Groupon files for IPO - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/06/02/groupon-ipo-its-here/ <comment><USER2> Andrew Mason's desire is for Groupon to be where you go when you think "I'm hungry or I'm bored"

If you're calling bubble and confused about how they're running at a loss don't miss this line:

"Participating Merchants: 56,781 in the first quarter of 2011, up from 212 in the second quarter of 2009"

That database of 56,781 merchants is GOLD.

The way their sale staff works is to create direct relationships, phone contact etc - that is not a cheap proposition.

In terms of growth potential there are 10x as many restaurants in the USA as Groupon's entire universe of merchants today.

If they continue to capture the consumer mind that they're the best in the world to answer those two questions, their valuation and growth potential is insane.

Refs:

[http://answers.ask.com/Food_and_Drinks/Restaurants/how_many_...](http://answers.ask.com/Food_and_Drinks/Restaurants/how_many_restaurants_are_in_america)

<http://www.geekosystem.com/groupon-im-hungry-im-bored/>

<comment><USER3> I'll confirm the sales model, my mother runs an (awesome) coffee shop in Abbotsford, British Columbia, "Chapleos" - and she routinely gets a call from her Groupon Rep. I suspect that their direct sales staff are incented to contact small business, and update the database on them. To some degree, the principal assets of Groupon are (A) their Brand, (B) their Mailing list, (C) their direct sales force, and (D) That database of business which will soon, if not already, be the finest database of businesses in the world.

Both Yelp/Google have an issue with their data freshness on business. I'm constantly updating open/close times, (and even whether a business exists) on Yelp. And business (particular taxicabs) have long ago figured out how to Game Googles Small Business directory to get in fake listings.

It will be interesting to see what they do with their database.

<comment><USER4> A funny example of how local merchants try to game Yelp: Plumbers and the like will frequently try to update a competitor's phone number to their own. This is hard to police without calling the merchant.

A have a friend who used to verify these listing changes for Yelp -- but it's all been outsourced to Indian now. Who knows if that will effect quality.

<comment><USER5> I find particular amusement and disgust with the local merchants who blatantly rate their own services with 5 stars from an account that clearly belongs to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can we call it a bubble yet?

Those of us who were around in the early 2000s recognize this game. Brand new ventures filing for IPOs based on 'amazing potential' and even more amazing valuations.

This is all going to come crashing down soon. The question is whether it happens before or after Bitcoins. :)

<comment><USER7> Did the 2000 bubble come with revenue numbers like these recent IPOs?

<comment><USER8> No, but have you corrected for the size of the audience? The web is a lot bigger than it was eleven years ago.

Meanwhile, from Groupon's prospectus:

 _Our revenue is the purchase price paid by the customer for the Groupon. Our gross profit is the amount of revenue we retain after paying an agreed upon percentage of the purchase price to the featured merchant._

So they have huge revenue numbers because they move a lot of coupons. But they're operating at a loss. It's promising that they have a big audience, and a database of merchants, but what does that really mean when they're not profitable?

If I build a scalable website that sells ten-dollar bills for $9, I will probably attract as much traffic as I can afford. If I have a billion dollars to lose I can probably arrange to do roughly $10B in "revenue". But what does that number prove? Not so much in itself. It's other details that matter.

<comment><USER9> If you take your analogy to completion it makes perfect sense.

Let's say you're in the business of giving $10 for $9.

Let's say you become so popular at it that you beat out all your competitors and now whenever anybody wants to make $1 comes to you and goes to no one else. So multiply this by the size of your market.

Now you add the condition (or maybe you had it in the first place) that those $9 have to stay with you at least 10 years. Now you're pretty much running a bank (well perhaps a CD is closer in terms of return and style of investment.

That's a real business. It's not just leveraging capital but now you're the only bank out there so you've pretty much got a monopoly going. Now you can change your terms and say instead of giving back a $1 maybe you only give back $0.50 or $0.25. What is everyone else going to do about it since you have so much power in the industry you can crush your competition?

<comment><USER10> The point was that for Groupon the revenue numbers are meaningless not that the example business plan can't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Absolutely wild. Revenue was almost as much in Q1 2011 as it was in all year in 2010 ($645m vs. $713m) with a 20,000% revenue growth since June 200.

They are hoping to raise "close to $1 billion at a valuation of about $20 billion." [1]

And they still aren't turning a profit. (~15% loss Q1 2011 and ~54% loss in 2010) [2]

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230374530457636...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303745304576361631817311972.html#ixzz1O9D5o2Hb) [2] [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/0001047469110...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/000104746911005613/a2203913zs-1.htm)

<comment><USER11> Incredibly impressive revenue, but really, $389.6MM loss on $713MM revenue? Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't get why it's being hyped up so highly.

<comment><USER12> That's some pretty insane expenses. What are they wasting money on?

EDIT:

1) Ad spend: $200+ million

2) 7000+ employees (at $40K average per employee, that's $280M/year)

<comment><USER13> Salary, to convince businesses to work with them on their extreme terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Am I wrong, or any idiot can spend 1 billion dollars to make 700M?

It's very scary to me that they scaled and failed to prove they can profit, before going IPO. I have no issue with that tactic as a private company, but you shouldn't go public until you can prove profitability. Otherwise, the bubble word is truly deserved.

<comment><USER15> Abosolutely right on. If they can't show profit at this scale and leverage as a private enterprise, it is a big question mark as to when & how would they turn up a profit and at what margin. It looks like investors cashing out rather than sticking on to provide the business model and profitability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My read on this, especially given the extreme flexibility series G investors showed in cashing out founders, is that when Groupon is up and running in a locale, it makes a whole shitload of money.

I also would anticipate from reading the expansion numbers and having a little bit of business experience myself that Groupon grew literally as fast as it possibly could in the last few years; there was no way for them to successfully move any faster, no matter how much cash they were given.

I'm guessing you'll see some gyrations as they continue to try and solidify their global lead, then slow move to profitability, then one day, (if margins hold up) BAM. Major Net Income.

Right now the market clearly is going to reward a company who can get this done successfully in as broad a portion of the world as possible; if they can demonstrate that existing locales are profitable after a certain period of time, they will have happy shareholders as well. It's a landgrab, and Amazon is a good comparison.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps the other useful part of the Amazon analogy is that I believe that GroupOn will slowly be eaten alive by competitors unless they bring some real business and/or tech innovation.

Last I saw, LivingSocial's trajectory was steeper than GroupOns. I think we can expect LivingSocial to go public soon so they can add some cash to their war chest.

<comment><USER16> This would be great. I'd gladly be in a situation where I could split investment dollars between two large growing competitors in a market situation like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If nothing else the timing of this seems suspect to me. The Linked In IPO has investors who missed out champing at the bit for something else. I think Groupon knows their current business model is unsustainable and have picked this moment precisely because the market is particularly irrational right now. (Note: I'm not saying there is a bubble in general, just that the Linked In IPO has created a unique opportunity for them to go public with less scrutiny than would otherwise be the case.)

<comment><USER18> I think Groupon is a suspect company to begin with. It's a great idea, but most of the last few rounds of funding have gone to pay off the early investors.

[http://allthingsd.com/20110602/where-did-groupons-billion- do...](http://allthingsd.com/20110602/where-did-groupons-billion-dollars-go/)

They raised nearly a BILLION dollars, and spent 80% of it on paying off the insiders. Not a good sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Prospectus: [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/0001047469110...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/000104746911005613/a2203913zs-1.htm)

<comment><USER20> The risk factors section (starting on page 11) is particularly enlightening.

<comment><USER21> I agree, and these two would concern me if I were considering investing:

-Retain our existing merchants and have them offer additional deals through our marketplace;

-React to challenges from existing and new competitors.

Groupon could be facing the double-whammy of existing merchants in many markets having no incentive to offer follow-on deals while threats from the competition would erode margins. These are threats to existing revenue streams, not just to revenue growth.

In my view, investors in Groupon must be betting that they can successfully translate their current traction into a more sustainable business model (i.e. Groupon Now). At this valuation, not a bet I would take.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From what I could make out of the prospectus, the revenue number is the sum of the face value of all coupons sold. Since Groupon has to pay the merchants a predetermined percentage of the face value, I'm having a tough time understanding why the entire face value should be considered as revenue. To take an analogy, this would be like Visa claiming the total value of transactions as revenue instead of the fees it charges the merchants for said transactions. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER23> You're paying your money to Groupon, then they send a portion of the dollars to the merchant. You can assume that basically all of the cost of revenue line item is representative of the portion they send to the merchants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> From the article:

'Don't expect profits anytime soon: Groupon hasn't turned a net profit in any of its first three years of operations, including a net loss of $389.6 million in 2010. The company said it expects its "operating expenses will increase substantially in the foreseeable future ..."'

Sounds very 1990s dot-com bubble to me ...

<comment><USER25> No, it actually sounds like their business model is so profitable in a single locale that they've been rapidly spending outside funding to accelerate their growth and stay ahead of the competition.

<comment><USER26> I'm sorry; but that's a completely ridiculous conclusion to draw from reading that they have been losing tremendous amounts of money.

Staying ahead of competition means nothing if you don't have a strong plan to become a profitable business.

<comment><USER27> Why is that ridiculous? It's ridiculous to say that Groupon doesn't have a "strong" plan to become a profitable business. Of course they do.

The market they are in is becoming intensely crowded, and since they are the current market leader, they need to spend a lot of money (yes, even if it results in losses) to stay in that position. If they stay can cement that position whilst their competition falls at the wayside, then they will become extremely profitable as the market leader.

<comment><USER26> It's ridiculous to draw a conclusion in this form (as rottencupcakes did):

"Local-oriented company is losing money globally, therefore, they must be hugely profitable in at least one locale"

There's absolutely no evidence to support that claim (at least, none that has been presented in this discussion).

You've actually taken ridiculous one step beyond with your assertion that, "they will become extremely profitable as the market leader." Market leadership has absolutely nothing to do with profitability. The two concepts are 100% unrelated.

What is their plan to become profitable? If they can grow revenue by thousands of percentage points and still not achieve profitability--how do they do it? They've got great plans around achieving revenue growth--but I contend that have no idea how to go from revenue growth to profitability.

<comment><USER27> You really don't think Groupon has a plan, however flawed, to go from large revenues to large profits?

<comment><USER26> Based on the way they've operated their business to this point, I have no reason to believe they have such a plan.

There are things we know, such that Groupon is known to negotiate very aggressively with local businesses to get the best possible deals. We also know that there's strong competition to Groupon negotiating with the same (or at least a similar set of) businesses. That fact alone suggests to me that Groupon will not be able to negotiate as strongly as they currently do-- therefore their COGS will go up.

We also can see a trend where as their revenue has grown, their expense growth has actually outpaced their revenue growth. While that means they haven't found efficiencies that no doubt exist in their business, the fact that their expense growth is outpacing their revenue growth suggests that they aren't even LOOKING for those efficiencies.

Finally, there's the evidence that (like many tech companies before it) that investment up to this point in Groupon has basically operated as a ponzi scheme--taking new investments and paying that capital out to earlier investors. Sadly, that's a really dangerous indication of their real reasons for doing an IPO--raise capital so the last of the early investors can cash out.

I'm not saying a business like Groupon can't succeed and can't have a legitimate IPO--but I see no evidence that Groupon is really that business.

<comment><USER10> The barrier to entry for Groupon competitors is low and there is no cost for both consumers and local businesses to switch to competitors. Based only on that I don't see much hope for them long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised by the loss they are running. Think how big their cut is. My understanding is that on a 50% off deal, they get half of the merchant's take! Granted their effective cut is lower since they provide some costly/valuable services .. e.g. they pay you right away while redemptions might happen over months. But still ...

I wonder if merchants aren't just curious about the groupon model as opposed to groupon having "cracked the local nut". I guess we'll know in 2-3 years. If their revenue flattens or goes down vs if it keeps going up up and up.

On a side note, I hope this makes Facebook file for their IPO already. For some reason, I feel the Facebook IPO will be a turning point of sorts in the current tech boom. Not sure why though.

<comment><USER29> > Granted their effective cut is lower since they provide some costly/valuable > services .. e.g. they pay you right away while redemptions might happen over > months. But still ...

How is that at all costly? Groupon receives money up front--say $20 for a $40 coupon and then pays half to the merchant ($10 in this case). The customer is the one floating it--Groupon has theirs, the merchant has theirs.

<comment><USER28> You're right. The customer is the one doing the float. This margin seems high to me. And they still end up with a loss ... boggles the mind.

<comment><USER29> They spend a ridiculous money on advertising and sales, so it's not too surprising too me. Their products are "free", but having a staff of 7,000+ means a tons of boots are on the ground to shake out those deals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I know there are people scraping Groupon deals and sales figures and estimating revenues. Does anyone have the name of these sites? It seems like a hell of a opportunity to sell $10k research reports based on public information to wall street traders.

</comment><comment><USER31> $200million in ad spend + dozens of competitors spending just as much or more on ads = buy GOOG.

</comment><comment><USER32> Cue for dozens of Fortune, Newsweek et al articles proclaiming the new bubble. If everyone's so confident in their assertion, go short that stock.

Groupon will grow like hell until there are finally no new deals to lure with left and the 'extreme couponing' lifestyle has been grinded to death (regular couponing will have a place like it always had).

The problem with extreme valuations/bubbles is not so much to recognize them, it's to pinpoint when they will burst.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, when it bursts short it all the way to the bottom, hopefully panic selling ensues and you can pick it up a firesales prices at the bottom. Just saw citigroup at $40 today and am kicking myself for not having the cajones to pick it up at $2. Hindsight is 20/20 though and I know I liked it at $18 as well.

Looks like I'm being downvoted, I guess the CEO of overture reads HN.

<comment><USER19> 1 for 10 reverse split...

<comment><USER34> I always find it weird that retail investors speak of share price when that number is so obviously easy to game. Seems to me like it'd be better to think of it in terms of percentage of the company than in numbers of shares.

<comment><USER35> You're right about that number being so obviously easy to game, but share price isn't completely irrelevant since many mutual funds won't hold shares with a price < $5 [1]. Also, share prices < $1 can lead to delisting from exchanges such as NYSE or Nasdaq [2]

[1]<http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3011203?f=related> [2][http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/krantz/2009-01...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/krantz/2009-01-12-delisting- stocks_N.htm)

<comment><USER34> right, but a company that is worth something is going to do a reverse split when it starts trading in the $5-$10/share range. Share price is technical arcana, something the accountants should worry about.

Personally, I'd compare letting the stock price fall below $5 to filing your required government regulation paperwork late. If it happens often, there is something wrong, sure, but it's something that can be fixed by firing a couple of paper pushers; it doesn't indicate a fundamental weakness in the company's business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I just don't understand why anyone would invest in a hot IPO for a company that hasn't even turned a profit yet and had a $389.6 million net loss in 2010! Can someone explain to me the allure of an investment like this?

<comment><USER37> They appear to have cracked the nut on local advertising. Their business _could_ end up bigger than Google's.

<comment><USER38> Wow. Google revolutionized the way we entertain ourselves, learn information, and interact with each other. Groupon has revolutionized paying $5 less for a pedicure on Sundays before 1pm.

<comment><USER37> Groupon is revolutionizing the way we explore our local communities, discover hidden treasures, meet like-minded people, go on adventures we wouldn't have otherwise.

Google has revolutionized finding celebrity sex tapes and forwarding people to Wikipedia 2 billion times a day.

(It's easy to put a spin on anything)

<comment><USER39> Imagine life without Google (or any other search engine) Can you? Now imagine life without Groupon. Done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Don't expect profits anytime soon:"

Based on their first quarter 2011 results, they are on a revenue run rate of 2.4 billion a year. It's a little surprising that they are not going to generate profits on 2.4 billion a year in revenue, despite the fact they employ around 7000 people and have other operational expenses.

</comment><comment><USER41> One important item that hasn't received a lot of attention is Groupon's "Accrued Merchant Payable." If you'll indulge me, a longish thought experiment (yes, it relates to Groupon).

Imagine a sandwich shop that allowed customers to purchase future sandwiches-- buy one today at a 50% discount, eat it sometime in the future. The sandwich shop would receive $3 for a sandwich for which it normally charges $6, and it would owe me a sandwich at a future date. Also assume the sandwich costs the shop $1.50 in direct costs (50% margins at a $3 price).

This proves to be a popular promotion with the shop's customers. The shop sells lots of $3 "sandwich rights," bringing in $3 in cash up front. It spends a good deal of that $3 in cash to pay ongoing expenses and to get the word out about its 50% off sandwich deal.

But then the growth of its "sandwich rights" business slows. Other sandwich shops offer a better deal--$2 for a $6 sandwich--and it begins to saturate the market of local lunch eaters, causing a slowdown in the sales of sandwich rights and the cash they've been paying the shop in advance.

Now the sandwich shop owes sandwiches to all of its rights holders, each of which costs $1.50 in cash expenses (to pay suppliers, employees, etc). However, instead of holding the cash it previously received for the sandwich futures, the shop has already spent it on marketing to other potential purchasers of sandwich futures. Clearly, if the shop doesn't have the money to pay $1.50 x # outstanding rights or can't get financing, it will go out of business. Because the shop was dependent on sales of sandwich rights to finance its growth, when the growth rate slowed, the money dried up. In essence, the shop borrowed from the future by sucking in cash today for discounts on tomorrow's sandwiches.

This is _exactly_ what Groupon has done. Its operating cash flow includes "Accrued Merchant Payable" of nearly $291M (3/31/11). But its cash balance is about $208M (3/31/11). Because it collects cash up front from individuals and pays merchants over time (or, in its non-US operations, only when coupons are redeemed), Groupon is showered with customer cash before it must pay merchants. Roughly half of this cash eventually belongs to Groupon, while the other half is eventually owed to merchants (true, there is breakage, but if nobody redeems the coupon, that adds little value for the merchant, so significant breakage/non-redemption isn't necessarily in Groupon's long term interest).

In other words--and Groupon spells this out--if the growth rate in coupons sold to customers dives, Groupon could face a cash flow problem. It's not a ponzi/pyramid scheme exactly, but it is a highly risky financial practice to spend cash you will owe tomorrow on expenses you incur today. As long as the company grows and/or can sell shares to the public and increasing prices, it will do fine. Once the growth slows or access to capital dries up, it's vulnerable. Groupon may well outrun the cash demands it has piled up by going public. But it can't maintain these growth rates forever--remember those other sandwich shops selling similar products?--and will ultimately face the music.

Don't believe me? Here's a quote from their S1: "Our accrued merchant payable, which primarily consists of payment obligations to our merchants, has grown, both nominally and as a percentage of revenue, as our revenue has increased, particularly the revenue from our international segment....We use the operating cash flow provided by our merchant payment terms and revenue growth to fund our working capital needs. If we offer our merchants more favorable or accelerated payment terms or our revenue does not continue to grow in the future, our operating cash flow and results of operations could be adversely impacted and we may have to seek alternative financing to fund our working capital needs."

<comment><USER42> Or that $1bn+ they've raised could have gone to this instead of cashing out the insiders...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> When and how can they eventually make some profit? If they aren't making a profit at expected ~2.5 B revenue, how would an additional infusion of 1 B make them profitable or let them grow more in the long run? Isn't that what companies get listed for?

<comment><USER44> Groupon wants to be THE site for deals and coupons. If they acquire enough end users, the cost of acquiring new partners will go down. The benefits will be common knowledge, businesses will approach _them_ , and lots of salespeople will get laid off or at least growth there will slow dramatically.

But end users won't use groupon without a good selection of partners. There are a variety of strategies for building up a solid base of partners, and it appears groupon's tactic is a large sales staff. It's a gamble and I have no idea whether they will pull it off. If they don't eventually lower the marginal cost of acquiring partners they will certainly fail, but there is possibility for success and aggressive growth is an understandable (if risky) approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Does the fact that they aren't turning a profit concern people that much? Didn't the Xbox division take years before profitting? I'm not a business guy so I'm genuinely asking this out of curiosity.

<comment><USER11> The Xbox wasn't in a market with zero brand loyalty, low barrier to entry, etc. It's an apples to aircraft carriers comparison, IMO. Groupon could be very profitable in the future, but so could the other 1000 companies in the space. It's a race to the bottom with little retaining their business.

<comment><USER45> Good points, but as a business, I would consider GroupOn before those other 1000 companies because of their reach.

<comment><USER11> They have reach now, but others are gaining ground. I see LivingSocial as the biggest potential competitor right now, since they're an Amazon subsidiary -- that gives them a lot of leverage that Groupon doesn't have, e.g. giving away $20 Amazon gift cards for $10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> No net profit, but: "gross profit (revenue minus expenses, which was $280 million in 2010)"

So it sounds like they're just spending madly on acquisition and growth. Or am I missing the gross/net distinction here?

</comment><comment><USER47> I worked as a sales manager at a group buying site which is a competitor of Groupon, and it amazed me how well off they were despite playing a domain you would expect to be monopolized by a goliath like Groupon. Just goes to show how much room for expansion there is in the niche.

</comment><comment><USER48> Wouldn't it be typical of a growing company like Groupon to run negative because they keep investing all the profit into people and technology? Paying over 7000 people and their benefits probably takes a majority (e.g. 51% or more) of the revenue.

</comment><comment><USER49> It does feel like 1998-2001 but it also feel more solid this time. Business with actual revenues rather than the hypothetical revenues of so many early dot com's.

I kind of hope we aren't' in a bubble but a rise in the economy. Either way head down and back to work. I missed the first bubble and related opportunities being distracted by school and the fun of school.

Not this time. I doubt that <http://infostripe.com> will IPO anytime ever but if there is enthusiasm and growth in the industry then I want to be in there somewhere in the wings fighting over the scraps.

</comment><comment><USER50> Looks like they beat Zynga to it, there's only a handful to high-profile tech companies who are likely to go IPO soon, perhaps we could bet on who goes next + what their valuation will be at.

Maybe the next one isn't one of the big ones (Facebook, Zynga) but is instead something like Yelp or Pandora.

Edit: Didn't realize that Pandora just filed. Overshadowed, indeed.

<comment><USER51> Pandora's already filed for an IPO:

[http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/01/not-pandoras-box- why-...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/01/not-pandoras-box-why-the- music-companys-ipo-isnt-the-sign-of-a-bubble/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Coincidental timing that they happens right after Google announces it's baking its clone into all future Android phones?

</comment><comment><USER52> When is the actual ipo though? These articles never seem to mention that.

</comment><comment><USER53> It's not a boom. It's not a boom. It's not a boom

</comment><comment><USER42> Wow, Eric Lefkofsky owns a shit ton of that company, and already cashed out a decent chunk of change personally and through his various LLCs just recently. Never even heard of him before.

<comment><USER54> He's the secret big dog in Chicago tech investing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> ticker symbol grpn</comment>


Use Jekyll To Keep Your Blog From Folding Under Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.kapilkale.com/blog/use-jekyll-for-massive-blog-traffic/ <comment><USER2> The irony of these "static blogs are The Future" stories is that the first blogging software to get really popular, Movable Type, worked in exactly this way -- grinding out static files.

Which led to everyone moaning and groaning about what a pain it was to have to wait for the site to rebuild when you made a change.

Which led to WordPress, which used live queries against the database to avoid the need for rebuilding, being hailed as The Future.

Which led to everyone moaning and groaning about how their blog would fall over anytime five people even thought about visiting it.

Which led to tools like Jekyll, which grind out static pages, being hailed as The Future.

Sometimes tech feels less like a story of progress and more like a merry-go- round...

<comment><USER3> Which leads us to "Use whatever you want and put Varnish in front of it", which is actually the future.

<comment><USER4> Which leads us to "why in the world would I need beefy servers for Varnish+Wordpress, when I could get away with a micro EC2 instance or a free Heroku dyno".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I host my blog at Amazon S3, not only it takes away the worry of high traffic, it almost cost nothing (I paid $1 last month for 8GB of transfers). I wrote about the setup sometime back - <http://laktek.com/2011/11/17/why-and-how-i- revamped-my-blog>

While Jekyll is a nice fit for creating and maintaining a blog, it's an overkill for running other kinds of static sites. I felt there's a need for a simple and more flexible static site generator, so I wrote Punch (<http://github.com/laktek/punch>).

These days, I'm working on a Punch based extension to generate blogs as well, which solves couple of pains I have with Jekyll (such as slow generation, non- existent error handling, lack of support for partials and rigidness in templating, etc.)

<comment><USER6> +1 for S3 and static sites.

I wrote about this topic last winter after a rash of links on HN went down. <http://www.maxmasnick.com/articles/bulletproof_your_blog/>

I recently switched to github pages after their stability improved, but if you don't want to pay for a github account or you really want 100% uptime, S3 is where it's at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use Octopress (<http://octopress.org/>) for my own blog[1], which is a Jekyll "framework". Styles, templates, RSS, etc. is all ready to go and you can tweak those without needing to build it from scratch.

There's still certainly more development time than a pre-packaged blog, the "new post" workflow requires a couple of lines on the CLI (rake new_post[title]; $EDITOR path/to/new/post/title.md), and there's no clear documentation on creating your own theme (I ported Bootstrap over to Octopress as a self-contained theme), but it can be a nice option for those who want some flexibility. I just host it all on Heroku out of laziness, although I would likely see some speed improvements if I hosted it on a VPS w/ nginx.

FWIW, I used to host my blog on Tumblr, until they added fixed Open Graph metadata to the site headers that resulted in me unable to show/change a photo thumbnail when sharing to Facebook (a specific issue, and really not their problem to think about).

Also, as others have said, GitHub Pages is a very low-friction alternative to DIY'ing your own Jekyll site and you can always fork a popular users' site to get you up-and-running quickly.

[1]: <https://github.com/elithrar/octopress>

<comment><USER8> Octopress is a great framework, although the default theme has one major issue: the default fonts.

It uses both PT Sans and PT Serif, which comprise 6 .woff files that amount to 300kb and take almost 3 seconds to load.

One of the main purposes of a static website is to increase its apparent speed. But when I visit an Octopress website, I always have to wait at least 1 second for anything to appear. On iPad it's even worse, as it takes about 5 seconds before any text appears.

I guess Octopress doesn't need those 2 fonts, and can just stick with Georgia and Arial (or Verdana).

Apart from being lazy to switch, it's one of the reasons why I'm still using Jekyll.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, I had filed a bug report for that:

<https://github.com/imathis/octopress/issues/433>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One great thing about these static file generators is that they make it easier to preserve history.

You can't just leave Wordpress based blog to linger on your server after you have quit blogging. It will occasionally eat all your resources and every once in a while new gaping security holes are found which need to be patched. And if you decide to switch hosting provider, it's a hassle.

With static files all these problems go away and maybe our kids get to see what daddy wrote 30 years ago.

<comment><USER11> "With static files all these problems go away and maybe our kids get to see what daddy wrote 30 years ago."

is this a good thing?

<comment><USER12> My first reading of this interpreted it as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "Static websites are resilient enough to last for years, for better or worse!" I do agree with the premise in that most dynamic solutions will in relatively short order (~1-2 years?) show signs of their age - be it memory leaks, security breaches, or just lack of flexibility.

"Me Too Aside": A few months ago I finally started up my personal blog[1] which uses Hyde[2] (the Python brother of Jekyll) and is served via an S3 bucket. I found it extremely refreshing not to have to worry about yet another web infrastructure to maintain. It's exceedingly easy to update and maintain.

[1]: <http://www.verdantrefuge.com/> [2]: <https://github.com/hyde/hyde>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Shameless plug: if you like your static site generator simpler, in python/django and with amazon s3 deployment built in check my project Cactus: <http://github.com/koenbok/Cactus>

</comment><comment><USER14> I've grown more and more into thinking having a database is maybe overkill for only a blog. I do use Octopress too and it really makes you think "do you really need a DB for that?"

If you compile your posts into HTML, use Javascript for more dynamic content (like comments by Disqus or a Twitter feed, for example), HTML files take almost no resources to serve, so you can handle a huge load without many resources.

</comment><comment><USER15> I tried octopress and it turned into a nightmare, because I had to migrate hundreds of posts and wanted a custom theme. Making a custom theme proved to be harder than what I was able to tolerate.

Now I use Wordpress with WP Super Cache plugin which effectively turns my site into a bunch of static files. My site has gotten a lot of traffic from HN and reddit without ever going offline and I made a custom theme in a few hours.

<http://elweb.co>

</comment><comment><USER16> You need to go deeper.

Take all those static files you've generated and just put them right on Akamai. Don't even worry about scaling your infrastructure on Heroku or EC2, because it's all on Akamai.

It's dirt cheap and really easy to keep updated if you do it right. I presented this at SydJS a little while ago, my slides are here:

<http://revealjs.jit.su/#/5>

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm using Hakyll which derived from Jekyll with Git server. It is quite appropriate for personal simple website like mine.

To edit page for website, just open terminal and edit and git commit & push. That's all. After git server accept the push request, it rebuilds and publishes the website automatically like Github with Jekyll.

</comment><comment><USER18> I recently ported my blog to Jekyll/Github pages, and I couldn't be happier. It becomes an interesting challenge to figure out how to implement common blog features, like RSS, tags, and comments without a back-end to call to. Building a custom theme is likewise a small challenge, but is IMHO easier than building one for a blog system like Wordpress or Tumblr. I also like that it's easy to back up. I have a git clone on two computers as well as Github [1].

Right now I'm experimenting with a tags in javascript that mimics the functionality used in other blog implementations.

[1]: <https://github.com/jamesleonis/jamesleonis.github.com>

</comment><comment><USER19> I got sick of Wordpress security issues and updates so I moved my blog to Octopress.

What is even better is that you can host those files without a server environment with Amazon S3 and cloudfront.

</comment><comment><USER20> Static sites hosted on S3 have become my specialty lately. Not just for blogs. You can do a lot with html,css and javascript. I have created and maintained dozens upon dozens of Drupal sites over the years, and the frequent core and module updates are quite annoying. I've heard it said that sites for Churches have more malware than porn sites, probably because so many run out of date wordpress installations.

<comment><USER12> Would you mind elaborating on what you use for static generation, and how you get it into S3? Any links to your work? I feel this solution has a lot of merit, and I would like to see how others are doing it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Static sites are great except they limit what sort of content you can put on your site. Varnish is a great way to make your blog "web scale".

</comment><comment><USER22> This doesn't seem to be solving the root cause of the problem.

Seriously, if your website can't handle bursts of traffic like HN would give - upgrade your server. Pay more. Do it now and don't wait for it to fail.

Jekyll sounds clever, but I would be interested to know the benefits of using it over learning how to cache content properly in your server side language, or just getting a better server.

<comment><USER23> Benefits of using static site generators from my point of view:

* Don't have to worry about traffic at all.

* Don't have to pay for hosting (it's free using Heroku or Github, probably other places as well).

* Less moving parts, less to go wrong. For my simple personal site I don't need any server-side code and don't want it.

* Still super easy (for me) to use to publish content.

<comment><USER24> Free hosting is only free if your time has no value.

See [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my- own-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-blog- anymore/) for more.

<comment><USER23> Nope, my time has plenty of value and I'm pretty sure my hosting is still free.

Patio11's article is a good one but just not relevant to my situation.

I've spent 0 minutes managing hosting details since I first put my website live. That's just the way I like it. That's part of the reason I chose a static solution: less moving parts, less fuss maintaining it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Jekyll's really great. I found that it makes publishing articles super easy (especially with GitHub Pages) while giving you full control of your front- end.

If you use grunt.js, you might like this grunt-jekyll plugin I wrote: <https://github.com/dannygarcia/grunt-jekyll>

</comment><comment><USER26> I use Jekyll+GitHub Pages for my personal blog. It works fine, but I recently started using Wordpress for my company blogs, and I prefer it quite a bit. I use WP Engine for my blog hosting now and my blogs rarely have problems under load now.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've looked at Jekyll, but even it was a bit too complex for my needs (plus, I'd rather use Python than Ruby...). So I rolled my own: <https://github.com/pdonis/simpleblog>

</comment><comment><USER28> I find it's easier to use a fully hosted platform like Tumblr with a custom domain, but if you like Jekyll then GitHub pages is pretty awesome.

If you're using WordPress, install a full page caching plugin.

</comment><comment><USER29> No reason to make things so complicated. HTML5 tags makes writing your blog in plain HTML/CSS a breeze. On nginx with a cheap vps you'll handle any load.

</comment><comment><USER30> On that note, does anyone know a working S3 policy script to prevent hotlinking outside your domain/bucket? I can't get any to work.

</comment><comment><USER31> Maybe someone should create a _Use WP-Cache_ website similar to the famous _Use bcrypt_.

</comment><comment><USER32> Then why bother using Heroku at all? GitHub Pages supports Jekyll.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I hadn't seen / used github pages before, and it looks like they let you set up a custom domain so might be a comparable solution.

<comment><USER23> I use github pages with jekyll and I'm pretty satisfied with it.

I have an additional wrinkle - I have a jekyll plugin I wrote that I want to use, so I have to run jekyll on my own machine and then commit the plain html output to a separate repository. Once it was set up though it doesn't look much different though, just one extra step (running ./push_site_live.sh) after I'm done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> +1 for Hyde. +2 for Emacs Org mode to xhtml</comment>


Apple's motivation for suing Samsung - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/08/07/apples-motivation-for-suing-samsung/

<comment><USER2> Meh. Perpetuating the myth that Samsung copies Apple.

I've had the iPhone. I've had the Samsung Galaxy S. The latter is nothing like the former, and that was why I ditched the iPhone for it.

Apple is suing Samsung because they are very, very competitive and eating into Apple's market-segment, or at least the high-end market-segment which Apple wish would be theirs and theirs only.

Apple has nothing new to show for, the iPhone is getting stale and the future is looking increasingly bright for Android as a platform, and this is bringing on even more Android OEMs, bringing out even more competitive devices at prices Apple cannot (or wont) match.

Apple wants monopoly its own high-end, high profit-margin market-segment, and because of Android they cant have it.

Apple wants to stop this, as iOS now represents the majority of the company's income. Without iOS, Apple is nothing. They put themselves here, and now they are trapped. Apple wants Android gone since the success of Android will mean the end of Apple, or at least the end of the golden days Apple is seeing now.

Apple is acting aggressively anti-competitive for very selfish reasons. There is nothing more to it.

Those who try to analyse this lawsuit as anything else, or as some magic stroke of strategic genius are deliberately BSing themselves. Apple is getting desperate. Simple as that.

<comment><USER3> I also have a Samsung Galaxy S and no one has ever confused it for an iPhone. When using others iPhones they feel radically outdated compared to the Samsung. It seems to me that smartphones are the next logical progression from the Palm phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I believe that Apple's future products are going to change the industry so much, Apple has to put a stop to Samsung now."

I don't understand this arugment. If Apple really has industry changing products in its pipeline, why bother with this? Their advantage would be that they're visionaries leading the way, so it won't matter if others are copying their old products.

However, he tries to predict the future. Does Apple really have industry changing products in its pipeline? They haven't really impressed lately.

<comment><USER5> > Does Apple really have industry changing products in its pipeline? They > haven't really impressed lately

There is the oft rumored apple tv (not the hockey puck). Samsung is heavily competitive in the television market. I read (random google search...possibly junk stats) something like 20% of the flat panel tv market, and 50% of the 3d tv market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Apple has a purpose for everything it does, including this lawsuit."

OK, this is beyond crazy. Why are some people taking Apple like some sort of Holy Company that does nothing wrong, ever? This is so dangerous.

<comment><USER7> Because Apple is both secretive and very successful - they do not comment on rumor, they do not comment on their intent, they do not comment on criticism (positive or negative), they only talk about their existing product, never about the past( all the compromises and features ) and as little as possible about the future. Yet, despite that, they manage to affect everyday people life.

The same conditions that drive people to read the future in tea leafs, or judge God intent in the colour of the sky.

That makes 90% of all the blogs and article about Apple completely useless. When they are correct, it is by chance, and very often when they are not correct, they cannot really be proven wrong.

<comment><USER2> _Yet, despite that, they manage to affect everyday people life._

What sort of nonsense are you talking about? Seriously? I don't get it. This sound like religious ramblings to me.

If you are going to make that sort of argument, you better be prepared to expand on it. What does it mean? What practical consequences does it have? Why should we care?

<comment><USER7> I meant that Apple is well known (in good or in bad) to the general public, despite the secrecy about the company itself.

IMO that is what lead to the success of tea leaf readers disguised as Apple analyst - i.e. the gp complain.

Instead of reading my religious rambling, have a look at the rambling of Samsung lawyers in the same line of reasoning: [http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/05/samsung-accuses-apple- exp...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/05/samsung-accuses-apple-experts- of.html)

<comment><USER2> Not to dilute the discussion even further, but that's certainly impressive, almost cute and shows everything wrong about this trial, basically why it shouldn't have been a trial in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> Apple has a purpose for everything it does, including this lawsuit. There can be no doubt that Apple has some clever, perhaps industry changing products in the pipeline over the next few years. Although none us know for sure what those products are, if they are truly disruptive, like the iPhone and iPad, it's in Apple's best interests to stop Samsung now._

People have already begun worshiping Apple.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is one of those Apple fanblogs that should not be taken seriously. One person in the comments section seriously claims that other phones HAVE TO use larger screens because Apple buys all the 3.5 inch screens and does not leave any for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> This may well be the worst piece of reasoning I've ever seen. It's a religious position.</comment>


Google launches an end-to-end AI platform - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/10/google-expands-its-ai-services/ <comment><USER2> Make sure you've read the service terms[1] if you plan on building apps for speakers, cars, TVs or smart watches...

 _12.1 The following terms apply only to current and future Google Cloud Platform Machine Learning Services specifically listed in the "Google Cloud Platform Machine Learning Services Group" category on the Google Cloud Platform Services Summary page:_

 _Customer will not, and will not allow third parties to: (i) use these Services to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) a similar or competing product or service or (ii) integrate these Services with any applications for any embedded devices such as cars, TVs, appliances, or speakers without Google 's prior written permission. These Services can only be integrated with applications for the following personal computing devices: smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops_

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms#12-google- cloud...](https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms#12-google-cloud- platform-machine-learning-group-and-google-cloud-machine-learning-engine)

<comment><USER3> I have a hard time imagining who this wouldn't be a dealbreaker for. These terms also mean you can't use it for open source, and you can't use it if you don't know what the ultimate application is going to be. And you probably can't resell technology you create, because no one who buys it is going to want that restriction, either.

<comment><USER4> It's not a dealbreaker for in-house ML applications particularly in the enterprise (banks, telcos, etc.), which is a huge market for cloud providers.

<comment><USER5> That's how my company would apply the platform to our work. My boss is there now, will be interesting to see what he find out vs what we're doing with our current IBM platform.

<comment><USER6> Which industry are you in? Would love to get your thoughts on the IBM platform.

<comment><USER5> Health care. If you're running on-prem, it does a good job of integrating Kubernetes where it's not something my data scientists have to worry about. Also fairly easy to tie in our data mart and all of our databases - MS, Oracle, DB2, MongoDB, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is being announced now in the Google Next keynote.

This platform focuses not on the this-AI-is-magic-and-can-solve-everything like many AI SaaS startups announced on Hacker News, but focuses on _how to actually integrate this AI into production workflows_ , which is something I wish was discussed more often in AI.

The announcements here, including AutoML Tables (which is coincidentally similar to my own Python package: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19492406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19492406)), the new BigQuery BI tools, and the new Google Sheets integrations, make me a very happy data scientist.

I'm taking the rest of the week to figure out how to integrate everything announced into my team.

<comment><USER8> Looks like Google is taking over Cloud (from AWS) for AI by building an ecosystem and building tools for non Data scientists - consumer level product. Surely IBM can do similar thing with their recent Redhat acquisition, but will they ?

<comment><USER9> Azure and Amazon have these offerings for multiple years already, or? Including workflow tools, like Flow.

<comment><USER10> So what is exactly Azure or Amazon offering for "AutoML Tables" or for "End- to-end AI Platform that runs ALSO on premises"?

<comment><USER11> There is Autometed ML on Azure (in theit ML studio) [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine- learning/serv...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine- learning/service/tutorial-auto-train-models)

From Amazon there is no automated ML solution (autoML that you can train models with few clicks)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've tried using Google's AutoML to classify medical images as part of a Kaggle competition just to see what their process is like and how well it performs. This was Q4 2018, so things might have changed slightly.

In brief, my experience was quite frustrating. First, getting my dataset to the cloud required quite a bit of manual labor. Uploading my 25GB of images on my 40mbit/s wasn't really ideal so I ended up spawning an virtual machine on GCP and downloading directly from Kaggle. Unzipping the files and writing it to Google Cloud storage with some terminal commands.

Furthermore, to get the label data into AutoML I had to write some generation script that generated the exact format CSV that AutoML requires - which was hidden in their documentation somewhere with no mention in the AutoML environment itself.

Nothing too cumbersome but generally not a very user friendly experience, or something I wish to repeat many times if I get a new/different dataset.

Ultimately, when the data with labels was in the model started training. Then I found, that I didn't really have the tools and information to assess the model performance. They did a decent job of characterizing model performance through precision recall graphs and displaying incorrect predictions but that didn't really satisfy me. I was interested in getting more details about where it was misclassifying images, specifically how classification performance was distributed across the 28 classes the model was predicting (in a multi label context).

This is the point where I think the downside of working with a platform such as AutoML starts showing. I tried reaching out to someone about gaining more insight into model performance by opening a ticket, since there was no phone number. After a couple of days I finally received an email from a product representative that told me that for any assistance I should contact one of their local cloud partners.

These are third party vendors that typically assist companies in deploying cloud based applications in the GCP. However, after calling two of these companies that were highly recommended by Google's vendor page I was told that they don't have any experience with AutoML and that I was on my own. The other company didn't reply at all.

In my view, choosing a product such as AutoML - for a company that is serious about adopting AI to improve their business - is currently not a good path (yet). And I see this space as being wide open for competition with current solutions not cutting it from my point of view.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's so disingenuous for Google to brand these efforts as "democratizing AI." It is precisely the opposite.

This is classic commoditization of your complement. On one hand, Google is pushing to centralize the integration, data management and computing platforms for machine learning, so that these things become as much of a commodity as possible.

On the other side, they are offering massive compensation packages or acqui- hiring as much AI talent as they can, not really because they have useful work for these folks to do, but to artificially reduce the supply of statistical algorithm talent, making their consulting and pre-packaged AI solutions go up in value in a manner that is pretty much the same as De Beers pushing silos full of diamonds to keep diamond prices artificially high.

This is very much the opposite of democratization, and my advice to anyone considering services like this or like Amazon's out of the box models, don't do it!

If you think it's going to save you money over paying competitively to get your own in-house machine learning staff, you're wrong, and you're going to waste probably hundreds of thousands of dollars before you learn you're wrong.

<comment><USER14>
      >> It's so disingenuous for Google to brand
      >> these efforts as "democratizing AI."

Exactly. NVIDIA building fast consumer GPUs and CUDA/cuDNN is "democratizing AI". FB (and Google) releasing open source deep learning toolkits is "democratizing AI". People releasing reproducible research code and datasets are "democratizing AI".

Cloud vendor lock-in and proprietary hardware, software, _and_ datasets is not in any way "democratizing" anything.

      >> not really because they have useful work for these folks to do

This, however, is where your argument flies off the rails, IMO. They offer this much because there's very limited supply of people who can do both research and development at the same time. Meaning, they don't just write papers, but also can code pretty well. It's usually one or the other, and hardly ever both. And the total in this case is much greater than the sum of its parts.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you that the supply of those workers is low (I am one of them! And hiring more is extremely hard!) ... but it doesn't mean Google / FB / etc have meaningful work for them. A friend of mine was hired as a senior ML person at Facebook and ended up working solely on cartoon avatars and page responsiveness / latency optimization (not using ML).

When he raised the issue to managers that he wasn't working on anything related to his specialization (deep learning for NLP) and this made him unhappy, the response was essentially, "Get in line." I've heard similar stories about Google from a former boss who had been a long time manager in Google.

You essentially get paid super well to be put out to pasture so that your skill isn't being used by other companies (leading to more demand for Google's managed AI solutions).

In order to get career-developing work, you have to play political games or get hired in a non-standard way, like acqui-hire or poached, where you can negotiate your projects as part of your hiring conditions. Eventhen it will probably only be respected for a short time while it's convenient for Google, and they'll find a way to manage you out of that situation when they want to.

There are some tremendously talented AI engineers in places like Google. Some of them create awesome products and tools. A bunch of others sit around and atrophy working on dumb shit locked in golden handcuffs just to ensure they're not on the market and able to help a company build things in-house more cheaply / more optimally than if they needed to buy it through some managed services through Google.

<comment><USER14> As an ex-Googler, that's not how you're supposed to operate at those companies. You find something you like to do, talk to the team, ensure the other team has open spots and would like to take you on, and move your shit from one desk to the other. Done. You're working on your specialization, if that's what you like to do.

Discussing stuff with your manager is utterly pointless because your interests aren't really aligned. You want to do something else. Your manager wants you to do whatever you're doing now because finding a replacement for you is a bit of a pain in the ass. She gets no brownie points if you leave.

It is true that Google has a ton of PhDs who just copy one protobuffer into another and browse memegen all day while earning half a million dollars a year. But they also have a ton of PhDs who do meaningful work, too. It's not really Google's problem that someone can't be bothered to look around and find something meaningful for themselves to do. Or to be more exact, it is a problem _for_ Google, because there are a lot of people who can be deployed in higher leverage occupations, but not one that Google itself can solve, because one of the main tenets of how they operate is _nobody tells you what to do_. You're supposed to figure it out on your own. A lot of people can't deal with that.

<comment><USER15> That might be how Valve works, but I'm quite sure it's not how Apple / Facebook / Google do.

Just move your shit to another desk and join whatever team you want with out talking to your manager or hr or updating your goals?

Yeah... nah.

<comment><USER14> Well yeah, you have to tell your manager of course, but _they can't stop you_ from moving to another team.

Don't know about Apple or Amazon but Google/FB are like that. If you're very senior, a few months (no more than 6 no matter how senior) delay might be imposed so that you hand off your stuff, if you're less senior, a few weeks is usually enough. It is also expected (at Google, don't know about FB) that you'll stay on each team for at least a year, and that you'll wind down your obligations in an orderly fashion, which I think you'll agree is not unreasonable.

But _nobody_ will force you to do work you really don't like to do. In contrast, at most other companies it's easier to get a job _at another company_ than to move to another team.

<comment><USER16> There are many ways at Google to stop people from moving teams. For me it was a code yellow. I am hazy, but it was either referred to as indentured servitude or more politely stated as such by our senior director who expected 3 year stints. This was at MTV, probably a toxic environment due to CxO visibility.

<comment><USER14> Code yellow is by its very nature a finite-duration thing. I've never been a part of one that was longer than a month. It's reasonable to not allow transfers for the duration, if it helps to resolve the code yellow IMO.

<comment><USER16> We had 4-6 month cyclical code yellows. It's not unlike the game where 20% projects could only be within the same team without significant blowback. Things are only reasonable when used as designed, which is not how all of Google operates for everyone. You can talk in the general sense, but you cannot speak definitively especially when such actions are blessed by the executive team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have tried Google AutoML, Microsoft cognitive services and looked at Clarifai for image labeling and classification. I ended up writing my own system. Maybe this new Google product will be better... definitely room for improvement in this space.

</comment><comment><USER18> This will make a bunch of startup's life really hard. I think it makes it harder to justify investing in your own ML pipeline or even building your own models for many use cases.

<comment><USER11> I'm running a startup which offers the same solution as Google AuotML Tables. Recently I decided to go open source. I will need to compare my solution with Google AutoML Tables (compare in terms of final model accuracy). But anyway I think many times the best model accuracy is not the most important in ML solutions.

Any ideas what can I do with such a situation with my solution? Can I compete with Google?

<comment><USER19> Usually google is good in the initial release of a product, but they lack good customer care and support. They have non transparant pricings and they disrespect privacy. Those are something's you can differentiate on

<comment><USER5> > lack good customer care and support.

Depends on how much you're paying them and the SOW you've signed.

> non transparant pricings and they disrespect privacy.

For pricing, talk with them. Or use a cloud broker.

<comment><USER20> > For pricing, talk with them.

You're joking, right? Every other day there's a top 10 article on HN about Google locking out a whole business customer with no humans to speak with.

<comment><USER5> Far from it. If you have an actual sow and contract with them, you can define your support terms and get better support than if you just sign up with a business account and avoid talking with salespeople.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Paraphrased from the article: AutoML tables takes a generic table and predicts can predict a columns value (for an unseen partial row, I assume). Their product page emphasises how easy it is: for developers with limited machine learning experience. What are the consequences of using such structured data predictions devoid of interpretation or quantified uncertainty? Presumably such predictions could be from a set of discrete values, how is that smoothed? What is the result of providing definite results in the absence of intention?

<comment><USER22> AutoML is essentially training a ML model using some heuristics or optimization algorithm to select model architecture and train a model. Feature engineering / feature synthesis as well as interpretability remain open challenges.

If I'm understanding your questions correctly, the main problems I see with this are:

\- Using raw data instead of feature engineering (less of a problem given feature synthesis libraries like [https://www.featuretools.com/](https://www.featuretools.com/) and other heuristic methods). I'd expect Google to do a good job of basic things like normalization of raw input features before training.

\- Using features that it really shouldn't (if you just throw ML at your database for say, loan applications, then sensitive / personally identifying information can/will be used as features)

\- Lack of insight / understanding as to what is driving the model. This can be partially overcome with post-training methods like LIME, Shapley values, etc.

I wouldn't expect predictions to be from a set of discrete values - if (say) predicting housing values and training a NN, the output should be continuous and based on the input features.

<comment><USER23> Another common error I see is timing (e.g. using data from the "future" to predict an event). To build on your loan example, if you inadvertently included the current FICO score of an applicant that applied 12 months ago, it will be unfairly correlated with the loans current performance.

<comment><USER24> This is very important! If you use Featuretools, we provide a mechanism to avoid this very problem. See how we handle time in our documentation here: [https://docs.featuretools.com/automated_feature_engineering/...](https://docs.featuretools.com/automated_feature_engineering/handling_time.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I work in building and deploying production ML/AI models but I'm having a lot of trouble cutting through the marketing jargon in this article and on Google's website as well.

Can someone explain what this does in engineering terms? How does this differ from something like AWS Sagemaker?

<comment><USER26> So for me, automl means machine learning without writing a single line of python code or any code. I.e. data and schema IN, deployed models OUT.

With sagemaker you still need to provide the python code for training.

<comment><USER27> SageMaker has a wide array of built-in training algorithms:

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/algos.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/algos.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is where Google really has a big lead on AWS -- the AI space. AWS has AI tools, but Google's are better and easier to use.

The big question is: If all your data sits in AWS, because your app that generates the data is there, do you reach across and try to use the Google AI tools, or are their tools compelling enough to get you to move your app and all your data to GCS?

<comment><USER29> What AI tools? SageMaker is awesome. What can Google do for me? All I've seen from them is marketing hype. I also haven't looked very hard.

<comment><USER29> Note: this is a real question with real curiosity. What are googles best AI tools?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> crooked-v Neat. How long until they shut it down?

<comment><USER30> Please don't post glib cliched comments. There's a valid point behind this but the same one-liner appearing several times on every Google product announcement is just tiresome.

<comment> crooked-v You say 'glib', but I actually want the answer to the question, so I know whether to bother investing any time learning about this or not.

<comment><USER31> "but I actually want the answer to the question"

No, you don't. Because any rational person would know that nobody is going to have or tell you the answer. So, still glib and disingenuous to boot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does any of this announcement affect Google Datalab? It feels like they keep Datalab as some second class citizen, that doesn't even get a spot in the menu bar in the cloud console and doesn't get any love when all of these let-us- build-the-model-for-you products get all of these announcements and upgrades.

</comment><comment><USER33> The point of autoML from what I've gathered is to make it as easy as can be to get a model working in production. AutoML at least AutoML Vision is using transfer learning to retrain X number of layers from their algorithm (the one google uses is escaping me right now). The number of layers it has to retrain is the value they offer, it tries and tries optimizing for accuracy.

I've had good results with it, but you do have to do things their way and its not always well documented. If you want more control you should create your own model and host it on google app engine, otherwise AutoML is what it is, no way to customize or tune it other than changing the training data you give it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Google launches: 1500 HN entries [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google%20launches&sort=byPopul...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google%20launches&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Google shuts: 700 HN entries: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google%20shuts&sort=byPopulari...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google%20shuts&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

(thought it would be funny to compare, it's not very scientific of course...)

<comment><USER35> Using "" will be more correct? [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22google%20shuts%22&sort=byPo...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22google%20shuts%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story) gives 71 results and that includes shutting down websites as well.

Disc: Googler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is this different to Azure ML and Amazon's offerings?

I know Azure ML as has been out for 3+ years - so I assume they have many features and enterprise learnings baked in over the years.

Does anyone have good comparison?

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd be curious to know who has used one of these end to end "AI" services in production for a successful, market fitting product.

From my experience doing this for a handful of companies, it's almost always better long term to use ML libraries that fit into the organizational architecture that exists, rather than outsource the whole ML pipeline. It's a serious amount of lock in to do that.

Maybe it's a an easier sell if your entire pipeline is already built into GCP and you're just tacking this on as a parallel path.

<comment><USER6> Agreed with the long term benefits on fitting into existing architecture.

I did speak with someone in financial services who's been all GCP and they are quite impressed by the way everything is integrated and how they do not have to shift data from storage to train.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> TMForum are developing an end to end standard for model dev and management, unfortunately it's closed but I really think that standardised components (feature store, model store, model registry) and model non functionals (identity, use history, status) with standardised API's are pretty necessary. BTW : deployed to prod is only 50% of the story; someone poor fool has to manage (and account for) these things in life!

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm thinking of integrating this into Polar for people that use our cloud sync support.

I should be able to use the documents and their tags to build more derivative tag data so that when I'm given a new document I can compute a set of automated tags for the user.

This way when you save a document to your repository it's given some suggested tags.

</comment><comment><USER11> I cant find in the documentation what kind of algorithms they are using? Is it only one algorithm type (neural network)?

</comment><comment><USER39> Only a fool would use any of these platforms and large companies never will. The ml industry is full of fledgling products that no one should ever use and clearly if you use this you will be locked into google forever

<comment><USER40> some large companies here:

[https://www.datarobot.com/customers/](https://www.datarobot.com/customers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> In before Google kills this

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm really not happy to see this. This further entrenches people into Google's AI platform where all the input data will be harvested for ad revenue and even further profiling of human data. Laws enshrining natural rights of privacy of personal data can't come soon enough.

<comment><USER43> Google Cloud does not use customer data for Google's search graph. No cloud does this.

From Google: "At Google Cloud, we do not access customer data for any reason other than those necessary to fulfill our contractual obligations to you. Technical controls require valid business justifications for any access by support or engineering personnel to your content. Google also performs regular audits of accesses by administrators as a check on the effectiveness of our controls."

Justification reason codes for data access [https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit/reading- access-t...](https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit/reading-access- transparency-logs#justification_reason_codes)

That said, I agree with what you've said here: "Laws enshrining natural rights of privacy of personal data can't come soon enough." Nicely put.</comment></comment>


Be my tech co-founder - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kpljaskovova/be-my-tech-co-founder-b8dc491e64df <comment><USER2> > Who will work 15 hours a day next to me.

Science proved many times that working this much does not yield any result and is actually harmful both for your health and productivity.

Great post otherwise :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed! I found the article and thought it as an interesting approach to look for a tech cofounder.

What other way would you suggest? [https://angel.co](https://angel.co) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great post. Love the creativity. Wish I was a developer or I'd inquire. I'll check up again- When/If you need some kick ass marketing!

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Don't hesitate to write me anyway (firstname.lastname@example.com), I'm happy to chat. It's about building relationships. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome post!</comment>


Future Smartphones Won't Need Cell Towers to Connect - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530996/future-smartphones-wont-need-cell-towers-to-connect/ <comment><USER2> I much prefer GAN (Wifi Calling) ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_Access_Network](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_Access_Network)) to LTE Direct. LTE runs on licensed spectrum, which means the licenseholder (the cell network) can squeeze you for as much money as they want. Unlicensed spectrum is always cheaper, and you hardly need LTE's range advantage for femtocells. Why use licensed spectrum for short-range stuff?

I also find it suspicious that this article emphasizes how much buy-in LTE Direct has from gigantic corporations, without making much of a case for why actual endusers would like it. A good clue is that there's no equivalent for Wifi MAC randomization (which iOS 8 does by default) in LTE Direct: spoofing your IMEI is a federal crime. There's no way to avoid being tracked by LTE Direct femtocells, short of shutting off your phone and sticking it in a metal box.

<comment><USER3> Not defending phone operators but the problem with unlicensed spectrum is precisely that it's unlicensed. You're power limited and everyone and his uncle messes up the spectrum.

<comment><USER4> Is that a problem? My wifi works great on the limited garbage spectrum that it has been allowed to operate on. I think spectrum licensing served an important purpose in the days when everything was analog, but now it's just a way to get a great return on investments in lobbyists.

<comment><USER5> How does digital change this? It is still subject to interference, noise, and bandwidth limitations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So something like "push to talk" is coming back to mobile phones. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Oh, maybe push-to-talk has never gone away.[1] (It's not a feature offered by my cell phone carrier.)

The article kindly submitted here with the interesting new news about phone- to-phone LTE communication reports, "In theory, LTE Direct could be used to create communication apps that route all data from device to device. Some chat apps can already use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to link up nearby phones, but LTE Direct could offer extended range and better performance. However, carriers will control which devices on their networks can use LTE Direct because it uses the same radio spectrum as conventional cellular links. Wireless carriers might even gain a new stream of revenue by charging companies that want to offer services or apps using the technology, Qualcomm says." As usual, the actual implementation of this service will be all about carrier policies and business agreements.

[1] [http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/faqs/PushtoTalk/faq.h...](http://www.verizonwireless.com/support/faqs/PushtoTalk/faq.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't this just a cellular mesh network? How does it compare to wifi mesh networking as far as range, security and usefulness? I'd like to see more of these decentralized alternatives to monopoly infrastructure providers, I'm just not sure how feasible they are.

<comment><USER8> LTE Direct is more about service discovery than data transfer.

As for mesh networking, it's hard. Routing becomes extremely complicated, especially when you're talking about mobile nodes. I used to work on protocol design for cognitive radios, where you have the added complexity of not having guaranteed spectrum. Mesh networks have certain advantages there,[1] but when we moved to a base station model things got exponentially simpler.

Distributed mesh networks are interesting in theory, but you have to be willing to pay a huge tax in terms of overhead and complexity.

[1] Say you have two nodes that, locally, never have common channels available. If you had a third node that shared at least one common channel with each, you could have it flip between the common channels to route data between nodes that otherwise can't talk to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> With facebook working on mesh-networking we can be assured that it will be corrupted and heinous. I don't quite understand how the tech community could just simply capitulate freedom, liberty, and anonymity to a malevolent demon like Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER10> This would be fantastic for disaster situations if coupled with the right software. If the radios can speak on unlicenced spectrum, it'd open up even more possibilities. For example, you could have a "cellular" connection on all your devices, and not just your cell phone.

See [http://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android- mesh/](http://stevenjewel.com/2014/01/android-mesh/) for some of my ramblings along these same lines from earlier this year.

<comment><USER11> Have you seen the Serval project? There may have been a talk at LCAU this year about adding a little USB dongle to extend mesh networks over 433MHz(?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Some see the technology as a potential new channel for targeted promotions or advertising."

A fair amount of the article is devoted to the potential for advertising, tracking and 'user experience' \- which often equates to 'we will encourage you to buy something'.

I hope this feature has an 'off' switch or a set of granular user preferences.

<comment><USER13> It probably means that, like some "free" WiFi services, you have to watch an ad before you get to connect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice! I'm sure Japan and South Korea would be awesome early deployment targets since nearly everywhere has such blazing fast internet to use as a backbone.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you recommend getting a basic understanding of the law? - <AUTHOR>

My knowledge of US law is fairly rudimentary and I'd like to learn more about it. I'm interested in both laws related to hacking (copyright, contracts, startups, etc.) but also just any laws that may be useful in life. Are there any no-nonsense resources I can look at? <comment><USER2> Both the Copyright Office and Patent Office have sites that can give you the 101.

<http://www.copyright.gov/> <http://www.uspto.gov/>

If you are ever thinking of living in the U.S., especially in NYC, then there's a whole set of laws you should understand regarding the rights of tenants, if you rent:

<http://www.tenant.net/>

Note that NYC tenant law is not transferable to other cities. The laws exist as they do due to several distortions, both by gov't and the market.

</comment><comment><USER3> Particularly on laws regarding the internet you may want to look at: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/about/readings> especially Free Culture by Lessig.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nolo press publishes a lot of good books for people who want to learn about various laws:

<http://www.nolo.com/></comment>


Introducing Elm Reactor - <AUTHOR> http://elm-lang.org/blog/Introducing-Elm-Reactor.elm <comment><USER2> Pretty nice. I actually have a big thank you to Elm as I based my Clojurescript time travelling debugger on the initial Elm demo!

[http://connecttous.co/connecttous/connecttous.html?livedebug...](http://connecttous.co/connecttous/connecttous.html?livedebug=true)

[https://github.com/zubairq/coils](https://github.com/zubairq/coils)

<comment><USER3> That's really cool.

For the connecttous.co link it would be nice if it was clear that it will actually send email to the addresses entered in the fields - it's not just a demo/toy. I may have inadvertently spammed someone when I was playing around with it.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, it actually works. The point of the demo is to show the Coils framework works end to end, and has full MailChimp/Mandrill email integration too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks great. I have recently started a simple physics-based rope swinging game in Elm. It's a lovely language to use, but I have found the workflow quite frustrating. I love the "try elm" editor on the website for the quick feedback loop, however the text editor itself is basic. For this reason I find myself writing larger blocks of code in emacs, and then copying and pasting between the browser for debugging. Not ideal.

I will try this program later, and even if it's not currently quite there feature wise, it definitely looks like it has a lot of potential facilitate a great development experience.

<comment><USER5> If you open a file with Elm Reactor, and edit it and save it then Elm Reactor will get notified by that and recompile the code in the browser. See the first video in the blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great! And it's awesome that someone on an internship could do this. Great work Michael! :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't load the page without Javascript enabled in my browser. It's a shame that I need to enable JS to view what's really some text on a page.

<comment><USER8> Are you sure it's not your modem? (Consider upgrading to 9600 baud.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Outstanding work!</comment>


Transitioning Persona to Community Ownership - <AUTHOR> http://identity.mozilla.com/post/78873831485/transitioning-persona-to-community-ownership <comment><USER2> Persona is one of the Mozilla projects that best exemplifies why we need Mozilla. They're the only ones purely dedicated to the future of the open web. The only foreseeable future for the web today is one where two or three gatekeepers control user information with no way out. Persona seemed like the best way to prevent that future.

The services that they're switching their focus to are also crucial for the open web. Firefox needs them to be competitive, and the open web needs a competitive Firefox. But it feels like putting Persona on the backburner—especially when it comes to UI integration in the browser—is letting a pivotal moment pass us by, and I don't think identity on the open web will recover.

If you held a donation drive for Persona browser integration, the donations from Hacker News alone would fund it.

<comment><USER3> Mozilla does a great job promoting open web standards and Firefox is the one of the best footholds the community and industry have against hegemony and stagnation online.

However other organizations can and do work towards the same goals. I'm one of the creators of Tent[1] which shares a lot in common with Persona (including some community members) but is more ambitious in many ways.

In the Persona AAR Mozilla identified several reasons for Persona's failure to gain adoption[2] including that Persona " can't offer the same [as Facebook Connect] incentives (access to user data)". Tent's primary purpose is as a user data store and also supports features like address changes automatically (which Persona never did).

We were fans of and friendly with the Persona team, but I believe the best solutions to these problems will come from teams that aren't afraid to think bigger than Mozilla's strategy at the time allowed.

The work of federated identity solutions will continue on Tent and other projects, many of which are probably better suited for a wide variety of users and products than Persona would have been. Of course none of us have (or are likely to gain) the level of institutional (or financial) support that Persona had.

[1] [https://tent.io](https://tent.io)

[2] [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR)

<comment><USER4> Okay, spammer...

> Persona " can't offer the same [as Facebook Connect] incentives (access to > user data)"

That sounds like a feature. Gathering ever-creepier amounts of personal information to serve marginally-more-effective ads is a losing game.

<comment><USER5> > Okay, spammer...

Oh please, it's not as if Tent wasn't entirely germane to the topic of conversation. People plug their stuff all the time on HN, and as long as there's disclosure and it's relevant, I don't see the problem.

Also, you're missing the fact that users aren't the ones building services. A service that doesn't attract any services is useless to users. I'm not saying that Persona fits that description, but it's a fair point to bring up in terms of the spectrum between compromise and ideological pureness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I never understood why Mozilla always talked about how great the future was going to be, when Persona would be part of web browsers.

But then never implemented it in Firefox, even as a default-off optional feature.

It looked very half-hearted, and that was a really bad signal to the world.

<comment><USER7> Without it being an established W3C standard I think it would be disingenuous to integrate it into the browser. Despite its obvious benefits, it would feel like they're using their browser as a platform to push other products. Until it saw widespread adoption I think implementing it as a browser extension/add- on would be more appropriate.

<comment><USER8> The implementation of Firefox contains countless things which are not W3C standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One thing I want to add right off the bat: we're going to build new features, where "we" is some of the people who used to get paid to work on Persona + some people in the community.

We'd love help! There are some get involved links at the bottom of our MDN page: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Persona](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona)

</comment><comment><USER9> As a former Mozilla intern whom worked directly with Identity team on a daily basis last summer, I can say that this indeed hits close to home, though not unexpectedly so. I could see this coming. The Identity team has so many weird and wonderful things on the way for the broader Firefox audience that transitioning it to the community only makes sense.

I for one can't wait to see what the open source and HN community does with Persona and also can't wait to see what comes out of the Identity team as a result of this transition of focus.

</comment><comment><USER10> Personally I think it's great that something like Persona exists. When Youtube switched over to require Google login, my comments started posting under my GMail username without any warning. When I sign into something with my Facebook account, the app will most likely ask me to invite all my friends to try out the app or post about it to my wall.

An SSO that provides no information other than a confirmed email would be ideal for user privacy, but app developers implementing SSO stand to benefit from the existing social network data of their users, and subsequently exclude Persona from their SSO options.

<comment><USER11> Does it really exist if no one uses it?

<comment><USER12> Yes, aka UNREALIZED demand.

<comment><USER13> Persona was launched in July 2011. It has gotten a fair amount of publicity in that time. Yet the adoption rates among websites and users are still very, very low.

I just don't think that there's any significant demand for this product, realized or unrealized. People know about it, and people could choose to use it, but doing so would likely not make them sufficiently better off.

Maybe that's not ideal, from an ideological standpoint or when it comes to "openness". But I think it is the, perhaps unfortunate, reality. It really doesn't make sense to endlessly waste resources on a product that has been proven to be unwanted, or at least not valuable enough to use.

<comment><USER14> Persona was launched in July 2011. It's been two and a half years, and they still haven't declared it safe to actually verify anything locally; you're still supposed to load a random Javascript file from their domain that will spawn a window with their contents.

I'd have thought the whole point was to target people who didn't want a centralized system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This sounds like a bit of cop-out, but, maybe it has a brighter future than it seems.

I hope the Google and Yahoo bridges are reconsidered. On paper they're a good idea but in a practice, they add further complication and confusion to a concept that's already alien to most users.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. I recently had someone who refused to sign in (after paying for a subscription!) because they thought I was asking for their Gmail password. He ended up changing his account to a different email address specifically so he wouldn't go through the Google bridge.

Persona is a great idea on paper, but my outsider's perspective is that it has been very very challenging to implement in practice. The BrowserID protocol works great. User experience and login state management has been a bumpy ride.

My site (letscodejavascript.com) relies solely on Persona, so I hope it thrives, but I can't help being worried at this announcement.

<comment><USER17> I'm a little confused at how the process could be any clearer. Just trying to register on your site, I'm asked to enter my email address. Upon providing a gmail address, I'm redirected to a Google OpenID page. It specifically says that your site will be granted access to my email address, no more. By clicking yes (without being asked to enter my password anywhere) I'm authenticated.

I've never used a more simple SSO system before.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the kind words! For most people, it works exactly like you described. Unfortunately, there _are_ some rough corner cases for folks with multiple Gmail addresses, and the experience is less-than-stellar if you're not logged into Google at all when you start.

(We do have patches ready for those issues. They'll go live as soon as we work out some deployment kinks and finish upgrading our production servers to Node 0.10.)

<comment><USER15> Is it documented that there is some rough cases that are still being worked on? Diving off from [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Persona](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona) I don't seem to see a summary of the real world state of play.

(Just mentioning this as I think it might help adoption if the project is more upfront about rough edges.)

<comment><USER16> The projects are on GitHub:

The main Persona project: [https://github.com/mozilla/persona](https://github.com/mozilla/persona)

The Gmail bridge: [https://github.com/mozilla/persona-gmail- bridge](https://github.com/mozilla/persona-gmail-bridge)

The Yahoo bridge: [https://github.com/mozilla/persona-yahoo- bridge](https://github.com/mozilla/persona-yahoo-bridge)

(I'm not affiliated with the project, just a long-time user.)

<comment><USER15> Perhaps I have miscommunicated.

I was asking why there is not (or at least not that I've found) a summary of the state of play in a prominent place.

I could have read through several hundred issues to determine that I'd run into some rough edges with these bridges and that perhaps I should come back later. Instead I find these rough edges when I dive-in, and now I wonder what other shortcomings are not being mentioned with the same gusto as the projects wins.

I hope that clarifies my prior post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had an idea they were going to kill Persona.

Without Mozilla to really champion it, it's dead

edit: so, anyone have a near alternative, that is open source, to invest time into that either will get browser uptake, or won't need it?

<comment><USER19> I disagree. Persona piggy backs on email system so it doesn't need a critical mass of users to be useful. Persona as a brand may not become widely recognizable with limited involvement from Mozilla, but some people argued from a beginning that it was a mistake that Mozilla tried to create a recognizable brand. The team succeeded at creating smooth email verification system. As long as Mozilla keeps servers running, quickly solves security issues and accepts patches with improvements from community, Persona will be used. I strongly believe it will organically grow and eventually will become a crucial part of the open web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As an early supporter I find this really sad. Persona is as good as dead without a big name behind it like Mozilla.

</comment><comment><USER21> We don't deserve a technology as good as Persona.

</comment><comment><USER22> The phrase "transitioning to community ownership" \- which always means "we are dumping this" \- is too odiously weasely for an otherwise respectable organisation such as Mozilla, and I do wish they'd stop using it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think the landing page needs more work.

Show me how to integrate it with a simple code snippet on the front page (and if it's not simple.. it needs to be). Honestly my eyes glazed over a little bit looking at the implementation details. Clearly it's not that hard, but the second thing is motivation which leads to..

Show me a video on the front page of how simple it is for users to login, and how any server can act is the authentication provider. It's too hard to understand the need.

I guess these are just personal suggestions but I think UX is the only thing holding Persona back.

</comment><comment><USER24> I find the blog disingenuous. We haven't forgotten this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243021) Why not take another stab based on what you learned.

<comment><USER16> That exact link (the Persona AAR) is in the blog entry. It's in the FAQ under "Why has Mozilla stopped funding new feature development on Persona?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's why i cant use Mozilla techs,lot of projects started,few finished.(XULrunner ? Tamarin ? ...). Nobody is going to use Persona now.

<comment><USER18> I sincerely hope that's not the case. Mozilla Corporation is still using Persona internally, and still deploying new sites and services that rely on it. We think it's absolutely great for when you need simple, email-based authentication, and we're still fully supporting it.

(PS: Because it's email based, there's absolutely _no_ lock in. Want to migrate away from Persona? Just add a password column to your database. But we hope it won't come to that.)

<comment><USER16> There's no lock in, but migrating away from Persona isn't _quite_ that simple. You still have to educate users about the switch ("make a new password, and by the way, don't use your Persona password!"), then implement everything Persona provides: login form, password change form, email authentication, ...

<comment><USER26> If Mozilla did migrate away from persona, would the staff become less familiar with the details over time thus making the best effort support being offered by the community in sumo and being talked about here: [https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/forums/contributors/710099](https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/forums/contributors/710099)

My question for you all is what do you think could be supported once it has been depreciated?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Tldr; Persona is dead</comment>