Ask HN: Sales Lead Generation Best Practices? - <AUTHOR> What's been your most effective/ineffective Sales Lead Gen effort:  Marketing (automation platform, or Old School Cold Calling/Cold Emailing? Others? <comment><USER2> We're in an antiquated industry (oil & gas) providing a B2B data-subscription service, so this may or may not be relevant. I've seen similar methods work for B2B direct services in manufacturing, and in B2B and B2C product development services as well.

Anywhere we can find up-to-date titles on executives in organizations is very effective for leads generation. Linkedin, Manta, Businessweek biz listings, or ASKINT (cold-call with sole intention of finding out "who's in charge of XXX", build the lead and get the name only for concentrated calls later) all have been effective. We have identified companies of a particular genre previously, and targeted particular titles in those orgs. I personally like running a Manta scraper and vetting results by hand with Linkedin to confirm current titles. I strongly suggest getting Rapportive for Gmail for snooping networks associated with email addresses. If you want to get really snoopy, Maltego is a great tool for looking for connections elsewhere on the web.

We have also found trade-shows to be fairly effective at having companies self-identify as needing our service and providing contacts that you have early rapport with to help you find your guy in their company. More effective for bigger business development deals (which can distract as much as help, in my experience), but was moderately successful for us.

Bonus of tradeshows: company listings of all the competitors. Generally these will be great lead-list starting material that you can vet down to be high- quality leads (again, in our industry)

<comment><AUTHOR> Kudos-- much appreciate your insights into the B2B Sales Lead Gen space! Follow up question: are there any authors, thought leaders, or bloggers on this subject you like to follow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We are trying two approaches which may or may not work for you considering we are still in process:

* We select a niche say Cloud Hosting Providers, we then make a personalized yet generic landing page which contains placeholders for the name of the person we are going to cold call/email and his company. Once we contact them we also send them the URL which seems personalized and thus increases the chances of conversion or at least better response. Change the name of the person and company name and you have yet another landing page for a different company.

* Make a short 1-2 min video and clearly explain what's in it for them if they take up your product. Video should be made preferably by the CEO. Upload it to youtube and make it private. Send out the link to the concerned person.

These two tactics can be accommodated in many different scenarios so keep your mind open if you try them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts! How do you initially connect with your target customer phone or email?

<comment><USER3> Depends. I prefer email because it feels less intrusive. Moreover it's easier to tag a URL in email. If you're going to have a call, you would anyways have to send them an email later on, with the link.

Contrary to what I said above if you have good convincing skills, you should have a call first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It very much depends on current situation of your company, but general good resources:

MarketingProfs - Outbound is most effective way of lead gen [http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2013/12161/b2b-lead- gene...](http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2013/12161/b2b-lead-generation- trends-for-2014-whats-hot-and-whats-not)

Aaron Ross [http://predictablerevenue.com](http://predictablerevenue.com)

Steli Efti [http://blog.close.io/how-to-develop-a-first-sales-process- fo...](http://blog.close.io/how-to-develop-a-first-sales-process-for-your- company)

<comment><AUTHOR> Much appreciate the links, all NEW to me... thank you~!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cold mailing (snail, not electronic) has worked for me in the past. Hand- written letters converted way better than printed, IME (I used an online service to get them written, since my handwriting is terrible).

One of my favorite tricks was to include something slightly heavy in the envelope (I've used keys and pairs of dice), with enough weight that it would be delivered as a "package" rather than a piece of normal mail. This makes it stand out from the rest of their mail, it's a practically guaranteed open. You tie it into your letter copy somehow: "unlock the potential of the web" or "don't roll the dice with your website". It doesn't matter if it's corny, it sticks out in peoples' brains, and they'll probably call.

You can get miscut keys for free at Walmart, Home Depot, etc, just ask for them. It helps if you bring a kid and say they need them for a school project (or if you can't find a kid, the employee will most likely sell a good number of them to you for $5-$10).

Another tactic I've used with varying success is to have 3-4 fake LinkedIn accounts (grow them for a few months before you start), and then when you have some cold leads (you should be connected to them via your real account), start using the accounts to tell people they really need to upgrade their website (one every few days or so). Roughly a week after the last message, hit up the lead with your real account and let them know that you're running a special deal on a full website redesign, and that you're starting out with your LinkedIn network since there's limited availability. This one netted me 4 contracts in a month a little over a year ago, with maybe a total 15 hours of work (creating and growing the accounts was the most time-consuming part, and I still have them if I ever wanted to repeat it).

Finally, one sales tactic that I've always wanted to use (but haven't gotten around to using yet), is to suit up and rent a Lamborghini for a few hours, and drive around town making high-pressure, high-profit deals. "You could have a car like this", etc. Who's going to say no to a handsome guy in a sharp suit with a Lambo? Make as many deals as you can and then return the car. No clue if this would actually work, but it sounds like a lot of fun :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hand-written snail mail letters-- I like it, Old School!</comment></comment>


Love Your Bugs - <AUTHOR> http://akaptur.com/blog/2017/11/12/love-your-bugs/ <comment><USER2> If you like bug postmortems like this you may also enjoy the Jepsen presentations by @aphyr. A video summary is available here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSaFVX4izsQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSaFVX4izsQ)

and if you want to get into the weeds with any of them these are largely published publicly on aphyr.com; see for example:

[http://jepsen.io/analyses](http://jepsen.io/analyses)

There's a lot of "oh, here's how this dirty read from the underlying system became a much bigger bug in the system we built on top of it!" but what I like most about Kyle is that he is generally pretty great about having an attitude of "these are actually really hard problems and it's not surprising that there are implementation bugs when you let me mess with the clocks and cut off nodes and whatnot."

<comment><USER3> Also, u/luu started a list of interesting bug post-mortems. It hasn't been updated in awhile but contains a lot of the classics (many which have made the rounds on HN):

[https://github.com/danluu/debugging- stories](https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really doubt they were legitimate bit flips and not just software bugs, to be honest.

The likelihood that you've seen multiple flips on the same piece of data .. sounds like a typical threading bug.

<comment><USER5> Let's run through the likelihood of seeing multiple flips on the same piece of data.

Google's research [1] finds a DRAM error rate of "25,000 to 70,000 errors per billion device hours per Mbit" on hardware in "modern compute clusters." If there are 100 million Dropbox clients out there, Dropbox clients should encounter 2,500 to 7,000 errors per Mbit per hour, though factoring in the "low-end or old hardware" that many Dropbox clients are running on, the error rate is probably somewhat higher. For the sake of making the math simple, call it 10k errors per Mbit per hour, or 1 error per 100 bit-hours. So a given bit should flip on some user's machine on the order of once a week. That seems pretty firmly in the range of "sometimes we see these weird errors that we don't really understand," especially if you multiply by the same error potentially coming from different parts of the program (so "the same piece of data" is really "a few pieces of data that get collapsed together for purposes of analysis).

Your intuition that a "typical threading bug" is much more likely than a random bit flip is spot on, but that actually works in favor of the "random bit flip" thesis. On the Dropbox scale, a threading bug/race condition would typically show up as a significant, persistent issue, several orders of magnitude more common than the random oddball errors described in the article.

[1]

<comment><USER4> Citation is missing. Thanks for doing the math, very interesting, but I'm still very skeptical! The paper says they observed bit error rates "order of magnitudes higher than previously reported" so should we expect 1 error per week or 1 error per 10 or 100 weeks?

<comment><USER5> oops: [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35162.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Bitflips are real!_

And yet some people still claim that they don't need ECC memory.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good article, although I'm a bit surprised at the difficulty the author proposes for rolling back the log bug. Why not simply serve 500s to 95% of your clients? That way, you get logs sent to you gradually.

<comment><USER8> I think they expected it wouldn't have much effect, since the client was also updated to delete the old (corrupted) log. Because the logs were always deleted after a success, and updates started with the oldest, the corrupted log would necessarily become the oldest.

By the time the DDoS was in effect, the corrupted logs had been deleted by the client. They would now always succeed (even with the old server code, or old client code) until they got a new corrupted log.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I'm saying that they could have just served 500s to clients (even ones with regular log files), which would have backed off and retried later. Essentially what the "chillout" method does too, but it doesn't sound like the author had considered it.

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing the answer is that inserting a feature to serve 500 to a fraction of the incoming requests would have required a similar amount of effort as just enabling the chillout feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't agree with all the "growth" and "fixed" categorization. Intelligence is fixed, that's pretty much a fact (see all research about IQ etc.). What isn't fixed is your state and knowledge in the process of solving a problem. It has nothing to do with intelligence.

This is the equivalent of talking about cars engines, and how some can get to higher speed than others, when in the end of the day you can probably reach your destination even with an old car engine, that can only drive and accelerate relatively slowly. It didn't magically improve/grow so you can reach your destination. You reach it because you kept the car moving.

</comment><comment><USER11> My take on why bugs are good for us (mostly because we learn from them):

[https://henrikwarne.com/2012/10/21/4-reasons-why-bugs-are- go...](https://henrikwarne.com/2012/10/21/4-reasons-why-bugs-are-good-for- you/)</comment>


The Pi Zero Simpsons Shuffler: Push the Button to Play a Random Simpsons Episode - <AUTHOR> http://stephencoyle.net/the-pi-zero-simpsons-shuffler/ <comment><USER2> These are impossible to get and the people who are getting them are using them for stuff like this? No disrespect to Stephen but I'd love to see some ambitious projects using the PI-Z outside of dedicated movie players and Game Boy emulators.</comment>


Google wants to run cities without being elected. Don't let it - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/24/google-alphabet-sidewalk-labs-toronto <comment><USER2> The city and Waterfront Toronto have not abdicated anything, as reported by the CBC:

 _" They have no permission to build anything," said Coun. Paula Fletcher, who has been heavily-involved in plans to redevelop the nearby Port Lands.

Fletcher says she's looking forward to seeing the ideas Sidewalk comes up with following a year's work and a series of public consultations, but warns they'll be held to a high standard. "It has to be good enough for Toronto. And it has to meet certain standards as far as jobs and land use are concerned," she said. _

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs- toronto-...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sidewalk-labs-toronto- development-1.4365431)

<comment><USER3> "It has to be good enough for Toronto."

As a Toronto resident: I guess this means begin construction and then don't do any work for 5 years, all while burning through city funds.

<comment><USER2> Well, at least Sidewalk Labs is putting some money behind it. Mentioned in the linked article, and also in The Toronto Star: _Doctoroff said his company will spend $50 million on a yearlong discussion, starting at a Nov. 1 public meeting, with citizens, governments, universities and others, about what the project dubbed "Sidewalk Toronto" should be._

[https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google- fir...](https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google-firm-wins- competition-to-build-high-tech-quayside-neighbourhood-in-toronto.html)

I've attended some of the other consultations hosted by the city planning department, and I agree their timelines are epic. It was good however to engage with neighbours I wouldn't otherwise and hear differing opinions. I can understand why it can take so long when engaging with the general public, land redevelopment can be very divisive.

The town hall meeting is November 1st if you're interested in participating:

[https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/sidewalk-toronto-community- town-...](https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/sidewalk-toronto-community-town-hall- tickets-39231506492)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has the author seen Toronto's eastern waterfront? It's the ugliest part of the city. A friend of mine said that much of the soil there is polluted and a ton of money will be needed just to clean it for residential purposes. I have been rowing there for a couple of years and I'm happy that they are revitalizing the area.

Here's Google street view of the area: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-79.3348222,3a,75y,340...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-79.3348222,3a,75y,340.34h,84.12t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1stKZ- Qn_l0sacgjFZiBQsCQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

<comment><USER5> I feel for you, but that's a civic responsibility, not a corporate one.

Civil governments are created with _goal_ (yes I know it's imperfect) of providing access to resources equally. Corporations are formed with the goal of evading individual responsibility for financial benefit. They have no incentive to treat expensive individuals such as the less educated, the disabled, the poor, etc. They only support them in the most minimalist ways legally required and actually spend money to change laws to support the disadvantaged even less.

If you want that area to be better, round up your fellow residents and get an initiative passed in the city.

<comment><USER6> That's what happened; the city's initiative to restore the place was to launch a competition and partner with the winner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree, tech billionaires should not be allowed to own parts of cities. Lets leave that to the real estate billionaires.

<comment><USER8> I get that you're being sarcastic. But what's your actual point?

<comment><USER7> There is nothing new to be scared about. Landlords already exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this just the equivalent of saying Disney wants to run Disney EPCOT, don't let it? Or that Google wants to run a Campus, don't let it? It seems like he's arguing if you live in Canada, Sidewalk will become your mayor automatically without any choice on your part which seems a distortion.

</comment><comment><USER10> There was no argument being made here. Just some frivolous claim that since Google is a big scary ambitious company and unelected we should be worried. No. Back up your absurd claim with evidence. 1) Who's to say that "elected" is the best approach for humanity's benefit? Has a double blind study ever been done? Some dictatorships have flourished while most have floundered. 2) An elected government is working in partnership with with a company (Google) to develop a part of it's jurisdiction. Is the author proposing the government should do it all it's self? Canadian city governments aren't in the business of developing anything. They contract or provide permits. How is this different than the city giving any other developer a permit to build?

<comment><USER11> You're "rebuttal" is equally, if not more so, absurd than any claim made in the article.

You're calling _democracy_ into question as your first argument for letting Google do this? REALLY? Then you ask for research, as evidence, that would be impossible to do?

I agree if the city wants to let Google do this then so be it, but your response to the article was even more pointless than you claim the article to be.

<comment><USER10> My "rebuttal" isn't a "rebuttal". It's taking the serious lack of objectivity in the article to task. Yes, I am calling democracy into question. Especially representative democracy which is the only real democracy that currently exists. The US has Donald Trump for a president. If that isn't a refutation of the hypothesis of democracy I'm not sure what is.

In order for social and political sciences to carry weight they should be held to the same standard as all sciences. Therefore they should follow the scientific method:[http://www.bio.miami.edu/dana/dox/scientific_method.html](http://www.bio.miami.edu/dana/dox/scientific_method.html)

I've included the link so there's no confusion as to what the scientific method actually entails. Democracy is an unproven hypothesis that we are using to govern society and has shown time and time again that it can be poorly executed and have dire consequences. For example, Hitler was democratically elected.

Your response to my response was by far the most pointless activity. You achieved nothing but showing that you lack a certain awareness and might have a reading comprehension issue.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On one hand, I don't see how this is different than any of the other numerous influences we have in our cities through corporate lobbies. To suggest that the way we live is solely due to the good nature of elected representatives is naive.

On the other hand, maybe Google is flexing a little much here. I sincerely believe them that they have peoples' best interests at heart - because that will eventually be beneficial to Google as well. But inserting a little more competition here I think would lend itself a long way.

<comment><USER13> Google, like any corporation, has no best interests at heart but their own. I don't know how the idea that a multibillion-dollar international corporation "has people's best interests at heart" has survived to 2017.

<comment><USER11> The interests of the people are more or less aligned with Sidedwalk Lab's interests. So you're not wrong, but you miss your mark a little bit.

You're generally right though, that any publicly-traded company has _primarily_ its shareholders best interests at heart. But that doesn't mean they'll ruin their public image by doing something untowards. Google especially seems to be more forward thinking than the traditional "quarterly results" style company. So I think it's worth giving them a shot at this just to see what happens. (Spoiler alert: it'll probably be the ultimate form of sacrificing privacy for convenience)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks like the whole crux of the authors arugement rests on this paragraph:

"But cities are not machines that can be optimized, nor are they labs for running experiments. Cities are not platforms with users, nor are they businesses with shareholders. Cities are real places with real people who have a right not to live with whatever "smart solutions" an engineer or executive decides to unleash."

The reaction seems more visceral than thoughtful. Cities in many ways ARE machines that need to be optimized; and, regardless of our feelings, are always in a constant state of experimentation. Cities may not be platforms, but they are certainly businesses with shareholders called voters. Businesses are real places with real people; and while I agree that they should have the right to live without any "smart solution" that a business would like to unleash... my neighborhood covenant (enforced by city ordnance) already disagrees with my opinion.

I don't disagree with the intent of the author, but she failed to make any reasonable argument in support of her point.

</comment><comment><USER15> Allowing Google to remember it for you wholesale for modernization and experimentation doesn't seem like a good deal for what you get.

Also, when Google pulls out because they don't know how to budget for most of their experiments after one year will still allow them to keep your data.

<comment><USER16> I wonder if they're going to use Google's support approach?

Three weeks after they turn your water off for no readily apparent reason, you post here in hopes that someone that works there will see it and intercede.

<comment><USER6> Just three weeks? That's would be an improvement compared to some water utilities I've known.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is both cool and really f*cking scary; I'm glad there's going to be a "smart city" or at least "smart district" but at the same time what would Google do with this data?

I've got a massive issue regarding my digital footprint and I know Google spreads my data like the plague if it gets chance.

There needs to be some sort of organisation that could do this but not for profit which Google/Alphabet will no doubt get in someway shape or form.

</comment><comment><USER18> I for one say let's see what google builds? I think city management/development is something that definitely could use some 'disruption' if it takes a google/fb to re-imagine modern cities I'm all for it, esp if we get some 'Jetson-like' technologies out of it... Like escalator walks in lieu of public transit.

</comment><comment><USER19> If a non-tech company -- say a property developer -- wanted to develop the land would the author have the same problems?

</comment><comment><USER19> What is the complaint here? It sounded like a very generic accusation without any specifics on what the author believes the ethical problems are.

I think he would have to take specific proposals by Alphabet and then point out flaws for this to have meat.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a modern version of giving cable companies local monopoly for internet connectivity. And we've seen how bad that has gotten in terms of the ISPs controlling the local politicians. How much more would a company like Google control the local politicians when it would be in charge of many more things than just providing citizens with internet connectivity?

</comment><comment><USER21> Honestly, given how badly literally every town/city/municipality here in California is run, I say let Google take over for a while. Maybe we'll at least get decent public transit systems.

<comment><USER13> Self-driving cars are expected to do the opposite of improving public transit. Since cars can drive themselves in addition, there are actually more cars on the road than before, and the added convenience of summoning a private vehicle makes using public transit less appealing and less likely. An article... last week? pointed out that Uber and Lyft have also hurt public transit usage.

<comment><USER21> In the short term, sure. But larger self-driving vehicles, especially combined with dedicated lanes, could have the potentially to fully realize personal- rapid-transit[1] concepts.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo _Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday the genesis of the thinking for Sidewalk Labs came from Google 's founders getting excited thinking of "all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge," although he joked he knew there were good reasons that doesn't happen. He then related his reaction when the company discovered it had won the bid for the development of its city-as-a-platform model: "Oh my God! We've been selected. Now, it's our turn."_

Google being given a city sounds like hell, but they'll probably stop supporting it after a few years, anyway.

The grandiosity and ego of tech CEOs never ceases to amaze. You'd think someone with so much power wouldn't so casually drop that they want a city, too. Why don't you guys focus on your existing empire?

<comment><USER22> Grandiosity is in part how big ideas exist. The important part is balanced with being humble and not greedy - being aware of ego and its potential influence. If Google or its founders are able to pave way for some significant improvement and value for a city/society without extracting too much value or adding unreasonable cost to a society, then it could be good. We of course can't blindly assume this will be the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> When will all this annoying tech bullshit be over? I'm so tired of screens and data and information and whatever-the-fuck. Can we please just stop at the smart phone? There is no chance Google will improve my life. It's going to be a disgustingly modern sterile piece of crap which is where everything is headed these days. I want to smoke some cigarettes and have a malt 40 without anyone complaining to me while looking out at the water. Not sip $7 lattes on some 'smart campus' designed for business assholes.

They are a corporation. They are here to do nothing but make more money. They are not here to make your life better. Fuck off Google, this article ruined my day.

<comment><USER24> Thank you for summing up my feelings. I've been actively moving everything away from Google and Facebook lately. They're just distractions to living a fulfilling life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's up with The Guardian and all these hit pieces against Google? Did they get screwed on a bill or something?

Am I the only one who feels like there's a shady, coordinated media attack on silicon valley right now? Somebody wants these companies dead.

<comment><USER13> Or, you know, there's a lot of really valid concerns about the way Silicon Valley companies are behaving right now and a lot of people are increasingly upset about it.

Insinuating articles that criticize your employer have ulterior motives while conveniently forgetting to mention you're being paid by the company being criticized is significantly more concerning behavior than The Guardian's.

<comment><USER9> Well, the Guardians behavior is concerning when they are making hyperbolic, distorted, or wrong claims.

For example: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/20/security-researchers- call-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/20/security-researchers-call-for- guardian-to-retract-false-whatsapp-backdoor-story/)

This article on Sidewalk labs leaves out a lot of details and for "journalism" didn't even bother to ask the local authorities if Sidewalk had the authority to build or execute any plans without approval by the government.

The reality is that this appears more like every other property developer master-planned community. Localities find a bit of land they want to develop or re-develop, they solicit architects and builders to submit proposals. Typically those proposals are master-planned, including commercial, residential, and public spaces. The city signs off on the plan, and then it is built. And like most such areas, there is a property management organization responsible for up keap, landscaping, repairs, maintenence, etc.

This is not the same as the company becoming the "government", they don't run the police, fire departments, schools, etc. The only difference it seems between what Sidewalk is doing, and what Centex, or Shea Homes, or other master-plan community builders, is that the latter are real estate companies, and Sidewalk is a tech company.

Oooh, scary. It's Omni Computer Products, better watch out for those ED-209's on the corners.

<comment><USER13> Your sarcasm would have a lot more punch if the similarities between Alphabet and Omni wasn't so blatant. Good call on torching the military robotics division though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Saving social media for posterity - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/magazine/how-an-archive-of-the-internet-could-change-history.html?_r=2 <comment><USER2> No mention of ArchiveTeam, which has been slurping down social media into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for years now. I sicced the crawlers on some of the yuckier corners of Twitter just the other day. The bad needs to be preserved along with the good, for context.

(Join us! [http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveBot](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveBot))

</comment><comment><USER3> The gratuitous bit of quantum at the end was irritating. I'd have much preferred it if they said something like "Unrelatedly, a recent quantum physics paper used a phrase which is particularly apt in this context:".

</comment><comment><USER4> Even the New York Times now has clickbait. Sad.

<comment> et-al Back in the day, they were just called catchy headlines.

<comment><USER5> Back in the day, they were called tabloid headlines.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What all is broken/frustrating in software engineering - <AUTHOR> What do you think? <comment> crooked-v In the land of web dev, the number of files you need for a "modern" project that are boilerplate configs or boilerplate placeholders is pretty absurd.

.browserslistrc, .babelrc, .editorconfig, .eslintrc, .prettierrc, .stylelintrc, jsconfig.json, package.json, src/index.html... and this is with a "zero config" Parcel setup. And that's not counting the src/vendor/ folder of two dozen files that only exist to work around old AngularJS libs expecting everything to happen in a global context and there still being no bundled that can handle those properly.

</comment><comment><USER2> Reinventing wheels and justifying it by straw man arguments when in reality it's just generational churn. Building up needless towers of abstractions. Going all-in on cloud and fashion stacks without assessment of requirements for a given task aka resume-driven development.

For example, agile vs waterfall (when there is no such thing as a "waterfall"; there _is_ such a thing as cluelessness, though).

It's most readily observed in Web dev, where every five years or so the entire landscape is changing because a new generation can't be bothered to understand what came before (or, in fact, where the de facto mainstream stack has grown too many idiosyncrasies). For example, I'm expecting a back-to-basic-Ajax movement at the end of the React hype cycle, similar in spirit to motherfuckingwebsite.com.

<comment><USER3> [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because "worse is better". Social human issues (like the job market or committees) give a boost to not so great or "good enough" softwares. People can emancipate themselves from that but they need to admit it first and find satisfying explanations.

Curtis Yarvin (urbit), Terry Davis (TempleOS), Alan Kay and Niklaus Wirth are people who don't follow the others.

</comment><comment><USER5> React, Redux, and all the (not so) necessary libs it needs to work (not so) properly.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interview questions aiming to pass only rocks star programmers or leetcode grinders.

<comment><USER7> Serious question: what's a leetcode grinder?

<comment><USER8> There's a site where you can learn solve "interview-style" questions, [https://leetcode.com](https://leetcode.com) Just heard of it recently on HN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Project planning? I don't think I've ever seen a software engineering project where the costs don't overrun and the tasks don't take longer than they're 'meant' to. Waterfall, agile, anything else... they all seem to fall apart in everyday life with development related tasks.

Similarly, feature/scope creep seems to be a big problem in this field too. It's not as common as projects taking too long/costing more than expected, but still pretty common none the less. Usually because someone didn't actually ask the customer what they needed before building it, or feel like telling someone that they can't just 'have extras thrown in for free midway through development'.

Documentation too. We desperately need more people to willing to write/update that stuff, especially where free software is concerned.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm frustrated that so much work is duplicated. Every new programming language seems like it requires another new universe of packages around it. Often there's not even an attempt at interoperation, except maybe for C.

But even just between projects I feel like I lose a lot, rewriting things that I've done before, but slightly different. It's maddening.

<comment><USER11> every single web page feels like this to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Knowing what tools to use and how to put them together. How many times have you seen posts about what blogging frameworks to use? So many of these stacks have out-dated documentation on the hosting service too (i.e. one click install Pelican blog on Digital Ocean)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the process or best practices of writing requirements and specs is not well understood by the business side in many industries. This is my opinion would greatly benefit the engineering side.

</comment><comment><USER14> People with no real cs background/coding knowledge or experience becoming managers and making top dollars and engineers struggling with pay.

</comment><comment><USER15> Windows operating system. I mean so many people are using that since a long time. Still its performance is too glitchy and slow.

</comment><comment><USER16> documentation

</comment><comment><USER11> humourless Vulcans.

</comment><comment><USER17> JavaScript.</comment>


Amazon EC2 Instance Update – Faster Processors and More Memory - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-update-faster-processors-and-more-memory/ <comment><USER2> Anecdotal comment: it looks like Amazon is putting an audio player at the top of each press release to showcase their "Amazon Polly" deep learning voiceover. Starting at 3:18 in the audio it starts reading the entire table and (expectedly) screws up reading the table, but not _too_ bad.

However it's a great way of proving that we are not ready for computers to read to us yet.

<comment><USER3> The audio is generated by Amazon Polly; see [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/give-your-wordpress- blog-a-...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/give-your-wordpress-blog-a-voice- with-our-new-amazon-polly-plugin/) for more info!

I now use the audio version as a second form of proofreading, and find that it helps me to find places where my written transitions could be better.

I agree that there's room to make the contents of the table sound better, but I am not sure what direction this should go in. Suggestions are welcome!

<comment><USER2> Hi Jeff, here's a suggestion: When entering a table, maybe Polly can announce the table and read each data cell followed by the <th> descriptor for that cell.

Example:

" _Table 1: Row 1: [Instance name: z1d.large] ... [vCPUs: 2] ... [Memory: 16 GB] ... [Local Storage: 1 x 75 GB NVMe SSD] ... [EBS-Optimized Bandwidth: Up to 2.333 Gbps] ... [Network Bandwidth: Up to 10 Gbps] ... [pause] ... Row 2: [...]_ "

This is how a human would read it, so Polly should do it that way too. What a human actually ends up doing though, is reference the preceding row for each subsequent row. Something like " _z1d.xlarge has double the vCPUs, double the Memory, and double the Local Storage, with EBS-Optimized Bandwidth and Network Bandwidth the same._ " \-- I don't think you are at that point yet with Polly ;)

<comment><USER3> Hmmm - cool idea, but definitely ambitious and re:Invent is almost here.

The plugin is open source and we welcome PRs at [https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-polly-wordpress- plugin](https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-polly-wordpress-plugin) . Feel free to code something up and give it a try :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Sustained all-code Turbo Boost" sounds like a euphemism for "We want to say overclocked but Intel won't let us".

<comment><USER5> Isn't turbo boost an Intel trademark? If so, that sounds more like a "factory overclock", which isn't really an overclock at all.

<comment><USER6> If my memory serves me well, Knight Rider had a Turbo Boost before Intel :-)

<comment><USER7> In the show, look for the one bush that isn't burning in the lava, or otherwise shouldn't be there. They hid a ramp behind it every time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > Z1d instances use custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors running at up to > 4.0 GHz, powered by sustained all-core Turbo Boost.

Sounds rather impressive. Are similar Xeons available anywhere else?

<comment><USER8> Azure has the 2.7 GHz Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168 SkyLake processor. It has clock speeds as high as 3.7 GHz with the Intel Turbo Boost, but that's for a single core not all core, and also not sustained.

And on GCP the best CPU is 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5 (Sandy Bridge)

So when these Z1d instances are GA they will be the fastest available VM's across the major clouds.

<comment><USER9> There is the E3-1270v6 with 3.8GHz base Kaby Lake over at Vultr. Packet also seems to have nice offerings, but both are in these configurations supplied as bare-metal. It always depends on what you need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google Cloud instance types are so much easier to grok and simple. I think AWS adds complexity and makes poor user experience decisions on purpose sometimes (tongue and cheek).

AWS T2, M5, M5d, C5, C5d, X1e, X1, R4, H1, I3, D2 vs GCE standard, memory optimized, or compute optimized. Want a custom amount of cores and memory on GCE? No problem, just punch it in.

Then there is EC2 billing... Google Cloud sustained use and committed use discounts are superior yet again.

<comment><USER11> Amazon groups the types into standard, memory optimized, compute optimized, and storage optimized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Still no way to get 16+ cores without huge amounts of RAM (and cost). My workloads are CPU bound but not particularly memory intensive.

<comment><USER13> Did you consider C5/C5d ? they typically get to 3.5Ghz and have smaller DRAM/vCPU ratio

<comment><USER12> C4 spot instances work for me at the moment. The price increase for C5 wasn't worth it as I was only seeing a 5-10% performance increase. I need to re- benchmark though.

<comment><USER14> _The price increase for C5 wasn 't worth_

I don't know about spot pricing, but on demand pricing for c5's is about 15% less than the c4's.

If you look at c5d's with ephemeral storage they are still a bit cheaper than c4's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Z1d, R5 and R5d are publicly available now

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now- available-r5-r5d-and-z1...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now- available-r5-r5d-and-z1d-instances/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The z1d.6xlarge is a great match for what I was just searching for... I'm looking for a spot to park my 16 core 192gb SQL Servers, which have licensing for exactly 16 cores. I was looking at the 32 core, 244gb r4.8xlarge instances and trying to figure out what to do with the unused cores!

<comment><USER16> You can actually take most EC2 instances and specify the number of cores it has for this type of licensing issue: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance- optimize-cpu.html)

<comment><USER17> Note that this doesn't save any money because you're still paying for the disabled cores. IIRC GCE does not have that limitation.

<comment><USER16> That's true, but given that 32 cores of something like Oracle is something like $800k, I'm not sure it's all that relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice, the z1d instances might be perfect for interactive raytracing we do at $employer. The tracing itself is quite efficient and parallel, but scene manipulation has a lot of single core and IO bottlenecks. Plus the metal versions are useful to profile the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd like to see nested virtualization on EC2.

<comment><USER13> The press release mentions Z1d.metal bare metal version coming soon, that would save the need to run hypervisor on hypervisor in the largest instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I take it these vCPUs are hyperthreads? Or are they actual cores with HT turned off?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, vCPUs are hyperthreads.</comment></comment>


Dieselgate – A year later env stinks || exit - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8131-dieselgate_a_year_later <comment><USER2> The technical talk about emission management is interesting as well:

[https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7904-software_defined_emissions](https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7904-software_defined_emissions)</comment>


PayPal EULA update: only way to opt out of arbitration clause is snail mail - <AUTHOR> https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-full

<comment><AUTHOR> There should be an "Out out as a service" where I can may $3 per month and it opts me out of all these EULA clauses automatically.</comment>


Ask HN: Sad because I don't have a mentor or anyone - <AUTHOR> I'm 24 and come from an uneducated family I'll be the first to graduate from a real university. I have been thinking about how I should negotiate my hourly rate for my second internship this summer. I thought how great it must be to have resources like family members that have been in my position before and that could offer useful advice. I don't. It makes me sad that I don't have resources or even anyone to go to for guidance on college and career questions, etc. Has anyone been in my shoes before? Thanks HN. <comment><USER2> Your post got killed by a spam filter. Sorry. They are tuned more strictly for new accounts. We've marked your account legit so this won't happen again, and you're welcome to repost your question. The convention is to put "Ask HN" in front of the title.

Plenty of people have no mentors or family members who can advise them about college and career. I didn't. It makes some things harder, but it's definitely possible to find a way, so don't be too sad—you're blazing a path for your family in the future. Don't neglect to appreciate the advantages they _have_ given you—if you look for those, you'll find them.

Also, if you do a good job of phrasing your questions and following community conventions (which you did in this case), you'll get tons of advice from HN, and then you'll have the opposite problem of figuring out which of it to follow.</comment>


Google Indefinitely Delays the Nexus Q After Poor Reviews - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/google-delays-the-nexus-q-after-poor-reviews/ <comment><USER2> Google squandered the Q - it was a great marketing opportunity, what with its unique form factor. They should've used it to create a first-party Google TV (with support for using Android phones and tablets to control it, particularly the Nexus 7) and released game controllers along with it, encouraging developers to create Android console games.

Then they should've made the Q the cable box for Google Fiber. That would've really made the headlines.

However, while it's easy for us to sit here and take potshots at Google, we have to remember that it's a logistical _nightmare_ bringing together disparate divisions of a massive organization like Google and getting them to coordinate their efforts so that the company as a whole can present a united front to consumers.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree. Either buy OUYA, and improve the product if you can, and get even more partnerships for launch day, or build something similar (also for $99 - very important!), and release it a few months later at the next Google I/O with Tegra 4. Boom - crazy buzz around it.

The price is essential though. Screw everything else. Just make sure it's $99. And using a _beefed up_ Tegra 4 (no regard for energy efficiency in a console), or some other next-gen GPU architecture with OpenGL ES 3.0 support (like Exynos 6/Mali T658), coupled with Cortex A15 CPU's, would be a huge bonus over OUYA, even if it arrives a few months later compared to OUYA.

But please - please - stop buying into that theory that says early adopter products need to be more expensive or whatever makes Google release such products at prices that everyone thinks are insane.

Just a few examples:

Xoom - $800

Google TV - $300

Chromebook $450

Nexus Q - $300

Google still hasn't learned that they need to introduce these new products at a "sweet spot" pricing point - much like the Nexus 7 actually! But it took Amazon to teach them that, so I don't have much faith in them repeating this, especially after seeing the Nexus Q pricing.

Google's problem regarding pricing is also that they keep putting components that are too expensive in those products, without receiving an equivalent value from it.

The Xoom was this expensive because of the 3g/4G chips and high MP cameras. The Chromebooks and Google TV were this expensive because of Intel's Atom chips. Nexus Q was too expensive because it had an amplifier (did anyone actually care about that?), and because it was "built in US". They need to stop making these kind of mistakes once and for all, if they want to be successful selling hardware.

Apple puts only the essential components in their products that 80% of the people would use, and make sure they are high quality. For example, the original iPad had a high-quality display, but had no cameras, and not even a GPS. This kind of thinking made the iPad cost "only" $500 at the time, when people thought it would be significantly more - maybe not $1000, but perhaps more expensive than an unlocked iPhone, thanks to the expected bigger screen, bigger battery, etc. Google needs to learn to do that as well.

<comment><USER4> > _Either buy OUYA (...)_

Buy, what, kickstarter mindshare?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good decision. There's nothing wrong with not releasing something you don't feel is up to par. I actually admire that. Ship it when it's ready, and not a moment sooner.

On the other hand, there is something wrong with releasing a product that turns out to be over-priced and under-featured. That worked for Google in the past where it was all Web products, the price was "free", you could just slap a "beta" label on it and iterate daily. But that doesn't work when something costs $300 dollars in a competitive marketplace with established leaders.

<comment><USER6> It makes Google look amateurish to announce a product with big fanfare and to cancel it later admitting that it does not do much... executive powerplays at work I guess...

<comment><USER7> Amerteurish would be to blindly carry on launching a product and then releaseing version 2.0 that fixed all the issues and making the 1.0 unsuported.

No, what google did was to listern to feedback and respond in the best possible way. Those who ordered get the product and there money back and those who havnt get a chance to wait for the improved version based upon feedback. Realy can't fault that and to call it amateurish is perhaps overly strong. No power plays at work at all, mearly good PR/marketing and activly listerning to feedback.

<comment><USER8> _Amerteurish would be to blindly carry on launching a product and then releaseing version 2.0 that fixed all the issues and making the 1.0 unsuported._

Sounds like Google TV...

<comment><USER9> Google TV's lack of success has certainly taught them a lesson or two here. Hence, the freebies as an attempt to win back good will.

<comment><USER10> The lesson they need to learn is don't do things that lose goodwill in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google now has five boxes hooked up in living rooms of Google fans. They amplified the problem they should be solving. Seriously, a Logitech Google TV, a Nexus Q and 3 boxes for Google fiber.

Edit: They also managed a pointless keyboard with the boxes.

<comment><USER5> The moment I saw a keyboard with GoogleTV I facepalmed. That's not how people should interact with their TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think google are handerling this extremly well. They had a product that was about to launch and pretty much good to go. Go some feedback that they thought, hmmm maybe we should look at this again and are doing it.

Then ontop of that they are not only honouring all preorders with the product they were advertised, but also doing it for free with full refunds as well.

That is how you do marketing and deal with feedback.

</comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately, Google is developing a history of announcing – and later killing – products at their Google IO event.

I can appreciate the pressure: Every year, all eyes are on the company to match/outshine Apple's WWDC announcements.

It seems that Google needs to move IO to a different (less pressurised) time of year, and focus on only announcing release-ready products.

</comment><comment><USER13> I still think if they'd _removed_ the HDMI out, it would have got better reviews. The inbuilt amp and connecting to a TV are pretty much mutually exclusive, and everyone focused on the latter then wondered why it cost 3x as much as something that connected to a tv but didn't have an amp in it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nexus Q should have been considered a house-wide Android extender appliance; a compute node accessible by any and all authorized Android devices. It could be used to supplement the resource demands of phone apps, to serve as an autoconfigured caching HTTP proxy, etc. There are a lot of possibilities for an appliance like that (w1ntermute's suggestion that it double as Google Fiber's cable box is awesome) and I think it's sad that they felt it needed to be marketed as a $300 collaborative jukebox.

<comment><USER15> The average consumer would have _absolutely no idea_ what that (compute node, resource demands, autoconfigured caching) means. None.

<comment><USER14> Right, but they'll understand it when their tower defense game says "Get a Nexus Q for cooler auto-generated maps", "Get a Nexus Q for faster load times", or "Get a Nexus Q for LAN multiplayer with all other Android users in range".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think Pogue had a really good article on it a little while ago (it's linked from this article as well) [http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/the- google-nexus-q...](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/the-google-nexus- q-is-baffling/)

<comment><USER7> Your right, that does sum up alot of issues and oversights and google listened. If only Google did the Olympics instead of #NBCfail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If it were a google TV also, and played android games via some innovative controller like ouya's, i'd buy it in a second.

<comment><USER7> I believe you have nailed the shortcommings just right. It has half-way step to what you suggest and in that it realy should have those features. Also given the price of this and the ouya (also not released yet) I'd say some people were asking some questions about price also.

This and the opertunity to add google tv to the device from the start would of been to good a opertunity to miss that I feel that could be the main reason there stepping abck a bit and doing a rethink now instead of carrying on a unstable path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm confused. Why would you get one of these instead of an Android TV?

My Android TV running ICS was only 135 $NZ and I got a wireless keyboard for 70 $NZ. Now my kids play Angry Birds Space and Justin Bieber videos on TV!

<comment><USER19> Could you link to the TV? I'm curious.

<comment><USER18> The device itself plugs into the TV's HDMI slot and looks like an oversize memory stick. I then put in my home wifi details just like you would on a phone. Then with apps like kies you can link to any other android phone or vice versa. The family windows box isn't turned on most days and when it is it just continuously downloads updates and spins the hard disk.

<comment><USER20> Any links? Where did you get it?

<comment><USER21> DealExtreme always has a few different ones for sale: <http://e.dx.com/albums/201207/android-4.0-mini-pc/index.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've said it before, but to make the Nexus Q _awesome_ : give it Google Now, and have multiple users able to set up their own Google accounts on it.

I don't want an Android console, I don't need something _else_ to stream content to my TV, but what I do want is a couple of glowing orbs in my house that will remind me over speakers that I have an appointment at 10am but heavy traffic means I should leave at 9:15am. Or, using built-in mics or connected Android devices, ask it Now-style questions and receive Star Trek style responses.

</comment><comment><USER23> Now that they're holding it, I sorta want one. Mad world.

<comment><USER24> [http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=google+nexus+q+-cover+-b...](http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=google+nexus+q+-cover+-bluetooth+-pouch+-battery)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sensationalist title, as usual. I don't see any evidence showing poor reviews. The only people who got it are people at IO anyway, so that's kind of a small sample. I'd say they delayed it so they could add more features before a real launch, just so it lives up to Google's standards.

<comment><USER5> > just so it lives up to Google's standards.

To be honest, Google doesn't have a great track record when it comes to initial product releases. They get by with it because they release early, iterate often, and eventually develop a winner (a good strategy). But rarely are they winners out of the gate.

If your comment were about Apple, then absolutely you'd have a point about high standards.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Small, cheap server? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a free culture project that will place small wifi servers at various high traffic places and allow people to upload/download content anonymously. I'm looking for a device that runs linux, supports a standard disk drive, and can act as a wifi access point. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Check out <http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/CloudPlug>

<comment><USER3> See also //http:www.tonidoplug.com

Looks like the same part under a different manufacturing label.

<comment><USER4> These are all rebranded versions of the SheevaPlug and GuruPlug, manufactured by Marvell. So, if you're looking to write your own software stack on top, just buy from Marvell... <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SheevaPlug>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you looking for a prebuilt solution or are you willing to fab your own ? Here are a few things you could look at a) <http://www.compulab.co.il/t3530/html/t3530-cm-datasheet.htm> b) the gumstix modules c) nxp has some devkits d) hack the sheeva plug to do what you want.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have never used this part, but it is cheap, and supposedly supported by the OpenWRT project.

<http://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=8el2DcrRjLoHNdQ8>

</comment><comment><USER6> soekris has some interesting stuff. I'm not sure what kind of processing power you would need, they are low power 486/586 class processors. you could get something like the net5501 (<http://www.soekris.com/net5501.htm>) with a case that has room for a 2.5" SATA drive and 1 PCI slot that you could use for a wifi card. I've only seen them used with BSD but there is documentation out there that explains how to get linux working on them.

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.ubnt.com/rspro> or <http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm>

</comment><comment><USER8> You could save on the disk drive and set up a PXE over HTTP boot configuration, then keep any data on the cloud. Just a thought

</comment><comment><USER9> Linksys wrt54g(dd-wrt) + s3

</comment><comment><USER10> Some micro pc that can run DD-WRT would probably be ideal.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would suggest TonidoPlug. It supports webdav and has a web based file server as well that allows people to upload and download from a browser</comment>


Ask HN: Where to look for a job in Cincinnati? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I'm graduating from RIT next month with a degree in Software Engineering, and by the end of July my wife and I are moving back to Cincinnati, OH, where our families are.  Unfortunately, between my wife, and my impending school loans, a startup is pretty much out of the question; I need a dependable source of income for the time being.
Naturally, I need to find a job ahead of time, but I'm having difficulty finding a decent place to look for openings.  I've tried Dice.com, and the job boards from JoS, DWTF, etc, but it doesn't seem like many people are looking to hire anyone coming out of university, especially not in Cincinnati.
I have plenty of "real world" experience, as I've been in a junior position with a local Rochester telecom company working on internal tools and web applications, as well as working on open source projects, so I'm not just any "green" newbie with an embossed piece of paper.
Does anyone here know of a company in the Cincinnati area that would be interested in someone like me, or can you suggest a better place to look for availabilities?  If you'd like to see my resume, it's available in a couple formats at http://files.leetcode.net/resume/
Thank you. <comment><USER2> I grew up in NKY, finished my MSc in CS and Engineering and then moved back to Cincinnati to work and visit with my family for a year and a half before getting completely fed up with the IT market in Cincinnati and moving out to silicon valley. There are a few small consulting shops and the big players - citibank's new facility, kroger (I worked there), PG (I have done consulting there) and of course 5/3. The overall culture is very, very old school, there's lot of red tape and very few people doing new and interesting development. Speaking as a Cincinnati/NKY native, unless you want to land a permanent cubicle at one of the big companies, find a way to live elsewhere!!! Just because you are working at a startup does not mean you have an unstable source of income - just less stable than one of the big enterprises. I realize how negative I sound about this area... but having grown up there, went to school near there and worked there. IMHO your chances of sharpening your skills and having a rewarding and fulfilling career in software engineering while living in Cincinnati are slim to none. As a native, I strongly recommend reconsidering this now rather than 2 years down the road when it will just be that much harder to move - some imagined sense of stability is not worth your job being hellishly dull! Now, that does not mean some people are not happy in the cubicle and there are no good jobs in Cincinnati... it's just such a bad environment for development.

<comment><USER3> If he needs to be within driving distance of Cincinnati, he should move to Indianapolis. Indy has a healthier and more progressive business climate. It's only two hours away, but it feels like a completely different world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate it when people answer a different question than I asked, but is it really, absolutely necessary to move to Cincinnati?

I grew up in the Midwest -- born in rural Michigan, went to college in Chicago -- and I couldn't imagine being a software engineer there right now with the state of the economy.

The stories I hear from my family, who are all still in Northern Michigan, make me very happy that I decided to move to the SF Bay Area as soon as I graduated from college.

I wasn't married, but I had no money in the bank, $40k in student debt, and was living with my girlfriend at the time (we moved from Chicago to SF together).

I don't know about your personal situation so I might be totally out of line.

That said, if your situation dictates you must live in or around Cincinnati, I think it's just going to be a numbers game. Hit the streets, send off as many emails as you can, make lots of phone calls, and leave no stone unturned. Apply for every single job you can, whether you think you're qualified or not. Don't be dissuaded by "senior" titles and such.

I'd plan for 1-2 months to find something solid.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a software engineering manager for a smallish company in downtown Cincinnati (manage 5 developers). It is going to be very difficult to find a job because there have been a lot of high profile closings and layoffs in the region, Lexis Nexis being one of the biggest.

That being said, I do think you can find some good paying work in the greater Cincinnati area, IF you exercise some patience and really search all the surrounding areas (downtown, NKY, blue ash, etc.)

Don't be discouraged by the people saying that you will be working as a drone in some corporate machine. First of all, only the biggest places are like that. Second of all, keep in mind that you are not out there to redefine some fortune 500's development practices. Realize that it is not a sin to work a good well paying job during the day, and pursue your startup dreams with your spare time.

Once you've saved up some coin and have some 'enterprise' experience under your belt you will be in a much better position to quit your day job, and if that fails, get another one in relatively short order.

Good luck, and don't be discouraged.

MB

</comment><comment><USER6> Be more specific throughout your resume.

For example, the years you attended school and GPA are probably necessary for a new graduate (5 years down the line, you probably won't need them, but now you do).

Also, these lines are useless (but they sound promising, so more details could help):

"Learn various programming languages and paradigms."

"Follow and contribute to various open source software and Linux distribution projects."

"Manage multiple web application, development, and package servers."

<comment><AUTHOR> Considering my GPA is rather depressing to me (2.9ish, RIT is a tough school), I'm uncertain about how putting that on my resume would affect an employer's interest. Thoughts?

<comment><USER7> Mine is about that and I put it on my resume, otherwise it seems like you have something to hide. If your in major GPA is above 3.0, include that also...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.indeed.com/q-programming-l-cincinnati,-oh- jobs.ht...](http://www.indeed.com/q-programming-l-cincinnati,-oh-jobs.html) brings up 572 jobs for me. Since you're looking for a steady job, try variations. Also, you're not _that_ far from Lexington and Louisville, so you may want to consider looking for jobs there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know about that site, so thank you for that. Unfortunately, it seems that specific search is bringing up some things unrelated to software, but I can sift through that.

Secondly, since I'm actually living on the north suburbs of Cinci (Fairfield, to be exact), Louisville and Lexington are pushing at least 90 minute commutes, which is a bit much, IMO. I have however looked in the Dayton area, which is closer than Kentucky, but the situation seems much the same as Cinci: multiple jobs, but they all either require more experience than I have (senior level), or they are for people with hardware or testing experience... :(

<comment><USER9> I would never be stopped for applying to a job because it's "Senior". If you know your shit, it doesn't matter how old you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sort of in the same situation here in Indy (albeit I'll end up with an AS + `green`) and am having absolutely no luck marketing my resume [pdf: <http://tinyurl.com/cs9mbp>] for entry-level opportunities. Note: _you might want to include an active email address in your resume_

One my friends suggested to me that I get up early in the morning and just start cold-calling companies or show up to their front-door (of their business) and ask if they're hiring. If they're not, summarize your story [get some empathy points] and politely ask the secretary if they would file your resume with HR.

Another method is go to more career fairs/conventions; I've found that I get more leads and feedback here than any job board or online application.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have heard that the tech market is better in Columbus. It's only 1.5 hours away, so it's close to your family, but not too close ;)

<comment><USER12> The tech market in in Columbus is starting to grow quite a bit (I graduated from Ohio State). They've had 2 startup weekends, have a number of smaller web development firms, and also he could try to find an opportunity at Ohio State or with the state government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> skyline chili! if i moved back to the 'nati i'd get a job there. i miss it so... (the canned stuff doesn't come close)

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you tried searching LinkedIn and Craigslist? Craigslist is definitely hit or miss and you'll be browsing through a ton of scams, but you might get lucky - some good companies do use it.

LinkedIn always seems to have interesting jobs, though I've never actually applied for one on there.

</comment><comment><USER12> I grew up in Cincinnati - might try applying to GlobalCloud.net - they are a pretty big web dev firm in Cincinnati.

</comment><comment><USER14> Have you looked for jobs at nearby universities? UC, MU, etc.?</comment>


Open Source Madness or People are stealing Mayan EDMS. - <AUTHOR> http://orangethirty.blogspot.com/2012/08/open-source-madness.html

<comment><USER2> _If you fork Mayan EDMS into a closed or private respository, stop and think about what you are doing because you going about it the wrong way. Likewise if you fork Mayan EDMS and the first patch you commit is to change the name, stop._

Both of those are allowed under the GPL. See <http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/61038> for the former, and the latter is allowed under just about any open source license so long as you adhere with the rest of the terms; in fact, that's the pre-GitHub definition of a "project fork". Under the GPL, others are even free to sell your software as long as they link/ship the source code (probably not what's happening in your case, but I'm mentioning that anyway for the sake of discussion).

 _How will this affect the future of Mayan EDMS? It is too early to tell, what is certain is that the latest technologies being added to Mayan EDMS must be protected until they are ready to be released._

I might be biased because anything I write is MIT/BSD-licensed, but I don't understand why the fact that there's a few "unauthorized" forks of your project out there is deterring you from continuing working on it. Chances are, those forks have not a single user, and even if they do, so what?

<comment><USER3> I'm not opposed to the forks, there are 31 forks in github alone. My gripe is with at least three fork, two being distributed under different names and whose only patches are a name changed. Those may not be illegal, but are unnecessary and unethical. The last fork is being distributed with just a simple change of name also but being sold and no instruction or apparent source code is being distributed.

"If you are distributing the software, your responsibilities kick in."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting, I'm the creator of Mayan EDMS and while stealing Open Source software sounds like and oxymoron, it can and it does happen. In some cases is just avoidance of the terms set in the license in other cases, such in the case of Mayan EDMS they are just plain and blatantly selling the code under another name!

<comment><USER4> Then you should have chosen a license that doesn't explicitly allow that. Like the previous poster said, this is perfectly fine under the GPL as long as they provide the source code and since it is in Python I assume that they do.

<comment><USER4> It sounds a bit like you didn't actually want to open source this code at all. Open Source isn't, "Look, I am giving away my hard work for free." Open Source means you give people the opportunity to build on top of your work. This is how things evolve. If everyone has to start from square one every time they have an idea for improving something they use it would slow everything down. And yes, it means you will effectively end up competing with your own code for mindshare and users, but presumably that doesn't frighten you. As long as they abide by the terms of the license and let others to the same they are in the same boat. If someone else does a better job improving the code, marketing it, providing support, etc. more power to them. Chances are if your version is the best supported contributions will flow back to you.

I personally prefer BSD-style licenses. I don't mind commercial competition at all.

<comment><USER3> And I give the people the freedom to do with the code as they please, as long as they follow the terms of the license. And I don't mind commercial competition, in fact I promote it right in the website: <http://rosarior.github.com/mayan/support.html></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dropbox confirms it got hacked, will offer two-factor authentication - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/07/dropbox-confirms-it-got-hacked-will-offer-two-factor-authentication/

<comment><USER2> _> It turns out a Dropbox employee's account was hacked, allowing access to user e-mail addresses._

This is misleading.

 _> Some Dropbox customer accounts were hacked too, but this was apparently an unrelated matter._

Unrelated how? What I read was: "Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites... A stolen password was also used to access an employee Dropbox account"

This article dangerously leaves the impression that an intrusion was made into Dropbox's system to access the employee's account, and possibly an admin interface. In reality Dropbox let a spammer with a valid email and password look at someone's files.

<comment><USER3> An employee account was compromised and privileged information (in this case user email addresses) was accessed. The attacker exploited a flaw in dropbox's password policy / authentication system to access the information. Dropbox is modifying their systems and policies to prevent this sort of attack in the future.

All that together certainly adds up to an intrusion and is well within the definition of a "hack".

<comment><USER4> _"a flaw in dropbox's password policy / authentication system to access the information"_

What flaw? It sounds like a Dropbox employee was simply reusing a password stolen on another site.

<comment><USER5> How is that not a flaw in the authentication system?

<comment><USER6> Using a key to open a door that was designed to be opened with that key is not a flaw in the lock mechanism. The fact that the user set that key to also open something else is not the fault of the former lock.

<comment><USER5> This is not at all how security researchers think of it. Security vulnerabilities are very broad, they can be exploited through social engineering, through incompetent employees who do not have rigorous password standards, etc. If you narrow security vulnerabilities to coding mistakes, you're neglecting your customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish websites with user accounts would offer the option to "login via email" - as in you'd type in your username (or preferably your email) and maybe a captcha and then you'd login by clicking a link it sends via email afterwards. Ideally having a password associated with the account at all would be optional.

I have a Gmail tab opened just about 100% of the time I'm on the computer, so this would be very convenient for me as an alternative to having to remember passwords for sites that I visit once a month or less (and end up having to get a "password reset" link via email every time I log in anyway), and then I'd only have to keep my Gmail account secure (which I do via 2 factor).

<comment><USER8> In this case it wouldn't have helped, because the intruder apparently had access to a Dropbox employee's email account.

EDIT: Disregard what I said, apparently the attacker had access to the Dropbox employee's Dropbox account.

<comment><USER4> Where do you see anything about the Dropbox employee's email account being compromised?

<comment><USER8> You are right, I misread. Thanks for pointing that out :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dropbox did _not_ get hacked. One of their employees used the same password on multiple other sites, and one of _those_ got hacked. This is awful journalism.

<comment><USER10> Security is fungible. You're applying some subjective standard that divides what constitutes a hack and what doesn't. If I had to guess, you wouldn't treat a buffer overflow where some code was executed the same way. This is arbitrary.

Considering a dropbox employee, corporate information, and internal security practices are on the line here: I think the author made the fair, ethical call.

<comment><USER9> No, the article is flat-out wrong. "Dropbox got hacked" means their system security is breachable by a malicious attacker. This is simply not true.

<comment><USER8> I would think that if the attacker had access to a Dropbox employee's account, which in turn gave him/her access to user accounts, that would constitute a security breach.

<comment><USER9> _if the attacker had access to a Dropbox employee's account, which in turn gave him/her access to user accounts ..._

That didn't happen. The employee account merely contained a list of email addresses.

<comment><USER11> That's not really a response, is it? User account data could be accessed – because Dropbox was unable to protect your data. That's not quite as awful a access to user account but it's still awful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meh. This has already been posted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320429>

Also, kindly avoid the linkbait title, dropbox did not get hacked, some of its users' account credentials were compromised on other sites.

<comment><USER13> > Also, kindly avoid the linkbait title

The title of this submission matches the title of the article, matching recent HN policy. Users objecting to the phrasing may wish to flag the submission instead.

<comment><USER12> I'm just going to quote the HN guideline back to you. > please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

<comment><USER13> Yep, the guideline does say that. That is why I said recent policy. There have been several recent instances of submission title being edited to match the article linked, in some cases when that title was misleading or provided minimal context. Some examples here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102013>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most worrying quote for me:

 _Dropbox today said a stolen password was "used to access an employee Dropbox account containing a project document with user email addresses."_

(What else is being left around in data dumps?)

<comment><USER15> There's no mention of how many users were in that document. I've had a Dropbox account for many years with a Dropbox specific email address and I did not receive spam, so it must not have been everyone.

<comment><USER8> It appears that the attacker had a list of stolen emails and passwords from _other_ compromised sites, so your Dropbox account would probably be safe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> IMHO confirms this incident the value of having an individual mail address for each site, service etc.

Gmail has allowed for such individual mail addresses for years:

email@example.com

Example:

email@example.com

Mails addressed to email@example.com will be delivered to firstname.lastname@example.com. They are easy to identify, filter etc.

<comment><USER17> That's not just GMail, that's all compliant email handlers; it's part of the RFC. Unfortunately, it's not guaranteed that the site you're signing up to can handle that address format - Facebook doesn't...

<comment><USER2> While the RFC mandates the ability to send and receive email from email@example.com it doesn't require that it go to email@example.com. It's an extension to the email standard, and you could have labels in another form if you wanted to, e.g. email@example.com (<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very happy to hear they are planning to start offering two-factoring authentication. Hopefully something that works with Google Authenticator.

For client side encryption I have good experiences from BoxCryptor on Windows.

<comment><USER19> I really hope that Dropbox use Google Authenticator.

The last thing I want is double the number of apps on my phone as every single app has another 2-factor auth app to ship.

Just add yourself to Google Authenticator and be done with it. It doesn't require a Google account, you can use Google Authenticator as the generator of the 2-factor auth code and that's all.

LastPass uses Google Authenticator for 2-factor, and it works well.

One of the problems I've found with Dropbox is that I tend to use a shorter and easier to type password because I enter it on my phone in addition to my desktop.

Good passwords are great when you have a password manager, but in the app you're stuck with having to type it in. So my Dropbox password is weaker than I'd want just because apps mean I can't use a password manager. 2-factor can't come soon enough for me.

On a related note, 2-factor is one of the weaknesses I want addressed. The other one I'll bang on about is client-side encryption. If it's possible at all for someone to access their systems I still want to feel sure that someone can't access my files.

It's not that I limit my use of Dropbox, but I use it differently. That 1GB file in my account... that's a Truecrypt volume. The other files are just less sensitive.

<comment><USER20> How often do you have to log into your dropbox account? I hardly ever have to log into the website, and you don't have to log in every time on your phone.

<comment><USER19> I do client work and frequently find myself onsite where I can't connect my computer or phone to the network yet can use a computer on their network to access the web.

So, a fair amount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe they should offer client side encryption. You know, the kind that's not reversible on their side of things.

<comment><USER22> 1) What about this issue would have been helped by client-side encryption? A valid username and password was used to access dropbox information, so it would have gone right through client-side encryption.

2) Do you not enjoy features like the web interface and public links? Those are one of my favorite parts of dropbox and they wouldn't work with client- side encryption.

<comment><USER21> > What about this issue would have been helped by client-side encryption

I was assuming that an employee account can in a more or less direct way access user files. Either way, it's not the first time they've been compromised and last time[1] client-side encryption would have certainly helped.

> Do you not enjoy features like the web interface and public links?

The web interface could work with client side encryption. I wouldn't mind having no encryption for publicly shared files.

[1] www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/dropbox/

<comment><USER22> You assumed wrongly. They accessed an employees account and took a file out, they didn't further compromise Dropbox's backend in any way. So in this particular instance, client side encryption wouldn't have helped at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it just me or has there been a lot of security mishaps like this for various high-profile services? LinkedIn was a victim on a much larger extent not to long ago. This is becoming ridiculous.

<comment><USER24> This isn't on the same scale. Some user email addresses were in a spreadsheet, and the employee's password was compromised. I bet every single day someone's Gmail gets "hacked" if that's the standard for that.

<comment><USER23> The point is it shouldn't occur on any scale. Even small scale security exploits can turn into much bigger ones further down the track. For all we know, we've yet to see the full consequences of this attack it could be revealed that it's much more than an a spreadsheet of email addresses. The very fact Dropbox made everyone change their password is proof enough that even Dropbox aren't sure what hackers have taken or had access too..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The most annoying part is the disingenuous email we all received tonight.

 _Recently, passwords have been stolen from some internet services. We've reset your password._

I'd have been shocked, but ultimately more respectful of:

 _We've had a security violation. You can read about it here. Your account wasn't affected, but we're resetting everyone's password just in case. So sorry about this._

</comment><comment><USER26> It disappoints me that a Dropbox employee might be using the same password for a work account and anything not work related. It's bad enough that they might re-use passwords internally, but I find that understandable.

However, using a work e-mail and the password you use at work on someone else's system was stupid. You can have faith in your own security measures, but not anyone else's. If you're going to re-use passwords, at least have a work one and an everything else one.

</comment><comment><USER27> I believe your dropbox needs to be secure as your email account because it deals with storing your personal data.So offering 2 factor authentication is a step in the right direction, like what gmail has.

Other than that dropbox can't do much about people using the same passwords for different sites or social engineering attacks. You can educate and warn people about it, but it's ultimately up to the user to follow through.

</comment><comment><USER28> Not surprising. Remember, we're talking about a service that at times lets anyone login to another user's account without a password.

</comment><comment><USER29> To increase security you can enable "email me when a new computer or app is linked to my account" in the account settings.

It's not much, but at least you'll be notified when someone syncs their computer with your dropbox or adds your dropbox to their phone.

</comment><comment><USER30> That's why client-side encryption is useful, regardless of what some "security researchers" self-servingly say.</comment>


EBay test of paid search effectiveness - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/did_ebay_just_prove_that_paid.html

<comment><USER3> It seems like the obvious thing to do when you first start advertising - <USER2> bid on your own company name. But the money is probably not wisely spent when you wind up being the #1 natural listing anyway.

For eBay, Walgreens, Amazon, etc to bid on their own name seems like a complete waste of money. Anybody searching for one of those company names is just probably being lazy and typing it into google instead of the url bar.</comment>


Performance and Speed Optimizations of WordPress [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lamosty.com/app/uploads/2015/02/bachelors-final.pdf <comment><USER2> I've run wordpress sites for more than a decade. I've never had an experience with opcode caching that wasn't unhappy.

I've used all of them. They all crash like a demolition derby in a brewery.

At one point I put Wordpress into a profiler and found that a only a few percent of total time was spent compiling PHP; most of the time spent was in waiting for MySQL and concatenating strings. So I just gave up on opcode caching.

The biggest improvements I got were:

* Whole page caching. In my case, WP-supercache spitting out gzip'd pages, with Nginx configured to find and serve those gzip'd pages.

* MySQL query caching.

* Moving MySQL into another server. This was a decent win when I was on spinning rust.

* SSDs. MySQL is a major chokepoint for Wordpress, because until recently its idea of a query plan was "let's join half the workloads on disk in gigantic join tables".

* Killing bad plugins. Even the "recent comments" plugin that ships with mainline is horrendous.

<comment><AUTHOR> You got some good points here though I don't know why opcode caching didn't work for you. Nowadays, it's just a matter of putting some configuration lines into PHP-FPM config and it works like a charm (at least for me, you might have a special site, idk).

Yes, compiling PHP shouldn't take that much (even though typical WordPress site consists of thousands of PHP files). But as you can see from some of the charts from my work, it can potentially double the amount of concurrent requests the server is able to respond to.

Whole page caching (I call it page cache) is the biggest improvement one can make. However, instead of using WP plugins, in my work I configured Nginx to cache the output of PHP interpreter (FastCGI). The advantages are that you can use Nginx's location directives to bypass the cache early (e.g. logged in users, shopping cart, etc) and that Nginx stores the pages in RAM in a tree- like structure with pretty fast access times. In a heavy WP site (plenty of large plugins, etc), you can go from 200 concurrent requests at 8 seconds to 1000 concurrent requests at 2 seconds, which is a pretty huge improvement.

MySQL query caching should definitely help, though in my testing it did not. Maybe I need a real benchmark with a real 100 people requesting different subpages. Then the DB (MariaDB in my case) might become a bottleneck.

Yeah, SSDs are superb-useful, in any cases. I made all the tests on a non-SSD server. At least the WordPress DB structure is quite flexible, though, as you mentioned, it now suffers from the gigantic joins.

Bad plugins and themes are the root of all the performance problems. But sometimes it is easier to implement caching and replacing Apache with Nginx on the server side than replacing plugins that you really need. That's the main point of the thesis: Time of an experienced developer fixing plugins and themes is more expensive than optimizing the server. But yeah, if you are a developer, learning to write clean and fast plugins is crucial.

<comment><USER2> It wasn't that configuring opcode caches is complicated or difficult. It's that they locked up every few days, no matter which one I used or how I configured them.

At the point where I wrote a cron script to kill PHP every 24 hours, I realised the extra few percent weren't worth it.

Maybe it's improved, but: four times bitten, twice shy.

> _Nginx stores the pages in RAM in a tree-like structure with pretty fast > access times._

On disk caching delegates this to the OS, which is pretty good at it.

Badly behaved plugins and themes are not a solvable problem on Wordpress, because it's essentially a cooperative multitasking environment. One bad actor can hog all the resources and there's no way to constrain it.

It seems as though very few plugin authors know what O-notation means (so many nested loops), what EXPLAIN QUERY is or that tinkering and and firing up a copy on your laptop isn't really testing.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Maybe it's improved, but: four times bitten, twice shy.

I see, happens all the time.

> On disk caching delegates this to the OS, which is pretty good at it.

Yeah, it's just a matter of preference and convenience.

> It seems as though very few plugin authors know what O-notation means (so > many nested loops), what EXPLAIN QUERY is or that tinkering and and firing > up a copy on your laptop isn't really testing.

This is the real issue. I know a very few WordPress developers who have a formal technical education. While you can learn it yourself, school forces you to learn this in a great detail. In a near future, I will hopefully write on these topics, though, I need to study on this a bit more first.

<comment><USER2> Well in the old days, the operating system was there to help you. If plugins were standalone processes, they could be resource-constrained. But they all have to run in-process because of the LAMP architecture.

Hence -- cooperative multitasking.

I've been complaining about it for years. Eg: [http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/10/shared-hosting-is- doomed...](http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/10/shared-hosting-is-doomed-and-i- have-the-graphs-to-prove-it/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the article, it's insightful and I & history agree completely with you. Nowadays, people are using prebuilt VPS images or automation scripts to provision their servers and shared hostings are becoming more of a VPS hostings with a good UI around these tools.

I see that you are a WordPress veteran, nice to hear your opinions :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lead Developer of TheDirty.com here. Nice work. We're built on WordPress, running on a single machine, using Nginx + PHP-FPM, and currently serving ~20,000,000 pageviews a month.

Before I took over development we were running on apache w/ vanilla PHP and CPU's would be > 75% on a regular basis. The site frequently ran into the Apache 10k issue you mentioned in your paper as well. After getting the new server setup & optimizing all our MySQL queries, it's abnormal for all of our CPUs to even be doing anything. Out of all our CPUs, we might have 5 < 10% currently.

One thing I've gathered from this project is technique is a huge part of optimizing WordPress. 1 resource hog at this scale is greatly amplified and can bring everything crashing down. I remember the first time I coded a simple 'popular posts' widget and how hard that hit when you have 150,000 posts to run through and 300,000+ pages generating on a regular basis throughout the day. We had to scrape it the same week it went up.

One big example on how thinking about your queries is huge (let's ignore page caching for a moment) is if you have a menu that queries all your categories (We have 1,000+) in the menu on every page load, and then run that query every time you generate a page, that would be ~650,000 times a day that menu query is run and the menu is generated. When you think about running one query on a table with 1,000+ rows, it sounds like nothing. But when you have to do it 650,000+ times a day... It adds up.

By switching our menu to be generated once every 5 minutes, having it cached in html each time, and by having that menu loaded onto every page via javascript instead; we only have to query & generate the menu 288 times a day. Apply this "single query/generation + load in js technique" to things like widgets within WordPress (all our related posts areas are loaded like this), it has made our resource usage less than 1% of what it used to be.

Although people get really excited about things like widgets & cool custom plugins... It's good to remember, if you can code, that sometimes hardcoding and/or coming up with your own technique will save you a ton of cpu/ram usage if you truly want to build for scale. Every single query counts. Nginx is crucial > 10k connections & php-fpm is a great partner for nginx as well. I'm going to print out your thesis and run through it a few times. Nice work my friend.

\----

Also, idk why somebody said APC is dead. One of the most, if not the most, widely used caching plugins, W3TC, still supports APC caching and a lot of talks about WordPress optimization use APC. Personally, I find other ways to be better, but that's another topic.

<comment><USER4> I think people are saying APC is dead because another opcode cache was included in PHP 5.5 and APC has not seen a release since 2012.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators#Alter...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators#Alternative_PHP_Cache_.28APC.29) [http://pecl.php.net/package/apc](http://pecl.php.net/package/apc)

<comment><USER5> There is still a need for a ucache (in addition to built in opcode cache)... although a lot of high traffic WP sites are turning to redis over memcache for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> WordPress is slow by design! I have managed to create a blogging engine (in PHP) that it only takes 2ms to create the page dynamically (without caching) from the database + ~20ms for Nginx to serve it.

One might argue that my engine does not have as much features... and you are right.

Incase you are interested: SunSed.com

<comment><AUTHOR> WordPress is rather big, having more than 200K function calls on a typical request to a blog post. However, when using the default Twenty Fifteen theme, the performance is not that bad, as you can see from [http://ldr.io/1cbbomp](http://ldr.io/1cbbomp) (VPS server with 3CPUs and 4GB of RAM).

I've just checked your blogging engine and it looks very minimalistic. I like it.

<comment><USER6> Thank you! Yes you are right! WordPress is huge! but not everyone need all the functionality... let's just say 10% of current WordPress users just need a simple blogging platform without all the widgets... then I think 1K function calls should be enough!

Anyway, I love WordPress and do not compare my hubby project with 10 years of 1000+ developers time!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks outdated. APC cache is no longer, for instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. The figure depicting the workings of APC cache was just an example of how opcode caching in PHP works. The thesis was published just today.

<comment><USER8> Bratislava! Partizanske here. Just moved here from the United States (NJ). I'm going to give this a good read. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Howdy! If you want to replicate the load testing on your server(s), use my Ansible Playbooks: [https://github.com/lamosty/wordpress- ansible](https://github.com/lamosty/wordpress-ansible) (part of the work).</comment></comment></comment></comment>