Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems? - <AUTHOR> In the article, "Silicon Valley's Youth Problem" [1] the author mentions Meraki (now Cisco-Meraki) as an example of a startup working on advances in technology rather than the latest web app.
Do you know of other companies that fit the description?
Follow up: Are they (you?) hiring?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/silicon-valleys-youth-problem.html <comment><USER2> There are several startups attempting practical nuclear fusion, including:

Helion - has investment from ycombinator, attempting D-D/D-He3 fusion, which would produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation.

General Fusion - D-T fusion, but with a clever design that pretty much solves material issues caused by hard neutron radiation. Fusion happens in a spinning vat of molten lead, compressing plasmas with acoustic shock waves from steam- driven pistons. Jeff Bezos is an investor.

Tri-Alpha - the biggest of the fusion startups, quite secretive, with about 30 Ph.Ds, 150 employees, and over $150 million invested. Investors include Goldman Sachs and Paul Allen. Attempting boron fusion, which would produce less than 1% of its energy as neutron radiation.

LPP - the smallest, only about $4 million invested, but might not need more to complete its experiments. Also attempting boron fusion, from a reactor that fits in a small room. About to start a new round of experiments using a reactor core carved from solid tungsten, which they think will boost output dramatically by removing plasma impurities.

Those are the ones that I know have funding. EMC2, the polywell company, is looking for investors now that Navy funding has ended. Non-startups working on alternative fusion include:

Lockheed - this has gotten a lot of press

Sandia - repurposing the Z-machine to attempt net-gain fusion, after simulations showed they could hit breakeven with their existing machine, and 100x to 1000x gain with a 2-3x increase in input power. Very cheap since the Z-machine already existed, and things were going well last I heard.

UW's dynomak project - the most conventional of all these, similar to tokamak but does away with big external superconductors, which makes the reactor ten times smaller and cheaper. Needs $10 million to test whether the idea will scale.

<comment><USER3> Pardon, I think you meant to say:

[http://www.helionenergy.com/](http://www.helionenergy.com/)

[http://www.generalfusion.com/](http://www.generalfusion.com/)

[http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/](http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/)

[http://emc2fusion.org/](http://emc2fusion.org/)

[http://www.lockheed.com/](http://www.lockheed.com/)

[http://www.sandia.gov/](http://www.sandia.gov/)

[http://www.washington.edu/](http://www.washington.edu/)

I'll send you my bill in the mail.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Since you did all that work I'll upgrade your last three links to point to information on the fusion projects:

[http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact- fusion.htm...](http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html)

[https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/mag_fu...](https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/mag_fusion/#.VQ4bQV02w_s)

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the- dynomak-a...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a- fusion-technology-cheaper-than-coal)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A super incomplete list:

Databases:

\- PipelineDB

\- Snowflake (Computing)

Internet of Things / Communications:

\- Helium

Robotics:

\- Pneubotics

\- Kuka, namely the research department

Autonomous Systems / "Self Driving Car" et al.:

\- Kiva

\- Anki

Computer-Vision / VR based:

\- Jaunt

\- Oculus VR (especially the 'research' department)

Agriculture:

\- Blueriver [http://www.bluerivert.com](http://www.bluerivert.com)

(there are many more super-interesting companies in this area!)

Computing:

\- Mill Computing; though quite dubious

\- D-Wave

and than there is Microsoft Research working on super interesting stuff in programming languages, computer architecture (FPGAs).

Additionally, I believe really challenging problems will alwyas be coming from creative people, companies in that area; such as Pixar, architecture, and design (keywords, just to give a start: generative {design, art, ...}).

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER5> Is Kuka really a 'startup'? They are very well established among the industrial robotics scene.

<comment><USER6> What a name!..

<comment> semi-extrinsic Yes, they're obviously not Scandinavian (where the name means male genitalia, plural).

Funfact: in the northern parts of Norway, calling a policeman a "horses penis" is not illegal, as that is a somewhat common thing to call another person. Yes, this was tested in court in 2008.

<comment><USER5> I have a theory that if a word is less than 5 letters long, it probably means male genitalia in a foreign language.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Interestingly enough, the number of <5 letter words in English is of the order of 10-15 000 [1], while the number of languages is 7000. Since most languages (I guess) have more than one word for male genitals, it is technically possible for all English <5 letter words to mean precisely that.

[1] [http://norvig.com/mayzner.html](http://norvig.com/mayzner.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Terminal.com is writing next generation virtualization. This includes live- migration without hypervisors (already in production) and live-resizing (also in production).

I think we'd like to think we're working on the ugly bits of infrastructure people don't care about.

This includes a distributed file system optimized for speed and storing machine state like Github, software defined networking for IP migration across metal, and other abstractions for making devops easier.

We're looking for people who want to think about hard computer science problems like managing stateful systems more intelligently (think auto-failure detection and recovery and less I/O intensive WAN replication strategies).

<comment><USER8> This is really interesting. I have never heard of Terminal.com before and I'm now deeply interested. Do you hire remote or sponsor visa?

<comment><USER7> Feel free to ping me on the email address in my profile. Be forewarned, we have a pretty serious technical interview for all candidates. I would say it's not easy to get a technical job at Terminal.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. I pinged you ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined:

"For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken.

I am not going to name any specific startup, but I would like to ask the readers of Slashdot a question.

I know this is not how the world works, but I am still curious to know what kind of ideas would prosper if the primary aim of a startup was not to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. So, if your startup idea would be judged by the amount of good it would to mankind, what would it be?"

<comment><USER10> Where has this concept of "world changing is important, and a business must be of real value to mankind" come from in recent years? Who gives a shit how incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a business?

Since when did this become some sort of measure of the worth of a tech company?

Sounds like misguided hippy shit to me.

Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't set out to change the world and "do something incredibly important for mankind", despite what the message might have become in later years. They all set out to do things they were interested in, pursuing technology for its own sake, as most people were back in the 1970's.

These days startups seem to need to feel that to justify their existence they need to be "changing the world" or "doing something important for mankind" or "giving back to the community". There's no need to justify the existence of a business. Do it for the cash, do it for fun, do it to scratch your sense of ambition, do it because you think it's a good idea, even if some pompous git stands on a high horse and looks to the sky and proclaims "this business is not changing mankind for the better, I am dismayed at the trivial nature of this endeavour, I deem it of little value".

<comment><USER9> Well, that's ok, we all see things differently. And I guess, I don't have a problem with that. If that is what you want to do, go for it. But I would rather not be called some pompous git, I really think that is as far from what I am as possibly can be. Ok, I can be an asshole sometimes, but I try not to be.

<comment><USER9> Trying to find uses for the internet? Oh well. If you think it is pompous to "judge the startups you see against some measure of "importance to mankind"" I think there is a problem, and you are probably part of it. I don't want to argue. Just go make lots of money and find some use for the internet and all is well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sandstorm.io ([https://sandstorm.io](https://sandstorm.io)) is working on turning server infrastructure and security upside-down without the need to rewrite applications. The goal is for distributed infrastructure and security to be as easy as possible for end users to manage, and as hard as possible for applications to screw up. The model we're building is capability-based; previous capability-based research systems have usually required rewriting apps to fit the model, but ours does not. This leads to a lot of interesting computer science, systems engineering, security, and UX problems, both in designing a new model that is practical and just-in-time reverse-engineering of application intent in order to seamlessly fit it into the new model.

Possibly-interesting technical posts:

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run- docker...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker- apps.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-13-sandbox- security.h...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-13-sandbox- security.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-24-tinytinyrss- plus-s...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-24-tinytinyrss-plus- security-discussion.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-05-12-easy- port.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-05-12-easy-port.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web- ap...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require- federated-hosting.html)

[https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute- units.html](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html)

Sandstorm is not currently actively hiring. But it is an open source project if you're interested in contributing. See:

[https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Get- Involved](https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Get-Involved)

<comment><USER12> Wondering why you're not actively hiring?

<comment><USER11> We only just raised a seed round[0], which only gives us money to hire a couple of people, and we already have more really awesome candidates than we have budget to hire. So basically we're all set on hiring until Series A (2016?). You can feel free to e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com if you think you're an exceptional case, but _probably_ the answer will be: "Sorry, we don't have budget or bandwidth to interview more people right now. :("

[0] [https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-15-sandstorm-1.3M-see...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-15-sandstorm-1.3M-seed- round-pay-it-forward.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> MapD ([http://www.mapd.com](http://www.mapd.com)) is building a hyper- interactive big data analytics and visualization platform running on multiple GPUs/CPUs. We basically do every performance trick in the book (like compiling our queries via LLVM and caching hot data on the GPU) to do this. The end result is the ability to scan billions of rows of data in milliseconds at rates greater than 2 terabytes/second per server when running on 8 Nvidia K80s (although we also get great results on laptops and even ARM cores.) And not only can you query the data with SQL but you can visualize it or feed it into machine learning algorithms without copies because it is already distributed across all available compute devices.

<comment><USER14> Where did your cofounder go? Why is half your company non-engineering (per your team photos)?

Tech looks good, company looks shaky.

<comment><USER13> Actually all of our team codes, we just wear other hats at times. Our Director of Business Development has a PhD in GPU algorithm acceleration and I (the ceo) coded the original version of MapD and still play full-time engineer as much as possible. I can see why one might get the impression you got from the website though - perhaps we should add a bit more background on ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At Graphistry, we are powering nextgen visual analysis through real-time GPU clusters that stream right into your browser. For example, we cracked a botnet a couple days ago using it. Visually exploring millions of data points in real-time is a hard problem for both infoviz design (hairballs!) and high performance programming (1000 node GPU clusters), but unblocks some of the biggest industries (finding criminals, avoiding economic meltdown, datacenter rootcause analysis, ...).

And yes, we're looking for the right data viz folks to help us harness all this performance and help data analysts make sense of it all.

<comment><USER16> > we cracked a botnet a couple days ago using it

Do elaborate...

<comment><USER17> I love how due to the nature of the Internet that huhtenberg may be the owner of that botnet. ;-)

(note: not saying he is, obviously. just making a point we should all be aware or when communicating with strangers online.)

<comment><USER15> If he takes it down without authorities forcing him to, great!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Kryptnostic seems to be working on bringing usable fully homomorphic encryption to market. If they actually have something real there, that could be game-changing for cloud privacy:

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/kryptnostic/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/kryptnostic/)

It's a shame Google isn't focused more on this, too. They should be having a Google X lab just for that, and invest at least as much as they currently invest in quantum computing. They have a lot to gain from it. Infringing on people's privacy is currently Google's biggest PR issue, and it's not going to go away. It will only become a bigger issue in the future. Without this, Google could perhaps return to being _almost_ as liked as it used to be (there's still the issue of bullying others in the search engine, of course).

<comment><USER19> The first company that can crack the full operational cycle of homomorphic crypto will get a license to print money. As long as they don't squander the first-mover advantage, it will take quite a long time for the eventual second- mover to take over.

It's not just doing the computations in an untrusted cloud environment, although that's _a_ big promise. I would say that an even bigger part will be the eventual ability to run computations on multi-party data sets. If you can provide a provably secure zero-knowledge service that still manages to compute results from multiple sources of opaque data, you will have every single financial institution and insurance giant banging on your door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> At Packetzoom we're building up a networking protocol specifically designed for mobile networks. We've discarded the TCP/HTTP stack completely and started from scratch. The idea was to go back to the drawing board (to the lowest level possible) and ask this question:

 _How would network protocols on mobile work if they were being designed from scratch today?_

And that's what we've done. Results so far are pretty amazing (yes, we're out in production with private beta customers).

And oh... sorry but we're not hiring right now. We have a small, tight-knit team and we plan to hire very slowly with only the exact right fit of people.

<comment><USER19> I have an honest question: what do you answer when the obvious comparison to (and lack of industry adoption of) SCTP is put forward?

In-protocol multiplexing must be pretty high up the list of necessary features, but how about transparent multi-network roaming? Not just over mobile operator networks, I'm talking about hopping between different transports.

<comment><USER20> Let me answer your latter questions first:

 _In-protocol multiplexing must be pretty high up the list of necessary features_

Yes :-)

 _but how about transparent multi-network roaming_

Yes :-)

 _I 'm talking about hopping between different transports._

Yes :-)

(I was thinking of writing a much more detailed answer to above, but it's so detailed that it would be far better as a blog post... I'll post the link here for a more inclusive discussion soon)

Now going back to your first question:

 _" what do you answer when the obvious comparison to (and lack of industry adoption of) SCTP is put forward?"_

Oh... where to start.. OK. First off the comparison is not all that obvious. SCTP was never built for the mobile use case (4 way handshake??). There are some improvements over TCP (reliable, out-of-order message based delivery with multihoming are all good things), but there's a fatal flaw that prevents any serious use of this protocol. It's not TCP or UDP!! And there are umpteen middle-boxes on the internet who won't let it through. That's all you need to know to explain the lack of industry adoption of SCTP.

So we built our protocol on top of UDP (which we basically treat as a proxy for raw IP). Luckily for the mobile users, UDP based custom protocols are now well baked into various standard applications (DNS, VOIP etc.). A vast majority of middleboxes support it and the trend is in the right direction -- every new middle box has to support UDP passthrough/NAT by default barring exceptional circumstances.

Now, how do we expect our new protocol to get adoption. The answer is, we don't. We're not just building a protocol. We're building a turnkey service for mobile app developers. Our business case doesn't involve convincing anyone of the technical superiority of the protocol. We simply sell a superior user experience with minimal developer effort. And you'll learn as we get more open in the coming few weeks (wink, wink), it's not at all a hard-sell :-)

Feel free to connect with me directly or just continue the discussion here if you have more questions. I'm always happy to engage skeptical observers ;-)

<comment><USER19> Let's start with the encouragement: please, please put the technical details into a blog post and publish it on HN. This is the kind of stuff I've always[tm] been interested about.

> _umpteen middle-boxes on the internet who won 't let it through. That's all > you need to know to explain the lack of industry adoption of SCTP._

Heh, I've dealt with IPSec. You don't have to convince me on the futility of getting new protocols ("the magic number on IP header") approved for end to end delivery. :) For better or worse, UDP encapsulation is the sensible thing.

I used SCTP as a fairly well known example of a protocol that has many of the modern technical requirements built in. As far as protocol features go, it is a pretty good yardstick.

Now, as for "turnkey service"... I would guess you're positing yourself as the platform provider. You need to control the server endpoints to work with multi-homing; you'll have to provide and maintain the mobile app libraries, along with best practices documentation and aids for debugging; you _probably_ want to provide a patch for wireshark (dissector); and then there's the security to think about. That's just off the top of my head.

I am genuinely interested how you have solved the problems and where you have looked for inspiration. Because this is aimed at mobile developers, unreliable latency will be a major factor. That's something you do not have control over - maybe the protocol library can help a bit, and multi-homing already mandates graceful handling of concurrent retransmits. But mobile networks are not just unreliable, they are all too often outright crappy.

Can one ever work around that?

<comment><USER20> _Now, as for "turnkey service"... I would guess you're positing yourself as the platform provider. You need to control the server endpoints to work with multi-homing; you'll have to provide and maintain the mobile app libraries, along with best practices documentation and aids for debugging; you probably want to provide a patch for wireshark (dissector); and then there's the security to think about. That's just off the top of my head._

That's a good list of issues. And yes, we've thought about each of those issues and have had enough success that a few pretty rigorous customers are currently using us in live apps.

 _Because this is aimed at mobile developers, unreliable latency will be a major factor. That 's something you do not have control over - maybe the protocol library can help a bit, and multi-homing already mandates graceful handling of concurrent retransmits. But mobile networks are not just unreliable, they are all too often outright crappy._

Well the general issue of lossy connections, unpredictable latency and outright disconnections and reconnections (often with a different IP address) _is_ the main impetus behind designing a brand new protocol. TCP does a woeful job here and any new approaches that limit themselves to just tweaking server side TCP are DOA when it comes to solving those issues. We'll be going more public with some of this info soon (in a couple of weeks).

Btw, checked out Cricket WC odds on Smarkets. I think you guys are spot-on on the second Semi Finals ;-)

<comment><USER19> > _TCP does a woeful job_

Not just TCP. Network operators are guilty too. There are the network side megalith buffers that are trying hard to "optimise" TCP transfers and just murder latency. Then, precisely because TCP is a stateful protocol and clients have the retransmission logic built in, the operators also have the option of applying something like RED at the earliest sign of network congestion. False positive or not.

(Note: I have a friend who works on the other side of the table and runs a team of engineers responsible for installing new mobile network equipment in the field. The use of mobile networks grows faster than the operators and their contractors can add capacity. Which means the situation is unlikely to improve soon.)

As you mentioned earlier, UDP at least has the distinction of being used in real-time and streaming protocols => operators and network gear are more reluctanct to mess with it. If you think you can get away with it, you could also assign multiple ports to any single session and apply at-least-once logic to the transmission - or to put it in layman's terms: blast and spam the network, in order to get even a single datagram out without excess delay. Do that often enough and you can expect the operators to crack down on it, though...

As for work: thanks :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oscar Health in NYC is fixing the health insurance industry by building a tech and data driven insurance company from the ground up. It's an extremely complex, highly regulated industry that is in need of fixing. There are many startups that try to address pieces of the broken health care system, but Oscar is the only startup trying to solve it by doing it all. Engineering talent from Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Spotify, Apple, and more.: [https://www.hioscar.com](https://www.hioscar.com)

The USA shouldn't have such a terrible health care system. Let's fix it. They are hiring all sorts of talent: [https://www.hioscar.com/jobs](https://www.hioscar.com/jobs)

Fully cloud based, heavy aurora/mesos shop, kafka, hbase, redshift, mysql, python, flask, and an abundance of data analytics.

<comment><USER22> No doubt health insurance is hard problem, but it's not _technically hard_. OP asked for examples of company's pushing the limits of advanced technology, and Oscar is not one.

<comment><USER21> It's not? Why do you feel that way?

<comment><USER22> It's not solving difficult problems in algorithms, systems engineering, hardware, ML, AI, etc.

Nothing wrong with that. But using today's technology in web and mobile to build a highly-usable customer experience, is not what OP meant by hard technical problems.

<comment><USER21> I'd like to correct you on that, Oscar is not just a pretty design smacked on- top of an insurance company. It's the entire insurance stack redesigned from the ground up.

Algorithms and ML are all heavily used in analyzing member data to improve the lives of people.

We're engineering systems that give us real-time feedback on the insurance system as a whole, rather than the usual "30-60 days". Building a claims system from scratch is not an easy feat.

If you'd like to learn more about what we're doing i'd be happy to demo it for you.

Don't be fooled by our pretty and simplified website. It's all of the hard engineering efforts that you don't see that make the simplified experience possible. :)

<comment><USER22> Good luck! I hope you guys do well and deliver an awesome product :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> According to basically every career page of every startup, every startup ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I should have been more specific in the title. Although I do think the description gives a better idea of the kind of startup I was looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'll play devils advocate since no one else is. Why does the company's product(s) have to be the advanced technology? The successful "latest web app" startups have created tons of tech they build on top of. Scale leads to technology.

</comment><comment><USER25> I work in the data analytics space, so I'll focus there since many of the other answers give a good, broad set of companies to consider.

* Trifacta ([http://www.trifacta.com/](http://www.trifacta.com/)) are dealing with the very grungy problem of data transformation. Their approach is heavily UX-centric, with built-in predictive capabilities that learn what you are doing as you try to transform disparate data sets to meet your needs.

* Segment ([http://www.segment.com](http://www.segment.com)) acts as a data router, allowing you to implement significantly less data plumbing in your application while allowing you to deliver your data to many different analytics tools.

* Jut ([http://www.jut.io](http://www.jut.io)) is a full-stack approach to building a hub for streaming data. They take any operations data (logs, metrics, alerts, events) as inputs, manage storage and analysis, and have creating a framework for streaming visualizations as well. Technologies include an in-browser, retargetable compiler, a streaming analytics layer, storage (elastic search and cassandra), A d3-based visualization framework designed for 3rd party add-ons, and a simpler way to manage large-scale data called hybrid SaaS. (disclosure: I work here.)

* Databricks ([http://www.databricks.com](http://www.databricks.com)) has implemented apache Spark as a service.

</comment><comment><USER26> At Airware, we are doing hardware, embedded systems, flight controls, desktop development, and web services. We deal with every type of data that could be captured by a 5-50lb drone aircraft and processed or analyzed: images, video, logs, streaming telemetry, etc. Problem spaces include autonomy, machine vision, and distributed computing (both on the vehicle and in the cloud).

Yes, we are hiring: [http://www.airware.com/careers](http://www.airware.com/careers)

<comment><USER27> Are you hiring interns (for the fall)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Skymind is building an open-source, distributed deep-learning framework for Java and Scala.

[http://www.skymind.io/](http://www.skymind.io/) [http://deeplearning4j.org/](http://deeplearning4j.org/)

<comment><USER29> Plus their scientific computing library [http://nd4j.org](http://nd4j.org) and machine-learning vectorization library Canova.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> At Spire (spire.com) we are building small satellites to monitor the weather and global trade. We're looking to improve the efficiency and safety of shipping as well as help prevent illegal fishing. And we're hiring.

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://UtilityAPI.com/](https://UtilityAPI.com/) is making the Twilio for energy.

Humans needs to switch 87% of our energy sources (~450 Quadrillion BTU/yr) from fossil fuels to other source in our lifetimes[1]. That's an unbelievably huge transition, and one of the current bottlenecks is energy data communication. Solar and energy efficiency companies can't communicate efficiently with utilities and vice versa because each utility has a unique, antiquated, manual system for handling energy data. We are trying to fix that by making a universal API that wraps utilities so energy innovation can happen efficiently on both sides of the meter.

Yes, we are hiring: [https://angel.co/utilityapi/jobs](https://angel.co/utilityapi/jobs)

[1]: [http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next- internet/](http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/)

</comment><comment><USER32> At Parallel Universe we are working on a full server-side stack (distributed in-memory storage, through the database, and all the way to the communication layer) that is mechanically-sympathetic with modern hardware architecture (most current software architectures actually fight the hardware).

Most of our projects are free software, and yes, we are hiring.

</comment><comment><USER33> Tachyus - Predictive analytics for the oil & gas industry. They offer solutions for production optimization in cyclic steaming, steamflooding, CO2-flooding, waterflooding, pump optimization, workover prioritization, and shale fracking.

[http://www.tachyus.com](http://www.tachyus.com)

</comment><comment><USER34> Three startups I want to promote:

1) Onu: A cloud computing framework based on GPUs. I have worked with both of their co-founders and have really high hope for this company in the future of cloud computing market. They are hiring top GPU programmers: [http://anticipate.onu.io/](http://anticipate.onu.io/)

2)Tachyon Nexus: memory-centric distributed storage system. Just announced a couple of days ago by my friend Haoyuan Li from Berkeley AMP lab. [http://www.tachyonnexus.com/](http://www.tachyonnexus.com/)

3) Mental Canvas: A spin-off from Yale professor Julie Dorsey, they are working on 3D reconstruction from 2D drawing. Very cool stuff and one of my friend is the early employee there: [http://www.mentalcanvas.com/](http://www.mentalcanvas.com/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Blockstream is writing the code that will one day run not just the entire financial system, but eventually all forms of digital property, contracts, and services drives thereof. And we're hiring:

[http://www.blockstream.com/jobs](http://www.blockstream.com/jobs)

<comment><USER35> ^services _derived_ thereof. Stupid phone auto-correct...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I work at a network security startup [1], I can't say much until we come out of stealth mode on Tuesday, except that it's a very challenging engineering problem.

[1] [https://www.protectwise.com/](https://www.protectwise.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> We were working on autonomous stuff, but had to move onto simpler things because people weren't buying.

[http://robots-everywhere.com/portfolio/navcom_ai/](http://robots- everywhere.com/portfolio/navcom_ai/) (2007)

<comment><USER38> This reflects your current status I presume? [http://robots- everywhere.com/re_site/](http://robots-everywhere.com/re_site/)

<comment><USER37> Yeah. Was trying to not link that coz I don't want to spamvertise.

<comment><USER38> I see. Nitpicks: \- The twitter icon on the top right points to @spiritplumber which has the name of a "Linda Camezon", a standard issue avatar and only 1 tweet which doesn't signify anything. \- The text at the bottom of the website (in green) is unreadable given the background. \- I couldn't find a careers section or the location of the company. \- The videos are not professionally produced which gives the feel of an amateur effort not an established company.

<comment><USER37> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Periscope ([https://www.periscope.io/](https://www.periscope.io/)) is a data visualization tool that automatically and transparently syncs customer data into a huge multitenant data cache that runs queries ~ 150X faster than customers' own databases.

In the long run, it is a data tool that will eliminate the need for data warehouses.

It turns out the hard problem is not running the queries fast, but keeping the cache accurate and up-to-date. Our cache coherence service is probably the piece of code we're most proud of.

And, yes, we're hiring in SF. :) Reach out to me, firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER40> For a second, I thought this was the streaming video platform that Twitter just bought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I read this a few months ago. I agree with its interpretation over the current state of the entrepreneur culture amongst the youger cohort of emerging adults. I believe that I am working on a unique problem. One that involves being able to create a behavioral profile on an individual based off what their online behavior (i.e. their public timeline information) and connecting it to how the tend to spend. (categories or unusual trends) Not currently hiring, but open to talk to people interested in it.

</comment><comment><USER42> MetricWire ([https://metricwire.com/](https://metricwire.com/)).

We are building a platform that enhances the workflow of clinical trials thus making it easier, faster and cheaper on drug companies and safer for the participants involved. We help the researchers using the data collected from the trial to adapt the future stages of the trial thus helping avoid serious adverse effects or making them known to researchers in real time if they are occurring at present.

<comment><USER43> can you expand on the technical r&d involved? Sounds like a pretty normal user interface & data sharing problem.

<comment><USER42> In a way it is. So basically our platform allows users to create studies and structure the entire workflow of a trial(in a lot of these they are multi- staged so there are multiple steps that need to be designed). Now after this done, they can follow this workflow on our platform when they are conducting their trial in house. Now for parts where a doctor/researcher is not present(like drug/medication/treatment application), we have a mobile and web app that lets users answer questions/file serious adverse events if they face any, etc.

Now here is the cool part, the above is just the surface. Our team is really passionate about data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence and its applications in real world. So we do something called adaptive clinical trials where we run analytical models on the data that comes in and can forecast when the trajectory of a trial needs to be altered. This means you can catch any serious reactions to drugs, faster.

All in all, to answer the main question, our solution helps keep the costs of clinical trials low and reduces error rate. Being able to run these trials fast and keeping the costs low, allows not only for drugs to get out to the market faster, but also helps reduce the costs of drugs(due to the reduction of costs to process).

I also only explained the application of our tech in clinical trials, but our software is so flexible that it can be applied to any industry such as Consumer Insights, Depression analysis studies, etc.

Not sure if I adequately answered your question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> At Meteor, we're building a complete open-source platform for easily building best-of-class, fast, web and mobile apps. If you've never heard about Meteor, check out the original screencast: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi0aJ9yr2o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi0aJ9yr2o) (needless to say, lots have changed since then -- most notably a security model :)

Meteor touches all parts of an application stack (client-side templating[1], live database updates[2], a websocket-based sync protocol[3], an "all you need" build tool[4] that can build mobile and web apps, an in-house "transparent reactive programming" library[5], a cloud hosting environment[6] built on Docker and Kubernetes, and the list goes on -- all with a very very strong emphasis on great developer experience).

Learn more about Meteor's subprojects here: [http://meteor.com/projects](http://meteor.com/projects). Most of these projects are current edge new technology -- we develop new systems when the existing open source ones aren't good enough (either because of how they're implemented or because we can supply a better developer experience)

Moreover, almost all of our work is open source which means working here builds your GitHub profile -- always a good thing. Remote is OK. Learn more at [http://https://www.meteor.com/jobs/](http://https://www.meteor.com/jobs/), or happy to answer questions at firstname.lastname@example.com.

[1] [https://www.meteor.com/blaze](https://www.meteor.com/blaze)

[2] [https://www.meteor.com/livequery](https://www.meteor.com/livequery)

[3] [https://www.meteor.com/ddp](https://www.meteor.com/ddp)

[4] [https://www.meteor.com/isobuild](https://www.meteor.com/isobuild)

[5] [https://www.meteor.com/tracker](https://www.meteor.com/tracker)

[6] [https://trello.com/c/FMdB7GAu/78-galaxy-managed- production-q...](https://trello.com/c/FMdB7GAu/78-galaxy-managed-production- quality-meteor-deploy)

</comment><comment><USER45> Have you seen Carbon3D? [http://carbon3d.com/](http://carbon3d.com/)

(I'm not affiliated with 'em, just think they're pretty rad)

</comment><comment><USER46> At FarmLogs (YC W2012) we're using high-precision satellite, tractor, weather, and nutrient data to generate predictions and recommendations for crop growth.

</comment><comment><USER47> Counsyl is doing great work in genetic testing. [https://www.counsyl.com/careers/](https://www.counsyl.com/careers/)

</comment><comment><USER48> From the website for Vicarious

"our mission: build the next generation of A.I. algorithms"

[http://vicarious.com/](http://vicarious.com/)

</comment><comment><USER49> MaidSafe ([http://maidsafe.net](http://maidsafe.net)) recently raised over $8m from one of the first ever cryptocurrency-based rounds of financing. As the company approaches beta launch, they are looking for a front-end Qt Developer to create applications to sit on top of the SAFE Network, a secure and fully decentralized data management service made up by the individual users who contribute storage, computing power and bandwidth to form a world-wide autonomous system.

[http://maidsafe.net/careers](http://maidsafe.net/careers)

"Know any #QT (C++) developers who want to help change the world from our Scottish HQ? Please ask them to get in touch: email@example.com"

[https://twitter.com/maidsafe/status/578961937981161472](https://twitter.com/maidsafe/status/578961937981161472)

Features of the SAFE Network:

\- Self-authentication: users can create accounts and log in from any computer without the need or knowledge of third parties ([http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/...](http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/self_authentication.html)).

\- Farming: this self-regulating network lets users offer spare drive space and in return delivers anonymous, super-fast internet ([http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/...](http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/proof_of_resources.html)).

\- Examples of apps that can be used on the SAFE Network: cloud storage, encrypted messaging, websites, VoIP, social networks and any existing service that runs on the Internet ([http://maidsafe.net/applications](http://maidsafe.net/applications)).

\- Safecoin is the currency of the SAFE Network and a mechanism to incentivize and reward farmers and app developers as well as provide access to network services ([http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/how_it_works/safec...](http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/how_it_works/safecoin.html)).

If you have any questions about the SAFE Network, please ask them on [https://forum.safenetwork.io](https://forum.safenetwork.io).

</comment><comment><USER50> Visidraft is working on making Augmented Reality actually deliver on the promises of presence on mobile devices at the consumer level and give 6 degrees of freedom around virtual objects in the real world context.

We have to make Large scale Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) easily computable across existing mobile devices to bring consumers hyper- precise (cm precision) geo-reference. This is actually super hard but also pretty awesome.

Yes we are hiring. Specifically CV experts.

[1][http://www.visidraft.com](http://www.visidraft.com)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_m...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping)

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

</comment><comment><USER51> Quobyte. We're building a fault-tolerant scalable distributed storage system for POSIX files, block and object storage. Lots of challenges around distributed systems, architecture and concurrency.

Development is in Berlin, Germany, and we're hiring.

[http://www.quobyte.com](http://www.quobyte.com)

<comment><USER10> What's the revenue plan for a business like that?

<comment><USER51> Software licenses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Deepmind, working on general AI, and yes, they're hiring.

<comment><USER53> No longer a startup -- they got bought by Google.

[http://deepmind.com/](http://deepmind.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Planet Labs [https://www.planet.com/](https://www.planet.com/)

<comment><USER55> seconded. geo-rectictification is insanely difficult and computationally intensive

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I work for Pivotal, which is working on a bunch of problems. We're a startup in that we were founded on investment capital (EMC and GE) and we're growing very fast.

Probably the biggest effort we're making is on Cloud Foundry, an opensource PaaS. Developing scalable production-grade systems for managing and running 12 factor apps is _hard_. Superficially it looks easy. Once you do anything at scale, it stops being easy, which is where we come in.

We also have teams working on Hadoop, GemFire, antirez is on Redis and Disque, the Spring team works for us and I've kinda lost track of the rest.

I work for Pivotal Labs, the agile development wing founded in 1989 from which the whole company takes its name.

We're hiring across all divisions. Email me: firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER57> At Second Spectrum we use spatial-temporal pattern recognition to tell stories about sports. We have lots of interesting challenges in machine learning (how to recognize patterns from moving dots), user interface/experience, (how to intelligently display the mountain of information that we gather from a single game or even play), and computer vision (how to augment video to display semantic information from our pattern recognition layer).

And yes, we are hiring in LA, in those areas, as well as for full stack developers. Feel free to reach out at firstname.lastname@example.com or firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER58> At The Climate Corporation we're making science based tools to push forward precision agriculture.

I quite like it, there are lots of hard technical problems. I realised that since I joined ~1 year ago, I haven't worked on any CRUD apps at all yet.

Here are some positions: [http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=JobL...](http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=JobListing&j=ohHMXfwr&s=Hackernews_Satshabad_Khalsa)

Reach out if you have questions: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER59> At Netra ([http://www.netra.io](http://www.netra.io)) we are building true visual search. Imagine being able to search video/images using other image(s) or video clips. Yep we are doing that, and eventually Google scale.

We see immense benefits to humanity - from medicine, to environmental science, crime prevention/monitoring....down to the trivial - search millions of your photos for your pet dog, look for all photos where you & Aunt Millie were together etc.

p.s : and yes we are hiring.

</comment><comment><USER60> At Clarify.io, we're making audio & video searchable. Unlike a general purpose ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) engine, we perform a bunch of automated analysis to tune the engine and optimize it for the particular language, accent, and a variety of other things. We've found that our accuracy is much higher than a general purpose one.

The founders went through Techstars London 2013 and moved to Austin right after. We raised 1.4M last fall from a mix of angels and VCs.

</comment><comment><USER61> nvidia is doing amazing work, and many of their employees are in the bay area. 3072 cores for $999 - [http://www.geforce.com/.../geforce- gtx.../specifications](http://www.geforce.com/.../geforce- gtx.../specifications)

The number of companies using this device to solve real problems is growing. Jeremy Howard just started an interesting one - [http://www.enlitic.com](http://www.enlitic.com)

<comment><USER18> Nvidia has done great work with CUDA, but I wonder if AMD/ARM's HSA will make the work of the people using CUDA now much easier in the future - compute with a high-level language that you already know. That's got to be some kind of paradigm change there. I just hope they end up supporting Rust, too.

<comment><USER62> Compute on the GPU is unlikely to be unified in a meaningful way with the CPU in the near future. The GPU is a massive SIMD machine in contrast to the CPU.

Even if you use the same language for both, the style of code & algorithms are very different.

<comment><USER15> Check out the AMD APU. We've had good experiences with recent Intel integrated as well due to embedded RAM. You are right though in that we write our code with data parallel and sometimes manycore SIMT in mind.

<comment><USER62> I worked on the Intel integrated embedded RAM a couple years ago (before release)! It was tough getting the h/w bugs out. Are you using it in Windows or Linux?

<comment><USER15> Frustratingly, only when we do the client-only demos on our macbooks (iris). Our 'real' version is AWS or dedicated nvidia boxes, where we don't get it. OTOH, this sort of thing makes me excited that we can expect significant HW- driven speedups for our approach for years to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> At JamKazam, we are trying to enable real-time play of music over the internet. While we can't magically make the internet better, we have spent a ton of time getting latency as low as we can in Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and on custom hardware (still under development).

Just a week ago we released our 'distributed metronome', which lets musicians hear a synchronized metronome regardless of how much internet latency there might be.

</comment><comment><USER64> We're using a combined data pool from multiple companies (i.e., customers) to predict security breaches before they occur, and provide a usable set of notifications rather than the long list of "possible alerts" that so many infosec apps drop on users' laps.

</comment><comment><USER65> Wriber ([http://www.wriber.com/](http://www.wriber.com/)) is SaaS that empowers enterprises to build marketing and communications content more effectively using dynamically-generated artificially intelligent writing prompts.

</comment><comment><USER66> WebAction is working on some complex problems from a data management aspect (continuous queries on streaming, distributed in-memory data). From a front- end dev aspect, we're working on efficient rendering, modular and re-usable UI components and frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER67> Asteroid Mining:

[http://www.planetaryresources.com/](http://www.planetaryresources.com/)

Space Travel:

[http://www.blueorigin.com/](http://www.blueorigin.com/)

Robots:

[http://modbot.com/](http://modbot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER68> Machine Insight. We have a powerful machine learning system based on genetic algorithms. ([http://www.machineinsight.com/employment.html](http://www.machineinsight.com/employment.html))

</comment><comment><USER69> We're trying to develop a set of algorithms that can detect if two online accounts are the same person as well as whether or not the person can be trusted.

Not saving the world but its still a fun challenge!

</comment><comment><USER70> maybe not a hard technical problem; but they're tackling (with science) a gigantic challenge i.e. the global food industry and its discontents.

Hampton Creek [http://www.hamptoncreek.com/](http://www.hamptoncreek.com/)

This one also looks promising: Endless Mobile [https://endlessm.com](https://endlessm.com)

and they're also hiring! [https://endlessm.com/jobs/](https://endlessm.com/jobs/)

</comment><comment><USER71> We (Ananas) are working on the challenge of using technology to eliminate extremism amongst other things.

We will be hiring in a few months.

<comment><USER72> What sort of extremism are you hoping to eliminate??

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> uBeam: Wireless electricity

</comment><comment><USER74> Although I dont work there but I think theranos is one such company.

</comment><comment><USER75> Narrative Science

</comment><comment><USER76> I had a start up that was working on hard technically challenging problems.

We were a spin-off of the MIT mind machine project. We were working on cognitive modeling with the long-term goal of modeling intention awareness, which is modeling cognition (knowledge and emotions) with a time component.

We were working on knowledge graph theory, blending over time, based on all written communication of an individual or population sub-group.

It proved to be too soon - probably about 10 years too early. We needed more data from individuals - email wasn't enough. We probably needed daily recording of all interactions to build a knowledge graph of an individual. But even working with email data it was too much information - we could barely process all of it especially when blending with a time vector.

Google glass was hopeful for acquiring enough interaction data for a person and their daily lives, but it proved inadequate (no one used it). The closest data set to what we needed was recordings of all interactions on the ISS.

This will be necessary to model a human personality AI at the beta level (copy of an individual based on observations of that person).

We've since moved off on to other projects.

</comment><comment><USER77> Scrape.it works on building a web scraping tool that minimizes effort and time invested to quickly extract data from websites. Web scraping is simple in theory but building a tool that can work with a lot of different websites in the wild is no easy task.

I am looking for a co-founder.

[https://scrape.it](https://scrape.it)

</comment><comment><USER78> Yo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you explain what advance in technology they're working on at Yo? (as opposed to "advances" in social media)

<comment><USER79> Yo.

<comment><USER10> Yo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Palantir and yes we are hiring.

<comment><USER81> How do you justify to yourself working under a CEO who proposed making a smear campaign against Julian Assange?

<comment><USER82> A third party (HB Gary) — not Palantir and certainly not its CEO — suggested the 'offensive' campaign against Wikileaks.

Palantir — and specifically its CEO — immediately disclaimed involvement or interest in both that plan, or anything of its general type.

How do you justify to yourself slandering a company by claiming nearly the exact opposite of what happened?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is not true. Palantir along with HBGary and Berico Technologies authored the report suggesting an 'offensive' campaign. [1]

They did apologize for this and as you say, disclaimed involvement or interest in such a plan. [2]

[1] [https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf](https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf)

[2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palantir- apologizes-for-wikileaks-attack-proposal-cuts-ties-with-hbgary/)

<comment><USER82> The slide deck provides no support for ~adamnemecek's claim that the Palantir CEO himself proposed the plan. And the CEO's unequivocal statements afterwards suggest that if there wasn't a bright-line inside Palantir against offensive operations before 2011, there has been since.

But also, the branding of the presentation does not reliably indicate the origin of the specifically offensive bullet points (most notably the "Potential Proactive Tactics" slide), nor whether the contents ever progressed past trial-balloon status.

In particular, coverage by Greenwald [1] (working from more email thread context for which I can't find a current online source) identifies HB Gary principal Aaron Barr as the verbatim source of some of the most-aggressive anti-Greenwald language.

So I can see that someone at Palantir was coordinating with the other entities _and_ leading the document-prep. But they also cut-and-pasted material from the potential contract partners, including vague proposals outside Palantir's focus, that may never have been approved or presented.

I'd ascribe those bullets to Palantir itself if that deck was in fact ever presented to a client. We don't know if that's the case. If instead that text just bounced around as a discussion draft (including their more-aggro partners), but went nowhere, and was eventually categorically disavowed... then it's a stretch to say that the company or its leadership actually advocated those steps.

[1] [http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/](http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you read the entire Salon article you linked to?

"So apparently, if Palantir's new version is to be believed, a 26-year-old engineer went off on his own and — without any supervision or direction — participated in the development of odious smear campaigns intended for two of the nation's deepest-pocket organizations (Bank of America and the Chamber), potential clients which the emails repeatedly emphasize would be very lucrative. I'll leave it to others to decide how credible that version is, but I will note that several facts undermine it: ..."

"The leaders at the very top of Palantir were aware of the Team Themis work, though the details of what was being proposed by Barr may well have escaped their notice."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> All of them</comment>


Unique Productivity Hacks to Try Out Today - <AUTHOR> https://30hourjobs.com/blog/8-unique-productivity-hacks-to-try-out-today/ <comment><USER2> Number 8 would be the first bullet on my list. Realizing that I could just go outside and take a walk (or a run) instead of trying to think at my desk had a huge impact. It feel like non-work in a way.</comment>


Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://qwerjk.com/posts/duck-duck-firefox/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy.

I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...).

Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Firefox is again about as fast as Chrome.

Regarding Google, I've found that it's result are often better than DuckDuckGo. But I promised myself that sometime I'll make a week using only DuckDuckGo, and see if I can survive without Google.

<comment><USER3> I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com <tab> in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.

<comment> k-mcgrady On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search on Google.

<comment><USER2> That's one of the best, and yet one of the worst feature of DuckDuckGo.

When I tried using it a while ago, I ended up always searching for "!g <query>", since I knew I would always get equal or better results.

I'm glad it's this easy to search on Google from DuckDuckGo, but it also makes the switch harder. Or, at least, it did for me.

<comment> k-mcgrady I had the same problem. I switched to DDG and Firefox when the PRISM story broke but ended up using !g on so many queries I made Google my default again. I find Google much better when I'm searching for API docs, StackOverflow Q's etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using DDG and Firefox for years now, and don't miss Google at all.

The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results that are close to but not exactly what I asked for.

This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else.

As far as DDG's privacy boasts go, I'd love to see them confirmed by frequent audits from a trusted and respected entity like the EFF. For all we know, DDG might be lying (or being forced to lie) about not tracking or spying on its users and not handing over the data it collects on us to others.

My motto is: trust but verify. So far, there's no way to do that in the case of DDG. Still, I'd much rather use a service that at least pays (pretty convincing) lip service to respecting its users' privacy than services where there's clear evidence of abuse and contempt for its users' privacy, such as Google or Facebook.

<comment><USER5> DDG is Bing with some front end work, why not just use Bing and then you can use quotes searches without problem [1]

[1] [http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en- us/bing/ff524480.aspx](http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en- us/bing/ff524480.aspx)

<comment><USER4> It's not just Bing.

 _" DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and others."_[1]

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features)

<comment><USER6> It is a meta search engine with lions share of queries answered by Yahoo! BOSS (which is backed by Bing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was surprised to see _praise_ for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks.

My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the top of the options every single time. One down arrow, enter, and done. Chrome puts it as option five under a search for "task" and three predictive recommendations from Google's search engine that start with "task" (none of which I have ever visited in Chrome). "Taskstream log in"? I don't even know what that means.

Essentially everything I want to select in the omnibar is always several items down the list. Very frustrating and inevitably one of the chief reasons I close Chrome and switch back to Firefox.

<comment><USER8> Here are some of my Chrome autocompletes: n (news.ycombinator.com), mu (music.google.com), ma (mail.google.com), a (amazon.com), gi (github.com), q (quora.com), l (localhost), i (images.google.com), c (coursera.com). I don't think I even give it a second thought after pressing these characters. I just do 'n' and Return.

Your experience might be worse, probably because you haven't used chrome enough.

<comment><USER7> To be clear, if I start typing the _beginning_ of the domain name, Chrome will correctly identify my intent. But if I type a _fragment_ of the URL (or multiple fragments), it assumes I want to run a search.

In your example, you said "n" leads to news.ycombinator.com. In Firefox, "n" leads to me to news.cnet.com, which I also visit fairly regularly. Meanwhile, "yc", or "hac", or "nator" yield Hacker News. In Chrome, "yc" yields a suggestion of "yc.edu" (whatever that is) and "hac" yields "hacked games." Part of my distaste for this is that it reveals that everything I type into the omnibar is sent to Google for analysis. I have _once_ accidentally pasted a password into the omnibar field and had a sudden panic. I know it's Google, and DBE, and all of that. But still.

Back to the fragments point, I might remember a site had something to do with "combi" in the name. Type that into Firefox and it knows what I want, even if I've only visited it once several months ago. Google thinks I want "combivent respimat." No joke. Apparently it's a drug.

In fact, as I experiment right now, I can't even get Chrome to suggest news.ycombinator.com by typing "combinator" into the omnibar. As a user of Chrome I am _required_ to remember the domain started with 'y'. In Firefox, the browser tries to help me.

As an exercise, can you tell us what sites are suggested when you type "combinator", "host", "hub" (this one is an example of a plausible case--"It was something-hub", type "hub", "oh yeah, _git_ hub!"), etc?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > But the keyboard shortcuts mean I can ... without reaching for the mouse, > and using a very limited set of shortcuts.

This is why I love vimperator[0]. I actually preferred pentadactyl[1] but development apparently stalled so I switched back.

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/vimperator/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/vimperator/)

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/)

<comment><USER4> As a long-time user of Pentadactyl, Firefox, and vim, I'd like to make the heretical suggestion to try w3m in emacs.

Having a web browser fully integrated in to a powerful editor like that is fantastic. It's far more powerful than what you'd get from the Pentadactyl/Firefox combination, with the disadvantage that w3m can't handle Javascript.[1]

w3m's also far faster and a lot less bloated than Firefox. For sites that work without Javascript and where I only care about getting information in text format (which is probalby 99% of the sites I use), it's just about perfect for me. For the rest, I have Firefox, Opera, and Chromium as backups.

[1] This is not a big loss on most sites, as they can usually be used just fine without it. In fact, it's often good to have Javascript turned off so as to avoid Javascript exploits, tracking and advertising.

<comment><USER10> The most annoying thing about w3m for me these days is the fonts in my default terminal window. I've been shopping around for a better alternative (GNOME terminal or XFCE4's terminal seem to beat my trusty old rxvt). The ability to dynamically resize fonts is also kind of nice (yeah, I'm old school).

That and the fact that color settings for w3m are pretty hard to tweak just right for whatever terminal / foreground/background you're using.

The fact that so many pages render _much_ more readably _without_ CSS is .... sad, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't believe someone misses Chrome's "Tiny Tab" thing, I think it's the single most broken thing about the browser. In Firefox I used to use multi row tabs and then Tree style tabs when I had too many tabs. In Chrome all I can do is open a new window. I don't see what's useful at all about having 20 reddit icons.

(pretty much switched to Chrome entirely because of web development and Firefox taking too long to reload, but might switch back once I don't need to do web dev for a while).

</comment><comment><USER12> One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages.

Chrome (even stable) seems to crash tabs all the time, while in the past 6 months firefox nightly hasn't crashed more than a once or twice. Another annoying thing about chrome is I never got a reason for a crash it just was a crash page and if I tried to reload that page it was very likely to crash silently again, with chrome at least I get the stop script dialog once in a while.

Chrome still starts faster (more noticable on windows than linux). There are also a plethora of webkit optimized experiments that don't work for shit on firefox.

<comment><USER9> > One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages.

It took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to then I realized I haven't seen one of those in months -- since, I believe, I stopped using Flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g.

Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

<comment> k-mcgrady When I was using Firefox I used this extension to unify the address/search bars.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/omnibar/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/omnibar/)

<comment><USER14> I don't use Omnibar, because by typing words into the address bar directly, Firefox does do a search.

Also Firefox's address bar is much better at searching your history, saving you from doing Google searches. For example you can type the words in the titles of articles you've read and Firefox's AwesomeBar does a good job at suggesting past entries.

This is awesome when you no longer remember the domain or url, but you remember a word or two. In such instances searching on Google doesn't help either.

This feature to me has been an epiphany actually. Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar, because they'd rather see you doing searches on Google instead.

<comment><USER15> > _Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar_

As far as I can tell, chrome's address-bar behavior _is_ trying to do something like the FF "awesome bar", i.e., combine searches of past urls and titles of pages you've visited, plus google search results, etc., into a single DWIM-like result.

Chrome's results aren't as _good_ as FF's (I typically have to type more to get what what I'm looking for, and the ordering is often not ideal), but it does appear to have similar goals. Chrome used to be _much_ worse at this, but seems to have improved somewhat over time.

As to why exactly FF's results are better, my guess is that it weights the results differently, emphasizing pages you've visited often even if the match is in the middle somewhere, whereas chrome seems to give prefix matches more weight....

[I normally use FF, but use chrome occasionally too...]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Things I advise you to install on Firefox : Tree Style Tab[1]

Basically what it does is display the tabs on the left, thus occupying a space that is rarely used on websites (borders). It is so practical for managing many tabs, nesting tabs etc... that I can't understand why a power user who uses a lot of tabs would switch to chrome.

Just try to use it for a day or a week and it will change your life.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

<comment><USER10> Tree style tabs. All-in-one sidebar. Vimperator. Ghostery. Adblock Plus. Stylish (or Stylebot). I've come to rather love the latter under Chrome, which I've been using increasingly lately. Readability. Torbutton.

That's off the top of my head, there's a few others I typically add.

My main problem with FF lately is that with _both_ FF (well, Iceweasel) and Chromium installed, Chrome pigs out all available memory, while Firefox is single-processed. While the _active_ Chrome tab usually frees up fairly quickly if swapped, Firefox can literally take _minutes_ to dig itself out of heavy swap.

Yeah, I still use spinning rust.

<comment><USER16> There's Adblock Plus Pop-up which is a must have as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn I actually never ended up switching to Chrome from Firefox in the first place, but those are still good tips. I guess I did the right thing :)

Yes, it has a terrible memory leak issue, but all of my computers have enough ram as to not notice.

I'm still not ready to make the switch to DuckDuckGo. I figure that if I'm going to stick with Gmail no matter what, if Google already has that information, collecting a few search queries is nothing.

Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no? [http://www.chromium.org/developers/how- tos/get-the-code](http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code)

Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy friendly version?

<comment><USER17> There aren't any memory leak issues in Firefox. I have been using Firefox since Firefox 10 and it has made huge strides in memory performance so much so that it beats every browser out there on memory benchmarks.

In fact, on the mac, with the same number (34) of tabs, the same content, no add-ons or extensions, Firefox takes 600MB - 800MB, Safari takes around 900MB-1GB and Chrome takes around 900-1.2GB. I use these browsers every day and I have the same results every day.

I have the same tabs open now in Firefox, all 34 of them and it's only taking 740MB. You just can't beat that. It's really awesome.

<comment><USER18> None of that points to the absence of memory leaks.

(I'm not saying Firefox has memory leaks. Though it's extremely unlikely it has none, same goes for Chrome and Safari)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a Mac guy, I switched back to Firefox when Chrome became practically unusable (slow, crashy). Pleasant surprise: Firefox is snappier and much- evolved since I last used it.

Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.

<comment><USER5> This makes no sense. I, like many people here use a Mac and Chrome and can't remember the last time it crashed. I suspect this is something specific to your installation, possibly a rogue plugin you've installed.

My experience is quite the opposite to yours. neither ff or chrome crash much, and chrome is significantly faster.

<comment><USER19> On my system -- and I've tried everything I could think of, including blowing away my profile -- it's slow, crashy, and hangs a lot. It's a newish Macbook Pro with plenty of disk and RAM.

FF, on the other hand, is faster (!) and doesn't crash often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are people switching to DuckDuckGo simply because of paranoia? I don't care if Google knows whatever I'm searching for, it helps them improve their search results. DuckDuckGo's search is nowhere near as good as Google.

</comment><comment><USER21> I also made this switch, and am slowly trying to find my way off of Google services (mostly gmail).

I really like Chrome, and might have stayed with Chromium if there had been an easy to install bookmark and password sync server I could run like Firefox has with Weave (for obvious reasons, I no longer want my sync data centralized with Google). Chromium apparently has a server you can run at home, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do it. In addition, Chrome for Android has no support for self-hosted sync, so unlike with Firefox I couldn't sync my mobile devices even if I could set up a self-hosted server.

With Firefox, hosting your own sync server is trivial: there are even several different implementations of the Weave server besides Mozilla.

I miss Chrome, since I was very happy with the performance and dev tools, but I've made my decision and will live with it (except when I need to test web development stuff in Chrome).

</comment><comment><USER22> DDG's obviously gotten a massive boost from this whole issue: [https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo)

I was a bit surprised that Firefox hasn't: [https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox)

but obviously it has a lot more inertia. (Or maybe everyone switches to DDG first, and THEN looks for Firefox, so Google Trends doesn't know about it...)

<comment><USER23> it _is_ the #1 related term (duckduckgo firefox)

as of just now

also compare them: [https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C%20duckduckgo&cmpt=q)

firefox jumped about as much as ddg recently, but that's a blip on firefox as a whole

<comment><USER22> Ya, that's what I meant by the 'inertia' of Firefox. It takes a lot to move the needle on it. The comparison is definitely illustrative though.

(The part about everyone finding Firefox on DDG was a joke.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I made this switch myself recently. The web dev tools in FF are still a bit weak in pseudo areas and media queries but I'm living with it for now. BTW, why doesn't Firefox have "paste & match style"?

DDG is also my go-to search engine.

Personally, I feel better supporting Mozilla and DDG more.

</comment><comment><USER25> Two suggestions:

1) if you are concerned about privacy you should also turn off malware protection in FF because it sends pages that you visit to Google (yes, I know their privacy policy - do you trust them?). For additional points you can open _about:config_ , search for "google" and remove all occurences. Point being: even FF doesn't completely protect your privacy by default.

2) DDG is great and I use it, but if I were really concerned about privacy I would use a non-US provider (StartPage is based in Netherlands, not sure where they host their servers though). Point being: DDG claims they don't store user data, but that doesn't mean NSA doesn't either. If they are USA based, they must obey USA laws.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sentiment in the comments indicates how I feel: FirefoX is now the New Browser To use if you want privacy and security but wait there is more: the sole act of installing it is a charitable donation towards the free internet. Firefox problems aside ( _caugh_ no multiprocess execution model _caugh_ ) thats still a strong sales pitich. And that is one of the few (hip?) trends WE get to influence if not decide the choice wich Browser our close aquaintances use. And that is awesome and and i encurage everyone to excersise it. Bretheren lets turn the tide and make FF no 1 again by leading with a good example! As a long time DDG user and recently reformed ex chrome user I say: Hutzzah

PS please pardon my autocorrect

</comment><comment><USER27> I tried Chrome last week, but I still think the FF has a better UX, so I switched back. My biggest problems was that, out of the box, Chrome's address bar is just plain bad. It only shows 5 possible targets, while in FF I can go through my whole history, and the most used page comes up first. I didn't really noticed that I used it that much, until I tried Chrome.

This goes for the Android versions as well. If I click the address bar there in Chrome, it will go to the edit mode, which I rarely use. In contrast FF goes into edit mode + it shows relevant possibles from history underneath.

</comment><comment><USER28> _In Firefox, typing /downl[return] will open a link titled "download" on the current page_

Using ' (Quick Find within link-text only) instead of / (Quick Find ) is even faster/easier.

</comment><comment><USER29> I made the exact same two switches over the past week and agree with the author. Honestly it's been great. I'm also slowly migrating away from my gmail and to a hosted email on my domain.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd like to switch back to Firefox, but it's such an unbearably slow hog that I cannot force myself doing it, and I'm not even using anything JS intensive.

</comment><comment><USER31> I use Firefox mainly and Chrome/IE for testing sometimes. Firefox has been pretty solid; however, one really annoying change in v22 is that it blows up the default zoom level. That makes websites look very big. They said it's honoring the DDP setting on Windows and for HiRes monitor, but it looks like a bug or a misguided feature. I really hope they revert the change. I'm tired of hitting ctrl-- to zoom out on every site.

<comment><USER32> An easy fix for the DPI change in Firefox 22 is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config to 1.0. [https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/questions/962945?page=2#an...](https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/questions/962945?page=2#answer-452951)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As a long time Opera+FF user, I'm surprised I never came across the Custom Tab Width add-on, or even bothered to look for such an add-on. Made my day. :)

<comment><USER34> Tab Mix Plus is another option, with plenty of settings for everything concerning tabs:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix- plus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> You can still use the Googlesharing addon to proxy your searches through a concentrator.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/googlesharing...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/googlesharing/)

As long as you trust the proxy to not be an adversary.

Sometimes[often times] the default proxy will go down. I've had luck using the following alternate:

googlesharing.riseup.net

</comment><comment><USER36> Why does anyone trust DuckDuckGo more than Google?

I am really confused

<comment><USER37> The only sensible comment in the entire thread! There is no reason whatsoever to trust DDG more than Google. In fact you'd think it far more likely that DDG is a stooge of the NSA than is Google.

I do personally find this thread quite amusing because it's so irrational. Firefox + DDG is so slow for searching that you might as well erase 10 years of browser performance improvements and downgrade your DSL line. Chrome omnibar + prefetch + google instant makes for much faster searching vs. firefox which lacks all of those things (and DDG which lacks "instant"). Also I have to type the entire search into firefox's search bar because DDG doesn't have suggestions. And let's not even talk about the gulf in quality between DDG and Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My biggest problems with Firefox after using Chrome for so long is stability. I find that web pages can lock up the entire browser rather than just a tab, and this isn't just a rare occurrence, when I tried to give it a chance a week ago, it happened several times. I am amazed they still haven't picked up the separate process per tab feature yet.

<comment><USER39> The separate process per tabs feature has different drawbacks. Notably, it means Chrome uses more memory and can handle way less simultaneous open tabs than Firefox.

I'm glad both approaches exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Over several years of comparing, I find DDG results are fine for reasonably common questions and recent stuff. Sometimes when doing deep searches for more arcane topics (especially farther back in history) Google will get to what I'm looking for sooner. But I usually use Google Books for that stuff (which is where they retain a -big- advantage).

</comment><comment><USER41> "Chrome Inspector is nice and all, but Firebug is clearly superior. I no longer recall why I hold this opinion. I'm looking forward to finding out."

For some reason, I also think this exact thing.I also know other people who share this sentiment. I wonder if it comes from Firebug just being the first to the scene?

<comment><USER42> In my experience, Chrome is way better than Firebug or Firefox's builtin tools for development. Firefox's debugger doesn't appear to have any way to debug webworkers for example. You can't reformat source. They only just got SourceMap support and it doesn't appear to work as good. No syntax coloring. Poor profiling tools, can't get a timeline which shows frames per second, breakdown of paint/style recalc/layout/composite, no memory/heap profiling UI, etc. No explorer for local storage or filesystem apis, no manager for app- cache. Nothing like chrome://net-internals for analyzing network issues, and on and on.

I'm sure they'll fix all that in time, they have a good development team, but to say Firebug is clearly superior is obviously based on not having used the Chrome tools to do anything significant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Another particular nagging problem with Firefox is that "full screen doesn't even hide the tabs or address bar (just the OS X bar, assuming you're using OS X). It would be nice if you can add a way to change Firefox's settings so that, in full screen, the only thing visible is the web page.

<comment><USER44> On my Linux fullscreen (F11) shows nothing but web content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm currently using DDG + Safari with Glims. I would love to switch to Firefox, the only thing that's holding me back is the lack of a good replacement to ClickToPlugin killers.

Those are little js that will remove the flash/silverlight video and replace it with an mp4. This also effectively kills youtube ads.

</comment><comment><USER46> Blog post about why DuckDuckGo cannot provide any real privacy assurances when it comes to the NSA... [http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go- illusion-of...](http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-illusion-of- privacy.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> Looks good! Omnibar instantly makes Firefox more familiar. I have decided to switch back to Mozilla, they seem far more ethical than any competing browser vendor. So I too am going to switch for a while. Firefox & DuckDuckGo.

</comment><comment><USER48> Is there anyway to specify a time range on queries on DuckDuckGo? Such as "last year", "any time", "last week" etc. Works on StartPage but would be nice to have it on DDG too.

<comment><USER49> check out [http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622](http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622)

<comment><USER48> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I've never used Chrome, always been on Firefox so that part is really not a big deal for me, but I did try DDG in the past and there always comes a point where results aren't quite up to par.

</comment><comment><USER51> fwiw, FireFox on MacOS shrinks the tabs to favicon before scrolling, without using an add-on. The article screenshots indicate it spoke of Linux.

</comment><comment><USER52> Searching the current page for links in Firefox (using ') is a great feature and one of the things I miss most when I have to use Chrome.

<comment><USER53> I wish there was a way to do this search only on the currently visible part of the page. Installing a hit-a-hint type of addon would then be less of a prerequisite for me to use the browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is there any substitute in firefox for Chrome's keyword searching? That's the only chrome feature I really care about.

<comment><USER55> Firefox has built-in support for Keyword Search bookmarks. You don't need to install an add-on to create aliases.

If you bookmark any website's search results page, you can add a keyword and edit the bookmarked URL to include a printf-style %s placeholder. When you enter the keyword plus some string, Firefox opens the bookmarked URL, substituting your string for %s.

For example, I have a "w" keyword search for Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s) and a "yt" keyword search for YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Searc...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Search)

<comment><USER54> Awesome, that's exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I find it interesting that everyone suggests switching to Firefox and then changing the default search engine since a good deal of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying to be the default search engine.

<comment><USER57> Less data-points for Google /NSA the better it is. Firefox managed quite fine even without $300 million a year and the idea is not use Google for everything, not to ensure that FF has billions in their bank account

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> anyone else think that the bigger DuckDuckGo gets the more likely it will turn into something similar to Google in terms of less privacy?

</comment><comment><USER59> One question, Why?

<comment><USER60> Firefox is comparable to Chrome in terms speed and features. However, Mozilla doesn't have the same incentive to collect and use data on their customers that is inherent to Google, an advertising company. In addition to that, Firefox is fully open source, unlike Chrome which contains closed source components from Google.

<comment><USER19> ... and, as I mention above, the Mac version has been pretty bad over the last few months, enough to drive users away (including me).

<comment><USER60> Really? I've been using Nightly exclusively on my laptop and haven't noticed any problems. Maybe just lucky.

Edit: Oh, the mac version of Chrome. Gotcha.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I'm still on Chrome on various Windows VMs and PCs with no problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


42Floors launches "Showroom" to show off cool additions for your office - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/03/42floors-launches-showroom-to-show-off-cool-additions-for-your-office/?awesm=tnw.to_1EHSY&utm_campaign=social%20media&utm_medium=Twitter%20Publisher&utm_source=Twitter&utm_content=42Floors%20launches%20%22Showroom%22%20to%20show%20off%20cool%20additions%20for%20your%20office

<comment><USER2> _Every startup needs a stunning office space with tons of cool furniture and accessories to make its employees feel at home and to attract new talent._

 _At a time when companies MUST have cool offices to attract talent_

meh.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's unreasonable at all. I mean, perhaps the word "cool" is used too many times- I don't care if the furniture in my office is cool. But I have switched to a standing desk and love it- so an office with standing desks would definitely be an influencing factor when I choose where to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't the magical thinking that this is set up to exploit another tell of a bubble?

<comment><USER5> "Selling Pickaxes During A Gold Rush"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In contrast to this 'cool office' wave, when the company I work for was acquired, we moved to a new office and we used furniture that the company who had bought us had in storage.

</comment><comment><USER7> If this is not proof of a bubble, I don't know what is...

...Aeron chair anyone?</comment>


Vertical Finger Trees - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexkyte.me/2015/10/vertical-finger-trees.html <comment><USER2> A linked list of levels reminds me of Binomial Heaps

<comment><USER3> Also reminiscent of skip-lists

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finger trees don't provide O(1) insertion, just O(1) prepend and append.</comment>


[Study] HTML5 Use is Real: Majority of Developers Find It Important in 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/11/05/html5-use-is-real-majority-of-developers-find-it-important-for-their-jobs-in-next-12-month-study/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=HTML5%20use%20is%20real%3A%20majority%20of%20developers%20find%20it%20important%20for%20their%20jobs%20in%20next%2012%20month%20%5BStudy%5D&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia <comment><USER2> Link to HTML5 report fixed & here: [http://www.kendoui.com/surveys/html5-adoption- survey-2012.as...](http://www.kendoui.com/surveys/html5-adoption- survey-2012.aspx)</comment>


Printer dots raise privacy concerns - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/surveillance/2008-07-13-printer_N.htm <comment><USER2> This isn't really new, it's been around/known for several years now. I haven't kept up with the yellow-dots, but this quote in the article piqued my interest:

"The Secret Service is the only U.S. body that has the ability to decode the information,"

Last time I read about this in depth, the yellow dots were basically a printed "braille", and decoding the information they represented was trivially simple.

<comment><USER3> The EFF managed to fully decode the code for Xerox DocuColor tracking dots, but there are many other printers whose code is unknown:

<http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/>

<comment><USER2> Thanks, that was one of the links I remembered reading before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just buy your printer while you're on a road trip, and pay cash. Wear a hat.

<comment><USER5> And place it in a Faraday cage.

<comment><USER6> and don't print the "Pelican Brief" on it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's not just printers. Scanners, copiers, and image manipulation software like Photoshop have all had anti-counterfeiting measures quietly added:

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

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to see an open source project to do this. Might raise awareness.</comment>


My Summer Internship At A Startup - <AUTHOR> http://jianxioy.posterous.com/under-incubation Here's an analysis of my experience working at a startup over the past summer. There were good, bad, and "wtf?" moments but I still enjoyed it nonetheless. <comment><USER2> Sounds pretty low-level. How does the technology, or database architecture help achieve the long-term vision of the company? Were you there as an engineering intern, or business?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was more of a prototype. I believe they will be scrapping it after alpha. The current technology and database architecture is more of a testbed for us to see what needs to be fixed in the future version. I was there as a software engineer.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Here's how to secretly download anyone's Instagram story - <AUTHOR> https://www.savefromweb.com/download-instagram-stories/ <comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, its because Instagram changed their backend setting for downloading stories. I am working on it and it will be fixed within 2 to 3 days. Sorry for the inconvenience. :(

</comment><comment><USER2> I was looking for this exactly today.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work. I'm redirected to [https://www.savefromweb.com/inner.php](https://www.savefromweb.com/inner.php) and there nothing happens.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can confirm, Im not able to download anything either</comment>


A Detailed Technical Account of What Happened At Fukushima [powerpoint] - <AUTHOR> http://energyfromthorium.com/pps/FukushimaDaiichiAREVA.pps

<comment><USER2> For the PowerPoint avoidant:

[http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fenergyfromthor...](http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fenergyfromthorium.com%2Fpps%2FFukushimaDaiichiAREVA.pps)

P.S. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google- docs-p...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google-docs- preview/)</comment>


Azure surpasses AWS as the public cloud of choice - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3186756/cloud-computing/azure-surpasses-aws-as-the-public-cloud-of-choice.html <comment><USER2> Ah, this is from back in March.

The consensus opinion then was that the surveyed folks were corp IT oriented, looking to transition purely Microsoft-centric workloads to a cloud provider. In that specific scenario, Azure is a solid choice. For non-Windows workloads, it's generally far more debatable.

Disclosure: I write a weekly newsletter (lastweekinaws.com) that focuses on AWS; I'm much less familiar with Azure.)

<comment><USER3> "More than half of the Azure users were from enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft's cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises"

From the actual study (or press release for the study) "The final data set comprises 235 IT operations, application development, and informa- tion security professionals. All respondents are from companies with 500 or more employees, with roughly half from companies with 5,000 or more employees."

And the actual statistic is "• 66% are using Microsoft Azure, compared to 55% using AWS." So what does "using" really mean? For example, it could mean that lots of large organizations to use Azure on trial/small projects, while still using mostly AWS on serious projects. Or the opposite.

This is one of those studies run to promote a service, and it's really unclear how accurate it is (not statistically, but logically). It appears that MSFT has been successful with very large organizations, but other data I've seen says that AWS has about 80% of the entire market revenues and revenues is the direct measure of value. If someone is paying money for your service they find it valuable.

<comment><USER2> I've also heard whispers of Azure credits being handed out in huge quantity provided large enterprises buy enough Office365 licenses. I'd not be at all surprised by that, but I'm likewise unaware of any companies who have an Azure presence without at least something also running in AWS.

<comment><USER4> I've heard whispers AWS gives big customers like Netlix considerable discounts ;)

<comment><USER5> "Under an EDP, AWS will give price discounts to large customers that commit to a full year (or more) and pay upfront, in many cases with minimum volume increases. One AWS partner told Deutsche Bank that they're aware of one EDP payment of $25 million." [https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/07/17/5-ways...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/07/17/5-ways- brexit-is-accelerating-aws-and-public-cloud-adoption/#796d5329523e)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When AWS has an outage half the internet goes down.

When was the last time you noticed an Azure outage?</comment>


Robinhood has been down for over 12 hours - <AUTHOR> Support tickets have stopped going through as well.
Looking forward to the postmortem.
I personally had a few SPY calls expiring today and Wednesday that I couldn't execute all day.
https://status.robinhood.com/ <comment><USER2> Rumor mill and Reddit comedians are having a field day that apparently this happened 4 years ago - their data feeds Abe order book can't handle leap years and don't fail gracefully. Take it with a grain of salt of course, but there are some alleged screenshots [1]

1\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fck1tu/if_y...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fck1tu/if_youre_wondering_why_robinhood_wasnt_working/fjbf65c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)

</comment><comment><USER3> They forgot to code for the leap year.

[1]: [https://i.redd.it/hmcf47ct2ck41.jpg](https://i.redd.it/hmcf47ct2ck41.jpg)

<comment><USER4> Twice... they made the same mistake 4 years ago

[https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/48mep4/robinhood...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/48mep4/robinhood_not_working/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)

This years thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fck1tu/if_y...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fck1tu/if_youre_wondering_why_robinhood_wasnt_working/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll be happily surprised if we get a postmortem. Pulling everything out as soon as I can.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for returning to Microsoft's stack - <AUTHOR> After many years of largely ignoring Microsoft's platform, I need to refresh my knowledge. I've worked on a few .NET and C++ projects on Windows recently, but I've mostly focused on Linux and Java.<p>Does anyone have any non-obvious recommendations for getting up to speed with .NET and Microsoft's stack/platform (specifically C# and ASP.NET)? <comment><USER2> Part of why I've always liked the Microsoft stack is that historically they've always had excellent documentation. (I taught myself C++ with the VS 6 documentation) While not up to their old standard, their current documentation is still many times better than many open source and new/trendy technologies.

I know you requested non-obvious recommendations, but the fastest way to get up to speed is literally to read the docs. I'd avoid .NET Core for now and let things settle first. So [http://www.asp.net/aspnet](http://www.asp.net/aspnet)

C# is close enough to Java that just pretending it is Java will get you 90% of the way, and reading the ASP.NET docs (in C#) will expose you to enough that you shouldn't need to study it specifically.

<comment><USER3> I agree their documentation is one of the best around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "Microsoft's stack" is quite large.

What problems do you want to solve?

</comment><comment><USER5> I suggest looking at [https://www.pluralsight.com](https://www.pluralsight.com)

Even though premium, they have some of the best stuff when it comes to Microsoft stack.</comment>