How to find a remote job - <AUTHOR> https://www.deekit.com/how-do-i-find-a-remote-job-part-1/ <comment><USER3> I found a remote job this year on [https://angel.co/](https://angel.co/)

This article seems like an excellent resource, but it doesn't get into the drive you need to find a remote job (at least early in your career like me). When I started looking for remote jobs online, it took me over six months to finally land the right job.

What articles like this don't emphasize enough is when you're applying for remote jobs, you're competing against a worldwide talent pool. This is a lot different than the localized competition you may be used to. The increase in competition makes it exponentially harder to land a remote job.

Some tips I'd recommend: \- Make a list of the job boards/companies that post relevant jobs and view them daily. If a company is looking to move fast, this could give you an edge. \- Do something to stand out. (Make a video, send them something physically, etc.) DO SOMETHING! Don't just assume because you're you that they will want you. \- Put together a project company's usually ask for, without them even asking. (Browse the site and make suggestions, look for bugs, etc.)

<comment><USER4> I've always worked remotely. You're not really competing with the entire global talent pool if you're applying for an American company.

First, most companies will have a time zone limit.

2\. Companies will require that you can communicate in English extremely well.

3\. You need access to a reliable electric grid and reliable fast internet (the firewall rules out mainland China completely--1/5 of the world).

4\. Many companies don't want to hire someone from a country without a strong legal framework accessible to foreigners--they want to be able to enforce NDAs etc... And some companies don't want to risk dealing with any foreign legal system at all, even a good one.

5\. Travel time (and expense/visas) to the office in case you need to visit.

6\. You need to pass the "culture fit" interview.

7\. Very likely to run into someone involved in hiring who has a bad impression of programmers from certain countries after working with terrible offshore teams. Overcoming this sterotype won't be easy. Related to 6.

Already being in America gives you several huge advantages.

<comment><USER5> 8\. You need to be able to work well remotely. This is an skill all its own that is often underestimated.

<comment><USER6> Definitely true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pro Tip : If the first person from the company that you talk to is from HR, you're doing it wrong.

I wrote up my process in an article on Medium "How to Get a Remote Job, Even When Remote Isn't Advertised"

[https://medium.com/@aantix/how-to-get-a-remote-job-even- when...](https://medium.com/@aantix/how-to-get-a-remote-job-even-when-remote- isnt-advertised-286f955264a0)

<comment><USER8> Nice short article.

Its a bit difficult to do that same if one is from a developing country though (flying is expensive :-)). A more interesting problem to crack.

<comment><USER7> Agree, there's definitely another hurdle of perception if you're from another country. But I still think it's doable. It always comes down to trust - <USER2> can I make sure that if I work with you, you're going to commit code that I won't have to do a ton of cleanup on?

So, you combat that by :

1) Be visible. Have code up on Github that I can see.

2) Offer a month to month contract. 15 day notice for termination. This gives you and the company an easy way out if things don't work out and the added bonus of not having to deal with messy tax issues across country borders.

3) Flying is only expensive if your hourly rate doesn't justify it. Honestly, if you're approaching a company with some incredibly low number, e.g. $15/hour, even if that's a decent wage for your country, as a manager, I see that as a signal of cheap, inferior labor. Increase your rate, e.g. $100/hr, so that you could fly if you had to.

<comment><USER9> Hope your code cleanup is more "decent" than your spelling.

<comment><USER10> This manages to combine a tedious nitpick with a personal attack.

Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, so please don't post like this again, and maybe lay off the tedious nitpicks as well.

<comment><USER9> I don't see it that way - all I see is a predictable corporate reaction to pointing out micromanager tendencies.

Also putting down non "first world" coders before they have even been given a chance. I can see that "flagging" is obviously easier than comprehending and rectifying the unfair situation that OP is putting these people in. It is clear that he views such candidates as below him or at least that is how it comes across.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Upwork, PeoplePerHour and Freelancer are great places to secure remote work. > What you'll find may be more short-term, but that doesn't mean it can't > evolve into something permanent (if that's what you're looking for).

Scratch that! Those platforms are useless even for freelancers.

Best advice that worked for me is to apply for any job and during the interview process you just say that you will work remote and come to the office once per XX amount of days.

<comment><USER12> Out of curiosity, what percent of companies just outright refused to consider remote work? And of those that considered you, how many had no remote engineers or didn't really have the processes in place to support remote work?

Because, I think, working remotely it's not just something that you, as an organization, do. Getting it right, in my experience, requires active effort.

<comment><USER13> What I have seen is that devs start fulltime at the office and as they gain experience at the company and the trust level builds, then they start working remotely a couple days a week. Some people become indispensible and then want to move and the company will cut a 100% remote deal in order to retain their services. This is really the only way I have seen it work out such that the person maintains any kind of job security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To find my remote job two years ago, I went down the list of companies in the Awesome Remote Job list [0] and checked every single one of their career pages. You can sometimes also find remote jobs on Indeed by putting "remote" in the location field.

[0] [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote- job/](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Here's a question I'm trying to understand: if I intend to travel while working, where do I say I'm "from"? How do taxes work? Suppose that I have an apartment in some country, not necessarily my country of citizenship, and I will sublet it while I travel.

I suppose, to freelance, one needs to create a "company", but where is that company based? Does it need to have an address?

If I am a citizen of one country, a resident of another, but I'm working while I travel in _other_ countries, where do I owe taxes?

These are the roadblocks I find most complicated, beyond just "finding the job", I don't know how the legal "infrastructure" should work when you are freelancing and in such an odd living situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question.

I still run all my taxes as if I'm based in the UK, even though I travel and work remotely. I am taxed as an independent contractor.

I'm considering setting up as an Estonian e-resident soon though ([https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/e-residency/](https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/e-residency/)) to change where I pay my taxes.

In terms of working while in other countries, it's a grey area for sure. I was travelling extensively in Asia last year and I was on tourist visas. Although I know Thailand for example is considering introducing a 'nomad visa' very soon.

<comment><USER16> > I'm considering setting up as an Estonian e-resident soon though > ([https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/e-residency/](https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/e-residency/)) > to change where I pay my taxes.

Talk to a solicitor before you do this unless you want HMRC to come a knocking. Estonian eResidency _is not_ actual residency, and it won't change the country you're resident in for personal tax purposes. You could set up a company in Estonia, but if you're an independent contractor and all the profits from that company flow directly back to you HMRC may again have questions (and you'll still have to pay taxes on the dividends you receive at the UK rates).

<comment><USER17> The way its done here in Europe (don't know about USA) is to have most of your spending billed to the company as an expense. You take very little to no money out of the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From my personal experience, I got remote job offers (with competitive western salary) in two ways:

\- via my network (so people/clients I have worked with before on site have approached me with extra work and new projects)

\- from my open source contributions (some of my projects on github and my contributions led to me being emailed by interesting companies)

So I would forget about "looking" for remote work online. I don't think you'll randomly find anything which pays well.

What I suggest is to:

1) (if you are a consultant) build a network of clients and acquaintances by working on projects onsite. It's likely there will be more work you will get reached out to about. And then you are in position to arrange remote work as they have already worked with you and there is a trust between the two parties.

2) Contribute to open source and work on interesting projects/libraries in your free time. You never know which company will end up using your work and reach out to you with job offers. Often they will be ok with remote work too.

</comment><comment><USER19> Most of the companies I've interviewed with will only consider remote workers who have prior experience working remotely. I just don't know how to demonstrate to employers that I have the self-discipline to actually work if I'm not forced to go into an office full of distractions every day.

In any case, after yet another round of rejections for (mostly remote) gigs, I've given up on getting out of my crappy job for the time being. It's a non- programming "architect/sme" type job, but it pays well. I've been focusing my creative energy on a little side project which I've managed to find the self- discipline to work on in my free time over the last year (maybe it'll be successful and then that can be my 'exit plan' from this place).

<comment><USER20> Couchbase is happy to hire remote workers, even without previous remote experience.

I've worked for Couchbase for a year and a half now, and it's a nice place. We're a mature startup building a NoSQL database, headed for IPO soon (within a year or two).

And we're hiring: [https://www.couchbase.com/careers/open- positions](https://www.couchbase.com/careers/open-positions)

<comment><USER21> There's no reliable way to tell which roles permit working remotely.

For instance, this one requires being onsite: [https://jobs.jobvite.com/couchbase/job/oApC4fwp](https://jobs.jobvite.com/couchbase/job/oApC4fwp)

<comment><USER20> On paper, yes. In practice, the company has a lot of distributed-work-friendly DNA from the open source movement, so I would expect the matter to be negotiable even for positions that explicitly name a work site. How negotiable? Mumble. I can say that my immediate work group has a manager and two engineers in Mountain View, and one engineer each in Denver, Toronto, and Manchester.

<comment><USER19> Good to know, thanks. I've looked at Couchbase before, but when I saw locations listed for each position and no "Remote work possible" in the job description, I assumed you weren't considering remote applicants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Step 1) Become indispensable in your current job.

Step 2) Move.

<comment><USER23> I've seen a couple employees do this to transition to mostly-remote at a big employer. You might have even better luck at a small or medium size company.

<comment><USER24> I did this easily at a 100 person company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's what I do. Find employees using LinkedIn, find their GitHub profile and any projects they're doing that I find interesting. Create a _good_ pull- request.

After it's accepted, I send a follow-up saying I'm looking for work and asking if they'd pass on my CV.

I only do PR for projects that interest me anyway, so it's not time-wasting as I'd do Open Source work anyway.

This approach hasn't actually got me a remote-job yet, but I think that's more down to my lack of interviewing technique.

<comment><USER26> > This approach hasn't actually got me a remote-job yet

<comment><USER27> Sure - but I think it's good advice regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know that applying on jobs pages is not popular here on HN but, well, sometimes it works. In my opinion, having some projects on GitHub certainly helps, even if they are just hobby projects with no use in real world. So it doesn't mean that you must spend months working on open source projects on the evenings and weekends, hoping to get noticed. Same for technical blog posts. It definitely provides more signal to the person who is reviewing your application.

Also, very few companies are 100% remote, and making remote team work is not trivial, so it's important to ask the right questions when interviewing. Don't forget that's it is a two way street! Personally, I was looking for these two key things:

\- at least ~30% engineers should be remote;

\- there should be a strong culture of written async communication.

Once I discovered a company which I found interesting ( [https://heapanalytics.com](https://heapanalytics.com) ), checked the jobs page, noticed that they are hiring remotely and just applied a few months later. Had several interviews over video chat / slack, no white board coding or CS trivia. In the end it worked out and I got an offer. Totally recommend applying at Heap - we are doing cool and challenging technical things (querying hundreds of TBs of data in seconds and making it reliable), the interview process is great and our small distributed remote team is made up of engineers from 4 continents, from North America to Australia!

</comment><comment><USER28> The hardest part of remote jobs is finding one that will pay even remotely (hehe) what you could make at a local company.

My experience with remote interviewing culminated in getting 3 separate remote offers for anywhere between 35-60% less than my asking salary or the local offers I received.

Part of this might be that my area (Salt Lake City) has particularly high engineering salaries despite what most people expect, but it seems to be a thing across the board, because like others have said they are tapping into a worldwide talent pool where they can get talent that are happy with the company's salary budget.

<comment><USER29> > The hardest part of remote jobs is finding one that will pay even remotely > (hehe) what you could make at a local company.

If you live outside the US, it's the opposite: the goal is to find a job that pays a US programmer's salary, which is usually far _more_ (yes, even outside SV) than what you could make at any "local company."

<comment><USER28> That's very interesting, and makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm on remote job #4 right now. Here's how I got each.

Job 1: Referred by a friend who worked for the company. She joined the company about 5 years prior, after being cold-emailed by an internal recruiter.

Job 2: Friend referral. I met the friend by way of a local developer meetup and we got to know each other over the course of a couple years. My friend was referred into the company by a friend of _his,_ who had moved out of town to take a job with this company.

Job 3: Internet referral. I'm on a developer slack community and the position was posted there.

Job 4/Current one: A mishmash. People on the team knew me from developer conferences and a couple meetups in NYC (job #3 was based in NYC as well, and I would attend meetups when visiting the office). One or two of the people were also on that slack. My resume was ultimately brought in, however, by a local friend of mine. He got the job in a similar manner as the friend in job #2; a local friend of _his_ moved to NYC to join the company.

</comment><comment><USER31> The salaries on upwork seem laughably low. I went travelling with the idea of maybe doing some bits like this, but it made no sense - I would have spent all my time working for very little money and no time to do what I liked.

Remote working can work if you already have a client-base, but I can't see how any of these sites are viable for someone who wants 1st world wages.

</comment><comment><USER32> How does an submission from someone who prefere to write clickbait headlines with an blogpost with nothing new or special get so many upvotes?

<comment><USER33> It is written by Blake Moore who roams the world and works as a growth hacker. With emphasis on "growth hacker." Source the about author.

Maybe Hacker News have been (growth) hacked?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I did some freelance jobs on the side while I was still working full-time, all of it being remote even if the client would be in the same city, then I would just drop by for demo's and meetings. My full-time job consisted of working in remote teams for mostly US customers. While I was working for a certain customer through my day job I was the only person in the building working for that particular customer and there was no real necessity to be in the office. I was effectively fully remote from that point.

At a given point I got a new customer that basically wanted to hire me for 20 hours per week, which would mean I could sustain my life with it and I left my day job. Building upon that I landed two customers through LinkedIn, one lead through YouTube (some intelligent comment somewhere...that was pretty weird though!), some more work from local and remote customers I had before and then I rolled into TopTal.

TopTal has a steady stream of really interesting work. I had a pretty sudden drop in work from one customer and I could fill it up in a week or two by taking TopTal work. Now I remain on one TopTal client and for the rest I'm working directly for customers. TopTal pays a bit less but is a lot less headache and most of the work is pretty good. The sites that are recommended in this article didn't do anything useful for me.

I still don't know _really_ how I manage to keep a full roster apart from TopTal but somehow customers know how to find me. Lot of referrals too.

</comment><comment><USER35> I work remote now. There's good points and bad points.

Some Good:

No commute. No noise. Fewer distractions. No open office floor plans!

Some Bad:

More distractions. I miss the physical presence of people. Time zones suck! I miss hallway conversations about the current sprint. Nobody makes an 1800 mile serial cable.

[-] Distractions. I don't have people walking by my desk trying to get me to work on their pet project. However, that stack of dishes that needs cleaning is very distracting.

<comment><USER36> no, but they make an 2896.819km internet cable :) I've made proxies so I can talk to remote serial devices. Mainly for remote support. As conversations like

       Me: Type Blah
       Them: Did you say bleah?
       Me:  No Blah
       Them: Blah? ok...tap.......tap......tap.......tap
       Me: What's it say?
       Them: Just a bunch of numbers and letters

...

are Painful :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I joined Aftership.com last year as remote employee, they have a vibrant engineering culture and they have very convenient remote friendly environment.

I think significant efforts are required from the team & company to make remote jobs possible and convenient, so its important to find a company that have remote-friendly workflow.

In case, anyone here is looking an interesting node.js remote experience, can email me.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ptoblem with remote job is that it's mostly limited to a developer role. If you wanna go up the chain of command there are less and less options.

To be a remote team leader means that you are limited to companies that have all of their developers remote.

Basically any kind of management position will limit you to apply to companies that are 100% or mostly remote and there aren't many companies like that yet.

<comment><USER39> Yes, that's why the best way to increase the numvber of remote companies is to build them from scratch, with a remote incubator. That's what I am doing: [http://www.startcrowd.club](http://www.startcrowd.club)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Freelancing is the way...!

Elaboration:

I worked for a few companies remote, most I met via angellist.

Sooner or later they wanted me to move to their place.

When I started freelancing, nobody cared anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you switch any of the companies you worked for remotely to clients? Or did you start from scratch?

<comment><USER40> Started from scratch.

Looked on some project sites, wrote some email offers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The article came across as some fluff mostly to promote Deekit's product.

</comment><comment><USER42> I've found the timezone to be quite an issue. For a start a lot of positions advertised as Remote really mean Remote US Only, but then there are also many companies that aren't too concerned about being outside USA. I'm in UTC+12 which doesn't overlap well with USA or UK. USA is a bit better, but I didn't get one role because they had a 9:00am daily meeting which would have been 4:00am my time, and that just didn't seem practical. There is another person in my town that works for a UK company by staying up all night though.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've been working remotely for 4-5 years now. Started the remote work thing at my previous workplace.

Tried a 9-5 job last summer, it was the worst.

Now have 2 remote gigs. Found one via Github, other one via a Facebook freelance group.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is it just me or does this article feel like something written together in one hour, based on information that one easily could find in 15 minutes, just to serve as a platform for selling their templates? I've come to expect a higher standard from hacker news frontpage.

</comment><comment><USER44> Join toptal.

<comment><USER34> I don't get the down votes, nor the negativity in other threads about TopTal. Working for TopTal for a while now and it has been great. I can better rates elsewhere but I notice that clients are really expecting you to be good so the jobs are more interesting and/or you get more freedom. Also no hassle, every 2 weeks a payment.

It's cheaper to hire me directly while I would still be getting paid more but I guess a lot of people want a trusted intermediate.

Rates are negotiable but they'll naturally prefer to pay you less, like any company. Perhaps it's more interesting for people that live in countries that have relatively low wages, but you'll have to be able to converse fluently in English.

<comment><USER45> I always got the impression (maybe mistakenly) that TopTal was basically like a temp job service for tech workers. Essentially I have been under the impression that one would not be able to work for TopTal while holding down a different job, but at the same time with TopTal you would never have guaranteed work and that their rate of pay would be only in line with what a developer would get at a regular day job except being paid hourly rather than salaried, thus effectively enabling TopTal to pay below market prices.

I'm not saying any of this is fact. I'm asking for clarification since you have first hand experience.

<comment><USER46> If you're based in United States, Toptal probably isn't the best solution for you.

Otherwise, it's a completely different story.

As a developer I've used Toptal in the past and honestly, they're doing a great job. I'm based in central europe where average salary can be as low as $22,000/y. Toptal allows you to 3x-5x that easily by working 40h/week, 100% remote.

It's literally transformed hundreds of lives within my city.

There are tons of long term projects (6-12+ months), and I've never had problems finding a new project (front-end, js). Once I start looking, I expect to be working the next week.

For some, it's a great long term solution. For others who are more ambitious, it's a great stepping stone into the $70-100+/h market.

They do take a pretty big cut, but the developer is still left with tons of cash.

I dropped it after a while, because I started receiving fat offers directly from other clients, but I'd still recommend it to anyone who doesn't have a well developed client network.

<comment><USER45> Is it something though where you would have to do a normal 40 hours/week on 9 to 5 hours and so couldn't hold down your day job or are there people working a day job and then doing 20 hours of Toptal work nights and weekends?

<comment><USER46> You can definately work nights and weekends, but most people don't need to hold down their regular local jobs.

Why would you keep your local $30k/y job when you can work full-time on Toptal for $80k/y?

Toptal covers hourly (min 10h/week), part-time (20h/week), and full-time (40h/week) engagements. Some months I've worked 60h/week (on my own accord).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> it's not that easy to find a good remote job. even with relatively good CV. very rewarding though. I wake up, make a cup of coffee and I'm at work. found it via twitter - made a list that followed all remote job listing twitter accounts I could find and just spammed. getting through interviewing is the hardest part.

</comment><comment><USER48> 9 filter ruthlessly.

Because if your goal is to find a remote job as soon as possible, you will be scammed in 4,3,2...

</comment><comment><USER49> My two bits: Contribute to some open-source projects. Great way to get noticed.

</comment><comment><USER13> I had hoped that by now a lot more developer jobs would become remote because why not? Everyone commuting is wasting a lot of resources for dubious value. But instead, I have seen remoting as counter to the trend--managers want dev teams "co-located" so they can "collaborate" or whatever. They just don't trust people is what it all comes down to. Maybe rightly so.

Another factor: Internet service hasn't gotten better and mine has actually degraded even though I live in the suburbs of a a major metro area. I'm basically either stuck paying Comcast (a reprehensible company whom I would not be shocked to find out that the C-level execs eat live babies) or the crappy DSL from Frontier, which I pay to be inconvenienced by, but at least am not sending my money to Shitcast and cable tv brain deadness. God I hate how this has all played out!

My co-workers refer to my ISP as "North Korea Internet" because when I do work remotely I end up experiencing random outages or speed dips that make our VPN unusable. DSL topology is weak and Frontier is likely under-investing in their infrastructure while slamming as many customers as possible onto that network.

</comment><comment><USER50> [https://www.SkipTheDrive.com](https://www.SkipTheDrive.com) only focuses on remote jobs as well.

</comment><comment><USER51> I hired 100+ senior developers at $50-70K per year for a project, mostly from East Europe/Ukraine/Russia.

We were like, "Holy __! these people are so cheap. If I hire people with same level of experience locally, I would have to pay 3-5x more on average. "

Later, my friend took over this team of developers for his startup. What he found is that 30% developers in his team were working for two or more employers.

And something like 20% of them outsourced part of the projects to developers in South Asia, __security risk __.

Today, we try to hire onsite as much as possible.

It require very high level of trust to hire someone remote.

<comment><USER52> _> Later, my friend took over this team of developers for his startup. What he found is that 30% developers in his team were working for two or more employers._

That sounds like something inherent to the sort of candidates you hired, not remote employment in of itself. I can't imagine a remote employee having enough time to work for two different companies unless they have no requirements for being immediately available at any time (like meetings, or debrief after a deadline).</comment></comment>


TED: Carl Honore, Slowing down in a world built for speed - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/carl_honore_praises_slowness.html

<comment><USER2> Good talk. I have found that spending a little time meditating certainly slows you down. Furthermore, you tend to start "seeing" more and analyzing less. I have found taking long walks (no ipod, no speed walking), taking a long hot shower, lowering the lights, lighting some candles, and just listening to a great jazz album on my headphones works just as well.

I certainly was the kind of person who was IM'ing while coding, twittering while on the phone, surfing HN while watching TV, a person who always had an agenda while having an agenda.

These days, I don't feel (so) guilty sitting at a coffee shop at the brink of dawn with a nice cup of coffee watching the sun rise. Or walking by myself in the woods. Or sitting by my window on a rainy day listening to the pitter- patter of rain.

This talk will certainly give you an insight, and I recommend reading Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now". Its a quick read and will certainly open your eyes to just slowing down.

Update - Edited for grammatical errors</comment>


Ask HN: How can one learn to build API gateways? - <AUTHOR> I want to know and be able to build what cloudfare did with nginx.
Figure things like: why request buildups happens on nginx whereas haproxy works fine. And in the end architect the distriuted to localize failures and not affect rest of the system. Thank you, <comment><USER2> The honest answer to the question "How can one learn to build API gateways?" is unfortunately "Go and build some API gateways and reflect on what you learned at each step perhaps teaching others as you go". This isn't specific to API gateways - it's the way to learn anything effectively.

Your use cases, edge cases, opportunities and pitfalls will be different from mine. Write them up, share them online (including here), so others more like you can learn when doing paper research, much like the research you've done now.

Realise that next time you might need to do it differently. Name the reasons why those needs differ. Write that up. Share.

It's still a youngish field that we're still trying to get right. If the existing books and blogs aren't doing it for you, it's time to figure out why and contribute back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do you want to build this over one of the many choices out there:

      https://getkong.org/
      https://lyft.github.io/envoy/
      https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/
      https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/
      https://www.ca.com/us/products/ca-api-gateway.html
      https://www.3scale.net/technical-overview/

There's a lot of options out there across the spectrum so just curious what your end goals are

<comment><USER4> Seconded. We have used Kong API and it works flawlessly for our basic needs. Time from research till first prototype was in hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not on a technical slant, but here is a good, pragmatic API design guide by Vinay Sahni that I came across a couple of years back [0]. It gave me a ton of good ideas on how to design the API for our SaaS app.

[0] - [http://www.vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmatic- res...](http://www.vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmatic-restful-api)

<comment><USER6> I quickly looked at it and "don't use envelopes by default", "paginate using Link headers" contradict what [http://jsonapi.org/](http://jsonapi.org/) specification says. json:api might not be the best standard and there might be better ones but using something that has many implementations in different languages is better that rolling your own.

<comment><USER7> I used Vinai guide and these exact two advices caused issues as the api grow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Start with an open source http proxy

[http://www.catonmat.net/http-proxy-in-nodejs/](http://www.catonmat.net/http- proxy-in-nodejs/)

[https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http- proxy](https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy)

</comment><comment><USER9> Writing a book on this subject would be a fairly pointless exercise as it will age very quickly. You would be better off looking for "how we did xyz" type of blog posts from notable sources.

There are also academic-style papers from Amazon's team on creating high- reliability systems and such. These are worth a read too.

<comment><USER10> _Writing a book on this subject would be a fairly pointless exercise as it will age very quickly._

The technology that we use to implement APIs changes but the fundamental reasoning doesn't. A book about building APIs doesn't really need to talk about specific technologies. Personally speaking, I think the principles that drive the design of APIs I build today are the same as the principles I was using 20 years ago; plan your data structures, include extensible structures for future unknown things, don't make anything trivially enumerable, use HTTP verbs consistently, and document the hell out of everything with working examples that have automated tests so you can easily fix them when the API changes. If you do all that you _should_ end up with a nice API.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, sure. But all this adds up to more like a skinny pamphlet rather than a book.

<comment><USER11> There need to be more skinny pamphlets with concise good advice in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Checkout apache nifi</comment>


Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com) - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_fuck_away_from_this_thiswebhostcom/ <comment><USER3> 1.) Monthly web hosting invoice unpaid

2.) Customer informed and appropriate action taken for unpaid accounts (suspend account for non-payment)

3.) Customer's friend makes a public complaint on Twitter

4.) Web host responds badly (but perhaps with some justification, outside parties getting involved in disputes, where a simple pay-the-outstanding- invoice would have resolved the situation)

5.) Non-payee gets abusive

6.) Web host deletes the account for abusive behaviour.

Apart from point 3, everything else seems in order. The customer's friend was provoking a reaction in public. What did he want, the webhost to publicly state that his friend's account had been suspended for non-payment? That seems worse than a firm private message to butt out of a contractual matter.

Suspending the customer's friend does seem harsh, but taken from the view that he's complaining publicly about a problem that doesn't involve him, it might be a long term justification of ejecting bad customers instead of just tolerating them (perhaps there's more to the story). That sort of approach is recommended by things like The 4-hour work week, firing your worst customers.

The guy should have paid his bill, either on time, or as soon as justified. There was no reason for his friend to escalate matters, there was no reason for the non-payee to escalate matters. You pay for the service, you get the service. You don't pay, then you get no service. Yes, the web host can be more lenient, but it's not something you should feel entitled to.

There are a number of extenuating circumstances that can warrant or could result in one or more of these points being appropriate responses.

And look at it, it's a cpanel / shared-hosting reseller - those margins are razor thin to non-existent, even loss-leading. If you're not paying at least $7 a month for a cpanel account, then expecting the host to be lenient for non-payment and subsequent abuse from the non-payee is unjustified.

<comment><USER4> > That sort of approach is recommended by things like The 4-hour work week, > firing your worst customers.

Okay - but removing all of his backups? That's just petty and vindictive. There is zero justification for that.

<comment><USER5> I actually think it should be a good lesson not to tell people to go fuck themselves when you still need something from them.

<comment><USER6> Remind me not to depend on you ever in any situation where tempers may rise.

<comment><USER5> Do you disagree that, generally speaking, it's a bad idea to tell someone to go fuck themselves when you still need something from them?

Both sides acted childish, but I can't see why a negative outcome would come as a shock to anyone.

<comment><USER6> Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to harm people to stoke your ego, too.

Let's say I flip out in my local bank branch. They're perfectly justified in calling the police, because it is a bad idea to yell at people at the bank - but they would not be justified in closing my account and keeping the money to "teach me a lesson", and that is essentially what happened here.

I find it a shocking lapse of professionalism to do anything like this, and I find it incomprehensible that an adult could think it was justified. Seriously. You just don't act like this in the real world and hope to stay in business - sooner or later this attitude will kill you. Customers _do_ flip out and tell you to fuck off, they just do. You either learn to act like an adult about it - maybe step away from Twitter for a while - or you quit, and get a job that doesn't involve interaction with customers. Or co-workers. Or anybody else that might harsh your fragile calm.

<comment><USER5> Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to justify it in any way. Both sides acted completely against their own self-interests.

Anyone working in a professional setting needs to grow a thick skin and deal with situations like this much, much better. Out of self-interest. However, if a customer mistakes this for a license for consequence-free abuse, and is then shocked when someone on the other end snaps and does something stupid, I fail to conjure up too much sympathy or moral outrage, for either party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are better ways to handle one's customers than displayed by the CS employee here, but be that as it may: think long and hard before you get into the business of taking $3 a month from people who are demographically similar to Redditors.

<comment><USER8> Redditors are demographically distinct from the average purchaser of web hosting? I'm suspicious.

<comment><USER9> i think the point the parent was trying to make is that there's a couple million redditors - they aren't demographically distinct from _anybody_. he could have said "the general public" instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the hardest things when communicating with customers is not taking it personally. Don't take criticisms or complaints as personal attacks and above all else resist the temptation to try and "one-up" your customer.

Loads of times we've received pretty insulting emails, but done our best to be polite and helpful back, more times then not we've received a really thankful and praising email back in response. A lot of times customers forgot they're sending a message to a real person, and just think they're contacting a faceless corporation.

<comment><USER11> It's doubly worse at a porn company. People already half-expect you to be scamming them somehow, and come into it with apprehension if not outright hostility.

The upshot is when you give them amazing customer service, they turn into instant evangelists :)

<comment><USER12> I'm curious how 'evangelical' someone could be about a porn company? Do you really find word-of-mouth advertising to work for you?

<comment><USER11> Oh definitely, most people don't go around talking about paying for porn sites, but the really hardcore porn customers (the kind who regularly pay for porn) can be extremely loyal if you treat them nicely (and vocal if you don't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TLDR, someone told a hosting company to fuck themselves on Twitter, so the hosting company canceled their hosting?

Nice DoS vector; all I have to do is claim I'm foo.com on Twitter, then I just tell foo.com's host to fuck themselves, and then foo.com is gone forever. It also sounds like a good way to cancel unwanted credit cards. Instead of waiting on hold for hours to talk to high-pressure "you don't really want to cancel, do you" guy, just tell your bank to fuck themselves on Twitter, and your account magically goes away.

Somehow I feel I'm missing something here...

<comment><USER14> Let me be clear (customer here) I told him to go fuck himself AFTER he cancelled not only my account, but that of my friend's. And he did this on a few tweets, based on our Twitter handles - had we been using pseudonyms, that could have been a whole different can of worms.

Yes, I got really riled up. Yes, I'm not free from blame. It's kind of ridiculous to delete someone's account based on a personal dispute with no prior notice.

<comment><USER13> You did nothing wrong. It's the Internet: people say fuck.

Some sort of legal action should be brought against your host.

<comment><USER15> > Some sort of legal action should be brought against your host.

No. Legal action is hell for both parties. Why put yourself in hell? _Especially_ for a $3/month hosting service?

<comment><USER13> _Why put yourself in hell?_

For the enjoyment of seeing the other party in hell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reason #3 in "Why we're so good" (<http://www.thiswebhost.com/reasons.html>): "We want to help. Customer service is very important to us, so we'll treat you like a valued client and not like a number."

<comment><USER17> How many people do you think "we" is? Could the person that runs the twitter be an employee? They advertise 24/7 customer support. Even if it is an employee, and he is terminated because of this, would that allow you to trust the company again?

If it turns out to be the founder/CEO, then we have no hope for the company. But how devastating would it be for your startup if one of your employees did something like this, without your permission. We all know how difficult it is to recruit the right people, but should a mistake like this be un-recoverable?

<comment><USER11> thiswebhost.com appears to be hosted on LiquidWeb's servers, which makes me think it might be a reseller account for Sonet7 (reseller hosting owned by LiquidWeb).

I know a couple of people who resell white-label cPanel hosting, and it's definitely not a full-time job, so I would guess it's probably just one guy (the WHOIS will tell you who).

I know from experience that it's nigh-impossible to stop yourself from using the Royal 'We' as a lone entrepreneur.

<comment><USER18> If it's on liquidweb shared hosting then there are four levels of backups with rotations on an external drive array. They don't mess around.

Not sure if they could do an end-run around a reseller to liquidweb and prove ownership, but the backup is definitely there and undeleteable at a reseller level.

Someone should point that out to the former customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pretty dumb to tweet "go fuck yourself" before you've got your data off their servers - given you've _only just_ seen that they clearly take things personally and act like kids.

<comment><USER14> Hey - the customer in question here. I'll admit, it was really stupid, definitely a mistake - I was really angry. My friend had just told me my site was down, and I got an email saying my account had been terminated, and then to top it off, a tweet saying "good luck finding your next hosting provider".

The "go fuck yourself" was a kneejerk reaction to a guy clearly enjoying his powertrip.

<comment><USER18> Tell your friend if it's on liquidweb shared hosting then there are four levels of backups with rotations on an external drive array. The data is definitely there and a reseller can get it restored within an hour for free - if they are motivated of course.

If they can prove ownership of the content to liquidweb maybe they can do an end-run around the reseller.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, I'm looking into that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate to say it, but when you go with bargain basement hosting, you're often going to get bargain basement quality.

I'm sure we've all heard horror stories of shared hosting providers, but personally I've had one just completely disappear, taking my 2 years of prepaid hosting with them (along with hundreds of other customers, at least).

<comment><USER20> A few months ago, I was told by Rackspace that "We're not responsible for looking after your hardware" after they'd removed, and destroyed, a working hard drive from a dedicated server instead of replacing the disk that had failed, regardless of the price, all hosting is 'bargain basement quality', some are just more bargin than others =)

<comment><USER21> Isn't "looking after your hardware" _exactly_ what they're responsible for? Why else are they being paid?

<comment><USER22> I know that rackspace isn't responsible for data loss caused by hardware failure or an accident on their part. A number of rackspace employees have told me (on irc) that I'm responsible for my own backups. Perhaps it was a misquote?

<comment><USER20> "We're sorry for the issues you've had with your server today, but we're not responsible for looking after your hardware."

A drive failed in a RAID1 array so I contacted their support to get broken the drive replaced, they removed the working drive and destoryed it then insisted it wasn't their fault, I even gave them the serial number of the failed drive before they removed it. I do have my own offsite backups of everything, but it was still annoying to have to restore the entire server

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> boriskourt: "That's not cool. Suspending a friends account because of a minor PayPal dispute? When did you get into doing that?"

This seems to be about a web host not accepting people not paying their bills.

It's not really the web hosts problem if you can't pay, doesn't matter if you've a dispute with paypal. Don't pay and they're in their rights to cease providing service.

Don't pay, then bitch about them not providing your service, then provide profane public responses and post a call on Reddit to try and get the company destroyed ... well is it a surprise that they delete your data at that point.

Aside: berfarah needs to read up on the Gunpowder Plot.

<comment><USER24> This* terminated his account (that was paid and in good standing!) _and deleted all his data, including databases_ for calling them out on twitter. Seriously. That's just insane.

If you still think that this* is somehow justified in any way, read their twitter feed. This isn't the only time a customer has been treated like crap by this*.

<comment><USER23> FWIW I read the twitter feeds of both subjects (but not of This*). All I saw was (paraphrasing) "I can't believe my PayPal excuse didn't wash", "fuck you for suspending out account", "oh noes you deleted it all now"; very roughly speaking.

Can you point out the bit in the Twitter feeds where we become privy your supposed fact that any service was terminated that was in good standing.

Basically you're saying that the web host maliciously shut down the account without any cause. Can you quote me the bit in the Twitter feed that proves this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From <http://www.thiswebhost.com/reviewus.html> :

"It's no surprise that when things work as they should, people rarely talk about them. When things don't work, however, people are often very quick to criticise, condemn and even publically discourage the use of the service or product. Fortunately for us, there's none of the latter - and we hope that remains the case for as long as we're in business.

Unfortunately for us, because of an excellent proven track-record, there's relatively little in the way of comments or reviews of this* on the Internet. We'd like to ask for your help to change that.

If you're happy enough to write a review for us, here are some of the best places you could do so: [ ... ] Social Networks - everything from a quick Twitter message to a forum post on any of the forums you frequent. Every little piece of exposure is appreciated!"

Isn't that pretty much...what he did?

</comment><comment><USER26> It's easy to see where both sides originally began from: As a web hosting provider owner myself, I can see where the default assumption that paypal disputes automatically equal fraud originates. Sadly though it's not the correct stance to really take -- and one has to distance themselves emotionally from every situation (particularly as 'Director', in this case, like Jules) otherwise it'll turn into a shitstorm just about 100% of the time.

Allowing it to descend to the point where backups were deleted is just an absolutely appalling situation though. I've given clients the boot before, but descending to the point where removal of their backups occurs _after_ suspending them is just wrong.

As a provider you're the technical link between someone and their content, and your goal is to protect that content with everything you've got: Destroying it yourself is simply disheartening.

It's sad to see that thiswebhost* has arrived at this point, but the good news is all it will take is some effort & 'emotional distancing' to really improve. I know not many years ago I was in the same position as a fledgling company owner where it's very easy to take things to heart.

Hopefully thiswebhost* can dig through some backups (assuming they still have some) and provide the users with their content.

</comment><comment><USER27> _It irked me that he didn't seem to care about lost customers_

He doesn't sound like a good customer, I can understand why a company would want to ditch him. Companies shouldn't try to keep all customers all the time. Just read the blog <http://notalwaysright.com/> which is full of anecdotes of stupid customers.

<comment><USER28> I am of the opinion that businesses are defined by how they handle the exit of customers more than by how they handle take-on of customers. A customer being difficult to manage or not profitable still deserves a professional exit.

These sorts of customers are not, however, automatically "stupid customers". They are "difficult" or "non-profitable". In my experience, a user simply being "stupid" doesn't in itself mean that you shouldn't work with them - <USER2> fact, often with a little bit of work, they might even become a reasonable repeat customer.

Like a lot of people who have had customer facing roles, I have enjoyed reading notalwaysright (and the older <http://customerssuck.livejournal.com/>). But I have found over time the postings to have become more deliberate funny-making or actually problematic from an equality point of view.

<comment><USER27> _These sorts of customers are not, however, automatically "stupid customers". They are "difficult" or "non-profitable"._

Yes. notalwaysright.com is funny, and I'm sure some are good customers. However it's a good 'ammo' against the idea that "The Customer is always right" (a corrollary is that businesses should care about losing any customers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> meh, that sucks.

A 1and1 employee once ripped a domain from me. I was bored and bought top10.eu, a minute after I got a call from that company telling me that he is going to own that domain and I cannot buy it. I told him, you're late my friend, refreshed the browser to be sure about it, it was all ok, yes I owned it. Refreshing my account again revealed that there was no such domain anymore. So much for trust. He called again and said, sorry but you cannot own that domain, I own it now. Man was I pissed.

Trust nobody, even if it's nobody. Do your own backups regularly. Daily and hourly.

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems like an unwise legal move to make it look like you deleted the data not out of policy, but out of a desire to harm the (now former) customer.

</comment><comment><USER31> As someone who runs his own consulting business, if I had clients who didn't know what they were doing and abusive towards me, I'd drop them in a heartbeat. The original poster on reddit isn't going to garner any sympathy from me.

<comment><USER32> There's a difference between dropping a client and treating them disrespectfully. At the very least, the bad publicity isn't worth it.

<comment><USER29> Sorry, but there was a guy earning millions just because he had the worst customer support. That was his job, to be rude, aggressive and an ass to customers. Really google even changed it's algorithm due to people like him.

Telling everywhere, that domain abc.org sucks would result in domain abc.org beeing ranked top, heh. At least it was a creative way of fraud and motivated google for a move, otherwise google would have lost reputation due to that guy too.

<comment><USER33> Yes, and that guy (Vitaly Borker of DecorMyEyes.com) has now pled guilty to two federal counts of sending threatening communications, one federal count of mail fraud and one federal count of wire fraud.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/business/13borker.html>

Do not try this at home!

<comment><USER29> Yes and it's good that he finally gets into prison for acting like a fraudster. Don't see a reason to downvote me because you don't like him. No logic in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is why, as a startup or small business, it's crucial to have that guy/gal on your team who is just superb at support and dealing with customers.

They should be the type of person who has the ability to not take insults or criticism about the company personally, they should have a very thick skin, and generally they should almost always be happy and upbeat. It's rare to find this person but even more rare for them to be one of your founders.

If you're in the business of having customers who require support I suggest hiring this person before almost anyone else when you have the ability to do so. It's a game changer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Latest update from thiswebhost.com:

[http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit- incide...](http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit-incident/)

<comment><USER33> I understand where this* is coming from, but I personally still wouldn't do business with them after this. Yes, these customers did lots of things wrong. But a provider that was more committed to customer service would have tried to be constructive in the way that they handled things anyway.

Even if you want to fire this customer, "No soup for you!" is not the right way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> FatCow isn't different. I've promoted their hosting services and they've consistently refused to pay me around $1K.

The only reason I've not brought their actions to light is that I still have some months before my account there expires and they can terminate the account without any reason.

But after reading this I'm very motivated to bring their shady tactics out before they make a buck more by scamming their own evangelists.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think the Redditor complaining isn't being entirely fair (shock horror, wronged customer doesn't represent both sides of the issue), and I think they handled this the best way they could once it got so big by issuing that statement. That said, it still positively reeks of unprofessionalism, from the smilies in the text to the inarguably weak reasoning:

> It is our policy not to discuss client accounts with anyone but the account > holder. I have unsuspended your account and hope that this allows you to > retrieve any data required.

Pretty sure that I'm not the account holder, and yet he's discussing the details with me? I would certainly think twice before considering them as hosts.

</comment><comment><USER37> I will take this opportunity to warn everyone about BlueHost.com. Three knocks against them:

1) Most importantly: _They store passwords in plaintext_ and require the last four char of your password whenever you contact support. I kid you not.

2) Almost as important: They _shut down customers_ when they disagree with them politically — this is a Salt Lake City outfit, and therefore extremely anti-gay, and you will be paying people who take down pro-LGBT websites simply for being pro-LGBT.

3) Terrible tech documentation (they "support" Rails but it's quite difficult to actually use).

</comment><comment><USER38> Is this company run by 15 year olds? This behavior is just ridiculous. Completely unprofessional to delete someone's data in a fit of rage. I seriously hope people boycott this company.

</comment><comment><USER39> I fear some of the negativity might trickle down, considering this* is a reseller as mentioned.

I poked LiquidWeb, so they should be aware of the issue.

</comment><comment><USER40> This makes me wonder. What's stopping Google from implementing something like "social scam warnings"? It would be nice to see something along the lines "1 of your friends thinks this site is bad" with the search results.

It wouldn't even have to be Google - anyone with a huge social graph (LinkedIn, Facebook et al) could implement "check your friends' opinion on X".

</comment><comment><USER41> Maybe I'm old fashioned but I really hate the idea of using twitter as a customer service and account management vector.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Their response, this time not from Jules: <http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/moving-on/>

</comment><comment><USER42> That's the thing about customer service. People are gonna call you out, but professionalism is in not rising to it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Do we really need a third thread about this?

</comment><comment><USER44> BOFH much.

</comment><comment><USER45> You better believe everyone will hear about this and drop them. Very unprofessional for a grown man to act like a child.

<comment><USER46> You are assuming he's a grown man.

<comment><USER47> Even more unprofessional to allow a child to do your customer service, so assuming he's a grown man is really giving them the benefit of the doubt now isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I won't judge This* without knowing the whole story. From experience I know that customers can get really retarded PITAs and waste all your time with nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER49> What are the twitter accounts of the customers? All I've seen here is a couple of DM's from the host and a couple of emails from the host.

<comment><AUTHOR> <https://twitter.com/berfarah> & <https://twitter.com/boriskourt>

<comment><USER49> Unprofessional behaviour from the host, but these guys should perhaps have employed a bit of professionalism too - I wouldn't be surprised if the 'perpetually indignant' twitter mode of address, and the tendency to want to summon up mob of the righteous whenever possible, has spilled over into their dealings with this company. Seems like twitter has given every angry person the opportunity to wave a banner of Truth and Justice 24/7. However, even seeing the twitter streams, all the facts are not out in the open, so this is just my unscientific take on it. I expect it'll be an unpopular view.

<comment><USER11> I think there's some truth there. Both sides acted like children, but the reason the focus is more on the hosting company is that they abused their power.

As far as the attitudes go, when you're reselling $2.95/month hosting you're going to get $2.95/month customers. In my experience, cheap customers are the most likely to squabble and gripe and moan over tiny things and drive you crazy. But hey, you make your bed and you gotta sleep in it. And don't delete your bed's data and backups over a twitter hissy fit.

<comment><USER50> and on that $2.95 your profit is $1.50 a month ... that doesn't buy a lot of "taking shit".

<comment><USER51> Maybe not, but collateral damage caused by handling it in a wrong way may be worth few orders of magnitude more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> :)

</comment><comment><USER53> A couple of points:

\- Backups are your responsibility. Not the hosts, not the government. Not anyone else. You. Period.

\- Cannot pay with Paypal? Paypal HQ spontaneously explodes into a huge ball of fiery death? Find another way to pay. It's your responsibility to hold your side of the contract.

<comment><USER54> And when they only accept Paypal? What do yo do then? I don't care if I have backups. Such a termination of services and further purging of data is a big no-no in my books.</comment></comment>


Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia University - 2007 - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/24/AR2007092401042.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say that, if they let a political figure that according to Wikipedia is both domestically and internationally criticized, this testifies that they actually believe in freedom of speech.</comment>


The Algorithmic Lens: Christos Papadimitriou on how CS is transforming science - <AUTHOR> http://www.scivee.tv/node/10204

<comment><USER2> Dang. I'm into computational photography so I was a little sad this wasn't about actual algorithmic lenses.

(Also, did this site have an awful video player or what?)</comment>


A well designed GOVERNMENT website. - <AUTHOR> http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com/

<comment><USER2> Oddly enough, the high-graphic Apple-like website gives it a `less serious` feel. Apple-like websites primarily try to sell something, whereas a government website's more or less sole purpose is to present information.

An example of website that presents information well is Wikipedia (but it could do better.) Essentially, the driving factors in a website like this should be: 1) Is the information well-organized? 2) Is it easy to find? 3) Is it well presented?

However this website seems to put an undue emphasis on presentation and graphics (with the large background picture of the police men and two vehicles taking up much of the page.) Compare this with Wikipedia, where snippets of information, news highlights and other interesting tidbits of information from their vast encyclopedia populate the front page. Milwaukee police does do that in their second page, but too much of the index page contains fancy ad-like imagery. To me, it looks like they're trying to raise the public opinion of the department.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesnt quite work in Safari 6 Mountain Lion.

Oh, yes it does, it just needs about a minute to load using my 50mb connection. It is probably the parallax script.

Site looks good, but works poorly. Not well designed

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow - I disagree that this is well designed. It also looks half finished (lot of links are dead, many others are unclickable when they should be) - I'm guessing this is a work in progress from an agency?

<comment><USER5> ...thats not design

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At least with Chrome on Linux is really sluggish when scrolling. It's like they have something on place to make the scrolling slower... or a lot of JavaScript code on each scroll event.

</comment><comment><USER7> Impressive, though a bit jumpy/slow on some of the larger images.

Another well designed government (UK) website: <https://www.gov.uk/>

</comment><comment><USER8> This site causes 100% usage of one of my CPU's cores.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ridiculously slow on Safari 6 and Chrome 21 on OS X 10.8 - The site is sure pretty, but it's not for today's browsers. Maybe in 2014.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this really a gov site? Looks like a local police blogger. The about page doesn't load for me so I can't be sure.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure what the point is?

whitehouse.gov is also a GOVERNMENT website that looks good.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you tried it without Javascript?</comment>


Orange: Data Mining Toolbox in Python - <AUTHOR> http://orange.biolab.si/ <comment><USER2> Surely things change over the years... right? Orange has been used widely as a bioinformatics tool at Karolinska Institutet and Baylor College of Medicine for example and as a teaching tool for the students. Also: [http://bit.ly/29dGD0b](http://bit.ly/29dGD0b), [http://bit.ly/29cROFv](http://bit.ly/29cROFv), [http://bit.ly/29slSQ5](http://bit.ly/29slSQ5).

<comment><USER3> Is it necessary to use bit.ly here?

<comment><USER4> He clearly needs referral data to mine

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Orange has been very handy on occasion, is great for introductory walkthroughs and presentations. I wish more people understood how important the visualization aspect is.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used this for my masters thesis a few years back. It was fairly intuitive, you still need to be comfortable coding to dig into what's going on under the hood, but the visuals of all the pieces hooked up really helps abstract away some of the complexity and lets the user focus on how the data flows through the algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've actually found this tool to be very convenient for explaining the data mining process visually to laymen.

Does anyone have any experience using Orange? How would you rate it compared to SAS EG or other alternatives?

<comment><USER8> It doesn't.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't rate against those tools, to be more clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, I did some work on this many years ago. It was adding some visualizations using QGraphicsView, and sponsored by Google Summer of Code. It was my first "real" programming project.

Unfortunately I never had a use for Orange. Even while I was working there, nobody could tell me who uses it. There was some cancer research paper from the same team who wrote the software, I think about identifying which genes cause cancer, but nothing else I could find.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have had great experiences using Rapidminer community edition which is like this but on steroids. I say community edition because they've started charging for the pro versions and probably future versions so community is still free and open source. I think a lot of people miss out by not using these tools to prototype their pipelines. You can get probably an order of magnitude more experimentation done using one of these visual pipeline creators vs. trying to essentially reinvent the experiment infrastructure yourself in your own code.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> Neat. I always wanted to do a node-based application like this but for statistics and tabular data editing..</comment>


Why Your Static Website Needs HTTPS (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs-https/ <comment><USER2> The recommendation of Cloudflare here seems poor. Using CF to make an HTTP only site support HTTPS will only prevent MITM between CF and the end user. MITM between my server and CF is not improved as it's still HTTP. Yes, you can add a self signed cert and tell CF not to check the cert validity, but that doesn't prevent MITM.

Worse, Cloudflare can inject JavaScript into your site. The default settings will show Captchas to users if CF thinks they are not trustworthy. So you end up with MITM anyway if you aren't careful. For a static site, does a captcha really make sense? Cloudflare makes the internet worse with insane defaults like this.

[https://community.cloudflare.com/t/getting-cloudflare- captch...](https://community.cloudflare.com/t/getting-cloudflare-captchas- every-website-i-visit/9277) [https://www.techrez.com/remove-cloudflare- challange-page/](https://www.techrez.com/remove-cloudflare-challange-page/)

<comment><USER3> Then again, the defaults of the internet let anyone remove you from it with a $5 booter and your data is in cleartext and your MITM is every ISP + any hop in between instead of just your reverse proxy.

Takes defaults far more insane than Cloudflare to do worse than the internet status quo.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, what is a "$5 booter"?

<comment><USER5> Automated service for issuing DDoS attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was disappointed the article is so thin on real substance. It could have listed out the reasons to always use HTTPS. Easily done:

1\. Privacy matters. A medical website, or indeed Wikipedia, should prevent a snooping ISP from finding out you have been reading about an embarrassing condition. This is similar to the way librarians are extremely protective of their loan records [0]. Netflix use HTTPS for their streams, for the same reason (it does nothing to aid their DRM, it's purely about privacy) [1].

2\. HTTPS prevents ads/trackers/malware being injected into the page by unscrupulous ISPs (this really has happened [2])

3\. Modern browsers will (rightly) warn users not to trust the site. This makes the site look bad.

4\. Some fancy browser features are disabled if you use unencrypted HTTP. Likely irrelevant for a static site though.

5\. Let's turn the tables and ask why you wouldn't use HTTPS for a public- facing web server. There are just 3 reasons:

* Reduced admin overhead not having to bother with certs

* It enables caching web proxies, which is only relevant if you're running a serious distribution platform like Steam, or a Linux package-management repo [3]

* Better support for very old devices, such as old smartphones in the developing world

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/13/us- library-r...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/13/us-library-r..).

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/it- wa...](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/it-wa..).

[2] [https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com/](https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com/)

[3] [https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/](https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/)

(Taken from an old comment of mine at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21912817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21912817) )

 _Edit: Added the third reason not to use HTTPS_

<comment><USER7> ad. 5 - There are more. For example:

* You don't like the Let's Encrypt Subscriber Agreement, for example the part about indemnification and attorneys' fees.

* Your domain name is on Let's Encrypt blacklist ([https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/name-is-blacklisted-on-r...](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/name-is-blacklisted-on-renew/9012/6), [https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/domain-blacklist/106374](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/domain-blacklist/106374)), though they now seem to un-blacklist most cases on email request.

I think the problem is that there are little alternatives to LE.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sold on either of these objections. Let's Encrypt is not the only CA. If you don't like the free CA, pay to use another one.

If I see unencrypted HTTP on a website, I immediately think less of that website. It's a _Good Thing_ that the web has got to this point. Quibbles about Let's Encrypt's terms don't strike me as convincing.

> I think the problem is that there are little alternatives to LE.

But there are. Again, there's a whole marketplace of CAs to choose from.

If anything, there are too many CAs trusted by today's browsers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The exchange between Troy Hunt and Jacob Baytelman is a little aggravating for me--they appear to be talking past each other.

Jacob challenges him to "hack [his] static blog". I don't know what 'hacking a website' means to him, but to you and me it probably means compromising the web server, which is not directly related to HTTPS (although I can think of a lot of ways that the use of HTTP could lead to a web server being compromised).

Troy responds by taking him up on this challenge, accuses Jacob of thinking that his site is immune from transport layer risks, and then performs a man in the middle attack on himself using Jacob's site (when in reality literally any HTTP site could have been used).

It's like these two are having completely separate conversations.

<comment><USER9> If you read the Twitter exchange leading up to the 'challenge accepted' tweet linked in the article ([https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1014736960542289922](https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1014736960542289922)), it's clear that the context of 'hack' is specifically about man-in-the-middle injections. That is, hacking his static blog as it is served up to users.

And arguably, the fact that nearly any HTTP site could have been used for the demo is partly the point.

<comment><USER10> It's clearly not clear to Jacob, since he eventually says "I am afraid you will only demo MITM attack on the traffic."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Certbot and LetsEncrypt make this a trivial process these days. Takes 15 minutes to set up and is free. Why not use it?

<comment><USER12> or Cloudflare. Just a couple origin hits and your site is served via CDN for free, fast and secure.

<comment><USER13> Definitively no. I set up my own personal page on a VPS precisely to avoid LinkedIn, Google Scholar, Research Gate or any third party service being in control of my public face. Using another service would defeat that purpose.

<comment><USER14> You are probably using a VPS running on someone else server, through many networks. (So do I.) Any of those can MITM your traffic. Maybe you're also using apt/yum to keep the VPS up-to-date. Is adding Letsencrypt to the list such a burden? Or maybe you're only against Cloudflare. I go with Letsencrypt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The first time I saw a mobile/prepaid ISP inject their notices on my own personal website, I realize I needed to get off my lazy ass and setup LetsEncrypt.

</comment><comment><USER16> CITM - detected Corporations In The Middle (CITM) attack. requests blocked 15%, cdn.example.com dnjs.cloudyfaire.com troymcclure.disqus.com fonts.noodleapis.com fonts.noodlestatic.com platform.example.com noodletube.com example.com

https is easy. point everything DNS everything to cloudyfiare and click Purchase and by clicking Purchase agree to all the terms (but don't actually read any of them.) hand over root access to a program with the word bot in it, and allow it to update itself automatically (what could possibly go wrong.) Everything HTTPS all the time. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar)

call me skeptical, or the many ( [https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/what- to-know-about-the-...](https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/what-to-know- about-the-controversy-over-the-sale-of-org.html) [https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is- now-i...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now- intercepting-all-https-traffic/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS#Criticism) ) many reasons Why My Static Website No Longer Exists.

</comment><comment><USER17> Devil's advocate: HTTPS centralizes the web around big players. The CA trust model gives a privileged few the right to say what websites are "secure", even in cases where no user input goes down the wire. "Not Secure" in the top left brands and shames amateurs. _Come on, just make a Medium page! You should be posting this on a FAANG property!_ Let's Encrypt is great, but don't forget that it could disappear overnight--after every browser started de facto blocking non-HTTPS traffic.

<comment> jagged-chisel How does Let's Encrypt fit into this? Are they part of the 'privileged few?' Can we trust part of The Few more than other parts?

<comment><USER17> They have even more power than the paid ones, because the most of sites they secure wouldn't/couldn't get a paid cert if Let's Encrypted disappeared or refused to serve them. At least the customers of paid ones could just move their billing to another service.

<comment><USER18> I would be more comfortable if there were several acme based free certificate providers

However I'm far more concerned about chrome, and the attitude of so many in the biz that think Firefox should be mothballed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > HTTPS Is Easy

It is not easy at all. Getting a certificate and putting it into the conf is. Maintaining that certificate, applying the ever growing number of "security" headers, dealing with broken stapling, is anything, but easy.

<comment><USER20> Strange. Once per week I receive a mail from a cronjob telling me my certificate(s) are renewed. So for me the original statement holds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Back in early 2009, I was launching a file storage web service similar to Dropbox (without the client, but with an API with OAuth 1 support) using AWS Ec2 and S3. I planned to use HTTPS, but it was expensive for me (as a college dropout), and the website is still online without it. I abandoned the project afterward. Recently, I started to migrate it from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, and one of the goals was to add HTTPS to it. However, I haven't had much time to finish the migration, and it's still not being served as HTTPS (even though it has all other sorts of protection that were the norm back then). I wonder how many other "legacy websites" have a similar issue (which I don't find justifiable for anything 'in production').

<comment><USER22> Have you tried let's encrypt a la certbot? It wasn't a painless process when I did it but I do have autorenewing "green lock" SSL certs for free.

<comment><USER21> Yes, I have.

Let's Encrypt ACME challenge resolved this from now on. However, I'm using a really old machine + OS, and the nginx version I'm running is old enough not to be compatible with it. So, instead of having a hard time updating the server, I decided to migrate the site to a newer machine (even because some AWS technical limitations don't let me migrate to a new instance type).

~10 years ago I slacked in getting an HTTPS certificate as this would have meant a lot of money.

~ Today, I want to use the ACME challenge with Let's Encrypt (no need of OV for a portfolio website), but I never find the time to finish the migration (that should take more 4 to 16 hours).

<comment><USER7> There are ACME clients written in Python 2 or even pure shell -- should work even on very old systems (but not older than ~2010, you need openssl with TLS1.2 support).

I personally prefer them even on current systems, as I don't really like the "automagic" nature of certbot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article is two years old - think it's been well established that sites need https, if for no other reason then browsers and search engines punish you in a variety of ways for not having it. Certificates are free with let's encrypt so there is no excuse not to anymore.

In the case of Cloudflare (or any CDN) best practice is to reject requests not from the CDN. Cloudflare doesn't support AWS S3 compatible storage directly - it won't make signed requests - but you can write IAM policy that only responds to certain IP.

<comment><USER2> Here are those IP addresses. Just know that the list can change over time, so you'll want to update your IAM policy.

[https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/](https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Note: 2018.

Troy talks about a tipping point, which was Jan 2017.

</comment><comment><USER24> HTTPS PR is not the internet's defense against hackers. It's FAANG's defense against Comcast and AT&T.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have found one of isp used to inject ad on http page and user has no idea how this popad apear. http protocol need to die.

</comment><comment><USER2> > In one of many robust internet debates (as is prone to happen on Twitter)

Maybe I just don't get Twitter. Every time I look at a thread it starts with some coherent conversation, but then devolves into a bunch of tangents that don't coherently follow each other.

HN and similar seem much better suited.

<comment><USER3> Makes a lot of sense when you acknowledge that we like the dopamine release of arguing. Twitter consolidates an argument into just the parts you mean and read anyways. But you'll just find long form of the same exact thing on message boards and Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm stuck in a related situation: I own a website with heavy traffic that contains inline iframes to some http pages (about 30% of pages) hosted by third parties. I can't turn https on for my website, otherwise these iframes would be blocked by the browser. Since I don't offer https, it means that I can't offer features such as login/sign up etc.. Any ideas?

<comment><USER27> Proxy the iframes through your own server.

<comment><USER26> Would be very bandwidth intensive? They're service video streams served over HTTP.

<comment><USER27> Oh so then I'm pretty sure they use http to reduce CPU load.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> HTTPS is bad:

\- It wastes resources.

\- It adds complexity.

\- You can solve everything HTTPS solves over HTTP!

\- It encourages passive destructive behavior.

\- Troy Hunt probably has money coming in from certificates somehow.

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are also bad.

WebSockets are bad.

As a side note:

Vulkan is bad.

HDMI is bad.

Wakeup people. Time to get off that over-engineering couch and downvote the guy telling the truth again!

<comment><USER19> So... you are both correct and not, which is probably why you're getting downvoted.

Is much of the current tech overengineered? Yes, it definitely is.

HTTPS on it's own - having TLS and a certificate - is not. It never was. But with stapling, CORS, X-XSS, and the rest, it becomes a beast. Those are becoming requirements, and they are making things _very_ complicated.

I hear you, and I tend to agree on many things. Serial ports were gloriously simple whereas USB3 is a nightmare on every level. VGA was beautiful in it's simplicity, HDMI 1.4 with Ethernet included is certainly too much.

mta-sts is probably the worst idea that could have been added to email, by relying on HTTPS requests.

My personal take on this: use all of them responsibly. Use HTTPS, but don't make it exclusive, let the user make the choice: keep HTTP as well. Leave CORS, STS, Referrer Policy, etc out.

<comment><USER28> You are the first person in the world who has a dialogue with me about this. Thank you!

Here are a bunch of solutions I use instead of complexity:

I hash with one time server generated salt for login:

[http://talk.binarytask.com](http://talk.binarytask.com)

I use Comet-Stream for real-time communication over HTTP:

[http://fuse.rupy.se](http://fuse.rupy.se)

And my latest finding is DPI for video:

[http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=2433316338364993026](http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=2433316338364993026)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857975)

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes, add HTTPS, but keep the option for mere HTTP, because backwards compatibility is good.

Many parts of the world can't deal with TLS1.3 HTTP/2 websites only.

<comment><USER30> It's not "many parts" but a fraction of people with older browsers (mostly IE, Android). The global figures shown on Can I Use are pretty close to what I see on an international web property as well — ~80%:

[https://caniuse.com/#feat=tls1-3](https://caniuse.com/#feat=tls1-3)

That may or may not be a fraction of traffic you care about depending on your visitor profiles and security posture but it's not really accurate to say "many parts of the world".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> To prevent [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the- middle_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack)

</comment><comment><USER32> There are almost no arguments given, but all the other ones are nicely rebutted on n-gate:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hV6m26a...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hV6m26a8hrAJ:n-gate.com/software/2017/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Without HTTPS, Russians could MITM my knitting blog any minute now!

Indefinitely babysitting letsencrypt is a small price to pay to keep those grannies safe!

<comment><USER18> A cronjob does the job just fine - far less babysitting than keeping your OS uptodate with security patches (ok that's another cronjob if you're happy with auto reboots on occasion)

<comment><USER24> Everything in awful awful IT requires babysitting--even cron jobs.

<comment><USER18> If you're running your own server you need to be babysitting it, extra babysitting for your https cert is negligible

<comment><USER24> Let me guess... IT guy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The problem with these calls for HTTPS is that those doing it believe http and https are mutually exclusive. They completly turn off human navigable webservers and leave only the machine navigable ones online. It makes the web only accessible to computer software written in the last 5 years.

There are plenty, I'd say most, websites which do _not_ need HTTPS. And my static website does not _need_ https. It's nice, sure, but it's a personal website and there's no money or personal information involved. Leaving an HTTP version going alongside the HTTPS and Tor hidden service is just fine.

The greater evil is having people run third party code by default on every website from every random domain that's called. Now that's insecure. It's like opening every email attachment you get. Every single "danger" of HTTP he lists is actually a danger of running third party code blindly and automatically.

<comment><USER15> Do you want ISPs to inject random crap at the top of your website? Because that's how you get ISPs to inject random crap at the top of your website.

I remember getting a Vodaphone sim card (I think it was in Belgium or The Netherlands) and seeing their banner displayed on MY WEBSITE! It wasn't in a language I know, and it might have just been a bandwidth warning or something to indicate I need to reload, but it was still on my website, injected right in there.

HTTP is needed for static sites, if you want to ensure your readers see the exact same site that you made.

<comment><USER34> >Do you want ISPs to inject random crap at the top of your website?

If your ISP does this, or if you are on a sketchy network somewhere, then maybe you should not use it at all. Get a new ISP, or use a VPN if you are that worried. If the webmaster is not sharing sensitive information on his casually maintained static website, then that is good enough reason not to use HTTPS. I know it sounds... uncaring.

It is true ordinary people, who don't understand the risks could get MITM'd and never suspect a thing. For some reason I still don't care enough to put HTTPS on my shitty old flash game website. I just can't be bothered. I think that is good enough of a reason. Blame should go on the ISP who are MITM'ing their customers.

<comment><USER35> Sure, but when the biggest (or only) ISPs in many countries are doing it, and you can prevent it by taking out 15 minutes to set up Let's Encrypt, that's on you.

<comment><USER34> Nope. They can get a VPN, or fight against their big ISP or government to stop such dubious practices. Your point of view seems to come from a standpoint of infantilization of these users.

<comment><USER35> You expect that from the vast majority of the population which is not tech- savvy?

<comment><USER36> I expect the vast majority to complain if their internet provider is putting ads into website. The bigger the company the bigger the group.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I forgot my laptop at home and had the most productive day ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.cambrianhouse.com/blog/startups-entrepreneurship/i-forgot-my-laptop-at-home-and-had-the-most-productive-day-ever/ <comment><USER2> I still don't have a laptop, and I don't tend to listen to music in headphones. I have about a 20-minute walk to class, and I find that it's either relaxing, to just walk and not do anything else, or I'm deep in thought, considering the day's lecture topics, project ideas, implementation ideas for a current project, or any number of other things.

I have often found myself disappointed that so many people are wrapped up in technology and oblivious to the world around them. I think that if more people allowed themselves some downtime, everyone would be a lot less stressful and more friendly.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a case of going from feeding brain fast food and actually giving it a five course meal to enjoy.

Without your laptop you actually had to use your brain and not rely on brain fast food and use your brain for what it was intended, complex thoughts.

Now, put that into your schedule, every 3rd and 20th of the month you will not even touch your laptop and you'll have more miracles occur in your life.

</comment><comment><USER4> Long before microsoft, there was SAP (Systems Analysis & Programming). A bunch of funky long haired ex IBM programmers who perfected their applications first consulting with their clients (big business). Then sitting down at a desk and creating their applications with nothing but pen, paper and cards. Programming stripped bare. Then typing in (or transferring by punch card) the application(s) into the clients own machine (they couldn't afford personal IBM minis) and configuring it.

Development has speed up a lot since then with developers working with _live_ code at the console. Has it got that much better?

</comment><comment><USER5> I couldn't read that text and had the most productive day ever! Is it just me or someone else also noticed that a black font on a brown background with little gray circles is not conductive of reading?

</comment><comment><USER6> I try to spend two weeks out of each year without computers or the internet - usually one week off for every six months on. That may sound like a lot, but in practice it hardly matters because I spend such a huge % of all my other time on here, and it is very possible to get work done without a computer. I find that I get many of my best ideas when I'm forced to take a step back and live in the non-tech world for awhile.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you spend all your time doing $X it's a good idea to take a break from doing $X every once in a while.

<comment><USER8> PHP style variables. Always fun.

<comment><USER7> yeah, I've been hacking Drupal all week. I actually don't really care for PHP style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This would actually be a good idea to do about once every 2 weeks or once a month. Anyone else do this?</comment>


Would you pay $100 for one time advice for your startup? - <AUTHOR> It's helpful to get feedback and advice for your startup to help bypass blind-spots, open up the mind etc. Which is why mentor hours are also popular.
Quora and other discussion forums are fine for generic advice, but less helpful for advice specific to your scenario.
So would you pay $100 for a one-time (somewhat detailed) answer to your problem/ question? Assuming it came from experienced entrepreneurs (10+ years exp). <comment><USER2> To be entirely honest, I probably wouldn't because if someone is asking me to pay them for advice on how to improve my business (a.k.a. consulting), I'd wonder why they're only charging me $100.

This seems like one of those areas where charging more would be a signal of value and competence.

My answer might be a bit North America-centric, though. I'm not sure how business advice of this type is viewed elsewhere in the world.

Overall, I think the idea is a useful one. But if you're giving good advice, $100 might be under-charging for it.

This interview comes to mind: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit- sethi-and-patrick...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and- patrick-mckenzie-on-why-your-customers-would-be-happier-if-you-charged-more/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Only If this is from a well know entrepreneur, manager or dev working for a big name / successful startup, somebody I heard on some popular podcast.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The advice may be related to product, technology, sales, marketing, fund raising, hiring, operations, etc

</comment><comment><USER4> Definitely. I think it will be important to clearly show the expert's identities.

</comment><comment><USER5> If it would mean to sign up your first (or n') customer? Absolutely!!

</comment><comment><USER6> Without hesitation, yes.</comment>


Show HN: Java to PHP Compiler - <AUTHOR>

I had this crazy idea like some years ago.. I wasn't expecting it be factible, and there's still some semantic problems with this approach
Anyways, the whole idea was to take some java source, generate an AST, and output it back as syntactically correct PHP.
why? 50% fun + 50% exploration
So I have this really basic compiler, which can roughly output its own code; what's still missing?

    - static vs instance detection (-> vs ::)
    - class' properties
    - method visibility
    - <USER2>
    - inner types
    - annonymous classes
    - dealing with method overriding
 There's a huge gap in the semantic area (eg: String.format vs sprintf) that is way out of scope for this hack.
Source: https://gist.github.com/eridal/a850a8a665a255b74d2c <comment><USER3> Interesting idea, you should clean it up into multiple files and put it on an actual repository. If you compiled all of Java's libraries, would you be able to self host the trans-compiler?

</comment><comment><USER4> why have you not put it in a regular repo, yet? by the looks of it, this thing is something far beyond a mere 'gist' :P

</comment><comment><USER5> Great work, it looks awesome.</comment>


What I learned from building an AI that generates porn - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@DavidMack/what-i-learned-from-building-an-ai-that-generates-porn-ba1f47b2035f <comment><AUTHOR> "Reflecting on my earlier experience of trying to share the project, it felt like I'd struck a corner of hypocrisy in our society and technology — pornography is a major part of internet usage and people's daily lives, yet we're not comfortable talking about it. Here was a fledgling technology that could improve the situation, but we moderate and bury it."

-> see e.g. "Ten indispensable technologies built by the pornography industry" (2011) [http://www.enterprisefeatures.com/ten-indispensable-technolo...](http://www.enterprisefeatures.com/ten-indispensable-technologies-built-by-the-pornography-industry/) and "Does Porn Make Men Bad at Sex?" (2016) [https://medium.com/@SexCoachSarah/porn-a-convenient-scapegoa...](https://medium.com/@SexCoachSarah/porn-a-convenient-scapegoat-5187aad00349)</comment>


Pitfalls of Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/pitfalls-of-node-js-c4055dfecd8e <comment><AUTHOR> I agree with the article, in fact I moved away from node.js to php/laravel for backend. Async is not the priority for all the things I need as far as product devel goes.

<comment><USER2> I'm currently working with PHP and node on different projects, and I find PHP worse in the 3 criteria used in the article:

\- Library: This is debatable, but I find PHP's library far worse than node's in both diversity and API design. The reliance on npm isn't a downside for me, and I find npm far superior to composer in usability.

\- Error handling: In PHP, try-catch doesn't catch fatal errors. Handling fatal errors is very hacky and ill-conceived (they all get funneled into a single, weird, script-scope handler function). Inb4 _you don 't want to handle fatal errors_: sorry, but there are many use cases where this is essential, such as self-respawning worker scripts and any kind of customized logging.

\- While node forces you to think about async, PHP doesn't even have it, and I don't quite see this as a net positive. I also don't think node's async-await is very problematic on the server side (whereas client-side support is rare and its transpilation is pretty rough).</comment></comment>


Chrome DevTools Commands - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/f1f29cb2c5e0

<comment><USER2> Object.keys has nothing to do with Chrome's DevTools, it's part of the ECMAScript 5 spec and is supported in all modern browsers (and IE >8).</comment>


Sources: Shyp Is Raising $50M at a $250M Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/sources-shyp-is-raising-50-million-at-a-250-million-valuation/

<comment><USER2> Cool idea, but I just can't get my head around the economics of many of these VC-subsidized economy companies. I don't claim to be the smartest guy in the room, so I would love to be educated on the how companies like Shyp and Instacart can make a profit, and what assumptions underlie this. Any takers?

<comment><USER3> for Instacart for example; the postage fee of $3, or whatever they advertise is more of a trojan horse. The company makes most of it's money through partnering with stores and also marking up the prices of items. i.e. the price that an item has on Instacart is not the same as the price the item is actually sold for if you go into a Safeway (or whatever) store.

<comment><USER2> Even with markup, shopping & delivery are expensive. They'll have the 1%ers but I doubt they can scale beyond when they have to compete with Google and Amazon. Google could spend $1b/year for 10-years preparing this market for driverless/drone-based delivery. And this would be a rounding error on their balance sheet. No one, not even Amazon has that muscle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shyp is super awesome, I hope they can manage to maintain the current pricing and don't crank it up once they reach the mainstream.</comment>


Will the provision of coffee by employers be seen as exploitative in future? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Will-the-provision-of-coffee-by-employers-be-seen-as-exploitative-in-future

<comment><USER2> [https://www.quora.com/Will-the-provision-of-coffee-by- employ...](https://www.quora.com/Will-the-provision-of-coffee-by-employers-be- seen-as-exploitative-in-future?share=1)</comment>