Large-scale attack tries to steal configuration files from WordPress sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/large-scale-attack-tries-to-steal-configuration-files-from-wordpress-sites/ <comment><USER2> It's not just WordPress config they're after. My logs are filled with thousands of 404s for hundreds of different paths all containing a file called ".env"

I don't even have PHP installed, so I have Nginx set to 444 on anything with php in the name. I suppose I should add env to the list, but seriously a $5 DO droplet handles this without much effort.</comment>


Timeline of programming languages - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages <comment><USER2> Anyone brave enough to bet which ones are going to turn out big ?

Swift has a big potential in the sense that it's backed by Apple, and looks like Objective C reimagined for Apple's purposes.

Rust has Mozilla backing, and it's already popular around here, so I won't elaborate.

Extra points for naming languages which will succeed despite not being initially corporation-backed.

<comment><USER3> Swift will rise and fall with iOs. Rust will gradually eat Unix tooling, and supplant C.

WebAssembly will be really interesting. It could finally be the tech layer that replaces the JVM. I'm not sure what the winning language will be though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that PHP, Ruby, and Javascript were all created in 1995.

<comment><USER5> Java as well (public alpha release).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If a fellow wikipedia editor is reading: some recent languages like Pony, Purescript and Reason are still missing.

<comment><USER7> It's also missing a lot of details that should be added from [http://james- iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...](http://james- iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Always a fun discussion when someone calls a language old. "ColdFusion? That old language? You should use Javascript or Ruby or Python and get with the times!"

</comment><comment><USER9> Only 17 new languages in last decade? Why such dramatic slowdown in contrast with earlier decades?

<comment><USER10> Honest but cynical answer: deletionist Wikipedia editors rained down the delete hammer on most new languages a while back. They now have very high requirements for notability, so unless a language is old enough to be mentioned in print sources (which are increasingly not relevant to the advancement of human knowledge), then it's unlikely to have its own page on Wikipedia.

<comment><USER11> In all fairness, although I'm pretty much solidly in the inclusionist camp, lists like this on Wikipedia can turn into this vast laundry list of everyone's pet hobby project or master's thesis. You could probably delete 75% of that list and not remove anything that was commercially important or historically significant.

<comment><USER12> I guess that one could solve this by making Wikipedia more semantic-driven: imagine being able to filter through the laundry list by measuring relevance using Github statistics (is it still maintained? was it starred by more than 100 people?) - you could have a lot information and still be able to digest it by prioritization. What do you think?

<comment><USER11> That's just one example. There are all sorts of lists like "Notable people from X city" that get pretty ridiculous.

<comment><USER12> One could add queryable criteria there as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Didn't know that python was actually older than java

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting. I had the impression ML was older :)

<comment><USER15> ML first appeared in 1973. Pretty impressive considering the laundry list of features, many of which are missing from mainstream industrial languages. For example: parametric polymorphism (aka "generics"), pattern-matching and type inference.

<comment><USER14> lol, I hate the words "parametric polymorphism" had it as a question in an university exam and failed, because I only learned "generics" and "templates" xD

love the concept tho

<comment><USER15> The problem with the word "generics" is that it already meant something else in programming language theory. If I used reflection to implement a serialisation function in Java or C#, it could be generic with respect to the data-type of the value passed in, but not parametric. A parametric polymorphic function strictly has the same behaviour for all types, a generic one has type-dependent behaviour. This matters of course when we want to reason about programs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Bitcoin Grant For Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoingrant.org/

<comment><USER2> >continue to do great work and we will reach out to you.

That's a bit of a sticky problem. It's a hard job finding worthy projects that than benefit the most from funding. There are a lot of projects out there. Some have a lot of potential but identifying them isn't easy.

I can understand why there isn't a sign saying "I'm giving away money, apply here." That is a recipe to be inundated with requests where the the most worthy lose out to those more skilled at applying for grants.

I wonder if there is scope for a crowd sourced intermediary here. We all think about the worthy causes we could support if we were mega rich. Maybe what we need is a "If I had a Billion Dollars" website where people suggest and critique causes to enable those who do have the money can look to see where they can do the most good.

Specifically for Open Source, I have found quiet little projects that could benefit from grants, projects that would never actually seek out funding in their own right. Another aspect are projects that are not yet open source that could possibly be liberated with a fair payment. I see things like <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Studio_Pro> which I doubt will ever be finished as a proprietary project, but might have a chance as open source. Similarly <http://sol.gfxile.net/atanua/> is an excellent program that is largely lying idle. Both of these could be possibly bought into the open source world if their respective developers were offered some compensation for their efforts so far.

Of course I know only a little snapshot of what is out there, perhaps there should be a way for the cumulative eyeballs of people to find the best opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like an interesting initiative (if serious), but I can confirm this has nothing to do with the Bitcoin project or foundation. They may use bitcoin, but that's all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some kind of crowdfunding platform could work better here. Something like fundhub.org or gittip.com

</comment><comment><USER5> the fuck? why is it okay to put up shit like this if you don't have any external validation?

<comment><USER6> It is 'okay' to put up anything at all, of course.

But I too am wondering what on earth this is and why anyone would take it seriously.

<comment><USER7> _The only requirement of the Bitcoin Grant is that the project must be open source in nature, this is not limited to only software. There is no application to fill out, simply continue to do great work and we will reach out to you._

That's all you need to know. Which is nothing. All of this is, at least at this point, nothing at all.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for pointing this out. I could't get through the fold/unfold interface, or the biased overgeneralized writing.

So the tldr; "I have a lot of bitcoins, which are now worth something, so I'm going to give some of them to some people working on open source projects. Keep being awesome free software developers!"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Visualization: Your Startup's Exit Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://media.juiceanalytics.com/valuation/

<comment><AUTHOR> Fairly simplistic but interesting way to make data an interactive part of the conversation.. without excel.</comment>


We raised 200K € in 48 Minutes as a hardware startup in Germany - <AUTHOR> https://www.seedmatch.de/startups/protonet

<comment><USER2> Very nice product! Sadly, most guys here do not speak German. I'm thrilled to see how things go for you guys!! And yes, it seems the future for the cloud is local.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks man!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> congrats and please tell what the company does because Ich spreche kein Deutsch

<comment><USER2> You will have some idea with this article: [http://www.cloudecosystem.com/author.asp?section_id=2019&...](http://www.cloudecosystem.com/author.asp?section_id=2019&doc_id=246767) It's exactly what many mid sized business in Germany and elsewhere are looking for, a Cloud solution very easy to handle but that it's local. Appealing product.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> actually it was on thursday, but the past days were crazy...

<comment><USER4> We met at HackFwd Build 0.9, I was the 16-year old cofounder of Holalabs, one of the finalists of Pitch In Berlin. I just wanted to say... congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys! I haven't forgotten you too! How are you guys doing? Let's skype! ;)

<comment><USER4> Awesome! I'm licuende ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Climate Realism Against Alarmism - <AUTHOR> https://defyccc.com/scientists/ <comment><USER2> I notice that once again one of the comments to the article raises the issue of glacier melt and automatically leaps to the conclusion it is caused by elevated CO2, when much evidence indicates it is due to soot - ://www.scientificamerican.com/article/subcontinental-smut-himalayas/#

The plague of humans is causing a lot of problems for the planet, but it is essential to use good science to understand the real cause of problems so appropriate efforts can be made to minimise impact and not waste even more resources.

Most things are not as simple as they may seem in the case of such complex systems, so undounded dogma that prevents good questioning science isn't going to help.

<comment><USER3> The only mention of "melting" in the comments is "the rate of both polar and ice sheet melting is worse than predicted." This was in the context of giving an example of a prediction that Gore made.

The comment says nothing about CO2 vs. soot. If anything, soot may be the reason for the increased rate.

You pointed to a SciAm article from 2009 concerning the Himalayas.

I'll respond with a 2014 Guardian piece titled "Climate impact of black carbon severely overestimated, says study" [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/26/climate-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/26/climate- impact-of-black-carbon-severely-overestimated-says-study)

Or this 2016 piece from the Earth Institute, citing research from 2013 [http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2016/03/22/the-damaging- effects...](http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2016/03/22/the-damaging-effects-of- black-carbon/)

> a 2013 study estimated black carbon's effect to be 1.1 watts per square > meter per year, second only to carbon dioxide, which is responsible for 1.56 > watts per square meter. In other words, black carbon is the second largest > contributor to climate change after CO2. But unlike CO2, which can stay in > the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years, black carbon, because it > is a particle, remains in the atmosphere only for days to weeks before it > returns to earth with rain or snow.

This appears to be a well-studied topic in climate research. It therefore makes no sense to point out a possible mistake or incomplete comment by a random someone from the internet as the basis for a call for "good scienc", nor does it justify accusations of "undounded [sic] dogma".

<comment><USER2> The Gaurdian, lol. I will take SciAm over them any day.

Plus, it is not just soot, it is dark particulates in general and it is not causing global warming but very local warming nucleation sites on the ice that start the melt.

I make my point again, the complexities are immense and can rarely be boiled down to an article written for general consumption by mass media.

<comment><USER3> It's not like the Guardian article didn't link to the primary literature, which is www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140925/ncomms6065/abs/ncomms6065.html . All you're doing is making an ad hominem argument.

You originally said there was "much evidence indicates it is due to soot". The SciAm article asks "Is Soot the Culprit Behind Melting Himalayan Glaciers?"

Now you've changed your mind and said "dark particulates in general", but provided no references, nor explained how that is different than soot/black carbon. That's changing the goalposts. You wasted my time by making an argument you don't actually mean.

Since you think it "can rarely be boiled down to an article written for general consumption by mass media", why did you reach to an outdated SciAm article as justification, and not something in the recent primary literature?

It's even much less likely to be boiled down to an HN comment.

In any case, you still incorrectly summarized the glacier melt comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The roll call of scientists who've actively questioned climate alarmism should give pause for thought to those who simply label those who question received opinion on climate as ignorant of 'the settled science' or 'in the pay of the fossil fuel businesses'.

<comment><USER3> There is a direct parallel with how creationists have created lists of scientists who actively question evolution.

One response was Project Steve - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve) a list of scientists with the first name Stephen, Steven, Stephanie, Esteban, etc., all of whom support evolution.

This list is far longer than any list of scientists that creationists have put out.

Similarly, the "roll call of scientists" who support the current rather pessimistic view of the human-caused effects on global climate, is far larger than the list given there.

Continuing the parallel, those opposed to evolution say that its supporters treat it as a "religion". I note Ivar Giaever says that of climate change, at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivar_Giaever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivar_Giaever) .

As another parallelism, many of the scientists who support creationism/are against evolution aren't from a background which is closely connected to evolutionary biology. (Eg, a physicist instead of a biologist or paleontologist.) That's "many", not "all".

Going down the list, Giaever started in superconductivity, and then went into biophysics. He now is an adviser for The Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute received funding from Exxon, a fossil fuel business.

Robert Laughlin, condensed matter physics.

Frederick Seitz, solid state physics. He was founding chair of the George C. Marshall Institute, which received funding from Exxon-Mobil. Before getting CO2, he was one of the so-called "merchants of doubt" about the harmfulness of tobacco smoke.

Richard Lindzen, a bona fide climate scientist. You know that because they wrote "an atmospheric physicist" instead of a generic "physicist" like the previous scientists.

Fred Singer, another atmospheric scientist. Who "has been a paid consultant for many years for ARCO, ExxonMobil, Shell, Sun Oil Company, and Unocal" \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer) .

It's boring now, so I'll jump down the list to John Coleman, a weathercaster trained a journalist who, among other things, claims "the polar ice is increasing, not melting away" \- an incorrect statement. He has never done any research in climate change. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coleman_(news_weathercast...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coleman_\(news_weathercaster\)#Views_on_global_warming)

Now, of course it isn't required that people be trained in field X to provide useful input or counter-point to that field. My point instead is that if the criteria for a "roll call of scientists who've actively questioned climate alarmism" is so broad as to include people who have never done any scientific research in the field, or in the case of Coleman, never having done any scientific research at all, then you need to have a similarly inclusive definition when coming up with people who support "climate alarmism."

It is a much larger number. Just like Project Steve.</comment></comment>


3 Ways We Could Stop an Earth-Killing Asteroid - <AUTHOR> http://www.bluelabellabs.com/ideatoappster/asteroid-defense-3-ways-to-stop-an-earth-killing-asteroid/ <comment><USER2> awesome!!!</comment>


The "Dolt" button - <AUTHOR> http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Do_It.txt

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting error I find many older users making. I call it a "way out of context error". There is no reason whatsoever to assume that the software was calling you a dolt. This should cause the user to look for an alternative interpretation but somehow, they just don't.

<comment><USER3> The "context" is entirely a fabrication of programmers.

If you have years of experience with computers, you know what they should and shouldn't do. You know that a programmer might call a user an idiot in a comment or on a Usenet forum, but not in a dialog button.

If you've never seen a computer before, you have no such idea, which is exactly why testing like this is necessary: Programmers have too much experience with the "context" to recognize when something might be confusing or outright offensive.

See also: "Abort."

p.s. re-reading my text, it might look like I'm disagreeing with the parent comment. that is not my intention, rather I'm agreeing with the parent and attempting to explain why this might be the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kind of wrecks the joke nature of the story by linking it as _'The "Dolt" button'_ , don't you think?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, because there isn't an Ah Ha! moment at the end where you start laughing. However the story does remain informative.

Edit: To whoever decided that I required downvoting, please familiarize yourself with the voting etiquette here.

Just because I disagree with the guy being upvoted doesn't mean I'm being a jerk. I was quite amicable, actually.

<comment><USER4> _"He replied, "I'm not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?" "_

Where it not already spoiled, that would be the punch line.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you laugh at that? You asked me directly if I think I spoiled a joke and I don't believe I did, because it did not make me laugh.

<comment><USER4> It's humorous, and I think it's pretty likely the author intended it to be that way. Things don't have to _literally_ make you laugh to be considered humorous you know...

Perhaps you should lighten up a bit. I was just offering a constructive suggestion for the future. (I heard this story already quite a while ago, so it's not like the joke was personally spoiled for me).

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I sound pent-up? I'm really not. I just answered your question truthfully. Let's agree to be on different pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, at least the buttons didn't say "Submit," right?

<comment><USER6> This is the joke those guys in the thread above were looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had the same problem with the recently-released browser RockMelt: I can't help but reading it as "rock-me-it".

Which, I admit, doesn't mean anything, while "dolt" is a word. (does RockMelt mean anything though?)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would you use a capital letter for the second word? It should have been "Do it" in which case the problem does not happen. Strange that nobody seems to take this basic rule into account. [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Capital_lette...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Capital_letter#Usage)

<comment><USER9> Sure, that's the basic rule for English prose. But dialog button labels are a lot closer to headings or titles than they are to sentences in a paragraph. (Note also that there's no period after "Do It")

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Neat. The doIt method is still quite central to Smalltalk systems.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting. Akai's famous MPC series of sampler/sequencers use the term "DO IT" in this way. I wonder if its of the same origin.</comment>


Get an interview at LinkedIn by solving this puzzle - <AUTHOR> https://www.workatlinkedin.com/ <comment><USER2> Is that really a legit website affiliated with LinkedIn? Smells fishy:

        $ whois workatlinkedin.com
        (...)
        Creation Date: 2015-12-28T20:13:00.00Z
        Reseller: NAMECHEAP.COM
        (...)
        Registrant Name: WHOISGUARD PROTECTED

        $ dig +short workatlinkedin.com \
        | xargs -L1 whois \
        | grep Organization: \
        | sort -u
        Organization:   CloudFlare, Inc. (CLOUD14)

<comment><USER3> I doubt it, given that the logo is faked.</comment></comment>


WWJ, the world's first commercial radio station - <AUTHOR> https://www.detroitnews.com/picture-gallery/news/local/michigan-history/2015/11/08/wwj-the-worlds-first-commercial-radio-station/75308222/ <comment><AUTHOR> My late father told me that six months after WWJ went on the air and he was in kindergarten his family got their first radio, a crystal set. He said my grandfather had held off until a second Detroit station, WJR, had gone on the air.

You know you're a pioneer when the guy who invented the technology sells his first transmitter to you.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_de_Forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_de_Forest)</comment>


Ask HN: Does a Server-side Native Client Make Sense? - <AUTHOR>

Have anyone thought of having NativeClient (Nacl) running on the server side, interfacing with node.js? I thought this would be really cool, mirroring some advantages of node.js. Suppose Nacl is supported on the server side (and let's call it nacl.js?), I could write high-performance code that runs on the client side AND deploy on the server side. This would also make it easy to deploy non-trivial C/C++ code on commodity server (assuming vendors support it, which I think they will thanking to Nacl's sandboxing model).
Your opinion? Flaw in my logic? Is someone already working on this? I think this would be a cool project. <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. Seems like people are already doing it. Just Google "NaCl server side".</comment>


Notes on Arthur Whitney's B Compiler - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W83ME5JecI2hd5hAUqQ1BVF32wtCel8zxb7WPq-D4f8/mobilebasic <comment><USER2> This is super awesome, thanks a bunch! Whitney is certainly a programmer of the highest caliber.</comment>


DHS skirting Supreme Court order by using purchased location data - <AUTHOR> https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/07/dhs-skirting-supreme-court-order-by-using-purchased-location-data <comment><USER2> _A 2018 court ruling had limited the U.S. government 's ability to obtain location data from phone companies, but purchasing commercially available data is a way for them to sidestep the rule. That same year, ICE bought $190,000 worth of licences to data stored by Virginia-based Venntel, who describe themselves as "pioneers in mobile location information."

Experts familiar with the situation say that this is one of the largest troves of bulk data being deployed by law enforcement in the United States. The data had initially been used to track human and drug-smuggling organizations but has since shared the data with ICE's arm that carries out deportations._

Why is this legal? Abusing government funds to get access to location data is the worst of all worlds, for everyone involved.

</comment><comment><USER3> I noticed the McDonald's near my home is running a promotion. "Safe Driving" gets you discounts on McDonald's food.

I'm in a particularly non-tech savvy area. I have not seen this is running in higher-income, higher-education neighborhoods, or any McDonalds inside universities.

I didn't look into it, but I feel that the app probably uses GPS to know your location as much as possible in order to monitor "Safe Driving". I guess you could use only accelerometer data to look for hard acceleration/braking events, but I doubt that's the purpose.

Seemed like a data broker trying to drum up new data sources.

Edit: Coincidentally, the next YouTube ad I got after submitting this was a McDonald's ad.</comment>


U.S. Telcos Sold Highly Sensitive Customer GPS Data Typically Used for 911 Calls - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3b3dg/big-telecom-sold-customer-gps-data-911-calls <comment><USER2> Why is anyone surprised at this point? These companies manipulate legislature; in what world don't they, at the very least, exploit the data that they gather from you to empower themselves? Selling your data off is a far easier moral leap to make.

The only thing that surprises me is that I thought T-Mobile were the good guys. Apparently their stance on net neutrality was empty fan service.

Nothing digital has any semblance of privacy. If you want to take nudies with your significant other, buy a Polaroid camera. If you want to shake hands on a shady deal, do it in person. If it's not the company who develops your product screwing you, it's the people pwning them: just look at what happened to the bastion of privacy, Apple (the iCloud leak).

Stop trusting your digital devices, or, alternatively accept that you have no privacy (which is a completely valid choice).

<comment><USER3> I don't like this fatalistic attitude. Privacy is not black and white. I switched to signal, duck duck go, and Firefox. And since then, no one knows how to target ads to me anymore. That's a privacy win, even if there's a long ways to go.

<comment><USER2> It's not fatalistic. Your digital Life is optional, which is my point. You can have privacy, or you can have a device: and _both_ are fine.

Do you use you DNSSEC on your phone?

<comment><USER4> Does DNSSEC contribute to privacy (which is what I think this question implies)? If so, how?

<comment><USER5> No -- you'd need DNSCrypt for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apple has their own replacement for A-GPS, I wonder if it's more secure or not [https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/01/08/apple-helo- technolo...](https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/01/08/apple-helo-technology/)

Edit: Looks like apple uses a 3rd party clearinghouse to pass the information go 911, so the carriers don't get it. [https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nena.org/resource/resmgr/docs/Appl...](https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nena.org/resource/resmgr/docs/Apple_Enhanced_Emergency_Dat.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm confused, how does GPS data get gathered by the telco? Wouldn't that need a backdoor in the OS's GPS software/driver?

<comment><USER8> Cell networks triangulate a pretty accurate device location in order to connect you to the best cell towers for where you are.

Also, the baseband processor in most phones runs its own code out of the control of the OS and has access to a _ton_ of surprising stuff.

<comment><USER7> GPS != cell networks, and I'm asking what is actually happening, not for a hypothetical guess (which I can make too).

<comment><USER9> The article mentions it's aGPS which uses tower triangulation. But this would be requiring a data link back to the network provider I'd assume.

In airplane mode it _shouldn't_ be sending that data.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS)

<comment><USER10> aGPS has nothing to do with cell tower triangulation.

With aGPS, the cell phones can download up to date GPS almanac from the tower instead of having to lock to GPS satellites to get it.

<comment><USER8> Read the wikipedia page before downvoting the parent commenter, who was correct: "A-GPS augments that by using cell tower data to enhance quality and precision when in poor satellite signal conditions."

<comment><USER10> Feel free to point out where the Wikipedia says that it helps with triangulation. (Hint: it does not.)

The parent commenter explicitly write "A-GPS which uses triangulation".

That is simply not true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The reason for US' paranoia about Huawei is a scenario where the network (built with Huawei gear) could not only triangulate locations in real time, but also transmit voice and data via backdoors to China.

</comment><comment><USER12> And people in the US still oppose telecom regulations like those we have in the EU.

Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Puts device manufacturers in a tough spot. They can fix the problem because sometimes the carriers/police/whoever need the A-GPS data

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple could add an option to disable A-GPS, leaving the device relying only on satellite GPS.

Carriers would still have cell tower location.

<comment><USER13> I'm sure apple could, but this might be an easier said than done item.

A-GPS certainly shouldn't be disabled at all times, as it is a mandate as part of E911, which has the express purpose of closing the gap on emergency services being able to find a caller in an emergency.

The difficulty is, I don't think A-GPS is OS controlled, I think it largely lives in the baseband, which Apple may have a much more limited control over, optionally enabling and disabling features that for all intensive purposes are built into the hardware. Ideally, a user should get a notification when not in a 911 call, but without spending a good deal of time hunting in the standards, it's possible this isn't exposed either.

I think in the CDMA2000 day's when I looked at this, the OS call for GPS positions couldn't even say don't use assisted GPS. The baseband if it had a network connection, would just contact the location server, and use that when locating the device to give back to the OS. That's old technology though, I'm not intimately familiar with the current standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Kind of surprised no one has started a petition for each tel co (maybe there is one and it;s viral on fbook which I hardly see any of) and demanded privacy legislation to stop other carriers collecting and transferring location data at this point.

<comment><USER15> I have personally called and written my carriers. I think if more did they might take notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can you opt out of location service for 911 calls ? One the one occasion I had to call 911 from my cell phone, I had to laboriously go over my address. There was more friction than ordering pizza since there was a lot of back and forth over the address. So I don't know what this back channel for gps data for 911 does anyway. And ultimately, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff for people to make on their own if they don't want enhanced 911. Cell phone operators will still get other auxiliary and approximate data from towers, but I don't want an API for them to request more precise location.

<comment><USER17> It appears that you will be able to opt out of Apple's new Enhanced Emergency Data. However, that part is device-initiated anyway. The traditional Network- Initiated Location Requests probably cannot be opted out of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anybody have an explanation about A-GPS? How does it work? I thought it was available to end users, I don't understand why carriers have such data.

<comment><USER6> Wikipedia has a great article on it [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1)

<comment><USER18> I do not understand. That carriers have my cell location data, that seems ok. But do they get my own phone GPS data along with it? The article seems to imply that such data is sent only when dialing certain emergency numbers... Not always!

<comment><USER19> Pinpointing a phone requires three satellites. With A-GPS, it can be accomplished with two satellites and cell tower data and/or WiFi info.

Official Apple statement:

Calculating a phone's location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple. [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110427005749/en/App...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110427005749/en/Apple- QA-Location-Data)

Also worth reading: [https://transition.fcc.gov/pshs/911/Apps%20Wrkshp%202015/911...](https://transition.fcc.gov/pshs/911/Apps%20Wrkshp%202015/911_Help_SMS_WhitePaper0515.pdf)

<comment><USER10> > With A-GPS, it can be accomplished with two satellites and cell tower data > and/or WiFi info.

I think you might be confusing 2 separate things:

* aGPS uses the cell tower to download data that helps with locking on to GPS satellites much faster. It basically tells the GPS receiver: here are the satellites you need to be looking for.

* cell tower triangulation is used when you have no GPS reception at all. It's inaccurate, but it's better than nothing.

If you know your location roughy with triangulation, you can improve your location estimate if you add 2 satellites to the mix (more data is usually better than not), but even then it has nothing to do with aGPS.

<comment><USER19> Thank you. I went back and did some additional reading. From what I read it appears aGPS has different options available.

Standalone - Your handset has no connection to the network, and uses only the GPS satellite signals it can currently receive to try and establish a location.

MS Based - Your handset is connected to the network, and uses the GPS signals + a location signal from the network.

MS Assisted - Your handset is connected to the network, uses GPS signals + a location signal then relays its 'fix' to the server, which then uses the signal strength from your phone to the network towers to further plot your position.

> If you know your location roughy with triangulation, you can improve your > location estimate if you add 2 satellites to the mix (more data is usually > better than not), but even then it has nothing to do with aGPS.

Isn't this exactly what aGPS is? One or more data points outside of satellite data? If you have an additional resource I'd love to take a look. Just a quick search of the topic did reveal some contradicting statements.

[https://www.windowscentral.com/gps-vs-agps-quick- tutorial](https://www.windowscentral.com/gps-vs-agps-quick-tutorial)

<comment><USER10> > Isn't this exactly what aGPS is? One or more data points outside of > satellite data?

I don't think that's what it is: with aGPS, the phone downloads data of where the satellites are. That allows the phone to accelerate its ability to lock onto GPS satellites.

Triangulation based on cell phone tower location is orthogonal to aGPS. The original iPhone didn't have a GPS receiver and didn't use aGPS, so it used the location of the towers as a crude way to figure out its location.

The triangulation + 2 satellites examples could be (but doesn't have to be) a hybrid of the 2:

Use old school triangularion as one of the location estimates and use 2 satellites as further location estimates.

And then, orthogonally and optionally, you could use aGPS to accelerate finding additional satellites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Forgive me if this seems obtuse but honestly seriously in each of our phones is an antenna, over that antenna is sent radiowaves, encoded in those radiowaves is information that must be decoded by the other side of the transmission.

Each layer of that has a specification, in that specification each side has implementations of that specification. To me, I fundamentally don't care what an individual corporation "can or can't do". I care what the spec says, because that's what the corporation can and can't do unless they have something completely 100% proprietary.

Speculation is worthless, show me the spec of what function calls enable the collection of this data, and what the structure of the message looks like over the wire.

Beyond that, on a rooted device that I have full control over, I should be able to work out the details of how that's happening and whether or not I want to fiddle with it to allow my carry around computer to do so or not.

If the implicit assumption that root access to my pocket computer makes it unable to turn off such a thing, then that's news. The rest are layers and layers of complexity as to what the defaults of the systems involved are allowed to do via permissions systems. We're either cool with those defaults, or we aren't.

So, imo. Start with the specs, if it's possible via them then it's surely happening whether or not it's "legal" to do so. My apologies if this comes across as harsh, but what else did we expect? We're fortunate enough to live in the cusp of the information age, but the first 50/100/200 years of this are bound to be messy before it either goes full dystopian forever, or enough outrage affects those defaults.

<comment><USER21> This isn't just about software capabilities. The telcos don't need to have remote code execution on the device. Their huge network of receivers has to identify your device for routing, and that reveals your location. Simply connecting to the towers implies that you're within a few miles of them. In areas with denser coverage, triangulating you within a few meters is trivial, and I suspect that every network is storing your location in perpetuity from this method alone. It isn't a issue of software freedom, it's an issue of having a radio signal emitting from your pocket to a huge network of receivers with known positions.

Only way to guarantee you aren't being tracked is to turn the signal off, which isn't feasible for most.

<comment><USER20> I hear ya, and I personally understand that that's the case, thus if just the "connection" of my antenna to the tower reveals information I personally don't care to share then the natural next question is: "can I toggle the antenna off on my own device except when I want to reveal my location, or is that beyond my control as long as the antenna has power?"

I personally don't know that I mind it, but some people do and that's the question that is either allowed by some spec or isn't.

edit: furthermore, just connecting to the towers at all would give approximate information, unless it's connecting to multiples wherein they can triangulate. the other question would be "can I compromise and force my antenna into 'one tower at a time' mode" via some spec. Would I then affect my ability to do tower handoffs upon movement without having multiple tower connections? If so, do I care that my antenna is forced into single tower "approximate location" mode with drops upon new tower acquisition or not? What spec controls that and can I control it via root access to my device? See what I mean?

<comment><USER17> This is probably between the baseband firmware and the SIM card, so rooting wouldn't help. And it's using A-GPS (probably in MSA mode, where the location is derived on the servers, not the phones), not just cell tower triangulation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cell therapy shows remarkable ability to eradicate cancer in clinical study - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140219142556.htm

<comment><USER2> As has been said by the Carl June who did the pioneering work at UPen, this is like a targeted, safer version of a bone marrow transplant.

The problem is generalising this to every type of cancer. You need a target that is widely expressed on the cancer cell, and that isn't found on other important tissues. This is the case (sort of - it still destroys all the healthy B-cells, which as it turns out, doesn't cause TOO many problems) for CD19 which the T-cells are aimed at in this study. For solid tumours like lung cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer etc it will probably be much harder to find a similarly useful target. But they are trying:

[http://cancerimmunolres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2013/...](http://cancerimmunolres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2013/12/19/2326-6066.CIR-13-0170.abstract)

<comment><USER3> After reading this, this is what came to mind: (from I am legend). [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRctxZT-a1A](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRctxZT-a1A) Though, I don't think we'll be needing to worry about mutated zombies it's still an interesting comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.

[1] [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174)

[2] [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by- coi...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coincidence- only-journal-press-releases-versus-journal-articles/)

Participants on Hacker News have been commenting for years that there are much better sources for stories than ScienceDaily.

Comments about ScienceDaily:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206)

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

[http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare- dn...](http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dna-changes- following-population-explosion-may-hold-common-disease-clues)

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1219240)

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

[http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare- genetic-...](http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic- variants-1.10655)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603)

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."

</comment><comment><USER5> See also treatment with low doses of Naltrexone, opiod growth factor - [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11890982](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11890982) [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110519101242.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110519101242.htm) [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8620464](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8620464)

There's a lot to be said for using the body's own immune system rather than suppressing it.

</comment><comment><USER6> My god! Is this as good as it looks? Because it looks like my chances of living to be 100 have just gone up significantly.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, looks sensational to me, not sure why nobody comments on this. Also, I think that's the right path - improving our own immune system.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't improve your immune system per se, injected cells are programmed to target cells with specific markers and there can be collateral damage (see top comment). Also if I understand it correctly your immune system will not reproduce these programmed cells, so it's temporary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just started working on a project related to immuno-oncology and I think this field is (1) really fucking fascinating and (2) rapidly heating up. Two decades ago, the centrality of our immune systems in the prevention and/or evolution of cancers was barely appreciated. Now, immune evasion and immune editing are understood to be central aspects of 'cancerness' and cancer immune therapies are being rapidly dreamed up and evaluated. We suddenly (on the timescale of medical research) have chimeric antigen receptors (this post), immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD1, anti-CTLA4), dendritic cell vaccines, adoptive T-cell therapies, growing databases of tumor-associated antigens, and a lot of momentum around tumor sequencing (which can help make immune treatments fully personalized).

</comment><comment><USER10> I have recently lost a good friend in her 40s to multiple myeloma. It isn't named in this article, but would this treatment work for that cancer as well? Both seem to target B cells.

<comment><USER9> CAR therapy requires identifying a broadly expressed target; it looks like there are a few candidate antigens being evaluated for MM but I don't know if any of the studies have published significant results yet.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24411699](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24411699) [http://www.myelomabeacon.com/resources/mtgs/ash2013/abs/14/](http://www.myelomabeacon.com/resources/mtgs/ash2013/abs/14/)</comment></comment>


The Journey of Selling Sifter - <AUTHOR> http://garrettdimon.com/2016/the-journey-of-selling-sifter <comment><USER2> Founder of Sifter here. Happy to discuss and answer questions.</comment>


Best IRR ever?  YouTube 1.65B... - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/09/google-has-acquired-youtube/ <comment><USER2> It's kind of funny that Sevin Rosen is giving up at the same time Sequoia is scoring on this scale.</comment>


Ask HN: Opensource video streaming options? - <AUTHOR> What are the best, most scalable opensource projects for encoding and streaming video? <comment><USER2> JWPlayer still works for us (though not sure if it's "open source" anymore). The player component speed always wins hands down when we re-test options. [https://github.com/jwplayer](https://github.com/jwplayer) [https://developer.jwplayer.com/](https://developer.jwplayer.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a fan of acestream: [https://github.com/magnetikonline/docker-acestream- server](https://github.com/magnetikonline/docker-acestream-server) & [http://acestream.org](http://acestream.org)

</comment><comment> Sean-Der There are a lot of different options, but depends on what you are looking for!

* What are your goals around latency

* What does the publishing/viewing look like (want to watch in the browser) do users need to upload?

* Do you have any restrictions around codecs or bandwidth?

</comment><comment><USER4> ffmpeg + nginx-rtmp-module & nginx ? Depends on your needs and how complete of a solution you want.</comment>


Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless * - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-case-counts-are-meaningless/ <comment><USER2> Here's an attempt at estimating the true infection rate in NYC. Same math can be applied elsewhere. (e.g.,Chicago is at 5%)

[https://medium.com/@FasinFoxtrot/stay-the-f- home-d43ffea8b4](https://medium.com/@FasinFoxtrot/stay-the-f-home-d43ffea8b4)

<comment><USER3> Did you read the article?

The link you posted is likely in the class of meaningless studies for Nate's piece because you didn't account for the nonrandom testing that is going on

<comment><USER2> I did, and I read the linked to papers like [https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_e...](https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_estimates.html). The medium piece uses deaths, not cases, to drive the estimate

<comment><USER3> Which is even further removed from the answer</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Advisors - <AUTHOR>

Any comments on the relationship between startups and advisors?
More of a conversation starter than a list of specific questions, but issues like:
What is the norm in terms of compensation, frequency of meetings, etc?  What do you look for in an advisor? <comment><USER2> It's extremely variable.

An advisor could give you business advice or make introductions or review your code or discuss product strategy. You could meet with them every week or every month or twice a year, or everyday while your company is getting started.

The more they give you, the more compensation they get. An advisor might get .1% per year of service (in equity), or as much as several percent of the company.

</comment><comment><USER3> Expect advisors to give you advice - and only that. The best ones usually don't have the time/bandwidth to perform any sort of real action for you (including email introductions to their famous and important friends); if that were the case, they would be called "actioners" or something.

Separate the advice-givers from the action-performers, and seek out the best in both domains. The point should be to gain timeless insight that helps you grow as an entrepreneur, and which can be applied to all of your future pursuits - regardless of whether these pursuits happen to relate to your current project.

Oh, and try to hold off on bringing on action-performers as long as possible, if your business plan can allow for this. You'll eventually be able to pay action-performers by the hour, rather than via very-expensive equity. (You are building something of great value, aren't you?)</comment>


Show HN: My project helps you create kick ass mobile sites - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilova.com/ <comment><USER2> Lots of unnecessarily harsh comments for what _could_ be a cool idea.

He's doing a "Show HN" to get some feedback. Maybe we could all be a bit more constructive? Calling somebody's work a "joke" or an april fools prank isn't really all that nice. There's plenty of other places than HN I can go to watch somebody's work get needlessly trashed.

I agree his stuff needs work, but I bet all of our projects (for those that have actually _made_ something) needs some level of work.

The vitriol here is kinda toxic, take a chill pill people.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm 99% sure this site is some sort of parody or joke.

After all, this is what it looks like on my iPhone: <http://i.imgur.com/KNqzy.png>

And searching 'TechCrunch' for 'Mobilova' returns zero results, despite Mobilova's claim that they were featured on TechCrunch.

<comment><AUTHOR> nope, it's not, I miss that bug, it's due to the sidefloating button, fixing it right away, thanks for pointing out.

<comment><USER4> You absolutely need to remove the TechCrunch and KillerStartups logos if indeed they have not reviewed you. It's highly misleading to your users and an abuse of their brand.

In addition, the testimonials each have New York Times icon logos next to them. This doesn't add credibility; it's obvious the New York Times didn't write those reviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe you are wrong about Techcrunch and Killerstartup not reviewing me, maybe you just miss the reviews...well, as for the testimonials, for me, it's indeed obvious that the New York times didn't write them as well, as it is for you, so I don't get why "it's misleading", could you please elaborate?

Check Techcrunck UK , and look for GmbhNews: Old Brand. Check Killerstartup, and look for GmbhNews: Old Brand

Check the press section, you will find some of those infos. Thanks for your great feedbck, I'll create new facvicon, I wasn't aware that those favicons are exclusively NYT favicons (it's a suggestion of the designer)

<comment><USER5> Could you link to the reviews from your site? Preferably directly from the "As Featured In" banners. That way there's absolutely no question. No doubt. Credibility can be proven without requiring a search or investigative discussions on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Watched the video, some complaints.

* Your video says "GMBH", but your website says "MOBIlova".

* "Remote the dots" and "remove the domain" do not make it at all obvious that you mean the TLD.

* The worst thing, though, is that you didn't show us what happens once you hit "MOBILIZE." Does Mobilova then host a mobile version of the site? Do I get a static list of files? What's the point of the category dropdown?

I tried it out, using BoingBoing as an example. It took me to a page that says: "Thank you very much for trying us. Your submission will be reviewed, and should be added shortly if accepted, meanwhile add following code in your site header or template, to take full control of your mobile site"

If accepted? What? I literally have no idea what's going on. What happened to less than two minutes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback pavel, The Video is a bit outdated and I'm still tweaking the new one. (GMBH is the old brand) working to fix that, when you hit mobilize now, there are two options, a mobile webapps is created in the choosen category and listed in the mobile portal <http://www.nicezine.com> , I'll add a description at the front page to make it clear.

The second option that we offers is based on stylesheets, that's the option with the floating tab, if you use it, we'll create a mobile stylesheet and host it on Amazon S3 /and backup on Google storage , and send you the link for media query linking. Working to get all these infos on the front page now. As for remove the dots, I'm a bit concern that, non techie folks don't know what TLD means, do you have any other alternative suggestion? Thanks

<comment><USER7> Use javascript to automatically extract this information from the URL that they enter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Renders poorly in Firefox 6 (Yes, Firefox 6 not IE 6). There's a weird floating half-cut off artifact that says something about 'ustom mobile site'...

Advice. If your service is centered around the generation of quality content formatting for other people's sites, better make sure your own house is in order first (both on mobile and in modern browsers). Otherwise it's like buying cabinets from a carpenter who conspired to already cut off half of his fingers and both of his thumbs.

</comment><comment><USER9> Please, hire a designer. Also "create and monetize your mobile website in less than 2 mins for all phones.It's free to start." – please, insert space after "all phones."

<comment><AUTHOR> fixing the text issue, thanks. What's wrong with the design?

<comment><USER10> It's amateur hour. Some basics:

      All the shades of yellow are subtly different
      The font sizes are all over the place
      The fonts themselves are all different, you seem to be using 4 different ones
      Whitespace proportions are wrong
      The red and the yellow don't compliment each other
      The shading effect in the red looks horrible
      What the hell is going on in the footer?
      Why are there full stops after people's names in the quotes?
      The embedded video has a higher z-index than the form for creating the mobile site

Also the video is downright insulting too. Your target market seriously don't know what an iPhone or an App looks like? Or how to fill out a form?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could you accomplish this by just starting with the URL as your first step? #1 - Enter your URL, then if you like what you see, enter your email, etc.

I didn't give it a try because the signup form looked daunting.

</comment><comment><USER12> Your site doesn't work on mobile safari Techcrunch has never heard of you Link to your blog doesn't work... I could go on like this forever...

<comment><AUTHOR> Got the bug info , I've tested the site so far in a simulator and it looks good (my mistake was to not check it on an iPhone after adding some UI related features), working on it to fix those bugs. As for TechCrunch , you mean you couldn't find my link on TechCrunch? You shoudl try TechCrunhc Europe (TechCrunch UK)...with the old branding: GmbhNews , thanks for your feedback, fixing all the bugs, and don't hesitate to share any other bugs/issues you find.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As others have pointed out you have a lot of work to do on your own site. Re- size the browser on your desktop an see if you notice anything that strikes you as odd. Hint: your design breaks apart. Mobile phones have a small screen so you must be able to re-size it seamlessly, before you can sell a web to mobile solution .

</comment><comment><USER14> Keeps crashing my iPhone browser ironically

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this what I am supposed to see - <http://i54.tinypic.com/ibkkt2.png> ? This hardly relates well to anything "kick ass".

</comment><comment><USER16> Fix your own site first if you are serious. It doesn't look that awesome btw.

</comment><comment><USER17> $10/mo for that joke - come on.

</comment><comment><USER18> April Fools' Days is a few months off yet.

Post again then?

</comment><comment><USER19> What's up with all these people who "JUST SHIP" and are shit at everything they do?</comment>


Whitemark: Steganographic encoding of a watermark in the whitespace of text - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rlk/whitemark <comment><USER2> Reminds me of a fun Obfuscated C Contest winner:

[https://github.com/c00kiemon5ter/ioccc-obfuscated-c- contest/...](https://github.com/c00kiemon5ter/ioccc-obfuscated-c- contest/blob/master/2004/sds.hint)

The author, Stephen Sykes, submitted a program that encodes a message into the whitespace of another file. Since whitespace doesn't matter in C, he encoded the encoder into the source of the decoder and only submitted the source for the decoder. Neat!

</comment><comment><USER3> Extremely weak under an active attack: 'sed s/\\([^ ]\\) */\1 /g'

What you want is something that cannot be easily removed from the message without also affecting the meaning of the cover message. I am thinking of some sort of encoding that uses orthographic errors that are not trivial to fix automatically (e.g. substitute words with valid homophones, instead of changing individual characters). That would be still easy to detect, so you probably need a very low bandwidth channel to make it indistinguishable from a typical text with mistakes.

Doing this with multimedia is probably far easier.

</comment><comment><USER4> ...and to avoid TPP etc. leaks becoming traceable, now something to routinely scan for this sort of thing and perform character and eol normalisation.

<comment><USER3> This technique has been publicly known for well over a decade. See: [http://www.amazon.com/Information-Techniques- Steganography-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Information-Techniques- Steganography-Digital-Watermarking/dp/1580530354)

It's been a long time since I read it, but if I recall correctly, the UK government has been encoding the identity of the receiver of highly sensible information in this fashion for a long time. Probably it is SOP by now in most environments where truly important secrets are exchanged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In case you are wondering how it works: it converts 8-bit chunks of data into 10-chars string, with the normal space as the '1' and non-breaking space as the '0' (the remaining two chars are used for control and to mark begin/end of data). The string is then put back into the message.

<comment><USER6> There are multiple unicode characters that are whitespace. I have a plugin for IntelliJ just to spot these darn things. So you could actually encode more.

Also of course there are multiple .'s and ;'s in unicode so you could encode more data in punctuation characters like them.

<comment><USER7> However that won't survive a scanning and OCR.

This could be useful to see who leaked a script, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Context for this (from the author, coming off a discussion of [https://github.com/reinderien/mimic](https://github.com/reinderien/mimic)):

[http://www.metafilter.com/154087/Zalgo-text-would-be- kinder#...](http://www.metafilter.com/154087/Zalgo-text-would-be- kinder#6259125)

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of this talk from Defcon 2008: [https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-16/dc16-presentations/d...](https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-16/dc16-presentations/defcon-16-kolisar.pdf)

Tool called Whitespace used to encrypt messages

</comment><comment><USER6> This also reminds me of the Whitespace programming language: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_\(programming_language\))

</comment><comment><USER10> Is anyone aware of legally (US and/or British law, specifically) "strong" stenographic techniques? Meaning a court would allow that this object is assigned to this person because of a stenographic key embedded in the object?

<comment><USER11> I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer.

I suspect that the common law legal systems would approach this via case law. Unless case law exists already I think that if you wanted to claim ownership of a file you'd need to present your case including expert witnesses and persuade a judge/jury of its validity.

<comment><USER12> Exactly what a lawyer would say....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat, thanks for posting!

Invisible Secrets [[http://www.east- tec.com/invisiblesecrets/](http://www.east-tec.com/invisiblesecrets/)] has a mode for this that works quite well on HTML source. Rendering is unchanged and you have to be looking at the source and looking at the spacing to even see the difference manually.

</comment><comment><USER14> Really succinct & easy-to-read code at only 118 sloc, very nice!</comment>


Goodbye Ubuntu's Unity, I Will Miss You - <AUTHOR> http://news.softpedia.com/news/goodbye-ubuntu-s-unity-i-will-miss-you-515717.shtml <comment><USER2> Looking forward to the shift back to the gnome personally, though regardless of the gui, there is inevitably a couple of hours of modification needed after every clean install.</comment>


Probabilistic bug hunting - <AUTHOR> http://lpenz.org/articles/bugprobhunt/ <comment><USER2> Oh my! That one might be corresponded with artificial probabilistic bug intriduction just to keep happy uniformity of the distribution.</comment>


How Sleep Deprivation Drives The High Failure Rates of Tech Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelthomsen/2014/03/27/how-sleep-deprivation-drives-the-high-failure-rates-of-tech-startups/ <comment><USER2> Once upon a time I did the start-up, sleep-deprived, living at work thing, and frankly younger me thought it was awesome. Older me looks back and things younger me was sometimes an idiot.

Recently I had a kid and got to experience the sleep-deprivation effects all over again except this time with one big difference: I work with an awesome team who were able to pick up the slack, and I was smart enough to know when to ask for help (once literally saying "I'm too stupid to do this now, can you do it?")

Sleep-deprivation is going to continue to be endemic in our industry (not just amongst start-ups, the twenty-somethings today are going to be having kids soon themselves). Instead of fighting through the slack, find ways to mitigate it; build your teams with people you can rely on to cover you when you're short.

<comment><USER3> I realized this super early on in high school. I don't even bother doing anything remotely brain intensive if I haven't gotten 8 hours of sleep. I just can't, I know how great a good sleep feels and anything else sucks in comparison, so I cast it away as a lost day as my "punishment" for not sleeping.

<comment><USER4> Oh yeah man I'm totally with you on that. My unproductive side takes over on those days: "Hmm could work on that project... na feeling a bit sleepy, how about some video games... just a bit..."

;)

<comment><USER5> I'm the opposite. When I'm sleep deprived menial tasks don't seem as boring as they do normally, since I need my full attention to do them with the limited brain capacity.

<comment><USER6> My prior scrum team's PM had 4 hour sprint planning meetings. Every two weeks.

Sounds agile, right? Pure torture.

I'd skip sleep and coffee before the meeting(s), just to survive them.

<comment><USER7> Throw in spending three 8+ hour days working on an inception deck. Then do a 2 hour sprint planning meeting, spend 1.5 days working, then a 2 hour sprint review meeting.

Then throw in a pivot every 2 or 3 weeks, involving a new inception deck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a really weak article. As much as the headline is somewhat plausible, none of the cited evidence even indirectly supports it. In fact, it mentions only Mayer/Dorsey as data points linking sleep deprivation to success, and they're counterexamples!

... so why is this article being upvoted?

<comment><USER9> Yeah - maybe sleep deprivation really is a dark blight on the tech industry, but this article is so tendentious! Google Glass is bad, and not only that, it's because of sleep deprivation! Proof by assertion.

<comment><USER10> Maybe the author was sleep deprived when he wrote the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the fascinating parts about needing "x hours of sleep per night" and in the past people slept "x hours a night" is I never see anyone take into account the _seasons_. For all of us at one end of the year we're in a place with 14 hours of darkness and later we're at 14 hours or more of light. I think that impacts how much sleep we need probably by 10 - 20%. I for one hate 6:30am flights in winter when it's dark but don't find them nearly as hard in the middle of summer when the sun's been up for an hour.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here is another single datapoint (but supported by a peer-reviewed paper!): I just bought blue light blocking glasses which I put on at around 9 or 10pm every day. They look goofy but it seems to actually work! It's like a real- life Flux app. I seem to fall asleep much faster and it seems that the bright bathroom light does not to make me as alert anymore.

[http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/mind- read/what_keeps_you...](http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/mind- read/what_keeps_you_awake_at)

[http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S1933X-Eyewear-SCT-Orange-Anti- Fo...](http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S1933X-Eyewear-SCT-Orange-Anti- Fog/dp/B000USRG90)

[http://justgetflux.com/](http://justgetflux.com/)

<comment><USER13> These also work: [http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S0360X-Ultra-spec-SCT-Orange- Anti...](http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S0360X-Ultra-spec-SCT-Orange-Anti- Fog/dp/B003OBZ64M/ref=pd_bxgy_hi_img_y/181-7536720-6361927)

I cured my insomnia by replacing white compact fluorescent lamps with amber lamps from [http://lowbluelights.com](http://lowbluelights.com). An old comment on this (I have made too many comments here--it's a disgrace!): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495358)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think success in this context is less about hours of sleep and more about manic focus. You can sleep 8 hours, spend 2-4 hours on random crap, and still work/be around work for the other 12-14 hours. I've been either inside or involved early on with a few very successful startups and none of them felt like an environment of balance or moderation. The founders and early employees (especially technical employees) are maniacs who focus on their product, vision, or whatever it is, at the expense of all else. Founder types especially seem to think about work 24/7 and never really switch that off until the companies have matured significantly.

<comment><USER15> This. I think what people most misunderstand about this kind of environment is that the hours are merely the side product, not the main focus. It is very hard to plan that I will put in 16 hour days. But when it happens naturally, it seems like the easiest thing on the planet(and much easier than _not_ doing it). To get to that position, a lot of fuzzy things align(like the clarity of vision, the challenge, the opportunity etc.)

What is also not said is that most manic types also take more extreme vacations. They might take a week off every few months and completely disappear to recharge themselves.

<comment><USER16> How is what you describe an "extreme vacation"? Isn't a week off every few months fairly normal?

<comment><USER17> "Extreme vacations": I think he emphasizes on disconnecting during vacations, maybe doing extreme sports in very unique locations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately, the people used as examples do not support the claims (Marissa Mayer and Jack Dorsey). Perhaps those two are part of the 1 to 3% of the population who can get by on four hours of sleep at night. One of college professors had this phenotype.

Personally, I need between 8 and 9 hours to be at my best.

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703712504576242701752957910)

<comment><USER19> I've always assumed that Dorsey's comments about his sleep habits were a combination of macho bravado and myth-building - it's not like anyone is actually around him enough to know if it's literally true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> People often work long hours because they feel more productive at the end of a long stretch.

It's hard to be stressed when you're sleep deprived. You just say "fuck it, X will work well enough, and I'm too tired to care if it's good enough". Which is probably what you should have done 8 hours ago, but didn't, because you were worried it wasn't good enough.

I find it's just as useful to close your eyes for a minute, and think "I'll probably figure it out later, and I'll still be smart enough to refactor any ugly but pragmatic code when inspiration finally hits" can be just as productive.

</comment><comment><USER21> This explanation makes sense to me. I have seen a sort of reverence for people who don't get enough sleep, as though they're a good example of people doing whatever they can for their company, when really they're making themselves much more likely to do things that have a net negative impact.

As an aside: "my startup" is the new "that novel I'm writing".

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a likely explanation for the myriad of terrible ideas and the people willing to fund them. The problem with sleep deprivation is that the person who is depriving himself of sleep oftentimes cannot see the obvious (to others) degradation in the quality of their work, thinking, and life in general. To the sleep deprived, things look like they're going well to the point that they will deny that there is any loss in quality. This degrades to the point that sleep deprivation is now a badge of honor amongst people who are cranking out worse and worse work with each day that passes.

</comment><comment><USER23> So true! I know when I don't get a decent night's sleep for more than two or three nights in a row, I get a LOT less productive. I lock myself out of my car, forget important things I had to do. It's terrible. An occasional melatonin supplement has been a lifesaver when I just can't turn my brain off, obsessing over my startup.

</comment><comment><USER24> A concerning statement from a link in the Forbes artcile - 'Marissa Mayer admitting to 130 hour work weeks at Google' [1]

> "Burnout is about resentment," she said. "It's about knowing what matters to > you so much that if you don't get it that you're resentful."

Is this statement implying that burnout is a psychological condition related to 'resentment' rather then the physical symptoms? I can't help but feel that one could interpret Google's VP as pseudoscience ...

[1] [http://it- jobs.fins.com/Articles/SBB000142405270230340470457...](http://it- jobs.fins.com/Articles/SBB0001424052702303404704577309493661513690/How-Google- s-Marissa-Mayer-Manages-Burnout)

</comment><comment><USER25> Working excessively long hours has obvious negative impacts on a programmer's performance. If you do it constantly, instead of being considered a hero you should be considered a liability. Would you board a plane with a pilot who flies, say, 300 hours a month

I am fine with chasing a bug for hours every once and then or to extend your schedule when your muse pays you a visit, but if you do it so frequently that it starts impacting your performance negatively, you should stop out of consideration for your colleagues.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article may not be the best... but honestly the social construct that start-upers (especially in the early stage) are maniacally dedicated to work has become so tight that I worry it's solidifying into an expectation.

When I started working on my idea, I felt guilty when not working. (I naturally don't feel happy unless I'm productive, but this is probably also externally influenced.) In January, I worked 100+ hours. I cooked, ate, slept, went to the gym, but other than that I largely worked. Since I don't consume media entertainment by nature and am an introvert, it was easy to work on my passion unless a friend proactively reached out. I slept-worked a lot, but never felt mentally tired or burned out. Physically though, I became a wreck, at some point tweaking something to the point where I couldn't turn my head. Scary.

I used to think 4 hour work weeks were reserved for those who sought escape from a job they didn't like. But I now realize that the larger goal of work/life balance is equally important for people who love their jobs. And I get that time feels threatening: we have to move fast or the opportunity will pass. But if this idea is something that I'm truly passionate about, I should have no problem devoting a lifetime to it (not blindly treading water without success, of course!).

Now, I know my happiness is still driven by productivity, but I'm trying to redefine that for myself. A day with friends, cleaning the apartment, or climbing at the gym is actually very productive and a good recharge. I really hope more entrepreneurs read this article, and really evaluate what working and living means for them.

FYI I wrote a blarticle about my experience in January and work/life balance here: [https://medium.com/entrepreneurs- corner/9461ce206589](https://medium.com/entrepreneurs-corner/9461ce206589)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm watching (and writing up) the Improvides' interview of Vincent Walsh on creativity right now, which addresses a great many barriers to creativity and problem solving, sleep being among the factors. Highly recommended:

[http://fixyt.com/watch?v=QfMvqkrQkYQ](http://fixyt.com/watch?v=QfMvqkrQkYQ)

[http://redd.it/21qgiv](http://redd.it/21qgiv)

Along with the importance of sleep and naps, "creativity is not team sport".

I'm not sure if I ran across this through h/n or not originally, it happened to be in my downloaded videos queue, however.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't function at the top of my game without 9 hours. At 9 I feel godly, everything sinks in, at 8 I'm OK, at 7 I'm phasing out all the time.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sleep deprivation has been a major cause behind more things than people appreciate. Many major disasters have occurred during the wee hours of the morning, often by people working later than intended. Chernobyl, for example, and the Bhopal leak. Sleep deprivation isn't the only cause in those cases but when there are minimal safeguards the effects of sleep depression become that much more dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER30> >I fall asleep most nights writing and rewriting opening lines and first paragraphs in my head. And every morning before I wake, I am somehow still writing sentences in my head, twisted into my sheets while comparing arguments and searching for counter-arguments that could undo a whole story.

While some of the arguments in the rest of the article seemed a bit dubious, this opening segment resonated with me—I find myself dreaming in code fairly often, tossing and turning while my brain works through some non-existent problem, iterating non-functional lines of code. It's bizarre, uncomfortable, I don't feel rested and I wake up tense. Generally I take it as a sign that I need to scale back how much of myself I'm sinking in to my work, as I think it's more likely to happen when I've been working longer or later days. I think if I worked in an environment where I was expected to work so much that I started having dreams like this on a more regular basis, I'd burn out or quit very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wanted to like this article, because I agree with the premise, but the author went a bizarre direction in trying to prove his thesis.

As constructed, several far-fetched notions would have to be true to support the conclusion in the way he argued:

\- the high failure rate must be due largely to bad ideas and not to poor execution

\- sleep deprivation must be endemic at Google, Facebook and Twitter

\- Google Glass and Android Wear (and corresponding FB and Twitter projects) must be the product of the sleep-deprived, and shown to be bad ideas (kind of early), and representative of projects at the company.

I think it would be easier to show that lack of sleep just results in poor work. It certainly makes more intuitive sense than honing in on the problem of "crazy" ideas.

</comment><comment><USER32> I hate reading on Forbes, it flashes text in the position:fixed headerbar every few seconds, an absolute nightmare to focus on the article while that's happening.(although I do manage to simply remove the headerbar from the page using the dev tools :P)

<comment><USER27> Install the Stylebot (Chrome) or Stylish (Chrome / Firefox) plugins and make your CSS edits permanent.

I've created over 1000 custom CSS styles over the past 9 months or so fixing various site "errors" such as this. Fixed headers, flyouts, and anything that moves are among the first to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Well I don't believe in the rules like "you have to sleep at least 8 hours", I think it depends on the person and in the part of your life you are in. Some people are able to perform great 8 hours, other people 10 hours and other people 16 hours (like Jack Dorsey). Each one has to know himself/herself.

What I don't understand is that if someone is about to faint because he didn't sleep enough keeps working… Here is a quote that this article remind me of:

"Make rest a necessity, not an objective. Only rest long enough to gather strength." \-- Jim Rohn

</comment><comment><USER34> Which only happen in countries without proper unions.

<comment><USER35> The tech industry is pretty much non-union the world around.

<comment><USER34> Well in my company they will get really pissed off if anyone does more than 50h weekly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think the desire to work as hard and long as possible is admirable -- but if the long-term result is lower real productivity, then it's ultimately futile and counterproductive. The flip side is, some people can pull this off occasionally, and a few can do it more than occasionally.

Oh, and the article does not support the title at all.

</comment><comment><USER37> Article itself is not as useful as the discussion it will bring. This is not a "How" article. It brings up some evidence that might connect to start-up failure but the evidence presented is super weak.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm not sure I'm more productive on 8 than 6 hours' sleep - is there any way to verify this? I'd even pay good money to find out the optimal amount of sleep for me.

<comment><USER39> Set up some experiments using [http://www.quantified- mind.com/](http://www.quantified-mind.com/) to see whether there's any difference in your cognitive performance when you've been sleeping for 6 hours vs. for 8. Practice the tests a few times, then start a custom experiment with your sleep variable in there. Alternate back and forth between each, maybe a week at a time, for a few weeks–test at the same time of day each day. Hit the Data Minding and see whether there's any perceptible difference in performance.

(Disclaimer: I wanted this to exist, so I helped Yoni build it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Aside: Does anyone else find the top bar on the forbes website with the flashing headlines extremely distracting?

<comment><USER17> They also refresh the page every so on, which usually prevents reading for a normal person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Light on evidence, still true enough to be worth discussing.

I think that sleep deprivation and the high failure rates are connected but not that the causal arrow isn't so simply drawn. People can be well-rested and still have terrible ideas. It might go the other way. It could be that, because these ideas are so terrible, people throw insane amounts of effort behind them to avoid being blamed when they fail. When you have a death march (and most VC darlings are whole-company death marches) you're going to see a split between those who disengage and drop out, and the "A for Effort" strategists who believe that 110-hour work weeks will be noticed above and have them "rescued" (promotion in a big company, EIR gig in VC) when their current project fails. Generally, founders are going to take the "A for Effort" strategy so that, if they fail, they can launch their careers in VC. Employees generally don't have those exit options, but they can't exactly leave before their bosses do in most of these companies.

What we have is an economy of asymmetric risk. Just as hedge fund managers share profits but not losses, and therefore have a higher-risk tolerance than the principals, the decision makers in the VC-funded world benefit disproportionately from obscene risk. Being able to say that one was in Facebook early is career-making for a VC, while 0x and 5x are essentially identical in the personal career calculus.

Founders share some of the risk (they suffer if the thing fails) but at least take part in the upside. Employees get mainly the downside: mediocre equity and no control, nonexistent career support, high risk of job loss and painful hours.

This leads to a risk fetishism (young people! fail fast! sleep is for the weak!) that doesn't make for a good place to work, nor does it produce broad- based success (VC is an underperforming asset class). It produces terrible ideas, reckless business expansion, _and_ the extreme long hours of the startup ecosystem.

TL;DR: the sleep deprivation is a symptom of a deeper problem (risk fetishism arising out of the principal-agent problem in VC).

</comment><comment><USER42> Sleep deprivation was an integral part of my work experience, from working on my dad's farm during the height of the summer harvest, to the Army. If you couldn't keep up, someone else would.

I often go 30, or more, consecutive hours without sleep when working on certain projects.

No drugs involved, no coffee, just a driving desire to accomplish my goals.

I also sometimes go 2 or 3 days without eating a real meal.

I think I got around 3 hours of sleep last night.

<comment><USER43> wow, you're really cool.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Examples of Apps with Lots of Data - <AUTHOR>

Can any provide examples of web-based applications that return an outrageous amount of data to the user?<p>I'm basically looking for UI/design inspiration for a database querying tool - results will more than likely be returned in a table-based format (similar to Excel). <comment><USER2> In case you ever need to generate your own data, I found it MUCH better to generate the data according to a clean, debuggable grammar, vs using a "test" database. You can return a spreadsheet with four columns, A, B, C and D for example, where each recordset would have a column-name prefix and to that you append a progressively "increasing" string. One sample recordset might be: (a-aaaa b-aaaa c-aaaa d-aaaa) (a-aaab b-aaab c-aaab d-aaab) (a-aaac b-aaac c-aaac d-aaac)

The size of your data would depend on the "width" N of your variable string suffix. In this case N=4 or a dataset of 26^4 when using only lowercase alphabetical letters a-z.

Predictable data makes debugging trivial. I'm not sure how that helps you with UI. It goes without saying not to return large datasets via ajax ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you aren't already familiar with the various web-based DB to tools, that wouldn't be a bad place to start.

The basic admin interfaces from Rails or Django are probably simpler than what you are looking for, but you might get some ideas. You've probably used it before, but exploring phpMyAdmin might be helpful to get ideas for features and improvements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was thinking of some of those but couldn't come up with a comprehensive list... DabbleDB, Zoho DB & Reports, others?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't think of any public facing ones at the moment, but a couple of prior (subscription or you had to have a series 7 type license) sites I've worked on would let the user get the data as an excel spread sheet. Sorry.</comment>


Ask HN: Everything I try to build already exists - <AUTHOR> As a beginner in programming and someone looking for something exciting to do, every idea I have already exists in some form.
Every project idea I have, I go to GitHub and there are at least a few dozen of them. Why should I bother?
Any advice to see this situation in a different perspective? <comment><USER2> As a beginner in programming, learning programming itself is supposed to be what's exciting to do. You're coming to know a whole new way of thinking and doing.

There have been an enormous amount of beginners before you; of course all the things beginners can accomplish already exist. Many have turned into experts before you, also; of course many of the things only experts can accomplish already exist.

But, it's all new to you. As a beginner, your job isn't to create, it's to learn and improve, to understand. Meaningful creation might come later. You can't do that if you never do anything at all. You have to start by learning what's possible, and that means doing things that have already been done, for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is normal, because you don't have enough experience to think of more advanced things. Also, programming is a means to an end. If you just sit around looking for something to program, then you'll be limited to your current shallow understanding of other people's problems.

Work on other people's projects for a while, and develop a hobby or work interest besides programming. When you find something that would be better if it were automated/digitized then you'll have both the technical skills and the domain insight necessary to create something new.

It might seem from reading interviews and blogs that other people are just overflowing with ideas for new things, unlike you. Don't worry about this. >>90% of interviews and so on aren't real studies of their subject, but really promotional - some light news/entertainment about someone of momentary interest that's engaging enough to be worth subsidizing with advertising. You can of course learn some interesting technical or personal details but they won't help you with the more fundamental questions. 'How I got my big break' stories usually get refined down to the level of an elevator pitch, and are neither intended nor likely to be informative.

tl;dr programming teaches you _how_ to make things, you need to explore other spheres of activity to get ideas about _what_ to make.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you find it exciting, who cares if someone else already did it? Do people avoid skydiving because someone else already did it?

If you're looking to make an impact, then help with an existing project. Most big open source projects have some kind of contributors guide.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's the joy of technology. There's always room for improvement, as you can imagine there are a thousand of things existing before these on Github.

If you enjoy a project, you can always submit a PR and became a contributor.

</comment><comment><USER6> It may exist but bring it to the average user and make it easy to use. The average user can not use github.

</comment><comment><USER7> Competition is good.

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/1*SCO-6zyGCoAcxPC_WAZXMA.jpe...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/1*SCO-6zyGCoAcxPC_WAZXMA.jpeg)</comment>


How Bitmovin Is Doing Multi-Stage Canary Deploys with Kubernetes: Cloud and On-Prem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kubernetes.io/2017/04/multi-stage-canary-deployments-with-kubernetes-in-the-cloud-onprem.html <comment><USER2> Hi, I am the author. If you have any questions please feel free to ask.</comment>


Ask HN: How much would you price a template-based simple lead-gen website? - <AUTHOR>

I am about to launch a template-based lead-gen website service. The template is simple but looks professional. The service includes the website (with wysiwig editing), web forms and notifications of leads.
I am considering a monthly-fee pricing.
The target is small businesses who do not have online presence yet, and need a simple website for lead generation purposes.
What do you think would be a a good monthly fee? <comment><USER2> This may be an inexact comparison, but is the WP plugin from seedprod.com similar to what you're doing? If so, his pricing may give you some clues on what the market will bear. I understand that the plug-in is doing pretty well as a one-man shop. (My info comes from Rob Walling and Mike Taber's podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us).

Note that the plugin is available free on WP.org and you buy up to the Pro version if you want the extra features.

As a small business owner myself, I would pay a one-time price (and seedprod.com's prices would be something I would pay). I would not pay monthly unless there are significant reasons so do so.

Significant reasons would mean (off the top of my head):

\- I not only capture emails, but the emails get dumped into MailChimp (or its equivalent) so that Something Good happens to them -- follow-up marketing, etc. In other words, don't just get leads, do something with them.

\- The lead generation functionality includes "give me your email address and I'll show you a good time next time you're in port, sailor" promises (see, I think promises of fun in the future are bullshit). But more important it gives me the ability to do something right now that provides real value up front to the lead. E.g., get instant PDF book.

\- And along that line, not only "give me an email and I'll show you a good time right now" but additionally "buy this thing right now." Again, in my case, an e-book. Bolt the functionality of Gumroad to it. (Purpose: it is easy to have people leave an email as a lead. I'd like to have -- on the lead generation page -- the ability to get the damned serious leads. People who are willing to spend money right now are serious).

And yes I have a project right now for which this would be useful. I own the domain name. The purpose is to sell an e-book for $X and drive leads to my law firm where people will pay some exponent of $X for services. And yes the e-book is ready.

So why isn't project live yet, you ask? (1) Normal life interferes; and (2) I'm about to get into a canoe and be eaten alive by mosquitoes in Ontario for many days.

So there you are. A potential competitor, and a potential customer.

Happy days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. And have a good canoe vacation. sounds good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think that this is a good idea, I've seen people in the internet marketing space sell themes and templates like this. What you should do is customize the template for different niches, i.e. one for lawyers, one for doctors, one for dentists, one for chiropractors, one for restaurants...

</comment><comment><USER4> Where?

<comment><AUTHOR> French-speaking countries.</comment></comment>