Ask HN: Is it a big deal if my app was on lifehacker+published newspaper - <AUTHOR>

Also got tweeted out to like a million feeds.  Where do I go next?  I want more people to find out about the app. <comment><USER2> Publicity jolt is only meaningfully useful for companies whose per-user value growth with userbase, such as social networks. For all other products it's a flash in the pan.

You don't provide specifics, so let's just talk about a stereotypical subscription-model business. Each user generates you on average $1/mo in revenue. Each month 1% of users abandon your service and leave. Each month you bring in 100 new users through your marketing efforts. Once you reach 10,000 users, the inflow and outflow will equate, your user base will stop changing. If you lose too many users to some freak accident, say, going down to 8000 users, your natural outflow will shrink to 80/mo and you will gain 100-80 = 20 net new users that month. Similarly, if a publicity jolt brings you extra 2000 users, your outflow will increase to 100-120 = - 20 net new users, and you will keep bleeding them for a few month. The system will naturally stabilize around 10k users. Hence there is a "natural size" for most such businesses.

Now if you can increase your monthly inflow from 100 to 200 users by being mentioned on Lifehacker every single week, your "natural size" doubles to 20k. But a single mention won't do you a whole lot of good.

The story is different for social network - the more people are there, the more people are likely to join. The key difference is that the inflow is a factor of the user base size, not of your own marketing effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first and foremost thing to do is to understand your target audience. Once that is done, you have to figure out the competition and where does your app fit into the whole scheme of things.

Once that is done, have a good marketing strategy to pitch your app for the appropriate audience. For this process, blogs such as LH come into picture (if you know that your potential users "do" follow those blogs). Investing a little in SEO and promoting on FB is also not bad option.

Also, the success of the most apps depend on the first impressions, usability and word of mouth from peers :)</comment>


Stanford Updates Its Logo - <AUTHOR> http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/stanford_gets_classier.php <comment><USER2> [http://www.jerrysartistoutlet.com/new_promo/3_1_2012/strath_...](http://www.jerrysartistoutlet.com/new_promo/3_1_2012/strath_files/image017.gif)

</comment><comment><USER3> They did this at exactly the wrong time. The industry is shifting to high DPI screens; the old logo works well on an iPad 4 or Nexus device.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, that looks so bad ... old one was much better

</comment><comment><USER5> That has to be one of the most pretentious typefaces I've ever seen. It's practically dripping with insecurity. And the funniest part is that it's instantly reminiscent of the Star Wars logo.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it looks worse :(

</comment><comment><USER7> Hate it.</comment>


Angel Investors Do Make Money. Data Shows 2.5X Returns Overall - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/13/angel-investors-make-2-5x-returns-overall/

<comment><USER2> <http://sites.kauffman.org/pdf/angel_groups_111207.pdf> ends at 2007 <http://www.willamette.edu/~wiltbank/jbv_angels_2009.html> was published in 2008 and [http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/reports/assets/features...](http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/reports/assets/features/siding_with_the_angels) was published in 2009.

All of these look at returns that predate the "new angel age" of the last couple of years. Every hot bubble looks great using metrics collected before world+dog pile in.</comment>


The quest for a reactionless space drive - Digit-Al http://boingboing.net/2014/11/24/the-quest-for-a-reactionless-s.html <comment><USER3> A really amazing, honest, and straightforward account from the grad student in the lab.

[http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/physics/graduate- studies-...](http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/physics/graduate-studies-in- physics-at-cal-state-university-fullerton/)

<comment><USER4> _Some quotes from the end of the article:_

As time progressed and the experimental apparatus more refined, the "effect" seemed to get smaller, and that's a REAL bad sign. It was already well below what the theory predicted. That sets off alarm bells. After all this time, if something isn't in hand to float around a table top, its should still at least be producing unequivocal results.

I am aware of only one positive replication attempt, and even that experimenter (Paul March) had concerns over its validity. All other replication attempts have either been negative or ambiguous. My own experiments were ambiguous.

It seems to make the effect happen, a lot of parameters for the test devices, some not clearly understood, need to be "just so". The question remains, are the devices being dialed in to create a real effect, or do things need to be just so to cause merely a false positive?

<comment><USER3> it's (sadly) very refreshing honesty from a scientist. In grad school, I counseled a junior grad student on this sort of phenomenon, she didn't take my advice and learned a very hard lesson - spending 4 years of grad school chasing down ghosts. On the other hand, it wasn't a waste, she got a very good job in the pharma industry on the back of her commitment to sussing out errors, her honesty and introspection.

<comment><USER5> Given the potential upsides, I would say it's worth finding the errors in this reactionless drive. Even if it turns out to be just a fantasy the poorly understood effects that need to be "just so" might be interesting in their own right.

<comment><USER6> That seems like a compelling position until you're exposed to a million such cases. There's no end to the number of weird, malfunctioning pieces of equipment or complicated many-body systems for which we have a theory that sort of explains them with a few poorly understood wrinkles.

<comment><USER7> Yes, yes, a million times yes.

In a world as big as ours, it's reasonable to diversify your investments and keep a few million to one long-shots going, but it's important not to lose sight of the odds. Buy a lotto ticket every now and again, but put the bulk of your money in a 401k or other solid investment.

In this case, I think we're giving this idea more or less exactly the right amount of attention: one dedicated crank (and I use that term lovingly) devoting his life to his crazy theory, and a handful of less invested others occasionally checking in on it. If he can make it work, fantastic, if he can't, well, we didn't waste too much on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Several points:

1) "Foundations of Physics" is closer to a philosophy journal than a physics journal. It's full of fascinating stuff, but it's far more speculative than any other legitimate journal. When libraries were cutting budgets in the '80's and '90's it was generally the first to go.

2) When highly theoretical phenomena are talked about in engineering terms, the odds of confirmation bias are huge. Who wouldn't want a reactionless-ish thruster?

3) Measuring transient forces of the kind being applied here is extremely hard, and the number of confounding factors is extremely large. The article mentions a mu-metal shield, which will screen some of the Earth's magnetic field from the apparatus but which is useless for screening transient magnetic fields, which get generated by transient electric fields thanks to the magic of Maxwell. Ampere's law tells us CurlB = mu_0 _epsilon_0_ dE/dt. So the possibility of residual electro-magnetic forces is non-trivial to say the least, particularly in a room full of conductors and time-varying EM-fields (from the wiring, the pump, etc).

Putting the whole apparatus in a Faraday cage would help, but the history of measuring small (and transient) forces in physics in the past couple of decades (the fifth force mess, Joe Weber's coherent neutrino scattering work) argues that we take these experimental measurements with a large grain of salt, unless they can be shown to be in precise numerical agreement with the theory's predictions over an order of magnitude variation in power input and rate of variation.

The theory may not be wrong, but it needs a lot more experimental investigation and likely theoretical examination as well. Theorists tend not to spend a lot of time critiquing things that look really likely to be wrong, because proving something that everyone thinks is probably wrong, wrong can be incredibly time-consuming and utterly unrewarding. So the lack of theoretical disproof is not very compelling. So far as I know Joe Weber's coherent scattering theory was never dis-proven in publication, either: it was mostly dismissed by informal but compelling arguments at conferences (the best one was simply that there was nothing special about neutrinos in Weber's theory, so if what he said was correct single crystals would coherently scatter x-rays in exactly the same way, which would have shown up as an anomalous low-energy contribution to EM cross-sections that would have been an obvious problem for decades if anyone had observed it.)

<comment><USER9> > Who wouldn't want a reactionless-ish thruster?

anyone who understands that it's a device for turning bricks into weapons of mass destruction. not that a conventional nuclear reactor isn't one, it's just that it uses more sophisticated bricks.

<comment><USER10> You should check out these things called "rockets" that have been doing that for many decades now.

<comment><USER9> i don't know of a rocket that could effortlessly accelerate a rock to a nontrivial percentage of c, which would be within a reactionless drive's capability, given enough time. see also [http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/reactionlessdri...](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/reactionlessdrive.php).

<comment><USER11> >effortlessly

A reactionless drive, if possible, would still require "effort" to produce thrust in the form of energy. It is not a "free energy" device. The only difference between a reactionless drive and a rocket is that a rocket must carry its own fuel with it, so that it can expel the fuel to generate thrust. The fuel adds additional mass to the whole rocket, so in a way, a rocket requires extra fuel to carry its fuel. Since a reactionless drive does not expel anything, a reactionless drive would not carry any fuel, and therefore could be more efficient by way of lower mass, but it would still need to carry an energy source of some type, such as a nuclear reactor, or a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

Rockets are certainly capable of accelerating a mass to a significant fraction of the speed of light. However it is important to note that it becomes more difficult to accelerate an object as the object gets closer to the speed of light. You need more energy to add a constant amount of velocity as your current velocity increases. This applies regardless of what kind of method you are using to accelerate - doesn't matter if it's a rocket or a reactionless drive. The difference is only in efficiency - it is thought that a reactionless drive might be more efficient. However if a reactionless drive really is possible, it might provide a lot less thrust than you think.

So even if reactionless drives are developed, they might be more efficient than rockets, but far less timely. I think you'd be waiting quite a while for the reactionless vehicle to attain any sort of appreciable velocity - <AUTHOR> decades. As far as weapons go, humans have not met any aliens yet (to my knowledge) and our species currently only resides on planet Earth, so any weapon would be ballistic in nature, to strike targets on Earth's surface. A reactionless drive would be ill-suited for ballistic propulsion because it doesn't give enough thrust. If it was launched from the ground like an ICBM on a suborbital trajectory, it wouldn't be able to escape Earth's gravity, it would just sit on the launch pad. If it was placed into orbit using a rocket as a first stage, and then activated later, it would take a while to deorbit rather gently. The vehicle's velocity would slow down due to air resistance, and its kinetic energy would not be usable as a mass destructive weapon. This is why large explosions are used as weapons of mass destruction, and not kinetic energy alone. Kinetic energy is simply used for timely delivery of the explosive device from a great distance away.

Now, for interstellar warfare, a reactionless drive could be useful if you were extremely angry at another planet in another star system located many light-years away. The large distance between the aggressor and the victim allows the kinetic vehicle a lot of time to accumulate velocity. However the steering of such a kinetic weapon must be very precise in order to hit the target planet, so the vehicle must have the means to estimate its current location/speed/direction, compute the orbits of itself and its target, and apply the necessary course corrections in order to hit that target. It is possible that a reactionless drive might provide vectored thrust, but if it does not, then attitude adjustment thrusters would be needed (either reactionless or conventional.) Accurately steering a vehicle traveling near the speed of light does not seem like an easy task. If the target was missed, the vehicle would be traveling so quickly that it would escape the star system on a hyperbolic escape orbit.

Such a weapon would be quite the undertaking and would be a large energy expenditure for a civilization. It might be more worth it to focus that energy into colonization and defense instead.

<comment><USER12> >>> Rockets are certainly capable of accelerating a mass to a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Well, yes and no. The speed of a rocket is limited by the specific impulse of its engines. That means that hydrogen-oxygen rockets aren't going to go very fast. Ion thrusters will go a lot faster, but take a long time to get up to speed. If you want to go really fast you need something really exotic like antimatter, but the technical challenges are quite daunting. Theoretically you could use a flashlight, but the batteries would run out before you could get anywhere.

The allure of a reactionless drive is that you aren't limited by the the rocket equation. You may still need a big energy source, but your speed isnt limited by how fast you can spit stuff out your backend.

It's fun reading to look up things like specific impulse, the rocket equation, relativistic rockets, even project Orion.

IANARS.

<comment><USER10> To be precise, the ultimate speed of a rocket is limited by the specific impulse of the engines _and_ the mass fraction i.e. how much of the rocket is fuel versus how much is not-fuel.

There's nothing that theoretically prevents a hydrogen-oxygen chemical rocket from approaching the speed of light. But it would need an amount of fuel roughly the size of the Sun to do it with any appreciable payload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _The result is a drive that exerts an intermittent net force in one > direction. [...] Nor does it violate the principle of conservation of > energy, because the system requires power for its operation._

Well, you actually can't do that. In special relativity when you change of reference frame, the momentum and energy mixes. If you break the momentum conservation in one reference frame, then you break the momentum conservation and the energy conservation in almost all the other reference frames.

If you do the experiment on Earth and in that reference frame the energy is conserved, then the astronauts from the ISS will see that the energy is not conserved, if Elon go to to Mars he will see that the energy is not conserved, even the people on the other side of the Earth will see that the energy is not conserved.

If you put two of these devices in opposite orientations in the opposite sides of a spinning carrousel (and assume that the angular velocity of the carrousel is small enough to ignore it in the calculations) you will see that each of the devices gain some energy and you can harvest it.

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems much more plausible to me than the microwave thruster previously reported all over the internet. I think it's a clever application of relativity and motion. It feels crazy to say this, but it seems to be on a solid theoretical footing.

<comment><USER3> My thoughts exactly. Why _don 't_ they crowdfund this? For about $200k they could probably stick a prototype on a nanosat and just hit go. With the right tracking equipment the results should be pretty conclusive.

<comment><USER15> From my limited understanding, it seems that the current prototype requires a ton of power (far more than you could fit in a nanosat) and produces a miniscule amount of thrust (even in space with a nanosat it might not move much).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, a change in the movement (flux) inside a capacitor is the key? A "flux capacitor" you say?

</comment><comment><USER17> "The problem is, crowd funding requires a significant investment of time, which might be applied more productively to research."

So they can't arrange for a capable student to take care of that as part of a work-study program? WTH. Perhaps I'm underestimating the amount of work involved, but it's not like they need to have contributor tiers with silly T-shirts.

<comment><USER18> Try to crowd fund this and you'll bring out hordes and hordes of Skeptic Movement Skeptics who will scream "con man!" and "pseudoscience!" and do everything they can to sabotage the campaign. Kickstarter would probably start getting e-mail campaign letters to de-list his account for fraud, etc.

You see, he needs more money to try to boost the signal and further test the effect. But since the effect is novel and controversial, attempting to raise such money means he's a con man and invites comparisons to that e-Cat dude from Bologna.

If I were him I would avoid publicity outside the scientific community simply to avoid the character assassination. I'd work with interested other scientists and publish in obscure journals until I could either find the flaw my measurements or generate data so unambiguous that it overcomes the howling.

<comment><USER19> Have other crowdfunded scientific projects had this problem? It's easier to see why people might unleash a lot of criticism at projects that might receive federal funding, but wouldn't the critics just... not back a crowdfunded test of Woodward's work?

<comment><USER20> Because, unfortunately, some people are just jerks, and will troll for the luz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I found the mention of Mach's Principle beyond intriguing. How have I not heard of this?! I'm quite glad to ponder it [1]

        You are standing in a field looking at the stars. Your arms are resting
        freely at your side, and you see that the distant stars are not moving. Now
        start spinning. The stars are whirling around you and your arms are pulled
        away from your body. Why should your arms be pulled away when the stars are
        whirling?  Why should they be dangling freely when the stars don't move?

... _There have been other attempts to formulate a theory which is more fully Machian, such as Brans–Dicke theory, but most physicists argue that none have been fully successful. At an exit poll of experts, held in Tubingen in 1993, when asked the question, 'Is general relativity perfectly Machian?', 3 respondents replied 'yes' and 22 replied 'no'. To the question, 'Is general relativity with appropriate boundary conditions of closure of some kind very Machian?' the result was 14 'yes' and 7 'no'._

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle)

</comment><comment><USER22> This article acts surprised about the possibility of changing an object's mass by varying its energy, but I thought that was common knowledge among relativists, as per [the classic "a compressed spring weighs more than a relaxed spring" meme][1].

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196182)

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if you could rotate the capacitor about a central point instead of vibrating it?

<comment><USER24> With magnetic bearings in vacuum and superconductor for the coil the only energy loses would be the ones that this theory predicts due to mass fluctuations I think?

So either it does nothing and stays where it is, or it converts energy into movement at 100% efficiency?

<comment><USER18> Electric motors can be ~90% efficient, or even higher for really well engineered ones, so very high efficiencies in converting electricity into movement are common. Electricity is basically movement already -- of electrons -- and is usually generated by spinning conductors and magnets around.

It wouldn't be 100% since some energy would be lost due to internal friction and the need to actively cool the thing to maintain superconductivity (and pump away heat generated by friction). You'd also lose energy in the electronics in generating the oscillating signals, switching, power conversion, etc., and in EMF losses. If it really does work I could imagine it approaching the efficiency of a good motor, just one that creates directional force in a vacuum by pushing against... umm... something. That'd be a question for the theoreticians. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Um. From what I remember of having learned about capacitors in a basic physics course a long time ago, the net charge of the capacitor is always the same. When voltage is applied to a capacitor, it generates an electric field between the plates, which causes charge separation. The charge is already there, its source is the dielectric between the capacitor plates.

So charging the capacitor may make one plate slightly lighter, the other slightly heavier, but its overall mass is the same. Is it this mass change he's trying to use?

<comment><USER26> It isn't the charge on the plates that alters the mass - it is the stored energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Someone who understands the _notion_ here, please tell me: would this violate conservation of momentum or not?

<comment><USER28> It does not change momentum or speed. But rather allows you to shift your location. You do not wind up with any net velocity, or momentum.

<comment><USER27> Isn't it meant to help a spacecraft accelerate? And if that happens, doesn't that mean that its mass has accelerate? And thus its momentum has increased?

<comment><USER28> No. It just makes it move, but in between machine cycles (or if you turn it off) the speed of the spacecraft is zero.

It requires no energy or momentum to just change position. Except it's impossible to do in space, but this machine makes it possible (supposedly).

<comment><USER27> Very helpful. Thank you. But then why were they trying to demonstrate efficacy by measuring torque, which I assume is just a proxy for force?

<comment><USER28> I don't know. It should only develop cyclical force (back and forth - <USER2> pushing against nothing).

I'm not 100% sure this thing actually is real, I'm just going by the description in the wired magazine, plus reconciling it with the statement that it doesn't violate Newton's laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I found it really noteworthy that a science fiction enthusiast, writing about a "reactionless drive", would fail to mention the Dean Drive.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive)

</comment><comment><USER30> I want to go to physics grad school just so I can have a lab full of equipment like that, with a lot of it stuff I machined myself.

<comment><USER31> Just join your local hackerspace instead, and you will still do all those cool things, and more!

If you're in Austin: [http://atxhs.org/wiki/Main_Page](http://atxhs.org/wiki/Main_Page)

<comment><USER32> It's late for me as I just finished my CS studies, but I realized recently that the university is nothing but a more formalized Hackerspace with much, much more expensive equipment. I'm thinking about re-enrolling, for biotech this time, to get access to the lab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Second picture, anyone know what brand those keyboards are?

</comment><comment><USER34> Can someone please suggest an accurate, neutral title?

<comment><USER35> "The quest for a reactionless space drive"? That's the article's URL slug, though not its title.

<comment><USER34> Thanks! Title changed from "Strange thrust: the unproven science that could propel our children into space".

<comment><USER32> Dang, I see you consistently active in many a thread, always telling what was the original title when changing it, and asking for suggestions when you're not sure. Thank you very much for that. It feels much better when the reason for title change is explained and open for discussion. I like how HN is improving itself recently.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for saying so! It's good to hear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Jeeze, really HackerNews/BoingBoong news are not good science sources. This "reaction-less" drive is simple variation of the "Dean drive" (another "space thruster" that only works if it is on a kitchen floor so that it can do standard work and exploit the different scales of static and slipping friction). I thought this was at least going to be the "microwave thruster" that works in cheap partial vacuum (but not in actual deep vacuum). Not even new bad ideas.

<comment><USER34> It sounds like you know something about this topic. I don't, and I'm sure that many other HN users don't either. Your comment would be better, I think, if you assumed that people here are curious to learn and shared your knowledge in a way that was easier to absorb. If bad ideas are circulating, offer better ideas and explain why they are better. That strategy may not work everywhere, but at least some of the time it does work here.

<comment><USER36> I guess I would say if you are truly curious about physics read about conservation of momentum, Noether's theorem, and things like that. You get really neat things like: if you assume general relativity is position invariant then you can prove it has conservation of momentum (i.e. you don't have to directly assume conservation of momentum!).

<comment><USER37> I think what Dan was trying to nudge you towards was sharing some of your knowledge with us, and starting some good discussion on those topics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So many pseudoscience articles today! We got one about solving NP complete problems in polynomial time with a new kind of "brain-like" computer, and now there's one about violating conservation of momentum. Next up: Peano arithmetic is inconsistent & telepathy proven to work based on quantum mechanics.

<comment><USER18> What exactly makes this pseudoscience? Is it pseudoscientific to investigate unlikely or speculative possibilities?

They have presented evidence and a proposed mechanism, have fully published the details of their work, and have invited others to attempt to replicate it or to show where they're wrong. Where's the "pseudo"? It's also important to note that in experimental physics it's more than enough to show an effect that can be replicated. Their currently proposed theoretical explanation could be wrong, but that wouldn't matter.

<comment><USER38> They have an experimental setup that spits out some data. That data goes against the theory of general relativity. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The article also sets off various other pseudoscience alarm bells, such as the fact that their paper is published in a philosophy journal, and the guy having a history degree instead of a physics degree. But that goes against the naive rebellious spirit of HN that dictates that anybody can overthrow fundamental physics with an experimental setup in his basement, so downvote away!

<comment><USER10> Going against established theory has nothing to do with "pseudoscience". Pseudoscience is how you treat it. If you say, this is the next best thing, all my doubters are idiots, and invest now! Then that is pseudoscience. But if you just go, "hmm, that's funny" and keep investigating what's going on, that's just plain science.

The article is very much written in the second form, at least as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER39> "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'"

[http://www.wisdomquotes.com/quote/isaac- asimov-7.html](http://www.wisdomquotes.com/quote/isaac-asimov-7.html)

<comment><USER10> I was attempting to reference that quote! But I couldn't find it (because I thought it was from Einstein) so I didn't say so explicitly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: We just shipped Hammer, our new Mac app for HTML. - <AUTHOR> http://hammerformac.com/?

<comment><USER2> This is fantastic. I've been using LiveReload, and this is a much better experience. I especially like the one click publishing, although I'd love the option to specify where it gets published too -- that's one obstacle that prevents using this at work (no prototypes outside the firewall). Still, for personal and consulting use, definitely worth the $24 price tag.

Edit: Looks like using Anvil will address my issue.</comment>


Ask HN: What VPS size is the best? - <AUTHOR> I'm wondering what kind of VPS you get for which use case.
I've seen Ruby on Rails deployments running on 1 Core / 2GB RAM / 10 GB SSD size, but I have also seen mattermost deployments on 4 Core / 8 GB / 50GB SSD + 1TB data disks.
What do you think is "normal" today? <comment><USER2> It's whatever you need. If you're just running a simple web-app that doesn't need to do much processing, get something small. If you want to run a database and have a lot of IO, you'll need something beefier. There is no single "best" size. Get what fits your needs.</comment>


How would you build a startup to make jazz more popular? - <AUTHOR>

So I am a huge jazz fan and have some spare cycles to invest some time and energy into a something and thought it would be an interesting project to try and make jazz more popular.
My question - how would you go about building something that made jazz more popular?
In particular, I'm living in NYC and am thinking starting with the aim of making jazz in NYC more popular is the way to go.
Any/all ideas appreciated. <comment><USER2> One problem which plagues jazz is the barrier to entry. A-lot of people would appreciate it more if they sort of had an 'a-ha' moment when they experienced jazz. So - if you lay it on too thick or make it too 'jazzy' , that wont work. What I am driving at is an approach to marketing the app/web app/website as a tool for a more "serious/aspiring to be serious" musician ....similar to how reddit has an appearance of being interesting but is still crammed with lolcats.

Avoid the cats , feature the jazz semi prominently and then try to market it to a more mature fanbase while keeping it cool/hip. Then have elements of building blocks to jazz which can be in the form of short videos by musicians who explain jazz and its relatability to any other kind of music.

Don't go all Coltrane upfront, but start with Jamie Cullum and try to meander over to Miles Davis.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if a startup is the best solution to making jazz more popular. I think becoming a popular musician in a genre heavily influenced by jazz is a better shot.

I have seen an iPad app called "The History of Jazz" which is aimed really at people who are already fans, but something like that could be good education for others too.

</comment><comment><USER4> You could make a site that informs people of jazz events near users. Then offer discounts or promotions..

There are a lot of models that exist already, but try to form them into something for jazz. (look up a startup called Will Call)

</comment><comment><USER5> I came to Jazz via its margins: Jazz Funk, Rap samples, Movie soundtracks or Salsa.

Show how it's at the middle of everything.

</comment><comment><USER6> make jazz more popular? did you ever go to a big jazz fest like in Montreal or Newport? I think it's big enough personally. That's the funniest thing I heard in a while. It won't be more popular. You re talking about culture not a boys band, prefabricated ideas. It's like wine, it's a taste you develop through the senses slowly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Use jazz to teach X. A new method for learning.</comment>


Ledger-autosync: get transactions from your bank and add them to your ledger - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/egh/ledger-autosync <comment><AUTHOR> [http://plaintextaccounting.org/](http://plaintextaccounting.org/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I briefly looked at the introduction. I'm curious how does app link mint work?

is a bank api? or they basically parse text files?</comment>


The Fallacy of the Selfish Miner in Bitcoin: An Economic Critique - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3009466 <comment><AUTHOR> This paper is related to a mathematical critique found here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839648](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839648)

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3004026](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3004026)</comment>


20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home <comment><USER2> I had to fight with it for a while with Firefox on Linux. Hung up the browser. Worked on Epiphany first time. Finally got it working on Firefox. My CPU seems to have calmed down too.

</comment><comment><USER3> This site design and programming is crazy! Is it custom-made or a templated solution?

<comment><USER4> It's Google, what do you think?</comment></comment>


Are bad sleeping habits driving us mad? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126962.100-are-bad-sleeping-habits-driving-us-mad.html?full=true&print=true <comment><USER2> This is very "Chicken or Egg" -ish

Are bad sleeping habits causing mental illness or does mental illness lead to bad sleeping habits. It seems to me the reality is that they are two conditions that exist because of each other.

In other words, if you can't sleep you probably already are a little mad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Short answer: Yes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Who needs sleep when there is caffeine pills to take instead? :-)</comment>


One world, one currency - could the bitcoin solve all our problems? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mindfulmoney.co.uk/7016/investing-strategy/one-world-one-currency--could-the-bitcoin-solve-all-our-problems.html <comment><USER2> Huge problem: as soon as Bitcoin gets any mainstream success, numerous other Bitcoin-like systems will spring up, thus negating the premise of _one_ currency.

In the arena of competing Bitcoin-like systems, those built by governments will win, because governments decide what is acceptable for paying taxes.

<comment><USER3> How does the government decide what to tax if the government currency is not used for transactions, and paid full salary with btc but at least minimum wage in cash?

<comment><USER2> They would treat it as a trade of goods, and tax it the way those are handled. For instance, suppose I trade a cow for your tractor. It would be taxed by treating it as two transactions: I sell my cow to you for cash, and then you sell your tractor to me for cash.

There are exceptions when what we are trading are "like kind" goods. For example, if we were both farmers growing the same kind of crop, and we swapped some land to make the shape of both of our farms more convenient that would be a like kind exchange and would not be taxed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because one currency for one continent has been working out so well for Europe....

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't it more appropriate to think of bitcoin as an investment or money market security? I mean, bitcoin has some of the features required of a monetary unit, but its rapid fluctuations in value really make it a speculative investment.

Unless bitcoin becomes mainstream and gets enough volume to smooth out these dips and valleys, who would ever use bitcoin as a money replacement?</comment>


Ask HN: Past submission about the importance of the introduction to an article - <AUTHOR> I recall reading a post that showed how the introduction to an article or proposal, even though very generic and bland, was key to ensuring the reader agreed with the conclusion of the article or approved whatever was being proposed. Cant seem to find that submission anymore.<p>Does anyone else remember reading something like this? Appreciate if you could share the link <comment><AUTHOR> Ok found it. Its from 2013 so no wonder cannot find it anymore, its gone from the internet but still available on the Internet Archive. The title is "How to write an opening sentence"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5060076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5060076) [https://web.archive.org/web/20130116141857/http://asserttrue...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130116141857/http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_\(journalism\))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but not the one I'm looking for. Its from a few years ago, made it to the top of HN and had lots of comments to go with it.

The reason I remember it is because there was an implication of influencing the subconscious somehow. The first few lines didn't seem to be very pointed or hard hitting or driving a conclusion, but were terribly important in influencing the outcome for the person reading the article.</comment></comment>


Everything you need to know about the Heartbleed SSL bug - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/04/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html <comment><USER2> "Unfortunately, Apache remains the dominant web server today"

I prefer (note the _I_ ) much more nginx than Apache, but for stating _Unfortunately_ in the article that way... it's pretty much a _common sense_ opinion to favor the alternatives over the ol' Apache or that was just the author _touch_?</comment>


Nasa's New UAV Is 80% 3D-Printed - <AUTHOR> https://www.aerodefensetech.com/component/content/article/adt/features/insider/34484 <comment><USER2> [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/langley-aerodrome- creat...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/langley-aerodrome-created-to- explore-urban-air-mobility)

I assume this is 3D-printed from some 3D printing tech beyond what I've experienced buying some small 3D printed items that are temperature sensitive and kinda flexy?

<comment><USER3> The mechanical parts of the printer aren't that important pretty much all the printers can reach a good enough resolution for production.

The biggest thing in 3D printing now is high end composite filaments and multi material applications.

So for example if you print with PEEK (PolyEtherEtherKetone) or PEK/PEKK/PEKEKK you can print extremely strong parts which can be used for aerospace applications and even more.

The problem is that those materials are very expensive PEEK can easily get to $250-300 per lb. and even higher for the better known brands and composite PEEK filaments (e.g. fibre reinforced PEEK).

Beyond that you are limited by your print volume but many of the cheap printers especially the Chinese ones are pretty good in that regard.

My largest 3D printer (Anycubic Chiron) has a custom print head (E3D Volcano) and custom drivers my hotend can reach 420c> so I can print with PEEK I just can't afford it, not to mention w/e NASA has used for this which I'll assume is probably even more expensive.

That said I can print quadcopters and small drones with glass or carbon fibre reinforced nylon or PET easily and the 3D printed parts are usually the toughest part of those builds.

<comment><USER4> The real problem with printing these materials is that the part isotropy is poor, so you get the expected strength on the x- and y- axes but the z- axis (where all of the layers are stacking up) is quite poor. Turns out that printing things in a layer-by-layer fashion has its own cost.

I'm quite involved in this area, happy to share more if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER5> > share more if anyone is interested.

What would it take to print 45ft yacht hull?

And not just the mould, but the hull itself?

<comment><USER3> A very large printer..

[http://www.thermwood.com/lsam_home.htm](http://www.thermwood.com/lsam_home.htm)

Technically they printed it for a mold but that's because fiberglass is better and while you can can print with glass reinforced materials the fibers have to be quite short which reduces their tensile strength compared to composite sheets.

That said if you really wanted too you could print a functional hull, but it's not a good application for it.

Not every manufacturing method is appropriate we can CNC mill a car from a single block of aluminum too but it's not exactly a good manufacturing process for this task.

EDIT: HanseYachts AG apparently prints a 10m (~33ft) hull for one of their Yachts using a cellulose composite filament.

<comment><USER5> Cars are mass produced, yachts are much less so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mods: Nasa's -> NASA's

<comment><USER7> This is a stylistic and regional difference. The convention in the UK is to use title case for acronyms, and all-caps for initialisms.

<comment><USER8> Why would conventions in the UK matter ? It is an article about a US agency on a US website.

Just use the original title.

<comment><USER9> The submitter might be from the UK, or some country other than USA, or use language constructs from such an area. The submitter might have corrected the title to match their local conventions.

That makes the title _right_, just not consistent with the conventions of a particular country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it also much cheaper?

<comment><USER11> Given this bit - "allowing engineers to change the wings, the fuselage, and other sections quite rapidly.", then it probably is, at least in comparison to having to produce lots of different aircraft.

<comment><USER12> Exactly - conventional techniques involving moulds would probably be cheaper if you're making 100 or even 10 of them, but if you're making 1 of them 3D printing is excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone know what it's made out of, the specific materials?

</comment><comment><USER14> Step one for an eventual von Neumann probe. Go NASA!

<comment><USER15> Relativity Space is also working on this, but with rockets:

[https://www.relativityspace.com/](https://www.relativityspace.com/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does Heroku support less known JVM languages? - <AUTHOR> Lately, I have been coming across Heroku tutorials and resources as I am learning Clojure. Knowing how big and popular Heroku is, makes me wonder why they support non-mainstream languages like Clojure. You could also say that Kotlin and Scala are less popular than the others web dev languages they support as well. I just wonder, why actively support such a small community like Clojure?
It makes me think that they possibly derive more revenue from resource-hungry JVM languages and that might be a big reason.
Do you have any theories or data? <comment><USER2> Because their deployment model is 'git push' your source code, they need to actively support a language in order to use Heroku at all. Every extra language they support _directly_ translates to a larger market size. New, niche languages are disproportionately important to Heroku's target market, because they're frequently used by startups and hobby projects and Heroku's best use-cases are often for startups and hobby projects.

It's also not that much technical effort to support an additional JVM language: they already support runtime deployments on the JVM, so they just need to learn & automate a new build toolchain, and then the deployment artifacts are basically the same as for the JVM. I'd bet this portion of their stack is isolated from the runtime & auto-scaling parts, so they can assign a few engineers to it, build out the tooling, and then have it just feed into the existing JVM stack.

High profitability + low cost = it makes a lot of business sense to do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm the Java Languages Owner at Heroku. While I can't reveal in full detail why we do (or do not) officially support a particular language, I can say that it has nothing to do with how resource-hungry the runtime is :)

Our determination to officially support a language is based on numerous factors including community demand, relationship with other technologies, suitability to the platform (C++ is really popular but not for web apps), and more. In any case, I wouldn't read too much into our support--it's not a determination on the language itself.

Fun fact: Clojure was the first JVM language supported on Heroku back in 2011 (even before Java itself)! [https://blog.heroku.com/clojure_on_heroku](https://blog.heroku.com/clojure_on_heroku)

Today, Heroku support Java (with Maven or Gradle), Scala, and Clojure buildpacks. JRuby is supported via the Ruby buildpack. Buildpacks are the mechanism that prepares each app for production, so in some ways our support is more tightly coupled to the build tools than the language. That's why we don't have a Kotlin buildpack (it can use the Maven or Gradle buildpack accordingly). In fact, there's nothing specially you need to do to run a Kotlin app on Heroku, so we have some docs and there isn't much more to say about it. We've also worked closely with the Kotlin folks to make sure the ecosystem plays well with Heroku.

Let us know if you have any trouble with Clojure on Heroku. Stackoverflow.com is a great place to start (and I personal try to watch for questions tagged with "Heroku" and "Clojure").

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to languages: [https://www.heroku.com/languages](https://www.heroku.com/languages) \- Additionally they have Kotlin documentation and tutorials</comment>


When will self-Driving cars be on the road? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/When-will-self-driving-cars-be-on-roads/answer/Andrew-Ng?srid=cgo&share=1 <comment><USER2> Suggesting that we'll see them in mass market in less than five years strikes me as insane. Marketing bull, even. Currently today, self-driving cars are still far worse drivers than humans, and companies developing them have been misleading people to build the hype.

Google likes to brag about how it's cars have driven 1,000,000 miles without causing an accident. But they've neglected to brag about what they had to report to the California DMV: That among their 30-some-odd cars, there would've been 10 at-fault accidents in 2015 alone without human drivers intervening. Google took the telemetry from those incidents and simulated the behavior if the car had been allowed to operate unimpeded.

One out of three cars being at-fault in an accident in a year? That's an AWFUL safety record, and far worse than the human average. If the Google self- driving software was a licensed driver, it would've had it's license revoked

[http://9to5google.com/2016/01/12/googles-self-driving-car- ca...](http://9to5google.com/2016/01/12/googles-self-driving-car- caused-10-accidents-test-drivers-control/)</comment>


Show HN: Props.tv – Give props to breakdance videos - <AUTHOR> http://www.props.tv <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, thanks for checking out my passion project. Feedback will be appreciated! :)</comment>


Tricked and Indebted on Land, Abused or Abandoned at Sea - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/world/asia/philippines-fishing-ships-illegal-manning-agencies.html <comment><USER2> Already posted twice today, first one here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10533619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10533619)</comment>


WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-14/wework-ipo-shows-it-s-the-most-magical-unicorn <comment><USER2> I have a bit of knowledge of the co-working industry.

I'm good friends with the founder of the first and long-dominant tech/creative co-working space in my Australian city, and I served on its advisory board in the past couple years, through what turned out to be a distressed sale of the business to its landlord, after it became insolvent and unsalvageable.

There are several fundamental flaws with the concept that make it very hard for this kind of business to work:

1) Difficult/unpredictable/uncontrollable customer retention

Most of your customers are individual freelancers and early-stage companies up to about 20 people. If they become successful, they outgrow the space and leave (possibly after a period of tenancy on negotiated discounted rates because "hey it would really hurt you guys if we left"). If they are unsuccessful, they go out of business and leave, possibly after a couple of months of non-payment ("oh man we're just waiting for a big payment/financing, we'll be able to pay next month for sure"), which is hard/impossible to recover once they've left. And even where people remain eligible customers, the transient nature of the customer-supplier relationship means it's easy to jump ship if a cooler space opens around the corner.

So you're running this revolving-door business, where retention is only partially within your control, and having to invest heavily on new customer acquisition (often involving free trial periods and other incentives) to keep up with churn.

Your most reliable customers in terms of tenancy and payment are remote workers/teams for bigger interstate/international companies, but too many of them and the culture can become too corporate-feeling and less appealing for everyone - them included.

2) High setup costs and fixed running costs

Rent, fit-out, furniture, facilities, utilities, cleaning/maintenance, staff, etc. Most of these costs are largely independent of occupancy levels/revenues.

3) Difficulty finding/keeping good staff

The "community management" job in these places is highly specialised and demanding. All day you're dealing with human problems that are exacerbated by people's stresses about their business or job, as well as all the minutiae of things like the toilets/kitchens being clean/stocked, meeting room booking windows being adhered to, ensuring that the people in the space are all people who are meant to be there.

Emergency calls from people who e.g. left their wallet in the space that day and "just need someone to let me in to grab it" (at 9.30pm) become routine occurrences once you reach a certain scale.

Beyond these practicalities, the people in these roles set the mood for the whole space, and can make all the difference between it being a welcoming and happy place or a dull/miserable one.

Finding people who can not only do this kind of work all day every day, but do it with an enthusiastic and friendly demeanour, is very difficult, and burnout/turnover is common.

In general, the kinds of people who can do this job really well can get a less-stressful/better paid job elsewhere (quite possibly for one of your resident companies).

4) Competition/substitution

The market in many cities has become saturated (partly thanks to WeWork itself). This pushes market rates down, acquisition/retention costs up, expectations up ("the other place has FOUR types of kombucha on tap"), and dilutes the pool of potential residents and staff.

And after all, what you're offering is not essential for freelancers/small companies anyway. They can easily work from home, cafes, borrowed/subleased space with other companies.

It seems the only way to make these businesses financially viable is by partnering with something like a startup accelerator/investment company or an R&D body backed by industry and/or academia.

But this requires deep links with local community/industry, and is a huge amount of work to establish and manage.

For a player like WeWork, this kind of work is hard to do as it can't be done with a cookie-cutter approach, and local collaborators for these kinds of partnerships often prefer to work with locally-owned businesses rather than big outsiders.

So, we'll wait and see. Maybe WeWork has something up their sleeve that will allow them to build a model that works.

I'll be interested to watch it play out.

<comment><USER3> I really like your analysis here and it made me think.

Ultimately, for control of many of these issues, a localist approach is superior..understand the local culture, etc.

Maybe a coworkery in La Jolla would have surfboard racks and a tacit understanding that surfing comes first...so allowance for wet gears (and showers) might be needed. Maybe a location in Boulder has community climbing gear and/or a bouldering wall.

So, does scale lend _any_ benefit? Certainly the "network" of locations might help...but what % of tenants are really and truely jet-setters off to many major cities, versus those that stay close to home and just need a regular space out of the house. I don't think scale is that vital in this view.

Next, deals...I suppose scale can lend itself to leasing deals with major brokers that have multi-city inventory. But that benefit is only on the supply side, and unless the _same_ landlord is involved, they won't come down in price just because.

At the end of the day, more, 'localist' coworking spaces probably wins and is a more dynamic market (and thus resilient) than some attempt at "winner-take- all" scale. Also, to reinforce that...I suspect many times a good coworking location is probably an individuals labor of love...they like their town, had access to the commercial space, and they wanted it first-and-foremost for themselves. Any subscribers are just helping to pay the bills and making new friends.

<comment><USER2> > So, does scale lend _any_ benefit? Certainly the "network" of locations > might help...but what % of tenants are really and truely jet-setters off to > many major cities, versus those that stay close to home and just need a > regular space out of the house. I don't think scale is that vital in this > view.

Spot on here. They are building for a world in which everyone is location-and- asset-independent. Don't need a car because we have Uber/Lyft. Don't need a home as we have Airbnb. Don't need an office as we have WeWork. Etc.

But the market of people who live that way is still small, and I think it will always be somewhat small, or at least limited. (It becomes much harder to live that way once you have a family, for example.)

And can they really end up opening spaces in all the places where location- independent, digital nomads want to go - e.g., all those beach resort towns in Thailand and exotic villages in Central/South America?

But even if they do, independent digital nomads are not the people who will sustain the business anyway, as independent freelancers are more costly to acquire and service, and harder to retain. Their bread-and-butter is mid-sized teams (5-20) and satellite staff for interstate/international companies.

They're often described as the Starbucks of office space [1].

But Starbucks doesn't succeed in every region it enters - certainly not ours [2], as we have our own many-decades-old coffee/cafe culture in which people much prefer independent cafes over large chains.

I'm sure this mentality will apply to co-working spaces just as much as cafes, in many places.

[1] [https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/wework-company- year-2017.html](https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/wework-company-year-2017.html)

[2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/20/starbucks-australia- coffee-f...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/20/starbucks-australia-coffee- failure.html)

<comment><USER4> > Don't need a home as we have Airbnb. Don't need an office as we have WeWork. > Etc.

> But the market of people who live that way is [A] still small, and [B] will > always be somewhat small

I agree with A, but not B. To me this is a classic disruptive tech scenario. Right now living in hotels and working in coffee shops is strictly worse than having a home and an office for almost everyone.

A few people who have very special needs are well served by coworking.

However, all of the different metered rental propositions (metered office rental, metered car rental, etc) offerings are getting better and better. They are all pretty bad but you can imagine what it would take for them to be great.

Will those experiences eventually catch up to long term home/office leases? Maybe. If enough services like that get good you open up interesting possibilities like a company that only exists for a week but can do everything a fixed company can do.

I find it difficult to predict what can and can't happen here, so I think your "people will never want this" assessment is too hasty. If there are enough early adopters who will hold on and provide feedback and a small amount of revenue, that could produce something quite compelling over the next decade.

<comment><USER5> > Right now living in hotels and working in coffee shops is strictly worse > than having a home and an office for almost everyone

Maybe it's just the WeWork I've been it, but it was every bit as loud and distracting as a Starbucks. The glass fishbowl offices constantly remind you other people are walking around you. You see them, they see you. In addition, the one I was in had the bright idea of installing hardwood floors everywhere. Men and women in dress shoes and high heels would "clop clop clop" all day long.

You also never want to mix sales people with engineers. Or any job title that requires a good percent of the day socializing. Sales people are on the phone nonstop, usually running a script quite loudly. That's not even something you could get away with at most Starbucks. But WeWork on the other hand...

<comment><USER6> It surprises me that they don't offer quiet cubicles or areas of office space for quiet workers. I see noise of coworkers as a major complaint among office workers and the source of hatred for open concept offices. Do these WeWork offices not have separated work spaces?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Control/ownership/structure aside, the interesting line here is:

" _The financial disclosures make it clear that WeWork — which, it should be said, is a commerce office leasing company and not truly a tech company_ "

Lots of tech companies (eg uber) take VC funded losses to grow at tech startup rates. This can create unsustainable business models and mask sustainability issues. But...

..But, in tech, the potential _payoff_ driving all this investment flow is getting to a monopoly (in the Thiel sense). Out of this world business models like Google's or FB's that generate massive revenue with near-zero marginal costs. Software economics, basically. The winners win incredibly big. This makes the massive-multiple investment case rational.

Tesla, WeWork and such have much more normal, non-software-like economics. WeWork will never lease office space for _that_ much above market rates. No matter how good Tesla's cars and/or manufacturing tech gets, they are never going to sell cars at a 40% margin^. That's why Elon had to sell all the Tesla share and take loans. It takes a lot of resources to build factories and cars. Office space can be leased, so WeWork hasn't needed as much financing, but it comes out of operating margins instead.

You basically cannot achieve software startup money-machine goals with atoms and marginal costs.

^Self-driving aside.

</comment><comment><USER8> The City of London is having a skyscraper boom at the moment - two major 100+ floor buildings are going up and you can hardly turn a corner without some crane or building work going on.

I personally (and without any empirical evidence) think that there is no way London needs this much more office space, partly because "Brexit China Tariffs", but mostly because remote working and "just not in the office five days a week" is becoming a thing.

Turning that sterile office space onto more live/work/mix-it-up space, perhaps floors 1-20 as office and 20-40 as apartments or something, will _almaot certainly_ be a feature of the next twenty years.

And all that office space and living space and mixed something or other we don't quite get, all that will need to be sold and packaged and marketed.

And so, long story long, whilst WeWork may look like a joke, may be a "lose money on each sale but make it up in volume", something like WeWork _may just be_ the Hoover or the Pullman coach of mixed live work office buildings. Because mixed live work office buildings will be the Pullman coaches of tomorrow's cities - cities have a new brighter car free future, where Barcelona's mega-blocks will meets the density of skyscrapers. But it needs ... looking after.

Putting a millions tons of glass and steel pointing straight up is an awesome technical achievement

Making that tower somewhere that families can live, love, shop and work is a different skill set entirely.

It won't look like building service companies do today. It might _just_ look like WeWork

(Thank you, normal cynical and cutting remarks will resume shortly)

<comment><USER9> I wonder what happened to the concept of the garage startup that Silicon Valley's foundation is famous for? Too much money from profits and not enough people or ideas to invest in?

Paying for an office space is an extremely inefficient use of resources, especially when plenty of cafe space - or just, you know, your living room, kitchen - or garage - are useful even for teams of 20+ because will be rare to need everyone in a single space at once, and then you can just rent something larger for that event.

I kind of have a challenge with myself to work towards launching the fastest growing projects/platforms using as few resources as possible. whether I'll reach that goal is moot, though - it's more or less a mantra for me to pay attention to whether I am rushing or not.

<comment><USER10> Maybe it could work for founders, but as an employee I would absolutely not sign on to a company whose space is a garage. First of all, it signals precariousness and non-seriousness. Second, I can get a job at any number of companies in more comfortable settings, so why shouldn't I?

Maybe part of the difference is related to supply and demand: potential employees have other opportunities, so why should they make sacrifices for companies they don't own more than 0.5% of?

<comment><USER11> > I would absolutely not sign on to a company whose space is a garage. First > of all, it signals precariousness and non-seriousness

So you would have avoided Apple and Amazon then?

<comment><USER12> They would also have avoided a million companies you never heard of.

<comment><USER9> Right, so following the leading metric for your decision basing it on off of if they mostly run out of a "garage" is a terrible idea; adding the two Apple founders into the equation, assuming you have the opportunity to get to know them and their ideas and plans well enough, would be an important part to the equation of deciding where to work.

<comment><USER12> Only if you believe that you can distinguish lucky founders from normal founders with sufficient precision to beat the odds. Personally I wouldn't trust myself to do that.

<comment><USER9> Of course, you can only do what you're most comfortable with - which should depend on your understanding of as many pieces to the puzzle possible, that's how we understand risk/reward, and how we hopefully make calculated decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Zoom is also up 50% since it went public in April, and Crowdstrike is up 70%.

I don't really get the sense in comparing a bunch of companies with disparate financials and very different industries. The We Company is a real estate company trying to convince people it's a tech company. This list mixes B2C and B2B companies, SaaS platforms with monthly recurring revenue with companies with advertising-based business models. Almost none of these organizations are reasonably comparable.

<comment><USER14> I would expect something described as a real estate company to be long, well, real estate. As I understand it We is short real estate.

<comment><USER13> I forgot about the shell company bit on their long-term leases. In any case, they are in the business of managing and reselling real estate, whatever the time horizon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> WeWork's business model makes more sense when you realize it's probably just a scheme for transferring VC money directly into Adam Neumann's pocket. He owns a number of the buildings that WeWork is leasing: [https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/01/16/wework-c...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/01/16/wework- ceo-neumann-property-owned-ipo.html)

<comment><USER2> No longer true; he transferred them to a fund owned by the company:

[https://www.businessinsider.com.au/wework-ark-fund-to-buy- co...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/wework-ark-fund-to-buy-commerical- properties-2019-5?r=US&IR=T)

<comment><USER16> I don't mean to be facetious but how does that make it better? Doesn't he still control the company that owns the fund?

Is it suppose to be better because it "looks" better because with my minimal understanding there isn't a difference.

<comment><USER17> I mean, it is different / better.

Now, if WeWork goes belly up, Neumann doesn't get to keep the buildings.

<comment><USER18> But he gets to keep the money that they paid him for the buildings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Magical indeed. From the chart in the article it looks like for the most recent half-year they were paid $1.35B in rent and spent $1.23B to operate their properties, which works out to just $120MM in operating income for the year, let's say $250MM for the year. Per the S1 they already have around $4B of debt which looks like it costs them about $80MM per year in interest. That leaves about $170MM in plausible "earnings" if you assume they didn't have any other costs (they do, massive ones, but for sake of argument). The suggested IPO valuations are about 400x that amount, or about 20x higher than the average P/E of the S&P 500.

<comment><USER19> Digging into those other costs is informative as well, the numbers for 2018:

        Pre-opening location expenses $350MM
        Growth and new market development expenses $475MM
        Sales and marketing expenses  $370MM

One could make some sort of argument that the first two categories are long- term investments, but the last one really stands out to me: they spent $37 on sales and marketing for every $25 they "earned".

<comment><USER20> Their sales and marketing was $370m/$1350m or 27% of revenue. Is that in line with industry norms?

I think it makes little sense to express Sales & Marketing expense as a percentage of Net Income...

You could express it in terms of New Revenue Growth, to get a feel for customer acquisition cost, and then look at churn to get a feel for lifetime value and payback periods... if you wanted to analyze them like a "SaaS" type business.

<comment><USER19> What industry are we talking about? Most commercial real estate used for offices spends almost nothing on marketing (they put a sign in the window perhaps).

I don't think SaaS is at all relevant. Typical SaaS gross margins are upwards of 60%. WeWork's gross margins are under 10%.

Edit: found a source[1] that states "5% of broker's cut is standard" for commercial real estate marketing expenses, with a broker getting about half of the commission which is around 2.5%. Even if you went with 10% of a 10% commission rate that would only be 1% of the total.

[1] [https://www.calicomarketing.com/commercial-real-estate- budge...](https://www.calicomarketing.com/commercial-real-estate-budget- marketing/budgeting-marketing-listings/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One thing I never see mentioned in any analysis of WeWork is Regus, which does more or less the same thing but with less fanfare. They've been running coworking spaces and short term office rentals around the world for a long time. Do the two companies have similar business models? Can we look to Regus's long history to better analyze WeWork's prospects? It's not like WeWork invested co-working spaces, so I don't understand why everyone acts like they did something novel.

On a personal note, I've been a happy user of Regus for nearly a decade and I can't imagine switching to WeWork. The WeWork offices I've been to are large open offices or glass-walled. They have better kitchenettes but not astronomically better. And the whole vibe feels very unprofessional, one step up from a coffee shop. And they cost a lot more. I don't get it.

<comment><USER22> I've worked at a lot of different WeWork locations in different cities and countries. They are essentially Starbucks for working - you get the exact same product in every location and it is "good enough". The overall product is definitely designed for a younger generation, but it is very easy and fast to use.

I've also used Regis occasionally when a WeWork wasn't nearby. It was like stepping back 30 years into the past. Instead of getting my corporate- allocated portion of predictable factory-generated open office space, I got what was equivalent to a random left-over desk at your weird uncle's small town real estate agent office 25 years ago.

The whole Regis experience felt like something from the mid-90s. It was a whole different thing than WeWork. The crowd skewed 30 years older and heavily into non-tech industries, the architecture was very "90s small office", etc. I honestly felt like I would turn a corner and see someone using a Packard Bell 486 with a giant CRT. That's how much it reminded me of working in offices in the 90s.

I'm not saying one is good and the other is bad depending on what you need. WeWork often comes off as a parody of itself and can be a ridiculous place to work. But WeWork is also something that most people in their 20s think is a "fun place" where you just "hang out with your friends" where as the Regis offices would probably feel like an old school work prison to them.

I think WeWork is probably a ridiculous business in the long run and I'm not convinced they are even a "coworking" business at all, but I'm happy to spend their VC money to get free office space as long as they want to give it out. Likewise, I can also totally understand why Regis would never excite any investor.

<comment><USER21> I feel like what you and the other replies are saying is WeWork is super trendy and hip whereas Regus feels old-fashioned and stuffy. This feels surprisingly superficial to me.

1\. The old fashioned office feel at Regus is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm able to focus much better in a Regus office. And I feel like I'm actually getting what I'm paying for (if I want beer, I'll go to a supermarket). I've never had client meetings in either place, but from what I've seen Regus is much more the kind of place I'd want to bring clients to if I wanted to give a good impression. This kind of feels like a parallel to the open office versus cubicle debate. Open offices are undoubtedly trendier and more community driven and just feel cool, but if you want to actually be productive and get work done then open offices are kind of a step backwards.

2\. Regardless of what's better in our differing opinions, the business models are more or less the same, so it feels like Regus could be a useful case study when thinking about WeWork. I still find it confusing how most articles about WeWork imply it's the first company to do what it's doing at scale and therefore it's in uncharted tech startup growth mode territory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What I don't get is how small some of these numbers are. Weren't some of the figures being tossed around valuing it at $40bn? And their revenues are in the low single digit billions. It's one thing to get sucked in by a company like Uber who does $50b+ in rides, and think how valuable they could be if they figured out how to earn a meaningful chunk of that pie, but WeWork earns virtually no money, and exists in one of the oldest and most competitive businesses known to man. What is the upside that investors are envisioning?

<comment><USER24> The optimistic case for WeWork is that they have a shot to become an extremely powerful player in the office real estate market. The idea is that they could get to a place where most big companies looking for office space would prefer to do it from WeWork because it's better than leasing directly from a building owner. And most building owners would prefer to lease their space to WeWork because it's better than trying to lease directly - after all, at this point everyone looking for office space is going to WeWork so it's tough to find companies who want to lease directly. Once they're in this position they'll be able to bully building owners into leasing to them at very favorable rates - who else are the owners going to lease to?

The idea is that WeWork can do in real estate what cloud infrastructure-as-a- service providers like AWS and Azure are doing in computing. Most companies find it easier to build on AWS instead of running a data center directly. And data center hardware providers find they kind of have to accept the big cloud providers' terms because they don't have a lot of other people to sell to these days.

In order to believe this optimistic case for WeWork you have to believe that they are providing a useful abstraction on top of leasing office space the traditional way, and you have to believe that they won't face any deadly competition. Personally, I'm skeptical of both of those, but I think the best case for WeWork providing a really useful abstraction hinges on two things: 1) a secular shift in the way people work leading to highly flexible office arrangements (e.g. instantly spin up an office in Berlin, run it for two months, then shut it down) becoming much more attractive; 2) WeWork being able to structure lease terms in ways that are better for corporate accounting somehow (i.e. it's not a better product at the end of the day, but it looks better on the books). The best case for them winning out over competition comes down to them getting such a big lead in the amount of space they offer and brand recognition that nobody can challenge them - hence the rationale for burning a ton of money quickly to open as many locations as possible as soon as possible.

I'm skeptical and I'd argue WeWork is more likely to end up like MoviePass than AWS. (MoviePass had pretty much the same idea and playbook - burn money to get to scale and market power quickly then dictate terms to the suppliers who have been eating into your margins - and it didn't exactly turn out well.) But anything is possible.

tl;dr Long-term investors hope that if WeWork can achieve a dominant position in the global office market then they can increase their margins by both lowering their cost to acquire space and increasing the rents they charge. If they pull that off then they can rake in hundreds of billions of dollars and be worth trillions.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for this thoughtful comment, it's the most insightful one to me so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine" -Benjamin Graham

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't the new WeWork in the Brooklyn Navy Yard empty? They have been trying to fill it for months. But double-check me on that.

1/2 billion to build that baby.

<comment><USER28> Unless there's another one, the Dock 72 location is still "Opening Soon" [https://www.wework.com/buildings/dock-72-at-the-brooklyn- nav...](https://www.wework.com/buildings/dock-72-at-the-brooklyn-navy-yard-- new-york-city--NY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A bubble company, pure and true. What's new? This one is riding the wave of both the commercial real estate and tech bubbles. Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER30> I never knew pinterest was that big, never used it in my life not even once. How many other startups and market tangents have I been ignorant to I am beginning to wonder.

</comment><comment><USER31> Pretty certain that paying for wework is a vanity project.

You get biscuits and beer and a nice location but you don't need any of it

</comment><comment><USER32> As much as I love reading all the commenets here that try to use rational and great thoughts about WeWork, they forget one thing - this company for a very long time is a classic pump and dump. Even the founder sold stocks just a while ago. There is no business reason, unique technology or anything else that will even try get close to the numbers of this company. I just hope that when it collapses it will be contained and not affect the entire technology sector.

</comment><comment><USER33> Market will teach these companies a lesson

<comment><USER34> Companies don't possess a capacity to learn, being just a legal fiction and not actual people.

<comment><USER35> institutions are just as capable of learning than anything else as long as they consist of bodies that are capable of reform and memory (my home country Germany can tell a lesson about it), and anyhow the idea of an 'actual person' as somehow continuous entity is a fiction too.

Individuals pass through just as many disruptive phases as any other entity. A person at the age of 5 and at the age of 50 is only 'the same' in a legal sense.

<comment><USER36> Iso9001 being a prominent example of RL on an organizational level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> When the recession hits (more controversially the bubble pops), I'm not sure what will happen to WeWork.

I would guess it will collapse, as tenants leave and it can't pay for its rental costs.

But on the flip side, in a recession landlords become much more open to renegotiating terms, and more people freelance or start their own business when they lose their jobs. So it's possible WeWork could somehow claw their way out of it.

<comment><USER38> There's an interview to Neumann by BI where he talks about that exact same thing. Makes one wonder if they're betting it all on a recession for things to "work" (heh)

The interview, soft paywall: [https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-adam- neumann-busi...](https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-adam-neumann- business-model-softbank-ipo-risks-2019-5?r=wework-10yr)

I don't like this pattern, more than VC funded startups they are more like QE funded startups, regurgitating your own devalued money as a favour. Uber comes to mind, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Magical = Most incredible potential for failure

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm sorry, who the frack is this CEO?

How are these anti-savvy CEOs getting this much money in the first place? What investor looked at this kind of model and went...oh hell ya, Imma dump money into that.

Massive real estate speculation you say? Shrinking capital gains you say? No downside risk of massive customer fallout or systemic risk of market downturns you say?

Oh...you're saying all those things are totally possible and very likely! Well in that case just take 75% of all my money for your little scheme.

</comment><comment><USER41> I feel like something must be seriously wrong with capitalism if it can keep creating these startups and funnelling endless hundreds of milions into them so they can accumulate debt, lose money, and achieve absolutely nothing of value.

<comment><USER10> Even if that's true, why should it bother you that money is being extracted from rich VCs and distributed to other rich people in the worst case, and working- and middle-class employees and customers in the best case?

<comment><USER37> Aren't the rich VCs cashing in on the IPOs and letting the markets take the losses? Classic bubble behaviour - pay plenty so long as someone else will pay more.

<comment><USER41> Sort of like a ponzi scheme requiring a constant inflow of cash, where those who get out earlier are fine and the rest lose?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as public companies". It features 9 relatively recent tech IPOs, including Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat. All of the companies have a negative delta in terms of initial stock price, from -47% to -2%, _except_ for Pinterest, which is +77%. I actually had forgotten Pinterest IPOed, and I guess that's a reflection of how much I get my tech news from HN. Pinterest seems very underdiscussed on HN [0] relative to its market cap – $17.5B vs Lyft's $15.8B and Dropbox's $7.3B. I guess that's a function of how relatively few HNers may be Pinterest users?

[0] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pinterest&sort=byPopularity&pr...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pinterest&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story)

<comment><USER43> Huh didn't even know Pinterest is still a thing. Is it like Instagram?

<comment> munk-a Every time I've interacted with it I've found it extremely obnoxious, it is very strongly oriented to capture users within it's network and actively tries to avoid letting users do anything while logged out or to get a raw image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I realize I'm probably a bit of a unicorn, but I've coworked in the same co- working office for over 8 years. The businesses in the office have changed and there has been some turn over in those years but 50% of us have stayed! Those of us who have stayed the past 8 years have cycled between self employed, and employed full-time, often years at a time for one company.

We live in a small town in Colorado that has never provided work opportunities in our field, but we've always been successful working remotely.

Small town co-working has provided a huge value for us: no commute, we're out of the house, camaraderie, friendship and support. Maybe this is an example of a profitable co-working.

I know that in these past 8 years the owner has done very little recruiting and the desks are always full.</comment>


Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater - <AUTHOR> http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap071214.html <comment><USER2> Quote:"Now thirty five years later, Cernan and Schmitt are still the last to walk on the Moon."

That page was last updated in December of 2007, so add another four years.

How many people in this forum can truthfully say this sentence: "Man has not walked on the moon in my lifetime."

Say it again. Say it again. Say it again until righteous rage makes you want to spit on all of the bureaucrats, activists, and other parasites who clipped humanity's wings.

Repeat after me: "Man has not walked on the moon in my lifetime."

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, what we need to solve all humanity's problems is more moon rock. If only we had enough moon rocks, things would be just so much better. Why can't the paper pushers and beureaucrats just get with the program and give us our moon rocks?

How much moon rock do you think we need? A dozen tons? A hundred tons? Wow, imagine what we could achieve with a hundred tons of moon rock. Why, the sky's the limit!

Which pressing need of humanity for moon rocks do you think we should tackle first?

<comment><USER4> Do you really think the reason we have not returned is because the resources were diverted to solve "humanities problems"?

<comment><USER3> They were diverted to solve some problems faced by some humans. Problems that would not have been solved otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That photograph of them on the edge of the crater is wonderfully dramatic. Makes me wonder what instructions they had, precautions they took, preparations they made to make sure they didn't tumble in accidentally.

</comment><comment><USER6> A bunch more Apollo panoramas. . . [http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/maps/Moon- Apollo-Landing-Panora...](http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/maps/Moon-Apollo- Landing-Panoramas)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a beautiful image, but I think the colours are a bit off. There's some vertical red banding especially on the left of the image that I can't un-see. I emailed the person who made these about this once, and he mentioned he had a slight colour-blindness.

I know there's some colour on the moon, but I don't think it's as much as this image suggests.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to feed the conspiracy nuts...but why are the shadows on the left and right of the shot being cast in different directions?

<comment><USER9> Many features in moon photographs are bizarre, I don't blame the nuts too much...

In this crop from a panorama, for example, the rover seems completely out of proportion, like a miniature: <http://cl.ly/3M0v0S3R2M2N3h180Q1W>

Compare the size of the footprint and the stones in the left side, to the stones near the rover. Either the moon has some weird rock distributions, the image is highly deformed, or this is a fake :) The fact that for multiple generations we haven't been up there again just contributes to the idea.

<comment><USER10> That photo is obviously a composite of multiple shots. You see strange deformations like that all the time in composite shots.

If we apply Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is that they went to the moon. Over 350,000 people were involved at a total cost of $140 billion of todays dollars. I've never heard anyone deny that we had the capability to land on the moon. The rockets, vehicles and astronauts were all real. The evidence is too monumental. For the moon landings to be a hoax, it would require everything that it takes to complete the mission and an extra group of people to do all the work of faking it.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. People seem to overestimate the power of the government to fake things. If it was that easy to pull off a hoax of that magnitude, it is quite likely that WMDs would have been "found" in Iraq after the invasion.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ETL-Less Smart Data Warehouse Raises $5M - <AUTHOR> http://newscenter.io/2017/09/panoply-raises-additional-5-million/ <comment><USER2> Interesting to see what machine learning is doing in the Data space. Other companies to look at --> Snowflake, Splunk, Google (amazing advancements in ML in the past year)</comment>


Secure messaging app Telegram now offers its own anonymous blogging platform - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/telegram-telegraph/ <comment><USER2> Telegram-FOSS (the FOSS friendly fork you can find on F-Droid, not the official app on Play Store) maintainer here. Telegram is NOT a "secure messaging app".

<comment><USER3> Quote from the Telegram-FOSS Github Page: "Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security..."

<comment><USER2> That comes from upstream's README.md. I've never payed any attention to it, but now that you've pointed it out, I'm seriously considering changing that paragraph, or adding a note/disclaimer somewhere.

After all these years and promises, server's code is still closed, federation is nowhere to be found, their update/commit policy for the official Android app is a joke [1] (they even closed its issue tracker), and I'm really tired of their "trust us, we're not evil" policy [2].

If you haven't switched to Matrix/Riot, do it right away.

[1] [https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master](https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master)

[2] [https://telegram.org/faq#q-who-are-the-people-behind- telegra...](https://telegram.org/faq#q-who-are-the-people-behind-telegram)

<comment><USER4> As one of the resident cryptography nerds: Matrix/Riot seems to be in every way better than Telegram. I still need to review it before I can wholesale recommend it, but it was audited by NCC Group previously.

<comment><USER5> I don't seem to understand Matrix/Riot.

It appears to be like IRC, but also integrates with Gitter, and IRC and has a identity federator called vector.im.

<comment><USER6> Matrix is a federated chat protocol. It is like IRC or XMPP but synchronizes history and uses HTTP-based protocol. There are bridges to IRC, XMPP, and Gitter.

Riot is a client. It used to be named Vector.im.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use telegram on a day to day basis, but calling it "secure" is quite a bit of a stretch. But it is quite possibly the best app I have used in regards to user expetience.

But until signal actually produced a usable (to the average person) app, people will continue to use telegram and other insecure chat platforms.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, some Telegram usability comes from a reduction in security. Things like seamlessly going, with full chat-history, between multiple devices is a bit tricky when your protocol only permits one person to receive a message once, rather than storing the messages unencrypted on the server like Telegram does.

One "secure" approach would be that of the older Skype clients, where chat history synced between the logged in clients of a user. However, that was a horrible user experience, made worse by bad notification management.

So while Signal can get better, you will probably always have to decide between usability and security, which is most likely the very reason that "normal" people always end up with the less secure solution, which in turn renders the secure solution even less usable with its smaller userbase.

<comment><USER9> How does userbase affect usability?

Also, I tried Wire recently, which has e2e and all your messages on all your devices. I tnink sent messages duplicated, encrypted with each of your devices keys. So when you add a device it can't read previous messages.

<comment><USER8> An instant messaging platform needs a network of users. I am more likely to use a platform that allows me to talk to all of my contacts, than to use multiple platforms that only allows me to talk to a few each. If I have multiple, I am also only likely to add the new platform if there is at least a handful of people I know there. Likewise, the more users that are on the platform, the more likely that new users will be attracted.

I am on Telegram primarily because it's the best I can come up with that my friends use, and moving my friends is an unlikely task as they have _their_ friends on Telegram as well. You need to move or duplicate users from existing platforms to get a userbase, but you need a userbase to attract users from existing platforms.

I have been looking at Wire. They're using the signal protocol, but in a more closed model IIRC. I didn't know that they had a solution to this problem, though, and always just through of them as basic Signal clone. I guess I'll have to have a look. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's dangerous and irresponsible to build services advertised as such to those you cannot provide the claimed protections to. When we build infrastructure with rotten foundations, people can die.

</comment><comment><USER11>
      > Secure messaging app Telegram […]
      > Telegram, the security-focused messaging app […]

Stopped reading right there. I don't even know where to start dismantling this nonsense.

<comment><USER12> But they have stickers and a gif bot, so normies are going to use that over Signal. And no issues with synchronization between devices (since it's just plaintext xD xD). Seriously.. "secure messaging app" doesn't even have secret chats in the official desktop client.

<comment><USER13> not sure what you mean, I use the official app on OSX and it has the secret chat option. click on a contact, it shows you all the infos including "start secret chat"

<comment><USER14> If 'secure' is not the default, how can Telegram claim to be security-focused?

<comment><USER15> Anyone could claim absolutely anything, and the bigger the player the more likely it would be without any negative consequences (and with positive ones until the discovery - and sometimes even after), even if it's discovered to be an outright, blatant lie. Not like Telegram is unique or exceptional in this regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Telegram, is that the app created in Russia, where the gov demands a backdoor in the chat app?

[http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-anti-encryption- telegr...](http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-anti-encryption- telegram-2016-6?r=US&IR=T&IR=T)

[http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/russia-demands-backdoor-spy- users-w...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/russia-demands-backdoor-spy-users- whatsapp-viber-telegram-messaging-apps-1566726)

<comment><USER17> Telegram has flaws, but please stop this "Russian backdoors" FUD. They even have this in the FAQ:

"While the Durov brothers were born in Russia, as were some of the key developers, Telegram is not connected to Russia – legally or physically. Telegram's HQ is in Berlin."

[https://telegram.org/faq#q-who-are-the-people-behind- telegra...](https://telegram.org/faq#q-who-are-the-people-behind-telegram)

Also,

"Since being dismissed as CEO of VK in 2014,[7] the Durov brothers have traveled the world in self-imposed exile[8] as citizens of Saint Kitts and Nevis.

[...]

Durov is a self-described libertarian and vegetarian.[27] In 2012, he published manifestos described by commentators as "anarcho-capitalist" detailing his ideas on improving Russia[28]"

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

<comment><USER18> > Since being dismissed as CEO of VK in 2014,[7] the Durov brothers have > traveled the world in self-imposed exile[8] as citizens of Saint Kitts and > Nevis.

It's b/s. Durov regularly visits Saint-Petersburg's office where Telegram is built. Source: VK employees, own eyes, [0] (in Russian).

[0]: [http://uip.me/2016/04/dark-side-of-the- telegram/](http://uip.me/2016/04/dark-side-of-the-telegram/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Telegram has nothing to do with anonymity and privacy, they are using phone numbers for registration.

<comment><USER20> I'm not disagreeing with your argument, but I might disagree with the premise... Signal works the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> ...but still not auditable crypto. Questionable priorities there.

<comment><USER15> It is auditable, but probably no one capable is going to spend time on this. As I get it, it's like developing software for really ancient computer platforms - possible, but no point in doing so, and there are probably better things to do in one's spare time (unless they're really into this kind of stuff, of course).

<comment><USER14> Are you sure? According to Wikipedia[1] "its server-side code is closed- sourced and proprietary".

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_\(software\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Previously: [1][2]

Telegraph appears to be a minimalist anonymous blogging platform, with images and markdown support. It's link of a blank canvas -- pun intended. It's like anonymous gists where the post becomes uneditable once you clear your cookies. It may turn out to be the next great thing, or may turn into an abusive slugfest of scum and spam.

Other than it being an experiment, it's clear to me that Telegram is actively looking at ways of increasing time that users spend in its app -- much like every other chat messenger has done in recent years, with bots, in-app browsers, stickers, and integrations. The way to cultivate a walled garden people actually like is to have it be a pleasant and varied garden; this seems to be the way of the game, and it's amusing to see Facebook (through its four platforms), Snapchat, Google (through its 3+ platforms), Kik, Viber, LINE, WeChat, Microsoft, and even Apple and Slack get a piece of this pie.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13017592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13017592) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13017604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13017604)

</comment><comment><USER22> Neat! I use Telegram on a daily basis, so this seems interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> ITT: everyone talking about Telegram instead of Telegraph.

</comment><comment><USER4> Telegram is not a secure messaging app.

If anything, Telegram is a modern replacement for newsgroups.

</comment><comment><USER23> How can anyone call "Telegram" secure? Those days are over. It's the least secure messaging app of them all now. Even WhatsApp is more secure than Telegram (let alone Threema).</comment>


Just Wow: YouTube Had 344M Global Uniques in Oct. - <AUTHOR> http://newteevee.com/2008/12/01/just-wow-youtube-had-344m-global-uniques-in-oct/ <comment><USER2> Numbers like these are why I think YouTube will do just fine against upstarts like Hulu.

There will always be a market for amateur video, and YT has a big enough audience to make content deals if they can't figure out how to monetize all the user content.</comment>


Yahoo to encrypt all users' data - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-vows-encrypt-users-personal-175630455.html

<comment><USER2> Riding the wave of general paranoia like a boss. But, a bit too late?</comment>