Why Snapchat Spectacles failed - alfozan
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/28/why-snapchat-spectacles-failed/
======
cocktailpeanuts
It's amazing how you can write a whole article on this, but the gist is they
built something with low utility value. period.

If you look at it from this point of view, everything else is just side
effect.

\- It failed because it's not fashionable? => No. See bluetooth headset. Also
see Crocs. If it's useful, people will use it.

\- It failed because it waited 5 months to sell it? => No. See Apple.

\- It failed because the excitement died off by the time it shipped? => No.
See all kinds of films that succeeded WITHOUT any initial hype (such as the
Matrix)

\- It failed because it couldn't get any influencers to endorse the product?
=> No, see Snapchat. Yeah their original app itself.

\- It failed because the content couldn't be ported over to other platform
without cropping? => No. In fact, if Spectacles would have succeeded,
Techcrunch would probably be blabbering about how the key to success is how
brilliant its marketing strategy was, so that all the videos uploaded to
youtube and instagram had the "signature snapchat crop", which got everyone
else curious.

The only arguments I agree with in this article are related to its utility--
how it's considered rude to be video taping someone else, and how it was
limited to sunglasses format.

The rest is bullshit because they're one of those "MBA case studies" type
after-the-fact interpretation, which in most cases are bullshit.

Just go build something useful and you will never have to worry about being
"fashionable" or all the gimmicks. In fact as a tech company you should never
see yourself as a fashion company. It's a myth created by ignorant media
pundits who's never built a product in their life.

~~~
saimiam
I disagree with your entire comment and here’s why - in my view, saying that
the reason something failed because it relieved no itch or there was
insufficient utility is at par with suggesting that trading is simple because
you have to “Buy Low and Sell High, d’oh”. It teaches no one anything they
don’t instinctively know.

Everything the article says - be it about influencers not picking up and
promoting the Spectacles to difficulties with porting content without cropping
- is extremely useful to anyone else looking to launch a Spectacles type
device.

~~~
jasode
_> Everything the article says - [...] - is extremely useful to anyone else_

The post you replied to tried to explain why it's actually _not useful_. The
journalist uses a style of seductive writing (some call it "narrative
fallacy"[1]) which connects _plausible-sounding_ causes to its _supposedly
logical_ effects. That style of explanation can actually make readers _dumber_
about what happened because it leaves out _counterexamples_.

That "narrative fallacy" is common in writings from Harvard Business Review,
histories, biographies, newspapers & pundits trying to explain why the Dow
Jones Index went up/down, why startups/products failed/succeeded, etc. All of
those suffer the omission of counterexamples.

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

~~~
donmatito
> That style of explanation can actually make readers dumber about what
> happened because it leaves out counterexamples.

Thank you for writing this

------
sssparkkk
So how about this: the influencers on Snapchat are all recording _themselves_
most of the time. These glasses did nothing to help with that particular and
most popular use case.

I feel really weird for being the first to bring this up, it seems pretty
obvious to me the main reason these glasses weren't going to catch on.

~~~
lsc
yeah, what they need are programmable drones that follow them around,
recording. Bruce Sterling suggested such a thing in "The Artificial Kid" \-
and I think we've got the tech to actually kinda do it now.

~~~
icebraining
That was the Lily: [https://www.wired.com/2015/05/lily-robotics-
drone/](https://www.wired.com/2015/05/lily-robotics-drone/)

Spoiler: the video was misleading (California is suing them for false
advertising) and the company is dead.

~~~
secabeen
Mayfield Robotics is making a non-flying version of this, called the Kuri:
[https://www.heykuri.com/](https://www.heykuri.com/)

It is a real product, founded by a bunch of robotics people from Harvey Mudd.

~~~
lsc
The camera angle seems like it could be... problematic, though.

Also it doesn't look like it has the capability to follow me in even most
sedate urban environments. I mean, I'm not asking for stairs, but that thing
looks like it'd have a hard time with a sidewalk crack.

Both those problems could probably be solved by making it bigger.

------
seambot1
Am I the only one that thinks that a) it's obvious that these sorts of devices
(face wearables) aren't led by people who have worn glasses their whole life
and b) if you haven't lived that, you shouldn't try to build devices for
people's faces?

I say it's obvious because neither Glass nor Spectacles were wearable by
people who need corrective lenses AS corrective eyewear.

None of the leadership had any idea what it meant to have a large piece of
hardware on your face all day every day. Nor, importantly, how to convince
someone to put a large piece of hardware in their face every day all day.

It's like they didn't even BOTHER to call the guys at warby Parker, or zenni,
or even the anti-christ Luxotica

Glasses are SO much more personal than a computer or a phone, or even a shirt
or other clothing. They are your face. Your literal identity.

It's so tone deaf of both teams (and everyone in the AR/VR community that
thinks some manner of out-in-public eyewear is "close) to not deal with that
need for customization at minimum.

Sorry had to rant about that. M sure all those people are actually pretty
sharp, and I'm just being grumpy.

~~~
gaius
_I say it 's obvious because neither Glass nor Spectacles were wearable by
people who need corrective lenses AS corrective eyewear._

This reminds me of Canon vs Nikon. Fanboys on the Internet wank on about
megapixels and whatnot but the real differentiator is the eyepoint of the
viewfinder, which is probably literally as simple as, the eyepoint guy at
Nikon wears glasses themselves and their counterpart at Canon doesn't.

~~~
frankchn
Is there a large difference in viewfinder design nowadays? I wear glasses and
use a Canon 1DX2 and have tried out a Nikon D5 — if anything the Canon is more
comfortable for me to look through.

The specifications bear me out: Nikon has a 0.71x magnification VF with a 17mm
eyepoint, while Canon has a 0.76x magnification VF wish 20mm eyepoint.

~~~
gaius
My experience of this is back in the day when it was a real eye opener if
you'll forgive the pun when I switched to a Nikon F5 from a Canon EOS 3. I
expect both companies have different viewfinder designers now, but it just
goes to show how a simple usability test can be overlooked.

------
untog
I was talking to a parent friend of mine a while back, and we both agreed (he
owns a pair) that Snapchat Spectacles could be an amazing accessory for
parents.

Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely
throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably
because they now want to play with your phone. No such problem with Spectacles
- and not only that, it means you can keep two hands free (not a small issue
when one arm might already have a child in it).

The problem is that Spectacles are so tied into Snapchat that it makes sharing
the output very difficult. Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat,
and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to. You can, eventually, import into
Snapchat then export single videos back out again, but they lose the cool
display method for circular videos and look awful. I think they could shift
some of these glasses with a little rebranding and a spin-off app just for
importing videos into whatever destination you want. They'll never do that,
though. Maybe if they finally declare it dead they'll open up the sync API,
but I'm not holding my breath.

(this is a repost of an old comment I wrote a few days ago in case anyone is
suffering from deja-vu)

~~~
Analemma_
> Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat
> wants them to.

There's no maybe about it: Snapchat definitely doesn't want them. Evan Spiegel
has been very upfront that he doesn't want the riff-raff. Snapchat has always
been deliberately shitty on Android and Spiegel went out of his way to make
clear how they definitely weren't going to make a Windows Phone application,
back when WP was a potential player. If you're not a cool, hip teen with an
iPhone, you can piss off.

He reminds me a lot of that Abercrombie CEO who said that they didn't want
fatties and uglies in their stores, which was a winning strategy until it
suddenly wasn't.

This is partially why, as much as I hate Facebook, I'm not particularly upset
at Snapchat slowly getting steamrolled by them. Businesses that stick up their
middle finger at potential customers out of snobbery deserve to fail.

~~~
jseliger
_He reminds me a lot of that Abercrombie CEO who said that they didn 't want
fatties and uglies in their stores, which was a winning strategy until it
suddenly wasn't._

To be fair, my impression is that this aspect of their marketing wasn't the
problem; the Great Recession was the problem, because suddenly no one had 2 –
4x the money to pay for a piece of clothing that only differed from the
competition in that it told other teens you have 2 – 4x the money.

Great Recession + fast fashion seems to be the real culprit.

The market for elitism has never disappeared in that domain. Maybe any domain.

~~~
Analemma_
There's a difference between being an upscale brand and actually turning away
customers. Apple and BMW are elite brands, but if you're poorer but save up
for one because you want it that bad, they'll happily take your money.
Snapchat and Abercrombie are looking at people who _want_ to give them money
and telling them to go away.

~~~
kenshi
Is Snap really telling anyone to go away? You can download and use the app for
free.

------
jonahx
It's interesting to go back and re-read the overwhelmingly positive
predictions HN users made when Spectacles were announced:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569182)

and compare those to the "it was obviously going to fail" responses here.

~~~
empath75
The only people I ever saw say anything positive about them were people that
were pumping the IPO or people they paid to hype them.

~~~
jonahx
Looking at the profiles of the two top-voted comments in that thread, that
doesn't seem to be the case. But just browse the replies: many HN posters
genuinely seemed to believe they'd nailed some key niche and important product
details. They didn't strike me that way -- which is why I remembered the post.

The contrast struck me as an interesting example of hindsight bias.

------
Fricken
I was really curious about spectacles, and bought a pair as soon as I could. I
lost them about 3 weeks later, and that was that.

In some ways they were really cool, but the article was bang-on about pretty
much everything. It's really a case study about how to fuck up a product roll-
out.

Portability complications were a huge downer. The shaded lenses made them
difficult to use indoors, and what wasn't mentioned was that the mic was
hypersensitive to distortion from the slightest breeze, which made them
useless outside as well.

But, as the article states:

>To drive demand, Snap needed to demonstrate all the creative things you could
do with Spectacles, and the cool people who wore them.

Why the fuck didn't they do this?

~~~
DanBC
> and what wasn't mentioned was that the mic was hypersensitive to distortion
> from the slightest breeze,

And you can't really stick a micromuff on your glasses.

[http://www.micromuff.com/](http://www.micromuff.com/)

------
vm
I was a Snap power user. Got spectacles very early. Hated the upload UX.

Bluetooth issues galore. Completely stopped using them. As standalone
sunglasses, they are inferior to a good $10 pair from amazon - heavier, worse
lens quality, and limited viewable area.

------
minimaxir
A few months ago on Hacker News I asked about the low usage of the Spectacles
and the response was generally that people who bought it liked it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14562560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14562560)

Spectacles are a case where appealing to a niche may not be the most
_profitable_ endeavor. (and now that Snap is a public company, they have to
actually care about profit at some point)

------
Overtonwindow
Just curious, am I the only one who really, really wants the AR glasses from
Daemon by Daniel Suarez? I would very much like a pair of glasses that records
information, helps me to recognize faces, and bring information further into
my reality.

~~~
josephpmay
I read Daemon in middle school and became so obsessed with augmented reality
that I essentially devoted the next seven years of my life to working towards
making it happen: attending conferences, conducting research, and starting an
AR hardware company.

So no, you're not the only one :)

Also, unrelated to my previous obsession with AR, I have prosopagnosia, so
having glasses that could tell me who I'm looking at would make a major
improvement to my life.

~~~
LambdaComplex
>devoted the next seven years of my life

Was that a while ago? Or is that still what you're doing?

~~~
josephpmay
I'm a senior in college now. This was something I worked on from the beginning
of high school until this May.

~~~
fzzzy
What happened in May?

~~~
bayonetz
Right? Don't leave us hanging!

~~~
dbish
I was curious as well. Looks like he worked on Mira, an AR company that is
working on shipping hardware that works with your phone. Reading the about
section
([https://www.mirareality.com/about](https://www.mirareality.com/about)), it's
kind of funny, lists only three founders, who are not him, in the copy, but
the photo at the top of the page has 4 founders. Looked like it could be an
interesting product, though I'm sure the right AR glasses that customers will
purchase need to be far less bulky.

~~~
josephpmay
The fourth person in the picture is Evan, our CTO. He wasn't a founder.

~~~
dbish
Cool. Thanks for the clarification. I assumed it was you since you weren't in
the copy ("founded by Ben Taft, Matt Stern, and Montana Reed"). Any reason you
left the AR world when it seems to be heating up now?

------
sebringj
IMO, (well based on actual data from my websites and apps) most people consume
media, not produce it, where producers are < 1%. The phone is a device that
both consumes and produces doing a great job at it but for the majority of its
use, ~99% , consumes. A device only for producing is already at a disadvantage
and its a novel one at that. When glasses or contact lenses both consume and
produce, we got something pretty great going on. For example, kind of related,
when the iwatch becomes 100% an phone in its own right, no tethering, you
already sold me and I'll buy it as it just dramatically increased its utility
and its novelty vanished turning into a new form factor.

------
koiz
Because they were pointless.

The first time I saw them I thought to myself, well that's a cool idea but
that was it.

It truly felt like marketing or some attempt to trick people into believing
Snap could make cool things... like a response to Facebook/Oculus.

~~~
baby
If I can use them to shoot videos and make something cool like the japan tour
thing[1] I would buy them.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3i5asc3qI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3i5asc3qI4)

EDIT: actually looking at the snapchat spectacle webpage, it looks neat and I
can see myself buying them. Just not at that price (130GBP) because I will
probably not be using them a lot. But if there is a promotion around Christmas
why not.

------
HumFac2
Here is detailed usability and feature function allocation analysis. This
product was dead in the water from the beginning.
[https://www.mauronewmedia.com/blog/snap-spectacles-failed-
po...](https://www.mauronewmedia.com/blog/snap-spectacles-failed-poor-
usability-featurefunction-allocation-errors-compromised-potentially-
breakthrough-product/)

Mauro Usability Science

------
Theodores
They took a gamble and it did not work out for them, their product was not the
next 'spinner' grade craze. But if you don't try you don't get.

It is only a matter of time before cameras in sunglasses becomes a common
thing with people using them in place of action cameras, dashcams and regular
cameras. The UX needs to be 'wink' to take a picture so these things can
operate hands free with voice control - 'cheese' etc.

Somehow these wonder sunglasses of the near future weigh no more than normal
sunglasses, charge magically in their special case and stream 4K HDR+ 3D
stereo over bluetooth 24/7 storing all content on a nano-SD card. But we are
not there yet and Snap took a punt at pitching a fun variant of the ideal
product with low-res functionality seeing if people would go for it. They
didn't. People didn't go crazy for them like they did with 'spinners', an
equally 'useless' product. But cameras in sunglasses are happening. People
have got over lenses in public. There is one in every car bumper.

------
swang
i actually bought one.

1: hard as hell to pair.

2: circular video does not work since a lot of people want to port out the
videos away from snapchat.

3: i wear glasses, the lens on these frames are not circular. couldn't find
anyone in the bay area who did custom lenses (at the time).

4: towards the end of the year (2016), a lot of people wanted them but were
frustrated that even if they got to the vending machine there was zero
guarantee they would even get one. at most they had ~70ish in quantity per
day. way too low. drove short term hype up though.

5: no marketing at all for this thing.

------
lustyHogwash
God damn it. These fucking wearable pieces of shit need to stand on their own.
They can’t be unrepairable, expensive, tethered pieces of shit that die when
the battery refuses to charge.

No one wants garbage that only works with one website, and no one wants to pay
for an uncontrollable device with a mind of its own.

If you have a free service on the internet, millions or perhaps even billions
may clamour to use it. If you’re giving stuff out for free, people will
happily try it out, if they have the option to throw it in the trash without
consequence.

Make people pay for something? It better do what they want, when they want it,
or you might have some pissed off people on your hands.

~~~
chiefalchemist
In short:

Getting people to spend their free time is relatively easy.

Getting people to spend their hard earned cash is very (very) difficult.

You'd think this would be obvious already :)

------
IncRnd
I can buy a pair of spy glasses for $100 to record at 30fps for an hour in
full color 1080, 60fps for half that time. There are no giant lenses on the
sides with lights that show my glasses are even capable of recording.

I can even order those glasses with a prescription. They will help me see, and
nobody else will be the wiser about being recorded. I'm not saying that I go
out of my way to discreetly record people - I don't. But that shows to me
these commodity glasses are a superior product to cartoonish looking Snapchat
Spectacles.

For me, that is why Snapchat and all other similar recording spectacles will
fail.

~~~
ggg9990
Can you post a link to those spy glasses you mention?

~~~
IncRnd
There are some similar ones here: [http://www.recordergear.com/camera-
glasses/](http://www.recordergear.com/camera-glasses/). They aren't exactly
the ones I meant, no longer having the manufacturer's link.

You can also find a bunch here:
[https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=1080p+spy+glasses](https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=1080p+spy+glasses),
but at ebay I'd rather spend $100 instead of $12 for these types of things.

------
avip
Notably missing from the list - nobody wants this product.

~~~
dawnerd
I dunno, they are/were demoing them at Universal Orlando and plenty of people
were checking them out. Price tag probably scared most away (who's dumping
100+ on glasses at a theme park?).

I'd buy a pair if they were more like traditional action cam style glasses.
The technical limitations right now make them far too expensive for what they
are.

~~~
imroot
You'd be surprised: when I worked in retail, I was told that the sunglass
stands in the theme parks were 3 of the the top five grossing stores at the
time for the luxury sunglass brand that I was working for. Admittedly, this
was...almost 20ish years ago, but, I'd still think this would be true today.

------
Animats
They had the application completely wrong. It's not for "social influencers".
It's for jocks. People doing extreme sports. Skateboarders. Surfers. They
needed to market this as a more convenient GoPro.

The trouble is, that's not Snapchat's target demographic. The device concept
is fine; it's the seller that's wrong.

~~~
nradov
The device looks too fragile to use in extreme sports and would have to be
completely redesigned, especially for compatibility with ski/snowboard
goggles. The shape also reduces peripheral vision which is an issue for some
sports.

I haven't heard many extreme sports athletes complaining that GoPros are
inconvenient. The helmet mounts seem fine for most people.

~~~
Animats
For helmet uses, the GoPro box is not a big problem. Not all sports use
helmets.

~~~
nradov
I see a lot of athletes using chest mounts. For surfing it's common to mount
on the tip of the board pointing back at the surfer. I really can't imagine
surfers wearing any kind of spectacles; they'd fall off in the first big
wipeout.

------
evervevdww221
I thought it faced a certain and quick death when it was launched.

The thing is expensively useless. And the design is very cheesy.

Surprisingly, at the time, I saw many articles praising it as "the most
brilliant idea", feeling like total flattery. I suspect those were from their
marketing team. Guess the market isn't so easy to fool.

------
Grue3
When people were saying that Snapchat is toast after Facebook stole all their
functionality, there was always that one person saying that Spectacles will
save Snapchat. Which made no sense even back then.

Also, before this article, I have never seen a single video shot by
Spectacles. And now I understand why: they look _terrible_. It's not at all
like seeing the world from the glasses-wearer's point of view. It's more like
looking into a goddamn peephole.

------
Fej
Spectacles failed because they wouldn't sell us the damn things! There was all
this hype but it was practically impossible to buy a pair except for scalper
prices on eBay.

------
nscalf
These failed because they built all of their hype around "we have a truck
selling them in random cities for a couple days" and they weren't interesting
enough to buy second market. To be honest, I didn't even realize I could buy
them now. Their whole thing was that you CAN'T just buy them online.

This is the same issue Pokemon Go had---they made a really cool product that
would go through a period of super high demand followed by an extreme dropoff,
but they didn't roll out their product in time---their release window didn't
match the window for the traction they actually generated. Pokemon Go was
massive when it released for a couple weeks, and they touted a IoT thing to go
with the game that made it even more immersive, but that didn't come out until
people really stopped caring.

The moral of the story is to know that if you're going to have a huge release,
be ready THEN to sell things. Hype is useless if you aren't capitalizing on
it.

~~~
nkristoffersen
To be fair, the IoT device wasn't sold by Niantic, it was sold by Nintendo.
Nintendo dropped the ball on selling the only thing that was really profitable
for them around the Pokemon Go fad since they only receive license fees for
the characters I believe.

------
mhomde
I think the use case is brilliant, if albeit niche. I would never wear them in
everyday life but when travelling I found myself wanting something like this
to capture memories, moments or just "atmosphere". A mobile camera doesn't
quite cut it because it's hard to get an authentic angle, especially if you're
moving. I'd rather not wear glasses when i don't have too but if it's sunny,
why not instead of sunglasses?

I'd prefer something with less conspicuous branding however, and something I
could export in a decent format. I predict this will be a somewhat mainstream
gadget within 5 years (Well, for people who can afford it). Apple will make
iGlasses, or some shit like that, with Siri and camera.

Then there's the whole thing about living in the moment, perhaps that's better
:)

------
coldtea
Because it was a BS idea designed to get some cheap press and PR, and doomed
to fail from the start?

Google Glass failed for all the technological and social reasons it did, why
would a BS subpar imitation from a, in the grand scheme of things,
insignificant service, fare better?

------
paul7986
I think AR sunglasses could be big just needs the right execution.

Maybe it only allows you to see things in the real world based on QR codes
embedded in real world objects like objects in a museum and other places where
businesses, organizations or governments embeds AR qr codes. The heavy
computing lifting is done not in the glasses but in the displays. Possibly
making the glasses cheap and barely bulkier then current sunglasses.

Also this way distribution of such glasses could be like 3D glasses ... pay
ticket for museum tour and get Their AR glasses for the tour.

A good introduction to AR glasses in the market and other businesses could do
the same.

------
adamnemecek
TLDR hw is hard, “fashion” hw is double hard

~~~
baby
It's interesting how on the other side Apple has succeeded with the Apple
watch even though you need to recharge it every day. My guess is that it was
highly priced and so seen as a "rich people" jewelry. Hence the market being
driven by people who want to look rich.

I'm sure that if snapchat spectacles had been priced lower, every middle
schooler would have gotten them. Driving the market/trend by mass adoption.

~~~
pgm8705
In terms of watch prices it is far from highly priced. I don't know anyone
that would considering it "rich people" jewelry. I've had my Apple Watch for
several weeks now and its usefulness has made it worth every penny. I
especially love having cellular service and not having to take my phone with
me everywhere I go.

------
dingo_bat
They should have supported iphone only. And adjusted the projected demand
accordingly. It's much easier to make bluetooth peripherals work nicely only
with one specific device and specific os. The whole experience would have been
much more polished. They could even have used something like airdrop. Iphone
users are also more likely to have $150 to spend on a joke pair of glasses.
Really seems like the obvious thing to do.

------
cagataygurturk
Maybe it‘s because they released sunglasses in November. I don‘t know
California but here in developed Europe nobody buys sunglasses nowadays,
because there is no sun.

------
rch
This was obviously a marketing-led disaster from day one. It's hard to accept
company leadership that can be be persuaded to do go down a path like this so
easily.

------
inthewoods
I wonder if they ever tested the concept before the release. To me, they would
have seen the issues with any sort of actual market test prior to the
investment.

~~~
ImSkeptical
Testing before release is too late. They need to create a dummy mock-up and
try it out while they are still brainstorming. If they did that, and were
thinking clearly, I expect they would be able to think of a lot of the
problems in this thread.

~~~
inthewoods
Agreed - concept testing.

------
jVinc
This is the very first time I've heard about snapchat spectacles, and I
frequently use snapchat... Yea, they failed pretty horribly at doing PR.

------
mattbierner
Besides their technical and marketing failings, spectacles are also a failure
of imagination. They attempt to digitize moments rather than trying to use
technology to enhance what you are doing or to create entirely new artificial
experiences. I wish this was why they failed but the reasons outlined in the
article are much more realistic

------
thinkloop
> Google’s core mistake was allowing geeky developers to become the face of
> Glass.

That's us! We're the mistake :-D

~~~
Redoubts
Wasn't this the same problem with Google+? Facebook started exclusively with
college students, Google started a social network exclusively with
programmers.

~~~
SapphireSun
FUCK. I thought that when we attained wealth, power, and appeared on the
covers of magazines people would stop dunking our heads in toilets and finally
pay us SOME RESPECT. This just shows that our society isn't a meritocracy. It
doesn't even matter anymore what you do, we're still undesirables to the
cheerleaders and jocks and the popular kids.

We'll get our revenge though. We control everything you mfers see, hear, buy,
and think. If you look down on us, get ready for your phone to be the new
heroin. If you like us, you can be free and dance with us and sample the
earthly delights of the real world. We will be Neo, you can elect to be
Morpheus or Trinity. Or we can be the machines in zero-one. Maybe that fits
better.

Enjoy your new paradise losers.

/s

------
eyeareque
I wish they would sell these glasses for $50 USD. they would have no problem
clearing out quite a few of them. I can’t see myself paying $100+ on
Craigslist let alone the retail price of $129.99

Here’s to hoping they get highly discounted and dumped on eBay/amazon.

------
_pmf_
Because people don't want to put stupid shit on their face that doen not even
have any trace of marginal value. There's no transcendental deeper reason.

------
lsh123
How about: because it was a bad product that nobody needed?

------
thinkloop
I wonder if the ultimate answer is for them to be completely imperceptible and
indifferentiatable from regular glasses - the glasshole thing is big.

------
dingo_bat
Lol! But guys! Snapchat is a camera company! Interesting how just saying
absurd things doesn't make it true.

------
malloreon
Snapchat is for selfies. you can't take selfies with your own glasses. That's
why it failed.

------
mhh__
Has _any_ wearable succeeded yet? Beyond the obvious ones like earbuds, the
smart watch?

~~~
monk_e_boy
I'd not heard of these glasses before, but for action sports they seem like
the perfect fit. I kitesurf so I can't hold a camera, I tend to clamp a GoPro
between my teeth to film. Same with surfers.

If these glasses had waterproof headphones I know tons of people who would
snap them sup.

~~~
nradov
GoPro and third-party vendors sell a bunch of mounting accessories to put on
your head or chest or wherever. Why don't you buy one of those instead of
holding the camera in your teeth?

------
djhworld
It's a hard sell in countries that don't get that much sun (e.g. UK)

------
endlessvoid94
People didn't want them. That's why they failed. It's that simple.

------
Havoc
Because it's awkward as fk?

Same as google glass. The tech wasn't the issue

------
yvsong
iGlass will probably be created by Apple or a hardware startup led by some
people like Steve Jobs and Woz. No software company has made a hugely
successful hardware product.

~~~
cbowal
Microsoft/Xbox?

~~~
macspoofing
They came close with the 360, and then took 5 steps back with the One.

~~~
user5994461
Microsoft is a hardware company. They've been shipping computers, keyboards,
headsets and all sort of electronics for a while.

------
pix64
Never even heard of this

~~~
eddie_catflap
I’d heard of them, didn’t even know they were out yet and today I find they’ve
already failed. Ho hum.

------
return0
moral of the story: quit hyping things that you know are stupid


Jurassic Park: Trespasser CG Source Code Review - coderdude
http://fabiensanglard.net/trespasser/index.php

======
BrandonMarc
I couldn't help but chuckle at this part:

\----------------------------------------

Trivia : The first things one should run on a new codebase are the following
greps :

        find . -exec grep --with-filename --ignore-case fuck   {}   \; 2>/dev/null
        find . -exec grep --with-filename --ignore-case shit   {}   \; 2>/dev/null
        find . -exec grep --with-filename --ignore-case hack   {}   \; 2>/dev/null
        find . -exec grep --with-filename --ignore-case lame   {}   \; 2>/dev/null
        find . -exec grep --with-filename --ignore-case stupid {}   \; 2>/dev/null


Dark social traffic in the mobile app era - prostoalex
http://fusion.net/story/31450/dark-social-traffic-in-the-mobile-app-era/?curator=MediaREDEF
======
wodenokoto
What I don't get is why facebook would keep this data secret to the
publishers. Isn't it in Facebooks best interest to show how many eyeballs they
can send to publishers and start charging for increasing that number?

And why aren't they selling meta data about this? What kind of demographics
visit your articles? What kind of people share them (how do they overlap?)

Sell CSV files or JSON with data about users who visit/shares your articles
and makes those shares visible to you on facebook (public or the person has
liked your page and made its posts visible to liked pages).

Summarize and anonymize the discussions surrounding your articles that are not
made visible to you on facebook.

------
ncw33
So basically, lots of big publishers are really upset that they don't know
where their traffic is coming from. They were previously uncategorised because
clicking on links from the Facebook app doesn't add a Referer.

Then someone noticed that the Facebook app sets User-Agent to something very
obviously Facebook-y, and this is the "breakthrough" in tracking Facebook
clicks.


What it takes to build 18-Mpixel basic phones - Anon84
http://www.embedded.com/underthehood/220600299?cid=RSSfeed_embedded_news
======
jws
Great, 18M pixels, but how are you going to get enough photons per second
through the tiny cell phone lens to keep the signal to noise ratio up?

Maybe we will have to carry phone tripods and use 5 second shutter times, or
we could use giant pans of flash powder to make really bright flashes.


Shopify's 2013 Year in Review - jimmiejo
http://www.shopify.com/2013

======
JimmaDaRustla
Slide is more dangerous than it looks, still haven't seen my gif though!


Easy Password Hash Enhancement - philip1209
http://philipithomas.com/2012/06/easy-password-hash-enhancement/

======
dllthomas
Is it common practice to use one salt value across an entire site? I thought
the idea was to generate a random salt for each user, in which case adding the
username doesn't really buy us much extra. Applied Cryptography (from 1996!!!)
seems to back me up on this, although it could be clearer about it. From the
bottom of page 52, of the second edition:

"Salt is a random string that is concatenated with passwords before being
operated on by the one-way function. Then, both the salt value and the result
of the one-way function are stored in the database on the host."

If the salt wasn't re-generated for each password stored, there's not much
reason to re-store it each time...

Edited to add: Granted, it'd be better than what people are apparently doing!

~~~
philip1209
Interesting. Most of the open-source projects I follow do a per-system salt.
Isn't this how Wordpress does it?

[http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-
config.php#Security_Ke...](http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-
config.php#Security_Keys)


Randall's Theory Increases Number of Dimensions in Physical Universe (2009) - bootload
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/6/2/class-of-1984-lisa-randall-as/
======
jerf
Title led me to expect a discussion of the mentioned theory; it turns out to
be a biographical piece in the "Look how awesome our alumni are!" portion of
the Harvard Crimson magazine. Nothing wrong with that per se, but not what I
expected from the title.

~~~
silentplummet
This is exactly correct. I flagged the submission.

~~~
bootload
@jerf, @silentplummet (all of 39 days) the article is posted on _"
thecrimson"_, expect it to be a bit bio-ish. What title would you give the
article? For me I only change the title if it's too long. This is a fault of
story posters web wide. A bug bear of mine - there is no universal editor on
the web.

~~~
jerf
Well, since you ask, I wouldn't post it as it doesn't seem to have anything of
HN interest ("people exist who have done interesting things" isn't all that
great of an article to start with, it being in a marketing context cuts it
down even more), but apparently 47 people disagreed, so _shrug_. I do
sometimes wonder if there's a substantial contingent of people who upvote
things based on the title alone, bolstered by the occasional appearance of
commenters who have clearly only read the title, but there's no way for me to
prove it either way. (And that's an observation well beyond just this one
article, btw, not a targeted thing.)

~~~
bootload
_" I wouldn't post it as it doesn't seem to have anything of HN interest"_

I add anything I find interesting. You'd be surprised what the HN crowd read.
A lot of the time I'll add two stories. The first a journal with an in-depth
description of some topic. Followed by a general science article that points
to the journal. Rarely does the source article get upvoted to the first page.
Not always and it depends on the topic.

The article added here is further information on this article _" What killed
the dinosaurs? Dark matter, says theoretical physicist Lisa Randall"_,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714657)
I was curious what kind of background Randall has to theorise an idea linking
asteroid impacts, dinosaur extinction and dark matter.

------
z92
Dimensions in Physics are like indirections in C. One extra level of
indirection fixes most problems in C. Same for Physics. The challenge is in
explaining with less dimensions.

~~~
jjaredsimpson
I don't see how that analogy works at all. Higher dimensions have completely
different physics than lower dimensions. Whereas pointers are just an
interpretation of an already existing data type.

------
gpvos
Article is from 2009.

------
crystalclaw
My first thought was something XKCD related. I was dissapointed.


Who got interviewed by Highland? - ginn

======
ginn
Now that we know which Y combinator members were accepted into the Y
combinator program, LightSpeed, and TechStars. Let's see who got into
Highland. Anyone get the interview call this week yet?


2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure - dilloc
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/2020-cloud-report/#
======
unreal37
They calculated the costs based on 3 years running at the hourly rate.

That's kinda weird. How about including multi-year discounts? These are
available to everyone.

[1] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/pricing/reserved-vm-
instan...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/pricing/reserved-vm-instances/)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-
instances/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/)

[3] [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-
up-c...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-committed-
use-discounts)

~~~
derefr
Elastic rates _are_ really what you should be comparing when using cloud IaaS
services, though. That's where the price works out in favor of using cloud
IaaS hosts in the first place, after all.

If you have a stable set of instances and a known lifetime for them, then,
before trying to calculate whether AWS or GCP is cheaper, step back and plug
those same numbers into a regular non-cloud DC managed-hardware-leasing
pricing page.

~~~
devy
> a regular non-cloud DC managed-hardware-leasing pricing

You have to factor in the total cost of ownership (TCO) to make a fair
comparison, which in almost ALL the cases, you are more than likely to
overspend on bare metal boxes on your own DC. Some of the TCO components are:

\- DC staff salaries

\- Electricity

\- Networking bandwidth

\- SLA guarantee (yes this a hidden cost, e.g. if your DC power is out, you
owe your customers fees depending on your SLA).

\- etc.

~~~
derefr
Note, I didn't say "your own DC", I said _managed hosting_. As in, leasing a
physical 2U server from a DC provider (just not a _cloud_ DC provider), that
you "temporarily own" (sort of like you "temporarily own" a condo you're
leasing), but where the DC staff still has BMC access to the box, and will
handle hardware going bad, etc., so you never have to drive out to the DC.

You know, the primary offering of DC providers like Softlayer, Hetzner, etc.

With a managed service, "utilities" (salaries, electricity) are factored into
the lease. And bandwidth, as it turns out, is cheap-enough that many DCs will
give it to you unmetered, since you can't use enough through the limited links
they give you to dent their uplink.

~~~
zxcmx
Bit of an aside, but a lot of people in AWS or Azure can't run their workloads
in Hetzner, OVH or what-have-you for compliance / paperwork related reasons.

Now SoftLayer I'm not so sure about - interested to hear from anyone offering
services to say, gov or health from managed hosting and how that compares cost
and experience-wise to AWS, Azure, GCP.

~~~
latch
I've never had to deal with this, but there are tens of thousands of managed
providers out there, so I figured some of them must have this type of
compliance.

The first two that I looked at, Hivelocity and ReliableSite both seem to have
a number of certifications, as does our current provider, LeaseWeb.

Is there a specific certification that's really sets AWS/Azure/GCP apart?

------
jsploit
Direct PDF link:
[https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/1753393/guides/Cloud_Report_2...](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/1753393/guides/Cloud_Report_2020-1.pdf)

~~~
dtrailin
These reports behind an email wall frustrate me to no end. I don't want to
receive your spam to read a single article!

~~~
kyrra
Its rather expensive (and time consuming) to produce reports like this. They
are doing it to generate leads.

~~~
freehunter
If there is a cost associated with producing content and that cost can’t be
recouped by the presentation of that content (speaker fees at conferences,
advertisements, sponsorships, etc) then the content should be sold for a fair
market rate.

That’s basically the entire point of GDPR. Stop making people trade personal
information for “free” content.

~~~
manigandham
No that's not the point of GDPR, it's about choice and control over data.

You're free to not share your email if you don't want to read the report. The
rest of us can make our own decision.

~~~
freehunter
GDPR literally prohibits you from requiring personal information in exchange
for something that doesn’t require that personal information in order to
function. You’re right it’s about choice and control over data and “you can
only have this thing if you give us unrelated personal data” is not choice nor
control.

~~~
manigandham
It's not that simple. GDPR is purposely vague and regulated "in principle"
rather than by the letter. Otherwise anyone operating a digital storefront,
email newsletter or even subscription paywall would be in violation.

GDPR doesn't have much standing against gated content and many top law firms
agree. There's also a combination of legitimate interest, business vs personal
emails, and contract in effect to sign up for communications as workarounds.
And to be extra clear, GDPR has no enforcement outside of the EU so it can't
do anything against a US-based database company anyway.

------
ignoramous
> _...in 2018, AWS outperformed GCP by 40%, which we attributed to AWS’s Nitro
> System present in c5 and m5 series... In 2020, we see a return to similar
> overall performance in each cloud._

How did GCP and Azure catch-up to AWS Nitro in one year which IIRC is a coming
together of minimalistic micro-vms, hardware-accelerated network and IO cards,
hardware offload for encryption and other maintenance tasks... a work that was
5 years in the making [0]?

[0] [https://www.youtube-
nocookie.com/embed/rUY-00yFlE4?t=1m45s](https://www.youtube-
nocookie.com/embed/rUY-00yFlE4?t=1m45s)

~~~
cdoxsey
Meltdown and Spectre did a real number on the c5 and m5 instance types.

Amazon's original fix reduced performance substantially, which lot's of people
noticed, but no one knew why till the vulnerabilities were announced.

Meanwhile Google built a clever workaround which minimized the pain. It was
really a mic-drop moment from Google and I wish someone would dig in deep and
tell the whole story.

At this point I'm sure AWS has merged Google's patches, but it showed how much
Google was investing in their GCP offerings.

~~~
DDerTyp
Interesting! Do you know of any resource where I can read more about this?

~~~
campers
There was a few interesting bits in a post the other days about their new
compute VM class, #4 in particular
[https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/understanding...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/understanding-
dynamic-resource-management-in-e2-vms) Its pretty light on details but was
news to me.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
This is not related to Spectre/Meltdown, which was over a year ago.

------
account73466
I remember that GCP claimed they will follow Moore's Law and drop the price
for the same instance type over time. It was just BS marketing, unfortunately
I believed them.

~~~
user5994461
AWS also stopped to drop instance price periodically. Sadly Moore law has
stopped some time ago affecting everyone.

~~~
sudosysgen
As we're starting to see, it was mostly Intel not keeping up, actually.
Moore's law is mostly holding up till today, and probably for a couple more
years before we really have to switch paradigms.

~~~
user5994461
The definition of doubling performance every few years stopped holding up a
while ago. The formal definition of doubling the amount of transistors
somewhat holds up, see the huge increase in core counts in recent years, but
that doesn't benefit most applications much. Incidentally cloud providers are
billing by core count so adding more cores doesn't help the bill.

~~~
sudosysgen
Nope. It's just that GPUs carried the mantle. If you have a massively parallel
number crunching application you should bite the bullet and port it to GPU,
and you'll see a truly massive FLOP/$ increase. And unlike processors GPU
performance is still rising 35-45% per generation, although that will slow if
NVidia gets too far ahead.

Also, if your goal is to get optimal cost/FLOP and you are computing pretty
much constantly then you shouldn't be using the cloud, to be honest. If you
are IO limited or if you have burst use then maybe, but for cost/FLOP the
kings are still consumer GPUs and Threadrippers, by very far and large.

------
ishjoh
Well done Cockroach labs team. This data is very valuable and much
appreciated.

A small nitpick if you're reading. Fig 19: Sotrage: Azure Write Throughput the
y axis has an incorrect label of "1,00" when it should be "1,000"

~~~
orangechairs
Cockroach here: Thank you! We'll get this fixed.

~~~
taspeotis
A most minor point (and not to detract from the great effort you to went to
produce the report): it uses yellow for AWS (good, their logo is
yellow/orange) but red for Azure (bad, Azure is ... azure.)

------
mobileexpert
Looking at the Azure networking numbers I wonder if they got their configs
correctly optimized. Azure networking was always tricky to get best
performance when I used it heavily at my last co.

~~~
daxfohl
No, I contacted them directly after seeing this report and confirmed they did
not even use accelerated networking (which is a free, but opt-in service on
Azure), much less things like placement proximity groups (which only recently
went public). So machines were communicating across availability zones
(separated physically by miles and logically by additional networking layers)
and a bunch of networking was happening in CPU rather than offloaded to FPGA.

Disclosure: I work for Azure networking.

~~~
jiggawatts
(I'm sending this feedback here because Azure feedback via official channels
is printed out and then fed directly into a shredder.)

Can you answer why -- for the love of God -- why Azure IPv6 networking is
doled out in microscopically small /124 blocks (16 addresses)!?

The standard is a /64 _at a minimum_ for residential connections, and /48 is
recommended for most premises, particularly business connections. Azure could
easily obtain a /32 for each of their regions, providing a very roomy 4
billion /64 scopes per data centre.

Right now, if I want to "embrace IPv6" and all of its advantages, such as a
flat address space and the elimination of NATs, I will have to either:

1) Juggle a bunch of /124 prefixes and carefully allocate services to them.
This is a load of fiddly scripting or manual work.

2) Probably be forced to NAT anyway!

3) Pay for addresses that ought to be too cheap to meter.

~~~
daxfohl
Sorry, I'm pretty far removed from low-level networking, on CDN team and
fairly new at that. I'd have no idea who to ask.

------
m0zg
I wonder why they stuck to the "standard" machine types on GCP. Unlike with
AWS you get to vary the config there somewhat, so if your workload benefits
from more CPU you can add jus the CPU. Same for RAM. That will affect the per-
dollar figures because you can tailor your instance to your workload pretty
exactly.

------
brenden2
I wish they had benchmarked the arm instances on AWS, I'd like to see a 3rd
party validate AWS's claims about performance.

~~~
tybit
Scylla DB did a write up on it [https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-
ready-for-server-...](https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-
server-dominance/)

------
AustinDizzy
This is a good report, but I'd also be interested to see focus on GPU
performance on both classic GPU intensive workloads and machine learning
workloads.

------
dzhiurgis
> cloud

> compares virtual machines

I mean cloud is different for everyone, but for me a VM is far from cloud.
It's the least differentiable item in each of their suite.

------
phonon
Did this use the latest 36% higher performance EBS systems on AWS?

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-
ec...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-ec2-nitro-
system-based-instances-now-support-36-faster-amazon-ebs-optimized-instance-
performance/)

~~~
wmf
I think they're using local storage not EBS.

~~~
phonon
Five out of 12 AWS models they tested were EBS based.

------
samuelfekete
After clicking on this link, I now get ads about this report.

------
killjoywashere
GCP seems to have gotten the "most improved" award, but is Azure winning
anything?

~~~
scarface74
Support and confidence of Big Enterprise....

------
carlivar
They should add Alicloud.

------
QUFB
Sorry for the non-technical comment here, but why do I have to provide my
email address to read the full report PDF? I suppose the marketing department
at Cockroach Labs proscribed this workflow.

Is this a viable strategy? Might it be better to provide the report without
the annoying engineers with the email requirement? How many readers of the
report are interested in Cockroach Labs, rather than the benchmarks?

~~~
adambyrtek
You can always use a disposable email address like 10 Minute Mail:
[https://10minutemail.com/](https://10minutemail.com/)

~~~
universenz
Notice how the responses are honest ones, where people would rather skip the
report than supply their real email address? The target demographic are tech
savvy, so 90% of the leads are going to be 10MM email addresses.

The popularity of this thread illustrate that there is a need/use for this
content - so Cockroach nailed the bait, but have massively overshot the type
of trap required to convert these savvy mice.

~~~
chirau
That 10minutemail workaround is easy to block, just require a business domain
and a use a verification link.

~~~
adambyrtek
Like many similar problems, it's a cat and mouse game. For example, it's
equally easy to detect adblockers, but they are still really effective.

~~~
chirau
Cockroach is a DB company. Customer acquisition cost is in the thousands if
not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.

The steps I mentioned above are what, maybe a few hundred dollars. Trust me,
their lead generation pipeline most likely already subscribes to this and
utilizes it with minimal concern.

There are plenty of CRM tools that can flag out BS domains and/or low value
not worth it domains.

If you are a person who gets by using 10minuteemail, you are not their target
market. So will their target demographic.

The extra hop is very necessary for prevalidation. And they will be just fine
with it.

You on the other hand, being the cheapskate that you are, have to commit an
extra 5 minutes every time you generate these BS emails. Obviously you don't
value your time as much. And that is why, again, you are not the target market
because you extract no business value from accessing the knowledge they spent
time and money aggregating for you. Your getting the PDF is inconsequential to
both them and yourself.

So go ahead, no one really cares.

EDIT: Lol, you was not referring to you specifically, just the folks who think
they are being smart or outsmarting corps by using these services like
10minutemail or whatever it's called

~~~
maest
Your comment is particularly vitriolic.

I am squarely in their target demographic and yet refuse to provide my email.
I like keeping noise low in my work inbox - if I will decide I'd like to buy
something from cockroachDB, I'll approach them. It's purely negative value to
have them approach me - I have never received any useful messages by being on
a marketing list.

It takes way less than 5 minutes to generate a temporary email address.

Also, I fail to see how refusing to provide your email address correlates with
frugality. If anything, people who are cheapskates would be happy to pay with
anything but money.

------
otacketoc
They should also have included oracle which will soon surpass google (making
it 5th most popular) cloud

~~~
BossingAround
Surely, if we were including other clouds, we'd include IBM before Oracle...
:))

~~~
outworlder
I would add Alibaba Cloud before them too :)

------
CzarnyZiutek
google sponsored article.


Maximizing Iterations - konsl
http://mike.posterous.com/maximizing-iterations

======
wccrawford
And totally forgetting that more iterations isn't necessarily better. If you
push that to its limit, you can have an iteration ever second... And you'll
get absolutely nothing done in each one.


How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faster with one line of code - ronnoch
http://keyboardy.com/programming/html5-link-prefetching/

======
willwagner
Google already does this prefetch on some search results pages with the top
result. For instance, in firefox if you search for "hacker news":

<http://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+news>

there is a link element added to prefetch news.ycombinator.com.

      <link href="http://news.ycombinator.com/" rel="prefetch">

I assume if you aren't careful in your logs, you could be overestimating your
traffic.

~~~
daleharvey
wow I certainly didnt realise google were going this

I guess some people with top search results can infer some pretty accurate
stats from this.

------
WillyF
How will this affect web analytics? Let's say that Google chooses to prefetch
the #1 result for any given search term. Will the #1 ranking site's analytics
package report a unique visitor for every time that query is searched? If so,
that would be a serious problem for those who rely on analytics.

~~~
jeff18
It shouldn't affect Google Analytics and other JavaScript based analytics, but
from the article,

* If this becomes popular it has the potential to skew logs and stats. Consider what happens when a bunch of prefetch requests are made to one of your pages, but the user never actually visits the page. The server (or stats package) doesn’t know the difference.

To clear this up, Firefox sends along an HTTP header, X-moz: prefetch, but you
need some logic on the server side to detect it.

~~~
robgough
Do you just count the prefetch for what it is... a "maybe" page view. Or when
the browser shows the prefetched page can it send a "view" (or load it again
in the background - but that seems wasteful).

~~~
mseebach
You'll only get the "maybe" hit, and never the real hit, so you can't
accurately detect this on the serverside.

Javascript on the page isn't run until you actually visit the page, so that
will be unaffected.

I don't think this is a big issue since JS-analytics are already superior to
server-side log-analysis (caching alone).

------
invisible
This guy is deathly truthful: "Link prefetching will probably pop up in Opera,
Chrome and Safari soon, and in Internet Explorer sometime around 2020."

Neat little tidbit though, I'm interested in how this work with regard to the
cache control/expiry headers (for dynamic pages).

------
democracy
I would expect the browser-makers to allow more than 2-4 connections per host
- that would speed things up. This links-prefetching thing feels a bit dodgy
for both performance and security reasons.

~~~
lanaer
That, and I thought link rel="next" already existed… and had a more semantic
meaning than pre-fetching.

It (and its brother, rel="prev") are meant to inform the browser (which then
hopefully informs the user, but that never took off) of what the next or
previous page is (in contexts where that makes sense). Maybe it's the next
page of an article (evil!), or the next blog post in line. Whatever.

Anyway, this has been around for a while, even mentioned in this post from
2008: <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/06/21/minimalism>

So it's more accurate to say that Firefox likes to prefetch pages, and will
use <link rel="next"> tags to guide it. If you're going to be pre-fetching
pages anyway, that seems a reasonable enough way to decide what to fetch, but
I agree that I'd prefer pre-fetching to be off.

~~~
spc476
The Firefox extension "Link Widgets" also uses those to generate a menu bar
for the site (it also uses the rel="top", rel="up", rel="first" and
rel="last").

------
xeno42
This has been around for years - Load up mail-archive.com in Firefox 2 (for
example) and browse threads via Charles proxy or Fiddler so you can see what
it's requesting and you'll see it pre-fetching the next message in the thread
thanks to rel="next".

Does make it feel super-snappy though

------
ck2
Definitely block prefetch on your site, it completely screws up stats to save
the user 100ms of load time.

 _in .htaccess_

      RewriteCond %{X-moz} ^prefetch
      RewriteRule ^.* - [F]

~~~
mseebach
When did we decide that getting accurate serverside log-analysis is definitely
more important than saving 100ms of load time?

~~~
smiler
For people who want an accurate representation of the number of people
visiting their sites and the marketeers who would very much like correct data
too?

~~~
wfarr
JS Analytics

~~~
ck2
All client side analytics can be blocked.

Check out Ghostery for Firefox.

Only server-side is reliable.

~~~
mseebach
Not if someone caches your stuff.

------
wvenable
I can think of ways to abuse this already.

~~~
robryan
Anything that you couldn't really do firing off an ajax request after the page
loads?

~~~
blasdel
No same-origin-policy, since you can't access the data in the response, but
you could do that already with hidden iframes.

~~~
mseebach
You could stick hundreds of huge images forced to 1x1 px size.

Maybe the "annoy a minority of people with tight bandwidth-caps"-attack isn't
all that big of a threat.

------
nitrogen
Prefetching could explain the occasional log entries I've seen where the page
is retrieved by a modern, graphical browser (i.e. not lynx, links, elinks,
w3m), but no images or stylesheets are downloaded.


In Nomine Jobs, et Woz, et Spiritus Schiller - Hagelin
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/177715198/confessional
======
blasdel
I adore Merlin, but you'd have to be pretty epically stupid to upgrade _all 5
of your computers_ on day zero of the release before realizing that your
shit's broken. While you're supposed to be writing a productivity book. When
you knew that the release has no new features that affect you.

I guess someone has to lead the troll brigade (deserved or not) for every
major release of every major platform.

~~~
merlinmann
"Epically stupid" and "leading the troll brigade?"

Thank God you adore me, blasdel.

~~~
blasdel
It's better that you're the principal complainer at the moment than any of the
usual suspects -- like the greybeards at macintouch (still pining for OS9) or
the denizens of any of the Mac rumor forums (oh no my themes and Haxies!) or
any of the surviving BBEdit users. You're doing a pretty good job of playing
the goat on Twitter too.

Given your usual quality of effort and the normal tone of your writing, it
took me several readings to realize that you weren't taking the piss!

Did you _really_ upgrade _every_ Mac you come in contact with? When you ran
into trouble why didn't you just revert to a backup?

------
scottjackson
I guess Merlin's argument taken to the extreme is that Apple should wait until
every piece of software written for a Macintosh computer is SL-compatible
before they release Snow Leopard? "Well, I don't want to go that far -- I just
want the apps that I _use_ to be compatible", you might say. That's not fair
unless you consider all of the apps that _everyone_ uses and wait for those to
be compatible. Very quickly we get closer to needing every app to be working
again.

Upgrades can be bumpy. I lost a Dashboard widget that I use a lot (and didn't
get upgraded until today), a few Preference Panes are a bit buggy, and my
Safari plugins are totally f'd (since Safari64 can't load 32-bit plugins, I
believe. I could be wrong, though -- ask John Siracusa). Yes, Merlin probably
shouldn't have had TextMate and Photoshop crash on him. But at the same time,
this _is_ point-oh software -- I guess that in 2009, that means we should take
it with a grain of salt.

By the by: I can't imagine that Apple releasing Snow Leopard a month ahead of
schedule was a good thing for developers ( == 1 less month to Snow Leopard-
proof their applications). I wonder if that is a contributing factor to the
mountain of problems that people are having.


How to Improve Security Awareness of Software Engineers - forty
https://blog.dashlane.com/sstic-2019-improve-security-awareness-of-software-engineers/
======
yogesch
Perhaps test teams could include a security sub-team as well..

So, for example, if a tester is working on whether the file upload feature is
done right, another tester could start uploading known malicious files to see
how they get handled.


What the hell is the point of facebook? - annoyed
http://hollywoodphony.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/what-the-hell-is-the-point-of-facebook/

======
annoyed
it's a way to let a certain set of people express themselves, a translation of
a social process to the internet. while some of us have outgrown it, we
haven't forgotten what it was like for us: phones, chat rooms, geocities.


Just a though - tjaldur

What would happen with NSA`s internet surveillance system, if the trigger words or terms , where found in all Emails worldwide  ?
======
ksatirli
My first thought would be that AWS' GovCloud would explode because of all the
new instances being started...

~~~
tjaldur
:) would be nice :)


The impact on middleware of expanding APIs with Go's interface smuggling - zdw
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoMiddlewareVsInterfaceSmuggling
======
nickcw
I had a lot of problems with this in rclone.

Rclone has backends which connect to cloud providers. These all implement a
common interface. So far so good.

However some cloud providers can implement optional features, say a server
side copy of an object.

Rclone used to use interface upgrades to discover these. Still so far so good.

However rclone has backends which wrap other backends, for example the crypt
backend which encrypts file names and data.

This backend has to implement all the optional features - you want to be able
to server side copy an encrypted file if possible.

The problem comes when the crypt backend wraps another backend which does not
support server side copy.

What rclone used to do here is return a special not implemented error. This
works, but isn't ideal because you have to call the method to find out if it
is supported and often you'd like to know before that.

I eventually gave up on interface upgrades and resorted to good old function
pointers which you can check against nil. When the crypt backend starts up it
finds out whether the backend it is wrapping supports server side copies and
if not nils the pointer.

A little bit of reflection removed the boiler plate for this and it turned out
quite neatly.

If instead there was a way for crypt to remove methods from its method set
then that would be a better solution.

------
_old_dude_
The same problem was discovered 15 years ago in Java :)

The first attempt to fix it was to use dynamically generated proxies. The
IAdaptable mechanism proposed by Ken Beck is an example of that for Eclipse
[1].

This was ultimately fixed by introducing default methods which is as
restricted way of implementing Traits [2] in Java 8.

I guess Go will have to follow a similar direction.

[1]
[https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_use_IAdaptable_and_IAd...](https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_use_IAdaptable_and_IAdapterFactory%3F)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trait_(computer_programming)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trait_\(computer_programming\))

~~~
lmz
Why stop at Java? Isn't this solved by IUnknown's QueryInterface from COM?

~~~
jmull
Right... for people who don't know, QueryInterface was the fundamental method
client code would call on a COM object to get a particular interface.

The key here, is the object can implement this any way it wants.

A typical "static" object would just return itself as the requested interface
for the interfaces it supported. But a proxy object, with a wrapped upstream
object, could pass through requests for interfaces it didn't know or need to
override to the upstream object.

I don't know Go, but a quick google makes me think type assertion is the
mechanism for getting an interface from an object at runtime. So if Go allowed
a type to override type assertion, I think that should enable middleware and
other proxy objects to behave well.

------
i_have_to_speak
> People can work around this for HTTP middleware because they can make files
> build only on specific minimum versions of Go. Your package doesn't have
> this magical power; it's something available only for new APIs in the Go
> standard library.

It is indeed possible to add build constraints to .go files to have them
included for compilation only on specified minimum versions of Go, see [1]

[1] [https://golang.org/pkg/go/build/#hdr-
Build_Constraints](https://golang.org/pkg/go/build/#hdr-Build_Constraints)

~~~
randomdata
That's what your quote says. However, what it also says is that functionality
is only available for Go versions, and therefore Go standard library versions.
It is not functionality available around third-party libraries that are
developed independently of the Go release cycle.

------
DougBTX
Hopefully generics will help with this, if the middleware can deal with T then
the calling code can “smuggle” whatever types it wants because it controls T.

------
kstenerud
This is what happens when you design in a vacuum, ignoring the lessons learned
by those who came before you.

I know, every language suffers from this to some degree, but somehow it feels
like go gets bitten a lot more than the others (except maybe PHP).

~~~
throwaway894345
You have to compare everything on balance. By not setting out to reinvent Java
or C++ or whatever from data 0, Go doesn’t have a lot of features that chafe
developers on a daily basis. But yeah, it means it sometimes misses a feature
for some use case. But even then those use cases are often marginal, and
omitting the feature is often a better design decision. I’m pretty happy with
where Go landed—I’m glad it doesn’t look like C++ or Java or C# even if those
languages have some cool features. I think _on balance_ Go is an incredibly
productive language that performs well on almost all criteria even if it isn’t
top of class in any (except simplicity and perhaps developer velocity).

~~~
Brian_K_White
You already said that.


Why does Microsoft not have free food like Google and Facebook? - knowbody
http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Microsoft-not-have-free-food-like-Google-and-Facebook/answer/Amin-Ariana?share=1

======
tired_man
Given a choice, I'd rather not have a company provided/subsidized meal. It's a
taxable benefit.


Fines Remain Rare Even as Health Data Breaches Multiply - dthal
http://www.propublica.org/article/fines-remain-rare-even-as-health-data-breaches-multiply

======
specialist
Article doesn't explain why: All data is stored as plaintext. Including all
demographic data.

Because otherwise there is no way to match patient records across our (USA)
heterogenous IT systems.

The two possible technical fixes are

#1 Centralization, where every patient is issued an UUID (aka MRN, PID), their
demographic data is hidden, and UUID is used to retrieve medical data (ala
Translucent Databases).

#2 Individualization, where every patient "carries" around their own medical
data.

We can discuss the social, cultural, bureaucratic, workflow hurdles to either
of these solutions, if this thread gets traction.

FWIW, I designed and implemented 5 regional health care exchanges 2007-08.


Ask HN: Should one avoid using niche technologies for a startup? - zaph0d

I am doing a startup with a small tech. team. We would like to use cutting-edge technologies like Clojure, Erlang, node.js, etc. which are not really mainstream but help in rapid application development and iteration.
The problem here is that in case of a potential acquisition by another company, the deal might get canceled because the technology we used is non-mainstream, and the acquiring company might face a lot of problems in maintaining the code-base.
So the question here is how do you deal with such issues? Should one compromise speed of development now in favour of an easy acquisition path tomorrow? How do you convince the `elders' in your startup about this?
======
davidw
This site would not exist and none of us would be here had pg not been
successful with Viaweb, which utilized Lisp. I think that PG and company were
probably bright enough that things would have worked out with other
technologies too, but Lisp made them happy and more productive, I guess.

~~~
paulgb
"Did it alarm some potential acquirers that we used Lisp? Some, slightly, but
if we hadn't used Lisp, we wouldn't have been able to write the software that
made them want to buy us. What seemed like an anomaly to them was in fact
cause and effect."

\-- <http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html>

------
scottdrake
I can't tell you how many startups I've run across who are deperately looking
for programmers who know [insert cutting edge/obscure technology here].

Because they can't find anyone they like, they are stuck making bad/deperate
hires or with the prospect of rebuilding the codebase. The list of
technologies that are tough to hire for vary by market. In my midwest market,
Rails still falls in that group and I know a ton of companies that can't find
the talent they need. Do your best to stick with the technology stack that has
the largest candidate pool in your market.

~~~
zaph0d
True, but that means we will have to stick to Java even though we are Lisp,
Python, Erlang guys here. That also means that we will have to muck around
with JavaEE crap even though we can build the same thing much faster using
something else; all this to be future proof.

~~~
NickPollard
I don't have any experience to back it up, but I'd say go for the technologies
you want to use: Good programmers can learn a new language pretty quickly,
whereas knowing whatever is language du jour doesn't make you a good
programmer. Hiring someone just because they know a framework doesn't really
strike me as a sensible hiring strategy.

There might not be as many Clojure programmers as Java Programmers, but
there's probably a higher proportion of good programmers working in Clojure
than Java. Hire whoever you can find who is technically able, passionate about
tech and your idea, and I'd wager they will pick it up pretty damn quick.

------
icey
I don't think acquisition will be as much of an issue as recruiting employees
will.

If you think you can find people to work for your company who either know
those languages or can learn them quickly enough to not kill your productivity
or your product, then go for it. Otherwise, you may want to think about making
some tradeoffs (i.e. node.js over Erlang because you're going to be far more
likely to find competent js devs than Erlang devs.)

Most acquisitions end up with the founding team contracted to transition for a
year or three; during that time the acquiring company either rewrites the IP
or ends up with enough qualified people to take it over.

------
prosa
The best path forward is the one that lets you iterate easily and bring a
product to market as quickly as possible. Until you have validated your MVP
with customers you are burning cash with the risk of zero return.

When and if (and it's a BIG if) companies are expressing interest in acquiring
your technology, you can sort out whether you'll need to rewrite portions as
part of a deal. But far more likely is that the product will pivot at least to
some degree, and you'll be thankful that you're using technology that you can
comfortably and quickly modify.

------
jswinghammer
It's probably wise to use a more common framework. Even if you are more
productive initially being able to hire people when you're off focusing on
some other aspect of the business is important too.

I'm not sure there is a huge productivity difference between the modern
frameworks unless you really know nothing about what you're getting into. I'd
choose something mainstream that you all know at least a little and can use
and then get to work.


OAuth of Fealty: Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond - jlees
http://m.bogost.com/blog/oauth_of_fealty.shtml

======
edwinnathaniel
Facebook Platform isn't the only offender.

Occasionally I found basic features on Facebook website just don't work. For
example: 2-3 days ago, I can't put description on my newly uploaded photo. I
have to complete the photo upload workflow, and then click the newly uploaded
photo on my album and edit the description.

Regression on basic feature.

I suppose Facebook is just like any other companies with sharp growth: you
don't want to know what's inside it (or how the sausage is made). That boils
down to ship features and ignore everything else (documentation, good design,
good habit, better architecture, better quality, etc).

I'm not saying that's a very bad idea for them because I've seen this practice
a lot in our industry.

Having said that, this is one of the many reasons why young startups want to
hire the brightest and smartest engineers out of college: they need warm
bodies smart enough to move forward, to deal with legacy codebases and
figuring a clever (but may be dirty) hack to workaround the legacy design
decision, less on solving complex new problems. The latter may be reserved for
the infrastructure teams where people develop back-end infrastructure
component like Haystack or something along that line.

The recent "rant" stories/articles of the quality of Facebook Platform showed
us the same repeated story we've read before in the past and to confirm that
Facebook engineers were not way much better than Googlers or Yahoo or
Microsoft engineers.

~~~
rhizome
_Having said that, this is one of the many reasons why young startups want to
hire the brightest and smartest engineers out of college: they need warm
bodies smart enough to move forward, to deal with legacy codebases and
figuring a clever (but may be dirty) hack to workaround the legacy design
decision, less on solving complex new problems._

Wasn't it the brightest and smartest engineers who created these problems?

------
tjmc
What a great post. Given that Facebook's official motto is to "move fast and
break things", I've always considered developing on their platform akin to
contracting for the Marquis de Sade.

~~~
mathattack
I wouldn't have put it so eloquently, but relying on consistency in a rapidly
moving platform is risky.

------
MaxGabriel
While working with the Facebook iOS SDK was a horrible experience, I don't get
where this is coming from:

"Apple pushes new iOS releases...breaking software written relatively
recently"

Can this really be considered true? I can't remember anything deprecated that
didn't still function in iOS, with the exception of the UDID and mac address
APIs which were deprecated for privacy reasons (and developers have had ages
to move away from UDID). iOS 3 era code I download from Github still runs
fine. At worst, this summer Apple required apps to support the iPhone 5
format, but that's a pretty easy upgrade to support, and a major user facing
one.

~~~
ibogost
Admittedly, it's mostly lots of little things over the course of iOS updates,
small changes in the behavior of specific SDK packages rather than full-bore
failures. I may have overstated that point and it certainly pales in
comparison to FB. Still, you get the gist right?

~~~
MaxGabriel
Yeah I get the gist. Post definitely resonated for me and I've never written
anything that's totally on Facebook's platform, like Cow Clicker was.

------
mixmastamyk
Quote of the day:

"Facebook is like a kindergarten run by child molesters."

~~~
damian2000
I liked "The Facebook Platform is a shit crayon.".

------
thristian
Another reason to support federated social networking platforms like
[http://pump.io/](http://pump.io/) and [https://tent.io/](https://tent.io/)
that are outside the control of any individual company.

~~~
cbhl
I feel like these come and go every few years; look at StatusNet or Diaspora
for example.

Hell, I still remember when MSN tried to integrate with AIM and Y! messenger
by reverse-engineering the protocols and putting them into the MSN client.

~~~
PavlovsCat
status.net and diaspora are still here and working just fine... ?

~~~
percentcer
Can you really say a social network is working if nobody uses it?

~~~
PavlovsCat
Yes, I can. The networks work fine. If people need more than "this works fine,
it's free, and you can use it instead of the other way around" as a reason,
the people are broken.

20 years ago we hardly had cell phones and that was just _fine_ , if you
actually loved your Grandmother you'd always find a way to send her some baby
photos... and now we start to cry because Diaspora is kinda basic? Even though
that would change real quick if only 5% of the FB users would switch to it. I
think that's silly, so I for one am reachable by phone and email, and my
friends are always welcome to join me "on the actual web". Until then, I'm not
supporting them in their self-harm: for whatever reasons people use Facebook,
I try to avoid being one of them (edit: one of the reasons, that is).

------
mgkimsal
Unrelated

Did a small oauth project a few weeks back trying to integrate with web mail
providers - gmail, ymail and outlook.

Gmail was a bit of a pain, but basically worked.

Ymail - a much huger pain, and extra hoops and far less usable documentation
explaining basic workflow - "oauth" libraries continually failed me, and
_only_ using the crappy php4-style example code worked. At the end of the day,
it didn't come close to being easy to use (and required my users to jump
through extra hoops).

Outlook/microsoft webmail? Just didn't work at all . Oauth connectivity
worked, as easily as gmail, but they simply don't allow sending at all - no
access to the inbox at all. Oh sure I can 'download contacts!' but can't use
outlook/livemail to actually handle the sending programmatically.

It really hit me that as bad or potentially bad that google might be in this
space, they're 'winning' hearts and minds just because they're less bad than
the alternatives. I used to wonder why so many services and add-ons were built
on Google properties vs Yahoo and MS, but I wonder no more; Yahoo/MS just
don't want to compete in that space (making stuff at least usable for
developers). Facebook also seems to fall in to that camp, but right now they
don't have any major competition (except from G+ it seems). But FB still has
an upper hand with a full platform (however crappy). I suspect when G+ rolls
out stronger API stuff, the game will change dramatically.

------
ChuckMcM
I wish I could write rants as poetically as this.

------
kmfrk
Weird. The site has both a www- and non-www version:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141702).

------
sidcool
This is a very poetic post. I like it for its literary value.

------
dohertyjf
I laughed out loud at this:

The Facebook Platform is a shape-shifting, chimeric shadow of suffering and
despair, a cruel joke perpetrated upon honest men and women at the brutish
whim of bloodthirsty sociopaths sick with bilious greed and absent mercy or
decency. Developing for the Facebook Platform is picking out the wallpaper for
one's own death row holding cell, the cleaver for one's own blood sacrifice.

------
Camillo
I was thinking of making a Facebook chat client as a fun project, but this
post made me reconsider.

~~~
eksith
You can do something with Twitter instead. No reason to completely drop a
project if the first place you look to host it doesn't seem appealing.

Twitter has their share of warts, but they're markedly different when it comes
to the _speed_ of "breaking things".

Something to keep in mind though: You're working with someone else's platform
which means you participate at their pleasure. Any API provider can do
whatever they please with their product so try to decouple API handling from
the rest of your client as much as you can so you can reduce the likelihood of
being pulled by the tides.

~~~
mjn
The OAuth bit in the title of this post reminds me that that change broke one
of the author's previous projects on Twitter:
[http://www.bogost.com/blog/it_soared_a_bird.shtml](http://www.bogost.com/blog/it_soared_a_bird.shtml)

Twitter's responsibility does seem somewhat less, anyway, in that they've
never been as platformy as Facebook: Facebook actively claimed that this was a
place to deploy your games and other apps, but then broke stuff constantly.

------
gwern
The "resignation beyond sorrow" \- what a phrase! It's such a Kierkegaardian
phrase I was surprised to google it and find it was not an allusion but
original.

------
cygnus
"OAuth of Fealty: Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and
beyond" Would be a great metal song title.

------
Muzza
> "Here's a thing," young white dude founder blogs...

If he would've said black instead of white or dudette instead of dude, Hacker
News would have had this guy's header on a platter. Racists, the lot of you.

~~~
moomin
Nope, he's asserting that the founders come from privileged groups. Punching
up is acceptable, punching down is not.

~~~
specialist
Great metaphor. Stealing it. Thanks.

~~~
moomin
Thanks, but not mine. :) I think this may be the original:

[http://reasonableconversation.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/punch...](http://reasonableconversation.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/punching-
up/)

------
AsymetricCom
I'm surprised this article doesn't touch upon the unending hell that is
"OAuth" and "federated identity"

------
dpeterson
There is an excellent solution to the author's dilemma. He does not have to
use Facebook or its API. That's the great thing about capitalism and the free
market. He has a choice. Also, because he is not motivated by money, he can
make his own, perfect platform, motivated by the plight of the proletariat and
it will be noble and superior in every way. He can give away the games he
makes because who needs money in such a utopia... Give me a break. Shut up and
make a better API that cares about backward compatibility. Give the aloof
moral superiority a rest.

~~~
Gigablah
Interesting, I wasn't aware that capitalism and the free market absolves
everything from criticism.

~~~
dpeterson
Criticize Facebook. It sucks. However, arguing that it sucks because the
developers are privileged white dudes motivated by making money is not a valid
argument. The author even points to an example of a good api from Microsoft.
Do you really believe the developers at Microsoft back in the 90s weren't
motivated by making money? The Facebook API sucks for so many reasons.
Zuckerburg originally wrote Facebook in PHP, he was not a computer scientist
scientist, their motto is "move fast and break things". It's an experiment and
they made some mistakes. To imply its flaws are rooted in capitalism is wrong.
I realize profit and money are popular punching bags. It feels good to think
you are morally superior and have other people think you are a good person.
However, the hate and bile being spewed at anyone trying to make a buck is
irrational. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head telling them they have to
use Facebook. Go out and make something better.

~~~
mjn
I think you're reading some kind of general anti-capitalism into the post that
isn't there. Bogost's view seems to be that chasing _short-term_ profit is a
significant problem in this sector, which is why he uses Microsoft as a
counterexample of something that _was_ a profit-oriented business but still
managed to keep stable APIs, because they were oriented longer-term. If he
were trying to make a general anti-market or anti-capitalist point it would
make no sense for both his pro and con examples to be large for-profit tech
companies.


Lyrebird beta – Create your voice avatar - adbrebs
https://lyrebird.ai/blog/lyrebird-is-back
======
angersock
Why is this being built? Have we not had enough trouble with veracity of audio
and video already?

~~~
sotelo
It's important to make people realize that this technology is here. It's
impossible to stop the technological advances but at least we can reduce their
impact by making it well known.

------
brebs
This is amazing... I wonder how Obama feels about it !

------
fedora_batman
This is awesome :o


Show HN: PaletteList – Generate 10k color palettes after picking 2 colors - mattaus
https://www.palettelist.com/
======
mattaus
Hello Matt here, a friend of mine and myself built this website to make it
easy for developers and designers to find colors for your projects. It's built
with React and Ruby on Rails, hosted on Heroku. You can download palettes in
CSS, Sass, and SVG.

I was frustrated with current solutions so we built PaletteList.com. I also
built [https://materialpalette.com/](https://materialpalette.com/) for
Material Design colors. I hope you like it.


Scalable Work Queues with Beanstalk - igrigorik
http://www.igvita.com/2010/05/20/scalable-work-queues-with-beanstalk/

======
mattrepl
There are some tasks, such as asynchronously-generated web content, where a
message queue is the obvious solution. But there are a class of problems where
either a message queue or batch processing system (e.g., Hadoop) could be
used. Consider the summation of user mention counts from the Twitter streaming
API for an example; either a job is put on a queue for each tweet containing a
mention, or each of the mentioning tweets are thrown into a bucket that is
used as the source for a batch job that recurrently executes.

From what's mentioned in the article, it sounds like some of the tasks that
Beanstalk is being used for at PostRank are the same type of tasks that other
companies, such as FlightCaster, are doing with Hadoop/Cascading.

The trade-off seems to be that message queues are more flexible and can offer
lower latency of job completion but batch processing systems provide better
support for admin concerns like adding worker nodes, debugging, and reporting.

~~~
igrigorik
"From what's mentioned in the article, it sounds like some of the tasks that
Beanstalk is being used for at PostRank are the same type of tasks that other
companies, such as FlightCaster, are doing with Hadoop/Cascading."

Hmm, not at all. A message queue and a job queue are not necessarily one and
the same. What we need is real-time scheduling, with up to the second
resolution for each job. We don't run a batch "go fetch all of these pages"
jobs, rather our system is always running, always fetching content. For that,
a heap/work queue is required.

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mattrepl
I've enjoyed reading your posts over the years, thanks for them.

You're correct that a message queue isn't necessarily a job queue, I was
referring to job queues.