How to Design and Structure a Successful Personalized Newspaper - <AUTHOR> http://mattschlicht.com/post/3747073311/creating-a-personalized-newspaper-hit-me-up-at

<comment><AUTHOR> The summary for those in a hurry

"Ultimately the Personalized Newspaper must instantly deliver a meaningfully personalized experience upon sign up and continue to evolve with the user's interests with no manual input required from the user - behavioral/interest data must be passively collected from multiple sources not just limited to user interactions with the newspaper. The consumption and discovery process includes data from friends, trusted topic curators, the general reaction of the entire audience, and most importantly a small amount of content that falls outside of these filters - allowing the user to discover new content and topics they may not have known about."

</comment><comment><USER2> So far the closest I have found and been using with good success is from genieo.com Their app run in background and monitor your browser history from what I am guessing and then extrapolate potential sites, news that could be of interest. Since it is in active development some results can be awkward but overall I am a happy user and stumble upon some good articles that were not in my daily sites visits. I am curious to see if anyone else share the same feeling.

</comment><comment><USER3> "due to the difficultly of it, there have been no real successes so far."

That's possible. Or else it's just one of those things that sound good in theory but in practice never seem to be very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could be. A personalized "newspaper" may not end up being that much better than what you already have.

On the other hand I think that personalization as a concept can be applied to pretty much anything and if done right will improve the experience. So a lot of the points in this post can be applied elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> I don't know. Personalization was all the buzz about 8 years ago, but there have been very few (no?) success stories. Not to say someone might not get it right. But perhaps they won't.

I'd rather bet on social than on personalized these days, as a concept that can be widely applied.

<comment><AUTHOR> Social and Personalization go hand in hand - I don't see them as alternative options.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Big Game Hunting: The Peculiarities of Nation-State Malware Research - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackhat.com/html/webcast/08202015-big-game-hunting.html

<comment><AUTHOR> this is the video to give more context [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVlMYXLB0m0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVlMYXLB0m0)</comment>


Why Brands Are Turning to Spotify as the Next Big Social Platform - <AUTHOR> https://buffer.com/resources/spotify <comment><USER2> This is actually pretty cool and not nearly as intrusive as other kinds of advertising.</comment>


The very quotable CK Prahalad on entrepreneurship, strategy research etc - <AUTHOR> http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00043?pg=all

<comment><AUTHOR> I love this quote onn the nature of entrepreneurship:

"Having aspirations greater than your resources. That's universal. Whether you're Sam Walton or Narayana Murthy [founder of Infosys Technologies Ltd.], if your aspirations are not greater than your resources, you're not an entrepreneur. For large companies to be entrepreneurial, they have to create aspirations greater than their resources. You can call it 'strategy as stretch' or 'strategic intent'. "

<comment><USER2> Neat subset of the quotes here:

[http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/the-very- quo...](http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/the-very-quotable-ck- prahalad/)</comment></comment>


Next-Gen Nuclear Is Coming–If Society Wants It - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/next-gen-nuclear/ <comment><USER2> Is it society that is the main resistance? I get the LFTR's have unsolved problems in containing the molten salts and neutron degradation over time, but serious money never really got thrown at something that was basically a sideproject of the Air Force.

Nuclear is so heavily regulated that the players that make money off it seem to effectively block any innovation in it.

I'm surprised they just don't offload the plants across problematic borders and "import" the power.</comment>


The Lisp Curse (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html <comment> tony-allan Update on October 6, 2017. N.B.: Please stop submitting this to Hacker News! Look at the Hacker News search results for this essay. Check out the note for the first entry: Come on, everyone! Let's beat the dead horse one more time! If you want to earn Hacker News e-cred, then try submitting The Eternal Mainframe, instead.

[http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html](http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Link is just to this page?

Did you mean to link this?

[http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html](http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html)

Also,lol at the first paragraph on that page

> Update on October 6, 2017. N.B.: Please stop submitting this to Hacker News! > Look at the Hacker News search results for this essay.

ha!

<comment><AUTHOR> Some confusion on submission! Thanks for report.</comment></comment>


Pub/sub networking for enterprise awareness - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jonudell.net/2011/03/25/pubsub-networking-for-enterprise-awareness/

<comment><USER2> This post does a good job documenting how communication can break down over time in an organization. While a person can easily talk to (e-mail) a group or another person, it's not as natural for a group to talk to another group or person.

It doesn't look like there is a good/obvious solution to this breakdown. For a solution to work, the (ideally automated) system would have to be smart enough to communicate to the appropriate group/persons/etc. Also, the system would (ideally) have the right amount of communication to avoid users tuning out perceived spam.</comment>


Gmail was down - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1390590318542 Is gmail down in your country?<p>Colombia +1 <comment><USER2> Very funny that me and my coworkers at nearly the same time opened our office doors to look into each others eyes and silently confirm that we were having the same issue.

Then we all turned around and went back into our offices to check HN to see if it was just us.

Very funny that _everyone reading this_ did something similar. 84 points in 4 minutes.

<comment><USER3> The intensity and speed this thread rose up on HN illustrates a very important principle. People are more likely to leave a review/comment/upvote if something is not working for them.

Understanding that is useful when comparing products using reviews.

<comment><USER4> This is a very important principle.

For a time, Target used Amazon's website code. Here is what they found. People leave reviews of books that they like. People only bother reviewing microwave machines when they didn't work.

This meant that Amazon's code didn't work out as well for Target as it did for Amazon...

<comment><USER5> The whole online review thing is thoroughly broken. I am not even talking about people leaving bad reviews for things like "the seller didn't ship it on time", etc. I am talking about the fact that most people that leave a review have nothing to compare the product to. For example, try shopping for a wireless router. You'll find lots of people either praising or bashing it but having no basis for comparison. Star ratings are completely screwed because lots of people give both one and five star ratings based on completely insane criteria. Long written reviews are naturally most informative, but you have to remember that they are also extremely subjective.

On the other hand, you can't trust expert reviews either. The experts spend too little time with each product to form an actual opinion. They often form their opinions based on some very shallow factors. A canonical example of this is mobile phone reviews by sites like Engadget or Gizmodo. They review so many phones that they can spend only a few days with each.

Edit: one of the worst things for this is reviews of hard drives. While there certainly are hard numbers to go off, there are also lots of opinions: "Well I've owned 6 Seagate drives over the past 4 years, and they all ended up dead. Seagate products are crap!" That does not mean that all Seagate drives are crap, maybe just laptop ones. Or maybe your controller is bad and you keep attaching good drives to it. Or maybe you keep sticking these drives into a case with poor ventilation. On top of that your sample size is too small.

<comment><USER6> Are there offline reviews that are better? Do you trust the information of a salesperson better? I think there are definitely problems with a selection bias of who leaves reviews, but sites like Amazon have implemented a number of features to improve upon them like rating distributions (how many 5, 4, 3 ,2, and 1s), the vine program, reviewer rankings, verified purchases, large volumes etc.

<comment><USER7> Consumer Reports is actually pretty damn good for most things, especially in terms of reliability ratings. Good reviews is one of the things I'm happy to pay for, since the web doesn't seem to have spawned a good free alternative.

<comment><USER3> Ah, that convinced me to actually buy membership. Thanks for spreading the word.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it's really a great publication. I really enjoy that they've taken an ideological stance to never take advertising so that they never have a conflict of interest, in stark contrast to almost every review site on the internet. When testing cars, they have plainclothes buyers to buy the cars, as well (partly so that they're not subject to keeping companies happy to keep the review samples flowing). They seem to also have pretty involved testing methodologies. All of this takes money, and I imagine that the rise of the internet hasn't been kind to their cashflow, so I'm happy to chip in to keep this sort of independent testing organization alive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Top of the front page in less than a minute. What does it say about us that our first response is to rush over to HN?

<comment><USER9> Took the words out of my mouth.

I suppose that the logic is "hey, I wonder if it's just us... surely someone on HN will complain the instant that things go south, better check there first."

Checking twitter never occurs to me...

<comment><USER10> I was happy with that. The first thing I did was try from a couple different proxies then try a different gmail account and I was in wtf mode. Google's status indicator was showing everything was fine. I then checked HN and it was at the top. Their status indicator reflected the state of affairs 15 mins later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality.

How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc...

Scary how much faith we put in this free service.

<comment><USER12> Each one of us has the power to do something about it: Perform a Backup.

We should be downloading our mailbox with our contacts on a regular basis. I'm guilty for not doing this, but seems like an area that can use a SaaS.

<comment><USER13> [https://www.backupify.com/](https://www.backupify.com/) do this for Google Apps - works pretty well.

<comment><USER14> We use Backupify at TechHub. It works great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google Plus is down.

I don't think anyone's noticed yet.

<comment><USER16> Actually that's how I noticed it was down. I stay in touch with my fantasy league through Hangouts, and was about to post the new 'Bad Lip Reading' NFL version that just came out.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRqKYXcL-2U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRqKYXcL-2U)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? If there were such an alternative, all they would need to do is wait until gmail fouls up, as they did here. Then they'd have a flood of new users.

I can imagine a few reasons why there currently isn't an alternative, like network effects stemming from your contact list, or the fact that you'd have to change your email address everywhere and forward from your gmail account. But what are the real reasons?

<comment><USER18> A better question is, why isn't there an open source webmail service like gmail that can be run on a server you control? My lab uses Gmail for business, and the outage took us down too.

I just want to be able to run an email server that has conversation features, contacts, XMPP chat, etc, but isn't Microsoft Exchange

<comment><USER19> So coincidentally I was just looking into this earlier this week. I just got a server to host the blog I've been working on and figured hey, why don't I try self-hosting my email while I'm at it.

Turns out there are plenty of good open source webmail frameworks: Roundcube, Mailpile, Zimbra and RainLoop are all freely available and ridiculously easy to set up.

The issue is that they're all just front-ends for the horribly complex and difficult to configure backend of a modern email server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP). You can configure them to hook into Google/Yahoo/Other smtp servers, but then why bother — you're back where you started.

I had no understanding of how broken email was until I tried to set up a simple SMTP + IMAP server using postfix + courier.

<comment><USER20> I didn't find postfix all that hard to set up. Courier, on the other hand, is a disaster area, which is why my mail server runs dovecot instead; the latter took little effort to configure, and works quite nicely across several devices. The really hard part was finding a halfway decent CalDAV/CardDAV server that didn't require undue suffering to configure; I settled on Baïkal, which works okay, but could be considerably improved upon.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the tip on dovecot. I'll give that a shot.

<comment><USER20> Do; I spent half a day wrestling with courier and lost, and it took me less than an hour to get dovecot up and doing what I wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Happy that the gmail team is having this much success with their product! Don't let the haters get to you, it's inevitable to have some downtime for a product that has gotten so many users. Hoping you guys are back up soon, since our startup has really come to rely on your services. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER22> Their app status page says it is up, but for me it is down as well.

[http://www.google.com/appsstatus](http://www.google.com/appsstatus)

<comment><USER23> It is back up for me as well but saying it's now offline on the status page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Apps Status Dashboard for the current status of the service.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

Technical Info

Numeric Code: 93

<comment><USER25> Interesting, my numeric code was 151. Are these codes definitively documented anywhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Of all things, this happens as Google's Site Reliability Engineering team starts an AMA on Reddit[1].

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1w1y5m/we_are_the_goog...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1w1y5m/we_are_the_google_site_reliability_engineering/)

<comment><USER27> Apparently, not the team responsible for GMail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> No Google status update as of the time of the orignal post, but a quick Twitter search suggests this is a widespread problem: [https://twitter.com/search?q=gmail](https://twitter.com/search?q=gmail)

<comment><USER29> Google gets access to the restricted Twitter firehose; you'd think they'd add it as another monitoring source.

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure they are aware that there's a problem

<comment><USER29> Revised statement: "I wonder if Google processes the twitter feed looking for keywords to assist in monitoring their most-used services"

<comment><USER31> It happened at one point. Turns out it's kind of superfluous, and a fairly noisy data source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Mine is down also. This is actually slightly terrifying. What's standard operating procedure for recovering from a lost gmail account? And I don't mean getting the account back--I mean, your account is lost forever.

<comment><USER33> Your whole account or just the email part? If you have a real email client, you could rescue your email from it even if your account is toast. If just the webmail part goes down permanently, you can download your mailbox from [https://www.google.com/settings/takeout](https://www.google.com/settings/takeout)

<comment><USER34> Creating the archive takes some time and is it working during a Gmail outage anyway?

For OS X users, CloudPull (payware) is a good solution for a continuous Gmail backup. It's developed by Golden Hill Software:

[http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/](http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/)

<comment><USER35> No Takeout was affected by the outage as well unfortunately.

<comment><USER34> Thanks, good to know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are a million "it is down for me" but is it actually up for anyone? A few text messages to friends around the US show they are all affected.

Edit: back for me in California, too.

</comment><comment><USER37> Google Music is also having some trouble. Does this affect other services as well?

<comment><USER38> Same, weirdly I can listen to radio but cannot load my playlists.

<comment><USER39> I can load some music from my playlists, but in the same playlist I am seeing it retry a song several times and then skipping it, so I think it is reasonable to assume it is affecting some servers but not others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vhost- I'm not seeing any red on that status page, but the service is definitely down for me.

It is a firm reminder that Google is not bullet-proof.

</comment><comment><USER40> Confirmed by my own email not working.... Probably limited to a small subset of users though.

<comment><USER41> Count me in. However, the Apps Status Dashboard shows that Gmail should be working, so probably you're right with the small subset affected.

<comment><USER42> I'm not sure it's a really a small subset of users. My personal gmail is down as are all accounts in two different Google Apps organizations I belong to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's not working for me either, and there are widespread reports on Twitter of the same experience. Funny thing is, the App Status Dashboard shows green for me.

</comment><comment><USER44> Google has published an outage report: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/todays-outage-for- sev...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/todays-outage-for-several- google.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's strange that Google did not make validation/testing to configuration files in isolated servers, before publish them to production servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Most Google services except Gmail seem to be having issues at present. My experience was that I was corresponding with someone about a tech support query for an application they run on Google Compute Engine. Just as he asked me to hit some developer swizzlesticks in my Google Chrome, the problems started. First Google Chrome crashed on my PC, then Google chat went, then Gmail, G+ and eventually everything. A few minutes later their Apps Status Dashboard showed an outage. From now on I shall refer to that particular swizzlestick as the Kill Google swizzlestick, and shall laugh maniacally when pressing it.

</comment><comment><USER46> If it's actually a widespread outage, is this a configuration problem for some anti-snooping changes that Google is making?

I don't think they've ever had a worldwide outage like this.

</comment><comment><USER47> What are some relatively-cheap ways of hosting your own secure email server that's easy to bring back up in case of power outages or other common reasons for downtime?

</comment><comment><USER48> Our Google Apps for Biz is down as well.. 10 minutes or so. Getting 503's from Blogger and errors from Google Plus.

Any idea how many Google services are affected by this right now?

</comment><comment><USER49> User d1egoaz just hit the Karma Lottery. First and only submission: 435 points in 18 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true :) but I have to say that I follow HN all day (read only mode) until today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My OS X Mail.app got stuck since it cannot access Gmail at the moment. OK, using Mail.app with Gmail isn't the best idea as we probably all know … ;)

</comment><comment><USER50> It's down for my (paid) Google Apps account as well. Which is nice since it means I'll get to start the weekend even earlier than planned!

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm also getting 503's from [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Say where you are located.

It is down for me, SF Bay Area (east bay).

<comment><USER52> Down for me from Philadelphia (via university network) as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Interestingly the page says that it has no problem but I can't log into mail.Google.com or send any mail from my phone.

</comment><comment><USER54> Status says it's up, but my Google Apps email doesn't work. Good thing I've my emails backed up.

</comment><comment><USER55> Per their SLA ([http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html](http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html)) if it's out for more than 45 minutes (0.1% of January) biz users get 3 free days. Yay?

</comment><comment><USER56> Started with me not being able to download an attachment about 7 minutes ago. Now down fully.

</comment><comment><USER57> I just realized how you could generate thousands of points of Hacker News karma without ever manually writing a post or comment:

Watch all major status pages (e.g. Google, Facebook, Heroku, etc.) and immediately auto-post the link to that page when anything goes down.

</comment><comment><USER58> [http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1390604399...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1390604399000&sid=1&iid=8201b96db60ea3ccc26c53a4487c5492)

</comment><comment><USER59> Screenshot of the error message I received just after entering my credentials: [http://i.imgur.com/0my28zo.png](http://i.imgur.com/0my28zo.png)

(I'm in the Midwest and typically hit the Chicago DC, I believe.)

</comment><comment><USER60> Anyone have the ability to write a quick Twilio app to notify people via SMS when it goes back up?

Would save us all a massive amount of time continually refreshing the page. I realize a browser extension could do this too, but SMS would be much better.

<comment><USER60> Looks like Twilio rate-limits you to one SMS per second per phone number, so you'd need to buy a lot of phone lines to make this possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Hopefully they get it fixed soon! But I wouldn't mind if Plus never came back..

</comment><comment><USER62> [http://www.theonion.com/video/google-shuts-down-gmail-for- tw...](http://www.theonion.com/video/google-shuts-down-gmail-for-two-hours-to- show-its,27610/)

<comment><USER63> would be much funnier if they published an announcement from google sunseting gmail, like reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Google voice also appears to be down. Outbound calls showing up as carrier's phone number, and dial screen doesn't show normal "dialing with google voice."

<comment><USER64> google voice now working for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Connecting with POP3 over telnet and authenticating gives the following message: +OK [SYS/TEMP] Due to a temporary system problem, this mailbox will seem empty.

</comment><comment><USER66> Well, someone is having a really bad day @ google today.

</comment><comment><USER67> Very happy at times like these that I use the gmail offline webapp. I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, which I took down (deleted the blog) but still have the gdoc if anyone's interested:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0ApnDQyV0zRX6jhisBxHHuZ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0ApnDQyV0zRX6jhisBxHHuZdELwBvyGBV-23_g124Q/edit)

</comment><comment><USER68> I don't understand how throughout the whole time Gmail was down, it worked for a coworker and me the whole time, but it didn't work for anyone else. We enemy exchanged half a dozen emails to test it!

Could it be that the Web app was down, but the actual mail servers weren't? I know I have the Gmail extension in Chrome Installed (not sure about my coworker), could this be the reason?

</comment><comment><USER69> This thread has now become the most reliable way to send a message to my coworkers. Andrew, please push those changes to production, kthx.

</comment><comment><USER70> I was in the midst of trying to upload files to Google Drive ... I guess I'll use DropBox for this one (I love having choices!).

<comment><USER71> You're to blame. Please don't be uploading files while the rest of us are emailing.

<comment><USER70> Yeah ... it's always my fault!

The percent-complete gauge on my upload went up to 20%, then back to 0% ... maybe I'm just backwards?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Also confirming down for me and my co-workers.

</comment><comment><USER73> Google Play is not working for me either

<comment><USER73> Checkout is not working

[http://i.imgur.com/wDL6MzX.png](http://i.imgur.com/wDL6MzX.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Some blogspot blogs are down as well.

</comment><comment><USER75> The app status @ [http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=139059123...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1390591237525) just started showing Service Disruption for Gmail

</comment><comment><USER76> Gmail for your domain (Google Apps for domains, or whatever it's called) is down as well.

</comment><comment><USER77> Forget about Gmail. The Mavericks Invitational is on. Watch it live now: [http://live.redbull.tv/events/374/mavericks- invitational-201...](http://live.redbull.tv/events/374/mavericks- invitational-2014/)

</comment><comment><USER78> I love how their status page says they're still up. Who will watch the watchers ;p

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm surprised the status board isn't nearly instant when this type of thing happens. I wonder if it's a manually switch or if it's automatically triggered after a certain number of regions become unavailable.

</comment><comment><USER80> Am I the only one who finds this google status page a bit difficult to interpret?

</comment><comment><USER81> The Google AppsStatus dashboard looks broken at least in Chrome 32 and IE 11.

The status indicators orbs are either missing and misaligned.

[http://www.google.com/appsstatus](http://www.google.com/appsstatus)

</comment><comment><USER82> Down for me and another user.

</comment><comment><USER83> Google's stock just took a 3% dip (~$36), since 10 AM (close to gmail downtime). [https://www.google.com/search?q=GOOG](https://www.google.com/search?q=GOOG)

<comment><USER84> Woww, I don't think I've ever seen a more specious stock-price correlation haha, that's impressive.

FB is down almost 4%, AAPL is down almost 2%, TSLA is down almost 4%, AMZN is down almost 3%, the whole S&P 500 is down ~2%. I'm pretty sure the market doesn't think that an Apps outage threatens all those companies (and the whole S&P 500) to the point that they'd shave whole points off all of their market values.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Not working for me in USA and my coworkers in Brazil, definitely widespread

</comment><comment><USER86> The most tragic part is that I was doing a difficult 2hour test for a company I really want to work at (frontend developer position). And right now I can't send an email with the completed task.

</comment><comment><USER87> Yahoo seems to be enjoying this news: [https://twitter.com/Yahoo/status/426795724542455808](https://twitter.com/Yahoo/status/426795724542455808)

</comment><comment><USER88> A friend pinged me over IM to ask if it was down. I hadn't noticed since I've been using the Gmail Offline chrome app. (Which I really wish they'd merge with the main gmail app)

</comment><comment><USER89> Back up, but is anyone else's unread email count fluctuating? I have about 160 (constant #... sad.. I know), but with every third or fifth page refresh it is changing - 191, 160, 380.

</comment><comment><USER90> I wasn't able to access gmail (same error 500/93), so I just closed all my tabs and went on HN for 15 mins. I then tried getting on again, and it seems to be working for me.

</comment><comment><USER91> [http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/gmail.com](http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/gmail.com) \- more accurate than google app status

</comment><comment><USER92> For all the startups screaming "email is dead & broken"... the top of twitter and HN might indicate otherwise.

(well, except for this very minute, because it actually _is_ broken)

</comment><comment><USER93> [http://www.google.com/appsstatus](http://www.google.com/appsstatus)

had gmail green for a long time, right now half orange. clearly not fully dynamic.

<comment><USER94> I think they have to manually change it

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I remember the last time something like this happened - 4 years ago it was down for almost a day.

Impressive that it's almost always up without serious flaws (for me at least)!

</comment><comment><USER96> Urgh. If only there were a simple protocol to transport mail between distributed systems so the world didn't grind to a halt when the central router died.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord And I thought the reaction to Michael Jackson's death was huge...

This will probably go down in history as quite a record. I'll wait for the post-downtime analytics.

</comment><comment><USER97> [http://www.google.com/appsstatus](http://www.google.com/appsstatus)

Thought it was just me. Glad to know I'm not alone.

</comment><comment><USER98> Fastest rise of points seen in the past one year ! On another note, for one moment I got scared as shit - if my data gets erased, I'm done !

</comment><comment><USER99> lol its everywhere! Both GAFYD and gmail.com are down here in N. California. Anyone have real time satellite imagery of The Dalles in Oregon? :-)

</comment><comment><USER100> Everyone's gmail in my Chicago office is down.

</comment><comment><USER101> Both of my accounts just came back up for me.

Note - I have no inside knowledge of what's happening. I'm just posting my observations.

</comment><comment><USER102> Google Plus is a big whitespace [https://plus.google.com/](https://plus.google.com/)

</comment><comment><USER103> Back up for me in Chicago however I can't actually send an email:

Oops... a server error occurred and your email was not sent. (#793)

</comment><comment><USER104> Search for Gmail in google and click on "email" which is sub link of gmail. See the magic.

Jeff Morsey is doomed with emails !

</comment><comment><USER97> Now all services are down.

[http://www.google.com/appsstatus](http://www.google.com/appsstatus)

</comment><comment><USER105> 400 points in 15 min (can we get updates on how the votes are changing over time? it would be fun to go through those)

</comment><comment><USER49> I've been having intermittent problems with the GMail-integrated Talk / Hangouts client all day as well.

</comment><comment><USER106> I should note that only Google Apps Gmail seems to be affected. My non-Google- Apps account is working just fine.

</comment><comment><USER64> Was back for a minute, back down again.

<comment><USER107> Same here, it seems it just came back up for a 2nd time ...

<comment><USER107> Scratch that, very intermittent up/down. . . mostly down!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Glad Google is keeping people informed, also glad to see I'm not the only one developing GWT apps.

</comment><comment><USER109> Seems to be affecting google docs and sites as well. My site loads but some of the image assets do not.

</comment><comment><USER110> meanwhile, my self hosted mail hasn't failed yet for 15 years. but i heard self hosted mail is hard!

(just had to)

</comment><comment><USER111> The free public beta is now over. ;)

</comment><comment><USER112> Same here. The GMail status page seems at variance with the actual status.

Manhattan, New York. Verizon DSL.

</comment><comment><USER113> if gmail charged $200/month, I'd tell Google to shaddup and take my money. That's how important it is to me. Hell, I'd pay $200/month for their search engine as well.

Would I pay $5/month for your SaaS? Most likely no!

</comment><comment><USER114> Does anyone know if a potential incoming email would be lost when Gmail is down?

</comment><comment><USER115> It looks like google decided that we should all take a break from the internet.

</comment><comment><USER116> Their uptime is excellent.

It's taken google hpw many years to read bell level reliability?

</comment><comment><USER117> It is up for me now, except that I am unable to add any attachments to emails.

</comment><comment><USER118> Weird, I seem to be one of the few without any problems.

Edit: Gmail up, Hangouts down.

</comment><comment><USER119> Not anymore, it isn't. As global outages go, that was quick.

</comment><comment><USER112> I wager 25 cents that no explanation is forthcoming fro Google.

</comment><comment><USER120> I know a lot of people use gmail, but I never understood why...

</comment><comment> j-rom Wow I was just about to post this here. Front page already too.

</comment><comment><USER121> With Gmail down, now I get a chance to catch up on HackerNews.

</comment><comment><USER122> I'm back. Google Apps using SSO server. Anybody else?

</comment><comment><USER123> I'm not well equipped to handle life without gmail.

</comment><comment><USER124> China is probably about the dump all of their T-Bills...

</comment><comment><USER125> I wonder if Google can be DDOSed; isn't it always?

</comment><comment><USER126> And it's back! 2:24pm EST here in Ontario, Canada.

</comment><comment><USER127> Can't wait to read the post-mortem about this one.

</comment><comment><USER128> Someone updates this title. Gmail is up again.

</comment><comment><USER129> also down in Madison wi at 1:18pm Friday (CST)

</comment><comment><USER130> Down in Montreal!

</comment><comment><USER131> Google voice appears to be down as well.

</comment><comment><USER132> YouTube comments and Google+ as well.

<comment><USER81> Same for me. YouTube already acted weird for the last few hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> It is back for me in Missouri, USA.

</comment><comment><USER134> yep, it's out

[http://imgur.com/7dempIL](http://imgur.com/7dempIL)

</comment><comment><USER135> It's been up and down for me.

</comment><comment><USER136> Funny to see all the GMail posts:

Is GMail down?^2

GMail is down^4

Gmail is still down^10

gmail is back up^2

Gmail was down

</comment><comment><USER51> It's back for me - bay area.

</comment><comment><USER137> Reason #33 I host my own email.

</comment><comment><USER138> apps dashboard says app but gmail is down for me and my co-workers as well.

</comment><comment><USER139> Something explode at Google

</comment><comment><USER140> It's like a snow day.

</comment><comment><USER141> Back now in San Francisco!

</comment><comment><USER142> Up in Brazil... fuckyeah!?

<comment><USER143> Down for me (região da Paulista).

<comment><USER142> I guess it's intermittent here (Rio). Sometimes it loads, but it's definitely slow!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER144> Up and running in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER145> Annnnd it's back up!

</comment><comment><USER146> It's back up for me.

</comment><comment><USER147> ...someones getting fired

<comment> wc- Maybe the dynamics change when things get to gmail's scale and customer base, but if this was the result of a single action wouldn't the person responsible have learned one of those "I'll absolutely never do that again" lessons? Also I'd consider it a failure of the system if one person's action could create a result like this with no oversight. Maybe the manager in charge of that would be under more heat?

Then again, maybe everything I said goes out the window when things are at this magnitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER148> backup but slow...changes are most likely still propagating out

</comment><comment><USER149> Yep, same here... oops!

</comment><comment><USER150> never seen a thread get so many votes so far. Damn you google

</comment><comment><USER151> Still down in Ireland.

</comment><comment><USER152> ...and it's back!

</comment><comment><USER153> yup down in the UK too

</comment><comment><USER154> Just came back for me

</comment><comment><USER34> My Gmail is back … :)

</comment><comment><USER155> the mighty beast falls... Down for me in Phoenix, AZ.

</comment><comment><USER156> And it's back.

</comment><comment><USER157> And it's back.

</comment><comment><USER158> down for me. NY, NY

<comment><USER158> it's back!

</comment></comment><comment><USER159> Down for us as well

</comment><comment><USER160> Down for me in NYC

</comment><comment><USER161> Dead here as well.

</comment><comment><USER162> yup, and talk too.

</comment><comment><USER163> Is down in Boston

</comment><comment><USER164> down in montreal

</comment><comment><USER165> down in sw ohio.

<comment><USER129> also down in Madison Wi, at 1:18pm Friday (CST)

</comment></comment><comment><USER166> Back up for me.

</comment><comment><USER91> It's back!

</comment><comment><USER167> down for me too, in Ontario, Canada.

</comment><comment><USER105> its back up in gandhinagar, india

</comment><comment><USER168> Back for me.

</comment><comment><USER169> down for me & my coworkers

</comment><comment><USER100> GMAIL WORKS

</comment><comment><USER69> Down in VT.

</comment><comment><USER162> guys guys it's up again

</comment><comment><USER170> Its up !

</comment><comment><USER56> Back up.

</comment><comment><USER64> Confirmed

</comment><comment><USER171> Confirmed.

</comment><comment><USER172> it's been fine for me

</comment><comment><USER173> aaaaand we're back

</comment><comment><USER174> blogger is down as well

</comment><comment><USER175> back, but not sending.

</comment><comment><USER176> down in Nepal here

</comment><comment><USER177> down in Greece too

</comment><comment><USER178> up but flaky...

</comment><comment><USER179> dfm down for me

</comment><comment><USER94> looks good now

</comment><comment><USER180> that was fast

</comment><comment><USER181> down in india

</comment><comment><USER176> now up

</comment><comment><USER182> confirmed.

</comment><comment><USER183> ^R

</comment><comment><USER184> Dead at my end too... :-)

</comment><comment><USER185> Confirmed.

<comment><USER185> What? I didn't write this. And gmail is up for me. HN is making users post false claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER186> so what? i dont use gmail</comment>


That'll do, pig, that'll do - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@oscargodson/thatll-do-pig-that-ll-do-8998f9df9f77#.65ygnw6fy <comment><USER2> This isn't about an "app". This is about a business that initiates transfers of money from one account to another. The people behind this didn't realize what business they were in.

If you want to initiate transactions in the financial system, you have to work through what happens when things go wrong, and be prepared, financially and operationally, to handle them. How does the money get from the parent's account to the kid's account? Note that if the kid can get cash out, you can't fund this with a credit card. Visa and MasterCard don't let you buy money with a credit card; that's too fraud-prone.

So, as someone pointed out, you're back to ACH debits. Getting set up for those is hard, for good reasons. It gives you a connection to other people's bank accounts. So you need financial strength, bonding, and good references.

Note that the chore list has to be secure, too. Otherwise the kid can add "Mow lawn, $1000", check off the item, and drain the parent's account.

If you try to do this by having the parent transfer money to you in advance, and you then release it to the kid later, you're now a depository institution. In most states, you have to be a bank or a money transmitter to do that. (It's so tempting to take the money and run, and that's happened enough times that such businesses are regulated.) Also, that's a pain for the parent. They might as well use Venmo.

PayPal was successful partly because, back when they were above the bike shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, they started as a security token maker. So they had security people and were familiar with the problems. A big portion of PayPal's operating costs come from dealing with fraud. The legit transactions are fully automated; the problems require a big call center.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why they couldn't simply release the app without the money transfer part, and it would just keep a tab of how much the parent owes the kid. Then, when the parent gave cash or whatever, the debt would just be wiped.

Pretty much "freshbooks for chores".

<comment><USER4> Would be a perfect way to introduce kids to cryptocurrency. No need to deal with regulatory agencies. The "points" (btc/ether) are actually worth something (whether more or less in the future).

kid marks they've completed task, parent xfer bits to kids wallet. Kid can now buy games at newegg or gift cards from tons of stores through Gyft.

the smart kids (like my oldest daughter) roll the dice and Alex p. Keaton it for long term savings that has decent potential to multiply in value.

I do this with my kids already, but with no app..just verbal "do this and I'll pay you $0.25 in bitcoin" an app with actual chore list they can work through and automate fund transfers would be awesome.

If you're a rich VC make sure you PM me to partner up. There's only one way to successfully monetize this, and I'm the only one who knows it.

Small target market but growing every day...the power of "frictionless transfer of value outside the insanely regulated walled garden of fiat banking and high finance"

<comment><USER5> can bitcoin be converted into money outside the US?

<comment><USER6> There's plenty of exchanges outside USA. Safello is currently the big local one here in Sweden, and there's plenty of bigger ones in other European and Asian countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel that there are structural problems with this business concept that wouldn't be solved by a bank partner / additional capital / etc. Note that I am not a parent.

The fact is that kids should not be paid for chores on a chore-by-chore basis. This is perhaps the way that you should do things if you just need labor from your children, and want someone who will rake the leaves for cheaper than a hired gardener. But most parents also want to teach their children good values, and one of the most important social things to learn is about reciprocity in relationships. In transactional relationships, where you will perhaps never see the person again, reciprocity must be established immediately (paying for a cab ride, tipping a pizza delivery person). But in social relationships, immediate 1-for-1 reciprocity actually damages the relationship. If you were invited to a dinner party, would you try to pay the host for the cost of your food? Of course not. If it's casual friends, you might bring a bottle of wine, and if it's very close friends, you may not even do that, as you know you will be inviting them over at some point. Paying a child per chore teaches them to treat their family obligations as transactional obligations, rather than teaching them about the nature of reciprocity in a close personal relationship.

Also, when teaching kids about money, I think that many parents prefer to teach kids about "the value of a dollar" with cash, rather than with a bank balance. My parents opened a bank account for me in 4th grade, which was very unusual at the time, to encourage me to save my money, but even then I found that spending money was and is a lot easier when it's a number on a screen than when it's paper money that you take out of your wallet. By first finding pennies and nickels on the street, then getting $5 bills from their parents, and then graduating into a bank account, people learn to appreicate just how many found nickels it takes to buy a flatscreen TV.

<comment><USER8> When I tunred 5, a beloved great aunt gave me a crip $20 bill for my birthday. My mom helped me open a bank account, and deposit the money (along with the contents of my piggy bank). About a week later, I wanted to know if I could get my $20 back out to admire it. I was told that I could get _a_ $20 bill, but it would not be the same one. I found this very upsetting, and I think I may have cried.

<comment><USER9> They should have told you that $20 bills are like electrons: Every one of them is the same one. :-)

<comment><USER10> Not sure if the kid would believe it when he gets back a wrinkled old bill.

<comment><USER11> Whenever I've withdrawn money from a bank in person I've gotten nice clean bills, fwiw

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not entirely sure why there needs to be a financial services or banking contract to build this app and startup. What's wrong with PayPal? Or bank accounts? Or Stripe/Square/Braintree? Paper checks?

This might be a little harsh for what seems like a sincerely useful app and startup, but the problem with the "Yo" startups is that it's just raking leaves (money) to compost them or light it on fire. If the value is in the app, sell the app. If the value is in other people's products and services, then there's no value in it. And if the value is in the "idea" then it's hopeless. If the value is in the fundraising, then we're lost.

What I don't see is why the idea, PiggyBank, couldn't be functional in the first week. Just like I don't see why a company needs $X billion with no imaginable costs or expenses to put that money toward.

Let's say it isn't possible to do mobile-to-mobile payments (which I think it is), or online payments, without owning a bank — then why not release the same app and when you do the chores for your parents or your uncle they put money in a jar? Beyond not making revenue, having users is at least some sort of reward. When you have the revolutionary breakthrough, add that to the app.

And finally, don't leave your job over something you think is a good idea. Make it a reality, and if it takes all of your time _and_ it can support you, then make the jump.

Obviously these aren't things any founder wants to hear, but someone with a greater risk aversion might be able to be as productive with a more realistic focus than the average SV press release.

Edit: Obviously this is a little naïve considering all things, but I'd still like to see the payments possible on a "small business" scale of things.

<comment><USER13> I'm also curious about the bank integration issue, but I'm tired of people saying things like why app x or website y "couldn't be functional in the first week".

have you launched an app that you expect to build a company out of? it takes a lot more work than most people think. people love to over-simplify building software by saying 'its just an app', oh, twitter is just a list of sorted strings, seriously try building a solid, fleshed out product you expect thousands of users to use in 1 week. it's not that easy.

<comment><USER12> Fair points. I really am commenting as an outsider, so don't think that I speak from experience. As a programmer, though, I am much more interested in seeing something built than in selling it or seeing it become popular, which fair enough are the next two places a startup can fail.

"One week" is also hyperbole because it isn't possible to deploy _anything_ in that amount of time, so maybe in the first six-months is a fairer comparison.

<comment><USER14> > "One week" is also hyperbole because it isn't possible to deploy anything in > that amount of time, so maybe in the first six-months is a fairer > comparison.

Not true. One week is plenty of time to plonk down a website in a basic CMS with an email form, or even a bit of code that sends you a daily spreadsheet of orders or whatever. Often that's all you need to validate the idea.

<comment><USER15> Yup, and you can even spend $50 on AdWords and estimate your CAC by measuring conversion rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some people here are commenting on how bad the idea is. There are worse ideas out there that did and continue to do so much better.

The problem here I think was defining the MVP with a timeline. They could have just started with some virtual currency (like a point system) ... kids don't care about money or points as long as they accumulate something. This virtual currency or point system could have been used by parents to say to their kids "if you get 20 points I'll hand you a $20 bill".

You can make an app like that pretty fast, independent of any "partner ecosystem" and then if the idea lifts off then invite the big players into your ecosystem.

Everything they did was opposite.

<comment> swagasaurus-rex Exactly.

> If you need to raise money to launch your product do that first. Don't even > think about building out your product outside of a very simplistic > prototype.

There are products that need initial cash, but this isn't one of them. If they had a fully functional MVP that people could use and enjoy, funding would come to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My comment is late, but the thing I take away from this (and I'm biased) is that the VC-first track is as terrible as it's been made out to be for years. Now they have a real business, helping people for money, and all the crazy shit they had to deal with as a start-up isn't a factor now. They've bootstrapped, successfully, and NOW would be the time to start working on a product.

I get it, opening another consultancy isn't the most glamorous thing, but man it gets you to solvent quickly. Then you build a product in your off time WHILE being your own boss. The flexibility is awesome.

That's what we did. Somewhat accidentally, but it's awesome. Now we are a product company with no investors and 100% equity.

Now that's not to say that someone shouldn't take money - but do it now, after you're a business, after you stop wondering where the next dollar is coming from.

It's not a bad way to go.

</comment><comment><USER18> So basically this was a 'to-do' app like you can find on any beginners tutorial (quick Google example: [https://www.thepolyglotdeveloper.com/2015/03/create-todo- lis...](https://www.thepolyglotdeveloper.com/2015/03/create-todo-list-mobile- app-using-ionic-framework/)) the only difference was banking integration which would have been trivial to add in, they could use paypal, stripe, take the payment themselves and pay the kids out in apple credits etc

Somehow not only did they convince some poor sap to give them $100,000 for it, but that wasn't enough, they had to keep 'fund raising'. They had no outlay at all, just build the app and deploy.

I'm really struggling to understand the mindset here, not just of the developers who didn't need any investment to write that app, but the people who actually dumped money into it.

<comment><USER19> The app is reasonably simple, except of course it's a little more involved than a to-do list from the get go since you have to maintain user's accounts, assigned tasks with mutable states, transaction history etc etc. But yea no rocket science.

Banking integration for this flow would be reasonably involved though. To get set up with a merchant account to take the funds is reasonably simple although you'd have to figure out how the payers tie their payment instruments to your system so you can actually charge them and then develop the functionality to drive that (more dev work). OK.

So now you have the funds that you need to be able to move to recipient's accounts. THIS is where the fun begins.

Provided that you have the registration flow for the recipients in place (which means more dev work but anyway) now you have to be able to disperse the funds to their accounts, track payment statuses, reconcile data across multiple sources so you are aware of the current state of the payment etc etc ad nauseam.

And if you're touching a credit card number don't forget about PCI compliance :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love these type's of posts. Very raw, very honest. Sure it's a pitch for their new business but they deserve the free ad since they got me to read to the end.

<comment><USER21> Agreed. Is there a maintained list of posts about startup failures/learned lessons?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I may be totally out of touch, but why would someone give someone else $100,000 for an app? And why wouldn't $100k be enough? By the end they needed $700,000 "bare minimum."

I just don't get how this can cost so much.

Making something like this in one's spare time while getting paid with a salaried "real" job seems like it would totally be sufficient to get moving.

But assuming it really takes $700k on hand to get these bank sponsors, why not just change the model slightly. For example, integrate with Square cash or something similar. Square is dead simple to use and the money arrives instantly, not sure if it's integrate-able in this manner though, but the concept stands.

And then maybe when the company is really successful with tens of thousands of subscribers, partner with someone to add direct bank account integration.

Sorry if this sounds callous because I really don't mean it to be, I'm just flabbergasted the amount of money involved for some app someone came up with randomly.

<comment><USER23> You really need about a million dollars to make a marketable product. (not a lifestyle business) You can either put a million dollars of your own blood, sweat and tears in, in which case it'll be the wildest ride of your life, or you can deploy capital.

It looks like it's just code but it's not. There's a dizzying array of skills and knowledge you must be able to deploy effectively. If your product is not in an established industry and niche, if a bank can't understand you, that makes everything much, much harder. There's a reason franchises do so well.

When you get started, you don't know what's going to hose you. It's easy in retrospect to say that they shouldn't have messed around with a business model requiring a bank partnership to get started without already having that partnership before building anything, but they didn't understand that going in.

<comment><USER24> > It's easy in retrospect to say that they shouldn't have messed around with a > business model requiring a bank partnership to get started without already > having that partnership before building anything, but they didn't understand > that going in

Doesn't have to be in retrospect. Why didn't any of the dozens of experienced investors they met with tell them this? "You're too early" is too wishy washy for them to have got the message.

<comment><USER25> Because it's rarely in someone's self-interest to give honest feedback, which is true for investors, potential employers, departing employees, and almost anyone else in a position to issue some type of denial. Instead, they part with something ambiguous, non-committal, and ideally flattering because it covers their butts and allows them to backpedal if necessary. Since the stated reason for declining the relationship is airy, you can't really get in a shouting match over it if the applicant/founder/whatever disagrees, and you don't offend them and preclude the possibility of future engagement.

Politically and socially, it's almost always best to speak in platitudes, be ambiguous and non-committal, and refuse to give concrete information or rationale that could be used in the future to show that you were wrong about something. People usually _do_ have a specific objection when they're turning down a request, but they just know that it doesn't help them to tell it to you, which is why it's always wise to cherish those who care enough about you to be honest.

<comment><USER26> > Because it's rarely in someone's self-interest to give honest feedback, > which is true for [...] almost anyone in a position to issue some type of > denial. Instead, they part with something ambiguous, non-committal, and > ideally flattering because it covers their butts and allows them to > backpedal if necessary.

I broke up with a girl a few hours ago and this sounds so cruelly true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Two comments 1) If the investor had another idea of how to make the product work, why did that not come up earlier? You should be working "with" your angel investor, not selling your work to him so he can run it.

2) You took the wrong lesson from this. "Don't even think about building your product" is the wrong mentality. Build it quick and get a few people using it. Figure out what you need to do to get people using it. The MVP for piggybank didn't include payments (possibly) or it had something else.

The founders here didn't find a way to make this product work. It's a great idea (I think) and now the first Angel investor is going to take it and make it work because for some strange reason the founders saw the hard road, the one which could break them and destroy their dreams and they decided to run straight into that wall with their eyes closed instead of finding a different route around.

</comment><comment><USER28> They got really screwed by their first banking partner. This is when having a good lawyer would have helped.

The correct course of action would have been to politely tell the bank that they would not free the bank from their duties under the contract but would welcome any new introductions. Under their duty to limit their damages, the startup would do everything possible to find a new bank partner, and if they did the original bank partner would be free from their obligations without paying any damages.

This way you get the bank to help you but still be liable under the contract if things do not work out.

Of course nothing here is legal advice, every situation is different, so do consult a lawyer for your own situation.

<comment><USER29> You think a big bank contract had them hold any liability?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Echoing what many others on this thread have said - FinTech isn't just hard, it's _insanely fucking hard_. The technology piece is truly the easy part. Build the app, design a nice interface, and so on.

Then you have to deal with the banks, and yes, you absolutely must deal with the banks. There is simply no way around it. Anything having to do with money is heavily regulated and for good reason.

The first rule of creating a product that involves money is that people will look for ways to exploit it (read: fraud). There are many great FinTech startups out there right now wanting to do great things and the simple truth is that it is orders of magnitude harder than just about anything else. Barring, maybe, sending people to Mars or disrupting the car industry. :)

<comment><USER31> I worked for a startup where we had to take credit card payments.

The first bank we dealt with let us sign up for a merchant account, even knowing the kind of business we were in would require 'cashing out' winnings, without batting an eye.

Then in the first weekend with our shiny new merchant account [1] we racked up 5 figures in sales and they froze the account. They said they suspected fraud. It was an insane hassle to get people their money back.

I assume the guy got a commission for signing us up; no loss to him if the merchant account didn't actually work for us. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Later on we found another way to pay people out, and signed up with a better merchant account that has redundancy,[2] i.e. it is backed by two merchant accounts behind the scenes, so we can switch to another one if one of them get's 'upset.'

Credit card merchant accounts can be shut down on you for any reason at any time, we've learned, leaving a complicated mess to sort out.

[1][2] After a considerable amount of development work to integrate with their API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just seems a bit absurd to me the amount of effort put into an idea that can be replicated in your own home by putting money in a jar for the kid and then when it's full enough to buy skyrim or whatever put the money in your pocket and order it off amazon for them.

Get to engage with your child on a person to person basis too… not parent via an app and servers.

Not to mention I really don't understand where all the investor money went with no product to show for it. Seen as the payment part never got fully fleshed out we're left with a several thousand dollar todo list...

<comment><USER33> The fact is that the solution needs to evolve as the kid gets older. This specific solution - a card based one - is best suited for teens.

What if your 14 year old is going to soccer camp in another state for a month? Handing them a jar stuffed with $400 of cash is not a great solution.

<comment><USER34> If your 14 year old is going to another state for a month then your 14 year old isn't going to be doing chores and you won't be needing to tip them for said chores.

I agree with theinternetman that this idea was ill-conceived and easily replicable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It seems like they concentrated on the easy stuff (design, app, marketing), and ignored the hard stuff (banking). You need to do the opposite. Work out what is hard, get that started asap. Visit it every single day. When you are blocked and waiting, then you do the easy stuff.

<comment><USER36> Actually, they probably should have pushed the banking part to a phase 2, and actually finished building the rest, and opening that up to end users.

The debit card is a nice add-on to the concept, but not at all essential to execute the concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This sounds like a neat concept but then again is this something that really needs to be automated with an app?

A friend of mine made a kanban board for chores. There's some chores that have to be done within a week, and there's some that are optional. The optional one has money clipped to it and when the card for that chore is done the child can take the money. And the mother is the one that moves the card to done.

So kind of the same thing as this app, but a physical board. And I don't see how moving this to an app really enhances or disrupts the physical board.

<comment><USER38> This app is basically a todo list app with financial transactions just for the hell of it. A simple points system would have been enough and then the kid would show the score to the parents to get the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> No better way to ruin children's motivation to do something for its own sake, than paying them for chores. Nothing personal, but I'm glad thjs project flopped. So many children are better off without external monetary motivators. Those will lead to disaster in their lives and 9-5 jobs they hate.

</comment><comment><USER40> The lesson here friends is to fail faster. The lack of momentum on the kickstarter should have been a clear red flag.

<comment><USER36> Not really. Kickstarter for a software play is a fool's errand in the first place.

Kickstarter works best as a marketplace for things that don't yet exist.

How does software that is "free" (I'm guessing they planned on taking a fee off of transactions) have a value proposition for people on kickstarter?

Their big mistake was not having the payments backend as a secondary stage goal. They should have built the chore tracking sans payment integration (or using a typical payment processor like Stripe/Dwolla/PayPal to process), and got that up and running with real people. If they had a proven model for everything short of the debit card, fundraising would have been much easier than "we promise guys, this is totally going to work."

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> No MVP. No talking to users. No strategy. No surprise they failed.

MVP - build an app with parent login, child login and a points system for chores.

Talk to users (parents) by having chat in the app.

Find how to acquire users cheap, retain them, and make them pay. Go for a bank partnership when it is a compelling business proposition. Banks like money, not startups with no profits and no users.

</comment><comment><USER42> A former Googler just launched www.nickel.co, which is an app for kids to manage their allowance. Their backing bank is Sutton Bank.

My guess is one of the partners that they were referring to is CorePro ([http://corepro.io/](http://corepro.io/)) which was spun out of SmartyPig ([https://www.smartypig.com/](https://www.smartypig.com/)). Their backing bank was Lincoln Savings Bank.

One of the consumers of CorePro was Qapital (qapital.com). It seemed like recently, they switched models from Lincoln Savings Bank's individual account to Wells Fargo's custodial account.

In any case, if you're doing anything in consumer FinTech, the technology/product is the easy part. Banking partnership, customer acquisition, and unit economics is the hard part. Focus on solving the hard part first before building the technology.

Edit:

One thing that they could have done for an MVP is a bring-your-own-bank- account model.

1) Parents would open a bank account for their kids (or the kid may already have their own bank account)

2) Integrate with Plaid Connect to get ACH info.

3) Use Dwolla ACH API (free) to transfer funds between parent's bank account to kid's bank account. (The downside of this is that this is a 2 legged ACH transfer which may take up to a week -- but for this use case, it shouldn't be a problem.)

This will get them the same value proposition that they would have had with bank integration. Once they prove out the demand, they can then optimize:

1) [Reduce ACH lag] Use an actual ACH processor that will handle the transfer between accounts. The downside is that this is expensive.

2) [Reduce ACH cost) Use a real bank (Wells Fargo, Chase, Citi) as an ACH processor -- this cuts out the lag in transfers. The catch to this is that to work with these banks, they want to see sufficient activity

3) [Eliminate need to bring your own bank] Partner with existing bank to provide account opening service. If you can prove sufficient activity and traction, many regional banks are interested in a lower cost customer acquisition channel and innovative products. Alternatively, use custodial accounts and they can earn float on the deposits.

What they were trying to do is jump to #3 before proving out the demand. Secondly, banks are approached all the time by startups to do these types of "partnerships". To banks, unless you can show traction or sufficient volume, it's not worth their time to work with you. The large banks (WF, Chase, etc) don't see much business from this area. The small banks don't have the resources or risk tolerance to do this. So you need to find the sweet spot of banks to establish these relationships. There are a number of regional banks that are willing to work with startups (tip: scout the ToS of these fintech startups to see who they have partnership with)

I'm not sure what their monetization strategy was going to be, but the unit economics here don't really work out for low deposit amounts.

(I've spent a lot of time research this area in FinTech)

<comment><USER33> Johnie,

Any chance we could chat? I am NY based and sounds like we tread similar territory. This analysis is scarily on point!

G

<comment><USER42> Sure, send me an email and let's connect.

<comment><USER33> I am new to posting here - can't see your email. I've put mine in my profile. Just pop me a note and will take it from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> One of the things I see a lot of people screw up on is trying to get "traction" and buzz and virality going BEFORE they actually have something that is fully functional in people's hands. Seems to me that if your buzz dies out before the product is actually ready to be used in it's basic form...you're screwed.

<comment><USER41> No, this is probably the only thing they did right. Getting early traction is important for many reasons.

\- It gives you an opportunity to get early feedback from people interested in your product. If you can get an email you can talk to your users. \- It gives you some early KPIs and a limited, but important understanding of acquisition channels. If you can't find any one who is interested in your product as a concept, how will you get users? \- It motivates companies to get products out earlier. \- It helps when talking to investors to mention that you have 1,000 people on a waiting list.

I agree though, you always need to get the product to market.

<comment><USER43> I get your point, but I think that if you're consumer focused, and your app doesn't actually do it's core function when you start drumming up hype, you're screwed. Consumers have a low attention span and want instant gratification. You may only have that once chance to get them hooked, and a beta sign up list has pretty low engagement rates. If they hear about the hype, find a beta sign up page, and bounce, you've lost them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> In the UK we have gohenry.co.uk. They partnered with Visa and the kids get a debit card, chip&pin and all, that I as a parent can set how and where they can spend their money, auto weekly allowances, chores and the payoff for them etc. Its works quite well, and I pay a few quid a month for the privilege.

<comment><USER45> GoHenry haven't really "partnered" with Visa.

They're just on a prepaid card program provided by IDT Financial Services (if scroll to the bottom you can see it listed).

Same company that provides prepaid cards to Osper.

There's a half dozen prepaid card providers in the UK.

There's also Marqeta in the US (used by doordash to by food on your behalf) who they could have used also well as a dozen other prepaid card providers.

They just made it hard for no reason.

<comment><USER33> 'They just made it hard for no reason'. LOL. Osper has raised over 11MM. It takes a lot more than a kickstarter campaign to fire up a card program like Osper or GoHenry. Give Marqeta a call and check out their fee structure.

If there is constructive feedback here, it is that there were smaller, cheaper hops PiggyBank could have taken to get a smaller product out there earlier to validate assumptions. And if they had taken a few of these hops, they would have learned along the way, and maybe one day would have had a chance to pitch for a 10MM raise. But they didn't.

It feels like a typical 'first startup' experience - as founders, not employee. At least there is some really great collective feedback in this thread about how they could approach things differently if they were to try again. Unfortunately, little of it is on tap when there are just two people in a room trying to navigate a path.

Thanks for sharing Oscar.

<comment><USER45> > "It takes a lot more than a kickstarter campaign to fire up a card program > like Osper or GoHenry."

No, it doesn't. At our startup we managed to get on a prepaid program without funding (we are a London based startup). Infact, through negotiation we even got the sign up fees waived.

And, we did all that before we had ANY funding.

> "Give Marqeta a call and check out their fee structure."

We did call Marqeta but they're not yet in the UK. Can't discuss pricing because of the NDA they make you sign but I can tell you that we didn't have to pay anything to Marqeta during development.

But, either way my issue is that they kept blaming their banking partners for the failure of their startup instead of taking an actual critical look at the mistakes they made.

<comment><USER33> I can't comment on the UK eco-system, but things are definitely more difficult in the US.

You first have to convince a prepaid provider to work with you. You'll need runway for this. You then have to convince a bank to back your card program. For this you also need runway. And if you get through that and start developing, you are immediately on a clock since card program fees are substantial when they kick in.

Let's say it takes you 6 months to get from scratch to launch and fees are waived up to that point. I'd guesstimate you now need a minimum of 25K retained users on your card program to cover costs. If you have a conversion rate of 5%, that means 500K downloads. And that's before factoring in churn.

The PiggyBank team raised 100K. They were two people and iOS only. It is a stretch to think they could achieve all of this before running out of cash.

I am with Johnie and a few others - the lesson is to try something less ambitious first and use success there to raise money to build something more ambitious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I really find it hard to empathize with these kind of founder stories -- what I see is a technology that's trying to solve a problem where a problem doesn't _really_ exist and then the frustration of failure. Maybe find a problem to solve that actually matters?

<comment><USER47> I'm not sure the writer wanted empathy

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I came into this thread and expected to read encouraging and/or consoling comments, and instead all I see are people bashing the idea and its execution.

Of those bashing this business, how many of you have actually built something of your own, and of that group, how many of you have become successful doing it?

If you look hard enough, you can find flaws with any business concept. It's the entrepreneur's job to stay alive long enough to recognizing and fix those flaws. You don't fix them on day 1. Sometimes it takes years, even decades.

How about instead of tearing these guys apart for trying to build a business, we congratulate them for going all-in and paving the way for future entrepreneurs to get this concept right?

<comment><USER34> I agree for the most part. But this kind of effort needs to be criticized. They made huge mistakes and they need to be pointed out so that others can learn and do it better on their attempts.

Their execution, (and the idea), frankly, were awful.

Execute by all means but execute smartly.

<comment><USER48> Sounds to me like backseat entrepreneurship

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The way I would have done it:

1) Parents are charged via typical merchant mechanism to fill their account with "credits" worth $0.99 each, costing $1.00, and can optionally allow the app to automatically top-up their account when low.

2) The service sends cash in a registered mail envelope at a frequency configurable by users, with mailing fees paid for by credits.

Then the business can function and grow a user-base, and by holding the balance, the company can build up a lot of cash-on-hand which will enable them move onto the bank integration they originally wanted. Bonus: receiving legitimate mail and getting cash in hand are very exciting experiences for a kid.

<comment><USER42> If you were to do this, you'd be violating multiple federal laws and regulations.

You have basically created a stored value and money transmitter business without the proper license. In addition, you've created a conduit for criminals to launder money.

See:

* Liberty Reserve - [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-plead...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-pleads-guilty-laundering-more-250-million-through-his-digital)

* Ripple - [http://www.americanbanker.com/news/bank-technology/fincen-fi...](http://www.americanbanker.com/news/bank-technology/fincen-fines-ripple-labs-over-aml-says-firm-enhancing-protocol-1074173-1.html)

* FinCen MSB fines list - [https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/ea/](https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/ea/)

Disrupting finance is hard for a reason.

<comment><USER5> Wait a sec, so Uber, AirBNB, 99designs... etc etc, who all collect money & then disperse it to service providers... You are saying all of these companies require a special license?

<comment><USER33> Yes. Amazon for example was a normal merchant for years and did not need a money-transfer license. However, as soon as they decided to open a marketplace for 3rd party stores, they required licenses. And they got them.

The rule is simple - if you take and hold on to customer funds, you need to be licensed for money transfer in all the states you operate in.

Today, a few services like Braintree and Stripe offer a middle ground solution. Essentially, they will open an escrow account for your merchant customers, and you move any money your holding into the escrow. They will then hold the funds until you release them. This approach is clever, but still a legal grey area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I did a payment card thing back in the 90's with a couple of friends, during the first Internet wave. We actually got some traction and signed a few bank partners, but ultimately it is very hard to be disruptive when you require access to a massive, privately-owned network that is controlled by the same institutions you might be threatening. All you have to do is set eyes on Mastercard's marble palace on the Hudson to know who is calling the shots in that world.

</comment><comment><USER51> Liberty Reserve would have solved all your problems, but Budovsky rots in jail. And you guys go through emotional roller-coaster with banksters who got lost in their own regulations.

Another observation - you had a great idea that delivers clear value. Didn't happen. Now, by looking at your web site, you quite successfully sell some bullshit to other bullshitters who sell their shit to VCs, who sell their shit to innocent bystanders. Hell of a transition.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't understand why they gave up the company instead of pivoting to the cashless approach that the original investor wanted anyway.

<comment><USER53> The only thing the app did was: list the chores; pay the kid. Without the payments the app was a list app.

Not really going to pay the bills.

<comment><USER54> Why do you even need an app if you're paying your own kid? Presumably, their account will be at the same bank as your account. I've had accounts with BofA and USAA and they both have super easy ways to send money to anyone else with an account at their bank. I'm sure most other banks do too.

<comment><USER55> This is what I am wondering as well. Both of the banks I have used in the past (one large national, one tiny credit union) have special "youth" checking accounts that can be co-owned by parent and child. Both of these banks had apps that let you transfer money between your own accounts super easily, and like you mentioned, between any accounts at their institutions fairly easily. You mentioned USAA, and I believe they actually let you send money to any old e-mail address (method of transfer depends on recipient and who they bank with).

The banks themselves aren't really sitting on the sidelines and waiting for disruption. Lots of them run "incubators" for their internal teams precisely to stay relevant. Apps like this face a real uphill climb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> My backseat quarterbacking here... I feel like these guys focused on the wrong things, the fascinating thing though is that with all the help they had, no one told them.

I would have got a marketing person in on day 1. Who needs a "back-end engineer" if you have no users using the product. I wouldn't have rewrote the app. Who cares how maintainable the app is if you have no users. I would have looked for a more realistic back-end route that can work today while I work on the bank integration (why not top up gift cards? I've paid people to write blog articles for me in Amazon Gift Cards. They're as good as cash.) basically, just keep plowing until get from zero to one. Even if one looks NOTHING like your original vision.

</comment><comment><USER57> Great post-mortem thanks for sharing.

Did you try a model where your app would be a great vehicle to sell (yet another) credit card to parents plus additional cards to their kids? In that model transfer transactions would be internal to one company and maybe they would already have an API to interact.

In my country risk investment or VCs are nonexistent so every time I think about funding one of my ideas a possible option is to use a big business where they serve as the distribution channel while the app serves to drive sales. In telcos for instance, apps could be a selling point in corporate sales; say a job tracker that helps a telco nail a contract with a contractor firm.

</comment><comment><USER58> This story rings a bell on so many levels.

Not because my stories are the same, but because the entrepreneurial journey is so long.

You have to try over and over and over again and keep learning every time and every time it fails for a new reason there's a new lesson.

</comment><comment><USER59> It sounds like they were near bankruptcy right before they gave up the app.

How do you go from near bankruptcy to starting a consultant firm and generating income in your first month? Would love to hear that part of the story.

</comment><comment><USER60> Sounds like "Don't count chickens before they hatch" or, in this case, don't allocate time or money or sign deals or promise things before are darned sure can do them -- better yet, have those things already done.

Or basically have a plan that has the startup go live and get revenue enough for break even before making promises. Then, when one of the unexpected things happens, the launch date is just pushed out another month or two but don't get into trouble with investors, bankers, lawyers, employees, etc.

</comment><comment><USER61> > We were behind on payroll taxes

Don't ever do this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8080884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8080884)

</comment><comment><USER62> Something I see a lot of in my area. A couple of people, usually friends, pair up for an app or a saas idea. It falls through for one reason or another. A little later the same folks end up launching a web dev agency, work on random contracts and make a ton of money. I have no idea why more people don't just pursue that to begin with. I have a friend who makes very good money doing this while keeping his full time job.

<comment><USER36> Much less of a sex appeal vs a successful B2C startup app.

But yeah, typically lucrative business isn't sexy business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> What parent really wants to complicate the fundamental lessons and experience that chore assignment and reward teach their kids?

Every thing, process, or task out there isnt always improveable by an app. Maybe all that wasted capital could of gone to kids who wont ever be given an allowance?

</comment><comment><USER64> The irony here is that their banking partners may have had cofidence in the company if YC had accepted them, bringing in more investors. You just can lean startup everything, and yes, money can often buy you what you need.

</comment><comment><USER65> So... ChoreMonster but with cash?

<comment><USER66> I was waiting for someone to mention ChoreMonster. That's the first thing I thought of [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/choremonster-an-app-to- get-...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/choremonster-an-app-to-get-kids-to- do-their-share-now-free-parents-rejoice/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> At least the lunch looked pretty good

</comment><comment><USER68> Reminds me of knox payments which seems abandoned

</comment><comment><USER69> Andddd shit like this is why bitcoin was invented.

Fund via coinbase!

Thanks for the post mortem.</comment>


Ur/Web, a Simple and Powerful Language for Secure Web Applications - <AUTHOR> https://hacked.com/urweb-simple-powerful-language-secure-web-applications/

<comment><USER2> Just have played with it. It was unexpectedly easy to use and it generated impressive small and fast executables. Very nice.</comment>


I don't just refuse, I don't tolerate a-holes fullstop - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingninja.co.uk/i-dont-just-refuse-i-dont-tolerate-a-holes-fullstop/ <comment><USER2> Problem is , how do you define an "asshole". I know a few people I consider complete a-holes but they seem to be very popular with everyone else.

Likewise I know a few people who are disliked because they have a number of weird personality traits but I don't take offense to them at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess, it's subjective to a degree. There probably is a slight grey area. But on the whole, I think its the "generally" recognised a-holes. i.e. some- one most would describe as an a-hole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This blog post is ludicrous. Seriously, how bloated does your head have to be to insert your own quotes in your blog articles? Check this out:

"There is nothing, in software engineering that can't be done by other "non- genius" programmers. Further no one developer is greater than a community of developers. - Coding Ninja"

Are you so sure about it? A million mediocre mathematicians couldn't have achieved what Grigori Perelman did, and a million of mediocre developers couldn't have produced the tools we use nowadays. There is absolutely no evidence that a community of average guys could have come up with something like LIPS or Smalltalk. If you claim otherwise, then please mention ONE example. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants, and only a myopic cretin would deny the staggering impact they have on all our lives and our profession.

For further reading, dear OP, check out this post by Joel Spolsky: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason for the self quote, is because the block quote only has one style on that theme. Thus in the past readers have been confused between external quotes and internal quotes. That is the reason (as a means of reference).

Secondly, the example you gave is about mathematics. In that context I agree. But in the context of software programming this is not the the same. The statement stands.

<comment><USER3> Do you know who McCarthy and Alonzo Church were, what the lambda calculus is, and in which way LISP relates to mathematics? If this is all Greek to you, then please look it up. Next time, though, please do some research BEFORE you write blog posts. It will save you from being ridiculed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I'm aware, you still haven't backed your statement. The context is "software engineering" not about creating the next LISP. So please answer that before throwing ad-hominem's?

<comment><USER3> Who creates the tools that allow, in your world view, average programmers to compete with "geniuses"?

Further, you are the one making bold claims, so the burden of proof lies on you. There are more than enough examples of great software written by "geniuses". But now please mention one great (groundbreaking) project that was written by an army of mediocre programmers.

Let's just make it a little game. I'll go first:

Don Knuth: TeX

Now is your turn!

<comment><AUTHOR> No, you have completely miss-represented that article. No where did I say to the effect that a group of non-genius can be the same as a genius. This is something that you injected (incorrectly). Now you are asking me to defend something that you incorrectly suggested and attributed to me!

The claim I made (if you actually read it carefully) is that in current field of software engineering (99.99% of software, boring Line Of Business software, OS, Kernels etc.) can and are done by average developers. And they do not require "super developers" with inflated ego's aka the a-holes.

You however taken away that to some how mean "geniuses". That is an error on your comprehension and interpretation.

So please do calm down your nerd rage :)

<comment><USER3> I'll quote you again:

"There is nothing, in software engineering that can't be done by other "non- genius" programmers. Further no one developer is greater than a community of developers. - Coding Ninja"

If you think that kernel programming is easy and can be done by "average" programmers then you are either so far ahead of the curve that you don't even realize it, or you are a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I strongly suspect that it's the latter.

The important stuff gets done by truly outstanding people. To deny this is nothing but laughable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't say anything about easy or hard (again you are injecting). Yes kernel programming is hard. However it is not "impossible" :

case in point-> The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles (by Noam Nisan).

Your average CS student can do this (from nand to tetris). Kernel development is hard (without a doubt), but not impossible.

"The important stuff gets done by truly outstanding people. To deny this is nothing but laughable."

Once again, you are adding things that do not exist in the original article.

<comment><USER3> You must be joking! The book you are referring to accompanies a course called "CS116". What about digging through some graduate school course catalogues instead?

Of course Kernel development isn't impossible. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any kernels in the first place. But of course it is the domain of a rather small number of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm well aware of the course, what exactly is your point? Your second part of the sentence makes no sense either, what is your point?

I've demonstrated that kernel development, although "hard" is possible even by students (hence the reference to the book and its related course).

You have offered nothing in response.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


V8 under the hood - <AUTHOR> http://offthelip.org/?p=113 <comment><USER2> _When you build V8 from source, you can have it generate a snapshot of the memory state once the libraries are loaded and this gets packaged in the executable. It makes it slightly bigger but the load time is blazingly fast. Pretty sweet._

That's like the Smalltalk _image_! (A few years ago, a 10 megabyte VisualWorks image could load faster than the 768k Perl runtime.)

<comment><USER3> The cool part about that is maybe they could precompile stuff like prototype, jquery, etc and include it with chrome since majority of websites use some kind of framework. All it would have to do is run a checksum on the prototype js file and if it matches, load a precompiled version.

Then again, it probably wouldn't help too much, since most websites employ fancy packaging tricks to speed up javascript file load times.

<comment><USER4> Or more generally... I've been hearing about these things called caches...

Maybe they should "cache" this data for the most common files. Voila, no favoritism, only sweet sweet performance. (At the cost of having some sort of frequency table.)

And cache eviction and all that is pretty well understood too...

<comment><USER5> But you don't know that url A and url B in fact point to the same file until after the file has been downloaded. At that point, why not just load the javascript instead of performing an md5 checksum.

<comment><USER4> Because parsing isn't free. In addition, one interesting optimization it opens up is something akin to the JVM where performance improves as profiling of code is done. Imagine if every site that used a Javascript library served to improve the performance of that library for all future invocations. That would be nifty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to wonder why they chose C++ for writing the VM. Since their architecture is based on compiling Javascript, why not just write the compiler in Javascript to begin with?

The most likely reason I can think of is that it makes it easier to interface with the existing WebKit code, but this doesn't seem like a very strong reason to me.

<comment><USER7> Because you would need to bootstrap it every time you want to run it, since Javascript is interpreted. This means you'd need a 3rd party Javascript interpreter to run your Javascript interpreter.

<comment><USER8> You only need to bootstrap it once and write out an image.

<comment><USER7> Ah. So you propose writing a Javascript compiler that spits out a dynamically linkable, PIC executable for multiple architectures using semi-static assembly, and then using that to write V8? Otherwise, if you simply dump a raw image you've got a closed environment that can't really be integrated into a browser very well, or linked into other apps for their use.

That's a whole lot of unnecessary -- and nontrivial -- work, when all you want to do is interpret Javascript.

<comment><USER8> I'm not really _proposing_ anything, since the V8 team has forgotten more about VMs than I know, just pointing out another common design alternative. The post implies that V8 can already perform some sort of AOT compilation:

 _When you build V8 from source, you can have it generate a snapshot of the memory state once the libraries are loaded and this gets packaged in the executable. It makes it slightly bigger but the load time is blazingly fast._

There's certainly extra work in this approach, but maybe it would be worth it if it allows the compiler to be written in a more productive language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is interesting - No intermediate language. I was wondering about this in response to a comment yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=293962>

This linked to a post where one of the key developers (Dave Griswold) said "The release of the V8 VM is the beginning of a whole new era for dynamic languages"...

From this, I wouldn't see this as the case at all. I can't imagine many people wanting to use JavaScript as an intermediate language.

Without an intermediate language or some form I wouldn't call this a Virtual Machine - it's an interpreter... Granted, a pretty fast and sophisticated one.

<comment><USER10> Actually, it's more like a compiler than an interpreter. I think people use the term "VM" out of ignorance -- they think VM is a fancy term for "thing that runs javascript".

But anyway, if you want to run your $NEW_LANGUAGE on V8, just compile your language to JavaScript. That is the "IR".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has anybody taken a shot at building a js server stack that can intelligently detect the capabilities of the user-agent, and determine what code can be executed client-side and what code can be executed on the server?

<comment><USER12> Not sure about detecting the capabilities of the user-agent, but Aptana did a quite interesting server-side Javascript implementation:

<http://www.aptana.com/jaxer>

Interestingly enough, server-side Javascript is actually quite old. I remember one of the very first web apps I worked with was in SSJS (aka Server-Side JavaScript), on the Netscape Enterprise Server.

<comment><USER11> I remember ASP 2.0/3.0 supporting server-side js! I've never seen anything though where you write the js code once, and the server determines where to execute the code.</comment></comment></comment>


Information May Have Mass - <AUTHOR> https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794 <comment><USER2> > To test the hypothesis we propose here an experiment, predicting that the > mass of a data storage device would increase by a small amount when is full > of digital information relative to its mass in erased state.

Isn't a disk in its "erased state"\--whether storing zeroes or random values-- still storing information?...

> An example of true erased state would be an array of bits in a magnetic data > storage memory, in which the erase operation does not imply reset of all > bits to identical magnetized state, but total demagnetization of each bit, > so neither 1, nor 0 could be identified in any of the bits.

But if you instead think of the drive as a ternary storage system, now it suddenly would be storing actual valid values, and you can also always define the magnetic readings to be a fully analog storage: so this definition of "information" has to be flawed for being subjective.

Something with a lack of information would need to be something of high entropy--essentially the opposite of information--and thereby more indistinguishable along some axis towards a chaotic gas or whatever.

> From (6), mbit = 0 at T = 0K, so as expected, no information can exist at > zero absolute.

Isn't this the exact opposite of correct? Information is maximized at absolute zero, which is used as the definition point of minimal entropy (which is, again, the lack of information).

<comment><USER3> Yeah I'm struggling with that bit also; shouldn't information content be defined as the difference between a storage device with all bits set to the same 0 or 1 value, vs. a device with all bits set to purely random values? And can you isolate a measure of information content from the system that generates that information?</comment></comment>