Mailgun: new pricing without plans and limits  - old-gregg http://blog.mailgun.com/post/new-mailgun-pricing-no-more-minimums-features-for-all/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome. Aside from the fact that my bill will be cut in half, I hate plans. Plans are just one more thing to monitor (make sure you don't go over your totally arbitrary limit!), and they generally lead to weird inequity.

For example, I've been adding ~75 people per day to my MailChimp list and the price stayed the same. Then one day it went from $75 to $150. Adding thousands of subscribers was completely free, and then adding one subscriber cost $75/month. That just doesn't make any sense to me.

Related anecdote: My company doesn't have plans (most in the industry do) and customers tell me all the time how much they prefer our approach. There may be selection bias going on, but I have tons of feedback supporting my decision to avoid plans.

<comment><USER2> Isn't your company Less Annoying CRM?

I see a monthly plan on your pricing page, did I misunderstand what you meant by "My company doesn't have plans"?

[https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/pricing.php](https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/pricing.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> Chrischen is right. Maybe I'm not using the term correctly, but I think of "plans" as meaning multiple different tiers that a user can choose from. Mailgun previously had plans (i.e. you had to pick which tier you wanted) and now they don't (i.e. there is just one tier that applies to everyone).

Some characteristics of plans that I don't like:

* Passing some arbitrary limit (# of contacts, # of users, # of files, etc) triggers a steep increase in price, rather than having the price gradually increase as usage increase. For Mailgun, usage is the number of emails sent. For us, it's the number of users on the account.

* Because of the steep price increases at arbitrary points, some users get a lot more value out of the software than others. With Highrise (another CRM) an account with 5,000 contacts pays $24, while an account with 5,001 users pays $49/month. Both accounts are getting roughly the same value, but one is paying twice as much as the other.

* Most SaaS companies with plans force users to choose which plan (or tier) they want when they sign up. How would a user know what features are worth paying for when they haven't even tried the software yet?

* Plans are often used to upsell existing customers after they're locked into your service. Salesforce has a plan that is cheaper than my company's price ($5/user/month vs. $10/user/month) but it is limited to the point of being almost useless. I've talked to many people who got suckered into a 1+ year commitment with them only to realize they'd have to pay $65-$250/user/month to get the functionality they needed.

* Customers have to monitor their usage to make sure they don't trigger the next tier. It's just one extra thing to worry about every day, and businesses have enough on their minds without worrying about unexpected price increases.

Having said all of that, I'm currently struggling with how I might go about offering more products than just a CRM without making it look like a tiered system. I don't consider it to be the same thing because they really will be additional products (project management, invoicing, etc.) which are generally completely separate subscriptions if you use a different company's products, but I want them to be integrated/bundled directly with the CRM to make the user experience as simple as possible. Still not quite sure how to pull this off. Pricing sure is tricky.

<comment><USER3> I took a quick look at it because I will be in the market for a crm system. A question I have is whether it's possible to add contacts to a campaign so it's easy to see the results per campaign.

In terms of offering more products without making it look like a tiered system. If it's invoicing, it's perfectly fine to add that as a feature we can pay for. Lots of SMBs already have their own invoicing system. They know it's something separate. Just give it a name, a different color and sell it as a feature. I think I would like a to-do list as well. Not all contacts buy the same thing but some do, I want to automate it a little bit, so it's a step by step approach that I can go through. Give me a list that I can easily copy to other projects and easily change. Not sure if Basecamp offers something similar. Add it to the crm system as a feature and charge me for it. Sounds fair to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking us out! There are two different options if you want to track campaigns. One would be just make a "Group" for each campaign, and then add the appropriate contacts to the group. Very soon we'll be adding the ability to filter the pipeline reports by groups, so that should give you what you're looking for.

Alternatively, you could add a custom field to a pipeline (pipelines = leads for most people) which would track the campaign. It could be a text field or a dropdown list depending on how many campaigns you're running.

As for the task management, it's not quite the same, but you can add a checkbox list to the lead pipeline to track which tasks you've completed. We also have more task functionality coming at some point, but not in the near future unfortunately.

Thanks for the feedback on the pricing. Our reservation with charging more for each feature is that while it's very fair, it seems kind of complicated to some people if they have to pick and choose every single feature they want to pay for. Many of our users love how easy it is to understand the price. What we were considering was offering two products: CRM, and "everything else". So you decide whether you want all the extra stuff (invoice, project management, etc.) or if you just want the CRM, and there are just two prices (probably $10 and $25). I like that model, but it seems a lot like having pricing plans which is why I'm not 100% sold on it yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be closer to how Mandrill works, and it's exactly what got me to sign up for them only a few days ago. I knew about Mailgun and Sendgrid before, and started looking into them first but their pricing tiers turned me off and got me to keep searching until I found Mandrill.

My app is very small, just bootstrapping without any funding so I'm trying to be very careful how I spend my money. At first I see that Mailgun's minimum was $19/month while Sendgrid's silver plan is $10/month. Easy, Sendgrid wins.

Oops, I want to support inbound email though. Sendgrid will give you that on the trial plan, but not on the $10 silver plan. Suddenly I'm up to $80/month to use Sendgrid. Mailgun wins here.

But before I even noticed that I had already signed up for Sendgrid (believing I'd be paying $10/month), but had to wait like 5 hours and then I received some email from them basically demanding that I tell them what my app is, why I need email, what is the purpose of me sending email. Maybe it's for market research, but it didn't come across that way. It came across as "we assume you're a dirty spammer". Of course if I _was_ a spammer I'd just give them so BS answer, I wouldn't admit it. I can't say call a winner, only a lower: Sendgrid. Mandrill and SES both treat you like you expect; you sign up, they cap you at ~250 emails/day for a bit and then you're fine. Sendgrid fail.

Anyway, then my friend points me over to Mandrill and I sign up. The pricing model fit us well.. up to 12k emails free, then $0.20/thousand after that. In the state my app is right now I probably won't go over 12k for another few months, and once I do go over that limit I'm not going to find myself jumping suddenly to something like $80/month.

If I had been setting this all up just a week later (that is, now) I'd probably be on Mailgun due to this new pricing model.

<comment><USER5> Inbox providers keep track of reputation of an IP address, so most outbound e-mail service providers guard their IPs, since even a few bad apples can cause havoc for existing customers. Not saying it's justified, but there's some verification that needs to happen sooner or later.

<comment><USER4> Right, but that's the point of SES and Mandrill limiting you to like 250/day at first and gradually increasing your limit.

Asking you to write an essay telling them what you're using email for is not verification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great job on this. What I really like about this type of pricing is that it puts the complex cost calculation onto your side instead of the customer. I use a ton of products, Heroku services being an example where I have to try to guess at usage. Literally every day I have an internal conversation with myself that says, "Do you need to go into Heroku and turn down the Database tier you're on because the service isn't using the capacity that you're paying for? Wait, but you might get a traffic surge and the site will go down if you decrease the capacity."

This seems like for me, the ideal case. Automatically scaling down all the way to $0 so I never have to think about unsubscribing if I stop using it.

I was actually discussing with a friend that it seems like there could be a big opportunity in the cloud server space to have a zero scale server where you only pay for time that it is being used. I believe Heroku already does spin down instances that aren't needed behind the scenes, they just don't give you the cost savings. They keep it.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, they only spin down people on the free tier, where you can't save over $0.

<comment><USER6> Is this documented somewhere? Are you sure? How can you tell that you actually have 3 dynos running when you're paying for 3?

I suspect that if you pay for at least 2 dynos what happens is that they keep at least one dyno running and scale up to 3 as needed because as a customer I can't really tell the difference between 1 and 3 dynos unless my traffic requires all 3 at which point the service would have already scaled up to three. We already know from the free tier that they can spin up an instance in a couple of seconds.

I would bet this is Heroku's little secret about making money. If you look at their cost per month you find that they aren't really making much per instance on AWS servers although, they are perfectly capable of detecting when they should auto scale up. Amazon even has a built in service to do that, but Heroku doesn't expose it because that's where they make their profit margin.

<comment><USER8> Dyno idling is documented, and it only happens to web dynos, when there is only one running. [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#dyno- sleeping](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#dyno-sleeping)

I can say from experience they definitely do not scale down the dynos you are paying for - you still see log entries from them and they are immediately available to requests.

<comment><USER6> Oh interesting. I was wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Our most popular feedback to date is to eliminate minimums and get rid of feature gating in plans. So, here you go.

As always, open to feedback.

<comment><USER10> Before if you had a 59 US $ plan (dedicated IP), the cost was 0.59/thousand, so you could send 118k emails.

With the new plan, for 59 US$ you get the dedicated IP and 10k emails. Sending 118k emails with a dedicated IP would cost 113 US$

<comment><USER9> For some customers it may make sense to stay on their current pricing, which we allow for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While reading the new pricing structure, I realized that the Mailboxes feature [1] (allowing programmatic creation of mailboxes via the API) is deprecated. That's too bad; it was the reason I started using Mailgun in the first place. Is anyone aware of an alternate service that offers this feature, short of managing my own mail server?

1: [http://documentation.mailgun.com/quickstart.html#using- mailb...](http://documentation.mailgun.com/quickstart.html#using-mailboxes)

</comment><comment><USER12> The old pricing was fine with me. Now I worry you will go out of business or get swamped with support requests from people who haven't paid anything. But whatever works for you, I guess.

<comment><USER13> Mailgun was purchased by rackspace. I don't see them going out of business any time soon.

<comment><USER14> I was also more than happy to pay $19/month. Now my monthly bill goes to $0? I'm a bit worried what will happen to quality of service and support now.

And the fact Rackspace has purchased Mailgun doesn't mean a thing. Just look what Rackspace did to JungleDisk... I used to be also happy customer of JungleDisk so no wonder I'm a bit bitter regarding Rackspace.

<comment><USER13> You can continue to stay on the $19/mo plan. There's an option to stay on your existing plan or move to the new pricing.

I'm not familiar with what rackspace did to jungle disk as I've never used it. I was under the impression the service was still running with a rebrand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always thought there was a price point to weed out spammers. I hope this doesn't effect the service.

</comment><comment><USER16> Been using mailgun for a while to send nagios alerts from our server using SMTP to various accounts that need to be notified. Instead of sending it to 3 accounts, you send it to one then mailgun sends it off to the accounts you want added.

It is perfect and worth the $19. Now I'm unsure if I should just downgrade... but it's not really worth it for the value I get out of Mailgun.

</comment><comment><USER17> I started looking at [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/) and realized that many companies I often see listed on the front page here are actually YC companies, but not marked as such.

<comment><USER18> Mailgun is now owned by Rackspace, so I don't think it's still considered an active member of the YC family.

<comment><USER17> Ok, how do you explain stripe and priceonomics? I'm sure I'm missing others.

<comment><USER19> Why do they need to mark themselves as YC companies if they don't want the boost associated with being YC?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When SES is 5 time as less (although less features, I know), there's really no reason why I would go with Mailgun. 10 cents for every 1000 emails is very very hard to beat. And when I'm just relying on you to email, I don't need things such as UI, analytics, etc as much.

I typed in 300000 in the pricing calculator, and got $150.00/month as my price. For any startup, that is just too much. With SES, it's $30.00/month. I know that there's a premium to be paid for certain features, and I know the pricing is better than what it was originally, but SES to me is still superior.

<comment><USER21> You don't get dedicated IP and custom DKIM with SES. Those affect deliverability significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't under the pricing table.

It shows:

Emails Price / 1,000 Total Price

0 - 10,000 Free

Next 500,000 $0.50

Next 1,000,000 $0.35

Next 5,000,000 $0.15

Any Additional $0.10

Does that mean emails 10,001-510,000 cost $0.50 per thousand and then emails 510,000-1,510,000 cost $0.35 per thousand?

<comment><USER23> Yes, that seems to be what it means. In general, heavy users get better marginal prices, but there's a "free sample" amount for very light users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Dear Mailgun --

How can I programmatically identify the accounts that are on their first email blast? Please include a header. I suggest it look like this:

X-Mailgun-FNG: 1

with the value set to the number of days on which this customer has used your service to send more than 100 messages.

Then I can filter out all the spammers who are signing up for your service with stolen credit cards, sending until you stop them, and then doing it all over again with a new account.

What, you didn't think of that?

</comment><comment><USER25> Weirdly, the pricing calculator doesn't appear on the linked page - but it does on the pricing page. (using FF 20, ubuntu)

I think some people might like plan limits, to cap their costs (so they don't accidentally run up a huge bill). It might be nice to have a separate option to also impose a limit. Though this is an extra complication and I'm not sure how many customers would actually want this, if any.

</comment><comment><USER26> Aside from the cringeworthy meme thing, the pricing seems really, really nice :D.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is awesome! I've been meaning to use mailgun for some small personal projects, but didn't want to pay to use my own domain. That's the biggest advantage of the change for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> These price changes make Mailgun much more expensive than Mandrill (especially for dedicated IPs). Mandrill also has inbound now, so I don't see the point of choosing Mailgun over Mandrill.

<comment><USER29> Also note that mandrill inbound is complimentary to customers right now ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is RAD. I love mailgun's service, and now I have even more reason to never use the built-in mail server on my *nix boxes for processing or sending mail.

</comment><comment><USER31> I had just switched to Mandrill after being unhappy with Mailgun for unrelated reasons. I'm tempted to switch back to Mailgun after this.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you're gonna promote your big pricing change, why not get closer, or, ideally, undercut your competitors (Sendgrid, Mandrill)?

</comment><comment><USER33> Why use a service like this in the first place when you can simply send out mail via a VPS?

<comment><USER34> Many email services block spammers / unknown senders, especially if you start sending hundreds of mails.

<comment><USER3> Do you happen to know how that works ? I never used a service like mailgun or mailchimp. Do they use IP addresses that are not being blocked by the email services ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The input box doesn't work with a French keyboard, nor copy/paste.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just changed my Plan... Now i am saving $66 per month.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is it just me or is it odd that after the free tier sending an e-mail is almost as much as letter postage?

<comment><USER38> huh?

$.50 per 1000 is... nowhere near letter postage.</comment></comment>


Valve sold 103,000 Index VR headsets after Half-Life: Alyx reveal - <AUTHOR> https://www.tweaktown.com/news/70249/valve-sold-103-000-index-vr-headsets-half-life-alyx-reveal/amp.html <comment><USER2> The main meat of the article seems to come from [https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/superdata-xr- update](https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/superdata-xr-update)

Which states:

> Valve sold 149K Index headsets in 2019. Sales more than doubled from Q3 to > Q4 (103K) thanks to anticipation for Half-Life: Alyx, which was announced in > November and is slated to arrive in March. The Index sold more units than > any other PC VR headset during the quarter despite a steep price of up to > $1000. It would have sold even more if not for inventory issues (the device > is currently sold out worldwide).

It's not hard to imagine gamers spending $1,000 USD for such a game changing (pardon the pun) piece of hardware. Being a gamer, it's not unusual to budget $1500+ for a build, and if this is truly the future of gaming, it's more than worth it to a lot of early adapters — especially for a new Valve game.

Anecdotally, I first remember watching a friend play Half Life 2. The combination of graphics, game mechanics, and gameplay led me to save all the money I could to buy a brand new computer that could handle it. Valve doesn't release often, but when it does it's so far been ground breaking and a total immersion of craftsmanship.

</comment><comment><USER3> At $1k per headset these numbers get interesting. And only 1 month of sales. I realize low margin, it's hardware and all, but $100m in headset sales in one month? Is my math right?

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it surprising, that Samsung Odyssey and other VR headsets did not make top 5 list despite much lower price. That actually makes me question reliability of this data.

<comment><USER5> The kind of person who purchases a system exclusively to play an unreleased game title, especially the latest in a series in over a decade and a half, is rarely concerned about the economics of their decision, they just want the best.

I've had friends with barely two pennies to run together buy new PCs, monitors, desks, and chairs on credit for little more than a slightly better play experience in anticipation of a release.

I'd wager that's even more true for half-life, since its fans are likely older and more established than Steams typical "hardcore" gamer.

<comment><USER4> I understand the uptick in Index sales because of that. But there are 4 other headsets listed, and somehow none of them are of the Windows Mixed Reality family. I am not even sure Oculus is in any way better than Odyssey. And the later does not come with its own stupid store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In other news, water is wet! I doubt anyone is surprised by how important the release-shy HL franchise is, but the real tsunami will come when the thing is real and independently reviewed.

<comment><USER7> Of course, short term, the quality of the game experience is going to determine the initial response in terms of Index and VR sales, but long term, the quality of the development tools is going to be a major factor, just like with HL2 and source. If the tools are easy to use, and allow for any mildly motivated individual to create original, unique, immersive, interactive, hands-on experiences (especially co-op or pvp multiplayer), it will truly be a new era of video game creativity.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Coin-op Web, a simple app to help you stop wasting time on the internet - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mistnim/coin-op-web <comment><USER2> This is a nice idea but wouldn't it be much more useful if it only disconnected you from a subset of the web (i.e. distracting websites) like SelfControl.app? You obviously need the web for productivity.</comment>


Firebug 1.5.0 Release Details - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getfirebug.com/2010/01/15/firebug-1-5-0/ <comment><USER2> For about a year, Firebug was horribly unstable for me. It seemed that each time they introduced a bunch of new features, the crashing, hanging, and erratic behavior (e.g. breaking at a line of source code far removed from the actual breakpoint) got worse. Happily, though, the last release before this current one reversed that trend. It didn't eliminate the problems but it did make them tolerable, which was a relief. I hope this one doesn't revive the previous tradition!

I think part of the problem is that FB wasn't designed to work with large (or even medium-sized) JS programs. We bundle all our JS into one HTTP request. It's a few thousand lines, which is big enough to cause FB noticeable trouble. A lot of the fancy features they've been adding are pretty useless to me; I wish they would simply make the console and the debugger rock solid. (And fix things like the horrible way they print arrays...)

<comment><USER2> Just to follow up on my earlier comment: so the new Firebug crapped out the very first time I tried to use it. I've already reverted to 1.4.

I don't understand this project. Serious web app developers are, I guess, not their target audience.

Edit: it's not like 1.4 works either. I set breakpoints and they just get ignored. Grrrrr.

Edit 2: so I resort to putting "debugger" keywords in my JS and Firebug breaks into the debugger at an entirely different source location. Grrrrr ^ 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been a big fan of firebug, even though I switched to Chrome I come back to firefox just for debugging.

No, web inspector is no match for on the fly css modification to tweak a color here and there, even editing html right there if you need it.

<comment><USER4> Yes! People always point out to me that Chrome has built-in powerful Web Inspector and I don't have to go back to Firefox to keep using firebug. Web Inspector _might_ be a powerful dev tool but firebug is very intuitive to me for quick look-ups on the source. I really hope they can do a full firebug port on chrome, this is the only thing that's stopping me from using Chrome exclusively. But I doubt this will happen, because Chrome extension frame work in its current form has limited functionality, unlike Firefox.

<comment><USER5> Have you (or the OP) tried Safari's (or better yet, a WebKit nightlies) Web Inspector? Its more powerful than the one in Chrome.

<comment><USER6> FWIW, Chrome dev channel's inspector is approximately equivalent to the one in webkit nightlies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They left out "Segfaults Firefox 3.5.7 on x64 ubuntu 9.10"

<comment><USER8> I had the same issue on x64 fedora 11, but found a workaround (although a bit annoying one). Delete the .mozilla directory and start firefox, install firebug, then it works. I tried messing with files left behind from the previous firebug individually, but couldn't find a specific culprit...

Annoying bug, this is just a temporary workaround.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just upgraded to this (Leopard 10.5, FF 3.5.7), and the feature I used the most is now borked. Right-clicking an element and selecting "inspect element", or expanding Firebug and expanding the nested child elements (clicking the arrow to expand the contents of the div > the form > the fieldset > the input) is now completely broken. Has anybody else had this happen? Any fixes you can recommend?

<comment><USER9> In case anyone hits the same problems I did, upgrading Firefox to 3.6 seems to have fixed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been 1.5a since 1.4 was released (or since I knew about it). 1.5 is mostly bugfixes. For my purposes 1.4 was completely unusable.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been using this since early beta. It's performance is worse than 1.3.x. The new features are miniscule at best. I happened to open an older VM the other day that was running FF3.0 and Firebug 1.2. I was shocked at how fast it was compared to the newer versions. I had forgotten. They need to stop worrying about new features and focus on speed.

<comment><USER12> why would they allow it it to become slower than it already is? It seems like they want more people to move away from firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> New features that I like:

\- Computed styles and DOM are now tabs when working in HTML

\- "Persist" buttons for both the Console and Net. I haven't tested it yet, but there have been many times where it would have been very useful.

</comment><comment><USER14> the html inspection (outlining) works a lot better than in 1.4. several of my sites had outlining way off in 1.4, very frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this release is better for debugging than using chrome? What do you recommend?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think? is wealth inequality a problem? - <AUTHOR> How would you fix it? what if corps just limited the amount founders and investors could own/make with a cap. <comment><USER2> It's not a problem.

A problem is when too many people are poor, not when too many people are rich.

<comment><AUTHOR> even if monopolies are stifling innovation? limiting consumer choice?</comment></comment>


My 2019 programming language hierarchy - <AUTHOR> https://labs.iamhamy.xyz/posts/2019-programming-language-hierarchy/ <comment><USER2> Mostly agree. My go to language is python. Used c# in last job and it improved much over past few years.

When I need blinding speed I can use nuitka to compile python scripts.

On the rare occasions needing speed and cross platform coupled with my lessons to avoid wasted effort I turn to Lazarus/fpc because code is simple and Lazarus takes care of the target platform stuff so I don't have to.

For IOT bare-metal stuff you can't go past C. It just works and after learning it's quirks you will see how other IOT tools are largely hacks or compromises to avoid learning C.

<comment><USER3> <rant> I think you're right that there's no viable alternative to C for IOT right now. However, I also think we need to collectively move past C in this space. The compile, run, debug cycle in embedded electronics is just too slow. I don't really mind the language, just the painfully slow development (and lack of package management). uPython and similar are a move in the right direction, but I think we need a minimalist crossplatform bytecode runtime to become standard on every popular embedded platform. This runtime needs frictionless c FFI (with the ability to seemlessly drop into c at any point, though it may require a recompile), and to be designed with embedded in mind. Actors and RPC should be first class citizens, as should remote inspection of systems over the wire, hotswapping running code, and the security needed to do those things safely (easy to get started with automatic self signed encryption). I think that every attempt at doing this so far is focusing on creating hobbyist boards for people who don't want to learn c instead of creating this ideal runtime with seemless c ffi (allowing easy adoption on new platforms), or is not lightweight enough to run on $4 chips like the ESP32. I think that most likely this platform will need to be written in c, and provide simple hooks for tying the networking libraries for individual boards together.

I was looking into building this for something my company needs, but then a Taiwanese company approached me about a low cost industrial modular linux device with hotswappable i/o they're developing. At this point I just shrugged and figured that seemed a lot easier than building a better wheel.

The thing is, I can use a $400 modular linux device because my market can bear it, but I was looking at developing the other set of features for inexpensive micros. Virtually every market can bear the cost of a $4 chip. </rant>

I apologize for the rant, it just physically pains me that this doesn't exist, and that embedded development is so primitive.

<comment><USER4> Actors, RPC, remote inspection, hot swapping, you're talking about Nerves right?

[https://nerves-project.org/](https://nerves-project.org/)

<comment><USER3> Nerves is too resource intensive, but that's the right idea. AtomVM is closer to what I'm thinking, except ideally I want static typing that's interoperable with C, and the readme for the project would be something like: Here is a bunch of C code with some functions you need to fill in. Compile these two files for your device, and fill in all of the second file's function bodies. We maintain versions of the second file for common boards. If you add a c function to the second file, our tooling allows you to call it from the runtime.

C FFI is really critical, as that allows you to use all the existing libraries on a given platform.

So, a runtime language with elixir/erlang features, but with the C FFI of Nim. But Nim is compiled, and we need bytecode for rapid iteration.

The challenge is that what is nearly universal right now is a c compiler, but the board is always different. S7 scheme has the right idea with a single c file, but is too resource intensive and wasn't built for embedded electronics.

There is definitely an unfilled niche for rapid embedded application development. We're either going to get a $4 RPi in a chip someday, or the platform I'm describing needs to be created. Those are the routes I see to embedded RAD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are we doing Tier-Lists on HackerNews now?

        S Haskell, Rust
        A Python, C, Go, Julia
        B Prolog, Assembly
        C C#, Java, C++, Scala, ML
        D Ruby, Groovy, R
        F LISP, XML, Bash, VB

<comment><USER6> I like your list.

Where do you put JavaScript? For me it's an F.

Python I think needs a distinction. It's an A for small projects that can be owned by a single person. But a C for projects large enough to warrant multiple developers. Dynamic languages don't scale without a huge amount of extra tooling.

The Python ecosystem gets a B. But the environment gets a D. [https://xkcd.com/1987/](https://xkcd.com/1987/)

<comment><USER7> Python can easily get a B for large projects if you use something like mypy. However sure, where the language really shines is as a substitute for scripts, so smallish pieces of code.

And environment... It is complicated. It is not that it is that bad, however it sure lacks some polish. The solution is not easy either since even if you solved the problem today (like using poetry), there is still the whole backwards compatibility problem.

There is various hacks to make things easier, however in the end the problem is still more complicated than it should.

<comment><USER8> > Python can easily get a B for large projects if you use something like mypy

I'm curious if that's actually true - my actual experience is that it actually suffers horribly in large projects because as the size and complexity goes up it's just harder and harder for its heuristics to not produce false positive typing errors. It worked great on a small library where it could see the whole source and everything was well annotated ... but that's sort of the context where it is least needed in the first place ...

<comment><USER7> Well, Instagram [1] and Dropbox [2] are probably the biggest Python projects in the whole world, and they both are using mypy and seem to be successful.

And my particular experience with it is very positive, even if my project that is using it is still small (it is getting bigger though, and mypy is really helping me to refactor it when I needed).

Most of the "false positives" that mypy reports to me end up being code that is overly cleverly, and rewriting it to make mypy happy also improves the code quality.

[1]: [https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2018/type- checked-...](https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2018/type-checked- python-at-instagram/)

[2]: [https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/09/our-journey-to- type-c...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/09/our-journey-to-type- checking-4-million-lines-of-python/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice list, I enjoyed it, and agreed on C#. I'm over my Python phase, I wouldn't use it for anything today for many reasons. Also agreed on Rust, the way I put it is that it's the "best programming language that I'll never use".

I haven't met a programming language that I hated, and find them all pretty similar. My ranking criteria is different as a result. Top metric is "keeping the lights on", then my second metric is what it enables me to (easily) do. My main technical requirement is that it has good tooling, well-supported (no breaking versions), and is fast, because software always gets extended and ends up longer lived than first intending.

I'm originally from a small city, and may one day return. C#/Java let me keep the lights on for decades going forward in any locale. I also don't have any complaints with those languages and their chosen abstraction layer, which I think Java nailed for most business applications in the 90s and the target hasn't been better hit since.

</comment><comment><USER10> > [Python is] fast enough for almost everything

That's a bold statement. Also I feel like he's missing a few cons for Python:

* The 2/3 mess (yes it is still a thing)

* The insane packaging situation. Packaging a Python app is a nightmare.

* Dynamically typed

And some extra cons for Javascript:

* The insane prototype system

* Basic things are broken and have never been fixed: ===, type coercion, still no 64-bit integers as far as I know.

* Dynamically typed

> Assembly: Too low-level. V verbose. Kinda confusing. I choose Python.

Lol when would your two options ever be assembly or _Python_??

Not a bad list though.

<comment><USER11> _> The 2/3 mess (yes it is still a thing)_

It's still a thing for the (loud) few who couldn't manage to move to 3 after 10 years. The rest just went on. The ecosystem is on 3 [0] and it has been for years now.

[0]: [http://py3readiness.org/](http://py3readiness.org/)

 _> The insane packaging situation. Packaging a Python app is a nightmare._

The packaging story in Python is in the middle of a big transformation from legacy tools to modern npm/yarn/cargo-like tools. pipenv [1] and poetry [2] are the most popular contenders. It will take a while until the community settles on this, but both tools work already.

[1]: [https://github.com/pypa/pipenv](https://github.com/pypa/pipenv)

[2]: [https://github.com/sdispater/poetry](https://github.com/sdispater/poetry)

 _> Dynamically typed_

Python 3.5 introduced type annotations. It is now possible to write statically typed code in Python via mypy [3], which from my experience works similar well as TypeScript works for JavaScript.

[3]: [https://github.com/python/mypy](https://github.com/python/mypy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am the same, but with Python and C# flipped, as my projects usually grow waaay beyond what can be comfortably sustained with Python. IMHO, refactoring tools are nice to have for anything beyond 1,000 lines, and a must for anything beyond 10,000.</comment>


Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market share needle - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/google-and-ibm-still-trying-desperately-to-move-cloud-market-share-needle/ <comment><USER2> The reason for IBM's failure is pretty obvious. Their old school bare-metal servers at Softlayer are a good value, but the need for bare metal is decreasing with IO improvements like SR-IOV and real hardware level virtualization (ex HVM on AWS). I've also heard IBM is running that division into the ground.

Their cloud offering sucks. Last time I was curious, I couldn't even figure out how much my server would cost. They're too used to old school contracts when I can easily setup a server with many providers in 5 min with $5 for a month. IBM has never been a commodity business, but nearly everything they sell is becoming a commodity.

GCP's problem, as far as I can tell, is too much "cute" shitty documentation. And their hatred for maintaining services on a reasonable timescale. Everyone I know, even outside of tech, has lost a Google service they loved over the years to neglect. See Golang package management for a notorious example in the devsphere. You can't maintain dependencies on old package versions. Wtf?

It seems to be common knowledge that Google's infrastructure is technically the most solid of any cloud provider. That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses

<comment><USER3> Completely anecdotally speaking - at a few enterprises, convincing customers to make use of GCP has been an uphill battle. I notice deep misgivings regarding the support timescales, and even for supported products, poor support in general (ymmv+++).

GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support.

> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can > build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how > software projects are done for non-technical businesses

Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and after some experience this resonates quite well.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non- technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, before they cloned most of AWS).

Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it.

We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along.

1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.

<comment><USER4> > Windows 95 in a VM

Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding edge, boys, bleeding edge.

<comment><USER5> Statistically a new software project - especially if done by a team with no common history of past successes - is risky.

So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the product from scratch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google has two big problems - developer relations and compliances.

Here's a very simple example - has anyone filed a ticket in Google cloud ? Well you cant, unless you are on an expensive tier of support. Even when you have one, it is super hard to file a ticket. They generally ask you to go to Google groups.

AWS and Azure ticket support is beyond awesome. Anything from issues with servers to billing. AWS has live chat support for 29$ per month. In India, the only way to get postpaid billing is through a local Google partner : Google will not do it. On AWS and Azure, it's a simple process after you hit a certain spend .

AWS Artifact is a brilliant self service tool for compliance. And I can't stress this enough - they do this country by country. They will issue digitally signed (for you) compliance documents for free. In fact, in India they went above and beyond and did specific compliance (using a big-4 consultancy) because of some regulatory changes that I highlighted.

I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service. Their entire sales org is broken.

<comment><USER7> You can go to [https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue- trackers](https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers) and open a ticket at the respective product public issue tracker without a paid support plan.

<comment><USER6> These are issue trackers. I'm not reporting a bug in Google. I want support on "how to do X" or "I purchased this reserved instance by accident, can I get a refund".

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. For questions, Stack Overflow is what they usually point to. Sometimes GCP staff logs on and answers, otherwise the community.

For the refund scenario, I found this: [https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve- issues](https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues)

You can also vent in their feedback widget within Console. To my surprise the product managers actually read it, and sometimes respond back for more information.

There's also a UserVoice forum to voice out feature requests for each product: [https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-goog...](https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-google- cloud-platform)

<comment><USER6> I also recently found out there is slack channel ! But look, this is not what people want. We are looking for a plain, vanilla, ticketing system that someone can respond to. GCloud does have it at the Gold level support.

So in my mind, GCloud is more figure-it-yourself-dont-call-us . AWS is more dependable. They have scaled their sales/devrel/support ops so that a small startup can access it.

Google only does this for the Snapchats of the world.

<comment><USER8> > We are looking for a plain, vanilla, ticketing system that someone can > respond to.

You definitely don't have to be Snapchat-sized to get access to the support console where you open tickets. The base plan is $100/m, which is admittedly more expensive than Amazon's $29/m but should give exactly what you're looking for.

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.

[0] [https://cloud.google.com/support/#support- options](https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-options)

<comment><USER6> ahh - it has actually gone down. About 6 months back, it was 150-200$ per month and before that it was always a percentage of spend. I just saw that the old gold/silver/platinum have gone away and replaced with role-based support options.

Thanks for highlighting that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Neither company is satisfied with that, of course. Google so much so that it > moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle > veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums.

> (...)

> Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of > salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page > straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.

I'm not an Enterprise IT expert, but looking from the outside, it doesn't seem like AWS and Azure got to where they are today by following that playbook...

My personal take on it is that AWS was first-to-market with a 21st Century- ready cloud offering (i.e. you could pretty much hear developers shouting "Yes, _THIS_ is what I'm talking about. Finally!") and Azure got to where it is by responding quickly and aggressively, with an additional pull for certain customers due to the synergy with MS / Windows, as well as being the next best choice for those directly competing with or not willing to sign up to Amazon.

If that's true, then unless Google / IBM can really differentiate themselves, they will always lag far behind. I don't know what other plans they have in store, but opening up Watson to other platforms or hiring an Oracle sales guy are not quite what I'd call differentiators.

<comment><USER10> Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable the massive .net/MS-SQL army. Initial attempts weren't great (Azure tables, branding changes) but they iterated fast and knocked it out the park.

Google is replicating Amazon now (after failing with app engine), but without the mindshare. Amazing because they are _the_ cloud story - many cheap computers rather than huge ones. App Engine hurt them so much they have a hell of a job to recover and now have to compete using someone else's playbook.

Right now, nobody gets fired for using Amazon.

<comment><USER11> > Azure was pretty late but their main fairly simple task was to cloud-enable > the massive .net/MS-SQL army.

I'd be interested to know about the number of:

* Linux based deployments on Azure * Windows/.Net based deployments on other providers

Basically I'm assuming that all the .NET crowd is hosted at Azure and the rest are being hosted on Amazon/Google/RedHat/Heroku.

If that assumption is true (even with 4-5% of room for error) the ~20% would be .NET's share on the backend.

Am I missing something obvious?

<comment><USER12> Azure is bought in the boardroom, not by the engineers and ops staff that will use it on a day to day basis.

When you have a $xx million Azure minimum commit that your C-level has already written a check for, you yell at your account team until they add Linux support and try to make due with what you have.

I've heard internal numbers that Linux VMs outnumber Windows 2-to-1, but that they see long term value in doing a "lift and shift" of existing apps, then down the road sell them consulting services to migrate to .net.

<comment><USER13> Actually Azure has a huge hook at the engineering level in that Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions come with $150 a month in Azure credit. It's very hard to avoid using when you just need to slap a quick demo online and need a server or DB and your in-house IT is away, it's all right there in the IDE... and then you're in hook, line, and sinker. So while there are C-suite level mega-sales, Azure has plenty of grassroots appeal.

<comment><USER14> That's actually a great point, Visual Studio becomes a distribution point for Azure client software and SDK's, meaning you potentially don't have to do any extra configuration the way AWS and GCP require.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am not surprised for IBM but Google could do a heck of a better job if they treated their customers a bit better. They suddenly make changes to their policies and don't care a bit while discontinuing services who don't update their products. I had two very bad experience with Google. The first was when Firebase was still a niche and we built our product on top of it. Then they made an update where certain features were deprecated in the tier that we were in. One fine day the product stopped working.

The second was a more recent one where our app was discontinued from their playstore because they updated their SMS policies. All their communication were landing to my Bulk folder. Even HN has some horror stories about their 'couldn't care less' attitude.

<comment><USER16> Let me guess: "the tier that we were in" was the free tier?

<comment><USER17> And it may well be that "the tier that we were in" was the free tier.

But my question would be why did Google enter a paying field with a free option, knowing full well it would kill off all those paying players, to only then kill their free option knowing all competition is now gone?

Google should not be offering up any service, free or otherwise that has a _use by date_ that is only known to Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand why Google doesn't woo silicon valley startups more aggressively. Gcloud is actually a pretty solid service, far more usable at varying levels of technical expertise. A lot of nice integrated tools for high end users (EC2/kub8/cloud console/etc) that gives AWS a good run for their money, and (gcloud web browser, web console, gcutils) for devs not that familiar with cloud tools that are _significantly_ easier to use than AWS.

It's a boon for startups that are being quick and scrappy and haven't brought on a cloud specialist but need to use the cloud to run things regularly.

But where are the 1 year's worth of free credits ads? Or the regular meetups to hand out cloud credits and give a tech talk and promote some startup? I'm not even talking about basic customer service and support, something Google is notoriously skimpy on (although probably mandatory to build developer relations). This stuff is key. If they captured a unicorn or so, and churned out the occasional semi-corn technical founder who advocates for a gcloud stack out of SV when they move to their next gig, they will have grow their market so much better.

It's mindboggling to me that with their resources and being based in MTV, and being the single largest corporate alma mater of SV technical founders, more startups here aren't being marketed to use gcloud.

<comment><USER19> Google has lost much of the trust developers placed in them, first of all by terminating products some of us loved [1] and also by terminating user accounts in an automated fashion with no way to appeal.

Imagine your business depending on Google Play Store, then getting your account banned due to some association with another account that supposedly broke their ToS, with no way to contact support, to appeal the decision or to even find out what the hell happened [2].

I mean, imagine that your spouse buys a Nexus phone, sells it [3] and your account gets banned via association, along with your right to publish apps or content on Play or to access your email archive.

And if you think this can't happen with a GSuite account, since that's supposedly the gold standard for their support, how about getting your entire company of 100-150 people banned [4]?

So the answer for me at least is that I have a trust issue with Google. No thanks, AWS has been around for longer, I haven't heard so many horror stories from them and if I'm feeling adventurous one day, I might try Microsoft's Azure, since they have actual support and without the history of shutting down products over night.

[1] [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

[2] [https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our- start-u...](https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-up- google-play-publisher-account-on-christmas-day-5cb69a454da0)

[3] [https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess- wi...](https://www.dansdeals.com/shopping-deals/google/dont-mess-with-the- google/)

[4] [https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_getting_google_to_ban_our_entire_company/)

<comment><USER20> FWIW, [4] appears to be at least unverifiable, since OP never posted again, and when support tried to reach out or find something that matched the listed details, they never heard back and couldn't find something that fit? [1]

(Not trying to claim that there's not a problem, just that the particular story seems to have a number of things that are suspect without further details.)

(I work for elgooG, not on anything Cloud or otherwise related to this, this is just my own $0.02, etc.)

[1] - [https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banne...](https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banned_an_entire_company_gsuite_accounts/dzcw5vg/)

<comment><USER21> The fact that it was a single, unconfirmed post and yet people still believe it may say more about the trust issue than whether it really happened or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Desperate? I'm not sure.

The total addressable market here is every non-local computational need.

That's trillions of dollars. For a market that is emerging right now, which already shows massive path dependency. So there's one time to win a slice. It can't be done later.

If I was Google's position, I wouldn't be running a profit. I'd be throwing every spare copper into Cloud to grab market share. I'd be giving away credits on street corners. Driving out at least IBM and Oracle by just drowning the market with data centre capacity. Buying my way into existing relationships. Finding folks in consumer-facing divisions who've trashed the brand ("how long until this service is canceled, ha ha ha") and pulling them up sharply. Doing whatever can be done.

I don't think Google really _gets_ , at the highest levels, that this is the first business they have that can truly diversify them out of advertising. They seem to see it as a nice extra source of cash, rather than an existential imperative.

But then, Google hasn't got the DNA to be afraid of existential threats. It's just not something they've dealt with since they switched on the cash pumps. Meanwhile, everyone else in this fight _gets it_.

<comment><USER23> Yes, it's been posited right here on HN years ago that GCP could dwarf their existing ad business and that gets clearer by the day. However the vision and momentum just doesn't match the opportunity.

It's especially strange that Amazon is now getting in the advertising business and is very quickly (in less than 2 years) posing a serious threat to some of Google's ad products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What this articles doesn't mention that much is that IBM and Google are both betting on catching the wave of containerization by following a somewhat similar strategy.

They're both focusing on a container-native, Kubernetes oriented and opinionated cloud. They're both heavily investing in Kubernetes development, AI integrated technologies and the results are visible in the quality of their container offering. Despite their reputation for obtuseness and lack of support, as an enterprise customer, we've had fantastic support, quick turnaround on issues and the actions taken on many of our feature requests.

As a developer, I've found GCP to be somewhat behind in features BUT man their documentation is good, and easy to use. Despite this article, I would bet big on Google Cloud. They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people. Maybe its due to Google Research? But I don't see them going anywhere soon and in fact, I do see them as the next iteration of AI-heavy, big data optimized and container native cloud (sorry, couldn't resist using all of the buzzwords).

<comment><USER25> > They may be late to the cloud, but they have some of the best people.

There's been plenty of projects filled with very smart people that have failed.

<comment><USER24> I think my comment mentioned a lot of reasons why they might succeed and not just because they're staffed with smart people. Cherry-picking a statement like this really adds no value to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r Google has always seemed actively hostile when it comes to support, since they don't like to leave any power in the hands of a human when an algorithm could do it more efficiently. Is cloud any different?

<comment><USER7> You can go to [https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue- trackers](https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers) and open a ticket at the respective product issue tracker.

To get more hand-holding support, it's the same as AWS, i.e. you pay for it: [https://cloud.google.com/support/](https://cloud.google.com/support/)

<comment><USER26> Hostile answer further discredits google support

<comment><USER7> How is this answer hostile?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Who even would use Google Cloud seriously? They have a shitty history of maintaining products after depreciation. No, 1 year is not enough. Once I've invested in your platform, minimum of 5-7 years guarantee is mandatory.

Too many horror stories to even think about moving there.

This is coming from an org which spends 10M/Yr on Azure/AWS.

</comment><comment><USER28> Cloud is where Google's reputation for killing products is really going to haunt it. Every time HN commenters complain about Google axing a service, there are lots of "you're making too big a deal about this, no one is leaving Google because they ditched Reader" responses, and for its consumer products that may be true.

But decisions about which cloud provider to use are made by C-suite executives, and they absolutely do look warily at Google, especially in comparison with Amazon (which makes basically all its profit from AWS) and Microsoft (which is obsessed with back-compat and keeping old products working as long as possible). Basic risk management and the huge cost of abruptly switching clouds will be the albatross around GCE's neck.

<comment><USER29> At startups and even medium sized tech companies, these decisions are often driven by engineering/ops teams and not by executives. I was on a team trying to decide between staying with AWS and moving to GCP about a year ago, at a company that spends well over $1M/year on infrastructure. The fact that Google has a track record of abandoning products with active users and has repeatedly shown they do not know how to deal with customers was absolutely part of the reason we decided to stay with AWS. I respect the engineering at Google immensely, and I would be willing to reconsider in a few years, but they need to prove their commitment first. They literally just killed another product today (Android Things)!

<comment><USER7> Looks like GCP needs to sorely address this (mis)perception, and ensure their commitments to GCP is separate from the consumer business.

But really, GCP is not the same as the consumer-facing products. GCP already has a lot of clout, and literally nothing I know in GCP has been deprecated/chopped just like that. GCP already has a huge following in its own right and it's very unlikely for GCP stuff to be axed, given how careful they are with implementing new features (I have interacted with numerous engineers, and often feature requests are taken with a lot of valid pushback to prevent feature creep).

<comment><USER30> I don't think you can fully separate business and customers. Google Maps? Google suddenly vastly increased prices.

This is something all cloud providers suffer from. What assurance do I get that pricing and quality of service remains stable? Amazon has the same problem. If I look into my billing console, I see an increase of used computing resources. From inactive projects. They still managed to use significant CPU-time. I would not be able to claim otherwise. As long as the costs remain low, this is not a problem. But you have to believe your cloud provider...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Google is betting on serverless, with products that are very developer friendly.

Firebase and the Firestore NoSQL database just out of beta are awesome products, and they are backed by Google Cloud. The ability to build a serverless application out with nearly no server code, with authentication, file upload and hosting built-in is awesome.

Plus we can have Node processes for any server code that we might absolutely need, like for signing Stripe payments.

<comment><USER32> If all you're doing is building web apps then that sounds pretty good.

Pretty certain any large enterprise cloud workload that gcp/azure/AWS is interested in is a lot more than that. Data warehousing, Kafka stuff, identity management, document storage etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Its incredibly hard to catch up. The following is a list of new major AWS functionality delivered just in the month of January:

[https://blog.clusterdyne.com/posts/new_aws_features_jan2019....](https://blog.clusterdyne.com/posts/new_aws_features_jan2019.html)

Two new services introduced and one in GA, plus multiple solid innovations like the Elastic Inference Predictors API. And this doesn't include roll-outs of existing services in new regions.

<comment><USER34> The amount of movement to Azure is staggering from AWS (if only from job postings and recruiters I speak to). There are a lot of businesses that do not want to fund their competitor (rightfully so), even if Azure is half baked (it is, but one desperately hopes it gets better if one is forced to use it).

Also, Office 365, Exchange, AD, Sharepoint/OneDrive, Flow, and other platform lock-ins are not to be discounted.

<comment><USER35> is there any cloud thats "fully baked" in comparison to AWS?

<comment><USER36> No cloud provider is fully baked, that included AWS. Every single one of them has their own set of drawbacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> A friend of mine at an old company who relied heavily on IBM (and paid for it) told me the story about how they were going to "get into the cloud stuff". They talked to their IBM consultant guy at a meeting about what they wanted to do and he told them what they were thinking of doing and he responded "well that will take a few weeks, they have to set it up".

Now it was possible their IBM contact was thinking of some sort of older managed hosting but he said they were talking about "cloud" for the entire meeting ... at that point it seemed IBM just thought of managed hosting as "cloud".

</comment><comment><USER38> There doesn't seem to be much information in the article. No actual numbers just:

> the market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get > a much bigger piece of the pie

In my circles people only talk about AWS and Google Cloud. I know there is going to be a massive segment of the market that just defaults into Azure because Microsoft .... but it seems to me that beyond that the race is pretty much over. IBM, Oracle all the others are not going to succeed beyond niche applications.

<comment><USER39> In my circles a lot of non-Microsoft people talk about Azure.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, same here. Microsoft seems to really change people's minds these days. Many of my friends disliked them, but now see them as a great option compared to AWS lock in. I think Azure has a strong offering, but that Portal UI, oh my...

<comment><USER32> Yeah the portal UI sucks. Anyone seriously using Azure is probably using az- cli, ARM templates, terraform etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing Google doesn't get is how big a deal it was to reject the DoD. Vast swaths of corporate America do business with the DoD. And a lot of people in DoD took the Prohect Maven backlash a bit personally. The general tenor of the conversations I have about GCp with these folks isn't "No, just flat no". It's "NO! Oh, hellll no!" The fact that they refuse to bump their FedRamp cert to cover DoD req'ts doesn't help.

I seriously doubt a company with any significant fraction of income tied to DoD is going to ever allow it to appear that they might have ever even considered GCP.

<comment><USER41> It seems very unlikely to me that google is not aware of this

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ginni Rometty was on Bloomberg the other day saying that Hybrid Clouds are a trillion dollar business and that IBM intends to be #1 in the market.

[https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty- hybrid...](https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty- hybrid-171405544.html)

I'm more than a little skeptical on their ability to execute on this, given that they've let a lot of their top-talent go.

</comment><comment><USER43> Oracle's cloud efforts are just a footnote even when compared to the "IBM Cloud". If Google thinks hiring somebody from Oracle is going to solve their problems, they are delusional.

They'd be better off picking somebody at random from one of the flyover states then sticking to the monoculture.

</comment><comment><USER44> Am I the only one that thinks IBM's acquisition of Softlayer did more to help Amazon than it did to help IBM? (or, more specifically, their mishandling of the acquisition)

Cloud isn't the big market, traditional hosting is. But cloud continues to grow. I thought the idea behind the Softlayer acquisition was going to be to try to funnel the much larger group of people who aren't ALL IN on cloud into some hybrid/cloud option.

<comment><USER45> "cloud isn't the big market" sorry lost me there

<comment><USER46> Not a native speaker, but it seems to me that they are not saying that cloud is not _a_ big market, but that the cloud is not THE big market, since THE big market is something else (bare metal?).

<comment><USER44> That's exactly what I was saying. Thank you. I think I'd agree that it's the fastest growing market. And maybe the one with the highest profit margins though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Related, seemingly contradictory:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud- pitch...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch-vs-aws- we-wont-compete-with-you.html)

<comment><USER36> This is one of the main reasons I am so highly confused why Netflix is so melded with AWS. When Netflix more or less made itself 100% AWS a year or two back, I was genuinely baffled.

<comment><USER12> > Netflix is so melded with AWS.

But it isn't.

Netflix core service (video streaming) runs entirely on hardware they produce that runs in their own datacenters and embedded in ISPs. Billing, account management, video transcoding, etc. happen in AWS, but all that stuff can go down and customers don't get that upset.

<comment><USER48> Video transcoding is particularly suited to the cloud. This sort if unpredictable load - new titles will pop up at odd intervals - is ideal for striking the balance between speed to market (you don't want to delay releasing new titles) and cost (having extra capacity for transcoding on the off chance you need it is expensive).

Spool up hundreds of servers when they need to get a new title out, and buy them at cheapish rates is pretty much what the cloud was built for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think by going the "enterprise playbook" route, with an Oracle guy no less, Google are ignoring the long tail at their own peril.

With the cloud market still relatively new, a lot of the adoption decisions, especially in small and mid-sized companies, are not made at C-level, but driven (directly and indirectly) bottom up from the technical teams.

And a major driver there is familiarity with the platform. And familiarity is driven by how easy it is to quickly set something up and play around with to see if it fits your needs. Even appeal for developers' private projects could tip the scales here.

And while Google isn't so bad on the technical end of this, they certainly are when it comes to signing up and to pricing. So, ultimately, AWS has a kind of bottom-up push that G can't match and certainly won't by playing the enterprise playbook.

Add to that their track record with killing services, and their generally less than approachable support, and it's no wonder they're single-digit.

</comment><comment><USER50> Lots of commenters here failing to recognize how much competition within consumer vertical plays here.

For years AWS _was_ the cloud, and the only viable option.

At the same time that traditionally non-technical (or at least not tech-first) companies are coming around to the idea of moving to the cloud, there are alternatives for the first time ever.

Amazon is now a major player in ecommerce, perishable/grocery _and_ digital media content (both delivery and production). Companies in those verticals are hesitant to move to AWS, some are already outright refusing. This is where the opportunity for competitors lies.

Edit: was mentioned, about 13 hours before I did [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149933)

</comment><comment><USER51> The "S" In GCP stands for support.

As a former App Engine user, steer clear of Google cloud.

(And I am aware that Amazon also has what to improve in support.)

</comment><comment><USER52> From a user point of view I much prefer AWS than Google Cloud (and I got used to the AWS names). Also as AWS is what basically everyone used, all the tooling is built mainly around it and sometimes support Google Cloud but it's not very well tested / supported. All that steams basically from being the leader by a vast margin.

<comment><USER7> Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is much simpler from a developer standpoint. AWS might have 20 tools to solve 20 problems, GCP has 5 tools to solve 20 problems (that's my observation).

The tools provided by GCP itself will help you get the job done. AWS never really clicked for me, terrible UI/UX, too many steps to get things done. GCP is the opposite when it comes to ease of doing most things. When I started using GCP, I had a "wow" and "aha" moment: this is how a cloud should be.

Give GCP a shot ;)

<comment><USER53> I played with both, and I think in terms of what's easier is probably which one you used first, although I must admit that they are constantly adding new services, so perhaps for people that are starting now might get confusing to know which are the core services and which are just extra. They should simplify their console to list just core stuff, and put the other stuff on separate page.

They have their own strengths and weaknesses. What jumped out to me is when I tried Google is I believe that Google has superior network infrastructure that lets them do some things that are hard to do in AWS, especially seamless integration of networking between regions, internal IPs also don't seem to be tied to individual zones etc.

On the other hand, some services are just awful. I tried Deployment Manager, and while looks like it is a nice design that makes it more powerful than Cloud Formation, it is still buggy. Seeing that I'm now not surprised that terraform is so popular. I don't think it is that much better compared to CF, but if you use DM you must be a masochist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm not sure if hiring an Oracle person will change much here. GCP lacks with features and is so focused on Kubernetes alone. Biggest issue with Google is support and lack of diverse options. I have never used IBM, so can't comment on their experience - but IBM always had good sales and consulting teams.

Maybe both should team up?

</comment><comment><USER54> Alternative interpretation: Google's Cloud is ridiculously large, but they occupy 99% of it with their own product.

</comment><comment><USER55> Hey google. You want people to use your cloud? Fix your documentation. It's abysmal. For example: 1) How do you use let's encrypt with google kubernetes engine? 2) How do you securely store secrets? Pretend you don't know and try to follow the documentation to figure it out. You can't because the documentation isn't geared towards solving specific problems. I have no idea what it IS geared towards, but it's not that. You will never win if people can't figure out how to do the things they need to do. Aws is arguably more expensive and in some ways less capable. But they will win simply because normal people can figure out how to do stuff.

</comment><comment><USER56> I have never been a fan of IBM but if you like open stack for dev ops then their BlueBiz service is nice, with a very generous free tier.

I have always favored GCP over AWS but Amazon does win in the customer support offered.

It will be interesting to see if Google invests in non-automated human teams for sales and support.

<comment><USER57> BueBiz? Do you mean Blue Mix?

<comment><USER56> Yes, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google's Customer perception problem is that it's too hard to use. (Fear of the unknown) IBM's is that people resent their history of broken promises and hype. (Fear of the known)

<comment><USER59> > They both suffer from opposite ends of Customer perception. Google's > Customer perception problem is that it's too hard to use. (Fear of the > unknown) IBM's is that people resent their history of broken promises and > hype. (Fear of the known)

Google has its share of broken promises around sudden product discontinuation, and account closures without recourse.

<comment><USER58> Fair enough. And that spoons businesses. I think the larger perception on them is that the technology generally works, it's the handholding that's missing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> IBM's Softlayer offers various Cloud options as well. I don't know how do they fare against other major Clouds however. I don't know about Google Cloud services, but AWS use a very unethical business model which lacks transparency. Most of their clients aren't warned that they will end up paying a high data transfer fees on "Data Transfer Out".

Our experience with Azure is a bit better, but they are still more expensive than any average cloud. Our company uses cloud infrastructure service with a smaller cloud - [https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public- cloud.html](https://www.hostcolor.com/cloud/public-cloud.html) \- and they are pretty good and inexpensive, compared to the major clouds, in terms of technology (VMware Cloud computing) and in terms of cloud storage.

</comment><comment><USER61> Wait. AWS only has 32% market share? That is way less than I would have guessed.

<comment><USER62> 32% of `cloud` marketshare. Cloud includes things like Salesforce's SaaS, Oracle DB in the cloud, Office 365, gSuite, ...etc.

I'm sure if you look at Compute, Storage, and Networking cloud spend, AWS has a much higher marketshare.

<comment><USER61> Okay yeah, that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> IBM needs mainframes collocated with cloud data centers if it wants to stay relevant. CA is legit in the CAP model, but you need sane latency to other systems.

</comment><comment><USER64> what about Oracle/Alibaba clouds?

<comment><USER65> Fun fact: Aliyun (Alibaba cloud) has more revenue than GCP

<comment><USER66> So I just took a look at their offering and was shocked to see just how many services they offer. Way more than I had anticipated for a provider I don't really hear too much about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> why they are not capable enough to move for that?

</comment><comment><USER68> Google is the only (major) cloud provider to suffer global service outages (AWS and Azure have only ever had region-wide outages). They have done so more than once, and they have no notable blog posts that ever explain how they will mitigate it in the future. That's enough from my perspective to never recommend them to any customer that ever needs region redundancy.

From my experience of being a cloud middle man the only industries left that haven't already migrated to the cloud are the ones that have burdensome regulatory and compliance burdens. From that perspective MSFT is winning. They try the hardest to get all the qualifications, certs, and partners that make Medicine, Finance, and Auto feel safe. Are they the best cloud? Probably not, but they are poised to take what's left of those who haven't ventured into the cloud yet.

<comment><USER69> What global outage do you mean ? I havent seen one for 1y of using it meanwhile office 365 just scored a global outage recently</comment></comment>


Setting up analytics for our bot with Botkit and Keen IO - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ngardideh/tracking-conversations-with-botkit-and-keen-io-63a9209a12da#.icyg61uwv <comment><AUTHOR> Was interesting to see a company take over a community open source initiative.</comment>


Amazon ElastiCache - Distributed In-Memory Caching - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/amazon-elasticache-distributed-in-memory-caching.html

<comment><USER2> The nice thing about memcached is it's _reliably_ fast. I wonder how amazon's version compares. Looking forward to the inevitable blog posts that graph response time of elasticache over the course of a day.

Seems like a good service to offer though. Most sites can benefit from memcached or something similar.</comment>


ForwardTacotron: Simplified Tacotron for fast and robust Speech Synthesis - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/as-ideas/ForwardTacotron <comment><AUTHOR> They have release it ope-source and here you can find:

Samples: [https://as-ideas.github.io/ForwardTacotron/](https://as- ideas.github.io/ForwardTacotron/)

Github: [https://github.com/as-ideas/ForwardTacotron](https://github.com/as- ideas/ForwardTacotron)

Colab: [https://colab.research.google.com/github/as- ideas/ForwardTac...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/as- ideas/ForwardTacotron/blob/master/notebooks/synthesize.ipynb)</comment>


Database exposed 267M Facebook users' phone numbers, names - <AUTHOR> https://mobilesyrup.com/2019/12/19/database-exposed-267-million-facebook-users/ <comment><USER2> Not again. But this time 267M more users exposed with phone numbers, names and more. Enough for telespammers to litter everyone involved with their rubbish.

If this had a portion (It probably does) of several EU users in this breach, then this essentially creates another GDPR bill for FB.

Glad I never signed up to Mark Zuckerberg's website.</comment>


A Twitter bot to generate Boaty McBoatface names - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jacebrowning/mctweetyface <comment><USER2> Boty McBotface is perfect</comment>


Available for design work - <AUTHOR>

Hi Hacker News. I just received a ticket to attend WWDC through the Apple student scholarship. I'm in a tight situation with funding transportation, so I'm available for design work. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you need anything done, rates are flexible - http://joek.dunked.com <comment><USER2> There is a semi-oficial "Who is hiring / freelancing?" post appear the first day of each month. Next edition is tomorrow. You should post your info there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! I definitely will, thanks for the heads up!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's Your Experience with Cloudflare Registrar? - <AUTHOR> Anyone used or have comments on Cloudflare Registrar (https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/)?
I dislike commingling any internet related services when it's not necessary but zero markup on the TLDs that they support is quite compelling. As an example, the renewal price for .com or .org domains is about $7 cheaper per domain/year than anyone else I've seen (specifically for renewals, not new registrations). Across a decent number of domains that adds up.
Anyone here with negative experiences, gotchas with the setup, or a reason to avoid switching?
Note that there's no intention of leveraging any of their firewall / protection services. This is purely to save money on the annual scamola of domain renewals. <comment><USER2> Lots of user experiences in this HN thread from 5 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19452391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19452391)</comment>


China's Xi could rule for life, as two-term limit set to be scrapped - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/with-a-dash-of-putin-and-an-echo-of-mao-chinas-xi-sets-himself-up-to-rule-for-life-/2018/02/26/ddae5e3e-1ad7-11e8-8a2c-1a6665f59e95_story.html?utm_term=.6e9b977fc2ef <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457998)

</comment><comment><USER3> Once again it seems to me that Ai Wei Wei's quote about China is pertinent:

"Can China be a global power? I don't think so. It can gain an advantage, that's true. But it doesn't have soul. It doesn't have heart. It doesn't trust its own people. So it has no self-identity in the sense that it has never accepted human rights as common values. No freedom of speech, no independent judicial system. If those don't exist, how can you have creativity? How can you be a country? So forget about China. China is an illusion. It's there, it's large. But nobody can tell you what it is."

We live so much with representational democracy - so close to it - that we take it entirely for granted. We imagine that our situation would be somehow replicable with other forms of government. That we could have a benign autocracy and everything could be the same. People talk about China as if they're just a slightly different version of us. But instead of a mirror or an aspiration they ought to be a warning.

<comment><USER4> "It doesn't have heart. It doesn't trust its own people. So it has no self- identity in the sense that it has never accepted human rights as common values. No freedom of speech, no independent judicial system."

All of this was true of the USSR and yet it was a global super-power for half a century.

<comment><USER5> It was a military super-power, yes, but that was about it. With the possible exception of having some great classical-style composers, it otherwise was not an inspiring country. You sided with them to have big weapons on your side, not for any other reason.

<comment><USER4> It also inspired half of the world and had a massive cultural, artistic and sports influence across the whole world. Space program that was well ahead of the US for a good period time.

Classical composers as you mentioned, literature (Russian realism), opera & ballet. Russian academies in those areas are still considered the best in the world.

<comment><USER5> There was a brief period from about 1957 to 1965 where they seemed to be gaining steam; but other than that, it was mostly other dictators that tried to emulate and/or side with them, not general populations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if WaPo changed the headline or if this was an attempt to shorten it for HN, but the article currently has "could rule for life" rather than "to rule for life."

The latter may well happen, but at least for now, it's only the former.

<comment><USER7> We really won't know until Xi dies in office. Seeing as the NPC is just a rubber stamp congress, there are no other checks and balances on the core leader's power except what happens between old men in smoky rooms. What will happen is entirely opaque.

<comment><USER8> > _We really won't know until Xi dies in office._

We would also know if he is replaced 5-10 years down the line while still very much alive.

<comment><USER7> Sure, I was talking about the if true happens case.

<comment><USER9> It's at least true for the foreseeable future that he'll be the leader. Just like you don't know if a current relationship will persist through the end of your lives until one of you dies. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't really understand why power obsessed people don't seem to recognize that at some point retirement is graceful. (Thinking of Robert Mugabe, for example.)

<comment><USER11> Fear that the new power won't overlook the misdeeds they (the old power) undertook while in power.

<comment><USER12> I've heard someone say that Putin is at the same time the ruler and prisoner of Kremlin for exactly this reason.

<comment><USER13> I've read something that Yeltsin resigned to Putin in exchange for forgiveness, whatever that entails: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin#Resignation_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin#Resignation_2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Paywall someone wanna translate?

</comment><comment><USER15> good thing - he will be able to finish all planned his reforms

<comment><USER16> That presumes that his planned reforms are in fact a "good thing". That's possible. It's possible that they aren't, too... and, if that turns out to be the case, nobody can stop him.</comment></comment>


Increase FiOS upload speed to match download - <AUTHOR> http://www.verizon.com/home/MLP/myrewards.html

<comment><AUTHOR> If you join the Verizon rewards program, they change your upload speed to match your download speed for free. It took less than a day. It was probably instant, I just checked about a day later. (I don't work for Verizon)</comment>


Show HN: Resyum.com – No nonsense online resume maker - <AUTHOR> https://www.resyum.com

<comment><USER2> Nice.

Couple of suggestions:

* would be nice to be able to export to other formats so that I could send this as email attachment to someone not as link

* When you edit anonymously and then login you loose all things you put there earlier, would be nice to keep resume state from the phase before login after login

* why not allow people to edit headings? For example some user could rename Key Skills / Achievements to something else

* Tips from google docs seem amateurish and probably not necessary, you give people cool app to edit resume, this is great even without extras

* Samples look like good idea, more samples would be even better, dividing samples by topic, specialization etc would also be cool, for example "resume of senior dev", resume of junior dev, etc</comment>


Guy Kawasaki's Newest Venture: Truemors - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/03/guy-kawasakis-newest-venture-truemors <comment><USER2> I was actually just thinking yesterday about how woefully inadequete local area webforums tend to be. All the right people still seem to have their nose in a newspaper (or are working for one).

I didn't come up with a good way to solve the problem. Maybe this is an attempt to do that.

<comment><USER3> I agree, forums as a whole are inadequate. I think sites like Chowhound.com have done an incredible job at brining an interesting perspective on forum interaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am kinda disappointed in this from initial descriptions. Guy's writing seems to want to inspire people to change the world. I guess I always associated this with in positive way not in a crappy myspace way.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it me or does Guy remind you of the guy who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad?

</comment><comment><USER6> Pink is the new Kawasaki.</comment>


How to make $800/mo from three lines of code - <AUTHOR> http://jmduke.com/blog/2013/12/6/how-to-make-800mo-from-three-lines-of-code

<comment><USER2> That's a very programmer way of looking at it. People don't pay for highlighting, they are paying for more traffic from an ad. Ultimately, they are paying for all the other stuff on the website that gets people to show up, view ads and click on them. I guess the point is revenue != labor, but you should mention why this is possible in this case.

<comment><USER3> What you say the article is missing is the whole point of the post. This is not a programmer way of looking at it on the whole. In fact, I think the goal of this post is to change programmers "way of looking at it'". 'this is only three lines of code' is a programmer's viewpoint. But it is only a hook into the post to grab programmers and then the post goes on to shift to a practical, business viewpoint. (this post changes the programmer's view point who reads the post)

In terms of

'People don't pay for highlighting, they are paying for more traffic from an ad Ultimately, they are paying for all the other stuff on the website that gets people to show up, view ads and click on them.'

Uhhh dur. And the post even addresses this:

' There are a lot of lessons one can learn from this anecdote: the art of the graceful upsell, the underlying value of 37Signal's brand/traffic that lets them charge $200/month for a glorified <li> element. '

Note, "the underlying value of 37Signal's brand/traffic".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can pay $1M for just two lines of delta:

          House address: 123 Main Street
        - Owner: Joe Previous
        + Owner: You

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually, without significant traffic volume which means customers willing to pay for highlighted listing the three lines of code would not by themselves produce $800/month in value. This is like saying that a movie theater can make $1,000 more in 2 seconds by changing the popcorn price. It's all about having a large audience first, then small changes can have a significant impact.

<comment><USER6> Of course. That was the entire point of the article, to point out that you should not use technical difficulty as your primary data point for setting your selling price.

The author purposely picked out an example where the technical difficulty was trivial to illustrate that the value to the customer is _NOT_ related to the technical difficulty of the feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article author makes an important point. The value of your product or service to a customer often has little if anything to do with the prices and investments you made to create it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, it's not only 3 lines, you need the code that adds the class to the elements

But it's an interesting analysis of value through the chain.

Whoever payed for the highlight, funnily enough is going to end up spending _more_ since it's going to hire earlier than the others (in principle, on average)

But they expect the $50 to pay for itself on the longer term

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, I feel like I instinctively ignore blocks with a different coloured background because they appear as being ads, so it may actually produce the desired effect (by reducing the number of applicants).

<comment><USER10> It's not just ads, but anything that visually sets itself apart from the rest of the content on the page. This includes sidebars next to articles and even headings at the top of the screen, if they look too different. It's called banner blindness [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness) I had to deal with it in a product where the current location was shown in a purple tab at the top of the screen. Users would consistently get lost because, even when looking for location cues, they never read the text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well yeah, 3 lines of front end CSS. But there's a bit more back end logic that goes into it. But I do like the concept of relatively small yet profitable changes.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's a lot more than the 3 lines of code suggested. It's still very very small, only a few hours work, but it's not a 3 minute, 3 line change.

And in reality, that $50/month price may rise in order to keep the number of highlighted lines infrequent enough to still stand out.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's like wondering how much would it take to replace the three letters: "TIM" with letters "ROL" on a device?

$5,000-10,000+

Do the exercise and share the results.

The keyword is: "TIMEX"

</comment><comment><USER14> Bit sensational though, it's not just those 3 lines. You'll also have to add the option to the sign up form, bit more overhead in testing, etc.

It's not just 3 lines is what I'm trying to say.

</comment><comment><USER15> But it is for the 'business concept', and not for changing code customers are paying. Code is already written, it is just a matter for switch-on and switch- off ... which is again max. 3 minutes job.

How many times companies sell same product? They are not rewriting the code, just sending you a copy - zero effort

</comment><comment><USER16> 3 lines?

What about the lines of code in order to control the feature? Code to charge customers who use the feature? Running analysis to test different shades of the color and how well they perform? What about time spent on the phone and sending emails answering questions from prospective and current customers?

<comment><USER17> I think you missed the point. The point is that although it's technically very easy to 'highlight some job postings on the list, that simple upsell can generate hundreds of dollars a month.

This was not intended to be a literal guide on how to make $800 in 3 lines of code.

<comment><USER16> _How to make $800 /mo from three lines of code_

The title was just link bait then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You are missing the whole point. What they are selling is people's attention. And they have it. If I did the same thing even for free, I doubt I would get as much hits as they do. Once you have people's attention then you can try stuff like this. This is a pretty stupid post. Honestly. It lacks a point.

<comment><USER6> Did you read the entire post? It ends with:

> But the most important lesson -- and the most easily digestable -- never > confuse technical difficulty for demonstrated value.

<comment><USER18> I did. And that is exactly why I say there is no point to the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When browsing the ads on [http://weworkremotely.com](http://weworkremotely.com), I have to force myself to read the highlighted listings, otherwise my brain just ignores them.

I guess it's the product of years of ignoring the ads on Google.

<comment><USER20> I wonder if that makes you more conscious of them.

I'm thinking about a study cited in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow[1] where the participants did better on a test when the questions where in a blurry font. I believe it was suggested that being forced to exert mental effort to read the questions forced their brain into "actual thinking mode" as opposed to "pattern recognition" mode.

ie. If we know it's probably not an ad, but it looks like an ad, is it a more effective bit of non-ad? (well, it is an ad, but it's an ad we want to see.)

[1][http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel- Kahneman/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel- Kahneman/dp/0374533555)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The point of the article is that small technology changes can provide disporportionate value to the customer and your company (The best types of changes to make) and most commentors still feel it necessary to mention that its not _really_ 3 lines of code.

</comment><comment><USER22> Clearly, this is something that people pay money for, and that counts for something. I never would, though. It looks like a losing game to me. Surely there are more interesting, compelling, inspiring ways to reach out to people?

</comment><comment><USER23> Step 1: Be as well known as 37signals

Step 2: 3 lines of code

Step 3: Profit

</comment><comment><USER24> There are probably a few profound lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs and developers somewhere in this find, beyond it's profitability.

</comment><comment><USER25> Google makes _billions_ with highlighting text on a yellow background. Not sure how many lines of css it took them, however.

</comment><comment><USER26> And if everyone starts paying to highlight their ads, then those that don't pay will stand out.

<comment><USER27> May I paraphrase patio11 ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4477088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4477088) ) ...

If everyone want's to highlight their add, then double your price. If everyone still want's to highlight their add, then double your price again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't understand why it is currently #1 on HN. In newspapers it surely doesn't cost them much more to put your ad in bold. Probably less than a cent. But hell yeah they will charge in the thousands if the newspaper happens to be WSJ weekend edition real estate section.

Obviously, you pay for the amount of eye-balls seeing that ad. Changing the color may result in thousands of people more seeing the ad. The cost is in the know-how to get these thousands of eye-balls to see your content. Not for the color.

Without a platform as hugely popular as 37-signals the programmer could change colors all day long on his 'localhost:3000' and that wouldn't be worth $800. That would be worth $0.0.

The premise of the article is completely false.

<comment><USER17> I thought the article was just trying to make a point about charging based on how much work it takes vs charging what people will pay.</comment></comment>


Manufacturing Porn (SFW) - <AUTHOR> http://manufacturingporn.com/

<comment><USER2> Be sure you do not post to Facebook because it contains words like "nuts" and "screw", but (should be) totally SFW. It actually is about manufacturing.</comment>