Ask HN: I'm away from the software industry since 2017; what has happened since? - <AUTHOR> I used to work as a programmer. In 2017, I had to stop working because of health issues. I remember Rust was a cool project, JS had plenty of frameworks fighting between themselves, SPA was a thing albeit I was skeptical of it, and I was in love with Go. Big words like Data Science and Machine Learning were thrown everywhere. Whas has changed in this scenario? Are there new stuff I should know about? Thanks. <comment><USER2> Probably the most surprising thing for you: Go is getting generics. No exact timeline, but it's happening for Go 2.0.

Rust is seeing production use in many places and its being accepted more as _the_ sane alternative to C for modern development of high performance software. Ecosystem still not big or mature enough to make big waves, however, but that depends on how you interpret "big waves".

SPAs are used and abused, the tooling to make a performant progressive website with them has gotten better but the know-how is not widespread enough.

React has essentially won the mindshare battle and they are focusing more on functional components. But there are other things with their own healthy niche like Svelte compiling components that manage their own DOM, Elm is still around (and still not 1.0) and it has inspired other "Elmish" frameworks.

Desktop software quality has gone downhill and seemingly everyone is using Electron.

For many companies, Kubernetes is the new normal mode of operation. You should know it, but it's still far from "the way to do things" for industry in general, mostly due to its complexity and learning curve.

<comment><USER3> >React has essentially won the mindshare battle

I'm looking to learn a front-end framework and had a few people recommend Vue. Sounds like maybe I should go for React instead? In case it matters, I'm not looking to be a front-end developer. I'd mainly like to improve some small projects I have. And get the most value out of my time learning a framework.

<comment><USER4> As a backend developer who makes frontends for his projects, I enjoy Svelte. I found React to be quite complex when I tried learning it last year.

I'd use vue if not for svelte, probably.

<comment><USER5> I'm in the same boat, and also love Svelte and wish it success.

Svelte's reactivity was also something we had in Splash, the Microsoft- internal UI framework that was used to build the Zune desktop app and Windows Phone 7/8\. I haven't enjoyed building UI since then, but with Svelte I can finally enjoy frontend development again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most interesting developments have been in infrastructure.

AWS has started to take on third-party, open source components e.g. Cassandra, ElasticSearch, MongoDB as they run out of things to build. Expect them to continue further up the stack possibly into applications.

Kubernetes has really taken off with every cloud provider having a solid implementation. And it's getting massive adoption within the enterprise as companies look to reign in their cloud cost, simplify their infrastructure and have better DevOps. It also allows them to standardise the NFRs across multiple applications e.g. metrics, logging, security, routing which is more important than ever.

Data Science has seen massive adoption in the last few years within the enterprise space as companies go after the low hanging fruit. Also seeing lots of traditional Data/Reporting Analysts been cross skilled in Data Science and vice versa. It's definitely here to stay for the long term just without the hype.

<comment><USER7> >"AWS has started to take on third-party, open source components e.g. Cassandra, ElasticSearch, MongoDB as they run out of things to build."

I'm aware of their Elasticsearch and MoongoDB offerings but what is their Cassandra offering?

<comment><USER8> Dynamodb

<comment><USER7> Oh sure but that actually predates Cassandra. The Dynamo white paper is one of the things that kicked off the NoSQL movement. In other words it's not something they created to "take on" Cassandra.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perf is becoming more important than it had been. Rust is still around and growing. WASM is becoming mainstream. You see some people migrating away from things that require garbage collection. Edge is becoming real, with Cloudflare and Fastly doing edge functions/workers, and AWS having come out with outposts, local zones, and wavelength (deploy AWS VMs to Verizon 5G hubs).

AWS is still eating the world, Azure is doing well and growing faster in enterprise markets but devs still hate it, GCP seems mainly startup and ML loads and they have an ultimatum to become top 2 or bust by 2022.

Open source is a little under fire. AWS made a closed source MongoDB clone. I feel like things have moved a bit away from DIY toward settling on whatever the big three provide.

JS framework overload has settled down and it's pretty much React and Vue. NoSQL has too, there's still mostly the same players as in 2017 but I'm seeing far fewer new entrants. In general I'd say things have slowed down _as a whole_ , and the level of innovation isn't what it was a couple years ago. Shiny new object fatigue has set in a bit and people just want to make things work.

Docker in production is very real (our team uses docker in production _only_ , not dev), and k8s has the mindshare.

ML is still fairly hot, but various experts saying we're starting to hit a wall wrt ML capabilities, and others saying plow forward and see.

<comment><USER10> > WASM is becoming mainstream

Really? While I've heard of a lot of experiments and a few companies using it in production, I'd hardly call it "mainstream".

<comment><USER9> You're right. I work in the WASM field, so it probably seems more mainstream from my bubble. It would be more accurate to say it's stabilizing and has reached a point where various orgs are rallying around it as a real thing and starting to build stuff around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're still suspicious of SPAs, you can be sure there's still an alternate universe outside of the Valley bubble that builds server-side web apps on modern frameworks, though now we use Vue.js instead of jQuery. PHP has continued to be a top language of choice for the working class dev, and Laravel is an example of one of the most beautifully crafted (and wildly popular) web frameworks ever made.

Examples of the kind of tooling built by the community that betrays the cultish appeal of Laravel (yep, people actually make a living off Laravel- specific tooling)

\- [https://tinkerwell.app/](https://tinkerwell.app/) \- [https://laravelshift.com/](https://laravelshift.com/)

<comment><USER12> > language of choice for the working class dev

What an incredibly strange framing.

<comment><USER13> So are you implying that you're not filled with the spirit of the proletariat when you program in PHP?

<comment><USER4> I certainly feel like the bourgeoisie when I use Rust or Haskell.

<comment><USER14> > I certainly feel like the bourgeoisie when I use Rust or Haskell.

I feel like a peasant sharecropper when I use Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of good answers here, but none seem to mention that asp.net core is improving a lot and getting traction.

Microsoft bought GitHub and LinkedIn.

Oracle is disliked like before.

<comment><USER16> In my mind, with OpenSource being more and more well regarded, the disdain for C#, a language once Windows-only, grows larger.

Probably just a bias in my circles, as we're heavy OSS users and contributors..?

<comment><USER17> I mean, ms has released net core 3.0 (fully open source), blazor, and ml.net. F# has always been open source. They also made private repos free on github, released vs code, released zero and deepspeed for pytorch and published the state of the art NLP model along with it. So I'd say your circles probably have a justified chip on their shoulders from the old days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You've been spared from the blockchain and serverless hype trains.

<comment><USER19> The blockchain months were rough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> GPT-2

[https://openai.com/blog/gpt-2-1-5b-release/](https://openai.com/blog/gpt-2-1-5b-release/)

[https://talktotransformer.com/](https://talktotransformer.com/)

[https://github.com/openai/gpt-2](https://github.com/openai/gpt-2)

(GPT-2 docker image needs a version tweak to get it working)

and BERT:

[https://github.com/google-research/bert](https://github.com/google- research/bert)

<comment><USER21> Bert (more like transformers) really did change the whole nlp scene. It truly was nlp's imagenet moment. Though nlp continues to be significantly more difficult than vision to get running in most problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think React is "winning" the framework competition, if we're judging from number of jobs. It seems like a business decision for many people - React can make websites and apps, and it's probably easier. I haven't had enough experience to say, but it seems like Java; not necessarily the best tool, but something easy to hire for.

Flutter is also coming in hard on mobile. Also not something I've had enough experience to comment on, but there's also little criticism, which suggests it's a good thing.

<comment><USER23> Dumb question but how is react better than jquery? (Im from 2010 instead of 2017 like op)

<comment><USER24> It's debatable if it really is for most sites, especially if you have a good way to generate/write your html. React is a better choice if you are truly building a web app rather than a website.

<comment><USER25> > especially if you have a good way to generate/write your html.

Server-side React is a great way to generate HTML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There seems to be a lot more skepticism towards AI/ML and especially anyone pitching their product as using it. I think the requirements to do data science as a job description have ballooned as well - we're talking requirements for having a PhD and lots of experience.

I could be misrepresenting from just what I've read here but trying to be helpful. Ymmv

<comment><USER27> Block chain and cryptocurrency is another thing that's gone from unhinged hype to heavy skepticism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nothing has changed. It is still programming. You take some input, you manipulate it and then you do something with the output.

How you do that comes down to mostly a matter of preference with a smattering of "engineering".

<comment><USER29> In my humble opinion, frameworks and mostly hotshot languages are akin to celebrities. If I asked hey I was away for 10 years spending time in remote island and just came back to LA what changed ? Nothing changes in the main business. We've got few celebs come and go Toby Maguire, Lin-Manuel Miranda aka React. They still need to bring back Ahnold for Terminator (looking at you C) or Tom Cruise for MI (looking at you C++). The industry is the same, you need inputs film money and people to generate outputs that people enjoy.

<comment><USER30> I always thought of C++ as Jim Carrey, Tom Cruise is way too simple for the role!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> We are running out of nouns to name js frameworks.

<comment><USER32> I used to troll my old housemate (web frontend guy) by saying something along the lines of "Oh, Node.JS? Yeah some people I work with use that, but they're mostly moving over to Pangolin with Clamp on the backend." (substituting Pangolin and Clamp for any other nouns)

I don't think he ever caught on.

<comment><USER33> Note to self: check out Pangolin and Clamp.

I've got to say, they sound totally believable. I'm not entirely convinced you're making a joke here.

<comment><USER32> Joke is on me. I picked those nouns at random but Pangolin is a bona-fide frontend framework[1] and Clamp is a text truncating utility.[2]

1: [https://pangolinjs.org/](https://pangolinjs.org/) 2: [https://github.com/josephschmitt/Clamp.js/](https://github.com/josephschmitt/Clamp.js/)

<comment><USER33> It does emphasize the point that we're running out of nouns.

<comment><USER32> I work in electronics and laser stuff, where we use german-style compound names like "multi-pixel photon counting" and "erbium-doped fiber amplifier." Even in low-level compute, packages are named descriptively e.g. FreeRTOS. Lots of acronyms, but very few cute single-word nouns to name things. I've only observed that trend in relatively high-level software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I feel like nothing really changed. Rust still is a cool project, JS still has plenty of frameworks, SPA still a thing, Go still a thing, Data Science and Machine Learning is still thrown everywhere. Blockchain hype is dead, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER35> SPA:s are now being overused for no particular reason, particularly by junior talents, who by now have been taught this is the one and only way to build Professional™ web sites.

The Javascript frontend scene almost literally exploded, in various ways.

Webasm got some serious traction. Old serious people like this, becuase it may eventually allow them to avoid the increasingly crazy javascript scene.

Computer vision (by means of machine learning/deep learning) got quite a bit easier to use, even if you're not a PhD in Computer Vision. Real-time inference from static photos is now easy. Real-time inference from video is still sorta hard/expensive, depending on your deployment target (embedded, backend).

Python people are still using Python even though it's dead slow.

A bunch of people moved from Java to Go and suddenly felt a lot happier.

<comment><USER36> I am a Python / Django guy given the choice. Python may be a slow language, but I haven't seen many places where python is the cause of the bottleneck. Rewrite stuff so that the database is doing the heavy lifting, and add the appropriate indexes and you shouldn't have any problems.

SPA's are a pain in the arse. Usually close to twice the amount of code to avoid page refreshes. Usually the apps are way slower than a page refresh as well - with lots of JSON calls to get data that would be in one server side page load.

<comment><USER37> I disagree. I think SPA's are fantastic. Sure, they can be misused, but so can most things.

I'm an intermediate level web developer. I enjoy working with ReactJS-- I like that it's a framework and way of doing things.

1\. manages to accomplish everything that I need to get done

2\. has a huge community & huge amount of open source reactjs components available

3\. is highly customizable

If one isn't going to use a modern, prolific SPA framework such as Vue/Angular/React, other options seem to be:

1\. Vanilla JS (potentially a mishmash of vanilla JS + CDN/local js libraries)

2\. jQuery

3\. other jQuery-era frontend frameworks

ReactJS in my experience makes development faster, easier, better organized and more enjoyable.

<comment><USER38> I think you are confusing frameworks and SPAs.

For example, React is meant to build small components not SPA. But you can build a SPA using react-router. But you can build SPAs using vanilla JS as well.

The only thing that truly defines SPAs is lack of "true" page changes. JS is taking control of your browser url bar and history. Which I personally dislike.

<comment><USER12> > React is meant to build small components not SPA

React is meant to build (composable) user interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Serverless is starting to become less of a buzzword and more of an actual movement. I see more and more new projects start with serverless as a sane default before going the containers route. Yeah I know, serverless is not server less, it's a marketing term, the cloud is just someone's else computer. But I see more and more preferring someone else to manage auto scaling, load balancing, networking, have much smaller attack surface and not having to have a PhD in k8s to launch a web app.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interviewing is a nightmare.

<comment><USER41> Hi, I basically agree. But can you expand on this? What exactly do you (or anyone reading this) see as such a problem with regard to interviewing? Especially, anything you see that's gotten worse.

<comment><USER40> If you were to ask me, I would say that middle managers are generally miserable and are trying to avoid risk and maintain job security by NOT hiring people as long as there is VC money to burn. But I'm a nihilist.

<comment><USER42> I know this is late, but a lot of us really want to hire people, but there are a lot of people out there that are overconfident in their skillset, and sometimes you have to do a quick sanity check to weed them out. I agree, though, that most you can tell before that point. I'd never make someone donate a day to a test, but 15 mins of whiteboarding can go a long way if someone doesnt have a lot of publically available code to go look at (and, a lot of devs don't, due to working on public repos)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> what-the-grump Let's see people still can't write SQL. Most data related issues can we done in SQL. But we hit with a pandas data frame hammer and cry that it hurts instead.

Everyone is data scientist. Load Excel into python? Data science. Divide x by y, and run some algo, data science and ML.

</comment><comment><USER33> > _" I remember Rust was a cool project, JS had plenty of frameworks fighting > between themselves, SPA was a thing albeit I was skeptical of it, and I was > in love with Go. Big words like Data Science and Machine Learning were > thrown everywhere."_

From this description, it sounds like nothing has really changed in the past 3 years. This could easily describe today.

There have been some shifts in the fighting JS frameworks though; Vue is a big rising star, has overtaken Angular and is now challenging React for the top spot. Angular is still used a lot, but I think it's on the way out. React is still strong. Typescript is becoming standard.

Server-side rendering is big, though. People talk a lot about static sites (which can still be dynamic), and serverless (which still has a server, obviously).

Rust is more than a cool project; I have no experience with it, but it sounds increasingly like the low-level language of the future. On the JVM, Kotlin is on the rise, has overtaken Scala and Clojure and is second behind Java.

</comment><comment><USER43> Lots of comments about which technologies are becoming popular. what about things that have lost popularity? Ie. Ruby on Rails and Hadoop

<comment><USER9> Node, maybe. There's still plenty of it out there but more skepticism about perf and npm, and less hype that it will be the great general unifier of front and back ends.

They were probably equal in 2017, but now go seems to have far surpassed it in terms of server side relevance.

<comment><USER44> I'd have to see some stats to believe that because that's certainly not the trend I'm seeing. Nodejs is pretty strong, and generally the bottleneck is dev speed and network latency, not CPU performance.

<comment><USER45> Agreed, I'd like to see stats on this. From the stars on the Deno repo it looks like the server-side JS market is only going to get bigger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> A lot of noise but fundamentally it's all the same.

<comment><USER47> Different perspectives; being in the industry for 25+ years, I didn't think being away 3 years wasn't long enough for much other than names and fads to have changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Kotlin has replaced Java for Android development

This month was the 25th anniversary of Delphi, but I guess that is not relevant for the industry.

</comment><comment><USER49> I think DevOps and cloud services have had the most movement. Kubernetes is seeing rapid adoption as is TerraForm. I'm also seeing a bit of whiplash where enterprises are getting pretty comfortable going all-in on their preferred cloud vendor and just diving into proprietary fully-managed services. AWS is still tops, but Azure is making huge inroads.

Also, everyone has given up on chatbots. Voice assistants are increasing in penetration, but they're just defaulting to transactional modes and not conversational.

</comment><comment><USER50> In the JVM space there are now new web frameworks that specialize in Microservices. The advantages they offer are very low memory usage, better performance, fast startup time and finally the ability to generate a native executable via GraalVM [0].

[0] A lot of JEE Frameworks heavily rely on reflection and other dynamic features that cannot be used in a native image.

<comment><USER51> I admit I only dip my toes into the Java ecosystem occasionally. How low is low memory usage? The last microservice-oriented Java framework I used was Spring Boot, but I don't know that I'd call it lightweight.

<comment><USER19> I hope no one calls it lightweight. We've been running a few or our own benchmark tests for various frameworks and we have found that Quarkus running on GraalVm is the definition of lightweight.

<comment><USER51> Thanks for pointing me towards Quarkus! That looks really cool!

Edit: And yes... the folks I was working with were excited at how much lighter-weight Spring Boot was compared to whatever it was they were using before. When I showed them a Go-based server just using net/http, they almost had a stroke!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Frontend hottest: Next.js/Typescript/React w/ hooks.

Backend hottest: Rust, Graphql is gaining adoption at the enterprise level.

Edit: ML is still very hot but tough to get a job as a Data Scientist without actual experience.

<comment><USER53> nextjs? whats that

you meant "nestjs"?

<comment><USER54> [https://nextjs.org/](https://nextjs.org/)

It's a server side rendered framework for React. It can also do static sites but doesn't have as many plugins as Gatsby JS, which focuses on static site building with React.

<comment><USER55> Yeah the idea of building a 100% static site in react seems a bit ironic to me. Handlebars is so much simpler to work with for a static site (like a blog) that isn't going to "spring to life" and become a SPA.

But I can see it being useful in the niche area of someone who needs to do server side rendering for performance (every millisecond to first render counts), while keeping the code simple by not having a second technology to do that rendering, and they need the same thing to be a SPA. Maybe a GMAIL type application? And again the user has to care - I don't care if I wait 10 seconds for my mail app to load as I'll be spending minutes in there once it does, and you've locked me in for other reasons anyway.

This might matter for SEO but to be honest you could just have a non-JS version of the same page which looks different for SEO purposes.

Next.js seems pretty hot, so I am probably missing something :-).

I'd rather not use JS on the server myself, so for my projects I'd either make a SPA with API backend and no server side rendering. Or just a classic "rails style" crud app with a sprinkle of JQuery.

I hope someone chimes in and tell me what I am missing and why to use Next.js other than "I only want to do JS and React for all the things."

<comment><USER56> Next.js positions itself as a hybrid framework, and is recommending SSG (static site generation) by default over SSR.

See this discussion [1] with the response from rauchg (framework author and Zeit founder) outlining where they are heading.

This ability to easily mix SSG and SSR pages within the one project, the PHP- inspired philosophy of simple file-based routing for pages, and pre-configured babel / webpack with easy customisation are a few things that draw people into next.js dev.

Like anything that deals with reasonable complexity there are a bunch of concepts to understand, but once that happens next.js feels like a thin layer around "it's just react".

I particularly like being able to drop api functions with a standard req / res signature into `pages/api` to immediately have some server-side api endpoints available, which can be deployed to Zeit's now as Lambdas with minimal fuss. It significantly reduces the friction of thinking about and implementing front-end sites with custom api endpoints for whatever you're building.

[1]: [https://github.com/zeit/next.js/discussions/10437](https://github.com/zeit/next.js/discussions/10437)

<comment><USER55> Does this mean I can treat it a bit like PHP hosting of yore, where I upload a single file and stuff just works? No NPM etc? That would be compelling!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> AMD is giving Intel a tough time! Checkout the new Ryzen series processors.

</comment><comment><USER58> I hope your health is better now. Stay strong.

</comment><comment><USER59> Kubernetes has become important

Experiments with new "open source" licenses are unknown

Low code has entered the hype frey

<comment><USER36> We moved from one big box to Kubernetes. Now we have a load of kubernetes related problems to fix.

<comment><USER59> Learning pains? It is more complex, but the efforts will return value.

Email me if you'd like some help debugging and stabilizing

<comment><USER16> > It is more complex, but the efforts will return value.

It seems Kubernetes is often the wrong tool for the job. The industry, and even Google is starting to recognize that, e.g. Kelsey with his "Monoliths are the future" [1] statement.

That said, boy do I like Kubernetes... It is extremely complex, though, and often its deployment seems not to be justified.

[1] [https://changelog.com/posts/monoliths-are-the- future](https://changelog.com/posts/monoliths-are-the-future)

<comment><USER59> Have you heard of Anthos from Google? I think they are directing more resources towards k8s

Monolith / microservices is a separate conversation from orchestration. I have deployed both to Kubernetes for great benefit

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> C++ is getting Modules and Concepts in its newest standard (2020) version, bringing more simplification and making it even more modern and as easy as other languages. The compile-time programming is even more powerful than before

</comment><comment><USER61> Blockchain came and went. I'm unsure of what the current scam/buzzword is on VC's bingo cards.

<comment><USER62> DeFi is the new ICO

[https://defipulse.com](https://defipulse.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Elixir is now fully mature (almost at v2.0) and probably the best all-round language, with a super powerful web framework (Phoenix) and a very rich ecosystem. Highly recommend playing with it!

</comment><comment><USER15> Microservices are the new hype with related tech. It's DDD with a new jacket, requires a devops team and it has some interesting concepts though.

Almost no one has a decent implementation for micro-frontends. Although ING bank released a nice framework related to this - [https://medium.com/ing- blog/ing-open-sources-lion-a-library-...](https://medium.com/ing-blog/ing- open-sources-lion-a-library-for-performant-accessible-flexible-web- components-22ad165b1d3d)

<comment><USER64> The first rule of DevOps is that if you have a DevOps team then you're not doing DevOps.

<comment><USER65> sounds really stupid

<comment><USER19> It forces developers to write better code because they have to maintain it from design to deploy. The biggest pushback I've seen is from people who don't want to think about how inefficient their app runs in the cloud and just want to write the next API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Just a nit pick, but maybe the title should be updated to specify the question is about "web software" rather than software in general, since the question and most of the answers offered are pretty narrowly focused on web technology and ML and not software in general.

</comment><comment><USER67> Rust has grown tremendously in the last few years. People are using it as a general purpose language, from Unix command line utilities to industrial IoT services. Greenfield projects are using Rust as are next generation refactoring projects. Game development, multimedia, and even data scientists are showing increased usage. Embedded adoption is growing but at a slower rate. I'm not going to drop names until announcements are made but companies that have used Go for flagship products are no longer doing so. They're rewriting in Rust. Healthcare startup(s) who are building systems to compete with Epic are using Rust. Government contractors working on intelligence systems are also using it.

</comment><comment><USER68> AI is still thrown, investors seem to like it.

React is performant now, so if I was you I'd take a good hard look at Clojurescript / Reagent / Porting those to React-Native.

And welcome back, good to hear your health problems are sorted!

</comment><comment><USER69> Kotlin is now preferred for Android development. Apple has embraced FRP and introduced it's Combine framework as well as SwiftUI, a declarative React-ish view framework for all it's platforms. Swift got module stability and looking towards server side and cross platform development. Google is pushing Flutter pretty hard and trying to find a place for dart, it looks promising but nobody is using it. React Native is being used heavily by startups and small shops but big companies are still building native apps. PWAs are getting better but still have a way to go.

</comment><comment><USER70> I'm scratching my head to think of anything really significant. It's a bit of a stagnant period, albeit with lots and lots of churn, but all that churn hasn't really amounted to much.

</comment><comment><USER71> still have to support ie11 but no one cares about 8/9 anymore

</comment><comment><USER72> Python 3.0+ is no longer optional.

</comment><comment><USER73> JSX in favor of HTML has won. Compiled server side languages are the future. Everyone writing untyped is converting.

</comment><comment><USER74> I got one. Hadoop seems to be dead. Cloudera will be a penny stock and MapR had a very strange exit.

</comment><comment><USER75> Angular - Still lost track w/ their versioning. React - More popular JS Postgres - Getting better and better Svelte - Might make it. K8s - Too much stuff going on. Jump w/ care.

</comment><comment><USER73> MacBooks are still all the rage even with the crappy keyboard.

<comment><USER76> And now you can even buy one with the non-crappy keyboard again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Nothing - oh I forgot there is 8 new Javscript framwork this week. It's been a couple of weeks since I checked but there must be a new language or 2 out there.

</comment><comment><USER78> Basically nothing

</comment><comment><USER79> Java release cycle was changed. Now, it's being released every 6 months.

Windows 7 and Python 2 are officially dead now :)

</comment><comment><USER80> JavaScript, Java and PHP still suck.

</comment><comment><USER81> Nope, I think that about sums it up.

</comment><comment><USER82> Serverless is getting bigger.

<comment><USER83> But no longer a silver bullet. Costs to be calculated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Serverless

</comment><comment><USER24> Svelte is slowly but surely growing and gaining attention. I think more than any other framework it has the potential to really challenge React in the coming years.

[https://svelte.dev/](https://svelte.dev/)

<comment><USER85> That's not what npm stats show. Rich is good at marketing though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Java's market share is declining fast.

Ruby and Clojure are dead, literally for Clojure, most libs are from >7 years ago.

Javascript(and TS) and Python are the tools of the trade to achieve most common things.

Devs are starting to realize how they got fooled by Rust's marketing/hype train for general purpose programming/exploration/prototyping and productivity because it's too restrictive and its compile times are atrocious.

A more accurate Rust slogan:

 _A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software at a very high cost._

Which is fine is you really need that efficiency.

<comment><USER6> Should clarify that first statement.

Java market share is declining but the JVM is still as good as ever. Instead everyone is moving to Kotlin and Scala.

<comment><USER36> What do you base that on? I still see a lot of Java jobs advertised (never seen a Kotlin job and not too many for Scala). It seems to be entrenched in the corporate world in a way that it isn't going away soon.</comment></comment></comment>


Attack on the pentagon results in discovery of new mathematical tile (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/aug/10/attack-on-the-pentagon-results-in-discovery-of-new-mathematical-tile <comment><USER2> For those looking to create patterns like these in real life, I've had some success describing aperiodic tiling expansion rules in PostScript: [https://github.com/steiza/postscript_fractals](https://github.com/steiza/postscript_fractals)

From there you can send it to a laser cutter (see link for pictures), vinyl cutter, plasma cutter, CNC machine, etc.

PostScript is particularly great because it's a stack based language, and aperiodic tilings are often defined by expansion rules that are basically recursive algorithms. Just don't go too deep or you'll blow the stack!

<comment><USER3> Nicely done. I envy your etched windows.

I've long fantasized about using penrose tiling for my bathroom. Alas, my craftsmanship is terrible and I can barely manage subway style tiling.

I think someones could make some side money doing these one-offs for local builders, remodelers. Every service bureau I've ever met with their own laser (CNC, 3D printer) has spare capacity.

I've also long wanted to have client-side procedurally generated backgrounds for web pages, and user interfaces in general. Wood grain, marbling, penrose tiling, fractals... I got something kinda working using applets with Sun's HotJava browser, once upon a time.

I just saw that CSS now has a paint image hook. Made me think it's time to rescratch that itch. Unless someone beats me to it... :)

<comment><USER4> It really isn't that hard to make custom shape tiles by hand using the average Joe tools but it's a long, precise and tedious process. I kinda miss doing it with my step father blasting Chris Rhea on the stereo and slapping my head whenever I was "unattentive" and had a 1mm difference from the model, it isn't a huge difference but add it up to all the tiles and you can get a pretty messy job in the end...I miss those days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's fascinating to me that Marjorie Rice, a housewife in her 50s, essentially taught herself, created her own mathematical notation, and found four pentagons on her own. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Rice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Rice)). I'm astonished and encouraged by her work.

<comment><USER6> I think there is a lot of latent amateur mathematical talent going underutilized.

<comment><USER7> There's a number of Numberphile videos I've seen where there are computer checks being done on various conjectures famous enough to on a video series like Numberphile, and even IIRC one case where a counterexample was found by an amateur with a computer. I've often thought there must be a lot of much less famous conjectures that are probably something an amateur with a computer could attack, and could well be the first to try. Or be the first one to try with gigabytes and teraflops, if the last person tried in an era where "kilo" still sounded pretty impressive.

Math is well covered, but the frontier is larger than ever; it grows every day. There's just a certain art to finding them.

Another field I've wondered about that may be relevant to HN interests is quantum algorithms. There's a lot of very smart people working the theory and the engineering and such, but I wouldn't be all that surprised there's a lot of room for even a relative amateur to learn about what quantum computers can do, and find _practical_ speedups to existing problems, not because nobody is trying but because the field of existing problems is just so large that there almost has to be low hanging fruit still available. Theorists right now are mostly interested in solutions that change O() classes, but someone just having some fun will care if they can find a 100x speedup that is technically not in a different O() class, or something like that.

<comment><USER6> As for Conjectures: I tried one of them ([http://norvig.com/beal.html](http://norvig.com/beal.html)) but didn't have any luck (see the part just before the Conclusion). Like Peter says, better spend your brainpower on a proof than your computerpower on finding counterexamples.

It didn't need a subject domain expert- just computer engineers who understood the problem and how to test counterexamples efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _attack on the pentagon_

Wow that definitely sounds like a clickbait title.

<comment><USER9> On top of it, "plane" is all over the article.

<comment><USER10> Well.. I think its fair to acknowledge this as a perfectly cromulant "next generation Peace Symbol" as a consequence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes I feel like there's not much left people haven't figured out, and then I see something like this: pentagons that can tile a surface aren't fully worked out mathematically. You'd think that would be something we'd have covered, but no — there's wonder left in the world!

<comment><USER12> You might be interested in these [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_mathematics)

Notably some of them like the Millennium Prize offer a reward of 1M dollars if you solve it. There's definitely still some absolute mysteries out there!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wikipedia [1] says it has been proven in 2017 that no convex pentagons that can tile the plane other than these 15 types exist. I've been wondering if there's a single convex tile that can only tile the plane irregularly, guess not.

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

<comment><USER14> It's an open problem to find a single aperiodic tile. It's called the Einstein Problem.

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

<comment><USER15> The _einstein_ problem (lower-case E).

Not to be confused with the physicist.

<comment><USER16> TIL ein stein means one tile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045297)

Man those 3 years went quick!

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish I know how to cut these shapes out of regular square tiles in large quantities. I would love to have Penrose tiling on other exotic patterns in my bathroom.

<comment><USER19> Do a polished concrete floor but stamped with the tiling pattern cut out through a CNC.

Done. Super cheap.

<comment><USER20> Penrose tilings are aperiodic. The stamp (or combined area of all CNC-ed stamps) would be as large as the floor.

<comment><USER21> Within a fixed distance of a given type of tile, the possibilities are not unlimited. Stamp with occasional overlap, and you could get the job done with only a few different stamps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article says that "tiling the plane" is:

"If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps"

So the trick, if I'm understanding this, it's that the shape must have sides that can push up against other of its sides, leaving no gaps. Obviously a circle isn't gonna do it.

Does the plane have to be a plane in the mathematical sense, i.e. infinite? Because then you're obviously not going to cover it with anything. It goes on forever.

If just a section, does the plane have to be a square or other rectangle?

<comment><USER23> Making the plane infinite makes the problem easier, since you don't need to worry about the boundary of any finite section of the plane. For example, if you choose a triangular section, you won't be able to tile that section by squares. But it is still clear the infinite plane can be tiled by squares; just keep laying the squares edge-to-edge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very dishonest title

</comment><comment><USER25> > "We discovered the tile using using a computer to exhaustively search > through a large but finite set of possibilities,"

Brute force. That's my kind of math.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Every triangle can tile the plane. Every four-sided shape can also tile the > plane.

The triangle case makes sense to me, intuitively, but the four-sided one makes much less sense (maybe I need a sheet of paper?). Does this also have a "trivial" proof?

<comment><USER27> Hint: The interior angles of any four sided shape add up to 360°.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> An example of when Title Case would be most misleading.

</comment><comment><USER29> I want to build boats that are shaped like this, then you can tile them together and create a new country.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yeah the headline is a bit misleading, it sounded like a cyberattack on a US government institution

But interesting nonetheless

<comment><USER31> it's not misleading, it's a joke

<comment><USER32> It's prime clickbait. It's published on a major news site, and they know what many people's first reaction will be.

Definitely funny, definitely dishonest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Startup idea: ceramic tiles for geeks.

<comment><USER34> Indeed. Some of the examples [0] are very aesthetically pleasing. I imagined them as season-themed stained-glass windows, representing leaves, nuts, icicles etc., maybe in a house with indoor/outdoor rooms for each season. :)

[0] [https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys- images/Guardian/Pix/pict...](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys- images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/8/6/1438878897109/cb0eea28-8fe7-4cc3-a0ce-896c6f8a6fb4-bestSizeAvailable.png?w=620&q=20&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&dpr=2&s=4f52798b5c17e781e33274833682d36b)</comment></comment>


Hiring Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/06/hiring_hackers.html <comment><USER2> You're more likely to hire the wrong person, not less, if you refuse to hire people without certifications. Certifications have been discredited in high- end security.

<comment><USER3> Discredited amongst the truly high-end for whom Matasano is a household name, sure.

Trust me, though, the Booz Allens and Deloittes are still making tons of money by churning out 25 year olds with Masters degrees in "IT" and GSEC certifications, billing them as "security experts" and parking them in John Q. Federal CSO's office at $600/hour.

<comment><USER2> You are right, but having said that, when _you_ are hiring, _you_ want the iSec people of the world, _not_ the _mumble mumble_ 's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since this has turned partially into a discussion about rhetoric and semantics, I figured I'd join in. I kind of disagree with The Schneier's sentiment, quoted thusly:

"Hacking is primarily a mindset: a way of thinking about security. Its primary focus is in attacking systems, but it's invaluable to the defense of those systems as well. Because computer systems are so complex, defending them often requires people who can think like attackers."

All the way up to "Hacking is a mindset" he's on the right course. Although I'm a security professional by trade and by passion (and was just christened "The Hacker" by my peers at the new job last week), I truly believe that the definition is a bit broader than simply security. Hacking _is_ a mindset: a way of thinking about solutions to complex problems.

It so happens that security is -- or at least can be -- a pretty complex problem, but hackers of all kinds often think about the solutions to their problems by using critical thinking skills, intuition, and intimate knowledge of the system. This applies to complex problems of all varieties.

I understand, to an extent, why his essay was entitled _Hiring Hackers_ , however, _Hiring Computer Criminals_ may have been a more fitting title. Or maybe even simply _Hiring Felons_ , for that matter.

<comment><USER5> Given that the essay opened with "Any essay on hiring hackers quickly gets bogged down in definitions. What is a hacker, and how is he different from a cracker?", I gave him the benefit of the doubt and read that not as his universal definition of the term, but the one he was using for the remainder of the post. Admittedly it could be better labeled.

"Is X a Hacker?" is only a step removed from "Is X art?" When someone gives their definition for the moment, you really have to just accept it, contingently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see - The _other_ kind of hackers. This is all very confusing to me.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Would you hire a convicted pedophile to work at a day care center?"

No, but I would consider contracting them to give advice on a child protection policy for a day care.

<comment><USER8> In reality, probably not. If the parents found out you were contracting a convicted pedophile for whatever reason, it'd be the end of your daycare.

You'd fare much better contracting law enforcement who catch pedophiles for child protection policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to ask recruiters in NYC (this is 1-2 years ago) for candidates with hacking backgrounds. They continuously looked at me with perplexed expression.

From my perspective, they make the best employees. A 1990's hacker, for example, is someone interested in coding and the internet before 'building web apps' was a viable profession. This means they are creative and quite skilled at taking things apart and dissecting them.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure I would hire someone I don't trust.

</comment><comment><USER11> How do you get software written without hackers?

<comment><USER12> Java.

<comment><USER13> Getting "software written" and "hacking" - neither has anything to do with programming languages.</comment></comment></comment>


U.S. Gov't Software Creates 'Fake People' to Spread Message - <AUTHOR> http://nation.foxnews.com/culture/2011/02/19/us-gov-t-software-creates-fake-people-spread-message-social-networking

<comment><USER2> This just in, big money creates "Fake People" that can buy or sell property, sue or be sued, required every quarter to show earnings.</comment>


Facebook quietly ends email address system - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26332191 <comment><USER2> One really interesting thing about this: When I speak with my Facebook rep, he has brought up time and time again that Facebook basically believes email is fundamentally broken. They keep saying they are going to remove the offers ad unit (which derives most of its value from sending an email to the users sign in email address), because they see email as something people feel obligated to deal with. There's a clear focus within the company on becoming the default communication medium for the internet. Their attempt to purchase Snapchat and now the WhatsApp purchase seem to back that up too.

Not really commenting either way on whether or not it's a smart strategy, just that it's been interesting to think about while watching their decisions.

<comment><USER3> Aside from the NSA liking that, and a lot of foreigners not trusting that, a lot of people in general have a distaste for Facebook. There are many reasons for this, which means there are many reasons why Facebook can collapse. What they say believe and the lack of understanding of how to apply a solution practically keeps being mirrored by Facebook's behaviours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Trusting Facebook with anything is a bad idea. They have no obligation towards anyone to do anything, except for their shareholders.

People come and go, the email system stays, eventually outliving Facebook, too. :)

I wouldn't be surprised if they'll make a U-turn and offer email again in the future.

<comment><USER5> >They have no obligation towards anyone to do anything, except for their shareholders.

This is true of every for-profit enterprise. Why direct it against Facebook in particular?

<comment><USER6> That is obviously not true. For example, as soon as you have a contract with a for-profit enterprise where you are paying them actual money, they have legally actionable obligations to you in return.

<comment><USER5> Any private company will stop entering contracts for a particular service the moment that those contracts stop benefitting shareholders.

The societal value (portability, privacy, openness, etc.) of a product doesn't stop anyone from withdrawing it the moment it stops being profitable. This is what I take to be parent's issue with Facebook in this case.

To continue doing something because it's good for users (even when it's not good for shareholders) you need a nonprofit or a government (or very altruistic shareholders.) USPS is an example of this - it's not profitable to serve rural areas at such low prices, but the government does it anyway while corporations won't/can't.

<comment><USER7> This is not about a product not being profitable, but about an alternative strategy being more profitable, and an open system does indeed discourage choosing the alternative strategy, precisely because it prevents a single actor from being able to withdraw the product from the market.

With email (well, email before people were stupid enough to use gmail), if a single provider withdraws their email offering from the market, that does not really have much of an effect on the system as a whole, the affected users just switch to a different provider and email overall just continues to work as it always did - which in turn should discourage companies from withdrawing their email offerings in favour of their proprietary offerings, as they would expect people to switch to a different provider rather than to their proprietary offering.

Well, in practice, though, people just seem to be too stupid to understand such basic economic realities as network effects and the effects of monopolies/dictatorships/other concentrations of power and what the long-term effects of those are, and so facebook and twitter do actually have users, so something about that theory must be wrong, I guess.

<comment><USER8> With email it all boils down to owning your email, on your own domain, with Gmail no less, speaking of which people had yahoo.com and hotmail.com accounts long before Gmail. And if you don't own the email address, it's painful to make a switch, though much less painful than switching from FB to something else.

There is a big difference between email and FB - people depend on email on a daily basis, especially for work. When 2 people exchange contacts, what do they exchange? Their phone and email of course. Do you give out your FB or Twitter handle to people?

Email is reliable, everybody has an email address and everybody with an email address can communicate with you. My father doesn't have the patience to be on FB, he can barely use a laptop or his phone, but he does use email.

My point is - these new platforms for communication will never replace email and I also believe that because of the lock in, FB and Twitter and G+ will never be so relied upon as to be irreplaceable. This lock in these bring is also their weakness.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the problem with gmail is not gmail itself, but rather its success. If everyone/a majority/too many people use(s) gmail, that puts google into a position where they would be able to change the system unilateraly, that is why I think it's stupid when people, in particular people who should know better, use gmail. Well, plus the fact that google has plenty of motivation to hinder privacy in emails because their business case is built on reading your emails, which makes it all the more scary that they could get into a position to dominate email.

Other than that: Oh, I hope you are right! But don't underestimate network effects - people were also stupid enough to let Microsoft lock them into word documents, which indeed were practically irreplacable for quite a while, and to a degree still are.

<comment><USER6> I find it reassuring that Google tried to do something similar before, when Google Groups attempted to take over Usenet, and people using real newsgroups had little time for either Google's "replacement" or for people who were accessing Usenet via Google Groups and thought everyone else should/must be as well.

<comment><USER8> Not sure what you mean, but Google Groups is basically enabling ... mailing lists. So we go in circles, back to email.

<comment><USER7> Google groups was based on Google acquiring DejaNews and building a usenet archive and interface on top of that - mailing lists are a later addition. The usenet interface was (and I guess still is?) terribly broken, making it a pain for other usenet users to deal with posts from google groups users, because it simply works in a way that hinders interoperability with the rest of usenet.

(And while at it: The mailing list feature is also quite defective, obviously built by people who don't really have a clue how email works.)

<comment><USER8> OK, I understand what you're saying. I'm not really familiar with the history of Usenet and Google Groups it seems.

And for mailing lists it could be better, but as a user of several mailing lists of various open-source projects, I have had no problems.

I am noticing that Google doesn't work in our interests though. For example I am disappointed by their shitty support for IMAP, CalDav and CardDav.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I never figured out what their thought process was with this feature. They didn't offer a traditional inbox, and there was no real effort to educate users on how the "Other" inbox worked. They rolled the @facebook.com email addresses out as the default public email address, which suggested they had a plan, but they never went any further.

<comment><USER9> @facebook.com was supposed to make people feel that all their electronic communication needs can be met by facebook. I'm guessing, it turned out people didn't mind that much logging into both their gmails/hotmails and facebook.

<comment><USER10> I personally think that people _did_ mind, but they minded the fugly messages interface even more. Every HTML email had to open in a modal pop-up because it would get messed up by Facebook's internal styling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would think that this is their attempt to kill the very _idea_ of e-mail. In their world, everybody has Facebook, _period_.

<comment><USER12> From the WhatsApp's acqusition to closing down Facebook Messages, I think his talk back in 2010 makes sense.

 _" We don't think modern messaging system will be email," he noted, saying that he believes seven characteristics that we will come to define "next generation" messaging: seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal, and short._

([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email- addr...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email-addresses- _n_783697.html#s182605title=Email_SetUp))

He hasn't given up his dream of becoming the leader in mobile, seamless messaging/communication.

<comment><USER13> Why does every definition of new future super cool messaging system imply "immediate". I quite don't like that. Not everything needs to be a chat and immediate.

<comment><USER14> Well, why _not_?

Just put your phone in your pocket when you want to stop replying immediately!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I want to see the _real_ email addresses of my friends (again).

<comment><USER16> Also my thought: Are FB going to "unbork" all the displayed email values that they automatically and without user opt-in switched over to instead display these @facebook email addresses?

To me, it seemed an obvious ploy to keep user and their friends further captured within FB. Want to contact a friend out-of-band? Well, now (i.e. then) even though that friend chose to make their email address visible to you, you effectively no longer have it; you instead have this FB email address that forces you to remain within FB for this communication and until you manually request and receive that friend's "real" email address.

Now, supposedly emails to that FB address will silently forward to the person's "real" (registered) email address. You still don't, in these cases, actually have that address; everything still passes through FB, and you are dependent upon FB doing the right thing (or not) both morally and technically in forwarding your email on.

I'm not saying they won't. But the whole endeavour has become a mess that apparently stemmed out of the business' self-interest -- as opposed to the user's interest -- in keeping users "trapped" within its domain.

P.S. And would they do so _correctly_ , reverting displayed addresses where the prior address values had been displayed to others, but not doing so where they had not been or had been displayed to a different set/group that current -- some people may have been comfortable displaying an @facebook.com email address once those became available but not their "real", personal email address.

<comment><USER17> 2 days ago I was asked to respond to a survey on facebook and my opinions on the site. This ploy was one of my many gripes - I look forward to seeing the rest of my complaints actioned...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's a shame. There's plenty of potential in email that's yet to be explored. Gmail was a great step ahead 10 years ago but it hasn't kept pace. Deep integration of email with web has yet to happen.

<comment><USER19> I don't have data, but I'm pretty sure email is all but irrelevant as a social tool from a today's teenager's perspective - something that "only old people use". I'm 29 and it's been years since I've sent a casual email to a friend...

<comment> k-mcgrady But teenagers are no longer Facebook's core market. Teenagers are using Snapchat and other services like Instagram and WhatsApp more (that's why Facebook is buying them). Email still matters to people who started using Facebook as teenagers 10 years ago when email was still important.

<comment><USER20> Email is and continues to be important to many to receive a paycheck. I'm very quick to scold clients and other professionals I interact with who send me texts instead of email. I can see email being supplanted by tools like Basecamp, however, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook start to go in that direction ("Facebook for the enterprise")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Having not used this feature were messages sent to your @facebook.com address delivered into your FB messages box? Or somewhere else? I would assume the former, which actually sounds like a nice feature until.... you remember that Facebook is a walled garden, which means that people who would see/have access to your @facebook.com address could just ...message you on Facebook.

This almost seems like a feature for non-FB users to get in touch with you via Facebook (while also obscuring your "real" address). I know the idea of "following" is a new-ish FB feature, but I wonder the timing of that was too late to give this feature any traction.

<comment><USER22> They went to your "Other" inbox, which nobody ever checks. It's the same place messages from non-friends go.

Actually, now that I look at it, there's a message from somebody who found my wallet once. Fortunately he also discovered me on LinkedIn, or I would never have noticed.

<comment><USER23> Someone found my wallet too and located me on linkedin. Come to think of it, it's the most useful linkedin has ever been for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I dont get it. I really liked the single inbox idea, what I didn't understand is why they didn't just allow IMAP or oauth integration with gmail and tackle it that way, they already have messenger on my phone, they already have all my Facebook messages, the only thing left was email. Email addresses are ids. They dont change. Period.

<comment><USER25> _Email addresses are ids. They dont change. Period_

I am guessing you are very young. I remember back in the 90s when your email address was provided by your college or your workplace, and when you moved on, you lost it, you didn't even get to set up a forwarding. If two people happened to move in between updating their address books, then they simply lost touch. Phone numbers where similarly ephemeral; landlines were only portable within an area code, mobiles within a single network. And of course postal addresses too, people were moving every year at college, then every few years with work, including overseas. Keeping track of how to contact people was a tedious and error prone process.

The radical thing about FB for now-30-somethings is that this problem simply went away.

<comment><USER26> > this problem simply went away

Yeah, cause everyone has Gmail.

<comment><USER27> Not even remotely true. Gmail _may_ have become the largest webmail service, depending on who you ask, but Outlook.com / Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are still huge too. In many markets Gmail comes well down the list.

"Everyone" in the _tech_ world has Gmail.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, but webmail sort of fixed the disappearing email address problem. That's what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love the photo subtitle:

> _Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of email in 2010._

<comment><USER29> This guy invented email, right?

<comment><USER30> Yes, and when people say "my Internet", what they're really referring to is not a home Internet connection but their _own personal Internet_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, after the change, anyone who knows my public Facebook username can now directly send me email? I wonder if we'll be able to turn that off...

<comment><USER32> Facebook says that will be an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was just talking to someone about this service today. I don't think I ever tried it.

When it launched I still actively used Facebook, but it was a slow rollout and I didn't have access at that time. Since then, I've stopped using Facebook for almost everything and after the initial launch, all but forgot about it.

The recent purchase of WhatsApp however, reminded me of their email service and I remarked how reminiscent it was of the move in the late 90's from email to IM.

I'm sort of surprised that they are retiring it entirely as I thought they'd use the messaging app to drive higher adoption rates of their email service, akin to Hangouts integrating with GMail. I thought it would actually be a good strategy. I guess it's hard to convert the masses to another email system when most users are probably happy with what they've already got.

</comment><comment><USER34> That actually came in handy the odd times when I had to input an email address for someone that mainly used FB.

</comment><comment><USER35> Interesting that they didn't restore the old email addresses for people who kept it or didn't know their email showed up as *@facebook.com. Or at least it didn't seem like it from the profiles I viewed.

<comment><USER36> Because if they do that they will be unable to eavesdrop on your e-mail anymore, technically to forward an e-mail they have to receive it and resend. AFAIR SMTP protocol does not have redirects as HTTP does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Who would have thought customers would want yet another email service that had no real benefits over their existing email service?

It always seemed like a baffling idea to try and run out in the world, especially as to get a Facebook account you need an email address.

</comment><comment><USER38> Oh, just wrote an article about the lessons we learned from that: [http://blog.frontapp.com/lessons-from-facebook-stopping- its-...](http://blog.frontapp.com/lessons-from-facebook-stopping-its-e-mail- service/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Well, good. Being assigned an email address I didn't ask for by the "we need to know all we can about you in order to optimise the pictures of baking your Aunt keeps posting" website never really drew me in.

</comment><comment><USER40> That's a shame.

I use this to send emails to a couple of older family members who are happy using Facebook but don't use any 'real' email address. Is there any chance they'll keep some forwarding option around?

<comment><USER41> As the article says, they will forward it the email the user signed up with, which is of course required to use Facebook so your relatives must have one (even if they don't check it).

<comment><USER36> And now ask yourself a question why would they want to do that? I mean why keep unneeded load on their servers and support whole infrastructure just to forward e-mail. Probably because they want to continue to reading your e-mails but now they don't have to invest into storage. Just copy the interesting ones for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> i don't even know there's facebook email address given to us

<comment><USER43> It used to be prominently featured in your profile page. I've never used mine since I have so many better, older options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Well that was one huge success again.</comment>


Fossil, DVC with wiki and ticketing developed by sqlite creator Richard Hipp - <AUTHOR> http://www.fossil-scm.org

<comment><USER2> Previous post and discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809493>

<comment><USER3> Thank you! I missed this the first time around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And here I was wondering what a serial port driver had to do with DVC and wikis.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSSIL></comment>


Google to be Punished in France for Failing to Pare Back its Privacy Policy - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/30/cnil-slaps-google/ <comment><USER2> "Define specified and explicit purposes;" What does this even mean? For every piece of data they have to detail where and how it is used? I don't think any major company could do this reliably.

"Inform users with regard to the purposes of the processing implemented;" Seems like an extension of the first.

"Define retention periods for the personal data processed;" Forever, but valid.

"Not proceed, without legal basis, with the potentially unlimited combination of users' data;" What? Are they saying that the use of data can never change?

"Fairly collect and process passive users' data ;" A good one.

"Inform users and then obtain their consent in particular before storing cookies in their terminal." Their cookie law is freaking ridiculous so they should probably get their head out of there ass to begin with.

Most of this seems like FUD - are there any companies that have these policies in place currently?

<comment><USER3> I wonder what would occur if EU privacy laws were weakened so that no violation would occur.

<comment><USER2> Or if they altered them to be reasonable - knowing what "processes" your data, especially if it's a ton of things, in no way protects your rights as a consumer since most consumers wouldn't understand it anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yawn. I'll believe this is something other than a publicity stunt when they start going after Microsoft with the same zeal for making essentially the same privacy policy changes:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft- expan...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft-expands- gathering-and-use-of-data-from-web-products.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

[http://marketingland.com/microsoft-privacy-change-google- att...](http://marketingland.com/microsoft-privacy-change-google- attacked-23598)

<comment><USER5> How did we reach the point where we suspect a country's privacy regulator of engaging in a publicity stunt (why? what do they gain from publicity?) while ignoring the point they're making - that Google waited for the last day of a 90-day deadline to amend its privacy policies to comply with French law, only to question the regulator's reasoning.

Is it not possible that the answer could be the simplest one, Occam's Razor and all, that Google doesn't want to comply with French privacy law because it interferes with its business model?

<comment><USER6> > How did we reach the point where we suspect a country's privacy regulator of > engaging in a publicity stunt (why? what do they gain from publicity?)

Are you new to the world? Or just hopelessly naive?

It's called politics & lobbying.

> Is it not possible that the answer could be the simplest one, Occam's Razor > and all, that Google doesn't want to comply with French privacy law because > it interferes with its business model?

Occam's Razor doesn't apply here. It never applies to law, because law is not about simple, concise rules of logic. And second, it doesn't apply because your scenario doesn't make any fewer assumptions than other scenarios.

It's possible that French law is right and Google is wrong. It's possible that Google is right and French law is wrong. It's possible that Google is right, French law is right, and the regulators are wrong.

And really all of those are equally likely possibilities.

<comment><USER5> > It's called politics & lobbying.

That is a generic explanation that offers absolutely zero insight about this particular incident. From the article, the regulator waited for 3 months for Google to comply, after which it threatened to impose fines. Any other regulator around the world would have done the same when faced with a company refusing to abide by its laws.

<comment><USER6> It's part of a big song and dance. Google doesn't think it violated the law, the regulators think they did. Google is taking the entire amount of time they were given before responding with "no", and now the regulators are banging the pots and pans.

This is how it always goes - regardless of guilt or innocence.

<comment><USER7> But how does that make it a "publicity stunt"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 400k fine for multi-billion $ company is hardly a newsworthy punishment. It's a parking ticket.

<comment><USER9> Quite; Google's Paris office building alone cost €100 _million_.

[http://www.vincentabry.com/en/new-google-french- headquarters...](http://www.vincentabry.com/en/new-google-french-headquarters- photos-1253)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This title doesn't need to be this vague. The original spells it out pretty well.

"Google To Be Punished In France For Failing To Pare Back Its Overreaching Privacy Policy"

<comment><USER11> minus all the capitals which add no value and make it harder to read

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can the fine be unlimited, by the way, up to e.g. half the value that France thinks it's worth it for Google to remain in France?

What is the recourse that Google would have?

<comment><USER13> According to the CNIL site the maximum fine is 150,000 Euros, or 300,000 for a repeat offense.

I'm not familiar with the CNIL specifically, but normally this kind of decision would be subject to judicial review if Google felt it merited it. Or they could refuse to pay, in which case the matter would ultimately go to court.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> subtext: France to punish google for recognising their EU revenue in Ireland and not in France.

<comment><USER15> subtext: easytiger spreading FUD

First, this is about privacy rights. Second, this is an independent agency. Third, it is actually rumored that other equivalent agencies in the EU will take the same kind of measures.

<comment><USER16> Yes. The CNIL and the tax service have really nothing to do with each other.

Not to say that Google shouldn't pay taxes like normal businesses do, but this has nothing to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> skim-read this headline as "Google to be Punched in Face..."

</comment><comment><USER18> lol</comment>


Doubling SaaS Revenue By Changing The Pricing Model - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/ <comment><USER2> Happy to answer questions to the extent that I can.

Speaking of which: if it isn't transparently obvious by now, I really, really like getting feedback about how my advice worked out. If you ever implement a suggestion from me (particularly with an A/B test), please, drop me an email. Even if the result was "Well, that was sure an epic failure", because negative confirmation is useful, too. (If you want to share results I can write up for the blog, I appreciate that, too, but I'd be just as pleased with a "Keep this under your hat but we did a first-experience tour and, yikes, engagement +20%.")

<comment><USER3> Here's what I find really surprising: Making the word "Free" in the call-to- action much less prominent did not reduce conversion by very much.

The original page prominently says: "Sign up for a free trial" and gets a 6.9% conversion from visitor to trial user.

The new page unprominently says: "Money back guarantee" and "Free Sign Up" in the top right corner. Conversion is 5.2%, which is almost the same considering the scope of the change, even though there was much less use of the word "Free".

This is surprising in itself.

I'm also curious about how the next stage of the funnel is converting users from the trial to entering their credit cards.

Also you say that credit card signup is not mandatory. When does the CC enter the picture? Does the service wait a while (e.g. one month ) and ask you to enter you credit card? How does this compare to taking a credit-card upfront and offering a one-month money-back guarantee?

<comment><USER4> I don't want to be pedantic, but 25% fewer conversions is not "almost the same", it's quite the loss. You need to increase your funnel 33% _somewhere_ down the line to make up for it (which I'm sure they did - I'm just making the point that X% -> X-d% is significant if X _and_ d are small).

<comment><USER5> Depends if you're maximising for revenue or signups. The number of signups decreased but the revenue increased significantly, making up for the loss in signups. Of course if you can increase signups now with the new pricing then that would also show revenue increase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "The minimum buy-in for the service is now $99 a month, which will segment > away customers who are less serious about their server uptime."

I use Server Density (and even blogged about it, <http://cherrypopapp.com/blog#Server_Provisioning>) and would not pay $99/month to monitor 1-2 servers.

I don't see how paying more or less reflects a level of seriousness.

<comment><USER7> With the new pricing though you are no longer a targeted customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The minimum buy-in for the service is now $99 a month, which should scare > away the idiots.

I'm scared, and as a potential customer I hate to be labeled an idiot.

I'm very happy with New Relics system even though they're priced higher than you per server, they at least offer a price PER server instead of tiers.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I don't doubt that being ruthless about A/B testing pricing increases revenue, but I'm not wild about the implied attitude that customers only exist so that we can extract as much money as possible from them. The user experience should definitely be a factor as well.

I don't think it's possible to support this claim with data, but I'm convinced that being ruthless and unfriendly with pricing can have a negative impact on the business in the long term. As a customer, I much prefer usage based pricing to arbitrary plans.

<comment><USER10> _I'm convinced that being ruthless and unfriendly with pricing can have a negative impact on the business in the long term_

Optimising for price isn't necessarily being ruthless and unfriendly to customers.

In my experience more people _like_ pricing models like these. It's easier to understand. They know what they'll be spending each month. It saves them effort and work.

I worked with one organisation who just killed out of hand any service that had variable pricing since it played merry hell with their accounting processes. They would much rather pay $99 a month every month than deal with the hassle of figuring out what this random number was on the invoice (because you had to check that that number was the right number somehow - which cost them money in admin, tracking, etc.).

Yes - models like this make some customers unhappy. Some of those customers will be good customers. That doesn't mean that other who go for the new model are unhappy - or being screwed.

Changing pricing models like this are in many cases more a way to resegment / target your market. The revenue increase is just evidence that you're doing it well :-)

Also - money for the company _should_ mean more resources for building a better product for the customer, so a long term win for the customer.

<comment><USER9> Pricing is obviously a complicated issue, and I know there will never be a "right" or "wrong" way to price a product. I guess all I can say is that I don't agree that plan-based pricing is good for the consumer. One of my main objections is that I don't agree that plan-based pricing is easy/simple.

Take a look at Highrise: <http://highrisehq.com/signup> 37signals seems to have set the standard for plan-based pricing pages, so I think this is a good example to use. Right off the bat it's complicated because I to choose which plan I want before signing up. How in the hell do I know how many deals I need? Then I have to constantly monitor usage to make sure Idon't pass the invisible threshold. Uh oh, one of my employees added one contact and my price just doubled. That's the opposite of simplicity.

Now let's look at a more recent 37Signals pricing page: <http://basecamp.com/pricing> This is still plan-based, but it's much closer to being a la carte based on the number of projects used. I can't speak for 37Signals, but it would seem as if they don't think that the plan page they popularized is actually the best approach.

Things can definitely get too complicated if the units you measure with a la carte become too granular (like charging per byte of storage or something crazy like that), but there's normally a nice middle ground. Basecamp made # of projects the metric to focus on. My company charges per user and makes everything else unlimited which generally makes the cost scale linearly with usage (roughly) but it's still very simple and predictable so no one has to spend time checking the invoice.

My company is called "Less Annoying CRM" so we naturally attract people who are sensitive to the annoying shenanigans that are common with other companies, and this is one of the biggest things my customers tell me they like about our service. The pricing has a huge impact on the customer experience which is largely ignored in this blog post. (Note: I realize there is selection bias with my anecdotal evidence, so you can say I don't have the complete picture, although I think after 2.5 years of talking to potential customers every day, I've got a decent idea)

In addition to all of that, it seems clear to me that the purpose of plan- based pricing is to get the majority of your customers to pay more than they should by only allowing them to buy more resources than they need. This is obviously true with cable subscriptions and cell phone plans, and I think it's equally true with SaaS apps. This is even more apparent when you read blog posts like this one and understand how much thought goes into designing a pricing structure that extracts every penny possible from each and every customer.

If you want to make more money, then ok, but I don't buy the claim that this is in the customer's best interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Couldn't lower pricing be seen as marketing? For example to sell in to companies that are now poor, but could be successful and profitable later. If they can't afford SD and pick something else, how likely is it they'll switch to SD later?

</comment><comment><USER12> Regarding the question of estimating the error: I don't know a ton about stats, but can't you use bootstrapping to get a valid sense of the variability/margin of error of your dataset for non normal distributions? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics)>

</comment><comment><USER13> I always wondered how volatile your pricing scheme can be. Suppose you wanted to A/B test a pricing scheme - is there any potential impact/backlash from customers? And when a company changes their pricing scheme, what happens to customers who were paying a former price/scheme?

<comment><USER2> _And when a company changes their pricing scheme, what happens to customers who were paying a former price/scheme?_

Best practice -- and I'm shamelessly stealing this lesson from Joel Spolsky -- is to grandfather SaaS accounts in indefinitely if you raise prices. This a) lets you get a nice bump in sales if you announce the incoming price increase (no reason you can't do the A/B test quietly but announce the conclusion that prices are going up "loudly"), b) rewards people for taking the risk on you "early", and c) incentivizes them to keep their account active because if it lapses then they lose their super-sweet not-available-anywhere deal.

If I were to redo a pricing scheme in such a way that some customers would benefit from switching, I'd switch them automatically if the new pricing dominated their existing plan ("More quota for less price!") and tell them to make the call if it weren't obvious ("More quota for less price _but_ this new plan doesn't have a particular feature that you may want to have in the future.")

<comment><USER13> Fair, but what if simple economics/margins do not allow you to offer the old price/package. Ex, say you license Twitter data at $0.10/1k, and Twitter decides one day that they want $0.15?

What do you do when your old pricing scheme is no longer profitable?

<comment><USER2> You can head this issue off by charging more, because your margins for a SaaS should probably be in the 80~95% region, and if you're finding yourself thinking "I'll just add a 20% markup on top of Twitter's API rates then compete on price" or "I'll make a payment processing solution which charges 0.25% on top of credit card costs" then you can _reasonably anticipate that this will eventually happen to you_. So, for anyone thinking they might ever be worried about this, charge more. Cost-plus pricing has no place in software.

There's some costs which are difficult to anticipate prior to launch. One is ongoing customer support, and it is entirely possible to price below profitability if you get a lot of pathological customers in on the ground floor. If you've just got a few and the business is fundamentally sound, consider it a marketing expense and let them get weeded out by attrition. If you're like Spreedly or Chargify and discover that a lot of the early adopters in your space are toxic, then it's time to have the "Look, we're not in the business of subsidizing you" discussion. I'd have the messaging for that discussion stress that you'd like to continue offer the old terms but circumstances are tying your hands, and try to be generous on e.g. giving 6 months or so of lock-in to the old prices or assistance in moving them to a provider which is more suited to their needs. But honestly, at the end of the day, if the choices are a) not making payroll for my employees and b) ticking off a bunch of pathological freeloaders, I know what I'd pick every single time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The minimum buy-in for the service is now $99 a month, which should scare > away the idiots

And bootstrapped startups, etc. This isn't just a pricing change but a market repositioning?

<comment><USER15> 99$ a month is reasonable for bootstrapped company's. It's not reasonable for most hobby's, but 50$/month or 100$ / month are both rather high for a hobby website so there is little real loss.

<comment><USER16> _99$ a month is reasonable for bootstrapped company's._

I think HN has been collectively in denial on this kind of point lately. Yes, services offering real value should charge commensurate with that value. Yes, it's lovely if you're Patrick or Thomas and in B2B world where you can whack up your prices and hope whoever is paying the bill isn't spending their own money.

Newsflash: If you're dealing with a bootstrapped business, it might well be that the person paying the bill _is_ spending their own money.

Newsflash #2: There are _dozens_ of companies pitching useful-but-not-that- useful tools and services to these bootstrapped businesses. If you spend $100/month on this one, and $300 over there, and $150 on the next one, and ten more after that, and then you multiply it by 12... Well, before long you're spending on the same kind of level that it takes to hire some office help or to run a long-term marketing campaign with a significant level of funding or for that matter to hire in a guy who knows what he's doing for a few days to build your own customised versions of a lot of these services.

In short, if you think the ability to monitor a couple of production servers is worth $1,000+/year to a bootstrapped company, you're crazy. Yes, it's a convenience, but you're talking about a service that could be built using a couple of widely available building blocks with a tiny fraction of the running costs, and frankly to a business at that stage in its development it is highly unlikely that a server falling over until the morning is going to cause any real long-term damage anyway.

When you're dealing with relatively time-rich and cash-poor early stage businesses (OK, time-poor as well because they're trying to build the business, but that's not really the point here) you can't just dismiss the cumulative effect of all these SaaS gadgets. They add up, and if you want to know why so many small businesses fail, I expect not controlling costs is probably somewhere around #2 or #3 on the list.

Does that mean bootstrapped companies are bad customers for these kinds of services? Sure, maybe it does. If there isn't enough in it for both sides to make it a deal worth doing, it's not time to do the deal yet.

<comment><USER15> With bootstrapping it's not just a question of write and maintain something myself or use a 3rd party. There is also the option to use something until you write it yourself. Month to month SAAS means you can add an expensive monitoring service _temporarily_ while you work on other pieces, or diagnose a bug. You also get to play with complex features to decide which are useful and then build out those pieces. Think of it as a DEMO that you pay someone else to write and suddenly X$/month can look vary cheap.

<comment><USER16> The thing is, every time you integrate with another one of these services, you are spending time, both learning about the service and implementing the integration. You may also be incurring some degree of lock-in, either due to direct technical constraints or because of the future costs in time and money of getting your systems unhooked and any relevant data out again.

These costs are on top of whatever you're paying for the service itself, so if you're only going to be using the service for a few months anyway, you might be better off spending the time just implementing something quick and dirty yourself until you have a chance to do it properly.

The key thing is that in bootstrapping terms, _very_ few of these services are indispensable: if you're in that environment then you're probably looking for just enough infrastructure to make a viable product/service, just enough legal/financial advice not to screw up in the early days, and then throwing everything else you've got into marketing, R&D, and sales to try and reach a self-sustaining level of income as soon as possible.

There are decent arguments for integrating certain services early on. For example, analytics/optimisation tools and billing services that boost customer retention can easily have a direct, significant, sustained impact on your income that exceeds the initial investment very quickly. But hardly any of these trendy SaaS tools aimed at small businesses are in that category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Server Density is a UK company. They use to have pricing in pounds.

They seem to have switched to dollar pricing.

My question: Are they taking payment in dollars? or are they converting the amount to pound equivalent in last moment and taking that payment?

I've been thinking about pricing on the internet, whether its good to price in dollars to make it more convenient for the american customers. I feel like customers from UK are alright with paying dollars, but americans don't like to pay in pounds.

</comment><comment><USER18> Someone shared a couple links on this topic before but I didn't see them here

<http://www.erica.biz/2012/pricing-strategies/>

[http://conversionxl.com/pricing-experiments-you-might-not- kn...](http://conversionxl.com/pricing-experiments-you-might-not-know-but-can- learn-from/)

</comment><comment><USER19> When I change pricing I always worry that current customers will be unhappy because they might have saved some money had they bought it later (I sell a desktop product).

Is this a problem you have seen youself when you sold desktop software?

<comment><USER2> Give anyone who complains a refund. Problem solved. (P.S. Not many people will complain, and _you don't want the business of the ones that will_.)

Though I'd wonder why one would be lowering prices when _raising_ prices is just as easy and generally does better things for revenue.

<comment><USER19> I meant lowering in context of a test but fair point.</comment></comment></comment>


The Foamy Rules for Rabid Tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/11/02/the_foamy_rules_for_rabid_tools.html <comment><USER2> While his specific tool examples are excellent, I agree most with his point that, whatever your tools, you need to love them more than is really healthy ;-)

<comment><USER3> I think the core point is that you need to care. The chance that you will be good if you don't care is vanishingly small (because you are competing against people who do care). If you care, you can find tools that will help you.

That said, I've seen people who care less but are still excellent developers. Talent can compensate to some degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favourite part of the article:

"Dreamweaver was attempting to be helpful, but the moment it reformatted my code, I threw a fit. YOU TOUCHED MY CODE."</comment>


Faceleaks : leak your friends anonymously - <AUTHOR> http://www.faceleaks.info/

<comment><USER2> and the use for this is... what exactly?

I mean, it's interesting, but utterly pointless, and even invasive.

On the other hand, this is facebook photos that are being leaked, it's not as if we expect any privacy on facebook.</comment>


Ask HN: Anybody using web components (or Polymer) in production? - <AUTHOR> Obviously Google, but curious if it's ready for general use over (say) React. <comment><USER3> Yes, we used Polymer to build the new ING banking portal. We had each component in its own repository which was kind of neat. I am doing React now and comparing both I think React is better, there is more support in the community. With Polymer all you basically have is the Polymer docs most of the times.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yup, lots of people, we are creating some new components for RhodeCode using Polymer right now. Whole team is very pleased in how nice it is to work with it.

Companies like EA, IBM, General Electric or Salesforce use it in production. Works like a charm, there were multiple sites that list some polymer projects I think.

IMO it is a mature project perfectly fine for production use today - <USER2> community is ~5000 members and vary active - lots of job offers, lots of discussions and applications being worked on.

[https://new-console.ng.bluemix.net/](https://new-console.ng.bluemix.net/)

[https://www.battlefield.com/](https://www.battlefield.com/)

[https://github.com/abdonrd/PolymerProjects](https://github.com/abdonrd/PolymerProjects)

</comment><comment><USER5> Check out [https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/wiki/Who's-using- Polymer%...](https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/wiki/Who's-using-Polymer%3F) and [https://madewithpolymer.com/](https://madewithpolymer.com/).

Some recent ones: [http://www.ea.com/](http://www.ea.com/) [https://rio16.usatoday.com/](https://rio16.usatoday.com/) [https://www.victoriassecret.com/](https://www.victoriassecret.com/) [https://www.net-a-porter.com/](https://www.net-a-porter.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not me, but there was a dev from the Seattle Times who gave a talk at SeattleJS and CascadiaFest about using web components in production.[1]

[1]: [https://thomaswilburn.github.io/slide-dash- show/#0](https://thomaswilburn.github.io/slide-dash-show/#0)</comment>


We have found the seed of Minecraft's title-screen background panorama - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/hthrmk/big_news_we_have_found_the_seed_of_minecrafts/ <comment><AUTHOR> Summary from the reddit post (written by reddit user Tomlacko):

Minecraft@Home is a volunteer distributed computing project powered by BOINC allowing users to volunteer their idle computers to help advance Minecraft- related research, one of which was this panorama project. In less than 24 hours after launching the panorama application; a volunteer host on Minecraft@Home found this seed. This was approximately 93 days of processing time at a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs compressed into 24 hours. Another ongoing project is search for the tallest cactus (currently we have found a 22 block high one!).

Github: [https://github.com/minecrafthome/b1.7_seedfinder](https://github.com/minecrafthome/b1.7_seedfinder)

Same team is also working on a much harder problem which is determining the seed of a screenshot included with the Minecraft distribution. There is a nice video about current progress here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7f9tMslVE) There are so many reverse engineering tricks done to reduce the 2^64 possible seeds, such as training a neural network with the specific job of upscaling minecraft screenshots.</comment>


U.S.'s Only Civilian Town Encircled by a Military Base - <AUTHOR> https://princewilliamliving.com/2014/05/no-piece-virginia-touches-town-u-s-s-civilian-town-encircled-military-base/ <comment><USER2> That seems rather depressing... People so scared of crime, they voluntarily choose to live in a sort of police state. No wonder that "the vast majority of crime in the Town of Quantico is domestic related".</comment>


Shiv - A wrapper over Django - <AUTHOR> http://fauzism.com/post/6684122984/shiv-django <comment><USER2> > As income inequality has grown dramatically in the nation, the very wealthy > are blamed for all manner of social ills.

Boo hoo.</comment>


What do with a project that has one user? - <AUTHOR>

I have a small free link-saving service at http://scrooty.com/ that a friend of mine uses. I'd like to kill off the servers as they're the only one that uses it, but that seems rude.
I've showed them other projects but the user professes their love for Scrooty and only Scrooty. (I showed them Delicious, Historious, and like five other things)
User's unwilling to pay for the service, suggested advertising.
Any suggestions as to what I should do with this? <comment><USER2> I have a similar project (<http://www.twirlapp.com/>) that only I and a friend of mine uses. The cost is pretty minimal for me to maintain since it's on a shared instance with a ton of my other projects so I just keep it up.

I do some occasional work when I need a break from everything else and I thought of open sourcing it but never really got around to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sending my user to you in the hopes of offloading them. :)

<comment><USER2> Haha what have I signed up for?!

I mean the product is pretty different but may be good enough. Your friend can also take a look at <https://kippt.com/> and <https://collections.me/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just provide your friend with a deadline for when you're shutting down the service along with the list of possible services he can use to replace the existing one.

I would also just provide him with the option of taking over the server account and paying for the monthly maintenance fee himself. Basically: "Here, please have this, I don't want to deal with this anymore."

<comment><AUTHOR> They're not willing to pay anything for it.

Yeah, I know.

Thinking of making the end of the month the cut off.

<comment><USER3> Right, but just give them that option, just as part of being nice. That way if they ever bitch about it, you can always say: "if it wasn't worth $x for you, it sure as hell ain't worth $x for me!" :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny thing is that by making this post you may just end up with even more users.

You could move it to Heroku (or another similar service) who offer a free plan.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Funny thing is that by making this post you may just end up with even more users.

It occurred to me, but then I trusted in my repellent design skills.

>You could move it to Heroku (or another similar service) who offer a free plan.

I have religious objections to Heroku, but I might do it for the sake of my friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Taking a look at it just because. Don´t mind me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just be aware that I'm going to either bring on a paywall ($5/month) or shut it down eventually.

<comment><USER5>
      I know. Like I said, just taking a look, trying to understand why your friend wouldn´t want to switch to something else

<comment><AUTHOR> Because they either charged or led to a lack of organization of links.

It baffled me too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>