Why I'm running a bootstrapping conference in Vienna, Austria - <AUTHOR> http://unicornfree.com/2010/why-im-putting-on-a-bootstrapping-conference-in-vienna/ <comment><USER2> I'm from Vienna. I recently started letsannotate.com. It's absolutely true that role models help extremely.

When my cofounder and I were in the really early stages we often were looking for inspiration and while we knew very well that lots of US and many UK bootstrapped SaaS products exist and thrive, we feared their success wouldn't easily translate to us.

We were thinking "Oh maybe people from the US and UK won't buy from continental europeans, who aren't native speakers, wo live in a different time zone, where (in the US case) totally different laws apply" and while in no way this was going to make us stop, it was constantly nagging in the background of - at least - my mind.

It has turned out this is not the case. As of today there was exactly one case where a company from the US told us they'd love to use our product, yet feared to export their sensitive data to the EU.

But before we knew that from hard evidence we had inspiration: letsfreckle.com (Vienna), mite.yo.lk (Berlin) and mindmeister.com (Vienna and Munich) exist and thrive just as well as US based SaaS providers.

And this is IMHO what Amy Hoy is talking about in her blog post: These were our role models and while I don't think we would have stopped creating letsannotate.com if we wouldn't know about their success stories, it certainly helped to know we weren't the first to step into this unexplored terrain of bootstrapping in continental Europe.

</comment><comment><USER3> I may be completely wrong here, but sometimes I fail at recognizing the real ROI of such conferences, especially in terms of knowledge that I don't know yet. Also, having the speakers being some kind of rockstars (Peldi is been 'on tour' all summer so far, does he ever work on Balsamiq?) might create a huge gap between you and them, and this dosen't help creating solid connections in most of the cases. I'm not sure if the 'you've got to spend money to make money' motto applies here, but again, I may be wrong. Any real-life experiences on this kind of events?

<comment><USER4> As the organizer of a similar conference myself, take my opinion with a grain of salt.

1\. It depends of course. There are millions of conferences and networking events. Some are great, some are terrible. You not only pay a price to attend, you also pay in terms of your time.

2\. I always say that networking events pay off with an horizon of about 6 months to a year. Every time I went to an event with a specific, short-term goal, I failed. But amazingly, I bumped into people that I actually wanted to get in touch with eventually. And it helped me later.

3\. Another major thing that pays off is the "buzz". When you go to conferences, you hear all the latest stories before they get written anywhere. You are ahead of everyone who didn't show up. Sure, bloggers will cover this or that rumor, but being there and having heard it all gives you an edge. Whether that edge will eventually be valuable depends of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> With all due respect, our conferences are completely opposite :)

Schnitzelconf is didactic. And I don't mean how to pitch to VCs. It's an entirely different worldview, not a networking event, and there will be no rumors. I doubt anyone will hear anything that is hot news. Just solid advice, business sense, war stories, and action steps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi, my name is Anita. I'm from Vienna too. I started wienett.com and raumdirekt.com some years ago. I can say it's not only "Angst" that prevents Austrians from being entrepreneurs but also it' s the political and social system. many friends of mine - employees - say they would never be so silly (!) to give up their social security they have being employed. yes it's true, we need role models and we need changes in our school system (learning business), in our insurance system (microbusinesses are treated like big companies) and in our mindsets. I'm on the schnitzelconf mailing list and hope to be in the second batch of early bird tickets ;-) and yes: I'd love to spend 250 euros to be able to meet new faces and people from abroad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Anita! Nice to meet you! I really hope you'll come to Schnitzelconf, your projects look awesome! Either way, we should at least meet for coffee sometime.

For the record, your friends are extra silly. You know that self-employed people (selbständig) in Austria have social health insurance, pension, and even unemployment coverage?

My husband is selbständig and he even has a part-time employee, all without creating a GMBH. (Don't get me started on how GMBHs are superior to the American LLC!)

<comment><USER6> The problem is, you don't simply "have" health and pensions insurance, you are forced to pay somewhere around 250 euros per month for that insurance, regardless of your income. During the first 3 years of your first startup it is less than that. Unemployment insurance (which is a ridiculous idea for the self-employed anyway) is voluntary and costs extra.

In the UK, the minimum contribution is around 20 euros per month. It gives you health coverage (no dental) and you are not forced to pay into the pensions system. In my view, the UK system is hugely more attractive for startups. Ireland is similar I believe.

<comment><USER7> I remember being quite surprised in the UK when I heard from a friend whose tooth broke off that he would have to wait several days for an appointment. Also long wait times with broken limbs, I seem to remember (forgot the details). That was 13 years ago, but still, there might be disadvantages to the UK system.

<comment><USER6> Oh sure, there are tons of problems, but the Labour government has pumped massive amounts of money into the NHS (the national health service) after they came to power in 1997. The budget was growing at an anual rate of 7 or 8 percent up until recently. 13 years ago the UK spent much less on health care than the average European country. Now it's about equal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm from Vienna as well and this sounds great. If I manage to get my hands on a ticket, I'll definitely attend.

And € 250 or € 300 are certainly cheaper than hopping on a flight to london or the states to hear and meet guys like those announced.

And even if I don't manage to learn anything from them (what I don't believe), I can at least deliver some feature requests for balsamiq first hand :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like a great idea, but honestly - I would never pay 250 euros[1] for attending such a conference.

Good luck though, hopefully I'm just not your target demographic :)

[1] for a frugal Viennese hacker aiming at ramen (knödel?) profitability, 250 euros is almost 2 weeks' living expenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm very familiar with that party line... and that is part of what's keeping you down.

If you want to be successful in business, you've got to learn the idea of investing for returns. 2 weeks' living expenses in exchange for the opportunity to learn from people who've made anywhere between "a very respectable living for one person" to "millions a year" seems worth it to me.

You can listen to their stories. You can walk up to them. You can ask them questions. Do you really think that you're not going to see 250 euros of value for that ticket?

The question of whether to go to a conference, or spend money on a professional designer, or hire an assistant, or outsource some copywriting, or a lawyer... they are all the same question at heart.

To run a successful business, you absolutely have to pay for things. End of story. You cannot do it all yourself. If you need to pay for something, and you don't have the money, you figure out how to earn more so you can pay for the thing and free yourself to earn even more money after that.

Look, I don't care whether you personally come, I'm not making a profit and - more importantly - there are people lining up for that ticket from Denmark, France, Italy, and even Serbia.

I just want you to question your assumptions so that you have a chance of succeeding.

<comment><USER9> Well, as I said I'm probably just not in your target demographic.

I would like to give you one tip tho:

       He not only took his product from spare-time to $2
       million, he's also a true mensch!

I think you are using that word the way you would in Yiddish, in Austrian German referring to someone as "mensch" can sometimes actually be seen as derogatory ;)

<comment><USER10> I was also confused by a friend who came back from New York and referred to someone as a mensch.

It means human being or person in German.

<comment><USER9> Apparently it means "whore" in Austrian slang [1].

I'm not a native Austrian, but was told several years ago by a friend that I shouldn't use that word as people might misunderstand what I meant by it...

Might be a Tyrol thing tho.

[1] <http://www.dict.cc/deutsch-englisch/Mensch.html>

<comment><USER8> I'm from austria and I've never heard "mensch" used in a negative context.

As a native german speaker I absolutely read it as positively as it was intended.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm chalking it up to the fact that Wienerisch can make anything sound dirty. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a brilliant idea! IT/internet entrepreneur role models were exactly what I missed out on growing up in Vienna.

Thanks for organizing this, Amy. I'm sure it'll be hugely successful.

(Believe me, I would attend did I not happen to live in New Zealand :-)

Sandy

</comment><comment><USER12> >the land of glorious socialism.

as if it were a bad thing not to have to worry about your medical insurance fucking you up if you get sick...

<comment><USER9> I don't think Amy meant it in a bad way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct! I love my socialist healthcare. That was me poking fun at the typical American view.

<comment><USER12> ok then :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i so hope i can grab a ticket!</comment>


Dark social traffic in the mobile app era - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/31450/dark-social-traffic-in-the-mobile-app-era/?curator=MediaREDEF <comment><USER2> What I don't get is why facebook would keep this data secret to the publishers. Isn't it in Facebooks best interest to show how many eyeballs they can send to publishers and start charging for increasing that number?

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER3> So basically, lots of big publishers are really upset that they don't know where their traffic is coming from. They were previously uncategorised because clicking on links from the Facebook app doesn't add a Referer.

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


Rejection forced the creation of Google - <AUTHOR> http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/06/rejection-forced-creation-of-google.html <comment><USER2> Perhaps rejection also forced the creation of a slew of other companies no one has ever heard of because they went nowhere;-)

<comment><USER3> Rejection increases volatility. Or, since 'rejection' is what happens when you don't apply, you can restate it as: 'Acceptance' is a progressive tax on brilliance; no matter how plodding you are, you can probably find someone to pay you for showing up 9-to-5 -- but if you're brilliant and you want to capture even 1% of the wealth you create, you'd better accept the risk of working for yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They even offered it to Yahoo! I think some of the biggest favors we get turn out to be the rejections.</comment>


Engineered for Dystopia - <AUTHOR> https://thebaffler.com/latest/engineered-for-dystopia-banks <comment><USER2> An interesting read to be sure. Definitely some valid points, However, before we lynch or demonize the Engineers, I'd like to offer a rebuttal.

The article demonizes and laments that the Engineer has no sense of ethical self-moderation, while not at the same time acknowledging that our society is driven by financial success, and the incentive structure which rewards capacity to facilitate capital growth has as it's inputs the wills of those with the most capital at stake.

Taking the article seriously, if the Engineer is an amoral tool, the tool is being guided by the hand that guides the majority of capital.

Mind, the Engineer is reacting to the same forces as everyone else. They have a certain set of skills, and the willingness to apply them, and are driven by the same desire to achieve success in life.

To make use of his/her skills to create and make real, the Engineer needs tool, fuel, means of production, workspace, necessities of life for him/herself and anyone else he/she works with. In our society, this is rationed out by access to, and ability to acquire capital based on the promise of positive value output or indirect contribution in some way to positive value output at some time.

What the article seems to be wishing for is that Engineers stop making things that can be used for evil. That they choose worthy outlets of their power to utilize the technology to further anything that could potentially be used, yet reject anything with the capacity to limit the freedom of it's beneficiaries.

I don't think _anyone_ , most of all engineers, want engineers calling those shots. If nothing else, no one else has any conception of just how burdensome it is to be capable of feeding forward models of your own actions through a mind sufficiently honed with enough engineering know how. It can completely paralyze you. The making of things is trivial. Detail and clarity of thinking is needed, yes. However, once you start asking the really tough questions of engineering, is where the nightmare fuel comes from.

What will other's do with what I would create? Hell, if you want a good example of an illustrative piece of art that should be seared into every engineer or scientist's head, look into The Protomen, Act II The Father of Death.

Look into Dr. Frankenstein, look into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1984 Brave New World.

Would you prefer not to have the Internet?

Pharmaceuticals?

Gene therapies?

Robotics?

We (Engineers) hear the cries of those around us, and walk a razor's edge.

"We want safety!"

"We want convenience!"

"We want to be able to spread information!"

"We want strictest secrecy!"

"We want freedom from drudgery, misery, hunger and disease!"

"We want freedom from 'the System' being able to compel us!"

"We want to be brought together and be heard!"

"But not by them!, and don't want to be silenced."

How to hit the right balance of enablement, while keeping the worst potential outcomes at bay? You can't account for it in the process itself, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it's out. No going back. Once you proved it can be done, everyone else knows they can do it.

The hardest thing as an engineer, is to use what faculties they've been gifted with, to guide their actions in ways that keep the "me and mine's" happy and alive without sacrificing one's conscience to the gods of financial expedience.

As long as the survival of the Engineer, and the survival of those around them is underpinned by fiscal constraints, Mammon will guide the invisible hand.

That's the system that we chose. This is the outcome that decision creates.

A bit fatalistic? Maybe. But it's what we've all got to work with, and suggestions for alternatives never seem to pass the test of getting past the action filter of political viability to gain any momentum that can produce a successful alternative.

Do the world a favor. Get your priorities straight and communicable, and build consensus. If you want it, it'll be made. Just don't expect the maker's to be omniscient, or to be particularly in favor of putting their heads on the block when someone unscrupulous comes around and starts ruining things for everyone.</comment>


Kodak Moments Just a Memory as Company Exits Bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-03/kodak-exits-bankruptcy-as-printer-without-photographs.html

<comment><USER2> It wasn't very long ago that magazines like National Geographic refused to accept digital photographs, insisting on film submissions from their staff and contract photographers.

How quickly things change.</comment>


How the Friday DDoS Attack Affected Pingdom - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2016/10/24/ddos-attack-affects-pingdom/ <comment><USER2> We've been with Pingdom for a while and it's an outstandingly affordable service but their new features seem riddled with bugs (tagging checks as an example), and their API is slow and unusable from Australia (ignores query limit params) - It seems like they're no longer innovating and when I tried to share my concerns there was a bit of a 'who cares' attitude. It's great to see transparencey about this issue, but it could've come the other day when they 'paused' checks for unaffected clients.

<comment><USER3> Will you move to an alternative? If so, what?

<comment><USER2> We're currently investigating two solutions:

1) [https://github.com/arachnys/cabot](https://github.com/arachnys/cabot) 2) Prometheus with [https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter](https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter)

Keen to hear what others are using</comment></comment></comment>


Pokemon Crystal Access: emulator hack to retrofit access for the blind - <AUTHOR> http://allinaccess.com/pca/

<comment><AUTHOR> A friend of mine did this. To provide a little more technical info on how it works: He wrote a Lua plugin for the VBA emulator which reads the emulated Game Boy's RAM to find out what's on screen and the state of the game. It blew me away when I heard about it. Of course, the reason screen readers don't do this for modern software is because modern systems are just too complex. And of course, this is for just one game.</comment>


Amazing iPhone app lets you acoustically measure distances of up to 25 meters - <AUTHOR> http://iqtainment.wordpress.com/acoustic-ruler/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are some promotion codes for you. Please tell me if all are used up, I will then post more:

LRRE3RNJFE39 7YT4PXYJXKMA RAY7PLFLMJTA HAKWXJ7RYWWJ EY9K6JKMFMPK

You can redeem them as follows:

1) On your iPhone/iPod/iPad, tap the App Store icon from the Home Screen.

2) Navigate to the New section on the Featured tab.

3) Scroll to the bottom of the list to locate and tap the Redeem button.

4) Enter the promo code and tap the Redeem button in the upper right.

5) Tap done on the Thank You screen, then tap the home button to return to the home screen.

6) After a second, you should see the my app installing. (If the promo code was not used before...)

7) If you like the app, please upvote

<comment><USER2> Hi quadrix, Do you have any more promo codes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I nabbed the EY9K* one, thanks a lot! First time someone's _ever_ posted a promo code that I actually got.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Did you try the others before and they didn't work? Just want to know if it's time to post more.

<comment><USER3> I didnt, it's usually my assumption that codes are all claimed by the time I actually see them, so I tend to walk the list backwards to save time entering previously used codes.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Interns Are Annoying Their Neighbors at a San Jose Apartment Complex - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/google-interns-are-terrorizing-their-neighbors.html

<comment><USER2> Sensationalist headline. Disturbing maybe, terrorizing no. Terrorizing implies an active intent to cause harm - obviously absent here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Favorite quote: "I have to be very careful when I'm driving"

Well..... yeah.... so you should.

<comment><USER4> You left out the part of the quote right before that:

 _> "They dart out into the middle of the street," she said. "They jaywalk all the time."_

Drivers _should_ be careful when driving, but the flip side of that is that pedestrians should cross at crosswalks and respect walk/don't walk lights. Pedestrians who just wander obliviously into the street without paying attention to what's going on around them make it much harder for even conscientious drivers to avoid hitting them.</comment></comment>


Facebook Is Losing Teens - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/10/19/facebook-is-losing-teens-and-new-privacy-settings-wont-bring-them-back/ <comment><USER2> As the article stated, it's difficult to overcome the "grandma factor" \-- once something becomes so pervasive as to be near-universal, even among persons unlikely to be clued in, its cool factor is diminished if not completely obliterated.

Some groups actively crave differentiation, and teenagers seeking to assert their independence are prominent among them. It can be difficult to express and explore in the way teenagers seek when you know all your grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, cousins, second cousins, etc. will be reading, as they surely will when you post on Facebook.

<comment><USER3> As a 19 year old, I will say that from my perspective, this "coolness" factor is seriously overblown and misunderstood. Facebook was _never_ "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old. Facebook was always a highly addictive and vital _necessity_ \- a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction. It was never cool and I never saw how coolness or differentiation had anything to do with it.

Likewise, Snapchat is not "cool." Snapchat is pretty maisntream now (among my peers). It's popular because it's fun. All my peers use Snapchat as picture messaging for frivolous photos you wouldn't put on Facebook/Instagram.

<comment><USER4> > _Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th > grade, when I was around 14 years old_

At the time Facebook was cool, it wasn't open to 14 year olds...

<comment><USER5> A bit blunt but, yeah. Facebook was arguably a lot more cool when you at least needed an .edu address to get on. (Or a bit before or after that point depending on your perspective.)

<comment><USER6> And a very specific .edu or .ac.uk at that. It's easy to be cool when you are leveraging exclusivity already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Facebooks is priced at 240X Price to Earnings. If they start losing users or even stop growing its hard to imagine how that PE ratio continues to makes any sense. Even with an increase in mobile revenue its still less then desktop revenue and users are certainly flocking to mobile too which is a double wammy. So facebook has to transition to making more money per user if its user base stops growing. Otherwise you're going to have people really questioning the price of the stock which could end up effecting the whole industry.

<comment><USER8> I don't know Facebook's details, but in theory another possibility to lower P/E: "Stop pouring money into expansion, to lower expenses and increase bottom-line earnings."

For example, Amazon could certainly do that, since they spend heavily on expansion

<comment><USER9> That is an important aspect, but let's consider the P/S (price/sales) ratio to gauge that savings potential:

Facebook: 22.3

Google: 5.9

Amazon: 2.3

(source: money.msn.com)

Of course, comparing to Amazon doesn't make sense. Retailers are always going to have very low margins and low P/S ratios. But comparing to Google does make sense. Assuming Facebook's potential margins are similar to Google's, Facebook would have to have incredible sales growth or incredible cost cutting in order to lower their P/E significantly.

I think it may be possible for Facebook to achieve that goal. People will put up with incredible levels of spam and harrassment in exchange for not losing "friends". So they might be able sell four times as many ads as they do now and cut costs dramatically on top of it.

<comment><USER10> What was Google's P/S like 5 years ago?

<comment><USER9> My very very rough guesstimate is that in 2008 Google's P/S was about 7.

Revenue: 22bn

Number of shares: 317mm

Average share price (P): $500

Revenues per share (RPS): $69.4

P/RPS = 7.2

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At the peak of the CB "bubble" around 1978, roughly 10% of all cars had a CB radio installed in them as a lower bound, although claims were it was higher, like 15% to 20%.

That percentage has dropped somewhat since then...

There is no particular reason to assume the peaking and decline of a socializing technology must result in its similar competitors growth in a nearly identical field. It could be home video conferencing or terminals built into vehicle seatbacks or far more likely, something we can't imagine at this time.

And no, for you youngsters, the smartphone was not the social technology replacement for CB, for basically all of the 80s and a substantial part of the 90s average people simply completely stopped technologically socializing in their cars. I see no reason to prevent future people from simply not socializing via handheld devices.

That doesn't mean the death of the industry, truck drivers still have CBs, but your grandpa probably does not (not since Carter was president, anyway)

The industry can only make money on the up slope, but investors and innovators can make money on both up and down slopes. Might be time to start thinking of money making schemes for the down slope.

<comment><USER12> I never played with CB other than low power walkie talkies from radio shack. I did get into amateur radio in 2003 and do have a radio that can be mounted in the car. There seems to be quite a lot of activity on the air where I live. It's still a fun hobby in 2013 and is a nice break from the daily grind of the internet startup scene. It's funny how different various subcultures are - even among technical people.

<comment><USER11> Even just within ham radio the subcultures are pretty wide, there's the HF guys, the digital mode guys, the contesters, the microwave builder/experimenters, the public service volunteer guys, the dxpedition ops, the antenna system designers, the satellite/moonbounce ops... The good news is it only takes several decades experience (and $$$$$$) to try everything by which time someone's gone and invented something new.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Teens are attracted to Twitter, Instagram and Vine. They like these mini social network where they could gain followers by posing interesting tweets or photos or videos.

Youtube's top celerity usually started their channels when they were teen (high school, freshman). Certainly getting your channel popular now is harder, so the best way to get attention is either by posting photos or posting a 6-second videos.

Vine and Instavideos took the spike. Kids are spending more time watching videos and looking at photos than reading statuses.

Ironically, IMO, Vine and instavideos took off partly because people could publish to FB and Twitter. I spend most of my FB time either reading memes or vine videos. i don't pay much attention to status anymore.

<comment><USER14> I noticed this as well. Personally I feel that twitter/instagram/vine is more informal and disposable. Facebook and its albums, status, friend lists, etc., it's all so formal to the point of being old-fashioned.

It feels like the current zeitgeist is not to give a crap about anything older than a few hours. Instagram feels like it's only about about making "now" look cool, hash-tagging it and then forgetting about it. Vine gives you a few seconds of entertainment, about the threshold at when boredom kicks in.

Honestly about 99.999% of the time I never re-read a tweet, look at the same instagram or vine. It's disposable social media. Facebook feels like the exact opposite.

<comment><USER15> I think that's probably a large reason along with two others:

They're more content focused. Twitter is about what people write, Instagram is about the pictures people take. Facebook is about... the network? Facebook is more muddled, and clarity is valued today.

Asymmetry. Yes, I know you can "like" things and get updates and you can join groups, but ultimately the relationship between two users on Facebook has to be agreed to by both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > However, teenagers have made it clear with their quick adoption of social > networks such as Instagram and Snapchat they want to share everything and > with as many people as possible.

Alternative explanation - teens want to share ephemerally and with a certain degree of anonymity. They don't want their parents looking over their shoulder at their friends or conversations, and seek to avoid entanglement with sections of their social network that are going to bully them or have a significantly lasting effect tied to a persistent searchable identity.

<comment><USER15> The lack of anonymity and pseudonymity on Facebook is definitely a factor. Facebook works under the assumption that we have one unified "identity" to which we can and want to tie everything we do. In reality, we share different parts of ourselves with different people at different times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As more teenagers gravitate toward online social networks (if not Facebook, then Instagram, etc.), I'm concerned that not enough of them will feel lonely.

I recently watched a Louis C.K. interview about young people and technology, which struck a chord with me. I agree that adolescents benefit from a sense of boredom and isolation because it encourages them to cultivate stronger in- person social networks:

[http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell- phone](http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-phone)

<comment><USER18> I am flabbergasted. Adolescents benefit from isolation? And you're citing a comedian? Care to cite some serious sources?

<comment><USER19> What the parent comment is trying to get at is that many people today do not know how to sit quietly alone with their thoughts. If they have a single spare moment, in less than half a second they whip out their phones and mindlessly check fb, etc. Due to this, they are less pensive and self reflective. While hard to test, it seems like a reasonable theory.

<comment><USER18> Really? I am not sure. We've got a lot of quirks in our cognition and intuition is not really a good heuristic for studying human mind.

<comment><USER20> Haven't _you_ noticed it yourself, that especially younger people seem to be engaged with their mobile devices whenever there is a few minute idle time, when e.g. waiting for a class to start. Quiet hallway, 10-20 people, all but a few with their noses in their phones.

<comment><USER18> Of course, I've noticed. But is it a bad thing? Reality is pretty dull for 90% of humans.

<comment><USER21> It is bad in the sense that it is an alternative, and growingly a replacement, to using our biological escape from Reality - the Imagination.

Actively engaging the Imagination has a much greater potential to cross over into Reality and affect it in such a way that escape is no longer necessary. Escaping from Reality by relying on external input feeds and output sinks only passively engages the Imagination and does not produce the same internal Imagination-Reality-Manifestation loop.

As with most things, a healthy balance of both internal and external escapism is probably the best. Calvin and Hobbes explains this the best.

<comment><USER18> Right. First someone says that isolation is good for adolescencents citing a comedian, you are arguing that mix of external and internal escapism is probably the best as the comic explains. I am not a subject matter expert, but comics are not an authority on psychology for me.

<comment><USER11> Authoritarianism is not much of an argument. None the less, I'll see your making fun of comedians (and who is better to comment on the human condition than a comedian?) and raise the stakes to Zen Buddhism. "And Buddha said, the eightfold path to enlightenment begins with posting to your facebook wall and ends with spend lots of time making your linkedin profile look pretty" Oh no wait maybe I misquoted.

I have observed as I get older that teens suffer from many self caused maladies, although an excess of calm introspection has never made that top 10 list. Given observation that teens are legendary for causing enormous amounts of suffering because of a lack of even a tiny amount of thinking, that would imply the scales are likely tipped far in excess away from a healthy level of introspection. Its unlikely given an extreme situation that a return to something approaching normal would be seriously controversial.

<comment><USER18> I hugely respect Buddhist philosphy but quoting eight fold path in a discussion about addiction to our gadgets is a non sequitur. Do you know who is better to comment on the human condition? Actual scientists who study human mind. And while psychology doesn't conform to some principles of scientific rigor it produces useful models for improving human condition. They often fail, but it is much better than intuition, comedian's intuition included.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Didn't Zuck say recently that the actual numbers weren't concerning, and that they're aware they are past the "cool" stage and instead want to move on to become the social fabric of the Internet, much like a utility.

<comment><USER23> This would make sense if they actually offered much utility. Even Google+ has them beat when it comes to compelling features.

<comment><USER24> Err, what? If I closed my facebook account I would lose virtually all contact I have with every friend I have made other than the person I live with and a few people who live near me and my family. How the hell is that not utility?

<comment><USER25> It's not really Facebook offering utility though. They offer the same features every other site trying to be the "fabric of the internet" offers and some would say not as much. It just so happens that everyone you know has a Facebook at the moment.

<comment><USER24> If I like watching birds and someone in my village puts up a bird feeder and all the birds go there and he offers to let me come and watch in return for a small payment then I would say that, while the birds are at his feeder, he is offering utility. This remains true even if all the other villagers also put up identical feeders which remain sadly birdless.

Whereas If I'm understanding you correctly, you would say that he is offering utility only if the birds are at his feeder because of some unique bird- attracting design features of his feeder which the other feeders lack.

That seems to me to be confusing an implementation detail with what actually matters to the user: he just wants access to birds (his friends). He doesn't care why they are where they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't even think that the reason is "Facebook isn't cool anymore". Facebook is just annoying at this point. When Facebook was for your friends from college and/or high school, things were great. You could post embarrassing things that people did, inside jokes, whatever. Now your mom is on Facebook. your grandma is on Facebook, and so is your boss. Yes you can stop them from seeing everything you post or everything your friends post, but no one knows that. There's probably a 50/50 chance that if I were to post something funny and slightly embarrassing on a friends wall, BAM, there's their grandma who is a tad bit confused. Then of course your friends grow up and all they post is baby pictures.

Teenagers, who are looking to keep things private between them and their friends, can't have their mom popping up on their Facebook pages all the time.

</comment><comment><USER27> MySpace is laughing ... not maliciously but because they now understand that teens are a migratory species. You can't expect them to stay anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER28> There are really two hypotheses:

1) _Teenagers in general_ do not use Facebook (which does _not_ rule out that they will become avid Facebook users once they grow out of their teenage years)

2) _Today's teenagers_ disinterest in Facebook is fundamentally different than it was for teenagers' of several years ago (which would suggest they'll never get attached to Facebook the way previous teenagers once did, and therefore never become avid Facebook users).

The 10-K report suggests #2 ("younger users were less engaged with the social network than previously") but my hunch is that it's more like #1 (I argued this here: [http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity- isnt](http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity-isnt)).

Teenagers now have more social networking options (Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) to choose from than previous generations of teenagers - which explains why today's teenagers are less engaged with Facebook than previously - but that doesn't mean they won't want/need the kind of canonical identity that Facebook provides (once that awkward, impressionable teenager actually grows into an adult with a firmer identify).

</comment><comment><USER29> For those referring to the social utility of Facebook, I recommend hiding your news feed. The newsfeed is not a social utility, whereas messages, profiles, looking up mutual friends, etc. IS a social utility. Here's how to hide your newsfeed without affecting your experience on the rest of the site:

[https://medium.com/productivity- efficiency/631ed8f466e1](https://medium.com/productivity- efficiency/631ed8f466e1)

Basically, this trick uses a Chrome extension that hides the newsfeed using custom CSS.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Karp wrote that all of her friends are using Instagram and Snapchat,

Well...Instagram is owned by facebook so there's that...

<comment><USER2> As of only fairly recently, and it can still be a problem for the Facebook brand even if the same conglomerate owns both units.

<comment><USER30> Not if you think of facebook like a company & facebook.com & instagram.com as services of the company with many more like it on the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I suppose the coming months/years will be when we see whether Facebook becomes the "backbone of the social Internet" or just another MySpace. I honestly don't know where the smart money is here-- it's an exciting time!

</comment><comment><USER32> This inevitability is an assumption of Facebook's strategy (see Zuckerberg's Letter), and the reason they bought Instagram.

My suspicion is that teenagers will engage Facebook as they become adults and the social pressures shift.

</comment><comment><USER33> Aren't Instagram and Snapchat completely different products? Of course, these compete on the 'share of time' of the users, in which case everything teens do is competing with Facebook.

<comment><USER32> No, Facebook, Instagram, and Shapchat all do the same thing: photo & videos sharing.

So do Twitter, Tumblr, reddit, MySpace, Google+, blogs, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> They've been losing teens for a while now, and once you start losing teens, a so-called "social networking" website is dead, it doesn't know it yet because the agony may take a while.

Due to its unusual size for facebook it might take a longer while, but it's on the path to irrelevance that many others have walked before: friendster, myspace, msn, etc.

it's funy that the 10-13 years demographics adoption will make or kill an online website.

</comment><comment><USER35> If only Facebook had a product like Instagram, perhaps they could use it as a gateway drug...

</comment><comment><USER36> As a teenager, Twitter is what everyone is using currently. Don't complicate it, teens just want to be on what their friends are on, and their parents are not on.

Twitter just fits the need.

</comment><comment><USER37> Facebook was cool until weaponized.</comment>


Show HN: SM510 (Game and Watch) Homebrew Games - <AUTHOR> http://montrose.is/games/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully this will be the end of my semi-obsessive journey and I won't end up actually having to manufacture physical units. I guess that remains to be seen though. These were made with our own (bad) assembler: [https://github.com/trevorjay/marios-binary- factory](https://github.com/trevorjay/marios-binary-factory) . Technical overview here: [http://montrose.is/sketching/201808260123.html](http://montrose.is/sketching/201808260123.html) .</comment>


I Tried to Make My Dog an Instagram Celebrity. I Failed - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/technology/personaltech/instagram-influencers-dogs-food.html <comment><USER2> Lol, fun idea and cute corgi :)</comment>


Gitrep - Discover and organize Github repositories   - <AUTHOR> http://gitrep.com/

<comment><USER2> Funny, I owned this domain until July of this year and was planning to build the exact same thing. I was in my "have an idea, get excited, buy the domain, do nothing, let it expire" phase.

Glad to see you picked it up and actually built and launched.

<comment><USER3> ha, thanks! I knew I was lucky with a useful 6 letter domain. If you have any ideas that you had wanted to implement but don't see please let me know!

and thanks for the domain brandon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like where this is going. I blogged about this very topic a few months ago <http://derekmyers.com/open-source-information-overload>. If you watch/star as many repos as I do then you realize the problem is clear. Discovering and filtering repos is incredibly difficult, but the vast resources are there and growing at an even more incredible rate.

Say you are a web designer who just found out about GitHub (I know right?), then what would their first steps look like? Maybe spend hours googling around random sites discovering outdated "10 popular plugins for Bootstrap" kind of stuff. I think this applies to all kinds of things as well.

I also think this is one of the reasons they took on funding to figure out these problems. I had been contemplating adding similar functionality to my GitHub web app. I kind of think they should start an app marketplace (I know YAAM) to bring additional functionality beyond the scope of GitHub that wants to manage (ex: they killed off messages), I realize they have Services, but I don't think that is clearly enough, similar to how Facebook recently added App Center.

<comment><USER3> awesome, thanks wise young man, this is exactly one of the problems I personally experienced that I was hoping to solve.

I am also interested in how this plays out. Maybe this project will succeed, or maybe something else better solves the problem. Either way I think it will be awesome.

There is so much out there, it can sometimes be hard to make sense of it or manage it in a way that suites someone the best. This is just my stab at trying to solve the problem.

If you have any other input on how to make it more useful please just let me know! Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know what I love to know? Which branch is the most uptodate! The network page of github is slow and hard to see what is going on.

Some repos become dead then I look for forks to see if somebody fix it or improve it. Normally, I need to open several forks to select one.

I imagine a interface like a leaderboard where the most uptodate and with more commits lead the pack...

<comment><USER6> On GitHub there's a "Branches" tab for each repo which lists how many commits ahead or behind master each branch is. Sounds like it's close to what you're looking for.

<comment><USER7> I think s/he means "Which fork is most up-to-date?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was really hoping that this would be a service that would allow me to organize my private repositories into folders. I know I can do this with submodules, but I was hoping for an easy user interface. I'm guessing this is an area where you could make money, until GitHub solves the problem.

I find it difficult to track the 100+ private repos we have for various projects and such. Giving me some ability to organize them by folders along with some general notes, would be useful and something I'd pay a small bit of cash for.

</comment><comment><USER9> This sounds neat!

> Typically it is not easy to answer questions like "What is the most popular > jQuery Instagram library?" or "What Ruby gems are similar to Devise but > newer?".

>

> This is where Gitrep aims to help.

But, then, I totally failed to discover how to do that sort of search. The search dialog seems to be tag based. Is the copy aspirational or am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> creator here!

tl;dr: yes, it is a little aspirational as of now, but will change.

The first search you can do, since I equate "star count" to popularity, and by default all results are sorted by star count/popularity.

The second search will be entirely implemented soon. You can find repos similar to other repos according to their tags, but can't sort by created or updated date yet. The information is there in the data, I just need to finish that functionality in the search and sorting.

I wanted to try to get something out the door before I finished every feature to see what people would use and what requests/issues people would have, and prioritize accordingly. Otherwise I know I would spend weeks fleshing out every feature I thought I wanted, including many that most would find useless =(.

In retrospect, you are correct in that it is a little misleading since you assume you can do that yet. It will hopefully be corrected shortly (busy trying to keep things running smoothly!).

Thanks for the input troutwine! I'll finish this functionality hopefully this week (if not sooner).

<comment><USER10> I hope to see something like alternativeto.net too, were you can link multiple items and compare facts about them. I realize this is what can be done with the tags. It can be easier to see which programs are similar than coming up with a unique tag for them though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool. But how is it different from Github's own <https://github.com/stars> ?

It was announced a few months ago <https://github.com/blog/1236-searching-and- filtering-stars>

<comment><USER3> you can add tags, instead of just searching based on language (and description). Hopefully as things begin the flesh out, you will be able to more easily find other similar repos and repos of interest (through the "similar repos by tags" and "similar repos by stars"/"users who star this repo all star these other repos" functionality).

Very soon, besides being able to sort by popularity/star count, you will be able to sort (and search) by created date, updated date, and forks.

Also, there have been some requests to make this more service agnostic outside of just github.

So those are some points that hopefully make it more useful than github's current search functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This would be far more useful as a general curated open source database if github access were not required (one useful side effect is that, when it is down the next time, gitrep would still be up). Then it would be possible to specify alternative repo locations

</comment><comment><USER13> Very good to see more sites utilizing the GitHub API. I do have a few comments to make though. First, you mention badges on the homepage, but this feature isn't complete so I don't think its even necessary to mention it yet. Second, the search is somewhat confusing. I'd love just a single search box at the top of the site where I can type whatever I'd like. Maybe make the current search the "Advanced Search". Third, I probably wouldn't emphasize the tagging so much. I'd probably never tag anything and rely entirely on the data you're gathering from GitHub. I think it's much better to focus on the sorting algorithm and how easy it is to find popular repos.

<comment><USER12> IMHO it's a bad thing. Too many projects and services depend on github so that downtime represents a systemic risk (homebrew was unusable during the downtime last week). Sure, you have your code backed up, but you don't necessarily have your issue tracker or gists backed up.

Now using GitHub for user credentials makes things even worse. Soon we'll see horror stories involving github being down ...

<comment><USER13> You can say the same for Twitter, Facebook and Google. There is always the potential for downtime, but users generally don't want to create more accounts. I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Plus, sites that use GitHub logins are much more appealing to developers rather than sites that use Facebook or Twitter logins.

<comment><USER12> Haha Facebook. On 90% of show HN posts involving Facebook logins the top or second to top comment is something like "Facebook login is a nonstarter"

<comment><USER13> I can understand that if a facebook login is required, but offering it as a choice shouldn't be frowned upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just signed up, really love the design both front end and once logged in however I'm not really sure what to do with it?

So you can tag stuff (granted, quite useful) and search tags? Is this more useful that googling what you want/need?

<comment><USER3> hard to say if it is more or less useful, but hopefully easier (and therefor more useful).

this hopes to centralize the search for good repos, instead of having to turn to a generalized search engine, and ideally add some functionality that facilitates the search (search/sort by created date, updated date, popularity, find similar repos, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is godsent. I have over 100 starred repos for various reasons and the only sorting github allows is through language. So naturally, finding old repos is extremely tedious. I'm going to start using this right away.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very cool. I publicly tagged at least 25 things as I went through my starred list.

I did notice that the auto-completion of the tags is likely experiencing a missing table index as it seems to take quite awhile to find any matches. This could be as simple as increased DB usage from hitting HN, but it might be worth looking into.

One other suggestion I have, and I'm sure it's likely on the horizon, is to give users the ability to star/watch repos directly from the listings page. I've found some cool shit I'd like to star on the fly without having to jump over to github.

</comment><comment> bink-lynch Nice work! That I can organize repositories by my own tags seems very useful and I second the "most up-to-date fork" feature request.

I happened upon a once-in-a-sign-up bug. Here are the steps to reproduce (I cannot reproduce it anymore as it will only happen the first time you need to allow gitrep access to your github profile):

1\. Sign in to gitrep. 2\. Allow gitrep access to your github profile. 3\. Hit the back button until it asks you to allow gitrep access to your github profile again. 4\. Hit allow. 5\. Notice 500 error.

</comment><comment><USER3> thanks for the interest everyone! This is my project that I just launched, thought I'd say hello!

I'll start answering questions as quickly as I can, it's the only thanks I can offer now for everyone melting my servers!

Very quickly some technical specs (going to write a post on this in more depth soon):

It's a ruby on rails application hosted on heroku. Unit testing with rspec, webmock, vcr, machinist, and capybara. Authentication is with devise obviously, with omniauth-github, and cancan and rolfy for authorization. Unicorn since it's awesome, and asynchronous jobs are taken care of by sidekiq. fragment caching is done with dalli/memcached. database is postgres, redis, and memcached, with monitoring by newrelic and logging by loggly and papertrail. Let me know if you have any questions!

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome! Such a pain point that needs an actual solution -- I'm honestly pretty underwhelmed with GitHub for not providing this kind of functionality in the first place. Glad someone took the initiative to do something not just cool, but so very necessary with the GitHub API.

</comment><comment><USER18> FYI (@ 11:09 AM EST): an error occurred in the application and 'gitreb.com' could not be served.

</comment><comment><USER19> Same idea as <http://repos.io> ?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome, thank you. I've got 300 starred repos which renders the entire system effectively useless as I cannot find anything. Gitrep looks like it'll fix this awesomely, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER21> Neat!

Mobile search view is a little cluttered, and the sort dropdown doesn't seem to be changeable.

<http://imgur.com/KNl9t.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice idea and implementation.

I noticed a typo in the About copy on the main page: "along with apply personal tags" should be "along with applying personal tags"

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems like it's already been slashdotted (HNed?). I spend too much time trying to do this manually and really hope that this works out, though!

</comment><comment><USER24> Pretty cool - as someone with probably way too many starred repositories its nice to have the ability to organize them.

</comment><comment><USER25> Couldn't read the repos listing on my Iphone the display was quite mangled. Will check again when I'm near a laptop.

</comment><comment><USER26> Please add some tag filtering tools on the left of the user page. A little tag cloud would be nice, for example.

<comment><USER3> like a personal tag cloud that applies just to the tags of that users starred repos? actually that's not a bad idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sweeet, can't believe github still dont have something like this

</comment><comment><USER28> Bravo! I've already found 4 new awesome projects to follow.

</comment><comment><USER29> Like the design.</comment>


How much Facebook is paying to its employees? - <AUTHOR> http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/facebook-inc-610870.html

<comment><USER2> Good data.</comment>


V initiative – Building tomorrow's secure digital democracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.v-initiative.org/ <comment><USER2> The main problem here is that an _ordinary voter_ should be able to check the integrity of a voting system. With paper votes, (which we still have in the UK) an ordinary voter can do this - they can watch the ballot boxes being carried about, count people voting, and watch the votes being counted. With electronic voting, an ordinary person has to take it on faith. The more clever technology you put in, the less it can solve this problem - the harder it is for an ordinary person to check that the vote is being counted correctly.

A better route is the development of voter-verification, such as Rivest's ThreeBallot: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot)

He didn't include any crypto, even though he's one of the world's most famous crypto experts, precisely because that would make it opaque to anyone who isn't a cryptographer.

<comment><USER3> This is a bitcoin-based system. The integrity of the keychain can be in danger only if a 51% attack takes place (creates a larger keychain). That's highly unlikely IMHO in a national election system, where any geek could setup a node not to mention political parties, organizations, etc.

There is a public ledger. The votes are easily verifiable by anyone, on the fly, all you have to do is a client with a nice GUI for the user. The user doesn't care about the crypto, all he wants to know is that his vote counted and that 40 years later, it's verifiable and private.

Bitcoin can do all those things. Actually it _solved_ the most important problems related to e-voting IMHO.

ps. The only not-solved problem is _selling votes_. With this sort of scheme the _buyer_ could request a _proof of vote_ (e.g. a picture, or something more sophisticated like your user/pass). But this is already happening in Greece and I guess elsewhere too. I'm not sure though if an e-voting scheme would allow this to take a much larger scale. Technology can overcome the lack of social/political education, unfortunately.

<comment><USER4> Why not use a non-bitcoin-based system and completely avoid the 51% attack?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s)

I'm not sure if this is state of the art[0] since the talk is 7 years old. This scheme provides proof to the voter, but not enough so he can prove his vote to someone else, avoiding vote selling altogether.

The biggest challenge IMHO is trust in the system.

[0] I'd appreciate criticism or any other progress in the field.

<comment><USER3> I've seen the video you posted. It's a 2007 video, otherwise I'm sure the author would have mentioned the Bitcoin protocol time and again, because it solves all the problems mentioned + it's decentralized.

Decentralization is a key-aspect here. Votes count equally for all citizens. So every citizen has the opportunity to operate a node for the time (48hours) that the elections will take place, in order to inhibit possible corruption. Given the No of organizations, individuals (e.g. political activists, freedom believes, anarchists, you-name-it, conservatives, liberals, you-name-it) and geeks (who will do it for fun, get an RPi, setup a node for the elections, measure traffic, do a JS/CSS3 front-end to display traffic, real-time results etc.)

The government (formed by all parties) should be able to setup an X number of nodes that would allow the elections to take place anyway, without relying to third parties. But third parties will join to ensure reliability of the network.

A government could block the access of nodes from IP netmasks that are located outside the country's IP blocks, to avoid interference of foreign governments[1].

Now, I'm not 100% about the interface and the interaction which is equally important:

        * Should the voters use PKI? Should an account be linked with their IDs?
        * Should we use a dedicated machine with touch screen and accessibility options in a private chamber?
        * Should we use electronic signatures generated by a special 'card' which every citizen should have one?
        * etc

Estonia has an electronic card[2] for example that could turn handy into situations like these.

There many ways of deployment with pros/cons to be considered on a country by country scenario.

Bitcoin protocol solves the double voting, the possibility to re-count votes, the possibility (which is nowhere today) for citizens to review their votes even years later.

Also we should not underestimate the ability to vote from the comfort of your home, using any device: Imagine how greatly that would improve the % of people participating in the elections for example.

[1] I can't think of what the NSA could come with in this scenario. Would make an interesting discussion.

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card)

<comment><USER5> I don't see the point in using a Bitcoin-esque protocol for a voting system (ie a hashing based blockchain). In fact the existence of a double spent vote could simply invalidate both (or all) votes; the user attempted to cheat, no need to decide which is valid. Otherwise vote acceptance could be based on the votes of the ids themselves rather than by hashing power. You say decentralization is a key aspect, but the distribution of whatever underlying identity the users are voting with still has to be centralized. Bitcoin has opened people up to these sorts of ideas, but that doesn't mean it has to form the basis for everything in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was thinking about a Bitcoin-based e-voting system (Specifically made for political nation-scale elections) for some time. It was a project that I'd like to get involved after I get my degree (~ Jan 2015). I believe it is the future because it can incorporate everything that an e-voting system needs (privacy, votes are re-countable, data is publicly accessible, nodes can be run from individuals to organizations to parties, etc.)

This looks _not bad_ but what I'm failing to understand is:

         * Is this an organization or a company?
         * Is code open source? Where is it?
         * Are they interested in 'corporate voting' schemes or in public voting schemes?

I see nothing more than a landing page which says a several things but nothing specific and NO I don't want to register first in order to know _exactly_ what this is.

</comment><comment><USER6> >100% Fraud Proof

This is a highly problematic claim, I am not aware of any serious security specialist who guarantees any system is 100% fraud proof.

[http://v-app.io/landing](http://v-app.io/landing) seems to be the real application behind this, which seems to be a much better and wider version of Doodle, the voting application. If anyone from v-app is listening I don't think you should mix v-initiative.org with v-app.io/organising things in a democratic way.

<comment><USER7> It's not just a highly problematic claim, it's 100% false.

Any democratic digital vote is in itself 100% fraud, because it lacks two fundamental elements:

1) Completely transparent and verifiable for all voters. 2) The guarantee that anyone can cast their vote free of immediate external pressure.

That's why we have paper ballots and voting booths. Anyone who claims otherwise, anyone who claims this system is merely "outdated" isn't talking about free and democratic elections.

This project is a fraud.

<comment><USER8> Uncertain why you got downvoted - perhaps "fraud" is a bit too strong but you are mostly correct.

Even if you had a device and protocol that was perfectly secure, if you vote from home, someone else can demand to see you cast it. Or, if it's an app on your phone or a website, there will be an enormous incentive to either monitor your votes or hack them from the rest of the OS.

I've looked into this question a lot and as far as I can tell, there's no way around it. At best, you might be able to distribute relatively secure machines to many places. Maybe every place that has minimal security, like pharmacies or post offices. Or possibly you have some scheme that allows you to repudiate coerced votes later - but that also offers more opportunities for coercion!

That still leaves the problem of verifiability. We might imagine a relaxed standard of verifiability where almost any geeky person can verify the vote is good. I don't have any real ability to verify paper ballots for even a local election, as they are held in a warehouse somewhere. Maybe ubiquity of verification trumps ease of understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the main issues to overcome will be making sure that only registered users vote, and only once per voting event.

This could be achieved by distributing an undivisible votecoin to each registered voter upon presenting their proof of registration or eligibility.

But then there's a weak point of someone giving/receiving more than one votecoin (bribe, threat, blackmail, etc)

Even if there are checks and balances with number of votes vs number of registered voters, there's again the weak point of human element of data entry.

</comment><comment><USER5> Bitcoin isn't the correct starting point for this as the whole point of verifying blocks via miners is that you can't trust entities in the system to be unique for each user (i.e. Sybil attack), whereas with a democratic voting system trusting that each user has been given a unique starting key is a core requirement.

<comment><USER10> I agree that you need to know that voters aren't voting twice (assuming one voter one vote), but that doesn't mean that a blockchain isn't the way forward. If keys are issued / signed centrally, then there's no way to vote more than once.

<comment><USER5> So what does the blockchain do?

<comment><USER10> Provides a public record of votes - anonymous / encrypted or otherwise.

<comment><USER5> That's just a record though. A bitcoin style blockchain would provide a hashing-power based method of deciding which votes count in the case of double voting, which isn't required or even wanted in this case.

<comment><USER10> It's not _just_ a record. It is public and untamperable, and could form the core of vote verification.

I didn't imagine voting to be like spending a bitcoin. Although that could work too. Issue every voter a single indivisible votecoin. To vote for a candidate send the votecoin to their address.

But, perhaps the V initiative have something else in mind for the blockchain. I'm sure there are others.

I've outlined only two possibilities for using a blockchain here, but I'm sure there will be others.

<comment><USER5> You haven't given a reason to use a blockchain, you're just pointing out ways in which you _could_ use a block chain.

As I said, why would you rely on a democracy of hashing power for _anything_ when you have unique underlying identities you're trying to let vote? Why use a system designed to allow the decentralized use of a currency without double spending when double spending isn't an issue?

The two biggest issues solved by Bitcoin are double spending and distribution of a decentralized currency. Our would-be voting system doesn't need either of these things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If it's a _digital_ democracy it's neither secure nor a democracy.

The system can be rigged with the oldest means possible: a knife to the voters' throat.

I really wish fellow techies would cut this kind of dangerously ignorant and arrogant crap.

We've invented polling stations and voting booths for reasons other than being fucking Luddites. Only in the voting booth behind drawn curtains, an anonymous ballot paper and zero potential electronic surveillance equipment are you free to cast your vote without external pressure and manipulation.

And the result, the counting process, should be observably by any voter, including the ones that don't know shit about software. I.e., the manual counting of ballots.

That's a fucking democracy. Totally secure and yet totally transparent and verifiable.

The rest, like this project, is a self-important sideshow that only serves to undermine true democracy, and half the time that is the actual agenda.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was thinking about digital democracy for some time but the open source model loses credibility when you use a centralized approach. I think making it decentralized with a cryptographically sound method is the key. Bitcoin is everywhere. I hope this project gains traction.

</comment><comment><USER12> Had an idea for something similar several months ago but was struggling with the conceptual implementation [1]. Very glad to see someone is doing something here and working towards a solution.

I'm going to install this on my phone and play around with it, and see if I can get some folks in my community involved as well - and see where it goes. Looks very very early but I'd be happy to give it a shot.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493129)

</comment><comment><USER13> Rights can't be voted off.

Fix that problem first.

Then suffrage won't be necessary at all.</comment>


First-Class Statistical Missing Values Support in Julia 0.7 - <AUTHOR> https://julialang.org/blog/2018/06/missing <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool.

At one point, I had to write some code to deal with messy JSON that was highly nested, and being able to use the null conditional operator (?.) to read things deep in the tree without crashing was very useful from both a sanity and also readability perspective.

This seems like a more general approach, assuming missing.blah_property would also return missing.

</comment><comment><USER3> User extensible types on core functionality is where Julia really shines! Looking forward to see how the downstream libraries use it.</comment>