It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended. - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September <comment><USER2> Eternal September has become a pattern of mass interaction, especially on the net. It's why we have News.YC, after all: the Eternal September of Reddit.

The problem is fundamentally content overload, but that goes hand-in-hand with decrease in average quality. Quality, in an absolute sense, may increase, but it's overwhelmed by ignorance and mediocrity. So there needs to be filtering on the content lifecycle.

Filtering right up front is very effective, but bad for business. Take Google Answers. You had to pay money (mostly) to ask a question and few were allowed to answer them. Extremely high average quality content for what was there, but where are they now? Compare that, of course, with its polar opposite Yahoo Answers. It was never even August there!

But the internet's native model is to eliminate any constraint on generating content. That's why Eternal September was so grievous -- it's when that philosophy got mugged by the reality of induhviduals, spam, crazy people and the sheer volume of mundanity.

It was also when people realized that the potential of the internet was rapidly approaching. But okay, given Eternal September as a reality of content generation (don't try to set up walled gardens), what do you do? You bust out the best tools you can for dealing with it -- the PageRank, the groups, the tags, the voting, the social connections. And people seem to enjoy the internet again. And I think some money was made along the way.

So is it more interesting that Eternal September was the end of the golden age for the elite or the birth of a golden age for the mainstream?

<comment><USER3> Crazy idea - but perhaps news.ycombinator should have limited registrations. I wonder what the outcome of that would be.

<comment><USER2> Leaving aside the question of whether filtering users upfront is desirable, you don't need to simply limit registration. There are a lot of intermediate steps you can take.

MetaFilter is a classic example of reasonable but comparatively high barriers to registration: $5 for an account and you have to wait a week to post. Seems very clever, but I'm not a MeFi regular, so I'm not sure how well that's worked out.

<comment><USER4> I think paid barriers to entry just amplify the positive or negative effects of other administrative measures; in and of themselves, all they do is reduce the rate of people coming in without much affecting its make-up. It doesn't even work that well for filtering out teenagers any more with the advent of prepaid gift cards (and before that they could just ask the 'rents to stump up the cash anyway).

I say that paid barriers don't do that much good or bad themselves based on the fact that on MeFi they seem to have been an asset whereas on, say, Something Awful they seem to've just turned the place into an echo chamber, and on Kuro5hin all it's done is drive the site further into stagnation. Paid barriers aren't risk-free either; it makes account gaming even more fun and makes your site a juicier target for attacks, especially if it means you end up storing people's personal details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is a very relevant article to the "Eternal September" story:

<http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

What's surprising is that some of the group dynamics that contribute to the break down of online communities was identified in the oddest of settings decades ago...

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems to me the problem of news.yc, if there is one, so far would not be too many irrelevant submissions, but rather, not enough interesting submissions. Can we really expect dozens of stellar submissions every day, though? Maybe there are not even that many interesting new things relevant to hacker news happening in the world every day.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ironically, this post refers to itself.

</comment><comment><USER4> Of course "the September that never ended" ended two years ago. So this post appears to be not only a non sequitur but also self-contradictory.

<comment><USER8> "Of course "the September that never ended" ended two years ago."

How so?

<comment><USER4> Fair point. It was actually three years ago:

"On February 9, 2005, AOL discontinued newsgroup access through its service (this was announced on January 25, 2005[6][7])."

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually found that comment a little ironic, because I thought that AOL itself died pretty much when they bought Time Warner.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google+ names policy discriminates against American Native Indians - <AUTHOR> http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-names-policy.html <comment><USER2> Obligatory: patio11's Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/) (was dead, now live, if dead again it's in google's cache)

However, until Google's (and Facebook's) absurd name restrictions (or even the idea that "proper" "official" names exist at all for humans) start seriously affecting their real customers (advertisers), they will _not give a shit_.

Another link, this on the consequences of real names policies: [http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F)

<comment><USER3> I dislike when lists are written in such a way that the reader must mentally negate all of the statements the author is making. It's more difficult for me to quote or remember out of context correctly. I also feel like I learned a lot less than if the author had told me the things that are common problems and how to fix them or offered a model of names that is less-bad than the one most websites use.

<comment><USER4> It's satire.

      12. People's names are case sensitive.
      13. People's names are case insensitive.

Edit: Let me explain ... I was responding to the parent post, and that it wasn't meant to be a logic list of rules. Individual points may be true, but the overall tone of the list and post uses humor to explain the complexity of names.

      32. People's names are assigned at birth.
      33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
      34. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
      35. Five years?
      36. You're kidding me, right?

<comment><USER5> "It's satire"

Absolutely not!

Case sensitivity varies amongst countries.

One very simple occidental example: in France names are usually written LASTNAME Firstname

So if you type Lastname and your DB doesn't normalize the capitalization of names you won't match

So for the last name the search is case insensitive but for the first name not so much.

Another example is Turkish, where there are two capital I's, one with a dot, one without.

And not alphabets have a notion of case.

<comment><USER6> > Another example is Turkish, where there are two capital I's, one with a dot, > one without.

It's even more complicated: they have two letter _I_ s, one with a dot in both lower and uppercase (İ/i) and one dotless (I/ı) in both cases. So any automatic case change needs to take this into account or the letter will get switched. This also make using fonts with fi ligatures problematic.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Try having an apostrophe in your last name. O'Brien, O'Keefe, O'Dell and my fave O'Charley's. It is really simple to accommodate this in software and databases, but the problem is getting worse and worse. The pharmacy can't find my prescription, the cleaners can't find my clothes, my doctor's office can't find my appointment. My passport doesn't match my drivers license. Some of my credit cards have the apostrophe and some don't. I have to use the right credit card to pay certain bills (Straight Talk, I'm lookin' at you). One employer's system set email addresses from your name in the payroll system, and believe me, you really don't want an email address with an apostrophe in it. The sneering response to this is that I should change my name. Really? It's part of our Irish cultural heritage. Sigh.

<comment><USER8> > The sneering response to this is that I should change my name.

REALLY? Computers exist to bend to our needs, not the other way around!

<comment><USER9> I would assume there were quite a few people of Japanese or Chinese origin utterly annoyed at the generation of computers that only had ASCII character representation.

... of course, that era was a long time ago. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Google, pick up your act. It's getting really old. Frankly, the fact that > Elaine Yellow Horse appealed your policy three times and it was only once > the media got involved that you did the right thing shows that your staff > are either incompetent, or racist. ...

My guess is neither. They're probably very smart people, and they may just arrogantly assume that their specification of their algorithms are correct, are correctly implemented, and therefore produce correct results. All three assumptions are clearly and demonstrably wrong.

That said, good intentions and brains can inadvertently produce racist and incompetent results.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure the programmers who did this had no ill intentions, but when someone tells you about a broken algorithm multiple times and you ignore it then you are no longer smart.

A lot of very common names are also dictionary words (Jack, Jon, Dick, Smith, Smart, Baker, LARRY PAGE, etc...) so someone clearly sat down and figured out an algorithm to allow or restrict certain words. Whoever came up with that algorithm should have quickly realized they didn't have a good way to distinguish real names from fake names.

My vote is incompetence.

<comment><USER12> As if Google's naming policy is a check against a list of words... More likely; Google has implemented an algorithm that uses machine learning and several other heuristics to try and determine the probability that the name is real or not. Still sound like incompetence? Does a name like "Elaine Yellow Horse" seem real or fake? You simply can't win all the time when you deal with billions of people. Google's customer support and appeal process leave a lot to be desired, but calling them incompetent and racist is just silly.

<comment><USER13> "Still sound like incompetence? Does a name like "Elaine Yellow Horse" seem real or fake?"

The name seems pretty real to me. Could you please explain what about it would indicate it was fake?

Yes, using fancy methods to get a wrong result is still wrong. Let's also remember we are talking about a company that indexes the web. Perhaps they could use that data to test.

<comment><USER12> How many people do you know with adjectives in their name? If you met someone and they said their name was "Joey Red Puma", would you assume that's real or fake? You'd probably say something like "really? you're joking, right?" I would certainly be skeptical.

For all we know that might be a real name too, but all we can do is make an educated guess about whether or not it is. My point is that determining if a name is real or not is pretty arbitrary so if your objective is to verify if a name is valid or not, you simply can't be 100% accurate.

A wrong result is wrong, but making the best of what you have to try and get the right answer most of the time (while still being wrong sometimes) is in and of itself not wrong. Take any NP-hard problem, the best you can do is use heuristics to try and approximate a good solution, since the "right result" is simply impossible to compute.

<comment><USER13> "How many people do you know with adjectives in their name? If you met someone and they said their name was "Joey Red Puma", would you assume that's real or fake? You'd probably say something like "really? you're joking, right?" I would certainly be skeptical."

Nope, I grew up around people with adjectives in their name. It is very, very common among the plain tribes[1]. I tend to be suspicious of people named "Smith" or "Johnson" since it seems like a common dodge on forms.

I am troubled that you think having an adjective in a family name should be cause to trouble someone. I realize European names have suffixes added in place of adjectives, but that should not blind people from other ways names are assembled. I am also particularly unhappy with an American company that has heuristics that flag a specific ethnic group in the USA.

"the best you can do is use heuristics to try and approximate a good solution, since the "right result" is simply impossible to compute."

Then don't friggin do it. Google is a SEARCH company and has indexed a huge amount of the web. Running names through their damn heuristics should have shown a problem. If you google "Yellow Horse" you see multiple examples of people with that family name on the first page of results.

Google especially shouldn't try it since they don't have support needed to handle the exceptions without people going to the press.

1) not sure about south or east or 1st Nations

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Yellow Horse", "Good Iron", are extremely common style of names on the northern plains for Native Americans. This is one basic reason why we had to go with Microsoft versus Google. We couldn't trust Google's name policy not to screw a goodly chunk of our students. Plus, after the whole Google Voice thing which blocked one of the Tribal Community Colleges without many people caring, we just had to go with a company that we could call.

</comment><comment><USER14> Google's stupid name policy is probably their worst idea ever.

Interestingly, it's somewhat undone by one of their other bad ideas: merging Youtube and Google+ accounts. Because nobody had a real name for their Youtube account, and suddenly Google creates a bunch of Google+ accounts that nobody asked for and are obviously pseudonyms.

<comment><USER15> The actual implementation may have been bad but the intent (improve the quality and civility of comments) was not a bad idea and has arguably worked.

<comment><USER14> I don't see how G+ was any less civil before the stupid name policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They are neither racist nor incompetent programmers. They simply are a company with little to no customer care culture. I suspect this will bite them in the rear in the future.

<comment><USER17> In this case they are actively working to hurt their users in order to serve their customers' interests. This is not a customer care issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is a meta-issue going on in this discussion. Funnily enough, it has to do with nomenclature, but not of people. Specifically, the meaning of the word 'discrimination,' and how it can refer to two different concepts (intentional and indirect). I think this problem merits direct discussion on its own. I don't expect a comment on HN to solve the issue once and for all, but I would like to hear people's opinions.

So, I think it's a fairly common thing that people, with absolutely no intention of doing so, accidentally create a system that disadvantages some group of people compared to others. My question is, _what term_ should we use to describe this action? I want to be able to bring this problem to the attention of the people performing it, without making it seem that I am accusing them of ill intent.

Quite a few people (myself included) are/were of the belief that "discrimination" is the correct term to apply in this context. (To us) the word "discrimination" is a description of effect, not intent. In a technical sense it only means treating two groups differently (it's a common term in systems analysis), without implying judgment.

Apparently, some people think that the word "discrimination" does imply intent. That's fine, words mean different things to different people, and I'm glad I learn that. But, that leaves me in a bit of a quandary: if discrimination is not the word to use here, than what is?

Right now I'm leaning towards compound terms like "accidental discrimination." I've seen "indirect discrimination" used elsewhere (as a UK legal term), but I don't like that one. If "discrimination" implies motive, adding "indirect" to me implies being sneaky about it as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> I really can't think of a better way to get this fixed than to write an angry blogpost about it like this. Google's feedback loop can be arrogantly useless at times, and this is a fantastic example of one of those times.

</comment><comment><USER20> The weirdest thing about their naming policy is that you can make up a ton of fake names that fit their policy, but then someone with a _real_ name comes along that doesn't.

(Some part of me thinks we should just give everyone a GUID or something and be done with it...)

<comment><USER13> But this is Google, they don't need to make up a ton of fake names. They index the contents of the web and surely can see a ton of vcards and addresses on contact pages to run through their name rejection algorithm. Some of those have Native American names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thinking about it, I do have a question for the Google folks: When testing your "Real Name Detection Algorithm" did you use actual names from phonebooks (or other sources) that could have included Native American names?

I guess my big problem is the thought that "Yellow Horse" triggered your automated systems in the first place. It's not like "Yellow Horse" is that uncommon a name with the Lakota. You would think with the obvious resources of a search company that had to scoop up tons of addresses and vCards from the internet, Google would have found out some Native American style names. Did some programmer think they were just fantasy names and ignore it or did they not test this thing.

It was bad enough with the Google Voice crap, but this is just too far. Has Google made an official comment on it?

</comment><comment><USER21> My surname is quite akin to the OP first example, but in a "foreign" (non- English) language. Were it instead to be expressed in English -- just a literal translation -- I could well be in the same position as Ms. Yellow Horse.

I've forgotten the multiple names academia has come up with for this situation. But in a nutshell, Google, you are conflating two "problems" you are trying to solve: "True" and "Names".

We could and do debate the merits of these separately. E.g., I think your "true" initiative is kind of full of shit -- based upon my and others' _experience_ on the Web.

But even if you want to and decide to pursue "true", that doesn't give you any authority to judge and decide what is, or isn't, a "name".

Perhaps your overwhelming mountain of data and analysis capabilities might enable you to establish a leading position in some de facto opinions on the matter. But, as the OP example demonstrates, even there you are most obviously failing -- it appears to us, the general public, to be in good part due to a lack of real effort to analytically and functionally back up your "initiative".

So... as a result, once again your "initiative" and "policy" looks to be full of shit.

Just drop it. Treat names like the name qualifier in email -- or I guess that is now, for Google, a field within Contacts: People enter a string, and that's the name. Maybe some subsequent processes try -- more or less successfully -- to parse it into components. But at the base level, it's an arbitrary string.

There, that was simple, wasn't it?

(Now, focus some effort on keeping that name from unintentionally bleeding across properties via Google+, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER22> "Discriminate" because this was obviously intentional prejudicial racism!

Of course it's not malicious. This guy is not good people.

<comment><USER23> In the UK, at least, "discriminate" is the right word because it is possible to discriminate indirectly. This is defined in law. If you have rules that apply to everyone but disadvantage people who share a protected characteristic, you are discriminating, whether you intended to or not.

[http://www.equality-law.co.uk/news/106/66/Types-of- discrimin...](http://www.equality-law.co.uk/news/106/66/Types-of- discrimination-definitions/)

<comment><USER22> I don't like his post because he needlessly implies Google engineers are malicious when it's obviously not the case.

>staff are either incompetent, or racist. I hope for incompetence. Either is bad, but racism is much worse than incompetence.

>protected characteristic

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/4](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/4)

[http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and- guidance/new-e...](http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/new- equality-act-guidance/protected-characteristics-definitions/)

Does that include names?

<comment><USER23> You're right: it is wrong to suggest that Google is deliberately malicious here. But again, you can have the best intentions in the world and still be discriminatory. I think it's important to separate the two terms: malicious suggests a motive, while discrimination is about consequences.

> Does that include names?

IANAL, but the specific discrimination against Native American or First Nation names could fall under race. Race in terms of the Equality Act is more than just skin colour: it includes nationality, or ethnic origin.

Or even belief, which "need not include faith or worship of a god or gods, but must affect how a person lives their life or perceives the world", according to this page from the EHRC:

[http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and- guidance/furth...](http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and- guidance/further-and-higher-education-providers-guidance/protected- characteristics/)

Our names do "affect how we live our lives": we have to use them every day. They are a way of defining who we are.

I don't think it's a stretch either to say that many cultures place a great deal of emphasis and tradition on names. I'm no anthropologist, but variations on naming ceremonies exist throughout the world -- christenings, for example.

Also see the other six points under belief on the EHRC page above. They arguably protect the right of Native Americans to use their own names, and not be denied service because of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There was a nice DjangoCon talk by Russell Keith-Magee. It's about the custom user models in Django 1.5, but the first 15 or so minutes of the talk deal with exactly this problem: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs)

</comment><comment><USER25> This happened to my coworker, last name Tower. It sucks, but it wasn't too difficult to clear up the issue.

</comment><comment><USER26> Even people who don't have a middle name can have problems on some sites.

Not to mention

Admiral Sir Reginald D'Arcy ffolkes-O'Harris

And in college I knew someone with a name very similar to the name in the article, a "normal" first name, and family name <adjective> <animal>.

</comment><comment><USER27> What is an American Native Indian? That's a new one to me.

<comment><USER13> Having grown up on a reservation, I really have never heard that combination. Its "Indian", "Native American", or "American Indian". Canada adds "First Nation". Using three words is pretty unnatural. Really not sure why people are down voting you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I apologize if I got this wrong. No offense was intended.

<comment><USER13> Never was offended, just confused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why did Yellow Horse _want_ to use her real name? Attaching your real name and photo to everything Google knows about you seems like a pretty bad idea.

<comment><USER13> Because she is a professional that needs to use her actual name, plus she was following the rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting. What would be awesome is Google hiring a Native American Indian named Joe NoFucksGiven. I mean, it would be hilarious.

<comment><USER30> Google employees have had their names rejected by Google+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I thought it would probably be a good idea to fire Vic Gundotra for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER32> I hate seeing this stuff always get blamed on the programmers. As someone who had to implement a stupid "real name" (where real name = precisely a first and last name) system for a web site, it is not my fault. I pointed out the problems with it repeatedly. The suits own the company, they own the site, they decide how it works. Place the blame where it belongs, it is unlikely that the programmers at google decided this was the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER33> Interestingly, google didn't bat an eye when I put my nickname as my first name and the full stop symbol (.) as my last name. Yellow Horse? Totally made up. .? Obviously a legit name, why my best friend is named $. (I write too much perl).

<comment><USER34> Obviously they read XKCD. "Little Bobby Tables we call him".

[http://xkcd.com/327/](http://xkcd.com/327/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hope that OP isn't seriously suggesting that "discrimination" was a factor, it's too serious an accusation to be thrown around so carelessly.

There are enough past incidents of "unusual" names being erroneously flagged to suggest it's no about irrational human discrimination but about imperfect mostly automated processes.

The policy is about using "real names", the automated system was obviously tripped and the appeals fell through, imperfect systems don't imply malice.

Seeing that eventually the issue was resolved and I assume they'll be more mindful of native American names from now on, is there really a need for name calling and further escalation?

<comment><USER23> > imperfect systems don't imply malice.

... but they can still discriminate. In some jurisdictions, such as the UK, intention or malice is not required. If Google has a policy or system that disadvantages a group of people who share a protected characteristic, it is discriminating. This is defined in law.

[http://www.equality-law.co.uk/news/106/66/Types-of- discrimin...](http://www.equality-law.co.uk/news/106/66/Types-of- discrimination-definitions/)

<comment><USER36> Notice how that article uses the term "indirect discrimination", rather than just "discrimination"? That qualifier is there because without it, most people understand "discrimination" to mean intentional prejudice.</comment></comment></comment>


YesGraph (YC W15) Raises $1M to Build a Better Referral System for Mobile Apps - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/yc-backed-yesgraph-raises-a-million-to-build-a-better-referral-system-for-mobile-apps/ <comment><USER2> _These invite systems are often fairly basic – they connect to a phone's address book and then force the user to sift through their hundreds of contacts for those they think would be interested in joining the new app, too. A Y Combinator-backed startup called YesGraph wants to make these invite and referral systems more intelligent, with a tool for developers that puts the best contacts – meaning those who are most likely to accept an invite – at the top of the list provided to users._

So they want to mine your contacts list, identify likely suckers, and spam them.

This is why most apps shouldn't have access to your contacts list.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually what most apps do without YesGraph is try to get users to send-all to every contact. Ugh. We want to fight that.

No one wants spam. It is a bad experience and has horrible conversion rates. No one wins. I literally pushed for removing send-all while running growth at Dropbox. We saw an 80% decrease in emails sent and only a 3% decrease in signups.

We want to make apps smarter using the data users have already shared with them. It's a better user experience that drives deeper engagement. Everyone wins.

<comment><USER3> Love it. Early stage, hard to justify optimizing send-all into 'suggest 5 people to invite'.

Total no-brainer to use a drop-in like this. Make onboarding a way better experience, captures exactly the same, if not more, value on referrals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out this post on viral metrics: [http://blog.yesgraph.com/top-3-metrics/](http://blog.yesgraph.com/top-3-metrics/)

In short, look at # sending, # invites, and % accept. We know we can do a lot better than the status quo.

Invite all: very small # sending, large # invites, very small % accept. By the way, getting marked as spam hurts all your invites, lowering your overall acceptance rates even for direct invites that weren't spamming the whole list.

YesGraph: larger # sending, more # invites, larger % accept.

This by the way is how to tell the difference between buzzword bullshit "viral" and real products: Math.

<comment><USER4> I love that last line.

I can understand how YesGraph gets a larger % accept, and probably larger # sending because you are so much better than the terrible "solutions" built into most apps, but I don't see how larger # invites directly follow from what you have. Isn't the point fewer, better invites?

<comment><AUTHOR> When comparing to reply all it will be fewer. Most people sending invites send one or two. Making that two or three, on average, is huge.

It's hard to generalize about performance like this because apps are so different. Even within Dropbox for example, there are multiple invite channels, and their performance stats aren't similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I help make YesGraph.

This is actually my second time through YC. I was in W08 with Tipjoy. AMA

<comment><USER5> Firstly - congratulations on your company's success and fundraising round.

As for the AMA, I'm curious of the differences you see in YC between now and 7 years ago.

There are some obvious ones, like larger class sizes, more partners, different funding amounts.

But YC is way more popular now, some of its earlier companies have had tremendous success, and I'm sure YC partners have learned a lot in 7 years of what works well and what doesn't. So I'm quite interested in how their strategy has changed in 7 years from the point of view of a startup founder. Eg, is there a different relative focus on building customer base vs product development, or a different view on accepting VC funding, etc? Are the office hours more intense, and does YC expect more progress faster throughout the program?

Cheers and thanks for offering the AMA!

<comment><AUTHOR> The other day they had a YC Alumni party and Jessica Livingston, my wife (+Tipjoy Cofounder), and I were chatting. The general sentiment is "OMG 7 Years!"

Yes, the obvious things are obvious: much bigger and more advanced. The reputation has improved. The process is more solidified.

Much of the advice is part of my DNA now when it comes to how to build companies. So when I hear it, the ideas are reinforcing rather than new. I can easily predict how a VC might answer a question, for example, about their process, what they look for, etc.

So the big difference is what I'm looking for out of YC. I want more anecdotes and operational details to enrich my understanding of how to build a great company.

Beyond that, one difference is how they need to treat the batchmates. They have warnings about what not to do that sound like they are talking to children. I think "why would anyone do that?!" when hearing the warning of what not to do. It turns out that at scale you see a lot, so they warn against things they've seen. Surprising, but true.

Another difference is that a lot of the speakers are YC alumni. I think they can commiserate and tell more interesting stories than people that have been very established and rich for a very long time.

Another difference, related to size, is that I don't know everyone. This is a pretty big difference but I end up talking to a few people repeatedly, making a closer connection.

I could go on, but I think this should probably be a blog post :)

<comment><USER5> Interesting, thanks for that!

I for one would be interested in reading a more detailed blog post if you are able to get to it.

Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why did you guys pivot away from employee referral amplification? The original idea seemed incredibly powerful - we all know hiring is broken, and amplifying the referral graph seemed like a great way to add a lot of value to growing orgs.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few reasons.

#1 This new idea is better. It's a bigger opportunity with larger barriers to entry that we're especially well positioned to take advantage of.

#2 Deployment of the recruiting app was challenging. The old app worked like this: you connect to Facebook, LinkedIn, and email, and we parse and rank your contacts to find matches for a job rec. But that means employees go through multiple auth flows -- and recruiting teams need to push their team to do it. Recruiters are pitched new products weekly, and have a barrier to getting their team involved. As a result, most recruiting teams are incredibly inefficient and make poor use of technology. It is hard to change that.

#3 We saw better traction with pilot customers for the new idea. That is how I decided to change directions: sell the idea before making the product. I highly recommend people focus on customer development when thinking about a new product -- rather than just on what is technically possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats on the launch and the financing! New products is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER8> Good luck Ivan!

As for others, I built this concept in 2011, unfortunately Facebook shut us down after we hit about 1.5 million queries per month. Never got access to LinkedIn.

<comment><AUTHOR> Facebook is certainly concerned about passing around user tokens, so we won't do that.

Facebook doesn't control the email or phone number graphs though. And users don't connect directly to Facebook via a YesGraph Facebook app, so there is nothing to shut down.

There is more to say about platform risk here. I've built apps on every major platform. Email me: email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting optics. I first see $1m as a "small raise" but maybe you're just running really lean and don't need as much money?

Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL at $1M being small. Imagine explaining that to your grandparents.

But you're right! This is just a seed. Demo day is coming up, so we're thinking about the strategy there with a larger seed. I guess I'm not allowed to say I'll be fundraising because of SEC rules? [edit: for those confused, there is a rule that you can't fundraise in public. I think that means I can't say "we're fundraising" but I'm not sure about future tense. IANAL]

We have a team of 4 and I'd like that to be 6 or 7 soon. Payroll makes up most of our costs.</comment></comment>


The history of celebrity: from Bernhardt to the Kardashians - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/modern-celebrity-history-kardashians/ <comment><USER2> Highly recommend Leo Braudy's "Frenzy of Renown". Basically considered the default text in the field of celebrity studies.

Braudy's hypothesis is the celebrity has always been an inherently quasi- religious phenomenon. Religious only in the sense though of being post-death or of having an afterlife. Attaining celebrity is a transcendent goal in each generation a few can reach.

Every era of society has a means of attaining life in the next world. This is often seen as the ultimate purpose / highest goal one can achieve. The best way to attain this is being known in eras beyond the one you live in. Sometimes this is via extreme piousness (sainthood), military and political conquest (history), or in modern conceptions, being so extremely known in the present it simulates a forever-knowing effect through everyone-knowing.

Wish I could describe it better, but here is the book: [https://www.amazon.com/Frenzy-Renown-Fame-Its- History/dp/067...](https://www.amazon.com/Frenzy-Renown-Fame-Its- History/dp/0679776303)

<comment><USER3> There is sometimes direct connection. In some places if India, actors who play deity roles in TV-series based on Hindu mythology, get treated like gods by the poor people. In the US Oprah has clearly moved towards becoming spiritual guru/leader, "The Church of O".

Certain actors, like Keanu Reeves. Tom Hanks etc. first get a good guy reputation, then they become like celebrity saints. First they probably were just a good guys, but now it has become a marketing angle that affects their actions.

<comment><USER4> Also In India people treating as literal deities the movie stars like Amitabh Bachchan / Rajnikanth. One of my Indian friend would bow down to poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger in all seriousness and call him 'Shakti ke devta (English: God of Power)'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "What was the nature of MTV? For me it was insatiable desire. That's the very nature of Americans. We want what we don't have. One of the characteristics of the consumers in the early 80's was Shop till you drop. 'I want it. I don't know what it is but I want it.' \- Dale Pon, Advertising exec part of the MTV launch campaign in Aug 1981 [From the book I Want My MTV - Tannebaum & Marks]

With MTV giving birth to Micheal Jackson and Madonna the Celeb-industrial complex understood its potential. And here we are 40 years later with a large part of the world run by Celebrities.

<comment><USER6> MJ must have had half a dozen albums, a movie or three, and half a dozen years of solo career outside the Jackson 5 - who he was singing with for about a decade - by the time MTV got around to launching. All the Thriller video did was boost sales of albums from the already-a-celeb worldwide. His celebrity was launched by being young, cute, and part of a _very_ famous family. Basically being born into that family was enough.

<comment><USER5> Please go and watch music videos before MTV and after. Music videos changed what stardom was.

<comment><USER6> Course they did, but that wasn't MTV's doing. Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody invented the music video as we know it, _in 1975._

That was the groundbreaking event that changed everything. The video was as important as the single. Every act from that day on wanted to duplicate or surpass "that video". The Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star", was a hit in 1979. It was used unchanged in MTV's launch transmission two years later.

Music programmes were increasingly built around videos and clips, rather than performances. You'd get mostly videos with perhaps just one or two acts miming along to their single, or playing in the studio. By 81 all significant releases came with a video. MTV was just a place to play them back to back. Videos were very well established and expected by then. Which is no doubt _why_ MTV launched.

Video certainly changed style over the 80s, and every other decade, just as they had 1975-81, but what doesn't evolve over a decade? The 80s brought more emphasis on production and direction. By the mid and late 80s videos were being shot on film, ran longer with far bigger budgets. Acts were starting to be created for video first, and with MTV and other music programmes in mind.

<comment><USER7> As I understood it (obviously with some exceptions), music videos were an expense for the band/label that fell under the general purpose of promotional material (like posters, magazine ads, etc.)

Of course they were a chance to be creative and have fun as well, but that can be the case for any promo material. The thing with MTV was that it was such a low cost concept for a network. Instead of paying for programming like most TV, music videos were essentially free (if not sold to the network in a reversal of the typical TV transaction).

It was like a paid infomercial for bands and albums, except actually entertaining in its own right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The alpha Kardashian is as skilled at capitalizing on transgression as Bernhardt was at playing Phèdre or Tosca."

A safe assertion, I guess, given the number of the living who have seen Bernhardt perform.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I do feel somewhat sorry for Bernhardt though -- she couldn't get the same eternal recognition that people a generation later could in the movies. From the reviews, it seems she had the kind of personality that would surely make her a movie star.

I hadn't even been aware of Sarah Bernhardt until a couple of months ago, when I visited the Alphonse Mucha museum in Prague. It was she who essentially launched his career in art, by commissioning him to make posters for her performances. And through his art, I could feel her personality reaching across time to me. I'm not sure if I'd actually like her performances, but she felt like someone with skill at holding attention, that's for sure.</comment></comment>


What the Enron E-mails Say About Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/what-the-enron-e-mails-say-about-us <comment><AUTHOR> A general question if anyone here is acquainted with The New Yorker's writing guidelines, why do they love unusual spelling? For example ive had an article use coördinates instead of coordinates, which is rare according to wiktionary.</comment>


Lyft Reinvents the Bus - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/06/lyft-reinvents-the-bus.html <comment><USER2> It will be interesting when self driving starts to be design from these "buses" needs. May be with more seats than usual cars, or larger space to put stuff from the mall.</comment>


Here's how I bought Bitcoin off a guy on the street - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sefsar.com/heres-how-i-bought-bitcoin-of-a-guy-on-the-street

<comment><USER2> Ahem. Bitcoin isn't anonymous. So bitcoin can actually be "hot".

Thus, I'm not sure if buying from a random stranger (as opposed to somebody you know or a big exchange) is such a good idea.</comment>


America's largest companies quietly give Equifax worker data - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and-the-work-number-database <comment><USER2> so this is some of the employment data they hold, from a number of companies (such as Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Booz Allen Hamilton, Wal-Mart, Twitter, AT&T, Harvard Law School): date of birth, social security number, job title, salary, pay raises or decreases, tenure, number of hours worked per week, wages by pay period, healthcare insurance coverage, dental care insurance coverage, and unemployment claim records.</comment>


HTML5 Sandbox - a bad idea - <AUTHOR> http://homakov.blogspot.com/2013/04/html5-sandbox-bad-idea.html <comment><USER2> I'll venture that this is overblown.

Homokov is saying, HTML5 sandbox frames (which allow you to render subsets of a page with JS disabled) break security features that _require_ JS, most notably the framebusters that some sites use to prevent Clickjacking (CJ).†

But, most sites don't protect against CJ at all.

Of the sites that do, as many use XFO (the HTTP Header that denies reframing) as use JS framebusters.

Meanwhile, JS framebusters are extremely fraught. Rydstedt &al published a really good paper†† back in '10 about this. Most JS framebusters don't work in the first place.

For 99.9% of sites, JS is an unsound place from which to defend against Clickjacking. Most sites can either safely be reframed as designed, or (vastly more likely) are never intended to be rendered in frames. For the same reason that we don't call out to JS to require HTTPS but rather use HSTS, XFO is right way to block CJ.

The problem with XFO was browser support. But that's a red herring in this case; what browser supports H5 Sandboxes but not XFO?

Apart from a possible incompatibility with a bad compat hack for XFO, what is the problem with sandbox frames? You'd want an answer to that, because otherwise, they address an extremely common, extremely painful problem for developers: accepting rich content, either from users or third parties, and rendering them on a page without losing control of Javascript.

We have much more to fear from sites that can't get output filtering or rich text right than we do from all of CJ on any site, I think. CJ is an inherently less scary problem than XSS.

Finally, if the feature isn't going anywhere (this issue came up during H5 standardization, and the reaction on Hixie's list seemed more or less to be, "pfft"), isn't it a waste of our time to be "considering it harmful"? Oughtn't we just encourage everyone to set XFO, instead?

It is very possible that I'm wrong about this; I'd just like to know how, if so.

† _If you weren't aware: Clickjacking is when an attacker reframes your site "underneath" theirs, which then presents an interface to victims that when clicked passes events to your site; the net effect is similar to but more cumbersome than CSRF._

†† [http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/abstracts/framebust.ht...](http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/abstracts/framebust.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> >Homokov

who's that guy?

>But, most sites don't protect against CJ at all.

This is definitely truth. Sad truth.

>Of the sites that do, as many use XFO (the HTTP Header that denies reframing) as use JS framebusters.

do you have statistics or something? Because I am not sure about this. IMHO, for now, framebreakers are more popular. XFO is still for well educated developers, framebreakers are old-school.

> But that's a red herring in this case; what browser supports H5 Sandboxes > but not XFO?

I believe all do support.

> rendering them on a page without losing control of Javascript

can you elaborate this please? Because most people say 'something bad with JS'. SOmething what? What exactly bad is going to happen, besides prompt(1)?

> CJ is an inherently less scary problem than XSS

obviously, but XSS is unrelated threat here (or i missed something)

> Oughtn't we just encourage everyone to set XFO, instead?

I agree with you. _NOW_ there is no way back, but 3 years ago people should have been more careful about security compatibility, IMO

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In fact I didn't want this to be on the front page, because the topic is specific/argueable.

Anyway I like people telling me I'm wrong, and enjoy conversations with them.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's reasonable for anybody to setup a JavaScript playground like "SITE/playground?code=alert(1)". That's asking for trouble.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's reasonable for anybody to setup a JavaScript playground (same origin) at all. Not a use case for sandbox then

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The circumstances under which a clickjacking attack could be introduced to an otherwise secure site are quite narrow:

      1. Attacked site use Javascript anti-framing protection
         (otherwise there is no benefit to the attacker in
         disabling Javascript).

      2. Attacked site doesn't use X-Frame-Options to prevent
         framing (probably rare for the bigger sites these
         days).

      3. Attacked site allows the functionality under attack to
         work even when Javascript is turned off. Many common
         clickjack targets (e.g. Facebook Like buttons) don't
         work at all with Javascript disabled.

      4. Attacked form has effective CSRF protection tokens
         placed in it server-side (otherwise it would be easier
         to do a CSRF attack rather than CJ and get the same
         result).

I think that the circumstances under which the attack would be possible might be quite rare compared to those in which the sandbox feature would be a benefit.

One protocol fix that might get the best of both worlds would be to add a new X-Frame-Options token that indicates that the sender of content 'consents' to it being framed in a no-script sandbox provided it is consistent with the other X-Frame-Options. If the embedding frame requests a sandbox, and the embedded content doesn't have the appropriate X-Frame-Options header allowing no-script embedding, the frame just displays a browser error.

<comment><AUTHOR> > One protocol fix that might get the best of both worlds

it would be good unless following fact - many developers DONT follow HTML5 tricks, and vk.com is an example. They rely on framebreakers because it worked once and they DONT expect it to get broken someday.

<comment><USER2> The parent comment raises a very good point. Does the supposed VK.com CJ vector work at all with Javascript disabled? Disabling JS stops the framebreaker; does the site UI still work when you do that?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes it does. VK migrates "gracefully" and Like/friend/comment buttons work w/o JS.

I'm sure you know that most of the Rails forms will work w/o JS as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is old news.

[http://media.blackhat.com/bh-ad-11/Lundeen/bh- ad-11-Lundeen-...](http://media.blackhat.com/bh-ad-11/Lundeen/bh- ad-11-Lundeen-New_Ways_Hack_WebApp-WP.pdf)

These guys used html5 sandbox to break facebook's javascript frame breaker. Two years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, of course! I know about it since I first read about sandbox.

In my spare time I write how broken web is. This is my hobby.

<comment><USER5> Ah okay, I didn't mean to belittle your work (I actually think it's quite great) I was just hoping you knew this wasn't exactly new material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I commented on the page why the author should not give security advice.

You should use a different domain as there are tricks to leverage arbitrary js on a subdomain.

Sandboxing is to help protect the client from arbitrary crap. It was never intended to protect the server.

And as for UI Redressing (aka ClickJacking) browsers that support the sandbox attribute must support X-Frame-Options.

<comment><USER6> TL;DR Author is wrong about clickjacking and sandboxing is a good thing.

<comment><USER7> You failed to address his realistic criticism that many websites are not yet using X-Frame-Options. Browsers that introduce the sandbox feature have now broken those sites' security.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what you mean -- how can the browser possibly break the _sites_ security?

I understand that English is not everyone's first language, but I honestly had a hard time parsing the linked post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously he meant turning of JS made clickjacking feasible again for many websites. Why u pretend to not understand that? Are u kind of html5 moralist?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A bit of a tangent: it might be a really particular use-case, but I kind of wish that Chrome's <webview> ([http://developer.chrome.com/trunk/apps/app_external.html#web...](http://developer.chrome.com/trunk/apps/app_external.html#webview_element)) was a universal HTML5 feature _for secure rendering contexts_ (extensions; file:// URLs; node-webkit, AppJS, and other HTML5 "platforms"; etc.)

It would be great if, _in those use-cases_ (where clickjacking isn't a problem), there was a guaranteed way to have a page load in an iframe-like context, but with a separate renderer, separate JS state, asset(window.top == window.self) passing, X-Frame-Options passing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> While reading this, it reminded me of interesting paper on javascript privilege separation, what do you think about it?

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/privilege...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/privilege- separation-html5-applications)

<comment><AUTHOR> is there TL;DW (too long didnt watch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> a question to iframe spec writters, why didnt they make everything secure by default? if i want to allow javascript in a iframe ,let me explicitly write it for instance. if i want my content to be embedded in an iframe , let me explicitly allow it in my headers , etc ... wouldnt it make more sense ? rather than introducing more security holes and attack vectors ? third parties should have my explicit permission to embed my content into their site.

<comment><USER12> Frames go back to the 1990s. Like a lot of the web technologies dating to that time period, the security implications of such functionality either weren't very well understood at the time, or weren't considered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey. I like JavaScript. It makes Node.js work.</comment>


Paradox CEO Calls DRM a 'Waste of Money' - <AUTHOR> http://www.industrygamers.com/news/paradox-ceo-calls-drm-a-waste-of-money/ <comment><USER2> This is a lesson that was learned back in the 80s, after valiant attempts to protect games from copying. I remember things like having bad disk sectors, which were foiled by the likes of copyiipc, and then it moved on to requiring the manual for specific passcodes, which was foiled by photocopies and people simply hacking the binaries. None of them worked because it was an eternal war of the game providers vs the pirates, but the pirates had a lot more incentive and opportunity to crack the games than the content developers had to protect them.

As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud. As long as the actual machine where the content is being run off is in the hands of the client, it can always be hacked, either through software or hardware. But things like streaming video and Louis CK are showing that people are willing to pay for content, as long as it's convenient enough and cheap enough.

<comment><USER3> > _As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having > thin clients and running everything off the cloud._

You can protect yourself from piracy by making quality content that people genuinely want to support. You do more good by making it convenient, easy, and affordable to customers than anything else, and having an awesome game makes it even easier to hand over cash.

Convenience and affordability is where a lot of people fail.

<comment><USER4> I've mentioned this before, but World of Goo did everything right: great game, 90 on Metacritic, easy purchase through Steam or direct from their website, no DRM at all, and priced at $19.99. But an estimated 90% of players were on pirated versions of the game: <http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/>.

Is there something else they could have done?

<comment><USER5> Unless pirate players have a significant negative effect on the gameplay experience, which doesn't seem to be the case from what I can see for this game in particular, World Of Goo's makers do not care how many people pirate their game, either in absolute terms or as a percentage. All that really matters is the absolute number of legitimate sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> DRM period isn't a waste of money. DRM as it's commonly practiced is.

DRM always entails a hit to the customer's convenience. If you're not giving the customer more convenience in a different way, then you're fighting an uphill battle.

When you implement DRM, please be aware that you are engaged in an asymmetric conflict, and that _you are the underdogs_. The subset of the internet community interested in cracking your DRM most likely outnumbers and outguns whatever department in whatever company you're at. But asymmetric conflicts can be won:

        - concentrate on detection, bias to false negatives
        - separate by a significant interval in time the
          detection and any consequences of detection
        - never do anything that looks like a bug
        - never fight where you are weak and the enemy is strong

You are strong where functionality depends on a server. If you ever have to keep someone out, do it there. If you can avoid doing that at all and fight in even sneakier ways, then do that instead. Remember, in this conflict you are the guerrillas, and the pirates are the big empire. You can only win if you keep _them_ guessing where you will strike, not the other way around.

<comment><USER7> \- _separate by a significant interval in time the detection and any consequences of detection_

Why?

<comment><USER8> The consequences of detection are also the validation step for people cracking your DRM. They won't release something until they can confirm they've broken it.

It's _much_ harder to work through removing DRM if you have to play the game for half an hour each time you want to test a partial solution. Games that dump you before even showing the title screen are actually making this confirmation activity easier.

<comment><USER6> _It's much harder to work through removing DRM if you have to play the game for half an hour each time you want to test a partial solution._

Actually, I think it's best if the time interval is something like _two weeks_. Shift much of the revenue to downloadable content and online multiplayer. Make the consequences for having been detected completely invisible until then.

This gives the pirates two choices: either they can release their crack early, and their customers will be screwed, because even if a new crack is released, those users will already have been identified, or they can wait until well after the release, when the downloadable content comes online, in which case, you've won a reprieve where there are no sales lost to that pirate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I pirated Paradox's Europa Universalis II when I was a poor student. I later pirated the first version of Europa Universalis III and Victoria, both of which I didn't much enjoy at the time, because they sucked at the time from a technical/gameplay and gameplay perspective respectively.

Since then I purchased, because I initially pirated them, For The Glory (effectively an EU2 final edition) and EUIII Complete and its two expansion packs, including one for twenty dollars. I also purchased Victoria II.

DRM doesn't work, and because Paradox put all the effort that they'd put into DRM into their game engines instead, I'm buying their products and am utterly addicted to EU3 in particular.

For every seed and peer on BitTorrent of a Paradox game, I'm happy, because it means that the community will grow larger and that there will be more paying customers in the future. It helps that the parts of the forum with Technical Support, Patches and Mods are only available to registered customers :)

There's only a few things that bother me with Paradox, and they are that Victoria II is not much fun, because one has as much control over that game as a leaf in the wind, that EU3 needs another dozen expansion packs and that not everything is available for Steam on Mac when it should be...

If EU3 had three-time install only DRM, I'd have pirated it, and so would have most others. Instead, Paradox seems to be a publisher that loves its community, as the forums alone prove.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. We never seriously considered DRM as an option for For the Glory, nor will I again in the foreseeable future. If I would hate something as a gamer, it's a good bet I won't be doing it as a developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "But people who purchase a game should have just as easy a time as those who pirate the game, otherwise it's a negative incentive to buy a legal copy."

I thought this was a key point in the article and one that has been lurking below the surface in the SOPA/PIPA discussion. In order to 'prevent piracy', technical solutions are worthless compared to providing a quality service where your customers' willingness to buy is on par with your price. As noted by the author, DRM decreases the quality of a service, and often carries an increased price [at least for company in production/support/etc].

For some industries, the price does not align with expectations. I can think of retail Blu-ray for instance [the price is too high].

For others, the DRM encourages piracy to some degree. Often with Windows this is the case. While I own legitimate copies, often a pirate copy is easier to install [no key/activation] or find [no cd to track]. This is especially true for quick n' dirty VM builds.

Finally, I believe in expressly Anti-DRM approaches, ya know.../trusting/ users with content. Encouraging users to purchase in order to support their favorite [movie, game, software, comedy special] is the way forward. Piracy will not go away, the game is converting pirates to customers by convincing them that your product is worth their money.

<comment><USER12> I no longer play games, because of DRM hassles in the past.

<comment><USER13> DRM-free games are becoming more and more popular these days. Look at the Humble Indie Bundles, for example. You get 3-6 indie games which are completely free from DRM (and in some cases are open source!) for as much or as little as you care to play. Heck, you don't even have time to finish all of the games in one bundle before another one comes out.

If you want to play games, there's really no reason not to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> iPhone store is DRM. It helps the customer in a way by preventing apps from breaking the phone. I don't like it personally but I have a higher knowledge level of technology than most people.

DRM is useful mostly to people who can't figure out anything in a technology product. They are more likely to break their products without it than with it. The big thing though is I wished companies offered an option to those who are willing to risk it all vs fighting them.

<comment><USER15> You are confusing DRM for the locking down of a product or platform. Apple locks down iOS for the benefit of the user (most of the time), but adds DRM to apps to prevent unauthorized code from being executed on the device and to prevent apps from being pirated (which Installous has proved futile).</comment></comment>


The value of mentors in accelerator programs - <AUTHOR> http://montrealtechwatch.com/2011/06/28/the-value-of-mentors-in-accelerator-programs/

<comment><USER2> After SF, Boulder, New York and Vancouver, it's time for the european capital of North America to get an accelerator program. Pretty much everyone who comes to Montreal ends up wanting to stay here, so this is a golden ticket for anyone looking for a bit of variety! Looking forward to seeing what talent we attract - the advisor list is pretty impressive in any case.</comment>


Netlify CDN Is Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlifystatus.com/?1 <comment><USER2> My monitoring only picked up a few load failures. Doesnt look like a major outage.

</comment><comment><USER3> seems like it's resolved

> Resolved - We're no longer seeing the issue with sites slow or failing to > load. Closing this incident as resolved. If you continue to see issues, > please contact us here: netlify.com/support.

</comment><comment><USER4> Direct link: [https://www.netlifystatus.com/incidents/njmz2677n7zw](https://www.netlifystatus.com/incidents/njmz2677n7zw)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> and it's happening again! [https://www.netlifystatus.com/](https://www.netlifystatus.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a partial outage

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the pages I've hosted on netlify are up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So those beautiful FreeBSD box finally require a reboot? They have been rock solid stable for years with no down time.

Edit: Sorry I misread it as Netflix CDN.</comment>


The Rotating Lepton Model - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437119320515 <comment><USER2> I saw "relativistic gravitational force between neutrinos" and red flags went up. I've not read the article, just the abstract.

Doing a bit more of a look on the RLM, I found this[1] where they (mis)write the relation between inertial and rest mass. Specifically the gamma^3 factor ...

I've been out of physics for more than 20 years, so it's possible that there has been some new development since my Ph.D. Though 2 additional factors of gamma in special relativity aren't likely.

Color me ... skeptical.

I did follow their Einstein paper reference[2] to see if I had missed something. I didn't. I don't understand the origin of their 2 extra gammas in eqn 1 of the first reference. The paper abstract appears to be a continuation of that work.

From what I could determine, they need the gamma^3 term for their arguments, but it doesn't come from Einstein's paper as they claimed.

Again, I could be missing something, but I don't think I am.

[1] [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/738/1/0...](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/738/1/012080/pdf)

[2] [http://fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/](http://fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/)

<comment><USER3> Refer to section 10 of the Einstein 1905 paper - Dynamics of the Slowly Accelerated Electron. The longitudinal mass is theorized to increase as gamma^3. This was first introduced by Lorentz. Relativistic mass is rather controversial, as can be seen by referring to Wikipedia.

It appears the current article is claiming the the inertial / gravitational mass of certain particles is gamma^3 times the rest mass of relativistic neutrinos that comprise them. Or something.

<comment><USER2> Ok, I see that now. Thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't find it on arxiv, but it is referenced in another of their current articles here:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09760](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09760)

Very novel :-/

edit: They have published a book. One can read the preview on Amazon to get a feel for it:

[https://www.amazon.com/Gravity-Special-Relativity-Strong- Boh...](https://www.amazon.com/Gravity-Special-Relativity-Strong-Bohr- Einstein-ebook- dp-B00BLQYBW0/dp/B00BLQYBW0/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=)

They aren't attracting any citations.

<comment> T-A > Very novel :-/

Not sure what you mean, but just in case: the "2001" part in "2001.09760" is two-digit year followed by two-digit month, i.e. January 2020.

<comment><USER3> Heh. No, I was referring to the content. However, Vayenas has been publishing on this since at least 2008. This paper is the latest refinement of the theory. I haven't found any response to his work from the physics community - I would think that if it was easily refutable, that would have happened by now. But virtually all the citations appear to come from the small group of people working with Vayenas.

Professor Vayenas is a distinguished chemist, and his work looks rather like a blend of Old Quantum Theory and particle physics, so I suppose it's an uphill fight for him. However, Bohr did get a lot, e.g. the hydrogen spectrum, from a simple assumption, and Vayenas is trying to follow the same path.

The papers he's published are relatively accessible and full of startling calculations that result in close agreement with experimental results. They make interesting reading, and I haven't found anything so far that would cause me to reject them out of hand.

From the conclusion of the current paper: "Another emerging conclusion is that neutrinos, electrons, positrons and photons are present in all composite particles and are apparently the only undividable [sic] elementary particles."

[https://cheme.stanford.edu/events/colloquium- constantinos-g-...](https://cheme.stanford.edu/events/colloquium-constantinos- g-vayenas-university-patras-greece)

<comment><USER4> They are using 4 particles with spin 1/2 to model a particle with spin 1/2\. That is impossible. More details in my other comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223610)

<comment><USER3> That's an excellent objection. And yet, Vayenas is well aware of it and lists it as one of the requirements of a successful RLM.

Another question is how a neutrino triplet could condense in the first place, given the extreme velocities involved. But there was a lot of energy and density during the Big Bang.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see a different approach to combine gravity with particle physics, so I wish him luck. I'm going to read some more.

<comment><USER4> I can't find it in the paper. In which page it is?

This is a huge. Spin rules have a very strong experimental and theoretical support. In this case they should write that in at the top of the article with all-caps, red color and blink.

It is almost as big as breaking the conservation of charge. (Almost.)

\---

The condensation at the big bang makes no sense, because the particles are created and destroyed constantly. But this requires some handwaving and estimations.

The use of gravity here is very dubious, but this requires some handwaving and estimations. Try to read more about the "standard model" and about this, and compare the results. A good question is why there are two missing particles in the figure "B.1"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They model the proton as three neutrinos rotating around a positron. These are spin 1/2, particles, so the composite particle that includes all of them _must_ have a spin that is an integer number: 0, 1 or 2 in this case. But the proton is a 1/2 spin particle. This is a _huge red_ flag.

For comparison, in the Standard Model, the proton is made of two up quarks an one down quark [1]. Each of the has spin 1/2, and the composite particle _must_ have a non integer spin: 1/2 or 3/2 in this case. The proton is the one with spin 1/2\. The version with spin 3/2 is the Delta+ particle, that is a 30% "heavier".

[There are other technical details, like if the three rotating neutrinos break the Pauli exclusion principle for neutrinos. I suspect that this is a problem, but I'm not sure. The inclusion of the Higgs boson is very strange. Anyway, the total spin is the easier to explain and check.]

[1] And a bunch of gluons of spin 0 and virtual particles that get compensated and don't affect the total spin. Let's use the naïve version with only three quarks.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't this just mean spin is more complicated? Are there other obvious issues like this that the small group of proponents are also ignoring?

<comment><USER4> [Standard disclaimer that Physic is an experimental science and everything can change in the future.]

Spin is more complicated! That the reason that force the sum of the four 1/2 spin particles to have spin 0, 1 or 2. It has a nice mathematical reason that is the SU(2) group representations.

All the experiments so far agree with this rules. The rule for four 1/2 particles can be tested with electron in small molecules or light atoms. The extension to other amount of electron and particles with spin 1/2 have also been tested. (The technical name is "fermions", IIRC this includes also particles with spin 3/2.)

The theory includes also rules for particles with spin 1 (like the photon), and the extended rules also agree with the experiments. I'd be more surprised that the rules for spin have to be changed than the other claims in this paper (that are also quite surprising).

<comment><USER6> From this link [https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-3936-3](https://sci- hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-3936-3)

Neutrinos are fermions with spin 1/2 [10] and thus one may anticipate spin of 1/2 or 3/2 for composite states formed by three neutrinos. Indeed most baryons have spin 1/2 and some, as shown in Table 4.4, have spin 3/2 [10]. Several baryons are charged, e.g. the proton or the Ξ+. The differences in mass, m, from their neutral brethren (i.e. the n or the Ξo) is small and of the order of αm, where α(= e2/εch¯ = 1/137.0359) is the fine structure constant. Thus the rotating neutrino model discussed here can describe with reasonable accuracy (e.g. Fig. 4.8 and Table 6.2) the masses of both neutral and charged baryons. However, since neutrinos are electrically neutral, the question arises about how charged baryons can be formed within the rotating neutrino model. One possibility is that in the distant past charged neutrinos existed. Their stronger interaction among themselves and with other particles led to their extinction via formation of hadrons, mesons, and neutral neutrinos. A more likely explanation is that neutral hadrons were first formed (e.g. neutrons) and then protons and electrons were formed via the β-decay [10], i.e. n → p+ + e− + ν¯e, which has a half-life of 885.7 s.

I guess he assumes here that with three neutrinos you can have the right spin and make neutrons, but for the charge aspect, in order to keep the half integer spin, you either need charged neutrinos or charged particles from neutron decay.. while tossing all strong and weak force away... if that's possible !! I believe the real problem with this theory is the relativistic newton gravitation law which he derived with handwaving arguments, while all the theorists have expressed explicitly that these two cannot be combined..he tossed the gamma factors in there, picked the neutrino mass of his choise and everything coincided with some accuracy, which isnt even helpful or hints at anything if it doesnt predict anything falsifiable, or better accuracy than the current model

<comment><USER4> The part about the charged neutrinos is weird but not imposible (can we call it electron?). The part about the beta decay only make sense if they provide a good model for the internal structure of the proton.

I think it's an old theory from the same people, where they used three neutrinos instead of four. The old version does not break the spin rules. It's even more weird that now they added a fourth particle.

The combination of the Newtonian Gravity, with special and general relativity is weird. Those gammas are in the wrong places. I'm 99% sure it is wrong, but I should read the details carefully.

I think there is a problem with the uncertain principle because the neutrinos must be too close, and other with the Pauli exclusion principle (perhaps they solve it with the "resonance"). I'm 99% sure it is wrong, but I should read the details carefully.

There are more problems with exchange symmetry, and partiles that these theory predict nut don't appear experimentally.

The way they break the rules of spin is straightforward. As I said in a comment in other thread, it's almost ass bad as if they break the charge conservation rules. (Almost, because breaking the charge conservation rules is even worst.)

<comment><USER6> I guess he needs a particle with the charge of the electron and the mass of the neutrino (which he chose one out of many to get his results) and other neutrinos without charge and the same mass with the previous particle. It doesn't make any real sense on scrutiny apart from some coincidences.

The rule of spin is broken with the four particles, so that model is garbage from the start.

In another paper, to justify the relativistic newtonian formula they used an analogy with general relativity, using a schwartchild effective potential with static masses (low velocities). But in general relativity you get different contributions in the stress energy tensor from relativistic particles, than static with the same enhanced relativistic mass. It's all so wrong... They don't even try to solve the problem of gravitational attrachion of particles with general relativity, i guess it's too difficult and in such scales maybe requires quantum gravity? (i don't know if i'm correct on this one)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale An Elsevier link? Really? ugh.

[https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2019.1236...](https://sci- hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2019.123679)

</comment><comment><USER7> How common is it for a physics theory to be able to compute so many quantities without fudge factors to make it all work out? I'm not a physicist, so I'm currently imagining this could be quite significant. Is that how physicists are reading it? Also, can any physicists comment on whether this is a top journal.

<comment><USER4> They have the mass of the neutrinos as a fudge factors. (I think they are using only 2 of them, but they list a third number ...) (And perhaps the mass of the electron.)

The table 1 they have a lot of baryons, each of them has two numbers nB and lB. These are small numbers like 1, 2 , 3 so they are not very fudgable. The problem is that the numbers are somewhat arbitrary. For example it's not clear how these numbers are related to the spin of the particle. Also it's not clear how they are related to the "strangeness". Both are clear an easy to measure properties. It looks like they calculate the mass for possible particles with small nB and lB and then they cherrypicked the real one with the closest mass. (There is a missing particle with nB=2 and lB=1. Why?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> RLM reminds me of Hestenes (1990):

 _The Zitterbewegung Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics_

The _zitterbewegung_ is a local circulatory motion of the electron presumed to be the basis of the electron spin and magnetic moment. A reformulation of the Dirac theory shows that the _zitterbewegung_ need not be attributed to interference between positive and negative energy states as originally proposed by Schroedinger. Rather, it provides a physical interpretation for the complex phase factor in the Dirac wave function generally. Moreover, it extends to a coherent physical interpretation of the entire Dirac theory, and it implies a _zitterbewegung_ interpretation for the Schroedinger theory as well.

[http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/ZBW_I_QM.pdf](http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/ZBW_I_QM.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/proton-spin- myste...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/proton-spin-mystery- gains-a-new-clue1/) [https://phys.org/news/2017-03-proton.html](https://phys.org/news/2017-03-proton.html) [https://phys.org/news/2017-10-proton- puzzle.html](https://phys.org/news/2017-10-proton-puzzle.html) RLM model by Vagenas solves the spin problem easily, some are still trying...that theory of everything based on the standard model is just for hackers... lol

<comment><USER6> Ok sofos, tell us how rlm model solves the spin problem of the proton easily and how the spin is conserved with 4 spin1/2 particles

<comment><USER10> The orbital angular momentum of the spinning fermions neutrinos has to be taken into account. You can not simply add up fermion spins. Read about the proton spin crisis.

<comment><USER10> I think there is a funtamental test here how the neutron gets its magnetic moment. Based on RLM the spinning neutrinos have electric dipoles and magnetic moments how to neutrino magnetic moments scale up with relativistic mass? I could accept electric dipoles arising but how can you get the magnetic moment of a neutron which is 1.93μN almost twice the nuclear magneton.

<comment><USER6> Ok, there are many serious questions here, but really now, even with the proton crisis and all that stuff, how is the vagenas model useful ? There is no known mechanism for gravity in such scales, and he abuses relativity, assymetrical rotating gravitational objects emit gravitational radiation so they are not stable, the neutrino mass he uses is his own choice since we don't know it yet and there is so much experimental stuff from the detection of quarks and the standard model that i dont really think it can really match up to them. In the end with the way he uses relativity and neutrino masses you can deduct any number you want with slight changes of one or the other, how is that helpful ? We already know all the stuff he tries to deduce. Also there is the experimental verification of Higgs and all that..

<comment><USER10> He plugs the masses for quarks and then tells you that the quarks are actually relativistic neutrinos nothing new invented.So he keeps the same attractive black hole force and based on that he calculates the hiĝgs W bosons masses. In the proton the electron in the middle contributes only about 1/2 a Mev the rest up to almost a Gev are made by the spinning neutrinos.He just added gravity to the subatomic world. And told you that the strong nuclear force is actually gravitational.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It looks like there is a related article by the same author in 2016.

[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/738/1/0...](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/738/1/012080/pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> Press release: [http://www.academyofathens.gr/en/announcements/press- release...](http://www.academyofathens.gr/en/announcements/press- releases/20190328)

</comment><comment><USER5> This model seems like an incredible breakthrough. Can any physicists comment on why this model isn't taken more seriously?

</comment><comment><USER13> This should have a (2019), shouldn't it?

<comment><USER14> Personally, I don't want to see any "(2019)" until half of 2020 is gone. Another rule could be to add it for articles that are more than one year old but this article is only two months old.

<comment><USER15> Agreed, asking for a year tag for an event that happened late last year is like all those "see you next year" jokes on New Years' Eve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I see _two of my favorite words in all of physics_ in this theory:

 _Gravity_ and _Inertia_...

So maybe they're onto something there...

</comment><comment><USER17> Any ELI15?</comment>


Nibble sort competition winner on GCC Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://url.godbolt.org/nibble-sort

<comment><USER2> Wow, 373 times faster than the reference implementation.

Here is the blog post:

[http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1213](http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1213)</comment>


Ask HN: Know a VPS provider offering downloadable/uploadable VM's? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a VPS provider which allows me to download a VM and use it locally. I would like to develop locally and create a new version of the VM which I than could upload to the VPS. This should make it a lot easier to deploy a new system based on several packages, configuration and code. Anyone know of such a service? <comment><USER2> If you actually need this solution to solve a problem you are having, it's very likely that you can provision your own server and handle virtualization yourself.

If that seems like a lot of work, it's likely that you don't actually need to solve this problem right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you really wanted to, you could spin up a windows machine and use VMWare's P2V software to create a VM of the running machine. Then downloaded it and run it on your laptop (VMWare workstation/fusion) or home server (VMWare ESXi)

</comment><comment><USER4> Linode lets you upload VMs but I don't think they allow downloads.</comment>


How to Design a Good Website - <AUTHOR> http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/10-ways-to-design-a-good-web-site/?em

<comment><USER2> NYTimes? website design? Have they run out of topics?

Anyway, A far better version is from the BBC (the media equivalent, but detailing their own UI experience). Don't recall if it was posted before on HN.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2009/01/how_we_make_web...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2009/01/how_we_make_websites.shtml)</comment>


Russian and Ukrainian developers starting to leave in midst of political crisis - <AUTHOR> http://red-buzz.com/2014/04/russian-and-ukrainian-game-developers-are-starting-to-leave-their-countries-in-midst-of-political-crisis/

<comment><USER2> Same thing will happen in some countries in latin america, as people run away from socialist governments.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not surprising, considering that, recently, Putin has implied, half-jokingly, that the Internet is a CIA plot (Yandex stock fell almost instantly as that happened).</comment>


DRY Career Advice - <AUTHOR> http://taylodl.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/dry-career-advice/

<comment><USER2> Well stated. I have 15+ years of Java experience writing line-of-business software. The sad thing about it is, it's mostly 3 years of knowledge repeated five times. Sad, but, true.</comment>


Securing web sites with HTTPS made them less accessible - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2018/08/19/securing-web-sites-with-https-made-them-less-accessible/ <comment><USER2> No, censorship regimes made them less accessible. In fact, those regimes were already making all content they wanted non-accessible, and only allowing people to see the content that didn't really matter anyway.</comment>


Maine becomes first state to ban single-use foam containers - <AUTHOR> https://wtop.com/national/2019/05/maine-becomes-1st-state-to-ban-single-use-foam-containers/ <comment><USER2> They mention other states ramping up for the same styrofoam ban; while they may be the first state, The District of Columbia implemented this years ago.

[https://doee.dc.gov/release/district-foam-ban-takes- effect-j...](https://doee.dc.gov/release/district-foam-ban-takes-effect- january-1-2016)</comment>


Dmesg is like a standup comedy routine - <AUTHOR> http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2011/08/dmesg-is-like-a-standup-comedy-routine/

<comment><USER2> Why is it like a standup comedy routine? I don't see the connection.

Also, is this article auto-generated somehow, it reads very strangely.</comment>


The Chicago School versus the Austrian School - <AUTHOR> http://mises.org/daily/5390/The-Chicago-School-versus-the-Austrian-School <comment><USER2> "Mises stressed that the important heritage of sound economic thought is not a collection of empirically tested claims about the behavior of economic variables. Rather, economic theory is an internally coherent framework for interpreting "the data" in the first place."

Bingo. No doubt the author of the piece would disagree, but he just distilled every failure and problem of "libertarianism" (if not capitalism in general) to a single paragraph. And "interpreting 'the data'" from that school of economic thought has come to mean nothing more than endless rationalization, instead of any reliance whatsoever on empiricism.</comment>


The world's most multilingual cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20150928-living-in-the-most-multilingual-cities <comment><USER2> Cached link for anyone in the UK (FFS BBC): [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zd6VUP...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zd6VUPNOy-4J:www.bbc.com/travel/story/20150928-living- in-the-most-multilingual-cities+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)</comment>


Socialcam App's Bad Behavior - <AUTHOR> http://www.simplerna.com/2012/05/socialcam-apps-bad-behavior.html

<comment><USER2> Leaving hooks to testflight in your app isn't particularly nefarious behavior. Bad form, no doubt, but nothing overly nefarious.

The article seems to imply the author has no idea what testflightapp is, and a simple google search would explain precisely what it is and what it's used for. Rather than a seemingly sketchy "bad behavior" article bordering on paranoia, a simple "SocialCam's author forgot to turn off TestFlight in a release build, forty-two lashes with a wet noodle" would have been sufficient.

I'm sure this is not the first time Apple's approved an app release with TestFlight still enabled, and most certainly won't be the last.</comment>