Containers won the battle, but will lose the war to serverless - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/simon-wardley-is-a-big-fan-of-containers-despite-what-you-might-think-18c9f5352147 <comment><USER3> When someone speaks in the style of this guy — absolute certainty of the superiority of their chosen technology, dismissive of or glossing over its disadvantages, condescending to those who use or advocate other technologies — it makes me very dubious of their claims. It also makes me assume they're trying to sell me something.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. This is clearly a fluff piece promoting his technology du jour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate to be all dismissive, but this is meaningless twaddle.

I'm baffled that anybody with _any_ experience of software development could think that something like FaaS will solve logic duplication issues; the hypothetical "118 systems doing pretty much exactly the same thing" exist because of _organisational failures_ , and the same thing will continue to happen regardless of how that logic is implemented.

<comment><USER6> And if the organization does decide to have a "one official system" then it will need 118 option parameters or weirdly specific virtual functions in a base class and become a disgusting, complex mess. Because "pretty much the same thing" is not "exactly the same thing." Sometimes it can be hammered into place. Other times those differences were important.

So yeah, I agree with you that duplication will continue to happen a lot.

<comment><USER7> And sometimes this results in the 1 system being so complicated that it's less effort to build and maintain system 119 than hammer system 1 into a round hole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Sure, it would be nice to have a competitive environment with different > providers you can switch between. But that is secondary to usefulness and > functionality, because companies are in competition with each other anyway. > And the chance of getting the actual providers to agree is pretty close to > zero. Everybody goes: "Well, we're going to differentiate on this or that."

That is exactly the situation with kubernetes and containers, and it is nice indeed, as I can easily switch between providers. In fact, my company got free digital ocean credits and was able to seamlessly host a cluster on DO for free to enhance testing. This is the ultimate.

What scares me about serverless is the complete lock-in with the vendor. It's the same reason google app engine just couldn't be a game changer. You need that balance between customization and commoditization that serverless I think fails on, unless some protocol like docker comes in to save it.

<comment><USER6> From what I've seen with serverless, it doesn't look that hard to build your own runtime for it if you did want to run outside of your vendor and avoid lock-in. It would turn your stuff back into a stack of containers, of course.

<comment><USER9> That's the relatively easy part. There's also a lock-in with all the integrations as you probably need to have some sort of persistent storage and all the other managed services helping to cope with the complete statelessness.

<comment><USER10> And you have this with containers as with serverless. So no argument here.

<comment><USER11> No, with Kubernetes, you specify, for example, that your app needs block store of a certain size or ingress at a certain port. The runtime knows how to satisfy that on each cloud.

<comment><USER10> What I meant was, when you set up the container and got your data in S3, it is in there, same goes with serverless.

Nobody prevents you to write your serverless function so it needs a block store of a certain size or ingress at a certain port.

<comment><USER11> But there is no standard way to specify those requirements in a cloud agnostic manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't "serverless" just a fancy way of saying "someone else's containers"?

<comment><USER13> > _Isn 't "serverless" just a fancy way of saying "someone else's > containers"?_

No, "serverless" just means that there are no servers (or VMs, or containers) to be directly managed by the developer.

<comment><USER14> In that sense, any 3rd party API, e.g. Stripe, or whatever, is "serverless" from the standpoint of the developer using it, but I doubt many would think of it that way.

<comment><USER15> That may change. S3, for example, is a building block for applications and abstracts away servers completely from the developer.

As do the following:

* SQS

* SNS

* DynamoDB

* Step Functions

* Lambda

* API Gateway

* CloudWatch Logs

* Cognito

* DynamoDB

You can build entire applications with the services above and never have to bother managing instances. It's not just about running code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Serverless really needs to work on their latency I think.

Things will be going great and then there's the oddly weird 2 second delay. I guess it is bringing up a new server or container to run the lambda in.

Whereas with your own (or well, Amazon's) machines you can scale up before hitting the limits and not need long pauses.

Maybe one day they'll fix that.

<comment><USER16> I just started using cron to keep my cloud functions warm at a cost of pennies per month. It feels like a strange ceremony to let more knowledgeable people game the system. Even figuring out the time that your functions go 'cold' is a secret handshake you can't find in proper documentation.

I'm curious what's going to happen when everyone else does this too. It goes without saying this isn't the intended use for the price they've set and it's also apparent that >75% of customers will, likely, choose to make this performance optimization before going to production or after complaints of bad latency.

Also it is a bit scary that even with keeping a single server warm, you still pay the cold startup penalty on subsequent scale-ups. Afaik, no cloud provider has claimed to have 'solved' this (yet more secrecy in how the platform is managed)

<comment><USER17> I don't see why they could not implement a pricing strategy to pay for the RAM used by keeping the lambda hot.

After all this is just keeping it "loaded in memory".

<comment><USER18> It'd be a regressive concession misaligned with the goals of serverless - <USER2> return to peak capacity planning. _How many_ containers do you keep warm? Might as well just use traditional non-serverless platforms at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He's right (in some ways).

I know it's written in an irritating style, but I feel like this kind of scaled application deployment strategy is basically the future, and you'd be very very naive to dismiss it as just some marketing hype.

The ability to deploy arbitrary micro-services to a cluster is basically all this is, under the hood, and that's something that intrinsically beneficial.

Sure, you may argue, the difference between deploying _code_ to a cluster, and deploying a _container_ to a cluster may seem immaterial, largely, but ultimately its hard to argue that it's better to choose the container in most cases, if you can delegate the work of 'configure and manage the container and container infrastructure' to someone else.

There's no question it'll slowly start eating the container world in my opinion; the barrier to entry is low, and ultimately (with something like openwhisk) you can use a container if you do need to package say, a specific version of opencv for some specific purpose.

Can anyone suggest why this is a bad approach?

It doesn't sound like a bad approach to me, and a lot of people are taking a lot of interest in it.

The problem is the people who are pitching "microservices as a service", as though you might be able to delegate some parts of your service out as a microservice to other people, like you can run a 'lpad service' and there will be the new 'microservice app store' and people will all flock to use it, and a few people who write the early 'good functions' will Get Rich Quick.

...and every time any single one person screws up their service, or has a tizzy and shuts it down, dozens of applications will fail.

What a disaster waiting to happen; its ridiculous, and all the noise about it is just people looking for funding (or just clueless, I have no idea).

...but, that doesn't change the fundamental value proposition of serverless: auto-scaling without devops.

(Also:

> And we're seeing the exact same pattern with serverless. Yes, other > companies could challenge Amazon's dominance. But they probably won't, > because they don't believe it's for real. And by the time they do, it'll be > too late.

Yep. That's spot on as well)

</comment><comment><USER20> To quote from the interview, verbatim, "Sure, it would be nice to have a competitive environment with different providers you can switch between. But that is secondary to usefulness and functionality, because companies are in competition with each other anyway. And the chance of getting the actual providers to agree is pretty close to zero. Everybody goes: "Well, we're going to differentiate on this or that."

The one exception, of course, being how everybody seems to have come together around containers. So now everybody's excited about containers, but the battle's shifted up. So you've won the battle, but lost the war."

The interviewee here manages to make a Santayana mistake without realizing it; eventually, just as containers standardized, serverless functions will standardize, and cloud vendors will either conform or marginalize their offerings in response.

<comment><USER21> But by the time serverless is standardized he'll probably be pimping the next thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are many connection oriented protocols that can never run on function as a service (Faas) offerings, which the article seems to suggest, is the only type of severless. Fundamental applications like email, webrtc, even git, cannot run inside FAAS.

The future, in my opinion is offerings like AWS fargate. The developer writes logic that is containerized, and the auto scaling, scheduling, etc is handled in a seamless fashion by the provider, removing the burden of ops from the developer. In many ways, this is a connection-oriented Faas, and that is where the future likely lies, due to its wide applicability

<comment><USER10> Isn't Lambda just the glue?

I mean there is also Kinesis Streams, AWS IoT and such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> He's almost right! The Erlang VM (BEAM) will soon replace all the things :) (See Grisp: [https://www.grisp.org/](https://www.grisp.org/))

</comment><comment><USER24> Lambda is somewhat standardized and competitive - if you look at the Node API for example - you can port your endpoint to Express or Koa in 20 minutes. You aren't locked in by any means.

<comment><USER10> Yes. You just need a tiny wrapper to convert your Express endpoint to a API Gateway Lambda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm new to serverless, can someone clear up two things for me?

1\. Can I run a standard Rails or Django app on "serverless"?

2\. If I'm running on Heroku and don't directly manage servers, does that count as "serverless"?

<comment><USER26> Another name for serverless is function as a service, which might help clarify. No to both of your questions.

<comment><USER27> Zappa[1] allows you to do this (for python WSGI apps - I'm not sure if there is a similar option for hosting a Rails app serverlessly). I've found it very straight-forward to use for my Django app. I also like that if I choose to, I can ditch Zappa and host my app elsewhere (such as on Heroku) without really changing my app's code.

[1] [https://www.zappa.io/](https://www.zappa.io/)

<comment><USER26> Huh, I'd thought Lambda covered smaller components than those asked. TIL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If they are talking about AWS Lambda-like stuff or just using 3rd party API services.. there are very obvious advantages to doing things that way over managing containers or VMs. Of course lots of people will still be using containers and regular VMs for quite some time just because it will be more practical for awhile for their use case or just out of familiarity.

But anyway I think that eventually the real 'serverless' will be peer-to-peer systems like Ethereum smart contracts, IPFS, dat, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> I really like the idea of serverless, in my use case a serverless setup would be great to run prediction on. For example a chatbot where you predict the intent. It would be a lot more cost effective than running the model on their own GPU/CPU instances.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wouldn't it be great if someone could figure out a way to express the logic that implements a function service as a compact, machine readable package which could be locally "cached" by all services that depend on it?

</comment><comment><USER31> Serverless is the future. But I doubt FaaS is. FaaS has a place, especially around latency-insensitive or bursty event handlers. But to suggest that it will replace any traditional server is pretty farfetched.

<comment><USER10> Aren't they working on that?

I mean there is stuff like kinesis streams, AWS IoT and Lambda@Edge

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm just waiting until serverless platforms develop build scripts that create file system deltas to make deployments more storage efficient.

<comment><USER32> Wouldn't version control solve this problem anyhow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good to know. Wanted to go full-stack this year and decided to try "serverless", lets see how it goes :D

</comment><comment><USER33> This is like claiming cars will lose the battle to planes. These technologies are not mutually exclusive.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was actually skimming his article to see if he mentions decentralization or blockchain somewhere.</comment>


F. Scott Fitzgerald and living on $500,000 a year - <AUTHOR> http://www.theamericanscholar.org/living-on-500000-a-year/

<comment><USER2> Snippets:

"To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue."

"Fitzgerald's income was almost tax free (5.5 percent effective rate), while today's taxpayer making $500,000 would probably pay 40 percent in income and Social Security taxes."

"As he put it, "So the only lesson I learned from it was that my money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow—a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave.""

"Fitzgerald did not agree with Chicago School market theory, which is to say, he did not believe that more sellers means more competition, which means lower prices. Fitzgerald thought that if you had more sellers they simply raised prices to whatever they needed to survive. He wrote that Great Neck "became the most expensive [town] in the world" because the gold rush had lured "too many food purveyors for the population.""

"The wolf was at the door. For the next five weeks he went to a large bare room over the garage and worked 12 hours a day "to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class.""

"He wrote to Edmund Wilson, "I really worked hard as hell last winter—but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart as well as my iron constitution." He wrote that he was "far from satisfied with the whole affair." A young man "can work at excessive speed with no ill effect but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.""

"During the 1920s and 1930s, the tax system relied almost entirely on the honesty of taxpayers. Fitzgerald reported every dollar he had entered in his ledger. He was impeccably honest in his reporting."

"a friend wrote from France to suggest that Fitzgerald join the many Americans living well in Europe on the strong American dollar. The friend wrote that it cost one-tenth as much to live in Europe: he had just finished "a meal fit for a king, washed down with champagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents.""

</comment><comment><USER3> Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" (Going broke on a million a year), p.137

"One breath of scandal, and not only would the Giscard scheme collapse but his very career would be finished! And what would he do then? I'm already going broke on a million a year!

The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had to take out to buy the apartment...

Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment's monthly maintenance fee… $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes. Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent."

</comment><comment><USER4> A young man "can work at excessive speed with no ill effect but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.". - F. Scott Fitzgerald

</comment><comment><USER5> 24,000 in 1920 dollars = $ 253,532.93 [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=24%2C000+in+1920+dollar...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=24%2C000+in+1920+dollars+%3D+)

24,000 in 1940 dollars = $ 362,138.28 [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=24%2C000+in+1940+dollar...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=24%2C000+in+1940+dollars+%3D+)

(yes, deflation. the dollar was worth more in 1940 than in 1920 - see the graph in the first link)

<comment><USER6> I find it fascinating that Wolfram Alpha provides absolutely no references for any of its information.

The author of the article makes comparisons of the costs of tangible goods to arrive at the 500k number.

<comment><USER7> And bizarre comparisons at that, since the luxury car market can hardly be expected to be consistent in any meaningful way from 1920 to 2009.

<comment><USER8> Technologically, not. Remember that a luxury car is more like a status symbol.

<comment><USER7> Yes, and since 1920 there have been changes in pretty much all the inputs to the luxury car price function, wealth distribution, production costs of pretty much everything, and what the Joneses that you're trying to keep ahead of can be expected to have being the ones that immediately come to mind.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72.868&rep=rep1&type=pdf <comment><USER2> Excellent read, nice to see such an interesting post on languages</comment>


Memory announces Dewo, a personal assistant for deep work - <AUTHOR> https://memory.ai/dewo <comment><USER2> Mathias, founder of Memory here. Happy to answer any questions if you have them! :)</comment>


Ask HN: Are there other well-paying fields that welcome self-taught people? - <AUTHOR> Are there fields other than software development where self-taught people can get a well-paying job? <comment><USER2> The arts can pay well if you're very skilled or talented. I moved into a career in film easily, though between the time I moved in and some extraneous factors, it's been financially difficult, but generally it's a results- oriented space that rewards innovation and initiative.</comment>


Reading Got Farm Women Through the Depression - <AUTHOR> https://daily.jstor.org/how-reading-got-farm-women-through-the-depression/ <comment><USER2> Our culture is moving or has already moved away from a reading culture. Instead of spending free time reading, people watch Netflix, Youtube, TikTok etc. I think that has huge consequences on human behavior. Where as once people would read the newspaper and be able to think about what is happening in the world, people today scroll through their feed where in one instant they are reading an article about war crimes in South America committed by the U.S. and in the next instant what Kylie Jenner wore to the MET gala.

<comment><USER3> "The new thing is bad, people should do more of the old thing". If people couldn't watch Netflix they certainly wouldn't be using that time to think about important issues.

The world has not moved away from a reading culture, it never had one.

<comment><USER4> > it never had one.

How can you say that? Literacy was once a very strong proxy to wealth, and still retains a connection today. Books have been fundamental to many aspects of human history.

If Russia never had a culture of reading, then how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

<comment><USER5> > how does the Communist Manifesto drive an entire society, millions of > people, to overthrow its familial leaders before the era of television?

It didn't and couldn't. That was the conceit and power behind Lenin's "vanguard" concept. Only a small minority needed to be ideologically driven; everybody else could and did join sides based on more practical, individualized motivations. See, generally, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism)

That said, I'm not trying to opine on whether, when, and how popular book reading was or still is.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your statement, but I feel like it's rather splitting hairs in terms of the entire conversation. Both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came out of Iskra (and it's impossible to describe Lenin without it), and reading culture very much fueled the rise of the vanguard and Lenin's immense popularity. The narrative passing from Lenin to Stalin was also driven by essays in newspapers by political figures. Reading culture was _inseparable_ from political culture at the time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think we underestimate how many people understand social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc. are/can be bad for us.

The issue is our ability to resist the addiction, which more people need tools to handle. I appreciate what TikTok does by giving a custom video reminder to take a break and go do something else.

I'd really like to see all major platforms forcing users off after a given amount of time. Of course this directly competes with profit incentives so would likely need to be regulatory.

</comment><comment><USER8> Excerpts from Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985):

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."

—

"What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility."

—

"Huxley believed that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking."

—

"This idea – that there is a content called "the news of the day" – was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is quite, precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation."

—

"Together, this new ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world – a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child's game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining."

—

"The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one's intellect is thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity."

</comment><comment><USER9> Americans were always voracious readers before television, has nothing to do with women or the Great Depression.

<comment><USER10> That's interesting. Do you know of any hard stats comparing to other countries?

<comment><USER11> This probably isn't exactly what you're looking for, but you might find Robert Darnton's essay "First Steps Toward a History of Reading" interesting. [1] It mostly covers the early modern period, if I remember correctly, not contemporary reading practices.

[1] [http://robertdarnton.org/sites/default/files/First%20Steps%2...](http://robertdarnton.org/sites/default/files/First%20Steps%20Toward%20a%20History%20of%20Reading.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TikTok will get them through this one.</comment>


Restaurants where you order with a computer at your table - <AUTHOR> http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/25/technology/ewaiter.php <comment><USER2> Just fly Virgin America to get an idea of how convenient it is. Going from NYC to LA they had 1 beverage service for the whole cabin and the rest of the flight you ordered food and more drinks directly from the screen on your seat. Best thing ever for flying.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool, they implemented one of my ideas that I was hoping would come out. Now if only they had little robot waiters in small tuxedos...</comment>


Permissionless innovation is the most important concept of political economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/10/michael_munger_4.html <comment><USER2> innovation is a tricky problem. On the one hand you need protections to allow ROI. On the other you need to give "inventors", experimenters etc. the ability to innovate.</comment>


Welcome to IBM's startup cementery. Rest in Peace Neteeza.  - <AUTHOR> http://vospe.com/2010/09/20/rip-ibm-buys-netezza-for-about-1-7-billion/

<comment><USER2> Netezza.

I don't think they'll kill this one. They needed something to compete with Exadata, and since they already own BO+Cognos, they have nearly a full BI/Analytics stack.</comment>


Notes on notation and thought - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hypotext/notation <comment><USER2> Honoured to be included.</comment>


Hunter S. Thompson's brutally honest Canadian job request - <AUTHOR> http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Hunter+Thompson+brutally+honest+Canadian+request/3606508/story.html

<comment><USER2> I think the letter is a great example of how I would like to see resume submissions / job requests written. It gets to the point pretty directly in "this is how I think I can help" and "here is the type of environment I am/am not interested in".

Instead, a lot of time these days is wasted in "here is my resume", phone back and forth with some HR person, phone with the hiring person, if in person, then you may or may not get a good feel for the work environment.

If only it were possible for both sides to be frank about "this is what we do" and "this is what we want".

<comment><USER3> Of course it's possible -- people just don't do it, and I don't know why.

I recently needed to bring someone on to take over the basics on a bunch of my web projects, because I'm overcommitted, as usual, and trying not to be. I tried a local resource first, and then I went to Craigslist, which has worked out well for me in the past.

My ad was simple and direct; it spelled out what we were about, what we were looking for, and what we could offer, and then it had instructions: if someone wanted the job, they needed to solve an easy puzzle, _not_ send a resume, and instead send about a paragraph talking about their skills and experience.

It worked out great.

As far as I'm concerned, resumes are next-to-worthless. I don't really care who you've worked for or what you've done for them. I'm not going to call them and see if they say good things about you. I just want to know if you can figure things out and communicate well. During the interview, I'll sort out whether or not you actually know what you're doing.

<comment><USER4> Did you get many applications from people who hadn't read your instructions?

<comment><USER3> We did, and since one of the unwritten job requirements was "able to follow clear instructions", it worked well as a filter.

Also, we posted the ad using one particular email address (a working, but incorrect one), but to apply to the correct address they had to solve an easy puzzle which consisted of looking at the page source for the ad, seeing that our logo image was being loaded from ourdomain.com/job/logo.jpg, and going to ourdomain.com/job for the correct email address to apply to.

I didn't want anything too difficult or annoying, but on the other hand, I knew anyone that could figure that out and follow the directions would work out fine for us.

<comment><USER5> Any chance of seeing a copy of the ad?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hunter seemed to be heavily inspired by Hemingway at this point in his career.

When Hemingway started out, he worked for the Toronto Star (another Canadian newspaper). He wrote his first novel during this time: The Sun Also Rises, about expatriates living in Paris.

Hunter decided to apply to a Canadian newspaper after admittingly not being familiar with it. Then not long after he wrote his first novel - The Rum Diary - which was heavily inspired by Hemingway's first, about expatriates living in Puerto Rico.

<comment><USER7> hmm, I'm not really sure he was inspired by Hemingway in any meaningful way. Perhaps purely by coincidence is that true, with Hemingway winning the nobel prize a few years before this letter was mailed, and thompson actively copied heminway's work, as well as several other novels, in order to learn more about writing style, though he never published any plagiarized work.

Hemingway was a traditional, fiction, novelist and focused on his characters. Thompson defied (edit: was defined, oops) 100s of years of traditional writing (both novel and newspaper) by inventing so called 'gonzo' journalism. The man openly included his own personal life directly into all of this work, including this letter. He also, never worked in canada.

While I hold both men in high regard, the only parallels between these two men are the facts they both were journalists and authors (and drunks), since that's true for almost every published journalist, it's a thin comparison at best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget the fact that they both took their own lives with a shotgun to the head.

Also, if you consult HST's wikipedia entry, you'll notice Hemingway come up several times (and in fairly significant ways).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson>

<comment><USER8> Best source I can find say's he used a .45 caliber pistol, you know otherwise? [http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/rela...](http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article3602025.ece)

No disagreement on the similarity between those two, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 2 other awesome letters he wrote:

[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/07/your-work-was- inadequat...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/07/your-work-was-inadequate- and.html)

[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/okay-you-lazy- bitch.htm...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/okay-you-lazy-bitch.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Hilarious, now, the one thing I can't get out of my head is the question if he got the job or not?

<comment><USER11> There is no sign in his Wikipedia page that he worked for the Sun. So probably not.

<comment><USER12> The Sun has a long history of establishment suck-holing and sucking-in-general that continues into the foreseeable future. There's not a chance that Thompson worked there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I did part of my MA on Thompson and even reviewed a collection of letters for Canada's National Post newspaper years ago ([http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg57692.h...](http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg57692.html)). I don't know if people will read anything but Vegas in 100 years, but his style and humour made him a standout in his time. He was influenced by Hemingway but he also typed out The Great Gatsby to try pick up on the style. Another strong stylistic influence was Revelations. A great letter that brought it all back.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have always hated writing bullshit cover letters. Now I just write short, honest introductions. As an aside, should I make a plain text version of my resume and put it in the body of the email itself? Or is a pdf attachment enough? I figure the overhead of having to download and open the pdf could be overcome by putting the resume in the body itself. Thoughts?

<comment><USER4> Last resume I wrote was in html (not on a site, I'd just attach a html file). It served two purposes; gave people a chance to see what my html crafting was like, and allowed me to include a number of links to previous sites, projects etc

I've always included a pdf version, and I don't think I've ever submitted a resume in .doc format

<comment><USER15> 90% of CVs are in .doc format, at least the ones going through recruitment agencies in the EU. From what I've seen the numbers for the US should be similar, but I don't think my experience there constitutes a large enough sample.

(Day job is at a company providing CV parsing to recruiters.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My Favorite [http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/graffiti/crook....](http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/graffiti/crook.htm)

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't know anything about Thompson as a person, so I'll refrain from judging. I'm only glad that I'm finally able to put a term to what I despise most about journalism in our country (U.S.), evidently the term is "Gonzo journalism."

"Gonzo journalism tends to favor style over accuracy and often uses personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or event being covered." --Wikipedia

I don't care about what the journalist thinks or feels. I'm an adult and I can form my own opinion, based on my values. Give me the facts! Just please give me the damn facts, I beg you! I don't need the anchor to "show attitude" and give me "what if" scenarios to wiggle my imagination while bending the facts in the process.

Currently, this technique is king among the major news networks in the U.S. It makes them completely incapable of reporting the news in its natural form: facts. It is unethical and amoral for journalists to swing public opinion with eloquent narrative that favors "style over accuracy."

<comment><USER18> I've always been a big admirer of Hunter S. Thompson's style. His point was that there is no way you can separate the author from the story so you might as well go in whole-hog.

No author can give all the facts and "just the facts". They can't help but shape and spin a story by selecting what they deem important, leaving out the rest. Their choice of words determines how the reader views the subject.

I'd rather know what the person that wrote an article thought and felt - it's another important fact.

<comment><USER17> This is probably true, the fact that you can't completely separate the author from the story. Where I disagree is going in "whole-hog." I consider it fundamental for a journalist to make her best effort to keep her opinion out of the story. To me, that's the definition of the format. News is not supposed to be about the person telling it.

If I am to believe what people said here (and I have no reason not to), Thompson adhered to a higher standard in his writing. As I said originally, I wasn't trying to say anything about him as a person or a writer. I just don't see high standards amongst our major networks. For issues that are important to me, they simply fail to report the basic facts when they're reporting their opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember once telling an HR person at M$FT when interviewing for an internship ( 12 years ago ) that "I don't like to be micromanaged." I've since learned to be less forthright in my job interviews.

<comment><USER20> In other words, you do (it turns out) like being micromanaged. :-)

<comment><USER19> Not really. But I don't think that most people interviewing a candidate would be pleased to hear something like that brought up by an interviewee. Perhaps you would, but I think most people would get the impression that someone who brought that up in an interview would be difficult to work with, even if their management style did not include "micro-managing."

<comment><USER21> There's a fine line between being honest about what you like and don't like, and then voicing an expectation that a certain workplace has certain negative properties.

In other words, there's probably a million other thing you also don't like, why are you bringing up micromanagement?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are you using for integration testing? - <AUTHOR> Are there any tools for automated integration testing of some semi-big web applications?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> Curious how big and what tools have already been considered.</comment>


Good, Creative, and Ugly Logo Concepts That Prove Good Design Is Hard - <AUTHOR> http://brandingbeard.com/inspiration/good-creative-ugly-logo-concepts-that-prove-good-design-is-hard/ <comment><USER2> Is it good design to throw a JS overlay in someone's face when they're trying to read your article?</comment>


The Startup Game: Why a major angel investor is backing online games - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.business2.com/startups/2007/07/jeff-clavier-is.html

<comment><USER2> I've heard some pretty heavy hitters are jumping into web-based MMORPGs big time.

Expect to see some YC apps this fall based around games. Speaking of which, are there any YC game startups? (can't remember offhand)

<comment><USER3> Here's a French game that I think is ripe for duplication and scaling.

<http://rms.miniville.fr/> You play by posting your link and your city gets bigger when other people visit it.</comment></comment>


80+ Speakers in the First Ever Virtual Software Conference (AirPair W14) - <AUTHOR> https://www.airpair.com/airconf2014

<comment><USER2> Looks like a great event. However "first ever" is a specious claim. See [http://www.mvcconf.com/](http://www.mvcconf.com/) [http://www.aspconf.net/](http://www.aspconf.net/) [http://www.dotnetconf.net/](http://www.dotnetconf.net/) Those were inspired by another online-only conference whose name is escaping me.

<comment><USER3> I've spoken at 2 other events (one hosted by O'Reilly and I can't remember the other one...), so yeah the "first ever" claim is fairly dishonest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think it's dishonest -- those events were much smaller scale and on narrow topics.

<comment><USER2> I think you're underestimating the scope of MvcConf. It was bigger than what you're marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally, I get it. FYI we're continuing to add presenters througout August and should be biggest soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm hosting a talk about Rails 4 going through all the new features as of the 4.1 release. It will be targeted towards people new to Rails and experienced Rails 3 developers.

This event has an amazing lineup and I'm looking forward to attending many of the sessions myself.

</comment><comment><USER5> BAS here. I am pretty active in the TypeScript community. I'll be discussing JavaScript. I'm going to be talking about `this` and explaining the beauty (and simplicity) of prototype inheritance in JavaScript. It's going to be pretty code focused. I've found this to be the _most_ mis-understood section of JavaScript. Also you'll understand why there is bind/call/apply on function prototypes (how they simplify your code). What's up with `constructor` and the simplicity of `instanceof`.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm hosting a panel with Chad Pytel the CEO of Thoughtbot, Evan Henshaw-Plath (rabble) CTO of Neo and Mike Mason, CTO of ThoughtWorks, to discuss the future of consulting. If anyone is interested, I wrote up my thoughts on AirConf and why I think it could be the future of tech conferences here: [https://medium.com/@obie/a-different-kind-of-tech- conference...](https://medium.com/@obie/a-different-kind-of-tech-conference- ee476c1bac50)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm hosting a talk on Meteor.js and what I've learned from my year+ time using it. I am pretty excited and I think the lineup looks amazing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Is Meteor.js still as hot as it was right after launching? Haven't seen much about it lately. For awhile there I was thinking it might be "the next Ruby on Rails", but then it seemed to drop off the radar.

Actually my main recollection from playing with it was that debugging was a bitch.

<comment><USER6> Debugging is not that hard. It hasn't really dropped off the radar, I just think most people are waiting for the arbitrary 1.0 tag to hit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 20% off code for hacker news readers

>>> [http://airpa.ir/1lgh65g](http://airpa.ir/1lgh65g)

<comment><USER8> Nice!! Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll be talking about Solr and custom search engines in Week 4 of the conference. Talk title: "Discover Your Inner Search Engine". If there is interest, I will also be talking about Solr vs. ElasticSearch in the interactive part.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks really cool!! I can't wait to hear what some of those guys have to say.

</comment><comment><USER10> Kudos to AirPair, this is a really impressive and extensive lineup. Also, from what I understand (seems a little unclear...), these are interactive workshops not just talks, so I'm very much looking forward to getting involved.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm leading a totally online Coding Dojo at AirConf, similar to what @caike and I ran at RailsConf 2014: [http://youtu.be/d-Yc7XpELRg](http://youtu.be/d-Yc7XpELRg)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'll be speaking about Composer packages creation in Laravel, and how to use them to fast decouple everything in your apps.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looking forward to participating! I will be speaking on visualisation techniques for lean startup teams on Aug 8. I think that this is a great way to foster conversations and cultivate new ideas.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm speaking about Twilio during AirConf - doing an intro to using Twilio for voice and SMS with your applications for developers who have never used Twilio.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this looks like a really great event. I'm buying a ticket this week!

</comment><comment><USER16> Looking forward to a few of these

</comment><comment><USER17> The speaker list actually looks pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER19> looks good!</comment>


The Computer Science Mismatch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/227066/The-Computer-Science-Mismatch

<comment><USER2> A computer science degree isn't the only way to get a good software/programming job. In fact, I think doing a more quantitative major like applied math or engineering with a base education of 3-4 CS classes (programming, algorithms, data structures, maybe an applied high-level lab class) would serve many people better. If you have the mind for it learning a language and applying it to problems in your speciality isn't hard and can be done outside a class.

<comment><USER3> I have never seen a replacement for the algorithmic study outside of a CS degree. It can be approximated by theoretical Math degrees, however. I have a strong bias towards CS/math graduates because of this. Self-taught individuals frequently have a terrible time grasping these concepts and difficulty picking up the language that is taught in CS classes. (n.b.: I don't know WHY this is. Certainly its right there in the textbooks and on Wikipedia. But its been my experience that it is so.)

Also, outside of the hotspots, programming jobs are scarce as hens' teeth. Would not recommend living or going to school outside of a hotspot in 2013.

<comment><USER4> I'm in Chicago trying to higher ops engineers for $70K who are already making $80-90K, and Java devs with 1-3 years experience who are already making $100-120K. What is this "job scarcity" you speak of?

<comment><USER3> Well, you might try looking outside of metro areas to see it. I'd suggest recruiting in the Dakotas/Montana/Wyoming.

<comment><USER4> I'm searching nationwide, using Dice, LinkedIn, Craigslist (international nationwide aggregator built for internal talent search!), and StackExchange.

While I've harped about companies allowing telecommuting, the startup I'm at is not my own, and does require people to be onsite (for the time being).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > You might also think colleges would be expanding their departments > proportionately, since even with higher numbers of students, the > universities aren't anywhere close to filling industry demand.

Why is that a bad thing? If high demand was to cause a proportionately high supply, then in 15 years we'd find ourselves having too many coders looking for a job.

</comment><comment><USER6> I find this article to be mostly bogus, while recruiters are working hard to bring in talent it's rarely with competing salaries or incentives that people actually want.

Increasingly companies are centralizing and reducing the locations in which they will allow employees to work. While those same employees are placing a higher value on staying close to their families and developing interpersonal relationships.

If you need to find an employee and having a hard time offer more money or expand the area in which employees can work so you have a larger pool of candidates!

If you are a company that truly needs specialized talent, then create it. Stop whining that it doesn't magically appear on your doorstep. Hire someone, train them, and then pay them a retention bonus so they don't leave.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stop obsessing about college degrees for the 90% of coding jobs that don't require complex algorithmic work. Hire smart people and train them on the job or hire smart motivated self-learners.

<comment><USER8> How do you find the 'smart people'? (not that a college degree implies that someone is smart). Being 'smart' isn't enough to get the job done.

<comment><USER4> Time and effort. They don't magically appear. There is no webapp for it. You WILL have to spend a significant amount of time to find these people. It's probably also why you should be spending whatever you can to hold onto them once you have them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At University of Massachusetts, you can't get into the CS degree program straight off--you have to take the first 2-3 intro courses, prove you're a) dedicated to CS and b) able to do the work, then they let you in. So if you spend your first year taking gen-eds and getting good grades in your CS classes, you're fine. I think it's a good system.

<comment><USER10> > So if you spend your first year taking gen-eds and getting good grades in > your CS classes, you're fine.

Isn't that kind of a general rule of thumb for just about any major/direction in college?

<comment><USER11> In my college you got accepted by the department before you took a single class. I think most work this way.

Sure, I took mostly gen-ed and low level CS classes the first year or so, but I was already accepted to the CS department while doing so.

<comment><USER12> My college was like this as well. I think the basic idea is that you will sink or swim. If you can't make it in the program then that's your problem. I don't really see the point in limiting who can take part in the program. They get my money and I get to try, whether I succeed or not is totally up to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These types of articles only make sense in Boston, NY, Seattle or Silicon Valley kind of places. In middle America generally few people compete for new/any programmers at a level that would inspire an article.

<comment><USER8> In middle America, businesses don't realize that you don't need a Computer Science degree to be a systems administrator, much less a CRUD app developer.

It's weird that the same society who thinks "little Johnny is good with computers, he can do x/y/z" has trouble even letting little Johnny get an interview if he doesn't have a CS degree.

<comment><USER14> They also don't realize that you don't need 5+ years of experience in their specific alphabet soup of languages, platforms, and frameworks to do those jobs effectively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice to get an Informatics shout out, even if it's presented as a computer science 2nd choice. It's a wonderful program that blends code, design, and user experience, with a sprinkling of library science and business ethics. I couldn't think of a better degree for an aspiring entrepreneur.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd just like to say that I'm extremely grateful to be working as a programmer right now. Of course, everyone else is, but I started my career right after the .com bust when all I read was how there were tons of new compsci graduates who couldn't find work (I was gainfully employed the whole time professionally).

So, no real comment other than to express my gratitude to be working at a time when so many others in other fields aren't. Hopefully the music keeps playing and we keep circling the chairs. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Did anyone actually learn software development from their CS degree?

<comment><USER18> Yes. Mostly from these classes: 1\. Operating Systems (custom malloc lib, building own data protocols, servers, networking, etc) 2\. Compilers. If you've ever taken this, I really don't need to say more. It's basically a semester-long project with distinct phases all relying on each other (parser, IR creation, type-checking, back-end code generation)

Pretty much every one of my classes included a heavy programming load, including Algorithms. Depends on the program.

<comment><USER17> I found that a lot of the stuff I do daily (architecture, and structuring code for optimum readability, elegance, and performance) was barely even glossed over in my classes.

I guess the how-computers/programs-work type of stuff is pretty important (in a subtle way). I just learned waaaay more by making things I liked in my own free time (games, web apps, tools).

<comment><USER19> I've found myself to be an effective programmer _because_ of the non-degree experiences that allowed me to see the larger strategic and tactical environment in which programming takes place.

However, the foundations that my CS degree gave me allow me to think much more openly about the possibilities of what can be done with computers. I don't need to depend on what a library can do, I can dream big and _then_ find the code that does what I need or build it if I have to.

And strategic thinking is an orthogonal skill that will elevate anybody no matter what professional discipline they are in. As a professor of mine once said "if the only things you learn at university are covered in your classes, you've attended a very poor university indeed."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems counterintuitive that a budget-stressed department would want to turn away potential revenue.

<comment><USER21> Try reading the article: the departments take a loss on each student. (But we'll make it up on volume?) It's the other departments like liberal arts which are cross-subsidizing them. (Which is cheaper to teach, a computer lab or a poetry class?)

<comment><USER22> Computer labs aren't so expensive. ~$3000 workstation, good for ~6 semesters, and multiple students per semester use one seat.

<comment><USER21> That's not even the beginning of the costs.

Again, the article directly addressed this issue. Read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So more people are applying to those programs - but what are the drop-out rates? I've heard that they can be quite high for these types of things.

<comment><USER24> The problem my alma mater faces is an incredible surge in CS enrollment but a fear of a 2000-style pop in which all those students flea the program.

IOW, they've got more students trying to major in CS than they can possibly handle but are afraid of hiring more professors to handle the load. That's what they did in 2000 and they wound up having three professors with nothing to do. For a small school of <3000 students, that's a big problem.

Their solution is just to make the intro courses so difficult that >75% drop.

(Intro to CS in Scala will do that)</comment></comment>


Looks Like Facebook Deals Is Being Unveiled Tonight.. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/25/facebook-deals-credits/

<comment><USER2> I think this is a genius move for them. Groupon tries to be a social coupon type of place but they don't actually have a social network to back them up. If you and three friends want to take up that skydiving offer, you need to coordinate outside of Groupon, agree upon it, and then everyone trusts that the others made the purchase.

Now imagine doing this on Facebook where you could potentially (no idea if they have this functionality planned, but they should) purchase the skydiving offer with a provision such as "only settle the charge on my credit card when three of my friends also sign up". It would get posted to your wall as "John Smith signed up for skydiving at 50% off and needs 3 more people to join him". Then Jane Doe also signs up and your wall now reads "John and Jane are going skydiving and they need 2 more people to join them". If Facebook did that, it could be huge.

Additionally, Facebook credits cost 30% commission to the vendor. Groupon charges 50% commission for their deals. Assuming that the commission structure for Facebook Deals uses the same percentage and there isn't an additional fee on top, it's more financially appealing for merchants to sign up with Facebook over Groupon. To match it, Groupon would need to cut their revenue by 40%. That'll be a tough pill to swallow.

</comment><comment><USER3> So we have Facebook, the top internet social company, getting into the top internet social advertising fad.

Then we have Google, the top internet advertising company, getting into the top internet social advertising fad.

So if the question was: "is the Groupon stuff more social, or advertising?" It would seem we have the perfect way to find out!

<comment><USER4> This is getting more than interesting. Out of the new entrants, I have to give the edge to Facebook. Assuming all of these companies can put together sales forces capable of finding good deals and vendors--but getting a corps of 2,000, like Groupon's, can't be all that easy--the whole revenue equation boils down to subscribers. More subs = more sales. The edge there has to go to Facebook, who, I would expect, will be able to weave something quite clever into their UI to allow and encourage people to shoot these deals out to their entire friend network. Their subs list could get massive quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link to the cached NYTimes article:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Abits.blogs.nytimes.com%2F2011%2F04%2F25%2Flatest- rival-to-groupon-livingsocial-facebook-embargo-till-midnight%2F)

</comment><comment><USER3> "You mention that Emily White says Deals will be the first product that uses Credits for real goods (rather than virtual ones in games). You can't use Credits to directly buy real goods. You can use Credits to buy Deals, and you get a voucher that you can print out and take to the merchant to redeem your deal. But you can't use Credits to actually buy a real good. Might be confusing to some people."

Um, what?

Perhaps they are trying to avoid the Secret Service (ie, avoiding the idea that it is a currency)?

Still, what a hilariously confusing paragraph.

<comment><USER6> For fun, try replacing "real good" with "drugs." It works about as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised to see Atlanta, Dallas, and San Diego ahead of LA, New York, and Chicago on the initial city list. Any thoughts on why they chose those cities?

<comment><USER3> I can think of a $25 billion* reason not choose Chicago to test in...

In all seriousness, if you actually wanted to have _test markets_ , I can't imagine including LA, NY or Chicago with a straight face.

*potential IPO, at least

<comment><USER7> Funny, point taken about Chicago. I guess I wasn't thinking about the fact that these are test markets, which is indeed a good reason not to start with the biggest cities.

<comment><USER8> I still don't get it. Why not have a big city as a test market? It seems like the more potential customers there are, the more likely it is to catch on.

EDIT: Serious question, by the way. I assume from the exchange above that there is an answer, I just don't know what it is.

<comment><USER9> Reasons not to choose the biggest cities:

1\. More traffic than you think you can handle.

2\. Demographics don't match the mainstream that you will be selling to later.

3\. Competition already has a lock on those cities.

I'm sure there are others as well.

Edit: the Chicago/$25 billion comments refer to Groupon's HQ being in Chicago (and their Potenial IPO valuation[1]).

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17/groupon-is-said- to-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17/groupon-is-said-to-discuss- ipo-valuation-of-up-to-25-billion.html)

<comment><USER8> Those all make sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The focus on concerts and events may also be due to tickets providing more opportunities to catch fraud later, after a transaction has taken place. FB credits are faster/more convenient than Paypal, probably by virtue of doing fewer checks before the transaction goes through.

</comment><comment><USER11> How long before Groupon launches a social network or a search engine?

<comment><USER12> Well, they bought Pelago last week...and then announced that Pelago's social network, Whrrl, is being shut down at the end of the month.

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/18/groupon-acquires-whrrl- crea...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/18/groupon-acquires-whrrl-creator- pelago/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish the best for Groupon as watching Facebook snip at Google and vice versa doesn't sound very fun.

</comment><comment><USER14> Facebook on the path to being like Yahoo, doing everything...Yahoo tried to do everything, they failed terribly, is Facebook ship beginning to sink?

<comment><USER3> I had the exact same thought with Google's announcement.

On the other hand, the problem's been that Yahoo wasn't actually the best anything. Casual web? AOL. Search? Anyone else, then Google. Email? Copied Hotmail, then GMail came along and they never really caught up. They purchased a bunch of top-notch companies and then let them stall into obscurity.

So, perhaps the comparison isn't going to hold up. Still, these companies should be warned.

<comment><USER15> I thought yahoo email was pretty good, and yahoo finance is probably still the best of the choices out there. But totally agree that a lot of things went to Y to die</comment></comment></comment>


NESPi – Mini NES Classic Raspberry Pi Games Console - <AUTHOR> http://www.daftmike.com/2016/07/NESPi.html <comment><USER2> Man, hobby electronics has come along way. Love em' or hate em' 3d printing is really adding that polish which takes things from a hack to professional looking prototype much more viable. What a time to be alive! :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Watch the video, it's great. This is truly art to me: the intersection of technology and cleverness in a fun, clean little package.

I don't have the know how to do all of this, but I wish I could get my hands on one of these already made.

</comment><comment><USER4> The fact that this was built that with the mindset of keeping the nostalgia is amazing. The click seemed RIGHT on and the mini carts are thoughtful.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is what nintendo should be releasing in November.

</comment><comment><USER6> What 3D printer is he using? Couldn't find it. What experience has others have doing 3D printing like this?

<comment><USER7> I've printed a Raspberry Pi NES Case with my 3D printer. Most FDM printers will print in similar quality, and I'm not sure if he has done any post- processing on the finished prints.

Looking at the author's Thingiverse page, he says he has a CTC Bizer which looks like a MakerBot Replicator Dual clone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> why build it now when you can wait 77 days to buy it? haha

source: [https://ldom22.github.io/NES-classic- reminder/](https://ldom22.github.io/NES-classic-reminder/)

<comment><USER9> Don't get me wrong, the thing Nintendo's putting out is a good deal for what it is.

But it doesn't look like it's going to be a better product than a lot of these hobby projects. It's certainly going to be running emulators, and there's no way to add more games.

<comment><USER5> > there's no way to add more games

At least out of the box. Expect myself or others to be hacking on that .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is so cool. I wonder if it could be scaled down even further, maybe by using a different developer board (FPGA?) instead of Raspberry Pi.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do all new Dell screens have that picture in picture mode for HDMI? damn i need to get new screens, thats awesome.

</comment><comment><USER12> If only Nintendo did the NFC cartridges thing with their Mini NES. That would've been so awesome and maybe somehow they could've had third parties rerelease thier own games independently through that mechanism.

<comment><USER13> Note that all the NFC does is to tell the emulator what to load.

<comment><USER14> Ideal might've been to put a URL to image dumps on the NFC, spend a few seconds downloading, store them somewhere then run them in the emulator.

<comment><USER13> True, but as this was a Pi2, it would either require a usb wifi dongle, or leaving the ethernet plugged in all the time.

<comment><USER12> That implies it would be redownloaded every time rather than just the check for the ROM first and download if absent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: The Moral Compass of a Machine - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/04/13/ethics-and-artificial-intelligence-the-moral-compass-of-a-machine/ <comment><USER2> The author fails to explain _why_ robots should use utilitarian ethics.</comment>


User-Generated Pricing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.servus.io/post/2013-05-29-user-generated-pricing

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting concept, and I'm curious what results you find.

Here's my issue:

You say you value a $0.99 app as throw-away, and that the more you spend, the less throw-away it feels. Sure, if you priced your app at $20.00, I agree that it would feel less throw-away (if a customer decided to buy it, they value it at >= $20).

But you're not pricing it at $20.00. You're pricing it at $2.50-$20.00. Really, anything I pay above $2.50 is a donation to you, for your work. But in my head, it's still a $2.50 app, isn't it? Because other people are paying that amount even if I'm not.

I think what you're talking about is setting my expectation of the value it will add for me. For a $0.99 app, the creator thought it would typically only add $0.99 of value. For a $5.00 app, they thought it would add >= $5.00 of value.

It just sounds like you're not sure how much it's worth (or you have customers who it's worth $2.50 to and customers who it's worth $20.00 to, and you can't choose who to target).

One more point/question... wouldn't it be better for them to "pay-what-they- want" after they try it? Before they use it, they can only guess how much value it adds for them. Are you expecting that they've already downloaded and used your trial, and then return to the website to buy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for your input!

> But in my head, it's still a $2.50 app, isn't it?

Is it? See, that's what I am trying to figure out. Personally, I don't think of the "excess amount" as a donation, it's part of the price I've picked myself. And when you buy the app, the amount on the invoice is just one number, it's not split between "base price" and "donation".

> It just sounds like you're not sure how much it's worth (or you have > customers who it's worth $2.50 to and customers who it's worth $20.00 to, > and you can't choose who to target).

I know what it's worth to me, in my eyes. But even though I've sold a number of licenses, both full price and 20% off, I have no idea whether it's worth the same to my _potential_ customers. Instead of running A/B tests and or different sales I'm trying to speed up the process and see how it pans out.

> wouldn't it be better for them to "pay-what-they-want" after they try it?

Of course everybody should try the app before plunking down money. That's why there is a 14-day trial period. :) Again, I can only judge from my personal experience, but when I run a trial of an app I like I tend to "return to the website to buy". Don't you? :)

<comment><USER3> > Instead of running A/B tests and or different sales I'm trying to speed up > the process and see how it pans out.

Ironically, you won't know whether you're speeding up the process unless you'd test both approaches (A/B-testing and 'pay-what-you-want'-pricing) and see whether they always lead to same outcome. (I'm betting against it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the pay-what-you-want model but it doesn't work. Every single Humble Indie Bundle has multiple popular games that sell for $10 to $20. They even has an incentive to give more than the average by giving more great games (and sometime even the games from the last Humble Indie Bundle).

Still they get less than 6$ in average... We know for a fact that people are ready to pay full price for each of these games. Yeah I know, these people probably already bought these games but I don't think the distribution of the values are that far (either you pay 20$ and more or you pay 5$).

I think it would work better if you offered multiple prices with more feature. You could have the 0,99$ one that offer the strict minimum but is a great showcase of the application (it could even be free). Then you have the 4,99$ one that has more feature, etc... Give your customer a reason to pay more.

<comment><USER5> Surely Humble Bundle demonstrates that it DOES work, otherwise they wouldn't still be running offers and would not be able to convince game developers to participate in the deals.

The average purchase may be $6, but how many of those purchases are from people who wouldn't have bought the individual games at all if not for the offer? If they weren't going to buy at all, that's $6 of revenue that you wouldn't have seen at all otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem with user generated pricing is there is no supply/demand, so the user will basically pick the lowest price they feel non-guilty about, which is usually a buck or so. Something I always thought would be interesting is a floating market price, so you start the price at say $1, and as demand increases at that price, it keeps going up.

<comment><USER7> Still there's quite a bit of wiggle room for experimenting.

Compare -

      Pick a price between $1.95 and $19.95

to -

      Pick a price between $4.95 and $49.95

Both allow picking up a copy for under $5, but the second one will yield a higher average price. That's your good old _anchoring_.

Another example. If you have an axis representing suggested prices, then if your tick marks go in $0.50 increments, people will likely to end up paying less on average compared to $5.00 increments.

And so on. Cognitive manipulation is your friend :)

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can read some research on name-your-own pricing in e-commerce from my former prof: one is here from the Journal of Marketing <http://www- bcf.usc.edu/~tellis/PriceAuct.pdf> (for more just check out Google-Scholar and type "name your own price")

</comment><comment><USER9> Game theory doesn't support "pay what you want" really well, e.g. there's no market to somehow arbitrate the price.

A true market could be created by enabling people to buy and sell the service, or perhaps by bidding. This doesn't work unless the supply of the service is artificially restricted (otherwise the price goes to near zero immediately). Of course, some argue that the "true price" of intellectual property is very close to zero, but the app in the article can be thought of as a service.

</comment><comment><USER10> I suspect that giving users a blank field to fill out may result in increased payment amounts. If a user tries to checkout with no amount, maybe reload the page with a high amount pre-filled for them, like $25, that they can then reduce.

But there's just no way, psychologically, I'm going to move that slider to the right. (If many have, I'd be interested to hear that.)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd be fascinated to see what the impact is if you give the user an indication of what the next user(s) will have to pay if they adjust the price scale. Down? They get guilted by seeing the next users will end up paying more. Up? Nice pay-it-forward aspect.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there some reason you decided to have a maximum price?

I was curious that you felt the app had $20 value personally to you, yet you don't think anyone else would value it higher than that?

I found that decision surprising.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

I didn't want to appear greedy. That being said, I've increased the upper range limit a bit. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't that similar to donation-supported freeware?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, as there is a base price. It's PWYW, but "what you want" > 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Irony: his app is down.

<comment><AUTHOR> My "app is down"? You mean the site? (It isn't.)</comment></comment>


Quicken 2007 Might Work On OS X 10.7 Lion, Not Right Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/quicken_2007_might_work_on_lion_not_right_away/ <comment><USER2> Summary: Quicken 2007 is PowerPC code, which means that it won't run on the next OS X, but it's too difficult to port to Intel. So for the past few months they've been trying to embed Rosetta into it instead, and if it goes well they may re-release the PowerPC codebase with Rosetta attached.

It surprises me that Quicken's code was written in such an irreparably PowerPC-specific way that it justifies months of Rosetta integration work. Intuit previously had experience developing Quicken on 68K (Mac) and Intel (Windows), and had just undergone the 68K-to-PowerPC transition, so PowerPC was hardly their one and only architecture.

Wild speculation, but what if the problem isn't really how the code is written, but that the developers who understand Quicken 2007 are gone. (What if even the people who understand how to _compile_ Quicken 2007 are gone?) That would certainly explain a preference for an emulation-like solution over making small fixes and recompiling.</comment>


Show HN: Mobile-optimized video platform to enhance SMS - <AUTHOR> https://www.trytape.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, we've built a mobile-first video platform designed to be used in conjunction with your mobile messaging outreach (like SMS, FB messenger, etc). It's web-based (no downloads), designed to load fast, offer interactivity, along with APIs + webhooks.

We've finally released a free tier to give more people the chance to leverage our platform. We'd love to hear and incorporate your feedback as we continue to build features and evolve the product!

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm a user, and product is top notch! Helps with engagement / conversion big time

</comment><comment><USER3> Video grabs attention. Looking forward to seeing the enhancements in this version of TAPE.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am really pushing my company to adopt this to delight our users before they inevitably come to expect this level of personal service.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks great, will definitely be trying this out. Is it available in Australia?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're available everywhere! To be clear, we don't send sms messages. We provide the video platform (creation tools, video player, data + apis) that you use to enhance the sms messages you're already sending from your phone or another service</comment></comment>


Robustness of Neural Networks against natural perturbations - <AUTHOR> https://scortex.io/robustness-and-repeatability-of-modern-deep-neural-networks-a-review/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello! I just published a blog post on the state of the art literature on neural network robustness against natural (real life no adversarial) perturbations. Hope this is interesting! Feedback welcome.</comment>


Cool things in the /proc filesystem. What the proc? - <AUTHOR> http://www.andythemoron.com/blog/2017-04-27/Proc-Filesystem <comment><USER2> Thank you. Very informative for the newbie that I am. I've used Linux for some time but never delved this deeply under the covers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the kind words! My initial goal in starting this blog was to help those trying to make the rough transition from beginner to intermediate. I tend to find that most information in this space is bifurcated into "do this exactly" tutorials and more advanced material which loses newbies. The middle ground seems to be a very underserved segment of the community and it is going to continue growing in an exponential fashion.</comment></comment>


Show HN: PodHound, an AI-Powered Podcast Discovery System - <AUTHOR> http://podhound.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, John Biggs here. I made PodHound to help us find better podcasts. It's currently transcribing about 3000 individual podcasts and will match podcasts based on semantic analysis. Any advice on the best services to use is welcome. I'm currently just using AWS.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it amoral to start charging for PDF of a previously free tutorial? - <AUTHOR> One year ago, I have written a FOSS tutorial on writing webapps on Go and published it via Leanpub using pay what you want model, the gitbooks version gets 1.5k readers each month ~50 unique per day and 1k downloads per month. only 4-5 users have paid $ via leanpub, I was thinking of removing the pdf version from gitbooks and making leanpub version as paid only. Is it amoral to start charging $ for PDF version? the source is FOSS on github and always will be OSS.<p>edit: https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook/ is the link. <comment> open-source-ux No, it's not wrong to start charging.

You could make some of the chapters available for free, and offer the full version for a price. That will give potential buyers a preview of the content and help them to decide whether to purchase the full version. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the content is open source entirely on Github and readable, I have gone out of the way so that the content can be easily readable both online and offline, I also have made video tutorials on because I was requested on reddit, which I am divided where to publish, youtube or somewhere else, any thoughts on that?

<comment> open-source-ux If you want to charge for your videos, post only a few example videos on YouTube (to act as a preview or taster for the course) with a link to the full video course on your site (or a third-party site).

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good idea, I was wondering about the ROI of Youtube vs others. Will Youtube ads earn me enough? I wasn't able to find out exactly how Youtube pays the video creators!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> of course not. you own some property or rights on it of some sort. what you do with it is entirely up to you. you could even change the license on future versions of the source, and it wouldn't be amoral.

you might face backlash under certain circumstances. you'd want to weigh that against the benefits of introducing restrictions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that I have some rights over it, just that when I had published the book and had charged some $ and notified the reddit community of Go, I got severely downvoted because probably they saw it as click bait article driven to earn $ (despite the fact that you could just slide the $ thing on Leanpub to the left and download it for free)

Thank you for your advice. I also made a screencast for the book, I am divided as to where to publish it, youtube or udemy or somewhere else.

<comment><USER2> that sounds like more of a function of reddit than amoral behavior.

ultimately you worked hard on something, and there's no shame in seeking recompense (pretty standard whether you're doing something commercial or open source)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! As a person who learned programming entirely from FOSS books and things, I felt immoral to charge for my tutorial/ebook.

Do you have any thoughts about the video series I made on the same ebook's content? Where does it make sense to publish? youtube or udemy or somewhere else?

<comment><USER2> i dunno. i'm not much into go. if i was going to do systems programming, i'd probably look to rust since one of my big programming influences uses it (armin ronacher).

incidentally, i created a tutorial series on programming the amazon echo (alexatutorial.com). my tutorials are pretty dry, but i'm going to probably try and create more content and start charging for it. i always admired jon lindquist of egghead.io. he started self distributing and has built a little empire. same with geoffrey grosenbach of peepcode later acquired by pluralsight.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the best for the alexa tutorial! I use Go for writing servers and not for systems programming, the lang was initially focused on systems programming, but it has now become a general purpose language, python - C bridge!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's called being an author and it's a career if you're good at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

The tutorial is here, [https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti- textboo...](https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook/)

I have received a lot of +ve feedback from readers, the tutorial is focused on newcomers to webdev in Go, teaches everything from scratch using real example, a todo list manager in Go</comment></comment>


Why does this innovative method of subtraction from a third grader always work? - <AUTHOR> https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2667980/why-does-this-innovative-method-of-subtraction-from-a-third-grader-always-work <comment><USER2> She is applying the anti-commutative law properties of subtraction; a-b = - (b-a)

Also note that you can do this with division. A lot of people are taught that anti-commutativity is only applicable to subtraction but it also applies to any operator or function.

a op b = Identity(op) op ( b op a )

Obviously that assume that a op b is defined and b op a is defined and that an identity exists under the operator op.

Same goes for functions,

f(a,b) = f(Identity(f()),f(b,a))

<comment><USER3> > Also note that you can do this with division. A lot of people are taught > that anti-commutativity is only applicable to subtraction

Wouldn't the application of this to division be the identity

        a/b = 1 / (b/a)

?

Because I'm pretty sure that's taught to everyone, and is in fact the only method taught for dividing rational numbers.

> but it also applies to any operator or function

Um... how's that? Can you apply it to the function f(x,y) = x^y? It looks like you're claiming that 2^3 is equal to 1^(3^2), but 8 is not actually equal to 1. (Then again, it isn't clear what you think Identity(f) would be here... there is no concept of "exponentiating 0 numbers" in the same way that the empty sum is 0 or the empty product is 1, because exponentiation is not associative and has no identity element.)

Similarly, 0 is the additive identity, but it is not the subtractive identity because no subtractive identity exists.

<comment><USER2> Not all operators or functions are anti-commutative; addition for example is commutative, not anti-commutative. Exponentiation is not commutative (2^3 != 3^2) and it is not anti-commutative because it has no identity (there are exponentiation equivalencies (sometimes labelled identities) but there is no symmetric identity like 0 for addition and subtraction or 1 for multiplication or division).

An operator or function is called anti-commutative when it fits the necessary conditions, not the converse. You can't just label something as anti- commutative and then point out that is doesn't fit the conditions; that's putting the cart in front of the donkey.

<comment><USER4> You wrote:

> it also applies to any operator or function.

I understand what you mean (that anticommutativity is a property that any binary operator _might_ have) but it did sound like you meant all operators are anticommutative.

<comment><USER3> He's wrong about anticommutativity, too, though. An operation ∘ is anticommutative if a∘b = -(b∘a). It happens that this is true of subtraction, but that has nothing to do with 0 being the "subtractive identity" or with the - in front of "-(b-a)" visually resembling the sign for subtraction. Vector cross product is anticommutative too, because a×b = -(b×a), but 0 is not an identity for vector cross product and negating a vector is not the same operation as taking the cross product of two vectors. The 0 and the negation come from the operation of adding vectors, not cross-multiplying them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting that the poster knows "subtrahend" and "minuend" and fully explains the algorithm, but can't solve the pre-algebra problem that shows that it is accurate.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting.. this is how I do subtraction in my head. Didn't realize it wasn't the "standard" approach :).

<comment><USER7> As do I, sort of. To subtract mentally I adjust the numbers of both sides by the same amount so it rounds up nicely in either side.

In this case I'd go:

        61-17 =>(-1 on both sides)=>
        60-16 =>(-10 on both sides)=>
        50-6 =>("normal" borrow)=>
        44

Had it been, say 148-34, I could go either:

        148-34 =>(+2)=>
        150-36 =>(-6 with borrow)=>
        144-30 =>(-30)
        114

     or most likely

        148-34 =>(+2)=>
        150-36 =>(-30)=>
        120-6 =>(-6)
        114

though in this simple case I'd just

        148-34 =>(set the 100 aside)=>
        48-34 =>(split digits)=>
        40-30 + 8-4 =
        10+4 =>(join digits again)=>
        14 =>(put the 100 back in)=>
        114

This is in line with answers that were given to the Math Exchange question. Edit: @srtjstjsj put it nicely when they call it "breaking apart".</comment></comment>


AirConsole – Play multiplayer games together - <AUTHOR> https://www.airconsole.com/welcome <comment><USER2> The concept and execution seems cool but I just wanna note in case anyone important is listening that "can you play them all" is one of the weakest taglines I've ever heard.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty close to the $15 billion pokemon franchise tagline.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but this isn't at all like Pokemon, which is the problem. I thought it was obvious, but my point is that "collecting" games or trying "play all the games" isn't the right tagline for a game platform.

Has any established gaming platform that has ever existed (except for maybe the super early ones) made game-collecting a thing? Trying to play every game on a console is a silly and pointless fools errand -- yeah you could do it, but there's no inherent value. At least to me, it seems like the value-add for a system like this is to effortlessly play games with your friends, and then _maybe_ to check out some console exclusives that represent interesting gameplay. Who in their target market wakes up and says to themselves "I need to play every game ever released for this new platform"? They're doing lifestyle segment marketing already, hence the smiling clean-cut millenials sitting and enjoying quality time together, they're encouraging me to want to be like those people, but then I read the line and instantly asked myself "why would I want to do that".

Just seems like the marketing team took the wrong turn on the road to being different. Maybe I'm totally wrong, and I'm just one data point, but also, maybe it's that that line that was awkward.

[EDIT] - On second thought, my original post was badly phrased. It's not the "weakest tagline I've ever heard", it just seems to massively _NOT_ fit the context/platform/product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've played a lot of AirConsole and they completely destroyed the platform when they introduced their monetization platform. I don't mind having to register or watch ads but it's completely broken. Nowadays we never manage to play a single game without someone getting stuck in an ad on their phone, which means the whole game stops working for everyone.

It's a shame because it used to be really awesome. In the early days you didn't even have to register for an account, just boot up the webpage on your phone and enter the code on the big screen.

<comment><USER5> If you have a smart TV which runs android you can use your phone as a controller and just play one of the plethora of games available on Android.

[https://support.google.com/androidtv/answer/6122465?hl=en- GB](https://support.google.com/androidtv/answer/6122465?hl=en-GB)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Warning: Firefox is not supported on Android. Game controller page asks you to start it in Chrome.

<comment><USER7> Install the app?

<comment><USER8> Doesn't seem to work without Google Play Services. Crashes on my device. Also seems like it isn't possible to buy the premium version without having the app.

<comment><USER7> Mind asking, how is life without Play services?

<comment><USER9> Not the parent commenter, but am currently using F-Droid and not Play services. It seems great for everything I wish to do on Android. Only exception is the game options, which are very limited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using it at parties for a while, always showing it to new people. I had the same idea and at some point that airconsole already existed. It's fun and the setup is easy, but many games are buggy (the hockey one for exemple has terrible controls and i never managed to play with 4+ people). Good concept, but probably hard to make reliable enough. Their SDK is easy to use, but i couldn't find a proper workflow to develop with it, i ended up having to re-type a game code all the time, so i gave up.

<comment><USER11> How do they make money? Are only certain games free and then you pay a subscription, or do they do in-game purchase rubbish?

<comment><USER12> They show ads every few games if I remember correctly. They offer a subscription to remove theses ads and only a single person of the group need to have one.

It's fun but thing is, paying 5$ a month is too much for the fun I got from it. It would be better if it worked like Jackbox with a single higher fee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of Jackbox Party games. Those work almost flawlessly and include the phone as more than just a controller

<comment><USER14> +1 for Jackbox Party Games. I have all 3 on my XBone and 1 & 2 on my laptop (and Drawful 2 on both as well). It's a fun game as long as it's all setup and ready to go.

<comment><USER15> +1 for Drawful and the other one that is basically Baulderdash with phones. super fun for large groups of silly people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is fantastic! I've been looking for a way to play games long distance with my SO who doesn't have a console or a beast PC.

<comment><USER10> Sorry to tell you that, but that won't do. This is meat to replace split screen playing, not some online multiplayer videogame. You could do it by sharing your screen, but the latency would be terrible, and it's usually not so great to start with.

<comment><USER16> Awww man good point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Suggestion: add a qr code so you can just scan it instead of having to type the code on your phone.

<comment><USER18> Suggestion: stay away from them. Opening the browser and typing in a URL followed by a short code is way faster than getting all participants to download a QR code reader.

<comment><USER19> QR code reader? I believe most native photo apps can read them now, it shouldn't hurt to have both the URL and a QR code

<comment><USER20> Not on Android v8 as I just checked.

<comment><USER21> Stock Android still doesn't. I think Samsung also has this through "Bixby Vision"

Basically, why not have a QR code in addition to the URL displayed?

<comment><USER15> Uggh.. don't get me started on Bixby... it's like a modern day Clippy... "I see you accidentally pressed the hardware button to awaken me the 10th time. how can i take over your screen today?"

<comment><USER21> Why not just download an app to remap it? I remapped mine to screen rotation lock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TBH with the game library available and the fact that most Android TVs can run games and much better games and that Android TV allows you to use the phone as a controller this provides fairly little value.

This will not replace console gaming, this won't even a good alternative to the casual party games you can run on most smart TVs these days.

It's an interesting idea but the availability of established and better alternative on the market just won't allow it to establish itself.

<comment><USER12> > casual party games you can run on most smart TVs these days.

Like what? The only similar game I know is Jackbox Party games and it certainly won't run on any smart tv, you need a proper computer/console to run it.

<comment><USER5> Jackbox runs on Android TV, Fire TV and Apple TV.

Plus you have plenty of various social and card games on the Android TV Google Play store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hey! anyone tried it? How's the gameplay/performance?

Game recommendations anyone?

<comment><USER4> I thought a lot more people had heard of AirConsole!

Obviously the performance is bad for games requiring quick response times but with that said there are a couple of ones you would think wouldn't work with the delay/lag but actually work fine (racing games). The best games are the party games though.

<comment><USER23> Wow - I've never heard of it before, and consider myself relatively knowledgeable when it comes to gaming. How long has it been around?

<comment><USER24> Since September 2015 - but started very small back then

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That library reminded me of Newgrounds. Back in the day, it was a treat to go through all the games to discover gems but I don't have the patience anymore.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's a much more valuable thing that's already been named that for quite some time: [https://www.get- console.com/shop/en/27-airconsole](https://www.get- console.com/shop/en/27-airconsole)

<comment><USER27> Umm. Nice, but what you're posting has nothing to do with the software project OP posted.

<comment><USER26> They have the same name. Now, when you do a web search for the valuable one that's been around for a long time, you instead get the new videogame thing. They chose to stomp on this name rather than respect an existing thing, and this attitude says something about their company.

<comment><USER28> It's a brand name for a USB device that provides an RS-232 interface. There is _absolutely_ no way to confuse the two things. If you were searching for the RS-232 device and you happened to know the brand name for this particular one (not sure why you would, exactly), then you could search for "airconsole rs-232" and Google ranks it #1. If you are searching for "usb rs-232", at least for _me_ it doesn't even end up on the first page.

If we're talking about trademark infringement, then this is not even close (it's impossible to confuse the two products). If we're talking about being nice: if you had to avoid every single established name of every single minor product in every single country in the world... you would have no names left. All new products would have to make up gibberish names.

I appreciate that for some reason this device is "mainstream" in your eyes and should have some extra special protection, but that's not the way international agreements on trademarks work -- for a reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is so cool, I really wish there were an open source alternative.

<comment><USER30> [https://docs.happyfuntimes.net](https://docs.happyfuntimes.net) is kind of an open source alternative. It used to have a whole console like system (install games, game switcher, etc) but devs didn't want that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> They probably need to talk to Apple regarding their 5 star review on iOS.</comment>


The Producer Playbook: Guidelines and Best Practices for Producers and PM's - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7bE7YKZJCt_6h5P7W3Wg115_MahcLoZ7Hrh6TgZyno/edit <comment><AUTHOR> Hey there,

This is a guide for new Project Manager's who want to level up or seasoned pro's who need to better document their process for their team. It goes over everything, from contracts to emails, folder structure to project kickoffs, retrospectives to financials and a lot more -- 50+ pages of content.

I put it together after working at agencies in New York (Big Spaceship, Laundry Service, Huge) on various types of projects for a range of clients. What I saw there were similar if not the same, problems at each place that could be solved the same way — basically a more consistent practice / process as they managed their projects I knew I had to write something that would help.

I hope you find this valuable and if you think it would help someone else, please feel free to share it with them.

Would love to answer any questions!

Wes</comment>