The Only Type of API Services I'll Use - <AUTHOR> https://www.rdegges.com/2020/the-only-type-of-api-services-ill-use/ <comment><USER2> > Customers know this, and are often apprehensive about these types of deal > negotiations, so they tend to only go through this process if absolutely > necessary

Unfortunately, for big enterprises, this isn't true. They (as a company, maybe not the individual developers inside it) want to go through it. They're the ones who start the RFP process, and as the service provider, you'll either follow their process... or they'll buy from someone else, no matter how much better your API may be.

It depends on the scenario, but this isn't as insane as it may sound. It's less relevant for, say, a SMS API which is interchangeable, but if you provide an API service that is deeply intertwined with the processes in that enterprise, the company needs to evaluate the different providers. This process is time-consuming one way or the other... they might as well let the different providers do most of the work for them (which makes sense, because they know their services).

As for the price negotiation itself: I agree.

Also, an enterprise sales process and usage based pricing are not mutually exclusive! You absolutely can sell usage based pricing, and both parties hopefully get the benefits listed.

<comment><USER3> I've seen this in my own business. They can't turn this process off even for a trivial purchase. If you let them they will drag you into the enterprise sales process whether it makes sense for you or not.

This is why there is a dearth of software in the middle of the market. You can sell something for less than $1000 because customers can expense it. After that the sales process forces up costs so much that you get "contact us for prices" and the hard sell.

<comment><USER4> Joel Spolsky wrote about this in detail, OMG, fifteen years ago:

> There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The > minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate > signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers > and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a > salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf > course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the Ritz Carlton. And with all > this, the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about > $50,000. If you're sending salespeople out to customers and charging less > than $75,000, you're losing money.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and- rubber-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber- duckies/)

<comment><USER5> That is talking about one-off sales, not SaaS.

Monthly billing changes his numbers drastically - because now software priced at $1000 is sold as $100 per month instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the takeaways:

> Usage-based pricing with automatic volume discounting incentivizes both > parties to grow and win together.

Highly agree, especially if you're trying to see how viable a small project is. And if it grows quickly, I know I'll get even more value from the service provider and won't worry about leaving money on the table at the end of each billing cycle.

> Bucket-based pricing creates an adversarial relationship between you and the > customer because the customer is always going to pay more for your service > than they want to.

I do see the viewpoint from the service provider as well, as they know they have N number of users at P price point, and can more accurately estimate their monthly revenue, plan out growth budgets, or show higher profits on price increases.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love tarsnap's usage-based pricing, but I think it only works because there's exactly one metric that they're using to charge me (bytes stored per time).

If you're trying to charge for a service or set of services but your costs vary depending on your customers' mix of usage (imagine you're hosting files, and customers pay you both for storing the files and also for ingress/egress), suddenly you either have a complicated pricing model ($X per byte-month stored, $Y per egress byte) or you have to simplify the model down to one metric, but this has its own problems.

Say you simplify down to just charging for storage. A few customers are going to figure out that you have "free" ingress/egress and they're going to use your service as a CDN that's cheaper than any other CDN, and now your costs are misaligned with what you're charging. Or if you decide to just charge for ingress/egress but not for bytes stored, a few customers are going to figure out that you're a "free" AWS S3 Glacier service and again your costs are misaligned with what you're charging.

You can write a ToS that prohibits this and you can track down these users, but now you're engaging in adversarial behavior.

I agree with the author that it's best to charge based solely on usage with a pricing model that isn't too complicated, but if your service isn't amenable to a simple pricing model, the next best thing is enterprise pricing -- _because_ you want to find customers who are going to be price- / billing- insensitive, who need your service.

<comment><USER8> Tarsnap user here and I second your love of its pricing model. Business folks don't seem to like it though and prefer the bucket model. I think love for this model stems from an engineering mindset where we're happiest aligning our interests with our customers'.

I read about Michelin's case somewhere that I found interesting. Apparently Michelin doesn't sell tires to trucking companies - they sell miles. So they're incentivized to make better tires and miles is all their customers care about and they don't have to worry about whether Michelin is deliberately making bad tires just to make more money. Same "utility" logic here I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Big companies and organisations often have tightly controlled fixed budgets, and in my experience it's hard to get variable-rate services approved. In fact, even for a personal-use account, I'd rather have a fixed amount than risk that someone abuses my account and I end up with an astronomical bill that precludes food for the rest of the month.

Personally, I like services that cap you to a "degraded" service level once you go over your limit, say you get 20TB at full speed, but after that you're either throttled to 10Mbit for the rest of the month or you pay extra to have the rate limit lifted.

While I agree with some of the mutual benefits of per-use pricing, as a customer I would like some control to set usage restrictions at the upper limit of what I am willing to pay, specifically for services where I don't have much control over the actual usage.

<comment><USER7> You raise a very good point here -- personal users are more likely to be price-sensitive but corporate users are more likely to be grief-sensitive (as in they don't want to deal with problems, they're willing to throw money at problems to make them go away to a certain extent).

It's up to service providers to market themselves effectively to the 'right' audience if they want aligned customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _And if you think of API services as utility companies, it only makes sense > that they should charge based on usage. After all, imagine what would happen > if you had to sign a two-year contract stipulating how much electricity > you're going to use at home, or if you had to choose a bucket plan for > electricity that forced you to purchase a set amount of kilowatt-hours of > electricity._

My utility company pretty much does exactly that: they charge a fixed fee for the privilege of supplying me at all, and then they charge me for my metered usage. Different suppliers offer a variable balance between a larger fixed fee and a larger per-unit cost, so I can shop around and find the optimal supplier for my usage level.

Why aren't more APIs priced in that way?

<comment><USER11> Many are, somewhat. It's common for services to have different overage rates at different tiers (eg: starter might be $10/m for 10GB and $0.1/GB after, while pro might be $50/m for 100GB and $0.01/GB after).

They also tend to differentiate on other features and support levels too, which muddies it a little, but the concept is there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What the OP fails to explain is how we can ensure that the user pays for the used service. The problem is that we have to bill after the service usage and the user could run away without paying and create a new account for his next use of the service.

That's the reason of upfront payment and the bucket usage payment model. An alternative would to pay upfront for a credit of usage, but this would require to monitor the usage and an action when the credit falls below a threshold.

The model to use depends on the type service we offer. If we can afford the loss due to people running away without paying the service, then it's ok to bill after use. But that wouldn't be a great business model.

To me, the upfront payment of a usage credit seam the best compromise.

<comment><USER13> I think the credit-based system is the best compromise. It's even better if the cusomer can explicitly opt into an automatic top-up option, where they're automatically billed when their balance falls below a certain threshold. This is even better than the bucket model, as those who want their service running at all times won't risk running out of what their bucket offers, whereas those who don't want to control how much they spend can do the top ups manually.

<comment><USER14> Another point in favour of this model: as the business is in control of the credit, they can implement custom flows of this virtual money bag without hitting any charges. Famous example being the $20 offered when signing up on some hosting services, or referral programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For an API, or really any software, you have a large fixed development cost plus a small marginal cost per request. So the problem is that you have to price your usage high enough to cover the fixed cost. Depending on the usage that can be hundreds to thousands of times the marginal cost.

Think of an address validation service. The cost to develop the service might amortize out to $0.50 a request while the infrastructure to run the service will cost a fraction of a penny per request. To make a profit the company would charge $0.75 an address. As a customer I might be willing to pay a dollar per address to validate a billing address. For addresses collected as part of a marketing campaign maybe it's only one cent. So there's a potential benefit from the service that isn't being realized due to the pricing.

I deal with this all the time at my job. The vendor of the software I implement has been offering a fixed price per ticket/process* created. This pushes us to implement a single big process when combining a bunch of smaller processes into one bigger one is the better way to do it. It also limits the problems we can solve to those worth more than X dollars per process where X is the cost the vendor charges per process executed.

*Stuff like credit card disputes or managing the employee onboarding process

</comment><comment><USER16> > As a service provider, I love using usage-based pricing models as it means I > can focus all my energy and effort on what I do best: running a service. It > lets me focus on the quality of my service above everything else. Usage- > based pricing also allows me to scale my service's revenues without hiring a > large fleet of sales reps.

> Usage-based pricing with automatic volume discounting incentivizes both > parties to grow and win together. Neither party is in an adversarial > position with the other.

As someone who runs a company with a pay-as-you-go, automatic-discounts pricing model, these points resonate strongly. We are always aligned with our customers and our metrics and incentives are very clear: do things that make it more useful for the customer.

We have had to add enterprise options because of customer demand, though. Enterprises really don't like unpredictable pricing and so we've had to create various flat-rate options for them.

We've found the pay-as-you-go freemium to be a great compliment to enterprise plans, though. People within a company can try out Geocodio for free or very cheaply (i.e., no PO required, just throw it on their boss's P card), make sure it's what they need, and then make the case internally. As a result, we don't have to do any outbound sales. The pricing model does it for us.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Your service can support a high amount of throughput (otherwise you won't be > able to earn as much revenue if you can't service the amount of usage > customers demand)

It's interesting to see this point under that angle, although it makes perfect sense: you only get paid after traffic has increased, therefore the service should scale first, then generate money to support infrastructure billing.

The bidirectional coupling of used resources vs revenue makes a lot of sense.

Now on the question of predictability of pricing (on the customer side), usage-based pricing, in some cases, should have caps to avoid over-spending. I'm not talking about rate limiting and DoS protections, but rather a way to tell your customers when they are about to hit a defined threshold, so they can plan their billing accordingly. This can give the customer the feeling of a bucket plan, but with optimal pricing and adapted resource usage.

<comment><USER17> Yes, and those caps and alerts should be seen as beneficial to the service provider as well as to the customer. I wouldn't want my customers to have surprise high costs. A well-designed cap or alert should help avoid any major surprises, and should avoid the awkward situation of customers having to ask providers to forgive large bills that were accrued accidentally.

Bitter customers are not good in the long run, and caps and alerts help avoid having bitter customers.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, alerting and hard-capping (limiting consumption) should be seen as different kinds of thresholds, possibly defined independently by different parties.

I'm looking into implementing this system in one of my projects, do you have good resources on this matter ?

<comment><USER17> I do not, but as a consumer I appreciate the option to choose between an alert and a cap, or some combination of the two. There are some projects where I'd want the cap to know I might get an interruption but will never get a large bill. There are others where I need to keep the service up, and an alert would be much better than an interruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The author doesn't seem to have much experience with running a business. The enterprise pricing makes a lot of sense when you know you need a service for multiple years. The bucket based pricing works very well for the example he mentions, sending SMS.

</comment><comment><USER19> > _" Bucket-based pricing creates an adversarial relationship between you and > the customer because the customer is always going to pay more for your > service than they want to."_

A great point, but there's also a significant group of people who prefer flat predictable rates, rather than fluctuating bills.

Examples of popular services with fixed rates; Digital Ocean, Spotify, Netflix...

Although these aren't API services, they could be using usage based business models.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's really interesting ! Do you have any feedback on how simple an API can be to be still useful and how you decide whether to start using one rather than build a service yourself?

<comment><USER21> Even a simple API if it needs maintenance over time should be outsourced. Examples include geolocation API. You could build one now but it needs to be constantly updated. Other example is an image processing API that gets better over time. I usually only build a DIY version of existing APIs when I'm absolutely sure that I don't have to look back at it frequently.

<comment><USER22> Why would you use a geolocation API in the first place? Nowadays there are better ways to find the location of the user, and they also respect user privacy more.

<comment><USER20> What would be a better way to get the location of the user without geolocating the IP? Do you mean the HTML geolocation facilities ([https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/WebAPI/verwenden_v...](https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/WebAPI/verwenden_von_geolocation))?

<comment><USER22> Yes! But for example smartphone OSes have their own ways of doing the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One model not mentioned in the article either solely, or in addition to those pricing models, is the per-user based model as well. Working in a medium-sized organization, this adds a billing/contracting barrier to growing usage of a good service.

Example - you want to try out a service, you sign a contract that has some cost $X, up to 5 users. It goes well, you want to double usage of the feature, but you now need to pay $2*X + $Y in order to expand to 15 users, which really only encompasses a few choice teams.

</comment><comment><USER5> There must be some way to cap the total bill - stop the service if it exceeds some $ limit. E.g. prepaid credits that run out.

Professional situation: that unexpected $20000 bill (expected $20) because of a bug that was causing spurious repetitive calls to a service that is billed monthly. That huge bill because someone has hacked your infra so they can abuse your account.

Personal situation: that $2000 phone bill due to unexpected roaming costs.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would argue enterprise pricing makes sense. When dealing with big companies, often it's easier to sell enterprise pricing product than usage-based product, and those companies are willing to pay more for enterprise pricing.

And it's not that you have to only use one pricing method. You can use have usage-based pricing for some customers and enterprise pricing for some customers.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is why AWS did so well. I had no problem creating accounts, testing, playing, because it was fair and i paid for what i used. If i had to register up front for $50/month I wouldn't know what it is and many other developers wouldn't be familiar with them nor ready to develop with them.

<comment><USER3> The one thing that has stopped me using AWS or Azure is that I can't top-up my account and know that it would use more than the available funds. It might not make business sense but I will never sign up for something so open ended as AWS.

<comment><USER26> This problem turned up in recent HN discussion. [0]

Turns out it's possible to get billing alarms from AWS, but it's not something they make terribly easy. I don't know if it's possible to configure a kill- switch the same way.

My favourite AWS billing horror-story involves Glacier. Its pricing model used to be the stuff of nightmares, and caught plenty of people by surprise. [1]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412869)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've thought about this for our product and I've made a different conclusion. Our service is combination of hardware and software and in the initial phase we would set things up. We've decided to go with a bucket based pricing because we wanted to remove the temptation to try and reduce your total cost by turning off hardware which is used less often.

When you can reduce your bill by sending 1 less SMS, you get an incentive to do so. If you are sending 2500 SMS, you cannot really scale down to 1000 in a meaningful way. On the other hand, having opportunity to grow to 5000 SMS a day without cost increase give the company opportunity to test out various ideas which may or may not bring revenue.

All pricing strategies have pros and cons and it is up to each to determine what fits them the best.

</comment><comment><USER28> > In my opinion, enterprise pricing is an absolute racket.

That's one way of looking at it I guess. The other way of looking at it is that every company that doesn't charge each customer exactly what they _can pay_ rather than something possibly less, is leaving money on the table.

<comment><USER29> And an even scarier way of looking at it—or at least, one that _should_ be scarier to you, as the API provider: if you charge a customer less than they're willing to pay, then an "enterprise services" middleman will come along, and _resell_ your product for what it's actually worth to these customers, and capture all the profit.

It's analogous to selling tickets: if you charge less than the market will bear, scalpers will come along and buy them all up, and then make all the profit _you_ could have made reselling the tickets for what they're "actually worth."

<comment><USER30> If you're keeping your operation fairly small and you haven't brought on any sales staff, I think those "enterprise service" middlemen can be really helpful.

It took no effort on your part to get those additional users. It might be indirect, but for a purely API service, I don't think it makes a great difference.

The risk would be if they implement some layer over your API service and then down the road shift it to another provider. To avoid that, I would actually try to find and partner with any such resellers to make sure they stick with you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The more organizationally remote the consumers of an API are from the people who pay for it in the organization, the more control the paymasters will want over the total budget, and the more reluctant they'll be to let developers / users consume the API in an unbounded fashion. This distance increases with organization size. Thus, being inflexible about only permitting usage-oriented pricing will make sales harder in organizations over a certain size.

</comment><comment><USER7> > And in the case of ISPs like Comcast, what happens if I move? Let's say I > move to another address where Comcast doesn't operate–I'm still going to be > held liable for paying them for the full duration of my contract, even > though I'll be unable to use their services.

I'm fairly sure they just let you out of your contract if you move somewhere you can't receive their service. Is that not the case?

</comment><comment><USER32> Cloud providers already price usage based. Let's see how long it takes to bubble up to the end-users.

</comment><comment><USER33> Not an API, but these same reasons are why I love hosting my sites with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It's all about incentives being aligned. Pay-as-you-go is great for that.

</comment><comment><USER34> The real question is... are there people who are willing to sell you all the API services that you might want to use based on this API pricing model?

I bet the answer is "nope".

</comment><comment><USER35> Don't discount bucket pricing from the consumer side. A small gaming community or other small noncommercial use would prefer a model of downtime over cost overrun.

Offer both

</comment><comment><USER36> It's interesting that the author used SMS as an example, since the pricing is way more complicated and providing a discount isn't always feasable.

</comment><comment><USER37> Apologies to the author but I have to object to the entire premise; these are 'business anti-patterns'.

I feel all of his points imply a misunderstanding of basic business and microeconomics.

1) Businesses like predictability. Consistency is such an important concept that stocks that pay regular dividends are worth considerably more than those that pay irregular dividends. People with consistent credit payments are more creditworthy than those who are irregular.

This isn't just for the seller, it's also for the _buyer_. A financial manager would always prefer some type of easy, annual fixed fee all other things being equal.

It's why you pay less for longer-term AWS EC2 contracts.

Predictability usually reduces the operational burden, which reduces costs and enables a better deal.

Your own understanding of your own long term business objectives is an _advantage_ that you can 'signal' down the value chain to your supplier by engaging in long term contracts. They do the same, and invariably competitive pressure means lower prices.

This notion of 'Enterprise plans being good for nobody' due to 'adversarial' notions is basically rubbish, makes no sense.

2) Often, price doesn't matter. In many cases, the surpluses yielded from a specific product is quite a lot, so much that nobody cares that much about the price. If your company with $2B revenues uses some service, if it costs $1k or $10k / year, it makes no difference at all. Nobody wants any kind of headache, it's like 'tranche pricing' for a haircut.

3) Combined with #2, we have the concept of 'Total Cost of Ownership'. The product 'features' that can matter more than price are usability and support. A cheap product that causes headaches is not cheap. A cheap product with extremely expensive support is not cheap. So consider 'total cost of ownership'.

On the seller side, they incur costs for giving free or cheap services. It may simply not be worth their while to deal with the tiny bits of incremental revenue.

4) The tiering models don't necessarily imply 'more or less value' for one or the other sides, it depends very much on the actual price - they could all be a ripoff or a great deal.

5) I don't think any particular pricing model is more or less 'adversarial' than the other.

6) Different pricing models are usually advantageous to the customer and the seller. Far from being 'adversarial', it's just the opposite: they enable customers and suppliers to engage on common ground, by building a financial premise that makes sense for both parties. Only each individual party understands their own needs, so more variety means more opportunity for common ground.

</comment><comment><USER38> The author needs to do some basic math on his example pricing. The way it is stated it encourages me to upload terabytes of random noise.

<comment><USER39> He obviously meant $0.01/GB for the _first_ TB, pricing $0.001/GB for the _next_ four TB, etc., without the discontinuities, just like your taxes.

<comment><USER40> Although I found the price decreasing by 90% at each change somewhat distracting. 2TB of data costs only 10% more to store than 1TB? People with less than a terabyte are subsidising the big boys.

<comment><USER41> It's more like storage isn't the driving factor of the costs. At low end, you'll have some fixed per-user costs; as you go from mid to high end, you may enjoy some economies of scale yourself, and you may want to pass some of those savings on to your customers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on our MVP that helps people find a better career? - <AUTHOR> http://jobgps.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=hackernewslaunch <comment><USER2> 2 years ago, in my last semester at the university, I volunteered at doing an intro-course for first-semester computer science students. Basically, we made sure they transitioned to the university learning style and they've got some student instead of a prof to talk to. Each student had to prepare a talk on a relevant topic.

One of the things we talked about was career options. Imo, first you want to do a broad search, and then you want to dive into specific careers. I.e. a computer science student could get into software development, system administration or consulting. If development sounds most interesting, she should learn about the differences between several technical areas (frontend/backend) as well as company types (software shop/IT dep in larger corp/agency).

One of the students picked up a book on career options for computer science students and did a 30 min talk. I wasn't really happy with the book and shortening it to 30 min didn't really help, but oh well. But it definitely broadened the horizon of most students. They either didn't have any clear picture of a job, or they knew one or two types of jobs because someone in their social circle happened to have that particular job.

If I had given my student(s) your MVP, it would have most likely failed. With 3 random jobs displayed, it's not broad enough to lay out different career options. Plus, job ads, especially for software developers, teach you as much about being a software developer as a car commercial teaches you about driving a car.

To finding "a better career", I'd still recommend my students a book that tries to list most major career options, and tries to objectively name (dis-)advantages of each job. Job ads, no matter how well done, are a terrible first place to start the search.

That said, I think you've found a problem that currently isn't solved very well and I'd look forward to the next iteration of your MVP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi CookWithMe. On your first point, 100% correct. The broad search is the whole idea. We've got a lot of work to go and it's very early days at present (we also look forward to our second iteration :))

Do you happen to know the name of this book? Would love to have a look at it.

Given your feedback is very considered, it would be fantastic if you could sign up to our page or shoot us an email on our contact page so we can keep in touch and hear more of your thoughts as we develop the platform.

Thanks again and keep the insightful comments coming!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the name.

Here's a problem I quickly ran into. I browsed to companies. I clicked on the company Autotask. I was mostly checking out the design, but I noticed something curious. On the right it lists the location + google map.

What country is Autotask located in? No clue. All it says is "East Greenbush, Rensselaer" and the Google map is devoid of any further relevant information. I could guess it's an Australian company, but....

The site is sort of ok looking, but it seems very cookie-cutter. Kind of looks like a template site for bootstrap. Some more personality would be nice, something more unique to whatever image JobGPS is looking to broadcast.

I clicked the Navigate button on the home page without typing in anything, and it didn't do anything at all. It should do something, if just tell me to type something. I also typed in "guitarist" (to test it) and it rolled down an empty gray space; it should do something constructive instead upon entering non-useful text. I also tried entering text and hitting enter on my keyboard and it failed to do anything; it also wouldn't respond to the enter key upon selecting an actual degree properly.

The register and sign-in buttons in the top nav aren't very good. The text definitely shouldn't turn black against that background color.

This is a slightly OCD issue: the spacing in the top nav between "jobs | companies | register" drives me crazy (that jobs is so far apart from companies, compared to companies and register; whereas I think the sign up / sign in buttons should be separated more so from the main nav items; again, not a critical issue ;) ).

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback. What did you have in mind when you mentioned more personality on the site? Also, would you be interested in learning about the various roles which are available after your degree?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's no way I'm reading that big slab of text down the bottom of the home page. Understand the SEO benefits, but I'm sure you could break it up into meaningful sections and make it seem a bit less keyword stuffy.

<comment><USER5> Yes, definitely breaking into smaller paragraphs will make it far more readable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks gpsarakis. Appreciate the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like something that is based on looking at what jobs people from a particular degree actually do -

A lot of people that I graduated electronics with now work in Finance (as quants or non-IT) because the money is better and banks love 'numerate' people. A couple of them went into accounting. I'd say more are doing other 'numeric jobs' than remained in electronics.

This isn't reflected in careers suggestions I read around the internet.

Could you derive this kind of data from linkedin to produce something empirically driven?

</comment><comment><USER7> I respect the MVP philosophy, but a location filter better be coming soon. Otherwise it's an MVP that helps people find a better career and move city/country.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, we will certainly be introducing that functionality.

Which kinds of roles and organisations would you be keen to learn more about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think the youtube videos add enough to justify the clutter. I'd rather have more text details/stats on the initial job descriptions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Moya. What types of detail and stats would you like to see?

Appreciate the feedback and keep it coming!

<comment><USER8> I'd like to see figures like average salary, number of listings, and a succinct description of the role. Maybe even something in the same vein as the "Company Perks" on the individual company pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> If the search results had videos explaining what you'd do in the role, would you find that helpful? Thanks again mate!

<comment><USER8> I think the role explanations should be clearly expressed in text on the site. I'm not saying the videos aren't helpful - they should just be included later in the navigation process.

Maybe I'll watch a video about Optiver when I've narrowed down a path, but initially I'm interested in the career and the roles associated with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. When you mention careers and roles associated with it, do you mean the industry and the sub-roles within that particular industry?

Great feedback again, you're a champion!

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

No problem. I look forward to watching your progress :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mike: i'd look into [http://www.careerleader.com/](http://www.careerleader.com/) for some inspiration, their career assessment approach and scoring system is quite comprehensive and effective. the goal behind the assessment report is to rank - align someone's interest & core activities. then putting all together for you to take actions ...

</comment><comment><USER10> Given that my search yielded jobs in the same city, I was curious how that was happening given an earlier commenter noted your lack of location filter. Then I realised you are a Sydney company backed from USyd. Good luck with the site, Sydney needs more startup success stories. Most of my feedback has been covered by other commenters. Fix that and you are on the right track.

</comment><comment><USER11> On the top nav bar (on the main page), I found it annoying how only the register and login links turn black when moused over, while the other two become a (too subtle) brighter white. This seemed inconsistent, and made me think the links weren't actually links. Also, black might not be the best mouse-over color on the dark blue background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the feedback. What do you think of the idea of a job site which allows you to view a variety of different roles relevant to your skills rather than 10s of the same job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't really do anything better than the (many) alternatives. What do you do better than your competitors?

I'd argue it's worse - it's based off degrees, and only shows me three jobs at a time.

Don't want to sound harsh, just some honest feedback :)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, thank you for the honest feedback! The idea is to show people the spectrum of roles available to their degree disciplines rather than 100 of the same roles.

There is still a lot of work to be done but we hope to become the destination where people see organisations and positions which they may not have considered.

Out of interest, if we're targeting Uni/College graduates why do you feel it's not ideal to search by degree type?

<comment><USER13> I'd just like to reiterate what timtamboy63 has already stated. There are an estimated 100,000 job boards around the world in various industries, sectors, cities and niches.

Each of these offer the ability to browse for skills/degrees.

For example, I just did a search for "graduate jobs australia" in Google and followed the top link to "www.seek.com.au/graduate-jobs/" where I was able to type in "engineering" and "bachelor of engineering" and saw a refined list of applicable opportunities.

In that above list, I'm presented with jobs that I would not have considered because the search was not job title based but degree based.

How do you differ from that experience?

I like the UI experience. You'll definitely need to consider a "location" field because Australia is a pretty big country!

Keep up the good work :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question and thanks for the feedback. For the most part, platforms like SEEK assume you know what you want to do. The rationale is that many graduate opportunities hire from a variety of degree disciplines which are not necessarily listed in job descriptions and go undiscovered by a lot of candidates who have never considered a particular option.

We only want one search result per industry or role in the primary search, not 20 "Engineering" and 2 others.

Keep the comments coming it's great feedback for us and we're taking it all on board.

Do you think job boards meet your needs currently or would you prefer to see something different on them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks good! I'm not looking for a new job, but I can understand the value for someone who is. Some of my friends who have no idea of their career would love this. Do you have more jobs on the way?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, yes we're looking to build up our platform with a lot more companies that are fantastic to work at.

Let me know if you have any more thoughts or questions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What do you think about changing Navigate Your Career to something else? I'd prefer to understand what to do. Looks good though

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks rheotron, suggestions welcome. What about:

"Discover companies and roles you've never considered"

<comment><USER16> > Discover companies and roles you've never considered

Can't resist saying that linkedin already does that. The kind of jobs they keep suggesting to me are just hilarious.

Your site looks good. Just checked a familiar company's listing. It looked nice.

And I agree, if you are targeting recent graduates, then search by degree is a good starting point. Ideally you should be able to read my mind and my dreams :-), but as a startup going by something that you can feed straight into a simple algorithm is the way to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi kops, thanks for your comment. The LinkedIn algorithm suggests my software engineering friend to be the head of legal at an investment bank, not ideal.

What kinds of things would you be looking for on a job platform (which can hopefully read your mind and dreams?)

<comment><USER16> As I said college degree is a good starting point. Next you could collect a few other pointers such as the optional courses a student has taken, their interest in particular industry or field, the people they admire, the place/country they would like to work in etc. All of these can serve as signal to what this person wants. You can even collect these attributes, and some data about the people who are already successful in the industry and build a neural network or some other algo that predicts the most fruitful path for a graduate. All this will give you signals where to concentrate your efforts w.r.t. an individual.

As for reading my mind, that's a little more involved and probably unprofitable/unscalable venture. But just because you asked, i will take a shot. I have always thought about a placement agency where I am not the one being sold but I buy the services of this agency to be on a lookout for jobs/opportunities for me. If this agency manages to become reputable, then companies will seek their help to staff their projects. Once the project is over I move to next interesting thing regardless of the company. I imagine this sounds like a very good consulting firm, but in my version the agency is to be honest to make its money purely from me either as direct fees or retainer or whatever. I should not have an iota of doubt that they will sell my resume to xyz company for a bunch of money and shaft me. The customers of this company will be people like me who are introverts and absolute retards at networking. That's not a pledge to buy anything :-) I think what you are doing is good. Stick to it :-))</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Understand WebAssembly in 5 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.jesuisundev.com/en/understand-webassembly-in-5-minutes/ <comment><USER2> It's important to note that WASM doesn't immediately deliver the speed benefits you'd think in all cases right now. Especially when you have to cross the boundary of the module it's in (tested this a while back, browser vendors may have improved this since then). In my tests, it "sometimes does, sometimes doesn't" end up being faster than JS, and it's hard to build intuition around when that will happen consistently. Early days, so that may change, that's just what I see atm.

It's also interesting to note projects like AssemblyScript which open WASM to a Typescript subset. Very cool work they are doing.

When WASM first appeared, I had deep misgivings. I was picturing a dystopia of unmaintainable bytecode springing up everywhere and the WAT format as a hand- wavy dismissal of those concerns. Credit where credit is due, though, the W3C groups working on this are doing a great job and WAT is actually not terrible to read (or even write, if you have an afternoon to burn and want to take it on just to learn a thing or two about WASM - look for the wabt compiler).

</comment><comment><USER3> Too bad Java was never properly integrated into Web browsers and ended up dying. This is basically what the promise of Java was, way back in 1999 or so.

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought this was going to be one of those "learn X in Y minutes" articles. It's not, unfortunately, but this is: [https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/wasm/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/wasm/)

<comment><USER5> I think this was useful as a "learn what WebAssembly _is_ " guide. It shows you how to build a wasm module from c++ source code, and how to use your module in a browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a relative web novice, WebAssembly continues to be an incredibly promising tool that has a lot of potential, but remains obtuse on how to actually get a compiled .wasm binary to run properly in the browser. Most of the examples I've seen either are trivial programs like the one here, where they I still feel they pulled things like '_Z3addii' out of a hat. Alternatively, there are some articles that require you to delve into a pile of Node dependencies just to print out 'Hello World'.

I'm pleased to say I've finally uncovered the incantations to interface with a .wasm binary easily, but I was surprised how much digging it required, even with something as hyped as this. Perhaps I should write my own article on my findings.

<comment><USER7> _Z3addii looks like C++ name mangling - embedding parameter/return type information in the symbol (function) name, required to support C++ features on top of the linkers C++ grew up with.

Declaring the function as `extern "C"` would turn the symbol name into "add", or maybe "_add". I suspect the author extracted the name from compiler- generated assembly or from a tool to list the symbols a .wasm exports.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you need to read the article to confirm it. Nothing is hidden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> WebAssembly is not for the faint of heart. Although you can easily output Rust using cargo target, the memory model that interfaces with the browser is completely manual.

Of course you should be able to create really complex algorithms and do really advanced inlining to achieve near native performance. While also working across all platforms that run Chrome/Edge/Safari/Firefox.

I think the question I have is, Figma is one product I know that really takes full advantage of WebAssembly as a full experience. 1Password does another that uses the Chrome extension for it. Would Figma's success have been the same if they had just foregone the hassle of building in WASM and went pure native desktop?

<comment><USER9> > Would Figma's success have been the same if they had just foregone the > hassle of building in WASM and went pure native desktop?

I think Figma's success can be at least partially attributed to being a web app with good performance. Sharing designs with a URL is a lot quicker than sharing files and importing them into a native desktop app which all users would first need to install. Figma made collaborating on design easier and more accessible than ever.

<comment><USER8> I have heard from a designer that they prefer windows even though all design tools are usually Mac. So they like Figma for it working on Windows out of the box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does exactly it handles security? Will it be another hell like Adobe Flash was?</comment>


Which State Has the Most Registered Drones? – Visual Data and Infographic - <AUTHOR> http://www.improdrone.com/state-with-most-drones/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting how Alaska is the State with the most registered drones per 10,000 population</comment>


Facebook with Adblocker makes 2000+ requests - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ArentWyatt/status/890584334620545024 <comment><USER2> If you have to use FB, just stick to [https://mbasic.facebook.com](https://mbasic.facebook.com) \- JS free version. Fast, ugly, works.

BTW the error is not present with FF + uBlock Origin.

EDIT: there is a less know FB app, called Facebook Lite. When you try to install it, you'll get a "This app is incompatible with all of your devices." \- which is not true. It's fully compatible, you're just not in the eligible geolication. To get it: [http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/facebook-2/lite/lite-53-0-0-3-9...](http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/facebook-2/lite/lite-53-0-0-3-91-release/)

It's an alternative, tiny app, without the bloat of the "true" FB app, aimed at developing countries where smartphones are much less powerful.

<comment><USER3> Great! I used m.facebook.com before but it doesn't support chat.

<comment> compiler-guy You can use your browser to "request desktop site" briefly while you chat, and then switch it off. There is no technical reason that it doesn't work, but Facebook gonna face.

<comment><USER4> I remember the day they turned it off. Then for awhile on my device the request desktop site move used to fix mobile chat, without changing anything else (still served mobile site I mean) which was fine. Then they took that away too. Still haven't downloaded the app.

<comment><USER5> Download firefox if you are on android! chat works on m.facebook.com on firefox but not on chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I keep thinking the state of being offline ~90% of the time is the way to go - my current choice in tech projects is strongly guided by this belief.

rss feeds are a great quality:size ratio, I have a huge list of primary sources, will export and paste it here if anyone wants - and always appreciate any good recommendations.

The best way I've found to win the ad blocking game is to get the rss feed when possible.

<comment><USER7> This is the same thing that I do. I wrote about my setup in my blog [1].

Basically grab RSS for most things I read.

Use node-red to create RSS feeds for things that don't have one, or use node- red to pre-filter feeds, as well as for downloading full content for offline reading.

I read Twitter with RSS. I haven't got time to turn Facebook into RSS yet, but hopefully at some point.

      [1]: https://www.dannysu.com/2016/12/29/huginn-to-node-red/

<comment><USER8> FYI: I created an app that converts any YouTube channel into a podcast. Just type 'epi' right before 'youtube' in the channel url.

[https://github.com/amtopel/epi](https://github.com/amtopel/epi)

<comment><USER7> oh awesome! gotta check that out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It infuriates me when I see people complaining about how slow they think JS/HTML/CSS is as a developer platform, or how terrible it is to use a JS framework, when the real cause of slowdown for 99.9% of the web is garbage like this.

Modern web browsers can preload resources and compile and run JS _incredibly_ quickly. But even the best optimization efforts fail when sites are loading thousands of scripts from hundreds of different domains.

And yet still I see developer advocates from Google on Twitter trying to shame people for using React, blaming them for the web's failure to dislodge native apps. It's utter bullshit.

<comment><USER10> Now you know how Flash developers felt when everyone was saying it was a buggy platform, because so much of the dev community never did active debugging.

I ran the debugger version of the player and would get error alerts all over the web - for things that should have been caught with a try/catch or basic variable checking - even on some of the most prominent web apps of the time.

99 out of 100 times, that was the reason for an app crashing, not the player itself.

<comment><USER11> this

<comment><USER12> But now everyone has a JS debugger, so everyone is a critic :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've made a similar bug before. Had an animation that moved a div around on our page for some seconds. Some adblocker decided to remove that div. The script then failed to grab that div for the reminder of the animation, 60 times a second. Since we logged all errors to backend, this resulted in hundreds of ajax calls, making the affected browsers kneel.

Backoff/rate limiting/setting an upper limit, and handling the missing div were solutions.

<comment><USER14> > Some adblocker decided to remove that div. The script then failed to grab > that div for the reminder of the animation.

Blockers do not remove DOM elements, they just apply a `display: none;` style property to them.

<comment><USER15> "Some adblocker" might not be one of the blockers that you are familiar with.

<comment><USER16> That might be true, but I'd expect the creator of uBlock Origin to be familiar with a fair amount of ad & wide-spectrum blockers and how they function (to see if there's any methods they can adopt to improve).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I get that a lot of those are retries... but hasn't anyone there heard of backoff?

(intentionally fallaciously generalized)

<comment><USER18> to be fair the adblock broke their frontend app

<comment><USER19> networks are not reliable, so adblockers should not be considered any different than partial network failures. which means backoff is needed anyway

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks like scribe_endpoint.php is an error logger for Facebook. I mean, if you block random bits of JS from it, it'll try to report that back up. Although, yes, backoff, come on now.

</comment><comment><USER21> Website making 2000 HTTP Requests is beyond ridiculous, doesn't matter if it is Facebook. Looks like they have architected it very poorly.

</comment><comment><USER22> I knew I saw him somewhere before.

[http://mailchi.mp/mit/how-ocw-transformed-a-learners- life](http://mailchi.mp/mit/how-ocw-transformed-a-learners-life)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14514686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14514686)

</comment><comment><USER23> YouTube will do the same thing with Ublock Origin. I've had a tab open for a few hours and have blocked 625 requests and counting.

</comment><comment><USER24> One would thought there's already enough reasons to stay out of facebook, but there's another one.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't know the details, but perhaps FB sends more requests when it's blocked?

</comment><comment><USER26> Why is this such a big deal? You're using an adblocker which interferes with the site. The requests are blocked immediately and don't hit the network so its not wasting any resources. Is there really a complaint about requests being made in the first place now?

<comment><USER27> Perhaps it's not wasting any network resources but it's definitely consuming battery and processing power to keep retrying those requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> when you haphazardly cut out chunks of an application it doesn't work correctly? colour me surprised

</comment><comment><USER29> Just a couple requests there. Insanity.

</comment><comment><USER30> The image says 27 requests, not 2000. The tweet has no further info. Where is this 2000+ number coming from?

<comment><USER31> It's a video. Press play.

<comment><USER30> oops. just came up as an image on mobile</comment></comment></comment>


Meteor 0.4.0 released with new page update engine - <AUTHOR> http://meteor.com/blog/2012/08/31/introducing-spark-a-new-live-page-update-engine <comment><USER2> This is a repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461562>

</comment><comment><USER3> So when this came out there was a tremendous amount of concern regarding database security - since everything is available to you on the front-end. Has this been resolved? Or has meteor found a niche market around this?

<comment><USER4> Apparently this update broke the branch that contained any authentication/authorization code.

The lack of focus on security is hilariously bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does Meteor have an rss feed for their blog?</comment>


Anti-surveillance clothing aims to hide wearers from facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/04/anti-surveillance-clothing-facial-recognition-hyperface <comment><USER2> Should we also learn a touch based sign language and huddle in dark rooms?

<comment><USER3> It would be more effective than snarky, defeatist comments...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Flag yourself as someone to monitor.</comment>


Case study: Analyzing Notion performance (or making a React app load 30% faster) - <AUTHOR> https://3perf.com/blog/notion/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News! I'm a long-time user of Notion (an advanced note-taking app). Notion's web app has been quite slow for me, so I decided to reverse-engineer it and see why. Here's a case study with findings and recommendations!

TL;DR:

* Notion has a large startup time because they serve a lot of JavaScript. This JS has to be parsed, compiled, and executed – and this takes time. This is especially slow on Android phones [1].

* The obvious solution to this is code splitting. But in case of Notion, there're a few other low-hanging fruits. For example, if you switch to CommonJS, you can (surprisingly) speed up the startup by deferring unnecessary modules [2]. Or, there's a bunch of unnecessary libraries in the bundle (including 3 duplicates of CoreJS).

* Apart from JS execution, there're also a few other issues. Analytics is loaded early – and it defers loading and execution of other, more important resources [3]. And page resources don't have `Cache-Control` headers being set, which could lead to different caching behavior in different browsers.

Overall, based on my measurements and some guesses, I think Notion can cut around 30% off their initialization time – simply by tuning some configs and deferring some loading.

Would be happy to hear your feedback :)

[1] [https://3perf.com/blog/notion/#cost-of- javascript](https://3perf.com/blog/notion/#cost-of-javascript)

[2] [https://3perf.com/blog/notion/#try-the-lazy-option-of- babels...](https://3perf.com/blog/notion/#try-the-lazy-option-of-babels- plugin-transform-modules-commonjs)

[3] [https://3perf.com/blog/notion/#defer-third- parties](https://3perf.com/blog/notion/#defer-third-parties)</comment>


Ask HN: Which are the best books on history from ancient times to present? - <AUTHOR> Hey there,
I want to read more about history to have a better grasp of the events that marked mankind throughout the centuries and I wonder if you have any suggestions for this kind of books.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Will and Ariel Durant's _Lessons of History_. I particularly recommend the audio recording, which includes additional interviews and asides from the Durants. Short (~115 pages), but highly informative.

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/lessons-of-history-by-will- and...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/lessons-of-history-by-will-and-ariel- durant/oclc/935304832&referer=brief_results)

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/lessons-of-history-revised- ed/...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/lessons-of-history-revised- ed/oclc/748325064&referer=brief_results)

Vaclav Smil, _Energy in World History_. Arguably a far more significant basis for describing what has transpired. Manfred Weissenbacher's _Sources of Power_ covers much the same topic, though at far greater length (not always relevance), and slightly unevenly. Daniel Yergin's _The Prize_ addresses specifically oil's impact (and history), and was mind-opening for me.

Karl Polanyi, _The Great Transformation_. The Industrial Revolution and emergence of the modern technological world.

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/origins-of-our-time-the- great-...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/origins-of-our-time-the-great- transformation/oclc/3298954&referer=brief_results)

David Christian, _Big History_. This goes back somewhat before ancient times, to the Big Bang.

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/big- history/oclc/940282526&ref...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/big- history/oclc/940282526&referer=brief_results)

Add to that a good overall outline. H.G. Wells, _Outline of History_ is somewhat in the tradition of David Christian's (and Christian cites it as a prior version of Big History). It's dated and jingoistic, but serves itself to show that viewpoints and perspectives change with time. Arnold Toynbee's _History of the World_ is another, though larger. The Durants' _Story of Civilization_ another.

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/outline-of-history-being-a- pla...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/outline-of-history-being-a-plain- history-of-life-and-mankind/oclc/893202610&referer=brief_results)

[http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=+au%3Atoynbee+arnold+joseph...](http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=+au%3Atoynbee+arnold+joseph+ti%3Astudy+of+history&qt=owc_search)

[http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Adurant+ti%3Astory+of+c...](http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Adurant+ti%3Astory+of+civilization&qt=results_page)

Will Durant's _Story of Philosophy_ gets at the _ideas_ which have shaped history. James Burke, _Connections_ and _The Day the Universe Changed_ cover similar ground. Both have extensive bibliographies for further reading.

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/story-of-philosophy-the- lives-...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/story-of-philosophy-the-lives-and- opinions-of-the-greater-philosophers/oclc/847855310&referer=brief_results)

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/connections/oclc/145746383&ref...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/connections/oclc/145746383&referer=brief_results)

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/day-the-universe- changed/oclc/...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/day-the-universe- changed/oclc/883303714/editions?editionsView=true&referer=br)

Finally, Reddit's /r/askhistorians has an excellent set of recommendations:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books)

This is probably a nonstandard list, but it's a set I'm finding particularly useful in filling in what was missing from my own earlier understanding.

With a general outline, I find I'm diving into specific areas and aspects of history. Less the politics and big events, more the philosophy, technology, energy, and informational aspects. There's some particularly good specific research on times, places, and periods being written. And some amazing online resources, ranging from primary materials (the Internet Archive and Hathi Trust have scans of original texts, Project Gutenberg has those converted to print, Wikisource as well), to compilations -- the History of Information and Basics of Philosophy both strike me as quietly amazing.

[http://historyofinformation.com](http://historyofinformation.com)

[http://philosophybasics.com](http://philosophybasics.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your answer! It helps me a big deal.</comment></comment>


Developing software is like participating in MasterChef - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/developing-software-is-like-participating-in-masterchef-6a2d203e4109 <comment><USER2> Great article. I noticed the exact same thing for whatever I loved doing. For example, at one point I was obsessed with chess.

Wherever I looked I saw opportunities to use chess tactics. The author is very lucky to have software development as his passion.</comment>


Show HN: A Portfolio website for every one that uses GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/imfunniee/gitfolio <comment><USER2> GitHub is not Git. Unless you got permission beforehand to use it, this violates the Git project's trademark policy.

git-scm.com/about/trademark

<comment><AUTHOR> i said github not git</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any great Python mailing lists to follow? - <AUTHOR>

As I'm getting more nerd on these kind of things, what are some great Python/Django mailing lists to follow? <comment><USER2> I'm on:

* Pycoders Weekly (pycoders.com) - not really a mailing list, but well, it's a list you sign up for

* Sydney Python

* PyPyDev

and a few more I cannot remember. I used to be in Python List as well, but that got noisy real quick, so I unsubbed

Here's a list of other mailing lists: [https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo](https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo). I also recommend joining local Python groups</comment>


Why does digg need so many servers? - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/spolsky/statuses/27244766467 <comment><USER2> Just as perplexing, why do they need ~68 employees (<http://about.digg.com/team>).

My counting may be off by 1-2, but last I checked Reddit is coming up on them traffic-wise (<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/>), and only has 7 employees? And I'm pretty sure Reddit doesn't have 500 servers either, although I could be wrong.

Both sites offer very similar functionality.

While past its peak, Slashdot only has 18 servers. (<http://slashdot.org/faq/tech.shtml#te050>)

<comment><USER3> My understanding (which is, to say, belief built up over watching the companies from outside) is that Reddit is currently running what could best be described as a skeleton crew: Conde Nast won't fund them, so they're just trying to keep the ship afloat and don't have time for anything else.

Digg has scaled to the size of a company that, for a couple of years now, has considered itself just on the tipping point of "something big happening." As in there being a sea change in the way everyone consumes their news, and Digg is at the center. You'll need lots of employees when that happens, right? I think Digg has partly grown fat due to non-existent leadership; the struggle between Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose was been well-documented, and having your two lead guys check out for at least a year is not a good way to run a business. A lot of the people there are "sales", which I guess helps Digg stay profitable, but I don't really think you need as many as they have. Five community managers on a community that is supposed to manage itself is also excessive.

I expect the truth of the matter lies somewhere in the middle of Reddit and Digg. More than Reddit so you're not stagnant, less than Digg so you're not fat.

<comment><USER4> Everything that is cool about Reddit at this point is what Redditors are doing _with_ Reddit, not what Reddit is doing with its site. And isn't that how social media is supposed to work? Not just some notion that users are tools, that you'll crowdsource your way to being yet-another-traditional-media source (except without journalists)... social media _should_ be individuals forming their own communities... communities of interest, communities of practice, communities of support -- all of which exist in Reddit (/r/SuicideWatch both disturbs and impresses me).

So the fact Reddit-the-software isn't changing that much doesn't seem like that big an issue, it's more like infrastructure. A major redesign would be negatively disruptive to the communities that are building there. Not that there aren't great things Reddit could do but isn't, but I think they are doing well at the most important stuff. If Reddit had 68 employees they not only would be fat, they'd probably fuck up a good thing.

<comment><USER3> Do not take my comment to mean I'm anti-Reddit, I like Reddit way more than I ever did Digg :) But Reddit doesn't really _do_ a lot apart from keeping everything going.

I agree that altering Reddit now is probably not a good idea, and they don't need a large headcount, but it's good that Reddit isn't answering to shareholders directly, because if it wasn't for Digg's implosion, their growth would have been far too slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The difference is that digg has network information (IE: Followers). Stack overflow doesn't.

Think through the ramifications of each of these page flows:

1\. Give me this question and everybody who commented on it.

2\. Give me every post that this user is following has made over the last n days.

That's why.

<comment><USER6> That would increase the load on the database. Why does that increase the load on the webservers?

<comment><USER5> It depends how you approach the problem. I'm guessing here, from my own experience implementing social graph features, but here goes:

There are a couple of ways you can go about this, the first is the database: Join the network of people against the land of content and bring it back. This doesn't work (as an aside this is what people mean when they say web scale, it has nothing to do with web traffic, it's social graphs) your database will cry. All though not at first, in development it works fine, and you feel fine, and for a while you're ok, but you start growing....

Another way you can go about it is by denormalizing. In this world you store a pointer to each content item for each user. So anytime I do something all the people [following|watch|connected|friended] to me get a record indicating I did this. This works, but now you have lots of data (lots and lots of data!) spread all crazy around. You need some kind of system to push that data out to everybody. It's those last two that drive up your hardware usage, it's not necessarily web boxes, but it's boxes in the background broadcasting the events out to the world, and the datastores to hold it all. Depending on how your web code works you could also have a lot of overhead on the webservers putting all that stuff together.

My experience here comes from building the social features into toolbox.com. A good example is this page [http://it.toolbox.com/people/george_krautzel/posts- connectio...](http://it.toolbox.com/people/george_krautzel/posts-connections) That's all the posts from users connected to our CEO (all 750k of them). Getting that to return in near real time is super fun (and you can probably tell that I went down the DB join path before it all fell apart).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where does the "500 servers" number come from?

Are they compute nodes? Are they webservers(5)? Webservers and appservers(10)? Web, app, database(12)? Web, app, database, back-end processing(15)? How much redundancy is built in(30)? Staging environments(60)? Development environments(120)? Standard IT infrastructure like DNS and email(125)?

"We run over 500 servers" sounds a lot like "we have 500 servers in our datacenters" not "it takes 500 servers to handle 200MM page views."

<comment><USER8> I used to work at digg as a engineer. I won't say your distribution numbers are correct, but you've got the gist. There are multiple environments, reserved capacity, research and testing machines, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My last job served around 30-40 million pages a month on 4 servers that used ASP.Net and SQL Server 2000. The only server whose CPU utilization was over 20% was the database server. I'm not sure the CPU utilization on the web servers ever went above 10%.

A friend of mine's company has a tough time keeping up with 500,000 page views a month using more equipment. They're using PHP and MySQL.

<comment><USER10> Apple and Oranges comparison really.

\- What do the sites do?

\- How optimised are they?

\- How much static/cachable content is there?

Really there is too little data for this comparison.

<comment><USER9> Both are simple sites by any definition. The database queries for almost all the pages views are clustered index seeks (on SQL server) and in MySQL they are mostly looking up on the primary keys for the tables used (these are MyISAM tables so no clustered indexes here).

Both are equally unoptimized outside of the database queries which I believe are fairly well optimized.

No real cacheble content on either outside of the usual suspects (JS, CSS, some images)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why does it take 20 feet of land to grow a gallon of orange juice and 200 feet of land to grow a gallon of apple juice?

<comment><USER12> A site that posts links, has voting and comments vs a site that posts questions has voting and comments is hardly apples vs oranges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing is for sure, Spolsky sure knows how to scale his ego.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe Digg uses small servers whereas StackOverflow uses big servers?

<comment><USER15> Using big servers would be what Microsoft's licensing model makes you want to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Non-linearity.

<comment><USER17> Even then, 500 servers? That's an incredible amount.

EDIT: Then again Facebook is using 60000 servers at the moment.

<comment><USER18> Facebook has a lot more than 100 times digg's registered users, though.

<comment><USER19> Not to mention a basically non-existent cachability profile, and an order of magnitude more functionality.

<comment><USER17> I'm assuming you mean Facebook has more functionality and no cachebility. That might be true but I wonder how expensive getting a Digg discussion(with 100-200 posts) page compared to say a 5 answer SO question or even just a simple Facebook profile.

<comment><USER18> As I understand it, a Facebook profile is anything but simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I mentioned this to Spolsky already but depending how you want to count servers (web servers or all front facing servers or all servers in your infrastructure?), we have 10-20 servers servicing 350 million page views per month. That is of course not counting all the ajax requests that we also service, which don't count as page views. So we service 17-35 million page views per server, compared to StackExchange's 12 million page views per server.

We use PHP and Apache, so the gloating about ASP being way more efficient than PHP seems to be unfounded.

</comment><comment><USER21> Digg must be pluggr's biggest customer... <http://pluggr.info/>

</comment><comment><USER22> Where does the "500" come from?

<comment><USER8> Kevin mentioned it somewhere a few weeks ago. I forget where though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> bad server administrators? no optimization? no cache? static content served from apache servers instead of, for example lighttpd?

there could be many reasons

</comment><comment><USER15> What's the cost per page view in each case?

</comment><comment><USER24> Depends on the servers to, I'm sure it would take more than 5 servers that Google run to run SO.

</comment><comment><USER25> Digg is using Eee PCs as servers?

</comment><comment><USER6> [Sunglasses On] Sounds like the .Net stack performs much better than the LAMP stack.

<comment><USER6> I thought people on HN are more open to technology discussion. It seems people can't handle their bubble being pierced when presented with facts.

It would be more interesting you have facts to refute my statement than downvotes.</comment></comment>


SXSX official schedule page is down :(   come on guys... - <AUTHOR> http://schedule.sxsw.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> At least you can see which bands will be at SXSW here (even if the schedule details aren't quite up to date yet):

[http://gigsounder.com](http://gigsounder.com)</comment>


StackExchange is down - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> NYC is running on generator power (Because of Sandy) so we decided to kick things over to our secondary datacenter in Corvallis, OR. With our tests this happens in about 5 minutes, but we had a scheduled index reorg which we didn't account for. That caused 40 GBytes that had to be synced across the country, so we had to run SO in read only for a little over an hour.

</comment><comment><USER3> "This site is currently in read-only mode; we'll return with full functionality soon."

<comment><AUTHOR> Where are you? I'm in Vermont and only getting as far as "Server not found."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in India. Server not found.</comment>


Quirky Birds and Meta-Syntactic Programming - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/2008-11-04

<comment><USER2> _As explained in Kestrels, the practice of nicknaming combinators after birds was established in Raymond Smullyan's amazing book To Mock a Mockingbird. In this book, Smullyan explains combinatory logic and derives a number of important results by presenting the various combinators as songbirds in a forest. Since the publication of the book more than twenty years ago, the names he gave the birds have become standard nicknames for the various combinators._

Holy crap. I own two of Smullyan's books, which I read as a kid, but I never knew this. News.yc pays off again!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My bad, the link really should be:

[http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/2008-11-0...](http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master/2008-11-04/quirky_birds_and_meta_syntactic_programming.markdown)

</comment><comment><USER3> Reg, as usual, is making Ruby do some pretty exotic gymnastics, but more than the language extensions themselves, I just really want to read To Mock a Mockingbird now.</comment>


Plot of 11.3 million video game collision deaths - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/27/just-cause-2-video-maps-every-in-game-death-in-one-haunting-landscape/

<comment><USER2> Cloud of death high in the air - jets, right?</comment>


How To Dissolve the Arrogance of the Young Hot-Shot on Your Team - <AUTHOR> http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2013/11/25/how-to-dissolve-the-arrogance-of-the-young-hot-shot-on-your-team/

<comment><USER2> This seems like poor advice (i.e., hazing). If someone is that toxic to your organization/team, why not just fire them and find somebody else?

<comment><USER3> Likely because if 'hazing' is part of your company culture, you're a toxic org as well.

<comment><USER4> It certainly didn't work for Miami now did it? [http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2013/11/12/why-a-teams- cult...](http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2013/11/12/why-a-teams-culture-cant- be-incognito/)</comment></comment></comment>


Security Hole lets anyone at Microsoft see anyone's salary - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/11/23/10095215.aspx

<comment><USER2> The headline makes it seem like this is happening now - the article refers to an incident from approximately 20 years ago.</comment>


Secret to Life: To Get What You Need, You Have To Ask  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.assetmap.com/2011/04/networking/the-most-easily-forgotten-networking-truth-to-get-what-you-need-you-have-to-ask/ <comment><USER2> awesome.</comment>


New York City granted .NYC - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectid=A08875E3-C29C-7CA2-F8E280AAD98676BB

<comment><USER2> Is it going to be run like NYC itself? What is the likelihood that a registration of occupy.nyc or biggulp.nyc will be successful?</comment>


RIA and java script - <AUTHOR>

As an entrepreneur, I believe that RIA could reduce the money payed for hosting compared with normal web applications (where the presentation is generated on server). I find ActionScript a good solution but the flow these days is with Html 5 and JavaScript even if it is not clear for me if that is what some big companies want or the customers (and the entrepreneurs) really need. Is JavaScript good enough for RIA?  What Java Script frameworks would you use for real RIA? <comment><AUTHOR> Copy paste from another question :D For my shame . Thank clyfe:

Coding the whole app in JS in the browser and using the server only for proxying data and validation/filtering. See: SproutCore, Cappuccino, Backbone.js, JavaScript.MVC Avi Bryant's "Django is obsolete, but so is everything else" [http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1186/djangocon-2009-dj...](http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1186/djangocon-2009-dj..). Yehud Katz's <http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/14/heres-to-the-next-3-years/> reply

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks that I have bad karma ) I read HN daily,but I never contributed with comments or questions,... mmm :)</comment>


Heroku's new $50 and $100 per month database plans - <AUTHOR> https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/5/3/crane_the_new_50_per_month_production_database_/ <comment><USER2> Heroku sells convenience, and resells EC2 instances to you. Their previous dedicated database option, Ronin, cost $200/month. When you connect the dots that this DB has a 1.7GB cache and that a small instance on EC2 has 1.7GB memory[1], you start to realize what you're really paying for.

While paying 3.3 times more[2] may be ok for the added simplicity, you have to wonder if your 'dedicated' database is really just a small instance on EC2? If it is a larger instance, then you are sharing it with other users.

However, even a small instance is far from not being shared. EC2 has performance issues, especially small instances. Disk IO is the worst.[3]

Disclaimer: These are all just my observations, and I don't how Heroku actually configure their Ronin databases. I'd love to be proven wrong, and to have someone from Heroku explain. But from personal experience with both EC2 and Heroku's Ronin database, if my conclusions are wrong, the results are not. I've seen very slow performance on the simplest of queries on both configurations.

[1] <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/> [2] <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/> [3] [http://www.frederico- araujo.com/2011/12/27/why-ec2-still-sux...](http://www.frederico- araujo.com/2011/12/27/why-ec2-still-sux-on-disk-io/)

<comment><USER3> I didn't think disk io matters all that much if you fit your data in memory, which afaik you should if you want any kind of decent performance.

<comment><USER4> Even if your whole data set fits into main memory, writes still have to go to disk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone from Heroku is reading, that page is a great example of how poor contrast results in poor readability. Blue-on-blue text makes me close the browser tab, and not actually see what you're trying to sell.

<comment><USER6> Many of us are reading. We'll look into increasing the contrast.

<comment><USER7> But please don't lay down the torch of dark backgrounds :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can somebody clarify which heroku plans are best, as you work from development through MVP and initial traction? My current understanding is:

Development Stage: Use the free plan.

MVP Stage: When I have an MVP that I'd like to show people and get feedback on, I'm not sure if I should stay with the free plan, or if I need a paid plan at this point.

Gaining Traction: Still low overall volume, but consistent users. What is the cheapest paid plan that works for this stage? Is it the $15 plan, or the $50 plan?

Increasing Traffic: At this point, it's a little more clear that you choose add-ons to match your specific needs.

I would love it if someone could clarify what kinds of loads each of these plans could reasonably be expected to handle.

<comment><USER9> The answer to this depends on such a variety of factors that it's impossible to give a useful answer.

Use something like New Relic to watch your app's performance. If it's exceeding tolerable limits, you need to change something. This might be a re- write of your code to reduce load, or pouring more resource into dynos, workers, database or caching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Heroku is really great to get your started if you don't want to worry about managing infrastructure. However, you're paying a major premium for that and you need to have an exit plan from the beginning incase you grow too big and the costs no longer make sense.

<comment><USER11> I agree with everything you said, except that I don't think you need to spend any time working on an exit plan until the day you realize you're paying "too much" (whatever that means to you) for the benefit you're receiving from their managed hosting. I recommend: Launch on Heroku. Reevaluate that choice on success.

<comment><USER12> Surely designing with the eventual migration in mind will reduce the pain in the end, though.

<comment><USER13> YAGNI - your first problem is getting customers.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely agree that that is the first priority, but there are many factors you can keep in mind during development without slowing it down much, and this is one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats to the Heroku DoD on launching this long-awaited price point!

Can we create Crane followers of a larger master database yet? That would be really useful - keeping a cheap, eventually-consistent replica around for backup and analytics.

<comment><USER15> If you are on an older ronin or fugu you can't. But you can from all other plans and newer ronin/fugu databases. The limitation on older ronin/fugu databases is related to: <https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/37>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really like this!

I'm building an app that will eventually use hstore for data. I say 'eventually', because I'm currently using serialized columns on the $15/month shared plan, and hstore is not yet supported.

At $50/month, this is cheap enough for me to use as a staging server or as a pre-release server to get hstore across my entire environment.

<comment><USER15> Then new dev plans support hstore: [https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/4/26/heroku_postg...](https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/4/26/heroku_postgres_development_plan/)

<comment><USER16> I need a bit more than the approx 5MB of data - much more, but currently less than 20GB.

I'm kind of in a no-mans land of Heroku data plans - until today!

<comment><USER15> I'd love it if you used the new dev plan for your staging/dev db needs. This can help us drive the final limits.

<comment><USER16> Can I access the shared DB from outside Heroku?

<comment><USER15> Yes, you can access the shared dev plan from outside as well as the crane and kappa plans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. I've been looking at spatial databases and the fact that I could get MongoDB running on a free plan (e.g. with MongoLab and MongoHQ) made me go that way. (for now)

PostGIS has been available on Heroku's dedicated DBs (<https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/is-postgis-available>), but the $200/month was a bit high for early stage. $50 is much more manageable and I might be looking towards Postgres + PostGIS in the future… (assuming that the linked post also applies to these new plans)

<comment><USER15> For now PostGIS is not available on the new crane/kappa plans....

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So if the plans are named after increasingly deadly things the crane is the least deadly? I guess I could see that.

<comment><USER19> That's right. They are all Japanese things in increasing order of deadliness.

<comment><USER20> I was curious and the list did not disappoint: <https://postgres.heroku.com/pricing>

With that said I'm not sure how squid managed to be more dangerous than a kappa. >Kappa are usually seen as mischievous troublemakers. Their pranks range from the relatively innocent, such as loudly passing gas or looking up women's kimonos, to the malevolent, such as drowning people and animals, kidnapping children, and raping women

~wikipedia

<comment><USER21> I checked with some Japanese, the word on the street is that Kappa's are pretty innocuous

<comment><USER22> It's kind of a love-hate relationship. They can be trouble when they're feeling mischievous, but if they're happy they'll help you out. The Japanese will leave gifts at Kappa shrines, just in case.

The best gift is cucumber, which the Kappa can't resist. Don't go swimming in Japan after eating cucumber, because they will drown you when they smell it on you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1tb and backups are nice for $50, i wish them all the best to grow and drop price more

</comment><comment><USER24> I was just thinking yesterday that their lowest $200/month dedicated plan seemed like such a leap from their 20GB $15/month shared plan.

<comment><USER25> 2 weeks ago, i was seriously considering moving off of heroku to roll my own hstore support. Perfect timing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For anyone looking to upgrade from the shared database to one of these, I believe this is the procedure:

[https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/migrating-data- between...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/migrating-data-between- plans)

</comment><comment><USER27> Tried to set up a dev database from the dashboard; got a generic fail message. Told me why when I tried to add it from the CLI (my acct wasn't verified), may want to make this clear on the dashboard as well.

<comment><USER15> This should be fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Damn, this is nice! Thanks Heroku! I love the service, but 200 bucks as the lowest price point for a dedicated db didn't always make sense to me, especially in the startup world. This changes everything.

</comment><comment><USER29> That's with 1TB of storage!

</comment><comment><USER30> Will be interesting to see what Heroku ends up rolling out for the higher- priced dev database (comparable to the current 20 GB plan).

<comment><USER31> They've said they'll release something "at a comparable price point" to the $15/month shared plan. Hopefully the $50/month database isn't it as that seems high for hobby projects that outgrow the small dev database.

<comment><USER6> Crane is not intended to be the plan that will fill the role of the existing $15/mo database. We're still working on that one.

<comment><USER31> Awesome, great to hear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I tried to create a quick "dev" database but got "Cannot create database. Please try again later."

<comment><USER32> Okay never mind. I had to verify my account to make it work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Heroku is my Apple for Dev staff.

</comment><comment><USER34> How stable is the PostGIS beta? Anyone using it

<comment><USER6> Most of our beta-testers have been using it just fine. We had one unlucky soul who encountered several pernicious bugs over a long period, but at this point I think they're all sewn up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is awesome, been waiting for this.

</comment><comment><USER36> Azure SQL is only $10 per month for 1GB. Why is heroku so ridiculously more expensive than them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heroku is $15 for 20GB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Still wish they would offer included mySQL (yes postgreSQL has advantages, but it's a pain in the arse to work with)

<comment><USER6> If the problems you're talking about are installation related (and you're on a Mac), we've got your back: <http://postgresapp.com>

<comment><USER37> Nope, not on a Mac (fucking hate it that there are numerous apps for hackers now that are only made for Mac). This was my first time building a facebook app, playing with cloud hosting and using postgresql so the entire installation and use was complicated. I would have thought that since Facebook is encouraging you guys as the preferred/primary/sponsored cloud host that you'd provide a database that most people are familiar with - mySQL.

I ended up going with the clearDB addon just to save learning time, but at $10pm for only 1GB it's definitely a worse plan than the $15pm 20GB postgresql database you offer.</comment></comment></comment>


Preview of Kite, the AI pair programmer - <AUTHOR> https://mpicard.github.io/kite-review.html <comment><USER2> Now, this is an exciting development of tooling. This could bootstrap next generation of tools that would make huge increase in software complexity actually manageable.

I like that it shows you code examples (I use GitHub code search a lot). Another idea would be to automatically show you the code of function you are calling, so you can quickly verify your assumptions (sync/async, error handling, return values).

I don't do much Python nowadays, but I'm very excited about Kite.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do a lot of Python and all I can say is wow, it's so handy. It's way better than any other hovering UI suggestion/completion plugins I've used. If it supports type hinting in Python then you could get arg types, return values, etc.

They plan on adding more languages I believe so keep an eye out for yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish they would send me an invite. I really want to use it.

Thesis: A truly enlightened company would let you use this in interviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was told from Kite that invites are going to roll out quickly now so check your inbox soon!

Thesis-2: A truly clever company would tell you to use this on a language you've never used before in an interview hahaha

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the way it displays the documentation/suggestions. I would much rather have that than the floating boxes i see in VSCode right now, does anyone know if it's possible to get this layout style via plugins?

</comment><comment><USER5> How does one get an invite?

<comment><AUTHOR> Via email, if you signed up on www.kite.com you'll get an email soon with details.</comment></comment>


Some Books - <AUTHOR> http://www.samonsoftware.com/?p=168

<comment><AUTHOR> The popup div idea was probably a bad one, baah :)</comment>


Fingerprint Reader Works on T480 - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/ibcpob/fingerprint_works_on_t480_kernel_581/ <comment><AUTHOR> "You need to understand that the decisions here are political. Technical aspects only play a minor role overall." [0]

While T480 support is interesting in itself, this is the deeper issue that I wanted to bring to HN's attention, but could not without editorializing titles (or writing a blog post and submitting that instead).

libfprint refuse to adapt their architecture to support the T480 driver, which requires a loose coupling due to device lifecycles, because doing so would _also_ allow compatibility with proprietary drivers, which they object to on principle.

I thought HN might have some interesting commentary on that.

[0] [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libfprint/libfprint/-/issues/...](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libfprint/libfprint/-/issues/276)</comment>


Control Freaks: Hulu Now Blocks Anonymous Proxies Too - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/control-freaks-hulu-now-blocks-anonymous-proxies-too/ <comment><USER2> To be fair to Hulu, the restrictions on content distribution are from the networks, not Hulu. To explain: a television show is created by a network or a third party and then that show is licensed for distribution within a country by that network or third party. So, Disney makes Scrubs and runs it on ABC in the US (although it had licensed it to NBC for a while) and, if there is a market for it in other countries, licenses it to a network in those countries for distribution in that market.

So, when a network gives online distribution rights to Hulu for content, it's only for the US. In order to make sure that they keep getting content, Hulu really has to prove that they won't be hacked - that Hulu can effectively serve ads that won't be easily blocked, that Hulu can control distribution, etc.

It sucks. However, the behavior is more network/hollywood related than Hulu related. I'm sure the Hulu folks would love to be an open free-for-all, but they also realize that by playing ball they're able to offer something that, frankly, I find more entertaining and a much better experience while also having a much greater potential for profit.

Who knows? Maybe someday show creators will simply license their material for online distribution, completely bypassing networks and borders. In the meantime, Hulu is trying to make sure they don't piss off their benefactors and have content yanked because they can't control distribution. Is it good? No. But I'd blame the networks before leveling my anger at Hulu.

<comment><USER3> > To be fair to Hulu, the restrictions on content distribution are from the > networks, not Hulu.

I always thought that Hulu __ARE __the networks. Founded by Fox/NBC. ABC/Disney recently acquired a 30% stake. This kind of thing never surprises me, because Hulu/The networks are the same thing. Sure, Hulu is run by a bunch of cool guys who're trying to do the right thing, but their bosses have never _gotten_ the online side of things.

<comment><USER4> i'm not sure that this is a matter of "getting it" or not. it seems like a contractual reality that may change over time, but as of now, it prevents them from distributing everything to everyone, so i am hard pressed to blame the networks for this particular problem.

<comment><USER5> Whether it's the networks' fault or not, lots of TV viewers outside the US are probably saying to themselves "Hulu? Who cares? I'll continue to download TV shows via BitTorrent".

If the TV networks are determined to go the same way as the music industry, it's their funeral.

<comment><USER4> how old is hulu? frankly i am pretty impressed with how far it has come already. while they may be terminal regardless of what they do, it is encouraging that they are at least starting to bleed off some inertia and change directions.

[edited to actually address your comment]

with respect to international users, i totally understand their frustration. i don't really depend on hulu for anything since i can dvr more tv than i can watch as it is, but i would be upset too. i think it might be best to look at it in the same light as geographic roll-outs of movies, games, etc. it's a bummer, and due to mostly stupid limitations, but we can plausibly imagine a future where those limitations are no longer in place because they are inefficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I was running Hulu, I would do the exact same thing.

A user costs Hulu 'x' amount of dollars in terms of bandwidth and Hulu makes 'y' dollars off that user via ads. In the US, x < y.

In developing countries, x > y. Two reasons - one, they're eating up more bandwidth ('x' goes up) and two, they're much harder to monetize ('y' goes down).

It's hard enough to monetize viewers from the US. Compared to them, it's practically impossible to monetize viewers from other countries. As a for- profit company, Hulu is doing the right thing. Otherwise, they'd be bleeding all over the place like youtube.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure most of us are talking about Canada, Europe and Australia, but thanks for referring to us all as "developing countries".

<comment><USER6> I was talking specifically about countries like India where users consume a lot of bandwidth, thereby resulting in a double whammy (it's not just the 'y' that goes down, 'x' also goes up)

I guess I should have been clearer in the distinction. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why there's the Pirate Bay.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to see someone make an international model of such a site and gain a large backing with some popular tv show or movie content providers and beat hulu at their own game.

It would be interesting to see how their revenue model changes.

<comment><USER7> I doubt if Hulu had the bargaining power, they would be spending their time playing "police officer". Unfortunately, its the same hand giving them the content, that is pushing them to plug these minor leaks.

The only alternative I can see would be an HBO-style online retailer willing to pay to produce high-quality content, cutting off the studio entirely. For whatever reason, they don't exist yet.</comment></comment>