Tell HN: Warning, Google ignores opt-out for Buzz if you set an away message - <AUTHOR>

Well, my opinion of Buzz just did a 180.  When it first asked me to join I opted out and moved on.  I didn't see the big deal for privacy concerns, since I could easily opt out and never use it.
Today, I set a status message for google chat as an away message, and suddenly I was auto-enrolled into buzz.  My away message was published as a status update, I had followers auto configured, the whole deal.  I think I've successfully killed it now, but already my privacy has been lost (just the auto-follow behavior exposes who I chat/email with through gmail).
So a warning to other HN readers: be wary in using google chat status updates, or you may find yourself enabling buzz even after explicitly opting out.
And if anyone from google is reading this: No means no.  If you enable buzz after I explicitly say no, then you just buzz-raped your user. <comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, I just tried it on an account with an existing Google Profile that doesn't have buzz set up and it did not add followers/followings to the existing Google Profile. It added the status message to the buzz feed, which isn't a privacy problem since contacts can see it anyway, but it did not fully set up a buzz profile. Clicking on the Buzz status textarea brings up the normal "How do you want to appear to others?" form and still won't let me use Buzz without setting it up.

Also, I can't see the following/follower lists from another account; it just shows the name, a link to the google profile and the fact that the two accounts are following each other, but nothing about any other contacts. It does, however, _appear_ that the profile is fully set up from within the account, showing the follower/following lists, but outside accounts can't see this info.

I also follow someone who hasn't created a Google profile or started using Buzz. She changed her status message and it showed up in the Buzz feed, but when I click on her name it goes to an empty Buzz profile view that says "This person does not have a public profile." where the name usually is.

TL/DR: I looked at accounts both with and without an existing Google Profile and although a status message change is posted to the Buzz feed, in neither case did it fully sign the account up for Buzz nor did it expose contacts, despite the fact that it looks like it does. YMMV, but probably not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good information. I didn't do any verification from outside accounts, I just started immediately trying to stop/undo.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it's tremendously confusing. As far as I can tell, looking at it from another account is the only way to know that the profile doesn't actually show the following/follower information publicly. It really shouldn't require an in-depth, multi-person investigation to figure out what's public and what isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So I've yet to create a Google public profile but I just saw a very disturbing "feature" related to Buzz. To make sure that I was safe from Buzz, I enabled it and unfollowed everyone it automatically made me follow, then turned it off again.

But then I went to my Google Reader page, and my "People you follow" list was now completely empty. Google has hooked up sharing between _everything_ with Buzz, and that's not cool.

Wow. I'm starting to wonder if I should also start looking for alternatives.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure it automatically followed people you weren't already following on Reader? If they were, the behavior makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My understanding is that you did not opt out of Buzz. What you said "no" to was taking the tour of Buzz - but you were still auto-enrolled. Hence the fuss.

<comment><USER6> That's just as bad or worse, if a tech savvy user can come to this kind of erroneous conclusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This whole buzz thing has send me looking for a new email provider. If they so eagerly give out all my contacts what else are they doing or whats next? The last couple months have been enough for me to start my move away from google.

<comment><USER8> If you come up with a short list of alternate email providers, please post as I'm in the same boat for this and other reasons.

<comment><USER9> see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121269>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's odd. I even opted in for Buzz but never created a public profile due to privacy concerns, and my chat status updates aren't be posted on Buzz(although when I looked in the linked sites dialog to see if it should be, I noticed that while Google Chat status updates were not linked, Picasa and Reader were(conveniently, I don't use Picasa and I use Reader exclusively for reading), although it said that they would not be actually linked until some further step was taken).

</comment><comment><USER11> I am so glad people finally start seeing Google for what it is. A huge evil (at least explicetely not "do no evil") corporation with a dangerous market majority on many things on the internet. Embrace alternatives!

<comment><USER12> While the launch of buzz really is a big disaster, i still think most of the errors that were made, were not because of a manager saying "hey, great, lets publish all privacy information of our users to the internet, thats a great business model!" (think of it, the users data is probably the most valuable data an internet company has today). It looks to me, as if a team had a good idea (yes, i think buzz as an idea is a good idea, the launch was not) but it was not properly tested and thought of such cases. All in all it was released far too early for far too many people. I still wonder why they didn't roll out buzz on an invite only base like they did with gmail. All this negative press could've been avoided and most people would be like "yay, thats cool!" without the "oh shit"-effect.

But that attitude that google fucked up your privacy on intent is just stupid. I agree, Googles power is scary: Think of it, google may control a lot of users internet experience from end-to-end in the future (ISP->Search->Mail->Mobile->Android->Netbooks+advertising = omg, scary!). They will eventually end up being split into many companies if the trend continues. But to say they fucked up your privacy on intent is just wrong, imo.

Thanks for the upcoming downvotes in advance, because i don't just repeat what every little blog is already writing over and over again.

<comment><USER13>
      > It looks to me, as if a team had a good idea (yes, i think buzz as an idea is a good idea,
      > the launch was not) but it was not properly tested and thought of such cases.

I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I feel they're evil. They believed that their idea was a good one, and so forced it on everyone without bothered to test it. Even if you don't attribute their mistakes to malice, the other option is to concede that they were 'merely' careless and reckless with our personal, private data.

My issue with Google isn't all the privacy issues around Buzz, it's that all the privacy issues around Buzz came after no outside testing, and with no choice on the end-user's part. They made a string of assumptions that turned out to be false in a not-insignificant number of cases, because no one thought 'hey, maybe we should ask people before we give other people information about them.'

<comment><USER12> Yes, i agree. As i said, it would probably have been a good idea to start with an invite-only beta stage. Still wondering why they didn't and why they didn't think the use cases through, that's a shame. To me it feels, like some manager wanted to push that software out before its time where i hoped google projects wouldn't be as budget-driven and as marketing-driven as the whole rest of the industry. Atleast not so much to produce such a disaster.

Although Google did some steps to open up in terms of what data they have on a user, i hope this incident pushes them to be as open as possible with what data of me they have and giving me more control over it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the biggest failure of Buzz is how confusing it is. I think this is one of the most misunderstood products that has ever been launched. I honestly believe about 90% of the complaints we've seen are misunderstandings of how Buzz works, and how the information that it sets up looks to other people.

For example, in my experience the autofollow doesn't reveal nearly as much information as some people expect:

1) It doesn't reveal anything if the person you autofollowed doesn't have a public google profile.

2) It never reveals the email address to anyone who already didn't know it

3) It doesn't really reveal on what level you have any contact with the person, because an outside observer has no idea whether you autofollowed this person or chose to follow them. For example, about 50% of the people I'm following I've never emailed before (and I still don't know their email address even though I've communicated with them through Buzz now).

There are some privacy issues with Buzz, but more than anything its biggest failure is being confusing.

<comment><USER15> I'd say the biggest failure is autoenrolling you, and then setting certain things public. Sure they could see my gtalk status, but I never set anything up to let my Reader be public, but it was by default. If I want people to know what I'm reading, _I'll_ tell them!

<comment><USER14> This is one of the other points I think is confusing. What exactly is being shared out of reader? I use reader, I've got it linked to my profile, but when I view my profile as an anonymous user it just says no shared items. I never used the sharing feature of Reader before, so I really have no clue what it did previously. Is that was was shared automatically on enroll? I definitely don't see any way for anyone to see what feeds are in my reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Strange, Google asked me what feeds I want to include in Buzz and one of the feeds was Gtalk Status, so are you sure you didn't select this one (for me, it was unselected by default). If you didn't, then it become really serious.

<comment><USER15> I ran into this -- thought I had opted out (turns out only of the tour), then because of this post, I check the Buzz settings. Reader and Gtalk statuses were shared by default. And I was already following others (presumably they were unaware their info was being shared).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> wow. i am so glad I haven't logged into any google products since they launched this. I may create brand new accounts. I don't use gmail, thank goodness!

I knew my reluctance to use Google products would pay dividends.

<comment><USER18> You seem very relived. Would this have actually directly negatively affected you?

<comment><USER17> Who knows? It has negatively affected others already.

<comment><USER18> Sure, but those were uncommon circumstances. I'm not denying that Google deserves a ton of shit for this, but I don't think it's the kind of thing that had much of a chance of negatively affecting the average user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't this really belong in a bug report somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel like the only person not pissed off about Buzz.

Email contacts might seed your connections, but I have followers and followees that I've never spoken a private word to in person or via email.

Honest question: what information is it that people feel is leaking, other than "I clicked 'Follow' on this person's profile"?</comment>


FIX engine for nodejs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bitfloor/nodefix

<comment><USER2> The callback style that NodeJS uses fits perfectly with FIX. After implementing QuickFix/J And building scaffolding around it to allow all the nice bits you will need like multiple notifiers on message received and mutexing multiple threads to a single communication thread. I think there are a lot of advancements that can be made.</comment>


Pa$$Word Doesn't Matter - <AUTHOR> https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Azure-Active-Directory-Identity/Your-Pa-word-doesn-t-matter/ba-p/731984 <comment><USER2> I didn't see anything in there that XKCD-936 wouldn't fix. Combine such a password generation system (note: words MUST be chosen randomly for it to have value), with a password manager, and finally, don't use the most commonly used operating system (hint, hint) - and you'll likely be "safe".

Perfectly safe? No. If the attackers are trying to get at you specifically, and know you use TempleOS - then they can target for that.

Practically safe? Yes.

Most attackers aren't going at specific targets, and most people aren't going to become or be "specific targets". Most attackers are going for the lower hanging fruit, who use the most common software stacks, because they comprise the largest attack surface.

Get out of that "rut" \- and your odds of being a victim will go down drastically. Of course, you'll have to guard against potential phishing attacks and such, but most of those even will be trying exploits against the "common stack".

What I find funny, though, is every time there is some kind of breach, the only time the software on the system is mentioned - if at all - is when it -isn't- running on the "common stack". I think this does a real disservice, and I wonder why it seems like this is what is happening. Maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part?

But - if every time there was a ransomware attack, or some other kind of breach via phishing or whatnot - if the reporting said something to the effect that it occured on a system running the "common stack" \- maybe those affected by the breach would think to themselves, "Hmm - maybe we should be using this stack of software, it seems to get breached multiple times all over the world every year now for 25+ years running - maybe we should try something different?"

But that wouldn't bode well for that "common stack", would it?

And certainly, I'm glad that the focus of the attackers is over there, and not on the software stack that I use daily at home, and less so on the stack I use for work. It means I am safer (except again, against a directed attack - and I am a nobody, so unlikely to be targeted). Not perfectly safe (after all, there have been the odd-duck attacks directed at these other platforms) - but safe enough.

Ultimately - especially on the level of the world as an "attack surface" \- the greatest threat has come from this virtual mono-culture of the "common stack" of software. It has been a boon otherwise, but like any monoculture, it is subject to massive failures should an invader/attacker succeed against its defenses. We see this kind of thing nearly every day. If your system is a part of a large enough such monoculture "attack surface", you can expect to potentially become a victim.

But even on such system(s), using an XKCD-936 password generation scheme, coupled with a password manager - and then following other security "best practices" \- you can ultimately limit your exposure. Not as great as coupling that with a lesser used software stack, but probably good enough for the common user.

The one area though (which is growing at a fast rate, and is being more frequently targeted) that a lot of this breaks down is that of "walled gardens". While in theory such systems, with app stores and whatnot, should be able to keep issues to a minimum, in practice we have seen there are still vulnerabilities. With people more and more using these kinds of systems, mainly with their phones, it is proving to be a very ripe target for attackers. People don't generally think of their phones as computers, and their attitudes and education (if they had any at all) from the PC world doesn't translate or carry over. So their security on that front is lagging.

What I imagine we'll see in the future (likely it already exists) is an underground market for "popular apps" \- where programmers create certain apps that everyone wants (imagine if "flappy bird" had been this way?), downloaded millions of times, then the developer sells it on a black market list (code and everything) for others to continue to update with malware, etc - but the reputation on the app store is already established. If these updates to the code base are done slowly enough and stealthily enough (piecemeal), a large malware base attack surface could be realized; by the time it is found out and removed from the store, tons of users would already have it on their devices. Even if some uninstall it because they heard about it being such an issue, many if not most won't - especially if it is very useful software otherwise. Alternatively, the software might exploit other weaknesses to install other bits in places that won't be removed by an uninstall...

The problem is multi-faceted of course, but I have to disagree with the conclusion of the article that passwords are worthless.

Weak passwords are worthless. Easily guessable passwords are worthless. Reused passwords are worthless. But passwords, with a great enough length (XKCD-936), combined with a password manager, and ideally de-coupled from the "common stack" of software - and use of commonly known other security techniques (mainly, be wary of phishing attacks) - and you will greatly reduce your level of vulnerability, likely into the sub-single digit range.

Of course, the authors of this piece would not likely want to tell people that, for obvious reasons.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is weird and contradicts itself.

Having a strong password reduces the likelihood that your password can be brute forced if the hash is purchased online. This helps with "Credential Stuffing", "Password spray" and "Brute force" on their list.

Not re-using passwords means that if one account is successfully compromised it doesn't then mean that others are too. This helps with basically the entire list.

(Maybe it's addressed further down, but the first item in the first table contradicts the premise so I didn't spend any time reading any further.)

<comment><USER2> There was also weirdness like this:

"So, as far as password spray is concerned – your password doesn't matter – as long as it isn't in the "most common passwords" top 50 list!"

Shouldn't that actually read:

"So, as far as password spray is concerned – your password doesn't matter – if it is in the "most common passwords" top 50 list!"

That is - don't use a common password (and don't reuse passwords), and your chances of a compromise go down greatly?

But this wording (and it's repeated similarly elsewhere in the article) seems backwards, unless I'm misinterpreting it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Right? I'm tired of ridiculous-still-inadequate hoops some websites try to make you jump through such as "add a number", or "add an uppercase letter", etc. - it really doesn't matter. If this is an account I need to protect, I'll use a password manager.

<comment><USER5> Security theatre, plain and simple. The harder something feels to guess to the human brain, the more secure it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > So, as far as password spray is concerned – your password doesn't matter – > as long as it isn't in the "most common passwords" top 50 list!

That's a matter of point of view. Microsoft may not care that users have passwords in the top 1000 list because, say, only 99.9% of the attacks were made with passwords in the top 50 list, but this .01% of users is still at a higher risk of being victim of password spraying than others. I'm worried that this line could be misinterpreted : banning common passwords is still important (and not just the top 50).

Also, the line saying that password managers should be used "if you are really nervous" is very weird. Password managers are a good way to apply the given recommendations (except for MFA, of course), and on top of that, they allow you to not have to remember all of these unique passwords. It's even more weird since the major point of the article is that the complexity of the password doesn't matter as much as its uniqueness.

<comment><USER7> the big picture of this excellent article is: to be safe, have a never-used- before 12-character password _and_ use MFA.

The article is not against password managers and if one reads the whole article, the "really nervous" will not be misinterpreted by the average reader.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's not saying "your Yg^V2jw,C~8fpVnq doesn't matter", just your "Pa$$Word". Don't be a human being who tries to remember these things.

A password manager also protects you against phishing attacks, for example, because it's savvy enough to check for things that could fool a human.</comment></comment></comment>


How to (Sort Of) Find Out If You Were Affected by the Equifax Hack - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/heres-how-to-sort-of-find-out-if-you-were-affected-by-1802238924 <comment><USER2> This whole hack is just utter trash.

Scammy website, long delay before notifying us, FULL identities stolen, bullshit monitoring service offered as consolation prize

Oh and the SSA says "sorry yeah we usually don't change people's SSNs. Yeah go get that monitoring service!"

Total sham. Glad they sold their stock and got their payout too!!</comment>


Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks - <AUTHOR> https://techiavellian.com/intellectual-denial-of-service-attacks <comment><USER2> I think the worst kind of intellectual DOS attacks are those with high compression rate. Those that sound vaguely plausible at first ("Just do away with ALL the taxes, people will sort it out and enterprise will skyrocket") but __require many more words to refute __. When the politician in question is also a fast talker, and has a master 's degree in Philosophy, he can appear to be smarter because no one can keep up with him and it's by definition impossible to refute all compressed arguments in the same amount of time. A Polish politician I have in mind goes by initials JKM.

My point: an intelligent, educated person can cross over to the dark side and it makes it all the way worse. Some people praise Dan Brown for his intelligence. So what, he doesn't write books for intelligent people.

In the past, centralized media kinda kept those guys in check because it had higher respect for formal education. The "compressed argument" still worked very well for populists in space-constrained media like TV debates (time) and print (word limit). Now, the Pandora's box is open.

To succeed in social media, you don't need to construct good arguments. Some charisma and a way with words will go a looong way. __Ordinary people no longer seem to respect education, logic and wisdom __. This is a problem because no one can be an expert at everything. In the end, we __trust __some people. What if a lot of people put trust not into expertise and experience, but into charismatic, cheeky figures? What if they prefer appeals to nationality, bloodline (son of a heroic activist)?

Is there a strategy that works against populism and isn't intellectually dishonest?

<comment><USER3> Why should people respect formal education?

Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published research is wrong. The non-scientific parts of academia are dominated by in- group politics and shallow status seeking. And in much of academia, evidence is less important than ideology: research and researchers are banned not because they are wrong, but because their ideas are unacceptable.

If academia wants respect, it should work on improving itself instead of trying to find a "strategy that works against populism".

Edit: Citations

> Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

[https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

> Scientists Replicated 100 Psychology Studies, and Fewer Than Half Got the > Same Results

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists- rep...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists- replicated-100-psychology-studies-and-fewer-half-got-same-results-180956426/)

> 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility

[https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid- on...](https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on- reproducibility-1.19970)

> Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who > are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences > between 7 and 9 percent.

> Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are > virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, > history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English > professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession- of-liberal-intolerance.html)

> In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and > personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly > conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they > said they would discriminate.

[http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf](http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf)

> When Inbar and Lammers contacted [social psychologists] ... they found that > ... the climate in social psychology was harsh for conservative thinkers. > ... Participants were asked about the environment in the field: How hostile > did they think it was? Did they feel free to express their political ideas? > As the degree of conservatism rose, so, too, did the hostility that people > experienced. Conservatives really were significantly more afraid to speak > out.

> Over all, close to nineteen per cent [of social psychologists surveyed] > reported that they would have a bias against a conservative-leaning > paper...and thirty-seven and a half per cent, against choosing a > conservative as a future colleague.

[https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social- psy...](https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology- biased-republicans)

<comment><USER4> The alternative is often worse.

"The mainstream media misled me about Iraq, therefore I'm going to get my information from Facebook articles posted by Russian intelligence!"

"There was once a batch of contaminated vaccines, so now I'm going to risk the lives of my and other children by not vaccinating them"

"The banks were unfairly bailed out, so I'm going to keep my money in Quadriga"

<comment><USER5> That's a false dilemma; as long as I'm not resigned to hopeless infotainment addiction, I don't have to believe the "least bad" reporting about events that don't concern me.

<comment><USER6> I am absolutely 100% confident that the success rate of individuals with no training doing their own research is way way way lower than the success rate of the academic community consensus.

<comment><USER5> That's not what I'm arguing against. I'm not claiming to be a better truth- seeker than the academic community.

I am claiming that a lot of this truth has no meaning to me, and I'm comfortable with _not_ seeking it. If that sounds horrible, consider a special case like celebrity gossip. Am I better than the magazines at getting to the bottom of it? Probably not. Does that fact implore me to seek their "knowledge"?

I distrust many media accounts of events. I don't believe their opposites either. And I don't "do my own research". I just embrace ignorance of things that don't matter to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also the Gish Gallop - a debating technique named after the creationist Duane Gish, which involves making as many specious arguments as quickly as possible. An unprepared opponent is likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of points they need to refute.

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

A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating, creating a truly absurd spectacle; most teams speak as quickly as humanly possible to fit the greatest number of arguments into a fixed time limit, creating a barely-intelligible blur of words.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0)

[https://www.americamagazine.org/arts- culture/2017/09/26/corr...](https://www.americamagazine.org/arts- culture/2017/09/26/corrosion-high-school-debate-and-how-it-mirrors-american- politics)

<comment> barry-cotter > A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating

Not outside the US it isn't. Policy debating is a special US abomination, with unfortunate extensions into the cultural colony to the north. Everywhere else does parliamentary debating.

<comment><USER8> It's more than just what the arguments are about. Anywhere else in the world someone making points so quickly as in the videos would sound desperate and instantly "lose" the debate. Nobody is expect to refute point by point a nonsensical diatribe.

<comment><USER9> Recently I saw on the local Australian politics debate show someone asking a question rattled off about 5 questions with opinions shared in between each one and the responder said something like "That was a political statement, could you please rephrase that as an actual question?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jonathan Swift in 1710:

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead."

</comment><comment><USER11> > Wasting intellectual horsepower by refuting bad arguments, experts have less > and less time for more productive endeavors

I disagree that it's a waste of effort. It may be considered a waste of effort from the experts perspective, but from everyone else perspective, it is a guard against experts keeping the truth for themselves.

Experts together are a "black box" to non-experts. If we let them continue refining their ideas, they might forget to think about the common good. Even if they are good intended, at some point the knowledge has to flow between people, but experts often use their own domain language to communicate, and no one but them can argue anymore about their ideas.

What people defending X are asking to the experts is that the latters should make their finding understandable by everyone, or some people will be exploited. If a piece of knowledge is true, but not useful to people problems, it doesn't matter to them.

To me, people defending X are asking experts how does Y (or even X) is relevant to their lives, and it actually show that neither X or Y matter to them.

From there, experts have to admit their are not HELPING people anymore, because they don't solve real world problems, in humanitarian term.

Why would you care about the shape of the earth when you are dying because you have no water or food to live ? That's the life of some people on Earth. Why aren't experts thinking about giving them food and water rather than arguing that they are wrong about the shape of the earth ?

<comment><USER12> Just wanted to second this. Experts _should_ be constantly trying to work themselves out of a job.

The most annoying thing I've come across is instances where I'm sort of backed into an intellectual as "the guy who knows X", where people fully capable of understanding X to act as repeaters refuse to do so.

However, I understand the compunction at the same time. So I can't really blame them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >Once we have publicly attached our name to an idea, the path of least resistance is to continue believing it.

This reminds of Paul Graham's essay titled "Keep your identity small": [http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Just wait till bots/ai gets good enough to spout bullshit. Just fill forums with thousands of argue-bots and you might be able to make the noise ratio so bad the internet is unusable.

<comment><USER15> That's already the case, I think.

<comment><USER9> I think it is probably happening on places like twitter now and I know for a fact that its quite common for people to control about 20 accounts so they can make an opinion seem like a common agreement.

<comment><USER16> Persona management and state level trolling has been happening for a while now. Go back to the long, long ago past of 2011 and revel in US weaponisation of social networks:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy- op...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation- social-networks)

"It is unclear whether a persona management programme would contravene UK law. Legal experts say it could fall foul of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, which states that "a person is guilty of forgery if he makes a false instrument, with the intention that he or another shall use it to induce somebody to accept it as genuine, and by reason of so accepting it to do or not to do some act to his own or any other person's prejudice". However, this would apply only if a website or social network could be shown to have suffered "prejudice" as a result.

• This article was amended on 18 March 2011 to remove references to Facebook and Twitter, introduced during the editing process, and to add a comment from Centcom, received after publication, that it is not targeting those sites."

<comment><USER17> I wonder if the US 3 letter agencies have any motivation, and are sophisticated enough, to create the appearance of an organization controlled by a third party that is operating online to shape the thinking of American citizens.

Not that this would ever happen of course, just wondering if it is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Decent article. If you want more along these lines try Cryptome: [https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum- spies.htm](https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm)

The strategies of information are fundamentally the same as for other forms of warfare, but the operational calculus is very different.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the great link. I'm saving to read the whole thing later, but wanted to point out that a variation of forum sliding (or possibly another tactic, haven't read it all) appears to be in use on Reddit.

The amount of noise from what are in many cases fairly obvious troll accounts introduced in important and high information density threads on /r/politics is staggering.

I can only surmise the intent has been to leverage Reddit's thread compression and comment ranking system to push down informative posts with lots of "active conversation" that really is just tossing low information, low quality chatter back and forth to reduce the signal to noise ratio of the comment section an bank on people getting to annoyed with the poor comment quality to bother scrolling for the good stuff that has been pushed down.

I'm also curious if tools like Masstagger are compromised yet and what the tooling of attackers may look like by comparison.

I'm sure there is much more going on that is harder to directly observe, but Reddit really is a great data source for any researchers on this topic.

<comment><USER15> Sorry for not replying earlier. Thanks for the reference to Masstagger which I wasn't aware of as I'm not a regular reddit user. Every platform has its own quirks, but the brigading techniques are easily adapted from platform to platform much like skills learned in one FPS are fairly transferable to any other FPS etc.

If you're interested in this topic and/or have any expertise in directed graphs and network mapping please drop me a line, same username at gmail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Related: I don't recall it was djb or Bruce Schneier, but I remember, after Snowden's revelations, one of them criticized the NSA/NIST was using a "denial-of-service" technique to push flawed standards. That is, it's relatively easy to draft a protocol but hard to analyze them. You would publish a dozen of ciphers and protocols at once, then the cryptographers would busy working on _some_ of them. Eventually, flawed standards went through without being noticed...

</comment><comment><USER20> A compilation of related concepts and references, with some overlap to this article:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability/)

</comment><comment><USER21> So true and a great way to think of it.

I moved to weighing the benefits of proving someone wrong vs. ignoring and nodding. Will help to reduce the number of arguments you get into and make room for the important ones.

<comment><USER22> I realised a while ago that I was spending way too much time and energy getting into pointless online arguments about social justice issues. I now have a pretty low threshold of disagreement above which I'll immediately (and politely) disengage, and if it escalates at all from there, just block the person. I no longer care if someone is wrong on the internet, it's not my job to re-educate them, and the less energy I waste on them the better.

<comment><USER23> You might find this interesting: The Ego and its Own, by Max Stirner [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wholeheartedly agree with this article, and I firmly believe that if no one paid attention to flat earthers, for example, it wouldn't have become such a big matter.

It's mind-boggling to me that there's people on YT/social media going out of their way to prove to flat earthers that the earth is not flat. We have 600 years of science proving that, and they don't believe that, do you think that your little experiment will change their mind? Also, what's the point? It's not like if there's enough people that think the earth is flat, NASA will shut down or anything.

It's commendable trying to educate people but in these cases it's definitely not worth the hassle, and I really hope people start realising that and stop entertaining all the crazy ideas that random strangers have around the world.

</comment><comment><USER25> The hyperpartisan politics in the U.S. has been fostered since long before the internet. On the right, "rage radio" has been big since the early 90s. After listening to conservative outrage, it's hard to then listen to the other side of an argument and think "they may have a point."

Similarly, left wing comedy-news shows make fun of the other side. When you see the other side as ripe for ridicule, its hard to then say, "but they may have a point."

Source: I've known many people on both sides, and it always saddens me that discussions don't boil down to "let's both look at the arguments from both sides." Instead, there's an emotional "the other side is nuts" response that blocks all attempts at even discussing things fairly.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just like behind many dumb bots doing a distributed denial of service, there can be one mastermind controller/hacker, It is quite possible that behind these non-experts doing the intellectual denial of service, there is an expert mastermind.

</comment><comment><USER27> That quote on the slide is the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle)

<comment><USER28> There's a very similar saying in my native language (Romanian) that roughly translates into English like this:

> One fool person throws a rock into a lake and ten smart persons then try > their best to get it out

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Let's say the internet denial of service is controlled by a hacker who owns bots, and is the mastermind. It is possible that in an intellectual denial of service by non-experts there is an expert mastermind.

</comment><comment><USER30> Perhaps the most pernicious Intellectual Denial of Service Attack is the "need" to censor opinions that we don't agree with.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think the tldr here is that questions/challenges require significantly less energy than answers for many types of questions; and this is more true the more expertise the answers require.

I think one problem is that expertise have been a bludgeon for a long time and intellectuals have done an awful job of not over reaching their expertise and at sticking to their levels of confidence.

I also think that the once important role of "public intellectuals" and philosophers as critics of everything was an essential role to keeping participants honest. We don't have this any more.

</comment><comment><USER32> I would argue that this is the tactic used by most multi-national marketing agencies.

</comment><comment><USER33> Let's say the internet denial of service is controlled by a hacker who owns bots, and is the mastermind. It is possible that in an intellectual denial of service by non-experts there is an expert mastermind.

</comment><comment><USER34> I would have expected the article to say something about election meddling via social media. Citizens are denied access to true information by drowning it in fake news.

<comment><USER35> They aren't denied access to it, they just have to pay attention and be discerning if they want to filter all that information for the truth. The problem today is, there are fewer and fewer people who are trying to inform instead of persuade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Brilliant! The denial of service analogy is so true. There will be probably be an uneducated group that will refute the existance of DOS attacks!

</comment><comment><USER37> techiavellian.com

1\. BLOCKING SSL access to web TLSv1.2 browsers with ciphers that use AES128/SHA256 (AES256/SHA384 ciphers only).

2\. NO http access.

Intellectual denial of service attack: SUCCEEDED.

I cannot view your website!</comment>


Only Twitter Says It Would Refuse to Help Build Muslim Registry - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/12/02/of-8-tech-companies-only-twitter-says-it-would-refuse-to-help-build-muslim-registry-for-trump/ <comment><USER2> Breakdown of article:

        1) Email a bunch of companies
        2) They see the email is from Sam Biddle
        3) They roll their eyes and don't respond
        4) Write article stating that they won't refuse to build a Muslim registry

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the companies in this article hasn't existed for a year, SRA International. CSC spun off their public sector group last year. Upon being spun off they acquired SRA and renamed themselves as CSRA.

There are 3 options: He contacted CSRA but for some reason referred to them by the name of a company they acquired.

He wasn't aware that SRA doesn't exist anymore.

He tried to contact the other SRA International which is a professional society for research administrators.

None of these speak highly to his level of reporting.

<comment><USER3> I posted a comment on the article and sent a tweet to Sam Biddle pointing out the error. The comment was deleted and he blocked me on Twitter, so I sent an email to the editor in chief of The Intercept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everyone else thought it was such a ridiculous question they didn't even respond.

<comment><USER5> You know, I would've agreed on November 7th, but our president-elect has called for this.

Microsoft's statement says "it will remain important for those in government and the tech sector to continue to work together to strike a balance that protects privacy and public safety in what remains a dangerous time." That to me comes off as quite chilling. Why couldn't they just say no, they wouldn't help? Why the double-speak?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a part of me that would just love to see a double-cross in this.

"Hey, we're IBM, we can help you with your nifty new fascism."

Once the list gets made:

"Oh, that's not his address that's weird..." "Huh, that person doesn't exist, that's weird..." "Oh man, the servers are down again. That Microsoft you know!" "We lost the db. We have a backup, from March."

<comment><USER7> [https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story- archive/...](https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story- archive/2012-featured-story-archive/simple-sabotage.html)

>>>

        Organizations and Conferences

        Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
        Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
        When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
        Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
        Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
        Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
        Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

        Managers

        In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
        Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
        To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
        Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
        Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

        Employees

        Work slowly.
        Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
        Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
        Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

<comment><USER6> I've worked with IBM before. I think that's their management guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> sam biddle ? wasnt he a "gawker journalist"?

is this fake news, I cant honestly tell.

</comment><comment><USER9> They probably have already this fitler the same way Facebook try to guess your politic views.

</comment><comment><USER10> Their help is already implicitly provided with the networks of social connections they make available. Too late.

</comment><comment><USER11> .

<comment><USER7> To quote chapter and verse,

>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

and nowhere in that text, or in case law subsequently, is it necessary that the "people" in question be citizens.</comment></comment>


Fexl: Live Functional Programming Demo - <AUTHOR> http://fexl.com/demo/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is Turing equivalent, however in its present form it only reduces an expression to a normal form and stops there. I'll enhance it later to emulate some "side effects" such as print and read.

I use this technology when I need to embed a lightweight functional programming system into an existing program, written in C, Perl, or whatever.

I encourage you to push the button labeled "Evaluate". I think it's fun to push that button, but surprisingly few people do.</comment>


A Brutal Introduction to (Haskell) Arrows - <AUTHOR> http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2010/06/14/a-brutal-introduction-to-arrows/

<comment><USER2> I have heard some very smart developers admit that it took them years to wrap their brains around monads, and I suppose arrows are even more abstract ... I wonder how many people on earth honestly get this stuff well enough to use it day to day.

<comment><USER3> Well enough to use it - many. Monads are not hard to use - take the Maybe for example - it just stops doing the operations if one of them results in Nothing. That's pretty much it - now you can use it.

Designing one and implementing for your own purposes - now that's a bit more tricky. But then, we're often consumers much more than producers. Even when programming you're a consumer as far as screen, cpu, memory, compiler, etc. etc. production is concerned. You know this stuff well enough to use it day to day, but if someone told you to explain the cpu in depth, most likely you'd have problems with it.

If you do Haskell all the time, it's not that hard actually. But then again - not many people write serious Haskell stuff as their day job.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best domain you own that you aren't currently using? - <AUTHOR>

I just got a renewal reminder for my domain fluf.fr and it made me wonder what other funny domains are floating around the web, either unused or unknown. <comment><USER2> Back in the early 2000's, I was planning a trip through the mid-east and trying to get my visas sorted out.

That's when I discovered that syrianembassy.com was available.

I had nine dollars in my pocket at the time, but somehow it seemed like something that would eventually cause me more than nine dollars worth of hassle, were I to pick it up and put something inappropriate there.

Looking now, it seems that somebody is squatting it. Still, I'm glad that somebody is not me.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've been trying to come up with a use for Cramhole.com for twelve years now.

Still no luck.

For a while, I was hoping to use it for a data storage algorithm, protocol, wrapper or container of some sort. Just so that in the future some poor souls would be sitting around a conference table and somebody would chime in "Couldn't we use a Cramhole for this?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Up until 2 months ago, it was DownrightSimple.com. But I'm now using that for my iOS Development Company. The other one I really like is KeystrokeOfGenius.com, which I haven't found a use for yet. There's also CSLounge.com, which was going to be some sort of Computer Science social network that I never got around to working on.

</comment><comment><USER4> cliqu.es - well, I have something I want to build ([https://github.com/NotBobTheBuilder/cliqu.es](https://github.com/NotBobTheBuilder/cliqu.es)) but I can never find the time to commit to it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Octopus.org. I'm currently learning mobile development and hopefully will get around to shipping the app (it's in the commerce space)

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://comebackwithawarrant.com](http://comebackwithawarrant.com)

<comment><USER7> Love it. I have two of the EFF's "Come Back With A Warrant" stickers on this laptop (a large-ish one on the top and a smaller one just to the left of the touchpad).

<comment><USER6> Used to use it as an email server, nowadays I just have it forward to the EFF =P

</comment></comment></comment><comment> josh-wrale I recently thought about registering crumbersome.com. Have at it.. I have more where that came from.

</comment><comment><USER8> ThePentagon.com

</comment><comment><USER9> bigfootmeat.com

</comment><comment><USER10> Jotpath.com, notezoom.com, and snacks.io

</comment><comment><USER11> wookipedia.org

</comment><comment><USER12> tumblr.dj, i'm looking to share its subdomain, but still busy doing other project.

</comment><comment><USER13> FTP2P.com - who wants to share?

</comment><comment><USER14> sensepic.com & vinescan.com are probably the two best that I own.

</comment><comment><USER15> cron.management, transient.email, proxied.io, and finally spare.io.

</comment><comment><USER16> i once bought a te.vg domain, still lying around not doing anything

</comment><comment><USER17> Not sure? notesure.com

</comment><comment><USER18> thoughtministry.com

</comment><comment><USER19> Hexxa.com

</comment><comment><USER20> blogsqr.com</comment>


Tell HN: Start-up events, competitions and lectures in Cambridge UK - <AUTHOR>

For those of you in the Cambridge area I thought I would list some things that are happening this week.
Cambridge University Entrepreneurs:
The universities enterprise society is launching its annual events and competitions tonight. There is a £100 for 100 word business plan competition and I think some team events throughout the year. It seems to be open to anyone including outside the university. It will be a great way to meet people interested in start-ups! www.cue.org.uk/grandlaunch
Enterprise Tuesday:
This starts next week and is very good, I went to some last year and hope to be able to go to all of them this year. The evening starts with a lecture from a successful entrepreneur and is followed by a networking session with free drink and food! www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/enterprise/timetable.html
Also on the way to work this morning I walked past www.beginspace.co.uk. I haven't heard much about it but it looks quite interesting, anyone here involved? <comment><USER2> Clickable:

<http://www.cue.org.uk/grandlaunch>

[http://www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/enterprise/timetabl...](http://www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/enterprise/timetable.html)

<http://www.beginspace.co.uk/></comment>


Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/405783 <comment><AUTHOR> I really found this too funny at the time so sharing again. Story about VS Code easter egg reminded me.

Unexpected consequences of a bit of fun... you have to laugh.</comment>


Tips on Hiring Employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.erica.biz/2010/hiring-employees/ <comment><USER2> Tip #0: Blast annoying popups in the face of your readers, then tell them that you sold your company for a million.

>Tip #3: But They Still Are Your Employees I will fetch my boss a sandwich exactly once - then I he can find another employee.

You want me fetch a sandwich - either I am hired as an admin or I have significant equity.

>Tip #4: Make Sure They Give You Status Reports

You can read the log from my checkings if you want - any decent system should be able to send you an email about this.

>Tip #5: Never Be The Only Interviewer >Tip #6: Always Hire for a Trial Period

Do so if you can get away with it - but given the choice between two different employers, don't be surprised if a good portion of your prospects will choose the other.

>Tip #9: Three Employees? Time for an Office That would depend on the situation - but this seems like a good rule of tomb.

>Tip #10: How to Beat the Big Companies at Their Own Game Worth reading for this point alone, except it doesn't say much that Joel had said. You are properly better of reading his blog.

<comment><USER3> > You can read the log from my checkings if you want

If I were a boss and wanted a quick update on how things were going, the last thing I would want to do would be trawling through your git logs and diffs.

<comment><USER2> But that is exactly what I have been working on.

If you just want to see where we are going, look at the number of closed bugs, burndown chart, etc.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes you need a brief, human-friendly report of the general state of things. I suppose there are tools that can provide something similar, but that's assuming that everyone uses them, which for some types of employee, they certainly don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, and I've learnt this the hard way, micromanagement is often a bad idea. Perhaps rather than status reports once a day, because work becomes piecemeal if this is done and not interesting. Instituting status reports once a week is better. Firstly, because it will then actually give the employee the opportunity to see their weekly body of work; and secondly, it will also be more meaningful for seeing what has been done, as it will focus on results, as opposed to: spoke to so and so for half an hour regarding xyz.

<comment><USER5> "status report" is vague. Devs can maintain an internal blog where they just post a few sentences about what they are doing, any problems, etc. Or run an internal status.net server. It doesn't have to be onerous.

<comment><USER4> Fair point. I suppose I was thinking about it from the perspective of a non- dev worker. I can see the benefit of an internal blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was expecting this to suck, but I thought it was actually a very good article. I've had a lot of experience with all of the points listed (good and bad!) and I wish I knew this years ago!

One point I would make about the 3 people in an office thing. Find out how many of you would be in the office at the same time and consider renting virtual office space unless you have domain specific needs that require your own space. You can usually get a postal address, a certain number of hours or days a month and all of your bits together for a lot less than a full office.

</comment><comment><USER7> Depressing that you still need to have popup ads on your blog even if you have made a million dollars.

</comment><comment><USER8> We are just in the process of hiring a new programmer, so this popped up in just the right time. Tip #1 is very important and we are already very aware of that one. Right now it's a 3 man shop, and I can't imagine working with someone I can't grab a beer after work.</comment>


First complete dinosaur skeleton ever found has finally been studied in detail - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur-skeleton-ready-closeup.html <comment><USER2> The paper has some nice illustrations in case anyone is interested in reading about it in more detail: [https://sci- hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa06...](https://sci- hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa061)

<comment><USER3> I wonder why they're using illustrations instead of 3D models.

<comment><USER4> Not everybody's got a high res 3D scanner laying around

<comment><USER5> /me looks at the front facing camera and tof sensor on his phone and sighs...

<comment><USER6> Technology, meet business goals :(.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone recommend (non-fiction) books about dinosaurs that are scientifically accurate and aimed at a college educated but non-expert audience?

<comment><USER8> Not a book, but I enjoyed this talk from The Royal Institute:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f-jD7kQvyPs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f-jD7kQvyPs)

<comment><USER9> That was a good talk! The speaker (David Hone) plugs his book at the end "The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder: since we have skeletons of living species, and the living animals themselves, couldn't we theoretically train a model to go from bones to pictures of the animal (or 3D models or whatever), and then apply it to dinosaur skeletons to see what comes up? Is there any way that could end up getting us somewhat realistic depictions?

</comment><comment><USER11> Honest question - what has stopped us from bringing extinct dinosaurs back to life? Which variable in the equation is unsolved?

<comment><USER12> For one, we don't have their DNA.

See eg [https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/could-scientists-bring- dinosa...](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/could-scientists-bring-dinosaurs- back.html)

<comment><USER6> On top of what the article says, even if we _had_ pristine dinosaur DNA, the way we clone things is through a living host - so whatever we'd clone would be half-dinosaur, half-cow, or half-whatever animal volunteered a womb/egg.

<comment><USER13> Not necessarily half. There'd definitely be some sharing but when we clone things we replace the genome in the egg that's used. That said it'll share mitochondrial and other things during development

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wait, this is the first complete dinosaur skeleton ever found?! What have I been looking at in museums?

<comment><USER15> Possibly the first+N complete skeleton ever found. The first was over 160 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey, that's all well and good; but can someone get some web development work for Alexandra? This her bio/profile:

[https://sci-hub.tw/alexandra](https://sci-hub.tw/alexandra)

<comment><USER17> The waving gif link in the sci hub page posted by another commenter is _excellent_.

<comment><USER18> Which gif, and where?

<comment><USER17> [https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa06...](https://sci- hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa061)

<comment><USER18> I'm super confused. I don't see any gifs or links to gifs on any of the pages of that PDF.

<comment><USER19> It doesn't show up on mobile. Try requesting desktop site if you're on mobile.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Matters Now: get the free ebook - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/what-matters-now-get-the-free-ebook.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+typepad/sethsmainblog+(Seth%27s+Blog)&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Dup of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993920>

The link from there is simpler and doesn't have all the parameters on the URL.</comment>


How Korea's Naver competes with Google - <AUTHOR> http://kin.naver.com/robots.txt

<comment><AUTHOR> Further examples of anti-competitive behaviour:

\- [http://blog.naver.com/robots.txt](http://blog.naver.com/robots.txt)

\- [http://cafe.naver.com/robots.txt](http://cafe.naver.com/robots.txt) (Forums)

\- [http://comic.naver.com/robots.txt](http://comic.naver.com/robots.txt)

The posted link, kin.naver.com is the equivalent to Yahoo Answers.

To give a perspective, Naver processes over 70% of Korea's search queries and is the 5th largest search engine in the world despite most results originating from its own networks.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most exotic technical requirement someone proposed? - <AUTHOR> Working with people that have less developed technical knowledge can lead to dubious demands on the priority list.<p>My favorite: "It has to run on the cloud in a rackspace located in the datacenter owned by a guy I know from the golfclub." <comment><USER2> I work with a DevOps guy who is the biggest enthusiast of Postgres that I know. I am responsible for the Data Warehouse, and he blocks Redshift and Athena, says that a Postgres RDS instance can keep up with any in-memory columnar database, given enough tuning.

Aside from that, its mainly CV-driven development, where people either want to work with what they already know and are comfortable with, or want to add a feather in their cap so the backend has to have the latest buzzwords and the frontend has to use the latest JavaScript framework.</comment>


Digg Valued At $175 Million In Latest Funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/26/digg-valued-at-175-million-in-latest-funding/ <comment><USER2> What hope do they actually have of making any money? Do they even have revenue?</comment>


The nightmarishly complex wheat genome finally yields to scientists - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/give-us-this-day-our-daily-bread-wheat-genome/ <comment><USER2> I've been seeing "Genome of X has been fully sequenced" articles over the course of some years. Can someone who understands it explain to a layman like myself how exactly this benefits us?

<comment><USER3> I think the best big picture explanation of why this is important is this: our ability to feed and care for humanity is dependent on biology. Genomes are the source code for biology. Reading the source code is the first step to understanding the source code. Understanding the source code will allow us to build better expressions of biology (those being both ourselves and the animals and plants we depend on).

<comment><USER4> I hope you won't take it personally because you're far from the only one to say it (and I would have refrained from posting if I hadn't seen people taking this further in this thread), but I really wish people stopped using the "DNA is the source code of your body" analogy. It is used way more than what's it's actually worth, even though I can see how that analogy can be seductive. The structure of a program's source code is nothing like the way DNA encodes and propagates information. Even if you add a bunch of adjectives such as 'self- modifying', 'full of GOTOs', 'nondeterministic', 'live monkeypatched', and thus twist the picture many people have of the way source code translates into execution, it would still be misleading. We are a product of _both_ our genome and environment, at the same time, all the time. Not one then the other. Or, if you will, the source code is its own executable. It doesn't make sense because the analogy doesn't either.

And that's not even taking into account non-DNA things that encode and propagate information, such as microbiota or anything linked to epigenetics.

<comment><USER3> It's actually a great analogy. Analogies aren't supposed to be exact representations; they are supposed to allow you to quickly communicate a decent approximation of what something is by relying on preexisting understanding of how another thing works. The source code analogy does that well.

And, by the way, running programs are also the result of their source code and the environment in which they execute. It's just that the environments which computer programs run in are very homogenous and predictable. But flip some bits in memory or have a user thrash the UI and you'll see that a running program interacts with its environment in much the same way as a biological organism.

<comment><USER4> I never said it was a bad analogy, I even used a rather positive word ('seductive'). It _is_ overrated, though, and it does stop making sense sooner than many people think. What I'm really saying is that relying on this analogy to understand how DNA works in relation to organism development, function, etc. won't get you past a very cursory understanding of it. It may be enough for many people but:

-I like to think that HN is filled with people who take interest in many things, especially science-related subjects, and would hope that many of them on this site would like to know more than an analogy-based understanding of genomics

-For better or for worse, the recent bloom and advances in genetics and biology in general have taken over the modern world and been hailed (probably with reason) by all kinds of circles, from the media to governments or the tech world, as a promising new era that's going to revolutionize our understanding of life, disease, what it means to be human, cognition, what have you. It does feel pretty cool as an insider to know that you're working in the 'hot new thing' but a side effect of that is, I have seen people develop a pretty bizarre fascination with DNA, whether it be their own or other people's. And it's not something that can be pinpointed to entirely rational reasons. I don't want to go off tangents any further, but let's say it can't hurt to occasionnally remind people what DNA is and what it isn't, what it's like and what it's definitely not like. I dislike pedants as much as the next person but seeing so many (presumably very educated) people take that analogy in the same thread made me think that the reminder wasn't that out of place.

<comment><USER5> I disagree, DNA is pretty much the source code. any differential DNA expression are due to histone modification, proteins, or RNA (and rarely CpG DNA modification in humans) so DNA in the purest form is indeed the source code.

<comment><USER4> Source code for what, though? How about pre-natal influences in the womb, does this mean the womb is a sort of compiler? What about the structure of DNA itself, known to influence gene expression levels? What about the microbiota, which is arguably more 'you' than your own body in terms of raw cell count? What about the phages found in the microbiota (the phageome)? Why are they not part of the so-called source code?

<comment><USER5> Source code/machine code, I am just interchanging but in this analogy they are equivalent. Pre-natal influences change the epigenetics, i.e. "on" the genome. The structure of DNA is almost completely determined by histones, which are proteins that DNA wrap around, so once again, not the DNA. Microbiota affect the environment of the cells, meaning it is an input to the cell, not the source code. Any phages affecting the microbiota will affect the input to the cell. These factors aren't considered source code simply because it only affects the execution of the cell's source code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > For example, about 26 genes are differentially active in wheat varieties > with solid stems and those with hollow stems

If it has a solid stem, wouldn't it no longer be in the grass family by definition?

<comment><USER7> Nope. Phylogenetic families are based on the degree of shared ancestry, not the presence or absence of any given trait.

I mean, don't get me wrong, you CAN develop phylogenetic trees based on traits. That's how Linnaeus and all subsequent taxonomists did it before they could just look directly at DNA. But it takes a lot of traits, and has been preempted by DNA based methods anyway.

<comment><USER6> > Phylogenetic families are based on the degree of shared ancestry, not the > presence or absence of any given trait.

What about the rhyme "Sedges have edges, rushes are round, and grasses are hollow right down to the ground?" You're telling me scientists are now saying that DNA testing is more accurate than just using the rhyme?

<comment><USER8> It is not about DNA vs phenotypes. The issue is that biologists are more interested in building an universal classification, a single tree of life for all species, than they are in building single-phenotype-based classifications that dont nest particularly well.

For example, if you looked at just the ability to fly, you would group birds and bats on a same group. But that would be wrong because bats are clearly more closely related to flightless mammals than they are to birds. This becomes obvious if you account for more characteristics of the animal (presence of fur, bone shape, pregnancy, etc) or if you examine the DNA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Israeli press gives lots of credit to Bioinformatics company NRGene.

<comment><USER10> Yes, NRGene is an Israeli company, so that would make sense.

NRGene has a proprietary algorithm that uses a large amount of Illumina sequences to build a pretty good genome assembly. This technology has been used in a few organisms with large genomes, as it has been used in v1.0 of this assembly.

However there have been previous, less high quality wheat genome assemblies based on Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes (BACs), and that information has made its way into this assembly too, along with long-distance information from HiC and genetic maps and Bionano technology.

<comment><USER9> Yep I'm not qualified to tell facts from PR on this one (which is why I made that comment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's necessary to sequence all these so presumably they can be recreated if/when they go extinct.

<comment><USER12> Is it possible to recreate a wheat plant from just its genome?

<comment><USER13> A decent analogy might be:

is it possible to recreate a running program from just it's source?

(lacking a compiler, development and production environments, and perhaps user inputs)

so my feeling is, not really, to an approximation

<comment><USER11> Sure it's possible. (I've recreated programs from source despite lacking the compiler, etc., originally used on it. The trick is to adapt something else to the task.) The source contains instructions on how it works, and those instructions can be used elsewhere.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft extends AirSim to include autonomous car research - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/autonomous-car-research/?self_driving_airsim <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR; AirSim is simulation software built upon Unreal Engine 4 from Microsoft Research. It now includes car simulation and real city-like environment where you can test your self-driving algorithms. You can just download the binaries and start calling its Python APIs in minutes.

<comment><USER2> Is this same as Udacity car simulator?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not quite... I think Udacity's simulator is built on Unity and the environment it runs in is probably not as big and detailed.</comment></comment></comment>


Vigenère Cipher - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigenere_cipher <comment><USER2> The Vigenère is the classic example of an historically important cipher. This cipher is a substitution cipher: each letter of the plaintext is replaced by a different letter in the ciphertext.

In _simple substitution_ a fixed mapping from the plaintext alphabet to the ciphertext alphabet is used for the entire message. This can easily be attacked by study of the frequency distribution of a message's intercepted ciphertext.

Simple substitution:

      plaintext:  A B C D E F G H I J K L M ...
      ciphertext: K R P E X J A T O U M S T ...

      message:    HIDE A FIG ...
      cipher:     TOEX K JOA ...

The Vigenère is an example of a _polyalphabetic substitution_ . In polyalphabetic substitution ciphers, multiple mappings from plaintext to ciphertext are used throughout the encipherment of the message, thwarting simple frequency analysis. The Vigenère uses a particularly simple plan, a key selects which substitution mapping to use for each letter.

Vigenère:

      plaintext:  A B C D E F G H I J K L M ...
      cipher a:   A B C D E F G H I J K L M ...
      cipher b:   B C D E F G H I J K L M N ...
      cipher c:   C D E F G H I J K L M N O ...
      ...
      cipher x:   X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J ...
      cipher y:   Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K ...
      cipher z:   Z A B C D E F G H I J K L ...

      message:  HIDE A FIG ...
      key:      xyzz y xyz ...
      cipher:   EGCD Y CGF ...

Here the key, "xyzzy", is short enough that any reasonable message will be broken easily with a paper and pencil attack. On the other hand, a key that is only used once and which is as long as the message makes the Vigenère equivalent to the unbreakable one-time pad ciphers.

Many variations of the Vigenère make the cryptographer's work much more difficult. A scrambled tableaux (rather than the simple _Caesar_ ciphers) or a key controlled by the message itself (called _autoencipherment_ ) present interesting but not difficult challenges.

When I was around 12 years old (1963) I was fascinated by codes and ciphers and my aunt gave me a book by Gains, titled Elementary Cryptanalysis[1]. I can't recommend it highly enough for those interested in the pre-computer treatment of ciphers. The book was best treatment of cryptography available to the public when it was originally published in 1939 and it covered the cryptanalysis of several important ciphers that had seen diplomatic and military use before World War II.

For example, Gains covers the important Playfair, Double Columnar Transposition, and Fractional Substitution, and Nihilist ciphers. A famous Soviet pencil and paper cipher that was never broken (the VIC cipher[2]) used a combination of the these last three.

[1] Gaines, Helen Fouche, Elementary Cryptanalysis, 1939. Republished by Dover under a slightly different title. This newer edition contains hint or solutions to the over 100 samples found in the original. [https://www.amazon.com/Cryptanalysis-Study-Ciphers-Their- Sol...](https://www.amazon.com/Cryptanalysis-Study-Ciphers-Their- Solution/dp/0486200973/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3U12WQ6OJ0TX6&keywords=cryptanalysis&qid=1562244824&s=gateway&sprefix=krypton%2Caps%2C158&sr=8-1)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher)

</comment><comment><USER3> I once tried to fix one of the flaws of Vigenère and I came up with a slight modification but still keeping most of the simplicity.

[https://blog.hackensplat.com/2011/02/vinegar.html](https://blog.hackensplat.com/2011/02/vinegar.html)

I then noticed that my new crypto-system itself has a flaw. Oh well.

<comment><USER4> My 'gut' intuition is that doing that is the same as applying the cipher of length 2, then the cipher of length 3, 5, 7 each in turn invidually, but I haven't had the chance to dig out cyberchef to confirm this.

Edit: Indeed: (no spoilers for the fun of actually breaking your message)

[https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=Vigen%C3%A8re_Encod...](https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=Vigen%C3%A8re_Encode\('WI'\)Vigen%C3%A8re_Encode\('LHE'\)Vigen%C3%A8re_Encode\('LMVON'\)Vigen%C3%A8re_Encode\('HACKENS'\)&input=QUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEKQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEKQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUEgQUFBQUE)

<comment><USER3> Yes, my cipher is exactly the same as four rounds of Vigenère with 2,3,5,7 length keys, with the proviso that you can't go beyond 210 when all four keys meet again.

(I may go back and edit the text to make this clear.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> LostboY always included a Vigenere cipher in his mystery challenge at DEFCON. It's worth searching for team write ups of his challenges; they were some of the best and most difficult.

</comment><comment><USER6> Had some fun with this a while back, with a simple dictionary attack in Rust. Some might enjoy: [https://github.com/timvisee/vigenere-cipher- simple](https://github.com/timvisee/vigenere-cipher-simple)

<comment><USER7> 'jgrahamc posted a Perl implementation of Alan Turing's method which made HN a couple of times [0], [1]. This is much better than brute force. For something a little more accessible on mobile, I made this [2] at the time based on his Perl implementation.

[0]: [https://blog.jgc.org/2015/05/the-effectiveness-of-turings- vi...](https://blog.jgc.org/2015/05/the-effectiveness-of-turings- vigenere.html) [1]: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20effectiveness%20of%20Tur...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20effectiveness%20of%20Turing%27s%20Vigen%C3%A8re%20cipher%20breaking%20technique&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0) [2]: [https://github.com/cipherboy/vCAT](https://github.com/cipherboy/vCAT)

<comment><USER8> I'd totally forgotten I wrote that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently read Simon Singhs book "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" [1]: it is very fun and readable about this (and many other) cipher.

[https://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy- Cryptograph...](https://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy-Cryptography- ebook/dp/B004IK8PLE/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=simon+singh&qid=1562308890&s=gateway&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER10> The Kryptos puzzle [1] also contains two Vigenère ciphers.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> I've always thought the vigenere cipher was incredibly elegant and beautiful. Also, the Enigma cipher is effectively just a vigenere cipher with a super long key.

<comment><USER12> No it really isn't, it is logically a short key with a KDF.

The important thing about a "vignere cipher with a super long key" is that once the key length matches the length of the message (which is your implication) vignere ciphers are _provably_ unbreakable. They are the canonical one time pad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My favorite thing about this article is in the "External Links" [1]: Vigenère Cipher cracker with the source code in the shape of Charles Babbage's head. (Written in Perl of course.)

[1]: [https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=550450](https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=550450)

</comment><comment><USER14> I actually created a cracking tool for this cipher that uses local search algorithms to analyse and break it without a known key. It also supports several other classical ciphers.

[https://dulhanjayalath.com/decryptr](https://dulhanjayalath.com/decryptr)

</comment><comment><USER15> the first practice of our security lecture was breaking vigenere - one of the coolest practices of my studies so far…

<comment><USER16> Also did this in cryptography + coding theory class back in university days.

Our final exam had a practical code breaking test where we had a bunch of utilities and had to crack 3 different cyphers. I've always recounted it fondly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a Vigenere cipher on the back of this "book"[1] I wasn't able to crack.

[1] Quritania.com

</comment><comment><USER18> lovely childhood memories of playing with this on paper before computers flooding back</comment>


The Truth About Electric Eels Has Long Been Overlooked - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/article/597709/ <comment><USER2> A much better title would be "Electric eel found to be three distinct species"

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

3 more crazy electric eel facts [0] you may not have known, I didn't:

\- "Electric eels are also capable of controlling their prey's nervous systems with their electrical abilities; by controlling their victim's nervous system and muscles via electrical pulses, they can keep prey from escaping or force it to move so they can locate its position."

\- "They can also concentrate the discharge by curling up and making contact at two points along its body."

\- "When agitated, they can produce these intermittent electric shocks over at least an hour without tiring."

[0] That is referring to crazy facts about electric eels, not facts about crazy electric eels.</comment>


Datadog S-1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1561550/000119312519227783/d745413ds1.htm <comment><USER2> These are the two juiciest paragraphs for SaaS geeks:

> We have a highly efficient go-to-market model, which consists of a self- > service tier, a high velocity inside sales team, and an enterprise sales > force. As of June 30, 2019, we had approximately 8,800 customers, increasing > from approximately 7,700, 5,400 and 3,800 customers as of December 31, 2018, > 2017 and 2016, respectively. Approximately 590 of our customers as of June > 30, 2019 had annual run-rate revenue, or ARR, of $100,000 or more, > increasing from approximately 450, 240 and 130 customers as of December 31, > 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively, accounting for approximately 72%, 68%, > 60% and 48% of our ARR, respectively. Further, as of June 30, 2019, we had > 42 customers with ARR of $1.0 million or more, up from 29, 12 and two > customers as of December 31, 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively. As of June > 30, 2019, our 10 largest customers represented approximately 14% of our ARR > and no single customer represented more than 5% of our ARR.

... and ...

> Our business has experienced rapid growth and is capital efficient. Since > inception, we have raised $92.0 million of capital, net of share > repurchases, and we had $63.6 million of cash, cash equivalents and > restricted cash as of June 30, 2019. We generated revenue of $100.8 million > and $198.1 million in 2017 and 2018, respectively, representing year-over- > year growth of 97%. Our revenue was $85.4 million in the six months ended > June 30, 2018 compared to $153.3 million in the six months ended June 30, > 2019, representing period-over-period growth of 79%. Substantially all of > our revenue is subscription software sales. Our net (loss) income was $(2.6) > million, $(10.8) million, $0.5 million and $(13.4) million for the years > ended December 31, 2017 and 2018 and the six months ended June 30, 2018 and > 2019, respectively. We generated operating cash flow of $13.8 million, $10.8 > million, $10.6 million and $3.0 million in 2017 and 2018 and the six months > ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, respectively. Our free cash flow was $6.0 > million, $(5.0) million, $1.5 million and $(6.4) million in 2017 and 2018 > and the six months ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Very impressive SaaS business, especially in such a competitive space. And I'm a happy customer for several years. This chart of their quarterly revenue run rate going back to 2016 is truly amazing and will make every SaaS founder green with envy:

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1561550/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1561550/000119312519227783/g745413g04k21.jpg)

<comment><USER3> So nice to see an S-1 from a SaaS company with actually solid financials and clear explanations of where the money is going. This is what IPO announcements _should_ look like instead of being packed with hype, hopes, and dreams.

<comment><USER2> Agreed! For all the hype and noise out there, the combination of SaaS and business value has created some phenomenal companies, both in terms of growth, and in terms of unit economics. And, as a user, I can say Datadog solves a real (and burning) problem for product engineering teams, and, though expensive, is worth every penny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Their financials on the surface and the growth look really good. Congrats to the whole DataDog team on this! I used it in my previous job and loved it. I love how quick they were to add support for new things and how easy it was to configure everything.

Since they are a SaaS startup which deals a lot with data and compute, I wanted to see their infra cost. I was looking through the consolidated financials[1] and I didn't find something that referred to infra explicitly. I am guessing "Research and Development" operating expense will cover employee compensation(stock and salary). So, would the infra costs be the one in "General and Administrative"?

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1561550/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1561550/000119312519227783/d745413ds1.htm#toc745413_9)

<comment><USER5> Infra costs would roll up into COGS since they're variable costs. So the line item for Cost of Revenue captures that I believe. G&A is for fixed costs.

<comment><USER6> Just to clarify, infra costs are under COGS because infra costs can be directly attributed to production of what is being sold, not because they're variable. You can have fixed costs in COGS as long as they're directly attributable to production.

G&A can also contain both fixed and variable costs. G&A is for operating expenses that can't be directly attributed to production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love their product, hate their shady billing.

I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this month. Now this month my bill increased almost 400% and they said "oh we just soft- launched billing for this feature without notifying you". No heads-up when communicating with them that I wasn't actually being billed for my usage.

Still trying to get a refund for this curveball bill. Their sales team keeps forever escalating to management, leadership, and they say it has to be approved by a C-level. It's been over 20 days and they say it might take 2-3 more weeks before C-level makes a decision on credit or not. I've never heard of this many layers involved in something like this before with other companies.

<comment><USER8> Same. At several companies I've been at we've used or investigated Datadog. One place accidentally spun up a bunch of EMR nodes on AWS for a single run (less than 1 hour), to which we got charged their going rate ($15/mo?) for every instance - even though they were only up for an hour. DD refused to reverse this, though eventually did help up make sure those nodes got excluded going forward ... gee thanks. $15/hr/node for monitoring is too rich for my blood.

Most recently it was looked at to help monitor a small Kubernetes test cluster. 3 nodes. Now the base rate of $18/mo is just fine... except now they charge $1/mo/container past 10 containers per host. Because K8s (depending on how you install it) runs a bunch of little containers handling various back end things, you might not deploy anything to the cluster and still be WAY over that 10 container limit. In our case it came out to like $200/mo to monitor 3 nodes - that were no where near fully loaded.

They've got a great product but their billing just has not ever really made sense. While I haven't used them, Wavefront makes a lot more sense - pay per metric. Got a bunch of containers that don't need monitoring, then don't send metrics (or send them infrequently). Easy.

<comment><USER9> All that you've said resonates with my experience, but:

"Because K8s (depending on how you install it) runs a bunch of little containers handling various back end things, you might not deploy anything to the cluster and still be WAY over that 10 container limit. "

The way we manage that is to explicitly filter for containers. Don't monitor all containers by default, make it opt-in and you'll be fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Their sales teams are ridiculously aggressive. I've received 9+ calls from them this month, have told them that my org isn't interested, and won't be revisiting the decision for a few years. It's soured me on them altogether.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems like more S-1 filings have been making it to the front page of HN. Is that because more people on HN are interested in them, or because there's been a recent uptick in S-1 filings? And if the latter, is there any reason?

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of tech IPOs recently after a decently long drought. There is conjecture that people are rushing to get them filed before a recession hits and it's more difficult to go public.

<comment><USER12> And more difficult to continue to secure funding for companies that have yet to make a profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Their sales/marketing teams are way too aggressive, IME. They cold called me on my private number, despite being on the do-not-call list. At several conferences they've the one booth one had to be careful to stay away from, lest one get into pretty aggressive sales talks (as in, "not interested" and starting to walk leading to booth folks walking with me for a bit, and talking to me).

</comment><comment><USER14> Their product is great.

But the people I met there last year during a maybe-but-not-quite acquihire adventure we're also great. I wish them all the best with this IPO.

For those interested, I wrote a blog about what it's like for a solo founder to (almost) be picked up by company like Datadog.

[https://blog.checklyhq.com/my-acquihire-adventure-with-a- lar...](https://blog.checklyhq.com/my-acquihire-adventure-with-a-large-tech- company/)

<comment><USER15> Presumably you would have received options - in hindsight does any percent of you wish it would have happened now that they're going public?

<comment><USER14> When I was there talking it was already abundantly clear an IPO was in the works. So, no. I don't regret anything and am totally fine with the outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This company has a shite hiring process. Ask you to submit pull request on github with answers to a challenge (and you can publicly view other people's answers as it is a public repo).

The answers were straight forward and I didn't pass. And I could see my answers were the same as other people submitting. Very odd company.

<comment><USER17> I've never quite understood the rationale behind the 'public PR' method of submitting coding challenges.

I understand it's much lower friction for the recruitment team, but having everyone else's answers public too kind of defeats the point entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My service contract expired with them this Friday. Opted not to renew because of price change in synthetics product 100x initial release. The product is reliable, but billing is troubling.

<comment><USER19> The Synthetics pricing does seem unreasonably high.

We were using Synthetics during beta alongside Pingdom - doing pretty much the same on both. Beta period ended and sales rep said our Synthetics bill would be something crazy, like 10x our Pingdom bill, and it'd start next month (they later said that was a mistake and it would actually start in 2 months, when I pushed back).

We immediately suspended all our Synthetics tests. It's nice having them with the rest of our Datadog stuff, but it's not 10x better than Pingdom.

Datadog is still a great tool overall, but experiences like that make me wary of putting all our eggs in the DD basket and getting locked in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been meaning to learn how to read and understand an S1. Does anybody have any recommendations?

<comment><USER21> For starters, don't take any advice from Hackernews.

<comment><USER22> that piece of advice is a paradox

if I choose to ignore it, I have actually followed it!

heheheh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Love the product through and through, my only annoyance is "live tail" and log lines in general show up from the top scrolling down, aka the opposite of how regular logs scroll.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wrote an article summarizing the S-1 and contextualizing Datadog's metrics against its competitors (New Relic, Elastic, Splunk):

[https://medium.com/@jonbma/datadog-s-1-teardown-35934690e76f](https://medium.com/@jonbma/datadog-s-1-teardown-35934690e76f)

A beast of a business indeed

</comment><comment><USER25> One of the top 10 metrics they choose to highlight is operating loss in the past 6 months. They just knew what everyone was going to look for anyway!

</comment><comment><USER26> For those interested in the financials or model building, you can grab all the tables from the S1 in a single excel file here: [https://get.sentieo.com/datadog-ipo/](https://get.sentieo.com/datadog-ipo/)

</comment><comment><USER27> This was already submitted at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781524), not sure why it didn't get marked as a duplicate.

</comment><comment><USER28> I got to briefly/tangentially Work with Ilan at Ooyala long time ago. Brilliant guy... very well deserved this outcome for the DD team.

</comment><comment><USER29> Are there any hints on what will their market cap be on the first day of trading?

</comment><comment><USER30> Congrats to the whole Datadog team! I have been an avid user of it at a previous job and loved the product. Not surprised to see them have a solid business. When the product is good, people buy it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just for curiosity, what's the legal process to go from being a French startup to a public US company? I guess there is some paperwork.

<comment><USER32> It was founded in NYC

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datadog#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datadog#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Well done Datadog! Couldn't be happier for them—great product, great company!

</comment><comment><USER34> What do their margins look like? Is it worth investing?

</comment><comment><USER35> test1

</comment><comment><USER35> test

</comment><comment><USER36> I interviewed with them and it was one of the worst experiences I've had interviewing. Really shabby company.

<comment><USER37> Can you elaborate on your experience rather than just dropping a hate-bomb? (I'm actually curious). What was so bad about the interview? Why did that make the company shabby?</comment></comment>


Dan Ariely's Startup Lab - <AUTHOR> http://mailchi.mp/9924c041c258/dan-arielys-startup-lab-applications-open <comment><USER2> Here is the direct link to the lab:

[http://advanced-hindsight.com/startup-lab/](http://advanced- hindsight.com/startup-lab/)

It seems we are running up against the deadline, probably should have posted this sooner.

Advanced hindsight is 20/20

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems amazing, but I should note that this program does take 7% equity.

<comment><USER4> So does YC. (Relative merits left as exercise to reader.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking at the domain name, is this somehow related to mailchimp.com?

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure that's just the web-version of a _newsletter sent via mailchimp_ \- at least that's where I've seen that domain before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The last date to apply is June 30 but we are in July 1st. Can we still go ahead and apply?

<comment><USER8> June 30 5:00pm EST, so yes you have about 3 hours

<comment><USER9> Strange that they specify EST... currently it's daylight savings time, so it should be EDT, shouldn't it?

<comment><USER10> It should be, but people often forget whether we're currently in standard or DST.

I usually just hedge my bets and write Eastern. :)

<comment><USER11> EST is shorter than Eastern and more easily recognizable than ET, which is a more heavily overloaded acronym. I'm sure it's used by people who are aware of the technical meaning and not forgetting. There's no quick and reliable way to refer to non-EDT EST during the non-daylight months without mentioning the absence of daylight savings time or specifying the UTC offset.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>