Norwegian Air to cancel 85% of flights and temporarily lay off 90% of staff - spking
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-norwegianair/norwegian-air-to-cancel-85-of-flights-and-lay-off-90-of-staff-idUSKBN2132F7
======
johnnymonster
It's a temporary layoff and it's exactly what they should be doing. When they
lay off the employees, they are able to collect unemployment benefits from the
government. It's a perfect strategy so that the employees will be ok instead
of not receiving wages. once things rebound, they can hire them back again and
all is good.

~~~
marvin
While I agree with your point in general, Norwegian is done. They've got a
heavy debt burden that's due soon. They will either go bankrupt and be
restructured, or have to do a wipeout-level stock offering (unlikely in the
current risk climate).

~~~
axlee
Can't Norway bail them out? It's not like they lack the capital, and they're
the country largest airline.

~~~
ucarion
This is not to contradict what you're saying, but it should be clarified that
Norway's flag carrier is Scandinavian Airlines, not Norwegian Air:

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

Again: I'm aware that you haven't said anything to the contrary. But it's
useful context.

~~~
michaeljohansen
Well. We Norwegians joke that SAS stands for "svensk alt sammen" (Swedish all
together). Some of us consider Norwegian Air Shuttle to be more of a Norwegian
airline.

And yes, a bailout is likely. The govt will likely help keep Norwegian Air's
planes flying during the Coronavirus period. Additional help is possible.

~~~
hnarn
Looking only at state ownership, the Swedish and Danish governments own about
the same share of SAS (~14%) and 1/3rd of the company stock is privately
owned.[1]

[1]:
[https://www.sasgroup.net/annualreports/2018/assets/pdf/eng/S...](https://www.sasgroup.net/annualreports/2018/assets/pdf/eng/SAS_AR17-18_ENG.pdf)

~~~
Jhsto
Meanwhile, the Finnish government owns 55.8% of Finnair.

------
InTheArena
Norwegian was near death many many times before this hit. Coronavirus just
makes the death inevitable. This is too bad, I really did love their product.
Their premium economy seats were well priced, and only on 787, which really
helped with jetlag due to the higher humidity and lower pressurization of the
CFRP frame.

That said, it's going to be hard to see who doesn't go bankrupt with the
virus. Airlines are on limited margins at the best of time, and parking half
the fleet makes their business model untenable very quickly.

The other thing is that unlike almost all of the rest of the world, airports
in the US are still publicly owned, and funded by per-passenger fees. A lot of
cities are going to have a massive gaping hole in their budgets because of
that.

~~~
refurb
Norwegian has been near death for a couple years.[1]

Which is a shame as I had a great experience when I flew and the cost can't be
beat ($500 return from SFO to Barcelona).

[1][https://www.cntraveler.com/story/norwegian-air-is-taking-
las...](https://www.cntraveler.com/story/norwegian-air-is-taking-last-ditch-
measures-to-avoid-bankruptcy)

~~~
londons_explore
$500 from you, but another $XXXX from the government subsidising the airports,
the fuel (through zero rated tax), the air traffic controllers, the planes
(through big military contracts to keep Boeing afloat), and not billing for
environmental damage (CO2, noise pollution, etc.)

~~~
refurb
I'm not sure what your point is.

$500 on Norwegian is better than $1000 on United. They're both getting the
same set of subsidies.

------
unixhero
Not firing, temporary full time leave without pay. Important to note that the
Norwegian government will pay full salary for 20 days of the first. At least
we're talking about Norwegian employees on a Norwegian contract.

The same thing goes from SAS.

~~~
inferiorhuman
_Important to note that the Norwegian government will pay full salary for 20
days of the first._

Does that include the crews who are typically based in foreign countries to
skirt Norwegian labor laws?

~~~
angry_octet
I doubt it. American staff in particular are probably screwed.

~~~
foogazi
Don’t they get unemployment checks?

~~~
angry_octet
For a far smaller amount than their normal incomes, only for 26 weeks at most,
ceasing as soon as they get any job, and requiring them to undertake job
seeking activities. And provided they have worked for at least a quarter.

Only as long as their

------
dwheeler
I expect all Airlines to cancel many of their flights and have to temporarily
lay off a lot of their people. It is unlikely a lot of people will be doing
travel for mamy weeks, and I suspect the ramp back up to normal will be slow.

------
noncoml
The problem with the airlines is that pretty much everyone has been bitten by
them one way or another(unexpected fees, unreasonable policies, etc..) so it
will be difficult to get any sympathy from the public.

~~~
inferiorhuman
Yep. The NY Times is running an op-ed calling for a pound of flesh from the
airlines before any bailout (due to customer treatment).

~~~
zadkey
Could you share the link to the article?

~~~
inferiorhuman
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/opinion/airlines-
bailout....](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/opinion/airlines-bailout.html)

 _We cannot permit American and other airlines to use federal assistance,
whether labeled a bailout or not, to weather the coronavirus crisis and then
return to business as usual. Before providing any loan relief, tax breaks or
cash transfers, we must demand that the airlines change how they treat their
customers and employees and make basic changes in industry ownership
structure._

------
vsareto
US Airlines are now looking directly for assistance as well:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/16/us-airlines-seek-more-
than-5...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/16/us-airlines-seek-more-
than-50-billion-in-aid-as-coronavirus-roils-business.html)

~~~
coldcode
Gov is handing out money like the printing presses are fired up, everyone will
be asking. The major US carriers are not in terrible shape unlike Norwegian.

------
atlasunshrugged
I'll be fascinated to see which airlines make it out of this alive (with and
without a bailout) and the long term repercussions. Seems like the cheapo
airlines will probably go under relatively quickly because they're on razor
thin margins but even United and anyone with global route exposure is going to
get hurt really badly by this.

~~~
Svip
I am starting to think that only the partly/fully state-owned airlines will
make it out alive.

~~~
wp381640
Airlines are too important to the economy - plenty of them will get gov
guarantees / bailouts

------
fulafel
I really hope governments will realize what a bad investment bailout money to
airlines would be, given their doomed future as one of the main CO2 villain
industries. (Not to mention casual air travel's role in spreading epidemics)

------
mlthoughts2018
There should probably be a sense in which it is criminally negligent to run a
business of this size in such a way that a ~6 week period of market crash
behavior can imply a need to to layoff 90% of staff.

I understand businesses have to make tough choices, but this seems like
egregiously irresponsible planning, akin to using every paycheck for
exorbitant luxury while figuring you can use a credit card for necessities and
coast on some equilibrium of credit card payments.

It’s ridiculous for large corporations like this to not have sufficient
reserves to ride it out for lengthy periods of time while disallowing “lay
everyone off” from being a side effect.

~~~
digitaltrees
That is impossible. No business can see a 50% drop in revenue over an extended
period of time and survive. That is, unless we assume that the price setting
function of markets is suspended. Supply and demand will result in razor thin
margins unless we get rid of competition and allow monopolies.

~~~
throwaway2048
Is 6 weeks really an "extended period of time" ?, we are barely a few weeks
into a global crisis and already companies are collapsing, that's an indicator
of just how insanely fragile things are.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
6 weeks is a damn eternity. Modern supply chains are stupid highly optimized.

~~~
throwaway2048
highly optimized means insanely fragile in terms of disruption.

------
totetsu
Air New Zealand is also cutting 85%[1] of international flights and looking to
cut 30 percent[2] of its workforce. [1][https://simpleflying.com/air-new-
zealand-flight-cuts/](https://simpleflying.com/air-new-zealand-flight-cuts/)
[2][https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/411892/union-seeks-a-
voi...](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/411892/union-seeks-a-voice-as-air-
nz-prepares-to-axe-3500-jobs)

------
fasteo
Slightly off topic.

To any Norwegians around HN: Were they in trouble before the corona crisis ?
Stock value[1] started a heavy downward trend around Feb 2018, from 171 down
to 41 before corona crisis, down to 7 as of today.

I am based in Spain, and I am seeing this same trend in some local companies.
It seems that coronavirus is the trigger for an existing, latent problem.

[1]
[https://www.reuters.com/companies/NWC.OL/charts](https://www.reuters.com/companies/NWC.OL/charts)

~~~
vegardx
They have been struggling for quite some time.

They got hit quite bad with the grounding of 737 MAX (10% of fleet), and
before that they a lot of issues with the 787 Dreamliner (20% of fleet).

~~~
hjnilsson
They also signed a contract pegging fuel prices for the foreseeable future
when oil price was $70. Several unlucky breaks in a row, I don’t really think
it will be saved. SAS might though.

------
nbclark
I feel bad for the employees...not so much for the airline. Norwegian was the
worst nickel&diming airline I've ever been on.

~~~
cplanas
Really? In my experience, they were the best "cheap" airline, by far. Their
airplanes were pretty comfortable, compared to United, Alaska, or Spirit, to
name a few.

~~~
capableweb
To be fair, comparing most european airlines seems good when you compare them
to US airlines. Would be more fair to compare them to other european airlines.

~~~
cplanas
The most famous "cheap" European airline, RyanAir, is substantially worse than
Norwegian. And personally I find Norwegian better than WizzAir, easyJet or
Vueling.

------
fxtentacle
I am surprised that they are allowed to do that, since this is the EU and we
do have employee protections.

Oh, it's a click-bait title.

The text itself says "will [..] temporarily lay off 7,300 employees", so this
is still in the planning stage and not meant to be permanent.

~~~
ailideex
Norway is not EU. And many places that is not EU have employee protections.
You don't need EU for that.

~~~
vidarh
Most of Norwegian's employees are not in Norway. Their staff in Norway will
have extensive employee protections. Their staff at their UK and US hubs are
in far weaker positions.

------
throwaway693659
Throwaway for obvious reasons. It's not only about the pilots, crew,
administration, etc. A major airline I am working for will lay off pretty much
~90% of its IT departement within 1 month as well.

~~~
brnt
Since it's a throwaway, which airline is that? Asking for a friend...

------
KitDuncan
My fiancé is currently in Orlando and booked her flight back to Germany with
Norwegian for March 24. Does that mean the flight is cancelled? She hasn't
received any notification from them.

~~~
mopsi
Yes, the flight isn't going to happen. The EU will close all external borders
for 30 days tomorrow at noon. If she is a citizen of Germany and doesn't have
any symptoms, she can expect a seat on a repatriation flight. Contact
appropriate embassies.

------
paulmd
airlines are expecting a full travel ban soon (including domestic).
Projections have United revenue down 9% this quarter and 95% next quarter (not
a typo).

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-makes-
airlines-c...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-makes-airlines-
consider-chances-for-a-halt-to-us-flights.html)

------
the8472
That is one way to get CO2 emissions down, perhaps more will follow their
lead.

~~~
youareostriches
Whether people like it or not, shrinking global economic activity in fuel-
heavy and extractive industries (by extension, via demand destruction) is
inevitably linked to reducing carbon emissions. We must be prepared to give up
certain things for the sake of our ecosystem.

~~~
FDSGSG
How many people are you willing to kill in order to reduce carbon emissions?
[https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/economic-
do...](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/economic-downturn-
excess-cancer-deaths-atun/)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
How many people are you willing to kill in order to continue polluting the
planet: [https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-
pollution](https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution)

------
dcftoapv
Norwegian was struggling financially before COVID 19. This isn't surprising.
Norway has one of the world's most robust social support systems. I'm
confident that they will deploy it well here.

------
_bxg1
*temporarily lay off

------
allovernow
I just don't see how these closures aren't going to ripple through the global
economy. The market is down 25% YTD after two desperate stimulus measures -
$1.5T injection and interest rates cut to zero.

What are you going to prop up when world travel and trade is shut down? And
domestic regions are locked down too?

The kicker is that we had been seeing negative long term indicators for a
while before this - inverted yield curve, and long overdue for the
approximately 7 year recession cycle, among other indicators.

I would love to be convinced otherwise but, regardless of the outcome of the
2019ncov situation, this is shaping up to be a trigger for a global recession,
possibly a depression. Modern society cannot sustain itself indoors without
radical measures. The vast majority of people probably work at jobs that
cannot be performed remotely.

~~~
mehrdadn
> I just don't see how these closures aren't going to ripple through the
> global economy.

I can see it not rippling if (a) a vaccine comes out in time, or (b) people
just give up and work anyway, accepting coronavirus as a risk of life. Unlike
sacrificing everything for the sake of not getting coronavirus, that can
actually go on indefinitely.

~~~
standardUser
"Unlike sacrificing everything for the sake of not getting coronavirus, that
can actually go on indefinitely."

Not even remotely true.

If people go back to normal (against the advice from every agency with
experience handling communicable diseases) the disease will spread at an
exponential rate. Healthcare systems across the globe will be overwhelmed
(like Italy and China but vastly worse) and people start suffering and dying
from curable illnesses due to lack of capacity.

Then, once people start dying by thousands, everyone will quarantine
themselves anyway.

There is no scenario where this doesn't ripple.

~~~
mehrdadn
> There is no scenario where this doesn't ripple.

We can argue (b), but did you just ignore my (a)? How would that ripple like
this?

~~~
gus_massa
The vaccine will take like 1 year to test and be sure that it is effective and
that it is safe and cause no nasty side effects. So for 2020, let's ignore
(a).

~~~
jeremyjh
I don't know why this is being downvoted. A year is actually a fairly
aggressive schedule. Of course there may be certain elected officials who will
push to certify anything at all before November but nothing will be _proven_
safe in that little time.

------
klhugo
Misleading title, change it, it just spreads panic.

------
drfuchs
So one third of the remaining flights won’t have a pilot?

~~~
jrockway
Airlines are companies like any other, and they have a lot of employees that
aren't flight crew. Someone has to negotiate benefits, write HR handbooks,
forecast the weather, dispatch flights, update their website, "reimagine cabin
interiors", etc. I am sure you can end up with a very large organization
outside of people that show up at the airport to deal with customers.


Where Ruby/Sinatra falls short - onli
https://www.pc-kombo.com/blog/68/Where%20Ruby/Sinatra%20falls%20short
======
beat
I find it really interesting that the Ruby language led to two such wildly
different, yet equally valid approaches to web apps - Sinatra and Rails.

Sinatra is the most minimal web framework I've ever used. It's fantastic for
doing quick mockups and small apps. Yes, you will hit limitations. Bicycles
are not good dump trucks. And even before you hit hard limits, you're going to
find yourself inventing a lot of structure/convention to keep it from
devolving into pretty PHP.

Rails, on the other hand, is fantastically complete. It does _everything_ for
you. Convention over configuration is a brilliant concept, and the self-
discovery nature of the ActiveRecord ORM is something that is totally natural
in Ruby and quite awkward in other languages. For writing basic CRUD apps
(which is much of the software world), it's really hard to beat the efficiency
of Rails.

And when people whinge about performance... well, so what? Horizontal scaling,
friends. Developer performance is _much_ more important than software
performance in most cases (especially since networks and databases form the
bulk of your performance cost out in the real world). But efficient
developers, that's magical.

~~~
whalesalad
Sinatra is not an "approach to web apps" \-- it's a single purpose tool that
maps HTTP requests to Ruby. Like Flask or Web.py (Python) and Express (JS).

You are comparing apples to oranges.

~~~
menacingly
And you're saying oranges aren't fruit because they aren't like apples.

It's actually a not-insignificant amount of code that creates an approach so
cleverly transparent that you are able to interpret it as no approach at all.

~~~
TomK32
"oranges" is a very narrow range of colours between 585 and 620 nm wavelength.
I'm not surprised wikipedia has a page on that
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_orange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_orange)

------
whalesalad
This post would be more appropriately named "Where my knowledge of building
web applications falls short" \- the title is kinda inflammatory and a lot of
the commenters here likely haven't bothered to read it and are just throwing
in their two cents on the technologies mentioned in the title.

None of the complaints here are the fault of Ruby or Sinatra. One exception
could be the trailing slashes complaint. The issue exists in really any web
framework, though. Flask, for example, will give you the same hiccup.

I tend to defeat it in Flask with `app.url_map.strict_slashes = False`

> There are too many ways to access parameters

This is a bad thing? The framework gives you flexibility to build your program
the way you want, and the way your specific problems might require.

> You will need much more than included

Well... yeah. This is not a batteries included tool for building websites end-
to-end ... it's a simple way to map an HTTP request to Ruby.

> Rewriting www.yourpage.com to yourpage.com, or the other way around

> Serving your site over https

> Redirecting all [http://](http://) pages to [https://](https://)

> Running tasks in the background

> Saving data in a database, and reading from it

These are definitely not responsibilities for an HTTP -> Ruby library and the
first 3 are certainly responsibilities for your public-facing HTTP server
(Nginx, etc...)

~~~
skedaddle
It's supposed to be more than that. Sinatra is described as "a DSL for quickly
creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort".

Entire web applications, with minimal effort. I have not found this to be the
case with Sinatra.

~~~
dreix
The application is not the server.

~~~
skedaddle
Of course, I agree. But though in practice Sinatra may be just a library for
routing HTTP requests to a Ruby application, it is marketed as a relatively
complete environment for building web applications, making a bunch of these
criticisms valid.

------
coderobe
>And besides: If Sinatra starts a server listening for incoming traffic, why
does it still seem common to run a regular webserver like nginx in front of
that server?

This is a common technique used for tls-termination and management of 'virtual
hosts', among other things.

The mentioned "issues" don't seem to be Sinatra-specific, but rather about the
authors shallow understanding of the topic as a whole

~~~
adambyrtek
One of these "other things" is buffering of slow HTTP requests. Application
servers are usually not designed to deal with that and are meant to be run
behind a proper load balancer/reverse proxy. This is usually very explicitly
mentioned in their documentation, for example in
[https://bogomips.org/unicorn/PHILOSOPHY.html](https://bogomips.org/unicorn/PHILOSOPHY.html)

~~~
jrochkind1
puma does pretty good at buffering slow HTTP requests though.

I honestly _don't know_ why we usually put apache or nginx in front of our
ruby 'web servers'. But I keep doing it anyway, cause 'everyone else' does,
and I don't want to take the time to be sure I don't need to, it works.

However, I believe rails deployments to Heroku generally _don't_ put another
web server in front. Which, per your point, slow clients is quite exactly why
they explained the switch from unicorn to puma as a default web server.
[https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-
items/594](https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/594)

It is true that in 2018 web dev has gotten complicated (in a variety of
different axes), and if there's a framework/platform that will allow you to
not know it is, I don't know what it is! It would probably be one that made a
lot more choices for you though (like, say, ruby web server, so you don't need
to think about 'oh, unicorn can't handle slow clients but puma can') -- which
is the opposite of Sinatra's philosophy -- but then again Rails approach to
try to do that has not resulted in something people find easy either. shrug.

~~~
nathan_f77
I've stopped using Nginx in my Docker containers, and I just run puma
directly. It's still behind a load balancer that also handles TLS termination.
I also serve all the assets from the Rails server, but they're cached with a
CDN, so it only needs to serve each file once.

If you're using Docker with Kubernetes, Convox, Docker Swarm, Rancher, etc.,
then I don't think you need to run Nginx or Apache. I ran some load tests on
my staging environment with and without Nginx, and it didn't make any
difference.

This was a really good article that helped me understand request routing a bit
better: [https://www.speedshop.co/2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps-
to-100...](https://www.speedshop.co/2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps-
to-1000-rpm.html#how-requests-get-routed-to-app-servers)

~~~
jrochkind1
If you weren't caching with CDN, would serving those static assets as
efficiently as possible be a good reason to keep using (eg) nginx, do you
think?

Oh, I guess load balancing (with a multiple-host scale) is another good
reason, if you don't have heroku doing it for you, nginx is a convenient way
to do it just fine.

~~~
nathan_f77
I don't know if there's any middle ground where you'd want to use Nginx
instead of a CDN. If it's an internal app then it doesn't really matter. But
if you have any reason to worry about the performance of serving static
assets, then you should always be using a CDN like CloudFront or CloudFlare,
etc.

But yeah, Nginx can be a great solution for load balancing and TLS
termination.

------
lucisferre
If people are looking for a lightweight Ruby webserver, I'd highly recommend
checking out Roda
[https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda](https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda)

More related to the article, the author mentions that routing order is a
problem with Sinatra. Is this not common to all route matchers?

What different behaviour would make sense? Obviously once a route is matched
it should be executed, so is the issue here the way route ordering is done?
What order would make more sense than ordering in the way the routes are
defined?

~~~
33degrees
The author is claiming that the order ends up NOT being the order they're
defined, but without examples it's hard to tell if the problem is that or that
the regular expressions being defined are not working as intended

~~~
bhaak
"Now imagine not having a classical style Sinatra app, but a modular one."

I think the author ran into an issue where files were loaded differently in
development mode than in production mode. Likely in development mode only the
required files were loaded and the file with the more important routes wasn't.
I wonder why that didn't show up in their tests.

But I also wonder if they aren't using Sinatra for too large projects. If you
have routes defined over several files, it's likely to get problematic. Maybe
they should be using a more complete web framework like Padrino or go all the
way with Rails.

~~~
onli
It wasn't that setup related. pc-kombo does not need that many routes that I
did spread it over multiple files. I generally do avoid that. I wanted to give
the specific example at first, but did not find the related commits anymore
when writing the article, and in the end if it was really related to some
behavior change linked to a version change (or x86 vs ARM) it would not be too
useful now. It's meant as an example for the rough edges one can encounter.

But the essence is that I had some routes defined using regexpressions,
probably like the URL definition for a page in the blog (not saying it was
exactly this one):

        get  %r{/([0-9]+)/([\w]+)} do |id, title|

And I ran into a situation where on my local dev platform this did not trigger
when calling a similar looking route, but on the production server it did. I
just remember being surprised that the specificity of the regex-evaluation
seemed to change.

------
badosu
With micro web frameworks you're doomed to implement a subset of Rails, or
have to dig around to find and configure one of the gems usually associated to
it.

For those that are ok with this, or already have an understanding of the
limited scope of your app, I strongly recommend Roda [0], it's a much more
straightforward routing system with better memory/cpu usage.

I can't find a single instance for which Sinatra can be used where Roda is not
a better choice.

[0] - [http://github.com/jeremyevans/roda](http://github.com/jeremyevans/roda)

~~~
eropple
Agreed. Until I wrote Modern[0] - and that was in many ways more of an
exercise in OpenAPI/Swagger than anything else - there were few reasons I
could find to not use Roda over Sinatra.

Grape's also pretty good, but I prefer Roda over it too. Something about
writing it feels better.

[0] - [https://github.com/modern-project/modern-
ruby](https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby)

------
mirceal
For me Sinatra is great. It’s the minimum you can get away with in a lot of
situations. The whole thing is like 1-2000 lines of code (so totally feasible
to actually read all of the code). The limits the author has run into are not
necessarily Sinatra limits. The author also wants to do 120mph on a bike which
most people will recognize it’s a bad idea. Use the right tool for the job.

------
esilverberg2
My company runs its entire backend on Sinatra, and has since 2011. We do ~200K
requests/min on AWS c5.4xlarges and r5.2xlarges, so we are a fairly
significant deployment of Sinatra/ruby.

As the sole and still primary maintainer of our production infrastructure,
I've been very happy with this choice of tech. I think our problem was made
much simpler because, as a mobile app, we basically were building an API. We
did integrate ActiveRecord/Support, and today have a massive suite of tests we
run in rspec (it's pretty cool, Jenkins will spin up ~50 concurrent EC2
instances running docker, run the tests, and report back in about 15 min).

To this authors complaints, I suppose I feel that every framework has
idiosyncrasies that you just accept and figure out, and many of the issues
cited are felt only once and then not again. Today, running at scale, the main
challenges have to do with building and supporting new tests, which rspec is
amazing for, and handling application complexity, which we have been
addressing using Service Objects.

------
jillesvangurp
Part of the issues are with the separation of responsibilities between rack,
sinatra, and whatever you use to run rack (e.g. puma is just one of many
options here). We had similar issues a few years ago when we still used
sinatra (on top of jruby).

One of the assumptions baked into rack is that parameters can only occur once.
It returns a dictionary of values instead of a dictionary of lists of values
(like e.g. the servlet API does in java). So we had some issues with request
parameters that could occur more than once because of that. Ultimately we had
to grab the raw request and do our own parsing to get that working. Likewise
headers are treated the same way.

Another issue that was annoying was that rack, sinatra, AND the rack server we
used (something on top of jetty that I forgot the name of) each had their own
wonky logging primitives and configuration that interfered with each other. So
we were getting duplicate log messages with very inconsistent formatting from
different frameworks that each assumed to be in control of stdout. In the end
some monkey patching (mainly to make rack log calls do nothing) allowed us to
log via jruby/java via a proper logging framework on Java so that we could
send properly formatted json messages to our logging cluster instead of
dealing with unparsable garbage emitted via puts. We even managed to use the
MDC, which is a good reason to use Java logging frameworks if you are running
on top of jruby anyway. I don't think MDC is a thing in the ruby world.

Then there were loads of fun issues with cross site scripting protection in
sinatra breaking stuff in subtle ways, double session initialization (i.e. two
frameworks trying to set the session cookie), and a few more such issues.

I'm assuming some of these things may have improved over the years.

~~~
onli
> _So we had some issues with request parameters that could occur more than
> once because of that. Ultimately we had to grab the raw request and do our
> own parsing to get that working._

I had to do the same multiple times. Not for this project, but for different
ones. Thanks for mentioning it. I should've mentioned it in the article!

------
abhchand
Someone on HN previously mentioned that every project they've started with
Sinatra, they've regretted down the road that they didn't use Rails.

I think the complaints about Sinatra are vaild, in that it needs to limit how
params are accessed, better startup documentation, etc... But ultimately
Sinatra is for building super simple crud apps. I don't even use it for
anything that accesses something more than a SQLlite DB. I often use it for
serving up basic front end assets and running single page applications that
have some small server side component to them.

It's footprint is lighter than rails, but so is it's intended functionality.

~~~
nine_k
I suppose it's a selection bias. You likely heard about projects that achieved
some significance, which requires some sophistication which Rails provides.

I suppose there's a number of very small, non-public projects that have, say,
10-20 users doing a relatively trivial thing, and are just fine on Sinatra (or
web.py, or maybe even a plain CGI script). But they never catch much
attention.

------
jimbokun
How does Elixir's Phoenix framework compare for the shortcomings of Sinatra
noted here?

Give Elixir's commitment to immutability and functional programming, I'm
thinking it might be more explicit in some of the places Sinatra has implicit
or inconsistent behavior.

------
kposehn
I've been a long-time user of Sinatra as well as Rails. About 8 years ago or
so I decided to move all of my sites onto Sinatra and made a simple file-
backed CMS that has scaled quite well over the years.

The drawbacks of the approach have been having to write a lot of methods and
classes from scratch to handle certain processing data (there is no actual
database) but the end result has been something quite bulletproof and scalable
to a point, and the experience implementing those features (like TLS,
sessions, helpers, etc) has been quite valuable.

However, my needs are starting to grow and I think soon we will have to move
off of the old framework onto something new as our business requirements grow
more complex.

------
kgilpin
Sinatra is a great way to build test programs and demos. Once scaling up to a
real application I have found that Rails is a better choice because it has a
lot of the things built in that feel missing from Sinatra.

For example if you are trying to figure out how to add things like flexible
initialization logic, security protections, clever MIME type handling,
Cucumber testing, and better routing, you’ll find that Rails has these things
built in.

What you can’t get from Rails is the “one file application” that’s the killer
feature of Sinatra. But all those files and directories in Rails are doing
stuff that you’ll eventually want.

------
ravenstine
The answer to points 5 - 8 is basically to use Rails/ActiveSupport. If you're
writing an API for a SPA, then Sinatra hardly falls short.

------
hartator
Biggest thing is something else. Performance of Ruby/Sinatra plus gems needed
to make it workable is worse than actual Rails. Might as well directy work
with Rails. Better support and more features on top of better performance.

------
jdlyga
Ruby/Sinatra is really nice. I wrote a little webapp 10 years ago using it.
Faced with the alternative of doing everything in C++, it really made things
easier.

------
always_good
> And a small issue on top of that: If you define /route, /route/ will still
> throw a 404. The right solution would be to serve the page on the two routes
> but set one as canonical source. But you have to do that manually.

In most cases you can get away with wholesale removing and redirecting all
trailing slashes in middleware.

~~~
astrodust
Rack gets you out of a lot of jams if you know how to use it effectively.

~~~
tcopeland
That's the truth. I had a thing come up the other day where a client wasn't
including a content type header and thus the body was being interpreted as
application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Rack middleware to the rescue on that one.


Emergency stop signs projected onto waterfalls at road tunnel entrances - sgrytoyr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoTMC-uxJoo
======
kalleboo
This is probably the only thing that could work at the 11foot8 bridge
[https://www.youtube.com/user/yovo68/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/yovo68/videos)

~~~
komodo
I was just thinking, why don't they install a steel beam at the same height as
the maximum allowed, like 11foot8?

Obviously it would be set much farther back than theirs.

~~~
6eek
because it might get knocked off into neighboring traffic.

~~~
loco5niner
Seems like a simple solution. Split the beam in the middle with hinges on left
and right. Allow left and right beams to travel a bit but not too far.

------
beart
It's interesting comparing this to the airline safety issues in the news
lately. Every single thing on an airplane is designed with safety in mind but
for road traffic, they just put up a stop sign and call it a day. These aren't
directly comparable issues but it does seem like they don't really think about
safety in the same way at all when designing roads. Why are trucks that can't
fit into the tunnel even physically allowed to make it that far?

------
IceyEC
Seems like the liability for damages caused needs to be replicated between the
drivers and their hiring company, making it not worth ignoring signage like
this

~~~
aggie
Not everything can be solved with economic incentives. Do you really think
people are making a conscious decision, "I'm not paying for it, might as well
peel the top off my truck and grind my day/week to a halt because my employer
is liable for damages"? If that was the case, they can just drive through the
water wall too. This is an attention management issue -- does the driver
realize they are too tall for the tunnel. Most will be caught with the initial
flashing signs, but even those high-salience signs are somewhat 'normal' and
thus possible to subconsciously ignore. The water wall is very out of the
ordinary so it has a maximum likelihood of capturing attention.

------
AFascistWorld
Seems quite complicated.

------
sunstone
Pretty sure Musk's self driving system would have no problem with this. :)


Japan PM Abe: See no need to raise sales tax beyond 10% for decade - hhs
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-abe/japan-pm-abe-see-no-need-to-raise-sales-tax-beyond-10-for-decade-idUSKCN1TY0M3
======
lclarkmichalek
Sales taxes are regressive - people who don't have a lot of money have to
spend more of it to stay alive, and therefore pay more sales tax :/ I'd rather
have a higher income tax and no sales tax. Income taxes are much more visible,
but don't suffer from penalizing people who can't save.

~~~
andrenth
What's your opinion on a sales tax but simultaneously making food and medicine
tax-free?

------
skrebbel
I don't understand why this is on HN. It looks to be a generic "politician
makes non-promise" story.

~~~
MacroAffairs
It is not a "politician makes non-promise" story. It is actually a very
credible claim because the Japanese government doesn't even need more tax
income as they can lend freely.

The government can lend as much Yen as they want. The tax hike is something
that can help them get inflation, which has been too low for very long.

~~~
LIV2
Even if it is not an empty promise I still don't understand how this is on
topic for HN

------
baybal2
Japanese economy is a mystery to me.

I think the state tried just every possible thing to reverse currency trends
and ease fiscal restraints, but just all failed including an enormous
quantitative easing (money printing basically)

------
Causality1
>earlier this year suggested Japan’s sales tax needed to rise to as much as
26% to pay for bulging social security costs

Wouldn't that absolutely crater consumer spending? I know if I had to pay 26%
sales tax suddenly everything I buy would be from China and ship labeled
"personal gift".

~~~
the-dude
NL is at 21% and there are other countries in the EU which are around 25%.
Personally I think it is crazy.

~~~
RA_Fisher
Yikes! Talk about theft of labor. A 25% sales tax means one in four
consumptive dollars is taken away. Ouch.

~~~
rakoo
Taxes go to the State, which ultimately goes back to you and to those in
needs. It's not a theft, it's a shared account for the common good. Moreover
it's a tax on consumption, not on production.

High taxation is what makes something like Healthcare so good and eventually
cheap for everyone, contrary to the disastrous situation in the US. As a
French I'm more than happy to pay 20% VAT if I know it's going to benefit
everyone.

~~~
ekianjo
Of course it is theft since it is taking away from you the outcome of your
labor with the usage of force. If you go by that logic then you might as well
abolish private property for the common good.

~~~
hjanssen
By your logic every tax is theft, which is obviously ridiculous.

~~~
ekianjo
So what is tax if it is not theft? Genuine question to see what is your
definition of theft and how taxes do not fit such definition. If you have no
say in paying for something, how is it not theft?

~~~
rakoo
You do have a saying. Speak to your representative if you want to adjust the
percentage. Taxation is a commonly agreed sharing of goods. Theft is not
agreed upon.

If you live with your significant other and you agreed on a 50/50 rule for
paying rent, would you say they/this relationship is stealing money from you ?
That doesn't make any sense.

If you don't want to be taxed then don't live in the society and don't use
_any_ of the things it provide: no roads, no healthcare, no police (so if
someone actually steals from you you're not entitled to complain because
you're not part of the society), no food or water coming from a store... If
you don't want to participate to the society, then you _don 't_ participate to
the society.

~~~
ekianjo
> You do have a saying

Typically no, since you are tribute to:

\- your government being able to manage its funds well. Well too bad, they do
a piss poor job at it and keep increasing taxes year after year.

\- the majority during elections not voting for more government intervention,
which would lead to more taxes as well.

Plus, your example with your significant other does not make sense since you
do have a contract/agreement. As a citizen no such agreement/contract is ever
signed with you: the conditions are imposed and force is used upon you if you
refuse to pay taxes.

> If you don't want to participate to the society, then you don't participate
> to the society.

That still does not make taxation not theft, since you are never asked how
much you want to contribute voluntarily for example: you never enter a
contract as a willing party. Plus, let's say you don't want to "participate in
society", the state will still find you and jail you for not paying taxes even
if you decide to live on your own.


How We Got Our First 5,000 Users - smalter
http://blog.idonethis.com/post/4779807862/how-we-got-our-first-5-000-users

======
petercooper
Shame it got a better title over at Reddit: "Getting to 5,000 Users after
Launching on HN and Reddit."

~~~
smalter
I'm an idiot. I had this conversation after realizing that I posted the
article with a bad subject.

me: i sux, i shoulda tailored the HN submission to HN. in fact, that’s what
the article is about!

Brian: lulz. meta-fail

~~~
petercooper
It happens. It's just become particularly important nowadays due to the crazy
amount of stories that come by here now. This is both a good and bad thing..


Rhymes for Orange, Purple, and Silver – New Words Capture Universal Concepts - jawns
https://rhymes.pressbin.com/
======
jansan
Parking offsense, Schmarking offense!

Wouldn't the natural rhymes for Orange, Purple, and Silver be Schmorange,
Schmurple and Schmilver?


Vitalik Buterin Says Ethereum's 1000x Capacity Upgrade Is Coming Soon - tim333
https://breakermag.com/vitalik-buterin-says-ethereums-1000x-capacity-upgrade-is-coming/
======
tim333
This is kind of a summary of

>In a highly technical talk at Devcon, the annual Ethereum developer
conference, Buterin recounted the tortuous path that efforts to upgrade the
network have taken.

Keynote talk as on 31 oct 18, on youtube here
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km9BaxRm1wA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km9BaxRm1wA)


Testing Distributed Systems with Deterministic Simulation (2014) [video] - sensible123
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc
======
jacques_chester
My experience is that this is difficult without the system under test being
designed to operate deterministically.

So for example: the system clock needs to be replaceable with a fake, or the
current time needs to be injected, or perhaps both.

Another example: Go channels. These are a real PITA to surface in a way that
allows a test harness to drive them deterministically.

A while ago I built a simulator testing harness for an early version of the
Knative autoscaler[0]. I eventually ran aground on the difficulty of keeping
up with changes, but it may be rearchitected and repurposed to assist
Kubernetes HPA development instead.

FoundationDB's approach is to pretty much bake optional determinism into the
language with some macro magic. It makes me wish that were easier to do in
other languages.

[0] [https://github.com/pivotal/skenario](https://github.com/pivotal/skenario)

~~~
ryanworl
In the FDB simulator case, every event has a future time at which it will
fire, and the clock advances to that time when the event is dequeued.

This also has the side benefit of artificially “speeding up time”, which is
useful when many actions happen based on long timeouts.

~~~
jacques_chester
I used the same approach, which I learned from DES textbooks. I wrote up the
design here:
[https://github.com/pivotal/skenario/blob/master/docs/concept...](https://github.com/pivotal/skenario/blob/master/docs/concepts.md)

------
jFriedensreich
after the jepsen/mongodb post that hit front page nearly at the same time, it
seems like the foundationdb team has the exact opposite values regarding
resilience and data safety guarantees. I cant wait for the first results of
the couchDb rewrite on foundationDb

------
dang
Discussed a bit at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8345030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8345030)

------
cjlovett
This is similar to
[https://github.com/microsoft/coyote/](https://github.com/microsoft/coyote/)


ZMorph’s Hybrid 3D Printer Is an All-in-One Manufacturing Tool - twiceuponatime
http://www.engineering.com/3DPrinting/3DPrintingArticles/ArticleID/11703/ZMorphs-Hybrid-3D-Printer-Is-an-All-in-One-Manufacturing-Tool.aspx
======
colordrops
We need something like the x-prize for automated micro-manufacturing. A goal
could be to build a calculator from raw materials without human intervention.

------
deelowe
Getting closer. Can't wait until someone invents an all in one circuit
printer, mill, pick & place and printer combo.


The Top Smart Cities On The Planet - sdoering
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679127/the-top-10-smart-cities-on-the-planet
======
casca
Just what we need - another bogus ranking based on press releases for cities
that the "author" has never been to. Cue hand-wringing from politicians aiming
trying to boost their "ranking" as a justification for spending/SOPA/plow
chops.


Wpcom – A curated directory of resources and tools for WordPress - atknoz
https://www.wpcom.org
======
Ayesh
This is a shameless self-plug. I have written a few WP plugins because it is
not as secure I wanted it to be:

\- WordPress does not come with proper password hashing, and uses the phpass
library. [https://wordpress.org/plugins/password-
hash/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/password-hash/) will change this to use
bcrypt/Argon2ID

\- Comment forms do not have CSRF tokens, and hackerone/tickets for them have
been neglected as trivial. [https://wordpress.org/plugins/comment-form-csrf-
protection/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/comment-form-csrf-protection/) This
plugin adds a CSRF token to comment forms.

------
tyingq
Proceed with caution. A fair amount of wordpress's reputation for bad security
comes from 3rd party plugins. There aren't many (any?) restrictions on what
they can do.

~~~
mattigames
Well, is exactly the same for any npm package or any python package as do many
other languages, a lot -if not all- bad security comes from 3rd party plugins.

~~~
tyingq
Technically the same perhaps. But the actual history is pretty different.
WordPress plugins are notorious for RCE type vulnerabilities.

~~~
jermaustin1
I wrote one during my early years, in fact [1]!

1: [https://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2016/11/20/that-
time-i.html](https://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2016/11/20/that-time-i.html)

------
social_quotient
Kinda surprised not to see WPengine on the list.

~~~
atknoz
There is actually:
[https://www.wpcom.org/resource/wpengine/](https://www.wpcom.org/resource/wpengine/)

Though we don't recommend it due to bad pricing policy, bad reputation on
TrustPilot and from other testers, and personal experiences. There are way
better hosting alternatives that is currently listed and marked with yellow
background on our platform.

------
llarsson
How slow does WP get if you load all of these onto it at the same time? How
much would it resemble a Swiss cheese, security-wise?

~~~
atknoz
Load all of these? Why would you do that?

------
tednash
Is the Wpcom site itself a theme?

~~~
atknoz
It's a custom built theme by us.


Show HN: the first HTML5 avatar creator - duplikey
http://www.mangatar.net/create-your-avatar.php

======
duplikey
Hello HN!

We are an italian startup and we are working on a social game in the manga
universe. It will be ready in a couple of month, meantime on our website you
can take a look to our avatar generator and the community.

The avatar generator is the first one completely HTML5! No flash...just canvas
& javascript!

Tell me what you think about it from the technical and graphical point of
view.

Any feedback will be appreciated...also about the community features.

Thanks ;)


That man who ‘deleted his entire company’ with a line of code? It was a hoax - empressplay
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3057235/data-center-cloud/that-man-who-deleted-his-entire-company-with-a-line-of-code-it-was-a-hoax.html
======
tamana
Can someone explain how this would win him customers? "Oh yeah, let's get
WebHosting with that idiot who trolled ServerFault. He seems like a reliable
and professional fellow."

~~~
cmurf
What about the $700 juicer that doesn't juice, it uses juice packs, which are
so bad at preservation the juice can expire, so the whole point of the juicer
is to scan a QR code to know if the juice is expired because presumably the
user can't read an expiration date, and then denies using the expired pack?
People will still buy that ridiculous thing. Same thing here.

~~~
pkroll
I was so hoping you were joking. A quick search and yep, that's a real thing.
Hopefully not a well selling thing, but that it exists at all is depressing.

------
oconnor663
The comments on the original StackOverflow post said the same thing. Sounds
like a lot of articles got written without reading the whole thread.


Future apps won't be designed for smartphone or tablet - jimiasty
http://blog.estimote.com/post/137340094650/the-future-of-apps-for-the-physical-world
======
jimiasty
Hi Hacker News, this is Jakub, founder of Estimote (YC S13). To kick-off 2016
we have shared our vision for the future of contextual mobile computing,
beacons, proximity and beyond.

Hope you will enjoy it since this post is also a little celebration for us and
a nice start of New Year! : )


In defense of webfonts - sdabdoub
https://robinrendle.com/notes/in-defense-of-webfonts/
======
Jaruzel
I recently discovered that the 'src' attribute of the @fontface directive
supports the inline 'data:' syntax (like you can do with images etc.).

So you can basically do this:

      @fontface {
        ...
        src: url("data:font/opentype;base64,<base64-encoded-otf/ttf-file>");
      }

Although this expands the payload size slightly, it does remove the need for
another round trip to a server (so renders potentially faster), and also gives
you full control over your embedded fonts.


Blue Apron Tumbles After Losing Customers in Second Quarter - robertgk
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-10/blue-apron-beats-revenue-estimates-as-marketing-costs-decline
======
IgorPartola
I dropped them for two reasons after using them for nearly a year. First,
these meals actually take longer to prepare and way longer to clean up after
than what I normally make. The food is very good, but the instructions are
written by someone who (a) seems to have a gourmet kitchen at their disposal
and (b) doesn't do dishes after. No, I am not going to chop all six veggie
ingredients into six separate bowls, just to combine them in the next step.
Also, I'm not going to chop everything up front just to realize that the
garlic goes in at the last step for 30 seconds before the dish is ready.

The second was an issue I had repeatedly with the meat and fish ingredients: I
had several weeks where meat/fish packaging was open when I got the shipment
and the contents went bad. I emailed them every time, but at some point I got
tired of having to immediately go to the grocery store to find the right
quantity of pork or cod or whatever to complete the meal.

Realistically, their 35 minute meals always took me closer to an hour once all
was said and done. There almost never were any leftovers (yeah two medium
sized sweet potatoes don't go too far for four people). Finally, the price was
just a little too high.

I keep a few of the recipe cards and try to make those once in a while, but
mostly I am just back to regular grocery shopping now.

~~~
DLay
I liked Matt Levine's opinion on Blue Apron yesterday:

>Here is my theory, though: Blue Apron is a tech company in the sense that its
product is not meals, or ingredients, but simulacrum. What it delivers is the
idea of creating a home-cooked meal from fresh ingredients, without the
tedious shopping and chopping work that that would otherwise require. What
Blue Apron delivers is not exactly convenience -- ordering takeout is a lot
more convenient -- but the perception that you are doing something complicated
and real and primal while you are actually, through the miracle of technology,
doing something much easier. Blue Apron is a virtual-reality company.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2017-08-09/yogur...](https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2017-08-09/yogurt-
liquidity-and-listings)

~~~
antisthenes
These quotes make for a nice dramatic effect, but the reality is much simpler:

Cooking & cleaning is a much bigger time investment than shopping for
ingredients. In 10 minutes in a grocery store I can buy enough food for 10-15
meals, which would take hours to cook (in aggregate). The comparison stands
even when you include driving to the store (before any pedants try to be
_contrarian_ )

Blue Apron is optimizing the smaller part of the time pie required for eating,
but at a higher cost than delivery (that optimizes the larger part of the pie
for less money, usually)

That's why takeout is a decades-proved business model and Blue Apron is a VC-
subsidized non-business.

__________________________________________________________________

That being said, I do agree with it being a virtual reality company. And by
that I mean a company that can't really exist in actual reality.

~~~
jamesrcole
That analysis assumes that the service is only about time-saving.

I've never used it but I've heard people say how they like it because

\- they get to learn new recipes using less-common ingredients

\- have good quality meals (which take out often doesn't provide, if we are
considering time saving)

\- they, sometimes at least, prefer eating at home.

~~~
antisthenes
Well, yes, of course it assumes that, because providing value to the customer
should be somewhere in the business model.

If it's not, it'll eventually become a non-business.

1\. There's nothing that suggests the ingredients are less common. But if
you're a Blue Apron user, feel free to list some of the ingredients you were
not able to find at a grocery store.

1.5: you can learn new recipes 10 different ways already, without having to
subscribe to any "X as a service".

2\. Nothing that suggests an average person can cook better or faster than
takeout, which suggests the takeout provides value to the customer.

3\. Completely irrelevant to the points at hand.

~~~
jamesrcole
My comment was saying that you're assuming time-saving is the only value, and
was pointing out that's not true. I'm even willing to believe it might be the
most important source of value by a long shot -- I wasn't arguing against your
conclusion; I was pointing out an assumption made by the argument you stated.

Regarding 1. It's not that the ingredients are less common per se. It's that
using BA means that people ended up using some less commonly _used_
ingredients. They were introduced to new things that they hadn't used before
and wouldn't have sought out on their own. They liked that.

Regarding 1.5 - obviously, but the thing is there is greater convenience (that
_some_ ppl prefer) with not having to select the recipes, get the ingredients,
portion them out. For some people that different in convenience makes the
difference between whether they do it or not. So treating this issue as if it
was purely a matter of whether it was possible or not doesn't make sense.

Regarding 2, I have heard people say they have been able to make high quality
meals that they wouldn't usually have made that are better than most takeaway.

3 is most definitely relevant, because it's an example of a non-speed-based
kind of value it provides to some people - getting the kind of meal _they_
would only otherwise get at a restaurant but at home. Most takeaway can't do
that.

~~~
NoGravitas
There was previously a free website called notakeout.com, which has since gone
under (there's currently something else on the domain that's completely
unrelated).

What they did was provide daily dinner recipes for fancy-restaurant type
meals, with instructions, wine pairing, and shopping list. If you're an
omnivore, you could simply print the day's page, stop at the grocery store on
the way home, and cook whatever it was.

It seems to me that this represents about 80% of the value of Blue Apron at no
cost (I think they had a for-pay email service, or something?).

------
Waterluvian
Blue Apron needs to be a service offered by local grocery stores. You pick up
(or sure, are delivered) one of many boxes that grocery stores assemble from
their local inventory. There's 10 or so different options, always readily
available, with a full meal of supplies and instructions inside.

The objective is to show you that, "hey, cooking great stuff is within your
realm of capability! It's fun and empowering. You don't have to be like
Waterluvian over there who walks past all the produce and butcher every time
because he has no clue how to make something of it all." After meal 10 or
whatever, that's it, there's no more, you've graduated the "Get a Taste of
Cooking" program. Now you move on to more traditional grocery shopping with
your new added confidence and practice that will ideally see you buying more
produce and fewer frozen dishes.

~~~
Balgair
Wait, does your local Safeway/King-Soopers/Albertsons/Publix not already do
that? It's right next to the 'deli' section of mine, styrofoam packs (like
what meats come in) and plastic wrapped, all the stuff inside. Yeah, they
don't have the instructions, but it's not too hard to figure out what to do.

~~~
Waterluvian
None of those companies exist in my country. But no, I haven't seen it done
here. Though 80% of a product is 0% of a product, so just a box of ingredients
isn't quite what I'm getting it. What I'm talking about is the whole shebang
and the design to drive you towards being able to wield the full power of your
grocery store.

That being said, I wish we _at least_ had what you describe :)

~~~
Balgair
Oh, my bad, I didn't know. Hmm, maybe you could talk to the manager of your
store and suggest it. It's not too hard for the folks there to just pack it
all up like BlueApron or how we do it here. Plus, they could charge +10% or so
to do that, essentially free money for them. I'd bet the manager would be
pretty happy to do it. Then again, this a US perspective, so YMMV.

------
dbot
I joined for about six months and dropped them last week. Third shipment in a
row with missing ingredients.

On the plus side, it put me in the regular habit of cooking together with my
wife. We love many of the recipes, which are freely available on their
website...we've already started "re-doing" many meals by picking up the
ingredients on regular shopping trips.

EDIT: One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze
in some ways. It's an idea that consumers are attracted to, but the economics
and excess competition make the whole concept fragile.

~~~
ceejayoz
> One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze in
> some ways.

Yeah, Groupon is a great comparison IMO. Huge initial growth, but spending a
bunch of money to acquire each customer doesn't work once a bunch of copy-cat
competitors enter the market.

I also wonder how many folks drop off once they've learned some basic cooking
skills from the recipes - chopping, searing, getting the right proportions,
etc.

------
jerkstate
I live in the Bay Area and Blue Apron is on thin ice with us right now. Their
quality control got really bad right around the time of their IPO. Now nearly
every week we have missing ingredients and/or leaking containers. We had no
problems for 2 years and now it's pretty much constant! They are always pretty
responsive with a credit commensurate to what the damage to the meal is, but
this is basically the worst possible time for them to be screwing up like
this.

~~~
paulgb
I've noticed the same in the NYC area: the last few weeks I've had ingredients
crushed which has never happened before.

They've also been spamming me with discounts to the wine club only to tell me
that they can't legally deliver in NY when I tried to sign up. Don't they know
where I live?

I hope they can recover because I do truly like the product and I think
they're the best right now (a margin better than Hello Fresh, leagues better
than Plated)

~~~
codq
I live in New York City, and we are entirely satisfied and impressed nightly
with Sun Basket. It doesn't have nearly the reach or brand awareness as some
of the bigger players, but it's everything I've ever wanted in one of these
services. Worth checking out.

~~~
paulgb
Thanks, just signed up to try it out.

------
jasallen
My wife and I are currently back to using _none_ of these services for much
the same reasons as everyone else (prep time, dirty dishes, small portion
sizes) but I will say Blue Apron is by far the best of the lot. Their
instructions made the most sense, didn't require us to scale them ourselves,
the food tasted wonderful, and I learned new techniques. The rest of the
services have a lot of catching up to do, so if even Blue Apron is in trouble,
maybe this model isn't so sustainable at all.

------
krimmer
This company is not a tech company, so it shouldn't be valued as one. It's on
par with a local restaurant.

Second, the company produces enormous amounts of plastic pollution from
packaging. Why should we pollute our planet so the CEO can make $1 more on the
stock market?

~~~
brndn
More plastic than a super market does? And can you not just recycle the
plastic containers?

If the world switched to services like Blue Apron/Hello Fresh/etc. rather than
shopping in super markets, I wonder if we would overall produce more or less
pollution? Super markets use a lot of energy and have a lot of waste.

~~~
jly
Super markets certainly have their problems, for reasons you've said. However,
you can choose not to put your groceries in any plastic from the supermarket,
if you wish. I have done exactly that for a while now and it's easily doable,
you just have to be a little choosy about what you buy.

If people switched to shopping at local farmer's markets - so food wouldn't be
shipped around at all - we would produce much less pollution and have much
sustainable agriculture than either of those options.

~~~
jules
Local agriculture usually costs a lot more energy and land than large scale
agriculture or agriculture in a climate that is best suited for the plant. The
transportation costs are a rounding error for many products. Organic products
are particularly terrible in this respect.

------
enobrev
I've only tried Blue Apron once. I was watching a friend's cat while he was
out of town, and I grabbed his most recent order so it wouldn't go to waste.

I don't remember which recipe it was, except to say it was a chicken recipe -
probably with quinoa. Six of the eight steps included "Salt and Pepper to
taste". Fortunately, my wife and I both cook regularly, so we knew that would
have been a terrible idea.

I only seasoned the chicken once, and nothing else, and the dinner came out
great. My friend cooks often as well, so I assume he just skips the
unnecessary steps if they show up as well. His wife is just learning, though,
which is why they were using Blue Apron. I'd have to assume she may end up
over-seasoning from time to time if that's how the recipes normally go.

As someone who already eats home-cooked meals almost daily, I couldn't imagine
paying that price. But overall the idea makes a lot of sense, provided
execution is perfect. It seems, reading the rest of this thread, that hasn't
been the case of late.

~~~
spollo
That's actually a very normal technique and one of the reasons professionally
cooked food tastes so much better than most home cooked food. Frequent salting
at different points of cooking improves the overall flavour of the dish, and
seasoning ingredients separately can help with coverage.

Additionally something seasoned at the start of cooking won't be "salty" like
if you were to add salt directly on the food after its plated.

You don't add a crap ton of salt 5 times, just a pinch here and there and the
outcome is great.

~~~
graphitezepp
This is like the one cooking tip I don't stop blathering about in fact. Always
season each ingredient individually. Both ensures that the salt is distributed
well and makes it easier to get the desired amount in the end product.

------
JoshMnem
Better than these services would be a site that tells you how to shop for
meals and prepare them in bulk -- sort of "make your own meal kits". It would
be more efficient, healthier, and more educational.

~~~
joeskyyy
Platejoy[1] does this. I did their trial a while back and they've got some
great meal ideas. One thing I like about this, is that there's no potential
waste compared to Blue Apron and the like. Also being able to specify dietary
restrictions and stuff while getting a nice grocery list was pretty great (:

While yes, I can spend time researching things, picking things out, etc. all
for free, sometimes I do just want the experience to be catered. Add on top of
that an automated, weekly/bi-weekly grocery list was pretty damn cool.
Otherwise, I typically end up making the same boring meals I already know.

I didn't continue with them because my boyfriend is a pretty amazing cook, so
I just leave cooking to him instead haha

[1] [https://www.platejoy.com/](https://www.platejoy.com/)

~~~
acomjean
We use it to try and burn through CSA veggies. Works well.

Though it needs a CSA mode so you can tell it I got way too much swiss chard
and it needs to be cooked..

------
aembleton
The UK equivalent of this is Hello Fresh [1]. I've never tried them, but they
were clearly spending a lot on marketing and sending people door to door. The
thing is, for the price I could just buy the necessary ingredients at my local
supermarket.

I was tempted just so I didn't have to think about what to cook, but I find
Yummly [2] to be a great inspiration and helps me to try new dishes.

1\. [https://www.hellofresh.co.uk/](https://www.hellofresh.co.uk/) 2\.
[https://www.yummly.co.uk/](https://www.yummly.co.uk/)

~~~
this_user
The real issue with these services is that it is unclear what value they
actually provide. If you want to cook yourself and save money, you could just
get the ingredients yourself (or have them delivered by a service like Amazon
Fresh). If you want to save time, you either go out to eat or order take-out.
In contrast, Blue Apron and their like combine the worst of both worlds: high
prices and no time savings.

BTW, Hello Fresh is actually one of the companies funded by the infamous
Samwer brothers and their Rocket Internet. They operate in several European
countries, and they have been offering large discounts. I don't imagine
they're not burning through a lot of cash because of that.

~~~
jo909
For me personally, the value proposition is not having to think about cooking
_until I start cooking_.

I just come home to matching ingredients and can start cooking at any time
(which I mostly enjoy doing and is relaxing). It also saves time that I would
need to decide on recipes and make lists and go shopping (all of which I don't
like and stresses me out).

Its not about saving the maximum amount of time, but getting rid of the
unpleasant parts around cooking at home. And eating out is much more expensive
(where I live, maybe except the junkiest of junkfood), so this is an
acceptable compromise.

------
plg
How much would it cost to have a chef supply and prepare dinner 5 nights a
week for a family of 4? I don't mean takeout from a restaurant. I mean "home
cooked meals".

------
ryanmarsh
I suspect that the unit economics of this business aren't profitable at the
moment.

It's possible that the pro forma looked nice based on quotes from suppliers.
I've tried several of these meal kit companies and they all suffer from basic
logistics and quality problems. I suspect it's a hard business with hidden
costs and lots of unknown unknowns.

This is why I and others[0] believe Amazon will use its purchase of Whole
Foods to change the fundamentals of this business and provide the
infrastructure companies like Blue Apron need to do this profitably. Before
Amazon fulfillment existed ecommerce was a logistical mother fucker. I worked
at a number of startups in the late 90's and early 00's that struggled with
this. I think there are a lot of similarities here.

0: [https://stratechery.com/2017/amazons-new-
customer/](https://stratechery.com/2017/amazons-new-customer/)

~~~
antisthenes
You might be right.

If there's one thing Amazon has going for them, it's figured out logistics at
scale. The economics of a service like this start to look a lot better when
your delivery rates are dirt cheap _and_ you can selectively serve zip codes
with highest demand.

Serving sparse suburban or rural areas doesn't make sense with ingredient
delivery.

------
waivej
I've been with them for 2+ years and am hooked. We use Green Chef as well for
6 meaks per week.

Everyone complains about the lack of convenience but it saves me mind capacity
more than anything and I never have to go to the store. We also like variety
in food. Recipes show up, I cook for 30 minutes and we have family meals.

$20/meal to feed three adults and a toddler is a bargain to me as well.

I prefer Blue Apron to others and cringe to think they might make it easier.
Note, I could barely cook before and took twice as long. I just use a giant
cutting board and a favorite spatula and knife and occasionally use more than
one pan. I also overlap things like preheating the pans and chopping while
things cook.

We recreate some of the meals but have a hard time getting the quantities to
match up. It usually means I have to make a double batch for guests or have
leftovers and need to stock the pantry with various sauces and vinegars.

------
code4tee
It's not clear they have a long term sustainable business model. They clearly
have a problem with the cost of customer acquisition running up against the
lifetime value of a customer. If they can't fix that then the model is dead.

Execution issues are just adding fuel to the fire.

------
qq66
"Stop trying to make the meal-kit-by-mail business happen. It's not going to
happen."

Meal kits are going to be a big business. But they're going to come from your
grocery store, your office cafeteria, or Amazon. That's it.

------
oso2k
One other thing I forgot to mention, last week, Blue Apron offered me $30 to
rejoin (I already had a $10 credit I threw away). I thought it was interesting
and then I saw this HN post. Probably not a coincidence. :/

------
nemo44x
The really negative news was the issues they are having bringing the new
facility in Lindon online and at peak efficiency. This is causing issues with
rolling out new products they see vital to their business. Because of this
they will likely post a decline in revenues y/y for Q3.

In light of that news I can see why Matt Wadiak, their previous COO, recently
"stepped down".

------
marinman
It's been great to read this thread. I never understood the value. As someone
who can cook and grocery shop decently, it's not cheaper and only marginally
better than what I normally whip up. And there's no question about convenience
when it's compared to delivery (although, I live in SF, so my delivery options
are more than most).

------
lightedman
I tried it once. Having half of my ingredients arrive either opened or spoiled
(and I started my entry into the world of jobs as an apprenticed oriental
chef) immediately turned me off.

If I still worked as an AIB inspector I'd be going straight to their
warehouses right now and running a top-to-bottom run-through.

------
baking
So why is Wayfair on that bar graph? Their stock has been doing just fine
since the IPO.

~~~
mholmes680
That's a good point. looks like they took the lowest historical price vs the
IPO, without regard for current situation. Far from "total return". Good
catch.

------
hitgeek
i was one of the customers who dropped in q2 after using the service for about
6 months.

I really enjoyed the product, and never had an issue with quality.

for me cost was primary reason for cancelling. Buying ingredients saves me
about $100 a month. Even with Blue Apron I had to go to the grocery store
weekly for lunch and breakfast food, so it was a "nice to have luxury", not
something that saved time or money.

I worry that Blue Apron is going to have a hard time making the economics of
custom acquisition vs. life time value work if high churn is a permanent
thing.

------
randomerr
It never seemed like a sustainable business model. After a year you build up
enough skills that you no long need them. Also I can source ingredients
locally more inexpensively and fresher.

------
jayess
I subscribed to Green Chef for about a year but the hassle and time it took to
make the meals wore me down.

Then I found freshly, which sends pre-made meals, and I love it.


The Mathematical Con of Hedge Funds and Financial Advisers (2014) - jimsojim
http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/dangerous-mathematical-con-hedge-funds-financial-advisers-79212
======
pzone
"When it comes to publishing in the Journal of Finance or the Journal of
Financial Markets, the editors simply don’t have the mathematical knowledge
necessary to vet some of the more complex and nuanced assertions."

Personally, I think everyone should stop reading at this point. Of course I
went through to the paper itself.

What is the paper? Mathematicians citing Leontief from 1982 about the woes of
economics as a science, running some simulations (no data for me, thanks!) and
really getting quite angry, for what, to remind us that backtesting is a
flawed methodology? If you invest based on some random back-tested wavelet
bullshit you're doing it wrong, this is not news to anyone. Harvey, Liu and
Zhu made their point already (note - not the Zhu who authored this paper) and
nobody cares about your filling in some dull derivations in a mathematical
appendix and calling them "proofs." Everyone complains about economists doing
too much of that already.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I find it entertaining that you simultaneously critique the lack of rigor and
also complain about economists making the math rigorous.

The point of proofs, simulations, and the like, is to make sure that your
model is at least internally consistent and your assumptions actually yield
the results you think. A lot of times models specified with vague verbiage
don't even do that.

------
ricksplat
The point put forth in this article is that a certain degree of scientific
rigour is important in running a business and it's a principle that is broadly
generalisable. In particular in software development one encounters the
philosophy of "get it out the door quick" regardless of the cost to quality.
Engineers are often viewed as a cost-centre rather than the actual producers
of value in a business when the bottom line is evaluated. It should be clear
to us that businesses that actively capture and nurture engineering talent
(google, apple, facebook etc.) are the businesses that are doing better at the
moment than those that focus on "unit cost" of "resources" (e.g. IBM, HP) and
many are now trying to make that transition as we can see from the trend
towards more engineer-friendly processes such as Scrum (away from the more
punishing "waterfall" style approaches).

~~~
p4wnc6
I'm with you except that I think the "unit cost" thinkers are only shifting
towards Agile/Scrum because the cool kids are doing it. In the brand of
Agile/Scrum that those shops create, it is anything but engineer-friendly, and
they absolutely still view engineering and software development as cost
centers instead of value centers. In fact, in a lot of cases, Agile is used
explicitly because it enforces an aggressive deadline culture in which the
sacrifice of quality in favor of short release cycles is explicitly codified
into the work culture, and reinforced every day in every team interaction.
These situations also foster extreme degrees of "surveillance culture" \--
basically since the middle management over top of the so-called cost center of
engineering can't do much, technologically, to mitigate the realities of
creating software value, they opt instead for draconian surveillance and
progress tracking environments, like stodgy Jira, and they take things like
team burndown literally and draw sweeping conclusions from an extremely small
set of burndown data. This all typically goes hand-in-hand with open-plan
offices too, where everyone can be literally seen during their work and there
is an implicit mandate from the company that your status is partially related
to how much you 'look the part' while in the office. Even if you're a
developer needing quiet time to creatively solve a problem, and you're seated
smack in the middle of a loud group of sales associates whose job requires
them to be on the phone all day, the business doesn't care. Your actual
productivity as a developer isn't as meaningful to them as your ability to
look like a good piece of office furniture most of the time by fitting into
their surveillance and micromanagement culture. Typically, promotions and
advancement are won in the environments not through technical skill or hard
work, but through one's ability to sublimate your natural desires for
reasonable working conditions and "endure it with a smile" better than peers
can, a phenomenon which Michael O. Church referred to as "macho
subordination." In my working experience, at least, this has been precisely
how Agile/Scrum are used, whether in a start-up, a finance firm, or a long-
standing education tech company.

~~~
ricksplat
To borrow and misuse a phrase, "guns don't kill people". If you're working in
this kind of environment you're on to a loser no matter what.

------
chillydawg
Anything anyone is trying to sell you in this space is a con. If it were
profitable, they'd be doing it themselves. Exactly the same as gambling
systems.

~~~
gavazzy
Investing other people's money is always more profitable than your own. If you
found a way to get a risk free 30% IRR year on year, wouldn't you rather take
5% of the profit from $1,000,000 invested than 100% of the profit from
$10,000?

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's only more profitable if you don't have capital. Most of the very
successful hedge funds stop taking other people's money and just invest their
own once they have enough.

~~~
MR4D
You're confusing the math with the reason they stop taking external funds.
They always make more money if they add external funds just like 20% of $101
is greater than 20% of $100.

They stop taking external money because managing clients can be a pain. At
some point, depending on the fund (e.g. a niche fund that can never grow
beyond a certain size), a shrewd money manager can grow to dominate the niche.
In that space, they might as well just kick everyone else out and save the
headache because the reward of the bigger pie just isn't worth it.

Frankly, even though I manage money for a living, and I really like my
clients, it's still difficult. If it were my 1 beeellion dollars (touch pinky
finger to the lips), then I wouldn't manage other people's money either - the
marginal profit to me personally just wouldn't be worth it (for me, after the
first billion, it's pretty darn trivial).

~~~
yummyfajitas
Most strategies can't take unlimited capital. I've got $100k in one strategy
right now, but if I put $200k in it I wouldn't make any more money.

------
lordnacho
I've worked in quant funds for over a decade. The article is right that
there's a lack of rigour, and it's true the number of trials is an issue.
However it doesn't go into why it happens:

\- People with phds often have an authority that is unwarranted. People with
advanced degrees in similar sounding fields may have spent their time doing
very different things. Phds are also coming from an environment where getting
credit matters a lot, so you get political struggles that appear to be
mathematical in nature to the uninformed manager.

\- Programming skills tended to be crap in the places where I worked. Most of
the researchers think of coding as a necessary evil, and their code looks like
the kind of code you write when you're trying to take shortcuts. What effect
does this have on overfit? Well, it's simply impossible to know how many tests
are actually being performed. There's a lot of informative errors, too:
something gets coded up, you see a backtest, you realise there was an error
after. Now you have information that you can use to get a better result,
having not incremented your number of tests.

\- There's a lot of pressure to come up with something new. Pretty hard when
there's loads of people attempting the same. The most natural way to try to
make something "new" is to take something old, add a twist to it, and see how
it goes. Of course when you add a twist, there's more parameters to fit. And
because it's supposed to be complex, you can get away with an elaborate
fitting mechanism. Often something that hides the fact you're doing more
tests.

\- Backtest fetish: it's natural to think about how a system would have done
in the past. But unfortunately we all know about the past. Anyone coming up
with a strategy is going to know volatility spiked in 2008, so he'll avoid
anything that would have lost money then, or worse, just restrict the
parameters so they are in a safe zone. Basically, there's a bunch of tests
that aren't done, but should have been counted anyway.

\- How to fix this: well, there's no magic bullet. You should start by being
wary of adding parameters. If you add one, it should work with a number of
reaction functions. If it works with a step func, does it work with an s-shape
or a ramp? Does it work when the parameters are perturbed? Does it work when
the input data itself is perturbed? If you've built a model, does it work on
simulated data? Something I rarely see is when someone says "model is an
ARMA(2,2)" that they've generated an ARMA22 with the same parameters.

------
KasianFranks
I develop a number of backtesting systems and algortihms and the article is
spot on but lacks to address far more sophisticated backtesting systems that
include running once on sample data. These are the best algos.

------
iamsalman
TL;DR Over-fitting investment models is pseudo math.

~~~
lintiness
the greatest overfitting of an investment scheme the world has ever known:
markets must go up.

~~~
pzone
Er, no, that's basic economics. If you make an investment, you are going to
expect some sort of profit, on average.

~~~
MR4D
That's a different issue. I think what @lintiness is trying to say is that
just because a market went up in the past does not mean it will in the future.
Survivorship bias is absolutely huge here.

Most people forget this, but if you look at global markets since the early
1900's, there were several that went down and never came back up. Germany's
markets failed on at least one occasion and never came back. A good paper that
addresses part of this is here:
[http://www.researchgate.net/publication/4913017_Global_Stock...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/4913017_Global_Stock_Markets_in_the_Twentieth_Century)

Depression and war do many things that create discontinuities. Most people
don't come close to thinking about those because they aren't knowledgeable
enough to even understand how strong the survivorship bias in their current
local market like the US.


Former eBay CEO confirmed to be involved in cyberstalking campaign - abhi3
https://twitter.com/wired/status/1273310537720434688
======
Nicksil
This post links to a Twitter.com page which then links to the page with the
story.

Link to the story: [https://www.wired.com/story/ebay-employees-charged-
cyberstal...](https://www.wired.com/story/ebay-employees-charged-
cyberstalking-harassment-campaign/)

------
sct202
I've wasted entirely too much time today reading the FBI's charging documents
on this case. The details are just so ridiculous. The CEO seems to have gotten
offended that the bloggers wrote about how he built replica of a NYC bar in
the ebay HQ. I'm not surprised he has bad judgement considering it sounds like
he ordered this krazy campaign. Ars is hosting a copy here:
[https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2020/06/ebay-...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2020/06/ebay-Charging-Docs.pdf)

~~~
valuearb
I have a friend that worked with him at EBay. He finds none of this a
surprise.

------
Domenic_S
I worked for eBay/Paypal.

Honestly I'm so disappointed in how far eBay's fallen. I opened my eBay
account in 1999 - finding great deals, good sellers, sending money orders in
the mail... those were the good times. And it was like a dream come true when
I got a job there.

But eBay's lost its heart. Like all enormous and old businesses it got taken
over by the suits, and the suits decided that a Marketplace was eBay's best
future. Over the last decade they've been trying and failing, while being
occasionally mired in scandal: GSI Commerce/eBay Enterprise (SEC violations,
eventual divestiture), Skype (onerous terms for employees during sale to MS),
Magento...

Policies are broken. Did you know "no returns" means a buyer can still make a
return? Sellers take a HUGE risk selling on eBay these days, to the point
where I don't list on eBay anymore.

And then this? If it were an episode of Silicon Valley we wouldn't believe it
was possible. How the mighty have fallen.

~~~
godzillabrennus
I’m not sure what’s more disappointing, eBay or PayPal.

PayPal should be stripe and coinbase combined with their early lead but they
haven’t bothered to even try and compete.

~~~
jjeaff
They waited until it was too late to try to innovate. So they bought Braintree
and Venmo.

------
nknealk
I put this in another thread but it bares repeating here:

There are several SEC filings around the departure of the CEO in Sept
2019[1][2] that line up with with the timeline mentioned in this article.
Here's the relevant snippet from the 8-K: "On September 24, 2019, the Company
and Mr. Wenig entered into a letter agreement regarding his departure (the
“Wenig Letter”). Pursuant to the terms of the Wenig Letter, in exchange for
his execution and non-revocation of a release of claims against the Company,
the Company agreed to provide Mr. Wenig with (1) the payments required to be
made to him under his letter agreement with the Company dated September 29,
2014 upon a termination without cause, which letter agreement was originally
filed with..."

The key bit is that the CEO stepping down triggered a severance agreement for
termination without cause. This lines up with the reporting that he engaged in
unethical behavior and had to be forced out.

Here's the cash portion of his severance (there's a stock portion too):

"Non-Equity Related Payments. The Company will make the following payments to
you in accordance with the terms of the Letter Agreement in the form of a lump
sum payment within 30 days after the Effective Date (as such term is defined
in section 17 of this Agreement):

(i) Two times your Annual Base Salary (as such term is defined in the Letter
Agreement), which equals $2,000,000; and (ii) Two times your Bonus Amount (as
such term is defined in the Letter Agreement), which equals S4,000,000."

[1]
[https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1065088/0001...](https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1065088/000119312519254832/d806459d8k.htm)

[2]
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065088/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065088/000119312519254832/d806459dex101.htm)

~~~
downerending
> it bares repeating

it bears repeating

( _Sometimes you get the bare, and sometimes the bare gets you._ )