Time to abandon Gmail? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/debate/time-to-abandon-gmail/10131024/ <comment><USER2> I clicked the link expecting to see security/privacy arguments (perhaps a HN bias?). Instead, I saw arguments against Gmail's best-in-class web-interface. The combination of keyboard shortcuts, labels, and filters make it the best. Having used Fastmail, it does rival Gmail, but only if you are an advanced user willing to put the effort into making it fit your use case. The reason I am slowly switching away from Gmail is founded in security and privacy considerations, somewhat better control over my own domain, and I think that Gmail's move to a the tabbed inbox was failure in large part, and mixes junk with legitimate mail in my inbox.

FWIW, I've used Gmail for 6 or 7 years and Fastmail for 1 year.

Edit: clarification

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi I've been a Gmail user since its invite-only inception. I would agree with you about the UI a year ago. But the new SMS-sized compose window and the UI changes that put all non-basic functionality 2 or 3 clicks away are really annoying.

I would leave Gmail due to the UI changes, although I must confess I hadn't at the moment because it's too much bother to tell people about a new address, set up redirection, find out how to save all the old messages and have them at hand, etc.

<comment><USER3> I _despise_ the new compose window, but most of the time I'm using IMAP anyway.

<comment><USER4> This might help: ctrl-click the compose button to give it a whole new tab to itself. Shift-click for a new window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a strong trend of anti-Google stories, not just on HN, but all over the web.

Why? Is it just trendy to dislike Google? What are the alternatives to Google services? I am curious, I am not ready to dump Google, but I have been diversifying the services I use. Started using Outlook and Skydrive.

<comment><USER6> Outlook interface is the worst. I have been using it because my school is using it. Every two months or so I see new frontend changes. The style/font/color jesus christ. No. Just no. As much as I dislike some of the recent changes in the gmail interface, overall Gmail is still quite usable.

And if one doesn't trust Gmail then why would one trust Outlook or Yahoo Mail?

The one thing I complain the most about GDrive is only one account is allowed to log in and use google drive. I just don't understand why Google engineers haven't fix this issue.

<comment><USER7> >Outlook interface is the worst.

I haven't had an issue with it, and I've been using Outlook.com pretty much since it came out. Before then I was using the Windows Live Mail desktop client and before then I was using Gmail.

<comment><USER6> It's all subjective, frontend stuff. But it's ugly. Really ugly. The font, the color scheme, default all effing ugly.

A bug I encounter is when I click on an unread email, and if I then refresh the page the email is still mark unread, unless I read that email and hover to another email. Th

<comment><USER8> Weird, I have never encountered this bug and I have been on outlook.com since the beta days. Perhaps, you temporarily had bad connectivity?

Also, I will have to disagree on the design part. I find outlook.com refreshing. For me, that's just about right. Minimal, if any, bells and whistles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I heard convincing stories of a good client, I'd use that. But I've used Gmail's web interface for years, with reasonable happiness. And yeah, the anti-spam rocks.

</comment><comment><USER10> GMail keyboard shortcuts FTW! Love em. j-j-j-enter-v-"Fo"-enter

= Move down 3 items, open email, move to "Follow up" folder

When you have lots of folders drag n drop is totally useless compared to this.

<comment><USER11> Awesome. Didn't know about these.

Here's a list for the lazy: [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en)

<comment><USER12> You can also type a question mark to bring up a list in GMail. Be aware this list can scroll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Okay - what are the real alternatives to gmail?

-Outlook.com

-Ymail.com

-Hushmail.com

-Fastmail.fm

\---

Of the above - the only one I've heard great things about is fastmail.

Can anyone else add to this list? (I'll try to update it).

<comment><USER14> I'm surprised at the negative feedback Outlook is getting on this board. Have you tried Outlook recently? It's very good.

Compared to Google's rather cryptic UI (which has gotten even more cryptic over the years), Outlook UI is refreshingly simple and clear.

<comment><USER8> Completely agree. Sometimes I wonder whether people here actually use the products that think suck or just repeat whatever they have heard elsewhere.

<comment><USER15> BUT why are you leaving Google???? You are leaving Google to go into the arms of Microsoft????

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Abandon Gmail for Outlook? Surely the author jests.

<comment><USER16> His arguments are amazingly unconvincing, and he attempts to sweep by far the most important point for most people—whether or not Gmail is a good mail client or not—away with random hand-waving: "Meanwhile, its interface is as stale and frustrating as ever". Er, no, David, it's not (and never was).

Where does ZDNET find these bozos?

As far as I can tell, this is ZDNET hastily attempting to get some clicks by pandering to the youtube rage-quitting brigade.

Business as usual for them I suppose, but why do people post this crap to HN?

<comment><USER11> I've been downmodded heavily elsewhere onsite for suggesting that HNers love to hate google because of hipster mentality, so that clearly can't be it...

<comment><USER17> >I've been downmodded heavily elsewhere onsite for suggesting that HNers love to hate google because of hipster mentality

Because it's a stupid reason. You would get the same response if you suggested that the reason was that HNers love to hate google because they hate logos with color in them.

<comment><USER11> I think that if you examine the meta on HN dispassionately you'll see it's actually a very good reason.

It often gets couched in different language, but a great deal of HNers have a large dislike of HN because of either groupthink or mainstream-aversion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone recommend a spam filtering solution (doesn't matter if free or paid) that can match Google's? Spam filtering is the main reason I'm staying with gmail and from my limited experience, SpamAssassin can't even come close to it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it just me or has gmail got REALLY slow for anyone else in the last 3 months as well? As in sometimes it might take like a minute to open an email. I was hoping that it was some temporary issue but it does not seem to be going away.

<comment><USER20> I use (hourly) both regular GMail and apps for domains, and I haven't noticed anything like that. A minute to open an email seems like it would be really noticeable, too.

<comment><USER19> It's not always but it seems to be mostly with unread emails but sometimes with read emails as well.

<comment><USER21> Have had no problems lately either :S

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _> In its four years of life, Gmail has changed from embodying anti-Microsoft panache to being a gateway drug for Google's online services._

Pretty strange that one of the panelists chose not to include the "beta" years of GMail.

</comment><comment><USER23> I know Fastmail read HN, so I'm just going to use this as an opportunity (again) to say: please support push notifications on iOS! I _know_ it's Apple's fault, and they should support IDLE, but that's not the point. The point is that thanks to Gmail no longer supporting push for non-business email accounts on iOS, there's now a gap in the market, and I really really want to be able to use Fastmail to fill that gap. But I won't be renewing my subscription if they can't support push...

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone have anything to say about fastmail? I have been hearing about it lately.

<comment><USER25> I've been using it for several months now. I really like it. It's fast, and reliable. I made the move, and haven't (really) looked back.

The spam filtering isn't as good though. I've had a few false positives and false negatives. I don't get much spam, so it's not hard to have a quick look in the spam folder. Wish I didn't have to do this though.

I like paying for the product. It's nice to know my emails aren't being scanned to build up a profile on me. It's nice to know that I am a customer (of the traditional kind). I haven't had to use support yet, but it's there. Unlike Gmail.

I originally moved because I grew uneasy with the amount of information I had with Google. Now, I have none. A small win for me, but Google doesn't care. Ultimately, make the decision on the whole "best tool for the job" argument.

<comment><USER24> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Gmail is IMHO still the best mail provider – and in combination with Google App for Business, the best groupware provider.

I have tested many alternatives but I still mostly use Gmail. The reasons are mostly the feature set, the pricing, the security and the storage capacity.

There are only two major annoyances in my daily use: More and more Google+ integration, lacking IMAP support. The latter lead me to use Google's own apps or Google-specific browsers like Mailplane.

For heavy mail (and groupware) users, they only other alternatives is Exchange. Outlook.com/Office 365 is OK but very 'Microsofty', Hosted Exchange is a complete disaster.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's time for a worthwhile alternative.

<comment><USER28> Better yet, a worthwhile reinvention of the concept. I am hopeful with DarkMail, even though the name isn't very catchy. SecMail would sound much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Abandon Gmail for Outlook.com? After suffering through the mega-fail Games for Windows Live, real suffering: constant restarting and sign-in needed, really slow, really annoying update cycles, terrible support procedures; kinda worked when you went through hell... sorta thing.

After that torture, I'm reluctant to trust MS web email. I'm sure a different mob did the email application from the GFWL mess, but I won't rush over. I'd use Yahoo above Outlook. Yahoo email seems reliable enough, not too painful.

</comment><comment><USER30> Alternate question:

Is there room for a 3rd-party Gmail web client, in the same way that Mailbox is a 3rd-party Gmail iOS client?

<comment><USER31> I use Gmail through Thunderbird on the desktop and K-9 Mail on my phone.

I don't touch the web client at all except to set filtering rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm going to toss this up here as it looks like a really cool solution to self host. I haven't used it. [https://github.com/al3x/sovereign](https://github.com/al3x/sovereign)

</comment><comment><USER33> Like the 26 previous times we had no choice but to leave Gmail, right?

</comment><comment><USER34> Would anyone use peer-to-peer email service, that could send/receive to/from any other email provider and could be accessed also via web page, if there would be one?

</comment><comment><USER35> Yeah, Most of the govt organisations too block gmails because of the data it holds.....

</comment><comment><USER36> Anybody else think this is suspicious given the current outlook.com advertising campaign?

</comment><comment><USER37> i've been using it in html mode. it's not so bad!

</comment><comment><USER38> "No"

</comment><comment><USER39> LOL!</comment>


Immigration Is at the Heart of U.S. Competitiveness - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/05/immigration-is-at-the-heart-of-u-s-competitiveness <comment><USER2> So this is why the US was such an uncompetitive 3rd-rate country before the 1980's.</comment>


Digitize your doodles with an e-reader you can draw on - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/30/remarkable-wants-to-reinvent-the-notepad/ <comment><USER2> Can I ask, as someone completely outside the industry, why can't this be open? Most users don't want to fiddle and you need to make things just work, I get that for sure. But if I could choose my own syncing service or hack around with the reader software I would buy this in a second.

I don't mean to pick on reMarkable alone. I have the same complaint about Kobo. Does a locked down operating systems really do anything for the bottom line of this company? This is not snark and I'm not judging, I am seriously asking about how hardware companies make these kinds of decisions.

<comment><USER3> I plan on making it pretty open (ssh access over usb) and release the toolchain etc. that I use, but we don't have the resources to officially support third-party applications.

The OS itself is pretty standard Linux distro, but I might end up just using Debian. I also plan to try to mainline as many of the drivers we use as possible.

One of the issues I personally want to solve is the lack of a hackable e-paper device.

<comment><USER2> Thanks a lot for the reply. I totally understand the resources argument, especially as I'm probably one of the people who'd come looking to support forums because I bricked my device.

I'm super excited about the idea of a hackable e-paper device and look forward to seeing what happens. Congratulations on the launch, it's a great looking device.

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sink those svensk ships.</comment>


Teenager builds Death Ray - 5000 sun intesity - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1351935/Eric-Jacqmain-invented-Death-ray-dish-intensity-5-000-suns.html

<comment><USER2> Absolutely terrible reporting from the Daily Fail, as usual.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best Live chat Rooms For anyone associated  with Startups? - <AUTHOR>

Please provide links.  Thank so much. <comment><USER2> #startups on irc freenode

</comment><comment><USER3> I knocked one up with some mates around HN, some people didn't take to it too well but here it is anyway

<http://bleetbox.com/chat/123264/Hacker-News>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.hnofficehours.com/>

Is somewhat of a directory of hackers and their chat handles/contact info, if that's what you're looking for.</comment>


How to Build a Responsive WordPress Theme with Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/responsive-wordpress-bootstrap-theme-tutorial

<comment><USER2> Very bad:

\- Manual loading of jQuery, will lead to multiple jQuery loaded

\- Missing apparently all action hooks, see wp_head(), wp_footer() etc. This breaks basic blog functionalities and many plugins.

Not good:

\- Hardcoded path to CSS files, see wp_register_style etc

\- Hardcoded path to JavaScript files, see wp_register_script etc

<http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development> would be a good start.

</comment><comment><USER3> The project I've been working allows a theme developer to adopt bootstrap styles. One thing I don't like about bootstrap is having to subject the markup to bootstrap's classnames so I drop in bootstrap styles through mixins instead.

Especially all the grid related class names don't seem elegant to me for building a WordPress theme (fine for a quick mockup/early stage site though).

Let's say you want to have a wider sidebar, you'd have to change the php template file when it should be a simple tweak in the css.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bit of a shameless plug but I created something very similar here.

<https://github.com/Alan01252/WP-Bootstrap-2.1>

I used this as the base to create my current blogs theme ( can be found in my profile ).

Hope this helps others who my be considering bootstrapping their blog! :)

<comment><USER5> Hey, I've used this before. Works like a treat. Just wanted to say thanks!</comment></comment>


Linux Audio Conference April 9-12 2015 at JGU Mainz, Germany - <AUTHOR> http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2015/

<comment><AUTHOR> The call for papers is out now, and the online systems for registration as well as paper, workshop and music submissions are open.</comment>


Who is Mark Bao? Meet the 18-year old entrepreneur behind Threewords.me - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao-meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/ <comment><USER3> Thank you all so much for the awesome support. :) It's been a pretty insane roller coaster of a month, and I'm (unfortunately) starting college again in a few hours.

The interesting part of all this is that it's actually helping me develop my next step. Not in terms of startups, but in terms of life. In other words, is college something I'm sticking with long-term? Or is time of the essence and the need (and my parents' need) for a degree less vital?

Edit: also, how good is the startup community in NYC? I love the city, but not sure about the startup environment.

<comment><USER4> If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the chance to have a captive audience of thousands of women looking for a boyfriend will never happen again in your life. You should be one of the most ballin' dudes at Bentley.

NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women. It's not as easy as when you're in college. But it's about 100x better than Silicon Valley.

Relationships might seem unimportant when compared to your potential bazillion dollar website, but even the most autistic geeky weirdos want companions - <USER2> all of livejournal as evidence. I did startups in SV/SF for 10 years and could count the number of women I worked with on 2 hands. If you're working 12 hours a day, when are you going to meet the other women who aren't working at startups? At the bar, after work. But, you could go to any bar and there would be no women there, either. You end up condemning yourself to a life of near chastity hoping your startup sells so you can maybe attract a mate based on your bank account. That probably won't even work, there are loads of rich dudes in SF/SV who can't get a date.

The NYC startup scene is OK but kind of stupid. There is a lot of dumb money. For example, GroupMe got $10M for a product that took 24 hours to build and has already been built by a dozen other companies over the years. The guys working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands around. (Check their twitter history, I'm not just being snide.) I actually think they are cool dudes but I'm just using them as an example that the bar for funding in NYC is way lower compared to SV. The nouveau startup wunderkinds in SF/SV are now all straight-laced type-a achievers who went to Philips Andover, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.

(This is actually really weird, cuz it's the opposite of the previous bubble where SV/SF was a bunch of bipolar freaks and dropouts with purple dreadlocks, and you needed to go to Choate and Princeton and wear a suit to get a job in NYC)

I spent about 2 years in NYC hanging out with startups and came to the conclusion that most of them are just "playing startup." The startups that make the most sense there are startups that target the NYC market first, like Gilt and Foursquare and media/blog empire things like Gawker, Tumblr, and DailyBeast. GroupMe works well in NYC, too, as the main activity is to go out at night and you can use it to sync up. So if your plan is to service the NYC market first and then see how it spreads from there, it's not a bad place to be and it should be trivial for you to get funding $$$.

<comment><USER5> _If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women._

I will freeze that comment in time, it might end up going on HN's tombstone.

<comment><USER6> I actually found it significantly easier to meet women outside of college. I was a Computer Science major and all I did was go to my classroom with all males and work on my hw/projects with all males. Further, as you get older, you have more and more women you can date.

<comment><USER5> I have been upvoted for some unknown reason. My point was that such a crass, anti-intellectual comment is what is killing HN.

I have no further interest in discussing what aches the hearts of hormonal youth.

<comment><USER7> I agree that one of the cool things about HN is the level of discourse, but the idea that geeks must be social luddites should die. There is nothing crass about wanting to meet women in college, nor is it anti-intellectual.

<comment><USER5> Nothing wrong with it; but saying 4 years of your youth + $100k + all the opportunity to learn and grow is somehow worth wasting just for the sake of meeting "girls" is stupid.

There are women HNers too, but you don't hear them say boys are the highlight of the university experience.

<comment><USER8> >>> There are women HNers too, but you don't hear them say boys are the highlight of the university experience. <<<

Thank you. It's just shocking to me that no one called him out. The very idea that the central purpose of college is sex, sex and more sex is just disgusting. I'm not a prude by any means, but seriously what is this guy advocating?

I know that this comment really doesn't add much to the conversation, but I just can't help it. This conversation is the last thing I expected on HN, and I haven't been around for that long!

<comment><USER9> Maybe its my background (non-American by heritage) but most people that I know met their life-long partners in college. It was _not_ a time for serial sex.

Let's face it, companionship is important in life and college has a high concentration of people who are of similar age to you, relatively unattached, and of similar backgrounds or at least passions.

Now, turning to a cynical note---many if not most people think that college is useful as a certification that one _can_ learn, and is intelligent enough to _work_. A university education is required for a good job. If you already have a job, or money then to this group of people the only reason to attend college is love of learning or socialization.

I love learning, but lets not pretend that socialization is college is non- existent or even an insignificant part of the college experience.

<comment><USER8> A part of an experience != To the very purpose of an experience

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gotta give credit where credit is due. Mark, congrats on successfully selling off Threewords.me. Best of luck in your next startup.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool to see a writeup on a success :)

Doesn't say what everyone wants to know though - how much it sold for.

Also this is funny and sums up the domain name business for me:

> "He finally sold to Kevin Ham, an Internet entrepreneur who owns 300 million > in domain names including God.com and Satan.com."

      god.com gets no traffic
      satan.com fares even worse

Just because you have a one word english name .com domain, doesn't mean anything.

<comment><USER12> > Just because you have a one word english name .com domain, doesn't mean > anything.

It means he has money ;-)

<comment><USER11> or he was just the first person to think of registering them...

<comment><USER12> They're worth a lot of money, so my thinking was if he didn't have any money he'd sell them, although I guess maybe they're a super long term investment if he did just register them.

<comment><USER11> My original point though, is that they're only worth money to people who think they're worth money - domain speculators and 'cherished name' buyers.

To anyone else, if you think about it with a clear head, they're fairly worthless.

What is god.com? It doesn't get any traffic, have any users or product. If you bought it, you'd still have to find a way to get people to go there.

Yes, you _could_ build a brand/product/service around it, but then you could just choose some other name for your brand/product/service.

The web is literally full of domains like this.

      insure.com  $16m  Alexa 39,000
      sex.com     $12m  Alexa 24,000
      fund.com    $10m  Alexa 602,000
      beer.com    $7m   Alexa 374,000
      diamond.com $7.5m Alexa 103,000

So none of these get any real traffic, some are just holding pages asking for other silly people to buy them for millions.

<comment><USER12> So you wouldn't rather have irc.com than mibbit.com when you were starting out?

<comment><USER11> Certainly not. Despite the fact that irc.com would be blocking yourself into a specific protocol and not building a brand, I doubt anyone here has ever thought to go to irc.com.

I think building it around irc.com would have actually worked against me. People see <familiar word>.com as mostly holding pages/made for adsense sites, as well as being "web 1.0".

I did buy a domain - ircatwork.com. I bought it because it had users and traffic - things that are worth money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mark, congratulations on the sale and good luck with your future businesses. In the video linked above, you say that you don't know for sure what caused threewords.me to go big after a few days of little activity. Do you have any theories?

</comment><comment><USER14> Amy Chua would be proud ;).

Congrats Mark! I'm always happy to see young entrepreneurs do well.

<comment><USER15> There are people that like working on things the rest of the world views as "accomplishments" even without parental pressure, y'know...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hmm, a guy gets lucky and sells a really simple website and is now an entrepreneur/hacker genius?

It's stuff like this that makes me wanna read HN less.

<comment><USER17> First of all, forgive me for my english. I'm studying a lot for improve it.

I don't know Mark Bao personally, I live in Europe, but I really know a lot about he. He is not Lucky. He is so young, and have already created a some tech-company. 3words.me is only one of those, and was selled in few months. And nobody cares about how simple is an idea. The idea are worthless, the execution and the sociological effect are all, in a simple idea like this. Perfect execution, incredible effect on a lot of people. So, he is a good entrepreneur, and he will improve day by day.

<comment><USER18> You've explained what I was going to say clearly. Mark has worked on more than just threewords.me for the past couple of years. He's not some guy that just got lucky with a simple idea and cashed in.</comment></comment></comment>


Clojurescript still requires a JVM. Will this change in the future? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Yes: <https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr>

Clojure can run in the CLR, so if you have .net/mono you can (presumably, untested) run clojurescript onto top of the CLR

If you could port clojure to emitting LLVM bytecode or similar then it would be able to run as a native binary instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> CLR is a good host, though I do not use CLR (nor do I have noticed any of my fellow clojure users trying CLR).

Clojure seems to be 'for the JVM language' , in the line of Scala, Groovy (known as JVM languages).

Having said that, I will be pretty much excited about doing an LLVM port... :)</comment></comment>


Call for Code – Developer competition that seeks solutions for natural disasters - <AUTHOR> https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/ <comment><USER2> It is just a stunt from IBM to promote their WATSON software. a 200k$ prize is a small price to pay to get dozens of smart people to team up and work/test/enhance your products for free...

<comment><USER3> It's more than that. IBM is trying to win developer mind share, future tech decision makers are strategically important to them in their current situation.

<comment><USER4> I think they might need to accelerate their efforts, I think a lot of people here look at them in a very negative light.

<comment><USER5> I'd love to see a CEO do for IBM what Satya did for Microsoft. A lot of OSS people thought they were the devil, and yet they've turned that around massively. Unfortunately it seems (from the outside) that IBM is just organisationally crippled from size bloat at this point.

Maybe I'm being naive but what do their 350,000 employees actually do? That's nearly as much as Apple, Google and Microsoft combined.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft had a tremendous headcount as well. But I think that there is a subtle and important difference. Developers at Microsoft see themselves as product creators - and within every creator is a passion for the craft that good leadership can unlock. IBM, to my knowledge, has a much larger proportion of their headcount who are "contract maintainers" \- doing contracted work where their KPIs implicitly optimize for "how long can we keep/grow this contract" rather than "how good is the product created."

IBM has a cultural issue that will take far more than strong leadership to change - starting to change those incentives would require a disruption to IBM's business model that could truly hurt short-term financial performance, way more than Microsoft's "hey let's start releasing dev tools for Mac/Linux in ways that don't actually cannibalize PC sales - it's not like those devs were going to switch to Windows anyways - but do make it easy for them to become long-term Azure users."

And rather than fighting on the dev-tools turf, they're trying to gain mindshare with AI-as-a-service for people who aren't really innovating in AI. I'm looking at the icons in my Mac's Dock right now, and Microsoft's winning a ton of them with best-in-class IDEs and productivity software. Watson isn't in every startup developer's Dock. Now, if IBM bought Tableau and moved Cognos in that direction, adding generous free usage tiers, maybe they get Watson- branded icons on that Dock? But I doubt this happens any time soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do people really think _software_ is the element that's missing from current disaster prep & recovery efforts? I would've picked _money_ or maybe _leadership_. Maybe I'm unimaginative.

<comment><USER8> I certainly don't think missing software is the problem for disaster recovery, but there's something to be said for the idea that disaster recovery is missing from software instead.

Two examples that come to mind: Facebook developing their "check in as safe" feature for disasters, and Uber adding one-sided surge pricing so that they can respond to post-disaster demand without raising prices. Uber's move was mostly about fixing a prior oversight, but Facebook's has provided some fairly novel benefit. Basic mobile internet is both more widely available and more disaster-proof than other communications, so it's a welcome improvement on "people flood the phone system trying to call loved ones".

That said, the biggest opportunities here seem to be in disaster-awareness from developers of existing software. IBM's pitch of "come create novel software for disaster response" looks rather less convincing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This piece of code has been run for thousands of years and I see no reason why it shouldn't work now:

      do
        pray();
      while (badThing);

I accept PayPal.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that pseudocode would work, I'd be more inclined to use something moral and secure like Rust.

<comment><USER11> Surely we can encode morality in blockchain

<comment><USER12> I feel like a trojan that hijacks all existing blockchains and kill them would do more good to climate change than any other idea we could possibly come up with. We are burning an awful amount of electricity on something that's not being used for any practical purpose but only by speculators and "investors".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I could build a disaster-response version of my wish page [https://wishpage.tv/places](https://wishpage.tv/places) People could place a request (or a wish) on the map, that request is public and visible. People at the location can pick up a request (e.g. to make a video or to fly a drone over a volcano). Other people can up-vote requests and even attach money to them (rewards for fulfillment).

</comment><comment><USER14> An idea: provide a service for house buyers and job seekers: see which cities and neighborhoods are in danger of being inundated in the future. Probably it could be integrated with some real estate platform - calculate a simple risk score for the listing using open elevation and traffic data.

We need to start controlled abandonment of those areas already many decades early - starting from not investing more into building there.

This is a very cheap way of massive scale disaster preparedness: not having people where the disaster happens.

<comment><USER15> Do insurance companies not already do this sort of thing?

<comment><USER14> I don't know if they look so far ahead? Ie if insurance is just for a few years at a time at once?

There's a paper that proposes long term property insurance, which makes it seem the one year contract is the standard? [http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/J2010(JIR)_DJ,HK,...](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/J2010\(JIR\)_DJ,HK,EMK_LongTermProptyIns.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Ahh. That makes sense. So insurance is more interested in the potential for a claim within the current policy cycle and not the long term risk.

<comment><USER8> That, and in some cases highly-correlated risks get dismissed altogether.

If your neighborhood floods, that's a bunch of insurance claims, but if your city floods, that's potentially a bailout, bankruptcy, or contract exemption for the insurer. (In some cases, like sea level rise in Florida, there's already an understanding that the state is subsidizing insurance that wouldn't be available otherwise.)

So I could definitely imagine some value for a buyer-focused service that carries information about all known risk, not just covered/unsubsidized risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very much buzzwords-first and not problems-first.

> Blockchain

Ironic that such a power-hungry technology be used in dealing with natural disasters. If anything, it's just contributing to global warming. Can we please stop pretending that everything on Earth needs a blockchain?

<comment><USER16> Blockchain != PoW. There are plenty of blockchains without the problems you described (like IBM's Hyperledger).

<comment><USER17> Also blockchain != distributed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oof. I've got some training and experience in disaster management, including being a part of the overhead team for the Camp Fire last year through my county's search and rescue team.

The things they're advertising here just aren't the things that disaster teams need. Nobody on a natural disaster has ever said, "you know what would make this so much easier? ...Blockchain."

The only part of the Camp Fire that would satisfy a tech boner would've been Alameda County's drone team. It turns out that they've been fostering a pretty good drone team and they were able to do flyovers of large sections of the disaster area, capturing imagery down to 1cm resolution and piping it back to a mobile GIS center that looked straight out of an episode of CSI. Their work was good enough to satisfy the requirements for a lot of insurance adjusters who would ordinarily have had to physically visit the site. It could've sped up the entire search and recovery operation by several days if it weren't for CalFire's insistence on redoing all of it with pen and paper.

The number one technological need for disaster work is communications, hands down. One of the first pieces of infrastructure that falls apart during a major disaster is communications, and it's also the most urgent tech problem to solve, every time, because you _can 't_ have teams out in a disaster area with bad comms. We really need some kind of reliable, fast-deploying, low- maintenance radio and cellular infrastructure, and nobody's figured that out yet.

Probably the next big pain point is GIS or data management. Our current GIS software is good enough in the hands of skilled operators, but getting data into and out of it is labor intensive and its dataviz isn't exactly cutting edge. A mobile app that interfaced well with it and allowed search teams to bring up a search segment with a limited amount of data through a text message or QR code would be badass.

On the data management side, every single event, item of interest, and squawk of radio traffic has to be logged. Every single one. For a big disaster, this turns into reams and reams of dense paperwork and hundreds of man-hours to compile it all. And when teams arrive at IC in the morning, they have to fill out information cards and receive printed packets every single time, because there's no state-level coordinated database of DSWs and no way to quickly organize them by skillsets. This slows down deployment by around 2 hours in the hands of a top-of-the-line management team, and by much more when the incident management team is less experienced.

If you're seriously interested in pursuing any of this, feel free to contact me at the email address in my profile.

We've already started inter-agency training events for this year's next wildland-urban-interface fire.

<comment><USER8> This is fascinating, thank you.

My first thought reading the prompt was that "build tech for disaster recovery" is exactly the wrong direction of approach. There's far more good to be done, more efficiently, by taking existing systems in one category and finding places they can help in the other. "Adding disaster support to tech" might look like Facebook's safe-check-in feature, and "adding tech to disaster recovery" looks like everything you describe.

I would imagine the military truisms about technology are every bit as true in disaster management - namely that everything works right up until you need it, and has all the features you don't want but none that you do. Availability tracking for antibiotics sounds great, but it's probably useless unless it works over a crowded 2G connection and lets you manually alter records when the shiny inflow/outflow features can't describe reality. ("Blockchain for supply chain tracking" sounds particularly egregious; when you find out somebody mislabeled things five transactions back, what the heck do you do about it?)

Everyone I've known developing for outdoor or rural use is less interested in features than in redundancy, flexibility, and low-tech functionality. It'd be very interesting to work on something like bringing the easiest-to-use GIS solutions for hiking, research, or land development over to disaster recovery (assuming they're better than what you have). There are probably far fewer people qualified to build field-deployment cell infrastructure, but that also sounds fascinating. And all of it sounds far more useful than the IBM challenge.

<comment><USER18> > _...everything works right up until you need it, and has all the features > you don 't want but none that you do._

I hadn't heard that before, but yep, that's about right. _Especially_ when it's been developed by people without a lot of field experience.

> _It 'd be very interesting to work on something like bringing the easiest- > to-use GIS solutions for hiking, research, or land development over to > disaster recovery (assuming they're better than what you have)._

I hasten to clarify here that we don't really want to give up what we've got already for GIS, we'd just love some help extending it. What we use is a specialized offshoot of [https://caltopo.com/](https://caltopo.com/), built by the same developer but with additional features designed for search operations. That developer is himself a very experienced and well-liked search and rescue volunteer, and that experience is reflected in the features in the software (including the ability to host it locally). There's going to be a high bar to leap over to adapt anything else to fit the same niche and get the trust and adoption that sartopo already has.

But, for various good reasons, we still rely primarily on handheld Garmin GPS units for ground work. These need to be physically connected to a computer to get map data loaded and then search activity unloaded. It takes almost two minutes per device per operational period if nothing goes wrong, so in a massive multi-agency search, you can imagine the bottleneck this creates.

As a fall-back, we've started trying to use Avenza. It's ... okay. Anybody can walk up to a wall with a big printed QR code and start using their smartphone for navigation. But it still requires a network connection to get the search area loaded and it's not really ideal for retrieving search activities when a ground team returns to IC.

So what would be really sexy is an iOS/Android app that copied basic Garmin features, but had area map data stored locally (a la HereWeGo), and could communicate directly with sartopo to download segments and markers and upload tracks. That would be sooo nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I bet there are already projects in the making that will immediately claim the cash prize.

<comment><USER20> From their FAQ: "Applications must be new and built for the 2019 competition between February 12 and July 29 2019, but they may use code that was open sourced and available to all other participants as of February 12, 2019. Other than that, almost anything goes, and you can use any coding languages or open- source libraries."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Stop subsidizing flood insurance for people who live in places that are constantly underwater. Where's my check?</comment>


The winners of the 25th IOCCC are announced - <AUTHOR> http://ioccc.org/2018/whowon.html <comment><USER2> ... but not their entries!?</comment>


Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make an incredible discovery - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5731129/drunken-scientists-pour-alcohol-on-superconductors-and-make-an-incredible-discovery <comment><USER2> The superconductor proceeded to text its ex-girlfriend all night.

Couldn't help it. But I did try and find a more sober analysis of what was going on as it seemed that the only accurate words in the title were "scientists" and "superconductor." All I found was a press release from NIMS saying they would announce at ASC2010.

"The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS; President: Sukekatsu Ushioda) has discovered that alcoholic beverages, including red wine, beer, and others, are effective in inducing superconductivity in Fe(Te,S), which is an iron-based superconductivity related substance. This result was obtained in research by a team headed by Dr. Yoshihiko Takano, Group Leader of the Nano Frontier Materials Group of the NIMS Superconducting Materials Center (Managing Director: Hiroaki Kumakura)."

<http://www.nims.go.jp/eng/news/press/2010/07/p201007270.html>

<comment><USER3> The first comment on the reddit thread is also pretty entertaining: "Similar decreases in resistance occur when wine is poured on sorority girls."

<comment><USER4> They would say that at Reddit, wouldn't they.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It appears that science has reached its Ballmer Peak. <http://xkcd.com/323/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Ok, I've got to ask: is there anything red wine _won't_ do? Maybe scientists should start investigating it for use as an alternative to fossil-fuels as well? ;)

<comment><USER5> It will work wonders as an alternative as long as you remove the 90% water content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did they all jump then into the hot tub? And did John Cusack get transported back to the '80s?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm sorry, but it doesn't state they were drunk. They had a party and decided to test other liquids. Wine came out best. <http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.0666>

</comment><comment><USER9> I demand a similar experiment with marijuana.

</comment><comment><USER10> this reminded me of an article back in 2004, where an engineer discovered sake can be used to make wood pliable enough to form it into speaker cones: \- [http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/06/sake-marinade- soften.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/06/sake-marinade-soften.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Sigh. 12 comments so far and only 2 or 3 are not jokes?

<comment><USER12> I personally am happy to have a bit of humor. I hated the time humor was not an option here.

<comment><USER11> Though completely content-less humor comments are not explicitly against the guidelines, as you point out, for a long time now many many users have frowned on them.

Maybe its just time for me to start ignoring the discussions.

<comment><USER13> The reason they are frowned upon is because the discussion section should contain, ya know, discussion. Not 30 pages of tired memes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am suddenly struck with a flashback to the Cold Fusion experiments. I want to see this reproduced in a (pun totally intended) more sober setting

</comment><comment><USER12> Fellow HNer mmaunder has got a point here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1419536>

</comment><comment><USER15> I bet the superconductor just _thinks_ it conducts better a little buzzed.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was either hoping for Gay Robot* or Electric Dreams, but this is quite cool.

* Gay Robot was created when his inventor accidentally spilled a wine cooler on the motherboard.</comment>


Cathedrals, Pyramids, iPhones: Toward a Tentative Theory of Innovation (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://thefrailestthing.com/2014/09/26/cathedrals-pyramids-or-iphones-toward-a-very-tentative-theory-of-technological-innovation/ <comment><USER2> There's a lot of food for thought here but I would just swap consumerism with Capitalism, even if it makes it harder to digest.

The other point here is that as Capitalism becomes more sophisticated it suffers from the Innovator's Dilemma. Thiel himself understands that a monopoly is optimal under Capitalism but then won't take the next logical step to see that it will protect that position at the expense of innovation. Why are US taxes so complex? Because Intuit (Turbo Tax) makes a lot of money off of that inefficiency/lack of innovation.</comment>


Ask HN: I am about to launch a new site What pre-launch checks should I do? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> In terms of technical, seo, UX?

Is there a good easy to follow guide anywhere? What are the things I should be keeping an eye out for?

Tools I can run to check my site?</comment>


Imitation Game - <AUTHOR>

Just view this movie last night.  Though it was an outstanding one.  Don't understand why it did not receive an oscar. I wondered why England did not honor his contribution to the war and also would like to know if he was jewish.  His fellow school mates said "don't be such a kike. <comment><USER2> That whole project was very secret, and some of the breakthroughs were only revealed in the last few decades. Also the movie showed him considering being a traitor, but there is no evidence this happened (they just added it to the movie for drama). He wasn't Jewish, it was just a racist insult. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Early_life_and_fam...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Early_life_and_family)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your most informative reply. I did go on the site you mentioned, and learned alot. Later on, this evening, I think I will re-read it. There is much to absorb. Was it ever documented that he had an illness of sort.</comment>


Free hosted OSS alternative to Zapier/Airflow (now in public beta) - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.titanoboa.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN peeps! I single-handedly built Titanoboa (a workflow automation for JVM) and now I am just experimenting with hosting dockerized Titanoboa instances - so if you want to play with Titanoboa in your browser without installing anything, give it a try.

Feel free to check out Titanoboa on Github: [https://github.com/mikub/titanoboa](https://github.com/mikub/titanoboa)

Also: This is an early beta so please do let me know if something breaks or you spot a bug. Atm I have load-balancers set up only on West coast and in Europe, so apologies to folks from down under & similar locations, let me know if it's too laggy :)</comment>


Show HN: 1MB – Free and easy static website hosting and database - <AUTHOR> https://1mb.site <comment><USER2> Things I love about this:

I would have given my left ear to have a similar service growing up. There were a billion "free hosting" sites that let you throw PHP scripts up on them, and "free mysql" hosts that let you have a couple of free tables of X rows, which give a 12yo an incredible head start when it came to web-dev. The downside is that those sites were trying to push scuzzy gambling sites or were soft targets for hackers. This feels like a clean, modern reincarnation of that!

No, this isn't posterous where your creations will live forever, this is a little playground for those who don't know how to or rather not configure a VPS for a little toy they've made.

Great job!

(EDIT: Shout-out to 2008's T35.com and CJB.net and their free php hosting and short sub-domains [https://web.archive.org/web/20080617010556/http://www.t35.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080617010556/http://www.t35.com/) , [https://web.archive.org/web/20080408210303/http://www.cjb.ne...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080408210303/http://www.cjb.net/))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your kind words! In closing I can assure you that your creations will live forever on 1MB as long as you don't delete your account and follow everything outlined on [https://policy.1mb.site](https://policy.1mb.site). Also pride ourselves in being more secure than your average free website host

<comment><USER3> > In closing I can assure you that your creations will live forever on 1MB

I can assure you that the opposite is true. Tumblr deleted half their content. MySpace lost _all_ their content. GeoCities lost everything. Facebook "accidentally" lost Zuckerberg's old posts and with all the money and software "engineers" in the world can't recover them. Startups and corporations that had the kind of money and technical expertise you could only dream of can't keep data forever. Don't get carried away and make promises there is no way you can keep.

EDIT: I see you've redefined forever in the fine print:

> 1MB is not a big company. This is a project funded, developed, and > maintained by an individual. By subscribing to Pro you are helping keep this > project online for years to come.

> (1) Forever or for the life of the project. 1MB isn't going anywhere, but we > also can't predict the future. No refunds!

<comment> et-al > GeoCities lost everything.

Small nitpick, but Yahoo _deleted_ everything. Let's not forget how poorly run Yahoo is.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the clarification. For the purposes of my argument, the reason why the data no longer exists is irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love it, but one suggestion:

I'd change the headline to "1MB – Free and easy static website hosting and database".

That database is the edge you have compared to Netlify and Github pages people are asking for :)

The authentication part is a nice touch, too. Feels more like a community thing.

Checked out the API and you even have easy to setup database permissions. I like it.

-

Questions: do you plan to offer paid plans for people wishing to host more than 1MB, or having paid support? Maybe paid private login workspaces and SSO could be a paid feature too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :) Pro members get 1GB of storage and some other features: [https://pro.1mb.site](https://pro.1mb.site) (coming soon)

<comment><USER4> Nice to hear! Sounds like you have a great product AND a plan :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Pro launched! :)

<comment><USER5> You should really consider having Pro not being a onetime fee, but rather a monthly subscription, or at the very least both options. A single one time $100 fee is unlikely to go well with most users, but many more would be ok with contributing $5 or so a month if it meant supporting a good service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pro is $5 a month or $100 for a lifetime plan. The monthly option isn't available until I implement the new payment processor but please stay tuned I hear you :)

<comment><USER6> Worth telling people that a $5 a month is coming soon. Collect their email addresses.

Also the "no one can predict the future" is a bit scary so another thing is to promise you can get your data out as a static site for netlify, github etc. at any time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hit the subscribe to newsletter button in account settings I'm sending out an announcement when monthly pricing launches.

<comment><USER6> Thanks. But: I am suggesting you add clarity for other visitors to your site so you don't lose them because they think $100 and "it might disappear next year + tough shit no refund" is the only option.

By the way your offering fills a certain niche that I am interested in. That is the niche where a technical person like myself wants to design a site using HTML & CSS in text editor (how else would you do it!) but there is another nontechnical person who wants a nicer editor to edit the content. In addition I want a fast and cheap CDN type of offering. Netlify is what I use now, but it means I have to make the wording changes which sucks.

I imagine this is a common situation for small time website developers. For example if I make a site for the local pizza delivery, they might need to change their menu, but it is good if they can do it directly. But I like to host it as a static site so I know it is less likely to get hacked or be slow, and I can back it up more easily (looking at you Wordpress+MySQL+Bunch of PHP files called plugins).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Super nice. Despite presence of weebly, gumroad, shopify, squarespace, carrd et al, there is something missing that would put the rest of world on web, I feel; much like how WhatsApp has replaced most modes of personal communication in one fell swoop over the years, and how Twitter has taken over micro- blogging (key point: Both are free).

To do that, I guess, 1mb or similar businesses could add capability to create a website, post to it, update it via something as ubiquitous as WhatsApp, kind of like a Tumblr or posterous clone; add ability to accept payments, sell things.

Curiously, among my friends, telegram is used to consume content. They subscribe to telegram-channels and simply search for content posted and browse it right from the app. Much like how YouTube has replaced games, and Instagram has replaced Facebook, telegram in a sense has replaced Google/Browser.

Perhaps, someone needs to invent a new kind of web that is in symbiosis with WhatsApp or these other very popular apps. I guess that is exactly what Meesho [0] is doing, but not quite? May be some business like 1mb will figure it all out.

[0] [https://blog.ycombinator.com/meesho/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/meesho/)

<comment><USER8> WhatsApp is aggressively anti automation unless you're a big business. I'd definitely go for updates via email, though.

<comment><USER9> Whatsapp is opening it's biz API [0], hence founders are publicly speaking against it [1]. If you are big you get it first indeed.

[0]: [https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp](https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp) [1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian- act...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-acton-says- facebook-used-him-to-get-its-acquisition-past-eu-regulators/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks sweet. I might actually use this. A few questions:

1\. Why a custom JS-based CLI tool for deployment? What does it do? Why not something like plain SSH?

2\. What is the plan for this? Presumably you'll want to monetize the project? Will you ever add ads to my sites? Or will you offer premium features?

3\. What's the reason for the NoSQL DB?

4\. Your CLI tool only allows .png files as images. Is there a reason you don't allow any other types?

5\. Is there a limit on the number of sites you can have or the storage you can use?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. This tool allows you to deploy all files in your directory to your site. If you were using the API directly you'd need to deploy each file individually. 2\. It was monetized in the past but Gumroad banned my account because they consider web hosts to be a risky business. I'm re-implementing Pro soon (more info: [https://pro.1mb.site](https://pro.1mb.site)) 3\. It just seemed like the most logical way to store and retrieve data with JavaScript. 4\. It's coded by a friend of mine but I'll pass that feedback along! Thank you 5\. Only 1 site per account. There is a 1 megabyte storage limit. I know it sounds crazy but most users don't even come close. Pro users get 1 gigabyte.

<comment><USER11> Can u tell about your experience getting banned?

Were u allowed to withdraw your balance? What r u switching too?

<comment><AUTHOR> They banned me without warning and refunded all my customers and I wasn't impressed. After reaching out they refunded me all the money I lost though. I'm studying my choices

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love this service, and I have used it from the start. Whenever I see these free services offering freedom and creativity I see easy opportunity for abuse. I hate visiting a free service to see a note left behind from the developer - "sorry, we were flooded with spam and I had to wipe the database/shutdown the service". What plans do you have in place to prevent this from happening. All I can think of when I see free web hosting is "how long will this one last". Explain to me why I should place my trust in this not shutting down in the next couple of years :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have automated filters coded to help with spam and other abuse. I'm also recruiting volunteer moderators as we speak. Another reason you can trust that 1MB won't shut down anytime soon is that it's a profitable business and I'm passionate about building it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The service itself is really cool and lines up nicely with the likes of Netlify and Github pages. I have two concerns though:

1) This doesn't seem to be connected to any major company, so how are you going to handle abuse of the service? With 'free hosting' offerings like this often comes a wave of abuse and malicious actors, so dealing with them is going to take significant resources.

2) How are you planning to monetize the service? Even though most sites hosted wont exceed a few kb, hosting fees will quickly add up, and unless you are using a cheap bare metal server you will likely face significant monthly bills.

These concerns aside, the service looks really awesome for most personal blog use cases, so congratulations to a successful launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. For the past half year I've been moderating the site myself and also have automated filters I've coded. I'm recruiting some volunteer moderators soon! 2\. 1MB was monetized in the past but got banned by our payment processor because they consider web hosting to be a risky business. It's honestly my own fault I should've read the terms. 1MB will be monetized again soon when I implement a new payment processor: [https://pro.1mb.site](https://pro.1mb.site)

<comment><USER14> Here's a list of payment processors that was on HN earlier today:

[https://startupstash.com/paypal- alternatives/](https://startupstash.com/paypal-alternatives/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19771573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19771573)

Just dig into each that might fit your situation looking for people's props and gripes about them. Edited to add the HN link since commenters mentioned other services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, this is fantastic -- can't count the number of "free hosting" sites that are disappointing because they don't have a database. Well done! I may try it out.

<comment><USER16> What's the point of having a database for a static site though?

<comment><USER17> 1\. To store the site content in 2\. To store metadata that gets integrated into the generated site 3\. To record stats/metadata about the site generation

There's probably other scenarios people can think of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you want to upgrade your account check out: [https://pro.1mb.site](https://pro.1mb.site) \- For a one-time $100 payment you'll get access to 1MB Pro forever and help support an indie project. Monthly cost will be $5 a month when I implement my new payment processor. Until then only lifetime purchases are possible.

<comment><USER18> lifetime for as long as the developer decides to maintain the service?

<comment><AUTHOR> The combination of revenue between lifetime and monthly subscriptions actually far outweigh hosting costs after I hit an easily obtainable customer number. Granted I'll need to scale my server in time this is actually a sustainable business / I understand being skeptical of "forever". If you were paying $5 a month it would be $60 a year, in under 2 years you're already making your money back

<comment><USER19> It's rarely about the cost and more about the level of effort to maintain said service. Without a plan in place it's hard to accept "it Shouldn't lose money" as valid proof that you won't grow bored of this in 1...2...5...10 years. Also, more lucrative things may come up and take up your time, making running this current service unappealing or impossible.

<comment><AUTHOR> My point is $100 is about a year and a half of monthly 1MB Pro payments, so you only need to bank on 1MB lasting a year and a half at least not "forever" to get your money's worth (and you're supporting an indie project). Anyways I've added a disclaimer: "Forever or for the life of the project. 1MB isn't going anywhere, but we also can't predict the future. No refunds!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I haven't tried this yet but it reminds me of the spirit of GeoCities.

For years now I've been hoping that one day the wheel of internet trends will roll back around and make personally-designed webpages a thing again instead of this bland "social media" landscape.

<comment><USER21> Check out neocities.org

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This looks super cool! And I love that this is run by an indie dev and not some VC-backed startup or big corporation.

Definitely bookmarking this so that I can come back to it and see what I can build once I have time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Awesome service! Thanks for making it available.

A small comment: In the 'Edit Site' page, the preview is reloading with every keystroke. Would it be better to make it refresh on the click of a button?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted it to be live feedback, but it is kind of distracting. I'll add that to my development roadmap! Thanks for using my service :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome work, I will introduce this to my kid. With the built-in database/kv- store and excellent UX, I can't think of a better platform to get started with web development.

<comment><AUTHOR> How does your kid like 1MB?

<comment><USER24> He's mostly concerned with the learning curve of HTML and CSS, so I'd say that it's a success so far - no tooling got in the way of his learning. We haven't gotten to using the database yet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is great and incredibly useful.

Quick note:

Google sites requires 2 nameservers and because of that I am not able to point the site to my domain.

</comment><comment><USER26> Love the simplicity and custom domains. I often use glitch [1] but will give 1MB a go as custom domains is difficult with Glitch.

Side note, your footer on mobile is missing some items unless you release you can swipe across - which is not obvious.

[1] [https://glitch.com](https://glitch.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a horizontal scrolling menu by design let me think of how to make it more obvious, as I see what you mean

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looks great! Please make a plan how to deal with abuse; in the past, most services that provided low-friction hosting stopped being low friction (e.g. they started requiring login with a facebook account), presumably to cut down on abuse (like phishers creating lots of accounts to host phishing sites).

<comment><AUTHOR> In the past I ended abuse by adding that recaptcha to registration form. I'm recruiting volunteer moderators as we speak :)

<comment><USER28> That may stop automated abuse but ultimately that's less of a concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What if one of your users gets lucky and traffic goes huge for one site? Everybody else gets 503's? Have you planned/designed for such scenario?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a fair use bandwidth policy. You can't abuse it.

<comment><USER29> You mean: if passed certain traffic threshold a particular site gets automatically blocked, or, you hope your users will be fair?

Let's say that given your service is free and with custom domain, a journalist uses it to publish 100k worth of revealing docs in whistlerblower.com. Then a government acts and directs a DDOs to it. What will happen to that site? To other sites?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cool! But I can't see anything on the site about who is behind this. Did I just miss it or is it missing?

Especially when a service is free, I want to know a little about who I'm getting involved with.

Edit: what's the deal with the downvotes? It's entirely reasonable to ask who is behind a service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello my name is Dalton Edwards and I've been building this project for over half a year. I'm sorry I didn't make that clearer (I do link to my personal site in the footer). I'll write a bio about myself on the homepage.

<comment><USER30> Hello :) thanks. I'm excited by the project and I think transparency is important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Three suggestions:

1\. please dont have "forever" pricing. i would rather pay a higher fee monthly.

2\. please have tiers according to size and bandwidth requirements

3\. Instead of creating your own cli, etc. Could you integrate with Gatsbyjs ? In fact, your killer feature could be a wysiwyg editor for Gatsby

I would strongly prefer an open standard like Graphql over a custom nosql you have. You can implement it at your end using something like [https://hasura.io/](https://hasura.io/) or something.

this is killer if it happens. You are basically netlify+gatsbyjs+contentful rolled into one. I could never figure out why netlify and contentful dont support the features of the other.

<comment><USER32> > please dont have "forever" pricing. i would rather pay a higher fee monthly.

Well, I would disagree. Forever pricing would be awesome.

<comment><USER33> I've gotten forever accounts with shodan and a very popular vpn service, I was half expecting the service quality to at least diminish after a year or two around the positive return mark but didn't happen. They've outperformed my expectations dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This forum thread scares me: [https://forum.1mb.site/?t=1556326142930](https://forum.1mb.site/?t=1556326142930)

GET requests never affecting state is backend web dev 101.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's nothing like this even though it seems like there is. Great job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is very cool! I'm currently using Netlify to host tiny sites for non profits and local candidates. I love Netlify, but this would be an interesting alternative. Being able to edit in the browser could also be a big deal to allow some of them to edit their own pages. Netlify has forms but they are pretty limited (100 submissions per month on the free plan). I'll definitely give you a try when the next one comes around. Being able to store a little data is another really big plus.

</comment><comment><USER36> Is the 1MB name a reference to data limit? I couldn't see anything saying so but that's what sprang to mind.

I like it. Some people have expressed concerns about yet another platform which holds your data. I don't actually have a problem with that as long as you can leave without being penalized. A good way to alleviate those concerns might be a feature where you could download all of your site data along with a guide to setting it up self hosted.

<comment><AUTHOR> You get 1MB of storage. Don't be discouraged though most users don't even come close to using it all. You can delete all your data from my server at any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It displays as garbage on my system (Linux, Firefox 66.0.3): [https://screenshots.firefox.com/loCbaBtgGVqoUYeh/1mb.site](https://screenshots.firefox.com/loCbaBtgGVqoUYeh/1mb.site)

somewhat better with Chromium but weird nonetheless: [http://i.imgur.com/1IbVXEQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/1IbVXEQ.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm at a loss for words does anybody else want to weigh in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why is it called 1MB? Is it a reference to the maximum storage you get? It'd be interesting for size optimized sites.

Also are the sites supposed to look that big? [https://i.imgur.com/QIRNATC.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/QIRNATC.jpg) (sorry for shitty photo quality, my phone is ancient... i took a photo instead of a screenshot to show how big it looks physically)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's called 1MB because free members get 1 megabyte of storage. You build your site from scratch or use a template. That's just how I chose to make my site look

<comment><USER38> So i tried it out: [https://badsector.1mb.site/](https://badsector.1mb.site/) (this is something i made a few years ago, i didn't make it now :-P)

The UI looks a bit too big on my monitor, but other than that it is nice for small stuff. I think it needs some way to upload multiple files from the browser via upload dialog and/or dragdrop (like imgur does, for example).

Also i found the editor autocompleting the closing tag very annoying! Also a bit annoying was the "smart" autoindentation (autoindent is fine of course, but trying to be smart clashes with how i'd indent things).

Anyway, good luck with it :-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I want to upgrade and support this project. But I am not sure if this is a scam :) should I wait before doing this ? Any thoughts ?

<comment><AUTHOR> This project is ran by a guy named Dalton (me), not by some big company with lots of funding. When you upgrade to Pro you're helping offset hosting costs and validating the countless hours I spend developing this project. 1MB has been featured on Product Hunt twice: [https://producthunt.com/posts/1mbsite](https://producthunt.com/posts/1mbsite) & [https://producthunt.com/posts/1mbsite-v2](https://producthunt.com/posts/1mbsite-v2), has over 300 followers on Twitter [https://twitter.com/1mbsite](https://twitter.com/1mbsite), and is hosting over 1,100 sites at the time of writing. What's my point? 1MB is trusted by many :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have been looking for something like this! My use case is a minimal CMS back-end and admin interface.

Basically adding some dynamic content to a otherwise static site that the user(s) can change themselves.

The 1mb site would be an admin interface for changing the content in the DB, the 1mb DB serving the content to the front-end hosted elsewhere.

I'll have to try this out. Very cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :) I hope you like 1MB

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I love this so much. I would be so happy if this kicked off another round of blogs and brought us back to the sharing economy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :) that would be awesome and anything is possible when it's this easy to get online

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This looks really cool! It seems like it's just what I've been looking for lately, without realizing it. Will look more into this when I get back from vacation. Thanks for sharing and showing.

</comment><comment><USER43> Looks succinct and minimalistly practical. Is it totally open-source in the sense that I can replicate the 1mb.site on my own server using 3-4 the repos published on Github?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! You can't self-host 1MB, but we do offer some open source software on our repo at [https://GitHub.com/1MB](https://GitHub.com/1MB)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Very refreshing to see a come back of simple, static websites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I tried using this today. I couldn't find a way to rename the site I signed up for; I didn't make the connection that the username would be the URL/site name. I also couldn't delete my primary site to create a replacement, so I had to close my account just to create a site with a new name. Just thought I'd let y'all know a minor inconvenience I ran into.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll make it more obvious on registration that the name can't be changed :) I'm sorry about that. I'd add a username change option but it would actually require a lot of updates to the backend

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Am I supposed to see something here?

[https://i.imgur.com/WNBbIep.png](https://i.imgur.com/WNBbIep.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> "Securely access a NoSQL database using nothing but JavaScript

With permissions, enforced fields, and the ability to get the logged in 1MB username you can easily create a dynamic application. Check out chat.1mb.site and forum.1mb.site which are both applications that utilize a 1MB database.

Click here to read the API documentation." looks like inspect element lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This looks really neat! Seems perfect for those set-and-forget, single purpose type websites. Maybe I'll move [https://xkcd.wtf](https://xkcd.wtf) over to you!

The only question is: how long will you be able to run this? There have been so many free webhosts that shut down over night, my confidence in any hosting project is limited

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been running 1MB for over half a year and it's my passion project. I'm constantly improving and adding new features to it. 1MB makes money from Pro upgrades it's just temporarily unavailable. I want to run this project for years to come. [https://pro.1mb.site](https://pro.1mb.site)

<comment><USER48> Love it!

Also, you said the magic words...

What are the magic words? Are they "Abracadabra", "Alakazam" or "Open Sesame" perhaps?

No.

The magic words are: "Passion Project".

In any marketplace, there are 800lb Gorillas, medium players, and "Passion Projects".

I tend to root for the "Passion Project", having several of my own.

I mean, this is America, right, many of us root for the underdog, right?

Good luck with your "Passion Project"! May it grow and grow! (Also, realize that as it does, it will attract more and more criticism -> criticism = _barometer of fame_ and _indicator of success_ , that's criticism's secret identity, just so you know in advance! <g>)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I had a similar idea, with storage limit of a classic 1.44MB floppy disk. Imagine an entire website which fits in a floppy disk.

</comment><comment><USER50> Could this be used to create a niche CRM? I've got someone asking me to develop a CRM for them in their business domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but if you can build it with JavaScript and a NoSQL database than yes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Could you contrast this with Netlify? I believe they are in the same segment but I haven't used either.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I'm aware Netlify doesn't offer a code editor in your browser. 1MB is geared towards simplicity but is able to be technical also.

<comment><USER52> I haven't personally used it, so I don't know its limits, but Netlify offers an OSS CMS tool that you have to setup and configure yourself on your own static site.

[https://www.netlifycms.org/](https://www.netlifycms.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Boils down to the same answer as GitHub+Hugo argument. No installation required to use 1MB

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Congratulations on your HN success.

Having that built in DB is a killer feature to me.

Does the DB prevent hackers from overwriting keys?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1MB databases with public write permissions don't let you overwrite keys :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> [https://an.1mb.site](https://an.1mb.site)

"I'm An ..."

You're a what?

<comment><USER55> An. It's a name.

Though I'll admit I was confused as well until I saw the twitter handle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Nice work! A small question: even though I'm a real person always logged in on Google, the recaptcha you've used makes me click few photos for free ... Is it a setting you control when you put that plugin in your website, or Google does everything itself?

<comment><USER57> No, site owners do not control what challenge you receive from Recaptcha.

<comment><USER56> Yeah, my question was more about 'how many' than 'what'. There is no question Google doesn't think I'm not a real person, it still shows me two to three pages of image clicking making me its worker robot for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Great service. Use it since it's online for my little Job Board Listing: [https://altafino.1mb.site/](https://altafino.1mb.site/) Up in seconds, easy if you know basics of html.

</comment><comment><USER59> If you can make a chat app, I am not sure you need to say static, it's static + optionally dynamic.

Looks good.

<comment><AUTHOR> I refer to it as static hosting because even when using a 1MB database you're querying it with JavaScript. Also databases are a new addition to 1MB so I'm at this weird crossroads where I don't know if it's static hosting anymore. Thank you!

<comment><USER60> You might consider hitching your wagon to the term "JAMStack"... I have been playing with Hugo and the experience is great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Very cool default site page...! (Eg your page not found page or putting IP in browser)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> How does it work in terms of security? If I make my sites' database writeable by authenticated users, doesn't in mean that any authenticated client can send a request to delete all records?

<comment><AUTHOR> The db-delete endpoint always requires your API key no matter if read or write permissions are enabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I tried to deploy a Hugo static site to 1mb, and while it rendered fine on localhost, it would display text only on 1mb. Is this feasible, and what could I be doing wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1MB doesn't support directories at the time of writing.. did your Hugo site make use of directories? Or another thing I can think of is if you're trying to make a single page site make a 200.html file (it'll replace index.html and all requests to nonexistent files will go to 200.html)

<comment><USER63> Thank you for getting back to me! It is definitely caused by directories; I didn't see anything about that in the 1mb documentation (or skimmed and missed it), so I figured I just had settings wrong. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Any sort of git/GitHub integration features (or planned) ? Eg, I saw mention of code/theme editor, and working git into that would make some sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would that Git implementation look to you?

<comment><USER64> I think most would expect to just have a remote Git repo where you can push your site to. That would then do a checkout on the web server automatically.

<comment><USER65> Precisely this! 1MB is perfect for a small "hosting" company putting other small companies online, e.g. John's bakery. A git deploy functionality would drastically improve automation to manage websites. I know the provided cli can do it, but it's a other thing to integrate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pro members can host up to 5 websites per account now :) [https://pro.1mb.site](https://pro.1mb.site)

</comment><comment><USER66> Dang, this is awesome. I love everything about this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Hope you find 1MB useful :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Looks great. Now on my to-do list to build something using it. Well done and wish you every success with this as a business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I really hope you find 1MB useful :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is really fucking cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :) it's a project built with lots of love

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Looks nice. But what does it provide over Github/GitLab pages?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't understand Git you can use 1MB. When you log in you get access to a code editor in your browser. It has lots of features to help get you online fast. 1MB is meant to be an easy to use tool, but it does offer advanced deployment options too via API and CLI. Also it has a NoSQL database unlike GitHub and GitLab Pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Have you considered using OpenID authentication?

</comment><comment><USER71> I don't know why everyone is being so negative in the comments so far. It's really discouraging to other people who want to share something they made. It makes me sad.

OP: This is cool. It's not meant to replace Netlify or GH Pages or a million other things, and I understand that. Some people just want to make something and you made something. You've done more than so many people here by just releasing something and that's something to take great pride in. I don't have a use for it personally, but I think it's really cool and I took a look at the code to see what was going on. I found it neat.

Ignore and excuse everyone that's expecting a multi-million dollar product from you.

Everyone else: If you're genuinely asking "what's the point of this?" or "why's it free? who are you? why should I trust you?" or "what does this do that Netlify or GH Pages doesn't" — let's get real for a minute: Not everything is meant to compete with these services, or any service. There are a hundred-thousand products that exist on the internet with very happy users that you and I have never heard of. This bias that everything needs to be "the one" that we all use is discouraging, isn't the goal of this community, and isn't in the hacker spirit. It's fine to be skeptical and curious, but don't be a downer or shame.

This is show and tell: Timmy brought a rock he thinks is cool, Cassie brought her mom's diamonds, and Shaun brought a 2Pac album. Don't yuck other people's yums.

<comment><USER72> That's a good point - the attitude of "how is this any better than X, just use X" is one of the reasons why the web is so centralized.

<comment><USER73> The reason why the web is centralized is that people use other people's computers to host instead of their own. Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now. Hosting a simple static site is easy and works well.

If this 1MB free hosting ever became popular enough it'd be just as bad as all the other centralized sites.

<comment><USER74> > _Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now._

Uh... Down maybe. Up... We're not quite there yet. Rural America (sometimes just a few miles outside a major city) can have <5meg down and under 0.5meg up. During non-peak hours that is.

<comment><USER38> Also, sadly, many ISPs dislike you serving stuff from your own home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Great job!

</comment><comment><USER76> Hard to see what this offers beyond a simple GitHub+Hugo combo.

<comment><AUTHOR> For starters unlike Hugo you don't have to install 1MB

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> What can you really do with 1 megabyte? Clearly nothing serious. Why suggest it's free then? Neocities provides 1GB which is actually a relevant amount.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're entitled to your opinion. Please check out the featured sites on homepage. All of them with the exception of some Pro sites (which get 1GB) were made with only 1MB of storage. Most users don't even come close to reaching 1 megabyte. Not to mention you can link to external stylesheets and scripts...

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> OVH also offers a 10MB free hosting with Let's Encrypt for every domain, probably more reliable

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright I found the link. OVH's 10MB plan only has 1 GB of monthly bandwidth while 1MB's is unmetered (fair use - don't abuse). OVH's 10MB plan doesn't give you access to a database while 1MB gives you access to a secure NoSQL database. In closing they have more storage but they make up for that by taking away some core functionality that 1MB offers. [https://www.ovh.co.uk/domains/start10m_hosting_offer.xml](https://www.ovh.co.uk/domains/start10m_hosting_offer.xml)

<comment><USER79> Soft promises ("unlimited, don't abuse") make me nervous because they are not clear.

Is making the front page of HN and doing 50gb in one day "abuse"?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not going to ban a popular site. I have a fair amount of bandwidth. I'm only going to ban a site who purposely abuses resources</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to watch job listings from indeed.com using Scraper.AI - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@maxim_9663/how-to-watch-job-listings-from-indeed-com-using-scraper-ai-fa7399e80a00 <comment><USER2> I'm always interested in these anonymous reviews that make "x seem so easy", I end up assuming there's a bias.

The guide was written by "Maxim" and posted as "artif4ct". The tool "Scraper.AI" is owned by the company "Roadwork", which a google of "Roadwork scraperai" leads to the likely developer Xavier Geerinck[1].

A google of "Xavier Geerinck "Maxim"" leads then to the brother Maxim Geerinck who has a real medium page [2]. The poster "artif4ct" previously talked a lot about betanotify.com, which was written by Maxim so it's fair to assume Maxim runs "artif4ct".

I have nothing against self-promotion of a neat tool, but using a sock-puppet medium account to promote the ease of a tool your brother wrote without any mention of the bias or cost is, in my opinion, unethical.

On another note, there's a small spelling mistake here: "Therefor we bill based on usage where each scrape represents 1 unit." which should be "Therefore we bill based on usage where each scrape represents 1 unit.".

1\. [https://twitter.com/xaviergeerinck?lang=en](https://twitter.com/xaviergeerinck?lang=en) 2\. [https://medium.com/@maximgeerinck](https://medium.com/@maximgeerinck) 3\. [https://www.indiehackers.com/product/beta- notify](https://www.indiehackers.com/product/beta-notify)

</comment><comment><USER3> While it's an interesting method I'm doing the same thing but by using RSS feeds and it's way more simple than using a scraping service.

Go to Indeed, do a search with your preferred parameters (job title, city, pay, etc) and add the URL to a RSS Reader like Feedly or Inoreader. Done.

<comment><AUTHOR> RSS is indeed a great way, a lot of sites don't support RSS. This method shows how to do it without, might worth having a tutorial on how to do it with RSS

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People really will stick "AI" onto anything these days.

<comment><USER5> This just makes me want to get the domains aiaicaptain, aiofthetiger, aight, aisee, aido and aiofthestorm.

spoiler alert: they were all taken! (except for aiofthestorm if someone wants it)</comment></comment>


Before Capitalism, Medieval Peasants Got More Vacation Time Than You - <AUTHOR> http://evonomics.com/capitalism-medieval-peasants-got-vacation-time-heres/ <comment><AUTHOR> My sincere hope is that AI and robots bring about uncoupling of society from the burden of full-time employment. I'd like to see a society where people work 25 hours some weeks, 50 others, but it's more free-lance style and all basic necessities are taken care of. People can also pursue non-paid gigs during the times they would've worked. Honestly if we can work on increasing iq's across the board and not worry about how people pay for basic necessities more people can become scientists and work towards more innovations.

</comment><comment><USER2> "As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually."

Well why they don't count in weekends? Compare apples to apples.

</comment><comment><USER3> Before Capitalism, Medieval Peasants starved to death

<comment><USER4> Obviously not, since they had enough surpluses to feed the lord and knights. Also, they weren't dumb enough to try to fight human made climate warming, which led to a few good centuries. On the other hand they died from cold during the small ice age.

Of course, the modern peasants can feed 99% of the population, but they are still staved to death by the Capitalist banksters. [http://reinformation.tv/monde-paysan-suicides- campagnes-3949...](http://reinformation.tv/monde-paysan-suicides- campagnes-39490/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I meet a co-founder? - <AUTHOR>

TL;DR I'm 18 and I need a co-founder but have no connections or knowledge
Let's ignore the fact that I have no real experience, startups are hard etc. but I really need a co-founder. Problem is, I'm a fairly good programmer, I can happily sit down and code pretty much constantly for months. But I need some help with my idea, I need a co-founder to help me out with some of the business stuff I don't understand, getting designers/other staff, helping with the pitches to investors and all that sort of stuff. I have no real connections locally (All the work I've done has been with people from the US, I live in the UK), it'd need to be someone prepared to fully commit to the project and be enthusiastic.
What do you suggest? I've looked around, there are no "hackathons" near where I live, and even if I was to go to London they're not very often or as popular as the ones in the US. I don't really want to just start going round telling everyone my idea but I'm not going to get anyone on board looking for someone who want's to take part in "a secret project".
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts -Sam <comment><USER2> My two cents -

I could be wildly wrong, but it sounds like you want to start a company more because you know you want to be an entrepreneur than because (a) you have some idea that you are convinced will revolutionize the world and (b) you are convinced it is your destiny to bring this innovation to humankind.

If this is correct, given your age, I'd recommend either going to a school or working in an environment where you will be surrounded by really smart and ambitious people. This may not be the best way to find a co-founder _right now_ but in my opinion, it will yield the best results in the long run. You are young enough that you can afford to invest in the future a little.

One point in favor of going to a really good school for college would be that it's the one option you have that you can't do when you're older (or at least it's a lot harder).

</comment><comment><USER3> You didn't mention where in the UK you are. If you are near Birmingham, you can contact <http://oxygenaccelerator.com> and see if they can help you find a co-founder for your idea.

At your age you have going to university as an option and meeting people there who you may want to team up with. In the mean time I would suggest looking at the lean start-up movement to help you with the business side of things.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, yeah I'm from Birmingham, I'm actually applying to Oxygen this month but they say on the website "While we don't screen applications just because they have a single founder, it does make things more difficult" (Hence this post). I did look around the Oxygen website but couldn't find anything like that, do I just use the contact form?

<comment><USER3> Contact them and ask about any meet and greet or co-founder matching events they are hosting. If they aren't, then you may want to suggest they do (that should win you some brownie points for when you do apply).

Also check your local meet-ups:

[http://www.meetup.com/Birmingham-Open- Coffee/events/20668251...](http://www.meetup.com/Birmingham-Open- Coffee/events/20668251/)

[http://www.meetup.com/The-Birmingham-Entrepreneur-Meetup- Gro...](http://www.meetup.com/The-Birmingham-Entrepreneur-Meetup- Group/events/17576403/)

[http://www.meetup.com/Warwickshire- Entrepreneurs/events/2005...](http://www.meetup.com/Warwickshire- Entrepreneurs/events/20057911/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I don't really want to just start going round telling everyone my idea..."

Ideas are cheap, start building something. It'll help you recruit people and you'll almost certainly need something tangible to get funding.

If events are that lacking in the place you live, chances are that you need to move. If your hometown doesn't already have a lively ecosystem, it's probably going to be very difficult to recruit employees or make sales from there.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think you should work and develop a working prototype of your idea. Having an idea and bring it to prototype stage is just the beginning. Even when you are have a working prototype, you have no idea whether users will buy in the product or not, and actually pay for it. Without a working prototype, it is tough to any traction or mention on it.

With all these ground work undone, dun think you want to bringing in a business person to help.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a good cofounder candidate for geographic and other reasons, but I'd be happy to step you through some idea options and potential business models.</comment>


Ask HN: How much did Twitter software developers make during the last few days? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering about the economics of joining hot startups as a software developer. Assuming you joined twitter as a developer few years back, how much did you real make in stock options? Would be great if people can respond with year of joining and money :-) <comment><USER2> Apparently the IPO has created 1600 new millionaires:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo- created-1600-mill...](http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo- created-1600-millionaires-2013-11)

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I had heard that Google and FB had about 900 millionaires at their IPOs, and while all three had around the same number of employees (2000-3000) both Google and FB had significantly greater market caps than Twitter.

Was Twitter much more generous with their equity grants?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is something that I also would like to know, just for curiosity, I don't know anyone that works at Twitter currently, I used to but would be awesome to see what happened after the IPO inside Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER5> FWIW, I know someone who joined Twitter in 2010, and shortly after the IPO, quit his job and decided to create his own startup.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, this would be interesting to know. What employee wealth was generated? Why are these numbers hardly published?

</comment><comment><USER7> I would like to know about this as well..

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a great question. While I can't even pretend to know the answer as an east coast guy, amusingly, the one friend (real friend, not internet acquaintance) that I have that works at Twitter booked a trip to Guadalajara shortly after the IPO.

That might not say anything at all. He might have had the trip planned for a year, for all I know. But I found it humorous, either way.</comment>