Report: Bitcoin Now Main Method of International Payment, Overtakes Visa, PayPal - <AUTHOR> https://datalight.me/blog/researches/longread/bitcoin-becomes-the-main-method-of-international-payment/ <comment><USER2> The significance of this metric is questionable because transferring money to yourself (for example, from one device to another) counts as a transaction here. Financial transactions with Visa or PayPal are more likely to be transfers of value from one person or organization to another.

It's unlikely that Bitcoin is used for a larger total amount of person-to- person payments than these other systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very misleading title and abstract.

How does one know which BC transactions are international vs domestic?

Compared node count to data center, apples and oranges, how many computers are in each data center?

Visa, MC are still much more dominant

<comment><USER4> I thought it was an Onion article headline.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Community as a Service focused on owners and members, not advertisers - <AUTHOR> https://xcursi.com

<comment><USER2> I like the design and the flow of the thing, really. But I don't see who would be willing to pay for it (although I may be very wrong).

Also, some minor criticisms:

\- The code at the "Adding to your site" section should be in a monospaced font;

\- The pricing is strange. For the price of 10000 posts we could get 20 accounts of 1000 posts. Also, it is strange to pay per month by post. If I reach the 1000 mark I'll be doomed forever?

\- Why are you using a totally new mark-up language? You didn't find any good existing alternatives?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is just alpha pricing, but yes, as the amount of content increases the price goes up. We have a few things up our sleeves to drive the price down for the community owner over time, but there are a number of features we need to add first and we're really just trying to find some small to mid sized opportunities to flesh these out. We'd do a massive site but we'd need to charge a good bit to do it at the moment. Ultimately we think that there is a lot of value for a site with millions of comments not having to worry about there community software. Most communities will be at the .99/month tier for a very long time.

The mark up language is based on one that has been around for 15+ years at shacknews.com. The goal is to get some personality onto the page without having avatars and signatures disrupt the content flow. Thus you just end up with a few colors.

<comment><USER2> Right. That's good. I'm convinced. Good luck. I will recommend you whenever I see a potential user (but I don't know if that is going to happen, so don't count on me).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see a "community as a service" product like this, but positioned as "free hackernews-style hosting." Just let people build their own HN-style communities and promote them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I built this. Ask me anything. I'm all for suggestions and critiques.</comment>


Ask HN: what were the biggest software engineering achievements of 2012? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The release of Go 1.0 is up there. It's a phenomenal language.</comment>


How to Have a Darknet Site Gratis - m-jones https://bit.no.com:43110/1mjonesWKEtDaqepVR92wFhTP9eJD1Aa5/hn.html <comment><AUTHOR> ZeroNet is amazing. It's decentralized and distributed, and it has a builtin blog engine (ZeroBlog), discussion board (ZeroTalk), private messaging (ZeroMail) and a social network (ZeroMe), among other things. It runs on Python 2 almost out of the box (a few extra modules are required).

Official website: [https://zeronet.io/](https://zeronet.io/)

Github repository: [https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet](https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you learn a new programming language without low level goals? - <AUTHOR> The easiest way to pick up a new language is to just build something in it. I'd like to learn Python because there are some things I want to do with it, but those projects are well out of reach of "just learning". Unfortunately I have nothing low level that I have any desire or motivation to build, so keep putting it off.<p>How have any of you solved this problem in the past? <comment><USER2> _"The easiest way to pick up a new language is to just build something in it."_

That's an opinion. If you build something, chances are you only learn part of the language, and you also have to learn part of its libraries and build system. For some languages, you'll also spend significant time setting up a programming environment.

I prefer learning languages by reading the language spec (many languages start out with a fairly loose one) or the 'authoritative' text from its creator(s). It has to be halfway decent for that to be good, but that frequently is the case.

(The Python language spec is only 160-ish pages, for example, 140-ish if you skip index)

Examples of texts that I found good when I read them, some over 10 years ago: Stroustrup's books on C++, the C# spec, Apple's "the Swift programming language", Odersky's book on Scala (the spec, IMHO, is not good for learning the language)

Note that these books vary widely in their level of detail. I don't think that matters much.

I also think reading the docs of the entire standard library (not necessarily in full detail, depending on the level of detail in the text) is a better way to learn the library than googling around for answers. It gives you better answers, and, eventually, it takes you less time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this cli weather app written in python to be small enough that you might be able to figure it out, and it's basic enough that you can probably imagine features to add. [https://github.com/JasonMFry/weather- cli](https://github.com/JasonMFry/weather-cli)</comment>


Exhibiting the Mk2 Turing machine - <AUTHOR> http://srimech.com/exhibiting-the-mk2-turing-machine.html <comment><USER2> Unfortunately the video is too noisy to appreciate all the machine's clicks and buzzs. There's a linked video though of a (simpler) automaton, which provides a much clearer angle to appreciate its working and the sounds it makes.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=-1nbC6IfMm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=-1nbC6IfMm0)

</comment><comment><USER3> What is this? Is it even possible to build physical Turing Machines?

<comment><USER4> A Turing machine is only a device to illustrate an abstract mathematical construct. Of course you can build a device that resembles a Turing machine, but usually they do not come with an infinite tape as in the original definition.

Another example of a real-world Turing machine can be found here: [http://aturingmachine.com/](http://aturingmachine.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's like a steampunk computer without steam!

<comment><USER6> It can run on steam if you like; it just needs one rotating shaft as input power. I did have the first version hooked up to a model steam engine, shown at the end of the video here: [http://www.srimech.com/turing-machine-and- maker-faire.html](http://www.srimech.com/turing-machine-and-maker-faire.html)</comment></comment>


Are we in a Bubble? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/are_we_in_a_bubble_2011.php

<comment><USER2> There are several key differences between this funding cycle and the .com bubble: First the bubble was marked by several businesses receiving millions or even billions without any revenue or a solid business plan. Now, most companies that receive funding are already revenue positive or have a proven business plan. In the bubble, there was trillions of dollars floating around for IPO after IPO. Now, companies are looking to venture capital for funding, and as a result of Sarbanes Oxley there isn't the avalanche of IPO's that flooded the market back then. Finally, the cost of creating a web based business has come down so much that it's possible to create a revenue positive business with less than a month's salary for a decent developer. No doubt there are a record number of deals being closed at a high valuation, but that's a side effect of the market. Having said that, if the market crashes, I'll happily eat my words but I really think the market has changed.</comment>


Amazon RDS now supports PGSQL - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/?sc_ichannel=EM&sc_icountry=Global&sc_icampaign_type=Launch&sc_icampaign=EM_89270490&ref_=pe_411040_89270490_9

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6733518](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6733518)</comment>


The 10 commandments of good source control management - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/05/10-commandments-of-good-source-control.html <comment><USER2> _"10. Dependencies need a home too"_

I agree with this statement, but that home is definitely not with your code. There are tools better suited for that. For instance nexus & maven.

Nexus store artifacts (which are really any piece of data: a jar, a tar.gz, a zip file). That's where you put your dependencies. Maven manage a project's build, that's where you tell what are your dependencies.

But really, there are many other tools out there to handle that (ant, nant, pypi, etc.).

<comment><USER3> It's funny to see someone defend Maven in 2011.

However, yes, checking in dependencies with your code is the way to go.

Deps that can be _reliably_ included with just a meta-descriptor (i.e. Gemfile, pom.xml, etc.) are still exceptionally rare. Thus the natural choice is to put the rest right next to the code that it belongs to. Well, natural choice unless you're stuck in a 90s java mindset...

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with Maven? I'm asking this as someone who hasn't used it and who wanted to give it a whirl. Any input would be much appreciated.

<comment><USER5> If you want to do something simple it takes a 60 line pom.xml to express it. If you want to do something a little trickier it takes another 60 lines and three hours minimum of poking around at inadequately written docs. If you want to do something difficult, forget it. Ant, which is a nightmare of usability and continues to make me wake in the middle of the night screaming, is at least as complex to configure, better documented and is not a quarter as constrained as Maven.

That said the Maven dependency model isn't too bad; fortunately you don't have to adopt Maven to get it, you can just use Ivy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"In all fairness, VSS was a great tool."_

I disagree. Even back in 1995 it had fatal flaws. More than once it got so confused that we had to restore the source tree from backup. There was also the continual problem of files being locked by others when they should not have been, hampering progress and complexities. I was glad when we could kick it out of the door.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty lucky I got old enough to use version control _after_ fast, reliable and easy-to-use tools like git and hg were created. Every time I have to interact with a CVS repository I'm like "wow, people actually used to use this everyday".

<comment><USER8> Heh, I remember when I used CVS. It was for a senior project. I didn't really get what CVS was, and it was such a pain-

I slammed all the files in the day before and handed them in all at rev 1. Cranky prof.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I gave a skim and didn't find this

11\. Never commit revisions which can't be built. (In the exceptional cases, always state in the commit message that the code doesn't build.)

<comment><USER10> This. is wrong. One should be able to commit every little meaningful change he has made, with a equally meaningful commit message. If you wait until everything works you'll end with huge meaningless conflicting commits. Of course it is quite annoying if you use a centralized SCM since everything you commit becomes public. Well this is actually why you should not use centralized SCM.

<comment><USER11> > One should be able to commit every little meaningful change he has made, > with a equally meaningful commit message.

If your commit is broken, it's not meaningful, it's just broken.

> If you wait until everything works you'll end with huge meaningless > conflicting commits.

Reading comprehension, please. b0sk talked about commits which _can not be built_. It's a very clear and simple requirement and it definitely does not mean _is not feature-complete_.

> Of course it is quite annoying if you use a centralized SCM since everything > you commit becomes public. Well this is actually why you should not use > centralized SCM.

There really is no relation, and a DVCS will not save you when an axe-murderer with a short temper tries to bisect a bug, and you break his bisection because your commits made the whole project un-buildable.

<comment><USER12> Let's try this again. Speaking as a git user, my workflow is a little different.

> If your commit is broken, it's not meaningful, it's just broken.

Sometimes I make broken commits just to have something for the written record. Sometimes I rebase them away. Sometimes I ask friends to pull from a broken commit (gasp!) when I need their help to fix my bug. Often times I 'git commit --amend' to fix broken commits before I push. In any case, there's no reason to artificially hide these mistakes as long as the result works.

> There really is no relation, and a DVCS will not save you when an axe- > murderer with a short temper tries to bisect a bug, and you break his > bisection because your commits made the whole project un-buildable.

Git allows you to automatically skip untestable commits. See [http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git- bisect.h...](http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git- bisect.html#_bisect_run)

In my workflow, I usually use a 'master' branch and 'topic' branches. The master must always build, as you say. Topic branches don't -- they're experimental by definition. When a topic is ready to go, we rebase and clean up the commits. This way, we get a traceable, ever-buildable source tree from master and experimental branches when we want them.

Problem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _7\. Versioning your database isn't optional_

He's talking about versioning schema, not data -- he should have been clearer about this.

<comment> alok-g Where does he say that. I think he <i>is</i> talking about versioning data (and schema as well).

<comment><USER13> I had to dig for it, but he references another article he wrote [1] which says:

 _There is never a reason to use source control to version your data_ _This will be painfully obvious to most people, but I've seen it done before, and more than once too. Source control management exists to version, um, source code..._

[1] [http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/07/rocking-your-sql-source- cont...](http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/07/rocking-your-sql-source-control- world.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is a good tool for version control of a Postgres database on an Ubuntu server?

</comment><comment><USER15> This seems to assume that everyone is committing into the same branch. How about the workflow where you create a new branch for each work package and merge it into the main branch when finished? It lets you check in to your own branch as often as you want (even broken code) without worrying about breaking anything for the other devs. The merges will be bigger though, days or weeks of work. A good point is that the branch merge is a natural time to look through all the diffs.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Compilation output does not belong in source control_

I've seen this before, but never found a suitable alternative. Where does it belong? Suppose multiple developers are compiling a C++ .dll which testers are grabbing through websvn and testing. To track down crashes they get, we need the associated .pdb for the right revision. Where should these files be kept? In a plain folder where each revision gets its own subfolder named as the revision number? That means updating two separate locations with each build, using two different interfaces...

<comment><USER11> > Suppose multiple developers are compiling a C++ .dll which testers are > grabbing through websvn and testing.

The DLL is a compilation output, it's not to be in source control.

> To track down crashes they get, we need the associated .pdb for the right > revision. Where should these files be kept?

To track down crashes they need the DLL to start with.

Testers should either have the ability to build the project on their machine, or they should be able to grab the output from the CI server (just go to the CI server, open the latest correct (compiled, tested, green) revision, grab files from there and test that.

<comment><USER17> _The DLL is a compilation output, it's not to be in source control._

Mmm... I've been working in a medium-sized group project, and we've been having pretty good luck with source controlling our driver .lib file. The intermediate object files are discarded, but it's really nice not needing to recompile the library every time somebody updates the library code.

(This is a 'project' that produces a library rather than an executable, for inclusion into other 'projects')

<comment><USER18> What you want is a CI server that does a build after every checkin and keeps a copy of the output file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "6. You must commit your own changes - you can't delegate it"

My company does this, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. The motivation for delegating changes is that different groups in our company have different check-in priveleges. This results in half of my changes being committed by me and half the changes being committed by someone else. This does, of course, present some coordination problems though.

</comment><comment><USER17> _subsequent commit messages from the same author should never be identical_

I violate this one sometimes. I'm not a VCS magician, so sometimes I get commit errors, and wind up having to make a second commit. I figure identical commit messages makes it pretty obvious the two commits were intended to be one.

<comment><USER20> git commit --amend

<comment><USER21> Not everyone is using git. I know that the cool kids all do, but some of us still use svn.

<comment><USER20> See this as another reason you should look into switching. The concept of branches that work well is revolutionary to your workflow.

<comment><USER22> The most useful thing that git has given my workflow is `git stash`. I almost never find myself branching and absolutely hate having to push, pull and pick changes between separate branches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I keep all dependencies in ivy (.Net/C++ shop). If I don't need to hack the source it goes in ivy.

<comment><USER24> I know this is a tangent and that this story isn't about dependency management, but it's important to me and I've spent a good amount of time trying to understand it completely.

I spent what I thought to be a generous amount of time trying to wrap my head around Ivy and I just couldn't make it work the way I thought it should work. I use Maven, and while I'm not a Maven...er...maven, I can work with it well enough and I'm certainly adept with its dependency management mechanisms. Ivy just seems to have way too many moving pieces and their documentation always seems to be missing key pieces of information that link theory to example. I'm left with an incomplete understanding of how Ivy works and, as a result, I can't use it effectively.</comment></comment>


The Airbnb Economy in New York: Lucrative but Often Unlawful - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/nyregion/the-airbnb-economy-in-new-york-lucrative-but-often-unlawful.html <comment><USER2> Ex-NYC landlord here. I'm glad to see how many people realize that re-rental of a rental property in a multi-tenant building is problematic.

NYC rentals are some of the most regulated in the country; nearly half of rentals are covered by rent stabilization law, which makes it all but impossible to evict tenants as long as they pay rent, and dictates annual rent increases regardless of the gap between current rent and fair market value. Rent-controlled tenants who rent out through AirBnB are, quite literally, rent-seeking -- using their government-granted preference in the housing market to extract a profit.

Beyond that, there are very real issues of security and disturbance of community when strangers are coming in and out of a property. My wife and I lived in our building, and it was like a little neighborhood. People left their boots and umbrellas in the hall on rainy days, and we had a communal BBQ grill in the backyard. If you haven't lived in a super-dense city like London, NYC or Tokyo, it's hard to understand how sacred the interior of an apartment building is.

One way to look at it is that AirBnB is "disrupting" the stale hotel industry. Another way to look at it is that hotel laws and regulations were put in place to put paid to the crush of illegal/dangerous/unhealthy boarding houses that cropped up near the turn of the last century. Stories like laxatives' make me fear that we are headed right back there.

<comment><USER3> Surely they are rent-seeking -- I personally can't blame them. Perhaps if more people do this, it might even lead to the end of these immoral and wasteful "government-granted preferences". The fact that NYC rentals are some of the most regulated is not a good thing, nor does it prevent all kinds of horror stories with regular landlords. Is an average AirBnB customer less satisfied with his experience compared to an average NYC renter? I suspect not, particularly given the review system.

I have no problem with condo associations limiting what individual owners can or cannot do (or charging them extra for the privilege), same with landlords limiting re-rentals, but neither one calls for city involvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm all for AirBNB in NYC and otherwise, but the taxation issue is the real issue. I think other laws/zoning can and should be relaxed to accommodate them, but this is business - they need to pay their taxes to put everyone on a fair footing.

<comment><USER5> I agree. It's clear that (1) hotels aren't worth the cost; (2) people would rather 'live like locals'; and (3) distributing hotel management & maintenance is more effective that concentrating it in giant hotels.

Not to mention that the booking experience on Airbnb is way better than using the counterparts of hotels and hotel booking sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I lived in a building where the landlord stopped renting out apartments normally and started instead putting them on Airbnb. He charged ~30% for doing it via Airbnb than the normal rents would have been. Then they raised rents more on apartments in the building. When I left ~4 out of 50 or so units were on Airbnb. Apartment next to me was a continuous ramble of people who left trash around and threw late parties(more than the normal residents).

I'm all for the idea of Airbnb, but there needs to be something in place that prevents this type of thing. Finding an apartment in NYC is rough enough, but artificially reducing supply via this type of thing causes the rent increases even more.

Taxing it seems like the only way to put the reverse pressure on landlords doing this, but I'm doubtful it will do enough.

<comment><USER5> Your landlord was running a hotel.

I've stayed with people who had a few properties that they rented on Airbnb. Renting 1-5 seems okay. More or less, you're running a B&B.

When it gets to whole floors or buildings, you've got a hotel on your hands. That is and should be illegal and Airbnb should work with authorities to shut that down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm living in one of these hostels right now (the landlord has half a dozen buildings and probably ~50 rooms available in the area on AirBNB) and I posted about it before. In brief, its a shithole (ffs the showerhead is held up by electrical tape). From before:

"I'm living in one of these places now and I could not say enough negative things about the place or AirBNB. Its a mess, most of the rooms are either filled with beds or used entirely for furniture/tool storage. There were no shared trashbins until about 4-6 weeks after I had arrived. One of the guests had a severe breakdown and would spend hours in the middle of the night rapping or shouting at the top of the lungs, forcing his roommates to move to the permanent tents in the backyard. Eventually the guy left during one of his rants and disappeared for a few days, during which the landlord had us avoid calling the police because he did not want to have them involved. Worst of all, I feel like none of us are in a position to do anything. I complained within a few hours of arrival on my first day because the place is a mess, but AirBNB charges a months rent to leave early on a long term stay and there's nothing to gain in destroying our relatioships with the landlord. The rating system also makes it so that taking any action would probably result in an open flame war so that I'd probably get rejected by future landlords. I'll probably never use AirBNB again regardless."

I'm sure AirBNB is great for a night or two if you're backpacking and just need a matress to crash on before you move on, but if you're expecting anything more than that, I would highly recommend against using it.

<comment><USER8> I'd guess that airbnb is pretty heavily invested in not getting the cops called to any of these clearly-professional places in New York right now. Have you tried doing the whole executive email bomb requesting a refund for yourself/anyone else you can get together with there?

Edit: and if that doesn't work, you should absolutely report the landlord to all relevant authorities when you leave, probably including the NY attorney general currently chasing airbnb.

<comment><USER7> I don't know about an executive email bomb, but I requested a refund and was basically told I was free to cancel at any time, but they'd bill me a fat cancellation fee equal to a month of rent. I complained the first night I was here and I spoke to a bunch of residents who also complained. I heard an AirBNB representative was supposed to come check out the place due to the number of complaints, but from what I gathered he never showed up. Also this is in California, not NY.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In most residential apartment buildings, renting out your space for less > than 30 days is illegal, unless you are present when you have that visitor.

Why can't NYC come up with some common-sense regulation, like everyone is allowed to rent their apartment to up to 8 separate groups of people, for not more than 6 mos out of the year total, or something? And that landlords are not allowed to interfere?

This would prevent "hotel"-style abuse, like different tenants every night in a residential building, but still give people the flexibility to rent out for the occasional weekend, or month, or whatever.

The 30-day thing is just ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> _" Why can't NYC come up with some common-sense regulation, like everyone is allowed to rent their apartment to up to 8 separate groups of people, for not more than 6 mos out of the year total, or something? And that landlords are not allowed to interfere?"_

If someone's renting an apartment, it's by definition not "their" apartment but the landlord's apartment. The landlord decides to rent to a particular tenant based on things like background checks, references, interviews, etc. These kind of assurances are not available for random people that the tenant rents to. Unless the tenant bears complete legal and financial liability for anything bad his subtenant does, it's asking the landlord to take on a significant risk.

Also, if each tenant in a large building could rent their apartment to up to 8 separate groups of people, you would have a constant flow of strangers through the building. Since the short-term renters don't have any stake in keeping the building clean or safe or quiet, this could pose problems for the other tenants. I've lived in apartments where even the long-term tenants left garbage in the halls and played loud music at 2am. I can imagine that someone who is staying in the building for a weekend might be even more anti-social, since there would be no personal consequences to their bad behavior.

<comment><USER5> Airbnb has sought to bake in accountability both at a large and small scale.

1) Airbnb has a crazy insurance policy [1]

2) Both the host & guest get reviewed. A single bad review can impede your ability to rent on either side.

This is purely based on my experience, but it seems like guests really don't misbehave.

Maybe there is the occasional party or guest who trashes the place. Good hosts tend to hire cleaning services to deal with messes. Generally, guest are tired from traveling and doing activities and are low impact.

[1] [https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee](https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee)

<comment><USER10> But the landlord is not a party to the contract between Airbnb and the host. If any damage were to occur to the building, the landlord would need to sue the host and collect from him, and Airbnb says nothing about paying for legal expenses. (And once the landlord got involved, it would probably ultimately result in eviction proceedings against the host for violating the terms of his lease.)

Note that the Airbnb guarantee doesn't insure the host's personal property: "The Host Guarantee is not insurance and should not be considered as a replacement or stand-in for homeowners or renters insurance." However, using your apartment as a rental property probably violates the terms of a standard renters insurance policy, so the insurance company would probably not pay for losses that were due to an Airbnb guest.

<comment><USER5> You're talking about a situation in which significant damage is done to the building AND the host doesn't report this to Airbnb with photos and evidence. There are bound to be horror stories with any service (hotels certainly included), but I'd expect this particular combination of all-around irresponsibility to be rare.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/technology/george-soros-facebook-sheryl-sandberg.html <comment><USER2> She did what I would have done if someone was attacked my company for no obvious reason - I'd want to know if they stood to gain and how. Obviously when someone holds a short position and bashed a company it's pretty transparent. That's a big reason why Tesla was in the news so much the last 12 months.

It's when FB went on the offensive and started attacking Soros with "factually questionable" information that they crossed the line.

<comment><USER3> That's fine. But she lied about the whole thing which is not. It's a far cry from 'some emails crossed my desk' to 'I directed the research be done'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >told subordinates to examine why Mr. Soros had criticized the tech companies and whether he stood to gain financially from the attacks.

Well, he is an investor who has a history of causing financial damage to whole countries by betting against their currencies.

So, it shouldn't be surprising FB would want to know what might be in store for them if he went nuclear on them.

What is surprising is the odd bedfellows of Soros on the left and others on the right clamoring for FB regulation. I probably agree they need some kind of regulation --but one more generalized to all user-facing internet companies (colloquially "user is the product" companies).

<comment><USER5> If someone is publicly saying questionable things about your organization, then trying to find out what their motivations might be by doing research is just common sense (especially if the company in question is publicly traded). So I'm with you there, I don't get the outrage here at all. It comes off as cheap and manufactured from what I'm seeing.

<comment><USER6> Which outrage are you referring to? I didn't see any in the article. It seemed pretty even keeled.

<comment><USER7> I think the outrage is implicit in the the publication of the article. Why is this in the New York Times? He criticized the company, she asked is he had a financial interest behind the criticism. Okay? Why is this a story?

<comment><USER8> > Why is this a story?

Because George Soros is a lightning rod for the alt-right and NWO conspiracy theorists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Facebook is turning an awful lot of Democrats into enemies. Very curious to see how Zuckerberg tries to maneuver Facebook through wartime. [1]

[1] [https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime- ceo-2/](https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2/)

<comment><USER10> It's because the establishment segment (clinton) genuinely fear him throwing his hat in for 2020. Not that I like him but honestly, if he can sells fb stock and promises to genuinely treat Usa like his firm, I'd prefer him over a politician who says what pays (which is all politicians in all sides).

<comment><USER11> Is Facebook actually well run? Or just fortunate in its timing in the market?

It's a spectrum, right? Skill and luck. How much of each has contributed to its success?

<comment><USER12> Did you forget that Facebook used to play David to Myspace's Goliath?

There was never any shortage of competitors, and Facebook wasn't the first on the social media scene by any measure. It came out of nowhere and toppled the dominant incumbent, and is still going strong against competition from giants like Google.

<comment><USER11> That's why I posed it as a question and mentioned the spectrum that this sits on. Facebook got lucky in some ways, I don't think Zuckerberg meant to create artificial scarcity when it launched, I think he was growing it deliberately but the effect was unintended.

Facebook started with Harvard students. Then Boston area colleges, Ivy League, then it was expanded to most universities with a .edu domain. You didn't need invites (Google's preferred method), just to be a member of the right kind of institution. It launched to the public at large in 2006.

Those first couple years, a lot of the use of Facebook was reconnecting with old friends. High school classmates, or if you'd graduated but still had a university email your fellow college classmates. This was a distinct endeavor from Myspace. It was explicitly about connecting people who shared a particular geographic or institutional social context (not _any_ context, school). There were no bands, no autoplaying music. Just you and people you may or may not know connecting to each other.

Now, they obviously intended to grow it into something larger. And they have done a great job with it. Here's the question:

The choice to open it to universities was obviously deliberate, but was the intent to test scaling Facebook or to create an initial critical mass of likeminded, like-aged individuals?

My wager is on the former, though I could be proven wrong. That initial smaller but _focused_ group is what allowed them to successfully compete.

Luck: They stumbled onto a successful model for building a from-scratch social network with their focused approach.

Skill: They intended to be focused on college-aged students believing it would build their critical mass social network more effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not surprising but definitely adds to the icky feeling surrounding Sandberg and Zuckerberg. Interestingly enough I think Scott Galloway makes some great points, Sandberg is probably the most powerful woman in tech right now, it's probably a bad look for the board to let her go; and I doubt Zuck would force her out. I think she'll leave on her own terms.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think given George Soros' history and the fact he is an investor known for making big bets, it is possible he would have a big short position open against Facebook and could gain lots of money if $FB stock keeps going down. It's not outside of realm of the possibilities the he would make a big bet like that so investigating what are his current positions in the stock market, how many puts is he holding etc might be a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the reason why this is a story that is causing a lot of interest and outrage is that Soros was right! Sandberg, Zuck and co, instead of reflecting on what was actually happening, and investigating the issues that Facebook was causing, or was being used for, chose to try to play defense and attach the people and organizations that were criticizing them. If Facebook was serious about becoming a "good" platform, then it would have acted sooner. Instead, we can look back and say that they pretty much only care about growing revenue and did not care too much about these issues, until they because front and center after Trump was elected. There is probably some sexism towards the over criticism of Sandberg over Zuck. But at the same time, Zuck was more hands off while hosting facetime live from his backyard, and traveling around the US, and proclaiming how great Facebook was, while Sandberg is suppose to be the day to day operator. I think Zuck deserve a lot of the same blame for this, as the CEO and the founder.

<comment><USER16> That's a lot of speculation from limited information. Best to default to outrage in this case...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What? FB didn't have George Soros shadow profile at hand?

</comment><comment><USER18> But, but, but, she said she didn't...

</comment><comment><USER10> Mr soros is known to move markets to make money. I don't see why media can just label someone beyond reproach and malign anybody who tries to even dare to look them up

</comment><comment><USER19> I would not be surprised if Mark Zuckerberg ends up becoming a Republican. He very obviously has political ambitions. A significant portion of the Left blames Facebook (at least in part) and by extension Zuckerberg for the election of Donald Trump. If he says the right things, I expect the Right to be more accepting than the Left which would still hold 2016 against him.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would assume that any important PR decision at Facebook would have to be green lit by Sheryl or Mark or both. Not surprised at this finding by NYT

<comment><USER21> While it would be safe to assume that Facebook was being misleading from the start, it's important that news organizations do actual reporting to before coming to those types of conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This may be an unpopular opinion but here it is: Zuckerburg started this as a hobby with it being something he may never have thought of becoming full- scale. Fast forward to today and Zuckerburg is in over his head.

He has control over this !massive! amount of data that companies are chomping at the bit for. He's trying to make sure his company survives and his product does no harm. But, he's losing control. They're trying to wiggle out of these wormholes they've sunk in and all of their fabrications are coming to light.

<comment><USER5> Your comment is quite far off from reality.

To address your first point: he started the company deliberately. He had sold a successful company before Facebook. He also turned down multi-billion dollar acquisition offers because he knew exactly what he was doing and what the opportunity was. Many of the funding rounds for FB were red hot and everyone was trying to get in.

And to your second point: what he built is unprecedented. And because it is unprecedented, there are a lot of questions that we as a society need to answer collectively about the role a product like Facebook plays in our lives (kinda just like with every other new, transformational technology, including email). But to call his execution "In over his head" is laughable. I don't think other leaders would have fared any better and many could have fared much, much worse.

Now, are there questions and valid criticisms about his execution today or his handling of the recent controversies? Of course! Does that mean he's a random guy with a side-project that accidentally blew up and suddenly he's in over his head? Absolutely not, your comment is more fantasy than reality.

<comment><USER23> What business did he sell before Facebook?

<comment><USER24> Probably referring to the Synapse Media Player, which had a million-dollar buyout offer from Microsoft while Zuckerburg was in high school. IIRC he didn't actually sell it though; it was still a going project under Zuckerburg's control when he created FB, and just kinda died out because FB held more potential.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly it, I misremembered a bit of the history.

I forgot that he didn't actually end up selling. He did come very close to selling to Microsoft, though.

Here's a bit about it: [https://www.revealingthestuffs.com/mark-zuckerbergs- synapse-...](https://www.revealingthestuffs.com/mark-zuckerbergs-synapse- digging-the-tech-history/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article seems to imply Sandberg approved of anti semetic attacks against Soros, conveniently ignoring the fact that Sandberg (& Zuckerberg) is a Jew herself.

I don't know what the editorial team at NYT thinks is happening, but I don't think Sandberg would condone anti semetic attacks against anyone, even rivals.

<comment><USER26> That is such a weak defense. It didn't work for Edward Said and it won't work for them.

<comment><USER25> If you really think Soros' Jewish heritage, versus a plethora of political actions, is more fodder for Sandberg, you've thoroughly underestimated her.

My statement doesn't constitute a defense, because the NYT has failed to prove that Sanberg explicitly requested an anti-Semitic line of attack be launched again Soros. You'd expect a paper of NYT's stature to not omit the fact that Sandberg & Zuck are Jews themselves, and the likelihood of them conding attacks that paint their own heritage in bad light, is low, if not impossible

<comment><USER7> There's a difference between anti-Semitic attacks that are motivated out of antisemitism and attacks that are motivated out of self interest. I don't believe anybody thinks Zuckerberg and Sandberg implied anti-Semitic things about Soros out of their genuine hatred of Jews. Instead, the idea is that they tried to exploit antisemitism to obfuscate legitimate criticism of their company.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What makes you get out of bed in the morning? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> "Every morning when I get up, I look at a list of the 100 richest Americans. If I'm not on it, then I go to work." \-- Ray Orban?

More seriously, yes, "not starving" is part of the reason. But also, at least some days, there are things that I genuinely want to do. Sometimes there are problems at work that I want to solve, or things I want to get working. Sometimes there are people I want to see, or entertaining things that I want to do. Sometimes there are things around the house that I want to do, if only to get them out of my hair.

And if there's nothing that I need to do at work or at home, and nothing on the calendar? Well, there are things that I do for fun - I'll go do one of those.

</comment><comment><USER3> On weekdays - the thought that my current job has a very good ratio of pay to unpleasantness and I should try to do a decent job there so as to not be fired in the next round of layoffs (which are coming soon).

On weekends - sometimes I don't get out of bed for most of Saturday... Just recuperating after 5 days of madness. Whenever do I have enough energy, I'm usually excited about exploring something - reading a new book, trying out a new video game, maybe cooking a new meal or finding new path for a walk around my home. But mostly, just the thought that this whole day is totally mine alone can set me into an excellent mood.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have to use the restroom...

</comment><comment><USER5> A dog will totally do it. Or kids.

Seriously, though, was that a generic question, or are you feeling depressed/unmotivated?

</comment><comment><USER6> My dogs. Literally - they don't stop until I'm awake, to take them outside ;)

</comment><comment> t-writescode My cat's scream at me for breakfast. And then run across me... repeatedly.

I love my cats :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Force of habit

</comment><comment><USER8> my wife</comment>


I reset my location and "moved" to the safest social media state in the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/germany-twitter-social-media-trolling/ <comment><AUTHOR> In my eyes, this is a case where no matter from which perspective one approaches the topic, issues exist. Not doing anything against harassment is a bad solution. Doing something against it the way Germany does leads to collateral damage and overreach, which I also have a big problem with. This is really how freedom in a society dies by a thousand papercuts. I am worried about this race towards a "minimal common denominator" society where the only things that are acceptable to express are those that not even a single individual is taking offense with. Which in a highly fragmented, individualized society characterized by identity politics hardly exist anymore.

On a more general terms, people should just give up on Twitter. It's simply a shitty service that was nice to have at some point in the past, and now it's a source and force of misery, endless outrage and tribalism. The first few days/weeks of cold turkey are hard. Then it becomes easier and easier, and mental peace emerges.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm sorry but this is denial. There's an even better solution - quit Twitter and you'll never have to face the fact that Nazis exist.

Or, come to the realistic conclusion that Nazis exist, like global warming and terrorists, and denial won't make them disappear. FWIW Twitter and the gang have drastically increased their anti harassment detection and enforcement, which is a step in the right direction. You're setting the wrong example for the new generation - solution to countering hate isn't a nanny state or fleeing to make believe denial lands.

And Germany's over correction for their past is by no means sane. They need to deal with their past and civil liberties in a mature manner

<comment><USER3> How is it denial? You can acknowledge that Nazis exist and still not want to see their posts.

I'm also confused by you saying "FWIW Twitter and the gang have drastically increased their anti harassment detection and enforcement, which is a step in the right direction." when the article is about making Twitter go even farther in that direction.</comment></comment>


BSD vs. Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 <comment><USER2> This page appears to be positively ancient, referencing FreeBSD 5 and Red Hat 8, and a bunch of the technical differences are incorrect now; the Linux kernel hasn't used stable/unstable versioning in forever and is entirely on git, every GNU/Linux distribution has easy binary package dependency resolution and retrieval, etc.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It describes how Linux kernel development (recently?) moved to BitKeeper. That places it between 2002 and 2005.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's my impression that the discussion about ports, "full range of bits", "assurance that it works" vs. "decentralized" misrepresents Linux distros, or at least Debian - apt provides the full range of dependency tracking, package configuration, etc., and Debian maintains a centralized repository, often with local patches (just like ports), where things are guaranteed to work. The only real difference is the emphasis on source vs binary, which is important but not as fundamental as the article suggests.

Edit: And later on...

 _The individual releases of a given distribution are much more independent of each other, so it's harder to turn your RedHat 7.3 system into a RedHat 8 system. [...] With a Linux system, however, you tend to find yourself trying to keep a handful of obvious things upgraded, while others get further and further behind, until eventually you just reinstall with the latest version to bring it up to date._

That may be true for RedHat (which I've never used), but Debian has always had good old _apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade_ to bring everything up to date.

Edit 2: Whoa, randomly changing site theme.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention that the BSD community as a whole is being slowly taken over by pkgin..

<comment><USER6> Only pkgsrc part of the community ;)

Also, it's only used for packages distribution and the packages are still build from the ports:

        pkgin is aimed at being an apt / yum like tool for managing pkgsrc binary packages.

<comment><USER7> FreeBSD is (more or less) moving towards pkgng, which has roughly the same goals. I'm not sure what the OpenBSD guys are doing

And yes, it's only for distribution. But if it works well, it's the only thing end users should care about. Though I'm not exactly sure the BSDs have basic end users in the way linux does.

<comment><USER6> > FreeBSD is (more or less) moving towards pkgng, which has roughly the same > goals.

Yeah, but the BSDs always had pkg_add and other pkg_* tools, pkgin is just a nice alternative that works on more than one system... I don't believe it provides any crucial feature that was missing in the pkg_tools.

> And yes, it's only for distribution. But if it works well, it's the only > thing end users should care about.

From OpenBSD's FAQ:

        The ports tree is meant for advanced users.
        Everyone is encouraged to use the pre-compiled binary packages.

Basically, if you're running unmodified OS (i.e. official release) and don't enable any options disabled by default in the ports then you're just wasting CPU power rebuilding stuff that you could easily grab from the nearest mirror.

<comment><USER7> As far as I can tell, there is no tool in FreeBSD base that provides a simple way to check and update all ports using binaries. FreeBSD's pkg_add only handles direct installs of new packages. Upgrade management, things like "update everything" or "update this package and its dependencies" is usually done through one of the external tools like portmaster, portupgrade, pkg_upgrade, etc. Which interact with the ports tree and pkg_add behind the scenes, but with additional info on dependencies to keep the whole thing sane. They do the job okay, but they all have their quirks.

From its man page, it seems OpenBSD's pkg_add supports updating (and a lot of other things), so I guess they don't have this problem to start with. That's interesting, I wonder why the feature is lacking on the FreeBSD side.

<comment><USER6> Ah, indeed, it seems that FreeBSD is a lot less package-friendly than OpenBSD & NetBSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to be an Emacs user and felt rather mediocre about it, and then I tried Vim at the recommendation of a colleague and after some discomfort (like maybe an hour's worth), I was absolutely enamored with Vim in a way I had never been with Emacs.

Based on similar reasoning, I've been trying to get into trying BSD lately, as a current and avid user of Linux. I wish that this article would have addressed a bit more about the author's subjective experience of using BSD, as this is currently the sort of thing that would be helpful for me in considering FreeBSD as a desktop OS. The main thing that I have to reconcile currently is the fact that BSD isn't on the bleeding edge like, say, Arch Linux. To give a specific example, until recently, mesa lacked full support for the Sandy Bridge mobile GPUs, and so I couldn't play Minecraft on Linux. Pretty much as soon as a version of mesa with support for Sandy Bridge was released, Arch had it in the repositories where other distros would have lagged weeks behind. Of course, I could alter my lifestyle so that I wasn't always using such new hardware or didn't care so much about being able to play Minecraft without using Windows, but that would require FreeBSD being worth it in some other big way.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find it strange that I used to enjoy debates like this, around the time the article was written. I was so fascinated with operating system kernels and base system layouts then.

I've been a Linux-on-the-desktop user since 1998 or so, and started using it full-time in 2001. Having grown up on closed & proprietary operating systems with "black box" operation, I found it amazing how transparent everything in the UNIX world was, and how much control you had over your machine.

Lately, I've just been happy that my laptop hardware finally works "out of the box" and with minimal tweaking, so I can get on with my life and focus on the things that matter (I'm a software engineer, so get on to coding & designing software).

I fear that simple usability and hardware frustrations caused many people who would have been Linux/BSD users over to Mac OS X -- a proprietary & closed system that at least has BSD roots. Linux may not be the best kernel design ever, but it's a Free operating system with serious UNIX roots and astoundingly good hardware & software support.

In my current work as an engineer of large-scale web applications and distributed services, I find that kernels and base operating system layouts are playing decreasingly important roles. We are automating these details with tools like Puppet and Chef. We are spinning up Linux machines in virtualized providers like Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Web Service. We want to forget about these details and get on with our lives.

We just need something that runs on our physical or virtual hardware and runs our stack of open source databases, programming languages, and services. We need something that just works.

I only came across one place, recently, where operating system choice seemed to matter -- and that was in the deployment of a pair of physical network router boxes in a colocation facility. For that, we chose OpenBSD over Linux due to its out-of-box better support for high-availability networking, packet filtering, load balancing, etc. But I can't think of another time -- desktop or server -- in the last 5 years where it has made sense to choose BSD over Linux.

<comment><USER10> > Lately, I've just been happy that my laptop hardware finally works "out of > the box" and with minimal tweaking, so I can get on with my life and focus > on the things that matter (I'm a software engineer, so get on to coding & > designing software).

For me, that's Ubuntu on Lenovo hardware. I'm not trying to push this setup, just respond to the idea that 'just works' means you have to use a Mac.

<comment><USER11> Just want to toss in that Lenovo likes to cripple certain features in hardware, e.g. limiting SATA II speeds ([http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=84953](http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=84953)), disabling stereo mix ([http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T- series/Is-...](http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/Is-it- possible-to-use-Stereo-Mix-on-my-T400-T410/td-p/173463)) and whitelisting wifi cards ([http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unauthorized_Mini...](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unauthorized_MiniPCI_network_card)). I think at this point they stopped mucking with SATA, but new models still require "approved" wifi cards and disable stereo mix in hardware.

For those who enjoy the ideas behind Linux, Lenovo is not exactly the greatest manufacturer.

[Edit] And apparently HN does not use Markdown, or I was doing something wrong before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly, his conclusion about why he uses BSD matches exactly with why I use Linux. Personally I haven't used BSD very often or much. In the same way the OP says he's picked the right OS for him, I've picked the right one for myself and could underline my choice just as strongly.

There just is no one true answer to this debate. Each to his own liking.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is it valid to lump together all system with a linux kernel and then talk about the user experience? The user experience differ quite a lot depending on if you use debian, redhat, ubuntu, android, Mandrake, and so on. Sure, they can all be modified to be more or less the same experience, but the amount of modification needed to make a redhat user experience the same as a debian user experience is so large that you may just easier start with compiling your own kernel and go from there.

It is 2012, it is time to stop comparing BSD with Linux and start comparing FreeBSD with Debian, or OpenBSD with redhat, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER14> My only problem with split articles like this is when reading with Pocket(Read it later) I end up having to follow the rest of the links and add them individually.

Give me the offer of a full page article please.

</comment><comment><USER15> The main reason I got into the BSDs years ago was because of the ports system. I remember having a fun time with dependency hell that was on all Linux distributions. Then a friend showed me OpenBSD and did a "make install clean" from the ports tree, downloading all dependencies and installing them too. I was hooked.

Linux distributions eventually caught up and made software easier to install, but I've stuck with the BSDs.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think it's funny (and great) that's a lot of OSX users "support" FreeBSD and BSD in general because of OSX using part of the userland of FreeBSD. And it's funny when they said "not been able to get it with Linux".

</comment><comment><USER17> I've often wondered why BSD is not more popular as a desktop system. Since it seems more "stable" it would surely make an easier target for development?

There must be a reason Apple chose it instead of Linux to be the core of OSX.

<comment><USER18> OS X is not really a BSD. True, its userland comes from a mish-mash of NetBSD, FreeBSD, classic big-U Unix, and OpenBSD, in roughly that order, but xnu is not a BSD kernel, and while it supports many FreeBSD APIs (e.g., kqueue), that's done by reimplementing those APIs in xnu, frequently via gratuitous copy and paste, but definitely not by using a BSD kernel.

I mention that not because I want to be pedantic, because there's a huge gap between "OS X is using some BSD components" and "BSD would make a great desktop operating system." The one doesn't imply the other.

That said, there is a fairly nice desktop OS, called PC-BSD, you can take a look at, that _is_ FreeBSD with a KDE-based UI. Not my cup of tea, but you can check it out at <http://www.pcbsd.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> OSX BSD (or XNU based) is my operating system of choice. I used Suns and OSX during university and never been able to get into Linux.

<comment><AUTHOR> It may be just me, but I tried using FreeBSD on my laptop. But sadly some software do not have distribution for BSD. I could not get eclipse working. And Android SDK is not available for BSD too. And it was a downer for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _"But when BSD integrates it, _it works_."_

Even my limited experience with FreeBSD shows this is a falsehood. New major releases should basically be ignored due to all the bugs, especially concerning device drivers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I find that BSD stability claim does not hold true. My FreeBSD installation crashed sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> But isn't BSD gay? :)

<comment><USER21> And those downvoting are homophobes!

<comment><USER21> Or just Linux fans? Oh wa..</comment></comment></comment>


Nodelist should come with a .forEach() out of the box - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=869376

<comment><AUTHOR> Was discussing this with Christian Heilmann on Twitter who suggested I file this as a bug.

There's so much talk about Vanilla.JS and querySelector() / querySelectorAll() obviating the need for selector libraries.

But the first thing any developer inevitably does is create a shortcut to allow them to iterate over the NodeLists these new methods return.

Browsers providing NodeList.Prototype.forEach() would be great way to pave a cowpath.

(technically NodeList doesn't inherit from Array, but there's nothing stopping them from using the same code as a mixin).

Hopefully KHTML/WebKit/Blink and Trident will follow suit.</comment>


The Math That's Too Difficult for Physics - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161118-the-math-thats-too-difficult-for-physics/ <comment><USER2> An interesting effect of this is that you can only find in a particle collider what you expect to see.

i.e. you can confirm or deny that this effect or particle exists. But if something entirely new that no one expects is occurring you would never notice because you would never look - there is simply too much output.

At best you scan an energy range and look for bumps (indicating something interesting is happening), but you still have to decide what kind of collision to scan.

Basically run "energy balance" calculations - calculate the expected result of a certain experiment, run it a huge number of time, then check the totals and see if they match what you expect.

You also look for symmetry - if this thing is found, and there appears to be "room" for something like it, check for it.

So despite the limitations we found all sorts of things. But it's important to understand the limitations so you know what to imagine, and then look for.

<comment><USER3> There are different types of colliders, leptonic and hadronic colliders. Hadrons, usually protons, are composite particles so when you smash them together a wide range of output is produced. You can absolutely see unexpected things, and a lot of effort goes into analyzing and collecting data to explore many avenues for new physics. Leptonic colliders (usually electrons) involve point-like particles, so here you scan the energy and indeed it is much easier to find things when you know where to look.

<comment><USER4> Could you elaborate? I thought the difference between leptonic and hadronic colliders was only in the beam & resulting signal purity?

Smashing an electron and a positron together produces pure energy to be converted into matter. It could generate photons or it could generate Hadrons just as likely could it not (as long as all quantum numbers are conserved)?

<comment><USER5> Protons are not fundamental particles, they are made up of quarks and gluons. The exact composition is determined by the nuclear PDF's, it is not nearly as simple as "protons are made of two Up quarks and a Down quark". As a result, the actual energy of each collision varies widely since the amount of energy 'given' to each parton (quark or gluon) is randomly distributed. So even though the beam energy is set to a specific value the energy of each collision is not given and must be measured in each case. Different collision energies lead to different interactions taking place. Contrast this to a lepton collider where electrons and positrons are being collided. They are both fundamental particles so they collide with the full beam energy each time, making it possible to conduct very precise measurements at a specific energy.

Edit: fixed some typos

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At the end the author mentions a number theory (analytic geometry) correlation that not only suggests an optimization, but a correction. The current theory used to compute the more complex scenarios is not only computationally intensive, it also includes simulations that never occur in a lab.

</comment><comment><USER7> Feynman integrals are somewhat numerically tractable through quasi-Monte Carlo methods.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's actually more complicated than this.

There's a whole set of fundamental convergence "problems" associated with the perturbative approach that uses Feynman diagrams.

</comment><comment><USER9> does "loop" here just mean iteration, e.g. a for loop with delta-t for numerical integration

<comment><USER10> I'm a bit confused about that part too. I first thought loops are just repeated collisions, but "Loops represent all the intermediate collisions that could take place between the initial and final states" seems to describe something slightly different. Later edit: this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- loop_Feynman_diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-loop_Feynman_diagram) ?

<comment> semi-extrinsic When a single electron collides with another single electron, quantum field theory predicts the scattering probability distribution as a sum of Feynman diagrams. All of them must have two incoming and two outgoing legs, so the only difference between them is the number of internal loops. The basic ones, having no internal loops, is called the "tree level diagrams" (there may be one or more of these). The rest, having internal loops, can be thought of as higher order corrections to the results you get from just the tree-level diagrams.

Now, these internal loops are best thought of as vacuum fluctuations that pop out and interact with the two scattering particles. Say two electrons scatter: the tree-level diagram is two electrons approaching, interacting via a virtual photon (the force carrier for electromagnetism) and then going away from each other again. (There is also another tree-level diagram for this.) And then there are higher-order contributions, e.g. from the case where the virtual photon fluctuates into an electron-positron pair, which then decays back into a photon, in between the two electrons.

This is good for more detail (but a long series):

[http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw- feynman-d...](http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman- diagams/)</comment></comment></comment>


STMicro MPU Supports Linux and Android - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/21/stmicro-stm32mp1-cortex-a7-m4-mpu/ <comment><USER2> ST is pushing hard it seems. They bought Atollic and made their TrueSTUDIO IDE free, and while it's Eclipse based it's pretty easy to set up and get going at least. They've got a plugin for it, STM32CubeMX, which helps you configure and generate initialization code* for the peripherals and clock.

Having started out with Arduino I've lately been having fun with the STM32F103 "Blue Pill" boards. Like with this STM32MP1, ST have put a lot of interesting analog stuff in with the digital in their STM32 chips.

Both the STM32MP1 and STM32F103 has dual 12-bit ADCs, so you can do simultaneous sampling or interleaved for increased speed. The STM32F303 series has up to four. The STM32FMP1 has dual DACs as well (the STM32F103 series has at most one, but the Blue Pill has none due to using a low pin-count package).

Now, I've just been dabbling with this embedded stuff in my spare time for a wee while now, but it seems ST is pushing hard and on the rise.

*: now their hardware abstraction layer, the HAL library, leaves quite a bit to be desired, but it's nice to get a starting point for newbies.

<comment><USER3> ST is quite probably the market leader for embedded micros (though NXP may be getting there). They're hardly the up and coming underdog, they're the 800lb gorilla in the market and the things you mention are pretty much par for the course.

This combined A7+M4 device is unusual, but is simply a cost saving over what would simply be an A7 device serially attached to an M4 (for example). There does not seem to be any new features here other than the cost saving from combining them.

<comment><USER4> > ST is quite probably the market leader for embedded micros (though NXP may > be getting there).

This report from 2016 puts NXP at twice the marketshare over STmicro who are sitting steadily in the fifth place:

[https://epsnews.com/2017/05/01/nxp-tops-microcontroller- supp...](https://epsnews.com/2017/05/01/nxp-tops-microcontroller-supplier- ranking/)

Although at least part of the sales volume difference can be explained by NXP having had more expensive i.MX range available (and others), so in terms of chips sold they might be closer to each other.

> This combined A7+M4 device is unusual

I'm not sure if I'd say that, previously NXP did the exact same thing with i.MX7, and TI with their AM5x. And of course don't forget the classic AM3x which had PRUs filling part of the same role.

<comment><USER5> I can anecdotally say that I'm hearing a lot more about STMs than about NXP microcontrollers.

<comment><USER6> Because you're in the wrong industry. Very big in automotive.

<comment><USER7> I take apart prosumer audio/music gear quite often, and STM32s seem quite popular there. Not sure where that is in volume, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux The (optional) GPU is a Vivante core, which is great because it's supported by free software drivers and Mesa support. Given the generally good free software support that ST gives, plus the mainline Linux support landing over a year early, this looks like a pretty fun part to play with.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Discovery dev board [1] is pretty rich for the official $69 baord. Gigabit eth, audio, HDMI, 4 USB-A + 1 USB-C, Arduino/RPi expansion connectors, and of course a ST-Link (can it debug multicore Cortex-A7 btw?)

I hope it would get a great open-source support.

[1]: [https://www.st.com/resource/en/data_brief/stm32mp157c-dk2.pd...](https://www.st.com/resource/en/data_brief/stm32mp157c-dk2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Supports" Android is not the same as "running it without wanting to throw it out a window".

<comment><USER10> In any case a device able to run a standard Linux distribution is much better using OpenJDK than having to deal with Android J++.

<comment><USER11> Last time I checked, it was such an early port OpenJDK for AArch32 didn't even support a JIT yet.

<comment><USER10> Then check again, as OpenJDK has a much better ARM support nowadays.

In any case, the beauty of standard Java is that the OpenJDK is not the only option available for targeting ARM, there are other vendors offering Java compliant solutions.

And by being regular Linux distributions, there are also other programming languages available for those that don't like coffee based languages.

<comment><USER11> > Then check again, as OpenJDK has a much better ARM support nowadays.

I just checked, and it by default ships with Zero in interpreter mode, with Azul's AArch32 work still being pre beta and not even fully integrated into master yet.

> In any case, the beauty of standard Java is that the OpenJDK is not the only > option available for targeting ARM, there are other vendors offering Java > compliant solutions.

I'm not going to pay for a solution for a $5 chip.

<comment><USER10> Then you get what you pay for.

<comment><USER11> Going back to your original comment then, Android supports Java development on this chip much better than OpenJDK.

<comment><USER10> Except that Android is Google's J++, thus pretty useless to Java developers that care about compliant code and modern Java features.

The market failure of Android Things, while companies like PTC, IBM and Aicas thrive on embedded deployments proves just that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> See their official press release here:

[https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/about/media- center/pres...](https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/about/media-center/press- item.html/p4140.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> If it has their insanely broken i2c implementation, it wouldn't matter if it cures cancer.

Look into the linux driver for stm32 i2c driver. more curses per comment than any other driver. they are ALL deserved.

<comment><USER14> iirc, their SPI hardware is also a little wonky. The designer seems to have assumed that the only thing you'd ever want to read from in receive-only mode is an SPI flash chip, so it eagerly tries to fill the receive buffer every time you read. So you might be trying to do a single word read from some device, but you'll see a dozen reads on a scope trace.

The only way that I've found to get around this is to run a dummy transmitter. Transmit as many zero bytes as you'd like to read, and then it'll run the receiver in lock-step.

This would have all been reasonable if it were documented, but it wasn't at the time.

<comment><USER15> While I agree that I2C is mostly broken and filled with workarounds (at least in the STM32F103x family), the SPI in master mode (as I understand you are referring to) works fairly well. To receive data you have to send clock pulses. Sending clock pulses also means that you are transmitting (zeroes in your case), but there is no way to escape from that since it's the way SPI works.

SPI in STM32 is very precise with timings and general behavior. Take a look on how some seasoned users implement SPI to do VGA graphics: [https://www.artekit.eu/vga-output-using-a-36-pin- stm32/](https://www.artekit.eu/vga-output-using-a-36-pin-stm32/)

<comment><USER13> I think the parent was talking about using SPI in bidirectional mode (one shared wire for both tx and rx). In that case indeed it is hard to only read a fixed small number of bytes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ok then, that is pretty cool. Can't wait to get the Discovery kit [1]. Pretty much a 'super chumby' :-). Next up the 1K price point for these things.

[1] [https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/evaluation- too...](https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/evaluation- tools/product-evaluation-tools/mcu-mpu-eval-tools/stm32-mcu-mpu-eval- tools/stm32-discovery-kits/stm32mp157c-dk2.html)

<comment><USER17> > Next up the 1K price point for these things.

$9.80 @10ku for the part on the Discovery. Not shipping yet, but other parts in the STM32MP family are.

[https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/microcontrolle...](https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/microcontrollers- microprocessors/stm32-arm-cortex- mpus/stm32mp1-series/stm32mp157/stm32mp157c.html)

<comment><USER4> And the cheapest part is $4.848, that is pretty damn affordable. Many of STM32F4 are more expensive than that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> MPU supports Linux? Can somebody explain how they are doing this without MMU? Is it a security issue or complex compared to MMU?

<comment><USER19> They're calling the MPU: Microprocessor Unit, not a memory protection unit. The Cortex A7 has the MMU. BTW, there are some linux distros that are made to run on processors without mmu's. Look at uClinux and NOMMU Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I should hope so. The RPi2 is a quad core A7.

<comment><USER8> You should know that the computation capabilities is not the only factor of the industrial embedded system and that chip does not even look at it.

It much more focused on real-time capabilities and hardware control. Notable examples are 1. Built-in Cortex M4 microcontroller 2. RPi doesn't have ADCs but STM32MP1 got 16-bit ADCs and a sigma-delta modulator. 3. It's got 5V-tolerant GPIO whereas RPis are not 4. Best-in-class timers for PWM and quadrature encoders.

<comment><USER11> The title has changed since I posted. It was something to the effect of "ST Micro Cortex-A7 supports Linux and Android".

Which is sort of 'no shit, of course an A7 is easy to port Linux to.'

Yes, I know that an RPi isn't the best microcontroller. My last job had me as the lead for a proprietary RTOS for a custom robotics system. In fact if you go into the STM32F docs for the SSI controller where it calls the busy flag "unreliable", that was my contribution.</comment></comment></comment>


Self-Taught Software Engineers: Why Open Source Is Important to Us - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/rocknnull/self-taught-software-engineers-why-open-source-is-important-to-us-fe2a3473a576 <comment><USER2> > I then created a new repository on GitHub and created my own network scanner > for iOS called MMLanScan (The reason I didn't create a pull request back to > original project it's because it was abandoned).

This seems a bit like his early attempts to sell free Ubuntu discs. Hopefully he got the wording slightly wrong and forked it instead of starting a brand new repository with no attribution.

<comment><USER3> [https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops- sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

<comment><USER4> That was fascinating, but I don't quite see the application here.

<comment><USER5> If what the grandparent comment pointed out was deliberate rather than a goof by a inexperienced developer, then it steps right into the sociopath box.

And frankly the article is so relevant to current goings on in the FOSS world that it hurts reading it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slightly off topic but one thing I've long been curious about is what are the requirements to call yourself 'software engineer' as a job title?

In many parts of the world claiming to be an engineer (in a professional capacity) without the required qualifications opens you (and your employer) up to all sorts of liability issues.

I am a Materials Engineer I've long suspected the software engineer title is not regulated anywhere near as heavily.

<comment><USER7> AFAIK, it's not regulated at all - certainly nowhere in the US that I've lived.

But... I don't call myself a materials engineer, which probably has some sort of licensing or regulation, no?

<comment><USER6> It was more of a curiosity mostly centered around liability. I was curious for example what happens if you write a piece of safety critical software and it fails. Can you be found at fault as the author? Where does the responsibility lie is it with your employer who hired you on the presumption of qualifications?

<comment><USER8> >who hired you on the presumption of qualifications?

This whole line of thinking doesn't really apply to software development. Formal qualifications are, at best, only required to get you a first interview. Formal software development qualifications are generally regarded as being only tangentially related to the ability to do the job.

<comment><USER6> How do companies avoid being found negligent i.e. Could a company be sued for hiring someone grossly incompetent on the basis they did not vet the employees competence?

I'd always presumed there were similar requirements (i.e open source licenses often disclaim liability for code released under them)

<comment><USER8> >Could a company be sued for hiring someone grossly incompetent on the basis they did not vet the employees competence?

Not sure. I have personally never heard of it but that is hardly conclusive.

Its not the kind of job where individuals are out making decisions on their own as a rule. Particularly at established companies people's work likely has to pass assorted automated tests and rounds of human review and testing. And then the companies software is wrapped in extremely carefully worded licences and contracts to limit liability.

Also bear in mind that software is typically produced behind closed doors. The external users of the software likely have no idea as to the identities of the humans producing the software they use. You would never know if someone incompetent was hired (assuming their poor quality work somehow got released) because you don't know if the software is being produced by 1 or 100 humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The biggest barrier of contributing back is that it takes a lot of time and effort (even for small projects) which you are not obliged to make. A lot of the time the driver for contribution is only the person's internal belief that he/she has to do it and honestly sometimes even when you want to contribute back, you don't have enough time or energy after 8+ hours of work.

It can be a big difference if the library author allows contributions much- much easier to make.

</comment><comment><USER10> I learned a lot about what I was lacking or what was expected of me in early interviews, it's as if we need a few more blogs like this and some transcribed interviews to prepare people for those "oh shoot I forgot to learn something simple" moments. It's going to happen for college kids and self thought no matter what. If this were a intern job he would have still gotten it and been trained on git. The OS X time machine reply is priceless though...I can remember the copy a folder for backup every hour programming days...horrible times:)

</comment><comment><USER11> Some open source projects have "Easy to Fix" issues to get people on the roll (like Scikit-Learn), but many don't.

Some have overview of their source code and their design principles (like Redis) but many don't.

Some have good documentation of how to get your patches in main tree but many (especially those not hosted on github) don't have it.

Most notably for C/C++ projects, the undocumented dependencies to build the library can waste hours at a time.

Open source is great (I have contributed to a couple of projects) but not all projects are equal in terms of quality/easy-to-hack.

Brad Fitzpatrick has also written quite a bit about this [http://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html](http://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html)</comment>


Bundestag Inquiry into BND and NSA (WikiLeaks) - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/bnd-nsa/press/

<comment><USER2> I am not quite sure what all the implications of this link are about, but the puppy photo is sure cute. German Shepard with American flags for ears and a German flag tongue.</comment>


Optimizing Function Placement for Large-Scale Data-Center Applications - <AUTHOR> https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/cgo2017-hfsort-final1.pdf? <comment><USER2> Anyone know why the TAO [1] has such relatively poor IPC and mis-predicts in Table 1? It's an order of magnitude worse than something somewhat larger, Multifeed (70MB vs 199MB). Then if you flip forward it also has the most improvement in Figure 7 but also the most room for improvement.

[1] [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc13/atc13-b...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc13/atc13-bronson.pdf)</comment>


Tesla and FBI prevented $1M ransomware hack at Gigafactory Nevada - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2020/08/27/tesla-fbi-prevent-ransomware-hack-gigafactory-nevada/ <comment><USER2> Ransomware attack that impacts Tesla vehicles would probably be the worst case scenario for the company.

Not sure how vulnerable they are to that but it keeps me from buying cars that are too heavily reliant on electronic controls...

</comment><comment><USER3> court docs don't say the victim is tesla

this is pure speculation</comment>


How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/mattangriffel/how-we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users-in-60-hours

<comment><USER2> The 60k users 60 hours is just the end result, but the slideshow is not about quick results as I expected : it's about iterating around different things to see what sticks until you find something that works.

"Presenting one feature at a time" is a quite useful thing because it allows you to talk about yourself regularly with a slightly different angle and it create news all the time.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm the author of the slideshare/founder of the company. You are right, before the actual surge, there was a lot of upfront work understanding how to build our product and how to tell our story. That said, once you have the right product with the right viral loops we learned that taking an extremely focused story (check out this ONE feature) to the right audience accelerates growth like crazy

<comment><USER4> Hello Patrick,

First of all thanks for sharing, awesome story. We, at SlideShare, are currently running a contest "My Startup Story": [http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/09/04/slideshare-contest- wha...](http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/09/04/slideshare-contest-whats-your- startup-story/)

Your slide actually match what the contest ask for, so I invite you to join it. You just need to edit pour presentation and add the tag "MyStartupStory".

<comment><USER3> OK great, I will definitely join

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi Guys,

My name is Patrick, I'm the CoFounder of BrandYourself and I'm the one who made this presentation. I read HackerNews everyday, and was literally knocked off my chair when I saw my own presentation on the front page. Thank you

I've gotten some great feedback. Some of you have asked some great questions so I'm going through now to answer as many of them as possible.

In the meantime, some of you mentioned this would be more consumable in a blog post. Here's a link to the original blog post I wrote about this--it actually includes a lot more data

[http://www.patrickambron.me/we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users- in...](http://www.patrickambron.me/we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users-in-60-hours- what-we-learned/)

<comment><USER5> Patrick,

I heard Pete's story on NPR a while back and how it helped your company grow. It stuck out since when the reporter tried to verify the story they found no results. The reporter comes short of accusing you or your co-founder of telling a fake story to sell a product. I'd like to hear you or Pete's take on this story (URL below).

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/29/187080...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/29/187080236/Online- Reputation)

<comment><USER3> Thanks man. I remember that interview (it was a headache). The interviewer seemed to have an agenda going in. Before the interview he kept saying he thought it was "foolish that people would use Google to research people in the first place" and that "nobody should believe Google results anyways".

When Pete was in college there were _several_ criminals who all shared his name and his results were a mess. One of them included a story about someone suspected of dealing drugs. At the time we never thought to save or bookmark those results because we had no idea we'd be starting a company and being interviewed by NPR years later.

We couldn't find an exact article about a drug dealer (perhaps it actually was taken down). We WERE able to show him several other results with about criminals with his name. We linked him to them. When he asked us about it, we told him we couldn't find it, but we offered to redo the interview and be less specific "Pete was being mistaken for criminals with the same name" since we could show results for that.

In his article he claims we simply did not respond to these requests. When I asked him about it afterwards he apologized and said "he must have missed that email". He didn't update the story though. It seems like he wanted to tell a story about how online reputation management helps people permeate lies and that's why you shouldn't trust Google.

All that said, we learned a valuable lesson. We no longer use the term "drug dealer" we use "criminals" and we link to specific articles we're still able to find so people can't question the validity

<comment><USER6> If you were having trouble finding articles, what's with the Google screen grab on slide 6? Was this something you created specifically for the slides? If that is the case, showing a fabricated screen grab without noting it as such seems a bit disingenuous. It's a bit like selling a diet with a doctored "before" picture.

<comment><USER3> I agree, it is disingenuous, especially in this context. That slide was specifically made for an in-person presentation that was later posted online (it was posted by somebody else about a year ago). For the sake of a presentation, we thought that image got the point across much better than putting two hyperlinks on the screen. It was basically a design decision. In retrospect we should have put a disclaimer on the image since it looks so realistic, but we honestly had no idea the presentation would live beyond the room I spoke to. That was a mistake

We used to use a similar type image on our about page, but for the same purpose now only link to exact articles or results we can still find. [https://brandyourself.com/info/about](https://brandyourself.com/info/about).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot of good information the slides, but for the quick and dirty:

1\. They found one feature that a lot of people enjoyed (some would call this a MVP) and lots of people shared it

2\. Mashable picked up on it and then other publications did.

3\. Massive growth.

The main takeaway that I always tell startup people:

1\. Marketing works, don't neglect it. (in this case PR worked extremely well)

2\. Don't do marketing until you've found the one feature everyone wants (i.e. product-market fit)

<comment><USER8> I'd call that USP (Unique Selling Proposition) rather than MVP - the MVP would be the minimal product incorporating the USP.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. We already had the MVP--the key here was boiling down our product into a value proposition people could quickly understand. Rather than saying "we can match an ISP to a location and company" we said "you can figure out if an employer or ex gf googles you"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Numbers of registrations is a vanity metric.

How many used the core product?

How many retained?

How many converted to paying?

How many told their friends?

<comment><USER3> That's a very good question. We're not a social network or a game, so most people come to us to solve a specific problem: they don't like their Google results. We have a free product because we realize many people simply want to be more visible, they want to make sure their portfolio or linkedin profile actually shows up. Other people have more to promote or are trying to bury something embarrassing. These are the people who use the product more and pay for premium.

To answer your questions

"How many converted to paying" \--about 3% converted to paying, which is slightly lower then our normal traffic (4-5%). A lot of the "non-converts" were part of the foreign traffic we eventually moved to a wait-list until we can enter those markets with a more strategic plan

"How many retained" \--This is an interesting question. Most people used the product, 3% paid. Remember, our product is meant to be free, so many people do some upfront work and then just check their email progress reports to make sure everything is still OK. Our email open rates have never dropped below 60%, so many people are retained in the sense that they check those emails. We'll have people who signed up during that surge that will pay us for the first time today based off one of those emails

"How many told their friends"

About 75% of users tell somebody else. This is based on a user survey. The problem is, almost all of them tell people in person. They tell them over dinner, or at an event when someone mentions their Google results. We haven't figured out a way to capture that same rate through online vehicles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hm, it sounds like they just got lucky, so i'm not sure what the lesson is here. A sample size of 1 is useless for learning what works and what not. I would be far more impressed if they would get similar results repeatably after each promoting action.

<comment><USER11> I was going to say the same.

How we got 60k users in 60 hours: make something useful that people really want.

<comment><USER12> > How we got 60k users in 60 hours: make something useful that people really > want.

And tell them about it in a way that they understand

<comment><USER13> And identifying "them" properly

<comment><USER14> The fact articles like this surface again and again suggests that these three steps are not so easily remembered nor followed in the heat of the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So browsing nginx logs for my vanity domain and running whois queries for the IPs at 3am is not nearly as weird as I thought.

<comment><USER16> On that note, how exactly are they reaching conclusions on where Googlers who are Googling you actually work? (i.e. their actual company name, not just the physical location their IP address maps to).

<comment><USER17> I second this question. What are the best databases out there, that map IP addresses of office space, not web servers, to company names?

I see some products out there that purport to do this, but they aren't saying where they're getting their data. I'm really curious how they are creating such a database.

LinkedIn, for example, would have such a db, since people surf LinkedIn from work. However, they're not granting access to it, I'm sure.

Who else could generate a strong database like this?

<comment><USER18> We used a company called LeadLander for this when we were in the B2B space. Since qualifying leads and negotiating a deal were harder than lead identification for us, this was mostly a vanity / fun project, although it was successful in motivating us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm sorry this is off topic, but that slideshare ui is so annoying. Why doesn't it progress one slide when I click on the slide? I hate how I have to precisely click on that tiny "next" button to go to the next slide.

I'm posting this hoping someone can provide an easier way to navigate.

<comment><USER20> Use the keyboard

<comment><USER19> Thank you, Sir. I went down that route by wondering if "space" or "enter" would do it with no luck. I stopped short at arrow keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I noticed the 'do things that don't scale' actions like delivering a trophy with cookies to the 10k user or writing personalized emails to every new customer.

<comment><USER3> Yes within the company we've adopted a motto "customer service is the most underrated marketing channel". I think this is what has driven most of our steady growth which comes through word of mouth

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's interesting to see. If nothing more, I at least learned(again) that powerful marketing is the key for successful product/service - front page on HN/TechCrunch/Mashable/etc is definitely something that every startup should focus on in the beginning.

<comment><USER23> I absolutely disagree with your last statement. Many niche startups--those without mass appeal--have no reason to focus on TechCrunch. There may be some all-important blog in their field, though.

Think Patio11 focused on getting BCC on the front page of Mashable? I highly doubt it.

<comment><USER24> I'm pretty sure that time the Jane Austen Society called for a month of local chapter bingo games made me more sales than being on TechCrunch ten times.

That said, with a view to giving people the best possible advice, I've been told by people who are deeply in the Valley ecosystem that the fact that TC and whatnot are for better or worse the paper(s) of record for the Valley ecosystem means that you probably do want to be in them when you are hiring/seeking funding/etc, both for visibility and for social proof. Be that as it may, there are many, many, _many_ companies which will succeed in selling millions, raising funding, and hiring employees without ever having a single visitor from TC et al darken their doorstep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> At its core the product itself is pretty weak. Its recommendations boil down to linking in and out of various profiles, updating descriptions and adding photos...

As a case study this is a lovely bit of UX, CRO and digital marketing though.

</comment><comment><USER26> A signup conversion rate of 30+% from news articles on _Mashable_ , _Huffington Post_ , _Yahoo! News_ , social sharing, and direct and search traffic is just incredible.

Is that typical for this type of service?

<comment><USER3> Basically anything around 8% is considered very good. We spent ALOT of time optimizing our sign up flow. We did hundreds of usability tests. I think the key was making it clear what the product would do and why they needed to complete each step. We tweaked language until nobody in a usability test seemed confuse. We removed any step that people didn't actually need.

We continue to focus on this. Even as we've grown we've maintained a free sign up rate of 15%

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I didn't learn anything reading those slides

<comment><USER28> me too xD

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Homeboy flew out and delivered homemade cookies and a trophy to his 10,000th user. Awesome.

<comment><USER3> Haha thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The real question is how many sign-ups will occur from being on the front page of HN?

<comment><USER3> I'll do a follow up on this :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> one thing i don't get: if i google someone and find their brandyourself.com profile, wouldn't i (if i'm familiar with the service) conclude that they're using it to bury results and search harder?

</comment><comment><USER32> Can you help me to not have any results in google about me?

</comment><comment><USER33> From what app is the screenshot in slide 25?

<comment><USER3> That's just a custom report from Google analytics

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The pivotal moment that the OP talks about is being covered by Mashable, here:

[http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/brandyourself- google/](http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/brandyourself-google/)

The claim that the service can tell you who Googled you is partially true...if someone Googles you and _if_ they happen to click through to your BrandYourself page, then BrandYourself can guess the IP against a list of publicly known servers.

This is a useful service for those who can't set up their own website (and set a tracking script)...though let's face it, most readers were thinking that the service could conclusively show you any Google search.

<comment><USER35> where is this 'list of publicly known servers'?

do you mean just doing a reverse ip lookup? because often the ip address of the server is different than the ip address used by the business when people are browsing.</comment></comment>