On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/on-the-great-filter-existentia.html <comment><USER2> "I don't rule out the possibility of building robust self-sufficient off-world habitats. The problem I see is that it's vastly more expensive than building an off-world outpost and shipping rations there, as we do with Antarctica -- and our economic cost/benefit framework wouldn't show any obvious return on investment for self-sufficiency."

I think this is what eventually acts as the great filter.

In that by the time it is cost benefit approved to do something, the resources have already been depleted on something that would rake in more tokens in the short run.

and unless we manage to blow the atmosphere away, eventually nature moves in and covers everything up (what is uninhabitable for modern man don't seem the phase the rest of the animal kingdom much).

As such, the blue spheres we spot may be places that has come and gone already. But the only way to know for sure is to go there, and that is highly unlikely to ever happen.

Damn it, we keep finding new ruins in the Amazon constantly (never mind various deserts etc). It does not take long for nature to reclaim a region once civilization has gone bye bye.

</comment><comment><USER3> All of these HN alternate explanations are listed and explained by Tim Urban here: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi- paradox.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's my answer to the Fermi paradox: simulation. And not because we're in one (all respect to Nick Bostrom) but because when a civ reaches singularity, there's no point in expanding because the reality that it/they can live in from within a small efficient simulation machine is safer and cheaper than the prospect of interstellar expansion.

<comment><USER5> This has been my favourite explanation since I read Stross' book, Accelerando. The common argument I get against it is along the lines of "humans being too curious to abandon the real universe".

Of course simulation in this case doesn't answer the problem of Von Neuman probes and the like, as its still perfectly reasonable to expect a simulated race to have some physical presence and desire to explore the universe, however since we recognize the risks of these kinds of things so long before we even have the capability of launching our own VN probes, perhaps the vanishingly unlikely scenario is an advanced civilization actually doing it themselves?

<comment><USER4> I don't necessarily disagree. I think that there's a likelihood that Von Neuman probes are a possible thing. But are they inevitable? Perhaps they are unlikely. What if the technology required to create reliable VNPs was only in the grasp of singularity civilizations due to the (perhaps) strong AI requirements?

There's this line, I think, where a civilization would look at the divergence that would happen over interstellar distances and realize that they weren't propagating themselves, but at worst, creating more rivals and existential threats for themselves.

It's easy enough for someone to make the right decision and turn all notions of intergalactic conquest into lived-out virtual reality fever dreams.

<comment><USER5> Yep, I would agree that it would be very unlikely that a civilization capable of launching them, WOULD launch them. We are nowhere close to being able to build these probes ourselves, but already understand the dangers of doing so. Even assuming that VN probes WERE launched by some civs, who is to say that they aren't stopped by other even more advanced civs before they can become a problem?

Overall, my feeling is that there are 2 things which cause the 'dead' universe we see.

1\. The Great Filter is the evolution of intelligence. Since we are here, its easy for us to assume the evolution of sentience is normal, but the dinosaurs were around for almost 200m years and got nowhere. And if not for a string of lucky events, we wouldn't even be here, wondering these things right now.

2\. Advanced civilizations prefer simulation and dont need to colonize the universe at all, I think this would be even more likely if the first point is true, since once you understand the physics of the universe, see that its a cold dead place and you are bound by its physical laws, simulation has a lot more to offer. I would love to invent my own universes, simulate them, and be able to watch and manipulate them with omnipotence.

<comment><USER4> Makes perfect sense to me. And re: simulation—absolutely. The rest of the universe would be, in comparison, pretty boring.

Also, I have to pick up Accelerondo. Sounds like a good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, if sterilizers are common, why don't we see them?

A Matrioshka Brain has a perfectly recognizable emission spectrum, we'd have recognized a few already if they were common. If they use plain style Von Neumann probes, why aren't they here, and why don't we see their reproduction remains?

<comment><USER7> Space is big ...

<comment> rational-future Not that big. Advanced technology, like replicators and a few million years are enough to reach galaxies far-far away.

<comment><USER7> Everything that is reliable for a couple of million of years will be heavy. If it is heavy - it will be slow. And we have that joyous dark energy lurking in the intergalactic space - traversing it may not be the easiest thing in the world.

<comment><USER8> I thought dark energy is something that doesn't interact with ordinary matter.

<comment><USER9> Except through gravity

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's an alternative resolution to the Fermi paradox: we haven't heard from aliens, because they are communicating in ways that we are insufficiently advanced to listen for.

Analogy: in 1500, even if we'd thought to listen for aliens, we would not have been able to build radio telescopes.

Perhaps any sensible alien civilization communicates using, say, quantum entanglement. The moment we develop this technology and start listening, a cheery message will come from Alpha Centauri: "what took you guys so long?"

<comment> rational-future Not much of a resolution. If our progress continues to accelerate with same rate as of the last 10K years, in 100K years we'll have the capability to change completely the structure of our galaxy. Why can't we see any such grand-scale projects from other civs?

<comment><USER11> One explanation is that the extrapolation of 'progress' to 'change completely the structure of our galaxy' is false. Just because we've gone from point A to point B in 10k years doesn't mean we'll ever get to point C, no matter however many years. Ie either altering the structure of the galaxy is impossible (as lack of evidence would suggest) or progressing to that level would take even longer, such that no civilization has reached it yet.

Just playing devils advocate here.

<comment><USER12> The impossibility of changing the structure of the galaxy implies some exciting new physics that would explain why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One very simple anti-great-filter theory is that we're simply the first. Someone has to be by definition, it's a small chance but it definitely is a possibility.

<comment><USER7> Depending on how the universe works we only need to be the first in the galaxy (the chance for which is not that low). Also we can just be in the galactic backwater. there are places on earth we know nothing about. So the idea that we are in a part of the galaxy equivalent of the deep amazonian jungle is also not far fetched.

And the galaxy may be brimming with life - just so alien that we cannot recognize each other.

<comment><USER14> "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think Apple watches are a pretty neat idea."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Instead of one big filter there can be huge number of small filters.

Take a few dozens independent 90% filters together and you got the expected success number in the "1 per observable universe" territory.

</comment><comment><USER15> Where's the website that has a list of existential threats listed?

</comment><comment><USER16> Worried about griefer Von Neumann probes today</comment>


Exchange APIs requests that you never use to requests that you need - <AUTHOR> http://apihop.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! We are two data-scientists, came up with idea recently. ApiHop is the new platform for web-services API quotas exchange where you can sell your unused API quota or buy the requests quotas from other users.

<comment><USER2> I fear that many API operators will cut off users if they become aware that they're sharing API keys or reselling use of API keys, because they probably don't typically view this as appropriate use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment! We see the problem that sometimes standard API quota is not enough and researchers often cannot afford to pay for bigger API quota - we do not propose to share API keys or other credentials itself (what is prohibited by API providers), but to make a tool that will allow to distribute API requests and returned responces between users where keys orother credentials will not leave their owners. Thanks

<comment><USER2> I also think many entities may try to stop people from proxying or submitting requests for others, even without sharing the actual keys or credentials.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IR is better than assembly (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://idea.popcount.org/2013-07-24-ir-is-better-than-assembly/ <comment><USER2> > If you really can write better assembly than LLVM, please: Don't write any > more assembler by hand - write IR and create new LLVM optimisers instead. > It'll benefit everybody, not only you. Think about it - you won't need to > write the same optimisations all over again on your next project!

Very noble goal, but I can imagine that it can take a lot more time to do that than just writing a bunch of assembler instructions.

Perhaps there could be some intermediate approach, where LLVM can learn from a IR/assembly pair and improve itself (?)

<comment><USER3> Sure, you can file a bug with a snippet and expected assembly and make the devs do the work :P

They generally seem pretty willing if it's simple, and if it isn't then it'd probably be a pretty involved (but interesting!) side project for you anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I wanted to do this sort of thing, I'd probably use either intrinsics or C directly -- the compiler is already good at dealing with both, and will probably do a better job than LLVM IR.

The biggest reasons to drop to assembly is because there are high level constructs that the compiler is very unlikely to recognize and optimize effectively. Things like AES-NI, hardware RNGs, and similar.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is neat, I had no idea there was an intermediate language like this which is cross platform. It would seem that I could decompile binaries using llvm tooling and then recompile for other platforms.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6981810/translation-of- ma...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6981810/translation-of-machinecode- into-llvm-ir-disassembly-reassembly-of-x86-64-x86)

Obviously not cross os, but might be good for bare metal stuff. I've gotten libraries in the past compiled with weird ABIs. This sounds really neat.

<comment><USER6> I'm afraid not, because the LLVM IR does not abstract for things like endianess, word size, header file contents, or many other things that are platform dependent.

<comment><USER7> LLVM IR is pretty close to portable - the issues you mention are an issue with Assembler code as well. Even the examples in the article show the same IR being compiled to different CPU architectures.

I'm not sure I'd go hand writing IR code, though. It's pretty easy to just write C code with vector extensions, etc to produce the IR I'd be after. When I do need to write assembler code these days, it's typically to get access to some privileged instructions in kernel space. Most other instructions are available in C code via __builtin_foo_bar functions.

<comment><USER8> You have to be very, very careful when writing platform agnostic IR.

<comment><USER7> Sure but you have to care about word size, endianness, etc when writing C code too.

You would not go writing entire apps with it anyway, just a few inner loops or so.

I'd still use assembly-looking C with extensions and intrinsics for that, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The other thought I had here, is that AFAICT IR is not a standard. There is no requirement that it remains compatible in 50 years or 5 months. There is no standard IR, and shouldn't be, as that would become an impediment to compiler evolution and fit/optimization to newer architectures.

Doesn't AS/400 use an IR approach as well? Which let IBM seamlessly migrate the underlying CPU a few(?) times now?

<comment><USER10> > The other thought I had here, is that AFAICT IR is not a standard. There is > no requirement that it remains compatible in 50 years or 5 months.

Correct. Libfirm[0] is the only compiler I am aware of that attempts to use a "firm" IR.

[0] [http://pp.ipd.kit.edu/firm/Index](http://pp.ipd.kit.edu/firm/Index)

<comment> david-given The ACK's IR (which it calls EM code) has been stable for 34 years.

[http://tack.sourceforge.net/olddocs/em.pdf](http://tack.sourceforge.net/olddocs/em.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Neato! Thanks for the link.

Sorry if the tone of "only compiler I am aware of" came of as snotty it was meant as an expression of my naivety on the subject.

<comment> david-given Nah, don't worry; _nobody 's_ heard of the ACK! (Mostly because it's so old that it doesn't really believe that registers exist, which means it doesn't get on well with modern architectures.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096743) (220 comments)

</comment><comment><USER12> The Open64 / PathScale compiler suite has had intrinsics written in the IR (WHIRL) for a long time. WHIRL is stable enough that it's not a maintenance problem. Being written in IR means that the full power of inlining, function specialization, etc etc will be used, even if whole-program optimization isn't being used.

<comment><USER13> As described in this paper:

[https://www.mcs.anl.gov/OpenAD/open64A.pdf](https://www.mcs.anl.gov/OpenAD/open64A.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most of the guides I've seen for LLVM recommend you use the LLVM libs to generate the IR. Why? I feel like it would be much easier to generate the IR directly like the author has done.

It also wouldn't tie me to any particular library - I think the only actively maintained one is the C++ one.

<comment><USER15> The IR is highly unstable, especially the text representation, which is basically just a debugging tool.

The bitcode format is rather complicated, but at least there is backwards compatibility.

LLVM is the library, so you are bound to it anyway.

Further by having code for emiting IR you are basically just copying functionality that already exists.

<comment><USER7> > The IR is highly unstable, especially the text representation, which is > basically just a debugging tool.

It's not guaranteed to be stable, but it's not "highly unstable" either. Not too many breaking changes have been introduced in the past few years and it's unlikely that you'd hit those parts when hand writing it.

Not that I'd recommend hand writing LLVM IR.

It's a shame that we don't have an actual portable IR, which would not be tied to toolchain version or contain target specifics. LLVM IR can't be used as such for a portable IR, which is why we've seen efforts like SPIR-V (Vulkan GPU IR) and WebAssembly (IR for browsers), both of which are very similar to LLVM IR (and a lot of work was duplicated).

<comment><USER16> WebAssembly is very different from LLVM IR, because it is essentially just the greatest common denominator of what existing JavaScript VMs handle in the backend. For instance, WebAssembly allows only reducible control flow, has very limited support for function pointers, and a particularly nasty memory model (linear memory, which precludes any kind of non-trivial alias analysis and optimization).

All of these things may change in the future (apart from the reducible control flow restriction), but, at the moment, the goal of WebAssembly is just to have a viable compilation target for C++ in the browser. Google was championing LLVM IR for this purpose in the form of pnacl, but that was not enough of a compromise to work on the web platform. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I object to the article just associating the term "IR" with LLVM IR.

IR is short for "Internal Representation". Most complex compilers have at least one level of IR, usually multiple ones that are progressively lower level.

The point is that an IR carries more information than machine code, and so potentially allows more specific optimizations.

This should at least be mentioned in the article.

Rust and Swift, for example, both use LLVM, but have their own intermediate levels of IR ('Mir' for Rust).

LLVM IR is already stripped of a lot of information that might be important for certain higher level optimizations. For example, numbers are all unsigned, and there are different operations for signed and unsigned arithmatic.

<comment><USER7> In this context, IR stands for Intermediate Representation.

Many if not most compilers have one or more intermediate representations, but most of them are not as rigorously specified as LLVM's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In this way, IR would fullfil the same role Macro-32/64 did for porting VMS to Alpha and beyond. However, it appears to my understanding (sorry, I was still crawling when VAXes were on the way out), that the benefit was retaining "VAX" syntax to avoid massive rewrites.

If you're starting from a clean slate, what's the benefit of writing IR? Why not use C? After all, IR won't really give you complete control over generated code, and it's still an abstract VM (albeit that obviously allows writing IR that will only sensibly compile on a specific arch - e.g. system register acceses and so on).

<comment><USER14> Why the hell are people down-voting this? It's a purely technical comment. Seriously people, someone making an argument against a technology you like shouldn't make you reach for the down-vote button. I've noticed I get down- voted too if I make something critical of certain technologies, and it's really sad . Make a response or an argument.

<comment> david-given (Replying here, so my upvote on the parent doesn't get lost...)

Working in C means you get restricted to only doing things which C can do, and you're out of luck if you want to do things that C _can 't_ do: unaligned accesses, tail calls, saturating arithmetic, overflow detection, exceptions, stuff like that. IR allows you to do all this, at the expense of being considerably more complex and painful to use.

Of course, if your compiler _don 't_ want to do any of this, then C is a perfectly valid choice, as it doesn't tie you to the LLVM toolchain --- see Nim, for example. But as soon as you venture outside C's comfort zone, working in IR starts paying off.

<comment><USER14> LLVM IR can detect overflow, has exceptions, tail call optimisations etc? I thought it was lower level than C itself. I have kind of a strict hierarchy of abstraction in my head, with LLVM IR sitting a bit below C, but maybe it's not that simple.

<comment><USER17> Yes.

[http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#arithmetic-with- overflow-i...](http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#arithmetic-with-overflow- intrinsics)

[http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#exception-handling- intrins...](http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#exception-handling-intrinsics)

[http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#call- instruction](http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#call-instruction)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting since I proposed using LLVM in place of inline assembly a while back. I got this counter point when I asked on ESR's blog:

[http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2011-October/043724...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2011-October/043724.html)

Any LLVM experts have thoughts on this or my original goal within the context of LLVM's _current_ situation?

<comment><USER18> I'm the opposite of an LLVM expert, but I'm having a hard time seeing the relevance of that email. It's about how LLVM IR isn't cross platform, but inline assembly isn't either, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This may be a little off-topic but does anyone know a good and up-to-date tutorial for using LLVM in C language?

<comment><AUTHOR> LLVM's C is compiler clang. You can find it from

[http://clang.llvm.org/](http://clang.llvm.org/)

In many cases it's just drop-in replacement for gcc.

<comment><USER20> I rather understood it that they wanted to know whether there is a C API to use LLVM, so perhaps something like this: [https://pauladamsmith.com/blog/2015/01/how-to-get-started- wi...](https://pauladamsmith.com/blog/2015/01/how-to-get-started-with-llvm-c- api.html)

<comment><USER19> That's exactly what I am looking for but it's almost two years old and I think I tried it a few months back and got lots of errors. I was hoping to find a more up-to-date tutorial. Unfortunately LLVM people don't pay much attention to documentation and tutorials for their product.

<comment><USER8> I've been there.

Pretty much the only way is to just read the C api header and figure things out from there.

It does contain comments, which are mostly helpful, but sometimes incomplete or out of date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't have projects that fits on this, but sounds like a no brainer. Abstracting the specifics and keeping the timeless is a beautiful move!

</comment><comment><USER22> LLVM IR is not really suitable because of compatibility. Someone should create a portable assembler on top of LLVM instead.

</comment><comment><USER23> What's the difference between LLVM IR and various GCC IR's?

</comment><comment><USER24> TL;DR: vendor lock-in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Vendor lock-in comparable to writing in Rust or Go.

<comment><USER24> Sure. My point was related to that it would be interesting a standard IR, instead of a vendor-specific one :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yes. Let's all write IR instead of assembly. Let's encourage others to do the same, making Assembly even more of an ivory tower (or, more accurately, a grimy sub-basement) than it already is, further discouraging newcomers from learning it, thus keeping them from properly understanding the machines they program on. Eventually, nobody will even understand any of these machines.

Use whatever you want in production, I don't care. But don't discourage people from learning assembly. It's a worthwhile task.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone tell the LLVM team that the Babel tower is a myth and that it ends bad?

Some CPU have specific idioms that are not only hard to translate but requires to be used fluently. Like natural language.

Btw, I never uses any software relying on a name of a myth that was a pure failure such as Babel or death star. It makes me feel like people intend to fail.

<comment><USER9> Not really. IR is exactly a good fit for compiled languages, because there are no "hard to translate" idioms in languages targetted by LLVM that need really orthogonal translations on different architectures, which by the way aren't really all that different at a high level.

However I am still looking for a use case to write IR directly, or in place of bits of inline assembly.</comment></comment>


An IT productivity horror story - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1183 <comment><USER2> 'I heard a story last week, but got no details and don't know how true it is.'

That seems to make the whole article rather pointless, but...

'...there are a lot more customer hostile web sites... than most of us like to think about.'

We don't think about them because we don't use them more than once, and keep going back to sites which are more pleasant to use.

'This broker is side-stepping business hassles at a cost to his customers, to the detriment of most of the carriers whose products he nominally sells, and to the benefit of the one company that maintains a human interface to his business.'

Sounds like the broker is doing his customers a big favour by only working with the supplier who can deliver. As for the others, have they really not noticed that they aren't getting this broker's business?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think before launching any software may it be automation or any other many companies compromise on testing part.</comment>


Losing 80% of mobile users is normal - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchen.co/new-data-shows-why-losing-80-of-your-mobile-users-is-normal-and-that-the-best-apps-do-much-better/?utm_source=andrewchen&utm_campaign=3ae54ccc4f-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c1fae7e415-3ae54ccc4f-85701681 <comment><USER2> As a user that probably contributes a lot to the trends observed in the article, I think I can explain my user-behavior pretty well.

I really need about ~5 apps on my phone (browser, mail, alarm, somehow whatsapp managed to become one of those, and maybe few others I don't recall now).

All other apps I download for a very specific use case:

\- Rent a bike a foreign city that I'll leave again pretty soon

\- Navigate during that one trip where I don't expect to be connected to the internet

\- Play a game during the single train ride where my Kindle has no more battery

\- Check scores during that one playday of soccer where I have no access to my usual channels (TV, Friends, Browser)

\- etc

At the moment of downloading I often know for how long I will be using that app. Most of the time it is only on that single day, otherwise for the duration of a trip. I'm not sure there's too much App makers could do to keep me as a user (aside from sending me a brand-new phone). I don't really like my phone and I really prefer using my laptop or even desktop, whenever possible.

<comment><USER3> I agree!

An app developer needs to be mindful of if their app is a daily/weekly/monthly/annual use case.

I have plenty of apps on my phone that I purposefully keep around but will probably only use when I do that big trip once year: TripAdvisor, AirBnb, WhatsApp, GoPro, EpicMix etc.

Other apps: Amazon, Shazam, Bank(to cash checks) I also keep around but use rarely.

Under a conventional definition I've probably been marked as a "churned" user many times over for Shazam. It keeps sending me notifications for random things (Click here to find out the trending new hot single from Shakira!) so I've turned them off.

I also hate when companies force you to download their app to do something. United wouldn't let me check-in and print my boarding pass from my computer. I had to download an app and scan my passport with my camera.

<comment><USER4> > I also hate when companies force you to download their app to do something. > United wouldn't let me check-in and print my boarding pass from my computer. > I had to download an app and scan my passport with my camera.

I have a family member who still uses a dumbphone, so he's just SOL. These arbitrary restrictions must be maddening, especially when they clearly _have_ an HTML/JS implementation already with a cross platform wrapper around it, and they've deliberately chosen that nobody should ever be able to use it from a computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Each of the scenarios above can have both a qualitative activation goal, as > well as quantitive results to make sure it's really happening. Whatever you > do, sending a shitload of spammy email notifications with the subject line > "We Miss You" is unlikely to bend the curve significantly.

> I hate those, and you should too.

For this reason, I hope he's right and Android developers pay attention. Sometimes one upvote is not enough.

Alas, I expect that by the time you're in the long-tail of that curve, you have simply nothing to lose by going the vexatious notification route.

<comment><USER6> Also nothing to gain.

The time spent on implementing notification spam can be spent better on analysis of what went wrong in the first days.

<comment><USER5> That may not be first thing on the mind of people trying desperately to keep the dream alive.

Still, it's bloody irritating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Whatever you do, sending a shitload of spammy email notifications [...]

Yeah and thanks for that pop-up to prove your point.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a uBlock filter to block subscription pop-ups?

<comment><USER9> Isn't it funny how an article talking about user retention keeps throwing annoying pop-ups in your face?

<comment><USER8> I would say he is just as unconvinced about the quality of his content like the guys he's talking about. And this is the forceful, desperate result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The notification spam is affective on bending the curve for mysefl. Most of the times I get them I uninstall the app within minutes.

<comment><USER11> I've had to ban some unfortunately good games from my phone because the developer thinks that 2am is a good time to make my phone make a retention noise or beg me to buy in-game currency.

I also note the dev studio and never download anything from them again because these things are rarely one-offs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Did you really post the link including the campaign-parameters? Oh will will so screw his analytics ^^.

Kudos from an analyst.

<comment><AUTHOR> I post via bookmarklet, so yeah, whatever's in the address bar. hn sometimes trims most common parameters.

<comment><USER13> I, on the other hand, always trim urls when sharing them. Sometimes I break them :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There might be a certain amount of 'flag-planting' going on too. Especially with a new social network, people can register, grab their favourite username, then ignore the network for a while; only coming back when it has gained enough traction for others to join. Ok, a small set of people, but a set nevertheless.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wouldn't 50% retention of the top 50 apps imply most people use well over 25 apps? That is a figure that shocks me. Maybe there's a raw data problem?

The methodology claims to exclude popular preinstalled apps so my gmail, my wifes facebook, and my son's youtube use wouldn't be counted, so its 25 apps other than the popular ones.

I don't personally know anyone who uses more than about 10 apps on a daily basis...

Some other conclusions can be determined financially, like 20% of top 100 retained implies installing and ignoring 80 apps per month? I think I installed one or two?

<comment><USER16> 50% retention of people who download them in the first place. Not 50% retention of the entire potential market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is normal but that doesn't mean it's good... or bad. Retention of 20% can be good for some industries like education apps, but is low for social media apps.

<comment><USER18> It's bad in many cases. If you do mobile games with IAPs for instance, 20% retention during the first 7 days, with the ever rising user acquisition costs we have today, pretty much means you can't be profitable unless you explode virally. And since in 99% of the cases this does not happen, this effectively means the vast majority of developers doing mobile games _now_ will be out of business in maybe a year or two. Which is a pretty depressing thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My own experience leads me to guess that the retention curve on iOS would look quite similar. Its overall form (≈ 1/x) is no surprise.

</comment><comment><USER20> No doubt the mobile app bubble will pop very soon. There are way too many apps released that no one is using. I personally tie much of my activity to my mobile web browser, unless I'm using Email/Twitter or Geo.

It's becoming a terrible idea to build a startup entirely on a mobile app.

</comment><comment><USER21> There are about 1.5 million apps in Google's and Apple's app stores. People can only install on the order of 100 apps on a phone. Even if the devs would implement techniques to capture users in their first days, on average, apps can't possibly get much use.

</comment><comment><USER22> > The key to success is to get the users hooked during that critical first 3-7 > day period.

FOAD. The key is offering something useful, so you don't have to think like a crack dealer. OSMand never lost me as a user.

<comment><USER23> So the top 100 Apps don't offer something useful? I think the point is that regardless of how useful the app is, there is decreasing engagement right away. It's best to not be demoralized by it and think through your onboarding.

The goal is not to shift the slope because that is similarly negative regardless of how useful your app is. Rather, focus on day 1 where the downslope starts at 75% vs. 50% vs. 25% retained users.

<comment><USER24> I would agree and think it's equally important to focus on flat lining retention well within 30 days. Most products that fail, fail because retention falls and falls until it hits 0. If you find product-market fit that establishes a flat line of say, 10-30% retention within ~30 days, it likely means you've found a user who actually values, and continues to value, using your product. Just my 0.02</comment></comment></comment>


Instagram certificate has expired - <AUTHOR> https://instagram.com/?

<comment><USER2> Expired last night. Looks like they're deploying now - site's been down occasionally, so I think the ELB (where's your normally install the cert in AWS) is having a new cert installed.

If you can't see it:

[http://imgur.com/9wvSEcS](http://imgur.com/9wvSEcS)

Also SSL Labs: [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=instagram.com](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=instagram.com)

And they're back: [http://imgur.com/rWN7BmA](http://imgur.com/rWN7BmA), with 167 days left on their new cert, which still has a SHA1 signature. Their ELB also allows RC4.

<comment><USER3>
      And they're back: http://imgur.com/rWN7BmA, with 167 days left on their new cert, which still has a SHA1 signature. Their ELB also allows RC4.

I'm not a security expert, but from what I understand from HN threads that I've been reading recently, that doesn't sound good.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Compdescriptors: Python library for using composition - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/luther9/compdescriptors-py <comment><AUTHOR> The main tool in this module is the class 'Delegate'. It is a descriptor you can use to forward a method or attribute name to an instance attribute. It can be used like this:

        from compdescriptors import Delegate

        class Thing:

            def __init__(self):
                self.var = 'hello'

            def __len__(self):
                return 42

        class C:
            var = Delegate('thing')
            __len__ = Delegate('thing')

            def __init__(self):
                self.thing = Thing()

'compdescriptors' also contains tools like an abstract attribute descriptor and a way to define interfaces. (These are not strictly necessary if you rely on duck-typing.)

I'm wondering if I should rewrite the interface implementation. Currently, Interface is a class whose instances can be used as class decorators. I could make interfaces into classes that concrete classes can inherit from. This would be a bit more natural than decorators, but I'm not sure how I would implement the 'validate' method. (Maybe with a metaclass? But then all concrete classes would get that method....) The advantage of using a decorator is that I can modify a class in a very precise way without it inheriting everything the interface object has.</comment>


PHP Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> https://www.phpstrap.in/index.html <comment><USER2> I don't see the point. Bootstrap isn't that hard to get started with just about any PHP framework. Unless i've been doing it wrong. Add the html into the views, link to the js and css assets, donezo.

Or, if you want to get clever, add it to a Composer repo, and have a shell script run after the update that copies stuff from the vendor folder into /public (that tripped me up on pagodabox but it's doable) and now you have Bootstrap running with auto updating and dependency management.

Why does this need to be a service?

<comment><AUTHOR> When I first discovered Bootstrap (and web development), I thought it had the best templates and was a really good place to start making a website. I noticed that there were sign in and sign up buttons that I thought would work. I then learned that I needed PHP to make those buttons work. Being the beginner that I was, I searched the internet for something to make the whole thing work (with the users). I could not find anything. I just wanted to use the bootstrap templates with full functionality without having to do a lot of work. So, what did I do? I learned PHP and many other languages to build this. I want this to be very useful to people, so that people don't have to do all the work that I did to make it.

<comment><USER3> I'd recommend you to learn about MVC in PHP and javascript frameworks like Angular.js, I think this suits for PHP Bootstrap, keep doing good work :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why hitch your cart to the Bootstrap horse? If your focus is PHP wouldn't it be better if it worked in Foundation, Bootstrap and maybe Semantic UI?

nitpick: Your features UL renders everything centered which looks odd at desktop resolution...

</comment><comment><USER5> i'm a PHP developer. just clicked on the comments to see the usual negative PHP wrath... this time there are no comments at all. not sure which is worse :)

<comment><USER2> To be fair, today seems to be Hate On Google day on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The guy behind this is a 15 year old boy in Colorado. Respect!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, much respect to you too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Open source?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still deciding upon that.

<comment><USER2> Why wouldn't you?

<comment><USER8> At your age, open source is the best way to learn. That way other developer will be able to point out some of the mistakes. And point you out on the right way to do something.

Besides this is not something that any developer cant do in a couple of hours of work. So not releasing your code doesn't really have any impact.

But 15 years old and coding is impressive. I was rotting day and night playing Civ 3 at that age :) Wish i didn't :)

<comment><USER2> I don't even remember what I was doing at 15 but it definitely wasn't productive...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: An easy and simple landing page builder - <AUTHOR> https://oneprofile.page <comment><USER2> You are basically just spamming your site on HN: 20 submissions in 9 months.

You're getting good feedback because it's an intelligent community, but IMO your behavior is objectionable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really truly sorry about this. But the previous submission was actually a different product but with the same name. However, I understand your point.

But honestly, there aren't that many free and effective avenues for a non- influential internet figure like myself to get exposure for a product I create. Product Hunt and Hacker News are the most helpful sites.

I tried to get the word out at many other places but many times, it just went unheard of. I can't afford those expensive paid launching sites and adverts. So, these free platforms are my only hope and I had to post a few more times than normal. This post that got this many upvotes and feedback, I never really thought it would turn out this way. I got really really lucky with this 20th post.

I'm really sorry for the spam but I'm just trying hard to make my voice heard, too. I hope I'm still within the rules of this community.

<comment><USER3> I strongly disagree with the commenters. 20times in 9 months is absolutely ok!

I am honestly surprised someone would even take note of a single post in the barrage of posts that is the HN front page.

Just as example I login here EVERY DAY and yet this is the first time I discovered your app.

In the most respectful way possible, please please just ignore the thread OP, it is 100% unwarranted criticism IHMO.

Keep talking about your product, write blogs, take out ads, post it to your socials do just do your thing!

:)

<comment><USER4> > 20times in 9 months is absolutely ok!

It's actually not okay and the HN system is designed to stop that behaviour. Looking at the submissions this appears subverted through various subdomains and TLDs, but its the same submission.

I'm okay with posting a few times, but 20 times? Come on..

Also, it will show up on the [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show) for days, so if you miss it, it's because you're not checking there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, I'm really sorry that you found this behavior to be wrong and I agree to a certain extent that what I did was wrong, too. However, the submissions I made were not of bad faith.

When I first started, I used a Japanese-inspired domain name but none of my western users can relate to it, so I changed it. At that time, the product was different than it is now, it was more of a startup community group to showcase their startups on a profile page rather than a landing page builder. That didn't work out. However, some users liked the profile pages I created for them on that website so I changed the domain name to oneprofile.info, a personal page builder (which is active and is used by over 2000 people).

After I launched on Product Hunt, some users requested profile pages for their side-projects and teams. So, I bought the oneprofile.team domain and used it for a while. Then, I realized restricting it to team doesn't make sense and thought of opting for a domain name that is much general. Finally, I ended up with the oneprofile.page domain name which is what it is today.

It was a long and arduous 9 months journey for me, a solo dev/entrepreneur. I don't have a strong voice on the internet so I had to do something like this where I keep posting stuff to get the word out and hope I get lucky and noticed. I really didn't mean to offend you or the community.

<comment><USER5> I appreciate the clarity of your answer, and how it isn't full of marketing- speak and deflections. Keep doing your thing to get your business going!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the encouragement and support - it means a lot to me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations on the launch, Yusuf (?).

A few points:

1\. The pricing (8 months free + $2/month), even though it is very competitive, does make my brain calculate, "what if the 8 month free period didn't exist. What would be the total cost then?" And the conclusion it comes to, "a tad more expensive compared to other usual suspects". I don't think that was your intention and I don't know if others think so, too, but that was my first reaction to it.

2\. Access to the page builders without having to sign up would be a plus. Ref, divjoy: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044). Doing so might be difficult, so don't spend too much effort on it as I am not sure if it would actually help increase the sign-ups. It will make me try, though.

3\. Please see if you can improve performance. A demo page you linked to from the website is absymally slow: [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Foneprofile.giftworks.io%2F)

First Contentful Paint: 5.2s

Speed Index: 6.2s

Time to Interactive: 13.1s

First Meaningful Paint:6.1s

First CPU Idle: 10.5s

Max Potential First Input Delay: 320ms

4\. It is absolutely great you offer TLS and custom domains for free, but do you also offer a choice to _turn off_ analytics?

I love the dark mode. The colours (with or without dark mode) are really pleasant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the kind words, suggestions, and feedback!

Yes, I'm Yusuf here, haha.

1\. I believe the pricing is very flexible and competitive when compared to other usual suspects. Let's take Carrd.co as an example. Carrd doesn't offer monthly plans and a plan which offers custom domain costs $19 per year. What if you only need to use a page for 1 month? oneprofile.page with custom domain feature is available for $4 per month on the basic plan. Our yearly plans are 50% off and are far affordable compared to Carrd's. Carrd is great as it allows deeper customizability with CSS and JS. oneprofile.page is perfect for simple and quick use-cases.

2\. Yes, you're right. I've been reading a couple of comments about it, too. I'll see what I can do about it!

3\. Yes, I aware of it, too. I'm working hard to make it faster and will work on it gradually.

4\. Is privacy your concern? Because the in-app analytics are not invasive at all. It simply counts visits and it doesn't detect any more than that e.g. gender, country, age etc. If you want deeper page insights with privacy friendly analytics, you can connect to Fathom or Plausible analytics.

Thank you so much for the nice comment on dark mode! Worked pretty hard to get it right. Still need some polishing though!

Hope you love the experience so far! And please share any other feedback that you have, I'm eager to listen and improve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very confusing page, it says "Get started for free" and when you sign up and want to publish it says "$2/month Billed at $24 per year • 8 months free!" \- what does that even mean? 8 month free, then $2/month? How can it be free if I'm billed $24 upfront?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, please bear with me since I'm pretty new to setting up pricing plans. I've been learning through observations but am happy to listen to feedback. I'll try to clarify here:

It's free to get started and use the product in private for however long you want, only pay when you want to publish the pages live.

The pricing plans are relative to the monthly plans. For example, the Plus monthly plan costs $8 per month or $96 per year. Plus yearly plan is 50% off, so it costs $4 per month or $48 per year. $48 per year is equivalent to 6 months of what you will pay for if you opted for the Plus monthly plan hence it is 6 months free. The same logic applies to Beta Special 75% off.

Hope that clarifies! I figured I need to work on the wordings better—thanks for sharing your thoughts, really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you are offering a service to create a landing page then you really need a top notch landing page yourself. Some improvements:

* Don't offer a call to action that directs straight to a signup page, it is very off-putting and you lose users there

* Put more content above the fold. There is too little useful content above the fold.

* The images are lovely but they are massive over 1MB for this one which could be less than 10kB at the rendered size in my browser [https://cdn2.oneprofile.page/assets/3-b57554fe9a488e6cdc3c9a...](https://cdn2.oneprofile.page/assets/3-b57554fe9a488e6cdc3c9a3701498f00a8318460ce80535670845c1866a66c1a.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I see. You're right. Thank you so much for the detailed feedback and insights. I'll see what I can do to improve! Hope you gave it a try!

<comment><USER9> Also, there is one specific thing that I absolutely require, which is an option that puts large screenshots/video of the product (software) in action at the very top. I didn't see anything like that so it's a non-starter for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a feature called Profile Video where you can add a video from YouTube as your profile video instead of photo. Have a look at this demo page and see whether it fits your needs:

[https://parkrun.oneprofile.page/](https://parkrun.oneprofile.page/)

Hope it helps!

<comment><USER9> Wow, it's so tiny!

<comment><AUTHOR> But it's expandable :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would i try it? Yes right up until i have to sign in.

<comment><USER11> I completely agree. So many business shoot themselves in the foot requiring to sign up to quickly. At least let me have a taste of what I'm signing up for. Quite often there's a complete mismatch between my needs and the vendor's offering, and I don't want to waste time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. Thank you so much for your reasoning. I honestly never thought signing up was such a blocker. Personally, I sign up with google or use LastPass, and if I don't like it, I'll just delete the account after trying. But you're right, at least a quick demo of how it works will be pretty helpful. I'll see what I can do. Thanks again!

<comment><USER11> I really like you being open minded about it. Kudos for that. I see a lot that a lot of online retailers want you to create an account before you can browse. You can browse Amazon, the biggest online retailer, without an account. Something worth considering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much. Same goes for you, thank you for sharing your arguments and reasons, I learned a lot from reading others' comments. I can't promise immediate implementation because it'll take some time to do it but thank you for raising this up! I think I'll eventually do it sometime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I signed up, look around, tried, and created a page. I wish I was creating a site/website and then adding pages.

Unable to find my way quickly enough to claim/pay the 75% discount.

Here is my personal view;

The user experience on the site is too noisy with too many elements all over the page, and the constant reminders isn't helping.

I would suggest to tone down the excitements happening on the pages.

I was under the impression that people create a landing page(s) of their websites/domains. Can we make it clear what they are creating? Will it not be -- site > page(s)?

Are you going to charge me depending on how many pages I create, or am I creating per site account and then charged for the number of pages in that site.

Not an endorsement, but I'm a lifetime premium account (I think via Sumo) of [https://landingi.com](https://landingi.com) (too many repetitive elements), and I'm a paying customer of [https://carrd.co](https://carrd.co) (best so far) for the past few years.

<comment><USER13> Carrd looks very good on the surface - product and pricing. Will probably sign-up.

<comment><AUTHOR> It definitely is! But I hope you'll give my product a try, too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Okay. I usually don't comment on this stuff, but this time I would actually enjoy a tool like that, because I'm currently struggling with building a landing page for one of my project, because I have no experience building websites.

The feature set looks alright, although it was a bit difficult to discover what the features actually are. If it is a website builder I would like to see a demo or at least screenshots of the actual building.

It was unclear to me that this includes hosting as well. I was hoping to get a tool where I can make a one-off payment to build a simple static landing page that I can put into my static FTP host that I already have.

<comment><USER15> Always suggest [https://designmodo.com/startup/](https://designmodo.com/startup/)

It was used to build [https://rezi.io](https://rezi.io)

It took me just 5 days - super fast

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great to hear, and your site looks dope.

Anyway, I hope my product [https://oneprofile.page](https://oneprofile.page) gives people more choices to choose from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Your signup page does not show at all on an iPad. (I made a tool to find these kinds of errors, you can see the results here: [https://app.pagewatch.dev/8c381890f2e599beec475be2a3ac19a030...](https://app.pagewatch.dev/8c381890f2e599beec475be2a3ac19a03075b357/explore/pages/details?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oneprofile.page%2Fsignup) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Shoot. Thanks a million for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thing that stood out at a glance: The box for 'dark mode' is bright green. The box for 'more features' is dark grey. And the alternating text colour choices in the dark grey box can be hard to read.

Glad you've pierced the HN bubble and are getting some wide feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right! I'm not an expert in colors so your feedback is really valuable to me. So, thank you. I just had it in random colors, lol. Figured it needed some fixing. Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks nice! The pricing is a bit confusing: is basic plan free? How does that relate to the trial week?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! And I'm really sorry about the confusion.

Since I'm giving a 75% discount to beta users, the basic plan would've not cost anything. So, I made it not applicable to choose it if you enrolled in the beta program.

On a normal yearly plan, the basic plan costs $2 per month. If you enrolled in the Beta Program, the plus plan costs the same as the normal yearly basic plan at $2 per month.

Hope it clarifies :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> All I see is Bugsnap icon?

</comment><comment><USER20> Does it integrate with other systems, like Wordpress? Instapage has a plungin for Wordpress that makes it really easy to use their landing pages within your website/blog. Does oneprofile have anything like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, thanks for asking! Unfortunately not. There's no such integration. Instapage costs $149-$199 monthly so naturally, they have many more resources and features that they can provide. One Profile tries to provide a nice, simple yet practical landing pages that are affordable for the masses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hm, i clicked the Get Started button but nothing shows up here: [https://i.imgur.com/HSN8YEP.png](https://i.imgur.com/HSN8YEP.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, it might take a while to show up since there's a pretty picture of a 3-d lady mopping the signup page. Maybe give it some time to load. Thanks!

<comment><USER21> It didn't show up at all, but i figured out that if i resize my browser it appears. Not sure why.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's that right!? Hmm, it must be the port view. It may be an error on my end—will check it out. Thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams Congrats! I haven't tested it out as I would love to see a screenshot or video demo before giving away any personal information to know if does what I think it does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yes definitely, there are 3 different demos on the home page but I'll just leave you some links here so it'll be easier:

A product page demo: [https://cssscan.oneprofile.page/](https://cssscan.oneprofile.page/)

An about page demo: [https://oneprofile.giftworks.io/](https://oneprofile.giftworks.io/)

A community page demo: [https://parkrun.oneprofile.page/](https://parkrun.oneprofile.page/)

My previous product was a personal page builder and we got to no.1 on Product Hunt the other day ([https://www.producthunt.com/posts/one- profile](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/one-profile)). This new product, a landing page builder, is a continuation of the many requests we got.

Hope it helps! And thank you so much for checking out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've got the need for a cheap, 1 page, custom domain service. I looked at 1MB again but they are no longer free for a custom domain.

Any alternatives?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there again. I actually have another similar product for a one-pager here, [https://oneprofile.info](https://oneprofile.info)

Hope it helps!

<comment><USER7> Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Gladly! You can try carrd.co, too. It's a pretty nice alternative!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure I agree with the choice of the emoji used for the testimonials section.

</comment><comment><USER23> First thoughts: Really love the design / theme!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much! Glad you love it!</comment></comment>


Texas leaks 3.5 million private records including DOB and SS - <AUTHOR> http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/55316-state-of-texas-in-epic-data-leak-fail

<comment> T-hawk I think the more surprising thing about the headline is that Texas needs 3,500,000 employees to run its state government?

<comment><USER2> The title is inaccurate. Many of the records where from State run retirement programs, but not everyone affected is/was a state employee. Texas is a big place. The Teacher Retirement System of Texas(one of the affected organizations) alone has over 1.3 million members.

<comment><AUTHOR> Title now edited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> sarcasm ahead: they say everyone does it big in Texas...its more than likely the biggest leak in history..congrats Texas..</comment>


Might quit the SaaS model (Day 3 of running Adsense) - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone,
For a few months I have been trying to get customers for the SaaS membership site for TikTok analytics ( https://cloutmeter.com/ ) and got a few payments until now (under 10) but the website kept on growing and more and more visitors came, the conversions didn't go up though.
I have thought to myself that I can't lose anything if Im going to try to place Adsense on it for a week to test it out, and I did!
1st day: 25 Euro 2nd day: 46 Euro 3rd day ( half day, when I write this post): 22 Euro
If these earnings will stabilize like this, then I will be able to even pay for hosting and everything else strictly from the Ads and rethink the SaaS model, giving more free features to everyone without any payment.
Let me know your thoughts on this,
By the way: the proof and if you want to follow the journey: https://twitter.com/cloutmeter <comment><USER2> In case you're curious:

I know it's highly subjective, but in Canada on mobile, I'm getting ads for a well-known local phone number directory, Facebook (like, the actual Facebook) and Twitter ads for their ads.

Pretty high quality. Each user is worth hundreds to thousands of dollars, so I can understand why they'd want to acquire them on a Tiktok website. You can profit from social medias war on themselves.

But I seem to only get text ads. Not sure if you can enable text+image ads to maximize CPM.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great product dude! I tried it with my profile. More visitors do not always mean the right visitors. Maybe you're not targeting users who are most likely to buy?

For example, i'm part of marketing team and if we ever start on tiktok marketing I wouldn't want to use a platform cluttered with ads. I'd rather pay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

Yes, that is 100% correct. The users who come to my site are probably regular people who just want some quick and free insight.

I will most likely have only a Free plan and an Agency plan with no ads on it.

<comment><USER2> Or run two identical sides but with different marketing.

Kinda how like I can buy a seat on the same plane, but one is sold through Vueling and the other is Iberia. Terms vary slightly, but it's the same product!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Make sure your privacy policy/ToS complies with Google Adsense's requirements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you please elaborate on this?</comment></comment>


Chicken tax - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax <comment> J-dawg > _Largely because of post-World War II intensive chicken farming and > accompanying price reductions, chicken, once internationally synonymous with > luxury, became a staple food in the U.S._

These intensive farming methods basically involve treating chickens as protein factories with no regard for their welfare. Packing as many of them as possible into a small space and breeding them to put on weight so quickly that their legs often can't support their bodies.

I wish more people would face up to the reality that cheap meat is _only_ possible by mistreating animals in quite horrific ways. If we treated chickens properly, their meat would still be considered an expensive delicacy.

Then again, if you treat animals well it's likely worse for the environment (more land required for agriculture etc) so there's really no escaping the fact that humanity needs to eat less meat.

<comment><USER2> I agree with most of your points, but saying that treating animals well is worse for the environment is pretty misleading. "Treating animals better" should include not feeding them growth hormones or pumping them full of antibiotics which enter the food chain via the meat and ground water. Treating animals well is good for the environment, and drastically reducing consumption or not eating them at all is especially good (think of Amazon deforestation to make way for cattle ranches).

<comment><USER3> The effects of antibiotics entering the water table pale in comparison to 1. the extra pesticides that enter the water table from growing the extra plant matter that must be used to feed free-range animals, and 2. the pollution from the processes required to create the fertilizer to grow said plant matter.

You can think of an animal as a way to convert a whole lot of plant matter into a little meat. Growing plant matter for feed, itself, pollutes in various ways. A given animal might be less healthy eating corn than eating grass, but if it needs to eat 10x the weight in grass in its lifetime... that animal, raised that way, is now likely responsible for 10x the pollution.

<comment><USER4> >the extra pesticides that enter the water table from growing the extra plant matter that must be used to feed free-range animals

1) Why must it be grown? Shouldn't there just be less animals in places that can't support their grazing?

2) Why are you applying pesticides and fertilizer?

<comment><USER3> You misunderstand the entire concept of modern agriculture, I think: agriculture is _demand-driven_. People want food, and have money to spend on food, and so companies (farms) come into existence to turn natural resources _into_ food, so that they can take that money.

You can't just have there be "less animals", without feeding _less people_ than have the money to pay to be fed—which is effectively impossible without abandoning capitalism: a new company would always come into existence to capture that surplus.

Looking at things through a demand-driven lens, #1 and #2 are one-another's answers: if all the _existing_ companies restrict themselves to non-"enriched" agriculture, then the market can only support a certain number of those companies—but there is still demand, so a new company will come into existence that uses (or one of the existing companies "innovate" to use) pesticides and fertilizer, to squeeze more feedstock out of the same land, to produce more meat from a given agricultural base, to answer the unmet demand.

(The _real_ "problem" with this system is that demand isn't fixed; the more food there is available in an area, the more new _people_ the people in that area tend to make, creating a positive feedback loop where demand will never be fully satisfied, necessitating a "race to the bottom" of who can squeeze their natural resources the hardest. Fix _that_ , rather than abandoning an allocation system for operating too well.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An excellent episode of Planet Money on this

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/episode-632-the- chicken-tax)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is why we don't get some of the cool trucks we see elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER7> There was also the disgraceful Banana tradewar where arbitrary US tariffs on cashmere devastated the local economy of the Scottish Borders.

</comment><comment><USER8> What prevented any of the big 3 from copying a European or Japanese light truck design as a means of taking advantage of the tariff? With 3 major manufacturers in America, Why did small truck and van development totally stall? If I recall correctly, prior to the arrival of Mercedes' Sprinter, the Ford Econoline brand of vans, along with their dodge and chevy competitors, were typically based on truck frame designs a decade or two older.

<comment><USER9> Nothing _prevented_ them; Detroit automakers either had substantial interests in foreign makers selling light trucks outside North America, or were in some cases selling small pickups and vans designed by their own foreign divisions.

They simply did not feel that smaller/lighter trucks & vans would be profitable, or profitable enough. This goes off and on; often one of the Detroit makes will go years without having an entry in the small truck market.

There are advantages to using a pickup-style perimeter frame to make a van, that said, unlike Ford & Chevy, the Dodge B-series vans were unitized from the '70s on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thinking about it, if the US economy was still on the gold standard in the 1970s, it probably would have been declined when Japanese cars and other goods took over and would be very different by now. As a side note, one of the reason we got off it was government spending, which means as the more money NSA or Medicare for example spends more money gets printed (by increasing government debt).

</comment><comment><USER11> Economics is a big thing if you do not have a background in it, I recommend the book Economics in One Lesson. It was enlightening.

</comment><comment><USER12> The chicken tax used to tick me off. Then I figured out the trick around it: get a /heavy/ truck instead. The heavy truck market is way better than the light truck market. It's kind of insane and unfortunately yet another way US federal regulations (eg CAFE) encourage ineffeciency</comment>


Experimenting with HHVM at Etsy - <AUTHOR> https://codeascraft.com/2015/04/06/experimenting-with-hhvm-at-etsy/ <comment><USER2> The new stuff happening in the PHP space is really really awesome.

HHVM + HACK + XHP is an entirely different experience compared to writing PHP. Code can actually be very clean and lots of bugs can be found that may have previously gone unnoticed + performance benefits.

Just wanted to say FB is doing an exceptional job with these projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> Calling setlocale because the user you're currently processing has a different locale? What the..?

Notice: what works in UNIX utilities is not what works for web apps serving many users simultaneously. In fact, I'm pretty sure this doesn't work for UNIX utilities either and is just something you should never touch with your libc. It's like calling non-reentrant strtok, some of this stuff just doesn't exactly fit into todays world.

<comment><USER4> The PHP library is (surprise!) sort of a mess when it comes to things that use the libc locale (which tend to offer no other way of switching locale or encoding), things that use the locale settings from the intl extension, things that respect the default_charset setting (and/or the input_encoding setting, output_encoding setting, or internal_encoding setting), and things that actually take one or more of these settings as arguments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The good news about hhvm is that with the newest builds from the past few months you can finally run it longer than a week without memory leaks and crashing under high loads.

If you look at the changelog, you can see it really is a beta product that people use in production anyway

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/facebook/hhvm/master/NEWS](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/facebook/hhvm/master/NEWS)

 _" Ditko" 26-Feb-2015_ finally solved me having to restart it every several days

I'm very eager to compare PHP7 in production

<comment><USER6> This is what caused me to abandon HHVM for plain ol' PHP around a year ago. I was running it in Docker containers and the memory leaks would regularly crash my containers if left unattended for more than a couple of days.

It was quite frustrating because I noticed some definite performance gains (e.g., ~2x faster page loads, etc.), but ultimately opted for PHP's stability.

The benefit to running all this in Docker is that I can swap HHVM back in relatively easily (unless it's changed really dramatically over the past 10 months or so). Your comment has me tempted to give it another shot!

<comment><USER5> Update: we had an hhvm install today that crashed after 15 days or so.

Apparently this still happens but instead of several times per month, it is now a couple times per month.

Sigh, well PHP7 is right around the corner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shameless self promotion: I wrote hussar[0], a tool that uses HHVM for PHP static analysis in projects that can't run HHVM directly. Etsy says "getting [their] code to run on HHVM was relatively easy", but my experience has been the opposite. Previous discussion on HN here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9071854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9071854)

[0]: [https://github.com/wayfair/hussar](https://github.com/wayfair/hussar)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a great write up. I have been skeptical of converting to HHVM for a while because of a bad experience I had several years ago. I've been following the HHVM project off and on for a while now, but it really sounds like it may be ready for some smaller projects who don't have the resources of an Etsy to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER9> And later this year, PHP 7 is coming, which should bring huge performance improvements.

<comment><USER10> Beyond HHVM, in fact, has oob compiler. We've opted to hold off until 7 is out - HHVM extension support is still patchy.

<comment><USER11> Plus the whole "warm-up" procedure just seems immensely patchy to me - hopefully no such thing will be needed in PHP7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> bespoke endpoints sound like a good compromise, but I wonder why they stick with php for the general apis that the bespoke endpoints consume? Wouldn't they get better scalability if they moved that backend logic to something like Play, which would give you NIO on a jvm?

EDIT: Removed mention of "shared-nothing", which I misunderstood.

<comment><USER8> Isn't shared nothing a scalable architecture?

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

<comment><USER12> Ok, I hadn't seen that phrase to describe that kind of architecture before, thanks. Still though, it seemed they were describing each node's "build-the- world" process as onerous. Is HHVM thread-per-request?

<comment><USER13> Yes. It's why they had problems with certain non-thread safe routines like locale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ported 200k+ line app to Go over a year ago. Happiest day of my life removing any traces of PHP from my systems.

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess the question I've been having is that if I want to begin a new project with performance as a main priority, should I use HHVM+PHP or HHVM+Hack over something like Java or Go, or is it more for making existing PHP codebases more performant.

<comment><USER16> I'm a little surprised that HHVM would make or break anyone's decision to use PHP, since I'd think that there are more important language design concerns and features that ought to figure before it came down to that... at least in a PHP-vs-Java sort of fight, anyway. Big questions like your preferred form of _typing_ (strong/weak, dynamic/static/Hindley-Miller inference, etc), threading, ease of writing list comprehensions, whether you need to have functions as first-class objects, _et cetera et cetera_. Or the ability to hire developers who use that language.

<comment><USER15> For me I guess it's choosing the right weapon for the right enemy. If my greatest priority is shipping something tomorrow, I'll choose PHP or Python because I can code that in a blink.

However, if I'm able to hang back and take some time to develop something, priorities like being able to handle X I/O writes or, as you point out, threading becomes more relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great. After being one of the early contributors to documentation and clearing up the (admittedly ridiculous) on-ramping guides for what was then HipHopPHP, I'm really happy to see it get more traction. I deploy it in production for a webapp that is more or less simple CRUD on the outside but does some relatively expensive scheduled batch processing of number crunching. The differences are huge and allow me to keep it to a single - albeit big - dedicated machine.

It's come a long way and I'm excited to see further improvements.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is a comprehensive test suite for PHP a byproduct if this?

Last time I checked PHPs own tests only had about 30% coverage, and with a famously idiosyncratic language like PHP, which apparently needs a massive internal overhaul to increase speed, that seems less than optimal.

I thought the test suite was one of the best things to come our of multiple ruby implementations, though I read recently that core Ruby ignore it and so regularly introduce bugs that it would catch.

</comment><comment><USER19> There's a talk Dan gave on this same topic at PHP UK 2015 that's worth watching.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75j1RRxxARI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75j1RRxxARI)

</comment><comment><USER20> Be aware that while HHVM is more or less compatible with PHP now, there is no guarantee it will be in the future,and Hack is definitely not backward compatible with PHP. Not even talking about PHP C extensions.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would love to move onto HHVM and since mostly run own PHP code 3rd party code compatibility is not a problem, BUT unfortunately the editor I use (PHP Storm) doesn't yet support HHVM :(

what editors do people that are using HHVM use?

<comment><USER22> HHVM is just a PHP JIT compiler. It's not a different language.

That is Hack.

<comment><USER21> I wasn't clear enough I now realize in my post, I meant supporting Hack language that comes with HHVM (type annotations etc) in PHP Storm

<comment><USER23> But those are two things. You can move to HHVM and not use Hack.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blockchains, Teens and Hedge-Fund Hotels - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-30/blockchains-teens-and-hedge-fund-hotels <comment><USER2> Does _anyone_ trust back office developers at major banks to implement a cohesive, industrywide blockchain-based replacement for 30 or 40 years of settlement and clearance technology?

I sure as hell don't, and I work in the space: we'll get too distracted writing AbstractBlockchainFactoryFactories to do right by the problem.

<comment><USER3> "trust" is too strong of a word here (do you trust that your bank has their act together 100%?), but I don't see how these developers would be less trustworthy than the bitcoin core dev team or ripple labs etc etc.

If anything, the banks and financial industry in general are reasonably rigid and not very interested in chasing "the next best thing" just for the sake of it.

A very obvious outcome of this approach is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to clear an ACH transaction domestically for example.

I guess my point is when it comes to implementing changes the banks are no less trustworthy then most of the other players in the financial industry.

<comment><USER4> _...the ridiculous amount of time it takes to clear an ACH transaction domestically for example._

My impression is that this has more to do with banks' desire to book transactions at just the right time (e.g. to maximize fees charged or minimize leverage ratio) than with technical limitations.

<comment><USER3> ACH flow is basically a set of batches executed by the parties involved in a sequential manner, taking about a day each with cutoff times sometimes as early as 2PM EST to boot. This system dates to the 70s.

Mexican SPEI system for example is almost real time (they too have a cut off time I think it's 5 PM EST).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1) Innovation of bitcoin is proof of work, not a chain of blocks. 2) credit crunch for unicorns is troubling. we should all be worried about where this can lead.

<comment><USER6> > Innovation of bitcoin is proof of work, not a chain of blocks.

Proof of work was invented in the late 90s by Adam Back. The consensus algorithm using proof of work and a blockchain is what Bitcoin brought to the world.

<comment><USER7> > Proof of work was invented in the late 90s by Adam Back. The consensus > algorithm using proof of work and a blockchain is what Bitcoin brought to > the world.

Wikipedia disagrees:

> The concept may have been first presented by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in > a 1993 journal article.

Adam Back invented hash cash as one form of POW.

<comment><USER6> True, I was wrong. Thank you for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested to hear Digital Asset's explanation of why a blockchain is an appropriate technical tradeoff in an industry with a central clearinghouse.

<comment><USER9> They've written a whitepaper explaining their reasoning, listing over a dozen benefits. [https://www.finextra.com/finextra- downloads/newsdocs/embraci...](https://www.finextra.com/finextra- downloads/newsdocs/embracing%20disruption%20white%20paper_final_jan-16.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised DTC is pushing this. If it catches on, DTC becomes obsolete. DTC is a centralized clearing house not tied to any single bank. That's the traditional way to get a combined ledger between mistrustful parties.

Maybe that's why DTC wants to control the technology. What they're apparently doing first is applying a distributed ledger to some kinds of big, reasonably infrequent trades that are currently a headache.

<comment><USER11> >centralized clearing house not tied to any single bank. That's the traditional way to get a combined ledger between mistrustful parties.

somehow reminded about opening pages of Cryptonomicon describing an alternative to centralized clearing house. I think that the new block-chain tech being developed by the banks would look and feel surprisingly pretty much the same as the one described by NS :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > DLT may be able to provide regulators with visibility into the trading > portfolios of swaps counterparties that they lacked during the financial > crisis and that Dodd-Frank mandated.

Err, except, as you said, Dodd-Frank mandated that visibility, and banks have been reporting their swap portfolios for around 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER13> These non-work blockchains are really scammy. Anyone around here have a journaled database that's not selling? Call it a blockchain, and wall street will open its wallets.

<comment><USER14> I can't speak for anything else out there, but Tendermint is about providing real accountable BFT middleware.

[https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/wiki/Byzantine- Cons...](https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/wiki/Byzantine-Consensus- Algorithm)

Calling this a journaled database is an understatement.

<comment><USER13> Hello jaekwon :)</comment></comment></comment>


5900 online stores found skimming - <AUTHOR> https://gwillem.gitlab.io/2016/10/11/5900-online-stores-found-skimming/ <comment><USER2> Could run this list through a script which scans your inbox for payment receipts from any of the compromised hosts and flags up any purchases.

</comment><comment><USER3> Github booted my data last night, not sure why. I've moved over to Gitlab.

<comment><USER4> GitLab booted it too. Something fishy going on here.

Edit: Mirror of the 5900 sites: [https://archive.fo/8u0iB](https://archive.fo/8u0iB)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712454)

and: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712648](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712648)</comment>


Layer Styles - JavaScript backed layer style generator that outputs CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.layerstyles.org/

<comment><USER2> Which browsers does it support? The output styles I mean, not the actual tool.</comment>


Georgia court system hit by malware attack - <AUTHOR> https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/georgia-court-system-hit-by-malware-attack/85-1c8d8672-b7ed-4c12-a5f4-f4be6a626834 <comment><USER2> This is unrelated to the Georgia Tech hack but shows the fragility of state govt IT infrastructure.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/new...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2019/04/02/georgia- tech-network-hacked-exposing-personal.amp.html)</comment>


My Name is Brian and I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.parallella.org/2014/06/03/my-name-is-brian-and-i-build-supercomputers-in-my-spare-time/ <comment><USER2> This is Brian. I switched over to Nvidia hardware after building this because of Moore's law and access to libraries / tools. [http://www.parallac.org](http://www.parallac.org) has some of my machines.

<comment><USER3> > because of Moore's law

can you care to elaborate? how is switching to nvidia justified by "becasue of Moore's law"? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER2> By the time the parallella Kickstarter shipped, Nvidia shipped the TK1, which was roughly 10x faster FLOPS-wise than a single parallella board. Cost was similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> kind of tired of calling every small cluster a supercomputer. as someone who has been building actual supercomputers (think top 5-10) for over 25 years, it is very frustrating to hear such misinformation.

encourage parallel computing and scale out - dont call every small project a supercomputer.

<comment><USER2> Generally agree. The spirit of the term "supercomputer" in my case is tied to a) massive respect for Seymour Cray b) achieving something in the realm of late 90s scale according to top500 and d) parallella's marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What happened to the 64 core version? And do these chips actually serve a purpose beyond just experimentation and maybe embedded computing?

<comment><USER5> They failed and the guy behind it joined DARPA. You may have seen their new electronics initiative posted here a few weeks ago - that's run by him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, it isn't a supercomputer. These things (whether they be Parallela, Pi, or whatever) are generally at least an order of magnitude too low in every parameter relevant compared with a single node of a real HPC system.

A typical University system from that time might have been have been >~100 nodes with 16 Sandy Bridge cores, ~20 DGEMM GFLOPs and >=2GB ECC memory per core, a QDR Infiniband interconnect (~1μs latency, 40GB bandwidth), and >100TB of Lustre parallel filesystem. Also you could actually manage the hardware.

<comment><USER7> Don't be like that. The shorthand here is that this is a novel, massively parallel architecture, much like those in supercomputers. If it had been adopted and scaled up, it could have had interesting applications.

<comment><USER6> "Like that" as in trying to educate? Too bad.

This described something isn't "massively parallel" and couldn't scale up. I'm happy with calling the big Sunway- and PEZY-based systems supercomputers and hope that Neo turns out well.

<comment><USER8> You're violating the rules of HN.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h More precisely:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER8> I saw OP threw in technical points where the hobby machine is not like a production HPC box - after issuing a dismissal of the work entirely. HN does best when it gives a hobbyist a good faith appraisal of his/her work. A hobbyist is of course not going to have the resources to do HPC at home - usually.

<comment><USER9> > I saw OP threw in technical points where the hobby machine is not like a > production HPC box - after issuing a dismissal of the work entirely.

Which would make it a non-shallow dismissal, as it provided a number of specific discussion points, which are, in fact, being discussed. The guidelines don't, after all, discourage dismissal (even dismissal in entirety), only _shallow_ dismissal.

> HN does best when it gives a hobbyist a good faith appraisal of his/her > work.

This strikes me as a very subject assertion, all around. It's a matter of opinion on how HN does best, and it's a matter of opinion what constitutes a good faith appraisal, especially as it relates to a hobby.

That said, I might agree for a "Show HN" post, but not for a repost of something 4 years old, with the arguably clickbaity (and patently, unarguably controversial) unqualified term "supercomputers" in the title.

> A hobbyist is of course not going to have the resources to do HPC at home - > usually.

If not, I'm left to wonder, what's the point? Where is the performance "high" or the computing "super"?

I could somewhat wrap my brain around a hobbyist building a very small (in node count) HPC cluster as a testbed. I could also understand if the goal were something like cost-performance efficiency improvement (for purchase and/or operating cost). Is that what's going on here? I didn't get that from the article, and only one comment claimed the architecture is "novel" without specifying in what way.

I didn't even see anything to suggest scalability/modularity that's easier than "real" HPC, but that could be because I missed it among the emphasis on handmade construction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I only see a blank page for this blog, due to NoScript, but what's weird, is I can't disabled NoScript for this domain at all, and it says "This is a privileged page, whose permissions cannot be configured."

I've never been to this site before, and never seen any other domain do this to NoScript.</comment>


CircleCI - So we raised a bunch of money - <AUTHOR> http://blog.circleci.com/so-we-raised-a-bunch-of-money/

<comment><USER2> I've been using CircleCI for a few weeks now and it's really quite impressive. I hope that with more money/developer time they'll be able to get the zero- setup stuff working for more languages and platforms. The manual setup isn't too bad, but the first-use experience of just checking a box on a list of my github repos and having it magically be able to build the project and run tests was absolutely amazing.

Oh, and the favicon should spin while tests are running.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We are working on the bringing the zero setup stuff to more platforms - right now we do a great job with Rails, Node, Django and Play.

I'd like the favicon to spin. I seem to recall it causes a memory leak in chrome though - I wonder if that's been fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations guys. Our team has been using CircleCI for a month or so now and the platform has done exactly what we need so far. Keep up the good work! Simple HipChat integration is a nice bonus since we use this as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using CircleCI and have found it great. Plus the team is super- responsive and deeply committed to this product. Nice work guys!

</comment><comment><USER5> We use CircleCI for continuous integration at Sincerely and love it. I recommend their service every chance I get!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, founder here. Let me know if you've any questions!

<comment><USER6> Are you guys worried about what will happen when Travis becomes publicly available for private repositories? Do you think the familiarity with Travis of many developers will hurt you? (Or, to rephrase: have you considered doing a free service for open source repositories?

Also, why did you opt for building your own thing instead of running basically properly hosted Jenkis + plugins? (I know your FAQ mentions Jenkins, but it only explains why I'd want a hosted service, not not-Jenkins.)

Oh, and minor nitpick, after a particular entry your FAQ entries become mis- indented: [https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38476311/Screen%20Shot%202013-02-25...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38476311/Screen%20Shot%202013-02-25%20at%2022.30.53.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, this is going to be long :)

We're not worried at all. TravisCI has focussed on making a great product for open source, and we've focussed on making a great product for teams of full- time web developers. They have different needs, and both of us would need a lot more to be able to move into each others' space.

To give you a few examples, they allow you to test your code against different versions of Ruby at the same time, to show your build status on your public GitHub page, to be notified by IRC, and to send build emails to mailing lists. That stuff is great for open source.

By contrast, our features are all designed for your company's web application. We offer first-class support for Continuous Deployment. Our builds are lightning fast to reduce your feedback loop (a customer clocked us at 1m:30s vs 3m:50s). We also support automatic-parallelization to run your tests across multiple machines. We allow you to SSH into our machines to debug your tests. Our emails are personalized so you only get notifications you care about. We allow you to specify the exact patchset of Ruby (we support other langs, this is just an example) that you need.

There are probably some other differences, but basically, we've spent all our time making CI and CD amazing for teams of full-time web developers, and the caliber of our customers shows that: Stripe, Kickstarter, MongoHQ, and Intercom, to name a few who are well respected here. A product that has been honed for open source just doesn't provide the same productivity.

As for Jenkins, well its just not great. Its not a great experience, it allows you to do anything, but doesn't make it easy to do anything. The other part of this is that we wanted to focus on the platform, and Jenkins would have restricted what we could do. By limiting ourselves to a certain subset, we've been able to make the sort of product we described above - tuned to our customers needs. Would have been hard to do otherwise.

Thanks for pointing that out - I've pushed a fix.

<comment><USER6> Hey, thanks for your reply; sorry for taking so long on mine.

I understand why the Travis features you mention are good for open source, I'm not sure I understand why they're not good for web apps. Notifications (email and IRC) sound great for in-house stuff too; and build statuses seem to make sense on some central web page that gets a lot of hits from your dev team (be it the Github front page, or whatever) as well.

The deployment part makes sense though, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> They aren't bad, its just a question of where you put your focus. So while IRC could be used by businesses, its pretty rare (which surprised me, to be honest, but there you go).

For notifications, my point was the way of implementation. For open source projects, there tends to be a fairly low-traffic mailing list where all notifications are sent. For businesses, there tend to be way more commits, and developers care a lot less about what happens in branches they aren't working on. So we personalized our emails so only the right people get the right emails.

So its both a case of which features to prioritize, and the way the features are implemented, that make the difference for commercial web development teams :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations guys! A genuinely deserved win - well done!

</comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations. Excellent stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats!</comment>


Simple to use content creation system - <AUTHOR> http://adamdomoney.posterous.com/content-creation-done-right

<comment><USER2> The reason doctors spend so much on transcription is because they speak their notes. Often while walking around. To sell the system described would require radical changes in doctors' behavior and training. I don't think it can be done in any reasonable time frame for a bootstrapped startup.

I cannot comment on other potential vertical markets.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just wondering if you have any thoughts or ideas about a system like this. Or if its already been done. Even the ethics behind it would make for a good discussion.</comment>


How To Email Busy People - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-to-email-busy-people-2012-9

<comment><USER2> Really helpfull guide for better emails, I used in these days and I´ve better results</comment>


Activities in Berlin for "I love Free Software" day 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://fsfe.org/campaigns/ilovefs/2017/berlin.en.html <comment><USER2> Never heard the term and was hoping a "Gobo projector" was a low end, free as in free software, projector. Left a little dissapointed: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobo_(lighting)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobo_\(lighting\))</comment>


Chromeless: Build your own browser - <AUTHOR> http://mozillalabs.com/chromeless/2010/10/21/chromeless-build-your-own-browser-ui-using-html-css-js/

<comment><USER2> I want this yesterday. Been working on writing my own custom browser UI in a multitude of different platforms (WPF / XUL / Flex / etc. / etc.) but they were all either buggy or didn't come full featured from the start. All I really want to mess with is the UI, not the behind the scenes stuff, so this seems to be exactly what I'm looking for.

</comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't seem like you'll be able to embed XUL elements with this form of customization. Does it mean you'll have to implement your own tree control, toolbar control, etc [1]?

Also, will this work with existing browser plugins? If users are unable to use their plugins, would they actually switch to use a customized browser with no plugin support?

Is this project intended to let developers create installable web apps (like Google Chrome's installable web apps with the manifest's "container" field set to "panel" [2])? If so, probably it'll better to just market it like so. I think people are far more interested in building monetizable web applications than customized browser layouts.

[1] XUL elements: <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Reference>

[2] Chrome Web App's "panel" option: [http://chromestory.com/2010/07/panel- tab-and-window-styles-c...](http://chromestory.com/2010/07/panel-tab-and- window-styles-coming-soon-to-google-chrome-web-apps/)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome. I love JavaScript and all the goodness it offers and this is one more reason to love it even more because now I can pile all my greasemonkey scripts into the UI.

</comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't look like much now, but neither did Cello or Mosaic at first. My gut says this will be red hot.

</comment><comment><USER6> Love it. This is the kind of open UX approach I wish more platforms had!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure I understand the implications of this. Can it make Vimperator better? Or is it aiming at creating lots of little Vimperators i.e. various, less ambitious browser UIs?

</comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft has exposed the webbrowser control in "classic" VB and .Net applications for some time now. Before Firefox gained traction, there were several "lightweight" web browsers that took advantage of this (early versions of Maxthon come to mind).

I've actually done this for an app at a previous company. We implemented a "CSR view" on top of the existing website so the CSR could look at the customer site right from within the app.

</comment><comment><USER9> I understand why they've called it Chromeless, but I feel the name is jarringly similar to Google Chrome and that is a problem.

<comment> saw-lau I would imagine the naming implications was given very definite thought...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this essentially a JavaScript browser in a browser? When I worked at Netscape (1997), some developer developed one. No real use since you had to use a Nescape browser to run it but it was funny anyway...

<comment><USER2> Firefox is essentially a javascript browser in a browser to begin with, it's just that Firefox .js works on XUL instead of htlm5/css. The Chromeless project is just replacing the XUL chrome frontend with an html5/css frontend. It's kind of a misnomer because by their definition, Firefox already is chromeless, they're just adding a new API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Compelling. I've used several userstyles on Firefox's XUL interface before, such as coloring the progress bar and combining the stop and reload buttons. I welcome this latest increase in flexibility.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I suggested the same idea to my VP in 2002 it created _friction_ between us.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm being a little snarky here, but: more and more, Mozilla reminds me of that "friend" that let me play with all their toys, and then watched me enjoy it. Kind of an Eyes Wide Shut thing, if you know what I mean. Weird...</comment>


Blizzard lost a big sponsor after the Hong Kong outcry: Mitsubishi - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/29/20939236/blizzard-china-hong-kong-protests-mitsubishi-hearthstone-ban-sponsorship-pulled <comment><USER2> Ironically, Blizzard giving more exposure to the situation in HG then the protester could ever would have had</comment>


Madison Ruby Conference Early Bird Special Ends at Midnight Tonight - <AUTHOR> http://madisonruby.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally biased w/r/t this conference, but the venue is amazing, and the after- party looks like it will not disappoint.</comment>