ZX80 & the Dawn of 'Surreal' UK Game Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/06/sinclair-zx80/all/1 <comment><USER2> I started with a ZX81, and wrote and sold (one copy!) of a... Xevious clone, called "ZXevious". Perfect name, heh? All assembly, cross-compiled from another machine, many simultaneous objects on screen, and I even emulated (or tried to) the brand new Macintosh interface that had just come out, in the "GUI" for selecting the keyboard layout.

The ZX81 BASIC (and "OS", such as it was) was written by Steve Vickers, and everything fitted into an 8K ROM. I have always been impressed by this guy's work. The whole unit had only 4 chips (ROM, RAM, CPU and a custom chip). Scroll done for a photo: <http://oldcomputers.net/zx81.html>

Steve Vickers went on to create the _Jupiter Ace_ (with the main ZX81 hardware guy), which had similar hardware, but instead of BASIC, it had _Forth_.

<comment><USER3> > The whole unit had only 4 chips (ROM, RAM, CPU and a custom chip).

It always amazes me why would anyone need more than that. Well... Memory could be an exception - a single memory chip is limiting - but the rest is doable.

PCs are ugly overcomplicated things.

<comment><USER4> Well, the C64 for instance had complicated enough video and sound to warrant separate devices, plus a bunch of peripheral ports (joysticks, etc) and then you need address decoding logic to support all of that. It all depends how much of it you can bundle up into your "custom chip". The first Apple had no custom chips and generated video and sound with extremely clever arrangements of standard logic gates.

<comment><USER3> The later incarnations of the C64 had a much reduced chip-count in relation to the first ones.

[http://www.commodore.ca/products/c64/commodore_64_motherboar...](http://www.commodore.ca/products/c64/commodore_64_motherboard_1982_1992.jpg) and <http://www.commodore.ca/gallery/hardware/c65.jpg>

Even if you don't get to 4 chips, a simple and elegant design is very desirable. And, in the case of PCs, quite impossible.

<comment><USER5> And as history shows, doesn't matter much - users don't care how many chips are in their computers.

It just has to be cheap and run the software they want to use.

<comment><USER3> Engineers like me _care_.

I find it disturbing that my computer has, somewhere inside its sleek and modern body, a complete IBM 5150, with its ISA bus, serial ports, real-time clock, keyboard micro-controller (with that horrendous A20 hack so that the 286 it can emulate can switch between user and whatever mode OS/2 1.0 would need to run) and CGA display adapter ready to boot up PC-DOS from something it thinks is an MFM hard disk. The only thing missing is Microsoft's BASIC burned in ROM.

It's offensive. Really.

I have a collection of 80's and 90's computers. No computer in the collection is as inelegant as the IBM PC and its clones. Many of them (original Mac, Apple II - despite the chip count - Ataris) are absolute works of art. Sheer elegance in their simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Those in the UK should keep an eye out for re-runs of Micro Men, which tells the story of Sinclair vs Acorn in the 1980s. Brilliant television: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92>

<comment><USER7> That looks pretty hilarious! I've seen more realistic hair on Action Men than on the actor playing Sir Clive :)

It's on YouTube for those wanting to take a peek: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y8IkcUGV9w>

<comment><USER2> Oddly enough, this BBC production seems to put the people who were behind the BBC micro in a far better light than Sinclair - who is presented as a caricature of an evil scientist. I can't imagine he was really like that. Very funny though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ever wondered why Dundee in Scotland has a lot of game companies? In the 80's Timex made the Spectrum there, so all the local kids ended up with the machines thanks to (sometimes _ahem_ 'unofficial') employee discounts.

So you have Clive Sinclair to thank for both Lemmings and GTA!

</comment><comment><USER9> One of my friend had the ZX-81 with about every option under the sun: 64K extension, color display extension, microdrive, floppy drive, mechanical keyboard, joystick extension port, serial extension port, printer. It was hilarious to see, the tiny ZX in the middle of a huge heap of devices of all forms and colors. Plus at the slightest bump to the table the whole setup would crash or reset... :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh the memories of Chuckie Egg, R-Type, Daley Thompson Decathlon, etc....

</comment><comment><USER11> My first computer was also a Sinclair ZX-80. My father had bought it, believing that he might be able to use it to organize his company accounts. When he discovered that it was useless for such a purpose he gave it to me as a toy, and the rest as they say is history.

<comment><USER12> Everytime someone mentions the a Sinclair and accounts, I always think of Hey Hey 16k - <http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/>

<comment><USER11> The home computers of the early 1980s were more curiosities than utilitarian devices, although spreadsheets and word processors did begin to emerge at that time.

The practical difficulties such as very restricted memory (the ZX-80 had < 1kB of usable RAM), unreliable cassette tape drives, long loading/saving times and non-ergonomic keyboards meant that even the most dedicated business user would struggle to use them for any serious purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just played a C64 game written in 2009, Knight 'n' Grail. The interesting thing is it's the first game I'd played to completion in 8 years. So I can't say it's me that's the problem (and not the modern games), it's that modern games suck.

<comment><USER13> I was a little unclear. Knight 'n' Grail is a game done in the style of a 1985 arcade adventure platformer - like the BBC's Citadel. I used to love playing games like that. My point is that apart from Ultima Online - which I got bored of - I haven't liked _any_ PC or console game, even platformers.

So is it that modern games suck, or that I'm too used to the game of the 80s? I don't know, but I know it'll be a while till I find another game as good as Knight 'n' Grail.

<comment><USER5> To each his own.

I would much rather play Half Life 2: Episode 3 or Starcraft 2 to Pacman or Joust (my first computer was a 1986 vintage PC XT clone, so it's not that I'm not aware of the old games).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Growing up with the ZX Spectrum this article was a really interesting read. I never questioned toilets as enemies when I was 7 years old, but I do now =)

<comment><USER15> If my X360 had more surrealism and toilet-based enemies I'd probably actually play it instead of leaving it gathering dust.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps this is because these general-purpose computers were an open platform, while modern videogames like X360 (and iPhone, for that matter) are closed platforms. The open approach lends a lot more space to hobbyists, who I think are more prone to whimsy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My first computer, ZX-80 ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/268165912>

</comment><comment><USER17> Thankfully, the days of surreal games are here again, the form of homebrew .. see "Pandora Panic!" for example, one of the first homebrew games for the Open Pandora gaming console .. <http://open-pandora.org/></comment>


Custom Native iOS Views with React Native - <AUTHOR> http://almostobsolete.net/react-native/custom-ios-views-with-react-native.html

<comment><USER2> All this makes me realise that even if React Native isn't the best way to do what it's doing, the sheer amount of support it has will make up for it. Within a month I swear it'll have more custom plugins than every other "compile to native" framework out there...

<comment><USER3> Having used React Native for two months, I can confidently say it's the best way to do what it's doing. Native is garbage (overly complicated), web is garbage (for now, maybe?) and as for solutions using a JS bridge like React Native, I think RN does it best. Easy to use and extend, and has default support for one of (if not the best) JavaScript framework available right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's interesting about this example to me is that Apple is moving away from programmatically laying out your views. I wonder what the tradeoffs in building a complex view are vs just using Interface Builder, constraints, and size classes.

Also outside of Facebook Groups, which other apps are using React?

<comment><USER5> It feels a bit unfair to expect more apps to use React Native at this point, it has only just ben open sourced.

<comment><USER4> Oh I didn't expect many, I just wanted to know what's been published that uses React. I want to test the apps and see if they live up to the hype. For the past six years, I've tried so many non-Apple frameworks for building iOS apps that I gave up about 6 months ago after Famo.us.

<comment><USER6> React (outside of React Native) is being used on many high traffic websites.

\- Facebook comments, chat, search, ads creation, photo upload, tablet website... and basically every new product being written.

\- Entire Instagram website

\- Yahoo Mail: [http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/101682875656/evolving- yahoo-...](http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/101682875656/evolving-yahoo-mail)

\- A lot of the Khan Academy front-end: [http://khan.github.io/react- components/](http://khan.github.io/react-components/)

\- Netflix website and TV experiences: [http://conf.reactjs.com/schedule.html#beyond-the-dom-how- net...](http://conf.reactjs.com/schedule.html#beyond-the-dom-how-netflix- plans-to-enhance-your-television-experience)

\- Many Airbnb new products: [http://www.slideshare.net/spikebrehm/the- evolution-of-airbnb...](http://www.slideshare.net/spikebrehm/the-evolution-of- airbnbs-frontend)

\- Flipboard mobile website: [http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile- web/](http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web/)

\- ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does React Native support everything that React in the browser supports, and vice versa?

Can browser-based react apps be converted to React Native apps with the click of a button?

<comment><USER8> Not out of a box. There's not a huge difference in environments but automatic porting was never a design goal. React Native follows the mantra "learn once, write anywhere" instead of "write once run anywhere". The main differences are:

* React Native has its own primitive components (Text or View) instead of primitives that map to standard HTML elements (span, div).

* React Native's runtime environment won't have all the browser APIs (DOM, navigation, web storage).

* React Native uses a subset of CSS and exposes it through the JS API instead of relying on the browser's styling (and separate CSS files).

That said, porting components is trivial. If you have a library of core components (Buttons, Menus, TabBars, etc.) then porting just those to the native implementation gets you most of the way there.

It's also possible to alias Text => span, View => div, etc. and use React Native's css-layout library on the web. But that won't help for legacy applications.

<comment><USER9> While I've had no problems with React's coupling of components controller and view in one location, doesn't this suggest that it should be separated? One view for web, one for RN using the same state and controller?

<comment><USER8> That's how we've approached the apps I've been involved in. Your Flux or Relay stores and non component modules can be shared.

This isn't a hard and fast rule, just an acknowledgment that different platforms have different constraints and conventions. If you try and share all your code then you'll end up designing for the lowest common denominator, and your app will feel out of place.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06696 <comment><USER2> TL;DR summary (to my understanding, no sane human can ever claim it can summarize Paxos):

The claim is that, once a leader is elected (ie. Q1), is no longer necessary to attain a majority quorum for actually accepting writes (ie. Q2). A minority quorum can accept writes, provided the minority contains at least one node that participated in the leader election. By increasing the leader election quorum number to higher than N/2+1 (as to have a sufficient number of nodes that participated in the Q1 election), the cluster can then operate much faster because writes require only minority quorum. The drawback is that it no longer tolerates N/2-1 failures, as N/2-1 failures leaves too few electors to choose a new leader in Q1.

NB. the Paxos terminology uses terms like 'decide a value', but practically in clusters this is equivalent to 'accept writes' so I used that instead for easier comprehension.

<comment><USER3> If your summary is accurate (haven't read the paper yet), I don't think this works, because if you don't have a proper quorum, you can't know that the leader is still valid at the time of an event. It might've been re-elected in the meanwhile. The only way to know is to "check in" with all the other nodes.

I recently proposed this idea (informally) and had to retract it: [https://bentrask.com/?q=hash://sha256/b40971e7b30324fdda15ce...](https://bentrask.com/?q=hash://sha256/b40971e7b30324fdda15ce03)

Disclaimer: totally not an expert.

<comment><USER4> The nice thing about the paper is that it is transparent. It includes a TLA+ specification for the claims that they make.

In turn, you have a concrete model checked implementation you can talk about or use a basis for understanding where either their or your proposed idea either holds or fails.

Note that a model can specify the wrong correctness criterion in practice. So you may have a "proof" which works, yet the proposition proven is wrong.

In general, when working on distributed systems, we usually want some kind of formal criterion of correctness. The failure modes of such system are quite hard to get right, and hence retractions of claims are plenty. Sadly, we have too little literature on how to on-board people on model checkers such as TLA+, proof assistants such as Coq, Isabelle/HOL or NuPRL, and QuickCheck systems such as Haskell or Erlang QuickCheck, Clojure's core.spec (I believe), etc.

<comment><USER2> Book recommendation: Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers [0]. I did read it, but unfortunately I can't say I actually understood it as in to be able to use it day-to-day.

[0] [https://www.amazon.ca/Specifying-Systems-Language- Hardware-E...](https://www.amazon.ca/Specifying-Systems-Language-Hardware- Engineers/dp/032114306X)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Related discussion of the 'A More Flexible Paxos' blog quoted in the paper: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12292590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12292590)

</comment><comment><USER5> A friendlier story here: [http://hh360.user.srcf.net/blog/2016/08/majority- agreement-i...](http://hh360.user.srcf.net/blog/2016/08/majority-agreement-is- not-necessary/)

</comment><comment><USER6> There's an easy to understand visualisation of distributed consensus (specifically the Raft algorithm) here: [http://thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/](http://thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not a paper, but I liked this related article [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11813180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11813180)</comment>


LLVM Blog: Clang Builds LLVM - <AUTHOR> http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/clang-builds-llvm.html

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty huge step. C++ support in Clang has always lagged behind, but the Clang internals is all C++ -- as mentioned in the blog it isn't self- hosting yet, just self-building, but this is major step in making Clang a true replacement for GCC.

Compilers revolutions don't happen overnight, but rejoice, you are seeing one happen right now.

I personally can't wait to see systems like OSX & FreeBSD use Clang as their default compilers, which might happen in the next few years.

<comment><USER3> I'm happy to see this moment. I don't want to diminish it, but aren't these tools written in a "tasteful subset" of c++, which could mean there are still many missing nooks and crannies?

<comment><USER4> Yep. A detailed status report (last updated a few days ago) can be found here: <http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> chao !</comment>


Can't monetize free users? Try threatening them with legal action - <AUTHOR> http://teamblog.supportbee.com/2012/02/15/cant-monetize-free-users-try-threatening-them-with-legal-action/

<comment><USER2> This reeks of a team floundering trying to figure out how to keep a ship from sinking.

      1. Our "Free" product is now $6000/year ($500/mo)
      2. OR give us a link-back
      3. OR prepare for a lawyering

While the response is inflammatory and wonderful for up-vote fodder, I can't imagine any calm, decent person ever taking this tact with a client.

There are 17 different emails they could have sent to SupportBee that would have been more constructive than this.

I wonder if the Gigya team is too young to know better or if they have back- breaking pressure on them from their investors to turn any sort of profit before they are all taken out to sea and shot.

Obviously a stupid response, but really seems to be a response out of pure desperation more than anything.

<comment><USER3> _"Obviously a stupid response, but really seems to be a response out of pure desperation more than anything."_

Yes, that seems to be the simplest explanation. But from the original article this was the _second_ communication as well. The first one, (which is linked), was pretty clear that the choices were 'give us a link or pay us money, your choice.' The author notes it had a useless subject line. And useless or not, if a vendor I'm using sends me an email I read it, and if it truly is useless I ask them to not send useless email.

So this was an escalation on the part of Gigya from "We've changed our pricing, we don't offer a free version any more so you have to choose a new option." To "You ignored our previous response, let's be perfectly clear about what your choices are."

Now you can argue that the sequence might be: nice, nice, threat. But if the company is looking at a shrinking runway they might cut out the middle 'nice' version of the communication.

And the author comments _"This almost makes it a paid link that can help them rank up for 'Social Media for Business'"_ No, this is _exactly a paid link_ for helping Gigya rank higher on Google. Clearly they feel like the paid link is 'equivalent value' to the $6,000 which they want to charge.

The only economic question here is what economic value does SupportBee put on a paidlink on their site? If it were less than $6,000 then they win by giving the link to Gigya, if its more then they should just pay the $6,000/yr. (or use a different service).

I can't find a lot of fault on Gigya's part here. That it caught SupportBee by surprise seems to be because the author didn't read their mail.

<comment><USER2>
      > So this was an escalation on the part of Gigya from "We've
      > changed our pricing, we don't offer a free version any more
      > so you have to choose a new option." To "You ignored our
      > previous response, let's be perfectly clear about what your
      > choices are."

Exactly right.

      > I can't find a lot of fault on Gigya's part here. That it
      > caught SupportBee by surprise seems to be because the
      > author didn't read their mail.

Again, no argument from me (or I think anyone else?) -- the hub-bub is just over the tact Gigya took.

As you pointed out above and I mentioned in my comment, there are innumerable better ways to _state_ what they were trying to get across and they chose one of the poorer ones.

So no problem with what they did, just how they did it.

I also can't help but wonder why they didn't just disable the widget for that client after the 1st or 2nd notice, let the client come to them and then start a peaceful up-sell discussion where a well-informed decision could be made (exactly the way you stated w.r.t. to the worth of the widget/vs first-page linking for SupportBee).

Net-net, nothing to see here, just some people being more rude than expected.

Why so rude? My guess is financial pressure is causing them to act more aggressively to secure income; as you put it, a shrinking runway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an easy problem - change your API. It creates a built-in way of excluding previous users and, if a bit forcefully, opens lines of communication for users to update their implementations.

Legal threats? Good riddance to you. I'd not touch your service if it sent me free money.

</comment><comment><USER5> I act with the belief that notice by email is not enforceable and I ignore any emails with claims of legal action. I am under no obligation to read email. If it were true that an email serves as legal notice, then process servers would be out of work.

<comment><USER6> But how would companies with lots of users provide notice otherwise? Apple is not going to be sending out letters to all XYZ million users of iTunes when they change the Terms of Service.

<comment><USER7> I would bet the original ToS have a clause stating "you agree to receive notices by email" or similar.

Also, keep distinct the notion of general communication between a company and client, and serving a legal notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there something I'm missing? They discontinued a service. They're not asking for back compensation from when it was discontinued, only from this point on. So "please stop using our service or start paying" seems like a reasonable request.

I typically expect an "its their buisness, their prerogative" type of response here on HN, how is this situation any different?

Because the notice came by email? I'm sure if the first suportbee heard from them was a cease-and-deist letter in certified mail everyone would (rightfully so) point out that it could have much more easily been solved with a few email explaining the change.

Because the notice didn't come by enough (or good enough) email? I'll give you that it might be worded a bit strong for a second notice, but this is buisness, not a cuddle factory. Is it really worth getting your panties in this big of a bunch?

<comment><USER9> It is their business and prerogative to charge for access to the widget.

Instead of saying "please stop using our service or start paying" (or face legal consequences), they should have said "please start paying or your widget won't work any more".

That they use legal threats instead of an on/off switch to block access says something about their competence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hard to see how this could _not_ work. /s

Do they really think this is a good tactic? It immediately creates tension between them and the client. Even if you paid up or added their link to your page would you trust them in the future? Absolutely not.

</comment><comment><USER11> I personally can't wait until the freemium model finally dies. It is extraordinarily difficult to pull off despite how popular it is and creates desperate decisions like this.

<comment><USER12> There are many examples where freemium model works though.

<comment><USER11> There might be a few, but I'd be willing to speculate that there are many MANY more examples where it did not work and the company either went under or had to perform a complete reversal like this one.

I'm not saying freemium will never work, but let's face it: it's ubiquity is because it was at one time the flavor of the month startup model that VC money was pouring into, not because it is a superior or effective business model.

<comment><USER13> > I'd be willing to speculate that there are many MANY more examples where it > did not work and the company either went under or had to perform a complete > reversal like this one.

So the freemium model is like any other small business?

<comment><USER14> "There might be a few startups that work, but I'd be willing to speculate that there are many more examples where they did not work and the company either went under or had to perform a complete reversal."

Not perfect correspondence, but pretty close. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have never seen a Terms of Service agreement that would make gigya's behavior seem reasonable or justifiable in this case.

Even if their ToS reserved the right to start charging for the service at any time, and explicitly wrote in crazy terms that disclaim them from notification periods, methods of notification, etc., their odds of collecting actual dollars by force are infinitesimal.

Sadly, their odds of collecting actual dollars by _threat of_ force might be pretty good. How sticky is their solution?

</comment><comment><USER16> Ok so hate to point out the obvious, but if you want people to pay for your service ($6000 a year no less) or backlink you.

You might need to put in a bit more effort than a single email with a crappy subject line and a follow up email threatening legal measures. Maybe something nice and friendly even?

Someone said maybe they are a young team..sounds like the kind of crap corporate dinosaurs would pull to me.

<comment><USER17> Or sheesh, perhaps a _phone call_.

I do not understand so many tech companies' reluctance to pick up the phone. Often you can resolve whatever you need to resolve in 10-15 minutes, and you don't come off looking like a jerk during the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't think this is totally unreasonable. From their point of view, they offered a perfectly reasonable alternative to paying, which was ignored.

By ignoring (accidentally) the original email, the message sent back could be interpreted as: "We're not implementing your link back, and we're not paying for your service, but we're still going to use it anyway".

I'm playing devils advocate here, but there are two ways to look at this.

<comment><USER19> _I don't think this is totally unreasonable. From their point of view, they offered a perfectly reasonable alternative to paying, which was ignored.

By ignoring (accidentally) the original email, the message sent back could be interpreted as: "We're not implementing your link back, and we're not paying for your service, but we're still going to use it anyway"._

Wait, what? So - if I ignore an unsolicited email, that suddenly becomes actionable if I don't do what the email says? I have a hard time seeing how that is not totally unreasonable.

The only reasonable nuclear option for them that I see, would be to simply terminate the user account or service, if they did not respond.

<comment><USER20> Your argument hinges on the email being unsolicited.

One could argue that the email was not unsolicited, if the email address was obtained during signup and acceptance of the Terms of Service.

Since it is not uncommon for free online services to have Terms of Service which allow the provider to unilaterally change those terms, the argument that an email notifying the user of the change is unsolicited is further weakened.

While I am not suggesting that the alternatives offered are or are not fair or reasonable, the follow up email did its job in getting the service consumer's attention and more importantly action in regards to the matter.

<comment><USER21> Email deliverability isn't a guaranteed thing though. Usually that's fine, but if the argument is we're going to charge you because you didn't take action, wouldn't you need to prove it was either sent or received? Maybe I'm just really old school, but I'd think registered mail or something would be required in that case.

<comment><USER22> IANAL, but when I served on a jury most (if not all) of the emails relating to the case were not admissible as evidence because there was no way to prove authenticity, delivery, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I expected to come here and see comments lambasting supportbee for being whiny; I am surprised by the tone here. I think a lot (certainly not all) of the problems with the freemium model stem from the users. Just because it's free doesn't mean that it's always going to be free and that you don't have to read and comply with the terms of service.

In this case, for one it's not clear to me that we've gotten the whole story. In particular, what were the original terms of service, and how did they change? Did supportbee read and comply with them? The current ToS says explicitly:

>"Any notice or other communication to be given hereunder will be in writing and given (x) by Gigya via email (in each case to the address that you provide), (y) a posting on the Gigya Site or (z) by you via email ..."

And really, did they have to send any notice at all? If supporbee was failing to comply with the ToS, couldn't Gigya cut off service or take legal action, sans warning?

Meanwhile, supportbee doesn't want to put a _link_ on the webpage for a service that they use and benefit from for free, and they throw a small public temper tantrum about it, and we are sympathetic? I'm just surprised. Aren't we overreacting about "legal threats"? Isn't this pretty standard and run of the mill? It could make more of an effort to make you feel good inside, but that's not really enough to make it wrong.

<comment><USER24> I think warning them that Wildfire would be disabled for them on a certain date if they didn't pay/add a link would be more reasonable, but they just threatened legal action. They didn't even suggest stopping use of it, almost implying that having used it in the past indebted them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One of the best freemium products I use is github. This discussion made me wonder if they are profitable... (the answer is yes) I dug up this old HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3593980>

Other than the "powered by rackspace" in the footer, it's blessedly ad free.

</comment><comment><USER26> $6000 a year for a widget - without proper data & explanation is - extortion.

<comment><USER27> It really isn't anything like extortion.

<comment><USER26> I have gone too harsh by using that word. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Repeat after me: If I do not pay for a service, I am the product, not the customer.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't really see a problem with what they are asking. They want to be paid either in ad links or in subscription fees. The user of the service who wrote the article doesn't wish to do either. He also (in their view) ignored their previous email about it, so the second email is slightly less polite about it and brings up the possibility of legal action.

I see how it came to this: he says he didn't notice the previous email. Given that perhaps he should have more sympathy for their position believing their request has gone ignored.

I do agree that legal action claims are premature. It's also not very clear if they could prevail in a theft of services case against someone using their service after being asked not to (obviously consent to use the free version has been withdrawn).

Clearly it would be a lot simpler to shut down the former client's access than it would be to drive something through the legal system. It could be argued that without properly notifying customers a service is about to be shut down, the customer might have cause to bring legal action against the company, this may be why they are doing notifications and requests rather than just unexpectedly disconnecting.

Either party taking legal action at all in such a case is probably a foolish move. Not because it's a reaction to "not monetizing", but because it is unlikely there would be a positive outcome for any of the parties in such an action.

Blogging one's (I think) unjustified rage seems as premature as the legal threats.

Now looking at another angle. I don't think ad links are worth $6000, but the company says they would be happy with that. It sounds like the $6000 figure might actually be a fake number that they believe will motivate users to choose ad links instead, which is the real goal. The way they have approached this goal is poor. In this case, the user obviously doesn't want to use an ad link. Perhaps he would be willing to pay $100 a month instead of $500? We'll never know because of the way it was handled.

Both sides should have given the other side more of a benefit of the doubt until determining the real intentions of the other party.

edit: this being vigorously downvoted is pretty amusing.</comment>


Lift web framework bans someone from contributing a pull request - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lift/framework/pull/1527

<comment><USER2> Some background context in this thread: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/liftweb/7vvVPmi53Kc/S0kaJ-j2...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/liftweb/7vvVPmi53Kc/S0kaJ-j2O1MJ)

<comment><USER3> David Pollack is known as a bit of a hothead, so take the one-sided (post-ban) explanation with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER4> The key here is that no one was banned in the OP pull request. Naftoli was banned almost a year ago for matters entirely unrelated to this particular pull request (as seen in the gp thread), and it is perfectly reasonable that a pull request be closed once a person has been banned simply because it was opened by that person. Otherwise a ban is meaningless.

As a committer, I've seen the original interactions that David refers to in that public ML thread in the private committers list, and the reactions are reasonable. Naftoli contributed good code, but bad karma. David is less tolerant of that than other maintainers might be, but every person varies in their tolerance of such things, and the result is indeed a more harmonious community.

You can see my own full response to the original ban and its reasoning as the second to last post in the thread posted by gp.

<comment><USER5> This is really bad news. I recently saw that he was speaking at a Clojure conference and thought finally somebody else would have to deal with his behavior of no-I-can't-be-wrong-ever-let-me-threaten/insult/ban-you-for-that.

Imho, he is a burden to the Scala community, probably even more so than Jon Harrop (to the F# community), so it's kind of disappointing that he is still here.

I don't recommend Lift to anyone solely based on DPP's continued involvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've contributed to Lift in 2013 and was fairly involved in their community. They're quite nice there, but admittedly David is a bit of an ass. He doesn't try to be, if that's any consolation.

Also, Naftoli won the "Happy Lift'r Prize" about a year ago:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/liftweb/dCA89xrW01E/_dUL5KzQ...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/liftweb/dCA89xrW01E/_dUL5KzQ2p4J)

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't even know what Lift is, let alone any of the people involved in this specific issue, but I have a hard time believing someone was banned "merely" for contributing a pull request. This is a silly submission designed to stir up more drama.

<comment><AUTHOR> Notice how the title of my submission says "from contributing", not "for contributing". Subtle difference, but has a completely different meaning.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, those two phrases aren't meaningfully different to me. Regardless, this is trivial, gossipy drama and you're making HN worse by submitting it. Please stop.

<comment><USER8> They mean very different things. "Banned for contributing" means that contributing was the reason for his ban. What he is banned from doing is unspecified. "Banned from contributing" means he did something bad and they won't let him contribute anymore because of it. What he did to get banned is unspecified.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the incredibly helpful and pedantic reply.

<comment><USER8> prepositions are hard :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I mean, it's their loss I guess. They made the decision to exclude someone from the community, and a pull request is another form of communication.

I wouldn't want to be the one auditing every piece of code from someone who is "banned" either -- it only takes a few lines to insert a backdoor.</comment>


The Utopian Promise of Adorno's 'Open Thinking,' Fifty Years On - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/05/the-utopian-promise-of-adornos-open-thinking-fifty-years-on/ <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of Adorno's work. I think American/Anglo readers struggle with it for two reasons:

1\. It's largely consumed in translation. Normally, this isn't so problematic, but in addition to being incredibly philosophically dense, Adorno's work is rhetorically and compositionally complex, rife with structures that are rather difficult to translate, punning, particular sentence arrangements, etc.

2\. It's unashamedly steeped in tradition and assumes a _lot_ of knowledge of the history of Western thought. Adorno's texts are rich with allusions that require knowledge of philosophical and literary history, which can really confound those engaged in a superficial or cursory reading--it's easy to miss his point if you're not on your toes.

If you're curious, I recommend David Held's _Introduction to Critical Theory_ which does a great job of framing the work of the Frankfurt school. This article also does quite a nice job of summarizing his work.

I also think Adorno's critique of Existentialism and Heideggerean philosophy (mentioned in the article), (also contained in _Negative Dialectics_ ) actually serves as a great precis of key components of his thought.

<comment><USER3> Or, more cynically, people struggle with it because they have literally no education in philosophy - so reading Adorno is sort of like reading Knuth before you've written a single program.

<comment><USER2> I think this issue is also often coupled with another problem: a good portion of people seem to harbor an assumption that one can simply comprehend any philosophical work (or really, any work of the liberal arts, be it philosophy, history, or literature) without perquisite knowledge.

Hand the average person a highly specialized work on mathematics, biology, or computer science and they'll quickly explain to you that they lack the prerequisite training or reading to understand it. Hand them a philosophical tract or a novel of literary merit and they seem more likely to either attempt to struggle through it, ignoring things they don't 'get' to come up with a impoverished sense of the work, or they'll claim the language is too (and unnecessarily) foreboding and dense, but not necessarily the subject matter-- there's no sense that the difficulty lies in lack of training, but rather in something inherit in the work (conceived as a flaw or virtue). The onus is on the work to be comprehensible, rather than on the reader to comprehend--yet the obverse relation is oft upheld for texts in the sciences (in the rooms of average opinion. Specialists, of course, feel quite differently).

There seems to be less general acknowledgement of the fact that dedication to the tradition and assimilation of historical concepts is just as requisite in the humanities as it is in the sciences.

It's odd how certain subjects are victim to the full fury of uninformed opinion while others are immune. Ask anyone of his politics and he'll (usually) soon explain his view and why its correct, all the while finding the fact that he hasn't studied any political history, political science, political economy, or political philosophy totally irrelevant. Ask the same fellow his thoughts on a mathematical conjecture and he'll quickly scramble his way out of the conversation. It probably comes back to the mild religiosity our culture maintains about the sciences--its seems a profane thing for mere laymen to opine on the word from on high. Meanwhile the things of men are open to all cant and blasphemy.

<comment><USER3> Education systems are generally built around producing employable workers, so they always have this tension between totally concrete, 'train them for the job they'll have at the factory who founded the school', and totally abstract, 'maybe the job will change, so teach the foundations'.

The sad thing about this framework, is there's no obvious place for stuff that's not only abstract, but perhaps orthogonal to the economic sphere. So nobody gets taught philosophy. I think this lets everybody down, because with stuff you learn at school, you generally either learn it's hard, or you learn some things about it. With philosophy, you learn neither. So you think it's easy, and you know nothing about it.

I guess there's also some compounding effects from the prestige that gets attached to various subjects - I think philosophy is a weird case though, since the better an academic or scientist is, the more likely they are to take philosophy seriously.

The whole thing used to really bug me - but then, when people take philosophy really seriously (which seems to me, the history of christianity - a lot of people getting beaten to death over kind of dry philosophical trivia), it generally leads to worse philosophy. So everybody making the subject a target of shame and ridicule, making it out to be a ridiculous, worthless and pretentious occupation - all this actually is to the benefit of good thinking, in the end, since you won't get anybody philosophizing with ulterior motives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Quack's book has re-release." Adorno largely deserves to be forgotten.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#Overall_criticism)

<comment><USER5> hn loves to react this way to "continental" philosophy - latch on to one thing that is intelligible to them and then extrapolate from that. eg I got into it without someone about Marx earlier this week that had never read any Marx!

I mean nevermind that adorno is socially validated - ie his peers, those that are actually qualified to assess the value of his work, respect him and his arguments right? that doesn't matter because hackers are qualified for anything right?

like let some metaphysics philosopher read a machine learning paper and dismiss its claims because they're not ontologically sound (or something like that) and you'll have all of hn rolling in tears at the sheer audacity of not knowing calculus (or something), but do the inverse and you're a hero.

the truth is it takes a lot of effort to earnestly engage with both kinds of material so lazy people in both groups use lazy heuristics. the way I see it is you have two options if you want to be honest: either take up the mantle and dig in (read adorno and around adorno) or shutup (quit pontificating just to sound smart). both are completely tenable paths to being a responsible intelligent person.

<comment><USER6> A problem with that metaphor is that a machine learning paper refers to an objective reality. If a philosopher came along and said 'I'm not sure how this methodology works, but it is clearly optimized for the wrong metrics as evidenced by your sales since you implemented it', the data scientist should know to listen to the philosopher no matter how he came to that conclusion.

The equivalent in philosophy is, unfortunately, very different for someone deeply engaged with philosophy and an educated layperson. To a layperson, the measure of philosophy is something like the moral and mental well-being of the philosopher. That is why the laity cares and most would say should care about philosophy. Unfortunately, this is not the metric used by professional philosophers. Social validation may be a more rigorous heuristic than moral well-being, but that does not make it more relevant to what makes philosophy itself relevant.

It seems likely to me that the reason laypeople so consistently criticize more educated philosophers is that philosophy optimized for social validation is not optimized for moral well-being. That is an alarm bell that should matter to the intelligent philosopher, much as a 'but sales are down' warning should matter to the intelligent data scientist.

<comment><USER7> You could apply this criteria to mathematicians or historians, and it would be just as unfair. Philosophy isn't religion. How one should live is just one of many areas a philosopher might be interested in. Are we to judge the work of artists or writers by their well-being?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TeachYourselfCS Updated - <AUTHOR> https://teachyourselfcs.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> They have also introduced a course - [https://bradfieldcs.com/csi/](https://bradfieldcs.com/csi/) which they are running from this June 2020 onwards. Applications are open. Cost seems a bit high $19,500.</comment>


Just Landed - <AUTHOR> http://www.getjustlanded.com/ <comment><USER3> This is the quintessential first world problem. Out of the range of problems facing society that you could solve, of all the ways you could create value by making peoples' lives better, you settled on "making airport pickup easy".

Now, this is probably a completely rational move from the company's perspective. Silicon Valley over the last few years has been backstopped by acquihires and other such soft landings, and big companies desperate to hire outstanding talent are often very willing to pay high prices for a great team. From the landing page at least, it certainly doesn't look like the Just Landed guys are amateurs. They're probably a very talented, capable team.

If they're successful, I won't begrudge them their success. However, I do lament the idea that the best minds of a generation are being focused on getting people to click on ads and minimizing the number of loop-arounds you have to do at the airport. I don't buy the idea that these guys wouldn't be focused on "harder" problems if consumer web didn't exist; of course they would. This kind of talent rises to the challenge. The idea that these are the problems whose solution drives us forwards is just a monumental lapse of creativity. Technology is an amazing thing, and we can do so much with it. I really think it's just an exposure issue -- people are used to web, and fields like the life sciences or hardware seem mysterious and complex. How do those become opened up?

<comment><USER4> _Disclosure: I created Just Landed. Thanks for posting the app on HN!_

@frisco: I can understand how you lumped Just Landed in with other Silicon Valley startups some of whom are creating frivolous apps and raising vast sums of money against small ideas. I suppose those irritate me too for the same reasons you mentioned.

However, in this case, you would be wrong to assume that Just Landed is just another overfunded startup trying to conquer the world with an airport pickup app. First off, Just Landed is not a startup. Just Landed is an app, built by myself and two of my buddies, because I kept making the mistake of forgetting to leave for the airport on time to pickup my girlfriend. After finding that no other apps were solving this problem (and that flight apps generally sucked), I decided to take a crack at it.

I don't make any claim that this is an important problem in our society (I built this app for myself), that this would be a good idea for a startup (it probably isn't), or that it's worthy of venture funding (so far it's not a great business). Just Landed was built with $15k of my own money as a fun side project while I figured out what I wanted to do next with my career. Frankly, I'm amazed how successful it has been - it was totally unexpected. Also, it's not even really a company - it was released under Little Details LLC because I needed to protect myself with limited liability (I also plan to make other commercial apps).

Finally, while we have certainly had offers, it is also not my goal to be "acquihired". I'm actually working on a mobile game right now, and am thoroughly enjoying myself. My goal is to be free to work on my own fun projects for as long as I'm able. If I come upon an idea worthy of a startup, something that can really change the world, that's a different story. FWIW I've already failed twice at a startup (went through YC once), so for now I'm taking a break and building apps.

Just Landed is not going to change the world, but it sure saves my ass (and helps hundreds of thousands of other people) when it comes to going to the airport to pick someone up.

<comment><USER5> If you don't mind me asking - What did you spend $15k on? For just a "fun side project" that sounds like an outrageous amount so spend, and I can't particularly think of what it would be spent on as I'm assuming flight information is public. Don't mean for this to sound judgmental - <USER2> genuinely curious as I must be missing something.

<comment><USER4> As it turns out, accessing significant amounts of real-time flight data, as required by this app, is neither publicly accessible nor cheap (hence the need to charge for the app). There are also many other costs associated with developing even a small iPhone app to this level of quality.

I'm actually quite proud of myself for keeping the costs so low. Try asking some big companies what they spent on their apps - you might be in for a surprise (think huge numbers)!

<comment><USER6> Would you be willing to write a post about how costs broke down? It'd be awesome to learn more about what it really costs for a side project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have used this app since the summer/fall. It hasnt been wrong once and the UX is really great (The push notifications even sound like airport bells). No idea what the business model is, but the 8 or 9 times I've used it, I've been extremely happy.

I would say - if they supported longer lead times (so I could put in someone's info a week or a month in advance, and it would notify me, that would extend the value quite a bit). Otherwise, this app nails it.

<comment><USER8> I've used it several times as well. Great app. The only time it didn't work so hot was on an international arrival. It didn't account for the time they spent going through customs, so I was waiting a while.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for using the app, and I'm sorry if we let you down on an international arrival. It happens - customs and baggage claim are both pretty unpredictable.

As it turns out, we do try to factor additional time for international customs, but it's just an average since there's no real-time data available on customs wait times (which vary widely by airport, time of day, what passport the traveler has, and season). I also expect the customs folks don't make this information available because perhaps it would raise an airport security issue that could be exploited. In any case, I plan to submit freedom of information act requests for customs wait times, baggage wait times, and airport security wait times (that latter the TSA currently collects, but only makes available via their myTSA app).

Anyone have experience with filing freedom of information act requests, who might be able to help?

<comment><USER9> Hey,

I don't know whom you may be able to get to help, but I would bet that the government doesn't actually have great data on custom wait time- I've never seen them track someone from entry to pass-through. I strongly doubt they have that.

Rather, I think you may have come upon a really cool opportunity- find a way to track it! You'll have data no one else on the planet has. It's like when Uber starts in a new city- the error on their time estimate starts high and decreases over time. If enough people use it, you'll get really got at predicting the wait time based on the factors you mentioned.

Idea: let the traveler download a free companion to the app. Then the user links to the traveler. Once the traveler lands, they can turn on their phone and let you see location.

The user gets an alert "Bob has landed!" and actually see where the traveler is. Over time, you'll get really great at refining the wait time prediction algorithm. You can ask nationality, etc.

Potential problems: No phone, international traveler can't use phone in destination due to roaming charges, can't have phone on in certain custom areas.

<comment><USER10> We do this in GateGuru already. I think you are underestimating the scale needed to produce statistically significant models across airports (or even within one across checkpoints). MyTSA even has trouble with the crowd sourcing and they have TSA brand. It's a classic chicken and egg problem: nobody wants to use the app until its meaningful and it's not meaningful until you have huge numbers using the app.

Our approach in GateGuru is to bundle the security wait time functionality with other, highly engaging and free services (such as flight tracking, itinerary management, and our amenity database) in a completely FREE app and scale our way into it.

We are deep into it and its an ongoing part of our strategy, but its not clear to me how you could generalize this and build a business around it without an amazing solution to this fundamental problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Spectacular landing page. Really great. App looks nicely designed as well. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER12> Why not link to <https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/just-landed/id520338005?mt=8> instead of [http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/...](http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/wa/link?path=apps%2flittledetailsllc%2fjustlanded) which just prompts me to open iTunes?

<comment><USER4> The latter converts to better since there's one less step to get to the download :)

<comment><USER12> On the iPhone it ends up in the same place anyways, on the desktop it's just really annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Feature idea: let the passenger schedule a text message to the pickup person when it's time to leave. The same logic that powers the app could also send an appropriately timed message.

<comment><USER4> The app is really designed for the person who is doing the picking up (it shows no departure information), and does notify them when to leave (as well as prompting you to text your passenger on arrival at the airport). It sounds like you'd like to be able to use it as a passenger and remind the pickup person (who perhaps doesn't have the app) that they need to leave. Is that right? Would like to understand the use case you're envisioning.

<comment><USER13> That's correct - a passenger could use this service to send a timely reminder to their ride. This is doubly useful since, even if a passenger were to track the flight and determine the correct departure time (which the app does automatically), there is no easy way to send a message while on the flight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've got this, I've used it a couple of times when I needed to pick my wife up. I think the last time I saw it on HN was a day or two before she was flying back from somewhere, so I gave it a shot just for fun. It worked great, thanks!

I've got a suggestion though. On the last flight I was on myself, just a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to the two guys next to me and one of 'em said something about wishing there was an app that would do basically what Just Landed does. I knew I had it but I couldn't remember the name of it and didn't manage to find it to show him before the conversation turned elsewhere. Neither "Flight" nor "Airplane" nor "Airport" in the search page turns this app up. It seems like it's possible for it to - "Flight" shows TripAdvisor's app for example. You might have been a couple of bucks richer if I'd been able to find the dang thing to show it off for you. I don't know how you get things other than your app name to work on the search page, but if TripAdvisor manages it, you can too! I believe in you! Make it happen! Also because I'm going to forget what it's called again by the next time I have to pick someone up at the airport.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yikes - the HN cynics are out in full force lately.

Kudos to Jon, Graham, and Sean for putting together a great app. Looks clean and works wonderfully - can't ask for much more!

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't it a little short sighted to not have an android app? I get linked to the iTunes store on my phone. I also can't find it in the Play store.

<comment><USER17> It's quite a bit more difficult to develop apps for Android, since the ecosystem is so fragmented and there are many different device types to take into account.

It makes a lot of sense to develop an iOS app and push it out as soon as possible so that you can start getting feedback from real users. Version 2.0 can include an Android version.

<comment><USER18> > It's quite a bit more difficult to develop apps for Android, since the > ecosystem is so fragmented and there are many different device types to take > into account.

Bullshit. As someone who develops for Android, this is nothing more than FUD thrown around by Apple fans/developers. Unless you're making a game or something, fragmentation is absolutely not an issue anymore.

<comment><USER17> I develop for neither Android nor iOS. I'm simply telling you my experiences as an end-user who has used countless apps on both platforms. iOS apps are the only ones I can rely on for consistent cross-device experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd probably use this a lot more if it weren't so single-purpose. I don't think I'd use an airport pickup specific app enough to remember to use it (unless I routinely went to the airport to pick people up, in which case I might have my own knowledge about traffic and time of day, on top of flight info).

What I _would_ use is a more generalized "you must leave by X to get to Y" where the time of Y and travel time from me to Y both change dynamically.

And things like "you must start watching this movie now in order to have it finish before your flight lands".

I think Google Now does some of this (I'm not sure), but iOS alone would be a market for it, and a non-Google option would be worthwhile anyway.

I'm not disputing that "when do I need to go to the airport for an incoming flight" isn't important, but it just isn't frequent enough on its own for me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should probably mention that I'm not affiliated with this app or website in any way besides being a fan! :)

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this is a prime example of the vast potential of computers to generate material value beyond what we could have ever dreamed of in the 1960s. Finally I can avoid making all those painful driving time estimates. This is really a significant improvement over plugging the flight name into Google. It could save me seconds, no _minutes_ of valuable time that I could be spending developing my revolutionary messaging app that allows you to send small cartoon images of ice cream cones to your friends and family for a nominal fee.

<comment><USER4> LOL. Seriously though, there are real benefits: don't be late or forget to go to the airport and leave your guest stranded; don't go to the airport too early in the event of a delay and spend hours hanging out at the terminal. I've done both of those, and I'm glad I no longer have to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> From my experience all I need know is if there is a delay or not, which I check quickly on the airport's page. If on time: For international flights and large airpors if you have about 1h to travel (traffic, distance etc) leave when the plane is landing. By the time the plane gets to the gate, people get out, find their luggage and so on, it will be ~ 1 hour. You won't need to park your car, go straight to the door for pickups.

Speaking from experiences. Also my gf is a FA.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, everyone has their own airport pickup estimation method. I guess after mine failed me enough times, I decided to solve it with computers ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great app guys, congrats on getting it out. In my previous role I worked on myskystatus.com, which was a similar idea, originally built as part of an airline marketing campaign. We could see the potential and were desperate to get them to invest in its future, but they didn't bite, and it was eventually mothballed.

Are you working with FlightStats?

</comment><comment><USER23> No this doesn't solve great universal problems, but monitoring a flight and figuring out when to leave is definitely annoying enough for me to warrant at least trying out the app. Ultimately my time is my most valuable asset, so anything I can do (no matter how little) to maximize time efficiency will always be useful to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> How unfortunate, another "app" that would be more useful implemented as a web page and text messaging service.

I realize web pages have discovery problems, but so do apps at this point. But if the goal is an aquihire, I guess they can get bigger bonuses as an app development team rather than a web development team.

<comment><USER25> Apps are easier to get paid to build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One thing that I think would be REAAAALY cool with the homepage is if the plane moving would actually change the UI displayed on the app. It would be an easy, non-obtrusive way to demo the app without waiting for someone to click on a play button. Looks great though!

</comment><comment><USER27> The app looks beautiful, and solves a problem elegantly, but it's not a problem that I would pay any amount of money to solve better than a text message or airport/airline's flight tracker does. Even the 99¢ price tag seems like an overpay.

<comment><USER4> Thankfully lots of other people (limo and taxi drivers in particular) feel differently. Some ppl have actually stated that they would pay significantly more than the current price.

<comment><USER27> Good to hear! I think anyone picking folks up from the airport with any regularity (including friends and spouses of business travelers) would definitely find it useful.

<comment><USER28> This proves the fact that as developers we can greatly underestimate the real demand for a product if we base it just on our own needs. One can now see the app being very useful for taxi and limo drivers by automating a crucial part of their business and saving them lots of time and hassle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Am I the only one thinking there is something strange with the numbers in the screen capture ? the time is 4:42, the plane lands at 5:23, it's a 33 minutes drive... so you should leave in 8 minutes, not in 18 minutes.

<comment><USER4> It's correct. The numbers won't match your back-of-the-envelope calculations because it's a tad more involved than you're assuming. Among other factors, there's additional time for the plane to debark and for passengers to make it to baggage claim. You don't want to arrive at the airport just as the plane is landing. Plus, I'm not sure how Sean edited that video together when he did the screen capture.

Props for noticing tho ;)

<comment><USER29> That makes sense; however as a visitor of this page I don't know about all these details so I might think it's a possible error and I shouldn't trust your app. Basically there is a small risk to lose potential users here. I suggest choosing another example with a calculated vs intuitive time gap different from exactly 10 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Beautiful app. Love the custom animations. Focused and effective. Based on the apps I've worked on and the range of reviews to app downloads, this app probably has enjoyed the success of 200,000 to 500,000 downloads.

</comment><comment><USER31> From my experience, there's a ~30min. difference between various data providers and even the airport on a flight status so I'm not sure if this would be my primary source of information.

<comment><USER4> Just Landed's times are actually quite accurate (especially for major carriers), but they differ from the times that the airlines some other sources publish for two important reasons:

\- The airlines publish scheduled gate arrival times, whereas we show runway landing times and then factor time to the gate and time through the terminal when telling you when to leave.

\- The airlines pad their times by 15-30 minutes depending on the route to allow them to be a little late and not get penalized for it.

Our times will almost always be earlier than the time printed in the itinerary or shown on the airline website. This is normal and intentional, and does not mean the data is wrong - in fact it's just giving a more accurate estimate of the actual landing time. I feel very comfortable making this statement as I have verified it in my own field testing, and I've also heard from thousands of happy customers who write to me to say how surprisingly accurate the app is in a real airport pickup scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Your website sucks 30-35% of one of my CPU cores. Likely that's the parallax cloud effect since it's only happening when the tab is visible. You may optimize that.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I think you're correct. I didn't build the landing page, but perhaps I will optimize that. It's currently just shifting the various cloud layers using JQuery's animate() method. I imagine the main hit is layout & rendering, but that's just a preliminary guess. Specific ideas for improvements?

<comment><USER33> You'll want to use CSS transitions instead: [http://css3.bradshawenterprises.com/blog/jquery-vs- css3-tran...](http://css3.bradshawenterprises.com/blog/jquery-vs- css3-transitions/)

In addition, you may also want to try forcing hardware acceleration: <http://davidwalsh.name/translate3d>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Love the app and just downloaded it. I do airport runs all the time for my roommates. Really beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER35> I love this app! I remember seeing it when it first came out, do you guys support other iPhones now?

<comment><USER4> Thanks! We support the iPhone 3GS and newer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This app is not available in my local iTunes Store. Does it perhaps only do US airports?

<comment><USER4> Yes, unfortunately Just Landed is only officially supported in the US & Canada for now. The limitation stems from getting good enough global flight data (surprisingly difficult & expensive). The app actually works reasonably well in other countries (I used it in Turkey last summer) but given the known gaps in the flight data coverage for flights landing outside North America, I don't feel comfortable selling it in other countries (yet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Well polished everywhere and looks great, but... is there really a demand for this?...

<comment><USER4> To my surprise, there is :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just noticed the plane fly by in the background. Nice touch!

</comment><comment><USER39> Really loving the design here, it's truly beautiful

</comment><comment><USER40> very well done landing page. nice job guys!

<comment><USER4> Props to @partlysean for the site design. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Not available in the UK store.</comment>


RIM responds to open letter published by BGR - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2011/06/30/rim-responds-to-open-letter-published-by-bgr/

<comment><USER2> Still no mention of iMessage...

</comment><comment><USER3> that BGR site slows chrome down to a crawl for me :S</comment>


China spied on African Union through computers it donated to the organization - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2018/01/30/china-donated-computers-to-the-african-union-and-used-the-same-computers-to-spy-on-them/ <comment><USER2> Nothing is ever free...</comment>


SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic - <AUTHOR> https://apollodigital.io/blog/seo-case-study <comment><USER2> > The main issue was that the writers weren't SEO specialists: they knew how > to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO > content.

> The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the > first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind > what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. > Then, you create content based on that intent.

Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc.

Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope that makes sense :)

Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.

<comment><USER3> Some of the best content isn't searched for by anyone at all before it was written, though. In the extreme case, consider the Harry Potter series—fantastic content, but it would have been horrible SEO content when it was written.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but in most cases, you won't write Harry Potter - you just want to drive leads from people searching for process management solutions, haha.

What you did mention IS an actual strategy though. The idea is, you coin a new term or strategy, and if you PR the content enough, the term will have a ton of searches (and you'll rank #1). More often than not, though, you have to be a big fish to really pull this off

<comment><USER3> Yes... thanks to books and subsequent fan fic, all kinds of Harry Potter characters and terms are both all over the web and heavily searched!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do these SEO people write so dramatically? Why do they use such short sentences and short paragraphs?

Want to know?

It's simple.

They fall fowl of Goodhart's law!

But what's that? I'll tell you!

Goodhart's law states 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'

That's a lot of words, and it's really complicated, so let's simplify!

Stay with me -- I'll teach you. We can learn together.

You're still reading this, but you're not learning anything.

And yet I'm being measured by you reading. To. The. End.

So I do anything to make you do that.

Anything.

It doesn't matter if I'm not adding value for you any more.

You've probably figured it out already and are skipping to the end. Thanks for getting this far.

Basically, if you aim to game metrics, you can do it. Easy.

But why were you aiming for organic searches in the first place?

You wanted your visitors to like you. To trust you.

And to meet that goal the 'writers who weren't SEO specialists' were actually your friend.

They were (if they were good) _reader_ specialists. They created what people wanted to read. Not what would make your KPIs go up.

And ironically, now your KPIs look great. But your content is bad, and not useful.

Don't aim for your measurement. Aim for your goals, and use your measurements to see how close you got.

<comment><USER5> I've got the urge to kick you in the balls while reading it. You have really represented a problem with this writing style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides SEO services.

In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long- term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they perform well on multiple devices.

But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their long-term traffic by delivering a good product, and having our customers speak well of us. Then people search for us, and when they find and go to our page, our rankings go up. You end up in a positive feedback loop due to the quality of your content and your product.

<comment><USER7> Your last paragraph doesn't negate the value of SEO. IMO you still need good product / good content / some reason for people to visit your site for long- term success, but if 10 others have an offering (of any quality) in the same category & they all make at least some attempt to optimise their websites, how is anyone going to find your site at the top of page 2?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> Tallyfy, a SaaS startup based in St. Louis

Ironically, I'm based in St. Louis, looking for business automation software for my company based in St. Louis and the only reason I know Tallyfy exists is because of this HN article.

<comment><USER9> Check out Pipefy instead [https://www.pipefy.com/](https://www.pipefy.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Small nitpick but title says 0 to 200k, and 3 paragrafs down from the headline it says ~8.000 to 200.000:

> which is why we created this guide - a complete step-by-step SEO case study > on how we took Tallyfy, a SaaS process management software, from ~8,000 > monthly traffic to about 200,000 in less than 2 years.

I imagine there is a big difference between starting from 0 and from an already established baseline.

<comment><USER11> Ok, we've added 8k to the lower bound in the title above. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the little experience I have of this domain for me SEO still was all mostly about building backlinks, not your shitty $5 links but making something to which people want to link to naturally.

One of my sites was mentioned on Techcrunch which led to lot of other blogs linking to it and within 2 or 3 months we were dominating the first page of Google (happened around 2010 so a lot must have changed too). So yeah getting big sites to link to you is the 80% part. The rest of the SEO stuff like tags, etc is probably the 20%.

</comment><comment><USER13> > done right, SEO can be a game-changer...

SEO is still one of the few free ways to get customers. Any ideas how to best leverage it for startups?

<comment><USER14> I do SEO work for a large (DJIA component) tech company, so I'm pretty far removed from startup-land, but I'll still share the number one piece of advice I give out internally:

Write high-quality content about topics that people are searching for.

Simple? Yes. But it still seems so hard to get people to do it. Everyone would rather talk about page load time and HTML markup and structure and meta tags and exactly how many characters their headline or URL should be. Yes, you should make common-sense decisions about those things. But no amount of technical optimization is going to make people start Googling something that they couldn't care less about to begin with. Find out where demand exists for answering questions, and give the user a good experience as you answer those questions, and the search traffic will follow.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. SEO is content & links. Good (valuable to the searcher) content earns links (over time), low quality content needs various tactics of increasing dodginess to gain links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Felt very meta reading this article about SEO while the article itself was employing all the SEO strategies - backlinks, infoboxes, etc :P

It was great that the company had already started its SEO pipeline, but what about for companies with no strategy at all? Are there any good tools to help decide which keywords to focus on?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, haha. It's super meta - we're trying to get this article to rank on "SEO case study." It will probably take a while since the domain is pretty new, but we'll get there.

As for which keywords to focus on, our rule of thumb is, find one of your competitors that's winning with their SEO, and borrow their ideas. In most industries, if you combine the keywords from your top 3-5 competitors, your keyword strategy is gonna be pretty comprehensive. As for the "how," just run your competitor's website through SEMrush or Ahrefs, and voila!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good results.

SEO is not only content there are other factors such as performance, accessibility and structure. Looking at a lighthouse audit on the landing page ([https://tallyfy.com/](https://tallyfy.com/)) it looks like there can be a lot of improvement there.

</comment><comment><USER17> Worth noting also that "ApolloDigital" cofounder and writer of the article is also the Head of Content & SEO for "Tallyfy". So not sure that constitutes as a client, nor take full ownership of this growth. Not saying they couldn't do it, but seems misleading.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice post! I would add "per month" to the original headline as "200k per month" sounds much more impressive than "200k in 2 years" which the current headline says.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And a very fair point. Fix'd!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Would be great to see how this translates into actual $ for the business. Is this mentioned somewhere else? The high CPCs indicate that there IS some value. But in general some people/businesses can make a living with an audience of 100 and others not with an audience of 100k.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's super situational and really depends on the keyword you rank on. Can't give you the numbers, but yeah, the high CPC keywords are usually the bread- winners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are they really trying to say that SEO was the sole reason that the organic traffic grew so much? That is ludicrous. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the service itself grew in popularity, or relevancy, or reputation, etc.?

I'm convinced SEO is modern-day snake oil. If you have a useful website/service with well-written content then the traffic will come to you. The idea of trying to "SEO" a useless/poorly-built website is like an obese person taking herbal pills because the bottle says they help weight loss.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the organic traffic is content SEO, yes. Around ~2k of monthly searches is branded search (people looking for the company). And, well, it IS pretty reasonable - the company IS ranking for most BPM / workflow keywords.

I do get why you'd think SEO is snake oil. Yeah, useful website, service + good content is the way to go. You can't just "SEO" a mediocre website and expect anything to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hate any SEO case study and companies that want to make it happen for you.

Just write content that help people and solve people problem.

Have you seen how Digital Ocean has lots of useful tutorials and articles, they get tons of visits and lost of customers and exposures, they solve people problem.

How about StackOverflow ? is the content written with SEO in mind ? No, they solve people problem, problem that people seek an answer for;

[https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-to-write-for- seo/](https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-to-write-for-seo/)

<comment><USER22> You are using 2 examples that couldn't be more different.

Digital Ocean's tutorials are often written by third party contributors, not DO staff. Those third parties are doing their own SEO by linking to their own websites, if you haven't noticed. It's a win-win for both DO and the writers.

Having set up a few DO droplets, I'll say that the documentation around their own services is less than great, and I often find myself Googling how to do this or that in DO and finding help on third party sites.

StackOverflow is like Facebook or Reddit; it's all user-generated content. SO staff don't contribute besides moderating the discussions. SO does well on SEO because it's been around for a long time, and the content is set up in a question and answer form, which is tailor made for search engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Traffic is of course nice but in the end not the goal, just a tool. Traffic by itself even increases costs. In the end, you usually want to have customers, not traffic. To be even more precise, you want HAPPY customers, because then they will remain customers and also bring new ones.

That means you still need good content and a good product more than a lot of traffic.

</comment><comment><USER24> What effect on sales did this have?

I have a hard time believing those keyword terms are used by people in pipe.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know why the screenshot of a keyword spreadsheet is all about prescription drugs? It doesn't seem to match the business described. Could they have uploaded the wrong image?

</comment><comment><USER26> I invite you to see this site : [https://www.apprentus.fr/](https://www.apprentus.fr/) you can find SEO specialists

</comment><comment><USER27> I have a question to author: What is your avg. session duration and bounce rate on those 200k visitors a month?

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting read. I recently experienced something very similar and wrote about it here: [https://upmostly.com/specials/2019-year-in- review](https://upmostly.com/specials/2019-year-in-review)

I went from 0 to nearly 600,000 page views in just under 12 months.</comment>


Can a Software Development Company Be Your Co-Founder? - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251255 <comment><AUTHOR> I helped David from FFVC put this together -- and the topic is near/dear to me, as I'm an agency owner who would rather work on startups :)

Would love to hear the HN community's view on this "cofounding with a dev shop" approach.</comment>


Runaway Open Source Project - Lessons learned from developing HiSRC - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cdeutsch.com/2013/09/runaway-open-source-project-lessons.html

<comment><USER2> Solid advice. In general there is a certain 'bar' you should probably set when publishing open source that you check before you do a git push, things like "are any passwords in here?", "are there private URLs?", "Email addresses?", "API Keys?". All of which can come back to bite you in weird ways.

<comment><USER3> Anything that is about "you" rather than about "code" should be in configuration or input parameters, instead of the code.

Don't get me wrong, it's inconvenient sometimes, so people will skip it and get caught, but if you can instrument a good system for doing this configuration redirect quickly it can pay off.</comment></comment>


Windows Vista security 'rendered useless' by researcher - <AUTHOR> http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1324395,00.html

<comment><USER2> This is an incredibly misleading headline.

What Dowd and Sotirov did was figure out how to defeat Vista's _post-exploit_ runtime security measures _in IE only_. They can exploit .NET DLL controls to build reliable exploits, even though the Vista runtime goes to a great deal of trouble to make reliable exploits hard to write.

For this research to come into play, you have to already have a memory corruption vulnerability in IE.

Great talk? Absolutely. One of the best of the show.

Important finding? Absolutely. IE is a top 5 attacker target.

A blow to Vista's standing relative to other OS's? Doubtful. Nobody has a good answer to this problem. If attackers can control memory in your process, they're going to win.</comment>


Is the fifth commentor representative... hmmm - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/10/26/the-economy-will-recover-in-2011/#comments

<comment><USER2> I certainly hope not.

I do, however, love the 6th and 7th. The exchange between Peter and Phillip is very insightful. Huge optimism still reigns at Google, and they still want to do great things. This is encouraging.

<comment><USER3> _"So we need approximately 15,000 Googles, hiring exclusively within the U.S., to clear out the currently unemployed and make room for the Americans who graduate high school and college in 2010."_

This should frighten us (or invite us to move to Denmark). I wonder if this will mean that most Americans will become underpaid part-time contractors for larger foreign corporations.

Edit: Learning HN markup.</comment></comment>


Sanyo debuts solar and lithium ion-powered vehicle - <AUTHOR> http://ceramics.org/ceramictechtoday/energy-environment/sanyo-debuts-solar-and-lithium-ion-powered-vehicle/ <comment><AUTHOR> "The van only takes 16 hours to charge (able to travel a 130 km distance) via the solar panels..."

This means that as long as you're moving an average 5mph or less and it stays sunny, you won't be losing your charge... or looking at it another way, a 12x improvement in efficiency*surface area is needed in order to travel 60mph and not lose charge.</comment>