Ask HN: In a microservice architecture, how do you handle managing secrets? - <AUTHOR> I'm evaluating solutions for secrets management in relation to a distributed microservice architecture and am curious to hear what everyone else out there does. Some options I've considered:
- Git-crypt and deploying secrets along with binaries
- Hashicorp Vault
- Square Keywhiz
- AWS KMS
- Lyft Confidant
- Roll your own
All seem to have pros and cons depending on use cases and how mission critical the service you are offering is.
So what do you do to solve this problem in your world? <comment><USER2> You should check out Daniel Somerfield's talk at OWASP, "Turtles All the Way Down: Storing Secrets in the Cloud and the Data Center"

[https://youtu.be/OUSvv2maMYI](https://youtu.be/OUSvv2maMYI)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We use Kubernetes, which includes its own secrets API:

[http://kubernetes.io/v1.1/docs/user- guide/secrets.html](http://kubernetes.io/v1.1/docs/user-guide/secrets.html)

I can't remember which issue this was on, but it seemed like there was some discussion on their GitHub project about making pluggable secrets backends (HashiCorp's Vault was mentioned).

Kubernetes' secrets API is still very basic, but I think the fundamental concept is very sound and has a great foundation to continue building on.

<comment><USER4> Are the k8s Secrets still stored in plaintext in the etcd datastore? Seems that this feature is a bit half-baked right now -- though I'd love to me mistaken on this point. The k8s docs mention shredding your apiserver hard drives once you're done with them; that's hardly feasible in a cloud environment.

Also on access control, any process with root on any node in your cluster can get access to all your secrets (since the kubelet needs to be able to do so). There are no user access controls either; any cluster admin can dump all the secrets.

This stuff is clearly documented, so it's not an indictment on k8s; I just get the feeling that the feature isn't really ready for production use yet.

<comment><USER5> afaik the only part of kubernetes accessing etcd is the master. Nodes don't need and can't access etcd directly.

That still leaves the secret in plain view on the nodes that run the pod that needs the service. It would be great to be able to umount the secret when not needed anymore.

<comment><USER4> Correct, the etcd instance is only accessed by the master, which uses etcd to back the apiserver. But any root process on the nodes can access the secrets through the apiserver (there's no access control at this point).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We have started work on exposing Hashicorp Vault secrets via FUSE and Docker volumes. The expectation is your containers will just mount secrets via a mount like /secret in the container.

The project is brand new and we'd love to hear your feedback: [https://github.com/asteris-llc/vaultfs](https://github.com/asteris- llc/vaultfs)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! The FUSE mounting method for obtaining secrets is similar to how Keywhiz does this. Very cool and novel solution. Though, if you are unfortunate enough to still have Windows servers in your architecture, I think you're out of luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We run a PHP hosting platform and that tickled us as well. We were especially upset with the common sense that storing secrets in ENV vars is a good idea — in PHP those vars are easily exposed. See our blog post: [http://blog.fortrabbit.com/how-to-keep-a- secret](http://blog.fortrabbit.com/how-to-keep-a-secret) — here we suggested:

1\. create a secret key, store it with the code of your App 2\. store the encrypted credentials in env vars

Later on we even launched our own solution for our clients, an app_secrets.yml file, which can be edited via Dashboard. [http://help.fortrabbit.com/secrets](http://help.fortrabbit.com/secrets)

The nice thing is, that this file is partly managed by the platform for it's own credentials and partly by the user.

That has been running for a while now. The adaption rate is low until now. It turned out that not everything will fit into that ONE fault. Blackfire.io and NewRelic run as PHP extensions, thus the API-keys are stored with the extension setting.

We have also discussed to implement an some open source "Secret as a Service" but came to the conclusion that this can too easily turn into to be a SPOF.

I am amazed that this topic is getting discussed again and I have learned about many new concepts here.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wrote some of my thoughts on the topic, and the primary motivation behind SOPS [1] (which uses PGP and KMS): [https://jve.linuxwall.info/blog/index.php?post/2015/10/01/In...](https://jve.linuxwall.info/blog/index.php?post/2015/10/01/Introducing- Sops%3A-an-editor-of-encrypted-file-that-uses-AWS-KMS-and-PGP)

The initial trust problem boils down to trusting the API that controls the provisioning of your infrastructure. Failing that, you have to ask a human to manually authorize new nodes to retrieve secrets (that's how puppet approves new agent certs).

[1] [https://github.com/mozilla/sops](https://github.com/mozilla/sops)

</comment><comment><USER9> A simple solution if you are in AWS is S3 with instance profiles for access.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but is there a succinct howto on this?

<comment><USER11> The short version is:

1) Create an S3 bucket. Remove all permissions from it

2) Create an IAM role - give it explicit read permissions to just that bucket (there's a HOWTO at the bottom of this article: [http://mikeferrier.com/2011/10/27/granting-access-to-a- singl...](http://mikeferrier.com/2011/10/27/granting-access-to-a- single-s3-bucket-using-amazon-iam/)). When you start an ec2 instance, you can give it one (and only one) IAM instance role.

3) Put your secrets or configs in a file on that bucket. For example, config.json or whatever format you choose.

4) On your instance or container, use the aws-cli on when your app starts to copy that file down from S3, then read it into memory in your application and then delete it.

It's a bit of a hack but you can now easily restrict access to that secrets bucket, and only your running instances/containers can access it. The secrets only exist in running app memory. Now don't allow SSH access to those instances :)

<comment><USER12> I'm somewhat naive regarding S3. If data is in RAM, can you prevent it being swapped to disk and read by an unauthorised user?

(I guess "RAM" and "disk" are virtual entities, but hopefully the spirit of the question still applies.)

<comment><USER11> As the sibling comment to mine points out, the fact that the instance has access to S3 means it's not actually secure - they could just use the aws-cli to copy the file back down again. My comment about deleting the file from disk was a bit silly and doesn't add any true security.

Really, you need to just make sure that the instance is secure. The point of this whole setup is not to make secrets unobtainable if someone compromises your app server; it is to prevent you from checking in production database passwords and secrets to your code repository.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We have an open source solution called Cryptex[0] to handle this. It's better explained by this blog post[1] that gives the thinking and configuration necessary for most scenarios.

[0]: [https://github.com/TechnologyAdvice/Cryptex](https://github.com/TechnologyAdvice/Cryptex) [1]: [http://technologyadvice.github.io/lock-up-your-customer- acco...](http://technologyadvice.github.io/lock-up-your-customer-accounts- give-away-the-key/)

</comment><comment><USER14> There's also blackbox by StackExchange [https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox](https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox)

</comment><comment><USER15> For AWS users, KMS's GenerateDataKey is a simple way to store secrets locally in a way that reuses your IAM policies. You can also use grants and EncryptionContext to restrict the ability to decrypt secrets in a very fine- grained manner. As a bonus, all decrypts are logged in CloudTrail. The KMS docs are awful but if you're on AWS then it is worth checking out!

</comment><comment><USER16> Conjur ([https://www.conjur.net/](https://www.conjur.net/)) has been working well the users of our PaaS. It's a self hosted commercial product.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there any detailed opinion on good and bad approaches to this problem? It is clearly a hot topic.

I'm sure each product listed conforms to one from a small set of design patterns. Has any credible analysis of these designs been published? Are competing offerings likely to evolve toward a stable converged solution? Or is there something in this problem that remains fundamentally unsolved?

I appreciate it's turtles all the way down, but I'm wondering if anyone has proven the merits of some approaches over others, or components within the approaches at least.

</comment><comment><USER17> We use [https://github.com/meltwater/secretary](https://github.com/meltwater/secretary) . The key differences with Secretary is that plaintext secrets are never stored to disk or otherwise made visible outside the container.

</comment><comment><USER18> We ended up creating [https://github.com/meltwater/secretary](https://github.com/meltwater/secretary) to allow storing encrypted secrets in config files checked into Git by devteams. The encrypted secrets are passed as env vars through the continuous delivery pipeline, Mesos/Marathon and into containers. They're then decrypted and injected into the app environment at runtime, safely inside the container.

At startup the container reaches out to the Secretary daemon that holds the master keys, using public key cryptos to authenticate itself. The Secretary deamon uses Marathon to authenticate containers (checking their public keys stored in env vars) and validate that they're authorized for the specific secret in question (checking that the encrypted secret is indeed part of the containers env vars).

Meaning that Marathon is the single source of trust of which container can access what secrets. The problem then becomes controlling who and how changes are made to the Git repo containing the CD config, which is something Github does well with roles, status/deployment API and pull requests.

We had a similar problem as some describe with the distribution of the initial secret (i.e. Vault token) and one time Vault tokens being cumbersome in dynamic scaling envs. We didn't want the cleartext token ending up in config files nor in the [https://github.com/meltwater/lighter](https://github.com/meltwater/lighter) config we use to drive our continuous delivery pipelines that go into Mesos/Marathon. We also had some other aspects like

* Wanting to keep secrets, app config and code versions promoted together throughout or deployment pipelines. Seeing secrets as another type of app config we wanted to track all config and versions for an app in the same way, in the same place to avoid mismatches or deployment dependencies.

* Wanting to enable our very independent devteams to easily manage secrets for their services, same was as they manage the app config, versions and rollout of their services. And delegate management of what service is authorized for what secrets to devteams (with both automated checks for unencrypted secrets, and some gentle manual coaching post-commit)

* Versioning and rolling upgrades for secrets? E.g. how to roll out a new secret in a Marathon rolling upgrade? Creating and managing versioned keys in Vault seemed somewhat cumbersome.

Perhaps something like that could be used to solve your initial secret distribution problem or even handle the secrets themselves until Vault has solved the initial secret problem..?

</comment><comment><USER19> Azure Key Vault! Disclosure: am dev in Azure, although not on this specific product.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/key- vault/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/key-vault/)

<comment><USER20> Azure Key Vault is a great component but it's a component not a solution. By way of example, Key Vault's hardware "secrets check in but they don't check out" capability is awesome for preventing disclosure of secrets but if you don't have a system for adequately managing who/what can use the contained key to sign messages all you've done is add a complex and pricey piece of security theater (but as I mention elsewhere our primary concern is making sure whatever secret management we use helps us defend against at least the early stages of compromise of our infrastructure)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Because we are already using Consul we went with Vault. We are using it in a POC type setup now (only for a few services/scripts) but so far it's been pretty easy to work with. The API is fairly easy to use outside of the fact that there is no search function (or wasn't last time I checked). The documentation could be better but since it's a public project and I haven't submitted anything I'm not going to bash that :) The fact that it's a single binary is another thing we liked. just drop it out somewhere and run it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm pretty happy with this solution from Strongauth.

[http://keyappliance.strongauth.com/](http://keyappliance.strongauth.com/)

You can secure the root for it with TPM or HSM.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting solution. I guess this would really only work though if you are self hosted, right?

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We're using Ansible which means we use ansible-vault to store secrets. We store the encrypted files in S3 and decrypt them on deploy as needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> So if you potentially need to roll a secret you would just run your deployment playbook limited to the secrets task?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I am building stuff in AWS, most of the secrets are for entities that are access-controlled by AWS and can be passed in through server roles.

</comment><comment><USER25> Another option for your list, which you'll have to evaluate for your use case: [https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Barbican](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Barbican)

I've been evaluating most of these same options for my use case, but haven't made any decisions yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, thank you! I haven't heard of that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It also depends on how secret it needs to be. For most of our secrets (those used for configuration) we use Consul.

<comment><USER27> I think this can be sane when you don't have multiple privilege levels anywhere in the data center you're deploying in. It's less sane if you have less- and more- privileged machines anywhere in the environment, or less- and more- privileged applications.

You're putting a lot of faith in a very complex and not- well- tested codebase if you rely on Consul ACLs to protect secrets.

<comment><USER28> The poor state of its testing is the biggest red flag I have towards Consul. I'm much more positive about it in its way than I am about other Hashicorp tools like Packer and Terraform, if only because it seems like Consul is core enough to the way they want to make money that it's more important to them. But there doesn't seem to be a culture of correctness and strong testing around those tools; trusting my sensitive data to a tool that's as complex and complicated as Consul is worries me. (I feel like it should be normal to have something maintaining my cryptographic secrets to be at least as well-tested as my web framework...)

Of the tools listed in the OP, I feel really good about Square Keywhiz; I'm still rolling it out in my first environment, so I can't say for sure, but I appreciate the level of effort that's gone into _only_ doing secret storage and making sure it is exhaustively tested to spec.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I used Marathon and Mesos and rolled my own pub/priv encryption for our developers JSON (encrypted the ENV parameters POSTed to Marathon): [https://github.com/malnick/mantle](https://github.com/malnick/mantle)

</comment><comment><USER30> You can encrypt and deploy secrets using Distelli.

[https://www.distelli.com/docs/user-guides/securing-your- appl...](https://www.distelli.com/docs/user-guides/securing-your-applications)

Disclaimer: I'm the founder at Distelli

<comment><USER31> This is not a trivial thing. Why should I trust you with my company's secrets?

How do you manage key storage securely? Can people at your company see my secrets? If somebody comes with a court order will you give them my secrets and not tell me? What encryption algorithms do you use? What experience do you have in reducing attack surfaces from internal and external threats? Is any of your software open source? Has your software been audited? Is it PCI (or any other standard) compliant?

<comment><USER30> All good questions. We do not store your secrets. You do not give us your secrets. Your secrets do not live on our servers. No one at our company can see your secrets or access them.

We provide you with an agent that you install on your own servers and that agent is marked as a key management server. That agent is contacted to do asymmetric key encryption.

Here is a more detailed blog post about this: [https://www.distelli.com/blog/keeping-your-application- secre...](https://www.distelli.com/blog/keeping-your-application-secrets-safe)

Also we use standard encryption algorithms and have not written our own crypto (and never will).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What is the tradeoff matrix for these kinds of services? They all seem pretty similar to me.

</comment><comment><USER20> it's a huge pain point for us. We're a .NET shop rolling our own that mimics/overlays app.config and web.config patterns for both dev and production usage. Our concern is less on how do you get the secrets to the box (though that's obviously important) and more on how do you keep an attacker who has started penetrating your infrastructure from gaining control of the infrastructure that holds your secrets.

<comment><USER33> Have you had a look at the new ASP.NET Configuration classes? [1]

I hate having to manage web.config but I get your point about keeping attackers at bay (and not providing pivot points).

[1]: [http://docs.asp.net/en/latest/fundamentals/configuration.htm...](http://docs.asp.net/en/latest/fundamentals/configuration.html)

<comment><USER20> Thanks - it's clear MSFT is working hard to get to a place where secret management is a first class part of the dev process and we're attempting to integrate with the classes you mention but as I understand it they only work with ASP.NET 5 so you can't use them in console app based test harnesses or Windows services or etc. That means we end up needing to have a bunch of provider mechanisms, all essentially the same in principle but with different implementations for the different platform details. If it's not super easy for the dev to drop into a quick test app, they'll "just copy and paste the secrets for now" which is always the path to darkness.

<comment><USER34> It's 100% possible to use the new ConfigurationBuilder class outside of a asp.net site (like a console application). ex: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31885912/how-to-read- valu...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31885912/how-to-read-values-from- config-json-in-console-application)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd choose the one that I am the most comfortable with and is less obtrusive to the rest of my stack.

Whatever you choose, make sure you are comfortable with it, it's easy to deploy and work with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. I guess the easiest thing to do is use git-crypt with some encrypted file and have the secrets available at deploy time, but I'm worried about long term disadvantages to this approach. Rolling secrets would then require a deployment of at least that secrets file and restarting the services, or writing them in a way they read the file every time they need the secret.

Since our stack isn't on AWS, it kind of throws out AWS KMS and Lyft Confidant (since it is built on AWS). I'll keep digging into Vault and the other options put forward in this thread. Thanks again.</comment></comment>


Cool Story, Bro (Milo.com's response to Google Product's blue dot specials) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/11/milos-response-to-googles-blue-dot-specials-in-image-form/ I'm second from the left, in the picture. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if they'll make it or not, but Milo is one of those rare startups that actually solved a real problem for me!

I needed to buy a laptop battery within three hours in Atlanta GA and had no idea where to go. I messed around calling stores at random, finally in frustration I gave Milo a try. It worked on the first search! Solid work in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice, but the claim to welcoming the competition doesn't ring true. They welcome the competition the way I welcome a knife fight. It might be exciting and will make a great story if I'm still alive after it's over.

<comment><USER4> Except it's not like that at all, right? It's a weird analogy. It's more like if you spent lots of time and effort implementing an idea, and now Google agrees that it is a great idea to the point of doing it too. It seems like good news to me.

<comment><USER3> Come on, think about it seriously. They probably already knew their idea was very good or else they wouldn't be working that hard on it. Google's joining their market does not provide them much information. However, the odds of them being killed be a competitor probably increase by more than a factor of ten from the world where Google was not copying their core feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm second from the left, in the Cool Story, Bro picture.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hacker News becomes 3rd grade.

<comment><USER6> So does _your mom_.</comment></comment>


Cabin: Thoroughly Learn React and Redux with This Example App - <AUTHOR> http://cabin.getstream.io/ <comment><USER2> I tried this tutorial series a few days ago. (Perk of being a founder at Stream). Love what the team has done here. React and Redux are amazing to work with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey all! I'm one of the main developers behind Cabin. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask! Questions and comments are always welcome :) Have fun!</comment>


2013 will see a shift from social networks back to blogs - <AUTHOR> http://dendory.net/blog.php?id=5116e01b <comment><USER2> The broken-out slice of the pie chart is badly distorted.

The slice is broken up into rings for each percentage, but the rings are sized by their _width_ , not their area, so the areas are way off.

It says 57% Facebook. The width of the entire slice is 500 pixels, and Facebook's width is about 285 pixels - that's 57% of the width. But the _area_ of the Facebook ring is obviously much greater than 57% of the entire slice.

In fact, since the area varies with the square of the radius, the inner rings all combined (43%) are only 18.5% of the area, and the Facebook ring is 81.5% of the area!

Or consider the two slices that are supposed to represent 13% each. The inner blue slice is 6.37% of the total area, and the red slice next to it is 8.88%. That's 40% bigger than the other slice that is supposed to represent the same amount.

Using widths that give correct areas would be misleading visually too, because the widths would then look wrong. Facebook's 57% would be only 34% of the width, and the inner rings combined would be 66% of the width.

I think the only way to fix this and stick with the pie representation would be to make the sections _angles_ of the slice instead of rings within it.

For anyone who wants to make better charts by learning what _not_ to do, I recommend the Junk Charts blog which picks apart all sorts of bad charts. I've learned a lot from it and it's entertaining too:

<http://junkcharts.typepad.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not very convinced by the analysis presented in this post, but it seems fairly clear to me that at some point in the (near?) future people will start to think of social web services as more of a commodity rather than some big shiny gold rush that we all have to be part of.

Maybe then we can stop throwing piles of money at people who want to build walled gardens and go back in the direction of people hosting their own content for others to peruse.

(Yes, I'm predicting the failure of Google+ as well as Facebook and all the other me-too services like mass photoblogging services and all that other crap.)

We've spent too much time and effort writing code to help people push their content into companies that will claim the right to own it. Let's make tools that help people express themselves in ways that benefit everyone and that ensure creators retain ownership of the work they create.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh goody. Maybe it will spell the end of the "you should follow me on Twitter" imperative at the end of every blog post on every blog everywhere.

<comment><USER5> I sure hope so. Nothing shouts "I don't understand A/B testing so I'll just use Dustin Curtis' result" louder than that sign-off.

<comment><USER6> I always thought it conveyed more of "blogging is not my livelihood but some people think this is the best and I don't have time to find out so I'll use it."

<comment><USER7> I don't know anything about Dustin Curtis or A/B testing. Honestly, I always just thought it was the author being an arrogant prick. Apologies to all the authors whose character I impeached. Apparently, there was more to the story.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....](http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html)

It got a lot of coverage here and elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's arguably not that interesting to consider oscillation between these two things because basically it's the same problem under two names. There's a pretty large amount of fungibility among a 90s .edu home page, a geocities home page, a Wordpress instance, highly-customized Myspace or Tumblr.

I don't meant to suggest nothing has changed. It's significant that the required technical knowledge has reduced and extraneous degrees of freedom have been removed and there are simple ways of discovering other users and their posts. It has democratized the personal page and mainstreamed something which used to be for arch-nerds. But everyone has done these things.

Most of the innovative activity of this Facebook/Twitter generation of sites seems to be in playing with different ways of locking people in (sorry: I mean being 'sticky'), getting more data and exploiting it better. Other than that, the competition seems to be mostly about marketing and network effect. These seem like continuous efforts not subject to much permanent advantage. Does anyone ever just win on this basis? Do we really imagine that it will still be Facebook and Twitter in 30 years (like Coke and McDonalds 30 years ago)?

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a big difference between blogs, corporate blogs, and blog advertising. The author is conflating the three and drawing a bogus conclusion.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Does that "social media spend" slice describe how much the brands were spending on advertising on blogs/fb/twitter or how much they had spent on creating content for blogs/fb/twitter. The graphic implies the former but the author assumes the latter and goes from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not at all clear that advertising on a blog will increase sales just because blogs are influential in the buying process. If I read a blog post that is an honest, unbiased review of a product it will likely contribute greatly to a decision to buy that product. But the power of the blog's suggestion had little to do with the fact that it was a blog and a lot to do with the fact that they were not paid to review.

If I'm reviewing simply to advertise then I lose a great deal of credibility and influence as far as the consumer is concerned. Advertising on blogs will simply shift them from the blog category to the retail or brand site category which may cost them influence.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. Furthermore, from personal experience I have clicked on adverts on search engines a number of times, but I don't remember ever clicking on a link on a blog post.

On a side note, where are you finding reviews that are "honest and unbiased"? I find them them pretty rare

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> About half my posts to twitter, g+, and FB are just links back to my blog. I may spend 30 minutes writing a blog article, then 1 minute posting links to my own site. I also post short things that I hope people will enjoy, but most of my effort goes to blogging or writing books.

A blog is a great way to meet people with similar interests, which is the purported reason for social networks. Nothing wrong with people using social networks but for people who can manage their own site, that just seems like a better way to invest energy creating content.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a pretty weak pitch. Basically the person takes two sets of stats and creates an argument that isn't necessarily grounded in reality. The stats don't correlate, nor do they consider what end users are going to do.

Now, is there room for blogs to make a comeback? Yes. There are publishing networks big (Medium) and small (see all the Markdown+Dropbox blog platforms) that are gunning for WordPress and Tumblr right now, which suggests that we're going to find new ways to encourage movement on the medium-form writing style.

And here's the other thing: While blogs are more likely to influence a purchase than Facebook, any good marketer has presence on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter _and_ blogs. That one percent difference is nullified if they have their hands in multiple pockets with multiple approaches.

A lot of what marketing clients look for is a top-down approach which takes into account each of the tools at our disposal and finds ways to make each of them work together. You can't treat one as more important than the other, though Facebook is certainly getting the lion's share of the attention right now. If anything, the second graphic in this post shows the value of a more holistic approach, not one that relies largely on one platform over another. If you're really doing it right, you're leveraging Twitter to lead someone to a blog post, getting them to watch your YouTube video, and drawing a like on a Facebook page all in a single visit … and the triangulation of these elements eventually leads to a sale and/or a growth of brand awareness.

</comment><comment><USER16> Any move towards a decentralized system that is harder to track and spy on would have my support.

<comment><USER17> IMO popular mainstream consumption, and being difficult to track/spy, are at odds. If everybody and their brother reads what you write, I can't think of any way it could simultaneously be difficult for the Feds to follow it too.

<comment><USER18> You also have to think about tracking on the readers' side of things. If you read something on Facebook or Google+, you can count on that being tracked and added to that system's profile of you. If you read something on a blog, and block things like Google Analytics, it's harder to passively track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This effect exists due to the very nature of blogs, which the author seems to fail to take into account.

In blogging you're talking about a very large number of individuals, most of whom are not likely going to be good at ad sales / management / placement. The blogging ecosystem is inherently chaotic, it'd be like herding cats trying to get blog based advertising up to the effectiveness of a singular organization of massive scale like Facebook.

Then you have a huge portion of the blogging world that is made up of corporate blogs, non-profit blogs, and so on and many of those simply will never have any interest in ad monetization.

To correct the imbalance would require a very large and efficient ad machine at the core of the blogging world, with the ability to determine placement and ad matching for every blog - that doesn't exist and never will. Slapping AdSense on a blog won't cut it (not to mention most blogs don't run any serious advertising and never will).

<comment><USER20> It seems to me that a centralized blogging platform[1], that did its own analytics on the people browsing each blog, but also had enough information about each blogger's identity (perhaps through API access to their Facebooks, Twitters, G+s &c) to determine their likely audience, would be able to do very good with ad sales and placement, perhaps much better than Facebook itself (because if you're looking at Bob's wall, you aren't in a buying mood, but if you're looking at Bob's review of something on his blog, you are.)

The only problem with this is putting ads on what people think of as "their" blog. People want to be able to run _their own_ ads on "their" blogs; even if they're hosted with some other service, they want to be the ones making money off people seeing their own content on their own pages.

I think Tumblr might be closest to a solution here (though even they haven't grasped it yet): once you can get people to read the blogs you host through a _centralized_ interface (their "dashboard", effectively an RSS reader), you can display ads beside/between/around those posts that _you_ think are relevant to those posts--and because the viewer never ends up going to the blogger's site itself, the blogger doesn't feel slighted by the ads + lack of revenue. They're not showing up on _their_ site, after all.

[1] You can debate the other pros and cons of centralized/decentralized blogging--there are many--but "makes enough money for the people doing the centralizing to offer blog-hosting as a free service, and blog consumption with a streamlined and enjoyable UX" is definitely one of the pros of centralization.

<comment><USER21> >The only problem with this is putting ads on what people think of as "their" blog. People want to be able to run their own ads on "their" blogs; even if they're hosted with some other service, they want to be the ones making money off people seeing their own content on their own pages.

I don't see why that would be a problem. So you share the revenue with them, which the bloggers are happy to do because you're providing all the analytics and economies of scale they don't have right now.

<comment><USER20> A lot of the people who _would_ be providing content for your blog-hosting service (that is, blogging), aren't necessarily in a legal position to receive money. 8-year-olds, for instance, or people living in countries where it is terribly expensive to set up a bank account that can accept internatonal payments, or even people staying in the US on Student visas who are obligated to not earn any income while they're here.

And yet, if you say "well, we'll only give you your cut if-and-when you jump through all the legal hoops yourself so we can just send it without worrying or doing too much work", these people will get mad that you're withholding "their" money, move their blogs elsewhere, tell all their readers that you're stonewalling lazy moneygrubbers ("you're just like Paypal!" they'll say), etc.

<comment><USER21> >And yet, if you say "well, we'll only give you your cut if-and-when you jump through all the legal hoops yourself so we can just send it without worrying or doing too much work", these people will get mad that you're withholding "their" money, move their blogs elsewhere, tell all their readers that you're stonewalling lazy moneygrubbers ("you're just like Paypal!" they'll say), etc.

I don't understand how "give us a routing number and we'll deposit the money into your checking account" is particularly arduous. If you live in a country that makes payments difficult, what do you expect a blogging platform to do about it? You'll encounter the same issue from any ad network who might pay you to put ads on your own unaffiliated blog. If you want that fixed you have to lobby your government to fix it, or move to another country.

In addition to that, Paypal has to deal with an army of international scammers and Paypal are cheap/lazy bastards who would rather screw over their users than devise elegant solutions to those problems. But almost all of those problems are a result of Paypal withdrawing money from one account and depositing it into another. A blogging platform doesn't do that: They get money from advertisers, who are happy when their ads are shown to users who buy stuff regardless of the are-you-a-dog status of individual bloggers, and deposit the money into the accounts that said bloggers have asked it to be deposited into. There is nowhere near the same opportunity to steal anyone else's money in the traditional method of signing up for a scam account and taking payments for goods or services you never intend to deliver, so the level of dickishness required to run the operation is substantially reduced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >I think in 2013 and beyond we will see social media spending go up, but we will also see a big shift from Facebook and Twitter back towards blogs as influencers

I'm not convinced that blogs ever _stopped_ being "influencers," especially given how much Google traffic goes to blogs. I suspect that whatever metrics dendory.net and others are using, however, have understated the impact of blogs and probably have for a long time.

I do think we've seen blogs shift: people with long-form aspirations write them. People who just want to post links and one-liners that are only likely to be of interest to a small circle of people use Facebook and so on.

Certainly I've spent a LOT more time writing blog posts than I've spent on Facebook, but I'm also anomalous in this respect.

EDIT: I should've just written, "I think companies are catching up to what most of us already know about the differences in purpose in both readership and writership between blogs and Facebook."

</comment><comment><USER23> I tend to use Facebook as a social blog already. It's "free" hosting (oh, I know: I am the product), and many of my friends are coerced to view my musings (if they want to see their news feed).

I'd really love for Facebook to integrate analytics into personal accounts. I know that they offer some functionality via "Pages", but I'd love to know what type of content that my readers (friends) are most interested in. Which links they follow, etc...

</comment><comment><USER24> The analysis ignores that as a company, you spend budget on buying Facebook ads. That's in addition to the money you spend directly maintaining your FB and blog. The fact that a larger percentage of budgets are going to FB just tells you that's where companies spend money to attract new eyeballs to both their FB page and their blog - most of the companies I follow on FB primarily post links to their blogs.

</comment><comment><USER25> Blogs sell display ads which are part of the big 41% slice of the pie chart. The smaller ones sell space entirely through AdWords--I think that's in the 41% as well, but I'm not sure.

What I don't know is what constitutes blog spending under the category of social media. Running your own company's blog? Outreach and free stuff aimed at influential bloggers? Astroturfing?

<comment><USER26> My blog gets plenty of readers but I refuse to make any money off of it. Maybe I'm out of touch with that reality.

<comment><USER27> The only type of ads I think look good on blogs are the ones from networks such as <http://decknetwork.net> and <http://carbonads.net>

Why do you refuse to make money with your blog?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You mean, like what started in 2012 ?

Social networks are know widely known, meaning they became boring and non- innovations.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hmm, I can bet against both of them :P

</comment><comment><USER30> I agree, this trend is a big part of how we are thinking about the future of Referly

</comment><comment><USER31> Aren't social networks just sort of like... blog networks?

<comment><USER32> More like sharecropping networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> s/2013/2012/</comment>


Show HN: Demo of live container migration using Virtualbox, Vagrant and ShutIt - <AUTHOR> https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/docker-migration-in-flight-criu/ <comment><USER2> "Show HN" is reserved for usable stuff not content:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><USER3> The page links to code ([https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit- criu](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-criu)), so I assume it's something people can try running for themselves?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes they can:

        pip install shutit
        git clone --recursive https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-criu
        cd shutit-criu
        ./run.sh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How fast do you think this could be made to work? AWS spot instance termination notifications give you a 2 min warning.</comment>


Ask HN: So I got first two paid customers, now what?  - <AUTHOR> Hi Guys, This is my third or forth try to address this community and ask advice w my startup (previously I got zero responses).
I am launching my project (as part of HN - November Launch pad initiative)
Ystd i got some 1k uniqs about 50 registrations (couple paid), few calls from potential customers, advisors, investors etc
My question is again the same. What now? What should i do now? I have solid roadmap on developing product, but feel like I am all over on business dev strategy: I was sure my initial market is education(screencasts, tutorial, etc) and got some good agreements there, but yest couple guys from Hollywood called and said that i should go to LA for big guys in Movies and entertainment industries... I feel like i am lost a need some good advices.
Thanks in advance. Hope this post will not get lost again, please consider upvoting, i really need some advice from respectful ppl here(not more  traffic, thats why i am not posting link to my site here.)
Edit:
Based on feedback in comments here is the link: http://videolla.com <comment><USER2> Keep going and build upon that initial momentum.

A few other thoughts:

"Videolla is a media business revolution!" on your homepage is enclosed in quotation marks. If it is a real quote, attribute it correctly and let people know of its source.

Getting the [Site in 70 seconds] video onto the main page is something that could also increase your conversions.

Seeing the word "Sign" twice in your menu bar (Sign In/Sign Up) somehow does not look right to my eye. I believe something similar to Log In/Sign Up might improve usability of your site by approximately 0.0018%.

Details like these are not necessarily what you should focus on right now. But as your schedule permits, you might want to allocate some resources to A/B testing if you are not already doing so. Find out what works. Rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER3> This could very much be a personal preference issue, but the scrolling steps on the right hand side just bugs me. I expect new steps to be _below_ their predecessors, so when the slide scrolls _up_ to the next step, it's a bit jarring to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Never thought about this :) Thanks! I will surely change it if your comment will get few upvotes :))

<comment><USER4> A/B test it ;) I know what xatax means though, it's just a little jarring.

<comment><USER5> Exactly what these two said. I was reading through the copy and kept getting distracted by the slides scrolling down rather than up

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't let the hype get to you. Just focus on developing your product and make sure you solidify your customer acquisition process. These people will only be around for a short while, afterwards they will move to the next featured thing. Make sure the basis of your business is strong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I was thinking along the same logic. What do you think about market niche i should focus on initially?

<comment><USER6> I have no idea, I'm not very conversant with how your business works. Just do what you feel is best, build strongly on the biggest, then expand to the smaller ones till you discover the one that takes off strongest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what I do for building internal software and it may work for where you are now. Look at your existing roadmap and then get feedback from your customers (the ones who are paying for and the who are using the site). Take this feedback and incorporate[1] it into your roadmap. Now go back to work.

I'm always apprehensive of 'Hollywood guys.' In my opinion there is just a much higher ratio of BS in LA than many other places. You should certainly talk to them, but keep your BS meter on high alert :)

[1] You don't want to let your current customers completely drive your vision since their feedback is going to be based around their exact needs (this isn't always true for example when dealing with fewer but very high paying customers), but you should be able to use their feedback as a stepping stone to understand the bigger picture and if your current roadmap makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, very general but still good advices. Especially about Hollywood guys! I wish i could share some conversations i had with that type of ppl )))

<comment><USER7> Well other people were giving you detailed advice on your site (typos, A/B, etc...) and since you're the only one who knows your current roadmap and any feedback you're receiving you're the only one who can make the big picture decisions going forward. I like the idea and wish you success!

<comment><AUTHOR> Practical advices are always useful. Listen to clients, iterate, do split testing, etc are all great. I am gonna do most of this anyways. This is not all new to me and I believe do have so experience.

But right now I am mostly looking for general advices regarding my product, initial market, grow strategy, etc

Like:

DHH replied me and advised that I should get some partnerships in hollywood and get some premium content like movies to grow audience.

Another well known guys suggested to focus on smaller producers and materials like tech tutorials.

<comment><USER8> I would say start with small producers and learn from your experience.It's always better to make mistakes with the small players before swimming with the big fish.

In terms of your homepage and conversion rate, you have five call to actions with two sign up for free buttons. I would consolidate these to the one or two most important ones to make them more effective.

Congrats and good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Custom Plan We have special offers for Serious Businesses Please get in touch"

I wouldn't call them "Serious Businesses." For one, it looks odd as a proper noun. Secondly, it makes it sound like you're putting down smaller businesses or single people.

Also, periods would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, i will change it! My eng sucks, sorry.

<comment><USER10> You should probably pay somebody to proofread your site, or you're going to lose customers. Your tech could be rock-solid, but a potential customer can't see that, so they look at what they _can_ see. If they see bad English or bad design, they'll assume that the rest of the business is of similar quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, great advice. Gonna do this anyways. Just didnt have time yet.

<comment><USER11> I can do it for you if you like. Email me (in profile) or give me your email address. I'd also like to discuss some collaboration with my startup if you're interested.

Please put your email address in your profile. You never know who might want to get in touch!

<comment><AUTHOR> thx, just added

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, I don't know you (sorry), or what your product/app is, so it's hard to give much advice.

All I can say, if you got 2 customers, go get 2 more. Keep doing that until profit :)

In all seriousness you have to be careful about trying to look at trends from small data samples. Your first two or twenty customers might not be representative of your best user base, they might just be a couple of early adopters that happened to hear about you.

Pay attention to the trends though and try to look for commonalities among the customers, or other use cases or verticals you might not have thought of, while at the same time trying to make sure you don't get yourself pulled down a rabbit hole by following the wrong data.

</comment><comment><USER13> This seems to be his site:

<http://videolla.com/>

<comment><USER14> That sites redirecting my iPad to the mobile subdomain/site. You don't want to do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats interesting(I spend couple days making this mobile version). Why? I dont have iPad, but tested it on iphone and adroid. Can you please check if same happens when you go to youtube or it has some custom version for iPad?

<comment><USER15> Are you redirecting based on user-agent string? The iPad reports Mobile Safari in its user-agent:

      Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

You might want to white-list user-agents containing 'iPad' from the redirect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I know how to do it technically. I am just not sure how other video sites do it with iPad. Custom mobile version or redirect to general site?

<comment><USER16> Worth going to your local apple store and testing with their display models. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a little experience in this domain: developed a video product/model for a large publishing company that produces a little over 500K rev/annum.

In short: Keep on pushing the product. Do not pay much attention behind any of the hoopla that comes with a product launch - but entertain all opportunities nonetheless, you never know when the contacts might be beneficial.

Where you have positioned yourself makes this a perfect solution for a small business or entrepreneur with a unique content offering. The service is cheaper than Brightcove but more optioned than YouTube. Target coming up with a Wordpress plugin to market directly to that very powerful segment and promote to them. Wordpress + your service would be a 80% solution to a challenging issue related to monetization of video.

Find some way to integrate distribution with YouTube to leverage the power of their network (perhaps set up a site for preview videos).

Target the educational video providers (5min and others), make sure you scan the ENTIRE ecosystem to see what the other competition is doing right / wrong. See what guitar lesson video producers are using, for example.

Once you have some notable customers (even give away a free/discount account to a notable customer just to get their testimonial). Post their VIDEO testimonial on your site.

Even before features, you may want to explain "How it Works" in a brief tab so that users do not have to view the whole 70 sec video to find out how this works.

The word "Alfa" in your header is spelled "Alpha" in common English.

Play the intro video on entry into the page, better yet, create an illustrated video of how things work (not technical, just illustrative) and place it on the homepage.

No offense, but I had a tiny bit of trouble understanding what you were saying in the 70 second video. You may want to replace that with a female voice reading the script.

I'm not sure I see the pricing model set up working for micropayment videos (anything less than $4).

Also, how does the authentication/sessions work? Will a user that's paid for one video automatically be able to buy a another video on the same domain (or within the Videolla domain) without another authentication?

Reach out to me if you have a viable business and want to sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great practical advices, thanks! I have most of this developed already or planned in my roadmap.

What do you mean by:

>Reach out to me if you have a viable business and want to sell.

<comment><USER17> When/If you are seeking a cash exit and the product is stable, growing & profitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hi - Good luck with your business. As a technology marketer & first time visitor (and someone not in your target segment) to your site here are few points of suggestion:

1- Market & Biz Dev: -You said your target market is education, this is a very broad vertical. I suggest picking a segment from this broad market, for example K-12. You could do one step better by focusing on a sub-segment within this group, for example science teachers/content creators.

2- Look & feel: \- The auto scrolling 1,2,3 steps to getting started is too fast to follow and read. Makes it difficult for users to learn about your service. \- The current page is too busy with too many calls to action (support our campaign, upload, browse, tour, singup, sign-in etc), simplify this for higher conversion.

3- Hollywood or not: -I think meeting with new folks (Hollywood or not)is always good for business. But don't waste your money flying there - tel calls are cheaper and more effective.

Hope this helps and the very best to you.

</comment><comment><USER19> To begin with, I would suggest making a list of your target customer segments, if you havent already. Who will use this service to distribute video ? Media agencies, DIY publishers, sports publishers etc. Your service is not targeted to the users who upload videos to Youtube.

Once you have this list, figure out what are current solutions available to that segment of users. Then, start your customer acquisition process. Be it google adwords marketing or organic SEO or whatever. If you want to begin with a niche and evolve from there, thats fine too. Identify which target segment is tech savvy and will be easy/cheap to acquire and can easily try out your service. For instance, DIY publishers might be easier to approach and convince in terms of trying out your service. Wedding videographers might be another (just thinking out loud here).

Once you start this way, you should get a good feel of what the market needs, how and where you can acquire users etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would recommend you to focus on the busines side for a while. Your minimum viable product seems to work, you've already a pricing strategy and a few customers. To validate your pricing and offer you need to get a few more customers. 5-10 at minimum.

Do everything you can to get your first 10 paying customers, you'll learn a lot, and after that focus on your product roadmap. You don't know what your customers need, or want, until you have a bunch of 'em.

So, call people, sell, market your site, try to get some PR and do everything you can come up with to get these 10 customers. When you've done that, you will start to get real feedback from your customers not other entrepreneurs and will a better clue on how the product roadmap should look like. And how your product will fit into the market.

Then, it's time to get 100 customers. Do everything you can to get them.

Then, it's time to get 1000 customers. If you have 1000 customers, you know you have a scalable business. Time to celebrate!

</comment><comment><USER21> The Hollywood guys are giving you good advice, but their wrong about the reason.

I wouldn't go after the movie industry. It's something I don't understand and something you probably don't either. However, you need to dominate a niche. I e-mailed some advice on how I'd go about doing this a couple days ago to you.

The most important thing is to become THE website for x. You can always branch out from there.

One way to pith this to bloggers is basically for $25.00 a month a person can subscribe to your channel. This where you dump all your excess thoughts about your niche. I have a lot of ideas that I think are useful, but I probably couldn't write a 1500 word minimum blog post on. I could make a 3 minute video on it though and produce 2 or 3 of these a day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Noah! Your email is still in my "Stared", sorry I am so busy in these days with this and other projects, but i will reply to you in a few days

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The part of the site that looks like it needs the most work at the moment is the browse section. Get people to tag their videos - make it searchable as once you start getting content you're going to want people to see that similar videos are up there. It's also the simplest form of feedback - are people tagging their films "movie", "ruby" or "money"? Which ones generate the most revenue, and which ones prefer which payment plans?

Possibly you can suggest people place their video under certain headings for them and develop vertical browse pages for people looking at those markets. These categories prove to might well warrant their own landing pages similar to the home page but with targeted content "sell your screencasts - charge per video or per course" and their own testimonials and examples etc. If you can effectively silo your content and marketing messages you can directly target more than one audience.

Going after big deals with the movie studios sounds like it could be a big waste of time unless your contacts aren't simply wannabes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Get a few more and form a VIP club of first n customers - and give them special benefits -> they'll get you more customers.

</comment><comment><USER24> congrats on the first few paying customers. Feels great, doesn't it?

1) if you have enough "volume" of unique and registrations, analyze you acquisition cost. How is it relative to your margins? Try to account for externalities (your time) and see if it's sustainable. It's ok to be upsidedown on your acquisition cost early in the game if you think you can optimize the acquisition engine.

2) Be willing to talk to partners, but be weary of hollow partnerships. Its easy to fall into the trap of thinking you are making progress because you are "in talks". IMO, this is especially true of hollywood/music industry.

3) Talk to you customers. Both paying and registrants. Learn what their pain points are and their use case for your product. You will learn a crazy amount of stuff you never thought of.

</comment><comment><USER25> Post the URL of your service so people can give more constructive feedback based on specifics.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you have two paying customers it means you have something people want. Congratulations! That means you actually have a business. Now, all you have to do is keep growing and improving. One thing I would do is reach out to those first customers, and thank them for being early customers. Ask them how you might help them even more, and why they found you valuable enough to buy. If you can find out more about them, then you should be able to find more people like them, and target your marketing to them. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER27> _couple guys from Hollywood called and said that i should go to LA for big guys in Movies and entertainment industries_

Is it your full-time job? If not, don't do this. You are talking about a huge investment of time for sales. Are you a good salesman? If not, you will need to become so to make this work.

Alternatively, you have 50 registrations and a couple of paid ones. Perhaps you could find out who your first few customers were, and do more of that?

</comment><comment><USER11> You are probably losing a customer by not linking to your business here. I wish PG would add this to the site guidelines: when asking for help, be specific.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, after PG's recent post about rising spam wave from low carma accounts (I have 160), I was afraid to post my link. Link posted above is correct though.

<comment><USER11> You are right. But, you are clearly not spamming! If genuine posts like these don't contain links, then we are only worsening the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can you repeat the acquisition process for 10 more customers? Getting the initial set of customers is extremely tough. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I believe I can. So far i have like 0.5% conversion (and i can improve that rate). I am not looking to grow traffic right now as I want focus on my initial users and improve product a bit (like fix obvious typos on site), experiment with pricing etc...

<comment><USER28> Are you paying for traffic or is it organic? Do a cost analysis to see how long you'll last at the current burn rate. Make amends accordingly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not paying anything for traffic (well except some interesting experiments with fb ads). its mostly from twitter, fb, blogs and google. I do have enough savings and my freelancing/consulting brings me enough, so money isnt an issue here so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Having spent far too much time dealing with Hollywood I advise you to avoid them like the plague. They will expect a great deal more from you than you will be willing or able to provide/spend.

However, do get your DMCA ducks in a row sooner rather than later so the first major copyright infringement that someone misuses your service for doesn't take you down.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everyone for your suggestions and feedback! What a great community here! If you know somebody with experience in this field, please forward my contacts (in profile). Lets get in touch.

I am looking for advisors for that project(not looking for funding atm).

</comment><comment><USER11> Now that you have a few customers, why don't you put up some testimonials? For your site, video testimonials would be great as they would help your customers promote themselves too and showcase the technology at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well the first thing you need to do is get market validation.

You got a few signups...but your actual market validation is whether someone would actually buy the videos. Noone is going to pay you a subscription if they aren't making sales.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that market is validated and quite big. Idea is nothing new. Some of competors are everyone from iTunes, Netflix, Amazon Video, down to sites like Railstutorials.org...

I am struggling to find my initial place in this wide market. Where should i focus - Education? Movies? Sports? I got some good feedback and contacts in all these niches and dont know where should i focus my efforts.

I got two real(not counting number of test) purchases(i suspect from friends of my customer).

<comment><USER31> I would recommend it to the ebook selling crowd. Those business owners would love to have more "How to raise a parrot" sort of ebook sales, but in video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Any currency, any payment method"--I think you're overpromising here. Someone is sure to want to pay in something unreasonable, and then your customers will complain that you misled them.

<comment><USER32> Like Canadian tire money? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money>

<comment><USER10> Or even just a niche payment card. "Any payment method" includes things like a Macy's card, or the stored-value cards some subway systems use.

Obviously a reasonable person wouldn't expect to buy a video with a farecard, but that just means you'll be getting complaints from _unreasonable_ people, which are the worst to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In your pricing slide you have 'monthly' spelled as 'mothly'

And as a minor preference thing having the slides scroll downwards looked wrong ... maybe upwards or sideways would look better.

</comment><comment><USER34> Get two more. That's 100% growth.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the websites you visit daily? - <AUTHOR>

Not necessarily hacking related. <comment><USER2> every day:

npr bbc hacker news slashdot cnnsi espn ars technica lifehacker economist ny times</comment>


Tutorial - How to Target Facebook Groups with Facebook Ads - <AUTHOR> http://freelancer.freelancercv.com/blog/29/tutorial-how-to-target-facebook-groups-with-facebook-ads <comment><USER2> Actually clever hack without needing a landing page to target and remarket, thx for sharing!</comment>


Lenovo's new Yoga 2 Pro has the same flexible hinge, 3200×1800 display - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/lenovos-new-yoga-2-pro-has-the-same-flexible-hinge-3200x1800-display/ <comment><USER2> A warning for anyone considering this laptop: I bought a similar laptop, the Sony Duo 13, last week.

If you're doing heavy work on a machine as a developer you'll often need to do complex "mousing", such as working in a UI building tool, art program, or working with dialogs in Visual Studio.

For these cases, I find I'm frustrated because I want the speed/simplicity of the touch interface (instead of using the touchpad) but my finger just isn't precise enough.

These situations constantly make me reach for my stylus, which surprised me: Turns out, precision styluses are very useful, even when you're not doing strictly "artsy" things.

However, this Yoga 2 Pro touch display does NOT appear to have precision stylus support. The Sony Duo 13, on the other hand, ships with an excellent wacom-style stylus.

BOTTOM LINE: I think you'll regret buying a touchscreen laptop without advanced stylus support, if you use computers professionally.

EDIT: Others have pointed out the now "Yoga" also released today (not the "Yoga 2 Pro" with the high res screen) has stylus support.

<comment><USER3> Stylus support is a good point, but you could also just use a good mouse to perform complex 'mousing'.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, folks will have to try what works best for them- Just wanted to let people know that there is something potentially useful they might miss out on.

<comment><USER4> The Tinkpad Yoga has a stylus [1]. It can have the resolution "only" up to 1920×1080 though. The other positive thing is that you have an additional precise pointing device: the trackpoint (I admit it takes more time to get productive with it than to a stylus, mouse or touchpad - but for ten-finger typists it pays really off)

1: [http://m.heise.de/newsticker/bilderstrecke/bilderstrecke_195...](http://m.heise.de/newsticker/bilderstrecke/bilderstrecke_1950865.html?back=1950853;bild=3)

<comment><USER2> The Thinkpad Yoga and "Yoga 2" are two different machines, both released today. Near as I can tell the stylus support exists ONLY for the regular Yoga, not the "Yoga 2" linked by OP. (but since information is still limited I could be wrong.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How comes that the non-Thinkpad Yoga has a higher resolution than the Thinkpad Yoga? I thought that Thinkpad is the brand that is targeted to the PROfessionals!?

I agree about the battery with you. However not so much about extra cost. The computer is my main tool, I am using it the whole day - I stare at it the whole day, I type on it the whole day. For me the keyboard, the trackpoint, the ergonomy, the screen quality are more important than the price.

Disclaimer:

* Being a freelancer, unfortunately the money for my equipment is at my expenses

* I am a Thinkpad user (X220T currently).

* I do not use mouse and touchpad. I have to admit that over years my dependency on a good trackpoint grew to a state where I feel uncomfortable on computers without them. When at customers I have to spend days on their machines (because of security prohibiting to use my laptop in the customer's network) I bring in an external Thinkpad keyboard with a trackpoint, even though the most time I spend on the console.

* I would love to see good alternatives to Thinkpads and I would be ready to pay even a higher price.

* I added this disclaimer as an edit to the original post

<comment><USER5> Well, "PROfessionals" that use the thinkpad lines (think business people) have no need for the extra costs and battery hit associated with a higher PPI screen

<comment><USER4> I agree about the battery with you. However not so much about extra cost. The computer is my main tool, I am using it the whole day - I stare at it the whole day, I type on it the whole day. For me the keyboard, the trackpoint, the ergonomy, the screen quality are more important than the price.

<comment><USER5> You're not the one buying the laptop though, your company is. The bottom line is they don't feel the need to buy a more expensive laptop for you whose only reason for being more expensive is the screen is nicer. Typing a Word doc or making a powerpoint doesn't require a high PPI screen. High PPI is pretty much dead last in the sprint for "things that matter when corporate buys a laptop for you"

<comment><USER6> Yes it does. Eye fatigue takes much longer to set in one a high dpi display. The productivity benefits of giving a high dpi display are probable more meaningful than those of giving an i7 instead of an i3 (for word users).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They also ruined the keyboard in the process, no more home/end/pgup/pgdown row. I love those keys.

<comment><USER8> Learn your emacs shortcuts - ctrl-A, ctrl-E, ctrl-U, ctrl-D.

<comment><USER9> Not every application is emacs.

<comment><USER10> Eventually there is an emacs port of every application.

<comment><USER11> Even of emacs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit Sounds interesting. I could see using something like this. I'm guessing that once you've flipped the screen back that far to make it a "tablet" then the exposed keyboard on the backside gets disabled so that your knee doesn't start typing for you?

<comment><USER4> The Thinkpad Yoga has actually a mechanical solution by raising keyboard plate to the level of the keyboard buttons [1]. The Yoga Pro, while not having a mechanical solution will disable the keyboard electronically, so even if a key is pressed nothing will happen.

[1]: [http://m.heise.de/newsticker/bilderstrecke/bilderstrecke_195...](http://m.heise.de/newsticker/bilderstrecke/bilderstrecke_1950865.html?back=1950853;bild=5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 6 hours of battery life in a Haswell laptop? That's probably why Apple is keeping the Retina screen out of the MacBook Air.

I really liked the old Yoga but 14" is too big to use like a tablet and 6 hours is not enough battery life.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps ... but the resolution on the macbook air models is getting more and more conspicuously behind the times.

We were disappointed when there was no macbook air with retina _two_ years ago, when the first retina screens were released. Now it's 2.5 years after that 2012 WWDC and ... same old same old ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would make a pretty nice Ubuntu machine (next version of the OS). Imagine in laptop mode, you get desktop Ubuntu and flip for tablet mode for Ubuntu Touch. The orange version even matches Ubuntu's theme. Hum..

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone used one of these touch screen laptops for Linux? How useful is the touch display with say the latest Ubuntu distribution?

<comment><USER2> Driver support for my Sony Duo 13 (a very similar machine to OP) is awful. Ditto for the Ubuntu touchscreen experience.

I've given up running Ubuntu natively and just run it in virtualbox, instead. Unfortunately I think it'll be a couple of years before Ubuntu has caught up with the current transition to touch interfaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Was very much looking forward to this. But I'm curious, how did they manage to squeeze in 4x the pixels for essentially the same price in just under a year? I feel like this might be a mistake or there is going to be a big trade-off somewhere else in display quality.

</comment><comment><USER17> From the article it says it has 2.4ghz-only Wifi. That kills it for me, and for a lot of people too.

<comment><USER18> Why?

<comment><USER19> One example... I have a Motorola SBG6580 that I use as both my cable modem and wireless router [0]. Although it claims to support dual band 802.11n, it really only supports one or the other, not both simultaneously. This means that if I have _any_ wireless device in the house that doesn't support 802.11n, and specifically the 5 GHz band, then I'm forced to tell my router to fall back to 2.4 GHz unless I want to buy additional hardware.

[0] [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=25-122-014](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=25-122-014)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That concept looks good in photos and videos, but who's ever going to turn their laptop upside down whenever they feel like using the "tablet mode" \- so a few times every day? I might do it in the first few days, but I think I'd get tired of doing that, and just touch the screen in "laptop mode", instead, and with that flexible hinge, the screen will wobble a lot (which is why I think touch on most laptops is a bad idea).

<comment><USER21> Have you used one? I ask because I thought the similar thing but recently purchased the Dell XPS 12" and one of my coworkers bought the Yoga. While I agree, I don't often times flip my screen around unless I'm reading a long article of some type I do touch the screen a lot and the screens don't move like you'd think. In fact I'm so used to using the touchscreen (and I've only had the dell for about a month) that I find myself trying to touch my screen on my macbook now as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Do they still make convertible laptops that have one hinge point in the middle, so it can swivel 180 degrees and then fold down to become a tablet while covering the keyboard keys? I just can't see myself leaving the keyboard exposed, even if it is disabled electronically.

<comment><USER23> That would be the Thinkpad X230t and Thinkpad Twist. Neither of them are using Haswell, but the X230t will probably be killed, the Twist will probably be updated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd love to have that kind of screen on the x230, touch screen is not something I really need nor want, while a good screen is still something that seems hard to find on a high-end mobile laptop.

<comment><USER25> I'm hoping to see this screen rez on a 15" or so Thinkpad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really hope they change the name..

</comment><comment><USER27> When will we be seeing normal (30"+) displays with that kind of resolution? Please say "soon".

<comment><USER28> The 4K monitors have resolution of 3840×2160 and they are already on market. I believe the cheapest contender is 39" seiki[1] which goes for under $1k.

For more dots per inch there is bunch of 31.5" 4K screens coming to market at the $3-4k price range.

[http://4k-monitors.com/seiki-39-se39uy04/](http://4k-monitors.com/seiki-39-se39uy04/)

<comment><USER29> Except most 4K displays can't do 60Hz which for most is the bare minimum for computer usage.

I would avoid that Seiki monitor, it can only do 4K at 30Hz max and there are wide reports that it can't even do 1080p at 120 Hz properly (even though its in the spec sheet).

The first 4K 60p input displays are just coming to the market this year. You can see a list: [http://www.noteloop.com/kit/4k/](http://www.noteloop.com/kit/4k/)

Right now it is just a trickle but expect a flood of both cheap and expensive 4K 60p displays next year.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: full-time job or full-time freelancing or both? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious how many of you work Full time programming in languages like Java, Python, Ruby and also do freelancing on the side maybe using PHP or Javascript for on the side work or extra income.
I'm going to be starting work soon as a Python Developer and wanted to perhaps use PHP on the side when I'm off work to make extra money working for clients.
Has anyone tried this? PHP is hated a lot here I know but it's really simple and quick to build dynamic websites with it plus it is in so much demand. I just need advice on how many of you have went this route before and what was the outcome and result of your freelancing while working full time job too? <comment><USER2> I used to freelance after my full-time job and I have to admit that it is really exhausting. I had less time for my girlfriend and to compensate this I left all my hobbies. I could not even watch a movie or start reading a book because I had to finish my freelance work. It is really hard to predict sometimes how much effort is needed for a freelance job, so if you are not so experienced take my advice: always tell your client that when he changes the requirements the deadline must also change. Always thinking about the deadlines and the work to do - best way to burn out.

One more thing: sure it is a good thing to earn more money by working more. If you have a debt or you are really need to save for something it might be (not sure it is the best) a good approach to boost your income. I had no debts while I was doing this; I just wanted some more money to increase the level of my lifestyle, let's say.. the problem was that I had no time to really spend or use the plus money in a good way.

I hope I could help. Also please notice that I am sure that there are people whose tolerancy for work or their energies let's say are higher than mine.

</comment><comment><USER3> With PHP you can enter the wonderful (and lucrative) world of Wordpress templating, plugins and/or maintenance. Like the other post suggested you will be burnt out if you freelance while working full-time so balance your freelance workload such that you still enjoy what you do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I'm not doing construction or blue collar work I never thought people could get burned out from freelancing in that sense, most if it involves siting.

<comment><USER4> It's just sitting inasmuch as reading is looking, writing is moving your hand, and living is breathing.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News for Kindle's Experimental Browser - <AUTHOR>

Scrolling is a pain on the Kindle's experimental browser so I made (yet another) hacker news interface that uses back/next buttons instead of scrolling. Just something I did so I won't be bored on a friday night :p (shoutout to api.ihackernews.com - thanks!)<p>See it here: http://toniobox.dreamhosters.com/hnkindle/ <comment><USER2> Cool! I shortened the link to <http://bit.ly/hnkindle> because I won't remember the full URL on my Kindle.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool thanks for that!</comment></comment>


How to increase serotonin in the human brain without drugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2077351/ <comment><USER2> 1) Think positive thoughts, 2) Get exposure to bright light, 3) Exercise, 4) Take tryptophan (not foods containing tryptophan) though this is considered to be a drug in some countries.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/serotonin-disease- aging...](http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/serotonin-disease-aging- inflammation.shtml)</comment>


San Francisco Cuts 'Cruising' for Parking in Half With Market-Clearing Prices - <AUTHOR> http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/san-francisco-cuts-cruising-for-parking-in-half-with-market-clearing-prices

<comment><AUTHOR> And a link to the nicely titled study[1]:

"Is the curb 80% full or 20% empty? Assessing the impacts of San Francisco's parking pricing experiment"

[1] [http://people.ucsc.edu/~adammb/publications/Millard- Ball_Wei...](http://people.ucsc.edu/~adammb/publications/Millard- Ball_Weinberger_Hampshire_2014_Assessing_the_impacts_SFPark.pdf)</comment>


Show HN: Zero – an HTML5 game about modular arithmetic and prime numbers - <AUTHOR> http://zero.karaniwan.org/?ver=1.1

<comment><USER2> Summing up digits manually takes too long. A decent strategy seems to be: start chaining a long path together. At some point it will pop by itself, or you will notice what's needed to complete it.

Suggestions: There should be a button to clear the chain in progress because you can box yourself into a dead end. A pause button would also be nice (maybe blank the screen when paused).

<comment><USER3> Randomly chaining numbers seems to be the most practical strategy up until you start running into the empty blocks.

Game should probably be made a little easier so the intended strategy of chaining primes becomes more viable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I found that the easiest consistent strategy is to play it like Minesweeper: start with randomly clicking (to gain time) until you find it too risky, then start with the easy portions (2-3 chains like 5-5 and 3-6-1 to clear out blockers, also remove 1s and 2s to increase overall average value), then move on to the difficult part when you're ready (chaining 40+ numbers when you have a lot of time).

There are of course other strategies, but I'll leave that for others to discover. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should really be allowed to click on a completely separate circle to start a new chain.

I was initially unsure about how the blockers worked, that should be made more clear. For others, if you create a chain out of a prime count of numbers, you may clear blockers. If you create a chain out of a composite count of numbers, you may create blockers.

Interesting game, but it doesn't have that same "I know I can do better" feel that 2048 grabbed everyone with :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's going to anywhere as popular as 2048. zero's "oh crap I clicked the wrong number ruining my 30+ chain just because I wasn't paying attention for a second" is much more frustrating and more common than 2048's "I filled up 3 rows so I have to take a chance breaking my 1024-512-256-128 row" :P

The "click separate circle to start a new chain" seems a bit risky - when I play the game on my phone, dragging/swiping tends to skip numbers. I'll try implementing the "clear selection" button suggested by the other commenter first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get this game. The explanation is so short and I have no idea what happens next when I click on another number.

<comment><AUTHOR> wbhart got the gist of it.

Here's an even longer version of the rules:

Click/tap numbers to connect them to a chain. You can only connect numbers that are at the left, right, top, bottom of the last selected number. As a faster alternative, you can also drag/swipe through the numbers.

When the sum of the chain ends in zero (ie. sum % 10 = 0) you get rewards and side effects depending on whether the chain's length is composite or prime.

\- if it's composite (e.g. chain length is 4, 6, or 8 digits long), you gain 2 seconds on your time for each digit connected. However, each digit also gives you a 1 in 4 chance of replacing a digit in the grid with a "blocker", a cell that cannot be selected. \- if it's prime (e.g. 2, 3, 5), you only gain 0.5 seconds for each digit, but instead of spawning blockers, each digit now has a 1 in 5 chance of removing a blocker in the grid.

Either way, the point value of the chain is ((sum / 10) ^ 3) * 5.

So connecting 1-2-3-4 gives you 5 points and 8 extra seconds but has 4 chances of spawning blockers. On the other hand, connecting 9-3-8 gives you 40 points, 1.5 extra seconds, and 3 chances to clear blockers.

Game ends when the time runs out. The goal is 1 million points, but the game will not stop you from playing when you reach that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In a few minutes of playing around, you realize you can just click long paths and get a nearly infinitely high score.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did something change between this one and the one posted yesterday? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894748)

<comment><AUTHOR> Daniel (HN staff) asked me to repost it. Said they were trying something out.

There were a couple of big changes in the game since I posted that, though.

<comment><USER7> I see, cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Once you figure out some rules for avoiding chain completion, you can fairly easily extend time. When/if it gets a bit blocked, just take extra care to end the chain on prime number lengths. The top score is then just determined by how long you want to keep at it... currently at 1.8 mill, with 500+ seconds to spare.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love games that teach math concepts. Dragon Box was mind blowing.

However, this seems less accessible.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure this is Numberwang.</comment>


Jeff Bezos Escapes Scrutiny from His Own Paper–and Its Rivals - <AUTHOR> http://fair.org/home/worlds-richest-person-escapes-scrutiny-from-his-own-paper-and-its-rivals/ <comment><USER2> Okay, what the hell. I googled "washington post amazon" and immediately found TWO news articles from the last 3 days, both critical of Amazon.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/birkenstock-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/birkenstock- ceo-accuses-amazon-of-modern-day- piracy/2017/07/25/24fa7644-7086-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/is-amazon-getting- to...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/is-amazon-getting-too- big/2017/07/28/ff38b9ca-722e-11e7-9eac-d56bd5568db8_story.html)

Am I missing something, or is TFA just straightforwardly wrong, to an embarrassing degree?

<comment><USER3> Here is an HN comment from jawns on one of the WP articles that tries to explain this:

"This reverse submarine -- a critique of Amazon published by Jeff Bezos' paper -- tries to give what appears to be a biased news source a patina of unbiased objectivity by running what appears to be a piece that's critical of the thing it's thought to be biased toward."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877216#14878179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877216#14878179)

Whether this is true or not actually does not matter as long as the conflict of interest is there.

<comment><USER4> So, if the WaPo doesn't criticize Bezos, it's because they're owned by him, but if they do, it's because of a 'reverse submarine'?

Quite the box they're in there.

Let me throw occam's razor out there -- unless Bezos and/or Amazon PR people leaned on the WaPo to write this story, then it's exactly what it looks like, a random writer with a critical thought piece about Amazon.

<comment><USER5> It bugs me that without evidence sedevach and the commentator he linked to just present something speculative as a certainty. HN comments just jump right into full throttle conspiracy theories and receive hundreds of upvotes. It's not like at the edges of the discussion and downvoted. These uncritical comments are frequently floating at the top of what people are reading.

If you've got evidence of Washington Post writers trampling their journalistic credentials and planting favorable stories for Bezos you should share that along with your accusations otherwise you should maybe hedge your claims a bit. Eh? Maybe go look up the authors for these pieces on twitter, they're often there, and just go ahead and accuse them right there where they can see it. Such a shameful thing to do in my opinion, and so far fetched.

<comment><USER4> Well, there's an argument to be made that captains of industry shouldn't own newspapers, full stop. That argument can be made without evidence, and there's some credence to it.

<comment><USER6> The problem with that argument is that newspapers basically aren't profitable anymore, so we have to choose between "news" outlets that skimp on all journalism costs and simply parrot stories from other sources, real news outlets owned by those captains of industry who are willing to run them at a loss for what amounts to vanity purposes, and bankrupt/soon-to-be-bankrupt new outlets with little-to-no future.

When someone comes up with a profitable model that can support real, independent journalism, perhaps we can start making that argument. Personally, if I compare quality journalism with a blind spot for Bezos, neo-nazi/alt- right crackpot "news" sites and small-town Romanians making up fake news to go viral on Facebook, I'm inclined to think that what little bias WaPo has isn't really that big of a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article literally says that the Post was not less critical and scrutinizing of Amazon then other news paper, falling right in the middle.

Therefore, I have to conclude the title is clickbait. And this makes me feel less confident that FAIR has a valid point in saying Amazon appears to evade scrutiny, and more likely to believe there's nothing scrupulous to report about Amazon, except for FAIR wanting to make the headlines.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not just Amazon. Facebook and Google also want to avoid any criticism that suggests they should be regulated as utilities.

The #1 marketplace, #1 social network, and #1 search engine companies all lend themselves to natural monopoly, much like the oil and railroad companies at the beginning of the twentieth century.

<comment><USER9> It will be kind of amazing to watch the complaining as people who, by consensus, refuse to pay for news and discuss news on a site that helps them evade paying for news, then complain about what the news organizations they don't pay for do or don't do. Because apparently America is owed robust news organizations that act in the public interest and survive off bread and water. The parallels to open source software and maintainers will be ignored.

<comment><USER10> This was probably (wrongly) downvoted because it's hitting too close to home.

Nearly every HN post with a paywall has comments boycotting or denouncing said paywall, how else do you expect them to survive?

<comment><USER9> I expect people who want robust investigations of what half trillion dollar companies are doing to pay for news, not expect reporters to devote say 1/4 of a year to an investigation at a cost of probably $100k+ (their salary, expenses, editors, travel, etc) in exchange for a couple hundred thousand pageviews with $0.1cpm ads. Though spending $100k to make $50 _is_ actually supported by the valley =P ... but it doesn't lead to a robust public press.

<comment><USER11> It's not that simple. The amount of money it takes to run a newspaper exceeds the amount it could easily charge readers, at least in the conventional way in which newspapers have done. This has always been the case (a good read is Hillaire Belloc's "The Free Press").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this a statement about WShington Post or the other papers or all the papers together?

Out of curiosity, is there anything critical to be written about Bezos specifically?

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand the title and its implications. Why is it relevant that Bezos owns the Washington Post, if the Post is no more guilty of bias than any other paper?

<comment><USER14> > no more guilty of bias than any other paper

When 99% of the press beats up on a presidential candidate, and he still wins, people may smell a rat.

2016 was a fun year.

<comment><USER15> The rat that smells here is one making ridiculous and patently absurd declarative statements about extremely recent history.

<comment><USER16> I am not sure the poster from parent is all that wrong. The mainstream media (CNN , MSNBC, WaPo, NYT, HuffPo) straight up shilled for HRC during the election. CNN even provided HRC with questions for the debates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Figuring out whether or not Bezos is doing behind-the-scenes censorship of his own media outlet ultimately depends on the internal organizational structure of WaPo and Amazon.

If the most senior leader of WaPo - the person in charge of greenlighting or pulling articles that get published - may be fired/terminated/reassigned by Bezos, or someone who Bezos oversees, then there is a conflict of interest that can't be ignored, and will always be inherent within the organizations until this is remedied.

Now, just because there's a conflict of interest does not mean that shady reporting is occurring. But, we cannot definitively say that WaPo is unbiased towards Amazon, unless there is something about the internal controls that would separate Bezos from the ultimate decision-making.

</comment><comment><USER18> Assuming we take the article at face value.. how does coverage compare to any other major company?

</comment><comment><USER19> I used to listen to FAIRs radio show. They clued me in to the sides of journalism i never knew existed.

Nowadays though, wapo and other are just not as relevant.

For example, HN has taught me via comments to expect counterfeit electronics on Amazon..

FAIR is still a net positive IMO

</comment><comment><USER20> I also wish that WashPost would disclose that its owner has contracts with the CIA, whenever it writes a story on the CIA (especially a positive one). Readers should know that there may be a pro-CIA bias in the story and a conflict of interest when publishing the story.

</comment><comment><USER21> WaPo shouldn't cover Bezos or Amazon at all.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have been enjoying the investigative journalism of WaPost; I am disappointed to learn that it is so closely affiliated to Amazon, an economic powerhouse (e.g. commanding about 50% of online sales, and their AWS).

<comment><USER23> There is a need for non-corporate owned media. There do exist independent media voices, but they often have ideological leanings.

<comment><USER24> Nothing stopping you. I pay for journalism from Michael Yon, The Guardian, Rebel Media, and others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> FAIR is a noted hard right wing organization.

<comment><USER26> You're thinking of the other FAIR: Federation for American Immigration Reform.</comment></comment>


Another lovely Google Chrome ad - Extensions - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5ryTLrgTbI

<comment><USER2> They really only need to show one thing, the Google translate extension. I have it set to automatic now and I often don't even realize I'm looking at a page that's not originally in English. That's some serious Star Trek universal translator business going on right there.

<comment><USER3> It's not perfect. Whenever I go on a page in Scottish Gaelic, it says "this page is in Irish - would you like to translate it?" That could cause some trouble.

The languages are admittedly similar and there's some level of mutual comprehension, but they're not similar enough for Google's translator to work across both - it emits gibberish when you click "yes".

<comment><USER2> I have to admit, I do not spend much time on Gaelic (Scottish or Irish) sites.

I've noticed that it's support for East Asian languages is also pretty bad. But Romance languages, German and Arabic are pretty amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll be grouchy and say I'm put off keeping a lot of the Chrome extensions I install because they want to plant their brash ugly icons (that apparently can't be toggled or collapsed) on the main toolbar. Part of the reason I like Chrome is the airy and minimal appearance.

<comment><USER5> you can hide them.

Before: <http://i.imgur.com/MJdNw.png> After: <http://i.imgur.com/5qMj4.png>

Chrome Beta build but I have seen this on Chrome stable build too.

<comment><USER4> Ah - Thanks. In 5.0.342.9 on OSX it seems you can push them off the edge, but the >> drop-down isn't presented.

<comment><USER5> Just checked my mac. You are right, the drop down doesn't work on Mac. But I guess you are trying to hide them so it works out perfectly. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me a bit of Ok Go's latest video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w>

Seems like something Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdRaf3-OEh4>) would do. I think it _is_ abstract, but I like it a whole lot nonetheless. It's creative and cute and whimsical.

Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER7> pleasant to watch but I think it misses the mark by not showing footage of the actual extensions referred to doing what they do. It might go over the heads of their target audience.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe it's only me, but I find it too abstract. If I was someone who didn't know what Chrome was, much less what extensions are, I might be scratching my head at this point.</comment>