in 1999, and co-chairman in 2003.[8] Sackler was in charge of the research department that developed OxyContin. As president, he approved the targeted marketing schemes to promote sales of OxyContin to doctors, pharmacists, nurses, academics, and others. Shelby Sherman, an ex-Purdue sales rep, has called these marketing schemes "graft".[2]

In 2015, Sackler was deposed by four lawyers in Louisville, Kentucky. The deposition concerned the development and marketing of OxyContin under the watch of him and his family, who were and are active board members of their private company, Purdue Pharma. The marketing and prescribing of OxyContin in Pike County, Kentucky, was of particular interest.

Before the case could go to trial and thus before the deposition could become a matter of public record, Purdue settled for $24 million, admitting no liability, sealing the deposition, and requiring the Kentucky prosecutors to destroy, or return to Purdue, millions of pages of internal documents obtained from the company during discovery. The medical news website STAT then sued to unseal Richard Sackler's deposition. A state judge ruled in its favor. Purdue appealed, and, as of October 26, 2017, that appeal remains outstanding. The deposition cannot be made public unless the appeal is decided in favor of STAT again.[9]

Sackler has donated to both Republican and Democratic politicians, though chiefly to Republicans.[3] His charitable foundation, the Richard and Beth Sackler Foundation, has donated to anti-Muslim organizations, as well as to organizations that have promoted the falsehood that millions of undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election.[3]

Sackler is a member of the board of advisors of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.[7]

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Even when they were developing opioids, they knew that that long term care was ineffective and that the risks outweigh the benefits for long term care. This guy does not care. Politicians are on the take so they don't care. As long as companies can patent and profit off of prescription drugs, this problem will continue. It's that simple, yet no one in government has the guts to take these people on. For starters, someone get that damn transcript because I'm sure it has plenty of information to blow the lid off of this.

</comment><comment><USER34> Been there, done that; went through hell to get off OxyContin after a climbing accident.

Repeat customers are created by doing long term harm while providing short term relief, expecting corporations to actually solve problems or have a conscience is beyond silly.

<comment><USER35> I was switched from Oxy (liquid) to morphine after tongue cancer surgery and months of mouth and neck radiation treatment. Was on a maintenance plus "break through pain" prescription for 6 months. It took a week to get withdrawal symptom free with the first 3 days being the worst. It wasn't terrible but I don't want to have to do it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just some background information on the drug patent (which washington post's link to the patent is paywalled, so here: [https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/85/96/76/8ba72da...](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/85/96/76/8ba72daaca8a42/US20160235739A1.pdf)). It's basically buprenorphine (an opioid agonist that is technically non- addictive and indicated for pain control in opioid dependent patients) in a different delivery package that is quite frankly superior to our current versions of buprenorphine.

Our current methods of providing buprenorphine are via sublingual (under your tongue, Subutex) or orally (Suboxone, which is actually buprenorphine plus naloxone). It's a wafer that immediately dissolves when taken delivering the drug orally.

Now, these methods of administration are pretty good. Subutex will dissolve relatively quickly and you've got good pain management in recovering addicts. However, patients will sometimes take these out of their mouth quickly before the healthcare provider notices, so that they can inject it later (which can definitely provide the euphoria associated with opioids).

Suboxone gets around that somewhat, by combining the buprenorphine with naloxone, an opioid antagonist. This works because if the provider wants to give the patient a longer term supply, the user can't abuse it by dissolving the med and injecting it. Why? Because the opioid antagonist that is built in only works when injected, causing severe withdrawal. The issue with this, however, is that opioid addicts are smart. They burn off the naloxone and then inject.

So this drug patent offers an alternative: give wafers of buprenorphine at addiction centers that dissolve immediately in front of the healthcare provider. This avoids the hiding issue of subutex, and provides the same route of administration which is the benefit of subutex over suboxone.

Now, at the end of the day, does any of this matter? Not really. Subutex is still hard to get covered by insurance, so most providers stick with Suboxone (or generics, as I think that's available now) anyways. Do you think that this new medication will make it into practice? We don't even have phase 1 trial data on the drug, just a patent.

If you're really outraged over a drug being patented, though, then the discussion becomes far more complicated. Smarter individuals than myself argue that on HN all the time.

</comment><comment><USER36> This guy is the Sylvester McMonkey McBean of pharmaceuticals

</comment><comment><USER14> Crazy. Sub clinics are sad places. Gray-faced junkies paying $3-400/month to stay hooked. A buprenorphine script is probably $10/month. It's a racket. Capitalism at work.

<comment> tmp-20150107 Wow! This makes slightly less angry about the hoops I had to jump through to get on a treatment program with the NHS in the UK. (Well, the part of it where prescriptions are still free.) At least they don't add to the problem by making you pay to get help...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37>
        Jack Donaghy: Imagine that your favorite corn chip manufacturer also owned the number one diarrhea medication.

        Liz Lemon: That'd be great, 'cause then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.

        Jack Donaghy: Keep thinking.

        Liz Lemon: [beat] Except then they might be tempted to make the corn chips give you...

        Jack Donaghy: Vertical integration.

</comment><comment><USER38> Build the poison, with the antidote to (much) later follow ... A perfectly sound business model. Reinforce the pathways that ensure that an industry's products (prescription drugs) will never fall out of vogue as the mechanism to solve all of people's problems, and make (a lot of) money all the while. Subjugation through palliation, a textbook case.

<comment><USER39> Remember when Oxycontin was supposed to be a pain pill that was "impossible to get addicted to"? Yeah... I'm trusting this "relief measure" about as much as I trusted that line in the 90s.

This is just gonna be their new wave of "milder" Oxy, that people get hooked on first. Sure, we're sold that its for helping things now... But give it a few years and this will be just another prescription opiate slung by street dealers. "Oh its safer!"

Methadone is addictive too. And so is this filth.

<comment><USER40> > Remember when Oxycontin was supposed to be a pain pill that was "impossible > to get addicted to"? Yeah... I'm trusting this "relief measure" about as > much as I trusted that line in the 90s.

Huh? Oxycodone is extremely addictive, just like every other opioid. This has been well known since always.

<comment><USER41> I don't know that they ever flat-out phrased it as extremely as "impossible to get addicted to", but Purdue Pharma definitely made puffed-up claims that the extended-release nature of OxyContin drastically lowered addiction potential compared to immediate-release opioids. They were fined $600M for aggressively misleading marketing about its addiction potential and reduced side effects [1].

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/business/11drug- web.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/business/11drug-web.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go through life with no conscience. I don't really want to be a sociopath but I admit that to be free from guilt or anxiety over my actions at even a level one tenth of this guy would be nice.

<comment><USER43> Opioid pain drugs are life savers for people who actually need them, so I think this is a bit more complicated than capitalist Satan-incarnate vs. the poor helpless fools duped into taking his wicked drug.

<comment><USER44> OxyContin was largely a gimmick to market a drug that was long out of patent (Oxycodone was first synthesized in 1916):

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/)

<comment><USER39> The real gimmick? That it would be "non-addictive".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is great news. Anything to fight the opioid epidemic is a good thing.

<comment><USER26> If this drug works it may well fuel the fire.</comment></comment>


Stylus, the Revolutionary Successor to CSS - <AUTHOR> http://nylira.com/stylus-the-revolutionary-successor-to-css/

<comment><USER2> I think this article is not a great introduction to Stylus, it's a better idea to check out their Github page: <http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/>

While you can write functions to create abbreviated versions of CSS properties, it's entirely optional.

Also I actually prefer Stylus' mixins and functions to SASS'.

</comment><comment><USER3> I kinda doesn't like the concept of such cryptic representations of standard language. May be by writing such way you saved a lot of characters, but anytime standard CSS is lot more readable thus maintainable.

Though I also feel, browser specific styles are really painful. And I also miss lack of functions, variable in CSS.

</comment><comment><USER4> less characters != equal readability. I'll stick with SASS for now.</comment>


Cyber Warfare Tactics To Cure Cancer? - <AUTHOR> http://nocamels.com/2012/08/cyber-warfare-tactics-could-be-used-in-war-against-cancer/

<comment><USER2> Another example of why I hate biology reporting in the media.

-No citation to original article. Check.

-Obligatory image of a kidney cell. Check

-Silly analogy between technology ("social network!") and biology. Check.

-Overstated and even sillier analogy about some cure ("Cyber warfare tactics!"). Check.

-Respinning old knowledge of cancer with a new, glitzy light ("Spy cells! Technology! Internet!"). Check.

Nothing to see here except another fluff piece trying to drum up pageviews.</comment>


Almanax – a place to draw, visualise and search graphs - <AUTHOR> https://alman.ax <comment><AUTHOR> This is my new startup, let me know what you think or if you have any questions</comment>


Show HN: A little file config format I made - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/flyingmachine/higml Would love any feedback, especially on the documentation. Is it clear what the purpose of "Higml" is? Is its advantage clear?<p>Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Tonight I finally extracted this from a project I'm working on.

I'm not really sure how to describe what it does. In the readme I have "Higml is a terse format for converting an input hash to an output hash." If anyone could take a look and tell me what you think of the project I'd appreciate it. Is the documentation helpful? Is it clear when "higml" would be useful?

Thanks

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what the world needs is another config file format. What's the impetus behind reinventing the wheel for the 400th time? Between YAML, JSON, XML, and the 40000 other annoyingly dissimilar config formats people have invented, what does this have to offer the rest don't?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main advantage of my config format is that it takes a css-selector-style approach to determining the final configuration. This makes it much easier to create config file with complicated conditions and to understand it.</comment></comment></comment>


Stashing your work with git - <AUTHOR> http://pierrerambaud.com/blog/linux/2013-06-08-stashing-your-work-with-git

<comment><USER3> One place where the stash is really useful is pre-rebase. Unlike in merge, you need a clean worktree before you can rebase irrespective of whether or not those worktree changes will be affected by the rebase. A very common workflow on a topic branch:

      $ git stash
      $ git rebase master
      $ git stash pop

To automate this workflow, there is a topic called rr/rebase-autostash that introduces the configuration variable rebase.autostash which will automatically 'stash' and 'stash pop' for you.

The topic is still cooking in git.git, and is due to hit `master` in a few days. If you want to know more, read about it from the `pu` branch of git.git. I've put up the most important commit message here [1] for convenience.

[1]: [http://artagnon.com/git-rebase.autostash](http://artagnon.com/git- rebase.autostash)

</comment><comment><USER4> Useful post that taught me a few new tricks about stash.

I like to use stashes as opposed to a "half commit" mentioned by others because conceptually it's not a commit; it represents a chunk of work that is not in a commit-ready state, but is a work in progress. You can (and almost always should, IMHO) include a description of a stash and you also know what commit the stash is based off on and the branch you had checked out when you stashed. Thus, you get the same basic information as a "half commit" while avoiding what for me is a mixing of conceptually different things that I prefer to keep separate.

Of course, to each their own. That's one of the things I love about git is that it offers at least some flexibility to taylor it to what you feel is your optimal workflow.

</comment><comment><USER5> stash is something that should be used for only the briefest of times - <USER2> only time I use it is "stash, pull, unstash"

If you want to save partial work to a branch, commit it, go do your work on the other branch, then use "reset --soft HEAD^" to undo the commit but keep the work.

Far more reliable

<comment><USER6> Why? I stash often and it has been quite reliable for me.

<comment><USER5> primarily, if you come back to a stash a week later, other than your memory, what tells you what branch that stashed code belongs to?

If somebody else needs to take over the project and pulls the branch, what tells him there's also stashed code for it?

stashes should be very short-lived, they're the wrong tool for anything else

<comment><USER4> I agree that stashes should be short-lived, but

      % git stash list

will show you what branch was checked out when you stashed. Also, because a stash is represented as a commit, you can know what commit the stash is based on. From the git-stash man page:

"A stash is represented as a commit whose tree records the state of the working directory, and its first parent is the commit at HEAD when the stash was created. The tree of the second parent records the state of the index when the stash is made, and it is made a child of the HEAD commit. The ancestry graph looks like this:

             .----W
            /    /
      -----H----I

where H is the HEAD commit, I is a commit that records the state of the index, and W is a commit that records the state of the working tree."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> git-stash is cool, but it can be easy to fall into a habit of creating stashes that you never come back to. When you finally list them all, you find 10, 20 stashes, and you can't remember what they all refer to. I find that situation nightmarish.

I prefer to make a half-commit (and note this), and simply rebase -i later on ( _before_ I push my feature branch).

Then again, I'm very comfortable with rebasing my work and how to avoid issues when doing so, and I recognize that not everyone is.

<comment><USER6> I have my stashes listed in the status, and drop them when needed. For me committing requires a good name and needs to be "somewhere", so it is a deeper action, while I can put any kind of crap in a stash instantly, and drop it if unused.</comment></comment>


Nerves: buildroot linux and Erlang, with an Erlang "init" - <AUTHOR> http://nerves-project.org/ <comment><USER2> I don't think I'd agree that Nerves is "firmware". Nerves is, at its root, buildroot linux and Erlang, with an Erlang "init". At least the last time I looked, the "hardware interface" was just file I/O operations in sysfs. Which is cool and all, but that's just a process in Linux userland reading and writing files.

I spent quite some time trying to get tighter integration between a kernel module and the Erlang runtime. Because of the way Erlang works, one can't select(2)/poll(2) file descriptors in a useful way, which makes sysfs interrupt files less useful. I wrote a very simple Erlang node[0] to send messages when select/poll returns. It works okay, but the jitter is very high.

Peer Strizinger wrote something called Grisp[1] which uses the POSIX interface to RTEMS[2] to run Erlang without a canonical OS. RTEMS is still ultimately an embedded kernel, but it keeps you much closer to the metal than Linux. Unfortunately, Peer hasn't/won't release his code despite my pleas.

Most promisingly, there's Cloudozer's Erlang on Xen port to the Raspberry Pi[3]. This is a clean-sheet Erlang VM implementation that actually runs bare- metal (no POSIX!). The code is definitely experimental and I don't have the time to try to retarget it to my preferred platforms, but it's exciting anyway. It's definitely what I would call "firmware" in Erlang.

Anyway, Nerves is cool, but it's (u-boot + Linux + epmd + BEAM).

[0] [https://github.com/thenewwazoo/erl_poc/blob/master/c_src/nod...](https://github.com/thenewwazoo/erl_poc/blob/master/c_src/node.c)

[1] [http://www.grisp.org](http://www.grisp.org)

[2] [http://www.rtems.org](http://www.rtems.org)

[3] [https://github.com/cloudozer/ling/tree/raspberry- pi](https://github.com/cloudozer/ling/tree/raspberry-pi)

<comment><USER3> > _I don 't think I'd agree that Nerves is "firmware". Nerves is, at its root, > buildroot linux and Erlang, with an Erlang "init"._

Ok, we'll use that as a provisional title, since people here have been objecting to all the previous titles. If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) one, we'll change it again. (Normally it isn't so hard to look at a project page and find a suitable description, but I couldn't do that here—this one is surprisingly on the other side of the breathless marketing divide. Et tu, Erlang?)

<comment><USER4> The web page's original title is perfectly good. The new one is like an early investor is seeing AirBnb early on and saying "Oh, it's just like VRBO but with higher fees." True but not helpful, and not likely to result in a correct investment decision.

      * it's Elixir not Erlang
      * to the people who would use the project, it is "firmware"

Nerves is really cool. And the cool part is that it's becoming possible to do what firmware programmers used to, but using higher level more productive languages/OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the term _embedded systems_ is slightly abused in this context.

From what I understand, Nerves essentially creates a minimal Linux firmware image that boots into your Elixir app. That is way too huge and bulky for most embedded systems i.e. microcontrollers and FPGAs. Furthermore, I don't think that the overhead of the firmware and VM can actually handle the level of realtime control required in the embedded space.

Since Nerves seems to be targeting the IoT space, why not just say "Elixir for IoT"?

Nonetheless, it looks like an awesome project. Elixir is a really interesting language running on a mature platform, and has come quite a long way in a very short amount of time.

Edit: from the ElixirDaze talk [1], Gareth says that the image is around 18 MB in size.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poWoCWDLxRU&t=9m05s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poWoCWDLxRU&t=9m05s)

<comment><USER6> I'm an old embedded dog and I struggle with this a lot recently.

I get that an RPi or Beaglebone or any large SoC architecture qualifies as an embedded system in the sense of "this board is running a drone/driverless car/CNC machine/etc".

But, at least to me, these are _highly miniaturized desktop systems now_. There's disk. There's advanced I/O (HDMI, LVDS, 802.11, Ethernet, SATA, PCIe!). There's a full operating system on there. You could put one inside a 1U case and pretend it's a server.

Not that this is a bad thing. SoCs are awesome and I personally have a half- dozen projects cooking with iMX6s and other cool parts in this domain. But I think we need to find a way, especially in the IoT era, to quantify a small device node architecture versus a Linux-desktop-on-a-board. I already see Microsoft abusing this by putting Win10 on an RPi and calling it an IoT architecture.

<comment><USER7> As someone that has played in the embedded world too, i struggled with that last year.

But let's be honest. Except if you have really strong constraint about power consumption and form factor, most of these small stuff are far easier to work with, perform probably better (because yes your software has bugs) and have so so so much better tooling.

Because the embedded world has a big tooling problem. I still hope to have some Rust on lower level to push it into the XXIst century.

And the nerves project is made by people that come from the embedded world. They completely know their limits and do not try to push it everywhere.

<comment><USER5> Not only power consumption, but also for realtime applications, like those used in industrial and automotive control systems.

In such scenarios, the overhead and unpredictability of the OS scheduler is unacceptable. When you want to say isolate a fault _exactly_ 100us after it takes place, you can't have the OS executing that task at some different delay in a nondeterministic fashion.

<comment><USER7> well in that case you enter a completely different world. Hard RealTime system are not really only "embedded". They also exists for bigger things.

It is just a really different set of way to think. And a really hard one i may add.

<comment><USER8> Hard realtime can also be with seconds latency, to further complicate things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nerves looks like a really exciting project. IoT is only going to get bigger and as a result there are a number of problems to overcome. Things like how to do remote deployment and version handling to the devices. Also with Nerves you can write the device "client" code and backend server code all in the same language.

Anyway checkout the Elixir Conference talk on Nerves: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=118-g0ODfgg&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=118-g0ODfgg&feature=youtu.be)

If anyone wants a 30% off coupon to an Elixir course, here you go: [https://www.udemy.com/elixir-for- beginners/?couponCode=Save3...](https://www.udemy.com/elixir-for- beginners/?couponCode=Save30%25)

<comment><USER10> alternative -> [https://elixirschool.com/](https://elixirschool.com/)

<comment><USER9> Great course by the way +1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Nerves is young, but already powers rock-solid shipping industrial products!_

Wow. Okay. Can you show us?

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out Garth Hitchens' talk about 2:40 in: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poWoCWDLxRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poWoCWDLxRU)

<comment><USER7> To be complete, iirc it is that product that is in production. The elixirconf EU talk that is show above also talk about some production stuff. [http://www.rosepointnav.com/commercial-radar- interface/](http://www.rosepointnav.com/commercial-radar-interface/)</comment></comment></comment>


Hard Drive Reliability Stats for Q1 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/ <comment><USER2> The bit about the ST3000DM001 is fascinating - they've a longer article on it at [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive- failure](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure) \- I have had four (out of the four I bought - two internal, two "shucked") of these die on me over the years, on the first occasion simultaneously in a raid-5 array that I'd just downloaded several TB of irreplaceable video to from SD cards. Now at least I know why.

<comment><USER3> SD cards are pretty easy to recover media from, if you haven't overwritten them.

Also, I'm a bit surprised by their topology. Reading the bit about the 3TB drives, it sounds like three drive failures in their raid5 array would result in lost customer data.

I hope they have a 2nd line of defense, e.g. tapes. One company I used to work for ran into sufficient failures (particularly of the living-dead variety, where a second drive fails during rebuild or after reboot) they made tapes the 3rd line of defense, and maintained two copies of all data at the cluster level, so that the total failure of an entire machine was acceptable.

<comment><USER4> "A Backblaze Vault is comprised of 20 Storage Pods, with the data evenly spread across all 20 pods. ... Drives in the same drive position in each of the 20 Storage Pods are grouped together into a storage unit we call a "tome". ... Every file uploaded to a Vault is broken into pieces before being stored. Each of those pieces is called a "shard". ... Each file is stored as 20 shards: 17 data shards and 3 parity shards. Because those shards are distributed across 20 storage pods in 20 cabinets, the Vault is resilient to the failure of a storage pod, or even a power loss to an entire cabinet."

From [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage- architect...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage- architecture/), which is well worth taking a few minutes to read. Their approach to data resiliency is pretty neat and full of the kind of common- sense reasoning that warms the very bottoms of my ol' sysadmin's heart ("use simple parts" and "build the tools you need to run your infrastructure", among others).

<comment><USER5> Yev from Backblaze here -> Glad you like the build! We have more fun things we're working on in that regard ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought it was the same article I'd seen before since I've seen this URL appear on HN before at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923535), but apparently it's not. Only the small "May 21st, 2015" text in the article is any indication.

I think they really need to put a date in the URL and not just overwrite the previous version, so we can see how things change over time.

Edit: in fact they had a nice bargraph of the failure rates by drive model in their previous post, but it's gone now. Fortunately someone seems to have archived a copy of it here: [http://thetrendythings.com/read/28144](http://thetrendythings.com/read/28144)

<comment><USER7> Some of the previous articles are still up:

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard- drive-q4-2014/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014/)

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability- update...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update- september-2014/)

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i- buy/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/)

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives- last/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/)

You can also sift through the data yourself: [https://www.backblaze.com/hard- drive-test-data.html](https://www.backblaze.com/hard-drive-test-data.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are these consumer drives being used in an industrial setting?

I'm surprised to see such high AFR from Seagate and WD. These brands have had decades of well-deserved loyalty and trust, and I'd never suspected some of their drives have such high failure rates.

Why are HGST's AFR numbers so much more preferable?

<comment><USER7> HGST was originally IBM's hard drive division. They probably have inherited much of the reliability secrets that the other manufacturers never bothered with for their consumer class drives (which Backblaze uses). Either that, or they learned a lot of stuff with the "DeathStar" model[0].

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_failures)

<comment><USER9> Yes, but nowadays HGST is no more. The company has been bought by WD, the 2.5" and smaller HDDs are now part of Western Digital. The 3.5" HDDs are now Toshiba due regulatory requirements.

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

<comment><USER7> A surprising amount of industry consolidation happened after the Thailand floods a few years ago. There's what, 3 hard drive manufacturers left!?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is the formula used for confidence interval ? "0.0%-106.9%" interval for low numbers is somewhat disturbing. What approximation cause this problem ?

<comment><USER11> The 106.9% isn't a problem of mathematics; it just means an average of more than one failure per drive per year, or alternatively an average lifespan of less than one year. It comes from the fact that they've only had those models in service for a very short time, and so they can only constrain the lifetime through the same reasoning used to estimate a MTBF of multiple years with less than a year of testing. With zero failures so far, it's obvious why the bottom of the confidence interval is at 0%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please rename the HGST drives. There are only Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba - HGST is no more.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital! To address the requirements of regulatory agencies, in May 2012 WD divested to Toshiba assets that enabled Toshiba to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets. So all HGST 3.5" HDDs are now Toshiba, whereas the HGST 2.5" and smaller HDDs from Western Digital.

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

<comment><USER4> This comes across as a pet peeve. If the drives are branded, marketed, and sold as HGST, then they are HGST drives. Even if Yev is wrong, it's possible that WD or Toshiba are maintaining HGST drives to different specifications or QA standards.

And I don't think Yev's wrong, I'm pretty sure I remember reading/hearing the same, and [http://www.zdnet.com/article/western-digitals-hgst- cuts-500-...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/western-digitals-hgst- cuts-500-singapore-jobs-shifts-production-to-thailand/) also suggests that WD is maintaining HGST as a separate entity.

Calling HGST drives Western Digital or Toshiba would be more confusing, not less.

<comment><USER9> Either call them Hitachi or HGST or Toshiba. But as HGST still exists as a brand name of Western Digital and new HGST drives are either 2.5 or don't resemble the old ones mentioned in the statistics, it get's quite confusing - as the statistics is often used as a buyer guide. Adding a remark somewhere on his article would help to avoid the confusion.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon gadget hijacks owner's heating after hearing radio report - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/11/amazon-gadget-echo-hijacks-owner-heating-radio-report <comment><USER2> This is pretty hillarious, I can't wait for commercials that change what you are watching to the website of the commercial/etc.</comment>


Process One releases their Erlang XMPP library - <AUTHOR> http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/processone_labs/

<comment><USER2> I am hopeful this is in line for Wave servers. I'm actually surprised they haven't already put out a beta wave server extension.</comment>


Apple Accidentally Leaks Radical iPhone Upgrade - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/06/11/apple-new-iphone-11-max-release-usb-c-lightning-upgrade-iphone-xs-max-xr/ <comment><USER2> As the article notes, the image actually never made sense because it was pointing the lightning connector to the computer which obviously never actually used lightning. So it's very possible that when they had to update the imagery for the new iTunes some smart designer thought "We should probably fix that".</comment>


That was quick: Grooveshark disappears from the Google Play Store (again) - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/08/31/that-quick-grooveshark-disappears-google-play-store-again/ <comment><USER2> Last week I was using grooveshark at home, when suddenly it opened a new tab showing that malicious "Windows Update" virus advertisement. This has been a problem with grooveshark in the past, and it's very ridiculous that they haven't sorted it out yet.

<comment><USER3> There are a whole heap of issues it is ridiculous that they have not worked out. Mislabeled songs, incomplete songs, poorly organized library, low quality tracks, viruses, partial albums.... etc...

And from what I understand also they haven't sorted out the whole licensing issue behind the music they serve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get why people like Grooveshark. It's like LimeWire in a webapp. I thought we had collectively moved past that.

<comment><USER5> People like it because it is LimeWire in a webapp.

Actually, scratch that -- they like it because it lets them listen to whatever the song they want to listen to, whereever they want to listen to it. As far as I know, nobody has that kind of selection anywhere else.

<comment><USER6> Youtube does, and is used as a main music player for a lot of people.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but youtube doesn't have an offline player feature and if it did, the videos would still be larger than Grooveshark audio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Grooveshark is an eloquent discovery tool. Music discovery is always a challenge for music lovers.

Example just now made me want to comment here - very simple.

Friend posted a YouTube video with a song on Facebook. I went to Grooveshark and listened to the song, and others by the artists - not song samples, but the whole songs, which I made a little playlist with. Hooked on the band discovery, I just went and bought two albums.

</comment><comment><USER7> I honestly believe that Grooveshark will never get love from the major record labels. They just pissed them off and the record industry likes to play hardball.

I gave them a tech suggestion a few weeks ago for their mobile apps. Obviously the apple app store won't allow them and neither will Google Play. Their obvious route in this situation should be to leverage HTML5 Localstorage. (this is with respect to storing songs for offline listening..) They haven't gotten around to it yet but I hope they do sometime soon.

I have an rDio subscription but I love Grooveshark because I can always find every song there. rDio doesn't have deals with every label around the world so if I want to listen to something slightly offbeat - chances are that only Grooveshark will have it.

<comment><USER9> I am not familiar with the music app scene, but whenever I am working I have grooveshark open, I can find any song, especially the latest ones. I also don't have facebook so I can't use those apps, the whole experience is very seamless. At the gym I use the Pandora app but if I had access to grooveshark, I would definitely replace Pandora with it. Maybe to do what it takes to get this level of seamlesness is what is causing a backlash from record labels. I also love not being forced into social sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've loved (and used) Grooveshark since the early days. I have most of my music saved to my account and go to the site daily to play music. What's always irked me though was that it wasn't a subscription service. I would gladly pay for an app of its caliber monthly without a thought.

I pay for the pro version now (I believe it's at 25/year) and it's just too low. I imagine revenue from a (monthly) subscription service would give them a lot of cash for handling labels. In turn, I think they'd garner the respect/legitimacy needed to get them in the app store.</comment>


Life After Objective C - <AUTHOR> http://cocoamanifest.net/articles/2011/05/life-after-objective-c.html I think there's some pretty good hints that Apple is going to make MacRuby their next generation language platform. <comment><USER2> Don't visit this link. This site breaks the back button; forward and back are changed to navigate between posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. Back button works for me in safari and chrome. What browser are you using? I'll disable the keyboard arrow key navigation for now until I figure out what you mean.

<comment><USER2> This is chromium on ubuntu. It looks like a chromium bug; lots of mentions of navigation issues, though I don't see a specific report on this yet. alt-left and alt-right do browser back and forward in normal circumstances, but in the presence of the navigation code their behavior appears to change. It appears that browser forward and back buttons continue to work properly in the presence of the navigation code.

Sorry, false alarm!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yuck! Well, I'll leave off the keyboard navigation for now. It was just a fun diversion for me to write and wasn't critical for the site anyway.

Thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr

The article argues that MacRuby is the future of Mac & iOS software development.

</comment><comment><USER4> People that complain about languages simply haven't mastered them yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I don't know why BASIC got so much hate. It was so powerful. There was nothing to complain about.

<comment><USER4> It serves its purpose. Just like C++, Java, C#, Ruby, Python and Haskell all serve their respective purposes. Fact is, not everyone agrees with your position, nor do they agree with my position.

I would be foolish to attempt to convince you of my point of view. You can write a blog complaining about a language and get commentary from people. I will write code in that language and get money. This is okay with me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't complaining about a language. I was arguing that I think I see hints for what direction Apple is moving.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Value of "free" customers in a freemium pricing model - <AUTHOR>

In what way are nonpaying customers valuable in a freemium pricing model.  Let's get the obvious out of the way:  Yes a certain percentage of them will convert to paying customers and they will tell their friends etc I get that.  Say someone like Dropbox has x million customers and only a 2% of them are paying.  There is a cost associated with the other 98%.  How do you adjust the pricing to cover the cost of those free customers?  Does anyone have any stories they wish to share about how they approached this problem?  Also do big numbers strike an emotional chord when raising successive rounds? <comment><USER2> "In what way are nonpaying customers valuable in a freemium pricing model"

They keep your user from using a competing service (whether pay or free).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It depends on the product. In some products, there may be "network effects" where each user benefits by the number of other users in the system-- for example, if Facebook were to adopt a Freemium model, the paying customers would benefit from having the free users in the system.

This, of course, is not the case for most apps-- like Dropbox, in the example you chose. For Dropbox, the free customers have costs associated, but largely serve as a funnel. In other words, the costs of the free users are just considered part of the customer acquistion costs, the same as if they were Adwords costs with a given conversion rate.

I don't think big numbers strike an emotional chord with VCs when it comes to financing rounds, if by "big numbers" you mean "big numbers of non-paying users", unless there are plans to improve the conversion rate on these prospects.

If I were you I'd frame the question another way: given the product/app that you are planning, what advantages would a Freemium model offer over, say, a free limited-time trial of a paid-only product?

<comment><USER4> Actually, I think Dropbox has a network effect as well. I'm a paying user, but my account is more valuable to me because can share folders and collaborate with free users. Many of them would not use it if it wasn't free (hey, I started with the free service and later upgraded myself), but since its free they have seen how awesome it is and are 1000% more likely to upgrade to a pro plan than if they'd never started using it in the first place. In the mean time, they make my Dropbox account more valuable to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Free customers may add value by virtue of the data that they contribute during normal use of your product.

In my case, our free users contribute data which, in aggregate, allows us to peer deeply into the college admissions process and ask questions such as, "To what extent does applying early to Yale help my chances of admission?"

</comment><comment><USER6> You need to figure out what it costs you to support each user, make a ballpark of how many free users will upgrade (it's less than 2% for most sites that share their numbers, including my own W3Counter.com), and do the math to see if freemium will work for you. You might find that you won't be profitable if your cost to support the free user base is more than the paying users can cover at prices they're willing to pay. You can't just make the price arbitrarily high, sometimes freemium really doesn't work for a business.

W3Counter barely gets by as a freemium service. The paying users cover the servers it takes to run the site, but not enough more to pay even a single person's salary. I'm always waiting until service degrades to the point someone starts complaining before I add more hardware, otherwise enough new users wouldn't have started subscriptions to pay for the expansion.

The next service I built, W3ROI, does not offer a free plan. It's harder to build traffic to the site, and there are less people talking about it on blogs and social networks, but each new user it adds pays for themselves. There is never a risk of not being able to afford the hardware to provide a good quality of service.

</comment><comment><USER7> They are valuable for several reasons:

1) They may give you feedback 2) You can track + analyze their usage 3) They may refer peers 4) They may become 'paid customers'

In a vacuum, non-paying customers may not be super-valuable. However, if these non-paying users have good experiences with your product/service, it is possible they are adding more value to than they cost.

Remember, the marginal cost (per user) for many web apps is minimal.

</comment><comment><USER8> From an non-financial perspective, presumably they are useful for testing the service? Adding experimental features, seeing how they react, not having to worry about up time on their servers. Understanding how the service scales, in case you get any enterprise-style customers. Learning what sort of features are missing etc. Essentially a loss leader to improve the service.

</comment><comment><USER9> Aside from the items you've mentioned you should also consider these items:

Proving your market - Attracting and registering large numbers of people prove it's something people want. If you can't give it away for free, there's a problem. (Good for funding)

User feedback and "The up sell" - With the right features that non-paying customer may be a paying customer waiting to happen. You'll also have collection of emails of people interested enough to try your product, where you can up sell them to paid later. (Good for your product)

Scalability - Testing your product in the real world with real traffic patterns, live servers, and people depending on your service is very valuable. (Good for funding AND your product)

I'm a huge believer in the freemium model. Just don't give the cow away and try to position your premium product where users feel like they are getting real value when they have to take out their wallets.

</comment><comment><USER10> We use the freemium model (Paymo time tracking & invoicing <http://www.paymo.biz>) it can have the following benefits for your potential business (in no particular order):

1\. helps spread the word (lower customer acquistion costs) 2\. "free" users are more likely to give you feedback, which will make your app better over time 3\. you and your team feel good that you're able to share with the world something for free (just think of how many free apps help you during the day) 4\. you can convert free users to paying customers. (in our case the app actually helps the users grow their business) 5\. people seem to be willing to try out free apps vs trial apps more often

</comment><comment><USER11> I have extensively researched on the software products relating to the PC maintenance category. What I have found is that you can cover the cost associated with non-paying customers through advertising,etc. For instance, Trial Pay is used by many software vendors to let customers pay for essential things and get software for 'free'. There are other advertising models which can be adopted. Yet for our product, RegInOut, <http://www.reginout.com> , we have not yet tries these freemium model yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ning is one prefect example. They gained lot of popularity with the freemium model but weren't able to cope up ultimately.

Ning did get into the bad books of many when they pulled the plug and asked all existing customers to either pay or leave.

Adding to what someone pointed out, the value depends on cost involved per free user and also if it is worth it in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think for Dropbox free customers are recruiters, when I recommend it to someone I usually find that it fits their need perfectly and they love it, they just didn't know it existed before. Without the freemium model thy would struggle to reach some of these people and as long as a small percentage want to pay for more space they keep growing.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are three reasons. You mentioned two of them - word of mouth, and potential conversion to paying in the future. But there's another one too, and that's just the total size of your userbase. Either for bragging rights (we're bigger than competitor X) or for future sale value (the more users you have, the more money you will likely make from a sale/acquisition of your service, even if a lot of them aren't paying for your service) - both are good reasons to offer a free, dumbed down version of your pay service.</comment>