68 Katy – 68000 Linux on a Solderless Breadboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.bigmessowires.com/2014/11/17/68-katy-68000-linux-on-a-solderless-breadboard/ <comment><USER3> That is seriously good work and an amazing DIY project!

I remember when I was a kid, trying to just get a pre-made Linux-image boot on my Amiga. I had a 68020 CPU, but due to no MMU and no FPU (neither being "normal" accessories at the time) I just couldn't get the thing to boot at all. Later, when I acquired a 68030 CPU, I at least had the MMU covered, but I was still a kid and didn't have a budget for a FPU. So I still couldn't get things booting.

Granted, back then I wouldn't know my way around Unix if I had been handed a booting system, but I was curious about this "Linux" thing which was supposed to be superior if you wanted to run BBSes, multitask and do stuff like that.

But despite all those resources I had, I couldn't get things going. And here this guy gets Linux running on a home-built 68008-based system of all things.

That is seriously cool!

Edit: I may be mixing up my 68k models. I also had a plain 68000 earlier, which was definitely not up for the task. If I'm mixing things up, please forgive me. It was a long time ago :)

<comment><USER4> Your post just brought back a flood of memories for me about the frustration I went through as a kid trying to port free software to 68k BSD. I started out running MachTen [1] which ran under System 7 on the Mac. There was something odd about the way it did dynamic linking, I can't remember now, but it just turned any port into a nightmare. I don't know why it took me so long to figure out there was a mac68k NetBSD, which had a much better/compatible toolchain for building stuff. I don't remember ever trying to get linux going on 68k, but I can sympathize.

[1] [https://www.tenon.com/products/machten/23-info.shtml](https://www.tenon.com/products/machten/23-info.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazing, he did in 3 weeks and that seems like 3 weeks of part time work, that's amazing. It's amazing how much work we can put out in a small time if we are focused. I lost it during the video when he got tangled up in vi. In 1998, I got a Sun 3 workstation which has a 68000 cpu, the only thing I could get to run on it then was NetBSD. It's amazing that a single person can now build such a computer and run Unix on it within 3 weeks. Just amazing, how time changes things.

<comment><USER6> I built almost the same thing as a senior final project in digital electronics in 2000. It took me 7 months and I never even troubled myself to go beyond simple assembly programs.

I am humbled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great project! Good hustle with the multiple attempts...

I smile at the use of a 555 as an interrupt timer... I did the same thing in my 8088 senior project in 1996... Typically one wants the interrupts to be accurate and periodic (hence hardware dividers to adjust the rate), but the 555 is (typically) based on RC time constants and as such is subject to heat changes :)

So your operating system runs differently at different times of the day :)

Also, mine had potentiometers to control the two external interrupts (556), so you could change the interrupt rate in hardware and there was plenty of pot noise which was easily detectable in the output audio stream... tee hee memories.

</comment><comment><USER8> Steve of BMOW has done several amazing hardware projects including a homemade CPU from logic chips and CLPDs, Mac floppy emulators, and more. Rather than link them here, browse the links on his sidebar and read the descriptions of each project.

>Schematics? Forget it. Everything was built incrementally, one wire at a time, while staring at chip datasheets. It's an organic creation.

Yeah, that's real hardware hacking right there.

</comment><comment><USER9> To clarify the article's text, uClinux is not (just) a distribution, but a version of the kernel that rus on MMU-less hardware.

The full Linux kernel does have m68k support, but it needs a 68020 or better CPU. This gets you real memory protection, VM etc.

<comment><USER10> Wasn't uClinux merged into mainline a long time ago?

<comment><USER9> You can build it from the mainline git repo, but what you get is a version of the kernel with defining features of Linux/Unix missing.

<comment><USER10> What's missing? I haven't used uClinux before but I consider it on a cortex m4 - what should I be wary of?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "...hung at calibrating display loop. Aha, I needed a timer interrupt...."

He must be a true genius, to be able to infer the second from the first.

<comment><USER12> Not-genius here: I've actually come across this problem trying to boot Linux on enigmatic hardware. If you look in the Linux code it's actually reasonably simple to work out what it's waiting for.

This guy is definitely a genius for other reasons, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 2MHz on a breadboard is good going. Getting linux into half a meg of Flash is also extremely good going, even if it is uClinux.

</comment><comment><USER14> The article spoke about a suspected memory leak in setenv(), I assume it uses uClibc but it was a bit light on the details (no source code links in the article, that I could find).

I dug up this link: [http://git.uclibc.org/uClibc/tree/libc/stdlib/setenv.c?id=30...](http://git.uclibc.org/uClibc/tree/libc/stdlib/setenv.c?id=308bd3f7988e13267b67c7a17c36ba2ad92b3c1c#n50) which I believe is the relevant function.

Unsurprisingly for this level of library code, it's not 100% super-obvious or easy to understand. Especially the details on the in-library memory management are unknown to me, but I thought it might be interesting.

<comment><USER15> The whole putenv()/setenv()/unsetenv()/environ API is inconsistent hack that is essentially impossible to implement without introducing memory leak in at least one of these operations without introducing some complex additional book keeping. The good news is that there aren't that many reasons to actually use these functions, as only reasonable usecase for modifying environment is changing environment of spawned subprocesses, which can be done by constructing your own environ and passing it as envp argument to exec().

On the other hand the memory leak is mostly negligible and one would assume that for reasonable program that calls setenv (ie. does not call setenv in a loop) probably smaller than cost of the aforementioned extra book keeping.

<comment><USER16> I used the older uC-libc, not the newer uClibc (no dash in the name). You're right. There's a tiny leak in this version of setenv(), when you set a value for an environment var that already exists. It leaks the old value, which seems to be an intentional design choice, in case anything was holding on to a pointer to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I built a 68008 breadboard 'computer' as a student with 6522 VIA, an EPROM of 'code', some RAM and some LED lights to show if anyone was home. It took a lot of work to get that far. And that was a long time ago. The benefits of the 68008 were the same - minimal pins to wire up, more chance of it actually working.

Anyway I am impressed that someone can get a distro working on 68008, getting to the start line of that project is a big deal, going the extra miles - <USER2> impressive!

</comment><comment><USER18> I would never be able to keep all these wires straight in my head. And that's even a step-down in terms of wiring from the BOMW1 project...

</comment><comment><USER19> Kudos for wiring this (and also for the rest). I can't seem to succeed wiring much simpler circuits on the first attempt, and get mad going through all the connections to see what's wrong.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is amazing! It's pretty surprising to me how little there is on the board. It looks comprehensible.

I wonder if you could do this with a modern CPU and RAM. What would it look like?

<comment><USER21> A lot of newer CPUs aren't available in DIP packaging which means they won't be usable with a breadboard; the M68k is one of the more unusual ones in that it's available in a 64-pin DIP, the longest common DIP package. E.g. all the x86 processors moved to square packages starting with the 80186/80188, only the 8086/8088 were in DIP.

DIP packages are problematic for high-speed operation since the leads to the pins near the ends are longer than the ones in the middle, creating signal skew; hence the move to square/BGA packages.

That being said, there _are_ microcontrollers with a relatively powerful ARM core and in DIP, but they usually have internal memory and use the pins for peripherals, not as a full memory data/address bus.

<comment><USER22> A lot? Make that pretty much all. The only things you still find in DIP format are very low-end micro-controllers.

<comment><USER23> Not ARM microcontrollers, which the OP specifically references. NXP's LPC810 & LPC1114 are really the only game there, and they don't support external memory AFAIK (and it's an M0). Of course, there are a lot of shops bonding an QFP ARM or similar to a slip of PCB that's DIP form factor, but that's not exactly the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would love to take a class for building a computer like this.

<comment><USER25> The hardware is remarkably simple. It's the software that's tricky. It's nowhere near the level of insanity (all for good reason) you find on modern PCs where you boot without knowing how exactly you'll get to your RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of the days when the 680x0 series was still a Mac thing and Yellow Dog Linux was a compatible distro.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you instal an upgrade the day it's out? - <AUTHOR> I have this itch, the moment a beta release is out -- I gota have it. A week ago was a really big day -- I spend few hours upgrading to (all still in beta) Mac OS 10.13, XCode 9, IOS 11, Watch OS 4. Not surprising, quite a few things break and everything is sloooooow to the point it's embarrassing and I have to explain to coworkers why I can't answer Skype calls reliably any more, and why can't I share my screen on gotomeeting. I actually do not mind that I have to reboot my computer more often than usual because it freezes. But, there is this special feeling of beeing on the bleeding edge, touching the newest thing with my own hands -- how can one beat that argument? I anticipate reactions, some may say -- stupid. And I'm just wondering, how common this "stupidity" is? Am I the only one who has this itch? How do others cope with embarrassing situations that arise because of beeing on the bleeding edge? <comment><USER2> I usual bide my time on commercial upgrades on important machines (the big Cos have no qualms on pulling the rug out from under you on an upgrade.) I'll let the bleeding edge guys beta test it for a few months till theres a decimal version available and that I can be assured nothing will break in the upgrade,.

Now on Linux, I have played with stuff on the day of release on a secondary system, mainly to see what works better, what's not broken anymore, and what still works (hasen't been broken or deprecated). Still takes me a while before initiating an upgrade on my main machines but its good to check.

</comment><comment><USER3> I keep the bleeding-edge and stable stuff side by side whenever possible, for ex. keep both the stable and alpha versions of Firefox installed together and generally use the bleeding-edge versions as daily drivers.

If I am doing something extremely important like payments or making a project for some non-tech clients where stability is paramount I stick to the stable builds unless the betas solve some major issue or have some required features.

</comment><comment><USER4> I work in Operations, so unless it is a major security fix, I would never install anything on a day one/two/etc, but rather wait and see and after that install in the lab / pre-prod first...</comment>


Test That Startup Idea You Have in Just 24 Hours - <AUTHOR> http://validate.tech/ <comment><AUTHOR> Maker here. Validate was born after my frustration with building a product for months and months, only to have the market ignore it blissfully.

Never again!

Check it out, and if you have any questions about "Validate" at all, please let me know!

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea, but your own landing page is very text-heavy and doesn't have any screenshots of your landing page builder. A free trial or demo would be even better. There's no way I'd sign up for a $49/mo plan without a clear idea of what I'm buying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Fortunately, the rework shouldn't take long when it's drag-and-drop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So then is this startup idea testing itself?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would only be fitting.</comment></comment>


Why you shouldn't parse the output of ls - <AUTHOR> http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs <comment><USER2> This is the big thing that disappointed and frustrated me after I had spent a bunch of time hacking on Lisp Machines and then switched to Unix: in the Unix world, everything but _everything_ is character strings. On the LispM, when you called 'directory', you'd get back a list of pathname objects. All the system interfaces were like that; it was hardly ever necessary to parse anything -- and when you did have to, it would be in s-expression format, so all you'd have to do is call 'read' on it.

In contrast, Unix is a Babel of different syntaxes. Every basic command like 'ls' has its own output syntax; every configuration file is in a different syntax. (Command line parsing isn't standardized either, but that train wreck deserves another conversation.)

In the case of the LispM all this was achieved by running the entire OS and all apps in a single address space; this obviously made passing objects between apps trivial, but at the price of a complete absence of security. Such a design would be a non-starter today. However, what you _could_ do today would be to specify a standard system-wide serialization format, and give all the basic system commands an option to generate it. S-expressions would work great, but if you can't stand them, okay, use JSON. (Don't even think about using XML.)

The result would be, instead of just piping text strings from one app to another, you could, in effect, pipe _objects_. It's a far more powerful paradigm and would save you all this parsing pain.

<comment><USER3> > everything but everything is character strings

Actually it's worse: they're byte streams. They don't have to be decodable as any encoding, can contain weird control characters, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The utility 'find' has a nice parameter you can use if you need to parse its output.

        find ./ -type f -print0

Using the '-print0' option will output a null terminated list. Since Linux filenames can't contain nulls, you can reliably parse the output.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, xargs (often combined with 'find') has a -0 option indicating that the input is null-terminated. So you often see:

      find ./ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> All of this makes me happy that I use Powershell, where my output isn't some text I need to carefully parse (avoiding edge cases), but a list of objects, each of which has properties for me to interrogate.

<comment><USER5> Of course bash is not the only shell, nor is it the only approach for scripting on Linux/Unix. See e.g. perl, python, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of these mistakes are detected by ShellCheck:

[http://www.shellcheck.net/](http://www.shellcheck.net/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's good to be aware of these pitfalls, but in practice they often don't arise. If you're parsing log files, or any other system-generated files with sane filenames (no spaces, or other odd characters) you won't have an issue. Still, I normally would never attempt to parse 'ls' for this sort of thing. The preferred approach in a shell script is to use the shell's globbing capabilities (as in the example given):

      for f in *; do
          [[ -e $f ]] || continue
          ...
      done

</comment><comment><USER8> I think if you're trying to use the shell for something other than some basic program launch glue, you are doing it wrong.

In C, readdir returns a perfectly usable struct dirent * with no parsing issues to worry about.

Python also provides a usable Unix layer for automation.

<comment><USER9> Every so often, I'll find myself frustrated with some bash script. For me, once a shell script gets to that point, it's best to rewrite it in Python. Translating a script into Python is almost fun, and I find the result much more maintainable. BTW, the original submission is great. I've written shell scripts over the years that have made this very mistake! For example doing something like:

       ls pj* | wc -l

Which normally returns the number of pj* files, but will fail for pathological file names as the submission points out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does not work well if you also care about hidden files :

[simula67@hades test_bash]$ touch .hidden

[simula67@hades test_bash]$ touch not_hidden

[simula67@hades test_bash]$ find . -type f

./not_hidden

./.hidden

[simula67@hades test_bash]$ ls -al

total 8

drwxr-xr-x 2 simula67 simula67 4096 Jul 7 00:32 .

drwx</comment><comment> 40 simula67 simula67 4096 Jul 7 00:31 ..

-rw-r--r-- 1 simula67 simula67 0 Jul 7 00:33 .hidden

-rw-r--r-- 1 simula67 simula67 0 Jul 7 00:33 not_hidden

[simula67@hades test_bash]$ for f in _; do echo $f; done

not_hidden

You have use shopt -s dotglob

[simula67@hades test_bash]$ shopt -s dotglob

[simula67@hades test_bash]$ for f in _; do echo $f; done

.hidden

not_hidden

</comment><comment><USER11> This is is one of those "Required Reading" posts for *nix users.. Thank you for this!

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GuOdGlv...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GuOdGlvv1SYJ:mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER13> This unix.stackexchange post[0] is relevant as well.

[0]: [http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/128985/24124](http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/128985/24124)

<comment><USER14> That question/argument is a fine case study in some form of bug in the human mind, the name of which I know not.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm biased, but I'd say out of all the "big" tech companies, FB has the best engineering culture.

* With few exceptions, engineers aren't hired for a specific team; they go through bootcamp where they get exposure to all parts of the stack and tasks from different teams.

* Ideas usually come from engineers. Managers are there to be a sounding board/connect you with people resources as needed.

* Moving fast is valued (we used to be famously known for "move fast and break things" but now it's "move fast with stable infra". I.e., our dev infra is developed with a eye towards enabling rapid iteration.)

* Lots of internal knowledge sharing.

* Scale. Probably only Google, MS, Amazon come close.

* With only very few exceptions, every engineer has access to the near-entirety of source code at FB (Oculus, Whatsapp, Instagram...).

* Internal mobility is quite straightforward; after a year you can generally transfer to teams with available headcount without a formal set of interviews.

Of course, it's not everyone's cup of tea and like any big company it's not always 100% perfect and we don't always live up to this in every circumstance, but in general this is what it's like and what we're aiming for.

<comment><USER3> I think Facebook has very poor engineering culture. They built their iOS app with 18k classes, then claim that iOS and Git can't handle their 'scale'.

Let's avoid putting here obvious companies and companies who over-engineer, maybe?

[http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth- th...](http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-the-facebook- ios-application-is-so)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/facebook_engineer_ios_cant_handle_our_scale/)

<comment><USER4> I've spoken to Facebook engineers who work on their internal source control systems, and it was pretty obvious from talking to them that Git wouldn't work for their purposes. There is plenty of writing about this topic that explains in some detail why Git is unsuitable, and why Mercurial was a better option for them.

As for the 18k classes in their iOS app, I don't see why this is a sign of bad engineering? I'd expect that a large number of these are auto-generated, for example from Thrift API definitions, and I'd also expect that what we see as users is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the code needed. There's obviously a lot of analytics code, and also I'd expect the resiliency and reliability needed requires much more code than we'd expect.

<comment><USER5> It's nothing more complex than 100,000s of other apps out there. Yet somehow they managed to create 18k classes?

Scale is handled at the back-end.

<comment><USER6> I can't immediately think of any apps that are just as complex as Facebook's, but maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough. Could you give me some examples (honest question)?

<comment><USER7> Unreal Engine.

<comment><USER8> Based on their documentation—which, albeit, I know has many classes omitted—Unreal Engine has ~6900 classes. That number probably gets greatly multiplied, though, if you count generated classes.

<comment><USER7> And it's managed in git.

<comment><USER9> I can't find the link, but I remember an Epic engineer saying that they use Perforce internally and do a 2 way sync with Github.

<comment><USER10> Correct, it is managed in Perforce and MIRRORED onto Github.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google has an unique software engineering culture that was built and designed by the first engineers. Many of the practices show deep understanding of the challenges that growing an engineering culture faces.

A few examples:

There are clearly defined initiation rites for new employees that make them familiar with the engineering practices.

Focus is on a few key languages (C++, Java, Javascript, Python, Go) and code reviews are practiced over the team boundaries. This makes the knowledge transfer inside the company faster.

Changing your team and role regularly is encouraged.

Single, company-wide code tree and build system makes it easy to switch teams and make it possible to build very efficient tooling.

Coding style is strictly enforced to avoid petty fights and Google's very good coding styles guides include reasoning why certain choices were made.

<comment><USER12> I'm interested to know more about the "initiation rites."

<comment><USER13> I'm guessing he means readability. Google fetisihizes consistency, even at the cost of ingenuity and productivity. Heroism is a virtue at some other companies; at Google, it's a sin.

<comment><USER14> > Heroism is a virtue at some other companies; at Google, it's a sin.

This is not entirely true. I've seen many people being promoted for "jumping on grenades", especially in SRE. A culture of heroism is unsustainable, but individual acts of heroism (when required) should always be appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is no universal scale. Some people prefer to work at big companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook... some at smaller fast moving startups and everything in between.

There are for sure better and worse companies in each category, but even within big companies there is huge variance and it depends what you are looking for.

Though some generic observation:

1\. Product companies tends to have better culture than software consultancies.

2\. Companies which got strong technical leadership and software is a key component rather than add on (e.g. some banks).

3\. Good litmus test is to ask employees, do they have hackathons/educational budget/internal tech talks.

4\. Another litmus test is to ask how hard is to push feature to production/release or about developer tooling. Good companies tend to have convenient tools.

Of course even those 4 points got exceptions.

<comment><USER16> > Good litmus test is to ask employees, do they have hackathons

I'm a designer rather than an engineer, but I've always been a bit puzzled by the popularity of intra-company hackathons. It seems like a great way for management to keep employees working longer hours for less pay – an overnight hackathon that results in, say, 80 hours of additional work from a small team only costs the company some pizzas.

<comment><USER15> Heh, actually that is a good question, since answer will also tell you a lot about culture. It is an indirect question about working hours too. E.g.:

1\. We do hackathon once a quarter during work hours.

2\. We do 24h hackathons, but it's really fun!

3\. Well we work so long that we don't have time for hackathon.

4\. We care so much about work-life balance, that we don't do hackathons.

Depending on what you are looking for, you may be satisfied with different answer.

<comment><USER17> Serious question: Who out there isn't looking for #1 or #4? I'm failing to see anything positive about 2-3. Who's looking for those?

<comment><USER18> Have you ever wanted to collaborate with a coworker on something outside of your job, but can't ever find good time outside of work to schedule it? Our company did a hackathon (time limit of 24 hours, but no one stayed overnight) and I got to work with one of the senior tech leads on a HipChat bot. I found that extremely fun and rewarding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could someone explain to me why so many people on here fetishize scale? Scale is a constraint on a problem, and it affects the solution you come up with. I don't understand why solving problems around that constraint is considered cooler than solving problems around other constraints like uptime, performance, memory cost, etc. Does "Our API serves 234 million requests" hold more cachet than "Our medical device firmware runs 24/7 without crashing and takes up 12 MB of RAM"?

<comment><USER20> This is just a guess, but I suspect that "scale" also generally correlates positively with compensation. A medical device company with 50 employees just doesn't have the same resources as a company with 1M+ users, for example.

Following from that, compensation is one of the easiest ways to measure professional "success", which is why large, highly-compensated companies are commonly viewed as the pinnacle of software engineering.

Whether that's a fair or accurate assessment is a different question.

<comment><USER21> Scale is also scarce. There are few companies operating at Google or Facebook or Amazon scale. You can't just create a product at scale if you want to gain the experience of scaling a product, you have to be working somewhere that grows tremendously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am surprised that no one mentioned Microsoft so far. These days they are professional, innovation-driven, and do not bring in much of the unnecessary cult that comes with companies like Google. They are more open than Apple.

Also from a personal experience I think their interviews / hiring methods are better than all of the other big players.

<comment><USER23> But are their engineering practices better? They used to take test seriously, but then they fired all the testers and quality of basic things has slipped. They don't even hire for dedicated testing roles any more.

I get that devs are supposed to test their own code, but they are surprisingly bad at it overall and unit tests, despite being a great meme, just don't cut it.

Some examples of quality issues: new limit to how many items can be in the start menu. I see bugs/rendering issues in Word for the first time ever (Windows and Mac). Edge is glitch when opening/closing tabs.

<comment><USER24> That's interesting to hear because I was reading the Software Project Survival Guide and it said that, at the time, Microsoft knew the value of quality because their tester to developer ratio was 1 to 1. Higher quality code had a ratio of up to 4 testers per developer. Low quality code is usually the opposite ratio, 1 tester for every 3-4 developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a fairly hard question, and inherently ha bias. What I will say is this, I believe every company from Google to the startup down the street will have some fault.

However, one of the largest faults I've seen in my years working is the arrogance. I have personally found startups to be some of the most humble in that regard, they'll push you to make design choices other shops won't have you make, and if you mess up, your job is much more on the line. This humbles many engineers, and in my opinion creates a better culture.

Larger companies breed arrogance, people learn their niche, there's "in breeding" so to speak. Engineers learn and specialize, and believe they are the smartest or most knowledgeable. This will create arrogance. Where as startups will train everyone to be tricks of the trade, masters of none. And people will learn to improve generally.

<comment><USER26> I've had the opposite experience.

Not universal, but I find most startups I've interviewed with extremely arrogant. The nicest workplaces for me have been the old and steady companies with boring software.

Things I see a lot in startups: Lack of real world business experience, so terrible management. "we're the best" attitude pervasive in everything. Hyper focused on the technology used over the job at hand. Unrealistic expectations in general. I'm gonna be rich because I'm awesome founders club.

<comment><USER27> That's my perception of startups too. Some of them pretty much _require_ you to believe the company is the best, and if you express moderation, it is a sign that you are not going to give your all to make the company succeed.

You know, the faulty "If you don't think you're the best, then you never will be" advice everyone seems to believe (not just in startups).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Etsy. I don't work there, but I've interviewed there twice and know lots of contacts who work there, and it's a great engineering culture.

The overwhelming majority of the company are engineers, and they have a large commitment to OSS, which was one of the initial selling points for me. Not to mention, Rasmus Lerdorf works there, and several of their engineers contribute to HHVM.

<comment><USER29> I'm a former Etsy employee. The engineering culture is awesome there, but I feel the need to point out that the majority of the company are not engineers. Even when I joined in 2013, we were about half the company. By the time I left (June 2016), we were around 1/4 or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In regards to mega companies, it's hard/impossible to talk about culture in a meaningful way because the organization is so large. For a personal example, saying "I work at IBM" is not terribly informative because IBM has more employees than most island nations have citizens, and its branches and divisions are extremely different. Some are doing really cool, cutting edge work, some are doing uncool, arthritic, blue-polyester-suit-style work. And the culture may not be homogenous across those either. Considering two "uncool" divisions, maybe one, despite being uncool, has a really innovation- oriented exciting culture and the other has more of a who-took-my-stapler vibe. Maybe the same holds true for divisions doing cool work.

I would venture to say that this more or less applies at any company of a sufficiently enormous size. It's just hard to generalize.

I will definitely agree with posters here who have said different strokes for different folks. Megacorps of all kinds, regardless of internal culture, are just different from startups.

</comment><comment><USER31> Spotify sounds very interesting to me. But I don't work there, so cannot really tell if it really works as they describe.

[https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering- cult...](https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture- part-1/) [https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering- cult...](https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering-culture- part-2/)

<comment><USER32> The Spotify app for macOS has a habit of eating 100% for no reason, even when no music is playing. I habitually quit Spotify every time I leave the room. I hate coming back from shopping only to realise that my laptop fans have been running for hours. Poor machine.

These kinds of problems with Spotify, SpotifyHelper, SpotifyWebHelper etc. have been well-documented for years. It would kill me to work for a company with such low engineering standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Valve's new employee handbook looks pretty interesting - [http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

<comment><USER33> According to Newell[1], Valve aggressively fires as it hires. It's not based on stack-ranking bullshit - more of a cultural and disciplinary fit. If you have the right personality you could thrive there, but if you need a manager to help you shine it's best to look elsewhere.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU)

<comment><USER34> It's based on capricious and cliquish factors that aren't documented anywhere. Having the "right personality" to thrive there means knowing who to ingratiate yourself with.

Source: close friend is an ex-valver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Long time lurker. First comment at HN. Apologies if this sounds too HR.

I had a year stint at Cloudera working remotely, meeting up with our distributed team 3-4 times/year. I was smitten with the approach they took in implementing 18 different open source project into enterprise big data offerings. They had proper software development lifecycle. There was/is lots of talent and maturity. I absolutely loved my team, the maturity and the culture at Cloudera.

</comment><comment><USER36> Reading the Netflix engineering blog now and then, I do appreciate how many of their engineering decisions also take into account the effect it will have on their colleagues, i.e. "does this change affect how quickly/independently our engineers can do stuff"?

<comment><USER37> Netflix's stack ranking is a huge turnoff though. Netflix's philosophy is that it has no loyalty to employees and expects none in return. Regardless of Netflix's other attributes, this policy is a huge turn-off.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/the-future-of- work/she-c...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/the-future-of-work/she- created-netflixs-culture-and-it-ultimately-got-her-fired)

If I wanted great pay and cutthroat competition, why wouldn't I just work in finance? The finance industry isn't stupid. They have developer efficiency teams too.

<comment><USER38> How does loyalty even work? Let's you'r a valuable developer, but your performance dropped significantly for 6-12 months because you got a baby. The company should stick with you not because of loyalty, but because it's good business - they know you will bounce back once you start getting enough sleep.

Another example - you were a valuable developer, but got a crippling, chronic disease which makes it harder to concentrate. There is no hope of your productivity ever going back to "reasonable" levels. What is loyalty in this case? Should they still pay you for the years even though you can't contribute?

<comment><USER39> Your first example relies on the tired employee have specialized skills. Instead, if the tired employee were easily replaceable, then loyalty would be sticking with that person despite the fact that they could be easily replaced.

For your second example, loyalty would be working with the employee to find a more suitable position in the company (or outside of the company) and helping with medical bills and any rehabilitation.

<comment><USER38> I've read that that's how it pretty much works in a lot of Japanese companies (i.e. even when you're pretty much of no use because of bad luck (illness, accident), they give you for example a janitorial job where it's understood that little is expected of you).

That's completely at odds with Western individualistic culture though hence it's rare here. Netflix is not really an exception - if you are the "weakest link", they will just fire you after your yearly review instead of waiting for a panic fire of bottom 10-20% of staff when stock price plummets (like most other corps do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Valve's dev culture is quite good. Teams are very small and each developer can get a lot done. You decide which team you're on and what work you do. There's no manager on a dev team; there's a team lead but the role is taken on as more of a service to organize discussion rather than dictate the team's focus.

It's a very collaborative environment and requires that each person is good at figuring out what's important to work on. For those suited to it, it's a hard place to beat.

</comment><comment><USER41> I know some people are going to be looking at this list to find potential places to go to. I urge some of you to be the change you desire. You might not be at place that currently have a great engineering culture, but you can become the origin and catalyst of that change. Read engineering blogs, papers, get new ideas and bring it forth to wherever you want.

</comment><comment><USER42> Without cross-company exposure it's hard to answer this question, but for me, Netflix is very good at projecting good engineering culture. The fact that they build engineering tools that work in general contexts, that they write blog posts describing them, and that they open source these tools impresses me. When I read their blog posts, I see a company that's effectively solved a particular problem in a very general way that works well in specific cases too. I love it.

The degree to which Twitter open-sources its work is another thing that I like.

</comment><comment> thomas-b Biased as well, but for that other side of the world: Atlassian Engineering culture is amazing, and repeatedly ranked best place to work in Australia. Atlassian is also very actively hiring in Sydney with great relocation experience (feel free to poke me on that).

<comment><USER43> I think the perception of 'Atlasssian Engineering' has been tainted by HipChat

<comment><USER44> JIRA taints their perception, for me at least.

<comment><USER7> And how unmaintained Sourcetree is.

<comment><USER45> Sourcetree is a pretty crummy product regardless of how maintained it is. It reveals a culture that seems to hold basic usability testing & concepts almost in contempt.

<comment><USER7> It's one of the only git UIs hat has proper rebase functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd have to say Square:

They have amazing engineers, contribute a ton to open source, their devs travel around the world, write blogs and generally do really cool stuff. They put emphasis on clean code, maintainability and testing.

</comment><comment><USER47> Pivotal. I've had the pleasure of working with many Pivots, and Rob Mee has built a great XP culture.

<comment><USER48> Pair programming all day, every day I thought I could handle. Turns out, I'm in no state to interface with any other human being, including my SO, at the end of a day of that. I think it's a good fit for a select group of folks who are both extroverted and technical. I also prefer having a tiny corner of my own space at work. It's comforting. At the office where I worked, everyone shared desks (you sit wherever your partner for that project is sitting at the moment) and nobody had their own space. It may be different at other Pivotal offices, but I didn't enjoy the short time I was there.

<comment><USER49> In fairness, pairing is not for everybody. We fret about whether we select for extroverts. In my experience, no, but pairing certainly takes a lot out of me.

On the flipside, we absolutely _smash_ out the work here. I love being able to _finish_ stuff every day, every week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> That depends on what you want. Do you want more process, or less process? Do you prefer strong leadership, or consensus decision making? Etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> Facebook --- far and away the best engineering culture I've ever seen, and I've been programming for 20 years. Other companies aren't even in the same league.

Facebook has an incredibly high hiring bar. I never once met someone who I didn't feel was qualified to be there. I was seldom the smartest person in the room.

The high average engineer quality allows the company to give developers almost complete autonomy. At Facebook, you not only get to choose your team, but once you're on that team, _you_ , not some PM or manager, decide what to work on. You're evaluated on impact twice a year, and Facebook has an expansive and nuanced understanding of "impact" that rewards things like developer productivity improvements, side projects, and removal of bad code.

Facebook encourages cross-team collaboration in a way that Google only dreams of doing. There's a single codebase unified under "fbsource", of course, but also a lack of OWNERS files. That means that it's your job as an engineer to decide what code to add, not some team of blessed approvers. There's no readability process. Teams are trained to _expect_ people from all over the company to contribute code. It's a dream job if you want to wear lots of different hats, or if you have a maniacal obsession with following a problem to its root cause and fixing it.

One engineer famously traced a sporadic failure to a single bad register on a single core on a single server. He was recognized for it too: Facebook has a "fix of the week" program that highlights heroic fixes and clever hacks.

Facebook management "gets it" in a way I haven't seen anywhere else. Developer productivity is paramount. When something goes wrong, management doesn't overreact. The general ethos is to apply tooling to make developers better, not to add process to make developers slower.

Best of all, Facebook is _fun_. The code review tool, Phabricator, has built- in meme support! The internal Facebook groups are full of interesting discussion and trolling (of the good sort). The people there all feel like, well, characters. They're memorable in a way I haven't seen at other technology companies.

Best of all, at Facebook, there's none of the insufferable technical grandstanding you see at other companies. It's hard to describe --- at other companies, people with just enough competence to be annoying regularly create elaborate word-salad design documents that would fit right in at /r/iamverysmart. At Facebook? People say what needs to be said.

The most striking thing about Facebook is how it does more with fewer developers. At Facebook, you feel incredibly productive. There's always enough to do. Teams are much smaller than equivalent teams at other companies, but somehow move faster. Management trusts you --- I never once heard "you can't check that in: the technical risk is too great".

Oh, and the pay is fantastic, especially if you demonstrate extraordinary impact.

Is Facebook perfect? Of course not. After all, I'm not there anymore. Some people ragequit. The company is growing more corporate over time, little by little. Traffic in MPK is nasty. Traffic in SEA is worse. The tooling has some room for improvement --- but you're welcome to send patches! The playfulness isn't for everyone. The open allocation policy sometimes leads to duplication of work, forcing people to discard their hard work. There are few hard rules, and sometimes you don't know where you stand in the power structure.

All that said, I'd go back to Facebook in a millisecond if circumstances lined up. Despite Facebook's flaws and its inevitable slow decline, it's still the best fucking engineering culture on earth right now.

<comment><USER51> As someone who generally wouldn't look at large companies, that does make FB sound kind-of interesting.

One question: how much emphasis is placed on day-to-day visibility? Is it legitimate to hide in a corner for a few weeks trying something out?

<comment><USER13> > Is it legitimate to hide in a corner for a few weeks trying something out?

Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I actually made a website that attempts to answer this question. My site, Devstop, provides a resource for developer certified reviews of companies' software engineering practices. The idea is to help software engineers identify the best companies to go work for. Check it out here: [http://devstop.io/](http://devstop.io/)

</comment><comment><USER53> London-specific (and from a recruiter that is listing some of their own clients, so take with a grain of salt), from [https://www.quora.com/What-are- the-best-software-engineering...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best- software-engineering-companies-to-work-for-in-London) (2014):

Large tech firms:

</comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Google, Deepmind

Facebook

Twitter

Microsoft, Skype, Yammer

Palantir Technologies

Bloomberg

Start-ups

</comment><comment>===

Improbable.io

Swifkey

Hailo

VisualDNA

Editd

State

Opengamma

Duedil

…and plenty more good ones in stealth.

Gaming:

</comment><comment>

Mind Candy

EA Games (Playfish)

Playfire

Foundry

…and the list can go on forever.

Not software engineering firms, but have plenty to offer software engineers:

Investment banks:

</comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Morgan Stanley

Goldman Sachs

JP Morgan

Barcap

....and plenty more.

Tech-driven funds:

</comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

Man AHL

G-Research

KCG (Getco, Knight, Automat)

…any plenty more you've probably never heard of.

<comment><USER54> You do know that there is no Yammer or Skype in London anymore? (we did have a fantastic culture though, so great it has been recognised. source: ex-Yammer.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> simply depends on how you measure/see 'best'. In some ways my tiny company is 'the best' simply because how the 3 of us design and define it. Want a different process, suggest it. Want a useful tool, build it. In some ways the 'best culture' is the one in which you follow all the rules, build foundational code, limit your hours and contribute back to open source frequently while at a giant company whose existence seems a certainty. The experiences are so varied situationally, compensationally, etc. I'm starting to think on a remote island as a nomad freelancing and/or working on your own projects. You live in a beautiful place, its often affordable, interesting cultures, etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> From friends who work there, Asana has amazing culture.

<comment><USER57> As someone who has worked at Asana for 3+ years, I would agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I worked at Quicken Loans before, and I would have to say the culture there was one of the best I have seen/heard of. An allowance for time to work on personal projects, a healthy work/life balance, and the usual job benefits were incredible.

</comment><comment><USER59> Be aware that the culture of an organization has little to do with the software it produces.

Actually, I haven't seen many poor organizations produce good software, lots of good organizations produce bad software.

For example, when I worked for IBM in the 90s, the organization (in Austin anyway) was great, but they couldn't get anything to market that wasn't garbage.

</comment><comment><USER60> Why not broaden the definition of "company" to include open source software projects? If we do that, I would suggest that the Linux kernel project probably has a very successful engineering culture. I'm basing that opinion on the quality of their work, their longevity, and the incredible success of Linux as a server OS.

</comment><comment><USER61> Doesn't this story just beg for companies to advertise their "culture"? This may be just exactly the targeted advertising they need, right?

</comment><comment><USER62> Interesting (but perhaps not surprising) that no one has mentioned Apple, while the other large tech companies have been mentioned multiple times.

</comment><comment><USER63> I knew some peeps at Fog Creek who seemed to love the culture. I haven't worked there myself but Joel Spolsky seems like a thoughtful fellow.

</comment><comment><USER64> ThoughtWorks has a great Engineering culture. It's run by most engineers. The amount of freedom is amazing. Pretty transparent culture.

<comment><USER65> It's also extremely progressive. Last I heard, they had managed to hire 40% woman engineers in recent cohorts. Compare this to a ~10% industry average.

<comment><USER64> It recently won the award for the best tech company for women, leaving FB and Google behind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> ThoughtWorks?

<comment><USER67> I heard they pay way below market, otherwise I heard mostly good things

<comment><USER68> You could look at their positions in lower cost areas, like Dallas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Quip.

</comment><comment><USER70> yawn

<comment><USER71> You've posted plenty of unsubstantive comments to HN. We eventually ban accounts that do that, so please only post civilly and substantively from now on.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316569) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Wow. This is a wankfest we all needed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Accenture and Infosys

<comment><USER73> I'm assuming you're kidding, but if not, would you be willing to elaborate?

<comment><USER12> I don't have direct experience, but, judging by what I've heard, they're probably "best" by _some_ measure. ;)

<comment><USER74> Ah, Infosys! My only experience of dealing with them stands out as one of the more amusing of my career. I was contracted to lead a team for a digital agency to rebuild the front-end of one of the UK's largest supermarkets; Infosys already had an existing contract to handle the back-end and integration; the supermarket had just a couple of (not very) technical leads (glorified project managers, really) to steer everything from their end.

About monthly, the supermarket's tech leads, myself, a project manager working with me, and anywhere up to about ten Infosys employees would meet up physically in the supermarket's offices. Only one of the Infosys employees would ever address the table, and rarely at that. The others all had identical laptops (perhaps even identical clothes?), and all took notes during the meeting, but never spoke, apart from just occasionally to mutter quietly to each other.

It was absolutely surreal. Needless to say, the integration did not go especially smoothly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Writing an Intellectual History of the President's Cabinet - <AUTHOR> https://s-usih.org/2020/03/writing-an-intellectual-history-of-the-presidents-cabinet/ <comment><USER2> _The Federalist Era_ by Elkins and McKitrick, has much to say on Washington's and Adams's cabinets.</comment>


Nvidia learned to make realistic faces - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIVU8UuHPKI&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> They should implement on fifa, they need help with the smiles.

<comment><USER3> I think all sports games need it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I get a virtual number that can receive short-code SMS? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to be able to use my e-mail as a second authentication factor for services that only support SMS-based 2FA. To that end, I want a number that can receive short code SMS messages and forward them to an e-mail address. Twilio would have been great, but their numbers can't receive short-code SMS messages. <comment><USER2> I worked with a company called Tatango awhile back. Usually they are marketing companies that use a downstream provider.

There's a few providers, I recall that AT&T and Verizon OEMd one. Iirc, most people use a broker type service that manages the relationships between the 20 or so carriers/MVNOs. There are pretty strict rules if you roll your own, and the costs were pretty high.

</comment><comment><USER3> None, if there were there, it'd be abused and shortly banned from receiving SMS messages. There are loads of black hats that would swarm to such a solution.

<comment><USER4> If I get a Twilio number and register it as my 2FA in some app, how is a hacker going to abuse that because the origin of SMS messages is a shortcode?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twilio numbers work with some services. Others list them as invalid phone numbers.

I also started receiving texts on my skype number few weeks ago.

<comment><USER6> [https://support.twilio.com/hc/en- us/articles/223134047-Can-m...](https://support.twilio.com/hc/en- us/articles/223134047-Can-my-Twilio-number-send-SMS-to-a-non-Twilio-short- code-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> you can get a number from [https://engagespark.com](https://engagespark.com), but you can't receive to email, but to an http endpoint. And Zappier could bridge that gap.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use Google Voice.

</comment><comment><USER9> Twilio</comment>


The Overconfident and Unrealistic Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.leosternlicht.com/theoverconfidentandoveroptimisticentrepreneur.html

<comment><USER2> I hate these drink-the-Kool-Aid articles.

Doubt is healthy and normal. If you don't have doubts about whatever path you're on, you're probably not thinking clearly enough. If you truly don't have _any_ fears about risk, you're missing a critical self-protection mechanism that comes factory-standard for even the most primitive creatures on the planet.

In particular, when I encounter people who suggest that I shouldn't have any doubt about an financial transaction, I hide my wallet and back away slowly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Timr, my point was more about letting go of things that are inhibiting you from doing what you really want to do. This article is written for individuals that aren't able to give it their all because they are being influenced by societal pressures.

<comment><USER2> _"There is a reason why you want to run a startup—much of everything else is the influence of societal pressures."_

The problem is, you conflate reasonable doubts with irrational outside influences. It's not as if people who want to be entrepreneurs can't _also_ want to get a law degree. Entrepreneurial ambition is not the only kind, and there are many legitimate reasons that a smart person might want to get a professional degree, aside from _"society told me to do it"_.

The idea that you need to commit yourself wholly to whatever path you choose is well-taken, but the notion that you must eliminate all doubt in order to act decisively is excessive (and impossible).

<comment><AUTHOR> Timr, I fully agree with you. However, what I wrote is not written for everyone. It was an opinion piece written for myself, and many in the same situation. I think that due to the ever changing nature of the internet technology industry, it is very hard for many to justify going after what their gut tells them. Because it is a lot more tangible to see and understand what you're working for when you choose to pursue a J.D. program or go into investment banking, my mind (and others I've spoken with) tends to ask "what if," during times of doubt. The times when I am most productive are times when I am working with a team and am really confident. If I could silence those reservations or "what ifs," I am positive that I would be more productive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why can't we prevent wildfires / bushfires? - <AUTHOR> Why can't we prevent wildfires / bushfires?<p>The annually recurring wildfires near west coast of USA and Canada, and the bushfires near the east coast of Auatralia.
Why can't this be implemented immediately:
Satellites keep constant watch on fire-prone areas. Detect a wildfire / bushfire almost as soon as the first sparks occur. Automatically generate alerts ... and trigger launch of firefighting aircraft (choppers, drones) to douse a fire within a few minutes of detection.
Use AI predict rate of expansion of fire (wind speed and direction data, realtime satellite thermographic analysis to give size, expected rate and direction of fire growth).
The satellites that can do this have been in place for years.
USA, Canada, and Australia have the resources to implement this before the next fire season. <comment><USER2> Some of what you suggest is being done by fire departments and companies but there are complications that make the problem more difficult than it may seem:

* We don't currently have the satellites to monitor fires at both small scale and real time. Geostationary (real time) satellites have a resolution of ~1km, and higher resolution satellites of ~10m to ~1m may only make a pass once per day.

* The FAA imposes flight restrictions around wildfires and doesn't make exceptions for research or scrappy startups, so it's tough to experiment or go to market with drone-based monitoring or firefighting.

* A lot of research has been done into fire spread prediction, including some using AI, but it's a difficult problem. Like weather forecasting it's pretty accurate on short time horizons, but over many hours and days errors compound.

* Data. High resolution fuel data is needed, which changes every season as vegetation changes, and changes every day with the weather. Quality elevation data is needed. We don't have much ground-truth data of what's going on inside a wildfire.

Finally, we have a combination of: forest fires are natural, suppressing them increases future likelihood of fire, people are building houses in fire-prone areas, climate change is increasing the frequency of fires.

We could probably do more to reduce the loss of life due to fire, but the biggest problems are social rather than technical: we need to reduce our impact on the climate, stop building houses in high-risk areas, and not get NIMBY about prescribed burns and forest management.

</comment><comment><USER3> This episode of 99 percent invisible touches on a lot of strategies to reduce fires and the struggles with implementing them (it's mostly politics, not technology).

[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to- burn/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The solution probably lies much more in creating barriers preventing the fire from spreading from one area to the next ones. It's unlikely we're going to catch every instance, and some fire is indeed necessary in some regions. We just don't want one instance of fire incident resulting in lung cancer for 35 million people.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because people keep lighting them and the media keeps telling us its climate change</comment>


Addressing for PHP: Postal address management powered by Google's dataset - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/commerceguys/addressing

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I can tell, this is the first library other than Google (Java/C++) to make use of this data.</comment>


Show HN: Moleculer – Fast and modern microservices framework for Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://moleculer.services <comment><USER2> Crazy fast lightweight microservices on NodeJS with convenient adapters. Love it!

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice tool, Thanks Moleculer team

</comment><comment><USER4> Easy, simple, fast, pluggable</comment>


Bitcoin.org's Gavin Andresen on Open Source and Escrow - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitcoinbulletin.com/2011/04/09/bowling-for-bitcoins-meet-the-trader-05/ <comment><USER2> BitCoin is damn interesting, it has the potential to dramatically change the world.

I hope it takes off. I think it will though, since the early adopters have a vested interest in growing the currency (there never will be more than 21 million BTC in circulation, so acquiring 1000BTC now will never be less than 1/21000 of the currency no matter how popular it becomes).

New exciting things are happening daily on the BitCoin front: <http://www.bitcoinnews.com/>

<comment><USER3> Where does BitCoin's value come from?

<comment><USER4> Value source is pretty much the same as all other currencies too: people use it to exchange goods.

It's actually a big game of trust, that you can use the bitcoin you get today to buy something tomorrow.

As the number of people engaging in trading bitcoins, the market regulates it's self by supply and demand basis ( here is a chart on the current exchange values <http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/> ).

The difference to most other current FIAT currencies is, that there is a maximum number of bitcoins that can be generated (20,999,999.9769 BTC), and it gets harder with time (exponential computation time needed to get them). This prevents runaway inflation.

To break it down to simple terms: it has value because people believe that it has value and use it to exchange goods and convert it to other currencies.

<comment><USER3> I still don't see why people would pay money for this virtual thing. It doesn't have any real value yet, everything is promised to come. It looks like some kind of scheme that promises future value in exchange for your cash today. Isn't this called a Ponzi scheme? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme>

If, on the other hand, governments backed this currency by guaranteeing some kind of flat conversion rate, I would be all for this system. As it is, I'm staying out.

<comment><USER2> BitCoin is not a money-making scheme, it's just an attempt at creating a new digital international currency. It is not marketed as a scheme and it doesn't promise any returns in the future.

However, the ironical thing about starting a new currency is that the value of it is determined by the trust people have in it. Since Bitcoin is new and unproven, the trust is quite low. Until it is trusted it won't have real value, but a lot of people won't trust it until it has real value. It's a chicken and egg problem.

By investing in Bitcoins you are investing in the belief that the currency will gain in popularity. It actually is no different from investing in a company at an early stage. By investing early before something is proven the risks are higher - but so are the potential rewards.

The people who invested 50K in Facebook early are rich now. Those who invest 50K in Facebook today won't see anything close to the return the early investors did, even with the same investment. A lot of people lost their investment by investing in some other social network instead of Facebook. This is just like any other high risk/high reward investment - you invest on your belief that something will succeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think we've had enough Bitcoin for a while.

<comment><USER6> Yes, it's enough to talk about probably the biggest invention in financial sector in last 20 years. Let's forget all about those calls for entrepreneurs to focus on something more world changing than iphone widgets.

If Bitcoin isn't just a definition of a word "hack", and the most ingenious hack i have ever seen in financial sector which is in serious need of disruption.

Lets better read and talk about Steve Jobs'es new book and the how new ipad is better than older and Ipad.

Why tumblr is the new wordpress...

<comment><USER7> > Yes, it's enough to talk about probably the biggest invention in financial > sector in last 20 years.

Off the top of my head, I would state that the following are _unquestionably_ larger financial innovations in the past 20 years: SPDRs, HOLDRs, ETFs, ETNs, dark pools, target-date funds, target risk funds, auction-rate securities, online b2b markets, online b2c markets, online banking, automated market- making, new insurance products, improvements in risk analysis (credit scoring), removal of information asymmetries, just... so much innovation

The bitcoin market is less than a blip on the radar screen. It's so small that if somebody were to sell 100,000BCN right now, they'd crash the price down to pennies. And if somebody were to buy 100,000USD of BCN right now, the exchange rate would skyrocket. It's a small, illiquid market of people who have, mostly for political reasons, decided that they will convert electricity into a private virtual currency.

I know that right now there are a lot of bitcoin miners, dreaming of how wealthy they'll be once their deflationary-by-design virtual currency takes over the world, but I can't envision any realistic scenario whereby that could happen. Heck, the political risk alone makes it untenable as a serious store of value as it would be trivial for a nation to outlaw it's use, thus destroying the utility.

If you don't want to store your wealth in government-issued currency, that's great. But I'd suggest converting wealth to productive assets (e.g. shares of companies, loans to companies, land and other hard assets) rather than a virtual currency that lacks both the inherent value of productive assets and the transactional ease of government-issued currency.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent points. I'll confirm your assumption about BTC's volatility: a single sell-off of ~10k last week took 25% of BTC's value with it. The limited purchasing power of the BTC economy has hindered economic development, but that is to be expected with any new currency.

However, Bitcoin as a medium of exchange is quite extraordinary and has recently caught the attention of Anonymous because of its "untraceable" (term used loosely) characteristics. There is the potential for Bitcoin to cater to a community outside of sovereign banks. In other words, there are interesting possibilities that exist beyond what goldbugs have in mind.

<comment><USER7> > but that is to be expected with any new currency.

I think the problem is somewhat unique to unbacked currencies. BTC has value solely because some people agree that BTC has value. It can go to zero (and stay there) for any reason.

The value has no minimum that can be defined by looking at the industrial value of a commodity (as with commodity monies). Nor is there a minimum that can be determined by comparing the money supply to the underlying productivity of a nation whose residents are required, by law, to use the money (as with fiat monies).

As an aside, if I wanted to setup competing currencies, I'd create a brokerage that allows the cheap, easy, instant transfer of ownership of fractional securities from one member to another. Then we'd have tens of thousands of competing currencies, all of which are backed by a combination of assets and productive capacity. Entrepreneurs could even setup companies designed solely to work as currencies.

I know that wouldn't appeal to those who care primarily about traceability, but frankly, I don't foresee any government allowing the widespread adoption of any mechanism that allows for untraceable transfers of large sums of money.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Slim - A Fast, Lightweight Template Engine for Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://slim-lang.com/ <comment><USER2> How can you call something logic-less and then immediately proceed to discuss conditionals? True/False is logic.

<http://slim-lang.com/logic-less.html>

I'm a big fan of logic-less templating systems, I've used logic-less templating systems, I've written a logic-less templating system and this is no logic-less templating system. It does a nice job of making the logic seem less obtrusive, but it is not without logic.

<comment><USER3> You can't completely remove logic from the view, but you can enforce LESS logic. In other words, you are not free to dump a lot of code into the view, there are restrictions.

This is term is used by Mustache as well. <http://mustache.github.com/>

<comment><USER2> No. You can completely remove logic from the view. I've used more than 1 templating system that does exactly that and have written one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really, really enjoy working w/ this template engine.

If you are using rails and are accustomed to using jade for templating, or the jade-style flavor of scalate, this is the template engine for you.

</comment><comment><USER5> slim shaddy?</comment>


E2EMail research project has left the nest - <AUTHOR> https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/e2email-research-project-has-left-nest_24.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> This appears to be a weak attempt to spin as positive the news that Google have abandoned the end-to-end project... mysteriously posted when everyone is busy processing the SHA1 and Cloudbleed news. From the post:

 _E2EMail is not a Google product, it's now a fully community-driven open source project, to which passionate security engineers from across the industry have already contributed._

Contrast that with their Github repo, which has seen no commits since August, as well as pull requests and issues that nobody has responded to.

I would dearly love to be proven wrong; if there has been ongoing work from "passionate security engineers" somewhere else and I'm just missing it, hopefully someone can post some details here?

(edit: Disclosure, I work on Mailpile, which is arguably a "competitor" to both e2e and GMail. But I did genuinely want to see this project succeed and improve e-mail security.)

<comment><USER3> There was a pull request merged a few minutes ago, by someone whose username suggests that they are also the first named author on the Google blog post.

<comment><USER2> If this is all that has happened since August, well, the commit speaks for itself:

[https://github.com/e2email- org/e2email/commit/434f99c66efe49...](https://github.com/e2email- org/e2email/commit/434f99c66efe491bee58e69aabf585d0598c9bf6)

Hopefully there's more to come! :-P

<comment><USER3> Possible that it was in internal limbo for a while, and that the decision to release it as a community project actually may bring it back to life, even among Google staff.

(Never worked in Google, but it may be easier for interested employees to contribute to external open-source projects than internal projects with no resource allocation.)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for injecting some optimism. :-) I'm disappointed and cynical about this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do fraternity men talk about women when there are no women around? - <AUTHOR> http://obsessionwithregression.blogspot.com/2016/01/how-do-fraternity-men-talk-about-women.html <comment><USER2> I dislike frats more than your average joe, but this blog post is not worth your time reading. The clickbait title was 110% irrelevant to the content, which consisted of nothing more than "I browsed the TFM website, counted some numbers on profiles, maybe talked to some women/men, and drew conclusions from the TFM comment section. The author claimed she had bias, and thoroughly showed it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do marketers choose to make their advertisements loud and obtrusive, even though consumers say they'd prefer for advertisements to be quiet and out of sight?

</comment><comment><USER4> FYI readers this is NSFW material here.</comment>


Money scales but emotions around money don't - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/04/money-scales-but-emotions-around-money-dont.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29 <comment><USER2> "An investment banker isn't twice as excited about a $20 million bonus as she is about a $10 million one."

Isn't it a little sexist to assume the banker is a "she"?

I agree with the debt part. At a certain point, you are in a situation where you feel like you will never be able to pay it back (1 million feels the same as 5 million).

But $1 million feels different to me than $5 million.</comment>


Characteristics of B2B unicorn ideas - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rikutter/characteristics-of-b2b-unicorn-ideas-4536fec9d1c7?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-83BRQOIxTNR7jvkw4aLeFbP5TDveaw3SUkunDEve4itkVUYCjzWLVa7CYJyYhahnRs6u6EDN0sXWd6ENBI1YTLXES8fA&_hsmi=17086702

<comment><AUTHOR> In case someone hopes to discover some secret magical sauce of success in the article, here comes the TL;DR version:

Essential characteristics: Potentially huge market,Novel product,Ability to create an advantage / difficult to compete against.

Additinally the author lists 10 non-essential characteristics of the analyzed gruop of companies:

1\. Market Dynamics: Attacking a new market (or overlooked market)

2\. Market Dynamics: Entering a highly competitive market

3\. Enabled by a trend/change

4\. Focusing on tech "invention"

5\. Obvious value proposition

6\. Clear path to market

7\. No strong buyer power

8\. No strong supplier power

9\. Unfair advantage

10\. Mixed business models (B2C2B, B2B2C)</comment>


Price of riding the Moscow subway? 30 squats - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57611574/price-of-riding-the-moscow-subway-30-squats/

<comment><USER2> Would this be considered a form of discrimination if a rider couldn't do 30 squats?</comment>


The world in which IPv6 was a good design - <AUTHOR> https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810 <comment><USER2> Double posted at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167686)</comment>


Netflix Wants to Make Neflix Global - <AUTHOR> http://www.overclock3d.net/articles/misc_hardware/netflix_wants_to_make_neflix_global/1

<comment><AUTHOR> Netflix plans to create Netflix global, removing geo-blocking and allowing all customers access to all content. "The key thing about piracy is that some fraction of it is because [users] couldn't get the content. That part we can fix"

</comment><comment><USER2> Good luck striking deals with every copyright collecting agency.</comment>


Welcome To The French Tech Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/29/welcome-to-the-french-tech-ecosystem/

<comment><USER2> There's however something very concerning for the future: direct foreign investments (IDE / Investissements Directs Etrangers) in France have fell from 2012 to 2013, by 77%!

77%. That's the number widely reported in various media since a few days. During the same period, overall direct foreign investment across the European Union went up (including in Germany). So the french case looks very real and concerning.

This doesn't bode well for future startups, which may strive to find fundings.

Also note that as an investor hoping to make a nice exit, the case of DailyMotion (mentioned in an article) where a french minister jumped in and forbid the sale to a foreign company, is not something reassuring.

An article who made the top page on HN a few days ago about 30 startups with a $1 bn valuation had... 3 startups in Europe! (and zero in France)

I know that now there's a defense against any criticism regarding France's stance: simply name-call people pointing out the various issues plaguing France by calling them "french bashers" doing "french bashing".

But I can't help but think that the people writing these "feel good" articles about France doing great may be putting their heads in the sand.

That number is particularly concerning in that one of the defense constantly invoked near the end of 2013 against "french bashing" was that direct foreign investments were still very high... But they were using the numbers from 2012.

I think it was expected: you can't constantly raise taxes, put an exit tax, prevent exits from happening, have a president which publicly said that he hates the rich, etc. and think that there's not going be any consequence.

I find it also sad that the various issues cannot be discussed anymore without having an army of journalists invoking "french bashing".

</comment><comment><USER3> > An ecosystem is a four-sided network — you need entrepreneurs, VC firms, > schools, and journalists

That sentence tells you all you need to know about the author and his perspective, I think.

</comment><comment><USER4> Many medium to large firms were missed. Much of the French Tech ecosystem is built around financial technology that makes use of the country's math strengths. (Examples: Sophis, Misys and Murex)

</comment><comment><USER5> In the past I had heard it was very difficult to start a company due to France's legal system. I guess this is better now?

<comment><USER6> It's still pretty bad. A lot of red tape, a steep initial cost and then ongoing taxes left and right which make America's social security look like a waiter tip. The amount of coverage that business owners need to provide for their employees is through the roof, and it hurts both employers and employees.

There's also the ridiculous mandatory three month notice if you want to leave your job which makes hopping from one job to the next close to impossible.

The unions have completely paralyzed the working market in France and they very often act in direct opposition of the workers they are supposed to defend, such as how they imposed the 35 hour work week (which nobody wanted, especially not workers, who'd rather work more and earn more money) and the quasi impossibility to open shop on Sundays despite protestations of everyone.

I don't know why this article thinks France might be the next start up nation because unsurprisingly, the author offers very little evidence to back up this claim.</comment></comment>


The history of "How to Lie with Smoking Statistics" (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.refsmmat.com/articles/smoking-statistics.html <comment><USER2> One of my favorite movie lines of all time is Aaron Eckhart's (who plays a lobbyist for the tobacco industry) line at the beginning of "Thank You For Smoking" where he introduces the doctor:

"This is the man they rely on—Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany; I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius—he could disprove gravity."

<comment><USER3> Is there an established link between nicotine and (lung) cancer? I wasn't aware of one. Of course there is an established link between tobacco use and lung cancer, but that's an entirely different thing.

Of the studies that I've seen, nicotine actually is quite healthy and has many upsides: increased working memory and recall, preventive against dementia and parkinson's, and a mild mood stabilizer/anti-psychotic.

<comment><USER4> Nicotine is extremely addictive. This is what we're learning with vaping.

And seriously, if you've ever smoked 2-3 packs of cigarettes and get weird desires to have a cigarette, you've experienced nicotine's addicting qualities. It's so subtle at first that most people just don't realize they're addicted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How to Lie with Statistics is such a great book. It's amazing how relevant it is seeing it's over 60 years old. The same lies that were being told then are being told today with statistics.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the suggestion! Just reserved at my library to read after skimming a few pages online.

Somewhat related, there's a great article in Mental Floss on the scientist who helped get rid of leaded fuel despite the industry's "scientific" pushback. Wonderful read. [http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson- scienti...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist- who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it)

<comment><USER6> Seconding the recommendation. One of the most impactful books you can read for yourself. It's such a short and easy read, too (few hours; you can finish it within a day even if you're slow).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." \- Upton Sinclair

</comment><comment><USER8> I was wondering as to why it was never published.

From the linked article:

"There are many possible explanations for the sudden demise of Huff's book. The industry realized in 1968 that it had a credibility problem: the public was unlikely to trust a book funded and promoted by the Tobacco Institute. Perhaps the campaign was shelved after Tiderock closed up shop. Perhaps it was too late—some tobacco regulations had already been passed, others were inevitable, and new tactics were needed. Or perhaps the thought of legal trouble made them retract their offer to advertise the book, making Macmillan kill the project. But Macmillan was on the brink of signing a contract with Huff. Did they have second thoughts, or was Huff told to kill the project? Or were the Tiderock consultants correct in their assessment that "this mass of verbiage needs drastic editing" and was unpublishable without serious revision? The Documents Library offers no clues. Only documents produced or received by the industry are included, so any correspondence between Huff and Macmillan may not appear. Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University, reviewed the ethics of Huff's involvement with the industry and suggested Huff could have intentionally killed the project to save his own reputation, which would have been destroyed by his association with tobacco.2 But just a few months before the book's demise he had been fighting for a prestigious hardcover and better royalties. Whatever the reasons, How to Lie with Smoking Statistics went unpublished, protecting its better-known sibling How to Lie with Statistics from guilt by association."

Would the original book have commanded the same respect, if associated with another which would bascially be an example of what the first was meaning to expose?

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh man ... how deeply disappointing.

<comment><USER10> It's really insidious, to publish a book that establishes you as an intelligent truth teller, standing up to what marketers and profiteers want you to believe, and then use that success to shill for the worst consumer facing industry of the century.

<comment><USER7> Everybody needs money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is another great article about statistics that was posted a few days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278839)

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what his book would look like if published today. Would he still find big problems with the smoking studies?

<comment><USER13> I doubt it. Finding problems in e.g. a small-sample, 22-month study is one thing, finding problems in studies that cover entire nations over several decades is quite another.

<comment><USER14> point to 1 such study on smoking, where they did actual measurements on an entire nation. i bet you they just sampled a subset and called it statistically sound. ;D

<comment><USER13> Can't. I heard that when I was a conscientous objector at the university hospital in Trondheim, Norway. One of the physicians there told me that they'd done statistics on all patients. Norway has a single-payer system, so that would really be all patients. But it's a while ago and I can't find email addresses for anyone whose name I still remember, so I can't.

<comment><USER14> all patients and 'nation' seems a bit overconfident of said doctor (even though i respect their work a lot!)... i guess his world IS the hospital patients but vice versa i think the world or a nation includes (a lot) more than its hospital patients.

<comment><USER13> So I looked, starting at fhi.no, and found quickly found several studies that use data based on either the Norwegian cancer registry, the cause-of-death registry or both.

These aren't samples. The cause of death registry includes all deaths and the cancer registry includes everyone who's been diagnosed with cancer, even people who received no treatment. This means that studies that investigate e.g. cancer caused by smoking and use these data sources are nationwide rather than sampled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's the copyright status of this work?

<comment><USER16> Of the article, or _How to Lie with Smoking Statistics_?

The article is sadly owned by the journal, which does allow authors to post pre-prints on their personal sites.

The book I'm not so sure about. I spent some time researching the copyright status back when I wrote the article, and the results were confusing. I don't think Huff ever registered copyright for _How to Lie with Smoking Statistics_ , which was required at the time, but unpublished works were protected, and when the copyright system changed in the 70s unpublished works were given some statutory protections. The book only became public because of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which I haven't read but presumably sets some conditions on the documents it makes public.

In the end I decided it was safest to link to the Tobacco Documents Library, though I was very tempted to typeset a new edition of the book so we could enjoy an example of corporate propaganda.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone got an invite to kite.com? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For those of us who have never heard of kite.com before: [https://kite.com/faq/](https://kite.com/faq/)

"What is Kite?

Kite is an artificial pair programmer. While you're coding, it shows you examples and documentation for the libraries and terminal commands you use. Kite even detects simple errors and offers to fix them for you."

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's interesting. If it works of course. As a beginner, I think this would be enlightening

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could also really use one pls.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds great. A demo video pls.</comment>


YC Startup Going into Beta: Reble.FM Music Sharing - <AUTHOR> http://www.reble.fm

<comment><USER2> I prototyped something like this recently and enjoyed it quite a bit, so I'm glad somebody else has tried to make it into a business. I, for one, am a bit skeptical for a few reasons.

1\. The barrier to entry is pretty high. In a world dominated by web apps, who wants to try a heavyweight Java app that might take a full 2 minutes to get set up? We live in a 30 second world these days.

2\. Home routers are messy. People who aren't tech savvy aren't going to want to mess around with opening ports. UPnP helps this, but I've found that it's unreliable on many popular, low quality routers. Users who download the app and then find that it doesn't work oftentimes will just give up instead of diving into the router.

Of course, maybe I'm underestimating how much the average consumer can get done these days. It'll be interesting to see what kind of coverage this gets, especially since I'm working on an app that approaches the problem more in the style of Anywhere.FM.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is cool, but I don't understand why I would use this over an uber-piracy service like waffles.fm. I'm provided with all of the flac rips I could ever want in a way that enables high-quality music discovery. I just don't think free music that exploits a peculiar hack of legality can ever win out over DRM free piracy. If someone finds something they like on reble.fm, they have to pirate it anyways to get it onto their iPod, except for the people that buy it through your iTunes affiliate link.

It's tough to compete with free by being less free.

If anyone wants a waffles invite, by the way, send me an email.

<comment><USER4> Depends on who your friends are. Some of my friends are DJ's, and they have a lot of music that you'd be extremely lucky to find via waffles, torrents, etc. I myself have music now that, if I lost it, I possibly would not be able to get back.

<comment><USER3> Waffles really has quite a collection. Much better than whatever you can find on a public tracker or p2p and it's all high quality and transcode free. It is not quite Oink yet, but it'll get there eventually.

I'm curious if there is anything in particular from your collection that is unlikely to be on waffles.

<comment><USER4> not a whole lot, but on the hip-hop side of things, I have some album advances with tracks that didn't make the final release, and a couple of albums that got shelved and never actually came out. Others would just be specific mashups / blends that DJ's might just do live on air; a lot of them record their sessions and trade tracks with each other, but they're not going to put it up on p2p.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So streaming a friends music collection to your PC is fine, but streaming it to an ipod isn't? I'm not sure the legalities of this hold water personally. Such muddiness when it comes to this sort of thing.

<comment><USER6> It'll be interesting to see how it plays out legally. I'm glad some people are prepared to push the laws even if I'm not sure I'd take that risk in my own startup. I guess the legal analogy they're going for here is that you are lending your friend the song, just like lending a physical CD. It sounds pretty reasonable but the law isn't really defined by what sounds reasonable.

I think with the restrictive nature of this service the RIAA et al might see it as being in line with their view on a music purchasors license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats guys. I've wanted something like this for a long time. It's a pity you can't play something simultaneously though. I suppose intimate listening sessions will have to stay in real space.

PS: I never thought I'd say this, but I love the license agreement. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks =)

Yup, RL does have a purpose still.

If anyone wants someone to share with, guessing my username would probably work.

<comment><USER8> Congrats, Nick! Way to go. Catch you on the other side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would have thought this was a fantastic idea....before Anywhere.FM . Of course my opinion counts for little since I did not download the software, and have not actually seen it work

<comment><USER10> You can't find a particular song from your friend's collection via Anywhere.fm. You can only listen to their playlists and skip at most 3 times.

<comment><USER9> I've been ab;e to skip much more than 3 times...by refreshing my browser

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nick--assuming that the users of Rebel.FM are liable for direct infringement (which seems likely), the way in which the software is marketed may affect Rebel.FM's liability. (see MGM v. Grokster: <http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-480.ZS.html>). [This is not legal advice--just pondering.]

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, looks really cool. I haven't tried it yet because I'm on a Mac... And I don't think I could convince any of my friends to try it either. It's hard enough to get them to share their music in iTunes and not to mention having to install Java.

Just out of interest: Did the FAQ come across as arrogant to anyone else?

<comment><USER13> _> Did the FAQ come across as arrogant to anyone else?_

Yes. It doesn't inspire a lot of trust in its current form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats Nick. Glad to see it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sounds cool! Congrats on shipping!

Anxiously waiting for Mac version :)

</comment><comment><USER4> any plans for eventual Mac / *nix support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Working on the Mac version. Linux version should be out about the same time. The plan is to work most of the kinks out on the windows version and then get it running on Mac/Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> congrats nick!

</comment><comment><USER17> It's an interesting idea, for sure, but depending on just how you bought your music, you (the user) could get screwed.

Take for instance, buying mp3s from Amazon, and using Reble.FM. That's a violation of your agreement with Amazon. And other things may have similar restrictions.

Of course, with illegally downloaded content, you have no worries about how you can legally use it.

<comment><USER18> Who cares about EULAs?

<comment><USER17> Well, people were discussing the legality of such a service, so..

<comment><USER18> EULAs are generally not legally binding. So no.

<comment><USER17> I'm more referring to the Terms of Service of something like AmazonMP3, which specifically and categorically says that you cannot do exactly what this site does.

<comment><USER18> Learn the definition of "illegal".

<comment><USER19> A EULA, if written properly, is legally binding but violating it is not illegal in the criminal sense; it's a tort issue. If we were talking about violating the DMCA, however, it _would_ be illegal.

<comment><USER18> Legal advice on the internet...

morons.

<comment><USER19> I figured it went without saying that a comment on a forum should not be construed as legal advice and that one should seek the professional advice of a licensed attorney for that purpose. I'll say it now for completeness.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>