Now I can't speak to the truth of these claims. I have no inside knowledge but I will say this: be skeptical of such stories. I have seen other stories like this on HN where I have had some inside knowledge and I can tell you that there have definitely been cases that vary between being one side of the story to being a distortion of facts and events to being outright lies.

It's a common theme to have a post of "[BigCo] shut down my account for no reason". I describe such stories as "unverifiable stories in which the poster is a victim".

Like I said, this could all be exactly as the poster claims but it might not be as well. It could be as simple as the person having the same name as someone who got blocked in the US. Who knows? Amazon needs to be extremely careful to be right in situations like this or they risk undermining the ecosystem they've spent so long to create.

I don't mind buying Kindle novels because I tend to only ever read them once. And if they were $6 (like the paperbacks often are) I'd view them as a throwaway purchase.

But when it comes to technical books--books I'll often refer back to and that can cost much more--I'll have to make sure I either only buy the PDF version or I buy the PDF+mobi+epub upgrade from the publisher after buying the Kindle book (2 thumbs up to publishers who do this BTW).

Yet that's pretty much what Amazon did to this poor woman, except in the digital realm: Amazon 'broke and entered' into her Kindle, took away all her books, and then did not give her a straightforward explanation as to why they did so.

More alarmingly, Amazon did this with impunity, because this woman never really owned "her" books or, for that matter, anything else she "purchased" on "her" Kindle. In the digital realm, what Amazon did to this woman is perfectly legal.

Legal or not, this looks, smells, and feels so obviously wrong, it ought to be illegal.

"While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened."

This happens more frequently: Google says this all the time, based on posts here; Amazon now does the same thing; even apartment rental companies will say "you've been turned down on the basis of this report that we don't know the contents of."

If your company can't reveal specific reasons or steps behind why an action was taken, DON'T TAKE THAT ACTION. Even my credit card issuer will tell me exactly why my card was flagged and they deal with ACTUAL MONEY. All these statements do is infuriate customers, create bad press, and drive away other customers. Scammers will just back up, look at their entire operation, and hammer away again with 300 new accounts so all you've accomplished is pissing off customers who want to do business with you.

According to my reading of the legal case (I am not a lawyer, but it would be interesting if any of you are could comment - grellas, perhaps) regarding Amazon's remote deletion of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, the settlement involving that case appears to protect what happened in this story from happening to users in the United States.

Of course, it goes without saying that I do not agree with how things went down in this story, where a person has absolutely no recourse with Amazon, with the proverbial door completely shut in their face. However, I find it interesting that, again, according to my interpretation of the aforementioned settlement, it appears that Kindle units that are purchased and used in the United States are afforded special protections by law from what specifically happened in the story (i.e., the settlement outlines very specific cases where remote deletion can occur, but they do not appear to apply with regard to what happened in the story).

Is my reading of this correct? If so, why aren't all Kindle owners afforded this protection?

Here is the citation from the settlement [1]:

"For copies of Works purchased pursuant to TOS granting "the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy" of each purchased Work and to "view, use and display [such Works] an unlimited number of times, solely on the [Devices] . . . and solely for [the purchasers'] personal, non-commercial use," Amazon will not remotely delete or modify such Works from Devices purchased and being used in the United States unless

(a) the user consents to such deletion or modification;

(b) the user requests a refund for the Work or otherwise fails to pay for the Work (e.g., if a credit or debit card issuer declines to remit payment);

(c) a judicial or regulatory order requires such deletion or modification; or

(d) deletion or modification is reasonably necessary to protect the consumer or the operation of a Device or network through which the Device communicates (e.g., to remove harmful code embedded within a copy of a Work downloaded to a Device).

This paragraph does not apply to

(a) applications (whether developed or offered by Amazon or by third parties), software or other code;

(b) transient content such as blogs; or

(c) content that the publisher intends to be updated and replaced with newer content as newer content becomes available. With respect to newspaper and magazine subscriptions, nothing in this paragraph prohibits the current operational practice pursuant to which older issues are automatically deleted from the Device to make room for newer issues, absent affirmative action by the Device user to save older issues."

[1] http://assets.bizjournals.com/cms_media/pdf/KindleCase1.pdf?...

When making a decision whether to buy or not, I look at the price and consider whether I'm willing to pay this much to rent the book for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly as little as 3 months. Quite often it turns out that the price is too high. But I never delude myself that I actually "own" any of the DRM-restricted content that I paid for.

The Guardian is running a story [1] today about how Amazon forces publishers to cover the cost of 20% VAT (sales tax) on ebook sales, even though it only pays 3% to the Luxembourg government (where it is based for tax purposes). It also insists that if a publisher offers a better price to another retailer then it must offer the same price to Amazon.

They also pay no corporation tax in the UK, despite sales of more than £3.3bn/yr [2], through being based in Luxembourg.

I was going to jump ship to The Book Depository, but Amazon bought them last year. Its hard to understand why this was allowed by the competition regulator, and it doesn't give me much confidence that the UK government has much interest in limiting their control of multiple markets.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/oct/21/amazon-forc...

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-brit...

It's the game that many people play - trying to find the best Amazon (or Apple) store when they live and travel between countries. This means a constant struggle to find a combination of credit card, store with enough content (The US is best) and a local address (virtual and actual) to satisfy arcane internal rules.

Please Amazon - please move to one global store where any credit card from any country can purchase any edition of any book. Please Amazon and Apple, let us combine content from multiple stores into one account, and let us have a global price based on the best market. Yo usell more stuff, we but more as well.

Meanwhile take the chance to collect, and pay to the local authorities, consumption/sales tax based on the location of the IP address, not the credit card or address of the buyer. That way if someone is standing in the UK, buying content from the USA, then they pay UK tax (VAT), making it fairer versus the physical and local virtual alternatives.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Dear Amazon,

Your service was really nice to me so far. But I happened to read a news that was not comforting. Following is a link to the story.
http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/

This makes me hesitant about making any future purchases. I understand your right to act against any abuse but I also believe that users have a right know what was really going on, especially when they are being totally banished.

This email is to direct your attention towards the problem so you can have another chance of finishing things in a nicer way. I strongly believe DRM sucks but I also believe there are valid reasons for it to be there. The problem is not black or white. I'd like to see a solution that is acceptable for both parties (Amazon and the customer).

Thank you

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/kindle-help.html/r...

1. Complain. Keep complaining all the way to the top.

2. Sue. If complaining doesn't get you want you've paid for (or your money back, inc the Kindle you now can't use), you've just been robbed and you need to take legal action. You might think you're under a billion and five EULAs but when challenged, courts seem to side with the user when the EULAs attempt to restrict rights that they're not allowed to impinge upon. There are various sales laws that are protected well beyond the words of an EULA.

If you don't do anything about it, you make it worse for everybody else because <<insert horrid company here>> thinks they can get away with it now.

The DRM'd books are a different story. I still want my son to be able to read them, but I have no assurance that the ebooks will be available to him fifteen years from now.

So I yank the DRM from all of my Amazon purchases. These I put on backups. I do not share them.

I would like to see legislation about the ownership of digital content, requiring that purchased content be accessible /at all times/ -- held in escrow, if necessary. Clearly defining a purchase is probably part of this.

Because it appears to be Amazon UK dealing with the account holder
I'd be interested to know if she would get anywhere by submitting a Subject Information Request [1].

Under the Data Protection Act 1998 an individual can submit a request for personal information held by an organization and they must comply within 40 days.

Whether she would get the information she is interested in, i.e. which account she is linked to, is another question.

[1] http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public/personal_information/ho...

I don't understand how that would justify or require revoking access to stuff that was already bought/licensed? You could simply deny the offending user access to buying new stuff instead.

I haven't read the Amazon TOS but is it really as simple as "you rent this book for as long as we feel like and we can revoke it for no reason"?

In which case I would be somewhat surprised if this really held up in a court, for example what happens if you buy a book and they immediately decide to revoke the license 1 second after purchase?

In my mind, you're a complete idiot if you are an e-book consumer at this point in time.

You essentially rent the book for a price often higher than owning a physical copy of the exact same material. All this for the slight mobility advantage, and instant purchase ability. You can't share your ebooks with friends. You run the risk that the publisher might decide you're no longer worthy of that purchase.

I question the sanity of any person that has done a pro/con comparison and actually judged e-books to be superior. My guess is that most people don't bother to actually think about these purchases.

e-books can and should be revolutionary, but what is on offer now is essentially nothing more than window dressing - and people are eating it up.

It doesn't matter if it's 30 or 50 years from now; this person has been told that for the rest of their life, until they die, that they are never again able to become a customer.

Sounds like a long time to be banned without being told why.

A part of me would like to dump amazon due to stories like this, but at the end of the day the whole set up is just too convenient (I can find, 'buy', and start reading a book in less than a minute directly from my kindle)

The worst part is that attitudes like mine are probably a big part of the reason Amazon will continue to get away with this. The even worse part is that I just don't care enough to do anything about it.

I wonder how many others there are like me who should know better, but enjoy the convenience too much?

Before everyone starts hating on Amazon specifically, remember that this same thing would happen with Apple, Xbox Live, or Barnes & Noble accounts. It's not that all these companies want to have DRM. It's the content owners who dictate the terms of licensing.

Me:I have really enjoyed Kindle on multiple devices so far but I just read the following account of a different Kinde customer and am appalled at Amazon's treatment of this individual: http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/
Is it really true that at any moment, Amazon could delete all my books and not tell me the reason? If so, I strongly request that Amazon revisit its DRM rules & regulations. Thanks!
Hi Elakkiya!

Elakkiya:Hello, I'm Elakkiya from Amazon Kindle support.I'll be happy to help you today

Me:awesome
Basically it comes down to these terms cited by Amazon Exec Michael Murphy in his letter: "Per our Conditions of Use which state in part: Amazon.co.uk and its affiliates reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion."
Is this true?
Without needing to cite any reasons whatsoever, is Amazon able to delete all my books?

Elakkiya:I'm sorry for the inconvenience you had about this.
May I place you on hold for 1 to 2 minutes while I check this for you?

Me:Sure
No inconvenience so far for ME
just for the person in that article
so I'm asking if it is factually correct

Elakkiya:Thanks for waiting.

Me:sure

Elakkiya:It seems there was some problem with the account. This is the reason for the account closure.

Me:obviously. :) the appalling thing is that amazon doesn't want to tell her what problem
so my question is: does Amazon not NEED to tell its customers which problem an account has before closing it?
obviously amazon needs to have the right to close accounts
but i'd say in those cases it also has the responsibility to state why
more than a hand-wavy "there were problems"

Elakkiya:May I place you on hold for 1 to 2 minutes while I check this for you?

Me:sure

Elakkiya:Thanks for waiting.

Me:sure

Elakkiya:On further going through this issue, I see that I need to transfer your concern to the appropriate department who handle these kind of issues.

Me:ok
please do that. will they respond via email then?

Elakkiya:Yes, you should hear back from them in the next 1-2 business days.

Me:great. i assume you have my email since i'm logged in, right?

Elakkiya:Yes,John.

Me:Thanks, Elakkiya. Have a great day!

Elakkiya:You're welcome.
Thank you for visiting Amazon.com. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

I've always been afraid of what might happen to vendor-controlled content (either cloud servers or DRM), so I maintain a local de-DRM'd version of every file. For Audible, I actually had to go through a download, aac playback in iTunes to mp3 compression, mp3 file split workflow to make Audible books work with the RNS-E audio in my audi (it has built-in SD slots to play MP3, but the iPod in interface won't work with Audible due to DRM restrictions in their app).

It's a shame that you have to go through all this trouble just to use things you've legally purchased. It's sort of ok when the system just works (like Steam does now, although it didn't always), but horrible when you don't trust the vendor much and where the software doesn't work very well (EA Origin...).

I don't think I'd buy anything where there wasn't at least a technical workaround to rip to servers and formats under my control.

Dear Sir/Madam,

We've deleted your EC2, S3... Services and Permanently suspended your AWS account due to it's been linked to another account somewhere on the internet. In other words your companies services/product/startup is offline without notice and we don't care.

this is a risk for publishers and loss-leaders (like amazon) alike.

I'd like to retain ability to send documents from my computer to my Kindle over the internet.

Rights? You have no right to your eBooks.
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-y...

Edited to add: So this seems to be a case of a used Kindle's UDID being tied to a previously-suspended account and she got caught in the dragnet by buying that device used without knowing of its history. At some point -- if someone can get through to a live human being at Amazon -- this should all be straightened out. This is yet another reason why everyone should be careful buying used electronics with UDIDs (see eBay and Craigslist for all the "clean ESN" mentions for used phones!).

http://aaron.kavlie.net/2011/12/web/amazon-com-just-closed-m...

My story got to the top spot on Hacker News and, thanks to the exposure there, Amazon reversed its decision. At no point did I get anything that looked like a personalized response -- just terse form emails that didn't divulge any details.

What surprises me the most about this story is that they use the same approach with the consumer end of the business. I figured that the ham-handed treatment I got was due to Amazon's lack of care for that particular piece of their business, and that any issue with buyers would be taken up with more personal attention, and provide ample opportunity for appeal. Guess I was wrong.

It's going to be interesting to see if they are able to get any traction on this.
They actually might since her contact in Amazon seemed to be working for Amazon.co.uk, and Norway is part of the EU's inner market.

IANAL. But for anyone in a similar situation, consumer protection law is usually better than you think. Don't assume you can't sue, or have to sue in another country, just because the contract says you do. Consumer protection laws can trump contracts!

In particular, for anyone in EU or EFTA at least (i.e. part of the Brussels regime for determining jurisdiction to sue, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_Regime ), who is acting as a consumer, you can sue in your own country: "A consumer may bring proceedings against the other party to a contract either in the courts... in which that party is domiciled or in the courts... in which he is himself domiciled."

If Amazon want to do business in a country, they have to abide by the consumer laws of that country.

I am not a lawyer. Get yourself a lawyer and know your rights!

via http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-d...

However, I am going to take the opposition view here because I feel like people don't understand 'the beast' also known as Amazon.

Amazon optimizes on low margins, and cheap prices for goods (both physical and electronic). Amazon optimizes on the benefit to the mass majority of their customers at the expense of a small minority who do occasionally get "thrown under the bus."

I buy lots of Kindle books, but there are a few things I do to mitigate risk. First, for technical books I try to buy from publishers who have daily 30% to 50% off sales where I get PDF, a MOBI (Kindle format), and a iPub files. Secondly, I buy a physical book if I think that a book will have long term value (for example, I would read it several times during a financial meltdown when electricity is scarce, and we spend most of our time grubbing around for food - this has happened in Argentina, Russia, Iraq, etc., and it may well happen sometime in the USA). Thirdly, I buy "good deals" on the Kindle; for example, I am reading James Joyce's "Ulysses" right now and I only paid about $2 for it - a great bargain.

When everything works we all ooh and aah over how great Kindle and a thousand other things like it are. When someone tries to bring a more expensive product to market we scoff and criticize and shake our heads.

Well kids, "cheap" has its price, and the price is shitty, impersonal, bullshit customer service. Amazon has been great at customer service for many years in their physical goods-business, but to push cost down for electronic services, this is what you have to expect.

In the future things will be cheap and human interaction will be at a premium.

Go back through the New York Time Best Seller list in 5 year increments, and see at what point you start reaching books you've never heard of and that are no longer in print.

It's pretty revealing that except for novels that are in school curriculum or transferred to another medium (book, TV) the majority of best sellers are only relevant for 15-20 years.

If you're in your late 30s or old, try to find a new copy of some favourite novels from your adolescence. Good luck.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&outpu...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/forums/kindleqna/ref=...

The very fact this story is this popular is because we all understand it could happen to us, think that by upvoting it, commenting on it, and sharing it, we're making a difference, but then we go right back to Amazon and purchase more things. Perpetuating the cycle.

I've spent more than $1k on ebooks for my kindle. If Amazon did this to me they'd definitely have a lawsuit on their hands. Not because I would win in court, but because I could use it as a springboard to do millions of dollars in damage to their reputation.

Assuming Lynn did no wrong and this is entirely a fraud algorithm problem on Amazon's side, you would think there is a higher authority within Amazon to dispute the problem. It's a shame they they didn't offer her anything in terms of dispute resolution or fraud prevention.

I'm going to email Amazon's feedback link as chanux did, I hope the larger HN community does the same.

Accounts are accounts on Amazon and will they link a consumer account you or your developers use with an account you use for hosting business web sites on EC2?

Or, reading the blog entry, will they mistakenly link another account with your other Amazon accounts, including the one you use for EC2?...

They aren't her books, they aren't even books in the physical sense. They are the copyright owner's "books". All she had (and paid for) were licenses to display (in limited fashion) "books".

Linn might not like this, she should fight (infinite, broad) copyright which is the root of all this evil, not Amazon.

Now my questions:

Does her account use her home address? That seems unlikely as she is in Norway but is dealing with Amazon US. What are the rules for purchasing content when you're not resident? Could this be the problem? If so that sucks.

Secondly, it appears that she began her Kindle odyssey with a used Kindle. Could that be what links her account to a fraudulent one? A unique ID from one of her devices has been used by someone else in the past?

My experience, as a Canadian, is that Amazon encourages use of amazon.ca (your local version of their site) and you have to go through some tricks to use Amazon.com.

Many of my friends did because that was the only way to get a kindle and books for years. Are they all at risk of this?

These are two options for who Michael Murphy is:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-murphy/17/b72/231

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-murphy/0/b84/9b5

Some low level intern screwed up somewhere. While that hardly excuses Amazon for their exceptionally horrendous CS in this case (usually they're know for being good on that front), ask yourself:

  * How many customers does Amazon have?
  * How many instances of this have ever happened?
  * How likely is it to happen again?

One cockup with one customer hasn't shaken my faith in Amazon's ecosystem. They're going to have to try a lot harder in order to achieve that goal.

Look at another platform like Steam. I'd say they have even more issues because they'll actually dismiss people from the service for things like card chargebacks or restrict multiplayer account-wide in case of cheating. They've had errors too. They're rare and statistically insignificant, just like in this case.

And for the love of god if you're going to downvote me, please at least bother to explain why so we can all learn something.

Amazon's service was so sweet I didn't mind the DRM, the metaphorical diabetes. It seems now is the time to open my eyes and (again) realize 'RMS is always right'. I think I will stop buying any amazon e-book at least until I hear something good regarding this issue.

I still read a mix of kindle stuff and paper books, but the kindle is invaluable for travelling light. This is disappointing to hear about.

If everything is as stated - I have no reason to doubt it - it's very disappointing.

1/ Amazon is a private company.
2/ You don't buy books from them, you buy a license to read them.

So by buying a book, you agree with their power.
If you don't like to be in such control, then please, apply one of the start up credo : find a better competitor.

But don't complain, please.

(and the same goes with Apple who surely has some super control on your phone, and don't complain about FaceBook when they'll kill your account when you don't behave.)

Welcome to the privacy nightmare you all voted for by buying their shiny stuff.

Another option is : court ! Hey but you don't have enough money ? Hey, but that's what happens when you deal alone with a megacorp : you're just a small insect.

Funny people often forget that...

stF

http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-d...

On a related note (unfortunately not an alternative to everything Amazon offers):

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/07/torforge-e-books-are-now-dr...

"We would like to clarify our policy on this topic. Account status should not affect any customer's ability to access their library. If any customer has trouble accessing their content, he or she should contact customer service for help. Thank you for your interest in Kindle."

http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-d...

Unfortunately, I see no shortage for stories like this in the future.

Of course, for the ones willing to search, the truth is out there ... but the truth is copyrighted. That's what they forgot to mention in the X-Files.

You can try to find the Kindle/iBook version, but as this article points out "its a license to read" ... and very often, the quality of the digital conversion is very poor, especially for literature with illustrations.

DRM-free PDF is the only way for me.

It is pathetic what we have allowed corporations to do to us when we are the one's providing them the power to do it. Maybe we, as a society, have just become too lazy and complacent to worry about being trampled on?

I've mailed amazon to hear if this is the norm.

I don't really expect a response, but hopefully a few 1000's emails like that will at least let them give the situation more attention ?

It is detailed in the contract few people bother to read prior to signing!

.

> The problem? Microsoft has your operating system,

> Google has your email, eBay has your stuff, PayPal

> has your money, Amazon has your books, Facebook has

> your social life, etc.

.

The problem is YOU GAVE each of those entities information out of hand with misplaced trust.

.

> We need to push for a universal option for arbitration

Push for less inane contractual terms first. Then change the cultural ethos of wrong-tolerance.

Yes the Kindle is awesome, but how hard is it for a bookstore to come to your house and repossess a book?

The point here is that Markdown doesn't have a spec, nor do any of its variants to my knowledge, so I was proposing to come up with some Markdown-like language that does have a spec. Under discussion here is the more ambitious (but also appealing) plan of writing an official spec for Markdown, the same way JavaScript got a spec in the form of ECMAScript that we now identify with JavaScript itself.

A spec is a long, tedious, human-readable document that explains the behavior of a system in unambiguous terms. Specs are important because they allow us to reason about a language like Markdown without reference to any particular implementation, and they allow people to write implementations (Markdown processors) independently that behave identically. The Markdown Syntax Documentation is not a spec (it's highly ambiguous), nor is any implementation (not human-readable; some behaviors are probably accidental or incidental and difficult to port perfectly). The hard part of writing a spec is codifying the details in English, and secondarily making decisions about what should happen in otherwise ambiguous or undefined cases.

My motivation for working on a Markdown spec is first and foremost avoiding "bit rot" of content, which happens when we write content against one Markdown implementation and then later process it with another. We don't have this concern with HTML, JSON, or JavaScript, or at least we know what bounds to stay within to write code that will work on any implementation. This is achieved through specs, even if only implementers ever read them.

I would love pointers to Markdown processors that are implemented in a more principled way than the original code, for example using standard-looking lexing and parsing passes, but that still handle nested blockquotes and bullet lists together with hard-wrapped paragraphs.

Nobody should be using the original script, and unfortunately many of the other implementations out there are direct transliterations that replicate all of its absurd errors, like where if you mention the MD5 hash of another token in the document, the hash will be replaced with the token, because it uses that as an inline escaping mechanism! Reddit got hit with a XSS virus that got through their filters because of it: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/09/we-had-some-bugs-and-it-hurt-...

See the changelog for what started as a PHP transliteration and turned into a rewrite that squashed 125 (!) unacknowledged bugs: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/

The worst part is that he outright refuses to either disclaim or fix his implementation, and so far he's repudiated everyone else's attempts to do so. He's a terrible programmer and a worse maintainer, he really still thinks the documentation on his site is comprehensive and canonical. As much as Jeff Atwood leaps at every chance to play the fool, there's no way his directorship can be anything but an improvement.

In other words, let the user type:

    [something](http://whatever.com)

    (something)[http://whatever.com]

It will save a lot of trouble -- and especially when linking to a Wikipedia page whose URL contains parentheses.

Could I soft-wrap in my editor? Sure, but that would mean that the text files sitting on my hard drive now have very long strings in them making it harder to grep, making it harder to add to git (change a single character, entire line is now a diff :-().

I hope that doesn't become the default.

Why get all angry at John Gruber? As many have already noted, he created Markdown for himself and released so that others could use it. AFAIK he didn't put any license/restrictions on it outside of calling himself BDFL. Whatever his skills as a programmer, writer, or his role as Mouthpiece of Apple, the vitriol is unnecessary (but absolutely fanscinating to watch). My panties bunch up naturally, no need to allow my feelings regarding Gruber to bunch them further.

Why get his approval? In the same spirit that Gruber created something for himself, you should just create something for yourself. I find it hard to believe that Gruber was the first person that conceived the idea of user-friendly text-markup. The new standard could just be inspired by Markdown and that would be a win-win: a respectful nod towards Gruber as well as the ability to move towards something 'better'.

I love it because the world needs an easy-for-humans way to format in pure ASCII without any tool. It is much simpler than using even the most well designed GUI. You can even write books with it, and you can focus on content.

But I hate Markdown. I hate it because it is superficially good: a lot of Markdown seems to make sense at a first glance, but if you look at it more closely you see that a lot is broken in its design (IMHO the fact that the reference implementation is broken is the minor of the issues).

It is surely possible to fix it. However it's better to have a broken Markdown now that no markdown at all. The fact that Github and Stack Overflow and Reddit are using it makes it absolutely obvious how useful and great the concept is. The actual design, implementation, and specifications can be fixed now. So kudos to the original inventor, but it needs a second pass from people that can give it a more coherent shape, with clear behavior, minor surprise, and parsing in mind.

If you have not taken a pandoc for a spin I highly recommend you do so soon. In addition to being a great markdown dialect the pandoc tool set is the swiss army knife of text formatting. It is amazing how many formats pandoc can read and/or write.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html

EDIT: I spoke too soon, Fiddlosopher continues to impress. I just checked the open issues and a little less than a month ago he added "limited org-table support." Based off of the rest of pandoc "limited" probably means something like 85% to 95% :)

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/519

I ended up writing my own in Objective-C. It's not very pretty, and it doesn't use a formal grammar (just a lexer + custom grammar code), but it does the trick. I took a few liberties with the spec: throwing in GitHub-flavored code blocks.

https://gist.github.com/29dabe4b6e762ee221df

[1]: http://getmacchiato.com/

And then, for the LaTeX that you can't shim in, just have some escape hatch that sends fragments out to a renderer.
If I could only have:

    * Math mode
    * Citations and Bib files
    * Labels and References

EDIT: Having just investigated Pandoc, which many here are talking about, I realize this might be exactly what I've been looking for :)

The current behavior of Markdown solves this problem very well. I don't want the newlines I enter for non-wrapping editors to remain in the generated HTML.

1. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

   "I'm reminded of the guy who decides that there should be 
    one standard because there are n divergent implementations. 

    So he goes and writes his own. Now there are n+1 divergent implementations."

The idea of Markdown is great, but I found the implementation of links is less than obvious. (haven't tried it in 4 years, so there was probably other issues that I had that I've forgotten)

The problem I inherently always end up having with "parses to HTML" syntax conventions is there are always warts where the syntax is harder to remember than the HTML it is supposed to parse to.

Edit: I've wondered whether the original Markdown didn't have underline support because <u> was deprecated/removed from HTML. FWIW, <u> is now back in HTML5.

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001189
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

If this gains some traction I'm sure I'll be adding support for it at some point.

[1]: a wonderful almost-everything-to-everything text converter http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

[2]: http://www.docverter.com

IMHO, pandoc markdown support is the mother of all implement featuring lots of goodies (table and footnote to name 2)

I don't think such a thing is feasible. I also don't think it's feasible for any proposed standard to simply look at the largest users and say "okay, we'll accept the idiosyncratic extensions of all of these differing flavors in an unambiguous way."

So assuming this pushes forward, there are (to my mind) two possible outcomes:

1) A backwards-incompatible standard emerges. No existing project adopts it, but new projects do. It gains legitimacy only once Github, Reddit, et al fade into obscurity.

2) A backwards-compatible standard emerges. Every large existing project adopts it, but the standard is so full of cruft and TIMTOWTDI that in ten years it gets usurped entirely by a challenger that emphasizes simplicity.

    ```javascript
    alert('woohoo');
    ```

Mou + the (built in) Github theme = best Markdown editing experience.

> The problem with writing my own Markdown parser in Clojure is that Markdown is not a well-specified language. There is no "official" grammar, just an informal "Here's how it works" description and a really ugly reference implementation in Perl. http://briancarper.net/blog/415/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7307480/what-is-the-canon...

http://jlongster.com/edit/Introducing-Nunjucks,-a-Better-Jav...

I absolutely love the simplicity of Markdown, especially with github's addition of code fences/blocks. It's so trival now to add code and have it automatically highlighted. It's not nearly that simple in other formats (to get autohighlighting I guess).

Excited to see what will come of this.

Aside from that (and implementation bugs) I've been very happy with markdown.

There are many questions �" "What is Markdown?", for starters �" that feel unaddressed by the mark. Instead, we get the brute force approach: splitting up the word into smaller word parts, which is what you do with a word if you don't know what it means, or you have to gesture it in Charades.

Rather uninspiring for an idea so beautiful that Jeff and others can get so excited just thinking about it, but what else can you expect from such a mark whose approach is so stubbornly literal? I take that back �" only one word part actually gets to be represented literally... the other only managed to become a letter, in a moment I can only imagine involved the creator muttering "good enough". He must have found this mark uninspiring as well, given that he sought to put a box around it.

At least consider that the down arrow on its own is an overloaded concept, particularly on the web. Without context �" and a mark should not need context �" M�" could read like a hotkey or command of some kind. This kind of ambiguity is utterly unnecessary �" you're making a mark; it can be whatever you want it to be. Push!

If only a couple sites band together, then I see it more like this:

http://xkcd.com/927/

rst just looks more powerful and yet still as readable as markdown.

Dodgy HTML, content pasted in from Word (with crazy styling intact), and a general encouragement for users to see text content in terms of styling rather than structure are all things that it will be delightful to see the end of.

  1. hello
  something
  2. foobar

  1. hello
  something
  1. foobar

I'm very happy that GitHub has an Org Mode renderer, even if rudimentary - I don't have to rewrite my notes and READMEs to Markdown.

The one change for good I can think of would be removing the ability to embed HTML.

Are there any parsers (preferably in JavaScript) which currently let you toggle features like that?

I also see no reason for text and _text_ to produce the same output. It just seems like a fault in the original spec to me.

But I have learned to love Markdown too, I hope in the future, distant future: Someone will create a language that integrates HTML and CSS into a nice Markdown-like language.

You can play with it here: http://www.markdowncms.com

If there was a standardized Markdown, we would implement that for sure.

I'd certainly be interested in switching over to their version, provided some of the noted kinks get worked out.

This is an [example link]<http://www.example.com/>;

Enjoy.

  <html><body><b>Http/1.1 Service Unavailable</b></body> </html>

On the upside, their status page shows all green lights.

N. Virginia is both cheaper and closer to the center of mass of the developed world. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't managed to make it more reliable.

Also, What is happen in cloud is stay in cloud because nobody can able reproduce outside of cloud.

(And many other relevant quotes.)

EDIT: We are also using multi-AZ RDS, so either Amazon's claims for multi-AZ are bs, or their claims that this is only impacting a single zone is bs.

I have to deal with a number of folks who will be overjoyed to read this news when their tech cartel vendor of choice forwards it this evening.

There's a huge contingent of currently endangered infrastructure folks (and vendors who feed off them) out there who throw a party every time AWS has a visible outage.

Heroku should offer a choice between N Virginia and Oregon hosting (I think they're almost comparable in price nowadays). That way people who want more uptime/reliability can choose Oregon. Sure it will be further from Europe (but then it will be closer to Asia) and people can make that choice on their own.

But basing an entire hosting service on N Virginia doesn't make sense anymore, considering the history of major downtime in that region.

I've been working with AWS since early 2006 when they first launched - I was lucky to be granted a VIP invite to try out EC2 before everyone else, and ended up launching the first public app on EC2. This might be the first time when frustration has overcome my love for these guys.

Cloud hosting is not drastically different from any other type of service and is still vulnerable to the same problems.

What the hell is happening here?

I was just in the middle of booking a stay in a Palo Alto startup embassy for this week, too!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/10/22/amazon-aws-...

http://www.reddit.com/comments/hg9oa/your_platform_is_on_aws...

... which you'll be able to click as soon as reddit is back up :)

You have burstable network connections which by their nature, will have hard limits (you can't burst above 10Gbps on a 10Gbps pipe, for example; even assuming the host machine is connected to a 10Gbps port).

Burstable (meaning quite frankly, over-provisioned) disk and CPU resources.

And if any piece fails, you may well have downtime...

It is always surprising to me, that people feel that layering complexity upon complexity, will result in greater reliability.

2:20 PM PDT We've now restored performance for about half of the volumes that experienced issues. Instances that were attached to these recovered volumes are recovering. We're continuing to work on restoring availability and performance for the volumes that are still degraded.

We also want to add some detail around what customers using ELB may have experienced. Customers with ELBs running in only the affected Availability Zone may be experiencing elevated error rates and customers may not be able to create new ELBs in the affected Availability Zone. For customers with multi-AZ ELBs, traffic was shifted away from the affected Availability Zone early in this event and they should not be seeing impact at this time.

Does anybody have any experience with migrating to Oregon or N. California in terms of speed and latency?

Just one multi-AZ RDS instance claimed the automatic failover. However, the 200+ alerts over the automatic failover due to internal DNS changes to point to the new master shows that things aren't as easily described by the RDS DB Events log.

Some instances reported high disk I/O (EBS backed) via the New Relic agent (the console still has some issues).

So far, this is what I see from my side.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4680178

@caseysoftware thanks for the links, we now have something to read and implement this week.

- from a consistent average of 10ms over the last week

- to a new consistent average of ~2.5ms

beetwen 17:31 and 17:35 UTC. AWS started to report the current issue at 17:38 UTC. My app then experienced some intermittent issues (reported by newrelic pinging it every 30s). Don't know if it's related, could it be some sort of hw upgrade that went wrong ?

I did a push affecting my most used queries but that was one and a half hour sooner, at 15:56 UTC, so probably unrelated.

For most applications I think architecting EBS out should be straightforward - instance storage doesn't put a huge single-point-of-failure in the middle of your app if you're doing replication, failover, and backups properly.

And EBS seems to be the biggest component of the recent AWS failures upon which they've built a lot of their other systems.

Its high time AWS does something now.

I tried to get it out fast and just barely tested it, but it should be stable. The demo has three bosses, ~25 areas, and a good taste of the gameplay.

My server seems to be intermittently dying, so Chrome Store link for anybody interested in purchasing (buying through my site would be preferable, though): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subbania/epnejcjdg...

The demo now lets players skip cutscenes by hitting the Enter/Return key. Z/X/C (or 1/2/3 if you don't have a QWERTY keyboard) control actions and the arrow keys control movement.

Q.) "I'm really interested in the game, but dont want to support paypal. Is there any other method of purchase?"

A.) "The only easy way for me to distribute through my own site was with Paypal. I did have Amazon Payments, but Amazon randomly locked down my account for reasons unbeknownst to me and they only gave me generic automated responses."

This is becoming a habit.

Good luck!

Well done for getting it out, 2 years is a bloody long time!

Lately, I've been spending a crap-load of time coding in JavaScript, and in spite of its obvious quirks (and haters) very much enjoy it. I'll be interested to see how you managed complexity on such a large code base.

Kudos, man: you shipped.

was that a stylistic choice only, or are there some performance benefits?

some of the artwork reminds me a lot of Yellow Submarine stuff.

http://mtgox.com has a shopping cart that is trivial to integrate and allows people to pay with their bitcoins (also buy some if they don't have them yet).

- get the option to skip cutscenes back in
- these octopus dudes come way too close. It is too hard to dodge them.
- if you get killed, you should start over in the sub-area you were in, and not the main level.

I've been writing a little puzzler/platformer using Crafty JS, and it seems to have a pretty flexible approach.

Fair amount of bugs/undocumented behavior, but hey, I can always go straight to the source. :)

But for me the problem of browser-based games is just that: they're browser-based, and the browser is just not the environment I like to play in.

I'm not familiar with what's involved in porting this to iOS but if you can, you should definitely consider it.

Any chance of IE9 or IE10 support? I hear it's pretty fast for 2D games (certainly in my experience it has higher FPS than Chrome and FF)

It has the youtubelink & buy now button.

Since it uses JS , can I use my 360 pad or am I stuck with keyboard?

It's nice you also released your notes for it. ;)

You should host a playable demo on your site!

Good work!

In this the author said most HTML5 games are pacman, etc. If you look at Bastion for the chrome store, it's a very complex game with great graphics on HTML5.

Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible. Because the guys who architected this repugnant exploitation machine already got paid. They made millions selling their stock before the market truly understood what a shit business they were running. Meanwhile, front-line employees sat with their plummeting stock locked up.

So any bad Zynga news is nothing more than notice that yet another group of hardworking folks is, somehow, getting fucked over, despite their leadership enjoying tremendous rewards.

Very frustrating to watch.

Even big startups are hard. Zynga is startupy, even though they're public.

There's a lot of schadenfreude on HN when it comes to Zynga. Articles about Zynga's problems regularly make it to the top of HN.

Some people think games are frivolous. They're not. Entertainment is (almost) a basic human need. Some people think Zynga players are somehow being tricked. They're not. They're being entertained.

Some people say that Zynga steals ideas. Firstly, I'm guessing 99% of the people who say that are just repeating something they've heard. The other 1% should know that everyone steals from everyone. Unless you're the first guy to ever make a dynamic website, have usernames, top-bar navigation... you stole a lot of ideas too. And the ideas you stole are more fundamental than the plot of a game.

(also, if you know my history (i used to make fun of companies like this for a living) yes, i understand the irony of me writing such a supportive comment.)

Pincus was voted as the CEO of the Year at the Crunchies. He was chosen to be the closer to Startup School, he projected Zynga as a place for people to want to go to there: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041758

This is a story parallel to Lance Armstrong's own rise and fall. About how if you were to drill down, really drill down, to find the next ethical, justifiable company that used Facebook to great benefit for humanity you're going to be looking for the 27th, 28th, 29th place organizations. Because frankly, as cynical and as well-duh it is now, what did we spend the greatest of our generations will and brain power on?

A Facebook ponzi scheme.

Now the tide is turning, pendulum swung, omega alpha etc etc and all those wonderful metaphors.

Where to go now? Go fixate on and fix something else. But remember, be nice to everyone on your way up. They're going to be the same people you see on the way down.

Let's get coffee at the downtown Medici: http://www.paperlesspipeline.com/jobs

https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=zynga+%22ping+me%22+OR...

No, for me the problem is much simpler. Its a shitty business run by very poor business minds. That may sound dramatic and sensational, but let's consider the facts: they paid $250 million for a company of 15 developers whose most valuable asset was a mobile version of Pictionary that had been on the market for just three months. Completely unprofitable, they built a multilmillion dollar state of the art office in San Francisco. That's something you do when you are wildly successful, maybe. I work for a company many orders of magnitude more successful than Zynga and our office looks like a dungeon. So what? That's being wise with cashflow. That's a company I want to invest in. Finally, a friend of mine works for Zynga and he was regularly taking all expense paid trips. For his one year anniversary he was sent to England and Ireland as a reward.

I don't think of Zynga's management as sinister evildoers. I think of them as immature and completely unfit to manage a company. I say good riddance but I do hope those laid off find better opportunities soon.

Would you have acted differently?

So rather than predicting and pre-empting the dive in social gaming, Zynga is in a tough situation where they're facing the harsh reality as it comes. As a result, they're stuck with a huge, bloated company not prepared to quickly pivot or create innovation in new product categories.

I don't know what else Zynga can do right now but to downsize and to refocus the company on building what's next and not what was. It's almost like they need to find a new product strategy and business model. And it will take a lot of insight, leadership and team to get it done.

What they have going for them is that they have a lot of cash and a lot of experience in the social gaming genre.

But what they have going against them is momentum which includes employees losing faith in the company.

careers@bentoboxinteractive.com

They're nothing more than a money hungry company that deserves to perish. The real question here is: will this have a knock on effect for Facebook stock and perhaps have a chain reaction?

If I were Facebook I'd seriously be considering an acquisition and then priority number #1 being turn the image of Zynga around, perhaps even re-brand to Facebook Games.

My friend IM'ed me at 11:27a PST yesterday saying "Dude, my whole studio just got laid off. We have 2 hrs to vacate. Can you email someone?" Hit twitter, and it was off like a rocket.

Sort of softens the blow of it; at least a lot attention is diverted to Cupertino.

This concerns me because this is Zyngas leadership tone on display. It does not invoke confidence.

I don't know how much the inventory issue is mitigated by the fact that YC companies with working offerings seem to be immediately able to conjure up 500k-1MM in funding.

Also, YC's major successes haven't been hardware companies, have they? The last essay I read before this one suggested --- in agreement with the conventional wisdom of VC's --- that a company needs to be Dropbox-successful to move the needle for YC. Not that YC isn't, I'm sure, thrilled to have hardware product companies with traction in their portfolio.

Let me just add a banal point: YC's business strategy is, obviously, "throw everything we can at the wall and see what sticks". If you're considering your first company, that's probably not your best strategy. Even putting aside the big-ticket problems like inventory and margin, there are a lot of other things that suck about hardware: lead times, managing supply chain, QA and managing defects, field recalls, shipping. These problems are so big that major hardware companies have people who don't just have one of those tasks as full-time jobs, but are also famous for being able to deal with them.

Now I'm not so sure.

Our problem was twofold: First hardware development was not generally something you just did in your sparetime, it was for the big boys. This meant a lot of convoluted processes for dealing with suppliers, expensive and unreliable dev kits and tools, long lead times and all sorts of other hassles.

Second the turnaround time for a prototype was at least two weeks. If you made a small mistake you'd find out two weeks later when your prototype arrived. This adds up quickly and slows you down tremendously. Not because we made a lot of mistakes, but we had to be absolutely sure that something worked before sending it off to be prototyped. No testing a new idea in an afternoon or two.

These things have totally changed with the commodisation of hardware and the looming 3D revolution.

With a makerbot, a raspberry Pi, an arduino and a shelf full of components you're prety much ready to go and can hammer together a working prototype in no time. If you feel cheap you can buy a nice box for your arduino and call it a finished product.

  "And in particular, don't be deterred from applying to Y
   Combinator with a hardware idea, because we're especially 
   interested in hardware startups."

  "Usually $11,000 + $3000 per founder. So $17,000 for two
   founders, $20,000 for three or more. Occasionally we
   invest more. The goal is usually to give you enough 
   money to build an impressive prototype or version 1, 
   which you can then use to get further funding."

I could personally consider the idea of presenting a hardware startup to YC, but I would need to know that this is not about (with the utmost respect) finding a few starving 20-year-olds that will kill themselves for a $20K investment. From my vantage point, if you are not throwing $250K+ into a hardware startup it just isn't going to happen. Of course there are exceptions to every rule. Then again, this ain't my first rodeo.

Now, if the idea is to throw some money at a project to cobble-together a smoke-and-mirrors prototype and then go raise a few million, well, for the right project this could work.

Again, I say the above with respect for what you do. I have done a lot of hardware/software/multidisciplinary development. It's very different from pure software web/mobile startups. Very different.

When I was in Computer Engineering at Waterloo (class of '98), many of my classmates were vying for coop jobs in FPGA, ASIC or board-level design. I happened to be one of the lucky ones and it set me on a path to a career in ASIC verification.

Today when I look around at my industry, it's downright shocking how little young blood there is around. The youngest ASIC guy I've met in the last 6 or 7 years had a Master's and three years experience - and we all regarded him as the newbie.

Only in the last few months have we seen the occasional new-grad's resume cross our threshold. I'd not yet call it a trend, but I hope it becomes one. We have horrible languages, horrible libraries, horrible tools - a huge, shaky mess of infrastructure built on technologies stretched far beyond what they were originally built for - and it's so deeply entrenched that few of my colleagues seem to recognize it. We really need a new generation of fresh perspectives to shake us all up.

Let's hope it is indeed a new renaissance that Mr. Graham heralds.

In the same way we can expect startups to pop up that make life easier for hardware startups. For instance startups that make prototyping hardware easier. Or that simplify shipping goods all across the globe. Or startups that make it easier to find the right suppliers and get good deals with them.

Pretty exciting!

Apple used to talk about ease of use and "computer for the rest of us", and they still throw some of that into every presentation, but it's no longer the lead. After Steve Jobs rejoined Apple, it was all about the look and feel of the hardware, not ease of use of the software. "Look, candy colors!" "Look how small! Feel how light! Look at those curves! Oooh, you can never be too thin. Did I mention thin? I meant thinnest!"

Then the small, thin, candy-colored devices emerged, and they made Apple the most valuable company in the world, with the media hanging on its every move. And what are they talking about, the software? No, silly, a Windows machine can do anything a Mac can do. Apple wouldn't be so successful without the full package of hardware, software, and services, but it's the HARDWARE more than anything else that everyone talks about.

This has given Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and other big companies serious Apple envy, which shows up in their "strategies". How can it not affect small startups as well? It's the environment these little companies are born into.

Also many CE companies (Exception of Apple) stopped innovating or don't have access to the exceptional software skills. Typically they buy units from Taiwan ODMs, buy software stack from companies like us, put their brand and sell to their existing channels(Staple, Best Buy).
There is no value addition provided by these companies in the entire supply chain except their distribution. Now even the distribution is coming under attack because of the direct sales model. For instance we ship units to more than 75 countries.This situation is so true when you take a look at home networking products (Consumer Routers, NAS, DVRs). You can do a heck a lot of innovation there and people use it daily.

Now we are sitting with exceptional know-how, ODM relationships, a software stack that can run on all the embedded device (Routers, DVRs to NAS products) and mobile apps on all the popular mobile OS'es. In couple of years we can challenge the incumbents and build a company that can generate 50-100 million in sales and challenge the incumbents. Even if the margins are tight, we can still make at least 20% net margin. We are ready to accept investment from YC if PG is interested.

I'm not sure if hardware hackers want to be Steve Jobs... they want to be Woz!

"Woz soon followed with the machine that made the company, the Apple II. He single-handedly designed all its hardware and software�"an extraordinary feat even for the time. And what's more, he did it all while working at his day job at Hewlett-Packard"

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

This is great news. I felt a bit old and stupid at Startup school, because I want to make hardware (albeit for a niche rather than a mass market), but anyone I talked to seemed to find the idea weird and most of the concepts from the stage were along the lines that software - particularly internet software - was, is, and ever shall be the sole basis of a successful startup. It was a relief at the end of the day to hear Joel Spolsky discuss the viability and possible desirability of building a nice little $10m company in just as much detail as building a $1b one.

Every. Single. Hardware. Startup. I know, has either gone bankrupt due to lawsuits, or hasn't ever reached product market fit.

For example, the company might start by pulling all the open source EDA, CAD, CNC, and similar, software into a cohesive whole. It would then bring in one of the open source ERP systems and integrate it with the engineering toolchain. Keeping on doing this for every part of the process: ordering, inventory, manufacturing/robotics, testing, sales, distribution, support, financials. The idea is to (as nearly as possible) completely automate the process of scaling hardware based business from a prototype to a product. Achieve this goal and hardware becomes as easy to scale as software.

I've been building hardware for the last 30 years, and invariably most of the work goes into making the process run smoothly (ie. designing the process) rather than designing the product.

Let's say I have an idea for a portable mini-fridge. What kind of engineers do I need to contract to design it? Where do I find them? Do I need approval, testing? What kind of regulations do I need to follow? And finally how do I get it manufactured? Do I actually need to go to China and meet with factories?

I wish someone would put together a step by step guide for these kinds of questions.

However, it's possible that innovation in hardware technologies is out of reach of startups. I'm differentiating here between hardware-tech and hardware-product startups. Of course there are hardware startups that are attempting to bring new technology to market (go Integrated Plasmonics, and 3Scan!). Interestingly, a good indicator of whether a startup is developing an innovative technology is that Peter Thiel is invested in it--many of his fund-ees are slaving away in labs scattered around SF. The failure modes of these hardware-tech companies will be more interesting than the hardware-product startups. These companies may take a much longer time to develop tech, then the product using that tech, and then fail, because the market they try to disrupt with their technology may be disrupted by other technologies with better economics--energy tech is full of these sorts of baby elephant skeletons. Still, successful investment in real hardware innovation that wins leads to companies like the next GE, Intel, or AT&T so it makes sense for investors with deep enough pockets to aim for these.

Hardware products that simply integrate existing commodity components (like Blossom Coffee) have a pretty well understood binary risk profile, they either they hit or they don't. The new hardware renaissance PG is observing is based on the reduced cost of production, and new ways to crowd fund these sorts of companies: things you might prototype in TechShop (shared tools space) and sell via Kickstarter.

So what kind of startup can facilitate that change?

It's all about toys!

I want to see iPhone controlled toy tanks with cameras and laser sensors, so me and my brother can kill each other without moving away from our desks.

I want to see usb telescopes, microscopes, thermometers, stethoscopes so my kids can play scientists.

I want to see more e-toys so kids grow more interested in technology.

It's linking to <http://ycombinator.com/apply>; instead of <http://ycombinator.com/apply.html>.

Akihabara, Eat Your Heart Out
http://www.bunniestudios.com/wordpress/?p=147

A few months back I announced on HN that I started a http://www.reddit.com/r/hwstartups, so I wanted to mention that we're growing a pretty good community over there as well.

The same issue applied to software not all that long ago. As with software, the wide availability of consumer-level, cheap or even free tools to make stuff is driving a renaissance for hardware.

And with so much hardware hacking then, as with software, some will see explosive growth.

It's good to see in my mind because hardware can be infinitely more important/useful than software.

<editorial_hyperbole>
I really think the culmination of all this will be what I see as the next logical step after "mobility" in computing (i.e. the idea that you "take your computer everywhere with you"): "ubiquity" - or, in other words, the idea that everything around you - the table you are sitting at in your restaurant, the walls in your office, things that farm your food and control your air conditioner, are computers..and perhaps the most exceiting thing is that this next revolution will (hopefully) be ushered in and controlled by startups. Exciting times.
</editorial_hyperbole>

A couple of years ago, I was the CTO and cofounder of another hw startup (FTTH space), we did get this thing off teh ground for less than 300k and it is now doing very well and one of the top-3 in it's niche

Fulfillment by Amazon[1] could be a big part of the rise of hardware startups.

Couple 3D printing with a logisitics powerhouse like Amazon, and hardware could be as easy to deploy as a webapp soon.

1. http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4689244

Personally I think the biofeedback thing sounds very cool. I ordered a biofeedback device from some outfit a few years ago and never came close to getting the thing to work.

Hardware machines are much better than Virtual ones..)

I've been planning to apply to YC and start a hardware-focused startup in the home-automation space.

OT, but please be kind to a learner of the english language: should that sentence be "one of _the_ most conspicuous" or there is some rule by which the article can be used or not in this form?

If you look at the bigger picture, rather than the little world of YC you'll see lots of hw in medical, aviation, military, communications etc etc.

Saying that the number of companies that would be attracted to YC for money has risen from X to 8% doesn't really speak of any trend.

There are some examples from kickstarter that spring to mind, like for example, Brydge (bluetooth keyboard/speakers for iPad) and the game controller world has its fair share of hw innovation (like Connect for example) but real hw innovation is out of reach of startups, you need chip fab plants and cross disciplinary skills that are expensive and
locked up in the big company r&d departments. The real companies doing hw are not going to YC for money, they go to their boss.

There are a TON of software products you can build off of this and sell.

Now seems that software is taken for granted, e.g., you download TCP/IP Arduino implementations to connect your circuits to a LAN.

"How I Plan to Bootstrap Aspiring Hardware Engineers"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4691108

Hope that trend changes soon.

Unless someone come up with a solution for these problems, I don't see a renaissance of hardware in the form of many startups (but can be in other forms, since now Win 8 is encouraging hardware creativity)

What we're worried about is designing the wrong product at the wrong price for what seems like a limited set of distribution channels with some rather onerous fixed costs and low margins -- certainly compared to software/SaaS sales. How do you wade through that swamp?

Michal Zalewski is that kind of guy.

As an aside I have often felt this would be a fantastic Mythbusters franchise

I always thought it was my working class roots showing through but I've managed to collect a fairly complete set of metalworking, woodworking, automotive, electrical and HVAC tools over the years. The excuse at the time? I could learn it and do it myself and keep the tools forever for what it costs to pay someone hourly once. (note: if you're in the midst of a one-in-a-lifetime cash cow, just hire out this stuff and kick the hobby down the road.)

I have however run across certain trades that require developed skill not just a knack for learning quickly - among them: drywall floating, window tinting, body and paint. Others are highly scalable big jobs that just aren't suited to a one-man attack.

There is an element of burnout in that most of this physical work is a lot harder than what we all do for work!

If you use SolidWorks then check out HSMXpress, it's a great free CAM package.

[1] http://www.hsmworks.com/hsmxpress/

I want STORAGE ON EVERY DEVICE (not volatile!), and and automatic system to sync it with all my other devices, WITHOUT NEEDING THE CLOUD, just set up and ad-hoc mesh network and sync everyth (yeah, there's gonna be smth like "merges" for OS settings and music collection changes but I can do with that). The "cloud" should be just infrastructure, nothing else added, and I shouldn't be distrupted when my connection to it fails... "Always connected"? No, no, no, I'll always want to be able to work offline and be able to sync/merge/push/pull even my OS, its settings and software (and be able to "branch" my and keep multiple versions of software and all that).

DVCS should be the models for how to do everything in the cloud, with simpler interfaces for different level of user needs/competency.

Rob Pike's ideal of "homogeneity" in computing really misses the distinction between distributed and central syncing, the security and reliability implications etc. ...and large local storage capacity and "enough" computing power on all devices is needed for this. I'd rather be "part of the mesh" than "connected to the cloud mesh", because I think the distinctions are important and they require different things from "client devices" (all devices should be "clients"! no servers "in the cloud" for me please!)

I would like to see a nice balance: I basically work locally, and anything I do is synced ASAP to "the cloud" and thence to other devices (and other people). But if I'm in the hills or the server goes down, hey, I still have a perfectly good computer in my pocket.

For me, Dropbox has brought me that.

I still use Github and the like, but my computers now share such a similar setup (all Linux, install Go, install Dropbox, install Sublime Text 2, done) that I can walk out of the office without doing anything special to my machine, go home and pick up literally where I left off.

My git repositories are cloned into my Dropbox folders so that when I move from one place to another but am not ready to check in (local branch in state of flux) I still have that in multiple locations.

As Sublime Text 2 stores the project and file info in a plain text file, that state comes with me too.

My $GOROOT is also in my Dropbox folder, so if I've grabbed something via "go get" that also follows me around.

I view Dropbox as an ever present working cache, not as storage. Things like documents are in Google Drive and accessed via the browser.

On Friday I went to a meeting at 3pm that I thought would just be 20 minutes. It turned out that it took 3 hours, and I hadn't closed ST2 or anything I was working on... no problem, I went home instead of back to the office and my work was exactly where I left off with the same files open in ST2.

I think the only thing that doesn't follow with me are the undo buffers in ST2.

I'm always shocked that this hasn't happened faster. I've expected Dropbox, Amazon, Google and Apple to move into this space more aggressively, but at best they've all only just scraped the surface of what's possible.

It's as if a majority of the hardcore hackers have gone "Fuck it, I'm being watched anyway, they might as well be backing up my stuff as well."

Are we past the point of it being a topic of debate except by people like me who have the illusion of choice?

  My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world.

Any geek's 'bat-cave' is testament to this need: a Mac Plus sitting underneath a table next to Commodore 64. On top of the table lays a 486 DX/2 PC with Super VGA and a Soundblaster compatible card decaying inside. Everywhere strings of SCSI, RS-232, Ethernet spaghetti encircle cases of floppies (both 5.25 and 3.5). Where's the data? Anything precious has made it's way through different formats to whatever you're on now. Everything else is slowly rotting away.

Outsourcing the batcave to this ubiquitous seems much more appetizing to me. Plus it leaves me room for my 1st and 2nd gen Transformer collection.

"This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary."

and

"In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work."

Interesting that someone so steeped in the "old ways" of Unix dumb terminals is also, seemingly, such a good matchup for the "far future" vision of Chrome OS. What's old is new again?

Of course, the article is tiny and talks abstractly about something that everyone has an opinion on, so of course it has up lots of votes.

I am disappoint.

Here is a tutorial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M

How last century. I thought he would have at least suggested a hologram projection screen combined with some bio implants. ;-)

The "always accessible" and "continue where you left" paradigmata we can still relate to though: I've been using screen in ssh / putty windows for almost 20 years now, I used VNC for some time (even wrote a 16 bit client for DOS that ran off a floppy disk and with 2MB RAM...) for the same purpose.

Something like VNC but with a "responsive" UI that adapts to the device currently used (tablet, laptop, desktop) while still retaining all the state needed for the user to continue where he left, that'd be something novel and useful after all these years.

This is exactly my idea of changing from our current memory hierarchy to take advantage of the new SSD and cloud capabilities we have now: "Fat Cache."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522

This intersection between an obsession with minimalism of a particular sort and dispossession is unknown to me. Seems common to the Go programmers I talk to.

    My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have 
    to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not 
    even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around 
    with me in order to function in the modern world. The world 
    should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for 
    me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, 
    my life would become much simpler and so could yours.

That being said, I don't think going 100% cloud is for everybody yet, but we're getting closer.

A smart phone which is always connected to remote storage (the cost could be a problem here?), and how about an electronic paper keyboard which rolls up to the size of a pen, that's somehow attached to or part of the phone.

Sit down somewhere, connect, unroll the keyboard, and there is your computing environment.

It's definitely a nice idea though, maybe some day it'll happen. Nice to see Rob Pike getting a usesthis.com post, slightly (but not much) surprised to see him using Macs as his primary choice.

I think the big failure is programmers' inability to bring these desired advances, like what Plan 9 achieved, to a wider audience. I mean, he says he had this wondwerful environment at Bell Labs, but almost no one outside of Bell Labs gets to experience that pleasure. Why not? They open sourced it too late? I'm not sure I buy that. It's still better than UNIX, so what's changed? It's like there's some assumption that people just don't deserve anything better, and there's no point in working towards it. Except if you're at Bell Labs.

We're stuck with old UNIX, with all of its historical cruft. Like him, I've just learned to cope with it. (It's funny he's complaining about argv limits (see 2004 Slashdot interview). That seems to suggest he likes to compose super long argv's. No? Maybe he does not like xargs? I never did. But then I've seen similarly unexplainable limits in the Plan 9 port to UNIX. Why can't I have a Plan 9 sed command file with a very large number of commands?)

We could certainly have better. Perhaps it's simply a matter of getting behind the right projects, instead of just following the money and being lazy... working at Google and buying MacBook Pros. That's sort of like giving up. Complacency.

Honestly, "grep'ing the web" just doesn't sound all that "amazing" to me. I don't care how many servers they have running, Google is not Bell Labs.

There's another couple of issues: syntax highlighting, large scale refactoring (which is not easy either with vi or emacs atm).

However, once you get accustomed to a certain workflow, it becomes difficult to accept something new. Maybe I should give it a shot.

Cellphones are in your pocket, come with your personal phone directory, are cheaper per minute, and you don't have to stand still to use them.

I'm really surprised that Rob thinks people would want to deal with a computer-as-payphone model. And wireless data networks suck ass in North America. His ideal world is probably at least 20 years away.

On the other hand, I love thin terminals. Screw local stateless networked computation. Give me a snappy remote interface to a beefy terminal server and i'm happy. That's an interface you literally can pick back up at any time with no performance cost due to being far away from the data.

  "The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere."

In the movie Tony (Iron Man) can control the infrastructure around him with this device, just like Rob Pike described.

It exists! It's called a sunray

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

And I'm a bit disappointed that he's not using Plan9. With the current ease of VMs there are no driver and installation issues and he could move the snapshot around.

For a serious question, does acme lend itself to a chording keyboard? It seems like this is taking another step towards Engelbert's vision in the mother of all demos.

I doubt the awesome bits of plan9 that he compared to a telephone (pay phone) can be replicated by a higher level service like amazon/google cloud something, git or some other dvcs. 9p is a protocol after all.

He also mentioned doing computing somewhere else, and not just storing data in the cloud.

So please tell me I just need to configure git differently or sign up for amazons newest whatever.

This seems relevant as well http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/

Curl has an option, CURL_SSL_VERIFYHOST. When VERIFYHOST=0, Curl does what you'd expect: it effectively doesn't validate SSL certificates.

When VERIFYHOST=2, Curl does what you'd expect: it verifies SSL certificates, ensuring that one of the hosts attested by the certificate matches the host presenting it.

When VERIFYHOST=1, or, in some popular languages, when VERIFYHOST=TRUE, Curl does something very strange. It checks to see if the certificate attests to any hostnames, and then accepts the certificate no matter who presents it.

Developers reasonably assume parameters like "VERIFYHOST" are boolean; either we're verifying or we're not. So they routinely set VERIFYHOST to 1 or "true" (which can promote to 1). Because Curl has this weird in-between setting, which does not express any security policy I can figure out, they're effectively not verifying certificates.

They cast a really wide net, looking for as many examples as possible where non-browser applications fail to do SSL validation correctly, but then conclude that this will result in a security compromise without fully examining the implications.

For instance, they point out that many SDKs for Amazon FPS don't validate certificates correctly. But I didn't see them mention that the FPS protocol does its own signature-based authentication and that credentials are never transmitted in the clear: it was essentially designed to operate over an insecure transport to begin with.

Likewise, they point out an "unsafe" construction that an Android application that I wrote (TextSecure) uses. But they don't mention that this is for communication with an MMSC, that this is how it has to be (many don't present CA-signed certificates), and that the point of TextSecure is that an OTR-like secure protocol is layered on top of base transport layer (be it SMS or MMS).

So I think the paper would be a lot stronger if they weren't overstating their position so much.

Many security flaws found in commonly used SSL libraries.

Other than that, it is a great find.

<base href="http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/pubs.html>;

This causes the page to throw an HTTPS warning: "this page loads insecure content" due to the css loaded over HTTP.

"Not the most interesting technically, but perhaps the most devastating (because of the ease of exploitation) bug is the broken certificate validation in the Chase mobile banking app on Android. Even a primitive network attacker�"for example, someone in control of a malicious Wi-Fi access point�"can exploit this vulnerability to harvest the login credentials of Chase mobile banking customers."

http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/

It validates SSL certificates correctly by default. How about other languages?

I suppose my web browser has an extended list of CA that my OSX lion does not know about.

i'm not saying that this would solve all the problems, or that you should develop critical financial software by having people that don't understand much writing tests. but tests are pretty much common culture now; you'd think people would have considered this. and the argument the paper makes is not that the programmers are clueless, but that they are confused by the API, so they should be able to think up some useful tests...

of course, integration testing with sockets is a bit more complicated than unit tests (perhaps something toolkit apis should support is a way to allow testing without sockets?), but it's not super-hard. [edit: hmm. although testing for unreliable dns is going to be more tricky.]

You can see it here:
https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/3-2-stable/activeresourc...

I'm pointing it out as it was not mentioned in the paper.

Edit: It looks like it has been that way since SSL was first implemented in Connection.

At any rate, here is a pull request for PHP which attempts to address the issue:

https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/221

require 'always_verify_ssl_certificates'
AlwaysVerifySSLCertificates.ca_file = "/path/path/path/cacert.pem"

http= Net::HTTP.new('https://some.ssl.site, 443)
http.use_ssl = true
req = Net::HTTP::Get.new('/')
response = http.request(req)

http://www.rubyinside.com/how-to-cure-nethttps-risky-default...

https://github.com/getlantern/lantern/blob/master/src/main/j...

? This code is intended for deployment in potentially dangerous regions for getting around government censors.

Thanks.

It is destined to be flawed as long as insecurity is allowed. Only when every exploit is exploited continously will people be vigilant.

<falls off chair>

Ok, so first and foremost I am incredibly sorry, Jacques, for the experience you had. I can say with confidence that your experience with WP Engine is out of the ordinary, but no excuses. I'm writing this as a way of owning up to mistakes that were made on behalf of our company, as well as transparently engage the discussion here. There's a couple of points I'd like to make, if I may...

We're in the process of moving to complete 24/7 support right now (we do have emergency 'site down' 24/7 cover) - as any entrepreneur on HN will tell you, getting your startup to take off is hard and scaling the human aspect is perhaps even harder. With mostly US-based business customers it wasn't as much of an issue to begin with but we're now addressing that.

Obviously if we'd had that 24/7 support in place we could have addressed this more immediately.

However, one of the reasons that your site experienced problems was that there were some aspects of the site development that simply didn't scale. Like any scale-orientated PaaS, we can provide the infrastructure to enable you to scale but your code needs to work in partnership to fully achieve that.

As Sean, my head SysAdmin wrote on a ticket to you, some of your pages were performing a sort on 188590 rows in memory each time. That just doesn't scale. From your post, I'm guessing this is the issue that also occurred when you tried Pagely. While it's awesome that the good folks at Pagely were able to work with you a little to try to address your problem, like most PaaS providers (eg AWS, Heroku) we don't provide consultancy services - there is an amazing WordPress community of consultants and dev shops out there and its just not what we want to get into. Just like Heroku won't fix your Ruby code.

We have many, many clients who are very happy with WP Engine but as a growing business there will always be customers who find that the service isn't right for them, and even occasionally have a bad experience.

So lets try to make this right. I can see that we've already refunded you all the hosting fees you paid for your account, and I'll also make sure we pick up the $500 migration bill that you incurred. If there is anything else we can do please let me know.

I will also take time once I've finished my coffee and out of my PJ's to analyze your case further and see what else we can do internally to ensure this doesn't happen again.

Bests,

Ben, co-founder WP Engine

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692775

Your staging server does not use WPE's caching technology, which your production server will use. WPE will not give you details on how their secret-sauce caching works. This means that things that work on staging will break on production. WPE also refuse to turn off their caching on production, but also refuse to turn ON their caching on your staging server. This means there is no real way to test. Things that work with their staging server, and even work with the standard WP caching plugins, will break in WPE production.

Their solution? Buy another production site to test on.

That website is now moving from WPEngine after having its launch botched by the aforementioned issues, and after not being able to make a basic paywall work with their caching. Once they realised the use case, WPE simply suggested moving elsewhere without making any further effort to accommodate.

I had a similar reaction to the post yesterday by asmartbear as Jaques, but he made the extra effort to actually write the blogpost, so bravo to him. WPE enjoys this sterling reputation that misleads a lot of people into using them, but their comfort zone it seems is limited to vanilla WP installs with little deviation.

So, while I'm here, go look at my very nice bloggers. I regularly submit their stuff.

http://ozblogistan.com.au/

Take, for example, this recent extremely intelligent discussion of privacy in the current internet:

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/19/manners-cost-nothing/

Or this discussion of the roots of order/chaos good/evil dualities in agricultural society: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/16/war-and-peace/

This confronting moral conundrum from the Massacre of Srebrenica: http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/24/srebrenica-should-the-so...

This discussion of the deadening effect of media laws upon Australian free speech: http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/10/24/the-deadening-of-free-s...

and so on and so forth.

I am enormously proud of all my bloggers.

Jason, if you're not scrambling to deal with this mess, you will be soon. And the main message I have is that you need to back off the marketing side a little and let the technical and customer service side catch up.

Godaddy makes an incredible amount of money, but they're still a terrible company from a technical and customer service perspective. But their marketing is so effective that they can get away with that [1].

I wonder if Jason Cohen's position in the tech community and general marketing prowess has allowed WPEngine to get ahead of themselves? I know when I read Patrick's blog post about WPEngine, I was really excited and it was a service that I wanted to like. And I do like them, but I'm not excited about them at all anymore.

1. Interestingly, Google is the exact opposite, and their customer service makes me want to take a spoon to my own eyes.

You never, ever, use NFS on something with hundreds of files to load for every page (ie. WordPress).

Every file takes 2-2.5ms to stat/load on NFS (from my tests on WPengine) which seems small but adds up fast.

It means you instantly have 700ms or more of overhead on the SERVER side to render a page (not transmit to the browser, just to render).

You can somewhat get around this by using an opcode cache and turning off file stat but there are still some files that have to be checked like static data read from the disk and turning stat off has other issues when editing code like having to flush the cache.

I'm not sure if it's true, but based on the poster's description of WPEngine's customer support experience, it sounds like their customer service is the typical poorly structured (from the customer's point of view) customer service experience I've encountered and/or witnessed many times from companies both large and small.

Some startups don't provide phone support. It's nice to see WPEngine does. Sometimes you just have to talk with someone to beat it into their heads that you have a complicated problem. They can't email email you back a link to some topic-related doc page and move on. They're on the phone with you and they have to make meaningful progress before hanging up.

In the case of email support, 95% of the tickets are answered with a link to a doc page and that's the end of the case. The metrics are excellent and every pats themselves on the back. 95%! And the volume was soooo high! Acknowledging positives is necessary, but measuring failure requires different metrics and 95% success does not necessarily imply 5% failure because each one uses different metrics. You think the the metrics on their dashboard will take into account this thread, for example?

The system breaks down when the customer has a more serious problem. It takes support a few emails back and forth to realize it. The case is handled by random folks based on availability, further degrading the experience. The person who'll pick up your latest reply to the thread isn't going to thoroughly read the whole thread, and by this point you've interacted with five support staff already. Finally, they realize it's outside their control and pass it off to Engineering, where it languishes for a month. Creating a system where the engineer is not allowed to reply directly to the customer but instead has to reply to support who then replies to the customer only removes the stress off the engineer, so they can care less and not solve the problem. Meanwhile, the support staff learn to drop lines like "Sorry for the delay. We appreciate your patience. The engineers are still looking into it." without any second thoughts.

We run a relatively small member site (<1000 active members) that operates on WordPress. We tried migrating the site to WPEngine, but could never get the membership plugin working as expected. Over a course of about 2 months we tried everything possible to get it working, and talked with their support on a near daily basis.

Overall, their support team tried to be helpful. They weren't always responsive (sometimes we wouldn't get a response for a day, or we would be waiting on hold for a long time), and we ran into the problem of different support people telling us different things about how their system was setup. Eventually one of the co-founders got involved in the support, but we still were not able to resolve the issue.

I managed to find 2 other people using the plugin that had run into the same problem with us on WPEngine. WPEngine claimed that other customers of theirs used the same membership plugin without any issues. I don't feel they lied, but we clearly weren't alone in this problem.

In the end, we moved to another WordPress host and were able to get up and running in no time. Unfortunately, WPEngine refused to refund us fully for the 2 months we wasted trying to get our site setup because we went past the 60 day money-back period. (We had paid for the 3rd month already, and they gave us a partial refund of that month only.) It was a relatively small amount of money, but after all the trouble we had with them it would have left a much better impression if they would have refunded the entire cost we paid.

I'm sure that WPEngine has thousands of happy customers, and our experience was largely unique, but there are many things I felt they could have done a better job of.

Go with Rackspace. They're expensive compared to budget hosts, but they seem to have an army of sysadmins available 24/7/365 that never say "that's your problem" / "not in scope".

PS: that redirect bug is probably a mismatch of your site_url setting in either wp_blogs, the wp_options table of your primary blog, or the wp-config.php. If the domain set in any of those 3 places doesn't match you get that endless redirect loop. Could also be htaccess sending you to www or no-www, and your config is set the other way. Its an annoyingly common issue when moving MU sites, and they should have been able to fix it.

WPEngine provides WordPress hosting services. They are professional and they do it for $250/month (which plainly means that their target audience is professional bloggers). For $250/month, they don't provide consultancy service as why your particular setup couldn't install in their server. This is your responsibility.

Setting up a WordPress blog can be easy (5 minutes) and complicated (Professionals charge up to $350/hour). What you are asking for is someone to move your blog. Fine. You are responsible for that. WPEngine offers you a "6 hours coupon" from another service. That is, they are not responsible for that.

Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients. This is the wrong thing to do, because their support service can't scale this way. I have been doing this to bootstrap my services and it had more negative consequences than positive ones.

tl;dr: The OP is expecting WP consultancy services for signing up to WPEngine.

The WP core team doesn't write code with performance, scalability, orthogonal design, good standards or any such thing in mind and you regularly hit gotchas. However... if you sign up to be a WP platform, you're kinda asking for it.

Obligatory performance tips:
1. Cache the heck out of it. CDN, varnish, optcode (APC), query caching on MySQL.
2. As has been noted, file stat'ing is massive. You have to have an exclusive install as close to each serving node as possible, even with optcode caching.
3. Core hack - Modify admin comment searching. Does 5 column wildcard lookups across the entire table. Not scalable. (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/20487)
4. Core hack - Remove content reallocation on user delete. With large user tables, you lose the ability to delete users (core fix pending: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19867)
5. Clean and optimize your DB regularly - Old post revisions are a huge gain
6. Add indexes intelligently - WP doesn't include all the indexes you need
7. Horizontally scale your DB (whether through MySQL clustering, or HyperDB + DBs with roles)
8. Tune everything. I've found that NGINX/Apache and Percona/MySQL make little difference, but setting the right config for each daemon makes huge difference.

How fast is... Apple.com? (tl;dr: not very);
Wired's Review of the Microsoft Surface (tl;dr: pretty interesting).

While perhaps the issue ended up mostly being due to a Wordpress core issue, I question why this was an issue for a service that someone is expected to pay $250/month for?

The OP was able to, without a team of engineers/admins get the same content running on a VPS with no issue. I then question exactly what one gets when they pay $250/month for this service? To expect to get any sort of scaling capability out of a $8-$30/month shared hosting account is asinine and anyone running more than a small amount of traffic under such circumstances deserves what they get.

Why then if the end service was not capable of sustaining traffic/memory to the same degree that some shared providers are willing to go, would one pay $250/month? I think this is a question the creators of WP Engine genuinely need to answer...

Until I came to this sentence, I was coming to the conclusion that CMSes fall down fairly quickly once you add in large data, large traffic, or complex installs. For the life of me, I can't see why people continue to use CMSes for large projects anymore, when they could potentially code something up faster in Django/Symfony/Rails and, here's the kicker, know the codebase inside and out.

My client has simple marketing (read: 99% static) websites that are built on Drupal. Sounds good at first, and it almost makes sense... and then you get to the non-functional requirement that it needs to withstand a marketing event that can bring 2k+ concurrent users for over 24 hours. Then you watch Drupal meltdown the server.

Since they 'are' WordPress they can make pretty much anything that does not modify core, work. It's not for everyone, but for the right sites (high traffic/high availability/generating revenue) it's fantastic.

I've been running a site about the same size as the OP's (500k-ish visitors a month) with WPEngine for nearly a year now, and so far I'm very impressed. It's smoother and faster than it was before, we've only had one outage of more than an hour (and they responded by crediting me with a full month's hosting!), and I've found their support to be absolutely top-notch.

I wrote a review of their service after a month - which I don't think I ever submitted to HN, d'oh - and all the points I make in it still stand: http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1... . My key point there, which I stand by, was that moving to WPEngine saved me money over an apparently cheaper self-hosted solution, because I no longer had to spend 2-3 days a month faffing around with server problems. (I believe Patio11 had a similar experience.)

(Note - there's an affiliate link in there, because I find that with money I can buy goods and services, but I added that after writing the review.)

Just recently I've had an extremely helpful dialog with one of their support engineers which ended up troubleshooting a problem I didn't even know my blog had - which subsequently boosted my available ad inventory by about 25%.

Overall, WPEngine aren't perfect - and I'm still checking out other options from time to time - but I've found their support and general solid hosting more than worth the admittedly pretty significant cost.

I went through 3 or 4 different providers, and the only place that i was really happy with setup, infrastructure and support was WPEngine.

As some of the other guys have stated regards the caching and their suitability to vanilla installs, i think that is most likely the case, and yes mine was a pretty vanilla install in the grand scheme of things, but i'd still choose them over anyone else.

We went live on a WebbyNode VPS, thought we had configured our system well and suddenly we hit the top spot on HN. The server was on fire and Jason personally showed up and worked on migrating our site over.

Your configuration may have posed problems, you may have had what seems like a shitty support experience, but this public bashing doesn't help anyone in the startup community and reads as if it's motivated by emotions rather than a real problem-focussed attitude.

Give these guys a break and work with them one on one to find a solution to your problems. I'm SURE they'll move mountains to make you happy because that's in the team's DNA.

WAT! Just add the domain to your hosts file with the WPEngine IP and test the site first, it's crazy to change your DNS without checking the site works first.

That being said, once you have the sort of requirements that the original poster seems to have, I don't know if any of those companies would be suitable…

> It's a quiet backwater. Collectively the sites would have maybe 20k unique visitors a day. 50k is a big day hereabouts.

I'm not quite sure why this blog is such a huge problem to host. It appears that the author has some customizations (plugins..) that are really slow. In fact, I would suggest to the author to hire a good developer, fix those core issues (say slow SQL queries, etc.). It might cost him a few thousand dollars upfront, but he can continue running the site on $20-$60/month hosting.

Paying $250/month for that kind of traffic sounds over the top to me.

I know that Wordpress can be slow but it can also be quick. Why not route your traffic through cloudfront ? Why not leverage full page caching for anonymous users ? These are things worth looking at IMHO :)

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-b...

I haven't tried it but it seems to be a good experience for some people.

I don't doubt this was a shit experience, it certainly sounds incredibly infuriating.

Jason & his team work super hard, and have thousands of happy customers, so they're doing lots right. Even the greatest of companies can screw things up now and then, especially in non-straight-forward situations. I'm sure he'll put it right.

Somewhere in the middle, and probably closer to the low end, exists a need for less commoditized services to support more complex installations.

It doesn't appear like WP Engine is really positioned or resourced to actually support these needs and this is not the first time I've heard of these troubles.

If you can perform the comment sort in memory without hassle, what is is about the size of RAM provisioned by wpengine that makes this impossible?

My opinion, but for for $3000 per year, you should have been provisioned with as much ram as a linode VPS.

Reading about this, I get concerned when people conflate "performance" and "scalability". Performance is about time-based metrics such a requests-per-second. Scalability is about the question of whether I can add more hardware proportionately to my request load and continue to perform. WPEngine's marketing claims are about scalability, not performance.

This guy's WPEngine code was apparently doing a 189k row sort when serving certain requests, which is not going to perform well on any hosting platform, including DIY.

This was posted on Reddit and killed with one comment the tl;dr of it : The client was incompetent and irresponsible and likes to blame people when things go wrong.

As nice a guy as this blogger probably is, he's the bane of services like WPEngine. There is no way to service the needs of his complex edge case of a system for anything like $250/month. They are guaranteed to lose money on him, and the only hope they have is to convince him to leave the service as rapidly as possible to avoid being sucked into the time sink that dealing with him is going to become.

This is the reason you have a "refund" button on the customer page of your admin console. A quick email apologizing for not being able to meet the needs of his unique setup and a refund of his payment, as soon as it became apparent just how impossible things were about to become would have solved this completely.

Or at least one hopes so. The tough thing about dealing with toxic customers is that they grow on you slowly and you don't notice at first. Then one day you realize you've spent four hours just digging into issues and writing emails to this one person who you're probably going to have refund eventually anyway.

I've never met the guys on the WPEngine team. But I feel for them after reading this.

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pincus

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/10/05/zynga-kee...

They are one of the most successful internet things and yet they still don't seem to have any really solid way to monetize that. They are now part of culture but are they revenue positive?

The things they are doing lately don't make sense until you take that into account:

Restricting 3rd party apps and APIs? Seems to be driving users away... Except that if all your users are costing you money, then less users is in fact good.

And the only money making thing they seem to have is "paid tweets" that you are forced to see (aka ads) and so yeah, obviously they don't want 3rd party apps and APIs that could filter that one weak still mostly crappy source of money. So if they loose some freeloading users, why would they care.

So yeah. Why has no one else mentioned Twitter in this discussion as the grand-daddy-king of unsustainable companies?

The most relevant trait of a celebrity economy is the importance of visibility (and the vicious politics surrounding who gets to be visible). If everyone (most relevantly, the investor community) knows you're a 5.5, that's better than being a 10 that no one has ever heard of.

This has been my observation. I've met plenty of very successful founders (people that the HN crowd would have heard of) who are just not very impressive.

It also gets under my skin when VCs say, "we don't invest in ideas, we invest in people". To which I say, "then most of you should be fired, because you suck at that." Honestly, VCs are a lot better at picking ideas. Sure, a lot of these "social" apps are lame, but VCs actually do an excellent job of choosing what ideas to fund, given the constraints they face and their objective function (variance-agnostic expectancy maximization, 1-10 year payoffs). That they do well. On the other hand, they seem to be doing a lousy job of picking people (and at that, I would do a better job than 90+ percent of them).

The internet was very different a few years ago - a source for information and creativity, but easy access and growing acceptance (no doubt related to the rise of mobile platforms), have changed all this.

Some startups today are just like pop acts or Hollywood productions: 1 out of 10 makes a killing, the others fail spectacularly. That's the mass media (gambling) busines, not a "bubble".

Sustainability is relative. Very few companies "last forever", so the real questions are... What is an acceptable pattern of growth and what is driving the shorter lives of these companies?

So long as capital stays productive, from a societal point of view it shouldn't matter whether it stays in one company for 20 years or moves from company to company every three.

I've got no problems with people exiting like that, but it makes me wonder where all the pressure to sell up and move on comes from.

...This guy's a psychopath.

But we do not see this behavior, and hence the mild outrage of this post.

We gnash our teeth and tear our hair because of the irrationality of buyers and investors, because if only they were rational they'd invest in my idea, not his! :)

If you could marry these people with others who have a proven track record of creating sustainable businesses maybe you would have some unstoppable force?

But then again, maybe in order to pump and dump, you have to make certain decisions that are bad for building a company and good for raising funds.

I mean what does Mark Cuban tell his kids? "I built this website and it was shut down, but I'm bloody rich anyways, so..."

I mean I personally would feel like a horrible role model to the children after that. Does this sort of information turn your children into thinking the end justifies the means?

If the true blur kernel is more complicated -- perhaps a wavy line -- then you probably need a blind deconvolution tool, which this is not (yet?).

If you're interested in blind deconvolution in general, Dr. Levin of MIT put together a nice overview paper a few years ago: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~levina/papers/deconvLevinE...

(Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Blurity, a blind deconvolution product)

For example, check out: Fast image deconvolution using hyper-laplacian priors (http://cs.nyu.edu/~dilip/research/fast-deconvolution/).

edit: I changed the link to the author's page, which has Matlab code and a GPU implementation.

Original: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24903613/hn/blur.jpg

Using the program I was able to get: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24903613/hn/blur-edited.jpg with the following parameters:

    Defect type: Out of Focus Blur
    Radius: 17.4
    Smooth: 72%
    Correction Strength: 23%
    Edge Feather: 34%

That's a decade of compromising images about to become significantly less anonymous...

1. The article states "the operation which is opposite to convolution is equivalent to division in the frequency domain" which is not correct. 2. "Deconvolution" has no mathematical definition (as implied by that quote), it is the name of various algorithmic approaches used in signals processing. 3. Finally, the Wiener filter is not deconvolution, it is just a filter.

Nonetheless, a great article, with great illustrations.

It's enlightening for me to read accounts about how others live their lives and derive happiness from simple pleasures. Breathing fresh air, enjoying the company of others, eating food that you've grown. This is such a stark contrast to the lifestyle I have lived for the past 28 years. I've worked at software companies for the past 5 years and have spent most of my waking life in front of a computer screen. Even though I am happy, I do admit that I wonder if life is supposed to be more than this. And here we have incredible proof of someone who had broken out of their Comfort Zone, possibly had to give up many of their "luxuries", and changed their life completely.

The point of this story isn't that this man beat cancer and lived to be a centenarian, its that by changing his life he dramatically improved his happiness and began to take advantage of all the things we take for granted.

Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidants have a net negative effect on long term health. But there's money to be made keeping up the lie:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/03/attempting-to-add...

Lastly, beware of pseudo-pop-science that opens with one person's story. People manage to survive cancer without treatment all over the world; one story is not remarkable and tells us nothing. In general the whole blue zones thing has little to no value in any serious consideration of health and longevity: it's about on the same level of credibility as diet fads.

It is not like staying all the time in a passive stress (or depression) - having a high level of stress hormones without any physical activities.

And the last but not least, there are emotion contagiousness - one can see it a subway. "Toxic people" is very real thing.

Then comes the media with its pressure about sex (which is about youth and health) and wealth (which is a weak substitute for the two former), and these material pseudo-achievements that one must accomplish.

All these factors together, plus many more - such as drinking water, air, soil in which vegetables and grapes grown, contributes to longevity, of course. But it seems like there is no one which makes it all - no shortcut, no way to buy it.

I believe it is much more about the state of the mind, which influence everything, including inner bodily processes and rhythms. Mind is first, environment is second, adversaries is third. ''Hell is other people'', you know.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-...

But by that point I was tired of reading, and quit.

Cut it out with the pathos and human interest, and get some of the real point in there quicker.

This point is interesting to me because I was recently reading a book called 8 Weeks To Optimum Health and the author (Andrew Weil i think) mentions that it is good to add a little turmeric to your diet. Now having been lived in India all my life, we all have been eating turmeric all our lives without ever giving much thought to it. It's not something we do to remain healthy, but rather something without which you can't food here. I don't remember not eating it for the last 30 years. Unfortunately, we counter-balance it with fried samosas, etc but still the point to take is when a society as a whole develops good habits it often becomes way too easy for everyone to follow through without missing a day of that (for decades).

My vote however does go for: stress level, diet, and enough physical activity. Genetics too but you can't control that.

  Another health factor at work might be the unprocessed nature of the food they 
  consume: as Trichopoulou observed, because islanders eat greens from their gardens 
  and fields, they consume fewer pesticides and more nutrients. She estimated that the 
  Ikarian diet, compared with the standard American diet, might yield up to four 
  additional years of life expectancy. 

Eureka. You've done it. You've found the secret to eternal life.

  She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 
  that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly,
  and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with 
  “good duration” and “achievement.” 

  Although unemployment is high �" perhaps as high as 40 percent �" most
  everyone has access to a family garden and livestock, Parikos told me.
  People who work might have several jobs. Someone involved in tourism,
  for example, might also be a painter or an 
  electrician or have a store. 

  "When everyone knows everyone else's business, you get a feeling of 
  connection and security. The lack of privacy is actually good, because
  it puts a check on people who don't want to be caught or who do 
  something to embarrass their family."

Anyway, the effect is almost certainly due to a "small study effect" sampling bias. In a tiny population (one island) a handful of exceptions (164 people over 90) massively affects the average lifespan. There's no randomization or blinding at all: observational studies like these are exquisitely sensitive to methodology errors, especially when examining small effects.

It's easy to find several small towns in the US where people have unusually high longevity. After all, you have many to choose from.

What's more curious is to make a hypothesis around diet and exercise, and then show causality across all similar islands in Greece.

I spend every Saturday afternoon, and most Sunday afternoons, taking 2-3 hour naps. They are great for decompressing and relaxing. I actually enjoy them a lot more than the normal sleeps I get at night. There's something very satisfying about waking up and finding out that it's still the same day!

On a related note, most of my friends who complain about being "stressed out" never spend their weekends actually relaxing. Instead, they rush from one activity/event to another, drive from location to location. Then when the weekend is over they say in dismay, "I can't believe it's Monday already." My guess is that if they spent their weekend being laid back, the weekend would feel a lot longer and they would be re-energized before the next week starts.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100....

I would really*very much AND strongly like to give a hint to all those who are skeptical about this article that they should consider that a vastly different way of their life can very well exist. You do not HAVE to be a well educated smart hard working entrepreneur to exist on earth. People existed well before that and will do for some more time (if our "civilized" "modern" world does not succeed in destroying our planet.

I would also like to point out that the western world (especially the "civilized" world) has actually failed in the FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN NEEDS, ie food and sleep. Having lived in a place where organic food was the only food I am sick and tired of seeing people eating "healthy" food which in fact is nothing more than a company's new product.

During the morning I found, completely by chance, some articles on a fasting diet from the mark's daily apple blog. And I had been without eating since first falling asleep (and still am), so I eagerly gobbled it up as validation on all those breakfasts I have skipped.

And finally I talked with my roomate about living long as related to these little body hacking experiments.

That said, the interface seems a bit too "inspired" by Github. I hope they rethink how an application like this should work for themselves rather than allowing Github to influence their designs.

I see this quite frequently among opensource projects, they try to make clones rather than making a better product.

TLDR: Think about how the UI should work in your application. Its different for everyone so don't blindly clone others.

There's also Gitorious, which has been around a while and is mature, full-featured, and provides both a SaaS [2] and the FOSS software you can host yourself [3]. I keep backups of some of my repo's there.

[1]: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq

[2]: http://gitorious.org/

[3]: http://gitorious.com/

And ironically, the source code is hosted on github.

http://rhodecode.org/

If you are looking for something a bit different, there's also fossil.

http://www.fossil-scm.org/

It's gloriously ironic! A photo mocking Rails security attached to a private repo... that's not secure.

If you install it on Ubuntu, their wiki has instructions that you can pretty much copy and paste; the most complicated bit probably being the gitolite setup, which is what it uses internally for repo auth.

I was just a single user so most of the functionality was a loss, so I transferred to bitbucket (free private repos) knowing full well the potential risks. It saved me the effort of keeping my own server up to date and secure (I'm not the pro, I can trust github or bitbucket to know and do better) at the cost of no longer being self sufficient.

That said, I'd recommend this for any organisation that wants its own github, doesn't want to pay enterprise money, and doesn't mind doing all the hard work itself. And that's not faint praise, because it was fucking good when I did use it (while it was mid-Twitter Bootstrap conversion).

Has anyone done any A/B testing on something like this?

[Edited: I'm _really_, _really_ not trying to be the grammar police here. I'm in no position to do so, and my grammar is faaar from perfect. I'm just wondering about the actual impacts (or lack thereof).]

Congratulations on reaching 3.0!

I was already planning on installing gitlab this week to try it out.
Anyone here got any advice or suggestions on using it as a Github replacement for a small team?

There is always room for something new.

http://rhodecode.org/

It supports both hg and git, adn while the ui could look better - its very functional and can do a lot.

AFAICS Gitlab is server software. You can run whatever you want on your dev machine.

I assume you didn't mean you want to run your own GitLab server on each dev machine, I don't see how that would make sense.

- Not all medical systems are the disaster described here. We elected to move back from the US to our native Canada to undergo treatment, and our experience in ward (pre and post-op as well as on the oncology floor) was a dream (at least given the circumstances). We experienced nothing but exemplary inter-disciplinary cooperation, compassion for the patient (and family) experience, and a professionalism driven by clinical need rather than liti-mitigation. These qualities were exhibited even more strongly during the initial phases of treatment post-discovery, which unfolded along a timeline similar to the one discussed here.

- Academic hospitals are exhausting. My spouse ended up being the real hero in this story (she was still breastfeeding at the time, and only one parent was allowed to overnight in the room). My job was to make sure she and our daughter had recovered enough each day to make it through a night of vitals, endless beeping, and the occasional overnight chemo administration (don't even get me started about that).

- The need for patients and their families to drive the narrative of their hospital experience and be their own champion is critical. I had worked in healthcare for many years before this nightmare began (my old office was at the hospital across the street from her room) and knew the system very, very well. We divided up responsibilities so 'I looked outward, and [my spouse] looked inward', meaning that I spent my time making sure that the relevant referrals happened, that medications were administered on time and on dose, and so on. My wife looked inwards towards our daughter, making sure she was fed, entertained, and comfortable. This setup worked very well for us, and was a likely contributor to our level of care.

- The power of parents to be strong in the face of terrible (often inevitable) odds is truly inspiring. We were lucky enough to know with reasonable certainty fairly early on that we would one day be leaving the hospital and resuming a normal life. Many, many families we met were not so lucky. To see a parent express joy and love in the face of such long and terrible odds is a truly unique experience. I myself am a measurably better parent for having witnessed it.

http://www.med.umn.edu/gi/faculty/vamc/home.html

http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2009-rst/5207.html

is a medical doctor and academic researcher in medicine at the University of Minnesota. I used to file his grant applications into the office file drawers as a duty of my part-time job while pursuing my undergraduate degree. Michael Levitt is perhaps the world's leading authority on intestinal gas and still has an active research program in diseases of the human bowel. He indeed has seen many patients at a research hospital over the years, the same hospital where my mother worked as a nurse for most of her career.

Dr. Levitt writes in the submitted article, "Overnight admission to the hospital is recommended for 'observation' and rest prior to the trip home. Fifty years of experience have taught me that admission to an academic hospital is not restful. I have stopped counting the patients who want to be discharged to get some rest." I have an immediate family member who was given excellent care at the same academic hospital Dr. Levitt knows so well. My relative is in excellent health now decades after that treatment. But indeed, even with best care, the patient experience at a research hospital is not restful, as world experts on the patient's case vie with medical students and a variety of other health science trainees and practitioners to learn from the patient. When a case is puzzling, as was the case of my relative, research-oriented practitioners are curious about how to understand the case, trying to find established, verified practice to help the patient, and otherwise working "empirically" (an ominous word--to me--used by my relative's main doctor to describe a procedure he attempted when he wasn't sure what to do next) to do whatever they can to help.

As the father of a daughter, I can hardly imagine a rougher kind of news to hear. Another immediate relative lost a fiancee to cancer years ago, and that relative's memories of that time are full of frustration. The various kinds of cancer are still so varied--as mentioned in the article--that there is essentially NIL prospect of ever having a general treatment that will be an effective first-line treatment for most forms of cancer. Instead, there will continue to be surgical treatment for come cancers, a growing variety of chemotherapies for a variety of cancers, in the best luck genome-matched to vulnerable cancer cell strains, and radiation treatment for other cancers.

Ultimately, though, we will all have to learn to die better,

http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/11/30/how...

because we will all eventually die of something. Meanwhile, if you are a parent, this submission is a reminder to cherish your children while they are here, and if you are a medical researcher, as Michael Levitt is, this is a reminder to continue to strive for better understanding of health and disease, while remembering the patient experience as new tests and treatments are devised.

When it is my time to die I intend to fully engage with the experience of dying, and not to numb the experience with knife wounds, drugs, and over-stimulating hospitals. Until then I intend every day to live fully, with great sensitivity, and to remember that each day I live is one my sister did not have. There is no entitlement to health or longevity; some things cannot be predicted nor controlled.

I once asked a veterinarian acquaintance of mine why he hadn't become a physician. "Wouldn't you rather drive something fancier than that pickup truck?" I needled, gesturing out the window at his old F150. "Yeah" he replied, "but those guys spend most of their time doing paperwork. I get to practice medicine."

Perhaps that wasn't his purpose, but that was the result. And it is a scathing, justified criticism, especially coming from an experienced doctor.

My father died of lung cancer, and we went through similar experiences with the health care system.

Before claiming that something is not a criticism, we have to ask whether or not we can imagine a better outcome, ask what is getting in the way of that outcome, and then make a change. This could be something small, like moving patients around less, and with less resistance. (The purely informational resistance in medical care is appalling, and this story shows it's real human cost. Electronic patient records is not about assuaging "people who can't be bothered to fill out forms".) Or it could be something huge, like revolutionizing what late-stage cancer patients, and their families, expect, and how they will be treated.

If you get late-stage cancer, the health insurance company should hand you $100,000 in cash, a large supply of morphine that can be easily self-administered, and a ticket to Hawaii. Huge bag of weed optional. The message is clear: you're going to die soon, so make your peace with it. Talk to your family.

My father fought until he fell unconscious, his personality ravaged by whole-brain radiation and chemo, in complete denial. He never got a change to face his sentence with courage, and he never really talked to me before he died.

So yes, the practice of medicine needs to be criticized.

No one should have to plead with their father to end their life early, this should be a choice that anyone can make without fear of consequence to their loved ones. This should be a well established and regulated part of terminal illness.

It's probably time to call hospice, not the "We can beat this oncologist." It's probably time to write a living will and a sign the DNR. It's probably time to decide how and where you want to die.

It's most assuredly time to decide how you want to live the rest of your life.

As far as the expenses went, he had Medicare in addition to supplemental insurance as a retired Marine. So he paid nothing out of pocket. I can definitely understand how this would add to the frustration of the experience.

A huge problem is that no one is actually in charge of a patient's treatment. The individual doctors were quite good, with maybe one or two exceptions, but there was never enough evidence of actual coordination between them for me to feel very confident. I saw him on a daily basis, but much of my time was spent staying on top of what half a dozen doctors and nurses were doing or planning to do at any given time and keeping everything coordinated. I worry about people who end up in the hospital without anyone else around to watch over them.

Hospitalization can be a very frustrating and disorienting experience, especially for older patients. The thing about hospitalization is that it's essentially a form of captivity. You could write a good psychological horror story that took place in a hospital, and it wouldn't be too far from reality.

What is the cost-benefit ratio for a routine MRI scan every six months?

That is say, do as complete as possible cancer screening every 3 months?

The worst seem to be the ones like pancreatic cancer, you have a very little chance of catching it before it has spread.

I just want to see my daughters grow up that is all.

I can't begin to tell you the things my family and me had to put up with.

Would I struggle and suffer in the hopes of living a few months longer or accept the fate and go in peace sooner. This reminded me of discussion with my wife during will preparation about how long should I be kept alive before plug is pulled.

However, Dr. Carson has stated publicly, both at conferences and on radio interviews, that he believes he was largely cured by a controversial holistic treatment called glyconutrients.

However, due to legal liabilities on the company's part, they banned all testimonials and would threaten lawsuits to anyone who publicized this information.

20/20 did a story on glyconutrients, disproving them based on glycobiologist Dr. Ronald Schnaar from John Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Schnaar said, "All of the sugar building blocks that we need in our body are made from the most common foods we eat."

Contrary to this, Dr. Carson says we do not get these simple sugars from our natural diet and said that his family, his employees and everyone he knows uses glyconutrients with great results.

He said he considered not having traditional surgery but he didn't want others mistakenly following his path to the detriment of their health.

Dr. Carson is not a glycobiologist. However, he is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at John Hopkins and a colleague of Dr. Schanaar. He's been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and had a film made about his life story starring Cuba Gooding Jr.

But none of this information about his alternative cancer treatment is widely known. Not one word on his Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson) nor on the page about glyconutrients.

It's disappointing there's no unbiased scientific research to explain what is factually true. And it's unbelievable that such a high profile cancer survivor could make these claims with virtually no one knowing.

Dr. Carson's speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROzftYwJihg

Dr. Carson's Story in the Dallas Weekly
http://glyconutrientsarevital.blogspot.com/2006/08/dr-ben-ca...

Related Local News story on Baby Hadley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3U4mrqslk

e.g.:

    Host internal-*.example.net
        ProxyCommand ssh -T external.example.net 'nc %h %p'

    ssh internal-dev.example.net

ssh even automatically replaces %h and %p in the ProxyCommand with a host and port, though you can of course replace those tokens with static values if it works better.

(Also, note above that one can use wildcards in Host declarations.)

If you keep all those private keys on the same machine and tend to load them all into ssh-agent frequently, then there's little point in that. People forget that keypairs are not like passwords -- if Github gets compromised, nobody can do anything with the public key you gave them.

Unless you treat the keys very differently (like having a special key that you rarely ever decrypt), there's no reason to have more than one per device.

http://mosh.mit.edu/

  function _ssh_completion() {
    perl -ne 'print "$1 " if /^[Hh]ost (.+)$/' ~/.ssh/config
  }
  complete -W "$(_ssh_completion)" ssh

They set you up with a layer of indirection that you can change later. Git-svn doesn't like having the URL to the SVN server changed, but if you set up a git alias to "svn" instead, when the SVN server moves for some reason you won't have to do anything except change the svn alias contents. You can also share the resulting tree between multiple people easily because they can plop in their own "svn" alias that uses their own user instead. In general you can safely reference the SSH alias in any number of places (beyond just shell scripts) and know that you can trivially change the alias later without having to change all those things.

There are many things that will use SSH, but won't accept any parameters, or will accept only a small subset. Emacs can use SSH to access remote file systems by opening "/ssh:username@ip:port:/file", but it will only take username, ip, and port (AFAIK). With SSH aliases, you have the full power of SSH available to you, so you can use all these other nifty things people are talking about. I've also been using ddd to remotely debug perl lately and that pretty much seems to demand 'ssh host' with passwordless login and nothing else.

I've been meaning to start writing again, and my post showing up on the HN front page is a pretty good motivator. Thanks for that, everyone :-).

Placing the following wildcard entry in my SSH config resolved the issue for those times when I had to use one of these networks...

  # Set Global KeepAlive to avoid timeouts
  Host *
    ServerAliveInterval 240

One real usage that is invaluable for me, is the fact that the config is used for SVP also. This saves a lot of typing.

With a key based login set up, copying files to a server is a matter of

scp file dev:~/

Host -host-name-here-
GSSAPIAuthentication no
GSSAPIKeyExchange no

Fixes this issue.
source: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011102011541796...

~? shows the few things you can do over the admin channel of ssh.

  ~ $ ~?
  Supported escape sequences:
    ~.  - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)
    ~B  - send a BREAK to the remote system
    ~C  - open a command line
    ~R  - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
    ~^Z - suspend ssh
    ~#  - list forwarded connections
    ~&  - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
    ~?  - this message
    ~~  - send the escape character by typing it twice
  (Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

  man ssh_config

...but now that I did manage to configure it, I wonder if it was really necessary. Github has a nice identity control, I think it was foolish of me to think I needed both a personal and a work account.

I know I could download ebooks from Amazon and just remove their DRM, but I think it's better to vote with my wallet.

After all, they sell the Kindle at cost and rely on you buying books from them to make any profit. So don't buy their books and maybe they'll learn..

In my opinion, if a company can't or won't provide a way for a customer to access their purchased files, then they should be required by law to provide a way for the customer to un-DRM those files.

For technical books it's a different story, but then the Kindle is not a medium that works well for diagrams and special formatting that you would expect in technical writing.

So in the end, Kindle DRM does not hurt me much. Then again, it is so easy to strip that I think Amazon does not care, either. It's just a pacifier for publishers.

But for some reason, I strongly doubt Amazon will ban him...

"Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book's read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format."

I suspect that it is in error, but this excemption does not specify that the reason for disabling DRM is to use it for one of the mentioned purposes, only that stripping DRM would be nessasary for the mentioned purposes. The lack of enforcement probably makes this a moot point, but if all of a e-book's versions have DRM, and you get in trouble for stripping the DRM off, this would probably hold up as a solid technicality.

Granted, it is still illegal to distribute software designed to aid people in lawfully stripping DRM from e-books.

Source: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2010/Librarian-of-Congress-120...

Lately I've been doing most of my reading via Safari. I pay for the "library" level plan and feel it's worth every penny, in spite of the horrendous mobile app. Every few months, I spend Safari token on an ePub copy of something particularly good.

I'd like to see all publishers offer the option to purchase a print + DRM-free digital copy for not much more than print alone just as O'Reilly and Pearson do today.

http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2012/06/15/how-add-kindle-...

Knowledge should be free.

[1] Joyent/Textdrive sold lifetime shared hosting accounts for a one time payment in the beginning. Those accounts would exist "as long as we exists". A couple of months back they sent an email that they are "discontinuing" lifetime accounts. After uproar from the community they offered refunds. Many people (including me) agreed to the refund, but then they decided to make another 180 degree turn, not paying out the refund. Instead they are now spinning off a new "Textdrive" that is supposed to "take over" the lifetime customers. No details about funding/general outlook/etc. of this new company has been provided so far. Questions to this end are shrugged off as "everything is perfect, just trust us, ..."

Incidentally, the new Textdrive Forum (discuss.textdrive.com) seems to be down at the moment...

..and we've had 100% uptime in our short run so far. Our systems are highly redundant and as decoupled as possible. Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability.

AWS does a great job on reliability. I do think EBS is a terrible technology that should die in a fiery pit, but they do a damn good job of keeping everything up.

If they really do believe their 99.9999% claim, I'd love to see them make a bet. How about Reddit gets $1M if they move and it falls below that?

No, I don't hate Joyent. I can't even figure out what they offer. And I don't see "Python" or "Postgres" or "Redis" in their tech stack page, so what would reddit (a Python / Postres / Redis site) want with them? They seem to be mostly node.js / Mongo, which is a nice tech stack but isn't the one reddit is built on.

Clicking around their dev docs seems to suggest you can install your own stuff on their "SmartMachines" (are those Linux VMs?), but there's a heavy node.js bias to the docs.

Now that they're beating that Joyent drum a little more: watch them fall down under a DoS attack that Amazon could bat away at this point. I'm by no means supporting Amazon, but Joyent is still a small company with big claims. I predict they will fall apart when Sun stops making hardware, and when their engineers argue over whatever trendy "wrong way to do it" Node-type technologies that they're jacking off over next.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669

well that was rather ironic..

This says it all really, just a bit of PR to boost awareness of their product...and the HN community has taken the bait.

I wonder how their current EC2 pricing would compare to Joyent?

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...

That's neither technologically possible nor commercially feasible.

Companies need to stop saying that.

The page is down.

It shouldn't surprise me that some give credence to conspiracy theories but it does. Amazon panicked and reversed itself because a story about removing DRM was on the front page of HN? Seriously?

What you'll find with customer service departments is that what they do is largely prescribed by scripts. Call centers work like this (to the point of there being checking to see that people don't deviate from the script). They will have procedures that must be followed.

The Mark Fiore example [1] springs to mind. Some saw some global conspiracy. The more likely explanation is that the procedures defined for those approving apps just hadn't taken such a scenario into account when being written ie it was an oversight (a "mistake" as Steve Jobs called it).

We're all too willing to accept bugs in software. Procedures that humans need to follow--particularly if they need to follow them rigidly--have bugs too. The more discretion you give those following the procedures, the more you tend to just add inconsistency.

[1]: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/pulitzer-wi...

EDIT: to clarify, I think the original story getting as much of an audience as it did certainly helped and may well have been instrumental. It's kind of sad that that's the case. I was referring to some commenters putting forward theories about the DRM removal story being the catalyst for action here, which is ludicrous.

I've been forced to withdraw my $20 ebook from Amazon because I simply cannot afford to price it at $20 in the kindle store (Amazon pays the same royalty for books priced at $10-20 as books priced at $10, and it pays lower royalties than BN or iBooks). I'm not allowed to price my ebook so that I effectively get paid the same (which entails selling the book at $40 for Kindle and $20 for everything else) because that violates Amazon's "you cannot sell for less elsewhere" rules.

Similarly, Amazon sells book readers that are incompatible with rival book formats, including ePub. No-one complains.

/cynic

"Account status should not affect any customer's ability to access their library."

Amazon has realized that they can quarantine suspect accounts, but not cut off the customer's right to their purchased books.

Every other manufacturer is now going to follow suit. The end result is a win for the consumer.

(I can imagine and understand -- although not always agree with -- the desire to e.g. keep some technical aspects of fraud detection private. Beyond that, I have zero sympathy.

And even in the event of some so-called "fraud detection", we have powerful entities who on the one hand want to benefit from a "global market" while on the other hand simultaneously seeking to restrict same when doing so is to their benefit. For example, taking advantage of lower "third world" production costs while insisting upon receiving "first world" prices for their own goods.)

P.S. I've had two friends communicate that they are backing out of pending Kindle purchases, since I shared this story with them. (In case any Amazon types are browsing by here.)

Seriously, fuck them.

I'll continue using Kindle for free content but I'll be buying only real books unless there is very clear legislation, or a change in Amazon's technology, supporting my right to keep and control my own purchases. Amazon (and not just Amazon) has too much power here and has repeatedly demonstrated that they will abuse it.

My Kindles hit Ebay a few hours ago. I'm out of the Amazon digital ecosystem.

1. Kindle-wipe Story on Hackernews.

2. One engineer at Amazon saw the story, told it some Executive above him

3. The Executive "nerds, let them talk THIS is real business!"

4. One day later "How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others (wired.com)" on Hackernews

5. The Executive "OH SNAP! REOPEN REOPEN REOPEN!!11"

If you feel that your account has been erroneously disabled, then got viral with your story, only then will we investigate your claims.

Then I would go lobbying for a law that would make it a legal requirement to make digitally restricted products available to the user in unencumbered format if the user's account gets terminated or if the company goes out of business. So, basically the user would buy the song/book/movie but hand over the appropriate storage to the company for as long as the account remains open. Then, if the storage gets shut down the user would still own copies of his/her files.

Because, the hardware of the device looks nice to me, especially if you'd add a water proof cover around it.

Thanks!

It's sad that such problems will be solved only by huge exposure to the story. Not something everyone can have all the time. Happy but sad.

So "Amazon did an about-face" actually means "Amazon did a change in direction" or even "Amazon did a 180 degree turn".

If there is a solution, they should mention it on their front page because I'm sure half the people who go there ask themselves: "Wouldn't I have to give my credit card info to complete strangers for this to be useful?"

This seems to be the weak link with these services.

- Drop off my laundry at the laundromat's wash and fold service to pick up the next day. There are even a bunch of services and laundromats that will come to your apartment to take your laundry and drop it back off for you.

- Seamless has about 100 places that deliver to my apartment, about 400 that deliver to work. You can schedule your dinner delivery time.

- I've had friends my age hire a maid to clean weekly apparently without costing much, or just Taskrabbit for one-off things.

- Fresh Direct for delivery groceries.

- No need for a car, so I can be productive on the train or at least read depending on the commute.

- Cabs are incredibly cheap here.

You could say that delegating work to "experts" means the work is done more efficiently so you save resources, and that's a step in the right direction towards automation, but not automation.

Note: I'm very interested in words and the contrast between what they mean and how people use them.

The automated driving component might work. Maybe if I lease a black hybrid, have the driver be my employee, and let him do uber on off hours, it could actually net money. But setting this up sounds complicated. If only I could automate it.

Related: $1/day is a really bad way to present a pricing plan of $25/5 requests. Yes, that's technically correct, but I don't want to amortize the cost over the number of days in the month; I want to amortize it over the number of days I actually use the product (or, better yet, the number of times I use it - so $5/task).

I, personally, had a bad experience using "Fancy Hands" and cancelled my subscription just the other month. Although, I do admit it was mainly because I just couldn't get the $25/month out of it (like you did).

I am curious, how did Fiverr work out (quality wise) for your proofreading? I have debated using this service before for proofreading, but had not yet actually tried it.

I definitely need to start using FancyHands (got the email from the guy who created it recently about how he was killing an old company and putting all effort into FancyHands). Unfortunately some of my current tasks require calling my lawyer and doing some other things that really only I can do.

I do need a dentist though, and a handful of other things. Time to delegate!

And apparently Steve uses 10 Q-Tips per day.

(Except cat litter, that is totally worth getting delivered from Amazon just to avoid carrying it.)

FH had a message on their pricing page that immediately turned me off. Sometimes, it's better to not be so dynamic (i.e. I would have signed up had I not seen the message below):

"Steve Corona knows you'll love having Fancy Hands.
Sign up now and get 50% off your first month or 5% off your first year."

IMHO, the whole post is not very useful and the 2 affiliate links are pushing it ... How much does one earn with such a HN post? Please disclose.

Using Mechanical Turk for proofreading/editing has always appealed to me. I wonder what the OP's results were with that that led him to choose Fiverr instead? As a writer, I would be paranoid about throwing any of my (commercial valuable) work online to the crowd...what if you wrote a script to break your manuscript into sentences and paid 2 cents per sentence? You could only catch within-sentence grammatical errors. But you'd vastly reduce the fear that your work is floating out there for someone to misappropriate.

[pedantic]

There's a grammatical error (I think) in the last sentence of the post ("half an hour an Amazon"):

> You can automate almost all of the boring parts of your life, today, for less than 25 bucks and half an hour an Amazon. And make sure to have your assistant email me telling me how much time I saved you.

I also automate groceries at http://shop.safeway.com .

In San Francisco you can automate laundry with http://sfwash.com . Great service.

I'm working on changing this mindset but it's proving difficult.

One problem I see is that access to one's financial records sometimes is used as a proxy for identity, much like the presumption that, if you can read an email sent to a particular address, you must "own" that email address. Didn't PayPal once (or even still does?) debit N cents from one's bank account and then ask what amount was charged as a way of verifying new users?

I think it takes me longer to describe what I want to the assistant than doing it myself.

I think I have something worth sharing, I just don't have the discipline to get it written down.

create an account on slickdeals

set up a deal alert for your desired keywords

don't think about it again until you get an email alerting you to a good deal

This removes a cognitive load for me. I no longer waste time researching trivial outlays.

I solved it by 'will'. TODO lists, monthly shopping, booking everything on time... It is easier than you think.

http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/2

I still haven't become a Fancy Hands user, but I do remember him saying lots of new parents turn to them for help when a baby arrives, so perhaps that'll be me someday.

(disclaimer: I run the outsourcing marketplace http://taskarmy.com where you can find screened virtual assistants: http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance-outsourcing)

I dealing with general fake-work but seems like there's just as much work involved in getting someone else to do these things as just doing them yourself?

Also - any recommendations for other services to compare to?

Is it just that I can make a request via a web form, rather than via a phone call?

Of course, you could probably rig a replenishment system using python, some hardware, and the Amazon API... An erp for your home...

Does Twitpic still not allow you to export your own pictures or did they give up on that?

And the quality of the actual video isn't even HD?

PS: Already a down vote. Be man or woman enough to state your case.

My favorite speaker probably was Joel Spolsky (and his slow, organic growth vs land-grab talk).

I love how Joel used Fog Creek to fund StackExchange's development and now Trello, which both seem to be land-grab businesses. It's almost like Fog Creek is it's own startup incubator now. Maybe a new model of funding/startups?

I felt a recurring theme was "don't give up"... so I'll really try to remember that lesson when I hit future roadblocks.

I enjoyed attending and meeting some of you in person. Definitely looking forward to next year's edition!

This recording will never be available? I would like to watch his talk...

http://pastebin.com/AxZCgcsF

NOOO! This talk was fabulous!

I had to strain to hear what the speakers were saying.

Was the volume OK for those on the main level?

I find it hard watching talks where only slides got recorded or others where only the speaker gets recorded.

For the latter, I'll normally download slides and use them to move along with talk.

Can we move beyond this simple issue and discuss more complicated aspects of security on HN?

I guess you could do this with YAML too?

I'm really pleased to see an article like this at the top of HN. It's informative and side-steps both the marketing bullshit about the metro interface and all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that metro has engendered.

More like this please.

Why would I use anything but the Desktop mode? I can already make apps fullscreen if I want, but I definitely don't want to be limited to only fullscreen mode.

So what advantage does Metro have for a desktop user?

After using Win 8 for a few weeks now, this article confirmed some of the things I was seeing, but not sure if it was just me seeing a new shiny toy or it really was happening.

The two things I've already noticed are it starts up a lot faster, and comes back from sleep a lot faster as well. It's also a lot more stable. Almost no crashes when I was running several Adobe apps at the same time. I'm running with 4GB RAM and was impressed with the performance. I can only imagine how well it would run under a much faster processor and even more RAM. The real winners will be desktop users for sure.

Losing the Start button was not a huge issue. I use an app launcher and just hitting the WIN button takes you to the main metro screen with all your apps. It's not hardly as confusing as everybody is crying about.

The new Task Manager looks great though, and the document history might be proven to be useful.

I think I'll wait Windows 9 to upgrade my desktop & laptop.

Personally I don't understand this concept of forcing a clunky and strange UI on people and having change just for the sake of change. Both suffer from huge amounts of backlash, yet their creators stand by it, for one simple reason: They have to change, so things don't appear stale. These interfaces aren't better, they're just new.

It's really that simple, we've had 10 years of the same type of interface in Windows, Linux and OSX and they need something new. Apple of course knows they have something good with OSX and are unwilling to slap their users in the face, and they generally don't fix what is broke.

Didnt we just read an article yesterday about how this isnt true? WinRT is built on top of win32, not parallel.

"By installing Windows 8, companies will implicitly force its employees to use a new interface that could severely dent productivity. "

This is, by far, the biggest issue with Windows 8. And, at least for me, the most confusing aspect of Microsoft's decision making process.

I would be surprised if ANY business with more than two employees willingly shifts their PC's to Windows 8. Imagine having one hundred employees grind to a halt due to the UI shift. Deadly.

I would really love to have the opportunity to hear from Microsoft on this one. Why is it that we don't even have an option to disable Metro (or tablet mode, or whatever they want to call it) on a desktop system? What was the logic behind that decision, if any?

I'll definitely go check it out at some retailer to see if I think I can get over (or minimize) the horrid multi-tile slate touchpad-friendly floating window interface.

Why should it require a command line statement with three switches to simply shutdown?

Also, completely unrelated: I hope that 'single keypress' for resetting your PC to a blank slate is somewhat exaggerated. If it isn't, leaving your PC alone for seconds becomes truly dangerous (yes, technically there is no difference; giving anybody local access to your PC puts your files at risk, but having a system make vandalism easier? I sure hope it asks for your password first)

I wish I had something more substantive to say here, but the problem is that we give Facebook an extraordinarily huge power in our personal lives. It's not just some random web service.

I was impressed with the account recovery process ("you entered an old password -- do you want to recover your account?"), but I felt like they were completely optimized for recovery versus preventing the intrusion in the first place (ala Google's two-factor auth).

Anyway, in this case they obviously took the wrong approach with the blogger and I hope it blows up in their faces. (Microsoft and everyone else used to not be nice to security researchers, Facebook will no doubt learn that cooperation is a better strategy too).

By using an app you are giving them access to a whole bunch of your personal information. I always assumed that many were scraping data from my profile. This is why I have never use Facebook for authentication.

When I read the original post I figured Facebook would want the data so they could narrow down who the probable culprit is. I would have thought finding a common app among a million users probably wouldn't be too difficult.

That said the nature of this conversation is ridiculous.

"By who?"

"Top. Men."

On the other hand, they are trying to solve this issue secretly, no disclosure. And we dont yet know if they are taking any privacy measures to prevent this kind of data leak.

By reacting like that, I think Facebook can be considered as guilty as charged.

Less conceptually fragile, less expensive, more portable, same software stack, same media stack, same OS, same UX, same premium experience, same monstrous manufacturing and distribution reach, same monstrous advertising and product awareness engine.

Every single one of the children you see in restaurants working an iPad so mommy and daddy can eat in peace will have one of these by January.

Schools will buy in by the hundreds of thousands, regardless of actual utility or how successful digital textbooks eventually become.

This is the new travel iPad. This is the status gift for the developing world. This is the throwaway iPad if you're rich or the first one you look at if you're less so.

It's priced to make Apple the margins they want while still inviting comparisons with less expensive and similarly sized tablets. It's going to suck the oxygen out of the $300-$500 price range for anything with a screen.

And it's cheap enough to substantially distinguish itself from the main iPad line, which is selling millions a week. That's all it had to do, pricing-wise.

I don't want or need this, and I don't think it was particularly necessary for the health of the iPad line, but they dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts when designing this product.

At 7.9 inches, it's perfectly sized to deliver an experience every bit as big as iPad

What does that even mean? Either it's perfectly sized, and the iPad is the wrong size. Or it's not. There can surely only be one perfect size to deliver an iPad experience??? Either it's 10" or it's 7.9".

I think Apple's marketing has always been the same - it's just that for a while they were ahead of the curve and so their hyperbole was justified. The iPhone was amazing. The Macbook Air is still amazing. But there is absolutely FUCK ALL amazing about a smaller fucking iPad.

The iPhone (original and 4S) were both great devices but too small. I could carry them everywhere, but the reading and browsing experience was cramped, by necessity of the small screen.

The iPad (original and Retina) are big, and lovely for reading and browsing, but too big to hold with one hand. This really is an issue for me, the way I sit when I'm reading... it ends up limiting my use of what otherwise would be a fantastic device.

So, the mini seems perfect. Light enough to hold, big enough to get a fantastic reading and browsing experience. I know it will be a little cramped compared to the iPad (well, expect it will be, but the same resolution original iPad was not cramped at all) but that's a fine tradeoff for being able to use it, literally, everywhere.

I like that they decided to start at $329 with 16GB, about perfect pricing for me. We spent over $650 on our retina iPad with LTE, and ended up not using the LTE much at all.

For our startup, which is heavily involved in iOS, and all of us have iOS devices, we will probably buy 2-3 of these minis.

In fact, I think I'm personally, done with the iPad and iPhone... I don't need the phone part (which is why I've mostly bought iPod touches) .... only went with it because the original iPad was not as portable as I'd like.

So, I'm totally stoked that this device is as it was rumored... I see no downsides to it at all.

The increase in width from the 7.9" screen is surely going to mean that this won't which is a pity.

Other folks have smaller form factor devices, the Dell 'Streak' [1] being an early example of an Android based device that started out at 5" and 'grew' to 7". 5" was not very successful and mocked as being an unwieldy phone, the larger size was better.

Laptops got 'huge' the 17" one being the pinnacle, and then 'small' again with the most popular models being 13 - 16"

Other tablets came out in 6, 7, 9, 10, 11" sizes at various levels of acceptance or not.

The Kindle was the first e-reader with a solid market foot print, it was 'small'. E-readers of 7" are common.

So dialing all of that together you end up with a bunch of different designers trying different ideas and some of them are successful and some aren't. The same designers look at the successful products and try to extract what aspects of the design were critical, which weren't? How did people use them, how did people think of them, what did people want that they didn't get.

So this market is evolving.

So the folks at Apple see these things and try to capture as much of the market as they can. They saw folks buying a bunch of Kindle fires and Nexus 7's and hey, they could do that.

I'm completely conflicted because I like the idea of an A6x iPad but I really like to 30 pin connector on my 3rd Gen iPad.

[1] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/mobile-streak-7/pd

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Streak

I also suspect that lots of doctors will buy these. I suspect this will fit very nicely into a lab coat, and the form factor will be a much better fit for doctors with easier one handed operation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFAjfUT8wZI

iPod + iPhone.. as far as I can tell are identical apart from the iPod cannot make calls.

iPad is a giant version of the iPod... which I really like to use to browse the web on the sofa.

We now have the iPad Mini which is that awkward size which is too big put in your pocket and yet you don't want to put it in your backpack as you could put your netbook / iPad / laptop in your bag.

I am sure they will sell plenty. I just don't really get it. Its like innovation has stalled at Apple. How many sizes can we make the iPhone?

Beyond this the iMac is incredibly disappointing. Its thin! Oh well. No SDD. No Retina Display. Probably has a little spec boost over last model. Its disappointing. Glad I didn't wait for it.

I must say, I've consistently been impressed with Apple's copy writing.

On the plus side for the N7, they screwed up on price though - for the ecosystem and build quality advantage may be a $50 premium would have been attractive esp for lesser screen resolution and older CPU/GPU. The N7 also feels like it should be more single hand friendly than the iPad mini.

The other thing that iBooks is sorely missing is the ability to use two fingers to zoom in and out of a page. I really don't understand why we have to look at a page with a one inch white border all the way around the page on a digital device, which forces a smaller font to fit the same content.

I think that the iPad mini might just stress the need or a better user experience in software such as iBooks.

Apple is now on the back foot and is heading towards market saturation and commoditisation via Android and intense foreign competition. Consequently I have held a large short position from 700 and will continue to do so following my sale of AAPL stock following the Samsung case - unless something changes.

You can only win in the brutal consumer electronics space by inventing the future. Otherwise you're just another commodity producer. You can't defeat the entire market by just doing more of the same.

Not impressed.

If it ran vanilla Android, it would have been a no-brainer for many of us.

Personally, I'm grateful someone is sticking to the 4:3 aspect ratio. If that made a comeback on laptops and monitors, so much better.

2. Critics yawn, criticize etc.

3. AAPL goes down

4. Many speculate as to what Jobs would or would not have done, joke about rolling in grave, call for Tim Cook to be fired etc.

5. Apple makes a mint's worth of money, AAPL hits new high.

It's been happening for 5 years. It's not just unsurprising, it's predictable.

Sure, with the 3g model you can still use iMessage, Whats App, Skype, etc- but you're missing out on regular voice calls and SMS.

From an engineering perspective- is it that difficult to add a sim card slot and the extra cell antennas?

Resolution might be the same as iPad 2, but pixel density is different. Therefore an area that is clickable on iPad2 or iPad3 may become too small to click on the iPad mini.

So we had two platforms - iPad2/iPad3 with one tap area size, and iPhone 4/iPhone 5 with another, and now we have three.