What a hermit crab named Nigel taught me about death and parenting - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/01/03/what-hermit-crab-named-nigel-taught-me-about-death-parenting/ <comment><USER2> 99% this thing didn't actually die but was simply molting, it can appear dead for 4-8 weeks! I wonder how many of these poor creatures wake up in a landfill.</comment>


Show HN: A self hosted alternative to Ngrok - <AUTHOR> Hi! I am sharing this because it may be useful to others. I created a simple Docker image that lets you easily expose a web app running locally on your dev machine to the Internet, via a proxy server. It is a self hosted alternative to something like Ngrok, which is a paid service if you use custom domains. A small server is cheaper than Ngrok (I use Hetzner Cloud and the cheapest server costs me 3€ per month). I use this method in particular to test HTTP verification with Let's Encrypt for a SaaS app running on my Mac. Hope this is useful :)
Code: https://github.com/vitobotta/docker-tunnel Blog post: https://vitobotta.com/2019/06/29/self-hosted-alternative-to-... <comment><USER2> The reason why I use ngrok is not because it is just a tunnel but because it gives you https and a really helpful UI with the ability to retry and inspect requests. Is this something you are planning on adding?</comment>


New Design and Criteria for Channel Verification on YouTube - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/14793658 <comment><USER2> In other words "If you're not a celebrity of a mega-corp, we don't give a fuck about you." _sigh_

I mean, sure, it's their right to run their site however they want, but this is still very frustrating to anybody who views (viewed?) the Internet as something of an equalizer, a place where the "little guy" could compete on a playing that, if not exactly _level_ , was at least not totally lopsided. I guess, in the end, there really is no way for a publicly traded company to avoid becoming evil, or at least avoid behaviors that closely approximate evil.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Usually these announcements put a shiny positive PR spin on a negative change, but it doesn't seem like they could even really find a positive spin for this one.

Sounds like YouTube has decided that with the huge size of the site now, it's too much work to verify every account above 100k subs, so from now on they'll just be doing it when they personally see one that they think needs it.

I see some English channels already complaining about this change, but I can imagine it'll be even worse for large foreign channels.</comment>


Wiretapping End-To-End Encrypted VoIP Calls: Real-World Attacks on ZRTP [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://petsymposium.org/2017/papers/issue3/paper01-2017-3-source.pdf <comment><USER2> Signal comes out relatively clean:

"Signal on iOS behaves similar to the Android implemen- tation. A simple [zrtpCall] is shown in Figure 11a. Its behaviour only differs for [termError]: While the An- droid client successfully terminates the connection, the iOS client hangs at the screen indicating that the key agreement is still in progress, as shown in Figure 11b." ( _page 12_ )

CSipSimple, Jitsi and Linphone Android appear to failed protocol tests ( _page 9_ ).</comment>


Bottom-up collaboration in the construction industry - Competing with email - <AUTHOR> http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0017-construction-collaboration.html

<comment><USER2> I think the thing that needs to be realised is that online collaboration is not merely the same as file sharing - particularly in the construction industry.

It's only at certain small parts of the overall construction process (from design through construction and then commissioning) that "collaboration" can be reduced to distributing files: typically where the files in question are "Issued for Construction" or "Issued for Review" - the formal gates in the process.

The rest of the time, as the documents are developed, and interpreted, collaboration (particularly in an online sense) means that additional information needs to be conveyed with the drawings to provide context and/or revision without the formal issue of a new revision of a drawing or document, or even a redline markup.

Some examples of these sorts of situations: \- Where as-built changes (i.e. where changes have been made on site from the "approved" drawings) need to be incorporated into drawings which are then handed over with the completed project \- When a drawing needs to be clarified between site and the design office. \- Where a contractual clause needs to be varied on a subcontract, because both parties agree it might be mutually beneficial to do so. \- Where a initial draft of a drawing needs to accept the input from multiple engineering disciplines in order to produce a final drawing.

These situations - which are, by far, the most common type of situations in construction - are ones where the transfer of documents is insufficient to communicate the context and changes which another person needs to understand to provide input. These are the situations where email comes into its own on the construction project - particularly if done through a document control system so the audit trail is established.

I think the future of construction collaboration will look a lot more like Google Wave than DropBox. Until then, email will hold an important role in any construction project - despite it being a shitty medium to share controlled documents, but because it can surround those documents with further information and context in the easiest way possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> It also depends if your trying to attempt some collaboration for a short period of time, most people would rather not have to learn a new system for a short/ small project.

Everyone has an email and is comfortable with it, it may be hard to convince non tech people that a web collaboration tool is the way to go.

There is a lot of upside to them, with time I guess collaboration methods other than email will become common, especially with Google Wave on the way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice write-up and in the end everyone needs to admit that email is still the way most people go; even if it is just to tell them that they need to log in to the online collab tool because there has something changed.

One question I have though is how far you have to go with -not- preventing user's mistakes. I miss some concrete examples (except for the Little Britain sketch).

<comment><AUTHOR> Some examples from Woobius:

\- Construction collaboration is all about official issues of files (i.e. "I issue these 10 files to you for comment"). We make it easy to fix an issue after it's happened, if there were errors in the issue.

\- If you're invited to the wrong company, you can easily be moved to the right company

\- If someone named your company incorrectly when they invited you, you can rename your company

etc.

<comment><USER4> Ok thanks for the clarification; comes down to that it's more about offering flexibility afterwards then "fixed mistake checking" before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's exactly it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One immediate thought I had about the e-mail problem is how online-dating sites deal with it.

Now, I realize online collaboration is completely different user motivation. Online dating preys upon a somewhat already-desperate userbase.

But it's also genius how they deal with the e-mail problem. For example, with Ok Cupid, they include a giant one-click "Login" link with e-mail updates. There's no password re-entry. With other sites, they send you just enough information about a connection that makes you want to sign back in again, but not enough information to let you contact that other person directly via e-mail.</comment>


Remote First at Brex - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/building-brex/remote-first-at-brex-1252cb30e347 <comment><USER2> > What happens to my compensation if I move? Brex pays by geographic market, > so we will ultimately adjust an employee's Total Compensation Value (TCV) if > they relocate to where pay rates are different. However, for current Brex > employees who relocate before Sep 1, 2021, Brex will not make any > compensation adjustments until Sep 1, 2024 to help each of us manage through > the unusual circumstances associated with COVID-19. Standard relocation > compensation adjustments will apply immediately for all employees who start > at Brex after Sep 1, 2020.

There are many different thoughts around the "right way" to do compensation adjustments in a remote-first world, but 4 years feels like way to long to have to deal with an SF->local pay discrepancy existing within teams.

If someone was to join Brex in 2022, it would feel very weird to learn that their peer on the same team, in the same geographic region, is still getting their SF based comp package, but hasn't lived there in 2 years.

<comment><USER3> Can someone explain the rationale behind geographically based pay in remote- first companies?

I don't necessarily disagree with it, but I don't know what aspects of the issue companies are actually looking at to decide that geo-based pay is the way to go.

<comment><USER4> It's a relic, and a bad one.

I run a remote-first, remote-only company and we pay everyone based on experience and merit. Not location. If you want to stretch $150k in San Francisco go for it. Good luck having to live with 3 other roommates.

However, if you want to take that same $150k and live like a king in the middle of Kansas that's an option as well. Adjusting someones pay simply because they're logging onto their computer from a different location is perplexingly stupid in a world where people can work from wherever.

<comment><USER5> It's not a relic, it's a way to price labor effectively. You're not paying for work, you're paying for the candidate to choose you over a competitor. If you're competing against local Bay Area or high CoL companies that are local, you will have a lower offer and will likely lose out on talent. That's OK as a strategy, but you may just be selecting out of low-CoL areas and limiting your pool of labor.

The alternative, which sounds like a relic, is offer your 150K and a reasonable upward CoL adjustment certain areas. Small enough that someone from a low CoL place wouldn't want to move, but high enough to keep your company competitive in high CoL places. If you have enough labor supply, you many not have an issue, but if you are having trouble finding skilled people and assume that skilled people are unevenly distributed in high-CoL places, it's a reasonable path to go down.

<comment><USER6> If you have to pay $200k to get talented engineers in the Bay Area, and find out you can get equally talented people in the Midwest to work remotely for you for $130K, obviously it makes sense to set waters geographically.

But what happens when your competitors realize this as well? Now you can no longer get the same level of talent in Iowa for $130K, soon it's $150k, then it goes up again. You aren't paying for work, you are competing for talent.

I think the market ends up being bifurcated, where working locally in-office gets a premium when it's worth a premium, but remote pays the same no matter where you are outside of time zone issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Brex laid off a significant portion of their staff earlier this year. It sounds like they are trying to save more money by getting rid of their expensive office space in Manhattan and SF

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/29/brex-the-credit-card- for-s...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/29/brex-the-credit-card-for-startups- cuts-staff-amid-restructuring/)

<comment><USER8> Make sense.. offices are not being used while staff is as productive (probably not as happy though? but that's case by case) at home. A lot of offices may go bankrupt in the coming years, even when this whole thing is over.

<comment><USER7> Its just interesting to see all these layoffs and cost cutting measures right after they raised a ton of money.

In case you are unaware, Brex's business model is to lend money to startups. The kicker is they lend money to startups that banks and investors won't touch. They advertise themselves as a tech company but in reality they are closer to a high risk VC firm.

<comment><USER8> At this current time that doesn't feel like a sound business model.. but I could be wrong. It also seems that they won't need so many people? The VC firms I know are all capital heavy and very light on staff.

<comment><USER7> They were able to raise money from investors selling themselves as a tech company. Now that they have the money, they dont need the engineers anymore which explains the layoffs and downsizing.

Brex feels like an attempt to gamble with someone else's money. They raised a ton of capital and now they are going to use it to invest in high risk startups.

<comment><USER9> > selling themselves as a tech company

They built a lot of the underlining infra for their Brex Cash product.

> use it to invest in high risk startups

Don't they require you to pay back the balance at the end of every month? And you're not aloud to go over a percentage of whats in your bank account. These restrictions limit the risk.

<comment><USER7> Every bank builds their own infrastructure, yet I've never heard a bank advertise themselves as a tech company...

<comment><USER10> Capital One does, to my knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Companies don't pay employees based on "what they're worth to the company". Just like with other goods and services, the market dictates the price.

So, companies pay what they can to compete for talent in the market. This meant that in high-competition markets like SV, the price (for engineering talent) was very high.

If now the market dynamics have shifted by not limiting supply to the SV area, then you would SV companies to pay LESS for the same engineering talent. So, if you argue that people should be paid the same no matter where they live, then you should also be prepared for salaries for many engineers to fall.

<comment><USER12> It will take years for markets to even out. Think SV vs rural Alabama. Paying market rate for the talent is table stakes. And I do agree, there will be less incentive to pay SV rates, so engineers living in SV will have to work even harder to demonstrate in the interviews that they are worth the money. Interesting times are coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I remember interviewing here and being bummed when they were 110% strictly no remote. Not surprised to see the about face here based on current events, but based on my experience it is a little surprising.

Without saying anything disparaging I do not imagine it is a pleasant place to work.

</comment><comment><USER14> I disagree. I think its actually correct to adjust based on location. Everyone is only looking at it from a "I am smart by living somewhere cheaper, dont doc my pay", but not seeing it the other way around as well. If you worked at a company based out of, say, detroit, but lived in SF, you would demand SF income, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to afford a living.

This policy protects you, even if you do work at a SF place. Lets say, in theory, you move to some place cheaper, and that place starts becoming more expensive. Likewise, SF becomes cheaper over time (or, the company just moves HQ to somewhere cheap). By doing location based pay, your pay continues to go up, in line with your local area cost of living. Otherwise, if you were still getting paid based on SF cost of living, you would be loosing money every year. Eventually forcing you to move, which, you might not be able to do because of family, house, etc.

Second, its ethical. "Salary" represents a quality of life, i.e. Purchasing power, not a raw number of dollars. If you were paid SF wages while you lived in a third world country, you could very well be the richest man in the country. This does not make sense. Nor is it ethical, think of the raw damage you could do to that economy. For a more common scenario, do you really feel that a mediocre software dev working for a SF company should be paid more than the local best ER doctor? Many professions simply cant be done "remote"

Third, it makes all companies "equal". In a "remote first" company, the location of the HQ shouldn't matter. Maybe, not even exist. Most companies are actually "Delaware companies". Should they pay delaware salaries?

And lastly, its just economics. The reason salaries are so high in SF is because no one wants to live in SF, because cost of living is so high. Its supply and demand. The cost of finding good talent in SF is astronomically high. As soon as you go "world wide", then you can attract great talent at a cheaper price. AKA, if you are going to demand a SF salary, they can certainly find someone cheaper and better (fire your ass). Frankly, _still_ getting paid a SF salary while in SF at a remote company is just incredibly generous of the company. At remote first companies, salaries will have a downward force. Over time, you will get paid less working remote.

<comment><USER15> I think it just sets up some pretty weird incentives for employees, especially when you consider that cost-of-living calculators are often wrong. I don't think this model will work in the future.

Let's fast-forward 5 years and assume many companies have taken on this model and are now remote first. COL adjustments will have occurred, and COL is a very reasonable proxy to "desirability of living location", because as you mention these cities are based on supply and demand. When there's a high demand, COL goes up and as such so do the salaries of the folks living there.

So now employees are basically at a junction where they can live wherever they want. However, their employer will cover the expenses of living somewhere better (if we take this high COL = desirable line of thinking). So employees will go to these places, effectively costing the employer money!

The fundamental outcome of this change is employers are offering a giant "live somewhere expensive" stipend that can only be cashed if you choose to live somewhere expensive. It's just odd. I know for a fact if I was at one of these companies I'd move to wherever I could get the most money, because I think COL often overrates how expensive cities are.

<comment><USER14> Whats to follow is completely anecdotal. I had a job at a decent/high salary in an expensive city. I moved and took a pay cut, to about an average salary in a much cheaper city. I feel significantly "richer" then before. I think the "more money is always better" is simply false. Its ultimately about how much money you make _after_ rent/mortgage. where rent should be equalized for equivalent housing. My $300k 5 bedroom house would be > 2mil in SF. A 2x or even 3x salary doesn't even begin to bridge the gap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I blame FB for setting this bad precedent. Now that they've set the standard for remote compensation every company now has cover to adjust compensation using some flawed cost of living calculator.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. I think its actually correct to adjust based on location. Everyone is only looking at it from a "I am smart by living somewhere cheaper, dont doc my pay", but not seeing it the other way around as well. If you worked at a company based out of, say, detroit, but lived in SF, you would demand SF income, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to afford a living.

This policy protects you, even if you do work at a SF place. Lets say, in theory, you move to some place cheaper, and that place starts becoming more expensive. Likewise, SF becomes cheaper over time (or, the company just moves HQ to somewhere cheap). By doing location based pay, your pay continues to go up, in line with your local area cost of living. Otherwise, if you were still getting paid based on SF cost of living, you would be loosing money every year. Eventually forcing you to move, which, you might not be able to do because of family, house, etc.

Second, its ethical. "Salary" represents a quality of life, i.e. Purchasing power, not a raw number of dollars. If you were paid SF wages while you lived in a third world country, you could very well be the richest man in the country. This does not make sense. Nor is it ethical, think of the raw damage you could do to that economy. For a more common scenario, do you really feel that a mediocre software dev working for a SF company should be paid more than the local best ER doctor? Many professions simply cant be done "remote"

Third, it makes all companies "equal". In a "remote first" company, the location of the HQ shouldn't matter. Maybe, not even exist. Most companies are actually "Delaware companies". Should they pay delaware salaries?

And lastly, its just economics. The reason salaries are so high in SF is because no one wants to live in SF, because cost of living is so high. Its supply and demand. The cost of finding good talent in SF is astronomically high. As soon as you go "world wide", then you can attract great talent at a cheaper price. AKA, if you are going to demand a SF salary, they can certainly find someone cheaper and better (fire your ass). Frankly, _still_ getting paid a SF salary while in SF at a remote company is just incredibly generous of the company. At remote first companies, salaries will have a downward force. Over time, you will get paid less working remote.

<comment><USER17> The other viewpoint is that you provide the same value to your company whether you work in SF or in Kansas City (assuming WFH in both places). So basically you are saying "Hey, if I move to a cheaper place, please take 40% of my compensation and give it out to the C-Suite and shareholders, since I have no other options in my new city". I guess that is the reality of capitalism, and why ownership/equity is so important.

<comment><USER14> this is already messed up though. Salary _does not equal the value you provide the company_. It represents the cost to extract the value. A quality senior engineer provides 3-7x the value of a junior, but only gets paid 30-40% more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Henrique used to play an online game called Ragnarök

I feel like this was a rite of passage for an era of Brazilians.

<comment><USER19> In my day Polaks and Brazilians played Tibia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are some good pro's and con's to this strategy, but given market forces I can imagine the future where everyone "works" from the same address in the Bay Area, while being based elsewhere. Maybe I am hoping to see this as a hack :)

<comment><USER21> You laugh but that already happens where "former" Bay Area employees relocate to a cheaper region but maintain a Bay Area address for their cost of living adjustment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For a remote company to adjust pay to employee's geography: so not cool.

Offering remote and paying people based on what they're worth to the company: Part of the solution! (The problem being: Structural deficits in certain regions yield lack of adequately-compensated employment opportunities for the highly-skilled. This makes the highly-skilled relocate. This makes it difficult to overcome structural difficulties).

Offering remote and paying people based on where they are: Part of the problem!

<comment><USER23> So how do you imagine hiring people with similar experience/skill level SF if they base salary offers are $200k and Europe people are happy with $100k since their rent/mortgage/livingcost is about 5-10x less?

Pay everyone $200k or $100k (essentially stop hiring in high cost location)?

Until the markets/remote salaries align, you kind of have to pay based salaries the people are able/need to receive in their respected market.

<comment><USER24> If an employee is worth $200k to your company in SF, why are they not worth $200k to your company in Europe?

<comment><USER25> Because, at least for the moment, it's unlikely that any company is going to offer that European $200k. It's about BATNA, not perceived fairness.

That said, this might change if remote work becomes a lot more common, and we might see a big flattening of salaries. Bad for SF real estate prices (and for high earners in those companies in general), since people in those HCOL markets will suddenly be competing a lot more directly with workers from elsewhere, modulo language skills, ease of scheduling, cultural fit, etc.

<comment><USER24> Right, it's about BATNA, but it stands to reason that especially in a time of ubiquitous remote work, offering remote workers salary parity will attract the highest talent from all regions, thereby providing a competitive advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This seems like a big deal. More and more companies are transitioning to Remote First....

</comment><comment><USER27> This isn't really related at all, but I've always considered "Brex" to be a strange name considering [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X)

<comment><USER28> I expect a lot less thought (and research) goes into most startup names than you'd think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A service that does planning and execution of off-site meetups for remote companies is a great business idea. Essentially, travel agency/event planning for remote first companies.

Once we're past COVID, a lot of companies are going to stick with remote first and making the planning of off-sites easy seems like a must need service.

<comment><USER30> I know that InVision (InVision app.com, a remote-first company) has an entire team dedicated to planning their yearly offsite. I can imagine many other companies choosing to hire a company to help plan offsites. Great idea :-)</comment></comment>


Faster, cheaper, and better: A story of breaking a monolith - <AUTHOR> https://zepworks.com/posts/faster-better-cheaper-and-re-architecture/ <comment><USER3> It seems like most or all of the benefits listed in this post could have been achieved just as easily by changing code in their monolith. Like the ElasticSearch optimizations and the decoupling from the relational database.

Similarly the benefits they do tie explicitly to microservices like scoped errors and tests can also be achieved in monoliths with simple filters on the errors and tests being run, without all the work of splitting out the service.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not disagree with your comment. As I mentioned in the article the main reasons to break into micro-services are:

1\. Independent releases 2\. Easier for on-boarding new engineers 3\. Scale micro-services independently

The rest of the article is about how to use the breakout opportunity to make major changes to the code and the data-structure. The goal is for the users of the service to have an aha moment of "Search is so much faster after the breakout!".

<comment><USER4> Microservices are almost completely opposed to agile development. They require a strong architecture before implementation and are much harder to reconfigure regardless of versioning. The running system is also hard to manage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if I agree with you regarding the agile part. If each team owns their "micro-service", then they can have their own "sprints".

<comment><USER5> What is the difference between each team owning a microservice and owning a part of the monolith?

There is common release process, but with proper infra in place, that shouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER6> It all comes down to coordination and regression, which are quite complex in monoliths.

Suppose you'd like to push code change to production for your monolith - <USER2> do you know that someone else's change 1) is ready to to production together with yours 2) does not affect your module. Typically these can't be answered easily - and so release process is converted to manual testing and scheduled (and often slow) releases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is microservices so much more popular right now than, say, distributed processing via the actor model? It feels like splitting things up with HTTP boundaries is a lot of work, less flexible and precludes a lot of re-use. Is it just because of advances in tooling lately like Kubernetes and docker?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a great question. Kubernetes and docker and the recent addition of service mesh layer definitely do make things easier for micro-services. However as another commenter mentioned, Microservices are typically an organizational rather than technical feature. We do use pubsub pattern for distributed processing widely. Regarding the http boundaries point that you brought up, we use gRPC instead of HTTP for most services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting article, though I wish there were more details on why this was cheaper, and where the hundreds of thousands of dollars saved annually came from.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mainly saved in infrastructure costs: Elasticsearch and Kubernetes resources.

<comment><USER9> Also from Fair here.

A lot of the cost savings were because we could decrease the size of our elasticsearch cluster. This was mostly due to the flattening of the elasticsearch document schema, which improved performance dramatically but also allowed us to run significantly fewer ES nodes.

<comment><USER8> Gotcha, thanks for reaching back!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I went straight searching for advises on how to avoid a distributed monolith, but no luck, looks like most of the micro-services now days are just distributed monolith.

Let's share advises about it: [https://medium.com/unbabel/your-distributed- monoliths-are-se...](https://medium.com/unbabel/your-distributed-monoliths- are-secretly-plotting-against-you-4c1b20324a31)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is cutting it close to say microservice, it's just two services and they don't fan out or have a lot of the complexity that causes the down sides; such as fan outs that require tracing to debug, requires too many services to startup on your laptop for dev, load testing and tuning, common libraries that cause systemic failures or require world rebuilds when modified, service to service authentication...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a very simplified version of our architecture just for the purpose of this article. We have exactly 83 micro-services currently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Writing new code is faster than understanding existing code.

Different teams should have enough room to not step on each other toes.

Soft boundaries tend to be overruled over time, because of human laziness.

<comment><USER13> I'm not so sure, I'd rather start from what is there, understand it and go from there.

Sure, if you start over you may we'll get there faster but you'll probably repeats some of the same mistakes all over again.

<comment><USER14> I think the temptation to "rewrite the whole thing" is often strong with a large legacy project, and often doesn't pan out as well as it seems because while it is effective at eliminating a lot of the cruft and architectural missteps of the legacy codebase, it also means throwing out all of the subtle behaviors and edge-case-handling which has been built up over years of iteration.

I am a proponent of the disposable-code philosophy though: no system should be considered "off limits", and a healthy codebase should probably be completely rewritten every couple of years. It should just be done incrementally, in a modular way in most cases rather than throwing out the whole thing and starting again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can you view Microservices in the same light as multiple companies? Just like when your monolith calls on a third party API that does the payment for you - ain't that also a microservices that happens to involves 2 different individual companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, not sure if I'm completely following... Yeah you can consider them separate entities if they are truly decoupled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good read, thanks!

I'd be interested to know how long this all took and how many developers were involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> It took over a quarter of the year with one engineer 100% dedicated to it and between 1 to 3 other engineers involved part-time over different stages of the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Faster, cheaper, better" is a trigger phrase for Australians, given that it was the three word slogan used by the Liberal Party to whitewash their sabotage of our national Communications infrastructure.

I was wondering when the author would get to the punch line, but they just kept solving problems not creating them.</comment>


My Encrypted SSD Drive Can Be Unlocked by Anyone? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/doh-what-my-encrypted-drive-can-be-unlocked-by-anyone-a495f6653581 <comment><USER2> "So while the usage of TrueCrypt has faded, especially when its open source developers gave up maintaining the code, it has been up to Microsoft BitLocker to take over and become the tool of choice for encrypting disk drives."

That made me bit worried there'd be no mention of Veracrypt later in the post.

</comment><comment><USER3> > A particular risk is Windows BitLocker — which has a virtual monopoly in the > market place for complete disk encryption — as it often relies on the > hardware encryption used in the SSD drives.

Seriously? Microsoft trusts SSD / HDD firmwares to do what they claim? SSD firmware is often just as bad as most UEFI implementations. I mean, they must know that, right? I can't believe they would be that naive?

<comment><USER4> For businesses, security is mostly about having someone to blame. If Microsoft did not leverage the hardware encryption capabilities in the drives they would end up being responsible for the performance not being as good.

In the world of proprietary black boxes, security is evaluated by the claims of the product sheet.

Microsoft is trusting SSD manufacturers to do the right thing, just as businesses are trusting Microsoft BitLocker to do the right thing.

Personally I trust Microsoft to make decisions that are good for their stock holders. That means having just enough security to avoid ending up with the blame in cases like this.

Samsung's lawyers are probably brain storming ways to get back at those pesky security researchers who made them look bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > along with hardware encryption

Why? Why not just use software encryption?

</comment><comment><USER6> The article fails to mention Apple. Are they affected by this?</comment>


My weekend project: OpenShare - Ad Service for OpenSource projects Add yours  - <AUTHOR> http://openshare.emotionull.com OpenShare is a free banner exchange service targeted at Open/Free source project and blogs that want to increase their audience and climb the search rank. It works like this:

    * You display a banner from another project on your site
    * Your banner is displayed on other opensource sites/blogs
 A fair and easy exchange that can help you attract more visitors, developers and improve your search rank.
It's running on Google App Engine using web2py. I would be delighted if you could provide me some feedback! <comment><USER2> I'd like to be able to filter by license. More specifically, I'd like to be able to show banners only for copyfree licensed projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> nice thought! I'll add it in the next version! thanks

<comment><USER2> Let me know if/when it's there, please.</comment></comment></comment>


Comcast has disabled a throttling system that it deployed in 2008 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/comcast-says-it-doesnt-throttle-heaviest-internet-users-anymore/ <comment><USER2> > But even before implementing data caps and overage fees, Comcast already had > a method for ensuring fairness in pricing. Comcast has long required heavy > Internet users to pay more than light Internet users by charging higher > prices for higher bit-rates.

I think he's tying speed and data more closely than is justifiable for most people.

Many people (I'd guess maybe even most) want higher speeds not in order to use _more_ data. They want it in order to use the _same_ data as they now use but with less waiting.

Comcast just upped me from 220 mbps to 500, for example. That is not going to have much affect on my data usage. It will just mean that when, for example, I decide to play an old MMORPG that I haven't played in a long time I won't have to wait as long to download all the patches I missed. It won't mean that I'll play more games.

Same story when a year ago they upped me from 120 to 220. And a year before that when it went from 90 to 120.

<comment><USER3> I think he's tying speed and data more closely than is justifiable for most people. > you assume that people control their data usage that closely.

I see a natural inflation in data usage because the services I use are inflating the data supplied to my requests. Streamed video sizes increase, I actually have had to use my cloud back up (3 times unfortunately) in the last 3 months so I've had to download 250gb * 3 because I actually had a cloud back up, web page sizes increase from ad-bloat, my hard disk is larger, so my back up size needs increase.. And so on, and so on, and so on...

The speed increases are just a way to eventually tip you into data overages if the data cap does not increase proportionally to the speed increase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really don't understand how ISPs became like this in the US. In Romania I pay $9.9 for 1000 Mbps down / 500 Mbps up with no data caps or throttling and it actually works, even though piracy is huge here, so people use a lot of bandwidth.

[http://www.speedtest.net/result/7391249917](http://www.speedtest.net/result/7391249917)

<comment><USER5> The sibling post's point about differences in prices/costs below is correct. The dominant cost of deploying and maintaining fiber is labor costs, which vary dramatically by country. It's not like consumer electronics that is all made in China and costs the same around the world.

The Romanian model of "micro ISPs," ISPs serving a few blocks here and there, is also illegal in most U.S. cities. The U.S. places a very high value on universal coverage, both of lower-income people and rural people. In nearly any U.S. city, the only way you will get permission to build Internet service to _anyone_ is if you agree to also serve low-income communities or rural parts of town, even if doing so isn't profitable.

<comment><USER6> Really? Does that apply to Wireless ISPs? (i.e., [https://startyourownisp.com/](https://startyourownisp.com/))

<comment><USER5> It applies to any service that offers cable television, which in the US market is a basic part of the economics of the business. Americans still overwhelmingly expect to get television service bundled with broadband.

I used to live in an apartment building with both cable and fiber. Nobody subscribed to the fiber because the fiber provided didn't have a franchise to offer television service. It was nuts—I was the first person on a floor of almost a hundred apartments to get the fiber service. I found out because the ONT had been misconfigured when it was first installed years before. People just didn't care—they wanted their cable package with ESPN. It's why Google Fiber offers a television package—a broadband only service is not competitive in most US markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Comcast has been playing the long game with the data caps. They know that everyone's needs will increase over time and we'll move from a cap that affects few people to one that affects most people. The cap will never increase however. What will increase is ways for Comcast to monetize the cap. Not like anyone has a choice, right?

<comment><USER6> A long game that could (and hopefully will) backfire once there are other options. There will be no loyalty to Comcast when it happens.

<comment> munk-a Unfortunately they're also participating in the "Let's sue all municipal ISPs into the ground" strategy, which might preclude the ability to have other options.

<comment><USER8> Let's see them try to sue space! Hopefully Starlink will be successful.

<comment><USER9> All of the satellite systems have a limited density of receivers, making them unable to have very many urban accounts: Oneweb, Starlink, O3b, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Throttling/deprio only makes sense when your network sucks or you are spectrum constrained (as in the case for mobile isp's).

Comcast could make the argument when they were overprovisioning their nodes like crazy the network sucked, but higher order modulation and more channels in newer DOCSIS standards, fiber being run everywhere to nodes has really improved the situation.

Less of a cash grab, more of a bandaid to handle misallocated resources.

The final argument could have been made for peering costs, but Comcast is really big now, so I doubt they have to pay much if anything for transit.

<comment><USER11> > _Throttling /deprio only makes sense when your network sucks_

Throttling is a reasonable response to the power-law distribution of network usage combined with flat-rate pricing.

At a certain point on the curve, a marginal user will cost more to service than they will produce in revenue. This means (a) you service them at a loss or (b) distribute their loss over everyone else, _i.e._ increase prices. The problem with (b) is as you raise prices, people at the other end of the distribution (the unusually light, _i.e._ profitable, users) will start de- camping. Balancing these factors is difficult, and almost necessitates capping or throttling.

The dumb move was promising unlimited data for an unlimited period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's nice that they don't throttle any more, but how about those data caps? A data cap is like a baggage fee on an airline: Once it's there, it's never going away.

<comment><USER13> I'm very anti-Comcast, so this isn't a defense.. BUT, aren't data caps.. fine? Nothing is unlimited, so why pretend you can get an unlimited amount of data?

Now that doesn't mean data caps themselves are the right solution to the "problem" _(conceptually!)_ , I'm just speaking to change the frame of mind of this.

Imo, what we should be demanding is an SLA for normal customers. Cap speed or data, I don't care, but give me what I'm paying for at all times.

As I see it right now you're getting capped on bandwidth, total data, and absolutely no guarantee about any of it working. It's the worst of all aspects.. for customers, great for Comcast I'm sure.

<comment><USER14> Basically we are tangoing around sparse provisioning.

Users feel like, "Hey I paid for a 1Gbps link, I should be able to saturate 1Gbps 24/7".

Providers know that 99% of users don't need 1Gbps 24/7, so to reduce the cost of the service, they sparsely provision.

Caps of some form, either on speed or on bandwidth (or N Mbps speed cap after Y GBs of bandwidth) are the way they keep users within the limits of the network.

<comment><USER13> Like I mentioned here[1], data caps don't serve to truly limit bandwidth congestion though. If you oversold your pipe by 50 users, totally 150 users, and all 150 are online at 5pm your data cap is not helping. Furthermore, even if those 50 did previously cap, that means that you need to cap that percentage of users that you oversold.

Ie, if you're overselling by a large margin than you'll need to be capping a lot of people. Not the same amount as the "large margin", but a significant portion of your users need to not be accessing the pipe at 5pm.

This is why I think they should just get rid of caps, and instead give us a meaningful SLA. They won't however, because they have _massively_ oversold their network[2].

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306906](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306906)

[2]: I don't know if they've actually oversold their network, it's just clear that there is data troubles based on user traffic. Personally I think Comcast is purposefully limiting traffic based on marketing strategies. Ie, when Google rolled fiber into Portland, suddenly Comcast's "available speeds" massively spiked to stay competitive with Google. Which indicates that they had a lot more than they were selling.

<comment><USER15> Data caps are not about quality of service. Data caps are about getting people who need more data to pay more money for it, so that the service provider doesn't have to increase the cost of every customer's data plan. Instead, only the customers who need more data will pay more. The increased cost is a cost of doing business, but they have to get the money somehow. They chose to only increase some people's costs versus increasing everyone's costs. This is what they mean by "fair pricing".

<comment><USER16> No, if you wanted "fair pricing" you'd have congestion pricing. Hard data caps are just a way of bilking the subscribers for more money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hypothetically, if they have a new throttling system they'd like to launch now that net neutrality is dead, I think they'd do exactly this. Get some PR spin for turning this one off, and implement the new website/service throttling system as a slow boil just as they did data caps.

</comment><comment><USER18> They're about to buy Fox. Probably doing this to look good to regulators.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yeah why throttle them when you can hand them pure profit surcharges instead?

</comment><comment><USER20> Awful headline. They're supposed to provide infinite product for a fixed price because the author wants it?

<comment><USER21> The article does go into some detail to support their claim. You might not agree with the claim, but the headline is suitable for the article.

<comment><USER22> It doesn't, though.

As a thought experiment, what if the caps went away tomorrow? Is it possible that the network would become saturated? If so, that is to say the caps might be reasonable. If not, how do you know that's the case?

I'm not any happier with Comcast than anyone else; I recently moved from 1Gbps service to 250Mbps service with them, and I was always bumping up against the 'cap' on my 1Gbps service. I want a better provider. But nothing in the article proves that the caps are useless nor a money grab.

<comment><USER23> >Is it possible that the network would become saturated?

That's on Comcast to handle as a part of building and operating a network. It should not be the concern of the customer.

<comment><USER24> Cost of network construction and maintenance is always passed on the customers, though. Without considering Comcast specifically, generally it'd be somewhat unfair and unreasonable if most users have to pay more to subsidize the "elite 0.1%"'s data usage. So I think it's not as black-and-white as you make it out to be.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Behind the Overlay – a keyboard shortcut to close any popover - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/behind-the-overlay-revival/ <comment><AUTHOR> There also appears to be one for Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/l...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/ljipkdpcjbmhkdjjmbbaggebcednbbme)</comment>


Google pays female workers less - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-pays-female-workers-less-than-male-counterparts-labor-department-says-1491622997 <comment><USER2> Even among males, there is a fair a mount of men that make more that the rest just because they overvalue themselves and also because they take more risks.

YMMV but this seems to be a common feature across men in many cultures while women tend to be the opposite (again YMMV)

I wonder how much this pay gap is due to a male conspiracy or because men are too optimistic about themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> All the article is is a rehash of a Guardian article which is here: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google- pa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pay- disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit)</comment>


Brilliant Pencil Sharpener Design Helps You Endlessly Extend Pencils - <AUTHOR> http://www.core77.com/posts/46964/Brilliant-Pencil-Sharpener-Design-Helps-You-Endlessly-Extend-Pencils <comment><USER2> Great idea! Would be way cooler if it did not require glue, though.</comment>


Show HN: An algorithm to automatically turn photos of food into faces - <AUTHOR> http://aaronrandall.com/blog/megabite/ <comment><USER2> Not bad, but not quite Arcimbaldo [0].

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo#/media/F...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo#/media/File%3AGiuseppe_Arcimboldo_- _Rudolf_II_of_Habsburg_as_Vertumnus_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Whoa. That's pretty rad! Why don't more people know about this guy? Considering he predates the surrealists by literally hundreds of years, you'd think he would get more press. This stuff would be right at home in an issue of Juxtapoz magazine.

<comment><USER2> Striking, isn't it? I ran across his work when taking cog psych/cog neuro courses. Arcimbaldo's paintings provide a great demonstration of face perception and — one could argue — face-seeking that our brains perform with no conscious effort.

<comment><USER4> Just to say, he's quite well known amongst artists and art historians, though I don't recall learning about him in my Western art history course. Along similar lines, but more well known is Hieronymus Bosch [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hieronymus+bosch](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hieronymus+bosch).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fun project, excellent article! Your figures made the algorithms incredibly easy to grasp.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, glad you enjoyed it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand how the part of the plate that was covered with food is reconstructed.

Does this assume that the plate has an uniform color and round symmetry? Does this work with plates that have circular color stripes?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great question! My original plan that once I had extracted all the items from the plate, the app would then detect the average colour of the remaining regions and "fill" the gaps - that wouldn't work well with plates that have different patterns, but would probably be good enough for plates of a single colour.

Due to time constraints (and ultimately solving the majority of the problems I had originally aimed to with this project), the app replaces the cropped circular region with a plain white plate (a separate image contained in the app) before placing the extracted items.

Maybe I'll go for the more advanced implementation if/when I spend more time on this project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great article, well explained and illustrated. The name is funnier than the app though. It literally translates to "giant dick" in French.

<comment><USER8> So does megabyte and megabit. Grow up! ;)

<comment><USER9> That's why they call it a mégaoctet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm just happy that I got to see a rotational transform of bacon today.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a fantastic example of an interesting academic task, and very well explained. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, glad you enjoyed it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems like a great example of a technically/algorithmically challenging problem that the layman would not appreciate, more so if this could be refined and applied to a wider set of images.

An elevator pitch for this, if you will, would likely not impress most non- technical people because, on it's face, what's so hard about rearranging foods into faces?

<comment><USER9> There are tons of tasks that are easy for a human to perform, but challenging for a computer to perform. Deepdream certainly seems to impress the layman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Think of how revolutionary this is for people who incessantly take photos of their food and post to Instagram.

We need a "food->face" filter stat. If not for the poster, then one I can apply to any of my friends' photos they post.

Or maybe I need better friends.

Or eat more photogenic food myself.

</comment><comment><USER14> Are there other example images? I don't have access to an iOS device right now.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great! This article is a perfect example of excellent documentation for source code. It would be great if any project had such a good documentation.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great! It's also a nice reminder that it's possible to do automatic image manipulation with tools other than neural networks.

</comment><comment><USER17> We truly live in the future.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nitpick: The area should be in units of pixels^2. Other than that, this is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER19> Bacon to Kevin Bacon?

</comment><comment><USER20> Am I the only person who read it as "feces"!!!

<comment><USER21> Nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ugh, millennials.

[http://buttersafe.com/2016/02/02/a-new-generation-of- art/](http://buttersafe.com/2016/02/02/a-new-generation-of-art/)</comment>


Can Scoopler (YC S08) be the real-time search king? - <AUTHOR> http://vator.tv/news/show/2009-06-29-can-scoopler-be-the-real-time-search-king <comment><USER2> Wow, Ezra Roizen really shows he doesn't get it in that interview. He thinks he's boiled down realtime search to merely an abstraction of existing search. Scoopler (and the entire space) is not a mere rehash of Google and/or Technorati. A) there's core tech here that is fundamentally more difficult than non-realtime search indexing, and B) Twitter Search is only the first example of how realtime search can be valuable.

Jeff Smith of Smule did an admirable job of smacking Ezra down, however. This interview was watchable if only because Jeff made some really salient points about getting to revenue, iterating on products, and not sweating that you don't have absolutely everything figured out.

The key point here is that AJ and team have a product, and they're scrappy, and they're going to do whatever it takes to understand the space and win.

<comment><USER3> To be clear, I wasn't comparing the _technology_ of Scoopler to Google or Technorati ( or Kosmix, or the other's I mention).

I was focused on the challenge of any large-scale search/discovery-based business model. You have to create MASSIVE volume on the consumption side, and then you have to pair it with a business model which can support such a huge platform. In the case of Google it was intent-based advertising, and in the case of Kosmix I guess it trended towards ecommerce (one would assume given their eventual acquisition by Walmart).

The challenge is in the requisite scale of demand, and then the follow-on challenges of monetizing such demand. Thinking more along the lines of companies like Digg who were able to create a great deal of usage, but struggled to monetize (less about tech, and more about business model).

I appreciated then, and now, that real-time search is its own animal. And a very hard problem to solve.

And a much belated congrats to the Scoopler team on being acquired by Google!

My full reply to this comment can be found here:

[http://roizen.blogs.com/ezra_roizen/2016/07/wow-ezra- roizen-...](http://roizen.blogs.com/ezra_roizen/2016/07/wow-ezra-roizen- really-shows-he-doesnt-get-it-in-that-interview-my-reply-the-wait-is- over.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not with a name like that.

<comment><USER5> What would you suggest?

<comment><USER4> Something cutting edge, like Cut Co., Edgecom, or Interslice.

<comment><USER6> so all cutting edge companies should be named like that? Aren't all startups in the tech scene "cutting edge"?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scroogled, new campaign by Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.scroogled.com/

<comment><USER2> This comes off as disingenuous to me, but is unsurprising coming from Microsoft, which seems to have always taken a stance of condescension to its competitors that waffles between apparent apathy and mouth-foaming rage.

At no point is MS seemingly capable of perceiving their competitors as legitimate, and their successes as being due to shipping superior product.

Sounds a bit like Steve Ballmer. Maybe.

Let's try this one on for size: how's about MS start shipping products that don't suck, instead of relying on smear campaigns?

<comment><USER3> Let's try this one for size: how about we look at the merit of what Microsoft is discussing here, instead of making what is essentially an ad hominem attack.

I had no idea that Google shopping results were more or less ads. I thought it was an aggregator of shopping results. This is news to me.

<comment><USER4> I agree here. I was un aware that google started doing this. Thank you microsoft for informing me.

<comment><USER5> Maybe because you don't use it? There's a notice at the bottom of every page and a link that says "Why these products" with the same discloser.

It's part of the reason I find this annoying, people keep parroting it and then talking about generic _search_ results which are not involved in anyway. Whether it's intentional or a byproduct of "Google" being so widely used for different things, I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the bad part here is that the google shopping page looks just like a regular search page except with a notice at the top right (that you have to hover over to read). I actually would have no problem with this if it were clearer from the page that all the results on that page were paid for, just like I don't have a problem with adwords ads at the top of search results because google really does seem to do a good job of making sure they are relatively relevant (though usually the only time I click on those is when I'm going to be shopping anyways).

Microsoft calling Google out on this is ridiculous, however, because the only way to get on Bing shopping right now is to pay for the privilege, which makes the situation essentially the same (note that the bing disclaimer says that they don't use payment for ranking, which doesn't disclaim the fact that you have to pay to show up at all).

[http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-attacks-google-with- sc...](http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-attacks-google-with-scroogled- campaign-forgets-its-guilty-of-same-thing-140856)

In any case, this feels super shady, exactly like a political attack ad, as others have said. It would be interesting to see numbers on how effective this is. The Bing it on thing did seem to have some reach into popular consciousness, but didn't seem very effective at getting people to actually switch (only anecdotal evidence, of course). I imagine awareness went up, but the key there was that Bing it on was a relatively positive ad: "we're just as good now" vs "look how bad those other guys are".

<comment><USER7> I think I've lost track of how many times Microsoft has accused Google of something, only to find out a few days later that they were doing the _exact same thing_. At least make sure you aren't doing that, too, if you're going to accuse someone of something. Seems like attack ads 101 to me.

And yes, all these negative FUD spreading ads remind me of the old Microsoft, which is the same as the new Microsoft it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was particularly surprised to see how aggressive the TV campaign was. I've seen these all over. They're really running with this thing:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WIluNt0mvA>

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_6bSCW_UI0>

Not surprisingly, they've apparently hired a former political hack to help run this campaign. It's interesting, because these ads definitely have a dirty politics feel to them:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2012/07/23/can- mark-p...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2012/07/23/can-mark-penn- fix-microsofts-bing/)

[http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/07/19/mark-penn- microsoft%E...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/07/19/mark-penn- microsoft%E2%80%99s-new-strategist-hopes-to-boost-bing/)

[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-03/did-mark- pen...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-03/did-mark-penn- swiftboat-google)

<comment><USER9> Holy cow: I knew about the Penn hire and the Scroogled campaign, but the connection didn't "click" until I read your comment. I should have realized that there was a connection. The dirtiness I feel when loading the Scroogled site now makes a ton of sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Higher visibility: Paid offers will be highlighted throughout Bing Shopping, including search result and product pages

from [http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/search- advertis...](http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/search- advertising/bing-shopping)

well, okay then.

</comment><comment><USER11> Google very publicly announced the changes and Microsoft is attempting to conflate product search with general web search. It isn't shady to create a paid listing catalog (which is essentially what Google has done with its product search) if people are aware of that fact. While Microsoft isn't lying in this campaign, they are attempting to paint Google as being dishonest with their general search results, something that isn't true.

The quotes on the top banner are all Larry and Sergey talking about search, not product search...a feature which is no where near as popular or used. Putting these quotes on the same page with attack language could easily confuse anyone to think Google was now accepting paid search results a la Overture back in the day.

<comment><USER12> How do you know that Google search is pure? I for one can barely see what are ads vs regular search and am deeply suspicious of Google's humongous increase in profits and Adwords revenue this past year after Panda and other updates. Occam's razor and all. Google has changed

<comment><USER11> Both Google and Bing have ads that are clearly marked as ads on their web search results? How does one know Google search is pure? Start a company, get some press, build pages in an SEO friendly format and start seeing traffic trickle in from organic search without paying a dime to Google.

Google has a lot more incentive (as they've proven over the years) to maintain really high quality organic search and paid ads separate. That is what set them apart in early 2000's. When they integrated g+ results, they had an orthogonal incentive (take down Facebook, spar with Bing) but if the incentive is just to make money in the business of search it is extremely unlikely they would pollute their web results with ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I click on "Try Bing" and it brings me to their landing page.. fine. So I click on "Shopping", thinking it will give me an "honest search result" but where does that take me?

It takes me to "www.ciao.se", a price comparison site that I stopped using years ago (pricerunner, pricespy or even amazon will all give better results in terms of prices and the information presented). As far as I know, the retailers that want to be listed on ciao.se need to pay for that privilege.

At least clean up your own house before you go acting all high and mighty, MS.

Also, I've never seen google present "Commerce" as anything but a commercial service, bought and paid for by the sellers on that service.

<comment><USER14> Maybe something is different if you're out of the US, but I didn't see a ciao.se website at all. From the Scroogled site, I clicked "Try Bing", searched for "toy trucks", and clicked "Shopping" at the top of the results page. (There was no shopping link that I spotted on the Bing homepage.) I was directed to the following page: [http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=toy+trucks&qpvt=to...](http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=toy+trucks&qpvt=toy+trucks&FORM=HDRSC6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cheap, tacky. Makes me seriously concerned for Microsoft's health if they feel they need to resort to this kind of childishness.

<comment><USER16> I think that concern is valid even though I agree that Google's shopping results are deceptive to the average user; if Microsoft can't make a campaign out of it that is less about Google's failing and more about how Bing offers better value, it doesn't do them any good.

<comment><USER17> I think the point is more to tarnish Google's halo in general than to promote Bing. They want to level the playing field and have people to see Google the way they already see Microsoft, as a generic big evil corporation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow.

What is particularly interesting is what this says about advertising versus search. I'm sure lots of people are familiar with magazines which are "published" with a bunch of articles that are really just long form advertisements for the people who paid for that month's print run. These 'manufacturer supported' publications are more common in the trades than in general circulation but still, few people reading them thinks "Wow this is a really honest evaluation of which oscilloscope is best."

I find it interesting that it accuses Google of switching to a more extractive business model. If that is true then this change would mark the nadir of Google's ability to grow that market. The tying of Google's search capability to their advertising business seems analogous to the way Microsoft Office and DOS were tied together, the 'team' being much much harder to dislodge than either element.

</comment><comment><USER19> This page looks terrible! There is a clutter of fonts, overlapping text elements, a scared girl and a scrolling banner. Its disorganized information overload! I would expect this from the Time Cube, but and not Microsoft.

It looks better through the Geocitiesizer

[http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2...](http://wonder- tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=4&url=http://www.scroogled.com/)

</comment><comment><USER20> All this does is make Microsoft more evil.

Edit: People don't like my short reply I guess, let me elaborate.. All this site does is say, "Google is secretly being evil and shoving ads in your face," but all I see is Microsoft low-blow trolling its competitor, and if that's not evil, then 4chan may as well be wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER21> Regardless of the message the Microsoft is trying to deliver here they could at least make a website that does not make me close the tab in the first 10 seconds. What a mess.

</comment><comment><USER22> FAIL. Shitty design, and none of the messages about Google posted by Microsoft inspires trust (infact, it arouses suspicion). It seems more like Microsoft is desperate to get more customers this festive season. It's a very very desperate attempt.

</comment><comment><USER23> OK. So you're a wealthy business with a huge talent pool. You discover that your competitor is doing something that might annoy its market and create an opportunity for you.

Do you:

a. Improve your product in the space and make it so amazing that people flock to it and abandon your competitor, or

b. Run a marketing campaign with smear ads?

Hint: if you're a technology company, you choose the first.

I haven't been enthusiastic about Google Shopping in a long time. I'm not surprised they've decided to turn it into a bidding war. But, Microsoft still isn't offering something better.

...Huh. Why does this feel like politics all of a sudden?

</comment><comment><USER24> What Google is doing is, indeed, shady - but then again if I imagine my mom (and Google's knowledge of her) she might be browsing best offers for her (And purchase what is really best for her), despite the fact that G makes money off it.

<comment><USER25> What is Google doing that is, in your opinion, shady?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The page is strangely put together. It feels very ... Geocities? ...

I had not thought MS played the attack ad game until recently. It denotes that there's some kind of strategy shift going on.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm quite surprised by the aggressiveness of this campaign, but maybe that's because I'm not from the US. Is this also over the top in the US or is this considered normal?

<comment><USER27> It's over the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What a terribly chosen name. I wonder what the Scroogle guy has to say about this.

<comment><USER29> I'm trying to figure out whether it was intended as Scrooge-google for the holiday season or screw-google...

<comment><USER28> I'm guessing "screw-google", as I always assumed scroogle.org meant, though now that I think about it perhaps Scroogle is "scrape-google"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's only missing "I'm Steve Ballmer and I approve this message" in the end.

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel like having a DejaVu. Wasn't this on HN a couple of days before?

<comment><USER32> It really was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As if we've never been screwed over by microsoft, fuck off

</comment><comment><USER34> "Scroogled"? Wasn't that an FSF campaign or Cory Doctorow story or something? Pretty sneaky of MS to co-opt it. Perhaps we've been Microscrewed?

</comment><comment><USER35> What's particularly bad about Google is that they've clearly copied the look and feel of Bing, and I remember a story about how they even used shady opt- out in their browser to track user's searches and clicks in order to copy search results from Bing!

Oh wait, that was Microsoft who copied Google, stole search results from Google, and is now bashing Google.

Disclaimer: I have a soul.

</comment><comment><USER36> This reminds me a lot of the anti-Microsoft stuff that Novell put out in the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER37> Reminds me of Edison vs. Tesla. Too bad this time Tesla is worth $200 billion (Larry Page made sure of it) and Edison and Co. is run by a bald idiot named Ballmer.

If you have to litigate or advertise your way against the superiority of your competition via attack ads - you've already lost.

</comment><comment><USER38> Desperate much?</comment>


Xiffe – the best mobile app prototyping tool - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xiffe.com/love-xiffe-look-best-mobile-app-wireframe-tool/

<comment><AUTHOR> Xiffe.com is the best mobile apps prototyping tool. Much better than photoshop, keynote etc. It helps you prototype 70% faster

</comment><comment><USER2> The prototypes you shared look good!</comment>


Porting the Rails Inflector to Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://trapm.com/vana-inflector-an-english-inflector-in-common

<comment><USER2> May I suggest you instead model your inflector's algorithm after Lingua::EN::Inflect? ( <http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Lingua::EN::Inflect> ) It handles tons of cases better than Rails's inflector does.

Damian Conway (Lingua::EN::Inflect's author) also wrote a paper about algorithmic English pluralization that actually takes a linguistic approach to all of this: [http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Plurals.ht...](http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Plurals.html)

The hard part about an inflector as part of something like a framework is that it's hard to add special cases later when you need corrections, because you risk breaking the existing incorrectly pluralized or singularized names people have for things. It's much easier to get it as right as possible as soon as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an insane library - I'll definitely take a look at it. This was just meant to be a reasonable stop-gap as I start to build real tools, but you raise some good points. I've book marked the Lingua::EM::Inflect to revisit for porting later - thanks!

<comment><USER2> To be fair, I've never looked at the source until now and... wow. I'm definitely glad he wrote the paper to go along with it.

It's not even that most of the code is hard to read (although a few parts did leave me scratching my head), it's just that without the lingustic explanations I'd be lost.

I wouldn't blame you if you held off porting it for the time being. A stopgap measure is definitely better than nothing. I just wanted to make sure you knew about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ahhh, the Rails inflector. An entire library dedicated solely to making things _less_ explicit, _more_ magical and more confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh? I'm curious as to what you mean. I can imagine the CamelCase to camel_case bit that's used for a lot of the internal class/file-naming stuff might fit your description, but certainly not the singularize and pluralize methods.

<comment><USER3> I don't really have a huge problem with it. I dislike Rails in general because it's a 500-pound gorilla that people use instead of understanding what's actually going on in their app, and I'm frustrated that it's the first point of contact most people have with Ruby. Rails has a lot of sorcery in its code, which is trivially exemplified[1] by the inflector, and Ruby doesn't have to be that way.

For example, let's say you have a Big Giant App with fifty database tables, each with a corresponding model object. You can use the Rails inflector, which is God-knows-how-many lines of code by now. Or, you can have a 50-line file that looks like this:

      model_table_map = {
        User => 'users',
        Shark => 'sharks',
        Lazer => 'lazers',
        Antenna => 'antennae',
        ...
        Locus => 'loci',
        Species => 'species'
      }

(Don't ask me what kind of screwed up, terrifying app you could possibly be writing that requires these classes, 'cause I don't know!)

This has numerous advantages over using the Inflector:

\- The conversion from singular class name to plural table name is _unambiguous_ and _self-documenting_ , so if you come back to the code in 6 months, or if you are working with someone for whom English is not their primary language, you don't have to wonder, "Hmmm... is 'locus' one of those words with an irregular plural inflection? If so, does the Inflector know about it?"

\- It's one less dependency you need to trust.

\- Memoization makes this already-minuscule point nearly moot, but calling model_table_map[obj.class] is faster than inflecting it.

Like I said: It's really not a big deal, and probably counts more towards personal preference than anything else. I simply prefer to be as explicit as possible until it would simply _hurt less_ to use magic.

 _"Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left."_ \- Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

1\. Can something non-trivial be _trivially_ exemplified? I dunno. :-/</comment></comment></comment>


Got mentioned on Techcrunch but still not enought visitors - <AUTHOR>

My site http://betnext.in got mentioned on Techcrunch but still there has been only few visitors (less than 10)
Whether I am doing something wrong or I should prompt more??
Here is the link - http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/06/super-bowl-apps-websites/ <comment><USER2> My employer has had a number of TechCrunch articles written on his company and it's always hit and miss. I should note that this still occurs even when the entire article is about the company.

TechCrunch doesn't always drive the largest crowd and even when they do they're not the expected audience of your website so you're likely to have many more hit and runs than genuinely interested visitors.

I'd suggest try growing it organically by finding a way to reach your target market instead of aiming for a higher profile PR piece in a niche tech blog.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's no way that number is correct. Yes, your site is just lumped into a list of several other links on TechCrunch, but the article was fb liked 61 times and tweeted 758 times, which means it must have been read (in my experience with analytics) at least 10x that amount (probably more), so let's assume 10,000 hits to that article. There's no way those 10,000 hits resulted in only 10 hits to your page - even if it was a blank page. That's an impossibly low number... so check your analytics.

Edit: Actually, I just had a realization that it Tech Crunch has a very wide reach across social platforms. I didn't think of this before, but it's possible the article was liked and tweeted by hundreds of people who didn't even hit the TC site. But I still think your number is off. I get 2,500+ hits to my blog every time I post an article to Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the first I've heard of your site and I'm pretty into sports sites, fantasy leagues, etc.

What other marketing have you done? A mention on Techcrunch is nice if you can get it, but if that's your only marketing vector, you're not going to succeed at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where I should do advertising? On fan sites of teams..

USP of my site is you can bet on any team from any twitter client by just sending out a tweet in a particular format..

To get to normal twitter users what should I do really??

<comment><USER5> promote a hashtag? either literally by sponsoring a promoted trend, or just by adding a hashtag to the tweets your apps generates.

at the moment, you ask users to tweet eg "@betnext 5000 on SomeTeam - Feb 7th 2011"

Change that to "5000 on SomeTeam Feb 7th 2011 #betnext". to me a hashtag is better promotion than an @reply.

<comment><AUTHOR> you gave me a better idea than what I am currently implementing..but the bigger problem is only few had tried placing bets via tweeting..

<comment><USER5> > you gave me a better idea than what I am currently implementing

^^ why I comment on HN :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd get a .com domain. Anything else is just asking for confusion.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know. I saw your site and I find it is not easy to use. The first page doesn't tell you what is a virtual bet about. It also gives you to calls to action that are equally important. I would only highlight one of them.

The How to Play page is boring to read. I would replace everything with a form that fills in a Twitter post for you (for which you don't need permissions from Twitter).

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try shortening up the how to play page..

Replacing everything with a form??

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are your analytics set up properly? It's weird that you'd only get 10 visits from an article on TC.

</comment><comment><USER9> Take a gander into my comment on this post on HN <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2187880>

basically another asked a similar question and I was feeling quite generous. :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> oh..typo errors..It should have been "promote" instead of "prompt"..</comment>


News Media - <AUTHOR> Hi Guys,
I am trying to disrupt the media.
http://firstperson.news/index/welcome
I would love to get some feedback on my start-up. Please comment! <comment><USER2> 1\. Your page took almost a minute to load.

2\. What does your platform offer that I can't already get via Twitter?

3\. You talk about the service being "free of media bias". But what about the bias of the people reporting your news? Journalists are at least taught in training that they ought to remain neutral in their reporting.

4\. How are you going to assure quality? Journalists are taught how to write and most have a very good command of their language. I don't want to be flooded by "news reports" chock full of linguistic errors. (Also, journalists are taught how to do proper research.)

5\. Lastly, how do I even know that a report is truthful? If anybody can post news, what's to stop a group of high-schoolers inventing an invasion of the US by Mexico (or some other nonsense)?

I think you have a worthy aspiration, but to put it bluntly: I trust a well curated selection of the traditional media with their trained, professional journalists way more than a couple of guys running around with their smart phones.

I find your current tagline of "disrupting the media" a) unnecessary, b) impossible, and c) just a little bit arrogant. IMO your service would be much more valuable if you set yourself up as augmenting the traditional media with first-hand accounts of people on the ground. (That I might actually be interested in.)

In short: your idea has potential, but I think you need to change the way you present yourself and address a couple of quality concerns.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let me suggest you check out the rules, etc, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show)

This probably should be submitted as a Show HN. This post probably will not prevent you from submitting it as a Show HN because, as I understand it, you will directly submit the link.

</comment><comment><USER4> No https support.</comment>


Pulp Fiction in Chronological Order - <AUTHOR> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1071439/pulpfictioninfographic.jpg

<comment><USER2> Oh.

        Error (509)

        This account's public links are generating too
        much traffic and have been temporarily disabled!</comment>


Show HN: A lightweight module to send HTTP(s) requests from Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vasanthv/fetch-lite <comment><USER2> How is this different from the other hundreds of modules that go this exact thing?

<comment><USER3> If I had to guess, the selling points are: promises + fetch syntax + tiny size.</comment></comment>


I'll Pay You to Read My Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2013/01/ill_pay_you_to.php <comment><USER2> Fascinating books then earn [publishers] less money.

Apparently fascinating but ultimately tediously unreadable books are the money-spinners but you'll probably need to use a new pseudonym (or be famous outside of writing) to sell copies of more than one book.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can see it now, people reading 800 books a day by outsourcing or some other scam.</comment>