Ask HN: Review my product, Peers - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to ask for some feedback on the 1st version of a product my team and I worked on http://www.peersapp.com<p>It's a friendly planner for college students. We are trying to build a network around work and social plans students have everyday.<p>- What would make you never use this app daily?<p>- What do you currently use to plan (work, social) ? <comment><USER2> I was looking at doing something similar a while ago, but, at the same time, (and this is weird to say after my last comment), I don't understand what you're doing.

Ok, it's a shared calendar, that I get (or I think that's what it is).

A demo video would be great, but going from your screenshots (in order)

1) Ok, nice clean calendar, it shows me my events. Did I create all of those? Was I invited to? Who else is going? Have I RSVP'd? I'm a bit lost here. I'm sure the colored dots mean something, but I don't know what. Now, I'd know if I created an event, but how about showing me if anybody else is going. That would probably be nice.

2) I think this is a peer's profile. Cool that it shows how many friends we have in common, and that we have friends, classes and events in common. WOAH, classes?? What if I'm not in school? Is a class just a repeated event? Why is that different from another type of event. This could use some work. Can I send a message directly to my peer?

3)Comments or Feed?? I thought it was comments about a single event at first, but now I'm thinking it's a feed, because I think it is referring to multiple classes. Again, classes is limiting your market, but ignoring that, you could do with some visual layout to show that the comment belongs to x event better. Look at Facebook's nested comments.

The last two screens are OK, again, Class or Work may not make sense to everybody, the less decisions a person needs to make the better. On the last page "Invite friends", am I inviting them to an event or to use the app?

Hope the feedback helps. Off to a good start, keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) It shows all events and assignments. So the assignments you follow and events you accept are here. Colored dots are color coded by class. If anyone else is attending the event it'll show their name below the event.

2) Classes are more like groups. You can't send a message to a peer yet. But thats absolutely something we are doing for the next iteration. Communication is key, I think.

3) Feed w/ comments. If you post to a class, it'll show up here. Comments for events/assignments are coming.

Ahh, ok. Class is just adding a class like you would in a homework planner. Work was "supposed" to be either a test or assignment.

Invite friends is an invite to the app. Perhaps this can be changed to "Share Peers with a friend"

This is probably the best feedback we have received. We wanted to make things as simple as possible so that we can see how people use it and follow to what students use most.

I agree that a demo video would be good. And, alot of the things you pointed out are obviously not clear. Every iteration I think we get better and better at this. So v1.0.3 will hopefully make even more sense.

I can't thank you enough for the feedback. We're trying to pull negative feedback from people and make a product that serves students. THANKS AGAIN!

<comment><USER2> Ah! So the key is that your target market is students. I didn't get that anywhere, and I'm wondering if narrowing your market this early is a good idea.

The thing is, this may be useful for more than just students, without changing the app at all, just how you refer to things.

Non-students, have similar scheduling/communications needs (I suspect), and you'll do great to target students first, but if "Class" had another label that appealed to more than just students, you may find your app being used in ways you didn't imagine. That may be a good thing.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Good Feedback again. I guess we narrowed our target to students for a couple of reasons. First, we pleased a lot of students with this there are a set of services we could offer specifically to students. We just felt that narrowing the market would help us focus better.

But, your absolutely right. Replace class and we have something that applies to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's impressive that you've build a good looking app. Good job on that.

Unfortunately, the app seems to fall into "build it but they won't come" category i.e. lacking product-market fit.

I used to be a student and I don't remember planning activities being a significant problem.

Another problem is that you have no monetization strategy. If your app is not free, no-one will use it and it obviously requires massive adoption to be useful.

Even if it gets massive adoption, then what? Will you put ads in the app?

How will you keep getting new users to offset the loss from people finishing college?

You have a chicken-egg problem when it comes to adoption, built-in 4-year churn and very few options to make money. It might be a useful app but a terrible business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, we definitely lack product-market fit. We just launched a couple of days ago. Also, we have made a point not to advertise. We'd like to see how a small subset of students use it so we can adapt.

Our monetization strategy comes from following students to where they go to spend money and providing them those services cheaper. The first being books. If you're able to get a large number of students on one platform, I believe they'll show you what services they need. But adoption comes before all of this

And you're right, part of what we are trying to figure out with a v1.0 MVP is exactly how the problem/solution fit the market.

Thanks so much for your feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> thats looking very nice sir, having done something similar i know it its a lot harder to do that it looks. very good job.

a point on these is traction may build really slow and you might have to hang in there for many months, but try to keep at it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We're really committed to serving students in some form. We will definitely hang in there!</comment></comment>


Don't Use SCRUM in Your COMPANY – Ken Schwaber, Scrum Creator - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@andrzejpiotrowski/we-write-code-in-scrummy-vs-too-much-talk-no-working-code-software-house-tips-e9b61516171a

<comment><USER2> Anyone else find that article almost impossible to read, solely due to the really odd way it was written/laid out?

</comment><comment><USER3> What did I just read..? I don't even see a reference to Ken Schwaber in the post.</comment>


Ask HN:Review My Updated Side Project - ShelfLuv.com (250 invite codes) - <AUTHOR>

http://www.shelfluv.com (250 invite codes) use: HN
I initially submitted this project to HN back in September/October last year. At the time, it was a hackathon project that just did instant search on Amazon. It received great feedback so I decided to build on it.
Although it took a really long time since the hackathon, the new ShelfLuv is finally here and I would love some feedback. It is far from done, but as they say, if you are not embarrassed by your first version, then you've released too late. There are still many glaring holes in the functionality but those are coming.
I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. What do you love about it? What confuses you? What would bring you back to the site. If you want to contact me personally it's pek at shelfluv dot com
Thank you <comment><USER3> I like the layout - the landing page looks pretty good. A few suggestions:

\- While I like the script font in your logo, I think it's a little too hard to read. The letterforms of the "u" and "v" are very similar and could use some slight modification to differentiate them. The kerning is also off - <USER2> letters are suppost to connect, but the tracking is too wide.

\- I think there's too much movement on the home page. There are three sections that animate (the slideshow, press, and recent activity). All that movement distracts from your call to action. Think about what you want a new visitor to focus on when they first see the page. (This is admittedly not as much of a problem for people with smaller monitors, but I can see below the fold)

\- Why not make your search bar in the header wider? Longer titles are cut off.

\- I'd shorten your overview sentence ("Share what you read with your friends and discover new books?") and maybe set it in a different color or font to help it stand out. I think this is a very important sentence.

Overall it looks great! Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are all great suggestions. I do agree there is a lot of movement there. I need to simplify it a bit and bring the focus back on the call to action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some random comments:

\- the front page loads slowly (FF4).

\- <title> in ?

\- I expected the image to change if I moused over the buttons below; I needed to click. I usually hate "active" mouseovers, but it's still something to think about

\- the 'log in with Facebook' text crosses the grey/white border, which is jarring

\- I wouldn't use this anyway, but there'd be no way I'd sign up for Facebook to use this.

\- do the "as seen on" logos do anything for your readers? I only recognized LifeHacker, and I've almost never read anything of theirs.

\- the bar at the top is annoying; then again, I always find a bar at the top annoying.

\- the per-book pages (e.g. <http://www.shelfluv.com/ASIN/1430219483>) contain a summary, but it's somewhat hard to find and the text is set in too narrow a column. Maybe place a sentence or two above the comments/recent activity, with a "(more)" button to expand?

</comment><comment><USER5> Love the design and use of the patterns in the background. What is the business model behind this? Amazon Affiliate commissions?

edit: Added my profile <http://www.shelfluv.com/brianbreslin/>

you have some css errors with the inputs and hover states over buttons in chrome 10 mac (borders showing, etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that is one obvious (and current) business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You might also try adjusting the number of books that load at one time from 10 to 12 or something divisible by 4 so that you load complete shelves and don't have half a shelf loaded.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder why this was not obvious to me. The original ShelfLuv had 5 columns of books which is why 10 loaded at a time. Great suggestion

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you considered that not all book lovers are Facebook lovers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have. This is the MVP. Down the line, I imagine people should be able to login using Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or heaven forbid email.

<comment><USER8> Non-facebook login seconded. I'd give it a go if it weren't for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can people tell me the order of preference? What alternative is most attractive after that.

<comment><USER9> I'd ignore this feedback for now. I'm not saying that these people aren't important, just that you sound like you're solo like me. Stay focused on your product. These folks will eventually come in from the wild once the product is good enough and they realize that you're using fbconnect like they use the power company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the design and idea. One thing you might think about is letting people put their own amazon referral id (for a cost or something). I recently asked Hacker Newsletter subscribers what books they were reading and had a great response, so I created a page to display the results (<http://www.kaledavis.com/2011/03/25/hnl-book-list-vol1.html>). Amazon astore's are just not what I was looking for, but something like this would work pretty well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel like that less than 1% of the people on there would be using this feature

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like the design, and the idea is nice. One suggestion I have is making some way to add books from your My Shelf page. I didn't see a way easily, and ended up just going to the browse page. I'm assuming that's probably the flow you want, but you may want to have a plus button or something on the shelf UI that links to the browse page for books.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should be able to. Once you are logged in, when you hover over any book on the shelf view, you click on 'Shelf it' to immediately add it to your shelves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Proof, if ever it were needed, that it's execution not the idea that's important. No doubt there are others too, as I have a half-backed prototype of pretty much this idea (including Amazon integration), however it's nowhere near finished (it was a Rails learning excercise), and even if it was, would never have looked half as good as this. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> what sort of Amazon integration have you done? Be curious to know what ideas you had

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very cool project, Pek. It's been great to see you iterate on the design over the last several months.

</comment><comment><USER13> No one has mentioned it yet, but I think the name is brilliant. Clever and memorable.

You might want to get shelflove.com if your site becomes successful, as I imagine lots of typos and word-of-mouth traffic will mistakenly end up there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try to get that if I can afford it

<comment><USER11> Can I equally suggest you try to get it /before/ your site becomes too popular - if you are seeing growth and anticipate it will do. Otherwise, the shelflove domain will get increasing type-in traffic as your site grows, and its value to the owner (hnce cost to acquire) will go up proportionally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's an example of what a profile page (your bookshelf) would look like: no login required

<http://www.shelfluv.com/pek.pongpaet/business>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.shelfluv.com>

</comment><comment><USER14> Do you intent to make money of it? If so, how do you plan to do that?

<comment><AUTHOR> If people buy books through my site I get a cut

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> smashing success! Great idea and awesome execution. I think this sort of 'display my favorites' is wide open for niche products, like maps, for map lovers.

<comment><USER15> and a shelf of wines for wine fans, beer for beer fans, etc.

<comment><USER11> CDs & DVDs might be a more obvious next step...

<comment><USER15> that's not true. those are big markets to compete with for small company. Its a strategy decision based on amount of funding you have to attack small or huge markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So wait, isn't it the same as Shelfari (bought by Amazon, if I remember correctly)? Even the design seems to be similar.</comment>


The court's decision to let AT&T and Time Warner merge is bad - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/15/17468612/att-time-warner-acquisition-court-decision <comment><USER2> History repeats itself. Ma Bell had to be broken up once; the Baby Bells have since largely reorganized into AT&T and Verizon, and now they're pulling in companies from other fields, too.

We already learned this lesson once. I guess we're going to have to learn it again.

<comment><USER3> History never repeats itself, but it rhymes.

They got together, got broken up, then reorganized, but instead of getting broken up again, they got bigger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why isn't the DOJ and Senor Trump appealing? Oh right, congressional elections later this year, that would risk losing out on corporate campaign contributions.

<comment><USER5> Has Trump made any mention of displeasure over the deal? It doesn't seem like something he would be opposed to.

<comment><USER6> [http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/22/media/donald-trump-att- time-...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/22/media/donald-trump-att-time- warner/index.html)

[http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/21/media/trump-comments-att- tim...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/21/media/trump-comments-att-time- warner/index.html)</comment></comment></comment>


A Sampling of Anti-Decompilation Techniques - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ret2.io/2017/11/16/dangers-of-the-decompiler/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised the Movfuscator hasn't been mentioned yet. It compiles C code into unconditional MOVs, and if you watch the author's Derbycon 2015 video there are ways you can scramble the MOV instructions, truely making it a decompilation nightmare.

1\. Movfuscator page [https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator)

2\. Derbycon 2015 video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7EEoWg6Ekk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7EEoWg6Ekk)

<comment><USER3> This is because "movfuscation" isn't a practical option for people actually trying to ship binaries that still perform well for customers but resist reverse-engineering. One of the battlegrounds for this sort of thing is the tug of war between game developers and cheat developers, and games still need to perform very well. Things the author mentioned, like address-rewriting at runtime, don't incur a performance penalty.

<comment><USER4> Just rebuild the sensitive portions of your code using movfuscator and leave the performance critical stuff alone. As long as everything is statically linked and you don't do anything stupid like "if (check) unlock()" that can be easily patched, it would make life pretty miserable for the RE crowd.

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with "if (check) unlock()" ? x)

<comment><USER6> It can be modified to "if (true) unlock()" relatively very easily, even in binary. No disassembling needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who has only ever written about 20 instructions worth of assembly, I am kind of torn.

The kind of cleverness needed to thwart the decompiler's efforts is _very_ impressive. A part of me wishes I had been around at a time when assembly was an acceptable "language" instead of the last resort it is today for most scenarios. Getting this close to the metal (or silicon) and being able to pull off such a stunt must be exhilarating.

At the same time, another part of me is very happy I do not have to deal with such low-level details. Debugging code written in assembly (with assembly being the main language, not just inline assembly in a C/C++ program or something like that) must have been exquisite torture.

<comment><USER8> One can also claim that today's programming is torture.

Back in the microcomputer days, all you needed to write a program was a desk with a single computer, one or two tools that you knew through and through and a few reference books.

Nowadays, we sometimes spend days or even weeks choosing our tools and libraries of sometimes questionable quality and getting them to work together before we can even start thinking of the problem we want to solve, and even then, we still spend half our days googling, and being lucky if we get semi decent answers.

<comment><USER9> It's six o' one, half-dozen t'other for me.

My most formative years as a programmer mostly involved 68040 assembly on the pre-PowerPC Macs. Back then, I used CodeWarrior a lot, and if there was a head-scratching bug in my software (as there often was), I could launch it from a fully-featured debugger, set breakpoints, skip ahead to a block of code, step through it line by line, see every single value that existed in raw hex on the heap, see exactly what was on the stack. If I was wanting to flip bits in someone else's software, I had MacsBug, which was a stop-the-world OS- level debugger that did all the same, but even better. [1] Back then, there was a very definite sense that I _owned_ the computer, that it was my tool, that it would do precisely and exactly what I wanted it to. In a way, whether something was open source or not didn't matter; I could modify it anyway, and often for less effort than it takes to crawl through a modern over-architected codebase.

However, now I can glue some really impressive libraries together, written by other people and available on massive centralized code repositories, and deliver an application to as many people as I want, all running different hardware or operating systems (within reason) but still all getting the same software experience (...mostly...), and even charge some money for it without having to worry about somebody cracking the license check on my shareware.

The effort required to make complicated new software has gone way down. The effort required to troubleshoot and fix complicated software has gone way up. Nowadays, when I'm doing the former, I'm happy, and when I'm doing the latter, I'm not.

I think that might be part of why there's so much churn in the software industry today.

[1]: MacsBug did this in real-time. Start up an application, drop into MacsBug, set a breakpoint on a function call, switch back to the OS and application, trigger the function call, then step through the code in MacsBug. If you were careful, you could even "rewind" code under certain conditions, so you could, say, change a branching opcode, back up, go back to the OS and see if the change did what you want.

<comment><USER7> That is a _very_ insightful reply. Thank you so much!

I wish I could upvote this more than once. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know if decompilers are able to do something about it, but there's a "neat" technique where your machine code can be interpreted as two different sequences of instructions depending where you start instruction decoding. For a simple but artificial example of what I mean:

The following sequence of bytes:

      b8 50 83 ec 10

Decodes as:

      mov $0x10ec8350, %eax

if you start at the first byte, and, if you start at the second byte, as:

      push %eax
      sub $0x10, %esp

Here I essentially hid an instruction in the mov'ed data, because that's the easiest way to create something like that, but I've seen mind blowing examples of this technique. I unfortunately don't remember where.

<comment><USER11> That's an issue for static disassembly, which is step one of decompilation. Your snippet is a classic example that can throw off naive linear-scan disassemblers. Recursive disassemblers can handle it easily if (and it's a big if) they can identify the basic block entry points. If you have top-level entry points (which can also be a problem), the main problem for a recursive disassembler are indirect jumps that don't fit standard patterns like switch jump tables.

All of this gets easier if you can augment your static analysis with control flow traces from program executions with coverage of the relevant branches, so you don't miss basic block entry points.

<comment><USER12> > All of this gets easier if you can augment your static analysis with control > flow traces from program executions with coverage of the relevant branches, > so you don't miss basic block entry points.

That's only true if the traces you can generate do a reasonable job at covering the states the application can find itself in, which is a big assumption.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that's what I meant by coverage of the relevant branches. But the good news is that all these partial, heuristic sources of information can be combined. E.g. for detecting function entry points, you can combine information from ELF/PE export tables (if present), function prologues detected by a linear scan, vtables, static CALL targets, dynamic CALL targets from run-time traces, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a really cool post. You can also target IDA itself directly, rather than the decompiler, making it difficult to even view the disassembly. It's been awhile since I did any of this kind of work (it's relevant to software security tokens, games, and content protection), but within the last few years people have published IDA RCE memory corruption, so I imagine it hasn't gotten too much harder to hopelessly confuse IDA.

<comment><USER14> Well, same here, it's been very long since I've seen that.

But wasn't what got scrambled imports, polymorphic code nasty anti debugging the shareware packers? Asprotect and whatnot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's an interesting vein of research work here in making software reverse engineering more difficult, and measuring how much more difficult.

A precursor to decompilation is control flow analysis, the production of the control flow graph you see in the "before" stages in all of the examples in this post. You can go one step further, on a good day, and make it very difficult (perhaps very very difficult, perhaps impossible) to recover a _precise_ control flow graph for a function.

There are a few different ways to do this, and I like these approaches more than targeting specific heuristics in IDA/Hexrays because, on a good day for the obfuscator, you can make a theoretical statement about the work effort required to un-do the obfuscation. If you can make that work effort large, then you start to have a security guarantee that is a shade of the security guarantee you get in cryptography. The methods outlined in the parent blog post are great because you can start using them today, but if they annoy Ilfak enough, he'll fix them and they'll stop working.

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me tricks people used to crash debuggers. E.g. [https://reverse.put.as/2012/01/31/anti-debug- trick-1-abusing...](https://reverse.put.as/2012/01/31/anti-debug- trick-1-abusing-mach-o-to-crash-gdb/), [http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/12/striking-back-gdb-and- ida-d...](http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/12/striking-back-gdb-and-ida- debuggers.html) and [https://xorl.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/more-gdb-anti- debuggin...](https://xorl.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/more-gdb-anti-debugging/)

</comment><comment><USER16> There are also undocumented instructions and prefixes. For example at this year's DEFCON someone presented a particular kind of e9 jump prefixed with 66. That instruction is incorrectly disassmbled by all hitherto known disassemblers (IDA, gdb, objdump, VS, etc). And since that will change the length of the instruction, effectively you can make the disassembler produce garbage.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is an interesting PowerPoint presentation you can find on the internet on how Skype used to evade debuggers.

[http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pdf](http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pdf)

The techniques described in that document are different, but in a way they are alike - both use dirty tricks to shield themselves from people trying to reverse engineer them. The only difference is that one takes place "at compile time", in way, while the other works in a dynamic program as it is executing.

</comment><comment><USER5> What about using UPX ? [https://upx.github.io](https://upx.github.io)

Can it make harder for software crackers to achieve their goal ?

<comment><USER17>
        upx -d packed.exe

UPX is fairly easy to defeat, but many malicious samples will have their own packers / loaders.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anybody have a backup of the Algorithms Design Manual solutions? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have a backup of Skiena's solutions manual for The Algorithms Design Manual? The book's wiki on algorist.com has been down for a week and Skiena hasn't responded to tweets or emails.
Archive.org doesn't have backups of the site because of its robots.txt and it looks like the content has been evicted from Google's cache. <comment><AUTHOR> The url that used to work is [http://www.algorithm.cs.sunysb.edu/algowiki/index.php/The_Al...](http://www.algorithm.cs.sunysb.edu/algowiki/index.php/The_Algorithms_Design_Manual_\(Second_Edition\))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I got a reply over email from the author. He says:

"I hope the Wiki will get back up in two weeks when my students return to fix the webserver. Contact me then if it is not up yet."

</comment><comment><USER2> Did you try to ask Springer (his publisher/agent)?

</comment><comment><USER3> What is your email?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm at email@example.com

<comment><USER3> Chk your email</comment></comment></comment>


Supermicro.com website is down - <AUTHOR> http://supermicro.com <comment><USER2> [https://www.supermicro.com](https://www.supermicro.com) is up however, something break with their redirect?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how many major corporations just ordered up motherboard audits.

<comment><USER4> They should hold off since Apple and Amazon basically denied all of that Bloomberg article. I'm curious to see how this plays out.

<comment><USER5> Those denials have no value.

It seems clear that this is a large scale counter-operation led by the US government and that it has been ongoing for quite some time.

<comment><USER6> Proof? The strong reaction from Apple including the "we are not under a gag order" statement is a petty strong denial, and that part of the statement was not needed.

<comment><USER5> You can't just ask for proof for everything. Sometimes you need to read between the lines.

You have no proof that the denial is genuine. Either those denials or the story on those spy chips is untrue.

Seems more likely to me that the story is true but that everyone has been told to remain mute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's working for me both for http and https if you add www.</comment>


Emails from a CEO Who Just Has a Few Changes to the Website - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/slackjaw/emails-from-a-ceo-who-just-has-a-few-changes-to-the-website-43ccb7b31709#.f7o2z6ils <comment><USER2> Dave Thorne is the master of the format: [http://www.27bslash6.com/](http://www.27bslash6.com/)</comment>


Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/android-continued.html <comment><USER2> From the point of view of a developer, one counter-point is that the App Store still makes far more revenue than the Android Marketplace (about 17x more, to be precise), so iOS is still a better platform of choice [1].

A counter-point to that counter-point is that Android's Marketplace has far fewer apps than the App Store (about 4x fewer), and far fewer paid apps (about 2x fewer) [2].

That 8x factor still doesn't explain the 17x difference in revenue. My guess is that the typical Android app is of lower quality (since the store is not moderated) and lower priced in comparison to iPhone apps.

At any rate, given this dramatic change in market share, it seems to me that not deploying for the Android platform at this point is a dangerous proposition, except perhaps if your primary customer acquisition channel is the platform's built-in store/marketplace.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/861-5-percent-growth- androi...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/861-5-percent-growth-android-puny)

[2] <http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-20032228-78.html>

<comment><USER3> Those are paid app revenues only, though. Because of Google's focus on advertising, that's becoming a very viable alternative method of revenue for app producers. Look at Angry Birds, who is bringing $1m per month on Android [1] and doesn't have to sell to as many new customers to maintain those numbers. Eventually, they're going to hit a wall. $.99 is great up front, but $0.05 a month from 5x the number of customers is better.

[1] [http://www.intomobile.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds- android-1-m...](http://www.intomobile.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds- android-1-million-ad-revenue/)

<comment><USER4> Angry Birds on Android was launched off of the success on the iPhone though. Not that invalidates their success on the Android platform or anything, just that it doesn't speak to the power of the Android platform, since it probably would never have happened if not for their previous success on the iPhone. I.e. the Angry Birds story is not a good example of when focusing on Android rather than iOS would have been a good idea.

Can you think of any Android _exclusive_ app or game that is achieving a similar success? Then that app is probably a better example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do the market share numbers look when you factor in iPads and iPod touches? The numbers look impressive for Android, but assuming app purchasing behaviors are the same on both platforms and mobile economics do end up looking like web economics Apple is still placing WAY more units in the field and covering a much broader demographic, from 6 year olds with the iPod touch to grandmoms with the iPad. I wouldn't underestimate iOS and their ability to make consumers happy.

<comment><USER6> You make a good point. But if you're looking at it as a winner-take-all (or winner-take-most) market like a lot people do, the phone is where the battle lies. Once your phone is beefy enough to be your media player, game machine, phone, and GPS, most people won't have differentiated / specialized devices.

Q4 iPod sales were down 11% year over year. I'd look for that to accelerate as smartphones become more ubiquitous.

If you want #s of everything, here's what a quick googling yielded:

Android shipped 33.5M devices in Q4 Apple shipped 27.34M iPhones/iPads/iPods in Q4 (~14M iphones, ~4M iPads, ~9M iPods)

Presumably some meaningful percentage of iPods were NOT iPod touches (i.e. no App Store), so shave 3-5M off of Apple if you're trying to guess iOS devices.

So conservatively, about a third more Android devices shipped in q4 than all iOS devices combined. That's BEFORE the 7% market share boost that Fred is talking about.

(this is quick/sloppy research-- feel free to point to better #s).

<comment><USER7> Where did you get these numbers? In my research, I couldn't find good comparisons at all. I saw some info in various places attributed to Canalys that showed 33 million iOS vs 32.7 Android unit sales in Q4. I also saw Schmidt claim 300k daily Android phone activations in Q4 with Apple's Q4 earnings report extrapolating to 375k daily iOS sales. Did Android have 75k daily sales of non-phone Android devices? Maybe if we include Nooks and things? Is this even really a useful comparison between two things anymore? Would a consumer recognize a Nook as being the same thing as a Droid, in the same way they recognize an iPod Touch is the same thing as an iPhone? This isn't an idle question since, e.g., millions of the Android activations are coming from phones in China with totally different user experiences. In my opinion, Android is not homogeneous enough to compare against iOS in the way that Windows vs Mac OS used to be.

<comment><USER6> Apple: [http://www.sizzlingbit.com/2010/10/18/apple- made-20-34-billi...](http://www.sizzlingbit.com/2010/10/18/apple- made-20-34-billion-revenue-in-q4-2010-highest-revenue-and-earnings-ever/)

Android: <http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=12707>

<comment><USER8> Those Apple figures are for calendar Q3, Apple's financial Q4 so you're not comparing the same time period. Apple generally get a big bump in iPad and iPod sales in the christmas quarter.

I'm fairly confident that Android is far enough ahead in smartphones sales (i.e. more than double globally, more than triple in the U.S.) that you can include iPods and they're still ahead and the gap is growing. I'll wait till I see a few quarters of numbers for the Android tablets before I'd be happy assessing how they're doing against iPad sales.

edit: Here's what Apple call their Q1 results, covering Q4 2010:

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/01/18results.html>

iPod sales declined 7% year-on-year, the 33 million iOS (pod+pad+phone) number mentioned above which would roughly equal Android smartphone sales last quarter works out if you assume half of all iPods are iPod Touches (I have no idea if that is true, either historically or currently).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel these kind of stats will always be flawed for the following reason:

\- It doesn't include other devices running iOS (as a developer I look at those too, especially if my app doesn't require Internet).

\- It doesn't consider that a big % of Android phones run apps horribly if not at all. Also most of this phone we'll never be easily upgradable to a newer OS version (I don't care if you can do it, I'm talking about for "normal" people), because the carriers and manufactures prefer pushing the new phones that come out every other week.

<comment><USER10> I can't tell if you're trying to convince us, or convince yourself.

<comment><USER9> Not trying to convince anyone. I was just stating that as a developer, I could be interested in more than 50% of the iOS market, and I could be interested in having my application being able to run on as many devices as possible of such market.

That doesn't mean that I wouldn't love to tackle the Android market as well, and we'll definitely do that. But we have limited resources so we chose the one that at the moment generates the most revenues.

<comment><USER10> No issue with counting iP*d's, that only makes sense. What I was trying to figure out was the big percentage of Android phones that [... or] don't run applications at all". Have a list of those?

<comment><USER9> I meant, given an application, there's a good chance that it won't run on run on all the Android phones.

<comment><USER8> I could say the same about Apple's iOS (e.g. you can use hardware not present in _all_ devices, or target APIs that not _all_ devices have (or are even capable of being) upgraded to), and it wouldn't be be an accurate reflection of the real situation there either.

Unless you put numbers on it, then it's an empty statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In his post, Fred dismisses critics by saying _"I got a lot of heat from Apple fanboys for that post"_

However, you don't have to be a "fanboy" to recognize that Fred is a huge proponent of "free". It makes sense for VCs to promote a zero-revenue, high- growth, "free" approach.imo that explains a lot of Fred's bias towards Android.

I'd say that vc-funded companies should develop on both iPhone and Android (as Color did).

However, most developers will be better off with iOS, if they can only invest in one platform - unless their business model is strongly predicated on a "free" app monetization model.

</comment><comment><USER12> Fred is a big proponent of "open", which is great, but it's still not clear that "open" is going to win this game.

The battle between Windows and Apple wasn't just about "open" versus closed. It was about availability of third party software. It was about ability to distribute effectively. It was about mindshare. There are other reasons that Apple was not successful through the late 80's to 90's (even when they allowed third party computer manufacturers like Franklin to license their OS). But Apple is an entirely different beast now. And Android appears to be on it's way to such a wide variety of configurations that it may not even be recognizable as Android at some point - what if Amazon's app store becomes real popular? At that point, are you developing for Android or are you developing for Amazon?

I wonder how many major corporations out there right now that are thinking of how tablets could fit into their work environments are playing around with the Android OS? My guess is not many.

</comment><comment><USER13> Android is going to "dominate" in the same way that Microsoft still "dominates" the desktop. That is, it might end up with a larger share of the market because it ends up getting distributed on 101 phones, but the actually valuable and choosy end of the market will still be on the iPhone. I'm sure Apple's quaking in its boots that it'll get to maintain its crazy profit margins while people are making pennies on the Android.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure Google is terrified of becoming like Microsoft's Windows and Office divisions too.

<comment><USER15> Well the MS Office division is pretty profitable...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The disparaging use of the term fanboy is disappointing from someone who I respect like Fred.

Can't we just prefer one good product to another equally good product without being reduced to "fanboys"?

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure it's important to predict now whether iOS or Android is going to be bigger or more profitable to developers. They're both going to be enormous and they're both going to be around for a long time, just like the Window-Mac horse race from the 1980s to now. There's a lot of money to be made on either - or both. Going back to the Windows-Mac comparison, though, think of all the horses that aren't still in the race from the 1980s: CP/M, Amiga, OS/2, etc. That's the question for the mobile marketplace. What is going to be the mobile equivalent of those? WebOS? Symbian? Windows 7?

</comment><comment><USER18> In terms of market, Android is like China while iOS is USA/Japan.

The Chinese market is huge but they do not have the spending power of the Americans or Japanese yet.

Companies will probably not make a lot of money in China right now but it is wise for them to try to penetrate the Chinese market sooner than later so they'll be in good position when things pick up.

This is similar to Android's position. Not a lot of money to be made yet but it would be a foolish move not position yourself in the market.

</comment><comment><USER19> The most fascinating part of the smartphone battle is that Google/Android has basically stopped and reversed a giant vertical integration play by Apple. Markets swing back and forth between integrated and disintegrated and Google grabbed the pendulum and pushed it back toward 'disintegrated'.

<comment><USER20> The table indicates that Google's share growth (+7.0%) has come at the expense of RIM (-4.6%) Microsoft (-1.3%) and Palm (-1.1%). Apple's share continued to grow (+0.2%). The breakdown is similar for all of comScore's figures for the last six months.

<comment><USER21> Does it even make sense to talk about share growth coming at anyone's expense when the market is growing this quickly? Is the absolute number of RIM phones falling? At this point I doubt any appreciable percentage is accounted for by people switching from one platform to another.

<comment><USER8> RIMs sales are still rising and Apple's market share growth, which has been flat for about a year, translates into somewhere between 50 and 100% sales growth. Meanwhile Android sales are up 800-1200% so yes, it's mostly about who's getting the new entrants to the smartphone market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a little disappointed that Fred has fallen into the seductive trap of comparing Android and iOS to Windows and Mac. It's superficially attractive but doesn't stand up to any serious scrutiny.

What's winning here isn't _openness_ (which has many, many definitions), it's _commoditization_. Android is successfully commoditizing the smartphone market, which is good for Google, good for consumers and bad for the carriers and handset makers (who are willing accessories in their race to the bottom).

A better analogy (IMHO) is, in gaming terms, PCs (Android) vs consoles (iOS).

PCs are more powerful than consoles (except for a short window when the console is released). This of course depends on what (if any) graphics card the PC has. PCs (despite Windows) are essentially "open". You can install what applications, devices, drivers, etc you want. Technically you can replace Windows with something like Linux too (but that won't do your gaming any favours).

Consoles are essentially a closed system. The device is protected from modification (to some degree). Publishing games requires meeting hefty requirements laid out by the console maker (and license fees).

The benefit of the console model is clear: consumer don't need to mess around with them. They just turn them on and they work. Gaming publishers can develop to a much wider audience with a fixed hardware platform.

We've now reached a point where 3D graphics have basically gotten as good as they need to for the vast majority of consumers. It's a bit like the move from video to DVD was huge (in terms of quality). DVD to Blu-ray? The majority of consumers still don't care (and probably never will).

Better graphics engine in games basically translates into higher art/content costs and that is a case of diminishing returns.

So consoles are basically killing off PC gaming (except for a few niche genres)--and here's the key point--because _the hardware is as good as it needs to be_.

None of this was true in the Windows vs Mac era. The rapid development of Windows-based PCs, both in terms of raw power and price-performance, is really what killed the Mac.

That power is now of far diminished importance. In the mobile market, in some ways, more power is less desirable because it comes at a cost in battery life, size and weight (none of which were ever relevant to the Windows vs Mac debate, other than for laptops). Now shrinking transistors does lead to increases in power but that is fairly predictable and uniform across all platforms.

Consumers, give enough power, start valuing other things like the UI, the design of the device, the ecosystem, the brand and so on (basically this is a "need" to "want" transition).

In all of these areas Apple has a _huge_ lead.

But Apple only produces one handset at the very top of the market. Android wins total market share in smartphones for two primary reasons:

1\. Most people just use their phones as phones (diminishing the value of the ecosystem); and

2\. Android competes in a lot of markets the iPhone doesn't.

So I concede that Android seems likely to dominate the phone market at this point. _I just don't think it's terribly relevant to the future of mobile computing._

The future (IMHO) is about tablets, a market where Apple has an enormous lead and huge advantages, one where the halo effect is likely to benefit everything else they produce.

<comment><USER23> I'm a little disappointed that (a) people have short memories or (b) everybody else is 10 years younger than me, at least

        Fred has fallen into the seductive trap of comparing
        Android and iOS to Windows and Mac ... What's
        winning here isn't openness (which has many, many
        definitions), it's commoditization

Windows "commoditized" PC hardware -- the differences between smartphones and what happened in the nineties are few and far between, even though you're struggling to look for reasons why it's not ;-)

        The rapid development of Windows-based PCs,
        both in terms of raw power and price-performance,
        is really what killed the Mac.

That's inaccurate -- standardization between multiple PC makers and the availability of PCs is really what killed the Mac ... I don't live in the US; my first computer was built by a local company (it was cheap too). Apple couldn't and still can't compete with that.

        Consumers, give enough power, start valuing
        other things like the UI, the design of the device,
        the ecosystem, the brand and so on

Before OS X, Mac OS was a piece of shit -- again, you're wish-believing; as if "price" and having a standard between multiple smartphone makers is suddenly less important.

        Android competes in a lot of markets the
        iPhone doesn't

Markets also converge -- in the early nineties IBM's OS/2 was promoted as this next-generation OS (and it was kick-ass), while Windows was the cheap solution for 286 PCs. SOFTWARE is so liquid that markets don't have clearly defined lines; and if you're telling me the iPhone is this superior alternative for people who want superior stuff, then the iPhone already lost the battle.

        The future (IMHO) is about tablets

The future, from my perspective, is convergence of every house/office appliance we have to being a personal general-computing device, including your fridge and your toaster.

And you can call a PC by any other name, but it's still a PC.

Saying that the future is about tables is really shortsighted; here I was hoping for something as big as the Internet.

<comment><USER24> 1\. Local PC clone companies used to reign but these days seems the big boys like HP, Dell, Sony, Acer have recaptured the share. The market for tech has gotten large enough that it seems to be more brand-driven than spec-driven.

That's the main difference between mobile devices today and the PC wars of the 80s. The market (thus far) is no longer interested in low cost custom builds, they're looking for an all-in-one experience. Though perhaps there is room for both approaches in the market, and there won't be quite a winner-take-all scenario here.

2\. Mac OS was NOT a piece of shit, though I guess it depends on your priorities. For those that loved it, it was brilliantly designed and useable. They (mostly) forgave its Windows 95-esque brittleness.

3\. Saying that every appliance includes a PC doesn't say much about what the computing experience will be _like_. I personally don't think my fridge and toaster will have much more power than they do today, because I can't see the utility in that (adjusting my fridge temperature from work? eh?).

But I do believe that smart phones & tablets will be the predominant mode of "mainstream computing", given how quickly the iPad is growing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> IMHO -

Apple's advantage is design. Google's advantage is search.

As the boundaries of mobile search are pushed (better local, better social, voice search, better x), I believe Google will dominate mobile. Good mobile design will become ubiquitous, but search is a different story.

Google has the best search technology (along with the best infrastructure and data to support it). They also have the best ad network to monetize its benefits.

<comment><USER26> It's not very insightful to realize that Apple has design while Google has search. This is obvious.

Design won't become ubiquitous. Where else has this happened in the world? Design is hard. Great design is incredibly difficult to achieve. What Apple's managed to do is create a great design and then make it a priority all the way through the company. They won't ship a product if the design isn't exactly what they want.

Building a search infrastructure is expensive, but relatively trivial.

I disagree completely in your assertion that design will become ubiquitous.

<comment><USER25> You're right, great design is incredibly difficult to achieve - the first time. But then it gets copied by numerous competitors. That's happening right now with the iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In design and usability, (iOS & Android) >>>> Feature phone.

So for most people in the world moving from feature phones to Android is going to be a huge leap forward. The difference between iOS & Android is a rounding error in this comparison.

A HTC Wildfire @ USD 250 is equivalent to an iPhone4 @ USD 600 for someone upgrading from a Nokia 1100!!

Android is allowing different manufacturers to offer phones at wildly different form factors & functionalities and most importantly price!

Apple is focused on the niche high end market where they can make maximum margin.

</comment><comment><USER28> Mr. Wilson's numbers leave out some key realities about Android as it stands as a smartphone platform.

First of all, Android is much harder to develop for than the iPhone. This is because the Android ecosystem is so dispersed. There are many more phones, many more os versions, and many more carriers to support. For a resource- strapped application team, iOS is a simpler choice and a quicker win.

Also, there is, what I would say, less of an app culture amongst Android users than iPhone users. I think this because I develop and work on a team that develops native apps for both platforms as well as a cross platform mobile web app. Our iPhone app does about 50 times better (in each category -- downloads, usage, and revenue) than our Android app without exaggeration. Part of this, to be honest, is our iPhone app is better, and that is partly because of my first point. Even in our mobile web app, though, we see about twice as many iPhone users.

Now, I'm glossing over a whole slew of details here, but the net takeaway for me is, if I were a start-up looking to make a dent in the smartphone market, I'd start with iPhone.

<comment><USER29> _First of all, Android is much harder to develop for than the iPhone._

As someone who's published apps on both platforms, I'll disagree with that. For me the occasional extra effort it takes to support multiple resolutions and OS versions is more than made up for by being able to use a semi-modern language. (Preemptive response: Yes, I know Objective-C well, and non- enterprisey Java beats it hands down).

<comment><USER30> Do you also know Cocoa Touch well? Even if I prefer Obj-C compared to Java, it's Apple APIs where the real beauty is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The Microsoft-Nokia deal has yet to have an effect on the marketplace. Nokia will take WP7 international, and that will be bigger than the Verizon iPhone.

<comment><USER32> What effect do you predict?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm not quite sure how the numbers Fred shows prove his point. Android has a larger market share, but it's only been one month since the Verizon iPhone launched. It's entirely probable that had it not launched, Android would have a significantly larger market share. Likewise, it's possible that given another three months, Android's share will reduce even farther. The only thing the numbers prove is that the Verizon iPhone was not a magic bullet that killed Android immediately on launch, but nobody expected that. (I don't actually expect Android's market share to decrease in the coming months either, but my point is that the numbers aren't very useful right now.)

</comment><comment><USER34> I could give a crap how much market share of people who don't buy anything google captures. If you are making free ad supported apps I'm sure android will be better if you're expecting people to buy your app just avoid it all together.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd be interested to know what percent of those Android phones have the Android Market installed and how many have multiple or a competing application store.

<comment><USER36> Hardly any Android phones don't come with the Market--in fact, the only ones I've heard of that don't are China Telecom's oPhone ecosystem. Plenty of Android _tablets_ don't have the Market.

<comment><USER37> I just got a cheap android smartphone for the equivalent of $100. I was afraid it might be crappy but I'm delighted with it. It has resistive rather than capacitative touch which aparently is not as good but you then don't miss what you never had. Imo the market works great though I've only downloaded freebie apps so far, chess, sudoku, google sky map. Glad I didn't fork out 5 times as much on an iphone. Google have done me a big favour

<comment><USER36> I _love_ Google Sky Map. I particularly enjoy pointing it at the ground and seeing stars from the Southern Hemisphere.

<comment><USER37> I must try that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> A lot of us had a good laugh when people said the global android phenomenon would could to a halt because of the Verizon iPhone.

My opinion on why the iPad will suffer the same fate: [http://martin.drashkov.com/2011/03/why-android-tablets- will-...](http://martin.drashkov.com/2011/03/why-android-tablets-will- dominate.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> Do people really believe that Apple wants to dominate the mobile market? It seems wasteful to critique sales comparisons of iOS vs Android when Apple has never shown any signs of making iOS devices a monopoly.</comment>


Why Do We Only Care About Programmers? - <AUTHOR> http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/why-do-we-only-care-about-programmers

<comment><USER2> Ahh survivors guilt. Dont worry, it'll pass.

On a little more serious note I believe it has a lot to do with supply and demand. Good programmers just think differently. Whether that way of thinking is something you can teach is something incredibly hard to argue. I think it can be, but I dont really know how and dont think the worlds education systems are even close to figuring it out. Its sort of a sum of life's learning's and experiences. You either pick it up and do well or you dont.

Well that's what I believe anyway. You might not agree but that and the 5 years of education and the 5 years of debt which followed is what I think separates me and the people selling what I create.

Please dont get me wrong I dont think I'm better than anyone else, I just think that my higher than average wage is due to a lack of supply and wanted to lay it all out.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best internal knowledge base - <AUTHOR> Our company is scaling, and we're looking for a knowledge base to use internally to help train new hires and share knowledge across departments.
We're looking for good security and stability, versioning of some kind so changes aren't lost, ease-of-use so computer novices can comfortably edit things, and solid full-text search.
In a perfect world, we'd find one that's open source that we can host ourselves.
Does anyone have any recommendations? <comment><USER2> If you can use a database, mediawiki which runs Wikipedia.

If you prefer flat text files, dokuwiki which I personally use at my company and at home.

If you already are in the atlassian stack and can't escape no matter what you do, use confluence wiki. But if you don't already have any atlassian products then stay far far away.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks all for your help. I am avoiding Atlassian, and editing a wiki is well beyond the skillset of most of our company.

Looks like we're going homegrown with a sqlite-backed markdown knowledge base. Hopefully open-sourcing it will prove useful to someone down the line.

<comment><USER2> Okay. Looking forward to seeing it open sourced if you choose to do so.

I don't see much difficulty difference in mediawiki or Dokuwiki wiki markup compared to markdown, so if the users are not able to do that markup, I don't see why they would be able to do markdown edits either, but that's just me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Check out wiki.js, it is open-source, modern yet quite mature, and has a lot of storage backends that you can choose from.

</comment><comment><USER4> Confluence works.

</comment><comment><USER5> Dokuwiki, MediaWiki, Confluence.</comment>


Pirate To Join European Parliament As Youngest Member - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-to-join-european-parliament-as-youngest-member-111120/

<comment><USER2> This is on the front page right now ....

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258442></comment>


JSONQuery - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/07/16/jsonquery-data-querying-beyond-jsonpath/

<comment><USER2> Kris Zyp (author, maintainer) has switched to RQL in his newest versions of persevere.

<https://github.com/kriszyp/rql></comment>


Share your Wi-fi network settings with just a link - <AUTHOR> http://brdrck.me/wifi/ <comment><USER2> Now I am guessing since they need password for Wifi that they don't have Internet access. How will they then get and/or use the link for the password?

</comment><comment><USER3> Those text fields need labels. How's anyone supposed to know what to enter, or in what order? (Edit: the field labels are there as placeholder values, which my (older) browser doesn't show.)

And a deeper issue: what if my laptop remembers the settings but I don't? How do I find out what to enter?

I'm guessing you expect people to use 3G to follow the link?</comment>


Microsoft Acquires Citus Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-acquires-citus-data/ <comment><USER2> This was posted in January 2019?

<comment><USER3> Yea it was. I started to think I had imagined this</comment></comment>


NPM CEO Bryan Bogensberger Resigned - <AUTHOR> https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/npm-inc-announces-leadership-change-300922517.html?tc=eml_cleartime <comment><USER2> I'm fascinated by the fact that while node has become a new standard in the industry , and the project is receiving lots of supports from all sorts of companies ( IBM , Microsoft etc...) absolutely no discussion has been opened about how much at risk the JavaScript ecosystem actually is with « npm » and it's weekly dramas

Not a month pass without something going wrong inside of inc, millions of developers are dependant on it but nothing seem to worry people...

<comment><USER3> Honest question, is it that much better in other communities? In particular, it's there anything inherent to npm that's problematic or is it just that a huge community with a Unix mindset (small packages that does one thing well) is problematic?

<comment><USER4> Lack of a large enough standard library is a big differenciating factor, as it makes you very dependent on third party libraries.

Even if you avoid it by creating your own utils, chances are that the creators of the large packages you use (like a database manager or a rest framework) will depend directly or indirectly of those third party tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Under Bryan Bogensberger's leadership, npm lost:

\- its CTO

\- its COO co-founder

\- some fantastic people in the JavaScript community

\- a federal labor dispute

\- its culture

\- its reputation

\- its business model to Github

<comment><USER6> They had a business model?

<comment><USER7> I always assumed their business model was " _Stay afloat till $BIG_CORP acquires us_ ".

<comment><USER8> It's obvious to me that Microsoft will end up buying NPM Inc.

<comment><USER9> Why? They already own Github which is about to reduce NPM to "feature, not product" status

<comment><USER10> Why did Facebook buy WhatsApp, or Oracle buy Peoplesoft?

Typically: to enhance their offerings, remove a competitor, or shut it down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish companies would do away with the "leaving to pursue other opportunities" nonsense and just give no reasons if they don't want to discuss it.

No C-level exec resigns "effective immediately" without either a transition plan in place or something concrete lined up. I get wanting to allow him to say he resigned instead of he was fired, but the silly language of the press release just makes it worse.

<comment><USER12> Maybe "he wants to spend more time with family"?

<comment><USER13> This is my favorite excuse in sports because they "retiree" almost always comes back out of retirement which leads me to believe they've had enough time with their family.

<comment><USER14> Nico Rosberg, springs to mind. Not racing again, but he does like to show his face at the races a lot.

<comment><USER15> He is working for Sky as a commentator at races. Doing the occasional TV commentary is a lot less time consuming, is a lot less stressful, and allows a lot more family time, than driving for the #1 F1 team, against arguably the best F1 driver off all time in Lewis Hamilton

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks as if he was asked to leave. No surprise given the terrible optics they've been under for the past year. NPM is such a vital tool and I really enjoy using it. I hope their next CEO makes better decisions in regards to the humans who work there. Good luck to all the NPM staff! I'm rooting for you!

From the Register...

"According to people familiar with the matter, Bogensberger was asked to leave by the company's board of directors." [0]

For more context...from Jonathan Cowperthwait, NPM's former vice president of marketing...

"Many of us spent the last year watching our friends and colleagues' struggle through our fingers, but I'm still profoundly confident in the company's ability to turn this around. Sometimes bad executives happen to a good company." [1]

[0] [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/20/npm_ceo_bryan_bogen...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/20/npm_ceo_bryan_bogensbergers_off/)

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/npm-ceo-bryan- bogensberger-r...](https://www.businessinsider.com/npm-ceo-bryan-bogensberger- resigns-2019-9)

<comment><USER17> Why was he asked to leave? To which "terrible optics" do you refer? Your implied context is opaque.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is some background on some of the things that happened while he was CEO: [https://twitter.com/fharper/status/1111694552262459393](https://twitter.com/fharper/status/1111694552262459393)

<comment><USER18> Maybe I didn't read too far into the thread, but it sounds like they laid off a guy, provided some severance, and there weren't many managers that sent him a goodbye note? I don't see the connection here... what was the bad thing they did?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, no goodbye note was really the highlight of everything that happened at npm in the last couple of months.

This article about union busting [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/technology/tech- companies...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/technology/tech-companies- union-organizing.html)

and this one about working conditions at npm [https://www.businessinsider.com/npm-employees-open- letter-20...](https://www.businessinsider.com/npm-employees-open- letter-2019-5)

or The Register who covered mostly everything that happened since the first layoff mentioned in my Twitter thread [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/22/npm_fired_staff_uni...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/22/npm_fired_staff_union_complaints/)

<comment><USER19> I don't know anything about NPM's board of directors. I don't know who is on it. So this should not be read as some sort of criticism of them.

But I know there are _some_ boards of directors out there, who would view the ability to bust unions (and get away with it) as a reason to hire, not a reason to fire.

I don't know why they let go of their CEO. I wouldn't assume it was necessarily for any of the reasons you mentioned. It certainly could have been, but it also could very easily have been for completely unrelated reasons.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree with you on this!

I wasn't mentioning those were the reasons, but that those were part of what happened in the last months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Background: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/02/npm_abandons_settle...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/02/npm_abandons_settlement_talks/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Story is all about his "success" and desire to seek new opportunities- why not a few sentences about the ongoing labor related litigation.

<comment><USER22> I actually think that litigation is no longer ongoing; Kate Conger from the NY Times is reporting that the case was settled. [1]

Edit: linked article says the case was settled in June. [2]

[1] [https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/1175097388253376512](https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/1175097388253376512)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/technology/tech- companies...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/technology/tech-companies- union-organizing.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, a settlement has been made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Under Bryan's leadership, multiple namespaces (left-pad, etc.) including my own (file-saver) have been wrongly transferred to new owners without authorization from the previous owners.

npm can't handle security, and they have been sorely in need of new leadership for years.

<comment><USER24> If only there were other dependency management build tools they could use as good examples to emulate....

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/npm-inc- announces-l...](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/npm-inc-announces- leadership-change-300922517.html?tc=eml_cleartime)

</comment><comment><USER26> "resigned"</comment>