Distri.js – Distributed computing for the web - <AUTHOR> https://distri.js.org <comment><AUTHOR> Not quite finished, very WIP, but wanted to share.</comment>


Twenty dollars in an envelope - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/jason-fried-high-school/ <comment><USER2> In my final year of University I decided to write some basic shareware that was helpful in creating your own custom theme for the recently-new Windows 95. After completing the app I put it out there to the shareware community.

I attached a note to the program asking for $20 if you liked it. I was very clear with the program though that there were no additional benefits to registering other than a clean karma. The program was fully functional from day 1 and payment though highly appreciated was not necessary. Being the poor student that I was I also offered a great incentive to people - instead of sending me $20 they could photocopy $20 and just send me the scan. Yes, being a 20something about to graduate encouraged me to ask for money but I was still too scared to jump in fully.

The crazy thing was that I started getting cheques from all over the world - and received some really cool scans of foreign currency that I hung on the walls as art. I even had the strange experience of receiving a note from somebody who lived in the apartment across from me who found the program and wanted to thank me (he was a student too so no money but having somebody at my University send me a thank you was even better than a cheque would have been).

I'm glad I wrote the software and put it out there. Even though I didn't make enough to retire I had finally realized that working for yourself can be intensely rewarding in many ways.

(I also learned a valuable lesson that even big companies can have problems writing cheques sometimes - I had one very well known software company send me some free games rather than a cheque.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Surprised that the big companies had a hard time cutting cheques (normally, that's a non-issue). Maybe because your software was too "fun"?

Do you remember how many people ended up paying you?

<comment><USER3> It's a giant hassle to get a purchase order approved for software at many large companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I too, made my first sale as a shareware author on AOL, selling a Tetris clone for the Mac called Blox. I asked for $5 checks sent to my home address, and while I sold less than 100, the feeling of accomplishment and the incredibly nice notes included with those payments definitely kickstarted my entrepreneurial career and taught me to listen to my customers (hence Blox Arcade II released a year later for $10, sold via Kagi, and selling thousands of copies).

</comment><comment><USER5> When I was a kid in the early 1990's, there was a very vibrant shareware game community in my home country Finland. I remember putting my pocket money to envelopes and sending it to these hobbyist game authors, to their home address and then waiting for weeks for them to ship my game back in a floppy disk.

There was a magazine that had monthly reviews of games and software and the magazine hosted a BBS where you could download the demos. There were so many Finnish shareware games back in the day that they had separate sections for Finnish and Foreign games and apps in the mag. Some of the local games had mild international success too.

Some of the games I still remember by name: Triplane Turmoil, Mine bombers, Slicks'n'Slide.

The internet has brought us many things, but we've also lost something because of that.

</comment><comment><USER6> From 2004-2009, I basically built things I could have charged for, but didn't. I was afraid to take money from people.

DHH (et al) to the rescue: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY>

This is where the "Nice little Italian restaurant" SaaS meme was sourced from. He was hilariously spot-on.

I caved and started building things I would charge for. I'm still just part- timing it, but my stuff is growing. And, frankly, I'm not the best Rails/iOS/Java developer out there. Literally if I can do it, you can too.

Great, inspiring article.

<comment><AUTHOR> So many people feel the same way. What was the scariest part about taking money from people?

<comment><USER6> In those days, two things:

1) The possiblility of "Oh, crap, I just bumped the decimal to the right, by accident, on 1000 customers."

2) The likelihood that someone would tell me that I was "a joke", to be charging money for my software.

So, fear of rejection and fear of screwing up on the money side. Thankfully, there are billing services which eliminated #1 a few years ago, and that was probably the tipping point for me. #2 is an ongoing concern, and always will be.

Thanks for the question!

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the fear of rejection is huge. I'm a pretty confident guy (I'll speak in front of crowds without too much trouble). But the idea of putting a price tag on something and asking people to pay for it _is_ scary. The biggest fear: "What if no one buys it?"

<comment><USER6> I had a leg up to begin with. I started with an audience (of sorts) that I was able to poll to gauge interest. I didn't start building until literally 200 people told me they would buy it from me. Turns out most of them were blowing some kind of sunshine (or else they found another solution before I could launch one to meet their needs), and very few converted...

But, just the fact that they said yes to my product and price point gave me the confidence to start.

But, I think you can hijack someone else's product-confidence... by which I mean you should find a 800-pound gorilla competitor in your market and just follow them into battle, and eventually outflank them. Not gonna lie, I did this too, because I got to a place where my market-vision was limited... so I piggybacked on a competitors market vision. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _People are happy to pay for things that are good. Don't be afraid to charge for your services._

"would pay", 5,200 results

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22would+pay%22+site:news.yc...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22would+pay%22+site:news.ycombinator.com)

"wouldn't pay", 38,000 results

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wouldn%27t+pay%22+site:ne...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wouldn%27t+pay%22+site:news.ycombinator.com)

(OK, so it's kind of a joke response, but the abundance of free software and services has really driven down the expectations around reasonable payment compared to box software's heyday, even for software developers themselves).

<comment><USER8> Don't drink the kool aid. There is still a lot of money being made. You don't hear about it because only an idiot would talk about his/her amazing sales.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm. Only an "idiot" would talk about sales?

Patio11 - [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator- and-o...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-other- stuff-year-in-review-2012/)

Nathan Barry - <http://nathanbarry.com/2012-year-quitting-job/>

Brennan Dunn - [http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar- consulta...](http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consultancy/)

<comment><USER8> A handful of people from thousands who prefer to keep quiet. Plus only those who do talk about them do it to help themselves (as a marketing tool). Any time you talk about amazing sales you risk alerting your competition about your niche.

<comment><USER9> Indeed.

I read all four of the blog posts. _All four_ of them make the majority of their money from consulting or from training -- books, videos, and workshops -- rather than from products. The split ranges from around 50/50 to almost 90/10.

In 2012, Patrick made 20% of his income (not revenues) from products, and 80% of his income from consulting and training, primarily client engagements. (He did not disclose revenues from his second product -- but careful reading of his blog suggests that it probably has not quadrupled his product income.)

In 2010, Amy made 32% of her revenues from products, and 68% from consulting and training, primarily workshops. (The 68% has to be split 50/50 with her husband, but even after splitting it in half, it's still 48% vs 52% -- with the majority coming from consulting and training.)

In 2012, Nathan made 18% of his revenue from products, and 82% from consulting and training, primarily books.

In 2012, Brennan Dunn made 13% of his revenue from products, and 87% from training and consulting, primarily consulting. Interestingly, he took Amy's course and did a 180-degree reversal of direction.

They have all discovered that the money is not in gold mining -- or even in selling shovels to the gold miners. It's in giving presentations about gold- mining, and selling videos teaching them how to pan for gold. Patrick wrote about wrestling with his conscience before charging for his expertise, but ultimately discovered that it tripled his income. They have all turned their blogging popularity into cash -- and that's why they continue to blog.

The people who are making most of their money from gold-mining are not blogging about the location of their mine.

<comment><USER10> Here's what I think is being missed in this discussion:

Product != Software

People buy software because they desire some intended outcome. For instance, I recently switched to Xero because emailing spreadsheets of categorizations back and forth to my accountant is messy and frustrating. And I might buy a book on bookkeeping because I suck at it. Or a course on cashflow because I never learned how to properly budget.

I think if you were to ask me, Patrick, Amy, Nathan, etc... if we see a huge difference between, say, a SaaS product we run and a workshop we teach, we wouldn't. The goal's the same: make someone better off than they were before.

It's really frustrating, but understandable on HN, to see people downplay products that aren't software. When writing Planscope, my goal was to help increase project transparency between consultants and their clients. After talking with many customres, I realized a large number of them needed help on something much more foundational to their business: how to price. So I built another product that helped people with that.

(Also, I honestly don't think that posting some — hopefully helpful — content on what I learned in trying to sell a book is going to result in "Double UR Freelancing Ratez" coming out and crushing my sales anytime soon.)

<comment><USER9> That's exactly my point. You've chosen to be in a business where blogging doesn't hurt you -- and in fact, it helps you.

As for giving non-software its due, that's a different discussion altogether. I was commenting on a post that talked about receiving $20 in the mail for shareware, on a thread that talked about the situation being tougher than in "box software's heyday."

<comment><USER11> "You've chosen to be in a business where blogging doesn't hurt you -- and in fact, it helps you."

How is this different than any other business?

Sure, what Brennan blogs about attracts his customers. But it can and no doubt will attract other people _like him_ as well. What's stopping his competitors, or potential competitors, from copying what he's doing… of using his revenue posts as proof of market?

<comment><USER9> Then why doesn't everyone do it?

Why does Patrick reveal all of his financials, _except for_ his second product? (Which, by the way, I think is a smart thing to do.)

Web 2.0 software-as-a-service is not helped too much by blog posts about how much money you're making. The site itself serves as promotion. A free trial is a much better way to promote your product than just a blog post. (Of course, you should do both.)

A training business is inherently more amenable to blogging as a form of promotion, vs., say, Google Adwords. Selling training requires that people trust what you have to say. The fact that you're making money convinces people that you are deserving of trust. Blogging is like a free trial -- it gives your customers a sample of what you can look forward to when they buy.

In Brennan's own words (speaking of his free newsletter):

[http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar- consulta...](http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consultancy/) "I'm cultivating an audience who trusts my opinion and has received a lot of value from me in the past. This makes, oh, selling a $1,199 workshop exponentially easier than if I were to run a paid AdWords campaign for the same workshop, which I daresay would be a fool's error."

<comment><AUTHOR> Patio11 doesn't reveal financials for AR because he's thinking about taking on investors for that project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd be interested in hearing more shareware stories. Did anyone else here have success selling shareware in the 80's and 90's?

<comment><USER12> So perhaps not much of a story, but the Amiga came out and the first (for me) compelling "dungeon crawler" game on it was Dungeon Master. I spent a lot of time on it, and as was my custom, kept notes in my notebook. Pretty soon I had a pretty complete set of maps for the place, which a friend of mine wanted a copy of. So I made copies of the pages of my notes but they were hard to interpret (except for me!) and disorganized, so I opened up Deluxe Paint and just drew them (they were all 32 x 32 squares I believe) anyway, the drawing lead me to go in and check things, and I went back and looked for every single secret room etc, and end the end had a complete set. So I printed them out and gave them to my friend, who offered to pay me $5 for them.

I wondered if anyone else would want them, and so I offered them up, a copy for anyone for $5. Sold a couple hundred copies. And to top it off, a German company that made 'player guides' bought a copy, decided they wanted to use it in one of their guides and offered me $50 for the "rights" to do that, and I gladly accepted.

That ended up funding my purchase of a lot of games for the Amiga.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love this story! How old were you at the time? How did you "offer it up for others to buy?"

<comment><USER12> Hmm, lets see the Amiga came out in '84 so I was in my mid-twenties. I originally posted availability on comp.sys.amiga as I recall. That spread to a couple of Compuserve forums and to BIX[1]

[1] The BYTE Information eXchange which was a funny funny bulletin board running on a VAX.

Edit: Apparently still valid in 1989 :-) [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/rec.games....](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/rec.games.misc/MGgdtxn5RqA/B1Ypz4COGIUJ) although that isn't my address any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I host an archive of a free British political satire podcast. As far as I'm aware, my archive is the only place on the 'net that provides downloads for older episodes of this podcast. I receive something short of a terabyte of transfer per month. It's been implicitly approved of by the podcast creators by their linking directly to my archive.

To my surprise, in the two or so years I've been running the site, I've had no fewer than 5 people go out of their way to email me and ask how to give me money. I always redirect them to a charity, as I'm just redistributing someone else's content and the hosting only costs $10/month anyway.

But this reflects what this article describes: people will pay for what they perceive to be a quality product. I really wish the content industries (entertainment, software, literature) would learn this lesson and stop with the DRM nonsense. Make your product easy to use, easy to acquire, and easy to pay for and people simply will pay you for it. It is a different business model than what we've had in the past, and you'll have to get used to the fact that some won't pay you at all, but it can and does work.

It's the future, folks. Time to give up on buggy whips.

</comment><comment><USER14> While the story is lovely, it's also quaint to think of the days when a young kid put his home address on the internet and bad things didn't happen.

Also, this is another "right time right place" story - his code wasn't just good, it was one of the few solutions at the time. Had he tried to do it a few years after that, I doubt the results would have been the same.

<comment><USER15> > it's also quaint to think of the days when a young kid put his home address > on the internet and bad things didn't happen.

Why would bad things happen due to that? Are there roving gangs of thieves desperately searching the internet for the addresses of people to rob?

I really doubt things have much in this regard, and one likely could do this just as easily (and with the same relative safety) as in the past. OTOH, it tends to be far less useful/necessary now.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, I've found that worrying about your "real persona" on the internet to pretty much not be worth it. Since I was about 15 I have started doing everything using my real name, as well as having my address and phone number highly available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I literally sold dozen of games in diskettes back in the '90. I cannot say how much money I've made, but certainly, a lot to buy a 50cc. motorcycle and a pro BMX. Ah… those days! And also, I re-traded lot of shareware. I bought them from the magazines and sold the copies for the same price…

</comment><comment><USER18> I sold my paintbox for £12 in 1988. It ran on a BBC Archimedes 310 in the shop window of the computer store where I bought it doing abstract expressionist artwork to show off its various calligraphic and airbrush tools in full colour.

To put this in perspective Photoshop 1.0 was available back then, ran on a more expensive Macintosh and was black & white.

I sold 4 copies and the shop took a cut.

</comment><comment><USER19> Jason Fried is so cool, he knew how terrible Filemaker Pro was before it existed! (Alright… it was probably 1990 already. Just had to point out the potential anachronism of 25 years ago being 1988 and Filemaker Pro being released in October 1990.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha ha. Either the dates are a little hazy, or he was actually using FileMaker Plus - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker#History>

Here's the earliest record I could find for AudioFile (1997): [http://web.archive.org/web/19971221191641/http://spinfree.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/19971221191641/http://spinfree.com/p_audiofile.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> my first experience was writing a call back verification program for WWIV BBS systems. I do not recall how much I made, but it was a substantial amount. I think it was named CBVWWIV, I forget as the code is long lost. It was written in Turbo Pascal and supported ASCII, ANSI, and AVATAR, output.

That was an interesting time to be involved in and at times I think it was more fun and entertaining that the net today.

</comment><comment><USER21> The best piece of advice he actually gives it build something you would use yourself (and would pay for it).

</comment><comment><USER22> Great interview. I assume the transcriber isn't a programmer: "database" and "readme" are pretty canonical programming terms.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I use a 3rd party transcribing service (so they're definitely not programmers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> When I was a kid, I mailed $5 to the address listed on a shareware disk, to get an unlock code for the full program. Never got a response.

I think that was last time I fell for the rebranding-resale scam.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you remember which program it was?</comment></comment>


The Weird Global Appeal of Heavy Metal - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-weird-global-appeal-of-heavy-metal-1455819419 <comment><USER2> What a strange article. It obviously has appeal because it's amazing and it's far from weird because the metal scene has always been very international. "I like Metal" is also similar to saying "I work in AI". There's tons of sub genres. I enjoy the more "melodic" stuff (Savatage, best band of all times).

What I thought was interesting: back in roughly 2000 the word "Metal" had a different vibe to it in the U.S. compared to Europe. I think the popular use of the term in the U.S. tended to include stuff I'd call Rock. My guess would be that the common mainstream answer to "name a metal band" would probably have been something like Iron Maiden in Europe and maybe Led Zeppelin in the U.S. +it seems like Black and Death Metal were much more common/represented in the European scene. Once again strange because most of the DM bands I liked at the time (still do of course) are from the U.S. I feel like my view could be highly distorted so I'd love some feedback on this.

I think it's also interesting that some U.S. bands are superstars in the European Metal scene or parts of it but seem to be fairly unrecognized in the U.S. (Savatage, Iced Earth).

South America has a huge Metal scene, too. I think it's mostly similar to the European one. Don't know much about Asia other than the fact that some German bands are really popular in Japan (Blind Guardian etc.)

<comment><USER3> Savatage turned into Trans Siberian Orchestra, which does very well in US. Big Savatage fan though, from the 80's.

<comment><USER4> And funny that so many people enjoy TSO, but turn up their noses at Savatage and related power metal bands. I took my wife to see TSO twice - and the first time was their performance of _Beethoven 's Last Night_, not their typical Christmas stuff - and she enjoyed it both times. But if I put on _Poets and Madmen_ or _Wake of Magellan_ , she yells at me to turn off that noise.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, funny. TSO can sell out a 10k seat venue, but Savatage, who's that? Some of the early TSO stuff is right off Dead Winter Dead and Hall of The Mountain King. After buying a couple of Avantasia albums, I like them more than TSO, but not original Savatage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I take issue with the headline - how can something with global appeal be considered "weird"?

<comment><USER6> It has a level of appeal globally, but not enough to be mainstream most places.

E.g. the top Norwegian death metal bands are amongst the most successful Norwegian musicians ever, yet they don't sell much at home. Yet they do extremely well by Norwegian standards because they sell ok all over the world.

<comment> vezzy-fnord I presume you're referring to Norwegian black metal. Norway doesn't have a lot of DM, in fact the only band that comes to mind is Vomit from the 80s.

<comment><USER7> Darkthrone's Soulside Journey is great Norwegian death metal, not that they obviously stuck to that for very long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone in the West who often despairs that popular music has moved to auto-tuning vocals, corporate pop and everything else, this article brings a smile to my face.

Great genre, great to hear it has spread so far despite the perception of it being a genre on its way out perhaps these days in certain countries.

<comment><USER9> Was there a time when popular music wasn't mostly bad? Before the discovery of auto-tune, they must have done lots of manual-tune involving lots and lots of studio takes and other magic.

<comment><USER10> >Was there a time when popular music wasn't mostly bad?

The 1960s? The Beatles for example were extremely popular.

<comment><USER11> As were the Monkees and the Archees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > [Lefutray]'s guitarist, Cristian Olivares, 32, says: "Metal is huge here in > Chile, and I think that is because of our history—full of violent acts of > repression and injustice."

It really is big in Chile. After spending a year here, in Santiago and Concepcion, rarely a day goes by without seeing Slayer and/or Iron Maiden T-shirts on someone walking by me on the sidewalk. I've seen 6 year old children with metal shirts.

<comment><USER13> As a Chilean, I can confirm. I played in 4 metal bands while being between 15 and 26. And enciclopedia metallum is crazy, even I am there! (And we were pretty underground)

Today I still play my instrument (piano) and enjoy metal, jazz (which is also big in chile) and classical music mostly :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone who liked this should definitely check out the below documentary

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal:_A_Headbanger%27s_Journe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal:_A_Headbanger%27s_Journey)

<comment><USER14> Or more specific to this article, the documentary Global Metal:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why is it weird?

I mean is pop, rock, hiphop, dance or even dubstep any less global?

Is it weird because heavy metal still has the "satanist' label attached to it in jurnalist minds?

</comment><comment><USER16> This one _weird_ trick to make any link clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER17> From personal experience I observe that metal has become more present in society than it was some years back.

One of the personal experiences is that only about 10 years ago, it was difficult to find metal music online, even on mainstream services. Today, I have an Apple Music subscription with tons and tons of metal music in it, with curated playlists and really good recommendations based on my listening habits. I wouldn't imagine this would ever happen.

Another anecdote is the ever increasing acceptance of headbangers as regular folks. Yes, with a peculiar musical taste and an unusual lifestyle, but nothing really suprising anymore.

And as for metal itself, I really love how people from all over the world have found in this music style something meaningful and special to them. You can go all around the world, meet fellow metalheads and see their eyes glow and their hearts accelerate as they talk about their favorite bands and the live shows they have seen. It's one of the truly friendliest "communities" I have ever found, way ahead and more welcoming than the tech community.

</comment><comment><USER18> Funny that Sweden ain't mentioned there with atleast bands like At the Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity (I saw some mention of Opeth)...

<comment><USER19> Ten+ years ago, I used to weird out people by telling them about my favourite technical death band Meshuggah ("It is like modern jazz or something, really complex and interesting. Just faster...")

Today, it seems that half the kids under 25 know more about Meshuggah than I do. :-)

As a fellow Swede, this is a bit funny:

[http://www.deathmetal.org/wp- content/uploads/Metal_bands_per...](http://www.deathmetal.org/wp- content/uploads/Metal_bands_per_country.png)

What I don't get is why Finland don't have more famous metal bands? If you check a jukebox in Sweden, typically at least half is factory made pop music made to sell for money. In Finland, half is good hard rock and metal.

(Edit: For a good take on metal, search for the interviews with the Darkthrone drummer on Youtube. See both the old and new ones. It gives a strange feeling how he dismisses everything I like... :-) )

<comment><USER20> I think that might be because Meshuggah are the most obvious and direct influence on a lot of the newer "Djent" bands like Periphery and Tesseract that are popular with younger fans.

What's interesting to me about those bands is that they took some of the elements of Meshuggah's sound - the complex time and extended range instruments - but usually end up with something that's not as heavy or extreme, often having very melodic sections and lots of clean singing.

For a long time it seemed the direction was a bit one way - bands tending to get more extreme - and while that's still the case it's maybe going the other way at the same time.

<comment><USER21> Yes there has definitely been a __lot __of experimentation in the last decade with blending very technical death metal (following Meshuggah 's lead) with elements of jazz and melodic elements from prog rock and metal.

Gojira, for example has been carrying the Meshuggah sound forward while Between the Buried and Me, who was born from very technical and chaotic metal, almost devoid of groove, to extremely proggy and theatrical like Dream Theater.

Mastodon moved closer to rock from technical death metal and Opeth once a paragon of death metal, doesn't even use death vocals any more.

For me at least it has been very interesting to see the exchange of ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The "globalisation" of metal happened a long time ago, it's definitely not attributable to the world wide web or the Internet by any means, the explosive growth perhaps, but not the initial seed in a lot of countries.

</comment><comment><USER22> They dared to mention Baby Metal, which has like nothing to do with real metal.

<comment><USER23> Poe's Law applies to metal.

Is Turbonegro metal?

<comment><USER24> > Is Turbonegro metal?

Punk.

<comment><USER23> Well, but they call their genre "black metal".

Is punk metal satire?

What about grunge?

And then there's Kiss ;)

<comment><USER25> Ah, I miss grunge with a fiery passion.

This thread reminds me of the underrated film _Airheads_ , when the band is asked what kind of music they play - the three members all start saying different things ("kinda this, but not really") but end up converging on "power slop".

<comment><USER26> _Airheads_ is a guilty pleasure film for me. It's a pretty dumb film, but I like it anyway, and I think it's aged pretty well over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For anyone into metal looking for a way to discover new stuff they haven't heard before, I recently discovered that there's a pretty great selection available on Bandcamp if you're willing to sift through the various metal- related tags and/or find some good users to follow. There's a lot of stuff on there that easily rivals mainstream "big label" metal. All the music there is available as DRM-free mp3/ogg/lossless often with a name-your-own-price tag.

</comment><comment><USER28> This tells everything there is to know about the popular appeal of heavy metal in Finland: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXhhlYdySqQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXhhlYdySqQ)

[http://noisey.vice.com/en_au/blog/meet-hevisaurus-from- finla...](http://noisey.vice.com/en_au/blog/meet-hevisaurus-from-finland)

<comment><USER11> Honestly can't believe this coexists with Demilich, Ride for Revenge, and Convulse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's a related chart from a couple of years ago: [https://flowingdata.com/2012/04/09/metal-bands-per- capita/](https://flowingdata.com/2012/04/09/metal-bands-per-capita/) (Enlarged: [http://i.imgur.com/P5Yfz.png](http://i.imgur.com/P5Yfz.png))

</comment><comment> norea-armozel I'm not much of a metal fan, but I'm just glad the Internet has kept a genre of music alive and thriving. Oddly enough, surf rock has a bit of a global following. Nothing compared to metal but I was surprised when I bumped into a surf rock band from Brazil of all places on Jamendo. I think the Internet definitely has opened more genres to people than radio and record companies ever did.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the appeal of metal is obvious: people everywhere are angry at authority figures. It's music that expresses that anger.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hell, I'm 44 and wear my Iron Maiden and Dream Theater tour shirts to my EE job (RF/Microwave circuit design).

Death to all but metal!

[http://youtu.be/yfB7vF7nCdA](http://youtu.be/yfB7vF7nCdA)

<comment><USER31> That description matches dozens of persons I know ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ah, the rebirth of heavy metal. It reminds me of that old Marx's quote:

"History repeats itself - first as tragedy, then as farce"

edit for the downvoters: I've listened to a lot of heavy metal in my teens. It kind of had sense at the time (late eighties, early nineties) - heavy metal had evolved naturally from other genres, and probably it's a type of music that appeals to a certain kind of person in a certain environment and age range (and that would explain its persistence). Nonetheless, it's a pretty ridiculous and backwards musical genre, extremely rigid and codified and, in my view, hardly evolving at all. The sight of the idols of my youth, now well aged but still dressed like satanists, monks or ancient warriors, and still singing the same stuff after decades, is a sorry one.

Now you can downvote me more :)

<comment><USER33> Did it ever occur to you that you certainly wasn't interested at all in that music?

I know some people who where only interested in metal because it made them more rebellious. Their interests quickly fade always as they grew up and now they are the first to tell everybody how it's a music for teen. I remark that your souvenir is about your idols and how they acted/are dressed and not that much about the music.

But some people are genuinely interested in metal and if you happen to be a bit curious, it's easy to see that it's not more rigid, codified or stalled that any other genre.

<comment><USER32> There are two comments, yours and another one, that suggest that I might not ever been a "true listener" of heavy metal. That's the "no true scotsman" fallacy. Why can't someone who sincerely enjoyed a genre of music in his teens outgrow it? No, better, outgrow the whole idea of genres.

Heavy metal is (you have to admit that) a pretty rigidly codified type of music. It requires a certain set of instruments, with few variations (I still remember debates in the eighties on whether keyboards were kosher). It mostly deals with a fixed set of themes. It sounds in a very recognizable way, so it's rather easy to classify songs that fall into it. Performers dress in a codified way, also easily recognizable. (To all these points there are obviously a few exceptions here and there, as always.)

As for the richness of subgenres: it seems to me that these subgenres are just the partitioning of a fixed space of immutable size. The urge to classify them is another proof of the fact that the rules of the genre are so rigidly codified that the slightest deviation or emphasis on an element requires (or allows) a new classification bucket.

<comment><USER4> _Heavy metal is (you have to admit that) a pretty rigidly codified type of music. It requires a certain set of instruments, with few variations_

Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, the OP itself talked about "folk metal", a sub-genre that uses traditional themes, musical styles, and instruments.

 _It sounds in a very recognizable way, so it 's rather easy to classify songs that fall into it._

Again, you've missed out (and even claimed that it never happened) a HUGE amount of evolution. Metal fans love to bicker and debate, and you'll see, for example, discussions over whether the evolved Opeth, that eschews their older death metal trappings, still counts as metal at all. In the proggy sub-genres that I enjoy, there's ample debate over whether a particular band or song is prog _metal_ or "just" prog rock.

In its infancy, much of metal was dismissed as being stupid, three-chord performances. It's evolved so that today, it's undoubtedly the most technically demanding genre within the entire poo & rock oeuvre. Bands like Meshuggah, or the whole math-metal sub-genre, are performing music so technically demanding that no high school garage band is going to get near it.

In its expansion into these prog, technical, death, extreme, folk, etc directions, there is no doubt that the variety of expression covered by metal today is many orders of magnitude greater than in its younger days.

<comment><USER32> _For example, the OP itself talked about "folk metal", a sub-genre that uses traditional themes, musical styles, and instruments_

Folk metal is actually well inside the tradition of heavy metal, that spans from the black/ gothic to the epic and fantasy themes. By the way there's even a more extreme musical genre called "folk": where people from different regions of the world perform _actual_ folk songs strongly connected with their real traditions. Can you imagine, you can actually listen to folk music _outside_ of the rules of heavy metal? That's _extreme_.

 _Metal fans love to bicker and debate ... over whether ... still counts as metal at all._

Exactly. A little bit of evolution or variation and people start debating whether you're still in the group or out. That's silly.

And oh yes, I've listened to my share of Yngwie Malmsteen and Cacophony. Heavy metal fans are certainly very proud of the raw technical skill (which is, in fact, just speed) of their players. But it's a sort of pissing contest, who can play the riff or the solo faster is not a good meter of one's musical talent or skill.

<comment><USER4> _which is, in fact, just speed_

Sure, if you're talking about just Malmsteen or Cacophony. But again, you really have missed the evolution. Things have moved well beyond that in the 21st century. For just one example, the band Meshuggah that I mentioned requires the performer to shift fluidly between bizarre odd time signatures. It's debatable how much this improves the musicality, but it's an advanced skill that requires a ton of experience; some small amount of this was visible in the era you're referring to, but the evolution has been, well, extreme.

<comment><USER32> Listen, I can understand that for a serious chess player, the style of chess has evolved enormously during the 20th century. That doesn't make it less of a strictly codified game. Anyway, it's a matter of tastes..

One last observation. I remember that in the early nineties, a single chord from Nirvana - I was hearing them for the first time- was enough to make me say "this is not heavy metal" (I was actually pretty disgusted by that sound at the time :)). How is it that after more than twenty years (during which I haven't listened to new metal bands), 3 seconds of Meshuggah are enough for my brain to categorize them with absolute certainty as heavy metal?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 2016 - Editors of Wall Street Journal discover heavy metal

</comment><comment><USER35> Why weird? A music with the technical demands of classical music, channeling the angst and rebellion into unity. A music with power - the brotherhood adversarial nature of the mosh is something to be experienced - everybody is doing their best to crush all of your bones, except when you stumble or fall - then literally 20 hands will pick your up and throw you away to safety. A music that is good for training, fragging people in Quake, sex or invading neighboring country. A music with infinite variability and versatility. Why is weird that it transcends borders, cultures and generations?

<comment> saiya-jin it's weird to generic shallow pop-infested mind... why is this lad sticking out of the conformity crowd? he must be weird, right?

(btw that sex part works only if both have same attitude :))

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A bit offtopic link. Or shoud we all start posting Cats and Food on NH? This site takes it all :)

<comment><USER37> How is it off-topic?

Anything people might find interesting is welcome on HN as far as I understand it.</comment></comment>


Can I give you ten billion dollars? - <AUTHOR> http://kumailht.com/2011/10/can-i-give-you-ten-billion-dollars/

<comment><USER2> It wouldn't cost $10 billion to recreate Linux because it's been done before, and people could quickly code it with knowledge of the framework and the key tools.</comment>


Does Facebook Make Us Unhappy and Unhealthy? - <AUTHOR> http://on.wsj.com/2s9dn3o <comment><USER2> There's definitely times Facebook has made me unhappy. If one looks at social media like a drug, then you have a good analogy. Use in moderation. Cut back or stop if you see signs of addiction or if it is making you unhappy.</comment>


Ask HN: Does Google consider .../somepage/ different from .../somepage? - <AUTHOR>

We have recently migrated our system from PHP to RoR.
However, in our PHP implementation, all URLs were of the form: http://somedns.com/hello-there/ and redirects the pages with a 301 without a / to the /.
(e.g. http://somedns.com/hello-there -> http://somedns.com/hello-there/)
Whereas, our new RoR implementation is of the form: http://somedns.com/hello-there and redirects the pages with a 301 that end in / to the no /.
(e.g. http://somedns.com/hello-there/ -> http://somedns.com/hello-there)
Will Google understand that both pages are still the exact same, and leave our SERPs in a good place, or will we lose our SERPs due to the change in trailing /?
If Matt Cutts, a Google Search Developer, or an expert SEO/SERP HN'er could chime in that would be incredibly greatly appreciated.
Our team members are split 50/50 on whether or not this would affect SERPs or not, so it would be great if we could hear some opinions, thoughts, comment, complaints, criticisms regarding all of the above.
Thanks in advance <comment><USER2> Google does view URLs with/without slashes differently, but since Google follows 301 redirects and they represent _permanent_ moves, you should be fine.

For more information, see [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to- slash-...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not- to-slash.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just a little fearful due to the _should_. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Google will follow those 301s and realise that the old URLs are the same as the new URLs. From experience, you _may_ see a slight drop in some search rankings when you make the switch as it can take Google some time to factor the 301s into it's algorithm, but remember not to panic - if you see any drops (big 'if'), it should only be temporary and I'd imagine you'd be back to normal within 2-3 weeks.

Ideally though, you'd just configure Rails to use the trailing slash instead so you didn't have to risk a temporary drop. If it's too much of an issue or would be a hassle to do though, don't worry too much - you'll be fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> With a 301 redirect, they are treated the same.

That said, I recommend having a canonical URL with 1 consistent format in the meta tags just in case.</comment>


Why we chose to move to HTML5 video - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/159906447698921/why-we-chose-to-move-to-html5-video/ <comment><USER3> Very very late for a company like Facebook. I'm not sure they needed a blog post to explain such an obvious move.

It looks like they decided to go all for HTML5 at once and avoid having to live with both Flash and HTML5 support with the cost associated to it (maintenance, support, etc.).

<comment><USER4> They still seem to use a flash version for some browsers:

> That's why we waited until recently to ship the HTML5 player to all browsers > by default, with the exception of a small set of them.

<comment><USER3> Then definitely no excuse :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Why I decided to stop slamming my hand in a car door."

</comment><comment><USER6> "When we shipped the HTML5 player, we noticed that on average it took slightly longer for Facebook to load. By fixing several small performance regressions and making multiple micro-optimizations, we finally reached a level we felt happy with shipping."

The way that's worded, it sounds like Facebook with HTML5 video is still slower to load than it was with Flash. This is really surprising... Would love to read details on that. Do they mean loading a link to a video, or to the general News Feed?

<comment><USER7> I'm fairly sure it means the entire page. I recently attended a talk given by Mike Magruder about (mobile) performance at Facebook, and a lot of it involved testing the impact of changes on the overall speed of the entire product, this uses the same language, ie referring to Facebook directly when talking about speed.

Just a wild stab in the dark on the cause, but maybe a contributing factor is devices that wouldn't load Flash at all take a speed hit from trying to load HTML5 video and the supporting scripts, or maybe the browser doing more heavy lifting rather than offloading it to a plugin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well the answer's pretty obvious in 2015, but 'The challenges we had to overcome' section is pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> Finally. Ever since I removed the flash plugin around a year or two ago, Facebook and Vimeo videos are the only things I regularly encounter that I can't play.

<comment><USER10> The BBC still uses flash for TV and radio, which is a real shame and I think is the only thing I still need Flash for.

<comment><USER11> Be an ipad (by spoofing your User-Agent header)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298240)

<comment><USER10> Wow! It even works for live radio, which they say HTML5 doesn't! Why isn't this the default?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I created an website that shows 100+ short small videos on a page. I tested it with common browsers on various platforms. And decided to load only the first 5 videos as HTML5 videos and show the rest as animated GIFs. The optimized GIFs have custom color pallet, the file size is slightly bigger, but the performance gain is enormous.

<comment><USER13> That's interesting, considering there's a whole new trend of websites dedicated to converting heavy GIF files into small video files instead - <USER2> such as [https://gfycat.com/about](https://gfycat.com/about)

<comment><USER14> The bizarre thing is that the vast majority of these "gifs" come from a video source in the first place, so all they're doing is converting from a video, to a gif, back to a video format. This process destroys the quality and sound channel. Strange how sites like reddit eat this up.

<comment><USER15> The reason why funny videos as gif became big is the promise they give you that they are funny without sound, so you can play them in the office or during commute without fear that something will suddenly be noisy, or that something won't be easily understood.

When gifs started breaking the promise of being fast to load, due to people sharing fairly large res animations, sites such as gfycat tried to replicate the promise of silent sketches, but with more modern technology.

This is not bizare at all. Less is sometimes more.

<comment><USER14> This is all certainly accomplishable without converting the video file twice. <video> tags support a mute attribute, and with minor javascript you can set a looping playback from a timestamp. Best of both worlds if you really want that.

I can't help but feel these tools are evolving in the wrong direction. And not even in a "Stop liking what I don't like!" kind of way; simply that the solution could have been reached with far fewer steps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "At Facebook, we care about the experience we provide to people. How long Facebook takes to load is a contributing factor we look at to gauge user experience."

Do they really need to talk like this on a tech blog?

<comment><USER17> Sadly they care less about content theft - [http://youtu.be/IrD96dNfHxk](http://youtu.be/IrD96dNfHxk)

<comment><USER18> eh, in the link to be reported he put the youtube link and not the page link, less than five days later issue is resolved, offending page is down, everyone's happy?

but the video lasts forever, with its partial information taken from a snapshot in time.

<comment><USER11> >"Freebooting" is a silly but oddly appropriate word invented by YouTubers CGP Grey and Brady Haran that means "taking online media and re-hosting it on your website without permission."

[http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/108548517677/facebook-f...](http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/108548517677/facebook- freebooting-video)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA)

<comment><USER19> "Freebooter" and "freebooting" mean "pirate" and "piracy", which is what I assume they're talking about: [http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/freeboo...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/freebooter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For canned video this decision is less than ground-breaking, but for me the more interesting question is what the state is with respect to live video broadcasting to a large audience.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if they know about this bug:

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=460709](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=460709)

It's been around for nearly a year, and Chromium eventually says they're following the spec and it's Facebook's fault.

<comment><USER22> it looks like something is hiding an ancestor of a video element so the video element is hidden...yes, sounds like a Facebook bug

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> " _Videos are an enriching way to connect with the world around you_ "

Er... thanks FB for the insight into why videos are good.

Interesting that it doesn't sound like they got page loading time _faster_ than with Flash, only to a point they were happy with.

Don't care. Haven't signed up to FB. Not until I can create feeds of my content to non-Facebook users, as simple as RSS. Unlisted content, similar to youtube unlisted videos. The URL discovery completely at my discretion and risk. You know, like more open, more choice and more in line with the web. Unshackled from branded ecosystem lock-in. That's all I want.

</comment><comment><USER24> The reasons given for the switch could have been easily mitigated. At NYT we used an HTML5 player by default and then when HTML5 isn't supported we downgrade to a flash video container, while still maintaining the HTML/CSS/Javascript player controls. We also have a bridge from Actionscript to Javascript for logging. We barley have to update the flash video container, it just acts as a viewport for video.

</comment><comment><USER25> Tangentially related question: what is the best software/hardware to economically stream HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) these days?

For live event webcasts, my employer has been using Wirecast to send an RTP stream to Brightcove. Brightcove is trying to move to HLS for all live streaming, but can't seem to give us a good recommendation for an economical, reliable way to create the HLS stream.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

<comment><USER26> You could try out the live streaming feature of [http://www.bitcodin.com](http://www.bitcodin.com), it supports HLS as well as MPEG DASH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really hope Daala (with input from Thor) will catch up and will force Apple to start supporting open codecs. The situation with fragmented and patent encumbered video is ridiculous.

Also, streaming situation is getting murky. MPEG-LA patent trolls tried to attack DASH a while ago. Is it patent free after all or not?

<comment><USER26> Yes, DASH is still royality free

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm very glad they finally did. Means I can speed up playback speed (using the excellent [https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed](https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed) chrome extension)

</comment><comment><USER29> If Flash wasn't already dead...

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe it's time browsers improve the decoding performance of HTML5 videos. In my experience Wirth's law is in effect when it comes to browsers.

</comment><comment><USER31> Regardless of their reasons, its a great move as it will push for better support.</comment>


Simulating Monty Hall: data beats intuition. Sometimes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nihit/MontyHall

<comment><USER2> Neat ! Here is a cool visualization: [http://blog.vctr.me/monty- hall/](http://blog.vctr.me/monty-hall/)</comment>


Got from the bottom up - <AUTHOR>

ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf <comment><USER2> Saved it for later, looks interesting for a beginner (like me). Thanks!

PS: Its git not got :P

<comment><USER3> Once you git it you got it, get it?</comment></comment>


The first wireless flying robotic insect takes off - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2018-05-wireless-robotic-insect.html <comment><USER2> [https://www.cia.gov/library/video-center/video- transcripts/i...](https://www.cia.gov/library/video-center/video- transcripts/insectothopter-the-bug-carrying-bug.html)</comment>


Show HN: Balances – Mint for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://balances.io <comment><USER2> This looks awesome, signed up and added all my wallets but I think i'm experiencing a bug ([https://balances.io/users/twofactor_qr](https://balances.io/users/twofactor_qr)) seems to be blank.

<comment><USER3> Hey guys, I just pushed a fix for this. Sorry about that! Thanks for letting us know.

<comment><USER2> Just enabled it and works as expected. Thanks for the quick fix!

Edit: Loving the gifs btw!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since I used the Bitcoin-Core to send/spend bitcoins, the export instructions from [https://balances.io/import_instructions](https://balances.io/import_instructions) will not work.

The balance displayed is much less than what the wallet contains, because of the internal addresses from the key pool.

See [http://blog.barthe.ph/2014/04/03/bitcoin-balance- differs/](http://blog.barthe.ph/2014/04/03/bitcoin-balance-differs/)

<comment><USER3> Hmm, we will definitely look into this, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And just like that your wallets aren't anonymous anymore or at least are tied to each other beyond transactions between them.

Seriously, though, this is kinda neat.

<comment><USER6> Wallets arent anonymous they are all in the block chain.

<comment><USER7> Incorrect. There are no "wallets" on the blockchain. In fact, the blockchain is not even organized by address. The blockchain is simply a ledger of inputs and outputs, most of which _refer_ to a certain address or addresses (but not to wallets).

If someone uses a new Bitcoin address for each transaction, there is no way outside of statistical analysis (which may not even work in many cases) to know which addresses belongs to which wallets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't show any of the BTC I purchased from coinbase, only the $20 worth I got via TinkerCoin

<comment><USER3> Is it possible you have more than one account/wallet on Coinbase? We currently only pull 1 account from Coinbase (whichever one is your first). We are working on making it pull all your accounts.

<comment><USER8> Nope, only one! I definitely clicked "get address" on a wallet which had significantly more bitcoin.

<comment><USER9> Did you use the Coinbase integration[0] or add an address from Coinbase manually? The latter will likely not work due to the way Coinbase generates addresses for each transaction.

[0]: [https://balances.io/coinbase/auth](https://balances.io/coinbase/auth)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is exactly what I have been looking for! I just signed up and added a couple of wallet addresses and I have to say, it looks really good. I can't wait for the iOS app, any info on an approximate release timeframe?

<comment><USER3> Glad you are enjoying it! In terms of iPhone release timeline we are still working out the exact date. It will be after the launch of iOS 8 however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you for using a limited oauth scope for Coinbase. Had you not, I would not have connected to Coinbase.

I do wish that you had a transaction history more like Mint does. The balance only isn't too useful for me.

<comment><USER3> No problem! :)

Transactions are in progress ([https://balances.io/transactions](https://balances.io/transactions)). Definitely something we want for ourselves as well, and we'll get it released ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The dogecoin lookup seems to be broken, 0 DOGE for all my dogecoin wallets

<comment><USER12> Nevermind, apparently the Dogecoin QT app makes new addresses every time coins are sent out so I had to track all my coins to the last one that still had all my coins

<comment><USER3> Ya we are looking into a way to better import addresses when the data is formatted like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> will there be something like [https://coinbase.com/docs/api/overview](https://coinbase.com/docs/api/overview)?

<comment><USER3> We aren't currently opening up our API to the public. However, if there is enough demand for it ([http://balances.uservoice.com/forums/244164-suggestions](http://balances.uservoice.com/forums/244164-suggestions)), we might open it up sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This one looks fantastic :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Or you could just use Mint

</comment><comment><USER16> We can only pray that your crypto is good. Recall the problems that bigger sites had.

<comment><USER17> Since they don't touch private keys at all I don't think they'll be that big of a target.

<comment><USER9> Correct. Though there is an issue of plausible deniability if we do get breached, assuming a user who absolutely requires it used a username that can be tied back to them. We're working on a solution for that.

If you require plausible deniability to be safe or avoid incarceration, I would recommend not using Balances at this time – I obviously can't guarantee that we are safe from a very motivated intruder, but we have taken many paranoid precautions to avoid such a breach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mildly off-topic, but a fun side effect of this site's demographic is when someone does a "Show HN", competitors regularly show up in the comments section and try to convince you how the submitted app is no good, and to try their app.

It's almost a view into the viability of the market (or whatever it's called) to see how many competitors comment - the more, the better. Right?

</comment><comment><USER19> There's also [http://cryptofolio.info/](http://cryptofolio.info/) which consumes feeds from multiple exchanges per asset type to show either an average or a preferred provider.

</comment><comment><USER20> On a related note, [http://www.currly.com](http://www.currly.com) is a place for a compiled view on digital currency news.

</comment><comment><USER21> For those of you interested in tracking more coin than just Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin!

Check out the beautiful [http://getfortuneapp.com/](http://getfortuneapp.com/)</comment>


Google's Gmail Ai Is Completing My Sentences - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVEXzy5jbjg <comment><USER2> Looks like this has been in experimental mode since around May (as "Gmail Smart Compose"). I only noticed it a couple of days ago so I guess they've decided it's ready to roll out to production! It's surprisingly quite accurate, although I personally haven't gotten used to it enough to reflexively hit Tab when a correct suggestion shows up.</comment>


How "Silicon Valley" Nails Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley <comment><USER2> Silicon Valley is so realistic that I stopped watching a few episodes into the first season. I was going through a rough and very stressful time at work, and the show was reminding me too much of that rather than being an escape (as I usually want TV to be).

Thankfully I'm in a better place professionally now, and I recently came back to the show. Now I enjoy it a lot, even though it can hit very close to home.

<comment><USER3> >I'm in a better place professionally now

Buy a gold chain!

<comment><USER4> Or if he's doing _really_ well, some Tres Comas Tequila.

<comment><USER3> hummm "Tres Comas", I wonder what that stands for..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "A friend of mine who works in tech called me and said, 'Why aren't there any women? That's bullshit!' I said to her, 'It is bullshit! Unfortunately, we shot that audience footage at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt.'"

Unfortunately, unsurprising.

<comment><USER6> If that's the case, why aren't there way more Asians in the show?

<comment><USER7> Why is this being downvoted? I think it's a valid point. Being an Asian- American in tech, it pains me to see that SV doesn't have an accurate representation (both in number and in stereotypes) of us on the show.

<comment><USER8> Yea, and Dinesh has (so far) been falling into the "sexless asian man" stereotype (also jin yiang, though he's just a minor comic relief character).

Asian exist in real life: [http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna- cdn.com/wp-c...](http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/08/Photo-Aug-19-5-23-32-PM-930x698.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know the show very well, but this is a much better article than I expected. The vignette about online forums is so perfect I can't resist quoting it in full.

 _"Silicon Valley," a show about computer nerds, has a fan base that is particularly attuned to minutiae, and particularly apt to argue about them on the Internet. If a Post-it, URL, or line of code is legible on the show, it will be screengrabbed and scrutinized. Last year, a few hours after an episode aired, a Reddit user with the handle HeIsMyPossum started a thread called "Why did the writers just obliterate all the good karma they had built up with their core audience?" He made an impassioned argument that a plot point—the accidental deletion of data from Pied Piper's servers—was implausible. "So the files were being converted live while coming through an FTP? And that affects disk deletion speed?… Come the fuck on guys." Rob Fuller, a software engineer and a consultant on the show, logged on to Reddit to defend his work, mostly by displaying his own nerd plumage. "Stuff like this happens," he wrote. "I think even Amazon had an outage because one of the admins fat fingered a DNS or ACL change at one point." Another user responded to Fuller: "Thanks for engaging us here, we really appreciate it." The thread amassed nearly three hundred comments. "Sorry for being a dick," HeIsMyPossum wrote._

Edit: well, it's weirdly anticlimactic sitting here. But it was hilarious in the New Yorker.

<comment><USER10> I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean, there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P

It's sort of a metaphysical overarching joke rolled into the show. Anything on the show talking about their compression technology becomes necessarily unbelievable as a result.

Causality caused the file to be deleted on both ends!

<comment><USER11> > I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean, > there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P

There are of course limits to how much you can compress things, but only for a finite number of possible files can you ever _prove_ that you've hit the limit. For almost all possible files/strings, you can't ever prove you've got an optimal compression algorithm, so if someone's new algorithm appears to work better, well, you've got the burden of proof to show you've already hit the Kolmogorov complexity of the file and they're cheating.

<comment><USER12> Well, I've compressed pi into a much smaller space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I completely agree. Silicon Valley talked about the reality.

I founded a startup and headed engineering for another. I have seen more than half the things there as follows: Getting money in tranches. Investors making you spend invested money for personal gain. Having a business CEO who has no product insights. Board control issues. Employees trying to overthrow founders and getting fired because of that. Being forced to hire friends and family of investors. Lawyers represent the company and not you. Founding company with someone whom you do not trust. Investors getting involved in day to day running.

Luckily each of the startups had an happy ending. But it took a lot of hard work and a few miracles.

<comment><USER13> One more thing to add. Having a CEO who takes a salary of 180k/year after seed round (which was almost half of the seed round) and apart from this also charges part of his house rent to the company. Those were fun times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want proof that the SV producers go the extra mile, a couple episodes ago there was a split-second appearance of a GitHub repository belonging to one of the characters. Turns out it's completely real ([https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai](https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari- ai) ) and the owner has accepted pull requests!

<comment><USER15> they're done worse with the hardware - in the garage with the GPU rigs there were a few brief shots of a cisco 6500 chassis with totally the wrong linecards for what they would be doing. actually a 6500 would be the wrong platform entirely.

<comment><USER16> Is this your own brand of satire or are you not aware you're entirely the person being satirized?

<comment><USER15> it's more meta than that, the 6500 satirizes itself with how people use it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Best part:

"Some Valley big shots have no idea how to react to the show," Miller told me. "They can't decide whether to be offended or flattered. And they're mystified by the fact that actors have a kind of celebrity that they will never have—there's no rhyme or reason to it, but that's the way it is, and it kills them." Miller met Musk at the after-party in Redwood City. "I think he was thrown by the fact that I wasn't being sycophantic—which I couldn't be, because I didn't realize who he was at the time. He said, 'I have some advice for your show,' and I went, 'No thanks, we don't need any advice,' which threw him even more. And then, while we're talking, some woman comes up and says 'Can I have a picture?' and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like, Sorry, dude, I know you're a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big deal—but I'm the guy from 'Yogi Bear 3-D,' and apparently that's who she wants a picture with."

</comment><comment><USER18> In last Sunday's show they were ramping up to launch a beta of their product and had a closed alpha session where the team could give out access codes to close friends. The three team members, all engineers, got universally positive feedback for how great their user interface was. Well except from Monica, who couldn't quite articulate why it was just off to the casual user [1].

[1]:[http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied- piper/dist/images/i...](http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied- piper/dist/images/interface_large.jpg)

Essentially everyone in the engineering team's social circle either were engineers themselves who wouldn't recognize good design if it hit them in the mouth, or intentionally did not give criticism of the product in order to suck up to the promising new startup.

<comment><USER19> Semi off-topic, but I think there was an Easter egg in that part of the episode. A few seasons ago Monica had to give some bad news to Richard, and she changed into white clothing before talking to him. I don't remember exactly how it came up, but she said she changed because studies had shown that bad news was less upsetting when the messenger was wearing white.

When Monica was in her office looking at the beta, she was wearing a regular suit. When she shows up at Erlich's house (presumably soon after the last scene), she's changed into a white/cream colored sweater. I thought that was a nice callback to the earlier season.

<comment><USER20> Close, but it was about dressing as plainly as possible: "as a study showed that the less sexual attraction a guy feels, the less it will hurt when he's given bad news."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For me the most realistic scene, one that only people in the field would understand, is when they made the "box". The lead up from hating the assignment to not being able to do shit work really hit home. I've probably had had a few projects that i hated but spent more time then needed. To either make it work faster or modulerized it even though it was probably never going to be updated, just to keep my interest or to learn something.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am a consultant on the show. I am super impressed with them. I find it less "funny" and more "accurate" on a regular basis.

<comment> atom-morgan How did that come about?

<comment><USER22> I spend too much time cultivating my network...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> ___SPOILERS ALERT_ __

The article contains several spoilers. You may want to hold off if you follow the show.

<comment><USER14> If you follow the show, then _nothing_ should be a spoiler. :p

<comment><USER24> Or I guess if you're familiar with the SV startup scene, not much should be a surprise :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > In 2015, Weissman convened the Stanford Compression Forum, which resulted in > a forty-page white paper outlining what middle-out compression might mean. > One of his graduate students, Vinith Misra, worked out the math more > explicitly in another paper.

The paper they link to from there ([https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip- Effi...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Efficiency)) is actually "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency: a model for male audience stimulation". Not that I'm complaining, that is absolutely incredible, but does the compression paper actually exist?

<comment><USER26> > whereas naive unsorted schemes have increasingly flaccid perfor-mance.

Oh my god

<comment><USER27> The chart at the end of the paper is very suggestive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great article, with some glorious lines:

"It's capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of 'We're making the world a better place,' because it's uncool to just say 'Hey, we're crushing it and making money.'"

"Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money."

"In the real Silicon Valley, as on the show, there is a cohort of people who have a real sense of purpose and actually think they're going to change the world, and then there's a cohort of people who say farcical things about their apps that they clearly don't believe themselves."

<comment><USER29> _and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money._

What a load of bullshit. First of all, libertarians have hardly "taken over" anything. If anything, the SV scene (as seen from the outside anyway) seems markedly _less_ libertarian now than it did 15 years ago. Back when Slashdot was full of techno-libertarian types, cyberpunks and crypto-anarchists were spending gobs of time planning how to use technology to enable the stateless society, and rich libertarian leaning folks like John Gilmore were suing the government over the right to travel without showing ID... back then, the SV technologist scene felt very libertarian indeed. Now, if anything, it seems that the progressives have taken over. You still hear a little chatter about Internet freedom and the need for strong crypto, and there is the crypto- currency crowd who have actually gotten somewhere... but by and large, the rhetoric you hear out of SV seems to have skewed in a distinctively statist direction the past decade or two.

Heck, just go back through the archives here at HN and compare the talk back at the beginning, to the talk now... you can't help but be struck by the profound shift that's occurred. Now it's commonplace for people to criticize capitalism, denigrate the value of hard work (after all, all success is just "luck"), promote more active government involvement in markets, etc. Heck, I guess you'd almost be hard pressed to find a libertarian on here anymore... or maybe most of us just don't bother saying anything because we know we'll get shouted down (and/or downvoted to oblivion) by the statists.

Beyond that, the essence of libertarianism is absolutely to care about "right and wrong", as expressed by the Zero Aggression Principle. And libertarianism itself doesn't say anything about making money... there are plenty of "hippie libertarians" who don't give a shit about making money. IOW, just because somebody is a Capitalist or is concerned with making money, doesn't automatically mean they are a "libertarian."

<comment><USER30> > _And libertarianism itself doesn 't say anything about making money... there > are plenty of "hippie libertarians" who don't give a shit about making > money._

And yet... there aren't a lot of women or minorities in the libertarian movement, and despite your 'hippie' comment, most of the voices are from people with well-paying jobs.

Libertarianism doesn't mention money per se, but the effect of it is that people who already have money and network effects don't have to share their bounty.

Hell, I remember arguing with one libertarian who was crystal clear on property rights, and that property could never be taken away if you didn't sell it yourself; the government had no right to take land (yadda yadda, Zero Aggression Principle) and any land transfers after that are moot because it would have been taken by force.

Okay, says I, then give your property back to the Native American tribe it was taken from. The rhetoric then changed to 'oh, I could only give it to a person who could show that they owned the exact plot of land that I had'. What, the specific plot of land that is only described by the entity that violently took it? That communal ownership that was tribal lands meant that somehow you could claim individual ownership over it anyway?

This is what libertarianism means to me, and to a lot of what you deride as 'statists'. It's a lot of superficially nice-sounding rhetoric, which boils down to "I get to keep all my stuff, and don't have to share. So what if my bounty is built on the backs of others, my stuff is my stuff".

<comment><USER29> _" I get to keep all my stuff, and don't have to share. So what if my bounty is built on the backs of others, my stuff is my stuff"._

OTOH, I'd say it's closer to "I'm happy to share with others, as long as I do it on my own terms, without somebody threatening me into it, and furthermore, even if I don't 'share', I contribute to the overall good simply by participating as a productive member of the economy". Consider what Adam Smith had to say:

 _" But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence. But though this principle ultimately provides him with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for, it neither does nor can provide him with them as he has occasion for them. The greater part of his occasional wants are supplied in the same manner as those of other people, by treaty, by barter, and by purchase. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old clothes which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old clothes which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, clothes, or lodging, as he has occasion."_

Now that's not to say that there aren't Libertarians out there with a "fuck you, got mine" attitude. Then again, there are people with that attitude who aren't Libertarians as well.

<comment><USER30> What happens when 'my own terms' are heavily asymmetric in the speaker's own favour? How often would 'my own terms' be against the speaker's own favour?

We've also been through times when people "contributed to the overall good simply by participating as productive members of the economy". It was awful, and is why we have welfare programs these days. Private charity and/or trickle-down economics just do not cut the mustard, especially for individuals with chronic or ongoing problems.

> _But though this principle ultimately provides [the beggar] with all the > necessaries of life which he has occasion for_

If you define 'necessities of life' as merely 'keeps a heartbeat going', then that paragraph will probably make sense to you. Most people would also consider shelter against the cold, clothes that fit and are in good order, and regular food as being necessities, none of which are needed to keep a heartbeat.

The other thing is that people's own self-interest is rarely thought about in the long-term. It takes a lot of education to plan out far ahead, which is one of the reasons why the wealthy stay wealthy. People aren't the perfectly informed, perfectly rational actors that these kind of paragraphs (and libertarian ideology) suggest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think it's good that people in the actual tech industry and startup eco system can laugh about themselves. It's healthy. The day they/we stop laughing is the day we have a problem.

</comment><comment><USER32> There was an article a while back on The Verge noting the irony in the show being "comedy". It's supposed to be a caracature of startup culture, stories, and the insane numbers that are casually thrown around. But as most people on HN know, Pied Piper would have had a similar path if it was a startup in real life.

What I'm getting at is that even in it's attempt to be more insane than what startup life is like, it's strangely... more accurate.

And I can't really tell if that's a good or bad thing.

<comment><USER33> This is also true for another current HBO comedy Veep. While it may not be as close to reality as Silicon Valley, many political insiders note that it is much closer than dramatic shows like House of Cards.

Maybe similarity to reality is a hallmark of excellent comedy. This is certainly true of one of my favorite comedy shows Louie, which is almost hyperrealistic.

<comment><USER34> "Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the history of television was the sitcom 'Barney Miller,' far more so than that father of reality TV, 'Cops.' The action was mostly off screen, the squad room the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the- detec...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the- detectives.html)

<comment><USER35> Likewise, all the doctors I know say Scrubs is the most realistic show about being a doctor.

<comment> semi-extrinsic How can it not be? Every other program about being a doctor has so much personal drama and sex going on, they barely have time to look at patients. (Except House MD, but he's obviously unrealistic, even in the show itself.)

<comment><USER36> Episode about how unrealistic House is was one of the high points of the later Scrubs seasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> In a lot of ways, "epochs" of software development track to Mike Judge productions... a lot of things changed after Office Space lampooned the industry the first time... I wonder if Silicon Valley will have the same effect.

</comment><comment><USER38> The thing about SV that always gets me is the forced "code" vs "hardware" rivalry between Gilfoyle and Dinesh.

"My code can beat your terrible hardware!" "My hardware is terrible because of your terrible code!"

That just doesn't happen in my experience. Has anyone else seen this?

<comment> old-gregg Well, if you replace "hardware" with "infrastructure", it starts making sense. Somewhat realistic scenario goes like this:

The CTO makes a decision to move to AWS. A couple of "server huggers" on the team start blaming AWS's "shitty infrastructure" for unexplainable latency spikes and increased downtime. The CTO responds blaming their "terrible code" for not being designed properly and points at Netflix.

<comment><USER39> Right. Or even bare metal vs VMs. How many VMs on what hardware? Many small VMs, or fewer large ones?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The attention to detail on the show is amazing. For example, during their move to the new office I noticed that they had Corovan moving boxes. If you don't know Apple uses Corovan exclusively and if you've ever moved offices chances are high that they moved you. Not sure why but it was amazing to me that they bothered with a detail like that.

<comment><USER41> Pretty sure it was product placement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I personally didn't like the humor of the show and stopped watching it after 3 or 4 episodes.

On a related note, a few days ago [1] Marc Andreessen recommended another show based on startup culture: Halt and Catch Fire [2]

I haven't seen it, but I will probably give it a shot.

[1] [http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc- andreessen/](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/) [2] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt)

<comment><USER43> I stopped after the first episode. It match ZERO percent of any of my silicon valley experience. Have never seen a backyard party with famous band. Have never seen a famous band with "nerds" not watching. Have never been to an SV party where hot women stand around looking to pick up rich SV men.

Maybe it gets better but I didn't give it the chance.

<comment><USER44> > hot women stand around looking to pick up rich

Rosewood Hotel cougar night by Sand Hill.

<comment><USER43> This was a private industry party in someone's backyard, not a hotel lobby/lounge

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> One of my favorite parts of the show is the opening credits. Being an old Netscape employee, I still get a little sad when I see the Netscape logo fall off that building, only to be replaced by Chrome. _tears_

</comment><comment><USER46> The Silicon Valley show makes me anxious. I laugh but I also feel the pain from experience. And I'm not sure if that's good. I want and need to catch up but I almost dread it. I wonder if it's the same for cop drama shows and cops who watch them.

</comment><comment><USER47> >"It's capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of 'We're making the world a better place,' because it's uncool to just say 'Hey, we're crushing it and making money.'"

the world does seems to be a better place when you're making a lot of money.

</comment><comment><USER48> I have really enjoyed watching this show but the last few episodes it seems like the writing has went downhill. There were a number of cringe worthy scenes like "tabs vs spaces".

<comment><USER49> Seriously? I laughed out loud at the "tabs vs spaces" scene since I have seen it played out exactly like that at several jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> NPR Fresh Air broadcast a similar article today: [http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon- vall...](http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon-valley-the- comedy-is-inspired-by-real-life-tech-culture)

</comment><comment><USER51> My favorite from the article:

Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades.

<comment><USER52> On top of that, I loved the irony that it was basically too ridiculous to use on the show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> for a similar satire of high tech culture 20 years ago, check out Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs)

<comment><USER54> Wait, That book was satire??

<comment><USER55> I didn't take it as such when I read it. But I can see how someone might think so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It seems to me that "Silicon Valley" is somewhat of a Roman a clef, as such I think it would be great if the HN readers could provide the "key". Anyone out there willing to give it a shot ?

<comment><USER44> Hooli = Google

Gavin Belson = Marc Benioff

Denpak Singh = Deepak Chopra

Peter Gregory = Peter Thiel

Erlich Bachman = Sean Parker

Russ Hanneman = Mark Cuban

Laurie Bream = Marissa Mayer

Philz Coffee onsite = Facebook

Hooli tunnel = Zynga tunnel

<comment><USER57> And who's Monica?

OP plz

<comment><USER44> Monica is the associate you messed up the pitch with because she was alarmingly cute.

<comment><USER56> Something like that may have happened to me, or I had some responsibility for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I have a really, really hard time understanding how anyone can watch the show and be offended.

OTOH, maybe it's just because I'm neither rich nor important.

<comment><USER57> Hint: nobody ever gets offended, they just get concerned that other people might be offended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Just once I'd like to see Dinesh win against Gilfoyle.

<comment><USER51> Yeah, I guess Dinesh would like that, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> As someone that works in enterprise storage, the last season has hit very close to home.

<comment><USER39> As someone who works for a SaaS company that's trying to provide SaaS on- prem... the mole people are real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Does anyone else find that the show is running out of steam ? I think the quality of the writing has gone down in this new series.

<comment><USER20> At times I had that feeling, but then something happens that has in me in stitches in a way that few other shows pull off.

My main issue is Bachmann. He's been a bit too much for a while, but judging by the last episode I think the writers did this on purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I love the Sweet Valley High series. Glad to see it's enjoying a renaissance of sorts.

</comment><comment><USER62> One question I'd like answered is how Richard lost controlling interest of his company. The ownership percentages are never really talked about other than Erlich's 10% and the two coders getting 7% each. One minute Richard is majority shareholder while Reviga has 20%, then Reviga has majority?

It's the only thing that gives me pause.

<comment><USER63> He sold shares to Russ Hanneman and Reviga bought those shares off of Hanneman.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Watchmespendmoney - <AUTHOR> https://watchmespendmoney.com/ <comment><USER2> Do we get to see the sudden enormous AWS bills as HN overloads your site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah of course, I'll be sure to add it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately vercel does not store logs for you, lesson learned. I can't tell if the email signup isn't working. Please use the link here:

[https://emailoctopus.com/lists/589a8309-b670-11ea-a3d0-06b46...](https://emailoctopus.com/lists/589a8309-b670-11ea-a3d0-06b4694bee2a/forms/subscribe)

Apologies for the outage, this has been educational. Thank you for the hug of death :)

<comment><USER3> Sidenote but the vercel <-> logstash integration is really easy to set up and will persist your logs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a suspicion that making spending public would increase spending rather than decrease it. People already spend money on expensive items for social signaling of how well they're doing but there's always ways around that (bootleg items, sales, etc.). With this they'd have no choice but to actually spend the money for social signaling.

<comment><USER5> Or just push a fake message?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Might want to spend some money on a better server so that we can actually watch you spend money.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys! Sorry for the downtime. Working on a fix!

<comment><AUTHOR> It appears that Plaid is rate limiting and mongodb is at max number of connections.

<comment><AUTHOR> Going to update mongo. There isn't much I can do about plaid

<comment><USER7> Maybe a quick cache in front of Plaid for now? Even in-mem might be a decent short term solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah if only I wasn't using vercel and serverless functions!

<comment><USER8> You can add a `Cache-Control` response header with `s-maxage` in your Serverless Function to cache at the Edge.

[https://vercel.com/docs/v2/serverless-functions/edge- caching](https://vercel.com/docs/v2/serverless-functions/edge-caching)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control#Expiration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting idea. When people post stuff on Linkedin, under their public "professional" persona, they tend to behave in a certain way. I wonder what would happen if this was a social network, where your posts consist of stuff you spend money on. How much would it change the way you handle your dollars.

<comment><USER10> Venmo surfaces something along these lines, there is a social "feed" of your friend's transfers and messages to each other.

<comment><USER11> It hasn't always been this way, but the current default is to set transactions to private. I've never allowed a Venmo transaction to be public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Super interesting idea, I wonder if this can be used by insta celeb's to show 'flex' by spending on ridiculously priced goods.!

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about this. I wonder if IG captures that need sufficiently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had to turn off uBlock Origin to get it to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is very odd. I'm not making an CORS requests from the client

<comment><USER14> Doesn't have to be cross-origin to get blocked by uBlock.

That said, the page isn't working for me. The call to [https://watchmespendmoney.com/api/plaid/transactions](https://watchmespendmoney.com/api/plaid/transactions) is returning a 500 Internal Server Error.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it yup, putting in a fix

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this what Clinkle did? Or some other failed startup I can't remember the name of?

<comment><USER16> Clinkle sounds nothing like this.

<comment><USER15> There was definitely some failed startup that just published people's credit card purchases in a giant feed... maybe it was just an earlier iteration of Venmo? I've been Googling but can't find it.

<comment><USER17> You're thinking of Blippy, by Pud!

[https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/blippy/](https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/blippy/)

<comment><USER18> As the father of a toddler, even you saying the word Blippy (Blippi, officially), is sending shivers down my spine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This doesn't appear to be a valid Show HN. Please read the rules: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><USER20> What rule does it break?

It's not immediately clear, but if you log in (at the top of the page) you can log your own expenses to a public transaction feed.

And you can participate in the main experiment by commenting on OP's transactions.

Seems like a cool and valid Show HN to me.

<comment><USER19> I don't see how people can try this out. It looks like a closed beta with a signup page?

<comment><USER21> I think it had a beta notification form thingie when posted, then other problems but now it looks like you can log in? It's getting spam and abuse though so it's maybe not quite at the public trying stage yet either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool idea, though I couldn't get it to load yet. Will look after the deluge of interest goes away!

I'm curious: do you see any risk of folks indirectly tracking you via your transactions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! I'm really not afraid of that. These are normal San Francisco purchases IMO. Also there are filters on the backend so I don't share things like medical expenses which reveal much more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> you're gonna get so much traffic from the findom community, may as well start charging a monthly subscription fee

</comment><comment><USER23> It fails for a number of times before it works.

</comment><comment><USER24> not working

</comment><comment><USER25> Not working..

</comment><comment><USER26> spend less money on Safeway and more on servers...

</comment><comment><USER27> "An unexpected error has occurred."</comment>


Re: All Word Processors Suck - <AUTHOR> http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2011/06/01/all-word-processors-suck/

<comment><USER2> That reminds me: I did my thesis in Word XP. On AMD Duron 700 MHz with less than gig memory on Windows XP (or was it 2000 back then?). I think, I ended up using almost any feature possible, including editing huge documents (although I splitted huge doc into chapter sub-documents to avoid wasting time while saving), peppering my document with enormous amount of formulas through Mathtype (Word's own Equation is Mathtype Light or something like that), having lots of illustrations, several page layout changes (portrait -> landscape -> portrait) in the same document and an automatic ToC generation. It worked out just fine.

There's a reason why Microsoft still sells their Office product in the age when everyone and their dog can whip out a document online for free.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the issue is that people do not know how to use the tools. I've used both LaTeX and Word extensively and i'll stick with Word.

On the basis of using Word 2007 and above, I can separate content from layout quite happily, have piles of templates I have written, I can programatically control it (I have written authoring platforms on top of Word), I can merge and diff documents from my version control system, embed information from other programs (this can be a sod in LaTeX) and I can typeset math quite happily. I can also collaborate with other people quite easily which is not the case with LaTeX.</comment>


How to Build Your Own Nintendo Switch to Starve Out Online Price Gougers - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/gallery/ku9zlNu <comment><USER2> You've got to be kidding! Building a "new" Nintendo Switch from scratch?

I guess some people really want to play Switch games!</comment>


Play a game, plant a tree, help restore the rainforest  - <AUTHOR> http://greenwala.com/treewala

<comment><AUTHOR> Today we launched a new game called treewala on greenwala.com. Just by answering multiple choice vocabulary questions users can help to fund the planting of trees and fight climate change.

There is an ad at the bottom of the Treewala game that changes when you answer a question. Each time you view a new page, the banner ad switches. That change is worth a tiny amount of money to the company sponsoring the ad. To start off with, every 20 correct quiz answers results in a tree being planted in Columbia, South America. Here's why it matters.

The project we are planting trees with is called Las Gaviotas. The community's leader Paolo Lugari and his colleagues have created an economically viable community that runs on solar and wind power. In a place where little grew in 1984, there is now an 8,000 hectare polyculture rainforest with more than 250 species represented. The community has a vested interest in the health of the forest because their income depends on it and is derived mainly from the cashews, jatropha, palm oil and Caribbean pine resin they harvest.

Sustainability is about more than planting trees to stabilize our global climate. It's also about finding ways to elevate more than 1.1 billion people worldwide out of extreme poverty while restoring the ecosystem so future generations will be able to thrive. Gaviotas is a perfect example of how we can do all three, a particular challenge in a country torn apart by civil war.

Las Gaviotas only has resources to plant one million trees a year. That's why we are talking to other non-profits that work with developing economies in Africa and Asia to plant harvestable polyculture forests for sustainable development. We expect Treewala to be a great success and exceed our goal. Please invite your friends to play the game, post it on your blog, tell your mom about it and help us plant millions of trees and fight climate change.</comment>