A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/05/a-cartoon-intro-to-dns-over-https/ <comment><USER2> I'll say what has been said time and time again in the past: CF should not be the default server. There shouldn't be a default server. Have an onboarding flow that says "choose DNS server" and allow the user to choose between clearly-unencrypted endpoints (ISP/router, Google, quad9, etc) and encrypted endpoints that use DoH.

And again, Google's DoH solution is infinitely less controversial: an upgrade list[0] so that, if your computer/router advertises 1^4, it uses Cloudflare's DoH. If it advertises 8^4, it uses [https://dns.google](https://dns.google). It even works for a provider known as clean browsing[1] that filters DNS.

0: [https://blog.chromium.org/2019/09/experimenting-with-same- pr...](https://blog.chromium.org/2019/09/experimenting-with-same-provider- dns.html)

1: [https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/711b1ba2735f8af4bd...](https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/711b1ba2735f8af4bd6359c6292e1875412df74f/net/dns/dns_util.cc#L146-L217)

<comment><USER3> Having a default vs needing to understand all of this?

Do you believe you are selecting the path of least resistance?

How many defaults in systems do you use today so you aren't configuring the dials and knobs of a spaceship everytime you power on.

Using Cloudflare as a default vs the ISP's defaults.

If you care you can learn and change them the same way we operate today.

The browser is a product, UX wins. How do I make my product easy to use while still maintaining a security forward stance? Defaults.

<comment><USER3> > However, we've spent time studying these risks… and we have negotiating > power. We worked hard to find a company to work with us to protect users' > DNS data. And we found one: Cloudflare.

> Cloudflare is providing a recursive resolution service with a pro-user > privacy policy. They have committed to throwing away all personally > identifiable data after 24 hours, and to never pass that data along to > third-parties. And there will be regular audits to ensure that data is being > cleared as expected.

I think this is a fair and reasonable reason to land on Cloudflare if they are willing to cooperate in interest of the user and make their organization open to audits aligned to that.

I don't understand the hyped up hate on picking a default who is appearing to be going over the top as an ally for end users privacy, users aren't forced into staying with, and would be an arguably more transparent starting point than what people have today.

<comment><USER4> Reading what cloudflare sells, people who have a domains on Cloudflare and buy Pro, Business and Enterprise plan have access to DNS analytics that displays DNS queries from Cloudflares DNS servers, including geographic information.

Personally I don't see how that product can coexist with the privacy policy.

<comment><USER5> > Reading what cloudflare sells, people who have a domains on Cloudflare and > buy Pro, Business and Enterprise plan have access to DNS analytics that > displays DNS queries from Cloudflares DNS servers, including geographic > information.

Those analytics are for authoritative queries against the domain(s) that you have on Cloudflare; not for queries to any domain.

Not logging _recursive_ queries against their public resolvers - and it's those recursive queries from end-users that hold the biggest risk to user privacy - is an entirely different thing, and these two systems can co-exist.

<comment><USER4> The distinction between authoritative and recursive queries is not meaningful in the context of DoH since that protocol is only about recursive servers. A user who connect to cloudflare through DoH is connecting through a recursive server, and knowing that the privacy policy say no logs, is unlikely to expect that logs are kept if the domain owner happens to be a customer of cloudflare.

Cloudflare could do as google and not include any query that comes via the public resolver. Any DoH query would thus be a blackhole in regard to analytics and only display data from users who used someone else recursive resolver for the query. In that way no logs from the public DNS resolver ever ends up as data, the privacy document is followed, and companies can not buy query data by becoming customers to Cloudflare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a concern.

DNS over HTTPS feels to me like we're edging towards end-to-end encryption for DNS. This seems like a good thing, but even though it will protect against ISP and state level observations of DNS, will it not reduce ones control over DNS locally?

My threat model remains web site operators and the malware and tracking inserted at that point. Additionally devices on the network that may observe locally and communicate externally like TV boxes and games consoles.

To manage those threats I use Pi-Hole. But once we start end-to-end encrypting, and especially when we start verifying those ends, how do I locally intercept and manage DNS for my privacy and security?

Is this a genuine concern about DNS over HTTPS? Or is the plan to enable systems like Pi-Hole to be a trusted and configurable resolver too so that consumers retain the ability to control their own systems like this?

<comment><USER7> > will it not reduce ones control over DNS locally

No. Run your own DoH server, point your DoH client to your own DoH server, and your DoH server can then provide any responses you want. (And it in turn can use DoH or do standard recursive resolution.)

End-to-end encryption means that malicious parties can't MITM your traffic or otherwise make you talk to the wrong destination server. That doesn't prevent you from intentionally running your own local servers and pointing clients to them.

If you have a client device on your network that you don't trust and can't change the configuration of, it has far more secure methods for protecting itself from you than just using DoH.

<comment><USER8> > _No. Run your own DoH server, point your DoH client to your own DoH server_ > ...

Except when the client ignores what you tell it. Per Paul Vixie:

       google, this is bogus as hell. my dhcp server gives you dns servers to
       use. please don't make me route and answer 22.214.171.124 just to watch youtube.

       > [71] 2019-02-13 16:39:40.548137 [#68 vtnet0 4095] \
       >         [18.104.22.168].56915 [220.127.116.11].53  \
       >         dns QUERY,NOERROR,7357,rd \
       >         1 lh3.googleusercontent.com,IN,A 0 0 0
       > [71] 2019-02-13 16:39:40.548210 [#69 vtnet0 4095] \
       >         [126.96.36.199].56915 [184.108.40.206].53  \
       >         dns QUERY,NOERROR,49247,rd \
       >         1 lh3.googleusercontent.com,IN,AAAA 0 0 0

       (no, this device i've paid for, will NOT be allowed to send you any
       information, other than what i personally approve, which will never
       include DNS traffic. if you don't like that deal, buy it back from me
       and i'll find some other video appliance that doesn't twist my arm.)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671)

Of course with DoH you can't just do a UDP redirect. With DoT, which uses tcp/953, you can at least block access.

But with DoH, you have just lost control of your network. (Unless block 443 and force everything to go through a (Squid) proxy?)

<comment><USER9> > But with DoH, you have just lost control of your network. (Unless block 443 > and force everything to go through a (Squid) proxy?)

Expect "enterprise" network equipment using an approach like this to provide a "DOH firewall" in the near future.

Net privacy gained: negative.

<comment><USER8> I've been on networks where everything had to go through a proxy, where browsers were told how to act via WPAD/proxy.pac and you set an HTTPS_PROXY env for wget/cURL to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't really understand what kind of improvement is the DNS over HTTPS.

Yes some middle parties won't be able to tamper with my DNS queries. At what price? Total control for the people providing the DOH endpoints. So chrome for sure will be using Google DNS for this, and with their efforts to remove ad blocking this fits nicely that you won't be able to use simply DNS based blocker.

<comment><USER11> We already have this situation though - the people who control DNS resolvers already have total control. ISPs have already been known to abuse this power [0].

This proposal doesn't solve this problem. Rather, it solves the problem of e.g. your ISP intercepting, logging and/or modifying your DNS request.

The solution will then just be to run your own DoH endpoint / proxy.

[0]: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/08/comcasts-dns- red...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/08/comcasts-dns-redirect- service-goes-nationwide/)

<comment><USER10> My first question in running my own DOH proxy will be how it works in my home network?

Right now I have my own dns configuration on my router, and any device that connects to the router is automatically using this dns. With DOH this doesn't seem to be the case though. I'll need to go and change the settings for each device to use my own DOH proxy. But whether I'll be allowed to do so is quite unclear if you ask me.

Becauae what happens when chrome says : "we have you covered, it's best to use only our DNS over HTTPS. If you need something else you can buy enterprise subscription"

<comment><USER12> Are you worried about things like Chrome fucking you over or are you worried about DNS encryption? The former does not require the latter, it's just one of a million ways to do it. Probably one of the more roundabout ways to be honest.

<comment><USER10> You are right, Chrome doesn't need the DNS encryption to screw me.

But I think what they need is screw all of us, in a way which we won't resist much because it's for our own good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the big concerns here is that this is another instance of "making the internet less decentralized by leaning on Cloudflare."

Someone once pointed out that if the NSA wanted to build a front company whose goal was to make hoovering up the internet easier, it would probably look a lot like Cloudflare. I'm generally not much of a conspiracy theorist, but this one has been frustratingly difficult to shrug off.

<comment> tedk-42 I wonder how long it will take for conspiracy comments like these to pass.

Anyone know how long it took for people to trust Lets Encrypt? Or did we all forget (myself included) of the times when people talked about the issue of trusting some random 3rd party handing out free certificates?

<comment><USER13> You don't need to trust Let's Encrypt anywhere near as much as you need to trust Cloudflare.

With Let's Encrypt, I generate my own encryption keys and never show the private key to anyone. LE just signs the public key. The risk is that they might also sign _someone else 's_ public key as being valid for my domain. But my servers will reject any traffic that isn't encrypted with my real public key. The best an attacker could do is set up a phishing operation.

But _any_ CA can improperly sign a public key as being valid for my domain, not just LE. This is just a result of the CA system being broken by design.

On the other hand, Cloudflare is usually only useful if you let them terminate TLS on your behalf. So you have to give them your private key, and they really do have access to all of your traffic. At this point, they can do whatever they want with it, largely undetectably (i.e. without the risk of releasing obviously fake certificates into the wild).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> peanut-walrus So they start with talking about ESNI and then kinda completely gloss over it afterwards. Yeah you can reuse the TLS session if several sites are using the same CDN, however, this is again relying on centralization for privacy.

The cool thing about DNS architecture is the fact that it is decentralized. Mozilla's plan with DoH tries to fix missing features in DNS by getting rid of arguably the biggest killer feature DNS has.

Furthermore, several governments use DNS right now to block websites deemed illegal in their country. Not just authoritarian states that attempt to censor material critical to the regime, but also western countries (copyright infringement, child porn, gambling, etc). Does Mozilla and Cloudflare seriously think they will just go "oh ok, I guess everything is unblocked again now". No, they will either force Cloudflare to do the same or force local ISPs to implement even stronger filtering controls.

<comment><USER12> Aside: I've never understood how DNS is decentralized.

The internet: I get a number (from a central authority), I plug into other numbers, a path to my number appears. Sounds pretty decentralized once I have a number it's up to peering.

DNS: I get a name (from some authority) under a hierarchy. To look names up in this hierarchy you start with sanctioned root servers (from a central authority) which point you to TLD lookup servers (sanctioned by the same authority) which are the authority for that level and so on until you get to your name. Doesn't sound very decentralized, the only portion that's decentralized is the cache.

Anyways to your original point: I disagree losing a layer or two of distributed cache servers (depending on the deployment" is "the biggest killer feature DNS has" and I think encrypted randomization and stepping towards end to end integrity are better "killer features" that haven't been able to take off with traditional DNS.

> Furthermore, several governments use DNS right now to block websites...

So it has to be air tight in standing up to the worlds governments to provide value over being unauthenticated plain text? Even in the cases of governments you'd be surprised how far making it more difficult goes in the volume of collection or how it makes governments have to explicitly admit they are monitoring particular traffic due to the way the technologies work.

<comment><USER8> > _Aside: I 've never understood how DNS is decentralized._

I use my ISP's recursive DNS resolvers (or not); you use your ISP's recursive DNS resolvers (or not). Anyone that wants to track "everyone's" browsing has to track a whole bunch of ISPs (and 3rd party DNS operators) if they want to keep a database of activity. There is no central facility that has everyone's DNS requests, unlike (e.g.) MSN Messenger back in the day where all traffic was transferred through the central system.

Further, because of caching, it is impossible to get exact numbers on people querying DNS. So while the records for www.youtube.com are in a central place, the exact number of people sitting on their couches at home asking for the A record is masked by people's home routers doing caching and also their ISP DNS servers (which the home routers talk to) doing caching.

So there is no "central DNS" server that does hostname-to-IP mapping: there are (tens of) thousands--millions if you count people's home Linksys/Dlink/Asus routers running dnsmasq (or whatever).

<comment><USER12> Yeah that's a fair take on it being privacy decentralized from a query disaggregation perspective, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Over the year of discussions in regard to DNS over HTTPS I find the best illustration is to look at email. Your email client on the phone or PC send to a email over SMTP to a email server, the server look at the address and contact the recipient server and delivers the request. In email it is client->MTA->server-recipient. In DNS it is client->Resolver->Authoritive- server with the answer traveling back in the chain.

A little historical similarity, ISP used to provide a default MTA servers just like they do with resolver. Now days it most people use a email provider of choice.

So lets now imagine we solved the plain text problem of email by having the client use a default list of trusted MTA, with thunderbird defaulting to partner with gmail, and just sent it there over HTTPS. Gmail would take the email and forward it in plaintext to the recipient-server.

Email security did not follow that path. There we collectively decided to first encrypt communication between the client and the MTA using TLS, addressing the first step in the chain. Then the communication between MTA and recipient server got encrypted. In order to prevent downgrade attacks there is also currently two competing standards, one based on DNS and the other on HTTPS side channel. Looking at email, we are also almost done converting the plain text protocol to encrypted: [https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer- email/overview](https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview)

The general question is then, why not just copy the success of email? The answer it seem is about money. No company got more users or data when email protocols got encrypted. Cloudflare however will benefit if everyone route their DNS through them as that gives them a comparable performance benefit when people use them as a hosting provider. They also say they won't sell data, but people who move their domain hosting to cloudflare and pay for Pro, Business and Enterprise plan can get access to DNS analytics.

<comment><USER14> Whatever happened to DNSCrypt? I remember setting it up and happily using it for over a year without any issues a few years ago.

<comment><USER15> Still here, still what most public secure DNS run, still secure and reliable, still being constantly improved, and new implementations keep being written.

[https://dnscrypt.info](https://dnscrypt.info)

The protocol was recently extended with Anonymized DNS, a mechanism that hides client IP addresses from resolvers by using relays dedicated to secure DNS forwarding. A new network of DNS relays is currently being deployed.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dnscrypt/comments/dhoxah/anonymized...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dnscrypt/comments/dhoxah/anonymized_dns_is_here/)

dnscrypt-proxy, the reference client implementation, is at version 2.0.29.beta3, released yesterday.

There is a new, easy to use and deploy implementation in Rust to add DNSCrypt support server-side, Encrypted DNS Server: [https://github.com/jedisct1/encrypted-dns- server](https://github.com/jedisct1/encrypted-dns-server)

DoH, DNSCrypt and DNS relaying can happily share the same TCP port 443.

A complete protocol description has been available for years, but turning it into an IETF document is time consuming. It will eventually happen, but as an independent project, writing software has been prioritized over marketing.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the information. Are you involved with the project?

<comment><USER15> A little bit. I run some public DNS servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As another post on HN argued a few weeks ago and as is stated in this article again:

> _After you do the DNS lookup to find the IP address, you still need to > connect to the web server at that address. To do this, you send an initial > request. This request includes a server name indication, which says which > site on the server you want to connect to. And this request is unencrypted._

Note that, until encrypted SNI is in place, DoH does not actually increase your privacy. Your ISP can still track all domains you connect to by analyzing the SNI header. The only thing they cannot do anymore is block or redirect any of the domains.

</comment><comment> ga-vu My problem is that this is highly overhyped by the Mozilla/Cloudflare PR teams, and both companies stand to make money out of it.

A better solution would be DoT+DNSSEC: [https://twitter.com/jschauma/status/1184483451111727106](https://twitter.com/jschauma/status/1184483451111727106)

I don't trust Mozilla anymore, especially after becoming a VPN vendor and partnering with Cloudflare. They now have commercial interests in pushing standards down on everybody, similar to Google.

<comment><USER17> My ISP (Entel Chile) started blocking DNS requests to non-Entel servers in July. DoT would not give me a way around this, because they can still see that it is DNS traffic by the port. DoH mixes DNS traffic in with the noise of HTTPS traffic, allowing me to run my own DoH resolvers and bypass their restrictions.

<comment><USER8> > _DoH mixes DNS traffic in with the noise of HTTPS traffic, allowing me to > run my own DoH resolvers and bypass their restrictions._

And when malware gets on your network and starts using DoH to get around _your_ home resolvers, what will you do?

* [https://www.zdnet.com/article/first-ever-malware-strain-spot...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/first-ever-malware-strain-spotted-abusing-new-doh-dns-over-https-protocol/)

* [https://www.zdnet.com/article/psixbot-malware-upgraded-with-...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/psixbot-malware-upgraded-with-google-dns-over-https-sexploitation-kit/)

As someone who works in IT, this is my problem with DoH.

<comment><USER18> That was already a possibility even before all of this DoH publicity. Mozilla, etc. pushing DoH publicizes it's availability, but there was nothing in the past preventing malware from tunneling all sorts of traffic over HTTPS. DNS inspection isn't an end all, be all for malware security. It just gets the low hanging fruit.

<comment><USER8> There was a lot of low-hanging fruit given that most malware writers aren't going to set up all of this infrastructure for custom protocols.

And even when they did, creating various C&C servers, the lack of ESNI would allow for detecting activity once the daily domain creation algorithm was reverse-engineered:

* [https://blog.malwarebytes.com/security-world/2016/12/explain...](https://blog.malwarebytes.com/security-world/2016/12/explained-domain-generating-algorithm/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17196415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17196415)

</comment><comment><USER20> > So how do we fix these?

> Avoid untrustworthy resolvers by using Trusted Recursive Resolver.

If it's to trust a resolver just 126.96.36.199 (or whatever)

> Protect against on-path eavesdropping and tampering using DNS over HTTPS.

This is the only real change but it is useless for everything outside a CDN Whit is basically everything that matters for users

> Transmit as little data as possible to protect users from deanonymization.

QNAME minimization can be done already, it is not a DoH thing

</comment><comment><USER21> Firefox could make a long-need replacement for DNS, but they chose to spend all this effort on adding more ducktape to the current system, while also contributing to its centralization (more control to Cloduflare, yay).

DNS was a passable solution in the 80s, but right now it's absolute shit.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is really exciting for security. Lin, you are so talented!!! Great work explaining this, wow!

</comment><comment><USER23> Why is there no Google container extension?

Sometimes it feels that Mozilla is just paying token lip service to the idea of privacy.

<comment><USER24> With 90% of their money coming from Google for decades they can't bite the hand that feed them. The question is why Google is keeping them afloat? My guess is that a few millions here and there to create the illusion of competition is way cheaper than having a monopoly investigation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is why I love Cloudflare. Makes everything secure and faster... for free (not to mention how easy it is to make records and go into developer mode to purge caching for a bit)

<comment><USER26> Have you asked yourself how they can make everything free? What are their incentives? When they successfully centralized majority of DNS resolving, what could they do with that power? Keep in mind that even if their motives are pure at the moment, management and ownership of companies can change.

Look a few years back and you'll find similar enthusiastic comments about Google: they make everything better and for free. Everyone should use their search, everyone should move to GMail, etc.

<comment><USER25> Good points. As others have said, I'll probably move off later on, but for now I intend to stay with them (similarly I've been with Gmail for a while and now moved off to stuff like Fastmail, hosting my own "dropbox", etc.).

Primarily because for beginners it's a bit easier to setup everything without much hassle.</comment></comment></comment>


Oracle surprises with new Sparc chip launch - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/oracle-surprises-with-new-sparc-chip-launch.ars

<comment><USER2> I don't know the details, but integrated software and hardware can give performance benefits not possible with modular architecture. eg. iPhone, consoles vs. PC with comparable CPU/GPU. Of course, a more appropriate comparison is with what IBM does.

Perhaps we can expect some proprietary extensions to java that will scream on that particular Sparc? Of course, that ruins Sun's dream... but the dreamer is no more. Or, closer to home for Oracle, that its database screams on it... Where they use this integration trick really depends on where they feel a little extra performance would beat the competition.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Sparc T series are relatively interesting chips. They offer logical segmentation for virtualization and IO, which is supported in Solaris and OpenBSD - you could, for example, run an OpenBSD firewall and a Solaris webserver in one unit.

They also have chip level threading, which is similar to Intel's hyperthreading, but much more dense - 8 threads per CPU core on most models.

These chips are designed for processing and network IO - they come with dual 10 gigabit ethernet on the CPU, but limited PCIe expansion compared even to most desktop PC's. Great for a compute server.

I wish the older ones would come down in price - the original T1000 servers are still going for nearly 2k on Ebay...</comment>


2600 releases a digital edition of their magazine. - <AUTHOR> http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12029

<comment><USER2> Anyone know if the actual magazine has declined as badly as "Off the Hook" over the years? I had an interest around the time of Corley's trial. Reading the transcript of the deposition of Jack Valenti -- may everyone dance on his grave -- was hilarious, and a depressing peek into litigation. The radio show was pretty good, but each time I revisit it (once a year or so), it seems to have devolved further into pointless wanking.

<comment><USER3> I have a subscription. In terms of hard technical information, Phrack has them beat. Still, I find most of the articles in 2600 interesting. The tone of the magazine is rather neutral, compared to Phrack which sometimes reads like it was written by an angry 15-year-old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I read this, I was kind of hoping that there might be... urm... 'easter eggs' in the digital edition. Would be very cool if it included an interesting (but non-threatening) exploit in the digital version to make it do something it shouldn't quite be able to do or that you were not expecting. (e.g. hidden in an article on exploiting Kindle or PDF security) The medium _is_ the message :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> A coworker of mine is adamant that the only safe way to buy 2600 is with cash.

<comment><USER6> I can't imagine the zine is taken _that_ seriously. The content has been elementary for most of it's existence. This sounds more like the paranoid types drawn to hacker scenes and less like the kinda folks that write exploits.

Try Phrack if this is your thing. Their articles are still amazing quality and contains much more information on the topics 2600 readers are interested in.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not gonna lie, I read this almost entirely for the letters to the editor section. So hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> $10 seems a bit much.

<comment><USER8> It's not one issue. It says "from 2009 to 2010", and while it's not clear whether that represents one or two years, it's still quite a savings over buying back issues on paper, or even a subscription.

<comment><USER9> On a random tangent, having spent most of yesterday grokking the transition from a date to datetime on a subscription billing system, and the resulting implications to inclusiveness (ie. 1 day vs 1 second), I can say with no hint of irony that I truly appreciate the ambiguity of the phrase 2009-2010.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> DRM free!

</comment><comment><USER11> I pick up and leaf through 2600 whenever I end up in a Barnes & Noble or Borders, just to see if it's still there, really.

I'm generally not that excited by the articles about computer security, but I still love reading articles written about the hardware that runs the PSTN.

</comment><comment><USER12> Kindle purchase is definitely worth it to me. The foreward is an interesting discussion, and brings up my own feelings about how I enjoyed 2600 being out of the mainstream, but it does seem like a time in which it can now be more socially acceptable and open.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember I used to buy 2600 when I was a kid. One of the biggest technical bookstores in Athens (Greece) only brought two copies of each new issue and it was basically a race to get it. That being said, it was severely overpriced but I enjoyed reading it.

</comment><comment><USER14> No epub?</comment>


Why Are There No 24-Year-Olds in Cleantech? - <AUTHOR> http://theenergycollective.com/christopherwilliams/46316/why-are-there-no-24-year-old-ceos-cleantech?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=The+Energy+Collective+(all+posts)

<comment><USER2> Because it has actual capital costs? So you can't just hack something together in a weekend with some hope of releasing it without anyone's permission.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found the article disparaged young CEO's by calling them "ridiculously young". BTW I'm 40.</comment>


2005 Zuckerberg Didn't Want To Take On The World - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/13/2005-zuckerberg-didnt-want-to-take-over-the-world/ <comment><USER2> 2005 Zuckerberg also lied point-blank when he claimed that nothing like The Facebook existed at Harvard (1:32 in the video). He knew about it, was a member and heavy user during the period in which he coded his version (<http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/timeline.pdf>). He repeated this false claim in his talk at Stanford's ETL lecture series and I find it absolutely infuriating.

It's also relevant that Mark appears so non-chalant about the whole endeavor in the video. That's more or less how he came off when I spoke to him a month before the site launched, except he was more coy, refusing to divulge what he was actually working on. It didn't sound like a business seeking venture capital financing whatever it was, and so I had no reason to think I should get involved. Nor did I suspect that he was actually willing to torpedo our relationship by copying my work feature for feature, seeking funding without mentioning it, and simultaneously asking for advice. Nor did I suspect anything about the fact that he was searching my Facebook for "winklevoss."

And yes, I've moved on, but each time these lies are uncovered fresh, no one else takes him to task for them.

<comment><USER3> You really should let this go. People have already made up their minds about facebook, and who created it, and where the ideas came from.

Even if those people are wrong, it doesn't matter. They've already decided.

When people read or hear things like what you're posting in this thread, it reflects poorly on you. Yeah, it absolutely sucks if things played out the way that you say they did, but being upset about it isn't going to improve anything.

To paraphrase a hacker friend of mine:

"Write shit, build shit, write about building shit...let them know you by the trail of [original content] that you leave behind"

The first time I've ever heard of you was in this thread. Right now, instead of knowing you as

"Aaron, a brilliant hacker working on facecash and doing cool things.",

I know you as

"Aaron, somebody who is really caught up on a dispute he had with a college associate almost 7 years ago."

If the latter is the perception you want people to have of you, continue making noise about your dispute with facebook, otherwise, don't.

<comment><USER4> "You really should let this go. People have already made up their minds about facebook, and who created it, and where the ideas came from.

Even if those people are wrong, it doesn't matter. They've already decided."

Is it just me or is this the completely wrong attitude to take towards history?

<comment><USER3> Towards history? I'm talking about this _one_ _very specific_ situation.

You're also taking those lines out of context. I'm saying that he is hurting his reputation because things like comments in a hn thread aren't going to change peoples' minds.

<comment><USER4> "Towards history? I'm talking one this one very specific situation."

Have you ever read a (U.S.) high school history textbook? They bring a similarly simplifying tone to the thousands of singular specific situations in the past and it does everyone a disservice.

"You're also taking those lines out of context."

I'm guilty of this, yes. I suppose what it comes down to is that I do not share your line of reasoning; Aaron's reputation is not hurt in my eyes.

<comment><USER3> This isn't a high school history text book, this is a conversation some hackers are having early on a sunday morning.

<comment><USER4> All I can say is you're missing the forest for the trees

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2883641>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just goes to show, you don't need a grand vision, all you need is a vision you believe is achievable. Once you've reached it, there's always enough juice to re-asses and readjust. With enough luck you will take over the world.

This probably also helps in getting the people around you to take you seriously.

<comment><USER6> David Kirkpatrick's book, "The Facebook Effect"[1] seems to gel with Mark's vision and attitude about Facebook in this video - that he's an ambitious & smart guy who started with a relatively small idea, and kind of stumbled upon its evolution into a much grander vision.

According to the book and Wikipedia[2], there was even a time when Mark was even more focused on another idea of his, Wirehog. It's possible he may have even had some doubts about Facebook, or lost interest in it for a little while.

And hey, what startup founder hasn't had those thoughts? They're totally natural. I'm sure some have a razor-sharp focus & vision from Day One, but I would never fault a founder for having a few shaky moments of doubt here & there.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company- Connect...](http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company- Connecting/dp/1439102120/)

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehog>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "So, um, like", "So, um, like"...videos like this of Zuckerberg really irritate me. Of course he didn't want to take over the world, he simply saw a profitable idea (after it was given to him by someone else) and took advantage of that. The main reason someone takes an idea that isn't theirs is for their personal gain, not because they truly want to do something substantial. Only someone who has the initial idea, someone who sees the problem area and can see a way to fix it, those are the ones capable of changing the world for the better (ok, ok, the Winklevoss twins probably didn't want to change the world for the better, but at least they had that initial thought). Otherwise, you're left with some d-bag taking advantage of something someone else saw simply for personal, profitable reasons. This video is proof the guy is no 'trendsetter' in technology. Hell, he sounds like a dude who was briefed on what exactly Facebook is 10 minutes before the interview.

<comment><USER8> How many startups have a long term plan to take over the world from the very beginning? If you interviewed Bill Gates back when Micro-Soft was making BASIC interpreters, would you get the slightest sense of what Microsoft is today? Or Steve Jobs when Apple was selling the Apple II? How about Larry and Sergey when Google was just a search engine? I think they would seem a little more concerned with where their business was at the time and a little oblivious of what it would grow into.

<comment><USER7> I would be shocked if any of those you mentioned would say "There doesn't necessarily have to be anything more after this" when asked what was next for their company. All mentioned were probably concerned with the current projects at their company during the early times, but all were also probably looking towards expanding their company as well. Oh, and I'd be shocked if any of them would be interviewed with a red 'frat' cup in their hand or with their co- founders doing keg stands as well.

<comment><USER8> I'll admit, it's hard to imagine any of those guys drinking beer from a keg, out of a red cup. I'm not sure that Zuckerberg's lack of media training and fondness for cheap beer at the time was a bad thing. In 2005 a fair chunk of Facebook's users were doing keg stands and drinking beer out of red cups.

Apple, in its early days, was Woz thinking "hey, I can build a cheap computer" and Jobs thinking "hey, I can sell people Woz's computer". I don't know what he would have said if you asked him what was next. I'm sure the Mac wasn't on his mind, and neither was becoming the most valuable company in the world by selling cell phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Similar to how Larry & Sergey were shopping their search engine around for $1 million [0]. They certainly weren't looking to organize the world's information at that time.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Financing_and_initial_pu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Financing_and_initial_public_offering)

</comment><comment><USER10> People really like to try to make him look bad; I mean, is it just me or does this article portray him to be some clueless dimwit that was standing on a goldmine and didn't know it until his face hit the ground so hard that he finally saw the shiny gold stars?

The reality is that it's very difficult to know what ground you're standing on until you dig deep enough to just see it with your own eyes. Predicting the future and investing in that wishful vision is a much more risky strategy than just acknowledging the current moment and trying to lead it closer to where you'd like it to go. I do not know whether he looked at the situation in this type of manner or not, but that's how I justify facebook's success.

As a side note, I wish people would stop pretending they never drank out of a big red cup before.

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course he didn't want to take over the world. No wonders, most of the so called "Next Big Thing" goes this way...

</comment><comment><USER12> The irony of "changing the world" is that the ones who've pretentiously bastardized the phrase as a way of hobnobbing with the Web 2.0 elite never do.

The few that actually do change the world don't usually set out with that goal in mind. Either that or they don't go out proclaiming they'll do it. They just do it.

<comment><USER13> Do you have an anecdote on this topic?

<comment><USER12> I think Dorsey & Twitter is a good example. He had the underlying concepts in his head from the time he was 12 years old and long before Web 2.0. When he was brought onto Odeo, the idea was to be manifested in the form of SMS alerts. I find it hard to believe that he had what we know today as Twitter in his mind at the outset. Nor do I think his intention was for the service to be used by citizens in a fight against oppressive democracies or in other scenarios which one could reasonably assume had a truly global impact.

Contrast that with the startups coming out of incubators boasting about how they're going to change the world with their.....t-shirt recommendation engine app. Or something of the sort.

And who knows? It might actually be a kick-ass product, have phenomenal revenues & truly help people. But it's not going to change the world.

Maybe it's just my issue with the phrase but I think "changing the world" has become one of those trite, overused Web 2.0 expressions that have become as hollow as a dead tree trunk to early adopters & end users. They've simply heard it too many times before and they know not every company is going to change the world.

The other thing that's troublesome is that it's discouraging people from building cool stuff because they think it's not "changing the world." I've already seen questions on Quora from folks who think their ideas (or even existing businesses) are invalid because they don't feel the company's going to become the next Google or Apple; even though, as someone already mentioned, Larry & Sergey were ready to sell at $1 million for the technology. That doesn't sound to me like someone who wanted to change the world from the very outset.

I don't know. Maybe it's just my issue with the phrase but I imagine there are at least a few folks that feel the same way. Apologies for the tangent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 1:00-1:15 or so. "Find information about you." Heh heh, well that part certainly works now.

I think it's perfectly fine his view changed from '05 to now about the use of Facebook.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any useful GDPR references? - <AUTHOR> I'm in the early stages of building a SaaS in the UK but finding it quite tricky to find any useful actionable information on dealing with the GDPR. The official stuff is a bit vague & at least to me, difficult to translate to my use case - and any search is plagued with consultancy-spam or blog spam rehashes of what must have been a single useless source from antiquity. Closest I could find to what I'm looking for is https://www.hallaminternet.com/how-to-make-your-website-gdpr-compliant/<p>Has anyone found any other good guides? Ideally as they'd relate to SaaS but anything similar that could translate is good too. <comment><USER3> Can you give some examples of what you are worried about? I'm a PM working on GDPR issues for the SaaS company I work for, maybe I can give some pointers, but I need more details.

In the dark, common issues are around consent of collection of personal data (including cookies) and Right of erasure. Anyway, I've found the actual text of the GDPR to be the best resource to be honest.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation) and [https://iapp.org/news/a/top-10-operational-impacts-of-the- gd...](https://iapp.org/news/a/top-10-operational-impacts-of-the-gdpr- part-3-consent/)

Easiest way to comply is not storing any identifiable data unless absolutely necessary for your service.

You can still collect anonymous statistics if you apply techniques like k-anonymity to make sure you can't deanonymize it. ([https://iapp.org/news/a/top-10-operational-impacts-of-the- gd...](https://iapp.org/news/a/top-10-operational-impacts-of-the-gdpr- part-8-pseudonymization/))

</comment><comment><USER5> I have been curating resources for this for a while. I'm hoping to get at least some of them online this weekend. I have already noticed that there are some opinions coming out which are more prescriptive than the actual GDPR text. A lot of it is FUD from IT service providers. I'm hoping to focus on interpretation, grey areas and materials for non-power-users rather than replicate the source material below

The three best resources for a high level user I have found are (in no particular order)

1) Wikipedia as others have said

2) ico.org.uk

3) The GDPR itself

Best tip I can offer is that if your business is not the personal data itself, simply acting in good faith is going to get you 95% of the way to compliance

</comment><comment><USER6> A good reference is the Information Commissioner's Office. They are charged with enforcing the regulation:

[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general- da...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data- protection-regulation-gdpr/)

For a summary of concerns that may be pertinent to your use case - <USER2> Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for Identity Architects:

[https://medium.facilelogin.com/gdpr-for-identity- architects-...](https://medium.facilelogin.com/gdpr-for-identity- architects-1a6423759d30)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://postmarkapp.com/blog/gdpr-get- ready](https://postmarkapp.com/blog/gdpr-get-ready)</comment>


Bringing a (physical) product to market — 6 tips - <AUTHOR> http://www.productdesignhub.com/articles/41-design-stories/75-cerevellum-the-development-of-the-worlds-first-digital-bicycle-mirror

<comment><USER2> Helpful rule-of-thumb: retail price = 3 * bill-of-materials. For volume products, your mileage _will_ vary, etc.

Ancient, but seems to be holding. Recently came across this example: <http://www.isuppli.com/NewsDetail.aspx?ID=20398> ("... iPhone 3G S carries a BOM cost of $172.46").</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage/share domain knowledge in your company? - <AUTHOR> So I am one of the oldest engineers at this company. and the company grew significantly in the past year. I found myself in situations were everyone is asking for a few minutes to get an understanding of a feature or a piece of code or some service/integration and I find myself spending almost 60% of my time on such requests. So just curious how does different companies manage their internal product/tech knowledge and what does the knowledge distribution mechanism look like. <comment><USER2> I recently read about GitLab's solution ti this, and it was quite intriguing. They have a 3000 page employee handbook, with everything basically since the beginning. They intentionally subscribe to a Slack tier that does not allow them to keep messages for long, which forces them to put things in the handbook. And then I assume the first answer to any question is "look in the handbook".

So basically, use some documentation that everyone can use, and make it painful not to use it.

<comment><USER3> I work at GitLab, just started last month. My experience with documentation has not only helped me better learn my role, but its given me the opportunity to contribute to my teams growth within my first weeks. This page helped me learn more about how we use the handbook, it might help others interested in learning more, too: [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/handbook- usage/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/handbook-usage/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. so how does the process of adding to the handbook look like? lets say you developed a new feature/service. do you add a page there with code references?</comment></comment></comment>


US Nation Debt at $14 Trillion, Corporations Still Don't Pay Taxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

<comment><USER2> I'm confused. Where on this page does it mention anything about corporations? Is that merely an editorial from the OP?</comment>


Prosecutors suspect man hacked lottery computers to score winning ticket - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/prosecutors-suspect-man-hacked-lottery-computers-to-score-winning-ticket/ <comment><USER2> >> The former security director "was 'obsessed' with root kits, a type of computer program that can be installed quickly, set to do just about anything, and then self-destruct without a trace,"

Probably just about the worst description of what a root kit is...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think is is pretty interesting that the human element is what caused this guy to get caught. bragging about having a rootkit and buying the ticket himself seems like something he should have known better than to do.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lots of ideas of how he could have cheated the system.

Video filming slowly. Him talking about root kit.

There's a video of a person that may be him buying the winner lotto.

They still have to prove it and I'm not entirely sure if this is clear cut with the jury. If this is all they have.

If they had proof that the machine was tamper with... then would be much better. Or the Belize corp that claiming the ticket is connected to him some how.

</comment><comment><USER5> The bit about the rootkits proves little -- would he be qualified for his job if he WEREN'T interested in hacking?

The rest, however, seems like enough to convict him in the court of public opinion, including my opinion.

Whether he should be convicted under the high standards of proof that prevail in a court of a law depends upon details not captured in the article.

</comment><comment><USER6> Lotteries probably shouldn't be open to corporations.

</comment><comment><USER7> The article does not address what I consider to be one of the most confusing elements of this story:

> as an employee of the association that administered the lottery, he was > barred by law from buying lotto tickets or claiming lottery prizes

As the head of computer security for the state lottery association, he was surely aware that his position precluded him from being able to win the lottery. Why did he buy the ticket, then?

<comment><USER8> the remainder of the paragraph you have quoted from explains it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It was a piss poor system if all he did was "change the time"

<comment><USER2> He didn't attack the system by changing the time. His excuse to be in the room was to change the time. To attack the system he actually installed a root kit.</comment></comment>


Google could face a $9B EU fine for rigging search results in its favour - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/google-eu-fine-search-9-billion-search-results-rigging-alphabet-shopping-service-a7768621.html <comment><USER2> How is it that Google search results are considered a public service that must run in any particular way other than their own whim?

Is it simply a matter of scale?

<comment><USER3> Google is a monopoly in the search engine market and monopolies are heavily regulated.

<comment><USER4> But it's not. I never use Google for searching and I do a lot of searching. It's merely the largest search engine.

<comment><USER5> "It's the largest search engine, but I never use it, so it must not be a monopoly" :slow-clap:

<comment><USER6> The lack of a viable alternative is the pretty much definition of monopoly. Just because lots of people use something doesn't mean there is a monopoly.

Def: "the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service."

Google has a very nice search engine but I personally fail to see how they control the supply enough to be considered a monopoly. Sure most people use them, but that is by choice. There are viable alternatives.

<comment><USER7> Standard Oil only maxed out at 90% market share. US Steel only reached 60% of the steel market. There were banks other than JP Morgan. A more nuanced view of monopoly has to do with how much power they can wield in the markets.

<comment><USER6> And of those which ones had successful antitrust litigation against them? Just Standard Oil I believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just write "translate" and you will get 1) Google's translate service inlined 2) Google Translate Website and then everything else...

<comment><USER9> But you are on Google's site, it's a company, not a public service.

<comment><USER10> There are different rules when you use a dominant position in one market to gain share in another.

This is equivalent to the Microsoft/IE thing.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a European I think it's sad how we spend our efforts fining startups instead of creating an ecosystem that fosters the creation of break out companies.

<comment><USER12>
      fining startups

does google really still count as a _startup_ (18 years old, 50k+ employees)?

<comment><USER13> Certainly not, the Alphabet company is a multinational corporation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The EU fining a company and collecting are two very different things. I expect whatever fine they decide to be litigated until a favourable outcome is agreed upon.

<comment><USER15> That's simply not true. See, for example, [http://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/statistics/statistic...](http://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/statistics/statistics.pdf) Chart 1.2 (fines), compared to Chart 1.4 (Fines adjusted for court rulings)

From 1990 to 2017, they collected 24.4 billion Euro of 26.7 that were imposed:

        Year            Imposed Fine  Adjusted for Court rulings
        1990 - 1994       539 691 550      344 282 550,00
        1995 - 1999       292 838 000      270 963 500,00
        2000 - 2004     3 462 664 100    3 157 348 710,00
        2005 – 2009     9 414 012 500    7 920 497 226,50
        2010 – 2014     7 921 947 674    7 608 375 579,00
        2015 - 2017.    5 091 156 000    5 091 156 000,00
        total          26 722 309 824   24 392 623 565,50

<comment><USER14> Of course it is.

>Intel Wins Latest Round in Battle Over $1.17 Billion EU antitrust Fine. Intel Corp.'s fight to overturn a record 1.06 billion-euro ($1.17 billion) European Union antitrust fine received a boost from an adviser to the bloc's top court in a case that could have ramifications for a growing list of disputes involving U.S. tech giants from Google to Apple Inc.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-20/intel- sho...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-20/intel-should-win- fight-over-1-16-billion-fine-court-aide-says)

<comment><USER16> Are you aware that your link doesn't prove your point?

> If Intel ultimately prevails, it would be the commission's first defeat in a > case concerning so-called abuse of dominance by a company for "very many > years," said Trevor Soames, a competition lawyer in Brussels.

<comment><USER14> I believe it does. My point was that fining a company and collecting are two different things. The EU has yet to collect a dime from Intel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have been thinking of a standard for example for how much space these results can take on the screen.

</comment><comment><USER18> Do they have proof of that?

</comment><comment><USER19> What is needed but AFAIK is never discussed is an objective index of what is on the www.

(Not a _cache_ of the entire www, and _not a full-text search engine_. Rather, an _index_ , similar to what is in the Yellow Pages (subject, alphabetical), but going a little further. For example, each site might submit a list of say 5 selected "permanent" URLs where a user could retrieve site information.)

This is not an insurmountable task. And _it need not be conducted by a private company_. A significant amount of the work is already done with respect to sites that register domain names, via zone files. But this is only start and is not comprehensive.

Back in the day, early search engines required operators to _submit_ www sites to the search engine. That active involvement of www site operators seems to have been lost.

There could well be a publicly-run directory service for the www. Operators could submit their site to a public agency instead of a private company. Or at least make it easy for a very simple crawler to retrieve a sitemap.xml or some file with a standard format for disclosing site information.

Private companies have difficulty policing overzealous marketing and fraud in such situations. Today we have one company using "secret algorithms" that supposedly address the situation. But if a site is submitting information to a governmental agency instead of a private company maybe it becomes a little less easy for marketers to bend the truth. There is more opportunity and incentive to enforce the consumer protection laws. Better for consumers.

Users could still access Google to determine popularity of a given www site (or "relevance" if you believe that popularity has some bearing on relevance).

Keeping in mind that Google is a private company that encourages a bidding war between advertisers for a spot to the right of the top popularity ranking for a given search query. The behind the scenes of the auction process is opaque. Google has no incentive to be _wholly_ objective.

Give users more choice _how to look up www sites_. (Note this is a little different than full text search. It is far less complex.)

Site discovery: This is a fundamental problem that _is_ occasionally discussed. Site discovery. All those sites users never learn about because of search engine schemes like "PageRank". We see the same phenomenon in an "App Store". Top 10 are promoted excessively. All the rest are never discovered by the vast majority of users. Perhaps the only reason someone can make large sums through selling an app is because if they can get into the top 10, then all other apps are effectively hidden from most users. This dynamic creates a certain hype and draws in more contributors all trying to get into the top 10. Each paying fees to the company behind the "App Store". Can we apply a similar analysis to Google search and the sale of AdWords? What might fuel demand for ads? The lure of a #1 rank or an ad to the right of it?

Getting back to the issue: Let user/developers work with a free, objective index not produced or manipulated by a private company. I can think of many ways to build efficient search i.e., www site discovery, using such an index. I believe others would have even better ideas.

We already have a privately-held _cache_ of the entire www.

What we still need is a publicly-accesible _index_ into that cache so that users can _discover_ www sites by means other that _popularity_.

</comment><comment><USER20> At some point it seems like the US government needs to step in and somehow mediate these things. I'm sure it's incredibly popular to fine US companies huge sums of money in Europe, but this is starting to get out of hand.

<comment><USER21> Would you say the same thing if America fined China for its companies taking advantage of US citizens? Or is it selective sovereignty?

<comment><USER20> If they levied a $9 billion fine because of how a Chinese tech firm possibly manipulated search results? First, that wouldn't happen. Second, yes, I would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Google's motto is 'don't do bad things' so I highly doubt there's any merit to these accusations.

</comment><comment><USER23> How about a similar fine for rigging search results during the US election?

[http://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2017-SUMMARY-WPA- A_...](http://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2017-SUMMARY-WPA- A_Method_for_Detecting_Bias_in_Search_Rankings.pdf)

<comment><USER24> For all the good it did...

/s

<comment><USER25> "But your honor, I only _tried_ to kill my wife - I didn't succeed!"</comment></comment></comment>


Why isn't there a general purpose visual programming language? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth/archive/2010/07/07/visual-programming-languages.aspx <comment><USER2> Because they're awful?

The author doesn't mention LabVIEW, perhaps because he is not a scientist. LabVIEW is a visual programming language -- you construct software by connecting little icons together with wires.

LabVIEW has been around for decades and is a big success. Lots of science labs use LabVIEW, because (a) it's a National Instruments product and interfaces perfectly with National Instruments interface cards -- which have been the industry leaders for years; (b) it has drivers for every instrument ever; (c) the visual paradigm does work great for GUI design and layout. (Which shouldn't surprise anyone who has used XCode or Visual Studio.) Scientists love the ability to throw together a chart recorder application in ten minutes, and then wire it up to everything else in the lab, and LabVIEW works great for that particular use case.

Unfortunately, as you go beyond the most basic of computations or out of the environment's sweet spot -- in other words, as you try to use it as a general- purpose programming language -- LabVIEW just gets more and more painful. It has its own special vocabulary, semantics, and design patterns that are unlike everything else you've seen. Every time you want to define a subroutine you need to create a little icon for it, and define its arguments in terms of little panes on the icon. That's slow and painful and limiting; it makes writing Java in Notepad feel like luxury. But you have to stay disciplined and keep defining those subroutines, or your code will _literally_ turn into spaghetti. Oh, the horrors I have seen. It's particularly awful if the code sprawls over more than one screen.

You can't effectively print out the code. It's hard to blog and hard to quote snippets from. To refactor you have to manually rearrange icons; there's a lot of time wasted laying things out. There's no way to use version control or create a patch. There's no search-and-replace.

Think of emacs. Now think of Notepad. Now think of something that is less useful than Notepad, to the same degree that Notepad is less useful than emacs. That's a visual programming language.

<comment><USER3> (Disclaimer: I work on LabVIEW.) For refactoring and layout, there is a diagram cleanup tool that will automatically re-layout your diagram for you with just a button press. It does a pretty good job IMO, and really changes the way you code. Also, version control _is_ supported, and allows for graphical diff and merge. While there is no search-and-replace, there is a search function. (Search/replace has quite a different meaning when you're dealing with graphs rather than text.)

<comment><USER2> Ah, I forgot to mention another of LabVIEW's good features: The company has been improving it steadily for decades. ;)

Diagram cleanup tool sounds interesting. I'm old enough to remember the earliest version of LabVIEW, which as I recall forced you to rewire every connection to something whenever you moved it. Now _that_ was torture. When I went back a few years later and found that wires would automatically follow you around it felt like Christmas. Perhaps the cleanup tool is an equally big win.

Version control and diffs sure would have been handy when trying to clean up some of the terrifying things I inherited back in the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You always see the same basic demo when people show visual languages. Here is your homework. Pull up the source code to the program you most like to use. Take an average-sized function in it. Break it up into a Lisp-like syntax tree. If you have fewer than about a hundred nodes, you are probably cheating; get a bigger function. (The purpose of my asking you to get an average sized function is not to minimize the problems, it is so you can actually complete this task.) Draw this tree on a piece of paper using any visual syntax you like.

If you've still managed to dodge enlightenment, repeat one layer down on all functions your function calls. If you happen to ascribe to the "one method = one line" school of OO design, then this is mandatory, and you have to complete the transitive closure of your call graph. Complexity can not be removed, only moved around. If it took you less than five minutes, you are now assigned to take the largest function in the source code.

You will attain enlightenment.

If you still don't believe me, grab a literal pen and a literal piece of paper and literally, in real life, conduct this exercise until you do believe me. The human mind is quite skilled in handwaving to itself; the paper will not permit that.

</comment><comment><USER5> The idea of visual programming is that we'll make the syntax easier for people by using colors and shapes and connecting things together in 2D.

To me that seems misguided. When it comes to parsing a stream of text into concepts, humans have hardware acceleration. You're doing it right now, effortlessly.

Visual formatting cues can help, but only at a pretty crude level, compared to our sophisticated understanding of language and grammar.

Furthermore programming requires that you extend the notation every time you use it. This implies that programming can _only_ be represented well with combinations of symbols, of which the example par excellence is text.

</comment><comment><USER6> What would be the point of this? Sure, you can come up with a more general purpose visual esolang (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language>) but how would this match the efficiency of programming in, say, C? This would be meaningful only when the visual element adds some value.

One such place I can think of would be a video/image query language, e.g. for querying Flickr, that allows users to create complicated queries from image primitives.

<comment><USER7> _What would be the point of this?_

I think many seasoned programmers forget that for the non-programmer, syntax is a sizeable impediment to getting a working program and so I'd imagine removing syntax as a source of errors would open up programming to more people.

 _Sure, you can come up with a more general purpose visual esolang (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language>) but how would this match the efficiency of programming in, say, C?_

I don't think this comparison makes sense — how can you compare the efficiency of a programming environment to that of a programming language?

<comment><USER8> Many non-programmers get around this by relying on learning by example, most notably by copy-and-paste code, with minor adjustments of the parameters, in a kind of cargo cult style. But even this is more awkward with visual languages; it's far harder to e.g. do web searches, ask for help on forums, etc.

<comment><USER7> I don't think visual necessarily implies non-textual. I remember once seeing an old terminal app used by an airline that would allow you to escape the bounds of the input area if you used the arrow keys. You could literally type anywhere on the terminal which as you'd expect, effectively trashed the session till it was reset.

The analogy I'd draw is that programming in most editors is like that terminal app, you can do anything even if it's totally illogical and breaks horribly. When I read the question posed at the end of the article, the image that came to mind wasn't a pointy-clicky diagram monstrosity but more of an Intellisense with a tight input guard and strong visual delineation of blocks; a Python with even tighter structural rules rather than a UML on steroids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have said this argument in HN before, but let me repeat.

There's strong evidence that evolution of human language and ability to think with abstract concepts are related. Programming is all about abstractions. It might be even harmful to move to mainly visual programming paradigm.

Visualization certainly help in certain subdomains, for example state machines, but, as said, there might be even biological bias in favor for text- based programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER10> So SmallTalk and Self are not visual enough?

<http://www.smalltalk.org/> also <http://www.squeak.org/> <http://selflanguage.org/>

</comment><comment><USER11> I am convinced that this is because the primary input method for PCs is the keyboard, so user input is primarily text. Perhaps a visual programming language will emerge on the iPad, or some other platform where primary user input is graphical rather than textual.

<comment><USER12> Primary input for _coding_ on PCs may be the keyboard. Doesn't need to stay that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For the same reason we still use text to communicate: iconography is insufficiently rich to express the degree of complexity required to abstract, describe, and solve hard problems.

</comment><comment><USER14> Visual programming languages are great as a teaching tool, but I fail to see how they would be useful as a general purpose programming language. There is no need to be filled.

<comment><USER15> I believe that a visual programming environment or state visualizer for concurrency will be essential for a next generation programming language. The need to be filled is the need for representing many dimensions of computation simultaneously. It's 2020 and you've just written a program to run on 1024 machines with 1024 cores each. How do you reason about that?

<comment><USER8> How do you visualize a subspace delimited as segments in 1024 axes? Visualization doesn't scale in this way. You need to focus on the small, and have strong and reliable guarantees about those fundamental particles; combined with a safe and reliable way to compose those particles, and combinations, and so forth. You need proofs, and easy ways of asserting that certain properties are true, with help from the machine such that it can tell you - for certain - whether your assertion is true or not for all possible numbers of threads.

Now dataflow programming languages, which are often visual, are naturally parallelizable in the same way functional languages are, but this is not related to their visual implementation.

<comment><USER15> You certainly don't make each processor or core a dimension if that is what you are suggesting.

The small is type systemic. Machine proofs show that you have written your typable logic correctly.

This is still not at the level of concurrency or machine assistance to which I am referring.

You are getting closer with dataflow programming languages. Pipeline and compute farm visualization, spatial/resource quota policies and control, and process calculi equivalences proven across visual/spatial refactorings is what is needed.

Of course you can do all of this with a linear byte array. Of course you can get more dimensions with names and references.

Unfortunately, these methods are very specific and very technical and, despite their accuracy, are relatively devoid of meaning at-a-glance. In the future, a domain expert will work with a programmer to build an application which the domain expert will then operate and monitor. This is not possible without heavy use of graphical interfaces and visual representations. This is not possible without an advanced type system and an easily constructible syntax for DSLs and DSL graphical front-ends.

Perhaps you wouldn't classify this as a "visual programming language" as most of the programming itself is not done via virtual objects and connections. However, visual system tools will become increasingly important as programming moves from implementation to specification and control.

<comment><USER8> > _In the future, a domain expert will work with a programmer to build an > application which the domain expert will then operate and monitor_

This has been in the future for at least 30 years, by my knowledge of the literature. In fact, it's been in the future for so long by now that it seems to be in the past, by my reckoning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> VVVV is probably the closest you'll get:

<http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=Tutorial+Hello+World>

<comment><USER17> Also interesting in this space (audio/visual/performance) is Pure Data: <http://puredata.info/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> java studio for sun tried to do this but sun was a failure of a company and didnt succeed in staying in alive.

i have dabbled in creating a visual programming language for c#. i have a lot of code written. contact me. <http://www.thedirtydeveloper.com>

</comment><comment><USER19> Let's one statement = a 100x100 images..

Now, imagine 1 million line of code.

<comment><USER20> That mapping seems to undervalue the expressive power of pictures, which is commonly taken to be: 1 picture = 1000 words.</comment></comment>


NASA Rover Finds Active and Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4413 <comment><USER2> For those eager to read ahead, they are very, very careful in this article not to imply in any way that this is definitely from any sort of living sources.

> _Organic molecules, which contain carbon and usually hydrogen, are chemical > building blocks of life, although they can exist without the presence of > life. Curiosity 's findings from analyzing samples of atmosphere and rock > powder do not reveal whether Mars has ever harbored living microbes, but the > findings do shed light on a chemically active modern Mars and on favorable > conditions for life on ancient Mars._

Shame. I for one am looking forward to reading about actual life on Mars within my lifetime. Hopefully active life. We shall see.

<comment><USER3> It may be comforting that considering the Great Filter theory ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) ) finding life on mars might actually be bad news.

<comment><USER4> The great filter theory is subject to our own filter bubble. As I see it, there are other possibilities -

Intelligent life doesn't want to be found - at least by us.

Intelligent life tends towards simulation, rather than expansion.

Further to the above, we are the only intelligent life in the simulation in which we reside.

Intelligent life is far more of an aberration than we realise.

Intelligent life is actually very dumb on a macro scale, and falls prey to Malthusian collapse, either by falling into a significant energy gap or by destroying their biosphere.

Intelligent life tends to succumb to dysgenic fertility, and ceases to be intelligent.

Therefore the discovery of life on other worlds means little for the Fermi paradox, as our model may grossly oversimplify or overlook one or more variables which lead to us, now.

Personally I think we're in a sim and we're about to lose the game, as we're staring down an energy deficit Malthusian collapse, uh, right now.

<comment><USER5> The important thing to realize about the Fermi Paradox is that all generalizations about behavior fail automatically as explanatory theories.

It only takes one small group within one species to generate a self- replicating probe, at which point all of the galaxy is visited in a few million years.

A solution to the Fermi Paradox has to explain why that event has never happened despite the fact that some element of our species will do exactly this at some point in the next thousand years. The laws of physics allow it, and our psychology is clearly up for it.

<comment><USER6> The whole Fermi Paradox thing bugs me too, but in a different way. It assumes we have the capability of detecting the presence of other intelligent life.

The largest radio telescope we have (the 305 meter diameter Arecibo) would need to have it's sensitivity increased by around two orders of magnitude JUST to pick up our TV/FM/AM signals from outside the solar system. If we move into the narrowband signals then, depending on the source-strength, it could pick up signals at up to a few thousand light years... if it happened to be pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time. So, our most sensitive instrument is only capable of measuring a fraction of a percent of a fraction of a percent of the galaxy.

I just straight-up don't believe that we're even remotely approaching the capability of asserting that the galaxy is sterile of higher life that's constantly dumping EM noise... and that's without assuming they've found ways to transmit data that we're ignorant of or that we've seen it and just haven't noticed it.

\--

The other thing (and I feel a bit like a religious person saying this) is that we have exactly zero basis for asserting that the type of machine you're talking about haven't been here. Given that if one of these machines came here, and stayed, the Earth itself would annihilate all traces of it (especially on the surface) within short order we shouldn't necessarily expect to find evidence of a visit.

Taken to the extreme, you could even reason that all life on Earth could be the product of one of these machines.

<comment><USER7> Not only is sensitivity an issue, but also frequency range. I feel quite confident that more technologically advanced civilizations will communicate at frequencies we are currently unable to demodulate. It's more efficient. Look how our frequencies have scaled on the order of a hundred years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Methane outside of earth is more common than I thought it would be (after reading the article): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Extraterrestrial_methan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Extraterrestrial_methane)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's a fun exercise in speculation: How long does HN think it will be between confirming life (e.g. bacteria), confirming life (e.g. mammals / bugs), and confirming intelligent life?

(Never is an an acceptable answer for all 3, but please state why you hold your position)

<comment><USER10> I think we will confirm life within 50 years by reading the spectra of distant planets and finding free oxygen in the atmosphere. As far as we know, that can only happen if living creatures are replenishing it.

I think it's unlikely that we will find life anywhere else in our solar system. It's possible that we'll evidence of past life on Mars, but not current. Basically, it's just way too cold or way too hot everywhere but Earth.

edit to add: I hope we do not discover intelligent life until we travel to distant star systems ourselves. If it discovers us here, the outcome will almost certainly be terrible for us, based on the long Earth history of species encountering species.

<comment><USER11> > way too cold or way too hot

This isn't as big of a concern as it once might have been. See extremophiles.

> It's possible that we'll evidence of past life on Mars, but not current.

If life takes hold anywhere and has any amount of (geologic) time to spread, I'm guessing only an extremely powerful gamma ray burst or other high energy event could completely exterminate it. It might be impossible to sterilize the earth at this point without completely destroying it, and even then there'd probably be microbes in the resulting meteors, etc (until our sun dies at least).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I totally understand being very cautious about their findings, but the wording of this paragraph struck me as odd:

> The ratio that Curiosity found in the Cumberland sample is about one-half > the ratio in water vapor in today's Martian atmosphere

> _suggesting much of the planet 's water loss occurred since that rock > formed_

> However, the measured ratio is about three times higher than the ratio in > the original water supply of Mars, based on the assumption that supply had a > ratio similar to that measured in Earth's oceans

> This _suggests much of Mars ' original water was lost before the rock > formed_.

So I guess a lot of water was lost both before and after the formation of the rock, and they only have ballpark figures for the hypothetical amounts?

<comment><USER13> Correct.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory's drill."

</comment><comment><USER14> If life is discovered on mars, would we be allowed to colonize it?

<comment><USER15> Colonization is probably not the motivation for finding some microbial life there at the moment, but provided we _wanted_ and _could_ colonize, I'd guess we would just do it.

<comment><USER14> I do remember hearing there was debate if we should introduce invasive species, let alone terraform, or try to preserve life the way it is. There is also concern about it going the other way around mar's life becoming invasive on Earth or infectious to humans.

Obviously neither of our planet's life has evolved to be very fit in surviving in the other's environment. But evolution often has "arms races" where organisms evolve highly optimized weapons and defenses against them. It's possible one planet has evolved something the other has no defenses against which would give it an advantage.

E.g. on Earth, the cane toad produces a poison that no Australian predators can survive, and so they all die and the toad overpopulates. Same with many invasive species, like plants that produce poison that kill all the other plants nearby, and take over fields and native ecosystems. Or predators introduced on islands that are much better than the native predators and kill all the native life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It could also be a case of severe alien flatulence. Sorry, I could not resist...

<comment><USER17> I think you were looking for this: [http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2phv82/nasa_rover_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2phv82/nasa_rover_finds_active_ancient_organic_chemistry/)

<comment><USER18> A similar comment on the other /r/science thread about this was also downvoted into oblivion; don't make cheap criticism based on stereotypes.

<comment><USER16> how is that criticism? it was obviously said as a joke...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Totally unscientific impulse based speculation, but here it is, I want to be the first.

A long time ago (billions of years), our ancestors lived on Mars. The climate was changing due to human activity and shrinking of the Sun. Shit was getting serious and humanity needed a way to escape. The third planet from the Sun was chosen for seeding life into, due to it's proximity to the star and life- supporting characteristics.

A ball of DNA was sent here to seed the planet. It contained the code for all living things, including humans with the source code for a consciousness able to evolve until it finds out the truth of creation. And here we are, close to finding that out and able to continue what our ancestors left behind billions of years ago, before going extinct. But that is only Step 1. Step 2 is finding out who seeded Mars and the Sun and the Universe. Might just be that it was us all along forever. Good night world ;)

<comment><USER20> That's quite a narrative.</comment></comment>


High pollution cuts most Indian lives short by three years - <AUTHOR> http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/02/26/high-pollution-cuts-most-indian-lives-short-three-years?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UChicago+%28The+University+of+Chicago+News+Office%29

<comment><USER2> Does anyone do these studies in the context of life expectancy changes as a result of industrialization? I'm trying to recall where I read whitepaper on how the pollution was killing people in China but the factories creating the pollution were part of an economic engine that was lifting people out of poverty and increasing their life expectancy.

The question for me at the time, and with this one, is what is a better measure of 'better' ? Is there a single standard to use to determine that India at time T0 vs India today is 'getting better' or 'getting worse' ? And if it is getting better, where does the pollution / labor laws / corruption penalties become the dominant factor in slowing down the rate of improvement ?

This sort of trade-off appears in all sorts of unlikely places, like how long do you burn capital making your product "better" until you focus entirely on customer acquisition? Which is a better measure of a company getting "better"? Is it total sales, customer satisfaction, or product reliability? Some mix of those?

<comment><USER3> Good point.

A start for India might be in looking at the decrease in calories and food quality of the poor (a very large faction of the population) over the last 2 decades or so. Rather sobering.</comment></comment>


Assange's father calls on Australia to bring him home - <AUTHOR> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/assange-father-calls-australia-bring-home-190414063251076.html <comment><USER2> One of the issues is that Australia is ruled by the same person who rules the U.K.</comment>


Why everyone wins in the smartphone wars… - <AUTHOR> http://www.macgasm.net/2012/11/29/in-the-smartphone-wars-everyones-a-winner-baby-thats-the-truth/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I agree that everyone is winning at the same time, but the idea that one phone exists in order to solely stop the other phone from dominating is an interesting one.

It may be the case early on, but as Android grows to dominate, the whole game from Google will have to change if we assume that Google's original goal was to prevent Apple from hegemony in the mobile space.</comment>


Base64 encoding versus traditional image hosting benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://flax.ie/base64-versus-trad-image-benchmarks/

<comment><USER2> That's very interesting -- I never actually thought about base64 encoding an image to send inline in a file, then reconverting it with javascript!

Mostly I love how you had an idea, then tested it. Thank you for writing up the results and publishing them, too.

This could be more interesting in the future as bandwidth increases, but latency will still be limited by the speed of light. At some point, it will be worthwhile to stuff another 100kb into a file in order to prevent the latency.

Also, I wonder how much of that +100kb in the base64 encoding would be compressed back down by mod_gzip (assuming you're compressing your http connections, which is pretty standard). If that base64 overhead can be cut in 2/3, then you'll really have an interesting idea.</comment>


[Ask HN] Review my weekend project - linkloo.com - <AUTHOR> http://linkloo.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Link: <http://linkloo.com/>

A very simple idea: pick 50 main or interesting sources, build a stack coupling the whole thing with superfeedr and some scripts for sphinxsearch, a database and a nifty frontend.

Search example: <http://linkloo.com/#twitter>

Why? Well, when something important happens (twitter xss, ipad update, pope visit…) I usually go through main sources looking for information. This way, I just have to write a search query and get some interesting insights.

And near real-time. The homepage is a real-time stream, the search results don't update in realtime... yet, but results are also fresh (delay is under 20 seconds and superfeedr is pretty fast).

Tips? Useful for anyone or not worth it? :)

[edit] added more ram to the instance and tweaked fcgi settings, forgot to do it before, should work faster now

<comment><USER2> Interesting! Make an iPhone friendly version :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd recommend putting somewhere on the page 'instant news search' or hopefully a better tagline.

I had no idea what linkloo was until i read the page title which is partially hidden in the tab.

</comment><comment><USER4> nice idea, not sure about the name though, I'm English and loo means toilet to me. I assumed it would be lots of 'crap' links not good links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crap, didn't really think about the name, I just had the domain name lying around (was the name of one of my first projects, when I was 13 or 14).

For now it's just a concept. Maybe if it ends being something useful for people on a daily basis and I can get enough time to push interesting features I'll change the name and establish it as a serious project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good idea, great execution.

How do you envision the site being used in the long term, and do you think there is a way to monetize it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Being honest, nothing at all. And it takes ~25€ to run it each month (superfeedr credits, virtual machine).

Honestly I need some good tips to make this more than a occasional tool. But I definitely don't want to be a replacement for google blogsearch nor technorati, but rather be an interesting 'hub' for contents (and realtime, that too).

<comment><USER6> This could be actually be a good way to recommend new articles to people. Have suggested articles on the side, based on previous search terms. This could become pretty accurate as the user logs in over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting idea. I definitely see this as something I might use on a more regular basis.

There's one annoyance, though: instant search generates a lot of "browsing history", so I couldn't get back to HN with just one click on the "back" button. At least that's what happens with Firefox 3.0.19 on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER8> What about maintaining a list of "last 24 hours" "most searched / mentioned in the news" terms for them to autocomplete via jQuery in the search box , a la Google Instant ?

That way you could get informed about popular terms in the last 24 hours you didn't even notice.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's great :) Love the instantization of select news sources. Maybe you can provide an on-the-fly custom selection of news sources - or adding custom news sources by RSS

</comment><comment><USER10> The site is good, idea is fresh. Just one thing, search needs more work, I will suggest you make regular search work first before going instant.

<comment><AUTHOR> For example? The search is powered by sphinx, the title, summary and tags are indexed and words are stemmed. Search is fast, instant search is error-proof for concurrency problems (or at least it should). There is no synonym search, but this isn't google either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sources button is broken in Chrome (running Ubuntu 10.04 derivative).

<comment><USER6> Not for me, exact same setup.</comment></comment>


Meritocracy and Doublethink - <AUTHOR> https://rationalconspiracy.com/2018/07/11/meritocracy-and-doublethink/ <comment><USER2> People should get a bit smarter about where and how they get their education. You can go for a big brand university in the US and pay a premium, or you can go to Europe; pay a tiny fraction, gain a lot of life experience in the process, and stand out from the play it safe & stay at home crowd. All while not building up any debt. I see lots of US students and expats here in Berlin these days. Not surprising. Life is nice here, universities are good, and there's plenty of opportunities in the local startup scene after you are done studying. Sort of what SFO must have looked like when it was still cheap and habitable a few decades ago and when smart people moved there because it was genuinely a nice place to be.

Likewise, unless you are investing in the SFO housing market, there are more interesting ways to burn cash than to fund the local housing bubble through vastly inflated engineering salaries. For example in Europe where where you can hire entire team for the price of a single mediocre engineer in SFO (forget about getting the really good ones until you land that big series A and can afford the 300K/year salaries).</comment>


I Created a Working Conceptual Prototype for My App in Less Than a Week - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/create-a-working-conceptual-prototype-for-your-app-in-less-than-a-week-ce904fe3bc5d#.le6yf9l90 <comment><USER2> Interesting series - whichever way this is going to go...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

I am glad you have enjoyed it.</comment></comment>


Proof that HubSpot CMS sites can have amazing UI/UX - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenhouse.io?utm_campaign=hn

<comment><AUTHOR> A friend of mine works at greenhouse and I know they are using Hubspot for this site.

I don't know about you, but I was blown away when I saw it. HubSpot CMS sites normally suck. I know it's just HTML and CSS, but for whatever reason, most companies don't do those kinds of deep integrations.

Any other startups using HubSpot CMS and focusing on UX/UI?

</comment><comment><USER2> What? Care to give some context for discussion instead of promoting your site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Sorry no context. Don't work at the company either. My friend pinged me this morning with their new website and I was blown away given that I know they are using HubSpot CMS.

I have worked with a lot of HubSpot CMS partners and have never seen a site like this before. It sort of got me thinking that rather than using Wordpress + HS tracking code, I should be building site directly into the CMS and get all of the full funnel metrics stuff.

Not trying to shamelessly plug. More of a... holy shit, I didn't realize HubSpot CMS could be this flexible.

Gave me pause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Took ages to load, didn't even finish loading by the time I left.</comment>


Dave Rogenmoser explains how he built Payfunnels - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/payfunnels <comment><USER2> Thanks for Sharing! Dave here.

Happy to answer any questions about how we built, grew, and exited our first Saas in under 12 months.</comment>


How Many CPU Cores Do You Need? : Are We There Yet? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/multi-core-cpu,review-31567.html <comment><USER2> I'm saving up for an 8-core mac for a project I'm working on, and I'd prefer at least 16 (which is not economically feasible at the moment).</comment>


On how Jet.com chose F# - <AUTHOR> http://techgroup.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet-chose/ <comment><USER3> The post seems to be a discussion of C# vs F# without considering any other alternatives. It also mentions being surprised at user groups for Scala and Clojure being larger - I'm surprised that it would be surprising. It seems like the verdict was to go to with F# because it's functional - a good reason, but I'd love to have read why not Scala/Clojure/etc.

Odd thing is that at no point does it mention the cost of running ASP.NET servers - are they using F# with Mono? If not, the cost of licensing etc. is a valid concern - though I know MS provides incentives for startups.

 _Less competition over top developers can only mean good things for Jet._

Ehhh... yes and no? If your overall pool of potential developers is much smaller that's definitely a potential issue.

<comment><USER4> For an operation the size of Jet the licensing of Windows servers is trivial. Without looking very hard I found a Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard - 64-bit License for $574.94. That's a one-time cost. There are ways to get it even cheaper. Maybe expensive for a hobbyist, but not much of a consideration for a company in production.

Companies with a lot of MS licenses have different options available, but this gives you an idea of the scale of the cost.

<comment><USER5> Software that is licensed per-server has a higher burden than just the license's purchase price: you have to actually keep track of those licenses so that you can plan and optimize license capacity (even if you have a site license) along with real things like server and network capacity. To me, as someone who works exclusively in open source environments, that is a heavy burden and I don't buy software that is licensed per-machine.

To get an idea of the difference in overhead costs I think it's helpful to look at Amazon's pricing between un-licensed Linux and licensed Windows instances. An m3.2xlarge instance with Linux is $0.532/hr whereas the same instance with Windows is $1.036/hr. That is a pretty big difference.

I'm not certain, but I'm guessing the difference boils down to two costs for Amazon:

      1. The cost from Microsoft of a license of Windows
      2. The cost of dealing with licensing Windows
      3. The cost of support from Microsoft

52% cost overhead does seem a bit high, and I bet you could do better than that yourself, but I also don't think it is trivial. Just looking around to figure out the cost of licensing things for this comment was draining.

<comment><USER6> The cost spread also no doubt has some "because we can" spread built in as well. (Which is entirely proper, IMO. Their customers are getting benefit from the freedom to elect Windows and are paying for the benefit.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A more accurate title would be "Why Jet didn't choose C#" as they don't seem to pay _any_ attention to the non-Windows stacks available.

I'm still no closer to understanding why they would build a startup on a MS stack, a question I've been pondering for the past year and a half.

<comment><USER8> Because it started with the CEO making a WCF service. Meaning he knew .NET and stuck with what was comfortable - just like StackOverflow's origin.

Best to keep to what you know when you are starting something risky - <USER2> there is nothing wrong with the MS stack for this sort of thing.

<comment><USER9> Did you mean "a WTF service"?

<comment><USER10> Not sure if you're just joking or don't know what WCF is, but in case the latter is true:

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms731082(v=vs.110)....](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms731082\(v=vs.110\).aspx)

<comment><USER9> Can it be both?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Jet is the shopping cart membership that gets you club price savings on just > about anything you buy.

Pricing should be completely transparent for a competitive market. We need less of this.

<comment><USER12> Waiting for someone to make something like Tracktor for Jet. It shows you pricing data for Amazon products using an extension.

[https://thetracktor.com/](https://thetracktor.com/)

<comment><USER13> From what I've seen, it wouldn't work, because they adjust your pricing based on the other items you've recently bought. More items/$ gets bigger discounts. Never used it though, so not 100% on how it's calculated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> F# is what the cool former C# developers are using nowdays. It's either that or node.js embrace. Go figure.

<comment><USER15> Where are all the wonderful .NET github repos written entirely in F#? They sure do like _writing about_ F#.

<comment><USER16> compiler : [https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp](https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp) build automation : [http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/](http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/) deedle : [http://bluemountaincapital.github.io/Deedle/](http://bluemountaincapital.github.io/Deedle/)

And there are plenty of other very cool open source projects written in F#.

Most of them can be found here [http://fsharp.org/community/projects/](http://fsharp.org/community/projects/)

<comment><USER17> FAKE is awesome. The entire F# ecosystem is pretty impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does F# compare with Ruby? Ruby code is so compact!

<comment><USER15> As compact. Most of type errors will shift to compile time, instead of blowing during runtime. Profit.</comment></comment>