Internet Censorship Bill Could Spell Disaster for Speech and Innovation - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/internet-censorship-bill-would-spell-disaster-speech-and-innovation <comment><USER2> The Act is as bad as the EFF says it is. 18 U.S.C. 1591 makes illegal "participation in a venture" which financially benefits from trafficking. This bill defines "participation in a venture" to include "knowing conduct by an individual or entity, by any means, that _assists, supports, or facilitates_ the violation."

That language _vastly_ expands potential liability. If a website knows that its services are being used to somehow assist in sex trafficking,[1] the website could be as culpable as the persons getting paid to coordinate the shipping of sex slaves. It's completely bananas.

Here are the sponsors:

Rob Portman (R, Ohio) Richard Blumenthal (D, Connecticut) John McCain (R, Arizona) Claire McCaskill (D, Missouri) John Cornyn (R, Texas) Heidi Heitkamp (D, North Dakota)

[1] It's pretty much impossible to run a website that allows people to communicate that isn't used for illegal purposes. For example, GMail is _definitely_ used to facilitate a wide variety of illegal conduct. Up to now, for criminal liability to exist, you had to go beyond knowing that your service was used to assist criminal activity to taking special measures to assist that criminal activity. This bill basically lowers the standard from "having intent to assist the illegal activity" to "knowing that what you're doing will somehow assist the illegal activity."

<comment><USER3> I just wrote to Blumenthal and shared some info from your post. He's my senator, and I agree with most of his policies, but this is seriously misguided. Thanks for helping me to understand the chilling effect this bill would potentially have on every popular online communications service.

I seriously cannot imagine how this would not put Facebook, Google, Reddit, and every other online communications platform out of business overnight.

<comment><USER4> If Facebook's and Google's future is at risk, why haven't they done anything to stop this bill?

<comment><USER5> Because like almost all laws of this nature, the costs of compliance will harm upstart competitors greatly while being a rounding error on the books of the major incumbent players.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Joe will end up in jail because his blog had a comment section. What about Facebook? Are they going to put Facebook in jail?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I swear, you can predict the quality of a law as the inverse of how good the name sounds.

If this law were going to limit sex trafficking, it would have a name like "Revisions to the Prosecution of Certain Interstate Crimes". But no, it's got a big, gaudy name that poisons the well on any opposition whatsoever. So, predictably, it will either endanger innocents or restrict basic rights. It's like god damn clockwork.

<comment><USER8> Because if you have a cool name you can sell it solely based on the name. A bill with a boring name must stand on its own two feet to pass.

<comment><USER9> Also, nobody wants to be the guy who opposed the "Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not some covert attack on Internet businesses, it is a well- intentioned but misguided attempt by these senators to prevent adult service websites (namely backpage.com) from enabling pimps and organized crime to traffic victims with impunity under Section 230. Backpage actively helps buyers and sellers remain anonymous _specifically for adult services_ , and provides the means to avoid detection by law enforcement - Bitcoin payments, encouraging prepaid credit cards, not requiring phone numbers for verification, stripping metadata from images, etc. Interestingly, it requires phone number verification for other classified sections on its website like cars and boats, but for adult services it even offers a 10% discount for using Bitcoin.

There could be a legal argument made that Backpage induces trafficking on its website by not requiring verification for adult services, and is therefore involved in the creation of its content and thus not protected under Section 230. Section 230 could also be amended specifically for adult content to require verification and restrict anonymous payment methods. But the EFF is absolutely correct that in its current form, this would be terrible for anyone hosting content on the Internet because this amendment could be broadly applied to illegal content posted on any content providers website, and creates an incentive to have no filtering of content.

One recent development is this Washington Post article that uncovered evidence that Backpage has actually been actively promoting sex trafficking posts to its site [1]. This would make Backpage unequivocally the publisher of its content, and therefore criminally liable. So it is entirely possible that this amendment will not be needed to bring down the human filth that operate on backpage, but some legal remedy is certainly needed to combat the many existing and future websites that will enable sex trafficking.

1\. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public- safety/backpage-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public- safety/backpage-has-always-claimed-it-doesnt-control-sex-related-ads-new- documents-show- otherwise/2017/07/10/b3158ef6-553c-11e7-b38e-35fd8e0c288f_story.html?utm_term=.8fe1c667200f)

<comment><USER11> If those same said senators wanted to actually make a dent in sex trafficking in this country, they would take a look at legalization and regulation in a controlled environment, not unlike Nevada. This is another Band Aid to help make themselves look/feel better by exerting more control on a populace and ignoring the ways this bill will be misused, rather than taking a look at taking real steps to solve a problem. Unfortunately, the American public seems more than ready to eat a ton of BS sprinkled with a little sugar and false hope. Same way Guantanamo was pit in to make it's way against trial laws, PRISM was implemented while directly opposing constititional law and invasions of sovereign countries have taken place by using drones instead of soldiers. The road to Hell is, was and always will be paved with good intentions and politicians promises.

<comment><USER10> "Legalize and regulate" doesn't work when you're dealing with criminals that are enslaving and trafficking underage women. I highly recommend that you learn more about backpage.com and understand why there is great _emotional_ resolve to fix the problem, even if the solution presented here is misguided.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps the reason trafficking is incentivized is because this is a black market in the first place. We don't have the same levels of criminality with alcohol that we experience in the U.S. during prohibition precisely because a legitimized industry crowded out the ability to do most egregious criminal activity.

<comment><USER10> This is another conflation between legal prostitution and the _exploitation and trafficking of underaged girls to customers (technically paedophiles) who are actively searching for underage sex_. I recommend reading about backpage and understanding the difference between _criminally exploiting underage girls_ and the debate around legalized prostitution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The real way to fight trafficking is legalization and regulation, including interviews with sex workers to detect coercion, then followups to help them.

Since fixing the laws is going to take a while, we've taken it upon ourselves. We're building such a superior solution for both sex providers and clients, it'll hurt trafficking like iTunes hurt music piracy.

<comment><USER14> Not that I don't support legalization, but I'm skeptical as to how much legalization would help. Put simply, can we expect new sex workers to come out of the woodwork to create the supply needed to make sex trafficking substantially less profitable? Are women and men suddenly and substantially going to start selling that service if it became legalized?

<comment><USER3> Take a look at Rhode Island for an example of how this works in reality. The results were overwhelmingly positive: [http://www.businessinsider.com/how- rhode-island-accidentally...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-rhode-island- accidentally-legalized-prostitution-2014-7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Without having read the bill, I suspect the titular "sex trafficking" is just a code word for sex work in general, as is often the case with such initiatives. It's very easy to crack down on sex worker rights by claiming all of them are trafficked. Which helps nobody: driving sex work further underground only makes the women working in it more vulnerable.

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh crap -- not again!

Holding the line against censorship is very, very nerve-wracking.

<comment><USER7> I've got a certain painful sympathy for Lovecraft characters these days. There's nothing quite like the feeling of having to win every battle ad infinitum, against an opponent whose every gain will be permanent.

<comment><USER17> Fortunately there are no immortals here.

<comment><USER18> non corporal entities (.inc) are

<comment><USER17> long-lived != immortal! I still take the essence of your point though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _The two choices facing platforms would seem to be to put extremely > restrictive measures in place compromising their users' free speech and > privacy, or to do nothing at all._

So where is the problem again? "Do nothing at all" sounds good to me. Be the dumb pipe or host you're supposed to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _So where is the problem again?_

Third-party liability for content hosts is a problem for all online platforms. Platforms are not dumb pipes in the way that an ISP should be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Do the same Republicans did with ACA, give it another name (Obamacare) to lessen it in the eyes of the people, I suggest "Internet Censorship Act" or "Destroy Internet Act"

<comment><USER21> Kryptonite Internet Legislation Lowlifes

It's another KILL bill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately, in the desire to show that they do not support Nazis, the tech companies have already ceded the high moral ground on free speech. They have also given up the argument that they are just a neutral platform or dumb pipe. One thing that can get broad agreement from both sides of the political aisle is that actual human sex traffickers( especially if they traffic children) are more evil than neo-Nazis who go around marching and chanting hateful slogans. I see a good chance of this bill passing. After all, who wants to go on record as enabling human sex traffickers.

<comment><USER23> >more evil than neo-Nazis who go around marching and chanting hateful slogans

They also are known for killing and brutalizing people.

<comment><USER2> I don't think you can use a website to kill people, but I'm not up with the latest W3C proposals.

<comment><USER24> You can't use a web site to traffic people either.

<comment><USER25> You don't have to shove a human into the internet tube to use the internet tube to help move the human.

Or do we want to ignore all of the sites facilitating prostitution, human trafficking's BFF?

<comment><USER24> Likewise you don't need to invent a knife-over-IP protocol to use the internet to help kill people.

<comment><USER25> You can order bullets on the internet.

Does this fall under the banner of 'use the internet to help kill people'? Your facetious post and response seem to imply that you had something more specific in mind, or perhaps something by a specific group.

<comment><USER24> My point is just that "you can't directly do it over the internet" applies equally to both examples, so you need something else if you want to distinguish them.

<comment><USER25> Sites that facilitate sex trade / crime are direct actions in the trafficking chain. It happens on the internet. No, the john doesn't come through the tubes, but his order does. Directly over the internet.

What was your example again? You keep referring to it, but I can't find it in the comments, which makes i thard to see how your point applies equally.

<comment><USER24> The other example was Nazis getting together and beating/murdering people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Probably good for the incumbent social networks. They have the resources to patrol their territory and no small startups will raise to threaten their status. The extra work is a premium they pay to be safe.

Probably bad for everybody else living on comments. Disqus, but also for the mid sized blog platforms that want people to post comments and talk each other, example: Medium. And how about Slack?

If that part of the internet shrinks, all the products and services ecosystem will shrink too.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish I hadn't gotten so conditioned to think that free speech is nazi speech. Every time I hear someone defending free speech on the internet, they always seem to be defending the most vile opinions or someone's right to be unsympathetic or uncaring. The EFF doesn't seem to be doing that here, though, yet reading the headline puts me on guard.

Why isn't anyone ever defending free speech for good, positive things? I like free speech, but the positive associations I have with it, like allowing individuals to criticise politicians or the government, never seem to be what people on the internet are trying to defend. Free speech should be used by the disenfranchised to defend against those in power, but people want to defend it being used to attack the powerless too.

<comment><USER28> If you claim to support free speech, you have to support the right of others to speak things you disagree with. We have ceeded some limits (e.g. you generally cannot directly incite people to harm others) but every additional limit you allow on speech you oppose can eventually be used against speech you support.

<comment><USER27> This is the same slope argument I'm skeptical about.

Nazi speech isn't something I merely disagree with. It's not a simple difference of opinion. It's not a perfectly valid alternative viewpoint we should respect. It's an ideology that caused a world war that we should never repeat. It's not something that should ever be protected.

<comment><USER29> Communism caused countless wars, and more deaths than WWII. Should communism be an exception to your free speech laws?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the intent of the lawmakers here is to make a law to put people in jail or out of business who are running human trafficking websites that advertise services from victims. How exactly do they do it without trashing the whole internet?

</comment><comment><USER31> Free speech doesn't exist online. I learned this when Brendan Eich was fired from Mozilla (even though his speech was private, non-vocal, and offline).

The conclusion for me is to never use social media. Online everything is business. The most political I get is heated opinions about programming and developer incompetence. For everything else you will have to meet me in person and buy me dinner.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not a lawyer but what does this mean for apps like Signal?

<comment><USER33> I'm not a lawyer either, but it would seem Signal would have less culpability operating a network of users knowing that they do not have any access to the contents of the messages and thus have an implicit impetus to do nothing. Then again, they could be held in contempt of court (maybe?) because sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting La La La isn't really a good defense for ignorance of a fact, if they were to be given evidence that illegal pornography was being transmitted through their servers.

Basically, it seems like it probably would have less effect on them than say Tumblr, which does in fact host a lot of pornographic material in the clear, but they could still be thrown into the mix depending on circumstances.</comment></comment>


Why Did the World Shut Down for Covid-19 but Not Ebola, SARS or Swine Flu? - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-did-the-world-shut-down-for-covid-19-but-not-ebola-sars-or-swine-flu/ <comment><USER2> Because covid19 is a pandemic while every single one of the examples given were at best localized epidemics.

More importantly, countries who endured SARS epidemics such as South Korea were very fast in issuing decisive tactical lockdowns and rolling out policies devised to contain the spread. Those countries who never endured similar epidemics did not had the infrastructure in place to act cirurgically to contain the epidemic, so their only option is to impose a nation-wide lockdown.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because Trump wasn't president then?</comment>


CrashPlan Australia been down for 5 days and counting - <AUTHOR> CrashPlan woes continue.
I have not been able to back up to CrashPlan in Sydney for nearly 5 days.
Even worse - YOU CANNOT RESTORE! When logging in to their site, you get the message "Unable to login to server".
How can a backup service leave their customers in the lurch for so long?
Suggest to all that have been screwed by their recent decision to kill their Home product, get the hell out of there as soon as you can.
The best I could get out of support was:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Code42 Support!
Unfortunately, it appears there has been a problem with the server you mentioned (ECA-SYD) going down. Your files are still perfectly safe, but it's taking us a lot longer than usual to get the server back up and running. I do not have an ETA for a fix just yet, but I will let you know once I have more information.
You're certainly not the first person I've talked to who's having issues with this server, and I'm doing everything I can to bring more attention to the problem.
Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns, and I'll be more than happy to help!
Thanks, Redacted Code42 Support <comment><USER2> When you ask about backups for an entire region (Sydney) and then they refer to "this" server as in singular, you know things are bad, at the least not HA, at the worst not even backed up.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why a backup service would need to setup regional infrastructure. It's not sensitive to latency, the bandwidth costs the same and it adds management overhead.

<comment><USER4> Not sure about Australia, but the most common reason would be local regulations (i.e. laws forbidding to store certain data outside of the borders of a particular region). But given we're talking about Australia, I would not rule out the latency at all.

<comment><USER5> In Australia it might be to attract Gov clients? Not sure why the Home service would matter though other than Australians are big on using services located in Australia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One really really simple thing they could have done in that communication is (using their casual style):

> I will reply again in 2 hours (or XX time) outlining action taken and what > we're currently doing to restore services.

And actually reply spontaneously.

> Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns, and > I'll be more than happy to help!

Very canned.

</comment><comment><USER7> ECA-SYD is still down - 9 days since it first stopped working! I've had a response from Crashplan support confirming this, but still no ETA on a fix. Pretty unacceptable for a backup service, but I have a few TB of data that will be a pain to move elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry, not seeing that here. I've been able to backup to CrashPlan Australia over the last few days, last fully completed backup on August 31 and I can see some files that I created this morning on September 2. I'm able to restore files as well.

Mine is hosted on ACA-SYD, so I'm not sure if ECA-SYD was a typo or if you're on a different server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a typo. Are you using Home or Small business?

<comment><USER8> Using CrashPlan Home - I haven't decided if I'm upgrading to Small Biz or jumping ship yet. I just got home and my CrashPlan has started syncing again to ACA-SYD over WiFi, albeit at 208kbps.

I did have outages about a year ago, where I had to repeatedly enter my restore password to kickstart the backup. But I haven't had that issue recently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting that you know the server name. I looked through the logs to attempt to find out the cause. I don't think that information surfaces anywhere in the UI.

<comment><USER8> I had to dig for it, prompted by seeing your post. If you click on "Show Code42 CrashPlan" to bring up the main window, then click on Destinations, Cloud, and then actually click on "CrashPlan Australia". It should show some extra info including the internet address, which I assume is my server name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's actually going on with CrashPlan? Why are they shutting down their Home offering?

</comment><comment><USER10> Time to move.</comment>


An array of common YC questions - <AUTHOR> https://jamescun.github.io/iPG/data.js <comment><AUTHOR> A common app that people use to prep for YC interviews is [https://jamescun.github.io/iPG/](https://jamescun.github.io/iPG/) because the question is randomly pulled and you're limited to 15 seconds per question.

But, if you just want a list of all the questions, you can use the above link to access the array of questions.

Good luck to everyone!</comment>


Show HN: Book Recommendations From Successful Founders - <AUTHOR> http://www.founderreading.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting concept, and definitely great for those who want to read business books that those founders are most likely going to recommend.

A few questions:

\- Beyond getting book recommendations, how else will you offer value? Online discussions? Cliff notes?

\- What happens when multiple founders recommend the same book?

\- Will you be using Amazon Associates to make money through affiliate book sales?

And of course, a few comments:

\- "Featured Entrepreneur:" text and entrepreneur profile image do not line up, along with the entrenpreneur's name, this is bugging me and can easily be fixed!

\- You have a very simple description, but you might want to give me a reason why to give you my email address other than getting book recommendations from you

\- Getting high profile entrepreneurs (like Andrew Warner) is great, but what will it really mean for me?

Great idea, hope you get a good list of subscribers!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not very technical but I've been a reader of hacker news for a while. After wanting to start something, for what seems like forever, I finally made this site last weekend. The goal is to provide high quality book recommendations from successful founders. First month's featured entrepreneur is Andrew Warner.</comment>


Algolia introduces pay-as-you-go pricing for search - <AUTHOR> https://blog.algolia.com/introducing-algolias-most-customer-friendly-pricing <comment><USER2> Why the indirection in the pricing page. Like, if a unit is 1,000 searches/month, why not just put that in the matrix.

Free = 10,000 searches/month.

Standard = $1 per 1,000 searches. ...

Pay as you go:

1,000 - 10,000 searches = Free

11,000 - 100,000 searches = $1.00/ 1,000 searches

The whole to unit conversion really just adds a level of indirection that I don't understand. This was further confused by units having different colored dots depending on the plan, making me think there were 3 different kinds of units.

A slider would be nice, let me slide it to what my search volume for a given month would be, and tell me how much that would cost, factoring in volume discounts.

Additionally, this is a huge red flag:

> If you exceed your committed usage, there are overages that will be charged.

What are the overages??! Why is it not just sliding back to pay-as-you-go pricing, like reservations for say EC2 work.

\----

As an aside, we use Algolia to power some search features at Discord. This new pricing structure looks to be an order of magnitude more expensive (we fall under the "contact sales" usage here...) Luckily we're grandfathered in or we'd have to consider putting a cloudflare worker in-front of this and leveraging that to do caching of common hot queries to reduce cost.

<comment><USER3> We (Streak) are in the same boat. Looks like we'd be paying approx half a million dollars a month on their new pricing which would be ~100x more than we are paying now. Haven't heard from our enterprise rep but starting to get nervous...

Sounds like the new pricing is for their ecommerce customers given how much value they provide them, doesn't seem to make sense anymore for SaaS use cases.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, could you expand on how it doesn't make sense for SaaS use cases?

<comment><USER5> Not the GP, but I figure their point is as follows:

If I'm running an e-commerce website, I don't mind pay-per-search since those searches may turn into sales, so the cost is justified. My income scales with search count, and the Algolia price is part of user acquisition costs.

If I'm running a SaaS business, the search is a feature for customers who have already paid, so I don't see any further returns from the search being used. The more a client uses search, the less I'm profiting from having them as a client. They could potentially even cost me money to service them!

<comment><USER6> Interesting. This reminds me of Canada Post's address complete API. You can integrate it with your website or app to ensure the addresses the users enter are valid within Canada and entered correctly. The pricing is around 5–10¢ per search [0]. At that price point, it only makes sense to use it for e-commerce if you are going to deliver physical goods to the customer and want to minimize the number of returned "address not found" packages. But if the pricing were lower, e.g. close to Google Map's 0.3¢ per search [1], I imagine the list of potential uses would have increased substantially.

[0] [https://www.canadapost.ca/pca/pricing/](https://www.canadapost.ca/pca/pricing/)

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/maps- platform/pricing/sheet](https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/sheet)

<comment><USER7> Many local governments publish shapefiles (geojson) that have address information. You could parse out addresses and have a fairly simple free option. Since this data is based on property taxes, these data sets aren't going to be missing parcels (or the tax collector would be missing potential revenue).

<comment><USER6> That still leaves out a lot: unincorporated lands, First Nation reserves, small settlement where all the mail goes to a post office instead of individual buildings, etc.

Also, one of the main benefits from Canada Post API is that it gives you the canonical address Canada Post uses to deliver packages. I don't think this always overlaps with addresses municipalities use to assess taxes. For example, I can imagine for an apartment building belonging to a real estate management company, there would be a single entry in the municipality database (because there is only one _owner_ who needs to pay taxes), but one entry per unit in Canada Post database.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, my initial suggestion likely misses some corner cases. One case I am fairly confident it covers is (not sure if correct term) mutual interest land ownernship (aka, condos). Each layer has the same shape, but they're stacked one top another; each layer is a billable portion of the interest (e.g., a single condo on the shared land).

A poor man's approach could be to query the publicly available data sets, and use that data when there's match. Then, only pay for queries that fall into the edge cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting change. Disclaimer, I joined one of Algolia's competitors ([http://sajari.com](http://sajari.com)) 6 months ago and we are about to release a new product and change our pricing, so I've been thinking about this a lot.

Having worked at Atlassian before, I understand how important simple pricing can be. My personal (and probably biased opinion) is that this is a move in the wrong direction. It appears simpler on the surface, but the concept of a unit and understanding all the disclaimers associated with it make the pricing more complicated than before. If I have to read the faq to understand what I'm getting, it's too complicated IMHO. Also, it seems other features, like analytics retention, crawler, have moved into add-ons, which requires you to contact sales to find out how much you'll pay.

More granular pricing does provide more flexibility, but it also reduces predictability, which can be important especially in small to mid-sized businesses. I'm curious to understand how people feel about "usage pricing" vs. "tiered pricing" where you know exactly what you are paying each month? Which ones do you prefer? We are still finalising our own pricing, any feedback would be very much welcome.

<comment><USER9> THIS ! I feel many times business put the "business-complexities" onto the client, in this case the search-unit and although the CTO explained why (I gloss over it) as a customer , I don't need to understand what makes it difficult in your business nor do I want to know all your internal jargon and limitations. I the customer understand searches and searches per month. Don't make me think !

Like going to a restaurant: I don't want to know the whole nine yards story as to why you don't have lasagne today since one of the guys didn't show up for work and he was supposed to make the sauce and another guy was over his government allowed working hours. All this might be true and adequately explained why there is no lasagne, but now I need to also understand about employees, government working hours and and and. Just give me lasagne or not :) It's almost always a red-herring if you need to "explain" your pricing or use internal-company-jargon in your pricing-pages.

<comment><USER10> I prefer 1000x a complex pricing page than having to talk to a sales rep to get the first sense of pricing.

Each industry has different aspects of how much value they get from a product, the effort to try to encapsulate these aspects into a single pricing functions is much appreciated.

We face the same challenge with Decimals.app - should be adding pricing soon as well

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a huge increase in pricing for all our customers using Algolia.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200620142025/https://www.algol...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200620142025/https://www.algolia.com/pricing/)

The previous Starter tier pricing was a lot cheaper. Most important point to note is that additional searches were closer to 10k/$1 vs the proposed 1000 (additional 100k operations: $10/month). Yes, these were 'operations' not searches' but the mapping between operations vs searches doesn't appear to be anywhere near 10-1.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not the case, the price of unit decrease with volume and you can have a big discount if you want to commit to a yearly (similar to AWS/GCP/Azure)

<comment><USER12> I fail to see where you provided him wrong, based on my math and the calculator in the backend. The existing $29 is roughly equal to $240 on the new plan 250,000 operations vs 250,000 searches. Obviously operations include adding/updating/deleting data. But if you don't do any of that it's basically a different of $220. If you do some operations, say half of them are operations you are looking at $150~ vs $29.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We've loved algolia for the 2-3 sites we've used it for. The speed is unbeatable.

I wish we could've used it for one of our HIPAA use cases (patient data). I could've rolled out powerful search for an internal site in a day, but instead I'm having to build in postgres full text search and looking longingly at them.

<comment><AUTHOR> (I am the CTO and Co-founder), we are HIPAA compliant since 2020 and we can support your use case

<comment><USER13> Good to know. We'll be in touch!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So you basically only pay based on amount of queries? Dataset size doesn't matter? We have an expensive elastic search setup. It's expensive because of the amount of data it contains. But we don't run a lot of queries. So with algolia this would basically be free and potentially faster?

<comment><USER15> It's written in small print under the screenshot of the "units widget" here [1]:

"Number of indexed records is capped at roughly 10% of annual search volume. See FAQ for more information."

The FAQ says:

"When using Annual Commitment pricing (minimum one year commitment and 1,200 units), each unit contains 1,000 searches x 12 = 12,000 searches during the year, and 100 x 12 = 1,200 maximum of records at any point in the year."

[1] [https://www.algolia.com/pricing/](https://www.algolia.com/pricing/)

<comment><USER16> So for 1 million records, you need to spend $1k/month. Hmm.

<comment><USER17> 1 million records doesn't seem like all that much. If each document is 1 MB, that's only 1 GB of indexed data. Does Algolia add a lot of value on top of that?

<comment><USER18> 1 MB * 1,000,000 = 1 TB

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We just jumped on with algolia and we love it (4 days in)

Trying to figure out if the new pricing model is going to skyrocket costs or not. FWIW we are on the old $29/mo plan for the moment.

But Algolia is incredible.

<comment><USER20> For what it's worth, we do around ~5.1k queries on App Search and pay something like $200.

Looking at Algolia (which we didn't go with because it was too expensive), the cost would be about even right now ($1.50 premium * 6). However, that doesn't include the elastic or kibana instance we get at the moment.

Hopefully the cost doesn't grow too sharply.

<comment><USER21> How come you're paying $200 for 5.1k queries on App Search? 5k doesn't seem like a big number so I imagine the lower tier plans/configs like the $20-30 plans should be enough right? Right now I have the lowest configuration and I pay $25/month.

<comment><USER20> Woah. Err I don't handle billing but it looks like we got App Search through Elastic and it comes with the entire ELK stack behind it.

I know they are moving App Search to some kind of Elastic Enterprise service, perhaps we're dealing with that instead?

We use the analytics, clicks, and suggestion API's - idk if those are included at the base level or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> These guys are probably planning to IPO next year. And when they file the S1 they can claim they had 100% year over year growth (mostly due to price increases).

<comment><AUTHOR> (I am the CTO and Co-founder). I can reassure you this is not the case, I don't have visibility on when we will do an IPO and we grandfather all existing customers. We always did that and we still have customers today on 2013 pricing! It bring a lot of complexity internally.

We released this new pricing only because we are convinced this is better for customers.

<comment><USER23> I signed up for an account just to respond to this. I run a small, low-budget, lean startup and we were banking on the starter plan lasting us at least 6 months as we gradually scaled. You cited in the blog post that making this change was supposed to "reduce entry costs" but how has this happened?

Just the limit of the old free plan would cost you more than the old starter plan! The limit of the old starter plan would cost like 7x as much now. Can you give a single use case under which the new pricing is cheaper for entry level customers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand your perception, pricing and perception is hard. I want to reassure you that this is really way cheaper for people to start using the product and as a company it was a huge project to lunch this pricing, especially when you lower the price for such a large portion of users.

The previous pricing was based on indexing operations + search operations. The new pricing is only based on search request and in a lot of situation N search operations = 1 search request (disjunctive faceting, federated search, etc.). At the end, for the big majority of free users (> 99%) they have as many or more search request in the 10 free units than in the old plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For comparison, the old free plan used to be 10k records plus 100k searches. That would be $100/month now.

I think the new plan makes sense if you're selling to sites with purchase intent, but for searching knowledgebases it seems like it's way too expensive -- the value per search just isn't there. Especially when using instant searching and counting each slightly debounced keystroke as a search.

<comment><USER25> I've been working on an open source alternative. It's dead simple to setup and run (including raft based clustering). It also integrates seamlessly with Instantsearch.js library. Would love to hear your feedback on Typesense: [https://github.com/typesense/typesense](https://github.com/typesense/typesense)

<comment><USER24> Tried it out with about 10k short docs and it works pretty well as a potentional algolia replacement. I had to use 'sort_by' : '_text_match:desc' to get good results.

I couldn't find a way to create synonyms, is this possible?

Is it also possible to control typo sensitivity like algolia? e.g. min chars for 1 typo, min chars for 2 typos.

The curation features looks handy, but I haven't tried it yet.

Install and config was a breeze which is appreciated.

I hope it takes off for you. Nice work.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the feedback. Synonyms is on the immediate roadmap, but not available at the moment.

> Is it also possible to control typo sensitivity

You can control overall number of typose with ?num_typos=1 -- there is no way to define min chars for a specific typo. The engine does make some intelligent decisions to optimize. For example, for a 2 letter query it does not use a num_typos=2 even if that is specified.

Glad to hear about the setup. Will continue to improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As somebody with a small side-project that would benefit from search, this sounds like a pretty good deal! Will have to give this a spin and see.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ah, "Value-based" pricing, or, how much a company can gouge their customers before their customers change vendors.

</comment><comment><USER28> Everyone seems really hyped with Algolia, before and after the pricing update but the major drawback i've seen is the pricing model that is still a big issue IMO.

Given you have 10K documents, if you want to make a "sort by something" you have to create a replica with another ranking configuration.

So if you want 4 sort criteria, you'll be billed for 40K document even if you have only 10k at start.

I've looked in competitors like Swiftype and even them point out this issue in the pricing page :

"Index once, sort all you want (No need to replicate engines to sort or filter your data in different ways. Once your data is indexed, it can be filtered, faceted and sorted at will.)"

</comment><comment><USER29> Love the change. I really like the "annual commitments" pricing - I love it when I can pre-reserve a certain amount of performance and get a discount for it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Unit pricing seems complicated and arbitrary.

<comment><USER8> What is your preferred pricing model and why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well thats no good. I will say, that for the customers Ive had who have suffered big problems with their search engines, Algolia has always been the solution. It just works, so its worth paying for. Im a little concerned that this change puts the price over the top.

</comment><comment><USER32> People, just use Doofinder -> [https://www.doofinder.com/](https://www.doofinder.com/)

</comment><comment><USER33> While I love algolia, I hate the way it is implemented on producthunt.

</comment><comment><USER34> this is serverless search. I love it

<comment><USER35> For the user, correct, since you just plop a widget into a page client side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A dollar for 1,000 queries. A million queries costs $10000 dollars?

For that money there are so many better options.

<comment><USER37> And those are?

<comment><USER38> Elastic Search

Lucene

Sphinx

Solr

And thousands of other ones made by hobbyists, but those are the mature (as in since the 90s) ones. For instance Craiglist uses Sphinx.

<comment><USER39> For a quick search engine it's hard to beat Sphinx. I especially love that you can just point it at a database and give it a query and it will just work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is awesome. Now that it exists seems like inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER41> Why do people want this product? If I use the demo search on their homepage, theres several annoyances on mobile that made me nope out. Is it because backend free form search queries are hard? or do people use this primarily for the frontend quality? Edited for typo.

<comment><USER42> Because it gets customers to the product they want faster than anything else in e-commerce. Selling shoes or something online? Algolia will earn back its cost in conversion.</comment></comment>


You can help it get better - <AUTHOR> http://www.pattonoswalt.com/index.cfm?page=spew&id=150

<comment><USER2> I definitely see where Patton is coming from. I was heavily bullied early in school, then honed my "too cool for school" smart ass streak and said a lot of mean shit to a lot of people.

Once you get in the habit of finding smart ass comment for every situation, it's really, really hard to stop. It wasn't such a big deal as a plain old dev, but I'm managing other devs now and it's too easy to be an accidental asshole.

It would have been much easier if I never started. Now I've just got to try and watch my mouth and break the habit.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Despite the fact that the title is in all caps and its just a repost of a Myspace blog entry (which got deaded automatically when I tried to post here) I thought a lot of people here might enjoy this one.

<comment><USER3> If caps are shouting, I'm good with this being shouted from the rooftops. Thanks for posting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone ever seen the 30 Rock where she goes to her reunion, and the whole time, she thought she was bullied in middle school and high school, only to find out that everyone was terrified of her, because she made such cutting remarks?

 _"Hey, Liz, how's your new telescope?"_

 _"I don't know Kelsey, how's your mom's pill addiction?"_

I think a lot about that episode, and I thought more about it reading this blog post. I knew there was a reason Patton was one of my favorite comedians.

</comment><comment><USER5> Surprised there aren't more comments on this, given the number of votes its received. So I'll share something.

I was always a bit of a weird one growing up, especially in high school. I got picked on a bit by various groups, sometimes even by other picked-on kids that wanted to assert themselves. None of it was that severe and there were kids that had it worse. I had friends, and I got along with most people, but I was always a little bit of an outsider, and even my friends thought I was weird. I never fit in with any one group.

But I always felt like it was them that was f'ed up, not me. I never really lost confidence that I was okay, and that I was okay being myself, although it was lonely at times. Looking back I think it affected me more than I realize, because I was pretty anti-social for a while in my late-teen years. I don't have any friends from high school or earlier that I really keep in touch with.

Things started to get better in my second year of college, and I can honestly say that they've gotten better each year since. I moved away from my home state as soon as I finished college, and it's made all the difference. I couldn't be happier with my adult life, I have a lovely family, a good job and lots of friends. Sometimes I think that if I had fit in better as a kid I might have stayed close to home and missed out on the experiences that I've had as an adult. I don't think I'd change a thing.

So I would say to any kid that it's okay to be weird or different; embrace it and don't let anyone make you feel bad about it.

</comment><comment><USER6> When I was that age, almost every piece of advice that came from adults seemed completely unworkable. Even if it was good advice, my brain couldn't process it in that way. I just heard some authority figure lecturing me again, and the thing to do was to appear compliant and get the lecture over with as soon as possible.

I don't think it _hurts_ anything to post advice like this directed at kids, but I have my doubts about how much good it does.

If you really want to change the behavior of 13 year old boys, get some reasonably cool 15 and 16 year old boys to preach your message. That might be a bit of a trick in itself, though.

<comment><USER7> I don't think his point is to change the world. If his message resonates with only one kid that looks up to him, I'm sure it's worth it to him. That's all that matters.

If everyone did this with the kids that look up to them, it has the potential to make a massive impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great message for those of you who have middle and high schoolers (or the equivalent thereof). Show this to them, swearing and all.

</comment><comment><USER9> This message also needs to be sent to the parents of the witty shadows of bullies. Which is where those of us with kids probably come in.

After all, I was the same shadow for a time... and I think many smart kids are, especially after doing a stint in that awkward phase and then realizing that they are, in fact smarter than their tormentors. My folks are smart and admit to having been bullied and using wit to deflect it, but I was never cautioned against bullying others; it was just assumed that I'd do what it took not to be a mark.

And so I need to admonish my kids not to compromise like I did... because we all know that the 10-year-olds that we parent and influence probably won't figure this out until maybe it's too late for some other kid.</comment>


Mint Explains Why The Real Unemployment Rate Is 17.2 Percent  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/04/real-unemployment-17-2-percent-mint/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> U6 isn't the "real unemployment rate," it's just the loosest definition of "unemployment" that the BLS calculates.

It's much higher than U3 because the definition is so much more broad. It is also, of course, much higher than U3 in good times as well as bad.

The cartoon tries to assert that U3 is not valid because it excludes people not actively looking for work, etc. While it's true that there are deficiencies in U3 (and that is the reason why the BLS continues to publish U4/5/6), the primary purpose of U3 is to provide an economic indicator, so we can tell if things are getting better or worse.

U3 is a less subjective definition than U4/5/6 and is more reliant upon primary data, rather than data from sampling-based surveys. It's the broadest definition of unemployment for which the available data is very robust, and thus less likely to drift due to sampling problems. Robustness is a very important quality for an indicator, whose primary purpose is to be compared to itself at some other t.

U4/5/6 are important to keep in mind, but calling any of them the "real" unemployment rate is disingenuous. Any one of them would be inferior to U3 as "the unemployment rate indicator."

<comment><USER3> Your argument fails take into account the fact that the unemployment rate is a highly politicized figure in which the adjustments are by no means all for statistical accuracy.

The discussion of employment and unemployment at the Shadow Government Statistic website gives a good overview of this topic. See <http://www.shadowstats.com/> (I've given the home page since they discourage deep linking - the article is at article/employment).

Of course, the original Mint discussion was hardly better than the parent's argument.

<comment><USER2> My "argument" is simply to state that U3 is a measure defined so that it can rely on population (not sampled) data. This is done precisely to reduce the amount of processes error and bias.

The definition of U3 leaves little room for adjustment, and that is intentional.

If you were worried about "manipulation," then U4/5/6 are much more open to manipulation than U3 is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Mint explains…,_ then why is the link to techcrunch? Perhaps <http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/unemployment-rate-video/> would be nice.

It isn't a pure link jacking, the tech crunchers did add a pair of facts from today's announcements.

</comment><comment><USER5> Today was NFP day and the newest statistics should have set off bells for anyone reading them. A lot of people are already aware of the difference between the U3 and U6 unemployment rates, but consider this:

-11000 jobs were lost in November

-there have been net job losses every single month since Jan 08

\- the unemployment rate officially fell from 10.2 to 10.0 today.

This is kinda like saying a function's value has started growing while its first derivative is still negative. Reeks of bullshit through and through.

<comment><USER6> Unemployment counts the number of unemployed active job-seekers, not the total number of people without jobs. It says so right in TFA.

<comment><USER7> The loss of jobs could easily have led to parents switching from 'employed' to 'home keeper'. I know people who have been fired, and because the cost differences between child care and income are negligible, they're better off being unemployed due to lower taxes.

<comment><USER8> "I know people" unfortunately does not support your argument well.

<comment><USER9> "The loss of jobs _could_ easily have led to parents switching..."

The point of speculation is that it doesn't require support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Somewhat aside: what software do people use to create cartoons like this?

</comment><comment><USER11> Surprised no one pointed out <http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data> which indicates 22 per cent, if the stats today were calculated using the pre- Clinton administration method.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm wondering if I get counted as part of the officially unemployed as the little checkbox that asks you to give details of your job search contacts for the past weeks has never been checked on any of the UI claim forms I received. This is in CA.

<comment><USER13> The U3 official rate is based on a household survey, _not_ any unemployment insurance claims. So whether you're collecting unemployment insurance, whatever you report on the forms, and even whether your unemployment insurance runs out has no bearing on the rate.

Instead, it's a statistical projection based on the surveyed households self- reported employment/looking-for-employment status.

(So you weren't _literally_ counted unless the survey contacted you, but you were _statistically_ counted as long as their sample was representative.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's the relative change that's important. Doesn't really matter what 'scale' you use, the change in % is what is most telling about where we are headed.</comment>


'A Conservative Climate Solution': Republican Group Calls for Carbon Tax - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/science/a-conservative-climate-solution-republican-group-calls-for-carbon-tax.html <comment><USER2> Some prominent members of the group:

• James Baker. He was Chief of Staff and Treasury Secretary under Reagan.

• Henry Paulson. He was Treasury Secretary under Bush 43.

• George Shultz. He was Director of the Office of Management and Budget and Secretary of Treasury under Nixon, and Secretary of State under Reagan.

• Marty Feldstein. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and chief economic advisor to Reagan.

• Greg Mankiw. He was chairman of Council of Economic Advisors under Bush 43.

They have an opinion piece written by members of this group in the OP-ED section of the NY Times to day called "A Conservative Case for Climate Action" [1].

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/opinion/a-conservative- ca...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/opinion/a-conservative-case-for- climate-action.html)

<comment><USER3> > James Baker. He was Chief of Staff and Treasury Secretary under Reagan.

Also Secretary of State and White House Chief of Staff under Bush 41.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What languages/tech do you want to be using in 5 years? - <AUTHOR>

HN is a crowd of early adopters/re-adopters of Clojure, Go, Haskell, F#, node.js, etc. are all very much in style here, but where will they be in 5 years?
What tech will you want to be working with in 5 years? <comment><USER2> I'm still going with Steve Yegge's opinion from a few years ago for the rest of this decade: _JavaScript._ It might have been around for ages but it's just coming into its own as a full-scale, popular language that isn't a total PITA to work with in any serious way (unlike 5-10 years ago).

I've had a good (but lucky) record with checking out languages ahead of the curve but little except JavaScript _really_ excites me right now. For a zillion reasons (and intuition), I'm bullish on Scala, Lua, Ruby (but _only_ if significant implementation improvements come soon _or_ Apple more seriously backs it) and Go, neutral on Python and Haskell, and bearish on Clojure, Java and Erlang. (Feel free to quote this back to me if I get it wrong!).

<comment><USER3> The best part about Javascript is that because it's a functional language it has amazingly deep capabilities of being improved and modified through libraries. The Javascript that people write today (often reliant on prototype/jQuery, node.js, etc.) is quite different from the code that people were writing 10 years ago. The same is likely to be true in another 10 years, even if the language spec. itself doesn't change one iota.

<comment><USER4> Very true. It's also one of the only languages out there to let you inspect functions' source code, which means you can implement full-blown Lisp macros in it using eval(). Given its popularity and the runtime performance of V8, I think this makes it the ultimate language for the next decade.

<comment><USER2> _It's also one of the only languages out there to let you inspect functions' source code_

Got any pointers on this? I've been searching a little and unable to find this and haven't heard of this level of introspection before.

<comment><USER4> Well actually, I did end up writing Lisp on top of Javascript this way: <http://github.com/spencertipping/caterwaul>.

The basic mechanism is to call f.toString() on some function, then construct a new one the way you want it using either eval() (for non-IE browsers), or new Function(code) (for all browsers). Caterwaul leverages this by implementing a JS parser, defining a macro syntax, and letting you determine how the code gets rewritten. (So you can do things like let[x = 5] in x + 1, which is valid JS to begin with but nobody would ever use it :) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use F# for a high-level language right now; at the rate that it's improving, I have a hard time imagining I'll want anything else as my main high-level software language in five years. I wish it had better support for script-y tasks, but for now I'm "stuck" with Ruby for that sort of thing [1].

I use C when I need to do low-level manipulation. D or Go might be better, and one of the two will probably be compelling in five years. I was really hoping that BitC (a low-level language with a modern type system) would take off, but development on that seems to have stalled.

For hardware, I really hope that bluespec becomes mainstream. I use it as an HDL on my spare time projects. It's nearly as expressive as Haskell; other HDLs (Verilog and VHDL) are about as expressive as assembly language, so the advantage you by switching from a mainstream language to bluespec is much larger than the advantage you get by switching from C++ or Java to F#/Haskell/Scala.

[1] Want to do a cross-platform directory copy? You can use Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.FileSystem.CopyDirectory, which doesn't preserve permissions under Linux/Mono, or write your own function. And that's an example of something that's _well_ supported.

</comment><comment><USER6> A Common Lisp variant of "Lisp", ActionScript/Flash, and Android.

Android is the future of computing, Lisp is eternal, and I can't imagine a future without Flash and my beloved ActionScript 3.

Things I want to become more popular: AliceML or Mozart/Oz as LLVM style runtimes and optimizing compilers. Alice is such a beautiful and ambitious language and VM, it's unimaginable that it's not popular.

I would also love to see more pervasive use of "mathematical" and "modeling" tools: R, specially.

More generative audio/visual programming languages; Processing, Pure Data, ChucK, SuperCollider, and live-coding environments.

I want to see Arduino become to "kits" what Android is to mobile OSes.

I want Linux and the BSDs to progress.

I want on going support for my desktop OS of choice: Windows XP. I just love the damn thing.

<comment><USER7> > I want to see Arduino become to "kits" what Android is to mobile OSes.

Care to expand on that one?

I want to be working with something that does to high-quality "consumer ready" end-product creation what Arduino has done to electronic prototyping. Actually, I want to be creating it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's very hard to say. Ten years ago I wrote an app in C++ and thought it's the greatest language around. It's fast, close to the OS and rather interesting to work with (as opposed to VB6, at that time). Five years ago I was doing a lot of Java work. Now my latest business is completely based on C#. The programming domain is moving too fast to make serious statements about future languages. Actually, I can bet that Cobol and C++ will still be popular in 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER9> In 5 years I'd like to be a master Pythonista. I'd say I'm moderately poor at Django and Python in general, I'd like to be able to do all kinds of whizzy things by then.

</comment><comment><USER10> Something I am good with now, but want to explore way more and really get better. This is most likely JavaScript.

I am really hoping/expecting non blocking/async coding to go way up in popularity over the next few years. I know every modern language supports this, but I will probably start getting my feet wet by doing this in Javascript. Reason being the syntax and tools that already exist.

</comment><comment><USER11> Whichever language is best for the immediate job at hand.

5 years is a long time, lots will change in 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER12> just for the heckofit, here's the github #11-22, which i figure will be in broad use in 5 yrs:

objective-C, C#, emacs lisp

actionScript, haskell, lua

scala, clojure, ASP

erlang, common Lisp, groovy

<https://github.com/languages>

</comment><comment><USER13> Emacs, Lisp (but not Emacs Lisp).

</comment><comment><USER14> Python

</comment><comment><USER15> F#</comment>


Why CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2010/07/02/why-ceos-should-tell-it-like-it-is/ <comment><USER2> "As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust. A CEO's ability to build this trust over time is often the difference between companies that execute well and companies that are chaotic."

Awesome quote. From my experience, I would say communication is the greatest challenge for startups in general, whether they've just started or have established themselves and are growing. Without good communication, misunderstandings can easily become a huge headache and perhaps a show stopper.

</comment><comment><USER3> More articles like this should be posted here.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesomely good advice all around.</comment>


San Francisco official tasked with keeping streets clean arrested by FBI - <AUTHOR> https://www.theblaze.com/news/san-francisco-official-tasked-with-keeping-streets-clean-gets-arrested-by-fbi-charged-with-corruption <comment><USER2> The Blaze is a pretty worthless news source, and this article is a good example.

This is a sweeping corruption case against one of the biggest names in SF politics, Public Works director Mohammed Nuru. The allegations mostly involve Nuru bribing various entities to direct money to his friend's business, on one occasion with an actual envelope full of cash.

But The Blaze largely uses their article to highlight SF's homeless problem and poop-filled streets. The only useful bit they provide is a link to an actual news story at SF Examiner. Might as well save some time and click over to that directly:

[https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/mohammed-nuru-head-of-sf- pub...](https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/mohammed-nuru-head-of-sf-public-works- arrested-by-fbi/)</comment>


Godot and Rust Tutorial Series - <AUTHOR> Hey,
I just have started a series of tutorials for people who would like to use Godot in conjunction with GDNative script using the Rust programming language. I cover some basic setup and other stuff like debugging. Happy to get your feedback
You can find the tutorial overview here: https://github.com/Schr3da/godot-rust/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> Awesome, I look forward to viewing them! Unfortunately I'm slammed at work so it'll be another few weeks before I have time for some side projects (like Godot) so don't hold your breath on my feedback. I look forward to watching these. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really great! I never knew you can use Rust with Godot. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> Very much appreciated!!!</comment>


U.S. Tech Funding – What's Going On? - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2015/06/15/u-s-tech-funding-whats-going-on/ <comment><USER2> _" And the tech IPO is basically dead. The tech IPO market is at early 1980's volumes. For most of the 90's the majority of tech funding was public. This has reversed. It used to be routine to hit $20 million in revenues and go public. Not anymore."_

It's interesting how it seems that inequality is an unintended consequence of Sarbanes-Oxley. Before an engineer might vest after four or five years, just as the company is going public at a modest valuation. But if the company stays private, the employees are forced to go double or nothing. Either the company continues to grow, and there is a Google or Facebook like outcome with hundreds of employees getting rich. Or the company goes sideways and the stock ends up diluted to nothing. Furthermore the general public would have shared in the growth in the 1980's, but now most of the value has accrued by the time the company goes public. So for the few that make it, all the wins go to the founders and VC's, rather than having the general public get in early.

<comment><USER3> I'd also add that until the public validation of an IPO and some time trading on the markets, tech companies have just become investment "tokens" that hold arbitrary amounts of wealth as "valuations" that make no meaningful sense. M&A efforts are simply capturing this fanciful valuation and hoping they can sell this token off in some way for more to somebody else.

It's like putting $1 in a sock and under your mattress, claim it's worth $1million and never letting up on that claim by trying to sell your "money sock 1.0" on the open market. You might even be able to get somebody to buy your "million dollar" sock and _they 'll_ go and claim to everybody that it's worth this ridiculous amount (or even more ridiculous they'll trade you their "million dollar" hat for your sock so you can both claim private market validation). Then if the hype lives long enough, they can then sell it for $1.2million to another private buyer, or tear it up and sell it off in threads for even more "buy a genuine thread from the million dollar sock! only $1,000!".

It's almost completely divorced from reality.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure public markets are a unique way of getting "real" prices. Private-equity sales are a real market with real money; if Google buys a company for $50m, that's an actual market transaction that valued the company at $50m. Is the idea that public markets provide better price discovery than private sales do? If so, is there empirical evidence that publicly traded companies really are more accurately valued than privately held companies are? (Genuine question; it's possible there is such evidence, but I haven't found a good article on the subject.)

<comment><USER5> It's a fair hypothesis to me: the public market has a larger amount of people, so more information; it also has mechanisms such as securities that benefit highly and rapidly information bearers.

But the idea that private investors' valuation is not "real" somehow sounds silly to me. The companies are still getting sold. The companies/investors that buy them have real value and expect to generate enough revenue from the acquisitions amounting at least to the acquired value.

The question then (and I think is a good one), is why private investment is getting more prevalent if public markets have more efficient valuation mechanisms. I think the answer is that private investors are more willing to 'kickstart' so to speak the early stages of startups, and from then have grown to dominate the investment market to their great benefit.

<comment><USER6> Public markets investors typically have far _less_ information about companies than do private investors. For most technology companies, the probability of success / profit is driven more by specific company factors rather than larger industry and macro trends. Most public tech companies are understandably worried about disclosing detailed sales metrics / technology roadmap to all investors for competitive reasons; however, as part of any PE / VC backed investment process, private investors are typically given access to all of this detailed information.

<comment><USER5> Ah yes so private investors have more specific information while public market investors focus on overall market trends. But is there no way to public investors to get a glimpse of the internals of the companies without disclosure of competitive information? Maybe through some kind of report by a consultancy under NDA, or a small group of investors under NDA giving an investment report?

<comment><USER6> Under the SEC's Reg FD, public companies are required to disclose all material information to all investors at the same time. So, what you propose is not really workable under the current regulatory regime. Sometimes public companies will give extra disclosure to help investors (e.g., product line revenue, numbers of employees within each function, etc.), but often that information is not enough to truly diligence an investment thesis.

As a result, there is a slight information asymmetry penalty in the valuation; however, this penalty is dwarfed by the liquidity premium you get as a public company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note that they use the valuations of public companies to argue that the market isn't overvalued, then spend 90% of the presentation arguing that all of the value is being "created" in the private markets, and that IPOs are dead.

Moreover, they're basically arguing that it's logical for investors to pile into these late-stage deals, because waiting around for IPO is a losing strategy.

If you believe this data, it doesn't tell you that there _isn 't_ a bubble. It says that if there _is_ a bubble here, it's mostly happening off the books, and depends on the _huge public exits_ of a handful of mythical creatures.

Also, slide 38 is an argument for the "No Exit" way of looking at startups: we've got a boom in low-cost, early-stage deals (2x growth since 2009), coupled with an ever-more-ruthless culling of the herd, where most of the aggregate funding goes into fewer (<20) hot deals than ever. Investors are taking a cheap call option on your youth.

<comment><USER8> Interdependence is a big deal.

Some real, present revenue to big companies comes from the startup world. Maybe it's where I live and what I do, but startups seem to pay for a ton of the Twitter and Facebook ads I see. Amazon makes good money running datacenters for them. Apple and Google see a lot of the value of their mobile platforms created by startup app developers. The big companies' current revenue helps determine how much they're willing to invest, including investments in the form of acquisitions, so the dollars invested into the system can themselves contribute to exit amounts in a weirdly circular way. I'm not the first to observe this.

That in itself proves very little; both sustainable and unsustainable systems can feed on themselves. And all these large companies I'm mentioning are certainly sticking around.

But it does suggest there are paths were one thing goes bad first--new investment falters, the market starts pricing ads drastically lower, big regulatory interventions shake up some subsector or other--and the ripples are bigger and reach further than might be expected.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, this is definitely a reasonably-sized elephant in the room. It's clear that a big chunk of tech revenues come from spending by other tech companies. You can't throw a stone in SOMA without hitting the fancy offices of a startup-servicing startup.

In the late 90s, this happened because all of the companies were buying ad contracts from one another, booking the total value of the contract as revenue, and using that to pad revenue growth. Today's version is the deferred ARR, which turns a tiny cash flow from subscription software into a magically big top-line number. But what goes up quickly, can fall just as fast...it doesn't take many companies to pare back on spending before your fictional deferred revenue graph falls off a cliff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought Dan Primack had a solid response:

[http://fortune.com/2015/06/15/andreessen-horowitz-why- were-n...](http://fortune.com/2015/06/15/andreessen-horowitz-why-were-not-in- the-next-tech-bubble/)

"Andreessen Horowitz's presentation treats the relative lack of tech IPOs as a sign of market health. As I wrote last week, there is a much less charitable way to view it. Moreover, the lack of IPOs also means that the public markets have yet to validate many of these unicorn valuations."

<comment><USER10> Except that the valuations are meaningless without understanding all the other undisclosed terms granted to the VCs in the latter rounds (eg. liquidation preference, participating preferred, etc).

<comment><USER11> How important is a liquidation preference on a $500m round which values Uber at $40b? Not very.

Moreover, most of the institutions doing these late stage rounds and secondaries are the same banks and asset management firms that float the IPOs.

One of the unintended consequences from SOX is the creation of this public- private funding environment where huge private firms and high net worth individuals can invest, but small retail investors are shut out until the venture firms believe the company's value has plateaued (Slide 30). We saw this happen with Facebook, for which there is a ton of second market valuation data from 2007 through the IPO to the present. If you believe that small retail investors should be protected from themselves when it comes to early stage investing, this is a good thing.

<comment><USER10> > How important is a liquidation preference on a $500m round which values Uber > at $40b? Not very.

It's substantial. If VCs get a 1x liquidation preference, then it's (effectively) a no-downside investment since Uber is worth (worst-case) $500M+. If they get >1x and are the last investor (most-preferred), then they are virtually guaranteed solid return. Late stage VCs know what they're doing and valuation is still only half the equation.

As for private firms and high net worth individuals.... that's an entirely different issue; I'm certainly not a fan of accredited investor regulation. I'm also not a huge fan of my retirement (401k funds) being invested into the startup ecosystem without any say in the matter either.

<comment><USER11> I personally wouldn't call it substantial. You can quantify the value of the liquidation preference by looking at the difference between the value of the preferred shares and the value of common shares available on secondary markets. Once you have a company that owns its market, has healthy and growing revenue, etc, there is very little difference. This is what happened to Facebook and Twitter. I'm not familiar with Uber but I do track Pinterest and Airbnb and right now their common stock (no preference) sells for about a 10% discount to the latest preferred rounds. Square and Palantir, which people seem to have less faith in (for whatever reason), trade at a steeper but still not what I'd consider substantial discount.

<comment><USER12> Preferred shares have different terms, they don't all have liquidation preferences. Even if they do, the preference is worth much less once the stock appreciates significantly. For example, if I get a preferred with liquidation preference at some price P then that is worth far more than the same security once the price appreciates to 3*P (since it acts more like a common share, the value of the preference being reduced [since the chance of it being useful is less]).

And which secondary markets are those?

<comment><USER11> The most active secondary markets I see today are the broker dealer successors to Frank Mazzola/Felix Advisor type outfits who use company approved (or tolerated) LLCs to vacuum up stock from ex employees who want liquidity. You have to find them or be referred to them and then they will periodically pitch you inventory as it becomes available. Chris Sacca is doing the same thing but it looks like a venture fund and (as far as I know) he holds to IPO, where on the east coast it looks like a private equity fund and they will allow intra- fund exchanges between old and new investors. Very little transparency in this market and probably the perfect breeding ground for the next Bernie Madoff style Ponzi scheme (not Frank or Chris who are both legitimate).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My takeaway- the VC's have leveraged the money from their successes to create a vortex that sucks in money from consumers, into privately owned companies, back into VC pockets, and back into more companies that get more people to spend more money.

The tech vortex that is sucking away quality of life from the middle class and padding the billionaires (and large company) bank accounts. Throwing out a few bones on occasion (fewer and fewer) to entrepreneurs to keep the vortex going.

Vortex is the opposite of bubble, but it does the same thing to the life of the average person.

<comment><USER14> That's the way capitalism has always worked - it is up to you to make deals that increase your overall level of happiness, and it's up to your counterparties to ensure that those deals _also_ increase their happiness. In past years, instead of "VCs" the villains have been hedge funds, private equity, corporate raiders, giant conglerates, corporations in general, investment trusts, robber barons, and colonial empires.

In return, the average person has gotten information at their fingertips, sheep-throwing, Farmville, Candy Crush, easy travel bookings, a place to stay in every city, a computer on every desk, the ability to fly through the air, a car of their own and a house in the suburbs, and many other things.

The reason money gets drawn away from "the average person" and collects in "billionaires and large companies" is because the average person values money for what it can do for them, while billionaires and large companies value money as a scorecard. Naturally, it makes sense that money will flow away from people who want it so they can spend it, and toward people who want it so they can hoard it. If you're unhappy with this arrangement, decide which side you would rather be on and then act accordingly.

<comment><USER15> >In return

In return for what? I've read your post several times now and it's unclear what you are referring to.

<comment><USER14> In return for forking over the vast majority of their income. It doesn't just vanish (well, except for credit card interest...that _does_ just vanish). The "vortex" that the grandparent's referring to is the money that customers are shelling out for services, which then becomes a tech company's revenue. But in return for shelling out that money, they get mobile phones, cloud storage, a place to stay in every city, on-demand transportation, access to service professionals, a second income stream, exposure for their business, and many other things of value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's my current map of where the money is coming from and going to.

Fed buying trash MBSs with QE -> Investment Banks -> Stock Market -> Big Tech Companies -> Acquisitions -> Venture Capitalists -> Tech Companies -> Startup Employees -> San Francisco Landlords and Fancy Toast Restaurants.

<comment><USER17> And the landlord step is further accelerated by the overseas wealthy using sf real estate as a secure bank account compared to their home country and hedge funds buying up stock as an investment step.

NIMBYs then leverage it further by constraining supply.

<comment><USER16> The "overseas wealthy" is the trade deficits we've been running for the past 30 years slowly trickling back into the U.S asset markets. We were able to export our inflation for 30 years and it was all piling up in foreign central banks as treasury bills. Now, with very low interest rates, it is going into any asset that's not a bond. If the dollar index starts to go the wrong way, watch out, that little stream of overseas dollars buying into U.S assets is going to become a flood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As I have mentioned in another thread.

We don't have a tech bubble we have a Silicon Valley valuation bubble, one a16z is part of themselves.

The discussion isn't whether tech companies are under or overvalued, they are most likely in general undervalued.

The discussion is whether the kind of investments that companies like a16z and other VC companies make are over valued or even valuable.

In other words, they are setting up a straw man about tech funding in general but the very issue is that it's not the tech sector in general that is having insane valuations tied to it but a small but important subset.

<comment><USER19> they made a number of specific points about why they don't think it's a bubble. Now, they could be wrong, but at least they are coherent

<comment><USER20> It's a red herring. They present data about _public markets_ to conclude there's no bubble. But the bubble, whether real or not, is generally considered a funding bubble taking place in private markets.

<comment><USER18> Exactly!

They are showing that there is in fact no tech bubble which I agree with. But that doesn't mean there isn't a bubble far more problematic inside the tech sector. There are a bunch of companies that get a lot of attention for their valuation but without any real proven path to ever honor it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When Andreesen talks about "tech funding", what do they mean by this?

A lot of VC funding that used to go to "tech" companies is now going into much less profitable types of businesses that should not be considered "tech". Businesses that most VC's don't really have a lot of experience with.

For example, their investments in Soylent, Walker and Co, Dollar Shave Club. It is REALLY hard to make money in these types of businesses when compared to software. They could be in for a rude awakening...

<comment><USER22> If your business has a website, it is now a "tech" company.

It's a brave new world.

<comment><USER23> Us consultants call this the "Digital Business Transformation"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Robert Shiller had an interesting analysis of the current stock market's "frothiness": [http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-shiller-stock- market-b...](http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-shiller-stock-market- bubble-2015-5)

Basically, the stock market is a bit overvalued, and people expect that trend to continue. However, peoples' level of confidence in the stock market pricing is very low. To me, if there's a coming crash, it's going to be because investors are overly anxious rather than because valuations are so stratospheric.

<comment><USER25> Hopefully gradual increase in interest rates will result in stabilization of stock value as people pull out for safer low-rate returns (which are basically non-existent now).

Then again the fed sure is taking their time...

<comment><USER26> The average retail investor is still licking their wounds from 2008. Many, like myself, put our tiny blood soaked wads in CD's, at .01 percent. There are millions of Americans who can't gamble on a rigged stock market, and relied on a healthy 5% interest rate.

This free money being doled out by the Fed to a select few entities will have consequences. My biggest fear is market will finally win over retail investors from 2008. Then, and only then will the big boys pull out leaving us holding the empty bag. Big boys who should gave bleed out if Bush Administration didn't throw them a coagulant? (I know a cheezy metaphor.) Oh yes, My America --you are the picture boy of Capitalism?

<comment><USER27> The average retail investor is doing just fine. Anyone who did something as basic as _hold an S &P 500 ETF_ is up quite a bit from the crash.

<comment><USER28> Well, yes. But that dies to fit the narrative of markets bad! Capitalism bad!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If anyone had trouble seeing the embedded flash of slideshare, here's the direct link to the slideshare:

[http://www.slideshare.net/a16z/state- of-49390473](http://www.slideshare.net/a16z/state-of-49390473)

</comment><comment><USER25> This doesn't really directly address the issue of valuations for the unicorns. P/E valuations are probably insane by most metrics - the type of user base growth required to get them in line (P/E wise) with other companies is on the order of double-digit percentages of the global population IIRC.

This doesn't really mean there's a "tech bubble", though. It's possible we'll see a massive correction to those companies, but it will likely be isolated, and thanks to the weird structuring of these private equity deals I can't imagine that the VCs will be much worse off.

<comment><USER30> Facebook revenue grew 8000% from 2007 to 2014. Clearly not all "unicorns" will perform this well. And maybe none will. But possibly they avoided discussion of these companies' P/E because the data is both unavailable and unreliable given their size?

It's not just a canard that these companies are "not focusing on revenue".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think a lot of people don't grasp the extent to which the cost of founding a tech company has fallen since the dot-com boom. I remember forking out tens of thousands of pounds for physical hardware (which then had to be hosted somewhere) and software licences for things like Oracle and Checkpoint firewall, which I then had to install, set up, admin and maintain.

These days, with Google, AWS, Rackspace, Heroku, there's none of that. You can spin up a new server in minutes and scale up as required. All the technical infrastructure is already there, so you can focus on the product and market.

</comment><comment><USER32> 1999-2000 was insane.

Regulators killed the IPO market such that all the gains are being made by venture investors and the public is totally missing out.

<comment><USER33> >Regulators killed the IPO market such that all the gains are being made by venture investors and the public is totally missing out.

A point which seems to be lost in this discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lot's of points to dispute:

Slides talk about S&P IT but no one is concerned with IT public market valuations (at least relative to the rest of the public market). The concern is with private tech market.

Slides talk a lot about how the amount of funding is justifiable but the question is whether the valuations are. Lower amounts of funding do suggest there is less at risk, however.

How do you reconcile slide 37, which suggests that fund raising is as difficult as ever, with the widely held view that money is flowing freely today.

You can't own an index of unicorns (slide 32)

etc.

<comment><USER19> you can own an index of unicorns if you are an LP in a16z :)

<comment><USER12> No, you can own some unicorns but not all of them or something that represents all of them. I suppose you could invest in the top 5-10 VCs but in either case you would also own a bunch of non-unicorns. It would be like saying you can buy an index of CPG companies by buying the S&P500.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "It's Carlota Perez's argument that technology is adopted on an S curve: the installation phase, the crash—because the technology isn't ready yet—and then the deployment phase, when technology gets adopted by everyone and the real money gets made" \- [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows- advan...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man)

</comment><comment><USER35> The slide about e-commerce only making up about 6% of total retail sales is only relevant if there are a lot of "unicorns" which are in that market. According to Fortune's Unicorn list there are only 3 unicorns that are retail e-commerce based businesses.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is a16z focused on the seed stage now? That seems to be what they are selling in these slides.

</comment><comment><USER36> Who were those companies which had funding > 1bn within a year in the year 1999?

<comment><USER37> [http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/fuckedcompany.com](http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/fuckedcompany.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Maybe the tech IPO is dead because Andressen Horowitz (et al) invest in Series B, C, and D at geometrically increasing valuations and have pushed valuation levels to where the public markets are skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER39> The takeaway for me is that investing in tech companies during the growth stage has gone from being mostly for rich people to being pretty much exclusively for very very rich people.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why are IPOs no longer viable? Too much red tape? It seems that investors and their money have a better chance underground (private) where public stocks are either too slow to get a return or the return amount would be much less.

Why does it seem all the money is in the US and not in Canada? More investors? More money? Taxes?

<comment><USER12> If you want to raise money and can't do so without going through the regulations of being a public company you would do so.

The only reason to IPO these days is to provide liquidity to existing shareholders (i.e. cash them out).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Didn't see where the OP explained _why_ the tech IPO market is dead.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is there a video of someone giving this presentation? It's interesting.

</comment><comment><USER43> IPO's are dead and so are options.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've been adamantly opposed to the public trading of tech companies for fifteen years now:

The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

[http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/stock/venture/capital/...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/stock/venture/capital/misery.html)

Investment yes, Wall Street no.

The reason to seek investment is to grow one's company so that one can grow one's business in ways that would not be possible to fund out of one's current revenue.

One of the very wealthiest people I have ever met founded "The Nation's Largest Sperm Bank" in the early 1970s with $2,500.00 of his own money, along with just one other partner, mostly for liquid nitrogen dewars, medical lab equipment as well as pr0n.</comment>


Firefox add-on to add OTR encryption to web-based chats - <AUTHOR> http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/pipermail/otr-dev/2011-June/001183.html

<comment><USER2> I wish I had more friends that would actually use OTR...

<comment><USER3> I think the biggest problem is client support, and that some people prefer using multiple devices for chat, including web based services (GMail, Facebook Chat etc).

Even with Jabber where you can have separate resources, it's not possible to have some clients use OTR and some not (with good reason, I guess), so you either have to add a separate, non-OTR account, or get used to turning OTR on and off manually. And I'm still looking for an iPhone Jabber app with OTR support.

<comment> mike-cardwell I have a solution to this problem. For all of my IM'ing I use several IRC clients. I point them all at a single Bitlbee server which gates from IRC to various IM networks. I use the Bitlbee OTR plugin and assign each network its own OTR key. So no matter what IRC client I am using, I always have the same OTR key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Related to this. Some of you may remember "Kik" being launched last year. There were quite a few discussions about it here. Anyway, I set up an OTR feature request on their GetSatisfaction page a while ago. If you're using Kik and want OTR support, vote it up:

[http://getsatisfaction.com/kik/topics/otr_for_private_conver...](http://getsatisfaction.com/kik/topics/otr_for_private_conversations)

I also set up one calling for SSL at the same time:

[http://getsatisfaction.com/kik/topics/secure_kik_with_encryp...](http://getsatisfaction.com/kik/topics/secure_kik_with_encryption)

That ones been implemented now though. Kik 5.0 came out a little over a month ago and had SSL support, but didn't do certificate verification. Kik 5.1 came out a few days ago and now finally has working certificate verification.

</comment><comment><USER4> I want this for general posts on Facebook!

<comment> mike-cardwell OTR is only suitable for real time communication. For posting messages on facebook (as for email) you would use PGP. This used to be possible using Firefox with the FireGPG Addon, but the developer stopped working on it and a release wasn't even made for Firefox 4.

FireGPG was brilliant. It would detect blocks of PGP in the page, and add "Decrypt/Verify" links to the appropriate place in the page, and would let you easily encrypt/sign data. I can't believe nobody took over development. I keep meaning to learn how to write Firefox addons specifically so I can take up this project, but I haven't found the time.

<comment><USER5> But PGP gives the wrong guarantees.

<comment> mike-cardwell Yes and no. Depending on what "guarantees" you're looking for.

<comment><USER5> If the author of the root comment wants something like "OTR for Facebook" they probably wouldn't like the guarantees that PGP gives.

But Facebook and privacy don't mix anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't like that OTR allows the person your talking with to deny that they said something they said. I'd rather have pgp signed/encrypted chat so I can prove who said what.

I may be misunderstanding but I think OTR sends the encryption keys with the chat (to accomplish deniability), and while this means your text isn't transmitted in plaintext, it may as well be. Im open to being proven wrong though.

<comment><USER3> You're misunderstanding, OTR isn't equivalent to plain text at all. For a good introduction to the details, see the CodeCon presentation on the website (<http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/>).

The encryption keys are not sent with the chat, they're generated using DH key exchange. After a conversation is finished, others may forge messages to make them look like they came from you, but they cannot read the messages you originally sent. This gives you plausible deniability, which is what you want in most use cases (if you don't, then you're right that PGP is a better option).

The key exchange is susceptible to a man in the middle attack, which can be prevented by comparing fingerprints using a separate communication channel. Once compared, all future conversations should be impossible to intercept. If your private keys are ever found (a TSA official steals your laptop), they'll be unable to decrypt past conversations. Unless you've left conversation logging on in your chat client, of course.

I never thought much about using OTR until i logged into GMail and discovered reams and reams of OTR conversations stored in the chat logs. I never used the GMail Chat client, and this was a real eye-opener for me. Had I not been using OTR, Google would have stored a couple of years worth of conversations between my friends and kept them forever.

By the way, ZFone / ZRTP (<http://zfoneproject.com/>) is a protocol using similar ideas, but for VoIP calls.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which watch(es) are you wearing? - <AUTHOR> And why did you choose that watch/these watches? <comment><USER2> Top-right corner of my Android.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm rocking a Seiko SKX007. It was cheap, it's robust, it's not too big and it looks awesome on a NATO strap.

In a few years it'll be joined by a Submariner 14060M, if I can find one in good condition at a good price point.

</comment><comment> tony-allan Seiko Solar Sports SNE095P2

\- No batteries to buy

\- Field watch style (love it)

\- Waterproof

\- Great value for money</comment>


Ask HN: Eyes failing due to programming job. Any way to stop it? - <AUTHOR> First off, I am self-diagnosing this issue.  I have an optometrist, but I am unable to go through a complete eye test because I experience vasovagal syncopes [1] from the combination of eyedrops and bright lights involved (3 times and counting).
I had 20/15 vision in both eyes in my teens.  I am now in my early thirties.  My eyes started to go astigmatic after starting a programming job in my late twenties, getting worse at the rate of about 0.25 diopters every 1-2 years.  According to my optometrist, I am neither near nor farsighted.  Both eyes now have what's called "against-the-rule" astigmatism, which is less common.  I can, by looking at distant street lights at night, tell that the astigmatism is correlated with time staring at a computer screen.
I can't simply program less, so is there a way to "stop" the progression of astigmatism due to the screen viewing?  One thing I thought of is if there were a visual device that allowed the screen to appear at infinity, for example.  I have already switched to using a 65 inch television from a distance of 10 feet at home, but it doesn't appear to help much.
To be clear, I experience no pain from my condition, just apprehension that it will get worse and affect my driving.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/vasovagal-syncope/symptoms-causes/syc-20350527 <comment><USER2> Stop messing around with self-diagnosis, and go to a real opthalmologist (not just an optometrist). Your eyes are too important to play "I know what's going on" games. Being able to see is a _really big deal_. (I learned this when I got cataracts, and watched myself slowly going blind for several months.)

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's likely OP's self diagnosis is wrong as well, since there's no reason looking at a monitor should lead to eyesight deterioration. I would throw out as a general caveat to be mindful of one's screen brightness. But this sounds like way past "time to see a real doctor" time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" fallacy.*

Programming will not cause astigmatism, which is due to the faulty curvature of your cornea-lens complex.

* it was after 'this', therefore 'this' caused it.

Very unlikely. You might as well blame getting out of bed in the morning for the astigmatism also, because the astigmatism happened after you kept getting out of bed.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I've been programming, sitting in front of the computer for 20 years, since I was 13. My eyes are no worse today than they were when I was 19.

On the other hand there are plenty of outdoorsy friends who work in civil engineering and rarely sit in front of screens. They have much worse eyesight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like the others, see a pro. Until then, get outside! Focus on things far away. Tops of trees, mountain sides, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> What they said but also:

Big monitor(s).

I have a 34 curved and a 27. Both are high res.

That way I don't need to wear glasses.

</comment><comment><USER8> There are eye tests where they use optics rather than dilation. Go get that.</comment>