The Greatest Customer Service Story Ever Told, Starring Morton's Steakhouse - <AUTHOR> http://shankman.com/the-best-customer-service-story-ever-told-starring-mortons-steakhouse/ <comment><USER2> While I don't bemoan this man his steak, this kind of things increasingly bothers me.

On the internet I sometimes get the impression that "everyone" has cute things like this happen to them. When you dig, it often turns out, like this, the person is big in PR or some related field.

It can get easy to forget that 99(.99?)% of the people regularly on the internet aren't getting free stuff, lighting up twitter, hitting the front page of reddit, etc.

From the article:

"I don't think it's about my follower numbers. I think it's about Morton's knowing I'm a good customer, who frequents their establishments regularly. "

I am 100% convinced this is not true. I'm sure if I (with 15 twitter followers) had posted something similar there would be no chance of something similar happening.

<comment><USER3> I think part of it comes for asking for stuff. I've had a few experiences like this.

I was in London Heathrow when the plane crashed on the runway a few years ago - I was literally on the very next BA flight to I think the Czech Republic that was supposed to take off when we get notified that it's going to be a while, and then that things are canceled... nobody knew what was going until we heard the plane crashed, and then we wondering if it was terrorism, and the whole airport was really a mess.

I was really bummed out at that point. It's the middle of winter, and I really really wanted to get the fuck out of London. I can't say why exactly, but like, y'know when you're ready to leave a place and you get to the airport and it's like "ahh, I'm leaving"? Well, I had that feeling, then a fucking plane crashed.

After waiting in these gigantic lines for a really long time (everyone now trying to change tickets), I got to the ticket counter and the rep there was so, so cool. He said nothing could be done, and I could just head into the city.

And I said, "Man, I'm just overwhelmed with shitty foggy London weather. Can you put me on the next plane to _anywhere_ that takes off, and route me somehow? I know this is a ridiculous request, I don't care about hotel or accommodation or plans or anything, can you just put me on the next plane heading eastwards?"

And - he did just that. It wasn't even on their same alliance, he went through some complicated procedure of actually selling my ticket to another airline. My memory is kind of failing me here but I think I wound up in Germany for the night, saw a cathedral in the morning, and then was routed on to Eastern Europe.

The guy went way above and beyond the call of duty in the middle of chaos just because I was obviously bummed out. In retrospect, it was probably even uncool of me to ask for with all of the chaos happening around, but I was just really fed up with London at that point and wanted to get out. And the guy treated me really really well, with no expectation of any favorable review online or anything like that.

So - ask for stuff if you want stuff, and yeah there's some decent people in the world that'll try to accommodate you. Also, when you get a ridiculous request, stop and consider if maybe you can do some variation of it because people remember that stuff forever.

<comment><USER4> This might be more common than you suspect. I was en route to Tokyo from Toronto stopping in Detroit when bad weather meant I missed the flight from Detroit. The Delta staff said I'd have to stay in Detroit, I asked to go somewhere else and they happily sent me on the next flight to Seattle where I could depart for Tokyo the next afternoon. I assume when a lot of flights are cancelled it's not really a problem to send people on under booked flights and get those people out of the way and routed through a less congested location.

<comment><USER5> I had the same experience during a snowstorm in Seattle. My flight was cancelled, worse weather was moving in, and I just wanted to get to California for a family holiday.

I got a ticket to San Jose---from Portland. Because I was willing to change my airport and take some extra hassle myself, the agent was willing and able to help out. Ask for something nicely, be flexible on how it happens, and people can do good things for you. (Meanwhile, the lady who was screaming to get the exact flight she'd bought in the first place was turned down, because there wasn't a flight like the one she bought available and she wouldn't flex at all.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I respectfully counter this 'greatest' customer service story with the story of Katie the Prefect:

"A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about our plans to take our daughters -- particularly our nine-year-old Elizabeth -- to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios in Orlando. I worried, I suppose, that nothing surprising and magical would happen. Well, as it turned out, something surprising and magical did happen."

<http://joeposnanski.blogspot.com/2011/01/katie-prefect.html>

<comment><USER7> That is a fantastic read, thanks for sharing. I'd rank that far above any PR stunt or clever social marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "I was catching a 7am flight out of Newark to Tampa, Florida, for a lunch meeting in Clearwater, then heading back to Newark on a 5pm flight, getting me in around 8:10pm, and with any luck, to my apartment by 9 or so. We all have days like that, they happen from time to time."

I don't have days like that, and neither should anyone else. With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene. The fact that an expensive steakhouse decided to pull a cheap PR stunt by delivering a free steak to the airport to some well-known Big Shot is less obviously wasteful, but still a repellent manifestation of gratuitous luxury.

People within the cocoon of the upper percentiles of wealth often have a sense of how they are perceived by others, and usually take some care to disguise their self-satisfaction. It is always educational to get a glimpse into the mental world of extreme privilege.

<comment><USER9> The difference of quality between meeting face to face and through a webcam is so high that it's sometimes worth taking a plane just for one lunch.

For example, I like to shake the hand of people I do business with.

Additionally, I think it's generally better to refrain from commenting on how people spend their time and money, because you certainly don't want them to reciprocate.

<comment><USER10> It's not a waste of resources because there is no upside. It's a waste of resource because you limit the effectiveness of anyone who travels as a significant portion of their job. A single lunch meeting courtship between executives can easily add up to well over 100,000$ for that single handshake. So, it's not a question of shaky webcam or face to face because the price gap quickly covers maintaining a high-end video conferencing room with support staff with the occasional corporate retreat / week in Tahiti.

<comment><USER11> I think talking about dollar amounts is a bit silly. What's the maximum acceptable dollar value for a lunch meeting, per person? $100? $200? $500?

Further, what if those who pay for the lunch meetings feel that it was worth any price? How are you going to convince them they are wasting their money if a webcam chat wouldn't actually be a replacement in their eyes, and if they don't care about the dollar amount spent on lunch?

<comment><USER10> Let's suppose your talking about an executive making 20 million a year who spends 2 days traveling for that lunch. 20,000,000 * 2 / 365 = 109,589$. Granted he can get some stuff done while traveling, but it's also far less than what he could do in the office and it will ofen take more than 2 days once you include jetlag etc. I have no problem saying that handshake could be worth 10k, but once the numbers start growing you start talking about someone's full time salary for a year and I have trouble thinking that handshake is of that magnitude.

<comment><USER12> If it's the handshake that clinches a $100MM contract/acquisition/whatever, you'd probably leap at the chance, no?

<comment><USER10> No, I am perfectly happy avoiding any company that requires face time to operate. Edit: I am not saying this just to be pithy; such negotiations have a huge upfront cost which requires a specific type of business structure to deal with and I have no interest in participating in those structures. (And yes I do have significant experience in this area, and yes I did decide to make less money to avoid such things.)

PS: Ever wonder why Berkshire Hathaway is not located in NY City even though it's managing so many subsidiaries? Could it be even with a crappy website they better understand how technology has changed the business landscape?

<comment><USER13> Berkshire Hathaway also owns NetJets which allow its executives to fly private jets around the country in a way that best meets their tight schedules. You better believe that Buffet flies all over for meetings.

<comment><USER14> Berkshire owns its own jet; Buffet has written about how much he loves the thing and even wants to be buried in it.

(Edit: I forgot - he named it "The Indefensible".)

<comment><USER13> Even better. Though I know he still uses NetJets quite a bit--my dad worked with someone who now works for NetJets and flies with the Buffets fairly frequently. She says despite the cash and jets they're quite down to Earth-- down to cabs and not black cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> These sort of "social media success" stories need to stop.

As many here have pointed out, this was a marketing/PR stunt, because they know exactly who Peter Shankman is and what he would do in response. It's a no brainer from Morton's perspective to give him a free steak in this case.

But is this a "social media success" story in customer service? No. They gave a famous person a freebie. For free positive PR.

If you follow Peter in the slightest way, you know he has this happen to him all the time.

</comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr one of the most famous people in the PR industry with over 100k Twitter followers gets a free steak after he jokingly asks for one on Twitter.

Still, well played by Morton's and well-earned following I believe.

<comment><USER17> This is absolutely NOT about customer service and it does a disservice to great customer service to be presented as such. This is a fantastic PR & marketing stunt. Well played.

I'm sure Morton's has great customer service, but this is not an example of it.

<comment><USER17> By the way, it should be very clear to people that smart companies are very carefully _using_ twitter for PR stunts like this all the time.

One of my own examples: I have Comcast cable for my Internet connection. A few weeks ago the connection started going up/down/up/down every few minutes. I tweeted

        Comcast is like a yoyo this morning. Up-down-up-down-up-down. Mostly down though. /cc:@comcastcares

I immediately got two responses from Comcast reps (e.g. @comcastbill) and they sent me a new modem Fedex.

I have ~6500 followers. I do not believe I would have gotten this treatment if I had 20 followers.

For what it's worth, I plan on completely taking advantage of this phenomenon for my own benefit :-).

<comment><USER18> Response from most businesses on Twitter is great. I have 668 followers and get lots of help. UPS, Mediacom, McDonald's, Delta, Verizon, EVGA, and more. Even the city I live it is active on Twitter. When I complained about an issue with mobile bus schedules on the city's website, they forwarded my feedback on to the bus system. The number of followers doesn't matter if the company is committed to getting feedback on Twitter.

My only thought is that this type of response doesn't scale well at the top end. Monitoring (and responding) to a Twitter search for a term like Google or Netflix would take a ton of people.

<comment><USER4> The monitoring is automated. There are a lot of suppliers of this type of software and it's not very hard to write it yourself. I recommend playing with YQL + Twitter search API + cron.

<comment><USER18> Right, getting a list of the tweets is easy. Filtering them and deciding which require action and then acting on the information becomes much harder.

<comment><USER4> One thing you can do is parse the tweets for mentions of certain words. In any event, you can alert people to the tweets rather than having them sit there. Not sure how large corporations handle it process-wise.

<comment><USER6> Check out the open source ThinkUp from ExpertLabs:

Live demo:

[http://expertlabs.aaas.org/thinkup01/index.php?u=whitehouse&...](http://expertlabs.aaas.org/thinkup01/index.php?u=whitehouse&n=twitter)

<http://thinkupapp.com/>

"ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures your posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application"

<comment><USER18> That's pretty sweet for being FOSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think those pointing to his follower count are missing the point. Morton's has established what sounds like a pretty great CRM for their customers. I'd be really interested to know how they're set up.

We live in an age where everyone is a media creator. Instead of spending money on mass advertising campaigns (spray 'n pray) with little lasting value, this type of customer service is like launching smart bombs that target actual customers and the people around them. This story & pictures is now in the internet -- it will be around forever. Is that worth the drive from Hackensack? I bet it is.

I think the question we should be asking ourselves is how can we be this awesome for our customers every day?

<comment><USER20> Yeah, the CRM was a very interesting side note for me. I wish more companies actually used a CRM and could "personalize" my experience for me, it doesn't even need to be anything big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Neat story...but he's mixing up the customer service department with the marketing department.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great story! This happened to a coworker of mine who was traveling KLM. His flight was slightly delayed and mentioned that and that he was flying KLM. He was met in Amsterdam at the gate with a book about the Tour de France (they had checked his profile to see he was a sports fanatic), and surprised him. Then again. KLM has a good social media team too, and they do several stunts like that a day sometimes. They have a website <http://surprise.klm.com/> that lists al their surprises.

</comment><comment><USER23> Pretty disappointed by the assessment by the HN crowd.

I find it interesting how strong cynicism has crept into our social ideology. It's almost like a social darwinian requirement nowadays. You can't be happy about an interesting situation because it is, at some level, linked to some sort of marketing directed towards you. At least that's the perception, thanks to the Internet.

And thus, you are angry. Rawr. Upset that _you_ are the victim of some kind of marketing stunt. Travesty!

So an interesting and unique deed--whether the person was truly deserving because of some arbitrary, subjective parameters placed on the recipient--is thrown the curb because the cynical perception is since it's talked about, it's marketing, and therefore it needs to be discredited.

Bravo, HN community. Bravo! But I don't blame you. I just blame the social media tools on the Internet that half of us are building.

</comment><comment><USER15> Careful.

Peter Shankman might direct message you on Twitter (and not follow you so you can't direct message him back) and say he expects more from you.

Like he did to me an hour ago.

Peter Shankman: "would have expected more logic from you on your hackernews comment... Morton's can put a dollar amount on this, yes. It's business."

Peter Shankman: "Read the comments on their website. They do this all the time for non-famous people. As does KLM. And Virgin. It's good biz."

Peter Shankman: "An entrepreneur should know that. :)"

<comment><USER24> Knowing Peter wrote the book that describes this situation[1] and then denying that it's happening makes me seriously question whether this is Morton's own doing (great PR) or something that was discussed beforehand. Regardless, this is clearly just PR and in no way reflects customer service. Not to say Morton's doesn't have great customer service--it appears they do based on their high satisfaction rates--but the event was not causal.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Outrageous-Stunts-Work-Company- Needs/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Outrageous-Stunts-Work-Company- Needs/dp/047004392X)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think these stories about Domino's drivers saving lives beat Morton's delivering a free steak to a lucrative customer. (Which I agree every company should do occasionally for their own best interests.):

Old lady doesn't place her regular order, driver takes the initiative to drive over and check on her. Sure enough, she's fallen and she can't get up: [http://consumerist.com/2011/02/dominos-delivery-driver- saves...](http://consumerist.com/2011/02/dominos-delivery-driver-saves-life- of-regular-customer.html)

Psycho ex threatens to stab customer with the door open as the driver arrives, he sneaks away and calls the cops: <http://www.uhpinions.com/dominos-pizza/>

</comment><comment><USER26> That's not customer service, it's advertisement. There's a difference. When you do something to get a mention from a guy with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers/blog readers it's marketing. If they did that for me it'd be customer service.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great PR. You know who else would have done this, and you wouldn't have bothered to even tweet or write a blog post about it? Your mother.

Sounds like a best seller in the making to me, "Everything I learned about PR I learned from my mom."

</comment><comment><USER28> The brilliant part of the logistics is that Morton's really had no risk here, other than the cost of the food itself and some time. If they didn't find him, missed his flight, etc, no biggie - they just go home, forget it, and go about their business.

That is the real lesson here - that it is OK to try to pull marketing stunts, especially if there is no real downside to your company in the case of failure.

<comment><USER29> Maybe the real lesson is to look for lost-looking people in tuxedos carrying Morton's bags with steaks they need to get rid of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The only part of the story I found rather oft-putting was the fact that he quickly dismissed the fact that Morton's did this because they knew it would be broadcast all over the interwebs.

The most likely explanation is that Morton's does what a lot of companies do: know exactly who their most important customers are. He just happens to be one of them.

As an aside, I find it funny how a guy that is too health conscious for fast food orders a 24oz steak. I love my steaks but that's a little much.

+1 for Morton's for sure, but -1 for the media expert not being able to realize when he's being manipulated.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow. A shame... So let's see... According to Hacker news... I'm:

1) Super Rich. (Not by a long shot.)

2) Horrible because I travel for a business lunch. Sorry, but in the real world, business is much more fruitful when done over a handshake, and not a pixelated image.

3) A celebrity. If that's the case, can you inform my cat? I just cleaned up his puke from my couch. Don't celebrities have "people" do to that?

4) This was a set-up. Really? I'd risk 15 years building a professional career for one stunt? Thanks for playing, but no.

Sad. I expected more out of y'all. But hey, it's just the Internet, right?

<comment><USER32> I sincerely hope that your account is a fake, and is not managed by the actual Peter Shankman.

It would be disappointing if the real Shankman was so willing to paint the entire HN community with a ridiculously broad brush, when he's a professional and should know better.

<comment><USER31> Not really sure what's pissing you off, "hopeuarefake," I simply countered several of the inaccurate assumptions that have been made here. Why is that such a problem for you?

<comment><USER32> You painted everyone here with the same broad brush, when opinions were not unanimous. Hell, most people don't even bother to comment.

Please post to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter if this is really you.

Hard to believe it's real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> SF Food critic Michael Bauer says

"Even with items removed, the check totaled $159.05; otherwise, it would have been more than $200 for two cocktails and practically inedible food."

[http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-09-09/entertainment/23994311...](http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-09-09/entertainment/23994311_1_chicken- cutlets-morton-ruth-s-chris)

</comment><comment><USER34> I think it is a fantastic story, but is pretty obvious that they did it because he have a significant number of followers and not just because he is a regular costumer. And there is nothing wrong with it, they are just maximizing their gains with this action.

</comment><comment><USER35> His evidence that he was treated as any other customer is that ... a robot retweets mentions of their restaurant, prepended by "Cheers!"?

He gets a steak. I get a retweet. Yeah, boy, Morton's treats all their customers the same.

</comment><comment><USER36> To the people who say that it's about follower count after all,

Uh, think about that. Pick a different celebrity, like @neilhimself has 10 times the followers, and ask what would happen if he posted something like that. I will tell you: nothing. You know why? Because Morton's would have NO IDEA what he likes to order because he ISN'T a frequent customer. And do you really think they'd send a steak without anything to go with it?

That's why it's a customer service story.

</comment><comment><USER37> As a frenchman, I definitively appreciate the customer service quality in the US. We need more Morton's over there :)

</comment><comment><USER38> "I don't think it's about my follower numbers. I think it's about Morton's knowing I'm a good customer, who frequents their establishments regularly. "

Of course it makes no economic sense for Morton's to do this simply because he frequents Mortons establishments regularly.

The interesting part is that he believes that there are people who would believe this. But he's smart enough to think down to that level.

His parent's must not have been critical. People raised by critical parents (who call them on everything they say) wouldn't think anyone would believe this.

Being able to think like this is actually very helpful many times in coming up with schemes to make money.

</comment><comment><USER39> This isn't a customer service story. This is a PR story. If it isn't something they do for all customers in a similar situation, then it's not customer service, it's a stunt.

</comment><comment><USER40> Okay, so this story gives me a new startup idea. Twitter2Deliver

You sign up for the service, associating your twitter account to a real live person, phone, address and payment details.

Later, you're hungry, so you tweet "@twitter2deliver carls jr. large #6, criss-cut fries, coke."

Or "@twitter2deliver Big Apple country fried steak, baked potato, green beans"

A little later, and a delivery guy knocks on your door, food in hand.

Technically twitter2deliver is a concierge service, so it can incorporate more than food delivery.

</comment><comment><USER41> Looks like a pretty easy to spot "hidden" advertisement to me. Don't believe anything you read on the internet unless you can and will verify it. Same applies to newspapers, but I guess the internet being a more dynamic place it is a lot tougher to sort out truth from lies so you best be safe not believing _anything_ out there unless, as I said, you verify it.

</comment><comment><USER42> As Author said this a good stunt because author had many followers. I do not see how this stunt can reflect on the general customer service of the company.

I have worked in situations in where management have tried to please customers by granting them their wish list. This has almost resulted in customer treating that particular favor as his born right.

<comment><USER43> It's gotten attention plenty of places other than amongst his Twitter followers, so they'd benefit from it even if he had fewer followers as long as it'd get reposted. It seems more important that he's someone they know would be vocal about it. I'd almost think it'd have done _better_ if he had fewer followers, in that people would be less skeptical of it being just because of his follower count.

You're right you can't do this for everyone, though, but giving customers "treats" now and again would seem to do wonders. I think the key is that it needs to be a surprise _or_ it needs to be commensurate to what they spend for regular customers.

If it's commensurate to what they spend you need to budget and plan for it, and quite possibly should if you're aiming for a high end market, but it may be worthwhile to make some of the perks for regular customers "surprises" that makes it seem like you go above and beyond.

An up-market brand might have the margins to set aside say 10% for "stunts" that makes the customer fanatical about the brand. I don't know Morton's, but an upscale steak house can easily land you with bills in the $150-$200 range for a dinner - it doesn't take many dinners at that cost level before the customer has "paid" for a free steak and a 20 mile drive to an airport, and even _if_ such a customer doesn't plaster it all over the internet, you can bet that if my favorite steak house had shown up at SFO with a steak on one the occasions I had to do regular business travel to California, everyone I met would hear about it for a long time. I'd repay a $200 cost or more with extra business for them in a few months at most, probably already on that trip just because it'd be an awesome story to have (as long as they keep their surprises fresh and not too frequent).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> In my experience, Ruth's Chris > Morton's. Assuming neither gives me the royal treatment (and they never do).

<comment><USER45> And the granddaddy of them all:

<http://www.peterluger.com/>

Peter Luger eats all other steakhouses for breakfast, and I say that as someone who drools uncontrollably when I think about going to either Mortons or Ruth's Chris.

<comment><USER46> Two large chain steakhouses are hardly the ones to beat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> tl;dr - if you have 107522 followers on Twitter, you _may_ get a restaurant deliver a free steak to the airport if you ask. Obviously in return for free PR. And, no, it has nothing to do with the customer service.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've never heard of Morton's, but I will look for it now. They have gained one potential customer at very little cost. I call that a job well done for their PR and Marketing folks.

</comment><comment><USER49> Does he get the steak without his name and 100,000 followers?

</comment><comment><USER50> > Do you know anyone anymore who doesn't have a camera in their phone, or > anyone who doesn't have a Facebook or Twitter account?

I kept thinking "ME, ME, ME" as I read that.

</comment><comment><USER51> could it be that his secretary or driver arranged such? if morton's did that for everyone, that would seem like a loss considering there's no real contract for the transaction, too many things could go wrong. i think this customer must be a top spender so received special attention, don't expect to have this service if you're a regular blow.

</comment><comment><USER52> TIL: There is such a thing as a take-away steak ... and that eating hour-old steak out of a plastic box can be "amazing".

<comment><USER43> If it's kept at the right temperature, steak will usually only get better tasting for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> a 24 ounce steak?? Only in the US of A :)

That's literally 3 times heavier than a large steak in the UK.

<comment><USER54> Better still, it actually tastes like steak. Unless you go to the US of A (or at least as far from England as you can get), you might never find out what that tastes like. You might even want to eat 3 times as much of it!

Sorry for the outburst, but I'm going nuts in the land of British Beef. My last good steak was over a year ago, and I'm not going to make it back to the 'states until xmas.

      Day One: Mama's Mexican Kitchen.
      Day Two: Proper 16oz New York Steak from a proper butcher

<comment><USER55> If you're having trouble finding good steak, try somewhere other than McDonalds ...

<comment><USER54> It's not the restaurant, it's the beef.

I actually have a friend who's a beef farmer over here, and we've talked about this at length. There's no UK equivalent of the USDA grades of meat, and thus no incentive to selectively breed cows for flavor and quality.

You can go to a specialty butcher over here and get the absolute best steak they have, and it still won't be as tasty as the one you'll find on sale at any grocery store in the US.

<comment><USER53> Hang on, in defence of UK beef: you can buy incredible beef here, you just got to know where to buy it (probably not tescos).

I actually thought all US beef was pumped full of growth hormones and other nasties? Your cows are about 50% bigger than ours :)

<comment><USER56> I thought the difference was corn-fed vs grass-fed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This sounds more like a marketing stunt than a customer service story.

</comment><comment><USER58> So how did they find him in the airport? And what do they use for CRM?

</comment><comment><USER59> Whether it's due to Internet fame or not, this concept of customer service shifting from private emails and phone calls into a publicly visible space is very interesting. Maybe the Internet Pitchfork Society (e.g. Reddit) will lead to whipping notoriously awful customer service into shape. Or maybe it will be unfair gang-annihilation of small businesses, like victims of unfair Yelp reviews claim.

</comment><comment><USER60> That's not customer service. It's viral marketing.</comment>


Show HN: EverActiv, an ML personal trainer for iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://appstore.com/everactiv <comment><AUTHOR> For those interested in the engineering behind it, there's a few elements of this app that might be of interest.

1\. Workout builder: there's no stored workouts. Given a bunch of inputs: # of minutes, muscles to target, goals, the builder generates a workout for the user. The goal is to constantly get new workouts.

2\. Workout calibrator: workout builder gives a workout that consists of exercises, sets, and reps. Workout calibrator assigns weight to all the sets, based on the user's past performance for that exercise and other strongly correlated exercises. If it isn't confident enough (not sufficiently high correlation coefficient for any past exercises) it leaves it blank for the user to fill in.

3\. Set calibrator: the set calibrator is for calibrating a single set while in a workout. If it tells the user do 100lbs x 8 reps, and the user does 12 reps, it will adjust all subsequent exercises of that type to a more appropriate weight for 8 reps. There's no ML here, it's just a formula (8 rep weight = .6 * 12 rep weight, for example), but it works pretty well. This has the nice effect that if you don't know how much weight you can lift for x reps, just grab any weight, do what you can, tell the app how much you did, and it'll be accurately calibrated in 2-3 sets.

<comment><USER2> A slightly different approach: I was doing the hacker's diet exercise ladder ([https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html)), which is supposed to be completed in 10-15 mins; if you can't complete it in that time, move down a rung. But keeping track of the numbers at each level got annoying, and it was unclear if you were on track to complete things fast enough.

So, I wrote code to take those lists and a number of beats for each exercise, with a gap between to change position, take the completion time and calculate a bpm to make this fit. I then processed the output using the built in voices on the mac to read instructions in the gaps, count down reps and so on, and set up the metronome, so I never had to look at the screen. Now I could just type a command to kick off the whole thing.

I ended up not using it so much, I got sidetracked into the yak shave of making it play generative music in time with the plan, and just went running more.

One I did use more was a simple timer for cycling on the turbo, for eg watching movies instead of using a planned session like The Sufferfest. All this did was, you pick how long to ride, and then at decreasing random intervals it would read out the remaining time, then add a robot-based insult for encouragement (movie quotes and suchlike)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not available in my App Store (Norwegian). Why not make it international?

</comment><comment><USER4> Just FYI, on my iPhone 6S the date selector for scheduling your introductory workout is dark grey over a grey background....almost impossible to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, will fix. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool! Could you elaborate on the ways ML is used within the app? So far I gather it learns the optimal weight to be used for repetitions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

The main ML component is to guess how much weight you should lift for an exercise you've never logged before. To accomplish this, I periodically ingest all the exercise data offline, and for all possible pairs of exercises, see which ones are most strongly correlated. The client app downloads the latest data before every workout, and uses it to calibrate exercises if the user hasn't performed them before. If the user has logged the exercise before, guessing the optimal weight is pretty trivial, but if it's been a while, which can happen because every workout is somewhat randomized, it will override and make a prediction based on more recent exercises.

There's also some learning of progress rates, it'll slow down or speed up the rate of increasing weights based on the user's performance.

<comment><USER6> Im also just curious what technologies you are using, specifically for the ML. Is there a particular ML technique that works well for this use case?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just python. I'm by no means an ML expert, this was my first foray into it. I used some basic stats to identify correlated exercises, and then simple linear regression to fit the data to a line. In my mind, linear regression is sufficient for such a simple ML problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to try it, but it says that the app is not available on the German store. Is there a specific reason why you limited it to (as I suppose) the US store?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just an oversight. I'll add it to the German store. There's no metric option though!

<comment><USER7> Oh ok, well I may still give it a try.

<comment><AUTHOR> Available in all territories now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent onboarding, it's not common to see it well done.

By the way, the Scheduler widget's text is black, which doesn't appear well on the dark background.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks neat, but it won't run on my Nexus 6P. Any plans for an Android version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not enough traction to justify two apps currently. Maybe down the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> All weights are in lbs. Please provide an option for kg as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> What's the best way to provide feedback?

<comment><AUTHOR> PM or email kareem [at] everactivapp [dot] com</comment></comment>


Twitter Digest - read Twitter updates in a more manageable fashion - <AUTHOR> http://persistent.info/twitter-digest/

<comment><AUTHOR> The creator's blog post on it: <http://blog.persistent.info/2007/08/twitter- digest.html></comment>


Theorem of the Week - <AUTHOR> http://theoremoftheweek.wordpress.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> A blog written by a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, which every week (well ... notionally every week) posts an accessible description of an interesting mathematical theorem, with (typically) a sketch of the proof.

It's mostly at a level that shouldn't be too scary for the typical HNer, though the most recent entry (on Szemeredi's theorem) is somewhat scarier than average.</comment>


Show HN: streamplayer.js - <AUTHOR> http://player.streamomatic.com/ Made a pretty simple Flash+HTML5 video player controlled by streamplayer.js <comment><USER2> No video @ Chrome 21.0.1180.89 OSX Mountain Lion

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm testing Chrome (Same build on the same OS) and I see video. Must be an issue with the flash detection. I'll dig deeper... thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an Angel List for acquisitions? - <AUTHOR>

Or put another way, is there an efficient way to get your startup onto the market for acquisition.
Some background. We've built a 3d browser-game service that is monetizing well and has great new tech. We have about 0.5M users so far. Unfortunately our cash window is running low and want to reach out to acquirers in addition to investors, which is going slow. I'd guess our value around few million dollars as a technology/service play for web/game companies.
Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> Sure, try pe-nexus.com. Over 600 Private Equity Groups and Strategic Corporate Acquirers are actively sourcing acquisition targets on pe-nexus. Also, over 600 M&A advisors and investment banks are marketing opportunities.

Registration process is very simple and upon approval you can create a sell- side deal profile for your business and start marketing it and/or connect with an experienced M&A advisor or investment bank and let them run the show on your behalf.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to email me.

Regards, Igor Royzis Co-founder, CTO PE-Nexus firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Ask HN: Can it become a startup or be sold? - <AUTHOR>

I work for a digital agency that build sites and online campaigns. The main product there is a CMS, it is done in Flex and PHP. This app works but has some problems and they really want to move forward and leave Flex behind.
Thinking about that and how it is done actually, i build a new app using standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript) at home and free hours. The content and layout of the pages is edited in place, i really like the results and have some cool ideas for it.
Now i'v been thinking what should i do, i thought about 1) Try to sell then this app; 2) Make a startup from it; 3) Give it to then for some kind of better promotion because they offered one last friday if i become maintainer of the current app.
So what is the right or best thing to do? Some advices? <comment><USER2> Do you want a job or do you want to create jobs?

Answer that question and you have the answer to yours.</comment>


WebGL Statistics and the state of WebGL/HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://codeflow.org/entries/2012/apr/25/webgl-statistics-and-the-state-of-webgl-html5/

<comment><USER2> The stats page pyalot2 links to is his, at <http://webglstats.com/> which is great. I'm really looking forward to pointerlock and geometry instancing, which should allow for a lot more complex scenes.

No pointerlock has been the bane of my game project, but I still have a long way to go, so I'm sure it will be out long before my game is completed :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried to keep the article short and skimable, let me know if there's anything you think should be added or changed.</comment>


Deploying C# / Mono on Heroku - <AUTHOR> http://blog.benhall.me.uk/2012/01/experiment-deploying-c-mono-on-heroku.html <comment><USER2> Very cool. Would be nice to see an easy C# implementation on Linux available through Heroku, even if it is unsupported.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I'll post technical details on how people can deploy their own applications shortly.

<comment><USER4> Nice work Ben! Did you use this technique? <http://quickleft.com/blog/176>

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's the foundation of the approach with some additional modifications because of C# and Mono.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hundreds of Windows 3.1 Programs Join the Internet Archive - <AUTHOR> http://blog.archive.org/2016/02/11/internet-archive-does-windows-hundreds-of-windows-3-1-programs-join-the-collection/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11078415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11078415)

</comment><comment><USER3> The beginning of the Multimedia era that shipped on CD-ROM.

There were a lot of great software, like Sierra Print Artist (incl huge clipart collection), Microsoft Home product line (incl Fine Artist, Creative Writer, Encarta, etc [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Home) ) and many Shareware CDs with thousends of programs.

Those were very different days, compared to the beginning internet (Mosaic) age 2-3 years later.

</comment><comment><USER4> link directly to the games - [https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3_games](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3_games)

</comment><comment><USER5> World Empire II ! Playable in your browser !

I'll be back in 12h or so.</comment>


The 1931 Histomap: The entire history of the world in one chart - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/08/12/the_1931_histomap_the_entire_history_of_the_world_distilled_into_a_single.html <comment><AUTHOR> Pop quiz: how many civilizations run the entire length of the chart, and what are they?</comment>


Ask HN: What are the laws around using thumbnail photos from major news sources? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a news aggregator app and I'd like to pull in thumbnail photos from the news stories at places like CNN, NYTimes, Reuters, etc.
Does anyone know what the laws are around this? Do I need to license the rights to use the photos if they are just thumbnails?
I haven't be able to find anything through my own searching. <comment><USER2> When you aggregate resources from content producers, you tread a very thin line.

For example, CNN's Terms of Service reads:

"You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in any way exploit, any of the content, in whole or in part. You may download copyrighted material for your personal use only. Except as otherwise expressly permitted under copyright law, no copying, redistribution, retransmission, publication or commercial exploitation of downloaded material will be permitted without the express permission of CNN and the copyright owner."

The other sites you liked have similar clauses.

You may only use the images and article excepts if your usage is Fair Use, which you can learn more about here. [http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair- use/](http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/)

I suspect your "news aggregator app" is however, NOT FAIR USE, which means you cannot pull their content without their consent.

IANAL, but work around a bunch of them.</comment>


Advanced Port Scanner Beta Testing Open - <AUTHOR> http://www.advanced-port-scanner.com/beta/

<comment><AUTHOR> Free software for port scanning! Quickly find all open ports (TCP and UDP) and detect programs running on them. Free Radmin 3 license to each beta tester submitting constructive feed back (i.e. bug reports, suggestions, etc.).</comment>


Zappos is going holacratic: no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/161210/zappos-is-going-holacratic-no-job-titles-no-managers-no-hierarchy/ <comment><USER2> I found this helpful: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making-s...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making- sense-of-zappos-and-holacracy/)

there are job titles, there are managers, and there is of course hierarchy. its just different.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link!

This quote sums it up for me

> In fact, to an outsider, it is a wonder that anyone in a holacracy ever > masters these detailed procedures without the help of a resident lawyer, or > that people ever have time to get anything done and deliver value to > customers, given the time and effort needed to master and comply with these > immensely complicated internal procedures.

I tried reading the original post, some links, holacracy.org, watched some videos. Had a look at the constitution[0].

It all sounds terribly confusing and complicated. Maybe if you're in this, it makes more sense. To me as a total outsider I couldn't make any, even though the metaphors sound sensible.

[0] [http://holacracy.org/constitution](http://holacracy.org/constitution)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, but this is 9 months old.

<comment><USER5> Good catch. We added the date to the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There will be a lot of interesting learning to come out of this. I'm not sure if it is better or just different. Perhaps it's better because it IS different.

At some point companies have to try it and see what works and what doesn't. Interesting to see Zappos do that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good, now they'll just suffer under the tyranny of the informal de-facto organizational structure. Now instead of getting work done, people will dedicate their time to internal politics and jostling for group position.

The best part is that issues are usually resolved by either those who can yell the loudest or most deftly maneuver the wild-west political environment. Survival for those not at the top means finding the dominant group think and ensuring membership in that group, preferably under a patron you provide favors to in exchange for ensuring membership in the strongest group in the office. As an employee, over the long wrong, this kind of organization is a nightmare, where to next for my career? What happens when I leave, what do I put on my resume to demonstrate increasing skills and levels of responsibility? Even worse, wait until you get a few conspiratorial bad actors in the organization and now there's nobody who can cut that cancer out of the organization and get things working right again.

I'm sure Hsieh is going to enjoy working in shipping or filing when the alpha male and his coterie comes knocking on the corner office. I'm sure salaries, bonuses and other pay structure will be flattened out across the board.

Oh wait

>CEOs who sign on to Holacracy agree to cede some level of power.

So there's still a CEO

> It's not leaderless. There are certainly people who hold a bigger scope of > purpose for the organization than others.

Oh I see.

So what this is is one of those organizational plans that _denies_ organizational structure while still formally observing one. So not only do you get all the downsides of the informal organizational structure, you aren't even aware that there is a formal one until you get slapped across the paycheck for not observing it.

And how are decision made in a holacracy? _reads up on holacracy (oh my god I haven 't seen such vague handwavy nonsense since my cousin tried to get my mom hooked on healing through crystal vibrations_, well they don't quite come out and say it, but it appears to be through layers of committees. If one committee is bad for making quick, agile, well reasoned decisions, imagine fractal layers of nested committees. It makes congress look like a well functioning organization.

This all sounds vaguely familiar _reads up more on the topic_...oh yeah "autonomous work teams". Yeah...those. That worked great the last 5 times it was tried at any kind of scale.

I remember working for a "title-free flat organization" once. I was managing a contract with an outside firm and during a meeting, I introduced myself as the program manager for this work. After the meeting my CEO took me aside and said that she really objected to me using the term "manager" when representing myself. I noted that what I called myself was an industry normal term and the other organization needed that as a communication token. She insisted that in our company nobody had such hierarchical titles. I told her I objected that we were being thought of as faceless replaceable cogs in the company and offered to switch jobs with one of the new interns if we really were flat or were just pretending. The next week I received my business cards with "Program Manager" on the card. Three months later we started introducing titles again when issues in development were being left unresolved because nobody could assume the role of dictator and push through needed work prioritization schedules -- people had literally just stopped working on the product and started working on personal interest pet projects.

The best part is when this all falls apart, the One True Scottsman will come out of the highlands and proclaim that holacracy was not well implemented in this organization and that's why it failed. The impossibly vague materials available on how it works ensures this.

Here's a decent writeup on what Holacracy _actually_ is, in favorable terms. You'll note it appears to basically be a conference system, designed to get $4k out of conference participants while also ensuring it's vague enough that they have to come to the conference 2 or 3 times to "get it." [http://organizationalphysics.com/2014/03/09/an-inside- look-a...](http://organizationalphysics.com/2014/03/09/an-inside-look-at- holacracy/)

It also appears to be a revision and rebranding of a previously described organizational theory called Sociocracy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy)

interesting debate on this here in the comments [http://www.sociocracy.info/holacracy- sociocracy/](http://www.sociocracy.info/holacracy-sociocracy/)

An oft cited big company that successfully uses this model is Gore. You can read the reviews on Glassdoor about what the problems employees have with the company [http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/W-L-Gore- Reviews-E3044.htm](http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/W-L-Gore- Reviews-E3044.htm)

Here's some highlights from just the first couple pages:

\- "things move somewhat slowly"

\- "Something of a popularity contest at times, the feedback you receive can be quite inaccurate and harsh. The culture is both an asset and a hindrance...Need to bring in some experienced persons and start running like a normal company."

\- "Good ole boy system in place."

\- "Change is not welcome - older employees tend to fear new ideas that are being brought onto the table. "

\- "Waiting on people to continue with your projects can take a very long time"

\- "Not much room for advancement if you start in manufacturing."

\- "-No work life balance for those in operations (professional and production associates) due to no processes, backups, or proper business planning. This is a direct reflection of poor/incompetent leadership...Not a quality driven company. Most products I had experience with cannot be made the same way twice and product specs are vague at best..."

\- "The most nepotistic company I have ever had the experience working at in my career."

\- "Good ol' boys network is alive and well at Gore along with the friends and family plan. "Successful" leaders have at least 3+ family members working within Gore"

\- "Firefighting is rewarded and encouraged. 99% of these fires would be avoided if they had a clue about a quality culture."

\- "Career development is a joke."

\- "The Lattice "Flat" structure is real within Gore but there are lattice layers with stairs between the layers (those that have the access to the stairs are good ol' boys and are well connected)."

\- "Difficult to quickly make decisions"

\- "office politics,...more who you know not what you know"

So, decisions by committee make things move slowly (no duh), nepotism and informal power structures dominate, quality culture is low, lack of direction, business planning, leaders are those that can rally the most troops (usually by hiring relatives), not provide the best business practices. Basically all the things you'd expect from a flat organization.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone else hate the new quartz layout?</comment>


Ask HN: Good solution for storing notes/excerpts from books? - <AUTHOR> There's been a lot of talk about personal information management on HN of late, which made think of this.
I've been mostly making notes on my kindle and then other random stuff (highlighted pdf files, text files, screenshots, etc).
Is there any "modern" solution for handling book notes/excerpts I'm not aware of? <comment><USER2> No global solution I've seen.

Best overview of the landscape I've seen so far is here [0]

Personally I've been using a combination of Roam Research [1] and Readwise [2]. Used Notion [3] for a while but it's very hard to tag data.

0 - [https://beepb00p.xyz/annotating.html](https://beepb00p.xyz/annotating.html)

1 - [https://roamresearch.com/](https://roamresearch.com/)

2 - [https://readwise.io/](https://readwise.io/)

3 - [https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use evernote. It's really useful once you get used to tagging your notes.

I have a broad notebook called "Books" and then tag each post with relevant topics. As you continue to add to evernote in other domains with similar tags you can aggregate all the information into one place.

You can even make a tag of the bookname and go from there.

Bear is a cheaper alternative but i personally didn't like it too much.

</comment><comment><USER4> Recently I being using iPhone Notes. One note per book using the camera to take screenshots.

</comment><comment><USER5> You can use Google Keep. It is Google's note keeping service/app and it is free. Google sites and docs also can perform many of the same functions as Keep and are free also.

</comment><comment><USER6> Readwise is great for revisiting kindle highlights and notes</comment>


Canada's maple syrup 'rebels' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35028380 <comment><USER2> I won't argue that the Federation should exist, but I will argue that these producers are idiots for wanting it to stop existing. It's giving them their livelihood.

Maple Syrup prices continue to rise year after year (addicts like myself will tell you all about it). Supply is highly variable- some years the weather just doesn't work well, and there's little produced, other years there's an abundance. The Federation's cartel powers and large reserve mean that they set syrup prices (increasing, always) and they make supply constant. They also market it, increasing demand.

As an individual producer, the lack of the Federation is problematic: have a bad year, and you have nothing to sell; have a good year, well, so does everyone else- so now the price of syrup is rock-bottom, and you make very little profit, unless you decide to store it yourself and wait for a bad year.

Demand can also drop with supply variability. What company would start depending on pure maple syrup, knowing that next year it's price may double?

These guys want to have the prices that only exist because of the Federation's cartel powers, but refuse to follow the their rules. I have little sympathy.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, god forbid they should be able to do what they want with their own property.

Morons, who wouldn't like giving away 12%/pound for the privilege of someone doing price fixing for you.

<comment><USER2> Don't misunderstand me, I agree with you- I think it's a bit oppressive that laws like this exist.

But I can't understand why, now that it exists and these producers are making so much more money from it, they'd want to dismantle it.

Edit a moment later: in regard to "who wouldn't like giving away 12%/pound for the privilege of someone doing price fixing for you.".

A: Someone who gets 13% (or 113%) more because of the price fixing.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like the mafia. Except jail instead of being maimed/killed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Favourite quote:

> He says: "People who say that our practices are totalitarian should go see > what happens in China, North Korea, or Africa."

i.e. If you compare us to to North Korea, then we look good.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the problem with rules, laws and organizations created during, or as a result of, a crisis. There really should be an expiry date, or review system for when circumstances change, but there never is. So we end up with the Maple Syrup Mafia in the case of a maple syrup crisis and we end up with an increasingly restricted internet and increasingly reduced privacy because of terrorism fears.

</comment><comment><USER5> The seasonal production volume of maple syrup is very sensitive to temperature patterns. One year you have a huge production and the next few years almost nothing, and it's not about efficiency, only about freezing/defreezing patterns. In such a "market", where the production side is practically random, it will cycle from boom to bust forever. I don't see other solutions than a cartel to solve this. What they do is accumulate surplus during "boom" years, and release it during "bust" years, the offer becomes a smoother curve. Without such a mechanism, no rational investor will invest beyond a "hobby" scale production.

An investigation on how industries subject to "random like" production variations can solve the price unpredicability problem would make a more interesting article. Presenting it as an "evil cartel" story, is more sensationalist and involves much less research for the journalist.

<comment><USER6> As far as I know, the way the rest of the agriculture producers solve this is with futures.

Cartels have some advantages, but they are often unstable, and so they have to be enforced with threats of jail, as in this story, and which helps the characterization as "evil".

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, this sort of cartel is not unusual in Canadian agriculture. I have mixed feelings about Stephan Harper, but abolishing the Wheat Board and pardoning protestors [1] was a definite achievement in my books.

[1] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/harper-pardons-farmers- arres...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/harper-pardons-farmers-arrested- under-old-wheat-board-law-1.1146436)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One other side effect of this mafia is that it is almost impossible to get any grade of maple syrup other than dark amber seen on grocery store shelves. There are actually many different grades of maple syrup, depending on when syrup is extracted from the trees. The maple syrup mafia mixes all of the different grades together as that's easier/better for them. If you ever get the chance to try some of the other grades, its worth the treat.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a system that doesn't tend toward Nash equilibrium. If everyone is permitted to maximize their production then it floods the market, prices drop and everyone loses. You could argue that you should let the strong survive. Wipe out the higher cost producers and leave yourself with a factor syrup producing industry.

Yes you can (arbitrarily) value market efficiency over this, but the vast majority of products _chose_ otherwise. They put together a system that benefits their interests. We do this all the time when we create laws.

Now you have a few free-riders who benefit from the higher prices created by restricted supply, but who don't want to pay the cost. If the market was left to it's own devices, they would probably be out of husiness altogether or they would be running a factory sapping operation.

And let's be clear, unlike water, energy, syrup is a luxury good not an essential commodity. The additional cost of inefficient production will be a rounding error for most consumers.

<comment><USER10> > The additional cost of inefficient production will be a rounding error for > most consumers.

You can say this about almost any single consumer good. If this crap is allowed to proliferate, it would represent a material increase in the cost of living.

> Yes you can (arbitrarily) value market efficiency over this

What's arbitrary about preferring low-cost syrup?

Monopolies are illegal for good reason, they unfairly enrich the monopolist at the cost of the consumer.

<comment><USER9> You're making a very strong value judgement that cheap goods and low cost production trump tradition and the ability for people to make a living. I simply don't accept your premise as a blanket statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Welcome to Quebec, the province intent on shooting itself in the head. Check out their language laws if you really want to see totalitarian, it destroyed their economy and has likely set them back forever. Beautiful place to visit, just beware of falling concrete.

<comment><USER12> You know, "the economy" does not have to be this deity that you absolutely have to sacrifice every aspect of culture, history, socializing, and every part of living an enjoyable life to.

Québec still has the third highest GDP in the Canadian provinces [1]. Québec lost a lot of manufacturing and automotive sector jobs in the last decade or two. So has most of the western world. I don't think it has much to do with the language.

As for the infrastructure, I'd posit that crappy infrastructure at high costs is largely due to corrupt politicians (ever hear of another place where money played too big a role in electoral campaigns?) and construction companies being run by the mafia [2].

Which, of course, all are problems of their own, and in no way is Québec a utopia. It's just a bit tiring to always hear the easy intellectual shortcuts that blame everything on law 101.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_provinces_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_provinces_and_territories_by_gross_domestic_product) [2] [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe- debate/editorials/the-c...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe- debate/editorials/the-charbonneau-lesson-public-contracts-are-always-a- criminal-opportunity/article27484535/)

<comment><USER13> Uh huh, Quebec is enjoying it's 'culture' and nice laid back lifestyle at the expense of the uncultured Anglaise as the highest recipient of equalization payments: Quebec ($7.833 billion)

From wikipedia

<comment><USER14> Do you even know of the equalization payments are calculated? Also, back 20 years ago and before, it was Québec that was paying the equalization payments to Alberta and the western provinces.

<comment><USER15> I remember the news from 20 years ago, 1995, and my recollection is that Quebec was a have not province back then.

I think Quebec has pretty much forever been a have not province.

[http://news.nationalpost.com/news/time-for-quebec-to-end- equ...](http://news.nationalpost.com/news/time-for-quebec-to-end-equalization- addiction-montreal-think-tank)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > 'People who say that our practices are totalitarian should go see what > happens in China, North Korea, or Africa.'

'We're not as bad as North Korea!' is hardly compelling.

Why not set up a system of maple syrup futures, rather than sending in police and raiding people's homes?

<comment><USER17> I wish, that every time I saw a quote like this in a news article, the journalist would put a caption referencing the fallacy type.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I first finished reading the post-capitalism article, I was feeling some sort of hope. Now, after this, it's just emptiness.

Some time ago I read some metaphor a guy who build something that people really wanted, and then came another man with clubs and took it from him, build walls around it, and charged for it.

</comment><comment><USER19> This exists in the US too for a handful of products. Raisins are the ones I remember (NPR's Planet Money did a story recently that is almost like this one but about raisins).

</comment><comment><USER20> One issue with the Federation is that cheating is really rampant, even among its board members.

Part of the problem is that maple syrup harvesting is essentially a seasonal activity, with quite a short season, so it's a side activity for almost all producers, except the very largest ones; when they see high prices, they really want to make the extra money, unlike dairy farmer who sell year-long.

</comment><comment> max-a This was absolutely hilarious, but how comes the federation has power over people who don't want to have anything to do with it?

<comment><USER21> Because of its entrenched political power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can any Canadian lawyers shed some light on how this is legal?

<comment><USER22> The Quebec government passed laws enabling it in 1990. It was modelled after the Canadian Wheat Board.

The relevant legislation is called "Loi sur la mise en marché des produits agricoles, alimentaires et de la pêche" but it's all in french.

<comment><USER20> In English it's called "An Act Respecting the Marketing of Agricultural, Food and Fish Products": [http://www.canlii.org/en/qc/laws/stat/cqlr- c-m-35.1/latest/c...](http://www.canlii.org/en/qc/laws/stat/cqlr- c-m-35.1/latest/cqlr-c-m-35.1.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I see no 'mafia' there. It is typical democracy.

<comment><USER14> You're downvoted but you're right. There are laws that protect the federation. If people really didn't want that, the laws would be abolished.

<comment><USER10> > If people really didn't want that, the laws would be abolished.

Not at all. 95% of people could be against the cartel and it would still be law unless it was such a priority that it would actually change votes, which is not going to happen for a small issue like this.

Similarly for laws like those preventing Tesla from opening retail stores in some states. Pretty much nobody except dealerships and their families are for those laws, but there's no incentive for a politician to change them since they would lose donation money and hardly gain any votes.</comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk quits Trump advisory councils, saying, 'Climate change is real' - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-elon-musk-climate-change-20170601-story.html <comment><USER2> Some part of me believes that Musk leaving a board like this is cutting off the nose to spite the face.

I don't believe that this administration is redeemable, but I also believe that these advisory boards, and the Federal bureaucracy in general might also slow the administration down.

Power players leaving whittles away at the strength of that barrier slowing that tide. What is the alternative for Musk et al. if they opt out of this type of public service?

<comment><USER3> Power players leaving also undercuts the administration's credibility and lets them devote their energy to opposing it form the outside. Musk gave it a good- faith effort, and I think he's wise to quit, since staying in could do significant damage to his own corporate goals.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Trump just took steps that benefit the incumbent auto industry Musk is trying to disrupt.</comment></comment></comment>


A More "Exclusive" HN. Lobste.rs: Invite only but great content.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.lobste.rs

<comment><AUTHOR> If anyone wants an invite, email me a basic fizzbuzz solution in a language of your choice and if it runs I'll shoot you an invite. Members can give unlimited ones, but the parent of your invite can be affected by 'bad behavior' in a method to encourage quality content/a lack of trolling. I'm enjoying it so far quite a bit myself.

<comment><USER2> What leads you to believe that the ability to solve fizzbuzz is a valid selector for individuals who will contribute in the desired manner? In my experience, technical ability is not linked to social ability or empathetic behavior.

I think the expectation behind invite-only membership is that members will curate their choices beyond basic tests such as this. Look at it this way, if the ability to solve fizzbuzz were a valid selector, the site could establish a simple screening process that doesn't involve an invite system.

If your standing on the site is affected by your invitees' behavior, you may be in for a rough ride.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really just used it as a cool way to start conversation with people and if they didn't seem like some sort of troll I shot it their way. Someone even did a Prolog one, Clojure too. Makes for good nerd-chats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For anyone with hung request - [http://www.lobste.rs](http://www.lobste.rs) isn't working for me, but [http://lobste.rs](http://lobste.rs) is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! Is there a way to edit the URL in the original submission? I know you can the title but it seems to not allow it from what I saw. Could a mod help please? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452384)

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad! Didn't think to check before I submitted. Thanks. Vote this on up and let the rest of the thread check out the comments there folks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So is it _not_ more exclusive, or is the headline just gratuitous abuse of quotation marks?

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to be invited to join, and most members only will take a fizzbuzz solution or know sonmeone personally to send them out, however they do have unlimited invites. The "parent" that invited you can be penalized if someone is misbehaving. Also, the title link is not working properly for some reason and until its fixed: [http://lobste.rs](http://lobste.rs) works as pointed out in the comments in another spot.</comment></comment>


The World in 2076 - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/world-2076 <comment><USER2> It's curious how these predictions always turn out to be based on the current technology, pushed to its limits. Kinda like sci-fi from the 1950s predicts advanced space travel but barely any computers in the early 21st century.

<comment><USER3> I could have sworn that Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov both had computers in their sci-fi universes, but now that I try to think about it, you're probably right. The closest thing I can think of to a computer is HAL from 2001.

<comment><USER4> They had computers, but they usually remained gigantic expensive machines. They could forsee supercomputing, but not personal computing.

<comment><USER3> But you have to hand it to them, they and many of their contemporaries did an amazing job building the tech for their futuristic worlds. You could read Foundation or Childhood's End now and you probably wouldn't notice that they were written in the 50s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel it's unfortunate articles like these don't put more emphasis on climate change, and instead still keep up the narrative that we will innovate ourselves out of the problem. There is not reason to believe we will, and I expect society as a whole to already be heavily impacted by climate change by 2076.

The more people are talking about the fact that human civilization won't survive 4 degrees of warming in a 100 year time span (current projection by 2100), maybe the more society will see that although innovation is important, it's even more important is that we all accept to give up things deemed indispensable today.

Since that might not happen, 60 years time from now the future might look a lot more dystopian than this article would suggest.

<comment><USER6> I feel it's unfortunate that comments like this continue to spread the naive idea that anything but innovation will resolve the climate issue. Human nature is what it is. There is plenty of historic evidence to believe that innovation is our way out. Like we innovated ourselves out of material scarcity during the industrial revolution. Like we innovated ourselves out of the coal Industrial era using other carbon fuels. Like we have already started to innovate ourselves out of the hydrocarbon era with other energetic sources which by the way will need to be out-innovated again by our grandchildren because they are not perfect too.

<comment><USER7> Innovation is not magic; it is the product of investment. The time to innovate was 20 years ago; now it's effectively too late. The climate has already changed and the rate of change is not slowing. We will "innovate", all right, by necessity, and ride it out as best we can; but we can't innovate our way back to the climate we had before.

<comment><USER6> the "too late" death bell has been ringing since antiquity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The anti-innovation backlash is the most likely thing to happen.

Today, politicians are winning the populace by lamenting on unfair trade deals, globalism and foreigners taking jobs. Those jobs are not coming back, if they are, certainly not to humans.

We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. (read Professor Yuval Noah Harari new book [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow) ) And, no, the answer is not basic income. It's intelligence augmentation.

Intelligence is the only valuable currency nowadays and we are not acquiring enough of it fast enough compared to the machines.

Our only tool for intelligence augmentation is still education. Not good enough at all. It's already impossible to keep up; let alone learn something from scratch at a late stage in life and be expected to contribute something significant enough to derive long term economic advantage that can't be taken by a machine or globalists.

I think all other issues will fix themselves or reach a natural equilibrium (overpopulation, climate change etc.). But lack of intelligence is our doom.

<comment><USER9> The anti-innovation backlash is here.

Shiv Sena, the racist party of Maharashtra, has also been pushing luddism mixed with racism. No Biharis should get an auto driver license, and they want to stop technology (Uber, Ola) from allowing Biharis/etc to compete via other means.

[http://www.afternoondc.in/city-news/shiv-sena-mns-raise- red-...](http://www.afternoondc.in/city-news/shiv-sena-mns-raise-red-flag- over-ola-uber-cabs/article_147645) [http://www.newsgram.com/maharashtra-only- marathi-auto-driver...](http://www.newsgram.com/maharashtra-only-marathi-auto- drivers-to-receive-permit/)

There were even riots in my town. [http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/news/auto- strike-...](http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/news/auto-strike-in- pune-turns-violent-cabs-attacked/article9056540.ece)

Terrorists (or "illegal armed groups" to use TechCrunch's euphamism) in Columbia and France have engaged in political violence to stop technology, and the government has sided with them.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/ubers-colombian-speed- bump...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/ubers-colombian-speed-bumps/) [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3417215/Riot- police-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3417215/Riot-police- called-Paris-taxi-drivers-torch-car-tyres-block-traffic-anti-Uber-protest- British-travellers-warned-expect-severe-delays-reaching-France.html)

See also SF/NY attacking AirBnB.

The anti-innovation backlash is a 2016 issue which we will hopefully resolve before 2076.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't exactly call Uber a piece of _innovation_. It's a phone app for hiring taxi drivers from a pool of cheap labor. You want to claim innovation? Let's find the people torching self-driving cars.

<comment><USER9> There is a world of difference between "hiring X from a pool of cheap labor" and what Uber does. ODesk is hiring X from a cheap pool of labor. Uber is push a button and you get where you are going.

Fundamentally, Uber is a Walrasian auctioneer that solves the socialist calculation problem within the transportation sector.

I consider that to be innovation.

<comment><USER10> Go ahead and consider, but it's an _accounting_ innovation, not a technological one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As older as I get ( 30 now ) I feel more and more the world is going to dystopia, rather than utopia.

Instead of having a world-wide federation, we will most probably have a period of dissonance around the nations where people will close more and more inside their borders, until they feel they have the power of their lives in their hands again.

I know you won't like it, but I will blame unregulated capitalism for this one. Media is so sensational, because they know nobody will watch / read anything that has a boring title. Social networks are becoming click-junky. Advertisement is fraudulent on a lot of levels. Globalization, instead of making poorest people not so poor has made rich people richer and so on. And no wonder this tendency is going worse with such a high-priced education.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure capitalism deserves the entire blame - some of it is just human nature (it's harder to care about something that happens in a distant location or time).

The question is what can we do about it? How do we rebuild public trust in the institutions (science and education) that should guide the country in the right path even if the people are asleep at the wheel? Trust in experts is at an all time low. Fact checking appears to have failed = "The fact checkers are biased!". And people are retreating into their media bubbles.

I often see the "Pass it on" billboards ([http://www.values.com/inspirational- sayings-billboards](http://www.values.com/inspirational-sayings-billboards)) - perhaps we need something for science and education? ("Clean air regulations save x lives a year in your community", "Every $1 spent on education saves $x on welfare down the road". I hate billboards but at least they would break through the media bubble many of us live in.

<comment><USER10> >The question is what can we do about it? How do we rebuild public trust in the institutions (science and education) that should guide the country in the right path even if the people are asleep at the wheel? Trust in experts is at an all time low. Fact checking appears to have failed = "The fact checkers are biased!". And people are retreating into their media bubbles.

Experts and institutions need to care about the people and stand up against the malign parts of the capitalist establishment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Though it's always fun to read/watch such predictions, chaos theory suggests we have absolutely no clue as to what the future will look like. The black swan is a nice book explaining why predictions generally fail.

<comment><USER14> When I was a middle schooler in the 90s my grandpa would bring over stacks of old Popular Mechanics magazines from the 50s-70s that were predicting what life would be like in future decades.

I think it gave me a good perspective when reading these same kinds of predictions made today. For the most part, they complely missed on the existence, much less the impact, on things like social media.

It was easy to predict the physical nature of small, hand-held computing devices, but their actual impact on how society functions was missed.

Even watching "realistic" contemporary sc-fi like The Expanse, they focus on the physical aspect of how realistic space colonization would work with slow space travel, but completely ignore the role of AI and drones. Will we even need real people to live on an asteroid city, even if Mars is colonized?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How long until this feels dated?

Maybe I'm getting too jaded.

<comment><USER16> You aren't. Look at predictions about the future from 1916. They're the definition of quaint.

<comment><USER17> I've gotten the opposite impression. There was a set of drawings from 1910 predicting Paris in 2010. There were some obvious whiffs, but it broadly predicted automation, remote audio/video communications, and other things.

<comment><USER14> Predicting advances in technology are easy. What's hard is predict is it's impact on society.

How many people in 1950 would have guessed that social media would be a thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra Right now I'm more concerned about society changes than technology changes.

Will we make democracy work for the average citizen? Will they have control of their data? Do we get to preserve our culture and the rights deriving from it given the continuing mass migration? Will we figure out basic income? If not, what's the job all those people are going to hold? Will we stop concentrating people in a few attractive megacities surrounded by population desert? Will we stop preying on young like we do today? Perhaps when there'll be no young to speak of? What'll happen to religions? To parenting?

<comment><USER18> You'll have to decide what an 'average' citizen is, first.

<comment><USER14> I think the "average" person on earth is 35 year old Indian male.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some of these are science predictions, and some are economics predictions.

Here's my take:

\- Replicator is unlikely. The machine that makes everything is like the drug that cures everything and the man who knows everything. We already have specialist replicators, specialist drugs, and specialist professors. For the same reason, we won't get a generalist AI, just a bunch of very good specialists.

\- James Webb will tell us within a few years whether there's lots of life or none. Some realisation about just how likely life is will happen as we use the JWT to scan various planets.

\- Similarly with superconductivity, we'll either find a way to do it, or a reason why it can't be done.

\- Economics: the revolution here is how society changes when there's a bunch of old people around, mostly healthy and mostly skilled. I suspect people will want to be able to retrain, and so the old model where there was only time (opportunity cost) to go to school when you were young will change. It probably already has for some people.

\- Tech/Econ: society will have thought hard about giving everyone a decent living while the tech people build just about everything.

</comment><comment><USER20> Link to a page about their special issue, though it does have a TL;DR of each article. Seems that they are almost equally split between utopia (energy is free and we can make everything) and dystopia (everyone is becoming anti- science and oh about that nuclear war...)

</comment><comment><USER21> One of the best ways to get me to sign up for a magazine I've ever seen! Great tantalizing content list all in one place followed by an article with a paywall a bit beyond the fold.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra This one is funny:

> The world in 2076: The anti-science backlash has begun

Science is like fashion. We (as a society) might be pro-science in 2025, anti- science in 2040, pro-science again in 2055 and finally begin to recover from anti-science in 2076. In other words, this one might change very very fast. There might be much more options, like "everybody likes science but it grinds to halt" and "science is loudly disapproved but a lot of fruitful private research goes on"

<comment><USER22> Countries that turn their back on science will fall behind.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. "What has happened in these nations to support these discoveries and what has happened when they ended?"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3mtDC2fQo&t=22m47s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3mtDC2fQo&t=22m47s)

Around 10 minutes on that subject, that part of the presentation is called the "Naming Rights."

<comment> guard-of-terra That's an awesome video, I think you should post it separately.

<comment><USER23> Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. I'm not in an way involved with the videos, I just remembered the talk and searched for it for the post. It's just a part of the talks that happened in Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA, November 5-7, 2006. There is more, but it can possibly disappear from the internet in this form if it gets too much attention. Maybe it's better leaving them in the comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Every decade brings a technology movement that steers the path of humanity in a certain direction. Nobody would've predicted the rise of social media (yes, including Snapchat, Instagram, Pokemon Go)and how much of the humanity gets consumed by it, thereby derailing us from the track we were on the decade prior to it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why did this website want to have notifications enabled for it?

</comment><comment><USER26> No singularity?

<comment><USER27> It's always 20 years away.

<comment><USER28> And will be 20 years away in 2076, like it was in 1976 and (in its previous incarnation as millenialist religious beliefs) 1876 and 76BC

At least human predictions about the future are relatively predictable.</comment></comment></comment>


Auto-Scaling and Self-Defensive Services in Golang - <AUTHOR> https://raygun.com/blog/2016/03/golang-auto-scaling/ <comment><USER2> When I needed to solve this problem, I spun up 4x as many workers as I needed and managed them through supervisor. This handles two of the requirements: 1\. Autoscaling - Unless your workers are very expensive to run, or your load is exceptionally spiky (e.g. 100x jumps), just pre-scale instead of autoscaling. 2\. If a process dies, supervisor (or runit or whatever) will restart it.

My supervisor config has each worker log to its own file (e.g. /var/log/acmeinc/worker_01.log). For death detection, I'd probably use a watchdog process that checks the mtime of each log file. If it's more than X minutes old, then no work has been done in that time, so kill the process and allow supervisor to restart it. Combine this with an in-process watchdog log message ("hey, I'm still alive!") on the main consumer thread every X minutes, and you have a fairly robust solution.

Tangentially, deferring engineering work by buying more hardware is almost always a good idea. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Virding's First Rule of Programming

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang."

[http://rvirding.blogspot.co.nz/2008/01/virdings-first- rule-o...](http://rvirding.blogspot.co.nz/2008/01/virdings-first-rule-of- programming.html)

<comment><USER4> My exact same thought.

I do believe that we, as software engineer, should understand how Erlang works at its core and have some sort of shared know how about the implementation of at least supervisors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whenever I saw the auto-scaling mentioned I had assumed that they meant they were spinning up new server(s) running this process, all working from the same redis queue. But it seems that they are just launching more of the same process from within the same machine.

For those of you who are experienced in platforms where this is a common practice, can you tell me why this is done? I have seen this done a lot.

Why don't people just launch more worker goroutines (or whatever their platform's concurrency primitives are) and max out their machine from a single process? Is it to keep the code simpler (i.e., it is easier to just spin up duplicate processes on the same machine) and not have to deal with any concurrency?

<comment><USER6> My thought as well. If your server is sized to handle 4 workers, run 4 workers.

If you want to autoscale to save costs cool. But then use a server only sized to hold 1 worker. Then the techniques in this post wont quite work.

The failure detector piece is neat, but if doing a true multi server scaling setup, may be better to just kill a hung VM and fire up a new one. Just as likely to be a server problem as a code problem. If automated why not just nuke it all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice read, but I'd like to point out that this is a very well studied problem, particularly in HPC. I'd point to a few decent resources, but the only one that my google-fu found was [https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/HPC/Algorithms1.pdf](https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/HPC/Algorithms1.pdf)

The main advice is that you need to carefully balance communication overhead against work done and also analyse the optimum number of workers per node.</comment>


Three Options for App Owners Facing the End of Parse - <AUTHOR> http://www.observationalhazard.com/2016/03/three-options-for-app-owners-facing-end.html?spref=tw <comment><USER2> You obviously don't run a parse app or have not tried option 1 (use parse- server) yourself. Parse-server is not an open-source version of original Parse.com technology, it is not a "here take a copy host it yourself". It's a different tech, they are flooded with issues and if you read through them you'll realize how far is parse-server from production grade. So, option 1 is really more like option 3 (develop your own back-end). You'd be fighting with incomplete code, bugs, no docs, missing features, etc.

I'd argue then that option 2 is the only path for front-end devs/novice devs that cannot afford to develop a proprietary back-end.

For option 2 I'd add backendless.com to your list. I have been testing their service and so far so good.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You obviously don't run a parse app or have not tried option 1 (use parse- > server) yourself.

I built 6 apps on Parse (4 of which are still in production) and started using it in 2011. Of course Parse-Server is still buggy, it's been out just over a month! In that short time it's garnered an incredible amount of support from the open source community. Knowing some of the leaders of the project and how quickly it's been adopted by third parties offering Parse hosting solutions ([https://github.com/relatedcode/ParseAlternatives#parse- serve...](https://github.com/relatedcode/ParseAlternatives#parse-server- hosting-providers)), I feel confident in its future and maintain it's the easiest (least code/ least cost) way to continue with your existing app. Maybe I should've added a con about its youth.

> I'd argue then that option 2 is the only path for front-end devs/novice devs > that cannot afford to develop a proprietary back-end.

The article was geared towards app owners, not front-end/novice devs. I agree for that category of developers CloudKit and Firebase continue to be very attractive.

> For option 2 I'd add backendless.com to your list. I have been testing their > service and so far so good.

Backendless.com looks good. I mentioned at the end of the article that other BaaS providers like Kinvey, Kii, etc have the same issue that a young Parse did (and I'd throw backendless.com in there) in that who knows if they'll be around in the future? Sure, FB shutdown Parse, and Google & Apple control Firebase and CloudKit. But despite FB's decision, I think it's more likely a BaaS backed by Apple or Google will be around 2 years from now than one that's not.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Hours left to protest ICANN's plan to uncap prices of legacy TLDs - <AUTHOR> Starting with .org, .info, and .biz, ICANN is planning to eliminate the 10% annual cap on increases of prices that TLD registry operators can charge for domains, both new and renewals. These TLD registries have a monopoly on the entire TLD (they're who your registrar buys the domain from when you order it), so you can't just switch to a cheaper company without throwing out your entire domain and starting over from scratch on a new one. Large companies may be able to withstand large jumps in prices, but small businesses and individuals will bear the brunt of any increases that occur, increasing the already considerable centralization of the Internet. PIR (who runs .org) already makes $90 million annually from registrations, in exchange for maintaining a database and running some DNS servers.
ICANN is currently holding a public comment period, which closes today at 23:59 UTC for .info and .org, and May 14 for .biz. Read the proposals and submit comments here:
.info: https://www.icann.org/public-comments/info-renewal-2019-03-18-en (email@example.com)
.org: https://www.icann.org/public-comments/org-renewal-2019-03-18-en (firstname.lastname@example.com)
.biz: https://www.icann.org/public-comments/biz-renewal-2019-04-03-en (email@example.com)
Help keep the Internet open to all! <comment><AUTHOR> More discussions and posts about this proposal:

[https://www.namecheap.com/blog/keep-domain-prices-in- check/](https://www.namecheap.com/blog/keep-domain-prices-in-check/)

[http://www.circleid.com/posts/20190423_spurious_justificatio...](http://www.circleid.com/posts/20190423_spurious_justifications_for_eliminating_caps_on_legacy_domains/) (discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767977) )

[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/23/2330210/icann- propo...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/23/2330210/icann-proposes- allowing-unlimited-fee-increases-for-org-domain-names)

My own comment, discussing concerns about centralization and ICANN's original mission statement: [https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-info- renewal-18mar19...](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-info- renewal-18mar19/2019q2/000168.html)

<comment><USER2> Nat Cohen (who wrote the circleid article) is an amazing proponent of registrant's rights. Disclosure, I've had the pleasure of working with him a lot and calling him a friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't understand their reasoning. Why would they need an unlimited price cap on gTLDs? I can't imagine their expenses are that high and they're a non- profit so whats the incentive to increase gTLD pricing?

<comment><USER4> Probably the usual, the people running the non-profit have financial ties (direct or indirect) to the people who'd make money from increasing the price cap.

<comment><USER2> I did some quick analysis...

7/20 ICANN board members have ties to Internet Society (which manages PIR - the .ORG registry), to PIR directly or NeuStar (managing .biz registry). That was just from reading their bios on ICANN.

4/8 PIR members were connected to ICANN previously or are still active in some capacity (including former board member and former liaison to the board).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was completely unaware of this proposed change, and can see big problems for individuals/small businesses if they end up implementing this. I've submitted a comment via email.

</comment><comment><USER6> I never thought I'd oppose he decision of transferring ICANN control to outside of USA- it seemed increasingly and inevitably for the greater good. now I'm no longer so sure why it was done.

<comment><USER2> So they could rob everyone blind and not be accountable to anyone.</comment></comment>