Ex-Reddit exec launches 'Imzy,' a warmer, fuzzier Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/04/22/fired-reddit-exec-quietly-launches-izzy-a-warmer-fuzzier-reddit/ <comment><USER2> I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible?

I really love how self-enforcing the community is here towards snark and lazy comments, which have absolutely destroyed Reddit. Edginess is much easier than proper discussion.

<comment><USER3> While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem.

There is a self declared "elite" group of users on reddit who are always echoing exactly your sentiments to the point that it's almost a chant: groupthink, low quality comments, uniformed discourse! Of course, recognizing that there is a need and desire by some for a place to have more detailed and nuanced discussions is not bad in of itself. Arguably its' a very good thing.

Where it turns bad is in their approach to a solution. Instead of "hey, people want a place where they can have more interesting discussions, let's go create one, promote, and moderate it!", they think "hm, these people with their memes and images, that's a problem. They shouldn't do that. We need to stop them and show them the right way to run a subreddit!"

This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs.

This is why I say that reddit doesn't have a "problem" with low quality content. That's what a lot of people enjoy and they _should_ have a place they can do that. If you want to change peoples minds, use words, not force.

All that being said, I recognize that you didn't actually advocate that reddit be changed. More to your point, as others have said, one of the great things about reddit is that people are free to start their own subreddit and make it into whatever they wish. There are a lot of smaller more heavily moderated subreddits that have great discussion. People who are upset with the bigger subs should look for these or even create their own.

<comment><USER4> I upvoted you because for a moment I thought you were talking about the political censorship that happens on reddit. Which I agree is awful and I hate that. Mods censor opposing political opinions all the time and get away with it.

But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments. You only need to look at web archive to see the quality of many subreddits vastly decline as they got big.

As a mod of a default subreddit, we remove joke comments and image posts. And it's not like it's a new thing, we have always done that. And the quality is still far from perfect, but it's much better than other subs.

Sometimes I click on the comments of a reddit post looking to see more discussion about it. And instead it's just a bunch of jokes. Often by a handful of people that lurk in the rising posts, and make sure they get their comments there first, and so beat all the other comments (reddit's comment sorting algorithm is god awful and easily exploited like that.) Even if they don't have anything to say, or any insight into the subject.

Another problem is there are two different types of users. "Serious" users, for lack of a better name, and "entertainment" users. The users there for entertainment upvote images, jokes, etc. Serious users are looking for discussion and debate and whatever. These two categories aren't easily separated and often mix. The users looking for entertainment often take over subs about serious subjects, e.g. worldnews.

The top posts become whatever pleases the lowest common denominator, or requires the least effort to read. Short articles are easier read the long articles, and images are even easier, and provocative headlines even easier. So image posts and headlines like "mildly important official says something politically unpopular" take over entirely.

<comment><USER3> I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed. There have been more than one hostile takeovers of more popular subs, driven by the idea that these subs need to change. To me, this behaviour is wrong, these people should be making new subs instead.

In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.

<comment><USER5> >inability to discover them.

As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.

You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own sub.

There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".

<comment><USER6> Honest question: How do you (or whoever is doing the takeover) know "what people want"?

After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?

<comment><USER5> Well, democracy answers this by asking people directly. So one way to do it is poll the sub's members. Or, you could see whether the stuff that gets deleted was highly voted before it was deleted. If people don't like certain content, it won't get voted up.

I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.

<comment><USER7> If you pull the "the majority decides" card then there is no decision necessary. Each subreddit is defined by the majority of its users. Simple as that.

<comment><USER8> Not necessarily. The algorithms that do the sorting might be biased toward certain content (for instance, if it highly values quickly upvoted content, it would be biased toward short memes and against long-form articles). Reddit voting isn't just a straight majority vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know how to phrase this in an HN-approved positive way, but I think it needs to be said: the graphics are disturbingly infantilizing if this site is supposed to be for anyone over the age of 9.

<comment><USER10> We made something that makes us happy. Will it appeal to every single human being? No, of course not, nor should it. And that's okay! Nothing on the internet has that power. Not even cats.

We chose to go in this direction because it made all of us happy to go to work every day, and whenever we showed people different versions of our site, whether it was family and friends or in more formal user testing, people tended to like it more with the dinosaurs than without. It's okay if you don't like it, or even if a lot of different people don't like it.

Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and there aren't as many dinos.

<comment><USER11> Who is your target audience though?

If this is the Reddit for 9-year-olds, spot on! I also think there are some other (older) demos who would be attracted to a space like this, but I'm interested in who you think it is.

Also, I'm sorry for the negativity (some of it from me). While I largely agree with the commentary here (that the world doesn't necessarily need a safe space community), I know how hard it is to put anything new out there and commend you for trying to improve upon Reddit. I genuinely wish an HN for "other things" existed and hope you can succeed.

<comment><USER10> Thanks!

It sounds like there's definitely some stuff we could be doing to improve our branding--we're new and we're learning, and the word "positive" seems to have been misconstrued by everyone from what we meant it to be to who we are as a company.

One thing, just as a note, is that we're not trying to be a "safe space" community, and we're not trying to censor disagreement, remove negativity, or even get rid of all hate and mean comments. Those all have a purpose, and without them it becomes an empty echo chamber and there's no point in actually talking.

Also, the fact that we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment is just a tiny, tiny bit of what we're doing differently. We're not trying to be a safer Reddit, or even trying to be a direct Reddit competitor.

What we've built is in response to issues we've seen in all different platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and more. We've tried to build a really broad, flexible platform that makes it so communities can do all the things they want to in one place, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.

<comment><USER12> > we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment

Do you believe it's possible for Anti-GG people as well as GG people to harass?

I ask because the prevailing culture at Twitter and Github is that harassment only comes from one direction: from white men. They don't want to act on claims of "reverse-discrimination".

However, many other people like myself believe that there is an equal or greater amount of harassment and threats from the Social Justice world.

I'm genuinely interested to know your attitude about this.

<comment><USER10> Yes, absolutely. Everyone can get too entrenched, and it's really easy for anyone to divide it into an "us" and a "them," and once you do that, it's too easy to really villainize the other side. Once you decide that the other side has absolutely nothing positive to contribute, then communication breaks down and it turns into snowball throwing that can escalate into grenade throwing.

It doesn't matter if it's GG or anything else. People tend to have valid complaints on both sides, regardless of how small, and both tend to have some guilt. People on both sides oversimplify the arguments of the other side and overgeneralize their actions as all black people this, or all white people this, or all men this, or all women this, or all... etc. And when that happens, it's bad regardless of who the group is and which side they're on, because it's guaranteed to be inaccurate about a vast number of people who are being unfairly characterized as something they're not.

There's a reason the term "social justice warrior" has come into existence, and it's because the people on what might generally be seen as the "good" or "right" side of the issue can also become way to militant, and when you become militant, you stop trying to work together to fix things, get people to see your way, and bring the sides together and start just trying to kill off the other side in order to win. (Now, I do think that term gets thrown around WAY too loosely for anyone who does anything you don't like and is often not accurate, but that goes back to the above paragraph.) Social justice is good. Social justice warriors are not.

Sorry for lots of rambling. It's hard to talk about such a complex issue concisely.

<comment><USER13> > Social justice is good

Honestly, I don't even think there is consensus on what social justice is. If you asked ten people who _love_ social justice to define it, you'll get twelve answers, especially if you ask about specific reforms and initiatives.

And you'll get glaring omissions. Complex tax codes and opaque regulations are great for the powerful and awful for the little guy. Fixing them isn't considered social justice for some reason, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see "warmer, fuzzier" and then I go to the site, and the example thread displayed in the mobile image has the following responses in it:

* "The best evuh"

* "hell yeah"

* "Speechless, it's F*cking beautiful"

It might be a more positive site, but it doesn't look like they are going for high quality discussion.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just to put it out there, we never said anything about warmer or fuzzier. We had no intention of having any press coverage for a few months, perhaps that was a mistake for this reason exactly.

<comment><USER16> Hey, don't let negative comments get to you. Always happens on HN. Best example being DropBox launch, top comments said something along the lines of "this will never work".

As a long-time reddit user, I like what I see so far. I submitted my email for invite, how long does that usually take?

<comment><USER17> Citing an outlier event is not strong evidence against negative-comments-are- always-wrong.

The complaints about Imzy on this submission are justified by the commenters and, in my opinion, accurate.

<comment><USER16> DropBox is certainly not an outlier on HN, it's just the largest example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My biggest complaint with reddit and hn is that there is a down-vote button. It serves no purpose the way I consume and participate in discussions. If I don't agree or vehemently disagree with something I pass over it and that's it. I've had the opportunity to downvote and even when I had a strong opinions against what's stated in a comment I never once downvoted. In fact, I've never used the downvoting link at all. Also, I find it enlightening to read opinions of people who are on the opposite end of some belief spectrum. It broadens my view and helps me better formulate what I think.

Hence, you either ban accounts for disturbing discussions repeatedly or just let everyone say whatever they think. A voting system that tries to hide comments is a bad idea.

I guess my issue is with what JBReefer calls groupthink and brigading. I personally would have called stuff-people-don't-like-to-hear.

Slashdot's systems used to work very well, but it's fallen apart due to the current occupants of their comment sections.

HN already is an echo chamber of sorts, so trying to filter that even more is wrong.

<comment><USER19> What if downvotes were a limited resource (maybe time limited)? It could help if downvoters had to think twice about pushing that button, in case something else deserved their downvote more.

EDIT: or a downvote requires a comment of why the parent was downvoted and/or a selection of pre-defined reasons e.g. factually incorrect, misleading, trolling, spam, etc (similar to Dota2's report system).

<comment><USER20> My thought is downvote, but it will take away from your karma (-1 point). The only way it wouldn't or you get that point back is if you left a comment, possibly responding why you downvoted in the first place (factual, wrong, not relevant to the discussion, etc). Quid pro quo.

<comment><USER19> I think putting "real" value to karma would be a bad idea. People already karma whore even if it has no real value (although it has perceived value). I imagine it would be worse if it has some actual (limited) value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Should people be striving to remove friction in discourse in the first place? I mean, if something hurts to hear, surely that should sound the alarm that it's worth confronting, rather than running away from, right?

Reddit already moderates discussions quite often, and the conversations there don't often reach the level of those here at HN, but still I wonder if maybe too much is too much when it comes to moderation.

I could say something totally offensive and uncalled for on HN, so long as I back it up with why it _needs_ to be said. In other words, I'd argue that the narrative isn't all that matters when it comes to discourse.

Somewhat offtopic, when I look at their material and theming, I think about whether or not I think I'd find people there worth talking to, and that answer is no. ycombinator's landing page, or hell, even Reddit's front page, looks leagues more professional than the weird children's book graphics of Imzy.

I just don't understand what's to be gained in the utilitarian sense by telling people what they can and cannot contribute to a discussion. I really like the idea of just throwing it all out there and then gathering up and working on whatever sticks. Maybe that's why Reddit is semi-appealing.

<comment><USER22> > looks leagues more professional than the weird children's book graphics of > Imzy.

Wait... isn't Imzy actually for children? Cutsy name, cutsy graphics, tight moderation. I thought this is basically the second coming of Gaia online.

<comment><USER17> "Cutsy name, cutsy graphics" is the design for 99% of new startups.

I blame Snapchat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> nv-vn The article doesn't really explain how anything is actually going to work in practice. By 'warmier and fuzzier' do we mean it's targeted at kids (as the graphics might suggest)? In that case, will they be moderating profanity and whatever they deem inappropriate for children? Or is it just going to be based on reducing harassment (as they mentioned in the article)? And in that case, what would constitute harassment and how would it be dealt with? It seems like the idea is very broad without an actual target at what it should be. I don't think Reddit was the right model to base it off of for what they're attempting to do.

<comment><USER10> Hi!

A few things.

1\. We're not trying to be "warmer and fuzzier"\--those are the author's words.

2\. We're not trying to be a children's site--we just wanted to make something that made us (and hopefully others) happy, and that included cute dinosaurs.

3\. We're not based on Reddit, nor are we trying to replace them.

(As a note, the author of this article didn't talk to us, and they haven't actually seen any more of our site than you have.)

Here's what we ARE doing. We're building a community site based on issues we've seen in all different platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and more. We've tried to build a really broad, flexible platform that makes it so communities can do all the things they want to in one place, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.

Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.

<comment> nv-vn Thanks for reaching out to answer my questions. I was really confused visiting the website after I read the article because barely anything matched up with the descriptions they gave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's the challenge: No community aggregator will ever be able to filter and promote exactly the stuff you in particular want to see. Everyone has different tastes and opinions and the only thing that can possibly come from community-driven aggregation is list of the most popular stuff in that community. You'll have to actually research and filter content yourself to get any better results.

The best crowdsourced results seem to come from specialized communities (HN, subreddits, maybe this new site).

For anything better you'll have to go through the volumes of unwanted content yourself, or have a trusted curator do it for you.

</comment><comment><USER24> That "get an invite" business is really annoying. Do they want people to join or not? It's an antiquated way to get attention...

<comment><USER25> Reason being it's a semi-private beta, not public release. Invite-only lets them ease into managing a larger userbase and the associated content.

<comment><USER15> It's true, this is the reason we are invite only right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The highest-quality discussion that I've found on the Internet generally came from "phpBB"-based website forums, built around specific interests or communities.

Part of the reason for that is the common interest in a shared niche. However, I believe that most important factor by far is the lack of up or down "voting" buttons.

On any platform with voting, the "imaginary Internet points" tend to drive the user experience. Upvotes trigger reward behavior, just like the social aspect of Farmville-style mindless freemium games. Downvotes trigger social anxiety and drive behavior also. Trolls relish it, while normal users are often insecure about it. Even on an "elite" platform like Hacker News, how many comments basically boil down to, "Hey guys, why did some of you downvote my last comment???".

Basically, voting turns a discussion platform into an MMO video game for a large portion of the userbase. It leads to groupthink, "brigades" and manipulation, low-quality memes and running jokes, etc. I think its negative impact on high-quality discussion easily matches or exceeds its positive impact on self-moderation.

Ultimately, I think the ideal model of discussion platform governance is a "benevolent dictatorship" of active mods, without user voting. It doesn't scale very well, but it's the common denominator among the highest-quality communities I've ever seen. The problem is since a micro-generation of Internet users is now accustomed to the MMO model, online discussion without voting is just... well... _boring_. Going back to that is like trading processed corn syrup for organic vegetables. Most aren't going to do it.

Downvote if you disagree. :)

<comment><USER27> This is a great comment. I'll expand it with a few other points that are along similar lines to what you mention.

Most (if not all) platforms suffer from 2 extremes, open discussion involves conflict which is seen as bad but can end up with insightful discussion and robust conclusion. Secondly, forums suffer from prejudice of the moderators. There was a good example recently of this in a HN posting on moderators. I'll illustrate with a topical example for modern times.

Why do people use the term misogynist instead of sexist? It's to reinforce a belief that sexism is a male behaviour, which, in itself is sexist. If you read the recent article on moderation, sexism didn't rate a mention but misogyny did. In other words, certain types of thinking are forbidden and some forms of prejudice are encouraged.

When I read about this new spinoff, my first two thoughts were on avoidance of robust discussion and the prejudice and politics of the founders and moderators. Here's hoping they don't make the same politically correct but prejudiced mistakes that most sites make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I find in some forums the issue is the group think enforced by moderators.

The StackOverflow forums suffer from this as they are community moderated and many questions get closed as Off Topic which basically are chats about something tangential to the area or opinion but are valuable none the less or I wouldn't have gone to the page to begin with. Effectively moderators promote group think.

Some bizarre things Ive seen in its computer science forum are questions being closed when about things like "what are the current areas of research in blah?". Somehow its gathered a bunch of crap mods and computer science doesn't really get discussed there.

If its truly out of forum then these forums need to allow some kind of "Open Discussion" tag or move to another forum ability.

</comment><comment><USER29> We're building a similar type of experience over at baqqer for organic communities to exist for people to talk about the things they love. We could use some feedback from the community if you have some time. [https://baqqer.com/explore/tags/startups](https://baqqer.com/explore/tags/startups)

This url might move to [https://baqqer.com/groups/startups](https://baqqer.com/groups/startups) or [https://baqqer.com/communities/startups](https://baqqer.com/communities/startups) because I'm currently actively working on the codebase.

<comment><USER30> Really odd critique. You might get a lot of confusion from people seeing it as an underlined URL and mentally think "bagger" initially. Especially since the a and the first q kind of continue where the next letter's curl ends. Part of the problem might just be that two Qs in a row don't really mentally parse well when read - for me, at least.

<comment><USER31> This is exactly what I though "bagger? Is that a low rider website?

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I see what you're saying. I wonder what would help? An entirely new name? It's been on my mind quite a bit, thinking about what can simultaneously convey community, prototyping, making, and growing. It's difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There have always been heavily moderated forums for users to interact with representatives of media corporations. That's why Reddit and 4chan got so huge and influential (not being that.) I can't tell what the secret sauce is supposed to be from this article.

</comment><comment><USER33> Someone is going to get the mix right on news aggregators one day and it's going to be big. Definitely a category of applications to keep a pulse on.

<comment><USER34> I disagree that there's such a thing as THE right mix. Some people will prefer the wild west, and others will prefer heavily moderated forums. From the looks of the cartoon characters on the home page, Imzy looks like it's targeting the infant-to-toddler demographic.

<comment><USER35> I read it as more "taking the cute Reddit alien and running with it". YMMV obviously.

<comment><USER15> I have spent a good amount of my last 6 years or so trying to be happy and helping others online to be happy. What we wanted with our mascot was something that evoked happiness. Admittedly it's a fine line to walk between cute/happy/childish and we need to find the right mix.

<comment><USER34> The home page looks like a scene from the Teletubbies TV show. It does not look like something designed to appeal to well-adjusted adults.

<comment><USER36> Fine to me. Better to "err" on that side, as a signal to hate groups who fester on reddit. Furthermore, you can take it as self-mocking irony, if you prefer...

<comment><USER34> I prefer to take it as I perceive it, to wit, as a dumb business decision that will likely be re-thought and re-done at some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> That "avoid undue negativty" stuff went out the window, eh?

</comment><comment><USER38> Who wants to try it out - come join our startup community on Imzy:

[https://www.imzy.com/startup](https://www.imzy.com/startup)

</comment><comment><USER39> Isn't the actual issue that every discussion seems to descend into politics?

Could you create a platform without that?

I can't say I've noticed issues on cat photo subreddits, or /r/unixporn, or whatever else.

There seems to be this slow and inevitable descent into discussing politics at every available opportunity, and not in a humourous sense.

If you create a subreddit about some social issue, then the social issue will be discussed there.

</comment><comment><USER40> How did an ex-exec create a competing platform? did reddit not have him sign a non-compete or does it just not matter in CA?

</comment><comment><USER41> My big question: how do you deal with community leadership and moderation? Is the first person to create a particular community that community's dictator for life? How can large communities, with populations larger than many nations, achieve practical, representative, and accountable self-governance?

</comment><comment><USER42> I think this screenshot I took from their site sums up how this is going to end up. [https://i.imgur.com/X7z4OnF.png](https://i.imgur.com/X7z4OnF.png)

I can't imagine "This is the best evuh!!!!" being a positive contribution to _any_ conversation.

</comment><comment><USER43> For one I'm glad that this guy is offering a "safe" place for discussion. Hopefully all the people who need to be shielded from "offensive" ideas will gravitate to this website. In a truly ideal world, sterilization would be part of the enrollment process.

</comment><comment><USER44> What every social network effect platform or application ignores is group psychology.

All conflicts on these services can be boiled down to how human groups work.

If these services addressed group psychology up front and at the forefront of their solution, then we could see people being more aware of their group and groups and where they stand as individuals.

I'd like to see an attempt to reduce conflict and increase collaboration between groups, peoples, ideologies, for example.

The "problems" that all these sites are labeled with all boil down to a mass of different people clashing against each other. They are not problems, they are symptoms of how groups are behaving on the internet, many for the first time, and people within their groups do not have the tools to deal with other groups properly.

</comment><comment><USER45> So the "safer" means more group-think and getting banned if you disagree with someone?

</comment><comment><USER46> Cool interface. I would love to read about the back end details.

What stack do they use? What database? Cache-engine?

<comment><USER47> Why would you want to know/ask about their cache engine when it's not clear they have one, or even have a single user?

Did you, by any chance, configure the site's cache engine... :)

<comment><USER46> Because I am curious. I love to read about what stack each company chooses to use and why. And even more so for brand new companies that start from scratch and have so many options.

For example, did they use RethinkDB for the real time features? Or something more conservative like RabbitMQ?

How about their primary data store? Postgres? MySQL? Or something more trendy?

What about the language? Python? Node.js? Something more adventurous, like go? Why?

No, I am not affiliated in anyway with them. If you google my username you will see my project, which has nothing to do with them, and is a bit too Xrated for HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm a long time Reddit user. Somehow I missed this information.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why do they have Teletubbies, that look like the head of the alien logo with 3 horns

</comment><comment><USER50> "Positive, healthy, diverse"

Looks like fun. And by fun I mean more toxic than tumblr in echoing the same "positive" thoughts and certainly criticism against those who don't share the same opinions

<comment><USER51> "Healthy, positive communities" is an oxymoron.

A healthy community has healthy and sometimes necessarily intense disagreement in its discourse (just as a healthy mind questions itself).

A "positive" community has no disagreement at all - or at least none that go deep enough to resolve really serious differences.

The only way to maintain a "positive" community the way they mean is to simply ban everyone with views outside a narrow opinion corridor. But _whose_ opinions will define that allowed opinion corridor? From the euphemistically fuzzy language and focus on good emotions, I think I know.

<comment><USER52> I don't know. A lot of small communities about very esoteric subjects tend to be both healthy and pretty much entirely positive. My secondary forum about the Wario series has a very upbeat atmosphere without too much in the way of disagreement, but that's only a thing because the subject itself only appeals to a limited amount of people. Same sort of thing with the forums I've seen based on the Super Mario Bros movie and the Mario RPG games.

But that's always going to be impossible if a community has a mainstream appeal, since large communities will inevitably have different groups with different interests and opinions, and Dunbar's Number means people can only retain super close relationships with between 100 and 250 people.

<comment><USER53> I'll give you an "I don't know" back. IMHO the best communities are those that retain bitter rivals. The worst are the ones that have a high churn of beginners parroting received wisdom in an echo chamber without any of the necessary experience.

I love nothing more than when high level participants who have fundamentally irreconcilable differences have explosive but on-topic fights. Even better when they surprise themselves and agree. These are special experiences you can learn so much from.

<comment> nv-vn Definitely. One of my favorite IRC channels is pretty much exactly this. Everyone disagrees about what their favorite technology is or what their political views are on said channel, but arguments are encouraged and often last hours at a time. Since all users (including moderators) are displayed as +v (voice), it helps create a sense of comfort disagreeing with people because there's no perceived risk to disagreeing with moderators/"power users" and in turn basically any discussion or opinion is welcome to be voiced. In a way, the friendships formed there are nicer than on other channels because you're comfortable bringing anything that comes to mind up without tarnishing your relationship and just arguing it out (+ maybe even changing your mind). This should be what online communities are designed to be like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> "Quietly" should really get added to a list of semi-clickbaity words that get excised from Hacker News titles.

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+quietly)

<comment><USER55> I'm not sure it's quite that bad, but we'll take it out of the HN title for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Reddit seems pretty adolescent in general. What comes to my mind when I think of it is cartoons/comics, video games, celebrities and mainstream news. So does warm and fuzzy mean they are catering to a more mature audience or what?

</comment><comment><USER57> You created an account just to post this? Are you affiliated with them?

<comment><USER58> This is a pattern for new sites/services that suddenly get press and then get noticed in random aggregators (like HN).

Since the site is new, it doesn't get _that_ much attention from the aggregator's core audience, and any negative comments are swiftly downvoted after 10-20 employees register and downvote them via central command. This has happened to me on HN before; I guess because I take a perverse kind of enjoyment out of sabotaging astroturfing attempts.

All of this makes perfect business sense; I would probably do it too if I were in this kind of position.

It also makes sense for HN to build better defenses against attacks like this.

<comment><USER55> Only established users can downvote. It takes 500 karma. That's the highest threshold we have.

<comment><USER58> Ah. That's good.

I guess that's why it has taken a couple of hours for my comments to heavily downvoted (comments that were initially quite heavily upvoted) in my previous attempts at smashing obvious astroturfs - their @all-employees mail needs to get to the employees who happen to have that amount of HN karma.

I do realize that going further than this in terms of defenses would be quite a complicated thing.

<comment><USER59> Or perhaps there are people who disagree with you, and are not affiliated with that company. People who think that accusations of astroturfing are actually pretty mean, and shouldn't be made without evidence.

People like me.

<comment><USER37> I also downvote accusations of shilling. As I understand it people should send those to the email address, and not dump them in the thread.

I don't know if accusations of shilling are the kind of thing I should be flagging though.

<comment><USER60> Without evidence beyond 'I don't like this person's views', which is just about all of them, I think they're reliably flagworthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Anyone else get reminded of Eugenics when hearing about stuff like this? It's not entirely a history of violence, but of keeping the "undesirables" out and congregating people with attributes they agree with in order to strengthen those attributes in the general population.

I'm just saying slippery slope and all..

</comment><comment><USER62> 4chan raid in 3.. 2..</comment>


Efficient String Concatenation in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.skymind.com/~ocrow/python_string/

<comment><USER2> Note that since this article was written (2004) CPython performs an in-place optimisation for assignments of the form

        s1 += s2

There are details at point six of [http://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#sequence- type...](http://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#sequence-types-str- unicode-list-tuple-bytearray-buffer-xrange), where it also says that str.join() is preferable.

<comment><USER3> OK, so for fun I did a ran this on my machine (MacBook Pro, 2.53GHz, 10.8.4, 8GB ram, Python 2.7.2 shipped by Apple). I had to emulate the old timing module using code from [1].

        Method 1: 0.115 seconds
        Method 2: I gave up after >120s
        Method 3: 0.265
        Method 4: 0.160
        Method 5: 0.220
        Method 6: 0.098

I ran each one a few times to make sure the times were roughly correct. Method 6 is still the fastest, but the naive method one is really close. it obviously got optimized. Actually, they're all pretty close with the obvious (and hideous) outlier of using MutableString.

EDIT:

I just remembered I have an old version of PyPy (1.8) on my Mac. Thought I'd give that a try.

        Method 1: I gave up after >120s
        Method 2: I gave up after >120s
        Method 3: 0.090 seconds
        Method 4: 0.102
        Method 5: 0.430
        Method 6: 0.102

Method one is a problem again, and method 5 (the pseudo file) is noticeably slower. Otherwise the results aren't too far off.

[1] [http://effbot.org/librarybook/timing.htm](http://effbot.org/librarybook/timing.htm)

<comment><USER4> Similar relative results, except that method 1 is always the fastest and even better than method 6. Ran loop count with large numbers (10 million & 30 million) to reduce measurement noise. Profiling was with cProfile on Core i3 2.53Ghz, 6 GB ram, Python 2.7.3 on Ubuntu 12.04

for 10M loop count, method 1 -> 1.599 s, method 6 -> 1.91 s

for 30M loop count,method 1 -> 4.967 s, method 6 -> 5.871 s

Summary: The KISS s1 += s2 always wins

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A very old article from 2004 (please edit the title). The tests are only for cpython2 and for a very old one.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you really care about efficiency (and are using PyPy), an actually efficient way to concat strings:

        from __pypy__.builders import StringBuilder
        builder = StringBuilder(<size estimate, optional>)
        for i in xrange(10000):
            builder.append(str(i))
        return builder.build()

</comment><comment><USER7> Note these tests were run on Python 2.2 which makes the results old enough to almost certainly be invalid. Last time I checked, straight string concatenation was faster than everything else for the types of inputs I was dealing with.

<comment><USER8> _straight string concatenation was faster than everything else_

As I understand it, this is implementation dependent. CPython has gone to some lengths to optimize its string concatenation code to do things behind the scenes that are basically equivalent to some of the faster methods given in the article. Other Python implementations have not necessarily done that, so string concatenation can be a lot slower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How would a method 7 using generator expressions fare on the same system, like:

        return ''.join(`num` for num in xrange(loop_count))

On one hand, it avoids creating a temporary list in memory. On the other, it can't know in advance how long the final output of the loop will be and so couldn't use tricks like preallocating enough RAM.

<comment><USER10> Interestingly enough, this is pretty much the example given for the timemit module:

[http://docs.python.org/2/library/timeit.html](http://docs.python.org/2/library/timeit.html)

Results:

        $ python -m timeit '"-".join(str(n) for n in range(100))'

        10000 loops, best of 3: 40.3 usec per loop

        $ python -m timeit '"-".join([str(n) for n in range(100)])'

        10000 loops, best of 3: 33.4 usec per loop

        $ python -m timeit '"-".join(map(str, range(100)))'

        10000 loops, best of 3: 25.2 usec per loop

<comment><USER11> I just ran those with Python 2.7 (ASCII and Unicode) and Python 3.2 (Unicode). "-".join(map(str, range(100))) was always the fastest, with ASCII (2.7) < Unicode (3.2) < Unicode (2.7). Makes sense, but worth keeping in mind when porting code from Python 2 to 3.

Full results: [https://gist.github.com/dbarlett/6479378](https://gist.github.com/dbarlett/6479378)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe that the current most efficient way of doing this is

        ''.join(map(str, range(n)))

<comment><USER8> In Python 2, itertools.imap will be faster since it doesn't realize a list. Also, if you are memory constrained, xrange doesn't realize a list either, whereas range does (but the article notes that range was slightly faster than xrange in his tests--I don't know if that's still true in Python 2, the article is 9 years old).

In Python 3, the map builtin is basically equivalent what itertools.imap was in Python 2, so it is the best choice. (Also, the range builtin in Python 3 no longer realizes a list.)

<comment><USER12> I tried it with n=1000 and n=10000, and found that using xrange made it slightly faster, as did using itertools.imap, but the difference was pretty small.

(Here I'm using the stock Python 2.7.1 on a 2011 MacBook Pro.)

<comment><USER8> _using xrange made it slightly faster_

That's what I would expect, since xrange works like a generator; but the internals of its implementation in CPython back when the article ran its original tests were evidently less efficient than they are now.

 _the difference was pretty small_

I suspect that's because the strings being concatenated are really small (the largest will only be 5 bytes for n=10000). I would expect the difference to get bigger as the individual strings get larger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How have I never heard of backtick quotes? Apparently they are an abomination [1], so I will promptly force-forget them.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/a/7490311/807674](http://stackoverflow.com/a/7490311/807674)

</comment><comment><USER14> Doing stuff efficiently is great when there's some benefit from efficiency. But I've seen a lot of fragile code (and implementation specific hacks) created based on benchmarks, when the time savings were meaningless in practice.

</comment><comment><USER15> For comparison, PHP has mutable strings. Some totally unscientific averaged benchmarks (Atom D2700, PHP 5.4.4-14 amd64):

        $buff = '';
        for ($i = 0; $i != 100000; ++$i) {
                $buff .= $i;
        }

Runs in about 0.06s

        $buff = array();
        for ($i = 0; $i != 100000; ++$i) {
                $buff[] = $i;
        }
        $ret = implode('', $buff);

Runs slower, in about 0.10s

        $ret = implode('', range(0, 100000));

Takes roughly the same time, 0.10s

</comment><comment><USER16> How about using Python 3.3.2?

I did many kind of performance tests when implementing my PyClockPro caching lib, even if I don't use strings in it.</comment>


Microsoft shows off Surface 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ces-microsoft-shows-off-surface-20/8349

<comment><AUTHOR> Some seriously impressive tech from Microsoft:

\- 4 inches thick

\- Each pixel on the Surface screen is a camera.

\- Horizontally and vertically mountable.

\- Able to detect text on a objects placed on the surface of the screen. They demoed it by placing a paper with text on the surface.

\- Surface has the biggest piece of Gorilla Glass ever produced.</comment>


Uber haunted by the ghost of Flash: your app doesn't need an intro - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/uber-haunted-by-the-ghost-of-flash-your-app-doesn-t-need-an-intro-40158a49ca26 <comment><USER2> The "demo video" is one of the scourges of the web today.

Today I am interested in animation that is perceived to hide latency rather than a source of latency.

Back in the PS2 era there was definitely a thing for games that took a long time to get the world model off disk. My cousin Tony would play Mafia Taxi Driver, and it seemed like we'd wait 10 minutes for it to load, take another 10 minutes driving across town, then the event would happen, he'd get killed, and then he'd have to do it all over again.

If you look at newer games they have a load of tricks they use to hide latency.</comment>


Linds Redding's 'Short Lesson in Perspective' - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/its-not-worth-it-linds-reddings-short-lesson-in-perspective-2012-11?r=US&IR=T <comment><USER2> A link to the actual essay by the ad exec, Linds Redding - A Short Lesson In Perspective[0]

[0] [http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson- in-p...](http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in- perspective/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is a brutally honest read, and it resonates more because the author is now diseased and this was a reflection back on his life before he left us.

</comment><comment><USER4> Enjoy your capitalism where people working in advertising and meaningless app businesses get huge sums of money while phd postdocs researching molecular biology (which is necessary to at least have a chance of finding a cure for cancer) are getting by on their 60000$.

You, dear reader, probably hope that you will make enough money off your trendy webapp business and will get the best medicine when the time comes, but you probably won't. This man's fate awaits you.</comment>


Close to launching first startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecitybee.com After months of reading/planning/coding I'm close to launching my first startup. Please signup and spread the word. I'll share with HN before the live launch. <comment><USER2>
      Heroku | No such app

      There is no app configured at that hostname.
      Perhaps the app owner has renamed it, or you
      mistyped the URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> >_< apparently adding www is throwing it off. For what it's worth...please use <http://thecitybee.com> as I can't seem to edit the URL in the link.

<comment><USER3> set up a cname.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did that. Damn godaddy...takes 24 hrs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tracking your social media strategy - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-track-your-social-media-strategy

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting - this post was inspired by this Hacker News comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347428></comment>


Google is completely redesigning AdWords - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/adwords-redesign-first-look-246074 <comment><USER2> In Dart and Angular 2. I have to take a look at Dart again. I thought it was going to be left to wither and die, but with Flutter and now this, I have to go back and take another look. The tooling was fun, and they are developing or have developed a 'strong mode' for stronger typing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the new interface - going to make Adwords much more user friendly!</comment>


Show HN: I mapped 30k+ paintings around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.artnear.me/museums?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=Claude+Oscar+Monet&location=new+york+city

<comment><USER2> That's great. Fun idea and good execution - well done.

Quick note (sorry to be the grouch): you're using OpenStreetMap map data, so you need to give OSM an on-screen credit. Not much to ask for the best source of map data in the world. :) Details: [http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright](http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Rails, leaflet.js. I parsed the museum locations from [http://www.the- athenaeum.org/](http://www.the-athenaeum.org/). Hoping to add more paintings in the future.

<comment><USER3> That's a great data source. I'd previously tried this with freebase data, but it's nothing like comprehensive enough when it comes down to individual artworks.

Still, nicely done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool. I didn't know that freebase existed. The next best source may be some of the sites that have poster prints of art.

<comment><USER3> I'd recommend having a look at dbpedia as well - that was better for less structured data than in freebase for my tests.

Freebase has great structured data about art movements though, which is likely to be more useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't help but think of The Monuments Men movie that's coming out in February. If you wanted this to get some more publicity, I'm sure you could rebrand/position this in some way to ride that film's wave. Maybe something like "Be a Monument Man, and find art around the world!"

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm no fan of the idea.

The parsed source is outdated and probably will be forever because it's crowd- sourced and can't keep up with changing exhibitions and lendings of paintings, which is a common thing.

The use case where I check my phone to find a painting or an artist near me also seems far fetched. A better scenario would be to have a map with museums near me and up-to-date information what they currently exhibit. You would need better sources for that.

On the technical side it's quite slow at the moment but the blown up thumbnails (where the Athenaeum also had thumbnails for fair use reasons but in a better quality) were not nice. I would keep them in their original ratio.

I assume that this was probably more an excercise to test-drive some new tech.

<comment><USER6> > I'm no fan of the idea.

It sounds like you're actually not a fan of this implementation, not of the idea of a map of paintings. Would you still be opposed to it if the data was always accurate, the previews were larger, and the site was more responsive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice work. I wonder how this art map compares with what the guys over at [http://artsy.net/](http://artsy.net/).

</comment><comment><USER8> São Paulo has a great mapping/index of graffiti art. Might be of interest to you. Related to this [http://jungledrumsonline.com/articles/travel- articles/take-t...](http://jungledrumsonline.com/articles/travel- articles/take-the-graffiti-tour-of-sao-paulo/). I couldn't find the database link

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice! Didn't know about leaflet.js, and happy I now do! Very fast results BTW.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC appears to be a few blocks off.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very Cool! I'm going to fiddle with leaflet this weekend

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice job, put a like and tweet button!

<comment><USER13> No, please don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Super, I love it!

</comment><comment><USER15> just what I need to plan my next heist :-D

</comment><comment><USER16> cool</comment>


Every German Submarine Is Out of Action - <AUTHOR> https://warisboring.com/every-german-submarine-is-out-of-action/ <comment><USER2> Famously, Trump sent Germany a $370 billion bill on overdue defense payments. This story is unsurprising in that light.

<comment><USER3> "Both German and U.S. government officials deny a media report that President Trump presented German Chancellor Angela Merkel with a multi-billion dollar NATO bill." \- [https://www.snopes.com/2017/03/28/trump-merkel-nato- bill/](https://www.snopes.com/2017/03/28/trump-merkel-nato-bill/)

Despite how much we spend on the military, the U.S. Navy has its own set of problems. Remember the multiple ship collisions this year? That's apparently as a result of how cost-saving measures affect training, at least based on one analysis.

WarIsBoring has also reported "The U.S. Navy Is Flat Worn-Out / The United States is asking too much from its sailors" \- [https://warisboring.com/the-u- s-navy-is-flat-worn-out/](https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-is-flat-worn- out/) :

"The fact is, the Navy is flat-out overworked. Americans ask their sailors and their warships to be in too many places at once, and when there are far too few of them. Nor is Congress allocating enough money to build ships to make up for the Navy's shortfall while it also seeks to cut taxes and balance the federal budget."

Similarly, "The U.S. Navy's Greatest Enemy Might Be Exhaustion" [https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navys-greatest-enemy- might-b...](https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navys-greatest-enemy-might-be- exhaustion/)

No, I don't think we have no ships available for a given class. But that's because we have a huge amount of ships.

And the US spends money on the military like there's no tomorrow. Not always well.

For example, "Here Is Why the U.S. Navy's Littoral Combat Ships Punch Below Their Weight" \- [https://warisboring.com/here-is-why-the-u-s-navys- littoral-c...](https://warisboring.com/here-is-why-the-u-s-navys-littoral- combat-ships-punch-below-their-weight/)

and "The U.S. Navy is trying to dodge its responsibility to conduct a critical test of its new, $13-billion aircraft carrier. ... The provision would permit the Navy to delay shock trials until the second ship in the class is ready for testing in several years. Waiving this requirement for Ford would endanger the lives of the 4,300 sailors of the ship's complement and risk massive cost overruns in the years ahead as the Navy continues building an untested design." [https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-wants-to-deploy-its- new...](https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-wants-to-deploy-its-new-flattop- without-vital-testing/)

and "Senators Are Forcing the U.S. Navy to Buy Crappy Ships It Doesn't Want" [https://warisboring.com/senators-are-forcing-the-u-s-navy- to...](https://warisboring.com/senators-are-forcing-the-u-s-navy-to-buy- crappy-ships-it-doesnt-want/) is one of several article concerning the 'troubled' Littoral Combat Ship.</comment></comment>


An Atlas of Consonance (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://normsohl.com/mt/maptone.html

<comment><USER2> If you enjoyed this article, you should read "Relating Tuning and Timbre" ([http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html)), which generalizes these ideas to tones with nonharmonic partials. I think it also does a slightly better job at explaining the underlying ideas clearly.</comment>


Two new open source projects to make Kubernetes easier to use in production - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heptio.com/announcing-two-new-heptio-open-source-projects-heptio-ark-and-heptio-sonobuoy-7cef88a06f8 <comment><USER2> Nice to see Heptio releasing some very accessible tooling to the community. We've solved the Ark use case with continuous etcd backups + EBS snapshots but this looks cleaner and more agnostic. Sonobuoy could easily replace our manual testing on brand new Kubernetes deployments (after upgrades, or when porting configuration to other platforms).

</comment><comment><USER3> These are excellent projects that showcase how far k8s has gotten in making infrastructure programmable. Helps that the names are pretty cool too :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Heres why i am bullish in this space.

Kube is so easy to use in prod. Literally easiest setup I have ever used. Gets better each release.

How much profit is in selling supporting tools for it? No idea but I wouldn't invest in it.</comment>


Your license to use React.js can be revoked if you compete with Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://react-etc.net/entry/your-license-to-use-react-js-can-be-revoked-if-you-compete-with-facebook <comment><USER2> I work on React.

I'm not a lawyer so I won't try to paraphrase the license -- I actually think the wording is pretty simple already -- but to be clear, only the patent grant might terminate if you were to sue Facebook; the BSD license that the code is provided under remains valid regardless.

The author's claim that Google and Microsoft employees are unable to use React is false. I know there are teams at both companies using React and React Native. (It is true that Google was not happy with an older version of the patent grant, but we updated it in response to their feedback.)

<comment><USER3> The problem with React is its patent rider. React.js comes with a BSD license, but has a patent rider that gives you a license to React's patents. This sounds like a good thing, right? But this rider has a "strong retaliation clause" which says that if you make any sort of patent claim against Facebook this patent license automatically terminates. Which means Facebook can now sue you for patent infringement for using React. You may think this is no worse than not having a patent rider at all. But that's not the case. If there is no patent rider then there is an implicit grant which cannot be revoked.

If you work for a software company and your company has patents then keep in mind that by using React you are giving Facebook a free license to your entire patent portfolio.

More info on weak vs strong retaliation clauses: [http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj9.htm](http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj9.htm)

<comment><USER4> > If there is no patent rider then there is an implicit grant which cannot be > revoked.

That contradicts everything I've ever heard on the subject. Can you cite any legal precedent?

<comment><USER5> The text of the BSD license says "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided...".

Now, there's a theory that looks like this: The BSD license gives you a license to _use_ a project. If I release some code under a BSD license, but I also patent it, and you download it, start to use it, and I sue you, then you couldn't _really_ use it, could you?

So some people have argued that the "use" part of the BSD license includes _all_ the rights needed to actually use the project, including the right to use any patents the author may have. There are some counterarguments too of course.

However, no court has ever considered the question, and no rulings have been made in either direction. Some day, a court may decide that the BSD license includes an implcit grant...or not. We'll have to wait and see.

Now, a followup question is: What happens if a court decides the BSD license includes an implicit grant, but an explicit grant is also included? Some people think that the explicit grant might _replace_ the implicit grant; others think that it might _add_ to the implicit grant. And if the explicit grant is seen as replacing the implicit grant, and the explicit grant terminates in conditions where the BSD license does not, then the explicit grant actually weakens the BSD license. Alternatively, if the grant is additive (or no implicit grant exists), then the explicit grant does not weaken the BSD license.

Petilon's position is right if: 1) A court rules that the BSD license contains an implicit grant and 2) Further rules that the explicit grant included in the React project replaces and extinguishes the implicit grant included in BSD license. So far neither step has occurred, but they _might_. In theory. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The spirit of the actual license appears to be toward specifically preventing patent litigation against Facebook _and contributors and related entities to React itself_. Assigning it to "competing with Facebook" in general seems a little broad.

IANAL, but this could be seen as a needed protection and Facebook playing it safe in the interest of both itself and its open source contributors, kind of saying "if you contribute to, use, or are involved in React, everyone has to play nice and mutually agree not to sue each other over software patents. If you do, you don't get to benefit."

Then again, you could take it the other way, and assume it could be used on the offensive. But I think there would be enough pressures against that type of use. Still, sure, consult a lawyer.

Edit: the last part seems to grant some pretty wide freedoms, protecting your right to use React even if Facebook sues you over a patent unrelated to React, so with that in there, I think it's making it abundantly clear that this clause is about protecting React from patent litigation. Seems solid.

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems to be a complete misreading of the clause, which focuses on patent claims.

</comment><comment><USER8> IANAL but the plain-English reading of the license is extremely straightforward: the license is void if the licensee engages in patent litigation against Facebook or React contributors.

That's narrow, clear and (IMO) sensible. This entire article is just pure misinformation.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is just patent-suit MAD ("If you sue, or counter-sue, us for patent-y stuff, your license to use the patents underlying React is forfeit."), not "You can't use React to do Facebook-y things." There is absolutely nothing in the grant of patent rights that supports the second notion.

</comment><comment> jake-low Here's some more discussion from a previous HN submission:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985541)

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems like the open source licensing equivalent of mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons. If Facebook were to aggressively pull the rug out from a competitor because of React licensing, I think the effects for the industry as a whole would be far worse than the threat some startup posed to them.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was never quite persuaded to tip in so how do devs who did feel about this approach, does not apply no bother? Does apply but won't compete? Does apply and uncertain of future?

"This is the reason why both Google and Microsoft employees are not allowed to use React.js in their work. " is that true ?

<comment><USER2> Google employees formerly were not allowed to use React but now are after the patent grant was changed (in response to their feedback). I know of several teams at Microsoft using React Native, so I assume there's no concern there either.

<comment><USER11> okay, that's reassuring, thanks.

<comment><USER12> Not so quickly. There is no verifiable source for to this. Are there any google team publicly announcing react in their tech stack ?

<comment><USER2> I guess I'm not verifiable enough? What about Paul Irish?

[https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/754864479460929536](https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/754864479460929536)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That title and article is very misleading. A) The React license is a 3 clause BSD license. [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/LICENSE) It has absolutely no custom restrictions in it. In addition to the license for using react, they B) grant an additional patent related license ([https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS)) such that if you use React and React "infringes" on a Facebook patent, Facebook is additionally licensing the patent to you. In this way, not only are you licensed to use the software (React), but you are licensed to use any Facebook patents that React might infringe/use. However, if you decide to sue Facebook for patent infringement (of any kind), they are going to revoke your license to their PATENTS. This only matters if the software (React) actually infringes the PATENTS. Either way, you still technically have a license (3 clause BSD) to React...but, you could be violating a Facebook patent by using it.

It's important to keep in mind that there are two different types of Intellectual Property in view here. Software licenses and patent licenses. Theoretically, you could use some software Y under the BSD license and have some third party X sue you because Y violates a patent (even though you didn't write Y and are only using it). Facebook is being generous IMO by saying both A) you can use our software and B) if we have patents that the software benefits from we also license those to you provided C) you do not sue us for patent violations, in which case we revoke B (but not A).

So, going back to the article, the license to use React would not be revoked and it has nothing to do with competing with React. It is possible that if you sued Facebook for patent infringement AND Facebook claimed that React benefited from it's patents, that Facebook could now sue you for patent infringement b/c you use React.

But, if you sue any big company for patent infringement, they are also going to look at their portfolio of patents to see what you might be infringing and will counter-sue. So, in that case, I don't feel like Facebook is really being contrary here. They are basically saying, "As long as you don't sue us for patent infringement, we promise not to sue you for any patent infringement related to our open source software (including React). By doing this, we are hoping you will take advantage of the software we have put out there in the OSS world and alleviate any patent fears you might have. However, if you choose to sue us for patent infringement, we revoke this promise, and are going to treat you just like any other Joe Schmo."

IMO, Facebook is going out of their way to make it possible for others to benefit from their OSS software by granting not only a generous software license but a related patent license as well. For the article to misconstrue this as a license revocation if you decide to "compete" with them is pretty disingenuous.

<comment><USER14> >So, in that case, I don't feel like Facebook is really being contrary here. They are basically saying, "As long as you don't sue us for patent infringement, we promise not to sue you for any patent infringement related to our open source software (including React).

So basically if you have this awesome, let's say, middle out compression algorithm patent, and have an interface in react, then they can use your middle out without being sued? (Just trying to clarify what you are saying here..)

<comment><USER5> If you patent a compression algorithm, and Facebook infringes, and you are also using React, and you sue Facebook over your compression algorithm patent then:

Your license to any patents which Faceboook may or may not have that cover elements of React will terminate. At that point, Facebook may choose to initiate a lawsuit against you over your infringement of whatever React patents (if any) they have.

So if you have (or are planning on obtaining) software patents, the React patent grant may not be very valuable. (Then again, Facebook may not have any patents actually covered by the grant, in which case it's not valuable to anyone.)

<comment><USER14> So, basically if you plan to compete with facebook territory as a small startup, then it seems to follow that you either

(1) Have patents / use a react alternative, such as vue (note this is annoying since there is no cross-platform native app version of vue ) (2) Don't have patents / protect your intellectual property in other ways (maybe by publishing a public whitepaper or something) / use React / Bust your ass since facebook can likely implement better and faster than any small team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We were beginning to use React for a few things at my company, but we had our legal counsel review the license and they essentially said to use something else if we could. They weren't really worried about it, but enough so to advise avoiding it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sigh. Isn't this why Apache 2 and GPLv3 have patent provisions, so we don't have to reinvent free software licenses for projects. Even if it isn't a big deal, I wouldn't trust a patent license that isn't FSF approved.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for this discussion. Why invest 100's of hour on a framework which might sue me?. Gonna use angular for now and never look back facebook's libs unless i have no option.

</comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps they should put out a non-legalease version of the license.

</comment><comment><USER18> It sure would be nice to get a real lawyers take on this.

</comment><comment><USER19> I remember there was a ton of hoopla about this when React was originally released - but I thought it was resolved? Am I remembering that right?

</comment><comment><USER20> If I was going to compete with Facebook I wouldn't use React anyway.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is really bad, but I'm going to use it to compete with Facebook. I hope they sue me, it would be great PR in Brazil.

<comment><USER12> Nice PR try for reactjs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> B.S.</comment>


How to Design a Replacement for C++(2010) - <AUTHOR> https://apenwarr.ca/log/20100721 <comment><USER2> Less than a decade after the article was written, I'm pleased to see that Rust fulfills at least 15 items out of his 19-point wish list.

And the unfulfilled items are questionable anyway, like "do not remove the cpp preprocessor", "implicit pass-by-reference", and "typesafe varargs".

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like this is about making a C compatible language. But actually most uses of C++ have been, and continue to be, replaced by languages that are not C compatible.

It's probably not useful to think about a generally workable swap-out replacement for C++ the language too much, since there could be no single language that fit the same odd set of niches but was still usefully different.

<comment><USER4> _The D language has entered the chat._

The emperor has new clothes now, all is well. ;-)

Yeah. Too often people complain they want a replacement, but then they want it to be a feature-complete super-set of what they didn't like too... trying to have it both ways and being oblivious to their internal inconsistency.

Objective C++ is the only mainstream, feature-complete superset of C++ that I know of. (I'm sure there are others.) Gluing two languages together is a feat, but does it solve anything? I think FFI C interfaces are the most universal heterogenous interoperability approach, rather than trying to figure out how to mangle names or pass objects that can have funky vtables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No GC: Rust

Other no GC are oldies: Ada, Pascal, Forth, COBOL (not OO-COBOL), ObjC w/o ARC, PL/I

GC: D, Go

Non-embeddable GC: Pony _, Crystal

_ GC claimed faster than Zulu C4 (JVM fork) and BEAM/HiPE.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > Most modern languages are integrated with their standard library - ie. some > syntax secretly calls into functions

Does rust do that in any way?

<comment><USER4> Here, let me Google that for you:

[https://stackoverflow.com/a/41213128](https://stackoverflow.com/a/41213128)

<comment><AUTHOR> That answer is about the syntax extentions and compiler plugins. How do these relate to this question?</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing Dart 2: Optimized for Client-Side Development - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dartlang/announcing-dart-2-80ba01f43b6 <comment><USER2> Does Dart provide any advantage over something like TypeScript or flow, or is it more of a matter of preference? Anyway, I do want to check out Dart sometime soon, especially Dart and flutter.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does dart still provide something relevant on the server-side ?</comment>


IIT-Madras to Teach Artificial Intelligence to Non-IITians Through PadhAI Portal - <AUTHOR> https://indianexpress.com/article/education/iit-madra-faculty-to-teach-artificial-intelligence-to-non-iitians-through-padhai-portal-5544586/lite/ <comment><AUTHOR> Portal: [https://padhai.onefourthlabs.in/](https://padhai.onefourthlabs.in/)

The four-month course comprises 80 hours of lecture content and requires equivalent time in solving assignments. The course will begin on February 1 2019. The registrations for the course are open until January 24, 2019.

Application fee: The course is open to all students, faculty, and professionals with a basic background in mathematics and Python. The fee for students and faculty is Rs 1000 and for working professionals, Rs 5000.</comment>


In Search of Fear - <AUTHOR> http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear/search-fear <comment><USER2> > Yes, choose a number—not too high—and when you hear footsteps on your porch > at three am, unfreeze your trepidation by whispering to yourself, "At ten, I > open the door! One, two, three, four..."

I increasingly believe time travel (itself an artifact of life inside culture, itself an artifact of language brains) is our biggest differentiator from primates. This simple machine for 10-second time travel is quite powerful. Addicts are finding the 5-second machine useful for controlling cravings. [https://melrobbins.com/the-5-second- rule/](https://melrobbins.com/the-5-second-rule/)

I'm reading the new San Francisco sci-fi novel _All The Birds In The Sky_ and one of the protagonists builds a 2-second device.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author is a famous highwire artist probably best known in the US for walking a wire between the WTC Twin Towers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Petit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Petit)</comment>


The conventional wisdom about not feeding trolls makes online abuse worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17561768/dont-feed-the-trolls-online-harassment-abuse <comment><USER2> Owners of websites and social networks are afraid of moderation. Because it takes time and money. Because the trolls will complain. Because you can't be neutral. But you've got to do it some how.

If you open an online community and neglect to moderate, you're just giving the most extreme people of any side a free megaphone. It's irresponsible. If you're not going to moderate, turn comments off.

For social networks - How do you do it at scale? You don't. Give groups the tools to govern themselves. Let users control what they see. Eliminate the timeline, and free for all commenting on posts. I don't care if it hurts your engagement metrics. Don't like it? Then I support legislation to regulate you.

<comment><USER3> > Then I support legislation to regulate you.

As opposed to simply not using those services? What gives you the right to determine what comments people are allowed to have on their posts?

<comment><USER2> I got carried away. Sorry. We shouldn't regulate websites on the content of speech.

Thanks for giving me a needed kick in the head!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a lovely prose style this writer has.

<comment><USER5> I agree, I particularly like this line:

In that pursuit, internet culture subconsciously turned itself into a calloused nub, a place where so many "jokes" are the equivalent of running and shouting "fire!" in a movie theater, and a place where the biggest joke of all is the idea of caring about anything in the first place</comment></comment>


How I Simplified My Phone (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1389 <comment><USER2> > _Iphones, which seem to get bigger, heavier, more expensive, and more > complicated with every release, not to mention a complete lack of > customization and control, are obviously off the table._

There are excellent reasons to not choose iPhone, but this one warrants a click on the back button.

Other than the iPhone 6 upgrade (the smaller one has a screen size of 4.7", the same as the phone the author ended up picking), they've been getting smaller, lighter, and thinner every release. (At the expense of using the space to increase battery life, which is what I'd really like to see improved.) There has been zero increase in cost since the first release. Complexity could be an open question, but after using iOS and Android, I've found iOS slightly more intuitive than Android, which is still too rough.

Lack of customization and control are good reasons, but the first bit is bafflingly misinformed.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is actually true.

The second iPhone model (iPhone 3G) was actually thicker than the original. When iPad mini went retina, it got 1mm thicker. iPhone 6S is slighter thicker and heavier than iPhone 6, which I find noticeable.

Also, maybe cost in the US hasn't changed (but that's disingenuous because iPhone was originally almost completely subsidised by your carrier), but in Australia, the base cost for latest gen iPhone used to be $799. Now, the iPhone 6S 16GB is $1079.

Of course, lots of things have happened for Apple to raise their prices in Australia - consumer protection laws changed (well, Apple started following them differently) significantly increasing the cost of providing a warranty. Also I'm sure the exchange rate has caused prices to change (though I'm not sure in which way - I think it's gotten worst though).

<comment><USER2> You're right, I forgot that the 3G did get thicker, and the iPhone 6s does seem to be slightly thicker and heavier, by a hair. My mistake. I think the general trend still sticks, despite these exceptions, whereas the author argued that the general trend goes the other direction.

<comment><USER3> I think generally speaking, the major revisions get 'significantly' thinner, and then there's been a few instances of the 'S' revision (or however it works for iPads) of it getting a hair thicker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few tips or best practices I've learned along the way. They would probably increase battery life and sanity.

1) Only allow notifications for texts, calls and maybe email.

2) Only allow yourself 1 screen/page for your apps. Extraneous stuff should be in folders. I have my most-used apps and 4 folders on a single iPhone homescreen (Shopping/banking; Food; Extras; Games).

I'm the last of GenX and remember many years without cell phones. But I feel bad for Millenials who never knew anything else and will probably never learn to really get control over these devices.

If I could get a T9 cellphone with voice dictated mapping built-in, I'd dump traditional smartphones altogether. Having your devices work for you rather than work you over is a huge part of the 21st century. So says grandpa.

<comment><USER5> I've also disabled all notifications except texts and calls. I can look up for messages myself if I have time and I want to. A silent phone means a happy user.

Further, I've used the weirdly named "Wifi/Data Auto Off/On" application¹ to disconnect mobile data and wifi except when the display is on. This helps me get days of battery if I don't do much with the phone. It also makes it easy to ration the battery: when I do something with the phone, I use the battery; when I don't do anything with the phone, the battery drains very, very slowly. Thus, I don't get surprises as the charge will be depleted only when I decide it's all right to use it. And nicely enough I don't get a zillion notifications all the time which would urge me to look at the phone again and again, further consuming the battery.

¹) [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whueric.da...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whueric.dataonoff&hl=en)

<comment><USER4> Yup, the key is to take back control and make the phone for your convenience. Rather than the convenience of others and apps.

Limiting social media accounts is helpful in this too. I have FB and Twitter but receive no emails or notifications from either and don't even have any FB- related apps on my phone at all. They sit there waiting for me to visit at my convenience. I check FB maybe once every 3 months at my desk. When I do look, I always realize I'm missing out on nothing.

If people need to reach me, I check my email a few times a day on my phone/desktop and can get immediate access through my cellphone number if they have it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Xiaomi is now retroactively locking bootloaders: [http://www.xda- developers.com/xiaomi-locks-bootloader-on-rec...](http://www.xda- developers.com/xiaomi-locks-bootloader-on-recent-devices/)

<comment><USER7> Whoa. Thanks for the comment, I was looking at Xiaomi for my next phone. Guess I'll have to be careful about which one I buy.

<comment><USER8> Xiaomi has a process to request unlock codes, which takes between 3-21 days, and they say it's to protect against malware from sellers.

And some users say they already recieved unlock codes. So maybe it's reasonable.

But it's new , it still requires followup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nova launcher is mentioned in the article and I would like to add my 5 cents about it. Specifically, it is an absolute gem of a launcher and is fast and highly customizable. 100% worth paying for it, though there is a free version with most of the features. I was able to customize it and make it exactly as I wanted it to be, up to details like icon spacing, using custom themes, gestures, unread badges, home screen arrangement and effects, home folders, widgets, app menu arrangement (I prefer it vertical coming from Symbian), etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> Given the same radio power (it's capped for all cell phones) the faster your wireless data, the less battery it will chew up. Why? Because it consumes the most energy when radio is on, and if you transmit at higher speeds, radio doesn't have to stay on for long.

<comment><USER11> Assuming the signal processing doesn't take so much more energy to kill the benefit, and the higher speed is equally stable against noise. (Which might actually be true, but I don't think it is obvious that it always is)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How I simplified my phone: I got a windows phone.

While I agree that Nova launcher is impressive, I don't want to have to change the launcher.

On a windows phone, the basics work relatively well. The phone takes good pictures and doesn't get in the way. There are very few apps in the appstore, which is a feature since it means I won't be tempted to tweak it too much (temptation... must resist...).

And it's cheap, so much that I don't care if it falls out of my purse. I'll just get another.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like he would like a Blackberry (running BBOS 10). My bb Passport has _excellent_ battery-life, no bloat, extensive customization of the messages "hub" and minimal notifications, privacy and per-app per-feature controls, etc.

But instead he pretends that Android and iOS are the only two choices. And while boosting a two-player market, somehow acts entitled to options that are not well provided within that limited competitive space.

</comment><comment><USER14> His comments about his previous phone, the LG G3, are interesting to me. That happens to be the phone I have, and I think it works great. I'm using a stock- based ROM (rooted, of course, with TWRP), performance is excellent, very little bloat, and the battery easily lasts me the day, even when I play a little GTA:SA, watch some YT/Twitch, do some video calling with Hangouts, and Chromecast some Dora The Explorer for my kid. I use Viper4Android to do DSP on Spotify and get some pretty nice sound out of my $10 earbuds. I'm not on Facebook, and one of my New Year's resolutions was to stop reading the news[1] and using Twitter and Reddit, so that's probably saving me loads of battery.

As far as expense, yes, it's more than $129, but it's currently being pushed heavily by MVNOs where I live as a $0 budget phone ($400 in subsidy). Currently flagships from Apple, Samsung, etc are in the $850-1100 range. IMHO the G3 is a perfectly serviceable mid-range phone.

[1] [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews)

<comment><USER15> That article is interesting because in the end, the news did involve him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a way simpler option: [https://github.com/paulfertser/fso- el/wiki](https://github.com/paulfertser/fso-el/wiki) ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> TL/DR iOS is crap cause it is not customizable and because some of iPhone specs are getting worst (while still better on average). So he search and found the holy grail of specs and install a stripped down alternative version of Android overly customized to remove feature from UI. And this is supposed to be simple and make your brain cringe less...

<comment><USER18> His "Endurance rating per mAh" is a really curious measurement to use. Particularly as, despite it casting Apple's performance as degrading year-to- year, it still ended up higher than that of every other manufacturer in the graph.

He also claims that iPhones have been getting "bigger [and] heavier" then bought a phone almost the exact same size and weight as the iPhone 6s (the Redmi 2 is 4mm shorter, 2mm thicker, and 10g lighter).

The "customization and control" stuff is right on, of course; what he's done with Android certainly wouldn't be possible with iOS, even jailbroken. It'd have made more sense to leave it at that (and price, as the cheapest current- generation iPhone still costs five times the Redmi 2).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> He'll be crawling back to iOS when he sees the standby time of Android eat massive chunks of battery. From the mobile radio active bug to the play store deciding it needs to be active for some unknown reason.

Don't get me wrong, I love android, I love it more than iOS, but damn does it eat battery for no reason. I only switched sides because I couldn't take it any more. Sure iOS devices have started a downward trend of capacity, but at least when I go to bed at night with 80% I wake up in the morning with 79-78% instead of 65% at best.

<comment><USER20> Might be worth giving it another shot. Doze in Android Marshmallow drastically improved my standby battery life[0]. Doze handles wake locks much like iOS-- not quite as well but it's night and day from my previous Android phones.

Here's more detail on how it works[1].

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/tQyNJXD.png](http://i.imgur.com/tQyNJXD.png) [1] [http://developer.android.com/training/monitoring-device- stat...](http://developer.android.com/training/monitoring-device-state/doze- standby.html)

<comment><USER19> I've been following Doze closely, there are still a bunch of quirks where Doze either doesn't force hibernate or other apps just keep polling. Also it helps that you had full bars the whole time. Low signal murders battery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > To my surprise it came not just unlocked but rooted.

This rings alarm bells for me. What are the chances that it comes with a pre- installed Android rootkit? How would you know?

<comment><USER22> I would be just as concerned if it was unlocked and unrooted. Nothing stopping a malicious party from rerooting the device after they install their rootkit.

<comment><USER23> In my experience you can only relock the device if you have flashed a manufacturer-signed system image. (That might not be the case for every phone)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> People should know about adb and dig into android 'shell' and tools. You can trim things a lot and make a focused 'distribution'. That requires root though.

ps: almost unrelated but you can also drive the UI through input events like swipe and drag. I had fun caressing my old HP TouchPad through emacs.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Other than these I use Lyft, Spotify, Dropbox, Drive, Amazon Underground, > Phone, SMS, and Calendar. Instagram is my only social media app, mostly > because I think the @soylent account is awesome.

Signal, phone, google maps, firefox/chrome.

I like how "phone" falls under the "other" category for this person

</comment><comment><USER26> I have seen many posts where people are turning off notifications and stop using sync go save battery. Are'nt modern phones give good battery life and allow to use all apps ?? I have all notifications turned on + Greenify + amplify + powernap to save battery. I get 7 hours SOT on nexus 6p</comment>


Ask HN: Who wants to trade brain cycles? - <AUTHOR> In the spirit of Who wants to be hired and who's hiring, I'm starting a thread for those who are looking for responsive, quality help that doesn't involve the exchange of money.  I'm proposing short-term trades, hour for hour, like solve a specific intellectual problem and the objective is to help another person get up to speed on a blocker in a way that's more customized (with more qualitative wiggle room) than stackoverflow.  It is likely that the giver and receiver is not the same person, so it might be a pay-it-forward arrangement on this thread.
Format: Open-ended - Briefly explain the purpose, what you're looking for, and what you can offer in return.
I'll start: This is for my MVP.  I have a CS/development background but backend isn't my main strength.  I'm looking for an hour or two of compressed MVC knowledge download, specifically to integrate backbone.js into my existing ROR app.  I can help you with prioritization, product features, design or algorithms. <comment><USER2> I like this idea a lot.

What about an SO-esque network that encouraged maintaining a relatively even "trade balance"?

Anyway, for me:

1\. Offering programming, FP, Haskell, Elasticsearch (possibly other, ask if you're interested) expertise

2\. Requesting input/patches for my recently released Elasticsearch client for Haskell: [https://github.com/bitemyapp/bloodhound/](https://github.com/bitemyapp/bloodhound/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a semi-retired website broker, I specialized in selling sites in the 6-7 figure range. I'm not a programmer, and I'm not looking for anything in return. If you need your side project, hobby site, or full fledged business valued or need advice regarding ways to increase value, website selling process, etc shoot me an email (in my profile) I would love to help in anyway I can!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great idea! I'm an amateur chess player (1200 rating) looking to improve my blitz game. So I'm looking for 1 hour of chess coaching, in return I offer 1 hour of code review of almost any language.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can offer advice and code in relation to building custom ecommerce platforms with mongodb and nodejs.

I am looking for design feedback and ideas for a pre public beta SaaS product.

Contact me at eric at getfwd.com

<comment><USER6> Who're you selling this to?

Businesses with a strong technical lead?

<comment><USER5> Yes, initially</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I built a (face) model app for my fragrance startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.commoditygoods.com/1minutemodel

<comment><USER2> That's a cool idea. Looks good</comment>


Show HN: Cider.io, Buy and sell pre-owned apple products. - <AUTHOR> http://cider.io

<comment><USER2> Love the design</comment>


Elite hackers target WHO as coronavirus cyberattacks spike - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-hack-exclusive/exclusive-elite-hackers-target-who-as-coronavirus-cyberattacks-spike-idUSKBN21A3BN <comment><USER2> > When asked by Reuters about the incident, the WHO's Aggio confirmed that the > site spotted by Urbelis had been used in an attempt to steal passwords from > multiple agency staffers.

Feels like the 2016 elections all over again...</comment>


Tesla Motors' Over-the-Air Repairs - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/523621/tesla-motors-over-the-air-repairs-are-the-way-forward/ <comment><USER2> Hats off to Tesla, right now they are doing for cars what Apple did for smartphones in 2007. Under closer examination concept is simple - work closer with customers. In Tesla's case this means monitor working parameters of all the cars they sold. This allows them to identify, diagnose, and solve quite a few problems extremely quickly.

<comment><USER3> That actually sounds a lot more like Microsoft - Windows and other products are sounding massive amount of telemetry data back to Redmond

<comment><USER2> Microsoft is huge software corporation that dominates operating system/productivity space. Tesla is a fairly small automotive company that is really innovative. I think that comparison is actually extremely flattering to Tesla.

Anyways your point is correct, however it is one thing to get telemetry from your own operating system that connected to the internet, and entirely different beast to bring that kind of technology to consumer automobiles.

<comment><USER4> Because who doesn't love having their personal possessions tracked by third parties, right?

One person's feature is another person's backdoor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This post just a few away (on the front page) from "Cyber attack that sent 750k malicious emails traced to hacked refrigerator"

I suppose the correlation here being that I would be concerned about not only about malicious activities being committed against your car, but someone then turning your car against you or others within its range.

<comment><USER6> Somehow I would hope that there would be a better security team at a car company started by the founder of a worldwide online payment processor and a space exploration company trying to mount a mission to Mars, than at your average home appliance company, where odds are most of the management don't even know what Linux is, let alone that their products are running it.

That said, it's a valid concern, and one I hope that's at the forefront of their minds as they design this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I shiver a little bit, picturing a future in which automotive software is _released early, released often_.

<comment><USER8> Or the alternate phrasing, "move fast and break things".

<comment><USER9> Shouldn't that be "move fast and crash things"?

<comment><USER10> thatsthejoke.jpg

<comment><USER11> I think you've got a broken image link there, bub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Its only a matter of time before over the air car hijacking becomes a real problem. I think I prefer my car not be wirelessly susceptible.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, if you can program a car to not catch fire, it should also be possible to program a car to catch fire.

<comment><USER7> You could do all sorts of nasty things depending on the car. With a gasoline car, you could melt the engine if the fuel maps are accessible via OTA.

<comment><USER14> You can probably melt the battery in Tesla. Batteries are heated, right? Add stress to batter, turn heaters on. Watch battery melt and/or explode. You can already do similar attack on laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s- killer...](http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer- firmware--Bad-design-and-its-consequences)

For this to gain more traction, manufactures are going to have to become better/more diligent about their software development practices.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is really awesome. Now if only Carriers/Manufactures would update Android phones as quickly.

<comment><USER17> Carriers and manufacturers have no incentive to deliver a good experience on Android phones past the first few months. It's a high three digits dollar device at best with a profit margin probably in the double digits, and customers don't care enough to reward carriers for doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is good.... but I do worry slightly that I'd get in my car one day and find some feature I liked had mysteriously vanished overnight or been replaced by something I didn't like. On balance though...good :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there anyone that understands computer security that doesn't think this is criminal? There are so many things that can go wrong here, both intentionally and by accident.

<comment><USER20> Currently the Tesla userbase is relatively small so it might not be that worth pwning, but as cars start becoming more like this, we might start seeing some worrying news items... and I'm almost willing to bet at least one person in the world, if not a group, is already trying to find exploits in one.</comment></comment>


Nvidia Races Past Intel (Yes, Intel) With Quad-Core Chip - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/mobile/nvidia-tegra-3-benchmark-inte/

<comment><USER2> I am still not sure what the target market for Kal-El is. Nvidia seems to be having an identity crisis where they're using an architecture normally reserved for lower power mobile operations and ramping it up to try & make it compete with desktop offerings. It's not powerful enough, nor does it have the compatibility to compete with x86. At the same time it probably uses too much power to stick in a phone or possibly even a tablet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Impressive but in fairness to Intel, that is a 2006 chip they're benchmarking Kal-El against</comment>


Show HN: Running OpenFaaS Locally with Kind - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zpratt/local-openfaas-workbench <comment><AUTHOR> I wanted an environment that I could quickly spin up and tear down to tinker with OpenFaaS. I settled on a combination of using kind and helmfile to make it easy to create/destroy the cluster as needed. I'm sharing it here in case it is of use to anyone else.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, you should also look at "k3sup app install openfaas" which also uses helm and possibly takes even less time to set up :-) [https://docs.openfaas.com/deployment/kubernetes/](https://docs.openfaas.com/deployment/kubernetes/)

Have fun</comment></comment>