Why we switched from Google App Engine to EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tophatmonocle.com/blog/2010/11/22/why-we-switched/ <comment><USER2> I think it was a mistake for the GAE team to port Django to App Engine. Django is designed for a SQL based worldview and even the crippled version included with the SDK is non-optimal for App Engine deployment.

Since the included version is so bad, people try to get django-app-engine- patch or django-norel working. Those also suck.

There's a mindset that if Django runs, I can keep doing things the Django way.

Nope. Abandon your old frameworks. If you're going to use App Engine, you have to embrace its distributed, scalable way of doing things. Use something made for App Engine like webapp or tipfy.

Yeah, there are problems with App Engine. It has downtime and things slow down. So does every other hosting platform.

App Engine is getting better all the time. I've been working with it for about 6 months, and nearly every month there is a new release with great new features that make developing apps for the platform better. The new 1.4 release has tons of great features that will make working with App Engine easier, like reserved instances and warming requests.

<comment><USER3> Could you please explain what you don't like about Django-nonrel? Why do you believe that webapp or tipfy are better?

<comment><USER2> IMHO, Django is too slow and bloated. I'm more interested in the frameworks which have a good cold start time.

<comment><USER3> Cold start times won't matter, anymore, when App Engine 1.4 gets into production - which is soon. Then you have warmup requests and reserved instances. At that point small frameworks will lose all their appeal for non- trivial projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an interesting detail in the final paragraph: "We pay about 1000x more for EC2 than we did for App Engine".

One of the rarely-mentioned virtues of App Engine is that it's _really, astonishingly, cheap_ — as well as removing the system administration burden, which is also a cost in either time or money.

For a large company, web application hosting is an insignificant cost, but for an unfunded startup it can be pivotal.

(I first used App Engine in 2009, in answer to a requirement for a simple application that had to be both massively-scalable and run on a close-to- nonexistent budget. It was a perfect fit for that scenario.)

<comment><USER5> I'm curious how this works out? When I look at the App Engine pricing it doesn't look cheap - see:

<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html>

What I see is Storage 0.15/GB/Month, CPU 0.10 / hr, Transfer 0.10/0.12 / GB. This seems basically on a par with EC2 except with EC2 you can get steep discounts for reserved instances or even use micro instances for some things.

So how is it that App Engine comes out so much cheaper?

<comment><USER6> You only pay for CPU if you really use it and not for "standby".

So if you have 100k requests in one month and each request takes 0.1 seconds you only have 10.000 seconds(or 166.66 hours or 2.7 hours) so you only pay $0.27 for that month. EC2 would bill you for 720 hours(30 days *24 hours). At a rate of $0.10 you would pay $72 instead of the $0.27.

(For this example I'm not taking the free quota into account)

<comment><USER5> Thanks. If I understand you right, it comes down to that GAE is counting the CPU on a per-request basis while EC2 is charging you per-hour - so if you load is highly variable (as many web startups would be) you get a big bonus because you're not billed for all the time between requests. If your load was heavy and consistent then it would be much more even.

<comment><USER6> I agree that it would much more even if your load is consistent and heavy, but if it gets too heavy you run in a lot of problems with EC2.

If you max out one instance, you would need to add another instance and as a result of that you would need a third instance as a load balancer. So if we take the numbers from the example I gave above and assume your instance maxes out add 100k requests and you get 110k request your cost would go from $72 to $216 ($72 for the load balancer and 2* $72 for the web/application server). That is 3x more but only an increase in traffic by 10% Of course the same math applies to your database server.

GAE pricing scales linear no matter how big you are and you never have to worry about maxing it out. Of course you have some trade off's because of that, but that is what the article was about.

I guess it's a question how you define heavy traffic. I've read somewhere that Zynga runs 10,000 EC2, at that scale adding another instance wouldn't have a huge impact, but I think if you have less than 15-20 instances (which is still huge) you're cheaper off with GAE.

(Even though it sounds like I'm affiliated to GAE I'm not, I'm going to use EC2 because of the trade off's mention in the original article)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love AppEngine. It takes you time to unwrap your head from SQL and wrap it around the datastore but that's the only thing you have to overcome, believe me.

I'll tell you my story, a desktop developer gone web, starting with php and cheap hosting from godaddy, spending hundreds a month for my pet projects.

Then I learned GAE was free, so why pay for monthly hosting when you can get it for free for your pet projects? I have hundreds of them so I took the plunge and started to learn python. Damn easy, not going back to php, ever.

Don't waste your time with java unless your corporate overlords dictate it. Python is ten times easier and you can go from zero to ninja in one day. Or less.

I started with the hello world example using webapp, no need for frameworks at all, even if you come from django, drop it. Webapp can do it all with a couple of utilities and the template engine (same as django) in a couple of lines.

You'll be amazed at how simple it is to build an app, of any size, once you master the basics about models, sessions, authentication, etc.

You don't need sql connections, chmod configs, apache htaccess, and stuff like that. Just get some data and render it with a template. Fucking easy!

Don't believe me? You lose, not me. Give it a try, you'll be surprised.

I am a happy GAE user and my next startup (which I hope will have a million visits a day) runs on AppEngine and no worries at all about handling them all. Google will be there for me.

GAE 1.4 will come with Channel API, an easy way to send messages back and forth, we just got multitenancy, longer task queues and cron jobs, xmpp, etc.

You get it all at no cost, you pay only a couple of dollars when you need it, when you get slashdotted, dugg or techcrunched. No sweat, no sysadmins running like headless chickens, no server rooms burning.

And that, my friend, that is peace of mind.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really appreciate reading stories like this. For budding startups like mine, we need every available resource at our disposal on technology choices. I also think articles like this will encourage Google's engineers to keep making GAE a better platform. AFAIK, Google is also notorious for eating their own dog food.

I was a bit taken back by the criticism on the last app-engine article. Quite frankly, sometimes you don't realize you the limitations until you hit them despite what the manual says. ("Every one's job is easy but your own.") If you haven't used GAE, you don't realize how easy it is to just get up and get going. It's absurdly simple. However, when you hit limitations you might encounter the sunk-cost fallacy, and that might propel you to keep working around its limitations.

<comment><USER9> I think Google sort of deserves some negative press after the major datastore problems of late (now fixed), but it's not reasonable to criticize the app engine platform itself. The so-called limitations are just reasonable trade- offs, and frankly they are less annoying than many that teams end up self- imposing in order to work around unexpected bottlenecks in their app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For what it is worth, we've had 99.998% uptime for static files on appengine - not using datastore or any other features (about 11 minutes of legitimate outages the past year).

During the same time period we've had 100% uptime for m1.small servers in EC2's US East and West regions, 99.989% uptime for EU West and 99.997% for APAC.

<http://cloudharmony.com/status>

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone have a happy story of GAE availability in particular?

I am not so bothered and actually appreciate the programming model. Actually reading the story, seems like some of their architectural patterns may have run contrary to asynchronous intent.

98% availability is a deal breaker for most betting thyeir business and image.

<comment><USER12> I'll pile on this.

I'm a huge EC2 zealot (and customer) - but I'm also intrigued by the concepts behind App Engine. However, there has been a spate of negative posts such as these around App Engine.

I also would like to hear from someone who is successfully using App Engine for a large scale project, and what their lessons learned, best practices are.

I'm one of those "right tool for the right job" type of person so I'd love to see where App engine might fit in some of my business' architecture.

<comment><USER13> I run two profitable businesses on app engine. The occasional downtime is a tolerable exchange for the numerous benefits. (I also use ec2 for computationally expensive jobs. The ec2 instances are started and stopped by gae.)

Bottom line for me is this: on gae one dude, sans team, can be dangerous.

<comment><USER12> Interesting perspective. I'm a "one dude" on EC2 and geeze I feel dangerous at times.... I haven't had any spectacular failures, but I've certainly had some close calls.

I'd love to hear more about how you've leveraged GAE.

<comment><USER13> Sure, my email is in my profile. The lack of sysadmin is _key_ for me. I focus on the app with gae, not updating BLANK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been developing with jruby on GAE for about a year. <http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/> There has been a good deal to learn, and some changes to adapt to along the way for the jruby library - which is to be expected. My sites are mostly noncommercial and don't get a ton of traffic, so their generous free/cheap plan was an incentive I couldn't pass up. Alternatively you can do very little for free on Heroku (the other 'free' hosting option for Ruby).

It's been a good experience overall, but this last month I have spent weeks pulling my hair out trying to do a join. I have a work-a-round in place now, so hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here on.

If I do run into performance issues I may have to switch, but then it won't be to hard to migrate and I've still had a free development environment which has pushed me to learn and cost me nothing.

</comment><comment><USER15> The thing people "forget" is that the further up the stack you move, the more support is required because there's less and less the customer can do to diagnose a problem.

<comment><USER16> By "people", are you referring to Google? If so, I agree -- not having technical support available is a deal breaker for a system of that scale, especially if outages are as prevalent as the author claims.

<comment><USER17> I think he means both Google and their customers.

Google should get it, in that they need to offer support if they want to run this kind of business. But customers should also know that Google doesn't do support, and they will need support, so GAE is probably not a good fit.

If that's right, I agree as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, these stories about the horrors of GAE are a little bit scary for me. I was starting to develop a project with a friend in our spare time, and we decided to go with GAE. We've only gotten as far as the end of the tutorial and are reading the documentation for GAE, but I have a question:

As a college student who is looking to build a project on the side as a means for experience and a way to handle an issue we have, should I look into something other than GAE? I really do not intend to make our idea a startup or anything. Any help would be appreciated!

<comment><USER19> Go with GAE. There's a lot less overhead with things you really don't want to be dealing with.

<comment><USER18> With GAE would you suggest I use a web framework like webapp or the built in Django?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is downtime associated with how complex the GAE app is? I'm planning to host primarily static files and I'm wondering if downtime is an issue at all in this case.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is it getting fashionable these days to blame Google App Engine? I am reading lots of horror stories about GAE!!

<comment><USER22> I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle.

There have been a number of posts attacking App Engine recently, and a lot of good discussions have come out of them. The two things issues that seem to get brought up most are app design and reliability.

\- Reliability: App Engine reliability used to be horrible, but it's getting better.

GAE was the first service I ever developed for where reliability was an issue. I've hosted apps on Linode, Slicehost, EC2, and my experience with those companies caused me to dismiss claims of downtime and the importance of an SLA.

Nothing sucks more then seeing your system go down for days at a time, and not being able to do anything about it. I'm glad that GAE is addressing this issue, but I'd be wary of running anything commercial on their services without buying a business plan.

\- App Design: Pretty much everyone agrees that you have to write applications the way GAE wants you to, or you'll fail.

The built in GAE Python library is great for writing simple, highly scalable websites, but it's too limited to develop complex applications on. Our application has over 20KLOC and uses numerous third party libraries. In practice, we found that it was difficult and time-consuming to write our application without turning to a more established framework like Django. We were also concerned with the vendor lock-in that would be caused by building on library that could only be run on GAE. Projects like TyphoonAE (<http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/>) are starting to make this less of an issue, but they aren't mature enough to provide an exit strategy.

We built our application on appenginepatch, a third party port of Django to GAE. Django was not designed to run on a non-relational DB, and GAE was not designed to handle a heavy framework like Django. Our decision to build things our application on Django ultimately lead to most of our problems, but eventually saved our skin when we decided to switch away from GAE.

<comment><USER9> I'm really curious about where Django helps with this? Is it really that hard to use 3rd party libs with webapp?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For a much better solution, give Djangy a try: <http://www.djangy.com> \- it's heroku for django (and eventually other WSGI frameworks)</comment>


Android Developer Income Reports Are Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.kreci.net/reports/income-reports-are-dead-long-live-progress-reports/

<comment><USER2> It really sucks to hear that. I really enjoyed all of your reports. Good luck with your future endeavors and keep us all notified!

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Unfortunately reports in previous form gave me more troubles than profits. So I need to change the concept.</comment></comment>


Michael Phelps has mastered the psychology of speed - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/michael-phelps-has-mastered-the-psychology-of-speed/2012/06/13/gJQAHiQuZV_story.html

<comment><USER2> Did Bowman remind anyone a little of Colonel Graff?</comment>


EA Takes Down 'Open Source' SimCity 2000 Remake - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/ea-takes-down-open-source-simcity-2000-remake-180730/ <comment><USER2> Bundling the graphic assets doomed this from the beginning. It was only a matter of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> fuck EA

<comment><USER4> If anyone on the project knows the copyright issues on the graphics, why is the project not official started with the conversion tool. Other projects will do it: [https://github.com/cdev-tux/q3lite/wiki](https://github.com/cdev- tux/q3lite/wiki)</comment></comment>


Microsoft cuts Live Labs staff by half, refocuses on search - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/04/09/microsoft-cuts-live-labs-staff-half-refocuses-search

<comment><USER2> really sad. Live Labs was probably the greatest innovation out of MS.

If anybody from the Live Labs team that's been re-assigned doesn't want to go back to working on shitty products...i could use some of that brilliance.

brandon (at) qds-systems.com</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most robust web app framework? - <AUTHOR> Kind of disappointed with Node error handling and resilience to crashes. It is bad enough that JS weak typing makes your app vulnerable to whole classes of errors that would not be an issue with other environments. Also, async programming in Node seems full of pitfalls.<p>What have you found to be the most robust web app framework? The one which allows one to program in the most simple, error-free manner <comment><USER2> Play framework ([https://www.playframework.com](https://www.playframework.com)), a JVM (Scala/Java) high performance web framework. Underlying it applies netty.io as I/o engine.

I introduce this because, you can just simply write Java code without learning the servlet spec to build your app server. There is nothing wrong about servlet spec, but it definitely slow down people prototyping some startup ideas. Play framework actually borrows the route file idea from Ruby community to let you write plan Java functions and configure route file to exposure them as REST APIs.

Talking about concurrent model, play framework mixes two models – reactor (This is the concurrent model NodeJS keep advertising about) and Actor model.</comment>


Ask HN: Plant a Trillion Trees Campaign? - <AUTHOR> It seems one of the few opportunities to meaningfully help the planet and avoid the worst of climate change is to plant trees (1).
After learning this, I googled "donate a tree" and "plant a tree" and was met with dozens of results for nonprofits, many of which I had never heard of.
Which of the nonprofits was the best run? Which was the most efficient at converting donations into trees? Where were the trees being planted to ensure the planting was protected and sustainable?
My idea is to create a simple campaign website,  trilliontrees.org, that serves as a rallying call to plant trees and that compares and provides guidance on the myriad of nonprofits involved in planting trees.
Anyone interested to partner on this?
(1) https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/07/04/world/forests-capture-two-t... <comment><USER2> Here's an idea to help "viralize" tree planting, especially among younger folks.

How about a tree social network? A website/app that incentivices the person to plant a tree and adopt it as a pet. The person plants a tree, names it and takes a few photos. A profile is then created.

The person can find nearby trees to socialize. Some cute artwork may help engaging people. Snapchat-like filters could be used to "dress up" the tree, further increasing cuteness (and the engagement).

People keep score by how many trees they've planted, which gamifies the process.

This may sound crazy (and possibly it is) but hey, it may just work.

If you (or anyone else) like the idea, I'd be more than happy to help build it, with the condition that it should be open source. Email is on profile.

ETA: Open source condition

<comment><USER3> Hey, that might be cool! I could try working on it in spare time, would you like to write down ideas?

<comment><USER2> Just brainstorming here, hopefully someone can further develop those ideas.

\- I think it should feel more like a game than a social network. More like Pokemon Go than Facebook. I'd gamify as much as possible.

\- Some people want to plant trees _and_ are able to do so. Others aren't. Maybe they don't have the time, or they live in a concrete jungle. I think the project should focus on both segments.

\- Those who can't plant, whatever the reason, may want to donate to projects that would plant. And those who can plant, may need guidance (where to buy seeds? where to plant? what to plant? etc). This website should facilitate both cases, as much as possible.

\- Let's say that for each dollar donated, one tree is planted. That number (trees "remotely" planted by the person) should be made public, as some sort of virtual currency.

\- Ideally, trees planted as proxy (via donation) would be photographed and shown to the donor. Unfortunately that's not practical.

\- I think each person should have their own profile (with their own name, picture) and they could create a "sub-profile" for each tree. Not sure about this. But having a separate profile (login) per tree would actually be a problem for those planting lots of trees.

\- (Or, using a better analogy for "sub-profile", people = Github profile, trees = Github repositories)

\- This "sub-profile" could be similar to a Facebook group. You can post "life events" of the tree, photos, comments, etc. You can browse other people's trees (and their own, actual profile as well).

\- Each tree planted by the users may have a location at the world map (provided by the user). This way we can show nearby trees and fellow "tree planters".

\- We can have mini-games like "visit/photograph/'collect' trees near you". Similar (to a certain point) to Pokemon Go. When completing such mini-games the person is rewarded with the virtual currency.

\- People may use the virtual currency with their own trees or others' trees. Not sure actually _what_ they could spend it on.

\- I really like the idea on sister comment from @secfirstmd. I think integrating related concepts further improves the platform.

\----

Also, something important to remember, is that this website alone likely wouldn't get anywhere near OP's objective of 1 trillion trees, but it certainly can make an impact on awareness, or at the very least increase people's contact with nature (even in large cities).

<comment><USER4> +1 on gamifying it, newly planted tree could be used as a in-app bonus/item/assets

\---

talking about social networks - such things can easily be adopted by companies like Facebook, if they simply put a planted tree counter next to everyone's profile, (allowing those how can't plant to donate for others to plant) it can lead to competitions among friends/family/groups to be #1 planters and do lots of good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems really interesting, and it obviously is important to be done. Something to note is that you'll likely need to buy up land to make sure it is secure when trees are planted. If you plan to buy swathes of land out of country, how do you deal with tree poachers? Probably your best bet is to buy in-country land and plant trees there. Perhaps do some research on what trees are more effective for carbon fixing.

And, of course, if you can find a way to make an economy around buying trees without destroying them, you'll have the most success. I've been trying to think of a good way to make an economy around that, but haven't come up with anything good. Maybe eco-tourism is the best option?

Send me a message, I'd be glad to chat more about this.

<comment><USER6> >tree poachers

Is this actually a thing? I always imagined tree cutting to be noisy, heavy, difficult and fairly non-subtle... stealing a tree seems like a really difficult task to pull off

Although I guess if you have a large forest, you'd have a lot of ground to cover and lot of coverage..

<comment><USER7> >Is this actually a thing?

Oh man the world is far worse than something like stealing trees for lumber, people are stealing entire BEACHES!

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/episode-853-peak- sand)

Transcript: [https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=628890875)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for this link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Today I discovered the 'Billion Tree Campaign' was started by the UN in 2006. Wiki says they'd planted 15B trees in 193 countries by 2018 (315M in the US).

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

Looks like the UN handed the program to 'Plant for the Planet' (Germany) in 2011.

'[https://www.plant-for-the-planet.org/en/home](https://www.plant-for-the- planet.org/en/home)

It'd be fantastic to see this organized nationwide in the U.S. ... and promoted as part of the campaign.

P.S. This video, 'Planting Bare Root Trees With A Dibble', shows how very easy it can be to plant a seedling. Anyone can learn it in a short time.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhqa3yeLxhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhqa3yeLxhk)

</comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps your website could provide coordination with land owners to show which areas are eligible for tree planting. People could even use an app to designate which areas they intend to plant on, and mark as complete. New areas would be opened up as more municipalities (or private land owners) jump on board. There is already a federal effort for tree planting, as my family owns some hunting land that they are paid to keep trees growing (likely for local soil/water retention efforts)

This wouldn't be the first time people have banded together for "Emergency Conservation Work" (FDR administration 5 billion trees):

[https://treesource.org/news/lands/ccc-tree- planting/](https://treesource.org/news/lands/ccc-tree-planting/)

I've had decent success planting things after amending the soil where the rootball is expected to be. This involves removing some of the clay-like soil and replacing with both seasoned and fresh compost. Planting a trillion trees within a rather urgent window of time may not be eligible for this sort of micromanagement (plus the root system of a tree will be quite large), but I still like the idea of spending free time doing this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Poland is paying up to 2000 euro per ha for converting agriculture land into forrest. There is also a lot of additional subsidies for forrests on private land which can add up to few thousand euro.

You can actually make small but stable profit from buying land and converting into forest.

> Priority will be given to those who intend to plant a forest in the so- > called ecological corridors, in areas threatened by water erosion, in areas > adjacent to inland waters and forests, in areas with a slope of more than 12 > degrees. Also, those who have land for afforestation in voivodships with a > forest cover of less than 30% will get points. Depending on the species > composition of the crop and the previously mentioned criteria, the amount of > support can range from PLN 4,984 to PLN 7,624 per hectare. In addition, > payment is possible for fencing of crops.

Assigned budget 2014-2020 for this project is 300 milion euro.

I believe there are similar schemes in other EU countries.

Link in Polish: [http://www.lasy.gov.pl/pl/informacje/aktualnosci/jak- zdobyc-...](http://www.lasy.gov.pl/pl/informacje/aktualnosci/jak-zdobyc- dofinansowanie-za-zalesianie)

<comment><USER11> Forrest area in Poland is growing since WWII from 20,8% in 1946 to 29,5% in 2016. The target for 2020 is 30% area of the country under forrest and for 2050 - 33%. 80% of forrests in Poland is under management of Lasy Panstwowe - state-owned company with political reach.

[https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasy_w_Polsce](https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasy_w_Polsce)

[https://lasy.gov.pl](https://lasy.gov.pl)

Additionaly areas of older forrests (over 80 years old) increased by 50% from 1946. There is also a policy of making forrests more ecologically diverse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Helping a planet that already helps itself.

"Here we analyse 35 years' worth of satellite data and provide a comprehensive record of global land-change dynamics during the period 1982–2016. We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics."

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9)

Human, an fascinating animal yet with such a high opinion of itself.

<comment><USER13> [https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years- offse...](https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offset.html)

"They further report that much of the new growth came about due to efforts by humans (such as reforestation efforts in China and parts of Africa) and because of global warming—warmer temperatures have raised timberlines in some mountainous regions, and allowed forests to creep into tundra areas. Other areas of new tree growth resulted from large farm abandonments in places like Russia and the U.S. The researchers report that their calculations showed that human activities have directly caused approximately 60 percent of new global tree growth. They suggest their technique for monitoring tree cover could be used to predict tree cover changes in the future due to global warming."

So reforestation efforts led by humans has contributed to this change. AND global warming caused by humans has caused the tundra to warm up enough that forests have moved up there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Information, live maps updating us moment to moment where new trees are going in, a way to communicate with others about planting methods, suppliers of hardware, and nurseries or seed providers, a network that is solely dedication to the actualization of the idea as seamlessly as is possible. Make an action network of steps and allow people to volunteer to be assigned a role at some geographic radius they preselect. The entire process can be organized to have everyone as effectively as possible making it happen. Hopefully the possibility of actually resolving climate change in a tangible way would help it spread and everyone could get involved together and be proud that, regardless of everything else that's wrong, we actually got together and did something good.

</comment><comment><USER15> Trees plant themselves, they have been doing so for hundreds of thousands of years.

It would take a serious amount of carbon for humans to do this task for mother nature - we need trucks to transport the seeds and soil to where we want them planted, we need to grow food so the human can eat to get energy to plant the seeds.

The best thing we can do is let mother nature grow. Build up instead of out and stop deforesting for farm land.

<comment><USER16> Exactly how big do you think seeds are? Soil already exists on the ground. It is the ground. Take a walk, take some seeds, plant them.

The trend to argue against helpful ideas is contrary to the goals of improving the world. Maybe every idea isn't perfect. Maybe no idea will solve all of the problem. But if the top 100 ideas each is completed with 1% efficiency, maybe that will all add up. Maybe we'll improve things enough to let better ideas come to fruition. So maybe we should stop criticizing, and start acting.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As someone pointed out in another thread, a campaign already exists at [https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org](https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org). That said, this isn't providing the information that I'm looking for.

</comment><comment><USER17> >Which of the nonprofits was the best run?

One can try to search for corresponding nonprofits with [https://CharityNavigator.org](https://CharityNavigator.org). For example, there are

[https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=6907)

[https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4157)

and more...

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm interested in partnering. I envision it as crowdfunding surrounded with some form of community. Buy up land, plant trees, webcams and video's to visit it, excursions to go there for a picknick. I love the idea tho give each tree an email/web/chat address.

But also plant solar panels. Conservation, buy or lease pieces of rainforest that need protecting. Attract the money from carbon tax, emission rights, companies and governments that want to greenwash their reputation. I have been inspired to work on this ever since seeing [1] when I was 10 years old. My grandfather bought a forest and walked me through it when I was a 4 year old boy. It instilled the idea of stewardship for our planet. And then there is the (mythical) 500 year old tree story about New College, Oxford to inspire [2]. A trillion trees is not enough, there are 3 trillion already, we need to double that [3]. When I go on walks I'll check up on all the trees my mom or dad and I talked about. I'll visit them, rather then their graves.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvYh8ar3tc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvYh8ar3tc)

[2][https://cherwell.org/2013/10/08/cameron-in-tory- conference-o...](https://cherwell.org/2013/10/08/cameron-in-tory-conference- oxford-analogy-blunder/)

[3] [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas_Crowther/publica...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas_Crowther/publication/281820435_Crowther_et_al_2015_Nature/links/55f9781408ae07629deb6269.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm playing with the idea of a trees4travel nonprofit. Eco-conscious individuals or business that requires employees to travel can quickly using some basic information make a donation to plant trees/take other climate change action in order to offset the impact of that flight - in an effort to become carbon neutral/negative.

LMK if this is interesting at all, anyone is free to partner or run with it - whatever to help the climate

</comment><comment><USER11> China has announced plans to plant new forests in 2018 that will cover at least 6.6 million hectares, an area roughly the size of Ireland.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/05/china-plant- fore...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/05/china-plant-forest-size- ireland-bid-become-world-leader-conservation/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Just plant some trees, it's easy:

\- Gather seeds from native species in your area.

\- place 2-3 large seeds or 5-10 smaller seeds in a pot. I use old 1l milk containers.

\- Put the pots outside, a terrace or balcony will do.

\- As soon as the seeds sprout, find a spot to plant. Can be natural (prairie, forest, ..) or not (parks, roundabouts, parking lots, yards,medians,...). Just ask for permission if planting on private property.

\- Go back during dry spells or heatwaves and water them.

\- Profit?

<comment><USER13> It is legal to plant local indigenous trees and plants in national/state parks? Or is this classified as guerrilla gardening?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Personally, I use [https://www.ecosia.org/(who](https://www.ecosia.org/\(who) would probably be a great company to try and partner with) as my web browser since they donate most of their profits to tree planting operations, and I give some money every month to Eden Project, who have been planting trees for a very long time and seem to have a good reputation.

If you're interested in helping out with their efforts it might be worth reaching out to trillion tree campaign. Their website really needs some work, but they've already done a lot of good work with some really big organizations. No need to re-do work when there is something already out there that you could potentially help expand on.

</comment><comment><USER22> Most people are going to plant a tree in the middle of nowhere, take a few selfies, and then leave it to die or be eaten.

Or they 'll plant too many trees in their backyard, which they will have to cut as soon as they grow too much, because it's annoying/inconvenient

</comment><comment><USER23> If we care about trees work on stopping the number one cause of deforestation - meat.

<comment><USER24> Source?

<comment><USER23> One for example: [https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/09/when-tree-falls-it- deforest...](https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/09/when-tree-falls-it- deforestation)

Land is cleared to make room for cattle grazing and for crops used to feed animals.

ie- meat

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can trees be uniquely identified? If yes, use tree-fingerprint and incentivize increasing age of unique trees. In return you get carbon offset credits that you can sell to make money. Like crypto, but greener.

EDIT: grammar

</comment><comment><USER26> Better, build an API for planting trees. Plenty of hipster SaaSes would be happy to add a "We will plant one tree for every subscription" slogan to their landing page.

</comment><comment><USER11> Forrest area in Poland is growing since WWII from 20,8% in 1946 to 29,5% in 2016. The target for 2020 is 30% area of the country under forrest and for 2050 - 33%.

80% of forrests in Poland is under management of Lasy Panstwowe - state-owned company with political reach.

[https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasy_w_Polsce](https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasy_w_Polsce)

[https://lasy.gov.pl](https://lasy.gov.pl)

</comment><comment><USER27> I think the correct way to go about this is to just encourage people to plant trees suitable and native to their (people's) environment. And let it scale. Better, also tell them not to fell trees left right and center.

In the exuberance of ecological conservation and all that, we must not overlook and override what nature would have done. For instance, one shouldn't plant a water sucking tree where it wouldn't naturally occur, and damage the balance.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wanted to donate to such a non-profit and I found three comparison websites, quite different from each other, that all recommended Trees for the Future: [http://trees.org/](http://trees.org/) .

They've been working for twenty years, already planted 150 million trees, and most importantly, train people in Africa to create forest gardens while lifting themselves out of poverty.

Now they plant eight trees per day for me too. <3

</comment><comment><USER29> Many US states have forestry services which will send you free or inexpensive native saplings.

A few examples:

[http://www.gatrees.org/reforestation/ordering- information/](http://www.gatrees.org/reforestation/ordering-information/) [https://www.tn.gov/agriculture/forests/seedlings.html](https://www.tn.gov/agriculture/forests/seedlings.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> how can one find areas in the bay area to go plan trees with a bunch of friends and not be associated with any campaigns etc?

With varying local rules and regulations, plant species adaptability, invasive vs non-invasive species debate raging on, it would be great to have a website which gives you info. about the local areas in the range of 100 miles where one can go and plant trees with this information readily available;

I would go one step ahead and propose to also have the saplings shipped or sold either from this website or have distribution centers/farms closer to the region where these saplings can be collected; these centers would be similar to your regular Home Depots etc. where you would have all the information readily available; One can also pay a subscription fees of 5$/month to have the farm take care of these saplings until it becomes self sufficient.

Before someone asks about how we would raise the initial capital for these distribution centers is thru carbon tax/federal/state funds.

</comment><comment><USER31> I once worked with a guy who'd coordinated planting on the ground with aerial seedling drops, saplings in cones from airplanes, as illustrated here:

[https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green- scienc...](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green- science/aerial-reforestation2.htm)

</comment><comment><USER32> I would recommend playing to peoples desires. People like beautiful yards and gardens, and you get people to plant more than just one tree if you educate them.

Tell them they can make their place beautiful and fight climate change.

I planted 6 evergreen bushes and 5 trees in just the past few months, and my yard is quite small.

</comment><comment><USER33> A friend of mine created a subreddit* a while back to encourage people to plant one tree a year. Unfortunately, the subreddit did not get any traction.

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/a_tree_a_year](https://www.reddit.com/r/a_tree_a_year)

</comment><comment><USER34> How about governments (counties/states) setting up areas that are memorial forests where people come and plant a tree or multiple trees for loved ones.

Encourage people to plant trees for previous generations of family members. And have small in memory of markers for each tree.

</comment><comment><USER35> You may find relevant people to partner with in this community: [https://techimpactmakers.com/](https://techimpactmakers.com/)

Among other projects they've already released climatechoices.co

</comment><comment><USER36> Cool idea. In my city, everyone is obsessed with cutting down trees because landlords don't want to rake leaves and the utility company eviscerated many older trees.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have a dozen in my back yard I planted 20 years ago.

Ahead of my time!

</comment><comment><USER38> How about contacting XR regarding your idea? Regards

<comment><AUTHOR> Who/what is XR?

<comment><USER39> XR is Extinction Rebellion, a group non-violently protesting the lack of action on climate change by governments and corporations. They've been growing pretty rapidly, though I'm not sure how far up their alley planting trees would be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, yes. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm used to searching a lot on the Internet and thus have made Ecosia as my primary search engine.

It plants trees from its ad revenues.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'd love to help partner on this. Coding, marketing, AWS hosting, whatever I can do. Email is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER42> this is being done in Israel for decades: [http://www.kkl-jnf.org/forestry- and-ecology/](http://www.kkl-jnf.org/forestry-and-ecology/)

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm working on something similar because a while back, I was in a similar situation as you, and was curious. The plans are to allow users to have a neat looking visualization where every single tree that has been planted can be rendered depending on where they're viewing. You may see a lot with a green border that means we can fill that entire lot up. "Here's how close we are to filling up lot X in Atlanta...", etc. There will be scoreboards. One for individuals, and one for organizations. You will of course be able to filter by region as well. I'd like to gamify it a bit but that's something I'm having trouble figuring out. Of course if someone with a lot of money wants to get a bunch of trees planted, that's great! Pay-to-win is pretty cool in this scenario. I want their contribution to be appreciated and noticed! However, there are ways to fund this sort of work besides money coming directly out of peoples pocket, too. And the people making that happen need to be appreciated and noticed, too. Revenue from ads could go towards the work, which would mean there needs to be a reason to stay on the site a bit, and whatever other factors are relevant there. That could be quality content, games, a community of sorts. A LOT can and will go into it, but I plan on getting a MVP out the door within the next month. Stay tuned! There's so much to this I'll make a post on HN when it's time. ;)

The important thing for me is to make this FOR profit and to give a QUALITY guide on how to basically "steal" this idea, assuming I am able to execute it effectively. Then, the competition can begin. As much as I hate capitalism, you can't deny it's ability to get people to work really hard. In my opinion, that's what needs to happen. To hell with the non-profit sector, for now.

If you have ideas or would just like to discuss this a bit, feel free to do so by replying, or getting in touch. My personal email is firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER38> how about contactong XR regarding your idea? Regards</comment>


The Other Education - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/opinion/27brooks.html

<comment><USER2> I felt compelled to tune into thesixtyone</comment>


Expanding a Cassandra cluster - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.gosquared.com/expanding-a-cassandra-cluster

<comment><USER2> I recently picked up DevOps duties on a project that is running Elasticsearch and MongoDB and have implemented, roughly, this exact strategy for migrating nodes to different hardware configurations within their respective clusters with similar results. Very neat.</comment>


How  Non-Profits Can Think Like Startups - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/03/advice-for-startup-nonprofits/ <comment><USER2> "new nonprofit organizations should not think all that much differently than their for-profit peers when it comes to growth. [...] Even if you are a solving a big problem, you must find a way to measure it in real time"

finding a cure for leukemia is not the same as writing a chat app.

solving truly big problems -- such as the example the article mentions: curing a disease -- requires large swaths of time, deep thought, reflection, curiosity, imagination, hard work, more had work, and then even more hard work . . . and it also means giving people room for that hard work to consist of exploring rabbit trails, failing, and hitting dead ends. such endeavours cannot properly proceed and unfold as they should in the kind of growth-and- metrics-obsessed, MBA-ideology-driven, strait-jacketed environment such as that which this article is proposing.

</comment><comment><USER3> The "self-imposed fundraising deadline" doesn't make much sense to me. I've never seen a nonprofit that didn't have a dedicated fundraising team that was always building and maintaining relationships with donors. Saying "we're only going to raise until date X this year" is like saying "we're only going to sell product until date X this year". Unless your product is entirely seasonal, there's no sane reason to do that.

<comment><USER4> In an early stage startup, building the product is just as important as fundraising. In a non profit, the product is not the good feelings they give donors, it's the impact they have on whomever their mission fulfills. If they spend all their time fundraising their product is the good feelings they give donors, which will dry up really quick without accomplishing their mission. Full time fundraising is appropriate at a scale that is not < 10 people, for sure.

<comment><USER5> Are you bringing some professional background to this assertion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked for 7 years on NGOs, then the last three on startups. I made the transition exactly because of that. And I plan to go back, with a lot of useful things learned.

But I was not thinking about these general guidelines. It is more about how to achieve growth. Make something people want/love is a great moto for non profits. Only in this case, the people are not customers or users, but the beneficiaries. Well intentioned people building things not knowing if they are solving a real problem or if their approach is the right way to solve it, it is even more common than with tech startups.

The same thing with "get out of the building". Just so many social problems are "solved" at air conditioned rooms. People don't talk (or don't listen) to the people they are trying to help.

And the growth mentality, through iterations, is a much better for a lot of problems. Specially social ones, the ones fighting poverty, urban problems, advocacy.

Following this principles, a lot of good advice on how to grow, how to impact more people, how to do product development can be used by non profits with not much adaptation.

Sure, as much as in the for profit world, not all problems can be solved by the startup=growth model. Medical research is a good example. But medicine distribution could. Some issues (lots of them) demand public sector participation. But advocacy, public awareness, could benefit from startups practice.

Also, I must say that most non profit would benefit better from the "bootstrapping startup" model than from "VC startup get huge or die fast" model.

<comment><USER7> There is a problem for NGOs. You have a user (beneficiaries) that is is different from you paying customers (donors). That is one of the many reasons of why it is easy to get derailed in the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What we really needs is the other way around: How startups can start thinking like non-profits (i.e. having a true net-positive impact on the world and public-interest values rather than focusing on "capturing", "monetizing", and "exit")

</comment><comment><USER9> Like a start-up? More like a normal business plan.

</comment><comment><USER10> I read in the last few days that 'innovation' and 'think like startup' has become exhausted, overused cliche in the non-profit world.

Also, the vast majority of startups fail. Do I want non-profits providing essential social services to fail at a rate of 90%?

<comment><USER11> I think so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure that many nonprofits are very non-introspective (like most companies I know). But some nonprofits totally blow away any company I know, like listing their mistakes and how they'll improve: [http://www.givewell.org/about/shortcomings](http://www.givewell.org/about/shortcomings)

</comment><comment><USER13> a great way to start thinking like start ups is to find ways to circumnavigate pesky laws that may be inconvenient for you and to lie about the effectiveness of your product/efforts. I think there will be a great case study published by Zenefits about this.</comment>


Lean Domain Search Launches New Business Name Generator - <AUTHOR> http://www.leandomainsearch.com/blog/15-lean-domain-search-launches-new-business-name-generator <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

I launched Lean Domain Search on HackerNews earlier this year [1] and a lot of folks have found it extremely helpful for finding names for their startups. This new tool is geared towards helping offline businesses find a professional business name that also has an available exact-match .com domain name (that way they don't have to pay thousands to procure it after they settle on a name). The tool is behind a paywall, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the concept, the landing page, and the pricing page.

Thanks!

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470977>

<comment><USER2> Your price point is far too high for the service it performs (and the competing tools).

Bustaname.com is free, and if you know how to use it, it does the same thing. Namestation.com charges $10/mo and has 18 name generators. All of which are very powerful.

I like that you're trying to monetize, and maybe you have the traffic to get a nice bit of side income, but I don't see how the service stands apart from the competition.

<comment><USER3> You may be able to get away with that high price point if you let people try your service for free first. That way you can really prove your USP.

Most entrepreneurs start multiple businesses, so they may likely pay large sums of money for your service in the future if they were given a chance to try it once for free.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two search tools on the site, the Website Name Generator and the Business Name Generator. The Website Name Generator, which will suite most of you, is free. The Business Name Generator works similarly to the Website Name Generator, so my hope is that if you see how good the free tool is, you might consider paying for the premium one (if you're looking to name an offline business).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sweet, I've registered a bunch of domains from you and Lean Domain Search is by far a procrastination killer for those times you really want to find a good name.

Glad you're continuing to build it out and it doesn't fade away like other tools have.

</comment><comment><USER5> 99$/month for that piece of crap ? Is this some kind of joke or something? I mean the web name generator is just a generator based on a small dictionary mixing the name you provide and each of the entries in the dictionary. Great ! (the whois check to see if the domain is available is just anecdotic) And you can't even give the business name generator a try. Good lick, guys.

<comment><AUTHOR> A few points:

\- The website name generator is free. If you're a startup founder, this is probably the tool you'll want to use.

\- The business name generator is the paid version. It helps you generate business names for offline businesses. Compared with the time it takes to brainstorm + check domain availability on your own or use a tool like CrowdSpring (and even then you'd have to buy the domain name for thousands after you find the name you like) this is actually pretty cheap.

\- The website name generator pairs your search term with 2,500 other keywords and shows you only those that are available; the business name generator pairs your search term with 4,000 other business names. The point of the WHOIS check is to confirm that the domain name is still available.

Hope this helps clarify things. I'll see what I can do to make it clearer on the site as well.

<comment><USER5> If the only thing that this service does is to pair a name I provide with 2500 keywords (or 4000 in the business version), I can do that by script for myself in less than a day or two (the longest time will be to generate the keywords list). Furthermore, if you suggest me 2000+ possibilities, you don't help, you just confuse me. There is no smartness in the in the tool that could really help me. Finally, why a 99$/Month whereas I will probably not use the tool to find more than one name. I mean who is starting a new business every month?</comment></comment></comment>


Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free <comment><USER2> "Maybe you think I can only do this because Instapaper is already popular. But it built its popularity while charging a lot for an iPhone app from the start."

AND there was a free version out.

He's neglecting the "critical mass" factor.

The free version helped him sell the full version until it reached that "critical mass" that was required for the popularity of the full version to continue to drive sales of itself.

I've personally found that by just offering a paid version of an app from the beginning is quite frustrating. But once I put out a free limited version, sales took off. So, MAYBE I'll try losing some of my free versions to see what happens, but I think that free-to-paid actually works just as well.

<comment><USER3> AND there's a free website that drives people to know about the ipad version in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Interesting that for all the arguments about charging for the iphone/ipad versions, he's not charging for the website service itself (which presumably costs money to run too). Perhaps there's value in 'free' after all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I second, third, and fourth the notion about pathological customers. iOS is practically training a generation of them. I'm glad they are far away from me.

<comment><USER5> Many of my friends own iPhones, and many are flabbergasted when they find out that my phone is not jailbroken nor is it filled with free apps.

I happily pay for quality apps. Why? It's going to cost me anywhere from $1 to $10, and that is honestly chump change for an app that will provide much more in value.

For some reason, if you give away your work for free, all of the cheapskates and losers come out and start insulting the service and/or claiming they didn't get enough support.

What do people expect when they don't pay for a valuable app...?

<comment><USER6> As someone who works on software for jailbroken phones, I just want to make it clear that jailbreaking and piracy are _not_ the same thing.

Yes, jailbreaking makes piracy possible, but Cydia has multiple warnings about adding the repositories required for piracy. In fact, our best statistics show less than half of all the jailbroken devices have pirated an app.

I agree with your points, but I don't want people to misunderstand the point of jailbreaking: jailbreaking is about controlling your own device and doing things the App Store doesn't even conceptually allow.

<comment><USER7> You seem like you might be a good person to ask: I love the idea of jailbreaking all my devices (I did so on my 1G iPhone as soon as it was possible). However, modern-day Cydia scares the bejeezus out of me. I have no easy way to discern what's reliable, let alone trustworthy, and I wish I could know what's getting installed under the hood, especially regarding background processes and changes to the underlying OS.

Can you give me some tips on how to discern quality and safety in Cydia packages, or are these things simply endemic to the jailbroken app ecosystem?

<comment><USER8> I don't think quality and safety are concerns unique to Cydia. Why does it scare you to use it? Do you really have any way of knowing what "genuine" apps downloaded from the appstore are doing?

[http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/10/04/iphone-apps- transmit-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/10/04/iphone-apps-transmit- phone-id-numbers-study-finds/)

<comment><USER7> To some extent, there are privacy and trust issues in both places. But I have a bit more confidence in Apple's ability to police their store, and more importantly, official apps are sandboxed and can't touch the filesystem or OS directly.

But honestly, I'm more concerned with quality than trust. I think that malicious apps are probably very rare on Cydia; I'm more concerned with background processes that eat battery life, changes to the underlying OS which make the phone unreliable, buggy code with unintended side effects, etc. I don't think this is the norm, but I have very little information with which to separate the gems from the junk.

On a computer, installing apps with no restrictions is the norm, and so there are countless forms of social proof to discover which apps are safe and reliable. I'm looking for something equivalent for Cydia packages, as well as detailed manifests of what is installed and running with each install. (Perhaps I should just stick to paid packages, where the author has higher incentive to maintain quality.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's some incorrect logic in there to point out.

 _"The math to explain this is simple: most Free users won't give me anywhere near $3.50 worth of ad impressions."_

So, a free user is less valuable than a paid user, fair enough. But not 100% of people who would use the free version will buy the paid version.

As he said in the second paragraph, _"it's hard to say which portion of the increase, if any, is attributable to Free's absence"_

While I'm not saying this is for sure, it is a possibility that, while one user with adverts gives him less money than one user who pays, cutting off all the free users could lose more money in advertising than it generates in sales.

<comment><USER10> But as he points out there are other costs to be taken into account. The amount of ad revenue can't be directly weighed against the money generated by sales. You also need to consider the development costs of maintaining the lite version, deciding what should be a universal feature, etc.

<comment><USER9> Sure, I'm not arguing for/against removing the free version, just with the logic of comparing the advertising revenue per person with the cost of the paid version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent analysis and line of thinking. The tech community really needs to give up the idea that hard work should be given away for free. Trail periods are fine, but legitimate businesses need real cash flow, and very, very few can survive off advertising alone.

<comment><USER12> _The tech community really needs to give up the idea that hard work should be given away for free._

Does "[t]he tech community" even have that belief to begin with? The techies I know, both OSS contributor and not, believe that there is value in giving away some things (e.g., open sourcing projects) but proper and expected to charge for other things.

While people may not agree on what exactly should be free I've met no one who flatly claims hard work should be given away for free.

<comment><USER13> The web appears to, but it actually follows the OTA television model (with all the implications). The Apple-led smartphone world is in an odd large-scale-B2C place right now that is looking increasingly unsustainable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does he know nobody will buy the Android app? I barely use any free apps other than the ones that come with Cyanogen Mod.

Titanium Backup? Paid. ROM Manager? Paid. Treking? Paid. Android IRC? Paid. X-Plane? Paid.

Android users have no problems paying for apps. Non-Android developers are afraid of the unknown.

<comment><USER15> I ported an iOS app to Android. I've sold three (!!) copies while in that same period, the iOS version has sold about 300. I dropped the price from $5 down to $2 over easter and still didn't sell a single copy during the sale.

The two apps have the same content and the sales funnel is exactly the same. (The only difference is the iOS app has lots of 5-star reviews.) It seems clear to me that Android users can't or won't pay for certain kinds of apps.

<comment><USER16> To all app developers, please don't give up on Android. If your market is educated middle class folks -- i.e., if you don't sell games and fart apps -- then give us a chance to start showing up in the Android market. Most of us bought iPhones back when they were clearly superior, and we are unwilling to throw away a couple-hundred-dollar piece of electronics that works perfectly fine. The new line of Android phones look great. I'll certainly be there in less than two years, maybe less than a year depending on how long my phone lasts. At that point all my spending will move to the Android market. I'm not a huge purchaser of apps -- I've probably spent somewhere between $50 and $100 on apps -- but I did buy Instapaper!

<comment><USER16> Okay, what bias did I run into here? Not everyone who is excited about Android is going to immediately shell out a few hundred bucks when they already have an iPhone. For me, that's enough money that I think about how to spend it, and new gadgets usually lose out to other priorities. Does that make me a bad nerd or something?

<comment><USER15> I'd also like to see Android thrive (mainly to keep Apple from behaving badly) and you make a good point that Android is steadily moving into the mainstream. But it will be a challenge for Google to shake the impression that Android users are reluctant to buy apps.

btw, another post from marco that shows his skepticism towards Android: <http://www.marco.org/2011/04/02/time-bombs>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This post reminds me of a post by Jacques Mattheij about an experiment he did by doubling the price of his app:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+(and+no,+Im+not...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+\(and+no,+Im+not+kidding\))

These two articles definitely make a case for experimenting with the pricing based on your market and target audience to find the sweet spot.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been using the free Instapaper iPhone app for some time, until it just completely stopped working. Trying to update, it would tell me that there was no network connection. Uh, wrong. Over and over. Eventually I logged out, wiped the local cache, and tried logging in fresh. And what did I get? A blank page with "403" at the top.

My impression of the app at this point was that either the developer is a fuck up or that I've been geo-locked out because I'm not in the U.S. Actually the second implies the first. I didn't care, I just stopped using Instapaper.

On the basis of this post, I took a leap of faith. Despite a complete failure of user experience with the free app, I bet $5 that maybe the paid app would, well, work. And so far it has.

Marco, if you're listening, you make some great points in this post, but your upselling in my experience is... as described.

</comment><comment><USER19> As an alternative viewpoint, his thinking seems incredibly shortsighted. When it comes time to launch "InstaAlbum, share your family photos", he is going to have 1/3 the potential audience to draw customers. 3x the existing customers could make the difference between the top of the charts and the press recognition that goes with it.

Part of his rational is that some tiny percentage of the free customers complain, and write negative reviews. Marco should man up and simply accept he has a good product and is a talented developer. That way he doesn't have to give a damn about the haters. It is sad that the %.1 of the population that is inherently bitchy, is driving his business decisions.

<comment><USER20> ...Marco should man up

If it gets under your skin and you are meeting your revenue expectations is there a good reason to invite haters to your party?

<comment><USER19> Yes, there is good reason. The haters bring 1000 normal people that you can sell your product to.

<comment><USER20> Again, he seems happy with his revenue generation and he cuts down significantly on annoying chatter in his ear. Seems like a good decision. Some folks would talk about his "lifestyle business" and how he needs to change x and y, I'd say just keep on trucking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use Instapaper free and am happy with it. The ten article cap doesn't bother me because I clear my backlog quickly. I actually like choosing from ten articles, reading one, archiving it and seeing a new one pop into the menu. Free used to not save my place in the article and I almost upgraded for that, but then Free started to save my place and I didn't upgrade. I am vaguely aware of some other features Pro might offer, but ignorance is bliss...

</comment><comment><USER22> I think Readitlater (and lately Readability) strips down the content much better than Instapaper. Instapaper always has a lot of weird extraneous stuff around the text. The others do not. +1 for them.

<comment><USER23> In fairness, it's worth noting that Readability app _is_ Instapaper; it's just been repackaged. <http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/05/instapaper-readability/>

<comment><USER22> Not true. Read it again -- the partnership is different. Readability was stripping away stuff long before it's partnership with Instapaper, and Safari incorporated it long before said partnership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Instapaper has little need for a free app because it's so unique; there are few paid alternatives, let alone free ones. If you're building something less extraordinary, offering a free app with an in-app upgrade path makes more sense.

The free-to-pro transition seems to work better with a single app using in app purchases (to remove ads and unlock features) than with two separate apps.

It's possible to structure the experience in a free app to make the upgrade more compelling too. Thermo and Astronut (both for iPhone) are two examples that handle it well in different ways: Astronut (game) presents an upgrade option when you reach the end of the first stage; Thermo (temperature widget) shows an ad at the bottom with a tempting X button -- when you tap that, you're prompted to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER25> I totally get Marco's decision to go with a paid version of his app. Of course, he doesn't provide an option for publishers to opt out of providing free versions of their content, which is what they're doing when Instapaper strips all the ads off of them.

<comment><USER26> He actually does:

<http://www.instapaper.com/publishers>

<comment><USER27> He also does through Readability (<http://www.readability.com/>). He's an advisor to Readability, Readability's iOS apps are based on the Instapaper iOS apps and Instapaper can be linked with Readability to provide Instapaper activity to Readability so that publishers can be paid. <http://www.marco.org/2011/02/01/readabilitys-new-service>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great article. I particularly liked the points about filtering out undesirable and unprofitable customers. Some clients really are just wrong, and far more trouble than their business is worth.

</comment><comment><USER29> I recently bought the paid app, based on the recommendations of a friend and the number of positive reviews in the app store, but am quite disappointed in what I got in return for my $4.99. I won't turn this into a review of the functionality or criticize the developer for wanting to increase sales, but I will say that buyers should have a way to vet the product before purchasing it (there was no free option when I purchased it).

</comment><comment><USER30>
      Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody seemed to notice.

What does this mean? This "nobody even noticed!" attitude he expresses several times seems _very_ ignorant to me. Sure, very few people heard that Instapaper had a free iPhone app, didn't look for it right away, then a month later searched for it, saw it wasn't in the App Store, and emailed or tweeted Marco personally asking what happened. This is the only chain of events I can see leading to a potential user giving Marco direct feedback, the lack of which is what he seemed to interpret as "nobody noticed."

If you change a bunch of road signs, but everyone from the neighborhood is on vacation and so no one sees the new configuration and exclaims "What is this?!", does that suddenly mean that new drivers won't act differently in response to the new road sign configurations? Note that assuming that somehow "everyone from the neighborhood is on vacation" is _not at all_ an unrealistic assumption to make. People who had already downloaded the free app were golden when he removed it, so long as they didn't wipe their iPhone or upgrade. You could argue that maybe they would've thought "huh, why haven't I gotten updates in a while?" First of all, I doubt anyone thinks like that. I know I certainly don't think about updates until the App Store tells me I have 10 and I get frustrated at it; I only notice when apps require updates, not when they don't require updates. Second of all, they may have just thought the free app would be getting less updates than the paid one.

And there are countless other reasons why "no one has personally emailed me about the absence of this" is a terrible reason to conclude "nobody really cared" and especially (what I think he is implicitly getting at) "no potential future buyers of the paid app were turned off by the absence of a free app." Maybe they only cared a little and got bored once they couldn't find it in the app store, but otherwise would've been engaged by the app or (since he acknowledges that there are few converts) have been interested enough to tell friends who would eventually pay for it. Maybe, and this is _crazy_ to propose, a significant number of geeks went looking for the free app having heard a lot about Instapaper, saw there was no free app, were pissed, but didn't know or think or care to email Marco about it; maybe they thought he did it purposefully and didn't want to bug him, maybe they were intimidated, maybe they didn't know who Marco was, etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm one Android user who would definitely pay $5 for an official Instapaper app.

<comment><USER32> Why? Read It Later is a great, overlooked service that does the same thing. It's also well designed. And it's cross platform.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for the tip. Just gave it a try, and it looks great so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps the free app might've converted better if Marco had added an in-app purchase to upgrade to the full version.

<comment><USER34> Or perhaps not. I've spent hundreds on apps, and have yet to spend a single dollar in IAP.

Horses for courses... it all depends on what type of market your app caters to.

<comment><USER35> Agreed. I've upgraded from a free version to paid from within an app (MobileRSS) before, but I'm not an average iOS user.

I think marco's point about the free version creating a "bad neighborhood" around his paid app really nails it. If you're not generating appreciable traction from the free version, but are starting to develop a negative image and generating significant headaches as a result of it, it's probably a smart move to suspend the free version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have a lot of respect for all the hard work, especialy since I am hooked to Instapaper like services, and getting rid of the free version might be a good move I think. Now, he seems to have such a policy of ignoring his competition in his talks.

I would guess one reason he doesn't hear complaints about the loss of the free version is because ReadItLater and others have a free app to catch these users. He talks a lot about the cheapstakes that wouldn't upgrade, but the free version couldn't get me to register when I tried it. When it worked afterwards, it was so stripped down it wasn't funny.

In contrast the decision to buy the ReaditLater (same priced at the time) pro version was natural, and I kept the free version on devices I didn't care to sync.

At least, he is totally right, after using the Instapaper free version, I am bitching a lot.

</comment><comment><USER37> I had tried the free iPhone app and could never get the thing to accept my credentials. So, I gave up and didn't give it much thought.

But then I kept hearing about how great Instapaper was. I didn't get it. My experience with the free app was bad so I didn't know what I was doing wrong. Instead of writing a terrible review of the free one, I went ahead and purchased the paid app.

And now I'm hooked. I find Instapaper to be incredibly useful and love its simplicity. I then turned it on in my Twitter client, expanding my use even more.

The free app is a detriment to Instapaper rather than an asset. Marco is likely better off sticking with a great product customers are willing to pay for who end up loving the service, than having a mediocre app that doesn't build up a fan base that translates to paying customers.

Keep up the great work Marco!

</comment><comment><USER15> Thoughtful approach on app pricing and customer selection.

The point that resonated with recent experiences was this one:

"How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything? (This is also a major reason why I have no plans to enter the Android market.)"

<comment><USER38> agreed, that point stood out to me too.

also his note about not needing _every_ iOS-device owner. And his footnote illustrates just how huge the iOS market is:

"If "only" 1% of current iOS-device owners bought Instapaper, I'd make about $5 million. I'd love to have 1% of the market"

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I applaud the fact that a developer can charge for his time and effort into building a good product. While I love hearing about these success stories, lets not forget the fact that all applications are different. There is an inherit and perceived value for everything and it's all dependent on the audience. The ROI per user is different for everyone, what works for you may not work for someone else. Marco's audience is made up of mostly tech savvy individuals where the implied value is greater than the cost of the service. This isn't the exception to the rule but it isn't the typical audience that a lot of startups are trying to capture. Every audience and product is different and take inspiration with a grain of salt. With that being said nice work Marco.

</comment><comment><USER40> > On the website, this cost is defrayed by ads from The Deck, but people using > the iOS app might never visit the website.

That's theoretically true, but how true is it? What percentage of people who have used the iOS app have also logged in via a desktop web browser? How many people have _only_ logged in via a desktop web browser.

A look at the web server statistics would prove quite fruitful - it would tell the author where to spend development time. Do most of the active users have an iOS device? Do they ever use the mobile safari 'read later' bookmarklet? Spend time getting iOS push to push new articles to the app vs. time improving other things; but only if the data justifies it.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's like a reverse of the iShoot story that caused everyone to run out and make free lite versions of their apps several years ago. Different market (productivity Vs. game, early app store Vs. current app store) but it's still interesting.

</comment><comment><USER42> If it weren't for Apple's pricing restrictions, I would love to see a free version of Instapaper that is "unlocked" to a full-featured version if the linked account is a paid subscriber. (For those that don't know, Instapaper also utilizes a subscription model: <http://www.instapaper.com/subscription>)

I happily pay the quarterly subscription fee and would love a full-featured application to go along with it. That said, I no longer own an iOS device.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't think the App Store is necessarily fostering a new generation of entitlement minded people. I think those people have and will always exist no matter what. IMHO I always prefer paying for apps, and I never complain about the prices that are in the App Store. I prefer to support the hard work that goes into the quality apps that I use. I also don't feel it's fair or right for me to complain about a product when it's provided for free. I think Marco made an excellent decision.

</comment><comment><USER44> Yes - he fails to note that the reason that most people learned about instapaper is because he offers a free version of it. I love instapaper but haven't contemplated paying for it because the differences between the free and paid versions are relatively minimal.

Freemium has a lot of perks, the chief one being - getting the word out about the product. How many people would know about dropbox if they didn't offer a free version?

</comment><comment><USER45> These days I really prefer to pay a service or an app, hopefully to give it some sustainable fuel, rather than invest in a free tool that doesn't allow the author to pay its bills.

</comment><comment><USER46> I love instapaper, but I really really want search built for it...

<comment><USER30> The latest version of the iOS app has search. Pull down when in a list of articles, and a search bar comes up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I like his arguments since they are logical and backed up with data. But at the same time I never would have bought the app if I didn't use "free" for several weeks and got the idea it was useful.

This is after reading about Instapaper everywhere and hearing from close friends that it's almost the main reason they even have an iPhone (which was probably an overstatement on their part).

Edit: Can we please stop the tired argument of "you paid 600$+ for the device, what difference is 5.00$..."?

It's like people who pay 6000$ for a HDTV don't mind paying 100$ for the HDMI cable. Some people do indeed do that, but I for one determine the value of an app or accessory based on the sunken costs of the device. I value a HDMI cable's value at about 5-10$ because that is the cost of a quality one from Monoprice.

<comment><USER48> > But at the same time I never would have bought the app if I didn't use > "free" for several weeks and got the idea it was useful.

There's a middle ground between only having a Paid app and giving a way a full featured, Free, ad-supported version. For example, you can create a Trial version that stops working after a certain amount of time. If you're making a game, you can only have the first few levels in the Free version. If your app creates content, then you can make a Free version that works exactly as the Paid version but does not allow for saving the users work. [I'm assuming these tactics are not forbidden by some EULA or whatever.]

Anyway you get the idea: there are alternatives that let the user see if they think your software is worth buying that don't involve giving the entire thing away and hoping to get enough ad impressions / conversions to make it worth while. Why so many iOS developers go this route instead of the above and just give away their app with some low eCPM ads is beyond me, though I've only dabbled in iOS development so maybe that's just what works for people :)

<comment><USER49> The time-limited demo idea is forbidden by Apple's TOS.

<comment><USER50> Does anyone know why? That seems fairly petty and arbitrary.

<comment><USER51> I'd assume it's got something to do with user satisfaction. Users hate when things are taken away from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I am sad about this since I was an Instapaper Free to Instapaper paid convert. In fact, I would never have used it if I hadn't used the free app.

I know I'm in a minority of users, but I still think the free is useful.

Having initially spent many months using my iPhone and not paying for any apps at all (only downloading free apps), I took my first step into paid apps with a cheap $0.99 app, and realized that for the small price, it made my app (and phone) experience a whole lot better. After that, I was always willing to spend money on apps (even if it was just for experimentation) and Instapaper became one of the first apps I bought.

I don't know if this is an unusual thing, but I've noticed a lot of my friends act in a similar manner. After paying for that first app, they are very willing to pay for more. And you'd be losing some very good customers if you removed the free app.

I suppose I understand Marco's decision even after all this, I'm still unhappy that we might see it go.

<comment><USER53> _And you'd be losing some very good customers if you removed the free app._

He's presented empirical evidence that he's not losing any, the exact opposite happens, he gains customers by not having a free app.

You've presented your gut feeling.

There might be something behind the 'critical mass' argument that some are saying, but that's impossible to test. Yours seems very wooly though.

<comment><USER54> That critical mass was likely there from Instapaper the web app. I went straight to paid since I was a fan of the service. I suspect there were many others

<comment><USER55> Instapaper fan here. Used the web app like crazy, wanted to support Marco so I bought the $5 app. No regrets.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Bitcoin Effect (aka Reality Distortion) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitcoinbulletin.com/2011/05/16/the-bitcoin-effect/

<comment><USER2> I wrote this but had no intention of submitting it here. As a Bitcoin blogger, I feel cramped knowing that there's a good chance anything I write will be posted to HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> no facts, no analysis, no points made. why is this submitted even? I just wasted 5 minutes reading it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Look, I think most people here agree that BitCoin could be something major. If not, the debate can still be interesting I agree that some BitCoin news is relevant here. What isn't relevant is every single thing remotely related to BitCoin being submitted to Hacker News. At this point, it's practically spam. I'm seeing 2 or 3 BitCoin posts a day, and I don't see _anything else_ getting that amount of coverage. If many of these posts didn't have "BitCoin" in the title, they would get 0 upvotes, because they're largely meaningless fluff. FFS, can we cut back on the BitCoin submissions unless it is _major, important_ news? This is ridiculous.</comment>