Advice on a paywall for SellDom.io - <AUTHOR> Hi!
I'm working on this project, SellDom.io where anyone can submit the unused domain and anyone else can make offers.
I've thought long and large on how to earn money with this service, and here's what I came to: 1. Manage the sale completely, act like an escrow. I would get the money from the buyer, and wait until the transfer has been successful to release the funds to the seller. This is interesting, but there is too much issue with it. I'm screwed in case of chargeback, and in legal and accounting terms, it's just hell.
2. Ask the seller to pay up-front. This is not good as I want to have a maximum of domains on sale on SellDom. Putting a paywall upfront would be against it.
3. Ask the buyer to pay to submit an offer. I'm not for asking the buyer to pay something again. He will already have to pay for getting the domain + transferring it to the registrar. Moreover, (s)he is not responsible for using SellDom.
4. Ask the seller to pay to access the buyer's offers. This is the best solution I came up so far.
So here I am. I have implemented a paywall that asks the sellers to pay 20$ (fixed fee, not a percent of the domain price) to get access to the offer's information.
The reason I decided to ask for 20$ and not a percent fee is that I don't want to make tons of money on it, just get a few to pay the servers and make a bit of a living out of it, that's all. Moreover, I believe that the higher the price will be, the more chance the seller will pay to get the offers.
What do you think? If you own some unused domain, would you use SellDom or would this information be a huge downer? Do you think of an alternative idea I didn't think of?
The project is recent, I released it today, so I can make an 180° change without any problems!
Any feedback in appreciated :) <comment><AUTHOR> If you want to check the website, the url is [https://www.selldom.io](https://www.selldom.io) (I know HN doesn't put links on posts :) )</comment>


What Kinds of Birds Are Angry Birds? - <AUTHOR> http://magblog.audubon.org/what-kinds-birds-are-%E2%80%98angry-birds%E2%80%99

<comment><USER2> It seems pretty clear to me that the red bird is a cardinal, white a chicken, and green/boomerang bird a toucan (which is not exactly native to Finland).

</comment><comment><USER3> The suggested birds on that page are all American species, but the Angry Birds are from Finland.</comment>


She's Got Game - <AUTHOR> https://restofworld.org/2020/you-just-got-pwned-habibi/ <comment> noman-land This is such an awesome mental image.

"When the hall flooded with nearly 3,000 women, some as young as 13 and others in their 50s, it was a shock. "I definitely did not expect moms to come," Felwa said. Back then, it was mandatory for women to wear the traditional black abaya, and often a headscarf, while in public. It was only when the women walked through the doors into the all-female space that their abayas slipped off to reveal an array of cosplay costumes."

<comment><USER2> This is what weddings are like (minus the cosplay) and it happens every week across the world

<comment><USER3> The "change into cosplay" part here is the relevant part. Thinking you're one of only a few, and for the first time in your life discovering that you're far from alone is an amazing moment.

I wish that happened every week across the world, but most of us will be lucky to experience this once or twice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I lived in KSA for about 2 months doing post delivery services on a project at the client's office. As I started befriending some of the personnel, I found one of them had a daughter from his first wife. He was very angry at her and blamed her for the child, basically saying that she had become pregnant on purpose so that he would have to cancel his trip to Europe where he was planning on finding his fourth wife. He was the fairer and kinder man of the bunch over there. Most of them were mostly busy making stunts to have some time off at work and look good, not caring at all about work or worst, create problems so as to gain leverage against our company for negociation. They separated the immigrants workers in poor shared offices from the KSA citizens. Offices were also missing drinkable water even thought it was in a capital city (I could see skyscrapers...)...

Ever since that trip, while I hope they'll see some positive change for women's right, I fear the opposite might happen to our countries due to low demographics. I don't believe we are benefiting from a relationship with that country at all, there is not point in even taking time to deal with them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Saudi Arabia is a Middle Eastern North Korea.

America's fascination with it is beyond understanding.

How can the world's most libertarian nation fawn over one that is the least free?

<comment><USER6> Is it really that hard to understand?

<comment><USER7> yeah, it is. I get that they have oil, that doesn't explain the fascination. I could see an attitude of necessary evil, but a lot of americans think the saudis are some kind of beacon in the middle east.

<comment><USER8> > but a lot of americans think the saudis are some kind of beacon in the > middle east.

A lot of Americans so on and so forth, supposedly.

For example, one could say a lot of Americans think Iran is better and are fascinated with it (I see that premise on a frequent basis on HN and Reddit). Why are some large groups of people in the US fascinated by Iran? Such statements are, at best, opinions. I'd say that Iran is not better, they're both similarly terrible on human rights, they're both extraordinarily violent theocracies (Iran murdered thousands of protestors last year, while the US media went out of their way to ignore it; contrast that with the Khashoggi coverage - which tells you everything you need to know about who is fascinated with Iran). In the US, the left is very sympathetic with Iran and they more strongly dislike Saudi Arabia; and that's reversed for the right. Such theocracies have dominated the Middle East since the end of the Islamic golden age, over seven centuries ago. In Iran they murder gay people and deprive their women of basic human rights as a matter of cultural routine, as in Saudi Arabia. Both aggressively sponsor terrorism and proxy wars all over the Middle East, fighting for influence and position. Some just pretend there is a difference between the two.

<comment><USER9> Ok, I'm going to throw out an oversimplification here, but I think it's representative of a common college-educated American's image of Iran vs. KSA.

Iran is a large, middle-income country full of lots of regular folks who wrestle with weird internal politics much like we do. Sure, they're a theocracy, but we also overthrew the only democratically elected leader they've ever had. I think Iranians are pretty easy to relate to. The US is full of Irainians who moved here because they weren't willing to buy into the theocracy.

KSA is a tiny, yet massively wealthy country full of spoiled princes drag- racing Ferraris and employing de-facto slaves who is currently committing war crimes in Yemen with weapons we sold them. A lot less sympathetic, and I'm not familiar with a large Saudi expat population that fled because of disagreement with the politics of the ruling monarchs.

<comment><USER8> Saudi Arabia isn't so tiny these days. They're #41 in population and climbing rapidly. Their population is larger than Australia and will soon eclipse Canada and Poland. In ~10-12 years they'll catch Spain and Ukraine in population.

Iran - as with Iraq and others in the region - is of course seeing a similarly rapid population expansion.

> middle-income country

Iran isn't a middle income country. Their GDP per capita places them at #95 (below Iraq) - around $5,500 - they're a very impoverished low-income nation. That's comparable to Jamaica, South Africa and Guyana, far away from middle income. To break into the middle income group you plainly have to approach the global average on GDP per capita (or higher), around $11,000 and above will get you into that discussion. Poland and Chile are middle income nations, with roughly $15k in GDP per capita.

> Sure, they're a theocracy, but we also overthrew the only democratically > elected leader they've ever had

Mohammad Mosaddegh was not democratically elected at all. He was specifically appointed by a king (the Shah of Iran) and feudal lords that ruled the Majlis. It's one of the great propaganda myths of modern times that Mosaddegh was somehow democratically elected, while it's a total fraud of a premise. Iran has never been democratic, not even remotely close, not at any point in their entire history.

Even Wikipedia openly supports the fact that Mosaddegh wasn't democratically elected, and instead he was appointed:

"On 28 April 1951, the Shah appointed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister after the Majlis (Parliament of Iran) nominated Mosaddegh by a vote of 79–12."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh#Appointment...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh#Appointment_as_Prime_Minister)

The Majlis itself was not democratically elected. It almost exclusively consisted of large land owners that were de facto feudal lords.

This would be like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump or Barack Obama (a former President or similar) appointing the new President after the US Senate voted on who to nominate. Absolutely nobody would think that was a democratic process. And it wasn't a democratic process when Iran did it.

Today, the same people that claim Iran was a democracy in 1951, simultaneously claim the US is not a democracy. It's a rather hilarious spin if one is capable of being objective about the propaganda behind that myth-building push.

<comment><USER10> > Their GDP per capita places them at #95 (below Iraq) - around $5,500 - > they're a very impoverished low-income nation.

That's nominal not adjusted for cost of living. For the latter they're close to the world average, above Brazil and not far below Argentina. Possibly more relevantly, "middle-income" is defined by the World Bank ([https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/90...](https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world- bank-country-and-lending-groups)), which in fact categorises Iran as "upper- middle-income".

Iraq isn't actually that poor, it's just terrible for mysterious other reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Makes me think of a meme or cartoon:

[https://me.me/i/cmdr-rheon-magerheon-replying-to- griglager-t...](https://me.me/i/cmdr-rheon-magerheon-replying-to-griglager- thi-s-sug-is-c97c16ad6a7848c88ad40b703fd340cd)

Though when I was a teen "gamer girl" \-- mostly RPGs -- I looked like a cross between the two images. You can be a gamer girl and also be pretty and like nice clothes.

I was usually the only girl there. Glad to see progress on this front across the globe.

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of the gender-based discrimination in Banks' Culture novel The Player of Games.

It's still astounding to me to see a country keep half of its population in effective slavery.

<comment><USER13> It's not freedom, but it's not slavery.

<comment><USER14> Women are effectively owned by men. They can do _very_ little without permission of a male guardian. There's been a bit of progress in the last few years, but for example marriage is a contract between two men amounting to transfering ownership of the bride.

<comment><USER11> That's not as radically different from Western culture as Western culture likes to pretend it is.

We have traditions like a man asking her father for her hand in marriage. We change her last name to signify she has transferred identity from her father's clan to her husband's. We treat marriage as very much a financial contract and divorce tends to hurt women financially much more than it does men.

Etc.

<comment><USER14> Just this week a woman who's spoken in favor of a man controlling his wife's vote was featured at the RNC. In my family, three of my female cousins were forbidden by their husbands from voting, employment, opening bank accounts or holding credit cards, and learning how to drive. They were evangelical Christians. Two have since stood up for themselves and divorced their husbands, one persists and still considers her obeisance a duty to god. I really don't understand why you're getting downvoted, Doreen.

<comment><USER11> _I really don 't understand why you're getting downvoted, Doreen._

I am getting downvotes because anytime a woman tells Western men they don't treat their women as wonderfully as they like to imagine, they kick the living crap out of her and let her know she needs to SFTU because women have it so very good here. It's par for the course.

<comment><USER15> Western men "kick the living crap out of" women who speak their mind like that? And tell her "to STFU"?

I think you're confusing the West with countries like Saudi Arabia.

<comment><USER11> Mmm, hmmm.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317792)

<comment><USER16> You are mixing up traditions that are optional, voluntary and more role play than anything else (as if it was common that a Western man in a Western country would ask the father of the bride to be _instead_ of her; it's, for some people, a formality _after_ the couple has decided to get married, and everybody plays their part) with state law with heavy punishment.

Similarly: it's tradition to say "until death do us part" in marriage vows, but essentially nobody means it, divorce is common.

"There are crazy drops in a sea of sane people" != "There's a sea of crazy people, but I've seen a sane drop or two".

<comment><USER11> I'm really not mixing up anything. Please, kindly, don't tell me I simply have muddled thinking and no real validity to my point of view.

I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN. I spent nearly six years homeless while a member here. I remain dirt poor.

Meanwhile, some of the men on the leaderboard are millionaires who made their millions in part by networking via HN.

The figures for women in leadership positions at Fortune 500 companies is something like 6 percent female CEOs and 17 percent overall. There appears to be one and only one woman on HN to have ever graced the leaderboard, a list of 100 names that has changed over time. So my brief appearance there puts me in a league of my own and well under one percent of those names is someone who posts as openly female.

Yet all most men here want to know if they email me is if I will sleep with them. So HN has been a huge networking fail for me and I remain dirt poor.

Since that poverty means I can't afford to eat today, I'm a hair crankier than usual about the whole thing.

Sexism is alive and well in the West and the gains we've made fall very far short of anything resembling equality.

I think I'm done here for now. My story is not remotely a secret. It's galling how I get treated here and then told to quit my whining about my poverty.

In discussions of gender equality, so it's on topic. It's just not welcome and this is a silencing tactic that helps ensure I can never get any kind of remedy.

<comment><USER17> Doreen, as someone who is here fairly often, I appreciate the perspective you provide, as it's one that's uncommon here and I (and judging by the fact that you have been on the leaderboard) and Hacker News finds very valuable. While I'm nowhere near being a millionaire, I'm young, male, and fairly removed from being in any sort of poverty; I think you would be right in your claim that on the leaderboard there is probably nobody with the same experience as you, while you could say I bring comparatively little that is novel "to the table" if you will.

That being said, a couple things you've mentioned that I wanted to talk about: one is that you're one of the only women, or poor people on this site (I noticed you've qualified it with "leaderboard", but I suspect you know as well as I do that this is highly correlated to "how much do you use the site"). I won't claim in any way that this group forms a majority of course, but I have run women who qualify themselves as being a woman in pretty much every thread where it would make sense to do so. I see people who are poor, perhaps living in countries where wages are an order of magnitude lower than they are in say the US, some that don't have a roof over their heads or have been skipping meals. So these people are here, and I am glad to hear from them just as I am glad to hear from you as well.

In addition, you're not really being fair to Hacker News with your claim that men here would only email you to see if you would be interested in them. Some might, of course–as you mention, sexism is a real thing, it exists everywhere including in what we would call "western countries". But it's something that Hacker News is not about, nor is it acceptable behavior; the majority of men are not how you're describing them to be. You mention that you haven't been able to network effectively, but of course Hacker News skews heavily into recruiting people with college degrees in computer science, maybe multiple programming languages under their belt, maybe a fresh graduate or someone with experience at another software engineering company. We can talk all about whether this is what Hacker News should be about, and perhaps if it should branch out into being more welcoming to people of your background, but I just wanted to point out that I don't think that you can necessarily correlate your experience with "nobody wants to network with me because I talk about being a woman and also being poor".

To be clear: we're not saying there isn't a problem in the US with sexist, or trying to downplay your hardships both in life and on Hacker News in particular. But on a topic of "is life worse for women in Saudi Arabia or the United States" your personal experience with sexism is anecdotal and answers the question " _is_ there still sexism in the United States".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a particular metric for your startup that you track daily? - <AUTHOR>

Looking for a single number that is motivating and meaningful - wondering what (if any) others look at. <comment><USER2> It really depends on what you are doing, and what your goal is. For my web app, I track the number of free and paid accounts in the last 1,7,30,60,90 days. I also track how many users have signed in in the same timeframe, as well as how 'much' they are using the product. Of course, this is on top of the standard google analytics stuff, including conversion ratio.

</comment><comment><USER3> For web apps... I recommend you track AARRR aka startup metrics for pirates. It stands for Acquisition, Activation, Registration, Referral, Revenue.

[http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup- metrics....](http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> How many users/customers we talk to each week. The higher that number gets, the more momentum we feel and the less we feel like we are lost in the woods.

</comment><comment><USER5> No.of users and Profit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that all users? or just paying users? For profit, do you look at gross or net, or both? If you could only look at one of those for a day, which would you choose?

<comment><USER5> Looking at all users and gross profit currently. But, these will vary by the type of business. If I had to choose one, I'd just look at profit, mainly due to my current financial situation.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter test-launching ephemeral tweets called Fleets - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kayvz/status/1235248673136635909 <comment><AUTHOR> I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day?

I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems.

I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development?

</comment><comment><USER2> _So Fleets can be used to send deniable abusive messages ?_

\-- [https://twitter.com/rdgresident/status/1235281721979031552](https://twitter.com/rdgresident/status/1235281721979031552)</comment>


Microsoft to tweak Visual Studio 11 interface with Release Candidate - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-tweak-visual-studio-11-interface-with-release-candidate/12664

<comment><USER2> WHO THOUGHT ALL CAPS WAS A GOOD IDEA? THIS IDEA SHOULD HAVE BEEN SHOT DOWN 10 SECONDS AFTER IT WAS SUGGESTED.</comment>


The iPhone cannibal - <AUTHOR>

How do you make an iPhone app that doesn't cannibalize its original business: an address and phone lookup service that earns its money on incoming calls? <comment><USER2> \- Forced registration + pay-per-use \- Forced re-installation (+payment) after a set number of successful uses \- Forced registration after a set number of successful uses Have a little brainstorming session and you will likely come up with a plethora of other possible implementation schemes... =)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your insights - but the main problem isn't for the app to make money, it is to generate calls to the call centre helping them grow their business. This is quite a challenge when users know they can get the answers they need in the iPhone app itself without calling the call centre for them..

<comment><USER2> Oh, I see! This is a real problem. Maybe the app could provide a neat user interface for framing a request, then send it as a text message to the call center, which then sends the answer back to the app.

I know this sounds contrived, but it seems to me the only way to not cannibalize the call centre is to not duplicate its functionality. The only thing left after taking the actual functionality away is the presentation, i.e. the user interface. So you can choose to use the call centre with the traditional interface (speaking on the phone) or the new app interface (that helps frame the question and later delivers the result).</comment></comment></comment>


On Privacy (or: what Buzz failed to learn from Newsfeed) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rosania.org/on-privacy-or-what-buzz-failed-to-learn-from

<comment><USER2> The article claims that "Companies don't understand privacy." It then goes on to explain how _users_ don't understand privacy. If you are publishing something in public on the Internet, you should expect people to be able to see it. Perhaps companies like Google and Facebook should be doing a better job of educating users that, yes, if you publish something publicly on Facebook, people will be able to see it, but I don't think it is the companies who lack the understanding of privacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article is about the problem caused by not being explicit with our privacy intentions and expecting software to figure it out. If we keep catering to the expectation that software will solve this problem, we'll miss out on lots of opportunities, including the opportunity to develop a privacy-aware society. People are able to learn these things. They will, if you let them. Human nature is not a fixed value in this problem. It will grow around the best tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point. One thing that I did not explore in the article is what the implications are for product marketing and adoption. By launching Buzz with preliminary connections already baked in, Google is really boosting the chances for uptake.

I agree that people can learn to use the tools, but can we design go-to-market strategies that do not depend on software continuing to guess who wants to talk to who, about what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Highlight of the article for me:

"* Computers suck at intent. Inferring privacy preferences for new software, based on prior actions in old software, is a recipe for failure, and a PR nightmare. * People assume computers are great at intent. We publish things to much wider contexts than we intend, and don't notice or care until new products and features make incorrect inferences based on that."

I think that best describes the problem. General privacy policies might make sense, and in truth, might be correct. Indeed, Buzz might be following the policies set, but at the same time, it makes the first mistake. Couple that with peoples assumption of the status quo and really not working to understand what they use, makes for a volatile mix.

In the end, this is probably the most important thing of all:

"Inferring privacy preferences for new software, based on prior actions in old software, is a recipe for failure."

<comment><USER5> _"Inferring privacy preferences for new software, based on prior actions in old software, is a recipe for failure."_

What I find so _very_ strange, is that this isn't obvious by now. What happened here?

Nobody at Google thought of this?

Someone thought of this but was too scared to mention this?

Someone did mention it but was overruled?

I really can't decide which one of those is worst.

<comment><USER4> Maybe the people at Google didn't see it this way.

"Inferring privacy preferences for a new feature, based on privacy choices in the existing software, is a recipe for failure."

That would be how to apply this to Buzz.</comment></comment></comment>


SCP user's migration guide to rsync - <AUTHOR> https://fedoramagazine.org/scp-users-migration-guide-to-rsync/ <comment><USER2> The examples are wrong in that the trailing slash on the source dir/ copies the _contents_ of the directory, not the directory itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone starts on scp, but rsync is the one everyone stays with because of how often a connection drops out during a transfer.</comment>


Ben Horowitz: Things Some VCs Do That I Don't Like - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/13/four-things-some-vcs-do-that-i-dont-like/

<comment><USER2> Many of the points are good. I believe one point is true about advice in general: "They confuse pattern matching with knowledge", which I think is often very true for advice from professors, parents, friends, etc. A pattern failed a few times might provide insight, but it must be presented in that perspective, rather than using it to draw general and strong conclusions. Someone/something might have failed in spite of the pattern rather than because of it.

<comment><USER3> Paul Buchheit had a good quote at the 08 startup school.

      If someone says:
      "That's impossible."

      You should understand it as:
      "According to my very limited
      experience and narrow
      understanding of reality, that's
      very unlikely."

Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E>

Slides: [http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-buchheit-at- star...](http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-buchheit-at-startup- school-08)

<comment><USER4> (Unless they're a physicist; then it's jargon.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can attest that everything Ben says is 100% consistent with the way he ran his company. Even today, ten years later, _my_ employees know better than to invite me to a meeting that doesn't have the set of Objective/Agenda/Outcomes in the calendar entry.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter _If you are a VC and want to be tough, be real tough. For a VC, real tough is: The courage to do what's right even if it makes you look really weak to the partners in your firm_

That "the partners" should be "the other partners", right? IIRC, pg stated/implied in numerous places that no actual communication has taken place until you speak to a partner.

Also, from Introducing Andreesen Horowitz _we will not have associates or other General Partner-track junior positions._ Bravo for honesty. They don't have the track even in theory, while in almost all VC firms the track exists only in theory.

[whine] This comment in the spirit of one deleted from Ben Horowitz's blog, as is his right[/whine]

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the point about avoiding crowd-think is great. It seems like that is one of the biggest pitfalls with VC investing, getting irrational about one area and then bidding up investments in that space.

It'd be interesting to see how other VCs avoid this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey, if you're getting tired of having coffee with VCs, send 'em my way, Ben! I'd gladly have coffee with VCs! :)</comment>


Mantrid, a pure-Python HTTP load balancer, open sourced by Epio - <AUTHOR> http://mantrid.readthedocs.org/

<comment><USER2> Looks cool. But if you want this to be anything more than just a toy, you really need to focus on the extensibility factor. It'd be great if you could inherit from some core load balancer object and add in your custom behavior with just a few lines.</comment>


Five Reasons not to "Upgrade" to Windows' Internet Explorer 9 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/five-reasons-not-to-8220upgrade-8221-to-windows-8217-internet-explorer-9/817

<comment><USER2> He makes a valid point about market share. We know why MS and other companies choose to restrict new products to more recent platforms, but with XP's ~40% installation base, like it or not, this might not have been the smartest business decision.</comment>


Man accused of placing GPS device on victim's car before burglarizing her home - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/man-accused-of-placing-gps-device-on-victims-car-before-burglarizing-her-home/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29

<comment><USER2> Is tracking someone's car a crime? It comes off as a newer form of stalking, in the casual if not legal sense of the term.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised these sorts of crimes don't happen more often. They probably do, but we just don't hear about them as much.

Trackers are cheap these days and even Mission Impossible style devices/bugs can be had that are just a little bigger than a car remote. Or if you're the DIY type, there are circuit and project boards with built in GPS chips or add- on modules available and you can buy plastic cases in standard sizes.

<comment><USER4> I think that once you reach a certain level of sophistication, you become able to make more money with less risk by working within the system. Just about anyone on this site could come up with really smart burglary plans, but even ignoring the morality of it, why bother? There are easier ways to make money with they sort of brainpower.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't take much brain power to walk into RadioShack.

And the money to be made in crime is way more than developer salaries. The new frontier for crime is bitcoin fraud.

<comment><USER6> "The new frontier for crime is bitcoin fraud."

I don't know much about bitcoin but I'm intrigued. Could you please elaborate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They're cheap and ubiquitous, no one is looking for them, and the data can be fed from an anonymous prepaid SIM to a virtual number (Google voice, for example).

Not surprised that this happened, surprised that the burglar was sophisticated enough to plan this but not sophisticated enough to recover it as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Of course the FBI wanted to do the same thing without warrants.

[http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/25/fbi-turns-off- thousan...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/25/fbi-turns-off-thousands-of- gps-devices-after-supreme-court-ruling/)</comment>


Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/10/05/496427956/as-buyers-circle-could-twitter-be-better-off-as-a-non-profit <comment><AUTHOR> This would be fantastic. Twitter's utility is in its open (inherently less profitable) nature. As a data source for academic study it's unparalleled.

<comment><USER2> It's unparalleled in that there is very little that's even similar out there.

I'm less convinced of its actual value. The Twitter-based papers I've read seem to all have two things in common: First, they all use Twitter data. Second, they all seem to desperately want to present observations about how people interact on Twitter as being universal, even though nobody seems to be able to come up with a theoretical or empirical reason why that should be the case that's more compelling than, "We we have to pretend it is in order to get published."

<comment><USER3> Yes. It also bothers me that quality news sources, like NPR, have fallen into the trap of presenting Twitter as representative of the general population.

They often report about how some group of people on Twitter are angry about something -- as if that matters. Reddit has almost as many monthly active users lately, yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the larger population.

<comment><USER4> Twitter is a cheap way to get response quotes for an article without asking anyone any questions. It's gotten so ridiculous that some news "content" is just a series of embedded Tweets. Serious news organizations should band together and restrain themselves from this silly practice. It violates one of the most important rules of interviewing, which is to know _who_ the source is and what her biases might be so that the quote can be presented appropriately.

<comment><USER5> There's a lot of lazy journalism looking for a quote, any quote, because they're required to have one in a story they're writing.

This isn't new. When I was an analyst, some reporters would call me for a quote about something. There were times when I didn't have anything to say because I didn't know anything about said thing. But some would pester me for a quote anyway so they didn't have to give someone else a call.

Twitter does seem to have become a particular crutch though.

<comment><USER4> The BBC was one of the most egregious pioneers in soliciting meaningless viewer responses in the pre-social media era. They would go so far as to kill 30+ seconds of airtime to soliciting/demanding "participatory" viewer responses that were invariably inane. On the plus side, at least it led to some good satire [1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQnd5ilKx2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQnd5ilKx2Y)

<comment><USER6> Auntie Beeb's insistence on such complete drivel has killed all the joy and interest. I find it utterly unlistenable much the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never been able to understand Twitter's popularity. To me, it's like a website's comment section without the attached content. And most of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is only slightly better than YouTube comments, and often worse. I know there are lots of Twitter users here -- seriously, I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, I just don't get the appeal. What am I missing?

<comment><USER8> Twitter gives you the ability to curate yourself a feed from comments of people you deem interesting enough to follow and keep up-to-date with, as far as I know. I mostly use it for my literary pursuits, and being able to follow editors, agents, and authors at the same time with minimal hassle has made twitter very useful to the fiction scene.

Alternatively, in the tech world, it gives you live updates on various developers that people look up to. technologies you want to keep up with, and updates on exciting open source software.

<comment><USER9> The problem with Twitter, IMO, is that it's a fire hose. Let's say that I decide to follow John Carmack. I'm interested in his thoughts on technical topics and especially articles or posts that he may have written. Instead, I get all of that plus* the inspirational quotes he posts every morning, his political opinions, his thoughts on current events, etc. None of which I care about, and none of which (AFAIK) Twitter gives me the ability to filter.

*I don't know if John Carmack actually posts anything of the sort, just a hypothetical.

<comment><USER10> Is there a comparable service that has a public/private feed? I guess Facebook wall posts would be the closest, but you can't publicly follow people there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Twitter is the odd one out. While others built walled gardens, twitter kept the gate open.

We now have a general catalog of human discourse for the last decade. Record of great tragedy, revolutions, elections past and future.

It would be shame if this was bought and locked up by some gardeners.

<comment><USER12> >general catalog of human discourse

I would contest this. Twitter represents a very narrow sector of society.

<comment><USER13> A good recent example is the Democratic Primary-Twitter massively magnified Sanders' supporters, and a lot were genuinely surprised that Twitter does not in fact represent the will of the Democratic Primary.

<comment><USER14> That's not a great example; because Sanders had far greater non-Democratic Party support than the other primary candidate, Twitter was reflecting the opinions of a more general population than the primary would. To say it another way - Democratic primary voters reflect a narrower sector of society than Twitter does.

<comment><USER15> I'd challenge that interpretation. Lots of Hillary's disproportionate support came from people much less likely to use Twitter (e.g. older black voters), while Sanders' strength with younger voters would be much more likely to show up on Twitter.

<comment><USER14> I'd agree with both points, but only 32% of voters are registered Democrats. Sanders polled far better than Clinton within the other 68%, although amongst registered Democrats, Clinton stayed 15-25% ahead during the entire primary IIRC. On Twitter, in addition to Democrats, there were also Republicans, Independents, Argentinians, and others commenting on the primary. That's the definition of a wider sample.

<comment><USER16> Argentinians? How did that make a dent :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Twitter's best bet is cut costs by bring employee count down to 100, 50 sales related, 50 engineering and move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability. I think once they become profitable, it opens a lot more opportunities to explore new markets. Right now they are in a scramble to get users. Being profitable and focusing on one thing at a time will do them wonders. Should start by shutting down Periscope and have a new tab in the app for Live.

<comment><USER18> 50 people to maintain a site the size of Twitter?

<comment><USER19> Serious question (because I've never worked on a site that large) does the size of the site mean anything as to how many engineers are needed to maintain it? I would think it would be more a function of complexity?

<comment><USER20> There is a loose correlation, yes.

Security, abuse / harassment, fraud, community interaction, developer relations, 24/7 maintenance & ops, APIs, marketing & PR, legal, advertising, physical security / cleaning etc (whether outsourced or not it's a cost), secretarial, accounting, human resources & recruiting, sales, engineering, various management and so on.

The notion that you could run a $2.5 to $3 billion sales business with 100 people is a _very_ bad joke. To deliver on that kind of sales level, you need more than a hundred people working in your sales organization alone. There are only a few types of businesses that can operate that thin at that size of sales, most of which are in the financial world.

Twitter doesn't need to cut down to 100 people to become nicely profitable, they need to cut down to 1,000 - 1,500 (while reducing infrastructure costs). Facebook delivers $1.5 million in sales per employee. Twitter's overall business is less complex and easier to operate than Facebook, they could deliver a higher ratio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article sites Mozilla as a "precedent in tech for a nonprofit spin out," but that's really not relevant at all. The Mozilla Foundation took over the Navigator codebase that Netscape open-sourced, the Mozilla Foundation having been created for that sole purpose. What happens with Twitter's software is moot because Twitter's value comes from its community.

</comment><comment><USER22> It seems weird to say that twitter discussion was so significant in furthering different causes. From the outside (I don't use it), I've still heard plenty about those events. From the inside, I'd bet it seems like they were the original source for the events, or at least the cause of it getting so big. On reddit/imgur/9gag/4chan/etc, there seems to be an idea that whichever one you are on is the source of whichever meme is getting popular. I think it's the same kind of thing. Maybe the discussion grows "organically" and that causes it to grow on each of these platforms, instead of the platform causing the growth.

<comment><USER14> 4chan and reddit have undoubtedly been the source of an enormous number of ideas and trends, though.

<comment><USER23> Which are largely storms in a teapot, with little effect on the world. They are, at their best, slacktivism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I only heard the jab on air, I didn't realize they were actually being serious

"In the second quarter it lost more than $100 million — so perhaps it already is a nonprofit."

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy.

But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel there is a real opportunity for Twitter to streamline its engineering and operational costs?

Is there a breakdown available of where/how they spend their money?

<comment><USER26> We routinely run 5MM simultaneous TCP/IP connections on a single 12-core box (with Erlang!).

There's no reason for Twitter to need all those employees and all that hardware. If someone can get it at a fire sale price, and reduce it to 100 employees, they can have a nice business.

<comment><USER5> As a point of reference, even the Wikimedia Foundation had almost 300 staff and contractors as of 2015. This is admittedly a lot fewer than Twitter employs today. However, I suspect that even a minimalist Twitter without sales, etc. needs more employees and would have more of other types of costs than Wikimedia.

<comment><USER27> And frankly, much of the same criticism applies to them. A tiny tiny sliver of their constantly multiplying budget is spent on actually hosting the Wikipedia.

<comment><USER5> That's somewhat fair. It's certainly true that Wikimedia has a fair number of active projects that haven't had much of an impact. Apparently there have been at least some discussions of streamlining their work although organizations universally find it hard to avoid scope creep.

I'd point out though that, according to Wikipedia :-), the Internet Archive has a staff of about 200 so a few hundred employees/contractors doesn't seem out out of line as the baseline for a non-profit information infrastructure project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It would be better for everyone who uses Twitter, better for people who use it for social sciences, but probably not better for Twitter itself as a company.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't forgive Twitter for what it has done with TweetDeck after buying it.

They have taken a great tool and striped it so that it fits their blurry vision of what the service should look like.

<comment><USER30> Are you talking about [https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/](https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/) or a desktop or mobile app? I think tweetdeck.twitter.com is my preferred Twitter UI because it allows me to keep on top of keyword searches as well.

Staying on top of current conversations and trends in a niche area of web design is a big chunk of Twitter's value to me and it's very time consuming to do that in their mobile app or regular Twitter.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yup. I suggested this in 2012.

[http://justinvincent.com/page/1972/its-time-for-an-open- twit...](http://justinvincent.com/page/1972/its-time-for-an-open-twitter)

</comment><comment><USER32> Hard to imagine Twitter working as a non-profit when so much compensation is tied to equity.

<comment><USER33> Exactly. Most people who work for non-profits do so out of passion for the company and mission because the salaries often are going to be about 80% of market rate. With no equity to compensate with either, you are left mostly with the believers (or the less optimal workers).

I'm not sure I see Twitter's mission being strong enough to attract the developers it needs if it were to become a non-profit. Further, while there are large media grants out there, I don't really see a huge pool of capital willing to cover Twitter's operational costs with donations.

<comment><USER34> <see Twitter's mission

I was going to ask What is it's Mission but then the more important question is Why Is it used?

A straw into someone's brain not knowing if they drew acid, water, colored water or truth serum first into the straw before discharging and reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Nonprofits", especially when they have associated revenue streams beyond pure donations (eg government contracts), have really odd organizational incentives.

In the context of something like Twitter where selective censorship / megaphone promotion is becoming a core part of their operations, it looks like reorganizing as a nonprofit is just a tax-advantaged way for the board to act how they want without being even theoretically obliged to operate for the benefit of the people that supplied them with the capital to build up their service.

They've been extremely aggressive in purging high-value users on extremely flimsy pretences in what cannot possibly be a revenue-optimal way (unless somehow you think celebrities fighting amongst themselves is bad for user engagement), but if they have a purported goal of something vague like "improving communication" that becomes a non-issue.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a non-profit, it would still need to breakeven. So far, it hasn't demonstrated this ability, so arguing that its problems stem from pressure by investors to make outsized returns seems weak. (And the article even admits that Twitter's problems aren't all about investor pressure.)

<comment><USER36> Right, but in that case could adopt the Wikipedia model. So, donations.

<comment><USER5> Which would require a very different cost structure from the Twitter of today. Not impossible perhaps but certainly a fundamental change. <$100m annual expenses for Wikimedia vs. $2b, so about 25x. Of course, some of those expenses are cost of sales and others could be cut in a more streamlined non- profit but it's a big difference today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think a better question is could you make a nonprofit serve the purpose of twitter and GNU social has been successful in this regard. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social)

</comment><comment><USER38> No. Twitter would be better off using machine learning to segment their users (the way Hello is trying to do manually). For example they should know I love Nike trainers, Arsenal football club, I'm a developer, I'm thinking about buying a house etc. and surface this information when I'm writing a tweet such that it knows if I'm talking about Arsenal or my trip around Japan and gives a richer UI based on this. Making my stream more interesting i.e. when a game is on and I'm writing about it there should be way to message only Arsenal people...

All of this should be automatically added/tagged up and while you can remove the metadata it'll be right most of the time. The advertising potential is incredible.

<comment><USER39> "The advertising potential is incredible."

Maybe some things don't need to have advertising crammed into every possible corner. Maybe some things don't need to be monetized to the maximum extent possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This seems like the only way to end censorship on twitter.

</comment><comment><USER41> See the #1 HN article today about returning the web (or the internet) to its decentralized origins.

The existence of Twitter and many other technolpolies that dominate with what could basically be a shared protocol is what's holding back decentralization.

Actually I think all of the giants will eventually fall hard because of (re)-decentralization. That includes Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the United States, etc.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think we are seeing a (vastly accelerated) version of turn of the century industrial politics.

The ultimate (good) destiny if Google, Facebook and Twitter is as public utilities. This valuable data open to all and their connective abilities as useful and common to all as the road network.

Should it be a non-profit. No it should be a utility

<comment><USER43> I'm confused, do you mean the Dot-com bubble turn of the century or something that happened around the turn of the 19th/20th century?

<comment><USER42> Oh yeah, we have had another. Fin-de-siecle 19/20th century.

Basically oil barons went bat shit crazy and owned everything and everyone, railways, oil etc. Whilst less pronounced in the US, most "modern" nations brought energy supply into strongly regulated industries, often price controlled

I hope / assume / fear that the (personally identifying) data industry will go the same way

<comment><USER6> What specific examples of nationally-controlled or regulated oil industries do you have in mind?

As of 1900, the major oil extractors were the United States, Russia, Romania, Austria-Hungary (Bóbrka field), the Dutch East Indies, and Peru. Canada had some operations.

 _Not_ on that list: Persia (1908), Venezuela (1914), Mexico (1901), Iraq (1927), Saudi Arabia (1938), Brazil (1930), Kuwait (1938).

Unless you're talking about subsequent development of national oil companies, largely in the 1950s: Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, etc. See generally Yergin's _The Prize_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am curious what the mechanics of this would be - take thee company private and then apply for classification as a 501(c)(3)?

Looking at the guidelines I'm guessing the type would they be a "private operating foundation"?

[https://www.501c3.org/what-is-a-501c3/](https://www.501c3.org/what- is-a-501c3/)

Just as one example 501c's are heavily regulated where politics are concerned. Given that Twitter is utilized heavily by politicians as well as political campaigns, would this even be a viable option for them?

<comment><USER33> Sure they could still do it as long as the company itself remains non- partisan, but they just couldn't take money from politicians or political campaigns. They would have to find some other sort of donor capital to sustain their operations.

<comment><USER44> I would think that the donor capital would also be needed to purchase all outstanding shares. So I guess with something like the Knight Foundation or the Kroc Foundation or something with a similar sized endowment could conceivably accomplish this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> No, because you would not build it that way. You could say the same about Facebook. Diaspora already exists, as well as some other distributed social networks. If any of these alternatives prospers it may be because the _idea_ of Twitter should be implemented as something other than an investor-owned venture.

</comment><comment><USER46> There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. The open Facebook alternatives never took off though - very hard to get traction against deep pocketed and connected rivals.

Doesn't look as though anyone is going to buy Twitter which is embarrassing for them

<comment><USER47> _> There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch._

Launch, sure. Scale? That's a much harder problem in terms of user acquisition (and if you can do that, you can deal with the technical side of things even as a nonprofit, maybe). I think there's only room for one Twitter. If you don't have 99% of the people interested in that sort of service, you might as well have nobody.

And I don't think the arguments towards federation and distribution help--you can have a thousand federated hosts, and if you have no users, you will get no users. It's a really hard problem.

<comment><USER14> Existing and being architecturally scalable while Twitter is failing or as it fails should be enough to get users.

<comment><USER47> Does that follow? "Existing" doesn't strike me as a sufficient prerequisite. Building something that scales is easy. I do it all the time. It's all the non-technical stuff that matters, and open-source/decentralized services don't seem to really be good at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Twitter betrayed all developers that relied on their API, and also helped overthrow legitimate governments and put middle east and ukraine in chaos. Their failure is well deserved and should help other startups to not fuck with everybody while pretending to help (Google and Facebook, are you the next?)

<comment><USER49> Allowing people to organize themselves is "helping them overthrow legitimate governments"???

What, do you think twitter should start censoring everything that governments disagree with?

An open, non-profit twitter would probably allow people to do even MORE things like "overthrowing governments".

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> At the very least twitter should have never gone public. The stresses of a public company don't jive with the needs of a platform like Twitter. Thousands of employees looking to monetize our tweets aren't what Twitter needs, in any case.

</comment><comment><USER51> I see nothing in this article indicating why it would? Shareholders want profits. Why would they allow twitter to go non-profit?

If you want a non-profit twitter, make a non-profit alternative and hope for Twitter to die.

</comment><comment><USER52> It would only be better if they unbanned everyone and stopped trying to bend the messages sent over the platform. At the moment it seems like it might be better for it to just burn down, so something more open can replace it.

<comment><USER47> Do you think they should unban people who threaten to rape and kill people because they disagree about video games? If so, why?

<comment><USER53> I don't necessarily hold this view, but I can see the merit in it. I tend to lean toward purist as far as free speech goes. Slippery slope arguments and what not.

Personally, I like the concept of outsourcing the policing/moderation of a community to the community itself. I think what online forums do by promoting moderators from the long time, trusted user base is a step in the right direction. The upvote/downvote system on HN, where the downvoted stuff gets increasingly more difficult read, is even better.

<comment><USER47> Great freedoms come with great responsibilities. I tend to think that free speech works only when the consequences of using that free speech...y'know...exist. In a universe of pseudonymity and anonymity, those consequences don't exist. Even when you are literally _committing the crime of assault_ (friendly reminder: assault is the threat of violence, battery is the violence) against somebody because they have the temerity to be a woman who makes video games or a black man who criticizes the police on the Internet.

To that end, showing people the door seems eminently reasonable. You aren't going to actually be able to visit upon them the prosecution (again, for literal and extant _crimes_ ) that they have earned for themselves, but you can, and IMO should, cut them out of the social universe that you undertake to create and protect.

<comment><USER49> But there WOULD be consequences. The consequences is that you would end up on a lot of people's ban lists.

That way you don't have to interact with people you don't want to.

<comment><USER47> The consequence for these _crimes_ when they do not occur on the Internet is jail time. What, exactly, does a ban list mean by comparison?

<comment><USER53> Not true. I can mail anyone a letter, anonymously to their house. I can even drop it in a public mailbox w/ no return address and it will be delivered to you. Unless I mess this up some how there will be no jail time. This doesn't mean everyone wants the government to go through all of the letters and filter out the bad ones. Same goes on the internet.

<comment><USER23> Except Twitter is not mailing a letter - it's like renting up a billboard in front of Christie's house, that says that you're going to kill her and rape her.

Doing that will absolutely land you in a criminal court. 'She doesn't have to look at it' won't be a great defense, either.

Words have consequences, and centuries of precedent and legislature have established them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's worth mentioning that the more principled alternative is GNU Social: [https://gnu.io/](https://gnu.io/)

<comment><USER55> I like the idea of GNU Social, but the Twitter-like frontend, Qvitter, is slow and feels clunky. And last time I checked, it still hadn't solved its "spooling problem": offline nodes won't receive updates and won't catch up when they're back online. A post you delete from your timeline might end up still visible on a node if it was offline when you deleted it.

I'm sort of tempted to try writing a UUCP- or NNTP-based GNU Social clone now.

<comment><USER54> I understand that Twitter is an impressive piece of engineering given the scale and instantaneousness at which it operates. On the other hand, it does kind of boggle my mind that microblogging should be as difficult as it is.

UUCP or NNTP are really interesting suggestions. They are protocols of the old net that seemed to scale very well and long ago solved many of the kinds of issues I'd expect to see with something like a federated Twitter clone. Maybe I'm overestimating the scale of newsgroups during their heyday?

<comment><USER6> Keep in mind that the Old Net, particularly in its heyday (pre-1993) was _small_. A few thousand nodes. A few million users perhaps. Usenet at the time was ~50-500k users according to a guestimate from Gene Spafford. Microsoft conducted measurements in the early 2000s suggesting a few millions of users IIRC. Marc A. Smith and others:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/picturi...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/picturing-usenet-mapping-computer-mediated-collective- action/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Yes, Reddit too.

These websites are more like gardens than amusement parks. A collective shared space, which is hard to monetize.

<comment><USER57> And when they die a new one comes to fruition and the herd moves along. Its a repeat problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> As a useful public resource, it could be. Along the lines of ICANN?

<comment><USER6> Poe's law?

Don't mention this to Karl Auerbach....

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> How about charging users?. Like monthly plans etc.

<comment><USER60> Wasn't there some "Twitter alternative" launched by someone who used HN? Its entire business model was to bill users. I can't remember the name of it, or the founder, but I think the service failed to gain traction.

 _edit:_ The service was/is App.net, and it was founded by Dalton Caldwell. It used to make the rounds on HN all the time.

<comment><USER61> It was a good idea, but the execution was ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> should adopt a decentralized system. should put them back on top and give another reason people should use it again.

</comment><comment><USER63> Diaspora* is surely better off that way.

</comment><comment><USER64> Twitter should be replaced with a protocol like email or TCP/IP.

</comment><comment><USER65> same with facebook please

</comment><comment><USER66> "In the second quarter it lost more than $100 million — so perhaps it already is a nonprofit."

</comment><comment><USER67> Good point. Apple is a non-profit: it does not give dividends.

<comment><USER68> Apple is not a non-profit, and it has been issuing dividends since 2012 ([http://investor.apple.com/dividends.cfm](http://investor.apple.com/dividends.cfm))

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> It already is, is it not?

</comment><comment><USER70> Twitter needs to be acquired by Google.</comment>


Show HN: My weekend project, A domain name hack and semi-mass domain search - <AUTHOR> http://domainsuitor.com Hey HN,
I was always sick of trying to find available domain names for other side projects, so I came up with this. It'll check availability of .com, .net and .org, as well as any domain name hacks available (gimpish -> gimpi.sh). It's Sinatra and EventMachine driven.
Enter a few words in the name field to try it out! e.g. apple, microsoft, reddit, purplemonkeydishwasher
Feedback muchly appreciated! <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I was always sick of trying to find available domain names for other side projects, so I came up with this. It'll check availability of .com, .net and .org, as well as any domain name hacks available (gimpish -> gimpi.sh). It's Sinatra and EventMachine driven.

Enter a few words in the name field to try it out! e.g. apple, microsoft, ycombinator, purplemonkeydishwasher

Feedback muchly appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER2> It's giving me wrong information for .org domains

On my first search, it shows chat.org and wizard.org as being available. Not so.

<comment><USER2> Hmm..just tried it again and now it shows them correctly as being as unavailable. Not sure what happened first time around.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's using Ruby Whois (<http://www.ruby-whois.org/>) to do the queries, and it looks like the .org implementation is a bit flakey.

Thanks for the heads up and thanks for the feedback! I'll see if I can fix the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://domai.nr/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty cool, but slightly different. It's certainly a much more polished product =)

Where that's showing you a combination of words, my site instead looks up every word and checks it's availability.

I created my site to help with the brainstorming of site names to see what's available, but I can see how domai.nr would be used in a very similar way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is just... super fast, impressive !</comment>


Senator John McCain Education Background - <AUTHOR> https://kenyayote.com/senator-john-mccain-education-background-where-he-studied/ <comment><USER2> Graduated near the bottom of his class and achieved far more than most.</comment>


Apple Accused of 'Providing Aid to Kidnappers' by NYPD Counterterrorism Chief - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/03/06/apple-accused-of-providing-aid-to-kidnappers-robbers-by-nypd-counterterrorism-chief/ <comment><USER2> Next up: car makers providing aid to criminals.

<comment><USER3> I've heard they're the vehicle of choice for scouting a crime and for the getaway.</comment></comment>


China dominates generation 3+ nuclear reactors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/08/china-dominates-generation-3-nuclear-reactors.html <comment><AUTHOR> Here's hoping that USA will start investing more in nuclear, not because it's cleaner than coal, but at least for fears of having China take the lead.

Best of luck & thanks to startups already working on nuclear!</comment>


Clojars - <AUTHOR> http://clojars.org/ <comment><USER2> Don't forget leiningen (it's mentioned on the page), technomancy's sweet looking Clojure build tool. The two really do go hand in hand.

<comment><USER3> InfoQ has an article about the leiningen / clojars one-two punch:

<http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/11/clojars-leiningen-clojure>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good name. I knew exactly what I was going to find at the other end of the link.

</comment><comment><USER5> The individual jar page should have a link to the git repository, or maybe even to the commit that the jar was built off.

</comment><comment><USER6> looks like a gemcutter.org clone, for clojure?

<comment><USER3> That is exactly right:

<http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/7477fbf2f855c516>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> List of all clojars:

<http://clojars.org/search?q=org>

</comment><comment><USER8> A killer tool/jar/utility developed in Clojure would help me better understand it's power.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really needs a browsing feature linked to from the first page</comment>


Games for Designers - <AUTHOR> http://graphism.fr/games/

<comment><USER2> I remember playing at least one of these a few months ago :)

I just tried RGB Challenge, every time I get one right, the "blowing up" animation freezes my browser for a couple of seconds.

(in case a dev sees this) Firefox 38.0.5 on Windows 7

</comment><comment><USER3> wow, many table games for designer. How about game for developer/startup founder? I only know Burn Rate.</comment>


Goodbye Stallman - <AUTHOR> Whilst respecting what Richard Stallman has achieved in the past, I just couldn't read his latest post on the <a href='http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html'>javascript</a> without getting a bit hot under the collar.
His  position is, in my mind, completely untenable. He sees everything through his 'free software' glasses, the same way a dyed-in-the-wool communist sees everything through his Breznospecs. It's not enough for him that a Google Docs javascript file be free (gratis) – he objects that the file is not easy to read and has no comments. The fact that removing unnecessary white space is a commonly-used practice in speeding-up page loading is not mentioned, even in passing. Seriously, what is this guy on?
I have in mind a special device for Stallman, Raymond and the other open source nutters. It consists of a big plastic bag that envelops their heads and into which is pumped the aroma of roasted coffee beans. It is required that they use this apparatus until such a time as their eyes light up and they utter the required phrase.
Today, more than ever, we live in a world of economic reality. In the recent past it was easy to find some chump to lend you all the money required to buy that house/car/tv you really couldn't afford, or finance your startup based on a 10 page deck and the words "web 2.0". But things have changed. And perhaps for the better.
The open software movement cares more about its users than it does its developers. Hacker kudos doesn't pay the fucking rent. I want to know whether all the people writing iPhone or Facebook apps would have tried so hard if they knew their expected return would be exactly $0? Somehow I don't think so.
We've got to move away from this notion that software should be free (gratis). If you use it and can afford to pay for it then why should I give it to you for free? Note: I'm not arguing against open-source, I'm arguing against working for free. If I spend a great deal of time writing a funky database application and big_multi_national dumps Oracle in favor of my code and saves itself $20million in the process, why shouldn't I get my sniff? Seriously, why not?
If the same code is used by some charity or someone's personal website then I'm happy to tip my hat and say 'glad to be of service', but not if they're Coca Cola, or Hertz, or... (you name it).
If there existed a fair and balanced why of rewarding open source developers then I believe the whole sector would explode with a level of commitment and energy that would dwarf the already impressive achievements seen by the community.
That time has come.
It's time for revolution's founders to retire gracefully, and for a more realistic (though still ethical) guard to take its place.
David Semeria Milan, Italy <comment><USER2> I enjoyed reading Mr. Stallman's proposal. I support it and I would like the abilities he mentions, to turn off and replace javascript, to be included in Firefox.

Most of what you say is well-hashed anti-GPL stuff. A few web searches should provide you with all of those arguments, much more carefully written, and save you a good deal of ranting time.

Personally, I don't think there is any good reason to believe that the copyright system promotes the economy or general society, or "the Useful Arts and Sciences" as it is required to do by the US Constitution. Your examples of iPhone and Facebook applications and writing a database are not very convincing. Why should programmers everywhere be constrained from copying something in order to subsidize the creation of iFart ? Giant multi-national corporations use GPLd versions of Oracle competitors, even through MySQL and Postgres and SQLite are licensed in exactly the way you object to, and somehow the free market system still figured out how to pay programmers to work on those projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> All the people that made Fedora 9 worth $10.8 billion for free disagree with you [1]. Just because you wont work for free doesn't mean other people wont. It's a pretty unbelievable display of human passion and generosity. Why criticize that?

[1] [http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux....](http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux.php)

</comment><comment><USER4> Stallman surely realizes that minifying JavaScript is a standard process, but it doesn't seem particularly relevant to his point. First, it not straightforward to determine the licensing for many scripts, and second it does not provide access to an unobfuscated copy of the source. In no way does he ask for JavaScript to be served without minification, but rather he asks that minified JS contain a pointer to a non-minified copy. Doing so doesn't create an additional cost for the site owner, beyond possibly requiring an extra step in a build script.

I think you are pushing two distinct movements into the same box: the free software movement championed by Stallman, and the "get users first, monetize later" euphoria of the "Web 2.0" movement. The first group is pursuing a moral agenda; the second believes that it is a legitimate route to wealth. Much of what you are blaming Stallman for seems better directed at the second movement or at open source developers (who are often a very different breed than Stallman, and who--in my experience--tend to hate the GPL as an unnecessarily restrictive license).

I also find your example of iPhone and Facebook applications as somewhat problematic. These platforms are ghettos where developers are dependent on the capricious rules and regulations provided by the owners. This is hard to ignore when you see traffic to applications dropping by a reported 50% after the latest redesign for Facebook, and also when independent apps like Podcaster (err, whatever the name was) barred from the AppStore because it competed with functionality that Apple's own apps provided. Opportunity abounds in both, but there are many many losers in both as well. The real winner in both these situations is Apple and Facebook. Asking forgiveness from Marx, when possible it is always best to be the landlord.

My second to last point in this unfortunately disconnected response is that neither Stallman nor Web 2.0 have _ever_ been the "guard". Both are and have always been fringe movements. The "guard" has always been large companies selling software to other large companies and making tremendous sums of money while doing so.

Finally, people do get paid for open source contributions. It isn't straight forward, and the correlation between time spent and money returned is not predictable in the same way it is for an hourly consultant gig, but there is always money there for people who grasp it.

</comment><comment><USER5> If nothing else, Stallman serves as a constant reminder that we should consider the extremes -- both free, and what would happen should freedom disappear -- in order to keep a realistic perspective.

<comment><USER6> We should be happy that RMS is out there fighting the good fight. Though most of us don't go quite as far as he does, our livelihood depends on the availability of Free and open source software, and the ideals of the Free Software Movement. Democratic society is built on debate. When you have people at various extremes arguing you end up somewhere in the middle and I'm glad RMS is there to skew the average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> First...discussion thread here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527500>

Second, the account you posted with has had 1 karma for 147 days. A rant should not be the first thing that you share with this community.

<comment><USER8> Critique the argument not the person.

<comment><USER9> I agree, ad hominem -> bad form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a really interesting proposition would be to get together and write some GPLed javascript libraries. Things that would be immensely useful in coding up something like Google Docs. IANAL, but we may need some modified Affero type GPL for this. I'll leave licensing up to Stallman and Co. Then, you'd quickly see some GPL adoption on that side.

The key is seeding the domain (in this case javascript libraries) with code so good and tempting, people would rather give back their improvements than rebuild the base from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope that RMS or any other Free Software advocate hasn't ever come to your place & threatened you to develop/use free software. If you like the concept you got that way & if you don't... you are free to go your way... It's the freedom of choice.

And I too believe that RMS is very strict & straight on his view. But we shouldn't worry about that. Since he is the icon that represent Software Freedom, he being loosy will not do any good to the community.

<comment><USER8> RMS says that proprietary software is evil. He makes those developing proprietary software feel bad for making a living. His endgame isn't about choice to be free, it's about everyone making free software.

If he had the power, do you think he would outlaw proprietary software?

<comment><USER12> "If he[Stallman] had the power, do you think he would outlaw proprietary software?"

This kind of hypothetical question is not a valid argument.

"If you were starving to death would you become a cannibal?" Should we put you in jail now if you answer yes?

<comment><USER8> I think it's a valid question because this is what we wants to accomplish, as he has stated many times. He openly states proprietary software is evil, and by association the vendors.

Chaunx said he isn't threatening. I disagree, and feel he is quite threatening to those who don't share his world view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand why you're writing this but I don't think you are making much sense. Don't get me wrong, I see how Stallman sounds utterly ridiculous. But he is Richard Stallman. Also, you are sort of making a whiny "wah wah let's get rid of this open source hogwash cuz I want my money wah wah wah -- but don't think I am against open source" argument.

FSF has a particular agenda, an agenda most of us here should at least understand. This javascript stuff does pose potential problems for complete free software types from following their principles and using the Web. It makes it difficult. So Stallman is proposing a means by which one can know if a JS is GPL. Fine. I had been wondering for a couple years now why I hadn't heard much about this issue.

If this is what put you over the edge about Stallman, then you just haven't been paying much attention.

<comment><AUTHOR> In a way you're right. But I do know what Stallman stands for and respect what he's done. I was just hoping he would lay off the web.

The web is open, by definition. Anybody can view a javascript file in the browser cache, and it's not hard to work out how it works even if it is minified/obfuscated.

I just don't see the need to start blocking scripts because the developer doesn't subscribe to his radical views.

In the unlikely event of his idea taking off, it could dampen innovation rather than encourage it.

<comment><USER9> Well, but minified or "obfuscripted," if you like, Javascript is not really in keeping with the views of FSF. A programmer sufficiently dedicated can work out and deal with assembly code of a given executable. The point is that, according to FSF, it should be utterly free.

As far as dampen innovation, eh, I doubt it. I don't think enough people will take Stallman's view seriously for there to be any real danger here. I certainly don't. But I understand your reservations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Free software is great. But it's okay to charge for things, too.</comment>


How To Manufacture Desire - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/04/how-to-manufacture-desire/

<comment><USER2> Here's the gist:

\- The degree to which a company can utilize habit-forming technologies will increasingly decide which products and services succeed or fail.

\- Addictive technology creates "internal triggers" which cue users without the need for marketing, messaging or any other external stimuli. It becomes a user's own intrinsic desire.

\- Creating internal triggers comes from mastering the "desire engine" and its four components: trigger, action, variable reward, and commitment.

\- Consumers must understand how addictive technology works to prevent being manipulated while still enjoying the benefits of these innovations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Addiction or fad? Back in the 1980s, there were people addicted to the CB Simulator of CompuServe. Some spent over $1,000/month in connect-time fees. That didn't save CompuServe in the face of change. And I'm not sure those CB Simulator addicts transferred their addiction to AOL. And if they did, are they on Twitter today? I really doubt it.

"Addiction" is just the latest marketing hype (it seems marketeers have also dumped "Tipping Point" for "Inflection Point") for those looking for the tech world equivalent of The Secret. There really is no guaranteed road to success at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like The Secret analogy. I use goldrush. There were all kinds of theories popping out all the time, but the ones that made the most, were infrastructure providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too broad, the article ignores the fact that companies like Zynga hire actual behavioral psychologists to create compulsive game mechanics that hook people in.

The consumers that do understand how addictive technology works don't use it because they know it's a zero-sum game that yields nothing, ergo not the target market for these strategies.

The fact of the matter is that addicted customers don't last nearly as long as loyal customers do.

<comment><USER5> but if you get repeated waves of fools it does not matter

in that sense, fishermen, advertisers and dealers of crack are in more or less the same market

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> _"Type the name of almost any successful consumer web company into your search bar and add the word 'addict' after it. "_

^ I really think he means "successful _gaming or social media_ consumer web company." "Dropbox addict" just sounds silly.</comment>


Bike Share War - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/10/23/16496908/bike-sharing-dockless-limebike-ofo-motivate-citi-bike-spin <comment><AUTHOR> This isn't just a problem just within the US...these are cropping up globally, often leaving bikes scattered all over the pavements.

VC funded business not having to worry about the losses when bikes are dumped or trashed... it's the city that does have to worry.

<comment><USER2> Seattle has had a remarkably good experience so far. The current service from dock-less companies is not only better than Pronto (municipal bike share) was, it's already better than Pronto could have ever been.

Regarding "it's the city that does have to worry" about damaged bikes being left on the streets, Seattle's permitting addresses that well: [https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/bikeshare.htm](https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/bikeshare.htm) (click "Bike Share Permit Requirements")

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good... good to see some sensible requirements in place. Hopefully they can be enforced too.

Other areas/cities would do well to take a look at this example.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's Anti-Semitic Ad-Targeting Disaster - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/608882/facebooks-anti-semitic-ad-targeting-disaster/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who thinks it's obvious and evident that those categories were generated automatically?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd hardly call it anything close to a "disaster"</comment>


Fox News Attacks Chicago Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/libraries/fox_news_attacks_chicago_libraries__166305.asp

<comment><USER2> Or better yet, why not just learn everything you know from Fox News?

</comment><comment><USER3> The truth is that libraries provide a means to rent FREE or almost free books. Without a requirement to have an ipad or ebook reader, or anything. Don't close them, in fact open more in poor neighborhoods.

If you want to reduce number of libraries, get iphone/android/ebook reader/pc/mac/etc apps that work like a regular library would work: The library has a license to rent out x number of books, you "rent" the book digitally, use it, "return" it which allows someone else to rent it. Would be nice if google did that since google already scanned all them books.</comment>


YC Office Hours in Prague – Sept 22 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-office-hours-in-prague-sept-22 <comment><USER2> How often does YC visit other countries?

<comment><USER3> In the next few weeks YC partners are speaking in 11 other countries: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-office-hours- in-11-countries...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-office-hours- in-11-countries-this-fall)

<comment><USER4> I hope these are split among several YC partners. A tour of 11 countries in a few weeks sounds like a nightmare. Over a few months it is an all expenses paid trip around the world, but a few weeks. Eek.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Raise money in the US and get a visa - <AUTHOR> Hello all,
I'm a French student currently legally working in the US for a year on a J-1 visa in a software development company. I also have an interesting side project that I would like to build and I was thinking of contacting angel investors to fund it. Before even dreaming of getting any funds, I was wondering if I could get any type of visa to stay  here a least a year to build my start-up.
My plans would be like so:
- Contact angel investors go get funds during my J-1
- Go back to France and break my J-1 to finally ask for another visa that would allow me to work on my company in the US.
After doing some research, I found out that the E-2 visa would allow me to stay if I can get at least 100,000$, but it seems that I must own 51% of the company, so any american investor wouldn't fit. What if I find a French investor living in the US (I found at least 10 french angel investors in SF), would I be able to get the E-2 visa?
Can I get funds from US angel investors and build my company in my home country?
Thanks for the help! <comment><USER2> >Can I get funds from US angel investors and build my company in my home country?

That is entirely up to the angel in question. I do however suspect that many people would like the reassurance of being able to see you face to face occasionally. Handing a check to someone about to fly out of the country would understandably make a lot of people nervous.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I don't consider it as a viable option, unless I find a french investor.</comment></comment>


Tech Support Scam on a Mac : Using ping to check Antivirus  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/16/mac_cold_call_support_scam/

<comment><AUTHOR> Detailed Breakdown of the scam is here : [http://blog.malwarebytes.org/intelligence/2013/10/tech- suppo...](http://blog.malwarebytes.org/intelligence/2013/10/tech-support- scams-coming-to-a-mac-near-you/)</comment>


Ask HN: If you needed a crud app built, how would you build it? - <AUTHOR> Let's say you needed a simple inventory or scheduling app built. Would you hack something with Google sheets? Build from scratch with rails or django? Use a saas tool or WordPress plugin? Something else entirely? <comment><USER2> I guess I'm the "something else entirely" vote. If it's mostly for internal use, I would shy away on build on a platform stuff, and find a "form builder" type app with web server capability or a web service. Google sheets feels a little light for this purpose, but likely could be done at some maintenance cost as your number of forms grows.

The first hit in my search was zoho creator or Airtable (but I know nothing about either) - I was looking along the lines of something like Filemaker for the web. And just to keep growth in mind, be sure to have a way to export the database and form/field content. That way you can keep the option for a more custom build scenario later.

Edit: added a google sheets comment.

<comment><USER3> Seconding Google Sheets.

We have a large and mature codebase, but we're always iterating with new features. These often require data entry by experts in the company (in our case, stylists, marketers, copy-editors, etc), and the first-pass at the CRUD behaviour is usually just a spreadsheet. Everyone understands them, and most editing/coordination is done in a sheet while a developer builds the models and front-end in the main site (Django), then a simple import script using the Python Sheets API sticks all the data in the database in one go. The second iteration is usually a simple management interface of some sort or user- preferences.

<comment><USER4> If you already have Django, why not just use Django admin? Give the users a crud app in 5 minutes and skip the import step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Django running on Heroku. Its easy and fast to start with if you end up needing to expand, it has the options. Also if you need a API later on, you can just slap Django Rest Framework on top of you app and reuse most of the stuff.

<comment><USER6> I second this. Django with its Rest framework is an awesome combo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Django because I'm already good / fast at it. If you're already at that level with Rails, use Rails.

One challenge of the Django approach today is deciding between a modern or "classic" front end. I think the answer is not black and white and really depends on the amount of interactivity in the app.

I would not use Google Sheets as the backend for anything more than a side project based on performance issues mentioned by others who have done so. Still, I think it's a really cool idea. I've considered trying to write a (partial) Google Sheets backend for the Django ORM.

</comment><comment><USER8> If the app is very simple and you don't want to maintain your own servers, i would go with Google sheets, forms and app script.

<comment><USER9> I actually do CRUD apps and utilities made with Sheets and Apps Script as a (very small) evening business. Fun to hack away on little projects that provide real useful value for businesses.

And you can actually get pretty complex systems going with a lot of planning and lateral thinking. Really makes me respect real software architects and designers.

I'm a writer by trade so it's a fun change of pace for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Laravel - it has built in authentication, and a while ago I cobbled together an artisan command that basically builds the model, controller, migration, and all necessary views with one command. It _still_ feels like too much repetition is involved in what by now ought to be as simple as pressing a button.

<comment><USER11> I throw in my vote for Laravel. Also, have a look at any of the following starting projects some of which include form generators. [https://github.com/chiraggude/awesome-laravel#starter- projec...](https://github.com/chiraggude/awesome-laravel#starter-projects)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ruby on Rails

</comment><comment><USER13> I would throw something together with a RAD framework like CakePHP.

Basically you design an ERD to Cake's specifications, install Cake, install the very excellent CRUD plugin[0] and CRUD View [1] if you want scaffolded views and it's done!

Depending on the amount of functionality you needed on top of basic CRUD there is no reason why you couldn't have something up and running in a couple of hours

[0] [https://github.com/FriendsOfCake/crud](https://github.com/FriendsOfCake/crud)

[1] [https://github.com/FriendsOfCake/crud- view](https://github.com/FriendsOfCake/crud-view)

</comment><comment><USER14> Build from scratch using Laravel.

Laravel has a super great ecosystem: Great Community, Laracasts.com, [http://laracon.us/](http://laracon.us/) (us conference), [https://laracon.net/](https://laracon.net/) (online conference, this Wednesday btw), [https://Forge.Laravel.com](https://Forge.Laravel.com) (Server creation AWS/DO/etc, connect repo, deployment), [https://envoyer.io](https://envoyer.io) (zero down time deployment)

</comment><comment><USER15> Depends on your language of choice. I am personally leaning towards PHP/Laravel Framework these days even though I am a big fan of Python/Django/Flask as well. Great thing about Laravel is that it bundles vue.js out of the box along with abstraction for webpack etc. So it is has a good mix of frontend and backend infrastructure to get things done very quickly.

I also work a lot with WordPress but if I had a choice, I wouldn't build a CRUD app from scratch using WP. But with its awesome ecosystem of themes/plugins, you could technically do it with WP as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you need it to be really simple django and customising the admin. Have done this for a simple ticketing system and had something surprisingly stable in about 8 hours work.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd size it out based on initial requirements and take it from there. Some things to consider 1) how much "stuff" do I need to keep track of 2) What's the fastest way for me to do it 3) what's the implications of doing it fast?

Most times by going through this exercise you realize you actually don't need to build anything and Google Sheets suffices.

</comment><comment><USER18> angular/groovy/mysql/springboot/hibernate - make the hibernate object model and the code writes itself. Run an embedded tomcat7 server in the WAR for easy deployment.

The bad part about this stack is that it takes some maven config to set up, but once it's running creating new crud apps becomes trivial.

<comment><USER19> Hasn't someone packaged this up into a nearly turnkey kind of application?

<comment><USER20> I think you are talking about Jhipster.

[https://jhipster.github.io](https://jhipster.github.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Grails used to be awesome for this kind of stuff.

You could define model-classes and it was able to auto generate working, good- enough database tables (using hibernate) views and controllers. All pretty mich easily customizable.

Think of rails, but on the jvm, with performance.

Sadly, it's a pretty dead project.

<comment><USER22> One reason it's dead is because Grails has issues with its governance. Look up the DNS details for its website (grails.org) and you'll see the same single individual listed, with a blank organization field, as the contact person for registrant, admin, _and_ tech. A project run by a single dictator instead of many leaders cooperating together within some organizational structure, not even a loose one, isn't one users are going to trust.

Apache Groovy had a similar problem which also helped caused its decline. It joined the ASF 2 years ago, but it was too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nodejs, vuejs, couchdb, rxdb.

<comment><USER24> I second this

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would use Vaadin -- lots of components and you can develop both front-end and back-end in Java. [https://vaadin.com/](https://vaadin.com/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Meteor is my goto for most simple applications. It has packages for auth, account management, and a simple admin UI as well. Will have the CRUD up and running in an hour.

</comment><comment><USER20> Money involved ?

Yes: Spring Boot

No: The fastest dirtiest way I could think of. Rails scaffolding

<comment><USER27> This explains so much of what I have seen in the Spring/Java community.

<comment><USER20> What do you mean ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Plain old Django.

</comment><comment><USER29> It depends on what you already know of course but Laravel or Meteor.

</comment><comment><USER30> rails new bam

</comment><comment><USER31> XAMP stack, using PDO.

</comment><comment><USER32> Laravel and MySQL</comment>


Covid-19 Predictions in Italy - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vincenzo-lavorini-05224ab0_covid19-italy-coronavirus-activity-6643997344536772608-BVV- <comment><USER2> This link to the notebook[0] with the generated graph of the current and projected data clarifies what he means by inflection point.

[0] [https://github.com/vlavorini/covid-19/blob/master/COVID_19_p...](https://github.com/vlavorini/covid-19/blob/master/COVID_19_predictions.ipynb)</comment>


How to Learn Math and Physics - <AUTHOR> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html <comment><USER2> Are there similar lists for engineering disciplines?</comment>


Caching and Proxying the Fetching of Dependencies - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/bitandbang/status/1229467759437910016 <comment><AUTHOR> From Node Weekly #326[1]:

The Main npm Repository Suffered an Outage on Monday[2] – But Here's What to Do For Next Time.. — For a period of time on Monday, the main npm repository was returning 429 "Too Many Requests" responses, breaking some people's installations and CI processes (here's a postmortem of why[3] – it was due to a Cloudflare policy change and not npm's fault).

This sort of thing happens from time to time, but is a good reminder to be aware of being able to switch to alternative mirrors[4] or begin caching and proxying the fetching of dependencies via a tool like Verdaccio[5]. More ideas in this Twitter thread[6].

[1] [https://nodeweekly.com/issues/326](https://nodeweekly.com/issues/326)

[2] [https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/836](https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/836)

[3] [https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/836#issuecomment-587019096](https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/836#issuecomment-587019096)

[4] [https://open-registry.dev/](https://open-registry.dev/)

[5] [https://verdaccio.org/en/](https://verdaccio.org/en/)

[6] [https://twitter.com/bitandbang/status/1229467759437910016](https://twitter.com/bitandbang/status/1229467759437910016)</comment>


Facebook movie and ethical dilution of partners  - <AUTHOR>

In The Social Network, Eduardo signs a document that somehow allows the board to dilute his ownership to almost nothing.   What is that document?  Does he just lose his board seat?  Maybe some sort of veto right?  Maybe the Articles of Incorporation specifically allow this?
Issuing shares solely for the purpose of diluting one partner would generally be a violation of ethical and legal standards, as I understand it.  How would one protect himself from this without owning a majority?  How often does this happen?
I've heard of VCs "cleaning the cap table."  This sometimes seems justified, but who decides and how can it be done legally and ethically?
If the cap table is just temporary, and can be changed by the board through dilution, what meaning does it have?  However, if it can not be changed and there is a deadbeat partner, some sort of action like this may be necessary.  In facebook's case, as show in the film, I'm guessing they did this damn-the-consequences figuring they would pay Eduardo off some day, rightfully presuming it would be cheaper than leaving him with a huge stake.   <comment><USER2> The thing about shares is, if you have more than %50, then you can do almost anything you want, provided that you haven't entered into an agreement with the minority shareholders that prevents it.

So, it is important, if you are a minority shareholder to have an anti- dilution clause in your agreements.</comment>


What's this? (example.com/pension) - <AUTHOR> http://www.example.com/pension <comment><USER2> After getting the raw response. It's actually the content of the example.com page sent in GZIP but for some reason the browser is not deflating it

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the response, I already had a conspiracy in mind :-) I searched for some parts of the plain text but couldn't find an answer so I just dropped it here with success. Thanks mirages.</comment></comment>