Heroku Beta Pricing - <AUTHOR> https://www.heroku.com/private/beta-pricing <comment><USER2> Link doesn't work for me. From another source I found:

Free – Experiment in your own dev or demo app with a web and a worker dyno for free. Sleeps after 1 hr of inactivity. Active up to 12 hours a day. No custom domains. 512 MB RAM.

Hobby – Run a small app 24×7 with the Heroku developer experience for $7/dyno/mo. Custom domains. Run a maximum of one dyno per Procfile entry. 512 MB RAM.

Standard 1X, 2X: Build production apps of any size or complexity. Run multiple dynos per Procfile entry to scale out. App metrics, faster builds and preboot. All Hobby features. 512MB or 1GB RAM. $25 or $50/dyno/mo.

Performance – Isolated dynos for your large-scale, high-performance apps. All Standard features. Compose your app with performance and standard dynos. 6GB RAM. $500/dyno/mo.

H/T [http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881](http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881)

<comment><USER3> Did the free-tier just drop from 750 to ~350 dyno-hours/month? Does no custom domains mean no DNS redirects?

[https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing](https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing)

 _edit: I read TFL, no more free tier with a cron job hitting it hourly to keep it awake 24 /7\. Can't say I'm surprised._

<comment><USER4> Under this tentative scheme, if you want to point example.com to exampleapp.herokuapp.com then you'd need to be on the $7/month tier.

I don't know why you'd want to point your domain to an app that's only up half the time anyways, so I don't think this is a big deal.

<comment><USER3> Good to know.

Domain redirects are useful for portfolio apps if you'd like to have some coherency in your urls, and maybe you're not trying to showcase that your app is on Heroku's free tier at that moment. That's legitimate, it's also a use case where 12 hours/day is likely sufficient. However users breaking TOS and keeping those apps awake 24/7 so recruiters don't have to wait ~30s for them to load is probably a problem Heroku's trying to solve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried to post this yesterday[0] and fell off the new stories list, but such is HN.

Basically, they're nerfing their free tier by charging $7/month for a 24/7 running app. People wanting to run a free app may look at App Engine or AWS's one year free tier, or compare the price among other "cloud" and cloud-ish services.

[0] [http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881](http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881)

<comment><USER5> Well, that just nuked my blog, and also my company's hubot.

Ah well, guess I'll need to properly support that hubot now.

<comment><USER6> I run my companies hubot on a $5 a month Digital Ocean instance. It's also far easier than using Heroku because it's just a regular linux server and not a managed/restricted instance.

<comment><USER7> I also use the $5-tier Digital Ocean droplets to host some side projects.

I've had some processes die semi-regularly, though, because the OS does a scheduled maintenance task that maxes out the 512mb RAM.

Adding a swap file seems to have taken care of it, though. I wish they enabled them by default on their smallest droplets: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- add-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on- ubuntu-14-04)

<comment> X-Istence Or try running an alternate operating system that doesn't run a task semi- regularly that uses up all of your RAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If Heroku actually does make the free tier unusable (12 hours a day availability), and if custom domains aren't free anymore... then Heroku, time to part ways, and no more referrals to others.

This is the reason I chose Heroku as my platform in the first place over competitors, and if my experience is common, it worked out well for them because I have paid for premium tiers on certain apps along the way, and spoke glowingly of them to others.

I'm also still a little bitter that I incurred financial loss on one app because one of their quiet upgrades bonked Ruby 2.1.1 support, causing a big delay in a critical production push. (But I'm more annoyed that this will be about $100/month cost for me to keep my lighter traffic personal apps on Heroku).

<comment><USER9> Most likely they will argue that you can use it 24 hours a day, just that they will cut the 750 free hours in half.

Does that mean you'll pay $7 a month or $3.50 a month for a 24/7 dyno?

I agree with you though, they might think they're kicking out X freeloaders, but how many of those freeloaders have production apps and how many of them are in decision making positions?

If I have to leave, I'll move /everything/.

<comment><USER10> I was a freeloader for 5 or 6 low traffic sites. But now I have a production- grade app at over $700 a month.

<comment><USER11> Are you going to move your very significant app to another platform because of this? Seems like an absurd thing to do to save yourself maybe a couple hundred bucks a year...

<comment><USER10> No, I'm very happy with Heroku. Just wanted to highlight my progression. Freeloader to paying customer. I wouldn't be a paying Heroku customer without a generous free tier to experiment with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's an analysis of how these rumored changes will affect apps of various sizes.

[http://www.octolabs.com/blogs/octoblog/2015/03/31/analysis-o...](http://www.octolabs.com/blogs/octoblog/2015/03/31/analysis- of-the-rumored-heroku-pricing-changes/)

tl;dr : Current paying customers will see a discount of up to 30%. Current freeloaders will have to pay $84/year for functionality equivalent to what they get now.

Anyone who is technical enough to use Heroku effectively can charge AT LEAST $84/hour for their time, meaning that they'd need to move to a new solution in less than an hour to save money. All the hand wringing is very silly.

<comment><USER8> > Anyone who is technical enough to use Heroku effectively can charge AT LEAST > $84/hour for their time

This is very off base in my experience. I know countless beginner devs who swear by Heroku, because it's designed to be that simple.

You're not a 'freeloader' if you have lots of apps on the free tier but production grade ones where you pay premium. You're a paying customer in that case, and that's probably a common pattern with these 'freeloaders' \- lots of free apps, but key paying ones.

All in all, I'm not going to pay $84/year for each of my 12-14 personal apps that have light traffic (couple hits per hour maybe). I'm going to pick a new platform and make it part of my workflow, and for the sake of simplicity, I will be moving all of my apps to it, paid ones included.

<comment><USER12> I'd be interested to hear what you move to, what the set up looks like there, and what you pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, as a fellow hobbyist with 12 free dynos running on Heroku with custom domains, I clearly don't want to pay $84 a month for apps that aren't meant to generate revenue.

It is a sad day.

Where are you moving your side projects?

EDIT: I'm asking since I have no idea where I should go next. Heroku was a blessing.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what you're doing exactly but I'm a member of hcoop and highly recommend joining. It kind of depends on what your use case is though. I'm not vary familiar with heroku so not sure what a dyno is.

[http://hcoop.net/](http://hcoop.net/)

<comment><USER15> Ex-hcooper here! My late friend "Nion" introduced me.

I had a good experience there, but it's a lot different from Heroku. There's no paid support or anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I understand why they're doing this - companies have to make money - I get that.

I'm still annoyed with Heroku though. Cachet ([https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io)) supports the "Deploy to Heroku" button. My experience is that their support is _terrible_. I've contacted them several times via; Twitter, email, GitHub and had no support from them in regards to this bloody button.

The reason I support Heroku in the first place is because of the free tier. It makes deploying your own instance of Cachet much easier. However, we've been having issues supporting it with Laravel 5's environment configuration anyway, so this is the last drop in the bucket before I pull _native_ Heroku support.

Our demo ([https://demo.cachethq.io](https://demo.cachethq.io)) and our own status page ([https://status.cachethq.io](https://status.cachethq.io)) are both hosted on Heroku with the "Auto Deploy" function, but only because it's "easy" to do.

</comment><comment><USER17> I totally support Heroku's right to charge whatever they want, of course. They're expensive, but they provide good value for the money.

Historically, I have a bunch of personal free-tier apps which sleep most of the time, and a couple which are up most of the time. My consulting clients, on the other hand, have paid Heroku thousands of dollars per month at various points. I also maintain a buildpack.

But at this point, it's time I get off my backside, set up a docker host on EC2, and containerize the stuff I care about. I can probably pack everything onto a pretty small instance, and I've been meaning to deploy some non-HTTP services. Besides, it's closer to what I'm using in production.

Thank you, Heroku, for some very enjoyable years, for top-notch paid service, and for the free hosting!

</comment><comment><USER18> [https://gist.github.com/cbartlett/b5e932217d494bc6601c](https://gist.github.com/cbartlett/b5e932217d494bc6601c)

[http://i.imgur.com/PdZT3JQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/PdZT3JQ.png)

</comment><comment><USER19> I think this is great! I was never very comfortable with the free tier where apps are swapped out (leading to a long loading request time) after an idle period.

A low cost $7/month plan for a dyno to always be running sounds good.

<comment><USER20> You can get around that by using a service like Uptime Robot to ping your site every hour and keep the dyno running. That way you have a free 24/7 app that doesn't go idle. I think Heroku is trying to get rid of that with these changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Digital Ocean has a dokku image. Within a few minutes you could be running several apps for $5/month.

[https://digitalocean.com](https://digitalocean.com)

[https://github.com/progrium/dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can't see it unless I login. Anyone care to post some details here?

<comment><USER23> You can't see it when you login either, think this is for select beta testers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why are people still surprised when free things become more restrictive. If you like a service, pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems they're still offering a free tier for an app that doesn't need to always be running. But if you need it running more than half the time, you need to pay at least $7/month. Will this affect current customers?

I understand there were probably too many apps running on free tiers, and probably some that abuses the TOS as well. But with AWS and others having cut prices so much, shouldn't Heroku also offer some kind of better discount?

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm kinda surprised that we haven't seen a price decrease, since AWS keeps reducing prices. I can understand they wanting to decrease the 'freeloaders', but it seems shortsighted, those people are their future paying customers. Their new pricing makes it more economical to just get a small droplet from digitalocean, i'm surprised they chose to be above that point.

<comment><USER27> I wouldn't be so quick to assume they're being shortsighted. I have no idea what the details are, but I've got to assume they have very explicit data about who and how many people convert from free to paid tiers and that they're taking this data into account.

Again, assumptions here, but maybe they found that only a very small % of users start with a completely free 24/7 app and move to paid? Maybe the folks who convert start with a low-utilization (<= 12 hrs/day), hence the limit.

I dunno. I'm just guessing that there's some logic behind the decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't see a change? Can you post the change ?

</comment><comment><USER29> Can someone make a screenshot or give a description? Link redirects to main site

</comment><comment><USER30> If you have only small apps running for free on Heroku, for $5 you'll get them all hosted at DigitalOcean and Dokku easily as with Heroku: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- use-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the- digitalocean-dokku-application)

</comment><comment><USER31> As a paying customer I am glad that Heroku is cutting down on the free usage. They are using AWS so free usage means actual expenses. Sure, it can be seen as a marketing expense but Heroku is well known now and don't really need it to gain awareness.

<comment><USER9> I am happy to pay for my production, but I feel as though part of the benefit is that I get a cost-free development playground. If they take away that, I'd rather put the money into something else where I get even more control.

I guess they want to go leaner, which is fair enough, but they will lose paying customers as well.

<comment><USER32> For a cost-free development playground, they have the hobby tier. You can run your dev apps for 350 hours per month - that's a lot of dev testing time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know when this new pricing starts? I have a free app on here that is only heavily used during certain parts of the year and I am about to hit that busy time and hope that this new pricing won't take effect too soon.

</comment><comment><USER34> This actually works out well for me since I don't host any "free" projects there, but I suspect DigitalOcean will be deploying a whole ton of VPSes in the next month with the Dokku image running ;-)

</comment><comment><USER19> IBM is trying to build their hosting business. They offer a really generous free monthly tier on BlueMix. You can run a web app with a small data store for free.

<comment><USER35> no, it's 375hours/month just like the new free heroku plan.

<comment><USER19> Actually, BlueMix gives you 375 hours of 1 gigabyte units. If your web app is configured to use 0.5 gigs of RAM, then you get 2 * 375 hours free per month. I was running a node web app with a data store using a combined 0.25 gig units, so running that 24/7 would only use up half of the free monthly tier.

IBM is trying to buy there way into the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if they will also change the pricing of the database tiers. Since paying 25$ for an 1x dyno and paying 50$ for a database just seems to be out of wack.

<comment><USER31> The database pricing looks pretty much like before. What is problematic about paying $50 for a database that you don't have to manage, has continous backups, dataclips, and ability to easily scale and set up replication for?

How much would a db admin charge you per hour to do the same?

<comment><USER37> _How much would a db admin charge you per hour to do the same?_

I think that's the wrong question.

A better question would be why you don't just rent a $50 dedicated server and run everything, including the database, on that.

If you think you need a "db admin" to do that then you should really re- evaluate your team.

<comment><USER38> Finding someone who can setup Postgres wal archiving and replication in only 6 hours per year is surely costing you 600$ in additional salary per year. I don't think your argument holds any merit at the level of hosting costs we talk about. Also as someone who does host stuff on a dedicated machine too, have you looked at what is involved in upgrading to say Postgres 9.3 from 9.1. If you have single server you will just not do it unless you are also big into Russian roulette.

<comment><USER37> _Finding someone who can setup Postgres wal archiving and replication_

Your $50 database doesn't need that. A simple backup works fine for a great many people.

 _I don 't think your argument holds any merit at the level of hosting costs we talk about._

In order to match the performance of a measly $50/mo dedicated server you'll pay in the ballpark of $1300/mo to Heroku (16GB DB + 16 "dynos"). In between these two figures there's a lot of merit to be had.

 _have you looked at what is involved in upgrading to say Postgres 9.3 from 9.1_

Yes, you stop the db, run pg_upgrade, and start the db.

But as you correctly state, most people in this bracket have no reason to upgrade their database software ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm also interested in what has changed. The dyno-hour prices of $0.05, $0.10, $0.80 for 1X, 2X and PX, respectively, seem the same as before.

</comment><comment><USER40> Goodbye then, and thanks for all the fish! =)

</comment><comment><USER41> Guess i'll be moving my stuff off heroku then (no free custom domains!)</comment>


Why large IT development projects are problematic - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/isoft-government-projects.html#problematic

<comment><USER2> They aren't - the authors are just using the wrong performance metrics.

The point of a large IT project is career advancement for all involved.

The customer managers get promoted or new jobs on the basis that they have experience of managing a $$$ project. The greater the $$$, the more valuable their experience.

The supplier gets $$$ in fees, the more $$$ the better obviously.

The project is paid for either by taxpayers (generally) or very large number of shareholders/policy holders. Their individual contribution to the $$$ project is a few 0.01$s and so they are irrelevent.

It's not just IT - it's the reason that a metro line costing Bn$$$ or an 8 lane freeway bypass is always built in place of putting on a few extra buses.</comment>


Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160313-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-facebook-dead <comment><USER2> I tried, and failed, to 'memorialize' my fathers Facebook page. It became more and more full of crap from unhinged friends and distant relatives posting things they think he would have liked. I left Facebook over a year ago, and this is one of the things that drove me away. I could no longer stand seeing posts of shit videos with the tag line "Donny would have loved this!", just so the poster could score some likes from the clan.

<comment><USER3> That's truly awful, but can't people still post to 'memorialized' pages anyway? I have a dear friend who passed several years ago, and I believe her page was memorialized... but people still post "Miss you" messages every year on her birthday.

<comment><USER4> That, along with "Donny would have liked this" posts both seem rather nice to me. It's seems a little cynical to assume they're doing it for likes from other family members. I think it's a nice and natural way to reminisce with your family about those who have passed on. I think it'd be heart warming if people posted about me on my FB years after I passed away.

<comment><USER5> It is cynical, but it's also some well-founded cynicism, given that people do such wild things for the Likes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yep, always a nice surprise when you're using your phone, decide to check Facebook and get a "your year in Facebook" featuring your now-dead best friend, and an ex-girlfriend. Thanks for that, Facebook.

<comment><USER7> "Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty", welcome to the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Randall Munroe of xkcd had a (humorous) look at when the number of dead people on Facebook surpasses the number of living people a few years ago: [https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/)

<comment><USER9> [http://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term- facebook](http://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the last quote of the article is telling:

"The truth," writes Borges, "is that we all live by leaving behind."

Honestly, why can't we all heed this advice and just leave Facebook behind?

The second we all stop looking at it the second it stops being so important. I hardly ever check FB anymore.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand how this is relevant - it's a technology people use to stay connected, share photos, and communicate. Is there some issue you have with this? The article wasn't commenting on the moral implications of facebook or even the beat-to-death privacy issues.

<comment><USER10> Please explain how it is irrelevant. If you cease paying attention to FB, then your deceased loved ones no longer continue this "digital life" as the article puts it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the future, people will only be dead for a short moment, then a Facebook AI will take over and keep on posting and replying, generating new photos and liking your posts.

<comment><USER13> Or even without Facebook. From the linked BBC story:

 _Consider a robot that was commissioned by the entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, called Bina 48. The robot is almost identical in appearance to Rothblatt's wife, and contains a database of her speech and memories.

Rothblatt, author of Virtually Human and the CEO of United Therapeutics, is a transhumanist whose motto is "death is optional". Rothblatt foresees a near- future world in which the dead can be reanimated thanks to mind clone software that can allow avatars to think and respond and be in an eerily similar way to those they're cloning._

<comment><USER14> Real life Black Mirror

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A few years ago I saw appearing in my facebook feed a link shown as shared by my deceased father, a month after he passed away.

I still wonder if his account had been compromised or if facebook was disguising sponsored links as shared by one of your contacts. Either way not very tasteful.

<comment><USER16> It was probably an app that had posting permissions on the account.

I think if you notify Facebook that the person has died (and provide some sort of proof) they switch the account over to "memorial" status (which can't post, etc.)

<comment><USER17> I needed zero proof to memorialise the profile of a deceased friend. Didn't even have the exact date of his death, let alone any documentation. It had been over a year, so I guess Facebook took a look at the profile activity and wall posts and decided it was a legit request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's been over 6 years now since my father passed away and still, every year, Facebook sends me a notification that it's his birthday. How many years without someone logging in before Facebook stops considering them a "user"?

I did try to memorialize the page, they wanted me to fax his ID and death certificate, not going to happen, so the page will sit out there forever or until they have a change in policy I suppose.

<comment><USER19> To be fair, long absences from Facebook are likely not uncommon. Personally, I signed up when I was in University and it was restricted as such, stopped using it pretty much immediately, and only very recently after moving abroad did I start using it again to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, meaning a gap of almost 10 years.

During that time, Facebook wasn't shy about reminding me that I wasn't using it, and frequently sent emails suggesting content on Facebook I might want to see. An auto-hibernate or shut down for accounts seems unlikely as it's contrary to their attempts at retention.

I think death is just something that Facebook hasn't really taken the time to establish a good public protocol for; per your post, the behind the scenes protocol of "fax us an ID and death certificate" is probably outside the comfort zone of a lot of people. Maybe it would work for people to establish a series of emergency contacts and grant the contacts a page where a certain number (at least more than one) are needed to confirm the passing of a person, at which point the page moves into the memorialized mode. The process should also have safeguards to be reversible, just in case of pranks, and allow alternative proof methods just in case the contacts are unreachable/unwilling to confirm.

<comment><USER20> I wonder how many dead people are still showing up as active users on dating sites like match.com/etc and are still getting messages from people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the primary reason why I deleted my Facebook account. I couldn't stand the thought of being run over some day and having no way of stopping the creation of a virtual memorial owned by Facebook's stakeholders. I'd be turning in my grave.

</comment><comment><USER22> At some point, people will indeed continue "living" online. It will be a gradual process, I suspect. People will increasingly rely on AI to handle routine stuff. To fake paying attention. And gradually, those AIs will become indistinguishable from their owners.

<comment><USER23> The Black Mirror episode called "Be Right Back" deals with this in an unnerving sci-fi context

<comment><USER22> Thanks. Missed that series. I haven't watched much video in recent years. I've been reading a lot more. Mostly SF. But I do recall liking how Caprica handled this.

AI augmentation could get very strange. Imagine an AlphaGo like approach to becoming better at your profession. Maybe as a politician, even. You just read from the prompter. I'm reminded of Primer, where characters were repeating dialog from recordings.

<comment><USER23> Worth watching that one episode - but be warned, it messed with my head for a while afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been thinking of this for a while: if you share quite a lot of things about your life, then, a good enough AI a few decades from now can learn - well, _you_.

'What would you ask from grandma if she were still alive?' becomes 'ask your grandma now'

<comment><USER25> That's the premise for a great Black Mirror episode: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back_(Black_Mirror)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back_\(Black_Mirror\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yeah Facebook honestly does suck, it basically becoming MySpace.

</comment><comment><USER27> Archaeologists will uncover the ancient memory talismans known as "hardisks" in the odd burial vaults the ancestors called "serv-are-ooms".

The Facebook of the Dead.

</comment><comment><USER28> surely Facebook could simply hive off accounts not logged into after say one year.

</comment><comment><USER29> They should get facebook.rip.

</comment><comment><USER30> one of my friends died in a climbing accident in 2011 in Austria. LinkedIn still asks me to endorse him for his skills.

</comment><comment><USER31> and = an ?

Should the bbc title not be "Facebook is a growing an unstoppable digital graveyard" ?

Not being pedantic but not sure if that typo is intentional.

<comment><USER32> No, not sure where you got your wires crossed but you can have either;

Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard

or

Facebook is growing an unstoppable digital graveyard

but not

Facebook is a growing an unstoppable digital graveyard

<comment><USER31> Ah yes. missed the 'a' :)

Though option 2 in your list would have been a concise and good enough title.</comment></comment></comment>


Why We Should Keep Wi-Fi Off Airplanes - <AUTHOR> http://www.openforum.com/articles/why-we-should-keep-wi-fi-off-airplanes

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's a very good justification. If you want to use that time to think then make the personal decision not to connect.

I think you're romanticizing 'travel' too ... those hours can add up to very significant amounts of time spent messing around on your way to/from/between airports, planes and hotels - your 3 hour adventure is someone else's 20 hour journey. I've probably spent 2 or 3 weeks in that limbo this year, and can't wait until the day every seat has an electric socket and every plane has wifi.</comment>


Favorite design books (Irene Au - Google Head of UX) - <AUTHOR> http://bagcheck.com/bag/5571-favorite-design-books

<comment><USER2> Just a quick note on _Don't make me think_ \- go to your bookstore and flip through it. There is about two paragraphs worth of an actual material in the book, the rest is a filler. Think - a moderately insightful blog post stretched into a _book_... it is one of few books that I regret paying for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to add a different point of view: this was probably the first eyes-opener for me, both on writing and design.

I can only personally recommend it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _How to Choose the Perfect Blue_ by HAL 9000

<comment><USER4> <http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html>

<comment><USER5> Nice! For the TL;DR crowd, it's an article from Google's first visual designer, grousing about the Google culture of testing "41 shades of blue" and arguing if 3, 4, or 5 pixels are proper border widths. Note also that the article conspicuously capitalizes the word Design.

<comment><USER6> I would love to see a list of the 40 losing shades of blue!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure what Au may or may not have been responsible for, but the Android tablet is the first time I've been wow'd by a Google UX. I'd be more interested in seeing Matias Duarte's picks.

<comment><USER8> The only UI examples that stand out when I think of google are:

\- GMail -- more for the rich use of javascript that a stunning UI. Effective, simple, and performant.

\- The main website -- simple, loads quickly, etc.

\- Android (Froyo and beyond) -- there are elements I really wish Apple would adopt - widgets, unobtrusive notification system, etc.

Beyond those, I really haven't seen a UI/UX example from google worth being wow'd about.

<comment><USER9> Google Maps should be on that list. Can you remember the sort of maps we used to put up with on the web?

<comment><USER8> Good call on Maps. I forgot about them. I think I forgot because I mostly use the Maps app on iOs/Android rather than maps.google anymore.

A serious minus that comes to mind on their UI/UX experience is the way they handle image search now. I'm still on the fence about "instant search"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also useful (but not mentioned): _Universal Principles of Design_.

<comment><USER11> Great recommendation. If I could only choose one, it would be this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish my last name were the chemical symbol for a precious metal.</comment>


Snowden, Chomsky, and Greenwald: A Conversation on Privacy, Tonight 8 PM EST - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/a-conversation-about-privacy/ <comment><USER2> That's going to be interesting. Chomsky doesn't seem to be extra concerned about the Internet. His position, AFAIU, is that all the current problems are just a new reincarnation that have been with us for a long time. I guess Snowden's and Greenwald's position is somewhat different.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg held off-the-record dinners with influential conservatives - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-holding-private-dinners-with-conservatives-2019-10 <comment><USER2> "Zuckerberg is reportedly engaged in this wide-ranging effort to reach out to conservatives as a way to calm right-wing calls to crack down on the company."

I think this is pretty key here. It's probably not because he's trying to get in bed with conservatives for whatever political ambitions he might have. It's that he's trying to keep FB from getting even more hammered by legal action for not controlling its platform in a way that keeps everyone happy.

<comment><USER3> That reminds me of a joke. Hitler is standing on top of the Reichstag after another bombing raid looking over a destroyed and burning Berlin and mutters what can I do? what more can I do? Guard behind him says, you could jump Sir.</comment></comment>


The five worst things to say to a potential investor - <AUTHOR> http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070614.wsb-seanwise/BNStory/specialSmallBusiness/ <comment><USER2> There are so many "X Things You MUST Do . . ." and "Y Things NEVER To Do . . ." articles that after having read a substantial number of them I wonder what a presentation based on the sum of all of their advice would look like. "In the next 30 minutes you will receive 20 pieces of information clearly demonstrating the eight signs of a successful startup, while avoiding the five pitfalls and accentuating the. . ."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 1\. We have no competition

2\. Our financial projections are (and/or valuation is) conservative

3\. We know more about (software / search / media) than (Microsoft / Google / Fox )

4\. This will be our last round of funding

5\. If we only get 1% of the market, then we will all be rich

</comment><comment><USER3> It's like he cut and pasted out of Guy Kawasaki's book, and then used a computer program to add randomly generated sentences in between the main points.</comment>


Oldest, Longest Ancient Egyptian Leather Manuscript Found - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/oldest-and-longest-ancient-egyptian-leather-manuscript-found-150914.htm <comment><USER2> FYI: The captions under the images (which have to be expanded first) are more interesting with more technical details than the article itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> They're looking into a rolled up manuscript that was dug up 260 years ago after being burned in a volcano eruption almost 2100 years ago. That's pretty cool.</comment>


Making Facebook 2x Faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=307069903919 <comment><USER2> Unrelated but just have a look at the comments in that post. It is hilarious because almost every comment says the site has become slow. Engineers measures load time their own way; users experience load time their own way.

<comment><USER3> Some of them complain that the site is slow in the sense that their friends' activities are pushed to their timeline a few minutes after they've happened instead of instantly. Not exactly the kind of performance problem the front- end engineers had in mind, I'm sure.

How are all these people "fans" of Engineering at Facebook?

<comment><USER4> Yea, I became a fan of FB engineering hoping to talk about their distributed systems and what not. Turns out well over 99% of the fans are simply there to complain about something on facebook thinking an engineer will fix it. None of them know anything about technology and are often complaining about apps that facebook has nothing to do with.

It's a shame. Could have been a cool group.

<comment><USER5> It'd be nice if a group like that could have a simple admission test. I'm not trying to exclude people that are actually interested, but something really simple just to keep out the whiners could be useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> interesting article, but faster is only useful when everything works.

I'd much rather a real concentrated effort on getting rid of the constant errors that popup on facebook. "Oops! something went wrong", "chat not available at this time", etc.

<comment><USER7> I went months without having any significant problems... was really happy with their reliability. But for about the last month it's been _really_ bad. It feels like I'm on their beta site or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's good to make things faster, but their method of fixing it by "writing a library" instead of just rewriting the same functions over and over again is really, really basic. It really took them that long to do that?

And once again, Facebook creates a completely custom solution for no real reason. They don't see any advantage in basing this off of jQuery or similar if they're rewriting the JavaScript anyway?

Are we supposed to be impressed here?

<comment><USER6> I'm not being nasty or anything, but if you're aiming for speed, using a general purpose library like jQuery isn't what you should be doing.

Writing the js properly optimized to the specific use case is what should be done.

<comment><USER8> You're assuming that jQuery isn't fast. In my opinion, especially with something like JavaScript, one of the main reasons one builds upon a library is that the library's functions are faster than one could make independently.

jQuery is concerned with speed as far as I'm aware; I see benchmarks for it somewhat often, anyway, and I know it's used at a lot of big sites who are also very concerned with speed and load time and therefore has had a lot of iteration and testing with what methods work best.

Of course, if Facebook tested jQuery and found it too slow for their needs, that's all fine and good, but somehow I doubt they have. If there is a specific function that's too slow, there's no reason you can't improve or rewrite that function specifically and keep the rest of the benefits of the library.

I just doubt that Facebook came up with something faster out of the blue. In some cases, it is true that highly-optimized and specific code is necessary to get maximal performance. Those cases are relatively few, I think, and usually involve code much lower level than JavaScript. In the case of JS, the code should be optimized to perform optimally across all of the major JS VMs. This sounds to me like something that jQuery's authors would have familiarity with, as they spend all day working on that.

jQuery is not an abstraction or extra layer of cruft to bog things down, jQuery is a general-purpose library. It's not like an ORM or a dynamic language that adds a whole new abstraction that didn't exist before. Yes, ORMs and/or dynamic languages are slower, but they're slower because they obscure a major functional piece that still has to be performed (mapping onto the appropriate SQL dialect and memory management, respectively) by the computer. In this case, yes, a human could usually make a better choice than a computer if that human was adequately informed.

jQuery is not like that. jQuery is not an abstraction, it doesn't abstract away any major task that the computer has assumed for you. It's just a fast library of commonly-used functions and building blocks. It's frequently tested against new browser releases for compatibility and speed. It's frequently optimized and improved upon. There is a huge community out there on tap for support and there are a lot of plugins for it. It's open-source and easy to modify if your case requires it. There are lots of other people from other places that are making important and great changes to that base at no cost whatsoever to you or your company, changes that you can apply just by installing the new version (in backward-compatible releases, naturally) and magically enjoying this speed boost that some other guy provided your website.

I don't see any reason not to use a good open-source JavaScript library. We've used jQuery in this example, but I'm sure it's applicable to many others. I don't understand any business reason why Facebook would want to write something completely from scratch when there are these many frameworks already available. The only reason that I can see why this would be implemented in this way is either developer indulgence or developer ignorance.

<comment><USER6> >> "The only reason that I can see why this would be implemented in this way is either developer indulgence or developer ignorance."

That's quite ridiculous. Any framework is there to solve most problems reasonably well, and to make things easier for developers who may not have the skillset to delve into inner workings etc. A custom solution will always be better, and if you're working at scale like facebook is, it could be orders of magnitude better.

>> "You're assuming that jQuery isn't fast."

'fast' probably isn't the best word to use, since it's all relative. I would say it is certainly non-optimal.

<comment><USER8> >A custom solution will always be better.

This statement is so absurd to me. I guess it depends on what you load into the word "better". Taking your idea to the extreme, why doesn't Facebook just develop a computer from the ground up, with custom hardware, a custom OS, and everything else? Wouldn't that be faster?

I don't agree with your statement even on the basic level. Why do you even use any pre-made tools if you could just crank out everything and have it work "better"? Why use an established programming language at all?

Custom-made is not always better, especially not at a place where it just now dawned on the developers "if we make a library, we won't have to keep rewriting the same things!"

Let's take the example of Google, a more stable and mature company than Facebook. They certainly have the resources to come up with a completely custom stack if necessary. Why, then, does Google run on Linux? Sure, they modify their systems to meet their needs, but it's still Linux. And, why does Google occasionally rebase their customized kernel off of mainline? Shouldn't Google just rewrite all of those patches so that they are applicable specifically to their situation if custom is always better?

I mean, seriously, be reasonable here. The communities behind Linux or BSD or LLVM or many other open-source projects are skilled and experienced. They may make some sacrifices for the general-purpose nature of their systems, but I sincerely doubt one could sit down and churn out from scratch an OS that's "better" than Linux just like that for their specific use case. Linux or BSD is almost always going to be better than a custom solution. There are a few cases where this wouldn't be true, but in most cases, it is true, and to assume otherwise is silly.

The only advantage of writing something custom comes if the authors of an open system haven't considered your specific problem set, but even then, unless the open system is trivial (relatively) or its implementation is totally off- kelter for your project, you're better off modifying something than starting from scratch.

<comment><USER6> You're comparing linux, to jQuery. Please...

<comment><USER8> I agree that there's different levels of complexity there, but the same principles apply.

jQuery is non-trivial. It's been worked on and improved for years. There are many big-time users of it. There are many who spend lots of time developing for it. It's fast and regularly tested for fastness. Its speed improves in each release. It's easily extensible and easily modifiable. It's not abstracting anything major and there is no major speed hit in using it.

It seems that this argument can't be solved without additional data, but if we assume that Facebook's custom library is the same speed or even somewhat faster than an implementation of the same based on jQuery, what advantage is there in the custom library? jQuery would be better here.

The only time Facebook's custom library would be better is if it was several orders of magnitude faster than it would have been if it had been implemented with jQuery. I would be very surprised if it were, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility, I guess.

That's our point of contention here. You think that jQuery is slower by default and I think it's faster by default. Does anyone know of any data to help corroborate one of these points?

<comment><USER6> >> "Its speed improves in each release."

This should worry you. It does me.

[http://blog.jquery.com/2008/06/04/jquery-126-events-100-fast...](http://blog.jquery.com/2008/06/04/jquery-126-events-100-faster/)

>> Event Handling is 103% Faster

>> CSS Selectors are 13% faster

>> .css() is 25% faster

etc.

Each to their own, but checkout the source code, and checkout writing javascript without any library.

If speed matters, or large scale, or custom things, etc then it's not an odd decision to write the javascript code yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The big_pipe used on the homepage is quite cool. The initial request just returns <script> blocks as each partial is rendered. I wonder how they work it on the server side - they use PHP so they're not using any kind of threading.

Perhaps the initial PHP request passes off most of the heavy lifting to their backend services over asynchronous Thrift calls. If that's the case then their PHP layer wouldn't be doing too much work, which doesn't seem to really tie in with them releasing HPHP.

</comment><comment><USER10> "We noticed that a relatively small set of functionality could be used to build a large portion of our features yet we were implementing them in similar-but-different ways."

Wait, what? They didn't do OOP in JS?

<comment><USER11> What does OOP have to do with it? Not all libraries in javascript have to be OOP.</comment></comment>


Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand - <AUTHOR> http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2013/02/us_rep_justin_amash_introduces.html <comment><USER2> This is my congressman. Here's why he's interesting:

He doesn't miss any votes, and he explains every single vote (even boring, inconsequential votes) on his Facebook page:

<https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash>

Here's an example of a boring explanation:

[https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/51291397874801...](https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/512913978748013)

Here's a longer explanation:

[https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/51246580545949...](https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/512465805459497)

<comment><USER3> _Here's an example of a boring explanation:_

He explained why the vote took place. He didn't tell you why he voted for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Legislatures run mainly on norms and customs. As people have pointed out already, no legislature can bind a future version of itself (which is why the 60-vote filibuster is unconstitutional, but I digress).

Congress could establish better customs, of course. It is customary in many nations to limit legislation to a single topic and to codify the laws on a single topic in a single published Act. For example, virtually all of the important laws relating to, say, education, might be published in an Education Act, and from time to time, a legislature would enact a new version of it, replacing the old version entirely.

This tends to make reading up on the laws (and proposed laws) much easier, and it also makes super-specific tax breaks for individual companies and things like that really stand out.

The U.S. custom of publishing bills as a list of "replace "and" in line 76422 with "or"" statements is a really poor legislative custom.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The states do it this way as well. I worked on updating some statutes after a legislative session and it was a nightmare. Many bills conflict with each other. Often, nobody even knows what the latest version of a statute really is. It's a joke.

In some states, such as Georgia, the public can't even read statutes! They have to buy a copy. Pay to know the law to which you are bound. How does that make any sense at all?

<comment><USER6> In theory good parliamentary practice is not to allow conflicting motions and any consequentials should have been worked out beforehand.

Also any amendments should be relevant to the original motion - which if applied in the USA would stop a lot of the pork barrel amendments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bills are a lot easier to understand if you think of them as source code diffs. This bill is basically requiring them to provide context diffs which is actually a pretty decent idea.

<comment><USER8> They should just make a law that requires all legislation to be hosted publicly on github.

<comment><USER9> Why would you choose a private commercial entity like Github as a host?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some people, when they find legislation hard to understand, think "I know, let's legislate to make legislation easier to understand." Now they have two problems.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi I think you might not have read the article, because the proposal is rather simple and reasonable.

Laws are often written with links to other laws that are required to understand them. Some laws are even "diffs" of other laws: "Paragraph 5 in law 65/1996 is removed, and the following paragraph is added instead: blah blah".* This means that you often need to open four or five different documents to understand a single law.

The proposal seems aimed at doing away with the links and the diffs, which sounds very reasonable.

*Note: the example is based on my country's laws (I'm not from the US so I don't read US laws), but judging from the content of the article, it seems like US laws have the same problem.

<comment><USER11> From the article:

''No Act shall be revised or amended by mere reference to it. Every bill or joint resolution which amends an existing section, subsection, or other subdivision of any Act shall set forth the section, subsection, or other subdivision sufficiently to enable the intent and effect of the bill or joint resolution to be clearly understood," the two-page bill states.

First of all, any bill that can't be understood will be struck down by the courts immediately. The "clearly understood" provision violates the principle that legislation will be precise. If the legislation lays out a supplementary principle that serves to explain it then it can't be enforced in court so it absolutely meaningless.

Congress already lays out why it passes bills in introductions. This is a political stunt and nothing more.

Law is by its very nature hard to understand especially in a common law system like ours based on precedents. There is no easy way to allow citizens to understand the law. It would be great if you could go online and clearly see

1)what the law is and sections have changed over time 2) which law led to which changes in the published statute and see how that law changed other sections

I'm working on something like that right now. Please keep in mind that making the law more accessible doesn't make it easier to understand. There are so many terms embedded in the law and the courts may not have a clear interpretation of the language yet; or different circuits have different precedents.

<comment><USER12> Quoting a bigger part of the changed text will not make the law meaningless.

Saying "we replace '5kg of solid gold' with '3kg of solid gold'" Instead of "we replace 5 with 3 here" makes it clearer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress _already does this_. In fact, it's what this particular agency was created to do.

Maybe Rep. Amash should spend more time learning about existing resources and less time passing redundant laws?

<comment><USER14> As an not very politically active person, when I go to look up laws, I am confronted by the reference problem this bill is designed to solve. Furthermore, this bill can essentially be viewed as Congress slightly modifying their own operating procedure to make things easier for themselves (and others). They are probably the only entity in the US that needs to pass a law to change how they format documents.

<comment><USER15> Every Congress has the ability to change any rule about how they work before the session starts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of a great talk on simplifying legislation so that law people can actually read and understand it:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_ja...](http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_jargon.html)

In the talk, Alan discusses how they simplified a non-trivial set of legislation to something more like an advertising brochure. They then confirmed with appropriate lawyers that it was equivalent to the original legislation.

I would love to see a NPO or volunteer group spring up, comprised of marketers and lawyers, who retroactively applied this technique to existing laws, then published them freely.

</comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this more the arena of a procedural than federal law? This definitely seems more feel good than reality. I believe the court precedent is called "legislative entrenchment"[1] which seems to prevent Congress from passing these laws that "bind" future Congresses.

So, to answer the Representative's question, it would appear that courts would hold this bill unconstitutional.

[1] [http://www.yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law- journal/essay/leg...](http://www.yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law- journal/essay/legislative-entrenchment:-a-reappraisal/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Minor point: Absent a constitutional amendment, I don't think the bill would be legally binding (it could, of course, establish a social norm within the Congress, enforceable by peer pressure).

Suppose that a senator or representative were to introduce a bill that didn't conform to the diff requirement. Suppose also that both houses passed the bill, and the president signed it. I don't think anyone would argue that the bill hadn't become law.

<comment><USER19> Yup. "Congress cannot bind future Congresses" and all that. Basically any "I want to change the way Washington works!" movement is so much circle-jerking for this reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Love love love this! It is precisely the kind of ideology-agnostic change that needs to start happening! Most of us argue politics in a state of almost complete ignorance. Politicians take office not knowing the first thing about the actual job itself. Ideology is a preoccupation, governing is an occupation.

</comment><comment><USER21> The bill should also include the fact that you can't add stuff to the bill that have nothing to do with the main topic of the bill. This happens far too often - like putting indefinite detention clauses in budget bills, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER22> If I'm ever President, I'll veto any bill that's over two pages without reading it.

If we really need to pass a 1000-page law for the good of the country, Congress can send it to me in 500 pieces, which I can veto individually.

<comment><USER23> So, no Federal Budget during your administration. While your at it, perhaps you want to look at the actual text density on federal bills.

<comment><USER22> Not as a monolithic bill. Modularity and delegation would be better.

The main side effect of having Congress micromanaging tens or hundreds of thousands of numbers is that everyone goes for pork. For example, everyone wants military bases in their home state. But with a smaller budget, you might just have a single item for "Military - Domestic Bases - $15 billion" (or whatever the actual number is) and let the military high command decide how many are actually necessary for national defense, where the best locations are, and whether it's better to have a lot of cheap ones everywhere or a few expensive ones in crucial locations.

And also, having a 2-year, 4-year or 8-year budget would make a lot of sense too. We can always write another law to repeal it if it's not working (or the next administration/Congress opposes the previous one's decisions), but we'll probably usually let it stand after we pass it. And it reduces waste if agencies know what they're going to get well ahead of time (especially for things like certain kinds of scientific research where you're running long- term experiments).

<comment><USER23> "military high command decide"

No, that's what we elect congress to deal with. We do not want the "permanent undersecretary" problem showing up in the US like it has in various other governments around the world. Its bad enough much of the regulation we have to deal with was never voted on by congress after seeing what the consequences of their legislation was. That's where the money is in government and what directly affects the voters.

Congress cannot pass anything over a two year budget because that would be unconstitutional.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Financial Markets Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://get-mrkt.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys,

I realized the internet lacks a simple place to monitor financial markets: a list of markets and their year-to-date performance, nothing more.

There it is.

Let me know what you think!

Maxime.

<comment><USER2> I love the simplicity of it! Perhaps it would be nice if you could switch between YTD, 1 week, and 1 day performance.

How frequently is it being updated? Maybe you could indicate when the data was last updated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestions. It is updated every day at market close. Will add a dropdown to select between YTD/MTD/1Y. Would you be interested in receiving a weekly update to your inbox?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the hardest developer interview questions you've been asked? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> A client of mine asked me at the start of the meeting; "how would you go about making a logistics application that will collect data from 300.000 different logistics companies, calculate the price based on the country the logistics company is in, and make it usable all over the world between users, agents and said companies".</comment>


The Programming Languages Zoo - <AUTHOR> http://plzoo.andrej.com/ <comment><USER2> Two powerful, mind-bending items missing from the list of paradigms:

(1) Dependent types. c.f Idris (or Agda, or others -- but Idris).

(2) Logic programming. (It appears in the list of languages ("miniprolog") but not the list of paradigms.)

I consider both of these much more important than some of the more popular paradigms (object-oriented, procedural, dynamic typing -- if I never use such a language again it'll be too soon).

<comment><USER3> (3) declarative programming (e.g. SQL)

<comment><USER4> It has miniprolog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminded me of the Programming Paradigms Poster: [https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigmsDIAGRAMeng108.jpg](https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigmsDIAGRAMeng108.jpg)

<comment><USER6> ah yes, the chart in which they just put "Oz" and "Alice" under every box

<comment><USER7> ctrl-c, ctrl-v issue ...

<comment><USER5> Well spotted. The reason is that this chart's author is the designer of Oz, which is a multi-paradigm language if there ever was one, as is reflected in the chart, and the design of which is painstakingly and very well explained in his book, "Concepts, Techniques, Models of Computer Programming".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there one of these languages to start with? Or would you choose one that interests you and study that one? There seems like some great content but I don't see a clear place to start

<comment><USER9> The best way to choose a language is always to look at what problem you're trying to solve and what kinds of problems the languages you're looking at aimed toward.

If you're not familiar with programming already, python has a very low cost of entry and a massive following.

If you're familiar with programming and looking to get into functional stuff, Haskell will give you a pretty good start.

<comment><USER10> I guess what jesse_m had in mind were the mini languages from the article. I'd say 'calc' looks like a good starting point, but I agree that picking an order is hard.

<comment><USER8> Yeah I'm familiar with OCaml I wasnt sure if there was a language progression that was suggested to go through. I was actually interested in using Menhir more too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Taste of Ramsey Theory - <AUTHOR> http://www.penzba.co.uk/RamseyTheory.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This was initially a short email in reply to a question I was asked recently. I then wrote a slightly longer version as a web page and pointed the individual at it.

I always intended to add diagrams, but I think it's better without. With diagrams, you will follow my explanation, but you might not work at understanding. Without diagrams, you have to do the visualisation yourself, and I think that helps the understanding. It takes more work, but if you really want to understand this, you have to do the work.

You may disagree - I'd love to hear your take on it.</comment>


Show HN: Easy React Universal App Example - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tonyspiro/react-universal-blog#top <comment><AUTHOR> I added some new sentences to the README.md file which explains the organization:

"I tried to keep the organization as simple as possible. There are no client, server or shared component folders. All components are shared and the only difference between client and server are the entry points (app-client.js, app- server.js, app-deploy.js)."

I think there are a lot of universal react example boilerplates out there that over-complicate the app components.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice code, interesting how you split the server and the app into to different app.js files.

I was wondering if you can speak to how fast rendering react is on the server side now that 0.14 is out? I've heard somewhat negative things about doing it on 0.13, but 0.14 seemed like it might make a difference.

Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks checking it out!

I'm not sure about the speed difference between 0.13 and 0.14. Do you have any links you can share?

\- Tony</comment></comment>


YouTube will opt-in all existing videos (over 8mins) for mid-roll ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCLxiN_dpjU <comment><USER2> I've been working on mainstream media content for broadcast and streaming services heavily for the last 10 years. I figured it was only a matter of time before they did something like this. At some point, the ad dollars and need to be profitable take control.

To be honest, I think this will go over very poorly. Once content becomes inundated with ads, we tend to just move on to something less intrusive. I'm not sure if views will drop, but there's a massive economy at stake here and media is a far more fragile ecosystem than most think.

<comment><USER3> What ads?

<comment><USER4> Dont you worry, at some point google will switch to re-encoding every session in real time with hardcoded ads. Even today they dont care about cache-ability and their official player keeps refetching same data every time you decide to rewind more than 5 minutes, +video stream TTL is set to something like 60 minutes last time I checked. Btw Chrome will happily write that data (twice) as cache on your SSD, to never be used by anything ever again!

<comment><USER5> Excited for TiVo for YouTube

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it still worth it for people to make videos on YouTube?

Is Google still sharing revenue from the ad money?

<comment><USER4> Most big channels have external sponsor/affiliate deals. Others,like AvE, instead of 'selling out' go direct patronage route and are pulling comfy >$50K/month thru donations [https://graphtreon.com/creator/AvE](https://graphtreon.com/creator/AvE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> YouTube cannot "opt-in". That's not what "opt-in" means.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ha, I'm responsible for this as I was insisting on scrolling over hundreds of 3-6 min soundbites to find the 1h+ concert I was after, even if Google made it nigh impossible to find in the last couple months. Seriously, we need a new (paid) music download service; Apple Music doesn't carry all the titles I want anymore, and the videos on yt are just consuming bandwidth anyway.

<comment><USER9> What's wrong with Spotify?

<comment><USER2> Spotify and Apple Music have the same issues, sometimes opposite issues. I used Spotify for years, and switched to Apple Music out of curiosity to allow me to have better control of a curated collection of work mixed with all the music I still owned from my younger years. I listen to a far more diverse collection on Apple Music, but it's also far more difficult to discover new things and aimlessly browse. Spotify is slowly building a wall around itself. They have a lot of great original content that you can't get anywhere else. Just thoughts I had so far. That's all.</comment></comment></comment>


Better than another job posting? - <AUTHOR> http://www.killerleadeng.com

<comment><USER2> From a cultural point of view I find this interesting: it may well be the epitome of hipster job offerings. Look at all those white dudes from the early ninties!

Is "bubble nostalgia" its own genre yet?

</comment><comment><USER3> No, much worse actually. Arrogant and left me with no clue as to what they are doing. Won't even bother looking.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "...the epitome of hipster job offerings". Guilty. As. Charged.</comment>


Ask HN: Non-technical jobs for an average person without a college degree? - <AUTHOR> What kinds of non-technical jobs can your average person without a college degree get in the US to still make it into the middle class? <comment><USER3> Let's remember that the vast majority of jobs are non-technical and held by people without college degrees. Most of the middle class don't have college degrees, and of course very few have technical jobs.[0]

My point is that the range of possibilities is immense. Nobody could possibly answer your question, especially without knowing more about you. Here's some general advice from a stranger on the Internet:

1) Self-knowledge is most important, IMHO, to career choice. Learn what you care about, what inspires you, what you like and don't like, what your strengths and weaknesses are, etc. Most people have a poor understanding of these things.

2) Based on that, embark on a career in something you love and which suits you well. It will take plenty of time and effort to get traction and build 'career capital';[1] it will seem impossible to get your foot in the door, but be patient and persistent and use the time to acquire skills and contacts - <USER2> will be very busy later. You might as well invest that effort in something you love. That way, later, when a contact calls you with a business idea or you come across some great opportunity, it will be to do what you love instead of something you merely endure.

3) No matter what you do, some people will tell you it's wrong. You can't please everyone, and they really don't know you the way you do (see #1). Ignore most advice (especially from strangers on the Internet).

\----

[0] A quick search of formal education levels didn't find anything but I did find that only 40% of middle-class students who start college get a degree, so the number with degrees is very likely lower. [http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/25/news/economy/middle-class- ki...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/25/news/economy/middle-class-kids- college/)

[1] [https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career- capital/](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-capital/) \- this whole website seems pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER4> Skilled trades like plumber come to mind. There are millionaire plumbers. Car dealerships and real estate/ property management are also paths to success for many. Many jobs require some certification or education, but it's less than a college degree. [http://profoundlydisconnected.com/](http://profoundlydisconnected.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Middle class isn't about where you are employed, it's about you employing yourself eg. You're not dependent on someone else for money.

edit: although you are dependent on customers. But the recent /r/dataisbeautfiul post said that if you're employed, you're not middle class. Middle class is like a company owner.

I shall find the link.

Hurr tis

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/54ahqj/eve...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/54ahqj/everybody_thinks_they_are_middleclass/)

Saw this somewhere on Reddit.

Factory work sucks, but I see people who put in the years and get to 50K, but fuck factory work. Unless you do something cool. In my instance cutting meat (doing the same thing, 6,300 times in a day)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Hurr tis

This was my favorite part.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes, brilliance is like a piece of corn in a pile of crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of jobs can lead to being middle class if you a) sticjpk with them/get good and b) manage your personal finances well.

Some janitor left millions to charity. He was frugal and was good at investing in stocks.

I have read that the 5% of people who have financial goals outperform the 95% without them -- combined.

I have also read that people who folow their interests typically have more career success. People who like what they are doing tend to do it well, for a variety of reasons.

I suggest you figure out what you enjoy doing and try to find a job that is a good fit for that to the best of your ability. Also, learn to budget, stay healthy, use birth control consistently. Health issues and unplanned children seriously derail personal budgets.

Best.

</comment><comment><USER7> If by non-technical you mean non-IT, then... the majority of jobs? :-)

Plumber, electrician, mechanic, more or less specialized repairman, construction, plant operator, retail. Many of these can pay well as long as you gain experience and are willing to put in the hours. On the less "sweaty" side, many marketing and creative jobs (photography, videomaking, design, etc).

Since you'll have to spend a lifetime at it, what is it that you actually enjoy doing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was interested in IT the most but I wanted to keep my options open with non- IT, like a desk job. A job in marketing, human resources, recruitment...could work but I think you need a college degree for those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> UX designer or researcher, product manager, visual designer, graphic designer, QA engineer</comment>


Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2018/06/20/surgeon-atul-gawande-selected-ceo-amazon-partners/ <comment><USER2> Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust. This is still probably a terrible choice of CEO.

To my knowledge he has never run a large organization or dealt directly with the complex backend of the healthcare system. The was healthcare is delivered and paid for is full of independent, semi monopolistic players that have often conflicting incentives. Oh and lets not forget that we have 50 states and 50 different sets of regulations.

Unless the plan is to create a brand new completely vertically integrated system, you're gonna have to deal with the existing infrastructure, and I'd be much more confident in success if the person leading that effort had experience there. Having worked with many physicians and insurance companies, I can say from experience those skill sets are not the same.

Even if the idea is to be vertically integrated, someone like the CEO of the Mayo Clinic or Kaiser would have been a better choice.

<comment><USER3> >Atul Gawande is a brilliant person with interesting ideas on how to make healthcare more humane and robust

No, he's not.

No offense to him, but he's a -popularizer-. He takes various bits the HC quality improvement folks have been talking about / doing for years and writes (very articulate, engaging) articles that make it accessible to the wider community, including the wider medical community that normally isn't in on those discussions. He also has a habit of relating it in a fairly shallow/one dimensional way, compared to the real deb-

Malcolm Gladwell. He's Malcolm Gladwell, but for healthcare.

<comment><USER4> That's not at all the case.

[http://atulgawande.com/about/](http://atulgawande.com/about/)

Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is also Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and Chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally.

[http://atulgawande.com/research/](http://atulgawande.com/research/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Gawande%20AA%5BAut...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Gawande%20AA%5BAuthor%5D&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=29862506)

<comment><USER5> Fair enough, he's a popularizer _and also_ a top-tier surgeon.

I agree with parent comment -- there is a difference between being the person/people who came up with brilliant ideas and being the person who brought them to the masses in a pithy, cogent and engaging manner.

One might even make the argument that the latter task is relatively more important than the former for people in high-visibility figurehead type positions such as CEO of a massively ambitious new healthcare venture.

The "Gladwell for healthcare" comparison is a good one, and I say that as someone who has enjoyed reading Gawande's books.

<comment><USER6> >and also a top-tier surgeon.

The only people who can differentiate between 1)surgeons who are expert in the O.R. whose patients do well in the long run and 2)those whose reputations exceed their abilities and results are anesthesiologists. Trust me, I was one for 38 years, at UCLA, the University of Virginia, and in private hospitals. I will never forget the time a world-renowned cardiac surgeon at UCLA at the height of his career — holder of an endowed distinguished chair, first author of the then most widely acclaimed textbook in the field, whose surgical skills were so sub-par he was only allowed to operate with a senior cardiac surgeon as his "first assistant" — was repairing a child's AV septal defect by sewing on a patch (on full cardiopulmonary bypass) only to be interrupted by his "first assistant" who quietly told him, "You've got the patch on backwards." I was standing literally two feet from the two of them, behind the drape.

<comment><USER7> So what's your point? Should no one try to differentiate good surgeons or bad unless they are their peer for years?

There's lots of crappy programmers with good reputations too. But it's a weird reply to "he's a top tier surgeon" that you say it's unknowable.

I'm sure you're right, I'm not a surgeon so I have no idea how to evaluate a good surgeon, but there must be some way to qualify the poor ones from the great ones.

Your anecdote is a great example of high reputation, low skill. But is that the only instance. Is it 10%? Are most board certified, practice for 20 years surgeons good or bad? What's the actionable intelligence, but it seems like the conversation ends with "it's unknowable."

I am sort of aware of quality measurement, but not a healthcare practitioner, but I've noticed this comment from lots of docs that the only way to know if medicine is good or bad is to have a doctor review it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can thoroughly recommend reading Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto". The premise, on the face of it, is mundane, but the stories that back up the claims are thoroughly enjoyable to read. [http://atulgawande.com/book/the- checklist-manifesto/](http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/)

<comment><USER9> The book is good, but the article it's based on is better, because there's simply not enough material for a whole book, so it feels a bit forced.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the- checklist](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist)

<comment><USER10> I wish every self help book had an article like this for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the type of topic where I feel that HN community tends to not provide valuable insight as it's outside of the community's collective expertise. How many individuals here have hired SVP+ level employees and how would that compare to the collective experience of Bezos, Buffet, and Dimon?

<comment><USER12> Bezos, Buffet, and Dimon are unfortunately not available today to discuss this topic in the HN forum so you're stuck debating the pros and cons with us [fellow?] peasants, sorry.

<comment><USER13> Off topic sorry, but this is such a British response. Funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I read the checklist manifesto I thought it was going to change my life. It didn't because I didn't put it into effect.

Then I thought it would be great if software did the work for me, including communal checklists that people can share with me. (Got a new car, here is a checklist template. Got a new house? Here is the checklist template? Is it an investment property, use this checklist. Oh, that is good for Florida, but in Texas, use this one.)

I found some software that is sort of close but nothing quite there.

Edit: Atul Gawande wrote the book so it is sort of tangentially related. I could make it more relevant by explaining how his checklists make him a general purpose leader or something, but I can't bring myself to do it.

<comment><USER15> Have you tried Process Street?

<comment><USER14> Just looked it up. It looks interesting for a company that wants to run a process.

I was thinking more for individuals, and note that the key is having people remember things you may not. For example, if the list has something like check your roof for leaks if its been 15 years or something you may not think of.

<comment><USER15> It's also something I always wanted after reading that book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want to learn a little more about how Atul Gawande looks at the healthcare system read Being Mortal. IMHO it's more relevant than Checklist Manifesto, esp. wrt what Amazon could do here: [https://www.amazon.com/Being- Mortal-Medicine-What-Matters/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Being-Mortal- Medicine-What- Matters/dp/1250076226/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1529507999&sr=1-1&keywords=atoll+gawande+being+mortal)

While Checklist Manifesto is about operational efficiency and quality, Being Mortal is about asking if we're doing the right things in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER17> Literally just listened to his podcast he did with Freakonomics Radio yesterday. Definitely a great mind.

For all of you developers/operations folks out there, I recommend reading his book The Checklist Manifesto. Every team can learn so much from that book about their everyday practices. We read it at our company book club, and began taking checklists and documentation much more seriously which I attribute too much better productivity, operations and less siloed dev.

<comment><USER18> I was just about to mention that podcast episode! He clearly has a good, realistic grasp of what can be done to improve healthcare outside of the political mudpit. I was skeptical when this company was announced, but I am now extremely optimistic.

[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/atul- gawande/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/atul-gawande/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> BWH culture is crumbling so I won't blame him for seeking other opportunities. However, this is an odd/weak selection where I believe Amazon-Berkshire-Chase will regret. Toby Crosgrove, former Cleveland Clinic CEO, would have been a well-qualified candidate and better choice. He has over 10+ years of leading a highly complex AMC and elevating the organization into the top 3 hospitals in the country for many consecutive years. This man can get things done via transformative, sustainable, and systematic changes. Alternatively, the CEO of Iora Health would have been a good choice too. Let's pause and compare performaces and outcome of between Cleveland Clinic under Crosgrove and Iora Health under their leader, and Adrianes lab under Atul. The result is clear. Atul doesn't have the experience only the Harvard brand. Being a CEO is different from being a professor, surgeon, philosopher, or executive director at the Adrianes Lab. In those roles and physician-led environment where MDs are treated like kings, the medical directors can put in 5-10% of their time with the expertise of administrators, interns, staffs and get away with having the breadth but little depth and claiming to be a SME. Atul seems like a good storyteller and highly intelligent physician, but he is absolutely an individual contributor. Frankly, Boston is full of highly intelligent and innovative people like Atul; the CEO of this venture should have more experience or at least specializes in one of the three verticals. Atul would have been a better executive advisor.

Concerns: \- He stated not wanting to give up his privileges of practicing at BWH and professorship at Harvard meaning he can't be fully committed to leading this new organization. This is not an academic medical center environment where a physician can have multiple administrative titles and not put in the hours and work. \- Atul's fame is credited to his publication, but also from the prestige of Harvard's affiliations. He knows this and is trying to strategic about not giving that up, but I would hope he realize that truly effective leaders know they can't do everything. Most of those innovator physicians stretch themselves too thin and get their hands into too many pots, making them ineffective. If he's serious, then he needs to commit and prioritize.

IMO, extreme network/lip service must have been invloved in his pursuit or the new venture and company is only buying his fame, reputation, and brand for marketing purposes.

<comment><USER20> Didn't Cosgrove retire? Why would he be interested?

<comment><USER19> Yes, he recently retired. I don't know if he would be interested but only meant to use it as an example of other well-qualified physicians leaders.

Full disclosure: I've worked in healthcare for prestigious AMCs, but have zero affiliation with Cleveland Clinic or Iora Health.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the kind of healthcare CEO most health tech startups should have -- someone who lives and breathes the system, intimately knows it's flaws but still has the vision and desire to change it. That is the rare and valuable skill in healthcare -- even more rare than engineering or operations skill

Rushika Fernandopulle, the healthcare CEO I most admire, fits this profile

</comment><comment><USER22> I love Gawande; he's an amazing author and very thoughtful, systematic physician. That being said, to my knowledge he has never actually run anything before or operated on the back end of healthcare, so it seems like sort of a strange choice for an org this size and of this type.

Additionally, his (publicly stated) thinking seems to primarily revolve around systematizing routine practice to reliably increase outcomes for the majority of patients (ie what he espouses in Checklist Manifesto). While this is certainly important, routine patients are not responsible for most health care spend, edge case patients are. A tiny minority of very sick people account for a majority of health care spend, so I would argue that cost recovery should center around creative management of these patients rather than more systematic management of routine care, and the org should really be led by someone whose thinking centers on that.

<comment><USER23> To be fair the people running existing health care organisations are all experienced at creating the sort of company they want to avoid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's interesting reading the comments here. People with no background (I assume) in healthcare describe the guy as "brilliant" and "the perfect choice".

People with years of experience in healthcare question think he's a poor pick and just a famous name.

It's amazing what a good public relations strategy can do for someone!

<comment><USER25> People with years of experience in healthcare are invested in the status quo.

<comment><USER24> That's Silicon Valley speak. People with actual experience on how something works and have practical ideas on how to make it better as passed over by people with better PR agencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "The new company will be based in Boston."

Just wondering if there's a big regulatory benefit to being in Massachusetts.

<comment><USER21> Atul gawande is based there and the Boston area is actually ahead of the Bay Area in terms of biotech startup scene and similar if not better in terms of healthcare services

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> _Such Great Choice_! Atul Gawande is the definition of integrity. On this basis alone I would subscribe as a individual or company co-founder. Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER28> Tyler Cowen's conversation with Mr Gawande[1] was well worth the time. I don't know enough about him or the new company's plans to speculate on how this will all work out (although: neither does anyone else in this thread), but he's clearly a highly intelligent and thoughtful person with deep domain expertise. I certainly wouldn't bet against.

[1] [https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/atul-gawande- che...](https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/atul-gawande-checklist- books-tyler-cowen-d8268b8dfe53)

</comment><comment><USER29> This gives me hope for the US health care system. Gawande's 'Being Mortal' really helped me understand what was happening when my dad was dying. Highly recommend it

</comment><comment><USER30> He's written a lot for the New Yorker is very intelligent and thoughtful. No idea how he'll adjust to being an executive of a corporation, but I think that is a risk worth taking. It sends a message that they will be patient-first and strongly evidence-based.

[https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/atul- gawande](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/atul-gawande)

</comment><comment><USER31> I've read most of Atul Gawande's books about the medical industry (Better, Complications, and The Checklist Manifesto) and I found the three of them extremely relevant to my career as a computer scientist. The latter book is by far his most famous, but IMHO the other two are much better.

This is a bold choice by Amazon, but it seems like a good idea even if it's just for name recognition.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't know how to fix this title, but it reads at a glance as either: Atul Gawande is going to be the CEO of Amazon, or that "Amazon" is the name of a Berkshire healthcare company.

EDIT: Thanks to the mods for the title fix, this is much better.

</comment><comment><USER33> He seems like a very smart guy and an excellent communicator - I wonder if he'll be able to step up and make this role work. I will be rooting for him because the industry needs some players with deep pockets to step in and innovate.

On a side note I find it funny in a sort of inside baseball way that his description of an operation that he does, that he describes in detail and holds up as an example, drives my surgeon wife up the wall because it is not great (she does a lot more of them).

</comment><comment><USER34> Curious, what are the n-order effects of large corporations reducing the cost of providing health insurance for their employees? My wages won't go up (probably), their profits will go up but I'm sure many other things happen in the middle. How will this affect taxes at the fed, state, local level? Will one level see an increase/decrease in taxes collected? etc.

</comment><comment><USER35> Had a conversation with someone that had a speculation that the recent departure of Jonathan Bush of athenahealth because of Elliot Management might get him appointed to this CEO position but I guess that didn't happen.

</comment><comment><USER36> Solid choice. He's a brilliant guy and obviously has deep knowledge of current flaws in out system.

<comment><USER37> Fragmentation - such as the creation of this company - is the primary flaw in the system. His leading that company stands in opposition to the ability to fix healthcare.

<comment><USER21> This is a separate debate, but id argue that consolidation, not fragmentation, is the current primary flaw in the system

It's a zero sum consolidation arms race between payers and providers with patients and physicians as pawns

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> this title could be improved, at first glance it seems to imply he will be CEO of Amazon AND some healthcare company from Berkshire. that's not the case.

</comment><comment><USER39> Great choice.

</comment><comment><USER37> Imagine if these three companies used their political clout to push for single payer instead of setting up yet another insurance company.

<comment><USER40> If you're asking yourself why you're getting downvoted, it's because you committed blasphemy by saying s * * * * p * * * * in the USA.

<comment><USER41> I disagree — lots of HN denizens support a single-payer model. What's silly is thinking that Amazon et al could trivially push it through within a reasonable timeframe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ouch. This is an incredible man who is a bad choice of CEO. CEO is fundamentally an execution-oriented, anti-creative role. Bezos know this and it implies that

1) He's going to CEO this himself 2) He wants this intiative to fail

<comment><USER43> I think you are confusing CEO with COO.

CEO typically is providing vision, mission & strategic direction while the executive team he builds is more execution oriented.

<comment><USER42> Nah, the COO can't really say "no" the way the CEO can to all the execs and their pet projects for their personal agenda.

<comment><USER44> Sure he can, if people know the CEO backs his decisions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Color quantization using k-means - <AUTHOR> http://lmcaraig.com/color-quantization-using-k-means/ <comment><AUTHOR> Color quantization using k-means compared to a random selection approach. The color spaces considered are RGB and Lab.</comment>


Android Now Controls 39% Of The U.S. Smartphone Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/android-apple-smartphone-market-share-2011-7

<comment><USER2> Correction: "Android Now _Serves_ 39% Of the U.S. Smartphone Market"

People choose what kind of phone they're doing to buy. The software cannot and does not choose for them. Even if you substitute "Google" for "Android," the original title still doesn't work.

I know that people will say that this usage of the word has been long established. That much is true, but it isn't my point. The _logic_ behind the usage doesn't make sense, and it interferes with clear thinking on the matter.</comment>