Information Leaks via Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.07421 <comment><USER4> We've addressed the issues disclosed to us, and if you try any of the 5 POCs in the paper you will find they no longer work in the latest Safari. Details of the fixes here: [https://webkit.org/blog/9661/preventing-tracking- prevention-...](https://webkit.org/blog/9661/preventing-tracking-prevention- tracking/)

There may be room for more improvement here but be aware what the POCs illustrate is not an active vulnerability any more.

In addition, we don't believe this channel was ever exploited in the wild.

(If anyone is aware of other issues in this area, I encourage you to practice responsible disclosure and report to Apple or to the WebKit project.)

<comment><USER5> If only we had the same level of transparency in native apps. At least in Chrome, Firefox, Safari - you have dedicated large groups of engineers thinking about privacy, security and stability. Compared to native iOS/android where you get isolated groups of developers able to exploit and track with little to no visibility from end users - let alone access to source code for review by third party software engineers like we have on the web.... it's madding that apple doesn't invest more in its browser and yet pretends to care so much about privacy - of the major three browsers - apple definitely _seems_ to underinvest when it comes to web technology...

<comment><USER6> > _It's madding that apple doesn 't invest more in its browser and yet > pretends to care so much about privacy - of the major three browsers - <USER2> > definitely _seems_ to underinvest when it comes to web technology..._

Well, WebKit came from Apple's work on KHTML. So Safari, Chrome, Edge ...

 _"KHTML and KJS were adopted by Apple in 2002 for use in the Safari web browser. Apple publishes the source code for their fork of the KHTML engine, called WebKit. In 2013, Google began development on a fork of WebKit, called Blink."_

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

That's not that long ago in browser families, and 2002 - 2013 is 11 years of investment in web tech that now everyone else built on. And they didn't stop investing.

Some of those investments:

\- It's mostly been the least battery hungry modern browser (by a long shot) on the most wished for dev laptop, and in many cases, the highest performance.

\- The bookmark and tab sync across devices is seamlessly slick. I regularly end up maxed on tabs (it's in the 100s of tabs open at once) and can access any / all of them across all devices sharing iCloud account. Also appreciate that across all kinds of devices, you can save all open tabs to a folder of tabs, then close all tabs, and immediate get at those 300 tabs in the bookmarks from another machine. All those bookmarks are searchable too. None of this slows it down.

\- Built in reader mode works beautifully. Reading List is there too.

\- Saving a web page to file can save clean reader views into full length PDFs. They're amazing!

\- Interacts with keychain, essentially has LastPass "built in" if you let it store passwords on your keychain.

\- While I miss UBlock Origin, ad blockers like 1BlockerX work great across iPad, iPhone, and MacOS. (See also AdGuard for Safari.)

\- ITP performs better than one would expect for something you don't think about at all, while not breaking most banks, which I appreciate.

\- Safari never kills my iPad, iPhone, or Mac. Once in a blue moon a terrible site makes me 'eject' Safari from running apps on iOS. Launch it again, and all your tabs etc. are fine.

There's a lot to like, except it's not super tweakable, or basically "it's not Chrome". Even there, most devs or tech geeks who grump at Safari and reach for Chrome, have no idea of the lineage.

Doesn't seem fair to call it under-invested in.

<comment><USER7> Hey hey, "Google Chrome" (+ MS Edge) is not everyone else. Firefox exists and is based on Gecko, which is based on Netscape, they've had a separate and unbroken lineage for 23 years now.

Apple's OSS work tends feel well-made (I use CUPS on Devuan, they own that), but they are not and will never be "The One True Web Tech Makers".

Still, they're the biggest ones on the market as of today, if you count their offspring, Blink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reposting from the other [1] thread:

Basically Safari keeps track of which domains are being requested in a 3rd party context (i.e. I load example.com in my browser and the page loads the facebook sdk - Safari increments a counter for facebook by 1). Once a given domain reaches 3 hits, Safari will strip cookies and some other data in 3rd party requests to that domain.

The problem is that advertisers can use this to fingerprint users: register arbitrary domains, make 3rd party requests to them, and detect whether or not that request is having data stripped. Each domain is an additional "bit" of data.

This is similar to "HSTS Cookies" [2] and also to issues with Chrome's XSS auditor, which is why it was removed [3].

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22120136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22120136)

[2]: [https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/02/02/anatomy-of-a- bro...](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/02/02/anatomy-of-a-bro..).

[3]: [https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1220021377064849410](https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1220021377064849410)

<comment><USER9> Please don't copy/paste comments on HN. It lowers the signal/noise ratio and makes for pain when we go to merge duplicate threads. If you want to refer to something you posted elsewhere, please use a link.

Better still, when you see a split discussion, email firstname.lastname@example.com so we can merge them. We'll make sure your comment ends up in the winning thread.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20copy%20merge&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER10> This policy is odd.

The link could die, the text at the link could change, or the comment at the link could be deleted. Not to mention a comment section full of links is ugly and unreadable.

StackOverflow has the exact opposite approach because they don't want their site riddled with dead links.

How many people will care enough to send an email to have a comment merger? That really isn't a solution to whatever "problem" this is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a fundamental difficulty when trying to implement privacy: A limit on the disclosure of information is _itself_ a disclosure of information.

A good privacy design needs to confront this issue directly. Sometimes there's nothing to be done. I think in some cases it's mathematically unsolvable (cf. Cynthia Dwork's paper on Differential Privacy). But an explicit consideration can at least surface some trade-offs. The more fine-grained and selective your redactions, the more information they reveal.

<comment><USER12> It makes me think of password requirements. Isn't it bad to earmark a password as requiring certain things rather than to let the possibilities be completely open?

<comment><USER13> From a strictly mathematical view, yeah. Requiring that certain character classes exist in the password will shrink the search space for that password.

But: (1) only a tiny teeny little bit, and (2) the gains in password complexity are probably worth a lot more.

Imagine you have a site that allows numeric PINs between 4 and 6 digits. And another site that requires exactly 6 digits.

Technically, the search space is larger for the first site. An attacker would have 1,110,000 possible codes to check, whereas the 2nd site has 1,000,000. But ensuring that all users are in the 1,000,000 search space is worth it to prevent some users' 4-digit PINs being cracked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Last time Google researchers made similar discoveries, 2012, it was used to ... track users :-)

[https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/21/microsoft-google-is- also-b...](https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/21/microsoft-google-is-also- bypassing-ie-privacy-settings/)

"We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It's important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information."

and bypassing IE third party cookie protection: "impractical to comply with Microsoft's request while providing modern web functionality." Google says complying with tracking protection is Impractical!

</comment><comment><USER15> Haven't read TFA yet, but at first glance this sounds similar to the approach used by the "Privacy Badger" browser extension - if it sees the same tracker on multiple sites, it "learns" and begins blocking it. Would it also be susceptible to similar information leaks with this threat model?

<comment><USER16> Yup

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been following privacy issues and technology for a while, but haven't come across a foundational discussion of (a) the merits of and (b) technical implementations of different approaches to avoid fingerprinting:

"hiding" vs "blending in"(making me look identical to countless others - <USER3> even randomizing who I look like in a smart way).

I wonder if any subject area experts reading this thread would be willing to share a summary of their knowledge and thoughts here.

<comment><USER18> There are countless add-ons to stop fingerprinting, ad-tracking, disable WebRTC, and force things such as HTTPS. As you've touched on above, these add- ons can be used as unique identifiers to attach your activity to your 'profile'.

Just a thought: I think the route Mozilla is taking is where the industry is heading. More open-source/transparency means more privacy protections for the user. If we get to the point where every browser has built in security features, fingerprinting becomes more of a challenge.

Websites themselves could provide the functionality of a data broker. I am perfectly okay if I get suggested products by a company that already has my data.

In my honest opinion, the current landscape is more than hostile towards the average user and needs immediate course correction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Conversely, Chrome is heading in the right direction:

>Chrome plans to more aggressively restrict fingerprinting across the web. One way in which we'll be doing this is reducing the ways in which browsers can be passively fingerprinted, so that we can detect and intervene against active fingerprinting efforts as they happen. [0]

This will include things like restricting the volume of Browser API checks allowed, etc, to reduce the number of bits that can be used in a fingerprint.

[0] [https://blog.chromium.org/2019/05/improving-privacy-and- secu...](https://blog.chromium.org/2019/05/improving-privacy-and-security-on- web.html)

<comment><USER20> Chrome is just trying to start catching up to where Safari and Firefox are.

<comment><USER21> Chrome is restricting fingerprinting, but they still ship google analytics in the browser itself so it's harder to block.

They'll only really block fingerprinting in their browser when they have no use for it.

<comment><USER22> I do not see connections on my network to google when I open and browse to 3rd party sites.

Can you show me that's true? If it is, that's fairly interesting.

<comment><USER21> Look in the inspector of a page using GA, and you'll see it's served from within the browser, rather than as a download from the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow. I understand ITP's high level design, but didn't know it's implementation is so naive. Maintaining global database with a few rules which can be easily reverse engineered and giving its access to any documents? How did it go through the internal review process? Does Apple have any privacy/security review process for its major products?

I understand that privacy engineering is _very_ hard and sometime can get not very obvious with implicit statistical dependency chains, but this kind of direct problem could (or should?) be caught in an early stage of design. Anyway, ITP is all about privacy and deserves attentions from dedicated privacy engineers.

<comment><USER24> Things started getting explicitly dangerous a couple years ago, internally we always did no wrong, externally, everyone was praising us for being the one company focused on privacy...when pretty much everyone who cared to think about knew why we didn't encrypt iCloud backups, and knew we were collecting app store searches, News articles viewed, and location for ad targeting (this is easily found in public documentation). I left shortly after I realized how little my colleagues knew, cared, and were willing to think about it – a manager on Safari refused to believe that data was being collected, refused to read our documentation on it, and told those concerned that we needed to read up on differential privacy. (note: that didn't apply at all in the conversation, they werr reaching for buzzwords they remembered)</comment></comment>


Economics Behaving Badly - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15loewenstein.html?_r=2&hp <comment><USER2> One thing I think is interesting about this article is that it's written by a behavioral economics professor. I probably wouldn't have noticed if I didn't have so many friends who took his class. I think it makes his case stronger and am surprised that fact was not drawn out in the article.</comment>


Bill Watterson: How to Find Your Life's Meaning - <AUTHOR> https://betterhumans.coach.me/bill-watterson-how-to-find-your-lifes-meaning-3bc6a17be275 <comment><USER2> I love Bill Watterson and Calvin and Hobbes more than anything, and I appreciate the relatively uplifting message in the midst of all of the recent bad news, but this is just a shitty medium list-ified version of his Kenyon College speech with zero insight of the author's.

If you want to read the actual speech, it'd be better to head to [http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H- speech.html](http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html)

<comment><USER3> I was going to post that same link to the speech before I saw you already did.

And yes, the medium post doesn't seem to introduce any particular Author's "best ideas" (which is was it is advertised), apart that of using Bill Watterson's name in the title and citing parts of his [1990] speech with some bolding here and there (without even providing the source).

I was expecting a new interview with Bill Watterson ...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Way to Transition from Here? - <AUTHOR> I've been coding for 10 years now and used PHP and  JS frameworks as my tech stack. I want to jump ship and start using modern tech like Go or focus heavily on data analysis using Python (ML).
How do I get a remote developer job with this technology when I'm just starting out since the majority of the companies require some experience?
P.S. This has been stressing me out for the past few months because I feel like I'm stagnating already and I know that I wanted to move forward. <comment><USER2> I'd guess the same way you got your start in PHP/JS - if you're like a lot of people.

Do some personal and side projects in $newTech that you can use to show the required experience - then do the "word things carefully on your resume" thing, which emphasises both your commercial experience, and your $newTech experience, without explicitly claiming commercial experience in $newTech. Then wing it like crazy when you get an interview...</comment>


Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=365 <comment><USER2> I've long felt that Blu-ray is destined to be a niche videophile product. I'm happy to buy them, but I've got a high-end HDTV and sound system. Even then, most titles aren't dramatically higher quality than upsampled DVDs on my Oppo. Most people, on an average home theater, would have a hard time noticing the difference. With today's economy and the ubiquity of DVD players, it's difficult to imagine that there are many more people willing to buy a new player and pay 50% more for media. I suspect Christmas sales will be very disappointing for Sony.

<comment><USER3> >I suspect Christmas sales will be very disappointing for Sony.

Man, the way things look right now, I suspect Christmas/Holiday sales will be bloody horrible for pretty much anybody. Tough to have consumer frenzy when everybody's wallowing in red ink. Somebody better come up with an amazing must-have thing, or the media better change their strategy of scaring people to sell news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?"

Come on. That was absolutely obvious! People have leapfrogged HD/Blu-ray and gone to digital.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rotating mechanical disks are dead. Why would anyone want to use such a format when we can be using smaller and non-rotational multiple-write devices like Flash Memory on USB sticks or SD-Cards?

Discs of all types are dead. They will be replaced by non-moving part memory sticks.</comment>


BeamNG.drive – Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PAzk5HHVp7M <comment><USER2> I remember before bng the developers had an open source project called Rigs Of Rods.

Watching the original trailer for bng was surreal back then. The game was easily worth the money and works pretty good on linux with some messing around with Proton.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a good website to hire cheap freelancers for basic data entry? - <AUTHOR>

Thank you <comment><USER2> <https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome>

On amazon turk people will do tedious things for cheap.

<comment><AUTHOR> thx</comment></comment>


Congress, Don't Make Us Hitch Rides with Russia. Love, NASA - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/08/congress-dont-make-us-hitch-rides-russia-love-nasa/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be great if one day a paper incident happened and the budget for the NSA and NASA were switched?</comment>


Elon Musk has published an outline of his ambitious plan to colonize Mars - happy-go-lucky http://www.businessinsider.com/Elon-Musk-has-published-an-outline-of-his-audacious-plan-to-colonize-Mars-with-a-million-people/articleshow/59166030.cms <comment> happy-go-lucky Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14573837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14573837)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link is broke (404)</comment>


Startup strip-mines data from social media for landlords, employers and dates - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06/09/creepy-startup-will-help-landlords-employers-and-online-dates-strip-mine-intimate-data-from-your-facebook-page/ <comment><USER2> Would it be legal for a landlord to require an applicant to supply social logins? Wouldn't it just lead to people having double lives online?</comment>


Donesday – getting shit done like there's no tomorrow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/donesday/donesday <comment><USER2> If there's no tomorrow, I'm not motivated to clean my mess up, because it won't matter.

Then again, I have so many things half-done that working one day from dusk till down or the reverse won't help anyway.</comment>


Algorithm Reveals Secrets of Leaf Shape - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25117/?ref=rss

<comment><USER2> Bonus URL, on parameter tuning: [http://www.hvass- labs.org/people/magnus/thesis/pedersen08the...](http://www.hvass- labs.org/people/magnus/thesis/pedersen08thesis.pdf) (PDF, Tuning And Simplifying Heuristical Optimization (PhD thesis)). Via <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_swarm_optimization>

Someone may want to "cross-breed" those papers. I found Pedersen's interesting thesis via the picture he kindly contributed to that Wikipedia page (thank you; I used it for harmless, I hope, pedagogic purposes).

</comment><comment><USER2> Good find. Snippet:

 _In his model, the growth of leaf lobes is governed by the position of leaf veins. [...] By varying just a handful of parameters, Young can produce a surprisingly rich variety of shapes._

The issue of the shapes _not_ found in nature is also thought-provoking ...

P.S. Technology Review editors: <http://begthequestion.info/> , please. Thank you.

<comment><USER3> I read the article diagonally, and found no samples of what non-natural leaf shapes does the algorithm produce. Sad. But it is interesting that even complicated shapes like maple can be produced with such a simple model.

<comment><USER2> The editors' "produces one or two shapes not found in nature" may mean Fig.5a and Fig.6c, which are lacking the '[as] seen in' notes given for all others presented.

I'd say the author was going for showing that the model covered many (all ? ferns, etc.?) natural shapes. But both the issues of exists-in-nature-but-not- in-model and vice-versa should be interesting.

Perhaps the sets of "these parameters do not show up in nature" can give the bio-mechanisms researchers some hints.

<comment><USER3> I think those missing sets can be very interesting. I didn't realise these figures didn't have tags (I scanned the text twice, but missed them :/)

The problem of lack-of-space in journals justifies these kind of cuts, but you can always submit a longer version to ArXiV without any problems or restrictions</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Darpa Wants to Build Flying Aircraft Carriers - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/darpa-wants-to-build-flying-aircraft-carriers-1656851864 <comment><USER2> It would most likely have a very poor cost-effectiveness ratio. A surface aircraft-carrier expends no energy in maintaining itself, only for propulsion. Turn off the engines though, and a flying aircraft carrier rapidly becomes a surface un-carrier.

</comment><comment><USER3> I want to build flying aircraft carriers. Doesn't everyone want to build flying aircraft carriers?</comment>


Show HN: www.whorunscoinhive.com - <AUTHOR> Check who runs CoinHive, check Coinhive Site Key + Stats/Traffic and expose JavaScript Miner and CryptoJacker.
Today webmasters have the possibility to place code on their website to mine crypto currencies with your computer power. This leads to a high bill from your electricity supplier.
We are here to inform you, because we think it should be transparent to the website's visitor if he wants that, or not. Fair play! <comment><USER2> The domain names have been removed to protect the website visitors. Some of the websites deliver malware and so on and i guess its partially not so good to link to these sites directly!? What do YOU think? I think this guy is crazy: [http://whorunscoinhive.com/coinhive_id/FGZZeDbNg5AMpILuz8fKW...](http://whorunscoinhive.com/coinhive_id/FGZZeDbNg5AMpILuz8fKWI4UJqdNIxce)

This one guy running tons of adult sites ranking on Alexa...

</comment><comment><USER3> So the list of offenders contains _only_ those sites that run Coinhive in the background so the visitor is unaware?

[Note that the 'h' in Coinhive is lowercase, perhaps fix that on your site. Also, the site's title should be _Who runs Coinhive?_ and the text above the domain entry field should read _Let 's Expose!_]

</comment><comment><USER4> are the offenders not listed as link for a reason? I just saw TUI and i wonder if thats TUI.com for example.

Also great idea! May also make a Twitter bot to blame them (maybe try to use meta tags to @ them even, when availble)

This practice really sucks, and is just yet another reason to enforce Adblockers on users.

Edit:// Oh btw, what about coinerra.com and other related services?

<comment><USER3> When it was first posted, the list contained full URLs. I assume the OP removed the TLD to keep the list from being completely open source, perhaps to monetize it.

<comment><USER2> WhoRunsCoinhive is a nonprofit website... The links are removed because in some regions its not allowed to link to illegal ressources... But i guess in case these are big alexa domains its not hard to findout the domain names :)

<comment><USER3> Ah, that makes sense. Perhaps people could gain access to the full list with TLDs somehow? I was thinking that it would be useful for maintainers of blocklists for Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin and so on.

<comment><USER2> yes that makes sense indeed. how could that get implemented so that users are not able to click/move to that site but Orgs like Adblock Plus and Co can access them?

<comment><USER4> Makes totally sense now. Sorry for coming to wrong conclusions. Maybe make a "hidden API" where people need to contact you first and consent to receiving potential harmful links.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mutable Algorithms in Immutable Languages, Part 3 - <AUTHOR> http://tel.github.io/2014/07/15/mutable_algorithms_in_immutable_languages_part_3/

<comment><USER2> Half baked thought.. more looking for discussion. :)

I've checked out Rust a bit, and their approach to memory safety seems pretty novel, by statically tracking where a piece of memory is being used in computation and only allowing it to be used once at any point in time.

Seems like using Mem can bring back all those mutable errors in stateful languages, would it be possible to apply the Rust memory model to Mem?

Side note: #haskell on IRC is an awesome place to discuss PLT :D

<comment><AUTHOR> My understanding is that rust uses linear types. This could be done in a an embedded language in Haskell (even through just using Haskell's type system, albeit in a strange way).

Someone actually familiar with Rust should comment on what the typing systems used there actually involve, however.

<comment><USER3> _" (even through just using Haskell's type system, albeit in a strange way)."_

Tell me more! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can encode it in Finally Tagless Style [0] basically as an extension of the strongly typed de Bruijn indexed lambda calculus. Here's de Bruijn

        class DeBruijn r where
          z   :: r (a, h) a
          s   :: r h      a        -> r (any, h) a
          lam :: r (a, h) b        -> r h        (a -> b)
          app :: r h      (a -> b) -> r h        a        -> r h b

which might be a little easier to read in HOAS form (it's certainly prettier)

        class HOAS r where
          lam :: (r a -> r b) -> r (a -> b)
          app :: r (a -> b)   -> (r a -> r b)

Anyway, if you extend the idea of the tupled free variable environment denoted by the second parameter to `r` in the `DeBruijn` class above to have "unused" and "used" variables then you can enforce linearity. To do this we encode a "type-level maybe" demonstrating we may or may not actually have a type variable to use

        newtype F a = F a
        data    U   = Used

        class LDeBruijn r where
          z   :: r (F a, h) (U, h) a
          s   :: r hi       ho     a        -> r (any, hi) (any, ho) a
          app :: r hi       h      (a -> b) -> r h         ho        a        -> r hi ho b
          lam :: r (F a,hi) (U,ho) b        -> r hi        ho        (a -> b)

Kind of. Really it's a bit more complex since in order to actually execute statements of these types you need to do a bit more work. Creating evaluators for `DeBruijn` or `HOAS` is quite easy, but you need to do some type-level work for `LDeBruijn`. See the article itself for more.

[0] [http://okmij.org/ftp/tagless- final/course/#linear](http://okmij.org/ftp/tagless-final/course/#linear)

<comment><USER3> I'm definitely going to need to come back to this a couple ties.

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I highly recommend taking the time to read Oleg's entire Finally Tagless series. It is not easy material, but the technique is tremendous and his examples to explore it are packed with learning moments.

<comment><USER3> I shall!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reality Is What It IS - <AUTHOR> http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/08/reality-page-191.html

<comment><USER2> What if there is no way to perceive reality? At best we can perceive our own reality, but other people's realities will probably differ. So that reality approach might simply fall short of realities. I mean it doesn't give us a way to solve problems, because individual realities might have too many discrepancies to be resolved by pure logic alone.

The only way it could work is with the omniscient super computer that understands all of our individual realities and always choses the optimum common dominator. Not sure if we want that, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a convenient meta-narrative...</comment>


The Kid VC - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/13/technology/alex-banayan-vc.pr.fortune/index.html

<comment><USER2> >As he moves across town, he says, "I really only want to meet with entrepreneurs under 25. I mean, if you're 30, what are you doing at South by?"

Oh, that's nice. Is this _Logan 's Run_ or something?

<comment><USER3> I smell an identity crisis in his future in 5 years' time... especially if he's replaced by someone 5 years his junior at that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a beautiful irony in a 20-year old so quickly dismissing any entrepreneurs above the age of 30 while also discussing fake IDs.

(This guy sounds amazing. I just wonder where he's going to end up in ten years.)

</comment><comment><USER5> As a developer who has helped create some of the largest websites and projects and who is finally getting an opportunity to work on my own projects in his 30s. I would gladly push this kid off a cliff :)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is why America is making such huge strides in entrepreneurial ventures - because there are finally the old guys with all the money who aren't too proud to admit that there are people half their age with twice the talent. Going to a travel entrepreneur meet up yesterday in Paris really opened my eyes up to this cultural difference. (The French are too damn proud of their hierarchy!)

<comment><USER7> Isn't the story of VC over the last decade the mediocre return from the industry?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nope, no bubble here...

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting piece. Can a kid with pretty much no experience actually add any real value to a VC though?

<comment><USER10> Alex is the real deal! Never have I talked with someone and been so inspired! He has influence to source deals and has heard thousands of stories from entrepreneurs. I trust his expertise.

<comment><USER9> I don't know. I still feel like a VC is taking a big risk on a hot-shot young hustler like this.

<comment><USER11> Venture capital is literally all about taking big risks...

<comment><USER9> Truth. So in that case why aren't other VC firms bringing on young hustlers like Alex here to build relationships and scout out young founders?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's awesome that kids are in Tech these days. The discrimination against minors in the past was unfair.

<comment><USER9> discrimination? hasn't tech always been dominated by young people on the bleeding edge?

<comment><USER13> Would you guys please stop astroturfing?</comment></comment></comment>


Nerd Fitness: 20 ways to be better at life today - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2011/08/26/nerd-fitness-20-ways-to-be-better-at-life-today/

<comment><USER2> +1 for "Stop eating crap and start eating real foods – meat, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Cut the bad carbs, eat more protein and fat." but this should be #1 on the list. It's far more important than running.</comment>


Building the UI for the new the Times (of London) website - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@peduarte/building-the-ui-for-the-new-the-times-website-26dc4e6569e#.2iz44ceik <comment><USER2> I can't help but be thoroughly impressed with his execution, yet simulatanously being thoroughly frustrated if it was me that had to maintain a UI that was architected in this way.

<comment><USER3> What problems do you have with the architecture?</comment></comment>


.HEIC Photo Format is 50% Smaller than Equivalent .JPGs – with 500 Tests - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xtrp/heic-jpg-comparison <comment><USER2> Can I use it on my website?</comment>


Think Tanked (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.12/interval.html <comment><USER3> Sounds the ideas were good but too far ahead of their time - <USER2> infrastructure was not yet there.</comment>


EU Court: YouTube Not Required to Share Email and IP-Addresses of Movie Pirates - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/eu-court-youtube-not-required-to-share-email-and-ip-addresses-of-movie-pirates-200709/ <comment><AUTHOR> For the purposes of this law, the word "address" only refers to physical location and/or it's corresponding mailing addresses. Not at all how I thought this would play out. The ruling is linked below.

[http://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-264/19](http://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-264/19)

> Interestingly the EU Court says that obtaining additional information on > users isn't completely ruled out but such decisions are to be made by EU > Member States after balancing various fundamental rights, including acting > proportionately.

> "The Court nevertheless stated that the Member States have the option to > grant holders of intellectual property rights the right to receive fuller > information, provided, however, that a fair balance is struck between the > various fundamental rights involved and compliance with the other general > principles of EU law, such as the principle of proportionality," the Court > adds</comment>


Our Reddit Ad By The Numbers - Whiteyboard  - <AUTHOR> http://tinycomb.com/2010/07/19/our-reddit-ad-by-the-numbers-whiteyboard/

<comment><USER3> _With TechCrunch, LifeHacker, New York Times, etc (and any other blog), we usual generate about $1 per unique visitor_

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's conversion rates... but _darn_.

<comment><USER4> Darn is right. I'd love to see an article comparing your stats across each channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should remove the option of a 2x3 foot board completely while it's out of stock, instead of disabling it and writing "Out of Stock". Better yet, A/B test it.

My bet is that people are seeing the option they want, saying they'll wait until it's in stock, and then promptly forgetting you ever existed.

If there's no better option to wait for, more people will buy one of the other options.

<comment><USER6> Better yet, an "Alert me" button instead, collect an email address and notify them later when it's back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jason, mind if I ask what's going on with the footer of <http://whiteyboard.com>?

It looks, uh, a little sloppy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ask Alexis Ohanian, he designed it. I like the MS Paint look

<comment><USER8> It's true, I mocked up basically the site you see there in a few minutes in Photoshop, sent the png to Jason and he asked for the PSD... I didn't know he'd actually use the draft as the final version - hehe. It's got a certain charm to it, I suppose...

<comment><USER9> even though there is a charm; perhaps it's time to up the ante; looks like part of it is scribbles covering something else up :/

<comment><USER8> But you're intrigued enough to see what it is... was that my plan all along?! (it wasn't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think that the length of the campaign had a lot to do with the substantial difference in numbers.

Even though the actual amount of money spent may be the same, I saw the DuckDuckGo advertisements countless number of times. In addition, it also had strong upvotes and positive feedback in the actual comments of the ads.

On the other hand, despite browsing reddit for likely a few hours over those dates, I never saw the Whiteyboard ad once.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I was hoping that with a high bid like that, it would have received awesome priority placement. Alternatively, I found out that Reddit accepts whatever bid above $20 per day that you commit and however well the ad does, is up to the readers. At the end of the day, I agree I should have prolonged the campaign, but I wanted to see if a limited deal would have appealed to the readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whiteyboard looks cool. I might have even bought one if it was very apparent that it could stick and re-stick easily. By the time I found that, I was off of the purchase page, and I had decided I didn't actually _need_ it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for posting the numbers.

Online commerce is interesting in part because it's so darn _fickle_. I saw your product awhile ago on HN and shrugged. Then just saw it again today, and bought the largest size. I couldn't really tell you a good reason why.

If I had to guess, I'd say that "Free shipping" is probably part of it, along with "limited time" but just a couple weeks after seeing your original ad, I have different ideas for office layout, and suddenly your product fit that void nicely.

Good luck with it!

</comment><comment><USER13> I personally had no idea what Whiteyboard was . . .

So from fresh eyes - the landing page doesn't do a good job explaining what it is and why it's awesome before hitting me up for $$$.

I bet your bounce traffic left in a hurry (sub 2 seconds) yah?

I'm sure the reddit ad explained partially, but on that landing page I'd have suggested a really bold headline, summary, picture of use then buy buttons below. . .

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, our bounce rate is awesome. I agree though, we don't do a stellar job of explaining the product and we are working on a way better commercial. Should we keep the same girl?

<comment><USER14> If you do, please have her practice applying it without bubbles. And get rid of the nails. It looked quite amateurish, and her not really being able to hold it didn't help.

<comment><USER15> Re: the bubbles, that was my first thought too. But actually I liked the way she just threw it on there WITH the bubbles, and how they were easily patted away. Shows how easy perfect installation is - but this should be highlighted as a feature instead of potentially giving viewers a bad perception.

<comment><USER16> "Got some air bubbles? Not a problem, just quickly wipe your hand over the whiteyboard and push the bubbles out. Easy as that."

It should definitely be shown off as a feature - everyone has had that frustration when trying to put a screen protector on some device.

Also, they say it can be re-applied. So maybe demo putting it on one way and then moving it to another wall or flipping it the other way. And demo on a non-white surface. It looks kinda transparent in the video because it's being stuck on a white background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would put the video above the buy, as well as a static section with an little explanation. As well as something like step 1 - stick, step 2 - write, step 3 remove/restick type thing. Emphasising that it can be easily removed front and centre is a must, that would be my first question once I got what it was.

Also being able to get the product at a glance without a video would help. With the right images and writing I could get what the product does and decide if I would be interested in probably 10 seconds as opposed to having to watch a much longer video.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hi Jason, quite a few of the comments here are pretty constructive. What struck me about the landing page though is the first things I see on the screen are the logo, then an ordering form. What would probably work better for me at least is some more information and some pictures of different examples where it could be really cool (I can imagine using this on my fridge for example). The video is OK, however youtube is banned at many workplaces as well, just a thought - some images wouldn't go astray!

</comment><comment><USER19> (unrelated to this discussion) I think if you added some sort of (painted) border around the sticker/whiteboard it would be a better product - <USER2> wouldn't have to worry of writing on their walls by accident. You could also have different kind of "borders", resembling a web browser, a computer screen, a notepad or something like that so that its not just a "large overpriced white sticker on the wall".

</comment><comment><USER20> good writeup.

Concerning Facebook, you just have to be a frequent user of reddit to know about the general dislike of Facebook.

In general I find that redditors are more than willing to open their wallets, examples: recently they asked for donations, reddit soap, divvy, and a game developer ( can't think of it now)... just your product wasn't a right fit for the reddit crowd.

<comment><USER21> There was a lot of grumbling about the $40 shipping charge to Canada too. I probably would've bought one if the shipping charge didn't more than double my total.

<comment><USER22> Same here. $40 shipping charge on a $30 purchase really puts me off. Especially on something that is as light as your product.

What shipper are you using? Maybe you should give people an option of choosing a slower delivery time for less cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What about conversions that take some time to happen? The post didn't explain their typical/average time between first contact and sale. Assuming it's more than the 48 hours they ran this for, this experiment might still get better ROI numbers.

Are they tracking this metric? It's an important one!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not actually. How do I track this?

<comment><USER23> A really long-life cookie, say a 6 months or more.

The concept: on the first visit, give the user a long-life cookie that stores the timestamp of the visit. When a sale happens, check the value of this cookie and store in a database.

You can make it more elaborate by storing and analysing referral information, geolocation of the IP address, exact time of day and other things you think might be relevant.

Also, if you're doing an A/B test on new visitors, this cookie should also store which version they were shown. This is a more complicated situation as to how you tie it into the A/B testing framework, but it's not hard with a bit of thought based on how you implement it and how you test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On your blog post you mention that you are keeping the free shipping option up for another day. Given that you will be getting a lot of traffic traffic from HN, I'm wondering what your conversion is from HN traffic alone?

</comment><comment><USER25> Did you see an upswing in your invoice requests? I have a e-commerce site and currently do not offer this service. What luck have you found with this?

</comment><comment><USER26> Wait. What? You thought that based on the ROI on an ad to get traffic to a website you'd get the same for an ad trying to sell a physical product?

</comment><comment><USER27> I've had an overall positive experience with reddit ads. I'd really recommend trying a campaign that is longer than 2 days - say a week or longer but you don't need to spend as much each day and you'll get a lot more unique visitors.</comment>


The FCC Still Doesn't Know How the Internet Works - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/12/fcc-still-doesnt-know-how-internet-works <comment><USER2> The FCC is willfully ignorant - and that is 100% wrong. How many people on the street, who innocently don't know how the Internet works, might agree with this FCC statement though?

"[e]nd users do not expect to receive (or pay for) two distinct services—both Internet access service and a distinct transmission service, for example."

<comment><USER3> > people on the street, who innocently don't know how the Internet works

"people on the street who ... don't know" have a tendency to accept the statements of "officials" as correct and accurate. So "people on the street" are very likely to state agreement with these statements on the FCC's part.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find a co-founder that would help you sell your product? - <AUTHOR> Well, we developed very cool app (both android and IOS) to help restaurants to speed up sales. Apparently it is not a very hot field to be in at this point, but we do have very unique product.
Myself is not a very good salesman, neither my partners, since we all come from a engineering background. We can do market research, manufacture hardware and build apps, but selling our product is hard.
Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> I was in a similar situation when I was doing my startup several years ago. My advice:

1\. Be very careful when dealing with sales people. They will be good at selling themselves, and you do not know how to evaluate them. Do not make any promises, do not make any vague statements, esp. about equity. Also be careful regarding statements about %s of deals, ie. do they get a cut from the first 3 months of payments, or the entire lifetime of the subscription? I got burned on this one.

2\. In the comments you write: "I am afraid to speak to [customers]". I will be brutally honest with you: with this sort of mindset, you will fail. If you want your startup to succeed, you will have to stretch beyond your wildest dreams. Going up and talking to your customers is the zeroth step. Keyword: stretch. Corollary: if you can't get yourself to talk to your customers, you should stop right now and get a job! (No offense!)

3\. At this early stage, the process of selling is undefined, and is a sort-of engineering challenge in itself. A salesperson [that you can convince to work with you at this stage] will not figure this out for you. A salesperson will ask you who the customer is, what to tell the customer, what the pitch is, you will have to write the contract, etc. Maybe they have a few contacts, in my experience that's the most you will get out of them. Based on your description of your business, you don't need that because restaurants are everywhere, you just need to walk in and hustle.

Basically, my advice is: do _not_ look for a salesperson. Learn to do the job yourself. Once you know what the job is, what it takes to be successful, what the rates are (1 sale out of 5 pitches) then you can hire somebody and evaluate them in their first month, and hold them accountable to be at least as effective as you were.

Startups are tough! If they weren't, everybody would do it :)

<comment><USER3> > Learn to do the job yourself.

How?

<comment><USER4> _You Can Negotiate Anything_ , by Herb Cohen

 _Riches Among the Ruins_ , by Robert P. Smith

 _High Stakes, No Prisoners_ , by Charles H. Ferguson

 _Power Schmoozing_ , by Terri Mandell

 _The Best Seller_ , by Forbes D. Ley

If you're selling to restaurants, read books or attend trade shows aimed at restaurant owners and managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd suggest doing two things. Start looking for sales & marketing people and learn some yourself. Kick the marketing tires, interact with restaurants. You'll learn a lot from the process, even if it's just establishing that your product-market fit is perfect (usually not). Don't delegate all your client interaction to "sales" because you lose a lot in the process.

Unless they have a serious track record, let any salesperson earn their way in. Don't give up equity on promises.

Checkout saastr.com [http://saastr.com/2013/02/12/what-a-vp-sales-actually- does-w...](http://saastr.com/2013/02/12/what-a-vp-sales-actually-does-where- the-magic-is-and-when-to-hire-one/) [http://saastr.com/2013/04/02/the-48-types-of-vp-sales- make-d...](http://saastr.com/2013/04/02/the-48-types-of-vp-sales-make-deadly- sure-you-hire-the-right-one/) [http://saastr.com/2013/11/06/if-your-vp-sales- isnt-going-to-...](http://saastr.com/2013/11/06/if-your-vp-sales-isnt-going- to-work-out-youll-know-in-30-days/)

P.S. I have a friend who has a restaurant-chain SaaS app and he's not enamoured with their sales setup. Speaking to him next week. Someone really needs to make a company that handles the relationship with restaurants and connects to all these related solution providers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Thank you for your responce, I found those links are very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is extraordinarily difficult to hire sales people, one of the hardest "business" tasks there is. Even on teams led by people with a background in managing sales teams, the hit rate on good salespeople is low. I came up in my career with a bunch of people who went on to start companies, and so I talk to a lot of founders, and the number of tech founders who managed early in their company to hire salespeople that actually worked out is (0) zero.

The biggest problem with this task is adverse selection. A salesperson who can take a product with no traction and no awareness and successfully sell it can sell any other product. The world is full of potentially but not kinetically viable products. Good salespeople have their pick of all of them. So if a salesperson is willing to talk to you... you have to wonder why you're their best option.

An approach that can work:

1\. You figure out how to sell your product to some subset of its potential users.

2\. You execute on that strategy until you can reliably hit some number every month.

3\. You hire an _inside sales person_ , a dial-for-dollars robot, to execute on the script that you worked out in the previous step.

Don't kid yourself about steps 1-2, or you'll just throw money away in step 3. It's important to understand the implications of this: it means you can't easily hire someone to figure out how to sell your product. You have to cross that gulf yourself.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can reccomend finding a great salesperson in your network and ask if he would teach/coach you on your sale.

I did this and in a few days I improved my sales skills dramatically.

Remember that selling is a proccess and a skill that can be learned, just like programming, and if you have a great teacher you can learn the basics really fast.

Too me the hardest lesson was that the more annoying and hard questions a person asks, the more interested in your product they are and the more they see how they could use the product. Not because they did not like it as I thought!

<comment><USER8> They are developers, they don't have a network. Only a network of other people that code.

But you are right, THEY have to learn it and sell their product. Nobody can do this for them at this stage.

<comment><USER9> That's a pretty limited view of things. It's possible that that's the case, but there's a lot of places where I've met people who are great at sales:

\- Past startups that I've worked at. Unless someone has only worked at massive companies where they were completely isolated from the sales cycle, there's a pretty good chance they've had at least some interactions with sales.

\- Barcamp ([http://barcamp.org/w/page/402984/FrontPage](http://barcamp.org/w/page/402984/FrontPage)) there's usually one of these in town on at least a semi-annual basis. It's not just "coders" that come out to these, people involved in all aspects of the business of software show up.

\- Past clients. While doing freelance work, most of my clients were people who ran businesses, had a little to no tech background, and had an idea for a tech project that they thought could improve their business.

\- Other "coders" in my network who have struck out on their own. Even if none of the above applies to you, there's a pretty good chance that there's only 2 degrees of separation between you and someone who could help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Talk to your customer. Where do you live? You probably frequent the same restaurants and probably they recognized you in some of them. Ask to talk to them. Don't sell. Tell the story of why and listen. If you want to start with one (and you are in the Valley) hit me at @JDcarlu and I will go with you to a friends restaurant and introduce you. Don't be scared to ask.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am afraid to speak to them, I did try, but I do not think I am good storyteller. Maybe I need someone to help me to make a pitch story? I am actually in Chicago right now, but thank you for your helps. I am considering moving to the Bay Area lately.

<comment><USER11> May be you can hack your way into talking to customers. You don't have to think of restaurant workers as people you are trying to sell to understand their pain points. This is one thing I have tried myself. When you go to a restaurant next time try to have a casual conversation with one of the workers. Try to get them talk about their pain points without directly asking them. In most cases they'd be happy to talk to you because you have leverage over them because you being their customer. And once you have understood some point points and developed a solution for them try to generate some demand for your product. You can go to one restaurant and tell them such and such restaurant is using this product and is doing great with it. And then go to another restaurant and tell them there is another restaurant using your product and killing with it. Also, read "The Paypal Wars." This book has a wealth of sales tactics you can use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You won't like this, but sell it first. Your first few customers are buying a vision and if you can't sell your vision, no one can.

Then once you can show some kind of product market fit (eg your customers love it, and would be really disappointed if you pulled plug), and you're ready to begin scaling, THEN hire first sales person.

You'll have an idea of who likes your product and why, and that can give sales person a lot of confidence and focus.

<comment><USER13> this....i spent a lot of time with a potential co founder but it basically boiled down to me selling. he was a fantastic guy but it was just not possible for him to sell. the product and the customer base has not been established.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you think you've done market research, but you haven't spoken to your customers directly (in person or by phone if in person is not possible. no email), you haven't done market research. And if you can speak to your customers to do research and discover their problems, you can sell them your solution if it's a good one.

To underscore what others have said, if you want to have any success, you have to sell this yourself.

</comment><comment><USER11> You are saying you can do market research but it seems to me after building the product you realized it was not a very hot field to be in. Not to point fingers at you but this should be a good takeaway for you. It may be easier to assume before you build but in some cases it may not work out later on.

Now, to answer your question, if you cannot get to your customer yourself maybe you should have not entered this market to begin with. Even if you hire a "co-founder" or an independent contractor to "sell" for you this may still not work out. For one thing, it seems you have not tested out your idea with customers. So, you may or may not have a product that solves a pain point. Although, you may get lucky to find a partner who is effectively able to communicate back customer feedback to help you in product development.

This stuff will take time. Just don't give up. And I'd suggest if you really believe in your idea you should go talk to your customers yourself. If this idea doesn't work out, next time may be build something for yourself or your friends so you don't have as much anxiety when it comes to talking to your users.

</comment><comment><USER15> When doing your market research (by which I specifically mean talking with your target market about their pain - you can't do market research in your basement, only competitor research which is not the same thing) ask them about sales reps for their other providers that they like and trust. Get an introduction wherever possible.

1) If nothing else, people who already sell to restaurants understand the market and can introduce you to other owners you can speak with, and

2) You probably want a salesperson with industry expertise and existing relationships, rather than someone with App / SaaS experience. Even if they've previously sold produce or tableware or linen services, you can teach them the technical basics and they can sell it in terms that will create cutthrough in the market.

Lastly, when people Ask HN about finding a technical co-founder, the advice is nearly unanimous: try learning some of the skills yourself. The same is true of Sales and Business strategy - you may never become an expert, but forcing yourself to learn the basics will help you identify the really good operators in that space.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the advise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pay attention that some sales people will be good at selling themselves to you but not your product to the customers. ABC: there's no way to know if he/she's a good sale person if not seeing it in action.

To know which kind of sale person is best for you - you have to try to do it yourself first: know your customers, know their problems and which are the values they see in your product (I assume you have done this before building the product).

Then start searching key people in the industry you're targeting and ask for help - get into that network and you'll find your person.

Avoid sales consultant. Avoid external sales company. It's too early for you. You need someone internal that will do more than just selling your product. You need someone that will listen to any comments, feedbacks, needs, feelings of your potential customers and will identify opportunities, product changes, propositions and values.

To get him/her on board pay attention to do not give out shares on day one. Setup an option pool with vesting and link i.e. salary with _company_ performance (not personal one). I can give you some further tips on that if needed. I did that myself with a new biz dev guy.

All the best!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the advise, I believe that you are right. I will try it myself first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a really hard question. It's also the reason my product never took off. I've got ~50 loyal customers who love the platform and send millions of emails a week but I never found a co founder to come along for the journey.

I looked locally and abroad for a founder, and had investors ready to continue to back me. I'm a good engineer and gave sales a go but realised I'm just not cut out for it. I put up ads and got plenty of interest (early product hunt advertiser) but never found the person making investors were willing to put their cash on the line for.

It's a tough find. Especially if you don't have a sexy as fuck product. I wish you luck!

Tl;dr without a go to market or sales co founder, chances are you're fucked.

Edit: Abysmal spelling.

</comment><comment><USER18> In my experience business owners are very open to cold email introductions. Somewhere it became legend that nobody responds to sales emails but if you rethink your pitch as an earnest attempt to either listen to their problems or provide them a solution, they will respond. Just write as a person in an honest tone about the solution and ask for a few minutes to discuss on the phone or in person. Send ten of these personally written letters and I can almost guarantee that you will get at least 3-4 meetings. From those you will learn more than any salesperson could teach you in two years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestions, I will try it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> You are a salesperson, you just don't realize it. You sell in most facets of your life.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others: Daniel H. Pink - [http://www.amazon.com/To-Sell-Is-Human- Surprising/dp/1594631...](http://www.amazon.com/To-Sell-Is-Human- Surprising/dp/1594631905)

Feel free to reach out if you need some guidance or advice.

</comment><comment><USER20> We have found our CMO on AngelList.

You can post an something on it saying your are looking for a CMO or a VP of sales. People on AngelList are usually really smart, get startups and are looking for opportunities like that!

</comment><comment><USER21> > ...help restaurants to speed up sales. Apparently it is not a very hot field > to be in at this point.

Money and confidence. It's probably better than you think!

<comment><USER22> Or worse. I see a new startup looking for salespeople for a new point of sales app every week, so the "not a very hot field" observation is more likely to be commentary on the overall market potential than it not being popular to try. Of course, there are a lot of restaurants out there, but they tend towards being the opposite of the type of customer you want to sell to: small, traditional, not very technically or commercially minded and needing an in- person visit. And quite possibly having been pitched by two other iPad/Android/SaaS apps in the last 12 months.

It's possible this product does something completely different, but its also possible that some of the difficulties the OP and his cofounder are having selling it are more down to it being particularly difficult and time consuming to convince the market they need it, and less down anything they're doing wrong in their sales approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Do you have an email? I'm in the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, My email is willwang4202 at gmail.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Take interns to see how it goes

</comment><comment><USER25> Luck.

</comment><comment><USER13> if you can't sell it yourself then somebody else will have a tough time. you have to figure out how to sell it on your own, you being the creator.

once some product market fit is established, and you need more bodies and time to expand, you should do it.

this is what I learned this year.

<comment><USER26> This is what I learned this year also. Well said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll respond with a quote by Rumi (and try not to sound pretentious as hell while doing so):

If you are hungry and unable to find food, be the bread.</comment>


Amazon actually paid $150M for Goodreads - from AllThingsD - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130329/actually-amazon-paid-about-150-million-for-goodreads/ In light of the other thread about the BS $1B valuation based on an active users count (this is why the businessweek's of the world don't get tech), this price makes a lot more sense - Goodreads' users are not worth the same as LinkedIn or even Facebook. <comment><USER2> I think that sounds like a fair price based on other acquisitions taking place. You can see how many DAU they had on FB, they were thriving.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is interesting to me, given the silly discussion about the $1B price point (this is why BusinessWeek doesn't get tech) - clearly Goodreads users are not worth as much as LinkedIn users or even FB ones.</comment>


BBC blocking articles from UK residents - alex-warren http://alexwarren.co.uk/2013/07/03/bbc-blocking-articles-from-uk-residents/ <comment><AUTHOR> So the BBC is... weird. The majority of the operation is a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster with a remit to produce high quality programming for free; but there's a unit called BBC Worldwide whose job it is to battle it out in the red-in-tooth-and-claw world of commercial TV programming, selling BBC programmes overseas and minting money that can then be used to subsidize the public broadcasting component.

While this sounds laudable as an idea, for this to work it also means that the British taxpayer is not allowed to subsidize BBC Worldwide in any way. For example, BBCW pays rent at market rates for its office space to the rest of the BBC, even though they're in the same building, and they're virtually prohibited from selling anything in the UK. Add in the fact that the rest of the British media business is (understandably) quite pissed off about having a competitor that operates under a different set of rules, meaning they watch it like a hawk and squawk as soon as there's even a hint of unfair advantage, and you get all sorts of bizarro-world conflicts and overblown solutions like this that throw the baby out with the bathwater.

(Disclaimer: I used to work for a company owned by BBC Worldwide. This is my personal opinion.)

<comment><USER2> So, are UK residents prevented from looking at bbc.com URLs in case we see/click on any advertising?

<comment><USER3> No, it's in case the BBC URL substitutes for a UK commercial website.

<comment><USER4> But if BBCW is emphatically not subsidized as stated above, wouldn't it be perfectly OK -- even more OK than regular BBC -- if it competed with UK commercial websites? Since it's not got any "unfair" subsidy advantage?

Not trying to argue, just trying to understand the (bizarre) logic of the blockade.

<comment><USER5> one word "Murdoch"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please send an email to the BBC Trust asking them to reassess wether this policy really is in the best interests of the BBC and the licence payer.

Please abstain from just complaining. The BBC is a complex beast and I genuinely believe this policy was drafted with the BBC and the licence payers best interests at heart, but perhaps they should take another look at this policy and debate wether or not there is a better way to comply with the BBC charter whilst not limiting access to content for license fee payers.

firstname.lastname@example.com

You may also contact Maria Miller, who is the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to perhaps urge the BBC Trust to look into this issue.

email@example.com

And it wouldn't hurt to CC your local MP. [http://www.writetothem.com](http://www.writetothem.com)

<comment><USER7> The anger by the OP and most of the commenters is misplaced. This is not a decision solely by the BBC Trust, and was not done with the licence players best interest at heart. This is the result of lobbying by newspapers and commercial broadcasters. The theory is that compulsory tax (or license fee) payers money should not be used to compete against commercial interests in anything other than TV broadcasting. In the current political climate, this is unlikely to change.

In fact, there was a concerted effort a few years back to shut down the entire BBC News website.

<comment><USER8> The BBC has been out of control for a while now. They bought Lonely Planet and sold it at an £80m loss, they claim to provide impartial news coverage but clearly don't, and they have presided over a paedophile scandal that would make the Catholic Church blush.

<comment><USER6> The BBC runs the worlds largest news broadcasting organisation. It has 3,500 staff, has 44 foreign news bureaux, has correspondents in almost every country, produces 120hrs of radio and television output each day, is the largest news room in europe and runs on £350 million a year.

The BBC Natural history Unit produces 100 hours of television and 50 hours of radio every year, and is the largest wildlife production house in the world. It's work is watched by audiences around the globe and has won Emmys, BAFTAs and Prix Italias.

It's sports coverage (when it can get the rights) is second to none. The most long lasting and iconic comedies and dramas in British culture were created by and housed at the BBC.

The BBC runs for £4.8 Billion a year. Compare that with sky that runs at £5.9 Billion a year. Everything on the BBC is free to licence payers. To get the complete sky Package would cost you £66 per month AND you have to watch adverts AND they still have Pay Per View for anything worth watching. Neither ITV, Chanel 4 or 5 offer anything near the quality and quantity that the BBC offer (Although Chanel 4 news is my second choice). And every other digital channel is basically endless reruns of BBC programming (Switch on Dave, $5 says it's a Top Gear rerun).

I'll forgive them a few hiccups, and I expect a few hiccups considering it's size and reach. Overall, I think they're doing a sterling job.

<comment><USER8> A lot of their output is excellent.A lot of it is "me-too" copying of successful commercial formates.

However, all the points you make are unrelated to covering up of child abuse by several presenters.

<comment><USER9> In your comment about the child abuse scandal, you were replying directly to a comment about attempts to shut down the BBC News website; in that context, your comments are going to be interpreted as being about the whole organization, not just about a single issue. In that context, it's not justified to then dismiss counterarguments (for the continued running of the BBC) as unrelated.

<comment><USER8> I would have thought that policies and procedures for producing good programming content are unrelated to whether it is OK to cover up child abuse or not. You could run a perfect news organisation, for instance, but still have a bad record on child protection. The two are unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The BBC are prohibited from running certain commercial services (of which BBC.com is one) in the UK due to regulatory requirements.

It's not their decision.

You could of-course lobby your MP to get it changed, but I imagine there would be substantial opposition from both supporters and opponents of public media services to allowing BBC to run commercial services in the UK.

<comment><USER11> So showing ads is the problem right? Then don't show adds to UK citizens and let them read the damn thing instead of blocking the article? Then BBC International can charge BBC for showing "add free content" to UK citizens and that would take care of the formalities.

<comment><USER12> They are not allowed to do that, either, due to lobbying from the private media companies. The companies managed to push through a rule that the BBC cannot show any content in the UK whose _production_ was funded commercially, even if they showed the result ad-free in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _A BBC Worldwide spokesman said: [...]

'Under the BBC's Fair Trading rules commercial websites are not allowed to receive unfair promotion from the BBC's public services.

'This prevents us from being able to provide Future content on BBC.co.uk. genres._

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208251/Global- BBC-w...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208251/Global-BBC-website- boasting-depth-analysis-cutting-edge-research-available--EXCEPT-British- licence-fee-payers.html) (daily mail, so you have to scroll way down past the righteous indignation to get the facts)

<comment> alex-warren Surely they can still make the content _available_ even if they're not allowed to _promote_ it on the public services?

e.g. I can still buy Doctor Who DVDs in the UK, even if the BBC can't advertise them between programmes.

<comment><USER14> Not that it invalidates your point, but your example is a bad one - BBC can, and do, advertise DVDs of their own TV series, in between programmes.

<comment><USER8> They used to advertise their own magazines as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know if any of the brits here have ever browsed the BBC from abroad - when I was at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 (being at a political gathering, I was on free wifi and news sites half the time) I was _shocked_ to see the BBC news site with _adverts_ on it!

I was laughed at by the Danes, Swedes and Canadians I was with, because obviously the BBC always had adverts on.

Seriously, if the law says the BBC _can 't_ show adverts in the UK, they should make ad-free versions of the sites available, not an error message.

In fact, the issue here doesn't even seem to be adverts - it's that its a bbc.com article instead of a bbc.co.uk one - i.e a commercial service that isn't allowed to receive "promotion" here. As long as they don't link to it from the UK sites, I don't see how they are "promoting" it; we all found that link from a 3rd party source (i.e. HN) and wanted to read it! :/

<comment><USER10> The BBC brand is hugely valuable, letting a commercial site use it (even one owned by the BBC) is clearly promotion.

<comment><USER15> So the site would need to be whitelabelled? yea, that would be an unreasonable cost I suppose.

Shame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wanted to read this exact same article yesterday, clicked on the link and got the same "reason" page. I thought about configuring a proxy to try and get it to load, but then thought "fuck it" and just gave up.

It is ridiculous and the lawyers that cause this to happen are so short sighted about how the internet works that its laughable. However as my actions show, it is annoying enough for people to give up and just accept it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love the NYUD trick, but trying to look up nyud.net brings me to some parked website, I don't know more about it.

A sensible worldwide url proxy-like would be great in order to bypass such country-based accesses. Oh, and letme.in is for sale!

Wanna see the BBC? paste letme.in in the url ; wanna see french public TV from abroad? do the same ; belgian public TV? go ahead

On a related note, lemonde.fr has similar weird rules (not state owned though). Coming from google news you can't see the full article [http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2013/03/04/grand- par...](http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2013/03/04/grand-paris-la- victoire-de-bertrand-delanoe-sur-jean-paul-huchon_1842275_823448.html) but copy pasting the title in google [https://www.google.at/search?q=Grand+Paris+%3A+la+victoire+d...](https://www.google.at/search?q=Grand+Paris+%3A+la+victoire+de+Bertrand+Delano%C3%AB+sur+Jean- Paul+Huchon&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=rcs) you just have to click on the first link to get the full article...

<comment><USER18> I found that [http://www.bbc.com.sixxs.org](http://www.bbc.com.sixxs.org) was far faster than using Coral cache, but that assumes that you have access to IPv6. You can't chain the IPv4 proxy to it by the look of things ([http://www.bbc.com.sixxs.org.ipv4.sixxs.org/](http://www.bbc.com.sixxs.org.ipv4.sixxs.org/)).

<comment><USER17> OK, so NYUD and SIXXS are "tunnels" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_protocol](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_protocol) which seems to work similarly as a proxy...

<comment><USER18> Both are proxies of a sort. They're effectively websites with a wildcard DNS entry and the subdomain is then used to determine the remote site. In nyud.net's case, this is located in their CDN before the real site is contacted. In the case of sixxs.org, the site is contacted directly. The difference is in the DNS entries. _.ipv4.sixxs.org returns an IPv4 address and_.sixxs.org returns an IPv6 address. Once connected, if the Host: header ends in ipv4.sixxs.org, the proxy connects to the remote site over IPv6; if not, the proxy connects over IPv4. The end result is that you get a proxy that lets you access the IPv6 web without IPv6 (and the IPv4 web without IPv4).

<comment><USER17> Cool, thanks for the explanations!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This falls under exactly the same Laws that prevent a UK resident viewing Channel 4 content on YouTube. (Or, try asking a German why so much of YouTube is "dark" to them, specifically Corporately sponsored music channels).

It has nothing to do with your license fee, and everything to do with the (vastly complex and totally out of my expertise) realms of International Copyright / Licensing Laws.

As ever, these things are really not simple enough to be covered by a blog post. Yes: the BBC's default page should be totally transparent (i.e. "You cannot view this because of agreement X, Y, Z", however, there's probably a clause in some contract preventing them from stating it - and no, that's not a joke) but this really is _not_ the droid you're looking for to rant at.

Hint: If you're in Australia, the entire works of George Orwell are public domain; in the USA and the EU, this isn't the case. And yes, we need a serious shake up of the entire structure to progress, but this isn't the wet-stone to sharpen your axe on, trust me.

Ask why Disney gets 70+ years of Copyright, it's a far more egregious case.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wrote to my MP. This is his reply:

10 July 2013

Dear Edward,

Thank you for writing to me with your concerns about why a particular BBC article ([http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130701-why-you-feel- phanto...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130701-why-you-feel-phantom- phone-calls/all)) cannot be viewed in the UK.

It is the case that some international BBC content cannot be viewed in the UK because it is not funded by the licence fee, but instead by BBC Worldwide which is a commercial enterprise.

I appreciate that this is frustrating but because BBC Worldwide is run commercially there is no obligation for the BBC to make international service content available in the UK.

Thanks again for bringing your concerns to my attention.

Yours sincerely,

Julian Huppert Member of Parliament for Cambridge

</comment><comment><USER21> It's a little like the BBC world service news, which is pretty good (especially compared to sky and cnn and so on), except you can't get it in the UK ... it even has the same presenters that are on the normal BBC 24 News, and 10 o'clock news! It's weird to say the least.

But it gets even more weird, as programmes made by the licence pay version of the BBC appear on the world service news. I was watching it a week ago in a hotel room and noticed they were showed Click, a programme made by the BBC in the UK. So what is that doing being shown on the commercial arm of the BBC?

<comment><USER22> > So what is that doing being shown on the commercial arm of the BBC?

BBC World News is distinct from BBC Worldwide, they're different commercial groups. It has a much closer relationship with BBC News, which is publicly funded. BBC Worldwide exists to make a profit, whereas BBC World News is commercially funded but not profit driven. It's...complicated.

<comment><USER21> Thanks, it certainly is :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So this stuff we are "forced" to pay for via the TV licence, but we cannot see..

Think the BBC should be privatised.. TopGear is worth a few million for a start...

<comment><USER24> No thankyou. BBC worldwide does just fine earning from the channel's exports and otherwise the BBC maintains a fine standard of ad-free media.

<comment><USER25> Then let those who want the BBC pay for such a thing. I see no good reason why I should have to subsidise your tastes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A government controlled media outlet? How is this possible (sarcasm). I in general like the BBC, but this should not be a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you bookmark the JS below you can create a 'button' to convert bbc.com links to bbc.com.nyud.net links as suggested by the OP:

javascript:window.location.href=window.location.href.replace("bbc.com","bbc.com.nyud.net");

A better solution would be a greasemonkey script/browser extension but this does the job for now :-)

<comment><USER28> Chrome extension: [http://goo.gl/VsD5s](http://goo.gl/VsD5s) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This just reads to me as generic nerdrage and/or an attempt to gain some internet points by piggybacking an earlier discussion on HN.

It would be far quicker to view the article via Coral Cache, the Way Back Machine or some other proxy, and it would be far more effective to write to the BBC Trust and/or your local MP.

</comment><comment><USER28> A Chrome extension that solves this issue: [http://goo.gl/VsD5s](http://goo.gl/VsD5s). Extract the files, head to chrome://extensions > Load unpacked extension and select the folder.

</comment><comment><USER30> The confusion is because of the name.

If they called their international subsidiary, "Super Mega Global Worldwide Media Corporation", it wouldn't seem any more or less ridiculous than anyone else doing geo-targeting.

<comment><USER14> Anyone else doing the same gets the same level of ridicule. It's not even the same as the likes of Netflix where there are all sorts of third party stake holders, licenses, etc. - BBC owns this content. Why would anyone other than BBC not get criticised if they did this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Weird .nyud.net (coral cdn ) doesn't work from my network with any website. Damn you Pakistani censorship :< .

</comment><comment><USER32> If it's not funded by the license then that suggests that part of the BBC has been quietly privatised.

<comment><USER33> The BBC used to have a lot of commercial divisions, or wholly-owned subsidiary companies: BBC Resources Ltd, BBC Technology Ltd, BBC Broadcast Ltd, and BBC Worldwide Ltd. Of those, the first three have been sold off, leaving only BBC Worldwide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> THIS! In the last few years the BBC have produced nothing but period dramas and drivel all of it aimed at the american market. Why make quality british programming for the British market any more when you can make a 'UK series' (6 eps) and make pure profit in the US market.

<comment><USER35> So the BBC is no longer producing content for BBC 1 and 2 in the UK?

Don't be ridiculous.

<comment><USER34> I never said I didn't like it, I said it was drivel. I'm quite partial to the odd well produced period drama.

What I'm trying to say is that recently they tend produce content with a mind to how the US will receive this new content. Dr who, top gear and downton abbey for instance. All of these are popular in the US and while that isn't a bad thing (more money to the BBC to hopefully make more content) what I disagree with is that all they produce is more of the SAME content. They've lost innovation and only make content in a few genres with recurring themes.

>> Please don't project your own opinions onto the rest of the UK. how is my stating a personal opinion 'projecting my opinion onto the rest of the UK'? Isn't the point of a discussion to discuss your personal opinion or must I refrain from commenting because I happen to think strictly come dancing is a pile of poo and you think claudia 'needs a haircut' winkleman is brilliant? :D

<comment><USER36> Have you heard of BBC4?

<comment><USER37> Literally the only channel I ever watch on television. It's pretty sad that the interesting documentaries have to be relegated to a separate channel so as not to confuse anyone watching BBC 1 or 2 (and BBC 1 and 2 get the HD versions, damn it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I noticed this the other week when there was a link from fark.com

It's utterly ludicrous.

</comment><comment><USER39> Even funnier, Canada can read these articles as well, just not the U.K. ;)

</comment><comment><USER40> I've read the reason several times and I still don't get it.

<comment><USER41> BBC is forbidden to show ads. There are ads on BBC future. So BBC cannot show it in UK.

Now one would think that they could you know - strip the ads and not show them for UK IPs ...

<comment><USER36> They'd also be held to other requirements though, for example if an article were seen to be promoting a particular brand, etc.

bbc.co.uk does exactly that, there are ads shown externally but not internally.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I explain a long activity gap due to depression to interviewers? - <AUTHOR> tl;dr I've been a NEET for several years, during which I learnt programming. I'm trying to get a programming job now. How do I explain this suspicious activity gap to a potential employer?
When I finished high school I didn't pass the admission test for the university I was aiming for. I signed up to community college for another course, but after a few weeks I stopped showing up and I've been staying at my parents' home ever since.
I was dealing with depression since I was in HS, and dropping out only made it worse. For a while I wasn't able to do much except getting out of bed and waste my whole day online, watching movies or playing videogames.
Eventually I became interested in programming (I had started to learn it by myself in HS), and I started spending lots of time reading and writing code. Now I have quite a few projects on github, some contributions to other github projects to my name, some blog posts, and have some experience with a lot of different languages, libraries, frameworks, and various other tools.
I've been trying on and off to get a job as a programmer, but after some rejections and a really bad internship experience (which is in my best interest to keep off my CV) I've become discouraged with the whole process and I keep putting it off, but due to some circumstances I'll have to find a job soon.
I'm out of depression now. I've been feeling good about myself and life in general, and I'm sleeping and eating well, exercising regularly, and I've been spending time with friends. I'm 100% confident I could hold a job and perform well now.
I don't think the interviewers were convinced with the stuff about part-time jobs and abroad gap years/months I made up about what I did during all this time since I graduated from HS, and I don't know if being honest is a good idea in this situation. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
So: do you have any advice for explaining this mess to a potential employer? <comment><USER2> If you were under medical treatment for your depression (hopefully you were), just say that you had a medical issue, the treatment helped you recover, and that you spent part of the time recovering studying independently. Be prepared to provide a note from your therapist/doctor that provides the dates you were under treatment to back up your words but note it does not have to describe the issue you were treated for or the treatment. If pressed about the specifics, know your rights (Google around for info on what employers are legally permitted to ask about medical conditions), remind them of those restrictions, and be prepared to write off that employer if they persist.

Resign yourself to the fact that you're going to have a long, difficult road ahead if you want a programming job. Being from a non-traditional background, you're going to really have to shine at the interpersonal and coding side of interviews to persuade a company to hire you. Use study guides for both aspects and try to attend local tech meetups where you might be able to persuade a working professional to give you interviewing tips.

Persistence almost always pays off. Good luck to you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps see if you can find some freelance/contract projects to work on (E.g., a family friend who needs a site/app built) to help build your confidence and experience, and see if you can build from there into more projects or contracts.

After a few successful freelance/contract project under your belt you'll be in a much stronger position to apply for permanent jobs as you'll have a solid track record of good work to point to.</comment>


Show HN: OmniDB – Open Source Web Tool for Database Management and Conversion - <AUTHOR> http://omnidb.com.br <comment><USER2> Looks like a great alternative to SQLPad and phpMyadmin. Asp.net turns off the excitement somehow.

[http://rickbergfalk.github.io/sqlpad/](http://rickbergfalk.github.io/sqlpad/) [https://www.phpmyadmin.net/](https://www.phpmyadmin.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What exactly makes this 'lightweight' as described? Are there some metrics to back this up? I.e. How much memory cold, querying and modifying a database, how many different languages / technologies does it utilise? How large is the install? Etc...</comment>


Ask HN: Is Google's 20% time a myth? - <AUTHOR>

Suppose a person were considering joining Google and saw as one of the primary appeals the possibility of spending a decent amount of time on a blue sky project that he/she has already been working on, but which almost certainly has no short-term economic payoff. Are the social incentives set up at Google to make this possible?
I've gotten many conflicting reports about this from people at Google and in the industry generally. What seems to be the case is that the 20% time is really "120% time" -- i.e. you're welcome to spend your time working on your own projects but the expectation as far as output of an individual employee on their primary responsibilities isn't any less.
Does anyone have knowledge or personal experience on this topic? <comment><USER2> 20% time is not a myth. It varies through the company, but in general it really is 20% time, not 120% time. However as one person put it to me, "Nobody will give it to you, but you're free to take it." And certainly not everyone does take it.

That said, most of the 20% projects that I see are internal to Google. Also it is a work project done on work time with work resources, which means that your 20% project is automatically owned by Google. (That said, Google does encourage open source activity. So it isn't hard to work on 20% projects that are open source projects.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The "120%" joke is very common within Google. Interpret that as you will.

I don't know what you mean by social incentives. Don't expect anyone else to care about your 20% project. It is quite feasible to bank up your 20% time and then ask for a few months of relatively uninterrupted work. If you're doing a blue sky project from scratch, that's the only way I think it can work.

But seriously though, how long do you think it will take to make a prototype? If it's longer than three months of solo work I doubt you will _ever_ get it off the ground, in Google or out.

So if you have something you know you want to do, and can afford three months of unemployment, maybe you should do that instead. The experience will be worth it and it can only help your chances if you apply to Google later.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've seen a lot of open source people get hired by Google and disappear from the open source community entirely.

Google probably has a lot more interesting problems than the rest of the world, so it's possible the 20% gets dedicated to improving Google internally.

<comment><USER5> I've seen open source people disappear for all kinds of reasons. It is a natural ebb and flow. People tend to fall off when they are busy and they tend to come back when they've got an itch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, it is not a myth, but you have to take the initiative.</comment>


Ask HN: What was your "eureka" moment while programming? - <AUTHOR> My Eureka moment was when I figured out what interfaces were for.
I never understood the difference between interfaces and abstract classes. I asked on online forums and stackoverflow the typical answer I got was: "An interface is a contract that you define... A class has to implement the methods defined in the interface for it to work."
"Why do I need to use a contract if I can can simply implement the call the methods directly? Why do I need that middle man". I was working on a small web api project with Nancy,  MySQL lite was used initially, but,  I wanted to use a database like MySQL or PostgreSQL. The small project I was working on to learn Nancy needed refactoring. So, I asked myself "What if I could swap database at will". That when all the concept of interfaces came together.
I could simply use an interface as a mediator, which mean defining methods inside an interface, as long as the code calling the database implements these methods, things will work fine. <comment><USER2> Understanding how to pass functions.

For me this was more important than grasping object oriented programming.

The second deep insight was that programming is less about language syntax and mostly an exercise in manipulating data into and out of common data structures such as arrays and hashes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I what thinking about that the other day. Programmers are in the business of transforming data.

It's just finding the easiest method to do so.</comment></comment>


Linux Tycoon is the premier Linux Distro Building Simulator game - <AUTHOR> http://lunduke.com/?page_id=2646

<comment><USER2> An interesting concept, but the lack of a demo and the plain looking screenshots puts me off buying.

Some of the better simulation games i've played simulate things in locations. You can usually see and interact with people walking around and customize the look of the area which makes for a fun sandbox environment. e.g. Theme Hospital, The Sims, Game Dev Story.

In comparison, simulating a Linux distro on its own doesn't quite have the same feel to it.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of Theme Hospital, looks like there's a recent project to create an open source implementation: <http://code.google.com/p/corsix-th/>

Could be good, especially if it goes the way of OpenTTD and gets its own open source data files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The screenshots are so unrevealing that I think a demo is warranted or better still - a free beta. When did people start paying for beta access? 10 years ago people would complain about that - now they're grateful for the opportunity to do the QA.

Is this made by that guy from the linux action show who hates freedom? I saw the episode where they abuse poor old RMS and found it shocking.

<comment><USER5> "Is this made by that guy from the linux action show who hates freedom? I saw the episode where they abuse poor old RMS and found it shocking."

Yes it is.

I also found the interview quite shocking and they probably did nothing to prepare for it which is probably why it ended up that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about a game that simulates people _not_ building their own Linux distros, and instead contributing their efforts to improving the thousands that we already have?

</comment><comment><USER7> As much fun as herding cats.

Given the screenshots why is it even an app instead of a website, at least then it'd be social.

"Finding that perfect balance between a fun game experience and an accurate simulation of Linux Distro building is a bit of a challenge?"

How many people, even in your target audience could compare this? Right now I'm thinking of Linus, Theo De Raadt, Richard Stallman, and Jordan Hubbard playing SimDistro on their 360 complaining "Our CVS commits, never apply that cleanly, it's totally unrealistic for that big of a patch to have applied that cleanly"

<comment><USER8> Have Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman ever actually built their own distro at all? I seem to recall Linus saying he didn't have time for that, and he'd rather leave that task to somebody else who cares about it more.

More to the point: there are hundreds upon hundreds of different distros out there - it's not even that hard to make your own. Technically, anybody who compiles the kernel specifically for their own system and chooses a base of software around their kernel could call that a "distribution" and put it on the internet for anybody to use with a small amount of effort. You don't even need to know how to code anything to do that - you just have to know some command-line stuff.

That's kind of what I like about this - a game that "takes out the hard stuff" and just gives an overview of building a distro and what goes into it. If this helps educate people about the process and get more people learning about computers, I think that's great.

<comment><USER7> Ok fine, as long as in the game you have to start referring to Linux as GNU/Linux whenever RMS is within ear shot lest you lose a day to one of his insufferable speeches on terminology.

If that's the case then I'd say it's realistic.

It's a joke bro, lighten up.

<comment><USER8> I have adjusted my hue and saturation accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would really like an Apple/IBM simulation game where you go sue people for any sort of patent infringement while maintaining your offshore workforces (or your legion of consultants for IBM).

Or maybe an Oil company or Tobacco company simulation game where marketing and messaging are critical.

Or how about a GOP nomination sim game... I smell Super PAC! :)

<comment><USER10> PACman?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thought this was a late April Fool joke at first.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would buy this if I could pay via any means except PayPal.</comment>