One Good Reason to Delist Chinese Companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-07/u-s-listed-china-companies-should-follow-rules-or-exit <comment><USER2> Anyone able to chime in on this with professional experience?

I always assumed that a foreign company looking to be listed public in the USA had to play by our rules at least within USA soil. Including accounting and oversight. After a little bit of reading (I'm not really into investing/SEC rules), I'm finding out that no foreign country really has to. Almost honor system like standards. And it seems to stem from '07 when the EU pushed for that. Am I really off base? Confusing facts? I've only been researching for 15 minutes and need to do a lot of backlog reading to get a handle on it since it's not my field of experience.

<comment><USER3> They are generally required to follow US GAAP or International IFRS rules as a condition of being listed on a US exchange and undergo regular audits, but neither of these is an actual legal requirement, and the exchanges are not very good at enforcing their rules now that they are for-profit entities.

The SEC rules really just say that you can't defraud your investors.

<comment><USER2> So it would be up to the Fed to force and enforce regulations that the NYSE has to abide by. I doubt Interpol or the UN gives two shits. Especially the UN since they're having money troubles right now. But at least, freezing trading on a foreign company in the USA is at least something. Guessing there's going to be a bunch of loopholes if you have enough money and resources to just buy that stock anyways. Yea, a bit of a shitty problem I take it.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand your comment at all.

All the NYSE has to do is enforce it's _own existing rules_ and nearly every Chinese company on its index would be kicked off.

The Feds, Interpol, UN etc. have nothing to do with stock listings.

<comment><USER4> > All the NYSE has to do is enforce it's own existing rules and nearly every > Chinese company on its index would be kicked off.

Perhaps all it takes is a complaint to NYSER [1] and FINRA, CCd to the SEC to find out _why_ the NYSE isn't enforcing it's own rules on their exchange in regards to these listed Chinese companies. I submitted an inquiry to request the mailing address for complaint submission to NYSER, so a certified mail paper trail can be started. Best source of data for a list of Chinese symbols that would be non-compliant?

[1] [https://www.nyse.com/regulation](https://www.nyse.com/regulation) | [https://www.nyse.com/regulation/complaints-and- inquiries](https://www.nyse.com/regulation/complaints-and-inquiries)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > arguing that disclosing the records would violate laws that prohibit the > transfer of data potentially containing state secrets to foreign entities.

If there is fraud its likely state sponsored fraud, I have a hard time imagining another reason to explain this type of position; open to hearing other ideas. Honestly it's quite brilliant, instead of selling bonds just list another company in the west and skim money off the capital raised there.

</comment><comment><USER6> It only makes sense that Chinese companies should have to play by our rules. In large part US companies have been happy to tap into that Chinese behemoth <insert Google-China relationship here>, but I can't help but to wonder if the CCP will double down on giving favorability to their native companies. We saw a little bit of this with the (albeit highly unpopular) tariff back-and- forths. However China cannot operate in a vacuum. Their economy is very highly dependent on the US.</comment>


Despite Yahoo's down year, Semel gets a big bonus - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/02/technology/yahoo/index.htm?section=money_topstories <comment><AUTHOR> Terry Semel alone cannot be held responsible for Yahoo's misfortunes. The problem has its root in Yahoo's line extension; the company has too many products (often competing against each other) irrelevant to its core business. Each time Yahoo ventures outside its core business, it sets itself open to a confrontation by a more focused competitor.

For instance, why did Yahoo 360 do terrible while other social networks gained market share? Because other social networks were intensely focused on their market, Yahoo wasn't.</comment>


A one-take journey through Russia's iconic Hermitage museum - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49YeFsx1rIw <comment><USER2> See also, the original one-take, now almost 20 years old (and with a plot): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark)</comment>


Android Fake ID bug exposes smartphones and tablets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28544443

<comment><USER2> "We appreciate Bluebox responsibly reporting this vulnerability to us; third- party research is one of the ways Android is made stronger for users. After receiving word of this vulnerability, we quickly issued a patch that was distributed to Android partners, as well as to AOSP. Google Play and Verify Apps have also been enhanced to protect users from this issue. At this time, we have scanned all applications submitted to Google Play as well as those Google has reviewed from outside of Google Play, and we have seen no evidence of attempted exploitation of this vulnerability."

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be a little overblown, to put it perhaps more mildly than necessary.

See also: [http://www.osnews.com/story/27868/Another_day_another_sensat...](http://www.osnews.com/story/27868/Another_day_another_sensationalist_unfounded_security_story) which calls it out as basically BS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. One of the reasons I posted this here was to find out such a rebuttal. The article smelt like BS but I didn't know enough to call it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you please fix the title of the story? "Android Fake ID bug exposes smartphones and tablets"

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey walterbell, I don't see a diff between what you suggest and what the title is, unless you just want me to add the quotes. Do quotes mean anything special?

<comment><USER4> At the time I posted the comment, there was no title, only a URL. It's fine now.</comment></comment></comment>


Bing Pushes Microsoft's Edge Browser When People Search for Chrome or Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://marketingland.com/microsoft-pushes-edge-on-bing-over-chrome-firefox-141614 <comment><USER2> this post is completely pointless. well....on second thought...this is a good example of how to write 1000 words on nothing :-|</comment>


InterSCity: Addressing Future Internet Research Challenges for Smart Cities [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://interscity.org/InterSCity_NoF_2016.pdf <comment><USER2> Interesting read, at work we spend a lot of time thinking about the "city stack" \- this is a really well put together paper on the subject. "In particular, IoT poses major challenges related to the capacity to process continuous flows of sensor data generated by a large number of Smart Objects" \- fragmentation in this area is resulting in a huge inability for correlation and insight.</comment>


"HTML" the Song (by The Hot Toddies) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesixtyone.com/thehottoddies/#/s/rzsHejpkw9q/

<comment><USER2> lyrics: <http://lyrics.wikia.com/The_Hot_Toddies:HTML>

</comment><comment><USER3> Disappointing, the lyrics do not pertain to HTML syntax.

</comment><comment><USER4> seattle is better

<comment><USER5> +1

98102 ftw.</comment></comment>


Hacking Intercom to build a MVP - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/getting-design-feedback-right/hacking-intercom-to-build-a-mvp-b553a5c248d4 <comment><AUTHOR> How we built a feedback tool for designers in 20 hours by hacking intercom. Try Basil.chat now.</comment>


Most of the Google Hangouts API is being killed on April 25th - <AUTHOR> https://www.xda-developers.com/most-of-the-google-hangouts-api-is-being-killed-on-april-25th/ <comment><USER2> It seems many of the comments here read this like hangouts is being killed.

The hangouts API was mostly for little widgets and extensions that would running the video chat platform on desktop only.

They haven't worked on the new UI for almost 6 months now, they never worked on mobile, and you could count the number of apps on 2 hands.

The only one I ever used was a thing where you could draw on a friend's face during a video call, and even that was a one time thing.

Hangouts isn't being shutdown, they aren't gutting it's functionality, they are simplifying the system.

<comment><USER3> Some companies have used it for language tutoring. There are a lot of things a language learner with a keyboard and mouse can productively do during a video chat that isn't built into hangouts, e.g. looking up words, saving vocab items, etc... And that's just one use case.

What this change will do is chop off those offering free services at the knees and drive the premium services to Twilio, etc.

<comment><USER4> _Some companies have used it for language tutoring... What this change will do is chop off those offering free services at the knees and drive the premium services to Twilio, etc._

Google's a business. Why does it have the responsibility to pickup the tab for these businesses?

<comment><USER3> Aside from the fact that education has second order effects that powerfully benefit humanity as whole, good will is a boon for companies. The cost of running hangouts (which is essentially P2P) is a rounding error for Google. Why shut down those who are literally providing education for free?

Every time Google does something like this, it becomes a bit less beloved by consumers, loses a bit more of that halo it had in the early 2000s and finds itself having a bit harder time with regulators in the future.

In Google's IPO filing:

 _" We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. With our products, Google connects people and information all around the world for free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail that provides an efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. By releasing services for free, we hope to help bridge the digital divide."_

 _" We believe that our user focus is the foundation of our success to date. We also believe that this focus is critical for the creation of long-term value. We do not intend to compromise our user focus for short-term economic gain."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who's surprised? Google has a rep for killing things off now - I think it damages their brand; but I have to assume they've thought about this and judged that its still worth it.

<comment><USER6> They have been doing this forever it hasn't hurt their brand too much.

<comment><USER3> Google's brand has plummeted since the era of blogger/google reader/google talk, etc.

It's just that they have powerful monopolies that fund pretty much anything they want to do and there are powerful network/lock-in effects for email, documents, calendars, chat, mobile app sales, etc and even YouTube.

You're free to join a different chat network but none of your friends are there. You can change to another calendar provider but you'll still have on in gmail and people will share things to it. You can upload your video to Vimeo, but it won't have anywhere near the ability to attract traffic as it would on YouTube and it probably won't do as well in search results. Feel free to write an app for non-Google Android users, but not many people will buy it or even encounter it (unless you're in a market like China and are on a local monopoly's platform).

Google has hurt their brand. They're just not that dependent on people liking them anymore. In a lot of ways it's like Microsoft was 20 years ago.

<comment><USER4> _Feel free to write an app for non-Google Android users, but not many people will buy it or even encounter it_

iOS apps generate more revenue than Android

[http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-app-store-revenue- per-u...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-app-store-revenue-per-user- versus-android-2016-7)

<comment><USER7> > non-Google Android users

I suspect he means Android-without-Play-store, rather than phone-without- Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google has _so many_ chat clients right no: Allo, Duo, Hangouts, and I also just discovered that they have Google Messenger (which I've yet so see).

I'm not sure what their strategy is, but they seem to be flodding the market with apps that nobody uses. Meanwhile, a few [other] 2-3 apps seem to be used 90% of the time.

Their best shot at this point, IMHO, is to buy some [very popular] existing product, and merge all their chat apps into that one.

</comment><comment><USER9> I hope this means that both Allo and Duo will be getting desktop app releases.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hangouts awesome app. It was my replacement for Skype for the last 7 years i suppose, since I had access to close beta. It's really great app. But There was a few issue with cpu/battery consumption for Hangouts. I did not understand why Google avoided development optimized desktop app and sticked with desktop only app then chrome extension only. It's crazy wrong, because video call drains my macbook battery unbelievable fast. Anyway Hangouts is great for companies/corporate chats, I wish to have conference call integrated inside as it was in beginning with user-conference .

</comment><comment><USER11> I doubt they'll kill it completely, it is widely used as office messenger in companies that use Google Apps. In my company all the engineers use slack but everyone else uses hangouts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there good alternatives to google hangouts ? That preferably works with gmail contacts and/or phone contacts in a native desktop app (i.e. not with an electron style app).

<comment><USER13> I was interviewed a couple times using [http://appear.in](http://appear.in). It worked pretty well both times I used it. I didn't have any problems with video or screen sharing.

<comment><USER8> appear.in is _excelent_ for ad-hoc videocalls (especially with peolpe you don't have in your everyday chat client), but it's not very useful for people you frequently contact, or for quickly upgrading a text-chat into a videocall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this affect 3rd-party chat clients such as Pidgin?

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder what this would mean for hangups:

[https://github.com/tdryer/hangups](https://github.com/tdryer/hangups)

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish Google would make Hangouts more Slack-like. Especially if they want to target the enterprise. It seems they really just need to add the concept of chat rooms.

<comment><USER2> It has them, but not with the same UX that Slack does.

You can create what would be a "group conversation" in slack, then add more people and rename it to whatever you want.</comment></comment>


Sorcerer's greatest trick? Shrinking a CCG experience into a single box - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/sorcerers-greatest-trick-shrinking-a-ccg-experience-into-a-single-box/ <comment><USER2> CCG-in-a-box with "more pentagrams than a Slayer concert"? I'm sold.</comment>


HODLbot – Automatically diversify and rebalance your Binance crypto assets - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hodlbot <comment><USER2> Has anyone evaluated this, or similar? It's my understanding that these things can actually lose your portfolio more often than grow it. Happy to be shown otherwise though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not quite sure. Just found this, this afternoon. I'd love to see how it works.

What has your experience been? What's your basis for saying these types of things lose money?

Would love to hear thoughts from others who have used these types of apps.

<comment><USER2> I learned/was taught technical analysis and charting and so have always been used to making trades the manual way. I've looked into automating this a couple of times but as I read more into each automated solution I come across I end up finding issues that people have turned up through their own testing. It seems a lot of these bots don't quite yet have the AI smarts we are hoping for to allow for full automation. I guess if they really did work we'd all be using them.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fan of it, a movie discovery app (built with React Native) - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fan-of-it/id1017025530?mt=8 <comment><USER2> Tried it, Nice. But feel few laggy when scrolling list view on searching movie & display about 10 items.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) will definitely look at improving the speed, I think it might be a slight amount of image resizing which I can look to optimise away. Otherwise, just to baseline the performance, could I perhaps ask what device you tried it on?

<comment><USER2> I tried on iphone 5 with ios 7.1.1. Does it matter performance ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It may matter, thanks for the details, this will allow me to test and improve the frame rate on a similar device.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ICANN Delays .ORG Sale Approval - <AUTHOR> https://www.icann.org/news/blog/org-update <comment><USER2> I can't tell if ICANN is trying to publicly clear their own name of any wrongdoing, or if all the added attention has woken them up to how seriously flawed this whole ordeal was (which either by policy or procedure they managed to miss) or both. None of those answers are satisfying. Here's hoping they do the right thing and kill the sale... but even then, I'd be concerned they'd restructure the deal and try again.

I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I'm hoping they didn't just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)

<comment><USER3> >I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys?

You could say that about every government, yet there's widespread corruption in most (or all) countries[1]. There's even corruption in democratic governments that are directly accountable to their citizens every few years (via elections). Given the way the ICANN board is appointed is... indirect at best, thinking that ICANN are the "good guys" is wishful thinking at best.

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

<comment><USER4> To be clear are you suggesting the private sector would do a better job managing this? After all, we're _criticizing_ their transfer of the TLD to the private sector. They can't be both the hero and the villain in the same story can they? Surely I'm missing something?

At least the goal of the public sector is to serve the public whereas the goal of the private sector is to serve the interests of there shareholders.

If this was a private company on both sides wouldn't we just be hailing it as a big win for shareholders and/or demanding the government step in and intervene?

<comment><USER5> There are some people who think when it comes to DNS ICANN should basically be frozen - no new gTLDs, no wildcard DNS, no supporting domain name seizure, no price or policy changes, and so on. Just delegating to each TLD's providers, and maybe some policing of providers' behaviour.

If you believe that, _hypothetically_ the best choice would be some sort of private nonprofit, independent of the government but bound to inaction by charter.

Whether being directly controlled by government would be an improvement is somewhat debatable - would lawmakers be reasonably hands-off, like they are with things like GPS and NIST time services? Or would the opportunity to block pornhub/piratebay/wikileaks prove irresistible?

<comment><USER6> What's the problem supposed to be with new TLDs?

<comment><USER5> You can read more at [1] - in short, critics of the new gTLDs would argue that:

1\. It doesn't deliver the claimed increase the supply of domain names, as no- one would build a business or brand on whatever.info without securing whatever.com

2\. It _does_ shake down domain registrants for cash - if you already own whatever.com you'd better get whatever.info and whatever.sucks before someone else squats them.

3\. These factors mean .info domains and suchlike are a stereotype of sketchy sites, which is a negative feedback loop.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ICANN&oldid=93014...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ICANN&oldid=930148901#TLD_expansion)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If ISOC hadn't removed the .org price restrictions, I feel like this could have been defensible. Farm out the management but hold the new stewards under a strict leash, fine. (Of course it wouldn't have gone for $1B+ in that case.) But coupling it with the unrestricted price increases is just indefensibly corrupt and hopefully illegal given that ISOC was never intended to profit from .org in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER8> The people behind this deal are ICANN insiders who know the rules intimately; in some cases they may have written the rules. It's hard to imagine that ICANN won't approve the deal.

<comment><USER9> > The people behind this deal are ICANN insiders who know the rules > intimately; in some cases they may have written the rules. It's hard to > imagine that ICANN won't approve the deal.

If that's the case, maybe the US government needs to reclaim authority over ICANN, which it had until a few years ago, and assert that authority to reverse this decision. There needs to be some kind of effective oversight.

<comment><USER10> The majority of people don't live in the U.S. Why should the U.S. government hold such control? If the argument is that they invented the internet, (hardly entirely accurate), they certainly didn't invent the World Wide Web.

I don't even agree with them having .gov, them regaining .org would be a disaster.

If anything, some sort of multi-national, strictly non-profit charity should be setup for this, or if not, the U.N. as a last resort.

<comment><USER11> > Why should the U.S. government hold such control?

Because they did until _very_ recently.

> If anything, some sort of multi-national, strictly non-profit charity should > be setup for this, or if not, the U.N. as a last resort.

That would take _literally years_ , and would be too-little, too-late to deal with these shenanigans around the .org TLD.

<comment><USER10> > Because they did until very recently.

That's not an argument. Any regressive policy could and has been justified in those terms.

<comment><USER11> > That's not an argument. Any regressive policy could and has been justified > in those terms.

Yes, it is. The US government has an institutional history of overseeing ICAAN, so it's the most practical organization to take on that role on short notice.

I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Your preferred multi-national solution would likely take years to negotiate, which means it's not really even a solution at all, as far as .org is concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only sane outcome is clawing back .org from PIR, regardless of what they intend to do with it now. They've shown themselves to be bad stewards that view it as purely monetizable asset.

I doubt the will would be there even if it were legal. But one can dream.

</comment><comment><USER13> This continuing privatization of public goods is unconscionable and the leadership of ICANN should be held to account.

<comment><USER14> They've been held to... bank account. This is being done by ICANN insiders and there is no accountability mechanisms at ICANN. The organization is captured. The .ORG contract renewal wasn't even looked at by the board, it was handled by staff. It was pointed out letting staff do it avoids oversight mechanisms (coincidence? probably not). The board oversight group also all had to recuse themselves to the point there wasn't enough people to perform any actual oversight. ICANN is a captured and corrupt organization. Very few people who aren't being compensated to be there spend any time it seems, thus registry interests win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Public announcements by PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital contain relevant facts that were not required in the request for approval."

What facts?

Why were those facts not required?

Sounds like under the system in place there is little due diligence expected to be done by ICANN before a decision is made -- none of these public facts were "required", let alone anything non-public.

At least we know someone is reading the public announcements.

</comment><comment><USER16> The `.or` tld isn't taken.

1\. Create a non-profit to buy `.or` as a new gTLD. Legally carter it so that the stakeholders are distributed and it can never be taken private.

2\. Pre-reserve `.or` domains for all existing `.org` domains.

Optional:

3\. Give free lifetime registration to any org stakeholder that redirects their domain to the `.or` version and/or displays a banner about PIR's malfeasance.

4\. Any new `.org` registrants are barred from registering a `.or`

5\. Buy back `.org` when it becomes worthless and give it back to the stakeholders.

<comment><USER17> I know it's a joke, but two letter domains are reserved for countries :)

<comment><USER18> In practice it would be possible, if it was extraordinarily thought to be worthwhile, for ICANN to agree with the relevant UN group that this code should never be issued. The UK code is not available but is "extraordinarily reserved" and so it doesn't cause a conflict. EU is also reserved even though the European Union certainly isn't a country.

<comment><USER19> .uk is functional. Did you mean .gb ?

<comment><USER20> UK is not the ISO code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the code is GB.

.gb and .uk are both functional, and .uk as a top-level domain is exceptional.

EU is also not an ISO code, but has been reserved, and is also a TLD as .eu.

<comment><USER21> >EU is also not an ISO code, but has been reserved, and is also a TLD as .eu.

`eu` is also exceptionally reserved in the ISO database, which is enough for ICANN.

The ISO states in their FAQ:

"You can use EU for the name European Union. Please note that this is not an official ISO 3166-1 country code. The European Union is not a country but rather an organization. As such it is not eligible to be formally included in ISO 3166-1. Recognizing, however, that many users of ISO 3166-1 have a practical need to encode that name the ISO 3166/MA reserved the two-letter combination EU for the purpose of identifying the European Union within the framework of ISO 3166-1."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Their site supports public comments and, for all the noise, I see all of three comments up there right now. Go comment.

<comment><USER23> Those are very thoughtful and informative comments as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" On 14 November 2019, PIR formally notified ICANN of the proposed transaction. Under the .ORG Registry Agreement, PIR must obtain ICANN's prior approval before any transaction that would result in a change of control of the registry operator. Typically, similar requests to ICANN are confidential; we asked PIR for permission to publish the notification and they declined our request."_

Unbelievable. The brazenness of this heist continues out in the open.

</comment><comment><USER24> For someone who isn't super familiar with the details, on a scale of 0 to IOC/FIFA, how corrupt is ICANN?

<comment><USER14> FIFA level

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has anyone looked at PIR's 990 Forms and has knowledge of business operations in the sector. It looks like from their expense sheet PIR contracts all of the actual management of the their TLDs to Afilias. What is the breakdown of responsibility here? What does PIR actually do?

<comment><USER26> PIR chooses and supervises the contractor that runs the TLD. I don't know if maybe, once upon a time, PIR ran the TLD itself, and then decided to contract it out.

It's not an unreasonable thing to contract out. Afilias runs multiple TLDs, and there are many operational things that would have a cost benefit from sharing; for example, running the anycast network of authoritative servers in as many points of presence as possible --- each PoP requires capital investment and time investment to setup and run, but servicing additional load may be possible at a much smaller marginal cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really hope this isn't too little too late. The sale should be stopped.

</comment><comment><USER28> ICANN is just trying to calm down the riot. This won't end well until there's some formal investigation from the US government.

</comment><comment><USER29> This might be the 3rd-worlder in me talking, but I kinda want the sale to happen so a better DNS system can rise from its ashes.

</comment><comment><USER30> Anybody know of large .org sites that reconsidered or perhaps already have changed their URL(s)?

I do hear from contacts .org are more often not renewed when prompted for yearly fee, I did not either for my shelved .org domains.

</comment><comment><USER31> Its cool that my $13 domain is now worth >$750.

</comment><comment><USER32> We should have a peer-to-peer DNS driven by some consensus system like blockchain. Why do we allow critical pieces of internet infrastructure to be centralized?

<comment><USER33> There is no mandate to trust the root DNS servers. Someone like Google (126.96.36.199) or Cloudflare (18.104.22.168) could just start registering their own .org domain names and nobody could stop them.

The resulting shitstorm would be so enjoyable to watch.

<comment><USER34> Previously the CEO of Cloudflare has been against making 22.214.171.124 return anything non-standard, because even a single instance of that would ruin the integrity of DNS.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19829033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19829033)

<comment><USER33> Yeah, that's a very reasonable stance. I'm not saying it's a good idea to hijack .org, just that it's more possible than one might think.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do I profile myself as a programmer? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently unemployed. I think I'm a pretty good programmer - I practice a lot, I pay attention to detail, I rewrite my programs to be tidy and strive to learn more about programming, I enjoy analytical thinking and finding creative solutions. However, I feel my weakness may be relatively slow work speed. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, too.
For example at school I had a reputation for solving math problems slower but with fewer errors. Modern workplace puts emphasis on deadlines, shipping the product, and job interviews often involve a timed challenge. I had a job as a programmer once, but I never worked in a team and couldn't compare myself to others. I absolutely don't mention "slow work speed" at job interviews, I don't know how I could convincingly say it's an advantage.
How do I find out if I take too much time to write programs ? What can I do to improve my work speed except keep practicing ? <comment><USER2> I can't answer all your questions, but I will say this, as I had to learn it the hard way: getting faster by getting better is great. But you also need to get faster by being more comfortable with imperfection. Perfect code doesn't exist, and most businesses need code that's far from perfect.

Find out the source of your perfectionism and work against it. Try writing some MVPs -- give yourself a week to build something and pretend you have to ship it on the last day.

You can also scratch the perfectionism itch while improving your speed at the same time. Good static typing helps immensely with this. Good hinting/linting/debugging will also help with both.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ignore all that workplace bs, just apply to work somewhere and prove yourself to them by example or previous work. Forget about everything else about how you work slow. On the job training is the best kind of training, you will learn what is required to do the job, and time management will be a part of that training.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't see this submission under "ASK HN:". Am I missing something ? Instead, it's listed under "New" and "Threads".</comment>


Ask HN: Tips for evaluating a startup offer. - <AUTHOR> I have an offer to join a startup as a first hire and am trying to figure out if it is worth doing. There are two founders, one of which is putting his own money up to bootstrap with. In the first year, one founder will commit between 150k to 210k in cash, the other will work with no salary. Both founders are absolutely key to the idea working as they have the industry experience, smarts and contacts to get going with. They are looking at hiring two to three people, one of them being me. The offer that is on the table is this:  Option a) take a salary at 40% market rate in year one and receive 3% equity. Option b) take no salary in year one and receive 6% equity. With both options, if we live into the second year, my salary would go to 80% of market value. If we live to year three, market value salary is restored. The exit that is being targeted is in the 30 to 50 million range. The company is not planning on taking VC with the founders sorting out more funding through personal finances and a little revenue in year two. The idea is solid. The problem is really interesting. We are all new to the startup world which is why I am a little worried about the offer on the table. We haven't started hacking yet so there is a load of risk around building the product and interest in it. I would be very grateful to hear what you think about the options on the table. I want to take the plunge, but only on terms that make sense.       <comment><USER2> One year without salary sounds pretty close to a founder level committment in that first year. I am not so sure that 6% equity is adequate for your troubles.

<comment><USER3> I agree. If this guy is being asked to invest 100k for 6 percent of the company, he should be able to justify a 1.5 million valuation for the business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How do you target an exit?

They are asking you to take founder-level risk. Probably not appropriate ownership for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to answer.

I take your point about the exit. The numbers are the ball park that the founders would be happy with to exit.

What would an appropriate level of ownership be for that kind of risk?

<comment><USER5> _What would an appropriate level of ownership be for that kind of risk?_

Working without a salary for a year implies founder level risk. Right now, they only have an idea, and no code? I'd expect as much of an equity stake as the other founder that's working without a salary, 30%.

Furthermore, if all the founders are willing to give me for my full time work for an entire year was 6%, I'd run far, far away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi, you should follow your dream, not others dream. If you are looking for job, try to find one that offers best value. In this case, my assesment is that option "a" is the best deal. You get some money, even if company does not make it, and if company make it, you will get from 1M - 1.5M which is still quite a lot of money.

Cheers, Milan

</comment><comment><USER7> First, I would recommend you spend some time to figure out the probability of exit, and the valuation upon exit (including effect of dilution), and do that based on your own analysis rather than just their sky-high optimism.

For example, say your base is $100K (at 100% market). The company has:

10% chance of exit at 50M in 2 years

20% chance of exit at 50M in 4 years with 2X dilution

10% chance of exit at 25M in 4 years with 2X dilution

25% chance of exit at 25M in 4 years with 4X dilution

35% chance of folding or exit at a valuation meaningless for common stock holders

Assuming 3% at 40%, 80%, 100%, 100%

Case #1: = 1.5M + 40K + 80K + 100K + 100K = 1820K

Case #2: = 0.75M + 40K + 80K + 100K + 100K = 1070K

Case #3: = 0.375M + 40K + 80K + 80K + 80K = 655K

Case #4: = 0.185M + 40K + 80K + 60K + 60K = 425K

Case #5: = 40K + 80K + 60K + 60K = 240K

Average = 652K or 163K/yr (63% over base)

Is it good or bad? It depends on your perspective on risk/reward/experience. It is not an immensely attractive offer based on these numbers -- in fact, I would say an okay (not necessary great) offer from one of the hot startups or solid name brand companies is superior to this offer -- but I just made them up so you have to go through your own exercise and logic.

One thing you want to think about is that getting into the right company is _far_ more important than being hired as a founding engineer. I think you'd do yourself a favor in making a detailed evaluation of whether this company could strike gold in comparison to the top ones out there. Is it ground-breaking? Or me-too in a competitive landscape but acquirable? Keep in mind that by joining this startup, you'd be making some commitment that comes with opportunity cost (of working for something even better), so I would say spending more time thinking whether this is a first-tier startup, or more of a second-tier. It is okay to join a second-tier, but demand more.

</comment><comment><USER8> > _"We are all new to the startup world"_

That means the founders have no track record. That decreases the likelihood of attracting funding should it be needed and substantially decreases the odds of success.

According to Sivers it's not the idea which matters, it's the execution and the exit numbers you are talking about require better than a brilliant idea and better than brilliant execution. <http://sivers.org/multiply>

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think it's by any means a total rip off. I'd rather have 3-6% of a great company than 30% of a crappy one. If you really believe in these guys it might be a good deal. No harm it pushing for more though.</comment>


Show HN: wurl – web curl - <AUTHOR> http://wurl.io/

<comment><USER2> Nice. I'm making something similar, though more focused on manipulating the data after it's gotten. Have you thought of any cool/useful use cases?

</comment><comment><USER3> Check [http://webscrapemaster.com/](http://webscrapemaster.com/) You can fetch any data as JSON.</comment>


The Wall of Technical Debt - <AUTHOR> http://verraes.net/2020/01/wall-of-technical-debt/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f0a2fb/the_wal...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f0a2fb/the_wall_of_technical_debt/)</comment>


This Site's Domain is Stolen - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/15377-this-sites-domain-is-stolen/ <comment><USER2> As a registrar I would like to point out that this is a good reason _to not_ have privacy protection on your domain.

It raises the chance of losing your domain greatly. (Even though you can argue that having your email displayed exposes an attack vector).

Public info makes it much easier to recover a domain. And proper security on the email is required as always obviously.

I've helped several people recover domains by going to contacts I have at ICANN. Not having public info doesn't give me what I need to make a case. It's a non-starter many times. And it just confuses the issue for you as well when you are trying to correct things.

Registrars (we don't offer privacy by the way) want privacy because it is a) something they can offer and charge for and b) allows them to lock the customer in and create a barrier to exit. c) Many of them do this by changing ownership to them for the domain and giving you a contract that you are the beneficial owner. Not good for you. You want and need to be owner according to whois. (Read this again.)

If you want a private domain use a po box or a work address etc or your uncles's address. If you are a business you absolutely have no reason to have privacy (and many many businesses do because they have been sold some bullshit on this with respect to spam).

<comment><USER3> Public info also makes it easier to steal a domain.

Long ago, I (being childish) stole a domain from some random person who pissed me off in a video game. I spent three days calling the registrar's offices (along with a friend) over fifty times, writing the name of each service representative down so that we didn't dupe up on anyone and raise any red flags. (It was a huge registrar, though not GoDaddy.)

We were able to use the public info available on their whois records to weasel our way into getting additional account information from the employees. We'd simply call and ask for a small piece of the account information in a nonchalant manner, they'd ask for info we've already obtained from previous calls, and usually they'd either give us the info or say "we don't have access to that information".

The hardest part was getting the last four digits of the credit card on the account. Since we had all the rest of the user's information, we called maybe twenty times trying to get those numbers. Some employees would say they can't see them, but they could. All it took was one really stupid representative:

"Yes, I'd like to confirm the credit card on my account before I file a form to retrieve my account back. I have two cards that end with the same last two digits, what are the first two digits of the last four digits"

[she doesn't understand so we confuse the hell out of her for minutes on end]

"uh... 2... 6."

"And the last two?"

"82"

"Thank you, I have the right card. Good day."

Had a good laugh, filed a form, emailed it in, stole their domain before they noticed, and never gave it back. I talked to the owner and eventually redirected his website back, and he forgave me.

Keep your whois info private if you're on a crappy registrar. Likely, the OP uses the same password everywhere and some random kid stumbled on his godaddy account and took the domain from under his nose.

<comment><USER4> Wow. As much as I appreciate you coming forward and telling a good story about social engineering, this is really a total asshole move. I hope you look back on this experience with with no small amount of shame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would warn everyone that reads this to be very careful. When a domain is stolen, it's usually not used for "legit" purposes. Be very careful when visiting this site - use a patched browser, Java + Flash + Acrobat, etc., in case the new "owners" decide to stick an exploit kit here.

<comment><USER6> Why would they need access to the domain to do that?

<comment><USER7> Because they would mirror the site and then add bad stuff, so it looks legit, and then change the DNS record to point to the mirror.

<comment><USER6> I cannot really recall that ever happening for, like, the last 10 years. I could see the case if they wanted to intercept mail or something, but then the administrator would notice quite fast what was going on (ie. not receive any mails...).

<comment><USER8> I see this all the time with Twitter. These days you don't even need to mirror the website; just run a proxy that edits the HTML on the fly. Of course, they just use existing malware to edit hosts file but easy to translate to simply stealing the domain.

<comment><USER9> I have done this with Facebook as part of a prank on a friend, its not hard to do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Problem goes beyond just css-tricks.com. I've been following David Walsh for a while, and apparently his domain has been nabbed as well, along with DesignShack.net, SohTonaka.com, and InstantShift.com

[https://twitter.com/#!/davidwalshblog/status/142645321791586...](https://twitter.com/#!/davidwalshblog/status/142645321791586304)

<comment><USER11> It also happened to mckmama.com (a crazy popular blog my wife follows who couldn't believe that domain hacking was even possible anymore.)

The more interesting aspect was that since mobile nameservers are slow to update, the site worked on her phone still. That lead to the lovely "Where does DNS come from" conversation we all have with our loved ones eventually:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Judging from the comments on his website, it sounds like everybody and their grandma hates GoDaddy. I've recently been looking into getting a domain name and starting a website, can anyone point me towards a more reputable site to acquire a domain and host a site? (Yeah, I know, I read HN daily, and I'm still clueless when it comes to actually putting up a website)

<comment><USER13> name.com has been pretty good for me for the past few months. Very easy to use.

Also: Don't get a .com/.net domain name. You don't want the US government declaring your domain to be evil and taking it off the 'net.

<comment><USER14> Wait, I thought .com/.net (among others) were generic TLDs governed by ICANN? I would assume .us might fall into this warning (as would other country code TLDs), but .com and .net?

<comment><USER15> What matters is whether or not the operator of the TLD is within US jurisdiction, not the purpose of the TLD.

<comment><USER14> So, in that case, the FBI could seize any domain as long as the operator is within US jurisdiction?

<comment><USER16> Yep, pretty much.

Not exactly fair, but that's the current 'system'..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The only way the domain would be able to be moved from Go Daddy would be if the person stealing the name had access to the account, that's the only way to request the transfer authorization / epp code. Their support requires either a pin or last 6 of a CC used on the account to validate callers, if you can provide that they'll update the email on file and help reset the password, but he said his account email is unchanged. So the person taking the name would either have to know the account password, or have access to the email address on file where the reset requests are sent.

Given that this would have to happen from inside the customer account, I can understand why Go Daddy would want to confirm that this was indeed a nefarious act and not something like a domain being sold, transferred, then reported stolen to keep the cash and get the domain back. Or any number of other scenarios one might think of - shady domain stuff happens a lot. I can only imagine the hoops required to jump through for a registrar to get a domain back from another registrar under these circumstances.

<comment><USER18> "The only way the domain would be able to be moved"

Not sure that's the only way. That's like saying the only way you could get credit card information from Sony's playstation servers was if you worked in Sony's billing department.

Not saying this is necessarily a hack, as it most likely is insecure practices on the part of the user, be it passwords or phishing. But seeing a cluster of them raises some concerns that it could be some otherwise unknown method.

<comment><USER17> Thanks, I agree, 'the only way' is probably too absolute a phrasing.

I do wonder if the reason we see clusters is because they are the largest, and arguably the most publicized, registrar in the U.S., and in terms of market share, the world.

<comment><USER19> He said on the page that it apparently involved a Gmail hack of some kind, so even if it's not "the only way", it sounds like it was how it was stolen in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are a lot of posts blaming GoDaddy. Did anyone read the post by David Airey, linked in the article? The reason for his lost domain was that his Gmail account was hacked. The attacker performed a "legit" domain transfer through his registrar. It wasn't the registrar's fault, in this case. The only blame you could place was that perhaps the registrar didn't have enough security check points.

GoDaddy is certainly annoying with their obnoxious web site and sometimes, their tactics, but this could be another email-hijack attack.

<comment><USER21> One more great reason to set up two-step verification for your Gmail and Google Apps accounts.

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in- secu...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for- your.html)

<comment><USER22> I've yet to do this. Reason being I wonder what will happen if I lose my phone...

Is there a way to set up two-step without a phone?

<comment><USER23> Google provides a set of numerical codes for you to print out and store in case you lose your phone. They're all one-time use, and allow you to get in and change the settings.

<comment><USER24> Does that mean that if ANY of them are used, the rest are invalidated? Or just that any one of them may be used once?

<comment><USER23> You get 10 codes per generation(and can regenerate them whenever you want), and each code can be used once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This makes me worry about my own domains. I have about 180 domains with GoDaddy (all registered for various projects -- I'm not a squatter). I wish there were a tool that would verify that they're all still registered under my account at GoDaddy. Especially since the "new owners" seem to keep DNS records the same.

<comment><USER26> I transferred all my domains to moniker.com and have an account rep that calls me if any odd activity occurs. I doubt this would happen with them. They allow you to lock down your domains so that it requires offline authentication to move them. Been with Moniker for 4+ years.

<comment><USER27> Another vote for Moniker. I transferred everything from GoDaddy to Moniker a couple years ago after GoDaddy pulled some other asinine stunt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Here's another tip when dealing with registrars that really relates to dealing with any business or person when in this situation.

People have much discretionary power to help you depending on how you treat them. While there are many people who get their way by instilling fear my personal belief is that you get more by being nice to people and making them want to help you (and this has always worked for me).

So when you have a problem with your registrar or hosting company or a meal at a local restaurant don't go off on a rant and tell them

a) It's their fault

b) They suck

c) you will never use them again

d) You will tell everyone a&b&c

(Did I forget anything?)

This will only make them defensive and will alienate them and get them to form a wall.

I'm not saying to not point out some truths about what happened. But do it in a way that makes them think you will be a happy customer if they manage to help you. Edit: And you still love them.

<comment><USER28> Yes, you are right - unless they are a service-oriented company, in which case, they will jump through hoops to make it right for you, no matter how surly you are when you present your issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In case the nameservers actually update: <http://22.214.171.124/>

<comment><USER30> and if it updates add this line to /etc/hosts:

22.214.171.124 css-tricks.com

I _think_ I got that right. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why is all the blame being put on GoDaddy here? The problem is that his email account was compromised. Once that happens, it's game over. Everything online linked to that account is likely up for grabs at that point.

Use two-factor auth on your Google accounts, people.

<comment><USER32> How does this look specifically with Google?

<comment><USER31> Two factor auth? You just go into your account settings, elect to turn it on, it'll have you install the Google Auth app on your phone and scan a QR code, which configures the app. Then, when you try to log into your account next, it'll ask for the code generated by the app.

The authenticator itself is just HMAC-OTP with the seed as the current time quantitized to 30-second intervals. Very straightforward.

<comment><USER33> Also to use google services that don't support it (or can't, e.g. Smtp with gmail), you can have google generate a new "throwaway" password which it will display for you one time.

It was pretty straightforward and actual kind of fun to make the switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> With the number of domains that are being discussed here as recently stolen (seemingly all from GoDaddy), I think we need some answers. How did this happen? GoDaddy account hacked? GoDaddy account social engineered? GoDaddy internal systems compromised? GoDaddy - person on the inside? New flaw/hack in the ICANN registration methods?

</comment><comment><USER35> _They don't seem to have an active Twitter account. Just sending an email through the contact form for now._

Wait, what? Since when is twitter a _replacement_ for email?

<comment><USER36> Since major corporations started having turnaround times of minutes when contacted in the public manner that is Twitter rather than days, weeks, or never.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm curious to know if the domain was in REGISTRAR-LOCK at the time. According to GoDaddy's policies, they relock after 30 days, so it's likely it was locked. <http://help.godaddy.com/article/410> (obviously an outside domain transfer is not the only option for takeover)

</comment><comment><USER37> heh, this happened to us a month or so ago. we even got a ransom note!

(TLDR: godaddy eventually came through for us)

<comment><USER24> That ... sounds ominous and fascinating. Would you mind writing about your experience?

<comment><USER37> That was basically it, for the most part. I wasn't the one handling it, but essentially the guy was trying to get some of our server configs for some reason (I work on Postmark). We filed an FBI report and went back and forth with GoDaddy until they got our domain back a week later.

So not really as exciting as Hackers, but sort of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If a business is unwilling to release information to you per a standard request, look into filing a lawsuit and submitting a subpoena.

Even discussing that option with them may get them to disclose. Lawyering up sucks for businesses as much as it does for you.

IANAL / IDEPLOTI, you may want to chat with one or several or even just find folks who've disputed stuff themselves.

Additionally: register complaints with any and all consumer protections services: BBB, chamber of commerce, your state's attorney general's office, etc. And post to HN (OK, check that punchlist item).

</comment><comment><USER39> Godaddy stole phpiseasy.com from me too. Not sure who to trust anymore

</comment><comment><USER40> I moved my domains away from GoDaddy primarily because I grew tired about all the desperate upsell spam they sent me ALL THE TIME.

Secondarily I moved because they are so big that if anything happens to my domains the chance I get to speak to a reasonable person are practically zero.

Find a smaller registrar, make sure you can get proper support from them, then move your domains there.

(Recovering a domain you have lost is orders of magnitude more expensive than taking steps to reduce the chance of it happening in the first place)

</comment><comment><USER41> I remember reading about this happening to a few other design blogger websites over the last few weeks. I'm still trying to wade through the "I hate Godaddy" posts to find if anyone has any idea why this might be happening. I'm guessing weak passwords.

<comment><USER42> I waded through most of it and it seems as though the domain owner's email was broken into which then allowed the thief to begin the transfer process. So from what I'm reading here it actually wasn't GoDaddy's fault but just another Gmail account broken into.

I hate GoDaddy more than probably anyone here but it looks like their upselling and bad design didn't cause this one. Rats! I really wanted another excuse to talk shit about GoDaddy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here's what we know: Their GMail accounts are the common thread here: even Kirupa posts his addy with @gmail.com.

And we know that hackers have been all over Gmail. So obviously they got into their account. Their account probably had links to the registration... or they tried the same password, who knows.

But now they have them. I think the important thing is that the new 'Registrants' return them to Godaddy.com right now. They are trying to say that these people have to prove fraud?

That's ridiculous. With easy to provide proof, get them returned.

Also don't use GMail for important stuff... maybe your own mail server? One that you harden yourself? JK!

</comment><comment><USER44> Would locking your domain name at GoDaddy help?

<http://help.godaddy.com/article/410>

I am just wondering for my personal info, I have lots of domains hosted with them

</comment><comment><USER45> I mostly use Google Apps with enom, since it gives me the domain + email & all other google apps goodies "for free".

That said, I want to move a few domains away from GoDaddy but I am a bit confused how to do it the right way. Anyone have a good order-of-events list? I'd hate to lose the domains over a technicality when transferring. [edit: misspellings]

</comment><comment><USER46> Seems there is no idea how it happened yet. Perhaps a weak password... so weak that it was easily guessed? That would be my first bet.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is scary, I have all my domains with godaddy!

</comment><comment><USER48> First line: "... GoDaddy".

Laughed and closed the page. Even if it's not their fault for the original transfer, the headache of support is on you.

edit: Sorry you don't like to hear it? You get what you pay for, and you get what deserve for not shopping around and just going with the brand name that stuck because their CEO shot an elephant.

<comment><USER36> Once it's transferred away, GoDaddy has no power over it. Even the best support team can't do anything more than "give it back, please, new registrar".

<comment><USER2> I upvoted you but that's not true. The best support team can get on the phone with the other registrar and do something. They don't have to but they can. But sure they can just as easily go for the low hanging fruit.

As a registrar we have access to exclusive contacts at other registrars as well as in many cases personal relationships. If we want to help you there is plenty we can do. Yes in the end it's up to the other registrar. But there are professional courtesies as well and other ways of getting things done.

<comment><USER36> In no way have you disagreed with me. You just reworded my "Even the best support team can't do anything more than 'give it back, please, new registrar'" statement.

<comment><USER49> larrys' point is that there's a difference between begging the other registrar and using professional connections to ask for favors. Your original comment implied GoDaddy could do _nothing_ the previous owner of the domain could do when that's not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> could it be related to this:

"After a series of one-sided hearings, luxury goods maker Chanel has won recent court orders against hundreds of websites trafficking in counterfeit luxury goods. A federal judge in Nevada has agreed that Chanel can seize the domain names in question and transfer them all to US-based registrar GoDaddy. The judge also ordered "all Internet search engines" and "all social media websites"—explicitly naming Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google—to "de-index" the domain names and to remove them from any search results."

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/us-judge- ord...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/us-judge-orders- hundreds-of-sites-de-indexed-from-google-twitter-bing-facebook.ars)

<comment><USER23> Except... the domain was transferred AWAY from GoDaddy.</comment></comment>


ServerBeach Dedicated Server Sale - $99 Quad, $199 Octo - <AUTHOR> http://www.serverbeach.com/servers/specialoffers_quad_core_dedicated_servers.php/

<comment><USER2> There is cheaper hosting here: <http://www.kimsufi.com/ks/>

49€/month for a Q6600 quad-core.

and 99€ for a octo-core and 12gigs of ram.

I'm using their quad core at the moment for 6 months and nothing bad happened. Didn't try their tech support, though.

<comment><USER3> There are a lot of great prices in Europe (OVH in France, Heitzner in Germany), but not in the US to my knowledge. I've tried to run a server in Germany (Heitzner). The latency + newtwork issues (dropped packets) was not worth the price difference if your audience is in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice, it looks like I can get 2x1TB drives (gotta have my software raid) and 8GiB ram for around $250/month with that code. nice. (I mean, it's still cheaper to own, and obviously, I'm equipped to deal with my own hardware, but that's a relatively reasonable price as far as renting hardware goes.)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I haven't used ServerBeach, but I'm sorely tempted to switch some of my VM's to one. Thoughts? Experiences?

<comment><USER5> I've used ServerBeach for five years (as well as RackSpace, Slicehost, and Linode). Generally positive experience; they have occasional downtime as you might expect, but it hasn't impacted my sites to any significant degree. Their self-service tools are decent. Good support, good user forums. I'm about to upgrade one of my servers there and plan on using them for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For about the same monthly cost, Amazon has a dual-core machine with >3x the memory, 7.5 vs 2GB.

<comment><AUTHOR> How did you come to that conclusion? From what I'm seeing, the large instance is $0.34/hour, or $244/month. It looks like for a bit less ($199), one can get a 2x quad-core xeon with 6 gigs memory with the other deal.

<comment><USER4> moreover, you should expect to pay more for a physical server. It's more expensive to run a physical server than a slice of a virtual (at least until the physical servers start getting bigger than 32 or 64GiB)

Physical servers provide more value to the user, too; if you split a disk to 8 VMs, in times of contention, each vm gets significantly less than 1/8th of the disk's maximum performance. See, sharing the disk means that during times of contention, what would otherwise be sequential access become random access, and disk, especially cheap sata disk, is not any good at random access.

I wrote a bit about it here [http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2010/03/forward- looking...](http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2010/03/forward-looking- statements.html) when I was trying to track down a problem that pinboard was complaining about. (turns out the problem was actually a debian xen bug and not actually the problem I was describing. But what I say above is still true; virtualization is not any good at all for disk I/O)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No RAID, and I am guessing, no ECC RAM.

<comment><AUTHOR> True on both counts, though they offer RAID for a fee (40-100/mo for controller, then drives). Instead I'm planning on going SSD for 60/mo more + aggressive backups (bad idea?)

I'm planning on using this for things where performance matters a lot more than 100% data integrity.

<comment><USER4> SSD is not raid. get a second drive; you should be able to setup software raid without their help, and for a mirror, there shouldn't be much performance difference between software and hardware raid.

ECC ram is a larger problem, at least in my mind. having wrong data without knowing it is about the worst thing possible. ECC at least has the courtesy to crash my box when it gets an error it can't correct.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops I seem to have misread this comment... you did say "mirror".

As for ECC, how often does corruption occur? 100% Data integrity is not hugely important for the main app that will be sitting on this box, so a cosmic ray here or there isn't a big deal, but persistent unknown errors would be a problem.

<comment><USER4> if the ram is good ahead of time, bit flips are pretty rare. I mean, not unheard of, but if you are storing a bunch of mpegs, or tweets or what have you, it doesn't matter that much. when your ram goes bad, you will have lots of random crashes (and at that point, boy howdy, any data that was written gets screwed royally. You are really best off loading from backup at that point, on a new box.)

That is the other problem; because it's not 100% clear it's the ram (without ecc) it's easy for the service provider to push around 'half bad' modules without really fixing them. I know at all the big places I've worked, it was an incredible pain to get people to take a hardware problem seriously enough to get them to let me fix it, rather than just re-imaging the box and putting it back on the 'available box' queue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm yeah, promo prices on these makes me think they might have had a large "available queue" of these things...

I'll kick the tires before I switch everything over. Know of any good memory tests? :-)

<comment><USER4> there is no substitute for memtest86. but without a KVM over IP (or flipping a bit in memtest86 and a serial console) that's pretty useless to you.

At one point I had a set of patches to memtest86 that made screen scraping the pass/fail off a serial console much easier for one of the larger companies I worked for. But it'd be serverbeach that would need to implement that, and very few dedicated server providers give you serial consoles.

I did at one point, but it doesn't look like it makes sense for me to host dedicated servers for less than super premium prices, and frankly, I don't feel like providing the level of support that would be expected with such pricing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> spam?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not meant to be, I just thought this was an unusually low price and was considering biting. I posted it partly to share with everyone else here running an internet business, partly to get a potential reality check from the comments, and to see if anyone had disparaging things to say about ServerBeach.</comment></comment>


Punched Cards? Sheer Bloody Luxury - <AUTHOR> https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/punched-cards-sheer-bloody-luxury/ <comment><USER2> I did my Fortran in high school on punched cards, because the small timesharing system we had (a Cromemco Z80-based S-100 bus machine with a handful of terminals) had a habit of crashing and eating files - but it couldn't eat cards. We had a couple of surplus IBM 029 card punches, and they were a blast to use - they had nice crisp keyboards, and when you pressed a key the machine punched the corresponding holes with what felt like a major league bat hitting a major league fastball pitch - it was a really hard _thwhack_. Very satisfying.

I remember being astonished when my dad told me how they handled punch card accuracy at his office: engineers would write out their programs on (special) paper forms (i.e. a box for each character on each line), and hand the forms off to the computer department, where they'd have two different keypunch operators key in the program. Then they'd feed the two stacks of cards into a special punched-card-comparator machine, which would tell whether the decks matched. If so, it was considered successfully transcribed (and one of the decks could be thrown away).

I also remember reading a story long ago about decks of cards containing scientific programs being sent by rail between cities in two different countries in Europe (IIRC), and they kept having problems with the programs not working. Finally, they sent a courier along with the box of cards at one point. And, as the train crossed the border, the customs inspector boarded the train and checked passports and such, and inspected goods that were being transported, and, as is customary, took a sample from many of the transported goods (as one might take a bit of grain, say)... and, yeah, they took a couple random cards out of the box. Problem identified, if not immediately solved.

<comment><USER3> Holy crap! Did they manage to fix it eventually?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Brings back memories. I wrote a MIXAL assembler/simulator to run on an IBM 11/30 (actually, a clone - the General Automation 18/30), back in the mid 70s. About 7000 lines of 11/30 assembly, all on punched cards. And yes, I used the trick of running a marker across the stack of cards, diagonally, so it was really obvious when something was out of place. Don't remember if I put sequence numbers in columns 73-80, though the computer lab did have an ancient card sorting machine I used a few times.

I was really lucky back then - I was a high school sophomore who was given free rein of the local college's small computer lab. I got really good at keying in the IPL (initial program load) sequence on the front-panel keys, triggering a read of the IPL card from the card reader, which then would boot off the Winchester drive.

I got to show my daughter an IBM 029 card punch at the Seattle Living Computers Museum a few years ago. Don't think she was too impressed :-)

<comment><USER5> I've just realized that the old BASIC system of numbering every line is probably an artifact of putting a sequence number on each punchcard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dropping a deck was the threat. The preventative measure was to take a magic marker and draw a line across the top of the deck on a slant - nearly a diagonal. Then if you dropped the deck you could at least use the line to get the cards roughly back in order; then your memory took it from there.

<comment><USER7> I never used computer cards, although I did write an implementation of Knuth's MIX, and an assembler for it, but I wrote it in 2017 for running on PC DOS. Nevertheless, I did include an option in the assembler to punch a zero in the first column of each card other than the first and last cards. You can then line up and use a hook to easily find the first and last card, and it is easy to see which is which; other than the first and last card, the others can be in arbitrary order and it will still work. (These are the cards of the compiled deck, which does not use the same format described in TAOCP, but it should still be compatible with all MIX computers which use the loading mechanism described in TAOCP; my own implementation uses a single card bootstrap rather than two card bootstrap.) (Note that all of this describes the compiled deck, and not the source deck. There is no source deck in this modern implementation.)

(I have also tried to figure out how to make it work if all cards including the first and last card are shuffled (in order for this to work, it would require bootstrap code on every card, and it would probably need to know ahead of time how many cards there are), although I have been unable to do so; maybe it is not possible.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Punching a sequence number in columns 73-80 was not practical. Even if you allowed increments of 10 or 100, there always arose a situation where you had to insert more cards between two existing cards, than there was room. Ex: insert eleven statements between card 1230 and 1240.

Plus, you would have to manually enter the sequence numbers of the new cards, waaaay over in column 73, which was really slow and tedious on a card punch. Especially when you were in a rush because you were granted a brief slice of time on the computer, which was not capable of multiprogramming.

You could always duplicate the deck and re-sequence from scratch, but that was done on a machine that did not print (interpret) the characters at the top, making it impossible to read and manually maintain the deck.

The solution was: just don't drop the cards. I wrote and maintained a 4,000-card assembler program on a Univac 9300 in the 70's, and I never dropped my cards. The program was stored in two 16" metal trays.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had the run of a college computer lab. Always magic. Once groups for permissions came out they put the kids into the "brats" group for permissions - which was a fair reflection of the admins view of letting kids on the machines.

My high school was smarter. After I "hacked" the computers there - they put me in charge of maintaining them - I'd get called out of class to run around campus fixing computer things up. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was a forward thinking administrative office.

</comment><comment><USER7> Troff is still used (mostly for man pages, I think), and VT100 escape codes are still common, and I don't know what is meant by UNIX being "only for system stuff".

<comment><USER10> > UNIX being "only for system stuff"

At first I thought he meant server-side, but OS/X is as Unix as Linux is or even Solaris was.

<comment><USER2> macOS (neé OS X) is actually _more_ Unix than Linux, as it is certified.

<comment><USER11> That certainly says more about the certification process than about unix-ness of macOS ;)

On the other hand large fraction of UNIX(TM) certified OSes are in fact niche Linux distributions (IIRC mostly RHEL derivates).

In all it is mostly about nobody giving a damn about the certification outside of very specialized applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the saddest things I saw in college was a poor fellow walking along with a box filled with punch cards. It was a windy, blustery day. He stumbled, dropped the box and cards flew free in every direction. I will never forget the oaths and screams of terror as he ran after them...

<comment><USER13> Such a disaster was a rare, but unfortunately it happened. A heavy black marker diagonally down the side made it a lot easier to reassemble the cards in the right order.

<comment><USER14> What about having a hole in a corner that you could run a string or wire through? Was there a spot to position a hole that wouldn't interfere with the card reader? Heck, if possible I would do a 3 ring binder. Or rubber bands at a minimum.

<comment><USER7> Depending on the data format, it might be possible. For example, punch "I" in the first or last column of each card if the first or last column of the card is not used by the program. Unfortunately, I don't know much about the data formats of punched cards, as I have never used them (except in an emulation of Knuth's MIX system).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I missed punch cards by one year. The punchcard reader was still in the terminal room when I started working at the University of Illinois at Chicago computer lab. I did get to do a lot of JCL debugging. And we had to use a limited plain TeX at first because our ASCII-IBM bridge that let us use inexpensive terminals instead of dedicated IBM terminals had reserved ~ for signalling escape sequences plus the state of the art for the Xerox laser printer allowed only predefined sets of fonts to appear in a print job.

</comment><comment><USER16> When I took my first programming course in high school, we had a PDP-11/34 and several terminals in the classroom. But for our first assignments, we used mark-sense cards (in the usual IBM form factor). There was a dedicated column for the statement keyword (chosen by a single mark).

After a couple of such assignments, they turned us loose on the terminals. Those who were quick/lucky got one of the few VT100s or the DECwriter III, but any terminal was better than the mark-sense cards. I think that was a weeding- out exercise.

</comment><comment><USER17> > The big danger with card decks was that you'd drop the deck and the cards > would get out of order

At my first job, my boss told me the story of a colleague who was taking a box of cards out to the car. You had to drive your program to The Computer, of course, because this was back when there was a The Computer. It was out by the airport.

They took one step out the door, and just at that moment a foot of snow decided to let go and slide off the roof. Oof.

</comment><comment><USER18> /SYSIN DD*

Clearly this author worked on one of the gigantic, luxurious MVS boxes. I, on the other hand, toiled away relentlessly on a small VSE Box. He had it easy!

<comment><USER19> This story also highlights the enduring strength of IBM's 360/370 architecture. It is still in widespread use today. The correct syntax is:

//SYSIN DD *

A data definition statement indicating the next line in the program is the start of the input program to be processed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Writing new code in IBM assembly could be made faster by simply reshuffling an old deck!

<comment><USER21> When I was a highschool kid we use as perforated card system (you punched them out with a paper clip). We were charged for usage by the card 1c each (1c was a lot more back in the 70s). We used to share and recycle cards "anyone got a 'goto 10'?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Back in the days when bytes only had six bits...

<comment><USER23> You were lucky to have bytes! We used to shift and mask.

<comment><USER2> Luxury. We just had one bit and we could only turn it on and off.

And it was a timesharing system, so you had to share that one bit with 13 other programmers.

<comment><USER24> When I started out, we had to move the electrons by hand!

<comment><USER25> Oh we used to dream of having electrons! We used to have rotten fish dumped on us every morning and we'd use the presence of a head to indicate a true bit. Where do you think "running headless" comes from?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Associates to Terminate North Carolina Members - <AUTHOR> http://insight.makovision.com/amazon-com-north-carolina-tax/

<comment><USER2> It sounds like North Carolina is trying to claim that they are owed sales tax on any transactions that occur between Amazon and a customer if the referral came from an Amazon Associate in NC, even if neither Amazon or the customer is in NC. Why stop there? Why not tax all transactions where the person originally heard about the product from someone in NC, or where the computer they use to purchase was bought in NC. Give me a break.

This is bullshit and unconstitutional and will hopefully be struck down if it's passed at all.

<comment><USER3> "[O]riginally heard about" is a weak analogy. The issue with Associates is that actual money is changing hands. It's almost like having a storefront physically in NC, which would traditionally require a multi-state retailer to collect sales tax in that state.

I am a very anti-tax individual overall but the cross-state-delivery sales-tax loophole, which advantages distant sellers, has grown with the rise of e-commerce and efficient long-distance shipping to now seriously distort economic activity.

Why should a distant seller have an 8+% cost advantage over local sellers? Why should extra fuel/pollution/time be expended because of that jurisdictional anomaly?

Consider the similar case of NewEgg vs. Amazon for purchases by California residents. Amazon has subsidiaries in California. Amazon employs people in California. Amazon advertises in California. Amazon enters into long-term business agreements with California residents and businesses, including through the Associates program.

But because of some legal maneuvering, and keeping a few offices and warehouses outside California, Amazon can avoid collecting sales tax, while NewEgg must. Simply because NewEgg has more operations in California -- operations that are already subject to payroll, property, and income taxes -- it also faces an extra tax on each customer transaction.

(And as much as I would like to eliminate sales tax for all merchants, the state's legitimate activities have to be financed somehow, and often the alternatives to a broad consumption tax like a sales tax are even worse: higher income or property taxes.)

The best constitutional solution would be for the federal Congress to equalize the playing field somehow. (Note also that if the sales tax base is broadened, the rate can go down.) But until that day, I don't blame states that see large-scale retail, contractual, commission-paying, operational activity happening inside their own borders and say: this counts as in-state commerce, and should be treated the same as other retail activity.

<comment><USER2> _It's almost like having a storefront physically in NC, which would traditionally require a multi-state retailer to collect sales tax in that state._

It's nothing like this. This isn't about NC wanting to collect sales taxes on purchases made by buyers in NC. And while Associates are involved, they're not involved in the purchase at all. They simply forward traffic to Amazon and if the customer buys, they get a commission. This is completely different from a retail store that's holding inventory from vendors and handling the actual transactions with customers. This is quite literally just like hearing about something from someone. If I live in NC and I send an affiliate link to a friend who lives in NY for a book on Amazon and that friend purchases it, NC is claiming they're owed sales tax on that sale. That makes zero sense. They're taxing my income on the commission, which is enough.

<comment><USER3> I think you are misinterpreting the law. As I understand it, the law is both better and worse than your interpretation.

Better, in that your hypothesized shipment to NY won't be subject to NC sales tax -- only the payment of the commission occurred in NC, not the sale.

Worse, in that _all_ shipments to NC residents will be subject to sales tax -- even if those sales _did not_ start with an in-state Associate referral.

In the view of the law, the presence of the in-state Associates means that Amazon has a paid sales force operating inside the state borders. That, just like having offices or warehouses or storefronts, makes Amazon liable to collect sales tax on _all_ sales into NC.

They are paying people and facilities inside NC to help them sell. In some cases -- and I imagine those cases that generate the most commissions -- the in-state facilities display product names, pictures, descriptions, and prices. Sounds enough like a 'storefront' to me that Amazon should pay the same taxes as their in-state competitors.

<comment><USER4> It seems like reality has outgrown the individual states sales tax regime. The current tax system sounds like it contains ridiculous levels of distortion. Seems like time to rewrite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> California has something called a _use_ tax. Turbo Tax will prompt you about this.

In theory, you need to pay a use tax for things purchased outside of the state from a vendor who did not collect sales tax (e.g. Amazon or other internet retailer outside of California)

So, while it is true that California cannot levy taxes on out of state vendors, they can levy a use tax on its residents.

<http://www.boe.ca.gov/sutax/usetaxreturn.htm>

<http://www.boe.ca.gov/sutax/faqusetax.htm>

 _Do I owe use tax?

You generally owe California use tax when you use, consume, give away or store tangible personal property (i.e., products you can see, weigh, feel or touch, such as clothing, books, computers, DVDs or CDs) in California that you purchased from an out-of-state vendor. If the out-of-state vendor does not collect the California tax on your purchase, you must pay the tax._

<comment><USER6> I remember filing in New York State in 2000 or 2001 or thereabouts where the state actually went after use tax. The form actually had a line - you could calculate your use tax or just give up and give them 38 bucks, which was their average estimated amount. I think everyone just gave up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Misleading headline because the email says "Please note that this is not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Associates Program". They are only going to terminate things if the legislation is passed, which it has not yet.

This morning when I got the email I could not find out the specifics of the bill. If anybody has more information, please post it.

<comment><USER8> Here's a bit more: [http://www.news- record.com/content/2009/06/17/article/amazon...](http://www.news- record.com/content/2009/06/17/article/amazon_warns_nc_affiliates_about_tax_issue)

Maybe somebody else can find the law itself based on that.

<comment><USER7> S202:

"TO PERMANENTLY IMPOSE THE STATE AND LOCAL SALES AND USE TAX ON SALES OF DIGITAL PRODUCTS EFFECTIVE OCTOBER 1, 2009; TO PERMANENTLY REQUIRE A REMOTE SELLER TO COLLECT SALES TAX WHEN THE SELLER ENTERS INTO AN AGREEMENT WITH ONE OR MORE STATE RESIDENTS PROVIDING FOR A COMMISSION WHEN THE RESIDENT REFERS CUSTOMERS TO THE SELLER AND THE SELLER HAS GROSS RECEIPTS OF AT LEAST TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS ANNUALLY FROM SALES TO ALL CUSTOMERS REFERRED TO THE SELLER BY ALL SUCH RESIDENTS, EFFECTIVE WHEN IT BECOMES LAW;"

Bill: [http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2009/Bills/Senate/PDF/S202v6.p...](http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2009/Bills/Senate/PDF/S202v6.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not a proud moment for my state.

</comment><comment><USER10> California had a similar "Amazon Tax": AB 178. It was killed:

"Current law, under Quill v. North Dakota, requires a business have a physical presence or "nexus" in a state in order for the state to compel that business to collect and remit sales taxes. AB 178 represented an attempt to circumvent the federal interstate commerce law by presuming that a company has a physical nexus if business is solicited through a third-party advertiser that is based in California."

April 28th: "However, a bit of rare good news for California taxpayers came out of Sacramento yesterday. Just as the bill was scheduled for consideration, the Assembly Committee on Revenue & Taxation voted to remove AB 178 from the docket, effectively taking this odious piece of legislation off the table, at least for this year."

[http://www.atr.org/california-amazon-tax-bill-dies- quick-a31...](http://www.atr.org/california-amazon-tax-bill-dies-quick-a3170)

</comment><comment><USER11> I understand that this has an "adverse" affect on those who use these programs, but any taxes have an adverse affect on any commerce. Is there a reason why other transactions should be taxed and these shouldn't?

<comment><USER12> Well, there's actually a legitimate dormant commerce clause argument to be made here. The commerce clause is the most abused part of the U.S. Constitution, but this is precisely the sort of thing it is supposed to apply to.

<comment><USER2> I'd really love to hear that argument.

<comment><USER12> IANAL, but this is how it was explained to me:

      -The Constitution divides up powers, granting some to the federal
      government, and reserving others for the states or citizens.
      -The ability to regulate (that is, tax) interstate commerce is one
      granted to the federal government.
      -Therefore, the power to regulate interstate commerce is not the
      domain of the states.

Now, the "dormant power" argument (the first part) is somewhat debatable, but it is based on one of the very early SCOTUS decisions. It's also what prevents different states from having incompatible vehicle compliance measures, which is definitely a good thing.

This same reasoning has applied to mail-order catalogs (not to mention driving to other states for purchases) for years. States generally try to get around this by instituting a "use tax", but these are pretty well unenforceable in the general case.

In any case, I think we can agree that this is an entirely different matter than the typical uses of the commerce clause, to basically do whatever crazy thing Congress wants to do.

<comment><USER13> The "dormant commerce clause" power is actually the last bit: B/C the power to regulate interstate commerce is given to Congress, it is not within the domain of the states to interfere with (i.e., by regulating) interstate commerce.

The dormant commerce clause power doesn't prevent states from having incompatible vehicle compliance measures...the commerce clause does b/c Congress has passed legislation on point. States are allowed to have incompatible vehicle standards (Cali and NY/NJ can set their own emissions and fuel efficiency standards) b/c the legislation allows them to seek waiver. If the dormant commerce clause applied, they wouldn't be able to do this b/c there wouldn't be any waivers available b/c Congress was silent on the issue.

IAALBYANPM.

<comment><USER14> I am a lawyer but you are not Pac Man?

<comment><USER13> *pm = paying me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of North Carolina."

There are two factually false parts to this quote.

"enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme"

Its fine to say it should be challenged in court, but its not at all clear its patently unconstitutional.

"would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates"

I'm willing to bet if other states followed suit, Amazon would find the "choice".

State taxes on internet sales are going to be sought after as states look for ways to solve their revenue problems. I'm not arguing in favor of such taxes but do see this as a sign of the times.

</comment><comment><USER16> Time for TechCrunch to do another poll. What's more important: Amazon or North Carolina?</comment>


Show HN: Happi – Free hosted infrastructure software - Reece-Happi http://www.get-happi.co.uk/ <comment> Reece-Happi Happi's a software tool where you can find, buy and network servers, switches etc to create your own hosting environment. Happi is free to use, and at the moment you don't even need to sign up.

Are there any specific products not represented that you would find useful?

Any features you would like to see?</comment>


Is HN Scared of Discussing Andrew Keen's 'The Internet Is Not the Answer'? - <AUTHOR>

Is his book controversial? Yes.
Does he have all the right answers? Probably not.
But are his questions worth being asked and discussed? Absolutely.
While receiving wide press coverage on The Washington Post, The Guardian, etc., neither the book itself nor any reviews have received more than two points on HN. <comment><USER2> From the reviews, I've seen the thesis doesn't appear to be novel, the arguments for it don't appear to be novel, and there doesn't appear to be any particular new insight or point-of-view presented not widely discussed on HN.

I might be missing something that isn't obvious, but it just doesn't seem particularly _interesting_ to discuss; it does seem to be the kind of thing that might be interesting to people that _haven 't_ thought at all about the role of the internet and related technology in culture and the economy, but that group of people doesn't seem to have a lot of overlap with the HN readership.

Not finding something interesting based on the presented information about it isn't the same as being scared of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...no?

Getting points depends on a lot of factors, most notably timing. It should not be taken personally.

<comment><USER4> I move heaven and earth to get points, but no it is not to be.

But then some spontaneous offhand remark spawns a huge long thread and lots of votes.

<comment><USER3> There are more important things in life than internet points.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this book worth reading?

<comment><USER6> I saw it at B&N, read the back-jacket notes and thought it sounded interesting enough _to_ read. I bought it, but haven't had time to actually read it yet.

FWIW, the author (Andrew Keen[1]) made a bit of a stir with one of his earlier books _The Cult of the Amateur_. All in all, he seems to hold a generally negative view of the Internet and "Internet Culture" and a lot of the things that have been enabled by the Internet and which have become very popular.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Notably, also from Wikipedia:

"Keen returned to Silicon Valley in 1995 and founded Audiocafe.com, which received funding from Intel and SAP. The firm folded in April 2000 and after the demise of Audiocafe.com, Keen worked at various technology companies including Pulse 3D, SLO Media, Santa Cruz Networks, Jazziz Digital and Pure Depth, where he was director of global strategic sales. In 2005, Keen founded AfterTV, intended to bring clarity, understanding and foresight to the post- TV-centric media and consumer landscape."

"Tim O'Reilly has said 'I find, Andrew Keen's, his whole pitch, I think he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy to sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants.'"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fact that I had to use the internet to find the answer to "WTF is internet is not the answer" proves that indeed internet is the answer...

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think anybody is "scared" to talk about it. TBH, this is the first discussion of that book that I've seen pop up. I'd be happy to discuss it, if I'd read it. Unfortunately, however, I only just bought a copy and haven't had time to read it yet. _shrug_

<comment><AUTHOR> HN users, most being technical, are rather beneficiaries than victims of the internet as discussed. So it's not particularly far-fetched to think that we all, collectively, have avoided this topic and rejected the criticism.

<comment><USER8> How about writing a book review, posting it to your blog, and submitting a link to that instead of name-calling?

This is the first time I've heard of this book.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see any name-calling, just honest questions and criticism.

There are already quite a few reviews in the press where the authors probably did a better job than I could do:

[http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/01/internet-is- not...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/01/internet-is-not-the- answer-review-andrew-keen)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-the- inter...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-the-internet-is- not-the-answer-by-andrew- keen/2015/01/02/8627999a-7973-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/1134786...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11347864/The- Internet-Is-Not-the-Answer-by-Andrew-Keen-review.html)

[http://fortune.com/2014/12/28/an-internet-to-love-and- hate/](http://fortune.com/2014/12/28/an-internet-to-love-and-hate/)

[http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-andrew- keen...](http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-andrew- keen-20150201-story.html)

[http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/blaming-the-internet-is- no...](http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/blaming-the-internet-is-not-the- answer)

[http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/books/review...](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/books/reviews/the-internet-is-not-the-answer-by-andrew-keen- book-review-a-skilful-reading-of-the-runes-10031880.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyway, what do you what to discuss about it? Do you agree with his points? Disagree? Would you like to expand on something the author said? Etc? I mean, just saying "let's discuss X" isn't saying much. Start us off by throwing something out there!

</comment><comment><USER4> I know lots of people who dont use comouters nor the internet. They dont want to.

Its not because they lack money or education. One is a deputy sheriff; he uses a computer at work but its not on the internet. He doesnt have a computer at home.</comment>