Interviews with Y Combinator partners: Garry Tan - <AUTHOR> http://www.tapin.tv/#video/a4a77dcd254c423abd5c4d5d30438a06

<comment><USER2> I kind of hate it when people link to autoplay videos on hackernews. I open a bunch of tabs for interesting stories (and discussions), then go back and read them, and there's always the annoying task of finding the one playing audio when someone links an autoplay video.

<comment><USER3> We built video links with the assumption that they'd be shared to people who knew that they'd be getting linked to a video. We'll include a tag next time we link to a video on TapIn.tv

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd be very curious to look at Garry's work.

I know two other devs who developed seriously impressive design skills over the years and they both have an inclination toward specific design style - clean and simple, but nuanced. They design as they code, basically, so it'd be nice to have another sample point to validate the conjecture.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if he has a public portfolio, but he designed the Palantir logo[1]. The design functions as both a Palantir, the seeing eye from Lord of the Rings, and as a head looking at a book. All with a circle and a wave.

[1]<http://i.imgur.com/puTPC.jpg>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The sad robot has notified the admins :(

<comment><USER3> We're doing our best to put the sad robot out of a job.

<comment><USER6> While you're at it. When I click on a pin, I want to see what the video is about before I interrupt that great interview. I like the idea of exploring while watching, but I click just to get more information ABOUT the pin. I expected a bubble to popup up with a thumbnail, title, date, etc.

<comment><USER3> That's a really good idea. I made a thing for it on our community feature request page[1]. Feel free to vote and comment on it.

[1][http://support.tapin.tv/forums/167374-general/suggestions/30...](http://support.tapin.tv/forums/167374-general/suggestions/3079216-let- me-see-a-preview-of-a-video-before-i-click-on-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This site looks like shit on mobile. And it requires flash, do I can't watch it on my IPod touch.

<comment><USER3> We're incorporating a mobile viewing experience on the iOS app. Right now you have to do live video through Flash. We're looking at a transition to WebRTC, but it's not viable as of now.</comment></comment>


Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/11/fintech-startup-plaid-raises-250m-at-a-2-65b-valuation/ <comment><USER2> Plaid is a great idea, but the implementation worries me. My understanding is that, for most banks, you give Plaid your username and password, and Plaid scrapers on their servers log into your online banking account. Even worse, Plaid obfuscates this behavior from users by replicating their banks login window and making it appear that you are logging directly into your bank.

I'm not sure how to feel about this, because I understand that banks' lack of open API access is the central problem. But it seems irresponsible to present Plaid as a secure solution, when its login system is technically a phishing page.

I think a much cooler, probably safer, solution would be a mobile SDK that runs the scrapers directly from the user's phone, instead of on Plaid's servers.

<comment><USER3> It always blew my mind that services like Yodlee ([https://www.yodlee.com](https://www.yodlee.com)) worked that way. I can understand it from the point of view that no traditional bank was set up to allow structured access but it never felt right to me.

In the UK there is a big push around "open banking"[1] which will bring this into the 21st century and allow for proper programmatic access to data. It's still in it's infancy but the sector here is transforming around it.

[1]: ([https://www.openbanking.org.uk/customers/what-is-open- bankin...](https://www.openbanking.org.uk/customers/what-is-open-banking/))

<comment><USER4> Open Banking and PSD2 are both complete failures. Who is in market with a decent product built on it? Nobody is. What people need to realise is that 1st party APIs are completely at odds with the incentives to maintain the status quo, i.e. they pose an intermediation threat and in the worst case relegate banks to mere utilities with zero margin. Furthermore a bank will never use it's own public API in it's own products, hence there being zero downside for exposing a shitty one. The only way this is will happen is if 3rd party companies in the market force it to.

<comment><USER5> Good number of companies using it already [https://www.openbankproject.com/apps/](https://www.openbankproject.com/apps/) and they claim 10K developers.

<comment><USER4> That's not Open Banking. That's the Open Bank Project, a completely separate thing. They're a company that tries to sell their platform to banks and provide a FOSS sandbox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's been a whistleblower or two on HN about how Plaid scapes and sells your bank account transaction history to third parties.

It seems more unethical than most selling-user-data strategies in that the users don't even know Plaid is involved in the transaction _whatsoever_ ; they're just a hidden middle layer.

I'd be interested to know if this is still part of their monetization strategy, or if anyone at Plaid can confirm definitively that they do not collect and sell your bank account transaction history?

Edit: So sorry on my part, specifically on selling data, must've mixed this up now that I've read the comment (linked below). It involved scraping user data against the wishes of the banks, and doing huge amounts of customer analytics with such data, and another separate thread on giving transaction history as part of the service. Still a negative but different than above-- will leave this up so as to not destroy thread.

<comment><USER7> Co-founder of Plaid here. This is not true, we do not sell transactional data to third parties. We make 100% of our money by letting developers build financial applications[1].

[1] - [https://plaid.com/pricing/](https://plaid.com/pricing/)

<comment><USER8> Thanks William, and sorry for the wrong accusation. Super embarrassed; I read so many comments on that thread I must've conflated two.

<comment><USER9> Here is one discussion from a so-called whistleblower I was involved in. I will let you decide on the ethics[1].

I'm in the ACH space and I personally know a merchant who planned on using them for account verification for point of sale ACH payments. This merchant also planned on grabbing transaction history while they were in there for I don't know what. Analytics maybe? I have no idea if they ever went through with their plan.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692291](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692291)

<comment><USER10> This was the merchant, and not Plaid. While Plaid gives such merchants a lot of power, I don't think the ethics issue lies with Plaid (though you could make a good argument that they should grant limited access, and full API access only on a more restricted whitelist basis)

<comment><USER11> So according to you Facebook is not responsible for Cambridge Analytica scandal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember I spoke with both the CEO and CTO over Skype several years ago.

They actively reached out to me because of an open source project I created and they wanted to recruit me. They made quite an impression on me but I wasn't prepared to move to the US back then. Damn. Missed opportunity. Obviously they were very proactive in reaching out to the developers that they wanted rather than just passively waiting for resumes to flow in.

<comment><USER13> What project were you working on?

<comment><USER14> SocketCluster. A WebSocket framework for NodeJS. I'm still working on it actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those interested: In Europe, banks are forced to provide fintech companies access to customer data when the user consents to this under its "open banking" initiative

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/25/psd2-europes-banks-brace- for...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/25/psd2-europes-banks-brace-for-new-eu- data-sharing-rules.html)

Personally speaking, i have a problem with companies like Plaid and SOFORT (EU), where they kind-of hide the fact that you provide them with your login credentials (and not the bank). From what I understand from this thread, Plaid may be selling your data and gives developers full access to the customer's transaction history. This is worrying

<comment><USER16> Per whockey's comment here[0], it doesn't seem like Plaid is selling your data directly to 3rd parties - though it doesn't prevent the developers you're giving your data to from selling it.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655507)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm interested to see where this goes. I use Plaid as a developer, and it feels like the user experience keeps getting worse. This isn't Plaid's fault, but as more and more financial institutions require 2FA, it gets much less automatic for Plaid to scrape data.

Instead of just seeing updated transactions, users frequently need to enter a 2FA code before Plaid can successfully complete the update. This is very clunky, especially if you've linked 10+ accounts. Hopefully, Plaid (or even government regulations) will be able to encourage banks to create real APIs and Plaid can move away from scraping entirely.

<comment><USER18> Wasn't YC company Standard Treasury trying to help banks become more API accessible? If the banks have an API an offering, I can see how a standard would need to exist to support the primary use cases (auth, balance, transaction), and perhaps Plaid is showing what they could look like (reducing the complexity of interfacing disparate banks' approaches to managing bank data). [NB: if there is a standard or info I am clearly not knowledgeable of based upon this comment, please educate me!]

<comment><USER19> That was the goal but they were acquihired by Silicon Valley Bank. [https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/api-banking-startup- st...](https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/api-banking-startup-standard- treasury-joins-silicon-valley-bank/)

<comment><USER20> And then they left SVB to try again

[https://treasuryprime.com](https://treasuryprime.com)

<comment><USER21> Interesting, how is this different from Standard Treasury?

<comment><USER22> Heyo, cofounder of Treasury Prime here.

The main differences are how we're working with banks. Back then we sold only to large banks, plus banks weren't yet comfortable using cloud services, meaning everything had to be built on-premise (very silly). Now we sell into all sizes of bank because we're able to operate with a SaaS model.

Likewise for developers that means we can move much faster and there's a much better chance we'll be able to find a bank that's a good fit for you. If you're interested in using the API, email me and say hi: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The billion-dollar battle to share your personal financial information to even more unaccountable third parties.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am not yet convinced that giving away your bank username and password to plaid/mint/other scrapers does not exempt the bank from the liability limits established in Reg E.

The user effectively gives away control of their deposit accounts. If it is subsequently misused (unlike an access device like a debit card), the user's disclosure of the password might give the bank an affirmative defense. Push to shove, in a large breach with bulk cashouts via wire a depository institution might not honor the claims.

It seems obvious that revocable access w/ tokens is a solution, but that gives up the game on the transaction data (and likely drives some of banks' reluctance to offer that functionality).

I'd love to have my mind changed about this, if someone can point me in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems disingenuous for the banks to not provide an API spec, and then invest in and present Plaid as an alternative. This is not a technology problem, this is about entrenched players making a buck wherever possible, without doing the logical thing.

I'm glad Europe has defined an API for it's banks to avoid this from happening there

<comment><USER4> > I'm glad Europe has defined an API for it's banks to avoid this from > happening there

Except it hasn't. If you're referring to PSD2, that is not what that is at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know if such a thing exists in Europe?

<comment><USER27> I hope not, because its such a shitshow. You literally give your bank credentials to a third party who then logs in to your account and scrapes info off of it - info that you have no control over.

Capital One was smart enough to block them off (which is the bank I use), and now they actually provide proper OAuth based APIs to access your account.

<comment><USER28> Things are changing with PSD2 regulations. Banks in the EU starting in 2019 will have to provide open (and secure) APIs to third parties.

<comment><USER27> One can only hope this would make it to the US as well. The problem largely seems to be banks being ancient behemoths in terms of technology, and introducing APIs like this poses a significant risk from security and policy perspective. Plus its not going to be a major source of revenue either, so why bother?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I looked into plaid+stripe solution for our ACH payments need and after playing around with it a little I just didn't feel like I can put that in front of my clients and tell them 'Yeah put in your bank login and password on our website to make the payment, we promise it's secure'. Their solution didnt sell with me and I went for Stripe ACH where they make microdeposit and customer has to verify the amounts. Even PaySimple's eCheck solution sounds more reasonable to put in front of clients than to demand their bank login and password. IMHO

<comment><USER30> Every service I've used where you can verify your account with your bank's username/password had it as an option, not required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I met quite a few folks on the Plaid engineering team and was really impressed with the people I met and how they were approaching building their product. Congrats to them, and a lot more work to do!

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats Plaid!

Is Open Banking Standards going to abolish any international market opportunities for Plaid?

\- CMA9 Major Banks in the UK are ready to roll out Open Banking Standards. \- In Australia the ACCC is pushing for 1 July 2019 and within 12 months all Australian banks, including the related brands of the big four, will be brought within the scope of open banking. \- Canada too with it's 2020 initiatives.

US would be crazy not to adopt a similar standard but maybe this is where Plaid is specializing in due to the large number of US banks?

</comment><comment><USER32> I spoke to a young guy recently, who is doing a graduate/rotation with one of of the big US banks.

He was excited for the rotation in one of the (several) "moonshot divisions," with a goal of 10X-ing the bank in theory. I told him that I hope _giant bank_ doesn't have 10X growth in it, but...

... I think that any truly disruptive idea for fintech/banking is likely to be of the _" turn a billion dollar company into a million dollar company"_ variety.

</comment><comment><USER33> Side note: I once heard from the venture arm of a rather well known CRM that Patagonia gets upset when you embroider your logo on their jackets ( e.g. in this picture [https://techcrunch.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/DSC1296-2....](https://techcrunch.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/DSC1296-2.jpg?w=1390&crop=1) )...

<comment><USER34> that's not true, patagonia offers embroidery themselves: [https://www.patagonia.com/corporate-sales-silk-screening- emb...](https://www.patagonia.com/corporate-sales-silk-screening- embroidery.html)

they DO refuse to do corporate orders for certain companies, e.g. oil companies / oil bankers, given that those are antithetical to their mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would not be comfortable giving my banks, cards info to Plaid so they can provide an easy integration (API) to third party developers.

Why Venmo would need to hit Plaid API to get my banking info when they can provide their own API and allow seamless integration with my bank and credit card?

I honestly don't see the benefit over risk of handing over all my financial institutions information so they can provide a seamless API to consumers.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've stopped using a number of products because the underlying Plaid connection to my banks would routinely break and take weeks (!!) to get fixed. It got to the point that functioning connections was a rarity, and things not working was the norm.

I want Plaid to succeed and I want to use those products, but beware of building something on top of Plaid; you may be driving customers away.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is the gist of this company logging into a bank's web service using a user's credentials and scraping their account data and exposing that data via APIs to other developers?

I thought they actually integrated with the banks on the backend, but if this is all they do, I'm not comfortable using any product that snoops my bank info without any accountability.

<comment><USER38> Yup, I use Mint, occasionally, but now I am rethinking it. I really thought it was integrated with the bank's api.

<comment><USER39> It is, in some cases. Depends on the bank.

Capital One allows creation of read-only credentials explicitly for stuff like Mint, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The thing that keeps me away from all of these kinds of things is the requirement to hand over my user/pass for financial accounts.

Questions for those that know the space: 1\. Is that a big struggle for fintech companies or do most people just shrug it off? 2\. Are companies working on (and making progress) standards for system communication without user/pass?

</comment><comment><USER41> Giving a plug to [https://truelayer.com/](https://truelayer.com/).

They have a great team and they're making a big push to bring PSD2 compliant banking integrations to Europe. I haven't heard of many other offerings within Europe.

</comment><comment><USER42> Isn't it bloody easy enough already to pay for stuff? Fintech startups (this one with its dubious implementation especially) with huge valuations make me sad...

</comment><comment><USER43> "Plaid consolidates financial data from multiple sources and categorizes transaction data with up to 24 months of history, making it easy to use and analyze."

</comment><comment><USER44> What's the difference between Plaid and Yodlee?

</comment><comment><USER45> Can anyone point to a list of apps/services that use this?

For privacy reasons, I'd prefer to avoid anything of the sort.

<comment><USER30> You would know if you're being asked for your banks username and password by a third party and can decide if you want to share that information; it's not something that you really need to know anything about ahead of time to be able to avoid.

The apps I know who use Plaid are Drop and Venmo. Some banks use it to instantly link external accounts without having to do trial deposits.

<comment><USER37> That's not entirely true. They try and imitate your bank's branding on the log in page and do not make any mention of Plaid. For example, when setting up Venmo, I thought I was logging into something my bank had created.

<comment><USER30> I mean, the only reason I even know what Plaid is is because the services I've used advertise they are using Plaid, for example, Drop: [https://imgur.com/a/l4PM6QG](https://imgur.com/a/l4PM6QG) I remember seeing it on Citibank too.

You're still sharing your bank account information with someone else. Even if it's your bank's API or whatever, "something my bank created" could be "something my bank had hired an external company to create," or even "a front end my bank created that uses third party software to do all the data processing on the back end." I'm not sure of a meaningful distinction between each case. If you want to minimize sharing bank account information "for privacy" then you don't give your bank account information to anyone.

<comment><USER46> > If you want to minimize sharing bank account information "for privacy" then > you don't give your bank account information to anyone.

That's the whole point. You _don 't know_ you're giving your account information to anyone. I use Venmo and had no idea they relied on this technique until reading your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Startup. $2.65B valuation. I guess "startup" just means any non-public company now.

<comment><USER48> I think the pg definition of "A startup is a company that is pursuing a very high growth strategy" still applies. If you believe Plaid is trying to get themselves to 5B in the next two years, it can probably still apply.

I think of it as "Startup" vs "Steady State."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Will Plaid be a data brokerage for financial transaction information?

</comment><comment><USER49> The thought of giving any of my passwords to a 3rd party is problematic ... but my _banking_ password ? This is an issue.

Also a risk, because any bank could simply shut this down pretty quickly and if one does it, the others could follow.

The first 3rd party that messes up, with the whiff of a scandal ... and this is going to dissapear, or rather, the banks may decided that they'll do some API, but not for free.

I'm waiting for 'Cambridge Analytica' but with your money this time.

<comment><USER39> > Also a risk, because any bank could simply shut this down pretty quickly and > if one does it, the others could follow.

I mean, Mint's been doing it for twelve years, and they're hitting thousands of banks. They're definitely on the major banks' radar by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> why doesn't Mint have is kind of valuation?

I guess I don't understand how they differ, I do get that they both rely on giving your bank credentials to a third party and that they both scrape your financial history.

<comment><USER51> Mint is owned by Intuit, valued at 53.88B!</comment></comment>


With fluxspaces, San Francisco is using shadow real estate to grow inward - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/01/08/with-fluxspaces-san-francisco-is-using-shadow-real-estate-to-grow-inward/

<comment><USER2> One of the interesting things about Houston is that we don't have any zoning here--so, you'll have apartments right next to light industrial, commerce next to public office next to shipping depots. This leads to a very eclectic mix in various parts of town.

What's really fun is watching how engineers/hackers transform the space they live in--regardless of lease, regardless of contracts, regardless of anything, cable by cable and bolt by bolt true hackers will terraform their living space to match what they want.

At our house, for example, first came a clumsy dining room table and chair made from hand-cut wood. Next, ethernet cable snaking into every room tacked to the ceiling. Next, small bolts to hold closed a dining-room-cum-office door. Then came a small shelf mounted over the kitchen sink, L1 cache for cooking. A few months later, a new screen over the utility closet. After that, a two-bike rack scaffolded over a brick wall. A bookshelf over the fireplace holding a media server. Speakers shelves over doorways. More cables interleaved with/replacing the old runs. Homemade LED display over the bar attached to the new CNS of the house.

Every day, a minor itch building a desire that one day culminates in another improvement.

I think that the attractor state for hackers left to their own devices is basically Kowloon ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City)).

<comment><USER3> Have you seen the book "City of Darkness"? ([http://www.amazon.com/City- Darkness-Life-Kowloon-Walled/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness- Life-Kowloon-Walled/dp/1873200137)). It's the best photoessay I know on a place that doesn't exist anymore. One of the more interesting parts of that Wikipedia article is that William Gibson visited the Kowloon Walled City for inspiration.

<comment><USER2> That's...erm...outside a hacker's budget.

We spent less on an Oculus _and_ a Leap.

<comment><USER3> :) the destiny of all anarchist dystopias is to be commodified as a glossy coffee-table book. sorry guys...

<comment><USER2> The revolution will not be televised!

(it will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime HD, or as this nice 3-disc BluRay set)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China calls on US to follow its lead in eradicating ivory trade - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/09/china-us-eradicate-ivory-trade# <comment><AUTHOR> Currently, a lot of states are considering banning sales of ivory. If you want to get involved, please consider contacting your representatives and voicing your support for these bans.

Over at /r/babyelephantgifs, we made a post which should explain everything that you need to know and which also includes a template that you can use when contacting your representatives

[https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/338f7t/co...](https://www.reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs/comments/338f7t/contact_your_state_representatives_about_current/)

The situation is dire. At the current rate of poaching, elephants will be extinct in the next 10-15 years. Even though China is currently the biggest consumer of illegal ivory, the US is in second place.

You guys should also consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights the poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[2], is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train the park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed.

There is also the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[3][4] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans (most of whom are orphans due to poaching). For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular animal and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor this little girl [5][6] who was rescued[7] just the other day. This sponsorship is a pretty great gift.

[0] [http://www.iapf.org/en/](http://www.iapf.org/en/)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti- Poaching_Fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti- Poaching_Foundation)

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

[3] [http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org](http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust)

[5] [http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp...](http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp?N=335)

[6] [https://instagram.com/p/3tgs8CgUJd/](https://instagram.com/p/3tgs8CgUJd/)

[7] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHRosmdsoW0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHRosmdsoW0)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm surprised by the things that are still quasi-legal in the States, for example the consumption of lion meat of dubious origin:

[http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/23/smallbusiness/world_cup_lion...](http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/23/smallbusiness/world_cup_lion_burger/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this even a problem in the states? Only I've ever seen is faux-ivory.

"The United States is the second-largest market globally for illegal wildlife products after China, and it still allows trade in ivory acquired before a worldwide ban in 1989."

This doesn't seem like an issue to me.

<comment><USER4> A clearer way to send a message or take a stand is to be absolute. "No ivory sold here" is stronger and clearer than "Some ivory is fine, depending on how old it is"

<comment><USER5> So my 1920's piano would then be illegal to sell, just because it has ivory on the keys?

<comment><USER6> If so, there have to be better ways to fight poaching.

Why not legalize it? Given how large the current black market is "farming" ivory has to be a viable enterprise at some level. Cows aren't going extinct anytime soon, why can't the same market force apply to elephants and rhinos?

<comment><AUTHOR> > If so, there have to be better ways to fight poaching.

Better than banning the sales? How is legalizing it better? Because some people would be able to resell their old piano? You have a pretty dumb definition of better.

> Why not legalize it?

The current poaching epidemic is due to relaxation of CITES restriction of ivory trade in 2008 (I think). The poaching issues wasn't as bad until then. So "legalization" is what got us here in the first place.

> Given how large the current black market is "farming" ivory has to be a > viable enterprise at some level.

Right, let's inflict pain and suffering on an entires species of extremely intelligent creatures so that we can keep making some shitty trinkets.

Besides the ethical issues, it's also unlikely to be viable economically. It takes a while for an elephant to grow tusks (as in decades).

> Cows aren't going extinct anytime soon, why can't the same market force > apply to elephants and rhinos?

Domesticated cows might not, but their wild ancestors went extinct some 400 years ago ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs)). What this would do is make the market for ivory even bigger and there wouldn't be anything preventing poachers from hunting wild elephants to extinction. If anything, it would make the extinction even faster.

You aren't the first person to suggest this idea but it's extremely stupid regardless. As in, I cannot understand how anyone would think that this is a better idea than banning sales of ivory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Daily Show had a segment on this a few months ago. IIRC there was a bill in Congress to stop the ivory trade in the US and it had wide support until the NRA spun it as an infringement of your gun rights, because you need to buy/sell/own ivory-handled pistols. Then it was predictably killed.

<comment><AUTHOR> It wasn't killed. The bills are still being discussed.

<comment><USER7> Right, maybe "killed" isn't the right term, but the impression I got was that it lost the support needed to pass.</comment></comment></comment>


Loosing interest to code. - <AUTHOR>

Year and half back I used to write applications in Ruby on Rails for a startup which paid me less. Various reasons forced to me to look for a high paid job and I finally landed up in Corporate IT wolrd where now I spend my time maintaing ancient COBOL code. The job sucks. I thoght in the spare time I would do a bit of hacking and develop hobby projects, but nothing seems to be going fine. The day job is keeping me occupied and now I am loosing interest to do anything in my spare time.<p>Anyone in similar situation ? Need some expert advice to motivate myself and start writing applications and building hobby projects in my favorite programming language. <comment><USER2> My guess is that part of your lack of motivation is related to not having a goal, a plan and small achievable steps. Do you know where you want these side projects to end? Do you have a list of steps to reach that goal? And is it broken into small enough tasks that you can check something off the list each night you spend an hour or two?

I know that I accomplish very little without this type of "project clarity" and often end up poking around at this and that without actually finishing anything. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about 30 pages of tasks in MS Project ... Just a list that you can see diminish over time.

I'm also far better off if I get up early and do my personal projects first, do my paid work and save the reading for the evening ... You may not have the mental energy left to code in the evening so save the less intense work for then.

So ... What are you building? Can you make me excited with a short elevator pitch? If not, maybe you're not excited enough about it either?

These are my issues ... Maybe some will resonate with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> @smoyer Yes you are absolutely correct. There isn't any "project clarity" at my end. End of the day I will be very tired to do anything apart from checking my inbox, replying to a few and then crashing on to bed. :( I need to have a better "Project Clarity" as you said. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Been there as well but instead of COBOL was badly designed PHP codebase. I had the same thought as you but in the end, I was really coding less and less at home. What I did was help in the forums for my favorite language. Helped old timers and newbie alike with examples and good practices. This slowly reignited my passion for the language and I slowly started coming back as I coded libraries people wanted and little examples. Now I am full time back with my favorite language and happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats something interesting to do, helping newbies in various forums of my favorite language. Cool. That should obviously ignite the same old passion to code :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Replace COBOL with PL/SQL and that's exactly my story. Here are a few things I could suggest:

\- Start with a smaller project, something that you could finish over a weekend. Finishing that kind of a project will leave you with the confidence to continue with more demanding projects.

\- If you're working on a larger project, split it into smaller chunks. Make a list of things that could take, say, half an hour, and complete them as and when you get the time.

\- Don't depend on others for motivation - motivate yourself. If you don't know why you want ot work on your own hobby projects, nobody else would.

There are lots of people I know that struggle to find the time to work on side projects. Funnily enough, I see that people working in startups find it as hard as us corporate IT folks to find the time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe start learning more about architecting software, if you haven't delved into that at all. Coding can get mundane but planning to build an app, such as a web app, (on a technical level but without actually writing code) can give a new perspective. You've probably already seen a lot of code, by this point, that is crap, poorly designed, etc and that can provide motivation to learn some of the latest design strategies, etc. I guess what I'm really getting at is that you can try to gain a new perspective and new skills apart from just being a "coder" to where you can potentially open up new career options to find a job thats better suited to your interests

</comment><comment><USER6> A fun project with a clear goal is a helpful start, but you probably also need to get a few wins under your belt.

With a job where you're just propping up a rotting old codebase, programming probably just feels like crap after crap. Start a project where you can have something cool happen after just a couple of hours of coding.

The feeling of things actually progressing gives a lot of drive to continue. I guess thats the reasoning behind setting small, achievable milestones.

Go code up something fun & immediately gratifying :)

<comment><USER7> it helps to make it as transparent as possible too.. tell as many friends about it.. do a tell hn: thread.. chances are you wont back out from it there after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some ideas:

1\. Pick something that you want to build

2\. Pick something new that you have wanted to learn

3\. Use 2 to build 1

4\. Have a specific goal, and keep working X minutes a day - absolutely no matter what.

5\. Ship

Time actually runs fast, and even if you spent just about 60 minutes a day, you will quickly realize that you can squeeze in almost a working day into a week.

It's quite powerful, and before you know it you would have racked up a lot of knowledge, and actually have stuff to show.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here is my suggestion, but I am not sure it is doable as I never used COBOL in my life: can you write a program that would compile Ruby (or whatever new language you want to learn) into COBOL? If you can pull it off that would save you lots of time. And you can start by programming something to generate small pieces of COBOL for you, and then expand that program...

</comment><comment><USER10> Simple. To do something you need to have the passion to do it. If you love it you will find a way to do it. My roommate's job sucks too and yet he finds time to do what he loves.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Don't do things by yourself.

2\. Make a small commitment - and keep it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for dropping by here and taking your time to give some valuable suggestions.</comment>


Clojure : The zombie-reanimated corpse of Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2009-08-19-011225_clojure_the_false_lisp.html

<comment><USER2> "Nowadays it's frowned upon to criticize anything in society."

Vapid, semi-literate rant that starts out with the very lamest sort of defensive posturing. The only actual point on Clojure is that, _gasp!_ , it's built on Java and not some mythical modern-tech Symbolics machine.

<comment><USER3> >> That is unless you happen to also be criticizing the same thing that a group of other people are also criticizing.

Most rants I've read that include the word "lisp" have pretty much the same content as this one.</comment></comment>


The Necessary Talent - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n17/julian-barnes/the-necessary-talent <comment><USER2> Meta: I see a lot of long form articles here without any comments and I wonder, are they upvoted by bots? What is there to learn from this? I load and read and read and read to find the significance and relevance to my life... something to learn, but I find nothing on the order of other content here. How can this have been on here 8 hours, with 25 upvotes, not a single comment and a consumption time-to-insight value that is very low relative to the majority of content at HN?

For what it's worth, what I _did_ learn from reading this article is that it takes a "necessary talent" to understand the talent behind a work. The lay person, that person without talent, might be the kind who thinks, "I could paint that. The artist didn't even get the _cheeks_ right" without even realizing the artist intentionally painted the cheeks that way knowing and resisting the urge to preemptively counter criticisms about said cheeks.

Maybe it's my old cynical self, but by this time in my life, I know most people don't have the capacity or experience to understand the amount of thought that goes into a work of art or architecture or ... software.

Perhaps the whole point of this article is to waste time learning something you already know.

<comment><USER3> > I see a lot of long form articles here without any comments and I wonder, > are they upvoted by bots?

The Hacker News ranking algorithm _penalises_ lots of comments. Posts stay near the top precisely because they do not have comments.

<comment><USER2> What's the logic of that? If there are lots of comments, seems the content would be interesting to the community. It takes more to comment on something than to just click an up or down vote.

<comment><USER4> The same reason that you can tell if someone _really_ enjoys your cooking, because they will be quiet while eating it.

People tend to leave comments when they disagree. It's easy to disagree; it's harder to agree while also adding something interesting to the conversation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can you sell to people you don't like? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys. I'm a working guy with a young family. I need to get a side project started to bring in some more income to the house as we're only just managing at the moment. I have an idea for a SaaS which I have the skills to build and market but I'm at a conflict. They always say you shouldn't sell something you don't believe in. I believe in the value of the product I'm thinking about, I believe I could offer benefit to the customers and it's not immoral or illegal. I just feel like the kind of customers it would attract aren't people I would like. It would only really suit customers who are paranoid and self interested. Not the kinds of people I affiliate with or look up to. Has anyone been in a position where they had to balance their own business aspirations and ambitions with a responsibility for making people do better, more enriching things? Sorry if it's a bit of a rant. I'm happy to answer as many questions as possible for context or to just take feedback. I'm just wracking my brains at the minute with this thing. Help appreciated. <comment><USER2> You're making some implicit assumptions:

1\. Your idea is a good.

2\. You will succeed at your business.

2\. You will make money quickly.

There's a good chance your idea won't work, and even if it does from what I've read SaaS takes a long time to make real money. And during that time you'll need to spend a lot of time talking to customers and trying to figure out what to do improve things for them.

So basically you need the dedication to spend the next 1-2 years of your life catering to people you don't like. On the face of it that seems unlikely. More likely you'll give up in six months.

Instead of going "idea -> do work", try going in reverse direction. Pick group of people you actually like, then do research on them, then get idea based on what you learn about their problems. Benefits are your idea is more likley to work, when you get discouraged you'll have evidence to look back to, and you'll actually enjoy your work which again makes it more likely you don't give up.

[https://stackingthebricks.com/](https://stackingthebricks.com/) has a bunch of good advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> _it's not immoral or illegal. I just feel like the kind of customers it would attract aren't people I would like. It would only really suit customers who are paranoid and self interested._

Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

It might be helpful to come up with a broad variety of reasonable use cases besides the one you are imagining and not liking. Some thoughts on scenarios that might apply:

People fleeing domestic violence.

LGBTQ individuals, especially so in some parts of the world.

Other oppressed minorities, whether due to religion, ethnicity or any other reason.

People in war torn parts of the world.

People with hopeless medical situations interested in pursuing proven alternatives, like medical marijuana, that may not be legal in their location.

There are lots of situations where people are only trying to meet their own needs, are not up to anything nefarious, nor even _questionable_ to my mind, who need to take precautions because the world does not approve of them getting their needs met for reasons that often boil down to prejudice and malice.</comment>


Epic tantrum thrown by 30 octillion ton baby - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/12/15/epic-tantrum-thrown-by-30-octillion-ton-baby/

<comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3358490></comment>


Show HN: Mailbrew – Automated Email Digests from HN, RSS, Reddit, Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://mailbrew.com/ <comment><USER2> I just set up something similar for myself with Huginn [0], took a bit to figure out how it works but I've been liking short daily summaries. This definitely would have been faster/prettier though.

[0] [https://github.com/huginn/huginn](https://github.com/huginn/huginn)

<comment><USER3> Would you perhaps share how you did it with an example? I really like the concept of Huginn, but haven't had the inclination to play with it further myself; setting something up for my own sources' summaries would be a good way to start, I guess.

<comment><USER2> Sure. I started with Reddit, for a very basic setup you'll need:

1\. A website agent that parses the Reddit JSON api (just add .json to a subreddit URL)

2\. A trigger agent to filter based on your criteria (ex. minimum 50 points) and transform the JSON to a nicer message

3\. An email digest agent to bundle the messages into a single email

Each one of these feed into the next so you go from the raw JSON to a nice email. Then you can easily just feed more things into the email digest agent to add more to it.

Let me know if you have any other questions, my email's in my profile. It was pretty confusing for me to get started but I'm getting the hang of it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I set something similar up to mail me PDFs while I am in federal prison.

<comment><USER5> > I set something similar up to mail me PDFs while I am in federal prison.

That's amazing. I would love to hear more.

<comment><USER4> Its basically Puppeteer for using Chrome headless to browse to sites I want, then Readability library that Mozilla makes is used to extract text from the page - if that fails it uses the regular page.

It does this every week and emails a PDF to a friend to send in a weekly mail packet.

There are APIs you can use to auto upload and they will send the letter via the post. The problem is they aren't conforming to the rules like no staples, lots, returns, weight, etc.

There are also keyword filters and mappings to avoid some unfortunate article like "How to Kill A..." or some other clickbait that might trigger some kind of review. It would become "How to Hug A" and I kind of just have to keep track of those in my head.

<comment><USER5> That's really impressive. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see Mailbrew on HN. Been using it for a while to make sure I get tweets from smart people that tweet rarely

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it possible to bunch all of the newsletters into one email? I was interested to try out about 5 of the recommended newsletters, but I'm not exactly thrilled about 5 news emails per day/week. I have enough emails to sift through already, and my first thought was to cancel all of the subs :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! Right now it's a manual process though, you would need to add sources to the one newsletter you want to keep. But we'll make it much easier in the future, sorry about this.

<comment><USER7> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Loving Mailbrew so far, but it's too half-baked at the moment for me to be willing to pay $10/month for it. For context, I happily pay for 1password, fastmail, workflowy, notion, stratechery, NYT, Spotify, blackblaze, 2 VPNs and countless other subscriptions so I am not your average cheap bastard on reddit.

It doesn't even support producthunt, indiehackers, designer news, etc. yet. I'd also love for the ability to scrape and detect updates to websites that don't actually have RSS feeds (no idea how to achieve that technically, but that is something I'd pay $10/month for).

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool product, could be good for people that want to move from constantly disturbing notifications to daily digests. What is the roadmap for supporting more sources and for creating customized digests (i.e. create digests from custom sources that other people can follow)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. More sources and customizations are really high on our list. Long- term, we really see this becoming some sort of knowledge/news-hub for people.

<comment><USER10> Hey, how do you get the top tweets? Like do you especially filter those out based on no of likes/retweets? Also, do you have discover top threads of a person? Though, i think top tweets would cover the first tweet of a top thread too. Still, having thread specific feature would be nice and enticing to many users. great work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I absolutely love this idea! I've been consuming nearly all of my news out of my inbox as of late, for a lot of the same reasons outlined in the homepage (information dieting, "reclaiming your time", etc).

Definitely going to try it out!

<comment><AUTHOR> My inbox slowly became my information hub as well, and I always defaulted to it in the end. That's part of the reason Mailbrew was born.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perfect. Exactly what I was looking for to send me the X top stories from HN everyday but $10 per month is way to much for this. $10 per year is what I would happily pay for receiving the HN newsletter every day.

<comment><USER13> I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the conclusion. If an information/continuing-education tool is exactly what I'm looking for and isn't prohibitively expensive for me, then it's worth it (note: recognizing that I'm assuming HN is such a tool for you). At $10/month, the tool is cheaper than what many folks pay for coffee.

Anecdotally, there are also lots of folks that say they can build something similar without having to spend the money, but how often do they actually build it? And how much time would they actually spend building it? If the existing tool works the way I want/need it to, I'm more likely to gain value by paying for that existing solution than building it myself.

<comment><USER14> The tool isn't coffee though.

[https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/the-cup-of-coffee- pricing-f...](https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/the-cup-of-coffee-pricing- fallacy/)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, that article makes fair arguments, there are a lot of (often inaccurate) assumptions that go into comparing subscription services to the price of coffee.

I still think the comparison can be a useful way to measure one's own willingness to spend money because it can highlight how the cost of something seemingly mundane adds up. My armchair theory is that people don't always think about their cup of coffee (or anything that, in the moment, seems like a one-off expense) in terms of the annual cost, but they do think of subscription services in those terms (rightly so). And contextualizing e.g. coffee-spending in terms of annual cost can be a helpful way to determine for oneself whether a product is worth it.

And yes, it depends on how that individual values things, and it may not be the right comparison to make for you, but broadly, I think the exercise of thinking about how habitual costs add up is helpful. And again yes, this depends on the individual, maybe this is something you already do and have been doing for a long time so isn't helpful for you.

I agree the comparison isn't accurate and should be examined in context, but I don't think it should be avoided completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That looks pretty sweet. I've noticed a few projects offering summaries lately. Is there a Google Cloud or some other service offering summaries? I'm curious if it's been made simpler recently.

<comment><USER16> That would be super-interesting to us, an issue we have been struggling with is filtering/summarizing content from sources with lots of content such as RSS for sites like The Verge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Was thinking about doing this via iOS 13 Automations, but certainly something I'll check out. I use Feedly which pulls in HN, my other many rss feeds and even Twitter. As use RSS to fav/save the top articles each day that I read later in Feedly Saved or Instapaper. If this service supports sending just content from Feedly Saved and/or Instapaper that would be great.

<comment><USER17> Actually looks like Instapaper offers an RSS feed of latest 25 items. So once can use Feedly to organize all RSS feeds, including pulling in from HN and Twitter, and use the native save feature in Feedly, that can also sync to Instapaper. And then use MailBrew to send that Instapaper feed to email, or create an automation on iOS 13.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This looks really cool, but the UI is unusable on mobile for me. The layout is broken and therefore many texts cannot be read. I will check this out once I'm back at my laptop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, I thought we addressed mobile actually. What was broken specifically?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a user of mailbrew when they launched their beta. Love how it makes all my reddit, twitter information overload bearable.

</comment><comment><USER20> Unreadit comes to mind and probably is what inspired this service. Very cool.

I didn't see anyone else mention it, so I figure I should.

<comment><USER21> The team that is building Mailbrew has also built Unreadit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Cool idea, imho a bit pricey for what it offers, I think per subscription billing would make more sense.

</comment><comment><USER23> Good luck folks :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man!</comment></comment>


SSL, Gone in 30 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://breachattack.com <comment><USER2> Discussed yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141286)

What you want to know about BREACH is that it's an application of Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo's extremely clever CRIME attack, a traffic-analytic side channel based on compression and attacker chosen plaintext, but instead of targeting compression at the TLS layer, it targets Content-encoding: gzip.

Unlike CRIME, BREACH can't directly target cookies, which is usually what an attacker targeting HTTPS/TLS is aiming for; BREACH can only decrypt secrets in the response body. A common example people have tossed around is CSRF tokens.

<comment><USER3> A fun tool to make would be a template engine for mining dynamic content in arbitrary web pages. You could save a page and replace dynamic content with logic that specifies the possible values and how to probe it. The tool could use the attack to go section by section and decipher each piece of dynamic content until you had discovered the entire page.

One example might be to decipher a bank statement page. First the tool would guess the first section of dynamic content (account balance), then the second (account name), then the third (account number), etc. Though I imagine banks already have some rate limiting protection in place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For being a slightly less useful subset of CRIME, BREACH sure does have a solid marketing plan...

<comment><USER5> I'm not convinced that BREACH is less useful than the original CRIME TLS exploit. With the original CRIME POC, you could just disable TLS compression. Pow, problem solved.

BREACH is far more insidious, because there is no "easy" solution for many people. Disabling HTTP compression is a huge performance hit. The alternative is auditing every single endpoint to ensure that it won't leak attacker data into the response, which is practically an impossible proposition.

Sure, attackers have to do a bit more work to identify a vulnerable endpoint. But developers have to do _exponentially_ more work locking down all exposed parts of their application. Not really a good tradeoff IMO.

EDIT: there's the added bonus that BREACH stomps all over the ideal "isolation" between crypto and application code. In fact, BREACH may indicate that such isolation is inherently impossible: you can't write safe application code without knowledge of the crypto you're running on.

EDIT 2: s/daunting/impossible/

<comment><USER6> > The alternative is auditing every single endpoint to ensure that it won't > leak attacker data into the response,

I think you're underestimating how common this is.

For example, view source on [https://www.google.com/search?q=pajamas](https://www.google.com/search?q=pajamas) and look at how many times "pajamas" appears on the page.

This is a simple example, but query string parameters (and other attacker- controlled data) get reflected in server responses all the time. Eliminating this behavior is not a realistic goal.

<comment><USER5> You're absolutely right. Perhaps "impossible" would be a better word than "daunting" in my OP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting attack that uses the fact that when duplicate data is present in the returned packets, it will be compressed so will make the packet size smaller. This means that it's possible to quickly converge on secret session tokens.

The mitigation suggestions are all at the application level which will make fixes less likely as SSL/TLS is usually considered a security silver bullet.

<comment><USER8> Disabling compression is at the server level rather than code level (and it's a real easy config change too). However I can see that being an unfavourable solution for some of the busier sites.

<comment><USER9> Adding a few random bytes to a response seems to be an easy fix and doesn't require compression being disabled.

<comment><USER10> Adding a random amount of random bytes will not defeat the attack, it would only slightly increase the amount of time required by making the side channel noisier.

Adding a fixed amount of random bytes will have no benefit at all.

<comment><USER11> Not following your assertion. Suppose the reported size was always a random epsilon larger than the actual size. Choose epsilon so that its small enough to benefit from compression and large enough to obscure the BREACH. Why doesn't that work?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Voices of the defenders of grad school. And me crushing them." - <AUTHOR> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/29/voices-of-the-defenders-of-grad-school-and-me-crushing-them/ <comment><USER2> This is a gem of Philistinism, smug in its knowledge of how the world works. Everyone "knows" that what really matters in life is a job at a company. But this author is more enlightened than usual. She concedes that some therapy may be needed as well!

When Dostoevsky had his nihilists argue that a pair of boots was worth more than Shakespeare, he took for granted that this was hilarious, stupid, absurd. Now the burden of proof is on Shakespeare.

The real reason not to go to grad school in the humanities is that the humanities can't be found there. They were abandoned long ago for pseudotechnical bullshit and obeisance to administrators. That's what I found, anyway, and that was a long time ago and they were already ruined when I got there.

There's nothing wrong with a young person whose mind and heart have lit up on encountering arts and letters craving a deeper education in them. The problem is with a society that has no such education to offer, and with the middle- aged dispensing their wisdom that you should work on your resumé instead. Now eat your porridge and hand over that Thackeray.</comment>


21 Day No Complaint Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/09/18/real-mind-control-the-21-day-no-complaint-experiment/

<comment> old-gregg I don't really share everyone's obsession with fighting "negativity". Actually I find the lack of nonconstructive bitching to be quite annoying: sometimes that's exactly what's needed.

I bet the public pressure to always appear "positive" makes people feel oppressed: perhaps that's the underlying emotional background that feeds audiences to shows like "South Park" and rants like Zed Shaw's. Because force- fed "positivity" is everywhere: from bloodless CNN reporting of wars to always happy-ending movies. George Carlin's famous "pussification of English" is like an entire nation wearing invisible bracelets like these. To me that's borderline to orwellian doublespeak.

Fake "positiveness" comes at a cost. Both big corporations I worked for were filled with always-smiling, "outgoing, positive team players" who'd pollute everything they say with "great, awesome, tremendous" and other positive reinforcers that lost all their meaning because of overuse, while real problems tend to be overlooked and forgotten - nobody wants to be _that asshole_. My experience at startups has been the opposite: no time/money for fake bullshitting, _"this sucks and needs to be better"_ isn't a taboo, it's almost a mantra.

<comment><USER2> I would argue that "this sucks and needs to be better" is actually not included in Ferriss's definition of a complaint. By saying that _it needs to be better_ you are 90 percent of the way to also stating the steps you'll actually take to improve it.

I like this concept not because of its "negativity-fighting" aspects, but because it tries to cultivate a problem-solving mindset. That, at least, should be near and dear to most of us.

<comment><USER3> OK, so how about the example at the beginning of the article when the author was complaining about how difficult it was to resize photos on his Mac? Do you suppose it's enough that the "this needs to be better" was implied, or do you think he should have added something else?

Like it or not, a lot of the time the things that suck _can't_ feasibly be improved by yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds a lot like Benjamin Franklin's system for improving his personal conduct: he made some rules for himself (e.g. "always be punctual") and recorded infractions in a spreadsheet. He says it was remarkably effective. Me, I'm just tickled that he tried to solve one of mankind's great problems through the use of a spreadsheet.

<comment><USER5> The first rule given in Dale Carnegie's _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ is:

Don't criticize, condemn or complain.

He makes it clear that by "Don't" he means "Never".

<comment><USER6> There are many things many people would never learn if no one criticized their behaviour.

A corollary: there are many startups that would never have gotten of the ground if friends of the 'owners' hadn't criticised their ideas. Criticism is informative. It informs you of weak spots you easily overlook, it forces you to explain your idea and think about it much deeper than you ever would if no one criticised you.

Don't condemn or complain: maybe. Don't criticize: that would really be very wasteful.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, but it is worth clarifying Carnegie's statement:

 _When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity._

More often than not, a criticism does not have the intended effect. Our instinct in the face of criticism is to become defensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been wearing this bracelet for around 30 days. It is educational to discover, in my case, that there are certain types of family gatherings where the default behavior has me moving the bracelet back and forth across wrists many times.

I got a hold of it through United Centers for Spiritual Living, which talks about a lot of stuff along the lines of "Change your thinking, change your life." I've been working with it for a few months. If it turns out to be great, I'll let you know. So far, so good.

They do trace themselves back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Franklin, and generally call themselves the "New Thought" movement.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't see why you need to stop complaining. The only step required here is adding a potential solution at the end of the thought process.

For instance, I could say: "John is such an asshole. Here is plan A for avoiding or removing this behavior in the future." Using kiddie words like "Muppet" makes me cringe. At least be honest inside your own head.

</comment><comment><USER3> >that word choice determines thought choice, which determines emotions and actions

Alright. So what's wrong with thinking that things suck? Sometimes they do, right? If there really is no way to improve a situation, does it make sense to feel hopeless about it?

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that he states only the positive changes he observed as a result of his "experiment". Not a single drawback? Almost as if they are forgone conclusions from his (IMO) rather dubious premises. It's enough to make one wonder if positivity is so "positive" why it would it would require so much attention to change.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool experiment. Dares work well.

OTOH... I recall reading in an online post recently (can't find it) that healthy people vent their anger openly and that anger is a natural thing. It's the getting negative that poisons thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER11> Surprisingly substantive, coming from Tim Ferriss. Usually, reading his things makes me feel a bit skeevy, but I actually liked this one.</comment>


Tor Project suffers hack attack - <AUTHOR> http://thesecuritytimes.com/?p=812&sms_ss=hackernews <comment><USER2> Minimal content; links to ZDNet which has little more, but which gives us the source itself: <http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jan-2010/msg00161.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Key point: this was not an attack on, or a vulnerability in, Tor proper. Someone cracked one of the servers that happened to be a Tor infrastructure box.

The system got shut down when the developers discovered it, the identity keys were changed, and damage should be minimal or non-existent.

</comment><comment><USER4> How troubling is it that Tor Project hasn't revealed an attack vector yet (maybe they don't know)?

The source message indicates that they don't think the hackers knew that they had compromised Tor servers. How likely is that?

</comment><comment><USER5> No word on how they got in. Weak password perhaps?</comment>


Many Ways to Start an Xserver - <AUTHOR> https://nixers.net/Thread-How-Many-Ways-To-Start-An-Xserver <comment><USER2> This has been a pain point for me in the past, but I guess it's just part of how the ecosystem works.

I would personally rewrite the article as "Too many ways to start an Xserver"

</comment><comment><USER3> Author here! I'm fantastically pleased to see our small nixers community get this much attention. If you're interested in similar discussions, be sure to join us on the forums and IRC (freenode #nixers_net).

</comment><comment><USER4> X11 has always seemed weird to me, from an architectural and interface perspective, compared to the Unix platform it's built on.

I suppose it's the impedance mismatch between the "Worse is Better" Unix crowd and the "purity of interface" MIT crowd ([http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html](http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html))

This article was useful in showing the interface between the Unix side and the X11 side.

</comment><comment><USER5> Too bad that one can't figure out a way to login into 4 separate X-Windows/PCs using a single/sign-on.

I've stared at SASL, SAML, and PAM but the precipice is too steep.

Closest thing I could think of is to remote SSH into the other three and fire up its X session.

<comment><USER6> SSSD+LDAP is what we use in 2020. If you have an existing Active Directory backend you can use that. You can also do the reverse, which is an OpenLDAP or FreeIPA backend on Linux and use pGina to authenticate Windows boxes if needed.

We do this at work, and have everything from Windows desktops, Linux desktops and servers, and almost all our 3rd party applications using the same accounts and passwords.

<comment><USER7> Plus one for pGina, a really nice piece of software, login auth on your LDAP, then script mounts of drive if any and you avoid having a full Active Directory.

I was listening at a conference call about security in my area of work and someone said that 100% of the pen-tests done in the past year on various entities got full control of the Active Directory.

At the conference call I mentionned that we do without AD and with pGina, the senior security officer said it was not a bad idea when possible :).

<comment><USER6> Yeah a full AD doesn't make sense for us, as we only have a handful of Windows VM's and the rest is Linux. But if you're running an environment with 100's or 1000's of Windows desktops/servers you're probably stuck with AD if you want to be able to manage that lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I clicked this link expecting to find obscure ways to start an Apple Xserve.

</comment><comment><USER9> One of the many reason I stick with Wayland.</comment>


How to Increase Your Productivity by 500% - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/02/how-to-increase-your-productivity-500/

<comment><USER2> I've found that starting the day with work right away boosts my productivity for the rest of the day as opposed to days when, for example, I check out my twitter feed or otherwise procrastinating.

Try this out: check your browser history and compare the days when the first thing you did was procrastinate on the Internet vs. the days you start with work. You'll likely find that days tht start with work are less filled with visits to sites like twitter, HN, reddit, Facebook, etc. than days that start with those activities. Now try making work the first thing you do in the morning and see for yourself.</comment>


Ask HN: Static Site Analytics Without Cookies? - <AUTHOR> I run a couple of static sites, and am interested in aggregate stats about visitors - total number, referrer/origin, time of day and maybe location at the resolution of like, 100Km or so (eg State of origin or similar).
Are there any easy ways to do this that don't need a cookie consent pop-up, and are GDPR compliant (by recording zero PII)?
I'm happy to trade recording much less information about users in order to achieve this. <comment><USER2> It may not be quite where you want it yet, but take a look at [https://github.com/usefathom/fathom](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom). In particular you may be interested in issue [https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/40](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/40) where cookies are discussed.

</comment><comment><USER3> The oldschool way of doing this is programs like awstats that parse the web server logs, which can do all the things you're talking about and is in Debian/Ubuntu repos. I don't know if there's a fancier similar tool that people use these days, but AWStats gets the job done.

I wouldn't say they record zero PII but they don't record much additional PII over what your logs already use.</comment>


Does these readymade admin templates actually helps? - <AUTHOR>

i think they are over bloated, though it seems nice (Tutti frutti)<p>https://wrapbootstrap.com/theme/inspinia-responsive-admin-theme-WB0R5L90S <comment><USER2> I always found it cumbersome to modify these.If you have the time&&patience,have you tried this? [http://dashing.io/](http://dashing.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, they help. Modify with LESS/SCSS/SASS instead of CSS, though.</comment>


Show HN: Hello, Remote Life – an online community for remote workers - <AUTHOR> https://helloremote.life/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN! Over the weekend, I created Hello, Remote Life – a place for remote workers to chat and meet other fellow remote workers. If you need encouragement or advice on transitioning to remote work, you're welcome too - join us! We have a Discord channel that is just starting up: there's only a half dozen of us or so right now, but we'd love more people!

</comment><comment><USER2> It would be good to see some more information on your landing-page that would convince me to become a member.</comment>


Show HN: GraphQL Schema Stitching for Humans - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ForestAdmin/graphql-stitcher <comment><USER2> I believe from my GraphQL reading that schema stitching is often done real- time at launch, so the live schema is always used by the stitcher but at a non-zero cost in latency and instantiation time. Is there a way in your stitcher to cache and stitch the schemas at build time? (Optimizing for client instantiation speed that way seems to make sense since the rest of the app would likely break regardless if the underlying schemas changed arbitrarily and unexpectedly)

<comment><AUTHOR> Make sense @yodon! I will think about it to try it out. It could be a very nice feature!</comment></comment>


Sikuli: Automate Anything You See on Screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.sikuli.org <comment><USER2> I used this to automate my unemployment benefits, no joke. You have to keep reporting hours (every week I think), so I just set this up and run it, the closest thing I get to having a piece of software that makes money #sosad

<comment><USER3> Don't you have to report application/locations/etc too? Or did you actually do the applications and log them in some type of database (flatfile/etc), and have this script auto fill in the benis every week?

<comment><USER4> In my state you have a few weeks or a month of grace period before they start to require resumé and interview skill classes, as well as you reporting on any applications you filled out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great project, but it hasn't changed since 2010? Maybe we should add it to the title?

I was hoping that image based testing would eventually overtake Selenium/Appium for web/mobile testing. In principle there are several advantages:

\+ It works the way human works. If your button id has change from #submit to #submit-application, your UI test should work just fine. However, if your button became one pixel at top-left corner, test should break. Right now most frameworks do the opposite.

\+ If it's based on visual, it would be easier to maintain tests. E.g. Your button change color from light grey to dark grey, would you like to update your tests.

\+ Tests would be much easier and faster to read and write. Even less technical folks like current manual QA testing can contribute to automate testing tools.

<comment><USER6> You might be interested in [http://www.sikulix.com/](http://www.sikulix.com/), which was forked from this project and is more up to date.

<comment><USER7> Oh, you beat me to it. But the good news is, that SikuliX maintainer seems to be actively developing the next major release version now, and last release is not _that_ old (end of 2015, where the technology don't have to change that rapidly)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Made a small bash script to do something similar: [https://gist.github.com/eirikb/c189a7d8406b2897dad0e86086be1...](https://gist.github.com/eirikb/c189a7d8406b2897dad0e86086be1b23)

<comment><USER9> Nice. Any demos of it in action?

<comment><USER8> Certainly, it should be pretty easy.

Here is a demo: [http://i.imgur.com/1BpMKpe.gif](http://i.imgur.com/1BpMKpe.gif) Script is here: [https://gist.github.com/eirikb/ac8196beb0b57577a8fc47eb18427...](https://gist.github.com/eirikb/ac8196beb0b57577a8fc47eb18427bd4) Images are here: [http://imgur.com/a/Uv3NH](http://imgur.com/a/Uv3NH)

What it does: Opens Google translate in Chrome, inserts some Norwegian text, copies the translated text and inserts it into this comment. To make the images I used gnome-screenshot, it let me grab areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another great project in a similar vein is Pulover's Macro Creator, combined with Autohotkey:

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

[http://ahkscript.org/](http://ahkscript.org/)

Sadly Windows only. It's one area where Windows has a leg up on Macs.

<comment><USER11> Keyboard Maestro is a good option for Macs. Fake is another one but only for automated web browsing. I've been using both for years.

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

[http://fakeapp.com/](http://fakeapp.com/)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> FWIW I used sikuli(x) and found it very useful, but I have a chronic allergy to Java[1], so I've been re-implementing the same API in pure Python --> [https://github.com/shish/sikulpy](https://github.com/shish/sikulpy)

[1] more specifically, I found sikuli scripts pretty painful to debug, since neither java debuggers nor python debuggers seem to work quite right.

<comment><USER13> This is just plain incorrect.

Yes, the original API was written in java, but Sikuli scripts are written in Jython. I did an entire automation project using Sikuli written in jython without any hiccups a couple of years ago.

<comment><USER12> > This is just plain incorrect.

Did you somehow manage to read my comment and interpret it as "Sikuli scripts are written in java"? Because that's not at all what I said (or meant) :P

Sikuli _itself_ was (and still is) written in java - which I find a pain to work with when I want to modify the internals of the library; and then scripts are written in jython, which means I don't have access to my cpython-specific tools and extensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I started at my current job (back in 2011) they were using Tevron's CitraTest product to automate software hosted on citrix. The first task I was given was to see if we could find an alternative to CitraTest, well Sikuli was the answer. All of the existing code was written in VB.NET, but with a simple wrapper class and use of XML-RPC, we dropped CitraTest completely for a free MIT-Licensed software. It has worked great for years actually.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sikulix is great and comes with a Python IDE where you drag and drop screen captures - so a command to click on an icon has the icon itself written into the code.

Robotic process automation (e.g. Blue Prism) is coming to the fore in commercial settings - a mixture of API and computer vision (probably a horrible mix) so there's a market out there for developing something commercially.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sikulix is the current fork, and I have used it to surprising effect in all kinds of situations, really awesome as long as you can ignore some bugs, but the good news is the dev is super responsive to reports.

</comment><comment><USER17> Last time I tried it on OS X the experience was pretty painful but it did a decent job when all of the pieces fell into place. Has anyone tried both Sikuli and RobotJS [1] and can compare/contrast them?

[1] [https://github.com/octalmage/robotjs](https://github.com/octalmage/robotjs)

</comment><comment><USER18> Used Sikuli for some casino fairness testing [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4wlbnhIAAEti1z.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4wlbnhIAAEti1z.jpg:large)

<comment><USER19> I'd love to read more about this. Do you have a writeup somewhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Used Sikuli for automating systems testing a few years ago (last I heard they stopped working on it). We had to use a VNC because it was affecting system performance. Overall really good and glad SikuliX was able to continue development of it. I used it again a few months ago and there same issues with the IDE and some other setup/runtime bugs exist that existed a few years ago. Otherwise it has huge potential for automating QA/systems testing if someone takes the time and has the resources to do so.

</comment><comment><USER21> We use Sikuli for automatiom tests on both Windows and Mac. Other than occasional issues with its image recognition features it works great and serves us well. We have Jenkins automation jobs spin up VMs in VirtualBox, load build artifacts on the VM, and run Sikuli tests. All test output gets pulled back into the Jenkins output and parsed for successes/failures. Makes it possible for us to test across different OSes use the same Sikuli scripts.

</comment><comment><USER22> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11859996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11859996)

</comment><comment><USER13> Great tool. Used it to automate SAP in a project a couple of years ago. Was using it with a .NET framework though, so it is was a total pain.

That led to me writing Sikuli4NET about a year later. [https://sourceforge.net/projects/sikuli4net/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/sikuli4net/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I once worked on a project where we needed a tool like this. Sikuli definitely worked, but for us it only handled relatively simple cases, and it felt a bit like a science project (at the time, anyway... this was 2010). Good commercial alternatives at the time included eggPlant and T-Plan.

</comment><comment><USER24> Reminded me of the SCAR tool many of us used to use back in the day for botting on Runescape. Will have to look into this for QA automation, as Selenium isn't always too fun when you've got a hairball of ASP.NET WebForms, Vanilla JS, and Angular for a code base.

<comment><USER25> Surprised to see SCAR mentioned. I have some connection to it ;) I still use it now and then to automate some flash games. Helps me to relax.

<comment><USER24> Wow, it really is a small world, I can't believe you replied to my comment. You're one of the only aliases I still recognize from those days as I was about 12 at the time. SCAR and the other scriptable clients were a huge spark for my interest in programming as a kid. Seeing something that could automate actions in a game I played all day blew my mind and I had to learn how it worked. Cheers to you for that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, this is certainly more advanced than the xmacro* utilities. Once I had to use xmacro to do stuff like this, it's a good idea to dedicate a separate X server in the background though so you don't have to leave your other tasks while it's running.

</comment><comment><USER27> When I was working at a video editing shop, I used SikuliX to automate a lot of common, repetitive tasks (like inputting chapter names to chapter markers in Adobe Premiere). It's really great for automating easy repetitive tasks

</comment><comment><USER28> I used Sikuli to automate app downloads from app store. It opens iTunes, goes to the featured apps page, enters the password if required and downloads 10 new featured apps every day.

</comment><comment><USER29> In my experience Sikuli/X was too slow for image search on high definition desktops.

UIs also tend to change more than keyboard shortcuts.

</comment><comment><USER30> Also great for automating repetitive/grindy tasks in computer games! (Not a bot, promise)

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone knows if this could be used with Go or Rust? like a c lib.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wonder if an integration with Screenflow or Camtasia is possible?

</comment><comment><USER33> I love sikuli! Saved me a lot of time in the past

<comment><USER34> Fun fact: if you want to click() on something that appears more than once, Sikuli will choose it at random.

Some time ago I was demoing a script to my boss and the second time I run it, it clicked on a different place with the same text (and fortunately with the same destination).

We were shocked because the link wasn't where we expected to be (Ciscosecure ACS 3.x).

<comment><USER35> The "region" feature helps protect against this.</comment></comment></comment>


Cyborg Vision - Face Recognition from the Future - <AUTHOR> http://cyborgvisionapp.com Hey guys. I've had this app in the appstore with a fellow friend (Richard Cameron) on the app store. Its a fun app that recognizes your facebook friends from tagged photos via a cool 'Terminator-like' view :) You guys might enjoy playing with it over the holidays. Happy Holidays everyone :) <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys. I've had this app in the appstore with a fellow friend (Richard Cameron) on the app store. Its a fun app that recognizes your facebook friends from tagged photos via a cool 'Terminator-like' view...enjoy and happy holidays :)</comment>


Ask HN: Any resource on how to repair MacBook logic board? - <AUTHOR> My macbook won't turn on and I am afraid that it is a logic board issue. In other times I think I would be shopping for a new laptop but I am thinking that with the quarantine I have some time to try and fix it myself. I am watching some videos on how to debug the circuit board issues[1] and I am wondering if anyone has any personal experience doing this. Any resources you could share in how to get started would be greatly appreciated!<p>1. https://boards.rossmanngroup.com/Boardrepairsbymodel <comment><USER2> I run independent repair shops for a living, and we do board-level repair.

In general, when training techs I tell them to start with the easiest possible solution and work up from there. Since MacBooks are so heavily-integrated (so much is on the logic board), it's the last place I look.

First order of MacBook repair when it won't turn on: Start with a SMC reset. It usually doesn't fix the problem, but occasionally it does. (If it does, I don't charge the customer.)

Second step: Try a known-good battery. It is more commonly a battery issue than a logic board issue.

Third: Inspect the board for signs of water damage.

With PC laptops (and in general, laptops that are easier to repair), there are more steps here. But with MacBooks, this is about it.

We fix MacBook logic boards, but I would also recommend Tim Herrman over at [https://www.tcrscircuit.repair/](https://www.tcrscircuit.repair/) for logic board repair. He has a YouTube channel where he talks a lot about MacBook logic board repair as well, and he's been on Louis Rossman's channel a few times too.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you can shed some light on this: I recently took my older (7 years) MacBook Air in to Apple to get a new battery. They charged me $129. It's a great laptop, was happy to do it.

When they returned it, the had also replaced the main board too for free.

So, aside from the SSD, a new machine.

What would be a typical reason for this?

(I can't imagine any Dell or Lenovo feeling so solid after 7 years... have had both at various jobs in times past.)

<comment><USER4> > I can't imagine any Dell or Lenovo feeling so solid after 7 years...

I'm using a ~14yo Thinkpad T42p as one of my daily machines (using it to write this post), it feels as solid as when it was new. The battery still holds enough power for about 1.5-2 hours, the (1600x1200) screen still outperforms most newer models due to its relatively high resolution and 4:3 ratio, the keyboard is far better than that on most other machines (especially compared to Macbooks). The only substantial upgrade I made to this machine is that I put in a(n) SSD (through a PATA-SATA adapter since this machine is from before the shift to SATA).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup](https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup)

But be warned, repairing a Pentium desktop motherboard and repairing a recent Apple laptop are 2 different leagues. I did repair a lot of capacitors / magic_smoke on old desktop/vintage motherboards. You just need an acceptable soldering iron (with real temperature control, not just any junk), a tabletop EE heatgun (not the ones looking like a hair drier), a solder suction pump, your eyes and your nose.

However for modern laptops, you need a digital oscilloscope, logic analyzer, microscope, large reflow oven, vacuum chamber a dozen screw drivers and 5-15k$ worth of professional tools. Good luck with that. In my case, I can't even get my hands steady enough to do the smaller surface mount jobs. There is some wizards on the net who did it so many time they can do away with half of the tools, but unless you did it 500x time on the same model, you wont.

<comment><USER6> A number of top apple repair places, like Rossman repair group and iPad rehab, clearly do not use an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, reflow oven, or vacuum chamber on any if the repairs I've seen. You do need a reasonably good soldering iron, hot air tool, multimeter and magnification. The most used tools could probably be assembled in cheaper starter form for $1k, but some repairs would only need a subset of those. And Rossman repair guides will step you through anything that can be done with the smaller art of tools.

I don't know how stay or not your hands are. I've learned that you don't need rock steady hands for most fine hand soldering, but you likely would need them for putting dmm or oscilloscope probes on fine features. I find that good magnification makes it easier to steady my hands.

<comment><USER7> A multimeter (even a dollar-store one) a very good starting point to see which components have power and can detect issues like shorts on the board. In most of Louis Rossmann's videos he doesn't go further than multimeter + visual examination of the board to figure out which components are bad (or where to start at least).

<comment><USER5> That's the "there is some wizard in the Internet that did it so many time they can get away with half the tools" part ;). The vacuum chamber is also required only for ipad/iphone/touchbar/apple_watch, not most macbooks.

IMHO, most of these projects end up with "I will totally do this" -> "I am blocked for now, but will come back to this tomorrow" -> "I don't want to lose parts, so I will put the pieces in a plastic bag and 4 ziplocks" -> "I need to move this out to clean my desk" -> "2 years pass" -> "what is that bag, oh, my broken laptop" -> "I will never finish this, there is some room in the trash I need to fill".

/me Looking in from of me and my old ThinkPad W541p stares back at me in pieces. (and yes, I dismantled it yesterday to replace the screen cable and cooling unit. Only to find out the new cooling unit has the wrong connector and fan voltage scaling despite being "a factory part for the W540p")

edit: The last time I did a MBP board was my 2007 Santa Rosa 15". I actually _did_ reflow the GPU with a heat gun, but this was very scary. You move even a tiny bit and kiss the board goodby. I wish I had a reflow oven (I still don't have one big enough). BGA reflows are a nightmare.

<comment><USER8> An oscilloscope is a waste here besides for teaching purposes where a visual representation of what you're trying to get across eases understanding. Logic analyzer is over the top too. It's one of those things where by the time you understand the output of your logic analyzer, you already have enough of a brain to solve the problem without it

I can give someone who doesn't know how to fix a board in an oscilloscope and they will see strange little vibrations show up when they poke the probe in different parts of the board, but then what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i just recently (last month) repaired my mbp logic board (screen backlight circuit issue). i had very little experience (have never even taken a circuits class) but i was able to successfully perform the repair (with a little help).

the first step is obviously to get a multimeter (which you probably already have).

the second and thirds steps are to get the boardview and schematics for your logic board

1\. boardviewer [http://boardviewer.net/](http://boardviewer.net/)

2\. boardview and schematics files [https://www.apple-schematic.se/board- ids/](https://www.apple-schematic.se/board-ids/)

the boardview shows you all of the traces on the board and the schematics match components with labels on the boardview (resistor/capacitor values and IC numbers).

once you have these things you can try to debug your issue. i did this buy watching a lot of louis's videos and googling (my issue happened to be common but yours might be as well). i narrowed my problem down to the brightness step-up circuit by finding a ground fault where the shouldn't have been one. i then ordered replacement capacitors from [https://www.mouser.com/](https://www.mouser.com/) (guessing that the dielectric probably broke down on one of them) for all the caps on the circuit an the fuse (values for which i found in the schematics).

the hardest part was actually desoldering/soldering existing caps because they're surface mount (as almost all of the components of modern logic boards are). for this you need a "hot air rework station" \- quite an expensive tool. luckily i'm still in school and found someone in my ECE department that not only had one but was pretty handy with it. he did the desoldering and then i did the soldering. when the screen lit up both of us were pretty shocked the operation had worked :) anyway i can't give much more advice than this because i got pretty lucky! but there are forums where you can ask questions and people do discuss these things (louis also has a discord [https://discord.gg/kPTwD3](https://discord.gg/kPTwD3) where you can get more real time advice from various people). good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome! Thanks for the motivation story!

I am out of school for a few years so I don't think I'll be able to get access to an ECE department. Any idea what the model is?

<comment><USER4> I've been using an Aoyue 968+ [1] combined hot air/soldering station for a number of years now to repair equipment (phones, monitors, laptops, whatever happens to break down). The thing costs around €170 in Europe, I got mine for $125 straight from China (through Taobao) about 3 years ago. There are plenty of other choices on the market but this is the one I have experience with.

[1] [https://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-soldering-hotair-rework- desolderi...](https://www.aoyue.eu/aoyue-soldering-hotair-rework-desoldering- station-preheater-repairing/aoyue-rework-station-multitools-hotair-smt-hotair- soldering-iron-pcb/aoyue-int968a-repairing-station-hot-air-soldering- station-3in1-with-tweezer.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll check it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently repaired the logic board on my 2013 MacBook Air by baking it in the oven to reflow the solder. I thought I was being trolled when I first came across the advice on a forum but it worked! However the fix only lasted around 2 weeks before the issue came back and the laptop wouldn't turn on anymore. Now I'm probably going to buy a second hand logic board off eBay and swap it out, they look to be selling for around £100

<comment><USER11> I have a 2013 MBP that just dies randomly. I am curious if there was ever an issue. It seems Apple never disclosed anything on this model.

I took it to Apple twice and they could not figure out the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It can sometimes be a much simpler issue. For example twice a connector came off on my 2012 MacBook Pro that meant it wouldn't power on. Both times Apple reseated it for me for free. Although sadly Apple stores aren't open right now.

With regards to board repair though that certainly happens quite a bit and if you wanted to understand that better I'd suggest watching Louis rossmans videos on YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can you give some context as to why you believe it's a logic board issue? And things you've tried to get it running again?

As others have mentioned, macbook logic boards are basically the hardest out there in the consumer world. Was it a spill? spark? Localized? which part is damaged?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I am just jumping to conclusions but this article seems to describe the behavior I am seeing[1]. Here is some more context:

This is a 13 in Early 2015 Macbook Pro (A1502.) My laptop was working until the battery died earlier today(so this didn't happen immediately after a spill but I also have not been the most careful when it comes to this laptop). I plugged it in and pressed the power button and I still just get black screen(I don't even hear any fans starting or anything like that.) The charging indicator is orange which makes me think that the battery is functional. When I do a SMC restart the indicator changes from orange to green for a few seconds and then turns back to orange. I have tried plugging the laptop into a monitor to rule out an issue with the screen, but still no signal on the monitor. Are there any other diagnostic tests you can recommend until I can open the laptop up?

1.[https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/385224/Won't+turn+on+but...](https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/385224/Won't+turn+on+but+battery+charged).

<comment><USER13> Agreed it's not very promising.

Tried any of the other boot modes (safe mode[0])? Startup disk selector[1]? recovery mode[2]?

[0] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201262) [1] [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT202796](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202796) [2] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201314)

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, I don't even get to the point where I can pick which disk to boot from. When I hit the power button nothing happens.

<comment><USER13> Yeah figured it was like that.

At this point, I can only recommend waiting until apple stores reopen to get a proper diagnostic done.

Best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You're being a bad customer. This isn't how it works. When it breaks, you take it to the Apple Store and pay your dues. Apple will not succeed if people like you try to game the system.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can't offer any resources on home repair, but I've used Rossman's service before with good results.

</comment><comment><USER16> i would have thought miniaturisation would make this basically impossible without thousands of dollars of specialist equipment. I've never known a mac repair shop to do anything other than replace the whole bosrd. the thing is smaller than a raspberry pi.

spend enough time on hacker news and you've seen many srticles complaining specifically about how unrepairable macs are. especially newer ones, that cryptographically brick themselves if they detect tampering.

<comment><USER8> >I've never known a mac repair shop to do anything other than replace the whole bosrd.

I'm definitely firing my marketing guy...

<comment><USER17> Any chance you know any repair place with great board repair capability around South East Asia? My MBA 2011 is alive without battery, screens and everything work fine. But the previous repair shop jumped something in a weird way and my backlight doesn't come on with battery plugged in. It's been sitting still for 4 years..</comment></comment></comment>