United Airlines' Quest to Be Less Awful - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-united-airlines-struggles/ <comment><USER2> Airlines taking away free snacks for customers feels like companies taking away free snacks for employees: it doesn't really matter much by itself for anyone involved, but it's an obvious signal that the management involved can't bother to even put a fig leaf on the matter of your personal comfort.

<comment><USER3> What is odd is that even the cheapest budget airlines of Asia, and there are many, many of them, nearly all provide not just free snacks, but free hot meals.

<comment><USER4> I imagine I'm the minority opinion--and Asian airline meals are generally better than US ones but that probably just reflects my preferences--but I actually don't especially regret the general demise of hot meals on most flights. They were always horrible in coach to the degree that I can recall joking cartoons about them. Serving the meals was disruptive and often stunk up the cabin.

Now, when it comes to passing out cold snacks, by all means.

<comment><USER5> Yeah. To be honest, I almost looked forward to layovers during air travel for my once- or twice- yearly McDonalds visit. The food options in airports, as dismal and overpriced as they tend to be, are gourmet fare compared with what's served on the airplane.

I'd just as soon not have to shuffle my laptop or book around to make space for lousy food.

<comment><USER4> Many airport options have improved quite a bit--though most are still hardly cheap. At some point, the message seems to have gotten out--for at least some terminals--that very few people want pseudo-fine dining at airports but many want good, relatively fast food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I can't understand is why United (and tbh most airlines) put such ludicriously short connection times in going from international to domestic in the US.

I've literally had them quote a 42 min connection at me getting from IAD international to domestic. This is literally impossible unless the flight was very significantly early/they put me on Concorde by mistake. I phoned up when I noticed and asked to change flight. Nope, some huge change fee + additional difference in airfare due.

Gave up and sure enough I missed the flight. They just stuck me on the next one anyway, but probably lost the revenue for the flight I was meant to be on. This has happend multiple times (I've it take as much as 4 hours at EWR to go through immigration -> go through TSA-> get bag -> recheck bag -> go through TSA -> board plane.

It must cost them _millions_ of dollars. And as far as I can see there is no option on the scheduling system to say I want a longer layover. Not crazy long, just some room to breathe. Annoying.

<comment><USER7>
        > And as far as I can see there is no option on the
        > scheduling system to say I want a longer layover

A travel agent can help you with that.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but the idea that you actually have to hire a person to do something that can be almost trivially handled by their existing systems is ridiculous these days.

<comment><USER7>
        > something that can be almost trivially handled

One enters dangerous territory when one starts making assessments about how difficult changing a system they're not familiar with is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a whole lot of little things. On one flight, there wasn't enough space for my carry-on, so they told me to check it. I assumed they had meant "gate check", because that's what other airlines I fly do, but instead it got routed to the carousel, and because my next flight was on a different airline, there was no way to route it to my final destination; I had to leave the security area and _come back in_ to continue. Thankfully security was light and I didn't miss my flight. The least they could have done was to check to make sure I understood what this entailed, and worked to find a solution.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think not providing meals/refreshments on any flight longer than 30min is just wrong. Why? Of course on could argue that if you "pay less you get less" or that meals are not needed on short flights. But the true story is that often times, the actual time in flight is not the only time you wait. You stand in line at the TSA, you run through giant gangways, you are sitting in a plane that gets late an hour or more. Which all means: by the time you finally are in the air, many people need some rest and energy. Not providing at least some food/drinks for free thus is absolutely unacceptable to me.

Recently flew Frankfurt=>Detroit=>Dallas (2 flights). I was lucky they provided 2 meals on the long first flight, as on the second leg they only gave a coke. Including the waiting time and the time after the last meal on board, we had 5 hours without food.

<comment><USER4> There's much to complain about with the airlines but this is one I just don't get.

5 hours without food doesn't seem like any great hardship. And there are any number of places at most airports where you can pickup a sandwich or whatever to bring on board (or pack some snack bars). I guess maybe if you were expecting a meal on a transcontinental flight but airline food in economy was always a bad joke. I'd probably prefer a bag of chips when they serve me water or a Coke but it's really not a big deal if I know they won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Flight experiences are really just anecdotal if you're talking about the same "class" of flight. I know people who fly regularly and are perfectly fine with Delta while they'd never fly American. At the same time, its always felt like the "national" domestic airlines have had very poor service - I liken it to GM and Chrysler vehicles.

<comment><USER12> The quality of the experience can also depend on what routes and/or hubs people use regularly. Airlines also have different grades of presence at various airports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the airlines have had a bit of a race to the bottom in a few ways:

* Fees. Charge baggage fees, everyone else does the same, nobody's any better off. Boarding is slower and passengers crankier. I was HAPPY to not have to tote my bag around every single layover until they started charging for bags, now I'm another unhappy customer lugging a bag everywhere, walking up and down the aisles looking for space, having my bag gate-checked (and inevitably lost -- gate checking is the least reliable way of actually getting your bag to its destination, it seems).

* Chasing "frequent flier" business travelers. I don't have the numbers to back this up, but most of them already seem loyal to their chosen airline to funnel their corporate dollars to, because they've got so many damn miles accrued. But airlines trip all over themselves to throw free shit at the 1% of frequent fliers that they piss off the 99% of occasional travelers. Yes, the frequent flier dollars are very important, but now we have a (very) long tail of less-frequent travelers who can be _guaranteed_ that they will never, ever, ever be offered a free upgrade. You won't even get an emergency exit row (see: fees). I hate to sound entitled, but on my honeymoon, I was hoping that, for once, I might get a courtesy upgrade. Nope. I'd wager that if every airline set aside 2 slightly-better seats for a _random_ upgrade, they'd get a lot of good word-of-mouth from the average joe like myself. But instead they waste every single bit of effort on the jaded business traveler whose opinion won't be swayed that much by small favors, because all of the airlines are throwing free stuff at them all the time anyway.

* Space, obviously. I continue to insist there's a market to pay 50% more for just a LITTLE bit more space. I don't mean economy plus; I'm not tall, I'm just an average-sized male. I just want my own goddamned armrest. I don't know why the airlines can't get this right. Business class 2x2 seating on a narrowbody would 'only' cost them 33% of seat capacity. 2x3 would even be acceptable, with an offset aisle. On a widebody, even just taking out ONE coach seat would make enough space to give passengers a meaningful upgrade. add a couple more inches of legroom to make it easier to get in and out, and bam, you have my loyalty for life. I'm happy to pay for a little comfort. I just won't pay 5x as much for business class. It's simply not in a normal human being's price bracket. I don't have to pay $100k to get a car that's a bit nicer than a Corolla. (see: frequent fliers spending business dollars).

<comment><USER13> As someone who is in the top 1% of fliers I could not disagree more with the sentiment that the top 1% of fliers aren't going anywhere/will not notice good service.

In fact as a counter to that point I flew well over 150k miles on United last year and yet right now I'm doing a status match on American because United's service on my most frequent route (LAX -> JFK) completely changed in October of last year and I was/am hoping that American may offer superior service on that route. Regardless of the miles in my account (they truly don't matter that much to me) I care about how the customer service is, how the delays are and how often my baggage is handled properly.

When I do use my miles its almost never on a ticket for me but a ticket for a friend or family member.

As for those people who are not frequent fliers but expecting an upgrade "randomly" I'd suggest to pay more for the seats and "upgrade" yourself. The short of it is, the people who do spend as much time in the air as people like me do care and it does make a difference to the Airlines' bottom line no doubt.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your comment. We're all certainly sensitive to customer service issues (if anything, frequent fliers even more so). I think a major change in service for your most frequently-used route is pretty significant, and I'd expect anyone to switch airlines for this. I was speaking more of small changes that would likely go unnoticed, eg if one airline offers upgrades to frequent fliers slightly more often than another; that might go unnoticed, and even if it didn't, likely would not trump loyalty due to existing miles, preferable routes, preferred lounges/service of one airline over another, etc.

Your suggestion of "upgrading" yourself is not realistic for 2 reasons. One, very few people will pay 5x as much for a slightly better experience. The price difference vastly exceeds the actual cost (except to the extent that premium seats subsidize coach seats, of course).

Secondly, my comment was about the customer goodwill the occasional upgrade would generate, as lowly infrequent fliers do not expect to be treated as anything but breathing, inconvenient cargo.

You say that people who spend as much time in the air as you DO care, but you also said you don't use upgrades, and you changed airlines over a major service change, not over a minor upgrade policy change. I'm not saying you DON'T care about upgrades, just that it's not really what you were addressing in your comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> About 1/2 of the flights I've taken in the past 5 years have been on United or Continental. 11 flights on United and 4 flights on Continental[1] (I keep track of my airline travel in a spreadsheet). 2 of my United flights were international. My most recent United flights was in late 2014.

I can only speak for myself, but I've never had a bad experience with United or Continental. A few small delays here or there. One 3 hour delay caused by really bad weather, but no cancellation: I still made it to my destination before 1am.

For context, I've always flown economy, by myself or in a small group, and usually departing from Austin or Houston.

[1] In this instance, 1 flight = 1 leg.

<comment><USER15> Congratulations, you're an anecdote!

Statistically, United's performance has been absolutely _abysmal_. The crap really started hitting the fan in June of last year, when United reported departure/arrival on-time numbers of 42% and 66% (in other words, over half of flights departed late, and over one-third arrived late, meaning they didn't make up much time in the air).

For another perspective: if we look at "chronically delayed" flights (DOT defines this as being 30+ minutes delayed, 50% or more of the time), the most recent month published (November 2015) shows one-third of the chronically- delayed flights in the US are on United's network, through its chronically- comically-delayed Newark hub. Back in 2013 the WSJ published a report listing eleven flights through Newark which had landed on the chronically-delayed list for 8 consecutive months or more. The only carrier with more chronically- delayed flights than United... is Spirit. And that's saying something (they're also typically the only airline with worse overall on-time performance than United).

Granted, a lot of that is from affiliates running small regional jets under the "United Express" brand -- though mainline United was still dead last in on-time performance among the big three legacy US carriers in Q3 2015 -- but in turn that's mostly ripple effects of the way United manages its regionals and shops out as much flying as possible to them (in Q3 2015, Delta operated 233,000 flights, American operated 234,000 and United only 133,000; over the same time period ExpressJet, which does regional operations for all three but primarily for United, operated over 142,000 flights, and SkyWest which has over half its flying as United Express operated over 152,000 flights), which in turn was thanks to a major strategy (slashing mainline operations in the name of "capacity discipline") of the previous Smisek-led management at United.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I travel frequently and United is one of my favored airlines. I guess I just don't expect much and airlines tend to deliver. My biggest frustrations are usually with other passengers, not the airlines or their staff.

One thing I do miss is the airline Midwest Express, which used to hand out warm chocolate chip cookies on each flight. It was a delight just smelling them warm up about 30 minutes in to the flight.

</comment><comment><USER17> The last time I flew United was a non-stop flight from Chicago to NYC. I somehow ended up in Washington D.C. with seemingly clear skies* and no more flights out for the evening and a three-hour line for people trying to get hotel vouchers. I rented a car and was in my bed five hours later. That was six years ago. That wasn't my first bad experience with United by a long shot, but I'm trying to make sure it's my last.

* If there WERE poor weather conditions anywhere along the way, they weren't showing up on any weather maps. I'm no expert - I'm sure they had their reasons.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not to mention that they break guitars: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo)

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't help but think that all they have to do is to look at other airlines in the US and don't do what they do. Then you look at any airline in Asia and do what they do. Problem solved.

I fly a lot in South-East Asia and judging by what I see from US commenters here, the things I can complain about are problems a US airline would love to have.

</comment><comment><USER20> You'd figured with the reduction in fuel prices they'd be able to spend that extra cash on its clients or erase those dumb baggage fees!

<comment><USER21> why would they do that, when they can just make extra profit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had a decent experience with United over the holidays. Only $99 to upgrade to first class from DEN - LGA.

<comment><USER23> This is actually one of the things (some of) United's frequent flyers complain about -- very cheap day-of-travel upgrades which prevent complimentary upgrades for their most loyal/highest spending customers from clearing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if Satan also has a quest to be less evil.

</comment><comment><USER25> The airline industry needs to be disrupted. Lets hope for a day when building safe and reliable planes is cheap and fueling them even cheaper.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that people complain but many then go ahead and book the cheapest flight whether it's to save their own money or to comply with corporate travel policies. I'm not sure what "disruption" you have in mind that isn't available to existing carriers.

<comment><USER26> This is the key. People complain about the airlines, but they're only giving their customers what the customers want. Sure, nobody _says_ they'd rather be crammed into terrible seats and treated horribly to save $50, but that's how people behave, and that's all that counts.

Next time you're eating your terrible free pretzels with your knees in the back of the person before you, don't blame the airline, blame your fellow passengers. And yourself!

<comment><USER27> Why the heck would I blame myself or other customers when it's the company that's giving shitty service?!

If you want to make a capitalist argument then you also need to accept that customers also have the right to complain about the service they receive. It's part of the market. None of this "it's your own fault" bullshit when it's the airline that's installing the seats.

<comment><USER26> Airlines offer better service if you pay for it. If you choose not to take advantage of that offer, you're telling the airline that you prefer to save money than have better service.

You have every right to complain, but complaining itself doesn't _do_ anything. If you say X when you complain, but say Y when you pull out your wallet, airlines are naturally going to listen to Y much more than X.

I've lost count of how many times I've seen a conversation go like this:

"Airlines suck, I'm a tall guy and my knees are crammed into the seat back for the entire flight."

"Almost every airline these days offers an upgraded economy class with more legroom."

"Yeah, but it's too expensive!"

If you don't want to pay for it and would prefer to suffer (I'm a tall guy, and that's what I do too) then fine, but don't be surprised when the airlines listen to the signals you send with your money.

<comment><USER4> Mind you, United has more than its share of customer service issues even for people who regularly get upgraded. But I fully agree with your basic point. There does seem to be some market for relatively modestly priced legroom upgrades but, for the most part, the market tends to bifurcate into cheapest flight or price doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, they don't have an option to pay $100 for better customer service, so that's a little more opaque. Still, different airlines do it differently, and it's rare not to have a choice of airline for your trip.

That's an interesting aspect of this trouble with United's service. They had a long period where their service was well below average. Did their passenger numbers suffer accordingly, or did everybody just put up with it?

The major US airlines all suck to some degree, but they suck differently, so if you care about that then go with the one you like best even if it costs more. If you don't, you're saying you don't actually care.

<comment><USER4> I'm honestly not convinced that there are huge differences between the big legacy US carriers. Or, at any rate, your experience is just as much dictated by how busy their hubs are, whether your common routes are non-stop (as many of mine are with United), whether you're tending to fly in the winter in northern climates, etc.

I'm sure I would have absolutely no problem collecting a long litany of horror stories about every major US airline from among my Facebook friends with status.

So I go with United for size of route system and frequency of flights at my home airport and get enough miles to have status which does help. (Alternatively, for one shorter route where United doesn't have a non-stop, I usually fly JetBlue which IMO is one of the better bets in the absence of status.)

<comment><USER26> So much depends on luck, too. If you only fly a few times a year (which seems pretty typical) then the variance in experience can be huge. I think you really have to look at the relevant statistics to see how they actually compare. Gathering anecdotes from friends won't give you a good picture, especially since people have different standards for service. One person might say they had a bad experience when the airline baggage people took their bag and shredded each item in front of them while ridiculing their choice of underwear, while another might say they had a bad experience when their flight was delayed by 30 minutes because of a violent thunderstorm.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Some Startups Win - <AUTHOR> https://steveblank.com/2017/03/15/why-some-startups-win/ <comment><USER2> > It wasn't that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. What I was hearing > was a failure of management.

Uh, if you've inherited employees that think their job as marketers is to pump out Press Releases, you certainly haven't inherited good ones.

Most people in marketing do not behave like this, any more than developers see their job as 'write lots of lines of code'.

Too many management articles (and Blank is often guilty of it) have the pattern of presenting the 'employee' as an unthinking zombie, and then present 'management' as the answer. 'See, without highly paid consultants like myself, this would all go to shit!'

Most employees would find this kind of micromanagement-in-the-name-of- onboarding intolerable because they are good employees who are capable of autonomous thought.

<comment><USER3> Think about the jobs you've quit because the culture / environment made it impossible for you to get the right things done.

Even really good employees need an aligned sense of mission.

Of all the other early CEO's I've talked to (and it's a lot), none of them have ever told me "I just hire awesome people and never talk to them about what we're trying to do but it works out great because they are awesome people." Nor has anyone ever conveyed that these types of communication exercises are micromanagy. Aligning mission and understanding how your outputs are other people's inputs seems to me to be the exact opposite of micromanagement.

<comment><USER2> All of the things he suggests are incredibly obvious though.

Most marketing people I know (and I know a lot) would consider the idea that their job was to 'set up trade booths' or 'send out a Press Release and wait for things to happen' as a thinly veiled insult. Of course the purpose of trade shows is to gather and qualify leads- otherwise you're simply spraying money up the wall.

Likewise, if a marketing organization doesn't have basic targets or marketing/sales alignment in place, then it's not because of the lack of management, it's because the marketing/sales people are incompetent.

And if I think of the negative cultures I've worked in - the one thing they have in common is a 'leader figure' at the top who spends his time abasing the team and generally getting in the way of things that, left alone, the team would organize to do anyway. The job of a leader is to hire good people and get out of their way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is for some of the people like me to let you know you're not alone...

I too am at a startup where everyone wheres many hats. I would love to be CTO and not have to take my turn emptying the dish washer or taking out the trash but we are small so everyone has to do their part.

Our marketing team does SEO, usability testing, graphic design, copywriting... and that's just one person.

I would love to have a dedicated person to do trade shows. Heck, I'd love to be able to afford to go to a trade show.

So for all the people out there who are at startups that haven't raised enough money to do those sort of things... you are not alone.

<comment><USER5> Sounds all pretty good to me, what's not to like? Emptying the dishwasher and going to trade-shows can contribute to keeping everyone "grounded", wearing many hats is cross-fertilizing all ones skills better and reduces tunnel-eye vision.. I _wish_ more startups were still like that, in fact I see the bulk of them today having super-defined tiny dedicated roles and that's offputting. Dev-ops? CD/CI "engineer"? Really? Back in the day we had coders and admins, with admins doing a fair bit of plumbing coding and devs doing a fair bit of administering sub-systems of an architecture or server farm. And mostly wiring together some scripts, services, and some command-line acrobatics weren't the defining portion of the "engineer" role :D

Ah well, all is fair with changing times.

<comment><USER6> Having worked at both kinds of places, one thing I've observed is as the team size grows, the places with many-hats approach end up/or have problems with accountability. For ex: at the end of the day who's responsible for devops (automating things that can be automated, and making sure the data science team doesn't wait for 3 weeks to get a simple security group access etc..) and things like that.

For sure, there'll be problems other way around too. So there's no one- solution fits all problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b While I think there is a lot of good advice in there, I can't help thinking this feels like a management type modeled on the army:

Break down work in pieces that can be done independently in small groups, have the people of the small groups engaged by having them believing they're part of a greater mission. And then there is the "no excuse" culture. That seems like a great way of getting rid of people who don't follow.

I'd be interested in a anonymous feedback from their employees...

Also the end of the article really sounds self-congratulatory...

<comment><USER7> At least he doesn't call employees "subordinates" like some other Silicon Valley hot shots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another reason to consider growing slower and hiring considerately: it's too easy to think scaling fast and hiring a bunch of people is a panacea for success when it may ruin teamwork, morale and culture. There are situations to scale big and fast, but there is no one-sized-fits-all recipe.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know Steve Blank is a well respected person in this space, but the lack of real, verifiable details make this kind of case study lose credibility.

It reads almost like a business fairy tale.

I always wonder, when I read stuff like this, if the people in the story would characterize things the same way.

</comment><comment><USER10> And majority startups fail; Analogy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've just finished reading (finally) Ben Horowitz's Hard Thing About Hard Things. He too spends a lot of ink saying that onboarding is extremely important, and a prime management task not to be lightly passed off to subordinates. Falling into routines and losing sight of results is all too easy, even if you know it's too easy, of course.

<comment><USER11> Actually, now that I'm on to Andy Grove's book, it's there too - training is not only a management task, the only other task according to Grove is motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great article. Lots of wisdom</comment>


Show HN: Is the United States government shut down? - <AUTHOR> http://istheunitedstatesgovernmentshutdown.com/ <comment><USER2> It would be really neat to have a timeline of key events during the shutdown like when certain employees stopped getting paid, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> It be cool to see what parts of the gov. are still running and what ones are working without pay.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah but like not really though.</comment>


CUPS 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-2.0/relnotes.html <comment><USER2> I wish printing was harder. I have piles of slides filling my desk. Slides on paper, printed by someone else, pages that have been barely read once, their information is already outdated and the contents could have been collectively read from a white screen in the meetings.

Using Linux since 1995 forced me into paperless thinking, because printing used to be hard. And these days, with all those smartphone, tablet, laptop, ereader etc. screen it should be virtually unnecessary in office environments. But still people just keep on printing everything.

I hope there is some terrible fault in CUPS that makes people to think, that trying to print this is not worth the trouble</semisarcasm>

<comment><USER3> Funny that I have the exactly opposite feeling. I _want_ to print more, but I don't, because CUPS is a kludge, and I don't feel like using Windows at work for the sole purpose of somewhat sane printer handling.

Now to answer why and what I would want to print more? Surprisingly, I mostly want to print code. The reason is that computers suck for reading and thinking, and in my specific case, I can't focus on thinking hard in front of a computer screen (it's too easy to turn on HN).

When I'm stuck with a hard refactor to do, I like to print out all relevant files, take coloured pens and highlighters and keep drawing and annotating code until everything is clear in my hand. Paper is simply superior in annotating capabilities and high-level view (i.e. spread 20 pages in front of you to see everything). I haven't found any tool yet that would make doing this on computer even comparable.

I once asked a very known HN user, who prints out all relevant code every afternoon as a method of planning work for the next day, whether he worries about the amount of paper he uses. The answer I got: "Paper is cheap. Focus is golden."

As for ecology side of printing, I used to worry much more about it before. But at some point I realized that I didn't do any math, and from what I can tell, "paperless world" seems to be much more damaging to environment than cutting down trees for paper, and as long as we recycle, paper ain't that bad. But still, I didn't do the math.

<comment><USER4> >When I'm stuck with a hard refactor to do, I like to print out all relevant files, take coloured pens and highlighters and keep drawing and annotating code until everything is clear in my hand. Paper is simply superior in annotating capabilities and high-level view (i.e. spread 20 pages in front of you to see everything). I haven't found any tool yet that would make doing this on computer even comparable.

I can't agree more. I tried several ways to get a better overview of projects I work on, but ultimately it's all very klutzy and awkward. When you have 30 (or more) files with cross references and you need to get a global understanding of the whole architecture, working with code can be very hard. Even with visual tools like UML diagram or similar IDE features, even when ctrl+clicking offered by various editors to jump to definitions and jump around code, even with ctags and multiple buffers open in vim. I tried working with 4 screens but my eyes have to move all over the place to keep following, I can't easily re-organize my files next to each other to keep relevant portions of code close together (regardless of logical modularity in my implementation).

Paper is really the best we have at the moment, maybe a more modern environment in the future will solve this (I recall LightTable promising something similar where you could move around small blocks of functions, during their Kickstarter, however that was never delivered unfortunately), but for the moment we are stuck with paper.

<comment><USER5> I think this is sort of the fact that IDEs are signed primarily for writing code, not for understanding existing code.

If you look at a reverse engineering tool like IDA Pro, despite working with lower level code, you get powerful understanding tools, excellent cross referencing and diagram generation tools, graph views of code so you can see every decision made without having to read them all out and now even stuff like "proximity" view, which gives a nice way to understand calling structures.

[http://www.hexblog.com/?p=468](http://www.hexblog.com/?p=468)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> * TL;DR from [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgwMjE](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgwMjE) *

>> CUPS 2.0 has greater security around its scheduler, various OS X specific improvements, systemd support, support for TLS certificate validation and policy enforcement, updates to all Linux man pages, dropped OpenSSL in favor of GNU TLS, dropped support for AIX / HP-UX / OSF/1 architectures, and various other changes.

</comment><comment><USER6> CUPS work very well for the company I work for.

In just one linux print server, we've got exactly 1110 printers installed (HP, Brother, Ricoh, Argox, Epson, Samsung and LexMark), all working without hassles.

We're a warehouse/retailing company.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Dropped "dark wake" support on OS X, which was preventing portables from going to sleep when there was a stuck job. We now use a variation of the CUPS 1.4 sleep support to do a cleaner sleep (<rdar://problem/14323704>)"

At last.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm guessing this isn't a coincidence, with osx yosemite out as a release candidate?

<comment><USER9> It does seem to be somewhat OSX focussed - although dropping OpenSSL in favour of GNUTLS is going to be interesting, as currently I don't believe there's any sanctioned OSX build of GNUTLS.

<comment><USER8> Don't forget CUPS is an Apple product. I'm sure they have a plan :)

<comment><USER10> Notably, the maintainer who is by far the primary author, is an Apple employee.

<comment><USER11> Not only that. Insofar as that is possible, Apple owns CUPS.

Look at the footer on cups.org:

 _CUPS, the CUPS logo, and OS X are trademarks of Apple Inc._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it interesting they dropped support for HP-UX, and AIX, and that there was support to drop for OSF/1

<comment><USER13> To be fair the number of HP-UX and AIX machines that need to be connected to printers can probably be counted on one hand.

<comment><USER14> I had more than a handful of AIX machines serving literally thousands of printers to deal with at a previous job. AIX was hosting a POS/ERP system which was heavily dependent on printing to trade (b2b/'trade' retail business) - it was an entirely business-critical function.

I never want to see another OKI ML520 again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yup.. [http://localhost:631/](http://localhost:631/)

CUPS 2.0.0 CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for OS X® and other UNIX®-like operating systems.

<comment><USER16> _Bought_ by Apple Inc. for OS X. It predates OS X by a few years.

<comment><USER17> CUPS 2.0.0 doesn't though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder why there doesn't seem to be any implementation for AirPrint/ePrint in Linux. Seems like a good lightweight alternative to CUPS for wireless systems/devices.

Also, I am curious: is CUPS still used in OSX?

<comment><USER19> Certainly, go to [http://127.0.0.1:631/](http://127.0.0.1:631/) in your browser. CUPS is still actively developed by Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish that the CUPS filter language would be made out of something like lua or javascript rather than binary (C) right now.

But I have less than zero hope of that ever happening - both OSX and Linux use CUPS as their printing framework. There is no way, Apple (which basically owns CUPS) will allow Linux to get easy leverage on the superb printer driver ecosystem of the Mac.

Before anybody else comments - printers do work on Linux. But not all features work.

<comment><USER21> It's been a while, but I thought that CUPS filters were just executables with an input stream and an output stream, so you could write them in whatever you wanted?

<comment><USER20> correct - but they are non portable. Which means that all the nice features that Mac drivers have are not available on Linux (or the printing is screwed up, etc.).

I wish there was some way to make portable/obfuscated filter drivers, so that vendors could ship them and be usable on all CUPS platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> printer are bloatware. Old men recipe: new corporate printer tends to have a lpd daemon running accepting postscript (60%). Use rlpr and send your file directly bypassing the spooler. nmap on ldp port my help.

</comment><comment><USER23> We're going to miss you when you're gone.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have no comment about CUPS, but I will say that I find this site to be pleasant on the eyes, even if it is just bootstrap. I feel like half the reason people don't want to use Debian or GNU stuff or other free software is because the sites themselves are fugly remnants of the mid-nineties and leave much to be desired from a usability standpoint.

How hard would it be to simply wrap their boring html and drop it into a bog standard bootstrap? Like, a day?

<comment><USER25> Why don't you volunteer to improve the design of the webpages of the OSS projects that you think would need it?

<comment><USER26> "Submit a patch."

<comment><USER27> By far not every project does it like php and host their website sourcecode on a github repo.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A job board where all jobs are thoroughly reviewed - 0-o https://jobscurated.com <comment> 0-o Hi! Creator of Jobs/Curated here :).

Two weeks ago I figured it was time to start working more for myself and less for clients. I like the bootstrapped style of building startups and this is one of the first concepts I churned out in a while!

I'm going to try and process your feedback, convert it to tasks and get them in production as soon as possible, so please be brutal! :)

The concept is simple: Job openings get reviewed by experts. These experts are not your normal recruiters. They are qualified for the jobs they are vetting. Scoring is done on aspects ranging from salary to work-life balance, resulting in a curated list of high-quality jobs.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not looking for a job ATM, but i took a quick look at the site and while it looks clean and nice, the tags do not seem to work: the tags bar (why is it hidden by default? Initially i thought there wasn't a tag feature at all) at the left shows tags that are not part of the posted entries and the tags above the posted entries are not clickable. Also the search box should include tag (explicit when prefixed with # and mixed/fuzzy if just text - so, e.g, searching for #foo will only display entries with #foo tag but searching for just foo will display entries that contain the foo word but also the #foo tag).

Also i'd expect the location to be a drop down box with the locations sourced from the posted entries.

But good luck anyway, it sounds like a useful site (although like all those job posting sites, it mainly depends on the companies to post stuff there which i guess will be the hardest part).

<comment> 0-o Hi Crinus,

Thanks for your thorough review, this is exactly what I'm looking for.

It's really bootstrapped (a.k.a. riddled with small bugs and errors and incomplete features), mainly because I'd want to know what people would like to see more without preemptively assuming things.

The funny thing is that after asking a bunch of people for feedback and turning it into tasks, the list is completely different from my own backlog, the stuff I thought people wanted.

Just one question (you've helped a lot already so don't feel obligated to respond): Which features would you like to see prioritised?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think filling the sidebar with the proper tags would be the first to be done since right now the tags do not work. After that i'd do the clickable tags since it sounds the easiest once you have a tag filter there. Including the tag in the regular search also sounds easy, so that could be done next, then the explicit tags. I'd leave the drop box for after the tag stuff since it sounds the hardest (although there might be some HTML5 element that does it for you and all you need to do is feed it with the values, TBH my webdev knowledge stops somewhere between HTML3 and HTML4 :-P).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: HoneyMoney – 100% more Bees than any other personal finance software - <AUTHOR> https://HoneyMoney.io <comment><USER2> As nice as the tool and the insights it provides, the pain point is manually entering all the transactions. It is 2018, and we still dont have a easy way of exporting our transactions from the bank in a standard way. Every bank wants to use their own way of exporting it.

I was seriously considering using Plaid API[1] to build an app that would download my transactions automatically, categorise it, and prompt me to only verify entries it classified with low-confidence. But, Plaid API at the time did not support all my bank accounts, which made the effort moot.

Another concern of mine is exporting such personal data to a 3rd party. Ideally, an open source tool that strictly runs on my laptop would be the best!

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

<comment><USER3> In Europe the PSD2 regulations are just about to come into effect which means that all banks will have to provide a public API. You can also use an aggregation service like Tink ([https://business.tink.se](https://business.tink.se))

<comment><USER4> I really like Europe. Why is a cluster of countries functioning better than a single country?

<comment><USER5> You might ask some Greeks how they think it is functioning and you might change your view a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great copy writing / presentation. The non slick design comes across as being personal, cheerful and nerdy. I think it works very well for what you are trying to sell.

<comment><USER7> This is what I came to find. It was so refreshing to see some charming imperfections that make the design so much more personal, feeling old school while still maintaining a modern flow to the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use Mint but generally, am not trilled with it.

1\. I have a hard time managing my bank account AND my main credit card. Mint seems to think me paying off my credit card bill is another expense, however Mint already tracked the CC charges so basically Mint thinks I run a massive loss every month (yes I've tried fixing this, multiple times)

2\. Other than reviewing your newest transactions, and the occasional useful bill/fee reminder, I don't find much use for the app in regards to financial planning or analysis.

3\. I don't like how Mint is basically used to slurp up my data, and sell me credit cards - it's obvious now how little they care about making it truly useful. The app has been in existence for years and barely nudges forward besides new UI.

The thought of manually tracking my expenses however is too much work. I find it hard enough launching the Mint app regularly to allow it to download my latest transactions.

<comment><USER9> Check out You Need A Budget.

<comment><USER10> YNAB is great except when tracking existing credit card debt and new debt. I found it a real pain to figure out what my monthly payments should be. It's doable, I just found it not straight forward at all. That and trying to figure out what a 'month' is - different payments coming in at different times for purchases from different times, I kept finding myself trying to override and do manual catch ups. I finally just stopped using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to love YNAB, but once I started needing real support for multiple currencies, I had to stop using it. I haven't found a daily driver replacement since, and I've tried around 10 apps. I even started writing my own, although it's not done. Does HoneyMoney support multiple currencies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. All the currencies you want. Even bitcoin. It will even take into account your default currency when displaying it's symbol. For example, for me Canadian dollar is simply "$", but US dollar is "US$". For US it will be the other way around: "$" for USD and "CA$" for CAD.

<comment><USER12> like they once said about gender: currency is a text field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh wow this is super cool. IME the hardest part of using this kind of accounting software is to keep using it over time, because entering transactions is super boring, and it's hard to build the habit.

Right now, since all my expenses come from one bank account, I export the data from the bank and use a bunch of excel sheets to keep track of stuff, but of course is a quite limited system.

I was wondering if HoneyMoney has some kind of import system? In this way I could just dump the exports in there like once a month.

<comment><USER14> You can get used to it quite quickly and it is really useful. By adding your expenses right after the purchase you're all the time up-to-date with your budget. You know where you're with your plans, whether they need any modifications or not. I restarted using YNAB this January after a 2 years long pause and now I have again money at the end of the month. :>

<comment><USER15> I've been using YNAB for years too, similar experiences, until I consistently manually added the transactions I found my accounts got worse and worse during reconcilable and my budget forecasts were ruined consequently.

Now I'm checking the accounts almost daily when adding purchases manually, it's been consistently accurate for months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> YNAB4's desktop software has been my GOTO buggering (budgeting... I'll leave the typo in for laughs...) suite for years. Unfortunate it is no longer sold and they opted for a subscription model but it can still be found via nefarious methods.

I'll give this a look over and see how it works. Personally I like YNAB's process of allowing manual transactions to be added but supporting other file exports from banks like .OFX files to allow you to easily reconcile your accounts and transactions. Though it's unfortunate that only their subscription model supports live feeds from your bands.

All the same, I'll give your product a crack and see how it goes.

PS. I enjoy how your websites presented though depending on your intended market audience, I feel it may be just a little too jovial?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

Too jovial?

The app itself has fewer bees per square pixel than promo website. Check out the demo: [https://demo.honeymoney.io](https://demo.honeymoney.io)

<comment><USER15> Eh, I'm a grouch. It's so happy, carefree, cute and just straight up adorable I found it to be unprofessional. But. Everyone here likes it for the larger part. That's how I frame the website, you could almost disregard my opinion.

It's clear to see that the happy, carefree and cute design is what you were going for and you've nailed it! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have tried so many apps to get my financial shit together, but I always end up returning to my Google Spreadsheet-based system. One worksheet for each pay period. No tracking of transactions. Just columns for who's owed what and how much I'll have left after everyone is paid.

Things aren't always perfect, but I have a groove and that's what matters.

<comment><USER12> Anything you are missing from the spreadsheets? I started like you myself and it just wasn't good enough to make projections and fit those transactions that happen every three months for my austrian health/pension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's no privacy policy on this site (I did a custom Google search on the site to check if I'd somehow missed it). So my serious question is why anyone should trust this platform even for a trial. It's 2018, and it's unforgivable for a site, especially one that stores financial information, not to have a clear privacy policy and commitment.

@Ildar, if you see this comment, this is the first thing you should address before anything else (and also state how any policy you put affects past data collected).

<comment><USER18> If you don't want your financial information shared with anyone, don't put it on the internet. Even with a strong privacy policy, do think anyone can guarantee that your data will always remain safe?

<comment><USER17> I don't put it on the Internet at all. I was just wondering how so many people were praising the site and its features and how this application has so many users with nobody even asking the question about a privacy policy or the developer not thinking about it. Since this is a paid product, a privacy policy is a set of promises that the vendor makes to you as a customer, and is part of the contract with you (which you can enforce or claim compensation for when breached, depending on the jurisdiction).

While nobody can guarantee anything in life, we still expect reasonable policies and protections to be available. Otherwise why would anyone even worry or talk about the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Take this unrealistic example: would you not feel you're being scammed if you bought a flight ticket but the airline had no policy about baggage loss or delays (essentially anything that could affect you, the paying customer, negatively)? It's quite obvious that the airline cannot guarantee that your bags won't get lost or that there won't be delays in the flight times.

<comment><USER18> The same principle applies with the airline. If you really don't want to deal with the hassle of having your bags lost, don't fly. Of course, that takes the whole mentality to an extreme. It's not often, even with a good privacy policy, or lost baggage policy, that it offers any true protection. It is more for peace of mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Probably the cutest illustrations I've seen on an app marketing site in a long while. It's refreshing to see some whimsy and personality.

<comment><USER20> The presentation of information is absolutely excellent too. And you can instantly see what they mean about a calendar view as a default view, with the screenshot, it's really nice.

Fairly impressive overall, +1.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Your words make my heart smile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not to nitpick:

> _100% more Bees than any other personal finance software_

100% over a zero is still a zero.

<comment><AUTHOR> @mingabunga in the comment below explained it better than I can: "It's just a catchy headline, it doesn't really make sense but is comical/nonsense so it makes you stop and pay attention to it. I think it's brilliant."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> By coincidence I've started my own accounting software last month using ruby on rails. Previously I've been using GnuCash and then move to hledger (hard to beat simple text files) but I've always been missing something that reminds me to type in new transactions (I really don't like automatic imports). I like that honeymoney got envelopes, something I was struggling to use with hledger.

Is honeymoney double accounting, I mean internally?

Anyways, keep up the good work, great to see competition in the market for get-rich-slow-schemes :D

<comment><USER20> An self-hosted/open source one floating out there too is Firefly III: [https://firefly-iii.org/](https://firefly-iii.org/)

I tried to make some sense of an hledger thing with a web interface, and couldn't wrap my head around what it wanted me to do. :(

<comment><USER12> Ha, I even tried to contribute some code to hledger's web interface but I couldn't get the feel for haskell and tbh, the naming of variables in hledger isn't consistent and made it just harder. Or maybe I'm just spoiled from Rails.

firefly, thanks for the tip, didn't know that one. But just look and scroll that screenshot... [https://firefly- iii.org/static/screenshots/4.7.0/account.png](https://firefly- iii.org/static/screenshots/4.7.0/account.png) My personal data goes back to 2012 and I'm all set to import that into my own app very soon.

<comment><USER20> Heh, might already be fixed, Firefly is pretty actively developed, a lot of devs don't update their screenshots all that often though.

That being said, if you put in the time and effort I think personal software is amazing: It does what you want it to do, not what someone else wanted it to do. Development priorities are magically aligned with your needs!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I already use a ynab this year maybe next year if this can convinced me

<comment><AUTHOR> Why? If YNAB works perfectly for you, then no need to change anything. HoneyMoney is a different beast, you can check comparison here: [https://honeymoney.io/en/compare](https://honeymoney.io/en/compare)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> wow, HM's on HN :) good to see it here. I've been personally using HM for about 5 yrs now and can say that satisfies all my need. No ocr for receipts, but hey, who's got that the proper way? As for me I do not need such detalisation to follow, for a food purchases I just use categories and subcats.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a small world :)

<comment><USER23> Exactomundo, amigo :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting tool.

I would maybe use this tool if it had some kind of api. I want to be able to have my bot post financial data to my account in HoneyMoney automatically, is this possible?

I haven't found any info regarding this. If someone with an account know of such an api I would sign up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Web version uses a simple json-based API. Could you contact me via email so I can tell you more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> These are the kinds of tools that Open Banking in the UK promised, however I've as yet been unable to find a simple API reference or tutorial that outlines a way to get started.

<comment><USER26> The documentation provided by individual banks seems better than the documentation on the Open Banking site. For example, here is the documentation provided by

\- Barclays: [https://developer.barclays.com/documentation/dc72e132-2951-4...](https://developer.barclays.com/documentation/dc72e132-2951-4378-bc52-38e35b1e3564.bdn)

\- Santander: [https://developer.santander.co.uk/sanuk/external/open- bankin...](https://developer.santander.co.uk/sanuk/external/open-banking- account-information)

\- List of others: [https://openbanking.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DZ/pages/19104...](https://openbanking.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DZ/pages/19104033/ASPSP+Developer+Portals+and+Documentation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Really need a way to import at least a csv of historical data. I know its pitch is tracking manually makes you more aware, but let me bring in history to start at least. Then we get more use out of it right away. I have years upon years of data, and starting from square one seems like a waste of that data.

Totally love the calendar though, that is a nice way to visualize things.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's an import from CSV for historical data. Here's the demo: [https://demo.honeymoney.io/app/my/import](https://demo.honeymoney.io/app/my/import)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is the rounding of planned expenses a feature or a bug? I entered 3.80 euros as an expense, but in the calendar it shows 4 euros. If I enter 3.30, it shows 3 euros.

<comment><USER29> Probably because the original software was developed for the Russian market, and Russian rubles always get rounded.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rubles are not rounded. One ruble is divided into 100 kopeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This looks like a good start but honestly it looks like it needs the help of a good designer.

For a more polished alternative, check out [https://www.pocketsmith.com/](https://www.pocketsmith.com/) \- I've been a customer for a while now and, as far as I can tell, can do everything HoneyMoney can.

<comment><USER31> I disagree. I think the design is straight forward. More important is the copy on the page which is far superior to pocketsmith. It tells me about what your product does without having to click around.

<comment><USER30> I was referring more to the tools themselves than the landing page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Given the boring nature of data entry, this is a prime use case for gamification!

<comment><USER12> +5 points for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> so twice as many?

</comment><comment><USER34> You apparently either have zero bees, or only have twice as many bees as the others.

Is this what you _meant_ to say?

<comment><USER35> It's just a catchy headline, it doesn't really make sense but is comical/nonsense so it makes you stop and pay attention to it. I think it's brilliant.

<comment><USER34> I just get irked that people continuously misuse 300% increase, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's diabolical plan to screw your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.ifixit.com/blog/blog/2011/01/20/apples-diabolical-plan-to-screw-your-iphone/ <comment><USER2> On things known and unknown:

Known: Those tiny Phillips screws are pretty, but they eat driver bits. Realistically, you need to buy a quality #00 to get them out without damage. $4 for a Wiha 96100 will do.[1]

Known: Customers lie when they bring a product in for service. Dropped "my precious" in a toilet? An impending repair bill can have devastating effects on some people's morals. Part of your iPhone cost is the three water sensors assembled into it. You payed for those just to prevent you from lying to Apple and fraudulently claiming a warranty replacement.

Unknown: How many customers go exploring in their device, compromise a seal or connection, then later incur a repair? A small number to be sure, but at Apple's scale, the extra cost of an uncommon screw is zero. (the bits for assembly probably outlast Phillips bits, it might even save a tiny bit of money)

Known: A quick googling shows you can buy the uncommon pentalobe driver for $9.95 from ScrewdriversWorld, about twice the cost of a Phillips. That doesn't seem terribly well hidden or really any kind of barrier to someone that wants to install a $500-$1100 SSD upgrade.

Unknown: There are a number of different 5 lobed screw patterns. I'm not positive that one I found above is the right one.

Known: iFixit[2] got a great PR boost. They have driven a small nerd herd to their site to buy $9.95 screwdriver sets and for this they call Apple "diabolical"? They should be sending them a fruit basket and a nice card!

[1] But you are a geek! Get the complete sets of the tiny ones including hex and Torx.

[2] Don't get me wrong, I love these guys. Ah the evenings I've spent with the iFixit site, an iBook with a bad inverter cable, my full set of Wiha screwdrivers, and 24 tiny glass bowls for the beautiful tiny screws of myriad designs from each step. The entire procedure is just slightly more complicated than replacing Spock's brain.

<comment><USER3> "You payed for those just to prevent you from lying to Apple and fraudulently claiming a warranty replacement."

You make it sound like Apple is an innocent little child. It swings both ways - for every "amoral" customer you get claiming a warranty replacement, you'll have another "moral" customer getting short shrift from Apple (or company X) in terms of legitimate warranties not being honoured in a timely fashion or not following up on promises. When it actually comes to needing support, a lot of people find that Apple's slick sell doesn't flow into support - you take your chances and sometimes it really sucks.

"$500-$1100 SSD upgrade"

That's quite a tarry brush you're carrying there. A nice 120GB 2.5" SSD is all of $250 Australian dollars ($220 on newegg). A 240GB 2.5" drive is indeed $500, but I couldn't find an $1100 drive (my local may just not stock them). Regardless, you're intentionally picking the worst possible case to make your point.

What about this situation: The bottom end mac pro comes with a 250GB drive (and you can't get a 500GB one). Upgrading to a 500GB drive costs less than $100 for the parts if you buy your own drive ($89 near me). Or 750GB/1TB for $115/$185? That's a decent upgrade for you computer, and it's not ridiculously expensive like you make out.

I don't have a problem with countermeasures like water sensors, but to defend them by saying things like "what's the problem with buying a special screwdriver since anyone who's going to do so is going to install the most expensive SSD they can possibly find!" is just straight out apologism.

<comment><USER4> >When it actually comes to needing support, a lot of people find that Apple's slick sell doesn't flow into support

What are you talking about? Apple support consistently scores near the top. Have you ever dealt with Dell?

<comment><USER3> So I write a diatribe about selectively picking and choosing data points to spin your argument and you choose to reply by doing just that?

<comment><USER4> Given that your "selectively picking and choosing data points to spin your argument" was even worse ("a lot of people find..." what a nonsensical peace of spin!), that's pretty rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should make a hard polymer mold kit to create your own custom drivers on the end of a Torx tip. This would be able to adapt to any screw companies could devise, and would probably be safer from stripping the screws than improvised drivers. It would also keep repair people from asking questions about changed screws. Most importantly, it would defeat companies' attempts to keep us out of our own property. These tips wouldn't be as durable, obviously, but the typical user only needs this sort of things a few times a year.

<comment><USER6> This has me wondering, Couldn't I jut use sugru to make any screwdriver head I wanted? Or, does it now dry hard enough?

(<http://sugru.com/>)

<comment><USER7> Sugru wouldn't set hard enough, and you'd have to leave it in place overnight anyway. I'd go for Polymorph (called Shapelock in the US), which sets rigid in a couple of minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> iFixit has awesome marketing and PR skills. Their teardowns are in all gadget blogs every time Apple comes out with a new product, they know how to jump on the right topics and they are even able to set topics (blogs already picked the story up). Not even any topic (some companies would be happy if they could do just that), topics which are directly relevant to their business.

Oh, and they are also an awesome company (that certainly helps, too).

<comment><USER9> The claims made are that Apple did this in part because they knew the screwdrivers would be hard to find and/or overpriced so people wouldnt be able to get in.

I kind of gathered the feeling there was going to be good hack to solve this, well, the article then goes on to try and sell me that very overpriced screwdriver

No thanks.

<comment><USER8> Meh. You can't make everyone happy, some want to be contrarians just for the sake of contrarianism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nintendo hackers have been having to buy special screwdrivers for years, but they weren't completely unique like these. Still, they are unusual enough that they are commonly referred to as 'nintendo screws.'

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Proprietar...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Proprietary_head)

<comment><USER11> You can also melt the end of a Bic biro and mold it to the shape - it's not ideal, but it worked for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know this practice is not uncommon, but could someone explain the business case here? Surely it doesn't seriously keep 3rd party repair shops from working on the hardware? Is it to protect the aftermarket / 1st party replacement parts business, in that consumers can't order something on ebay and do the replacement themselves? Is this really a significant enough revenue stream to these companies to justify the abuse?

<comment><USER13> Apple probably doesn't see it as "abuse" when they use proprietary fasteners for components that cannot be unfastened without violating their warranty, nor are they likely to see it as "abuse" when they prevent unrelated third parties from selling Apple customers services that can only be performed by violating the warranty.

You see it as abuse, and I understand why, but from the perspective of a multi-billion-dollar business, this is not dissimilar from the people who think all non-GPL software is also abuse.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough, but what I was really wondering was what they get out of it. Obviously they have to go through some real hurdles in designing testing and revving the fasteners and manufacturing and distributing the tools. Why do they need to "prevent" people from voiding their warranties as opposed to just detecting it via marker paint or such?

<comment><USER14> From a support point of view (now that they run their own stores with people to repair stuff), it cuts down on the "I know what I'm doing" guy incidents. If you are competent enough to locate and buy the proper screwdrivers, you probably won't destroy anything. Everyone else will just take the thing in for repair.

I am currently at a college and our PC Techs tend to get some interesting problems with PC's brought in by people who tried to repair them. It is kinda ugly.

<comment><USER15> I'm a professional watchmaker, as well as a geek and hacker. This is entirely the reason Rolex uses a fluted case-back, instead of a keyed case-back. It prevents the average joe from opening it up and sticking his fingers in the delicate parts.

I would not consider this cheating, or an evil way to prevent people from hacking on the items they legally own. If anything, it protects consumers from getting into things that they most certainly do not know how to fix, and even more, they don't know when they actually break the item further. Hackers that can own up to their responsibility of opening an item and accidentally damaging it will always open up and play with the internals. No one cares about that, they care about the guy that thinks he can replace parts he doesn't even know exists.

<comment><USER13> Neat! What do you mean, "professional watchmaker"? Do you still "make" watches? Do you make components, or do you do full assemblies? What kind of watches?

<comment><USER15> Most of my work is repairs of higher end mechanical watches. I do manufacture parts, but it is to repair as well.

I've only "made" one watch from start to finish of which I still own. There really isn't much of a market for custom made watches. Plus all my tools are traditional hand tools so it can take a couple months to craft a single movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know this may be off topic, but as I find many people find this practice acceptable from the comments, how would they feel if this was applied to other facets of goods.

Example if your car manufacturer wouldn't allow you to go under your hood to bring to any repair shop but had to bring it to the dealership, or other electronics, you would have to go bring it to where you purchased it to replace the batteries ?

Theres been many times I wish I could have an extra battery I could swap out on my iphone, under heavy usage and not being near a charger all day. Thats why the iphone isn't right for my needs now, because theres alternatives, but I can see how this become more of a common practice based on the success of apple.

<comment><USER17> "I know this may be off topic, but as I find many people find this practice acceptable from the comments, how would they feel if this was applied to other facets of goods."

I don't find this acceptable at all. The rationale seems to be that some people will open up a device, break something, then try to get it covered by the warranty. But trying to prevent people from fixing their own hardware because some take advantage of it is the same backwards approach the music industry takes with digital restriction management: treat your customers like criminals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sure, you _could_ buy this kit to replace their "pentalobular" screws with Philips. Or you could just not buy hardware from a company that thinks you're too incompetent/untrustworthy to open the device you freaking own.

<comment><USER13> You can put value judgements on it like that, or you can express the exact same sentiment without emotion by saying "or, you could just not buy hermetically sealed products if you want to be able to tinker with your hardware", in which case even the Apple advocates will agree with you.

<comment><USER19> Yes, this is exactly the market that makes sense for Apple. They are tremendous products for people willing to pay a premium not to have to deal with the nuts and bolts and desiring to concentrate only on the task at hand. The astonishing part is that through amazing PR and Marketing that they have also managed to convince self-described 'hackers' (this is ostensibly Hacker News) that Apple makes great products for them as well.

It's as if a bunch of car racing enthusiasts were gonzo about a Prius with a welded shut hood! In my experience, while some racing fans are content with keeping the hood shut, most racers are also good mechanics. Are there other examples of experts being so willing to accept that their tools are not customizable? I think of things like low-fi music and the Holga, but even there there is a lot of modding going on.

The obvious answer is probably that 'hacker' is an applied rather than base characteristic. Rather, one can be a software hacker without caring at all about the underlying hardware. But I'm dubious: while it's certainly possible to write good software while never looking at the layers below your preferred virtual machine, I have to think that you benefit from knowing how that layer really works. And that one, and that one.

<comment><USER20> But to know how an amd64-based system works, I don't need to open _this_ laptop (from Apple). I do know how hardware works, and it is important to know how string comparison works and why that would be slow, no matter how far up the abstraction you are.

But unless you're a hardware engineer, in which case you have custom hardware anyway, you don't need to open the computer and inspect the data lines from the CPU and RAM. Just know that they're there and how they work.

In fact the only time I've ever opened this MacBook was to upgrade the hard drive, which admittedly did require a Torx, but Torx really isn't that uncommon. Plus given the low number of people (and high likelihood that anyone replacing a hard drive will have Torx) needing to replace a hard drive and known resistance to camouts makes Torx a good choice for the tiny screws that hold a computer together.

<comment><USER19> You're absolutely right, and yet somehow I just don't want to buy a product that takes that attitude. My disillusion with Macintosh started when I learned that one needed a special 'Mac Cracker' tool to open up a Mac Plus. The easy solution for me is to avoid their products and choose something that doesn't offend my sensibilities.

I've repaired a couple Apple products in the last year. I resoldered an IC on a friend's MacBook to get get rid of a constant reboot problem, and swapped out a broken video card from my girlfriend's desktop Mac Pro. Both were reasonably straightforward repairs, although I'm not sure what they'll gain by making it harder. I'm OK with Torx, but don't see the benefit of moving to Pentalobular.

But I'm sure I can drill them out if I really need too. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am not convinced this is the whole truth. Let's try and separate facts from opinion. Apple using these screws is a fact, "Apple chose this fastener specifically because it was new, guaranteeing repair tools would be both rare and expensive", from what I can tell, is an opinion.

I could find two arguments for that being a fact in the article. The first one is that these screws are only used on the outside of the devices.

However, the screws on the outside likely also are the ones that are fastened with the most torque, and they also can the only ones connecting two particular materials.

So, it could also be that these are just the technically best choice for the application.

The second argument I could find is the claim _"Apple occasionally refers to these as "Pentalobe security screws.""_ however, Google didn't turn up anything for a search for 'pentalobe' on Apple.com.

Finally, Apple being Apple, these screws might even have been chosen because their color best matches the case, are the ones that could be painted white best, or to prevent cases where the alignment of visible lines with the edges of the display of a square or rectangular screw would occasionally be 'just not right'.

My opinion? Making stuff hard to open may have been an objective, but I am not convinced it was the or even the major reason for choosing these fasteners.

<comment><USER22> The source for "Pentalobe security screws" is Apple's internal service manual, which is not publicly available. The tamper-resistant goal is evident from the context. You'll either have to trust me on that or find an Apple authorized technician to verify from the manual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who doesn't own an Apple laptop, I think it's completely outrageous they don't let you in to the MacBook battery. Laptops are fussy, and have the worst possible circumstances to contend with, and sometimes they really really need you to pull the battery to fix them properly (ie. very cold boot). It's certainly happened on my higher-end Lenovo.

<comment><USER24> As someone that's owned 4 Apple laptops over the last 9 years I've never, ever had to remove the battery to 'fix' any of them. That includes the Macbook Air that got sat on hard while sitting open and the 12" Macbook Pro that got dropped from 2m onto concrete.

<comment><USER25> So you wouldn't be opening them anyway, in which case it makes no difference to you. But as an Apple shareholder, I fail to see any benefit to Apple expending resources trying to stop customers who do want access to their own hardware.

<comment><USER13> There are two problems I can see, one I think is minor and one I think is major.

The minor problem is, people open Apple hardware up, violate the warranty, break the product, put it back together again, and send it back to Apple; Apple has to expend resources already to prevent that from happening (in the same fashion as all consumer electronics companies have to expend effort to detect moisture damage).

The major problem is, third party companies will open up shop performing unauthorized repairs on Apple hardware. Apple can't vouch for any of that work, many of those companies may end up damaging Apple hardware and upsetting Apple users, and Apple has a clear business interest in making it less easy for random people to enter that market.

<comment><USER26> Sharp commentary, Thomas. One thing that sticks out to me is how Apple straightjackets their products. Apple corals the entire user experience down a narrow path. Power-users hate the constraint of this Apple straightjacket, but at the same time, new consumer-level customers -- grandma with her iPad and cousin Alice with her iPod touch -- benefit from the simplicity of the straightjacketed experience.

<comment><USER25> Once again, I'll point to Mac OS X as a counterexample to the theory that providing a good experience to normal users requires denying control to power users.

<comment><USER13> Those decisions are Apple's prerogatives. When they lock OS X down, I'll scream bloody murder right along with you for the bait-and-switch. But _nobody_ bought an iPhone because they thought it'd be easy to tinker with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The only people who care about this are tinkerers and hackers and those with an agenda. I find it odd that people will bitch so much about this, and yet spend hours/days/weeks/whatever digging into the internals of stuff and poking around where they weren't meant to be just for the fun of it. So Apple changed their screws, huh? Instead of bitching about it and trying to turn it into an evil conspiracy plot, how about putting those tinkerer/hacking skills to use finding elegant and creative ways around it if it's so important to you?

For typical repairs, Apple offers very good warranties and one of the best return/repair services I've ever seen. It's not like you're going to save yourself a ton of time and money ordering iffy parts off eBay and tearing into the hardware yourself. If you're not doing this stuff for fun, why are you wasting your time with it in the first place?

This isn't about them trying to take away your right to modify your own hardware. There's still nothing (and likely will never be anything) stopping you from taking a hammer to it, drilling out the screws, x-raying it, or whatever. I'm sure Apple doesn't care if you want to see what's inside something you own. What they do care about is people modifying or attempting repairs and then breaking it and then trying to convince Apple it was _their_ fault. Or passing off a broken/modified device as a legit Apple product and causing customer confusion. Or perhaps these new screws simply work better in their machines, jam up less, can be screwed in faster, whatever.

<comment><USER28> _It's not like you're going to save yourself a ton of time and money_

I don't know how much money you have, but the price difference between replacing my failing iPhone 3G battery myself and having Apple do it was non- trivial, and the warranty did not cover it.

However it is definitely not for everyone, and I for one would just let people know to include the battery replacement charge as part of an ownership cost of the product.

(By the way doing this myself actually made me feel sorry for the people who have to do this all day long).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Apple chose this fastener specifically because it was new, guaranteeing repair tools would be both rare and expensive. Shame on them."

Now, I think that manufacturers should use open standard parts that are easy for end users to deal with, but they have every right to not honor warranty claims should you go dicking around.

BUT, "Shame on them?" Grow the fuck up.

They later toss in a remark that their mega-bit set can no longer open "Any consumer electrical device. Thanks a lot Apple!", which I assume is meant to be humorous... But it just seems to ring true. They seem bitter they can't get this open without another tiny screwdriver.

Is this kinda shitty? Well yeah. Was their reaction MASSIVELY out of proportion? Hell Yeah. Apple owe you shit all and are known for being unfriendly to those who like things modifiable. Don't fucking whinge about it, it's not like they TRICKED YOU into buying a phone with those screws.

If you're REALLY that unhappy, don't buy the fucking phone.

Dicks.

<comment><USER30> Their reaction is a blog post and a four-minute video. No matter what Apple does, a blog post and a four-minute video is probably not a "MASSIVELY" disproportionate response. Also, if you bought a phone with some ordinary Phillips screws, take it in for service, and the technician put in some other weird screws without telling you, they actually did sort of "TRICK YOU" into the weird screws.

<comment><USER29> I was talking more about the language and hyperbole used then the length and video.

Nevertheless, it might be "tricking" you, but do people REALLY buy from Apple expecting to _not_ get a tightly closed product?

"Oh, I bought this raptor, but I didn't EXPECT him to eat your son, I'm SO sorry!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 iPhones with these screws are already in the US, I bought one in late December 2010 and it appears to have the five-point screws.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm surprised this hasn't been done before, but it is possible to patent something like a screw head, thereby preventing anyone from selling screwdrivers for it. Were I part of the evil Apple conspiracy, I would suggest that. Whoops, maybe I am.

Seriously though, it's not a right to dictate the type of screws used for devices you bought on the open market.

<comment><USER32> The Robertson (square-socket) screw was patented. Robertson's refusal to license the patents to Henry Ford is one reason it never became popular in the U.S. You can find find them in Canada, however:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Robertson>

<comment><USER33> It's unfortunate that they did not become popular in the U.S. as they work _much_ better than the Phillips ones: if you pick the right size (3 are standard), the screwdriver _never_ slips, unlike what can happen with the Phillips one.

<comment><USER34> Phillips was specifically designed to slip on high torque - precise torque tools where not wide-spread at the time and it was intended to prevent threading.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Laser AK-47' that can set fire to targets a kilometer away - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2153310/china-brings-star-wars-life-laser-ak-47-could-set-fire <comment><USER2> Hrmm.. according to Gizmodo [1], this is claimed to be able to fire 1000 two second 'rounds' from the weapon's, presumably mobile, battery.

That's a half hour of lasing of a sufficiently high energy level to cause radiation/heat harm to water-based entities (ie. high energy absorbing) at a half mile.

Even with some sort of capacitor charging, I don't know of anything that could do that, and whilst I'm not a laser scientist, it's a field that I have a passing interest in, having looked into CO2 and solid-state lasers for various somewhat destructive applications.

If this is anywhere near real, the reported $15k pricetag seems like a bargain! Where/when can I get one?

[1] [https://gizmodo.com/china-claims-to-have-a-real-deal- laser-g...](https://gizmodo.com/china-claims-to-have-a-real-deal-laser-gun- that-inflict-1827284198)

<comment><AUTHOR> only China military and police for now. but no doubt there are prototypes doing the rounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > The 15mm calibre weapon weighs three kilos (6.6lb), about the same as an > AK-47, and has a range of 800 metres, or half a mile, and could be mounted > on cars, boats and planes.

So they are calling it an AK-47 just because of the weight?</comment>


An Evernote user once saved the company with a last minute $500,000 check - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2010/12/17/an-evernote-user-once-saved-the-company-with-a-last-minute-500000-check/

<comment><USER2> I'm the user that invested the $500k. Ask me anything.

<comment><USER3> Assuming, this is true. What did you get in return; are you now a stockholder? Can you get your claim verfied by evernote?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One reason I've been hesitant to use Evernote is that I don't want to put a lot of valuable information into a service that could easily disappear. I'd actually be more comfortable with Evernote if they charged _more_ because then I'd believe they were actually covering their costs and making a profit.

<comment><USER5> Erm, aside from the fact that they seem to be in pretty good financial footing these days - given how easy it is to export your data from Evernote, I don't see why you would be hesitating. Just export and save once in a while.

My only beef with Evernote really is the relatively ugly web UI.

[Disclosures: I have no relationship with Evernote aside from the two premium subscriptions I pay for]

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Uh, I don't think you need to worry so much any more:

      http://androidheadlines.com/2010/12/evernote-for-android-updated-making-800000month-revenue.html

I believe this was discussed here just the other day.

</comment><comment><USER7> We all get the incoherent client/customer emails about wanting feature XYZ yesterday.

It's wonderful to hear that they had users, or at least a user that loved their service and was willing to tell them.</comment>


How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-york-retail-vacancy/572911?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I have been speculating for some time that we are looking at a commercial real-estate correction or crash as many of the leases are now being held off the market by big firms (Blackrock) while larger retail is actually reducing its foot print. I don't know what the disconnect here is, but my nefarious interpretation is that the larger funds are actually holding off a crash by not leasing, thereby hiding what would be a downwardly market adjusted portfolio value. The counter to this is that office space could fill it up, but again, large firms are contracting their downtown footprints for a wide variety of reasons, including cutting costs. Only a few tech companies are expanding.

Looking at the mega projects like Hudson Yards which has lost and reduced several leases before even opening, SF's failed 7X7 mall which opened with ZERO leases and older established locations like 666 5th Ave struggling to find new buyers -- it appears pretty grim.

Putting all that together, you have an interesting crash that could actually affect the current White House in a very personal way.

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree that people are doing that, kind of. I don't think it's nefarious though, or some plot against Trump or potential plot against Trump. I think the simplest explanation is merely that real estate is a great vehicle to park capital for foreign nationals. NYT's ran a piece about this a few years ago with people hiding their money in real estate in markets like New York, Nashville, Atlanta, etc. It was largely Chinese money. The fear is if there is a longer than expected "trade war" and this property becomes sold in quick succession leading to a crisis to shore up balance sheets in East Asia.

China will not admit it, but I have heard ramblings from very smart people that their economy is currently on the brink. They're waiting out for the midterms, but if what I've read/heard is true they might not be able to hold out that long without causing significant damage to the global economy. You have the "trade war" with the US and high debt loads, but you also have a ton of manufacturing flight to countries like Vietnam. Things could get ugly if the dominoes start to fall.

That being said, I do think there is still reason to be optimistic that this is just a worst case and things will work out...but I still think foreign nationals parking money in real estate is a big problem that drives out actual tenants by obstructing true supply/demand.

<comment><USER2> Didn't mean to imply it was a plot against Trump. Just meant, unlike other presidents, a crash, or even a potential for a crash would strongly color his agenda as a leader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Walking around the Upper East Side, where I live, I find it striking how > many of the establishments still standing among the many darkened windows > are hair salons, nail salons, facial salons, eyebrow places, and > restaurants. What's the one thing they have in common? You won't find their > services on Amazon. The internet won't cut my hair_

Ok, fess up: how many of you reading this just came up with a dumb startup idea?

<comment><USER5> There are actually already a lot of "Uber for hairdressers" apps. One of them was actually partnered with Uber.

So it seems like actually the internet _will_ cut your hair.

I suspect there may be a social aspect to some of the salons that could be somewhat missing with only one person coming to your house though. But maybe the app just needs to incorpate a group video chat or something to get that as well.

Someday we may not even need to get out of bed if we don't want to. Which might not be very healthy of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Empty storefronts are a negative externality and should be taxed at a high rate.

<comment><USER7> Why stop at storefronts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I once approached a Property Manager about a retail location in Toronto. It was sitting empty for about 1.5 years because the lease was very expensive. I mentioned to him that it would be worth renting it to me for less than having it sit empty. He laughed and said that the property has been paid for the last 50 years and is just one of like 240 Properties the Landlord owns. He said the Landlord could wait 20 years for the lease price he wants and it wouldn't matter one bit.

</comment><comment><USER7> Dunno about Manhattan, but Toronto used to rebate property taxes on unused real estate.

The solution is simple here. A high property tax rate on unused real estate.

Who would vote against that?

<comment><USER9> Anybody who owns property. Any who wants to buy property.

Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax the man behind the tree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a Landlord I can truthfully say - paying rent is for suckers.

This world would be a much better place if the entire rental market system was outlawed.

<comment><USER11> As someone who rents in a large overvalued city, my landlord is getting a 1.5% yield before taxes and deprecation. That's 60+ years of rent to outright buy the same place.

More than happy with that situation while he speculates on near impossible capital gains occuring.

<comment><USER10> It's overvalued because a bunch of people bought stuff when it wasn't overvalued and charge as much as they can for rent. High rents mean high resale value. You're probably paying 2% or more of the original purchase price every month.

The prices will go up until it is not economical to buy anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like this should be a temporary problem. Won't landlords eventually get tired of not getting any rent?

<comment><USER13> A friend of mine is a commercial landlord in NYC. He told me how this works... Companies will seek extremely high rent, and make concessions to the tenants to offset the high rent. E.g., rent this space for $50k/mo, and we'll give you free storage, free power, and free construction build-out. Then the landlord sells the building with the ultra high lease included as an asset, to get an even higher value out of the sale. Rinse and repeat.

The amount of money they get from the sale of the property with the high lease offsets the loss they're taking by keeping it empty. And they don't have to bother with as many annoying tenants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Their strategy bodes the disappearance of those quirky restaurants, curious > antique shops, and any coffee shops that aren't publicly traded on the NYSE.

Curiously pro-linked markets given that SBUX lists on Nasdaq.</comment>


Need early adopters  - <AUTHOR>

Need tech people to test a brand new social network and get feedback. Thank you <comment><USER2> It looks like a dating site. What's your USP?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Get your early invites here: www.geneziss.com</comment>


Ask HN: would you pay to guarantee your app's first 1k users? - <AUTHOR>

For HN readers who have launched (or are about to launch) web apps: how did you get the first set of users to start using the service?
Not everyone manages to get into techcrunch or win one of those startup competitions, which is often the way to 'seed' your first 1k users...
Would you pay, on a success basis, for a service to deliver you your application's first x users? Say, $1 per new registered user? If not, why not? <comment><USER2> Having 1000 users who have been paid , or otherwise incentivized, to sign up for a service means nothing really as they generally won't be the kinds of early users you need. Plus, this model won't really work if what someone is actually looking for is paying users.

A service to help entrepreneurs to market their web apps effectively so that they reach their target audience/users, so that they sign up organically would have a far better chance of success I think.

<comment><USER3> This was exactly what I was thinking. I suspect (I don't know of any data on this, but I'd love to see some) that there's a huge gap between users that sign up to a new service because they hear about it somewhere and think, "hey, that sounds neat, I want in first/I'd like to explore" and someone who's simply been paid to setup an account. cf. grassroots (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassroots>) v. astroturfing (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd pay. I've tried going the Google Adwords route with one of my sites, and the return on investment was poor (definitely greater than $1 per sign-up), while waiting for organic traffic to come from Google despite all the back- links and SEO you can think is like waiting for your hair to go grey.

$1 per user (including them actually engaging with your site: adding a profile, posting some basic content etc.) sounds like good value to kick-start a new project.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find a very easy way to get your first X users if you don't care much whether they are in your core target audience (but they should be in same ballpark) is to do a giveaway for blogs with a decent-sized subscriber base. Give away $20 Amazon gift card but to enter you must sign up for an account, and do something. $20 for 50-100 users is in the realm of possibility.

The great thing about this is that it does 2 things: gives you those first X users for social proof and it gives you a head start in SEO by building "organic" links (though one might argue they're paid technically)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's not a bad idea, and I guess it depends on how much you would have to pay. Although I can imagine that the engagement of 'bought' users is less, there is also something called social proof. If your app attracts 1000 new users in the first day/week it must be worth it, right?

As far as ethics go, I don't object to these kind of things. It would be disturbing if you'd pay users for good reviews in the app store (which does happen), but paying for new users which will maybe leave a review in the app store, wether good or bad, is OK in my book.

</comment><comment><USER7> Surely this is just another form of marketing, which people pour a lot of money in to, for good, well known reasons. So, I guess one would want some data on how well paying for users actually works, compared to $1000 worth of decent targeted advertising, or whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> it would be users from a list of self-described 'early adopters', the type of people who love the internet and startups and are eager to try something new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great idea, get apps out of the ghetto!</comment>


Bill Gates Made These 15 Predictions in 1999 - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/bill-gates-made-these-15-predictions-in-1999-and-its-scary-how-accurate-he-was-a7828701.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708546)

See note at bottom acknowledging the original.</comment>


Edward Snowden and the Yes Men Surprise Crowd at Roskilde Festival - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCB-H7lg6i8 <comment><AUTHOR> Snowden speaks to the largest group of people in one place at one time.</comment>


Why Quora is a Dead Man Walking - <AUTHOR> http://joehall.me/why-quora-is-a-dead-man-walking/04/

<comment><USER2> It seems to me like the author is jumping to conclusions. Just because no one cares to answer his question, does not mean the Quora is a "dead man walking". Quora has value not because of the amount of content, but because of the community. If I wanted nothing but lots and lots of content, I'd look to Yahoo Answers. However, I'd rather go to a website where very smart, experienced people are often willing to answer questions in detail. If someone pointed me to a source with the answer to my question, I wouldn't be offended, I'd be glad. The author seems to have taken a little offense that few people if any were willing to spend the time to write out a reply to his question.

<comment><USER3> Did you even read the post? This has nothing to do with folks not answering my question. They didn't have a chance to answer it.

Another reason Quora will fail is because its full of folks that don't _read_ the post.

<comment><USER2> I did read the post, and I will admit that until I just reread it and the comments, I did not realize that your question was not accessible anymore, but was a redirect to another one. I assumed that your original question was still accessible, and that someone had linked to another thread with the same question.

I still stand by my thoughts that you're jumping to a conclusion about it failing because of this downfall. This is like saying an IRC channel will fail because new users will enter, ask a question and be brushed off with a brusque admonition to go read the FAQ. If that keeps any new people from joining the discussion then it will fail. However, if the community of the IRC channel (or Quora), continue to grow on other merits (like having experts available to answer questions), then it can still grow even if it's not perfect. In this case, Quora lost a user (you) because of this policy, but it will retain others. I don't think that many people will find this a complete deal breaker.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any tools for optimal data compression over multiple messages? - <AUTHOR> To clarify, consider that a single long message can efficiently and losslessly be compressed with methods such as a huffman encoding. But when sending many small messages, you may lose out on a broader encoding that both sides can use which would in the long pay off.<p>For example say that I know my application and the user should only ever communicate N different things, and one at a time. I could manually map each of these to an integer and only allow the payload to be an integer. But it feels like allot of extra work for something that could better just be built into the protocols configuration, and maybe set up by presenting it with a common usage list of your typical messages. Does something like this exist? <comment><USER2> For mapping of commands to integers you can use commonly available serialization libraries and schemas. E.g. using protocol buffers you can describe all your datatypes as enums, and it will only send integers around.</comment>