CNN Money: Microsoft is a Dying Consumer Brand - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/27/technology/microsoft_pdc/index.htm?cnn=yes&hpt=T2 <comment><USER3> I firmly believe that most of Microsoft's failings in the consumer market come from their fear of the World Wide Web. Microsoft does everything they can to hide their users from the real power of the web, since everyone - <USER2> Microsoft - knows that a ubiquitous Web means fewer sales of Windows and Office.

Their logic in locking users to Windows-based experiences is old, tired, and not going to work anymore. People like the Web. And right now, you can't have a modern Web experience using only Microsoft products: no HTML5, slow JavaScript and a terrible, terrible browser experience.

If Microsoft wants to become relevant again, they _must_ give their users the best experience on the Web they can.

Also, note that Windows Phone 7 ships with a modified IE7: what garbage is this? The phone will fail because it will suck at the Web.

<comment><USER4> They're also scared of phones. Check out their Phone 7 commercials.

They appear to be catering to people who think people with phones are douchebags who walk around staring at their screen all day.

I'm not sure how well this marketing strategy will work, because I am one of those douchebags, but it doesn't make me want to get one.

<comment><USER5> The message I got from the ad is that Windows Phone 7 would allow you to see if you had any updates on the homescreen itself, obviating the need for fiddling with the phone for a long time to access the same information.

<comment><USER6> That is the fundamental and sad misunderstanding of this ad.

People don't fiddle with their phones while walking because the phones are hard to use. They fiddle because the phone is fun and addicting.

There's no desire for a phone that lets you get in and out quickly. On the contrary. If they could come up with a phone that lets you be online all the time without walking into things, they'd have a huge winner.

<comment><USER7> For some reason I find myself reminded of the whole RIM Playbook "coping with family" faux pas. It is almost as if WP7 were being promoted on the basis of selecting a phone based on wanting to _avoid_ something: in the WP7 case, avoiding _using_ the phone, in the Playbook case, avoiding your _family_. Both show a disconnect with reality and neither bode particularly well for the companies involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As one of the largest software developers on the planet, MS has access to more cool stuff than anyone can imagine. With all that cash, I'm sure it comes across they're radar all the time -- and they do make purchases and investments.

The problem is the minute they implement new technology it gets some committee-driven marketing name that's so completely disconnected from what it does that it takes million$ to explain what should be obvious from the name.

Examples: IIS, COM, COM+, Visual Studio, .Net, BizTalk, SharePoint, MultiPoint, Windows Live, SilverLight, Zune, Bing, and now the latest -- Windows Phone 7 (dyslexic a fully name).

<comment><USER9> IIS: internet information Services. It IS services for internet information.

COM: component object model. It IS an object model for components.

Sharepoint: a shared point for sharing information.

BizTalk: communication between enterprise (buisness) software.

Doesn't seem like disconnected marketing names to me. Zune, Bing, Silverlight, yeah point taken. Still not much more disconnected than "iPod", "yahoo" or "flash".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Microsoft's attempts to build a social network through Windows Live have failed to gain traction. It has no real answer to Facebook. "

I take issue with this. Pretty much no one has a 'real' answer to Facebook. In fact, Microsoft didn't even really try. And whatever they did try, they actually gave up on. As I remember, when explaining the Facebook integration into the newest Windows Live "nobody wants another facebook".

It would simply be absurd to expect MS to "fight" FB. Waste of time and money like the rest of the activities that the article seems to be criticizing.

<comment><USER11> There is something interesting here though. I investigate computer crime and 18 months ago forensic submissions would be looking for "Windows Live/Messenger Chat". Now it is looking for "Facebook Chat".

It took about 3 months for the switch to really take note, and the forensic tools took all of about a month to catch up.

Facebook had some serious market penetration very very quickly with that product.

So in a way; it is not so much MS failing as Facebook attempts to build a chat app succeeded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since Bill Gates left his posts, Microsoft is being run by bean counters and has no real tech leader to lean on; not one with enough power to tell the bean counters -Balmer- to back off -- that was Bill Gates, and he was good at it.

As long as that continues, there will be issues.

</comment><comment><USER13> Saying "Microsoft is a Dying Consumer Brand" is somewhat analogous to saying "Mitsubishi is a Dying Consumer Brand."

Though the structures are different, consumer products are only a part of their portfolio. Both have successful industrial lines, and both have flagship consumer lines that often draw flack. Importantly, both own highly successful consumer brands e.g Xbox and Nikon, respectively.

What the article misses is that Microsoft has an asset that it's competitors often don't: trust. Because of their B2B orientation, being trustworthy is a necessary strategy...that's not to say they don't make mistakes, but by and large they support they support their customers well beyond the typical three year upgrade cycle companies such as Apple enforce. Companies like Google and Facebook change their products in ways that are in conflict with the user's interests even more regularly.

<comment><USER14> _What the article misses is that Microsoft has an asset that it's competitors often don't: trust._

What technical person trusts Microsoft? I don't mean to be flippant, but the reputation they have among technical people that I know is that their stuff is poorly designed, insecure, and buggy.

Disclaimer: I got fed up with their poorly designed and buggy software in the late 90s, and have had Linux as my primary development platform ever since.

<comment><USER15> XP, for example, has some level of support into 2014, so from a business perspective one can trust that they'll provide support for quite some time, that is something you won't get from Apple. How this has any bearing on a discussion of Microsoft's consumer relevance I am not sure.

<comment><USER13> I've been thinking about that lately. Consider the companies that the article compares them to in the consumer market: Google, Facebook, and Apple.

Google and Facebook identify individuals, track personal details of their lives to a degree beyond what most individuals can imagine, and then generate revenue by using those personal details. Apple on the other hand, as a hardware company generates revenue through planned obsolescence (and Apple is moving more and more toward consumer data collection as a major source of revenue).

For each of them one might argue that there is a misalignment between the revenue model and important long term interests of consumer. The problem for consumer oriented companies is that the easiest source of increased profits is simply raising the price of your products (reduced operating expenses are bounded by zero, increasing market share in mature markets is expensive, and creating new markets is very high risk).

Conversely, to a large degree, Microsoft makes products and provide services which contribute to their business customer's bottom line. This puts them in an entirely different position in relation to the consumer market, because their sales increase as with the economic expansion of their customers (a unique advantage of B2B sales over consumer sales).

Unlike Chrome, Microsoft doesn't send every keystroke in the IE address bar back to a server to be analyzed with the intent of targeting their customer. When you register your copy of Office, you're not encouraged to list your children with their ages and to post pictures of them on the web. And you can load up your copy of Office 97 in a Win95 virtual machine on a new Windows 7 system. Their B2B revenue model requirement that Microsoft align its interests with the long term interests of its customers carries over to their consumer markets.

I see Microsoft in the unique position to differentiate itself as "the company which protects consumer privacy." The requirements are not all that difficult, some changes to Bing, a realignment of Internet Explorer toward user anonymity, and proper positioning of WinPhone7. What's more, all these are things which are in the interest of many of their B2B customers and none would have meaningful negative impact on Microsoft's bottom line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author of the Gervais Principle blog posts did a nice job of comparing Apple's marketing culture (we have the best stuff, come get it) against Microsoft's sales culture (personalized, i.e. Windows 7 was my idea). Thinking about it though, Microsoft has completely failed to connect with any customer persona despite their baffling product segmentation, other than personal vs professional which Apple is soon copying. Okay Microsoft, Windows 7 contains an everyman's idea, I'm genuinely interested, what is it? Not going to say? Vapid and inauthentic. Okay Microsoft, you're going to hack my attention with puppies and irrestibably cute things? Great PR stunt, but you failed to make any kind of impression about the quality of your goods. Now we get these ridiculous Windows Mobile 7 commercials.. once again, trying to sell to you at an individual level by appealing to your phone addiction problem. Decreased ease of use is a benefit? Well, I want the phone designed by someone who wants to use a well designed phone, not by someone who has to have a differentiated design for marketing reasons. Sell me that.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hope Microsoft keeps doing exactly what they're doing. Microsoft's bad reputation is very much deserved. The web, and the world, is going to be a lot better off without this company.

Windows, MS Office, and Internet Explorer are examples of what happens when Microsoft wins markets. They let their products languish, make no improvements whatsoever in decade, while repainting the exterior and reselling it over and over again. Consumers have wised up, businesses are just slower to recognize when they're getting the raw end of a deal.

</comment><comment><USER18> Microsoft can afford to fail many times before succeeding. It beat Lotus Notes, Borland C Compilers, Playstation, people continue to pay for Windows even though Linux is free. You don't measure what's going to happen in the future by taking a tiny slice of the present and projecting forwards.

<comment><USER3> > people continue to pay for Windows even though Linux is free

99% of that is only because Windows is available in stores and Linux typically is not. I think this will all change in about a month when Chrome OS comes out and is preinstalled on cheap computers in stores like Best Buy, Futureshop, or wherever people buy computers these days.

Most consumers no longer _care_ that they are running a specific OS; they want to type documents, read email, watch videos, look at pictures and use Wikipedia. And Chrome OS will satisfy that perfectly. If stores decide to stock Chrome OS devices, I bet you'll see a huge rise in consumer "desktop Linux" usage.

<comment><USER19> Consumers nevered cared about a specific OS. They've always just wanted a set of applications. The problem is that Chrome only answers one class of apps that people must have... web browser.

But it lacks Office (Open Office and Google Docs are not replacements for most people). Lacks a decent gaming ecosystem -- does it even have the Sims? And is missing a lot of applications that users use along the long tail... such as CS5 and iTunes.

Chrome is a non-player IMO. I think a low cost Mac and the evolution of the iPad is a LOT scarier (by an order of magnitude) to Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> > But it lacks Office

Chrome OS will open Office files using Office Live, online. That seems like an excellent solution to me, and given that the service is provided by Microsoft I assume it works well with Microsoft documents.

> Lacks a decent gaming ecosystem -- does it even have the Sims? And is > missing a lot of applications that users use along the long tail... such as > CS5 and iTunes.

That is not the target market for Chrome OS. Google has said many times that Chrome OS should not be your primary operating system; if you buy a machine with Chrome OS you should use it as a portable, small machine to quickly access the web with. There's still a place for full-blown operating systems outside of Chrome OS.

The vast majority of users _don't_ run CS5.

> Chrome is a non-player IMO.

Chrome hasn't hit the market yet. I think it's a big mistake to take something that Google is developing and say, "nah, won't work" before release.

<comment><USER19> Chrome hasn't hit the market, but plenty of us have used it extensively.

If Chrome's target market is the secondary web browsing machine then its competition is iPad, and eventually Windows tablets (running on Oak Trail). I think it may do decently, but it's not a real PC compete.

Regarding Office apps, opening in Office Live is fine if your competition is iPad. Although Office Live is missing a lot of features, at least today, to make it a real Office replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I get the impression that Microsoft themselves are downplaying the `Microsoft' brand, in favour of market/product-specific brands: Windows, Office, Bing, XBox, etc.

</comment><comment><USER21> I tend top agree...xbox excepted. I think Microsoft has worked very hard to get their platforms and tools into the enterprise space....and it has largely worked for them and been very successful. Has this been at the expense of a "consumer story"...maybe.

With that said, they can still be a very successful and growth oriented company but in the B2B/Enterprise space.

</comment><comment><USER22> MS has some of the best engineering team in the world.

But MS does not have leadership with courage. That is the problem.

</comment><comment><USER23> This article is overblown at best. Microsoft's core operating system and office suites remain absolutely dominant even if competitors are rising.

While Nintendo Wii certainly moves more units than the xbox, the xbox remains a successful competitive system with interesting innovations that largely focused on a different segment than the Wii did. While Microsoft is way behind in the phone segment, it is a bit premature to declare Windows Phone 7 a failure in the consumer market.

What this is showing is not so much that Microsoft is dying but that because other competitors are rising it is no longer the absolutely dominating force it used to be. This in itself is significant, but a far cry from dying.

<comment><USER24> _This article is overblown at best. Microsoft's core operating system and office suites remain absolutely dominant even if competitors are rising._

Yes but are these business licenses or consumer sales? Go to any college campus and see how many Windows laptops you see students using. Microsoft sales are going to businesses (who are entrenched in MS solutions) and people who "have always used Windows" (i.e. older folks who don't want to change).

Their brand is tarnished. I don't see them recovering from this easily.

<comment><USER9> Its both business and consumer sales. Around 90% of the market share.

The large amounts of apple machines in colleges is probably more an indication of students wanting to be fashionably correct, than it is microsofts brand being tarnished in the general population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would actually argue that Microsoft has actually become a more consumer- oriented company over time. Xbox was only released 9 years ago and the Zune was only released 4 years ago. Prior to that, what was Microsoft's consumer focus? Their primary products, Windows and Office, have traditionally focused on selling to businesses (OEMs, VARs, etc). The majority of consumers do not go out and purchase Windows directly -- it is included on their computer.

</comment><comment><USER26> The place where I start to get leery is when Microsoft take a product like Live Messenger, which had _finally_ become a near-perfect product, and bloat it into a dreadful "social media" whizbang media applet interface aeroplane control panel. I later found out (after copious reinstallations and attempts at finding an earlier version at oldversions.com) that there's a tiny icon, of which the chance to find is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of the Higgs boson - that restores the bloated piece of crap to a an actual IM- only client.

Of course, Microsoft also made the effort of cramming in more awful toolbars (that can't be removed) and replacing all the emoticons with a new suite of something even worse than what you would expect to find in a ten-year-old version of ICQ.

This may sound silly, but _all_ chat clients on- and offline have _dreadful_ emoticons; emoticons are meant to disambiguate and diffuse in favour of the sender and represent their mood and tone. _That is their purpose._ It really makes interaction with friends and acquaintances much easier and joyous. There's a limit to how you can stand out from other IM clients, and this is perhaps the biggest yard stick.

Live Messenger had the best (the only good) set of emoticons, and now Windows have thrown it all away while bloating the client even more.

I am fine with them throwing billions at something that may or may not work, but why the hell are they destroying their biggest brand products in this futile attempt to becoming relevant and cool?

I shudder at the thought at what Windows 8 will be like. Will they implement Clippy in the terminal to compete with Mac OS?

</comment><comment><USER27> CNN nails it again. Next up: Year of the Linux Desktop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, Apple is the one taking the consumer market. 1 in every 5 retail computer sales is a Mac. Best Buy's CEO recently said that 50% of their laptop sales have been cannibalized by the iPad - a 6 month old product. Apple is the #1 technology company on the planet by market cap and recently attained the 3rd place in computers by market share. Their stock price has grown over 2000% in 10 years.

Apple is the one poised to take over in the consumer market ... although the consumer market will be less and less about computers in the future.

<comment><USER28> OH GOD NO !

I'd rather have Microsoft's monopoly endure than have it replaced by Apple domination. Perhaps they make better software, but they're also much better at being evil.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now is that any way to talk about your soon to be computer overlords? ;)

I don't agree that Apple is evil, just rigid. They are very strict about what they allow for the sake of a good user experience (and to avoid a black eye on their account).

And with them being the #1 tech company on the planet, there have to be a large number of people who really like their products. Actually, in recent surveys they were - The number 1 sought after phone OS of those ready to buy smartphones (at 38% just one point above android) - The number 1 in overall customer service (86) by a fair margin (9 points) - The number 1 in smart phone satisfaction (800 vs next in line 791).

<comment><USER28> They are strict indeed :

 _"We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone,"_ (Steve Jobs, quoted on the Wikipedia page about the AppStore)

Even though you bought the thing (and it's not exactly cheap), you cannot put it to all the legal uses you'd like to. There is someone else deciding for you that some things do not make for "a good user experience", and, as seen in the quote above, they enforce their own moral standards about it.

I find that evil. Of course, that's just my opinion, but who knows which other things they may feel they have a "moral responsibility" to keep off their platforms ?

<comment><AUTHOR> They mean porn apps. You can get all the porn you want. The browser is wide open.

<comment><USER28> > _«They mean porn apps»_

That's not what Jobs said. And besides, it doesn't change the problem : what counts as a "porn app" ? Is an app that allows you to download, among thousands of E-Books, the kama sutra, (one of the cases discussed on the wikipedia page) a "porn app" ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Was Microsoft ever such a big brand?

Google is, Apple is, Dell is, but with Microsoft it is more like many Brands: Windows, XBox, Zune.. I think the main things that people immediately associate with the actual word "Microsoft" might be mice and keyboards.

But, (at least in my perception) they are slowly beginning to address the problem of decreasing user numbers. See their marketing at "Colbert Report" and, recently, the How I Met Your Mother episode "Subway Wars", that was full of Bing and Windows product placement. Again, not promoting the Brand "Microsoft" directly, but rather its products. The shiny logo stands for Windows, while in Apple's case the logo refers to a whole company.

<comment><USER30> As of October 2009, Microsoft Windows had a desktop market share of 91% (and that figure is probably still about 88% today).

Office makes that look a little weak with a market share of about 95%.

You are kidding that people think of them as a mouse and keyboard company aren't you?

Dell, one of your listed brands, by contrast have a market share of about 11.5%.

<comment><USER31> I think a better way to put it is this:

When you hear "XPS" your mind doesn't immediately go to the Dell laptop (probably).

When you hear "Microsoft" though, "Windows", "Office", "Xbox", all the jazz, immediately go through your head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why IBM, Cisco, Intel are not rolling out smart phones?

<comment><USER33> Same reason they aren't building cars or aeroplanes.

<comment><USER32> Why IBM, Cisco, Intel are not building smart phones AND cars or aeroplanes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The article inadvertently hints at the reason why Microsoft is failing. It mentions all of the markets where they lost to competitors. Perhaps they lost in all of these markets because they didn't focus on dominating a single market like the competitors that they lost to did.

Apple: Mobile Devices

Nintendo: Platform Gaming

Facebook: Social Networking

Google: Search

...</comment>


Show HN: DevFreeCasts – A collection of free screencasts for developers - <AUTHOR> https://devfreecasts.github.io <comment><USER2> Since [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909967) is currently at #1 I think we need to treat this one as a duplicate.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always liked the idea of casts but I can't afford them. One such example is destroy all software who's public work is great but who's videos I can't afford.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you can't filter by language, it's pretty much useless. I can't watch spanish/german/... cast..

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback, I will work soon in add some useful filters

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent work! Bookmarked it! Obrigado!</comment>


New method for developing tracers used for medical imaging - <AUTHOR> https://unclineberger.org/news/sciences-uncover-new-method-for-developing-tracers-used-for-medical-imaging/ <comment><USER2> Has mercury ever been used as a radio tracer to trace thiomersal in the human body? Many of the mercury isotopes pass through gold isotopes, so I would expect gold to be relatively inert an inocuous, so it boils down to selecting suitable mercury isotopes for suitable halflife timescales (the halflife of the mercury isotope candidate to trace it, and the halflife of the gold daughter nucleus so as to remain gold throughout the test subject's lifetime)

</comment><comment><USER3> For any chemists out there - the tl;dr is that the chemists worked out how to break C-H bonds and replace them with a radioactively labeled C-18F bond for on aromatic rings which is pretty cool.

The molecule can then be traced through the body using PET

It'll be interesting to know how labelling of F would affect the chemistry of a compound - F is a fairly nice choice given that it is quite small so shouldn't introduce much steric difference.

That said, F far more electronegative than H which could affect some degree of solubility and possibly the reactive site if it is closely situated.</comment>


I've Always Wanted to Go Bald - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@TheDelusionalWriter/ive-always-wanted-to-go-bald-f75c5b68d8ac <comment><USER2> I can't read the article, but I went bald for a couple of years in my younger days. I was a very interesting social experience, and I recommend it.</comment>


Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/17-04/mf_settlers <comment><USER2> Have I entered some sort of time warp? I was introduced to this game at the gaming club at Cornell. In _1997_.

When reading this article I had to keep looking up at the dateline to make sure I hadn't accidentally slipped back into graduate school. Talk about existential terror.

The moral of this story is threefold. First: I was a much bigger game geek than I ever thought I was. Second: Your business can take a _really_ long time to reach its full potential. Third: Just because something is old news to you doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people encountering it for the first time.

<comment><USER3> I was never a board game geek, but that might have been a side effect of growing up in the 90's. I had friends who I couldn't hang out with every day, because we lived so far apart. So I ended up being killer at early video games and for the most part I still am although I rarely play the first person shooters or the RTS games anymore due to time (and, for the FPS', interest) constraints.

Yet even _I_ knew what Catan is. Even my wife does, I told her about 3 months ago that the next time we waste money on a board game we're actually going to get one I like, so I pointed it out to her.

So even for me that was a sort of bizarre 'deja vu' experience. Then again, I grew up in the UK so I suppose this game probably hit the market much bigger and much sooner than in the US. I guess an addendum to your second moral is that foreign markets can act in unexpected ways.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's one thing that stuck out to me, his iteration and testing on real people:

"""Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed immediate attention. After each of these sessions, Teuber would haul the game back downstairs for further refinement. He repeated this process over the course of four years."""

<comment><USER4> Of course! Games are essentially just user interface - imagine if your software product didn't _have_ an underlying set of tasks that had to be accomplished, or even a mental model on the user's part of what was being done. How much more important would UI testing be?

<comment><USER5> As one of several game makers on HN, I want to take issue with the idea that "games are essentially just user interface." Games almost always present an interface to an underlying system. Many games have an underlying system that is not particularly simple or intuitive and take significant effort to learn. And, because unlike tools, they do not offer to assist the user in doing something that she already knows she wants to do, we often provide many more incentives along the way, as struggling with a system is often not amusing, and amusement is usually the goal.

This is all to say that the UI is very important, but to consider games as _chiefly_ UI is to fundamentally misunderstand what games are and how we interact with them.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, my statement's only true in certain senses. It might be more accurate, with tabletop games at least, to say that games are a UI to the other players - that is, they channel social interactions in certain ways.

<comment><USER6> this is my feeling. the games that last are ones that distill some aspect of friendly competition between people. and the very best games are the ones that cause you to interact with your friends in some new way (games that involve auctions or mini-economies tend to do this well)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're playing this game without the "Penny Rule", you're missing out.

SoC suffers from a bit of a compound interest effect: a few bad (non- producing) rolls at the beginning can screw you for the entire game.

To make up for this:

Anytime there is a roll on which a given player doesn't get _any_ resources (and not because of the thief), they are given a penny.

During trading, a player can buy a resource from the bank using pennies for the cost of _number of victory points showing._

This dramatically reduces run-away-winner syndrome.

<comment><USER8> That's a great design hack. Did you come up with it?

If only someone could do something similar for mana drought/flood, _Magic_ would be a pretty good game.

<comment><USER9> Mulligans are built into tournament rules.

That being said, I find that they are quite the leveler; high tempo decks with less lands suffer less than a control deck, but need mulligans more often. It's a trade-off, and evens out the playing field more than people realize.

<comment><USER10> Even with mulligans, I'd argue that mana screw is one of the biggest failings of M:tG. Make your best estimate of what percentage of games you think are decided by mana screw or mulligan-reduced hands, then ask: "Is that too high?"

<comment><USER8> In my experience, it was about 1/3. Then again, I wasn't a great player.

In 2003, I came up with a Magic-like game that solved a lot of these problems. It wasn't a kill-your-opponent game, but a German-style TCG with a Victory Point (VP) system, making it more amenable to multiplayer games. There were no "life points", but you had Action and Focus points that you could use to draw extra cards or resources, to give creatures an advantage in combat (making it more nondeterministic), etc. The number of strategic options per turn was vastly greater than in Magic, so it was harder for a player to get "stuck" and unable to do something useful.

Unfortunately, at the time I knew nothing about programming, nor had any money (I was 20). It was pretty obvious that the only way the game had a shot would be to take it online. Now I could hack it up, but I've forgotten most of the mechanics.

The disadvantage of this game, and why I think it wouldn't have ever taken off the way M:tG did is that, despite having "better" design from a Euro-style perspective, it wasn't a game that would finish within 30 minutes. A turn involved multiple players (most phases of turns were concurrent) and had a lot more strategic options than Magic's "untap, draw, cast, attack" formula that describes 90% of turns, so a single turn would last 3-10 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with a lot of other commenters here that Catan is luck-driven and essentially over (except for a lot of tedious listening to people tell you _again_ that they don't have the resource cards you want) after you make your initial placements. What deserves more attention, though, are the ways in which "worse is better" applies here - the specific things about Catan that make hardcore gamers dislike it are, in many cases, the things that make it popular.

For instance, lots of people like to feel that when they win, it's because they were skillful, and when they lose, it's only because they were unlucky. On the other hand, if you really _are_ investing your skills in your decisions but still lose due to luck, you'll be really frustrated. Catan does an excellent job of keeping players busy, but essentially on an equal footing of powerlessness. On this basis it really appeals to people who get all kinds of nervous when asked to play any kind of game of skill with friends.

<comment><USER11> A better game for that group would be Fluxx (<http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258>) -> lots of fun, interesting decisions, but a massive element of luck. In Fluxx, if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast. If you don't get lucky, though, you're stuck. I've found that people interested in a light-weight game always end up liking it.

<comment><USER12> "if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast."

I would turn that around. The luck factor in Fluxx is staggeringly high. However, what makes Fluxx fun is that it does not make any attempt whatsoever to hide that fact.

My problem with SoC is that it has a very high luck factor, but that the game also tries very hard to hide that fact. The expansion Cities and Knights or using a deck of cards with the dicerolls make SoC bearable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone interested in board games should check out <http://www.boardgamegeek.com>. It's an amazing resource.

<comment><USER4> Why is there still no usable way for me to add my collection of games to BoardGameGeek? I've got to load the page for each game I own and click "I own this" separately. Even for a modest-sized collection like mine, this is enough to stop me from using what's obviously a tremendously powerful community tool.

<comment><USER11> They just redesigned the backend; hopefully this'll make changes like that easier. Personally, every so often I want to make my own version, but the user data on BGG is so useful, I think it might keep others out of the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was introduced to Catan during college and we quickly had a weekly game going. The interplay of luck and skill is intrinsically woven into the gameplay, which kept things very dynamic. The "wheeling/dealing" aspect of the bartering keeps things interesting when it isn't your turn.

Just when things would get boring on the skills side (someone was far ahead of everyone else), luck would rush in to make things interesting. Just when things would get boring on the luck side (a series of bad rolls), there would be opportunities to strategize around it.

I haven't played it in years, though (not near that group of people anymore), so it was a pleasure to see this pop up on HN. And it is pretty relevant insofar as the "programming" and game loop is quite clever.

There are some great online versions too (asobrain, jsettlers, etc... would provide links but I don't know what the best online versions are today).

</comment><comment><USER15> You can't figure out, what game the article is talking about until you finish reading a lot of text. So here is the link.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan>

It's called Settlers of Catan.

<comment><USER16> And it's a great game. There's also a decent version you can download for XBox 360:

<http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/catan/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Huge boardgame fan checking in. Settlers makes for a great "gateway game," a way to introduce non-gamers to the world of eurogames, but most hardcore gamers in my crowd find it a little too luck driven. We tend to prefer games like Agricola, Powergrid, Caylus, and El Grande these days. But I still think it's a pretty good game.

If you're new to boardgames and like Settlers, I recommend going to BGG (boardgamegeek.com) and checking out their list of the top 20 or so games and trying some of those.

If you're looking for people to play with, there are a number of active boardgame Meetups. You can also check out <http://www.brettspielwelt.de/>, which is a German site with a lot of popular boardgames available for online play.

Happy gaming!

</comment><comment><USER18> I learned how to play this a few weeks ago. I had no idea at the time that I was playing a "perfect" board game!

Seriously, though. It was just okay. The game always ended just when things were getting interesting.

<comment><USER19> You need to play with the 'cities and knights' extension. It makes the game more complex. Also try the board game Puerto Rico, which we're just getting into but seems pretty awesome.

<comment><USER11> Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy >> Settlers of Catan, all the way.

Basically, start at the top and go down: <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame>

<comment><USER20> In my experience --- and I am from Germany ;) --- The top games at the boardgamegeek are too complex as first games.

Settlers, Bohnanza and Carcassonne are excellent starters into the world of boardgames. Geeks will want to graduate to Caylus, Puerto Rico and the like later on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Come on. Nothing beats a good 40-hour marathon of Axis & Allies.

<comment><USER22> 40 hours, and all that matters is whoever can hold the Caucasus for longer that 2-3 turns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Funny a friend just introduced this game to me a couple weeks ago, it is pretty fun and easy to learn buy in my opinion too short, more like a rush to get 10 points than a thorough strategy game. For the first few games, just when I had my little economy humming along somebody would bust out their ten victory points out of nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER24> The luck and strategy part is also very nicely done in <http://www.wesnoth.org/> which is inspired by Settlers of Catan and other such games. You might be repulsed by the graphics at first, but after a while you actually get to appreciate them and find that they fit in perfectly.

<comment><USER25> Wesnoth is nothing like Settlers, but it's still a good game, especially considering the price. IIRC, ESR wrote a campaign for it.

<comment><USER24> yup, ESR is an active contributor. You can find him in #firstname.lastname@example.com sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used to play this game all the time, but eventually just got tired of it. It became too predictable.

</comment><comment><USER27> It certainly has become the new Monopoly in Germany. I prefer Carcassonne, though, or at the very least, Settlers with the Cities and Knights expansion.

Also the settlers of catan card game is very good in my opinion (I like it much better than the board game).

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't really like it, I guess it's a personal preference, but I need a game where skill is just a little bit more important.

When I play Catan I just feel like I'm following a train track - zero options.

I prefer Warcraft, the board game! :)

<comment><USER29> Truly one of my favorite board games! That, Twilight Imperium, and A Game of Thrones!

<comment><USER30> Twilight Imperium is really great. A couple of others that I really liked is Android and Arkham Horror (different style though).

Has anyone played Diplomacy and/or Long live the King? I love their concept, although I haven't played any of them..

Slightly off-topic: I play a lot of rpg's, but for some reason I don't like their newer versions, ie d&d v3+, vampire: the requiem etc. Are there any others who have gone through the different versions? How do you feel about the most recent ones?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can someone please make this game into an iphone/ipod touch app already

<comment><USER32> A lot of the fun of the game is playing with other people, taking and in general hanging out. I get together with a handful of people about once a month to play board games. We try to play one new game every time and then replay the good ones. Puerto Rico, Agricola, Power Grid, Ccitadels, etc. We any of the Boston hackers be interested in joining or starting a startup/hacker board game night?

<comment><USER4> That said, though, I wonder why there aren't more "hot seat" style mobile games, designed to be played on one handset that gets passed around. Or on many handsets that share game info wirelessly but depend somehow on co- presence in the real world.

<comment><USER20> I've played "Das verrückte Labyrinth" in this way with a friend on two Nintendo DS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As others have said, I find Settlers to be all about the initial positioning of your pieces. Choose wrong and it's a slow grind to an inevitable defeat.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you want (as the article claims) a real Monpoly-how-it-should-be game, give Chinatown a try.

<http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47>

It's about free-style trading much like Monopoly _should_ be, except that it doesn't suck.

</comment><comment><USER35> I had no idea they were releasing a new PC version soon, that's great news. I'm hoping they introduce a tutorial mode. I've tried introducing friends to PlayCatan.com but having to explain all the rules in chat they lose interest right away.

</comment><comment><USER36> And Puerto Rico is even better :)

</comment><comment><USER37> Here is an unofficial online flash version of Settlers of Cataan. (Registration is required) <http://games.asobrain.com/>

</comment><comment><USER38> growing up in germany I lost a lot of my youth time to this game

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a new thing? I've hated this game for years.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's one of the best board games I've ever played.

And there is a java version called jsettlers with online ladders and so on, that helped a lot to spread word about Settlers. The java version was created to test artificial intelligence applications for robot players, with some success (although robots never beat a trained human).

Settlers as a game pushes the player to discover different business strategies and to commit to them; in between strategies never win. And always to invest! Cards in the hand lose value very fast (and get taken away en masse with a 7, and by the robber as well). It's fascinating.

Edit: some here mentioned the "Cities and Knights extension". I have never played the game without them -- even back in 2001, the board game you can buy on a shop already had Cities and Knights included. I didn't know it existed without them at all.

Edit 2: the JSettlers applet: <http://www.jsettlers.com/>

<comment><USER41> We can also play for free on the official website : <http://www.cms.playcatan.com/content/view/137/59/lang,en_US/>

And there's also another open source version, Pioneers : <http://pio.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER42> There is a nice Java implementation and community at

<http://games.asobrain.com>

It's called "Xplorers" for copyright reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Solid game, but not the best of the genre. _Tigris and Euphrases_ FTW.

<comment><USER29> Tigris is a much deeper game.</comment></comment>


Study: Left-Handed Males Earn 15% More Than Right-Handed Males (All College Educated) - <AUTHOR> http://www.econ.jhu.edu/pdf/papers/wp533harrington.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> "Our findings are quite contrary to expectations. We do not find any evidence that left-handed individuals earn less, as might be suggested by the literature referred to above which generally finds that left-handed people tend to suffer more from factors that would reduce labor productivity. On the contrary, we find that left-handed individuals with higher levels of education have higher earnings than right-handed-individuals. More specifically, among the college-educated men in our sample, those who report being left- handed earn 15 percent more than those who report being right-handed. The size of this effect is economically and statistically significant."

"...Left-handers have a 3.5 percent greater return to a year of education than right-handers, whose return to a year of education is 4.6 percent; hence left- handers have a return of education of 8.1 percent (= 3.5 + 4.6). We therefore pursue this education difference in detail."

"We still estimate a 15.9 percentage point larger increase in wages for left- than right-handed men for completing some college, and a 26 percentage point larger increase for completing college (in both cases compared to completing no college)."

"The difference occurs only in the group with 16 or more years of education: of men entering college, those that are left-handed have a return to completing a college education that is 16.4 percentage points higher than the 23.4 percent return received by those that are right-handed."

</comment><comment><USER2> Left-handed males are also supposed to die a significant amount of years earlier than right-handed males. :P

Maybe I'll be able to salvage those years if I slice off my hand.

<comment><USER3> Just invest your extra 15% wisely, and remake your local world in a left- handed friendly fashion. I've heard that part of the reason for the lower lifespan is increased accidents among lefties due to the clear favoritism for right-handers in the world (one might say reality has a clear right-handed bias).

But, I'm left-handed and not _too_ worried about it. If it were a dramatic difference in lifespan, I guess we'd be even fewer in number than we are.

<comment><USER4> >If it were a dramatic difference in lifespan...

Maybe. But lefties could easily die, say, 10 years earlier on average, in theory, and still have plenty of time to pass on their genes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sweet I will count this as a plus, since being short means statistically I get paid less. Put them together and I probably earn what I deserve... Being in a start up I currently each 0.

</comment><comment><USER6> Another instance of statistical randomness taken at its face value.

<comment><USER7> As breck describes above, it's not random when you discard the data you don't want :)

<comment><USER8> It is random if you randomly select which data you don't want and keep repeating till you get a significant result!

<comment><USER7> Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm left-handed with a degree, currently earning 0% of right-handed males...

<comment><USER10> lol. You would be dropped from their study then. If you read the report, they drop a lot of outlier data points. Which is something to watch out for in general, as it means the researchers may have been biasing their results(most likely unintentionally) to find something they could report as significant.

<comment><USER4> Someone should make a T-shirt that says "I'm an outlier data point."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I need to give myself a raise.</comment>


Turn your G4-era Mac into a next-gen Amiga - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/2363177/turn-your-g4-era-mac-into-a-next-gen-amiga.html <comment><USER2> "After noodling around with MorphOS for about 30 minutes, you will notice a pop-up window that asks you to register, and then the system will become unbearably slow. This is where MorphOS reminds you that it is not free software."

What a letdown at the very end of the article. It would've been nice to mention this a bit earlier, like saying "trial version" in the title.

<comment><USER3> I was an Amiga fanatic. Spent every penny I had on my first Amiga (and then again on my second Amiga), and loved everything about it. But, here's the thing: Linux, which I discovered not even a year after giving up on the Amiga (I bought a Windows 95 PC in 1995, and mostly switched to Linux as my primary OS the same year), is (nearly) everything I ever loved about Amiga...only moreso.

It has a fantastic user community, even better than the Amiga, that focuses on great technology over marketing. It has a great developer community, with even more available code to study (and in fact, a lot of the stuff I liked most on the Amiga was derived from UNIX utilities). And, it has a hacker mentality above all else...doing novel things with Linux is expected, respected, and supported (just as it was on the Amiga and the C64 before it).

The only thing I've never quite gotten from Linux was the way the Amiga always treated the arts as a valuable part of the computing equation. Sound and graphics Just Worked. Linux has had an awful, effectively unusable, sound subsystem for its entire history...and still does, to this day. I recorded more music with my Amigas in maybe four or five years than I have in nearly 20 years of Linux use (I still reboot into Windows to record music).

Anyway, my point is that I loved my Amigas. But, it's not something I want to use again. I'm impressed that a small team is delivering a functional Amiga OS clone, but it's not an OS that I would want to use daily or develop for. The fact that it's not Open Source is just one more reason why I wouldn't have any interest in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rehabilitation of old computers is a pet topic of mine - I still have pretty much every computer I've ever owned, from the Oric-1 machine that got me going, to the Atari Portfolio with onboard C compiler that I used for many great things in the 90's, to the BeBox that I boot up every year, my old O2 that is still sitting there, in all its 200mhz glory, just because .. but one thing that has always kind of bugged me is that I missed out on the Amiga revolution, having gone from developing at first for my home 8-bit machines, directly to Unix and machines like the MIPS Risc/os Pizzabox .. which then led to SGI, and so on.. so I feel like I missed a serious aspect of the computer revolution by not ever really having much Amiga time .. all my mates ever did with theirs was play games, and I was much more interested in coding the thing than anything else.

So every few years I get the urge to have another look and try to figure out what all the fuss is about. It seems like MorphOS is a good way to do that - but I have to say that I'm a little disappointed that its crippleware, although I understand that with practically no market for their work, the MorphOS developers have to make a buck somehow.

Anyway, one thing that has really helped me get a bit of that lost spirit of Amiga computing has been the Open Pandora console: [http://openpandora.org/](http://openpandora.org/) which is, essentially, an emulation paradise .. this allows me to run the UAE emulator and others, as well as a veritable cornucopia of emulators for other systems .. plus, its extremely portable, to boot.

I even once ported BCPL to the Pandora, just so I could get a working EDSAC emulator, grin..

For anyone else interested in archaic computing platforms, the underground movement behind the Pandora can be a very comforting community to join.

</comment><comment><USER5> How terribly disappointing.

If you're going to get all nostalgic about running Amiga applications then you may as well just go and download the original kickstart and workbench ROMs and fire up an emulator. FS-UAE(1) works pretty well. Someone even wrote a PNaCl emulator for Chrome.

[1] [http://fs-uae.net](http://fs-uae.net)

</comment><comment><USER6> Dammit! I just put my PowerMac G4 MDD on the corner last weekend. With screen, keyboard, and mouse.

The disclaimer at the end of the article was a huge letdown. No way I'm paying 111EUR license for a hobby. That's about 3x more than what my G4 is worth. Probably more since I couldn't find anyone to buy it much less pick it up.

<comment><USER7> What? The MDD is a relatively rarer model that has some sought-after capabilities. :-( Should have put it on ebay to give it a happy home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've put a working G4 iBook in the bin this week (it can probably be rescued until tonight) as I couldn't think of any real use for it. I felt bad throwing a computer away but I couldn't think of a reason to keep it or of any value it might have.

<comment><USER9> They are well supported by NetBSD, and there is demand for them for testing and development. (There is some Linux support but less, most of the distros are now mainly supporting IBMs ppc64 hardware).

<comment><USER8> Well if anyone wants to collect it from North West Surrey (UK) get in touch with me.

I may even be able to bring it to London in a couple of weeks if you want. It is in a case so won't be messy from the bin.

<comment><USER9> I'm in London, and have a list of people who were looking for ppc machines (in process of distributing some ppc mac minis I acquired), email in profile... I might be able to get to north west surrey too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Autoplaying video with sound, what a crock.

<comment><USER11> Autoplaying video with sound = me closing the tab immediately and refusing to read the article.</comment></comment>


Graph of James Bond's booze, bonks and bodies over the years - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21564816-various-bonds-are-more-different-you-think

<comment><USER2> It's interesting how this displays exactly my feelings about Bond. I have the feeling that Craig and Brosnan are just too much. They feel like some action movies with a character I don't care about (sure Craigs Bonds were better action movies then Brosnans but they've all not been Bond to me.). We don't have to talk about Lazenby and Dalton. Moore and Connery were just perfect. They've fitted perfectly in the flair the cold war had and they will always remain my Bonds. With style.

I also took "The Tailor of Panama" as the missing part of Brosnans Bonds.

<comment><USER3> I actually thought Brosnan played a great Bond, but just suffered from a set of bad scripts. I only enjoyed GoldenEye. And as much as I enjoyed Casino Royale, I really wish they would've let Quentin Tarantino make it with Brosnan like he wanted to.

<comment><USER2> Golden Eye was special because it was the first Bond you really wanted to see after a decade and my first Bond in cinema. I went there with my father for the premiere at 0:07 so it left us with a special feeling. Looking at it today, I think it wasn't that good but it was not a Dalton for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Edited to be in chronological order: <http://i.imgur.com/opI0i.png>

Taken from reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/11pnuh/james_bond_bo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/11pnuh/james_bond_booze_bonks_and_bodies_data_compiled/c6omy3n)

</comment><comment><USER5> To be fair on the conquests stats, George Lazenby did end up in a castle on a mountain surrounding by "beauties, everyone of them different": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVP2n_GcdlQ#t=0m40s>

And he wore a kilt, went commando and gave the ladies easy access to his junk. I mean, what more reason did they need?

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's Brendan Dawes' take on James Bond kills:

"... the image pays homage to the wonderful opening titles to Dr. No by Maurice Binder. Bond only killed one person in The Man With The Golden Gun yet seemed to go a little crazy in GoldenEye..."

<http://brendandawes.com/projects/jamesbondkills>

</comment><comment><USER7> > _In the new Bond film, "Skyfall", Heineken has paid to ensure the hero only > drinks beer._

At least it wasn't Corona. Though that's no Bond.</comment>


ECMAScript 2016 Approved - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/7.0/index.html <comment><USER2> I wish this contained a delta between the previous release and this release. It's difficult to find the differences just by skimming.

Edit: apparently I hadn't realized that the changes were so few that what was in the outline really did cover everything. I thought it was a summation. My fault.

That being said I continue to be disappointed in the built-in standard library of JavaScript. As far as I can tell ECMAScript 2017 also has zero plans for incorporating useful libraries for file IO or sockets (currently both are provided through different APIs by node or the browser). This really needs to happen.

<comment><USER3> Javascript doesn't need and shouldn't have a "Standard Library". Javascript isn't python or c. It's more like Lua: It's meant to be embedded inside an application, and the application provides all the interfaces you need.

If you start trying to include things like file i/o in the base language, you're never going to satisfy all the _very different_ requirements of code running in a browser vs. running on a server. If file I/O had been standardised years ago, with API designed by server programmers the browser would be saddled with lousy synchronous stuff that hangs the browser UI, opens up a thousand security issues, and bloats the language with stuff that's pointless for purposes that aren't web browsers or servers.

If you think the web platform _lacks_ something what you do is take it up with the W3C or WhatWG who are in charge of deciding what APIs the _application_ exposes. if you want node to match the browser or vice versa, write a library.

Finally the biggest and best reason to not do this is that, once you put something _in_ javascript (or a web browser for that matter), you can never ever take it out no matter how badly designed it is, without breaking something. At least with an external library abstraction you can switch to a better designed library.

Javascript and the web is an open platform. not a closed platform. The web browser itself provides a MASSIVE standard library that includes everything from a UI and text layout engine, to a standard graphics drawing library, a standard file io library, and plenty of other stuff you'd have to build from scratch in python or ruby. Don't undersell that.

<comment><USER2> > Javascript isn't python or c. It's more like Lua: It's meant to be embedded > inside an application, and the application provides all the interfaces you > need.

I couldn't disagree more. JavaScript started out that way but today (really the past 6+ years) it's used in identical use cases as Python in addition to being embedded into web browsers.

> If you start trying to include things like file i/o in the base language, > you're never going to satisfy all the very different requirements of code > running in a browser vs. running on a server.

You don't need to. Provide the basic capabilities that all languages provide, restrict what isn't possible when it's embedded into an environment. Keep it simple.

> If file I/O had been standardised years ago, with API designed by server > programmers the browser would be saddled with lousy synchronous stuff that > hangs the browser UI, opens up a thousand security issues, and bloats the > language with stuff that's pointless for purposes that aren't web browsers > or servers.

This is very unfair. What's "years ago"? The asynchronous patterns used in JavaScript date back to well over a decade ago and JavaScript wasn't really used elsewhere until node.js. I'm not sure I would consider any standard APIs as "bloat" either. This just looks like a baseless attack.

> Finally the biggest and best reason to not do this is that, once you put > something in javascript (or a web browser for that matter), you can never > ever take it out no matter how badly designed it is, without breaking > something.

Same goes for all programming languages and their standard libraries. This is why you target specific versions. This is a solved problem.

> Javascript and the web is an open platform. not a closed platform.

So is Python. C++. C#. etc.

<comment><USER4> > You don't need to. Provide the basic capabilities that all languages > provide, restrict what isn't possible when it's embedded into an > environment. Keep it simple.

Well, that makes sense but wouldn't it make more sense that the environments supply what's meaningful on top of a very light base? Like window.document.querySelectorAll in browser and require("fs") in node.js?

I, although, also think that stuff like what underscore/lodash provides could very well be in that light base, before we start discussing a standard for observables.

<comment><USER2> > wouldn't it make more sense that the environments supply what's meaningful > on top of a very light base

I certainly don't think so. JavaScript is a language that works in more places now; commonized libraries would be a huge benefit. As an example you wouldn't use Python with different io libraries depending on the operating system it's running on and yet this is what node is evolving into.

> Like window.document.querySelectorAll in browser and require("fs") in > node.js?

querySelector / querySelectorAll are specific to a browser platform but a way to conduct io could be pretty universal, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, ECMAScript 2015 is ES6 and ECMAScript 2016 (this) is ES7 [0]. I like the new features (promises, arrow functions etc.) but the naming is as confusing as Visual Studio. VS 2015 is the current version but VS 15 is the next one.

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

<comment><USER6> ECMAScript is going to be updated on an annual basis now, so it is easier to just use the year going forward.

Promises and arrow functions are ES2015 features, by the way. Already directly supported in a slight majority of the browsers in use: [http://caniuse.com/#search=arrow](http://caniuse.com/#search=arrow)

<comment><USER7> We should just call it ES15 and ES16.

<comment><USER5> But then what about ECMAScript 2024 and ECMAScript 2025?

<comment><USER8> ES24 and ES25?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As always, see [https://tc39.github.io/ecma262/](https://tc39.github.io/ecma262/) for the up- to-date spec that implementers use.

</comment><comment><USER10> "This specification also includes support for a new exponentiation operator and adds a new method to Array.prototype called includes."

Not much new here for regular JavaScript developers.

<comment><USER11> Everything about this is for regular JS developers:

Exponentiation operator:

        2 ** 32

is much friendlier to write than Math.pow(2, 32) or

        x **= 2

versus x = Math.pow(x, 32).

Array.prototype.includes: if (['jim', 'bob', 'dave'].includes('bob')) { console.log('We have a party, now.') } versus using for/in, for/of, map/reduce or much more commonly importing JQuery/Underscore/Lodash/some other random npm package for this functionality.

Both are small improvements, but both are squarely for "regular JavaScript developers".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They should be working to make JS smaller and simpler and better. Focus on the philosophy of what JS should be. People instead tend to focus on 'new features'.

The power in JS is functional programming. For instance, grafting on Classes, was a mistake. They may focus on concepts like, how do we make sure we never create two ways to do the same thing - instead of how do we incorporate this new thing.

<comment><USER13> I think the way they added classes was actually ingenious. I actually don't use classes or even prototypical inheritance, I only use functions, functions and functions. But they didn't really change Javascript at all under the hood as far as "class" support is concerned apart from some minor things at the edges - it's the exact same prototypical inheritance pattern as before, only that you write it differently. And if you _do_ choose to use classes it's more readable now than before (yet yields the same result). So they satisfy the very big developer market of the "class people", those who like the old Javascript ways, and also those who like a functional approach. I'm content sharing the language with people who program very differently from myself and ignoring those parts.

<comment><USER14> What is your programming background? I just wondering because I also do not use classes or even prototypical inheritance but just functions. But I did not come from a class-heavy background like Java. I'd like to see a poll of those who use classes vs not in JavaScript and whether they come from a class-heavy language background (like Java) or not. My assumption is that those who come from Java prefer to use classes in JS and others not so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 504 pages according to Chrome's print preview.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know if decorators made it in? I can't find them via the search at first glance. I'm guessing they're listed under a different name/section than I thought?

<comment><USER17> I can't find anything related to it. It's literally the only feature I use in ES7, so I hope it is in there. Perhaps it has some other obscure name?

<comment><USER9> Decorators are not an ES7 feature. They are a stage 1 proposal, which means roughly that the committee agrees this problem space is interesting, but that it might see drastic changes in implementation, syntax, and more, or might not make it into the eventual standard at all.

At this point it is best to call them a Babel feature, not an ES feature.

<comment><USER18> I do hope they gain some more traction. I've found them to be very useful with reducing boilerplate / repetitive code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why don't they "fix" the numeric system to be more exact? I'm talking about the float implementation. I don't think anyone depends on the floating point rounding errors. But we do spend a lot of time avoiding them. They totally "screwed up" the syntax in 2015, with many breaking changes, so why not fix the damn rounding errors!?

<comment><USER20> Because the system JS uses is an ISO standard, it is a problem not just for JS, it works for the majority of use cases, and implementing a second number system (the old one will have to be kept forever) increases cost and complexity significantly without showing enough benefits, since those who need something different can do so.

For example, if you do "money-math" you could just use only integers (use cents instead of dollars) - your number will be an integer as long as it's a whole number and you re,main below Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER ([http://www.2ality.com/2013/10/safe- integers.html](http://www.2ality.com/2013/10/safe-integers.html)). That's not enough for big-finance math where fractions of cents matter, but for most such applications it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Did Observables make it in with the `async function* SomeObservable() {}` type of syntax?

<comment><USER9> No. Observables are a stage 1 proposal, which means roughly that the committee agrees this problem space is interesting, but that it might see drastic changes in implementation, syntax, and more, or might not make it into the eventual standard at all. The idea of observables for async function* {} has been withdrawn in favor of async iterators ([https://github.com/zenparsing/async- iteration/](https://github.com/zenparsing/async-iteration/)). Additionally, the last TC39 meeting surfaced some strong concerns about whether the design of observables is something that can fit with the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem, and at this point it seems that they will either undergo radical changes (becoming promise-based, for example) or will stay as a user-space library instead of becoming part of the standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> These 10 ECMA Features Taken From Actually Useful Languages And Presented As Cool Innovations Will Blow Your Mind!

<comment><USER23> Just so we're clear: you're saying JavaScript isn't a useful language? Ooookay then.</comment></comment>


Does performance matter? - <AUTHOR> With the recent announcement of ScyllaDB, a C++ challenger to Cassandra claiming 10x performance gains, have we seen a the start of a trend of moving from JVM/CLR to native ? <comment><USER2> Only ones I know that follow an architecture similar to ScyllaDB are aerospike (talks directly to storage) and voltdb(partitioned on cores), while most other projects are in golang/java so I think the answer is not enough.

Also, there are many posts that show that dedicated servers have much better latency/performance compared to vps, but ~everyone still follows the ec2 bandwagon.</comment>


Is the NSA on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR>

We know that in the past the NSA has embedded themselves into technology communities and also that they have attempted to sway public opinion. Since Hacker News is a large technical community where opinions are created and discussed about relevant topics, would that not suggest that the NSA probably has agents monitoring and commenting on threads?
What got me thinking about it was this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6881380
If rand_s is flawed, then most every communication online could be read even if encrypted since most client machines use Windows. I don't mind if people disagree with my ideas, but the thread was full of hand waving dismissals. Where was the typical Hacker News paranoia? We know Microsoft has let the NSA install Windows back doors in the past. We also know that an audit of the Windows 2000 version of rand_s found major flaws. Not one shred of evidence was presented to challenge my concern. I'm not suggesting that everyone in that thread is an NSA agent, but rather that I would be naive to think that there are not NSA agents attempting to sway opinion on this site in general. If you were the NSA would you not do the same? Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Swaying opinion is not what the NSA does. It does signals intelligence, and propaganda production is the purview of other organs.

Going further, I doubt it does much with HN other than tracking use. HN is text and accessible directly from the web and tends toward stable content. There's nothing upon which to construct a potential conspiracy and thus justify an operation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Given the recent Snowden leaks about the NSA collecting information to discredit "radicalizers" that is pretty funny. The NSA very clearly was holding information that they did not want getting out such as back doors in encryption chips. Why would you believe that they would not monitor and anonymously involve themselves in conversations happening around the web by people who may have been close to discovering their back doors?

[http://warincontext.org/2013/11/27/top-secret-document- revea...](http://warincontext.org/2013/11/27/top-secret-document-reveals-nsa- propaganda-operations-designed-to-discredit-radicalizers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _> Is NSA on Hacker News?_

Yes. CNE (computer network exploitation) and information warfare (formerly cryptology) people. They're into the same stuff as the rest of us, of course.

 _> I would be naive to think that there are not NSA agents attempting to sway opinion on this site in general._

I dunno. The NSA folks I'm aware of are just geeks looking for news and discussion, the same as everyone else.

What you were talking about I believe would fall under "psychological operations" and I do not believe that is a mission goal of NSA/CSS.

Disclaimer: I am not NSA, nor associated with the government currently :)

</comment><comment><USER4> You've caught us, dangero.

Hacker News IS the NSA.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why the snark? Is it not a legitimate question?

<comment><USER4> Okay, you got me. I'm actually an NSA agent trying to pursuade you that Hacker News ISN'T the NSA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think these guys probably have better things to do, and suggesting that they would spend any significant effort on this forum is egotism and hubris of the worst sort.

Of course, you can never rule anything out in it's entirety ...

<comment><USER6> ...better things to do? You mean, like playing World of Warcraft?

<comment><USER7> Yeah seriously, if the NSA sent a team of agents into WoW and Second Life it'd be absurd to think that they wouldn't monitor HN.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/09/nsa-spying-world-of- warcraf...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/09/nsa-spying-world-of-warcraft- xbox-live/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's only one way you can find out whether or not an hn'er is from NSA and that is ... you also need to be from NSA.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point and the other side of the coin is that it seems very likely there are people on HN that work for the NSA and just read HN in their free time for fun.</comment></comment>


Your Mac, iPhone or iPad may have left Apple with a serious security risk - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/04/your-mac-iphone-or-ipad-may-have-left.html

<comment><USER2> This really isn't a bug. Whoever was snooping could do it while you are in store instead.

There's really only two solutions here:

a) get rid of of public wifi points completely. This is compltely intractable.

b) encrypt your data sent over the internet so it doesn't matter if someone snoops it. This is the only practical answer.

This is like someone realising 'ooh if I run Wireshark in promiscuous mode I can snoop everyone on an unsecured network' but not wondering what the fix would possibly be.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a long time from private disclosure to public disclosure, but in reality not much will change. Perhaps Apple could use a more unique SSID on their networks e.g. "Apple Demo 2A422A" which would be different from store to store.

On the other hand, there are so many places with free open wifi, which could easily be used instead. I'm pretty sure most of the computers on campus have connected to either McDonalds or one of the 4 different networks available in public transport.

<comment><USER4> The SSID doesn't matter. Changing it will not help.</comment></comment>


State of Project Voldemort - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/project-voldemort/browse_thread/thread/5b2f6331e329590e

<comment><USER2> Ugh. I for one am sick of the discussions of whether to use maven or ivy, etc. in a Java project. Just as old is the conversation about whether the project should be an Apache project. The ant (later: ant+ivy) vs. maven thing and whether a (major) project should go into Apache has been ongoing since the early 2000s in one project or another.

It is interesting in relation to Voldemort, but egads... this is one of the reasons I'm glad to sneak away into Ruby, etc. a good bit.

<comment><USER3> This is a really interesting discussion that only touches on ivy, maven etc. at the very end. There are some good ideas for ways to keep a project relevant and increasing adoption. Notably the call for more non-LinkedIn committers that is brought up in the original post and addressed somewhere in the middle.</comment></comment>


ArcKit: A new location and motion detection framework for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sobri909/ArcKit <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


Still Got Your Crypto: In Response to Wallet.fail's Presentation - <AUTHOR> https://www.ledger.fr/2018/12/28/chaos-communication-congress-in-response-to-wallet-fails-presentation/ <comment><USER2> This seems a little disingenuous to me. The implication of the first attack is not that someone might sneak into your house and modify your Ledger hardware. It's that hardware could come to you with modified firmware from the get go.

<comment><USER3> This is largely the issue with 'hardware wallets', the security models aren't particularly well defined and this leads to ambiguity like this. You're absolutely correct in that the concern is the device is not genuine, which is what attestation of the firmware is supposed to prevent. In the case of the Ledger, the attestation doesn't prove anything about the safety of the device unfortunately for a number of reasons (this attack, and other logical ones).

The obvious one is that the security domains in the device are idiotic. There's a "secure" processor with almost no processing power or IO, and a "insecure" one which handles the screen, buttons and IO. Both of them handle secrets (for example, the seed shown on the screen), which leaves you with essentially no gain whatsoever.

The more logical hardware implant than the one shown at CCC is a bluetooth module that can simply read the I2C lines going to the screen and transmit the seed as a beacon whenever it is plugged in. This has the advantage of not needing presence as with their demonstration, and with assistance doesn't need any physical presence.

I described this as a concept for a security review of a cold storage setup which was "unbreakable". Is this sort of thing realistic? Perhaps. Is a $5 wrench attack more sensible? Probably. It's worth considering what supply chain attacks are possible though.

<comment><USER4> > The obvious one is that the security domains in the device are idiotic. > There's a "secure" processor with almost no processing power or IO, and a > "insecure" one which handles the screen, buttons and IO. Both of them handle > secrets (for example, the seed shown on the screen), which leaves you with > essentially no gain whatsoever.

I think the idea is that the secure processor will verify the insecure processor's firmware (the "MCU check"), making such attacks impractical.

Of course, the design is broken and it can be bypassed by emulation, but security isn't all or nothing - "no gain whatsoever" is not true.

<comment><USER3> Even if the firmware on both firmwares are completely virgin, this doesn't say much about the safety of the device. I agree that security is not all or nothing, protection in layers is always the goal of secure products. I do however caution that it can cause complacency if things are presented as bulletproof, you need to be up front about what tools such as attestation afford you. In this case it can not tell you that the device is safe or not tamptered with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i have occasionally heard stores of ppl losing funds from hardware wallets. usually it's after buying it on Amazon.

<comment><USER6> Its usually because the buyer was duped into following a fake instruction setup. The scammer will produce an official physical 'card' of recovery words that ships with the wallet, tricking the user into putting money into accounts that the scammer also has access to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I didn't watch the 35c3 presentation, but it certainly looks like it's an absurd attack. Kudos to Ledger people for constructively replying to it.

Some talks in 35c3, defcon, etc remind me of the rubber hose security ([https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)).

On the other hand, www.ledger.fr web site does not properly redirect to HTTPS (e.g [http://www.ledger.fr/bounty-program/](http://www.ledger.fr/bounty- program/)) and that would've been a more practical one.

<comment><USER3> Ledger has for a long time been grossly inept in security, there's really nothing absurd about this attack at all. In the Bitcoin industry we frequently see very detailed setup for long timeframe attacks and substantial effort going into identity theft and physical compromise. Worse, for these deices in particular a backdoored device is almost undetectable due to the way ECDSA can be used to transmit encrypted data in its signatures.

Ledger was recently compromised, or showed that they have no release process (both equally bad) by releasing a version of their application which stole user funds. Their claim is that they released a development version from a dirty git clone that contained "testing" code which happened to have a hardcoded address for sending every transaction to.

[https://www.ledger.fr/2018/08/03/important-message- concernin...](https://www.ledger.fr/2018/08/03/important-message-concerning- the-ledger-wallet-ethereum-chrome-app/)

<comment><USER8> That's indeed impressively bad. The full address seems to be [https://etherscan.io/address/0xC33B16198DD9FB3bB342d8119694f...](https://etherscan.io/address/0xC33B16198DD9FB3bB342d8119694f94aDfcdca23)

There don't seem to be any outbound transactions from that address, so Ledger refunded the victims separately instead of sending the funds back. That means they likely don't control the key. OTOH, the funds (worth about $40k for the Ether + another $20k for the tokens) haven't moved at all, so "test key that was lost long ago" does seem plausible. (Especially since it also was used on the testnet before [https://ropsten.etherscan.io/address/0xC33B16198DD9FB3bB342d...](https://ropsten.etherscan.io/address/0xC33B16198DD9FB3bB342d8119694f94aDfcdca23))

Could of course also be an attacker who was hoping for a bigger loot and didn't want to risk getting caught over $60k, but as you said, not sure what's worse - incompetence or compromise.

<comment><USER3> Yep.

Either they are so incompetent that they released software out of their git tree from someone's work environment, and had absolutely no process to catch a ridiculous and obvious failure. Otherwise they got popped and are lying about it. Neither is anything but a disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What bothers me is that they did not responsibly disclose the vulnerabilities to the manufacturers ahead of time. This is not moral, and I'm not sure what one gains by not doing that. I think that conference organizers should pressure presenters to do that before talks.

Either that or attendees should apply bottom up pressure and ask live questions like "what did you do to responsibly disclose this issue?". I think I'll do that on future security conferences I attend.

<comment><USER10> I wish the everyone would stop using the term "responsible" to describe "coordinated" disclosure. Researchers do not owe vendors any cooperation at all. It is perfectly moral to present factual information without any notice whatsoever. I think there's often something to gain through coordinated disclosure, but not always, and it's not your choice to make unless we're talking about your own findings.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Researchers owe the companies absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER9> It's not about the companies. I do not care much about them.

It's about people that may be hacked between someone's 0day disclosure and manufacturer's response. And if the manufacturer doesn't care to fix the bug - roast them about that. It's their fault.

It's not moral because people (not companies) may suffer. Your actions have consequences.

<comment><USER11> The vulnerability doesn't pop into existence the second it is publicly announced. It was already there. Everybody was already vulnerable.

At least if it's publicly announced people can take steps to defend against it.

<comment><USER9> Yes but why not send a single email to the manufacturer before making it public? Does it really hurt so much?

From a "cyberpunk hacker" mentality this only gives you an opportunity to roast the manufacturer if they do nothing. Perhaps even bankrupt them, I don't care. Competition will take their places and hopefully be better.

<comment><USER8> > Does it really hurt so much?

Potentially yes. The manufacturer may attempt to prevent publication through legal threats or action, which can be annoying and expensive even if you ultimately win. The incentive to be annoying goes down significantly once the disclosure cannot be prevented (because it's already public) and the public is watching (i.e. any action against the researcher has a higher likelihood of public backlash).

It also allows the manufacturer, who is likely more experienced and has more resources, to start PR to downplay the attack.

I generally default to responsible/coordinated disclosure, but I also do my research first. If the company has previously shown undesirable behavior (like the stuff I've described), or I've reported to them previously and didn't like the experience, they'll learn about the disclosure from the news.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Audience Strikes Back: 'Last Jedi's Plunge Is Worst Ever for a Star Wars Pic - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2017/12/23/the-audience-strikes-back-last-jedis-77-fri-to-fri-plunge-is-worst-ever-for-a-star-wars-pic/#14fa754d57fa <comment><USER2> I think I'd need to see more data to actually draw a conclusion here. Is this just a Star Wars thing or do other movies released recently perform similarly?

I think it's entirely possible that it's just a general movie industry trend that people who don't see a movie in its first weekend have no desire to go subsequently - maybe because all the good parts are almost immediately spread around the net? Less incentive to go to theater.</comment>


Interim Housing - <AUTHOR> https://stallman.org/seeking-housing.html <comment><USER2> Well this is what happens when people use cancel culture on anyone that they disagree with, especially career twitter archaeologists who dig up old tweets and put them out of context.

The result? A pioneering hacker in computer science, free software and privacy that has been shamed for wrong-thinkery, and has been financially suffocated, censored, and successfully cancelled. This cancel-culture is disgusting and is utterly unacceptable to treat anybody like this, no matter what their views are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Taking a stance of 'no matter what their views are' seems a bit extreme to me, for example, I would not mind people who condone the killing or expulsion of a given race being 'cancelled'. My concern is primarily with people taking comments that don't reflect a person's current views, willingly disregarding context or simply having views I don't find particularly objectionable.

<comment><USER3> >My concern is primarily with people taking comments that don't reflect a person's current views, willingly disregarding context or simply having views I don't find particularly objectionable.

To be fair, and as far as I'm aware, RMS never bothered to inform anyone of his "current" views on pedophilia until after the fact of the Medium article going viral[0]. His prior views on the matter _were_ current as far as the public record was concerned until that point, and RMS was willing to let that stand for about 20 years.

[0][https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul- oct.html#14_September...](https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul- oct.html#14_September_2019_\(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The title of the blog post is "interim housing," and should be changed from its current clickbait title per the site guidelines, and nowhere in the post does Stallman say he's homeless, or that he's looking for a permanent residence.

He may or may not be, but

        I am looking for a room in a shared house or apartment as an
        interim place where I could stay for at least two months.
        Ideally I would have the option of staying for up to six
        months, but I could do without that.

doesn't make it seem like he's in dire straits.

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember reading somewhere that his only source of income was giving talks, which he does irregularly. As the @krapp noted (don't know why he was downvoted) he may or may not be in dire straits but he is said to care little about money to the point of getting himself in tricky financial situations. Kinda like the brilliant Computer Science/Math student who helps everyone else with their assignments but gets kicked out of school for failing too many classes--because he didn't bother to turn in assignments.

</comment><comment><USER5> That was quite fast . Was he living pay check to pay check or am i missing something ?

<comment><AUTHOR> He lived in the AI lab at MIT, hence why he had a mattress in his office.

Edit: I'm not quite sure why I'm being downvoted, he mentioned this in Free As In Freedom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> On one hand, nobody should be encouraging RMS to continue in his bizarre offensive lifestyle. It's well past time he stopped treating women like garbage, and stopped treating men like garbage, and learned how to be a decent human being.

On the other hand, he's such a houseguest from hell that anyone who ignores basic morality and takes him in anyway will be sufficiently punished for their breach and no further social sanction will be necessary.

<comment><USER7> You need to stop being a Fascist.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Today is the last day to apply to Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> As a recent alumnus (S16), I encourage everyone to apply.

Not as good as past companies? Apply.

Don't see any companies like you? Apply.

Don't see other founders that look like you? Apply.

You're not quite ready and just need a few more months to polish things up? Apply.

Too big for YC? Apply.

Your company is starting to maybe figure things out, but also secretly kind of fucked up, but you think maybe you can pull it together and apply when you're a well-oiled machine like No Startup Ever? Apply.

Even the application process itself is helpful to learn the metrics you should be tracking and to get used to talking about your company.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure YC is great, but I don't think everyone should apply. It's a waste of time if you're seasoned and it leaks your business plans to a lot of well connected, moneyed people. The other side of the "never ask for an NDA" coin is "don't needlessly share your plans with people you don't know or trust".

If you think you'll get in - apply - it's obviously the best out there; but don't drink the punch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would be interesting to see a histogram of % acceptance rate for YC applicants by number of weeks before deadline -- 0-1 week, 1-2 weeks, etc, up to when applications are opened.

<comment> d--b Yes! Also, it would be interesting to see a histogram of who gets in by the time in the day that the application was reviewed. Or by "time since last meal of reviewer" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought of this idea recently. Something to connect voters with people living in swing states. So that they could use the address of those people to go vote. For instance PA is very close to NY and Nevada is very close to CA, and so on. So people could vote in near by states where their vote would make a difference once they got the address of someone in a swing state. Because you can't register to vote using a po box or private mail box.

</comment><comment><USER6> I came up with an idea yesterday, perhaps someone can do something with it as my life isn't at a place where I would do YC right now and applying today would be a bit short notice... but if you wanted to apply, and were looking for a strong idea, maybe this is it.

What is it?

\- A tithe manager.

Tithes are a historical donation of a % of earnings to charity, many religions have this but many non-religious people donate to charity too on an equally regular basis. The monthly amount is fairly consistent but sometimes one may wish to vary the amount that goes to which causes.

What this company will do:

\- Act as an intermediary between donors and charities

\- Encourage people to give more to charity (help with accounting of donations and claiming of tax relief as applicable)

\- Help charities to be discovered by donors

What the company's product would do:

\- Receive the whole amount to be donated each period

\- Pay each charity according to the donor preferences (this much here, that much there)

\- Provide end-of-year reporting for government tax claims, and instructions on how to claim, or auto-filing if it makes sense (where govts allow this claim to be filed separately)

\- Allow the donor to change these figures easily, i.e. during the Ebola crisis I put a higher % of my tithe towards Medicins Sans Frontiers.

\- Provide alerts on crises

\- Provide marketing services to charities (to help be discovered, but also to keep existing donors informed of what their donation is doing)

Size of market: In the UK alone, some GBP 14BN is donated by individuals annually.

Benefit to donor: In the UK, for every £100 donated via a Gift Aid registered charity, the charity will receive an extra £25 and if you are a higher rate taxpayer you are eligible for £25 in tax relief. The vast majority of these donors never claim their tax relief and do not realise how far their donations go nor that this would only really have been a £75 donation for a £125 gain for the charity.

Benefit to charity: Reduced marketing costs, know who your donors are, able to react at times of crises, increased revenue.

That's the idea, to handle payments and manage donor accounting such that donors can be encouraged to give more, and charities can do more.

<comment><USER7> Its a cool idea. Do people actually provision a fixed amount yearly for all their charities? I suppose the intermediary makes money by taking a percentage (5 percent?) of the donated amount? Is there something I am missing? One would not really need YC to implement this

<comment><USER6> One would not need YC for many of the things YC supports, but the mentoring, dinners, intensity, those things help deliver and make a success.

And I have operated a 10% on net earnings since forever. Well, since I learned about them at school... from a Sikh friend. It's called Dasvandh in Sikhism, and is literally 10% and must go to community. Islam has the Zakat, Christianity the Tithe, and atheists just give (though there isn't as widespread awareness in predominantly non-religious countries of the habit).

I choose to give to a variety of charities, but things like Open Rights, MSF, Computers for Africa, etc win out. And of course I consider open source donations and contributions to be within this.

Mostly... it's static, and one just needs accounting tools. But sometimes it varies by demand, i.e. Open Street Map request recently, or perhaps a humanitarian crisis.

Giving individually, direct, makes it hard to make adjustments as a reaction to urgent things like that. One cannot just cancel and renew standing orders easily, most charities wish to own the whole thing (naturally, as they want to have a base revenue guaranteed), but this actually makes it harder for donors to give more at times and makes it harder for donors to give more regularly (if they may need to make adjustments).

5% is too much, I'd probably suggest barely 1% on the payment processing. Instead it's services to charities that would produce the revenue, and fees to donors when you help get their tax return sorted, after all you would know that you helped them claim back a certain figure. There's obviously a lot of money there, but the business model would have to be worked on to make sure it didn't discourage giving.

<comment><USER7> I see the potential quite clearly. Sounds like something I'd like to do.

Mind if I send you an email?

<comment><USER6> Feel free, it's on my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any stats on applicant apply date relative to the deadline and the acceptance rate?

I've heard that earlier applications give more time for alums (who review submissions) to check out the demos. On the flip side, spending more time on polishing the application could help as well.

<comment><USER2> Don't think too much about that. Just build an amazing product that users love and the rest takes care of itself.

<comment><USER8> I'm not asking from an applicant's perspective. I've got no interest in applying.

I'm asking out of pure curiosity.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: A modern book how to build a scalable web application? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I have a close friend who started to learn programming. He want to be a backend web developer. It's a great book about building scalable websites https://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applications/dp/0596102356 but it was written in 2005 and now we have clouds and containers.
So, a question is. Is there a modern version of this book or on this topic? Could you recommend any title?
Thanks a lot for any tips ;-)
Tom <comment><USER2> Designing Data-Intensive Applications [https://dataintensive.net/](https://dataintensive.net/)

<comment><USER3> Came to recommend the same book. However,if your friend is a newbie to programming I doubt he will gain anything from reading such an advanced book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, you are right, probably it's above his level now :). But when he will be more advanced this book covers his needs I think.</comment></comment></comment>