How to Know If an Idea Is Worth Pursuing - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@thwiv/how-to-know-if-an-idea-is-worth-pursuing-75501f81ad <comment><USER2> Our educational culture has us convinced that we need to have some kind of complete mental process before we produce an answer for some problem. In school, you answer a question by recalling information, making deductions, and only after eliminating your doubts to a sufficient degree do you scratch your answer on a piece of paper. Oh, and a good student is always afraid of being wrong. It's a mentality that we carry into adulthood only to be paralyzed by it. If only we taught kids to instinctively do and produce even at the risk of being wrong or looking like a fool later. We should habitually be exploring, doing, and engaging with problems and ideas. Pursuing the right ideas in your career should amount to selecting from your experiences and the experiences that others have shared with you. What ideas worked and what didn't? How did the outcome conform to your expectations? It doesn't have to be a complete and finished product. What did you learn from making this prototype? What surprised you? No doubt you've have many bad ideas over the years. We all have them. What projects are providing value to you because you enjoy working on them, and what projects look like they could provide real value to others in the world? Those are the projects worth pursuing for the long run.

<comment><USER3> > Oh, and a good student is always afraid of being wrong.

The classical "right/wrong" paradigm followed me into my music playing too. (Just a bedroom guitarist, not a pro.) It took me years to realize that music - and arguably any creative activity - needs a vastly different mindset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Research is a pretty good way to know if your idea is worth pursuing. In my case:

1\. Read one of top-voted comments on CS Career Questions sub-reddit in past year.

2\. Write blog post on topic, get to #1 on Hacker News.

3\. Write intro to book based on blog post ideas, turn into blog post, get to front page of Hacker News.

4\. Write book.

5\. Sell some books.

Compare to "I had an idea! let's do some work".

Credit: [http://stackingthebricks.com/](http://stackingthebricks.com/) was hugely helpful in going from "I have an idea!" mindset to "I should rely on research" mindset.

</comment><comment><USER5> If your goal is to build a company, I think you should focus on the following:

1\. Find a problem that you (or someone you know very well) have.

2\. Look at the existing solutions to the problem and evaluate not only if you can build a better solution, but also how quickly people will switch to something better if they came across it today (i.e. How fed up are people with current offerings? How easy will it be for them to switch?).

3\. Build and market something for a very small group of customers or users. Focus on making that group extremely happy with your product or service. (It could be as small as one customer or user at first.)

<comment><USER6> What if the idea you have is for a real need/issue you face but its trivial for an established player to build in as a feature?

<comment><USER7> How many "you"s are there out there? Is this a space BigCo would bother with? Would the other "you"s trust your more/less than BigCo? Is your issue really that important or does it just annoy you?

In general, the only way to find out is to talk to everyone you can that you think is "you". Ask them if they care. Ask what they'd pay for a solution.

<comment><USER8> Better than asking them what they _would_ pay, ask them to _actually_ pay a token amount, with the promise that they'll get it back if the product never comes to market or doesn't meet their needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have had success using this checklist [0].

0\. [https://www.tillett.info/2016/01/27/a-good-idea- checklist/](https://www.tillett.info/2016/01/27/a-good-idea-checklist/)

Yes it is mine :)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for posting. From my perspective, seems like an even better checklist, and I'm planning to apply it to a few projects I have in mind.

<comment><USER9> Remember to contact me if you have more than 16 :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I had to ask other people then none of my ideas would have been worth pursuing. That is the problem with novelty. If an idea is truly original and fresh nobody else will see the value in it until the work is done and the value is immediately available.

<comment><USER12> This is really not true. If the idea is so novel that people can't understand and want it when you pitch it to them, building it is not going to help. You still have to pitch it to them.

I'll add: if you think it's true, it probably just means you're bad at pitching.

<comment><USER11> > This is really not true. If the idea is so novel that people can't > understand and want it when you pitch it to them, building it is not going > to help.

In my experience that isn't true at all. I have often found that new ideas are often met with a lack of care but sometimes contempt or even disgust. People being emotionally threatened by new ideas is actually a thing and there is nothing you can do about it except fast forward to the future when those people have gotten past their inner conservatism.

It is so incredibly rare that something screamingly original is met with a positive reaction, likely because there is no positive frame of reference on which to build enthusiasm. The only time I have any luck in this area is when I pitch my original ideas to people who are extreme experts around in that area such that the idea isn't a creative stretch for them.

Even when I build the new thing the positive reactions are, at first, exceedingly rare. A new idea doesn't become popular until it is endorsed by popular people or by early adopters who enjoy experimenting with wild unknowns. People generally need to be told something new is good before they can reach that conclusion themselves, but when it does happen it happens like a flood.

Based upon these experiences I don't dick around with pitches. Unless you really REALLY need a favor from somebody you are just wasting your time, time that could be better spent just building the new thing.

<comment><USER13> The answer is to gather feedback from early adopters, not avoid users entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Garrett Lisi has a moonshot of an idea, a grand unified field theory using the E8 Lie Group. He works on it and it is still alive. Of it he says:

 _I consider this to be a developing theory that is worth my time to work on, as a long shot._

 _Worth my time_. I think this sums up everything and I take it to heart. First and only, it has to be worth your time. Before anything else this is your deal. It has nothing to do with MVPs or investment or customers. This has to do with you, whether succeeding or failing (and chances are high that you will fail), whether it is worth your time.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything)

I also like Bezos' _regret minimization_ , whether you would regret _not_ attempting this.

</comment><comment><USER15> This post evaluates ideas from the perspective of the person who's doing it, rather than from the customer. This post is not about building a successful business, rather it is about finding out what "you" want to do. These are often, two different things.

<comment><USER16> You're absolutely right. When I was writing this I wasn't quite exploring it from the perspective of creating a successful business, but rather taking on a project from start to completion, which is something I (and I think a lot of other people) struggle with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> First make sure if it's your decision. Maybe the idea is worth pursuing but would bring financial ruin to you or make your family suffer? Or has some consequences that would be difficult to reverse, like getting a reputation of insane/maniac?

</comment><comment><USER18> Does the idea solve a problem that customers DEMAND a solution to. Can you readily find 10 actual customers.

<comment><USER19> There very best ideas create capabilities that the customer didn't even know they wanted or needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If your goal is to create something great focus on ideaLs instead of ideas.

An ideal is your an improved version of the/a/your world according to your vision.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good article. Always drowning in good ideas and never enough time to get to most of them.</comment>


Launching CakePlate, a boilerplate CakePHP distribution for fast web apps - <AUTHOR> http://cakeplate.posterous.com/launching-cakeplate

<comment><USER2> 'fast' and 'CakePHP' shouldn't be used in the same sentence. Cake is great for RAD (Rapid Application Development) but the framework itself is massively bloated to almost the same level as a full CMS.

You'll get to market faster, but you'll also be planning a rewrite or migration sooner should you enjoy some degree of success.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you expand on what you see as the bloat? I find the base distribution of CakePHP to be very lean, and using it on half dozen production projects, I have found no issues with speed, especially with proper use of memcached and media compression.

<comment><USER3> <http://avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks>

<comment><USER4> These benchmarks are from two years ago. The version of Cake used isn't even a stable release (1.2 RC1). Either way 1.3 has replaced 1.2 and is plenty fast for 99.99999% of sites.

<comment><USER5> Another benchmark source... <http://www.yiiframework.com/performance/>

Take with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER6> This benchmark seems to be either out dated or somewhat falsified. I ran the same benchmark on my system and CI out performed Yii ( [https://github.com/JosephMoniz/BlueElephant/blob/master/docs...](https://github.com/JosephMoniz/BlueElephant/blob/master/docs/benchmark.md) ) . The main point though is that with or without caching (APC) CakePHP is the slowest by an order of magnitude.

EDIT: yeah, pretty sure the original Yii benchmark is dated as the graph has older versions while the phpmark repo has slighlty newer ones ( <http://code.google.com/p/phpmark/source/browse/#svn/trunk> )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is excellent. I've been wanting a similar PHP version of the Html5Boilerplate for some time now. If this saves me as much time as the Html5 version, I'd hop on this in a heartbeat. Seeing more PHP frameworks take this approach would be a great thing, I believe.

The RoR commmunity has had this opportunity for quite some time now with Thoughtbots' Suspenders (<https://github.com/thoughtbot/suspenders>) template.

</comment><comment><USER8> You might want to update your copy to state that you are using the 1.3.6 version of CakePHP, and not the 1.3.3 version.

As well, Bitly and Tinyurl would be better served as Behaviors or Datasources, but that's a separate discussion altogether.

Good job otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch! Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why not some form of user self-registration and admin management tool as well? I see a facebook connect in there, which helps, but a pure cake-based user reg/management system would go a long way towards a faster 'out of the box' experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> CakePHP comes with that out of the box. You can use the built-in Auth component for registration and user management, and the "Bake" tools will give you the option of creating admin functions, similar to Django's.

<comment><USER10> I use CakePHP (actually forced to). You can't compare the bake tools with Django admin. The UI of Django admin is usable in fact it's actually nice. I've had lot's of clients who like it. But the generated CSS by the bake tools is non-usable. I usually end up having to write the views for admin when using CakePHP compared to not having to do anything much when using Django.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, bake's default skeleton is indeed pretty lame, but it is possible to replace this with other skeletons (<https://github.com/josegonzalez/app_skellington> for example, which does auth etc.)

And Django Admin? I've since stopped my work on app_skellington in order to work on <https://github.com/josegonzalez/cake_admin>. It isn't complete, not by a long shot, and php's syntax makes it difficult to use a DSL without going outside the language into something like yaml files, but it will do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> TL:DR

Find code here: <https://github.com/rynop/CakePlate></comment>


BEAST Cryptographic Attack Mitigations Overturned  - <AUTHOR> http://threatpost.com/not-so-fast-on-beast-attack-mitigations/102308 <comment><USER2> BEAST in practice, at least as far as I understand it (pretty well, that is, except that I might be dating myself a bit) requires more than a vulnerable browser. The attacker needs precise control over the first bytes of a new request on an existing SSL session. As I remember it, Thai and Juliano needed the Java plugin running to demonstrate it when they first discovered it.

<comment><USER3> That's correct: control over the first few bytes (the size of the encryption block) is needed. In addition, in practice you will also need a Same-Origin Policy bypass in order to submit requests to the target web site.

Surprisingly, the Java SOP bypass used for BEAST originally is still without a fix. In addition, IIRC, Java continues to treat sites behind the same IP address as belonging to the same origin. I think that, with some trickery, the latter could be used for arbitrary SOP bypass too.

In my research I discovered that XmlHttpRequest allows you to use arbitrary methods, which is handy, because those are the bytes that are submitted first. So that feature, along with keep-alives and a SOP bypass could also make BEAST possible in a vulnerable browser. (Disclaimer: I tested this approach a bit, but I haven't attempted to exploit it all the way.)

<comment><USER4> Oh my.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Binary JellyFish – A mistake while creating Newton Fractal - <AUTHOR> http://code-art.chintanghate.me/BinaryJellyfish.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The colored version can be seen here : [http://code- art.chintanghate.me/The%20Dark%20Side/BinaryJell...](http://code- art.chintanghate.me/The%20Dark%20Side/BinaryJellyfish.html)</comment>


Show HN: Why sign a NDA when you can just pinky swear instead? - <AUTHOR> http://pinky-swear.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> My friend and I made almost exactly the same thing in Python about 2 years ago.

[http://pinkyswears.herokuapp.com/](http://pinkyswears.herokuapp.com/)

[https://github.com/yuvadm/pinkyswear](https://github.com/yuvadm/pinkyswear)

<comment><USER3> Whoa. Those are eerily similar.

<comment><USER4> As are the (non-Bootstrap) element classes, names and IDs in the code...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is funny, but I doubt is resolves the main issue with NDAs: they tend to be enforced by people who put too much value on ideas, will over-associate future successes to the extended memories of their ideas, and who underestimate how unoriginal they ideas actually are.

Even being an hermit in the middle of the Lapland forest, I have seen too many unrelated people suggest to me similar ideas within weeks far too many times not to see any NDA on anything not fully developed as too high a liability to sign.

<comment><USER6> The dumbest NDA I ever saw was at a 3 Day Startup event I helped run.

This loser (whose idea absolutely sucked) actually had the audacity to make the first slide of his deck an NDA and then _read it aloud to the entire audience_ which consisted almost entirely of college kids.

The idea was an online tutoring site. (Did I just break the law?) That was the magic he didn't want us telling the world about.

I just stood in the back laughing. The domain for his company hadn't actually been registered—I half-considered buying it right then just to screw with him out of spite.

<comment><USER7> Did you end up explaining to him why NDA's may be counterproductive? Sounds like a valuable lesson he could've learnt ;)

<comment><USER6> No. I couldn't stand him so I just let his reputation in the community self- implode until he moved back to the east coast. Dick move? Probably but he really got on my nerves.

<comment><USER8> Inaction is rarely if ever a 'dick move' (unless you promised action)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://friendda.org/](http://friendda.org/)

"WHEREAS I possess a bright idea that I am choosing to disclose to you, The Advisor, with the mutual understanding that you are my friend and that you will not screw me."

</comment><comment><USER10> Turned down an "opportunity" to interview at Amazon once because of their particularly onerous NDAs.

I worked for a competing company, and Amazon's recruiter couldn't get it through her head that if I signed their NDA, my current employer would be exposed to potentially false but hard to disprove claims that Amazon's trade secrets had been leaked.

They kept trying to get me to sign, so I told them that as a professional my obligation was still to my current employer, and respectfully declined to continue.

If you have super secret stuff, don't tell it to people.

<comment><USER11> "Would Amazon like to hire someone who turns their back on their current employer?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Grammar nits: "A NDA" should say "an NDA." The ellipsis should be three dots, and there shouldn't be a space before it.

<comment><USER13> Actually, both are acceptable in this case. If you read the abbreviation using the words they stand for, i.e. "non-disclosure agreement", then "a" is correct. If you read the abbreviation as letters, i.e. "N-D-A", then "an" is correct.

Source: [http://www.gpuss.co.uk/english_usage/a_or_an.htm](http://www.gpuss.co.uk/english_usage/a_or_an.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We created Shake ([http://shakelaw.com](http://shakelaw.com)) to strike a balance between simple, short, plain-English language, and legal validity (marrying those two is harder than you might think). Like them or not, NDAs are signed all the time (we surveyed nearly 100 startups and found that the average CEO/Founder signs 3/month). I was surprised by that number, but that's what the respondents said. I don't advocate signing NDAs for everything, but we were aiming for a middle ground between a pinky swear and a traditional NDA full of legal jargon. Simplifying and standardizing the language and making them easy to create and sign (we started on iOS) takes some of the formality and awkwardness out of NDAs (and other agreements) without giving up protections or professionalism. Disclosure: I'm the CEO of Shake, which is free if you want to check it out.

<comment><USER5> I probably can't really use because I'm not in the US, but thank you so much for that. Now, to be completely happy, I just need to choose what torture instrument I'll use on whomever wrote Apple's EULAs, and I'll be a happy man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think a lot of developers and designers underestimate the reasons for NDAs. I have been asked to sign them for most places I've worked, and have been more than happy to do so.

\- What if you deal with customer data? I worked at an analytics company, and "company x" might not like you to disclose that they get 100,000 hits a month.

\- What if you deal with security issues? I worked as a pen-tester and our clients required certain levels of NDA or security clearance.

It's not all about protecting ideas. Very often it's about protecting customer data, or it's a requirement from much higher up chain.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't get it. It is just a form where you can write your own NDA.

<comment><USER17> And it also sounds kind of childish. If you are going to charge a customer a high rate as a consultant, then asking them to sign this seems somewhat unprofessional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How enforceable is this? I like the idea and I remember reading something (possibly written by pg) about binding text messages, but if I wanted to actually use this how would I convince someone intent on me signing an NDA.

I hope I'm not over-analyzing something potentially made in jest, but I'm fascinated on what it takes to make your word legally binding.

<comment><USER19> I think the point is to communicate "I would prefer an agreement enforced by social norms to one enforced by legal norms here." This is similar to my all- purpose dodge: "My professional discretion is free. If you want a formal contract I will be happy to execute it along with my formal invoice."

<comment><USER20> It's not a very good dodge. Signing anything, even something done in jest, creates more risk than if you hadn't.

<comment><USER21> If you're _also_ sending an invoice, I don't think it counts as "in jest."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So the point of this is ... "Ideas are not important"?

<comment><USER23> Common ideas are unlikely to be protected from competition by an NDA and constrain the other person's actions in a fairly significant way. Uncommon ideas are innately protected by requiring consecutive insights in a subject area which others are highly unlikely (in the sense that if you require 15 ideas that someone might or might not have from a subject area, there's a three in a hundred thousand chance of whoever someone talks to about it having that overlap) to be grocked and spread to someone else who's going to leverage it.

In either case it's difficult to see why someone would sign an NDA, that is largely to your benefit and the exclusion of theirs. Asking them to do so is roughly equivalent to the claim you're about to show them a unicorn; a simple, effective idea that somehow the rest of humanity has missed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I got a kick out of this. Great project.</comment>


Warning as 4G Hotspots Are Hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/reverse-engineering-4g-hotspots-for-fun-bugs-and-net-financial-loss/ <comment><USER2> I buy cheap Motorola phones, put LineageOS on them, and pick the security patches as they come along. This is a better way to go about it as it's unlikely any of these standalone units will get firmware updates.

Two benefits:

1\. I get many security holes patched.

2\. I get a hotspot on a phone plan, which is usually cheaper and can be used as a second phone.

</comment><comment> CKN23-ARIN It's usually not hard to get a root shell on these things from the user-facing web management page, in my experience. It's not surprising to learn that they're remotely-exploitable too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I strictly use my iPhone to tether. I keep it updated with the latest updates but I still worry about it being remotely exploitable but I feel a lot more safe with it than these other devices.

<comment><USER4> If all your hotspot does, be it iPhone, Linux box or anything else, is forwarding VPN traffic between your devices and your cloud instance (your VPN exit node), why should you care about hotspot vulnerabilities?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h The device running the VPN is still exposed to the attacker-controlled device. Now, on a decently-configured system this is probably fine (your workstation doesn't allow password-based SSH, right?), but it's still not great.

<comment><USER5> Seems silly to care so much about your tethered connection when the average home network has a bunch of computers, random IOT kit, a end-of-lifed smart TV, friends mobile devices and the random MAC addresses in your DHCP lease pool that you can't even account for.

Network security is unmaintaniable. Start caring about defensible boundaries instead.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h To some extent, sure; seriously, you _should_ be okay exposing your laptop to an attacker-controlled hotspot. I'm actually pretty sure my machines _would_ be fine exposed like that. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't minimize that exposure if possible:)

Also, I really do question the premise; it _is_ possible to be selective with what you let on your network. You shouldn't rely on it, of course, but again, better to minimize exposure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately those issues have nothing to do with LTE (or similar). Would have liked some analysis of the radio interface.

</comment><comment><USER7> Better not to buy ZTE, until they fix their procedures

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, most of those run Linux (Android, because cheap and easy).

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's the original source, it's not linked directly in the article: [https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/reverse- engine...](https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/reverse- engineering-4g-hotspots-for-fun-bugs-and-net-financial-loss/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks, this should really be the post. I didn't find the Forbes article did anything but excessively quote the source material.

<comment><USER10> People really need to adjust to Forbes being nothing more than a content mill nowadays. They'll publish almost anything.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/business/media/jeffrey- ep...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/business/media/jeffrey-epstein- media.html)

<comment><USER11> I usually read Starts With A Bang [1] and GrrlScientist [2] on Forbes. The former writes well grounded articles on particle physics and cosmology while the latter presents good summaries of recent findings in biology.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/)

[2] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess that's a reason you need a 5G hotspot

<comment><USER13> Yeah, because nobody would ship a cheap 5G hotspot with a known exploitable 2.7 kernel vintage linux on it, right? /s

"IoT": The Internet of Unpatched Linux Devices...

<comment><USER14> The S in IoT stands for Security.</comment></comment></comment>


The Wonderful WiFi232: BBSing Has Never Been Easier - <AUTHOR> http://www.bytecellar.com/2017/05/30/the-wonderful-wifi232-bbsing-has-literally-never-been-easier/ <comment><USER2> It's only slightly related, but I had this thought about setting up a wireless alternative to old BBS systems using only WiFi hotspots without an Internet connection.

[https://www.joeldare.com/blog/post/wireless- bbs/](https://www.joeldare.com/blog/post/wireless-bbs/)

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty excited about starting up my ham radio BBS soon.

<comment><USER4> That's awesome! I've been kicking around some ideas in this space, but it's just a pipe dream at this point. Alternative means of communication are interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love seeing the ESP8266 at the heart of this project. This little chip is the sweet spot - if you are new to the chip I would check out the videos by CNLohr on YouTube.

But this device is out of stock. Anyone hunted down schematics or firmware source for this device?

<comment><USER6> I've used the ESP8266 for a few things, and honestly its just such a lovely little device with great support, I don't know why it doesn't just get used everywhere.

Except it does. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Or you can use raspberry pi and tcpser

[http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/215/putting-your-retro- comp...](http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/215/putting-your-retro-computer-on- the-line)

<comment><USER8> 10x the price, 5x the size, thats what makes ESP8266 so great

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some of the emulators for older computers provide similar functionality.

The VICE Commodore computer emulator can use an external program called TCPSer to provide an emulated Commodore PC with a virtual modem. The command ATDT ip- address:port can be used to connect to telnet-ready or vanilla-TCP BBS's with vintage terminal software.

</comment><comment><USER10> Archive as the site is dead at the moment: [http://web.archive.org/web/20170604130327/http://www.bytecel...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170604130327/http://www.bytecellar.com/2017/05/30/the- wonderful-wifi232-bbsing-has-literally-never-been-easier/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Tried finding the spec for modulating/demodulating recently and came up empty. I wanted to write a useless phone app that sends and receives data by way of the old audio, two-tones, (modem) format.

Anyone have any pointers?

[Edit: reading other comments, probably I want to look into "v.32bis", etc.]

<comment><USER8> [https://www.araneus.fi/audsl/](https://www.araneus.fi/audsl/)

[https://github.com/romanz/amodem](https://github.com/romanz/amodem)

[http://aaronscher.com/GNU_Radio_Companion_Collection/Audio_M...](http://aaronscher.com/GNU_Radio_Companion_Collection/Audio_Modem_loop_back_test_FSK.html)

[http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup- pictured...](http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup- pictured.html)

negotiation protocol: [https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-V.8b...](https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-V.8bis-200011-I!!PDF-E&type=items)

[http://goughlui.com/2017/05/30/project-the-large- collection-...](http://goughlui.com/2017/05/30/project-the-large-collection- of-v-34-modem-sounds/)

edit: you and me both :) I,v been semi obsessed with writing my own soft modem ever since I saw Oonas sound of dialup writeup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "[...] the way it was meant to be done"

For me, calling a BBS will always be a modem and modem tones. I would like this more if there was a way to open a TCP connection directly to the BBS and somehow do v.32bis tones over IP. This would constrain the connection to actual modem speeds and wouldn't require a PSTN line or a VoIP provider. It would be similar to VoIP except using a codec that was specifically designed to make those legacy modulation schemes work. Ideally, this wouldn't require a real modem but if you could use a real modem and a FXS device, that would be sweet, too.

<comment><USER13> Have you seen quiet.js?

[https://github.com/quiet/quiet-js](https://github.com/quiet/quiet-js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like how BBS over modem and telnet on an ancient machine loads faster than like 50% of websites.

<comment><USER15> In a similar vein, years ago I designed a "digital extension cable" that communicated by modem. The point of the device was to replicate the state of 4 inputs at a water pump station to a remote monitoring site a few miles away. The box I built scanned the inputs about once per second, and if there was a state change, called the remote site over a leased phone line where an identical box had 4 outputs that replicated the state.

It turned out to be much faster to make the call at 1,200 bps than at the 57.6kbps max speed of the modem.

At the high baud rates, the time the modems took just to negotiate the connection and agree on a speed (about 5-10 seconds) was far longer than it took to transmit the few bytes of data at 1,200 bps and disconnect (well under 1 second). At 1200 bps, there was no negotiation: the communication is based on FSK at fixed frequencies.

One of those weird things I mentally filed away a long time ago :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This site could do with a responsive redesign.

EDIT: Redesign is the wrong term, as that implies that it would take any effort at all.

<comment><USER17> I prefer pinch and zoom tbh</comment></comment>


Re-Licensing Sentry - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry <comment><AUTHOR> > The BSL lets us hit our goals in a clean and low-impact way: it won't change > anyone's ability to run Sentry at their company, but it will ensure that we > are protected from our work being used in an anti-competitive fashion

I don't think this is accurate. It will ensure that Sentry is protected from its work being used in a _competitive_ fashion. While the issues pointed out in the blog post are real, competing isn't "anti-competitive." The intent and the effect here is to reduce competition, not increase it.

<comment><USER2> This ignores the nuance. It is to level the playing field. Sentry would not be able to compete against Amazon hosting their service and reaping the financial benefits, and nor should they have to (and to do so with Amazon's resources available to them would be a Herculean task). If you're not a fan of the model, roll your own codebase.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Sentry would not be able to compete against Amazon hosting their service, > and nor should they have to.

If that's Sentry's opinion (and it seems like it is), that's fine, but that's not what "anti-competitive" means. The word for that is "competitive."

(The specifics depend on the jurisdiction, but the behavior described by the FTC is what's widely considered "anti-competitive": [https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive- practices](https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices))

<comment><USER3> So you're inverting a word here, poorly. Competitive and anti-competitive are not antonyms, the latter has a more specialized meaning.

The opposite of being anti-competitive is not simply competing, it's competing _fairly_.

It is pretty clearly free riding to take the creative output of another company, repackage it for money and contribute little or nothing in return.

The world is poorer when this happens because free-riders can freely have business models that "kill the host", that is, don't capture enough value to keep people working on the underlying product.

Perhaps the answer is "well it shouldn't have been an open source product then?" and then we all miss out.

Meanwhile Amazon celebrates turning off all their Oracle databases. Great! And they make a lot of money off the back of Postgres too. But try asking them for the code that bundles Postgres into a reliable managed database offering. Of course they won't share it. That's _their_ IP.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It is pretty clearly free riding to take the creative output of another > company, repackage it for money and release nothing in return.

I completely agree and I think you found the perfect word for it: free-riding. As you note, anti-competitive has a specialized meaning. My comment was simply that free-riding is not, on its own, considered an anti-competitive business practice.

<comment><USER4> Oracle has been free riding red hat with unbreakable Linux, for years. Then red hat got bought for 30 billions. When you are confident about you ability to outsmart the competition and keep your customers, you don't have to use those new semi-open licenses. They are a legal risk for anyone who copies or reuses the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We're huge fans of Sentry and have it deeply integrated in our products. The fully open source nature has helped us a ton with these advanced integrations, being able to look at the code to see _exactly_ what is happening instead of relying on docs (which are great as well, not faulting them).

At the same time, I remember seeing a new startup that had completely ripped off Sentry + docs and had just done a find and replace for the company name. I thought I had read about it on HN but I can't find the link. It's clear we need a license that allows software to be developed in the open but prevents this type abuse.

I don't know if this license is the solution. It clearly isn't open source and should not be construed as such (they are very clear about this in the post), but I haven't seen other better proposals either. Armchair criticism is easy, and this seems like a reasonable middle-ground. We'll keep using Sentry and continue to be customers. Outside of their Sentry.io product, they have released and contributed to _a ton_ of other Open Source libraries. As I understand it, that will continue. For me, this passes the sniff test.

<comment><USER6> > It's clear we need a license that allows software to be developed in the > open but prevents this type abuse.

The ability to fork is _the_ point of open source, because it assures continuity. The price of this is the non-zero probability of hostile forks (which I would not classify as 'abuse'). I think there's a section of technologist who license their software for pragmatic (traction, fixing bugs) and not ideological reasons and get surprised when someone forks the project in a way they don't like.

<comment><USER7> You can fork it, you can mod it. But you cannot sell forked sentry as a service to companies. If companies want sentry they can host it themselves and you can provide customization/support services for that.

<comment><USER8> > But you cannot sell forked sentry as a service to companies?

But why not? That seems like such an arbitrary distinction if it weren't for the fact that the company is trying to profit on being the exclusive hosted provider of the software. Why wouldn't I want to pay a company that's better at ops to host sentry for me?

<comment><USER9> Better at ops? do they have issues?

The options are: Use Sentry.io, host it yourself, or use something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, Sentry is no longer Open Source at all, though people might potentially be able to collaborate on three-year-old versions (or, hopefully, use whatever unified fork pops up from the last Open Source release).

That's disappointing. Unfortunately, the more companies use such licenses, the more others see it as "safety in numbers" for them to do the same.

<comment><USER11> > Sentry is no longer Open Source at all

I just want to clarify that in addition to BSL converting into an Open Source license after the conversion date, we also did not BSL license everything. Client libraries are completely unaffected and so is a lot that is going on behind the scenes. We're firmly committed to being good Open Source citizens. For instance a lot of the work that is going on behind the scenes is separated into independent reusable libraries that retain their original licenses.

<comment><USER12> Why should we trust you not to change that in the future?

<comment><USER13> You shouldn't. Then again, they have no obligation to give you anything in the first place. And yet, they do.

If you really don't like what they are doing, you could fork them right now. But my guess is that you won't because then you'd have to do the work you're getting for free now.

<comment><USER12> Sentry also got work for free from people who assumed the open source project would stay that way. That's the thing about open source- it does have benefits, otherwise people would never choose it.

Right now there's this trend where companies take the benefits of open source for themselves, then toss aside the open source community when it looks like it might make them a buck. Ultimately I think that is bad for the community, and that the corporations that do this are putting their profit above the community that helped them grow. I don't think it's unreasonable to point this out.

<comment><USER14> > Sentry also got work for free from people who assumed the open source > project would stay that way

The BSD license is very clear that you can not assume that. A developer who contribute patches under BSD license should have no expectation for what other developers will license code in the future. Licenses is all about defining expectations.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. If you want an expectation of continued openness, choose copyleft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wishing you guys well.

Over time we're seeing there needed to be this sort-of middle ground license for companies, which is essentially, "anyone can use it as a dependency, but you can't use this product, slap a different label on it and then compete directly with us" and it seems that this and related licenses are going to accomplish that.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is the old Aladdin Ghostscript model, where the software is proprietary for one year after release and is then reverts to GPL. I think Ghostscript ditched this scheme 10-15 years ago.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=xBANKuFJWtUC&pg=PA306&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=xBANKuFJWtUC&pg=PA306&lpg=PA306&dq=aladdin+ghostscript+one+year&source=bl&ots=_sbDEU6GB5&sig=ACfU3U3EWBanfpdRKtHZQuwo21ijs76ebQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrz8acwtblAhXqFTQIHbwfDW0Q6AEwFXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=aladdin%20ghostscript%20one%20year&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER18> Why not GPLv3+? Under that license, it's possible for someone to offer a commercial fork, but it requires that the source is released under the same license, which makes third-party commercial forks 1) not a good business plan and 2) not contain code that the original author can't merge to the original branch, which are both aspects desired by the author. The GPL is a free/open- source license as defined by FSF/OSI. If additional permissions are needed, they can be added as allowed by section 7 of the GPLv3. In my opinion, the GPL fosters the best free software community because contributers can be certain that their code is not used in "anti-free-software" ways.

EDIT: s/GPL/AGPL

<comment><USER19> But it doesn't necessarily have to be a fork. It can be the raw unadulterated software that Amazon wraps a service layer around and then who would trust the a small player against one of the largest companies in the world?

If Amazon needs to make changes and opem source it, they can and without risk to their market because its value is in scale, balance sheet protection, name recognition for management buy in, and the integration on their AWS platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Previous licensing models – the "open core" model, GPL, and permissive licenses like BSD and Apache-2.0 – are not sufficient for the way OSS is distributed and used today."

This line _really_ bugged me. These licenses are still a perfect fit and more than sufficient for how OSS is distributed & used today. What they're maybe not perfect for is starting an open source, VC funded business, but they never have been. And the companies that face "existential threat" are a small minority of the total activity going on under these licenses, so maybe, ya know, the problem is the small collection of companies trying to operate this way and not the license.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Protection from other companies selling our work

I'm not against these sorts of licenses. But we should all be aware that companies like this (and Mongo, Elastic, etc) are a step away from the OSI model of "open source". Which is more about many orgs collaborating on a shared solution so we don't need a vendor, rather than what this is - a vendor opening up code and allowing contributions.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this is great; if I ever start a SaaS business I'll happily follow Sentry's example and use the BSL if I want to develop in the open.

To the open source fundamentalists expressing disdain: why is the ability to commercialize a piece of code such an important part of the OSS ethos to you? Why are proprietary protections, even when the code itself is still freely visible, usable and modifiable, such a step backwards? What about the very real threat of a business 1000x your size just deciding to fork your code and eat your lunch? Are businesses with open source products supposed to just accept that risk in the name of being good OSS citizens? I'd still much rather see a business with source available code, which will still benefit their users and the community at large - would you rather it be OSI approved open source or nothing?

</comment><comment><USER23> > _But if we move to an "open core" model that better protects our IP, in our > eyes, that means we're no longer an open-source company._

"Open core" products have an open source core. Sentry won't any more.

> _Enter The Business Source License (BSL)_

This license is NOT open source. Don't call it that. Actual open source advocates like me will keep hectoring you until you stop.

<comment><USER24> _Although we've come to refer to the BSL as eventually open-source since it converts to an OSI-approved license at the conversion date, due to the grant restriction, it is formally not an open-source license._

Yes, they don't call it that. Seems like the actual open source advocates will hector them before they even start.

<comment><USER23> Wrong. They call it an "OSS" license:

> _It's a brave new world, but we believe this licensing change will best > ensure the future of Sentry and that protections-oriented OSS licenses like > the BSL will become increasingly common as time goes on._

<comment><USER25> Probably because the _source_ is still open. This whole discussion strongly reminds me that open-source and free software are not the same.

<comment><USER23> This sort of confusion is exactly why this battle is worth fighting.

The proper term for licenses like the BSL is "source available". You can view the source, but you cannot use it under terms which conform to the Open Source Definition.

<comment><USER26> This now has been rectified. Apologies for the misrepresentation, wasn't intentional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have run the self-hosted version of Sentry for a couple years at my job now and it has worked fantastically, and I also use the SaaS product during freelance. The self-hosted releases take time to appear after launching on SaaS, but this is understandable as it takes time to coordinate things making it downstream to the public repo from internal stuff. And the self-hosted version is rock-solid once running, I never worry about it.

Of course it would be great if everything could remain truly open source, but I can understand the IP concerns as Sentry grows, and I am appreciative of the communication and commitment to offering the same product for self-hosting as your SaaS product. I'll be continuing to use and support Sentry and am interested to see how the BSL model goes here compared to something like open- core.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm really confused at the vitriol in the comments, does this license not become a true OSS license after the change period? IANAL but that seems to be the case to me. It's so confusing what part of this is frustrating? I think keeping a 36 month buffer of features to maintain an a commercially viable edge to fund work on a project is extremely reasonable. It seems like a really good and virtuous model.

Patents and Copyrights are more than an order of magnitude more temporally restrictive. This is great stuff, I hope it proves to be commercially viable and sees broader adoption.

<comment><USER29> It's a "vocal minority". Seriously, it's just a handful of people replying to every single comment. Sentry is being perfectly reasonable here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This seems fairly reasonable. It's understandable that you don't want others to offer commercial offerings of Sentry.

I'm happy as a Sentry user, and while we're using the cloud offering right now in our early stages, it's good to know that if we would crumble under the costs, we can always host our own instance. (Which of course is unlikely to happen, what I expect to be a part of the strategy)

</comment><comment><USER31> The BSL is a "have your cake and eat it too" license. It allows a company to accept contributions from third parties, without those third parties being able to use the changes commercially. It's immoral.

The moral equivalent of the BSL is to close-source the software, and to offer free-for-use licenses of the closed-source version. They can continue having a fully open-source release, but the release would be changes from 3 years ago.

Sentry isn't doing this because they want the contributions. They want the benefits of open source, without any of the costs associated with it.

<comment><USER32> I respectfully disagree with the suggestion that this is immoral.

Sentry is granting you a license, for free, to do anything you want with the software except provide a commercial competitor to their hosted service. People using the software for free may still decide to contribute code. This is not a one-sided relationship here. Both parties are getting something of value.

<comment><USER33> > People using the software for free may still decide to contribute code. This > is not a one-sided relationship here.

If the contributor is not allowed to do something with their work that the receiver is allowed to, is that not one-sided?

<comment><USER32> One-sided would imply that only one party benefits. You clearly benefit from being able to use and improve software, for free, for practically any purpose.

<comment><USER33> > You clearly benefit from ...

The benefit you speak of is available to both parties. The benefit I speak of is available to only one.

In Open Source, every party gets all the benefits, all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Armin Ronacher's blog post concerning this topic: [http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2019/11/4/open-source-and- saas/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2019/11/4/open-source-and-saas/)

<comment><USER12> I find the distinction between libraries and applications to be rather self serving. It's basically saying "I want to use these open source libraries to bootstrap my business, but I don't believe others should be able to use my code in an open source way because apps should have profit".

Now, I'm not disagreeing that one of the goals many people have for building code is to make money. But this line between apps and libraries is completely artificial and seems to exist for no reason other than justifying their closing a previously open source project.

<comment><USER11> > I find the distinction between libraries and applications to be rather self > serving. It's basically saying "I want to use these open source libraries to > bootstrap my business, but I don't believe others should be able to use my > code in an open source way because apps should have profit".

I generally believe that people should get a reward for the work they do. For me personally the rewards I got for my work on Flask, Jinja and many of my Open Source libraries was non monetary but awesome on many other levels. I got to travel to many countries, speak at conference, and I got a lot of experience and exposure through it. I am content. However I know from many people that they wish they could also make a living from Open Source libraries and I do not have an answer to that — yet?

I believe the BSL is an answer for applications, I don't think it works for libraries because of the reasons mentioned. I wish I had an answer however for people that want to live off their Open Source work.

The line might be arbitrary for some, but it's not arbitrary for me.

<comment><USER35> I see it as the same as the art school graduates who really, really want to make a living out of making art and finding in the real world a really, really small minority of artists can live off the art they produce.

Then they get a job teaching art to the next generation of people who really, really want to live off of making art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think it's interesting that one of the reasons Sentry gives for re-licensing their code (most/all of the major contributors work for Sentry) is also one of the reasons they gave 3 years ago on this site when asked why copycat services did not concern them: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800539](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800539)

</comment><comment><USER37> Seems a fair compromise.

Almost all users of Sentry.io benefit from the sort of freedom that FOSS is built on. They can control and modify the source that they are working with - sentry.io doesn't take away their rights.

At the same time, sentry.io does not have to compete against clones which are using sentry's own R&D against them.

I much prefer this over more restrictive alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER38> Elasticsearch and MongoDB has really started an interesting debate on Open Source Licensing..More Power to Opensource Software Providers that need to reap the benefits of their work.

<comment><USER10> They haven't started a debate. The debate of "should we be open or not" has been going on for as long as Open Source has existed. And we've had licenses that attempt to sound open without being open for a long time as well, under names like "shared source".

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> On the whole, while sad that it happened (it feels like a loss somehow), I think this is probably one of the better licenses they could have gone with.

As far as I understand there's still nothing preventing me from forking their code, just from selling it for 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't blame Sentry. FOSS is a fine ideal for hobby and academic projects, but it doesn't pay the bills. 36 years on and the most successful business model for FOSS is to convince someone rich to lose money on it. (Cf. Gilmore at Cygnus, Shuttleworth at Canonical.)

I do wish more companies would use these kinds of "Doom clauses" and contribute old software to the commons once it's no longer commercially viable.

<comment><USER12> That's the only business model as long as you ignore Automattic, Chef, CloudBees, Cloudera, Confluent, Databricks, DataStax, Gradle, Hashicorp, nginx, Puppet, RedHat, and many others.

<comment><USER40> Some of those companies make money by selling proprietary software. They are thus proprietary software companies, and bad examples of open source software business models.

<comment><USER41> What are good examples?

<comment><USER40> Red Hat. They work with the community upstream, and they open source all their stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I expect to see a lot more of this with GitHub Sponsors coming online. As it is now you can take any BSD, MIT, ISC, GPL open source project and start collecting money from it, not using it in another project, just by asking for money period. The licenses above all allow this. It's only going to take a few bad actors for the actual devs to start wanting a new license that somehow keeps the project open source but only let's them collect the donations. I have no idea how that will work but it seems a likely outcome.

I don't mind when my open source library is one tiny part in a larger project that is commercial and making money. But I'd be upset if someone forked my library, changed the name (or not), and started trying to collect donations. Even if they changed the library I don't know at how much they'd have to change it before I'd not feel taken advantage of.

</comment><comment><USER43> the issue with all these (mongodb, elasticsearch, sentry, redis, etc...) is that software doesn't work with zero marginal costs, software's creation and distribution costs are different, the same goes to anything digital.

Selling 1 is the same as selling 2, is the same as 200. If anything, distribution the costs will go up due to bandwidth (unless the distribution becomes decentralized).

The problem is that we live in a world economy desgined by and for material products with (in many cases) marginal costs. Making a single paperclip is expensive, making one thousand makes every paperclip cheaper, making more makes them even cheaper. If paperclips were software, the moment anybody makes a single paperclip, anybody can have one.

Software is (or rather, digital things are) different. The best model of ownership over software does not get along with the way ownership works in the market.

</comment><comment><USER44> A little off topic from the actual post, but I wish that there was an actual service or program that was a "re-licensing sentry". That is, given some list of open source projects, it would email me if any of the projects changed their license.

Many dependency managers just grab the latest release of an open source project, and you as a software developer may not be aware that one of your open source dependencies has changed their license in a way that affects what you can do with your project.

It seems a lot of projects are starting out as true open source projects and then once they have built up a user base, are changing their license to something else. It would be nice for me to have a better way to monitor this for my dependencies than just checking the front page of Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER45> I can't help but feel that if companies like Amazon, Google etc had been fairer in their dealings with open source projects (by either contributing more code or by paying the authors) that we wouldn't be in this situation.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is a very disappointing development. I was hoping to implement Sentry for a side project I have been working on, now I will have to find an alternative or use an old version, as I refuse to rely on closed-source software.

<comment><USER47> Nothing about this announcement makes it closed-source software.

<comment><USER46> Huh? Did you read the announcement? They clearly state that it is no longer under an open source license.

<comment><USER47> It not being recognized as an official OSI license does not make it "closed source", their source code is still fully and freely available to customers who can continue to using and customizing their own modified versions as they see fit. None of which they could do if it was "closed source".

Their software also converts into Apache-2.0 after their conversion period, where it by definition also becomes available under a permissive OSI approved license.

<comment><USER48> It is not fitting the requirement widely agreed for defining software Open Source: it creates a restriction on usage.

<comment><USER47> Which is both clearly spelled out in the article and irrelevant to my original comment where "Nothing about this announcement makes it closed-source software."

Being licensed under an OSI approved license (that their software converts to after their conversion period) makes it "Open Source" by definition, it does not make it "closed source".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Its interesting to see them reason that the BSL is more open source than open core. Do others think that? It is certainly more free as in beer for most users.

<comment><USER50> Having a sustainable funding model for open source isn't necessarily a bad thing IMHO. The potential upside here is that Sentry will be able to invest more into large improvements to the code knowing that their funding is sustainable. This is to the benefit of everyone who wants to use this software in the purest sense of open source, which is running the code on your own systems.

<comment><USER12> This isn't a sustainable open source model though as the code is not open source.

<comment><USER47> As they state in their article it's eventually OSS (after 3yrs it converts to OSS) and you're basically unaffected you're reselling a competing hosted version, you still have full access to the source code and can continue to run your own/modified version in house.

Given that Sentry is primarily the sole contributor behind improving and advancing their own product, making it more sustainable directly translates in being able to have more resources into making a better product whereas having their efforts stolen and repurposed by a competitive AWS/Azure hosted solution would directly make it worse. They'd be pouring their millions into competing against themselves whilst the cloud providers can use their marketing + monopoly network effects to reap all the commercial efforts off Sentry's investments.

The only losers here are the cloud oligopolies and Sentry's hosted competitors, Sentry ends up with a more sustainable business model they can invest in making a better product, which benefits their product and all their customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> BSL seems pretty decent... it _becomes_ open in a simple, easy-to-understand way.

But it's troublesome that they road the open source movement for years to grow and are now closing the license. Perhaps it's a business reality. I wonder if there are any supporters or users or other stakeholders who thought open meant continuing to be open. They're getting a slap in the face today.

</comment><comment><USER52> > Previous licensing models – the "open core" model, GPL, and permissive > licenses like BSD and Apache-2.0 – are not sufficient for the way OSS is > distributed and used today.

I think what they meant to say was "open source licenses (including GPL, BSD, and Apache-2.0) are not sufficient to prevent Google or Amazon from competing with our hosted service business."

</comment><comment><USER53> people's labor should be well compensated. this is a good move from Sentry, Mongodb and others that will follow. yeah, you've people with freeware or fsf idealism i.e Stallman ideas.That Sentry and the others betrayed their ideas. But simply, FU - let them get paid. Sentry is an amazing product. & the people who work on it should be able to put food on the table & sleep well, without worrying about Amazon n parasites. I think the greatest misconception is between open source and open core. & we should start labeling a bunch of software on Github as such. Now the parasitic cloud providers such as AWS won't profit via someone's work. when they hardly contribute to open core | source

<comment><USER54> Sentry, mongodb, et al. all got as big as they did by promising to be open source. Do you think they'd be where they are today had they not been open sourced? I personally do not.

<comment><USER55> > Sentry, mongodb, et al. all got as big as they did by promising to be open > source.

Do you have any proof to back this assertion?

> It's important to remember that Sentry "the project" has been developed > almost exclusively by employees of Sentry "the company"; millions of dollars > have paid the salaries of engineers, designers, and product people to > produce the software we know and love today.

I don't have any skin in this game, but they claim that most of the code contributions were by employees paid for by Sentry. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> We recently adopted the BSL too. Here's a blog post that goes into detail about our rationale.

[https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl- transition/](https://www.zerotier.com/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/)

<comment><USER57> That post states that GPL or AGPL would be adequate for your protection needs but you opted for BSL instead due to "GPL-phobia". So why not dual license under BSL and (A)GPL? That way open source purists (including me) would have a license they considered acceptable, without it compromising your goals.

<comment><USER58> It's an interesting idea. The BSL seems like a safer choice given the wording straight-up blocks SaaS's. They're the real threat to ZeroTier.

On a side note, most people contributing to F/OSS don't like AGPL either. They'd instead by griping about _that_. Folks be irritated one way or another. His profit and their jobs are safer with people griping about BSL, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> When will there be a 10.0 Open Source Release? It's harder for me to support this when I saw open source pull requests denied that in hindsight would have let more users run their own hosted sentry with features such as OpenID Support.

</comment><comment><USER60> What does this mean for people who have already contributed? Do you have to get permission of everyone who made a PR merged? Did they have some sort of CLA that allows them to re-license? Just curious how this works.

<comment><USER61> It doesn't appear they have a CLA. The old license was BSD 3-clause, which states: > 1\. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. > 2\. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

And nowhere is that list to be found. So it appears Sentry is violating the license for external contributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> content of the blog post aside, this is just completely obnoxious and distracting: [https://gfycat.com/sphericalfrailalligatorgar](https://gfycat.com/sphericalfrailalligatorgar)

<comment><USER5> Yes, but at least you can submit a PR to fix it.

<comment><USER12> You say that like it's a good thing, rather than being a way for corporations to extract value from free labor to line their own pockets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Have you considered that SaaS is just a terrible business model?

<comment><USER57> Tell that to Amazon, who seem to be making it into an extremely successful business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> > Minimal limitations on usage of code; as free as possible

Wait what?

</comment><comment><USER65> Seems reasonable.

Easy to be a purist, hard to reconcile that purism with the need to run a business (and let's not forget, pay engineers and other employees with the proceeds of that business).

</comment><comment><USER12> Yet another company that uses the open source community to grow and then rips the rug out from under them.

This corporate take over and redefinition of open source needs to stop. The "Business Source License" is not an open source license, and lying to the community about it is nothing short of gaslighting. This decision is bad for the community, and no amount of marketing speak and lying from sentry is going to change that.

<comment><USER66> How do you propose stopping AWS taking the code wholesale and selling with an upcharge? Is that what open source is?

<comment><USER67> AWS is emphatically NOT "taking the code", they have a license for it. If you don't want people to use your work commercially, then don't license it to them to use it commercially. It's pretty simple. Once you tell people what they can and can't use your software for, then it is no longer free; you don't get both.

<comment><USER68> >then it is no longer free; you don't get both.

You drew a line in the sand, do not presume that someone else will draw the line in the same place. For example, some people draw the line at GPL. I, personally, greatly prefer a BSL license to a fully proprietary license. That means, from me, they do get both.

<comment><USER69> Well yes but open source has well established definition.

If we just let everybody call them self opensource and free, those terms will loose all of its meaning.

The fact that BSL is better than completely closed source option is different discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Eventually open source LUL I'm sure they'll eventually let you into the open source conference.

</comment><comment><USER71> I built Cabin as an alternative to Sentry.

[https://cabinjs.com](https://cabinjs.com)

Less bloat, no vendor lock-in, works with any logger.

</comment><comment><USER72> I was at an open source event hosted by a16z ( a blog post about it is here [https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open- source/](https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/) ), and one of the things that was abundantly clear is there is no reason you can't have open source and a viable business model. Companies moving to BSL are effectively saying they can't actually compete so they are trying to shore up their business by using a license change. At the end of the day the better product will win out, and companies moving to BSL are tacitly admitting they don't have the better product so they want to lock in market share before they get out competed.

<comment><USER73> Imagine I create a fantastic new beer: a new taste that most people love. My recipe is open source.

I have put a lot of time/money perfecting the recipe/brand . I started selling it to local businesses and have been expanding slowly but steadily. I don't have big production scales yet so I can sell a bottle for $3.

Now come Big Beer Co., #1 on the beer market world wide. They take my recipe and can sell it for $1 thanks to their economies of scale. I keep making my beer better and better whiel Big Beer Co. keeps the original recipe they "forked".

I start losing customers: yes I keep improving on the recipe but it does not justify paying $3 instead of $1. Eventually, I die and Big Beer Co. are the only one remaining selling my recipe.

Is it because they made a better product? Nope.

<comment><USER74> You can't copyright recipes.*

If you could, that would still be the smallest part of the dynamics of why people drink craft beer and how the economics of scaling up production of a recipe work.

* - And trade secrets don't lend themselves to openness.

<comment><USER73> "You can't copyright recipes." => I did not say that and my analogy was not assuming that either. Can you elaborate why you made that point?

Perhaps I could have been more clear: I explicitly share with everyone the exact process/recipe so it is reproducible without any other research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> If you're wondering "why don't they just close-source the whole thing, and then they don't have to worry about competitors?", there's two reasons. One, open source is a good marketing tool to acquire trend-following customers, gain industry rep, and better hires. Two, if an open-source clone emerges, it could become a threat to their product, so they need to keep people using some version of their own product. This is what it means when a business says open source is a "strategic advantage".

All these "formally-open-source companies" are learning the same lessons we learned in the early 2000s: competing on software alone only works if you're licensing a proprietary product, or you're giving it away as a lock-in tool for a platform you control. The alternative is to compete on service and support, which works until you compete against a platform. A big player with a platform will just take ten million dollars and a year and a half and write their own version of it, and their customers will use it because it integrates with the platform's products better.</comment>


ZenYoda: Travis driven pandoc presentation engine - <AUTHOR> http://zenyodasap.surge.sh/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for suggestions to make this easier to use for average users..</comment>


Git workflow for projects with multiple developers - <AUTHOR> http://minhajuddin.com/2013/01/31/git-workflow-for-projects-with-multiple-developers <comment><USER2> Some tips:

You can track and checkout a remote branch in just one command:

        git checkout -t origin/foo

If someone's working on a topic branch themselves, it might be better to rebase master rather than merging it:

        git checkout foo
        git rebase master

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the checkout tip.

I don't like rebases when it is for a bunch of commits, it gives a straight version graph which everyone likes. But when you have conflicts, might have to fix them more than once.

From what I know, rebase creates a patch for each commit and then starts applying them on top of your master (if you are doing it on top of master). So, this has the unintended consequence of causing merge conflicts for multiple commits. With merging you just have resolve conflicts once.</comment></comment>


Domain Name Registration and Geo DNS for Route 53 - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/route-53-domain-reg-geo-route-price-drop/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty interesting move. Google has started offering domain names [1] in beta, but with my experience with their support I don't plan on using it.

Pricing is a big part of domains for me and AWS pricing seems a bit high to me. I'm also not sure on if whois privacy is offered or included? If it was then the domain price would be fine. I noticed a Route53 zone is included, but is it included in the price or costs additional? I had a domain with low traffic and it was $6/year just for DNS hosted zone so if it was included in the domain price I would probably move all of my domains, though whois privacy is still a big concern.

For the past few years I've been moving to Hover ($15) and then lately Badger ($10) as it is cheaper, but they both have whois privacy bundled in with the domain price as I think it is an important service. I previously worked on and maintained a domain registrar so these hit pretty close to home, but I'm still not really happy with any solution. It seems Amazon's model of getting pricing lower didn't really come through with this new offering just comparing to the current market.

Could hosted email be the next big thing AWS introduces? With as many people who are frustrated by lack of good options (Google Apps) it could be an interesting next stage for AWS (App Hosting, Domain Registrations, and Email Hosting), then I don't know what will happen to traditional hosting providers, but I think they will be trying to figure out how to stay relevant.

[1]: [http://google.com/domains](http://google.com/domains)

<comment><USER3> whois protection is included;

[http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2014/07/31/amazon-...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2014/07/31/amazon-route-53-announces-domain-name-registration-geo-routing- and-lower-pricing/)

"When you purchase new domains via Route 53, the service will automatically configure a Hosted Zone for each domain and ensure the privacy of your WHOIS record at no additional charge".

<comment><USER4> configuring the hosted zone... but do you get charged for it as well? i can't tell by that language.

EDIT: just tried to set one up - it looks like it's still an extra charge, so.. $12 for a .com plus minimum $6/year $18/year - kinda high if you don't need all the flexibility of the amazon platform. I don't see a lot of domain parkers taking them up on this.

<comment><USER5> "If you don't want to use your domain right now, you can delete the hosted zone; if you delete it within 48 hours of registering the domain, there won't be any charge for the hosted zone on your AWS bill"

Source: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/reg...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/registrar.html#domain- register)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now if they'd only offer the ability to automatically provision SSL certificates (and add them to ELBs) for the domains.

<comment><USER7> I sure hope so. You've got to figure that they'd undercut the ever living crap out of the other CAs, too.

<comment><USER8> I doubt much would change, given Gandi (who supplies this) already gives out certificates.

Wildcards and/or unlimited certificates would certainly blow any other offering out of the water, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It looks like prices are around the bulk D or E rates from Gandi (their upstream registrar). One notable exception is .io, which is currently $78 on AWS, but only $39 from Gandi (A rate).

Edit: Pricing list is available at: [https://d32ze2gidvkk54.cloudfront.net/Amazon_Route_53_Domain...](https://d32ze2gidvkk54.cloudfront.net/Amazon_Route_53_Domain_Registration_Pricing_20140731.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Gandi's E rates: [https://www.gandi.net/domain/price/info?grid=E](https://www.gandi.net/domain/price/info?grid=E)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats to Gandi for being the underlying registrar that Amazon chose for the registration service! [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/reg...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/registrar.html)

<comment><USER12> Might as well just register domains at Gandi.

<comment><USER6> For now, yes. In time, maybe not, as they add integrations into other bits like provisioning SSL for ELBs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> GeoDNS actually makes Route 53 usable for me since I don't use AWS for hosting. Yay!

<comment><USER14> You don't necessarily need to use it though.

(I wrap around route53 at [http://dns-api.com/](http://dns-api.com/) and don't yet support any kind of GeoDNS, or health-checks. They're not things users seem to want.)

<comment><USER13> Steve, it is a bit condescending to imply I don't know what I need for my use case.

<comment><USER14> Sorry that wasn't my intention :(

<comment><USER13> I misunderstood what you meant then. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this permit automated re-selling to users? I mean aside from the high(ish) price?

Edit: There does appear to be an API but it's still not clear if you can register on behalf of another individual...

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice. The final piece of the puzzle that I didn't even realize was missing until reading this announcement.

When I spin up a new idea, step one is to register the domain with my normal $7/year registrar. But from that point forward it's all AWS except for the step of manually copying back the nameservers from Route 53.

Sure, this is a bit more expensive but it's a no brainer from a lot of perspectives. First, it's Amazon so there's no fear of flakines (even of the whimsical negligent sort that Google specializes in). They're certainly going to be more reliable than the guys I'm with now (not because my guys aren't reliable; they're just not Amazon). And naturally, there's the bonus of having everything in one place and tied together.

But mostly there's the silly psychological reason: I have to manually renew a few of my domains every once in a while, sending off my card details for a few hundred more of my precious dollars and feeling the pain. With Amazon it'd be completely different. They're already pulling a grand or so out of my account every month. It's just business expenses, so a bit extra for domains can get nicely lost in the noise.

I get the feeling I might be doing a bunch of copy/pasting in the near future. Let's hope they have a good migration tool.

<comment><USER17> > the final piece of the puzzle

One piece is still missing: SSL certificates from AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Never register your domain with the same company / account you have your hosting under. If you keep them independent and something catastrophic happens to your servers you'll still be able point the domain(s) somewhere else. If AWS goes down and takes the control panel with it you won't be able to do anything with your domain.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately the TTL settings on top-level zones are less than friendly if your goal is to withstand a DNS provider outage by changing the registration. The TTLs on NS records in the ".com" zone are two days long. So when you log in to your registrar of choice and change the delegation, it's still going to be two days before all resolvers are using your new choice. You can improve things for most resolvers, by lowering the NS TTLs in your child-zone (though few do), but about 10% of resolvers are "parent-centric" and you'll just have to wait the two days.

Using multiple providers, but using no more than two authoritative nameservers from each provider [1], is probably the way to go if your goal is to withstand a full-provider DNS outage. Unfortunately when you do that, you have to also consider that if DNS is your tool for handling day-to-day problems like web- server failures; then every time you need to make a DNS change, you need all of your providers to reflect it reliably and quickly.

Or put another way; using multiple providers can lower your day to day availability, because of the increased probability that at least one of your providers is slow to make changes when you need it.

Full disclosure: I work on Route 53.

[1] Most resolvers will try 3 different name servers before giving up, so if you have 3 or more from any one provider in can be ineffective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So in essence could one programmatically register domains and then kite them all automatically using their API? Kiting is when squatters buy domains look at traffic over a few days and drop the domain before the 4 day refund period is over.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a great option for anyone who's planning to use Route53 for DNS anyway, and also for no other reason than having a clean and easy way to just buy domains without all up-sell crap you get from GoDaddy et al.</comment>


Bitcoin causing CO2 emissions comparable to Hamburg - <AUTHOR> https://www.tum.de/nc/en/about-tum/news/press-releases/details/35499/ <comment><USER2> Before anyone makes excuses along the lines of "it's renewable from remote dams", that energy could could have always been used for something more productive. If it weren't for Bitcoin, they would be incentivized to build a datacenter there, build a smelting plant there, or even just build the transmission lines to get it to the grid.

Using renewable energy for Bitcoin takes that renewable energy out of the supply. How much coal is being burned in China because electricity pours into Bitcoin miners instead of onto a grid?

<comment><USER3> Consider this: in Sichuan and Yunnan, the two most hydro-rich provinces of China, despite the high concentration of miners over there due to cheap electricity, there is such an surplus of electricity that they abandon over a hundred TWh of hydropower every year. This abandoned water is literally run through the dam without spinning the turbines. This is more than the worldwide consumption of electricity of Bitcoin.

This is a result of mostly inadequate grid infrastructure that will take decades to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll just leave this other side of the story: [https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-over-74-of-bitcoin- mini...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-over-74-of-bitcoin-mining-is- powered-by-renewable-energy)

<comment><USER5> Energy is energy. If that energy wasn't wasted mining bitcoin, it could power any of the other consumers of electricity.

<comment><USER3> Mining farms are by nature located in areas with cheap electricity, ie. where supply exceeds demand. So it isn't taking away energy from other consumers. For example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194135)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a tradeoff, like every technology. Streaming video infrastructure and consumption probably creates more CO2 than all crypto put together.

People who don't like the underlying premise of Bitcoin (a currency outside of government control) will tend to highlight the negatives, while people who like the premise of Bitcoin will support the positives. Narratives such as the one presented in this article are an attempt to sway the undecided/uninterested to the "anti-Bitcoin" side. Indeed, the conclusion of the article suggests "regulating" cryptocurrency as a method of controlling emissions, exposing this as another attempt to block the spread of cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is the link to the original study: [https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7](https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351\(19\)30255-7)

I was part of the peer-review process on this study. High quality research, although they made a last minute edit that IMHO lead them to overestimate CO2 emissions by 50% (15 vs 22 MtCO2/yr): [https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/113943906857019392...](https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1139439068570193921)

</comment><comment><USER7> What makes me so sad is that bitcoin is an algorithmic solution to a well- defined problem. I can imagine some lucky genius might one day solve the exact same problem better. But the damage is done.

The whole planet is suffering for an algorithm that is not being improved quickly enough.

I want to show the suffering here. Imagine all the arithmetic that was done in Roman numerals, because it was the state of the art. I can really feel the burden of this algorithn. Maybe there is something better.

<comment><USER4> Compare it to the amount of CO2 that the banking sector is emitting now. All those pointless buildings, branches, offices, computers, employees going to work everyday. To me, bitcoin feels much more efficient.

Sure btc is not perfect, and humanity might come up with something better soon. Until then, let's switch to the better technology that exists today.

<comment><USER8> The amount of transactions performed by bitcoin is laughably low. It performs around 10 transactions per second. This is not even enough to handle the transactions of a small city, yet it consumes as much electricity as an ENTIRE large city. If the banking industry was anywhere close to this inefficient it would be responsible for almost all CO2 emissions worldwide.

<comment><USER4> Look into layer2 technologies (e.g. Lightning network), scalability is a solved problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case you were wondering what the carbon footprints of the top cities were: [http://citycarbonfootprints.info/](http://citycarbonfootprints.info/)

        Urban Cluster Footprint(Mt CO2)
        Seoul 276.1 ±51.8
        Guangzhou 272 ±46.2
        New York 233.5 ±75.4
        Hong Kong SAR 208.5 ±37.8
        Los Angeles 196.4 ±43.7
        Shanghai 181.0 ±44.6
        Country of Singapore 161.1 ±34.1
        Chicago 152.9 ±37.2
        Tokyo / Yokohama 132.8 ±21.4
        Riyadh 118.8 ±26.4
        Dubai 110.8 ±31.0
        Wuxi 110.4 ±25.8
        Johannesburg 105.2 ±19.9
        Tehran 104.4 ±28.2
        Moscow 99.5 ±22.5
        London 98.9 ±21.8
        Benha 87.2 ±15.6
        Beijing 83.7 ±19.1
        Jakarta 83.7 ±15.6
        Al - Ahmadi 80.6 ±19.3
        Miami 80.3 ±21.9
        Samut Prakan 80.0 ±17.9
        Paris 78.0 ±25.5
        Dallas 76.9 ±16.0
        Tianjin 71.4 ±20.4
        Istanbul 70.9 ±16.0
        Detroit 70.6 ±15.4
        Philadelphia 70.2 ±19.5
        San Jose 70.0 ±19.7

Hamburg is ranked #129 at 18Mt. By these numbers, Bitcoin's 22Mt is closer to Kansas City at #106. Kansas City and larger cities sum up to 5001.3 MT.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am tired of people of coming up with these nonsense comparison. Bitcoin co2 emissions is the same as Hamburg. It uses more electricity than Las vegas etc. Have they accounted for the amount co2 the food that 1.8 million people in hamburg consume.

<comment><USER11> I think the underlying assumption in those comparisons is that Bitcoin is essentially useless.

So while Hamburg produces CO2 because of all the people and economic activity going there, Bitcoin produces the same amount for no actual benefits. In that case the comparison does illustrate the amount of waste.

Now, on the other hand if you're of the opinion that Bitcoin is something of value that makes a positive difference and produces something useful then the comparison does look random and nonsensical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To secure an international currency this is exceptionally efficient. Compare it to the economic and energy costs of protecting a fiat currency with an army or allying with a country that has an army.

<comment><USER8> How would the need of an army disappear for a country that would use bitcoin as its national currency? I really see no relation between the two. The currency that is in use has no effects on an invading force.

This xkcd seems relevant as well: [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

<comment><USER12> >How would the need of an army disappear for a country that would use bitcoin as its national currency?

Bitcoin is not a national currency. It is an international currency. It has not tied to any one country so your question doesn't have meaning.

But, lets humor it anyway. Bitcoin would continue to operate just fine if a country that was using it as their national currency (an absurd premise) was invaded. There are plenty of other countries. This would not be true of a fiat currency. The fiat currency would lose it's value and be controlled.</comment></comment></comment>


The Black Smurfs - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Smurfs <comment><AUTHOR> I found this part interesting:

> _Followers of zombie fiction have remarked the similarities between the plot > of The Black Smurfs and that of George A. Romero 's 1968 film Night of the > Living Dead, which introduced a new archetype of zombies that would be later > used in other fiction works: Plagues of zombies that infect the living > people, turning them violent, irrational and uncontrolled, as the black > Smurfs._

I never expected "Smurfs" and "George A. Romero" to show up in the same sentence.</comment>


The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html <comment><USER2> Tim Urban is a great writer, but read something like this - [http://lukemuehlhauser.com/a-reply-to-wait-but-why-on- machin...](http://lukemuehlhauser.com/a-reply-to-wait-but-why-on-machine- superintelligence/) \- if you want more nuance. (Caveat: It's been some time since I read either article, or about superintelligence.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Same misleading graph as always. He says he's trying to give people an idea what exponential growth is like, but he puts this totally misleading kink in it _just_ past where we're supposed to be now. I despise that "graph" and the manipulativeness behind it.</comment>


Cosy social networks 'are stifling [software] innovation'  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327195.600-cosy-social-networks-are-stifling-innovation.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The New Scientist's spin seems to be a takeaway from this longer article in _Science_ , though it's not clear from the free abstract:

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/325/5939/396>

And this MSNBC summary has better quotes and discussion:

[http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/07/23/2007019.as...](http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/07/23/2007019.aspx)</comment>


Which birth dates are most common? - <AUTHOR> http://thedailyviz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/heatmapbirthdays1.jpg

<comment><USER2> Full article and details about the sources: [http://thedailyviz.com/2012/05/12/how-common-is-your- birthda...](http://thedailyviz.com/2012/05/12/how-common-is-your-birthday/)</comment>


How people screw up on their product demos - <AUTHOR> https://ryanleask.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/9-ways-people-screw-up-their-product-demos/

<comment><USER2> Good list. To complement this article, I highly recommend "Demoing Software for Fun & Profit" by Dave Winer. There are pretty good tips in it.

[http://scripting.com/davenet/1995/01/04/demoingsoftwareforfu...](http://scripting.com/davenet/1995/01/04/demoingsoftwareforfunprofi.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I disagree with #9. Maybe Bill was on vacation, broke his arm and stayed in hospital for a full month. Of course he's underperforming.

The data is there for you to query. There should be pointers to begin with, but the software should never make business decisions for you.

If the business analyst needs an hour to find the data, then the interface is too complicated, or the analyst did not learn how to use the software in the first place.

Please don't make me write software that can replace your business analyst.

<comment><USER4> There are many ways to get around this issue. Alerts/notifications based on thresholds being exceeded is one. Another is to start with a dashboard that highlights the major issues for you to look at. Another is to have a marker/icon next to any figure that needs your attention (ala Stephen Few style).

There is nothing wrong with investigative analytics. I'm not saying slice and dice is a bad thing - just there are much better ways to open your BI demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having spent some years in business intelligence, point #9 especially hits home.

Just about everyone I know who has delivered a canned Cognos demo has done that exact drill down example.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bottomline: Developers don't use their own product in the same context that the end user will. Which means the end user won't get the right picture if the developer does the demo.</comment>


METI - Scientists discuss theory of humans as exhibits in zoo - <AUTHOR> https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/uk-world-news/scientists-discussing-idea-humans-exhibits-2662494 <comment><AUTHOR> Please note, the title cites a local paper. The original article comes from Forbes here: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2019/03/18/ar...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2019/03/18/are- we-in-a-galactic-zoo-protected-by-aliens-scientists-meet-to-investigate-the- great-silence/#3f1f98fd1ce7)

Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) questions discussed:

 _- "Are extraterrestrials staying silent out of concern for how contact would impact humanity?

-Do we live in a "galactic zoo?"

-Should we send intentional radio messages to nearby stars to signal humanity's interest in joining the "galactic club?"

-Will extraterrestrial intelligence be similar to human intelligence?

-Did life get to earth from elsewhere in the galaxy (interstellar migration)?"_</comment>