Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016? - <AUTHOR> From idea to release and first paying customer, how long did it take? What were the challenges? Encountered anything unexpected? <comment><USER2> I haven't launched, so I hope this is okay. I'm 7/mo into developing a side project called [https://keygen.sh](https://keygen.sh), and am finally wrapping things up to launch a beta in early January. I have a few hundred people on my mailing list, so that's a plus.

Challenges I've faced:

\- Getting carried away with automation: emails after certain events, marketing to users who don't convert, billing features; all of these are things I should have done post-launch.

\- Writing tests. I've literally delayed the launch of the product a whole month because I didn't feel my test coverage was good enough. I should have launched the beta and then started writing tests.

\- Too many features. "Hey, x) would be a cool feature!", "Oh man, y) would be super useful to my users." – Yeah, I've written and then removed so many features that I'm a little ashamed.

\- Wanting to adhere strictly to the JSON API spec. I shouldn't have spent so much time making sure that it followed the spec, because in the end, it doesn't.

After reevaluating things, all I need to do is finish writing documentation so that I can roll out the beta.

<comment><USER3> When I view your landing page, the graphics spaz out. Is that intended?

<comment><USER2> Yes. I wanted to try something a little different for the design. It's meant to give off a 'hacker' vibe (complete with a few Mr. Robot references).

<comment><USER4> Damn I really like those glitchy visuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 9 months: January to September. It took 2 weeks after launch to get the first paying customer.

The product is a SaaS progressive web app for budgeting. It's $12/year for the premium version.

The main challenges were adding the last few features, making it production ready, and polish. The 80-20 rule really applied here (it took 20% of time to get 80% of the way), and that's only for the MVP! I still work on the app almost every day. :)

I'd say the hardest part now that I have many customers is not breaking anything for those existing customers.

[https://financier.io](https://financier.io)

[https://app.financier.io/humans.txt](https://app.financier.io/humans.txt)

<comment><USER6> Wow awesome job you have done there! Mind sharing how you manage to get your first client?

<comment><USER5> I believe I got my first client by posting on Reddit, and from there it organically spread by people sharing it.

It is a side project though, and I'm not under pressure to acquire customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For my first side project which has resulted in paying customers the whole process took quite a while. From the idea to first sale the whole process was roughly 30 months (May 2014 -> Nov 2016). There were a few false starts and most of the work was done over the last few months, but I'm glad it's made it to a real release.

What is it? It's a crowd funded user interface rewrite for an open source musical synthesizer: [http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/zyn- fusion.html](http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/zyn-fusion.html)

Challenges:

\- Bug testing and regression testing a large/complex user interface was difficult as it tends to be a largely manual process

\- Maintaining a multi platform codebase added a lot of extra complexity and it certainly made distribution more difficult

\- Identifying what the users precisely needed was difficult as time could be spent on a number of different facets of the project

\- Polishing up pieces of the application after it was functionally complete took much much longer than originally predicted

\- Marketing/Estimating-the-market: Initial surveys indicated a large number of users would be willing to pay to support a replacement UI and a few hundred were on a dedicated mailing list for it. Conversion rates were much lower than expected with both the general audience and those subscribed to the sub- project specific mailing list.

<comment><USER8> Btw, I see that you are following a Libre Software + pay for the binaries model. How is that working out financially?

<comment><USER7> The response is leagues better than the old donate button, but it's certainly not what I'd call good. If I consider only the main sprint on this sub-project (last few months which included a fulltime period of work) and current sales (40-50 last I checked) I'm getting roughly $4/hr for the time that was spent on this.

Looking at other open source projects this sort of funding difficulty isn't unusual at all unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had the idea for the feature that would eventually turn into Unwaffle [1] back in July. It was initially just going to be an internal tool to track trial user actions for S3stat so that I could detect trends to predict who would convert on their own and who would need intervention.

But it quickly became apparent how useful it would be as a product, so I built it that way from day one, with its own domain and API for collecting data. The idea was to build the pieces I needed to do my thing, and if it didn't work amazingly well, to shoot it in the head and move on.

So:

      - Idea in July
      - Prototype in August
      - Decided to move forward in September
      - Public site live in September
      - Fully functional by around October
      - Some minor promotion in November
      - Just went live with real customers in December

No paying users yet (and no means of processing payment). With luck, and assuming the first round of trials go smoothly, it should get a proper "Launch" in January.

Naturally, feedback is always welcome.

[1] [https://unwaffle.com](https://unwaffle.com)

<comment><USER10> Awesome!

Could you elaborate a bit on the "minor promotion" part?

We are at the "fully functional" step and wondering how to approach the marketing part.

That'll make a great blog post, i guess we are not alone in that situation.

Many thanks.

We are [http://www.parseur.com](http://www.parseur.com) by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We're still working on getting our 501c3, so that was unexpected. I knew there would be a lot of legal work and IRS work, but the sheer _volume_ of it still staggers me.

The rest of the work on our site (werebooks.org) is coming along pretty well, I think. There has been a lot of work done to get the load times down (especially for mobiles in other countries), lots of tuning. We have a long way to go yet, but it's nothing like the prototype we tossed up early 2016.

Our biggest effort in 2017 is going to be adding content. Lots and lots of content.

So, to answer question 1 - from idea to 1,000 full book reads a week (we don't charge, so no paying customers) took about 8 months. I don't know that I'd consider it "done" any time soon, so many I'm speaking out of turn.

Challenges and unexpected potholes have been almost entirely of a legal nature.

</comment><comment><USER12> I started in 2015 and launched an early access in November of 2016. The product wasn't hard to make, per se, but I was stuck in analysis paralysis. Plus I went through a bout or two of depression which took away my time as well as I was writing a book which took even more time.

My biggest challenge was not picking something and just going with it. I picked what I knew (WinForms with C#) and went with it. I ended up throwing away the UI 4 or 5 times because I just couldn't get it right. It didn't look "good enough" it just looked horrible. After I launched I just thought my UI looked horrible so I started to re-do it (yet again) but this time in WPF. My UI looks so much better, I have added more functionality to the UI and it took much less time.

So far I have two big challenges, getting a paid customer as well as accurately tracking my metrics. I have, I think, 30+ downloads of the trial since I launched early access but I'm using events in Google Analytics to track and numbers I see don't always make sense. On top of that, my analytics don't seem to make much sense either as I'm getting majority of the traffic from direct but I'm not sure why that would be.

At the end of the day, I'm looking forward to 2017 as I will have a new updated release of my product, my book will be finished and I can devote more time to getting customers.

</comment><comment><USER13> We're actually launching our new SaaS for bloggers in January 2017 called the Blog Enhancement Suite, but we've spent most of 2016 working on it.

It basically allows you to plug in a community to your blog using a widget that will use the core of our community voting platform Snapzu (that launched in 2013). There are other widgets out there that bloggers can use, such as Twitter Timeline, Pinterest, Instagram, etc, but all of them are redundant, showing duplicate stuff that's already on the blog, and don't really add anything for engagement and revenue like we plan on doing.

Biggest Challenges:

1\. Getting the word out (mostly for feedback at this point), so that we can continue improving our landing page so that people understand it better and see the value proposition.

2\. A/B testing to figure out what works and what doesn't. This is tough because of the small sample sizes (because of challenge #1 just above) and because it requires a lot of re-writing copy/text.

Unexpected encounters:

Explainer video (still in production) is taking way longer than we thought it would, approx 3 months now.

Happy to answer any questions. Links if you want to see our service in action:

[http://www.snapzu.com](http://www.snapzu.com) (platform)

[http://www.blogenhancement.com](http://www.blogenhancement.com) (SaaS for bloggers)

</comment><comment><USER14> One of my perpetual problems with releasing software is that I hate writing for humans. Marketing blurbs, blogs, emails to the right people. It all sounds so easy when native speakers write or talk about it, but I'm so shy about this stuff that I'm never looking forward to finishing a project.

Is there a low-cost service that will proof-read everything you do (not for grammar accuracy, but also tone)? The easiest fix might be to live in the UK for a bit.

<comment><USER15> Yes, there are low cost services that will write copy for you or rewrite your copy, such as Textbroker. You could also hire a freelancer independently. (I do this kind of work.)

<comment><USER14> Yay! Thanks. Bookmarking your post for after the holidays :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 3 months to build a new video chat platform. The first release was very naked, live video chats worked, but there was no text chat on the side. Since then, we've fixed a lot of connection bugs, added Twitter login, and had to scale to a new server with 15 times capacity.

It's called Harf, would love to hear anyones opinion: [http://harf.io](http://harf.io)

<comment><USER17> Hi, can I ask what features you're going to implement next? Also, is harf.io's main advantage supposed to be that it's essentially a committment-free, platform agnostic videochat service? Who do you think would use it most; Craigslist patrons requesting remote, "hand-on" previews of listed products with constraints to iOS' facetime or Google's Duo?

<comment><USER16> Harf.io's main difference is that everything is public. I cannot watch other people's conversations on Facetime, Skype or Duo. Let alone call in and interact with them. But I can on Harf.

We are pushing code every day, though it's not always visible to the user. A lot of features are coming soon, most importantly moderations tools.

<comment><USER17> Wow, so it can host topic-specific (like subreddits) video discussions! It makes me think of a kind of cyber theatre or video-torium.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but usually people give the room a title, and 10 minutes into the conversation they will start discussing all kinds of other stuff as well. It all depends on who else decided to call in or comment.

I hope some day there will always be 100+ rooms open at any given day. Just imagine, you could be having a conversation with anyone about anything, at any given moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I spent a few months working on a biz lead generator for web dev freelancers which still hasn't been released. Then I spent a couple months on a news summarizer called Kiwi which never got finished enough to be useful to anyone.

Eventually I got sick of spending weeks and months on things that were too big and serious to actually release and spent one week to get www.whispe.rs out into the public eye. It started as a paid Twilio wrapper for anonymous texting but has now morphed into a free web tool for anonymously texting goofy messages to friends and family for free.(For anyone who has ever wanted to anonymously text "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of Elderberries!" to an unwitting friend) I don't think it will ever make money or anything but it was fun building it, getting harsh feedback, and then rebuilding it. It has also already made a few people smile so I consider it a worthwhile use of my time :)

At some point I will start finishing bigger and bigger projects but for right now I'm happy with Whispe.rs.

</comment><comment><USER19> About a week.

I launched DesignerJobs ([https://www.designerjobs.co](https://www.designerjobs.co)) about three weeks ago: posted on HN a friday afternoon and got like 5 upvotes. I thought that was going to be it but someone picked it up on ProductHunt the next day and it ended up ranking #4 on there all weekend. I got plenty of traffic from there, realized I wasn't collecting emails (oops) or had links to social media (duh) and rushed to deploy the features. Got my first customer on Monday! From there, I contacted a lot of companies with open positions for designers and eventually added more sales, one after another. So far things are going pretty well, I've added features, companies and I'm trying to maintain growth.

The biggest challenge for me was/is marketing. I'm finding it's actually pretty easy to code and design anything, but marketing/reaching out/selling whatever you have is what truly separates having a website from having a business.

</comment><comment><USER20> I started playing with computer vision toolkits like OpenCV in the late summer, took a couple months to play with different tutorials, then it took another couple months to launch a simple iOS game with face and mouth detecting. As an MVP, I avoided any features that might turn into a time sink and didn't even include in-app purchases.

Working with the libraries was unexpectedly easy since I looked at a lot of sample code and tutorials.

The challenges are to come when I have to dig deeper into combining different image processing techniques to boost my particular tracking needs. Additionally, I'll have to learn about 3D graphics from scratch if I want to make the game more immersive and dynamic. Lastly if I want to add stuff like an in-game economy, that will take time away from experimenting on the computer vision stuff.

Check it out and send me feedback! [https://appsto.re/us/hhcxfb.i](https://appsto.re/us/hhcxfb.i)

</comment><comment><USER21> I had an idea of a static JavaScript practice website with little to no maintenance required. It took me about a month of part-time work from idea to having the website up. I took a month or so to add more content to it.

It was never meant to make any money, so maybe your definition of side project is more specific than mine. I got about tens of clicks on the affiliate links and made a grand total of $0.00.

The website is at [https://javascript.onl/](https://javascript.onl/) and I wrote a high-level blog post about how I did it at [http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2016/05/12/javascript- online-...](http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2016/05/12/javascript-online- hosting-static-site-cheaply)

</comment><comment><USER22> I haven't launched completely, but it's been around 5 months since I started it. I'm building a visual-programming environment to build chatbots with pure drand and drop. Still lots of stuff to do, but I launched a successful beta.

You can see it in action: [https://talkbot.io](https://talkbot.io)

Website took 2 days to build, the idea, webapp and server took around 5 months.

I haven't charged a penny to my clients, because it's still in beta, but I'm on my way on making it no-beta soon and start monetizing.

Unexpected: Got featured in some blogs and it rained clients and e-mails, too demanding for one-person project. I wasn't ready, nor my product, marketing was going to happen later.

P.S. I'm the only coder and designer, should've been faster with more people on the "team".

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been taking a circuitous route with a side project: first just building an open source command-line tool that scratches my own itch, and then evaluating traction from there. If companies find the tool useful, I've been keeping in mind ways to build out a SaaS/enterprise version. Or if it doesn't get much traction, worst-case at least I have something that's useful to me!

The tool is called Skeema [1] and it allows you to manage relational database schemas as code -- a bridge between git (or hg, svn, etc) and SQL DDL. You can use it to export CREATE TABLE statements from a DB to a repo, and then auto- generate and run DDL based on changes to that repo. Currently it just targets MySQL (due to personal familiarity, and the historic complexity with schema changes there), but if it's successful I could envision porting it to other DBs.

The open source CLI is still in alpha, but getting very close to a first release candidate. I've spent 9 months of working 5 to 25 hours/week on it so far.

Some unexpected challenges:

* Even for entirely text-based command-line tools, building a nice polished interface takes a lot of time! My goal has been to make Skeema's CLI paradigms immediately intuitive to users of Git and MySQL, in terms of option-handling, subcommands, and config file format. Even little things like exit code values, and STDOUT vs STDERR for different types of output, matter a lot for building CLIs that are friendly to pipelines.

* None of the existing Golang CLI/config packages were the right fit. After a couple attempts at hacking/forking popular ones resulted in overly-awkward code, I scrapped all that and wrote my own. I should have done that from the start, but it felt like yak-shaving.

* I eschewed unit testing at first, going with the common side-project wisdom of only prioritizing functionality. But as the codebase grew, I really wished I had spent more time writing tests from the start. I suspect it would have been a net time-saver vs the manual ad hoc testing I was doing initially.

[1] [http://github.com/skeema](http://github.com/skeema)

</comment><comment><USER24> Less than a day.

I had been thinking about it for weeks/months and knew exactly how it would work. Having mentally worked out all the problems simplified the creation so much. While putting things off is usually bad, sometimes continuously thinking about it solves problems before they come up. The only challenges I had were with learning new tools and not execution.

Wrote a hn post (on an alt acc) and sent a few emails and it had a couple nice traffic spikes and news/blog articles. I haven't touched it since though. I won't link it because I don't want my name attached to it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been working on [https://instantexporter.com/](https://instantexporter.com/) I'm surprised by how much longer it actually took me to build the v1, compared to what I initially thought it will take (5+ months vs 1 month!). Also, I thought that I wouldn't fall for the common psychological pitfalls as I know about them well, but here we are.

<comment><USER26> Great idea! I have thought of this idea before previously but wasn't sure that if this is something user wants. I tried the demo, after pressing export to Google Sheets the window got blocked by pop-up blocker by Google Chrome by default.

<comment><USER25> Thanks, I'll see if there are ways around that behavior... perhaps by redirecting to do oauth, instead of the popup.

I'm also trying to find out if there is a real need for this :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We started working on customer development in May part-time (full-time starting July). It wasn't until mid-September that we actually knew what we wanted to create, and that's when we bought our domain. From there it took til early November to get our first paying customer.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nymeria ([https://www.nymeria.io](https://www.nymeria.io)) from inception to launch was one month. If you do any cold emailing for your own projects you may find it as useful as I have!

</comment><comment><USER29> 1 month per project, but nobody uses either - they were just for fun.</comment>


APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.apievangelist.com/2012/04/20/apis-are-forever,-wait-no...they-can-go-away-at-any-time/index.php#.T5IIrH2siH8.hackernews <comment><USER2> This makes me think of the not-so-recent deprecation of Offline Access by Facebook. I do not know whether it will be supported ad infinitum, but if not, it requires other completely-functional apps to be majorly rearchitected or break entirely.

There is rarely a good reason to actively destroy old API - section it off, keep it out of new code, maybe even kill the documentation so new developers don't use it, but it's bad business and downright disrespectful to the third- party developers who enrich your platform.

</comment><comment><USER3> as I have tried to start a business building on top of API's, this is in general a risky business. Not only can they disappear, but also work incorrectly, go down, change overnight without notification. Also your access can be shut down just because of a change of heart on their side

If you don't pay for access and have some kind of contract (Twitter firehose, Bing API), yes your business goals are not aligned and you'd better prepare for the worse.

<comment><USER4> Did you design your software or business plan with an API contingency plan? Some web APIs have reasonable replacements, but most offer some unique value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clear deprecation policies are great, but I also think that every public API needs to be explicitly versioned. This is commonly achieved by including the version in the URL (api.example.com/v3/whatever), but a suitable header (API- Version: 20120420) would also work.

Once published, a specific version of an API should never change in a backward-incompatible way, only become superseded by newer versions. Likewise, you don't change or deprecate individual methods, you merely stop supporting older versions. That would make it much easier for developers to keep track of API changes.

<comment><USER6> That definitely seems like the common-sense approach. There was an interesting article posted on here recently though, which argued that API versioning is an anti-pattern.

It makes some good points, although I'm not sure I entirely agree with the conclusion drawn, since it places all of the responsibility on the authors of the client-side code:

[https://secure.designinghypermediaapis.com/nodes/bujxbmhffep...](https://secure.designinghypermediaapis.com/nodes/bujxbmhffepq)

<comment><USER7> I agree on the disagreement. On removing functionality:

"This can be handled in the opposite way we dealt with new functionality: if you don't see something, don't display it."

In my experience that is just too simplistic idea to cover all cases hence the need for versioning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one of the best arguments for scraping data, if you can manage it. Generally businesses invest much more time and resources into maintaining an up-to-date, usable website than they would on an API, especially if they don't use a service-oriented architecture internally (ie, consume their own API)

<comment><USER9> What type of business can afford being down every time the site they're scrapping is tweaked?

<comment><USER8> How often do websites _really_ change the layout of their DOM? Sure, some sites that are actively developed (ie social networks) but for a lot of business websites where information doesn't change that often, like restaurants, reviews or clothing, websites are pretty consistent.

Plus, building a parser isn't always that much more work than trying to build a client for a convoluted API.

It's obviously case-by-case, but I think a lot of people dismiss scraping outright when there are a lot of useful applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Programmable Web noticed this last year when Google started charging more for their older APIs. Why kill the API when you can make as much money as you want from its users?

> Google is also providing developers a reason to finally move their maps off > of Google Maps V2. Overages for the old version of Google Maps costs $10 per > 1,000 map views.

[http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/10/27/google-maps- usage...](http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/10/27/google-maps-usage-fees- how-many-developers-will-have-to-pay/)

</comment><comment><USER11> How does one build a software that will not deteriorate over time, if he uses unstable API?. I don't know. Just don't use unstable API if you don't have to.</comment>


Crypto Fails - Showcasing bad cryptography - <AUTHOR> http://www.cryptofails.com/ <comment><USER2> This is kind of epic. I really enjoy the explanations of _how_ the crypto fails</comment>


Google starts advertising on the homepage - <AUTHOR>

I'm seeing a text ad for: "Enjoy free WiFi over the holidays - 47 airports and all Virgin America flights." on http://www.google.com/ <comment><USER2> It does appear to be a house ad. Or should it be considered public service? Being stuck in an airport with no reception and charge-a-minute wifi as my only means of communication... has sucked before.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's not a paid ad though, is it? Google's paying for the free wifi.</comment>


How "busy" are these successful VC's?  We asked a few - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zenlike.me/2013/04/23/how-busy-are-these-venture-capitalists/ Interviews with 4 VCs to talk about how they structure their day. <comment><USER2> I met a VC at stanford bootcamp for entrepreneurs. This VC had emails going down pages and pages within minutes of each other each with walls of text.

They're pretty darn busy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya. I've had a glance at the inbox of a few VC's I know. It's not pretty. Not to correlate inbox size with "busy-ness" ... but it's a proxy.</comment></comment>


Living and Dying at the Port of Ancient Rome - <AUTHOR> https://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/diet-at-the-docks-living-and-dying-at-the-port-of-ancient-rome <comment><USER2> As an aside, if you ever visit Rome take an hour train ride to Ostia Antica. It is the ruins of an entire port town, complete with a tile mural where the baths were and stone seating for a forum. It is about a mile square and you have full reign to wander and explore it with hardly anyone else around.

<comment><USER3> Yes this is really worthwhile. After a few days of the tourist city life I always want to get out for some relaxing experiences, which this daytour provides. Also it is not far to continue for a short swim in the Mediterranean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Dr O'Connell continues, "Towards the end of the mid fifth century we see a shift in the diet of the local populations away from one rich in animal protein and imported wheat, olive oil, fish sauce and wine from North Africa, to something more akin to a 'peasant diet', made up of mainly plant proteins in things like potages and stews. They're doing the same kind of manual labour and hard work, but were sustained by beans and lentils"_

This goes back to an earlier discussion I had on this site. Roman history covers a lot of time and space. The typical city denizen might have had a very good life at a certain time and place, and not so much at another.

<comment><USER5> I mean... the middle of the fifth century was literally the unequivocal _end_ of the Western Roman Empire and "Rome". Your point is a little out of place because this period isn't simply representative of long-term fluctuations in wealth and status; it was literally the demise of Rome as the epicenter of the Western world. "Rome" after this period was something else entirely.

<comment><USER4> _Your point is a little out of place because this period isn 't simply representative of long-term fluctuations in wealth and status_

Point taken that the example in the article is a lower boundary and an outlier. I think my point still stands. There was a lot of variation in the quality of life of a city dweller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's pretty cool how the hexagonal harbour has survived. It's a lake now, Lago Traiano, about 2km inland.

<comment><USER7> Why is it all land now? Sea level change, or manually filled to extend the coast?

<comment><USER6> Neither, just silting up. The Tiber has been filling in that area with sediments for thousands of years. The harbour was just a tiny dent in that natural process.

Here's a poster with some progress drawings over the millennia: [https://www.academia.edu/29407769/The_effect_of_the_Tiber_de...](https://www.academia.edu/29407769/The_effect_of_the_Tiber_delta_development_in_the_Central_Tyrrhenian_Sea)

<comment><USER8> Darn, I would like to see that poster, but I don't want to give Academia.edu (whatever that is) a copy of all my Google accounts!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems to suggest the porters were not slaves.

<comment><USER10> One of the real differences with Rome, over previous major civilizations, was that they had a quite established class system.

They worked hard to establish a strong middle class, which is arguably what fueled the majority of the Roman Empire's growth. The rich class also learned that a strong middle class meant lots of taxes, and thus lots of money in the upper government. This money fueled their expansion, construction of major monuments, and their strong military.

This is in stark contrast to previous civilizations that were built mostly on slavery. This isn't to say that Rome didn't have its share of slaves. Slaves were used in the building of many monuments of Rome that still stand today, but most of these slaves were prisoners of war. They were mostly used in dangerous construction projects and then later massacred for entertainment when they lose their usefulness. Rome had plenty of slaves, but not nearly as many per capita when compared to earlier civilizations.

So to your original point, these were likely middle-class dock workers that worked at this port. Just like dock workers today they made a decent salary (this was before unions, now dock workers do surprisingly well for themselves) and lived in reasonable homes and ate surprisingly well.

In fact I would argue that many of them probably were demoted in social status after Rome fell in the 400-500s AD. With Rome no longer the superpower that it once was, the desire to trade with Rome goes down, which meant that fewer ships come into port, which is bad for the dock workers that work at that port. Many of them probably lost their job and this may be the contributing factor to the food changes we see over the next hundred years with these people. There is far less money moving through their city now and more people move to a lower social-economic class.

Imagine if the US immediately collapsed. The billions of dollars of trade that goes in and out of the Los Angeles port (the largest port in the US) would drop by 90% or more. Many of those dock workers, who right now are strong middle-class workers, would lose their jobs and unemployment country-wide would increase dramatically (probably well over 25%). This would make it difficult for dock workers to find new jobs and many would start going hungry or reach poverty status.

It isn't too far of a stretch to assume that this is what happened to Rome's largest port after Rome collapsed.

<comment><USER4> _Imagine if the US immediately collapsed._

After the collapse of the USSR, regional governments and foreign governments stepped in. If the USA collapsed, New York, Texas, and California would have something to say about it. My point is that "collapse" is rather nonspecific.

 _The billions of dollars of trade that goes in and out of the Los Angeles port (the largest port in the US) would drop by 90% or more._

That narrows it down a bit.

<comment><USER11> >After the collapse of the USSR, regional governments and foreign governments stepped in

There was nevertheless a 30% drop in GDP. That's bound to have some effect.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Who will dominate neighborhood networking? - <AUTHOR>

Locational social networking in the form of neighborhood networks is a space that's heating up. NextDoor was recently funded by Benchmark. And Chuck Templeton's OhSoWe, DeHood, NeighborGoods.net, GoGoVerde, and even Zaarly are in the game.
The classic example - the average power-drill is used for just 6 minutes in its lifetime, yet 50% of homes own one. Why not share or rent?
People already have a website for their social identity (Facebook), and a website for their professional identity (LinkedIn). Is the 'civic identity' next? We at localblu believe it is.
We're tackling the challenge of building neighborhood networks at http://localblu.com/. <comment><USER2> I think locational exchange networks are bound to come about. I agree many companies are in the space now and that it is heating up.

Many of them, including NextDoor, use a system of address verification though - which I feel is sluggish. There has to be a better way to address the problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just checked and GoGoVerde is no longer in the game...wonder what they did wrong...

<comment><USER4> (Obligatory disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Nextdoor.)

GoGoVerde didn't do anything wrong, per se, but shutdown as a matter of funding. A few key folk from GGV are now working with us at Nextdoor, however, lending the experience gained from GoGoVerde.

A bit more info here: [http://redwoodcity.patch.com/articles/city-moves- virtual-nei...](http://redwoodcity.patch.com/articles/city-moves-virtual- neighborhood-gogoverde-nextdoor)</comment></comment>


Strongtalk: A high-speed Smalltalk with incremental, optional strong typing - david-given http://www.strongtalk.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> I was looking at Strongtalk the other day for the first time in some years.

Unfortunately, it isn't clear at all where to best obtain the sources.

Since Google Code is going read-only soon, it would be nice to have a canonical location outside of there.

In 2010, there was a post on the mailing list:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/strongtalk- general/S...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/strongtalk- general/SEAaPTNfwrE)

But that GitHub repo has been idle since 2010:

[https://github.com/talksmall/Strongtalk](https://github.com/talksmall/Strongtalk)

It seems other people have also tried exporting from Google Code to GitHub as well:

[https://github.com/szKarlen/strongtalk](https://github.com/szKarlen/strongtalk) [https://github.com/rvedam/strongtalk](https://github.com/rvedam/strongtalk) [https://github.com/rmacnak/strongtalk](https://github.com/rmacnak/strongtalk) [https://github.com/Michaelangel007/strongtalk](https://github.com/Michaelangel007/strongtalk) [https://github.com/DmitryVSkiba/strongtalk](https://github.com/DmitryVSkiba/strongtalk) [https://github.com/emanuelpeg/strongtalk](https://github.com/emanuelpeg/strongtalk) [https://github.com/liutanyu/strongtalk](https://github.com/liutanyu/strongtalk)

At that point, I got distracted and moved on to something else of interest at the time.

<comment> david-given It'd be really interesting to know whether the StrongTalk type checker could be bolted on to an existing Smalltalk implementation, or whether it was inextricably part of the JIT.

Smalltalk is a lovely, lovely language; being able to combine Smalltalk's dynamism with strongly-typed code where it makes sense looks like the best of both worlds (it even supports generics!).

[http://www.bracha.org/nwst.html](http://www.bracha.org/nwst.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I believe that the Strongtalk compiler eventually became HotSpot. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongtalk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongtalk)

<comment><USER3> And most of those people now work on V8 and Dart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> imho, the V8 runtime and the Chrome Dev Tools give a good enough approximation of a Smalltalk "live-coding" environment.

Given that approaches like Typescript, Flow and the most likely adoption of type hinting in a coming ES201x version, I would consider that JavaScript is a "spiritual" successor of Strongtalk.

Sorry Dart, you're just talking too long ;)</comment>


Taking a hobby from $0 to $60k+ in a year - <AUTHOR> http://www.launchbit.com/blog/taking-a-hobby-from-0-to-60k-in-a-year/

<comment><USER2> This guy started by running a popular site. He went from thousands of visitors on his site to $60k+ in a year, a non-trivial achievement, but he did not start from nothing. I wish him continued successes!</comment>


Semantic Compression (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015 <comment><USER2> This hasn't been submitted here yet? Glad someone fixed that.</comment>


YouTube incident: 'Shots fired' near HQ in northern California - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43635864 <comment><USER2> I hope everyone is safe.

Please, America: sort it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Next level of SWATTing?</comment>


Show HN: Open source security tools (top 100) with weekly ranking - <AUTHOR> https://linuxsecurity.expert/security-tools/top-100/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

This is Michael, a tool author myself. I created this project to have an up- to-date database source for Linux security topics. Starting with security tools and have them categorized and ranked. The goal is to allow people find the right security tool and information for the job, quick and easy.

Sharing the project here to ask for feedback and ideas on how to further improve it. Anything that you love to see?

Disclaimer: to ensure the project stays around and continues to receive development, we put in company resources (hence the footer and training). The paid training will help will fuel the development and pay for the hosting costs.

</comment><comment><USER2> How is this better than the list at [http://sectools.org/](http://sectools.org/) ?

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate having multiple sources of information, multiple points of view, etc.... but I am honestly interested to learn what you thought was lacking in the existing resources that are already out there, what you compared against, and what makes you better/unique compared to them.</comment>


If a nuclear bomb explodes nearby, never get in a car - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/survive-nuclear-attack-fallout-shelter-cars-2017-5 <comment><USER2> I would add that if a car is your only option and if it still runs, you actually should get in it before the wind brings any fallout. Most modern cars have some air filtration. It's not as good as a HEPA filter, but it's better than nothing and might get you to a nearby building faster. Unlike in the movies, the EMP won't likely harm the cars computer.

<comment><USER3> It seems like the article claims it's unlikely that you could outrun the wind- borne fallout.

<comment><USER2> There are many factors in this, such as proximity to the blast, elevation of the nuke, surface shape and soil/sand content, wind direction, ambient temp, humidity levels, your age, your pre-existing health condition.

There are way too many factors to generalize any proper response. If you are too close to the blast for the filtration in a car to be of use, you will probably be in a state of shock anyway, so just get in, drive away, go to the closest convenience store, help yourself to water, food, etc and drive away as fast as you can. Otherwise, if you are in a busy city, ya, yer pretty much out of luck.

Oh and this is just a guess, but save up on bottle caps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> See the move "Command and Control' on Netflix this week. They point out that the Nuke in the video, if it had exploded in DC would have killed everyone up to Philadelpha, half of NYC, and some people in Boston. That was a U.S. Nuke on U.S. soil, part of one of over 1000 Nuke-related accidents so far...

If you survive a Nuke explosion you can see then you can assume you will starve. Nobody is going to truck food in any quantity anywhere near you anytime soon.

A single modern Nuke explosion in any populated center anywhere on the earth is going to change EVERYTHING about how you live.

<comment><USER5> That is not even remotely true. A 5 megaton nuke in DC - about the upper limit of modern active-duty warheads - wouldn't directly injure anyone in Baltimore, never mind Philadelphia. If the wind was blowing the wrong way, Philadelphia might get some fallout. But that would take many hours to arrive, there'd be plenty of time to evacuate or take shelter. And even a lot of fallout wouldn't come close to killing everyone in the city.

Alex Wellerstein made an awesome map, where you can "nuke" any city with any size bomb and see all the effects: [http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/](http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/)

<comment><USER4> Did you watch the movie? I'm simply quoting the analysis. They modeled their results by taking the actual plume from a test blast of similar size and overlaying it on the U.S. mainland. So they are working from recorded data, not a model.

Wellerstein does not model a lot of the effects in Nukemap, as he admits.

The fallout issue depends on the height of the blast, the material attacked, etc. A ground blast lofts huge amounts of radioactive material into the upper atmosphere. Depending on the firestorm to follow there is yet another source of uplift.

Low background steel ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low- background_steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel)) is highly valued because it is not contaminated by nuclear tests which affect all post-war, pre-1963 manufacture.

Chernoble affected Europe in detectable amounts and it wasn't even a warhead.

Just yesterday I read an article ([http://investmentwatchblog.com/a-nuclear- spent-fuel-fire-at-...](http://investmentwatchblog.com/a-nuclear-spent-fuel- fire-at-peach-bottom-in-pennsylvania-could-force-18-million-people-to- evacuate/)) pointing out that a fire in the spent fuel storage in Pennsylvania would affect millions ([http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs24vonhippel.p...](http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs24vonhippel.pdf)). And that's just a fire, not a Nuke. If the Nuke hit a spent fuel pool things would get ugly fast.

I admit it might not kill everyone. But it would certainly ruin their morning coffee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the information from "Protect and Survive" (an old UK civil defense pamphlet) is still relevant in scenarios like this. It recommends building an "inner refuge" \- a sort of fort of dense objects (cans, suitcases, etc) around yourself in an inner room of your home or basement to attenuate gamma radiation. The advice is based on experiments carried out in the 1960s:

[http://www.atomica.co.uk/main.htm](http://www.atomica.co.uk/main.htm)

<comment><USER7> I suppose building an "inner refuge" gives you something to do in the roughly half hour between an ICBM launch and its arrival on target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty worrying that this article even needed to be written. In a scenario where a nuclear bomb has detonated it is rather likely many more will as well. I hope we aren't in a scenario where this becomes likely.

Also, if I'm sat home during a one-off detonation; what good is waiting for that nuclear material to rain down on my house?

</comment><comment><USER9> Afaik after the explosion no nearby car would run, and the advice to 'tune in a radio' seems futile as the EMP would zorch the modern electronics in either device.

BTW if you want real nightmare stuff, google the casualty rates after 1 year from the EMP of a nuke detonated high above the United States.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the nightmares.</comment>


Rudy Giuliani's Cybersecurity Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.giulianisecurity.com/ <comment><USER2> [https://theintercept.com/2018/10/05/rudy-giuliani-amazon- con...](https://theintercept.com/2018/10/05/rudy-giuliani-amazon-contract- brazil-election/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it funny that a cybersecurity company doesn't adopt HTTPS for their website.</comment>


Cisco buys Sourcefire for $2.7 billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/351040,cisco-buys-sourcefire-for-27-billion.aspx <comment><USER2> That's cool, but what I want to know is: when's Cisco gonna buy RedHat? I think that's a blockbuster acquisition that would make a ton of sense for Cisco. I think it's a question of price and whether RedHat would sell.

Time will tell.

<comment><USER3> In terms of company culture, Cisco and RedHat don't seem very aligned. Cisco is all proprietary and RedHat mostly doing free software.

<comment><USER2> IMHO, if you poke around in the Nexus 7K gear, it looks like RHEL or CentOS underneath. Cisco's always been very private about the kind of Linux they're running on their gear, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was modified RHEL.

RedHat does free Software, but their culture is services, which aligns well with Cisco. You don't get to be a billion dollar business without making some money somewhere.

Free software != $0 revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This exemplifies Cisco's build/buy/partner model.The acquisition of Sourcefire adds a team with deep security DNA to Cisco and will accelerate Cisco's security strategy of defending, discovering, and remediating advanced threats. In addition, Sourcefire's open source model will strengthen and accelerate Cisco's ability to build a strong ecosystem of security partners who can bring real time threat intelligence and innovations to customers through integration with it's technologies and platforms (OpenDaylight, SDN, etc...). Good move at a reasonable price (~29% premium to closing).

</comment><comment><USER5> Sourcefire's flagship product is Snort which is an excellent Open Source Intrusion Detection System. Their business model is to offer management tools, rules and support on Snort for enterprises.

Their 2012 earnings were $223.1m which was a 35% increase over 2011. With cash and near-cash of around $200m, this is a purchase price of around 10x annual revenue.

<comment><USER6> That's an impressive business, I didn't realize they were doing so well.

Cisco obviously has a long history of buying network appliance (no caps) companies, including those that sell competing products. Sometimes the product lines are incorporated, sometimes they're run in parallel, and sometimes they're squashed (after Cisco's internal EOL promissory schedule, hopefully).

What Cisco does _not_ do often is buy companies with open source products.

I think it's clear that Cisco needs to make big changes to their organization. I wonder if this signals that they are heading toward an IBM-style services model, or an Oracle-style _scorched earth_ model...</comment></comment>


Hate your job? You're not alone - <AUTHOR> http://bigthink.com/devil-in-the-data/hate-your-job-youre-not-alone

<comment><USER2> "You hate your job? Sorry to hear. There's a support group for that. It's called _everybody_ , and they meet at the bar."

George Carlin</comment>


Series AA Documents Back Online - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html? <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the delay. WSGR wanted to add some disclaimers to the documents, and then we ourselves were busy with Demo Day(s).

There's now a termsheet as well, which some people had asked for.

<comment><USER2> Can you also provide one easy zip file to download?

<comment><USER2> Sigh! To whoever down voted,

1\. Total file size uncompressed is 428 kB, compressed is roughly 100 kB i.e. reduced bandwidth from origin & faster downloads

2\. The webserver has to process 1 request instead of 6

3\. Having all the word files in one zip file is easier to download

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure it's legal to put an exclamation point after "sigh"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just submitted a comment in the Venture Hacks feedback suggesting an article or series of articles breaking these down into layman's terms.

It's nice to have the documents; it'd be even nicer to have a decent handle on the implications of their use.

<comment><USER2> Well said. For the term sheet check out Brad Feld's term sheet series: <http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/term_sheet/>

<comment><USER5> I'll put up a post about these documents on <http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com> in the near future.

<comment><USER2> That's nice, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't see a license that these were released under.

It could be useful to put these onto a wiki and allow people to mark them up with comments about any changes they made to them through the course of their own use.

</comment><comment><USER7> What kind of license are they released under?

<comment><AUTHOR> None in particular. I don't think they need to be. They're not the sort of thing the user publishes, like an image; nor is there any plan (for now at least) to incorporate changes contributed by other people, as one would with software.

<comment><USER8> A Creative Commons license might be a useful thing to add. With no license specified a potential user could run into picky copyright law hangups down the line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does a new ycomb company require vesting for all the cofounders? If so is it the typical (4 year vesting, 1 year cliff etc) terms?

<comment><USER10> as of summer 2006, yes. standard 4/1 yr

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't actually require it, but we encourage it, so that there's a predefined way to handle cofounders leaving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does WSGR work with many YC startups? I had heard that they've lost interest in most early stage web stuff, but I was wondering if they were more likely to work with YC companies since they clearly work with YC itself.

<comment><USER5> WSGR is very interested in working with all startups, including early stage web startups. WSGR represents many YC-backed companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks!</comment>


Competitive Start Fund (CSF) - Enterprise Ireland - <AUTHOR> http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/en/funding-supports/Company/HPSU-Funding/Competitive-Start-Fund-CSF-.html

<comment><USER2> Shocking to hear about this from Hacker News. I'm an Irish citizen living in Oz, with a startup (www.dealpinch.com), and this is the first I've heard about it.

One thing strike me straight away. The only reason I would accept equity would be for contacts and expertise. This program does not offer it, but it is a start!

Ireland is in a bad state right now, it's recovering from an inept government and crazy policy when it came to small startups. This will go a long way to starting up jobs in the country, they need to go much further.

The country has the talent to make an impact on the world stage, we have a highly educated, motivated workforce. It is exceptionally difficult for any startup to get a loan from the banks in Ireland right now.

<comment><USER3> You're hearing about it in the perfect place.

EI always had had funding if you want to help create jobs, from their perspective. My downfall is that I would only want to create one job: mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You get much better deals in other countries.

For instance, in Luxembourg, the state is going to double your investment (up to a million €) while not taking any parts in the company. But you must pass a comittee which decides on whether you get the funding or not. ([http://www.eco.public.lu/salle_de_presse/com_presse_et_art_a...](http://www.eco.public.lu/salle_de_presse/com_presse_et_art_actu/2010/07/Signature_jeunes_entreprises_innovantes/index.html))

There is still much more: E.g. reimbursement of fair costs, 40% salary takeover by the state if you hire university graduates which haven't yet found a job, etc...

<comment><USER5> May someone well-versed in the dark art which is French elaborate more on this program? Is it open only to EU members? Would a startup without millions of capital might really be eligible?

<comment><USER4> Your company must be based in Luxembourg, so you must have an authorization to create a company in Luxembourg which is sometimes hard to get. But they are trying to improve things there.

You will get the help only once and it will only match the investment you invest into your company as well. So if invest 0€ into your company, you will also get 0€.

<comment> barry-cotter You need relatively substantial skin in the game. The minimum amount necessary to register a company is somewhere between €12,500 and €31,000.

<http://www.ocra.com/solutions/setbusiness_luxembourg.asp>

<comment><USER5> but what about residency? From what I gathered at your linked website (tnx btw, seems like a great resource) their work permit (aka working for an employer) rules are pretty lax... Is it the same for working on your own?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dublin is a great place to live and good place for tech companies. I recently had to hire a developer and got plenty of good resumes and was really happy with the eventual hire. Google, PayPal, Facebook are here and loads of online gaming/gambling companies too.

Plus you can't beat the Guiness.

That being said, I'd say that if you aren't already in Ireland--the funding above would probably not be an option. Getting a visa is not a trivial matter (especially without an actual employer) and Enterprise Ireland will make you jump through alot of hoops for that money. Pretty great idea tho'--Ireland needs programs like that to get the economy back on track.

<comment><USER7> _Getting a visa is not a trivial matter_

Remember Ireland is a member of the European Union, so any EU citizen can live & work in Ireland. If you parent or grandparent are Irish citizens/have an irish passport, then you can get Irish citizenship and live and work in Ireland forever.

<comment><USER8> Not any EU citizen <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300890>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is not a bribe, they are taking an equity stake.

"The maximum support available is €50,000 for a 10% ordinary equity stake in the start-up company. "

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok sorry, I changed €50k "bribe" to "deal".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Must be capable of creating 10 jobs in Ireland and realising sales of €1m within 3 to 4 years of starting up."

They are asking a fair bit, what do they do, kick you out of Ireland if your not quickly successful?

<comment><USER11> I would imagine that they expect your business plan and projections to be able to satisfy these criteria.

If you're already eligible to work in Ireland (a requirement of the grant), I'm pretty sure the Department of Enterprise doesn't have the power to deport people ;)

<comment><USER10> Pretty sure from what I read the American startup visa was tied to your business continuing to run. Thought this may be a similar type of thing, guess this into tied to visa requirements though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You might get a better deal in other countries but 12.5% corporate tax is hard to beat. Also the fact that just about every silicon valley heavyweight has significant operations (dev, marketing & support) in Ireland is an indicator something is being done right over there.

Cheap, regular flights from Dublin to just about anywhere in Europe make those trips to London, Paris, Amsterdam and Germany into just day trips. I found it was a pretty good hub.

<comment><USER13> If by right you mean tax evasion (technically avoidance) through <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_Arrangement>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For 50k they take 10% equity, valuing your startup at a tiny 500k, plus you have to leave the country. You give up a lot.

Why not just pitch to Dave McClure's 500Startups? You can get started with $10k for 1% equity, valuing your startup at $1M. More funding is possible, plus space, mentors, ...

<http://500startups.com/>

<comment><USER15> At ~$20k for ~6% equity, YC would seem to be an even smaller valuation than $500k, right?

<comment><USER16> I doubt that YC measures their investment based on valuation. Imagine the companies they invested that had just the idea formed. How do you valuate that? Even in a stable business, valuation is still a bunch of guesses, how much future cash flow the company will generate, what will the investor opportunity cost be in X years, etc...

I would think more of a bet instead of valuation when thinking of seed investment in a start-up. What I would say they do is standardize their bets, using their history and benchmarking theirs with other investors. YC's standard bet is around ~$20k for ~6% equity, that's all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As an Irish software engineer/wantrapreneur working in San Francisco here is my take on some of the comments around this article.

-Ireland is incredibly expensive for what you get, food/drink/eating out is on par or more expensive than San Francisco. The only thing thats cheaper is rent.

-Couple the previous point with the fact that Software Engineers in Ireland get paid roughly 1/3 of what they earn in the valley.

-Most good Software engineers leave the country so the ecosystem in Ireland is not so hot for finding top talent.

-Most big companies in Ireland do localization, sales/marketing, IT stuff. Very little real development is done there by big companies (i.e facebook/google/amazon).

-Infrastructure in Ireland is shit. Its a right pain in the ass to get decent broadband setup and the roads here are a joke.

If I wanted to do a lean startup in Europe I would incorporate in Ireland for the tax rate and setup shop somewhere sane like Berlin where rent and cost of living is cheap.

</comment><comment><USER18> I heard about it through this really good podcast, where a rep from the David Smith, Senor Vice President of Enterprise Ireland (and I believe is based in Silicon Alley) explains the stake they take and why. Very informative:

Blog Post on Startup Success Podcast:

[http://startupsuccesspodcast.com/2011/01/show-96-david- smith...](http://startupsuccesspodcast.com/2011/01/show-96-david-smith- enterprise-ireland/)

Direct Link to MP3:

<http://media.startupsuccesspodcast.com/StartupSuccess096.mp3>

You can still work in the US but you just have to have your company HQ etc in Ireland.

As I'm from Ireland myself, but live and work in NYC, I can attest to the talented developers and modern infrastructure in Ireland. Its not for everyone, but worth a look.

</comment><comment><USER19> My pal, Robert Shedd, took his company overseas to Ireland after participating in Philadelphia's DreamIt Ventures. He's written a tiny bit about the experience thus far: <http://blog.shedd.us/greetings-from-ireland%e2%80%a6/>

He's definitely someone who could tell you about the culture and ecosystem from a US background if you're considering applying to the program.

</comment><comment><USER20> This seems like a weird requirement:

"The first tranche will be released when the company provides confirmation of an additional investment of €5,000 in the company"

So you have to get approval not only from them, but also some other funding organization (and one that invests such a small amount). I wonder if self- funding counts.

<comment><USER21> I'm not pretending any inside knowledge but that looks like self-funding to me.

It's been fairly common for the loans and grants I've seen in the UK to require proof of a bit of self-provided capital before you can get the funds.

<comment><USER22> Agreed.

I read that to mean "when you produce a bank statement with €5,000 in the account, we will pay you the first half".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Jesus, deadline for applications is March 11th. Interesting though.

</comment><comment><USER24> Strange to find this on Hacker News, considering I was only discussing the EI programs with my entrepreneurship lecturer last week! The March 11th deadline may be a bit too close at this stage, but I'm always willing to plot and scheme with Irish hackers! I will shortly complete my business management degree, and as part of this I am consulting with a local online marketing/SEO firm. I've dabbled with learning programming to do my own startup, or maybe even starting my own marketing shop, but for the time being I have been lurking here for ages, absorbing all the business advice I can get my hands on.

If any Irish hackers want to have a chat, to let me know what you're working on, or need a business-head to compliment their hacking skills drop me a line (email in profile).

</comment><comment><USER25> To my knowledge, this is actually the second such fund being made available since late last year. I guess the first one was oversubscribed, which (I hope at least) augurs well. If you're in Ireland and you didn't hear about the first round or this round, they were certainly advertised in the Sunday Business Post newspaper (and I assume others), as well as online. Announcements appear to generally be posted here <http://bestconnected.enterprise-ireland.com/>

I have no association aside from being an interested observer, FWIW.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Must be capable of creating 10 jobs in Ireland and realising sales of €1m > within 3 to 4 years of starting up.

What actually happens if the startup fails to do this?

And, what is ordinary equity? As you can tell by that question, I'm a newbie when it comes to this. Any background reading recommendations would be appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER3> Might be of related interest: a recent podcast with David Smith of Enterprise Ireland. [http://startupsuccesspodcast.com/2011/01/show-96-david- smith...](http://startupsuccesspodcast.com/2011/01/show-96-david-smith- enterprise-ireland/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I guess a lot of Europe's investors are sweating bricks just thinking of the length of time it will take for Ireland to pay back the money. 50k for equity now, in exchange for having up-to 10 additional tax payers is a good deal.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There actually is a scene slowly building in dublin. Some encouraging stuff going on. Can read about the dublin web summit here... <http://www.dublinwebsummit.com/>

</comment><comment><USER28> For many who apply to YC, this isn't really an alternative.

 _"Please note applicants must be eligible to live and work in Ireland."_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> i'm in dublin, but ironically I'm looking for a US visa. Swap passports anyone? <\-- I'm JOKING!!!

<comment><USER29> Care to share why you're looking for a US visa? Your comment would certainly add value to the conversation (ie Why do you think the US is better for entrepreneurs than Ireland?)

<comment><USER30> I live in Ireland and am an Irish citizen (US citizen too, hoping to move to the US). There are several reasons I would think the US is better for entrepreneurs and startups than Ireland.

* The truly brilliant people tend to leave after high school, since there're no world class universities here (particularly for sciences).

* People seem, in my opinion, to get quite tunneled vision in terms of what they can achieve: they see Ireland as the boundary of their successes. People here tend to be unambitious.

* Labour laws in Ireland are very strict: once you hire someone, it's practically impossible to fire them.

* We are currently in a terrible economic situation, the country is bankrupt. 20 year old Irish companies have trouble getting credit, let alone startups.

* It's probably worth noting that Enterprise Ireland is generally considered quite incompetent in terms of deciding who to invest in and in general operation of their programs. Getting this grant would require, most likely, an absurd amount of hoop jumping.

* Dublin is also still a very expensive place to live.

 _That said, there're a lot of great things about Ireland (more specifically Dublin):_

* It's a very small (and very social!) place, building a network is not hard, everyone knows everyone.

* Dublin is a great place to live.

* Very low corporation tax (12.5%)

EDIT: Formatting

<comment><USER29> Very interesting thoughts. Thanks for sharing! Upvoted :-)

I wonder why would big corporations move there if labor laws are so strict there. Maybe they get "special" treatment in exchange for creating lots of jobs?

Also, if Dublin is so expensive, does it make sense to hire workers there who probably have to make more in exchange to get low corporate tax? Hmmm...

<comment><USER30> It's not as big a problem for the big companies like Google and IBM since they can afford to pay people off, they can also afford to have a more extensive hiring process in the first place.

Dublin is definitely not so expensive that it outweighs the benefit of a 12.5% corporation tax, which is more than twice less than most other EU countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> another bummer:

"Please note applicants must be eligible to live and work in Ireland."

<comment><USER7> Any of the EU half a billion people can live and work in Ireland.

<comment><USER8> Not anyone from EU. Bulgaria and Romania are excluded:

 _On 17 December 2008, the Government announced its decision that, from 1 January 2009, it would continue to restrict access to the Irish labour market for nationals of Bulgaria and Romania._ [1]

[1] <http://www.deti.ie/labour/workpermits/whoneedsapermit.htm>

<comment><USER32> Let's adjust the figures to suit your additional facts:

EU Population: 500 Million

EU Population eligible to live & work in Ireland: 470 Million

<comment><USER8> Do you think that a Bulgarian or a Romanian cares about these figures if he/she can't work in Ireland and thus can not apply to this program?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> just in from the dublin web summit and there seems to be 6-7 startup accelerators/incubators

the scene in dublin is coming on leaps and bounds very quickly</comment>


Ask HN: review my startup ironode.com (simple/automated security testing)  - <AUTHOR>

http://www.ironode.com
Hey guys, please checkout my MVP security testing app (ironode.com); it crawls your site for open web exploites (sql inject, xss, xsrf etc..). I've allocated 30 free accounts for HN users - I'll add more as we finish the scans for people.
Questions:

  1. Would you use this service?
  2. Would you pay for it?
 Any feedback is greatly appreciated!!
Thanks guys! <comment><USER2> Does it cover the vulnerabilities listed in OWASP Top 10 for 2010?

[http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Projec...](http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Project)

It would be useful if you can illustrate how IronNode can cover these vulnerabilities.

Why is it a must for new user sign up to be restricted to just that domain? Who are you targeting? Ok, if I have just one domain. But if I manage multiple domains for my clients, and it's not possible for me to setup email for those domains. I guess I can't use your service. I think Google Webmaster Tools took the right approach to allow users to add domain instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We'll add the google type confirmation in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It sounds a cool idea, and I'll be interested to see the results. I just signed up and received a confirmation link:

When I clicked it I got:

Resend confirmation instructions 1 error prohibited this user from being saved:

        * Confirmation token is invalid

Edit: I'm using Evolution for my email, when I looked at the HTML and copied the URL out and used that, it worked :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Thanks for the feedback! I'll take a look in evolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another method of confirmation (see what Google does with analytics/webmaster tools) would be great. I couldn't be bothered to make an email account for my website, even though most companies should have one..

</comment><comment><USER2> clickable: <http://www.ironode.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> It's automated, but we have to wait 5 days for it? That's a deal breaker for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's just for now. We're manually running the scans to monitor the results as they come in. After our beta, scan results will be viewable in less than a day.</comment></comment>


Introducing Prompt. Nice SSH for iOS. - <AUTHOR> http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/04/introducing-prompt-ssh-for-ios/ <comment><USER2> So, as a UNIX hacker, here's what I don't get about the iOS community. There is way too much excitement over the simplest things ever. Let's break down some of the copy for this app:

 _Prompt is a clean, crisp, and cheerful SSH client_

What does that mean? What does a clean ssh client do; not commit any protocol violations? What is crisp? When you bite into it, it's like a ripe apple? What does cheerful mean? Is the ssh client really happy that it can make a TCP connection to the intarwebs, especially for me?

What does this sentence mean to someone that wants to ssh from their phone?

 _it helps you when you need it, and stays out of your way when you don't_

So when I want to be sshing, I can run it, and when I don't want to be sshing, I don't have to run it? Splendid. It works like every other computer program ever made.

 _Perfect for system administrators, web developers, movie-style hackers ("Let me just TCP/IP into the UNIX port!"), or any person who needs to connect remotely and type some magic._

So I googled for "ssh client", found your page, and you're telling me who uses ssh clients. How would you get to this page without knowing what ssh is, and how would you know what ssh is without needing to use it?

Anyway, a lot of happy-sounding words for ... a program that decrypts text from the Internet and writes it to the screen.

<comment><USER3> > There is way too much excitement over the simplest things ever.

Simple things done well are among the most delightful discoveries I can make in my human existence.

Have you ever had a perfect omelet? I mean, perfect? Fluffy, nice balance of tasty fillings, not overdone? I have. Maybe twice. Each time, it was _wonderful_. Wonderful for the fact that with just five ingredients, it created subtle, delicious flavors and enjoyable textures. Wonderful for the discipline and focus necessary not to overcomplicate it with unneeded flourish.

It's so simple, compared to some of the more elaborate meals I've eaten. And that's what made it so special.

Another parallel is tools. Have you ever hefted a _really_ nice kitchen knife? Maybe one of those numbers where the blade and the shank are forged from a single piece of metal? Everything just swoops and melts together, and the blade feels like a comfortable extension of your arm. Just the right weight, perfect leverage, a tool that was agonized over by a craftsman desperate to make the best.

Simple, relative to a Swiss Army knife? Absolutely. And that's where its power comes from.

iOS has some things about it that reward simplicity and focus. It's really easy to make an overwrought, complex app on any platform, and iOS is no exception. With a lot of care and attention to detail, though, you can make something that's simple, not distracting, made from the barest components necessary and extremely good at solving a very specific problem with minimum fuss.

When that happens, it's so nice to see.

*nix rewards people who build their own stuff, which is fine, but the tradeoff in this is craftsmanship. It's easy enough to get system tools to the level of "good enough for you" without ever reaching good enough for everyone. That, I suspect, is the cultural difference you've detected here.

<comment><USER4> Wait, what?

ssh is _simple_.

I suspect that the typical person needing to SSH into a box is already someone who knows how to operate in UNIX. Otherwise, you're using the wrong protocol.

<comment><USER3> It's not clear to me what you're objecting to.

This isn't a conversation about the simplicity (or not) of the SSH protocol, but rather a conversation on why it's exciting when good, simple tools like Prompt are created.

<comment><USER5> You're making a category error against SSH with examples like knives, which have a lot of variation. Let's see you write as much about having used a "really nice chopstick" or typing an especially round period at the end of a sentence.

There's a paradox here where ssh is already a good, simple tool, so how do you improve on that? Make it easier to type on an iPad? I don't think that's going to happen, so let's take a step back: putty, SecureCRT? Those can certainly have some improvements to their interfaces made. So, we move from ssh client to SSH Application.

Now, we get to the meat: given that you can hook an iPad to one of those keyboard docks, does this make a compelling thin client? Anybody?

<comment><USER6> > Let's see you write as much about having used a "really nice chopstick"..

Even though I think you're splitting hairs (I think the omelette and knife examples work well) I can write about a really nice pair of chopsticks: the ones I'm using right now to eat my pasta for dinner. They're not fancy, I think I bought the 5 (pair) pack for less than $10. But the weight of the metal is just perfect. Not too heavy, not too light... just slightly heavier than a wooden disposable pair of chopsticks. It's a very rounded square shape with small grooves on the tapered end to give you enough purchase to grab pretty much anything while not getting in your way and being difficult to manipulate because of edges or overall slipperiness. There's nothing ornate about this pair, which makes it easy to clean and to pair with random sets of my modernist spoons and forks. Unlike the stereotypical huge plastic pair of chopsticks at Chinese restaurants, the heavy flat metal ones that fatigue my hand at Korean restaurants, and the wooden pair that splinters that comes with my takeout, this is perfect.

Okay, so I went there. But I'm not kidding, I really do mean it about these chopsticks.

> Make it easier to type on an iPad? I don't think that's going to happen

Really, that is the only thing I compare when I'm shopping for an iOS ssh client. Ease of typing all the keys I need in an ssh client makes all the world of difference on a screen as small as an iPhone, while it may not be as big of a deal on iPad. Plus, Prompt works out-of-the-box just fine with my bluetooth keyboard that I've seen, unlike iSSH and some other alternatives, so that's already made the $5 well worth it to me.

<comment><USER7> Metal chopsticks are an abomination, gives a awful metallic taste. Should be made of bamboo! And don't paint them please.

You see, chopsticks have much more variation than ssh, which is just a protocol. It reminds me of a highly ranked recent post about a so-called magic color highlighting theme. Then at the end of the comment one poor guy said: "I'm I the only one to happily stick to the default?". Come on, there are most serious things to discuss in the world, and on HN, than a slick ssh iPhone app, or a color theme. For instance, we could discuss the next ssh protocols, those that will allow to solve the "where is my file" problem (listed in pg's list of ideas, can't find it right now).

<comment><USER6> I would normally agree, but for whatever reason these chopsticks don't give off any metallic taste. They're quite odd now that I think about it, and fairly difficult to find. I buy similar sets of them by randomly finding the utensil section at asian supermarkets and weighing all the chopstick pairs by hand.

Good bamboo chopsticks are useful too, but finding the right weight/size combination is usually the difficult part for me. Part of what I think makes my metal chopsticks so awesome is that they're not too light or too heavy, and bamboo usually end up being on the lighter end. I have small tremors in my hands most days and a little extra weight makes all the difference in ease of use.

> Come on, there are most serious things to discuss in the world, and on HN, > than a slick ssh iPhone app, or a color theme.

Personally, I think discussions about usability and good design are worthwhile, even on HN. Your product or vision or what have you is not as good as it can be if you (or someone you work with) don't at least take those into consideration. Why do I care that an iOS ssh client is polished on top of technically 'just working'? It saves me time and effort I can then put into my own work, at the least. And maybe that work could be something to improve on ssh ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd been using touchterm for a while, and had experimented with other iOS ssh clients. They... worked, but the experience always felt a bit clunky.

I've been using prompt for a day now, and so far it feels better than the others. The app design feels really clean, the method of expanding the keyboard to handle modifier keys and frequently-used non-alpha keys works well without grabbing too much screen real estate (this is clearly visible in the screen shots for what it's worth).

Finally, the terminal emulation has been flawless for me so far. Emacs runs well (and is quite usable with Prompt's modifier key placement, unlike in other iOS ssh clients I'd tried; remember, folks, ESC is Meta, Meta is ESC). touchTerm had some screen lag/partial refresh issues for me with Emacs -- these may have been fixed in later versions, though, as I gave up at some point.

In short, I like it.

obDisclaimer: I don't know the developers. I don't have a dog in this fight. I do like the app. I'm not the only one who likes it though -- see the daringfireball take here:

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/04/14/prompt>

<comment><USER9> I just bought it. It is slow and unresponsive to me- I have to wait for the screen to catch up with my typing. I'm on an iPhone4- so it's not like I'm typing fast. Nice, clean design though.

<comment><USER10> Been lurking on HN for a while, finally decided to comment for once.

Same experience on a 3gs (I've been waiting for the white 4, not sure why anymore), painfully slow to do anything, including just closing a connection. I just gave up waiting and let tcp time it out.

The biggest killer of being able to use it was readline support is horrid. First thing I did was login and escape-/ + ssh + n a few times and half the screen turned into some amalgamation of things that matched ssh. I didn't try emacs readline support but expect its about the same.

Interface is spot on, but it has a long ways to go before it can do basic terminal work. iSSH is still going to be on my homescreen for a while it looks like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> iSSH is still better. Especially on an iPad, and most definitely if you use a bluetooth keyboard once in a while [1]

Furthermore, I don't understand how someone could even make the remark that an _ssh_ client reminds them of linux, and mean it negatively. :-) _I_ certainly don't want an the equivalent IOS SSH client to the one Apple makes for OSX -- Terminal is rather shitty.

[1] BT keyboards on ipads don't support CTRL as a modifier for all keys, you have to create a workaround. So far, iSSH is the only app I've seen that has done it (By using option and remapping).

EDIT: Ga! Read the wrong tab.. was responding to Prompt and Grubers comments on it (re: linux), but this link points to the actual app. Just clearing that up... sorry.

<comment><USER12> As a happy user of Terminal, what's wrong with it? It's fast, it's simple, it supports multiple colour profiles, it can be customised like any other shell... What more do you want out of your terminals?

<comment><USER11> To choose a few obvious gaffes:

\- no xterm mouse support (no, option-click is not the same)

\- the utterly stupid default for PageUp/PageDown/Home/End, which is correct for OSX UI, but utterly wrong for terminals.

Less obvious (relavent to UI):

\- No notification support

\- No window splitting (yes, screen works, but, re: changing panes, see xterm mouse, above)

\- inability to launch a particular named window group from the command line (if this _is_ possible, please tell me how! :-))

...And much, much more! [1]

[1] :-) And I guess that's about it for the things that bugged me compared to, you know, the _actual_ xterm.

<comment><USER13> I've got Home/Down working correctly in my Terminal.app, you've got to go into Preferences->Settings->Keyboard, then scroll down to find the "home" key, click "Edit", and set the action as "send string to shell", and enter "\001" as the string. Repeat for "end", using "\005" as the string.

Caveat - this is how my work laptop is setup, my personal one is set to "\033[H" and "\033[F" for home/end respectively, but it works as well and I don't remember how I set it up. I'm remembering having some issues with the prefs wanting to escape the backslashes so "\003[H" ended up as "\\\003[H" or something like that...

For PageUp/PageDown I find that applying the shift key with them does the trick (at least in applications like vim/less). However you can probably apply a similar trick for them in the prefs.

The Control key (jumping word boundaries) works sometimes for me, sometimes not, haven't tracked that one down yet.

edit: by "correctly" for home/end I mean jumping to the beginning/end of a line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone got any ideas on getting a .pem key from EC2 into this? I got my non- EC2 id_rsa into it just fine, but .pems seem to disappear.

<comment><USER15> You can convert the .pem by doing something like:

openssl rsa -in test.pem > test.rsa

<comment><USER14> Running that on my EC2 .pem yields this:

unable to load Private Key 56049:error:0906D06C:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line:/SourceCache/OpenSSL098/OpenSSL098-35/src/crypto/pem/pem_lib.c:650:Expecting: ANY PRIVATE KEY

<comment><USER15> Just checked the .pem I was given (by a person, not by Amazon) - looks like it was an RSA format key all along. I'm a little confused - it's possible I'm an idiot.

I'll check to make sure I'm an idiot by seeing what I can generate from Amazon itself.

<comment><USER16> I've noticed the same thing. AWS keys appear to actually be RSA keys, with a .pem extension.

<comment><USER17> They still don't seem to work with the app though. I've tried multiple approaches and it keeps claiming the key was rejected by the server. The ssh log only shows:

        Apr 14 21:20:51 ip---- sshd[31560]: Received disconnect from </comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>---: 11: Normal Shutdown. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone downloaded this? Anyone have a sense of how it compares to any other ssh clients?

I was super excited when I downloaded TouchTerm, but it was just so difficult to do anything with it on my iPhone that I gave up, despite thinking it was very clever. The Prompt screenshots at least look a lot cleaner than TouchTerm's, but I don't want to go through another fit of excitement only to never actually use it.

<comment><USER19> I haven't tried out many other ssh clients, but I just bought prompt. I'm really digging the little bar above the keyboard that adds the most commonly used keys like esc, ctrl, tab, @, arrow keys. It makes my server admin jobs a lot easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Slightly off-topic I couldn't find a free SSH Ios app.

not that 4-5$ is a big deal, but there are myriad of ssh clients for free on android, no doubt due to different clientele, and different developer sentiments.

<comment><USER21> And the well-researched statistics on Android users being less likely to purchase apps.

<comment><USER22> Or mostly because all the good SSH clients are open source software, and were created before the Android Market had support for buying applications, so they have just remained free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hey @panic - I love the shiny new products, but could you pretty please update Coda a bit? It used to be my favorite editor, but the lack of git is killing me!

<comment><USER24> I thought git integration into Coda was an absolute must but after using Git Tower, command line (inevitable) and really understanding how git works (<http://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf>) I've surprised myself in that I don't see git integration as important any more.

More interested in code folding. Now THAT would be sweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm presently using iSSH, which supports port tunnels (SSH Port Forwarding as PuTTY calls it).

Could anyone enlighten me as to whether or not it supports SSH port forwarding and how well that works? iSSH works pretty well, but it pops up regularly warning that it's going to disconnect due to inactivity (despite the fact that I'm actively using the port tunnel to RDP into something).

</comment><comment><USER26> It's definitely one of the prettier SSH apps, but it faces the same barrier I've seen with other SSH apps - typing is too slow! It will sometimes be a full 2 seconds between when i finish a word and it starts appearing on the screen.

Has anyone else noticed this or found one that doesn't do this? I'm doing this on iPhone, maybe the iPad is better, but I don't see any reason why.

<comment><USER22> I assume the cause of this is the high latency in your cell phone's data connection. I can eliminate most of the latency of using ConnectBot on my Android phone just by being connected to Wifi instead of HSPA.

<comment><USER2> readline should really emit some character when it enters and leaves line- editing mode, so the line-editing can happen on the client side. It's not annoying to wait 200ms after you've finished your command and are waiting for the output. It is annoying to wait 200ms for your backspace to take effect.

<comment><USER27> Welcome to dialup, average latency 220 ms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The problem with ssh on iOS and then especially iPhone is the size of the screen. When I'm eg. connect to irssi I can maybe see one line of previous conversations.

And regarding 'Prompt', I dont see how Panic has made something 'new' here. There are several ssh clients with favorites, shortcuts and nice designs. Some are even free.

<comment><USER14> The SSH clients I've used on iOS - iTerm, iSSH - have been decent but unpolished. This one feels a lot more usable thus far.

<comment><USER29> Agree, but iSSH is also crammed with helpful features like public key authentication. Prompt is going to have to match those to become a favorite of the hacker crowd.

<comment><USER14> Prompt does have public key authentication.

<comment><USER29> It wasn't clear to me how fully supported this is. Lots of people have had issues with this, see the comments: [http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/04/introducing-prompt-ssh- for...](http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/04/introducing-prompt-ssh-for-ios/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> ITT: pedantry over the words "clean, crisp, and cheerful."

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone else have a major problem with the idea of using a closed-source SSH client? Even if it is App Store reviewed, I just can't bring myself to type production passwords into such a thing.

For this reason, and because I'd also like an on-the-go SSH client setup that works on other devices, it would be great to see a browser based terminal emulator and pty muxer like ajaxterm [1] really take off. It's almost there, but currently not so usable in mobile Safari.

<https://github.com/nats/ajaxterm>

<comment><USER32> Even in your preferred case, you're typing your passwords into a closed source browser on a closed source OS. You have to trust someone at some point.

Panic also seems to be a quite reputable company. They've been in the Mac software business for a long time.

<comment><USER31> > Even in your preferred case, you're typing your passwords into a closed > source browser on a closed source OS.

One could argue that iOS / Mobile Safari are both under incomparably more pressure to remain secure compared to any individual app, but you're totally right on a fundamental level. The truly paranoid should demand openness at all layers.

> You have to trust someone at some point.

Whole 'nother debate. ;)

> Panic also seems to be a quite reputable company. They've been in the Mac > software business for a long time.

No doubt about that. I wasn't insinuating anything about their intentions (this didn't even occur to me until your comment). Just that an SSH client is a pretty complex piece of software, and there are plenty of ways to make mistakes. We've come a long way since the days of telnet and scrutiny / skepticism has played a big part in that.

<comment><USER33> Panic has had SFTP built into Transmit since 1998, and a full SSH terminal in Coda since 2007. So Prompt did not come out of nowhere, they have quite a bit of experience in this problem space.

Still if you are in an industry that demands careful vetting of security, I certainly agree one should not jump on a new SSH client right away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was just looking for a simple SSH client for the iPhone today, and was disappointed that all the apps cost a few pretty pennies. Any recommendations on the SSH client(s) that will get me the best bang for my buck?

EDIT: I caved and just bought Prompt. It is indeed pretty slick, though I don't have other iOS SSH clients to compare it to. There does appear to be some bugs: I can't seem to "disconnect" from a session, even though it's already hung. The little "eject" icon in the servers list doesn't seem to work.

</comment><comment><USER35> A bit off topic but anyone know how they do the fancy header with the pushpin notes swaying forward as you hover over them?

<comment><USER36> A quick look @ the source looks like CSS3 transitions, specifically webkit CSS3 transitions.

<comment><USER35> ah good call, I was poking around the js

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How is this different/better then iSSH?

</comment><comment><USER38> I look forward to giving this a shot. I have been used to the Terminal application on my iPhone, even with the gestures, and it was never any fun to work with. I saw that you implemented arrows on the keyboard, and I was in. Thank you.

I believe this is my first Tier 5 purchase, I'm such a bum.

</comment><comment><USER39> Thanks for the advertisement. Would be nice to have a free ssh client for ipad.

</comment><comment><USER40> Has anyone tried GNU Screen on this yet (before I plunk down the $5)? Thanks.

<comment><USER41> Works fine.

<comment><USER40> Nope. It did not.

<comment><USER42> Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER43> I had a hard time trying to use irssi inside screen. On each new line it would refresh some 10-15 times and usually clutter most of the bottom half of the screen. Definitely still needs work. With these problems fixed, it might well become the finest iOS SSH app there is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I type "exit" and the app _crashes_. I think this is a feature.

</comment><comment><USER45> Does this have 256 color support? Anyone know of an iOS Terminal with 256 color support? Too much to ask for in a terminal? Heh.

<comment><USER8> Haven't checked which color escapes (16 or 256) it actually supports, but it does do the xterm-color color escapes just fine. GNUS looks really nice, for instance. :-)

<comment><USER46> The correct terminfo for 256 colours is xterm-256color, not xterm-color (which is obsolete). Simply the 'xterm' terminfo is sufficient to indicate 16 colour support these days.

<comment><USER8> That's good advice on ncurses-based systems.

This is Solaris 10 (SysV curses, with a hand-imported xterm-color terminfo entry). :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So I bought this, didn't much care for it, anyone care to tell me how to kill a connection?

<comment><USER48> Type exit.

...or, hit the globe icon which takes you to the connections screen, and tap the eject icon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if this would get so upvoted if it was free.

</comment><comment><USER50> This looks like spam to me.

<comment><USER51> There's a flag for that™</comment></comment>


Lhogho: The Real Logo Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was studying Logo as it is in the NetLogo Agent-Based modeling program environment when I came upon Lhogho.

You have to click the 'logo' to enter the site. I was stuck on the landing page for some seconds.

It appears to be last updated 2012-10-15, but the documentation is great, it runs on Linux and Windows, and shows how you can turn it into a scripting tool from the Windows or Linux terminal. It makes standalone executables too.

Like Forth, you have the ability to crash your machine with low-level access. The whole download is under 1MB, and it has docs, examples, and worked out of the box on my Win 8 and 10 machines. Trying Linux tonight.

[Edit] One of the team, Pavel Boytchev also created Mecho, for creating "mecholets" animated 3d mechanisms, but I think it is Windows only. [1]

[1] [http://pavel.it.fmi.uni- sofia.bg/projects/mecho/mecho.php?la...](http://pavel.it.fmi.uni- sofia.bg/projects/mecho/mecho.php?lang=en)

<comment><USER2> I found NetLogo waaaaay too complicated for when I just wanted to draw spirographs.

The last time I looked at Logo it came on floppies for Mac OS 8.

[http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/](http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/) looks more like what I remember.

<comment><AUTHOR> NetLogo is not for drawing spirographs, but ABM - Agent-Based Modeling. I use it to quickly put together models of things like building evacuations. It is really easy to knock together a GUI and show people who are less technical the results of flow, exit number and widths, number of people, etc...

Lhogho is a compiled Logo, and I have been having fun just creating little programs in Logo, since I have not done more in Logo before other than some turtle graphics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I always love seeing implementations of Logo that I haven't run across yet. Logo was my introduction to coding, back when I was in third grade in the mid-90s.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/details.html](http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/details.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sources: [https://sourceforge.net/projects/lhogho/files/lhogho/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/lhogho/files/lhogho/)</comment>


Verizon to offer daily deals based on tracking your phone data - <AUTHOR> http://news.verizonwireless.com/news/2012/12/verizon-selects.html see GigaOm to learn more about this phone-tracking twist: http://gigaom.com/mobile/att-verizon-offer-daily-deals-with-a-phone-tracking-twist/ <comment><AUTHOR> GigaOM has a story about this phone-tracking twist: [http://gigaom.com/mobile/att-verizon-offer-daily-deals- with-...](http://gigaom.com/mobile/att-verizon-offer-daily-deals-with-a-phone- tracking-twist/)</comment>