Exoplanet discovery count by year - <AUTHOR> http://exoplanet.eu/diagrams/?t=h&f=&x=discovered&xmin=&xmax=&y=raw&ymin=&ymax=

<comment><USER2> When I saw this on HN, I rewatched the _Cosmos_ episode ("The Backbone of the Night", aired on Nov 1980) where Carl Sagan is lecturing sixth graders in a Brooklyn school (the one he attended as a kid) on techniques to search for exoplanets and then says (from <http://www.american- buddha.com/backbone.night.htm>):

Well, both of these methods are being used, and by the time that you people are as old as I am, we should know for all the nearest stars whether they have planets going around them or not. We might know dozens or even hundreds of other planetary systems and see if they are like our own, or very different, or no other planets going around other stars at all. That will happen in your lifetime, and it will be the first time in the history of the world that anybody found out really if there are planets around other stars.

His stress on "even hundreds" shows that even he thought this figure was unlikely. Sagan was 47 at that time, so assuming the kids were about 12, he was hypothesizing into 35 years to the future, to 2015. He would have been pleasantly surprised at the progress so far, I think.

I wonder if any one of those kids have looked at this page and thought of that day.

<comment><USER3> The amazing thing is that he was more optimistic than most astronomers at the time with regards to extrasolar planets. It's a funny thing, prior to the mid-1990s there had only been extremely incomplete searches for exoplanets, and they all came up negative. But if you looked at the search space of those studies you see right away that they were really quite pitiful. I suppose this is one of those "effort trumps reason" situations, as a lot of effort were put into searches though they had almost no hope of finding planets. And yet those efforts led to a bias against the idea that planet formation could be common, and a bias against the scientific value of looking for planets.

At the onset of the great exoplanet discovery breakthrough in the mid '90s only a few very meagerly funded teams working were actually searching. Once they started to find planets then the astronomical community started paying attention, and funding as well as access to the best observatories in the world started pouring in.

Also, an interesting point of fact is that Sagan was actually hugely excessively optimistic. The two techniques for exoplanet discovery he describes are direct observation through occultation or deep nulling of stellar light and astrometry. As it turns out, these techniques are very, very difficult to use and we have not actually built any special-purpose spacecraft that use either method. To date only one planet has been detected through astrometry, for example. But there are methods which work rather well (doppler radial velocity and transit detection) though they were not familiar to Sagan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From what I understand, most known exoplanets are gas giants, and almost all orbit their sun at about the distance of Mercury, because those are easier to detect. That leaves a lot of harder-to-see exoplanets we can only guess at. There are about 20 stars within a dozen light years, so I wish we could send probes to them and take a closer look. It would be a gift to our grandchildren. The risk is that in the time they would take to get there, our detection capabilities may have improved so much they'd wind up being useless, but I sort of doubt it. Being 7-12 light years closer has got to make a difference.

EDIT: Here is an amazing video showing all known exoplanets orbiting one star, so you can see their relative sizes, distances, etc.:

<http://vimeo.com/47408739>

<comment><USER5> Here is a similar visualization in webgl, superimposed on our solar system for reference: <http://www.asterank.com/exoplanets>

Nearly every single exoplanet discovered is within the orbit of Mercury.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> These are confirmed exoplanets, totalling 872 so far. Kepler and other missions have found probably tens of thousands more planets that are in unconfirmed status and will take years to confirm. If I may speculate, and take SpaceX and Planetary Resources to be successful 10 years out, we might be able to build absolutely astonishingly large telescopes to resolve continent- scale features on exoplanets - and have discovered and mapped millions of them in the Milky Way.

<comment><USER6> By "confirmed" do you mean we've directly observed the planets as opposed to calculating that they exist due to changes in the light from their stars? Regardless I'm very excited about increasing our understanding of these planets.. Sounds like NASA is planning to launch a telescope specifically for discovering more about planets as well[1]

[1][http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/apr/HQ_13-088_Astro_Exp...](http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/apr/HQ_13-088_Astro_Explorer_Mission_.html)

<comment><USER7> I believe confirmation is usually just a process of double-checking data and waiting to see a regular cycle of wobbles or occultations. Directly observing a planet with current telescopes is difficult but it has been done:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Exoplanets_detected_by...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Exoplanets_detected_by_direct_imaging)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice illustration. But the x-axis scaling seems a bit wrong to me. Like there's only 8 or 9 years in each decade.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not to be that guy, but the fact that it plots 2013 and 2014 really messes up the impact of this chart. When I first saw it, I was thinking "whoa, we must have severely cut funding for such a huge dropoff!"

<comment><AUTHOR> It just takes an extra bit of thought, that's all; look at the 2013 value and then remember it's only _April_. Then think about what 2014 might look like.

Edit: Here's the graph just up to 2012: [http://exoplanet.eu/diagrams/?t=h&f=&x=discovered...](http://exoplanet.eu/diagrams/?t=h&f=&x=discovered&xmin=1985&xmax=2012&y=raw&ymin=&ymax=)

<comment><USER10> 2012 shows a drop down to about 150 from 200 in 2011. So there is a drop off. I think? Or perhaps the graph is just horrible, it's very hard to tell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know if exoplanets can find a stable orbit around binary stars? I read recently that 50-80% of stars are multi-star systems. It seems like it'd be hard for planets even to form with such a varying magnetic field.

<comment><USER11> Yes, actually, and some have recently been found. [http://phys.org/news/2013-03-capture-picture-tatooine- planet...](http://phys.org/news/2013-03-capture-picture-tatooine-planet- orbiting.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> e^x

<comment><USER8> Just eyeballing, but I don't think there's enough data to call that exponential growth. And the log plot doesn't look like it's fitting a straight line -- it's curving down a bit at the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> By the time we achieve technology where it is feasible for our species to utilize these exoplanets we will have sufficient technology for humanity to live normal lives without planets altogether.

The future of our species is huddling around the warmth of the campfire (sun) and using raw materials from the asteroid belt to create structures orbiting the sun, until we create a sphere around the sun and all space is exhausted... then.. maybe after another few hundreds after that point, will these planets become useful. But not for reasons we would think. Perhaps for research purposes to see if humans then have the capability to tune back in to evolution after a thousand years of being pampered and letting the DNA deteriorate by eliminating survival of the fittest.</comment>


This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/132.html?1

<comment><USER2> I understand what the blog post is trying to convey and I agree that programming is a wonderful craft, allowing anyone who knows how to code an amazing world of possibilities.

However, the way the blog post tried to convey this, it falls down for two reasons:

1 ) If you were someone who had studied media rather than programming you could film your own 'news' channel and upload it to youtube if you thought you could disrupt the news industry. This being the equivalent of sitting in your bedroom at home making a site or an app the way you want to. Thus this freedom to express your ideas does not just apply to programmers.

2 ) Just assuming that the news industry team don't know what they're doing and as a new hire media intern you would know how to fix it for them if only they let you, is almost like being a new intern at a software house and expecting to go in and tell everyone they need to change their methods or practices because you know best.

I expect you'd get similar resistance to making them change, as in both examples you as an intern have little experience compared to the people in either industry. What from an outside observer (or new hire) may seem dumb, perhaps is the most effective methods after years of A / B testing by the people within that organisation.

<comment><USER3> This article makes me wish HN had a downvote button for submissions - its some upbeat crap with an example that is debatable. It caries neither novelty nor intellectual investment.

SAGE has been used.

<comment><USER4> SAGE? I know of the herb and the mathematical Python simplification.

<comment><USER3> [http://dis.4chan.org/read/lounge/1195539988](http://dis.4chan.org/read/lounge/1195539988)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got into programming as a kid because to me it was like electronics (I make stuff and it works! I'm almost 40 now and still cannot get over the feeling.) but without the hassle of running out of 2k resistors (you never run out of Z80 assembly instructions!) not to mention some of the harder-to-get devices.

So I didn't think as big as the author (fixing world's issues) but the purely practical aspect of the freedom he describes was enough to get me in.

<comment><USER6> That hits the nail on the head for me. Programming is inventing, but stripped of the fiddliness, expense and irreversibility of tinkering with physical stuff. Plus of course there's the Internet now, so if you make something cool then you can share it with dozens/thousands/billions of others.

<comment><USER7> "Stripped of the fiddliness" \- have you ever tried to debug CSS?! :P

<comment><USER8> Have you ever tried to debug an electronic circuit?

I'd say the "fiddliness" of electronics is orders of magnitude above any high level software development. Turns out you have the wrong resistor? 2 day wait for a new one. One slip of a wire? Chip's blown. 2 day wait for a new one. Weird behaviour? If you don't have an oscilloscope you're completely in the dark. Debugging CSS may be tricky, but there's a suite of tools available which are yours in a few minutes. The power available in free debugging tools is equivalent to a 6 figure rack of electronics equipment.

<comment><USER9> All of that is true, but it isn't as bad as it once was. You can buy a 100 MHz oscilloscope for ~300 USD now; cheaper than an old used Tek, and better. Resistors are so cheap, buy a kit of them. Since the internet, not only can you get parts cheap, you can get them pretty quickly too; though, I have to admit though, my progress on a weekend project was halted Saturday because I had procrastinated ordering a few parts.

At least for basic electronic circuits, or even simple software projects, the difficulty becomes apparent when you move outside your normal comfort zone. Debugging even simple software is quite vexing to newcomers; I heard someone say it's like a blind person learning to paint portraits (though the one who said it wasn't blind).

>The power available in free debugging tools is equivalent to a 6 figure rack of electronics equipment.

They always charged too much for that crap. Thank goodness for open standards and cheap digital stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While this is true, and it's a great freedom that's not offered in many industries, it can lead to an unrealistic "I will build the perfect system from scratch in my parents' basement" effect. It's equally important to realize how much we rely on the work of others, and how little we'd get done if we actually tried to reinvent the news station/wheel/web stack.

</comment><comment><USER11> The argument is flawed. Every job has its own hassles, limits, dogma and so on. This applies to programming also. You might end up working with a team, which uses organizational schemes you hate, in a language that you dislike using tools you consider obsolete (See Linus Torvalds famous talk about git). In other situations re-writing the tool, is far from realistic, so you do professional patching, even though you _hate it_.

It's an awesome thing to like your work. But it's unrealistic to expect to do everything with your own terms and getting paid for that.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the way Cosma Shalizi described it to aspiring statisticians:

INDEPENDENCE: otherwise, you rely on someone else always having made exactly the right tool for you, and giving it to you.

HONESTY: otherwise, you end up distorting the problem to match the tools you happen to have.

CLARITY: turning your method into something a machine can do forces you to discipline your thinking and make it communicable; and science is public.

</comment><comment><USER13> It works on many levels in programming. You decide the algorithm, how to break down the problem in smaller parts, the method names, the variable names, the layout etc. There is a lot of freedom, and you get to create things almost every day. In addition, what you create is actually useful to somebody else. Plus, you get to see how all the moving parts (figuratively) interact and execute when the program runs (in a debugger, or following log statements or similar). Quite a thrill. That's why I still love programming after all these years ([http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love- coding/](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/)).

</comment><comment><USER14> "You can fix things. You can make new and amazing things." \- yeah, but as a front-end developer, I still have to program using messy Javascript. I want packages, classes, public, private and protected, abstract, getters, setters all running natively - without the hacks or superset/compiled languages (ie. Typescript, Coffeescript, etc).

I miss Actionscript (not that it was perfect), but to remain commercially viable (and for other understandable reasons in the Flash vs HTML debate that I wont go into), I now write Javascript in a way not too dissimilar to how I used to write Actionscript nearly a decade ago! Things could be better.

Ultimately, what I'm saying is that being a web developer is not all about freedom, many concessions need to be made. I'd love the freedom to say f __* IE. Forever.

We know there are better ways of doing things. But when it comes to the web, we have no choice to wait until it as a unified whole catches up.

Errr... to quote: "So it's not likely I could just step-in and make sweeping reforms".

</comment><comment><USER15> Apples to oranges, sorry. Creating an alternative is not the same as taking on the original.

Sure, you can write a better SalesForce at home, but making it displace the real thing is exactly the same effort as making a TV station adopt your new newscast format.

</comment><comment><USER16> I dont like attitude that programmers have some sort of super powers. Sure you can put your tiny script on github, but there are zillions of half baked repos there (including mine).

To change local news you could start blog, podcasts or video tube channel. Single person can bring down tv channel or corrupted major, this happened many times before.

Internet is like amplifier. But sometimes it just multiples number of people who will ignore you.

</comment><comment><USER17> "You can fix things. You can make new and amazing things." This could and should apply equally to teams as well as individuals working alone (albeit taking different approaches to working).

What's interesting here is the comparison between achieving something as a team/in an organisation and working alone, which is ultimately what the author is advocating in order to gain certain freedoms. However, it seems to me that one can only achieve so much as an individual and this includes effecting change on a large scale because it takes many hands and cooperation to stir a big pot.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is not entirely true. Social media & blogging have indeed provided an alternative to TV news. It has actually changed the "entrenched structure". Even established media giants use tweets or posts to spread information. How many of us prefer tuning in to local news station instead of just logging into fb/t/g+ to stay updated? These platforms have been built by programmers who I am sure are happy about the impact they have created.

</comment><comment><USER19> >But if you're writing an iOS game, an HTML 5 web app, a utility that automates work so you can focus on the creative fun stuff, then you don't have to fall back on the existing, comfortable solutions that developers before you chose simply because they too were trapped by the patterns of the solutions that came before them.

This isn't really true at all. It's very difficult to go against the existing standards. If you think the standards for the web are stupid then you're simply out of luck. Back to the desktop with you. What about all the hardware being optimized for C? How many people work in some language they hate because there's money in it and they have to eat?

The systems we have aren't designed for high level programming. Right from the start you are hobbled by this choice. Then someone decides to water things down further by enforcing a high level language on anything running in the browser environment so you don't even get your nice "raw performance" for the things the hardware is actually good at. And this high level environment isn't a a good one, even considered within the constraints set by the hardware! Then there's C - an awful language even for the hardware tailored for it, but many are stuck using it for one reason or another?

</comment><comment><USER20> Funny that the scene for his analogy in the beginning ends with the image of talking heads bantering about a fluff piece, and then he follows with a fluff piece for programmers. The genius is in the mocking subtext.

</comment><comment><USER21> Very well said! I made a similar point in a TEDx talk I have last year on the topic: [http://christiangenco.com/2012/12/01/tedxsmu.html](http://christiangenco.com/2012/12/01/tedxsmu.html)

The bit about not having to pay any regard for the way things have been done in the past was particularly resonant.</comment>


Deep Learning for NLP without Magic (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.socher.org/index.php/DeepLearningTutorial/DeepLearningTutorial

<comment><USER2> This tutorial is excellent, and Richard Socher has been doing some really fascinating (though complicated) work with deep learning for NLP. I also have a few other good references for people who want to investigate this area.

One of the most insightful comments I have seen about deep learning for NLP is a reddit r/machinelearning comment seen in this post [1]. As the poster in that thread mentioned, much of the theory about using neural networks for NLP tasks was laid out pretty clearly in a paper by Yoshua Bengio from 2003 [2]. At a high level, the basic learner is very similar to many of the other deep architectures for images and audio.

There is also a pretty great blog post [3] by Radim Rehurek (author of gensim) about how he implemented word2vec (a "deep learning"-style model for text) in Python, while also getting a performance improvement over the C version!

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2doi7e/what...](http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2doi7e/what_should_i_know_before_taking_on_word2vec/)

[2] [http://jmlr.org/papers/v3/bengio03a.html](http://jmlr.org/papers/v3/bengio03a.html)

[3] [http://radimrehurek.com/2014/02/word2vec- tutorial/](http://radimrehurek.com/2014/02/word2vec-tutorial/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would really like to do some neural network stuff, but i really have trouble reading the math. For example, they have a maxent classifier in the slides but I'd have no idea how to convert that to code.

Any resources to learn that stuff?

<comment><USER2> There is a nice tutorial here [1] about max-ent classifiers. Ultimately in neural networks there are usually a number of cost functions you can use for the last layer - softmax or cross-entropy are other possibilities that may be easier to understand, though possibly less performant for NLP tasks.

I thought the introduction to neural networks from Andrew Ng's coursera course (even though it meant writing MATLAB) was quite good, and allows you to implement backprop, cost functions, etc. while still having some other helper code to make things easier. I highly recommend working through that course if you are intersted in ML in general [2].

[1] [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~klein/papers/maxent-tutorial- sli...](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~klein/papers/maxent-tutorial-slides.pdf)

[2] [https://www.coursera.org/course/ml](https://www.coursera.org/course/ml)</comment></comment>


How the HNews tech community helped us rethink our fashion startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seat14a.com/post/36062192812/how-the-hnews-tech-community-helped-us-rethink-our

<comment><USER2> Can I ask, why the opacity hover effect on the post? Personal I'd prefer just to have darker text and more vibrant image from the get-go rather than needing to hover to do so.

Edit: I can see from the blog home this effect makes sense for post selection. Just feel it doesn't work well on the page of an individual post.

</comment><comment><USER3> You should consider finding someone to do your copy, the grammar errors (e.g. "you're" vs "your") on the main site really spoil the style.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> link (or link more clearly) to your main site from your blog!

\+ update your shipping times in "how it works" if they have chaged.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done. Thanks. www.seat14a.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Leaning on a global community like HN and only shipping to the US and Canada? Come on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently on our form we are just taking US and Canada. But we are more than welcome to cater to international patrons (<http://screencast.com/t/07dH4rgYS9kj>), if interested please shoot us an email at firstname.lastname@example.com and a curator/stylist will directly reach out and take care of your order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couple of things:

1) Mixing your Tumblr with your blog is confusing. Yes, I know Tumblr _is_ a blog, but you're using Tumblr in the "tumbly" way and so it's hard to tell which of the many photos represent your actual collection and which is just merely stuff that you've liked and re-blogged. It's fine to have a tumblr to represent the tastes of the brand, but I'm not sure it works here as your official blog space too.

2) I'm still not sure what the service is. The copy talks about working with an individual, local stylist, but there's only one example of an outfit (the Hauz Khas Hipster). Is there a different look/stylist for every customer? Or do we get variations of the HK Hipster? Or is the HK Hipster the only selection so far available? If not the latter, then it'd be helpful to have a page showing the various ensembles that your stylists have come up with.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1). Most of our posts are visual, so a grid theme made the most sense here.

2). The ensembles are volume based (magazine like), the curent volume is the HK Hipster (for right now our only volume) so the styling will be similar to what you see on the website. A user chooses a base ensemble and then they work with their stylist who then figures out the material, colors and sizing. Typically no 2 ensembles are the same.

Hope that helps and thanks for your feedback.

<comment><USER6> This helps but I think you really need to show more examples...I'm not the most style-focused person but I imagine most of your target audience is in the same predicament I am: I see the example you've posted, yet I cannot think of ways to better it...which is why I would be interested in the individual stylist in the first place.

Even within the single-view that you have, there needs to be more detail. Cloesups of each piece, for example (the stone pendant necklace can't even be seen). I think the product page could be much more inviting with more attention to loving-detail over each piece of the ensemble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its good to see this feedback - Show HN usually gets a good, constructive criticism from the HN community, and its done mostly I feel from a sense of supporting a fellow-traveller.

However its nice that the results of that criticism get back to HN, it helps motivate for the next one.</comment>


Taffy DB : A JavaScript database for your browser - <AUTHOR> http://taffydb.com/ <comment><USER2> moved comment to other thread.</comment>


Kilogram to Pounds Chart - <AUTHOR> http://converters360.com/weight/kilograms-to-pounds-conversion.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> It is used to generate dynamic charts from Kilogram unit to Pound unit</comment>


Boston Companies Using Django - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/31/boston-companies-using-django/

<comment><USER2> Interesting to see Boston.com, BU, Children's, Harvard medical and a bunch of people using Django because of the availability of Python devs.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's awesome to see so many other companies in the area using Django. Too bad they spelled my last name wrong :(

<comment><AUTHOR> haha, sorry jnoller, I got it directly off the spreadsheet. I'll make the change now</comment></comment>


Like Hot or Not for design geeks - <AUTHOR> http://piccck.me <comment><USER2> Love this. Couple quick comments, hope they're helpful!

1) Page load time is a bit slow, so it kills the desire to keep going because an action is going to make me wait. Maybe insert some mechanics like CubeDuel, where a fade in and fade out happens, buying you time.

2) Let people submit two different logos for a fee, and promise them X hundred reviews within a day. I would pay for that today.

3) Don't bias my voting by showing me the results before I vote. Show the results once I've voted and let me know if I'm "right" or "not". It's almost discovery at that point, I want to know how I'm "performing" so to speak.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool. If only they would integrate this with statistical research methods that offers the "geeks" info about themselves based on the photos, logos, designs, etc. that they chose. I once participated in a study similar to that at University and it was quite interesting. A photographical Myers-Briggs… my $.02</comment>


Minimum Respectable Product - <AUTHOR> http://ejw.com/2010/07/essay/mrp <comment><USER2> Um... "Viable" implies respectable, no?

<comment><USER3> I was going to post the same thing.

Ultimately, the key sentence he writes is: _Do not release crap, and use minimum viable product as your justification._

But do we really need to re-define MVP to say that?

<comment><USER4> Apparently so, since I've seen people talk about MVPs that didn't function. How is that an MVP? I even saw one comment that said someone had produced an MVP without a product at all.

<comment><USER3> An MVP without a product? That's called a Dry Test.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kim Dotcom Avoids "Unsafe" .Com, Picks Me.Ga for New Megaupload - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-avoids-unsafe-com-picks-me-ga-for-new-megaupload-121101/ <comment><USER2> Gabon's .ga TLD is run by Gabon Telecom. 51% of Gabon Telecom is owned by Maroc Telecom. In turn, 51% of Maroc Telecom is owned by media conglomerate Vivendi. There is no escape.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would think Russia, China or Iran would be better candidates. How steadfast is a little telecom branch in Gabon going to hold out against US pressure?

I can definitely understand not going for a com/org/net but beyond that it seems more like Gabon fit the name and the grandiose explanation came afterwards.

<comment><USER4> Iran and China could censor on political and cultural grounds - tienanmen, pron, etc. Max Butler hosted his CC forum in Iran at one time, but I guess banking fraud is quite neutral in said terms :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It has to be said, that's one of the worlds best domain names. Can't have been cheap!

</comment><comment><USER4> Changing his name to Kim Mega would be a great stunt.</comment>


Astronomers Gain New Insight into Magnetic Field of Sun and Its Kin - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/astronomers-gain-new-insight-into-magnetic-field-of-sun-and-its-kin.html <comment><AUTHOR> Publication in Nature (doi:10.1038/nature18638)

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7613/abs/nature18...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7613/abs/nature18638.html)</comment>


Preparing Rackspace Data Centers for Hurricane Sandy - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/preparing-our-data-centers-for-hurricane-sandy/

<comment><USER2> I always found it interesting at Google data centers their 'power fail' checklist started with 'call for fuel'. Basically as soon as power failed the diesel generators would start gulping fuel like there was no tomorrow.

Seeing reports of data centers experiencing flooding I really wonder what best practices are for a data center in a flood zone. Not like you could float it or anything. It hasn't been on my list of worries (Santa Clara doesn't flood much, more likely to fall into a crack in the ground). Anyone here who has an action plan for flooding at their data center? I recall seeing a nuclear plant that had a levee wall, that was pretty impressive.

<comment><USER3> Makes sense - assuming supply lines are cut then you'll need to get in before the thundering herd clobbers access to fuel and jacks the price up to uneconomic short term levels. I'm surprised they don't keep large strategic oil reserves on site like the military does.

<comment><USER2> As it turns out I know the answer to that one. Its a question of hazardous materials. You need a permit to store fuel on site (and you have to get regular inspections to insure it isn't leaking into the groundwater) and the permits get more expensive the more fuel you keep. At some point the permitting authority would probably change your business classification from 'data center' to 'fuel depot' if you went overboard :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is nice that they talk about this - however these are not Rackspace standards but standard industrywide, some of which have been in place since the 1960s, when ATT revised their plans for central office facilities in the wake of riots in some American cities.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is frustrating for customers outside of the US to have to look up and convert these unfamiliar time zones. As a company that services customers all over the planet, why not post UTC?

Thankfully though, they managed to convert the generator run times from the completely unfamiliar "hours" unit into the much more universal "days" unit. </sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER6> This link returns a 404 error for me.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sweet, sweet irony. <http://cl.ly/image/2G1Z1A3c1S0c>

</comment><comment><USER8> I hope preparing didn't mean putting up a 404 page. =)

But given the comments above, it seems likely that the issue wasn't a result of lack of power/gas. Interested to find out what failed with the preparations.</comment>


Skype for Web - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.skype.com/2014/11/14/please-welcome-skype-for-web-beta/

<comment><USER2> Is this actually available? There aren't any links to it in the post and I can't find anything by logging into my account.

<comment> k-mcgrady From the post:

"look out for access to Skype for Web on Skype.com in the coming weeks"

and

"We're making Skype for Web available to small number of existing and new users to begin with, and gradually rolling out worldwide in the coming months – look out for an invite when you sign in to your Skype account on Skype.com."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sococo for web has worked for some time now (shameless plug). We call it 'guest access' since its usually for people that want to participate but don't have the regular client.

Its tricky - you need a web portal for audio and video streaming, and some special servers to bridge to the common media servers for switching. Most open source is about playing streams, so there are issue with latency and dynamic configuration (bugs in the Open Source libraries).

</comment><comment><USER4> Using WebRTC I assume? If so it may mean there are more devs contributing/posting bugs for the WebRTC project which can only benefit everyone.

Edit: the description says "Mac OS: Safari 6 and above." Safari doesn't support WebRTC and Skype says "no downloads". So either this document is incorrect or Skype is using Flash.

</comment><comment><USER5> How does this work? I assumed the ORTC stuff was incompatible with SDP based browsers (FF, Chrome), thought I'm sure those tokens can be translated. I'm more so curious how Safari is supported, as without a plugin I didn't think it had support for WebRTC.

</comment><comment><USER6> long overdue...

</comment><comment><USER7> anyone tested it?</comment>


AMD wants to standardize the external GPU - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/amd-wants-to-standardise-the-external-gpu/ <comment><USER2> I've been hearing this will happen ever since the first MacBooks started to be released with Thunderbolt; it seems the market for those who would actually buy an expensive external card/enclosure would already be fairly limited (if you need something on a desktop, why not just a separate highly optimized gaming rig?), and on top of that, it sounds like AMD is planning on adding yet another new external adapter/standard, and not leveraging Thunderbolt 2 or USB C.

Sounds like yet another flash in the pan to me. VR could be a killer feature, of course, and price would determine the success, but unless they use a standard connector and don't require all manufacturers to add in yet another display/bus to the thin laptops, I don't see this going anywhere.

<comment><USER3> Also I think the thin laptops are a big part of the problem with the PC industry.

They are trying so hard to compete with phones they aren't doing anything to improve performance. Back in the day you could buy a new PC every 2 years and get a big performance boost, today that is not so. Get a cheap netbook and put in an SSD and you'll get something that feels more responsive than an i7 machine saddled with a mechanical drive.

No wonder people are not buying PCs. I remember when Tom's hardware used to be interesting but for a long time they have been colonized by this "power efficiency" thing which is really bogus because you can work really hard to power optimize your machine and then some stupid flash ad makes your CPU spin at 100% and it is all for nought. People buy things because of product attributes they can feel, not because of attributes which require careful measurement under controlled conditions

<comment><USER4> I would much rather have a laptop that can get through a full 16 hour day when necessary than one that was twice as fast.

<comment><USER5> I'd much rather not have a laptop (for work).

Study after study have shown that screen real estate and system performance improve our work output, let us use more of our working memory for task- critical state, etc.

If you _need_ portability, then sure, laptops are necessary trade-off so that you can get any work done at all. However, that's all they are: a trade-off.

It's a shame if we're _only_ optimizing for use cases that are ultimately regressive.

<comment><USER4> Most of the time, I use my laptop docked to two large monitors. But even still, I value the ability to take it unplugged for 12+ hours at a time when I'm travelling much more than I would value it being faster.

<comment><USER5> Why not both? I have a few laptops, and a high-end desktop; I get the best possible performance when I'm working at a desk, and acceptable performance when I'm traveling.

<comment><USER4> It's a pain keeping multiple computers in sync. And my laptop is a 2.7GHz Core i7 with 20GB of RAM that's more than fast enough for anything I do.

<comment><USER5> It's really not a pain; just update the SCM working copy.

If your project has tendrils into the local system, that's the real problem to fix, because it's going to introduce pointless inefficiency at every level: new developer setup, production deployment, support for enterprise- installation, and ... inability to use the ideal hardware. available.

Performance translates directly into working efficiency. There's no such thing as "fast enough", there's only "too expensive".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title is quite misleading ;)

There has been already a standard for about a decade and it's called PCI Express :) I had an external GPU setup about 8 years ago using the ExpressCard slot which worked at 1.6Gbit/s at the time (about 1/4th of what PCIe(1) X16 offered, but still more than enough for even upper mid-range GPU's of the day).

Since ThunberBolt came out you could run external GPU's without any issues or even performance bottlenecks.

The PCIe(3.0) x4 on TB3 these days offers more bandwidth than PCIe(2.0) x16 does and it's more than enough to saturate any high end GPU on the market today or in the foreseeable future.

Intel with IRIS and other IGP's and MSFT through DX12 and WDDM improvements support pretty much GPU hotswap which make this a plug and play setup (historically if you wanted to use an external GPU you had to do a full system reboot to initiate it).

But this the main problem for AMD atm, Thunderbolt and pretty much the entire eco-system for external GPU's today is based on Intel techonlogy, AMD has yet to implement TB or managed to create a competitor to it and it has tried and failed twice already - LightingBolt which was later re-branded and redesigned as DockPort.

So if AMD want to support external GPU's all they need to do is bite the bullet and implement TB at the cost of their pride and some royalty fees, but as it seems now all they want to do is get some PR and then abandon the project complaining about market monopoly like they've done quite a few times in the past.

Shame what have became of AMD, I loved them in the Athlon x64 days, too bad they tried to play dirty early on and then got fixated on the same tech they had without capitalizing on their market success to push it forward, they thought they can play the same game as Intel and they failed, poorly.

AMD's playbook is leading them to a dead end, at this point i hope they'll spin off their GPU department into a separate company that might get back on the right path that ATI has been going towards (which oddly enough also hit a dead end because they were too "cool" to play ball after their meteoric rise during the R300 vs GeforeFX days).

But hey Ars seems to like rooting for the "underdog" even when it doesn't deserve it, but at least the amount of fanboyism in comment section made me laugh a bit.

<comment><USER7> What do you want them to do? Create an open alternative? They tried that and failed. Implement thunderbolt? Sorry, that's Intel proprietary, no can do.

It's not just a matter of license fees. AFAICT, Intel won't even let anybody else create chips for cables or peripherals, let alone host chips.

<comment><USER6> Yes because they can't either develop their own controller or say implement the one from say Texas Instruments?

All they need to do is have a TB controller and have a free PCIe interconnect, from looking at say the Promontory chipset (AMD's answer to Intel's PCH) you can just drop it in without sweating.

<comment><USER8> Thunderbolt controller chips are only made by Intel and AMD is too proud to tell PC vendors to put an Intel chip in every AMD laptop.

<comment><USER6> What is this for then? [http://www.ti.com/ww/en/analog/tps22985_thunderbolt/?DCMP=sc...](http://www.ti.com/ww/en/analog/tps22985_thunderbolt/?DCMP=scblog&HQS=hval- hvl-apl-thunderbolt-awire-20140326-lp-en)

<comment><USER8> Those are little 50-cent chips that sit next to the real Thunderbolt controller (a small grey box in the diagram) which is only made by Intel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting that USB Type-C specification itself has an example of PCI Express docking solution, "5.1.4 Example Alternate Mode – USB/PCIe Dock", page 168.

</comment><comment><USER10> How about the Alienware Graphics Amplifier? [http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/ali...](http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/alienware- graphics-amplifier)

<comment><USER11> Which requires a custom connector/port. AMD aims to create a standard. From the article:

> On the other hand, AMD has tried to standardise the external GPU before—and > failed miserably. In 2008 AMD launched its XGH external graphics standard, > which essentially just took the pins from PCIe slot and passed them through > to an external connector (a solution copied by Alienware for its Graphics > Amplifier). This was a smart idea at the time, particularly as USB 2.0 and > ExpressCard didn't offer anywhere near the amount of bandwidth required for > a high-end GPU. Unfortunately, very few laptop manufacturers used XGH, with > Fujitsu Siemens' Graphics Booster being one of the rare commercial examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Surely I can't be the only person who remembers the old HP/Apollo PA/RISC workstations that had external framebuffers/GPUs that "stacked" with the main system chassis and had their own interface cables, power supplies, cooling, etc...

</comment><comment><USER13> I would love to have a thin and light laptop as my daily driver that I can plug into a Desktop dock with a GPU for when I want to game.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not sure I really get the point unless they start building the GPUs into monitors/TVs.

</comment><comment><USER15> I really hope this goes further than DockPort Plus.</comment>


The Laws of Reflection - <AUTHOR> http://blog.golang.org/2011/09/laws-of-reflection.html

<comment><USER2> So, could you write a (restricted) interpreter that converts a string to a series of reflect method calls? That'd be pretty cool. I don't see a mechanism for calling basic operators or converting, so it looks like it might be _really_ restricted..</comment>


Admit it: The coronavirus apocalypse is kind of fun for you - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-cozy-catastrophe-americans-secretly-crave/ <comment><USER2> I appreciate having my face rubbed in the fact that while I risk my life and carry on as normal a large proportion of my countries population is getting a sabbatical funded by the government. Thank you.

Apocalypse porn with a token paragraph about some people having a hard time. Please if you are having a great time right now you owe it to yourself and all of those who aren't to be productive. Whether that's helping the vulnerable, teaching your kids, teaching yourself new skills and so on. Trust me you will wish you had done this in 6 months when you are asked in a multitude of scenarios what you did during the covid outbreak.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _In the 1970s, science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss coined the term "cozy > catastrophe" to describe a fictional plot in which a bourgeois protagonist > finds pleasure while the world goes to shit._

After reading the article, this isn't a fictional plot. It's a sadly accurate prediction. The article's writer couldn't have proved Aliss's point more. It's tone def, divorced from reality and shows no genuine concern for how this will seriously and negatively affect the majority of people. This is the literal definition of irony which like everything else in this article seems lost with the writer.</comment>


Audi cars 'will talk to traffic lights', firm says - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37098513 <comment><USER2> Do I hear "arbitrary external input"? Yay, let's go hack me a row of green lights! (In other words, this sort of input needs to be sanitized ten ways to Sunday)</comment>


Support waning for RC4 after NewEgg Patent Troll Victory? - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html <comment><USER2> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNaeW- FyZXU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNaeW-FyZXU) My 2014 Miss Arizona USA behind the scenes pageant video. From Butt glue to Bullying</comment>


Google to enforce SSL encryption on developer APIs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/18/google_apis_require_ssl/ <comment><USER2> This is good, now if they could enforce SSL for adsense.</comment>


Why Cloning Is The New Gaming Business Model - <AUTHOR> http://ralphbarbagallo.com/2012/03/23/why-cloning-is-the-new-gaming-business-model/

<comment><USER2> This isn't a new business model. When a company has a huge amount of resources, it's pretty easy to cherry-pick smaller independent companies by borrowing their ideas.</comment>


Call for Ideas to Raise the Savings Rate - <AUTHOR> http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/call-for-ideas-to-raise-the-savings-rate/?hp <comment><USER2> The only one that should win is "a government policy", specifically raising real interest rates. Note that a strong deflation (which we just might be in) can have a significant real interest rate with a nominal rate of 0%.</comment>


Why is your Minimal Viable Product (MVP) really just a PoS - <AUTHOR> http://vincentjordan.com/2012/01/why-is-your-minimal-viable-product-mvp-really-just-a-pos/ <comment><USER2> A product is "viable" if it generates enough value for a group of customers that they find it worth paying for.

The "minimum viable" product is the product that does the minimum set of things to be viable.

Viability and quality are usually orthogonal concerns. Viability and _polish_ are especially likely to be orthogonal.

There are markets you can serve in which polish matters a great deal. Not coincidentally, these are markets covered carefully by people like Robert Scoble. Whether you're going to need to genuflect to Scoble's notion of your "viability" is an important question to address when choosing the market you want to serve.

<comment><USER3> Would you consider WikiPedia a minimally viable product?

<comment><USER2> I don't understand the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the key thing people are forgetting is the V in MVP. It has to be viable. I keep seeing people building minimal products, but nothing that's viable.

It's also a factor of people spreading themselves too thin. You don't have to do a dozen features and make them all minimal. Do the 2 or 3 that are core to the application and make them full-featured. Who knows? That might be all you need.

<comment><USER5> Yup.

If I can't use your product for what it's meant to do, then is it really a minimum viable product?

We already have another term for software that doesn't yet exist: vaporware.

What I hate most are the landing pages setup to gauge interest. Usually they have a name like:

"Flrghx.ly: social meets socal"

Which, of course, tells me everything. Throw in a few logos, like TechCrunch, Memefest, Facepalm, and CNN, and a few quotes from JS from SF, California on how he "Finally can socialize his socal social-mates using Flrghx on his iPhone."

And then you have the "Hey give us your email! We won't spam you, we promise, we hate spam! But after 7 months of not hearing from us, we'll notify you of our launch, and then we'll subscribe you to our newsletter, and then send you updates that include notifications from our sponsors. But no spam!"

Oh, and if I retween a tweet, I'll increase my chances to get into beta. If I post to my Facebook, then it doubles that increase!. And every friend that gives an email increases my chances! OMG! It's like a beta-pyramid scheme. Next they'll be pitching me Aetna.

<comment><USER2> The problem with Flrghx.ly is not that it isn't fleshed out and it's not that it isn't polished. It's that it's not likely to be a viable business.

Plenty of businesses have bootstrapped to customers with nothing but vapor. I've been on (extremely good) teams that got their ass handed to them _in version 3.0_ by vapor pitches.

These are really orthogonal issues. How complete your product is, how polished it is, how few bugs it have, these things usually have less of an impact on your "viability" than nerds think it does (unless you're serving nerds, graphic designers, or competing with Twitter).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> iPhone v1 is a pretty good example of a MVP IMHO. No copy paste, no multitasking, no 3rd party apps, the list goes on. But it was still the best phone money could buy.

<comment><USER7> Man, thats setting the bar pretty high

<comment><USER6> IMHO, the bar is currently set way, way too low. In the domain the iPhone was in, there was a very large amount of "must have" features for a product to be something that could succeed in the market. (Email, web, phone, SMS, etc.) In other domains, the amount of features for this is certainly lower. But, the bottom line is you should be shipping stuff you should be proud of that can stand on its own legs. The "embarrassed" point gets overemphasized and usually is misinterpreted to mean to ship garbage against your better judgement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've wrestled with this, personally. Honestly, I think it's hard to tell what's viable and what's not when it's your baby, and you've been living and breathing it for months.

The standard that I hold myself to is whether or not the product provides value to the user or customer. Does it do something new or interesting that someone (besides your team) cares about, or is it just the first part of something that you hope will provide value? It's tempting to jump the gun, and I think honesty on the part of those around you can help keep you from releasing a minimum, non-viable, product.

<comment><USER2> I have exactly this problem with our product, and have known for over a year what the solution is. If you can't tell whether your product is viable, talk to its prospective customers until you can.

Unfortunately, this is awfully hard for nerds like us to do. One way I know this to be true is by watching people who have an easy time of it hustle through customer meetings, taking a product idea from zero to "purchase order" with nothing but some static web pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was definitely one of the thing that stuck out to me, as I was (still am) learning about this industry, people throwing around the term 'MVP', all with their own definition and vision of what is an 'MVP' – from wireframe sketches (huh) to static screens. Some even blur it with videos explaining what their product is supposed to do (but no actual product yet). Do MVP really need work? Or is it sufficient as long you determine that there is value in your product via whatever means you choose? Hmm…

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everyone for your replies!

@justjimmy, as for my understanding of what MVP is — there actually needs to be an actual functioning product... although, Eric himself does mention in his 'Lean Startup book' to products that qualify under the MVP title with just a video (Dropbox) and a Concierge service (don't remember the product)... I do find it weird that he mentions those as qualifying, since they really just validate the business model.

One of his (Eric) simplest definitions for a MVP was a product that could easily go through a full cycle in the lean.feedback loop: <https://skitch.com/vince.baskerville/gixq3/mvp-feedback-loop> which should/hopefully help distill what customers want & thus actually pay for.

<comment><USER9> Maybe we need to separate the two more clearly? It's kinda blurry atm. PoC/MVP is basically boiling down the product to the core and validate if it has value. (Whether it's through an initial working product, wireframe or a video) But the actual working alpha product that a startup put in consumers' hands has to be a non PoS with minimum bugs, as pointed out in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good stuff Vincent! Wrote a similar piece a month ago:'Stop Launching Shitty MVP's in Competitive Markets' <http://bit.ly/vZXlN3>

<comment><USER11> If somebody is "launching" (as in public launch) an "MVP" then they're doing it wrong in the first place. You don't normally take an MVP and put it out there for the entire world. You release it to a (carefully?) selected subset of users, that you've pre-identified somehow, whom you expect to get validated learning from.

If somebody builds a crappy app, pushes it to the world, and slaps an "MVP" label on it, they haven't built an MVP and they're not really following the lean startup / customer development process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Odd. I'd think polishing the PoS idea you thought was an MVP was a more likely problem.

I know that would be my tendency. I'd need someone crazy helping me jump into trouble: [http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/inventors-who-want-to-do- bu...](http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/inventors-who-want-to-do-business- stop-doing-build-first-because-it-doesnt-work)</comment>


A new type of spring: soft when pulled gently and stiff when pulled strongly - <AUTHOR> http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/08/clues-in-the-cucumbers-climb/ <comment><USER2> I want one of these for my brake simulator pedal.</comment>


Show HN: Roughviz.js – Sketchy, hand-drawn style charts for the browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jwilber/roughViz <comment><AUTHOR> Author here: I actually wrote this library for a skateboard magazine - <USER2> wanted charts to feel fun & un-intimidating but still informative. Some alternatives exist (Semiotic for React and a plug-in for chart.js), but nothing as a standalone, super simple javascript library. I made this to allow the non-coders at the mag to easily ideate and play with representing the data as well as the chart's aesthetic.</comment>


You don't need millions of dollars - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/you-dont-need-millions-of-dollars.html <comment><USER2> "The ultimate point of Masters of Doom is that today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success, and John Carmack himself will be the first to tell you that. Where John was sitting in a cubicle by himself in Mesquite, Texas for 80 hours a week painstakingly inventing all this stuff from first principles, on hardware that was barely capable, you have a supercomputer in your pocket, another supercomputer on your desk, and two dozen open source frameworks and libraries that can do 90% of the work for you. You have GitHub, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and the whole of the Internet."

Which is bad news if your strength is that you are a good programmer, because in this kind of environment games become a commodity, so you have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other game developers who also don't have to be as briliant as Carmack. See the app market; it has a winner take all characteristic, so even if you don't have to be as brilliant as Carmack in programming, you have to be very strong in something or lucky to achieve success.

As I remember Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky took venture capital to take off stack overflow. (And also they had a huge following even before starting that venture.)

I kind of don't really buy these kind of 'motivational' posts. Achieving success is always possible but always hard.

<comment><USER3> Every generation faces different challenges, but the value of the internet cannot be understated. It's a resource that answers any question you may have about programming, about PC internals, or about the business and marketing parts you have to get right. You can easily reach out to hundreds or thousands of people who have already accomplished what you're trying to do and who blog earnestly about their experiences. You can test whether a game or app has merit with a fraction of the effort required in the 90s. And now you have millions of hours worth of open source code to build on top on.

"If you build it they will come" doesn't quite work on the internet. Except maybe if your product is extraordinary. But before the internet, when it's just you in your parents' basement? Then you need a real marketing channel otherwise you stand no chance. Even the Id guys had to write shareware games for an established distributor before they figured out how to do the shareware thing.

Today you can bootstrap a business worth millions based on a $8 a month VPS. As far as I can tell this hasn't been true in any other part of history or in any other field. There is still so much low-hanging fruit in software - it's crazy.

<comment><USER4> Everything you say is absolutely right, but your parent's point still stands: _everybody_ has all those same advantages, which means that the bar for both ordinary and extraordinary is much higher. DOOM would be ordinary (even sub- ordinary) if it were released now, precisely _because_ you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to make it.

<comment><USER3> The bar should be much higher, but it isn't. You'd expect there to be thousands of startups in every space imaginable, because writing software has never been easier and there are more software programmers today than at any point in history. You'd expect the competition to be fierce, but it isn't.

This is why mediocre products with mediocre marketing make bank. The games industry is very competitive, and so is the iOS app market. But that's only a tiny percentage of the software market (measured in dollars). Where are the thousands of Gmail competitors? Word processing and spreadsheet competitors? Where is a better DabbleDB? Nothing has changed in the past 5 years, and in any of these markets you can simply win with a better product and half-decent marketing. And if you make a product for a specific vertical it's even easier.

It's not like Patio11 is the first guy to ever make Appointment Reminder software. Or the 20th. But with half-decent execution and half-decent marketing he's still making a ton of money. And is he afraid that by posting on HN people here are going to start competing AR software? Of course not. Because there are so many better opportunities out there that there is no need to fight for the same customers.

How many startups do we see coming from Spain, or India, or Brazil? Very few. How many from Milwaukee? I don't know of any. But the software engineers exist. The opportunities are right here for the taking. But people just don't take them.

<comment><USER5> I agree in that there is an opportunity window until the market is semi- arbitrage-free. People around virtual communities like HN are in an advantage now.

But you are underestimating by a lot the costs and risks of software development, for example, a spreadsheet competitor. Not only from the software development side but also from the marketing/sales perspective. If you analyze an established software company the work force in software development and marketing/sales are evenly distributed and this is not because companies love to make advertisements, events, etc but because is how (currently) the business world works: you compete in an attention economy and this costs millions.

Another thing that you are underestimating is that Internet makes much easier things that were impossible or time consuming just a decade ago but "everyone" is competing in a new league and that advantage will be capitalized by "everyone".

<comment><USER3> 1\. In a competitive world you'd expect startups to pop up everywhere, and especially in areas with low cost of living. Reality: opposite.

2\. Building a spreadsheet program is a ton of work, but it's also a multi- billion dollar market. And a proof of concept can be built by a couple of smart hackers -- but it needs a good hook of course. Reality: very few people even try.

3\. When a ton of money is spent on marketing then that is strong evidence for lack of competition. After all, all money spent on marketing would otherwise go directly to the bottom line. This is why restaurants (fierce competition) spend almost nothing on marketing. They can't afford to. Fierce competition => low margins => no marketing budget. Reality: mediocre products and tons of marketing.

4\. The advantages of the internet are not capitalized on by everybody, as I've been saying. The _opportunity_ is there, but people still have to take it.

<comment><USER6> > _Building a spreadsheet program is a ton of work, but it 's also a multi- > billion dollar market. And a proof of concept can be built by a couple of > smart hackers -- but it needs a good hook of course. Reality: very few > people even try._

This is because it's a sucker's game. You can build the best spreadsheet in the world and _Microsoft will still eat your lunch_. The expected returns on a goldfish-selling business are higher. LibreOffice can't even manage to _give away_ a tenth as many as Microsoft sells. Like, yes, building a spreadsheet program is something people could do, but it is not an idea with even the remotest possibility of making good money.

I think I have figured out the fundamental disconnect here. You are talking about how easy it is to _build stuff_ these days, while other people are talking about how easy it is to _make a living off stuff_. It is easy to build things. But building something alone is pure cost, no profit. Then the hard part comes. The difficulty has just shifted around, not disappeared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Carmack turned red. "If you ever ask me to patent anything," he snapped, "I'll quit."_

Wow, my admiration for Carmack just increased tenfold.

<comment><USER8> He comes out of that book very well. Hard but fair. Romero, on the other hand...

<comment><USER9> What's he like?

<comment><USER10> In the book he comes off as an overly confident showman. Carmack was everything behind ID software (and to Romero's credit he pretty much admits that).

That said Romero's wild-side/recklessness provided the spark that ignited ID software, almost literally if I recall correctly. Basically Carmack had developed a new technology that allowed PC's at the time to handle scrolling. When he showed Romero it at work, Romero basically said "Fuck this company (softdisk), we're starting our own company right now." So starting that weekend they "borrowed" (pretty much stole, but would bring them back each Sunday night) all their workstations and began making a remake of the original Mario game for PC.

So basically, ID software = John Carmack's genius/technology + Romero's recklessness = DOOM.

Highly recommend this book, I don't read as many books as I like but I just couldn't put this one down.

<comment><USER9> Very interesting, it sounds like a good read. I'll buy it now, thanks.

<comment><USER10> HN has come full circle for me. I'm pretty sure that I actually heard about this book through a recommendation in a comment on HN a year or so ago. First book I purchased since the last harry potter book too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Lol, How many times does one (me in particular) need to read inspirational stories about hard work, dedication, pizza, and soda pop to actually do something about it?

Small anecdote: I was working on software for my site yesterday and thought about Carmack and the Fez guy (Phil Fish) and how they did amazing things on a computer. And then I thought about how tough it was for me to build a software for the web. Yes, its some complex software, but we have more tools now than those before us. There's really no excuse to not get things done (if you really want it done).

What I need to realize is that these guys didn't just think their way to success. They built their way to success. They had the idea, and then executed. You have to be moving and building. No one can see inside your mind. So, to show how amazing your idea really is, you'd need to literally "show" them the idea.

So yes, hopefully this is my last awe inspiring story. Hopefully (not hopefully, it will be...) the next time I chime in, I'll have something to show instead of an idea baking in my head.

In the words of Jobs "Real artists ship"! And I feel like I'm there.

<comment><USER12> > Lol, How many times does one (me in particular) need to read inspirational > stories about hard work, dedication, pizza, and soda pop to actually do > something about it?

If you want a good source of motivation, you might try getting a horrible job for a while.

Really. I did door to door sales when I was a girl. Hours upon hours of walking around seeing people who want nothing more in their heart of hearts than for you to fuck off and die. Nothing motivated me more to put in the hours at uni - even though I didn't like what I was studying - than the prospect of going back to that soul-crushing job, nothing's motivated me more to put in the hours at things that don't really please me than that either.

These days, when people tell me that something's hard, or that they have a shit job, I really have to step on my tongue to stop myself turning around and going - _You don 't know what a horrible job is, not really. You've been on easy street all your life._

<comment><USER13> What does being a girl have to do with sales?

<comment><USER12> In the sense I mean, I was 16.

In the sense I think you mean, sometimes it's an advantage because if you're chirpy and infantilise yourself a bit some people take pity on you more than they would a man. (If it's raining generally people are in a really bad mood, few people want to open their door and get cold and see grey. But if it's snowing - I always had really good leads when it was snowing. There were like two weeks of snow where I was getting three leads (around £100) a day. In either case though you don't want to mention it to people, you want to let them mention it and make a bit of a joke about it.)

On the negative side, there are some areas you really don't want to work as a girl. At the very least you want to be paired with a man, preferably an older man, when you're doing them. A lot of people in those areas are going to tend to look at you as being... owned pretty much... by the man you're with. That's not a nice feeling but it's still preferable to the alternative. I never had anyone grab me but this old guy stroked my hair once and god that was SO creepy.

It's not a job I was well suited to. I was good at it but emotionally you need a certain degree of detachment or it's going to mess you up. A lot of the girls in my team were really cold deep down, covered over with a sort of brittle humour. When you hear someone joking all the time, blustering about how tough they are, it's generally been my experience that it's a sign of severe insecurity. Almost like they're reassuring themselves. Some very rough backgrounds getting by on their wits there. Don't get me wrong, they really were tough, they weren't lying about that. But unfortunately when you go into things with the short-term idea that you can get yourself out of them because, "hey, wits," you'll almost inevitably end up getting yourself into situations where you're _obliged_ to get yourself out of them. To a large extent a pride in your wits seems to arise from a lack of a plan.

Some girls let other girls stay with them when they were having particularly bad times at home, and I saw that end poorly a couple of times. Some of those people are predators, that's the thing you've got to remember. When you invite a predator into your home; put your arm in their mouth; you can't be that surprised when you get bitten.

So, yeah. I think there are things about being a girl that make the job slightly different in some respects. Not hugely so but noticeably.

Also wear flats, the extra height can be nice but walking in heels for six hours isn't fun. ^_^

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you haven't read this book, go get it. It's the ultimate start-up story.

They start out as the most rag-tag group of developers. They took their computers home on the weekends from their day jobs at SoftDisk to work on their own games. These weren't MacBook Airs, they were full-tower 386 desktops with CRT monitors!

They packed into an apartment for their first 'real' offices. The story about them re-creating Super Mario pixel by pixel using a VHS recorder and TV is great.

Then these guys spent a small fortune on NeXT workstations to create Doom/Quake! Who doesn't dream about using the most high-end tools you can get your hands on.

And in the end, they all end up as famous 'rock star' millionaires driving Ferraris.

<comment><USER15> It's a much more down-to-earth story about some good Texas boys kicking ass than you'll find with the people scrambling over themselves on the coasts to catch as much as they can from VCs making it rain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it ridiculous how IT, the industry with lowest entry barrier that ever existed, is often marked as sexist and elitist. Wanna program? Here is computer and manual, see you in 10 000 hours.

<comment><USER17> _Here is computer and manual, see you in 10 000 hours._

Isn't this exactly why it is sexist? [1]

[1] This (being tone deaf to social cues) wouldn't work to attract women in a social setting, so why would it work in a professional one? You're basically offering up a scenario that is more likely to create anxiety for women, and as a result they will (statistcally) self-select into a different activity.

<comment><USER18> Isn't it sexist of _you_ to suggest that:

\- women are so fragile and anxious that they need someone to hold their hand through the exercises, or

\- women don't have the guts to persist through studying a difficult subject?

I certainly don't believe this to be true.

If the same, fair, treatment produces different outcomes, why does that make the treatment wrong?

<comment><USER17> I'm suggesting that you are inviting selection bias. That does not provide any grounds to question the median aptitude of the population. It just says that anything you infer from your sample data is most-likely skewed.

Now, a skew is discriminantory (by definition it _is_ bias). Whether or not it is <sexist> is simply a question of distribution of the mechanism responsible.

Is a program of 3.5 years of self-study (lets assume, in social isolation) an equally attractive proposition? Probably not, given that women consider doing anything in isolation to somewhat socially demeaning. We know that women, for example, self-select mates based on quite the opposite: high social standing. A long self-enforced period of social isolation is thus <rationally> counter- productive from the perspective of evolutionary biology. So, if we use this as a gating function, yes we will get biased results.

Fairness is a question of expected value. A fair bet is one where the ratio of cost/benefit is equal. So, in this case where there is an asymmetric cost, the result is uneven fairness (in this sense).

Whether or not it is right or wrong depends upon your criterion for value. By one standard - maximizing the potential peformance - it would be inefficient. This is beacaus you have mean XY and below mean XX performance represented (~regardless of proportionality -- as XX is biased down in both quality and quantity). Whether or not this inefficiency is wrong or acceptable is on the whole, just re-phrasing whether or not gender bias is (or is not) wrong.

That is beyond the scope of my commentary here.

<comment><USER16> Hilarious, this stuff comes from some manifesto? Nobody wrote '...in solitude'.

<comment><USER17> Actually, look at what is written..."go read the book"...and "don't talk to me until its done", are both clearly implied. It is a dick attitude, sorry.

Some people may respond to this, and some may not. Statistically, without question you will get adverse selection. So, yeah you can now start to make assumptions on how to avoid this fate, or not, but otherwise people with real options will do other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Amazing quote:

"The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers."

So inspirational.

</comment><comment><USER19> > today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve > success

That is a lie. To achieve anything similar to what Quake and Doom were at their time, one must possess raw undiluted talent and no amount of tools, libraries or online resources are going to help.

If it was that easy, we'd see masterpieces pop up every few months. But instead the market is flooded with mediocrity. Which really should come as no surprise, because we know that 90% of everything is crap. That includes people: most people (including myself), unfortunately, aren't half as smart and talented as they think they are. Which is why we struggle to create things that could be considered merely "good", and "great" is completely outside of our reach.

<comment><USER20> It says "to achieve success" (think Candy Crush et al), not "to create a masterpiece".

<comment><USER19> In that case his point is moot. Of course you don't need to be as bright as Carmack to achieve some definition of success. You can be a furniture salesman and achieve success that way. But it's like saying that water is wet.

His argument only makes sense if he implies that you don't need to be as smart to _repeat_ id software's success these days, which I think is incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As others have mentioned in the past, I believe this is one of the best "business" books I've ever read. Not in the traditional sense, but that only furthers my point. Absolutely phenomenal read.

</comment><comment><USER22> I strongly recommend the book to anyone who's at all curious in game history, Carmack, or game development. I read it as a teenager, and it really inspired me to become a programmer.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Excellent post. I've heard of the book before but never read it - although I did just order a copy.

I liked Carmack's comments on patents. Interesting that all these years later is still such a big issue in the software industry.

It was also very interesting to see the comparison between shareware and in- app purchases. Never thought of that before.

</comment><comment><USER23> And here I am, with good ideas about making a persistent online single infinite world, all the tools, but not actually working on it daily.

The weird thing, is that many other companies have the actual skills to do what I want to do, but they don't.

Clearly my project is either stupid or I'm very lazy, or nobody is innovating and that's what kill the market.

</comment><comment><USER24> You do need millions of dollars. Building a Game today is not what it was when Wolf 3d was made. The number of textures the depth of the story, the voice acting, the quality of physics that players expect to day is very different.

You can't write a Portal, or a Half Life, or a Quake, or a Halo, in you spare time between classes at school, or even by yourself living in your mom's basement over a year. The speed at which game tech advances is such that a one to 5 man shop can't create a game worth million in the time it takes to be obsolete.

Yes, there will be exceptions like Angry Birds. But most people aren't going to be that company that just nails game play at the right time. And most those won't be as much developers as designers.

<comment><USER25> >Portal, or a Half Life, or a Quake, or a Halo

Portal might not be a good example to use here. It's essentially version 1.0 of Narbacular Drop, which was made by a small team of students at DigiPen. Valve picked up the team and the retail version of the game never had more than 10 people working on it at a time.

<comment><USER24> 10 people for a year is $1m.

And they used digital Assets from Valve, and a lot of voice work and music work that they had to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just to the point, I am located in Russia where print copy of this book would appear in 6months to year if at all. Technology allowed me purchase this book and read it right away.

It is all about focus and determination nowadays, just like it always was. And way back it took some real patience and a highly structured approach to achieve any kind of success. And now you can the cake and eat it too - compared to effort you needed to expend in nineties to create something. Information wasn't just everywhere, tracing compiler bugs could make you go down one or other rabbit hole for days if not week or two.

</comment><comment><USER27> They don't make programmers like Carmack any more. When he was around, Carmack and his comrades were making the rules and paving new paths doing things that were considered impossible. These days, finding the answers is all too easy thanks to Stack Overflow and Github. I also feel as though the limits of computing in a gaming sense like Quake and Doom were will never happen ever again.

</comment><comment><USER28> One of the best game i ever play in my childhood and complete it with in 3 days, still remember the stage 3 when i have to touch space bar for open the gate and simultaneous monster came. it was scary for me. Mainly i like to target the oil drums :). Mine favorite weapon was the machine gun which was available in the middle chamber with a protected suit

</comment><comment><USER29> Yes you do, unless you intend to rent forever.

</comment><comment><USER30> Carmack and Woz would've made a great engineering team...amazing that such brilliant engineers were also so generous

<comment><USER31> Would Have? ... The future is not over yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Shareware seems more like Kickstarter to me, in terms of sentiment. You get niche, hobbyist communities excited about your product, and pool up money through grassroots efforts. Though perhaps shareware's most direct descendent today is when creators release albums or ebooks and add a tip jar for suggested donations.

</comment><comment><USER33> As much as I admire John Carmack's bootstrapped success (and on this axis the guy is just awesome), given how he handled the poor health of his cat, I don't think I'd ever work with or for him. It just doesn't sit right with me.

<comment><USER34> You would've been fine! As long as you don't pee around the office.

<comment><USER33> Here's what really puzzles me. John Carmack was a legend by the time of the Mitzi incident. Instead of dumping the poor creature at the animal shelter like he did, he could have auctioned off "John Carmack's frickin' cat" to his legion of admirers, giving it a new home.

Or he could have taken it to a vet and probably found out it had bladder stones which could have been removed by a ~$1,000 procedure, but I digress.

And that I think is part of why I'm not rich like he is...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Carmack still hasn't managed to let me down after all of these years, and I've probably tried to keep up with his happenings since the Quake days.

He's a real inspiration. If you haven't read this book already, it's really worth it.

</comment><comment><USER36> Carmack's story continues at Oculus. He might be famous among the gaming world (might not), but it won't be long until he's famous throughout the world. VR's coming.

</comment><comment><USER37> "You know how game companies spent the last 5 years figuring out that free games with 100% in-app purchases are the optimum (and maybe, only) business model for games today? "

What!!??

</comment><comment><USER38> Damnit, after reading that I simply had to buy myself a copy of that book. These two guys were my childhood heros. Although my mom hated them thanks to all the hours I spent playing Keen or Doom and "not doing my homework"

<comment><USER3> The book is really phenomenal. Highly, highly recommended.

<comment><USER39> The story is great but the writing was pretty marginal. There were scene jumps that the author didn't give any sort of hint or clue about. There we're complete misattributions of who was saying what.

I almost gave up on the book in the first few chapters.</comment></comment></comment>


Reduced diversity and altered composition of the gut microbiome in ME/CFS - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/27338587/ <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, full text here: [http://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...](http://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-016-0171-4)</comment>


Flickr is shutting down Marketplace, its commercial photo licensing program - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/21/flickr-is-shutting-down-marketplace-its-commercial-photo-licensing-program/ <comment><USER3> Yahoo holds a lot of the blame for the death of Flickr, but it would have been in trouble anyway. Flickr was born for a time when a photograph was a rarer thing, and was something you'd put a lot of effort into both creating and curating.

With smartphones, we are all now firehoses of photography, barely clinging on by adding hearts and likes as the images fly past. Carefully adding metadata and curating Flickr-style would be a full-time job for most of us these days.

I guess the closest modern analogue to what Flickr was is Instagram — which is more carefully curated and selective – but Instagram has never cared about quality, and a Flickr that chased the Instagram audience wouldn't really have been Flickr anymore anyway.

<comment><USER4> I disagree with this wholeheartedly. Pictures I take with my phone are "in the moment" pictures something like "oh look my son put his pants on his head, that's a keeper". Those I throw on facebook so my mom can check it out... and then i'm done.

But when I pull out my $1500 DSLR, it's not a firehose (well it is, but not what i'm going to publish) I'm going to go through hundreds of pics, pick 20 or so that matter, and then put effort into touching them up... because I shot in RAW just so I could do that.

After you spent literally hours making that photo "just right", that's what I use flikr for. It's also nice to have other photographers find your stuff, and comment on how nice it is.

I think this is just one more point of "if you want to do a startup, look for something owned by Yahoo, and build that"

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree with you; it's just that those of us with the DSLRs (and the ILCs) are the last holdouts, we're a niche rump of what used to be a mainstream activity. Someone will make a nice life out of creating a service for that niche, but it's not going to be a Yahoo-scale thing.

<comment><USER5> I would say that's more because Yahoo lacks any real good vision. :)

From what I see (based on this chart -- [http://petapixel.com/2015/04/09/this- is-what-the-history-of-...](http://petapixel.com/2015/04/09/this-is-what-the- history-of-camera-sales-looks-like-with-smartphones-included/)) -- DSLRs and ILCs are "slow but steady" and not crashing too badly. A "niche" for sure. But until smartphones can match the quality of a DSLR in certain situations (low light or zoom for a start) I can see there always being a market for these higher-end amateur / hobbyist type photographers. The category being slaughtered now by smartphones is (obviously) the compact digital.

Flickr's not going to be able to compete at this point with the general social media photography. Why not focus on a market they once had a good handle on and probably isn't going away anytime soon?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another half-assed job by Yahoo. The way I saw it, there was potential in becoming a realtime marketplace for photos of events. With the right interface, you could let a user who happens to capture a newsworthy event to sell his/her photos for good $$, and Yahoo collects a nice chunk of it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would go and say that when flickr will be gone we will enter a different era of the web. Flickr has been such a great influence over the years that internet without flickr will be a different internet altogether

<comment><USER8> I find it difficult to relate to you. I have been an active internet user since 1997 and have never used flickr a lot and don't feel I will miss anything if it goes away. Also, if Flickr is such a seminal piece of property, its usage would have been through the roof which is clearly not the case. Yes - it was popular during its heydays but now it is just another photo storing/sharing app.

<comment><USER9> Flickr was the first "web 2.0" site. It was the first social network. It was the first really global photo publishing website. So I agree with heyts above. Flickr repeatedly becomes a shadow of its former self, and that is really very sad. It could have been more, but Yahoo just drove it into the ground - <USER2> did it slowly enough however that it did remain relevant for a long time, but it missed just about every boat that came along.

<comment><USER10> _It was the first social network._

Friendster pre-dated it by 2-3 years, MySpace and Facebook by a year.

I have to agree with product50, I am an avid photographer but Flickr was never compelling for me. I would only ever see it when someone would post a link to Facebook...

<comment><USER11> "Friendster pre-dated it by 2-3 years, MySpace and Facebook by a year."

The BBS predates all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tangential....

Can anyone recommend a FOSS photo store built on top of AWS or similar cloud hosting/storage?

I'm aware there are a thousand PHP photo library website-in-a-box type solutions. I'm more looking for something that can take advantage of cloud storage such as Amazon's buckets, so the billing increments with the amount of data stored. In an ideal world it would retain max-res files in Glacier, select storage intelligently based on frequency of access, etc etc.

It's for personal use. I'd like to pop something up for our family to archive and share photos. Privately, with the option of publicly sharing.

<comment><USER13> You'll probably want auto-sync from your laptop/phone/etc too.

I think Nextcloud on a VPS or your own server could work? It supports external storage too (S3 etc). Though it's not just for photos.

[https://github.com/nextcloud](https://github.com/nextcloud)

I'm not sure if they do RAW previews, but should be possible to add.

Koken looks OK too, more photo oriented - [http://koken.me/](http://koken.me/)

<comment><USER14> The nextcloud/owncloud debacle seems to need a little more time before sinking too much into it.

We are currently using google drive to sync our photo library w/the home server, and share out private links via email when needed. This keeps us from having to maintain an app/server, users/pws for friends and family...etc, and we can take down the private links as needed.

Not great, but workable at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Flickr Has a Market Place?

I Bought License for Photos from at least 25 different Photographer by emailing them (on Flickr Mail). Never knew there was Market Place :)

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, and it is still marked as NEW in their photo search IU :-|

They want about $280USD per picture of 300dpi, which is waaaaaaaaay overpriced. On Shutterstock, you can get 2 images for $29 with the most expensive plan.

No wonder they failed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm growing weary of trusting the cloud for some things. There are a few photos I actually care about, and right now they're on Flikr. Facebook mangles them, and flikr holds them hostage if I stop paying. I used to keep a local copy, but over the years I've been lazy with copying it as I move machines.

I'm thinking of buying a raspberry pie, and a few extra large SD cards, and just hosting it on the web myself.

I'll miss the social aspects though. It was fun to have the occasional email pop up every now and then from someone commenting on a photo I took 3 years ago.

<comment><USER16> HDD space is cheap, combine a big one of those with a service like CrashPlan. Even if you do a self hosted solution you want to make sure things are backed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article didn't really clarify the actual reason for me. They cited difficulties against competitive platforms, but is it because (a) their technology wasn't as good as their competitors (b) their compensation plans/margins weren't as good as their competitors, or (c) there really wasn't interest from the photographic company for such a service, and there weren't enough users to keep it viable?

<comment><USER18> IMHO they don't have a clear enough focus.

In terms of being a cloud service for photo storage, they can't compete with Google Photos, iCloud and other mobile services that have the benefit of being more deeply integrated and available as a default on their respective platforms.

The social network aspect is obliterated by Instagram, Snapchat and the like.

The photo reselling part I'm not familiar with, but it seems to be lacking in a similar fashion.

In short - their high point was the time when they primarily catered to photographers. All three aspects of the service were useful for that crowd and perhaps if they kept that position and developed advanced features that appeal to that particular crowd, they could have remained strong. But once they started reaching out to the general public, they alienated their original audience and at the same time failed to compete with (originally) smaller services that provided a better experience in each specific field.

That's the way I see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The question is not what Yahoo is killing but what they aren't killing. I'll be surprised if anything is left of Flickr in a few years given the success of competition.

</comment><comment><USER20> In terms of what might replace Flickr for image-based content, I've been watching (and using) Ello for the past couple of years. The site isn't entirely oriented around galleries of photographs, but _does_ feature graphical content heavily (some fellow writers have griped a bit about this, though I feel only with modest justification).

One interesting feature added in the past few months was a "Buy" button -- a large green dollar sign -- which guides viewers to where they can buy a given user's works. Mostly this seems to link to other services, blogs, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, or related pages, but tying this in more tightly or providing a Flickr-type capability might be something Ello could look at.

I suspect they're familiar with Flickr's offerings, but feedback on what worked (or didn't) with that, or what Ello's missing, could be of interest.

(No stake in the company -- I use the site and pass on regular feedback, praise, and criticisms.)

</comment><comment><USER21> So sad Yahoo did absolutely nothing with this icon of photography websites. I've been revisiting old photos, and moving them over to my own personal site. It's probably inevitable that one day we'll all get the notice that Flickr is shutting down, and you have X amount of days to save your photos.

</comment><comment><USER22> If anyone is looking for a good way to sell their photos and isn't shutterstock/getty/etc, I can recommend [https://www.picfair.com/](https://www.picfair.com/)

</comment><comment> Altay- My only experience with Flickr was uploading tens of thousands of images with links to my websites for 'link juice' back when Google was stupid and eas(ier) to game. Ah, the good ol days....

</comment><comment><USER23> what are some good flickr alternatives for when they fully nix the product (store and manage all your photos)?

<comment><USER24> I've been using 500px lately for my publicly available photos. Seems to be the most popular alternative.

For private stuff I am hosting the originals on my own NAS and upload a copy in Google Photos for easy searching.

<comment><USER25> You might enjoy my Automated workflow with Synology and Goolge Photos.

[https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your- personal...](https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal- exif-based-photo-and-video-assistant-d92868f302ec#.nqyoae9ny)

[https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow- usin...](https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-google- photos-and-elodie-afb753b8c724#.humerckqa)

<comment><USER23> whoa this is pretty cool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >Flickr is shutting down</comment>


I followed the advice for Paris's hottest day – it didn't help (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/31/i-followed-the-advice-for-paris-hottest-day-it-didnt-help <comment><USER2> I live in the south of Spain and 42C is rookie shit. Here you basically can't go out until it's sundown.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here I was complaining about the 29C that I had to deal with this week in central Alberta, Canada. Yikes!</comment>


CDN Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/maxcdn-vs-cloudflare-vs-cloudfront-vs-akamai-edge-vs-fastly/ <comment><USER2> If you'd like a comparison from a customer point of view - here's a great summary: [https://www.thetoptens.com/best-content-delivery-network- cdn...](https://www.thetoptens.com/best-content-delivery-network-cdn- providers/)</comment>


How To Give A Horrendous Investor Pitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.johngreathouse.com/horrendous/

<comment><USER2> oh hai

can i haz monies?

kthxbai</comment>


A quick and easy way to setup a RESTful JSON API in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ant0ine/go-json-rest

<comment><USER2> The "Countries" example does not look correct to me. Go maps aren't safe for concurrent use (such as parallel REST API requests in this case) and need to be protected with a sync.RWMutex or similar, although it might work safely in some special cases (I'm not sure).

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure the map here is not the important part. The example demonstrates how to use the rest interface to talk with a store. The actual implementation of the store is up to you.

<comment><USER4> I think it's important for example code to also be correct. If it needs to gloss over some details, put them in a function call that isn't defined.

Using an unprotected map here is incorrect.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely! Example code affects programming style and teaches people. It should be correct (and in good style), this is probably very much underrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does this differ from Tiger Tonic ( [https://github.com/rcrowley/go- tigertonic](https://github.com/rcrowley/go-tigertonic) )?

</comment><comment><USER6> I once read the you aren't supposed to use ORMs in Go. I am not sure why. Does anyone have an idea?

<comment><USER7> Many gophers hate magic. ORMs are specifically magic, and therefore not very popular with many gophers.

Many gophers have a lot of experience in other languages with ORMs and have been burned by them on many occasions.

I like to say - ORMs make the easy stuff easier, and the hard stuff harder. If you're only doing really simple object storage and your data model easily fits with the model the ORM expects, then it's not too bad. If you EVER want to deviate from that model (and you'll ALWAYS end up wanting to deviate from that model), then you are gonna have a bad time.

There actually are plenty of Go ORMs: [https://code.google.com/p/go- wiki/wiki/Projects#ORM](https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/Projects#ORM) (there's probably many that aren't on this list)

Many gophers prefer their code to be more obvious and more under their control. Writing a little SQL never hurt anyone, and Go's SQL package is pretty good. Personally, I like [http://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx](http://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx) \- you have to write SQL statements still (I consider that a good thing), but it removes the boilerplate of getting data in and out of structs.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I see the "magic" in trivial compilers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would I use Go instead of Ruby/Python/nodeJS?

<comment><USER4> So you can have a maintainable codebase.

<comment><USER10> Well that's just nonsense.

You can have maintainable and unmaintainable codebases in any language.

<comment><USER11> Clearly you have never run across the same program, first in Perl, and then in Python, and felt the tangible differences in maintainability between the two implementations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>