Ask HN: What's the most important thing you learned this year? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I learned that I have enough skills to make meaningful things for other people.

I have been a hobbyist programmer all my life. This year I realized I wanted to use my skills to build things that are actually used by others. I accepted a freelance position that came my way, and I wish I had looked for this kind of work years ago. I see now, that I could have as much technical work as I care to take on.

If you are thinking of freelancing and have never tried it, take a chance. Don't quit your day job, but take on a side project. Most of us here have the skills to do at least some freelance work.

<comment><USER3> I had this same kind of experience.

I taught myself Rails in about a month and then joined a Startup Weekend event. It made me realize just how much I _could_ do.

I too went the "freelance" route. I didn't have the experience of taking it on as a "side project". I was fired from my job and, rather than do the job search grind, I found it easier and better to do contract work on a "freelance" basis.

I'm still figuring it all out, but the important part is that I've learned just how valuable and capable I am. All it took was making that leap and pushing myself outside my comfort zone.

Unlike most people, it seems, I actually do suggest quitting your job. Get a handful of months of savings (if possible) first, and then make the jump. It's hard work, but it's worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That I've failed.

If one thing among a handful of fundamental things goes wrong, I'm homeless or dead. I have no savings or backup. I don't have the courage or health to be homeless.

Don't fail. I don't mean the cute fail fast and pivot. I mean don't fundamentally fail managing your life. There is no do-over.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry to hear that. I can only hope that the new year will make it right for you.

I'd really like to know more about what kind of fundamental failures you're talking about. You hear a lot how failing is OK and one should not be afraid to fail. Though you say _don't_ and there's no _do-over_. This is alarming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Humility.

</comment><comment><USER7> to shrug.</comment>


Give me spark - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3086-give-me-spark

<comment><USER2> True dat. In many companies as soon as there is even the slightest hint of passioned discussion you will get someone who tries to step in "defuse" the situation and remind everyone of the "respect in the workplace" policy or some such.

This will then often lead to the intervening party trying to broker a "compromise" between the two parties where the emphasis is more on how to resolve the dispute without anyone getting their feelings hurt.

As long as the argument hasn't gotten to a point where you think someone is likely to get punched or it has got personal or so far off track that it doesn't look like it will ever end I think it's usually best to just leave people to argue it out.

In the end even the "winning" party is now likely to be more mindful of the potential pitfalls of their idea when it is being implemented.

If you are working with other people I think you should aim to have an argument a day.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone explain to me how 37signals got all the way up on the high, preaching horse? Aside from a handful of well designed web apps that are used primarily by web dev's and designers, what makes their wisdom worthwhile? I'm sure this will get down-voted into oblivion but I am genuinely curious.

<comment><USER4> They're successful in the realm of web design/development and are the archetype for bootstrapped startups.

<comment><USER5> And they're not some stupid VC funded hipster company, that's build in 2 weeks. They sell a few very solid products, not the unusable but shiny new thing everybody talks about for a few weeks and nobody remembers in a year.

Sure, some of their Apps could get some design overhaul here nad there, but they do what they're supposed to do very well.

Because of that success and the technical background (Rails) they build (in my view) a huge credibility, at least for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would add this attitude to the long list of "counterintuitive things you should do if you want to be successful in the long run".

Sure, a company where everyone is all chummy and nobody disagrees once a decision has been made, that sort of place might be successful in the short run. They can probably iterate more rapidly when no one argues about a feature. The might be able to implement more features in a shorter time when no one argues about implementation. Ultimately, though, I would bet they end up with an inefficient product that no one wants.

Actually, this reminds me of how Penn and Teller describe their relationship: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYcabRJRG54>

<comment><USER7> Having a product that no one wants, or that most people actively dislike even, is not much of an impediment for enterprise sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the biggest things that can get in the way of a useful debate, however, is pride.

There are a lot of employees that love to argue and, even once it is clear they are wrong, they will still argue for their point and refuse to back down.

This emerges even more around design decision when there is no clear right and wrong and two parties are battling for their ideas. Sadly, it is often said that those two argue the longest are the winners, regardless of who is right.

I would say passion and the ability to challenge everyone's ideas is extremely important, but you must combine it with humility and the ability to back down when you know you are wrong (or at least more wrong than the other).

</comment><comment><USER7> Corporate American seems to be headed far in the other direction. People seem to be more interested in being friends with everyone (while talking about them behind their back) than doing great work. Any kind of confrontation is seen as a serious issue.

<comment><USER9> Corporate always had this problem. If you're not a 'yes man' then you are a potential threat to their job. Small businesses, for whatever reason, seem to react differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would really love an actual example of what he is talking about. Sure I can use my imagination, but it would make the post more interesting. It's a good point he makes, but concrete details always provide an excellent analytic touchstone.

Incidentally, this is a good trait (IMO) to instill in your kids. I love arguing with mine.

<comment><USER11> I thought of this after we hired @qrush. He instantly started arguing with everyone about everything from technology choices to feature selection and I thought to myself, "that's so awesome". And then I thought that we've had a long history of hiring people like that and how well it's worked out.

And at the same time, how less than stellar it worked out elsewhere both for myself and others who fell under the spark-on-the-first-day column.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Similar to being able to discern what customers want vs what customers need... or being able to tell a person who wants to buy your product you don't think it's a good fit (and, of course, suggesting an alternative)</comment>


Ask HN: Classifieds VS Realtor: Whats the best way to find a home? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to rent and I just want to know if anyone has some input on whether I should go through classifieds or hire a realtor. The home will be the base of a startup out of Jersey if that factors in. <comment><USER2> I will never use a realtor again.

My girlfriend at the time and I dealt with two different realtors when looking for a home in Austin, and both of them encouraged really bad decisions. The first was pretty new to the job, and was a bit heavy-handed in his tactics and advice, and I saw right through it. The latter was much more subtle and good at it (she'd been a realtor for 30 years; we didn't stand a chance). We ended up in the wrong part of town, much farther out than we intended to be (we weren't familiar with the area, and were driving 3 hours each way, on days off from work, for our excursions to look at houses, so we didn't know enough to know; we were also in a bit of a rush because our apartment lease was up soon), and in a neighborhood and house that was not at all appropriate for us, and not at all what we'd asked for.

I've since read quite a few books about the sales process, and influencing peoples decisions, and I've realized that our realtor had used just about every single trick in the book to convince us to buy quickly, and from a seller that was associated with the same real estate company. There are very few people on this earth that I have strong dislike for, but that realtor is one of them. She was an extremely good sales person, but a pretty horrible person.

The incentives are _way_ wrong in that business, and the kind of folks, in general, it attracts are not who you want to trust.

I'm sure there's an honest realtor out there somewhere (maybe even two or three), but I've never met one. I consider it a very expensive lesson learned, and one I'll never forget.

When we sold that abysmal house, we sold it ourselves, and we were completely honest about everything that was wrong with it (and in the time we'd been there we had fixed almost everything that the realtor-recommended inspector had conveniently failed to notice when we bought the place). It sold to the first person that looked at it, and for a fair market price for the neighborhood and size. And, I rented a place out here in the valley from an individual with no realtor involved. Found it on craigslist, it was a good deal in exactly the location I wanted, the landlord is a nice guy, and he likes my dog. No complaints at all.

Anyway, I can't say enough bad things about realtors, in general. I just don't see how there is any good reason to use one in a world with craigslist.

<comment><USER3> I see where you're coming from, and I also agree that most real estate agents suck. One of the few bright points in this economy is that many of the most corrupt agents have left the industry since it is no longer "easy money." Of course, there are still plenty of crooks left to go around, and some are more desperate than ever to make payroll. I also agree that the incentives in the industry are massively misaligned, and I'm definitely not here to defend the industry. As I said in another post, I'm actually trying to change the industry from the inside.

One thing that many people don't realize is that if they don't have an agent representing their interests as a buyer of an MLS-listed property, it usually just means the listing agent gets a double commission. The fact that there is not a buyer's agent doesn't lower the price for the buyer at all. The listing agent just does a "notice of no agency" and pockets both commissions. FSBOs (and some REO properties) are pretty much the only exceptions, because they don't go through the MLS, which has its own arcane rules. So, if you're going to pay the money anyway, you should try to get representation. Just educate yourself about the process, stand strong about what you want, and try to find one of those two or three honest agents ;-) Or pay for a RE attorney.

FSBOs are usually overpriced, especially during market corrections like we're in now. I admire your honesty in listing YOUR property but, unfortunately, not all sellers are as honest. Agents have more accountability, legally speaking, than a random dude on CraigsList. You have more avenues open to you if an agent screws you over than if a private seller screws you over. In fact, you should report your bad agents to your state licensing agency. Many state agencies use 'mystery shoppers' to check out agents when they've been reported a few times. The fewer bad agents out there, the better for everyone.

<comment><USER2> _One thing that many people don't realize is that if they don't have an agent representing their interests as a buyer of an MLS-listed property, it usually just means the listing agent gets a double commission. The fact that there is not a buyer's agent doesn't lower the price for the buyer at all._

Which I view as merely another good argument for buying or renting directly from the home owner. Leave the sellers agent out of the picture, as well. MLS is a 20th century idea. While many houses sold are still listed that way, there is no reason other than inertia for it to remain that way.

When we sold our house, we explicitly stated in the craigslist ad, "We will not be responsible for buyers agent fees. If you have a real estate agent, that's your problem, not ours." Our buyer was working with a friend who was an agent, and was able to work out a deal they were both happy with which I wasn't privy to the details of (and given that the buyer found the house himself with no help from the agent, who had showed him lots of houses that weren't right for him, I'd say the agent got more than they deserved, whatever the amount was). But, the buyer _did_ get a better deal on the house, because we didn't give any percentage to a realtor. So, we could sell the house cheaper than a realtor listed house _and_ walk away with more money than the seller.

Anyway, as you may note, my own personal experience with realtors has been so bad that pretty much nothing will convince me to use a realtor again. This could be a case of two bad apples. But, the one that took me for a ride was a 30 year veteran, and had won awards and such. The industry rewards those most effective at screwing people.

So, now that it's an industry that serves no real purpose other than injecting themselves in between buyers and sellers in large transactions (marketing real estate for sale and finding real estate to buy can now be done on the Internet; legal stuff has always been handled by the title companies and the lenders, anyway, and realtors just stake a claim to providing guidance in navigating the process...but if you call a title company, they will happily provide all the guidance you need), I simply have no use for the industry. Realtors are selling wagon wheels, and I don't have or want a wagon.

I think you, as a technically savvy individual, probably well above the average intelligence of realtors, would be well-served to think long and hard about whether the industry will change or die...and get yourself at the head of that curve, whatever it is.

<comment><USER3> A really detailed response would be a book, and I'm not sure this is HN-worthy material...so I'll try to be somewhat brief. I realize that your mind is made up, and since I'm (finally) starting to learn how hard it is to change a mindset, I'm not even going to try to change yours. I actually agree with much of what you're saying, and we can agree to disagree on the few other parts.

As I said before, I invested in this industry because I hated it and because I thought the incentives were misaligned. I definitely have a different background than any other agents or brokers I know, which puts me at odds with most of them. That being said, I think there IS a role for a (much smaller number) of good, honest real estate agents if the incentives are realigned and consumers can be made to understand more of the process and what they're actually paying for. As with any industry, SOME intermediaries do create value. To think that no intermediaries create value is, in many ways, just as ignorant as trusting agents too much and paying the 6% "like everyone else does." I just want consumers to be able to separate those that do create value from those that don't, and to pay a fair price for the value they receive. Those seemingly small goals will probably not happen industry-wide in my lifetime the way things are going, but I'm slowly working on it...

I initially tried a more revolutionary attack on the real estate industry (and MLS), and was severely beaten by the experience just like so many that came before me. One of the main obstacles is the entrenched players in the industry and their power over the regulations, etc. Even more powerful and disturbing, for me anyway, is that most consumers simply don't care if the industry changes because they don't even understand financial basics. Most alternatives to the status quo fail because of consumer inertia, not competitors.

I think the industry WILL change, but not die. I've looked at where I think the industry is going, and right now I'm satisfied to educate consumers and to save them a substantial amount of money. A website can't replace an agent in all cases, on either the buy-side or the sell-side. Of course, in some cases, it can. I believe my company is doing better work by operating in the customer's interest on the leading edge of the industry, versus working on an idealized version of where we or others might WANT it to go. This is probably the least lucrative company I'm involved with, but it is very satisfying when some people do get it and we can help them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Use a realtor. They can go through listings for you to find what you are looking for. Make sure you get a buyers agent to represent you (it generally costs nothing or maybe 1%, depending on how the deal is structured with the listing agent).

The other benefit is when it comes time to negotiate. A good buyers agent can help guide you (but recognize that in the end you're on your own). The other big benefit is that they are a proxy for you. You won't talk directly with the sellers or sellers agent when negotiating. This has the benefit of them not knowing how excited you are about a particular property, and prevents them from getting a good "feel" for exactly what you can afford.

Also, just as an FYI, if you look at foreclosure properties (which are tempting in this market) be aware of all the fine print. These generally take a longer period of time to close and are much riskier overall. If I were buying another property in this market (I'm 1/2 looking)... Find a good buyers agent, get pre-qualified, know your limits and tell the buyers agent that if they happen to "hear" (all realtors in a market talk to each other) of a listing where the sellers are on the verge of foreclosure and would take a quick deal at a big discount that you would be interested...

<comment><USER5> Just remember that the realtor works for himself, not for you. His job is to maximize his commission, which is usually shared with the selling realtor.

We found that out when we bought our first house back in the 80's in Connecticut. A very nice older lady was our realtor, and she really didn't serve us well. (Lots of house issues swept under the rug, so to speak, until it was too late.)

<comment><USER3> "Just remember that the realtor works for himself, not for you."

That is great advice, no matter what kind of transaction you're entering into. I actually got involved with the real estate industry because I hated how it worked. It is ridiculous that incentives are so misaligned in this industry. I thought I could change some things in my small corner of the world, but I was too naive, and it will take much longer than I thought for me to have any impact. Unfortunately, most consumers simply don't care enough about their money to educate themselves. Sad and irrational, but true.

I will not work with anyone who stands to make more money simply by getting me to pay more. There is NO WAY they can represent my interests if that is the case. In my real estate brokerage, buyers pay for the actual services they use. They know the cost up-front, and there are no incentives for me to try to get them to buy a specific property or a more expensive property, because I'm not paid based on an (arbitrary) percentage of the property price. In 99% of cases, the money they spend on me will be spent whether I help them or not, so my fees aren't even an extra expense. Yet I still have to spend (relatively) much more time than my competitors to educate them about how and why I can help them, just because I am different. It's like the entrepreneurial cliches about the stupidity of introducing a completely new product (pioneers get arrows in their backs, right? It's easier to move to territory that has already been settled.)

There are real estate companies with good business models and good agents...they're just very rare :-(</comment></comment></comment>


The Race to Create Elon Musk's Hyperloop Heats Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-race-to-create-elon-musks-hyperloop-heats-up-1448899356?mod=e2tw <comment><USER2> I hate to be so negative. Elon is a really bright guy and electric cars are fantastic; a real advancement away from fossil fuels. We need more of that!

But we don't need hyperloop. We need decent subways, lightrail, buses and trams. And decently fast (200km/h) intercity trains. We don't lack the technology or the engineering, we lack the political will. Pissing away billions on more techno fantasy is just a distraction while the number of cars and parking lots and freeways just keeps on growing, accreting ever more, little by little, like it has for the past 60 years in the US. The layout of and density of US cities is already profoundly inefficient due to streets, parking lots, and freeways.

A lot of comments here seem to be betting big on self-driving cars, like somehow magic chariots will appear from the sky and whisk us away to fairy land where we never have to look at a stranger or sit in a seat next to someone we don't know, or god, touch a railing! And they'll just as easily disappear into the ether where they require neither maintenance nor upkeep, storage, or cleaning. Apparently these self-driving cars will also run on magic engines that are somehow going to be more efficient than electric light rail or subway, or god forbid, a bike.

<comment><USER3> > And decently fast (200km/h) intercity trains.

Surely you mean 200mph? 200km/h barely qualifies as high-speed rail on old lines in europe, new lines require 250, 350 lines are being rolled out and plans are being drawn for 400 lines in the UK and Russia.

<comment><USER4> Almost all Dutch intercity trains run 140km/h, and that's fast enough (it's faster than cars, and goes city center to city center). Of course cities are close together here, but we _are_ in Europe.

I'd certainly call 200km/h "decently fast".

<comment><USER3> > Almost all Dutch intercity trains run 140km/h, and that's fast enough

When it's hard to find cities more than 100km apart, sure. And the US already have passenger trains in that range.

> Of course cities are close together here, but we are in Europe.

I quoted what's considered high-speed rail in Europe, I'm sorry that offends you.

> I'd certainly call 200km/h "decently fast".

Not when your cities are 500km apart or more.

<comment> ju-st New high speed railways in Germany are built only for 250km/h: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendlingen%E2%80%93Ulm_high- sp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendlingen%E2%80%93Ulm_high- speed_railway)

<comment><USER3> A specific 80km rail section with a long tunnelled ramp is only built for 250 (which does qualify as high-speed anyway). Germany also has 300km/h rail: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt–Leipzig/Halle_high- spee...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt–Leipzig/Halle_high- speed_railway)

<comment><USER2> The trains almost never go that fast, and even if they do, it's for short periods of time. Average speed is the key thing.

Why are we only impressed by megafast trains? They aren't really cost efficient and probably won't be built at all. The best train is the one that exists! 200km/h is already probably reaching. Even 150km/h means you could go Chicago to Cincinatti in 3 hours (vs 4.5 by car) or San Francisco to LA in under 5 hours (vs 6 hours by car). At 5 hours, that beats the hassle of an airplane, IMO.

<comment><USER3> > The trains almost never go that fast

Sure they do. Worldwide, Acela is a peculiar exception, not a rule (and no if you're going to put your train on old low-speed rails and give priority to freight you definitely don't need high-speed trainsets, I'm not going to disagree with that one, turns out only in the US do people do that, go figure)

> Average speed is the key thing.

And the average speed is higher if the train can reach a higher top speed. All of the top average _service_ speeds are high-speed trains: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_veh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehicles#World_fastest_point- to-point_average_speeds_in_commercial_operations)

> Why are we only impressed by megafast trains?

Because megaslow trains are pointless for long distances?

> They aren't really cost efficient and probably won't be built at all.

Considering the US's love for trains, I just assume you guys won't build any either way, that's usually a pretty safe bet.

> Even 150km/h means you could go Chicago to Cincinatti in 3 hours (vs 4.5 by > car) or San Francisco to LA in under 5 hours (vs 6 hours by car). At 5 > hours, that beats the hassle of an airplane, IMO.

When the flight is 1h15~1h30, you'll be a very small minority, the general annoyance of transport and loss of the whole day means flight pretty much always win. Lower that to ~2h30 city center to city center, however, and train might become competitive, especially without security check and with better cabin comfort.

<comment><USER2> Well, you specifically mentioned trains in Germany. I've ridden quite a few, and I can tell you, they almost never go that fast, and not for long periods of time. With all the stop and go, all the slow tracks, quiet areas, and whatever else, the average speed isn't that high. So in general the US should probably not focus on superfast trains, since they don't pan out usually, but just getting some decent trains that are on-time and reasonably fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminders about the initial criticisms of the Hyperloop plan, which I do not see rebutted anywhere in this article:

* It's riotously expensive, far more so than the white paper indicates; simply building the elevated track overpasses at the costs listed in the white paper would imply a revolution in civil engineering.

* Door-to-door transit times are within the same ballpark as HSR, because it's not possible to terminate Hyperloop tracks downtown in LA or SF; ROW issues put them roughly an hour outside each city.

* Hyperloops will have approximately the same security concerns as airplanes --- they fail more dangerously than normal trains --- and so will have TSA-style security checks, further slowing travel.

* At the speeds Hyperloop advocates claim, there is virtually no tolerance for bends on tracks without inducing nausea.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great! I can't wait to see the pieces of this puzzle that turn out to be much harder than they first appear, and the pieces that turn out to be much easier.

No matter the final outcome, we'll learn tons, which is a win.

</comment><comment><USER7> I know Hyperloop has a ton of naysayers -- partly because the initial price tag of $6 billion is most likely a severe underestimation -- but...

It has the potential to make a tremendous impact on society, much more so than self-driving cars in my opinion. Just as a simple example, imagine what would happen to the Bay Area housing market if people could live in a ~300 mile radius and still get to work in downtown SF in less than 30 minutes.

<comment><USER8> I think the only game changing thing about the hyperloop is that it is getting rich people excited about public transit. I mean, my guess is that we're never going to get a SF <-> LA transit path that is faster than a airline with a "skip the security" pass; I don't believe that the hyperloop as envisioned will never be built.

I know that sounds trivial... but it's not. Public transit is a failure in America in large part because wealthy people, even wealthy people who support public transit in general, don't want public transit near them.

<comment><USER9> > even wealthy people who support public transit in general, don't want public > transit near them.

This seems very odd to me. Here in the Netherlands, housing prices actually increase when there's good public transport. In the north of Amsterdam a new metro line is being built, which is already causing an increase in housing prices there.

<comment><USER10> Really? Have you ever tried to get from the train station of, say, Blaricum or Bloemendaal to anywhere else there? 'Wealthy' people don't live in houses whose prices are affected by availability of public transport, in the Netherlands. (OTOH I wouldn't say that they 'don't want PT near them', but then again that's not really true for other places either).

<comment><USER9> This is true, but we're talking SF & LA here, metropolitan areas. Blaricum is better compared to something like the Hamptons. There is no public transport because there's space to park cars, so public transportation is not necessary and it's impractical since the population is spread out.

The Apollobuurt in Amsterdam is also full of rich people and yet there's a lot of public transportation. The people living there are not against public transportation though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "The pod has been pressurized to minimize the G forces effects on a > passenger"

Anyone's got an idea what they meant with that?

<comment><USER12> > Suprastudio's students suggested pods pressurized like airplanes to reduce G > forces

They even put it in there twice.

<comment><USER13> They could put it in as many times as they like, it doesn't make any sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Who is paying for this pipe dream?

<comment><USER15> Musk has played a blinder on this one cause no matter who does, his name will be on it, haha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> With rail - particularly these days when it's practical to work on trains - it's not really the speed, it's the capacity. And Hyperloop's capacity advantage seems to come solely from the assumption that their cars will be allowed to run as close as buses or trams or lorries.

We allow lorries to run at 56mph less than a meter nose-to-tail, with a human at the controls. Yet we require signalling blocks that put miles of clear air between two successive trains even when automatically operated. We could make rail vastly more economic overnight if we simply allowed it to operate at the same safety levels that we accept for road traffic.

<comment><USER17> The mass and stopping distance of trains is what dictates the length of the space, so we are already operating at the 'same safety levels that we accept for road traffic'.

It's all based on the friction between the vehicle and the surface, in road vehicles that's typically asphalt and rubber and stopping distances are relatively short because of reduced mass. In trains the materials are steel and slightly harder steel and stopping distances are _much_ larger, especially when the rails are wet.

A loaded freight train running 55 Mph will take more than a mile to come to a full stop. A passenger train doing 100 Mph takes 750 meters to stop with emergency brakes applied. This will lead to lots of people being wounded due the fact that trains don't normally have seatbelts, unsecured overhead luggage and people standing if the train is relatively full.

Trains also can't evade, they're tied to the rails.

<comment><USER16> It's not the same level. You're quite right that stopping distances are longer but we don't require road traffic to be its full stopping distance apart (you have to be much much closer before you'll get stopped for tailgating), and we do see much higher accident rates for buses and other road traffic than for trains as a result.

<comment><USER17> Exactly, buses and road traffic have higher accident rates than trains (and aircraft) and this has everything to do with how those means of transportation are being operated. Rail and aircraft operators are companies that take responsibility for the lives of a large number of people and that typically have a long term view, as in, they'd like to be in business in half a century or more.

Tourbus operators (not the same as public transport) are responsible for a large number of the road traffic accidents involving buses, public transport involving buses is involved in accidents at a much lower rate. The reasons are: tourbuses tend to go faster, drive _much_ longer distances (exhaustion), drive routes that are less safe to begin with and so on.

The way the rail industry deals with a capacity problem on a line is not to send more trains with a decreased train-to-train spacing but simply to send longer trains.

You can't really make longer buses beyond a certain maximum length due to the fact that the minimum turning radius of roads is a very small fraction of the minimum turning radius of a train.

<comment><USER16> Thinking about it I guess the more relevant question is: can the "hyperloop" stop faster than a train? If not, why should we let them run at anything like the capacity Musk claims?

<comment><USER17> A train is not constrained in the same way that the hyperloop is. This is both a good thing _and_ a bad thing depending on what happens. Presumably the remaining air between two hyperloop capsules will be compressed prior to impact reducing the deceleration to something more manageable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why do we insist on character worship. Hyperloop is not his idea - it's a totally obvious idea that has popped up many times since the 1800s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Historical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Historical) Compressing the air in front of the capsule is not some fantastic stroke of genius - it's trivially obvious.

All he has done is drawn our attention to a really good idea.

</comment><comment><USER19> The political implications tied to self-driving cars are all scary.

The political implications tied to self-driving trains are not.

The difference being the rails that bind and inhibit true autonomy.

An internet of two-ton things hurtling at 60+ MPH should not be an idea tossed about dismissively. It should at least be locked into track systems, or loops as training wheels, for baby's first sentient AI.

<comment><USER20> You're talking about tracking the populace? What if you could use a self driving car in an anonymous manner (paying cash)?

<comment><USER9> Or Bitcoin.</comment></comment></comment>


FunTAL: mixing a functional language with assembly - <AUTHOR> https://dbp.io/artifacts/funtal/ <comment><USER2> As far as I can tell, this is another piece of Amal Ahmed's high-level compiler verification project.

The idea is that we don't have good tools to compare programs written in different languages, but these tools do exist so long as we stay in the same language. So while it's currently difficult to verify a compiler from a rich functional language to assembly, we have very good tools to verify a compiler from one subset of a language to another.

So if we want to verify a compiler from a functional language to assembly we "simply" need a language that is a superset of both, and that's where FunTAL comes in.

\---

I'm looking forward to reading the paper and it's great that this project is producing some independently useful artifacts. On the other hand I still think that this approach to compiler verification is a bit odd. Time will tell, I suppose...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Py0l7CfQTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Py0l7CfQTo)

slides: [https://dbp.io/talks/2017/funtal- pldi.pdf](https://dbp.io/talks/2017/funtal-pldi.pdf)</comment>


Ask: The hunt for good domain names - <AUTHOR>

Anyone got some good domain names to sell? I am tearing my hair out to get something I really like. <comment><USER2> I generally perform a mass whois search with a bunch of keyword combinations and add some prefixes and suffixes for popular endings like LY, ER, ED, S, R, etc. I created a pretty simple PHP script for doing this which I have since made drastic improvements to, but this should get you started:

[http://www.jqueryin.com/2010/04/12/finding-available- domains...](http://www.jqueryin.com/2010/04/12/finding-available-domains-by- keyword-combination-in-php/)

The whole thing stores to a file as well as uses a couple different WHOIS servers to avoid you getting temporarily banned by randomly picking one.

</comment><comment><USER3> I make it a point not to buy a domain I don't have a use for. There has been ~50-75 domains I checked in the last month that were nothing but godaddy parked domain pages. That being said, I usually just pick some words and phrases I like, and hit the thesaurus. If you're persistent and lucky, you'll hit a good+available .com

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm trying to sell a number of domains. Take a look and see if you like any. [https://www.sedo.co.uk/search/searchresult.php4?showportfoli...](https://www.sedo.co.uk/search/searchresult.php4?showportfolio=1b9e247bcf3aab2c5e12678298488c172b4fd02b)

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a few although I'm not sure they would be good for you. If you can tell me what sort of domain name you want (some theme, keywords etc) I can find good names which are available.

Trust me, I'm really good at this.

</comment><comment><USER6> Uh... can you be any more specific, or does the meaning not matter _at all_?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was hoping for something I could use as a brand, rather than something functional-sounding.

We're building social software to help people get things done. It's pretty widely interpretable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I knew there was a previous, related discussion.

HN Domain Exchange: Add your unused domains <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794289>

</comment><comment><USER8> I bought bawk.com recently but probably will use another one as it turns out. I'd sell it to you for what it cost me because I'm a fan. I'll email you details if you like it.

<comment><USER9> If that's still available, I'd gladly take it off your hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I once wrote a script to crawl the entire US dictionary for words that hadn't already been registered.

Anybody dying to own limbate.com or vesuviate.com?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I actually built something to generate nice word-sounding nonwords and found hundreds of interesting domains. Maybe i should build a product out of that.

<comment><USER7> Like Wordoid? <http://wordoid.com/>

It can occasionally come up with some gems and is one of the three tools I use when trying to find available domains (the others being <http://domai.nr/> and <http://impossibility.org/>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm looking to get rid of curvd.com, labld.com, velvt.com, boostd.com, and remoteli.com

Email: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER5> Emailed contact@tastylabs with some names which are available.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am letting go - nameego.com and wearstartup.com @ $5 each.

</comment><comment><USER13> I recently bought kidzys.com

</comment><comment><USER14> What's your budget?

<comment><AUTHOR> We can pay anything reasonable, but I'll just go for some other name rather than overpay.

That is to say: it depends on how awesome it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> DailySter.com

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://burri.to/~joshua/fut.html>

i should update this old thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Snerk.com?

</comment><comment><USER17> I am pretty good at this... but can you give me more info on what your doing?

Here are some domains I came up with and am in various states of doing stuff with some of them...

BROWSETHROUGH.ME

BROWSETHROUGH.US

CHIRPCHAT.COM

CIRROSTRAT.US

CONFERO.US

DICIPUL.US

DOCTRIN.US

DOTSTAT.US

DROIDOC.COM

FLIGHTR.COM

IMBUED.US

MEDSTAT.US

MEDSTRAT.US

REPLET.US

SECUT.US

TEXTOO.US

TEXTUO.US

THELIFEWIKI.COM

TIMESTAT.US

VOLITICAL.ORG

WHATSTAT.US

JOTBOX.ME

</comment><comment><USER18> We got our domain names by approaching the registrant and making an offer.

There are plenty of domain names that are not listed on the ripoff domain name sales sites.

Find something you like and make an offer.

</comment><comment><USER19> Webstagram.com

check my profile for my email address</comment>


Get typical traffic for roads, not just highways on Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/04/get-typical-traffic-for-roads-not-just.html

<comment><USER2> The data don't exist to get near-realtime updates, but having "typical traffic" certainly helps much more than simple estimates based on speed limits (and hopefully traffic controls like stop lights or roundabouts).

<comment><USER3> Does Google do anything with the data it collects from those using Android Navigation? That could certainly provide enough realtime data in some parts I would think.

<comment><USER4> Yes, absolutely. I've seen the traffic status change from green to red for my stretch of road when I was stopped in traffic for a while I was running their Android navigation app.

<comment><USER5> That may be the case, but I don't think the data is actually used to route you. I missed an exit once and had my estimated transit time drop by 20 minutes, as it was going to put me on a heavily clogged highway. It knew how the traffic was too, since my traffic light changed as well, from red to green.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TomTom has this on their GPS units, and it's a killer feature. They call it IQ routes - but it's not just some roads, it's all of them.

Instead of using the defined speed limit on each road to calculate how long it takes to travel it, they use the actual speed instead (for each 15 minute segment of the day).

It works really well, as long as I don't make any incorrect turns, I no longer sit in traffic.

<comment><USER7> That sounds amazing. How do I get it? Buy any Tom Tom? Do I have to subscribe to anything?

<comment><USER8> It needs the IQ Routes feature. I don't know if it is standard or not.

<comment><USER6> After quite a lot of research my suggestion as best for the money is the TomTom XXL 540TM. It includes lifetime map updates (the M) and an included FM traffic receiver (the T).

Don't get the 550 instead, the 540 is much better.

If it's too large for you, the XL 340TM is identical in everything except screen size.

The other models have lots of other features (voice input, bluetooth, mp3 player), but they didn't seem worth the money to me.

The only drawback I've had with it is that it takes longer than I would like to recalculate a route if you miss a turn - especially if the destination is distant.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for looking that up. So I'm reading about the route IQ thing; it doesn't sound like it uses current traffic data to change the routes? Only historical?

Also does the FM receiver work in most places? I'm pretty far away from any cities.

<comment><USER6> Yes, historical average for that road and for that 15 minute time slice. If you want more current data you might consider the live models that use cellular data connections to download more accurate data. (But you have to pay yearly subscriptions - there may be a lifetime model, I'm not sure.)

The traffic receiver will get you current conditions for the larger roads. It's pretty much only the roads that you'll hear mentioned during traffic segments on news radio. So if you have traffic on your local radio you'll probably have traffic from the receiver as well (you must also have a large FM station in your area since it piggybacks on that). It also includes all construction issues and lane restrictions/closures, even those not mentioned on the radio (I assume they get it from the municipality).

If you are far from cities I can't image you have much traffic - where it really shines is when you travel to a city. It will tell you "In 5 miles on the road you are on there is a slowdown to 20 mph lasting for 2 miles."

Due to bandwidth restrictions it's not super accurate on exactly where on the road the slowdown starts/ends but it's pretty good. The GPS unit will automatically recalculate your route to avoid the traffic if it can find a better way. Or you can have it avoid the traffic no matter if it thinks the alternate route is slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They've had this feature for at least a couple years. I remember hearing that they pulled it off maps.google.com a while back (keeping it in their Android mobile Maps and Navigation apps) so perhaps they're re-releasing it after some internal changes.

</comment><comment><USER9> Have these Google people actually used their own app? When I bring up Google Maps for Android, the settings I get are Switch Account, Cache Settings and Labs. If I bring up Navigation then the only setting is screen dimming. Oh and both have some setting to bring up pages of legalese. Where exactly am I supposed to enable or disable this location setting?

Thankfully they do support secondary roads. My Garmin GPS has a live traffic receiver but only has information on the highways and _very_ major side roads. This means it can't make a decision about getting off the highway if there is a problem.

Google also unhelpfully do not make it possible to report map errors from with the Maps/Navigation app. They claim there is parking in the middle of a park near me which is definitely not the case.</comment>


The Cloud: No Sir, I Don't Like It - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-fruhlinger/cloud-computing_b_855746.html <comment><USER2> Can we all stop talking about "the cloud" please? It makes responding to this kind of article far more difficult. After all, you can't really compare something like Dropbox with EC2 - they do completely different things and there is really very little in common. If you're talking about remote file storage, call it that. Don't get Hung up on this mythical "cloud".

<comment><USER3> I consider myself a "Cloud" engineer and architect. I build enterprise systems hosted in Clouds. Developing in the Cloud has its own intricacies, but I'm getting off topic.

My point is that to me, "Cloud" is a software engineering term. It affects the way I think about implementing services. However, the term is being misappropriated by the media (in a similar way to "Hacker") to describe what to me appears to be just plain-old web services (or paper-hostage-holding services to quote the linked article).

This is because consumers use these services in the same way they always have. The cloud hasn't introduced some new magical way of interacting with the services. Using Dropbox as an example, it is a Cloud service because it is implemented on top of AWS. That's an internal technical issue though, of interest to the audience of HN, but not to the general public [1].

To summarise, I agree that "the Cloud" is overused, but is of interest from a technical point of view. However, the linked article is not a technical article for cloud implementers, but rather service consumers.

[1] There is the separate issue of how well the cloud service has been implemented, as the recent AWS outage has reminded us. Having a robust, secure service is of course important to the lay consumer. But services need to be robust and secure whether they are cloud based or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is a little irritating to think of people using cloud services without local backups. It is trivial to backup Google Documents but some data is more of a challenge (e.g., local copies of AppEngine datastore, SimpleDB, etc.).</comment>


Rushkoff proposes we abandon the Internet, and create something better - <AUTHOR> http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-net <comment><USER2> I blogged about a proposal like this some while ago: [http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/using-computers- to...](http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/using-computers-to-promote- freedom/)

In the long term I'd like to see that every computer sold in the western world came configured as standard as freedom-enabled: this would mean mesh networking, encryption, a steganographic filing system, etc, out of the box.

This would have two advantages. One is that western governments would find it difficult to take freedom away from the internet.

The other is that authoritarian governments would either have to abandon the free internet and implement their own locked-down and incompatible one, or they would have to accept that they can't control their people's communications. The advantage this would give the west in any future cold war against China is, I hope, obvious.

I'm standing for election to the Scottish parliament later this year. If I'm elected I'll try to get something like this implemented.

<comment><USER3> "I'm standing for election to the Scottish parliament later this year. If I'm elected I'll try to get something like this implemented."

I'd really like to hear how the voters are responding to such an issue. Do people understand, more or less, the technology, the ramifications, the options? Do they care? Do they care once <something> is explained? That sort of thing.

There are a number of comments posted on HN to the effect that "mere" users don't care, don't understand, can't be bothered, etc. That they only care that Stuff Works, for some limited definition of "works". I'd like to think that's not true, but my sample set of non-geeks is probably too small to make broad statements about the general population.

<comment><USER2> > _I'd really like to hear how the voters are responding to such an issue. Do > people understand, more or less, the technology, the ramifications, the > options?_

The vast majority don't (yet). That's one reason why the Pirate Party is going to have other policies as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author doesn't quite get it. Nonwithstanding the fact that physical infrastructure is never free (his fido example is a case in point: phone lines), once something turns big corporations will enter the game, and then even freifunk-like architecture would suddenly be corporate-owned, as their nodes outnumber private ones.

Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search engines.

<comment><USER2> > _Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many > attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by > the search engines._

This is a good point. But I don't think we should be complacent: if the USA and EU got serious about blocking these, they would be able to shut down both, with the current network infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One can't escape the corporations or governments' influence. They are already in every aspect of one's life. Rather than trying to build a super secret treehouse away from their gaze it's more productive to find a way to protect people's freedoms within the current system. To make it so senators do not have the power to meddle with the network arbitrarily.

<comment><USER2> Why not work on both political and technological solutions to the problem? The more ways the problem is attacked, the more likely one attack will succeed.

<comment><USER5> Of course. I thought that was implicit, sorry. What I don't agree with is the article's proposal to start over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> or tunnel through existing infrastructure, which you would be anyway with the other options. I actually like that the internet is a library, a shopping mall and any number of other things all at the same time and am not too fearful that yanking DNS entries would be such a terrible thing. I never used fidonet but I did have a uucp email address and set up dialers to get email working between unix systems back in the 80's. I feel like we are always tunelling over something existing, so why not use the most convenient. Wouldn't a VPN over the public internet give you the same result? Of course, your provider could pull the plug on you, but you switch to another, just like if someone else started transmitting on your frequency if you're using ham radio. the FCC tends to take a dim view of encryption (which they are also unable to define, or rather differentiate between providing confidentiality vs message ciphers for obscurity) so you would have to embed your subversive internet within benign ordinary traffic.

There's nothing forcing any of us to use ATT or comcast or whomever, its just a more fun place on a network where there are more people. If you grew up with uucp as your mail carrier and progressed to ccMail and finally a netcom shell account you'll remember how boring it was reading physics papers on gopher servers and looking at fluid dynamics latex documents. There was a time though between gopher and veronica and today's 500 million people wasting 2 hours every day checking out each other's cat washing stories and playing at being farmers. Maybe I'm just remembering it all wrong, but I kind of like the current internet.

<comment><USER2> > _or tunnel through existing infrastructure_

This would certainly be how any new network started. If/when it got bigger, it could outgrow the existing infrastructure.

> _the FCC tends to take a dim view of encryption_

Are they not aware that it is routinely used on the net, then?

> _you would have to embed your subversive internet within benign ordinary > traffic_

Datastreams with lots of bits are best for hiding things. So I'd expect steganography over video VoIP to be one mthod used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Typical worthless purist drivel.

Sure, let's throw away 25 years worth of infrastructure and progress and go back to a system where people have to dial in to a centrally controlled system via ham radios or the (corporate-owned) telephone system! We can even use our old 56k modems! Or pigeons! And let's make sure not to use any money to support it, since money is corporate owned as well!

</comment><comment><USER8> It may yet be possible to create a sort of 'commons' by opening up large portions of the radio spectrum for free data interchange.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network>

</comment><comment><USER9> Personally, I think the solution that could get some kind of market traction would be to sell WiFi routers that can organize themselves into Metropolitan Area Networks. A certain portion of the units is instructed to become 'long- distance' nodes, connecting to other nodes a mile or two away, and shifting large amounts of data between them. Another portion of the units is instructed to become 'medium-distance' nodes, distributing the traffic from the long- distance nodes to devices within a few thousand foot radius, and all devices are simultaneously capable of being 'short-distance' nodes, connecting directly to end-user devices. Since it takes more resources and a better antenna to run a long-distance node, routers capable of acting as long- distance could possibly be distinct from medium-distance-capable ones, and sold at a premium, with an assurance that local devices connecting to it will get better network performance. Apart from that, devices become either long, medium or short-range nodes depending on network and geographical needs.

The market for these devices will of course get its start with piracy and porn, just like any good burgeoning internet protocol, but you can bet local TV stations, radio stations and advertisers would be all over them to get their content out without having to pay the traditional network gatekeepers. Content producers would get free access to the network if they just run a node or two.

Eventually, as the metropolitan area networks become dense enough and spread out widely enough, it will be possible to link the different cities to each- other and start to create another wide-scale network. Until that happens, though, there's enough going on in most metropolitan areas to give more than enough value to a decentralized network such as this.

<comment><USER10> I assume you haven't spent much time using mesh radio solutions - they have their uses for sure but their performance and reliability are very poor compared to traditional solutions. And even then most of them rely on backending on wired plant for longhaul.

<comment><USER9> I have not, though I am aware of it. Perhaps the planned white-space open licensing would give us the bandwidth to address this problem, and the performance of such decentralized systems could be improved. If such an improvement is possible, then something like mesh would have a good shot at market success.

<comment><USER11> In a given channel, 802.11 mesh networking provides roughly 1/7th the performance of non-mesh (and an ideal protocol only achieves 1/3) [1]; using more spectrum increases throughput but the waste is still there. Many people (especially telco lobbyists) would argue that spectrum shouldn't be wasted on such inefficient protocols.

[1] <http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/grid:mobicom01/>

<comment><USER9> OK, plan B. First, we quantum-entangle a few million pairs of particles...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I support this project. I was hoping stuff like Meraki.net would be a good tool for this, but it doesn't seem to have taken off.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed..."

I believe he meant the Web or perhaps the other applications that run on top of the Internet. Email, ftp, and the Usenet were on the "Internet" in 1984.

</comment><comment><USER14> The one fatal flaw is that the author assumes disparate hoards of people can come together to create a new network to replace the existing one, which is a difficult task (dare I say extremely difficult). Just look at how an organized, business & government sponsored approach to creating a new network has already failed to take much traction (re: ipv6). Hardly disparate, yet a decade of efforts and still not truly active.

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't say ipv6 has failed, merely that it isn't being adopted fast enough. It'll get there. Sooner or later, reality will force ipv6 adoption.

<comment><USER14> Yes, failed is a bit harsh, but see how difficult adoption has been? A near apocalypse of ipv4 is required before the leap occurs. My point, though, was simply to illustrate how insane it sounds for a bunch of random people to do what an organized and financially backed group even struggles with.

<comment><USER15> GNU/Linux? Firefox also turned out quite a bit better than IE. I'm aware that money and organization are involved in both of those endeavours, but the amount of each is miniscule by comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm trying to figure out what the net neutrality reference was for, besides an attention-getting throwaway line.

In some hypothetical future inter-net that is truly decentralized and magically not subject to "lawmakers and lobbyists", _there could be no neutrality_ , since the system would be (somehow) free from any authorities who could impose neutrality.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps he imagines neutrality to be the default state of a lawless Internet, not something imposed from outside.

<comment><USER16> That's definitely imaginative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Holy crap, these are good comments. I agree that it's impractical to build a new net from scratch, but there's some really good work arounds here from cabalamat, wiseweasel, sfphotoarts, and others.

What other ways can we increase Internet freedoms working with existing infrastructure? What other legal and technical work arounds are there?

</comment><comment><USER18> This definitely is related:

<http://wiki.freifunk.net/Kategorie:English>

They're around for quite a while now and with some success not only in urban areas. (I don't know anything about them meshing together local networks, what I suspect to still require the ISP internets at the moment.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe this would be an opportunity to start with a content-centric protocol:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8>

</comment><comment><USER20> It would probably be heavily based around RSA encryption.

<comment><USER21> While it is true that encryption will be involved, it is not the hard problem, I think that's a bit like saying nails will be used to construct a building. The hard problems are how to get a packet of data from here to there without a central mediator (solvable with current tech but can have performance issues), and how to create a human-usable naming service of some kind that doesn't have a central mediator _and_ doesn't inevitably degenerate back into having a central mediator by its very nature. Technically DNS is decentralized but the way it works causes it to centralize naturally. I'm not sure if this is avoidable.

<comment><USER22> Strictly speaking there's no need for a DNS-like system to use domain _names_ - you could use domain keys instead (locating the authoritative servers could then be done with a DHT of some sort). The problem then is that it becomes hard to type them in manually, but people could exchange such things with QR codes, or abbreviated hashes of the keys. You do lose usability, but it's a compromise that wouldn't be entirely unusable.

<comment><USER21> And you'd have to solve the issues of deliberately corrupting DHT nodes, deliberately constructed collisions, and forged copies of the whatever-human- key ends up being used, since it is pretty much out of the question that we will all type in 128-bit numbers for website access.

Note I do not mean this as criticism of your comment, because you can't possibly solve these issues in an HN comment. Just pointing it out. Designing a decentralized network that works at all is a big enough challenge, designing a fully decentralized network that stands up to hostile attacks by intelligent adversaries is even harder.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CloudWatch Dashboards – Create and Use Customized Metrics Views - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloudwatch-dashboards-create-use-customized-metrics-views/ <comment><USER2> $3 per dashboard per month (first 3 free) seems exorbitant. They're already charging for storing and viewing metrics, I would have expected dashboards to be free.

<comment><USER3> I actually hope they will utilize elasticsearch and dyanmoDB one day. They already have integration b/w DDB and Titan, DDB and Kinesis, Kinesis and Elasticsearch, so it's just a matter of time and enough requests to see Elasticsearch & Kibana integrate with cloudwatch. I am not sure when they will have a "logstash" although that's already doable with cloudwatch log.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> But CW retention is still two-week maximum right? Would be really beneficial if AWS just make a service available or upgrade the two-week retention to customer-choosing. I know the metric storage can grow exponentially (like what happened with the recent Dynamo outage) but it will also alleviate customers to roll their own metric storage system if CW now can create custom dashboard.

<comment><USER2> Yes I want this too! You can pay them for CW log retention but not for metrics retention. Seems like an obvious step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We just setup DataDog, and absolutely love them for all of our charting and monitoring needs. They are quite deeply integrated with AWS.

<comment><USER2> We've been using DataDog for a while and I hate it. I'm really excited about doing this directly at AWS.

<comment> 2-m3m3n70 Can you elaborate on what's good / bad about it? We have been looking for a metrics solution and trying to find a good option.

What I'm confused about DataDog is they charge your per host - how exactly does that work if you are just reporting metrics (I guess you have to pay per host you are reporting metrics from).

<comment><USER5> Watching how players in the space are evolving how and what they bill for is interesting.

I think that charging by host is a lot easier for general buyers to understand and things generally average out.

I was recently also interested by the new signalfx pricing model - its really priced by metric volume but they sell it by host. When you peel back the covers they're just including a certain amount of metric volume with each host and your actual bill will vary.

Obviously underlying costs are tied to the amount of metrics, not the amount of hosts.

We are using Datadog for a bunch of stuff right now, and we generally like it. The per-host pricing model does get a bit hard to swallow especially when you have a bunch of really small hosts. Your monitoring bill can start to approach your hosting bill :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Grafana (in v2.5) now has a bunch of overlap with this.

It's arguably a better solution [disclaimer: I'm biased; co-founder of raintank, the company behind Grafana].

Best of all its open source and used for metrics viz by a lot of people.

v2.5 ships with a new cloudwatch data source, so it's super easy to add cloudwatch metrics to your existing dashboards.

We'd love to get feedback on it.</comment>


Show HN: Spora, New online giving service and its different - <AUTHOR> https://www.wearespora.com/

<comment><USER2> My feedback would be to simplify pricing, seeing that 1% suggested you weren't using something like stripe - your website elaborates that you are and you charge on top of them, but your users really shouldn't have to deal with that.

Having two % based prices is really not very transparent. Do you take your 1% before or after stripe? That would change the total cost right? Making it a flat 4% with no other fees would be much better than indiegogo for example, and probably an easier model for your users.

From your video it seems to allow single or monthly donations on all funds - while a fund specifies one? While it makes sense to make it easy to give however you like, is it not awkward for fund creators to monitor and for the UI? I mean, if a fund is asking for $1000/mo and I donate $500 as an individual payment, what happens to the meter? Or vice versa, fund needs $1000 one-time and I donate $500 a month?

On an easier ux note you should default monthly funds to the monthly donate view instead of making users switch it.

<comment><USER3> First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to thoroughly review our product. I really can't tell you how helpful it is! We put a lot of thought into how we should communicate our pricing strategy and the reason we decided to go with our approach is it's a similar approach all other giving tools take that don't charge monthly or set up fees. I think it's because if you don't specify the pricing breakdown, you end with with people asking for that information. By communicating that we charge %1 in addition to credit card fees, someone considering Spora knows exactly what the price breakdown is immediately.

Your UI comment is incredibly insightful. Our developers (Matt and Warren) have actually run into that problem and we are releasing version 2.0 in a few weeks with corrections to the mistakes you pointed out.

Just curious, what's your interest and experience with online giving tools?

Thanks again for the reply!

-Dane

<comment><USER2> That seems fair enough - rethinking about it that probably makes it easier to support other payment types too - indiegogo seem to quote 3-5% for various options. BTW your pricing does seem really cheap compared, is there any reason beyond you just charging less?

Tbh I'm not a huge user of these tools, just thought my feedback could be useful :) I've donated to a few indiegogo campaigns and raised on there twice. The faith aspect also isn't really interesting to me, but the site suggests it'll be available to others too? Btw I think the video only mentioned the faith aspect so it might be worth making it more general at some point too.

<comment><USER3> What allows us to charge only %1 is the fact that we are not investor funded. All of the indi-gogo's and the look alikes have to charge %5 so they can pay back the pockets funding them. We are building from the ground up- we believe our product will truly help nonprofits, so we're not interested in making a profit off of a handful, we won't be making much until we have over 200 nonprofits utilizing our service.

We are also working on removing the faith aspect. Our original target market was churches, but we realize nonprofits in general need what we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Spora improves the online giving experience with a completely re-imagined user interface, fine tuning the log in process, allowing a giver to sign up and give in minutes. Using a giving meter now givers can see the difference they make when they click "send," and the meter moves. Lastly and most importantly charge is 1% per transaction, which makes us less expensive than any other giving service provider Spora is truly the first major improvement to online giving in years You can see all of these great features in action by visiting [https://www.wearespora.com/](https://www.wearespora.com/) and watching our video at [https://vimeo.com/113853742](https://vimeo.com/113853742)

<comment><USER4> Why don't you use something like Google Forms, LaunchRock, or similar and just have a mailto: link?

<comment><USER3> Your so right...we need to get on that ASAP.

Thanks for the input! -Dane

<comment><USER4> Well, providing the input cost me 1 karma point as for whatever reason people downvoted it. Anyway, my mailto: handler on my work laptop is Outlook with my work email, so, that's one of the reasons mailto: is not a good idea!

<comment><USER3> Our developers our building a mail form into our page now...so as far as I'm concerned you should get that Karma point back and then some!

<comment><USER4> I know, that's the only karma that matters. 😄 What I meant is that people downvoted my comment here because I dared to make a suggestion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vayable (YC S12) adds worldwide payments and concierge service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/26/yc-vayable-worldwide-payments-concierge/

<comment><USER2> Vayable combined with Airbnb seems like an awesome, off-the-beaten-track way to travel. I hear people talk a lot about traveling but not wanting to do "touristy" things... Vayable seems like a compelling way to get more authentic experiences while traveling. Can't wait to try this when I'm on my next vacation.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a few other similar startups working on this problem that are worth checking out:

Sidetour - <http://www.sidetour.com/> HipHost - <http://www.hiphost.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I used Concierge to book a helicopter volcano tour in Hawaii. Worked great! Small outfits like Safari Helicopters rarely provide a seamless booking/reminder service -- Concierge is definitely a great value add.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love the idea behind Vayable. I would love to be a guide with them. I am a whitewater rafting guide in Denver and could take people down rivers that commercial rafting companies wont go to, but until they offer Liability coverage to guides, I can not comprehend working with them. (and no, having a waiver to give customers is not good enough. I would still get sued).

So Dear Vayable,

Learn from AirBnB's example and offer insurance to guides!!!

<comment><USER6> Airbnb does not offer personal liability though as part of their Host Guarantee. Since the Vayable experience is under the premise that you're vis- a-vis the guide the entire time that might be a difficult problem to solve?

<comment><USER5> You're correct they don't. But the Host Guarantee does cover up to $1,000,000 in property damage. Given that there is not property involved in Vayable activities, I think that some type of comparable protection of guides is required. As a "guide" I am legally responsible for the health and safety of guests. If I guide someone on a bike tour through Vayable and they get hit by a car, both Vayable and me the guide are going to get sued.

What if someone offered skydiving lessons through Vayable. They could certainly undersell other skydiving outfits if they didn't need to carry insurance. But as soon as there were an accident, everyone loses.

<comment><USER6> See my comment buried at the very bottom. I agree with you and this opens up all kinds of professional licensing requirements and property liability requirements. You can quickly go down a rabbit hole of worrying about verification/accreditation and Vayable could basically become known as the best place to work if you're an actuary.

Addendum: This might be a more worrisome problem only in the litigation-happy US and other similar first world countries. The Vayable landing page for me shows a tour of Angkor Wat. The last time I was there, I wasn't too concerned about who I was going to sue if I fell off one of the temples or got sick from eating something not properly cooked.

<comment><USER7> Because you have travel insurance right? That may be a relevant area for Vayable to get into for the extra income as a reseller (and in itself it's an area that needs disruption).

<comment><USER6> No. How relative would that be to domestic travelers or to younger(hostel age- qualified) travelers who are often already pushing a budget?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So at some point I'm guessing they will run into problems with "experiences" in popular destinations or large municipal areas which require licensing( e.g. tourguide/sight-seeing/insert miscellaneous professional requirements). Ah...the challenge of disruption. Probably not terribly different than the problems faced by Airbnb or Uber.</comment>


SAAS Marketing Help/Opinion - <AUTHOR>

I need some help and opinion from folks who either run or use SAAS/Web based Marketing applications.
Being relatively new (circa one year) to Digital Marketing, I'm still learning the ropes and as such, I've created a service called Octopus (octopus.org) to help myself and marketers. The goal of the service, with the help of other Marketers/Developers, is to list Marketing apps as well as make them searchable and discover-able.
I'd appreciate your thoughts on the site and whether you think it would be useful. <comment><USER2> I like the idea. I find it hard looking for trustworthy reviews of marketing apps. If there was one site which i could trust, then i would definitely find myself coming back for more.

That said, there is only one app being reviewed on the site - the site itself. Maybe you could first seed some content yourself and post reviews of apps you use.

Instead of this being a community driven review site i would prefer reviews from a single person or a small team with public profiles. For any marketing app you will find a 1000 fake online reviews. If you can trust into your site, there is a good opportunity here.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a direct marketer I could see this being useful, but it's hard to get a feel for it when the site is pretty much bare now - get some content up. I would think that you'd do pretty well in organic search results for things like "<app name> reviews" (which I search all the time, and never find anything good).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the replies guys and those who emailed. Working hard to make this service better.</comment>


Pdf2htmlEX: A PDF to HTML converter - <AUTHOR> http://coolwanglu.github.com/pdf2htmlEX/

<comment><USER3> Hello, I'm the author. MATHML is not used. PDF is rendered with only HTML/CSS, and a few JS.

Please comment at github such that I can see it in time.

<comment><USER4> Amazing - I am attempting to install this on mac osx lion -- it is taking a lot of time because of the dependencies. With so many dependencies the probability of failure is very high. Let's hope it works.

I urge you to find a way to allow people to install your software more easily.

I managed to get it to install (after about an hour and a half of tinkering. However I get "Segmentation fault" when I try running it:

pdf2htmlEX --debug=1 test.pdf

temporary dir: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv

Preprocessing: ....

Working: Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/__css

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/__pages

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/p1.png

Install font: (29 0) -> f1

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/f1.pfa

Segmentation fault: 11

<comment><USER4> I was able to install

cmake, fontforge and libpoppler with homebrew,

gcc-4.7 using

<https://github.com/sol-prog/gcc-4.7-binary>

<comment><USER5> you mean `poppler` instead of `libpoppler`

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm flattered the author mentions Crocodoc. Crocodoc is hiring by the way if anyone wants to hack on stuff like this full time: <https://crocodoc.com/jobs/>

</comment><comment><USER7> What's I'd like to see is a library that can extract multi-column text into a readable format. From looking at the source of the HTML here, they're doing it with absolute positioning. Nothing wrong with that for display purposes, but I'd like to have a library that can extract text meaningfully from a multi- column PDF.

<comment><USER8> The pdftotext tool from xpdf does something like that. One option pads the output text with spaces to roughly match the layout of the pdf (the -layout option) and another option just strips the pdf formatting out (the -raw option).

Depending on the structure of the pdf, one or the either may give better output (the -layout output would need some more processing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is fantastic! I've been using LaTeX for a while now, and nothing has really outputted HTML anywhere near this quality. I'm very impressed!

</comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting - It would be great if the author could outline his overall goals and design ideas.

What are some of the constraints on the PDF in terms of page dimensions or configuration?

How is the math translation done? Does it use MathML or something else?

For me, the interest is that I can now go LaTeX ---> Webpage.

<comment><USER10> Have you tried wiki.lyx.org/Tools/ELyXer for tex to html? I have used it on my dissertation and was mightily impressed (I am easily impressed):

<http://patterns.radekstepan.com/>

<comment><USER4> From my point of view, that's not really tex to html. That's tex markup to html. I am talking about using the latex software, whose purpose is to do typesetting. The amazing thing about this converter is that it takes the latex OUTPUT and produces html.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Neat idea, make it generate epub and it moves the pdf->e-book ball a bit further down the field. Looking at the source to this page view- source:<http://coolwanglu.github.com/pdf2htmlEX/demo/geneve.html> it looks like you can't yet generate a font from the characters, rather it uses the 'font trick' to put images on the page. That makes the epub problem harder (which really really wants fonts not images it seems)

<comment><USER3> What do you mean no fonts? You can try to copy the text out, which is not possible if images are used.

<comment><USER11> "           "

There I cut and pasted a quote from the document linked into this response. What do you see? I see a bunch of boxes.

<comment><USER3> If you use HTML inspectors and remove that piece of mess, you'll find text on the html also disappear.

It's the problem of font encoding, which is one of the difference between PDF and HTML. Sometimes you cannot copy the text out of PDF, but you can read correctly.

I'm working on that problem. I made things like this so far because I think visual accuracy is more important.

<comment><USER11> _"It's the problem of font encoding"_

Yes, and that was exactly my comment. It would be really cool if the converter generated character code points for the characters on the screen. So that cutting and pasting did what you might expect. But to make that work you need to do some form of OCR on the document, figure out where the text is, and how it is composed, then you create a font which re-creates the look based on the imagery in the document and then you generate the CSS that lays down the text and decorates it with the font and re-create the visual of the PDF. (or make it an epub)

If you can get it to that point, there will be huge utility for folks who want to convert paper books to e-books. Because the typical scanner will generate PDF but the typical e-book will only flow e-pub (or .mobi or proprietary formats).

<comment><USER3> OCR is beyond the scope of pdf2htmlEX I'm just trying to find out the real meaning of the glyphs through glyph names.

Actually usually you should be able to select/copy text without problem, if there's no type 0 fonts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks pretty neat - saving it as html file works great, but you can't print the docs (in Chrome print to pdf only shows a scroll bar, in FF it does not properly format).

Great work anyway - I'll have a deeper look.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, known issue. Currently I've no idea how to fix it :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool, definitely an area where there needs to be lots of work done.

What is browser compatibility like? Is IE8 supported?

Edit: removed reference to HTML5/canvas, didn't see any in the source HTML.

<comment><USER3> AFAIK, IE8 doesn't support enough HTML5 stuffs, so no. IE9 should be OK

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sorry for the very noob question, but how do you actually get this to run on a windows XP system?

I just want to run a quick test, but it seems I have to build the project - <USER2> that correct?

<comment><USER15> Step 1: Only use Windows for games. Fire up a *nix VM, fullscreen it and get real work done in the big boy's open source developer land :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm very impressed. Can you post some more examples online, some non-technical PDFs for example? I'm curious how well it does 'generic' PDFs (for example magazine layouts).

<comment><USER3> What do you suggest? I don't have one in my mind now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Amazing, Can the same trick be used for latex=>html? It would be better than tth which is also very good.

<comment><USER3> of course you can compile latex to pdf first

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool! This is exactly what I need. I'm going to play with it for a while.

</comment><comment><USER19> Has somebody already built it for Windows and could upload the binary?

<comment><USER3> I've tried and succeeded with CYGWIN. But no idea how can I distribute the package with the dependencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please try with commit f02e1d4 if any of you cannot build it on Mac

</comment><comment><USER20> What about complex vectors with gradients etc?

<comment><USER3> Just go head, try and be pleased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it faster than pdftohtml?

<comment><USER3> Probably not, as font conversion is slow. pdftohtml does not extract fonts for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Technically impressive, but what systems can render HTML and JS but not PDF?

<comment><USER23> There are also various use-cases for doing this as part of a larger product. Say you need to take a customer's crappy PDFs & reformat them for display within a web app, on a public display or to send as an HTML email. You could use this tool, convert to HTML, then drop in your own CSS stylesheet to reformat it. If your customer had many of said crappy PDFs you could no-doubt automate the whole process.

Needless to say I had to do something pretty similar recently, though I ended up having to ask the customer to provide better source data than the PDFs they initially sent. This tool could have been very useful at the time, hope to give it a spin soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is it possible to reflow the page, at least in simple cases like 2-column documents? That would be awesome for mobile.

<comment><USER3> That's beyond the scope of pdf2htmlEX.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, and I hope it stays out of scope forever. The idea of reflow is anathema to the idea of typesetting, as far as I can see.</comment></comment></comment>


Mika Mobile ends Android development - <AUTHOR> http://mikamobile.blogspot.com/2012/03/our-future-with-android.html

<comment><USER2> I work for an app company and can verify his comments.

Apple has done a great job at getting its users to pay for apps. They've done this via:

1) Encouraging Developers to not price free apps (this happens sometimes in review, in their literature, etc.)

2) Capturing device owner's credit card info at the start (so buying an app is frictionless)

3) Removing low-quality, buggy, copycat, and junk apps from the store via their review process

Google, on the other hand, has done just about everything wrong if you want to make money from paid apps. I suspect this is because Google wants to make money via in-app ad impressions and with free apps that's the only way you can make any money (in-app purchasing notwithstanding).

1) No review encourages spyware, copycat apps, buggy or broken apps, etc.

2) Android's "return policy" (which has since been tweaked) encourages people to pirate apps anyway (it's super easy to do so)

3) Initially (I'm not sure if this is still the case) you could sign up for a market account without a credit card, thus leading to a lot of friction when it came to paying for an app (entering your CC information was a royal pain).

Also, I share the frustration with the internal v. external/removable storage problem. Our apps are traditionally larger (content-centric, with lots of high quality images, audio, video) and have always ran into problems with Android devices' limited on-board storage.

This was purely a cost decision by Google and a profit decision by vendors/carriers as vendors wanted to produce devices as cheaply as possible and make a killing on SD cards - sell a device with xxxMB storage and no SD card, then force the consumer to go out and buy an overpriced SD card (usually at point of sale).

This all makes Android a developer-hostile environment; yes it's easier to initially get setup on Android (no provisioning profile, etc.) but it's all pain after that. If I had a choice, and didn't make cross-platform apps w/ PhoneGap, I'd write iOS apps first/only.

<comment><USER3> > 2) Capturing device owner's credit card info at the start (so buying an app > is frictionless)

Don't forget the pretty popular iTunes gift cards, either as gifts from third parties or to replace a CC.

<comment><USER4> That is a huge bonus for a lot of teenagers. Pay cash at Wal-Mart for an iTunes card so you can buy stuff from the app store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish Google would take the problems of cross phone compatibility more seriously. Without it the entire purpose of Android is compromised, and yet, they don't seem to put much effort into ensuring compatibility or motivating manufacturers to ensure it.

For example, while I support Google's decision to keep the Android market open, I don't see why apps that simply crash upon launch should be allowed allowed to be sold and downloaded to people's phones. Google can easily detect / track this kind of thing and automatically flag phones not supported as incompatible, refund users and notify the developers. On the developers side, they should have access to an extensive database of compatibility information so that manufacturers are shamed into seeing devices that are hard to support getting black banned in the market and crossed off support lists by developers.

I don't think you need an authoritarian approach like Apple's to make things better, but you need to do more than Google is right now.

</comment><comment><USER6> Too bad. My 5 year old son loves Battleheart.

I _bought_ it for the Kindle Fire. It's actually my son's preferred gaming platform (compared to Wii, 3ds and Leapster Explorer) probably because the game are so accessible/easy to use.

I've often considered getting into game development on the android. However, it doesn't look like a profitable venture.

If the makers of a fantastic (highly rated, almost 5 stars on the amazon app store) game aren't making money on the Android platform...what hope is there for the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been doing iOS dev for a while now and I'm considering expanding to Android as well but stories like this give me pause. I guess I've been spoiled by an environment that's homogeneous enough that I don't have to worry about things like GL shaders mysteriously failing on some devices etc.

Can more experienced devs comment on how common these kinds of problems are in practice? If I do some Android ports for my clients do I really need to buy 10+ devices and debug on each of them?

<comment><USER8> Your instincts are correct here I think. If you're writing games then I suspect this is pretty accurate. You'd likely have to purchase a lot of test devices and do a lot of tuning to keep up with the hardware. Android vs. iOS game dev strikes me as a lot like the difference between windows and console game development.

If, however, you're writing basic apps like I am and using the standard development tools then it's a lot less of a hassle. I primarily write appwidgets (apps that run on the home screen). Theoretically these have could run into more fragmentation issues since various manufacturers have built their own home screen replacements and improved appwidget capabilities have been a focus in 3.x, 4.x. Yet in about 2 years since I started I've rarely hit a device specific issue and I'm supporting 2.1 - 4.x. I have about 3000 active users so not exactly large scale, but enough that if it were a serious issue I think I'd be hearing about it more.

I have two devices - a nexus one to test on 2.x/phone and a transformer prime to test on 4.x/tablet. Other versions I spot test in the emulator (admittedly this is awful). That's been sufficient for me.

I'm sympathetic to the technical difficulties of developing and maintaining a high quality game for the platform, but that shouldn't scare anyone off from developing regular apps.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. The apps my clients have asked me to write so far are pretty straightforward so maybe I could also get by with only a few devices. I'm certainly not doing anything that pushes the hardware as hard as a game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those who may not know, and because it's not mentioned in the blog post, Mika Mobile develops their games in Unity.

It's a testament to the challenge of developing games to work on all Android devices that even with Unity's support they still have to spend so much development effort on shaders and debugging device specific issues.

<comment><USER10> what are these people complaining about?

Google didn't release Android to give the users the best possible product, service and user experience. They released Android so they can serve ads.

An ad company will never give a shit about user experience.

I knew this the minute Google bought Android. It took them these long to figure to this out.

<comment><USER11> What the hell are you talking about? Aside from admob integration on games that developers add themselves, what ads are you seeing on the platform outside of websites?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google wants the Android platform to move away from SD Cards, their Nexus series really shows this. The Nexus S, their second Nexus phone, had no SD card. However, due to the requirements of a separate filesystem for USB Mass Storage, they partitioned the internal storage into two.

Then you get the Galaxy Nexus, with only one partition. It features Ice Cream Sandwich, with MTP (Mass Transport Protocol). MTP allows access to a filesystem without unmounting it, so the phone can continue to use the filesystem. The only real disadvantage of MTP is that OSX and Linux support is limited, since it is developed by Microsoft. It should also be said that ICS still supports USB Mass Storage, but the Galaxy Nexus cannot.

The Asus Transformer also does this, using a large internal storage with no SD card. More phones might switch to this model, but for now the SD card is not going away.

<comment><USER13> Why the hate on SD cards? I mean, what's the reasoning behind this?

<comment><USER12> From what I understand, its because there is always 'wasted' space. If you have lots of movies and music, you might have a full SD card but empty internal; lots of applications and the opposite might be true. With a single internal space, all this goes away. Personally, I never want to remove my SD card because it houses so many applications and files I use on my phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would be interested to find out how MikaMobile did sales wise with their Kindle Fire version of Battleheart. It would be a good gauge to base what the total potential a developer has for supporting the Fire and ignoring the general Android market. I remember (back in the day) when they first announced Zombieville USA on iPhoneDevSDK, they have grown a great deal since then and I wish them all the best.

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems fine to me. No money being made, no money to pay for development. I don't blame this on Android phones or users, however.

(Bandwidth is, sadly, becoming a big issue these days, because nobody offers unlimited plans anymore. 5GB per month means one max-size app and maybe a few text messages before you start paying one billion dollars per nanobyte in overages. It's like 1980s long distance all over again.)

<comment><USER16> Apple caps 3g app downloads at 30mb I think. Any bigger than that and you need to use wifi or sync via iTunes.

It would be nice if Google would implement something like this for Android. I didn't even know about this limitation until today ( I'm an iPhone user/developer).

<comment><USER17> Android App store warns you that you are about to start a large download via 3G and asks if you're sure you want to do so. Personally I find that a much better approach. Apple doesn't know the details of my contract and if I want to download 70 (or 170)MB over 3G, surely that's my prerogative and why should my phone stop me?

<comment><USER18> I have unlimited 3G data plan on my iPad and it always hated that Apple won't let me update some apps until I'm near WiFi spot... until I bought Galaxy Nexus inserted SIM from my phone with limited data plan and it exceeded my capped data plan in the first hour (OS updates).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps Mika Mobile's problem is that they are trying to provide support like a large company without the resources to do so. I certainly applaud their effort, but would it have been more economical to simply tell people that they can give a refund and that's it?

It seems a shame that they're giving up their position in the Android market and abandoning some hard-won experience.

<comment><USER20> _What_ market? Virtually nobody making Android games is making money, especially compared to iOS versions. It's exceedingly grim.

"We make 5% of our revenue from Android" is not exactly an outlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If only people spent as much time working on a decent platform like Andengine (which works on most devices with little effort) instead of porting ios code and ending up with apps that only work on devices they were tested on (or complained from).

It makes sense they have to deal with problems all the time since they clearly don't have a thorough understanding of the Android platform itself and what it takes to actually support the range of devices. Buying $1,000+ of test hardware will also not fix your problem if the problem is not doing things properly. You certainly won't get it by patching ios-based code every time a customer complains.

<comment><USER7> How do you anticipate problems like buggy GL drivers with inconsistent shader implementations? At the rate new devices are coming out it seems impossible for any framework to cover them all.

<comment><USER11> Fair point, but like I said, if everyone works in bubbles they will all have to deal with this over and over again in different ways. Since these game companies are not actually doing anything for the platform itself, like sharing their libraries for dealing with the issues, they of course will find it painful.

This reminded me completely of the pre-jquery era where if you wanted some advanced JS functionality you'd have to reinvent the wheel over and over in dealing with browser inconsistencies. After years of bitching and moaning people finally released libraries to deal with the issue.

These companies have the right to complain, but complaining will not actually help solve anything except give them a way out avoiding the the complexities of porting platform-specific code to another platform.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Organizing a (Ruby) User Group - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently organizing a first Ruby user group in Nairobi. While I have checked on what similar user groups are doing, it'd be useful to hear from people who have organized/participated in such meetups. I'm interested in how you were able to lay the framework for the meetings and maintain the initial enthusiasm. Is it necessary to invite speakers at this stage? <comment><USER2> Depends on the make up of your community. In my experience, though, nothing gets a new group going better than several strong speakers in a row (that is, over several consecutive meetings). I relaunched a (non-Ruby, semi-technical) group and went from 10 attendees at the first meeting to 60+ in less than a year of every other month events by doing this.

If your community is one where the people feel comfortable just getting together to hack in the same space, perhaps speakers aren't necessary at every event. But I encourage you to try to book speakers and hold hack sessions only as a fall back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. I like the idea of having speakers at the meetings. We intend to complement this with hack sessions and (open) discussions as well.</comment></comment>


BREAKING NEWS: Coffeeshops open in Panama - <AUTHOR> http://contrarianroast.co/2014/05/21/coffeeshops-open-in-panama/

<comment><USER2> I live in Panama and was at Unido just the other day :) Excellent coffee and great people.</comment>