My friend jailed overnight, wrists bruised, put in the cold for 1 gram of pot - <AUTHOR> Tonight I was eating at Hardee's when a friend of mine walked in.  He could have been a homeless person by his look:  gaunt, breaking out, clothes 2 sizes too small.  He told me he had been in jail overnight (it was now evening, so all day too)
Since it was his second possession, in Wisconsin, a single gram of pot is a felony.  His wrists were bruised from handcuffs, he had obviously been treated pretty poorly  by the officers, and all day, he had been assured that he could collect his belonging at the Oshkosh police station. ( he was at a jail about 5 miles out of town and the police station is downtown )
So, he waited for 45 minutes in 18 degree weather, in the clothes they had given him, a weird turtle neck and a spring jacket, both were too small.  No socks either.  I mean, it was cold!
(continued in first comment [text too long] ) <comment><AUTHOR> (continued)

The jail bus took him to the police station, where they acted like he was an idiot for asking for his stuff, and told him to come back during business hours. So he went back into the cold, to the nearest place with heat, Hardee's ( they're like McDonald's ).

There I was by the grace of God, and he was happy to see me, to use my phone, and figure out logistics of how to get home ( he lives a town over ). I let him use the phone, call a few people. Offered him a burger, bought him a sprite.

I'm car-less, but I said we could walk over and borrow my mom's car. The cops left him with no phone, no keys, no laptop, no clothes (that fit), and he was also concerned because he had a bunch of magic cards with him ( geek cred anyone? ) who knows if the cops kept em nice.

This guy is not a criminal. I think he does freelance programming. He's kind of a delicate flower in some ways. Not the most delicate person I know, but he works with computers. He doesn't brave the untamed wilderness with no supplies including no winter gear.

I do Wim Hof method, jump in ice lakes, and all that crazy stuff, and I had on a hat and gloves tonight, because it was so cold. He does none of that, and had a too-small spring jacket and no hat nor gloves, was mis-informed about collecting his belongings, and was set loose with nothing else, all for a single gram of pot, which is legal in a growing number of states.

I dunno what else to say. What should I do? Pretty sure he wants to fight this with a lawyer. I want to get the laws changed. Can anyone help?

</comment><comment><USER3> Welcome to the Gulag. Seriously, the police didn't do anything legally wrong here--assuming the arrest was based on probable cause. They followed procedure. Your friend has no compensable injuries. But by all means, get involved and try to change the U.S.'s draconian drug laws. Start with Wisconsin.

<comment><USER4> I'm not offended, but I really do dislike it when people compare something like US police force enforcing crappy drug laws to the Gulag. It just undermines the suffering and horrors of those who actually experienced the Gulag.

I know we're all quite libertarian when it comes to drug law here, but a lot of people are still unsure about legalisation. In my country I can only go 70MPH on the motorway. I find that stupid, but I'm not going to break the law and then complain when I get pulled over for "only" doing 20MPH over the limit.

<comment><USER5> Is getting a $200 ticket for potentially endangering others really comparable to being physically abused and put in jail for doing something that harms no one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Move to another state. You can't do anything about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We just got a new governor, so potentially laws could change.

<comment><USER7> You need voter action not a leader change. --WA citizen

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He was released OR, in less than a day, without a hearing, on a _felony_ charge?

<comment><AUTHOR> They held him overnight.. it's a class I felony. When I saw him it was evening. So, yea? I dunno, is that odd? He said last night around midnight he was picked up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Back in 2011, I had a mental breakdown and ended up streaking down the block where I was living. Police apprehended me and threw me in the local jail cell. I was denied telephone calls which made me even more paranoid. A scuffle broke out where I was punched in the head, eliminating my memory of the incident - footage later showed that it was 10 officers beating me after something happened around a corner - conveniently, the police claimed to not have footage of any other angle.

After this scuffle they charged me with 6 or 7 counts of felony assault on officers and transferred me to Twin Towers correctional facility, left me naked in a solitary confinement cell for 3 days while constantly hitting me with a microwave beam from across the hall through the cell door window. The cell was so small I couldn't hide from it.

This is the device I believe they used on me: [https://youtu.be/CwYvhY-g10A](https://youtu.be/CwYvhY-g10A)

On day 3, my whole body was tingling and all my hairs had become burned and embedded ingrown beneath the skin causing sepsis, blood infection. I knew I was dying.

I was also losing sanity since I had been in this cell for 3 days straight without anyone on the other side letting me out for even a shower. So I clawed myself and spread blood on the cell window and EMTs finally got me out of there.

At the annexed medical facility I was put on antivirals and antibiotics intravenously to save my leg and fix the sepsis.

Had a lawsuit but my lawyer was a flake and bailed on me once Raytheon denied having the equipment at Twin Towers.

Hospital images: [http://imgur.com/a/qzrEICg](http://imgur.com/a/qzrEICg)

Here is an album of the damage months later (EXPLICIT): [http://imgur.com/a/uHYr5](http://imgur.com/a/uHYr5)

Images are a bit disorganized as I didn't plan on sharing my experience.

I am a shell of a person I used to be. I haven't worked in 2 years since resigning after a year at Amazon due to a shit boss. I been keeping most of what happened to myself because I ended up dropping the civil suit, and the PTSD combined with the long winded details of the case make it painful to recall and retell. I feel like every aspect of America let me down - <USER2> lawyer tell me that "I wasn't allowed to make a phone call" is not meaningful, despite the placard being nailed to the cell door, just infuriates me. Was told there is no way to prove things like this so it doesn't mean anything.

Tortured and stuck in a cell for 3 days smelling my own shit because the toilet didnt work. Then being told I don't have a case. My family not caring enough about me or the potential $$ to even help me.

I am so cynical in systems now. I sure fell through the cracks :-/

Not to knock on your friend, I read a lot about some technicality based cases that win some nice money.

I just dont understand how I wad almost assasinated and have proof of going into this jail ok, and 3 days later being burned from head to toe, and it doesn't mean anything.

Fml. At least Mathematics and Software/Reversing/Hacking will always behave according to rules that don't destroy one's faith in the laws...

</comment><comment><USER10> Why were his clothes 2 sizes too small?

<comment><AUTHOR> They didn't have his stuff.. they just gave him random clothes on the way out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> He already got arrested prior to this, and continued to engage in the activity?

<comment><USER12> smoking weed?

<comment><USER11> Dunno, the OP just says possession. Why do you ask?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm trying to find the problem here. He was transporting a Schedule 1 drug, which is a felony in states that still respect the rule of law. He was arrested, taken to the police station, and then released on his own recognizance after an overnight stay.

Where's the issue?</comment>


PoC Exploit for Nginx packaging on Debian-based distros [video] - <AUTHOR> https://legalhackers.com/videos/Nginx-Exploit-Deb-Root-PrivEsc-CVE-2016-1247.html <comment><USER2> This was fixed in Ubuntu in October: [https://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3114-1/](https://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3114-1/)

</comment><comment><USER3> well I guess for a webserver gaining any privileges is already bad. of course privilege escalation is bad, especially on client machine's, but on servers? well if you are an attacker from the outside and already have a shell your security is done anyway.

of course as said that won't apply to shared hosting (with shell) and client machines.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just looked at my current Debian Jessie system and it is not as described. That is /var/log/nginx is not owned by www-data, it is owned by root. It was freshly installed not to long ago and was only configured with my ansible setup. So I'm pretty sure that was the default.

<comment><USER4> I think I know why... it was fixed a few weeks ago.

[https://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3701](https://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3701)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An LSM such as SELinux, Tomoyo or AppArmor could mitigate this.

<comment><USER4> I was just researching these a little while ago and hadn't heard of Tomoyo. Turns out it is included in the mainline kernel and is pretty simple to use.

[http://tomoyo.osdn.jp/](http://tomoyo.osdn.jp/)

On debian you just need to enable it via a kernel param and install tomoyo- tools to get going.

<comment><USER5> I like Tomoyo better than any of the others. I find it the easiest to configure and reason about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well um, this is disturbing. Fun times!</comment>


Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects? - <AUTHOR> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/puar.12956 <comment> a-fried-egg "white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers"</comment>


Foundations of a good UI - <AUTHOR> http://www.codelitt.com/blog/the-foundations-of-a-good-ui/

<comment><USER2> Well, this is a list of nothing but truisms. Take each of the "foundations" and do a simple test: state the opposite and check if it makes any sense; if it doesn't make sense at all, then it probably means they aren't really saying anything worthy.

The said "foundations", stripped down of verbosity, are:

* Consistency;

* Convention;

* Ask for minimum input;

* Load and react fast;

* Use animation to communicate changes;

* Avoid clutter;

* Avoid content which screams "fake".

Now, would anyone advocate for the opposite of consistency, convention, minimizing user work or being fast/giving feedback? This is pretty much the same as saying that the foundation of flying a plane is to not crash said plane. True, but not very helpful.

<comment><USER3> Quite to the contrary, I thought the article contained a great list. I see these mistakes all the damn time, and for that reason, it's clear that there's not a universal understanding of how to get them right.

This high-level "here's a few tips" view of the common ways to improve the low hanging fruit (sorry) turns out to be really useful.

<comment><USER4> > This high-level "here's a few tips" view [...] turns out to be really > useful.

Do you really think spelling out "consistency makes your UI easier to comprehend" is gonna stop people from designing inconsistent UIs? I'd argue it's much more useful to give low-level examples of what makes a UI look/feel/behave consistent.

<comment><USER3> Perfection is not a requirement. It's a nice article.

I refuse to be critical of something just because it's not the epitome of function that solves all the problems in UX design education.

<comment><USER2> My point is not perfection, it's usefulness. Telling a pilot not to crash a plane wouldn't result in a "nice" or useful article.

<comment><USER3> Well, you and I can disagree on the usefulness of this article then. By that analogy, I see quite a few concrete and "useful" details on how not to crash the plane, here.

It's just a nice summary of some common errors, with suggestions on how to avoid them. It's not the end-all utility to stop them from happening, but it's a good high level view.

<comment><USER2> Without even a single reference to "get to know your users"? Sorry, but no. It's not a nice summary; it's actually what I wouldn't give to students or someone wanting to get a grasp on UX.

This kind of "guidelines-based" approach is detrimental to UX, as it enforces the idea of focusing on details instead of considering UX as a whole.

<comment><USER5> You seem to be conflating UX and UI. The article is no more than the title promises; principles of a good UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be careful with recommending animations. Getting animations right is extremely difficult. And it's dangerous: if you get an animation just slightly wrong, the experience will be worse than a sudden change.

Our brains are pretty good at coping with sudden changes.

What's more important than animating changes, is to make sure the user expects the change. For example, if extra form fields appear after the user clicks a button labelled 'show advanced settings', nobody will be surprised. However, if form fields appear and disappear automatically as you are typing, you'll startle the user wheter you use animation or not.

My recommendation would be: keep UI as static as possible, make changes predictable. If you really want to use animations, put a lot of effort into testing them to make sure they are beneficial. Hastily added animations can do a lot of harm.

<comment><USER7> I think animations are the one of the worst things to happen to modern webui. They are almost always misused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure I agree about stock photos. Not all stock photos are headset hotties and bespoke photography is expensive. Even large organisations use stock photos, so I think it makes sense for a small company, especially if it isn't a core competency.

<comment><USER9> The blog post uses a stock photo! From Unsplash!

<comment><USER5> You're right, good catch! The reason is we don't consider Unsplash to be a conventional stock photo repo, since the style and quality of photography digresses so much from the usual stock photo sites. We probably should have pointed out what we meant by stock photo- the article is targetting sites such as Shutterstock, iStock, Dreamstime, and the like. We love Unsplash, it has a very personal twist on similar subjects, making the photos available there that much more relatable and honest.

<comment><USER8> A lot of the stuff on iStock is good. Here's a window one:

[http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/white-window-frame-and- wint...](http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/white-window-frame-and-wintery- view-22031923?st=bc9de18)

Not sure I see the difference between that and Unsplash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And the foundation of a good write up on the "Foundations of a good UI" should always include screen shots of good and bad examples per point.

Wrong type of windows, those.

</comment><comment><USER11> _For example: the color red is associated with danger and prohibition as established by social convention. Talking about the environment in red colors will confuse users and distract from the message trying to be communicated_

How much weight does this really carry if your product is good ? My guess, negligible. Websites just pick a theme color and go with it e.g. Facebook/twitter : blue, Youtube/Google+/Pinterest : red, etc.

<comment><USER5> If your product is strong enough that people can link colors, shapes and typography directly to your brand, I think you need a pat on the back! For the rest of us, it's good practice to be careful with established cannon when dealing with potential ambiguities. It's known that certain color schemes respond to certain conventions, so as long as your brand doesn't go against them you can use whichever color you want and still be able to communicate your message. The products you mention don't go against any particular convention, so they can establish their brands within those color schemes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What do you think about consistency between a mobile app and a website? Logos and other such assets aside, is it valuable to keep the colour scheme the same, and keep UI elements such as buttons the same?

<comment><USER5> Hi! I'm Vicky from the Codelitt team and author of the blog post, thanks for your question! Consistency is a very important factor when trying to communicate your brand values and setting a clear message for your product, and color schemes shouldn't be treated differently. Brands have core color palettes that help communicate and keeping those consistent throughout platforms will only strengthen the relationship between the user and the product. However, keeping everything in the UI the same is a bit tricky: there are limitations to how much desktop and mobile platforms should share in terms of UI, as each of them have a set of rules individual to them. While working within those rules, you should try to keep as many constants as you can. For example, if you've decided to make any major CTA red with a white font, you should keep that constant for every platform you develop. Consistency in such elements will help ease of use when your users jump from one platform to the next (think of picking up where you left off when switching from desktop to your phone). Menus and navigability, on the other hand, might differ from one platform to the next.</comment></comment>


The Redshift Hate Logs - <AUTHOR> https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=a362fd3bffdc7eecde1838916fb8f4c267f5672b3774bd86dd23dce9dac72bee <comment><USER2> I just ran into the correlated sub query problem this week. Wasted a ton of work getting things working in Django just to have all of it die when it hit our alpha environment. Aggravating at best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Your personal site ([https://mdub.dev/](https://mdub.dev/)) is gorgeous, by the way! But there's a small bug: When I try to click the first post (Github OAuth 2 in Go) nothing happens. All the others work.

Edit: Actually, I noticed another bug too. When I go to the sidebar, only part of the little circle icon above your name shows up. If I zoom out I can see it. Interestingly, zooming out also makes that first link work! So maybe you tested everything on a bigger screen than I'm using? (I'm on a MacBook)</comment></comment>


Bayesian model makes final Eurovision predictions - <AUTHOR> http://mewo2.com/nerdery/2014/05/09/eurovision-2014-final-predictions/

<comment><USER2> Sad that this hasn't been as popular this year! Good work though, looks like I've made my annual loss on betting.</comment>


Clang Address Sanitizer - <AUTHOR> https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2015-07-03-address-sanitizer.html

<comment><USER2> AddressSanitizer is great. It's been around for a long time now though, the only thing that's new is that it now has Xcode integration. (And Apple marketing apparently thought that the name was better with a space in the middle, like they think that "LLVM Compiler" is a better name than clang.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome to see this integrated with Xcode! What's the status of the memory sanitizer?

</comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly enough, the x86 processor has a BOUND instruction, which was supposed to be used for array bounds checking and would throw interrupt 5 on error.

It has never really caught on.

<comment><USER5> AMD removed BOUND as part of the 64-bit transition. Intel is adding a similar feature to Skylake (Aug 2015) called "Intel Memory Protection Extensions" (MPX).

The Address Sanitizer team has an analysis of it: [https://code.google.com/p/address- sanitizer/wiki/IntelMemory...](https://code.google.com/p/address- sanitizer/wiki/IntelMemoryProtectionExtensions)

> A _very biased_ conclusion: Intel MPX might be useful for in-struct buffer > overflow detection, and for general buffer overflow detection in programs > with lots of arrays and few pointers. However AddressSanitizer (and, if > implemented, AddressSanitizerInHardware) is more useful: faster, finds more > bugs, easier to deploy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just awesome.</comment>


Illinois Drives People Away - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/illinois-drives-people-away-1513125224 <comment><USER2> Paywalled, but similar gist to things written about it in the past.

>The Prairie State lost a record $4.75 billion in adjusted gross income to other states in the 2015 tax year, according to recently IRS data released. That's up from $3.4 billion in the prior year. Many of the migrants were retirees who often flock to balmier climes. But millennials accounted for more than a third of the net outflow in tax returns.

What is happening? Due to the state being broke, it turns out that this does not make it that attractive for most people to want to live their for 1) fear of rising taxes and 2) economic opportunities

>This helps explain why Illinois's economy has been stagnant, growing a meager 0.9% on an inflation-adjusted annual basis since 2012—the slowest in the Great Lakes and half as fast as the U.S. overall. This year nearly 100,000 individuals have left the Illinois labor force. The University of Illinois Flash Economic Index, which measures corporate earnings and investment as well as personal income, hit a five-year low in October.</comment>


Ask HN: IT pipeline for producing a high-budget film without any shooting? - <AUTHOR> Hello, High-budget cinema is the least reproducible art these days because masses have little money, no crew, no actors and no tools. Is there a virtual pipeline out there aka a collection of software packages aimed at producing a high-budget, mainstream (no-cartoonish a la Disney) film without any shooting or writing? Can you try and win and Oscar prize for best film entirely from your basement in 2018? Thanks! <comment><USER2> You can make high quality 3d animated movies in your basement but if you're alone and have no assets at all it will take a very long time.

Free software we've used to make short films include: Blender (3d modeling), DaVinci Resolve (editing), DaVinci Fusion (effects), Google Docs (writing), Audacity (audio effects / cleanup), Gimp (still editing)

There are people that create short films in 48 hours on their own, with smartphone cameras and can achieve pretty good results. If you're interested in that you can look at [http://48hourfilm.com/](http://48hourfilm.com/)</comment>


Let's Build a Web Server, Part 1 (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbaws-part1/ <comment><USER2> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9318977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9318977). Also related:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9360421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9360421)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994044)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Code for the article has been updated to run under Python3.7+

<comment><USER3> Love your articles, this and Let's build a simple interpreter have really advanced my understanding

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great. Thanks for reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of the Web Framework From Scratch [0] series from Destroy All Software. A great series of videos worth the subscription!

[0] [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/routi...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/routing- simple-requests)

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice code.

I wonder how easy it would be to roll your own web server that uses HTTPS?

The real challenge would be to do it without any extra libraries(just sockets).

Maybe some cryptographic library would have to be allowed.</comment>


The flaw of anonymous apps. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/building-a-startup/1c7b25023a3c

<comment><USER2> The flaw of 9 pages of blank content area on Safari. Edit: ...and the full content is back. The first couple times I tried all I got was the header with its GG bridge image and the footer with its Statue of Liberty image.</comment>


Shopify is processing over $260k per minute right now - <AUTHOR> https://incoming.shopify.com/ <comment><USER2> As someone who has dedicated the last few years of his life building a dev / design shop around Shopify, seeing these kind of numbers makes me very happy.

Looks like we placed our bet on the right horse.

imho xal / Tobi should get far more recognition for what he built. Shopify is really quite remarkable and in a league of its own.

Curious if they'll ever beat Amazon / Alibaba volume.

<comment><USER3> Amazon sold 426 items per second Christmas 2013. Their average order value in 2012 was around $47. Assuming the average value to be the same, it works out to around $1.2m per minute.

<comment><USER4> If the average order value is $47, for the average item value to also be $47 it would imply the average order size is one item. That seems highly unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> They're up to $274k/minute. That's $16.5 million/hour. I wonder how Cyber Monday will do compared to Black Friday.

<comment><USER5> Cyber Monday is a myth. The highest shopping day online is about 2 weeks before Christmas, usually corresponding to ensuring shipping arrives before Christmas.

<comment><USER6> I work in retail e-commerce in the UK.

Sorry, but you're just outright wrong.

Cyber Monday has set sales records every year for 3-4 years in a row.

Why? It's often been on, or very near, the last payday before Christmas for people on monthly salaries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to piss on anyone's parade, but for comparison, Alibaba (Tmall and Taobao, via their own Alipay platform) did about 50bn RMB of sales in the first 2.5hrs of this years 11.11 sales festival.

That's roughly US$50m a minute. In the first hour of the promotion they did about 2/3rds of that volume, which is insane.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I saw the live stream, the first question I asked myself was: I wonder if they're filtering pornographic products and sex toys from that feed?

The answer is no.

</comment><comment><USER9> Somebody in ops is shitting bricks right now. Heart goes out to you brother/sister.

<comment><USER10> This is the production engineering pod right now: [https://twitter.com/tobi/status/802160212249604096](https://twitter.com/tobi/status/802160212249604096)

<comment><USER11> 0_o Why so many employees? In the context of the volume you do I don't see how you'd turn a profit with that many employees unless you get the tax credits other francophone software groups like Logivision get and more.

<comment><USER12> For context, shopify has pretty high monthly fees as well as taking a cut of sales. Last I saw they had over 200,000 shops, minimum $30/month (up to $300) means at LEAST $6 mil/month from monthly fees, plus some percentage of the 3.8 billion/quarter gross sales they process... whatever they get to keep after paying strip and the credit card companies. Even a half a percent means $19 million per quarter.

So if you are a startup, growing fast, and bringing in well over $12mil/month... a lot of employees makes sense.

<comment><USER10> > Total revenue in the third quarter was $99.6 million

[https://press.shopify.com/releases/shopify-announces- third-q...](https://press.shopify.com/releases/shopify-announces-third- quarter-2016-financial-results)

<comment><USER13> Wow. Internet startups FTW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Neat D3 based globe component, don't suppose the source is anywhere?

<comment><USER15> I'd like to know as well. Cool ASCII art in the Console.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find this page very misleading, only the top-right counters are correct. The products are just randomly choosen from random shops as seen by the function name in the code: `fetchAndDisplayRandomProducts`.

EDIT: I was wrong, see response in the comments

<comment><USER17> Hey! The products actually are recently sold by merchants who opted in to be featured! We populate the first 5 and then new ones come down through the websocket connection

<comment><USER18> I'm a Shopify store owner, how do I opt-in to be featured?

<comment><USER17> If you log in to Shopify you'll notice a card on your admin home that says "Reach a wider audience during Black Friday and Cyber Monday". That card will give you more information and allow you to opt in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Woa! I wonder what this chart would look like for Amazon

<comment><USER10> higher, but not much much higher. A lot of small things combine into something quite big!

<comment><USER20> Amazon sales in 2015 were $107.01bn, so let's say they sell 1bn on Black Friday. This would be around 300 times the numbers shown.

<comment><USER21> I don't understand how you're calculating this. I think you missed a couple of zeroes?

If you take that $260k/minute number and assume it's true for the whole day (clearly it won't be overnight, but bear with me), that's (260,000 * 60 * 24 =) $374M. A third of a billion, a far cry from 1/300.

<comment><USER20> You are making your calculations based on the peak minute of the day, I'm checking now and it's around half that and it's middle of the day in the US. I imagine during the night is several times less than 260k.

<comment><USER21> Of course, but not 100x less. Amazon's number is definitely substantially higher, don't get me wrong, but 300x is just not right.

<comment><USER20> I underestimated Amazon sales on my initial comment, it's around 3bn: [http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/black-friday-online- sales/](http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/black-friday-online-sales/)

The numbers are big but far from giants like Amazon and Alibaba: [http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/11/singles-day-news-alibaba- pois...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/11/singles-day-news-alibaba-poised-to- smash-records-at-worlds-largest-online-shopping-event.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this actual realtime data or estimations updated once in a while and incremented on the client?

Either way, looks neat (and some crazy numbers)

<comment><USER17> Actually real time streaming over a web socket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> shopify is still written in rails? :)

<comment><USER24> Absolutely!

<comment><USER23> this is really nice. For all the news that you hear about ruby and rails, that is slow, that is bad, that everyone leave the language. I found it really nice. I do follow and see all the video conf regarding ruby, and I do hope that next year, jruby will be 3 times faster, and jruby+truffle will be able to run normal ruby gems. As for ruby 3, to be 3 times faster, for that we wait and hope

<comment><USER25> I'm sorry to be this guy, but what a simple checkout store that Shopify is (nothing wrong with that) has to do with ability to scale and add more servers?

Whether this was written in PHP, .NET or Ruby.

<comment><USER26> What an arrogant comment, "simple checkout store", yes if they where doing it for one customer perhaps but they are handling inventory, sales, displaying products, theming, delivery, invoicing and payment processing for thousands of clients and millions of customers...

"simple checkout store" \- brilliant.

<comment> le-mark Ha! Shard on shopId. ECommerce can be hard, but there's nothing special about what you descibe!

<comment><USER24> I'm going to attempt to bring this back to a positive and constructive conversation.

From the sounds of it we are all devs here. And, as experienced devs, we all know that saying "you just have to ..." will be your famous last words.

Adding more servers, as many of you will know, only works up to a point. From there you have to further build out databases, redis, memcache, load balancers, etc. As much as we like to fantasize about a "go faster" button which just adds more compute, often the amount of memory or CPU you have isn't the bottleneck.

When it comes to sharding, you're not wrong. Sharding off of a primary key is something that is easy to grasp. Hell, it's not overly special (especially these days). However, that doesn't mean it's easy.

If you think building a commerce platform is easy, I'd encourage you to apply. Maybe you have the type of skills we are looking for?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Amazing. They need some outreach in Africa and South America.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does this include POS sales?

<comment><USER11> No clue, hopefully xal will comment on this seeing as he works for them.

<comment><USER29> He's Tobi Lutke, founder/CEO/Coder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Rails doesnt scale" mimimi

</comment><comment><USER31> Are they using actioncable for this?

<comment><USER17> No, ActionCable for this one, it's a Go service that's handling the websockets.

<comment><USER31> Do you know any reference on how to implement something like this with Rails (go + rails)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Did you guys talk to your legal department before going live with this? As Shopify is a public company, showing sales/revenue stats like this in real time might be in violation of SEC regulation FD if you did not alert all your investors.

EDIT: Actually, since they are a Canadian company they are exempt [0] from regulation FD. Interesting!

[0] - [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1594805/000119312515...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1594805/000119312515129273/d863202df1.htm)

<comment><USER33> So it turns out the SEC lets you use even things like Twitter to give out information, as long as it can go to every shareholder at the same time [I AM NOT YOUR LAWYER, IGNORE ME].

see: [https://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/13...](https://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/1365171513574)

<comment><USER32> You still have to formally tell your investors that you will be using Twitter (or some other internet platform) to disseminate said information.

This Shopify data could definitely be used to gain an edge in trading their stock. You basically compute projected earnings based on the sales per-second rate reported on the site and compare against their earnings guidance from the previous quarter (or analyst predictions). If the projected earnings go below the projection, you sell, otherwise you buy.

<comment><USER34> This is on their website. Therefore it's already an accepted source of information for stock related material. Since it is public and went out to everyone at the same time, it should be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> see, you can still scale and make money with Rails in 2016, even if it's not cool anymore :)

<comment><USER36> for context, sorry if ignorant question but what else do they write with when full scale, I thought twittter was written on rails as well

<comment><USER35> I think it's fair to say that there are high scale websites built using any stack, mostly using more than one technology.

I was just being ironic in my previous comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> UX orgasm, very powerful with very few elements

</comment><comment><USER38> Hate to rain on this (TBH I don't):

Shopify has raised (per Crunchbase) about $122M in funding.

At the current rate, they will see $374M in GMV on their best day of the year.

Shopify has between 1K and 5K employees (again Crunchbase). Let's make the most conservative analysis and assume 1K. If they are paid $20 per hour (low estimate I think), that is $41M in employment costs per year. With taxes, office rent, healthcare, etc, lets just lowball again and call it $50M/yr for all the people costs. Again I think this is a huge underestimate if the crunchbase number is accurate.

Lets assume no marketing, hosting or other costs of any kind.

The internet claims 100k stores use shopify. Lets assume they all pay for the standard tier plan, and pay month to month. That is $79 * 100k = 7.9M per month in revenue. Again, huge over estimate, since I would guess 95% of the customers use the cheapest tier, and the largest companies most likely negotiate better than advertised fees.

Finally lets assume their BEST day is only about twice as good as their average day. This is probably overestimating their revenue by about 10x, at least.

That would mean they are bringing in well under $47.4M in gross revenue, on over $50M in fixed costs.

So in other words, even if black friday were half the days in the year, they still would lose substantial money. This is after 12 years of business.

It's unlikely they will ever turn a profit. If they were going to experience some kind of exponential growth to defeat this analysis, 12 years of the fastest growth in the internet have already gone by, so it seems unlikely going forward.

<comment><USER39> Shopify is a public company. You don't need to speculate on their revenue or expenses, you can just look it up. They earned $99.6 million in Q3. They expect revenues in the range of $379 million to $381 million for 2016. And they are still losing money, although getting close to break even. Their market cap is 3.86B, so 10 times revenue, so the market is expecting them to continue to grow rapidly.

[https://investors.shopify.com/events/Events- Presentations/de...](https://investors.shopify.com/events/Events- Presentations/default.aspx#section_news)

<comment><USER38> Hey, you're right!

[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASHOP&fstype=ii&ei=IE...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASHOP&fstype=ii&ei=IEI5WOmYJMb9sAHUo7SQBA)

Revenue growth with corresponding increases in costs and expenses. NOT getting closer to profitability, in fact operating losses are increasing in proportion to revenue (almost a linear relationship in every quarter and year in the reports).

Again, this is a failing business. 12 years in and no profit, profit not within reach, costs growing in lockstep with revenues.

EDIT:

So I was curious how they had such high revenues when clearly subscription fees can't account for it. Found this in the financial statement:

"We principally generate merchant solutions revenues from payment processing fees from Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments is a fully integrated payment processing service that allows our merchants to accept and process payment cards online and offline. As a result of the launch of Shopify Payments in August 2013, we have seen significant growth in the revenues generated from our merchant solutions. In addition to payment processing fees from Shopify Payments, we also generate merchant solutions revenue from transaction fees, Shopify Shipping, Shopify Capital, referral fees from partners, and sales of point-of-sale ("POS") hardware. Our merchant solutions revenues are directionally correlated with the level of GMV that our merchants process through our platform. Merchant solutions revenues increased from $34.5 million in the six months ended June 30, 2015 , to $77.0 million in the six months ended June 30, 2016 , representing an increase of 123.4%"

So they are counting CC processing fees towards revenues. I suspect that CC payment processing fees shopify pays are approximately equal to what they are charging, so this is just a revenue game where they charge 3% to customers, pay almost 3% to the CC companies, and book revenue that can never be profitable.

EDIT2: So found the cashflow in the statement. They charged $76M for these fees, and paid out $56M. Not bad actually! However, that $20M in net is still much lower than the costs to generate the business, $56M just in marketing.

<comment><USER40> > So they are counting CC processing fees towards revenues. I suspect that CC > payment processing fees shopify pays are approximately equal to what they > are charging, so this is just a revenue game where they charge 3% to > customers, pay almost 3% to the CC companies, and book revenue that can > never be profitable.

You don't understand the meaning of the word revenue.

<comment><USER38> Maybe, I think I know what it means but I'm not an accountant.

I know that revenue is often quoted as some kind of measure of the success of a business, when in reality it's extremely easy to run up revenues if you are running at a loss. In the most trivial case, you can pay $1.10 for $1 bills, for example.

Ok, so shopify isn't doing that, but it's hardly different, just a more complex situation. They pay $50 for advertising to get $75 in revenue, which they immediately pay $55 for. That's $105 paid out to buy $75 in revenue.

It would certainly be cheaper to just pay $1.10 for each $1 in revenue. I'm sure the folks at shopify don't think of it this way, and I'm sure they genuinely believe that they will someday change the economics of this and become profitable. However, the balance sheet doesn't support that belief, for me at least, and it sure looks like every customer they maintain leads to more money they are losing.

Perhaps they can become profitable with enough economies of scale. Again, I would question how much larger they would have to get to hit the inflection point, which they haven't done, at least in the financials reported, so far losses are scaling up linearly with revenues (which is to say operating margins are a steady negative % against increasing revenues).

Since they have been around for a long time (12 years) and those same 12 years have seen an absolutely huge increase in ecommerce, it seems like they have failed to hit the required scale despite the most favorable conditions you might hope for. That doesn't make me very optimistic.

<comment><USER41> Assuming you based this off their financial statements, then everything you are saying is pretty much 100% on the ball with regard to interpreting their cash flow.

> That doesn't make me very optimistic.

I would say that the market is "on your side" at least for now, as people on here have been starting to compare them to Amazon which is, in terms of market cap, 100x higher valued than Shopify and really not a fair comparison. However, let's not forget that the reason Shopify is a 3.5bil company (and not worth say "only" 500mil) is because they have eyeballs on them right now, and quite a few at that. The market isn't sure how they plan to use those eyeballs, but there's enough visibility to give them a chance at being a strong market player in the future. Also yes, despite being publicly traded, most investors would consider them still to be startup based on where they are at with their business model.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Private company in possession of tax records of 5M Greeks; fined 100,000€ - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=el&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tanea.gr%2Fnews%2Fgreece%2Farticle%2F5163084%2Fidiwtikh-etaireia-eixe-sthn-katoxh-ths-ola-ta-forologika-stoixeia-pente-ekat-ellhnwn%2F&edit-text=

<comment><USER2> somehow 100k EUR doesn't seem that much for this kind of situation.</comment>


Serverless DNS over HTTPS (DoH) at the Edge - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stackpath.com/serverless-dns-over-https-at-the-edge-doh? <comment><USER2> Im still trying to understand why this is useful or helpful? DNS is pretty reliable and seems to be working well for a decades.

<comment><USER3> privacy, which is essential for security. currently your DNS requests are sent in the clear. and even if DNSSEC sort of guarantees the integrity and authenticity of the answers, it doesn't provide secrecy.

and yes, currently TLS (+SNI) leaks the domain name (server name in TLS parlance), but there's work being done on that and it's very likely that in a few years that leaky hole will be closed too.

<comment><USER2> privacy is a valid reason, this makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How the hell is this severless?

<comment><USER5> It's running on EdgeEngine, which is similar to Lambda@Edge.

<comment> fake-name So....., someone else's server?

<comment><USER6> Yes, the exact same snarky comment that comes up every time someone brings up the word "serverless." Anyone who is using this code base is probably smart enough to connect the dots that yes, the code is running on some server some where.

<comment><USER7> When it was first came to my attention, I assumed it meant "peer to peer" or "all code runs locally". I don't feel like that's because I wasn't smart enough. It is a fairly silly name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like this has the potential to be used as a way to domain squat. Or maybe even hijack?

<comment><USER9> How? Pointing your resolver to something returning whatever has been possible since DNS was invented. This changes nothing except that your ISP isn't able to read/change responses.

<comment><USER8> The example in the article circumvents ICANN

<comment><USER10> Right, which has always been possible by setting your own DNS server.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free ZumoCast (YC S07) App Streams Music, Movies From Computer To iPad, iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/free-zumocast-app-streams-music-movies-from-computer-to-ipad-iphone/58354

<comment><USER2> Nifty app.

I've been using AirVideo for a while with very few issues (doesn't play VOBs unless you rename them, and playback get stuck sometimes - but that could also be my iPad wifi which is a bit flaky). ZumoCast seems to do equally well with video, except it's a bit flaky as well - some videos wouldn't begin with a DRM error and then work fine on the next try?!

But the bigger win is my music library is now fully available on my iPad (I bought a 16G one and never synced the music) and the setup was almost trivial. It's a bit buggy though since I started playing music and switched to the Files tab and when I came back to the Music tab, I couldn't see any of my music anymore even though it was playing in the background.

This is going to become even more epic once the iPad gets iOS4 with background music, etc. Also, not sure if this would work if my iPad was on a different wifi network than my computer?

Good job in any case.

<comment><USER3> Agreed with what you said. I didn't encounter any DRM error's however I found video playback went out of sync with audio when I rotated the orientation I was holding my iPad. Other than that the program performed beautifully. Coupled with the price tag of free and I don't know of anything that beats it. Awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clicking on "Refer Friends" hits an HTTP 500 on your server, trying to load this URL: <https://www.zumocast.com/referral/new/zc_wizard></comment>


Ask HN: When has X startup in "X is like Y for Z" done better than Y? - <AUTHOR>

Dropbox might be one example (from their YC app):"Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them 'just work' for the average individual or team." <comment><USER2> Twitter is like AIM away messages for people who aren't AFK.

</comment><comment><USER3> 2048 is like 1024 for cool people.

Sorry, its not a real start up. But imagine if it had advertisements.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google is like a file organizer for the web.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I was wondering where the startups themselves or press coverage used the analogy.

And wasn't Yahoo's category system like a file organizer for the web? Google is more like sifting through co-workers papers to see what sources they use most on a given topic.

<comment><USER4> Google's mission statement is to "organize the world's information." So maybe Google is like a file organizer for the world?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook is like Friendster for College</comment>