When Will The Social Sharing Button Madness Stop - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigagranoff.com/blog_posts/social-bookmarking-and-sharing-buttons-when-will-the-madness-end/

<comment><USER2> This one is going straight in to the echo chamber. I doubt that anyone willing to put 10+ social media icons on their blog is prepared to hear this argument. Those of us who recognize how abhorant it is have already trimmed that list down.

This disconnect stems from the difference in a core belief about design and motivation. If you believe that sharing is driven by the mere opportunity to do so, you're going to bury your blog in this stuff. If you believe that good design sells itself, you'll prioritize good design in the belief that sharing will follow naturally. This is the argument that must be made.

<comment><USER3> Although I think your point about design is very astute, I disagree with your assertion that those who need to hear this are lost cases.

I have seen some insanely huge, hover as you scroll social sharing panels on blogs of people whom I consider to be luminaries in the field of technology and design. Maybe it's a case of outsourcing the blog design or using templates just because they are there... Let's face it: slapping together a Wordpress template plus Disqus comments and some other frills then calling it 'web design' is all too common these days.

I think that getting some dialogue going on the topic is very worthwhile and I ask that people like yourself, with such astute observations on the topic not take the shoulder shrugging stance and speak out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not to mention if you care about the privacy of your users every share button is a little tracking device that probes into your users habits and pages visited. (Ghostery can help you see the extent of the tracking that is taking place)

I get really mad at share buttons because there's no way to know beforehand if you are going to get to a page filled with those.

From observation I came to a simple law about these share buttons: _the amount of content is inversely proportional to the number of share buttons on the page_.

<comment><USER5> Regarding Ghostery, there is really no way of observing what is being logged and what isn't on the server. Only some sort of legal inquiry can reveal that (eg what happened with Facebook in Ireland)

You could also use noscript or disable third party cookies in browser settings if you really don't want social media buttons.

<comment><USER6> I've used AdBlock to disable iframes with URLs matching Like, Tweet buttons etc. It has worked pretty well for me so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'll probably stop once this is implemented in browsers, so every article declares a basic set of sharable info, and the social buttons install themselves and read that info. Until then, every one is running in a sandbox, they'll never share info, they'll never allow an intermediary, and they'll all be competing for screen space and article install-base regardless of your existence on a network or the number of networks.

I, for one, find it crazy that I can Like and maybe +1 a blog entry, but I can't Pinboard it or ReadItLater or Orkut it without the _site_ implementing those buttons, despite them all doing roughly the same thing with roughly the same data.

<comment><USER8> Isn't this basically what bookmarklets are supposed to do?

Facebook's open graph tags are everywhere (you kindof need them to make "like" work properly), and what you're describing could be implemented using a javascript bookmarklet that read the tags.

<comment><USER7> Well, kind of. Bookmarklets you have to click to use, and perform a strange action to install. An integrated 'share' button could do more, like render those Tweet +1 Like buttons inline, and show if you've already <verb>ed it. And have an _infinitely_ larger install-base; in my mind, this would be built in, and sites you can share to would register themselves with your browser, which would make it a one-click operation for people.

But yeah. Pie in the sky. This would require Google and Facebook (aka, The Internet) to give up absolute control over all that information, which they'd probably fight unless it can demonstrate some other kind of gain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If only each blog post or web site came with a unique address that enabled us to copy and paste it and send it to people ... oh, wait. Never mind.

<comment><USER3> Good point! It seems that what would make most sense is to move the sharing buttons onto the browser, no?

Mobile Safari does a great job of this with the bookmark/mail link to this page/add to home screen/etc. button, heck even Twitter is catered for as of iOS5. Maybe if desktop browsers had similar functionality we'd see less of this noise on the page.

Good deal that too: get the crud off the actual page and sacrifice but one toolbar button that (like the search bar) has a pull down with all of your selected networks. That makes it more elegant in appearance and opt-in by default.

...seems so obvious, maybe there are already extensions for this?

<comment><USER10> The "share" icon/menu-item is very common in Android applications too. Seems like the more modern apps and OS's are on top of this and desktop browsers just need to catch up. Firefox does have a "Send link..." menu item, but that appears to assume one means to use email... a somewhat dated assumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I believe Web Intents (<http://webintents.org/>) are designed to address this problem. Specifically: <http://examples.webintents.org/intents/share/share.html>

<comment><USER12> Yes, they are. They're in Chrome 19, if you're inclined to try them out, and the Chrome Web Store already has a bunch of extensions that use them. (Search for 'intents' or use the intent picker's suggestions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> On webpages, I've lately taken some glee in using RIP (the Remove It Permanently) plugin to permanently remove these buttons, and generally the entire bleeding div or iframe they're associated with, from the page and site.

On my phone (android), I'm aggravated every time I want to mail a URL to myself or someone else, as it's menu -> more -> share page -> select one of the _THIRTEEN_ share options, including "Share via barcode" (WTF!?), and finally be dropped into my email app. Compare with scroll to top of page -> highlight url -> copy -> home key -> email -> compose. One more step but far less fussy navigation.

And no, you cannot pick a default that will persist for future iterations of the action.

On a desktop, it's a really simple double-click URL -> terminal -> type "mutt" -> paste URL. When doing stuff that is repetitive I've even written short bash functions to, say, mail myself Craigslist postings, including the URL, the body of the post, and using the post title to write the mail subject line. Trivial.

Yes, the SN crap is madness. Usually a good sign the end is near.

<comment><USER10> "Share via barcode" can be useful. Say you want to tell someone some contact info for you, but neither of you currently have any contact info on the other. If your phones have screens and can read barcodes, which I presume they can, no need for one of you to say some number or email address while the other types it in. One person just shares via barcode, and then the person that just got that contact info shares theirs back using that contact info.

Also, emailing or texting links to someone right there at the table with you contributes to needless inbox clutter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I put those drasted things on my blog... and took them off when I re-did it. God forbid that I spend hours fine tuning the loading of my site only to have some facebook script take up 12 connections loading 6 different iframes into the client.

Buttons make your site slow. The only button I have on my site is a twitter follow button. And I kept that in there, begrudgingly, because it waits for onload before it starts downloading all of its crud and is a one-off cost.

<comment><USER15> It's a particularly irritating damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Avoid using buttons on your site? Then, as another poster pointed out, you don't get nearly as many shares, and your page views go down. Use buttons on your site? They slow your page down and, yes, your page views go down.

My experience is that with tweaking and sane numbers of buttons, b) costs you less visitors than a), but it's still a pain in the posterior.

<comment><USER14> Personally, I don't care much about blog views. I write, you can read. If it helps you, great. I'm not out to make money with my blog and as such I couldn't care less about how many readers I have. I do, however, care a ton about how fast it loads and how competently it is built because that reflects entirely on me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Those buttons do serve a very important purpose, which is to make it simple for visitors to share information. The problem is "website designers" crossing the line between providing the user with a tool to share information and just plain using that tool to "market" or "coerce" visitors into sharing.

I run a few sites and I know first hand these buttons are used. What I'd like to see are A/B tests on the various button layouts and designs to show their affects on sharing.

<comment><USER17> > Those buttons do serve a very important purpose, which is to make it simple > for visitors to share information.

Isn't it simple enough already? I mean, can you see a case where a visitor is like, "Man I'd love to share this post on Facebook, but opening up Facebook itself is just too much trouble."?

<comment><USER16> >Isn't it simple enough already?

Pick one:

\- click a button & sign in (if not already signed in), & click share

OR

\- Find the permalink of the information you want to share (not always obvious to people. e.g. the links my mom sends me via email), open the service you want to use to share, log in, navigate to the area of the service responsible for sharing information, paste the permalink, click share.

The buttons not only make it more easy and convenient they add a suggestive quality. Especially if the buttons include # of shares indicating a form of popularity.

So no, it's not a matter of something being "too much trouble" or "easy enough already". It's much deeper and if you really knew people well, you'd know there is no such thing as "easy enough already".

<comment><USER18> Those were my exact concerns, so I built a service to help: <http://www.yourpane.com./>

The low-down is that you install a bookmarklet and add some contacts. When you want to share a page, you click the bookmarklet, select the people you want it to go to, and click share. That's all.

The recipients don't even need a YourPane account, they just get an email saying that you sent them a link. It's basically very streamlined link emailing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Personally, I think a blog can get away with a little row of four or five, maybe six of these icons and that's all."

That doesn't really solve the problem. one is one too many.

I believe Firefox tried to solve this problem, but it didn't go anywhere. It seems logical that a standards based browser solution should be adopted across the board, but ....

</comment><comment><USER20> I think a happy compromise might be to have a dropdown widget labeled "Share" (perhaps with Twitter & Facebook icons to further afford meaning).

I've seen this in some places, but my pet peeve with those is that they usually open up on mouseover, but then don't collapse on mouse leave. IMHO, they should be click-activated ONLY.

</comment><comment><USER21> The social buttons are here to stay because the people in charge are desperate for traffic. That is the #1 reason, desperation. Sometimes they end up including them 2 or 3 times on the same page. We can thank people like mashable and huffington post for the bad habits.

Perhaps in a few years the madness will stop and people will focus more on fast loading websites, good content, and a good user experience.

Or maybe I'm wishful thinking.

<comment><USER15> Sorry to disagree here, but it's not quite that simple.

The buttons are here to stay because people want traffic and _buttons measurably increase traffic_.

I hope that they get faster and more friendly, but until they stop providing a traffic boost, bloggers will keep using them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am surprised no comment mentioned the real obvious solution to this sharing issue: a user should not need to share based on the recipient, sharing should be based on the emitter. I mean, if I am a Facebook user, I should just need this share button. Then my friends on Google plus should see this share in their stream. Just like emails: the social content should flow freely and transparently between social content clients.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think AddThis(<http://www.addthis.com/>) solves this problem rather efficiently.

<comment><USER24> I think DNT+ (<http://abine.com/dntdetail.php>) also solves this problem...

<comment><USER25> I use the "Social Widgets" list subscription for Adblock Plus. Just add:

<https://monzta.maltekraus.de/adblock_social.txt>

...as a filter subscription in Adblock Plus and you'll stop seeing most of these sorts of "share" buttons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Apropos.

<http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes>

</comment><comment><USER27> As soon as search engines stop caring. As it stands, they care. See: [http://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google- plus-w...](http://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-will-be- universal-ranking-signal-then-pulls-the-article/)

</comment><comment><USER28> The article doesn't really get into the privacy implications of loading so many tracking beacons, but there are ways to compromise (2 clicks):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2957119>

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like an opportunity for somebody to come in and write a "click once share everywhere" button.

</comment><comment><USER30>
      Hit the big boys like Facebook (once, please), G+, Digg, etc.

No offense, but you lose some credibility mentioning Digg next to Facebook and G+.

<comment><USER31> Was a little confused about this too. Made me check the publishing date.

<comment><AUTHOR> I corrected the post, added twitter and struck thru digg

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This isn't really so much about sharing buttons as sharing itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it was a rant I had after going to this other site, or sites for that matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> spud:~ zork$ less /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 facebook.com

<comment><USER34> You're going to need way more than that for all their subdomains, CDN, CDN's subdomains, etc. Not to mention having to keep it all up to date in case they roll out a new domain.

That said, I use the same technique. :)

<comment><USER35> Perhaps someone should create a repo on github containing all of the social sites' hostnames. _looking at you_

<comment><USER13> Run a nameserver and be authoritative for the entire domain.

Redirect at will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Anyone can share stats of the traffic those buttons bring BACK to your site?</comment>


Don't wait for perfection — launch and learn - <AUTHOR> http://patterns.ideo.com/issue/business_in_beta/

<comment><AUTHOR> How many of you are starting companies with this sort of approach? How do you manage feature creep and just put something up? Is there a downside to not "getting it right" the first time?

<comment><USER2> I think the biggest downside may be the difficulty of getting potential customers/users whose needs were not met at first to give you a second try once the offering has improved significantly.</comment></comment>


Fires in Flint MI since public safety layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=105386676999504402470.000482f87d58d424f4a5f

<comment><USER2> why not have a volunteer fire department? these are quite popular in NY/NJ/CT.</comment>


Ask HN: Single site for programmers - is it possible? - <AUTHOR>

Where any programmer can share his posts, discuss ideas and projects with the other programmers who have same interests? Where will be hackers with different interests, but will not information overload for each member. In this case you have not to visit a lot of different sites, blogs and forums. You will have just one.<p>Actually, it is my dream. What do you say? <comment><USER2> From reading the description above, I don't get the sense that pankratiev has fully fleshed out what he/she is looking for. What is the goal of the site? If the answer is "to be the one stop shop for programmers so they don't have to visit any other programming-related site" I would be pretty concerned. That sounds like a "throw in the kitchen sink" mentality that goes directly opposite to the lean/agile/customer development.

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 Jason, my name is Vladimir. You've made a very good remark. Yes, this was a very general question. But I have strict description of my idea. I will prepare detailed article about my idea and would like to share it with folks on HN. And I would like to send a link to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd say your dream is a good one, but it's going to take some serious work in design. Each of HN, StackOverflow, reddit, etc. have a unique feel to them, their own strengths and weaknesses. But none of them really do this right (or you wouldn't be asking). There are unsolved problems in making a monolithic programmer site while still keeping niche areas vibrant. I don't see any _coding_ roadblocks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think about the idea of such site for three years. Actually, this idea just sits in my head. One day last year I've decided to implement it. The site was launched recently and it is in closed beta for now. Main problem - explain the idea of the site to the people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well it can be done... With a RSS app in steroids.

By steroids I mean it could track specific links and post information directly from it. As for filtering, there are already some apps that can filter thru entries like NetNewsWire (<http://netnewswireapp.com/> OSX/iPod/iPad only though).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it can be done in such way if you want to use data from the existing sites. But I've made the site with a new approach to programmer's community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Might want to check out <http://forrst.com/>

> Forrst is a community of passionate developers and designers focused on > helping themselves and others get better at their craft, providing > thoughtful critiques, and sharing their knowledge to build better > applications and websites.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know about Forrst. As for me - it contains too much redundant graphics. And it is strange that posts are closed for non registered users. This is totally unacceptable for me because if I submit a post - I want to share it with anyone.

<comment><USER6> You can mark your post as public and then anyone can see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why did I read this as _Singles_ site for programmers? My next thought was of a certain Flight of the Conchords song.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think what you're talking about is a combination of Hacker News, StackOverflow and StackExchange:Programmers

<comment><AUTHOR> On these sites you cannot add your notes, thoughts or code snippets, I mean that they don't give you freedom that you have on your own technical blog. In addition, the main problem for me that on these sites is present some information overload - I cannot filter feed from unwanted posts (e.g. I am not interested in flash, ruby or php, but I have to see such topics because I have not any ability to filter them). And as I said - I want just one, I don't like to visit several sites every day but I have to.

<comment><USER9> Those plus GitHub, then.

<comment><AUTHOR> My question was about one site, which will be central place for programmers. And as I said - it is just my dream. I want ask hackers what they can say about it. Do you really like to visit a lot of sites every day? Or it is just because you have not any alternative?

<comment><USER5> IMO, the reason it doesn't exist is that "no information overload" and a site as the one you describe, "a central place", are mutually exclusive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an idea of filtration posts by tags, it can remove the problem of information overload. I will prepare an article with description of my idea and submit it to HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And in addition - there is no convenient way for me to get notifications about new comments in posts which are interesting for me. I just want to see the new posts (filtered from unwanted) and new comments in one simple page, no more.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like an opportunity for a startup that's willing to do a bunch of web scraping: offer a grand unified update notification service for a wide variety of sites. It would involve a lot of non-sexy work, but that's not exactly a bad thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I want to do something else. Actually I did the site with the features which I want, but it is hard to get traction. I just want to know who else has such problems and want such site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fragmentation isn't nearly as bad as a monopoly. I'm happy with the proliferation of sites for everything, even if it's messy.</comment>


Study Reveals Forensic Facial Examiners Can Be Near Perfect - <AUTHOR> http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/20150928facial.cfm <comment><USER2> So people who were trained to do something are better at doing that something than everyone else.</comment>


The end of hand crafted content - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/13/the-end-of-hand-crafted-content/

<comment><USER2> It isn't the end of hand crafted content -- it puts a heck of a squeeze on the middle of the quality curve, though.

Demand Media et al compete for more phrases versus me than my _actual competitors_ do, simply because they are virtually guaranteed to have a piece which is laser targeted at a query like [how do i make a bingo card]. In a perfect world, I'd like to rank for that query, rather than having to pay eHow for an AdSense click about it.

I have, nonetheless, paid over $20 over the past year for clicks on ads on this page:

<http://www.ehow.com/how_2120747_make-bingo-cards.html>

Demand Media's entire business model is that that page cost them $4 to create. They keep half of what I pay Google, so they're ahead quite a bit on that page -- and there are other advertisers than me with ads there.

My strategy for competing with this, such that it is, is to go for depth over breadth, do a bit of the outsourcing thing myself, and compensate for my comparative lack of scale with focused use of programming. I pretty much can't outrank eHow for "How to X" questions in a systematically economic manner. I can, however, outpublish them regarding actual bingo cards which, since it is what the customer _actually wants_ , tend to get the links and build the self- reinforcing authority.

For those of us who are at least partially in the publishing business (and I really am at least partially in the publishing business by dint of my SEO strategy), you have to have some idea of how you're going to compete on the long tail versus mass amounts of textually unique garbage backed up by impressive domain authority. At least until Google brings the hammer down on them. (Honestly, that Wired piece would have made me very uneasy if I were working for them. Google doesn't mind people doing SEO, but SEO which scales algorithmically pisses them off like you wouldn't believe. That is practically their working definition for black hat.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I dont think so. Sure, the signal to noise ratio is declining on the web, but we dont have to depend on Google to deliver things that interest us. I think HN is a reasonable model for a filter. Sturgeon's Law certainly applies here, but I manage to find a few posts that follow my interests. Most of the time the comments are more relevant than the link.

HN is really crowd source editing with a very high level of participants. I dont see any sign that purely statistical aggregation is going to cut the mustard soon.

<comment><USER4> I completely agree. People will simply adapt and find new ways to locate quality, original content. If HN-like sites are the solution they will take over. If not someone else will come up with a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Echoing the other views around here:

The internet is giving rise to even _better_ hand crafted content, not worse. Pick up any newspaper printed at any time and compare the entire thing (every section, every page) to the entire first couple pages of Hacker News links. It doesn't even come close. Most newspaper articles are pure drivel and ridden with ads, while the front page of HN has incredibly well written views on markets, business, technology, finance, etc... One of my favorite sites of all time is dustincurtis.com, a guy so far from cramming out a McDonalds article a day that it is silly.

<comment><USER6> I agree with you. I think the quantity of craft content has exploded in recent years, with the rise of blogging and with digital content sites displacing traditional media. However, as a proportion of total Internet content, yes, McDonalds content may dominate the pie chart.

I contrast the stuff I regularly read on two of my favorite online (non-tech) content sites, Salon.com and OpenSalon.com, to something like AOL.com's homepage and many of the blogs @ Xanga.com, and I notice a considerable difference in craft. But that doesn't mean the craft stuff isn't out there -- and in much greater quantity than ever before.

That's basically my rule for the web. The average quality of everything on the web is low, but total absolute quantity of high-quality content is higher than the world before the web. That's part of the reason I built my startup, <http://parse.ly> \-- to help people find the good stuff based on their own personal interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You certainly will be subjected to shitty McDonalds-type content if you keep reading TechCrunch.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think good filters, in search engines and at the users' end will make it really hard for mediocre and bad autogenerated content to ever compete with good hand crafted content.

Autogenerated content, for example, will never be able to replicate the snark of TechCrunch or the gossipy tone of Valleywag very effectively. If they ever come close, they will still need primary sources of information.

<comment><USER9> The content that they're talking about (articles on ehow.com and friends) are generated by Mechanical Turk or some similar arrangement, not by Markov chainers! But I'm sure they'll jump on autogeneration as soon as they possibly can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I didn't really understand this article. My interpretation was all of these spammy sites that steal and scrape content will overtake all of those that actually produce things. But the spammy sites still need to get their content somewhere and finding the content's original source can't be too hard. Or did I totally miss the point?

<comment><USER11> He's saying that the mass-produced crap "content" sites will all dominate the search result listings and push all the quality content sites out of business because noone will visit them.

But we're not using search engines to get to every place on the web. We learn where the quality content is, we don't rely on generic portals for news and articles. We learn which blogs are good. We get sites recommended by our friends. We find sites and bookmark them and revisit if they're good.

<comment><USER12> He still has the old school media mindset that the scoop is the important thing, and he wants respect for being the first one to find out something. Of course, the fact that he's a prime source for the echo chamber means things seem like they have more sources than they do.</comment></comment></comment>


Android is dead - <AUTHOR> http://brianshall.com/content/android-dead <comment><USER2> No it's not, that's ridiculous. Stop attention-seeking.

(I did write a long post about the future of Android, etc, but soon realised after flicking around on the blogger's site that it's not worth it. Load of rubbish from an "expert on how digitalization and the mobile web are remaking markets, industries, business models and lives around the world." ..Yeah).</comment>


Uber will ban riders with low rating, same as was predicted in Black Mirror - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/05/29/uber-is-going-to-start-banning-riders-with-low-ratings-just-like-in-that-one-specific-episode-of-black-mirror/ <comment><USER2> Gratuity Shaming</comment>


Ask HN: Programmer Compatibility Questions - <AUTHOR> Dating services like eharmony base their matches on responses to compatibility questions.
Can you think of non technical questions that would help predict if you'd get along with someone on a team?  Examples:
- tabs or spaces? (Tabs, spaces, I doesn't matter as long as we are consistent)
- what's the largest diff you feel comfortable sending for a code review? (30 lines, 100 lines, 1000 lines)
- Do you refactor code without first discussing it with the person who wrote it?
etc... <comment><USER2> Hmmm... Programmers all share different flavors of common hells that seem to originate in HR or non-technical management -- you can do better than multiple-choice and yes/no questions and improve your dataset at the same time.

Ask them to:

Describe their worst interview

Complain about recruiters

Describe their worst cubicle-mate

Craft the perfect daily scrum session

Describe the dumbest flavor-of-the-week woke matchmaking attempt, "team building", personality quiz, or psychological assessment they've suffered

==

Tease out the answers and see if you can derive commonality with your culture that way. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Show them some bad code and pray they recognize it and have similar feedback as you.

It's as simple as that, you really can't know their taste any other way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Servers need to be manually rebooted multi times per day. It's getting worse.

Your task is to add a todo calendar to the website by Monday.

What advise do you give?</comment>


The man who smuggled himself into Auschwitz - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8382457.stm <comment><USER3> Truly brave man. Another one:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki> \- "Polish James Bond" - <USER2> voluntered to go to Auschwitz in 1940, made reports about what happened there, organized resistance in camp, stolen some German documents and escaped when nobody wanted to try and attack the camp (he was trying to persuade Aliants and Polish Home Army to do that, but they thought it wouldn't work).

<comment><USER4> "Thought it wouldn't work." Bah, they just didn't care. The Poles were just as virulently anti-Semitic as the Germans, and the Allies, if they'd given a damn, would have provided visas for Jewish refugees years before the war even started.

<comment><USER5> In addition to viraptor's post. I want just add that for sure some Poles we're anti-Semitic. But labeling whole nation like this is a terrible mistake, which lead humanity to at least one holocaust. In 1930 Jews were 11% of Poland's population. There we're 116 Jewish newspapers. In September 1939, around 120k Jews fight with Germans in Polish Army (as officers as well, please find officer in Whermaht or in SS) against Germans and Russians. All pow's with Jewish ancestors we're murdered by Germans :-/, only because they we're Jewish.

Well what my point is, you cannot say things like this, it's just wrong. You're harming a memory of wonderful and amazing cultural contribution.

I would gladly show you Łódź or Kraków in Poland, so you can witness with your eyes, how wonderful we're coexistence of Poles and Jews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is something that puzzles me in all this : why didn't he spoke of it earlier ? Especially since it's advertised that he did it "so he could tell others the truth".

Perhaps he spoke about it and it didn't catch media's attention.

Anyway, if it's true then it sure is very brave, and crazy. I mean infiltrating an extermination camp ? You gotta be insane (or suicidary) to try something like this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not exactly sure why this story is on HN, but it was interesting read nonetheless. A very courageous man he was to have done such a thing- twice.

<comment><USER8> I'd say that it qualifies under the "it teaches you somethinng about the world" clause.

<comment><USER9> And hacking the real world. The mindset required is not that different.

<comment><USER10> Gah! Again with HN's obsession with labeling anything impressive and daring a "hack".

<comment><USER7> I agree. The story here is impressive, courageous, daring, and brash, but calling it a "great hack" doesnt seem fitting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, incredible story. That guy must have some incredible nerves of Tungsten.

</comment><comment><USER12> Two things.

First, this is irrelevant here. The is about geekdom, remember? And since Holocaust Remembrance Day in the media is yesterday, today and tomorrow, we don't need any more reminding.

Second, the reason they didn't bomb the camps is that they knew full well that right in the middle of a life-and-death struggle, the Nazis were actually diverting who-know-how-many SS soldiers and their immense support systems to running these camps.

The war, which tettered on a tipping point several times. might have been way different if those soldiers has been allowed to actually soldier. The camps held them down as effectively as several armored divisions.

<comment><USER3> Camps would be even better at holding soldiers if a few planes bombed them, and some millions of Jews/Poles/Russians/Gypsies/Ukrainians/Muslims/Homosexualists, and other "subhumans" would be free. Nazists would have to catch them again, make these camps defended better, fight with the people that were escaping, etc.

The more chaos on enemy teritory, the better for me, right?

They (England etc) just didn't believe raports about that camps, and anyway didn't cared that much about some Jews and Eastern Europeans. They showed the same in Jalta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's one hell of a hack.

<comment><USER14> It is. I think people may have modded you down because they thought you were being ironic.

<comment><USER15> Or maybe because it doesn't contribute much to the discussion?

<comment><USER13> I should have qualified it with "I wonder how he got in; that is one heck of a hack". This article wasn't mean for that perspective, though. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is this relevant?

I've been mentally bombarded enough with WW2.</comment>


Joyent: 54+ hours of downtime - <AUTHOR> I am a customer of Joyent.
For the past two days, the server on which I host some customer websites and mail servers has been down. I did not receive any warning or explanation by email or telephone. When I filed a support ticket, I was given a link to their help site with some status updates.
Status updates (paraphrased):
2011-02-26 09:22:19 GMT: server offline
2011-02-26 14:38:38 GMT: no ETA
2011-02-26 17:09:42 GMT: estimated downtime 12+ hours
2011-02-27 22:23:08 GMT: estimated downtime 20+ hours
That final estimate of 20+ hours is in addition to what is now 37 hours of downtime. Joyent has offered no reparation or backup service (e.g. backup MX service to keep mail from bouncing).
For your consideration when choosing hosting providers. <comment><USER2> I get the frustration. I really do and I apologize for any bump like this. I'm the founder of those old textdrive "share hosting" servers (they really have nothing to do with Joyent's current product line). These servers are ~6 years old and they're largely populated by "lifetime" customers who have tricked out various bits of their accounts enough that an automated migration has been basically impossible. We've been telling everyone for 3 years to really get off of them, we've been offering free upgrades for 4 years, including you btw, you got a free upgrade back in Nov 2007, and there's even support tickets detailing it (which you've participated on). So now we're piecing together everything that was left but those good ole FreeBSD UFS file systems take awhile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Offering a transition from FreeBSD to Solaris that requires the effort of the customer is not free. Asking a customer who knows FreeBSD to take on administration of a Solaris virtual server for your convenience is not reasonable.

You are offering an unacceptable level of service to customers who have supported and recommended you from your early days. You were paid in advance for a lifetime of service. I took you on your word and offered lifetime hosting to friends with small websites for small businesses. If you can't make good on your agreements, I will eat the cost of moving these sites to Rackspace Cloud. I can't risk another 54 hours of downtime.

With proper backups and a fresh server it should not take 54 hours to get back online.

<comment><USER2> To even call this "Joyent" is misleading.

The packing system is the same, it's BSD userland. The paths are the same. Everything is the same. The kernel shouldn't matter. And if you had told support that you wanted us to just migrate you because nothing was out of the ordinary, what would they have done? They would have migrated you ....

And this has been quite a good deal for you. The logic of moving from something that costs you nothing to something that does costs you something is interesting.

<comment><USER3> >And this has been quite a good deal for you. The logic of moving from something that costs you nothing to something that does costs you something is interesting.

Downtime costs him. So much so that he's willing to pay for uptime.

Also, it didn't cost him "nothing". He paid for service. It wasn't free.

Your reply sounds like you don't value him as a customer anymore because he's not giving you money anymore. Nobody forced textdrive into offering the "lifetime" package. You should treat him like a valued old customer, rather than calling his logic "interesting".

<comment><USER4> > Your reply sounds like you don't value him as a customer anymore because > he's not giving you money anymore.

I think you mean: _replies_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Frankly, I'm surprised you are still on there. I too was an original VC and I left _years_ ago due to the support failings.

Look, we were investors in the truest sense. TextDrive was this revolutionary new shared hosting platform with a lot of promise (flexibility, no overselling, etc). Problem was that shared hosting is a commodity with no profit margins. Since TextDrive was started by people who want to build cool shit, rather than people who knew anything about operations in a customer service industry, the result is a massive series of pivots that left us out in the cold.

I'm not making excuses for anyone here, personally I think Jason Hoffman spent way too much time in the forum sucking up the love, and not enough time figuring out how to run a support operation. So he burnt his bridge with me as a customer. I won't touch Joyent with a ten foot pole no matter how good it is.

But here's the thing: _that was their bridge to burn_.

It doesn't matter what 200 early customers think, because those 200 one-time payments were not going to build a successful company. The bottom line is that the market for a "premium" shared hosting service got squeezed by commodity hosting on one side, and VPSes on the other. Even if they had managed reasonable uptime (which they didn't because they totally underestimated the technical cost of giving people the freedom they did), it still would have been a doomed market, because VPSes got so cheap anyway. We can complain about what a bad deal we got, but it doesn't change the fact that the last salary we paid was in 2005, and the hosting world has moved on. They did what they had to.

</comment><comment><USER6> I generally like Joyent, and use them. So I offer this tip with a tinge of sadness:

It looks like these message are from a problem with their Howe server. That is one of their old servers, which came over from the Textdrive merger years ago. I used to have some sites hosted on that same server, and was likewise not very happy with things. It appears to me that Joyent as a company doesn't care very much about that legacy equipment and line of business.

The way to make the pain stop, is to stop using Joyent's old TextDrive servers. You can do that by leaving Joyent entirely, or by moving to their newer stuff. Either way it's a fair amount of work, depending on the complexity of what you are hosting.

I took the path of moving to their newer stuff, and have been very happy with Joyent ever since.

<comment><USER7> I had a lifetime account with TextDrive. I don't know if it was official policy at Joyent to neglect the old customers, but I certainly felt like I was being pressured to repurchase services I had already paid for. After several outages, data loss and extremely slow responses from tech support I switched to linode. No problems since.

<comment><USER8> Hmm, Joyent migrated my TextDrive lifetime account to their newer stuff at no charge. Did you ask Tech Support if there was a migration path for you?

<comment><USER2> This is correct. We've been offering upgrades to newer stuff. You just need to contact support.

<comment><USER9> Do we actually need to contact support to be upgraded? My understanding from the old Shared Accelerator documentation[1] (which you seem to have deleted) was that we were supposed to wait to be offered a "golden ticket", unless we absolutely needed to be upgraded ASAP.

Are you even still offering regular (not "cloud") web hosting? I can't find it on Joyent's site anymore; it seems as if the Shared Accelerator plans are discontinued, too.

[1]: <http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:kb:start>

Edit: Found it. This is the page that implies that TextDrive users have needed to wait for a "golden ticket" to be offered to them: [http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090305040858/http://wiki....](http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090305040858/http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:kb:migrating- from-textdrive)

<comment><USER9> Ah-ha! Looking at the front page of their (apparently new) wiki, I found a link to the old wiki:

<http://oldwiki.joyent.com/>

And _that_ wiki has up-to-date information on migrating from TextDrive to what are apparently now called "Shared SmartMachines" (formerly Shared Accelerators). And that page finally does resolve the question of whether we need to contact them or wait to be contacted: We do need to ask for a golden ticket, not just wait for it.

That's pretty well buried. Joyent really should send out a mass email to all TextDrive users asking us to upgrade, telling us exactly what effect it would have on our billing, and telling us exactly what we need to do.

It's still unclear whether, in the special case of Howe, we still need to ask for golden tickets, or all Howe users are being migrated to Shared SmartMachines without having to ask. The support post:

[http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=949](http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=949)

implies that they are rebuilding Howe, which implies that we will not simply be migrated to a Shared SmartMachine as a result of the failure (we still would need to ask), but they have not directly said.

The one remaining worry I have is that there's nothing on the main Joyent site about Shared SmartMachines. It seems like they're inviting users of one deprecated service to migrate to another deprecated service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seems to be some confusion in this thread about the difference between "free" and "paid for in advance".

Cutco will re-sharpen your knives for free, no matter how old they are, even if you bought them on eBay, because they made a 'lifetime resharpening' promise with the original purchase. And they're basically a multi-level marketing scam.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have one single client who refuses to move off Joyent. My experience with them has been less than stellar. Frequent problems with no explanations, ask a support question like "How does one do X on your system?" and often get "oh you want to do Y I see, here is a link to the support forum for that." and the link isn't at all related to X or even the Y.

They aren't horrible, but I would never use or recommend them to anyone.

<comment><USER2> If you're on an old textdrive server, then you need to move, like we've been saying.

<comment><USER12> Have you considered offering to buy back the lifetime offers from people who won't migrate? It seems like that might be cheaper in the long run than having to support the old BSD servers forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://www.joyentcloud.com/about/policies/cloud-service- leve...](http://www.joyentcloud.com/about/policies/cloud-service-level- agreement/)

For clause 2:

      2. Service Level

      Goal: Joyent's goal is to achieve 100% Availability for all customers.

      Remedy: Subject to Sections 3 and 4 below, if the Availability of customer's Grid Container is less than 100%, Joyent will credit the customer 5% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of downtime (up to 100% of customer's monthly fee for the affected server).

So probably you can get this month for very little (Takes only ten hours for getting full refund if SLA is signed)

But at the same time their exceptions list are pretty long, things like _emergency_ maintenance and upgrades are considered as exceptions.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like the OP is getting the service for free anyway...

<comment><USER3> It wasn't "free". We bought a "lifetime" package. I don't recall the details, but I ponied up a couple hundred dollars at a time when we didn't know textdrive was going to make it. I don't expect a lot of support, but I do expect uptime and courtesy.

<comment><USER13> Oh I see... then, I just wonder how they could eat up for life-time subscriptions for so long. After some Google searches, I've found that those plans are one off, and seems to cost $799 to sign up (<http://hostingfu.com/article/joyent-lifetime-accelerator>). If the terms was not changed, it now cost $25 a month on JoyentCloud to have the same thing with the SLA I mentioned. So it takes 31 years to compensate the cost of the $799 lifetime subscription to pay off. But the fact is that now they have "10 TB Monthly Bandwidth" (or unlimited depending on which web page you are looking at), I am just blindly guessing that lifetime users would get that too, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> FOR JASONHOFFMAN

I see you posting quite a bit here...you keep saying the same thing: "take the free upgrade that is being offered".

There also seems to be quite a few old textdrive lifetime members here.

Perhaps the best approach would be for you to outline the steps for those textdrive folks to migrate off of those servers and take the free upgrade you are offering. I personally have no idea how...so if you could explain it, give a link or some concrete information it would be helpful.

I for one would be happy to migrate if it means better servers, I just need to know how...I'm sure I'm not alone.

<comment><USER16> From one of the very many forum posts on the exact topic:

"If you have not sent in a request and would like to get a jump on the migration, please send an email to support [at] joyent [dot] com with the following information:

\- Subject line: migration request + plan type if known (startup, plus, premier) \- Full Name \- User Name(s) / Primary Domain(s) (please note new info if you want to change it at this time) \- Existing Server(s)

If you wish your username or domain name to be changed, please include this in the email and we will process when we send your golden ticket. Waiting until after your account is set up will incur a $50 fee and you will receive a brand new account (old one will be blasted).

Please do not send follow up requests as it only slows the process down. If you asked questions when you sent in your migration request, we will answer those when we send your golden ticket out.

Once you receive your 'golden ticket', you will have 60 days to migrate to the OpenSolaris environment. If you need the second account for more than 60 days, regular monthly charges will apply."

<comment><USER15> Thank you for that.

I find it a tad bit odd that I received NO emails on migration. Frankly, there is no conceivable way that announcing in a Joyent forum and expecting users to become aware of it is a sound strategy. Pull vs Push and all that.

Even so, I'm willing to migrate if I can find some additional information as to what is involved.

Again, thanks for posting...I'll go digging through Joyent's forums now....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Haven't read _all_ the comments but this really seems like a 'special case' being an exception and does definitely not apply to the experience and quality you'll usually get on Joyent.

I have been with them for a couple of years and the only reason why I left was because the project I used to host there was put on hiatus and I don't need that kind of 'enterprise' hosting for my other stuff.

I agree there shouldn't be downtimes on any of their machines but just going by the headline, you'd think Joyent is unreliable when indeed their own server plans are rock-solid.

You make it sound like they are Dreamhost. That said, hope your problems will get solved soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will edit my original post as soon as they solve the problem. No response yet, other than excuses and denigration from Jason Hoffman (Joyent founder) in this thread.

Edit: I can no longer edit the original post, but I will post a comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We're Joyent customers as well, and their support has always been great, so this is definitely surprising. You should get on the phone with them (they provide an emergency number). What kinds of machines are you running? Is it just one, or many? It shouldn't be necessary, but message me if you're still not getting through and I can ping some contacts.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, we actually take our support very seriously and we're pretty accessible. He's talking about a different product than what you have.

<comment><USER19> No you don't, I asked via a support ticket two days ago for an estimate, I can't even get a response from the support team. S I am frustrated enough to post here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a lifetime account as well. Joyent's tech support has always been excellent. I take this as a wakeup call to get my stuff off of the old severs beyond that I can see little fault with Joyent.

<comment><USER20> btw. Elapsed time between opening the support request and an answer from someone at Joyent - 9 minutes... Elapsed time from opening support request to receiving account details for an account on a new machine about 26 minutes. That includes the time it took me to get back to them about some details of the account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm sure I'll get down-modded for saying this, but on WHT people will tell you that you get what you pay for, which is in stark contrast with what most people here are saying (lack of gratitude for being a charter customer, etc).

Sure, you paid $200. But if you've been a customer since 2007 then you've basically paid the same price as any cheap shared hosting provider. Contrast this experience with Layered Technologies that ran three price hikes and then when I still didn't leave the server I had with them essentially told me to fuck off once their harddrive failed.

At least jasonhoffman had the courtesy to tell people their best option is to switch servers to avoid trouble.

But, like they say, you get what you pay for. If lifetime support and stability is what you'll come to expect, don't pay bottom dollar prices up front.

Disclaimer: I am not a Joyent customer in any way.

<comment><USER22> The better option would be for Jason Hoffman to say that he stands by his offer & will ensure that those who took advantage of the TextDrive deal will continue to see the same level of service or better that they received back when they bought it. Advertise your new services fine, but don't try to upsell people anytime there is downtime & don't go around telling everyone that these people are whiners getting their service for "free".

<comment><USER23> Okay, I get that migrating costs time and that's definitely not free, but saying that Jason upselling is false. It's been repeated by a number of commenters here and it's starting to bother me.

I'm a lifetime Joyent (TextDrive) member. When Joyent started offering newer shared hosting accounts, they allowed me and all other lifetime members the opportunity to migrate. No new fees, no hassle. Just a nice, shiny new space. To me, it's a testament of their support that they didn't try and keep all the lifetime members stuck on the old FreeBSD system.

I also find it unrealistic to expect lifetime customers to never have to migrate from one server to another. Do you really expect the server to run for 20 years without ever having to do anything yourself? Seriously, take some responsibility for your site and move to the latest supported service.

<comment><USER22> So there are no monthly fees after migrating from the old TextDrive servers?

It sounds like the offers to migrate have either not been sent to all or the messaging has been inconsistent as to costs/ease with which this can be performed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had some issues with a Textdrive server recently as well and migrated over to one of their smart machines (at a lower price than what I had been paying). I was a bit frustrated like you, but Joyent was extremely, extremely helpful in assisting me with the migration and now everything is running smooth.

I would try to touch base with them again and see if they can help you out.

<comment><USER2> And there's no reason that you needed to pay additional unless you bought a different product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I remember trying to get a quote / get a few details about buying large quantities of bandwidth from Joyent a couple years back.

They consistently took days to answer simple questions via email. I generally take it that if a company can't even get its sales people responding quickly there's a snowballs chance in hell it's techs will.

<comment><USER2> If it was a couple of years ago and for large quantities of bandwidth, then you would have been talking to me. We didn't have "sales people" a couple of years back. And I would have said "No" because we weren't in the business of selling "large quantities of bandwidth"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> You get what you pay for.

This isn't a glib statement. A business transaction is about more than coming to agreement about the price of a thing or service. It's also about creating and maintaining incentives for both sides.

I pay slicehost for a VPS. They get $50/month from me in return for disk space, CPU cycles, uptime and support. Our incentives are aligned.

With Joyent/Textdrive, every month you get hosting and every month they get nothing. The incentives are not aligned. In fact, from Joyent's perspective, the incentive to provide any meaningful service diminishes over time. No about of cajoling or complaining or threatening Joyent will change this imbalance. Sure, it's 54 hours of downtime today - but I can guarantee that a year from now the outages will be far longer and far more frequent.

"But we had a deal!" Yes, you did. And you were a fool to enter into it.

Here's the bottom line:

Your customers don't care what's causing the downtime. It's still your fault.

Website users don't care that the deal has soured. It's still your responsibility.

Joyent doesn't care that they're providing cr@ppy service to Textdrive users, despite the postings on HN by Jason Hoffman (hey Jason, instead of wasting time posting on some internet forum, why not spend that time fixing the actual problem?)

Seriously - Joyent doesn't give a sh?t about the lifetime accounts. If they did, then why are you experiencing 54 hours of downtime? If they do care, and are applying resources to solve the problem, then why is it taking so long? 54 HOURS TO FIX A SERVER. That, to me, is evidence of a shocking level of incompetence. In either case I would get the hell out of there.

</comment><comment><USER27> T minus 10 minutes before this hits TechCrunch

</comment><comment><USER28> I've had a very bad experience with Joyent. Abysmal performance, tech support in denial in spite of obvious tests. Just leave, your life will be better.

</comment><comment><USER29> I remember that chunkhost has really aggressive pricing.. And I remember there service being pretty good...

<comment><USER2> He's currently at "free", so get any more aggressive than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Paid for lifetime service in advance to help bootstrap your company, not "free".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is there any time that Mr. Hoffman's going to call it quits on this thread and actually take it offline in an attempt to resolve the OP's issues?!

Frankly, the tone of most of his comments have been borderline denigrating and it's doing nothing but adding nuisance value to the thread.

<comment><USER31> He's probably getting exasperated by the virtual lynch mob which seems to be downvoting everything he says and upvoting every angry comment, which is ridiculous. He's actually saying quite a lot of reasonable and useful stuff which is sitting at 0 or below.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> joyent had this sort of failure regularly about 4 years ago and continues to do so. Avoid.

<comment><USER2> Also incorrect. "About 4 years ago" we always did >99.99% uptimes even on the old textdrive stuff. I'd be happy to show all the old stats and graphs, we still have them.

<comment><USER7> Jason, you're experiencing a PR hiccup; it's not a big deal but it's also not clear that responding to every message in this thread is going to help you. Instead, why not (1) make things right for the OP and everyone else on Howe and (2) put a response on the blog?

You Joyent folks will never get a subset of your customers to migrate off textdrive hardware (so it's no use to keep yelling "just migrate!"). However, if you let those older servers fall apart you'll only get more negative PR.

<comment><USER4> I get having a passion for your product -- I really do. Some of the responses here from Jason are on the border line, though, and I think they are making the situation worse overall. I wish, for his sake, that he'd have quit while ahead.

Without a doubt, Jason has the best intentions here, but I'm getting a _really_ bad vibe from reading the entire thread -- particularly the _by the way, you contributed to a ticket and I can look it up so I'm going to remind you so that you'll look stupid for bitching about us_ bit.

The hostile you-are-wrong attitude, while maybe technically correct, is a disaster for outside perception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I will be moving from joyent. I am paying 15usd per month and have not been told to migrate. now I read the founder saying it's my fault that I am suffering so much downtime because I should have searched the forums and migrated years ago. Well I am going to migrate now.

</comment><comment><USER33> You must be on HOWE too. I am in the same boat - unhappy. send a tweet to CEO David Young @davidpaulyoung. (from @snapplez)

</comment><comment><USER34> joyent is enterprise grade and doesnt have this sort of downtime. its probably a break in your app.

<comment><USER35> [http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=949&...](http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=949&pc=6) acknowledges it's a real outage and talks of rebuilding the server after a significant hardware failure from two days ago, which implies they didn't have a disaster recovery plan.

<comment><USER36> Good catch; I just wonder how it can take more than 2 days, when you already have a bunch of employees as well as equipment and presumably spares, to build a replacement FreeBSD server and transfer data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The lesson jasonhoffman could learn:

If you have a small set of users who bought lifetime accounts to bet on a company you founded than even with new company I would bend over backwards to make sure their needs are met as a thank you.

Otherwise some gets the bright idea to put up a joynet sucks web page with proper Google approved SEO and makes this little PR bump a big EFFING MOUNTAIN!'

jasonhoffman, I imagine you have less than 12 hours before that happens..as TechCrunch may do it for 'free'..:)

<comment><USER38> Parse Error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Digging Techcrunch got me this story: Twitter and Joyent splits (Circa Jan 31, 2008)

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/31/twitter-and-joyent-split- am...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/31/twitter-and-joyent-split-amidst- downtime-travails/)

Twitter moved to Verio and here's Biz Stone's reply to Techcrunch:

We're still very much engaged in our efforts to bring solid reliability to Twitter. Achieving our goals is a sustained effort, not an overnight fix. Performance is our most important measure of success and we appreciate both the patience and frustration folks are sharing with us.

With regard to discussing technical specifics about last night's efforts, we'll be more keen to do that once we have a chance to come up for air and cover it with some perspective.

</comment><comment><USER40> Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER41> It sucks that your hosting is down, but this is a pretty malicious use of HN considering you paid $200 over 6 years ago for lifetime hosting. Less than $3 per month by now. What SLA were you guaranteed?

The lesson for service hosts, NEVER offer lifetime anything.</comment>


Show HN: 15 Dollar Bootstrappers Marketing Stack - <AUTHOR> https://www.wlaurance.com/2017/08/15-dollar-bootstrapers-marketing-stack/ <comment><USER2> I'd never heard of Mautic! Looks like a great alternative to Mixpanel.</comment>


Show HN: InfluencerNews – News being discussed and shared by influential people - <AUTHOR> https://influencernews.oly.ai/ <comment><USER2> At a quick glance there was far too much Trump. I think this definitely needs some form of news category system in place.

I get that it's supposed to be things from influential people but even limiting the sources to those people results in a huge mess of news, the majority not relevant or interesting to me.

Edit: It probably shouldn't count the NY Times as an influencer when it comes to NY Times articles. It probably shouldn't list NY Times at all.

> News discussed by _people_ we trust

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, InfluencerNews is a news reader that surfaces content most widely discussed by a list of influencers we consider trustworthy. The idea is that people on our list will generally share higher quality content and effectively filter out the noise.

To build this list of 'trusted influencers' we first scraped dozens of lists like businessinsider.com/100-best-tech-people-on-twitter-2014-2014-11. We figured if a credible source says you're one of the essential people to follow for an industry, that's a good start.

Next, we look at who these experts trust and follow. Those followed by at least 15 of these influencers made our list. To re-iterate, it's not enough to make a well regarded best-people-to-follow list, that effectively only gets you a vote; the people included in our list are followed by at least 15 such people. Our newsfeed is made up of articles most shared and discussed by these influencers.

Another thing that sets us apart from other newsreaders is that it adds some relevant context. You can immediately see influencer reactions to each story as you peruse the headlines.

Anyways, I'd really love your feedback on the idea. Thanks!</comment>


Looking for CTO partner for startup - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for technical co-founder in the Bay Area to partner up with for my startup called digizal.com, an e-commerce platform for a disruptive industry.
If you consider yourself a guru in PHP, Javascript, Ajax, HTML, CSS, MYSQL and other languages and just love to hack stuff please send me some info about you and your projects to firstname.lastname@example.com. As a co-founder you will be responsible for heavy coding, infrastructure, and all aspects technical.
I have recently applied for Ycombinator summer term and with a kick but technical partner this startup can't be reckoned with.  I have vast experience with e-commerce and have generated a lot of moola for a successful e-commerce company.
About me, this is my second startup the first was acquired when I finished college by a Bay Area technology company. I can give you all the details later, I am welcome to face to face meetings. <comment><USER2> One of the great things about your own project is using technologies that you _want_ to work with. Telling the "CTO" he's going to be using PHP/MySQL is going to diminish the attractiveness for some.

<comment><USER3> haha, yes, I would think the CTO would be able to decide on the technologies?

<comment><USER4> My suspicion is that there's some prototype of the product and they need a code ninja to take it to the next level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats exactly what I need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, using a set language could be unattractive, but I am building a release product right now and its already underway. There is always room for input on what technologies we choose its just that PHP/MySQL was the most affordable and available at the time I started the project.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ajay,

We did meet at a HN meetup, I believe you said you were developing an iphone app last time we met.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi dotmatrix, did we meet at a recent HN meetup?</comment>


Google Images screwed my Analytics report - <AUTHOR> http://jrom.net/google-images-in-google-analytics

<comment><USER2> The side effect of this is that, overall, your "organic" traffic might seem to perform worse vs your Adwords campaigns, since people looking for images are usually lower quality visitors.

I wonder if this is just a coincidence.

<comment><AUTHOR> @michokest yes, that happens too. For me the biggest issue was thinking that we were doing great at some keywords with SEO and it turned out it was just Google Images. Certainly, people coming through Google Images doesn't convert at all.

After my "hack" at least we know :)</comment></comment>


XmppFlask - <AUTHOR> http://xmppflask.org/index.html

<comment><USER2> Looks cool! A fun project to make would be a "what did you do today" sort of service that you could IM with descriptions of what you're working on. I know that even though I have a journal, sometimes it's a pain to either keep it open all the time or open it up just to write down "worked on foo bar." I always have my IM client up, though.

<comment><USER3> Awesome idea. It could also be cool to hook into something like the RescueTime API (is there one?) or selfspy.py to start nagging during unproductive activities.

If anyone else is thinking about going ahead with this, consider dropping down to xmpppy[0], which does the lifting behind the scenes[1]. The design here seems to be intended for more strictly syntaxed command-response interfaces.

[0] <http://xmpppy.sourceforge.net/> [1] [https://bitbucket.org/k_bx/xmppflask/raw/b3d7c6e853231d8e18c...](https://bitbucket.org/k_bx/xmppflask/raw/b3d7c6e853231d8e18c47906db73907e8edc2ac3/xmppflask/ext/xmpppy.py)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also add <http://sleekxmpp.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is xmppflask alive yet? No commits since 2012-08-16 :( <https://bitbucket.org/k_bx/xmppflask/commits/all>

<comment><USER5> Yes, it's bit stalled, but is not dead as it looks like. I have big set of patches for "actions", MUC, xmppflask-as-lib support, need just to found some time to make tests right and push them to the upstream. I'd planned to get them on this month, so stay tuned - April is not over (;

<comment><USER6> This is pretty exciting, I was thinking of creating an HTTP UI for controlling some stuff at home, but XMPP would be much better. Now I can _talk_ to my house!</comment></comment></comment>


Git-deploy : a fast way to push a website through ftp - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/aizatto/git-deploy

<comment><AUTHOR> I've found this tool after looking for a lot of ways to send my website to my hosting server : FTPSync, FTPSync.pl, FTPSync2d, WPUT, GIT-FTP, WEEX and Unison over netdrive.

It's very nice because it works over ftp, which means that you can use it with a simple file hosting server. It's also very fast because the diff with the server is done from a single __REVISION__ file.

The only issue I had was that I had some files that were different between my hosting server and my local test server, but it's very easy to edit the source to skip them.</comment>


My name is James A. and I'm an Alcoholic - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/my-name-is-james-a-and-im-an-alcoholic/

<comment><USER2> Amazing storytelling! Love the abstract part at the end especially. Felt like something out of No Country for Old Men.

However, I wouldn't recommend astrologers as a path to get out of a rut. I do admire his ability to reflect on his life. I think we could all take a page out of his book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Orky, thanks very much.</comment></comment>


Hometown or Startup Hub? - <AUTHOR>

My partner and I are starting a web startup in October. We figure we need 6 months max to build the product til launch. Our dilemma: stay in our hometown Amsterdam - really not a startup hub, but we can live here cheaply and have a bit of a network - and go to SV after the product is finished, OR go to SV right away. What do you guys think is the best strategy? <comment><USER2> If you already have a cofounder, a product, a network, and a six month plan with enough funding to keep you alive until launch, I can't see any point in moving right now.

Even without the visa issues, moving to another continent takes a lot of time and effort, and will eat up a significant fraction of those six months. (Visa issues have been discussed to death in other threads, but they're likely to be a problem too.) Even just the effort of packing all your stuff, getting on a plane, finding a new place to live and work, and buying all the stuff you need to keep you going in the short term is likely to occupy a lot of your attention for many more months than you might think.

<comment><USER3> +1 to the above. Also, who are you selling to? If your primary market is based in the EU, sounds like you should work on getting positive cashflow (i.e. getting out there and selling among your current network) and then think about SV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Move now (assuming that you're audience/customer base isn't clustered elsewhere AND assuming that you're envisioning funding/VC).

Reasons:

-You'd rather deal with moving/visa issues before your startup launches.

-You'll have smarter startup geeks to talk to here, which will make your product better. Read: [http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2008/06/the_spooky_econ.h...](http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2008/06/the_spooky_econ.html)

\- In the likely event that your startup fails (most do), you'll have had months of building a network which will help you find a cool startup to join or help spin up a new idea.

If you're going the lifestyle biz route, then you don't need funding and you don't need to be in SV (unless your target customers are startups).

</comment><comment><USER5> There is life beyond SV.

There is success beyond SV.

There is funding beyond SV.

Ship it.

Figure out if you need to "open a US subsidiary" later.

And besides, "opening a US subsidiary" sounds a whole lot better to the visa- issuing folks and the funding folks and to the folks in whichever US region you might want to move to than does a business in its bootstrap stages.

</comment><comment><USER6> Live cheaply while you can (SV is not cheap)

When you are ready to start hiring and getting outside investment move here.

There are also other more local startup hubs, don't forget that last.fm was founded and still is in london. If your idea has wings I don't think a US company would care where the offices are.

<comment><USER7> While expensive by American standards, SV is still cheaper than Amsterdam. Of course, if you're still iving with parents or have a house purchased decades ago, then things are very different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My $0.02 of going to SV...

\+ Networking

\+ Networking some more!

\+ More chance of random meetings with people who can/will help you.

\+ Vibrant community

\+ Continuous critique / constructive criticism from learned others (esp in startup community)

\+ Motivation through environment

\+ Sunshine (and good weather almost all year round)

\+ Parties held by other startups and tech companies

\+ "Cool" factor of being in SV

\+ Change of scene from where you spent most/lots of your life (its good to travel and work in various places)

\+ Lots of tech events more accessible in USA

\- Losing focus from product development to relocation issues

\- Losing time getting to market

\- Time & effort to move (find accommodation, offices, visas)

\- Initial costs & expenditure (Can spend on product instead)

\- Leaving friends & family

\- Shifting equipment (servers, printers, monitors, etc) unless hosted online or cheaper to (re)buy/replicate in SV.

...so basically I would say if you are able to go, then go. Also I have never met antone who regretted going but have met several people who have regretted _not_ going.

</comment><comment><USER9> The former - focus your initial time on building, getting users and feedback. If all is great, you will have a number of options, including going to SV.

Is there a specific reason why you want to go to SV first?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly the advantages of being in a startup hub, and SV is the primus inter pares.

<comment><USER9> You have email, IM, etc. for that :)

IMHO, where you right now, I don't think that's a significant _enough_ advantage. The costs of moving and living/working in SV is just not worth it at this stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a no-brainer. Without an extremely compelling reason to move, there's no point, especially when the place you're already at is decent. If you lived in South Dakota, okay, that would be another matter...

Have you ever visited SV? It's a big suburb.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sorry but to say Amsterdam isn't a startup hub, is just silly. There are many startups here and although not all are massive there are some pretty big ones: Soocial, E-buddy and TomTom just to name a few. I think Amsterdam's ambition (in the PG sense) is 'be more creative' - which fits perfectly with creating a value added service.

I think if you find the right people to network with you'll find there are quite a few cool startups and conversations to be had - that I think will rival SV conversations.

</comment><comment><USER12> Move when you need to take advantage of something only SV (or other start-up hubs) have to offer. For now, use Amsterdam (cheap, existing network) to your advantage.

</comment><comment><USER13> PS. Read Paul Graham's essay - Cities & Ambition

<http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> I am also in the very early stages of my startup and after considering the advantages and disadvantages of developing in Europe/India/Latin America/SV I have chosen SV. I know it will not be cheaper than most of the other places but I think the greatest advantage of SV is its the huge number of very talented people with the "startup culture"...</comment>