Basics of Space Flight: Orbital Mechanics - <AUTHOR> http://www.braeunig.us/space/orbmech.htm <comment><USER2> We are actually very fortunate that the Earth is not very spherical, because without that satellites on the high inclination orbits like the polar orbits and the Molinya orbits would crash into the Earth.

Due to perturbations of the Moon, high inclination orbits have a tendency to be pushed from low eccentricity to very high eccentricity. (This is known as the Kozai-Lidov mechanism.) However, the fact that the Earth's gravitational potential is not exactly spherical (it has a quadrupole moment) makes these orbits precess, and this precession happens to be fast enough to suppress the eccentricity oscillations.

There is a very good and very readable article by Scott Tremaine on this subject here: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5244](http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5244)

<comment><USER3> It would be very unusual for a planet to be spherical as it would have to not be rotating.

<comment><USER4> What about Venus? It rotates really slowly compared to Earth.

<comment><USER2> The quadrupole moment of Venus is much, much less than that of the Earth. For comparison, the relative difference between the radius at the equator and the radius at the pole of Earth is about 0.3%. For Venus it's less than one part in 100,000. However, Venus doesn't have a moon, so there's no third body to cause Kozai-Lidov oscillations [1].

[1]: Actually, this is not strictly true, since the Sun acts as a third body. However, it's so much further away that the Kozai-Lidov effect from the Sun is weak. That's why the Venus Express was able to maintain a polar orbit around Venus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This page is mostly a digest of the book "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics" by Bate, Mueller and White (known as the "BMW" after the authors). This page is useful as a reference but not really good for learning material. I find the Wikipedia pages on this subject a bit shallow too (one of these days I'll contribute improvements to the Wikipedia pages), so if you intend to learn this stuff, obtaining a book is the only viable option (if you know of other good online resources, please share with us. I don't). The 1st edition BMW book from 1971 is available for dirt cheap (15-20 USD), the 2nd edition came out just a month ago but it's poorly available (I'm still waiting for my copy from Amazon).

There's a few more pages (incl. interplanetary mission planning) if you go up one level: [http://www.braeunig.us/space/](http://www.braeunig.us/space/)

Finally, here's a project of mine that implements a bunch of algorithms for two body orbital mechanics: [https://github.com/rikusalminen/twobody](https://github.com/rikusalminen/twobody)

These algorithms are mostly based on the BMW book as well as a bunch of research papers from the 1960s to 1990s. Look around in different branches for some of the more advanced algorithms (including a search for closest approaches and sphere of influence transitions like Kerbal Space Program and a boundary value problem solver for interplanetary travel), they're still work in progress.

One day I'll turn this into a mission planner software for space simulator games (or some kind of game, not sure yet). If you happen to need some orbital mechanics algorithms, take a look of the above and I'm happy to answer any questions or help with this.

<comment><USER6> Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, edited by Wertz, is another classic. Used copies are available for around 35 USD, but new copies usually over 200 USD.

<comment><USER5> Spaceflight Dynamics by William E. Wiesel is also a good book with a broader overview into much more topics, including attitude dynamics and rocket dynamics. As opposed to the BMW which only covers orbital motion, but in more depth.

Orbital Mechanics by Prussing and Conway (of Laguerre-Conway fame) is also a very nice book, going into more details of advanced orbital motion, including some more modern methods.

But damn, aerospace engineering books are really expensive. I've spent a small fortune on these books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Couple months ago I started working on space shooter/simulator, just for fun. Newtonian physics, html canvas. It had 2D top view (F2 key) and 3D view (F3 key), but because canvas is quite slow on fullscreen I usualy switched rendering off (F1 key) and then I spent most of the debuging time there. I only needed few data to be displayed so I only rendered speed, distance fuel etc. as numbers. Then I added yaw pitch roll indicator and even though it was on canvas, because only small part was changing it was kinda fast, so I started adding more and more avionics and eventually the instrument flight [1] aspect of it become much more interesting that realistic planet renderings and I completely neglected 3D view [2]. The most fun so far was programing docking autopilot. So if you haven't make your own space simulator, you should, it's fun. (unfortunately it's not finished and not even in publishable state)

[1] [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5SCh06PKpVtZHowN1l0TEw3cGs...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5SCh06PKpVtZHowN1l0TEw3cGs/view)

[2] [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5SCh06PKpVtUzMxSGNhRy1vVlE...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5SCh06PKpVtUzMxSGNhRy1vVlE/view)

<comment><USER8> I am also interested. I've been curious what strategic elements a real space combat situation (on the scale of a solar system) demands, and if an interesting game can be made out of it.

<comment><USER9> Check out Atomic Rockets—great resource on realistic space combat ideas. (no stealth, lasers or missiles?, etc)

[http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php)

<comment><USER10> Lasers make a lot of sense in space, much more so than in the atmosphere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can either read this for an hour, or play Kerbal Space Program for 50 hours and learn most of it. Pft, easy choice.

(I will then read the article and realize what I was doing wrong the whole time.)

<comment><USER12> Well I am pretty sure playing KSP will give one a much deeper "feel" for orbital mechanics. The linked page contains all the math if you actually want to calculate the orbits optimally. I think i will stick with mechjeb. :)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, KSP is great for getting an intuitive feeling for what one would have to do to navigate space successfully – at least to the point where one would be able to identify grossly inefficient behavior immediately and be able to do something that's somewhat effective at getting where you want to go (though probably not most effective). I think that's pretty awesome, mostly because orbital mechanics is not something we think of being able to have an intuitive understanding of, at least if you don't have the requisite math background (and maybe even then not).

With KSP, at least if you play it long enough, you really do gain a rough intuitive understanding, even if you do not ever calculate anything. But one should probably also mention that it is time-inefficient and, well, not exactly rigorous. (Both of those things don't matter that much since it's just a game.)

Obviously you can also break out the calculator and approach it that way (but I don't think that's necessary, except maybe when it comes to interplanetary stuff and getting the right angles). The game is luckily easy enough to brute force things and when you are stuck around KSP's Mars equivalent with little fuel you can still always fiddle around with maneuver nodes forever to see if there is some way out – and then be forced to learn to be efficient that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I flew Orbiter to Mars from earth, docked with the ISS, also made a game of trying to visit each of Jupiter's satellites about 10-15 years ago

[http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/](http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/)

Its interesting to look at the MFD design for mission planning as an applied version of the linked page.

I have not played much KSP, is there anything as realistic as orbiter? From what little I've seen it tended toward comical set of pants, like comparing ChopperLifter to MS flight sim.

Orbital docking dynamics are weird. If you undock from the ISS and thrust up a little bit, in half an orbit you'll come right back. Increasing or reducing your speed along the orbit (moving front or back) will eventually affect your altitude. Docking isn't as simple as "if you wanna go forward, thrust forward". All the control mix; like hovering a helicopter but slower. Flying "in formation" can be very expensive in terms of fuel depending on the formation, or it can be free if in a favorable geometry. There is a classic very hard sci fi story along the lines of extorting someone who doesn't know orbital mechanics by literally throwing them off a space station, and the victim panics not knowing he'll be back in half an orbit seeing as escape velocity is a little faster than a human shove!

One amusing anecdote is for an inclination change greater than 60 degrees or so, its cheaper to land and take off again or go on a very high orbit into deep space and change your inclination there. The ISS is at a very high inclination and at least energetically, to put the thing into a GTO around inclination 0 or so, it would be cheaper to land and re-launch the thing.

<comment><USER5> As others have mentioned, Kerbal Space Program uses two-body mechanics, ie. only one celestial body has gravitational influence on the spacecraft. And every gravitational field has perfect spherical symmetry. In Orbiter, you can get restricted n-body dynamics and non-spherical gravitational fields so things such as Lagrangian points or Molnya orbits can be simulated.

The solar system of KSP is a lot smaller in scale, the home planet is just 600 km and the atmosphere is 70 km thick. Liftoff to orbit takes just a few minutes (instead of 8-10 min) and a full orbit is about 30 min (instead of 90 min for LEO).

KSP mods can add a level of realism and add more "scientific" tools to the game. "Kerbal Engineer" is a must-have addon because it adds some numeric data about the orbit that the game developers have intentionally left out (a decision I disagree with). MechJeb is a popular addon that adds all sorts of automation, similar to some Orbiter MFD modes. There are also mods to use the real solar system (in real scale) instead of the fictional universe.

But no, overall, KSP is not nearly as realistic as Orbiter is. However, making any comparisons is pretty useless - they are both really fun games with a different emphasis and I play them both regularly.

<comment><USER15> Kerbal's two-body mechanics thing is the worst limitation. Getting into orbit around Mun looks weird, as you suddenly snap from one gravitational system to another.

Slightly non-spherical gravitational fields don't matter too much unless you're doing a lot of orbits.

<comment><USER5> > Slightly non-spherical gravitational fields don't matter too much unless > you're doing a lot of orbits.

Actually the effects of non spherical gravity is one or two orders of magnitude greater than the influence of all the other bodies in the solar system combined for low earth orbit satellite operations. It has a huge effect, causing a rotation of the orbital plane several degrees per day (up to 10 or so).

The effect isn't as great for lunar or interplanetary trajectories, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember getting a basic primer on this stuff when I attended a USAF Space Operations course back when I was in the Army Reserve.

Our textbook (and an excellent book for the layperson interested in this sort of thing) was Understanding Space [1]. It's still sitting on my bookshelf at work and I occasionally have a reason to crack it open.

As a software engineer in the aerospace industry, I was once working on a project to create a simulator for a new satellite program. I got stuck with writing a simulation model for the Attitude Determination and Control system (rather than something non-physics-y like the communications system). A lot of my job involved taking matlab scripts from the scientists and translating them into Ada code. An understanding of the basics of orbital mechanics came in very handy, as otherwise I would really not have had any way of knowing if my model was generating nonsensical output. Not to mention the onus was always on _me_ to prove to a scientist that there was a bug in his algorithm.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Space-Introduction- Astro...](http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Space-Introduction-Astronautics- Technology/dp/0073407755/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444234742&sr=8-1&keywords=Understanding+Space)

</comment><comment><USER17> In case it might be of some use to anyone, I started a guide for beginners on the subject: [https://airsick.guide/](https://airsick.guide/) . For Python fans (or anyone with a computer, really), there is also a (very simple) library designed with KSP in mind: [https://github.com/qsantos/spyce](https://github.com/qsantos/spyce).

<comment><USER5> Interesting... This function from your project: [https://github.com/qsantos/spyce/blob/master/cext/orbit.c#L8...](https://github.com/qsantos/spyce/blob/master/cext/orbit.c#L86)

Looks somewhat similar to what I did a few years ago in a now-abandoned project of mine: [https://github.com/rikusalminen/libkepler/blob/master/src/ke...](https://github.com/rikusalminen/libkepler/blob/master/src/kepler.c#L329)

Did you by any chance, happen to look at my code for reference? Or are they somewhat similar just out of coincidence and similar naming conventions? If you did, in fact, look at my project for reference, I'm glad to have helped!

Just for comparison, here's the orbit determination from initial conditions code from a newer project of mine. It doesn't compute the classical orbital directly, because that tends to add numerical error (ie. first you compute inclination using acos() and a moment later you compute the orientation matrix using cos(inclination)).

[https://github.com/rikusalminen/twobody/blob/master/include/...](https://github.com/rikusalminen/twobody/blob/master/include/twobody/orbit.h#L73)

You can, of course, get the classical elements from the orbit, they are useful for presenting human-readable numbers.

<comment><USER17> I don't remember looking at this project. I think I did read other implementations of this algorithm, and they all end up very similar, so it's probably due to algorithm itself.

It might be interesting to link to all codebases that might be relevant. Maybe I will add a list to [https://airsick.guide/tools.html](https://airsick.guide/tools.html).

\---

I only searched briefly for more stable methods. Thanks for the reference, I'll have a look!

<comment><USER5> Yeah, there aren't too many ways of detemining orbital elements from initial conditions so it is very likely that the code implementing that ends up looking the same. The similarity in variable names and naming_conventions made the two functions look rather similar.

What comes to stability: given just a single pair of (position, velocity) vectors, it's hard to make something that is really stable. If you have several pairs, you can use the method of least squares to try to fit an orbit into observations.

Not using too many arcus trig functions (acos, asin), will give a bit better results near zero.

Additionally, not having to solve the Kepler's equation would be an improvement for near-parabolic trajectories. In other words: it might be preferable to store (true anomaly at epoch, timestamp of epoch) rather than time of periapsis passage or mean anomaly at epoch to avoid this. The issue is that E - e*sin(E) loses numerical precision when e is near 1 (parabolic) and E is near zero. Same applies for the hyperbolic equivalent of Kepler's equation.

Anyway, nice to find people with similar interests! Good luck with your projects.

<comment><USER17> Thanks!

Regarding the naming convention, I am trying to stick to PEP8 as strictly as possible (sometimes, even in C) and to use overly explicit variable names. I had not noticed that you did that too for the structure member, with `longitude_of_ascending_node` and such. My objective is to have the code be as readable as possible to a newcomer (hence Python, too).

<comment><USER5> You should consider using my libtwobody project as a "backend" for your Python library. That is actually one of the design goals for the library, to provide low level primitive operations for higher level tasks and be usable from "scripting" languages.

Advantages over a simple implementation such as yours: proper handling of parabolic and near parabolic orbits, state of the art solvers for time of flight (Kepler's equation) and universal variable formulation. Additionally I've done some work with higher level algorithms for interplanetary trajectory planning.

The library may seem a bit cryptic if you're not too familiar with the literature on this subject, but it should not be too difficult to get up to speed with it. It might take a little bit of trivial software engineering to make it work to get it working as a dll but shouldn't be too much work. I'm happy to help, drop me an email (address in commit log) or contact me on irc (freenode, same nick as here on hn).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another classic book in the field is An Introduction to the Mathematics and Methods of Astrodynamics by Richard Battin of Draper Labs who passed away fairly recently. He developed and led the design of the guidance, navigation, and control systems for the Apollo flights at Draper. [https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/02/23/richard- battin-...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/02/23/richard-battin- developed-and-led-design-guidance-navigation-and-control-systems-for-apollo- flights/vxP9iIEfKuKpR7eCfes4fO/story.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Great! A manual to Kerbal Space Program.

<comment><USER20> The master of KSP Scott Manley did a small series of orbital mechanics videos a while back

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYu7z3I8tdEm- oVAzO8EH...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYu7z3I8tdEm- oVAzO8EHRAqAFG5RmNPl)

<comment><USER21> ...fly safe!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's another interesting approach to orbital mechanics using geometric algebra. Paper below is from 1983, has anyone come across a later application?

[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1983CeMec..30..151H](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1983CeMec..30..151H)

</comment><comment><USER23> Mike Bostock's D3 can do some interesting visualizations based on satellite.js

[http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/6c149c08fc9cde682635](http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/6c149c08fc9cde682635)

</comment><comment><USER24> The book Fundamentals of Astrodynamics" by Bate, Mueller and White, where it seems like these notes come from was my Orbital Mechanics textbook in college.

Our final project was to program a crude missile defense system. Great book. It's an old one, but I highly recommend it. It's one of the few textbooks I saved from college.

</comment><comment><USER25> While getting ready for work this morning I was thinking about this very thing while I was brushing my teeth. I was thinking it would be nice to learn what the actual orbits of all 8 planets are, relative to the sun, and here I get into work and this is posted.

Now granted, I just wanted to know just the orbits as this stuff is way over my head, but I guess it would be good to learn it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice reference. Maybe now more of the stuff I hear on the orbital mechanics podcast ([http://www.theorbitalmechanics.com/](http://www.theorbitalmechanics.com/)) will make sense.

</comment><comment><USER12> its amazing for how many of the diagrams i think - "heh i did that and sorta know how to wing that by hand in KSP".

<comment><USER20> I got the same feeling. You can learn a lot through trial and error.

Probably the need to know everything comes in once you have to pay for that extra dV or if you plan to put your colleagues on thousands of tons of explosive rocket fuel ;)</comment></comment>


A Diablo 3 Story - <AUTHOR> http://diablo3story.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-diablo-3-story.html <comment><USER2> The story is fascinating but I cannot help but think what a massive waste of time and resources it is. And I thought hedge fund managers were not adding value to society. This puts things in perspective. I especially like the bit where he explains that botters were helping the virtual economy.

From the article: "I know a lot of people will say that what I did was cheating or unfair, but everyone must realize that in the end what I did was completely legal."

Sounds familiar?

<comment><USER3> "And I thought hedge fund managers were not adding value to society"...

Its always weird to me when people in the tech industry say that hedge fund managers/quants "add no value to society". The presumption that any individual's job "adds value to society" is really arrogant...do you really think that all the software engineers working at Google or FB or Twitter to make people click advertisement "add value to society"? Does my local grocer "add value to society"? Its such a vacuous statement.

I apologize in advance if this is harsh, so I would offer you to read more about finance before you make blanket statements like "hedge funds do not add value to society"

<comment><USER4> Worse case scenario: making people click google ads is just as mindlessly financially driven as eking out more alpha from an algo, in which case the googlers still win, because at least some of that money generated goes toward moonshot projects that may very well benefit society.

<comment><USER3> I respect Google, Facebook, and Twitter because of their ability to connect people and their genuine intellectual contributions to fields like information retrieval and AI, and sure, their moonshots. But I think its arrogant to say whether someone adds value to society because its an extremely complicated philosophical question (judging the guy playing the game saying he's wasting his time). I'm not sure its fair to characterize all hedge funds as simply trying to squeeze out alpha though either, there are many prominent activist investors who've pushed for greater corporate governance and transparency, in cases like MBIA, Lehman, Herbalife most recently, etc. And if you wanted to consider Google's moonshots, it should be only fair to consider the billions most of the hedge fund managers have given away in a dick-measuring contest to various charities and research initiatives. But I understand your argument and agree that a lot of financialization provides no benefit to anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recommended reading for those interested in this story: REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde)

<comment><USER6> I hate to dissent but I wouldn't recommend REAMDE under any circumstances. The first third or so begins lots of interesting threads about virtual worlds, economies and especially ransomware, but the book then morphs into a fairly standard-issue spy thriller, and leaves the most interesting subplots (the ones that don't involve commandos and terrorists shooting at each other) unexplored or unresolved.

<comment> bjelkeman-again I actually enjoyed it. Yes there was stuff that could have been explored more, but I still enjoyed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And with Blizzard getting a cut of the Real Money Auction House sales, there seems to be little incentive for them to really crack down on this. The perfect "crime"!

Blizzard gets some extra revenue, deep pocket players have a constant selection of rare items to buy, botters make a nice chunk of change, semi- oblivious sellers turn their items into gold instantly (reminds me of payday loans) - everyone* wins!

* Except the folks who list the RMAH price in gold and, of course, the normal players ;)

<comment><USER8> Of course, the RMAH (and the GAH) are now gone completely, so they did, at some point, decide that it wasn't good for the game.

<comment><USER9> i m sure blizzard's main source of revenue is selling of the game, not from commission earned from the RMAH. RMAH is probably players away, and i m sure their measurments/analytics showed this and thus shut it down.

<comment><USER10> Except they only did it a long time after introducing the RMAH - they were probably well past their peak income when it came to that income. If I were to make a random guess, I'd say that they made twice or thrice as much revenue from the RMAH than they did with actual game sales, and that's probably being conservative.

I don't know why they finally decided to pull the plug, given all that money. Probably trying to salvage some goodwill before figures were leaked about how much they earned from it, although I'm sure those figures are out there already, given that Blizzard is a publicly traded company and their earnings are out in the open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 100.000,00 €/year trading things that do not exist.

Why am I even working?

<comment><USER12> Items mentioned in the article exist, even though you cannot touch them.

Did you mean to use the term intangible or incorporeal? In that case you can sell insurance. :)

<comment><USER13> Yes, but these items are basically only flags in a DB under the power of Blizzard. It's not real in the sense that Blizzard could just enter whatever values they want in this DB and it would be perfectly legal.

Conspiracy theory: Maybe the didn't ban bots that much so they could hide their own "bots" (a simple function in their servers that sells goods they just have created out of thin air by a simple insert statement).

<comment><USER14> > Yes, but these items are basically only flags in a DB under the power of > Blizzard.

So is insurance.

<comment><USER15> And so is most money.

<comment><USER13> There it's two records in two banks (in the general case) for each transaction. The sum must check out to be zero. And beside that there are laws that are enforced because it is not legal to create money out of thin air. Ok, it is done anyway (when the government prints more money and thus increases inflation) and to a degree banks are allowed to do that in some sense as well (they loan can a certain percentage more money than they actually have). The whole system isn't perfect (hence the economic crisis), but there are enforced laws that aren't written by companies (well, mostly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My (somewhat lonely) contention has always been that these 'waste of time' games are actually the source of many more of the best programmers/quants than after school classes like 'learn to program 101'

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome article. I remember running a bunch of D2 farm bots in high school, and waking up every morning to put them up on Ebay, ended up making a few hundred bucks - first time I've ever made any money.

Really appreciate the writeup; it was very well written and its cool to see the guy figure it out and scale out from his initial experimentation.

</comment><comment><USER12> How did the bot interact with the game? You could send key commands and text to the program, but you can't easily read the item price for example. That script at the end doesn't tell much.

<comment><USER18> You can screen scrape the screen and do some rudimentary image parsing for OCR.

<comment><USER19> WoW's botters took this one step further, disassembling the game to the point where they made WoW "clients" which could bot/gold farm at <15MB of memory - meaning you could have a hundred accounts botting on one PC.

<comment><USER20> Do you have any more info/articles/discussions?

<comment><USER21> Here is a Defcon video about the topic [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABj_mrP- no](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABj_mrP-no)

<comment><USER22> Here's a Blackhat video with a complete C# WoW client from 2006. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKbZdlUFAK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKbZdlUFAK4) 11:55

<comment><USER19> Ah yep, it was the Defcon video I saw which mentioned it, never saw the C# code. Badass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am interested in game design, but don't have time to really play games, as of late.

This write-up illuminated me on what really was going on in Diablo 3 and why Blizzard who supposedly worked hard on the Auction House feature, had to remove it in the end.

So, does it mean that maintaining a stable virtual economy in an MMO is an insurmountable task even for a top-tier company?

</comment><comment><USER24> I made about $65 playing D3, which turned out to be pennies per hour. But it paid for the game, and it made me feel good about wasting so much time.

I also just sold a TF2 hat for $56... not sure how I feel about _that_ one. [http://i.imgur.com/Loqrvbw.png](http://i.imgur.com/Loqrvbw.png)

<comment><USER25> I can only guess that top traders in TF2 make the same kind of money as in this article

<comment><USER9> hah, that would be quite awesome, if only it was possible to get the money out of steam (which seems not to be possible).

<comment><USER26> Trade items for keys/purchase keys with Steam Wallet funds, sell keys via Paypal for slightly under the "legit" price, ???, profit.

(for the uninformed, keys are basically virtual lottery tickets in TF2 and DotA2 whose "legit" price is pegged at $2.50 a pop)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How much of the real money actually came from stolen credit cards? I bet it was a significant percentage.

</comment><comment><USER28> who are the people putting 100 euro into digital goods in a single transaction?

<comment><USER7> Would you rather grind for hundreds of hours to maybe get a rare item, or freelance for an hour and spend that $100 on the item you want?

<comment><USER29> I'd rather uninstall that shit and play a game that's fun immediately. Why on Earth would I spend either 100 dollars or 100 hours to be allowed to enjoy a game that I already paid for?

<comment><USER30> I spent easily a 100 hours on D3 before I decided to buy something from RMAH. I had lots of fun with the items I found, and then decided to spend 20-30 euros on some other stuff I wanted to experiment with. I did not do it to make the game fun - it was fun without it. I just wanted to add variety without playing for another 100 hours just to get the items I wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My biggest gripe with D3 was that the RMAH was not in HC mode. I made endless gold through the AH but sadly it could not be traded for cash.

<comment><USER32> They explicitly made a policy not to resurrect HC characters even if that happened due to a technical bug, server drop or whatever else. Would get messy with real money items.

<comment><USER9> it would make the game much more exciting - facing actual loss is exhilirating. Some people can't handle it though.

In my experience playing EVE online (which exhibit similar characteristics, where you could have paid real money for in-game items, and yet lose them for real), players who can't handle this sort of loss tend to be adversely against the parts of the game that could force such losses. They then end up enjoying the game less over all. Players who bit the bullet and take these losses on the chin tend to have much more fun in the long term, and tend to make better guild mates too.</comment></comment></comment>


Parens of the Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.parens-of-the-dead.com/ <comment><USER2> Links to some of the tools used

clojure and clojurescript

[https://github.com/clojure-emacs/clj-refactor.el](https://github.com/clojure- emacs/clj-refactor.el) (refactoring)

[https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider](https://github.com/clojure- emacs/cider) (IDE)

[https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel](https://github.com/bhauman/lein- figwheel) (code reloading)

emacs

[https://github.com/magit/magit](https://github.com/magit/magit) (the interface to Git)

[https://github.com/abo-abo/avy](https://github.com/abo-abo/avy) (jumping around)

[https://github.com/magnars/expand- region.el](https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el) (marking stuff)

[https://github.com/magnars/multiple- cursors.el](https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el) (placing cursors at similar stuff and editing all at once)

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless I miss my guess, this the same guy who makes Emacs Rocks.

[http://emacsrocks.com/](http://emacsrocks.com/)

<comment><USER4> It reminds me Rails for Zombie

[http://railsforzombies.org/](http://railsforzombies.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> context: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead)

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome series, (+1) for the really nice emacs setup!</comment>


Don't Invest in Today's Market Size - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/boost-vc/don-t-invest-in-today-s-market-size-98c1e282d223

<comment><USER2> Great post. Do you think a market downturn will increase the pressure for VCs and LPs to focus on short-term wins?</comment>


Prebake: Block EU Cookie Notices with Adblock - <AUTHOR> http://prebake.eu/ <comment><USER2> This whole thing is ridiculous. While adding these widgets to blocking filters seems like a workable short-term solution, the entire cookie notice scheme is unworkable in the long run. The problem is, this crap will stack up in the future, and none of it will ever get abolished. On some sites, I get a triple- stacked legalese warning banner, and I have to manually close all three of them.

Since internet law will only get worse, maybe it's time for a "real" technical solution to this. For example, if we had a standardized HTML element attribute to mark these widgets, browser/adblock makers could enable people to opt out of displaying them. It might look something like this:

...

...

...

And ideally, there would be a JavaScript API to query this as well, maybe piggy-backed on the Permissions API:

      navigator.permissions.query({ name : 'skip-notice', topic : 'cookies' })

<comment><USER3> Why block them? It's good that websites have to be more transparent with how they are tracking users.

It is however inconvenient for the websites. They could always stop using privacy-invading ad networks and external services which track users and then they wouldn't have to show any message.

<comment><USER4> >They could always stop using privacy-invading ad networks and external services which track users and then they wouldn't have to show any message.

"if these companies would just invent and build a new infrastructure to pay the bills, they wouldn't need to present a nag."

<comment><USER3> EU citizens are under no obligation to support business models that have a negative effect (be it small or large) on their lives, nor are they obliged to make it technically convenient for companies to conduct their business.

There are many business models which do not come with moral dilemmas and that do not fall under the incidence of this law. Data mining and tracking might be trendy, but it's not a free for all, there need to be rules and the privacy of users must be respected. If some companies are unable to do fulfill these basic and fair requirements, that is strictly their problem.

<comment><USER5> You seem to be ignoring the fact that this is about users not wanting to see that silly notice, not about websites not wanting to display it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This stupid cookie notification law was actually the main reason why I had to enable cookies permanently. My browser used to delete all cookies at the end of the session (when I closed the browser) except for a few whitelisted domains.

Then these notices popped up everywhere. So where do the sites store the information that you've already seen the notifications? In the cookies of course! So if you're actually serious about your privacy and delete cookies you will the the notices every time...

</comment><comment><USER7> The reason that the EU cookie law broke down is that directly after the EU directive was issued, several lawyers from large companies changed their interpretation of an older 1995 directive that dictate how consent is given. The directive says that consent require " _specific and informed indication_ ", but lawyers from very large companies decided that the act of continuing using a website _was_ the same thing as giving "specific and informed indication", thus users agreed to whatever policy or agreement that is linked in the banner.

I visited a conference during that time which had a panel where those lawyers was discussing this and even brought up a question if a person really could agree to 20 pagers of policy document from the mere fact of just continuing using the website, and their collective answer was _yes_ (through one agreed that 30 pages would be too much). To my knowledge no legal case has ever tested this, and thus we got this ridiculous cookie notice system where things has gone from bad to worse after the 2002 directive.

<comment><USER8> Thank god, ehm, the lawyers: otherwise we would not just have annoying banners, every page would start with an blocking dialog. No thanks.

<comment><USER7> You assume that every page need to have tracking cookies or that a websites would choose to have a blocking dialog if that was required in order to store and accessing information on users' equipment. Even if we do those assumptions, its not a good result for anyone and there need to be some peace rather than war between the industry and politics, and making the concept of consent meaningless is a very risky move going forward.

<comment><USER8> Afaik you need it if you use Google Adwords. Not sure if Adwords could be changed in a compliant way.

I recently started out to implement the cookie header on my site, and discovered things are rather unclear. For example, couldn't Google somehow get global consent for all Google Ads?

There also doesn't seem to be a way to ask for consent and only trigger Google Ads if consent is given.

Maybe there are some things that Google could improve to alleviate the situation. But advertising probably also depends on at least a little bit of tracking.

If they (the politicians) want to outlaw online advertising, maybe they should just say so directly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi HN, I'm the creator of this filter list.

If anyone can spare 5-10 minutes a week to help me and a couple of others maintain this list (testing and merging pull requests, closing issues, etc.), I'd be very appreciative!

You can contact me here or send an email to cookies[at]prebake[dot]eu

<comment><USER10> If an extension like Prebake (which I realize just a filter list) added a 'DNT: 0' HTTP header ( _Do_ Track instead of Do Not Track), then automatically dismissing cookie notices would be a "legitimate" new solution and not be "cheating" (as some might call it). If the user _also_ runs a ad or tracker blocker, well, that's their business and a different problem. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great not just from a user's perspective, also the fact that it exists helps pointing out the stupidity of the law.

<comment><USER12> I think law is fine and there should be only a handful of sites in the Internet that would need such warnings.

Problem is the abuse of technology to track users.

<comment><USER11> Even assuming that law was necessary (debatable), the idiotic thing was asking millions of websites to do this, instead of automatically in a handful of browsers. Not to mention absurdities like the fact that you need cookies to remember that the user doesn't want cookies, or even worse: [https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/633551359774691328](https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/633551359774691328)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps something is deeply wrong with the way companies approach the internet if millions of them have to display a notice that they are tracking their users.

<comment><USER11> No, I can see that you are not familiar with the law, I don't blame you because nobody is, since it's incredibly vague about when applies and AFAIK nobody has yet been fined. There are hundreds of companies doing wrong things, no doubt. The "millions" are collateral damage.

<comment><USER3> I am basing my statements on [http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm](http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm) (the chapter EU legislation on cookies). According to this guide, the following cokies are exempt from consent: user-input (forms, shopping carts), authentication (for the session), user-centric security, multimedia player, ui customization, social network for logged in members.

Seems quite straightforward and fair.

<comment><USER11> No it's neither straightforward nor fair. Because it's a whitelist (and a short one), not a blacklist. You can not legislate like that, making potentially illegal any use case that you could have missed or any future use case.

And there is plenty of legitimate usages that are not whitelisted. The most notorious is non-shared traffic analysis. Meaning what basic google-analytics offers and half of the internet uses. There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing how many unique visitors you got today, and everyone with a website wants to know that.

<comment><USER13> > _There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing how many unique visitors you > got today, and everyone with a website wants to know that._

Maybe people running those websites want to know that, but as a visitor, I might _not_ want that. Being ablet o tell "how many unique visitors you got today" implies that you can group actions by unique visitors, and thus tell e.g. exactly what I was doing on your website over the course of days. If I'm not logged in, I might not want that.

And don't get me wrong - I'm not really a strong privacy advocate or something. Most of the time I don't care much about tracking. But while in theory there's nothing wrong in tracking unique visits, we all know that the primary use of this is to manipulate users and shit ads on them, nowadays mostly cross-site. It's entirely reasonable people get fed up of being on the receiving end of someone else's malice.

<comment><USER11> > Maybe people running those websites want to know that, but as a visitor, I > might not want that. Being ablet o tell "how many unique visitors you got > today" implies that you can group actions by unique visitors, and thus tell > e.g. exactly what I was doing on your website over the course of days. If > I'm not logged in, I might not want that.

That's like asking the guy behind the counter in a shop to not look at you because as long as you are not buying anything you don't want him to know you are there. You are entitled to your feelings but if you don't want to be seen don't go there, or care enough to open an incognito window.

> But while in theory there's nothing wrong in tracking unique visits, we all > know that the primary use of this is to manipulate users and shit ads on > them, nowadays mostly cross-site.

No, primary use is regular analytics. 99.9% of websites on the internet are not amazon. And if the law was for cross-site information sharing cookies then this would be a totally different debate, but it is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tried this before and it helps only so much. Many sites actually don't work before you accept cookies (they pose it as a requirement and tell you that cookies keep you logged in, even though the cookie law is _only_ applicable to _tracking_ cookies) so you need to see the banner before you can see the page. Examples: fok.nl and tweakers.net.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been using a different filter list[1] for more than a year, and it's really useful as I already use self-destructing-cookies[2] to exercise control over which cookies my browser will remember, meaning that pretty much all sites think I've never visited before and therefore try to annoy me with their cookie banner.

[1]: [https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit- list](https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list)

[2]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/self- destruct...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/self-destructing- cookies/)

<comment><USER16> > meaning that pretty much all sites think I've never visited before

True, but also not True (unfortunately), because the websites can identify you anyway by your fingerprint: [https://panopticlick.eff.org](https://panopticlick.eff.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's depressing that we need something like this.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems uBlock (Safari 9) doesn't recognise this when i add it to the 3th party filters/custom URLs - when i click "parse" i don't get to see a new row with a checkbox. example:

this works: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/r4vi/block-the-eu- cookie-s...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit- list/master/filterlist.txt)

this doesn't work: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamja/Prebake/master/obtr...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamja/Prebake/master/obtrusive.txt)

<comment><USER18> True, although it's already in the 3rd party list and you can just enable it there.

<comment><USER16> ahhh thanks, i didn't notice/expect it to be under the 'Regions languages' section for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, this is just funny. Or sad, depending on how you look at it.

Personally, I'm annoyed by the cookie messages, but the law is supposed to help people.

Blocking (or auto-accepting) them is basically saying we don't give a shit about this law :-)

<comment><USER20> Cookies are integral to the operation of every modern website. They offer security in the form of features like csrf protection or maintaining login state between visits. There is sufficient protection for cookies in the form of encryption and a laundry list of further details which have been added over the years.

There are far larger security related concerns on the web. The cookie warnings are on par with if you had to agree with Javascript running on any page you visit in the EU. So, yes, I want to auto-accept.

As a developer I feel like I'm not going to make special considerations that ensure you can use forms on my website without cookies enabled. And I'm not going to find another way to detect and re-instate your login state.

<comment><USER21> It's a misconception that you need to show this warning if you use cookies. You only need to show it if you use _tracking_ cookies. Which means Google Analytics.

Don't use GA and you don't need to show it. Your login cookies etc and anything "essential to the operation of the website" are all explicitly excluded.

The law is absurd, but it's not braindead.

<comment><USER20> I honestly wasn't aware that was the law. I thought it was all cookies, that's what the warning messages are worded to sound like they are saying, thank you for correcting me. My question then is, websites are phoning home through use of iframes? Because those cookies aren't accessible on different domains than the ones they were issued.

Am I to understand companies are loading their own domain in hidden iframes that phone home when I visit a website? Like it checks the iframe's top window location and tracks what pages I'm on? Now you have me feeling paranoid.

What can be done about that. Google analytics arguably is a very useful service.

<comment><USER21> I don't understand how you make that logical jump?

You can look at how GA tracks users with a bit of googling:

[https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/g...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsTrackingOverview?hl=en)

[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2992042?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2992042?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There already existed a plugin for this [https://cookiesok.com/](https://cookiesok.com/), but it misses quite a lot. Hopefully this works better.

</comment><comment><USER23> This law is so badly designed it is beautiful.

It warns users who don't accept cookies that the website uses cookies, at every connexion. It doesn't warn users who accept them that they're used, putting aside the first connexion.

It should be the other way around. The website should warn the user that a cookie is used when the website just accepted a cookie from the browser. The privacy concern happen at this very moment, when you phone back to the website, not when the website phones you information.</comment>


Launch HN: Vendr (YC S19) – Buying software so you don't have to - <AUTHOR> Hey HN: I'm Ryan, the founder of Vendr (https://vendr.com).
We buy and renew software for companies. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time with software salespeople. We believe that the buying process should be dictated by the buyer.  For example, if you want to procure New Relic, you should be able to do it your way, not the salesperson's way. Vendr was created so that companies can get the SaaS they need without needing to invest the time to procure.
My background is in software sales.  Previous to founding Vendr, I was head of enterprise sales for InVision and director of SMB sales for HubSpot, so I've learned how to buy and sell software.  I've witnessed that many salespeople are really good at wasting customers' time (unnecessary qualification calls, demos, etc).  Buying and renewing software is complicated, and even more if you want to get the best deal. We take care of all that and get you the software you need, fast, and at the best possible price.  We also handle renewals and are able to reduce the price per seat as a company grows.
Vendr is currently buying and renewing software for many fast-growing companies.  We are currently working with Canva, GitLab, Brex, Drift, HubSpot, InVision, and others.  These companies have hired us to save time and money.  And it's working.  For example, in our first 12 months working with InVision, we saved them over $1.5M.  Many of our customers are good negotiators, but they've realized that spending the cycles is not a good use of their time.
Here's how it works: We are typically hired by the head of finance or engineering.  We analyze and organize your current SaaS purchases and renewal dates. You introduce Vendr to your vendors and we manage the procurement process from start to finish—getting you exactly what you need without ever having to pick up the phone.  We are integrated into your Slack environment to keep you posted along the way.
We make money via a monthly subscription to buy and renew all of the SaaS in your stack.  Our subscription fee is based on your company size and ranges from $2k-10k+. Happy to chat directly at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Have you experienced specific issues buying software? How have your experiences been working with software salespeople? We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas, and your experiences! <comment><USER2> Have you talked to any government agencies about using this for larger, public sector, software procurements? I've worked for a govt software vendor in the law enforcement space for a few years, and it's very difficult to actually sell anything real, because the clients don't understand anything and fall for every single marketing/sales tactic from the big vendors. If there were a technically knowledgable middle-man company involved, it would actually be a huge boon for my company because we could focus more resources on building good product that the middleman would understand is better for the client versus fighting the legacy vendors with big marketing budgets and very low engineering support/talent.

<comment><USER3> Technology advising as a value-add for less technical buyers definitely sounds like a great opportunity, but it isn't on our roadmap yet. Government contracting and procurement (especially at the federal level) is very complicated, so we've focused initially on high-growth private sector companies.

Thanks a lot for bringing this up! We'll reply back to your comment if our strategy evolves to include this.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the thoughtful response!

>Government contracting and procurement (especially at the federal level) is very complicated

Tell me about it... ha

I saw your founder Ryan say this in another comment here:

>we are testing non-SaaS purchases. As an example, we recently helped one of our customers save a bunch of money on their SOC 2 audit fees

My company also spends a significant amount of money on SOC2 audit every year. Feels like another synergy point here with public sector procurement and software vendors. You can theoretically help agencies find good software products at the right price-point, coming from certified vendors who you've already helped manage all their certifications and audits in an efficient way.

I know this is all pretty ambitious and not super well-aligned with what you guys are doing right now with private, growth companies, but I'm just spitballing here because this type of thing would have some really interesting effects in the govt software space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Back when I was at a largish company as an engineering manager I had to negotiate these sorts of contracts all the time. Would have paid for this in a heartbeat. You guys are definitely on to something.

We eventually had an in-house person do it and they didn't love managing it either. The hardest part of their job honestly was tracking all the ones we had, ensuring we renewed on time, and talking to the procurement department to get everything squared away. When we had to move off credit cards to more corporate billing it was a nightmare to update everything.

And even when it was all buttoned up I still had to review that list quarterly to ensure we could drop old stuff, maintain which team(s) owned what service from the technical side, etc.

Next time I'm at a bigger company I'm using you for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've observed the same. Even at bigger companies, the procurement team tends to focus on the most expensive/riskiest/sensitive vendors. That means that multi-millions dollar purchases are prioritized over $100k engineering SaaS purchases, for example.

We think that software buying needs to exist as an external function. There are too many products for internal teams to tackle this alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting! Have you bought and sold between any two of your customers? For example, have you bought a GitHub enterprise license for InVision, and procured InVision for GitHub?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes-we have procured between customers. Most negotiations are rational (ie: the license count is growing, so it is reasonable to improve the price per license). However, there are also times when mutual customers have issues, are looking to churn, or downsell. In those scenarios, we play match-maker to the customer success Director or VP. That way, they can get involved early, in order to hopefully save the relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is not clear how Vendr avoids the conflict of interest when negotiating.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gain-share models are inherently biased, because you make more money as you save more money. This also leads to conflict with vendors, since the incentives are tied solely to financial outcomes.

We took a different approach. We charge a fixed subscription fee and we negotiate towards the outcomes of our customers, not our own.

Our stance is that our customers are great negotiators, they just don't have the time or interest to do it. So, if they were on the phone for the negotiation, they'd be saying the same thing that we are saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How much of the value provided here is by combining the custom offer information given to each of your customers into one pool to use as leverage against the individual suppliers?

Also, wouldn't the customer sharing that pricing information with you violate some ( _most? all?_ ) NDAs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we are accumulating buying power as we sign on additional logos. However, that is not our north star. Instead of working towards supplier leverage, we are trying to find the equilibrium price for all enterprise software. That way, companies can buy software with confidence and certainty that they are paying a reasonable price. As long as "Contact Us for Enterprise Pricing" exists, pricing will be variable.

The vendors are the ones that share pricing information with us and we are under NDA with our customers. The reason that the vendors share the information is because companies have indicated that this is the way that they want to buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome. Even at a small/mid size startup we struggled with buying software. Wasting so much time across the board from engineering, engineering management, analyst and finance. Brillaint pain point to solve.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly why I joined Vendr. I've been in CTO/tech leadership roles at quite a few companies now, and have never particularly enjoyed having to negotiate with sales people. It always seemed like it was a timesink that was distracting me from building the best product/service/company that I could.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > We make money via a monthly subscription to buy and renew all of the SaaS in > your stack.

I find this a bit ironic. To solve the pain of purchasing SAAS, you need to subscribe to a SAAS. Additionally, I think it would be much more convincing if you offered an option in which there's a small upfront fee (or even none) and then you make money on how much you can make your client save.

<comment><USER10> I thought the same at first but it's not ironic really. No more than loan consolidation ie taking a single loan to pay off your various debts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A couple questions came to mind:

1) "ranges from $2k-10k+" \-- What is the smallest company size for which you anticipate delivering a positive ROI on those fees vs. the time spent handling purchasing on their own?

2) Do you handle purchasing of non-SaaS software?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. The subscription price is tied to headcount. If you're below 100 employees, we charge $2k per month and it scales up based on # of employees. We tied pricing to headcount because it is a solid indicator of quantity of products and total $ spend. At these levels, we are to maintain a positive ROI. I'm open to suggestions and improvements with the pricing model!

2\. Our sweet-spot is SaaS but we are testing non-SaaS purchases. As an example, we recently helped one of our customers save a bunch of money on their SOC 2 audit fees. Do you have specific non-SaaS purchases in mind?

Also, within our customer base, there is significant overlap in products. Meaning, most companies use G-Suite, Slack, Sfx, and others. So, we've learned how to buy those products efficiently and have a good understanding of what it should cost. This saves everyone's time (including the salespersons).

<comment><USER11> Thanks for additional info.

As far as the pricing model, what you say makes sense for larger companies. I'm thinking of small companies, say 10-20 people. Big enough that they do have some purchasing pain, but not $2k/month worth of it. Setting a low price point for them might get growing companies on board early, becoming larger clients as they grew.

For non-SaaS, I didn't have anything specific in mind. I know that my teams have purchased, at various times, IDE licenses, "Pro" versions of various libraries and tool, and even licenses to run various servers that aren't free/open source. The catch in my mind is that if "procurement-as-a-service" covers all my bases, it may make sense. But if I need an internal procurement person anyway, the value prop of your service diminishes a bit.

I like the idea overall. I'm a believer in hiring for the core product, and outsourcing the rest, and this idea fits in nicely with that philosophy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Today, we aren't built for 10-20 person companies, but it is definitely top of mind. We are working on productizing some of our knowledge to solve for this use case, but we aren't there yet.

In terms of non-SaaS, yes, we could handle those examples. But, we don't do your cable bill and things like that. Technology procurement, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My father once told me - if one of my sons was a drug dealer and the other was in procurement, I'm not sure which one I'd be more disappointed in.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is that what SHI does?

If yes, hope you can do better than them. As a product owner, I've been working with many resellers and most of time it's not worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Music to my ears! SHI and other resellers (like CDW) work for the supplier, not the buyer. That means that when you use SHI or CDW to buy software, you are likely paying list price. Or, you're at least paying more than you should.

Vendr works for the buyer and does not receive reseller commission. That means that we are strictly aligned to your price outcomes, not the supplier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do you negotiate for marketplace apps also? Like Slack apps, Github apps, etc. or is that too small fries for this?

<comment><USER15> If there is a salesperson involved then definitely. If there is a salesperson and it is a larger transaction, there will typically be an opportunity to save $$. If it's a smaller deal, there may not be a whole lot of room to save $$, but our goal would be to get on the phone and save time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> But who manages renewing Vendr's subscription? Lol, just messing. Great idea!

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice. Vendor reviews too? Or do you integrate with other vendors who perform said reviews (e.g. Whistic)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea. We don't do reviews today but are considering integrations like Whistic, G2Crowd, and others. That would help stakeholders get evaluation information before they commit to buying.

<comment><USER17> I think you can do better than the public review systems that exist today: you can authenticate the buyers, which improves the usefulness of the reviews. Your reviews cannot be stuffed by hyper aggressive sales members posing as fake customers.

And, a step above: you can show how ratings from the same buyer change over time as their price point, scale, and features evolved. (Solve for: would you rather buy a piece of software that makes you happy as hell on day 1 but miserable on day 366, or one that makes you modestly happy on day 1 but blissfully happy on day 366?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't know anything about this space or problem but I like this pitch. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!!! Demo day pitch is next week, so that gives us a nice confidence boost!

<comment><USER19> I think what you're doing is super interesting but I'd be curious to know who your biggest competitors are. How are you positioning yourself against Intello or Zylo?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can you partner up with F5 ASAP? The pain! (Insert Spock or Dune meme here)

</comment><comment><USER21> Do you protect/mask the identity of your clients?

<comment><USER22> We haven't found that to be necessary. Typically our customers welcome the idea of introducing us as their partner who will be handling the commercial logistics of their contracts.</comment></comment>


Smartip.io – Simple and Reliable IP Geolocation and Threat Intelligence API - <AUTHOR> https://smartip.io <comment><USER2> Looks quite similar to Ipregistry ([https://ipregistry.co](https://ipregistry.co)) but with higher world-wide latency, lower accuracy, no client libraries, etc. I mean what value your service brings compared to existing services?

Also, the pricing looks weird. Are you serious with your unlimited pack for a fixed price? Can you handle 2B requests a month for $250 with consistent latency? How frequently are you updating your data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our pricing structure puts us on a different level compared to all other competitors. I confirm the Pro Tier allows for unlimited lookups, still maintaining consistent latency and stability.

Our platform is completely powered by Microsoft Azure, which allows for a huge level of scalability and stability even under high loads. Which means, we can maintain a consistent latency even under 2B requests a month.

We are updating our data daily, cross-referencing multiple data sources to achieve maximum accuracy.

In terms of accuracy, at the moment, we are using MaxMind databases which guarantees high accuracy, on top of that, we are already in the process of building our own GeoDatabase which will add even more details and information to our offer.

Finally, we already offer open source client libraries for PHP and .Net on GitHub:

[https://github.com/smartip-code/smartip-dotnet](https://github.com/smartip- code/smartip-dotnet)

[https://github.com/smartip-code/smartip-php](https://github.com/smartip- code/smartip-php)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all!

SmartIP.io is a IP Geolocation API and Threat Intelligence service which will make developers life very easy.

We expose both IP and ASN lookups with two simple endpoints, we don't segment data response by Tiers, as most of our competitors do, instead, we return the entire dataset in our responses even in the Free tier.

Our pricing structure is unbeatable as well, signing up, we allow up to 250,000 requests per month for Free! More information on [https://smartip.io/#pricing-section](https://smartip.io/#pricing-section)

 _Why should I use a GeoLocation API_

Most companies use IP Geolocation APIs to identify their users to enrich the user experience based on their location, currency or timezone. Another use case could be identify threats and prevent frauds in time looking for Proxy connections, TOR nodes or just filtering Crawlers traffic. SmartIP.io can detect if the an IP is a proxy, TOR or even a crawler. More information on [https://smartip.io/#feature-section](https://smartip.io/#feature-section)

 _Why SmartIP.io_

Even though the API market is full of Geolocation API already, we realised that they all offer very similar datasets, and they all tend to be really expensive very quickly, segmenting data responses by tiers and adding costs to their customers which do not cost anything to them.

Our approach aims to solve this problem exposing single endpoints which return all information with no segmentation by Tier and with a huge Free tier which allows up to 250,000 requests a month.

We are the only one to expose Crypto data. Our service can identify if a specified IP is running a Bitcoin node with additional information like the port from where the node is running from. We are in the process of expanding this dataset with additional blockchains and more data.

 _Our features_

\- Geolocation data: at the moment we are using MaxMind database, but we are in the process of building our own GeoDatabase.

\- Currency data

\- Timezone data

\- Security data: Our service exposes Proxy data, Crawler data and TOR data.

\-- Crawler data: we detect the crawler type, the crawler company

\-- TOR data: we detect TOR exit node identifier, the published data and the last update date.

\-- Proxy data: we detect the proxy type like "proxy anonimyzers", "proxy attackers", etc.

\- Crypto data

\- We are powered by Microsoft Azure. We are 100% backed by the best cloud solution out there with no self-hosted servers. This guarantees extremely high performances and high SLA.

\- Official client libraries available on Github for .NetCore, PHP and Javascript.

\- Simple and intuitive Dashboard to manage your API keys and monitor your API calls.

\- Once registered, we offer a huge Free Tier which allows up to 250,000 requests a month.</comment>


Facebook Opens Messenger for App Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/technology/facebook-opens-messenger-for-app-developers.html?_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> A move that was due for a long time.</comment>


Dear TechCrunch - <AUTHOR>

TechCrunch, please stop having auto-popup images and auto-playing videos on your site when you scroll over something or when the page loads. Makes your site the most annoying one I visit.<p>Vote for this and maybe they'll stop. <comment><USER2> Techcrunch, please talk to an interaction designer. Or approach random people who dont read techcrunch and look at the annoyance on their face when they scroll through said area of page.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dear user,

We need the money.

Love, Techcrunch

<comment><AUTHOR> These are images. Not ads. Videos that autoplay when you are scrolling down the page and your mouse accidentally moves over them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/15/adblock-plus- chrome/](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/15/adblock-plus-chrome/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I also don't like this on Yahoo and Foxnews.com.

</comment><comment><USER6> what's TechCrunch?

</comment><comment><USER7> Adblock?</comment>


ThoughtWorks Go Continuous Delivery Platform Now Available as Free Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://www.thoughtworks.com/news/go-continuous-delivery-now-available-as-free-open-source

<comment><USER2> There is no need make Jenkins work like GO anymore to show the pipelines. Awesome :)

<comment><AUTHOR> the point is that "showing" pipelines is not enough, Jenkins misses the fundamental building blocks. It can be made to look like it but would need deep changes to actually achieve the same level</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Upper Limit for "Friends and Family" Investment option? - <AUTHOR>

Is there an upper limit on the "Friends and Family" Investment option?  if a friend or family member wants to inject cash into a start-up as a favor with no strings attached, is that possible? if so, is there an upper bound of what can be given?  what about taxes?<p>Thanks, <comment><USER2> The upper limit should be $0. Destroying your friends and family relationships by taking their money and potentially losing it on a startup - an inherently risky venture - is a terrible idea, despite the advice you may be given elsewhere. Your friends and family relationships are irreplaceable. Startups come and go.</comment>


On Digital Minimalism - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/12/18/on-digital-minimalism/ <comment><USER2> I strongly agree with Cal on this. I write software and generally spend much of my time focusing on how to better design digital technologies of various kinds.

But ultimately, I think that good design is typically subtractive, not additive. The best digital products improve our lives--our lives in the physical world--while sucking up as little of our attention, mental effort, and personal information as possible.

I think it's only a matter of time before we see these attitudes become more prevalent (precisely because they are controversial/reactionary), and the general design ethos of Silicon Valley shifts as a result.

One of the key tensions of the near future may be between minimalism and maximalism in this way: should we throw more and _more_ computation power at every single "problem", brute-forcing a solution to each for its own sake? Or should we optimize, and find the smallest, least intrusive, most elegant and simplest solution? I know which one sounds better to me. But will that drive business revenue? We'll see.

Perhaps more importantly though, at a certain point--by creating so much digital detritus and complexity, our brute-force solutions and ever-present computation create a new set of problems (such as the need to filter information aggressively to get any useful value from it--which is what minimalism is all about). So maybe this is just the realization of that. We need a new layer on top of the computation infrastructure to __reduce__, to complete our maximalist designs. Either way, interesting.

<comment><USER3> > The best digital products improve our lives ...

The trouble is, vanishingly few current products are designed to improve our lives _first._ We became the product existing to provide more data.

So we ended up with social networks that show us what produces most ad views not what's most helpful to network your friends and relatives. We've got phone "apps" that are just thin clients and give us todo apps that can't trigger an alarm unless it's got 4G.

I've ended up with an eclectic, almost intentionally obsolete, version of digital minimalism. I use old desktop apps, command line, text editors and old widgets. There's barely a web 2 app installed on phone or laptop, and browser visits social media less than once a month. Back to the 90s?

I'll visit here, reddit and one or two others for an hour a day. I need the net far less than 5 or 10 years ago unless I'm working, well researching.

The most interesting thing about the article, some of my tech friends, and where I've ended up is the number of techies who are starting to reject much of what we built!

<comment><USER4> > The trouble is, vanishingly few current products are designed to improve our > lives first. We became the product existing to provide more data.

This, more than anything, is why I refuse to view ads and jealously guard my data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the hardest parts I've found in winnowing the amount of sheer information I process every day was my iPhone. I solved it by limiting my access to a few key apps, silencing non-critical notifications(Re: Email) and deleting Safari. Anything that I can access through a browser and check once a day (Here's looking at you Instagram) was locked out of my phone/removed. Downside: The Internet is no longer in my pocket and occasionally I am required to use 411 and call someone.

Turned my iPhone into a almost-dumbphone using Configurator and have seen nothing but improvements to daily-life. > [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/hands-on-securing- ios-p...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/hands-on-securing-ios-pwning- your-kids-with-apple-configurator-1-2/)

<comment><USER6> That sounds more like an extreme way to deal with the lack of self discipline (deleting Safari??). If it works for you, great. For me minimalism is about how do I get what I need/want in the least amount of time and as little waste as possible.

First was how to deal with news. I find the 5 minute NPR news briefing podcast from the latest hour is great. Honestly, news just does not change that much, so listening to that briefing once or twice a day is plenty. If I have more time that day, I'll also listen to WSJ tech or Planet Money podcasts.

Next, the Google app on the iPhone does a great job at summarizing things I typically want to know about. I was using the Apple equivalent of this, but it simply does not know me like Google does (for better or worse). I can open the Google app and see the weather, traffic, etc..., scan it and go.

For email, Inbox is configurable to only send alerts for certain classes of email. I get alerts only when they matter, and everything else can wait until I'm at a computer to check.

<comment><USER7> >For me minimalism is about how do I get what I need/want in the least amount of time and as little waste as possible.

That's not what minimalism is for most people. I want a lot of things. More than I have time for. Minimalism is about figuring out the marginal value each of those provides and eliminating all but the top x percent.

It's about reducing the stuff you feel you need. Your approach sounds more like you are not doing that.

>I find the 5 minute NPR news briefing podcast from the latest hour is great.

Sorry for changing the topic, but as a former news junkie, I've long wanted to write a lengthy essay on how/why to read the news. If there is one thing I would want people to get out of that essay, it is that when it comes to news, the path of moderation is the one that will make you the _most_ misinformed.

There's so much misinformation out there that the only way I could get an idea of what was going on was to spend many hours a month reading up news from _multiple_ sources, and potentially _multiple_ analyses. Only then would you get a fuller picture. Any given single story was highly likely to be missing or misreporting key information. And certain stories would not be covered by some organizations but covered by others. By listening to a given news outlet, you _have no idea what important stories are not being told_.

I did this for several years before calling it quits (too much time for not much personal value). But I knew from my past experience with dealing with people who only "scanned" the news (or listed to the news summary on BBC/NPR) that they tended to be quite misinformed. So the only option was to more or less quit altogether.

Even then, a few months later, I found myself having opinions on current events. Why? Because I still randomly scanned newspaper headlines while walking or listened to NPR broadcasts while driving. I had become the misinformed person.

The person who doesn't follow news altogether tends to be less misinformed. They are certainly ignorant, but they have fewer faulty notions.

These days, have I really gone cold turkey? Not really. I do still read/listen to it. _But I do it while refusing to draw any conclusions._

Long story short: If you want to follow the news, either do it wholeheartedly or quit. No middle ground in this world.

<comment><USER6> There is a difference between being aware events are happening, and researching because I need to make some decision. By your logic, everyone is misinformed because there is literally an infinite amount of news and sources now. Even when you thought you were informed, you were just as misinformed as anyone else as there was no way you had ready everything.

Regardless, what I was really getting at is following the 24 hour news cycle treadmill is a pointless game. It is far better to get summaries and dive deeper when something interesting comes up and/or you have time. At no point did I talk about drawing conclusions. For those, of course you have to dive in a little deeper and even then you have to be aware those conclusions are only valid until the next bit of information comes out.

Learning to summarize and understanding the limitations of that summarization is a learned skill. We all do it every day.

<comment><USER8> You seem to suggest that being informed vs misinformed is a binary state: that people who consider themselves more informed are also misinformed because they haven't read _everything_.

Being informed is a probabilistic game. Every news source is from a particular perspective, with some bias and some error. But unless they are all ultimately controlled by a conspiracy, or have systematic bias / error, consuming more news sources will increase the amount of correct information one has about the world. There is a definite trend towards being more informed when consuming more news sources, particularly if they are from different ends of the political spectrum but with high reputation for accuracy.

Whether being informed is useful to the average citizen most of the time is another question entirely. News as entertainment, hyped headlines, the continuous need for updates that drive 24-hour news - I don't think these things are good for anyone. They always search for sensationalism, always look for a hook that drives an emotional response, outrage, anger, fear, nationalism, racism, bigotry - they appeal to our worst impulses.

<comment><USER9> Your third paragraph really contradicts your second. There is indeed a systematic bias in the news media - the preoccupation with rare, sensational, controversial and emotive stories. I would argue that this is one of the fundamental causes of misinformation in modern society. The news media conditions us to be fearful and suspicious, to believe that things are only getting worse.

No newspaper would ever run the headline "Majority of People Safe and Prosperous" or "Dems, Reps Agree on Most Things". Nobody would ever read a newspaper that gave an accurate depiction of the world around us, because it would be dismally boring. That's the big lie of the 21st century.

<comment><USER8> I think you can triangulate. It's 24-hour news in particular that needs to exaggerate; the bias isn't wholly systematic.

Different media sources focus on the fears of different subsets of people, so they'll exaggerate different things. I think these things cancel out too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The modern minimalism movement ...

... is an oxymoron.

It is plenty obvious from a quick scan of [https://reddit.com/r/minimalism](https://reddit.com/r/minimalism) where they struggle with reconciling all different interpretations of minimalism on daily basis. For some it's asceticism, for others it's having just one Rolex instead of 10 Seikos. There's also a separate circus from the "Help, my SO wants to buy a 2nd fork!" variety.

There's no single prominent movement, it's very much all over the place and to each his own.

<comment><USER11> The problem I had with /r/minimalism is that it's more focused on the aesthetic movement rather than the lifestyle movement. A 4,000sf house with sparse furniture and clean straight lines is minimalist in an aesthetic sense, but not really in the sense of owning only exactly what you need to do what you want and no more. The two meanings of minimalism seem to create a lot confusion and conflict about whether a given thing is "minimalist".

<comment><USER10> > not really in the sense of owning only exactly what you need to do what you > want and no more

It's one and the same really. Once you have a bit more money the pragmatic live-in-a-shoebox minimalism tends to transform into the "aesthetic" variety - you still own a bare minimum that makes you happy, but you can now afford a better quality of the same. Be it a larger place or a more expensive pair of jeans.

<comment><USER12> But a larger place is by definition not the bare minimum - you have more square footage than you need.

<comment><USER10> For bare minimum you can sleep on a park bench :)

"Need" is subjective and the rest follows from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm obsessed with minimalism. I want all my possessions to fit inside my backpack. I own one pair of socks. I sleep on the floor.

I still struggle with digital minimalism. The current state of software is unbelievably fragmented. I have literally created over 500 accounts in my life. I have more than 100 apps on my phone. This so-called software diversity makes my life miserable.

I've been attempting to solve this problem for the past 10 years. I came to the conclusion that we need to create a single app that does 80% of things. Somehow, people still don't believe this is desirable or possible. I can't grasp why.

<comment><USER14> Being able to fit all my possessions in a backpack is something I think about.

Can you go in to more detail on the stuff you own?

In what kind of climate do you live in? It seems a lot easier to not have a lot of stuff when you don't have to have cloths for multiple seasons.

<comment><USER15> I live in western Canada, a pair of long johns, jeans and a coat are enough to spend an hour in -25 °C. I own a few things that I don't mind getting rid of when I move like a snowboard and a mattress, otherwise my clothes + toiletries + laptop/phone is it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A couple of years ago I was _forced_ to buy a smartphone (to get into Android dev), but I didn't get a data plan. I've been very happy with this decision. Most of the useful mobile apps I use (transit/maps/email) work well enough offline, but I don't get any notifications or interruptions.

I still struggle with internet addiction through my laptop, but at least the phone isn't adding to the problem.

</comment><comment><USER17> Do people feel that reading Hacker News meets these principles? On one hand there's a lot of good links and discussions here, but a significant portion is either too obscure or just not very interesting (e.g. most medium.com links). How do you optimize your HN reading to maximize time spent learning?

<comment><USER18> Actually I use a habit tracking app, where one of the habits is "no news but HN". HN is an improvement compared to reading any other news source or various reddits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think the keyword here is "tool". Using a piece of software as a tool as opposed to the software using you.

<comment><USER20> Right. "What do I want to do? Here is the tool for me to do that."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I ditched Facebook two years ago for all the principles stated in the article (among other reasons) and I have never looked back. I am literately a healthier person ever since. Minimalism is a way of life, having to think about or deal with less things or situations helps me handle those better. Great article.

Edit: One nit, the author mentions Orwell to describe today's social media. I would say it's more like what Aldous Huxley described in Brave New World and Neil Postman embodied in Amusing Ourselves To Death rather than an Orwellian world.

</comment><comment><USER22> > GPS helped solve a problem that existed for a long time before it came along > (how do I get where I want to go?), so did Google (how do I find this piece > of information I need?). Snapchat, by contrast, did not. Be wary of tools in > this latter category as they tend to exist mainly to create addictive new > behaviors that support ad sales.

I agree, in the case of Snapchat, but I don't see this as a very convincing argument that tools that solve new problems should induce caution because of potentially addictive behaviors. It seems like the author is using a few choice examples to make an assertion when perhaps a better argument (that I am hoping someone can provide) could be made.

<comment><USER23> I think the larger point is that if you didn't perceive the problem as a problem before the tool existed, it might not actually be a problem. This is applicable outside of Internet technology too (e.g. fashionable clothing solves the problem of not being fashionable, but they also create the problem in the first place).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I ditched Facebook back in 2008, and haven't regretted that decision since.</comment>


Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56  - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#financial <comment><USER2> I really don't get how America can be so advanced in so many things, but still use cheques. Why don't you have a bank transfer system? When I was in Texas last year, we went to a bank and they had these pneumatic tubes that suck in your cheques! Like a gas station. I felt like I had time travelled to some alternate reality.

The last time I received a cheque from the U.S in germany, it was one of the most annoying payment methods I've ever used. First of all, there was this massive fee, then they froze the cash for 6 weeks while the check was verified. This was back in 2002 or so when I was pretty poor, and I had just done a contract job for a guy for a few thousand US$. So I had all this money on my account, but I could not withdraw it because of the freeze.

It was like putting some roast turkey in a sealed glass box in the middle of a famine.

<comment><USER3> The other amazing thing is that you _pay_ for cheques in the US, and you pay a 'convenience fee' for doing online transfers. I would hate living in a country where banking for individuals is not free.

In the UK I don't think many shops will accept cheques any more...

The US is great at marketing itself to "seem" advanced, but when you look at banking, or internet access, or mobile phones, or even land lines (They never work)... ;)

It also amazes me how credit cards don't seem to have progressed in the US. Here in the UK/europe probably, we enjoy chip+pin security on cards, but afaik in the US it's still just a magnetic stripe easy to clone.

<comment><USER4> \- Banking is often free in the US, just like in Europe. Credit card usage is more prevalent in the US. All of the things that I typically do with bank transfers in Europe (with the odd exception of monthly rent which was a check and my salary which was a bank transfer) I did in the US with a credit card.

\- I've had more problems with my land-line in Germany than I ever did in the US. And I've heard enough stories about BT to believe that it's all peaches and cream on the island.

\- Those little chips in the European cards aren't used in most cases (at least the German ones), and in fact the most recent ones being issued here don't have them anymore. You certainly don't need anything but the magnetic strip for ATM or credit card transactions.

<comment><USER2> What about the fee that the credit card charges? And don't you have to them go to the offices to pay the rent then?

<comment><USER4> Credit card charges are much higher in Europe. Because of the ubiquity of credit cards in the US, it drives prices down; incidentally, that's why bank transfers are expensive in the US and cheap in Europe.

I always either payed my rent in the US by mail or by putting a check in a drop-box that we had at the building where I lived. (Note that I haven't lived in the US since 2002, so things may have progressed since then.)

<minirant> This is the problem with most US-Europe comparisons -- and honestly, something that Europeans are especially bad at. They tend to look at the US with a set of assumptions and bemoan that the US is backward without realizing that the some of the things being used as a basis for the comparison are out of whack. That's not to say that there aren't huge problems in the US, but they're rarely as simple as portrayed in the European media. </minirant>

<comment><USER2> I don't know man - it just seems wrong that I should be paying a fee to Mastercard or Visa everytime I pay my rent, no matter how small. Bank transfers in Europe are free, as they should be.

<comment><USER4> A few things:

\- Bank transfers aren't universally free in Germany. Mine cost about 30 cents.

\- Rent was one of the few things that I mentioned wasn't paid with credit cards.

\- "As they should be" is problematic. I for instance, find the whole process of founding a GmbH insanely complicated (even with the new reforms), but hey, they're different countries. I could make a long list of things about each country of things that work better in the other, but it wouldn't be the most useful means of comparison.

<comment><USER2> Hmm, I didn't know that some banks actually charged money for transfer. Germany does make it incredibly tough and complicated to wade through all the neccessary laws and paperwork to get a business started. I guess that's why most people prefer to just be employees.

In england, it's WAY easier, and most things can be done online. The UK generally has a much less formal feel about most things compared to Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"It turns out that only 9 of the first 275 checks that I've sent out since the beginning of 2006 have actually been cashed. The others have apparently been cached."_

/facepalm

<comment><USER6> Seriously, what dunce would cash one of those?

<comment><USER7> I cashed the check Knuth sent me years ago.

I remember, at the time, thinking that Knuth might be offended if I didn't. I guess I was just young...

<comment><USER8> </sacrewcow>

The non-monetary value of the cheques is, to me, minimal. I'm well aware of the Knuth's work and the confidence required to post a logarithmic reward for bugs. But the concept of 'bug' has been artificially limited.

The primary goal of TeX is "to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort". It is clearly buggy, as it certainly has failed at that goal.

The problem is that engineers are to focused on algorithms to care about usability or even realize that this is a problem.

It _is_ a problem, and it prevented TeX from achieving it's stated goal.

The same attitude in other projects would ensure their failure too.

<comment><USER9> WTF are you talking about?

From wikipedia:

"In several technical fields, in particular computer science, mathematics and physics, TeX has become a de facto standard. Many thousands of books have been published using TeX, including books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer. Numerous journals in these fields are produced using TeX or LaTeX, allowing authors to submit their raw manuscript written in TeX."

In my field, Tex (used with macro packages) is the standard. We format book chapters and papers for publication using these macros. We communicate with other scientists using the product of these tools. We could easily produce journals and/or books _ourselves_ using these tools, and many people do.

They are _excellent_ for that purpose. They are free. They work. They work better than anything else I know.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER8> Yes, you missed something. And you're rude.

Read my post again.

If it still doesn't make sense, realize that most people are not computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists.

<comment><USER10> So in short you think someone should build a great GUI on top of TeX. Why not?

<comment><USER8> Someone should have done that many years ago, when TeX had a chance of succeeding as a mainstream typesetting language, along with allowing people to use their not-bitmapped, TTF (and later OTF) fonts without conversion tools.

I think now it's a little too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _It is absolutely idiotic to have 64-bit pointers when I compile a program that uses less than 4 gigabytes of RAM. When such pointer values appear inside a struct, they not only waste half the memory, they effectively throw away half of the cache._

Is that true? It's weird to hear Knuth complain about such a down-to-earth problem.

<comment><USER12> This is actually a serious problem when using complex data structures that consist primarily of pointers between memory locations (example: linked lists or trees): this is the one case where 64-bit can actually be significantly slower than 32-bit. Imagine a doubly linked list that contains "int" values: on 32-bit each node would be 96 bits, on 64-bit each node would be 160 bits.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> According to the Bank of San Serriffe website (<http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html>) I should be getting one of those "Certificates of Deposit to the Bank of San Serriffe" sometime (for 0x$1.20)-- I'll post a scan when it arrives.

</comment><comment><USER13> Darn it! I was able to ignore this problem until Knuth brought it to my conscious attention!

Come to think of it, this also describes my approach to algorithms. ;) Darn you, Knuth! I used to be contented with bubble sort!

<comment><USER14> Yeah. Crazy as it sounds, it's actually safer now to use a credit card than a check.

<comment><USER15> That's not crazy. It has always been very safe to use a credit card, because if some fraudster uses your credit card to pay for something, _you're not liable_. With cash, checks or a debit card, _your money is already gone_. With a credit card, the credit card company's money is on the line, not yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There go my funding plans...

</comment><comment><USER17> For someone so concerned about layout I've always wondered why Knuth's recent news never have a date attached.

<comment><USER18> If you attach dates on a page like this, you risk looking flaky whenever there's a big gap between posts. Leaving his entries dateless might mitigate the pressure to update regularly. That's just a guess, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _"It turns out that only 9 of the first 275 checks that I've sent out since > the beginning of 2006 have actually been cashed. The others have apparently > been cached."_

dude...

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly wouldn't cash mine, but I wonder about Thorsten Dahlheimer, who appears to have racked up $2635.52-- now that's worthy of some major props.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Favorite: _"From now on it will be kudos, not escudos"_

</comment><comment><USER21> "Account balances as of 31 October 2008:"

But it's the 30th today....

<comment><USER22> Knuth likes to play with alternate number bases. He really means 25 December.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> why doesn't he just paypal the money?

<comment><USER24> He could if people were really interested in the money. People, however, are more interested in keeping his check and autograph as a collector's item and/or bragging rights.

<comment><USER23> well then why not send people an autographed copy of the book? People would appreciate that even more

<comment><USER25> Like hell they would.

It's hard to explain, but if I had the choice between a $100 textbook with Knuth's signature, or a $2.56 check for finding a bug, I'd take the cheque. It's such a unique way to thank people, unlike an author-signed book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why not money orders?

</comment><comment><USER27> There's this thing called PayPal, check into it.

<comment><USER28> Sure. Go ahead. Check into it -> <http://paypalsucks.com/forums/>

<comment><USER27> There's a forum bashing every popular company. That doesn't mean anything.

What does mean something is that millions of people do have PayPal accounts and it's a trivial and inexpensive way to transfer small amounts of money.</comment></comment></comment>


Nutella theft runs rampant at Columbia - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/nyregion/for-columbia-students-nutella-in-a-dining-hall-may-be-too-tempting.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> Munchies...mmmm...Nutella...mmmm.....

Mystery solved!</comment>


Show HN: Integrated ElasticSearch and Tika and PdfBox with REST API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RD17/ambar <comment><USER2> The license here doesn't look like an Open Source license to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's Fair Source License [https://github.com/RD17/ambar/blob/master/License.txt](https://github.com/RD17/ambar/blob/master/License.txt)</comment></comment>