Universal.css - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/marmelab/universal.css <comment><USER2> Poes law meets css: "Poe's law is an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers for sincere expressions of the parodied views.[1][2][3] " [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)

<comment><USER3> I'd agree, except for the fact that the very end of the FAQ says

> _Is this a joke?_

> _Of course it 's a joke. Use semantic CSS class names._

<comment><USER4> Also, the 4.79 MB CSS should be a giveaway...

<comment><USER5> It should be. But... [https://vimeo.com/147806338](https://vimeo.com/147806338)

<comment><USER3> For anyone who doesn't want to watch a video: [http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is amazing. I quit a job at a company that did many stupid things, one of which was insist that their home rolled CSS framework did not suck. Said framework was, in all seriousness, exactly this but with shortened, cryptic names. Nightmare.

<comment><USER7> Ideally, in SMACSS, you could classify all components into their composable parts: a grid width, a title style, a button with a primary style, a button with a secondary style, standard body text, emphasized body text, etc.

But most of the time, designers don't know how to stick with a standardized padding and margin, so I find that without exception, an org requires me to develop "cryptic" representations of margin and padding, such as mr1 (margin right to 1 degree, or 5 px) or pl2 (padding left to 2 degrees, or 10px).

I've also rolled entirely new features without writing a single line of CSS. This is a way to mitigate CSS bloat. I take it you've never actually tried to deal with the problem of CSS bloat, or you'd find either 1) you'd have to hold a gun to designers' heads or 2) do exactly what I just showed you.

<comment><USER8> This is weird, because designers I've worked with hate CSS bloat even more than I do, and love things like consistent spacing and typography. The movement towards styleguides has been one of the biggest things happening in design in the last year or so, which is exactly what you're talking about with not writing CSS.

<comment><USER9> To add to this, the addition of a style guide is helpful on two fronts.

* Components and patterns are standardized, allowing for less process in design reviews and quicker iteration

* Engineers can create component libraries that mirror style guide elements and turn frontend work into something a little closer to 'lego' building

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Bootstrap V4 recently introduced spacing utility classes like m-t-1 (which > translates to margin-top: 1rem!important), and we thought we 'd expand this > idea to more classes._

Which is worse; when it's done as satire, or seriously?

<comment><USER11> When you do it as satire but everyone use your work seriously?

<comment><USER12> That's the best way to say "All of the above" in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Absolutely brilliant! Because of its _universal_ nature and compositional design, one only has to download this CSS page once from the primary CDN and it can be used for everything everywhere. One could even argue this should be a standard browser component.

</comment><comment><USER14> You'd think this is a joke, but have a look at this comment at [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/05/css-coding- techniques/comm...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/05/css-coding- techniques/comment-page-1/#comment-19925)

> Now that we're writing almost all of our html in modular fashion, I have > found mix-n-matching pre-defined css classes works the best. i.e. > class="inline-block bg-bbb text-333 padding-5-15″

</comment><comment><USER15> This is great. Something similar was on hacker news without the "of course this is a joke" qualifier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11001820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11001820)

</comment><comment><USER16> At under 5MB, it's quite lightweight compared to other modern tools too, nice!

<comment><USER17> I saw what you did here

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They're making fun of Bootstrap, but having classes that allow you to define margins and padding quickly by adding a class is actually really helpful. Of course that shouldn't be expanded to every possible property.

<comment><USER19> You can use Foundation + sass processor and not need any of that garbage. My website just has nav, main, sidebar, etc. I define what I want into foundation to be mapped to them and the preprocessor creates my minified CSS.

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/jekyll-3-and- foundation-6/](http://penguindreams.org/blog/jekyll-3-and-foundation-6/)

Adding "row-xx" or whatever to your HTML elements is basically going back to the garbage that was in table based html layouts.

<comment><USER20> I really don't know how to take your comment...are you suggesting that precompiling and overriding the functionality native to CSS is easier than just using a handful of classnames?

<comment><USER21> They're suggesting that Bootstrap-like classes that name and reference a specific visual rendering (e.g., col-md-hidden) are no better than the old ROWSPAN/COLSPAN mess. They've just moved from HTML attributes to being packed into the class attribute.

Then again, semantic markup was a huge pain in the ass before tools like SASS. Now you can actually name and categorize elements semantically in the markup, then decide what that actually means in the pre-processed CSS.

Edit: And it's true: Having recently gone through even a simple bootstrap-to- bootstrap redesign, we pretty much had to comb through every view and remove/replace non-semantic CSS classes. With SASS mixins and semantic markup, it'd have been a CSS-only change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's my favorite part of the presentation:

 _View Raw

(Sorry about that, but we can't show files that are this big right now.)_

</comment><comment><USER23> The effect of the joke is lessened when it is labeled as a joke, doubly so when every comment here copypastes the line saying it's a joke.

See also the latest reprinting of "A Modest Proposal," which kindly has "SATIRE -- DO NOT BELIEVE" in large caps on the front and back covers.

<comment><USER24> To be fair, the top comment here calls out Poe's Law. You can see this best by how "A Modest Proposal" was recieved: the anonymous author was _villified_ and many powerful people were _outraged_. People were repulsed and offended and everything'd else by it.

One of my favorite Asimov quotes is "It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." It's a damn shame that it's helpful to put blaring giant signs that say _SATIRE_ on it and ruin the joke a bit, but there's just a ton of people out there who just never really got up to speed on detecting it. Many - possibly most! - people really don't look that deeply into things and tend to take stuff at face value (or don't know that there _is_ a deeper meaning to spot), no matter how outlandish.

All that as a mea culpa, as I read the OP's README and thought, "man, that seems like a bit of a mess... under what circumstances would you need to do that?" The answer is _NO DO NOT DO THIS_ but I, lacking experience, kinda didn't get that right off the bat.

<comment><USER23> > To be fair, the top comment here calls out Poe's Law.

The top comment when I posted was a copypaste of the joke disclaimer. And the top reply to the top comment at the time of _this_ posting is a copypaste of the joke disclaimer.

> Many - possibly most! - people really don't look that deeply into things and > tend to take stuff at face value (or don't know that there is a deeper > meaning to spot), no matter how outlandish.

If someone can't figure out why generating a CSS class for every (property, value) combination is funny, then I don't think an explanation will help. Maybe it will give those readers an A-ha! moment and a valuable life lesson, but it won't be _funny_ for them.

> All that as a mea culpa, as I read the OP's README and thought, "man, that > seems like a bit of a mess... under what circumstances would you need to do > that?"

If you got rused then that's great. The joke did what it was supposed to do. What sucks is that people who instinctively click the comments first won't get that experience, because some killjoy had to post "IT'S A JOKE DON'T FALL FOR THIS."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this a joke?

Of course it's a joke. Use semantic CSS class names.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was almost offended until I realized it was too absurd to be real. Really happy this is a joke, holy crap.

</comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of Tachyons[1], except Tachyons (supposedly) isn't satire.

[1] [http://tachyons.io/](http://tachyons.io/)

<comment><USER28> I think I'd have to assume anyone using that on a project I was paying them for really was trying to be funny. I mean, really, take a look at this: [https://github.com/tachyons-css/tachyons- visibility](https://github.com/tachyons-css/tachyons-visibility)

<comment><USER29> I used and am using this in production. So are others. It works really really well.

Here's the rational: [http://mrmrs.io/writing/2016/03/24/scalable- css/](http://mrmrs.io/writing/2016/03/24/scalable-css/)

<comment><USER27> In all seriousness, what advantages do you see over writing inline styles?

<comment><USER29> Tachyons is based on mathematical scales: [http://tachyons.io/docs/layout/spacing/](http://tachyons.io/docs/layout/spacing/)

Practical example: I have a form with a header. I look at it and think "there needs to be more space below the header". So I change

      className="mt0"

to

      className="mt1"

It hot-reloads etc. It took me exactly two keystrokes to change this and I know that the spacing is consistent with all the other spacing in my app.

<comment><USER27> But how is that any more efficient than changing:

        style="margin-top: 1rem;"

to

        style="margin-top: 2rem;"

It's also two keystrokes, and is mathematically determined...

<comment><USER29> 1\. way less clutter and repeating, my whole style is in one line per tag.

2\. the scale also has fractional rem values.

I'd rather change "f5" to "f6" for a smaller font than: "fontSize: 1rem" to "fontSize: 0.875rem".

3\. the author of tachyons clearly understand design. If he improves his stylesheet, I benefit.

4\. Apparently inline-styles are slower [0], but I don't count that since everything could be extracted.

[0] [http://ctheu.com/2015/08/17/react-inline-styles-vs-css- stupi...](http://ctheu.com/2015/08/17/react-inline-styles-vs-css-stupid- benchmark/)

5\. I thoroughly enjoy using it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Funny, but before we all get on our high horses:

1\. Bootstrap is partly for prototypes and quick interfaces where front end best practices don't matter.

2\. If you're using a preprocessor, you can include Bootstrap's classes and rename/combine them to something semantic.

3\. Something can be a good idea when done in small quantities, and a terrible idea when taken to extremes.

</comment><comment><USER31> I know it is a joke. I have been a contributor to the Webkit project and these kind of jokes really scares me to death.

</comment><comment><USER32> People who don't understand the concept of atomic CSS usually joke about it, but has no idea about the benefits. The new Twitter mobile site is fast as hell and use this concept. Semantic class names makes no sense when you think about it.

<comment><USER33> I'm not familiar with this concept. What _are_ the benefits?

<comment><USER32> [http://acss.io/frequently-asked-questions.html](http://acss.io/frequently- asked-questions.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Delightful, cringe-entailing humour; this definitely made my day.

</comment><comment><USER35> If you don't read the docs fully, everything looks really official with 314 stars social credibility too

</comment><comment><USER36> It's sad that my first reaction was "Looks like bootstrap." I would like a few more colors. Maybe you could add pantone support, that would make this super useful esp. for mobile!

</comment><comment><USER37> The real joke is how screwed up client side programming is. Here's a library that's an insider/hipster joke but it's only obviously a joke to hipster/insiders.

<comment><USER38> Blah blah blah doesn't like JavaScript

<comment><USER37> Javascript is fine. It's the fact that the ecosystem changes every few months and devs post things like "look how ridiculous this old way of doing things is" when the old way was just last year (or 6 months ago) when _it_ was the new hotness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm getting scared to see that on front page, I'm the kind of guy which could have enough luck to randomly fall into a project where someone used it for real.

<comment> at-fates-hands "Dude, I just found the coolest CSS framework, take a look. This is going to solve ALL of our problems!"

I've had this happen a few times with other developers I thought were pretty sharp. The best example is when someone found Dogescript ([https://dogescript.com/](https://dogescript.com/)) and was convinced it was the next big thing. The best part was I didn't have the heart to tell him the truth.

<comment><USER39> Are you kidding me?!

How can someone take Dogescript seriously?! That is so retarded, even a guy witch is not into programmation and hang out on 9gag sometimes can tell it's a troll!:O

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is awesome. I no longer need to type the dreaded ":" , which requires the most awkward finger combination . My ulnar nerve will be so happy.

<comment><USER41> You know you're supposed to press the shift key with the _other_ hand right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was about to flip the table before reading the last faq. Good one.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think we should judge a technique in regard to the problems it solves and the ones it creates, not in regard to our understanding of the said technique.

No, it is not the same as using "inline styles" (just think about it). Yes, it reduces CSS scope and bloat in styles sheets. Yes, it breaks the Separation of Concern principle. No, it does not create bloat in the markup. Yes, it forces you to style via markup rather than via a style sheet, etc.

Like with any other technique, choosing to use "Atomic CSS" in a project should be considered in relation to the problems authors have to solve. CSS is a complex matter, there is no one size-fit-all solution and there are not that many solutions either so I think we should think twice before disregarding a tool, any tool.

PS: Yes, I know universal.css is a joke but it is mocking a real/serious approach to big CSS problems.

</comment><comment><USER44> I am really glad someone has put this together - I was enjoying Harry Roberts talk at RenderConf until he dropped this in our faces: [http://csswizardry.com/2016/05/the-importance-of- important/](http://csswizardry.com/2016/05/the-importance-of-important/)

Utility classes I dislike (mixins plx) and the idea of using important with them is not a design decision I would want to pick up.

I guess my bigger problem is that Harry sells himself as an expert, stands up on stage telling people this is how they should be doing things... and here I am, no book, no stage and my specificity level gets trumped by Harry amongst certain members of my team (despite my years of qualified awesomeness across large scale, popular, public domain sites)

Thought I'd just share that with you :`P

<comment><USER45> I read that post earlier and it seemed fine. If you add a .bold class to an element, why would you want it to sometimes not be bold?

Utility classes don't belong everywhere but I think it's going a bit far to discredit the man for proposing this. His work on ITCSS in particular shows he's well versed in the language. I find this system far more sane than other proposals.

<comment><USER44> Why bother with class 'bold' when you could use inline styles? (I jest)

I come from an older thinking that your HTML should not have any classes that imply visual style, and that classes/id's should be semantic to the content and structure of the HTML.

CSSZen garden is a good example of this.

Nowadays I personally love semantic markup, stylistic mixins, and a CSS file linking the two together following BEM patterns.

I think legitimate times when this falls apart, is when I watch the designers I work with now, work in HTML & CSS - they need to quickly move things around, so doing this all from markup gives them a big speed increase, up until a point that is. We get involved now early after initial client direction sign- off to make their markup and CSS more robust before they carry on like a pig in poo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> this is wonderful! finally, a clear, succinct way of writing CSS. This is what I've been waiting for since I wrote my first  tags when I was eight.

<comment><USER40> that might have been  tags

<comment><USER47> To be fair, 8-year-olds are exposed to a lot of closure.

"And the HTML tag lived happily ever after."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I pretty much completely disagree with the implicit critique here. The codebase I work on now has largely transitioned from "semantic" CSS (classnames based on feature) to CSS with classnames that describe what they _do_ , visually, and the latter has made writing frontend code dramatically more straightforward - it's gone from something I dread and try to pass off to a specialist to something I can do easily. A night-and-day improvement.

I mean, nobody actually advocates translating every single possible style attribute into its own CSS class. But what's wrong with padding and margin utility classes that use a consistent set of widths? Is doing calculations on "1x" and "2x" when you want elements to line up really worse than doing calculations on pixel or em values in your CSS just because it's "unsemantic"?

Let's take the examples from the "maintainable CSS" book that's linked:

Ask yourself, in which case can you read the code and tell roughly how it's going to render? In which case do you think you'll be able to re-use the classes on other pages? If you wanted to make another, visually consistent page that shows, say, seller search results instead of product ones, in which case do you think you'll be able to figure out which styles need to change more quickly?

Here's the backend equivalent:

      # "bad"
      def cheapest_products_with_min_rating(rating)
        products.
          select { |p| p.rating >= rating }.
          sort_by { |p| p.price }.
          first(10)
      end

      # "good"
      def products_for_category_landing_page(rating)
        allowed = []
        for p in products
          if p.rating >= rating
            allowed <
= 10
          result << p
        end

        result
      end

Ugh, that first example - using all these "unsemantic" components like "sort" and "select"! How do I know when I look at the implementation of any of them, or the function itself, what the intent is? What business problem is being solved?

The second example - so nice and "semantic". If we want to change what products show up on the category landing page, it will be easy!

...

In real life, nobody writes backend code like that. Why should we tolerate it in the frontend?

<comment><USER49> I'm with you. I'm not sure why semantic purists need to spread the idea that utility classes are bad. 1 class name for every property is stupid of course, but layout classes (yes, used with semantic HTML elements) are a great help if used with discipline.

After all, who are we writing code for? \- The end user? He can't care less about the class names. \- Search engines? They can surely identify relevant content. Semantic classes help, but they don't rule out utilities. \- Ourselves? I can read utility/semantic classes well especially that I've written. Also not a case against utilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I've been working on an app that relies on parsing CSS styles for like 6 months - full time. This almost gave me a heart attack until I realized it was a joke.

</comment><comment><USER51> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737510)

</comment><comment><USER52> Seriously though. What's bad about using, say, tachyons and composing several of its pieces inside more meaningful labels like "sidebar" or "header" or whatever? It's simpler to grasp, and it WILL wind up as one dictionary per node anyway

</comment><comment><USER53> It's really funny because I'm working on a real project which uses a CSS which is really like universal.css, and we are thinking of going responsive. Luckily at least this is a joke.

I sympathize with the other commenters with my same problem.

</comment><comment><USER54> I know this is meant as a joke, but having used BassCSS[0] in a production webapp, I believe it really is a valid approach to CSS.

To each their own, I guess.

[0] [http://www.basscss.com/](http://www.basscss.com/)

</comment><comment><USER55> go on and just waste more time on this by reading the comments

</comment><comment><USER56> Can someone kindly explain how I'm supposed to feel about this? I'm on mobile ATM and my feelings are somewhat restrained by available processing power.

</comment><comment><USER57> Does this compile with vanillajs?

</comment><comment><USER58> I've done this before. The performance on IE, firefox, safari and mobile is complete shit yet suprisingly good in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER59> cornflowerblue was a nice touch.

</comment><comment><USER60> (Sorry about that, but we can't show files that are this big right now.)

Uh oh

</comment><comment><USER61> For about 15 seconds I was horrified. Time to go to bed.

</comment><comment><USER62> > Of course it's a joke.

whew, had me going there

</comment><comment><USER63> Obviously, it's just a joke.

</comment><comment><USER64> Sign me up.

</comment><comment><USER65> These frameworks get everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER66> Cool

</comment><comment><USER67> > Where is the documentation? > You don't need documentation.

What constitutes self-describing code is wildly different depending on the person. I mean, really?

EDIT: I definitely missed that this is a joke :'(

<comment><USER68> I think you may have missed this:

> Is this a joke? Of course it's a joke.

<comment><USER67> Sure did. My mistake

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> In the end, why not directly have the JS reading the class and generating only what's needed? That would be very cool! I'm still having some doubts about the maintainability (duplication, isolation...) of such styling btw...

<comment><USER70> [https://github.com/Idnan/furnish-js](https://github.com/Idnan/furnish-js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> People really waste their time on these jokes.

I have a lot of ideas for small side projects that could be good (or probably not, but at least I wanna try them seriously) and can't get time to implement them, and people who have this time waste it writing universal.css.

<comment><USER72> > People really waste their time on these jokes.

Oh, come on. It probably takes two hours, at most, to create a text generator that prints this whole universal.css file...

<comment><USER73> I doubt that it will take two hours. The source code (running in node or browser) is here: [https://github.com/marmelab/universal.css/blob/master/univer...](https://github.com/marmelab/universal.css/blob/master/universalCssGenerator.js)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> So I have to choose between a several Meg download vs using JavaScript to render styles?

No thanks.

Honestly I thought bootstrap was the only css I would ever need, and this hasn't changed my mind.</comment>


How to let your current employer fund your next startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/2007/1/5/how-to-let-your-current-employer-fund-your-next-startup/10005/view.aspx <comment><USER2> I used to be a journalist. I didn't learn much in that career, but I did learn one thing: 80% of reporters have a novel tucked into their desk drawer that they're writing. (Metaphorically, of course - most reporters can use word processors.)

I never personally knew a reporter who finished that novel.</comment>


Ask HN: How much equity to give away for $100k? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, we are wondering how much usually other startups are giving away for 100k funding? Say, you are not launched yet and about 70% from releasing version 1.0. There are 3 founders. Thanks <comment><USER2> What's your expected turnover and profit in year 1? Year 2? Year 3?

What is the probability of failure?

The following is really, really rough, so feel free to argue with it, but here's some thinking.

Suppose a VC expects, on average, to double their money over three years. Suppose you have a 10% chance of $2M profit over three years, a 60% chance of $100K profit over three years, a 20% chance of breaking even over three years, and a 10% chance of losing everything.

Your expected profit over three years is around $200K to $250K. That's twice what they invested, so they want 100% equity.

Now tell me where that's wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> An oversimplification to illustrate the concept:

Shares = investment amount/current valuation

There is no universal answer. If your version 1.0 is likely to earn us $1B in sales the first year you would give away a hell of a lot less than if your version 1.0 is a freemium app targeted towards furries to help find local dry cleaners. It all depends.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks about "there is no universal answer". I was thinking if there is some "average" equity that people are giving out for 100k. Example, in YC, it's 2% - 8%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> $3.50

you can't really answer such question if you don't say what it is you are doing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Convertible debt is the best thing from your perspective and means you don't have to answer this question.</comment>


Using Zipcar may damage your credit - <AUTHOR> http://fstutzman.com/2009/03/29/using-zipcar-may-damage-your-credit/ <comment><USER3> My ZipCar experience: I rented a car for a full weekend last October, and returned it several hours before it was due back. I forgot to "tap out", though, and ZipCar sent me a late return notification and charged my credit card. No big deal, just a simple mix-up, so I called customer service.

Unbelievably, they couldn't do anything about it from the national help line, and when I was redirected to the NY office, I got more runaround. It got to the point where I called my credit card company to do a stop payment, as it was clear that I wasn't going to get help from ZipCar.

Then I tweeted about it. Someone at ZipCar saw the tweet, and the whole problem got fixed pretty much immediately - I got an email saying my case had been reviewed, that the computer showed I did in fact return the car on time, and that if I could cancel the stop-payment, I'd get my money back (which I did).

It was awesome to get the problem fixed with just a simple tweet, but I wasted hours on the phone and would have wasted hours more dealing with the stop- payment fallout, when they already had the information that I hadn't actually returned the car late. I'm still a member, but I think I've used them only once or twice since. The whole experience left me pretty soured on them.

The takeaway is: if you're only giving good customer service to the people who complain publicly, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER4> >The takeaway is: if you're only giving good customer service to the people who complain publicly, you're doing it wrong.

Speaking as a provider who has been in that situation before (e.g. losing a ticket, then responding to a public complaint) I agree _completely_. First off, 98% of your customers are not going to complain publicly. They are simply going to leave. And as I keep saying, the people who don't complain are the cash cows... the silent majority, from whom you get most of your money.

Now, I'm not saying you should ignore public complaints... that would be bad business. Respond publicly and solve the problem, or at least give a refund. But you must treat the complainers like canaries. for every valid complaint (and yeah, you will get invalid complaints... respond to those too, and offer a refund, but it's okay to say "I'm sorry my service does not meet your needs." - you can't be all things to all people.) you need to review your processes, and figure out why the complaint wasn't resolved through normal channels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't seem so terrible to me. You entered a contract with Zipcar where you pay them an annual fee for their services. Failing to pay the fee doesn't automatically break that contract.

Think of this way: what if you could simply stop paying rent when you want to move out of an apartment? Or you just stopped paying your cell phone bill when you want to cancel it? What if you forgot to pay your health care premium and you lost your health insurance??

Clearly these aren't acceptable ways to break out of a contract.

The author's trick to "lose" your card to prevent auto billing is inviting issues like this. It seems so much smarter to just check your credit card statement each month. That would be much less work than having to update your credit card number everywhere you _do_ want to renew a service.

Your credit card failed processing and Zipcar kept your service up and prompted you to update the card. That seems like a great way to go. If they had simply cancelled your account, I could imagine this blog post going the other way. "I forgot to update my card and zipcar cancelled my account, leaving me stranded when I really needed a car!!"

With critical accounts like your car, apartment, cell phone... it seems best to be explicit when you want to cancel your account.

<comment><USER6> I'm a reasonably experienced consumer and until now I always would have answered "yes" if someone asked "is cancelling your credit card an acceptable way of terminating a monthly service?" I'm also a reasonably experienced seller of recurring services... and my answer would have been the same.

If I'm pre-paying a service each month and I cancel my card, getting threats about collections is the exact opposite of what I expect. What I usually expect is for the service provider to either cancel my service or put it in some kind of suspended mode and then follow up with me to see if I really meant to cancel. Good billing providers would actually do this automatically: <http://chargify.com/features/dunning-management/>

As an aside, half the purpose of Zipcar is that it _isn't_ a critical account. It's an easy-to-use convenience that saves you from the complexities of owning a car or making arrangements with a traditional rental service.

<comment><USER7> It's a _possible_ way of terminating SOME services (I wouldn't try it on your cable or cell phone bill). But I think it depends what you mean by "acceptable." It's not very nice. If the best practice for a merchant is to suspend an account when someone doesn't pay, then best practice for a consumer is to cancel a service when you no longer intend to pay for it.

<comment><USER6> I dunno, it's not really "nice" or "mean". It's an amoral act. If a user automatically prepays for services and isn't under a more formal contract (as they would be with a cell phone provider, and possibly cable), opting not to pay is their prerogative. Just as opting not to provide services is the seller's prerogative.

Monthly services fees are a convenience for _both_ the buyer and the seller, not just the seller.

<comment><USER8> Nearly all cable services and most cell phone contracts are post-paid, not pre-paid. How else would they tack on fees for elective usages without a debit system?

It's effectively a credit system. You owe them money at the end of the month for services rendered since the last bill.

<comment><USER9> The existence of post-paid services seems to have no direct bearing on whether pre-paid services, like Zipcar, should feel entitled to rapidly go ape on your credit rating when the funding source disappears.

<comment><USER8> It does absolutely have direct bearing on whether "opting not to provide services is the seller's prerogative" as the parent stated, when the services actually are under a formal contract and post-paid. The argument holds up for Zipcar but not any of his examples.

<comment><USER6> I think you're making the same point I was...

<comment><USER8> Sorry about that, you're right, I misread the negative leading into the parenthetical

<comment><USER6> I'm exceptionally skilled at being unclear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've read my credit card agreements. It says that if you authorized a recurring charge before you cancel your account, and that charge shows up again, you are responsible for it. (If it's erroneous, you can dispute it, of course.)

The way to cancel services is to call up the provider and tell them you want to cancel. If they charge you after that, dispute it. If they won't close your account, sue them or write a letter to your state's attorneys general office.

Now ideally, there would be a way to cancel everything online... but that is apparently not good for business, and it's something that the government is going to have to mandate.

(Honestly, it surprises me how people manage their finances. Losing your credit card to avoid paying for things that auto-renew!? This reminds me of some hate mail I read that was directed at my employer; apparently this person kept a $0 balance in her checking account, bought a $5 sandwich everyday with her debit card, ate it, and then went to the bank and deposited exactly $5 in cash. Since overdraft fees were calculated overnight instead of intraday, she never paid overdraft fees. Then the algorithm changed, and she got charged the overdraft fees. This apparently was because the bank was evil, and not because it's stupid to go into debt to buy a sandwich when you are carrying the cash with you anyway. But I digress...)

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree this is dumb of ZipCar from a PR standpoint, but that is a ridiculously hyperbolic title.

Using ZipCar won't damage your credit. Canceling ZipCar won't damage your credit. Failing to cancel ZipCar while also failing to pay for ZipCar _could_ indeed damage your credit.

</comment><comment><USER11> There is good and ugly with zipcar. I have my share to say about the ugly. They increased their fare when gas price went up, but didn't lower it when the prices dropped significantly. [http://blog.cyberion.net/2008/12/zipcar-please- lower-your-pr...](http://blog.cyberion.net/2008/12/zipcar-please-lower-your- prices-gas-is-cheap.html)

Besides, a Marketing Executive noticed this post above and dropped me a line saying he would get back to me the next day at the latest (I thought, yeah, cool a 2.0 company or whatever. My expectations were lower, I just wanted to vent out publicly about zipcar not listening). I never heard of him again.

In short? I'm not surprised one bit about their poor customer practice.

</comment><comment><USER12> This does seem somewhat unusual. Forcing auto-renewal upon customers (and providing no way to turn it off short of actually cancelling the account) is, alas, common, but most companies won't go so far as to turn the auto-renewal over to collections. They'll send you an email or two complaining, then cancel the account. I think all the times it's happened to me it's actually been stated like that in the emails pretty explicitly; something like, your credit card is no longer valid, please log in and provide new details within X days or your account will be canceled.

Does this kind of thing meaningfully damage your credit, though? I wouldn't think that someone sizing you up for something like a car loan would consider a $50 dispute over an annual fee to be a very good predictor of your creditworthiness.

<comment><USER13> Problem is, it's usually not 'someone' sizing you up - it's an algorithm like a FICO score that gets spit back to anyone looking you up for credit considerations. When dealing face to face with someone reviewing a report for a score, they might take that in to consideration, but it's not always (or usually?) the case.

<comment><USER12> Hmm, yeah, I can buy that. If I were designing an algorithm, I think I would attempt to differentiate different types of disputes, so something like a dispute with _Newsweek_ over a subscription renewal doesn't get much weight, while skipping credit-card or mortgage payments does. But maybe they've run the numbers and found that these small disputes actually _are_ predictive of bigger defaults? Although, alternately, I could believe that the FICO folks don't care that much about predictive accuracy, since they're basically a monopoly with a good moat.

<comment><USER14> I missed a credit card payment a few months back. The reason? I didn't have direct debit set up on the bill, because I normally paid it in full manually before the bill date. Why manually? Because I actually overpay in order to increase the effective credit limit, since I'm new to the bank (moved to the UK fairly recently) and hence have a low limit. So, for the sake of a 50 GBP missed payment, I'll have that mark on my credit score for the next few years.

<comment><USER13> If you do it fast enough, the bank _may_ remove the charge. They might not be able to easily remove the mark on your credit report now - but you won't know without asking. I've had my branch remove a couple of 'late payments' because they were truly just 'late' by a day or two, and generally just a bit of misplanning on my part. I can always move my money elsewhere, and they'll lose a decent customer for the sake of a $30 fine - they've removed the charges in both cases.

<comment><USER12> I don't know if it's unusual, but none of the credit cards I've had have even _reported_ late payments that were only a few days late. Discussion on places like Fatwallet suggests that most companies report payments that are 30+ days late, with additional badness tiers at 60+ and 120+ days late.

<comment><USER15> _Discussion on places like Fatwallet suggests that most companies report payments that are 30+ days late, with additional badness tiers at 60+ and 120+ days late._

Yes. Also, credit reports focus on _currently_ delinquent accounts -- a missed credit card payment a few years ago almost certainly won't show up if the account is currently not delinquent.

<comment><USER16> > _Yes. Also, credit reports focus on currently delinquent accounts -- a > missed credit card payment a few years ago almost certainly won't show up if > the account is currently not delinquent._

This is absolutely untrue. Have you looked at a credit report before? There is a table in it that includes information about each month for the last few years (I believe seven); and each month is a whole column of information about each of the various accounts you have been paying to. It indicates whether there was no payment needed, payment on time, or, yes, a late payment. Even if the account is currently paid up.

<comment><USER15> Yes, I have looked at credit reports.

Don't assume that all credit reports are as detailed as the one that you saw.

<comment><USER13> The major 3 in the US - experian, transunion and equifax - all have that level of detail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A few thoughts _(I'm a ZipCar member btw)_ :

I don't pay an annual fee because I used a company code I found on a discount site that gave me no annual fee (use Google to find one).

They wrote and said that he was several weeks overdue paying for his annual subscription but I wonder if he'd tried to book a car whether they'd have let him without a valid credit card on file? Point is, if they wouldn't have let him rent a car then I think it's crap to say he was overdue because the membership was still in effect. I think his MO on the "loosing his card" is crappy, but this seems equally crappy.

Finally as an FYI, Felix Salmon wrote (admittedly a while back, but then this OP link is old too) that ZipCar insurance is very weak in places, see <http://www.felixsalmon.com/000855.html>. I'm not aware they've done much to improve the situation

</comment><comment><USER18> FWIW, I don't use zipcar, but this blog post is 18 months old... The plural of anecdote is not research.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is his own fault. Zipcar could have done a better job handling it, but please note how he says letters _became_ increasingly more menacing. Why did he not attempt to do anything about this until they were trying to send him to collections?

Come on. you arent a victim. If i start to get calls about something, im going to return them, and figure out what is going on here.

If he would have simply called them he could have avoided this. Zipcar saw that he "owed" 50 bucks, they saw him not returning their calls, and finally they sent his ass to collections. Pretty straight forward to me. Its his fault for making sure that they wernt trying to bill him any longer, and to have done something PRIOR to them sending him to collections. Sit back a moment and ask yourself how Zipcar makes money.. hint: its not on the mileage

I use zipcar, and ive never had any issues.

<comment><USER14> I don't know what it is about stories like this that make commenters here start thinking in terms of fault.

It's not about fault. It's about the customer always being right, even when they're wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> An epic fail that a company that is still so new in many markets (I was considering Zipcar for having a second car for the winter in my town when the biking weather becomes bad) would be so customer-unfriendly. I'll never be a customer for the first time if this is how the company treats early adopters.

</comment><comment><USER21> The grim reality thing about questionably ethical business practices like this is the increased profits usually outweigh the drawbacks, as long as they can keep the outrage down to background noise. Seems like nobody checks BBB listings before buying anymore.

</comment><comment><USER22> _I "lose" my credit cards yearly to avoid sneaky auto-renewals just like this._

Doesn't this also damage your credit? Length that accounts are open factors into your credit score, and people who cycle through cards typically see it go down.

<comment><USER12> If you just your card stolen, they send you a new card with a new number on the same account, which I don't believe shows up on the credit report at all (it still counts as the same account).

<comment><USER22> I don't believe that's how most banks handle lost cards, and I don't see how that would avoid the auto-renewals as the original author was trying to do. I assumed the the author was talking about closing the account and re-opening with a new number.

EDIT: I'm sorry, I mis-read your comment originally and thought you said the same number, not a new number. That said, I've been through this a couple times, and each number shows up individually on my credit reports.

<comment><USER12> That's how my banks have handled it, at least. When my Citibank card was stolen, they sent me a card with a new number, but it was still the same online login, same "years open" on my credit statement, etc. It stops auto- renewals because merchants only have the old number, which they can no longer charge. In my case that was mostly unwanted, because I had to go update the auto-renewals I _did_ want with the new number (as well as updating it in places like Amazon), but it'd stop auto-renewals that you didn't want as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I do something similar, but, arguably, lower-effort than outright cancelling my cards yearly. I use disposable card numbers.

I only wish every single one of my cards offered this service, but, most notably, Amex doesn't[1].

Currently, only Citi[2] and Bofa[3] (from their MBNA acquisition) offer it on reward cards I'm willing to use[4]. If anyone knows of other issuers who offer this on such a card or who offer it on an otherwise full-featured[5] business card, with all cardholders having access to this feature, I'd be very interested in knowing.

[1] They had it under the mark "Private Payments" but discontinued it. I don't think they ever offered it on the Costco co-branded cards, so I never tried it.

[2] "Virtual Account Numbers"

[3] "ShopSafe"

[4] At least 1% kickback payable as cash. Miles and "points" don't do it for me.

[5] Employee cards with spending limits settable online is the critical one.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is sort of off-topic, but does anyone know how Zipcar affect your _insurance_ record, since you don't have an individual insurance policy? If you use Zipcar exclusively for a couple years, then stop and go back to a private vehicle and private insurance, do insurance companies consider you "continuously insured" or are you going to get hit for having a break in your insurance record?

(I've tried to ask this question of Zipcar representatives in the past, and no one has been able to give me an answer. Their FAQ on insurance doesn't help either: <http://www.zipcar.com/how/faqs/one-faq?faq_number=28>)

<comment><USER17> I asked a similar question about building up a no-claims bonus for using ZipCar.

The short answer is no, it's technically ZipCar that is insured and so from a personal capacity you have no car insurance if you only use ZipCars and don't run your own car (and personal insurance).

I'm not clear why that is a problem - you just loose your no claims bonus but surely that's reasonable?

<comment><USER24> > you just loose your no claims bonus but surely that's reasonable?

Unfortunately not. In my experience, the slightest break in insurance coverage is an excuse to push you into the highest-risk pool. It's completely ridiculous. Perhaps the policy made sense before every piece of information relevant to insurance was tracked by computers, but now it seems like something that only exists to punish people who want to go car-free for awhile.

<comment><USER15> That policy probably exists to stop people from lying about their accident history. It's really hard for an insurance company to distinguish between "I didn't have car insurance in 2002" and "I had car insurance in 2002 and got into a major accident I don't want you to know about".

<comment><USER24> I would be surprised if the insurance companies had to depend on the honesty of their customers to know whether they'd be in collisions. Financial companies don't depend on my honesty to know if I've taken out a loan. They must share information about claims.

<comment><USER15> If you tell them that you had insurance with company X, you can be sure that they'll phone company X and ask for your claims history.

But there's far too many insurance companies around for them to phone _everybody_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Heh, I've been a zipcar user since the flexcar days and this happened to me but I just ignored it all. I ended up renewing some months later but Im hope they didnt report me me. Though I did a credit check a while ago while apt hunting and nothing odd showed up.

</comment><comment><USER26> I couldn't even get past the "you have too many speeding tickets phase" - <USER2> could my girlfriend...

</comment><comment><USER27> If you live in the Bay Area, a nonprofit alternative is City CarShare:

<http://www.citycarshare.org/>

<comment><USER17> I'm _totally_ into non-profit schemes but from the math I did it seemed that CityCarShare came out more expensive than ZipCar if you want to take the car out of the city because they charge you $0.35c/mile in addition to the hourly rental.

(ZipCar don't charge per mile just per hour).

I also have appreciated being able to use my ZipCar membership in other cities in America and Europe, esp in emergences/unexpectedly.

<comment><USER28> Their liability coverage is better - up to $1mil per incident vs. $300,000 with zipcar. I know at least one person who chose CityCarShare for this reason.</comment></comment></comment>


Why StackExchange will eventually fail – Control-Freak-ism - <AUTHOR> http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2010/09/24/why-stackexchange-will-eventually-fail-control-freak-ism.aspx

<comment><USER2> I love stack overflow, I love the idea, etc. What I don't like, and what I think is the real problem, which the author gets at, is that the site is becoming more and more fragmented. Programming is a very broad topic and it drives me NUTS when I post a question on SO, and get several replies telling me its more suitable for another SE site, then eventually someone decides to close it and I have to find the other site to re-ask. More effort gets put in by the control freaks to tell you what stack overflow is for and that you're wrong for posting your question there than to actually just answer it in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I was thinking about this. The obvious counter-example where control- freakism works is wikipedia. But it works there because there is only one wikipedia, and it is supposed to be about anything that's important. So there's no fragmentation, and there's no higher ambition for the site creators.

Stack Overflow is a great site, but I don't see the value of a federated series of sites for all manner of topics... at least not on a mass scale. I get the feeling that SO was just a bit too easy for Joel and Jeff, what with the sad state of the competition, and their mindshare amongst the target audience. So they needed to find a bigger challenge. I guess more power to them in their entrepreneurial efforts, but I think success will be elusive.

<comment><USER4> "there is only one wikipedia, and it is supposed to be about anything that's important. So there's no fragmentation ..."

There is fragmentation. See Wookiepedia, for one, where Star Wars fans have a different idea of what "important" means.

<comment><USER5> People on the main wikipedia site aren't going to tell you to go post your Star Wars article on the Star Wars-specific spinoff wiki site though are they?

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. I searched Deletionpedia (pages deleted from Wikipedia) for "Wookiepedia" and easily found that "Force Lightning" was deleted. One of the reasons for deletion (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Force_lightning) for discussion) was "this is precisely why we have outlets such as Wookiepedia for this sort of stuff." The page on Wookiepedia is <http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_lightning> .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Today I posted a simple non-programming question on Quora after I skimmed an article by MG Siegler espousing its greatness. Ten hours later and I still don't have an answer.

The same thing happens to me with Stackoverflow. Sometimes I get argumentative answers but most of the time I get no answer. Maybe I am an idiot but I think sites like this will fail when they are overwhelmed by people who have questions but aren't necessarily in the position to contribute back themselves (hey we are busy!)

The utility in these types of sites is the range of questions that will be archived and served off search results for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER7> StackOverflow is my first port of call when I run into a programming problem that I can't solve. I've started mucking around with Unity 3d (a game engine) and was quite relieved when I found a solid StackExchange forum for the engine.

The main complaint I have about StackOverflow is how the reputation system negatively affects peoples' behaviour. Although the net effect of the system is very positive, I find that people rush to answer easy questions to get some up-votes. If they take too long to craft a detailed answer, they miss out. Answers to difficult questions take longer and get less views and up-votes, so people don't bother trying.

Many of the questions that show up on StackOverflow can be answered with a quick google. They only serve to dilute the quality questions and answers, and cheapen the reputation system. I also get the impression that people who couldn't be bothered to google a question first also couldn't be bothered responding to the comments and answers that they get.

Having said that, StackOverflow is still the best programming forum for languages that I use and I don't see it failing any time soon.

</comment><comment> T-R Control issues never struck me as significant, either on SO or Area51, and I have trouble buying the argument that correcting typos and merging similar sites are unnecessary and evidence that Jeff,Joel, and the site's users are control freaks. On the other hand, I'm surprised he didn't bring up the Community Wiki police.

The most common thing I hear about SO lately is along the lines that all the questions worth asking have been asked, or are esoteric enough that the quality/quantity of answers is low, and few points are given - if anything kills those sites, I'd imagine that'd be it. There seems to be a diminishing ROI for time spent on the site, and scores seem to be fairly biased toward those who spent time on the site early on. Maybe other subjects won't have this issue.

</comment><comment><USER8> My takeaway:

"StackExchange did something I didn't like, so I'll write a blog post about why it will fail for (get this!) the exact same reason why it did the think that I didn't like. What are the chances?!?!"

</comment><comment><USER9> "If I wanted people editing my words, looking down at me, and deciding to change stuff, I'd start a wiki. as is, my answers are my own, and they reflect my mood, and my typos. and if they want me ot fix them they should ask me."

Sounds like the author is suffering from exactly what he is accusing Joel and Jeff of.

<comment><USER10> If you put your name to a comment on a public website, there should be some guarantee that nobody else can edit your words to say something that you didn't say and maybe disagree with. An editorial feedback system would be a more respectful way to achieve the same result.

Disclaimer: I've not spent much time on SO so I don't know how this feature works. If the comment is clearly marked as having been edited by a more senior member, that would mitigate somewhat.

<comment><USER11> Comments (on both questions and answers) cannot be edited by anyone except the author, but can be made at any time.

 _Questions and answers_ can be edited by anyone with enough rep, and a clear and detailed edit history is shown, including the names of all those involved. Anyone with enough rep or the author himself can also roll back any edits with two clicks.

It works very well, in my experience. I don't know what anyone is complaining about.

Moreover, editorial feedback on how the website works can be done on a "meta" site that is linked with the stack site in question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The title says StackExchange, but the article is about StackOverflow...

<comment><USER13> The article appears to cover both StackOverflow (programming community) and StackExchange (community sites using Stack software).</comment></comment>


Driverless Roborace car crashes at speed in Buenos Aires - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39027477 <comment><USER2> If there's no crashing, what would be the point of watching?

Seriously, nothing would be more boring than watching 10 cars all driving perfectly in a line. The opportunity for aggressiveness, risk-taking and crashes without human lives ending is what makes this exciting.

<comment><USER3> I think that is where the different Autonomous systems come into play. Each one may take a slightly different approach to each decision point.

It would be like the difference between Rinaldo Capello and Allan McNish in endurance racing. Both very fast drivers... McNish is much more aggressive, who took more risks and got away with them more often than not verses Capello who was much more conservative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is exactly the sort of thing we need to test the limits of robotic vehicles. Nothing spurs innovation like intense competition.

Also think it would be cool if the cars could get points for touching other cars (without crashing, of course) or faking them out with optical distractions or anything else.

Or unleash more obstacles that cars have to avoid or lose points. Fake babies crawling on to the track and such.

<comment><USER5> Add actual weapons fired from car to car and you've got something that I'd pay money to watch.

So pretty much the movie Death Race but with self driving cars.

<comment><USER6> Might as well go full Full Auto 2 and let people duke it out with them.

I'd pay money to watch that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been tracking this Roborace thing and they're spending a lot of money on bullshit. It's all sizzle and no steak. They have some very slickly produced videos about the passion and drama of racing robots and they're all hilariously anti-climactic.

Methinks the talent shortage in the autonomous driving space is severe enough that anyone capable of developing an (exciting) autonomous race car has more important things to do.

<comment><USER8> Depends on where their funding is coming from, and what the goals are. If they're being funded by big corporations as both research and PR, then it's not just junk. They're doing good work.

<comment><USER9> Is doing this on a track too ideal? Would be cool if this was done in super extreme conditions. That R&D would definitely help commercial autonomous cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I searched Youtube but could not find the shortest clip of the event.

Are there any?

<comment><USER11> BBC says they will publish it on Friday on YouTube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was terrified when I saw the picture of the dog before I read the caption.

<comment><USER13> The caption is downright hilarious because of just how dry it is.

"The winning Devbot 1 managed to avoid running over a dog"

<comment><USER14> I thought so too.

"Devbot 2, on the other hand..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to know more specifics on how the cars communicate with each other – is the event more a choreographed show than an actual race?

I follow motor sports to an extent, but don't feel too enthused about watching computers race each other (no matter if on track, or virtually), but it would further diminish the "racing" part of it if the machines actually told each other what they were up to next. A more humane way of driving might be more spectacular.

<comment><USER16> Hopefully it's on te level of what drivers already do. If you see someone is taking you on the inside, you don't close them off in a way to deliberately cause a crash. Basic politeness.

If they communicate so it's all a choreographed dance, then that's stupid and the sport is nigh unwatchable.

There's a reason "best crashes" videos are a whole genre on Youtube. The danger makes motosport interesting.

<comment><USER17> > you don't close them off in a way to deliberately cause a crash. Basic > politeness.

Typically the rules of racing will say you don't block faster cars or deliberately drive dangerously, etc. e.g. Forumla 1 says:

[https://www.formula1.com/en/championship/inside-f1/rules- reg...](https://www.formula1.com/en/championship/inside-f1/rules- regs/Licenses_driving_protocol_and_penalties.html)

But yes, this Roborace thing seems pointless unless the cars are made by different teams and have different software, etc.

<comment><USER18> Apparently that's how it's going to work: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/08/meet-devbot-a-self- driv...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/08/meet-devbot-a-self-driving- electric-racing-car/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of the things you could do with Chessmaster was have it play itself and watch, this turned out to be pretty boring. I suspect that having robot cars race would be similarly boring for everyone except the engineers who were enjoying the technical challenges being overcome.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps it would be boring if all cars are running the same basic strategy. If competing teams get to tune their strategies and counter-strategies I can see this being quite popular. After all, there might be bigger crashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This makes me wonder about the possibilities of AI-based racing in the future. Can we make a truly competitive sport of it? Grand Prix style auto racing is a _really_ complex thing, with the most sophisticated cars in the world, and a lot of judgment calls by the team as well as the drivers. Speeds are limited by human reflexes and safety. Theoretically, we could get even faster, more difficult racing with AI. But will AI flatten the curve to where it becomes uninteresting?

<comment><USER18> AIs are still limited by the capabilities of the hardware, and there are a huge number of variables to deal with. If the teams are properly incentivized to win even if it means occasionally having a crash because the car was operating on the bleeding edge, I think it should stay interesting.

I think the bigger question is whether it's actually fun to watch cars racing without humans in them, no matter how exciting the racing is otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "DevBot in Driverless mode — scanning the Donington Park circuit in England"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrfCQ7qwPh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrfCQ7qwPh8)

</comment><comment><USER22> >at speed

at _low_ speed, no idea why they run at what looks like 1/2 power of human counterparts</comment>


Peter Tattam created Trumpet Winsock and got very little: Let's set things right - <AUTHOR> While talking about the Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 upgrade video, I offhandedly made a joke at Trumpet Winsock's expense[1].
In the comment below, nailer mentioned that the creator of Trumpet Winsock saw very little money from one of the most widely-used pieces of shareware then in existence. Magazines and ISPs distributed the full version of his software but very few paid for it[2].
My first experience connecting to the internet was using Windows 3.1, Trumpet Winsock and Netscape 1.22 (I think) to browse the nascent web. Later I wiled away (too many) hours on IRC.
At the time I didn't have two 50c coins to rub together. Today, partly due to that early internet exposure, I am a well-paid software engineer.
In the same thread I have alluded to you will find that we identified Peter Tattam and two of us (badmonkey0001 and I) contacted him independently.
At our prompting Peter has set up a Paypal account where you can make donations. I invite you to chip in to reward a man whose work let so many of us open the door, for the first time, to an important part of our lives.
Thanks, Peter.
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---
Donate to firstname.lastname@example.com
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---
Edit: now cross-posted at Reddit in non-karma-harvesting format (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fwciq/peter_tattam_created_trumpet_winsock_enabling/)
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281698 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281770 </comment><comment><USER2> I can confirm that the email is the one I passed on to Jacques. The PayPal account is a legit one I have used in the past and is registered under the business name Tattam Software. If I encounter any problems I will look into the other option.

Thanks all... I had honestly thought the Internet had forgotten about me.

Peter

<comment><USER3> With Paypal's history, I normally keep clearing them to my bank as they keep reaching a certain limit of say $1000. I mean I know it is stupid and misses the entire point of Paypal, but I would rather do this than my account being frozen.

<comment><USER4> After you clear to the linked bank account, you need to be sure to move the money into a second account, as they are permitted by the terms of service to attempt to withdraw from your linked bank account any and all money they deem necessary up to the total amount received for all transactions for a good deal of time. I strongly advise you link a non-primary account for this reason.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't they just attempt to withdraw it from a now empty bank account, leaving you with overdraft fees?

EG let's say you have $100 in your paypal account, which you send to bank account A. From there, you send it to bank account B, leaving bank account A empty. Paypal decides to withdraw $100 from bank account A, leaving you with -$100 on A, and $100 on B?

<comment><USER6> I /think/ this may depend on the mechanism used to move the money. Do ACH transfers incur NSF/Overdraft fees, or do they simply get rejected?

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's similar to a check at least that what I understood from my bank when it happened in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Donated. As a closeted gay teenager, Trumpet was the software that got me in touch with the people who literally saved my life. I could never thank this guy enough.

(Edit: if you felt like making another worthy donation, the Youth Guard mailing lists are the people I'm referring to -- <http://www.youth- guard.org/youth/> . I cannot overstate the impact they had on my life.)

<comment><USER9> There's no easy way to word what I came away from your comment with, so I'll just get it out there: your comment was exceedingly enlightening. I doubt that during the development of Trumpet anybody thought they were saving even one life (it's a sockets API!), and your story speaks volumes about how programmers can touch lives in ways they'd never imagine during development.

Moral I learned: it's _really_ easy to underestimate impact. I'm personalizing that to relate to development, but I think it's applicable to a lot of what we do.

Thank you for sharing your story. Even though it wasn't directed at me, it gave me considerable pause and something to think about.

<comment><USER10> "it's really easy to underestimate impact"

And I bet the guy who made the video which inadvertently spawned this idea probably didn't imagine the impact it would have on another man's life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Suggestion: pay him by Mass Payment. You end up kicking in $0.50 in paypal fees, he doesn't have to pay to receive. It ends up that more of your donation reaches him net (if you donate above, let's see, $7.25 or so).

You'll need to save a text file. I think you guys can probably manage, but to make it copy/paste easy:

\---

email@example.com (tab) 25.00 (tab) USD (tab) winsocks_rocked (tab) This is a totally optional comment.

\---

Thanks for Winsock, by the way. You saved me hours of frustration when I was trying to get Compuserve and Warcraft 2 to work together, back in middle school. Crikey I feel old.

<comment><USER12> Another way to avoid PayPal fees is to 1) decide how much to give, 2) multiply it by six, and 3) decide by dice roll whether to give it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just a warning, if it's a new paypal account and there are a bunch of donations, PayPal will lock the account and keep the money for themselves until he runs their gauntlet.

Actually, they'll sometimes do that on accounts that are a decade old, but new accounts especially.

Maybe use WePay instead with a target amount?

<comment><USER14> WePay doesn't work except in the US, which will do nought to get him money from outside the US, where he no doubt has fans to.

Besides if PayPal is that stupid, we can always post to reddit that PayPal is stealing the guys money. Should cause enough of a problem that they open it again.

<comment><USER15> > Should cause enough of a problem that they open it again.

Do you have any examples of negative publicity leading to paypal correcting their mistake? I've never seen anything like that in any of the stories about paypal freezing accounts, even the fairly high profile ones.

<comment><USER16> A few days ago they reinstated the account of Courage to Resist, a Bradley Manning defense fund. The organization seems to think it was because of the pressure from bad publicity: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20036476-38.html>

<comment><USER17> I'll keep donating to the Hang Bradley Manning as a Traitor fund.

Thanks tho!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How much did a license for the original Trumpet Winsock cost?

Nevermind, in 1993 a single license for Trumpet Winsock cost $25 usd. Adjusted for inflation that is $38.10 today.

<comment><USER19> I guess it would be reasonable to ask people pay the full $25 if they ever used a pirated copy of the software.

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure I dealt with an ISP that distributed a pirated copy when I was going to school up in MN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great idea. With all the Paypal horror stories out there I honestly hope you've set up the account so that it doesn't get wrongly frozen if the donations start ramping up.

</comment><comment><USER22> Donated $38.10, the amount declared as the inflation-adjusted registration fee. My message:

Thank you for my career.

I've run open source projects, built e-learning systems, helped charities in Colombia work together, worked with people revolutionizing journalism and (once, by accident) made a large number of Utah Mormons very angry. None of this would have happened without the software you created. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER23> I used to wake up in the middle of the night and sneak downstairs with my brother, lugging our family's first computer, a Compaq Presario all-in-one (similar to the gumdrop iMac) onto the dining room table so we could connect to the internet. With a 486DX2/66 and 4MB ram, we'd load up Tabworks and use the /worst/ browser in existence (don't recall the name, but it was probably a rip off of Mosaic) and dial out to IDT.net to connect to the internet.

Later on, after saving money to upgrade to a whopping 12MB ram and Windows 95, that same computer allowed to to play multiplayer Diablo, which was my first taste of IRC. Naturally it was all downhill from there, and I played Diablo for two years straight.

There were a lot of fights in our household over phone bills and busy dial tones, and I'm sorry that my sister was left stranded at school with no ride because I was busy downloading FreeBSD, but now I'm a successful software engineer and budding entrepreneur in the education space, and it's all thanks to those formative moments panicking at 3 am, trying so hard to muffle the sounds emanating from my 9600 kbaud modem as it connected me to an exciting new world.

Thanks, Peter. Thank you so much.

<comment><USER24> ATL0 was a great command that muted the modem so that your parents couldn't hear that you were dialing up. :-)

Oh wow, now I feel old.

<comment><USER25> Wasn't ATH0+++ used to cause modem users to hangup via IRC CTCP requests? Good days.

<comment><USER26> A popular multi-line BBS back in Colorado had one faulty modem and if you were to post that in chat the person on that line would get disconnected... good times, good times.

<comment><USER27> It probably had a modem that didn't pay Hayes to license the patent on enforcing a delay in switching from data mode to command mode (+++ did that, and then ATH0 was the AT command to hang up the phone -- normally you'd have to wait a couple seconds, type +++, wait a couple more seconds, and then you'd get an OK and could type AT commands).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequence)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I feel like Dr. Sam Beckett, travelling back in time to put right what once went wrong.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: I've created a very simple site you can refer people to.

<http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/>

<comment><USER29> No disrecpect to anyone invovled.

The gang over here is all hot to chip in their donations..... Is there consensus that this is definitely legitimate and that the money will really go to Peter?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a reasonable question.

You can independently contact Peter or myself.

Peter has his own company, Tattam Software Enterprises, which you can look up (<http://www.trumpet.com.au/>).

I work for Charles Darwin University, you can look me up on their web site (<http://cdu.edu.au>).

If you are unsure, contact either of us by email or phone.

Note: I will be unavailable from midday, Australian Central Standard Time.

<comment><USER29> Good enough for us - if nobody's screaming scam by tomorrow morning we'll have a few more guys pitching in.

Cheerio.

<comment><AUTHOR> Out of curiousity, who is "the gang over here"?

<comment><USER29> Heh... nobody interesting, just me and a few hacker buddies who skipped university to start ISPs and whatnot back when the internet wave was kicking off publicly way back when :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Donated.

Even though I was kicking around the net on my Macintosh SE/30, using MacSLIP/MacTCP, this is a great idea.

<comment><USER31> Just a footnote. MacTCP was only available as part of an Apple site-license. However it was also commonly distributed illegally by ISPs and magazines. Most home Mac users on the internet prior to about 1996 probably inadvertently warezed it. (MacSLIP/MacPPP was freeware however.)

Not that I'm suggesting you donate to Apple anymore than you already do :)

<comment><USER32> Then there were the rest of us Mac users who used FreePPP. :-) There is nothing funnier than thinking back to when I would smother my modem in a pillow at 1:00 in the morning while it dialed out.

The FreePPP plugin for the Control Strip made dial-up idiot-proof. I remember running a custom installation of System 7.5 just because the Control Strip wasn't a standard install on desktop Macs.

<comment><USER30> That takes me back to writing modem init scripts. I always laughed when my dad typed "assword" in, since he wanted to match both (p|P)assword.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Truly one of the unsung heroes of the Internet. Actually met him at a BoardWatch conference where he received a well deserved award.

Fondly remember Trumpet as the key that unlocked the door to using Mosaic. Jumping from text only to a browser was like going from black and white to technicolor.

<comment><USER2> Heh. I remember going to Tampa (my first ever trip to the States) to get that Dvorak Award, which is sitting on the equivalent of my mantelpiece (I'll take a photo to prove it!). BBS-CON was the conference. I remember shaking the hands of a good many people back then - little did I know how much the onslaught of Windows 95 would have on the market. I was told, flatteringly, by one industry observer at the time that Trumpet accelerated the Internet by about a year - who knows, but it certainly was a wake up call for M$ who really hadn't taken much notice of the Internet before then and was only interested in a vertical control over the industry by peddling their own network protocols. Writing Trumpet Winsock to published and open protocols was a testament to the beauty of openness.

And some trivia.... the name Trumpet was actually the first product I made, an Internet newsreader for DOS - as in a newspaper name like "The Daily Trumpet". Also I like trumpets, having played one for many years, and also the apocalyptic themes of the final trumpet sounding appealed to me too. As I was writing it in Turbo Pascal back then, there was no open source TCP stack in pascal, so I had to write one, from scratch, armed only with the RFCs. Ultimately that TCP core became Trumpet Winsock.

The Internet really was a wild western frontier back then, with so many things being done for the first time - it was a matter of who was the quickest to market and could anticipate what was needed. P!

<comment><USER34> A link to your award sir. Well deserved. Enjoy dinner ;)

<http://www.citivu.com/dvorak/95awds.html#winsock>

<comment><USER35> Serves to get a feel of how the Internet was at the time:

"(Yahoo) lists over 55,000 sites and receives (snip) 250,000 users"

It also serves as an example to enterpreneurs:

"Not wishing to sell Yahoo to the various corporations that expressed interest they found venture capital, took a leave from Stanford, and went for the brass ring. They now devote their full time to Yahoo as the traffic continues to increase."

Indeed, Tattam's work was more revolutionary than the people at the time expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Demon internet used this, and I think maybe still do: [http://echannel.www.demon.net/helpdesk/technicallibrary/sdu/...](http://echannel.www.demon.net/helpdesk/technicallibrary/sdu/connection/trumpet.html) Funnily the images on the page actually show that they are using an evaluation copy!

I've sent them an email referencing this story to see if they step up and at least make a donation.

Would be great if some more people could email them as I don't see them taking a random email like I've sent seriously.

EDIT: Demon internet is an ISP based in the UK.

<comment><USER2> Some ISPs did license it properly on behalf of their users, and I think demon may have been one (sorry no records as I left the company Trumpet Software some years ago, except the builds I did which are on an archive I still have). You don't want to know how messy the typical licensing arrangements for ISPs ended up though... at the end of the day it was a headache for both us and the ISP. Bottom line was if your version came up unregistered, in all likelihood it wasn't properly licensed as each ISP would have received their own customized build encoding the ISP (or distributor's) name. Needless to say, the number of builds I did was a couple of magnitudes smaller than the number of ISPs using it ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> You rich folks in the 90s.. all my computer could run was DOS so I used the then-popular KA9Q by Phil Karn. If anyone wants to start a donation drive for Phil... ;-)

<comment><USER37> KA9Q taught me networking - I'm in!

<comment><USER2> ahh.... KA9Q, I remember it well. Was one of the first internet programs I got to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Literally don't have any extra money right now (and I used a Mac back in the day), but I tweeted this to help get the word out, and want to at least my thanks to you, Peter, for your important early role in the internet (I heard about this, even if I didn't use it as a Mac user), even if I can't give money, let me say: well done.

Pat yourself on the back and know your efforts were useful for a great many people. Well done, good sir!

</comment><comment><USER39> Donated. Thanks Peter. I had no idea that all of that mucking around trying to get things connected back then would lead to my career for the last 15 years and my own business for the last 13 years of that.

</comment><comment><USER40> Donated. Winsock + Slirp - truly life-changing.

</comment><comment><USER41> Hello HN. Here is a campaign I set up today for this cause

[http://vinatta.vinattaengine.com/Email/EmailInvite?campaignK...](http://vinatta.vinattaengine.com/Email/EmailInvite?campaignKey=Dlo74GKsp2)

It might help to get the message out to a wider audience.

Shameless plug: This is a part of my Internet Startup. You can opt in to have your name (or alias) published.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hacker News giving Reddit a run for its money? Bravo.

<comment><USER40> HN is kicking Reddit's ass, actually.

<comment><USER9> Reddit has the _donate to a shiny object_ market cornered at the moment, at least from my reading. It's a good market to disrupt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So, how do I?

I don't have a PayPal account, and I'm trying to navigate their site to find out how to do a donation, but I can't find anything like it? The closest match is making an "International Payment", is that the one? And why do I need to select which country he is in?

Or should I sign up and perform some other action when logged in?

<comment><USER24> Edit: The link that jacques_chester posted has a donate button, that solved it for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Donated. Warm thoughts, Mr Tattam.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just when i think nothing can impress me more, i find that in HN you can, i'm not technician, not a programmer and not and entrepreneur. I follow HN because i like the news and mainly the discussions, seeing different points of view, etc ... and from time to time in HN you make a thing that surprises me and show the power you have inside you. Like now from a video , came a comment about the old days , you found the person and so many years after you organize a tribute, because apart from the money this really is more of a tribute to a man whose work you admire. HNers you are great. Maybe the vets say that this is not the original HN but i think the spirit of HN is there.

</comment><comment><USER44> There is a big difference between thinking of doing something good and actually making it happen. Kudos to the guys who arranged this. It's great to see everyone donating. Just goes to show how many lives Peter impacted with his work.

<comment><AUTHOR> It also shows the power of the internet to let ordinary people to get together to show some love quickly and easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I too have fond memories of Trumpet. I remember even then (I must have been 15 or so) thinking that this software was so important and likely undervalued. Of course, I used it and never donated as I didn't have any money - something I intend to rectify now! For a while in those days, I was behind a SOCKS firewall, and I convinced Peter to add SOCKS support to the stack itself - something which perhaps ignited my love of somewhat abstraction violating clever hacks! And of course it helped start my career in computing, as did APANA and a bunch of other very kind Australians.

</comment><comment><USER46> Is there a way to make a donation without needing to create a PayPal account?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say get in touch with him by email. You might be able to do a bank transfer, a Western Union order or even, god forbid, send a cheque.

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: the donate button I have at the site lets you pay with your CC.

<http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I lived on Winsock + SLIRP + a university terminal account in 1994. Donated!

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm Daryl Hatton, CEO of FundRazr. As an "old guy" in this industry, I really benefited from Peter's work. I've set up a FundRazr campaign on Facebook to help collect money for Peter. The money goes directly to Peter's PayPal account. I will refund our portion of the PayPal fees back to Peter when the campaign is finished so that this doesn't make us any money.

Check out the campaign at <http://bit.ly/fDzVOF>

Make a donation but, at the very least, share it with your friends so that we can get Peter some of the money he deserves.

<comment><USER2> have contacted Daryl. This is legitimate folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Well, it appears that I cannot send the money I wanted because Paypal has assigned my credit card to another account.

Thanks, Paypal, I didn't authorize that. I do not WANT you to lock my account, or have anything to do with you and your freezing account policy crap. I just want to donate to worthy causes.

That said, I'm in Finland. US-Only solutions don't work for obvious reasons (among them, outside the US we don't have 30-day-waits for check cashing...) so I'm looking for a way to set this right that I can use here.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there an official story from Peter about how all this happened?

<comment><USER51> A little bit of it here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693>

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This actually sounds like a job that WePay would be better for.

<comment><USER3> Not sure. We Pay is ideally better for consumers, right? The donations are being made for what Peter made possible with Trumpet Winsock. I mean we are actually donating for his services and software, right? Sorry to go wayward, but just did not understand why We Pay and not Paypal would be a better option.

<comment><USER53> Less likely for a sudden burst of activity to result in a frozen account?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Donated.

</comment><comment><USER55> Donated.

</comment><comment><USER56> Donated.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Donated.

</comment><comment><USER57> Donated.

</comment><comment><USER58> Donated.

<comment><USER59> Donated

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would be happy to donate to Peter personally, except that Paypal is will likely freeze his account in the next few days specifically due to a high volume influx of varying dollar amounts from a variety of sources without a physical product or service provided. So my donation must go elsewhere than him personally, and that makes me very sad :(

</comment><comment><USER60> Donated.

Thank you for opening up the online world to me, back in the days when just trying to connect to the Internet was a bit of an adventure!

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm happy to be able to say both that I realized how awesome Trumpet was back in the day, and that I made the choice to send Peter the $25 registration back when that was a harder choice than it is now. It's nice to be able to remember and renew my license, as it were. :-)

</comment><comment><USER62> Donated! Trumpet Winsock was the gateway to my first internet experience. Thanks Peter!

</comment><comment><USER63> Donated. I once had to put an early (Win 3 I think) version onto the Net. It was the first time I connected anything to the Net and opened up a whole new world to me. For that I am very grateful. I would be extremely interested to see the total that peter actually receives. So if someone can ask Peter if he could set up some sort of online running total thing I think it would be a nice thing to watch as I have always believed that Geeks/Nerds/PeepsLikeMe have a financial conscience and I would like to see that shown in black and white. Please.

</comment><comment><USER64> He should do a reddit AMA

</comment><comment><USER65> Donated. From one Peter to another.

</comment><comment><USER66> Donated.

</comment><comment><USER67> I had to pester a schoolfriend for weeks until he copied me this onto a disk when I was a poor 14 year old (no idea if he paid for it, but I doubt it given his rep!)

I probably would've gone into this field without it but I got a big head start regardless. I'm donating.

I should probably send some money my parents way too. Long distance modem calls weren't exactly cheap back then!

<comment><USER68> Before internet came to our parts I would make long distance calls to BBS's with a 2400baud modem, spending hours downloading classics like WinZip :)

My parents got a $900 phone bill once (a _lot_ of money in South Africa). I mowed many lawns to pay that one off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Peter, your software made it possible for me and three other guys to start a local ISP in 1995 and support Win 3.11 for many years until Windows 9x finally penetrated the market. This start-up cemented my career in web app development.

On principle, I no longer maintain a PayPal account, but next time you're in Beaumont, Texas, a pint is on me!

Cheers

</comment><comment><USER70> I will donate ASAP. This man's work allowed us to get on the net with our old 386sx and Win 3.1 machine using Mosaic. I don't know if it was paid for or not, I'm too young to remember, but this guy deserves it for his effort and how its affected me. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER71> Donated. Ah, the memories of surfing the real web in 1994. (Not some Prodigy/AOL version of it)

</comment><comment><USER70> I will donate ASAP. This man's work allowed us to get on the net with our old 386sx and Win 3.1 machine using Mosaic. I don't know if it was paid for or not, I'm too young to remember, but this guy deserves it for his effort and how its affected me.

</comment><comment><USER72> No offence to the developer who did a good thing at the time, but what you guys are talking about here is the Internet. Consider instead sending your money to the FSF or other groups that make sure Internet is great now and in the future.

</comment><comment><USER73> Trumpet was a fantastic piece of software. Strangely, I was only talking about it a couple of days ago. Happy to donate for the hundreds of hours I spent online with it, and the fun I had creating dialup scripts in it.

</comment><comment><USER74> I know my life would have been much less without Trumpet Winsock. I hope I can remember to donate when I get some money late in the month. It's great to be able to help someone who helped me so much.

</comment><comment><USER75> Donated.

</comment><comment><USER76> Contribute? Absolutely - but never using PayPal. Find another method.

<comment><AUTHOR> Email peter directly to arrange something else (email@example.com).

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I never knew what a 'winsock' was, but at my college in '97, we used dial-up to connect to Demon on Windows 3.1, and it worked great. I used to FTP Amiga demos.

Will donate!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> New update here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303337>

</comment><comment><USER78> Donated. I never used Winsock, but I worked for Netscape, which would've been worth a lot less without Trumpet getting users online.

</comment><comment><USER68> Being online via Trumpet Winsock was how I downloaded my first Linux distribution.

Knowing Linux at the right time (1998) was how I got my first job.

Donated.

</comment><comment><USER79> Trumpet was a truly magical piece of code, basically the gateway to the world we live in today. Donated.

</comment><comment><USER80> I love this. Donated.

</comment><comment><USER81> I love it, spread the word people! +1 donation from me!

</comment><comment><USER82> Donated.

BTW: What was the original cost of Trumpet? (for an end user)

<comment><AUTHOR> US$25, or about $38 in today's money according to one calculation.

<comment><USER82> derr, just saw the above post. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Donated

</comment><comment><USER6> Donated

</comment><comment><USER84> Donated.

</comment><comment><USER85> Donated.

</comment><comment><USER86> Donated

</comment><comment><USER87> Nice work; donated.

</comment><comment><USER88> Donated

</comment><comment><USER89> donated and twitted around

</comment><comment><USER90> XP and later has a built-in IPv6 stack, but I remember reading that Trumpet Winsock later provided IPv6 implementations for older versions of Windows for the few people still using them.</comment>