Y Combinator: the X Factor of tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21677636-tech-talent-spotter-has-come-dominate-silicon-valleys-startup-scene-y-combinator-x?new <comment><USER2> >YC's partners seem surprisingly uninterested in money, or competitive threats. There are hundreds of other "accelerators" worldwide that have replicated YC's investment and training philosophy, but none with its brand or its record

<comment><USER3> >There are hundreds of other "accelerators" worldwide that have replicated YC's ...

Nonsense. The article authors are so very wrong. There will be literally zero replicators of YC until someone replicates the most influential open tech community/media that is HN. A competitive advantage that is truly hard to copy. That's like a basic fact from real world startups 101.

<comment><USER4> HN is like a realtime electronic marketplace -- or information exchange -- for young tech companies in that an issue can arise and be resolved, for better or worse, all in the space of 24 hours. I think the recent case of LiveCoding.tv is a perfect example of this, because a user was having problems getting her account deleted and posted a thread about it here.

A whirlwind of activity started up, within which a cofounder responded, as well as the president of YC. They both were actively looking for the CEO so that he could resolve the issue, and when he eventually popped up into the thread, a clusterfuck of absolutely biblical proportions ensued.

What people saw was the obvious mudslinging between parties, but what they didn't necessarily see was all of the cold, numeric computation going on behind the scenes whenever posts were being up- and down-voted, and karma points were being won and lost.

Say whatever you want about the validity of these kinds of emotionally/psychologically derived numbers, but the point is that they are realtime data points concerning large numbers of highly speculative investments, and they could not reasonably be ascertained in any other way.

When I was watching that whole thing play out just like a live sporting event, I was refreshing the profile page of the CEO in question, and his karma points seemed to be dropping like some kind of flash crash in the NASDAQ.

Some may say that it isn't in the best interest of YC to have so much publicity when these kinds of things happen, but I think the point is that it is always ultimately in everyone's best interest for the truth, no matter what it is, to be uncovered as quickly as possible, and framed within a language that is as objective as possible.

I can only imagine what kind of machine learning might be going on behind the scenes at YC, involving all of these data points that are so intimately connected to known human beings, many of whom are so intimately involved with the insanely dynamic economic activity that is starting up a tech company in Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER5> > _When I was watching that whole thing play out just like a live sporting > event, I was refreshing the profile page of the CEO in question, and his > karma points seemed to be dropping like some kind of flash crash in the > NASDAQ._

Now you gave me an idea for a HN extension - tracking of karma points of selected users (via HN API) and displaying a sparkline next to their name in comments. Also a split-screen mode like this:

       +</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+
       | ^ Tell HN: Something important  | Score: flamebait       |
       | 256 points by flamebait ...     |                        |
       |                                 |            --          |
       |                                 |    --    /-  \---  /--o|
       |                                 |   /  \--/        \/    |
       | ^ SomeHNer 5 minutes ago        |--/                     |
       |  Something something something  +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+
       |                                 | Score: SomeOtherHNer   |
       |  ^ SomeOtherHNer 1 minute ago   |  /---                  |
       |   HN turns into Reddit.         |-/    \ ---             |
       |                                 |           ---          |
       |                                 |              \</comment><comment>\  |
       | ^ LoremIpsum 1 hour ago         |                      -o|
       |  Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet     +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+
       |  start-up cloud computing        | Ticker                 |
       |  Docker Google IoT big data     |                        |
       |  Uber for Kitten Litter         | - comment nuked 5s ago |
       |                                 | - comment nuked 2m ago |
       |  ....                           | - new comment 5m ago   |
       +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+

Now you can read enjoy HN discussions like sports events!

<comment><USER4> If you really just took the time and effort to make that graphic in reply to my post... I just feel... honored... thank you :)

<comment><USER5> Emacs and Artist Mode. It definitely took less time for me to make the graphic than for you to write your post - so it's me who want to thank you for sharing some insights and sneaking in a cute idea I could draw ;).

<comment><USER6> I stumbled upon Artist Mode, but wondered what it could be useful for. Guess I have (some kind of) an answer now...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _The classroom setting creates a sense of paranoia and competition_

Wat

<comment><USER8> _The programme teaches engineers—some of whose idea of a polished pitch is to look at your shoes rather than their own while speaking—how to sell their ideas to investors._

Waat

<comment><USER7> I mean that part seems right on the money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well..it was a not a balanced article. What is YC? An accelerators, incubators or VC? I believe YC has changed since 2005. It started as an incubator, then gradually becoming an accelerator with Dropbox and AirBnB successes. And to scale their business fast, it would make sense to accept companies with traction.

The reason they received huge numbers of applicants because their criteria was wide and IMHO misleading.

The originals partners were brilliant founders. They were not young (drop out or out of college) founders. They had 'life' experiences. So they were very nurturing and compassionate and patient. They helped young smart founders to build companies and many become successful companies. With the current goals of scaling fast, and many new partners YC has diluted its success recipe. It's not about 'making what people want' anymore. It's about making what 20 something year old who live in the valley want.

Jessica Livingstone's book 'Founders at Work' contains many different types of founders. And not many of them were fresh out of college or college drop outs.

YC has become a big company, and along the way YC has contributed to build Silicon Valley as the center for technology. However, it needs to have big companies responsibilities as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had trouble opening this link on mobile. Here's the Google search link to get around the paywall that I encountered: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB0QFjAAahUKEwiO-7ass_rIAhVLdj4KHc7vAqI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2F21677636-tech- talent-spotter-has-come-dominate-silicon-valleys-startup-scene-y- combinator-x&usg=AFQjCNGKh_NIjVrqObAbVn-dNT9zsTivKQ&sig2=eI_qp1Uu-bYr- KQOPRfHyw&bvm=bv.106923889,d.eWE)

<comment><USER11> This is the purpose of the "web" link you can find at the top of the page; it works for any paywall that allows traffic from Google searches.

<comment><USER10> Wow, I have never seen that before. Thank you!!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the success is a mixture of 3 things, in that order:

No. 1 - Talent pool of 1000s startups to choose from.

No. 2 - Great alumni network.

No. 3 - Experienced partners.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Y Combinator: the X Factor of tech

I don't know. X Factor weeds out folks that are obviously fraudulent shams with a huge ego, but without any talent. I'm not so sure about YC.</comment>


Show HN: Pomodoro-Timer - <AUTHOR> http://www.musetheory.de/web/pomodoro Someone suggested the Pomodoro-technique on HN and I quickly threw together this page that is supposed to help me try Pomodoro out today.<p>Join my effort today and let me know if you like it! <comment><USER2> Wow, it's a timer hardcoded to do 25 / 5 cycles. You know, I like the idea of purpose-built things, but come on...

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a reason: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629624>

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty neat idea. I get it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks, You've gotten me to try the pomodoro technique. We'll see how it goes. Probably write my own timer inside emacs though to fit my workflow better.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use this <http://www.focusboosterapp.com/> stops me from spending hours in email.

</comment><comment><USER5> Really nice app for OS X: <http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com/>

<comment><USER6> I've found Vitamin-R for OS X to be really nice also. <http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Asking HN: Is there some app for linux or a mobile java app for this?

<comment><USER8> Linux: <http://eyedeal.team88.org/node/86> (uses Workrave, <http://www.workrave.org/>)

Linux + Adobe Air: <http://code.google.com/p/pomodairo/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> meta-question: why do scrrr's comments appear as [dead] ?

<comment><AUTHOR> what do you mean?

<comment><USER10> Your comment, "Someone suggested the Pomodoro-technique on HN and I quickly threw together this page that is supposed to help me try Pomodoro out today..." is marked as [dead].

Seems strange to me too - it's the only [dead] comment of yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I also wrote a .NET pomodoro timer. Should I release it?</comment>


Redis-faina: a query analysis tool for Redis - <AUTHOR> http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/23132009381/redis-faina-a-query-analysis-tool-for-redis

<comment><USER2> Redis now has several scripts for various analysis. This is a right time to build a user interface that clubs together all these various utilities.

1\. Query Analyzer based on Redis-faina, with the ability to grep only a subset of commands or only inspect commands from a particular IP Address.

2\. Memory Analyzer based on Redis-rdb-tools

3\. Lua Script editor that allows you to "dry run" a script against your data. There could also be a mode to revert the changes by using a combination of dump and restore commands

4\. An Admin UI to visualize/inspect the data, something along the lines of <http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/>

<comment><USER3> 5\. redis-stat from <https://github.com/antirez/redis-tools></comment></comment>


Help with tablet's MA-L info - <AUTHOR> i logged into my router to check devices and their access times. i clicked on my son's tablet's MAC address and this comes up:
00‐20‐91   (hex)    J125, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY 002091     (base 16)    J125, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY         9800 SAVAGE ROAD         FT. MEADE  MD  20755‐6000         US Your attention is called to the fact that the firms and numbers listed may not always be obvious in product implementation. Some manufacturers subcontract component manufacture and others include registered firms' MAL in their products.
what does this mean? the tablet is being monitored by the NSA? <comment><USER2> It's likely that your kid is pranking around by spoofing a MAC address belonging to the NSA.</comment>


Hidden video shows Ohio cows beaten - Canton, OH - CantonRep.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.cantonrep.com/newsnow/x289837620/Hidden-video-shows-Ohio-cows-beaten <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not usually squeamish about animal husbandry-but this goes way way over the border into just ridiculous cruelty. I couldn't watch more than 30 seconds of the video-when he ties down the cow's head and starts beating it I had to stop.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is absolutely sickening. Just one more reason to be aware of who/where you buy your food.</comment>


Cookies, Supercookies and Ubercookies: Stealing the Identity of Web Visitors - <AUTHOR> http://33bits.org/2010/02/18/cookies-supercookies-and-ubercookies-stealing-the-identity-of-web-visitors/ <comment><AUTHOR> There was an article here recently titled "Sniff browser history for improved user experience" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1125777>

tptacek commented that it was a "batshit crazy idea," and that is exactly right. This article is an example of how to (really) abuse history stealing. As promised, a stronger variant I've been working on is coming soon.

</comment><comment><USER2> One way to look at this is, "Look how bad this browser behavior is for users! We should eliminate it to protect them."

Another way to look at it is, "Imagine how horrific the impact of this problem is going to become as researchers and criminals weaponize it. There is _no way_ this browser behavior is going to survive. Therefore, it is a very bad idea for us to rely on it in any way."

It's also a nice clean example of how weaponization, exploit development, and full disclosure can move security forward. The worse this problem gets, the more likely it is that it will get fixed.

<comment><AUTHOR> A few security researchers, myself included, are getting together with one or two Mozilla devs tomorrow at Mountain view to talk about this and other related issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Because of this article I installed the BetterPrivacy Firefox extension. Looks like a good no effort solution; I have it set to silently clear Flash cookies and super cookies when the browser closes.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623>

<comment><AUTHOR> BetterPrivacy is good; it blocks Flash cookies, but I don't think it does anything against browser fingerprinting, which is also a type of supercookie (at least the way I use the term in the article.) [http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/27/panopticlick-effs- to.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/27/panopticlick-effs- to.html#comment-699959)

<comment><USER4> Ever since I replaced the Macromedia folder with a file called Macromedia, BetterPrivacy hasn't erased a single LSO. Everything works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone tell me why a user's identity is so important? Sure, with perhaps a whole lot of algorithmic work, they might be able to serve me slightly better ads but is that all it's good for? It seems like a whole lot of furor over nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan to address this in a future article, but here are two examples of many, many things that can go wrong: 1. throw up a customized phishing page mimicking a Google or FB login page where you've already filled in their username, fill in stars in the password box along with a message saying "Welcome back, shalmanese. Incorrect password." or something like that. The percentage of people falling for this will be _dramatically_ higher than a naive phishing attempt (and there are studies on this.) 2. Surveillance will become greatly easier: the government can subpoena just about anyone to get information about you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The first for all the social networking sites to change their URL patterns > by randomizing them so that point 4 above (predictable URL identifying that > you belong to a group) is no longer true

Wouldn't this break one of the fundamentally nice things about the web? Being able to refer to a page by a known fixed identity that can be bookmarked and passed around?

Wouldn't it be a far better solution to fix the history sniffing issue at the browser level, even if it means that css\javascript that relies on being able to read a:visited (or whatever else) no longer work?

</comment><comment><USER7> Frankly, I rarely ever use my browser history anyway. I think I will just disable it entirely now.

</comment><comment><USER8> And the nice concept of cookie stuffing: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_stuffing></comment>


Uber for the First Time Increases Fares in Nine Cities - <AUTHOR> http://ridesharedashboard.com/2015/03/19/uber-for-the-first-time-increases-fares-in-nine-cities/ <comment><USER2> The cited "overall" increases are calculated in a senseless way by taking the average of the base, minute, and mile increases. Since most of the minute and mile increases are larger than the base rate increase the actual increase in fare will skew higher.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always wondered what is the percentage Uber keeps from each purchase?</comment>


Windows 8 Continues to Struggle for Adoption - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/windows-8-continues-to-struggle-for-adoption/ <comment><USER2> This webpage is causing Chrome to freak out for me, it keeps reloading, about 10 times a second and flickering. Anyone else?

EDIT: Seems to be the HTTPS Everywhere extension, trying to force an encrypted connection to Geek.net. Strange.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Who could've predicted…?

<comment><USER3> All giants fell someday. The old ones around year remember the days DEC and IBM used to be the big ones.

<comment><USER4> Only on HN or Slashdot could you find a person who'd look at that pie chart and say (with no sense of irony whatsoever) that _Microsoft_ is the company in critical danger.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to be productive during a 48h startup weekend? - <AUTHOR>

In about a month, I am attending a startup weekend (= 48hr weekend hackathon where teams go from idea to product). Any tips on how to get more done during the weekend / how to prepare for the weekend?<p>I am looking forward to all tips (e.g. networking and all that), however it would be particularly interesting to hear about how I (as a programmer) can prepare and have the right tools/libraries ready... <comment><USER2> I'm not a programmer, but after a few technical and non-technical project hackathons, I've come away with three pieces of advice:

* Clear communication with your team (if you're working as a team): Have a system for communicating without interruption so you aren't sacrificing productivity for better communication.

* Pomodoro, Pomodoro, Pomodoro: Work in sprints. I favor pomodoro sprints, but whatever works for you. Small time sprints helps avoid burnout and focuses you on the piece of the problem at hand (I need to make X do Y) instead of the whole frickin' thing.

* Set a clear MVP for the 48hours: You've got 48 hours, that's great. But you've also _only_ got 48 hours. You can build something cool, but try to hone down to something that's functional, communicates your idea, and doesn't have bloat. Ask yourself, if you had half as much time, would you include this feature? Be merciless and work to build something awesome that you can get finished.

Good luck! Share whatever you build!

<comment><USER3> What are these things? How do you go to a 'hackathon' if your not a programmer? What do you do? Make it look pretty?

<comment><USER2> Great question, derrida. The projects were launching MVPs of projects over a weekend as part of a larger group or just a few friends working together. I've worked on:

* Copywriting - for a landing page, app, email responses * Setting up the CMS / working on HTML & CSS for the project * Integrating online tools into the project (Wufoo, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Get Clicky, Get Satisfaction) * Marketing - Designing and implementing a process for attracting new users and having them sign up

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was a developer in a startup weekend last month, and our team did really well. What helped us the most was that all the developers were familiar with the framework and VCS we were using (Django and git). None of us wasted any time installing anything or reading the how-to docs for beginners. We hit the ground running and wrote the most code of any group by far.

To prepare, make sure you're familiar with at least one popular framework so that you can join a team that's using it. Also, learn git and/or hg if you haven't yet.

If you're lucky (like I was), one of the teams using your framework will also have a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've done two. Won one. I'm not a programmer, so I won't speak to that part. I created an account just to share this.

1\. Arrive with a pitch. Figure something out that will keep you excited for an entire weekend. Transmit that excitement in your pitch. The excitement beats a good idea.

2\. Ruthlessly recruit. Find your talent before the pitches start and win them over. Nearly everyone has some pet project they'd rather work on, so you may need to listen to theirs' first and let them dismiss it as a crazy idea. Tell them you think it is genius and try to relate it to a part of your project. This wins recruits.

3\. Cull. Fire the non-essential team members by taking them over to another group and introducing them to the group. Then run. This may seem cruel, but it will save you from bloat and slowness.

3\. Refocus every 90 minutes. If you have a small, smart team, the duties will shake out quickly. But pull everyone back together for 5 minutes every 90 to give updates and to refocus. This is a modified pomodoro and will keep everyone from going down rabbit trails or checking out of the project. You have to lead.

4\. Brag. For the final pitch, share your failures and successes brazenly. Show off your team's skills and openly address gaps in skill or knowledge. You will be approached afterwards if someone loves your enthusiasm but sees where they could fill in a gap. Show your product, holes and all. It gets you honest feedback faster and will carry you through to full execution if you listen. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER6> Be really focused in what you intend to deliver and every 2 hours remind yourself what you were setting out to build rather than letting feature creep set in, its not a lot of time so simple ideas executed well will most likely do better

Get plenty of rest before hand

Quite often worth taking an electrical extension with you, incase power runs short

</comment><comment><USER7> Off topic, but where? I am always looking for these to attend, but only know of TC disrupt, and a few in Canada.</comment>


It's hard to understand U.S. drug policy when prescription opiates are legal - <AUTHOR> Why is it that the U.S. is so hard on drugs, unless it is the giant drug manufacturing companies selling legal opiates.
Double standards are an everyday thing in western society, but the scale of the double standard here is so vast that it is hard to understand.
How is it that these companies are not subject to criminal prosecution for drug trafficking? <comment><USER2> Opioids have a legitimate place in the pharmacopeia for acute pain and cancer pain.

I fell down and smacked my right quadriceps pretty bad and had severe bruising and pain -- I was off my feet for a few days. The urgent care doc prescribed 1 week of Percocet and I refilled for another week. The pain relief was welcome and I did not have problems.

When I had oral surgery I was sedated with a mixture of Fentanyl and Midazolam. No problems.

I have seen people who've received opioids in the hospital for a few weeks have problems when they get out. The big scandal now is over the use of opioids for chronic pain such as back pain, neck pain, knee pain, etc. For those uses opioids are big trouble.

</comment><comment><USER3> From personal experience I can say that when you are post-op and need them, opiates are the only answer sometimes. During pain, addiction potential is very low.

The problem comes when doctors continue to simply prescribe the drugs without including a pain management specialist to continually monitor their usage.

</comment><comment><USER4> Money</comment>


Puppeteer: Headless Chrome Node API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer <comment><USER2> One of the biggest wins here is this little tidbit:

> When you install Puppeteer, it downloads a recent version of Chromium (~71Mb > Mac, ~90Mb Linux, ~110Mb Win) that is guaranteed to work with the API.

A lot of the chrome interface libs about at the moment require you to maintain your own instance of chrome/chromium and launch the headless server with your command line, or require a pre compiled version, that can quickly get out of date ([https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless- chrome/tree/master/...](https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless- chrome/tree/master/chrome)). Having this taken care of is a blessing.

<comment> fake-name There is complexity here you may not be seeing, namely if you are on a platform without X, it will not work.

Normal chromium requires a bunch of X libraries be present. It doesn't _use_ them, but for things like headless testing, it's a massive pain, since the apt-get (or equivalent) is generally many hundreds of megabytes.

<comment><USER3> X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster

[http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix- haters/x-windows/disast...](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix- haters/x-windows/disaster.html)

<comment><USER4> > If you're using the Motif self-abuse kit

hehehehehe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great, but it's sobering to see how hard it is to get a nice, "complete" PDF screenshot out of a modern site.

Here's a quick hack: [https://gist.github.com/rcarmo/cf698b52832d0ec356c147cf9c9ad...](https://gist.github.com/rcarmo/cf698b52832d0ec356c147cf9c9ad898)

I'm using The Verge for testing because it lazy loads images, and am being clumsy about the scrolling, but it mostly works - I can get 90% of the images to show on the finished PDF.

What I can't seem to get right, though, is creating a single-page PDF where the page height matches the document height perfectly - it always seems to be off by a bit, at least on this site (mine works fine, _sometimes_).

Anyone got an idea of why this is so?

<comment><USER6> If I'm reading [1] right, you want to use getBoundingClientRect() instead of clientHeight, which does not account for borders and margins.

1: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/CSS_Object_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/CSS_Object_Model/Determining_the_dimensions_of_elements)

<comment><USER5> Well, no, really. Seems like this is due to the way Chrome deals with print CSS and PDF generation rather than any kind of calculations I do prior to invoking PDF generation...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So first there was Selenium's JSON Wire protocol, then came the W3C WebDriver spec and now we're back to browser-specific implementations? As someone who's tried/is trying to automate Firefox/Chrome/Safari/IE in a consistent fashion, my only question is: WHY?

<comment><USER8> Based on a quick read of the API, my interpretation is that this is not targeting people who are trying to automate _every_ browser, but those who need to automate _any_ browser.

In that context, it's dead-simple to use, and someone with very little experience should be able to get a working prototype in under 5 minutes.

For my use case, it's closer to "wget/curl with JS processing" than "automating a user's browsing experience". I don't particularly care which browser is doing the emulation, with the ease-of-use of the API making the biggest difference.

It seems very similar to PhantomJS, but to be honest, it's more attractive from an ongoing-support standpoint simply because it's an official Chrome project.

<comment><USER9> Exactly, this looks perfect for taking a screenshot of a page[1], or converting a page to a PDF[2] in just a few lines of code.

If you have an existing web service, this appears suitable for actual production usage to deliver features like PDF invoices and receipts, on-demand exports to multiple file formats (PNG/SVG/PDF) etc., which has quite different requirements compared to an automated testing framework.

[1] [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/exampl...](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/examples/screenshot.js)

[2] [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/exampl...](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/examples/pdf.js)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've found Chromeless to work great for that task. But then again, if this is from the Chrome DevTools team, it's a good guarantee to have.

</comment><comment><USER11> There's also a docker image for headless chrome automatically updated from the trunk if you're looking to test against the latest -

[https://hub.docker.com/r/alpeware/chrome-headless- trunk/](https://hub.docker.com/r/alpeware/chrome-headless-trunk/)

Full disclosure: I'm maintaining the image.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm really loving headless chrome so far. I have around 650 tests which are mostly dealing with iframes and popup windows, and they run flawlessly. The first release seemed to have a memory leak which wasn't present in non- headless chrome, but that seems to have been fixed in version 60.

Even sped things up a little versus phantom.

<comment><USER13> Hi bluepnume, if you are ok, can you share how you manage iframes and popups? I'm using DevTools protocol through websocket directly to communicate with Chrome. Have to do a lot of context handling (frames) and using Target.sendMessageToTarget (popup windows) to deal with them. These 2 features seem to be the harder to handle parts of the interaction layer when doing automation with DevTools Protocol. Thanks in advance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a little concerned about the confusion in the market of another product in the automation space called "Puppet"-something.

The project itself looks exciting.

<comment><USER15> I can imagine using Chrome Puppeteer in conjunction with Google Puppeteer [https://github.com/google/puppeteer](https://github.com/google/puppeteer)

The latter having been renamed from "puppet" when Google open-sourced it.

<comment><USER16> I believe they're referring to [https://puppet.com](https://puppet.com)

EDIT: Left the tab open too long, beaten to the punch by 20 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's funny how open the market for browser automation is. Everyone needs to switch off phantomJS in the next few years and is looking for the easiest option.

Sadly, there's probably no money on the line. But you will get your buggy software used by huge corporations for years to come!

<comment><USER18> I'm not super familiar with this space, can you explain further why everyone needs to switch from PhantomJS?

<comment><USER19> Core developer stepped down: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14105489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14105489)

<comment><USER13> There was still some commits in early July but haven't seen new updates till date. Maintaining a browser project is mammoth task. Even for an established startup such as Segment you see that NightmareJS has lots of issues unreplied for months. I guess it's primarily because of a potentially large user base and all kinds of edge cases requirements from different users. And add on to that, suppose to work on all OSes. Nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The important bit:

> Who maintains Puppeteer?

>

> The Chrome DevTools team maintains the library

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know if it's possible to take a screenshot of a specific DOM element? (instead of the entire page)

<comment><USER22> Yes using the `clip` option of screenshot(), you can get these dimensions from an element's getBoundingClientRect().

<comment><USER23> full example of screenshoting a DOM element:

[https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/issues/306#issueco...](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/issues/306#issuecomment-322929342)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The API looks nice and clean, but I'm puzzled by this from the FAQ:

> Puppeteer works only with Chrome. However, many teams only run unit tests > with a single browser (e.g. PhantomJS).

Is this true? Do teams write unit tests but only test them in a single browser? With test runners like Karma and Testem, running tests concurrently in multiple browsers is easy. You'd be throwing away huge value if for some reason you only decided to test in one vendor's browser.

<comment><USER25> From my experience most teams only test against a single browser, yes. It's however nice to have the option to switch to another browser when debugging a browser-specific bug.

From what I've seen in practice, for a lot of teams and projects, running tests concurrently across multiple browsers isn't easy as you claim. Once you have a database involved and not a perfectly clean setup, concurrent testing can become a hassle and is rarely worth the effort of fixing.

<comment><USER26> It's also quite easy to run Chrome and/or Firefox for free in CircleCI or TravisCI. Safari and Edge are non-trivial to test in those environments. (I think you can get Safari if you tell CircleCI you're an iOS app and hack your way over to Safari from there, but I don't know if you can even test Edge in the popular CI stacks.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Has anyone found something similar but for Python? The few I found all seemed to be abandoned or too limited in capability.

<comment><USER28> I've been working on something similar (Headless Chrome via DevTools protocol) called Webfriend. It is a Python wrapper to the DevTools protocol, as well as a simplified imperative scripting environment which is specifically built for ease of use by people with a technical-but-not-programming background (lovingly called Friendscript).

It's by no means done, but it is functional and I'm hoping to see the project grow beyond a toy if there's interest in the community.

Things to note:

\- Documentation is there, but there are gaps (especially w.r.t. the Python API.) I'll eventually get around to wrestling with Sphinx, et. al., but have not as of yet.

\- Targets Google Chrome / Chromium 58.x - 60.x. No testing outside of those versions has occurred.

\- Is Chrome only for the moment, but may evolve to work with WebDriver and other browser APIs in the future.

[https://github.com/ghetzel/webfriend](https://github.com/ghetzel/webfriend)

Also, PRs and issues are welcome, but my time to work on this is limited at the moment (which does speak to the point made elsewhere about corporate backing vs. individual maintainers, but this was built largely to scratch an itch.)

<comment><USER13> Thanks ghetzel for sharing, nice work! I saw that you've made your own scripting language to make it user-friendly :)

Just went through your Friendscript syntax, the amount of work going into defining that language is impressive....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Crawl a SPA and generate pre-rendered content (i.e. "SSR").

I've been maintaining (thanks to this team and Headless Chrome) a convenience API based on this feature. Some additional features:

      * React checksums for v14 and v15 (v16 no longer uses checksums)
      * preboot integration for clean Angular server->client transition
      * support for Webpack code splitting
      * automatic caching of XHR content

[https://www.prerender.cloud/](https://www.prerender.cloud/)

and for the crawling or to delegate your single-page app hosting and server- side rendering entirely [https://www.roast.io/](https://www.roast.io/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Great move! One of the biggest advantage of PhantomJS was easy to use high level API.

</comment><comment><USER31> How can this work on Cloud Functions/Amazon Lambda/Azure Functions without installing the dependencies each time it has to run?

Haven't done anything before with those serverless approaches.

<comment><USER32> It probably will not run on AWS Lambda as the version of Node required by Puppeteer is too recent.

From puppeteer readme[1]

> Puppeteer requires Node version 7.10 or greater

From AWS website[2]

> AWS Lambda supports the following runtime versions:

> Node.js – v4.3.2 and 6.10.3

[1] [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/README.md#installation)

[2] [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/current- supporte...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/current-supported- versions.html)

<comment><USER31> sight... I checked Azure Functions and Cloud Functions and they are running 6.x versions of node as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Are there any new python drivers for headless chrome? Selenium seems to still be lacking several features exposed by the DevTools protocol (e.g. print PDF)

</comment><comment><USER34> Has headless Chrome enabled file downloads yet? (I don't mean navigating to a known url and saving content, but when a site pops open a save dialog)

<comment><USER13> This issue is being tracked here and moving along fine - [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=696481](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=696481)

Default behavior by design is to block automated headless downloads for security reasons. But above issue tries to address this important use case.

<comment><USER13> This's the Puppeteer issue tracking downloads - [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/issues/299](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/issues/299)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Using puppeteer to call google seach the keywords "chrome puppeteer will return link to this HN page itself. :-)

This github page was generated by a markdown file created by a test.js running in a Puppeteer docker container:

[https://ontouchstart.github.io/170817/home/puppeteer- test/](https://ontouchstart.github.io/170817/home/puppeteer-test/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Is there an equivalent of this for C#? I use Selenium a lot and find it annoying. Be interested to see if this is much better.

<comment><USER22> Under the covers this uses the DevTools protocol which has a number of projects around it: [https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/awesome-chrome- devtools/#c...](https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/awesome-chrome- devtools/#chrome-devtools-protocol)

A C# binding was added just recently: [https://github.com/BaristaLabs/chrome- dev-tools](https://github.com/BaristaLabs/chrome-dev-tools)

<comment><USER36> Yes, I understand it's just a protocol but it's a pain writing it by hand especially when I just want to test it out on some existing projects Vs selenium.

Thanks for the binding link. Will check it out this weekend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Pretty psyched to see this. A lot of my automated testing headaches came from the intersection of using PhantomJS with transpiled code - which makes sense, since the Phantom team was always forced to play catch-up with the browsers being emulated.

</comment><comment><USER38> Awesome! This will make the Boozang/CI integration much smoother. I was using npm-headless-chromium before, but the Xvfb dependency was error-prone and difficult to setup properly. Thank you very much!

</comment><comment><USER39> Would be nice if it was possible to change the proxy settings for each request or for each session. Last time I checked it was only possible with the C API.

<comment><USER22> The request interception API might be able to satisfy your usecases: [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/docs/a...](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/docs/api.md#pagesetrequestinterceptionenabledvalue)

Outside of that, Chrome doesn't currently support changing a network proxy dynamically, let alone for individual (and overlapping) requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Im looking forward to seeing the pdf printing features develop. They are lacking a few of the formatting features of wkhtmltopdf.

</comment><comment><USER41> Has anyone found something similar than Selenium Grid, but for managing headless versions of Chrome? Thanks a lot!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is really nice. Thanks for your work.

</comment><comment><USER42> Has anyone been able to get headless mode to work with socks5 proxy, yet?

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone know if it supports screen capture for webgl?

</comment><comment><USER38> Awesome! This will simplify the Boozang Jenkins integration significantly (I was using npm-headless-chromium before, but there were many manual steps, and the Xvfb dependency was annoying). Thank you very much!

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if anyone know a Ruby equivalent?

</comment><comment><USER45> Very cool. In a previous job we ran our JS unit tests on PhantomJS, using a tool that allowed arbitrary code to be piped to Phantom for execution and redirected Phantom's console to stdout. (We did all this so our tests ran on something resembling a real browser, as opposed to jsdom.) Something similar should be possible with this.

</comment><comment><USER46> I think simple-headless-chrome is more far along [https://github.com/LucianoGanga/simple-headless- chrome](https://github.com/LucianoGanga/simple-headless-chrome)

<comment><USER22> We're fans of LucianoGanga's project (and of Chromeless, Doffy, Chrominator, Chromy, Navalia). I can tell you from personal experience that dealing with the raw DevTools Protocol isn't ideal for a developer writing an automation script, so it's clear there's demand for libraries with this higher-level API.

Would love to know if there's a feature parity concern you have or what you'd like to see from puppeteer (or any of these projects). (My personal feature unicorn: generate not a static screenshot but a proper video of a page session)

<comment><USER47> Chromeless allows for the setting of cookies. I noticed in an issue for Puppeteer that it wasn't seen as a high priority. Our use-case (session based cookies) rely on a cookie being set in order for our PDF screenshots to work.

Any chance you could give us some insight on when this may be available?

<comment><USER22> One of the puppeteer devs tells me he started on cookies last night. You'll see a PR soon. :)

<comment><USER47> Awesome! So stoked on this. After some Phantom headaches we're really excited to transition to Chrome Headless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Can you help with one of the existing API's that does the same thing instead of inventing a new one?

<comment><USER13> Actually the release of Puppeteer is a really exciting development. I've been waiting for some time for something like this to happen. We've seen what happened to PhantomJS (almost 2k open issues and main maintainer stepping down without a successor), NightmareJS (lots of unreplied issues for months, probably the project is not a strategic part of Segment) and so on. In theory it is great for an individual or an established startup to drive a web browser automation project. But in reality, the scope of web browser automation simply gets out of hand very quickly. There are just too much edge cases to support for a fast-changing domain.

Being driven by a large commercial entity actually has a chance of making it work out. With the browser automation tool and the browser dev team being one team, there can be synergies not possible otherwise. When I spoke to CasperJS creator some time ago, I can understand why there will be burnout. Referring to the popular Chromeless project launched less than a month ago, there are already 150+ new issues and 100+ still open, and they already have enough pipelines for a few releases ahead. It can be a nightmare to manage.

There's just too many needs from a large user-base for such projects. I'm speaking from the context of test automation and general browser automation.

<comment><USER49> Yep. Pat Meenan's herculean / ultramarathon support of WebPageTest is a remarkable exception. (Speaking of WPT, after just a cursory glance at this thread on my phone prior to thumbing this comment, it surprisingly hasn't been mentioned yet? shrug)

<comment><USER13> I just recently got to know WebPageTest. It even has scripting abilities! I'm just surprised why the project didn't enter into mainstream (in the sense that an average test automation guy like me will know).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do non-english speaking people code? - <AUTHOR>

For ex. how does a chinese person who doesn't know english write javascript? <comment><USER3> All the Chinese programmers I know can understand some English - <USER2> enough to write code, though many have taken English classes as well. It's possible my selection sample is biased, since the Chinese programmers I know are somehow related to this industry.

FYI: they use keyboards that have both Chinese and English characters on them, like: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Chinese>

</comment><comment><USER4> I doubt it would be that hard. You'd just have to memorize the keywords in the programming language. You don't need to speak English to write code, although it does help.

<comment><USER5> Memorizing keywords in a language you know/understand is really much different to just memorizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They would know the meanings for most of the names (classes, functions, operators) even if they don't know English at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would presume they use a keyboard.

On a more serious note, as a native Finnish-speaker, I've always written all of my code and comments in English. It's just so much simpler than any other alternative I can think of.

<comment><USER5> But you DO speak english.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you don't know any English then you don't code. How could you?? Every programmer I know does know some English and can write/speak well enough to be understood.

</comment><comment><USER9> How does a Spaniard who doesn't know English write French?

About as well as he knows French.</comment>


Smart Time Ago: a new JS lib to update relative timestamps more efficiently - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pragmatic.ly/we-opened-source-smart-time-ago

<comment><USER2> This is such a minor tweak that I can't see how it's worth trouble of downloading even a byte of extra code to get it done.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: "minor tweak" in terms of efficiency. The processing power saved by making it "smart" is probably less than what it takes to download the extra code.

<comment><USER3> It depends on the application itself. For pages which user will only stay for few minutes, no much more efficiency gained. But for realtime apps which user will keep the page open for hours/days, it will improve a lot. And for apps which have more read than write, it will also improve a lot. BTW, I'm not sure whether I catch you about the "extra code". It's a replacement with less than 1KB difference in size.

<comment><USER2> Even 1kb seems like too much. The processing power to handle the time ago logic is so small, having to download 1kb of data more probably takes more processing power than you're saving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The regular timeago is on Github: <https://github.com/rmm5t/jquery-timeago>.

I don't see the need for a new project for something like a tweak like this. Seems like a reasonable pull request for the timeago folks???

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. Ryan did a great job on the timeago lib. We have ever discussed about the pull request but finally find that we changed lots of the logic about how to deal with the relative timestamp. So we started a new one to give an optional choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Javascript relative time displays have hilarious results if the web browser's clock is set incorrectly. That's mostly not a modern problem thanks to NTP being baked into modern consumer OSes but it can be terribly confusing if you have a misconfigured client.

<comment><USER6> The simple solution to this is that the server sends a reference time along with the timestamps: when the page loads you calculate the drift from the local time to the reference time, and then adjust local time to server time when you update relative timestamps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just use <http://momentjs.com/>

Does timeago (with localizations) and more in one tiny library.

<comment><USER3> It's different. While momentjs focus on date parsing, manipulating and formatting, smart-time-ago is the lib to update the relative timestamps in time on the page.

<comment><USER7> Moment does both functions and 99% of the time that you're working with dates in an app, you're going to need both. Also, Moment is localized and has a fairly large community around it. The world doesn't need yet another timeago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> you guys might be interested at this; <https://github.com/azer/relative-date>

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks interesting. Thanks for the info. Just watched. :D</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I Want To Buy a $1k-5k/yr SAAS Business. Where Do I Start? - <AUTHOR>

Flippa has been okay for browsing niche websites, but I'm interested in buying a SAAS business and there doesn't seem to be much on the market.<p>Are there any other good places to look for buying a small (like $1K-$5K in revenue/yr) SAAS business? Do you have any caveats? <comment><USER2> By the way flippa seems to be getting worse and worse though I can't really put my finger on why.

I find the sites for sale on flippa to be overpriced. They seem to go for 18 months profit (or more) for an ad supported site that could lose most of its traffic in the next google update.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely, it seems like there's also more spammish/sketchy sites without solid revenue (people pump and dump).

I'm definitely not looking for ad-supported type stuff - I really want to work on a SAAS funnel :D

Finding a niche and establishing traffic and then getting conversions is quite time consuming and prone to failure - I'd rather pay a premium for removing that from the equation and then work on expanding the funnel ^.^

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can rent you software which enables you to start your own SMS selling business. An example of such service can be found here: [https://www.cheapsms.eu](https://www.cheapsms.eu)

Product features list can be found here: [http://www.itstripe.com/smpp- server](http://www.itstripe.com/smpp-server)

</comment><comment><USER2> I think a lot of people would be interested in buying such businesses. I really don't know where you'd find them though.

One thought I had would be a once per month "who's selling" hacker news post for people to list businesses for sale. Similar to the who's hiring. If you like the idea maybe go ahead and post it on 11/1?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, sounds like a solid idea. Heck I have some iPhone apps that I might want to sell :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried [https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home](https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/home) ? Made by a fellow HN'er if I remember correctly.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://flippa.com/](http://flippa.com/)

Make sure the revenue is sustainable and recurring _without_ the original person(s).</comment>


Why scientists and engineers must learn programming - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/166115-why-scientists-and-engineers-must-learn-programming/fulltext <comment><USER2> I didn't read the article (I will) but I can guess why. "Problems". They need to solve problems and programming is the medium to solving problems with computation.</comment>


The end of Samsung mobile - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/is-samsung-about-to-sing-its-swan-song-7000003335/

<comment><USER2> This has to be one of the worst articles I've read in a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> I may understand something like this if it was for his own personal blog, not on zdnet.

It will still be a very bad analogy with a worse conclusion but at least in a "it's my opinion I say what I want" kind of way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "If I were Samsung's CEO or on its Board of Directors, I'd suggest dumping the mobile unit and focusing on consumer tech in televisions, home appliances and cameras and hope to God that no one sues us over those."

This is probably the dumbest opinion I've read so far on this lawsuit.

<comment><USER4> Hey it's zdnet... clue is not one of their strengths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All I can say is that if judge Koh was reading this article, she'd probably ask him if he smokes crack, too. The idea that Samsung, the #1 phone company in the world right now would quit the phone market is so ridiculous it doesn't even deserve commenting on it.

Apple won in one pretty specific case - Galaxy S and its different variants. They couldn't ban Samsung's tablets, and it's highly unlikely they will get to ban Galaxy S3 or even Galaxy S2.

Plus, there's also a pretty high chance Samsung would win on appeal, if they can get Apple's patents invalidated with prior art.</comment>


Ask HN: Best note-taking device? - <AUTHOR>

Paper and Pen has always been the master pieces for note-taking. With digital age which do you consider as the best note taking device. Preferably I am taking about the handwriting notes. iPad with "Paper app" by fiftythree.com or evernote, Samsung galaxy note, Boogie board, Toshiba laptops. Which existing product do you like or do you have any new ideas for the same. <comment><USER2> TL;DR:

Nothing will ever be as good as paper and pen but if you are absolutely adamant about going digital as I was, Noteshelf + my tools is the best solution I've found after spending a lot of time testing things out. Obviously I only tested what was listed below so take that with a grain of salt but I researched and went over others not mentioned.

THE TOOLS:

iPad 3, Adonit Jot Flip Stylus

THE APPS:

Noteshelf, Ghostwriter Notes, Paper (by Fifty Three), Note+

THE BREAKDOWN:

After spending weeks researching, reading, watching youtube videos, etc... I narrowed down my decision on the best note taking apps to Ghostwriter Notes and Noteshelf of over a dozen other apps. Since Paper and Note+ were both free, I downloaded them to try them out as well. Here are the results...

Note+ - Total garbage. Not even worth rating as this app would receive negative points if I could issue such a thing.

Paper - Probably great for other purposes but totally not designed for note taking in mind and thus would be rated incredibly low.

Ghostwriter Notes (paid app) - Sounded sooooo good in theory and in videos but in practice, there were so many things wrong with this app. Regular note taking was completely unresponsive unless you plan on writing in font size 80. The only way around this problem was to use the zoom in writing feature but that left very little writing space at a time and the text in the box were often pixelated and there is still some lag time. The writing guard sucks as it required constant adjustment, etc. In essence, don't bother.

Noteshelf (paid app) - This was THE best option I found. The flaws were few. And while it lacked some options (such as PDF annotation), those are unimportant in just plain note taking if that's what you're primarily interested in. It does the job incredibly well (albeit not 5 stars). This app does a good enough job that I'm sticking with it.

FINAL NOTES:

I own almost everything Apple so iPad has always been my tablet of choice (I've owned all 3 versions). Yours may differ. In terms of picking stylus, I spent a couple weeks researching this as well and going over more than half a dozen kickstarter projects (new and old) as well. Jot Flip ended up being the one I liked best. For awhile, I was debating between that and the Cregle iPen until I saw a review video on YouTube showcasing the iPen (apparently the response isn't base on the tip but a sensor on the side). I then decided Jot Flip was the way to go. I wanted a stylus that resembled a pen tip and note one of those thick rubber heads you often see which I'd imagine blows for actual writing.

As a side note, if you just want a stylus without the pen, you can buy just the Jot or Jot Pro. The difference is the Jot Flip includes an actual pen on the opposite head. I wanted to keep the pen option available and was totally not disappointed. Its a really nice pen.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the excellent run through. I have tried many solutions as well and agree, of me, note shelf wins hands down. As far as stylus, I love the wacom Bamboo

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One tool I am seriously considering for "quick and dirty" scratch paper-style note taking is the Boogie Board tablet. It is a simple, low-cost LCD tablet with a pressure sensitive stylus and costs about $40 for the 8.5in original.

I see it as more of an appliance than a tablet, serving one purpose really well. It's like an etch-a-sketch for adults. I find that in programming I often need to scratch paper to track variables or do simple state diagrams and once I've solved the problem I no longer need the paper.

I haven't tried it IRL yet, but at that price, I think I will. Call it a kindle meets etch-a-sketch.

[http://www.improvelectronics.com/us/en/boogie-board-LCD- writ...](http://www.improvelectronics.com/us/en/boogie-board-LCD-writing- tablet/boogie-board-8-LCD-writing-tablet.html)

<comment><USER5> It's a neat little device. I bought mine probably a year or so ago and it's sat largely un-used. I think they were fairly new when I got mine, so these issues might have been fixed, but...

1) small size (think mine's 7 inches or so?) 2) difficult/impossible to write small enough to fit a good amount 3) no way to save pages (in any way). I tried to hack my way around this by snapping pictures of full pages, but it just became too much of a hassle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently using a HTC Flyer. Kinda regretted it... Only drawback was the fact that the apps really kind of sucked.

There's this really good (currently beta) app called "Write" though. Not sure if they'll be extending its consumer base anytime soon.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=58bN5ht- MtU)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.styluslabs...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.styluslabs.write&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5zdHlsdXNsYWJzLndyaXRlIl0).

its a fantastic app that works with my stylus so i'm pleased.

</comment><comment><USER7> I downloaded this free app 'inkflow' a week or two ago when it was featured in the app store. The interface could be better, but over all I love how simplistic it is. I definitely recommend it. I think there's a version for iPad as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have to put my vote in for Dan Bricklin's Note Taker HD (for iPad). I've taken close to 100 pages of notes with it. It's great for packing lots of info onto one page, and it's very versatile.

</comment><comment><USER9> I use the Echo Smartpen, which is hands-down the best note taking device ever. When something works as well on the iPad, I'll be a happy camper. So far, no luck.

</comment><comment><USER10> iPhone with Evernote. I actually don't miss paper at all. My handwriting was always terrible, and I doodled a lot more than I should have when taking notes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Curious to hear if anyone has experience taking notes via voice translation software (Dragon comes to mind.) If the technology has advanced enough, it seems like a great way to translate thoughts to text.</comment>


Ask HN: Where in Ireland or the UK should someone visit that most tourists miss? - <AUTHOR>

My mother will be traveling there this June for three weeks. This will probably be her last vacation, and I really hope she loves it. She's always wanted to visit Ireland and the UK as much of her family's heritage originates there. When visiting foreign countries, she really enjoys spending most of her time observing the culture outside of tourist hot spots.
More details: She plans to visit London, Wales (I don't know which city), Nottingham, Edinburgh, and Stonehenge or another henge. She'll be in Ireland for about a week, but isn't sure where to go outside of Dublin yet. She'll be traveling with three of her sisters and a friend. They plan to rent a car. She doesn't drink alcohol. She prefers BnBs to hotels, and I've shown her how to use Airbnb if they don't find a vacant BnB where they plan to sleep.
I would greatly appreciate if anyone from or familiar with these countries could offer any tips, suggestions, or warnings. <comment><USER2> In Ireland, New Grange.</comment>


Login to your Google account by scanning a QR code - <AUTHOR> https://accounts.google.com/sesame <comment><AUTHOR> Got it from a Google+ post.

[https://plus.google.com/103943309878727777440/posts/DCdBqZX3...](https://plus.google.com/103943309878727777440/posts/DCdBqZX3bvQ)

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

remember this url: <https://accounts.google.com/sesame> . next time you want to check your gmail on a public computer, don't trust even the incognito window because an installed keylogger can record your keystrokes, which unsurprisingly, include your password. use your phone to scan the qrcode on the sesame web page and hit the resultant url -- the desktop browser will automagically redirect to your logged-in gmail without entering your password. yes, i think you do need an android phone with a properly configure google account for this to work.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

<comment><USER2> I've always been scared about keyloggers in internet coffees or public computers in university/hotels. I really wonder if there's a way around. Especially since, if you can scan this with your cellphone it supposes you have internet on your cellphone.

<comment><USER3> Here's a trick: as you are typing in your l/p, click somewhere on the screen to defocus the textbox and then type some random characters and then click back on the textbox. And also type random characters into the textbox, and then select them with the mouse and overwrite them with correct characters. Do this a bunch. Almost all keyloggers just log all key strokes, then people scan for stuff that looks like "email@example.com/x,". There's still the chance that your internet cafe has a more sophisticated logger on it. But if you do this you've made a real step to fight keyloggers in internet cafes.

<comment><USER4> This, along with copying a character from the clipboard, won't defeat most keyloggers. The only kind you would be fooling would be a hardware keylogger. Your best bet is two step authentication.

<comment><USER2> Care to explain why it wouldn't defeat most keyloggers? My knowledge of this is that when you look at the log created by the keylogger you just see a bunch of keystrokes but you have no way to tell if they were typed in the same field.

The two step identification doesn't work if you don't have internet on your phone right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After poking around a bit, it looks like the original URL is <http://goto.google.com/login> which redirects to the somewhat more obscure <http://accounts.google.com/sesame>

My question is, what is <http://goto.google.com> anyway? It looks like a Google employee portal.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're on an untrusted computer, the network is by definition also untrusted.

What happens if the computer has a hacker's self-signed certificate for <https://accounts.google.com> installed and the hacker sets up a man-in-the- middle style attack?

The hacker's browser asks Google for a QR code and it gets sent to your browser. When you scan the code and authorise from your phone, the hacker's browser would be logged into your Google account.

<comment> mike-cardwell This is supposed to secure you on an untrusted computer. It doesn't. There are loads of attacks still. The moment you log in, the attacker has access to your account because they control the browser you're using.

What it protects against is basic key logging attacks (software and hardware). These are the most likely attack you can expect to see, so protecting against them has real life value.

The safest thing you can do is never use an untrusted machine to access important accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wait, if my phone can access the Internet, why would I use an untrusted computer to access GMail?

I can't see a compelling use case for this. It would be more useful to have my phone generate a one-time password without requiring to be connected.

<comment><USER8> Cost provides some compelling use-cases.

If you are overseas, roaming costs are crazy. I'd consider paying them to download a single .png (QRCode) and then use an untrusted computer.

<comment><USER9> The QR code is displayed on the unsecure connected computer. Your phone network is used to perform the login, so it very little data.

A logical next step would be an app that can streamline the auth a bit (have your username prefilled from the Android account) and send the auth to Google via SMS (often easier and cheaper than getting started with dataroaming).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stop ! If you're on an untrusted machine, this is untrusted, too. It should be pretty easy to install alternative certificates, MITM this page, and serve you a bad QR code that will give access to your account to a someone else.

They might not be able to change your password (if you have 2-factor auth), but they could read/forward all your mail, delete documents, etc.

This isn't enough to work on untrusted computers on untrusted networks (but it's still damn useful for fast-login).

<comment><USER11> > MITM this page, and serve you a bad QR code

You're then reading the QR code on what is assumed to be a trusted device on a trusted network (your mobile phone). The QR code would have to link to a bogus website mascarding as google in order to intercept your username & password. It requires a degree of vigilance on the part of the user at this point to ensure that the login page is genuinely google, but anyone using this auth mechanism must be reasonable security conscious to start with.

By your assertion, the only solution is to not use untrusted computers / networks at all. In the event that you have to this is one way to do so more securely.

<comment><USER12> This is not what he's talking about. Someone could open the sesame page on another computer, and use MITM to serve that code to you. Then, you're giving someone else access instead of yourself when you log in on your phone.

If you're this distrustful, don't use the computer. This entry only seems to prevent keylogging attacks.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for explaining what I meant in simpler terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't have much to add, other that this QR code is a timed one-time pad, so it expires rather quickly.

Visit the site and leave it open for a few minutes, and you'll get an expiration popup. So, people aren't going to be rummaging through the cache or snapping a screenshot at the cafe and going home and logging in as you.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is very similar to what I've been working on at qrauth.com

Glad to see my concept isn't too off the wall

<comment><USER15> Looks cool, but your about page is broken. Please fix so I can find out more About your project :)

<comment><USER14> Oops, I guess I missed a file when I pushed. I'll try and fix it later today. Basically I'll provide an iPhone app that will read the code, check the signature and authenticate the device/user account. The idea is that a single iPhone app can be used to log into many different web sites (or be used as a second factor authentication). It's still "pre-alpha" for sure.

<comment><USER16> You might find some inspiration from duosecurity, who uses QR codes during their setup process. (Don't know if they're using them for auth, yet.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't support multiple accounts yet. Unfortunately, the only way of dealing with multiple Google accounts (for instance, personal and work) remains to use two different browsers or two different browser profiles.

On iPhone, the process isn't as smooth. You'll be taken to a web-based login page to enter your account info. However, it seems to be buggy as if you're logged into one account on your desktop and another account on your mobile weird stuff happens.

<comment><USER18> _On iPhone, the process isn't as smooth. You'll be taken to a web-based login page to enter your account info._

Isn't that how its supposed to work? That's how it works on my Nexus S. Much hassle... Would be better to have an app that does that automatically (since android is pretty much always logged in but the phone browser pretty much never is).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sweet! Seeing a genuine use of QR code for the first time.

<comment><USER20> My favourite usecase for QR codes are the links to a web site showing realtime bus arrival times you see at bus stops that don't yet have a realtime arrivals sign up. You can type the web address in manually too, of course, but the QR code is much more convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great use case for QR codes.

</comment><comment><USER22> The service has been shut down for now. If you try to access the URL, this text is all that's there:

 _Hi there - thanks for your interest in our phone-based login experiment. While we have concluded this particular experiment, we constantly experiment with new and more secure authentication mechanisms.

Stay tuned for something even better!

Dirk Balfanz, Google Security Team._

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems like it has been shut down. The site currently only provides a message that this has been an experiment:

 _While we have concluded this particular experiment, we constantly experiment with new and more secure authentication mechanisms._

 _Stay tuned for something even better!_

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow! This is sweet, but I wish Google had an even shorter URL for it.

<comment><USER25> Try loging in to <http://goo.gl/> and paste the accounts.google.com/sesame link. You'll get your own shortened link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Something similar: <http://bidikey.com/en/bidikey-videos>

</comment><comment><USER27> Remember to log out manually when you are done. Just closing the browser isn't enough.

</comment><comment><USER28> it's kind of neat to re-load the QR-code quickly -- you can see that some parts are refreshed constantly, while other parts only refresh every few seconds. Presumably this has to do with the expiration behavior...

<comment><USER29> The actual contents of the QR code is the following URL:

[https://accounts.google.com/sesame/uc?s=vlrPimUVe5-LGarBtJxU...](https://accounts.google.com/sesame/uc?s=vlrPimUVe5-LGarBtJxU3k1hwik)

The `s` parameter is changed with every refresh, but the majority of the URL remains constant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Now closed... broken or really an experiment!?</comment>


Four Covid-19 Vaccines Are Closest to Becoming Reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/these-4-covid-19-vaccines-are-closest-to-becoming-reality/ <comment><USER2> forgot about pfizer/biontech?</comment>


The Case Against Google - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html <comment><USER2> I'm personally MUCH more worried about facebook and twitter than Google. Our current political discourse has gone off the rails in the U.S., and I think a large part of it is due to those two entities. Google I think is only a mild player in that space, which, in its extremes, is a threat to democratic society.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes I wonder how much their impact is overblown though. It seems like it's a very loud presence in people's lives, and a lot of very loud people on it who think they are making some kind of impact. When is the last time you were swayed by lefty or righty radical? I'm not even convinced it really pushes people further down an idealogy. But then again I'm genX. I just don't take tweets that seriously, even when they come from Trump or Obama.

<comment><USER4> > When is the last time you were swayed by lefty or righty radical? I'm not > even convinced it really pushes people further down an idealogy.

I haven't been _swayed_ by such radicals, but I have been turned off and disgusted by them, feelings which bleed over to people who I associate with them. I can see that effect as one that re-enforces political polarization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or this kind of rant-like writeups make it difficult to go through the content? While I held on to the romanticized story about the dating site, I gave up when it segued into multi-para story about Rockfeller and SC.

But I get the point and I think there is some value in Google making everyone dance every time they change their algorithm. Things might have been better if they have some kind of review board. Apparently having zero or negligible customer facing teams seems to be the norm.

<comment><USER6> I pretty much just read articles backwards now.

<comment><USER7> I was totally riveted. Without the storytelling I would not have learned, for instance, of this gem:

"In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory [regarding the federal antitrust lawsuit], but inside Microsoft, executives were demanding that lawyers and other compliance officials — the kinds of people who, previously, were routinely ignored — be invited to every meeting. Software engineers began casually dropping by attorneys' desks and describing new software features, and then asking, in desperate whispers, if anything they'd mentioned might trigger a subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into his office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive turned to the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a capricious Roman emperor."

<comment><USER8> Incidentally, it seems 'thumbs up' had the opposite meaning to today in Roman times. Weird huh.

[http://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down- history/](http://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down-history/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like media has become more monopolistic than tech and needs to be dealt with first.

I'm personally worried about the dominance of big newspapers. It seems that the field of "trusted online newspapers" has narrowed down to only the New York Times and Washington Post. Most non-Tech Hackernews submissions come from either Nytimes or WaPo.

I worry because these newspapers seem to increasingly be setting the political and social narrative for the entire country. That's a lot of power to give Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim.

<comment><USER10> Most local newspapers in the US are slowly dying due to their advertising revenue being killed off in favor of digital ads. I contracted at the Mercury News about five years ago and the vast majority of their income came from a single advertiser and their classified/ads had declined from a section that was larger by itself than the entire newspaper is today. Not enough people want to pay for news to make it worthwhile for smaller players to thrive in the current environment. Also newspapers don't set the political and social narrative for the country - only three printed publications backed Donald Trump and he won the election. That shows the Rupert Murdoch/Fox News TV crowd was more effective, at least with the electoral count if not the popular vote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think part of the problem when it comes to Google, is the massive name recognition. I'll wager that the average not-technical user who ventures to Google doesn't understand 1) what exactly a search engine is 2) alternatives exist.

If you asked them, they probably think Google is the internet, and if you have to find anything, you have to go to Google to find it.

I'll admit I have no proof of this, but I've found, generally that the non- technical individuals I know, have incredible poor working knowledge of the internet. I take as my primary evidence though the masses vulnerability to really stupid and easily caught scams, spoof websites, click bait, and spam emails.

As a technical user, I'm constantly baffled that people fall for this crap. So if people really are that incomprehensibly ignorant, I'll bet they don't' even really know what a google is and why they use other than it's all they know and they'd be lost without it.

If the general public can't figure out no one is going to hand them a million bucks from nigeria, how the hell can they figure out you don't have to use Google?

I use DDG btw. I find their results fantastically good. So good that I can't even use google. The spam, the adds, the poor results. I cant' take it. I also can't handle that google returns different results on different computers.

I get the same results on DDG every time i make the same search. I've gotten lazy and started performing searches for things instead of typing in the address because it's consistent and faster.

<comment><USER12> > I'll wager that the average not-technical user who ventures to Google > doesn't understand 1) what exactly a search engine is 2) alternatives exist.

I have seen my father type a web address into a google search page because he doesn't understand that he can use the location field to go directly to that address. I corrected this behavior the first time I saw it. He was doing it again the next time I visited.

This is a man with a high level of education and a healthy mind. He's utterly lost on many of the basic concepts of his computer. The thing is, it works for him and I would never know he was making this mistake without watching him because he still gets the desired result in a roundabout way.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure it's a mistake. Doing a search seems better for non-technical users since you get spelling correction, and you're more likely to get a decent result if you mis-remember the domain name.

<comment><USER14> It's not better. Because often the top result is a paid ad for that result. This is bad for a couple reasons:

\- It's a tax on the services you use who have to pay to be the top result, you burden companies you patronize when you do this. When you search for Dell.com in search and click the top link for Dell, Dell just had to pay a couple quarters to not have you redirected to a seedy scam site instead. Times millions for every other person who does this.

\- Google Ads allow advertisers to spoof addresses, and display a different destination address than where clicking the link actually takes you. I've seen amazon.com, bestbuy.com, and even, hilariously, youtube.com hijacked in very authentic-looking malicious Google Ads at the top of Google Search. For security reasons, you should never, ever click on a Google Ad.

<comment><USER13> This seems like a good argument in favor of understanding the difference between ads and search results. (Unfortunately it's more subtle than it should be.) Or maybe installing an ad blocker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The New York times is participating in a campaign against Americas top tech companies. I don't know what their goal is, but no good will come off it. Google is one of our strengths, not one of our weaknesses.

<comment><USER7> The article takes great pain to point out the importance and value of Google.

Genghis Khan was one of Mongolia's strengths. Standard Oil was one of 19th century America's strengths. An empire can be great and still stifle good things. It's hard to know what we're missing.

<comment><USER16> >They basically shut down Foundem, creating more time for them to give advice to other companies and regulators fighting Google. This consulting work, _some of which was funded by Google's competitors_ , has helped to keep the Raffs afloat.

They really buried the lead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think something that's maybe being exposed here is that it isn't clear how to make digital products work together and that the incentives are to keep it that way. Walled gardens are being built inside basically every major tech company. Most aren't even illegal.

Here's a simple example I ran into recently:

I last weekend I created a hackathon project that can find the location in an audio book of a photo of a page from an physical book. The idea is it lets you switch back and forth between your physical reading experience and an audio book. It wasn't even all that hard and worked way better than I'd ever expected. I could probably get it polished and pretty usable within a couple of weeks of full time work, but without access to the audio and ebook files it's impossible. With DRM the default that access is basically impossible.

I'm hoping to get Overdrive to implement it. I don't really care about any small potential profit it might generate and I know someone from there and they have the licensing and relationships to maybe make it work, but I feel like the world would be a better place if any company with an idea like that could just go out and do it.

Yes google is trying to make search more of a wall around their garden, but everyone else is just building there's higher and we have laws to enforce their right to do so.

<comment><USER18> Speaking of walled gardens, that feature already exists for Amazon e-books and audiobooks read through kindle/audible.

<comment><USER17> Yep. Almost mentioned that here. My original plan was just to do that in a more open way, but I realized it had a bad combination of being hard and not that cool.

Besides I and plenty of other people prefer real books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is so inane. I use bing all the time (accidentally) and I always go - wait, what's wrong with google? why are these search results so awful? oh riiiight. (switch to google).

Google is being attacked hard by Apple (blocking ads), amazon&azure (cloud)

and ads (facebook).

What Government really needs to do isn't break up Google per se, but generally give more natural advantages to smaller startups versus larger corps. One example would be corporate tax.

Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones.

In fact, if I were the democratic party this would be my rallying cry. Time to really re-invigorate the american dream.

<comment><USER20> That's strange. I've had the same feeling with Google for a long time: Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years?

Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back.

For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well?

If you really want to embrace diversity, look beyond the two largest players.

For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy and so on.

For laptops, it's not Windows versus MacOS, there's MINT, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc.

For servers, it's not Windows Server versus RHEL, there's also Debian, FreeBSD, etc.

For smart phones, it's not iOS versus Google-Android, there's also LineageOS, Replicant, etc.

(For nitpickers: Yes, LineageOS is heavily based on Android, which is again heavily based on Linux. Still, a slick LineageOS doesn't even need GApps, which is a huge difference to the e.g. stock Samsung/Asus/... crapware Android.)

<comment><USER21> My relationship with DDG for the last few years has been the following:

\- I read somewhere (mostly always on HN) how great it is.

\- I set it as the main search engine on my browser.

\- I use it for a while, but I notice how slow it feels compared to Google, and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.

\- I go back to Google after a few days, and I forget about DDG for a few months/years, at least until the next comment on HN about it.

...and the cycle begins, again.

<comment><USER22> The key to switching from Google to DDG is memorizing a few shortcuts for fallbacks, like "!g" (Google), "!gi" (Google images), and "!gn" (Google news). It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters, but over time you'll find yourself using them less and less. They will never completely disappear, but one day you'll realize you're only using them in a few percent of your searches. In most cases, you will know in advance that you specifically want "Google results" instead of "search results," and can add them on the first query.

From a privacy perspective, using DDG like this denies Google 95+% of the information it would be gathering about you.

Caveat: I have never wanted "local" or "personalized" search results. I'm willing to type "Chinese _food near ZIP code_ " or "Chinese _translation_ " instead of relying on opaque algorithms to use my location and personal data to decide whether I'm hungry or confused.

<comment><USER23> > It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters,

Especially on mobile. Can't they use something more mobile-friendly than "!g", such as "gg" or "/g" for example?

<comment><USER23> Better idea: place a "Google" button after the (say) third search result.

If not done universally, allow me to activate this feature in my preferences.

I tried DDG a few times but always switched back to Google eventually (typing <BACK> and then <SPACE> "!g" <ENTER> is tiring, especially on mobile). I think this option would make me switch to DDG indefinitely.

<comment><USER23> I just came up with the idea to make a bookmarklet, which converts the current DDG search into Google:

        javascript:(function(){ var s = document.location.search.split("&")[0].substr(1); document.location = "https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&"+s; })();

It's not perfect, but it's a start :)

To be clear: while this button directs people away from DDG to Google, it actually allows people to use DDG as their first (main) search engine, and lets them switch to Google if necessary without much inconvenience. The better the DDG search results, the less views they lose to Google.

<comment><USER20> Nice idea! However, I still struggle to see the advantage over "!g".

The workflow is exactly the same: Search for stuff in DDG, and if you suspect that Google might have returned a better result, prepend "!g " to your query (which might be even faster than clicking on the bookmarklet, depending on how fast you type).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Kind of an interesting thought from the article:

" If you love Google, you should hope the government sues it for antitrust offenses — and you should hope it happens soon, because who knows what wondrous new creations are waiting patiently in the wings."

<comment><USER25> These bizarre roundabout ways the NYT finds to worship corporations are starting to get creepy. Calling their work wondrous and speaking directly to people who "love" Google is just absurd. Just stop, don't worship an organization.

<comment><USER26> Or maybe you're just giving undue importance to those words. One may "love" Google in the same way one "loves" quesadillas, or chrome rims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm starting to despair that there's so much demand for reading/publishing 'the case against' X or Y company pieces, i.e. this and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950). Everybody who is _for_ these companies is not like, passionate about them, we just use their products and pay (collectively) a lot of money to do so.

With Google in particular, if their dominance was so unassailable, we wouldn't have slack or zoom, which exist essentially because gchat and google hangouts were so half-assed.

</comment><comment><USER28> Part of the reason that Google is in this situation is because, instead of staying neutral politically they took sides making themselves more of a target. There is also the issue of data privacy as it relates to sharing the data with the US Government. If they start to share more data with the US Government, the risk losing users and ad revenue. On the other hand many argue that their refusal to share data is bad for society as a whole. For example, some argue that more sharing of data would have helped catch the Florida school shooter before it happened.

No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings in most of their profits.

<comment><USER29> This is the sad reality. Google is out of sync with political currents so now there is this PR campaign against them.

Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides.

Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on DC.

For example, in 98 MS spent $4M. By 03, this was up to almost $9M. [https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000115&year=2017id=D000000115&year=2017)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A trifecta of failures: failure of capitalism to innovate its own self moderation from being inherently anti-competitive; failure of democracy which engages after the fact based on emotion and is reactionary; failure of meritocracy where elites hand out favors to "friendlies", lower the ladder of regulatory avoidance to some and not others, ergo the opposite of merit.

This is why we need more ethics, logic, rationality, and the promotion of epistemology as moderators. Capitalism, democracy, and meritocracy all in their own way are prone to people gaming the system, might making right.

</comment><comment><USER31> > People loved Standard Oil a century ago, and Microsoft in the 1990s, just as > they love Google today.

Which people are those? One of Microsoft's defining features has always been the juxtaposition of software iterations that consumers truly despise with those that they're sort of ok with.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Many of the most important antitrust lawsuits in American history — against IBM, Alcoa, Kodak and others — were rooted in claims that one company had made technological discoveries that allowed it to outpace competitors."

Does that say more about the success of antitrust at spurring competitors to catch up or that "technological dominance" is only good as long as long as the paradigm doesn't shift (i.e. Kodak is now pretending to be a crypto company as a last resort)?

</comment><comment><USER33> >""Google's built around horizontal search, which means if you type in 'What's the population of Myanmar,' then Google finds websites that include the words 'Myanmar' and 'population,' and figures out which ones are most likely to answer your question," says Neha Narula, who was a software engineer at Google before joining the M.I.T. Media Lab"

I'm not sure if it's relevant but I get an exact result when I do this search. Not sure if that is horizontal search...

</comment><comment><USER34> This was a fantastically written article. I've learned and been able to explore so much from it.

I still love Google and wouldn't be where I am today without it but it makes a fair point when camparing this time to the early oil industry. It's not like there's no competition against Google, it's just been a fantastic tool and why use anything else.

</comment><comment><USER35> Never expected that something could be blamed for being too useful.

Or did I? To tell you the truth it always seemed like there's an _awful lot of logic in the way internet works_. Seems like the real world is catching on, trying to close this gap... I certainly hope it's too late :)

</comment><comment><USER36> It's pretty easy to measure how addictive YouTube is. Let a toddler use it. Now is it all bad? Maybe. I found my kids build into their genuine play things they saw on youtube. Is it worse than cartoons/tv? Maybe.. Should it be rationed, definitely.

</comment><comment><USER37> Previous discussion about case: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374458)

</comment><comment><USER38> Whoa. Why is this post so buried?

</comment><comment><USER39> And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page...

<comment><USER4> > And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page...

Comments like yours are stupid and add nothing for these reasons:

1) A journalist or writer likely does not have technical control over their paper's website design. This is certainly true for someone writing for the NYT. They're not going to hold back their article because someone on the website team chose to use a product from the company they're critiquing.

2) Google, Facebook, etc. are so dominant that it's often not really possible to avoid them and their technology and still have a functioning business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Foundem sounds like a spam site to me. By definition if I'm finding Foundem results in Google, then Foundem would not be the one who is solving my search, Google is. I actually think one of the issues with Google over the last decade has been a failure to clean up the results. Google used to be merciless in hammering spam sites into oblivion. I miss those days.

</comment><comment><USER41> Meta: It's unfortunate this, like most tech behemoth critiques, got flagged off the front page so quickly. There are, of course exceptions to this rule, so perhaps those are simply enough to saturate people's desire for such articles.

More on point: what choices does a startup have when wanting to operate in a vertical that Google/Facebook et.al. also want to infiltrate? Find a smaller niche that doesn't hold enough interest (or money) to interest them? It's funny, I wouldn't have thought the RSS reader niche would have appealed to them originally, and yet here we are today where RSS reader startups still find themselves competing on price against a product that no longer exists.

It really does seem like its not enough to just be better; the "worse is better" paradox in action.

<comment><USER42> It wasn't flagged; it tripped the flamewar detector, which we've just turned off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The problem is Google will just be replaced with someone that dominates. Tech just ends up winner take all or most.

We see it with each thing. From Search, to Ecommerce, to social media, etc.

So we need to think through would someone else be better than Google? Because that is just what will happen.

<comment> wu-ikkyu This isn't natural, though. It's the designed goal of centuries-old patent law which has become counter productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Be evil." :(

</comment><comment><USER25> I love how difficult it's becoming to actually ever visit a website from a google result, especially on mobile. And even when you do you're usually still stuck with their tracking and spyware. Reminds me a lot of AOL's strategy back in the day.

<comment><USER45> I find this to be extremely annoying as well as it obscures the site link as well as it makes it very difficult to copy the source link if I want to share it. I think the comparison to AOL's strategy in 2000 is very warranted.

<comment><USER46> LMFTFY:

It is IMPOSSIBLE to copy search result link. Not just "difficult".

<comment><USER47> have been running browser mods for ~5y to do this.

it's a pain. but it works.

currently greasemonkey 'direct link out' and 'bypass google redirect'

<comment><USER48> I've been using "Google Search Link Fix" with Firefox (for a long time) to get the direct links on search results. [1]

[1]: [https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix](https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Google is not the most evil corporation ever invented. The most evil corporation has not been invented yet.

</comment><comment><USER50> This talking point comes straight from the top

[https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=...](https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=20)

Expect a lot of press on this subject over the next few weeks.

<comment><USER43> But you do have to wonder what Soros motives are. He is really not someone that looks for the greater good.

There is going to be some financial aspect that makes him money. Not saying he is not accidentally aligned with the greater good but most certainty not the driver.

<comment><USER50> [https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/csco- aap...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/csco-aapl-nflx-fb- silicon-valley-stocks.html)

Looks like a good time to short.</comment></comment></comment>