Amazon's Alexa is the new Vaudeville - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@loganhill33/amazon-s-echo-is-the-new-vaudeville-9fd11e80a99#.x1rce5vm4 <comment><USER2> > "Dot, a hockey-puckish satellite, extends the range of an Echo or Tap"

No. The Dot is standalone, and is not a range-extender. I think Amazon's tactic of allowing only those people who already own an Alexa device has backfired, if an otherwise well researched article misrepresents this basic fact.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure Echo is great if you live in the USA.

<comment><USER4> I'll echo that gripe. Amazon have hobbled their ecosystem by the bizarre design decision of mandatory configuration by US zip code. This effectively excludes all non-American users, and makes the barriers for overseas developers prohibitively high.

Since I am in Australia, my Echo is good only for parlour tricks and streaming audio: without an accurate time and place, even simple things like checking weather are impossible. Forget about booking a cab, or home automation. So I have not tried to develop for the platform, because I do not develop things I cannot test.

Perhaps Amazon were afraid of diluting their product focus. But failure to think globally means your product cannot be a world leader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having Alexa for almost a year now. My daily routine:

Evening -> "Alexa, set the alarm @9:30"

Morning -> "Alexa, stop"

<comment><USER6> Uhm, it has no memory?

<comment><USER7> They added repeating alarms a couple weeks ago. e.g. "Alexa, set alarm for six a m every day"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's not going to get confusing at all! [http://www.alexa.com/](http://www.alexa.com/)

<comment><USER9> Good thing Amazon owns both

<comment><USER10> "Now you can talk to your website analytics software?" – "No, the other Alexa thing, which nobody has a clue what it is."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find it interesting that the author completely looks over Cortana when listing the various voice assistants. Cortana is perhaps the most widespread voice assistant, it being on almost every windows pc.

<comment><USER12> > it being on almost every windows pc

Every PC with Windows 10. I'm not sure how many there are, but it may not be most widespread or most used.

<comment><USER13> Windows 10 is probably on roughly 14%-15% of Windows PCs, which is some way short of "every".

According to Microsoft, more than 270 million devices run Windows 10. However, Cortana voice isn't supported in all countries, and many people have turned "her" off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought the subheader was a sarcastic dig. Playing music is virtually the only thing Alexa seems capable of doing, and even then only semi-reliably.

<comment><USER15> You obviously don't have one, and if you do, you've horribly wasted your money. Even on day one it launched with more use than that.

I can set or check my thermostat, control any light or group of lights in my house, get an Uber to pick me up, have the morning news headlines read to me while I'm making breakfast, check traffic on my way out the door, add notes to my to-do list as they cross my mind, and add things to my shopping list with my face still in the refrigerator.

Those are all things that come out of the box with no custom code. With the additional skills I've personally written I have it tell me releases and showtimes at my nearest theater, I can ask if the garage door is open or closed, and a few other half cocked ideas.

The Alexa skills kit is quite easy to get your head wrapped around and the limit really is your imagination.

<comment><USER16> > control any light or group of lights in my house

Alexa has nothing to do with that. The hard/expensive part is making all the lights in your house accessible via remote control.

<comment><USER17> From the user pov, that's just engineering.

Users want stuff to work. They don't care about the engineering behind it. In fact they want to see as little engineering (friction) as possible.

Alexa is the part that makes the engineering fun and useful. And it's _much_ harder to build a system like Alexa than it is to build a 433MHz dimmer system for your lights.

Alexa is actually the new Windows. MS, Apple, and Google are following not leading now, and they should all be worried Amazon got a successful and popular consumer hardware product into this space first.

<comment><USER16> > Alexa is actually the new Windows.

That's one of the bolder and inherently unprovable statements I've heard in quite a while.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Space Frack, a fracking game in space - <AUTHOR> http://guscost.github.io/

<comment><USER2> How come I lose when the two robots are in contact? Or, for that matters, when a person walks to me when I'm drilling, I get the PR backlash?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) The other rovers have shotguns.

2) Yep, that's totally unfair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does not work, I get no resources when I drill to the white spot. I can kill the enemy, but that I all I can do in the game.

<comment><USER4> It was confusing for me as well. Press the spacebar to send out a shockwave. That shockwave will reveal the resources in yellow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you have to use a shockwave to break open the resources. I'll update the instructions.</comment></comment></comment>


Vizor: Create and Share VR Content on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://vizor.io/ <comment><USER2> Jaakko from Vizor here. Some more info (and a gaze-clicking tutorial) also in this talk from WebVR meetup at Mozilla - [https://air.mozilla.org/sf-webvr- meetup-building-the-vr-meta...](https://air.mozilla.org/sf-webvr-meetup- building-the-vr-metaverse/), and our GitHub is at [http://github.com/vizorvr](http://github.com/vizorvr) (it's open source with MIT license)

<comment><USER3> Hi Jaako! Very nice editor! I'm bhouston from the ThreeJS project as well as the guy behind the [http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io) online editor. We should figure out a way that one can use Vizor and Clara.io together, especially a way to access Clara.io's large library of models: [https://clara.io/library](https://clara.io/library) :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! That sounds good, let's do that. Drop me a line at jaakko at vizor dot io?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a YouTube video presenting this project: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8ZnWT- ydqg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8ZnWT-ydqg)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, looks great! Beautiful editor.

How are creations viewed? Is there any kind of export, or is it always within a Vizor viewer?

<comment><USER2> exporting to zip and embedding on the web will come later, the way to embed now is to mimic what the player page does (copy the player-min.js, the canvas tag and do some setup in JS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Full support to Vizor! Can't wait to have it working with Beloola!

</comment><comment><USER7> this is pretty amazing web editor.</comment>


Ask HN: Internet controlled padlock. - <AUTHOR>

Does anybody know of a padlock that can be controlled remotely via the internet? I'm not talking about the front door to my house, but a padlock (the type you would use to lock a chain around a gate). I have had a look around but can't seem to find anything. I am looking for a padlock with a keypad that you can assign different codes to different people for.
Ideally there would be something like lockitron (https://lockitron.com/) but for a padlock.
If you know of a padlock that can open via a swipe card, that could work also.
If anybody knows anything out there, I would love to hear about it.
Thanks!
Clark <comment><USER2> Something like this?

<http://www.cyberlock.com/cyberlock_cylinders.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> They look good. Thanks for the link.

I'd be interested to see if there were any that you can lock and unlock remotely</comment></comment>


Why I'm not happy about IE9 - <AUTHOR> http://stefanp.tumblr.com/post/1131008920/not-happy-about-ie9

<comment><USER2> There are many things I dislike in this article.

The first thing is this primal "everything microsoft does is evil" reaction. The author tries to rationalize, but in the end it's just "well IE9 is bad because it can be good for Microsoft".

The use of fallacies such as "most of them are probably Microsoft fan boys" is also quite irritating. People disagree with you? Fanboys! Blinds! Fools! Heretics!

Then, the article ends with the strange argument "IE9 should be cross platform". Should Microsoft port all their clients to other plaftorms? The goal with IE9 is to provide Windows with a as good as possible browser.

Yes Microsoft did play the embrace and extend game and we should thank them, because frankly, IE6 introduced a lot of useful features back then. The world changed and I don't think such approach would make sense now.

The real thing to be angry about is when they decided to stop development on IE.

<comment><USER3> I would fully expect a higher percentage of "fanboys" in the population of IE9 users, given simply that IE9 is just a beta. The crowd is basically limited to technophiles running Windows. Not that this is the same as "fanboy", but I would expect a significant correlation.

And you don't have to believe MS is evil to know that they are still pulling these Windows power-grabs. Windows promised Mac compatibility with Silverlight, only to yank our PowerPC support in v 2.0 just a year later (leaving ~half of Mac users in the cold).

I don't think MS is any more "evil" than any other tech company (just worse at PR maybe), but until they demonstrate they've changed their ways, you can't blame people for expecting them to still be up to their old games.

<comment><USER4> >Windows promised Mac compatibility with Silverlight, only to yank our PowerPC support in v 2.0 just a year later (leaving ~half of Mac users in the cold).

The writing was on the wall.

Apple stopped supporting PowerPC six months later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who benefits from IE9 being available for other platforms?

Not users. What would the ability to run IE9 add to the Linux or Mac desktop? Another web browser? Do we really need one?

Not Microsoft, who would have to invest massive amounts of effort into porting it, and large parts of the Windows codebase too.

Honestly, I wonder if the author of this article was deliberately trying to think of something to criticise about IE9, and this was the best he could do.

For non-web developers who use non-Windows operating systems, IE9 is an irrelevance. For web developers who use any operating system, IE9 has to be a good thing, because it means more browsers out there that are closer to the standards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey ! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.

I'm sad that you think I was trying to come up with something - I just wrote about this strange (but honnest !) feeling I got, as people talking in nice terms about IE hasn't happenned in a while.

In fact I don't think I'm criticizing IE itself at all.

Perhaps I could re-phrase my point more simply: I don't think IE 9's standards support means "the web wins" in the long run, since IE is still tied to Windows for strategic reasons.

You're of course right that it's a good thing for web devs right now, though.

<comment><USER6> OK, but you still never really answered the question. What's the benefit of having IE available to other platforms? How does say, a Mac user, benefit from having IE9 available for download to them over Safari?

<comment><USER3> Simple enough isn't it?

They don't benefit _now_ from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.

However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do this. Not because they're evil, but just because _why bother_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really silly article - I can't believe this made front page on HN. How many Linux users would use Internet Explorer? How many Mac users would use Internet Explorer 9? Probably not many, almost certainly not enough to justify the cost in time and dollars to Microsoft, and assuredly not the author of this post, who seems to just need to find something to pick on Microsoft about. I thought _those_ types died out long ago. I'm neither an MS/Mac or Linux fanboy. As a web developer, I've used Windows & Linux professionally, and developed sites to work on PC, Mac, and Linux browsers (as many of us have), and IMO, we don't need more OS/browser combinations to contend with; instead we need the browser/OS combinations that we do have to behave in a standards compliant manner across those OS/browser combinations. IE9 is a strong step in that direction for Microsoft.

<comment><USER8> I know for me not having to boot up VirtualBox to test that everything works fine in IE would be a boon not a problem. But yeah I'm not seeing where it really benefits MS here at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> IE for other platforms? No Please. There are at least a few niche mac/linux websites which you can build without worrying about cross-browser issues. You introduce IE and the whole echo-system lags behind.

Further, there may be reasons why IE is not so portable to other platforms. Considering the fact that IE9 is not currently (and probably will never be) available for even Windows XP, I don't think that a cross-platform version is a realistic expectation.

IIRC, IE is an integral part of the Windows OS (for whatever business/architectural reasons) and this means that producing a Linux/Mac version may be more work that you think it is.

</comment><comment><USER10> The core argument is that IE9 is so good that it might make people like Windows and stop using Linux, and that's bad because obviously MS will abuse its new found web browsers market share.

By that argument, with IE9 making web developers lives happy, and much more importantly, making users' lives happy with a decent default browser on the most popular OS are bad things.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why do Microsoft benefit from having a good browser? This article says the only reason is to protect Window's market share and that will inevitably lead to MS doing something evil with it's OS market share.

Two things occur to me: 1\. Windows still has a dominant market share, if they were going to do evil I don't see what's stopping them 2\. Having a good browser might protect their browser market share but I'm not convinced it protects their OS market share. Maybe if IE was way way better than anything else it would stop people going to Mac OS, but it isn't and there are plenty of other more significant barriers to changing your OS.

I think it's more plausible that their investing in browsers because they want to help their online services market share, and having that search box default to Bing on 50% of PCs is hugely valuable.

<comment><USER12> Agree with the above and add in (3) Being known for bad browsers is detrimental to sales of other products

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was under the impression that Microsoft is focusing on standards and web experience now because the last time it used a browser for strategic positioning with the operating systems market it got vilified or sued by basically every country with electricity?

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the author is forgetting that IE used to run on Mac OS a long time ago. Before Safari came out, or was any good, on MacOS you had the choice of either Netscape, IE5, or Opera, and honestly, IE5 was the best of the bunch at the time.

</comment><comment><USER15> It sounds like a conspiracy theory - make IE standards complaint -> get the market share -> introduce new nonstandard features.

PS Safari runs on linux only under Wine as far as I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm conspiracy theory... Nope, Microsoft is a for-profit company with a huge platform that might be slipping into irrelevance.

They're playing the cards they have at any given time - when it means supporting standards, they do that. And when they're totally dominant, they tend to set the standards.

I'm not even suggesting it might be intentional - the IE team and the MS top management don't necessarily have the same long-term goals is all.

Maybe the IE team would even love to go cross platform and compete _as a browser_ and not as a part of a larger platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The reason to be unhappy about IE9 is that it won't run on XP. That means it is essentially meaningless for 90% of the web developers on the planet for all practical purposes.

<comment><USER3> Just because it's meaningless the day it hits the shelves doesn't mean it will be meaningless forever. As the XP users are slowly forced to upgrade, the market will lose IE6/7 users and gain IE9+ users. It's not a license to ignore IE7 right away, but it's still _progress_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Back in IE6's day browsers were on the desktop, and that's about it. Now that browsers run on a whole host of devices, dominating the desktop browser market isn't the whole ballgame.

It feels unlikely that anyone will ever dominate the browser market like that again.</comment>


Show HN: Cost of a 51% Attack on Popular Cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.crypto51.app <comment><AUTHOR> After the multimillion dollar Bitcoin Gold 51% attack a few weeks ago, I was curious what an attack like this costs against other currencies. I calculated the cost of renting hashing power from NiceHash to complete an attack.

I found it surprising that it is possible to rent enough hashing power for many of the smaller currencies, which makes me question the use of PoW for smaller coins.

Please note that the attack costs do not include the money you earn in the form of block rewards, so in many cases the costs will actually be substantially lower.

<comment><USER2> Nice work. Its really important to consider this for those buying/holding crypto currency. Consider all coins using the same function to be the same family and the one with the most work and power to be the most valid. So there are sha256 coins, scrypt coins, equihash coins, etc. In the case of sha256 the most immune to attack is bitcoin. Everything else is massively vulnerable. In the case of scrypt, it's litecoin. Everything else you should not hold because it can be swamped by the hashing power mining litecoin atm. So on.

This is a little different from how people have been told to think about it before which is just focusing on the blockchain itself rather than the mining power behind any given variation/fork/whatever of block chain.

Ps. And that probably should be taken a step further. If you have families of coins that are all GPU mined, then you need to consider the tota GPUs mining them and the hashing power of those GPUs and the ability for them to switch functions. Now GPUs are a blip on ASICs so for the predominantly asic mined coins this doesn't matter.

<comment><USER3> Just want to note that there's no risk in holding a token due to 51% attacks (except for the external issues such as loss of value and hard fork proposals). No one can spend your assets, it's just another transaction may double spend (so you could lose incoming tokens).

<comment><USER4> Such attacks may lower the value of your tokens by undermining the trust in the currency though.

<comment><USER5> "except for the external issues such as loss of value"

that was literally stated

<comment><USER6> Literally stated, but sort of missing the point.

Paraphrased: there's no risk, except that you lose all of your money (because your coins are now worthless).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The elephant in the room is that with the exception of Ethereum, all GPU-mined coins can relatively easily be "51%-attacked" by a small fraction of GPU miners.

There are ~10 million GPUs mining cryptocurrencies in the world today. Because the majority of them mine Ethereum (5-10 million are needed to generate 250 TH/s), it means the other coins can easily be overpowered and attacked if a small fraction of GPU miners decided to do so. For example look at Monero: 400 MH/s of CryptoNightV7 hashrate means there are 400k-800k GPUs behind it, therefore only 4-8% of the pre-existing worldwide GPU mining capacity is needed to attack it.

In a way we could say Monero is vulnerable to a "4-8% attack!"

The best way to defend a coin from this scenario is for it to implement a unique PoW algorithm that is very ASIC-friendly so that GPU miners couldn't overpower it. Of course the same attack scenario would exist if there is a large pre-existing installed based of this ASIC, so the PoW algorithm must be unique. For example Bitcoin Cash could currently be attacked by 10% of Bitcoin miners as they are both mined by the same SHA-256 ASICs.

The irony is that the misguided trend to try to be "ASIC-resistant" is actually worsening the value proposition of all these GPU-mined coins as it makes them _more_ vulnerable to the very real possibility of 51% attacks...

<comment><USER8> Having a unique ASIC algo would raise the problem of the traditional 51% attack though.

Whichever fab produced it would have a huge hardware advantage in mining. They would mine themselves and just use 51% of their physical units (versus renting on a time-slot market) to do the attack.

<comment><USER9> Better to have one person who can attack you than to have 25.

<comment><USER10> This point doesn't seem to make sense. If you have 25 potential attackers, then for there to be an actual 51% attack, more than half of them (13/25) would have to band together to actually reach 51%. Unless the assumption is that the 25 parties buy chips and sit on them indefinitely without contributing to the network hash rate.

<comment><USER11> I'd guess they mean "better to have one potential attacker because of the centralization that mining with a unique ASIC would tend to cause, than to have 25 potential attackers because you're vulnerable to an attack by 1/25 of worldwide GPU power (which is normally used for other coins but could be briefly repurposed)".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a totally misleading calculation for the largest currencies. It's literally quoting the spot price for what's available on NiceHash and then dividing by the fraction you'd have of the total hash rate.

In reality, as you continued buying up hashing power, the price of the remaining hashing power would go up precipitously. This is basic supply and demand.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is why I included the NiceHash % for each coin. NiceHash offers fixed price contracts, typically for ~30% of their supply that you can lock in for up to 24 hours.

It's definitely a lot less do-able for the larger currencies - I still think PoW is a good option for them honestly. This was more to show that 51% attack risk is problematic for smaller coins, and I'd love to hear a discussion on the best way to fix this.

<comment><USER13> > I'd love to hear a discussion on the best way to fix this.

Proof of stake (still problematic for very small cap) or proof of ID (my favorite) using something like the e-estonia crypto ID system. You can prove every miner is a unique person, award them coins on a deterministic pseudo- random order.

<comment><USER14> If you're going to use proof of ID, doesn't that kind of remove any need for a blockchain? How do you suppose you can have a censorship resistant currency if all a bad state actor has to do is punish anyone who mines a transaction they don't like.

I like crypto, but the greatest danger of it seems to be the potential for economic enslavement(we don't like you, therefore you can't buy bread anymore) through censorship and oppression.

<comment><USER13> Centralized government only provide means for a person to ID themselves, possibly through pseudonymous means.

If you are worried about targeted censorship, I seem to recall from the first days of BTC that there are ways to "shuffle" IDs: participate in a pool P, get a new ID that is untraceable to the original one but that is traceable to pool P and offers the guarantee that there are no duplicates.

But note that no cryptocurrency is "censorship-resistant" (I am of the opinion that financial transactions are not free speech, so calling it censorship is not the appropriate word and confuses issues). BTC can be (and has, in China) be forbidden. Forbid mining, jail people who do it. Easy in a country that bans also VPNs and Tor.

BTC is only as strong as Tor is and Tor is dependent on the governmental goodwill to let people use strong crypto. Keep in mind that until 2000 US companies were banned from exporting crypto tools that the NSA could not break [1] and even to this date, restrictions exist for some material and countries. USA is just one executive order away from making Tor, VPNs, and thus, anonymous BTC mining, illegal.

And I think that many countries will ban BTC. China is more energy-constrained than most of us, but the energy needs of the BTC netword is gargantuan. I think they have a year to solve that issue (I think they will use proof-of- stake) before states starts pulling the plug.

And always remember that as cool as crypto is as a tech, it does not exist in the vacuum. While it allows to navigate against an incompetent but permissive state, it does not fare well against a competent hostile one.

A part of the problem of maintaining cryptocurrencies (or anonymous networks) is political, not just technical. I too, as a geek, love the prospect of being able to solve political problems with technical solutions, but it only works up to a certain point.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doing a 51% attack on a major coin, and actually profiting from it, is much more complicated than this chart implies. Here are some of the problems you'll run into:

1\. NiceHash doesn't have anything like the hashpower you need to attack a major coin such as BTC or ETH. The chart admits that NiceHash has only 2% of the capacity you need to accomplish this on Bitcoin. You'll need to start buying ASIC hardware or graphics cards to cover the other 98%. Both of those are hard to obtain in very large quantities quickly.

2\. Since you have to buy the hardware, you can expect to pay much more than the NiceHash prices imply. Bitmain is one of the major suppliers of such hardware, so let's use their prices as an example. One of their top Bitcoin ASICs is a 14 TH/s unit that costs about $1,000 [1]. So you need about 2.5 million of these units at a cost of 2.5 billion dollars. Not that Bitmain has the capacity to fill such an order.

3\. The cost of those ASICs is just the beginning. Have you seen photos of those Chinese data centers that have racks of mining ASICs on shelves? Each of those data centers has maybe a few percent of Bitcoin's hash rate, so you'll need to build something at least 30x larger. Your electric bill alone will exceed the GDP of some small countries. Since you've already spent billions of dollars on ASICs, hopefully you have some money left to pay it and hire a data center ops team.

4\. How fast can you build all this out? Bitcoin's hash rate has grown 30% over the last month[2]. You might sink billions of dollars into this project only to discover that you've come up short.

5\. Congratulations, you can now make a few million dollars by 51% attacking the blockchain. You would, for example, deposit some bitcoins with a bunch of exchanges, sell them, withdraw dollars, and then use your hashpower to unwind those deposits and put the bitcoins back into your own wallet. It'll take a few hours (or less) for every exchange to notice what you're doing and freeze withdrawals. The bitcoin price will free-fall as everyone wonders about how to prevent this next time. You may or may not be arrested and charged with wire fraud. You're done!

[1] [https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002018052320100...](https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020180523201006625r2KQCnC10650) [2] [https://blockchain.info/charts/hash- rate](https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate)

<comment><USER16> The interesting thing is that the Chinese government could theoretically nationalize all those data centers and be very close to (or far beyond) 51% on any proof-of-work-based cryptocurrency [0]. This would, of course, be a one- way street, immediately lead to a price crash, and likely be unprofitable... but it might be viable, say, as part of a scorched-earth cyberattack to cause chaos and wipe out international wealth parked in Bitcoin.

It's heartening to see things like Ethereum moving in a proof-of-stake direction [1], and there's a lot of hope for a lot of the new cryptocurrencies out there. But Bitcoin itself is far more centralized and government- controlled than a lot of people think.

[0] [https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin- with-51-p...](https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin- with-51-pocked-guide-for-governments-83d9bdf2ef6b)

[1] [https://www.ccn.com/ethereum-moves-one-step-closer-to- proof-...](https://www.ccn.com/ethereum-moves-one-step-closer-to-proof-of- stake-as-casper-receives-first-release/)

<comment><USER17> Given that money laundering is a significant use of Bitcoin, and given China's extensive history with capital controls [1] and their willingness to execute people for corruption [2], it would not shock me much to see them do this for purely internal reasons. Chinese leaders are historically not big fans of things they can't control.

[1] It's a hot topic: [https://www.google.com/search?q=china+capital+controls](https://www.google.com/search?q=china+capital+controls)

[2] E.g.: [http://time.com/4298731/this-is-how-much-money-you-can- take-...](http://time.com/4298731/this-is-how-much-money-you-can-take-in- bribes-before-the-chinese-authorities-execute-you/)

<comment><USER18>
      China's [...] willingness to execute people for corruption

I read a fascinating (although very cynical) book a few months ago, and it said something very interesting about corruption.

If an autocracy needs to buy the loyalty of the army/police/government officials, instead of paying them cash the autocracy can simply turn a blind eye to corruption. That means you don't need to spend your own money to bribe them - and if any of them display disloyalty, you can simply have them executed... for corruption!

So you always have to be wary when you hear a regime is cracking down on corruption - it may be they're simply cracking down on disloyalty, while retaining their private pro-corruption stance.

<comment><USER17> Oh, yeah, I'd believe there's some of that going on here. Although I'd also believe that the real rule isn't "don't steal", it's "don't steal too much". With "too much" being defined by some combination of "more than those superior to you in the pecking order" and "in a way that causes public upset".

<comment><USER19> That has definitely been a commonly deployed trick throughout historical Chinese dynasties. However there are always two sides to it and nothing can be regarded simplistically, especially if you're talking about Xi's anti- corruption campaign. While Xi might be consolidating power with the corruption crackdown, the general welfare of Chinese civil servants have indeed been reduced a lot, to the extent that many of them simply quit and started their own businesses indeed.

Whether one likes it or not, Xi is genuinely trying to make China more like the US and letting the private market play a much bigger role while reducing government support. He's just like Reagan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rent-a-miner attacks seems to be another amusing example of when the _existence_ of a market can break the system.

For example, voting works well in a democracy, but if we can sell votes, democracy would likely collapse because rich organizations would buy it up and control all politics. (Some say this is already true; but you know it would be way worse if votes were openly sellable).

Satoshi foresaw people trying to mount a 51% attack by buying a ton of machines, and so he went to great lengths to ensure this was unlikely using mining. I don't think Satoshi foresaw the liquid AWS-like market for instant hashing power. The ability to mount a limited-time 51% attack makes the attack literally 1000x easier than a buy-machine 51% attack.

<comment><USER20> It's bizarre to me that rent-a-miner is a viable business at all. Why don't the owners just set the miners to mine whatever the most profitable coin is at the moment?

<comment><USER21> The "owners" of the hardware are private miners. The rent-a-miner business (NiceHash) just connects sellers of hashrate (miners) with buyers of hashrate. The miners don't care what they are mining, and they get paid in BTC regardless of what their hardware actually mines. NiceHash is just a marketplace that automatically mines the most profitable coin by what people are willing to pay for hashrate. None of the hardware belongs to NiceHash.

Your question is still valid and good, but not in the way you have phrased it. The real answer is: laziness. NiceHash is easy and steady. If you have a nice gaming rig, you can make a few extra bucks a day by selling your hashing power while it's idle. If you are a serious miner, you probably don't use NiceHash.

<comment><USER20> Makes sense. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It would be helpful to expand on how many blocks can be reversed given only one hour of hash rate.

Many wallets, exchanges, etc require a minimum number of confirmations before allowing you to spend the coins to handle reorgs that happen naturally.

For example, in Bitcoin this is often around 6. With 1hr of hash rate you might be able to get 7 blocks but likely you'll actually need more time to get enough blocks or successfully attack. Accounting for this would increase the cost substantially.

Either way, pretty neat site!

<comment><USER23> I don't think it is particularly useful to talk about blocks reversed in this context.

In all cases, you can reverse about 1 hour worth of blocks. In practice, when wallets/exchanges/etc pick a minimum number of confirmations, they are really picking a minimum time. So, if bitcoin had double the blockrate, they wouldn't say 'well, we only require 6 blocks, so you only need ~30 minutes of an attack', but rather, 'we require ~1 hour, so you need 12 blocks of confirmation'.

<comment><USER22> Yeah it's sort of time based assuming consistent blocks, but it would still based on confs. If the hash rate doubled then one would only require 30 minutes until the difficulty adjustment kicked in.

The main purpose of my post is that to actually pull off a successful attack you probably need more than an hour, so the numbers are making it look like it's cheaper than it would be in practice (ignoring other factors other commenters have shared about acquiring ASICS, data centers, and such).

You can't 51% attack Bitcoin for $611K, but your site says you can. While the site can't be perfect, it would be helpful to make it more realistic. If a news site picks this up and doesn't understand the nuances they'll accidentally spread FUD and mislead a lot of people.

<comment><USER24> > If the hash rate doubled then one would only require 30 minutes until the > difficulty adjustment kicked in.

Difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I'm saying that rather than needing an hour to get 6 blocks if the hash rate doubled, you'd only need 30 mins _until_ the adjustment occurs. Then it would be an hour again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is incredible! What actually stops me from launching such an attack on something like Einsteinium?

One problem I found w/ the website: you have included Peercoin, even though Peercoin uses PoW only for initial coin distribution and not block validation. Block validation is done through PoS.

<comment><USER26> > What actually stops me from launching such an attack on something like > Einsteinium?

        - lack of exchanges accepting it
        - delays on withdraw/deposit to/from exchange
        - exchanges requiring verification of user PI

That is probably all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is why a POW based cryptocurrency can never handle a significant amount of money.

Suppose you're Coinbase. The way you protect yourself is on large transactions, waiting for more confirmations. This increases the amount an attacker must spend to do a 51% attack. If you wait long enough, it's not worth it. But wait! The attacker can use multiple accounts and multiple exchanges, so now Coinbase has to look at the total volume of newish transactions on the blockchain in order to know when it is guaranteed to be safe.

The upshot of this is that a POW blockchain cannot securely transact more money per hour than the 51% attack number. That's also approximately the amount of money miners spend per hour.

Total world payment volumes are on the order of a quadrillion dollars per year. Unfortunately world GDP is only $80 trillion. Even if we reoriented our entire economy to do nothing but mining, we could only protect about 10% of all of the transactions.

<comment><USER28> An exchange could mitigate this attack by also monitoring the outflow by 'age'. Delaying any large withdrawal of 'new' coins.

* AGE: i mean, how recent was the deposit of any coins involved in any transaction. So if I send a large quantity of Bitcoin Gold to an exchange (they are marked as 'new'), then if I immediately exchange them to Ethereum, the Ethereum is now also considered 'new'. If I try to withdraw the Ethereum the exchange delays withdrawal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If this graph were true wouldn't we be seeing attacks all the time? If coins could be exploited for just hundreds of dollars they'd be rendered useless pretty quickly. This can't possibly be accurate.

<comment><USER21> It is true and mostly accurate by some back of the napkin math I've done. What stops people from doing 51% attacks is a few factors:

1) If you can pull off an attack for a few hundred bucks, it's probably on a coin that will only net you a few hundred bucks. Remember, these coins are thinly-traded altcoins, many of which only do a few hundred bucks worth of volume on exchanges in the first place.

2) Once you pull off your attack and people realize what happened, the "free" coins you get back will be worth shit because nobody will want that coin.

It's not as much of a free lunch as it might seem at first blush. I most certainly possess the domain knowledge and skill to pull off a 51% attack, as I have contributed code to Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, written open source mining software, etc. But I would need several million dollars in starting capital to make the kind of money that would make me even consider it. That time would be better spent hacking away on a project with the potential to make me sustainable income, or a client project where I'm paid by the hour.

<comment><USER30> On point 1 take for example Ubiq, it'll cost you say 10x the 1h rate or $4.7k, and the 24 hour volume is 130k, that seems like a pretty good ratio to me. Or Bytecoin - let's say 100x since it's harder to get the capacity - cost $50k, 24h volume - $18m.

On point 2 I thought the entire point was to double spend - so you have 1 einsteinium or whatever, you put it in the exchange, you use it to buy bitcoin. You re-spend it at another exchange buying bitcoin. You got twice as much bitcoin as you paid for. As long as you're out before it becomes obvious what you've done you make profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting that BCH and DOGE cost about the same but differ in market cap by a factor of 40:

                       Market Cap ($M)   1h Attack Cost ($)
        Bitcoin Cash   $ 16,060               $62,356
        Dogecoin       $    380               $66,908

<comment><USER28> DOGE uses merge mining with LTC - [https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/guides/what-is- merged-m...](https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/guides/what-is-merged- mining-bitcoin-namecoin-litecoin-dogecoin/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks great, nice work, keep it up! One small improvement in my opinion would be to make the columns sortable- especially the 1hr attack cost.

</comment><comment><USER33> The cost and market cap estimates are probably both not good measures of how things would work out in practice on that scale, but even so- it looks like someone with a couple million dollars to invest could plausibly extract several billion from BTC via a 51% attack. It would cost substantially more than the estimate on here (since even non-NiceHash cloud GPU services probably wouldn't fully cover the required hashpower), and require substantial technical expertise, and decently-connected people would probably see it coming at least days in advance due to the movements of GPUs and GPU-power involved, and be pretty definitely illegal, and BTC's market value would be crumbling underneath you as you tried to sell out... _but_ , the sheer profitability of such a scheme should seriously worry people with a stake (finanical or emotional) in BTC. A dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk doesn't stay there long.

<comment><AUTHOR> I go into more detail in this [0] comment, but it would be substantially more expensive to pull off an attack if the hashing power was not available to rent from NiceHash. The 'nicehash-able' column is meant to represent how much hashing power is available - if it is > ~300%, an attack would be fairly do- able from just renting hash power.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173265)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is this really accurate? So 51% attack on bitcoin is around 100btc? Given the advantage of such an attack, won't more users want to do it? Also, won't nation states easily come in on this and attack the integrity of these coins?

<comment><USER35> This isn't possible for larger coins like Bitcoin because it assumes you can get a short-term rent of enough hardware to carry out the attack for exactly the amount of time it takes to carry out at the NiceHash market rate. Most of the Bitcoin mining hardware is not available for rent in this way and its owners have a financial incentive not to allow this because it'll wipe out the value of their hardware.

<comment><USER36> _and its owners have a financial incentive not to allow this because it 'll wipe out the value of their hardware._

Well they don't have to be on the receiving end of the attack. They can be, you know, on the other end.

<comment><USER35> Sure, the owners of the mining hardware could be on the other end, but that puts up the cost of the attack substantially - instead of depending on the cost of renting an hour's mining time, it now depends on the total lifetime value of the equipment used. There's also the rather large problem of how they could convert enough double-spent Bitcoins to something else before the price tanks; it'd have to be a very big heist to make the math work out.

<comment><USER20> Just tanking the price is enough, if you've sold enough bitcoin futures beforehand. I suppose that would put you on the CFTC's radar, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Bytecoin looks remarkably easy to attack. If we filter to currencies that can easily be NiceHashed and have decent market caps, and then sort by cost/mktcap, the top 5 look pretty juicy.

      Bytecoin	        BCN	$986,840,000.00	CryptoNight	164 MH/s	$637	219%
      Bitcoin Private	BTCP	$470,080,000.00	Equihash	12 MH/s		$1,280	922%
      Bitcoin Gold		BTG	$706,750,000.00	Equihash	29 MH/s		$3,120	378%
      MonaCoin	        MONA	$204,110,000.00	Lyra2REv2	2 TH/s		$3,218	436%
      Vertcoin	        VTC	$73,570,000.00	Lyra2REv2	697 GH/s	$954	1471%

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow nice works. I was working on the exact same project [https://www.coinmarketattack.com/](https://www.coinmarketattack.com/)

</comment><comment><USER39> In order to get to 51% share you would need 104% of the current hashing rate. Did you consider that?

<comment><AUTHOR> This math is based on having 100% of the existing hash power (the network is 500H/s, you would need 500H/s) - in most cases you would probably purchase enough to give yourself a decent buffer above the existing hashing power. The numbers are meant as very rough estimates to give people a better idea of the costs.

<comment><USER39> OK, so by 51% you really mean at least 50%. Do you happen to have a background in finance? It's quite unusual to say 51% in math/engineering.

<comment><USER40> "51% attack" is the name of the attack, but you don't actually need 51% of the hash-rate to do it, just 50% plus a small margin.

<comment><USER41> You dont need 50%. You can do it on 1% with luck.

<comment><USER39> Is there a known probability curve?

With so many actors it could be very steep. Like 51% capacity has 99% chance of success and 49% has 1% of success and 40% has practically zero chance (these are made up numbers).

It could also be quite shallow as in 1% capacity gives you 1% of success... that would actually be quite bad and invite malicious actors to test the system with regular attacks.

<comment><USER42> It's a race of who can get to N blocks first. The higher N the "steeper" it is. N is set by the merchant so as to balance security with quick transactions

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm curious were Cardano ADA would be on this list. It seems to be one of the more thoughtful designs, and also a recent addition to the list of coins.

<comment><USER44> Cardano is POS so no NiceHashing.

(rather, it will be POS when full decentralization and staking are implemented later this year, but it's not and never has been POW).

Agreed, it seems like a very thoughtful design and I'm excited about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> One coin I've seen is wrong is Komodo. It uses DPoW which is a completely different type of security scheme [https://wiki.komodoplatform.com/wiki/Delayed_Proof_of_Work_(...](https://wiki.komodoplatform.com/wiki/Delayed_Proof_of_Work_\(dPoW\)) even though the webpage says $593 to perform...it would be a lot more difficult

</comment><comment><USER46> That is disturbingly easy. Of the top 20 currencies by market cap 10 of them can be attacked with a NiceHash purchase. Representing over $2 billion in market cap. Bytecoin is a higher market cap coin that is almost as vulnerable as Bitcoin Gold. If a 51% attack also hits Ethereum classic (89% purchaseable), there will be market chaos.

</comment><comment><USER47> Loaded into a live-updating Google Sheet for convenience: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18tqvZPXjnEVExlSaTcGu...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18tqvZPXjnEVExlSaTcGu5kilasQ4N1i0ekx0zmSwSiI/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I'm happy to make a json endpoint or something as well if people would find that useful.

<comment><USER20> Another handy aspect of the google doc is the ability to sort by other columns. You might want to add that to the website, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Hey @xur17, I run arewedecentralizedyet.com - we should partner on adding this metric. Really great work!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to - feel free to reach out, @xur17 on twitter, or my email is in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'd offer to buy the companies or groups controlling most of the mining power. Even paying off individual executives to cut deals to lower the price. The resulting buy would probably be way, way, way less than $100 billion for Bitcoin. Hell, it might be less than a billion.

<comment><USER50> Depends if you can make more from the attack than the mining co. will lose from being out of operation (plus the BTC price crash that will follow).

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Does nicehash let you run custom mining software to make adjustments to how it handles your transactions (permit double spend) or change the algorithm (like the verge attack)?

Edit: or would the malicious code live in a mining pool that you direct the nicehash hashing power to?

</comment><comment><USER52> Mayor players (exchanges, bitpay) could decide to just ignore the dominated branch of the blockchain, by requiring that block n has hash h. This would lead to a fork similar to etherium vs etherium classic.

Alternatively they could start not to accept the spoiled coins. If account a double spends x, they track where the coin goes, let's say b accepts y:=x-? coin then a still has x-y spoiled coins and b now has y spoiled coins. Now you just don't accept transactions from accounts that have spoiled coins. Would work with bitcoin. Also the government can come up with similar regulations to crack down on bitcoin.

<comment><USER53> > If account a double spends x, they track where the coin goes, let's say b > accepts y:=x-? coin then a still has x-y spoiled coins and b now has y > spoiled coins. Now you just don't accept transactions from accounts that > have spoiled coins.

That would be a perfect way to lock another user's account out of exchanges. Care to give me your address? I'd like to send you some spoiled bitcoins I have lying around... ;)

As for the government, you can be sure they are already tracking all of the transactions. Bitcoin is far from anonymous - cash is a better alternative if you need anonimity, and even that can be traced easily nowadays.

<comment><USER52> Well, if you attack me like that I can always pass on the spoiled coins to a newly created account. Once I got rid of the spoiled coins my account would be clean again.

In a regalutory framework there could also be filter addresses that launder your coins for a high price (99%).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I don't think multi-algorithm is taken into account for multi-algorithm coins. Several coins have multiple independent mining algorithms each with their own difficulty, and need to be attacked simultaneously.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is correct - I wasn't actually aware that there were multi-algorithm coins, but I'm assuming there aren't very many. I will go through the list and try to update this, but let me know if there are any that you know of that I should update.

<comment><USER55> Does that explain why Myriad is such an outlier in this table?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It would be interesting to add the currency rewards the attackers would gain from the hashing process. I bet the cost may be greatly reduced, and may even make the operation profitable, without much illegality...

<comment><USER57> Is it even illegal? And if it is, is obtaining recourse through the courts the kind of thing that cryptocurrency users want to make a habit of?

<comment><USER25> Exactly. What law would I break by doing a 51 % attack?

<comment><USER58> The attack itself is legal. Sure you will cause some property damage if you split and roll back an hour worth of transactions. People might try and bring a civil suit against you. That would be interesting.

Of course, if you try to double-spend as part of the attack: it's fraud!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell So you can perform a double spend attack on the largest crypto currency with a market cap of $124 billion dollars for only $600 thousand?

For criminals who know what they're doing, this looks like a very juicy target to me.

<comment><USER59> Is it? Say you control 51 percent of the mining capacity. How do you profit from it in such a way that you don't tank the value of the good you're stealing?

<comment><USER60> Shorting it is the obvious way. You borrow a bunch of that currency, sell it, then use the money to buy hashing power, and steal it back to cover your shorts.

<comment><USER61> You have to short it by billions and billions of dollars.

Bitmain, alone, made 3-4 billion dollars in PROFIT last year. And they don't control even close to 51%.

Bitmain would have to make enough money off of a single attack so as to cover all it's FUTURE profits.

And then it would also have to not be noticed.... Do you really think all these exchanges would just suffer under an attack that loses them many billions of dollars, without retaliating? No, they wouldn't. And then people would end up in jail.

<comment><USER60> You short a small currency not bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Just curious - excuse my ignorance - wouldn't there be a high level of chance involved in that you might actually win, that would cause the cost to rocket way up for you to succeed in that double spend? Eg you'd have to keep trying before you got a hash that would cause you to need to actually spend a lot more.

This is for 1h of compute in the calculation so would you not actually need to run for a very long time, and also be spending in each and every one of those blocks?

Again sorry for my ignorance - hoping for some insight.

</comment><comment><USER63> It's important to note that this doesn't include block rewards, so these attacks are all actually less expensive than shown.

</comment><comment><USER64> I guess what's amazing about this is that a 51% attack on Bitcoin could be achieved by a relatively modestly sized company. More worrying I guess is the prospect of somebody with a suitably powerful botnet attacking the network for 'free'.

<comment><USER65> Even a massive botnet won't be able to attack the Bitcoin network. Unless it's a botnet comprised of ASIC miners ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> For the Bitcoin attack perhaps it is cheaper to open an asic factory + nuke reactor.

</comment><comment><USER67> It would be interesting to have some summary on different types of PoW algorithms, which of them have the highest durability. Does for example memory constrained PoW have an advantage over one that simply burns CPU cycles?

</comment><comment><USER68> Crypto currencies seem to have this sort of ethos where nobody controls the currency and that is great .... except for what seems like a baked in ability for a single entity to do exactly that....

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm pretty sure Sumokoin is wrong.

It doesn't use standard CryptoNight anymore but rather a custom "CryptoNight- Heavy" that I don't think is even available on NiceHash.

</comment><comment><USER69> You will need > 2x that amount of money to begin with to profit, in order to have enough coin to double spend, and cover for the cost of the privilege.

</comment><comment><USER70> You should add Decred to the list. It would be nice for people to see the increased cost of a 51% attack for a hybrid PoW/PoS coin.

</comment><comment><USER71> Does the cost of a 51% attack rise linearly with time? Is this right? Cost of 24h attack == 24 * (Cost of 1h attack)

</comment><comment><USER72> That's surprisingly cheap for a lot of coins with a reasonable coin cap!

<comment><USER73> yes becauze calcs are misleading. Ooh I will attack Dash tomorrow instead of booking a flight to my home town

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Very interesting data. Are you planning on making it available via an API?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should be able to add a json endpoint with all the data from the table if that would be helpful.

<comment><USER74> That would be great! I'm building a cryptocurrency app and this data would be really useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Nice collection, OP. Though the page is hypothetical it does show some viability of the cost of 51% attack, something which many people deny as uneconomical without proof.

But I am sure there will be people who will deny saying miners can refuse mined blocks and create a branch. And others who will deny this by talking up game theory mechanic of 51% attack - if someone does get 51% power then the rational thing to do is to not harm the coin. This obviously doesn't hold true for an irrational person.

And given the concerns raised for PoW for small coins, I can only say this - "Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It." Here's one of my favorite stories from Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold about a coin which was very small back in the day called - Bitcoin:

 _Laszlo's CPU had been winning, at most, one block of 50 Bitcoins each day, of the approximately 140 blocks that were released daily. Once Laszlo got his GPU card hooked in he began winning one or two blocks an hour, and occasionally more. On May 17 he won twenty-eight blocks; these wins gave him fourteen hundred new coins that day.

Satoshi knew someone would eventually spot this opportunity as Bitcoin became more successful and was not surprised when Laszlo e-mailed him about his project. But in responding to Laszlo, Satoshi was clearly torn. If one person was taking all the coins, there would be less of an incentive for new people to join in.

"I don't mean to sound like a socialist," Satoshi wrote back. "I don't care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%."

As a result, Satoshi asked Laszlo to go easy with the "high powered hashing," the term coined to refer to the process of plugging an input into a hash function and seeing what it spit out.

But Satoshi also recognized that having more computing power on the network made the network stronger as long as the people with the power, like Laszlo, wanted to see Bitcoin succeed."_

</comment><comment><USER73> this isn't correct.proof: the ongoing war between btc and bch has people holding millions in btc. they didn't even try to attack. you can't attach bch with 70k or you would have attacks everyday forever from old btc holders.

</comment><comment><USER76> Whoever wrote this must be totally oblivious. The hardware costs alone to attack bitcoin are likely in the hundreds of millions. Beside that, think you can rent that much hash power at the spot price is hilariously naive and ignores the fact that this is a supply and demand driven market.</comment>


Testing with Jenkins, Ansible and Docker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mist.io/post/82383668190/move-fast-and-dont-break-things-testing-with <comment><USER2> You should optimize your RUN commands. Every time you RUN in a Dockerfile, it creates a new filesystem layer. There's a hard limit (42, iirc) to the number of layers that Docker can support.

Instead of doing:

        RUN echo bar >> foo
        RUN echo baz >> foo

You could do:

        RUN echo bar >> foo \
            echo baz >> foo

<comment><USER3> In my humble opinion, each layer should have a clear purpose: [http://www.extellisys.com/articles/docker-layer- overload](http://www.extellisys.com/articles/docker-layer-overload)

<comment><USER4> You make good points in this post. We are working on addressing some of them already. I would love to discuss this directly, you can ping me anytime, shykes on #docker / freenode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _At the same time, we need to move fast with development and deliver updates as soon as possible. We want to be able to easily deploy several times per day._

Genuine question, not intended as any sort of troll: what benefits would people with this philosophy say their organisation gains from routinely deploying multiple times per day?

I have nothing against better testing tools or more efficient development processes, of course, and if you have a serious bug then being able to fix it as quickly as possible is obviously beneficial. I just don't understand where this recent emphasis on _always_ trying to move fast has come from, or what kind of management strategy someone might use to take advantage of such agility.

<comment> josh-wrale I found this article helpful in understanding the 'multiple times per day' motive.

[http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html](http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html)

<comment><USER5> The motivation for continuous _integration_ I can certainly understand. I'm sure many of us have worked on projects where someone was working on a branch for an extended period to implement some big new feature, and then ran into the mother of all merge conflicts when they finally wanted to release their changes for general use. I don't think CI is appropriate in all cases, but I find it a better strategy than mega-merges for most projects, most of the time.

It's specifically the motivation for continuous _deployment_ that I'm curious about here. Fixing bugs quickly is obviously a plus, and I found the point 'twic mentioned about rapidly instrumenting a production system interesting. These are good arguments for being able to release an update on demand, and indeed for continuous integration as a technique to support that goal.

However, to me neither seems like a strong argument for routinely releasing multiple updates per day. I've always been a little surprised that so many web sites and SaaS applications seem to take pride in making such frequent changes, even though doing so surely incurs some risk of breaking things and typically also causes some degree of instability in the UI. I was just wondering whether anyone had experiences and/or actual data they could share about whether the practice made a measurable improvement to, for example, revenues or reported customer satisfaction -- something concrete that might outweigh the risks -- or whether it's more of a subjective preference for that way of working.

<comment><USER6> > However, to me neither seems like a strong argument for routinely releasing > multiple updates per day.

I don't understand this line of thinking. If there's a bug that you can fix in short order, why not fix it and deploy said fix? If you've set your CI and infrastructure up correctly, update rollouts aren't something the user even notices.

I've always been a big proponent of small, atomic commits. Being able to deploy just one thing at a time means we often know where breakage comes from (when it happens), and we can respond to feedback sometimes within minutes.

The customers love it, and we enjoy excellent stability and development velocity. _These_ are the reasons we deploy many times a day. There's no reason for us _not_ to deploy things once they are tested and ready.

<comment><USER5> _If there 's a bug that you can fix in short order, why not fix it and deploy said fix?_

If you've got an important bug to fix, sure, of course you want it dealt with as quickly as possible.

 _If you 've set your CI and infrastructure up correctly, update rollouts aren't something the user even notices._

Not if it's for a bug fix or security patch, but presumably most of your development work is adding new features? In that case, isn't the whole point that it's something the user will notice?

 _I 've always been a big proponent of small, atomic commits._

And again, no argument from me there. While I don't think every development project is suitable for that approach, I favour it most of the time myself.

 _Being able to deploy just one thing at a time means we often know where breakage comes from (when it happens)_

This is where my experience and background seem to be very different to the deploy-hourly kind of philosophy. I've noticed that proponents of the latter often seem to assume that stuff is going to be breaking all the time, and therefore that being able to deploy bug fixes or diagnostics very quickly will be a significant advantage.

However, if you have so many significant bugs that you need to deploy multiple times per day just to keep up, to me that seems like a clear demonstration of insufficient QC/QA in the development process. And so I can't help wondering whether the pressure to release so often, and the consequent almost exclusive reliance on some sort of automated test suite for quality checking, is a causal factor in having so many bugs in the first place.

 _The customers love it, and we enjoy excellent stability and development velocity. These are the reasons we deploy many times a day. There 's no reason for us not to deploy things once they are tested and ready._

I guess this is the paradoxical part that I don't understand. If your project enjoys excellent stability and your deployments are all soundly tested before they go live, then by definition you don't need the rapid deployments just to rush out bug fixes or diagnostics.

So that brings me back to where I came in: do you experience any concrete, measurable benefits from the "excellent development velocity" you mentioned, or is it simply your team's preferred development style?

<comment><USER6> > So that brings me back to where I came in: do you experience any concrete, > measurable benefits from the "excellent development velocity" you mentioned, > or is it simply your team's preferred development style?

Yes, see the following:

> The customers love it, and we enjoy excellent stability and development > velocity. These are the reasons we deploy many times a day. There's no > reason for us not to deploy things once they are tested and ready.

We're not just deploying bug fixes quickly (which you seem to be fixating on a bit), we are constantly making small iterations. If we're handling support and see something that could be improved, we improve it and roll it out quickly. If we have a moderate sized feature branch, it is merged, tested, and rolled out immediately as soon as it passes QA. No need to set a rigid "We only deploy on Wednesdays" schedule. Pass QA, deploy immediately.

> Not if it's for a bug fix or security patch, but presumably most of your > development work is adding new features? In that case, isn't the whole point > that it's something the user will notice?

No, a huge chunk of dev time is spent iterating on and improving existing features. There gets to be a point in a product's life cycle where you are more or less feature complete, where the emphasis shifts to refining and improving what you already have. Sure, there are new features, but if you never iterate, you've got older stuff accumulating dust and ageing badly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Ansible for a few production-related tasks lately, and think it's great. It provides the right level of abstraction, IMHO: you can crack open a playbook, read through it, and know exactly what it is doing. There's also a growing number of playbooks if you google around.

That said, the biggest downside I've seen with Ansible is reusable components. They have something called Galaxy in beta [1], which should help, although it feels a bit rough yet...

[1] [https://galaxy.ansible.com/](https://galaxy.ansible.com/)

<comment><USER8> >That said, the biggest downside I've seen with Ansible is reusable components

This was a major, major issue with puppet, too - although somewhat worse, in that the manifests were more unreadable.

One issue that ansible still hasn't really solved is the horrible if/then/elses you have to put in to accommodate RHEL/ubuntu/centos/whatever else differences.

I like that galaxy at least lets you specify which environment the playbook will run on, though.

<comment><USER9> Check out the group_by module, as this can make those totally go away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool stuff! We actually use a similar setup [1], but with the additional hassle of figuring out how to handle hardware connections back to the app. Docker + Jenkins has definitely been a big win.

[1] [http://www.appneta.com/blog/automated-testing-with- docker/](http://www.appneta.com/blog/automated-testing-with-docker/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Take a look at github.com/drone/drone for an upcoming CI platform built around Docker. It's totally open source, but you can use the hosted version at drone.io as well.</comment>


Walmart may launch a video streaming service to battle Netflix, Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/walmart-may-launch-a-video-streaming-service-to-battle-netflix-amazon/ <comment><USER2> At a certain point there's simply going to be too many options. There's already a huge overlap of content between the big players, so it'll come down to who has the best originals.

People aren't going to pay for 3-5 disparate video services, especially where 80% of the same content is available on all of them.

<comment><USER3> >People aren't going to pay for 3-5 disparate video services, especially where 80% of the same content is available on all of them.

Sure about that? HBO, Showtime, Starz, sports packages, etc. Plenty of evidence that they _will_ do exactly that. I hope it doesn't go that way, but there's a reason we ended up with cable in its current form.

<comment><USER2> Eventually it'll end up just like a bundled cable subscription. Anecdotally I don't know anyone that pays for all of those services + an Amazon video and Netflix.

Most of the people I know have Netflix + maybe one premium channel add-on subscription.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, we have Netflix, and I get HBO for about 3 months/per year till I'm caught up on the major shows, except this year (No game of thrones).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The evolution of this would be providers combining services for a single price (let's say 19.99) and then sharing the revenue amongst themselves based on the viewing / usage patterns of the user.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good, we need more competition. Here are my thoughts:

Netflix is to metric driven and the creative uniqness of their original content isn't that great.

Prime Video has a lot of UX issues.

I gave up on Hulu years ago, no idea what it's like these days.

YouTube is the next social platform, which has a whole new set of issues.

I just want to watch a movie or show every now and then, offline, and with no compression artifacts.

There is no reason why I shouldn't be able to purchase and download movies or shows.

<comment><USER7> > There is no reason why I shouldn't be able to purchase and download movies > or shows.

Google Play Music & TV supports purchase and rental, and download of at least purchased content (possibly rental, too, not sure.)

<comment><USER6> I did not know that, thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It may be more prudent for Walmart to enhance user experience on Vudu, their movie renting/purchasing service, and add streaming features on it down the line. Why launch a new service when you can use preexisting infrastructure?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is genius. All walmart has to do is turn on their security cams, hire a producer to pick out the best feeds from hundreds, and they've already got their reality TV Show.. People of Walmart IRL.

</comment><comment><USER9> The real news would be that they join a common platform, saving the user to have 1000s accounts for watching content..</comment>


Ask HN: Porn Filter API! (Photo Moderation) - <AUTHOR> Would you be interested in an API/web service that tells you which of your submitted photos are safe for a general audience?
It would be useful for social networks, dating sites, forums, or any site that allows users to post images. The service would also handle videos and text (such as spam).
I have a system that already works well for several major sites, and was wondering if there is a larger market out there.
* Photos are reviewed manually, and we have two levels of review.
* The response time is not instantaneous, but under 10-30 seconds.
* Error rates are generally very low (<0.01%).
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> nude.js (<http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/nudejs/>) is a Javascript library that detects nudity in images.

I can't attest to its effectiveness but it maybe what you're looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is the first I've heard of it.

Reading through the link, I believe it does a combination of skin tone detection and human body pattern matching. Typically, this solution can detect a fully nude human pretty well, but fails on something like a close-up/partial shot of a penis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this would very useful, but for the reverse reason. I believe there could be a lot of value in filtering out _non_ nude photos. Realize the number of photo sharing sites that are available, being able to filter many of them and pull out nude photos could be very useful for those working on porn site companies.

</comment><comment><USER4> We would be interested. We run <http://picturepush.com> and adult material is forbidden, but there is a lot of it added anyway (of course). A service for fixing that would be great.

I would expect, by now, someone would have made something automated for that kind of thing though...

<comment><AUTHOR> I've worked with a number of companies that have tried an automated solution (including teams with PhDs in Computer Vision), but it's just not there yet. I'm sure within the next 5 years someone will figure it out, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower (using MTurk) support that already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'd argue that our team's error rates and response times are lower than CrowdFlower, and last I checked, our rates are better as well.

We have good technology and an experienced team, which lets us check a lot of photos faster and more reliably than the competition.

Do you happen to know anyone that uses CrowdFlower for this? I'd love to chat and see what they think of the service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm fairly sure there are a few existing services like this out there, have you looked at those?

<comment><AUTHOR> I only know about CrowdFlower/Mechanical Turk at the moment.

I know of other teams that moderate photos, but I don't know anyone that's put together a publicly available API/web service for it.

Do you happen to know the names of any existing services?

<comment><USER6> At a glance, I see 2 on this page <http://www.google.com/search?q=moderate+photos+api></comment></comment></comment>


Sex pigs halt traffic after laser attack on Pokémon teens – The Local - <AUTHOR> http://www.thelocal.se/20160816/pig-mask-pair-enjoy-waterwheel-sex-after-pokmon-hunter-attack <comment><AUTHOR> Not that exciting but the headline is awesome.</comment>


Show HN: Is WhatsApp secure? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@pascalgn/is-whatsapp-secure-8acb954547af <comment><USER2> Awesome Article. Full of information. But no source mentioned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point! Unfortunately, for most statements it's very difficult to find a source (hence this writeup in the first place). Where possible, I linked directly to the primary source (e.g. published paper)

<comment><USER2> Without proper source mentioned it's hard for people to believe anything.

By the way, article is good

<comment><AUTHOR> I added some more references where possible!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This does not qualify as a "Show HN".

<comment><AUTHOR> You're correct of course! Sorry, my bad! :(

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to have a clear and concise page I could send to people spreading FUD that "facebook is hacking all our data!"

Any comments and feedback are very welcome!</comment>


Html5shiv and Serving Content From Code Repositories - <AUTHOR> http://zoompf.com/blog/2012/05/html5shiv-and-serving-content-from-code-repositories <comment><USER2> Controversial but I'm going to say it anyway,

if my site looks messed up in IE I feel bad for you son

so I copy&pasted html5shiv.

I've never tested it in IE, if it works for you then cool.

If it doesn't or is slow. Well install another browser, I tried.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let's not forget the infamous Crockford alert.. <http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/12/10/crockford-alert/>

</comment><comment><USER4> You wouldn't believe how many times I've seen people serve 3rd party resources from source code repositories or other non-CDN locations.

Take for instance Twitter Bootstrap. Many people used to include "[http://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/bootstrap.cs...](http://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/bootstrap.css). Hell, the old Bootstrap site even suggested this approach by making it easy to copy/paste this url into your site. Luckily Bootstrap 2.0 improved on this by requiring a zip download.

</comment><comment><USER5> What we need is GitHub CDN, or something like that. An open CDN for JS.

<comment><USER6> Cloudflare has an open CDN at <http://www.cdnjs.com/> that hosts a ton of popular and not so popular js libraries. The link for html5shiv is <http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/html5shiv/r29/html5.js>

<comment><USER5> Ah, that's exactly what I meant! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I serve content from my own repository for my Turntable.FM chrome extension. Since the bulk of the code is JS, I just dynamically load the file from the github repo. What's great about this method is the ability to update _most_ parts of the plugin without needing to repackage the extension and upload back to the store. I work off separate branches for my local testing and updates and then merge into master when it's ready for showtime.

<comment><USER6> So your users have to keep downloading the file? Isnt that sort of inefficient considering the point of a plugin which is meant to be stored locally?</comment></comment>


The Fierce, Forgotten Library Wars of the Ancient World - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-fierce-forgotten-library-wars-of-the-ancient-world <comment><USER2> The rivalry between these great libraries sounds a bit like the competition between today's Silicon Valley giants -- they even were outbidding each other for talent already back then.

The storage capability of the Library of Alexandria seems so quaint today, when all of its books would fit multiple times over in the Flash memory of a smartwatch... And that makes me wonder how soon the computing capability of today's Google or Facebook will look similarly quaint. I'm sure it won't take 2000 years.

Maybe (hopefully?) these centralized information behemoths are just this era's Greek libraries.

<comment><USER3> Taking that digression for a moment: realise that in technology, with Moore's Law affecting at least _costs_ if not _capacity_ , we're in a situation where roughly every ten years, the cost of provisioning some level of service falls by a factor of roughly tenfold.

Facebook was about 10x easier to implement than Google was. Google was about 10x easier to implement than Microsoft during its 1980s peak. And whatever eats Facebook starting today will be roughly 10x easier than it was.

This also has something to say about _maintaining_ incumbency, when faced with the duality of a 10x cheaper upstart _and_ accumulating technical debt, though there may be compensation in institutional expertise and market positioning, especially as regards customer and business partnerships.

<comment><USER2> I find your comment insightful... And I'm not really sure why both your comment and mine have been downvoted to negative values. Is this discussion considered off-topic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the context of these ancient libraries: \- everything was hand written / copied \- there was no punctuation, no real word spacing - information was primarily transferred via oration and this written form was a new fangled technology :) \- there were multiple differing character sets in use, sometimes even for the same language. Also some texts were written right left, or left to right, or even alternating back and forth (boustrophedon)

The history of the english alphabet (with miniscules and majiscules) is a rather interesting story, and if this sort of history interests you I recommend The 26 Letters by Ogg.

<comment><USER5> and don't forget it was also argued passionately that it would ruin scholarship and the intellectual mind by some pretty smart and influential figures, one being Socrates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome! I'm a history fan of this particular period in human civilization, and this has served as a trailhead to many wonderful stories I didn't know about before. As much as I believe that we're currently living in the most exciting time in human history, there is so much to be said about exciting times of the past.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely! Plus: Learning more about the past saves us from what CS Lewis called "chronological snobbery" \- the belief that modern opinions (and, may I add, achievements) are better simply because they are newer. In an age without digital networking or even the printing press, a library of half a million volumes is a phenomenal achievement!

<comment><USER8> Pretty sure Lewis was upset because he couldn't prove his Christian faith as rational, so had to invent a lot of ways to discredit modern thinkers.

I'd go as far as saying that "chronological snobbery" is pretty much non- existent. Look at all the ways people idealize the past, especially when they talk about the 'good old days' or how things are much worse today.

<comment><USER7> Of course, the other extreme of idealizing the past exists as well, and is just as bad an approach. However, one does frequently hear people talking about people in the past in a very derogatory way ("I can't believe people used to believe xyz..."). While we do know a lot more nowadays than we used to, many things that we claim an "enlightened" perspective on are not actually facts, but mere interpretations of the world based on our cultural context. In effect, chronological snobbery is nothing but cultural snobbery projected back in time. (If you've ever lived in another culture for any significant period of time, as I have, you will realize just how differently two completely rational people can view the same event through different cultural lenses.)

As to Lewis: as far as I am aware, he actually coined the term "chronological snobbery" (or at least the concept) before he became a Christian. He did, after all, teach old/medieval English Literature at Oxford and Cambridge, so the past is something he dealt with and thought about a lot. And if you think he couldn't talk about his faith rationally, try reading some of his books (especially something like "Miracles")...

<comment><USER9> > If you've ever lived in another culture for any significant period of time, > as I have, you will realize just how differently two completely rational > people can view the same event through different cultural lenses.

The best course on American History that I ever took was taught by an man who had grown up in South America (he was teaching in the US). I first learned a number of interesting ways of thinking about the Americas through because of cultural emphasis that he brought from another part of the world.

<comment><USER10> I'm interested to know if this prof.'s lectures are online somewhere. Do you by any chance know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The Library of Alexandria, ultimately consisted of approximately 500,000 scrolls."

And about as many opinion pieces discussing whether that counted as Big Data.

</comment><comment><USER12> Now I want a game based on this.

<comment><USER13> Are you thinking of a board game or more like Pergamon Go? My first thought would be a tabletop RPG setting, as a quest for arcane tomes is fun in any era.

<comment><USER14> >Pergamon Go

Visions of young millennials crowding ruins trying to catch harpies, sphinxes, and minotaurs only to awaken the dormant odious spirits lying in wait beneath those ancient stones

<comment><USER15> Hail Helix!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty light on the actual warfare (besides poaching the other side's scientists and librarians, and the export stop for papyrus).

IIRC, they did also confiscate scrolls from merchants who set foot in their ports. I was looking forward to more stuff like that and even more sinister stuff.

As described here it was less a "war", and more "competition".</comment>


Locals - <AUTHOR> https://locals.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Ongoing Dave Rubin livestream talking about what this is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_v4-kajAWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_v4-kajAWk)

Sounds like they're going to mass produce white-label websites and apps for content creators with existing audiences in exchange for 5% of subscription revenue. No upfront cost (as long as you already have an audience). Sidesteps issues around content moderation by not really being a platform. Some vague stuff about networking between different creators' websites/apps, but adamant that each creator owns their own site/app.

<comment><USER2> May need a better title to attract attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I found it interesting that Rubin claims the site grants creators the ability to know everyone who signs up for their community, which protects the creators to significant degree.</comment>


How Will Advertising Enter the Next Dimension? - <AUTHOR> https://arinsider.co/2019/04/04/how-will-advertising-enter-the-next-dimension/ <comment><USER2> Full article [https://medium.com/@tomemrich/advertising-enters-the-next- di...](https://medium.com/@tomemrich/advertising-enters-the-next- dimension-e7672afca05a)</comment>


Mozilla Gives a Security Pass to the People It Shouldn't - <AUTHOR> http://news.softpedia.com/news/mozilla-gives-a-security-pass-to-the-people-it-shouldn-t-500986.shtml <comment><USER2> I wonder whether there's a connection between cowardice in the face of SJWs and cowardice in the face of everything else.</comment>


User-friendliness and fascism  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/09/userfriendliness_and_fascism <comment><USER2> The commenter/Economist writer gets their political art history wrong. Apple's roots lie in the Bauhaus, not in a fascist model of politics/art.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus>

The Bauhaus was broadly socialist, persecuted by the Nazis, but believed that industrial mass production would allow architects, artists, and designers to bring art/design cheaply to the masses. You can see that line of thinking about product and design from Jony Ive back to Dieter Rams and on back to the Bauhaus.

A great deal of modern architecture (e.g. the International School came out of Bauhaus émigrés to the U.S. – Gropius and van der Rohe) is derived from the Bauhaus. Modern architecture has been criticized not only initially by fascists, but subsequently by a broader cross section of society, because the architects were making concrete, glass, and steel structures than had little or no human touch (cf. the landscape of Kubrick's _A Clockwork Orange_ ). Tom Wolfe wrote a short critique of modern architecture in 1981 called _From Bauhaus to Our House_.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House>

The socialist aesthetic, privileging the designer, can be just as controlling in its way as the fascist aesthetic. But this article gets Apple's aesthetic lineage and politics wrong seemingly out of sheer ignorance.

<comment><USER3> The socialist aesthetic can also be as gentle and humanistic as William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris>

<comment><USER2> Of course, and part of the rivalry between Frank Lloyd Wright and the Internationalists was FLW's inspiration (among other sources of inspiration) drawn from the Arts & Crafts (which itself drew from the Pre-Raphaelites).

That said, FLW's politics were not strictly socialist, but were a complex combination of liberatarian, pacifism, populism, Wisconsin progressive, support for the Wobblies, and anti-semitism. Some argue that he was also close to Kropotkin (an anarchist). This earned him the suspicion of J. Edgar Hoover and a file in the FBI.

<comment><USER4> This comment threat came out of nowhere, HN, and it just made my morning. I had no idea these topics had such currency here. Savvy eclecticism FTW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Boy is this contrived. Control != fascism. A private corporation cannot be "fascist", because it has no governance over its populace (customers). I can choose, at any time, to purchase another brand of device. Choosing another government is not nearly as simple.

<comment><USER6> Every time you purchase blank cd/dvd media you pay an additional tax that is federally mandated and goes to a private corporation.

"A private copying levy (also known as blank media tax or levy) is a government-mandated scheme in which a special tax or levy (additional to any general sales tax) is charged on purchases of recordable media."

I'd say

<comment><USER5> Even if this were an example of fascism, which it's not, the government is the entity enforcing this tax, not the corporation. It'd be great to _not_ have corporations lobbying our government for ridiculous schemes like this, but the solution is not to attack the corporation. They've not broken any laws, and they're not the ones who created them in the first place. The problem is the government who allows it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a fan of the phrase "user friendly."

I've been a UX professional for fifteen years, focusing on the field of usability.

To me, "user friendly" evokes images of Microsoft Bob, software "wizards" that leave no room for user control, and chirpy in-dash car systems that overload the user with icons and friendly messages, instead of just getting the usability right in the first place.

I prefer the term "user subservient."

A good system should be subservient to the user, easy to understand, but ultimately leaving the user in control.

Apple and Microsoft go too far towards "user friendly," and the Linux approach veers too far towards user control without usability.

<comment><USER4> You, sir, have nailed it. I wish I could upvote this a hundred times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm conflicted on the signified, maybe because I'm conflicted on the signifier. I would be less conflicted, I think, if Apple products really did "just work" as so many Apple adherents purport. But from my experience, it's just a matter of degree, i.e. Apple products "just work" more often than MS products do, but not that much more often anymore, and when Apple products don't work, they don't work harder (or maybe it just feels that way because people have so little experience trying to get non-working things to work?).

On a more abstract level, it just feels weird and maybe subversive to characterize the restriction of choice as freedom. I mean, it does make a sort of sense, esp. after taking human psychology into account in that restricting choice to a manageable level might make it easier for people to make decisions. But it still feels weird. Maybe it just exposes "freedom" as a flawed concept, and a tense balance between orders of magnitude-larger forces is all there is. That's a weird Lovecraftian world to live in, though.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think analogy is more apt including Linux (bear with me on this)

The current system is (sort-of) like Linux. Pretty ad-hoc and less easy to use / figure out for the un-initiated. Often basic things are left out, not because they don't exist or work, but over principle.

The Democrats want to upgrade the current HC system to a Mac and the Republicans are certain that we'll end up with Windows instead.

</comment><comment><USER10> The author is just pointing out that Apple is a model of centralized control, one-way order-giving and -taking.

For some people a word to describe that philosophy is "fascist." For these people, fascism is not a form of government; rather it is a method, a toolset for achieving your ends.

</comment><comment><USER11> To the author: "GNU/Linux, have you heard of it?"

<comment><USER4> More to the point, have his readers? Assuming they haven't (a safe bet), its metaphorical value in framing a larger political problem is nil.</comment></comment>


Have yourself some Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/Have+yourself+some+Raspberry+Pi <comment><USER2> I dont think it's fair to dismiss OLPC and talk about how this will be better for third world children. Yes this is $25 but you still need to connect it to an input as well as HDMI output. Your Raspberry Pi and monitor needs to be connected to a reliable and constant electricity source where as the OLPC is battery powered with an integrated screen. I know that all these things can be solved but then you have to take into account that the $25 cost will start to increase.</comment>


Ballerina: An API-First Programming Language - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/ballerina-an-api-first-programming-language/ <comment><USER2> It's really hard to design a programming language that _does not_ revolve around APIs.

<comment><USER3> The article goes into some of the detail of what makes Ballerina specifically well-designed for API implementation and consumption: strong types for APIs, endpoints and services being first-class constructs, modern protocols and data formats baked in, and so on.

The examples on the website can serve as a nice quick overview: [https://ballerinalang.org/docs/by- example/](https://ballerinalang.org/docs/by-example/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: 280north breaks the mold? - <AUTHOR>

For several weeks now there has been a plethora of articles describing start up best practices in regards to who to select, who not to select, how many to select and methods for selecting co-founders. However, the most recent Y Combinator exit (and perhaps the largest?) was a group that broke most of the advice given. Does this discredit the advice? Is it the exception that proves the rule?
Specifically, here are some of the disparities between 280N and the common advice:
2 founders.
1 is too little, 3 is a bit too much and 4 is out of the question (except for Reddit?). 2 is just right. 280N is yet another example of a more-than-2-founder company that succeeded.
Business / Technical co-founders.
Ross, Tom and Francisco are all wonderful programmers. They all have a degree relating to computer science. Each one contributed significantly to the products that they delivered. None of them are business oriented (though I'm sure that had some business skills and/or picked them up along the way).
Products.
280North didn't create a product and start selling it. They released it for free. Then open sourced the framework they used to build it. They then created a community around that framework. And, finally, they started work on a development tool for the framework and community.
And other interesting notes:
Funding. In order to do this, they took surprisingly little funding.
Engaging the community. They took time to engage the community (their customers?) when they could have been coding new features. Of course, this is advice given by several successful entrepreneurs. They also attended and spoke at conferences.
So, HN, what's up? Is the mold bunk? Are 280N just a special case because they were building a framework and community? I'm interested to hear some feedback! :) <comment><USER2> Nah, I'd say they reinforce the mold.

1) I don't ever remember pg saying 3 or 4 is too many founders

2) Lots of YC companies have only programmers

3) Products: They made something people want. That's pg's main harping point - MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT. That's the implicit social contract in YC: If you make something people want, you will get a t-shirt that says "I made something people want." Pricing, open source, community, framework, monetization, etc are all details.

<comment><USER3> It certainly helped that they where making a technical play. A non-technical founder would have been a liability really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On Business and Tech co-founders, you are correct. I commented on the article and said as much, since even the most cited example of Apple involved two technical co-founders (one of whom just happen to nail the business part, but he relied on a solid technical foundation):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1606957>

For everything else, it is a misnomer to believe that a recipe exists for startup success.

If you do not suffer from having to motivate yourself, have solid experience and a good network of friends/advisors/mentors, then being a sole co-founder is not a problem (pg says as much on the yc website iirc).

It is simple, and your points are valid - the answer is that there are no real correct answers in entrepreneurship, only case studies and experience. Anybody purporting or claiming otherwise is misleading you (especially those with little experience to back it up, and what works for some cases might not work in others). Take in what you read and allow it to help you form your own opinion and experience, but nothing should be treated as either gospel or 'right'.

There are tons of examples online of entrepreneurs who copied playbook moved from 37signals or another company and found them not to work in their instance (there was a recent case on HN of a company that dropped their free option to find that they increased revenue by a large multiple).

Most business schools spend a lot of time with case studies, and the reason is not because they give you answers, but a base of information from which you can build your own experience.

(Edit: just to add on the issue of co-founders, I would much rather have two solid and experienced advisors over a single mediocre co-founder).

</comment><comment><USER5> _2 founders. 1 is too little, 3 is a bit too much and 4 is out of the question (except for Reddit?)._

I don't remember PG ever saying that. In fact, if I remember correctly, Flightcaster has something like 5 or 6 founders.

<comment><USER6> I just read this same statement a few days back..it may have been from an earlier Essay vs the FAQ, or a interview transcript (more likely).

I don't believe PG holds to hard and set rules regardless.</comment></comment>


Startup List - <AUTHOR> http://startupli.st/

<comment><USER2> What is the point of having an About link, Contact link, Privacy link, etc., at the bottom of the page if _it is impossible for a user to ever get to the bottom of the page_ because of your infinite scrolling nonsense.

This is the third site this week that I've come across with links in a footer that no user can ever actually click on because of an infinite scroll. Stupid & irritating.</comment>