Ask HN: Why is daily or n * daily deployment so popular? - <AUTHOR> Another job listing has appeared which promotes multiple daily deploys as a positive bullet point.
Is this really beneficial?  Has there been any meaningful analysis of the use of CI/CD - in parts or in whole?
My limited experience with CI/CD has shown significant overhead, both human and compute, but much less end user value.  Aside from research, I would enjoy hearing both positive and negative experiences people here have had. <comment><USER2> Frequent deployments emerge as a side effect of a good CI/CD process, rather than themselves being the thing that prompts it.

They can be taken as a signal that the deployment process is safe, automated, and low-overhead. When that applies, I have generally seen the number of deployments go up. The reason is pretty simple: engineers stop worrying about deployments, the overhead goes away, and deployment becomes part of the "definition of done".

My experience is that infrequent integration and deployment is a more painful process when it comes to integration and deployment time. Easy deployments encourage features and bug fixes to be rolled out as atomic units when they are completed, rather than saving them for big-bang releases. This encourages small, independent changes, rather than larger ones that involve more simultaneous code and data model changes – often in my experience multiplying the chance of failure by an outsized factor.

Honestly I'd actually go in entirely the opposite direction and say that one of the most valuable and beneficial systems I see in companies is an effective CI/CD system with frequent deploys. I find it discourages bad practices and encourages good ones; I would consider it a red flag when looking to work with a company if they didn't have such a process in place.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.

Deployments should be quick, simple, reliable and accessible to developers. With automated builds + unit tests you can have simple deployments that take < 10 minutes if not < 5 minutes without too much complexity on most medium sized projects.

This lets you ship often and break complex behaviour into smaller tasks. Exposure to bugs is limited to only what's shipped, so you can be confident that each deployment is correct.

I think the idea that there is significant overhead seems to me to be the opposite - frequent small deployments are simple and easy to verify. Single large deployments often change huge amounts of code, multiple DB migrations, and introduce multiple opportunities to fail.

If you deploy too infrequently, you can also develop a culture of rushing to get into the release, or being (or your customers being) scared to push to production due to bad experiences in the past.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been working on a project that integrated/deployed so rarely that we had a dedicated merge team consisting of about half the work force. Except the merge team wasn't involved in the actual development process so when they were trying to merge they had no idea how the various pieces should fit together. So the development team had to guide them trough the process. It was painful and it frequently took months for new development to reach the testing infrastructure and then many more months before reaching the customers. Debugging crashes on customer software meant checking out releases a year old or older and trying to figure out what could have been the root cause.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Release early, release often philosophy promotes a tighter feedback loop, allowing the catching of problems early and (with the framework of unit and integration tests supporting it) measurable increases in code quality.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it depends on the policies set by each company as to whether this practice is helpful or hurtful. If done right, CI/CD is great.

My company has embraced CI/CD. Unfortunately, they have created metrics around it. In some instances this has created headaches because managers want us to do stuff to make the metrics look good. I've seen the same thing with other practices in our company, such as the story points in Agile.

</comment><comment><USER7> Frequent deployment is almost always a reliable symptom of a mature team and pipeline.

When they list it as positive bullet point they are saying you are not going to be chasing "Jimmy the only guy that can do deploys" to get your work deployed and so on.

There are lots of crappy teams that deploy lots of times a day too though so keep that in mind as well.

</comment><comment> UK-Al05 The book accelerate has lots of statistics showing that companies who release frequently perform better

<comment><USER8> Companies that perform better can afford to release more often.

<comment> UK-Al05 It's a lagging indicator at how good you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One place where it does not work is when the user has to do something to update, e.g. flash a device.

In that case, you quickly get update fatigue from the user. From experience, every couple of months or so is a good trade-off.</comment>


Time Traveling Linux Bug Reporting: Coming in Julia 1.5 - <AUTHOR> https://julialang.org/blog/2020/05/rr/ <comment><USER2> This is very cool stuff. Keno is a great rr contributor, and I'm grateful for his Pernosco shout-out :-).

This sort of capability has always been part of my vision for rr/Pernosco. I want to see more projects like this doing record-and-replay capture of bugs in the field. With more projects depending on this sort of infrastructure, we can get more attention from OS/hardware people to make the record-and-replay systems better, and then I think we can reach a tipping point where it becomes best practice. Eventually we should be looking back and wondering why, as an industry, we didn't go in this direction earlier.

<comment><USER3> If you don't mind me asking, you mention that you want more attention from OS/hardware people. What sort of things are you looking for from OS/hardware people that would make replay systems better?

As for a more technical question on implementation. Assuming the post accurately represents the performance characteristics of rr, what do you think is keeping the overhead so high in the average case described in the post (50%)?

Disclaimer: I work for a company that sells similar technology.

<comment><USER2> Some small-ish items:

\-- Virtualization of rr's required PMU features on Azure and GCP

\-- Virtualization of Intel's CPUID faulting on AWS and other cloud providers (Linux KVM has it, but it's not enabled in AWS)

\-- Fix the reliability bug(s) in the retired-conditional-branches counter on AMD Ryzen so rr works there

\-- Implement CPUID faulting in AMD Ryzen

\-- Reliable instructions-retired counter on AMD/Intel (for more reliable/simpler operation)

\-- Trap on LL/SC failures on ARM (AArch64 I guess) and other archs (so we can port rr there), with Linux kernel APIs to expose that to userspace

\-- Similar traps for Intel HTM (XBEGIN/XEND) (less important now that's mostly been disabled for security reasons)

Bigger items:

\-- Invest in kernel-integrated record-and-replay for Linux and other OSes

\-- Implement QuickRec or some other hardware support for multicore record- replay on at least some CPU SKUs

(If anyone thinks they can help with any of that, talk to me!)

> what do you think is keeping the overhead so high in the average case > described in the post (50%)?

I assume you've read [https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05937](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05937) ? For many workloads the major unavoidable cost is context switching. With rr's approach every regular tracee context switch (intra or inter process) turns into at least 2 inter-process context switches (tracee to rr, rr to tracee). This is bad for thread ping/pong-like behaviour. For many other workloads the cost is simply the loss of parallelism as we force everything onto a single core. For other workloads there is a high cost due to system calls that require context switches to rr because we don't currently accelerate them with "syscall buffering". The last one can be mostly engineered around, the former two are inherent to rr's approach.

Who do you work for? :-)

<comment><USER4> This is my first time hearing about rr, and I'm very curious. Your comment below about increasing generality/performance with bpf is very interesting.

Can you share a little bit about how some of these features (looking at the first one for example) impact rr's ability to run in cloud environments? Does it work but with performance degradation? Without performance degradation but missing some features? I don't work at quite a low enough level to look at this list and quickly grasp the high level takeaway.

<comment><USER2> rr works today on cloud instances with hardware performance counters available, on Intel CPUs. For example it works on a variety of AWS instances that are large enough that your VM occupies a whole CPU socket. c5(d).9xlarge or bigger works well.

The performance impact of virtualization on rr seems small on AWS, small enough that we haven't tried to measure it.

On AWS rr is mostly feature complete. The only missing feature is CPUID faulting, i.e. the ability to intercept CPUID instructions and fake their results. This means that taking rr recordings from one machine and replaying them on an AWS instance with a different CPU does not work. (The other direction does work.)

(Pernosco uses AWS, but we have a closed-source binary instrumentation extension to rr replay that lifts this restriction.)

As I mentioned above, there's no technical reason AFAIK why AWS could not virtualize CPUID faulting; regular Linux KVM supports this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, I'm pretty excited to get this out there for you. I had published this this morning, so I could be around through the day to answer any questions, but things were a bit delayed by the HN algorithm gods (- thanks dang for rescuing it ;) ). That said, I'll check in periodically for the next hour or two if there's any questions I can answer.

</comment><comment><USER5> I recently spend two weeks on and off hunting down a bug on a platform that didn't support `rr`. I am fairly confident to say that if I had `rr` available it would have taken me a couple of hours at most.

Being able to run backwards from the point of failure and understand where a value is coming from is very powerful.

Having this available in Julia directly is great, and will make it much easier to get bug-reports from users.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised I haven't heard of rr before, it sounds like it could be a game changer for debugging many types of problems. How long has this project existed/been usable ?

Am I correct in understanding that rr can be used with any application (ie. the application doesn't have to be built specifically to support it) ? That's the impression the usage introduction on the website gives: [https://rr- project.org/](https://rr-project.org/).

<comment><AUTHOR> > How long has this project existed/been usable ?

It's been our (people who work on Julia) daily debugger since 2015 or so

> Am I correct in understanding that rr can be used with any application

Yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> is this coming to Windows or Mac?</comment>


The "bobbed-hair bandit" on the run in Brooklyn - <AUTHOR> https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2019/02/11/the-bobbed-hair-bandit-on-the-run-in-brooklyn/ <comment><USER2> Hold up a second (ahem):

"Celia pulled an automatic out of her pocket,... Ed then whipped out a gun in each hand and cleaned out the cash register. "

If he's got a gun in each hand, how is he cleaning out the cash register?

And they had pocket-sized automatics in 1920? Women's pocket sized?

(I expect the author meant "from under her coat" and she had a tommy gun: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_submachine_gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_submachine_gun))

<comment><USER3> There's an automatic pistol that is somewhat famous for coming into service in 1911:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1911_pistol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1911_pistol)

The more important question is probably as to how large women's pockets were in 1920.

<comment><USER4> obligatory gun-pedant mode: the 1911 is a semiautomatic. One pull, one bang, no recocking step because the slide does that for you.

Automatic would be one pull, as many bangs as there are rounds left in the magazine.

An example of that sort is from 1912. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steyr_M1912](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steyr_M1912)

<comment><USER5> Counter-pedant here :) Semi-automatic pistols were definitely popularly called "automatics" in that time period. Here's an excerpt from a kids book published in 1916:

> With all his might and main Penrod longed for one thing beyond all others. > He wanted a Real Pistol!

> That was natural. Pictures of real pistols being used to magnificently > romantic effect were upon almost all the billboards in town, the year round, > and as for the "movie" shows, they could not have lived an hour unpistoled. > In the drug store, where Penrod bought his candy and soda when he was in > funds, he would linger to turn the pages of periodicals whose illustrations > were fascinatingly pistolic. Some of the magazines upon the very library > table at home were sprinkled with pictures of people (usually in evening > clothes) pointing pistols at other people. Nay, the Library Board of the > town had emitted a "Selected List of Fifteen Books for Boys," and Penrod had > read fourteen of them with pleasure, but as the fifteenth contained no > weapons in the earlier chapters and held forth little prospect of any > shooting at all, he abandoned it halfway, and read the most sanguinary of > the other fourteen over again. So, the daily food of his imagination being > gun, what wonder that he thirsted for the Real!

> He passed from the sidewalk into his own yard, with a subdued "Bing!" > inflicted upon the stolid person of a gatepost, and, entering the house > through the kitchen, ceased to bing for a time. However, driven back from > the fore part of the house by a dismal sound of callers, he returned to the > kitchen and sat down.

> "Della," he said to the cook, "do you know what I'd do if you was a crook > and I had my ottomatic with me?"

<comment><USER3> Apo-counter pedant here, the writer is not talking about automatic weapons, but ottermatic weapons:

[https://img.ifcdn.com/images/cdc9a2d2b9a1284e3edd8c45135b75e...](https://img.ifcdn.com/images/cdc9a2d2b9a1284e3edd8c45135b75ebe0b2821b1c025042c235834f44d1a38c_1.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's kind of mind blowing how primitive medicine was back then. Her baby died just after birth and her husband died of tuberculosis.</comment>


How angel investors are destroying young gullible programming talent - <AUTHOR> http://maxkle.in/how-angel-investors-destroy-talent/ <comment><USER2> I think this piece takes an unbalanced view of angel investors by treating them as some sort of enemy.

Successful startups can come in many shapes and sizes, though some highly respected people like Steve Blank take the view that what you are building cannot legitimately be called a startup unless it shoots for the moon and seeks to massively scale. I think that Mr. Blank's view reflects VC thinking, and it is a legitimate point of view from that perspective. All small-scale businesses, in that view, are and will always remain "small businesses" unless they aim for massive growth and for a transformative commercial outcome, in which case they are true startups. High risk. High reward. High failure rate. But, in this view, you are not doing a true startup unless that is the view in mind. Of course, any such startup will necessarily require large infusions of capital in order to aim that high, and this assumes it will be VC-funded.

I strongly disagree with this VC-only view of startups (that is, with its being the only legitimate form of startup), and the founders I have worked with for years have tended to reject it as a working approach to their startups. These sorts of founders have always valued the independence of keeping control of their ventures and of seeking to build it to the optimum level for their needs and then either selling it or keeping it as a longer- term business that is solidly profitable. Even in the days when it took far more capital than it does today to launch the prototypical Silicon Valley startup, it is _amazing_ how many such independent startups managed to thrive and flourish in the nooks and crannies of the startup world. The founders behind such companies had all the exceptional qualities that solid entrepreneurs need in order to conceive winning ideas and to execute them well.

In today's environment, such independent startups are thriving and flourishing all the more as the capital needs for launching a startup have sharply declined. The independence of the entrepreneur, and the corresponding power of control over one's own company, is stronger than ever. This is solidly confirmed today in Silicon Valley and elsewhere as early-stage startups are proliferating while VC-backed ventures have been comparatively stagnant. In this sense, it is perhaps a new era for startups. Those that want to build their company independently, or even those who ultimately plan to seek significant outside funding but wish to defer such funding until they can build solid value and minimize dilution, are in the ascendancy and this trend is possibly a permanent one.

All that said, the founders who fit in this "independent" category have _never_ , in my experience, seen investors as the enemy. There is an antipathy to VCs who propose shark-like terms but never to quality VCs who can legitimately take the company to the next level. Maybe they don't want to take the risks associated with such a course, but the founders see it as one legitimate option to consider - to consider and reject for many of them, perhaps, but to consider nonetheless. They are not harmed by the presence of such VCs but rather helped in that their choices are broadened for situations where such a path might become attractive to them.

Whatever may be said of VCs, though, there has never been any general antipathy to angels as a potential investment source. Angel investors have always come in all varieties. Many are successful entrepreneurs in their own right and they not only can invest money into a promising venture but also other talent and expertise that can help guide the venture. I have seen such situations firsthand, over and over again, where such contributions have proven invaluable to the startups involved and much appreciated by the founders. It is precisely by this means that founders often can raise the comparatively modest amounts of capital that would be too much for the founders themselves to risk but that are essential to building the venture to the point where it can become commercially feasible. Such companies have nowhere to go without such capital, and the angels are there to supply it on terms that are often reasonable and very much in the interests of not only the angels but of the founders also. To categorically write off this sort of investment as coming from some congenitally hostile source that must be resisted at all costs by founders is a mistake. Some ventures, of course, will want strictly to self-fund. But not all do. Indeed, from my experience with having worked with countless founders, I would say that _most_ do not want to limit themselves strictly to self-funding because they themselves see that pure self-funding will not enable them to realize their goals for their venture.

I am not saying that all angel investments are good or that all angel investors are benign. It is a shark's world out there and, whenever entrepreneurs are taking investment money, they need to watch their backs. But to dismiss angels as a category is to dismiss the idea that founders should have a broad range of choices before them in seeking to build their companies, and such a categorical dismissal is a serious mistake for most ventures. It is like saying that, because there are risks in a certain direction, I as an entrepreneur will never walk that path even while my competitors keep that option open for themselves and perhaps use it to outrun my venture through needed capital infusions that can often take a company to a better level.

My advice to founders: don't be gullible in allowing yourselves to be cowed into taking in investment money for no good purpose other than to brag about being a legitimate startup (this is good advice from this piece); but don't become so narrow-minded about investment options that you box yourselves into a strictly self-funded venture in cases where that may not be in your startup's best interests.

In other words, forget categorical rules in this area. Consider angels and their investments in light of the bona fide needs of your venture and, if they can meet those needs, then by all means avail yourselves of the value they offer (and, yes, do it on the best terms you can and watch out for the vultures). If they don't meet your needs, and you see more value in building a long-term profitable company without looking to be acquired, then by all means avoid investments that will only complicate your company and your life.

But by all means keep a balanced view of this or you will only arbitrarily limit your own legitimate options for building a successful venture.

<comment><USER3> I think he sees angels as more of a blogospheric enemy than a financial or business enemy.

For everybody who's seriously involved in business around Hacker News, there are quite a few dabblers and posers, and a lot of people who get their rocks off by writing about business rather than doing it. There's also a lot of people who are immature and naive, haven't seen much, and get a 1-dimensional view of things... who ought to have some different perspectives on business than you usually see around HN.

But then again, you could also be hanging around people like Eli Aliosi and Nicky Cakes...

<comment><USER4> It's funny to see those names here, they are both industry friends of mine. There are thousands of affiliates quietly making six and seven figure incomes without any angel funding or hope for an exit. I know, I was one of them. terra, are you an affiliate marketer too? How do you know those guys? It seems like HN is dominated by startup guys rather than people building successful smaller scale businesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My partner left a comfy management consulting job to co-found our business and we constantly argued about taking external investment at the beginning. She felt compelled to seek it, even though we didn't need it. I'm convinced it was due to the prestige of receiving investment - instead of telling her old coworkers "I've started a little company," she could say "I've raised half a million dollars for my startup." Thankfully, I talked her out of it.

Now people come knocking on our door looking to invest. When you're solidly profitable and growing, suddenly these people looking to buy a chunk of your business don't seem like such a sweet deal - unless they really have enough capital and connections to safely push you into a much larger market.

<comment><USER6> What's your company?

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I don't care to reveal that information. I work in an offline sector that is not as carefree with information as Silicon Valley software firms tend to be.

My company is actually far more capital intensive (think plumbing or dentistry) than a software firm would be. We had non-trivial fixed startup costs and our costs tend to scale up (slightly sublinearly) alongside our growth, but we still managed to bootstrap via consulting, one-off jobs, favors, and creativity. I often puzzle at why a software startup which has far lower costs than our firm would want to take outside capital.

From an entrepreneur's perspective, capital is much more suited to a firm like ours than a software company - when I look at the margins in the software industry and the small amounts of money angels invest in exchange for the equity, I think they must be laughing all the way to the bank.

<comment><USER7> You're only seeing the winners. An ill-defined software product (which almost all software startups are), is similar to scientific exploration - you start with an idea, but you have no idea going in how much effort (months, years, decades) it will take to realize that idea, or even if its possible at all. After all that, what you end up producing may be not what customers want at all. In the time you took producing your new innovative software product, the market could have moved on.

The immediate example that comes to mind is "Cuil," - a search engine (large market) started by ex-googlers (great team), with $5 million investment (well- funded). It took them forever to launch (because its a hard problem), and partly because of that, they got poor PR and little traction. They've got another $25 million investment since then, and almost nothing to show for it.

<comment><USER8> Only one founder was ex-Google, Anna.

<comment><USER7> Crunchbase says: "Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts"

Anyway I don't want to cast aspersions too much on Cuil, because they may turn out to be successful eventually. My point was that software is a hugely risky business, with massive upfront costs.

You can build stuff cheaply of course, but when you do that, you have the problem of dealing with competition - namely if you can build it cheaply, others can too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope I'm not lumped in this group. I angel invest because there are some amazing people and I want to be involved and help the best I can. But I don't ever go looking for businesses and try to "convert" them to venture-backed firms.

There's a whole LOT of businesses that outside investors make zero sense for. Generally the kind that can reinvest their revenue for growth should avoid it. I almost always ask folks who have early revenue why they think they need to raise and suggest that they figure out a way to grow without an investor. If there was a way to reliably invest in a startup that was going to produce a revenue stream rather than exit someday then I think that would be awesome in general.

Also, I only update my blog like twice a year.

(And, finally, I am trying to build revenue-producing projects on my own. I don't talk about them because I am mostly just embarrassed.)

<comment><USER9> And, to be clear: I agree with Max. There is unnecessary seductiveness of the lifestyle. And a lot of distortions in behavior due to chasing far too few opportunities.

<comment><USER10> I think 'lifestyle' is the critical bit, rather than the hand-rubbing evilishness of angel or other investors - it's hard to imagine this has changed much, to the extent that it exists. The popular glamorization of 'startup as lifestyle' and, worse, 'startup as self-help/self-actualization' seems like a newer and sillier thing. You can open HN on some days and it reads like some sort of Cosmo for nerds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a paranoid worldview. Of course angels operate in self-interest, just as you should. It's unfortunate if you get taken advantage of by an unscrupulous investor, but it doesn't make angels evil in general.

At the end of the day angels (and VCs) are handing you wads of cash to build your company. This might save you years of scrimping and saving just to have enough savings to bootstrap for a year or two (and forget about it if you have any serious capital expenditures). Should they just be cutting 5, 6, 7 figure checks out of the goodness of their heart? No, it's your responsibility as an entrepreneur to know what you are getting into. And I should add that that is much easier today with the wealth of good solid information about term sheets, etc, that is available today on the web for free compared to as recently as 10 years ago where you basically had to learn things the old-fashioned way (ie. personal connections, apprenticeships).

That said, yeah, bootstrapping is better if you can possibly do it, because you take all the risk and you reap all the rewards. But to say that the very idea of aspiring to build a large company is koolaid sold by angels is ridiculous. It's the fundamental silicon valley dream; painted by history, not some snake oil pitch.

</comment><comment><USER7> A talented young programmer from a good university can easily be making $100k within 5 years after graduation. So building small profitable companies that pay your bills have a fairly large opportunity cost. You need somewhat of a blowout to overcome that opportunity cost.

<comment><USER12> \- most likely in a cubicle \- reporting to middle managers \- on a hardware and software stack selected for them \- frequently in the kinds of unsustainable scorched earth industries and overly large multinationals \- frequently in industries which centralize wealth and destroy small and local enterprises

All that and I'm not even a liberal saying it ;)

<comment><USER7> Still an opportunity cost. And facebook, google and twitter are among the biggest hirers of the kind of people I'm talking about. 3 or 4 years at facebook or google makes for an even bigger opportunity cost.

<comment><USER13> _3 or 4 years at facebook or google makes for an even bigger opportunity cost._

Can you elaborate on that?

<comment><USER14> Working at a company at facebook or google increases your human capital, increasing one's opportunity cost.

This can make it harder to leave the stable and growing pay check and try to create your own thing. This is not to even mention the growing amount of responsibilities that come with age (mortgage, family, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 'Max' extrapolates a lot from relatively little anecdotal data and does that quite frequently.

For instance:

> Angel investors are not interested in companies that create value and that > can hire one or two people, while making a steady profit.

That goes for some angel investors but definitely not for all of them, in fact the majority of the angel investors that I know of are doing exactly that.

> The investors are interested in blow-out companies – companies that either > grow huge, or that will be bought by other companies. Those are the only > types of companies interesting for the angels.

No, those are the only types of companies interesting for the VCs whose only way to recover their massive investments is a sizeable exit, not a lot of piddly little dividends over the years.

I think it's wrong to lump 'angels' and 'vcs' on the same heap like this, and even between VCs (and individual deals done by the same VC) there is a lot of difference.

Partnering with an angel or a VC that has a similar risk profile to your own is a good way to avoid such issues, and that starts by defining what your risk profile really is.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can drop the quotes around my name, just like you don't put quotes around Andrew Warner's name. It's now my real name and has been for several years.

What I am focusing on is not the actual people who successfully attach themselves to angels, but the people who fail by aiming for that mode.

If you build for acquisition but it does not take off, there is no place to fall back to.

<comment><USER15> Ah, sorry I thought it was an alias for "Mark Essien", a 'nom de plume'.

If you build for acquisition I think you're doing it wrong anyway, you really should be building a business that stands on its own strength. Of course there are plenty of people that do this but they are hopefully aware that their prospective buyer is under no obligation to actually consummate a deal at any price.

They also break their own negotiation position because there usually are not that many possible parties that would acquire such a company, so it's a buyers market by definition.

So, why did you change your name?

<comment><USER9> His name isn't relevant to the point.

Likewise, his methodology for getting to the point is not really relevant, either.

There is an angel bubble. Max is discussing one aspect of it. I disagree that many people are intentionally going out there and seducing people into the mindset, but that is a very minor point as the outcome in aggregate is the same.

More importantly, there needs to be a better way to finance the kind of companies that Max is talking about. While I get the impression that Max gets the impression that these are better, that is also not relevant to the validity of the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A couple of counterpoints:

\- The angels that invested in our company have jobs/companies, families, and dozens of other small investments. They don't have time to ensure we build any particular type of company, even if they wanted to.

\- Every time we ask them for advice, they put exactly zero pressure on us to take the company in any given direction.

\- The article assumes angel investors cunningly collaborate to craft their blogs to raise a generation of an entrepreneurs that behaves in a certain way. With all due respect, that's nonsensical. There is a similar argument that could be made about survivor bias, but the article implies conscious intent which simply isn't there.

\- Most angel investors make investments because they love technology and the startup world and want to use their money to affect positive change in the world. Often times they invest in people for no reason other than that they like them.

\- And finally, running a small company is almost as time consuming and stressful as running a large one, except you get no pay off. You also learn far, far less. I'd much rather get a rewarding job (of which there are plenty) - the stress is lower, the pay's much better, and there's opportunity to learn from other people.

<comment><USER17> I agree in general. About the last point: When you are running a (small) company for yourself, you are much closer to the market than when just having a job. There are lots of things to learn either way, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _And one of their main bait methods is in their writing. Angel investors and others in their eco-system are writing on the internet about how to make money on the internet. These articles are what young programmers read, and the methods that these people write about is what the programmers end up using._

Salesmanship is a fact of life. Even great products need effective marketing. People only use products they've seen. A company must find an audience and prove to them that the company is worthy of their money. Blogging and hanging around social sites accomplishes this faster than anything else. It means immediate feedback from tens - if not hundreds - of people, and a company can rapidly change its plans accordingly. Maybe I'm not reading the right angel investing blogs, but what I've seen is very up-front about the risks (although they _obviously_ are outweighed by the rewards :D).

Caveat emptor!

</comment><comment><USER19> This post seems rather disconnected from the angel investing process. And this is coming from a guy whose first start up was literally stolen from him.

Try not to lump it all into programmers vs investor, because no matter what happens afterthat distinction is made someone will lose.

</comment><comment><USER20> How many generalizations can this blog post get away with? How about an example or two?

Some things I wish were touched upon:

\- How do angels"investing money because they want even more money back" differ from VCs?

\- What are some examples of these malicious angel blog posts? What bait is in them exactly?

\- "Those are the only types of companies interesting for the angels." Why?

\- Why is "a simple product company that has a large market and that will pay your bills quickly" right for the young programmer? Why is it better than what angels supposedly advocate?

\- How do you distinguish between "ambitiously dumb" and disruptive innovations?

I agree with some of the bigger ideas here, especially: "Don't see venture capital as your aim. Don't see seed investments as your aim. Don't build only things that google may acquire." but the post does little to back up a pretty sensationalist title.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some businesses don't need "angel" money or don't need very much.

One of my tenants wanted to start a small brick-and-mortar store. He needed $30K to get inventory, and he could only get a bank loan for $15K. He was glum and depressed one day, and I suggested to him "have you considered equity financing?"

The next day he came around and asked me if I was serious -- I told him I'd chip something in if he got others to. I bought $2K worth of shares, and other people, like the leader of his coven, bought shares too.

Now, from my perspective, the $2K meant that he was going to keep paying the rent, and I could lose that much money if the apartment was vacant for a few months, so it's a pretty risk free proposition. If I cashed out now, I'd get at best a small capital gain, but I wouldn't have done any better in the stock market.

Of course, I'm not a "serious" investor and I wasn't systematically thinking about how to make money -- but this gives some idea of the scale of investment that's required to succeed at a "lifestyle" business and how it's just not worth it to somebody who's already rich...

\</comment><comment>

For a current venture I'm thinking a lot about finding "investors" who are interested in payments in kind that can be delivered quickly (a year or so;) Roughly, I'm looking for a certain kind of "investor/customer" who can pay me $10k now, expect to get $20-40k worth of value over the next year, and leave me with an asset that generates $2-5k a year worth of cash flow. This "moving revenue backwards in time" makes a big chunk of my balance sheet weightless, could let me grow fast w/o sinking in a lot of my own capital... And rather than diluting my equity, it incorporates the "voice of the customer".

<comment><USER21> _I bought $2K worth of shares, and other people, like the leader of his coven, bought shares too._

Coven?

<comment><USER9> Me too.

<comment><USER22> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coven>

Most likely the GGP meant it in the Wiccan sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe this is all just projection (Hey, at least I'm honest), but I think there's something valuable being said here. About building something for it's sake instead of building it solely for money. In the first case you're actually creating something, in the second case you're moving _only_ towards a payday.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with getting fantastically rich (or soemthing), you probably wouldn't be building something if not for the payday.

It's absurd to focus only on that, though. I know I couldn't sleep at night if I made a million (or 10) bucks selling a worthless company to a bigger company. That's _not_ why I want to create.

Don't get it twisted though, I'm not saying every company that doesn't feed the poor, clothe the needy and solve the issues of world peace and universal justice is misguided. I'm simply saying it's worth aiming for something/anything beyond the financial gain.

</comment><comment><USER24> _...they are investing money because they want even more money back..._

Oh my! While he has a good point in there somewhere I think he pretty much lost it by letting his imagination get out of hand.

</comment><comment><USER25> What? People invest money to make money? No way!

</comment><comment><USER26> There is nothing wrong with building small companies with "only" the aim of living off their money, without being huge and world-changing.

But some entrepreneurs are in the game to build exactly those huge companies; I'm one of them. I don't think I'm just gullible by wanting this: it just sounds like a better use of my time, despite the risk in it. (Of course, I'd rather a small business that makes me a steady income over nothing at all.)

Also, to address the point of the advice given by angel investors. I think for some of them (pg being a notable example), you can read a lot of their writing _before_ they became angel investors, and this can tell you a lot about the type of advice they gave before they had their own financial incentive.

</comment><comment><USER27> I agree with his general idea,

I think 37signals said it better: <http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Fund_Yourself.php>

There isn't much to fund anyway. If you're building a webapp: hosting is cheap and the infrastructure is open source; the OS is open source, the tools/frameworks are open source, the languages are open source (python/ruby/etc), the editors are open source (I don't need an IDE, thank- you-very-much).

Now, you need money for your living expenses, but you can finance that by getting a (boring) day job for a year or so.

<comment><USER26> "I don't need an IDE, thank-you-very-much"

Plenty of IDEs are open source as well, and Visual Studio is free.

<comment><USER28> AFAIK not for commercial applications. But if it's for a web server application, how would Microsoft know ?

<comment><USER26> The express edition is free for any application. The pro version does cost money, but a lot of people can get by without it.

Also, there's the Bizspark program, which means a startup can get pretty much every Microsoft tool they need for free, for 3 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The evils of angel investors aside, there's a lot to be said about bootstrapping and the ability to grow a small business and earning steady income on the web.

Maybe cause I don't live in/around SF, but the whole investor cycle was never in my mind when I worked on projects. I ended up on the hobby-turned-business track.

Now these probably aren't going to get you Facebook/YouTube-sized exits, but can do quite well. And if financial freedom and lifestyle autonomy are your ultimate goals, you can achieve that.

</comment><comment><USER30> You are telling programmers to "worry about making money; don't worry about building products that can change the world."

Whatever their motives, angel investors want entrepreneurs to build big, meaningful companies. And the money they provide helps them to that.

<comment><USER23> You're reading that backwards. He's encouraging people to _build something_ rather than _attempt to build something for the sole purpose of selling it_.

<comment><USER31> sometimes "building something" requires capital...

<comment><USER27> You need to read 37signals blog, they have a series of blog posts called "Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud", in their own words: it's a series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn't take VC, and are profitable.

The latest in that series was about github: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped- profitable-...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable- proud-github)

[1]: <http://bit.ly/ccc5C7>

<comment><USER31> i said "sometimes." i have no idea what you're trying to build, and neither does the author of this blog. for every company that has made it bootstrapped, there's another example of one that made it without going bootstrapped.

raising money is what it is. some people need it, others don't. it doesn't make angels "evil" because they don't align with your goal of building a lifestyle business. it's not like they're forcing you to take their money, or holding a gun to your head if you don't repay the money they risked on you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems like a lot of blogs have been expressing this kind of sentiment lately. Is it really that easy to make a livable income from the kind of simple web app one or two people can build? How big is this market really? How many people are actually doing this?

I'm more inclined to believe that, like the app store, most people trying this are actually making peanuts, but I'd love to be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER32> What, people with money and experience are taking advantage of the young and intelligent by paying them crap and building profitable businesses on the backs of the inexperienced?

Alert the press! Call the White House! Shocking revelation!

Nothing to see here. Move along now...</comment>


First full color Curiosity Mars Panoramic Pictures - <AUTHOR> http://spaceindustrynews.com/nasa-mars-curiosity-first-color-panorama-pictures-of-gale-crater/1121/

<comment><USER2> Maybe it's just me, but can I make a request to others who are interested in the NASA Curiosity rover? Can we please stop linking to blog-o-spam and link to the real sites, from NASA[1]? The sources are clearly provided, but the blog doesn't bother to link to the actual, full-resolution picture page[2], which provides full-resolution JPG or TIFF and additional information, in any way. I'm as interested in the mission as any other self-respecting hacker, but I'm tired of having to click through every time to get to the actual site. Considering the actual site contains real details and real pictures, from the horses mouth, as it were, it seems like we should all be making an effort to link to NASA whenever possible.

[1] - <http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4372>

[2] - <http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16029>

Edit: if the blog, in question, has real value to add to what NASA is supplying then, by all means, link to it. But for cases like this where the link doesn't really provide anything additional and leaves out important links like those to the NASA Photojournal page, it'd be better (IMHO) to link directly to the NASA page.

<comment><USER3> Actually, in this case I'm glad they didn't. Photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov has gone, so I didn't have any way to see this image until finding this post on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A guy at FARK took the publically released "self-portrait" of Curiosity and "stitched" it together to correct it. I am not sure what he did, but it looks hugely better.

Original: [http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/675130main_image_2331_946...](http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/675130main_image_2331_946-710.jpg)

Fixed: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithgabryelski/7747623468/size...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithgabryelski/7747623468/sizes/o/in/photostream/)

<comment><USER5> Those are from vastly different source pictures, I think. The "original" was from mostly thumbnails and a couple full-res pics, I believe, whereas the "fixed" one is from the high-res pics they just released today. They just had a press conference at 1pm ET/12pm CT today about the debris on top of Curiosity, which you can see in those images.

Either way, that's a really nice stitch job!

<comment><USER4> That's a possibility. The FARK thread is here [http://www.fark.com/comments/7259728/Stitched-together- by-a-...](http://www.fark.com/comments/7259728/Stitched-together-by-a-Farker- with-loving-care-here-is-an-exclusive-version-of-Curiositys-self-portrait) and you're correct, he doesn't say that's the original (and it does explain some of the differences between the two) but he does call the first one: "what the common folk got to see". Regarding the stitching, when asked, he said it was a friend's proprietary software....

<comment><USER5> ...And @MarsCuriosity JUST tweeted NASA's version of the stitch: [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16027.ht...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16027.html)

Looks like some different distortion correction, cropping, and levels correction was done between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _This panorama mosaic was made of 130 images of 144 by 144 pixels each. Selected full frames from this panorama, which are 1,200 by 1,200 pixels each, are expected to be transmitted to Earth later._

Despite the 2mp sensor limitation, this project is already yielding some fine imagery. I just hope people don't complain about it being a bit samey after a while.

<comment><USER5> > I just hope people don't complain about it being a bit samey after a while.

Hopefully Curiosity will find some cool stuff once she starts ambling around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's surprising how close old sci-fi moves got just by filming in southern california.

</comment><comment><USER8> _"The images in this panorama were brightened in the processing. Mars only receives half the sunlight Earth does and this image was taken in the late Martian afternoon."_

This is a fascinating aspect of Mars that I'd never considered. Half the sunlight, but much less atmosphere... I wonder how much dimmer it is overall.

</comment><comment><USER9> Mars receives half the light that the Earth does?! That is a ton of light!

For you photographers out there, just think: Mars's "Sunny 16" is a "Sunny 11". That's not that much darker!

I sincerely thought that Mars would be pretty dark out there since it's further from the sun. I was clearly wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: How much bigger is Google than other co's Twitter, snapchat, Facebook? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Google is 80% of the world's search engine. Android runs on 70% of phones. YouTube is the most used video site on the internet. Google Maps is the most widely used Navigation tools ever. Google Play is the #1 destination to buy books and films. Yep. Google is powerful.

<comment><USER3> That last one surprises me - I'd have thought Amazon with Kindle and Apple with iBooks (on iPad in particular) would outsell Google on books. I'd probably have guessed iTunes top for films too but that's less surprising. Do you have a source for it just out of interest?

<comment><USER4> Yeah I find it hard to believe that Amazon isn't #1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are comparing apples and oranges my friend. They all target specific user experiences and vastly different services. If I were to guess, Google would be vastly larger then the rest following by snapchat/facebook tied and twitter lagging behind with 300 million plus active daily users.

</comment><comment><USER6> Google is much more sprawling, diverse, Microsoftian than those other companies, which are all essentially focused on one core product.

<comment><USER7> FB have Facebook, messenger,whatsapp, instagram, ocutulus rift and others like parse.com. I agree Google is more sprawling but only for now</comment></comment>


Opus beats all other lossy audio codecs. Again - <AUTHOR> http://jmspeex.livejournal.com/13547.html

<comment><USER2> I would love it if Opus became more popular, so that I could save disk space – most of my 105GB music library is MP3. But for now, since I can't listen to opus-format music in iTunes or on my iPod, I don't use it for my music library.

What I do use Opus for is encoding lossless recordings that I make with WAVE Recorder ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tylab.wave...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tylab.waverec16.lite)) on my phone. These are usually recordings of ideas I have for music. I don't mind the compatibility problem when encoding those recordings as Opus because I never need to access those voice memos anywhere other than my computer. Also, I refer to them rarely enough that even though I have to use VLC to listen to those files, and VLC has a worse interface than QuickTime Player for my needs, I consider the disk space savings worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, Opus doesn't have a proper specification, instead relying on source code in several places to provide documentation through extrapolating what code intended.

To quote Sean Barrett:

      Opus' non-public-domain code as spec is terrible.
      Independent implementation requires "clean room" = writing
      own specification!

Sean is famous among the game developer community for providing a useful variety of public domain code (i'd call them libraries, but almost all are written to be used as a single-header file include):

[https://github.com/nothings/stb](https://github.com/nothings/stb)</comment>


Ask HN: What were your favorite threads in '10? - <AUTHOR>

There were so many articles and threads in 2010.  What were some of your favorites?<p>Please provide a link to the thread and a brief description of why you liked it. <comment><AUTHOR> \+ Ask HN: Music while coding [ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525445> ]

From this thread I discovered music that has since become some of my very favorite.

\+ Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why [ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973516> ]

I now have a stack of books that I can't wait to read. It's been a long time since I was this excited to relax and read instead of code. The change of pace is nice.

\+ Hey, Guys, It's Totally Okay If You Don't Get Rich [ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601281> ] Are you rich? If so, how did you get there? [ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610824> ]

The discussion in these two articles really changed my opinion of the make-up of the HN crowd. For the better. Lot's of thoughtful discussion that made me feel better about my own path in life.</comment>


Ask HN: Use WePay instead of Paypal? - <AUTHOR>

We are about to launch a product and were originally planning on using paypal for taking payments (until we get our own merchant account). However, with all the recent posts about paypal's draconian policies, we began to check out alternatives.<p>Is WePay a viable alternative to Paypal? <comment><USER2> Google Checkout is always recommended, as is WePay. The issue is that PayPal is the convenience/compatibility elephant in the room. The naive see them as "trusted", and they're as universal as a payment processor can come. "a viable alternative" is where your issue lies -- there is no viable alternative for the industry standard at this point.</comment>


Misleading modelling: overfitting, cross-validation, the bias-variance trade-off - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cambridgecoding.com/2016/03/24/misleading-modelling-overfitting-cross-validation-and-the-bias-variance-trade-off/ <comment><USER2> This is a marvelous articles indicating talking about dangers and trade-offs.

The thing about the diagrams is if the data was points on a coastline, maybe the most overfit curve would be the most useful. It seems like this kind of thing doesn't have an absolutely objective answer but depends on context (why one talks about tradeoffs, not laws).

<comment><USER3> Yes, you're correct, the sweet spot between under- and overfitting is completely dependent on the nature of the data set, and cannot be determined _a priori_. That's why cross-validation and similar techniques are critical for determining the right trade off between bias and variance.</comment></comment>


How to make people like you - <AUTHOR> http://ianharris.com/how-to-make-people-like-you/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi - author here. Happy to answer any questions on scaling relationships with your audience.</comment>


Charlie Munger on Greece, idiot bankers, accountants and more... - <AUTHOR> http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2010/05/11/charlie-munger-on-just-about-everything.aspx

<comment><USER2> He defends Goldman and says this about JPMorgan:

 _But the world would be better off if JPMorgan didn't run a gambling casino alongside a legitimate business. I take my hat off to Dimon, but I'd take away his derivative book in a second._

Why is it a casino in JPMorgan's case, but not Goldman's? Is there a difference between the two, other than that the speaker is invested in one and not the other?

I ask because Buffett and Munger have a mammoth interest in this subject (I was going to say "conflict of interest", but perhaps there's no conflict) and in the public statements I've seen neither has even mentioned that, let alone credibly addressed it. I find that disappointing. Like a lot of people, I've long looked to them as examples of business leaders who care about good beyond their personal profit and whose statements could therefore be trusted more than usual. But everything they've said (that I've seen) about the financial crisis is easily explained with reference to one principle, without Occam even breaking a sweat.

<comment><USER3> I took his comments differently; it seems like he's talking more along the lines of Glass-Steagall. I suspect that Munger doesn't have a problem with the casino (trading firm) itself but the fact that it is running alongside a traditional bank. The problem is, many people see JPM as a bank, not a trading firm, and mistakenly treat is as a bank when, in fact, it's taking more risks than a bank traditionally would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Berkshire Hathaway has $9 billion or more in derivatives. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/business/30views.html>

Would have been interesting to ask how to determine whether "gambling" is going on or not, given that Goldman, JP Morgan, and BH all have derivatives.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that he says: "Goldman has the best morality of any of the big banks".

Goldman have taken _a lot_ of flak recently. Perhaps it because they were the survivor.

<comment><USER6> I think it's more than just surviving and coming out on top. They came out on top because they have an extremely short term focus: buy stuff, package it, flip it, move on. That's their business model and it allowed them to change direction when the crisis it. In contrast, companies with a focus on long term investments were crushed (e.g., WaMu).

This goes against the dogma that "those short sighted companies, aiming for profits in the next quarter, now look at them." Therefore, Goldman must have cheated.

<comment><USER5> But Munger and Buffett are all about the long term. Why would they then admire Goldman Sachs who you say are obsessed with short term?

<comment><USER7> Munger and Buffett are long-term _investors_. They have nothing against short- term positions, so long as those positions aren't confused with investments.

<comment><USER8> Yes. They just do long-term investments in relatively simple businesses, because that's what they do best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > When Hitler was in his bunker before he shot himself, he said, "This isn't > my fault. The German people just don't appreciate me enough."

Charlie Munger knows his history. I wouldn't have expected a knowledgeable quote about German history.

<comment><USER2> It sounds rather like folklore to me, and I can't find the quote after a few minutes of googling.

<comment><USER9> Aye, all reports indiciate the only one in the room with him before the suicide was Braun and she didn't walk out of there either.

He certainly felt that way, but I don't think I've ever seen any evidence to show that those were his final words. It's a great quote, though.

<comment><USER8> Oh, the story with the bunker is a bit of a metaphor. Hitler ordered scorched earth tactics at the end of the war, ostensibly because this should have made it harder for the allies. But in his ideological point of view, this was because he thought the Germans weren't worth it anymore.

See [http://www.br-online.de/wissen- bildung/collegeradio/medien/g...](http://www.br-online.de/wissen- bildung/collegeradio/medien/geschichte/nerobefehl/) and <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerobefehl> and [http://www.lwl.org/westfaelische- geschichte/portal/Internet/...](http://www.lwl.org/westfaelische- geschichte/portal/Internet/finde/langDatensatz.php?urlID=602&url_tabelle=tab_websegmente)

Sorry, all of the sources are in German. (But that's German history for you.)

<comment><USER2> Oh, I see, you meant knowledgeable about the general situation, not about what Hitler said as such. I think you got downvoted (not by me, fwiw) for appearing to take the quote literally.

As for the general situation, that's quite interesting. Shows how much Hitler cared about the German people.

<comment><USER8> There's also a direct quote somewhere from Hitler, where he says so outright. It was written at the end of the war and meant to be kept secret. (Something about how the `Slavic races have proved superior, and the Germans don't deserve it anymore.')

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> earlier post about Munger this week on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1331591>

</comment><comment><USER11> just because someone can make money doesn't mean they know their history, are unbiased, or understand the nature and cause of economic calamity.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _We were on the edge of something that could have taken civilization as we > know it to the edge of ruin._

Banks alone can't take civilization down because they don't produce wealth. As long as there are factories, services, knowledgeable, skilled people doing useful things, the civilization will stand OK with or without the rotten banking system.

Failing banks, on the other hand, might have taken down Berkshire Hathaway, I suppose, but that's not the entire civilization.

> _Very high IQ people can be completely useless_

... in the eyes of very low IQ people.

> _I see no reason to think Goldman misbehaved in some horrible fashion. > Everyone was doing it, and it's only natural to increase your moneymaking > activities when you can do so legally._

Should I really comment on this nonsense? Goldman was doing what everyone was doing without much thinking about the consequences, and they didn't misbehave? Actually he responds to himself a bit later:

> _You have to be able to keep your head on when everyone else is losing > theirs._

<comment><USER13> > Banks alone can't take civilization down because they don't produce wealth. > As long as there are factories, services, knowledgeable, skilled people > doing useful things, the civilization will stand OK with or without the > rotten banking system.

While it is true, banks don't produce wealth, they are the lubrication that keeps the machinery working smoothly. Manufacturing has to buy raw materials, add value, and then sell their product. The time that lies between "buy" and "sell" is tough without banks.

<comment><USER12> What makes a bank a bank nowadays is money lending rather than deposits and transfers. Some say money lending itself creates value, but I don't agree. Oversimplified, it can be said that because money is nothing, then money lending is even more so.

But in any case I was talking about the "rotten" banking system with corrupt lending practices rather than about banking in general.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Boreddit.com – View Top Reddit Posts from Past Years by Subreddit - <AUTHOR> https://boreddit.com <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, the UI might not be the most intuitive or friendly.

As an example, here's the link to the top upvoted r/videos videos from all of 2012, click on the embed checkbox up top to have all the youtube videos embedded in the page for easier browsing: [https://boreddit.com/t/videos/2012/](https://boreddit.com/t/videos/2012/)

Hope people can take a look and share their honest opinions about the website!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is interesting. My friend built this - [https://arbazsiddiqui.github.io/rSlashVideos/](https://arbazsiddiqui.github.io/rSlashVideos/) which curates videos from a subreddit and sort by top, new, etc.

It's fascinating to see so many cool projects built over reddit.

</comment><comment><USER3> cool stuff when you get bored of "real time" reddit. Did you use reddit API in the background?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I Used the PushShift API for my data.</comment></comment>


Are you already Plurking? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.org/2008/06/02/are-you-already-plurking/ <comment><USER2> The writer says about everybody's mom: "She will never use Twitter, it's too complicated for her." Personally I think my mother will never use twitter because it's too narcissistic for her, and she'd probably be insulted by the implication that entering text in a text box is too difficult.

I couldn't get past the stupidity and self-importance of that sentence.

<comment><USER3> 'too complicated' could easily be understood to mean 'you are not smart enough to understand'. It could also mean 'Why bother, too complicated'. The act of entering text isn't too difficult for any of our mothers. But 'getting' twitter is way to complicated for them.

<comment><USER2> Then perhaps it needs a rewrite that doesn't insult everyone's mom. "Your mom is unlikely to grok twitter..."

<comment><USER3> Good point. My mother is on Twitter and I wouldn't want to disrespect her. Check the updated post...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Twitter thrives on the modern "Cult of Celebrity" idea. The reason Arrington and Scoble have so many followers and love Twitter so much is evidence of this fact.

My favorite analogy for these types of personalities would be if one of your friends in high school got a really hot, older girlfriend. Instead of living the high life (we all imagine) and going to older more sophisticated parties he brings his hot GF to your buddies basement to hang with you and your buddies instead. The point being he adores the attention lavished upon him in your basement more than the actual lifestyle that the hotty GF brings. Calacanis is another perfect example of this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well-orchestrated PR wave for a me-too texting karma fest. Having started out from sharing academic papers, the Web is slowly converging towards users' actual desires.</comment>


Developing for Android is like being a demonetized YouTuber - <AUTHOR> https://gbl08ma.com/developing-for-android-is-like-being-a-demonetized-youtuber/ <comment><USER2> After porting VLC on so many platforms, to be honest, working on Android applications is not too bad. Notably compared to other mobile platforms.

The tools and IDE are quite good (they need a lot of RAM though), the deployment is easy, the development workflow simple enough and the devices are easy (and cheap) to come by. Even the Play Store console is not catastrophic.

A contrario from Youtube, you can get questions answered by Google, and the dev communities are quite large.

The API changes are known 6 months in advance, which is good enough, for most cases. And you get them usually only when targeting the new SDK version (except for Android Q... why?!?)

What I don't like though, is their abysmal NDK support (notably compared to iOS), the removal of use-cases (just use SAF, right? wifi?), but mostly the APIs that are never finished and always buggy (Audio API for example), and the impossibility to send patches to fix those bugs.

Finally, the Play Store Console is so-so, but the user-facing part is quite nice.

<comment><USER3> > What I don't like though, is their abysmal NDK support (notably compared to > iOS)

Yeah, this is my biggest gripe. The vast majority of popular apps in the Play Store are games, which all use the NDK. Yet Google refuses to give the NDK more resources.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that Google's intent that the NDK be hard to use? They still act like they may pull the rug at any time and switch kernels or hardware architectures on a whim, so it always seems like Google acts as though any NDK usage is a "bug" to them.

<comment><USER3> There's aspiration, and there's reality. The reality is that virtually all games, which are most of the Play Store, depend on native code. Without those games, Android would be much less attractive of a platform. Even if Google wanted to break them, they realistically can't.

<comment><USER4> I don't think I've ever seen anyone accuse Google of being realistic. They certainly don't have a problem breaking NDK compatibility at whim, hence some the conversation above and in other threads. It doesn't feel from the outside that Google cares that much about how attractive Android is as a platform to games (or much else, for that matter), where it gets in the way of whatever the aspirations du jour are. (Is this one of the months of the arcane cycle as foretold by the elders that Chrome OS is still dominant over the other signs or is it that the Fuchsia kernel that waxes in the west again?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Android's Storage Access Framework is really underrated. Just ask the user to choose a document (file or image or whatever) by firing an intent-- then Android's built-in file picker starts up and you don't have to deal with implementing any of that UI experience. After the user picks the file, a content:// URI is returned back.

[https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/documen...](https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/document- provider)

Best part-- along with the URI, you get the permission to access the document/file/image/audio/whatever "for free" without ever having to request it! Because you kind of just did-- the act of the user picking the file auto- gives you the read permission, which can be kept ("persisted") across system/app restarts.

This file may not even be on the actual device. It could be on some cloud service or a file server or something else you've never even heard of. Android handles it all for you. An example of this is Google Drive. If they've installed the Google Drive app and it's linked to their account, the Storage Access Framework will let the user pick stuff from there just as easily as their own external storage.

You can also use the picker to create/save a new file or even choose a whole (directory/folder) tree.

Reading from the content:// URI is a little different than from a file:// , and I know there are some situations where this won't cut it. But starting in Q you'll be kind of limited in where those files can be accessed.

But in most situations involving External Storage, the SAF is really what you want to use anyway.

Watch this little-seen video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C28pvd2plBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C28pvd2plBA)

<comment><USER2> > But in most situations involving External Storage, the SAF is really what > you want to use anyway.

Or not. A File Picker does not work for playlists, linked MKV/MOV files, subtitles autodetection (subfolders and such), and so many other multimedia cases.

Also, it is a pain to use from the NDK... And incorrectly documented.

And then, the UI to allow people to give you access to the folders is extremely confusing, hard to explain to users, not customizable, and changes from version of Android to another, so very hard to document.

<comment><USER6> > Or not. A File Picker does not work for playlists, linked MKV/MOV files, > subtitles autodetection (subfolders and such), and so many other multimedia > cases.

Exactly. HTML files are another victim of this, as with content://-URIs there's no official way to properly resolve relative URIs for any subresources (images, style sheets, scripts and whatnot) or local links, and even if you could, you wouldn't have the permission to access those files anyway. Even Android's included mini HTML-viewer app (or Chrome for that matter) are broken if you try viewing a HTML file using a content://-URI, e.g. from the file explorer that's built-in since Marshmallow.

I opened [https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/77406791](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/77406791) for that, but you can guess at the reply I received so far (none - I guess I should be glad they didn't close it outright...)

And another problem is that even if your app has the appropriate storage permissions itself (whether through READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE or the new-fangled way, even if that means dealing with the SAF) and could therefore open both that file and its companion resources without relying on the permissions attached to the content://-URI intent, in practice that's rather difficult because even for local files there's no official link between the content://-URI and the file system location. In practice at least some ContentProviders will leak the path through the URI, allowing you to reconstruct the original file path with a little luck, but that's of course not really a reliable method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really mind that some behaviors are being restricted. (Although I think removing the ability for apps to toggle WiFi is nonsense.)

The problem is that Google wants to break API compatibility without actually calling it what it is. Your app, which worked for years, is now broken and as far as the user is concerned it's your fault. I've been tempted to set the "max API level" property on my apps so that I don't have to deal with this anymore. (Oh, wait, Google changed Android to no longer enforce that property.)

If Google wants to make breaking changes to the API then give developers a reasonable deprecation timeline and don't let users install apps that target old API levels.

<comment><USER8> >reasonable deprecation timeline

Each new Android version starts with a beta which previews and advertises the behavior changes, how is that not a reasonable deprecation timeline ? (real question, not trying to be cute)

> don't let users install apps that target old API levels

Google has been less active on that front that I would like but the play store is starting to at least enforce that new apps and update must target a recent API level.

<comment><USER9> > Each new Android version starts with a beta which previews and advertises > the behavior changes, how is that not a reasonable deprecation timeline ? > (real question, not trying to be cute)

Testing against betas can cause regressions for non-API reasons. That's why I'm reluctant to test against them, preferring to wait for final releases.

For apps that need maximum stability with minimal effort deprecation policies have to preserve BC at least for one release cycle.

<comment><USER8> >Testing against betas can cause regressions for non-API reasons .

if the regression is not listed on the behavior change list, create a ticket on the beta bug tracker to determine if it is intended or a beta bug.

What in this is not ok ? That's what I have been doing in the past cycles and have had no issues. I can't speak for all the usecases, but that's a reasonable process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Didn't they do some of this kind of storage crap back on 4.x? And for that matter, isn't this pretty much exactly what Microsoft was doing with Windows Phone?

My annoying use case for those was ebook readers - I have a pretty massive library of epubs (Thanks Baen Webscriptions!) and have tended to just dump a ton of them into a folder in storage on a device. I can then pull those up in CoolReader, Moon+ Reader (position sync!) or FBReader as I desire. On Windows Phone every reader app (not that there were many) had to have its own independent download because god forbid you have shared freaking storage.

Somehow I feel that this is also going to end up hitting things like third- party gallery apps such as ones that allow tagging, along with the multimedia stuff that other folks are concerned with. Oh, and music. The death of MP3s saved locally to a device and used by multiple apps?

So much of what Google has been doing with Android (turning it into a minimal platform for running the massive Google Play where all functionality lives) seems like they're heading down the walled-garden that Apple has always been, but with creepy monitoring and ad-driven revenues layered on top.

I always dismissed iOS as an option because I didn't like how locked-down it was and I really liked swipe-based input, but now that iOS allows keyboards and the locked-down aspect is happening everywhere perhaps it's time to reconsider.

Edit: removed disparagement of Windows Phone apps

<comment><USER11> I _do_ think sandboxing the file system makes sense. I recall on early Androids just seeing an arbitrary dumpster of files on the SD card for different apps and uses, and tons of apps had access to all of them. That's concerning.

But ideally, the user should be able to create an arbitrary storage location (say, a folder), and then permit specific apps to access it, without granting the app "file system access" as a whole.

Capability-based systems with a powerbox/picker UI are designed this way, so my guess is Fuchsia will work a bit more like this.

<comment><USER12> Totally agree. It works pretty well on iOS with APFS so multiple file copies occupy the same storage space. Not sure about Android though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two thoughts:

I got a little caught up in the argument about clipboard apps suddenly being broken as if there was no thought put into the impact it would have. Clipboard apps on Android are currently very dangerous since an app can access the clipboard without asking for permission so the user can unknowingly share anything in the clipboard with malicious apps. That's insane and Google is right to fix this even if it breaks things for well behaved apps. There is a lot of solid information in this article but starting with that argument set a poor tone.

Second, makes you wonder if Google as an organization wants to push you towards web apps / PWAs. Google has always seemed to think that getting people to abandon the app model benefits them and hurts Apple and maybe these changes are in search of that end result.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you on the clipboard thing, but as with every other API that gives access to sensitive information, they could have put it behind a permission prompt. It wouldn't make the situation worse than it is now, and wouldn't annoy users and developers nearly as much.

<comment><USER13> What you are suggesting seems so obvious that I'm assuming they couldn't do this. Android Permissions on older targets essentially "grandfathers" in apps since older versions didn't need to write code to ask for each permissions at runtime (they asked for the entire set of permissions at install time). I imagine there was no way Google could effectively permit apps targeting older versions to run safely inside the new OS. So, they just took the hard path for developers and are forcing those that really need the permission to update their apps. I'd be unhappy too, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised, and I'd only be furious if I was doing something bad and couldn't anymore. There is going to be the new permission READ_CLIPBOARD_IN_BACKGROUND which will give me whatever I need, and let users know I'm using it, so if I'm willing to write the code, I have everything I need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The constant API changes has been a huge PITA for me both as a developer and as a user.

As a developer, I am forced to take time out of developing my new app to update my older apps. This year, I spent 3 months updating my 2 older apps to the newest API. My app/game that will be released soon is targeting an API that will be banned from further updates later this year. The problem is that the game framework that I use does not support the newer API yet, and development has slowed considerably on it, so I may be stuck with the (possibly monumental) task of updating the game framework myself.

My two older apps should be left alone. My users tend to stick with them because they want to use a familiar interface, and most other competitors change interfaces on a regular basis. But I have had to occasionally remove features because of API changes.

And that brings me to my gripes as an Android user - most of my favorite old apps from just a few years back with either no longer work, or have completely changed so that they aren't really the same app that I used to love.

I am really rooting for a Linux-based phone to eek out some type of commercial viability. I am willing to pay much more for a device with much lower specs and polish, so that I can have a device that respects me as a user.

</comment><comment><USER15> > "Note that all of these things that they are removing for "security", could > simply be gated around a permission prompt you'd have to accept, as with the > contact list, or location."

I think letting the user decide on permissions works in practice only if (i) There is a good chance that an average user would understand the tradeoffs of giving different permissions to different apps (ii) A large majority of users are expected to give that permission to the app under reasonable circumstances.

If an average user does not understand the tradeoffs of giving permissions to an app, then the operating system may as well do it on behalf of the user. I think this is a common problem since an average user probably clicks arbitrarily on the permissions dialog.

Similarly, if a permission is perceived to be not useful enough by most of the users, then there is no point in even having that in the ecosystem.

<comment><USER16> This is the crux of the problem that gbl08ma isn't realizing.

"User choice is what all of this boils down to, really. Android used to give me the choice of being slightly insecure in exchange for having more powerful and innovative features in the apps I install..."

You're dead on about the average user. Watch someone install and app, and less than a second is spent looking at the permissions.

Google's solution makes sense for their platform, not for power users. Leaving security up to users will result in insecure devices, increasing support costs as well as denigrating the brand.

If people are going to do things like financial transactions _shudder_ on their phone, then the platform has to be rock-solid secure. That leaves those who might know and do better with their devices with less options.

It's the price of maturity.

<comment><USER17> Is it really that bad to do financial things on one's phone? I would be pretty annoyed if I had to fire up a browser tab on my desktop/laptop any time I wanted to look over the transactions on my CCs and bank account.

<comment><USER18> No. Mobile operating systems are considerably safer than desktop operating systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lile the article says, the Google Play Store makes it difficult for newer developers to get established. To get your app featured, you need to meet a whole host of design/accessibility/localization/etc requirements that pretty much make it impossible for small companies to get on the list--they simply don't have enough developer time to make sure that every button in their app has flashy touch feedback or to make sure their app is supported in Zimbabwe.

That said, I don't really feel that oppressed as an app developer. I think Google has done more good than bad here

</comment><comment><USER20> Here people is complaining about Google bad policies..but have you ever seen/read/experienced changes in iOS ecosystem? All the new SDK versions must support newer devices while deprecating old versions of iOS.

At least, you pay a fee of 25$ and it's on you (or Google). Paying 99$/year and still experiencing some strong frustration at each newer release and change is much more for fetishism

<comment><USER21> I compare that to Windows which has been around two decades longer than iOS and Android and which APIs have remained remarkably stable and backward compatible. It is possible to do it. It is just more work.

<comment><USER22> Well, to be fair, this comes at the cost of Windows (like other major desktop operating systems) being considerably less secure than Android or iOS. This tradeoff is not easy to avoid except by designing the permission model to be sane from the start, and we all know that good upfront design doesn't exist.

<comment><USER23> Legacy baggage also comes at the cost of performance, which in the case of mobile devices, means reduced battery life.

As an app developer, it's immensely frustrating to have to keep updating apps to stay on top of the latest SDK.

As a mobile user, I delete apps that get flagged up as battery hogs.

So that leaves me with a fairly simple choice, and I keep stuff updated if I expect anyone to keep using it, and if I abandon it, I shouldn't be surprised when my users do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We are currently struggling with firebase messaging in a multi million user android app. Receiving lots of quota errors which are preventing push notifications to work properly. There is contact support with the firebase team, but there is no solution. I learned that the firebase infrastructure is shared with other developers. If one developer is maximizing load on the system it affects others. The fact that you basically have no alternative to firebase fcm is really a pita. Each new version of Android makes it more restrictive. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2 years from now every app needs to have buttons with a predefined colour and fontsize

</comment><comment><USER25> Security on Android is a joke. Google may shut down completely legitimate developers' accounts and remove useful permissions, yet they will still allow malicious apps like Cheetah Mobile's Ram Booster to be in top 10 most downloaded apps of the Play Store...

<comment><USER26> case in point: the MalwareBytes app is no longer allowed to access SMS message info, so it cannot examine links in SMS messages.

so there's a legit security app which can no longer function as effectively as it did before the Google Play Store eliminated its access to the SMS permission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They can also blow you off overnight by mistake but whoops it's too late. At one time I had around 25,000 users on my app then a hiccup landed me back at 2 users. As a developer you have no rights. But at least they don't charge $100 a year like apple who can also randomly kill your app by mistake easily as well.

</comment><comment><USER28> In fairness, access to features such as call logs and clipboard are too easily abused. I think that most users downloading apps from the Play Store have the expectation that Google is taking care of their privacy. As the author mentioned, advanced users can still sideload any non-approved apps they want, and as advanced users they should understand any security implications.

The point I do agree on is that the platform itself is becoming far too locked down, and the example of "Imagine if the online banking of my bank refused to open on my desktop because it knows I know the password for the administrator account" is a valid one and shows just how crazy it's getting.

<comment><USER29> Speaking of ridiculous, Android and banking, just yesterday I was browsing my transactions and wanted to send a screenshot of one to my wife. As it turns out, you cannot make screenshots of banking apps. Because "security".

<comment><USER30> Good thing criminals don't have access to a camera or other device to take pictures of the screen. How does this stuff not get laughed out of the meeting when suggested?

<comment><USER31> I think the intention is that someone with malicious code placed in the users device still won't be able to access bank details

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I had 90% piracy rate on Android when I did it years ago. Gave up and didn't look back.

<comment><USER33> Anecdotally, 75% of my sales are on Android and only 25% on iOS.

<comment><USER34> Interesting...is the app exactly the same on both platforms and the same price (assuming it is paid)?

I am interested to see if it's worth porting some of my iOS apps to Android.

<comment><USER33> App functionality and price are identical. It's a very niche app with dedicated community though, so piracy is not such a big factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> a GPS nit: the Google Play Store's "timed publishing" feature lets you accumulate changes to your app's store page hours or days in advance of an update and then click a "Go Live" when you actually want to publish that update and make those changes publicly visible.

but apparently it's not quite atomic. the Timed Publishing documentation notes say: _If you ... add release notes to your app's "What's new in this release?" section while you 're in timed publishing mode, they'll be published immediately._

[https://support.google.com/googleplay/android- developer/answ...](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android- developer/answer/6334282?hl=en)

that's so confusing! if I want to update release notes about a new release I'm going to make live soon, why would I want them to be published immediately? huh?

</comment><comment><USER35> There are just so many apps demanding access to your clipboard, WiFi configuration and other stuff for no valid reason I'm actually glad to see Google is doing something. The only part that seems annoying is messing with what and how can apps access on the external storage. The μSD card and the OTG-attached thumb drive are exactly the places where I store content like audio, video, ebook, documents and other files, I use them the same way I use my laptop hard drive, having to grant root rights to an app every time I want to perform an operation on these files feels annoying and weird.

</comment><comment><USER36> While I understand the complaint about google eliminating entire classes of apps, I have to say that I'm finding it extremely difficult to have any sympathy whatsoever for the OP: he's effectively complaining that software requires maintenance, which is something that has always been true and every single one of us learned about project lifecycle management in our engineering management or equivalent classes; as time goes on the effort towards maintaining any piece of software tends to overcome the effort of having it created in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER37> Personally, I really hope that Librem 5 won't flop. While I don't see it going mainstream, at least it could provide a mobile platform for technically minded users.

I also think efforts like Fairphone are also promising. Android does provide a nice solid base to build on top of. What's missing is a community effort we see around Linux to build a completely open platform on top of what's already available.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wrote this 10 years ago, and it's as true as ever: Google signals every day that they don't care about people, just money.

[https://alanhogan.com/arrogance-of-google](https://alanhogan.com/arrogance- of-google)

</comment><comment><USER39> Android becomes more hostile to power users with every update. That's why I will never buy a phone I can't root. The very fact users have to pick a particular phone and then jump through hoops for the privilege is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER40> As an Android user it feels like Android is getting more and more IOS like with every new release. Seriously I wouldn't be surprised if they locked down the filesystem (like IOS) in the name of security.

<comment><USER41> Maybe they'll start mandating a half-decent device security update policy in the name of security. I've had a few too many two year old devices stop getting updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> We need a viable 3rd alternative.</comment>