Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Missing Is a Profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/technology/sales-are-colossal-shares-are-soaring-all-amazoncom-is-missing-is-a-profit.html <comment><USER2> The missing profit is a blessing for Amazon.

 _None of the other titans are challenging Amazon._ They can't because Amazon's Earnings Per Share are...

-0.23. Negative 0.23.

Investors often lump AMZN with GOOG and the like but GOOG's EPS is 33.59. TGT? 4.26. Walmart is 5.07. No other company with a market cap (100+Bn) as large as AMZN is allowed to get away with negative EPS. The only one that comes _close_ is Vodafone, with a tiny positive EPS (0.13).

It's important to note that if any other company spent until their EPS was negative, investors would _flip._ Amazon is playing with razor thin margins while trying to scale up a platform to end all platforms that we might someday use for everything without thinking about it. If successful, on that day/year/eon dollar bills might as well be printed with Jeff Bezos' face on them.

Amazon won't be using UPS and Fedex trucks on that day. They'll be using Amazon trucks. You'll know that era when you see it, I think.

If you're Walmart or Target its hard to justify trying to do something similar at this point, the stock could take a major dive from such a risk. They're at the "Ask-questions" phase, and the questions are always "What's the profit?" because these are publicly traded companies. Amazon has been playing it risky since the get-go. Bezos is in for a very long gamble, and that frustrates the hell out of some investors, but its lofty enough to still attract investment dollars while in the "build-first" stage. Hopefully they can pull it off for a few more years before the stock market shifts to asking questions.

So Amazon gets to play the long game that other companies are literally disallowed from playing because investors that have seen profits want more. Amazon gets to do something bold that would cause the mother of all stock dives in any other 100+Bn company. They get a free pass because Bezos is convincing and for Amazon its _sort-of-always-been-this-way._ Walmart/Target/Etc do not have either of those luxuries - the incredible (or believable) visionary and being a company that's still in burn (build) mode.

<comment>

All that said, an interesting question I think: What can we do to make more companies like Amazon? And is there a way to allow the older giants (such as Target) to ever be as ambitious again, without huge stock punishment?

<comment><USER3> I think you hit the nail on the head where Amazon needs to go. Logistics and shipping are pretty much where that company _must_ go to continue its path. I wouldnt be surprised if Amazon did try to venture into that arena by acquisition/merger.

<comment><USER4> I think they already started going there, at least in the UK. All my latest orders were delivered by 'Amazon Logistics'.

<comment><USER5> I've just integrated all of our 7,000+ products into Amazon and one of the things Amazon is trying to do now is persuade us to use Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).

It's quite attractive to us as a retailer as they take all the negative feedback, handle returns, etc etc. FBA makes us, as a retailer, look good and saves us money (no shipping costs), while protecting our reputation.

From a logistics point of view it simplifies things immensely (we just need to manage stocks in another warehouse).

Coding this should, however, be interesting :)

<comment><USER6> I would love to chat with you (email in profile). We have 20,000 products in FBA right now and I've been selling on Amazon for years with separate companies. The only issue is that you can't ship international multichannel yet, even if you get your products approved for Global Export.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real story is that Amazon is investing every dollar that could be realized as profit back into the company. Completely amazing given the scale. Imagine instead of sitting on a gargantuan pile of cash Apple could figure out how to efficiently invest $150B back into the company [and not through a buyback]. You can argue Amazon doesn't NEED to aggressively expand its warehousing infrastructure if the goal was to turn profit. It doesn't NEED to build AWS or the multitude of other smaller business lines, but it does.

A dream for many entrepreneurs is to start a fairly conservative line of business that buys freedom and a stable stream of revenue [consulting, online bookstore] and use the profits to fund a swing-for-the-fences idea. It's absolutely amazing that Amazon keeps that model going decades later.

<comment><USER8> Apple does not see opportunity at the moment which is why it's holding the huge amount of cash. And I do recall Steve Jobs giving advice about really focusing on the few things that the company does that makes it so great which would help explain it's huge cash reserves. The company is not trying to enter many different markets all at once.

<comment><USER9> _Apple does not see opportunity at the moment which is why it 's holding the huge amount of cash._

Exactly - that's the OP's point.

Amazon has the vision to invest its cash in building entire new lines of business, whereas Apple can't see any opportunities.

<comment><USER8> But it's not Apple's game to play in the things that Amazon plays. Amazon has their own strategy and Apple has their own strategy. Building entire new lines of business is risky and Apple probably does not think that the risk is worth the reward at the end. There's also the question of whether Apple can do as well as Amazon at what it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this sort of analysis misses three important elements:

1\. Control. Absolute control over a huge chunk of worldwide B2B and B2C transactions is extremely valuable _per se_ , in political and commercial terms. It's _power_ that can be leveraged in a number of ways which are not necessarily reflected in the balance sheet. Bezos just bought the most influential newspaper in US political circles; this guy knows a thing or two about setting the agenda.

2\. There is corporate profit and personal profit. Amazon employees are themselves turning quite a bit of personal profit. Does that make Amazon a No- Profit ? That's debatable. As someone else mentioned, pure profit is easy to tax, while "operating expenses" and share dealing can be shuffled around.

3\. Industrialism. Many XIX-century industrialists saw their companies as agents of change as well as sources of profits. Amazon is pushing the envelop in commercial infrastructure (fully-automated warehouses, software-enhanced packaging, customer-seller variable relationships, etc etc) as well as creating whole new markets (AWS). As long as they don't start bleeding money, they're running a self-sustained engine of change, which is an achievement in itself.

<comment><USER11> > corporate profit and personal profit

The Amazon's board have a fiduciary duty not to enrich themselves at the expense of their shareholders. Amazon certainly is not a non-profit.

<comment><USER12> It's not unheard of for a board to enrich themselves. I believe a lot of the salaries for boards and executives is nothing more than a looting of the company at the shareholders' and host country's expense.

<comment><USER11> Salaries for the board is a special case, since it usually needs to be agreed by the shareholders at the AGM. This case isn't really covered by fiduciary duty, since it is not a case of the board acting as agents of the shareholders (it would be different if the pay committee actually falsified their report).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazon's losses are less than 1% of their revenue. Their net income loss is about 0.06% of their revenues, and less than 1% of their cash on hand, in fact.

Amazon isn't losing money, it's operating at break-even to maximize growth. That should be obvious to anyone paying attention. They're growing AWS like crazy. They're expanding into new markets and services. And they're expanding into different countries. They're turning into a remarkably diversified company with both high-volume/low-margin and high-margin businesses.

If Amazon were a value stock distributing their profits in the form of dividends then their lack of profit would be a big deal, but it's a growth stock, and their tradeoff of profit in favor of growth is actually welcomed by the market, as evidenced by the stock price.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is an argument (I'm not really sure how strong an argument) that this isn't Amazon management's problem, it's investors' problem.

Amazon have a strategy which they believe is for the long term good of the company. Sell cheap, grow market share, get more repeat/prime customers, expand (by investing) into new areas. They've been doing that for a good while now. They're profitable. They don't rely on They're growing. It's articulated and consistent. Investors who believe in it, are welcome to buy stock. Those who don't can sell (at a nice, high price)Evidently many do believe.

HN likes to bring up fiduciary duty in these cases, but I don't think that extends as far as some comments suggest. Management can't deceive or steal or funnel money to friends. The board has a responsibility to get rid of incompetent managers. None of that is going on here. When it comes to the strategy of the company and decisions like growing market share vs maximizing profits, I think investors vote with their position more than anything else. Another way of looking at it is that "investor" is not a set thing. Different investors have different philosophies and strategies. The ones that like Amazon's strategy are the ones that own the shares in Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER15> I see two sides to this. First; the closing paragraph of the article, clearly intended to convince you amazon is out to get you once they've wiped out all the other competition. That's all fine and dandy, and isn't I don't think directly controverted by evidence; but in the same statement, I think it is far from affirmed.

The second side, then, is what I see this all as evidence of. Disclaimer, I know fuck all about the subtleties of running large businesses, but when you step back and look at the what they're doing at a high level, expanding facilities, exploring new markets, new products, during what is as the article stated an investment boom time and where maintaining a certain level of revenue might be a "somewhat safe bet", it makes sense to me that you would use this time to make more bets. Risk becomes more acceptable when you're not living dollar to dollar; the box of nails anecdote, simple as it is, spoke buckets to me. (maybe I'm overreading.) At the risk of showing extreme naivete, I would LOVE to for once believe that a company is simply using all of its financial resources to continually try to provide optimal and novel services. Shipping goes up in price; that's how the market works when you add more services without anyone funding em, the cash has to come from somewhere. I guess my hope is that the shipping is only raising due to their trying to provide new services, and that there will still be sufficient competition that amazon hasn't killed off to prevent this from going out of hand; and that it was just as I said above, a way to fund growth and try to balance for changing economic times, and not a sign of the impinging amazon monopolypse.

Oops, suddenly essay, and now I'm late for work...

<comment><USER16> It's not some grand conspiracy, but if you lack competitive pressure, all of the sudden price competitiveness and service become less important.

I grew up in a rural area. When Wal-Mart came at first, it was amazing. Clean stores, low prices, excellent service. They managed to put Ames, Jamesway and a few other marginal discount chains out of business. The convenience of driving to Wal-Mart and buying anything is more convenient that the closer speciality retailer, and thathelped kill of the specialty small retailers (hardware stores, etc). They mortally wounded K-Mart. They did this with ruthless efficiency and great service.

Now, Wal-Mart owns the rural market. Guess what? The lines are like DMV, the stores are filthy and poorly merchandised (in the grocery section, they don't even unpack boxes), and the prices are often not so good. I hope that Amazon doesn't go that way, but history suggests otherwise.

<comment><USER17> It seems like an enevitably? Almost a Law? I once heard a Restuant Entrepreneur state that every resturant should fire their staff every 6 months --it got rid of any theft, an dead attitudes--supposedly?

I think the only company I haven't seen go down this route is UPS? Their workers seem pretty happy?

<comment><USER16> It sucks that people get rewarded in the marketplace for being assholes like that. Theft is a part of the background noise in a cash business like a bar or restaurant -- a business owner is delusional if they think theft goes away when one set of people do.

My grandfather owned bars for many years. I remember him saying that he got more worried about bartenders who "weren't" stealing from him (either money, booze or pilferage) -- he assumed that if he didn't know about it, the guy was too smart and could do real damage.

UPS treats their people well and works them hard, and they have a strong union. The net result is that they make money, and they have a motivated workforce that performs and gets treated relatively fairly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Amazon is an inventory turnover business. This is the fundamental point that's usually not understood.

I'll explain by analogy.

Assume 2 businesses with the following assumptions

Store A: -sells jewelry -capital cost of store is $100K -inventory is $100K (1 turn per year) -annual revenue is $100K -net income margin is 5% -annual net income $5k

Store B: -sells pens -capital cost of store is $100K -inventory is the same $100K (they sell a lot of pens) -annual revenue is $500K (5 turns per year) -net income margin is 2.5% -annual net income is $12.5K

if you think Store B, the lower margin, higher turnover business, is the better investment, then you get the Amazon investment thesis.

<comment><USER19> Amazon goes even beyond this; for a lot of products they have a negative operating cycle. They can sell an item, hold the cash, and only pay for it later. Usually companies must internalise the risk and cost of buying stock before they can sell it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The chart in the sidebar says it all:

[http://imgur.com/edKyuSE.png](http://imgur.com/edKyuSE.png)

as long as Amazon are able to generate that type of return on investment at that scale then they should continue to reinvest all their money back into their businesses.

The alternative is to bank the money, miss out on the next AWS or Kindle, give nearly half of it to the tax man, leave 60%+ of it offshore waiting for the next repatriation tax holiday, and only then get a return back which you will then invest in another stock that isn't returning as well or just buy more Amazon stock!

Google, Microsoft, Apple et al _wish_ they could invest their cash as well - instead they have to listen to hedge fund managers lobby them for buybacks/dividends etc. because they believe they can invest the money better than Google, Microsoft, Apple can.

Given the option, i'd re-up with Bezos every year, his ability to innovate, invest and return is staggering and proven.

I really think of Amazon as an investment vehicle (like Berkshire) for web commerce with a strong umbrella brand.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think Prime is amazing. It's driven me to purchase things that I otherwise normally wouldn't have; that says a lot because I'm not usually one to buy a lot of "stuff".

It's incredibly convenient, I often buy stuff from mobile and it'll be on my doorstep in two days. It's literally magic and I love it.

I can't even begin to comprehend the levels of logistical wizardry it takes to make all of that happen.

I'm inclined to think Amazon knows exactly what they're doing here.

<comment><USER22> > I think Prime is amazing.

It was until Amazon created the concept of 'Add-on Items', which they have retrospectively applied to thousands of items.

These items cannot be bought on their own, even if you wanted to pay for shipping. Not even by Prime members.

<comment><USER23> It's the equivalent of the stuff next to the checkout of a retailer--it doesn't make sense to ship a $1-5 item on its own. I made an Amazon order yesterday and noticed an add-on item in my cart that I had saved from a previous session, I kept it on the order ("added on" you could say) and now I'll get the nail clippers I had been meaning to purchase as well as what I had originally bought. Happy Prime customer here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The stock is tremendously overvalued, no value investor would ever buy AMZN. The assumptions needed to justify its current price are absurd. The bull case of "they'll put their competitors out of business and then raise prices" is one of the most shallow analyses of a company I've heard and just highlights that person's lack of business insight. The quote from Horace Dediu is correct, AMZN isn't going to be able to raise margins without costing it revenue growth, they're stuck as a low-cost retailer or they risk their customers going elsewhere.

EDIT: I anticipate people getting hung-up on "value investor" because clearly AMZN is a "growth" company! Growth is always a function in assessing value, and sophisticated value investors know this. The popular convention of labeling something 'growth stock' or 'value stock' does the greater investing public a disservice.

</comment><comment><USER25> > "This isn't supposed to happen," said William H. Janeway, an economist and > venture capitalist. "It violates mainstream finance theory. Very few > companies have been valued this way outside a systemic bubble."

> No one is asserting that Amazon is a flat-out bubble, but there is an > increasingly noisy debate about when it will — or even whether it can — > deliver the sort of bottom-line profits that investors normally demand from > a company expected to post $75 billion in revenue this year.

Netflix started the year at under $100/share. It's up to nearly $340/share today. Tesla started the year in the $30s. Its high this year was just under $195/share. Pandora entered 2013 at under $10/share. It's above $26/share today.

You can make strong arguments that many tech companies deserve premium valuations. But this market has and is being driven by the Fed so debating fundamentals right now is sort of like talking about a fly on an elephant.

</comment><comment><USER26> This story line is so incredibly hackneyed. It's boring. You either believe that Amazon is a giant non-profit, some kind of cosmic joke that Bezos is playing on the world, or you believe that Amazon is one of the most unique and brilliant companies ever and that maaaaaaybe their true profitability shouldn't be judged by our ever-increasing myopic standards.

</comment><comment><USER27> sales is kind of easy if you don't care about profit. also kills off competition, which in turn makes sales easier.

but what happens once profits are needed? or is amazon the largest NPO on earth?

<comment><USER28> Correct.

1\. Give away profit, to increase market share

2\. Repeat

3\. Enjoy your new monopoly

4\. With competition gone and customers additionally locked in via your technology platform: Set your prices as you wish

<comment><USER29> 5\. Watch competitors instantly spring up.

*Note: there is no such thing as a non-government enforced monopoly. Marketshare != Monopoly

<comment><USER30> Counterexamples:

Microsoft (desktop OS), standard oil.

<comment><USER31> It's not such a slam dunk case.

"Some economic historians have observed that Standard Oil was in the process of losing its monopoly at the time of its breakup in 1911. Although Standard had 90 percent of American refining capacity in 1880, by 1911 that had shrunk to between 60 and 65 percent, due to the expansion in capacity by competitors.[41] Numerous regional competitors (such as Pure Oil in the East, Texaco and Gulf Oil in the Gulf Coast, Cities Service and Sun in the Midcontinent, Union in California, and Shell overseas) had organized themselves into competitive vertically integrated oil companies, the industry structure pioneered years earlier by Standard itself. In addition, demand for petroleum products was increasing more rapidly than the ability of Standard to expand. The result was that although in 1911 Standard still controlled most production in the older US regions of the Appalachian Basin (78 percent share, down from 92 percent in 1880), Lima-Indiana (90 percent, down from 95 percent in 1906), and the Illinois Basin (83 percent, down from 100 percent in 1906), its share was much lower in the rapidly expanding new regions that would dominate US oil production in the 20th century. In 1911 Standard controlled only 44 percent of production in the Midcontinent, 29 percent in California, and 10 percent on the Gulf Coast.[42]"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_and_anti- trust_legislation)

There's also no great evidence that Standard Oil raised prices once they had established such large market share. [http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=M04182US000NY...](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=M04182US000NYM264NNBR)

<comment><USER30> I don't have time to research the numbers right now, but from your quote it sounds like 1870 to 1900 it did enjoy some 80% control. That's long enough to be considered a monopoly for most purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's way easier to run a company if investors aren't expecting a profit. They don't complain about how you spend your cash, or that your operating margins have ticked up or down a percent this quarter, or that you missed your profit number in the latest results. Setting that profit expectation is the tricky bit, so why would Amazon give it up now?

</comment><comment><USER33> Doesn't this same story get posted every few months? Bezos stated that Amazon is re-investing revenue instead of trying to make profit.</comment>


Making spintronic neurons sing in unison - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7903.html <comment><USER2> This has got to me one of the most nagging sites I had the displeasure of visiting</comment>


A rape during a Tinder date tests a family's faith - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/13/us/antigua-rape-trial-extradition/index.html <comment><USER2> "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic."</comment>


Show HN: CSVshare – Instantly share data with anyone and make it searchable - <AUTHOR> https://csvshare.com/ <comment><USER2> Cool project, I had a same issue like author mentioned with sharing csv files in Google sheets so recently I made a utility to convert csv files to HTML table - [https://github.com/vividvilla/csvtotable](https://github.com/vividvilla/csvtotable) it works offline also and generates single HTML file which can be shared or hosted anywhere. Here is a demo of HTML file generated - [https://cdn.rawgit.com/vividvilla/csvtotable/2.1.0/sample/go...](https://cdn.rawgit.com/vividvilla/csvtotable/2.1.0/sample/goog.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I just tried out the service. Some feedback:

1\. It would be nice if I could upload CSVs that are gzip compressed.

2\. When I download the CSVs it would be good if the filenames included gz at the end as of now they're written out as a series of random characters followed by a .csv extension.

3\. Time columns have been transformed after I downloaded the file I just uploaded. The date is in US format and the time information is lost. 2010-12-01 13:51:00 became 12/1/10.

4\. When trying to view a 50K row CSV on your site Chrome slows to a crawl.

5\. I originally tried to upload a 1-million-row x 9 column, 33 MB, gzip compressed CSV. It would be good if the service limits could allow for something like this.

This service should do one better than just sending a CSV via email and having the other party opening it up in Excel.

</comment><comment><USER4> The idea is great. The internet needs a simple and useful tool like that.

However, it fails when I try to browse a .txt file (which is CSV, believe me) based just on its extension. Also, it is way too slow. I've opened the longest rivers example the site has offered me and couldn't even search, scrolling was difficult.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder why I would use this when I can use google spreadsheets?

<comment><AUTHOR> * Faster & easier to upload

* Anyone can search/query like a database

* Data can be downloaded in CSV or JSON format, manually or via API

Hope that helps!

<comment><USER6> I can download a google spreadsheet to CSV also. I agree that you are faster to setup to upload a csv

For some reason you can't upload directly on a google sheets website but you can do the following workflow:

1\. Open google drive and drag it to there

2\. Open the file on google drive and select spreadsheets.

I like your faceted queries and the JSON format might be appealing. Also Google sheets has an API. [https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/](https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/)

Is my information that I upload public to anyone or private?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I've always found it clunky and awkward to upload CSVs to Google Sheets.

Re public: see my response to @jordache, it is either public or "unlisted", but in either case it is available to anyone who has the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice Jason.

I know I'm always bugging you about Fieldbook APIs (this is Nate K again), but is there an api for creation here?

I have a super-duper-cool use case in mind but it involves POSTing an in- memory CSV rather than manually clicking (but I don't want to clutter my fieldbook namespace).

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't exist yet but definitely something we're thinking about, mind sharing the use case? Can ping me privately (jason@fieldbook)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if they've thought about the CSV injection attacks that were posted to HN recently...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we have. Those attacks don't apply to viewing data on CSVshare, which doesn't have the vulnerabilities of Excel or Google Sheets. However, be careful about opening CSVs in Excel or Google from CSVshare or any other source, unless you trust the person who uploaded them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very nice. I made a system to search CSV files at [http://gosharedata.com](http://gosharedata.com) but I it is only available as a download and not online, so I like CSVShare, very cool!

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there anyway you could put exported file size or total number of rows on the detail page (for those interested in analyzing medium-large sets).

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, for now one quick thing you can do is enter this in the search bar:

count()

And that will tell you how many rows there are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I assume this is meant for use of none sensitive data? What do you do with the uploaded files?

<comment><USER12> A business model that might work for enterprises (assuming they find the tool useful)

<comment><USER13> Why do you think it would work for enterprises?</comment></comment></comment>


Portability of C Programs and the Unix System (1978) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/portpap.html <comment><USER2> "The source-language representation of most of the code involved is identical in all environments."

Sometime between 1978 and about 1997, people figured out how to tie C code strictly to a single architecture. About '97, I sat next to some people doing a big C and I think X11 system on HP-UX. By 2000, they were trying to port it to something else, Sun Solaris, probably. They couldn't do it. They never got this system to run on something other than HP-UX.

The arc of portability is long, but bends toward "not" I think. It's basically unheard of for people to write about the portability of anything these days, C, C++, whatever. There's Windows, and there's Linux, both 64-bit, little- endian, with a stack that grows down from high addresses, and a heap that grows up. Both have the same sort of ideas about system calls, as near as I can tell. Portability is dead.</comment>


Nov 2019 – Visual Studio Code Update - <AUTHOR> https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41 <comment><USER2> I'm continually impressed by the quality of VSCode updates every month. Almost all of these features are things that I wouldn't have thought of / asked for but am glad are now available. Truly at this point it is one of the best open- source projects out there, right up there with blender, Dolphin-emu, and Inkscape. Bravo to those at Microsoft and the many open-source contributors!</comment>


The first cryptor to exploit Telegram - <AUTHOR> https://securelist.com/blog/research/76558/the-first-cryptor-to-exploit-telegram/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a very poorly designed piece of malware, not only does it rely upon running a bot with a 3rd party who would probably gladly shut it down, all the bot's details are hardcoded in the malware, so the whack-a-mole enforcement problem doesn't even need to be considered.

But maybe that's just part of the bait? If you're trying to test the "time to ban" of various communications platforms, you would probably write malware like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> 3mb for such a software sounds amateurish. Back in old days when we used to make trojans in delphi the focus was much on file size. Pushing the limits. I remember writing the application as a console app greatly reduced the size to few kbs.

I suspect this Telegram trojan is made as .NET GUI app that hides itself

Also 'D' is right about being dependent on third party for communication, its never a good idea. If you want some sophisticated setup in malware look up GameOver Zeus / P2P-Zeus.

That is what I call neat software made by a advanced developer.

</comment><comment><USER4> The exploit described in this article just describes using Telegram as a method for a trojan to emit signals using the Telegram API. The attack is amateur and has much room for improvement. Also the name of the article is terribly misleading.

</comment><comment><USER5> Terrible title; as others have pointed out, this makes it sound like the Telegram app itself was exploited. Can we get a better title?

</comment><comment><USER6> s/exploit/use/

<comment><USER7> Yea, this is a very misleading use of the word exploit. Especially given the wariness of Telegram usually expressed on HN.

<comment><USER8> Has there been any Russian or say German software which is popular with HN crowd?

Unless its made by Y Combinator companies or in Sillicon Valley, it doesnt exist... see hyper.sh

<comment><USER9> Nginx is one. It's now headquartered in SF, but it was founded in Russia and still has an office there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is an expected outcome.

Previously many cryptoviruses had grave security problems, thereby reducing business value (because customers could get their files back without paying the storage fee). The move to established and known secure cryptographic protocols was therefore only a matter of time, since it represents a tangible increase in business value.

<comment><USER11> > The move to established and known secure cryptographic protocols was > therefore only a matter of time, since it represents a tangible increase in > business value.

What does that have to do with Telegram?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713064)

<comment><USER12> This malware doesn't even take advantage of the encrypted messaging functionality... It could just as well use twilio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> J-Kuhn Stupid move.

Messages send to telegram with the bot-api can be forwarded to anyone who has the chat_id and the bot token with the forwardMessage method. And the message id is an increasing number starting with 1.

So if they did not already disable (or got telegram to disable) the bot, they can now extract the infection id with the seed key.

tl;dr: All the information required to restore the data is accessible if you have the bot_token and chat_id.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was not able to tell from the article if any telegram user is vulnerable. Can they encrypt my hard drive by sending a message to my telegram account (using desktop client)? Does it require some interaction or authentication by user to get access?

I would love to learn more, but I'm not a specialist in this field.

<comment><USER4> This article does not describe a vulnerability in Telegram. It only describes how a trojan could use the API to send messages( Which is what the API is designed to do)

<comment><USER13> OK, so a package can be delivered via telegram just as in email for instance. The attacker still has to gain execution access via social engineering or some form of priviledge escalation to actually encrypt a victim's drive.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you rate the results on searching "y combinator" on GoogleVsBaidu? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Here are my results: [https://imgur.com/a/B26XL](https://imgur.com/a/B26XL)

You will most likely have to zoom-in to be able to read them properly. Sorry about that.

Baidu for me returns mostly YC resources, whether on the same domain or not, wiki and HN. However, on Google it's mostly social media links and some regional article (even after being signed out on incognito at google.com/ncr).

It's probably Google returning links that it thinks I'd most likely visit. It's clearly getting it wrong though, I'd rather have HN on the first page of the results, than YC's twitter. But then again, the social media links could just be in my google results and I may prefer baidu's results right now cause I've never used it before.

Nonetheless, can't seem to wonder about the difference between the results. Do you think we need Baidu to participate in english search for a slightly different perspective on things?</comment>


Visualize Amazon's Acquisitions and Investments, courtesy MeetTheBoss - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/coolness-amazons-acquisitions-and-investments-visualized/ <comment><USER2> what happened in 2003?</comment>


Idea: Labels in OS instead of folders - <AUTHOR>

Why is that OS continue to insist that I keep my files in folders and directories.
Instead wont it be more user friendly to have labels which you apply to files, instead of putting them in folders?
For example, I have a file which which I want to label as "mindmap, django, project31" so that one year later I can find them wheter I am looking for mindmaps, or django or project31 files. Instead if I am looking for a particular mindmap, I need to remember all details about it.
Essentially, labels are more user friendly(than folders). Why not use them on OS level? <comment><USER2> I remember reading a USENIX paper on doing just this, by mapping each filename-related syscall to different semantics. Essentially 'ls /foo/bar/' would list the same files as 'ls /bar/foo/'. This paper on 'TagFS' is not it, but close enough:

<http://semfs.ontoware.org/pubs/2006-09-iknow2006-tagfs.pdf>

If I am going to be opinionated this is not done to OSes because of all the applications written for the current semantics.

If I was given funding to make file tagging happen, then I would forget retrofitting the OS-level file system. My attack angle would be in the GUI making it appear as files are tagged. Perhaps by changing the popular applications to connect to a daemon that handles persistent storage and tagging of blobs.

The regular user wants to know as little as possible about the file system anyway. Their concept of stored files are those that can be seen as icons in their desktop. Pure hiearchical paths are a thing for programmers and power users (sadly?).

Oh also, while going for tagging things, RDF is even more generalized, allowing you to classify tags them self. Each application might want to tag files they create or modify with an application-class of tag. (date-class tags, format-class tags, author-class tags,...)

Each application should implicitly add as many tags as it can when saving things (application name, resource kind, content-type, author, date, icon, etc).

This would allow you to get files by recalling "that image i shopped up in gimp last month".

</comment><comment><USER3> Hierarchical file systems were great when you had a limited number of files that you personally had to deal with. The desktop metaphor was great when your hard drive was 4 megs. When its 500 gigs, its just plain broken.

The Be File System had both a hfs part plus the far more interesting queryable database part where the user or an application could attach arbitrary data to fs entries. so you could have contacts stored in the fs that were searchable, email 'folders' that you could interact with via the OS and far far more. Alas, that more or less died with with Be although every now and then something else pops up but doesn't get any traction.

Another interesting idea was lifestreams which represented all your data as a series of versioned documents stretching back through time. you could search by creation or modification date or search based on content. See: <http://cs- www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html>

Hopefully sooner rather than later, we can ditch the hfs altogether or at least hide it and keep for backwards compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can, sort of - create "mindmap", "django", and "project31" directories and in each of them put a symbolic link to your file. Tagging, the unix way. A script or GUI for doing that might be useful, maybe.

</comment><comment><USER5> in a way folders are already labels...

documents django mynewsite applogic

documents/django/mynewsite/applogic

Removing a folder structure doesnt seem like an improvement to me: if I take 3000 files and tag them as LabelX it becomes useless for filtering. Conversely if I use 500 very specific labels for those files (i.e. multiple labels per file) filtering becomes a pain.

<comment><USER6> Directories with huge number of files are slower to access. You could look at extended attributes (xattr) feature of most *NIX's. This is user defined information which could easily be used in the manner that you suggest. A modified file manager would be able to handle the additional capabilities. Some music and photo management programs implement something similar so perhaps that could be used as a strarting point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mac OS X has tagging implemented in a nice way. I use it all the time. Compatible with the directory hierarchy. Some refer to it as a hack in the bad sense of the word, but IMHO it isn't.</comment>


Recommend a good recruiter in Boston? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all.  I'm posting this one under a different name for what I hope are obvious reasons, but I'm a regular reader of YC.
I'm in the market for a new gig.  I'm looking hard at some of the posts on this very site, startuply.com, and even monster, but I'd also like to talk to a recruiter about what's out there.
Can anyone recommend someone good who works with software developers?  I'd much appreciate any help...
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Jaclyn: jjussif at kforce.com

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


Why do Google and Facebook still use 1024bit SSL certificates? - <AUTHOR>

I'm just wondering since people seem to say it's worthless now. <comment><USER2> I assume one reason would be that some browsers have difficulties handling more than 1024, also this is not limited to browsers, also HTTP servers suffer from this (for example IIS <= 6 can only handle 128).

On the other hand increasing the key length on certificates will slow down the initial key exchange process (sometimes significantly once you get beyond 2048 bit) but have no effect on the strength of the encryption used during the actual session.

Key length is not necessarily proportional to security. A massive key on a crap cipher is still weak encryption. Of course though an unreasonably short key on a brilliant cipher can still be brute forced.</comment>


X86 vs ARM increasingly competing - <AUTHOR> http://www.tgdaily.com/opinion-features/59285-x86-vs-arm-the-apocalyptical-war

<comment><USER2> _For example, to move up ARM only needs to add more cores or more processors, while to move down, Intel would be force to cripple existing products._

So apparently the author has no idea what they are talking about.

If AMD can't match Intel "moving up" then what exactly indicated ARM will magically be able to do it?

Even if everything else was equal, Intel has a huge advantage in fabs, which is very important with high end parts. Only IBM come close to them.

<comment><USER3> I think the statement was made in the context of Intel moving to multiple cores and abandoning the higher-and-higher clock speed approach, which is something ARM licensees can do as well. "Moving up" wasn't meant to read "getting as big as Intel." In that sense there really isn't "ARM" - there's a bunch of ARM licensee's with different strategies so it's not one company against another, it's Intel vs. a different architectural approach.

It's not that Intel doesn't have everything it needs and more in terms of technology and resources, it's just that Intel stands for a certain type of processor and ARM for a very different one. Intel could start making ARM chips again (remember XScale) but that would cannibalize their monopoly on PC and server processors.

Personally, I wouldn't count Intel out quite yet. There's a lot more to building a powerful processor than a core and all those years of building chipsets counts for something.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Helm Broker – OSBAPI compatible Service Broker that exposes Helm charts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kyma-project/helm-broker <comment><USER2> Hows this worm?

<comment><USER3> You install first in your Kubernetes cluster a project build by one of the k8s SIGs called Service Catalog that is capable to connect multiple different brokers into one service offering.

And you can start consuming and manage services exposed through the helm broker, so all the different helm charts that you've bundled into a special package that is compatible with OSBAPI. Here is an example of such packaged helm chart that later on is visible in the catalog [https://github.com/kyma- project/addons/tree/master/addons/re...](https://github.com/kyma- project/addons/tree/master/addons/redis-0.0.3)</comment></comment>


VR HACKATHON Dec 2-4 at Microsoft Reactor Co-Hosted by Enflux (YC W16) - <AUTHOR> http://www.enfluxvr.com/single-post/2016/11/16/VR-HACKATHON-Dec-2-4-at-Microsoft-Reactor <comment><AUTHOR> We are pleased to announce that Enflux (YC W16) is joining forces with Microsoft, VRHackathon.com, and the Web3D Consortium to bring to you the VR Hackathon at the Microsoft Reactor, SF, Dec 2-4!

This VR Hackathon, organized by Microsoft, VRHackathon.com, the Web3D Consortium, and EnfluxVR, brings together the brightest minds interested in VR and complementary technologies to develop innovative hardware and software solutions.

More info on our Facebook page here: [https://www.facebook.com/events/1782522358688599/](https://www.facebook.com/events/1782522358688599/)

TO ENTER AS A DEVELOPER, SIGN UP HERE: [http://vrhackathon.com/san_francisco.html](http://vrhackathon.com/san_francisco.html)

Developers interested in working with EnfluxVR suits, fill out our form here: [https://goo.gl/forms/qXSE2zNAMNGURktc2](https://goo.gl/forms/qXSE2zNAMNGURktc2)

Location Microsoft Reactor, 680 Folsom St., San Francisco Date and time Fri, Dec 2 - 5:00-10:00pm Sat, Dec 3 - 8:00am-10:00pm Sun, Dec 4 - 8:00am-7:00pm Prizes, food, drinks, and lots of fun. What better way to spend a weekend?

More info - visit our Facebook Event Page - [https://www.facebook.com/events/1782522358688599](https://www.facebook.com/events/1782522358688599)

Thank you!

Mickey from Enflux</comment>


Set Bing's image-of-the-day as ur desktop's wallpaper, Automatically – Windows - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/guptarohit/bing-wallpaper <comment><AUTHOR> You can also use python to run the program.</comment>


App Store Scam - <AUTHOR> http://s4.postimage.org/5otalrxms/scam.png#

<comment><USER2> How can anyone claim there's a scam happening just because a list hasn't been updated in 15 minutes? Whoever said the list is updated in real-time? It could be hourly. And even if every fifteen minutes, why should there be any change?

<comment><USER3> Look at the pricing of the fingerprint app. There's your scam.

<comment><USER2> Those bits should have been circled in red so people would immediately notice. Scam? Hardly. Most likely a typo.</comment></comment></comment>


The Hidden Problem With J2ME or Why Mobile Development Crawls - <AUTHOR> http://www.spenceruresk.com/2007/05/26/the-hidden-problem-with-j2me/ <comment><USER2> In addition to the carrier restrictions, you also have device compatibility problems across handset manufacturers. I know a company that does J2ME development and they test on over 250 handsets.

That's why my startup chose to use the built in browser on the phone.

<comment><USER3> Does that help, though? I would be worried that the built in browsers all have varying capabilities, too.

<comment><USER2> Almost all the browsers are XHTML1.0 compatible (with the OpenWAP DTD). The only problem we've encountered are font size issues across phones.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC:  I have an idea for a physical puzzle requiring electronics - how should I proceed? - <AUTHOR>

Other than prototyping it on a computer to show how fun/challenging it will be, how should I proceed?
I don't have the technical background required for the electronics.
Because it's a 3d puzzle, I don't think it would work well on a computer. <comment><USER2> Firstly, i think it would be important for you answer the following questions

What are the list of things you need to achieve to make this a physical reality? What knowledge, skills, expertise do you not have to get there? Where are the people with those skills, attitudes, and experience found? What compelling reasons do you have to convince someone to work with you specifically on this product? ie what can you do that others can't? What is your ambition or objective with the project? Do you want to turn this into a company or do you want to just realise it physically for fun.

These are pretty fundamental to answer before you can proceed.

</comment><comment><USER3> It really depends on what you want to do, electronic design is not (IMHO) much different then the ideas in software design. My background is EE, my day job is circuit design including firmware and in my spare time I do web projects, RoR mostly and some PC software and I think alot of the same principles apply.

There are many ways to design the circuitry as the same for software, many designs will be 'better' and many will be quicker to market. But you can hack hardware together just like you can for software (its just much harder to upgrade a circuit board design).

If you have never done much hardware design I don't think I would recommend buying a cheap microcontroller and going to town will all the design. It would probably be much more advantageous to get a development board and try things out first. Sites like sparkfun.com have a lot of different offerings. These also give you a schematic of the circuit to start with.

As someone else noted it really depends on your needs and goals, I am assuming this is something complicated enough to warrant a uC.

Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Do the electronics require a microprocessor to execute the game logic, or is it an analog based design?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure. How can you tell if a microprocessor is warranted?

<comment><USER4> Great question, and there is always a fair amount of debate in this area. A way to start thinking about it is to ask how many logical states you need to store. If it exceeds a trivial amount you are almost always better off using one. I can't give you a more accurate answer without knowing more about what you are trying to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> One possibility is to build something that you would plug into your computer. The object could have touch displays on its sides.

<comment><USER4> Then we have eliminated 1 design variable; you certainly want to use a microprocessor with usb support and lcd display capability. The ARM based at91sam9260 has that functionality and runs linux. Low priced ($6 in volume), it seems like a good place to start for you.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, the first time I've ever been able to use Octopart for something:

<http://octopart.com/search?q=at91sam9260>

Worked pretty well.

<comment><USER4> They are a definite improvement over digikey. I'll pass this around.

<comment><USER5> And a YC company, too!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A zero-configuration static pre-renderer for create-react-app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stereobooster/react-snap <comment><USER2> Has anyone used Netlify ([https://www.netlify.com/](https://www.netlify.com/)) to host create-react-app? They handle pre-rendering with literally one click in their UI, right out of the box. Super impressed with them so far.

I just needed it for crawlers, happy with an SPA for what I'm working on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used this to enhance a microsite I made just the other day ([https://www.churnratecalculator.com](https://www.churnratecalculator.com)), and it was a snap to integrate (ba-dum psh!).

Used the following guide to set up react-snap into an existing CRA application in just a couple minutes: [https://medium.com/superhighfives/an-almost-static- stack-6df...](https://medium.com/superhighfives/an-almost-static- stack-6df0a2791319)

I want to investigate the CSS inlining feature--that's one of the areas where I still am loading a decently large external resource. Experimental, but could be a nice win.

(Edit: added the guide I used where I originally found out about react-snap)

</comment><comment><USER4> Eager to try this. Want to give a shotout to Phenomic[0] (also mentioned in the readme) if you need a more complex static generator. MoOx is a great maintainer.

[0] [https://phenomic.io](https://phenomic.io)</comment>


Project Svalbard, Have I Been Pwned and its ongoing independence - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/project-svalbard-have-i-been-pwned-and-its-ongoing-independence/ <comment><USER2> I appreciate what HIBP does, but I believe it serves Troy's personal brand more than it would any corporate owner. The biggest issue is the data is super stale. Things regularly pop up in SpyCloud 6-12 months before HIBP, and as a result they are a much more attractive acquisition target.

There is also an unreasonable dependency on CloudFlare kool-aid for HIBP and his other services. I reached out to Troy about sponsoring Report-URI because it was a service I believed benefitted the internet. In response I received a snarky response about how I didn't understand how web-scale CloudFlare was, when I was effectively offering to cover all the companies infrastructure costs for the foreseeable future (multiple dozens of servers and XX Gbps of bandwidth).

<comment><USER3> > There is also an unreasonable dependency on CloudFlare kool-aid for HIBP and > his other services.

How it is unreasonable? Do you criticize the hosting platform / cdn of every service you use?

CF has been a huge help to Troy with optimizing caching and helping him with the k-anonymity setup to make the scale of HIBP possible with less infrastructure. Their network is top notch (sub 10ms for most population centers) and they are trying to give back to the broader community by donating the bandwidth and cache to greater good projects like this.

<comment><USER4> If your whole raison d'etre is to be a trusted source on privacy and security matters, then putting yourself in a position where you can't speak objectively about the organisation that controls 10% of the internet's traffic is massively compromising that. I'm sure Hunt will do his best, but how could anyone possibly make a fair judgement of something controversial like "Flexible SSL" when his livelihood is dependent on them?

<comment><USER5> I am sure that literally any one of our competitors would give Troy their service for free. He's free to leave whenever he wants. And he's 100% free to criticize us while remaining a customer.

<comment><USER6> I love that you're here ... and as transparent as possible. Thanks for the work you do in keeping the Internet running (and as far as possible - "safe".

<comment><USER5> Well, I've been here close to 13 years ([https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jgrahamc](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jgrahamc)). Seems a shame to leave now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry, but the more I read this, the more I feel like KPMG is the main reason for the failed process...

> And so in September, we granted exclusivity to a bidder. (...) And so began > the extensive due diligence. KPMG had warned me about this phase right at > the beginning of the process and from memory, the word they used was > something akin to "onerous".

You're supposed to have your ducks in a row _before_ you launch the process, not after. As you're drafting your IM, you should also be preparing a virtual data room with as much data as you reasonably expect to be asked, and board minutes are the absolute minimum that any advisor should know...

> Among literally thousands of other requests (seriously - the total number > was four figures)

And you don't have to respond to all of them! You can answer any request with "The company believes this can be answered as a matter of confirmatory diligence"

From literally dummies.com[0]

"Sellers can't be afraid to remind Buyers that due diligence is confirmatory in nature, meaning Buyer should spend the time confirming Seller's information and not planning, creating, and combining the two entities. The Buyer should take care of post-closing activities after closing! Otherwise, due diligence will drag on longer than necessary."

[0] [https://www.dummies.com/business/corporate- finance/mergers-a...](https://www.dummies.com/business/corporate- finance/mergers-and-acquisitions/how-to-time-the-due-diligence-phase-in-an-ma- deal/)

<comment><USER8> I also distinct got the sense that KPMG bungled this process. They seemed to bafflingly parlay Troy's position of strength into a position of weakness. Of course, all they really cared about was the bill at the end!

<comment><USER9> If your company is getting shopped to 43+ other companies, it's not a very strong position. This seems like KPMG responding to their incentives: sell the company and make like $250k, or don't sell the company and make "the biggest bill I've ever paid in my life".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think he actually wanted to sell HIBP. He was way more focused on providing detailed constraints for the future of how it should be run, than in listing its assets and how those might benefit the future owner.

I think what Troy actually wanted was resources and support and management for his vision of the future HIBP. That's not usuallY what a sale is, and it sounds like he paid a lot to learn that lesson.

It seems to me like Troy treats HIBP as a mission, not a business, and in the US at least, a nonprofit would be an option to organize financial resources around a mission. As a private company, he could seek investment from like- minded folks with deep pockets, but that would likely come with external pressure to show a profit.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks to Troy for HIBP and the story here.

It may be because he cannot speak towards the specifics of the deal, but I truly hope there was a breakup clause.

For those un-aware, M&A deals eventually go exclusive which, as this post points out, is very very time consuming, which means expensive. Those who are involved in the deal itself, very little work gets done that runs the business.

So to protect against the downside for the company getting purchased, a break up clause to give them cash if the purchasing company does not follow through.

Only companies with in great negotiating positions can command these things, but sounds like Troy was in a great position when looking at the initial 43 buyers.

<comment><USER12> Does anyone here have a story about a startup operating at Troy Hunt's (tiny) scale actually getting a breakup fee? I've been through a couple acquisitions now and I've never even heard of someone getting a credible binding breakup clause.

<comment><USER13> I negotiated the acquirer paying all legal fees and for our time. We were tiny. It worked out. Like others said, spent a lot of time drafting superfluous policy docs in response to requests for copies...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Damn that sounds like an incredibly exhausting experience, and all he got out of it was... a hugely expensive bill.

All I can say is props to him to keeping his principles, I really hope he's be able to grow HIBP into a sustainable gig for himself and a small core team.

<comment><USER15> Seeing people hold onto their principles is pretty damn rare nowadays.

<comment><USER16> The world needs more people like Troy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This whole things seems extremely naive and almost like a different Troy Hunt...

Why KPMG? Their competence is below average for an above average price hiding behind a big corporate name. Why answer thousands of questions, the majority could have just been a copy paste one liner. You're selling a side gig, not a massive company. Also why selling it in the first place and then not wanting to give up control by limiting how the buyer can/wants to do with HIBP? If he didn't want to give away control then don't sell, find investment, find sponsors, find a business model which pays the bills and allows you to hire staff so you can scale it yourself. Decide what you want first :)

EDIT:

I _think_ the increasing exposure and interest in HIBP has made Troy fantasize about a potentially nice cheque which a buyer could write him which could put him into early retirement, but then he realised two things along the process which made him change his mind on selling:

\- HIBP is not really worth the amount that could retire a family (interest <> value, website hits <> value, etc.)

\- The fan messages gave him a bad concience

In the end the whole thing was not worth it.

<comment><USER18> I don't think the fact that KPMG ran it is necessarily the key thing here.

I have a perennial objection to the "Silicon Valley Way" where you try to build a scalable product or service and immediately look for funding (and later a buyer).

Normal companies just start. And try to be profitable quickly. I think this is probably the issue as well that Troy eventually found there. I think he should really be thinking: "What is my service and what is my product, and what is the 80-20 of where my product is worth the most."

And I don't mean dumb things like ads. I think he should be doing custom services for big companies that care about security.

<comment><USER18> To give an example, he probably can help a lot of big companies just with their authentication policies. Accountants are ignorant about these things and maybe he could for example be asked about when to use a password and when to use some kind of token, how to setup access to EC2 or Azure virtual machines and things like that.

I know these in principle should be simple. But the man is a rock star and should be able to cut through a lot of the bureaucratic BS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Apparently, the way these M&A processes run is that as you really get down > to the wire with the final bidders, eventually someone will ask for > exclusivity. This grants them a window of time in which they can do > extensive due diligence to the exclusion of all other bidders.

This is not always the case, and it's certainly not a requirement to get a deal across the finish line. More frequently, you'll select from the list of buyers who provided credible non-binding offers – presumably those with good strategic fit / rationale for the acquisition and that can provide certainty that they have the funds available to do the deal (e.g. they have the pile of cash and their board has already approved the acquisition.

Then you give that select list of final bidders more access to management, including below C-suite (i.e. the opportunity to ask technical questions to engineers and middle managers to really understand what makes the business what it is) and set a deadline for final, binding offers, of which you will choose that which creates the highest value to shareholders.

Exclusivity means betting all your money on one horse, and it can make sense in some instances, but preferably conditional on someone making a huge offer that you believe is bona fide and hopefully before you launch the broad process (140+ buyers, in this case) i.e. they are trying to preempt the process and are willing to pay up, and in return for sparing you the publicity / distraction / exhaustion from running the sale process, you grant them exclusivity.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised the author contacted KMPG to run M&A for a small independently run website..? Not sure what I'm missing here.

<comment><USER7> I'm surprised anyone would contact KPMG for M&A at all, in that they're primarily an accountant / auditor, not an M&A shop.

<comment><USER20> > _I 'm surprised anyone would contact KPMG for M&A at all, in that they're > primarily an accountant_

They have other business lines. But they aren't notable. If you're a top M&A banker, or even the best in a small niche, you're at a bulge bracket or a boutique. Not KPMG.

<comment><USER21> I think it's worth noting that Troy may have wanted a firm with a global presence given that he's based out of the Gold Coast. The firms with big M&A reps in the USA don't necessarily have that same rep or presence down here, particularly in Brisbane.

<comment><USER20> > _Troy may have wanted a firm with a global presence_

Troy is a deliberate thinker. I'm not second-guessing his choice.

The top M&A bankers in Australia are routinely one of a Swiss bank, an American bank and/or Macquarie [1]. The global banks are known as such because they have uniquely global reach. They're also uniquely expensive.

For a small deal, a boutique with global reach would be the default choice. They bring expertise with heavyweights who want a better work-life balance. They bring cost effectiveness with a reduced footprint.

The only reason to go with KPMG is because you know someone there you trust.

[1] [https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/ubs- macquar...](https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/ubs-macquarie- top-dealmaking-league-tables-20190103-h19ob4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thank you for sharing... 43 sounds super painful, and super tricky to safely share!

For others here: part of "companies are bought, not sold" is not just price difference, but whether the deal happens at all. Your startup needs to be solving something critical for an executive , eg, cuts red tape on internal politics, and enough so that they'll push the deal through because they need it. Good signal is inbound, but not only, and part of your job is to help figure that out or get that inbound.

The reverse is still possible, but now you both underprice and need to find a firm that is efficient here. As part of my surprise in seeing gitlab internal docs in the open.. they explicitly look for good but struggling product teams to scoop up for basically annual bonus levels, and it sounds like they can do that quickly... If that's what you want.

<comment><USER23> "good signal is inbound" \- mhm yep definitely english

<comment><USER22> Hah sorry super busy, sorry. Inbound interest is a good initial signal that there's genuine interest on the other end. It's way better than reaching out. Somewhere between inbound & outbound is maintained relationships you push on.

From having legit inbound interest, you still need to find an executive champion on the acquirer's side who'll spend months pushing through the lawyers, politics, etc, and ideally, has done it before. Not easy. They may not be the person who reached out to you, but they are the one(s) you need to identify, make the bet on, convince, and iterate with as issues arise. If they're senior enough, they can make it Just Happen.

Maybe the perspective here is selling a business is the ultimate big & messy & relationship-heavy enterprise sales process. The process described in the post sounds like the numbers approach of SaaS (outbound reachouts to BD people -> a few conversations -> sell), but not with the messy human parts of enterprise. \-- For example, it's unusual to bring in someone like KPMG due to deal size and risks around disintermediating the owner from the buyer during relationship building. (Individual advisors here are more normal for slightly bigger deals, and they'd have more skin in the game & involvement than a big firm.) \-- As another, was DefCon time hanging out with the CEO or #2 of the company and the champions?

Not easy! The advice I got here is 90-99% of these convs fail, so it's useful to be wary & understand.

<comment><USER23> I was commenting on the incredible level of jargon. This post is even more impressive!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think Troy is struggling to find his own place in this venture. I appreciate his take on selling it to a good buyer, because a massive password list would otherwise attract shady buyers.

You cannot sell something and keep it at the same time. That's not what selling is. It's good to see governments taking interest at this, I'm happy about paid plans. To keep HIBP under his original vision and for his to enjoy his lifestyle, renting would be the ideal solution. Not selling.

</comment><comment><USER12> My confidence level on this is very low, because what do I know, but my emotional commitment to this take, having been a small business operator (in Hunt's field) for a couple decades now, is very high:

This makes me very sad. Not that the deal fell through, because of course it did, but because of the process he undertook. Every part of it makes me sad. Any correction or rebuttal I get to this will make me happier, so I hope I'm wrong about a lot of it.

First, the adage that companies are bought, not sold, has in my experience and the experience of my friends been pretty much true.†

Next, The most valuable thing about HIBP isn't the underlying work Hunt did --- lots of companies have done equivalent work --- but HIBP's notoriety and popularity.

Which to me means that every credible acquirer of HIBP already knew he was for sale --- because _everybody_ is for sale --- and already fully capable of reaching out to Hunt and offering him some kind of deal. The list of bizarre stories I've heard about random projects that have received corpdev offers like this is long.

Which to me suggests that putting a lot of work into a deck that explains HIBP and what makes it valuable was not a good use of time. If you're explaining, you're losing.

Then there's reaching out to your tax advisor to coordinate the sale. I have only heard bad stories about retaining financial firms to shop companies. In this case there's the added fact of the enormous incentive mismatch: Hunt is engaging a financial firm to act as his agent with a bunch of their own clients and client prospects, practically every one of which seems like it'd be worth more to KPMG than the HIBP "sale" or any ongoing relationship with Hunt himself.

Then there's what KPMG actually did, which was to arrange FORTY(!) pitches. To each of which he disclosed traffic stats and revenue numbers!

Bringing us back to HIBP's value being its notoriety, in that: anyone you have to explain HIBP to is probably not a qualified prospect. Also, just the idea that there would be 40+ qualified prospects to begin with.

My feeling is that a pretty big chunk of YC companies get a whole stream of invitations to corpdev meetings equivalent to the ones Hunt went through here. And that a big part of YC's founder education is convincing founders _never to go to these meetings_ , because they're so unlikely to have good outcomes, and because the counterparties in those meetings are basically trained and selected to efficiently screw founders over. Here, it seems like Hunt paid for the privilege of experiencing this.

Then there's the deck itself; the one detailed slide of which we get to see is an exquisitely detailed rationale for why Hunt's presence is vital for the continued success of HIBP. "This is what the organisations bidding on HIBP were buying: trust in me." That's a description of a job interview, not a company sale. Elsewhere on this thread there's a comment saying HIBP should be worth 8-9 figures. Can we think of a company with this slide in their deck and that valuation?

In the end, he gets to term sheets with one potential company, and goes through what appears to be a full-fledged warrants-and-reps due diligence process, the completion of which is rewarded with a polite "no thank you" from the company.

This seems like the longest, most expensive job search anyone here has ever read about. I _assume_ he paid KPMG for their work on this, and what KPMG did here looks to me like malpractice.

We give YC a lot of shit and they sure deserve a lot of that shit, but it's not unusual for me to look at a security founder story and think "this person really, really would have benefited from going through YC".

I like what Troy Hunt is doing a lot and he seems great. I hope things go better for him building this project up without trying to shop it for new owners.

† _The exceptions to "bought not sold" that we read about most frequently here are companies put up on company-flipping brokerage sites and sold solely for their revenue streams._

<comment><USER25> > _the completion of which is rewarded with a polite "no thank you" from the > company._

My reading is that the interested company, being the large amorphous blob that it is, decided in some separate cortex to change their business model while the due-diligence nitty gritty was underway, and Troy decided to cut out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting what HIBP reveals about both attackers and defenders.

HIBP held a long randomly generated password I used exclusively on tvtropes. It was in plaintext in a pw dump, suggesting they weren't even hashing at the time.

I contacted tvtropes a few times but got ignored with no announcement.

It's not a banking site, not sure what we should expect. But given compelling evidence of a breach and making no announcement to users seems irresponsible.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sorry but, how is Have I Been Pwned anything but a text search of data that is already publicly available?

Normally a company is valuable because of some kind of value add. Either they generate data nobody else can, or they do something with that data nobody else can. HIBP does neither of those things. It literally searches one column of a database, and tells you if there was a match. You could run HIBP using a total of 1 SQL query, with a fancy template in front. It's essentially just a hobby project of a software dev. who wants something to do on the side. It is infinitely more valuable to Troy as a resume booster than to any company.

<comment><USER16> From the article:

"Anyone can cobble together a website with some APIs and load in a ton of data breaches, but establishing trust is a whole different story. Trust in the way I run the service is an absolutely pivotal part of HIBP and it's something I built organically rather than setting out to earn it, now here I was with big companies putting a value on it."

<comment><USER27> Yeah, so it's nothing but branding. There is nothing about this site that requires trust, since the data is already available. HIBP got popular on Twitter / the internet and is now a well known name in cyber.

<comment><USER28> Well, to be pedantic, it's not just a simple SQL query, it's also a percolation query server and notification system.

It's like saying that Pingdom is nothing more than a cron job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> He should really have built a password validating/auditing software for commercial use.

I used hibp in a corporate setting, like most others I looked to see if there was a way to check AD and Linux for bad passwords, a few people had some open sourcey things that only work retroactively with manual execution. We evaluated the need and decided on pursuing an unrelated commercial product that does all the password auditing using known bad passwords among a long list of other things. Since the start I wondered why HIBP did not do this. Having existing enterprise customers would have given him a lot more leverage.

<comment><USER30> That's basically what we've done with [https://safepass.me/](https://safepass.me/) and [https://pwncheck.me/](https://pwncheck.me/) ... and HIBP is the dataset we ship to our customers by default. If you are still looking to validate passwords when they're set, give me a nudge :)

We don't advertise the linux/PAM support since we have failed to find a market for it (usually things end up being hooked up onto AD one way or the other)...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anyone have a clue who the potential acquirer was? Just curious as to whether they wanted the brand of Troy Hunt as the databases are public and most technically savvy organizations can put one together.

<comment><USER32> My personal guess is Mozilla (not sure whether Corporation or Foundation). Their mission and vision seem to align well with Troy's views on privacy and security, but for reasons unrelated to HIBP, they're cutting costs.

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as- it-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for- subscription-products-to-generate-revenue/)

<comment><USER33> Yes, that would be my guess as well. They seem(ed) to be the most aligned with his mission. Giving him the freedom to stay in his home while also being in a corporate environment that could give him the necessary know how and back up to grow his baby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> After reading that, I think that what Troy needs is an employee or two (assuming the business supports it).

</comment><comment><USER35> > So we wrapped it up, I got the single largest bill I've ever received in my > life and then I sat down and started writing this blog post.

Where did the bill come from? Did he get billed by the prospective buying company for _not_ purchasing him?

<comment><USER36> He hired KPMG to help him court possible buyers, I'm guessing it came from them. They talked to 141 companies, and I doubt their hourly rate is cheap.

<comment><USER37> They get paid a portion of the proceeds of a sale (or raise if you decide not to sell and raise money instead). The bill was almost certainly from his lawyers. I went through a failed M&A process and we were left with a 90K bill for it.

<comment><USER20> > _They get paid a portion of the proceeds of a sale_

This is true for most M&A. But with KPMG, last I saw, they charge a retainer that must be re-upped from time to time. (The joke was that's what you get when you hire accountants as bankers.)

<comment><USER38> Having been through a similar process with KPMG (that ended similarly), I can confirm that they operated on a retainer basis and it did need to be re-upped from time to time. The vast majority of their remuneration was a success fee though. This is pretty standard for the industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I believe that Have I Been Pwned provides a useful service, but I find it very strange that needs to be valuated and sold like a startup when it's essentially been able to survive because people singularly trust Troy with a bunch of illegally obtained material. Like, how do you buy that; how could you ethically and legally make money from it? Why can't it just continue being supported by contributions?

<comment><USER40> A key feature of our society is that many things are given away for free and supported by an advertising infrastructure.

<comment><USER41> I emailed Troy to ask if he'd consider operating it as a non-profit utility similar to Let's Encrypt, and offered to help (because it's only fair if you come with an ask).

<comment><USER42> I've been sitting here wondering why bringing HIBP into an existing non-profit foundation wasn't the desired outcome. Having HIBP under the control of corporate interests seems icky.

<comment><USER43> Do we know for sure it wasn't? Couldn't Mr Hunt have wanted Mozilla to take over, but they weren't keen .. what other non-profit options fit here? Apache?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think that's good that he doesn't sell, having built a enormous marketing presence and gained market trust is only a minor step away from actually monetizing that. Selling what he has right now does indeed come with golden handcuffs (sucks), but also any purchase price would come in vastly under the projects' potential.

He could easily leverage this marketing presence to build a security SaaS company, create a huge conference, launch a big consultancy,...

If you value independence then running your own profitable balance sheet is the best thing you can do.

Hell, it wouldn't even be hard to attract talent to the cause at the point he's at.

<comment><USER45> > He could easily leverage this marketing presence to build a security SaaS > company, create a huge conference, launch a big consultancy,...

If it would be so easy it would've been done already.

<comment><USER44> He doesn't have the plan and associated funding and the people in place.

Maybe easy is the wrong word, but he's definitely well-positioned to reap more reward of what he achieved so far</comment></comment></comment>


Isogenic HTML 5 Game Engine Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.isogenicengine.com/ <comment><USER2> My impressions, in a nutshell:

"Hey this looks cool. There must be a demo, right?"

"Okay well I had to follow like 4 links to the demo and do way more reading than I should have had to just to see a demo of something whose main feature is that it runs in a browser. Because I'm currently viewing all of this... in a browser."

"Finally found the demo link... cool, looks like it is loading up!........... Login via Facebook? Are you fucking kidding me?"

</close tab>

Thanks to HN comments I see that there is actually a way to demo this without a Facebook login, but lack of an instant right-in-your-face demo for something that is browser based is a huge failure of marketing this thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really wanted to try it out, but unfortunately a facebook account is required to even see the demo, and I don't have one. I know developers these days hate writing any code they don't have to, but facebook only? Out the door to hang out in the gutter with spotify. Ah well.

<comment><USER4> This version seems fine: <http://www.isogenicengine.com/offline/iso_city/>

<comment><USER5> It seems _very_ buggy to me, is it supposed to be? Otherwise, really cool demo.

<comment><USER6> Hey, could you let me know what bugs you saw and what browser you were using? Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey guys, appreciate the comments... I'm the dev over at www.isogenicengine.com. The demos are still works in progress and mobile support is coming soon.

I'm just one guy working on this in my spare time (I have a full-time day job too) so things move a little slower sometimes that I would like! Currently looking for investment to get a full team to help!

Regarding the Node.js requirement, there is an offline version of the engine that runs on any standard web-host. It has all the network and server-side code stripped out.

Agree that the demo page has a lot to read, but it's written for developers rather than players so tech info is there to explain what the demo is showing (and what it's not).

A much more complete demo is on it's way I promise! :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Completely fails on iOS (iPhone 4). My browser is a fully featured html5 browser. I'm ok with it maybe being slower than a desktop, but it should at least run and resize itself to the screen.

</comment><comment><USER8> This was very interesting to me, since I'm looking for an isometric game engine for a project I'll be starting in a few months.

Thoughts- The counter read 218FPS, but it FELT slow. Any action (bring down the drop down menu) took FOREVER.

I signed in with FB, but would not have if I was a consumer. I immediately revoked access, before closing the app. God, this is a bold ("dumb?") move on the engine developer's part. There's no way I'd even consider the engine if this is a real requirement.

Is there no way to zoom in? This seems to be one of the big advantages to this type of game engine, versus a straight-on 2d engine, like Monkey Island.. I should be able to zoom these..

This seems very dedicated to a SimCity type game. What about Diablo, or Fallout style games?

When I had a man standing on a plot by himself, not moving, it still seems to set the rectangle to be dirty. Why? Because he "Could" move? That seems unnecessary.

The CPU on this seems higher than it ought to be on modern HW.

Overall, interesting project, I'll be watching this.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was actually just looking into this right before this was posted.

A big pain is setting up a Virtual Box just to use the server. Wish there were a Windows version of that. I also wish there were demos for other (non- isometric) multiplayer games. There's video of a platformer, but there's no live demo for it (nor is it multiplayer, far as I can tell.)

Still this is the best starting block for an HTML5/Node.js online game engine I can find. Will definitely be looking more into it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure if anyone else had this problem, but using Chrome (14.0.835.202) on OSX, I had my CPU shoot to 100% and pretty much become unresponsive. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER11> hold you horses everyone, we need to see the value in this.

1\. it's a html5 game engine that helps you build isometric style games

2\. the mobile version isn't working atm, but it'll be soon. Have talked to the guys abt this

3\. they provide pretty much an end to end solution (writing the first line of code to server hosting )

4\. with a single code base you can deploy to multiple platforms. Sure, the performance varies a bit now, but it's only going to get better.

<comment><USER12> OK, those are the pros.

The cons:

1) Facebook 2) see #1

<comment><USER11> i'm sure you can modify the code to not use facebook. it's just javascript after all

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So I can finally create that web-based sim city mmorpg I've always dreamed about?

All seriousness aside, however -- what in the world would you do with this thing?

<comment><USER14> With an isometric game engine? Some frigging awesome games have been built on such things - Diablo 1 and 2 for instance!</comment></comment>


Google vs. Yahoo vs. Bing. Most results are virtually identical. - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/07/google-yahoo-bing-results-virtually-identical-google-wins/ <comment><USER2> From the blind test site:

Google: 45%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 22% | 9,496 votes

While they're all the same order of magnitude, I wouldn't call that "virtually identical"...

<comment><AUTHOR> agreed, in fact i changed the title to "almost identical". Did you try a few searches, what were they like?

<comment><USER3> You can often tell which one is Google from prominent Wikipedia results.

<comment><USER4> When I tried the comparison, all three tended to have wikipedia pretty high in the rankings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Search results are important, but they aren't the _only_ thing that matters here.

Which one is faster? Which has a better UX? Which should trust with my data? Which integrates with other products I like? Which one works best on my phone? ...

<comment><USER6> I'd argue that search results trump many of these. The UIs (including mobile UIs) of most search engines these days are virtually identical, although maybe slightly flashier in some cases. No Cuil here. If a search engine offers better results but is a little slower, then that's an advantage over having to flip through pages in a faster search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> bing is faster. my firefox search box has been set to bing for a week, and I am not inclined to switch back.

(disclosure: I work for Mozilla, which competes with both Google and Microsoft in browsers, but not in search)

</comment><comment><USER8> The methodology for this is flawed because people will tend to search for things they have searched for before on Google and then pick Google as the best because they find that ranking more familiar.

<comment><USER9> What would you propose instead? It seems that asking people which they prefer is the only way to do this, even if it does stilt towards the market leader.

<comment><USER10> Here's a thought.. build a list of questions. Give them a search box to find the answer, using their own queries, and let them choose which result set was most helpful.

"What is" "Who is" "How was" type of questions.

Would be much more work, but could be worth it if you're trying to answer this question accurately.

Tho personally, I've begun using Bing in addition to Google. I think this is what most people will do. The idea that we only have room in our lives for one search engine seems silly. Doesn't anyone remember what life was like before Google? I'd often use multiple engines for a given query -- and each engine had links to 'Try this search on ____' at the bottom of each result page.

Google has been so far better than the competition that such behavior has died off. But I think it's going to make a comeback now. I guess we'll see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems a bit like the author is rationalizing why he's still using Google. Although I personally despise Google for the way they mangle my search queries, I don't think there's a need to explain why you choose to use the search engine you use.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to just use this service to seach all three. Wish there was a simple way to set this up in Firefox.

<comment><USER13> do this: <http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I seem to pick Yahoo the vast majority of the time in the blind test. I wasn't expecting that.</comment>


FlightCar (YC W13), the Airbnb for Cars, Launches at San Jose International - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27451696/flightcar-launches-at-mineta-san-jose-airport <comment><USER2> Not sure if anyone here has used FlightCar, but definitely consider them next time you need to rent a car.

I reserved my car on my phone at my layover in San Diego, received an email that provided a link that I should click once I got to SFO.

Got to SFO, clicked the link and I was provided a realtime map of where the driver was in route. The black car picked me up, took me to the FlightCar offices five minutes away and I rented a compact car for $119 for the entire week.

Fantastic experience.

<comment><USER3> $119/wk for a compact car is pretty expensive though, at least where I am used to renting cars at. Did you check something like PriceLine as well?

<comment><USER2> I just checked Priceline, SFO, compact 2/15 - 2/22\. The lowest I get is $160 and then it jumps to $240 for the week?

<comment><USER3> I always do the "name your price" and get a full size car for $98 - $105 a week. Smaller sized cars should be much cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> AAA estimates that it costs roughly 40 to 97 cents per mile to own a car (depending on the type of car and how much you drive)[1] so I'm having a hard time seeing that a lot of people will let random strangers abuse their cars for 5-20 cents per mile. Because let's face it, nobody treats rental cars as well as their own cars.

[1] [http://exchange.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/your- driv...](http://exchange.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/your-driving- costs-2013.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> couple huge problems that come to mind immediately.

1) owner risk. you are letting a complete stranger rent your car for x days. You have no control over how good of a driver they are or how many miles they will drive. as mentioned in other comments (and a fact that my dad, who owns a brand name car rental franchise CONSTANTLY harps about) is that people who rent cars treat them like crap. Rental cars lose value almost 3 times as fast as cars driven by their owners.

2) insurance complications. My current insurance doesn't even let my girlfriend drive my car, technically. If the person that flightcar rent my car to gets in to an accident, not only am I liable, but my insurance won't cover it.

3) uber/lyft is a much less risky method of using my personal vehicle for extra income, plus I maintain control of my car. Why take on that extra risk for such little return? doesn't make sense. I'd rather be an uber/lyft driver to make the extra $$.

4) return not worth the risk. article states $15-20 parking fees per day that would be avoided. lets say i'm gone 1 day, thats $20 cost. An uber from my place to the airport is currently $10 each way, so $20 bucks total. I can either park for 1 day or take an uber for the same cost. Anything longer than a 1 day trip would be dramatically cheaper taking the uber, so I don't park there. I'm not letting a stranger rent my car to save $20.

thoughts?

<comment><USER6> Another challenge I could see is the chicken and eggs cold start problem. Until there are enough people willing to rent their cars out, the supply would be minimal and no one would even consider this when flying. I can't see any easy way to bootstrap this marketplace. Uber could bootstrap their marketplace because there are a lot of repeated business in downtown, and even then it took a huge amount of capital to do that.

Maybe it's Thursday late afternoon blue, but I am seeing less and less start ups from YC that really make me go "wow, what a neat idea to solve a problem that's been bothering me". Now all I am seeing is a lot of solutions going around looking for a problem.

<comment><USER7> Today's actually FlightCar's two year anniversary of opening at an airport lot (SFO), and we're now open at ten airports nationwide, so the initial bootstrapping has long since happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In January 2014 I rented a 2006 Mercedes S-Class at SFO for $20 per day from FlightCar. Pretty amazing.

</comment><comment><USER8> AirBnB for Cars ... So, you pay to sleep in a car ?

Edit: OMG it's worse than my sarcastic initial thought. I drive _my_ car to the airport and _they_ rent _my_ car to random fools to abuse and sift through my glove box.

I can see renting out the second mortgage investment houses. But who the hell has an investment car?!

God just give the VC cash for this to the GPG project.

<comment><USER9> I'm not exactly thrilled at the ingenuity here either but lots of people leave their car at the airport for a week, two weeks, sometimes more in long-term parking. If you could wipe out that cost by letting someone use your car, why wouldn't you? Or if you want to avoid the usual rental rigamarole, why wouldn't you? Seems pretty sensible to me, if not particularly original.

It's weird that your thoughts jumped straight to an 'investment car.' Many people only use their one car occasionally, opening it up for rental, and two- car households can save or even make money by renting out one when it's not necessary to use both.

<comment><USER10> Do people not realize that a car is consumable good. There are many costs which people are not considering when renting out their cars including tires, brakes, oil changes,and of course the incalculable wear and tear that will bite you in the ass later. The rates for these "rental" cars are just screwing the car owners and raking in cash for the platform.

/rant

<comment><USER11> Owners earn 5-20 cents per mile. So an average of 12.5 cents, works out to $30 per 6000 miles. Just considering the oil, it doesn't sound appealing as a full synthetic oil change costs about $60. If you consider the savings from free airport parking around DFW for 6 months, that's 182 days x $7 = $1274. I'm still reluctant.

<comment><USER7> > Owners earn 5-20 cents per mile. So an average of 12.5 cents, works out to > $30 per 6000 miles.

Not sure how you got this -- 12.5 cents * 6000 miles = $750, not $30.

(Disclosure: I work at FlightCar.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>