A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools - <AUTHOR> https://acrossapp.com/blog/how-a-2-person-startup-already-uses-28-other-tools <comment><USER3> I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy.

E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid 9-digit code plus pin plus participant id). Six months after signing a 3-year agreement (my bad. rookie mistake) I had to resist my CEO's insistence that we switch to a different provider when we were courting them as a client. A few month later, sales went out and bought 10 mf'ing Zoom licenses without consulting anyone because some client hadn't heard of UC and asked if it was the budget solution.

Thank god our new CFO confiscated all the corporate credit cards and moved us to reimbursement with Concur. Of course, he later unilaterally selected NetSuite (for something like $40k a year!) and insisted on coordinating the roll out himself. It has been a months long dumpster fire, but he still won't give my team admin privileges lest we try to see other's salaries.

We use a lot of AWS. One of our red-teamers mostly used but occasionally built some of our infrastructure. He left the company last month. Yesterday, salesman from Digital Ocean reached to ask if we are still interested in going forward with the departed colleague's plan to move all our infrastructure to DO.

So for all you folks stuck in big companies, when you wonder why your IT department is so behind the times and won't let you use Postgres instead of MariaDB or Gitlab instead of Bitbucket, remember my experience. It's because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some other kid's shinier toy. Your poor CIO is left cleaning up your mess in the middle of the night after stepping on a Lego brick.

(All that said, my job isn't bad and my company is way less dysfunctional than most start ups. I get that start ups are chaotic, and the basic nature of my job is to wrangle it.)

<comment><USER4> Your CFO got sold ... twice. Concur and NetSuite are both enterprise level software that a company with 50 FTEs does not need.

NetSuite is a never ending money pit with varying results. I dealt with a very similar situation, in which a project manager("VP") talked our owner into using NS, but it was over $100k/year and commitments were 2 years per seat at something like $5k. He ALSO wanted to do the roll out himself. 6 months later, it was still not functional.

I got pulled onto the team to help. We made _some_ progress and I hired and managed 4 remote programmers to write all the plugins and customizations we would need to make it work with our model (multi-channel e-commerce, multiple warehouses/locations). It was a nightmare all-around and completely unnecessary. PM/VP left the company because he couldn't do the job and we were stuck with a half-assed implementation at that point.

It's been around 4 years since the first day, I am no longer with that company, and I am sure they are still struggling with NS and employing multiple developers to keep things going. Good for the devs, bad for biz. I am willing to bet it's never returned a single dollar on the investment and cost them far more than they wanted to spend. If you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel at this point, cut your loses, and don't get another "solution- in-a-box".

<comment><USER5> Weirdly, almost exactly 20 years ago, I sat next to somebody at a wedding who had an almost-identical story about cleaning up after an SAP rollout, but all of the numbers had an extra zero or two. It amazes me that what the SaaS shift appears to have achieved is that now much smaller companies can get stuck in the same "solve everything" money pit.

But I guess the fundamental problem hasn't changed: executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the actual work. With no regard for actual operational efficiency, and no need to hold themselves to the ROI standards they'd demand of others.

<comment><USER6> > executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the > feelings of control with none of the actual work

Corollary: R&D wants to believe they can build magical solutions that solve all the problems--solutions that will scale better and cost less to keep up than off-the-shelf ones made by people with extensive domain expertise--in a week or two, promise.

As with most things, the problem is complicated, deeply human, and answers lie somewhere in the middle.

<comment><USER7> I agree with this wholly. I very much doubt that many people are building tools in bad faith to consume money. It's just that in the end, "solve everything" means implementing 10:1 weird hacks for edge cases vs actual features that companies all have in common.

<comment><USER8> That works both ways. 70% of features are common with other businesses, but the feature set is pretty diverse. My experience is that internal folk with a good understanding of the business hit 90-95% of the requirements without implementing the 200% of non-relevant broader industry requirements. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt.

For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used by other small startups.

<comment><USER10> I used to think this every time I downloaded a free mobile game. Probably 90%+ of ads in mobile games were for other free mobile games that presumably also have the same ad-supported model and the same sort of advertisers. It feels like there's a few games making heaps from IAPs and everyone else is just advertising in a pyramid toward them while also using IAPs in a way that makes their own game basically unplayable.

<comment><USER11> Similarly, web comic ads seem to consist entirely of ads for other web comics.

<comment><USER12> This one isn't so bad. You like web comics, you probably would like other web comics.

What is boneheaded is advertising shovels to me because I was tracked while buying another shovel online. I already have my damn shovel for the next 50 years I do not care anymore at all about shovels. Now if I were served a wheelbarrow ad...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't worth it in a small startup:

1\. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype

2\. Notion ($16 / month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app — just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder

3\. Sentry ($26 / month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a high volume then it gets expensive — we host our own Sentry instance and past the initial setup it has mostly been a hands off deployment

4\. Cloudflare ($20 / month) — not sure why they felt the need to go with the Pro account, maybe they have a lot of page rules, but for us the free account has been more than enough

5\. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month), SalesQL ($29 / month), Hubspot ($45 per month) — these are sales tools that should pay for themselves and evaluating that is easy, they either get you the leads to monetize or they don't and if not, then they aren't worth the monthly subscription

6\. Figma ($24 / month) — I have mixed feelings about it, I haven't seen instances in which such software helped; might be worth it if the results are tangible and it saves you the cost of a designer; this too should be easy to evaluate and if it gets you the same results as drawing on whiteboard or paper, then get rid of it

<comment><USER14> Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?

<comment><USER15> Discord doesn't have threads. That's a deal-breaker for us.

<comment><USER16> This. For any serious discussion you need to have topics and async slow-motion discussions for them. Like forums.

Slack should definitely add a 'forum-like' kind of channel before someone creates a new 'forums with native client' product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You also use desks, and chairs, computers and displays. Cups for drinking water. Plates for eating.

This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality, if you think of _all_ inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.

<comment><USER18> True but you don't pay subscription for your chairs. You do pay rent, but in many case the sum of SaaS subscription is in the same order of magnitude as the rent.

<comment> apk-d Is this only true for US-based companies? Where I'm from, I rarely see use of subscription services (especially ones that incur per-seat costs). Developers here tend to earn roughly the same _number_ , but in a different _currency_ , which makes all software and services several times more expensive. This results in preference of OSS alternatives and free tiers whenever possible. We use Discord for communication, Gitlab for source control, vscode for writing code, and... honestly, what else do you even need to run a software company anyway?

At my last startup, the total monthly subscription cost was the $1 Bitwarden tier (granted, we were tiny). And yes, a Ryzen system bolted to a $10 lackrack was entirely sufficient for our hosting needs.

<comment><USER19> Lackrack is magnificent. First time i am seeing this.

<comment><USER20> Look at the history of google. Enclosures made of LEGO, and just laying motherboards on sheets of cardboard in shelves rather than buying "server pc"s. This kind of attitude plus the quality of their search, was what got them enthusiastically funded before they had any idea of revenue.

(They took so long to figure out the revenue model that they almost had the money taken back by the VCs, and had a CEO thrust upon them)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From the other side (vendor perspective) we see this SaaS fatigue a lot.

We have a free, open source, unlimited use product that has a very good, commercial, alternative. What we hear in calls is that there are just too many SaaS tools in the company and the monthly cost (or security review of all tools) ends up with the management saying "pick your top 5,10,15 most important" and drop the rest.

The GSuites, Slacks, AWS, Notions, Zooms, etc (picking from the article list) get in the top priority list and that list is so full the medium priority stuff just gets crossed out and pushed down to budgets lower down. Our category just rarely makes it.

A lot of the time we win out just because the company wants to avoid the admin of the paid solution, the tool just isn't _that_ important. Being creative in your business model, I think, is the way to go, particularly in terms of freemium offerings.

With the number of SaaS apps trying to get your monthly cost, being outside the core list is getting harder and harder and you need to define those niches and totally own them. Forget starting at the company level, start with 1-5 people groups for a _long_ time.

<comment><USER22> As an aside, draw.io (now diagrams.net I see, why the change?) is a nice tight project.

I was an early adopter (i.e. from beta releases) of lucidchart and really liked their first few years; convinced two companies to get a bunch of licenses. Over time they've become a hot mess of bad patterns in SAAS and I won't touch them for a few years now (and let a license for ~100 people expire).

Congrats on keeping things simple and not making it harder to use over time.

<comment><USER23> The popup on the page links to an article that explains why: [https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams- net](https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams-net)

Basically they're dropping the .io domain for security and ethical concerns, and the old name being the full domain is probably why that leads to a full rebrand

<comment><USER22> Makes sense, I missed that link somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A one-person startup uses not less than yours :) [https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology- behin...](https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behind-a-one- person-23/)

It's a good thing that we can outsource tasks to 3rd party SaaS for a small fee, rather than hiring full-time employees

<comment><USER25> Thanks for providing that link. It's not very often I would come back to a thread just to comment on a website. The vast amount of content available quickly is impressive.

The tagline is podcast searching like google. How do you keep discovering new content like google, are you running your own crawler?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting how hard it is to gauge the value of tools you don't yet use.

I'm the founder of a startup that recently subscribed to Gripeless ([https://usegripeless.com](https://usegripeless.com)). If you look at the Show HN thread and the other threads about Gripeless floating around the internet, you'll see a lot of commenters saying "this is too expensive", "I don't see anyone buying this" or something along those lines. I was skeptical too, but we tried it on the production site anyways, since the integration took less than 10 minutes.

Turns out it's more than paid for itself in the first month. We immediately caught 3 important issues and fixed them. I thought the value-add would stop here: our startup gained an unquantifiable amount of value (a la fixing bugs we would never catch otherwise). But it turns out there was a hidden treasure even more valuable and concrete. I personally reached out to the 3 users who submitted a Gripe, letting them know we were fixing their issue right away and asking if they wanted to hop on a phone call sometime. This effectively onboarded all 3 of them. I feel confident that Gripeless is going to continue to drive much more revenue than it costs.

That experience has led me to be less apprehensive about spending cash on additional tools. I'm not going to sign up for 28 of them, but I am more opening to trying them out and quickly cutting them if they don't work.

<comment><USER27> Hotjar does this (collect user feedback in the page) and more and has a free plan. I work there so I'm biased, but yeah.

<comment><USER28> I'm also biased because I work on Gripeless. Our product isn't really about broadly collecting feedback as a whole, but it instead focuses specifically on the _negative_ feedback part and tries to make it as pleasant and friction- less as possible for the end user to submit.

HotJar's feedback tool is built around getting all kinds of feedback, both positive and negative, which is generally fine if you want to improve your product satisfaction when comparing "happiness" at different time frames, but it does come with some caveats.

Since people don't want to be rude by nature it's less likely that they'd _explicitly_ pick the most angry face option on HotJar's happiness slider and submit their complain then - as they, again, would have to explicitly state that they're dissatisfied.

Submitting a gripe through Gripeless on the other hand takes just a single text field, no emotions, no decisions - users can simply quickly fire out their issue(s) at the product owner without any suspected judgement - <USER2> complaints are very clearly solicited.

Again, I'm super biased because I'm the solo founder of Gripeless and competing against a much more established company like HotJar is not easy, as an early stage company we can't afford to give out our product for free just yet (apart from OSS projects which we always give out our product to for $0), but I try very very hard to satisfy our current customers' specific needs, something that a larger company can't offer at scale.

Also if anyone reading is interested I'm doing demo's and answering concerns via quick 5 minute calls, feel free to reach me at firstname.lastname@example.com

\- Maciej

<comment><USER15> I'd never heard of Gripeless before this thread, but I can agree with your reasoning.

We use HotJar's free plan on an interal (engineer-facing) tool and we get very very few reports through it because engineers don't realize there's a text field AFTER the happiness slider.

We get an order of magnitude more feedback via Jira even though creating a ticket that way takes 10x more clicks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd personally drop gsuite, trello and slack and get a office365 essentials plan. I know, because I did, and it's so much easier to manage and it's also cheaper.

I'm not going to say the tools are better with Microsoft, because to me it's really much of the same where I genuinely don't really like any of the options. But because it's not worse either, you kind of get used to it.

I think if you got the full teams/one-note experience on the essential plan that it might be better, but you don't get the full experience in the browser. One example is that you can use Excel inside Onenote in the browser. But since I don't really like slack or the g-suite stuff either, it's basically the same with less hassle.

<comment><USER30> A counterpoint (also based on personal experience): recently moved from a company that uses Office365 to a one that uses GSuite. Communications and document sharing feels far more simpler and productive. I can't quite put my finger on why, but working on GSuite just feels faster and less clunkier.

<comment><USER31> I share this experience. My company switched to Office365 from GSuite. It feels universally like a step down. The workers who all used MS desktop products liked it, but everyone I work with it had expressed nothing but disdain.

<comment><USER32> We are using Office 365. Outlook's search, spam management and filtering tools are very poor compared to Gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I believe the attention cost of using and keeping up with so many great tools is underappreciated. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather use Github Projects than Trello not because GHP is better (it is not) but because I'm already using Github, and the mental and workflow cost of adding Trello to the mix is (I feel) higher than its additional value.

Notion in particular drives me nuts. I mean it's very very well done, but you use it to create a hierarchy of collaborative documents... because apparently GSuite docs are not good enough? Notion I think is a case of local maxima, because Gdocs/Office365 offer so many more ways to keep documentation and data in better formats (doc, sheet, slides...).

Sometimes I feel crushed under the weight of a thousand good things. :)

<comment><USER34> Agreed. Notion feels quite a bit complex. May be I just don't understand it yet. I understand AirTable's value prop. It's pretty straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> IMO startups, especially small ones should use as many tools as possible, because it is way cheaper than having to develop and maintain a similar thing in house, OR hiring a new person just to cover that. $200 a month is really very small cost compared to the alternative of hiring and spending many hours on that. You can always come back and replace the vendor once the company gets funded and has more resources.

<comment><USER36> On the flip side of that, we use three react libraries at my job: react-table, react-dates, and react-select.

If we had been OK just using whatever styles they gave us, it would have been fine. But we have a designer who designs how everything is supposed to look. And even the "style-less" react components have been a nightmare. Just a constant train of bugs to fix, and they still barely function.

It would have been way faster to start from scratch, in my opinion. This has all been over 6 months, so it's not like there was some initial payoff period either.

<comment><USER37> As a frontend dev, this really pains me. I've worked at many places with the same problems - first of all, pushing back on the designer is incredibly important if something is hard to develop. Most designers are doing their best to make things easy to code, but aren't developers, so they just don't know. It's the engineers job to tell them no when things are exceptionally difficult. If they understand that the style change they want is a 3 month project, maybe they would be happy to design something different.

Secondly, frontend is hard. Having a senior react dev who can accurately weigh the trade offs of using external components like that would have been invaluable here. People underestimate how much different in skill level a junior react/frontend dev is from a senior engineer with experience in multiple frameworks. 6 months is long time in terms of dev hours - writing a table from scratch for your use case that works with design is usually a 1-2 sprint task, and that's absolutely the hardest one there. But more reasonably, work should have been done to make a reusable style library to make this even easier.

<comment><USER34> Writing data tables isn't easy. Deffo not a 1-2 week thing and you call it done. The trail of bug fixes and browser edge cases are what slowly get you at the end.

+1 on not letting design dictate. Just gotta sit in the room and weigh pros and cons.

<comment><USER37> 1-2 sprints, which for most teams is 4-6 weeks. It really depends on use cases... generally startups don't have any need to support old browsers and can enforce current Chrome+Firefox only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Company I work for has grown to 10 people and the pricing per member things are getting out of hand. We had to drop some services, bc if there is a service that costs 10 per user for just one feature, it's they add up real quick (looking at you slack for example).

Some services have free tier or special pricing if it's only couple of members, but once you exhaust that, you are dropped to full pricing. I think there is a opportunity for different pricing for growing companies between 5-25 people.

It seems that this pay per member works for small companies, couple of people or huge ones. But if you are growing with limited revenue the costs are way too high while you are still also finding your market.

<comment><USER39> No reason to look at Slack like that. It may be well worth the price.

When company really starts using Slack it replaces the whole communication system of company, think at the level of replacing the complete Exchange/Outlook system, the whole intra-company email.

It's pretty big deal. And that's why they can charge that level of subscription.

<comment><USER40> Compared to a salary, it is nothing. If your company functions and people are more productive because of it, ~$80 a year is nothing.

<comment><USER41> I'd be more productive without slack.

It's useful for distributed teams, and for incident response, but basic messaging + jira/github + zoom cover those use cases better.

Slack was OK before the bot stuff and integration with ldap/email groups landed. Now, it's at least as spammy as email, except not searchable, the (non customizable) UI is worse, and the social norm is that you spend 100% of the day checking a firehose of broadcast messages and machine generated spam (in some teams, even after working hours).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have concluded that existing businesses and other certain factors limit the application of what I am about to say to a subset, but there is great room for a holistic "here is your IT stack" company that focuses on open source tooling, reduction of stack complexity, and working out many of the oft- repeated learning curves.

It's a huge market opportunity waiting to happen, because death or at least injury by a thousand licensing fee cuts is real. Small startups, small businesses looking to modernize, non-profits, etc would all be potential customers, and unlike the coast-centric viewpoint of HN, those tend to actually be the vast majority of companies in middle America.

Many MSP's and various resellers and salesmen make a living off trapping these in lock-in also. I have seen all of this over many years first hand. There is a reason Spiceworks took off so fast. There is also a reason they are hemorrhaging customers... because Spiceworks entire model was built around advertising lock-in type products to customers. (also their tooling sorta sucks, despite being easy and having a decent web front-end)

<comment><USER43> Isn't that what MS, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Amazon, and Google do?

<comment><USER42> Not at all. They provide little pieces. Businesses still have to cobble them together. Which is my whole point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Sublime Text isn't free. [https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text](https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text)

<comment><USER25> You can use Sublime Text 2 forever.

[https://www.sublimetext.com/2](https://www.sublimetext.com/2)

Sublime Text 2 may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use. There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation.

<comment><USER45> You can use use it forever without a license, but you shouldn't.

There are lots of honour based / social contracts that essentially function because enough of us abide by them. If enough people do not, they go away.

Or as the saying goes, "this is why we can't have nice things."

<comment><USER25> So someone should uninstall the program and download a true open source product like vscode. Because using it by the terms listed on the download page is breaking a social contract. If we don't no one will offer a free editor again?

\- There is a reason they offered a free unlimited trial. They were unknown and by offering it for free they increased popularity, increased business / education licenses sold. By me switching to another editor I stop telling people I use that editor my company stops purchasing that license. We all lose. Nevermind version 3 doesn't have that wording, so version 2 can be seen as a gateway product to onboard developers into version 3.

\- Even though vscode is open source by supporting that editor you are supporting big microsoft over a much smaller company. Long term this hurts small developers more. I think open source can hurt small players when used by larger corps trying to get you to buy into there paid ecosystem.

<comment><USER46> VSCode is not "true open source product". It's event not open source. It's "open core", i.e. proprietary version of "code" project with additional proprietary components: telemetry, special configuration and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I feel like a big portion of the apps you accomplish similar things. To name a few, Airtable, Notion, and Trello can all do CRM funnel, product roadmap and issue tracking. Even though 2 out of 3 are free, you guys could probably condense them into a centralized spot.

<comment><USER48> Additionally, one could sacrifice on features and use GitHub projects instead of Trello. That's what we do at work. Not great, but pretty painless for tracking dev work

<comment><USER49> Sure, but in this particular example, they're on the free Trello tier, and I'd say it's already more full-featured than GitHub projects.

Btw, another cool alternative that I've been playing with lately is ClickUp, which also has a generous free tier.

And on a general note, given that these days all of these systems have good APIs and export capabilities, I'd say there isn't that much business case to consolidate to fewer systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's fun seeing the comments here and the two sides of this. For me, being a team of 1, I pay for gsuite, Streak, Calendly, Docsend, Hellosign, and github. When I add a few staff members, I'll happily pay for Slack and Notion.

Yes, it's a lot of subscriptions for a tiny team, but if the combination of all of those (or heck even one of them) saves me 2-3 hours per month, it's worth it. If I close one deal, it's worth it. But really I love that I can set up a few zaps on Zapier and write a few API calls and it frees me up to spend my time thinking about higher-value things.

I get vendor fatigue and I understand that many of these tools get really expensive as you scale, but I'm pretty thrilled to live in a time when I can find tools that I can make talk to each other for a relatively low monthly cost.

</comment><comment><USER45> > FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. > Free since we built it ourselves :)

If the service you're providing is valuable, you should pay for it too. You don't need to actually funnel the money through your payment processors giving them a cut, just do it as an accounting exercise, showing the revenue on the books.

It also helps you quantify your pricing yourself. If you're not willing to pay $x/month for your service, why would your customers? What do you need to change to make it worth $x/month to you? Do you need to change $x to be $x-y (or $x+y? Are you under charging?)

Anyway, great list, great post, thanks for sharing, and best of luck with your product!

</comment><comment><USER51> What is the benefit of paying for GSuite for such a small team?

Also Github? You can now have private repos with up to three collaborators for free.

<comment><USER52> They are free for personal private repos. Team private repos aren't!

<comment><USER53> I think OP is trying to say they don't need to pay for the Pro or for the Team as there are just two collaborators, the free version includes 3 collaborators on private repos. [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

<comment><USER51> Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I suppose having the code in a personal repo gives the repo owner more power? I've never founded a startup, so not sure how typical cofounder trust dynamics are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Please consider paying/donating for smaller "free" tools like sublime etc.

</comment><comment><USER55> It would be interesting to see this kind of list for the "start-ups" in '90s. I guess Windows and MS Office licenses would be unavoidable items on the list.

</comment><comment><USER56> Remember when web pages linked to other web pages?

</comment><comment><USER57> I feel this on a near-spiritual level.

Once you factor in communication tools (including but not limited to...project management, email, calendar, chat, VOIP, and CRM) alongside your "real" technical stuff that actually powers your services or products, you invariably end up with a ton of different tools because nobody has the time to even _try_ to build all those different core components.

There's a ton of friction to doing anything differently. For example, I'm fairly anti-google. Therefore, I host my own email. Doing that, even in the most simplistic way possible, means utilizing several tools or technologies (mailinabox + a deliverability service being the most simplistic I can imagine). A larger operation would certainly have more specific needs that would require another approach - and the human effort of implementation and maintenance that goes with it.

We have a handful of people, in 3 different countries, each requiring differing currencies (USD, GBP, EURO). Our client base is global. Combine the operational complexity with everything else and even a small operation can start to feel like a fortune 500 company.

</comment><comment><USER58> As a B2B startup building an enterprise product, we've had to be wary of using external services as a part of our offering. Our customers prefer predictable/fixed-annual pricing and do not sign up for saas pricing models, especially the ones that cost a lot at scale. Also, this eats into our margins as the external service has no obligation/contract to reduce prices.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm rewatching Mad Men now, and I'm amazed how many people in that era were busy on administrative tasks that are completely automated now – set on 2010s, this series would be about a boutique digital agency that would employ under 10 people, total. This list of software may be long, but without it, it wouldn't be possible to do this with just a 2-person team.

</comment><comment><USER60> Truth is you don't need most of SaaS when you start. No-one is saying this out-loud because a lot of SaaS users are also SaaS selles.

Sentry, use free tier or self host or use Bugsnag free tier

Slack, use Skype instead

Notion, use Google Docs instead

AirTable, use Google Sheets

Office/coworking, work from home or cafes!

These huge usage of other SaaS is caused by venture backed companies with a lot of cash looking for an IPO. In practice if you are boostraped instead of venture based you don't want to have a lot of SaaS and/or hire a lot of employees. Some things like bragging about how many employees or SaaS you are using only make sense in venture-back land because by spending more you are getting to the IPO/exit faster but you are sacrificing future long term margins (which you don't care about since you will be long gone).

I'm a solo bootstrap founder and yes you can clearly see how I'm biased against venture-backed startups! :D

</comment><comment><USER61> I was shocked by the headline, then I noticed that only over a third of the tools are used for development.

I was again shocked by their monthly spending, considering the stage they're at[1], but then I noticed that over two thirds are spent on marketing.

So all in all, it makes sense; they're paying for what they deem required to use. I couldn't justify to myself using half of these tools, at least, at that stage.

[1]: Which highlights how good we, in general, have it for at least prototyping stuff freely, or very cheaply.

On that note, I got so confused by a couple of their bills that I had to stop and see if the tools had some sort of restriction for businesses. Nope, so I don't understand _why_ they're paying for some of them. I mean, they certainly should if they want to, after all, such tools are damn good services worth paying for, but they don't strictly _need_ to.

</comment><comment><USER62> If you're using free Heroku dynos, the first visitor in a while will experience long load times because the dyno has to be spun up. This is a pretty bad experience. I'd spend the 7 dollars each month to make sure your dyno is always up.

<comment><USER53> [https://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/](https://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/)

<comment><USER63> Heroku limits the number of hours you can have up - 550 a month ( [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno- hours](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-hours) ). So if you have a system with real users, you really should just pay the $7 a month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> That's a bit scary on one hand, it's pretty amazing though how much free value you can get from OS or Freemium tools. We use e.g. the free versions of RocketChat and Gitlab, they work great and we didn't have many problems administrating them (once a short outage due to a full disk, but gitlab.com had multiple outages in the same time frame). So I think if you are willing to put a little effort into self hosting you have a lot of choices available. Deployment and maintenance has become easier as well with tools like Ansible and Docker.

</comment><comment><USER65> I wonder if the $$ emphasis is the wrong way to look at this list. I'm wondering about: \- time to train on how to use it * every employee you ever get (some of them it's trivial, others not so much) \- time to do security reviews of any of them where sensitive information might ever pass through it (which is most of them) \- the risk of lock-in to something that gets bought by a competitor, turned into adware, or acquihired and shut down (in some cases switching is trivial, in others not so much without losing a lot of valuable history)

</comment><comment><USER66> Why use both Notion _and_ Trello for product/feature planning?

</comment><comment><USER67> 28 tools, and no password manager? Oof.

For "core" accounts, make sure you've got 2FA on. Google for starters. Also anything to do with code, hosting, or finances.

</comment><comment><USER68> Why is Slack needed if GSuite is there. It's decent for chat in a small Startup.

Also Google meet does basic video conferencing bearable. Zoom may be an overkill.

<comment><USER69> The tool they are building appears to integrate heavily with slack.

<comment><USER68> Oh ok. Then makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I was curious way the author used Slack for 2 people until I saw their SaaS is a plugin for Slack. As I mentioned in my other comments, startups selling a SaaS spend so much time writing copies and doing sales pitch of how their SaaS product is a must-have that they start to believe that also others SaaS are must-have.

SaaS selling to SaaS might turn into a Ponzi piramid scheme if left unchecked.

</comment><comment><USER70> Subscribe to Zoho One. 40+ integrated apps at $30 /user /month with an annual subscription (All Employee Pricing).

[https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/](https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/) [https://www.zoho.com/one/](https://www.zoho.com/one/)

<comment><USER71> Just curious, do you work for Zoho?

<comment><USER70> Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I'd be interested to see your disaster recovery plans for each choice you've made. When any of those fail what do you do for continuity? How do you back up your data?

What's your failover time between the site being down or other issue and being able to switch to different service?

Or is there no plan because all websites are assumed always up... ?

</comment><comment><USER73> There are certain dev tools like Gitlab/Github or AWS/GCP for your product. Besides can't things be simplified to just a couple of tools

Like just 1\. Gsuite/Office 365 2\. Asana/Notion

I am building a startup (Early stages) & think about this. I want to create one or two tools & use it.

Why need airtable, notion & trello at the same time?

</comment><comment><USER74> One thing i've noticed about markets is that when there a little to choose from you buy few tools, but expect them to do more, and you are prepared to invest time into learning them. However if there are a lot to choose from, you want more simple tools, dont want to invest time, and prefer the tools you already know.

</comment><comment><USER75> For about $230 a month the amount of functionalities a startup gets, compared to what would have been possible a decade ago, is truly enviable (at least for founders like me who are old). The nett capabilities at $2800 per year is roughly 1% of what a full time employee would cost the company. The times we live in!

</comment><comment><USER76> Some open source companies offer free use of their product if your product or organisation is open source as well. For our tool[0] we got offered free use of Gitlab Gold and a Sentry account for error tracking.

[0] [https://websecuritymap.org/](https://websecuritymap.org/)

</comment><comment><USER77> We at Levels.fyi are also a two person team at the moment. We use free versions of most services (helps that we're only 2 people) and essentially are only paying for AWS. We've always found that there are cheap high quality alternatives to a lot of well known tools. We pay less than $30 / month.

</comment><comment><USER78> What is the value of Figma ($24 / month for Designing product mocks..) Why not just get the Adobe Suite with Illustrator, Photoshop,... I am really curious, as I am trying to create a design tool too. What is so great about it? Is there some USP?

</comment><comment><USER79> I am running a small bootstrapped venture and use a lot of very low cost apps. It works well, particularly as integration tools become much more sophisticated. Loosely coupled looks messy but wins over tightly coupled big enterprise systems

</comment><comment><USER80> I have made this tool, which tries to help with this kind of situation: [https://aamu.app/](https://aamu.app/)

It already has quite a bit of features, but more features come quite regularly.

</comment><comment><USER81> why don't you use basecamp ? It does says it replaces quite a number of tools.

</comment><comment><USER82> I wonder, what is it they missing on $6 GSuite plan, so they need $12 one?

<comment><USER83> I think it's because there are 2 of them, each on the $6 plan. G Suite charges per person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Suddenly my lab's Cloudron + droplet costs seem low. Just the Cloudron subscrption opens up a world of easy to deploy and maintain open productivity tools with linked accounts.

</comment><comment><USER85> Find it interesting that they're paying for premium versions of all those tools yet are using free heroku dynos.. Doesn't that result in their app sleeping?

</comment><comment><USER86> > FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. > Free since we built it ourselves :)

Can you tell us more about this? Is this part of your product?

</comment><comment><USER87> gsuite, hubspot, github, jira, bitbucket, confluence, codeship, vs code, slack, discord

partially our product botium is open source, thats why we have github and bitbucket.

</comment><comment><USER88> Slack, Notion, Airtable, Figma, Sentry (maybe), Hubspot

seem to be really unnecessary subscriptions since there are actually better free or one-time payment alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER89> Thanks for the list. Curious how does Mixplanel compare to Google Analytics? Is it for similar use-case or different?

</comment><comment><USER90> This is brought home to me whenever I take the time to document a process.

</comment><comment><USER91> Some of the listed paid services either has free alternatives or can be easily DIY or self hosted on light vm or raspberry PI with fair enough functionality if you do not want to pay for them. Including error monitoring, topic/channel chatroom, git server.

</comment><comment><USER92> During a gold rush, sell shovels

During a shovel rush, sell shovel making tools

</comment><comment><USER93> What's the advantage of Robo 3T over Mongo compass?

</comment><comment><USER94> Airtable and HubSpot would cross over a fair bit, no?

<comment><USER95> Not even close

<comment><USER94> Strange. I've found that HubSpot's CRM and salespipe features are pretty good, especially for a small startup. Maybe I am missing something in Airtable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> I really don't get why companies use slack and pay 13 a month!!! when you can have gchat for free in your 12 a month. I mean, yes, gchat lacks some features, but for the most part it works.

</comment><comment><USER97> Please link to all the tools!

</comment><comment><USER98> i wonder if that leaves them any time to work on their own product

</comment><comment><USER99> And your hardware took 100's of tools to make. So what?

</comment><comment><USER100> SoftBank invested something like $24bn in WeWork, which went to the real estate bubble plus free beer for techies. There is an astonishing amount of money out there. In the case of the Saudi investment through SoftBank, it's practically a moral imperative to relieve them of it.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.

<comment><USER101> > Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable > alternative to wealth taxes.

That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.

<comment><USER102> Anything is better than nothing, isn't it?

Savings rate goes up with income. On a percentage basis, the 10% are going to be spending more money at restaurants, shops, etc. This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market.

<comment><USER103> > _This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market._

Arguably is the right word.

The global economy is a closed system, so money put _anywhere_ makes its way elsewhere. Spending money in restaurants and shops is most easily visible, but not necessarily any better than other investment.

Even in your example, the 1% putting money in the stock market provides capital for companies as well as income for banks and brokers and finance folk of all sorts (which can _then_ be spent in restaurants and shops). Sure, lower income people have a higher propensity to spend a marginal dollar (because they _have_ to), but that isn't necessarily "better".

<comment><USER102> What about tax havens and such? As you said, if I put some money into the stock market,

* my broker/bank takes some. If my broker is a public company, some of the money goes to pay operational expenses, and some of the money goes to their shareholders as dividends.

* the stocks I bought go up slightly. They get cheaper capital, and their owners get an unrealized gain.

Schematically, we can assume all bank employees put all their money into the stock market. So the end result is that the benefits accrue to shareholders of public companies, regardless of which stock you buy.

But if money never exits the financial system to go back into the real economy, none of this matters. If a large chunk of the public stock market is held by buy-and-hold investors who just never liquidate their investments nor pay tax, this money will never come to benefit ordinary folks.

Some of it will, by way of pension funds and whatnot. But it's worse than spending it on normal consumption, as I see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> No VS Code? Really?

</comment><comment><USER105> I noticed this:

        LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month) - Finding leads to contact
        SalesQL ($29 / month) - Finding email addresses for leads

I don't know who these people are, but it looks like their business involves spamming people.

</comment><comment><USER106> I may be lazy but I had to do math to figure out what you spend. Maybe total it? Just as a litmus test.

<comment><USER107> > we already use 28 different tools regularly totaling $227 / month

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> My two-person startup only uses one SaaS - Twilio, to send Prometheus alarms to my phone, which costs just a few cents at this volume. We use Freenode IRC instead of Slack, but that barely counts. For meetings we set up a Mumble instance, which is the most reliable setup I've tried. All of our infrastructure is on owned hardware, colocated. For taking notes I use text files.

More to the point of what these folks are using: Mixpanel, Fullstory, Hubspot, SalesQL, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are unethical and you should not use them. It's not "growth hacking", it's spam. You are a spammer. Drift is annoying, no one likes your chat widget. Seems to me like these guys are drinking the kool-aid pretty hard.</comment>


Why I Don't Rely on Time Machine - <AUTHOR> https://joeontech.net/why-i-dont-rely-on-time-machine.html <comment><USER2> This is a good time to remind people about proper backups: the 3-2-1 rule.

3 backups. 2 backups (or more) should be on different mediums. 1 (at least) should be offsite (ie. home copy at work or in the cloud)

You need three backups. If we assume that every copy has a chance small but real chance of failure, the chance of all failing at once becomes exponentially less with each copy.

You need at least two different systems (media) for backup to reduce the possibly that one of them appears to be backing things up, but is in fact corrupted. So, two of some system, like Time Machine, Carbonite, Backblaze, Arq, rsync, etc. Ideally, you need to be able to verify your backups. Backups that stores things as files means you can periodically try pulling down some files to make sure they're good. Cloud backups should be in the mix, but consider them last resort for restoration as they are usually pretty difficult to verify everything is good.

You need one offsite to prevent your house burns down and takes your machines and local backups. You can do this with physical media rotation (ie. have two machine backups swapping places with home and work) or have a backup to the cloud.

<comment><USER3> I like to say that if you have 1 copy, you have none. If 2, 1, if 3, you have 2 copies, the absolute minimum. And try to decrease single points of failure, e.g. I use rsync for rsync.net and BackupPC to local disk, and tar to LTO tape after giving up on the opaque and baroque Bacula.

 _You need one offsite to prevent your house burns down and takes your machines and local backups._

I'm a long term fan of tape, from the first time I used UNIX(TM) in 1978 and a DECTape saved me when I was learning the power of the -rf flags to rm.

LTO tape systems for the home are not _insanely_ expensive (then again, this is my minimum system today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483361) ECC is a requirement for me). Street price for the HP LTO-4 internal SAS EH919SB I'm currently using is ~1,300 USD (and it wasn't difficult to get it at around that price in 2011).

Add a LSI 2004 chip based SAS-2 controller such as the "Avago" LSI 9211-4i at $167 from Newegg right now to drive it, and a semi-disposable flash drive to feed it quickly so the tape doesn't "shoe shine" (the tape moves very quickly, if you don't feed it quickly enough it has to stop the tape and backup enough so that it's at speed when it starts forward again and hits the location where it ran out).

I.e. at whatever speed write a 10GiB slice of your backup to the flash drive, then write that all at once to the tape. Considering media costs, if you start from scratch today you'd probably be better off going LTO-5 now that LTO-6 is shipping, the media costs the same as for LTO-4 despite a near doubling of capacity. I've got enough LTO-4 tapes that I'll keep using them until my LTO-4 drive dies, then buy an LTO-5 drive, which per the standard can read two earlier generations, and write 1 earlier, and new LTO-5 media for it.

Current LTO-4 _and_ LTO-5 tapes from HP or Fuji (I wouldn't trust anyone else) go for $22-23, uncompressed capacities are 800 and 1.5 GB respectively.

And then store copies off-site, and copy your most important stuff at least once a day to a site like rsync.net, which saved me when a tornado trashed my apartment in 2011.

<comment><USER4> > Current LTO-4 and LTO-5 tapes [...] go for $22-23, uncompressed capacities > are 800 and 1.5 GB respectively.

I think you meant 1.5TB.

However, why not just use hard disk drives at just over twice that price? You'd get quite a lot of them for the cost of the tape drive.

<comment><USER3> Because tapes are _much_ less fragile than hard disks, and I can stash a bunch of tapes in my safe deposit box and other places. As well as have _many_ copies of my data as I keep monthly full backups for at least a year. And, hmmm, my tapes as I use them are more reliable than my Seagate enterprise disks, and that's with the latter not moving around (i.e. in all my post- mid-2011 tornado hardware, I've had two disk failures and no tape failures).

For the level of data security I want, and the tiny AT&T DSL straw I'm currently forced to use, even with things like Amazon Snowball and ever lower prices on "nearline" cloud storage, _if_ a tape drive lasts long enough, the numbers work better for tape. And compared to the usual enterprise, I don't beat up on tape drives, they're over-engineered for my duty cycle. I also have a desire to be able to make due without monthly charges, which a cloud solution doesn't allow.

And, yeah, TB not GB. The DAT tapes I used previously were in the GB range as I vaguely recall.

<comment><USER5> >Because tapes are much less fragile than hard disks,

In 'single serve server' configurations, such as small businesses, tapes work well because administrative rather than technical staff can replace the tapes daily reducing costs. If the tape is ejected then the user knows it safe to put the next tape in. If there is a failure the software itself can notify a systems administrator. With hard drives a non technical user has no idea if the disk is still mounted and live, leading to corruption issues if it is removed.

<comment><USER3> And even more fragile if still spinning ... yeah, it would never occur to me to have anyone but trusted technical staff physically swapping hard disks around. Whereas I think people, at least us older types who used VHS tapes especially, have an idea for how tough/fragile computer backup tapes are (maybe a little tougher than a VHS tape, but not enough to make a difference in how you handle it).

(We'll ignore for the moment that I never trusted anyone but myself to run the backup system and mount and unmount tapes, with one exception. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Huh. The Time Machine preference pane suggested that I try again later, and > I did, with the same result. Since there was an error creating a folder, I > guessed that the disk might have some errors, so I ran Disk Utility. Sure > enough, there were errors, but Disk Utility couldn't fix them. Neither could > DiskWarrior. Or TechTool Pro. So I was left with no choice but to reformat > the disk and start over from scratch. I still don't know what caused the > problem, but neither Time Machine nor any disk utility I tried could fix > it—and the hardware itself was, as far as I could tell, just fine._

The last sentence makes absolutely no sense. He said Disk Utility found errors, but couldn't fix it, and neither could DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro. So clearly the hardware itself was NOT "just fine".

> _When my backups become suddenly inaccessible for unknown reasons and I'm > offered no solution but starting over, that sort of diminishes my faith in > the software._

In light of that, what should Time Machine have done? Magically fixed a disk 3 specialized disks couldn't fix and continue?

What would ANY other backup software do?

<comment><USER7> For unrecoverable corruption and no hardware failures you don't need bugs in 3 pieces of reading software. You just need one bug in the writing software. Or a momentary hardware issue like a power surge or lost power during a write in such a way that the journaling can't fix

<comment><USER6> That's the thing though: it could be hardware failure (or software failure unrelated to TM, like the power surge/writing glitch that journaling can't fix etc).

He just says there were errors on the disk and that 3 disk utils couldn't fix them. Nothing of that translates to that the error was TM's fault, so it makes no sense blaming it.

If the disk had issues, they would have also affected any other backup software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, I agree with the author but not with the way he presents it;

I think the message should be something like "for important data don't rely on a single backup mechanism".

This has nothing to do with Time Machine specifically, any (backup)software can fail at some point...

</comment><comment><USER9> I've never used Time Machine specifically because I heard early reports of it not saving someone who suffered a total disk failure. I haven't bothered trying it since then. (First impressions are powerful things.)

I've used Carbon Copy Cloner (a glorified rsync + a great UI) for 5+ years and I've survived no less than two total disk failures. The best part is that CCC makes my full-disk backups bootable, so I can literally plug in my USB drive (or my 256GB SD Card--yes, I do full-disk backups to SD cards) and boot my entire laptop directly from the external drive, bypassing my (possibly defunct) internal disk. That allows me to continue working while I wait to get my laptop replaced.

When the new laptop arrives, I install CCC and do the imaging in reverse, copying the external disk to my new Mac. Then I reboot and my laptop is back to the way it was the last time I used it. (This depends on replacing my old laptop with a new one using the same hardware, but that's not difficult if I stay within a few years of the latest hardware.)

<comment><USER10> You replace an entire laptop when you have a tiny drive failure? A 256GB SSD is ~$200 depending on form factor.

<comment><USER11> I'm a Mac user and buy their extended warranty, which covers HW failures for 3 years. There are really no replaceable parts in their new laptops (soldered SSD and RAM!), which is a shame but an OK (not great) compromise considering their weight and other advantages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Surely it's OK for a backup drive to fail occasionally. Your working drive might fail occasionally too but it's extremely unlikely that both of them fail within a day or so of each other. That's the situation that would lead to loss of data.

That's for a pure backup. For a history of previous versions, of course you'd want more reliability if you only have one copy of that history.

<comment><USER13> I think the concern here is that the backup drive could have silently failed at some point in the past, corrupting the backups, and then the primary would fail too, leaving you without any backups whatsoever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had a similar problem. I encrypt the backups. The container partition that holds the encrypted partition had a corruption. TM took forever to backup, and then failed. Deleting the encrypted partition didn't solve the problem. Although this is not related to TM, it had the same effect. I didn't try to restore from this backup, looking back that was a mistake, just to see if that still worked. I had to erase the disk, create a new container partition and a new encrypted partition, and now it works.

I use Crashplan as well, two external disks, one offsite, one of 4TB with three partitions, one for TM, two to sync a backup using Superduper - the paid version that just backs up the difference. I hope this is good enough.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use Time Machine for general system backups, but I also push a few select things like ~/Documents and ~/Pictures offsite with Tarsnap. I want to find a way to integrate Syncthing into my workflow too.

</comment><comment><USER16> I agree with the author. I use Time Machine but don't rely on it.

I also had a disk with errors that OSX could not fix. I ended up having to reformat the drive using a Linux laptop. I have had two USB external drives totally die in ten years so I rotate between three drives.

I have cheap cloud storage via OneDrive so I sometimes create dated encrypted ZIP files and push them to OneDrive - additional backup safety. I do the same with Google Drive.

<comment> cat-dev-null I've had issues on (10.10 and 10.11) where FileVault 2 (FDE) irrevocably corrupts some metadata and it cannot be fixed by Disk Utility. (It "works", but performance is terrible and free space is wrong.) Reinstalling by rsyncing latest backup to recreating volumes fixes it.

Also, the usual popular, secure rsync-like service: tarsnap ( [https://www.tarsnap.com/](https://www.tarsnap.com/) )

        brew install tarsnap

[https://github.com/pieter/Tarsnap-OS-X- GUI](https://github.com/pieter/Tarsnap-OS-X-GUI)

[https://github.com/BTBurke/tarsnap-backup- osx](https://github.com/BTBurke/tarsnap-backup-osx)

Generally: Probably want to validate exclusion of big files for remote backups like VMs, caches, tmp dirs, swap/hibernate files to cut costs, unless they're important / service (&& internet) is cheap (BackBlaze).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm convinced that time machine over a network is a bad idea. Seems convenient, but if there's network flakiness, TM will decide that the backup is bad and force you to create a new one. And the first step in that process is to delete the existing backup.

I had that happen once, when the drive I was backing up was in the process of failing. It got about 5gb into the new backup before it was totally dead. Even a somewhat flakey full backup is better than 5Gb of a 2Tb drive.

<comment><USER18> Deleting the old backup is no longer the first step AFAIK. Yes, I have seen that behaviour in the past. Now, it gets renamed and then deleted once the next backup is completed successfully.

<comment><USER19> Still, it sucks that the solution involves losing your entire backup history.

<comment><USER18> Yes, it's completely rubbish, I agree. I'm pretty sure the people who are working on Time Machine are aware of this problem and I'm pretty sure it stems from the unreliability of mounting disk images over a network. Quite possibly due to hardware issues (e.g. flakey AirPort/Time Capsules) or problems with HFS+ filesystem. At a guess, I'd say they had to do their best to work around these issues. There is no excuse though, especially when it comes to backup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Has the state of ZFS on OS X improved at all? It seems like the ideal filesystem for backups, but last I checked there were major issues with using ZFS-formatted external drives — enough so that the developers working on the project recommended against it.

If it hasn't I might put together a cheap FreeBSD box for the express purpose of networked file storage and backup.

<comment><USER21> It hasn't as far as I'm aware but here's the project page: [https://openzfsonosx.org](https://openzfsonosx.org)

I just did the cheap FreeBSD box thing with FreeNAS and a lenovo server I picked up on Amazon, works great

</comment></comment><comment> oldo-nicho I use Time Machine for full system backups, mainly for convenience if my SSD fails. I also rsync onto two separate drives the two main folders that I'd be devestated to lose: photos and music.

I also always liked the quote of there only being two HDD's in the world: ones that have failed and ones that haven't failed yet.

</comment><comment><USER22> I had exactly that story, disk crashed, time machine not working. Fortunately most of the data on the disk was ok and I had cloud backup as a second backup. For me Time Machine + Arq for online backup makes me feel safe...

</comment><comment><USER23> I've had the same experience, TM backups were suddenly broken several times.

<comment><USER24> Did the backup drive perhaps become unplugged or fail to unmount cleanly?

I've managed to do that to an external hard drive under Linux and had the drive labelled as read-only subsequently.

Just wondering aloud...

<comment><USER23> There is a mounting problem with OS sometimes, too. I don't remember all the occasions, but I am very careful with ejecting the disk (at the moment OS X forces me to shutdown to "eject"). Still, I'd understand if the last backup would be broken that way, but why the whole disk? A backup shouldn't be that brittle.

<comment><USER24> Sounds very similar to what happens if you unplug a mounted USB hard drive from a running Linux without 'ejecting' it first.

My understanding is that the kernel labels the device (recognised through its UUID) as 'read only' thereafter. And it is the _whole_ device (i.e. /dev/sdb or whatever) that is labelled.

Your symptoms just struck me as very similar. I can't offer any way forward alas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I bought a WD MyCloud that claimed to support TimeMachine, and it has _never_ worked properly. Lacie and Apple's own Timemachine products have never given me any grief.

WD - not even once.

</comment><comment><USER26> my solution is an external WD drive that has RAID1. It's not gonna save me from all scenarios of failure, but it does increase my confidence that if my computer dies, i'll be able to get data back. I also rotate out drives and keep them for historical purposes to have something to go back to that might be several months old, but at least have my "stuff".

</comment><comment><USER27> I use time machine w/ 2 drives. One will always fail, but probably not 2 at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER28> Never used TimeMachine.

I use SuperDuper to simply image my entire box to a disk every so often.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like you have a faulty drive.

</comment><comment><USER30> I experience failures like this with Time Machine every couple of months. The only thing to do is wipe the previous backup and start anew. This happens on all my Macs so it's not device specific nor is it related to the underlying backup medium which is working perfectly. If you absolutely cannot take even the smallest chance of losing your data, TM is not a good choice. If you need something that runs for years on end reliably, TM is a terrible choice. It won't do that. If you can deal with the regular FUBAR'd backup and redoing it from scratch (so you have about a 24 hour period with either no backups or two separate backups) it's not a bad system. Sure is better than whatever Windows 7 offers which will never remove old data and will inevitably lead to full disks.

<comment><USER5> Why are the operating system supplied backups so terrible when there are really good examples to build from?

That said, in Windows 8+ the file history (not a full system backup, but a user data backup) seems to work well enough at keeping history and not filling up the backup drive. In general taking one system image from the original install gets you back up and running well enough.</comment></comment>


A Simple Job Board for Tech Jobs - <AUTHOR> A job board for Tech jobs
- No registration required
- Remote / Startup job listing
https://yupjobs.com/
Any feedback appreciated! <comment><USER2> I like the color selection!

To be improved (desktop):

\- Add Spacing (margins and paddings), play with negative space. At the job list.

\- The header image covers up way to space, its height could be way reduced if is only a search bar.

\- Consistency, I see some company logos at the job listings to have the triple width as other logos. It seems more of a UI bug, rather than a design decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you thought about collecting emails in the landing page? Something like "get notified when new jobs are posted".

Also, what's your USP compared to, say, remoteok? Make that clearer to the user, I think :)</comment>


Show HN: TaskrApp - Keep track of your daily tasks - <AUTHOR> http://taskrapp.heroku.com/

<comment><USER2> This seems like a Rails 101 project.

In the few minutes I looked into it, I somehow added the same task twice.

If it is a project, then I would say it is a great start.

Other than that, I don't see much value in it. Sorry to say.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the other hand, what would add to it so that it would have value to your eyes?

<comment><USER3> Allow sharing with someone else, or assigning to someone else. Then build a simple Twilio based SMS notifier when status changes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the ideas!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No nothing without sign-in? You might want to rethink your strategy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, anonymous lists are in the works. Just haven't gotten to it yet :)</comment></comment>


Does anyone want ~23,000 balls for a ball pit? One careful owner. - <AUTHOR> http://cdn.last.fm/rj/balls.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> All good things have to come to an end. After a year, you've done pretty much everything you can with them. This is serious, btw.

</comment><comment><USER2> Aw, c'mon -- what's the story? Did you upgrade to brass ones? No more room? Are they too unprofessional? Are the haunted?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Serious offers considered to email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll take em.</comment>


The death of Classical logic and the (re?)birth of Constructive Mathematics - <AUTHOR> https://forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=26183&start=105 <comment><AUTHOR> The law of identity is the cornerstone of Arostotelian/Classical logic. A = A is True.

In the 2nd half of the 20th century the American mathematician Haskell Curry and logician William Alvin Howard discovered an analogy between logical proofs and working computer programs. This is known as the Curry-Howard correspondence. Mathematical proofs are working computer programs. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspondence)

Therefore, if we can write a working computer program which asserts that A = A is false without producing an error then we have living proof contradicting the founding axiom of Classic/Aristotelian logic.

I hereby reject the law of identity, and give you the law of humanity: A = A is False.

A thing needs not be the same as itself!

Version 1: [https://repl.it/repls/SuperficialShimmeringAnimatronics](https://repl.it/repls/SuperficialShimmeringAnimatronics)

Turing-completeness/equivalence is the bar for "reason": λ-calculus ⇔ λ-calculus ⇔ λ-calculus ⇔ λ-calculus ⇔ λ-calculus ⊇ Type theory ⊇ Mathematics

I will spell this out in English: Turing-completeness guarantees GLOBAL consistency. Type theory allows for the containment of LOCALIZED contradictions thus preventing explosions. This is why intuitionistic logic is vastly superior to any "complete" logic that is NOT Turing-complete. Consistency paralyzes human thought! We are wildly inconsistent!

Being able to contain LOCAL inconsistencies actually allows for the GLOBAL system to become more and more consistent. This is completely and utterly counter-intuitive to most logicians!</comment>


Women's stories from the tech trenches – and how *YOU* can help - <AUTHOR> https://girl-germs.com/?p=2011 <comment><USER2> None of these stories would even make my top ten list of work horrors. Coffee is for closers. No one cares how many arrows were shot into to you, how much blood you've lost, who betrayed you. Want respect? Close.</comment>


EC2 console is not working properly - <AUTHOR>

It is returning

    <html><body><b>Http/1.1 Service Unavailable</b></body> </html>
 Does it also happen to you? I am requesting data about my instances on us-east1. <comment><USER2> The EC2 API itself is experiencing some trouble. So the console as well as the CLI and anything that depends on the API, like boto, is going to be flaky.

<http://status.aws.amazon.com/></comment>


Show HN: AccessURL – share access to websites without giving away your password - <AUTHOR> https://accessurl.com/?ref=hn <comment><USER2> Wouldn't that person be able to change my password with those cookies?

Also, if the browser extension has the key to decrypt the data, anyone can get that key.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you store the session cookies in your server and then serve them out again later? If so, how do you handle HttpOnly cookies?</comment>


PHP Pitfalls - <AUTHOR> http://creativepark.net/1439

<comment><USER2> _Avoid making a database connection when your request doesn't need it. And when your request does need it, you should prefer mysql_pconnect() over mysql_connect() for the simple reason that it potentially shaves some execution time off the connection part._

Actually you should avoid using both mysql_pconnect and mysql_connect, because they're both functions from the deprecated old mysql library of database functions. The preferred way to deal with MySQL databases in 2012 is to use either PDO (<http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdo.php>) or the "improved MySQL" library (<http://php.net/manual/en/book.mysqli.php>), both of which are better architected and give you access to things like prepared statements that the old mysql library does not.

There's really no good reason to be using the old mysql library at this point. Unfortunately, however, there's a vast amount of ancient PHP tutorials, code snippets, and other copypasta floating around out there that uses it, so people who don't know better still pick it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's absolutely true, but I was using the generic MySQL lib as a kind of common-ground illustration. The actual point translates just as well to _any_ other DB library. Establishing a connection to the server and issuing queries takes a lot of time and often times it's done for all requests even if some of them don't need fresh DB data.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, except you're talking about PHP Pitfalls and failed to mention and then fell victim to and perpetuated the #1 Pitfall of PHP: Legacy Cruft.

PHP's libraries are full of Legacy Cruft that any other sane system would have deprecated and eliminated during a major revision transition.

The wholly inefficient and unsafe legacy MySQL lib is one of the primary examples.

Good on you for at least mentioning parameterized statements, but you didn't really follow through. You then go on to confuse the situation by talking about the old API.

Instead, you should have just said "Using this old API is a horrible idea. Don't. Ignore every guide or tutorial that does."

PHP has evolved considerably from its roots. The #1 problem with PHP is that it still lives in its parent's basement and hangs out with the same losers it met in Kindergarten.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't this be seen as a "benefit" - not having to rewrite code after every major release?

<comment><USER5> You still do. They do break things with each major release, sometimes in a big way. (Fatal-by-default errors for some types of "bad" OOP code and not setting the timezone in PHP 5.4, for example). Just not as much as some other languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a pitfall I know from briefly trying to improve PHP, and having developed in it:

The _syntax definition_ is used for some types of basic _type-checking_.

I'm completely serious.

Because of this, if you try to do a combination of property/array/etc. accesses that the grammar designers didn't envision, you'll get a very cryptic error. For example, this (which runs an anonymous function dereferenced from an array dereferencing from a static member of a class):

      self::$views[$path]();

Doesn't work. It assumes that the result of self::$views[$path] is a string, and then complains there is no function with that name. (Yes, you can execute strings with names of functions, as if they were that function...) But this:

      $x = self::$views[$path];
      $x();

Does work.

Please, don't use PHP. It's horrible.

<comment><USER6> Because all other languages are without problems.

<comment><USER5> PHP has more than its fair share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Life is too short to read another half-hearted defense of a terrible language. This author lost me when he started out by only acknowledging the critiques of PHP that he could handwave away. If he actually had a coherent response to "Fractal Of Bad Design," that would be something worth reading on its own.

To the author: doesn't the fact that you have to point out all of these things to avoid say something to you about core issues with the language?

<comment><USER6> Only 1 paragraph deals with PHP's reputation, the rest is geared towards those who actually want to learn PHP and/or improve their skills.

To you: doesn't the fact that you myopically dismissed the entire article due to a single paragraph say something about you? Why are you looking for a flamewar where one doesn't exist?

I get it -- you don't like PHP. That's your prerogative, and you're of course entitled to it, but this article isn't just another skirmishing ground for the flamewar that is "PHP SUCKS" vs. "NO IT DOESN'T". Rather, it looks to me to be more of a braindump from a PHP dev looking to enlighten new PHP devs with what he's learned.

Is that so patently offensive to you that you have to attempt and interject the played-out flamewar that is now a decade old?

<comment><USER8> >Only 1 paragraph deals with PHP's reputation, the rest is geared towards those who actually want to learn PHP and/or improve their skills.

Do we really expect the language elitists to actually read articles now? Just say something bad about PHP here and you'll get 20 instant upvotes. We're getting as bad as reddit here.

As someone who uses PHP, I found this article very enlightening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _You don't even need serverside debuggers or fancy instrumentation to achieve this. The function microtime() returns a timestamp in microseconds. This makes it easy for you to check the passage of time at key points during your application's execution path._

Yes, that's just as good as a real profiler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously I'm not saying that, but it's a reasonably good method of determining how certain parts of your code perform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For debugging, profiling and optimizing Xdebug is highly recommend: <http://xdebug.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I appended that link to the profiling section.

I noticed there is some discontent with my use of the microtime() method. It's not intended to replace a serious debugger/profiler, but it is something that's available in any PHP environment for quick performance checks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very long, and I don't think the prose style fits the information you're trying to deliver.

It's a pretty good attempt, though. I would have liked to see more links for more information, and you don't mention packagist at all.

Either way, a good start. Knowing about these ideas, and knowing why to care about them, is the first step to becoming a better programmer, regardless of the language.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a nice way of saying my writing style sucks, but it's still a welcome (and probably appropriate) critique. I'm open to suggestions on improvements.

It's true that I didn't include a lot of links to more advanced frameworks and libraries, mainly because I wanted to limit the scope of the article to the basics of the PHP runtime. I also think that in order to avoid mistakes people should think more about those basics, even when they happen inside convenient library methods.

If you think there are links to essentials that should be in there, you're welcome to contribute them in the comments.

<comment><USER12> I liked your writing style, it actually kept me engaged until the end. I guess it also helped that I had an interest since I'll be supporting php applications for the first time in 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I decided to stop reading after the phrase " The blame lies solely with the developers using it".

<comment><USER14> He makes some useful observations and good points after that.

But most of what he says is on my "List of Reasons to Never Use PHP Ever Again."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> HA - pitfalls include needlessly using low level functionality when any number of hundreds of higher level (to varying degrees) frameworks and libraries that would abstract away most of these problems, and easily installed/found with composer/packagist. Why most PHP'ers ever need to write a mysql(i)_* function is beyond me. There are plenty of perfectly good wheels out there and you're not re-inventing a better on.

<comment><USER16> That's assuming that the users have the server access to install the packages or an up-to-date PHP interpreter. A lot of the appeal of PHP is that it is available on cheap shared hosting, which until recently would not be guaranteed to have PDO, mysqli and friends installed. If you have access to a VPS of some sort, you can easily install such things, but in that case you can also use a different language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> PHP Pitfalls: PHP :D

</comment><comment><USER18> Profiling with microtime? What's wrong with XHProf?</comment>


PhoneHome: Remote Logging for Android - <AUTHOR> http://mattspitz.me/post/69143620992/phonehome-remote-logging-for-android

<comment><USER2> Looks like a good candidate for a feature that should be opt-in, depending on how interesting the data you're logging is.

Also, it might be interesting to increase the logging verbosity to the remote service for users who've opted in and are experiencing problems.

I wasn't aware reading from the log now required root, but I'm guessing it's still a best practice to avoid logging sensitive data and/or copious amounts to the system log in production applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points all around.

PhoneHome home doesn't send any data that your application couldn't otherwise expose. It just provides an easier way to do it for the developer.

Regarding sensitive data, Facebook has had issues leaking user tokens in logs, and I imagine they're not alone. The typical way to handle this is to put all the sensitive information (if you have to log it at all) at a certain level and then use ProGuard to strip the calls out of the bytecode when making a production build, but between Android and remote libraries, I found that this involves a lot of whack-a-mole to get a config file that works.

But, if you've got everything through a layer of indirection (using PhoneHome), it's easy enough just to switch on the BuildConfig.DEBUG to decide whether to print to the system log.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "PhoneHome retrieves Hoot's logs from mischievous devices without asking anything from the user."

Sentry anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, you could route it through Sentry or whatever other logging-type backend you'd like, but the Android library takes care of the indirection and batching for you.

<comment><USER3> Sentry+ACRA is my recipe :)</comment></comment></comment>