Ask HN: What is your goto stack when building a MVP and why? - <AUTHOR> I've been fiddling with a idea sometime and I want to turn it into a product. I first want to build a MVP. I can't make a decision stack I am going to use. I find it difficult to make the difference between taking too much and too little account of an untenable and scalable 'future'.<p>Do you consider SQL for your data layer or settle for NoSQL solution, or maybe for something like firebase? How do you think serverless functions can contribute to a MVP? <comment><USER2> Web app: Django+Postgres+Bootstrap locally done with Docker, deployed with Heroku.

With Django you get a lot straight out of the box, including: user management, admin dashboards. For an 1 or 2 person built MVP I wouldn't even bother with a JS frontend, just Django forms & Bootstrap templates and full HTTP/POST forms. It simplifies everything and removes a point of failure.

You can get a solid functional system working very, very quickly. Which you can deploy to Heroku for $0 while you iterate, which can be converted to production ready system for as under $50/month depending on what you need.

Desktop: Python+Qt - but thats old and probably bad advice in 2019.

<comment><USER3> Just curious, what are better alternatives to desktop apps? And why is python + Qt bad?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I were you I'd use the stack you are most comfortable with if it can satisfy your requirements.

Otherwise choose what would be easiest to learn. E.g. if you know python but not web python, learn a python web framework instead of moving to NodeJS.

I'd probably keep it simple for an MVP and use a cloud managed SQL database, a popular stack like rails or something equivalent and use minimal client side JS (not a SPA) because that'll reduce your time to getting it done.

Use cloud services to save you headaches as much as possible: managed databases, VMs preloaded with Linux. Cheat by chucking cloudflare in front of it to get SSL, unless your cloud can do the letsencrypt for you.

Avoid Kubernetes, docker, nosql, lambdas and anything else that'll complicate things.

You want a monolithic crud app that serves up HTML like it's 2006.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rails + Postgres for MVP. Very quick to prototype (you can build a CRUD app with a few commands) and fairly flexible. Then when you want to scale you can add a JS framework if you need and use Rails for the API piece.

</comment><comment><USER6> For me it's Elixir + Phoenix because it's what I build fastest with. While it's not the very most performant stack in the world, it's built for scaling and can handle far more users than anything I've built with has gotten.

Usually for the MVP, I'll just stick with a traditional back-end MVC app and take advantage of all the Phoenix generators. As it gets a bit bigger, I might bring in Vue components on specific pages.

Once an app is really getting larger, I might bring in TypeScript on the front-end. I pretty much stick with Postgres the whole way unless there's a really compelling reason to do otherwise.

Disclosure: I run [https://alchemist.camp](https://alchemist.camp), which teaches Elixir and Phoenix, but this screencasting project was the _result_ of how much value I found in using Elixir for my last startup, not the reason I'm a fan of it now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Heroku Postgres + Heroku + Any framework that you are comfortable with

For me, it's Play + Vue (shameless plug: [https://github.com/GIVESocialMovement/sbt- vuefy](https://github.com/GIVESocialMovement/sbt-vuefy)).

The real time sink is not development. It's ops. Configuring server, making sure it's secure and online at all time, rotating logs, backing up database regularly, no-downtime deployment.

I'm using SQL because it's more flexible than a NoSQL solution. You don't need to plan in advance how to model your data. Just add a new index, and it works decently enough. I can also modify data without building a specialized admin UI.

</comment><comment><USER8> Mostly pick one with a big community that other are using for quick prototypes. And (as others have said) ignore scaling unless scale is what you are prototyping. Use SQL to start. (MySQL/PostGres/Etc..) It's better to denormalize if you need scale then have to normalize noSQL data if needed at the app layer (maybe that's up for debate?).

C#/.net It's the one I know the best and supported for both fast prototyping (.net MVC apps) and scale [Linux and Windows]. Desktop Apps / Mobile / AWS Lambda etc... I use MSSQL for my data, but have used MySQL in the past.

</comment><comment><USER9> Clojure is great for fast prototyping I usually start with Boot + System [https://github.com/danielsz/system](https://github.com/danielsz/system) and the holy grail: [https://github.com/danielsz/system#the-holy- grail](https://github.com/danielsz/system#the-holy-grail) It is a full-stack template with hot-reloading on both sides.

<comment><USER10> I've been wanting to learn clojure for a while but for someone in webdev who never coded in a functional style, I never could grasp it. Do you have any good resource to start with clojure?

<comment><USER11> Try this: [https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and- true/](https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Phoenix + Postgres, railsy enough to get it done quick and room enough to take the same codebase to a million user throughput. I wouldn't have it any other way.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that GraphQL did not come up.

For me, the fastest and most fun is: Postgres + Postgraphile (generates a GraphQL server based on your PG schema), with Vue/Nuxt on the Frontend. Use Dokku on a DigitalOcean droplet for the backend, and Netlify for the frontend.

I am not a professional developer, though. I found the combo above really fun, simple, and easy to work with.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would highly recommend completely ignoring scalability for your MVP. Choose tech you enjoy writing/learning.

Right now you don't have enough info to make a good performance decision, so you might as well choose a stack that will encourage you to complete the project.

As you learn more about the task, you will be able to decide what kind of tech makes the most sense.

</comment><comment> d--b JS + node + whateverDB.

You'll need javascript for the frontend, so that's a given. Since you're using javascript, you might as well still use it for the backend. Node with express.js is super simple/fast to deploy and will scale ok.

For the database, just pick the one you're most familiar with...

</comment><comment><USER15> I have a saas sideline I have been selling for 10 years. Some time ago I settled with the toro php router, mysql, jquery and bootstrap. I do most of my coding in Sublime over ssh i.e. my test sites live in containers on a little core2duo desktop. Each container has it's own Sublime. I can spin up any sublime, from any project, from any machine on my lan. As it's internal go for a weak but performant ssh cipher or you will get too much latency. Copies of the same containers are used in the live environment. I have a container running Gitlab for versioning.

The core2duo box cost £25 and I love it. It's also a file/plex server. Duckdns has also been a great friend. As well as nginx, lets encrypt and basic auth. Keeping in mind this is my test system.

<comment><USER16> You might want to replace that core2duo with an ivy bridge laptop or a similar device, which you could find for ~£50 (maybe with a broken screen). The power consumption will drop by more than half.

But if you don't run the system 24/7 then it's not worth it.

<comment><USER15> Funny you mention power as it was on my mind recently. The box hits 60w at full use so it is not a major concern.

I would be more concerned leaving a laptop power supply on 24/7\. I'm not sure if my concern is unfounded, what do you think?

<comment><USER16> Assuming that it's well built (i.e. it comes from a major manufacturer and it's not a cheap Chinese product), that worry is completely unfounded.

A modern power adapter is at its core just a transformer and a regulator. Three transformer itself is a passive device, it's the regulator that will use a bit of power that will turn into heat, but any well built one will have no risk of overheating. The heat is proportional to how much power the laptop is using, (i.e. under how much load it is on average).

Modern laptops use very little power, so I'd say there is little cause for concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use mongodb, I found it is quick for prototyping. But I'm worried about race conditions, because I think its transaction is limited. But for my current stage (MVP), it seems to be fine.

I might eventually switch to postgresql, but I don't know how to deal with data migration once my database changes. I want the program design to be stabilized first.

I will not use firebase, it will be very expensive. I have tried aws lambda once to create myself an email redirect service. I found it hard to debug.

</comment><comment><USER18> We were planned to use these technologies to build our MVP with scale-up in mind too: Instead of OpenID and JWT we wanted to use Redis. For front-end: React.js + ES6. For back-end: PHP 7 (Laravel 5+) and Phyton 3. For the database: MySQL 8 (MySQL improved a lot after this version) + Redis. Flutter for MVP. And Kotlin and Swift for the final product.

But I decided to build our MVP with ODOO ERP and CMS to test and then when is needed develop our own product.

What do you think about this?

</comment><comment><USER19> Gatsby starter + Firebase For Mobile: react native + firebase

People always complain about Firebase being expensive, but how many apps really make it to that phase that it becomes?

</comment><comment><USER20> Plain HTML, PHP I learned 10 years ago and a text file for a database, as simple as possible or else I will lose interest before getting my environment even setup.

</comment><comment><USER21> C++ and postgress. In theory it should be the worst choice for fast prototyping. No interactive development like lisp. Forces types on you. No awesome web framework.

But I'm so familiar with the language and tool chains I can prototype extremely rapidly. With just a few minimal sane decisions, the prototype can be "web scale" buzzword compliant.

</comment><comment><USER22> I haven't seen Meteor.js mentioned here yet, which is a shame. It's great for quickly building out MVPs due to their out-of-the-box real-time functionality.

Things can get a bit bogged down once there are a certain number of components that chain update each other and Meteor still primarily uses Mongo, but neither should be a problem for a MVP.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you don't know what to use. Use Javascript

<comment><USER24> I'm a Python/C++ programmer and I think this is good advice. There are a lot of JavaScript programmers around, JS engines are fast and the tooling is great. I have rarely had an opportunity to share frontend and backend code, but it does happen.

If I were starting a new product I'd look into TypeScript. Haven't used it, but I hear a lot of "I tried it and it was a clear improvement" which I think is a good sign. I would also look into whatever the big companies are pushing as their storage layer of choice, though I'm normally a Postgres guy. Would give me peace of mind to still talk to it with SQL though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nginx- unicorn- rails - MySQL + redis

Everything is crud so rails with percona is nice and scalable and easy to deploy.

Redis solves all the unsolvable problems... locking, queuing, caching, magic kittens, and it's easy to operate at scale

Nginx - makes it easy to have a robust front end for serving up css / js / images with http2

Unicorn is just nice way to run rails apps

</comment><comment><USER26> Web: Create React App for the front-end and NodeJS+ExpressJS+MongoDB/MySQL for the backend. Any MVP could be delivered under one week.

On the other hand - I really love what other folks saying. As for myself, I'm thinking about trying out some Django/Rails setups

</comment><comment><USER27> I've recently re-discovered Google app engine, together with firestore for any persistence it's truly a low friction MVP environment.

I usually use it together with go and Vue for the frontend.

</comment><comment><USER28> Digital Ocean droplet with LAMP stack. Lumen for the API and Web components with Polymer for the front-end

</comment><comment><USER29> We're building a new tool which makes it really easy to build backends, and MVPs are particularly easy. We literally built someone's product with them during a one hour onboarding earlier. [https://darklang.com](https://darklang.com) (or email me: email@example.com)

<comment><USER30> I can't find any code syntax examples on the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Node.js(If needed) + jQuery + Theme + Firebase & Heroku deploys

</comment><comment><USER32> HTML, Bootstrap and GitHub Pages.

</comment><comment><USER33> No-one using React?

<comment><USER34> Can someone explain why OP is downvoted?

I'm new to react and thought it would be used in MVP's.

Can someone explain please

<comment><USER35> Most likely because developing a web app using a react frontend and an API backend adds a significant amount of work for arguably little to no benefit, especially not at MVP stage.</comment></comment></comment>


'Intelligent people are more likely to trust others' - <AUTHOR> http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_releases_for_journalists/140312.html <comment><USER2> I don't still have the link, but this reminds me of a conversation I read where people were speculating that intelligent people are more likely to take strange ideas seriously and sometimes believe them, because they're good enough at telling good ideas from bad ideas that they have less need for a blanket policy against weird ideas. (Examples: transhumanism, cryptocurrency) If this holds, then intelligent people trusting others more is a specific case of intelligent people trusting their own judgement more.

Of course, conspiracy theories also fall under "strange ideas", and I don't _think_ being a conspiracy theorist correlates with high intelligence (but I may be wrong).

<comment><USER3> I reckon there's probably a correlation between the people who are obsessed by cryptocurrency (in its current incarnation as BTC) that are also conspiracy theorists though...

<comment><USER2> Ooh, point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Causality might go the other way though - if you are able to trust others growing up WITHOUT being hurt by it, devoting less brain power to suspicion and verifications may allow one to grow more intelligent.

Observational studies are never a recipe for action - just food for thought.

<comment><USER5> Not necessarily that they "grow more intelligent", but I think you have a good overall point.

Another way of saying it is "Intelligent people are able to take bigger risks".

<comment><USER4> What I was saying is "People who have been able to successfully take bigger risks (and still do) become more intelligent" is a possible explanation: This is the _converse_ of what you are saying. Well, I was limiting the "risks" to trusting others, but if I were to use your words, that would be my statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What exactly is "intelligent people" again? It just sums up to an IQ score?

It's naive to treat "intelligence" as a simple number. There are SO MANY skills related to 'human intelligence' and yet these studies fail to give a more closer look of what they mean with "intelligence" and how this affect the outcome.

I hate when, in those studies, they promote a set people as "intelligent" and start to research how these special category performs in simple aspects of everyday life, things like "trust others", "live longer"[1] or "use more drugs"[2].

[1] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/old-and- wise/](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/old-and-wise/) [2] [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific- fundament...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific- fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs)

<comment><USER7> It looks like intelligence was evaluated solely through two items: size of English vocabulary(?), and the subjective opinion of the interviewer.

Pretty much garbage, really.

"Our first measure of intelligence is a 10-word vocabulary test in which the respondent is asked to identify which of five phrases supplies the correct definition of a given word [24]. Despite its brevity, the test has a correlation of 0.71 with the Army General Classification Test, an IQ exam developed by the U.S. Military [25]. In addition, there is abundant psychometric evidence that individuals with higher IQs have larger vocabularies [26], [27]. Prior to taking the vocabulary test, the respondent is told the following by the interviewer [24]: "We would like to know something about how people go about guessing words they do not know. On this card are listed some words–you may know some of them, and you may not know quite a few of them. On each line the first word is in capital letters–like BEAST. Then there are five other words. Tell me the number of the word that comes closest to the meaning of the word in capital letters. For example, if the word in capital letters is BEAST, you would say "4" since "animal" come closer to BEAST than any of the other words. If you wish, I will read the words to you. These words are difficult for almost everyone–just give me your best guess if you are not sure of the answer." The respondent is assigned a score between 0 and 10, corresponding to the number of words she defined correctly.

"Our second measure of intelligence is an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. The interviewer notes down whether the respondent's understanding of the survey questions was "good", "fair" or "poor" [24]. We refer to our first measure as 'verbal ability' and our second measure as 'question comprehension'. The Pearson correlation between these two variables is 0.37 (p<0.001), meaning that they are moderately positively correlated. The strength of their correlation is depicted in Table 1, a simple cross-tabulation. It indicates that 98% of those scoring 10 out of 10 in the vocabulary test have a good understanding of the survey questions, yet only 36% of those scoring 0 out of 10 have a good understanding of them."

<comment> barry-cotter WORDSUM has a 70% correlation with real, designed by psychometricians IQ tests. Garbage it is not.

 _The correlation between adult IQ and WORDSUM = 0.71. The source for this number is a 1980 paper, The Enduring Effects of Education on Verbal Skills._

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum- iq/#....](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum- iq/#.UyczfstwaAg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This kind of makes sense, to me at least.

In terms of evolution, brains build out from the center 'older' parts, outward. Newer parts of the brain can override behaviors of older parts.

Reptilian brain (Trust nothing) -> Mammalian brain (Trust family) -> Primate brain (Trust clan) -> Human brain (Trust all those who may help) ->

Trusting is probably a very computationally demanding system of the brain. However, if one is able to trust wisely, one may also expand one's fitness.

</comment><comment><USER9> Though it has some issues, it's an interesting concept. Essentially, not having to worry about other people screwing you over let's you focus on other things.

That'd be similar to how those with financial troubles (i.e. the poor) seem to show less effective IQ in some studies. Worrying about money, how to make the rent, how to pay for X or Y, sucks brainpower from other activities. This is interesting, particularly in our community because some startups attribute their success to financial pressure. Maybe the effects are different depending on duration. Or maybe it's because the startups believe their situation is a matter of choice (they joined a startup) and they have the power to change while those who are in a perpetual state of poverty have fallen into some state of learned helplessness and thus feel powerless in changing their situation.

Though not completely accurate, a simple way to think about is in the context of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

At the very least, it's fun to think about.

</comment><comment><USER7> This study is worthless unless it controls for class. We already know that educated people are more likely to be supportive of the status quo and credulous towards claims from established authorities. We also know that they tend to be healthier and happier, due to the financial rewards resulting from the former behavior.

<comment><USER10> > due to the financial rewards resulting from the former behavior.

I agree, but not with your cause and effect.

Educated/wealthy people benefit and have benefited ( _hugely_ ) from the status quo. Therefore they have a positive interest in preserving the status quo.

It is not surprising that people without access to education and wealth have less trust and support for the establishment - this is a purely rational response.

<comment><USER7> My cause and effect was definitely editorial, but I think the process of becoming educated is a process of assimilating into the status quo, and thereby the middle class. As such, I think it's largely selecting people who do what they're told.

Educated people are not necessarily benefiting at all from the status quo _before_ they become educated. They may have worked their way through all kinds of adversity to achieve that education. That they _now_ benefit from the status quo (that they invested in) would be why those people would want to preserve it, not because they always benefited from it.

I agree with you that it's totally rational.

<comment><USER10> > Educated people are not necessarily benefiting at all from the status quo > before they become educated.

We're disagreeing here only because I believe that social status/education is largely a function of your parents' status, and their influence, rather than of your grit.

You benefit from the status quo if your parents benefit from the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another link on this topic: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/)

Essentially, the hypothesis goes that the smarter you are, the less you trust your intuition--even when it's right.

</comment><comment><USER12> An entry in a database that powers a website aiming relaxed, 'trustworthy' (it's "voted" up by your "peers" in a "democratic" way!) content at a certain segment of the population who create sophisticated tools that manipulate both first world and to a lesser extent global society en-masse suggested passively that its readers were intelligent and that their trust in their environment, notably including their employers and investors, was well placed.

Meanwhile, Dr. Evil atop the US megaplex looked on, powered by mass-psychology and post-WWII Nazi science, snickering at the simple fools stupid enough to buy his cut-rate strategically Monday-launched commercial PR company output, all the while expanding his coffers and political influence.

Well, what degree of back-slapping do _you_ require?

</comment><comment><USER13> "Ricardo's Difficult Idea"[1] (comparative advantage is available to all countries with free trade) is an example of an idea that sounds stupid on its face that must (on reflection and examination of the evidence) be true. Only a minority even of educated people believe in comparative advantage, but it is indeed an idea that can be the basis of expanded social trust.

[1] [http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm](http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm)

<comment><USER14> > an idea that sounds stupid on its face

It still sounds stupid on its face. As I recall, Ricardo said England produced textiles, and Portugal produced wine, and both countries were each economically better off for their own specialization.

Joan Robinson revisited this idea a century later and asked, how did that turn out economically for Portugal, which remained a backward, agriculturally based nation while England began an industrialization program, partly based around the industrialization of its textile industry?

<comment><USER13> The late Joan Robinson produced some interesting writings[1] but there are few economists indeed who credit her with proving Ricardo wrong about comparative advantage. That's because in fact her writings about Ricardo's ideas focused on different issues, and Ricardo was and is right that each party in free trade enjoys comparative advantage in trade with the other party. Economic growth through free trade has been the path to prosperity for Taiwan (where I have lived), Hong Kong (where I have visited more than once), and quite a few other countries all around the world. Portugal's economy during the years she studied was not characterized by following Ricardo's advice.

[1] [http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Robinson.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Robinson.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was hoping to see something along the lines of "Intelligent people take time in stereotyping or judging people until sufficient data is collected. Hence initially they trust what people say at face value. This obviously depends on what sort of information they are dealing with. If its something that logically sounds ridiculous at face value itself(which less intelligent people cannot calculate so quickly), they dont believe the person even if its an initial conversation. But if its some trivial gossip/anecdote which doesn't hugely affect their choices in future, then they go ahead trusting the person." Personal example, if I hear some gossip about 3rd person, the conclusions drawn from that gossip about the character of that person doesnt affect my future interaction with him. I need to collect more data than few gossips to stereotype someone. On the other hand, in this case I am NOT trusting gossips because I am aware of their nature and people producing them.

Research says that intelligent people instinctively know whom to trust or not which I am not so sure about. I have seen people who are extremely bad at thinking about problems like maths, physics or algorithms in general but brilliant at analyzing people. So we need more evidence on this I guess.

</comment><comment><USER16> In essence, they vaguely measure communication skills (the title summarizes this as "intelligence"):

"Our first measure of intelligence is a 10-word vocabulary test in which the respondent is asked to identify which of five phrases supplies the correct definition of a given word (...) Our second measure of intelligence is an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions (...)"

And they measure trust based on the anwer to:

"Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?"

I can't say I'm amazed with the results they get. People who can't communicate well probably misinterpret or misunderstand situations more often, and this affects their trust standards.

</comment><comment><USER17> No matter what the control for, these studies are very limited.

If they say that intelligence is correlated with X, if we like X we will say that this proves X is a good thing, and if we don't like X we will say that this proves intelligent people are not so "intelligent" after all. Put another way, it's so hard to do proper Bayesian updating on such loaded statements, they probably make people worse informed on average.

I'll end with a quote from Mohammad Ali being interviewed by Michael Parkinson:

Ali: [Animals don't race-mix so human's shouldn't either]

Parkinson: But we have intelligence

Ali: They don't have intelligence, but yet they stay together [with their own species], we should have more intelligence than them, right?

</comment><comment><USER18> The causal arrow may go B=>A on this one: A childhood environment which causes low IQ--malnutrition, toxins, other things that correlate with poor socioeconomic conditions--probably also teach children to mistrust others.

</comment><comment><USER19> The movie "Nebraska" played with this notion quite a bit, although it might have been inverted in the case of the main character. The most straightforward take was the behavior of Dave's cousins (who were portrayed as being dumb as hell). Despite being told numerous times in very plausible fashion that the prize wasn't real, they didn't believe that until they had committed crimes motivated by its presumed reality. Very entertaining!

</comment><comment><USER20> Intelligence seems orthogonal to the separate Big 5 factor of neuroticism, ie, prototypical security-industry hacker may not trust most people a priori (it seems it's usually very trusting || very untrusting). Perhaps they are a minority in aggregate, but being played for a fool seems like a deselectable vulnerability. Then again it's a soft science paper.

</comment><comment><USER21> Don't know how smart I am... but I often find that the pain of getting screwed over is worth the knowledge of whom to trust.

</comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps they're more confident that if they're betrayed by another party, they'll find a way to reverse or compensate for the consequences of whatever the other party did?

</comment><comment><USER23> Trust is required for a complex economy. Think if you had to verify _everything_ each and every time you exchanged something. You simply wouldn't get anywhere.

<comment><USER24> So by extension, it's probably fair to say intelligent people are more inclined to trust other people, because they understand distrust is intrinsically costly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So Albert Einstein was stupid for questioning Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation. Wow, an interesting studying from UK.

<comment><USER26> Either that or he was intelligent for trusting the works of Plank, Maxwell, Lorentz, etc. that demonstrated Newtonian physics was seriously lacking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't trust you. ;)

<comment><USER28> Proof that you're stupid? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In the words of discrete mathematics intelligence implies trusting behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER30> Alternate explanation coming from a person whose high intelligence is at the level that is, arguably, a curse.

There's trust in competence and trust in character. They're different (highly intelligent and competent people can have rotten ethical character) but people tend to conflate them, especially in the business world. We have a hard time believing that visibly competent or "credible" people might be liars.

Highly intelligent people are constantly being underestimated because they live in a world that's not really designed for them. There are all sorts of permissions systems and rules and rate-limits on career progress designed for people much slower and less capable than they are. The conclusion is that those systems and the prevailing _distrust_ they represent is useless and counterproductive.

Knowing that _they_ don't belong in the harnesses designed for "the slow kids", highly intelligent people tend to assume that _everyone_ deserves more trust than they are given by society. It isn't just a personal problem ("I'm too smart to be treated like a child") but a general one ("Who needs rules? Who needs management at all?") This biases them toward premature trust of others.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Those who score lower on measure of intelligence."

We know how well those work, don't we?

I know that unless I trust someone (say, my team) I won't get anything done, and that's enough of a reason to find people to trust.

But the implication of this study that this is directly the result of my intelligence, is actually insulting to my intelligence.

Are people who fall for scams highly intelligent? I'm not saying they're necessarily stupid, but people who fall for scams definitely "trust others" a bit too much.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm more likely to act as if I trust others, which is behaviorally very similar to trusting others. I don't, though.

</comment><comment><USER33> Maybe so original poster nreece... and maybe your father IS the king of a small African country that can get me a fantastic deal on a timeshare that will make my penis 4x larger, but you still can't have my banking information.

</comment><comment><USER34> I trust that the researchers of this study are too distrusting of all evidence to the contrary.</comment>


EFF Sues to Invalidate FOSTA, an Unconstitutional Internet Censorship Law - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eff-sues-invalidate-fosta-unconstitutional-internet-censorship-law <comment><USER2> Many legal sex workers have been hit by the takedown of sites like Backpage(1) and its sister cracker(2). These sites were the primary sources to advertise or find their services. It was heavily used by independent sex workers.

1\. [https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/7-sex-workers-on-what-it- mean...](https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/7-sex-workers-on-what-it-means-to- lose-backpage.html)

2\. [https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/sex- work...](https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/sex-workers-in- australia-say-american-law-is-creating-devastating-losses-back-home/news- story/09139a2f0d631cd7284090d2336ca517)

<comment><USER3> Yes, and they will have to "suffer" so that the scum owners of backpage who actively promoted child sex trafficking can no longer make millions selling children.

If platforms keep child sex traffickers off their sites they won't get touched. If they don't they will get shut down.

It really isn't that hard.

<comment><USER4> But FOSTA doesn't make it illegal for sites to promote child trafficking specifically, it makes it illegal for a site to promote any prostitution.

<comment><USER3> Here is the text: [https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr1865/BILLS-115hr1865enr...](https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/hr1865/BILLS-115hr1865enr.pdf)

FOSTA does make it explicitly illegal to operate a web site "with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person" ... but that is not new. It has always been illegal to _intentionally_ promote prostitution.

The EFF said the same thing arguing against FOSTA: that there was no need for a new criminal statute because existing criminal statutes already covered the same conduct.

The substantive change with FOSTA is: "CIVIL RECOVERY.—Any person injured by reason of a violation of section 2421A(b) may recover damages and reasonable attorneys' fees in an action before any appropriate United States district court."

Before prostitutes couldn't sue a pimp because they were engaged in illegal activity (same reason a drug user can't sue a drug dealer). Criminalizing prostitution creates a legal immunity for pimps.

FOSTA changes that and now anyone who gets pimped on any of these escort sites can sue the owners. That is what will put them out of business. Not any police action.

A lot of liars out there spreading false info about how this is "bad for sex workers" ... but pimps are good at lying so that should be no surprise.

<comment><USER5> You didn't really answer the question posed to you by OP. You just crowed about how awesome it is to be able to sue backpage now.

This doesn't specifically target child-prostitution. It easily could have, but doesn't. It targets all sex-work, which does have consequences.

So if the (I'm assuming) tiny fraction of child-prostitution is moved elsewhere (probably pimping them on the streets) then the grown adult sex- workers are now being forced to maybe go work for a pimp in dangerous situations vs. being independent and in control of when, where, and who they work with.

This law could very easily have been worded to make these companies responsible for any child-prostitution, but let adults be responsible for themselves.

<comment><USER3> > You didn't really answer the question posed to you by OP

I very specifically answered that first. Intentional promotion of prostitution has always been criminal. FOSTA didn't change that, which the EFF repeatedly said themselves when they were arguing against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IANAL, but do the plaintiffs actually have standing to sue given that they have not been charged under the act? The problems seem to stem from uncertainty and ambiguity in how people think the law may be enforced, not based on any actual enforcement.

<comment><USER7> Good question. (I am a lawyer but this is not legal advice.)

As recently as 2014, the Supreme Court held that "a plaintiff satisfies the injury-in-fact requirement where he alleges 'an intention to engage in a course of conduct arguably affected with a constitutional interest, but proscribed by a statute, and there exists a credible threat of prosecution thereunder.'" Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U.S. __ (citing Babbitt v. Farm Workers, 442 U. S. 289, 298 (1979)).

This is but the latest in a consistent thread of case law holding that an actual criminal indictment need not be made against a plaintiff for them to have standing. As long as there's a credible threat of enforcement and they can show intent to commit the proscribed act, that's sufficient to satisfy the standing requirement.

<comment><USER8> For the First Amendment in particular there's also a concept of a "chilling effect" on speech, which can make it a bit easier to establish standing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I will never understand why the USA, while producing so much porn, is so strict with sex. Here prostitution is legal and you can buy sex toys at the drug store.

<comment><USER10> It's because our politicians are hypocrites who use morality as prestige, all the while engaging in the very behavior they decry.

I guess there's also less of a paper-trail when prostitution is illegal, and girls are less willing to come forward about beatings and nonpayment, so...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The word 'promote' used in the sense 'to contribute to the progress or growth of' is inappropriate in connection with prostitution, since it has been around quite a while.

Therefore, I conclude, use of the word 'promote' is a Victorian dog-whistle.</comment>


Non Intrusive Phone Calls Coming to iPhone Soon? - <AUTHOR> http://shaiwininger.org/2013/01/05/iphone-non-intrusive-calls-coming-soon/

<comment><USER2> Because phone calls, no matter how infrequent, are very important. As long as the incoming call is from someone I know, I rarely opt out of answering.

It's the only synchronous action I have with my phone. And it's an important one.

Now the UI from the post is nice. I like it. But voice calls can't be "overlooked" as just a passing mode of communication.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article's title is totally misleading. The article makes no mention of any new iPhone feature that Apple is considering. Instead, it's just the author's own advice to Apple on what they should implement.</comment>


Show HN: Pymash.com – facemash for the most popular Python repos - <AUTHOR> http://www.pymash.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm actually interested, what is the purpose of the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> To find the best Python function ever written!</comment></comment>


The End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict - <AUTHOR> https://ottomansandzionists.com/2020/09/17/the-end-of-the-arab-israeli-conflict/ <comment><USER2> Is it weird that I'm seeing almost nothing about this online?

<comment><USER3> It's being discussed literally everywhere.

[https://news.google.com/search?q=israel+uae](https://news.google.com/search?q=israel+uae)

[https://news.google.com/search?q=israel+bahrain](https://news.google.com/search?q=israel+bahrain)

<comment><USER4> It was on the homepage of CNN for maybe a couple hours.

In contrast negative, trivial, news about Trump stays there for days. Mainstream media doesn't even pretend to be impartial.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacking a network with an infectious mouse. - <AUTHOR> http://pentest.snosoft.com/2011/06/24/netragards-hacker-interface-device-hid/

<comment><USER2> You can have a some much less malicious fun applying the same idea to old games controllers. People typically put flash drives in them with an emulator + roms. It would be fun to put a whole linux distro on there that boots straight into the emulator, with a special menu, but I've never seen that.

[http://edshowtos.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-make-your- own-n...](http://edshowtos.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-make-your-own-nes-usb- controller.html) (NES)

<http://forums.benheck.com/viewtopic.php?t=35526> (SNES)

You can find a bunch of other hacks like this on HaD:

<http://hackaday.com/page/1/?s=%22usb+hub%22>

</comment><comment><USER3> OMG, my mother's internet was dropping off and on yesterday, and as I was trying to diagnose the problem, she asked "maybe its the mouse." No mom, your mouse is not causing the Internet to drop....

Maybe it was the mouse. Damn.

</comment><comment><USER4> page not loading. Here's the Google cache [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9Z4lxiV...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9Z4lxiV3g68J:pentest.snosoft.com/2011/06/24/netragards- hacker-interface-device-hid/+http://pentest.snosoft.com/2011/06/24/netragards- hacker-interface-device-hid/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip=1)

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, that went down very quickly. this url has proper formatting... [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9Z4lxiV...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9Z4lxiV3g68J:pentest.snosoft.com/2011/06/24/netragards- hacker-interface-device- hid/.&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&source=www.google.co.uk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How was the payload executed? I've been thinking of trying to write malware test cases using HID specs, but the article doesn't go into much detail.

<comment><USER6> 0day vuln in convincing windows to auto-install the device drivers.

<comment><USER5> Should have read better, and realized that IronGeek might have played a role.

[http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/programmable- hid...](http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/programmable-hid-usb- keystroke-dongle)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> cool, but if they were given a single IP to target why could they have the mouse on another machine? alternatively: if they could attack other machines, why not use another machine that was exposed via the network? something isn't consistent.

<comment><USER8> I'm assuming that they were asked to compromise a typical tightened corporate network, in which there's only a single external address -- the firewall's -- and therefore that's the only address they had to work with.

In that case, compromising one of the clients behind the firewall is the typical next step for an attack. (They did a heck of a nice job on that, though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> so, was the person who plugged in the mouse fired? I mean, while the firing would be understandably and justifiably "for cause", I personally feel disgust about provocations.</comment>


Google removes Hong Kong protester role-playing app - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-google/google-pulls-hong-kong-protester-role-playing-app-idUSKBN1WP2E6 <comment><USER2> From the article it seems like a reasonable take-down, a developer made a cash-grab app to capitalize on the controversy, which is against policy.

If the app was made as a political statement, it wouldn't have in-app purchases IMO.

<comment><USER3> Why shouldn't a political app be allowed to make purchases? Why does that make the app's political position any less legitimate?

<comment><USER2> Political protesters being paid is generally seen as a bad thing. It cheapens the message, especially when instead of a donation link you use tactics typically used by massive corporations targeting the weak-willed and children to do it. I'm not gonna get up in arms for it but they are clearly trying to profit from the controversy. The political position isn't illegitimate, the developer's motives are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of the Bomb Israel and Bomb Gaza Apps

Context: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_confl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_conflict_in_video_games)

</comment><comment><USER5> The app is now available to install from the developers twitter account [https://twitter.com/of_yarns](https://twitter.com/of_yarns)

There's a link to the apk stored on S3.

I've been playing it a bit, it's an interesting games with a lot of thoughts by the author on branching the story based on your actions.</comment>


Hobbyist in need of a Project - <AUTHOR>

I've been programming in my free time for about 6 years. Self educated (well random web article educated). I can say with confidence I'm fluent in php, css, sql (all sql's), javascript, jQuery, ajax (I don't undestand why people always list this seperate) and actionscript (would say flash, but I can't draw). I spend the majority of my free time reading/studying trying to duplicate everything I can from database optimization to github's document rev monitor to css layouts practices to web protocols to compilers. I browse the web with firebug on.
The kicker is I really don't have much to show for it. Once I learn a tech or method I'm on to the next one because it's a hobby. I've never really taken the time to make anything. I did a project for a friends company that involves product demonstration organization across the U.S (36 tables). But due to what I will call "complications of business morals" on there part, I resigned. However they still use it to this day 2 years later without fail with over 1k users, 1k customers, and 3k products to which no one has monitored the site minus the host and an automated db backup. Small I know, but for my first project I'm happy.
I have a full time job 7-4 mon-fri in industrial sales that I enjoy and is very solid so I'm not looking to dedicate a full time job to web dev. Maybe someday, but I'm only 25 so I've got time.
I want to do something. Even if its borderline useless. I don't want to make money off it as long as it's not costing me an arm and a leg to host.
So I'm asking for suggestions/requests/challenges/something. I want to be tested. See where I'm at.
Please. Thank You. <comment><USER2> Do you have other (analog/physical) hobbies? Tie your love for programming together with your other hobbies. For example, if you love soccer build an app that lets you analyze game stats.

</comment><comment><USER3> You may be our GodSend... Have a look at this. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2350347> Let me know if interested. Coding is not my specialty, but I can learn everything in IT. However, I will need a tech lead/overlord to tell me/us what to do.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you live in or nearby Silicon Valley(/Bay Area)?

<comment><AUTHOR> San Diego

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Contact details?</comment>


Your looks and your inbox - <AUTHOR> http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/ <comment><USER2> I have loved all of the okcupid linkbait.

Much of it conforms to the old wives tales or intuitions of people, but "The women who are subjectively rated the most attractive get disproportionately less attention from men. No, really, we're not making it up, we can demonstrate this with SQL" is a whole lot more fascinating than the equivalent finding justified by, ahem, wild speculation. (Or its close cousin, "We surveyed 18 men and 22 women who happened to be enrolled in psych 101 at this campus! Sweet, sweet empiricism!")

<comment><USER3> OkCupid isn't a representative sample, either. Even more, you have to take into account the site mechanics: a mutual 4 or 5 star rating results in a "match event", but any other combination doesn't. So rating someone 1-3 is equivalent ("I don't want to talk to them") as is 4-5, and men and women's responses to this mechanic may influence their ratings in differing ways.

<comment><USER4> This is the case. Rating someone a 4 or 5 generates an e-mail to that person. So the only reason you rate someone a 4 or 5 is if you want them to come check you out.

<comment><USER5> Yep, which might also explain why the women are apparently so harsh on their ratings compared to men - they already get more messages than the guys, and don't want to be contacted even more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A dating site for geeks would have to include automatic A/B Testing for profile pictures.

Can't wait for their analysis of what makes a photo attractive. Especially as for men, men don't seem to have a good grasp as to what would appeal to women.

<comment><USER7> That sounds kind of evil. It would be a great way of getting advice for dressing, hair, etc.

<comment><USER6> Come to think of it, HotOrNot probably already provides that.

<comment><USER8> An old coworker of mine at an internship did exactly this to find the most attractive profile picture for a dating site. He had a sample size of maybe 10 photos and used HotOrNot to do a simple ranking of them. The top rated ones were used as his profile picture on social networking sites.

Unfortunately, he left out one part of the experiment - he did not have the "ugly" photos as his profile picture, measure response rates, and then try it again with a "hot" photo.

I am currently running an experiment with my OkCupid profile along similar metrics - I am varying my profile picture, as well as certain parts of my profile, and testing profile views, response rates, and 4-5 star ratings. This is mostly out of frustration with the pitiful view/response rates I was having originally, but if the data is interesting I might do a write-up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Totally decent-looking" dudes are actually co-founders of OkCupid :)

<http://www.okcupid.com/about-us>

</comment><comment><USER10> _As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh._

The female rating is particular interesting. Are only ugly men on OKCupid (myself included)? Or do men look worse in pictures than women? After all, remove the makeup, carefully selected attire, and fancy hair, and you have your average male. Even photogenic men don't look as good as their photogenic counterparts, in my opinion.

<comment><USER11> most guys shoot from the hip when it comes to pictures, women prep the crap out of it.

Hell I know a girl who used photoshop to tweak a photo she used as a profile picture on facebook

<comment><USER7> If you're serious about online dating you should probably be getting professional profile photos.

<comment><USER12> I disagree. I've done quite a bit of online dating, and professional photos (a) don't show your fun side, and (b) often look quite different than how you look on an average day. What this results in is me distrusting them -- before I meet anyone, I need to see a candid shot of them in natural lighting.

<comment><USER6> I think there would have to be a special kind of service: a photographer who can take photos that look as if they were casual, but aren't. Even for Twitter and other social networks casual is probably better, but few photographers (if any) understand that so far.

<comment><USER13> Any photojournalist worth his or her salt could pull that off. Might be a nice little side-income.

<comment><USER14> I am a photographer, and I've had inquiries for this. No one is willing to pay more than a few dollars, which doesn't even offset the time required or the depreciation of the equipment.

<comment><USER15> As a photographer, what is your opinion on the "going rate" or similar for a spread of five natural looking photos, compared to what you get offered ("just a few bucks")?

Curious if it's similar to what happens when people in "typical" social circles find out I'm a freelance web developer, offering as little as $100 for what could easily (after graphic design and so forth) be two weeks of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not really surprised about the female curve. They say attraction for males is 85% physical and 15% personality, and for women the reverse. Not sure on the accuracy of those numbers, but the general principle is probably true. And since you get no inkling of personality from a picture, it isn't shocking.

What I'd really like to see is if they listed the guys to one group of women as just photos, then to another given select bits of data, what would happen then. I suspect you'd see strong correlations, especially if income were there.

<comment><USER17> > _you get no inkling of personality from a picture_

Really can't agree with this. How people present themselves in self-chosen photos tells quite a bit about personality.

<comment><USER18> Man, ain't that the truth. My favorites are the following categories:

\- The only good photos I have of myself are with friends in bars.

\- My cat/dog has to be in the photo. I love my cat/dog more than I'll love you.

\- The only time I look good is with my ex, so I'll crop his side of the picture out. You won't notice, will you?

\- 20 self-photos of me in the bathroom mirror. Don't mind the mess in the background.

\- I love to travel! Can you see that speck at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower? That's me!

<comment><USER18> Thought of a few more:

\- I was a bridesmaid! Try and find me in this group of 8 well-dressed women! This says nothing about my craving to be married at all!

\- I could only get my coworkers to shoot this photo of me at the office. Can you see I hate my job?

\- Here's some cleavage to distract you.

\- This is me & my dad. I'm not a daddy's girl at all, but get ready for the interrogation when you pick me up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I question the numbers. (Well, the female ones anyway.) I had a plentyoffish account a few years ago, and the image ratings averaged around 3.5 out of 10 for both men and women. I know that the hotornot guys had the same problem, and admitted to fudging everything upwards.

<comment><USER20>
        fudged_hotness = 10.0 * ((hotness / 10.0) ** (1 / gamma))

Then just crank up the gamma correction to 3.0, and your 3.5 out of ten is now a reasonably-attractive 7.0472987320648917 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Favorite quote from the other posts on the blog: "This is what 'dying alone' looks like as a png." Lots of fun statistics, and some humor to boot.

<comment><USER22> Not as hilarious when all the attractive girls ignore your messages because they are flooded with spam, however...

<comment><USER23> If they're ignoring you, doesn't that mean your messages are spam too?

<comment><USER22> Sure, if they log into the site to read it. Most people got tired of bothering long ago, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> this sounds like a problem to solve. i'd like to see a dating site that doesn't involve browsing profiles like a catalog, and encourages people to respond to messages a bit more.

kills two birds with one stone, if you have it based on a smarter matching algorithm that requires you to give private feedback on people you interact with, to help hone your personal recommendations. also makes fake profiles and spamming a much tougher prospect, and would probably give it an overall safer feel.

</comment><comment><USER25> tl:dr Women don't have unrealistic expectations, they're just saying that the average man is ugly.

I disagree with their interpretation that the fact that women rate men as low attractiveness means they "have unrealistic standards for the 'average' member of the opposite sex."

Remember, they didn't ask "do you think this guy is above or below the average attractiveness." They asked "is this guy attractive." There's an implicit assumption that "neither attractive or unattractive" is equivalent to "average attractiveness of men."

That assumption is wrong. Men are ugly. So _of course_ most men will be rated as more unattractive on average than women.

</comment><comment><USER26> interesting. women rate men much more harshly on looks, yet a woman's attractiveness is much more important for whether they receive messages.

sounds like attractiveness is rated poorly for women partly because it doesn't speak to women.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ok, I'm going to go out and say it: There is an absurd amount of pressure on women in this society to be perfect.

Now, I'm not going to refute the fact that I wouldn't message the most- attractive women as well. But if the knee-jerk reaction of a woman is to reject the message from the most-attractive men or to harshly rate decently looking guys, there are outside factors affecting the female perspective of appearance, especially if the same isn't true for men.

<comment><USER28> Did you read the whole article? Men's attractiveness ratings of women are healthily distributed, almost unbelievably so. And women rated about 8.3/10 (rather than perfect 10/10) got the most messages.

<comment><USER27> I did, but I'm not sure what in your comment disproves the self-esteem issue. My point is not what men think of women (how they rate them), but what women _do_ when presented with the options I mentioned (attractive guys messaging them).

If an attractive guy messages me, I would be thinking as a woman "Wow, this is validating" instead of "No, he must have made a mistake". If it's the latter, you have to wonder what initially gave her the idea that he made a mistake? Was it something deeply engrained?

Maybe I didn't read the article correctly, but please don't assume I didn't read the whole thing. Starting off your comment like that is not very welcoming and doesn't add any value to the conversation.

<comment><USER28> You didn't talk about self-esteem. What you said was this:

>There is an absurd amount of pressure on women in this society to be perfect.

I think the data show precisely the opposite - that women aren't under pressure, at least from men, to be perfect. That was the point of my comment.

Actually, in my experience, women are many times more guilty of the things they typically accuse men of than men are (e.g. objectifying the other sex, being judgmental about looks, etc.). Men are under at least as much pressure as women in these regards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I met my girlfriend on ok Cupid over a year ago within a week of signing up. The site was a lot less spammy then, and most would say we just got dumb lucky.

I've done other sites and while pictures matter, if you're not a 4 or 5 not coming across boring or desperate will _make_ you a 4 or 5 in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER30> As far as I know, women date by "how you make them feel?" not how a guy looks :)

</comment><comment><USER31> okcupid is doing science. I wonder what academic will pick up this data and extract evolutionary biology conclusions from it.

<comment><USER32> I don't know why you're being voted down - it seems to me like they are doing science, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a reference to Okcupid in a university study or a pop science book.

<comment><USER33> If they release their dataset, it'll spark a lot of research. Datamining researchers today use a lot of 'hot' datasets, from Netflix to ePinions, which are sometimes old, but they are available. In some research domains, it is not uncommon for data sets to have huge importance, including getting you tenure and being guaranteed resources to exploit the dataset you gathered.

<comment><USER31> In this sense I meant it: that they are collecting valuable data. That their own analysis is flawed by their own bias is evident to me, but does not diminish the value of their data.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SolarCity's Gigafactory - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600770/solarcitys-gigafactory/ <comment><USER2> Seems like the gamble here is on either:

1) SolarCity's newly efficient tech being the best in production for long enough to re-coup the costs of the factory, or

2) SolarCity being able to keep up with new developments along the way.

I don't know enough about the production process for PV to understand whether this is just a capacity expansion project or if the Gigafactory is tooled specifically for that 22% efficient panel. Can anyone clarify?

<comment><USER3> This is a brand new factory in upstate NY that's going to equip SolarCity with about 1GW of yearly panel production, and allows them to vertically integrate their business (ie not rely on other panel suppliers).

<comment><USER2> Ah, okay. I realize they were primarily an installer before. The article seemed to focus on their new efficiency tech, so I was left wondering whether that was a more relevant part of the investment. Presumably they can re-tool as techniques improve and keep their vertical integration...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am glad to see this step towards economic growth for Buffalo. This project has helped out a lot of people in the area by providing jobs. Hopefully that progress continues.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is some really shameless product placement by the Tech Review, who are normally quite good about tech journalism. Slack? Really?</comment>


Editor Wars - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2016/07/26/editor-wars/ <comment><USER2> ok, so the article made this claim:

      >[emacs users] tend to be touch typists.

That really made me wonder: aren't most programmers touch typists?</comment>


Show HN: Resound.fm – Share and discover music with your friends - <AUTHOR> http://resound.fm

<comment><USER2> We ban accounts that are created solely to upvote and comment on one story.

<comment><AUTHOR> dang I'm aware of that. I'll make sure we make that more clear to anyone we share the link to. I love this community and the quality of all the posts. Sorry for the trouble.</comment></comment>


The Dual Pythagorean Theorem (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/01/DualPythagorean.html

<comment><USER2> This is the second in a collection of notes by Egan on the physics of his Orthogonal trilogy (which I've just started, but which seems excellent as always). It may make more sense to start with the first, [http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.ht...](http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html) .</comment>


It's Time to Think for Yourself on Free Trade - <AUTHOR> http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/27/its-time-to-think-for-yourself-on-free-trade/ <comment><USER2> The author's suggestion - temporary work visas to refocus on labor mobility - does not consider strain on public services and entitlement programs.</comment>


Airbnb revenue jumps 50 percent to about $1B in Q3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/14/airbnb-q3-revenue-hits-about-1-billion.html <comment><USER4> I wonder how much of this is the recently enforced payment in your credit card's primary currency (with the ~3% spread going to Airbnb as profit).

Due to this - and Airbnb's refusal to even discuss their reasons for it - <USER2> always consider other options before Airbnb. In the past it was the other way around.

<comment><USER5> How would gaining a 3% spread lead to 50% revenue increases?

<comment><USER6> My guess is assuming Airbnb takes 10% of the total booking cost - <USER3> additional 3% spread would mean a 43% increase in revenue

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AirBnB popularity has gone through the roof in many places. If you have visited Rome or Venice, it the defacto place to look for accommodations. You can't walk in Venice more than half hour before you see a tourist dragging thier luggage on cobblestones street to their AirBnB.</comment>


Why medical regulation is the problem not the solution - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/ <comment><AUTHOR> Clear and tight. Contrasting example at the end is hilarious.</comment>


Scala as long-term replacement for Java - <AUTHOR> http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html

<comment><USER3> I'm really pleased to read this blog post. I went to JavaOne this year (free ticket, I wouldn't have paid or asked my employer to pay), and it was kind of depressing. I hadn't been there since the early 2000s, and there just wasn't much spirit in the room. I'm sure the down economy and Oracle takeover had people down a bit, but I also think "Java programmers" (meaning folks who do a lot of work in Java) no longer feel excited about the future. It's starting to feel like you're at a conference for legacy systems.

I got out of my funk by attending absolutely ever session on Scala I could find, and it really did lift my spirits (I swear I didn't intend the pun). I've been learning Ruby (and I'll stay on that path for a while), but the Scala talks gave me what I ultimately go to conferences for - the opportunity to get excited about the future again.

</comment><comment><USER4> Despite having invested a bit of time and brainpower in Erlang, I have a suspicion that Scala is more likely to be a better bet over the long haul. It's fast, piggybacks on all the software out there for Java, and seems to be reasonable to use.

I do have some questions about its concurrency abilities though (not rhetorical ones, real ones): I _know_ that Erlang deals really well with concurrency, because of its internal scheduler. It's fairly difficult to completely wedge Erlang, in other words. How does Scala work out from that point of view?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a couple of nice articles about Scala vs. Erlang, although they take a more nults-and-bolts view:

<http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/scala-vs-erlang> <http://yarivsblog.com/articles/2008/05/18/erlang-vs-scala/>

-m

<comment><USER4> Yeah, Yariv points at what I suspected, that the Erlang model is a bit more robust. However, I wonder if Scala is, in practice, 'good enough'.

<comment><USER5> Twitter backend processing was rewritten in Scala.. Though I dont have specific opinion yet about Scala, that is a point to be noted.

<comment><USER6> While we're at it: the backend of the Facebook chat is coded in Erlang. 1-1.

No peculiar opinion about any of them either, btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _I've written tons of Java over the last decade or so & think its been a great evolutionary step from C++ and Smalltalk _

Did anyone else go wtf?

<comment><USER8> No, wondered why he was restating the obvious. There are certainly features of both C++ and Smalltalk which would be nice to have in it, but Java is, on the whole, an advancement over them.

In particular, GC and a great standard library for C++, and file-based and more performant (yes, yes, hotspot is based on a smalltalk derived vm, blah blah, the numbers still grossly favor java) and a more conventional interaction with the host system over smalltalk. The last is bizarre as java still absurdly sandboxes away the CRT. Oh well. Less of an advancement on Smalltalk, more of a more palatable branch of evolution, maybe.

<comment><USER9> I think it was Paul Graham who said Java was an evolutionary dead end (which doesn't mean dead so much as that branch of the tree won't continue).

It seems now at least the JVM, or the best bits of it will spawn other branches.

As for the java language (which is probably what pg was referring to?) - <USER2> agree it is probably a dead end. Except in some shallow basic syntactic sense - javascript and so on (the continuation of the "curly braces") - not sure if that means anything though. In any cases, certainly the lessons learned will continue (what worked well, what didn't) into a whole lot of other languages and has been.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it just me hoping against hope, or does it look like the world really could start shifting into a more functional paradigm?

Or at least the parts of the world that doesn't bill by the hour/LOC..

<comment><USER11> It's just the way cycles work. Few years of over exaggerated OOP hype, then few years of over exaggerated functional hype.

Some people just like taking things to extremes and seeing things in completely polarized viewpoints - good vs evil - rather than recognizing that both are great in different circumstances.

It's a lot less tiring (and more productive) to use whatever tool fits the job best, rather than whatever tool is currently in fashion IMHO.

<comment><USER12> ...and my impression is that FP and OOP are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. But I only have basic understanding of FP.

<comment><USER13> Yes. Alas, most of the automagic type inferences we are used to in FP languages (Hindley-Milner) does not play too nice with OOP's class members.

<comment><USER14> What if class members had to be typed?

<comment><USER15> They are (in Scala).

I think it's overloading (punning on static type of the same function, operator, or method name) that makes explicit type declarations more often necessary in Scala than in Haskell or ML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I asked this at reddit as well, but I think HN may have some better insights.

What does this say for Groovy (the language) that one of its co-creators is out advocating Scala?

<comment><USER17> Well, Groovy has never been "sexy" (in a CS sense) in the way Scala or Clojure are perceived to be.

Despite that (or perhaps because of it) my experience has indicated it's in wider use than either, and it has some enterprise-y backing (SpringSource) so I expect it's not going away.

Both Scala and Clojure are attracting people who weren't originally on the JVM though, which (again anecdotally) I don't think you can say of Groovy.

<comment><USER18> Confirming your second point, Indeed's job trends suggest that groovy has more jobs, and that it's growing faster: [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=groovy%2Cscala%2Cclojure&#...
Caveat: some of these jobs might be talking about how groovy they are. On the first two pages of http://www.indeed.com/q-groovy-jobs.html there were 19 groovy-lang jobs and one false positive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Scala is to Java as C++ is to C.

<comment><AUTHOR> Debateable -- but in any case one strike against your theory is that C can be made to compile using a C++ compiler, but no amount of contortions will make your Java do the same for Scalac. C++ has a lot of baggage in the form of _source-level_ compatibility with C while Scala does not. It is _API_ compatible, but that is one of its great strengths.

-m</comment></comment>


How my iPhone landed me with a £476 fine and made me a criminal - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/e8a177d4-dfae-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc <comment><USER2> > Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done > nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.

[https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kafka/franz/trial/chapter1....](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kafka/franz/trial/chapter1.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_\(novel\))</comment>


Ask HN: When to quit and when to stick - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
A bit of background: I'm the co-founder of a small startup/development shop (2 guys). We've been going since 2007 and have had a "meh" response to some of our SaaS offerings, while a couple have been partially successful but would in no way support the company on their own.
The problem: my co-founder is leaving, and continuing the company doing the generally uninspiring paid work which has become the norm does not appeal. Paid work was intended to provide capital for building products of our own - not as an end in itself. And, over the last couple of years, enthusiasm wained for building new services, mundanity crept in, and the company increasingly relied on client work until no aspiration for our own work remained. We're loved by the clients we work for and it's been worth it financially, but I don't find the majority of work inspiring, challenging or worthwhile (sounds bad but I'd love to work on stuff provided real value).
So, by the end of the year, I'm going to be left in control of the company with no clear idea what the next step should/could be.
Has anyone turned their directionless company around when a founder has left? Did you close the company and make a new start? It would be massively helpful to get outsiders' views.
The alternative is get a job which would require moving somewhere with more opportunity and selling the house (done the work-on-my-own thing for too long now and I need to work with real people again!), since where I'm based has zero tech sector/community.
If it comes down to "Suck it up and get a job!" that's fine, and it's quite probably an inane question, but I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks but I'm too "in" the situation to think clearly.
All thoughts and opinions welcome! <comment><USER2> Hey Thanks for posting an honest and heartfelt post. At the end of the day, there is no right answer. If you feel inspired by an idea/concept then you should absolutely pivot and use the resources you have to build a new thing. You might be able to find a new co-founder (perhaps someone non-technical) who has an awesome idea and who can give you a new wave of enthusiasm. It's amazing how quickly a "meh" feeling can turn into a "wow this could really work" if you got excited about an idea/co-founder/etc.

The advantages of getting a real job are that you'll feel better immediately. But it's a big sacrifice. After a while a real job might start feeling stifiling. You report to someone. You have to do what they say. You're not in control of your destiny. We all have start-up fatigue sometimes and I have days when I wish I worked for someone and could just relax and just exist without having to swim upstream every day. But I was not that happy when I had a real job because I felt a bit like a cog in a machine and didn't feel inspired by it in the end.

One thing: When a choice is really hard, it means that both options are good. If you get a job, you can still start a company again later. If you start a new venture/pivot now, you can still decide it's not working 6 months from now and go get a job.

Follow your gut. Your gut always knows best!

</comment><comment><USER3> "It is not good for man to be alone" is a phrase found in LDS ("Mormon") theology, that was spoken, purportedly, in the Garden of Eden. I am more responding to the <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4905386> blog post. Don't know if this Canadian IT CEO who works alone in his office is single or married. As a man married nearly 33 years, to one wife, and we being the parents of 9 children, I have been self-employed all but a handful of months (at the beginning) of those nearly 33 years. And, for the bulk of that time, I too, have long worked alone in an office.

Now I work out of my home, and the bulk of that, too, now, I am alone for.

Like the owner of that blog, I am also (now) an extrovert. But I am a man of many interests. I take some time out during my day to respond online to such things, as this, that interest me. That helps me in a small way to connect to others in somewhat similar situations.

But, being married, and having the physical intimacy that that should include helps to carry me a long way through otherwise difficult to bear circumstances.

Perhaps you could use an assistant or some other way get the cameraderie you enjoy. Or, maybe, you need to get another job like you had before. Don't know how many options are viable for you?

</comment><comment><USER4> I have not dealt with this situation so I can only offer my own opinion.

What's important is for you to figure out what you would like to do. As the founder of the company, you're the one who sets the direction of the company. As the sole founder, the company is you.

My recommendation is to try and take some time off, if possible, to figure out what it is you would like to do. Don't think of the company. Only yourself. If you discover what you want to do, then go and do it. If you don't, no worries. You can always get a job, and continue to think about what you would like to do on the side.

As for the company, you can choose to do with it as you please. You could turn it into a side business to keep it going. Hire someone full-time to help with the work. Or you could try and sell the company to someone. Or just shut it down. Later, when you discover something you really want to do and are ready to do it again, you could always start up another company.

Hope this helps a little.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds to me like the company has no heart or soul, thus was stillborn to begin with. You wanted to be independent and work on things that were inspiring and meaningful to you. You got the independence but not the inspiring and meaningful work. Doing more of the same is not likely to remedy it.

You are sick of working on your own and isolated. With what little you have written here, it sounds to me like getting a job elsewhere and moving would be the best option currently. Once you are in a more vibrant work setting, you might find something which inspires you. I would suggest that you start another company only if/when you find that inspiration, that thing which strikes you as meaningful.

Until then, it sounds like client work vs. a job is "six of one or a half dozen of the other". They are both just a means to pay the bills. But, in this case, a job has the benefit of pulling you out of your current rut. It sounds like that is the better way to bet, the thing which has more promise for ultimately leading to a business which might thrive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clear analysis from the outside. Thanks</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to Google analytic?  - <AUTHOR>

Which are the best alternatives for Google Analytics ?
I have decided to stop using GA because despite of repeated feedback they have not fixed the map of my country India in their interface. Looks like they are sucking up to China and I am not interested in using their services anymore.
Piwik is something that seems the best so far but the does this community know something better ? <comment><USER2> Here are a few analytics companies:

<http://www.kissmetrics.com/>

<http://www.woopra.com/>

<http://getclicky.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I run <http://www.w3counter.com> which you might try, but I use Google Maps with an overlay for the geographic reports.

</comment><comment><USER4> Piwik all the way.

</comment><comment><USER5> I tried gaug.es today. Pretty good so far

</comment><comment><USER6> Try <http://haveamint.com/> or <http://mixpanel.com/>

Piwik is Good but you would need to host it on your servers and increase the amount of work for you in maintaining the same!</comment>


IOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lottery-and-60-of-developers-dont-break-even/ <comment><USER2> if 60% of developers break even, counting opportunity cost, I would be really surprised</comment>


Sharding Pinterest: How we scaled our MySQL fleet (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/sharding-pinterest-how-we-scaled-our-mysql-fleet-3f341e96ca6f <comment><USER2> I don't know how this is even worthy of being in the front page. I work at Pinterest, and I work on the systems he's describing, and while the basic sharding model hasn't changed, there's a lot of outdated information in that article. There's also a non-trivial amount of bad advice. C'est la vie.

<comment><USER3> So is there an updated post?

<comment><USER4> My question too.

They shouldn't leave bad information up without noting it or following up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10086782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10086782)

<comment><USER6> Note that the URL in this post no longer works - it has changed to: [https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/sharding- pinterest...](https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/sharding-pinterest- how-we-scaled-our-mysql-fleet-3f341e96ca6f)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> not that impressive</comment>


Miso API Developer Contest - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gomiso.com/2011/03/28/announcing-the-miso-api-developer-contest/

<comment><AUTHOR> Got an idea for a great new feature in Miso? How about turning it into a new Miso app?

We are just finishing up Miso's public API -- check out full documentation at gomiso.com/developers -- and to celebrate we're launching Miso's first Developer Contest.

The objective is simple: Build an awesome app using the Miso API. The prize: A brand new iPad 2 and have your new app featured by Miso!

Submissions must be made by May 10, 2011 at 12 noon PST and must leverage Miso's API. Full entry explanation and rules can be found at: [http://blog.gomiso.com/2011/03/28/announcing-the-miso-api- de...](http://blog.gomiso.com/2011/03/28/announcing-the-miso-api-developer- contest)

To get started, please sign-up here: <http://miso.io/eAQJJK>.

Any questions? Shoot an email to email@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER2> If you're looking for a miso-like api but for cinema check-ins and local movie recommendations try this: <http://filmaster.org/display/DEV/API> (the project is open source, btw)</comment>


VNC as an anti-procrastination tool - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/2qv/antiakrasia_remote_monitoring_experiment

<comment><USER2> Having a babysitter is not permanently behavior correcting.</comment>


Lamprey, a new parasitic language to write Elixir in Erlang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gar1t/lamprey <comment><USER2> I long for a day when Ericsson is willing to make breaking API changes to bring the much-loved consistency of the stdlib offered by Elixir to Erlang land directly. Perhaps even providing a "free" upgrade path through parse transformations.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know what to think about this lol. But I think more elixir<->erlang interop stuff is cool</comment>


Osint Amateur Hour - <AUTHOR> https://www.secjuice.com/geolocation-osint-amateur-hour/ <comment><USER2> If you enjoy this kind of thing, you may like the Geoguessr game ([https://www.geoguessr.com/](https://www.geoguessr.com/)), and this guy on youtube who is really good at it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xApbqwtnSzs&list=PL_japiE6QK...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xApbqwtnSzs&list=PL_japiE6QKWprCnen-1gL31VA9owRLhcx&index=4)

<comment><USER3> That guy (GeoWizard) has an amazing video series where he attempts to cross the whole country of Wales while walking in a straight line [0], it is honestly one of the best things I've ever seen on the internet.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w986ni7_g&list=PL_japiE6QK...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w986ni7_g&list=PL_japiE6QKWphPxjqn0KJjfoRnuVSELaI)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that, enjoyable watch over a coffee. I'm currently looking into planning a kayak trip with some friends. Nice to see with a bit of imagination there is still some adventure to be had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doing this quite often as we are currently looking for a new house. Real estate offerings here in Germany often omit the actual address. So some research on the actual location is needed. It's fun and reduces the list of possible objects easily without communicating with the realtor.

<comment><USER6> Any idea on why the address is not provided?

I just find this practice really annoying and I don't see how it helps sell a property.

<comment><USER7> It prevents people from showing up randomly and ringing doorbells. The realtor can control the process, inexperienced and stressed sellers are not confronted with strangers 'negotiating'. Mostly it's in the interest of the realtor that their position as a middleman is accepted.

<comment><USER8> So why isn't that an issue in the US where addresses are openly listed and homeowners aren't harassed?

<comment><USER9> Realtors in the US typically have an exclusive contract with the seller and the seller must pay the commission however the house is sold. Without a contract like that (seems common in Europe), a buyer can bypass the realtor and work directly with the seller. The listing agents hide the address to try to prevent that from happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course the sleuths on twitter think they can identify people from clues in photos and often get it wrong with dangerous or disastrous results.

See: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52978880](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52978880)

And: [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/spike-lee- sued-...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/spike-lee-sued-tweet- george-zimmerman)

And, of course, reddit and the boston bomber.

Do this for fun, but don't get your pitchforks out

</comment><comment><USER11> How do you go about completing the challenge?

Identifying its SA is extremely easy with the Dutch text and newspaper names. There is no real hint this is Pretoria and not somewhere else. The satellite photos don't have enough resolution to help find the stop lights (which appear not too common looking at street view).

You can kind of see a double roof in the building in the background, and the road arrangement, but it would take days to manually look at every city intersection.

I guess the easiest approach is to post the image on a forum / twitter and get locals to chime in :)

<comment><USER12> There is no Dutch text. It is Afrikaans.

And as a South African, I would immediately know it was SA just by the look of the traffic lights and street signs.

I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.

In the article there is the line: "Some quick Googling revealed several universities in Pretoria, and I decided to wing it and take a closer look at the Pretoria skyline."

That's glossing over a very important part of figuring it out. Because once you know which city it makes it much easier.

<comment><USER13> > I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.

If you look closely, you can see stenciled markings on the yellow poles. These felt like official markings to me so I tried to figure out how to use the markings to narrow down the list of candidate cities.

According to Wikipedia, the _Burger_ newspaper is distributed only in three regions: Western, Eastern, and Northern Cape. There are not too many large-ish towns in these district.

So I made a list of all towns with >50k inhabitants. Looking at those cities on Street View one by one, I found there are only two towns where the yellow poles have the exact same typeface of stencil numbers on them: East London and Uitenhage.

So I took a closer look at either town. (After a few misses, you quickly get a feeling where to find the parts of towns where the roads actually have traffic lights). With a bit of luck, I actually managed to locate the first picture just by randomly clicking on corners. Its coordinates are 33.7648S/25.4012E.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First clue I noticed from the 1st photo was they seem to drive on the left hand side, which is fairly rare. The language on the signs obviously is a great clue.

<comment><USER15> Not just language, but brands can help a lot as well. Newspapers, obviously, but even a brand of soda can narrow things down.

I think a better approach on his second step would have been to search "<major city> skyline", preferably in order from largest population to smallest. South Africa isn't that big. I think it pays to be more methodical and work with the information you know, before speculating. Speculating is great if you're stuck, but I think he mostly just got lucky there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 4Chan is notorious for doing this successfully, with even less detail to start with. The large anonymous crowd of viewers and poster is highly likely to contain people who can identify even the smallest detail. Within the past few years, a few remarkable ones stand out to me:

1\. Locating terrorist training camps by high voltage power lines visible in the background.

2\. Shia LeBeouf's IRL Super Capture the Flag, "He Will Not Divide Us," located and vandalized no less than 5 times. The last one used astronavigation principles, and visible contrails from airplane traffic.

3\. Identifying muggers in crowds based on nothing more than biking gear and facial hair.

The one thing these had in common, was a sustained call for effort. By keeping the limited original details available and obvious, people in every timezone and demographic could view them. This greatly increases the odds of specialist knowledge or community insiders being able to add information to the detail, which goes back to the general audience, forming an action feedback loop.

Amatuer hour indeed, but when you have 10000 random people you get results pretty quick.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but then again, Reddit also did the same thing right after the Boston marathon bombing and as I recall it went pretty badly, as they ended up identifying the wrong person as the culprit and his mom ended up receiving threats from random people (he was missing at the time). He was later found dead in a river and it turned out he had killed himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool write up! It reminds me of the amateur osint that was carried out after Donald Trump showed the aerial photo of the Iranian power facility (iirc) and people were able to work out the exact coordinates and flight path of the satellite that took the photo from using the shadows on the ground. Amazing.

<comment><USER19> This one? "Trump Tweets Sensitive Surveillance Image Of Iran" [https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump- twe...](https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-tweets- sensitive-surveillance-image-of-iran)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> But they never took that information and went back to the first photo to figure out where it was taken.

Or am I missing something?</comment>


Deadlock in quora login - <AUTHOR> http://kracekumar.com/post/51741593651/quora-i-hate-you-for-this

<comment><USER2> Sorry for the trouble here -- can you email this in to firstname.lastname@example.com so we can figure out why this is happening.

Additionally, you can always view posts without logging in, and if you want to view a question and all its answers without logging in, just add ?share=1 to the end of the URL.</comment>


Show HN: CreditDaemon.com - Credit Score API - <AUTHOR> https://creditdaemon.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there,

I just wanted to get HN's feedback on this api for getting credit scores and see if anyone is interested in using this. It's an API that lets your frontend either show someone's credit score to them (such as in a personal finance app) or quickly let a borrower know that they qualify for a loan (such as in a customer facing online banking application), while also not having to worry about securely storing people's social security numbers.

It's still very early and in private beta. It's an API that we're dogfooding for ourselves as part of Original Tech, and after talking to a few other people, realized that other people found it useful/ wanted to use it.</comment>


Bootstrapping a Software Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.klhess.com/sef_spch.html

<comment><USER2> This comes from the author of this fantastic book, highly recommended: [http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Lessons-Learned-Building- Suc...](http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Lessons-Learned-Building- Successful/dp/0971187304/)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay for email? - <AUTHOR>

The recent startup idea from Matt Cutts reminded me of one of my own. Imagine an email service that acts as a proxy between email senders and your inbox. The senders however have to pay an arbitrary amount of money to get an answer (I won't go into other details, I think you get the point). This seems logical as your time is precious and (in some cases) you should be rewarded for answering emails. This would also filter out spam. On the other hand, my perception of such a service is that it's evil. That's the main reason why I haven't pursued the idea. It certainly would not replace standard, free email, but I can see how people would hate this.<p>What do you think? Do you also see it as evil or would you appreciate this service? <comment><USER2> This is an interesting service to consider from the perspective of both the sender and recipient of an email message.

The value that you create for the recipient is the spam filtering that you mention only as an aside. If someone is paying to send an email message, it's very unlikely that the message is spam. This form of micropayment makes email cost a little bit to senders, but it makes spam lose its cost-effectiveness. As a recipient, you can pretty much guarantee that email coming from this service is not spam. That makes going through your inbox a lot simpler.

On the other hand, value is created for the sender of email too. Because the recipient of the email is (mostly) assured that the message isn't spam, a response is much more likely. It sounds like you have a means (or idea) to guarantee a response too, which obviously amplifies this effect.

I think the service has potential. The first question that comes to my mind is who do you charge? You definitely charge the sender, but do you charge the recipient as well? Also, how do you make this work in a user's existing inbox? It seems like having users check another inbox will decrease the effectiveness of the service.

It's interesting that your solution is sort of an incremental solution to spam. To me, the best solution to spam would be to add authentication to SMTP or a new protocol with widespread adoption. However, your solution is more realistic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft Research has an interesting project along these lines, called "Penny Black".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project)> <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/PennyBlack/>

It doesn't sound particularly evil to me. What's the danger, in your mind?

<comment><AUTHOR> Email has been free since the beginning. People are used to it, that's why I think senders would hate having to use it, even boycott the service. It would also set a dangerous precendence that email doesn't have to be free.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I disagree. Sending email has almost _never_ been free.

Most of us pay for internet access. Email has been a non-itemized portion of this, but we still have to pay.

Part of the cost that we are paying are the amortized costs of spam, which costs each ISP a fair amount of resources. These costs are passed along to consumers, of course.

I can't imagine individual users boycotting ISPs that used a service like this, as it would result in reduced Internet costs and reduced spam. If you are not sending unsolicited emails, you'd never have to pay, and even if you are sending small amounts of unsolicited emails, the new costs would be more than offset by the savings passed on by the ISP.

The only people who'd be against it would be the spammers-- and once a critical mass of ISPs implemented, they wouldn't really have much of a choice: they'd either have to pay to send, or lose access to a large percentage of mailboxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is LinkedIn's business model - search for InMail on their site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, so a) it works and b) at least some people are already used to it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Displaying Lifespan Info in a D3 Family Tree Visualization - <AUTHOR> https://learnforeverlearn.com/ancestors/?lifespan=true

<comment><AUTHOR> A little background info about this is at [http://www.nowherenearithaca.com/2015/07/displaying- lifespan...](http://www.nowherenearithaca.com/2015/07/displaying-lifespan- information-in-d3.html)

<comment><USER3> It would be easier to look at if the birth dates were represented: each of the vertical intervals in time has a cluster of outgoing edges at the top for descendants. This makes things look cluttered and loses information. If these outgoing edges came from the right distance down the interval for the birth year then it would be easier to see structure in the graph.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi 314

Even for this early version I had debated whether it was worth it to do it for descendant tree due to clutter issues (it can still happen for ancestor trees, but the heuristic limits used make this a little rarer). I'm not quite sure I understand what you're suggesting though - the curves coming into the top do terminate at the birth year, but the node itself kind of covers this up - <USER2> that what you're referring to?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> His father was the same age as his maternal grandfather ? and mother 30 years younger than father? (Charles II of Spain)

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked again at this and it seems to be correct, based on Wikipedia etc. It's a weird tree that had some serious genetic consequences for Charles II - here's one note on that: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/04/inbreeding- th...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/04/inbreeding-the-downfall- of-the-spanish-hapsburgs/#.Va2cDxNVhBc)

btw, if you "pin" a person so that the popup remains showing, you can click on the name to do a google search of that person.</comment></comment>