Relaxation tips? - <AUTHOR> I <i>love</i> my startup job but, since starting it, my jaw clench has become bad enough that my front teeth are shifting.  Does anyone have some good tips on how to stop that? <comment><USER2> Your body has a built in mechanism for repairing itself mentally and physically: Sleep.

 _Some people experience alertness, relaxation, and a refreshed sense of well being. Ask your doctor if Sleep is right for you._

<comment><USER3> Sleep is basically a prerequisite for any of the other relaxation techniques. But some of the other suggestions will help you sleep better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Running and yoga are particularly good.

If you really want to clear out your brain, the best thing I know is hang- gliding, but that tends to take place at inconveniently distant locations.

<comment><USER5> Running works great for me for several reasons:

1) It's got a fairly flat learning curve.

2) The rewards are immediate and gradual, but clearly noticeable.

3) It's relatively cheap, though you can't cheap out on shoes if you are going to run on cement. A good pair usually costs over $100, but you can get them for half the price online if you know your size for a particular model.

4) It's convenient. However, you do need access to a shower afterwards.

5) You can do it alone or with someone else, at any time you want.

That being said, I found taichi to work just as well in clearing the brain, but you don't get the endorphin rush or the cardiovascular improvements as much.

<comment><USER6> It's FAST too, in terms of calories burned per minute.

I love cycling - but any bike ride under an hour isn't really worth the time, unless you're doing hard intervals or climbing a really steep hill. If you have 30 minutes, there's nothing more efficient than running.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yoga, tai-chi, kung-fu, swimming, water polo, running, skating, skiing, snowboard, surfing, windsurfing, kite-surfing, dancing, push-ups, sit-ups, breathing exercises, shower (especially cold one) are all things that I personally try to do as often as my time allows. I start my day with yoga and try to do at least one other of the above mentioned activities during the day. Any of these will do. Even just getting off the computer for a while will also help a little.

Alcohol, coffee, online porn, energy drinks, drugs, cigarettes are all bad ideas.

If you choose to believe ayurveda (the ancient Indian medicine) you need to have equal amounts of "Sun" and "Moon" activities during the day. Sleep, computer usage, reading are all Moon activities. All of us here do way too much of them. To stay in shape we need to counter-balance them with some team sports, interacting with people, running, jumping, playing, etc. BTW, meditation, although it's very effective, is also a Moon activity.

</comment><comment><USER8> Try meditation. I do it though not as regularly as I should, but it helps to calm you down. You start to notice more around you, mainly because you stop analyzing everything to the 'T'.

Read "The Power of Now" for a better (and lengthier) version of what I just said.

And yeah, try and take it easy... :D

<comment><USER9> To add to this, there's several different kinds of mediation. The one you're looking for helps you relax your body in a way that doesn't fuzz your mind, or burns up your focus.

Some of the meditation methods overlap with deep breathing. You breath deeply by expanding both the bottom of the lungs, the sides of the lungs, and the top of the lungs. You make sure the bottom ribs are expanding. You don't try to force the expansion to the point where you're trying to hold air in like a puffed up balloon, greedy for more.

You cannot force yourself to relax. Consciously relaxing requires you to relinquish control over the muscles that are tensing up while still observing it.

In your case, I would also work on clenching and then relaxing your toes. There's connective and control tissues going from your feet to the jaws and temples.

If you're going to learn how to do this though, you'll need to set aside definite time where the startup cannot intrude. Supposing you set an alarm clock to buzz in fifteen minutes, then within the fifteen minutes of meditation/relaxation, you must allow all of the concerns, worries, thoughts, obsession, guilt with the startup to drift away. Otherwise, this won't work very well. There are people who develop superlative levels of skill in relaxation and meditation; these folks spend as much time and energy dedicated to it as you would to a startup ... so the least you can do is respect it during the fifteen minutes you are cultivating calmness.

<comment><USER3> I agree completely, except to mention that 15 minutes may not be sufficient at first. I wasn't even doing a startup, and 15 minutes was _barely_ enough for me to let go for the first time I tried.

<comment><USER9> Very true. I experienced the same thing when I first practiced.

I didn't want to discourage anyone from picking up the practice, though. I wanted to point out it isn't a magic pill with an insta-cure, and it will take some time with daily effort before it starts working. Besides, the very first time, I had trouble sitting still for even five minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I recommend Yoga as well. I asked (almost) this exact same question to another forum back in January. I got a variety of good recommendations, but the best was definitely Yoga and Meditation, followed by organizational/time-management ideas. Exercise wasn't a problem as I was already exercising hard 4-5 times a week. Sleep wasn't really an issue either, but sleep is basically a prerequisite for any of these ideas. If you aren't getting enough sleep, you won't be able to focus on anything.

Just as a sample, try this:

Find a quiet, clean room with a hard floor that you can still lie down on and be comfortable. It should be softer than a hardwood floor, but harder than a mattress. I used a throw rug on top of a carpet. Get a small blanket or a pillow for your head. I used a $5 fleece blanket from the drugstore.

Lie flat on your back, with your arms slightly away from your body, palms-up. As you relax, your feet should dangle away a little, and your fingers should curl up a bit. Take a deep breath in through your nose by expanding your diaphram. Exhale slowly, and listen to your breath. Continue breathing easily. You should settle into a rhythmic pattern eventually. Keep listening to your breath. Eventually you'll notice that your arms and legs are getting heavy, as the tension drains out of them. Your mouth and eyes and face should relax too. Your mouth will probably hang open. It can take a long time. The first time I did it, it was 20 minutes of lying on my back and breathing before I was really relaxed.

Decide in advance how long you will permit yourself to meditate. I recommend 30-60 minutes. While you are meditating, do not think about anything else at all. If, while you're trying to relax, you begin thinking about your startup, or any other problems, stop and go back to listening to your breath.

The advantage of meditation and Yoga over guns or sports or even martial arts is that you can meditate almost anywhere, and mental discipline is useful for virtually everything.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like doing complex things that require your full attention or you die. Stuff like rock-climbing (although I'm too out of shape to do that) Strenuous hiking is great -- wish I did more of it. The trick is that if you have an analytical and goal-intensive mind, like I suppose many of us do, you may have to try some unusual things to beat it into neutral gear.

I've found that even out of shape old farts like me can get the same results by simply raising your pulse to about 80-90% of max for an hour or so. If you do this using smart exercise equipment, it does all the work of figuring out how hard you should be working. Somewhere around minute 20 or so I find myself relaxing mentally, although the physical part is a little painful. Your mind begins to wander. At this point, once you're used to it, you can easily slip into a very meditative state. Focus on a point, recite a mantra, relax your mind. This reminds me of the same feeling I had when I ran, except you don't get the great feeling of being outdoors. On the good side, you don't have to worry about dogs, traffic, or slippery roads.

Best thing about all of that is that you get a great endorphin rush when you're done for the next few hours.

My problem is that I'm always trying to hack my way out of relaxing -- using less time, gulping a Red Bull instead of doing my workout, etc. I'm slowly learning that this isn't something you can take shortcuts with, but it's a lesson I have a hard time with. I guess my mindset is that if you can make a computer do something really cool in ten minutes you should be able to hack your body-mind the same way, but it doesn't work like that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Read some fiction. Really helps to stop thinking about things in your world.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here is a little song I wrote:

You might want to sing it note for note

Don't worry... Be happy

In every life we have some trouble

When you worry you make it double

Don't worry... Be happy...

</comment><comment><USER13> Try a little book called "The Calm Technique" by, I think, Paul Wilson (?).

Simple, excellent introductory meditation.

But that takes time to build momentum. As at least one great yogi said "water will clean the mind faster than the mind can clean the mind."

Hot tubs and swimming, particularly in natural water (not a chlorinated pool) will get most of the junk that meditation will take care of eventually in a much faster and more expedient way. Oh, and consider a mouth guard when you sleep, so you don't grind your damn teeth away!

</comment><comment><USER14> Alcohol in moderation, combined with relaxing music can be good. Hanging out with friends...

</comment><comment><USER15> Martial arts - get out and start fighting yourself, people, and bags. You'll not only de-stress but you'll also learn to defend yourself - physically and mentally. I wouldn't have made it through grad school without 6 - 8 hours of practice a week.

<comment><USER9> I've noticed using martial arts as a means to de-stress yourself lowers the quality of your martial arts and rots away your skills.

<comment><USER15> I guess it just depends on your approach. I learned to put less effort into each technique with more training - I used to muscle everything. In the process, I learned to calm myself until the point of impact. 2 hours of that 3-4x a week made all the difference in my personal sanity. It become a moving meditation with practical applications.

<comment><USER9> The strategy I was taught was to be completely relaxed, yet I was not able to do that until as recently as six months ago. This is after four years of training. I've finally figured out how to inflict damage while being relaxed even during the point of impact and following through. I'm still not completely relaxed

I've made it a point to never train when I'm angry or distressed. (People get the wrong idea when they see bruises on my fists and I mention they are from working out on my punching bag). Anger is my default coping mechanism for stress. It is foolish, yet that is what it is. I once did a 3-mile repetition of kata while I was angry, and it destroyed my skills. It took three months to rebuild it back up from the basics.

I did finally find an effective technique for dealing with anger. It requires me to drop everything else in the world and immediately deal with the anger -- that nothing in my life is more important than dealing with it right at the moment. That's a huge investment of time, though it was eventually worth it when I got less angry and required less interventions.

I can see how, if you're deliberately training yourself to relax during martial arts training, you de-stress yourself during training. You also learn how to stay relaxed while stress is applied to you (during free-sparring). And in fact, for this person who asked the question ... the skill in being able to drop into being physically calm and centered would let him unclench his teeth and keep going.

However, as I mentioned in the other reply about meditation -- there are people who dedicated their whole lives to just meditation and relaxation. It is difficult enough to continue training wen you're exclusively dedicated to martial arts, let alone dedicating yourself exclusively to a startup and you happen to use martial arts with the expectation that it will de-stress you ... so that you can continue the startup, rather than developing martial prowess.

I will say this though. I might have learned how to relax from meditation practice, but I learned how to persevere from martial arts. "Keep going, keep playing." That was definitely worth the price.

<comment><USER15> Yes, yes, during free-sparing absolutely. You get that flood of adrenaline and have to learn to control it. And perseverance, I agree completely - to keep going when you think you have nothing left to give.

I'd say it took me three to four years to really start to understand the power and force of relaxation. But even then, people practice these skills for a lifetime and I still have a ways to go.

For me, practice became a solace and timeout. Just stopping from thinking about work for those 6-8 hours a week was extremely helpful. By focusing on the techniques, it became a meditation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey man,

I am having serious relaxation issues also. I'm working a fulltime job and a startup. I have definitely helped me to start running and working out.

If you are at all spiritual, read the book Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass. It will put things in perspective and calm you down a bit.

Cheers -

</comment><comment><USER17> Recommend YiQuan. It is a set of Chinese standing exercise similar to Taiji and Yoga,that uses a simple visualization approach.

<http://jadedragon.com/archives/martarts/yiquan01.html>

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER18> Meditation and yoga. Seriously.

<comment><USER19> Never tried yoga, but meditation is fantastic and not just for relaxation. I haven't meditated for awhile but I did very frequently for a few years and it taught me a lot about myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> See a therapist? If you don't have any underlying issues that need to be addressed, they can teach you relaxation techniques better than a Google search for "relaxation."

You could also see a dentist to get a mouth guard made.

</comment><comment><USER21> It _may_ be a sign that you need to have your wisdom teeth out. I used to use the pressure from my wisdom teeth as a measure of stress, and then eventually got them taken out.

Also, I find when I get that pressure before going to bed it's a sign that I'm going to grind my teeth. I sit up, give the jaws a relaxing rub, maybe prepare myself for some reading and the expectation that I won't be at work early next day, then have a good sleep.

</comment><comment><USER22> Massage your jaw under your chin with your thumb before you go to bed and/or when you catch yourself clenching.

Also use your fingers to massage the outside of the chin at those times.

Find out the source of your worries and destroy your fear by making those tough choices that you may be avoiding. What are you worrying about if you love the startup? Would you rather be somewhere else? Do you sense something bad?

</comment><comment><USER23> Meditation & Clubbing A perfect Yin Yang of chaotic movement and stillness.

Also a nice scotch with some Miles Davis in the background works great.

</comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone tried Transcendental Meditation? I'm really interested in learning meditation, but if I have to buy into some spiritual or New Agey mumbo-jumbo it'd kill the mood for me and I won't be able to get into it. I basically want some kind of relaxing empirical approach to studying one's own consciousness, awareness, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yoga, meditation and all those are great, but for simple quick fix I recommend breathing deeply, slowly and comfortably. When you get tense, or feel like relaxing, focus for a moment on your heartbeat and breathing, and give a little part of your brain to slowing both down a bit. Repeat as necessary.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sports.

<comment><USER27> Generally, strenuous physical activity is very good for concentration and relaxation. Sports are good. Chopping wood is lots of fun. Competitive Timberman Challenges are probably the best option.

<comment><USER28> really?! I want to do one, how does ones start with chopping wood in San Francisco?

<comment><USER27> Just go to any park with an axe and run away when you see the cops. Drum circle disruption is a good cool down activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I play Floyd songs on my guitars or ride my Ducati - when the lousy weather here in Norway allows it. Actually, I have also found that listening to bineural beats a la Holosync really helps me take a powernap when needed :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Guns. Seriously. Marksmanship is a simple thing that takes a lot of focus. Concentrate on the front sight, mind your breathing, squeeze gently .... it's like meditation, only less sissy. (j/k!)

</comment><comment><USER31> More coffee:)

</comment><comment><USER32> YouPorn.com: the best of "web 2.0"

</comment><comment><USER33> yoga works wonders for me. Started it 5 months ago and the mental side has been amazing. Sure I am not super flexible, but its not competitive - give it a go and remove any preconceptions you may have about it

</comment><comment><USER34> Sex.

</comment><comment><USER35> I was really wondering why my teeth were shifting!!

</comment><comment><USER36> I usually sleep.

</comment><comment><USER37> not caffeine

</comment><comment><USER38> cold shower</comment>


Results of the Google Native Client security contest - <AUTHOR> http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/07/native-client-security-contest-results.html

<comment><USER2> Let's presume that the world can be convinced of the safety of native client security. What's it worth? I think this is the same question as, "What kinds of things aren't good enough on the JVM or CLR?"

Modeling/Simulation/etc. certainly benefits from running on the metal. But, with the exception of SETI@Home, etc., nobody runs untrusted simulation code. Games are the obvious target. A webby sort of Photoshop might also benefit. What else?

Am I wrong to think it obvious that Google's goal is to do away with the last major reason(s) to run Windows? Is there any other benefit to being so close to the metal when we have nice, sandboxed VMs that JIT compile quite efficient code?

<comment><USER3> Previous discussion of this topic: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=390555>

My arguments for NaCl:

1\. Rewriting C code in Java is expensive.

2\. JITs do a poor job on SIMD code that is used in multimedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Nothing that pointed to a fundamental flaw in the design of Native Client".

No, just many flaws in the implementation that allowed unverified code to be run and make sys calls.

Seems like quite a disingenuous statement.

<comment><USER5> You'd rather they make or dispose of an undecidable claim? Everything has implementation flaws. They're right; nobody came up with a way to beat the simplified, scrubbed x86 subset they came up with to run NaCL in.

<comment><USER6> Well, they found places where it ran more than the purported subset:

> In the contest build, there were instruction sequences found that could > jailbreak you from the sandbox.

From this link, which is fascinating & thoughtful on the topic:

[http://www.matasano.com/log/1674/the-security- implications-o...](http://www.matasano.com/log/1674/the-security-implications- of-google-native-client/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks, we worked hard on that post.

The vulnerability you're talking about is a straightforward implementation flaw. Admittedly, it's a flaw NaCL's design begs you to make: forgetting about an aspect of x86 encoding is a problem you only have if you're going to let raw x86 instructions hit the processor. But the fix for it is no harder than the fix for, say, an implementation fault in the ELF loader code.

<comment><USER6> Hah, well, as you authored it you know what it says better than I! :)

But I'm inclined to say that "they're at greater risk of implementation flaws because of their design" -- and unlike you, for me I believe that itself does actually count as a design flaw.

(And on a side topic/rant since you mention the ELF loader: were I to have Google's resources, I would be far more paranoid than they about this whole thing. e.g.: the ELF loader doesn't need to be fantastically speedy; why not write it using tools/languages with stronger guarantees of memory safety? (That would hold for anything that wasn't inner-loop stuff, as well.)

Another example: The verifier & safety of the allowed instructions are the crown jewels; why not hire the pointy-headed folks who do formal verification for some stronger assurances that the allowed instructions really are safe and that the verifier is complete?)

Edit to add: And if changing the language & tooling isn't feasible, they could have at least pulled a neat trick and run the ELF loader (and similarly exposed code) within their own sandbox, rather than outside of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really hope this goes somewhere. I think there's a good chance they'll be able to make it difficult to attack this client to the point that other targets (Flash, Java, QuickTime, etc) will be easier to do damage with. And native code in the browser would rock, obviously.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Funny timing, this article about Dowd just peaked last night: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690592></comment>


Why I Have Been Avoiding the News - <AUTHOR> http://passionatereason.com/2015/11/why-i-have-been-avoiding-the-news/ <comment><USER2> > Sorting through intellectual garbage consumes precious moments of my life in > which I could be doing something I really enjoy.

If CNN is one's preferred "news" source, is it any wonder they remain uninformed? I've found Bloomberg to be a solid content provider for news, no silly paywalls like WSJ. > [http://www.bloomberg.com/](http://www.bloomberg.com/)</comment>


Show HN: Fast and efficient domain checking tool - <AUTHOR> http://instantname.me/

<comment><USER2> Neat, but I like <http://domai.nr/> better because it shows interesting TLDs that would make my domain be one word. For instance, it suggests tim.do/rr for my username.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good, feature request received. :)

<comment><USER3> domainsbot has a great API for this - it's what all the big registrars use

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice! Much like instantdomainsearch, but with much broader TLD coverage.

Your pricing for Gandi seems incorrect; for instance, Gandi charges $15.50/year for .com domains, not $18.54.

Sad that this still points people at GoDaddy as the cheapest option; you get what you pay for, and GoDaddy has numerous well-known problems (in their policies on how they (don't) support you if they get a complaint, and in their many distasteful actions as a company).

You might also consider doing the obvious domain hack searches, at least for exact matches: if the term the user typed in ends with a valid TLD, drop that suffix and search for that term with that TLD. For instance, for the term "exampleio", since it ends in "io", show the result for "example.io" and label it "domain hack" on the left (where you show the labels for "exact match", "gTLD", and "ccTLD").

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback and the great idea about the domain hacks implementation. :)

The prices are shown with the included taxes and ICANN fees, which all registrars calculate a bit differently. I tried to make them as much comparable as possible. The total price for .com domain at Gandi.net is indeed 18.54 (<https://www.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/com/>)

Which other registrars would you like to be included?

<comment><USER4> That price only applies if you live in the EU and have to pay VAT. You don't have to pay that price anywhere else in the world. And Gandi covers all the relevant fees; the price they quote is what you actually pay them.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, I'll take that into account.

Maybe I was confused because the domain for this project was registered through Gandi.net and I had to pay that tax as I currently live in the EU. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Last week I came back to this idea and realized that there are good alternatives available, it should not be treated a reason to stop."

\- Awesome, I'm glad you decided to go ahead with this. This is a crowded space but you've been able to make a useful tool with features other sites don't have. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow! Great work. If I had a request, it would be to support more exotic TLDs and other registrars--but it's amazingly useful as-is. The price comparison is killer; I had no idea I could register a .TV domain for 10 bucks. I'll definitely be using this.

Is your VPS doing the DNS lookup, or is that client side? If it's done on your server, I would suggest that the site preview feature could be made click- activation rather than automatic. It's already pretty slow to load, and I would be just as happy with a link to open an unavailable domain in a new window. Basically, if the preview slows down the domain availability lookup, I think it should be pushed to a lower priority.

Overall, very slick! Congrats on a successful side-project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank your for the detailed feedback!

You can get the availability for most of the known TLD if you specify the fully qualified domain name in the input. I am going to tune the list of the shown TLDs in order to have the most popular/interesting ones there.

Which registrars would you like to be added?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love the tool. Since the "Propose it" link doesn't seem to work for me, here's a feature request: can you put the query in the hash fragment so that I can paste this into an email or chat?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feature request! Will work on that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everyone,

This is a domain availability checking tool with a simple clean design, a website preview for taken domains and a price comparison for the available ones.

Some details about the used technologies are in my blog post at <http://floreskul.name/post/introducing-instantname-me>. I would appreciate any feedback. :)

Thanks

<comment><USER8> I didn't expect this to work with so many TLDs, very cool! I haven't really found anything like this before. I wish I had more constructive criticism, the layout is clean and it just works so great. Maybe include a more customized favicon? I'll definitely keep it bookmarked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I forgot about the favicon, will add that. I am glad you liked it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazing work, but why is GoDaddy always the top result? It's clearly not the collation, since Gandhi inevitably is at the bottom.

<comment><AUTHOR> The domains are shown in a random (but fixed) order at the moment, but I think it's better to sort them by price. Do you have any better criteria on your mind?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I particularly like the idea that it will preview the website on hover. I will probably like it even more once it actually works!

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool (and really fast) tool! I'd love to talk to you on behalf of the .CO TLD team.. can you drop me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Done

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Excellent! that's just replaced <http://instantdomainsearch.com/> for me (even thought that seems a tad faster) thanks to the inclusion of .co.uk.

Only slight annoyance is that I have to scroll down to see all the TLDs, that slows down the process a little.

</comment><comment><USER13> It took me a few moments to realize the reason this service wasn't working at all was because you use port 3000 to load the domain registration information. Many firewalls, both in a corporate environment and at home, tend to block things like this.

Perhaps you could reconsider this decision and use port 80.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is nice. I used it to discover that instantna.me is still available. You should pick it up! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, great advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great. Came back explicitly to search and upvote as this was perfect for that initial quick sanity check of url availability.

Currently US centric - would be nice to be able to select to see localised (UK here) registrars and currency.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice work, I would suggest expanding the range of ccTLDs though - as there are so many, maybe put the available ones at the top of the ccTLD list to prevent too much scrolling. I like the quick links to registrars at the side, very handy.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very handy! Here's another feature suggestion: include the renewal rate on your price comparison. For example Namecheap does .co registration for ~$13 for the first year, but after renewal it's ~$22 (just did this yesterday).

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks good. 2 things I would add: \- automatically exit the "getting website preview" on taking the mouse off the div. \- an X or some way to close the website preview thing (once website preview loaded). Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER19> It appears to be buggy. It told me Internet.io, Business.mobi, Collect.fm and others were available (they're not). It was making me very excited until I learned it was mistaken quite regularly. :(

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't want to make anyone upset with this tool.

The current version of the service is based on the DNS lookup, which is not always accurate. The errors may happen when a domain does not have a name server record specified or it is in the a redemption period.

The current version is an experiment that checks if such a tool can be useful for people. All the received feedback will be used to improve it. Using more reliable approach of domain availability checking for sure has the highest priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like it, but I gotta say - a decent logo would take this a long way forward. Can I volunteer to make something for free that's at least better than what you have now?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would really appreciate that. You can email me at email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The interface is easy and simple to use. I was trying to search for a .in domain and it is still looking for it after about a minute of hitting submit.

</comment><comment><USER22> <http://instantna.me/> would be a fantastic domain name for this website. And it's not taken!

</comment><comment><USER23> There seems to be some domain names that your tool indicates to be available, but they can't actually be registered (eg. ao.io).

</comment><comment><USER24> Loving it! I've sent you a few feature requests through your form, I hope it helps you a bit :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Very easy, fast and useful. Thanks. Bookmarked.

Minor misspelling on the contact link.

</comment><comment><USER24> What about domains that are registered but on sale?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now this tool does not help to find such domains, but it sounds like a really nice feature to implement, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> how do you deal with lookup quotas (if there are any)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently the domain check is done via simple DNS lookups. It's not the most reliable way, but it's very fast. Although there is a small probability of checking result errors, for the MVP I decided to stop with this solution.

I plan to apply for TLD Zone Access programs (like [http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and- services/domai...](http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and- services/domain-name-services/registry-products/tld-zone- access/index.xhtml?loc=en_US)) if this project gets a positive feedback. That would help to keep things both fast and reliable.</comment></comment>


Should I take time near the end of a big project to do a side thing? - <AUTHOR> I have been writing animation software for 2 years.  It's nearly bug-free, with all the features I want ( I was scope creeping for about a year ).  However, I am now dealing with a large code-base, and I'm thinking about writing an editor/IDE type thing that can help me resolve dependencies and refactor efficiently.  I'm debating between the various short term and long term benefits.<p>I know I should launch, everybody says I should launch.  I know people want to use this.  I am just so overwhelmed, and it's getting harder to manage this huge code base.  Plus, I kind of want to run on something new, but not something new that needs to be polished for launch.  This is something that could be fairly rough. <comment><USER2> Sounds like a good way to self-sabotage and not launch.

</comment><comment><USER3> No. Launch.

If your code is JS, gradually migrate it to well-typed TypeScript, one file at a time. There are already IDEs that do most of what you want in JS and do everything you want in TS.

Use jslint and tslint religiously.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know there are some softwares out there that do some dependency scraping, and will help you navigate around your code-base, I just envision one that does more in certain areas, and feels better in others. Making an editor that feels like google maps in some places, a spider web in others, mind-maps in others, and vim in the code parts. It would be smart enough to let you move methods from one class to another class, and automatically update instances. It also needs to allow you to 'highlight' parts of the code base, because I have an editor engine, and a frontend/exported engine ( the animation software exports to html5 and the html5 export version is slim, whereas the editor version has a lot of extras for editing ), so that's one of the big areas, I don't want to maintain 2 code engines anymore. So, a big part of it would be toggling certain lines of code to target to different versions, and then being able to toggle views as well.

This might be too big of a side-track at the end of a project, and I could be just wanting something else to work on, because mature projects get very un- fun. It is something I probably will do eventually, to help myself manage the two similar engines.

The other option is doing some sort of a JS lint type thing, where I just comment out the extras and they only get compiled in the editor version.

I wish someone would just give me $50k for 5%, and I'd have another year to get things ready for mass markets. When I launch I think the animation software will grow nicely, so I want my ducks in a row so I'm not too stressed. That pressure is counter-acted by the fact that I could use cash to live on, cuz 2 years of development with just a little free-lance is kinda draining.

</comment><comment><USER4> Launch, and figure it out later. Something like that realistically isn't going to give much, if any, added value to your eventual end users.

This is the reality of development -- mature projects _do_ get un-fun, but that's why you charge :)

</comment><comment><USER5> LAUNCH</comment>


Negative creep - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21690031-negative-rates-club-growing-there-limit-how-low-rates-can-go-negative-creep <comment><USER2> >"Savers might stomach a modest fee for making bank deposits, but as rates go deeper into negative territory, they will find ways to avoid charges. Switching to cash is the obvious solution, which is why some have suggested getting rid of banknotes altogether"

This is an incredibly troubling aspect of the push toward a cashless economy. Not only does it marginalize the unbanked (those who can't bank due to illegal immigrant status, or other mitigating circumstances), but it's also an incredibly powerful tool for population control.

It removes the agency a modest savings give us, by concentrating all wealth under the control of a select few anointed conglomerates. It also allows onerous policies like negative interest to be a new, truly inescapable regressive tax regime.

Edit: notahacker makes a compelling point that negative interest is likely less regressive than inflation. I thought it was something worth bringing to the root of the thread.

<comment><USER3> Thank god cryptocurrencies exist.

<comment><USER4> There is no structural reason why cryptocurrencies can't have negative interest rates.

<comment><USER3> But what would make me to use cryptocurrency with a negative interest rate? Of course all kind of cryptocurrencies can exist, it wouldn't be a surprise if there were already some kind of negative interest-rate model in some of the 100's of altcoins. But the user decides what kind of cryptocurrency he uses.

<comment><USER3> Based on your comments, I don't think you understand cryptocurrencies very well. Who would get the money from negative interest rates? Miners?

If miners are so powerful that they can change the protocol rules, why they wouldn't just raise the block reward? ( increase inflation/monetary expansion)

<comment><USER4> I do understand how cryptocurrencies work. Negative interest rates don't have the same effect as inflation and could be implemented in code. Just because miners have the same nominal changes in their wallets doesn't mean that the effect on anyone else is the same.

I just don't think our current problems with currency go away just because we use cryptocurrency. There is no reason to. Central banks don't enact policies because it's fun but because they think it will have a certain effect. People will find a way to do so in the future. Whether it's called "Inflation" or "negative interes rates" or whatever is not relevant. The only thing that matters is what happens to people's money.

Oh, and it would be much easier if you would actually reply to my comments (instead of yours). If neccassary wait a few minutes to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reasoning behind BOJ's move was to force banks to actually lend some money to people __*

Getting funding to start a business in Japan is rather hard. The good old fashioned way was to get a loan from the bank. Japanese banks simply prefer to avoid risk at all costs, deposit a pile of cash with BOJ and collect almost 0 interest :) Better than those risky loans.

 __* and of course it doesn 't hurt to weaken the currency while at it. Everyone and their dog are doing this and it is getting really hard to be the one weakening the currency the hardest.

<comment><USER6> But it has the opposite effect. Banks tend to lend less the lower interest rates go. There are other risks that have to be balanced which in a negative world forces their hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> " _Were interest rates negative enough for long enough, specialist security firms would emerge that would build vaults to store cash "_

I see this speculation from time to time, but no data to back it up. I wonder, who benefits from such rumors? To my limited understanding in economics, negative interest rate is to encourage lending vs hoarding, so while money is moving, you don't actually "lose" them?

<comment><USER8> The idea is that just as you're supposed to want to lend... you might also choose to stockpile cash. Both strategies potentially mitigate the negative interest. In tho regime, banks pay the central banks less in the future for money they take on loan now. The common sense assumption is that this means money will be worth more in the future. Therefore you may want to invest in cash. At a point, this makes cash like gold traditionally and hence stockpiling aka fort Knox. But that's why you can go negative...you just cant go negative enough such that folks start stockpiling. Iraw expensive to stockpile

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Negative interest rates are interesting. In Denmark many banks actually closed down for a while, due to the negative rates crashing their software.

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess when all of the people and businesses start putting money in their mattresses the government will just ban paper money in general. Then there would not be anywhere to hide money.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it will be ever very easy for goverments to ban owning physical, valuable things. If they don't issue their own paper currency, someone else will.

I think this fantasy some people have of banning paper currencies pretty well points just out that the people who propose the banning, have no idea how the world works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Placeholder comment for people who thought this was an article about Nirvana.

<comment><USER12> Or rather Radiohead....?

<comment><USER13> Nope that's definitely Nirvana! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ijtz6Du_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ijtz6Du_s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bitcoin, once more popular and stable, will make it hard for these regressive plans to be implemented.

<comment><USER15> Will it ever be more popular? EU is recently thinking about banning crypto currencies. This might end with ID verification requirement for all exchanges. Then Visa and other CC issuers will ban anything related to BitCoin, just like PayPal did and whole market will be dead.

<comment><USER16> Bitcoin commerce is surprisingly resilient. Sites like LocalBitcoins facilitate in person cash trades.

As long as you can barter things of value, like a brand new Macbook for bitcoins, bitcoin will survive.

<comment><USER17> > Sites like LocalBitcoins facilitate in person cash trades.

Sites like LocalBitcoins would very quickly cease to exist if there is a concerted government effort to ban Bitcoins.

<comment><USER3> Or move to anonymous networks or more relaxed jurisdictions. Usually countries fail to unite on this kind of topics, I'm pretty sure jurisdictions like Hong Kong will allow always cryptocurrency trading sites.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The case for vanilla front-end development - <AUTHOR> https://pushdata.io/blog/1 <comment><USER6> _> When on a 1Mbit/s WiFi connection in Greece, my vanilla app loaded in 4 seconds and started rendering after ~2 seconds, while the React/Redux app took 50 seconds to first render!_

This is the thing that baffles me about the SPA/framework trend, regardless of connection speed. The whole pitch for React/Vue/etc. is that they're supposed to make for more responsive interfaces. And yet, whenever I actually _use_ an app written in React/Vue/etc., I find myself marveling at how _slow_ it feels. Even on a desktop PC with a fast connection, I spend so much time staring at progress bars and loading spinners as all the various bits and bobs of the interface get pulled down and rendered. I don't know whether pages that are rendered server-side are empirically faster, but they sure _feel_ faster, because after a brief (usually < 1s) wait the whole page just, you know, _appears_ , fully rendered and ready to go.

As another developer who's old enough to remember the CENTER tag, I'm open to the idea that this is just incipient old-fogeydom on my part. But whenever I hear people start talking about how much more responsive SPAs are, it sounds a lot like the old gag: "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

<comment><USER7> > Even on a desktop PC with a fast connection, I spend so much time staring at > progress bars and loading spinners as all the various bits and bobs of the > interface get pulled down and rendered.

A lot of that is likely because of the way most REST APIs are laid out.

Suppose you're looking at a page that displays an invoice for an accounting system. With a traditional non-SPA app, you'd do a bunch of SQL queries and build a page from an HTML template.

With a REST API, you're doing one HTTP call per entity, at least, and then subsequent HTTP calls for aggregate entities.

When I've made SPAs before, I've often eschewed REST and just made a single Ajax call for "everything I need to display X to the user," not just out of efficiency, but also out of laziness -- it's easy to build. As long as you internally use your API only and don't publish keys for third parties, it's easy to maintain too.

There are some solutions to address the whole problem on a grander scale (GraphQL comes to mind), but overall, that's the cause of slow SPAs in my experience.

<comment><USER8> If that's the case, shouldn't HTTP/2 have solved that issue? HTTP/2 is multiplexed, so if you make something like 10 HTTP calls, only a single TCP connection would be established. Additionally, according to section 9.1 of the HTTP/2 spec[0], connections are persistent so unless the server closed the connection, an already established connection will be available from when you first loaded the page.

[0]: [https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc7540.html#rfc.section.9.1](https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc7540.html#rfc.section.9.1)

<comment><USER7> Well, no.

For one, the most major http client library (Axios) doesn't have support for that kind of pipelining.

But also, you don't necessarily know what to pipeline until you get the first request through. Most web apps will make a REST request, look at the contents of the response, then make another REST request. Maybe you could keep the socket open through that, or you could even use websockets to bypass HTTP altogether and use jsonrpc, but still, you don't know what you need to fetch in the second round until you finish the first one, so either way you're looking at a waterfall of requests, one after another. Pipelining them would scarcely help.

What would help is having one API request that basically says, "here's who I am and here's the page the user wants. Give me everything for it." Then you're moving the controller back to the server, and leaving only the view on the client.

<comment><USER8> Axios doesn't control what protocol is used, the browser and the server will negotitate a suitable protocol and version, which the browser will transparently use for XHR (which Axios use under the hood). Don't confuse multiplexing with pipelining which was introduced in HTTP/1.1. Multiplexing is a much better solution than pipelining to counter head-of-line blocking, since large or slow responses will delay subsequent requests while multiplexing allows parallel response/request communication.

I do agree that waterfall-style requests are more prominent with a REST structure, and that something like GraphQL could solve that - but GraphQL seems largely incompatible with how many develop web apps today; smaller components that request their own data. I'm also unsure how compatible a dynamic query language like GraphQL is with denormalized databases like Cassandra or ScyllaDB where you can't model your data before you've established what queries your site/app will perform. I've yet to see a codebase where the REST waterfall problem is a huge problem though.

Note that I too dislike how slow websites are these days, and much prefer to both build and use an entirely server-side rendered one. None of the SPAs that I know of has been a success in terms of performance; Facebook, Google Mail, Reddit's redesign, Youtube, Twitch - most of them are dreadfully slow and sluggish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "...while a framework will let you create standard solutions to standard problems very quickly, you always then have to add that little special sauce that makes your app unique, and that is where the frameworks can slow you down instead of speeding you up. Vanilla coding, on the other hand, is just as fast whether you're doing something "normal" or something unique to your particular app."

I've been saying this for years and always get heavy push-back by the framework proponents. I've also encouraged them to look at history. Ten years ago, it was ALL about Backbone. Then Angular came around and it was ALL about Angular. Then React came around and it's currently ALL about that. But, wait! Now Vue is starting to gain some traction. In 3-5 years it'll be ALL about Vue.

My point is this: if the frameworks are so great and all-encompassing (I've literally heard, "you can build anything with [FRAMEWORK]. You don't need anything else!"), why doesn't one of them stand out so solidly that nobody would think to create another one? Why do we, like toddlers grown tall, keep rushing to the next latest and greatest shiny object that catches our eyes?

<comment><USER10> I agree with your point, but having worked extensively with React, it really does make development easier for me. While it feels like there is always a new shiny front-end framework out there, the ones that stick out like Angular, React, Vue, etc. all have real value that developers like! So I don't really see it as a bad thing.

<comment><USER9> I don't deny that they make things easier. But there's a cost to that, sometimes a significant cost. In my experience (and confirmed by others I know --including the author of the post), frameworks get you to 80% of where you need to go in a project _really_ fast. The next 10% takes a little effort but it's not impossible. But that last 10% is like pulling teeth from a lion. That's because inevitably the project has requirements that the framework designers didn't and couldn't think of.

I submit that that last 10% is the reason why OP got more done faster with Vanilla than he could with React.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what you imagine that 10% to be but this has not been my experience at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jim-jim-jim >When on a 1Mbit/s WiFi connection in Greece, my vanilla app loaded in 4 seconds and started rendering after ~2 seconds, while the React/Redux app took 50 seconds to first render!

This never ceases to puzzle me. I thought yuppie framework jockeys love to travel. Don't they ever find themselves at some remote locale, try to check in on things, and realize that their site runs like pure ass outside of costal North America? Do they just not care?

Simplicity really can be a class issue. Lots of developers seem to write code with their own demographic in mind, rather than the real people who have to put up with their bullshit.

<comment><USER11> I haven't written a line of code that ran outside of a corporate network in years. Comments like this show how ignorant HN is about what "framework jockeys" actually do.

<comment><USER12> Amen, my code mainly runs outside my company but this 1000000x over. SOOO many people on HN seem to think the entire world works exactly like they do on the same kinds of things. It seems outside of most people's understanding that, maybe, just maybe, the business conditions where someone else works are.... different _GASP_.

It's not the same thing but it's a pet peeve for me when people make comments like "How could a developer skip X or not do Y?!?" Well not all of use can pick 100% what we work on and are sometimes forced to cut corners. We aren't happy about it but we are more happy with taking home a paycheck that being right 100% of the time. My go-to is "Is this this hill I want to die on?" when this stuff comes up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's downright hilarious that now, when IE is dead at last and browsers _finally_ have APIs and CSS support to do things cleanly, developers are completely abandoning "vanilla" JS development in favor of frameworks and per- processors. Feels like a job security thing.

<comment><USER14> Well, the fact that the JS standard library is crap doesn't help much.

<comment><USER15> How do you mean?

<comment><USER14> There are a number of problems that vanilla/standard library doesn't solve, so developers need to rely on libraries or spend an enormous amount of time developing those from scratch.

Date and time manipulation, reactive programming, data binding, etc. Those are bread and butter stuff that the standard library should solve but doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was a very interesting read, and I agree with Ragnars conclusions.

I'm amazed sometimes of how complicated and heavy some people, especially new developers, make things.

While I usually pull in JQuery for small applications, sometimes all you need is.. well, nothing, just the core language(s).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Sometimes I feel very old and lonely when I complain about overuse of components, in any situation. But for me, it is the way so many people today just seem to use npm to pull in millions of dependencies, that themselves pull in millions of dependencies, ending up with ridiculous amount of data having to be downloaded and ridiculous amounts of code being executed, for what may be just to compile a "hello world" app. I'm actually very frugal on the back- end side also: the Go API server for pushdata only uses a handful external packages (like Stripe's Go SDK, a GetOpt package, Gorilla/mux - a URL router, A PostgreSQL connector and an AWS package for talking to AWS SES)

<comment><USER16> I think a lot of it stems from bootcamps and whatnot, focusing on letting people check off a number of boxes by the end of the course/system/whatever.

Node - <USER5>

React - <USER5>

Angular - <USER5>

NPM - <USER5>

"See how much you've learned in just two weeks! You'll easily get a job with that!"

And so on.

Rather than learning how some of this stuff actually works, many new developers are falsely led down a path where they think they can't create cool useful stuff without relying on a massive number of libraries and build processes.

See the whole leftpad disaster for example (Yes, I know, they fixed it, but it happened to begin with).

No seasoned or even moderately experienced developer should be using a package for something as simple as padding something. If I saw leftpad during a code review I'd send it back to the dev to fix.

Right now I'm creating a website using pretty basic tools, no frontend builds, and a backend using FPC, Postgresql for DB and done, no mass of libraries, no cascade of dependencies.. Just good performance, simple builds (Single FPC compile to executable), and easy for anyone to wrap their head around the entire process.

<comment><USER17> Just look at your average job ad. Its basically a checklist of tech exactly like this.

<comment><USER16> Yup, and that's a problem.

It makes perfect sense for the bootcamps to exist to fill that niche, it's just horribly unfortunate for both the companies hiring people with less skill than they think, and the new developers being led down bad paths.

Another part of the problem is that job ads only show part of the image.

If you can show that you're a good developer with a solid track record, those HR checklists largely become null and void.

Just look at how many job ads include "Must have Bachelors in CS", which most of us know is complete bull.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Of course there isn't much benefit to using React/Angular/Whatever (and other tools in those ecosystems) if your site is mostly a static thing and maybe only needs some interactive content here and there.

If you have a stateful application (or even just a single stateful part on a static site), React will simplify life a lot.

Figure out your requirements and develop based on those. That's pretty much it. There can also be external requirements (e.g. we want to be able to hire easily, so opting for a well-known framework is better) and those should be taken into account as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> _When on a 1Mbit /s WiFi connection in Greece, my vanilla app loaded in 4 seconds and started rendering after ~2 seconds, while the React/Redux app took 50 seconds to first render!_

react + react-dom is 33.4Kb gzipped. That's not _completely_ trivial obviously, and if your app isn't doing much DOM work it's probably unnecessary, but nor is it the reason why any app would take 50s to download on a 1Mbit/s connection. The problem was clearly something else.

I have nothing against people who choose to hate on frameworks, but if your maths is that far off it really undermines your argument.

<comment><USER20> Agreed.

I didn't use a framework until 2016. I use React now and love it, and yet I still find myself using all of my knowledge of the DOM when writing React, to ensure that it behaves smoothly.

I personally think there are simply a higher number of devs who can code fine in React/Vue/Angular/whatever but don't fully understand the intricacies of the DOM. So the result is that these SPAs often feel slower. But it isn't the fault of the frameworks necessarily.

<comment><USER21> But the reason to use a framework is to have a fast path for devs to write SPA's that feel fast without having to know the intricacies of the DOM. I'm honestly not trying to be argumentative, I really though that was the reason for using react/vue.

<comment><USER20> I think that's a good argument. Although, React is much lighter on the DOM than Angular 1 was, so you could say there is improvement to some degree.

But still, that's a completely fair point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > It's just that a framework can help you adopt good habits if you're lazy, > ignorant or just have a dev team that is >1 person :)

I had to read that three times to convince myself that the author was not _stricly_ equating "having a dev team of more than 1" with "being lazy and ignorant".

Anyway. If I'm never going to see and maintain your code, sure, go ahead and write it the way you want.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Who knows if React will be used 5 years from now?"

It will be. I work on an application that still uses JS libraries from 5-10 years ago, simply because refactoring to use a new library is usually unnecessary (or even counterproductive). There will always be a need to keep applications like that running.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been writing SPAs for a number of years, and while I've become competent at it, I now use Jekyll for most of my projects.

There are some exception where a SPA is certainly justified, but for the most part a static site with some dynamic parts in JS is so much easier to produce and maintain. Also a lot faster to load.

It's easy to still use Webpack/Babel/etc with Jekyll. Here is a starter kit I made some time ago for some coworkers. It's for Vue but the same idea can be used for React, etc.

[https://github.com/PierBover/jekyll-vue-webpack-starter- kit](https://github.com/PierBover/jekyll-vue-webpack-starter-kit)

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel like I've been ranting about this for years. Way more the 50% of the web is simply content - text and images. Pages that serve up content should be HTML and CSS, period. Why do I sit around waiting for pages to render on magazine websites? Because the developers built what should have been a very simple website as a single-page app with a fat framework and 9000 supporting libraries. Development tell the business and tell themselves that it's about creating a great user experience, but it's really just fashion, and what sounds like fun to build.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been quite happy using plain typescript lately, and focusing on progressive enhancement vs graceful degradation. I just don't see many framework-based sites being 508 compliant these days.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's kind of ironic that I can't read this article on my mobile screen. Have to scroll left and right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I can fill you in on the fact that a fair bit of the contents described how useless my front-end coding skills are! Also, the whole blog section, with comments etc, was done in the past couple of days so I haven't tried to fix responsiveness there....will get on it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > my vanilla app loaded in 4 seconds and started rendering after ~2 seconds, > while the React/Redux app took 50 seconds to first render

I'm all hands up for vanilla JS development, but I really don't think this drastic load/render time difference is caused by React but rather by the poor coding.

React is tiny, and you can see performance degradation like that only if you don't use it right, don't understand the life-cycle or over-engineer

<comment><USER7> If it's consistently poor coding on behalf of react apps, perhaps the documentation or culture around react isn't explaining the pitfalls or encouraging good design.

<comment><USER27> It's not consistent at all, that's my point. Being small and fast library is a React's major selling point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Probably going to be torn to pieces for this (if someone sees it) but at least it will be entertaining :)

<comment><USER12> To each his own. You are developing this by yourself (AFAICT) and are the only one working on it. Don't let people tell you the right/wrong way to do it, do what works FOR YOU.

Me? I like frameworks, I use them daily at work, I'm familiar with them, and I'm comfortable with the tradeoffs. I think in a multiple-developer environment you need to standardize things and a framework is ONE approach to that. I think it's the best approach in a shared environment but I'm not going to be so cocky as to tell you what the best approach is for you.

I mean reading about your experience with modals made me cringe a little (at how long it took) but hey, you didn't have to lean Angular/React/etc so you probably came out ahead so who am I to judge? Focus on what makes your business successful, for you that is clearly NOT the web UI (not meant as a dig) so don't waste your time using the New Hotness (tm). Instead work on making your API servers rock solid and adding features.

A User is NEVER going to come to you and say "I'd use your product but you used vanilla JS so I went somewhere else" they will say "your site doesn't work in X browser", "Your site is ugly/inconsistent" (I don't think this about your site), "Your API is slow", "I need to be able to filter my time series on X but you only allow for Y". NONE of these problems are fixed with a framework alone and fixing them with a framework brings it's own set of issues.

You do what works for you and clearly this seems to work. Keep it up!

PS: I'll have to keep Pushdata in mind for future side projects, looks pretty cool, this is the first I've heard of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Trying hard to find something to disagree with in your comment, but no luck :) Seriously, I think I did at least mention in the blog post that the vanilla approach is something I'd mainly advocate for small projects, with few members. The kind of situation where I am myself, at the moment.

The thing is, I see so many reach for the big guns and over-engineer their new, tiny app that they're developing themselves, with a friend or perhaps a small team. And I see overuse of components in general - the tendency to just pull in a new dependency via npm for something completely ridiculuous. This post was not about big, in-house enterprise systems development.

And in fact, thinking about my experience from that financial company mentioned earlier, I would greatly have preferred a standardized, external framework before the in-house developed macro/library mess that worked but was pretty much undocumented and whose inner workings were known to a very small number of people.

<comment><USER28> > The thing is, I see so many reach for the big guns and over-engineer their > new, tiny app that they're developing themselves, with a friend or perhaps a > small team. And I see overuse of components in general - the tendency to > just pull in a new dependency via npm for something completely ridiculuous. > This post was not about big, in-house enterprise systems development.

Because it is much more reassuring having a community back you up in case you get into the edge cases. DIY? Good luck, you are on your own. Not to mention you have to scaffold all the things that are already taken of by the framework.

It's also a matter of maintainability. If you can successfully predict that the project will always be small, then fast, bespoke code might be great. But it's usually not the case. Prototypes almost always turn permanent.

<comment><USER29> > Because it is much more reassuring having a community back you up in case > you get into the edge cases. DIY? Good luck, you are on your own. Not to > mention you have to scaffold all the things that are already taken of by the > framework.

And once you're reasonably familiar with a framework it would make sense to use it even for a prototype. Unless you're actually interested in trying out "VanillaJS" or an alternative framework you would just use the tools you already know and get on with the problem you're trying to solve :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I saw a talk at SnowCamp Grenoble last week about the use of vanilla JS on both front-end and backend, only using what's available in the language / browser APIs / Node.js core libraries.

The author published his project (a 2048 game clone) here: [https://github.com/Swiip/vanilla-modern-js](https://github.com/Swiip/vanilla- modern-js)

</comment><comment><USER31> Vanilla is fine for small projects (and I tend to prefer it for static websites), but if you try to develop a large web app using vanilla JS you'll just end up making your own half-baked framework.

A kind of variation on Greenspun's Tenth Rule might be in order:

"Any sufficiently complicated web application contains an ad-hoc, informally specified, slow, bug-ridden version of half of React".

</comment><comment><USER15> I struggle to find somebody who can justify their favorite framework without using a cliche. Once I hear the cliche I have stopped listening to anything that comes after, because its all bullshit. If people just say they want easier because they are self-conscience about writing this code (or really don't know how) I would really value the honesty of their answer.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder how easy this code will be to maintain? If the person leaves and a new developer is needed to come in and add new features?

<comment><USER33> I feel like this is an issue to address when you hire your first employee/hand off the project to another team, not when you're trying to get started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hey wait. You consider AJAX plain javascript?</comment>


Rate my startup: Prize Glutton - <AUTHOR> http://apps.facebook.com/PrizeGlutton/ I've build a rewards site where users complete offers and refer friends for points, they then use said points to buy real items (iPods, games, etc) from our store, all from the familiar comfort of Facebook. (US/CAN only.. for now) <comment><AUTHOR> I've build a rewards site where users complete offers and refer friends for points, they then use said points to buy real items (iPods, games, etc) from our store, all from the familiar comfort of Facebook. (US/CAN only.. for now)</comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't OpenHunt Working? - <AUTHOR> For all of people's talk about wanting openness, fairness, etc., openhunt.co doesn't appear to be gaining much traction.
I have noticed this theme with other products/services (including some of my own) that aim to level the playing field.
Why do you think this is? <comment><USER2> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers.

It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.

There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end user barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), and even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.

If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Still chicken-and-egg effect. Even good ideas might not work if people forget about them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because no one is working on creating and nurturing a community around it. That is the main thing R. Hoover did with PH, and that is the hard part with a project like this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Level the playing field? OpenHunt.io looks just like a million other job sites out there.

It's probably not gaining traction because it's not anything unique or new.</comment>


Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me - <AUTHOR> http://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/ <comment><USER2> The closest thing we have to a meta-service is Meta-Elsevier, more popularly known as Sci-Hub, which works so well simply because it doesn't care about legality. It's hosted outside the US on a slowly changing list of TLDs, and so it doesn't have to worry about _any_ form of copyright law, not just the DMCA.

I think if you wanted to build more services like this, you'd have to go this approach: instead of building an above-board app that uses the Uber API and has developer info on file with Apple and Google, anonymously develop a tool for jailbroken phones that injects itself into the Uber app and monitors requests. Instead of building a website that scrapes Amazon centrally, build a browser extension with permissions on amazon.com. And so forth.

The arms-length approach of meta apps helps here, because then individual ride-sharing coops and bookstores get plausible deniability. They're not telling you to use the app, it's a shadowy foreign group who decided to link to them.

<comment><USER3> Sci-Hub is Kazakhstani creation actually.

<comment><USER4> It's Putin's creation to much greater degree than Kazakhstani, Elbakyan is not Kazakh at all, she just happened to be born there.

<comment><USER3> You've never lived there I guess, in the former USSR. Elbakyan is of Armenia ethnicty, who was born in Kazakhstan (hence she is Kazakhtani, not Kazakh). And her native language is Russian, so is the native language of many Kazakh people who lives in the bigger cities of Kazakhstan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The main challenge to _successful_ (i.e., market-dominating) cooperatively- owned platforms like the ones Cory wants is that usually there are no incentives that motivate _individuals_ to dedicate their lives and souls in the creation, launching, running, and perpetual improvement of such platforms for the benefit of others.

The exceptions, including successful projects like GNU and Linux, tend to be led by rather unique individuals, like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvals, who are almost religiously zealous about their mission, and they maintain their commitment year after year, and decade after decade, without any personal profit motive.

Barring these exceptions, Capitalism seems to be the "least-worst solution" to this problem that human civilization has evolved over millennia, so far.

<comment><USER6> Creating a federated platform is technically quite feasible. E-mail, the Web, Usenet (before it was overrun by spam anyway), IRC... plus these days, stuff like PeerTube and Mastodon. Sure, not every one of these is "successful", but the trend is there.

<comment><USER7> The trend is definitely not there. The trend is away from IRC towards Slack, away from open web to walled gardens (or trashpiles) of Facebook, away from Usenet towards unfederated forums like this one.

<comment><USER8> I agree but:

>[...] away from Usenet towards unfederated forums like this one.

We're actually one step beyond that already, the era of forums is behind us, now people open a Facebook page or Subreddit when they want to create a community around a given topic instead of powering up a new PHPBB instance like they might have 15 years ago. Forums like HN are getting increasingly niche.

I don't like this trend but I think it makes complete sense. Centralized solutions offer generally better user experience (you don't have to monitor 10 different websites or watch your emails for notifications, you don't have to create dozen of accounts etc...), they're easier to develop, easier to maintain and, perhaps critically, easier to monetize.

These days I only see the cryptocurrency communities betting on a decentralized future (instead of merely wishing for it without much hope like I do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> He's making a very important point here about the free market. In what sense is it free? What is a reasonable thing to hold someone to, contractually?

There's a real lack of thinking about what the free market should actually mean. It's almost always couched in industrial era terms when it does come up, esp in relation to Uber and the gig economy. "Labour" has a very different meaning now to what it meant back in the 1800s.

Good episode of South Park talks about this, "The Human CentiPad". Basically the boys fall foul of an Apple agreement and something bad happens. Really bad.

<comment><USER10> I'm glad you warned us that the something that happens is really bad. I wouldn't have guessed from the episode title... b^)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is a good time to plug LibreTaxi:

"Free and open source alternative to Uber/Lyft connecting passengers and drivers. LibreTaxi makes ridesharing affordable by getting rid of the third party between passengers and drivers. Negotiate the price before the ride is confirmed, pay cash upon arrival. 1-minute hiring for all drivers." [https://libretaxi.org/](https://libretaxi.org/)

<comment><USER12> Who has cash nowadays though?

<comment><USER13> Someone who doesn't carry cash is someone who doesn't do anything interesting...

<comment><USER12> What is that supposed to mean? In my country cash is virtually non-existent.

<comment><USER14> In the US I hardly ever use cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doctorow, per usual, writes with the certainty of an out of shape sportswriter playing Monday morning quarterback. He just doesn't know what he's talking about.

For example, he says "Uber...allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities" Does he really not know the long history of cab drivers not stopping for black passengers? This has been frontpage news on multiple occasions, most famously with Danny Glover. Multiple friends have told me how much Uber/Lyft have improved this situation.

Meanwhile, Doctorow's meta platform idea literally steals revenue from people who have added tremendous value not only at time of transaction but after via the reputational system and other customer service functions. Nevermind that it would be trivial for Uber to squash this via cancellation fees and driver derankings.

If you want to form a co-op app, go for it. But find a better thought leader than Doctorow.

<comment><AUTHOR> The racist cab pickup issue occurred to me too, but it's not in conflict with his overall argument. Doctorow allows that the ride hailing app experience (not to be mistaken with to the "ride sharing" business model) is, in most respects, a foundational improvement upon the old taxi pickup experience. This is not mutually exclusive with the claim that Uber, et al.'s business practices (i.e. circumvention of any and all possible tax and labor laws) introduce a unique set of problems for riders and drivers alike.

<comment><USER15> You may be right about the tax issues. My criticism was of his attempt to hang all of society's ills on Uber/Lyft/etc... It's inaccurate at best.

<comment><USER16> He never said taxis were great- did you miss this:

> Uber (and its Peter-Thiel-backed rival Lyft) are not good companies. They're > not forces for good. But the system they killed? Also not good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't see why meta-Uber has to hitch on the backs of Uber and Lyft. Just have an app (I'd suggest "Ride") that knows all these local co-ops and contacts an appropriate one. Ride Austin when you're in Austin, Ride Shanghai when you're there. Make it trivial for anyone to start such a co-op in a new city, and the drivers will come. There's no need to first book on Uber.

<comment><USER18> The reason why Cory wants to hitch on Uber is because he knows people trust Uber more than a random app they've never heard; he says so himself, when he recounts his Shanghai experience. So you'd find the driver on Uber (borrowing its trust network) before switching to the other app. But that also shows why his argument against Uber is flawed: they can charge more money because they actually provide a better service by being available worldwide, unlike these local apps. If the Meta-Uber were to kill the host, it would destroy itself.

<comment><USER17> But people who don't trust the other app are not going to use the other app anyway. If you want to hire a co-op driver, start with the co-op app first. Hoping Uber will accidentally send you a driver who also happens to be in the co-op seems like a pointless exercise.

<comment><USER18> As a rider, I need to trust the app to do two things: give me a decent driver and provide me with a reasonable estimate of the cost of the trip. By first making the reservation with Uber, I can get both of those from them, making me much more willing to use the local app to do the actual transaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Uber also eliminates safety checks for drivers (and allows them to illegally discriminate against people with disabilities, people of color

He has it exactly backwards. Taxicabs would routinely racially profile passengers.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/04/nyregion/danny-glover- say...](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/04/nyregion/danny-glover-says-cabbies- discriminated-against-him.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> A meta ride share app needs development effort (money), infrastructure (money) maintenance (money) and integration with local co-ops (money) and all that money needs an administrative hierarchy (more money).

All this overhead needs to be put in place without any direct income from riders. Either it come's in the form of a service that co-ops subscribe to and pay for or it comes in the form of a collective formed of individuals already in the co-op. Whatever the formation, it's activity that needs funding from the drivers.

This "meta" layer is then ready for abuse. Once the drivers are connected to this top-level coordinating layer the individual co-op layers become mere middle-men and are ripe for cutting out. Then we just get back to Uber.

It would be interesting to learn ideas how such a meta system could be created while limiting the overhead costs levied on the co-ops and retaining a decentralized cooperative system that allows drivers (and the higher layer workers) to retain their power.

<comment><USER21> There is absolutely no reason for ride sharing to not be a protocol. Drivers join a federated network of other drivers they "agree" with and you pick the driver pools you want (and they could be local drivers, or they could be drivers that meet some criteria or vetting process). You could have any number of ride share apps that use the protocol and interface with server infrastructure of each network.

If you distribute the authority in the system you decentralize the power structures that produce hostile actors like the brass of Uber and Lyft. Nothing says each city can't have its own app and own driver cooper so long as my app from my city can speak your cities language when I'm there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this downplays the anticipated response from Uber and the like. DMCA and CFAA are just tools used, not the entirety of the barrier to further co-op based disruption. There's nothing to stop Uber / Lyft from banning their drivers from the service completely if they are caught using the hypothetical Meta-Uber app.

I understand that this example is just an illustration of the spirit of the article and doesn't represent Cory's argument, but I feel that the "felony contempt-of-business-model" is only one pillar in the structure, rather than the whole thing.

<comment><USER23> If they tried that, it would undermine their argument that their drivers are independent contractors. You can ban an employee from working for a competitor, but you can't ban a contractor. Many drivers drive for both Uber and Lyft; in an area with a good co-op, they'd probably start out driving for all three, and if the co-op pays them more they'd take as many rides from the co-op as they could get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love this. It indirectly calls out that uber has relatively easy to clone tech. A co-op network is a great idea and a white label or open source uber application is probably a great idea.

<comment><USER25> I was appalled that the the existing taxi system (essentially a protected monopoly) wouldn't immediately create an Uber/Lyft app when ride-sharing first appeared. Then I realized that building such a thing would only benefit drivers and customers, and those are the two constituents that the existing taxi system doesn't care about.

<comment><USER26> In the UK there's an app available, [https://gett.com/](https://gett.com/), which is very similar to Uber but hails regular, licensed taxis.

<comment><USER27> But I don't want to ride regular, licenced taxis. They're still a cartel. They charge a premium for having to learn all the streets of London by heart, but that's not a premium I'm willing to pay (or that I consider valuable) in the modern day'n'age of Google Maps and the likes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Today, DRM is used to force people with artificial pancreases to buy > proprietary insulin

Wow, that seems especially evil.

<comment><USER29> It's worth exploring exactly what's meant by "proprietary insulin". Insulin can't be proprietary - it's a natural, widely available molecule of publicly known composition. What's actually proprietary in scenarios like these is some encryption key that will persuade the device to work - the fact that the key is embedded in a memory chip glued to the container is a red herring. In the case of a life-essential substance that is consumed at a predictable rate, there is no logical distinction between this and a Mafia protection racket - pay them periodically forever, or die.

It shouldn't be surprising that companies will do this if they can. There was an episode of Doctor Who not too long ago where employees on a space station had to buy oxygen from the company store.

<comment><USER30> I remember someone making a claim about insulin, but it wasn't the insulin itself – it was proprietary consumables for insulin pumps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > An investor in the audience stood up to tell me how full of shit I was: I > had no idea just how complicated Uber's app and infrastructure were, and > there was no way a bunch of grubby drivers would ever be able to match its > expert coding and administration.

Silicon Valley's technical skills and ethos are good at _discovering_ disruptive business models. It is incredibly hard to pivot operations at scale until you get the market properly sorted out. Investors would love to believe that this also imploes a moat for replicating and administrating the system... but there is no reason one flows from the other.

Of course, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" \- Upton Sinclair

</comment><comment><USER32> It's so frustrating to read Cory on economics. It's like:

market reasoning, market reasoning, market reasoning, pitch an idea and then forget about market reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER33> He shows an example of a successful co-op app that worked (as long as the government was keeping Uber and Lyft out of the city that annually experiences surges of traffic of tech savvy users) but never gives an example of one of his meta apps in action...

How much rent would one of those apps be allowed to seek? Or would they just be run out of benevolence?

<comment><USER34> Also, what happens if a competing co-op opens up shop in the same city?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Yes, it's true that by essentially hacking Uber and Lyft's systems, you could create an app that siphons away business from them.

But what would happen if such a technique were to become legal and ubiquitous?

Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant capital, because they know that as soon as the company becomes successful enough to become a target, there will be other companies that will swoop in and attempt to exploit its technology so they themselves don't need to invest significant capital.

The damage to the market would be severe.

That said, as a fan of distributism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism) I am also a huge fan of cooperatives, and I think worker-owned co-ops can be successful in the ride-sharing space without needing to resort to such tactics.

<comment><USER36> > Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant > capital

But this is the point: the reason Uber is successful isn't particularly because of their technical excellence or innovation, it's because they've used massive amounts of capital to very knowingly buy the market.

This is an example of one of the nefarious sides of capitalism -- a flaw -- not a celebration of how great it is at solving problems (which is genuinely is in a lot of circumstances).

If Uber didn't have as much capital, smaller distributed co-ops may well have prospered.

<comment><USER35> I am no cheerleader for capitalism, but for any business whose core offering is a marketplace (as with Uber/Lyft, who connect buyers of rides with sellers of rides), then building out that marketplace requires solving the chicken- and-egg problem, and typically that is done through advertising, marketing, pricing, customer loyalty, etc.

Much of that requires capital, and the asset you end up with after investing that capital is a large user/subscriber base, which can lead to other competitive advantages. It is true that having a large user/subscriber base does not imply technical excellence or innovation, but it is a business asset nonetheless.

But if that asset can be easily siphoned off, then there is less of an incentive to build it out to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> He missed a couple of points on the Austin side of things.

1\. Uber/Lyft went to the state to get the regulations overturned in a bit of venue shopping. They don't have to do fingerprinting. Happens a lot around here.

2\. He failed to mention Austin Taxi Co-op. Some old hippies got together and helped form a normal Taxi company but made it owned by the drivers. It has an adequate but clunky app that is slowly getting better. They grabbed about 2/3s of the regular taxi drivers.

We won't really know how the ride-share market plays out until the subsidy goes away. It reminds me of when Standard Oil would go into town, undercut the local gas station until it fold, and then recoup the cost by raising prices. It is one of the things that the Antitrust laws were specifically designed to stop.

</comment><comment><USER38> I find it ironic that the one problem w/ the cooperative model in Austin is that it doesn't serve the fancy shindig (SXSW) that shows up once a year and then blows out of town.

Meeting the needs of Austinites is a more sustainable business because you don't need to handle the burst capacity.

Somehow the market of people who are flying around all the time seems to get a disproportionate amount of attention from marketers who make catalogs full of stuff like:

[https://www.coolthings.com/motorized-monocycle-looks- fun/](https://www.coolthings.com/motorized-monocycle-looks-fun/)

Fortunately the "yellow cab" model works just fine at the airport where people show up at predictable times. I did not grow up with the habit of taking cabs, and I've never taken one in NYC, but I learned at some point that if I didn't have a better plan to get away from the airport such as

[http://web.mta.info/mta/airtrain.htm](http://web.mta.info/mta/airtrain.htm)

I could walk up to the taxi stand and be on my way and yeah it is kindof expensive... But often about the same or less then I'd spend on parking alone for a rental car in a congested city.

On the way back I learned I could go to the front desk of the hotel and have a cab ready for me when I want to go at 4am or whenever I need to catch an early flight.

<comment><USER39> For the most part, for airport to hotel and back, Uber/Lyft are mostly interesting relative to cabs because they tend to be cheaper (sometimes substantially). For one trip I do a number of times a year where I need to take a cab from and to the airport at my destination, the only reason I tend to use Lyft is that it's about $15 cheaper than a cab ride.

In general though I don't use Uber/Lyft or cabs all that much when I travel (which is frequently). But, anecdotally, a lot of people seem to have gotten into the habit of pulling their phone out of their pocket whenever they need to go more than a couple of blocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thoughtful article. Wonder why you couldn't have a meta ride app that would tell you which ride share app(s) to install based on your current location or on a search (say if you're about to visit Austin for SXSW). A simple API for people to submit apps (and perhaps reviews) and no need to hack the incumbents' apps (although there would be some karmic justice in that, I don't think it's right, and would probably lead to incumbents doing worse things to the apps trying to displace them).

<comment><USER18> If you want that, you can just go to the App or Play Store and search for "rides <city>".

What Uber provides, and what Cory's proposal piggybacks on, is trust: just like when you ask for a Big Mac, you know more or less what you're getting when you're matched an Uber driver with 4.8 starts, yet the same is not true for some other ridesharing app you've never heard of.

But that also backfires on his argument about Uber's rates and goal of replacing it; they can charge an higher rate because they provide a service that others don't - a reasonably consistent experience worldwide - and one can't get rid of it without harming the meta-app itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Cory, if you're reading this, don't call it Meta-Uber. Call it:

Co-opt

<comment><USER42> Co-opt is a clever name, but, if I'm not mistaken, Doctorow believes naming it 'meta-uber' would be critical to discovery of the app by end users.

I mean, I _think_ Doctorow's idea is that users search on Google Play for 'uber' and not only does 'uber' appear in the results, but so does 'meta-uber'

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm trying to find how Ride Austin was built. I assume that the money for the developers and the servers must've come from somewhere. If it was the drivers themselves, isn't that basically the 25% they pay uber up-front? Mind you, that's still better than Uber, since they own the app, but it's not exactly the surge in income that the article later tried to paint it as.

That doubt aside, I mostly agree with this.

</comment><comment><USER44> If they had such a great coop going, I don't understand why they went back to Lyft/Uber?

<comment><USER45> Found this piece in which Lyft boasts that they had more driver upon coming back to Austin, and where RideAustin states that their numbers have dropped from 50k weekly rides to 20k rides, which is their minimum number to remain relevant.

Drivers probably signed up again with Lyft/Uber simply because these apps had again a significant volume of business to offer.

Also, I saw on reddit that RideAustin had closed its onboarding office, which seems like the best way to send drivers to their competitors.

[http://austin.culturemap.com/news/innovation/07-27-17-ride-s...](http://austin.culturemap.com/news/innovation/07-27-17-ride- sharing-companies-austin-rideaustin-fasten-uber-lyft-return/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> In Germany you have to use mytaxi

[https://us.mytaxi.com/index.html](https://us.mytaxi.com/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> probably a dumb question: how does the "unique code" part of his idea work?

how could the apps on both the driver's and passenger's phones both reliably generate the same globally unique code?

<comment><USER18> It could be simply a combination of the specific information of the ride: username of rider + username of driver + origin + destination.

<comment><USER42> thank you for the response. i'm wondering how my meta-uber app would obtain my origin and destination. is Doctorow proposing that the user manually enter origin and destination into both the actual uber app and the proposed meta- uber app?

<comment><USER18> I believe the idea is that the meta-uber app would programmatically control the actual uber app, hence the CFAA and DRM concerns.

<comment><USER42> Ah. Ok. Got it. Thanks.

So, meta-uber would need to embed within itself a hacked copy of the actual uber app, or just very carefully mimic calls to Uber's backend somehow.

Or meta-uber would need to somehow have the permission to run and inject data into an authentically installed instance of the Uber app (not quite sure if or how, say, the Android platform's security model would allow this.)

Hmmm.

<comment><USER18> It could also use an embedded browser and load [https://m.uber.com/](https://m.uber.com/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>