Ask HN: Do Software Engineers Need Managers? - <AUTHOR> I have experienced and heard from a friend who also worked in a large company that many of the managers or project managers did not add any significant value (except in startups).<p>So my question is whether the Software Engineers (especially the senior one's) really need managers? I have been thinking about this and planning to work on a POC of a tool (may be based on blockchain like model) that would reduce or eliminate non-coder managers. While this would be my wish, am I thinking totally out of the line or too creatively :) ? <comment><USER2> It is hard for software engineers to see the value added of a good manager. Often a manager will have deep knowledge of the software being built, current priorities, and will know (from their team) where 'thar be dragons' in the code.

When I was an engineering manager at a large corporation, most of my time was spent in meetings about status, resources, future projects, finances, cyclical HR things, escalations with other teams, etc. Then the other half of the role is gathering information from the team about how things are going (PM's would be the task master) and finding out where there were problems either with technology (rare) or other teams (often).

These things cannot be scripted away - they all involve talking with other humans.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with you on the value of good manager, however concern is around bad or inexperienced managers which are out there by plenty. Typically the manager becomes a dumping ground for things which should be done by Business/IT Analyst, Product manager, Project Manager and Technical Operations/Support Manager. Once these are addressed properly then what you have got is essentially a Sr Engineer/Tech lead who is entrenched in the code and also knows who is best for the right task with in the team. Some of the other things like larger roadmap and talking to HR can be done by director or Senior managers, so yes I do see some need for managers, my whole point is that there is no need for Junior or Mid level managers for most cases.

Also creating a per team manager role creates more politics and overall bad working environment for good Engineers. I would not have argued this 10 yrs back, but considering the advancements in tools, processes and changes in work culture and attitudes, don't you think its viable to have a great degree of tooling for atleast the first level managers?

<comment><USER2> Ideally one would hire self sufficient engineers that don't cause drama which causes political battles.

A small organization doesn't need much management, but the larger corporate environment has middle management - managers of managers. This layer is really only there because of numbers. If you have 7 managers with 8 engineers each, one director isn't going to be able to make big picture decisions for 7 teams, let alone get thru HR reviews for 56 people, salary planning, etc.

What about mediocre and bad engineers? If there are a few and there is a system, they will find a way to meet basic criteria in the tool/system. You've heard jokes about teams that measure lines of code, and suddenly people are pumping out lines of code.

When you get a group of 20 or more people together they are going to disagree and some will outright dislike each other. These are the roots of political battles in an org, which beyond small teams, can't be avoided.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Sr. Management & Directors add values. Most first level managers are not effective in resolving disputes between Engineers, but rather just take sides with say one of their top coder, although the opinion of that engineer on say an architecture approach may be not be the right way to go..think you get the idea ? There may be many such scenarios or just lack of maturity or decades of management experience that makes such managers ineffective at resolving conflicts, and hence my point is that they are not required to manage Sr. Engineers with 10-15 yrs experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How would blockchain help in this case? Not sure I get the idea... Blockchain within an organization doesn't make any sense. I've had different managers and they were horrible or useless for the most part. Usually in big corporates they're useless and in startups they're too cocky and bad team players. Though, there are good managers out there but it's pretty rare.

You need a manager to resolve conflicts between peers, to hire/fire people and to report to upper level. That alone takes a lot of pressure off a team... I've had experiences on both sides, management and individual contributor. Being a manager is pretty stressful for these 3 reasons. Other than that, it either falls into micro management or into a tech lead role. As soon as a manager starts getting involved in technical decision it usually goes against the tech lead of the team or architect. If a manager asks for status updates constantly it's pure micro management and against the Project Manager.

In other words, conflicts between peers, firing/hiring people and giving status updates on all the major issues is something that is hard to automate. We do need managers, but we need them to stick to these 3 things and that's it.

<comment> git-pull I glanced over, I didn't see the blockchain part.

But my point is that stuff like Aha, at a smaller startup, can articulate business goals / customer stuff to individual issues on Github/Pivotal Tracker. That in itself is a software solution that supervises itself.

Not every startup fits that. But I think if they were open to it they'd like it. There is a downside though, it's 74/mo _per user._ Ugh. That cost.

[https://www.aha.io/product/pricing](https://www.aha.io/product/pricing)

But agreed on blockchain in itself not making much sense in this case. The _only_ times I've seen it intertwined with issues was with open source, cryptocurrency places like Gitcoin.

> Other than that, it either falls into micro management or into a tech lead > role. As soon as a manager starts getting involved in technical decision it > usually goes against the tech lead of the team or architect. If a manager > asks for status updates constantly it's pure micro management and against > the Project Manager.

You articulated this a lot better than I could. This is where I've seen manager's occasionally can harm more than they help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just quit a job where I dealt with both self-managed and micromanaged roles, and I was much more productive (and better rewarded) in the self-managed one. I found I'm better at managing lateral relationships, eg data-scientist to data infra, or data infra to devOps, than being micromanaged on a ticket queue. I was surprised that I enjoyed fairly mundane backup or recovery tasks, because I could see user impact directly.

The micromanaged situation had strange priorities as well; the overhead of trying to figure out why we were doing so much stupid stuff just added to the frustration.

<comment><AUTHOR> My main goal is to drive more ownership towards Sr. Engineers so that they deal with a "VirtualManager" tool for micromanagement and some guidance for issue resolution etc, and only as needed with Director or Sr. Manager (for guidance or difficult conflict resolutions).. So the Sr.Engineer gets to be more entrepreneurial (in some way).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It depends on your engineers really.

If you have great team, who enjoys, uses or deeply understand the product and VALUES their craft then no you do not. However you have to empower this team with a larger degree of control than most organizations are willing to give. Product people need to come with goals, not products and hash out a way to get there with the engineers... Just because a product person wants to build "X" doesn't mean it is going meet the goal in the most cost effective way, and a good engineer might suggest something else to get to the goal that saves time and effort when it comes to building and running whatever the feature is that is being suggested.

</comment><comment><USER6> In order to be effective, yes, they do.

If developers are left to work on whatever they want, they end up creating projects that either have no value to their parent company or have value but don't get sold to anybody. Developers need managers to redirect their efforts in the most profitable direction. The main issue is that _bad_ managers have a strong negative impact and most managers on software projects are bad.

If you truly believe that managers provide no value, then wouldn't a manager replacement tool also provide no value?

<comment><AUTHOR> So there would still be Directors and Sr. Managers who would outline their vision for the product/teams, which would be further mapped to UseCase scenarios or feature Stories by Product managers.

"The main issue is that bad managers have a strong negative impact and most managers on software projects are bad."

>> precisely this is the main motivation of my Ask, to see that if tooling could reduce (if not eliminate) bad team managers..so basically only Tech lead or Sr.Engineers (who code up to a verifiable percent) would be part of the Engineering team which in turn would be managed by an intelligent "VirtualTeamManager" tool and this tool would be tuned with inputs from Sr.Manager and Director (of that team).

Let me know your thoughts further..

<comment><USER6> What do you think a tool would be better at doing than a person?

<comment><AUTHOR> This tool would not intentionally play politics or not be improved in short time (like bad behavior or ineffective manager) , and so the employees would trust it more than a bad manager.

Think of it like an "AI Manager", the tool could learn from various scenarios or data points across teams and bring some sort of management consistency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (I have no experience working in Software)

There is always the need of someone who has the bigger picture in mind. Task distribution.

And for the "large company" part. I assume that most large companies are still operating in and old-fashioned way of working.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, there needs to be folks (director and Sr.Mgrs) who look at big picture but my focus is more on the low/middle managers or even PMs. Regarding low level tasks the Sr. engineers can self create these tasks i believe for the goals they need to be targeting.

And yes, you are right in that the big companies are operating in the old fashion way and i was thinking of a implementing a tool that would disrupt that in some ways..:)

<comment><USER7> The practices indeed need a major revamp! Good luck with that my friend

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes.

Managers are useful for decreasing the non-programming brain cycles that devs are spending every day.

Managers can re-prioritize based on feedback from marketing/sales/CEO, wrangle issue trackers, make sure devs are happy with what they're working on, screen new hires, talk to customers, and lots of other non-programming things that a software team must do.

A great manager clears away the "boring" or tedious obstacles that get between great devs and the next iteration of the product. They also set the tone for the team, motivate individual members, and keep things organized.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonderful summary of a great manager (hopefully you are not a manager:) .. In practice, what % of managers would fit the bill as you described (esp. in larger firms) ?

<comment><USER8> I have no experience at large firms. At startups, I meet them often. But I also only choose to work with startups with good, employee-supporting philosophies, so I can't say how common they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A manager's role is three parts: information routing, training, resource management.

A manager collects information from a team and abstracts it to upper management. Upper management can then use this info to understand what the organization is capable of.

It's also the manager's job to understand where the company is going, what the strategy is, and communicate this effectively to the grunts.

They also relay and filter out information between departments. They help engineers understand what sales (and clients) want, and sales to understand what the product is capable of.

They suss out flaws, normally with people. Sometimes engineers might not be willing to voice out concerns.

The engineers might also want more resources, whether it's an outside service, hardware, more manpower. The manager looks at this from a higher level and finds the best solution. They appeal for budget increases and extend deadlines.

And if you have a really skilled dev turned manager, their job is to mentor and train. This is possibly the most effective thing a manager can do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, however, we don't have good managers (due to lack of maturity or experience) to fill the job description you laid out. If you take a survey of people leaving teams or companies, you will find that many people leave due to bad managements.

<comment><USER9> I supposed that's why management is paid more - the skillset for a good manager is rarer than that of a good developer, even if they are less critical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, but they pay the bad manager's "more" too, which is bad !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> git-pull At startups, senior engineers only need light supervision.

Their time should be spent listening to customers, directors, and other stakeholders to check if they're sorely missing things. They should keep lines of communication open and be proactive.

One thing we don't see often enough is the "Principle Software Engineer" role in startups.

At most startups, it's an open office floor plan. The data analysts, sales person, and marketer would come up to me with a request for something that was actually detrimental to their doing their job, but it wasn't getting focused on in our sprints.

At Boostable (W14), I was handling all server / e-commerce / front-end issues, _plus_ setting up systems for marketing and sales needs that wouldn't have otherwise been done. And it brought substantial value to the company, for low hanging fruit a manager would have kept kicking the can down the road.

The issue is, these proactive things were never recognized or appreciated the way I think they should have been. Heh. It's as if it the work being unofficial made it less valued, when the way I saw it, it was shared success.

If a programmer is impactful and setting the best practices for the team, they can report directly to VP/CTO. Less supervision. Mentor fellow employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great insights on the multi-faceted responsibilities of a Sr. Engineers especially at early stage startups.

So my query was whether tool(s) can help permeate some of this culture in a large company and thus reduce or eliminate the manager who would otherwise have been unproductive not only from the perspective of marketing or for the company, but potentially also have demotivated the Sr.Engineers or just in case he/she was not a good manager ?

<comment> git-pull I don't know if I view managers as having to do with marketing, we would try out _project managers_. This was after my time at the company, but they're sort of like manager's, except performing more of an organizational task, rather than potentially hiring/firing. They'd play more of a mediator between engineers and other teammates in the group dynamics.

Tools: at Boostable we had Aha ([https://www.aha.io/](https://www.aha.io/)). And we would have the founder Alex split the tickets up. Aha would disseminate the tickets into Pivotal Tracker ([https://www.pivotaltracker.com/](https://www.pivotaltracker.com/)).

Aha played a really big role in top-down delegation of tasks and equating them to business objectives. That software is pretty cool and I recommend checking it out, because I think in some cases it can make manager's redundant.

After that, it was autonomous. I created a lot of issues by myself directly in Pivotal (which probably lends to them not being recognized officially, since Aha was where the business impact was overviewed)

<comment><AUTHOR> cool, thanks for sharing your experience. Definitely a unified tool that would map Product Roadmap -> Deliverables (Implementation Tasks) -> QA verifications in a trusted manner could reduce dependency on dev mgrs, PMs and inturn give more ownership to Sr. Engineers..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am not sure I understand the proposal, it seems that you've categorized managers into 2 buckets:

1) Managers who add little to no value.

2) Sr. Managers who do add value (big picture roadmap, headcount balancing, etc.

I don't think you are suggesting (or even can) automate the tasks managers from bucket #2 are performing. As for bucket #1, if they aren't adding value can't you just eliminate this unnecessary layer from the company? Fire the manager and the team will presumably be just as well (or better) off? What is there to automate / produce tooling for? The non-value added tasks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct, however, Companies will not fire #1 overnight or even understand if they can do that. Through some tooling, these will be rendered as not required (with data points to prove), just like "Architect" jobs have reduced as Sr. Engineers have taken up that part as well.

<comment><USER10> What tooling are you referring to? I skimmed through other comments and didn't notice any concrete examples?

Do you envision something like project planning software?

I think a key point of a good manager is also people development. But I imagine engineers could self-organize mentorships.

<comment><AUTHOR> This tool will basically deal with Product, Delivery and Team aspects:

1\. Product Direction

a. Source in Initiatives (road map) , Product stories managed by Product/Project manager, Sr. Manager and Director thus providing inputs on the business aspects and requirements.

b. Tech Lead/Principal/Sr.Engineer provides feedback on 1a.)

2\. Delivery Mgmt

a. Stories will be mapped to Features for which the Architecture/Design (done by Sr.Engineers) would be reviewed/voted by team. Override of a technical approach (with justification) can be done by Principal/Sr.Engineer, however, this could be escalated to the Sr. Manager / Director by other team members (anonymously) . Sr.Mgr and Director would also chip in and provide their inputs if required and accordingly lead to a resolution based on data points, pros/cons etc. In this way, conflicts or ego issues can be minimized.

b. Feature will be prioritized by Tech Lead / Sr. Engineer based on comments from team or directly proceed to c)

c)Feature will be assigned to an Engineer for implementation

d)Feature will be verified by QA as well as Business lead/user post deployment or software release

e)Delivery feedback to be provided by the Product manager and Business user, this will be used to provide opportunity for improvement and/or appreciation of the effort (and hence motivation).

<comment><AUTHOR> One more thing, based on the votes for data points/issues, the tool would also provide recommendations.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the Kodi Box Took Over Piracy - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/kodi-box-piracy/ <comment><USER3> _" In the UK, Kodi boxes have garnered more attention from authorities, thanks to stingy soccer fanatics driving an early swell of adoption"_

This is very unfair. I don't own a Kodi box, but in the UK it's against the law to show football games on TV on Saturday between 2:45pm and 5:15pm [1]. So it's not "stingy" football fans, it's fans that have no other way to watch a 3pm kick off without actually going to the game itself. No matter how much someone may be willing to spend, a game being sold out / distance from home / time commitments etc. are all non-stingy reasons to not be able to watch a game.

It sounds like Kodi boxes have fulfilled that desire, rather than allowing people to circumvent a paid service as the article implies.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television#3pm_.22Blackout.22)

<comment><USER4> We both know full well that mass football fan adoption of the service isn't just to watch the odd game at that specific time on one day of the week.

You're right that it isn't strictly "stingy", but wanting something you've been denied isn't a good reason to take it.

<comment><USER5> The standard reason for not pirating is that it cost the producers money. In the case where they won't sell it at prices (some) people would pay for, who does piracy hurt?

<comment><USER4> I don't see "they won't sell it to me at a price I like" as justification for pirating it yourself as if it's somehow deserved. I would much prefer people use an argument not based on whether or not the cost means you should be allowed to have it or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a massive gap between the pirate service and the "legitimate" media service.

For one, you can just type something in, and get the movie you want. You don't have to navigate between 15 different services, and then find out the film is only available on mail-order DVD, or in other countries.

For television, the networks are _HORRIBLE_ about providing their content to cord-cutters. Want to watch the latest episode of Mr. Robot, which airs on Wednesday at 10pm? You're gonna have to wait AT LEAST until 9am on Thursday morning, WITH YOUR PAID SUBSCRIPTION. Or, you can pirate it for free.

I'm not sure how many times it needs to be said, but Piracy is not a payment issue, it's an access issue.

Also, companies being greedy is a bad look. CBS hiding Star Trek behind their proprietary $10/month service is going to kill Star Trek, because the intended audience sees it as a bullshit cash grab. Put it on Hulu you greedy bastards.

<comment><USER7> "not a payment issue, it's an access issue."

...

"bullshit cash grab"

So in other words, it's a payment issue?

Let's say you watch $100/month for cable, and watch about 3 hours a day. That's over $3/hour. $10/month for 4 hours a TV is cheaper than cable, it's ad-free (I believe) and it's more convenient.

It's expensive compared to Netflix or piracy, but it can certainly be argued it's not a cash grab.

<comment><USER8> You missed:

"You don't have to navigate between 15 different services"

I pay for Netflix, Prime, and Hulu -- I won't pay for CBS because there are already enough services.

<comment><USER9> Then don't expect all content. Netflix, Prime, and Hulu have more content than you can watch.

Just don't think that justifies pirating whatever you want.

<comment><USER10> Content isn't fungible. Netflix, Prime, and Hulu put together may have more content than you could ever watch (arguably, even just one of them alone does), but if it doesn't have the show or movie you want, you're boned.

I've had Netflix, Prime, and HBO for years. A couple months ago my gf and I really wanted to watch The Handmaid's Tale, which is only available on Hulu. Hulu charges $12/mo for their no-ad plan (hell if I'm going to pay for a service and still have to suffer through ads). The idea of paying $12/mo for a single show seemed a bit much to me... in the end I signed up for the free trial to watch it because I couldn't find pirated copies on Usenet.

Now Star Trek Discovery has just come out, and CBS wants me to give them $10/mo for the privilege of watching it. No thanks.

It's funny, because we've all jumped at the chance to "cut the cord" and ditch our cable subscriptions, but we've replaced it with the online version of exactly the same thing. We still don't have a la carte pricing for TV shows and movies for the most part. At this point I might be paying more per month than I used to for cable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just think for a second about the hyperbole involved in even calling it piracy. Piracy implies not only theft, which isn't applicable since there is no deprivation, but the pillage of a vessel on the high seas, and the kidnapping (and possibly enslavement, slaughter, rape, or drowning) of its crew.

I think that this (and a whole system of) hyperbole has made it impossible to even talk about it. _The MPAA and other similar organizations clutch to legalism, in my opinion, at the cost of revenues to rights holders_.

On-demand (Netflix, Hulu, HBO's online thingy, iPlayer, what have you) has been the most effective way to actually recover rights-holder revenues. If rights holders would standardize licensing, and allow a wide variety of distributors to make consuming their content more convenient and a better experience than torrenting, then their revenues would recover; and since there are more people willing and able to pay for a service like this today than when the recording industries came to be, revenue per head can be lower while still funding better content than ever.

Added: Another working model is paid DRM-free downloads. I only buy music in open and lossless formats, which in practice means Bandcamp, a few independent online publishers (like Hospital Records), and CDs. I pay for it because I don't want to feel used while listening to music, and I don't want to rely on ongoing permission to listen to something I've paid for explicitly. This is a different stage of the on-demand/streaming userbase, when they want to have a copy of a record which lasts longer than Spotify Inc.

<comment><USER12> > On-demand (Netflix, Hulu, HBO's online thingy, iPlayer, what have you) has > been the most effective way to actually recover rights-holder revenues.

And yet those same rights-holders seem hell-bent on squandering the opportunity they were given, by splintering their offerings among their own pay services instead of offering them multiple places. I already pay for Netflix. I'm considering paying for Hulu. But there's no way I'm going to pay Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, Google, CBS, HBO, Showtime, etc., etc., et- frigging-cetera just to get access to content I care marginally less and less about. (Sorry, CBS, I'm not paying your monthly fee just for Star Trek Discovery no matter how much you think that show is worth it.)

You have the content. People want the content. Offer it on your own services if you really feel that degree of vanity about it, but also offer it on enough other major services that any mix of two or three has one that has your stuff on it. _You 'll_ make more money, _they 'll_ make more money, and _I 'll_ get to watch everything I want.

<comment><USER13> > [...] but also offer it on enough other major services that any mix of two > or three has one that has your stuff on it. You'll make more money, they'll > make more money, and I'll get to watch everything I want.

I think the prevailing theory is that exclusivity and opaque per-provider contracts actually make more money. I am not sure if it is true or not, but as long as the content creators believe it is and the providers cower to them, there will be no transparency and there will be little cross-provider access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Argh, this must be so frustrating for the Kodi devs...! There really is a very strong case for running a Kodi-box for ones own legit collection, and now it's just mentioned for the (admittedly, probably) not so slight share of piracy.

MPAA and friends has turned their eye on Kodi since a while ago, like Sauron on the little hobbitses. Could this be a submarine piece?

<comment><USER15> > Could this be a submarine piece?

Considering that Wired is a legacy media (Condé Nast) publication, it's not inconceivable.

<comment> Digit-Al Who would financially benefit enough to pay for it though? There's no one big seller of the boxes and the software is free.

Edit: For clarification - I'm not saying it's impossible. I just personally can't see any obvious beneficiary. Would welcome any suggestions though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am adamantly opposed to the MPAA in every way. The movie and television industries act more like a colluding monopoly than a business. The prices and costs have risen much too high out of greed, and by some strange quirk, they're using the legal and regulatory systems to gouge the public. This goes far beyond just pirating television shows. It's Comcast, net neutrality, set top boxes, and massive media conglomerates all rolled into one.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone else have fond memories of playing around with a modchipped original Xbox? I know I do. I think I still have that thing somewhere in a box, XECUTER3 and all.

I don't think the article makes a big enough point about Kodi being rooted in XBMC, and XBMC being a project that started on the Xbox homebrew scene. Kodi's roots in XBMC are inherently tied to piracy, because every early developer and user had to chip their xbox, and they probably did that so that they could pirated games. That filters who is going to be contributing and using the project, so it's no surprise that movie and music piracy addons popped up with time when you consider that one of the first features of XBMC in the first place was being a launcher for pirated games.

Don't get me wrong, XBMC always has had a legitimate and legal use case, and Kodi certainly has a legitimate and legal use today. But the roots of the project had to do with piracy and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the project attracted piracy addons and continues to.

<comment><USER18> I have very fond memories of those days. I remember the first time I saw the Linux boot loader after a successful exploit using Mech assault, my buddy and I high five'd.

The project has obviously come along way since those days, and could probably not be as successful with Xbox in the name or with the stigma attached to it. Hence the rebrand. Their only chance at making it is to distance themselves as much as possible from the piracy.

The reason it's attractive to (pirate) plugin developers is that it's cross platform (they've already figured out how to get it on AppleTV for example), and a generic enough API. You can write Python to hit a webpage, find a URL, and tell Kodi to play it. Kodi has also solved distribution (repositories) and auto updates. I get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was surprised by how prevelant these boxes are. It seems that every second family with kids has these and are streaming media to it.

These families had no idea what torrents are, but were using pirated content basically every day and streaming it a la netflix.

It is the future of piracy for sure. I suspect it is many many times larger in scope that torrents are currently.

(BTW I do not have one of these.)

<comment><USER20> I know several people with access to Kodi that don't regard it as theft/piracy. They become pretty defensive when you accuse them of it. How do you think IP owners can adapt when piracy is made so transparent that it doesn't even feel like piracy anymore?

<comment><USER21> > with access to Kodi that don't regard it as theft/piracy

> They become pretty defensive when you accuse them of it.

I would too!

Kodi itself isn't theft/piracy. Kodi is a FOSS media manager that is extremely extensible. Several extensions enabling piracy have been created by third- party developers.

This may seem pedantic, but it is extremely important to differentiate between a FOSS media manager and piracy-oriented plugins.

<comment><USER22> It's not pedantic at all. It's literally the same as people running torrent clients on Windows and thus then calling Windows a piracy tool.

The term "Kodi box" really annoys me because the core tools that people buy these "Kodi boxes" for are 3rd party applications that happen to execute inside Kodi's plugin system but otherwise are not affiliated with Kodi at all. They're not even included in the Kodi's official repositories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It drives me insane that we keep thinking that digital goods should be treated the same as physical goods. It makes no sense to me that we think of distribution as "hard". Distribution is soooo easy, and it's effectively free. The only reason we have these gatekeepers in the way now (hbo, netflix, etc) is that we haven't figured out a way to fix our antiquated financial models.

I don't see "piracy" as a problem, I see it as more efficient in our current situation.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm sure all of these boxes come pre-configured with a VPN Service, but all the standard protocols can still be detected with Deep Packet Inspection, something I've seen AT&T do (and block) pretty effectively. I guess there area always the StealthVPN/Chameleon providers out there that try and mask the signature of "what" is going over the VPN - but enough of that and I'm sure they'll nix those connections as well.

<comment><USER25> DPI is a sham, most of those specialized HW (sold by pseudo IT security gurus) just assume that any VPN connection "is bad" and procced to block them, there is no way to detect a pattern on a (decently-configured) VPN, there is a reason China (the biggest investor on that this type of tech) is mandating Apple and Google to delete all the VPN apps on their stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would totally support micro-payments to content producers as opposed to the status quo. Until then.....Kodi all day baby! Cut the cord and never going back!

I, however, didn't buy one pre-packaged. I did it the "hard" way and installed it on a Rpi3. If only I could play netflix on it, it would be perfect.

<comment><USER27> You need the widevine lib but I was under the impression that recent builds of kodi could support Amazon Prime and Netflix content via plugins (valid accounts for both are obv needed)

[https://github.com/asciidisco/plugin.video.netflix](https://github.com/asciidisco/plugin.video.netflix)

EDIT: Reading the issues on the NF Plugin GH seems like you will need a heatsink for the RPI3 and you are prob only going to max out at 720p

<comment><USER28> > EDIT: Reading the issues on the NF Plugin GH seems like you will need a > heatsink for the RPI3 and you are prob only going to max out at 720p

Why, though? Isn't the Pi CPU the same family that's also in smartphones, where Netflix works even with the FHD (or Retina!) screens everyone and their dog puts in a smartphone?

<comment><USER27> It seems to be down to inputstream.adaptive which is the bridge between widevine and kodi. See all the decoding has to be done in software and atm inputstream.adaptive isn't refined/optimised enough for lower end CPUs such as what powers the RPI.

Remember that the rpi is designed to be cheap. The whole rpi3 board is sold for $35 which still makes a profit for the board manufacturers and the Raspberry Pi foundation. So "corners" had to be cut somewhere and using a less powerful CPU helps keep the cost down.

Note: The devs believe they will be able to get 1080p widevine protect content to playback smoothly sooner or later, but as of the last time I looked at it, that belief is a best guess, I dunno if they have optimised the code yet or if they have changed their opinion of if/when it will be done.

<comment><USER28> > See all the decoding has to be done in software

So you're saying that, basically, Netflix is leaving the whole hardware acceleration capabilities of any mobile SoC and most recent-ish desktop/laptop chipset on the table and does basically its own decoding from crypted bitstream to framebuffer?!

Who designed this crap?

<comment><USER27> Sorry if I worded it badly, I didn't mean to imply that all Widewine content is decoded in software on all platforms, just that's the way its handled on Kodi running on a Raspberry Pi.

Now i'm not a widevine "Partner" just a person with too much time on my hands and an interest in DRM. So for anyone who works on kodi or who is reading who is a widevine partner who's NDA's prevent you from correcting please forgive any mistakes. This is just my understanding of Widevine.

As I understand it on Android/ChromeOS widevine can decrypt and decode in hardware but I believe its done via a HAL.

As far as I understand it there are 3 security levels to widevine Level1 being the highest and 3 being the lowest.

Level 1 is where the decrypt and decode are all done within a trusted execution environment (As far as I understand it Google work with chipset vendors such as broadcom, qualcomm, etc to implement this) and then sent directly to the screen.

Level 2 is where widevine decrypts the content within the TEE and passes the content back to the application for decoding which could then be decoded with hardware or software.

Level 3 (I believe) is where widevine decrypts and decodes the content within the lib itself (it can use a hardware cryptographic engine but the rpi doesn't have one).

Android/ChromeOS support either Level1 or Level3 depending on the hardware and Chrome on desktops only seems to support Level 3. Kodi is using the browser implementation (at least when kodi is not running on Android) of widevine which seems to only support Level 3 (So decrypt & decode in software) and therefore can not support hardware decoding. But that doesn't mean that hardware decoding of widevine protected content can not be supported on any mobile SoC. Sorry if I gave that impression.

When a license for media is requested the security level it will be decrypted/decoded with is also sent and the returned license will restrict the widevine CDM to that security level.

I believe NetFlix only support Level 1 and Level 3, which is why for a while the max resolution you could get watching NetFlix on chrome in a desktop browser was 720p as I believe that was the max resolution NetFlix offered at Level 3 and we had to use Edge/IE(iirc) to watch at 1080p as it used a different DRM system (PlayReady) and why atm Desktop 4k Netflix is only currently supported on Edge using (iirc) Intel gen7+ processors and NVidia Pascal GPUs (I don't know if AMD support PlayReady 3.0 on their GPUs as I don't have one so not really had the desire to investigate, I'm guessing that current Ryzen CPUs do not as they currently don't have integrated GPUs).

On Android where Netflix's app believed Level 1 was supported it would request a Level 1 license and then Widevine would then pass the content off to the TEE for decryption and decode which would then use hardware for decoding. If it didn't believe that Level 1 was supported it would fallback to Level 3 which is why some Android tablets had to run a modified NetFlix app to force Level 1 requests because the official app wasn't tested on that device and was put on the supported devices list even though it did support Level 1 (running the modified app on a device that didn't support Level 1 wouldn't result in playback).

<comment><USER28> Thanks for clearing it up!

And... Jeez. What utter amount of bullsh.t and wasted money... everyone with a bluray drive and a copy of AnyDVD HD can create a perfect untraceable backup anyway so why do the studios insist on making the experience for Netflix users as bad as possible?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> kyle-rb >That ease applies to creating the piracy addons themselves. Since primarily all they do is find existing sites that host pirated content, grab working links, and present them in Kodi's user-friendly interface, Betzen rates the complexity about the same as creating a simple web page.

This seems like an oversimplification. Most sites that host pirated content want you to watch that content within their website; so they can get their ad revenue and mine cryptocurrencies while you watch. They intentionally make it hard to get at their content, so in most cases, it's significantly harder than "creating a simple web page."

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how these plugins actually works. With traditional pirate sites, the business model is usually clear cut: webistes get income from ads, uploaders get money from hosting services and the latter get the money from user buying their premium accounts. With torrents, there is some exchange, too - <USER2> downloader is a seeder. But in the case of plugins?

<comment><USER17> For live sports it's typically just scripts that extract media from the flash player sites like firstrow. They piggyback off the content from the ad- sustained websites, but without showing the ads. The sites like firstrow can't do anything about it because they are not actually hosting the streams themselves, they're just embedding players from various live streaming services.

For movies, etc., my understanding is that it's P2P a la popcorntime.

<comment><USER29> OK, so if it's P2P, wouldn't it actually make the plugin users liable for making copyrighted content available (in contrast to simply downloading the stream)?

<comment><USER17> I did some digging and I think I was wrong above when I made that distinction about live and recorded content.

P2P can be done for live sports via sopcast/acestream/etc, and (as far as I can tell) this seems more popular than the method I described above (eg: ripping content from live stream websites) for live sports, due to the quality difference.

In addition, P2P addons for movies a la popcorntime do exist, but the biggest addons that I have heard of: Genesis and Exodus, just rip content from file host sites.

But yes, if they're doing P2P, they're definitely liable to get letters. I think people overestimate the frequency of people getting caught for p2p file sharing, especially for live things that appear and disappear quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well most of my friend that have one those Kodi-boxes used to paid subscriptions for pirate-content IPTV providers for Roku but since Roku started to fightback and ban the most popular pirate content providers it was only matter of time before they find someone willing to sell them an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER25> This fight will end with Kodi removing addon support on the next version and some fork taking over the work.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have an Amazon Fire TV running Kodi. I use it for watching the original 26 years of Dr. Who; that's it.</comment>


Scam from 800 number about Apple account - <AUTHOR> I just got a 800 call, supposedly from Apple saying my account had been compromised. When it asked if I wanted to speak to an agent, I said yes, then I asked the agent to identify himself. I got an immediate hang up.  Scam.
The interesting thing is that on my iPhone, pressing the recent number got me to real Apple support.
I'm pretty suspicious, but have not seen an 800 number before or something that smooth. <comment><USER2> I can buy my own 800 number for $8, but more than than, I can type any number I want into the command prompt on an asterisk box and have it show as the CID on most phones right now.

I could literally start running this scam myself in 20 minutes for less than $5.

Caller ID is not a secure system at all. Anyone can type anything. Its like the "from" field in an email.

</comment><comment><USER3> Long-ongoing, FYI.</comment>


How rare earth metals rose from obscurity - <AUTHOR> http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i34/whole-new-world-rare-earths.html <comment><USER2> A few years ago, the Chinese producers increased the price of rare earths. Then the Mountain Pass, California was taken over by Molycorp, and a new process developed that didn't pollute much. (Even the Sierra Club approved.) Then an Australia mining firm got into the business, and companies using rare- earth magnets figured out ways to use fewer rare earths. The price of rare earths crashed, there was a rare earth glut, and Molycorp went bankrupt.

The Mountain Pass, California mine is still shut down. A Chinese company is trying to buy the assets cheaply. The current question is whether the US Government will permit this.

<comment><USER3> A couple of years back, when rare earth prices were high and China restricted exports, the media was full of scaremongering stories about how we gonna see our industry shut down, etc.

Turns out that prices are a strong signal to start mining. While rare earth sound like a scarce resources, they are essentially prevalent across the globe in very low concentration. The existing mines are usually places where the concentration is a tad higher. But once prices are high enough, a lot of marginal deposits all over sudden become commercially viable.

<comment><USER4> Same thing going on with oil really.

And i think that was the original intent of the "peak oil" term. Not that we had found everything we could in absolute terms, but that the ROI on extraction had hit a plateau (or something of that nature).

<comment><USER5> We hit peak oil later than planned because the rate of oil-consumption growth plummeted. The estimates were within an order of magnitude (which is a small margin of error you double your consumption every 20 years).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fortunately for us all regular free shipments of rare earth metals are now available:

cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

Simply deflect onto the approval-pending lunar crash site! Friendly robots will construct an Ore-some(TM) plant for processing and EM-powering fulfillment to the ZIP code of your choice.

</comment><comment><USER7> "As Evans alluded, the demand for rare earths could lead to their commercial demise. Access to the metals has always been tenuous, leading to worries that one day demand for them may outstrip supply."

I understand that starting up a mine takes many years, but if you are not under a command economy where the Bureau of Rare Earths "demands" 1 million tons of Neodymium per year and the mines only produce 1/2 million tons, the use of the word demand does not make any sense to me. I heard demand used in a similar way in the oil industry sometimes and I could never really figure out what they meant or have it explained well.

</comment><comment><USER8> There appear to be rich seabed rare earth deposits that are feasible to mine. [1]

[1] [https://phys.org/news/2013-03-japan-rich-rare-earth- deposits...](https://phys.org/news/2013-03-japan-rich-rare-earth- deposits.html)

<comment><USER9> I know it sounds terrible, but at geologic time scales, the sea floor is recycled at a higher rate than non-coastal land [1], maybe it's better to keep more land in a better state, if that's the choice? The sea floor is immense.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_crust#Life_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_crust#Life_cycle)

<comment><USER8> I agree there's much more sea floor than land area to use, and that it gets 'renewed' faster than continental land masses.

On the other hand, we know so little about submarine ecosystems - what might be important in sustaining humans, what isn't, how they get damaged, recovery times, etc. It seems much harder to get that info from sea bed sites than from land sites.

Complicated decisions with no apparent easy choices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fortunately those are not so rare...

<comment><USER10> Are Rare Earth Elements Actually Rare?

[http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/are-rare-earth- elements-...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/15/are-rare-earth-elements- actually-rare/)</comment></comment>


ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B - <AUTHOR> https://www.keypointsabout.org/blog/advancing-the-internet-societys-mission-into-the-future <comment><USER2> The major threads so far, from most comments to fewest:

"Save .org": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677)

"Why I Voted to Sell .ORG": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960)

"ICANN races towards regulatory capture: the great .org heist": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677)

"ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779)

"Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold to private equity firm": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297)

"Private Equity Is Going to Ruin the .Org Domain System and Screw Nonprofits": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622)

Did I miss any?

<comment><USER3> Here are a few more I posted that failed to get much traction:

Ethos/PIR Funded and Led a Scorched Earth Campaign Against Communities at ICANN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21659409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21659409)

The .ORG Sale Is a Radical Departure That Puts the Internet at Risk [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21659278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21659278)

Vint 'father of the 'net' Cerf dodges dot-org sell-off during public Q&A [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21659240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21659240)

This submission by almostbasic offers an excellent overview:

.ORGanized Takeover – a timeline of the ISOC, PIR & Ethos Capital Deal [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21630179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21630179)

<comment><USER4> Vint Cerf did a lot of good but he also worked real hard to undo his legacy over the past decade or so. Unless I'm really mis-understanding him I keep finding myself on the opposite side of what he's arguing for.

<comment><USER5> If this goes through, I hope this is all he is remembered for.

Like Hans Reiser.

<comment><USER2> That's beyond the pale. Please don't do internet hell here.

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

<comment><USER5> What other example can I draw from? Pragmatism is all I was going for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The time of .org as 'trusted' is over.

When a private equity investment firm buys something, they plan to extract value, they don't create value.

Ethos Capital was formed in 2019 [1]. Price caps were lifted before it was sold [2]. Combined with the billion plus valuation, something is sketchy. Even if you trust this sale, they could even resell it to a less trustworthy owner after increasing rates making a return on investment, that is probably the plan.

.orgs will be filled with extortion to good .orgs, and fake .orgs will be created which will create distrust about existing .orgs, and allow propaganda to spread.

There will be tons of malware and phishing going on when people think they are on trustable domains.

If they could buy .gov they would. Just more of the turn of the internet to authoritarian/corporate control over the internet's anti- authoritarian/public/independent roots.

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

[2] [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/private- equity-f...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/private-equity-firm- buys-org-domain-months-after-icann-lifted-price-caps/)

<comment><USER7> .org is an unrestricted gtld... You don't have to be a non-profit to register a .org.. you just need $10. So I don't know what trust you're referring to.

If you've been putting any trust into a website because it's a .org, that was your mistake... It's been unrestricted for a very long time.

Ethos changes nothing in that regard.

<comment><USER8> I trusted that some committee somewhere was trying to make an honest go of it with this Internet thing [1]. With the selling of ORG, I lost some trust in the administration of the domain name system. Most people already knew anyone could register a .org domain. That really wasn't the point.

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920)

<comment><USER9> That RFC never went into effect. Perhaps it is a good thing that the illusion of .org trust has been shattered for many.

<comment><USER10> I don't think I know anybody non-technical (and not that many technical people either) that has any idea what these ".com", ".net", ".org" things are or that they can mean different things.

Most people don't even know that there was an illusion that's supposed to be shattered

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ISOC is redacting its own meeting minutes. The part here about "PIR business" is about the sale of .org (public interest registry).

What the hell?

[https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of- trustees/minutes/](https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-trustees/minutes/)

Ctrl-f for "redact"

<comment><USER12> Ctrl-f for the involvement of "Goldman Sachs".

<comment><USER11> I actually missed that part but now the urge to facepalm is even greater.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I suppose the question is who will do something about this.

What group or individual is going to slog through the work of getting this investigated?

What group or individual is going to slog through a lawsuit?

Would the EFF take it up, or is it outside their purview?

Is there any hope of reversal/fines/prosecution? Will it hinge on intent? Does that intent exist, or was ISOC just foolish? If there was intent, can that intent be shown beyond a reasonable doubt? Or is there some rigid, incontrovertible rule that has been broken, such that intent doesn't matter?

All in all, it seems like such a stupid financial decision by ISOC (and one which goes _against_ their mission) that one can't help but presume some sort of foul play. But who knows, perhaps they just messed up.

<comment><USER14> An alternative "do something about it" option is to just create a new name system (either based on DNS protocols, or something entirely new) that is controlled by someone more responsible. DNS is just an internet application like anything else, nothing is forcing us to use it aside from its broad adoption and lack of support for anything else in modern applications.

What it comes down to is: who is both sufficiently dissatisfied with the way DNS is managed and has the clout to get a large group of organizations to move to an alternative? Or perhaps: what is the killer app that is incompatible with how ISOC runs things that would get people to switch?

<comment><USER15> > nothing is forcing us to use it aside from its broad adoption and lack of > support for anything else in modern applications

"nothing"

IPv6 should give you some idea how easy your "nothing" is to change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone have a clue if they'll manage to keep their 501(c)(3) status with $1.1 billion in profit for 2019? My understanding is that profits like this unrelated to their normal business activies are taxable, and may also cause the IRS to reconsider their non-profit status and/or levy penalties [1].

[1] [https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated- business...](https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business- income-defined)

<comment><USER17> The $1.1 billion isn't profit. They're selling an asset (the .org rights). That transaction should be entirely neutral in terms of profit/loss.

<comment><USER18> In what world are the majority of asset sales untaxed? Look at stocks, bonds, bitcoin, homes, art, gold, silver... All assets and all taxable upon realized gains and losses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the "Why I Voted to Sell .ORG" article

> This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing — so that > the Internet Society can provide much more substantive help to nonprofits > than merely leasing domain names, and with more continuity over time.

I'm really disappointed in this perspective - the mission is now growing outside of its current operations (ie conquesting) AND will now have a slug of cash which they've never properly managed before.

The Internet needs them to be conservative stewards but they want to grow outside of that.

Further more the article goes through "protections" that are in place for Ethos to keep prices reasonable. The issue is these protections aren't all contractually obligated and even those written are weak.

Of course private equity is going to get a return on capital on $1B invested. Their incentive is to push the boundary as far as it can possibly go to find the profit maximizing point.

Would love to hear more arguments for and against.

<comment><USER20> I read this as "everything has a price." Disappointing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sounds like a lot of money for something that should actually only be a minor administrative cost.

Something smells. Perhaps a few audits, some regulation and a lot more oversight by people who are less "enthusiastically driven by negotiable pleasantries" would help?

<comment><USER22> Domain names were initially provided free of charge. I once saw an estimate that put the administrative cost of a domain name at less than 20 cents. Then came "NewCo", now known as ICANN, and the "business" of "selling" domain names.

Verisign, the operator of .com, arguably the most important TLD, operates the com registry subject to agreements with US Department of Commerce and ICANN. These contracts now let them keep raising prices gradually. It is doubtful that these increases reflect or are in any way proportional increases in administrative costs.

<comment><USER23> When ICANN was founded, the DNS was almost entirely monopolized by Network Solutions who sold domains for $100 per year. The process was very manual and time consuming (think old-style TLS certificates). ICANN's purpose was to break up the monopoly by setting up the two-level registry/registrar system, by creating more TLDs, and by taking away some TLDs. Verisign, through various acquisitions and sell-offs, the descendent of Network Solutions, and still dominates.

<comment><USER22> I also remember it was $50/year for a time. A 100% increase/decrease. The fees were/are arbitrary and do not correlate to administrative costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Question: what even gives ISOC the right to sell it? IIRC, they were granted control by the US gov, but that is not the same as ownership.

<comment><USER25> Likely the same contractual basis that granted the transferal of Network Solutions to VeriSign via acquisition, which brought along control over .com and .net. There are probably terms that allow for the control to be transferred via sale in some manner. Ultimately, either way, the US Government allows it to happen; they could intervene if they cared to and make the sale untenable.

It's such a good rent extraction business that Berkshire Hathaway has accumulated 11% of VeriSign. Last year VeriSign's gross profit margin was 82% and their net income margin was a staggering 47% (a level you never see from major public companies, outside of rare cases like Visa or Facebook).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> You know what an NTEN in partnership with a mega tech company (e.g. Google) should do? Buy a TLD that replaces .org and seamlessly transition (for free for 2 years or so) every .org owner. It's not impossible to imagine a mass exodus from .org that the search engines, browsers, and DNS providers quickly respond to.

And give ICANN the biggest sign of how this should never happen again.

<comment><USER27> What about individuals like me? I'm not a non-profit. I'm a hobbyist who's been using a .org domain for 25 years, very nearly my entire adult life. My entire digital identity is tied up in it. I have hundreds of accounts and email addresses and subscriptions that I'd have to change if my mail domains suddenly became unaffordable. This is madness.

<comment><USER26> Yes good point, that is why a TLD which recognizes you as a non-profit would not be a good idea. You would probably be just fine with .org regardless of whether a more apt TLD is going to be created.

<comment><USER28> > why a TLD which recognizes you as a non-profit would not be a good idea.

.org hasn't been restricted to non-profits since forever ago (even when it was the restriction wasn't enforced). It was, until very recently, a TLD supposedly run by a non-profit as part of the Internet infrastructure so that people would expect reasonable pricing, unlike others.

> You would probably be just fine with .org

Similar to gp I built my identity around an .org (though not as long). I certainly won't be fine if Ethos decides to jack the price of my domain to hundreds of dollars per year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like a cash-out or a kickback. Still not worth any more money than ISOC was already making. ISOC should listen and row back on this decision.

There are more than ten thousand signatures on [https://savedotorg.org/](https://savedotorg.org/).

<comment><USER30> That's seriously a tiny drop in the bucket in terms of total internet usage.

<comment><USER31> That's only because most internet users don't even know what a domain is.

<comment><USER30> Then why would they care if the domain is .org, .com, or .xyz?

This whole concern sounds like a tempest in a teapot.

<comment><USER31> It matters, because large scale domain migration would have very serious consequences for users even if they didn't know what a domain is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This isn't a defense or a criticism of the decision, but it looks like the board of ISOC voted unanimously to enter exclusive negotations with Ethos - their minutes are available online:

[https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of- trustees/minutes/14...](https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of- trustees/minutes/147)

That could indicate that there's more background and context than has been published, since the outcry seems so contrary to the vote.

Either way there's missing public information and for an important resource like .org that's going to cause problems given a sudden change.

<comment><USER33> I don't understand what you're implying, other than "this thing exists".

Read those minutes, and you'll find that every "interesting" section is filled with redacted text. If anything, that should make any outside observer _more_ skeptical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What other TLDs does ISOC control directly? Why sell .org and not another TLD? Is not .org at the heart of the ethos of a free and open internet? This feels like an intentional corruption of ISOC to discredit it's future activity and thereby change the course of future mechanisms for control of TLDs by changing narratives, public opinion, etc. This is so odd I would not be surprised if it one day comes to light that there were State actors at play making sure this deal happened. To me it seems like a point of immediate international security to scrutinize this transaction and invalidate it if required.

<comment><USER35> Can you please elaborate on what you judge to be potential international security concerns in this case?

<comment><USER34> Outside of the recent TLD expansion (which presents its own ethical concerns similar to this one), TLDs are almost all controlled by governments. In an ideal world those that aren't should be operated as a utility and prices kept at a legal minimum to support operations, due to their critical nature for human communication and the fact they are natural monopolies. Anything that moves away from that, such as moving from a nonprofit control to a venture capital control, should be rejected due to the risk of pricing out legitimate users of the tld and other unregulated behaviors which might benefit a business but not the democratic nature of the internet (such as allowing for preferred pricing or other transaction details with certain entities, or anything else they can imagine and get away with). These concerns are compounded by the intention of the Public Interest Registry, which is to provide TLDs for nonprofits -- which should be proactively protected from predatory business practices. Further, the buyer openly plans on raising prices extremely fast and will definitely price out at least some of the most vulnerable users of the TLD, and introduce hardship on others. If you love the internet you should hate this.

On the situation of gaming the system by a State actor, obviously there has been a long standing push to get ICANN and the US GOV out of the internet infrastructure. Creating chaos, little, by little, lends credence to this push or another similar one. That vacuum would probably be filled in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, etc by easier government censorship, including (they would hope) more control over their smaller neighbors' internet. The current situation is of course not perfect, but one can see why subversive action could be a chosen path by any one of several state actors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The seizing of .org is a scheme. I hope the US government steps in and puts the crooks in prison. Seriously, removing the caps right before the sale is a scheme with ICANN people paid under the table.

</comment><comment><USER37> Here's the primary source: [https://www.keypointsabout.org/blog/advancing-the- internet-s...](https://www.keypointsabout.org/blog/advancing-the-internet- societys-mission-into-the-future)

<comment><USER38> "The Internet Society will receive this as a fund that it will invest as an endowment... This funding is sufficient to provide the Internet Society with broadly equivalent annual earnings we currently receive from PIR. And through responsible, well managed investment, we believe this fund will provide a comparable level of funding to the Internet Society in perpetuity."

Translation: "We sold the Internet to vultures (super-nice vultures! you won't believe how nice they are!) so that we could have... basically the same cash flow that we already had. But now we're going to deal with bankers instead of Afilias."

<comment><USER39> I wonder how good their investment strategy is that 1.1B will earn them $120M/year in income, that's nearly 11% return...

<comment><USER38> No, it sounds like they're aiming for $50M/year.

<comment><USER39> Which then, if so, doesn't really add up... how is $50M "broadly equivalent" to $120M??

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> And where are bigger news outlets to be found when it comes to reporting on this? Who besides those of us inside the tech bubble have even heard of the issue, much less would even care?

It reminds me of the struggle to communicate to the general population the issue of Net Neutrality. That issue seemed to enjoy MUCH more coverage and yet (anecdotally), all my non-techie family and friends still didn't know what it was.

Recently I sent a "story idea" submission to NPR to ask them to cover this issue in a way that can help illuminate the dark corners of this story to the broader population. Unfortunately so many of the other major news outlets are so sensationalized that I wouldn't trust them to report on it accurately.

What other organizations have a broad reach that we should be contacting to encourage covering this? I don't know anyone outside tech checking in with eff.org on a regular basis, and many certainly don't have save.org on their radar. Any suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER41> Translation: the annual max of 10% price increases are gonna happen.

</comment><comment><USER42> Can somebody help understand the pricing of domains?

Reading the threads, I came across various prices. In case of .com, I saw ICANN fees of $0.18, Verisign fees of $7.85, and then there are registrar fees, eg. Godaddy $18.17.

Is Godaddy paying Verisign or only ICANN? The reason I'm confused is that the threads mention domain brokers hoard domains because they are so cheap ($0.18?). On the other hand, I understand Verisign is operating .com, so they would always get their fees as well?

<comment><USER38> All domains go through the registry; for .com that's Verisign. So you can't get a .com domain cheaper than ~$8. Nobody is hoarding domains for cents, although domain tasting was a hot thing for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Really...what the hell do they do to deserve a 1.1b$ evaluation? Are they manually checking the validity of .org domains? What do they do??? Christ, this is just blatant corruption its so depressing

Why do they need to make a profit in the first place?? Do everything needs to be profitable??

<comment><USER44> They earned that valuation by having a monopoly on a desirable TLD. They don't provide that much value, this is simple rent seeking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> move you domains off isoc-controlled tlds as soon as you can. It'll probably take some time for them to actually raise prices. Use this time to point your visitors/search engines to your new domain.

<comment><USER46> What other major tlds do they own?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> A lot of comments in these threads talking about the "maximum price increases" as 10%/year.

There aren't any maximum price increases. .org can increase to $5000/name/year, or $50,000.

</comment><comment><USER48> Anybody can ELI5 me why it's such a huge deal? I mean .org does not have any special meaning for a while now. Anybody can have a .org. Most commercial entities don't do that because .org kinda implies "not business" which is contrary to the impression most businesses want, but there's no limitation on that if any commercial entity wants to have a .org, they can.

TLDs are virtually unrestricted now (not entirely but close to it), so you can have me.sexy and spaghetti-monster.church if you wanted to. I know there were price caps on .org, but frankly unless you're in heavy SEO/marketing game - which most nonprofits aren't - domain name costs aren't that major expense even for commercial companies. And dozens, now hundreds of TLDs are being managed by commercial entities without Internet descending into chaos and ruin. So why does the Internet world "despair" about this thing?

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't understand how a non-profit can be purchased. Virginia must have some strange corporate law.

<comment><USER13> _IANAL._

Wouldn't this be a sale of a non-profit's assets, rather than a sale of the non-profit itself? I see no legal reason a non-profit can't sell, e.g., a building it owns.

Everything else seems skeevy, but this particular angle does not seem promising for a basis of any legal proceedings.

<comment><USER49> The press release says "Ethos Capital's acquisition of Public Interest Registry from the Internet Society". Public Interest Registry says on its website: "Based in Reston, Virginia, Public Interest Registry is a not- for–profit organization created by the Internet Society (ISOC), originally to manage the .ORG domain." and has links to IRS Form 990.

It's possible that Ethos Capital is being imprecise are not technically acquiring PIR, but it certainly reads that way.

<comment><USER13> Ah, my mistake. Yes, that does seem... well, legally complicated, to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Ok, Read the story/read the comments - the 1.135 billion $USD got my attention. First "WTF?" was same as "corndoge": Who the hell is "The Internet Society?" Lotta reading... and then the penny hit the floor: "Ah! A bunch of clever boys in Cali got the US gov. to give them admin. of the ".org" domain name that folks used if they hacked/outbid/cheatedoutof their .com TLD? (I lost mine to Serbian jewel thieves..) It became the PIR, and the guys running it got to drop the $ from registrations into a non-profit, and claim administrator salaries, board seats, nice Cali. offices, and all the perks. But their was both risk and work involved, and the non-profit status, meant they cculdn't pocket profits and make a big score. But along comes this idea: They can flog the ".org" registry, and its recurring revenue-stream, to a "for-profit" entity that a couple of insiders create just for this purpose. "Whoopdedo" notes that dns data indicates each user of .org is valued at about $135. Based on telco and cable company purchases, that valuation per subscriber looks about right. The two insiders take the valuation data to moneyboys, and suggest that the rev. stream can be jacked maybe 10% per year, best case. The moneyguys agree to fund the deal into the 10 digit range, and the project gets the greenlight. The plan offers "The Internet Society" a massive payday, which as even their own pressnotes say, will give them the same revenue, but without having to do any work, deal with actual users, or take any operational or legal risk of any kind. As another users suggests - They can "raise awareness" from nice Cali. offices, and then break for lunch.

But the whole deal smells a bit of sulfur and hotwind, no?

Or did I miss something? How did the "Internet Society" get its "ownership" of the .org TLD registry? Did they buy it? If they bought it, then for how much? From my understanding, they just got given it, by the US Gov't., with a mandate to run it at cost, more or less.

So, as some suggest, there is a risk that the $1.1 billion could be considered a pure profit - which would seem to put their non-profit status at risk.

Also, by selling the very thing they were established to administer, that should maybe terminate their mandate, and one might also argue that the $1.1 billion represents funds that belong to existing .org registrants, and should be refunded to them all.

The "Internet Society" is not a for-profit corporation, right? So where do they get off by just wrapping up their administrator-role in a big package, and selling - without any bidding process even - to a couple of folks who promise to maybe raise the user-fees by 5 times the rate of inflation for the next few years?

How do "Board Members" of the "Internet Society" actually get to become "Board Members" of the "Internet Society"? Who appoints them? Shareholders? Not likely.

The note from the "Barnes" fellow is interesting. He was the "Security" guy at Cisco, apparently. Now, those guys at Cisco, I've heard of them. They sell all those American-designed routers that beacon all their traffic and meta-data back to the NSA servers. I'm sure that's a fine thing to do, as it keeps us safe from bad guys.

But when I look at the details of this proposed deal, I start to wonder who the "bad guys" really are.

I have an alternate "deal" idea: Fire all the "Board Members" of "The Internet Society". Tell them "Thank you for your contribution." and send them home. Replace them all with different folks who might be expected to have a better understanding of what their role should be. Just an idea. And it won't cost $1.135 billion USD. And it won't require the .org domain be re-priced.

</comment><comment><USER51> My thought is "and so what?"

Domains are a monoploy with outrageous fees for new TLDs. This is what should be fought and not the fact they one of the TLDs is under the control of yet another entity.

</comment><comment><USER52> Good, let them have it. If they screw over .org owners as everyone fears, then perhaps there will be increased awareness and incentive to use or develop alternatives to registrars.

</comment><comment><USER53> OpenNIC is looking better and better.

<comment><USER54> ISPs buying in were OpenNIC's stumbling block (as no normal user is changing their default DNS), ultimately that is why OpenNIC never took off.

The only way an alternate DNS could become popular is if Apple, Google or Mozilla (assuming a resurgence in Firefox popularity) were pushing an alternative DNS.

<comment><USER53> It's not too late. Eternal vigilance! I fight for the user!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Does anyone remember the dotp2p project to create a mobile-first decentralized DNS? Probably around 2011? The core ideas are still valid today it seems.

</comment><comment><USER56> I control a three-letter .org domain on behalf of a non-profit. Was offered $500K for it a decade ago, by a for-profit entity.

.org has never meant non-profit in reality.

Considering the non-profit this domain supports is 95 years old and the domain was registered in 1995, though, selling it and switching is a non-starter. Unnecessarily annoying times ahead.

</comment><comment><USER57> Anyone know what is the likely outcome if I pay in advance for several years to keep my .org domains?

</comment><comment><USER52> Who the fuck is the internet society

<comment><USER58> Layer 8

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> In my experience a lot of corporate and government wrong-doing is targeted/revealed around Thanksgiving holidays, so that people and the media don't notice.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is quite strangely written, but if I understood correctly:

\- they got $1.1 B for selling PIR \- the will build a new misterious endowment to manage this money,

right?

</comment><comment><USER61> Can Firefox and chromium give OpenNic a bump with DNS over https?

I am just learning about OpenNic, so apologies if what I said makes no sense.

</comment><comment><USER62> "This funding is sufficient to provide the Internet Society with broadly equivalent annual earnings we currently receive from PIR."

How is it possible to sell something for the value of annual earnings? That means that Ethos Capital will return their entire investment in 1 year — that's preposterous!

What am I missing? I can't imagine any business deal like this going through, it's clearly detrimenal to Internet Society which's going to lose a big regular income.

<comment><USER63> I'm sure this means if they invest the $1 billion they'll get annual returns equivalent to the money they get from .org

<comment><USER62> Thanks for the clarification: that, at least, makes more sense than my original reading.

Still seems weird Internet Society would move from maintaining .org to investing for no real gain, but at least it's not "preposterous" as I originally claimed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> There's slightly under 10MM .org domains registered, according to statdns.com. So each name is worth $135 to them.

<comment><USER33> That's actually not completely unreasonable, given that domain registration payouts are essentially perpetuities. If a popular, long-standing domain gets dropped, it's likely it'll just get picked up by someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Cool how technology allows us to decentralize DNS yet no one uses it.

</comment><comment><USER66> they should have auctioned it... and get 10x more

<comment><USER67> i think the point was to sell it to friends at a discount

<comment><USER68> Specifically at a 10x discount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Time for blockchain based DNS.

</comment><comment><USER70> Well thank God: wasm.org already forwards to webassembly

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to copy and paste my own comment from 7 days ago, because I think the quote contained within the Register article is so damning.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21612033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21612033)

Some further background on what happened. I don't see how this can be interpreted as anything other than corruption, plain and simple.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_s...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_shambles/)

"Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade personally registered the domain name currently used by Ethos Capital in May and it was registered as a limited company in the US state of Delaware on May 14. That date is significant because it is one day after ICANN indicated it was planning to approve the lifting of price caps through its public comment summary.

As such it appears that the plan to purchase the .org registry was predicated on the price caps going ahead and that those behind the deal had intricate knowledge of ICANN's internal processes."

<comment><USER71> Is this potentially illegal?

<comment><USER72> Self-dealing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note that I've not found confirmation of this story and hope that someone has a second source.

<comment><USER23> Also reported at [https://domainnamewire.com/2019/11/29/ethos- paid-1-135-billi...](https://domainnamewire.com/2019/11/29/ethos- paid-1-135-billion-for-org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> So they expect to be able recoup that billion dollars. There's no way that's going to be done without screwing everyone.

</comment><comment><USER74> just fucking wow. ISOC didn't need that money, the internet is fucked. We need to start working to decentralize naming. I loved the internet before ICANN and DNS. We fucked and built a monster.

<comment><USER75> What was pre dns like? Just ip addresses?

<comment><USER58> No there was a hosts file. DNS solved the problem that the file was getting too large and took too much admin overhead to copy around.

<comment><USER76> Maybe this event will force us to take alternative dns more seriously. Maybe OpenNIC, Namecoin or other related technologies I'm not aware of will finally gain more traction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> DNS need to move to blockchain. End this shenanigans with centralized ownerships.

<comment><USER78> Public key crypto as used by tor is probably a satisfactory level of decentralisation without all the extra steps and inevitable fraudulence from blockchain types.

Convincing people to use alternate resolvers is the real problem. Already chrome has stripped out most of a URI, and from memory they are planning to go further, changing public perception around an "ugly" address is very much a social challenge rather than technical.

<comment><USER79> Tor also allows everyone to keep an URL instead of having to worry about being outbid or just being able to pay anything.

<comment><USER78> Exactly, it's a fair and equitable process, I have my doubts about the various blockchain implementations despite being quite close to some of them. If you are a company with branding needs you can always go the facebookcorewwwi.onion route.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia founder to fight fake news with new Wikitribune site - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-to-fight-fake-news-with-new-wikitribune-site?CMP=edit_2221 <comment><USER2> Covered at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14189688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14189688)</comment>


Ask HN: Btrfs or ZFS on Linux in production? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> ZFS but, tune it properly by limiting the size of ARC and buy some SSDs to use as both log devices and cache devices.

Also, do not buy any controller cards that will get in the way of ZFS talking directly to the disk (such as Dell PERC cards), where you see a "virtual" disk instead of the real one, it will affect performance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding the ARC, is zfs not as efficient about evicting the cache as, say, ext4? With ext4 I've never had to worry about it consuming as much memory as it pleases.

Thanks for the tips!

<comment><USER2> My layman's understanding: under Linux the ARC is not integrated into the usual Linux caches which are unified and which the kernel understands. So basically the ZFS ARC is a separate chunk of RAM, which can grow and grow (thus you need to limit it) and it won't be evicted as perfectly as the kernel would evict stuff cached on xfs or ext4 filesystem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> They are both check-summed and copy-on-write.

This is great for consistency and storage, but the first part somewhat sucks if you've built it into your layer as well (like hadoop fs). And it makes writes & reads a tiny bit slower than it should be.

They have fat xattr inodes, which is great if you use it - but useless if something like SELinux means nothing to you.

The point where they truly excel is in a multi-disk scenario.

And in that land, the zpool array implementation makes it awesome to introduce an SSD+HD mixture with nearly the best of both systems.

BTRFS doesn't have that yet (well, bcache on the lower layer, perhaps).

But as someone who's fired up debugfs a bit too many times, if you really don't know which one you need, pick the one that ships with your distro!

<comment><AUTHOR> > And in that land, the zpool array implementation makes it awesome to > introduce an SSD+HD mixture with nearly the best of both systems.

With an array of half SSDs and half HDs, can I configure ZFS so that I never hit the IOPS bottleneck of the HDs? How do you recommend configuring the array?

<comment><USER3> I have never used a setup like that - all I've done is throw an SSD in front of 3 disks.

That said, the zfs log and zfs cache command supports mirror disks for log and allows more than 1 cache per pool.

Using more than 1 SSD as a cache (and of course, using mirrored logs for safety) would be recommended if you had a production box with this.

To repeat, I have never tried ZFS-on-Linux anywhere near a production setup - but if I had to, I would use multiple SSDs just in case one locks up its firmware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Choose extfs every time. btrfs is bloated.

x220:~/tmp/linux-3.13.2/fs/ext4$ ohcount . Examining 39 file(s)

    							  Ohloh Line Count Summary

    	Language          Files       Code    Comment  Comment %      Blank      Total
    	</comment><comment></comment><comment>----  -----  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---
    	c                    37      31707       8586      21.3%       5038      45331
    	make                  1          8          3      27.3%          3         14
    	</comment><comment></comment><comment>----  -----  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---
    	Total                38      31715       8589      21.3%       5041      45345
    	x220:~/tmp/linux-3.13.2/fs/ext4$ cd ..
    	x220:~/tmp/linux-3.13.2/fs$ cd btrfs/
    	x220:~/tmp/linux-3.13.2/fs/btrfs$ ohcount .
    	Examining 81 file(s)

    							  Ohloh Line Count Summary

    	Language          Files       Code    Comment  Comment %      Blank      Total
    	</comment><comment></comment><comment>----  -----  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---
    	c                    79      77101      13378      14.8%      13025     103504
    	make                  1         15          0       0.0%          4         19
    	</comment><comment></comment><comment>----  -----  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---  </comment><comment>---
    	Total                80      77116      13378      14.8%      13029     103523

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be surprised if btrfs was smaller. Its feature scope is significantly wider.

The btrfs performance isn't at par yet either, but I'm particularly interested in filesystem-level compression which isn't supported in ext4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Both have good features, both will be useful and interesting in a few years.

Right now I'd not trust either of them, in production use. Even if you never spent 60 minutes restoring backups both filesystems are too new for me to trust, with my conservative tendencies.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My understanding is that btrfs is the likely successor to ext4, but that zfs on linux is further along and more featureful.

Are there any data integrity, performance, or other issues to beware of?

</comment><comment><USER6> I would go with ZFS, at least for now. BtrFS is getting there but i wouldn't use it production just yet,</comment>


Comparing battery usage of SVG and Video on iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.appsandcats.com/comparing-battery-usage-of-svg-and-video-on-ios/index.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting! I really expected the results comparing rendering SVG vs playing m4a, but m4a vs static image being the same? that's cool :)</comment>


Chile offers entrepreneurs a program that includes $40,000 of free equity - <AUTHOR> http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110831/SMALLBIZ/110839984

<comment><USER2> Phenomenal program in an incredible country. To anyone thinking about applying -- just do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> As a part of current batch, totally agreed!</comment></comment>


The Brexit and Trump elections was a big data exercise - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win <comment><USER2> The military are playing tricks on the population hacking your minds more than you realise. They are running so many sock puppets to manipulate people, they even released the Pizzagate story just to keep Clinton out of office. These politicians don't even know they are being manipulated. How anyone can not arrive at the logical conclusion the military want to know and understand anything that might prove to be a risk, is beyond me.</comment>


Massively speed up Time Machine backups - <AUTHOR> http://www.mackungfu.org/massively-speed-up-time-capsule-time-machine-backups <comment><USER2> This seems like a bad idea...

You almost assuredly do want to use low priority, throttled I/O for time machine backups. (see IOPOL_THROTTLE) Why? Because it prevents backups running in the background from interfering with foreground applications.

Honestly, if you're interacting with an app in the foreground then you almost certainly don't care how long the backup is going to take, and you almost certainly do care if the backup makes your app slower. And if you walk away from the computer then the backup's I/O will run unimpeded and unthrottled, i.e., fast.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most apps don't use a high queue depth and so waste a lot of SSD performance. With SSD a QD up to about 8 is free.</comment>


Show HN: Supercharge your front-end skills by building real projects - <AUTHOR> https://www.frontendmentor.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

I'm a Front-end/JavaScript developer and web development instructor at General Assembly in London. Over the years I've seen lots of students who struggle to find projects to practice on once they've learned the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

So I built Frontend Mentor as a place where people can come to improve their front-end skills whilst using a real-life workflow. Each challenge provides mobile & desktop designs, assets, starter code, project brief, and a front-end style guide. The rest is up to the individual.

All challenges are free and there's a Slack community if you need any help on one of the projects.

I've literally just launched this last week, so I'd love some feedback if you can spare the time.

Thanks for taking a look!

</comment><comment><USER2> I like the idea, and congrats on the launch!

The resource page you put together looks high quality.

One suggestion is to make each challenge focus on one thing, like flexbox (or even layout in general), font etc. I saw you are giving feedbacks on twitter, which is awesome. Maybe you could collect all the solutions and your feedbacks for each challenge, present them nicely on your site, and maybe also highlight what can be learned from each of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! The next stage will be to build out an actual web app where users can submit solutions and see each other's work easily and comment.

Now that I've got people doing the challenges, I'm talking to them to see exactly what they feel would improve the offering. The points you made about the solutions being visible is a common one already. At the moment people just post the URL in the Slack community or on Twitter.

Thanks again for your comment!

</comment></comment><comment> hashim-warren I like this project. It's hard to find high-quality mockups that are free for learners like me to use

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hashim, really happy you like the project. I'm looking forward to seeing your solutions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for your effort. I am tackling the first project right now!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome, looking forward to seeing your solution!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you plan to monetize it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ghyslain. Yeah, I do plan to monetize it. But I want to keep the challenges free to download/start for everyone.

The goal is definitely to try to move this towards being a full-time thing, as opposed to a side project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats on shipping! I was looking for something like this...

Is it possible to get feedback on the built-code? Do you have any feature down the line that will let people submit "solved" challenges and get feedback on their code from real front end developers?

That way, it would help catch bad coding practices early... or maybe you could include a standard solution with each challenge, kind of like how PluralSight courses have a "Before" and "After" folders, with the "After" folder containing the completed code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

At the moment anyone who finishes a challenge can post in the Slack community for others to see and comment on. The next stage will be to build out a web app where users can submit solutions for others to view and comment on.

The problem with including a solution is that I don't want it to become a crutch. It would be too easy for people to just look at the solution when they hit an issue, instead of debugging and asking questions. My aim for the challenges is for people to learn by using a real-life workflow, so having a solution available doesn't feed into that.

Perhaps when the web app is up there could be some notion of "Done", at which point a solution would be made available.

I'm open to ideas on this, because I've been going over it a lot and talking to users and still not found a good path.</comment></comment>