The Co-Founder Mythology - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/09/the-co-founder-mythology/ <comment><USER2> I wouldn't say partnerships _can't_ work out -- they obviously do, often enough -- but I would say that they can fail no matter how much you believe yours won't, so it's a really good idea to have a backup plan just in case, no matter how long you've known your friend for or what you've been through together.

I got my eyes opened on this last year. I was part of a pretty tight-knit group of friends. Some of us decided to get together and apply to YC. It's a good thing that didn't go very far, because a few months later, one of our group got in pretty serious trouble with the law. I took the view that he was a good person that didn't deserve to have a bad decision follow him around the rest of his life; my girlfriend and I attended his court dates and argued for his parole, and when he was released, we moved him to our area and helped him get back on his feet.

Our previously close-knit group of friends, it turns out, were really unhappy about that. They quit talking to us altogether, even though, as climbing partners, we've been responsible for each-others' lives on several occasions, and have generally been there for each-other through good times and bad.

Never saw that coming. Suddenly partnerships looked a lot less wise afterward.

<comment><USER3> To my mind, that response really depends on details such as "what sort of 'trouble with the law'?".

<comment><USER2> The illegal kind.

<comment><USER4> Bad parking or Murder?

<comment><USER2> If I were willing to discuss any of the details of my friend's case, I wouldn't be purposely obtuse.

The takeaway from that was only supposed to be that while I won't tell anybody that their friendship may not (edit: I meant, "won't") work as a business partnership -- even if they've done it before -- in my experience, even strong friendships aren't invincible, and they can collapse quickly over issues you've never imagined. So, when it comes to business, treat it like business.

<comment><USER5> No one is asking for his name, or the details, or anything that can be traced back to him (or you). Just the general charge.

<comment><USER6> Since he's too polite to, I'm just going to step in before this thread embarrasses us any further and say it's none of our business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate to say this here, but msuster is the one VC out there who really knows how things work and talks straight -- and the one I'd really want to go to bat for me. There is no sugar coating or extra idealism, but he's not limited to just software stuff either. In fact, I'd argue that makes him a better investor since he understands other industries -- and many of the dynamics in software are no different than other places.

To the specifics: I think when you are hacking on something large you need external motivation. Since the YCombinator model is to start with little upfront investment until you are "ramen profitable" you basically end up with a couple of people in a room hacking on something until it is presumably worth something (of course, valuations are notoriously difficult in software -- esp. social software). Since people don't get a lot done on their own, the purpose of a co-founder is for the motivational factor. If you were an uber-hacker (e.g. Drew Houston comes to mind) probably you don't need anyone else. You can build a functional prototype, get investment, hire, etc.

There is also the problem of the "idea." Although there are lots of loosy goosy "idea" people, there are also a fair number of talented hackers without any practical ideas -- and you really need to have a practical idea to have a startup. While personally I think you are usually better focusing on a problem domain where you have experience and there is a clear need, there are certainly cases where a hacker needs a co-founder simply to provide that interface layer between code and real life. As an example, anyone who has been in the industry for awhile will note just how terrible at design many otherwise very talented programmers are.

Anyways, I found this extraordinarily inspiring as a single founder YC reject who has been doing reasonably well w/o any YC support.

</comment><comment><USER8> The cofounder myth is a correlation vs. causation trap.

The reason so many successful companies have multiple founders is that in the early days, when it was just ideas bouncing around, the cofounder dynamic made two people sit down together, feed off each other's energy, refine each other's ideas, and get the company going in the earliest stages.

If you've already gotten that far as a single founder, you don't need to find a cofounder. If you haven't gotten that far as a single founder, maybe a partner will help you get that far.

<comment><USER9> Not entirely sure if this was what you were getting at, but I've always found advice against 50/50 equity to likely be the product of a cognitive error. People see companies with 50/50 equity splits failing due to founder disputes and extrapolate that to mean that 50/50 equity split is sub-optimal. This does not necessarily follow - it could very well be the case that it is the cause of disputes but that it is still often the best option. Sort of like how there's a lot of problems with democracy but the prevailing wisdom is that it's still the best form of government out there (same with capitalism).

Not saying that it necessarily is the best way to do things (though I'm partial to it), just that I have not seen convincing arguments against it - that it doesn't work sometimes does not cut it, it has to work less well than an alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Post is completely right. Especially saying that 50/50 split is a bad idea. I don't have to repeat all the arguments here (as organizer of the co-founders meetup, I get to discuss these at length). If I put my investor hat for a second, saying you split 50/50 is a signal that the leader of the company doesn't have the guts to make painful decisions. So failure is very likely.

</comment><comment><USER6> Suster has talked to far more second-time founders that wouldn't do 50/50 again than you can imagine. But in the universe of startup founder pairs, the majority won't work out, no matter what the equity. It's like setting up a saltwater aquarium. You have to get the chemistry, competence levels, roles, life circumstances, and business traction all within tolerances.

And when you don't, "50/50" is an easy scapegoat, isn't it?

There's good advice here; everyone should vest, and you need to have a mechanism to enforce consensus. My current company has a President (not me). That worked for us. Nobody had to jiggle the knobs on equity to make sure the business runs when there are disagreements.

But I think that for as many stories as there are on 50/50 blowups, there are other stories about businesses blowing up because the wrong person got 60. I worry more about the 60/40 failure modes. You _better_ pick the right person to get the bigger share.

</comment><comment><USER11> I started with a 50/50 partnership five years ago and would seriously rethink it next time around. I did it at the time because it was my first go around at starting a business and both of us had no idea what we were doing (basically the "fear" element that Mark mentions in this article). Everybody we knew told us not to go 50/50, but we pressed on anyway for lack of any other option.

Where it really hurts is in decision making. Things that would take a single founder a few hours or days to mull over can take weeks, months (or even years) to decide. It kills the speed advantage of being a startup. We ended up bringing in a minority partner a couple of years in, but that didn't help since the other two partners were still equal and there was no clear decision maker.

There has to be a clear leader, despite equal stakes. In my case, we had an awkward conversation about who should be CEO that went nowhere, and it has hurt us ever since.

Mark's post also mentions risk profiles. Right now I am married and have an inexpensive house, but my co-founder has two kids and a new house. Despite best intentions on his part, we have very different risk profiles which impact our decision making.

On the flip side, it is great to have the support of someone else there when you're going through the ups and downs of startups. My first go around I doubt I would have been able to get as far as I did without that, so I don't necessarily regret it. However, next time around will be a different story. I'm bookmarking Mark's post so I don't forget this lesson again.

</comment><comment><USER12> This contrasts greatly with Joel's post on the advantages of splitting equity fairly:

[http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/6949/forming-a- new-s...](http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/6949/forming-a-new-software- startup-how-do-i-allocate-ownership-fairly/23326#23326)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445447>

I'm afraid I don't have the expertise to tell which of the contradicting points are valid, perhaps someone who agrees with Suster could refute some of Joel's for me, or vice versa.

<comment><USER13> Anon account here.

I'm currently a co-founder in two-man startup. The idea, though not revolutionary, was my co-founders, and because he's older, more experienced, has more connections, etc: he has the vast majority stake in the company. He is also the "CEO" while I'm a "CTO".

A lot of posts, including the article, come from the prospective of the person with the greater equity; and I get that from their POV, it's a better deal.

But being the guy with less than his half of the stake, I gotta say, unequal equity is making me about ready to quit.

We both earn $0/hr. We both spend all our free time busting ass for the company. We're both "in it to win it", at least thus far.

But who gets to make all the important decisions, even when I'm pretty sure they're bad? Him. Who gets the biggest payoff? Him. Who's the guy in the spotlight? Him.

So even though we're "co-founders" and we work an equal amount, he gets all the glory, cash, and can steer the ship (for good or bad).

Obviously I didn't know it'd turn out this way when I started, but if you're out there thinking about bringing on a "co-founder" to boss around at 25% and $0/hr, think long and hard about what makes you worth doing that for. Which isn't to say those things don't exist: If you can raise money, sure, you're probably worth more than half. But be realistic: If you can't come up with reasons you're worth 75% of the company, then it's only a matter of time before people you've convinced otherwise realize that as well.

FWIW, I "fell" for the same "well we should have someone who can make rapid decisions steering the ship" line as well. Baloney. You do that when you can PAY people to do what you want. Until then you're just a couple dudes making negative money. I'll risk a 50/50 gridlock in decision making over having someone tell me what to do everyday at "my" company any day.

<comment><USER14> re: "I'll risk a 50/50 gridlock in decision making over having someone tell me what to do everyday at "my" company any day."

why not just make sure that you're the majority owner of your next company.

I can see the resentment this situation is causing you. But it might possibly be because the CEO isn't pulling his or her weight. If they were pulling CEO weight you might - perhaps - feel differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Others here seem to be taking a different lesson from this than I got out of listening to the video: it isn't so much having a cofounder is good or bad as it is that founder vesting is incredibly important if life and or other craziness happens.

</comment><comment><USER16> Was in a 50/50 partnership in the past. Things got tough because we didn't have a single CEO that had a final say. I wanted to compromise and work through it but my partner wanted to avoid that and wanted me to just claim him CEO because he felt I was diluting "his vision" but I refused (not until then did I realize I couldn't trust him as the CEO because I felt it was my baby too and wasn't going to hear me out if he was CEO). Not saying that can't work but it's tough and leaves it to chance you got the right personalities (like a marriage) and may put the business at risk.

</comment><comment><USER17> This really resonates with me. I've found in Michigan at least the best people just aren't willing to take the risk of a startup.

If you can get traction first I believe it will be possible to bring in someone who can really add value because you've just reduced their risk.

</comment><comment><USER18> Relevant: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2415467>

</comment><comment><USER19> Your co-founder will be your lifeblood. A startup has many valleys and only a few peaks...if you want to make it through need someone you trust with your life. I can't count the times I was willing to give up and throw in the towel and my co-founder has talked me off the cliff. don't believe the hype from these premodonas who haven't spent any real time in the trenches.

<comment><USER14> I spent 8 years in the trenches. If you want to argue with my position I'm open to a discussion. But merely saying people who don't agree with you are "primadonnas" is a bit superficial.</comment></comment>


Make Your Windows App for the 1% - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/user-camp/make-your-windows-app-for-the-1-978d53f1fa8f <comment><USER2> Author: Ben, CEO, User Camp

[http://user.camp/](http://user.camp/)

User Camp is dedicated to helping Windows Store developers succeed. You should follow us on Twitter.

Seems relevant. Not that it discredits his arguments necessarily, but it still seems relevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's me! Happy to answer any questions.

I wrote this article to address a trend I'm seeing in the Windows Store, where developers aren't treating small format devices (like the beleaguered Windows 10 Mobile platform) properly, and to make the case for doing so even though the user numbers alone don't justify it.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for replying ! I actually love portable windows devices. The joys of just having your files accessible and having programs just run. I had forgotten how that feels. Just getting a cache of files onto a device with a simple copy and then working on them on the go. Compared with android, and especially apple it's such a relief. And I'm soooo tired of app stores with their crappy apps that never seem to do more than a parlor trick.

That said, I do think you should state any financial interest you have upfront.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I vaguely recall Microsoft (long ago) announcing that Android apps will at some point work on Windows Phone. Googling for e.g. 'android apps on windows phone' yields a number of pages that explain how to accomplish this, but does anyone have any first-hand experience? Does it work well? Do most apps seem to work?

<comment><USER4> It was present in some early previews but then removed and abandoned: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/02/micro...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/02/microsoft-confirms-android-on-windows-astoria-tech-is- gone/). It later turned into bash-on-windows since the Linux subsystem part worked much better than the Android layer on top of that.</comment></comment>


Fuzzing with AFL is an Art - <AUTHOR> http://moyix.blogspot.com/2016/07/fuzzing-with-afl-is-an-art.html <comment><USER2> Great to read real-world use cases.

Tangent-ish question, I've seen some work on AFL for Rust[1], how much of this understanding maps to Rust? Is the instrumentation path pretty uniform for LLVM based binaries?

[1] [https://github.com/frewsxcv/afl.rs](https://github.com/frewsxcv/afl.rs)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if fuzzing with libFuzzer is less of an art? [http://llvm.org/docs/LibFuzzer.html](http://llvm.org/docs/LibFuzzer.html)

<comment><USER4> Alex, an SDE from AWS S3, recently added LibFuzzer fuzzing to s2n: [https://github.com/awslabs/s2n/pull/263](https://github.com/awslabs/s2n/pull/263) . The integration has been very simple, very impressive, and it has already found an issue we hadn't triggered with afl (a small memory leak in an error case). The minimization step is a big help in improving the branch coverage.

<comment><USER5> LibFuzzer runs in the same process as the code you want to test, right? Doesn't that mean you have to take special care to recover from errors? I mean, if it messes up the heap, for example, it would be possible but tricky to continue running. And continue is what you want, because then you save a process restart when exploring the parameter space (which makes it very fast).

<comment><USER6> Hi! Take a look at libFuzzerfication project at [https://github.com/ouspg/libfuzzerfication](https://github.com/ouspg/libfuzzerfication)

LibFuzzerfication project uses libFuzzer for fuzzing popular applications and libraries.

There are already some test stubs and mysamplelib stub is very good for learning purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been fuzzing a target pretty judiciously, and I have seen all of these effects. Glad to see somebody do a writeup. The dictionary is a huge boon, especially for text-based files.

</comment><comment><USER8> Shameless plug: I created a project that simplifies building jumping straight into fuzzing of most command-line Debian projects. Have a look here:

[https://github.com/d33tah/aflize](https://github.com/d33tah/aflize)</comment>


National Raisin Reserve - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Raisin_Reserve <comment><USER2> I live in a much more socialist country than the US. And when I think of the US I think of hard line capitalists that can't stand socialism. But reserves like this seem out right communist. State owned reserves designed to manipulate market prices. What am I missing? Or are my assumptions about the US and capitalism wrong?

<comment><USER3> Socialism has a "branding" problem in the U.S. It's been successfully portrayed by some to mean Soviet style communism, but then when you ask the average person who doesn't like socialism if that means they want to give up Social Security and Medicare they get confused.

<comment><USER4> I'm a capitalist, but if asked about my Social Security I'd still prefer to get back some of the money taken out of my pay checks for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Inspired by this `Planet Money` podcast:

 _Rocky Pipkin, Private Eye vs. The Raisin Outlaw_ [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/08/09/210550830/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/08/09/210550830/episode-478-rocky- pipkin-private-eye-vs-the-raisin-outlaw)

<comment><USER5> It's such an incredibly outdated way of conducting business. The podcast was really terrific in showing the underworkings of an industry that I would never even think twice about. Very interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Made me think of Quebec's strategic maple syrup reserve and the 2012 heist [1]

[1]: [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/why- does...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/why-does-canada- have-a-strategic-maple-syrup-reserve/261869/)

<comment><USER7> That is important though in case of low maple syrup production as they export a lot of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome: "fed to cattle or schoolchildren". :-)

<comment><USER9> Cattle and schoolchildren, our last line of defense against the encroaching flood of raisins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What has been the tangible outcome of the Supreme Court's recent ruling?

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps it's too soon to tell. According to SCOTUS, the ruling was on 6/22/2015 and judgement was issued on 7/24/2015\. At least this means the program is defunct, so I suspect the Raisin Administrative Committee no longer discusses this matter in the same way. Does this mean raisins could be cheaper in the future if there is less supply control/"diversion"?

 _SCOTUS Blog_ :

[http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/horne-v- departmen...](http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/horne-v-department- of-agriculture-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That 2013 case mentioned in the article is of utmost importance. I suggest you read up on it to understand just how dangerous the government has become. No tinfoil hat here, agencies are simply out of control because their powers are so unchecked everyday people don't stand a chance.

[http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/victory-over- rai...](http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/victory-over-raisin- administrative-committee-new-deal-case-took-80-years)

<comment><USER12> That agencies' powers are "unchecked" is an odd conclusion to draw from an article announcing that Cato's position _won_ and the Supreme Court has concluded that farmer's must be paid for their confiscated raisins.

<comment><USER13> Maybe the OP means the fact that someone had to sue in order to get paid for their confiscated property?

<comment><USER12> Maybe. But still, that's not evidence that the agency is unchecked so much as a complaint that it takes too much effort _in some cases_ to check it.

And more importantly, this was not exactly a case where the agency was running amok in blatant violation of the law. It was a genuinely controversial legal proposition whether personal property was covered by the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment until this case was decided. Most legal checks on agency action do not require enunciation of new principles of Constitutional law by the Supreme Court, so this is not a great example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One episode of The Simpsons had the characters driving up a mountain. Off to the side was a sign: "STRATEGIC GRANITE RESERVE". Just about as useful as a raisin reserve.

<comment><USER15> For the US, correct. For something like Singapore, I think a strategic granite reserve is actually useful.

It is interesting that remnants like this still exist after the economic transition at end of WW II: strategic raisin reserve, rent control in New York to accommodate returning servicemen and their families ([http://citylimits.org/2015/03/09/nycs-endangered-species- a-r...](http://citylimits.org/2015/03/09/nycs-endangered-species-a-rent- controlled-apartment/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The EU has a bunch of these, called the butter mountain, wine lake, etc.

<comment><USER17> They're mostly gone, but their existence had a very different cause:

'This basic system led to the infamous "butter mountains" and "wine lakes" of the 1980s, with farmers being paid to produce goods for which there was no market.' [1]

This seems very different to the USA system, where according to the article: 'The profits from the raisins, often seized for no payment, are then used to pay the expenses of the committee or pay back farmers for their seized produce. In one recent year, $65,483,211 was made, although it was all spent, with none left over for farmers'.

[1] [http://www.ecpa.eu/information-page/agriculture- today/common...](http://www.ecpa.eu/information-page/agriculture-today/common- agricultural-policy-cap)

<comment><USER18> There are definitely other programs that are more like farmers being paid to produce goods for which there was no market. Although what's more common in the U.S. is farmers being paid to leave their fields fallow to avoid over- production. The raisin reserve model is unusual, but there are _many_ ways in which the U.S. regulates/manipulates agricultural markets specifically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There was a Daily Show piece on this from the farmers' perspective: [http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/pmrodj/raisin-growers- laws...](http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/pmrodj/raisin-growers-lawsuit)

</comment><comment><USER20> > ... where they are stored until they are sold off to foreign nations, fed to > cattle or schoolchildren,

To reiterate:

> fed to cattle or schoolchildren

</comment><comment><USER21> America is so rich, she has to confiscate food from her citizens to keep a semblance of a scarcity economy.

<comment><USER22> Oh, poor countries do even more of these shenanigans.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, but when they confiscate food in poor countries it's to maintain the elite in their luxury, regardless of how much everyone else is starving.

<comment><USER22> Oh, they also do lots of stupid things just 'cause. (Eg the elite could have more money and luxury, if they were grabbing more efficiently.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like a plum job. I wonder if it will remain currant.

<comment><USER15> There's a grain of truth in what you say.

<comment><USER25> This isn't Reddit.

<comment><USER26> And this | is not a pipe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


There Is No Magic - <AUTHOR> https://deconstructinggenius.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/there-is-no-magic/

<comment><USER2> this was already posted 1 day ago. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2474467></comment>


Qajack - missing link in social media - <AUTHOR> http://qajack.com/play Qajack uses video to play with what you know and what you want to know. It's monkey simple, no profiles to fill out, just login, play and gamble with your reputation.<p>If Twitter is about brevity and inanity, Qajack is about authenticity and rich relevance. <comment><USER2> Is there any way to see answers without signing in? Because otherwise, you've already put a significant hurdle to getting people to keep visiting you. People don't want to make an account without seeing _anything_. It'd be like HN requiring a user to make an account just to click the links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point and something we're working to rectify, thanks for head's up, input very much appreciated.</comment></comment>


Digital Ocean: tech articles - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/

<comment><USER2> Lots of original and interesting articles centralized here.

That's explained mainly by the fact they are paying $50 for each article.

<comment><USER3> They do it as a SEO strategy, right? Someone looking for a solution to a particular problem will maybe test it on DO?

<comment><USER4> Yeah it's good content marketing, the referral rate is probably pretty good considering their $5 entry level is a bargain against most VPSs in that range and AWS.

The real genius of it is it goes directly for their audience, something many startups can learn from when they're penning their next stupid startup-article for HN - DO's stuff is going to pay off for years, random startup blah blah is barely going to pay off one time if you're lucky.

<comment><USER5> +1 :)

<comment><USER4> If you're taking feedback, it might be cool if at the end of the tutorial (or before) you actually have an embedded SSH to a very tiny virtual server where the users can do what they're reading about, and then at the end you could have "save this server" rather than "try this tutorial".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Similar marketing strategy as of FPComplete. Benefits community and on same time advertises the company.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes but aren't those articles written for their specific Linux images? For example their Ubuntu image comes with an active root user and a bunch of other things preconfigured. I wonder how useful those articles are for people using the original distro isos.

<comment><USER2> I don't think they have much stuff preconfigured on most of their images - maybe drivers. Articles are keeping a general style thought.</comment></comment>


WeWork Tells Employees Meat Is Permanently Off the Company Menu - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-13/wework-tells-employees-meat-is-permanently-off-the-company-menu <comment><USER2> I would tell any company that tried to dictate the content of my expensed meals while traveling to go fuck themselves. Sadly I know that not everyone has the privilege of doing so

<comment><USER3> I want to know how they plan to enforce it. Let's say I'm traveling and eat at an airport restaurant in the departure area. The receipt says "burger". I say I ordered the tofurkey burger. How can they prove I didn't?

<comment><USER4> Take a picture of the menu after you double check your receipt, I guess. Or don't order risky items.

I doubt any restaurant would list a veggie burger as "Burger". There'd be a "V" or something, to explain why it was $2 extra.

<comment><USER5> I bet most waitresses/waiters would ring you up for some other dish that is the same price as the one you ordered for a decent tip.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, this is almost certainly meaningless 'virtue signaling' in practice... My main question is who is the intended audience? The 1.8% of the planet that is vegetarian?

edit: thanks for the downvote, was my comment and question offensive?

<comment><USER5> > The 1.8% of the planet that is vegetarian

I was curious about this. According to wikipedia (take with salt), 21% of the world population is vegetarian either by choice or necessity: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country)

There are some surprising results in the list, but the tl;dr is: India.

<comment><USER7> Even in India though, I think the percent of pure vegetarians is 50-60% (not all Hindus completely abstain from meat like fish/chicken, and Muslims don't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a vegetarian, this is pretty dumb. I could see not serving meat at the company, but not allowing people to expense it? That's just weird and feels overly dranconian. If they are so concerned with environmental impact, do their other company policies extend this level of control? (Require carbon neutral transport, environmentally friendly electronics? What about building materials? Furnishings?). I don't think like they are going to convert anyone to vegan/vegetarian this way, and probably encourage the opposite.

<comment><USER3> I give it six months until they get sued by a Muslim employee. Culturally and religiously eating meat is pretty much _required_ in Pakistan.

<comment><USER9> The article seems to suggest that religious needs etc would be met.

<comment><USER10> Does one have to prove membership, or can one just claim it, I wonder? Will they be asking to see tithing records?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sure, there are strong environmental and ethical reasons against eating meat.

But do we really want to applaud companies dictating what their employees do in their down time?

Keep in mind this policy covers travel expenses, so if you have to travel for work, you _must_ eat the vegetarian option while traveling or you will pay out of pocket. Even if the only vegetarian option is fries, which is not uncommon.

<comment><USER12> They're not dictating what employees can do on their own time, only what they can use company resources for. You can always find a restaurant with good vegan/veg options, although its admittedly harder in europe.

<comment><USER2> So you fly away from your family to spend the night closing a deal for your employer and after a long day of meetings you sit down and have to order tofu because the latest Richard Hendricks of the hour started dating a vegan. Fuck this whole idea and fuck WeWork.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is how corporations are like autocratic governments. And the larger they get, the harder it is to get away from their spheres of influence (if you're a software engineer in Seattle, by rejecting Amazon as an employer you wrote yourself out of 90% of the open hiring reqs in the city).

</comment><comment><USER2> Can't see how a company can do this and then meaningfully claim to care about "diversity." Also worth noting that this decision falls wholly on employees and not at all on customers — best to abuse the people who will find it much harder to quit you.

</comment><comment><USER13> ...and a new cohort of coworking spaces kickoff with the investor pitch " 'we're the wework of the coworking spaces with meat' industry"

:)

</comment><comment><USER14> A few more details from an article in the Guardian:

\---

The Guardian US is based at one of the many offices run by WeWork in New York City. Currently on the event schedule is a TGIM with Capital One event that promises "mini doughnuts and bacon, bacon, bacon". This is one of many events promising to serve meat at WeWorks across the world – even as the policy was being announced, at the Corrigan Station WeWork in Kansas City lunch is being provided from Monk's Roast Beef as part of "food truck Friday", for example.

When the Guardian spoke to WeWork about whether these events would be cancelled, a spokesperson said they would not, and clarified: "This policy only applies to events paid for by WeWork. Members and employees are welcome to bring in meat for meals, and members are welcome to serve meat at events they host … we are working with vendors to align our commitment for previously scheduled events, and meat will not be served at events hosted by WeWork moving forward."

\---

</comment><comment><USER15> Not paying for people to buy meat is perfectly reasonable. It's your money and you can decide how you spend it. It's like not paying for birth control as part of a company health plan.

But having a company event, a "summer camp," with no meat food options might be incredibly fucked up.

<comment><USER16> > _It 's like not paying for birth control as part of a company health plan._

That's not reasonable either.

I don't understand why so many people think that "not actually illegal" is the same thing as "perfectly acceptable."

<comment><USER15> Well, I'm not paying for your birth control and I'm not buying you any meat either. I don't see anything wrong with either, for the same reason.

<comment><USER16> And that's fine, as long as you're not running a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> More discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17526695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17526695)

</comment><comment><USER18> Meat is too expensive!

Ramen it will be. And it will teach them startup spirit!

</comment><comment><USER19> biggest discussion ended up here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17526695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17526695)

</comment><comment><USER20> hippies

</comment><comment><USER21> Obligatory: "this is why Trump won."

<comment><USER2> When I see stuff like this I do get about a 500 millisecond urge to vote for Trump in 2020 just to give a big middle finger to people like this CEO. Then I realize the cost of that middle finger and it's too expensive for my tastes.

<comment><USER16> That's pretty much why we got Trump in the first place. A lot of disgruntled Bernie fans who decided they'd rather watch the world burn than accept the lesser of two evils.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good bye WeWork. Just another crazy idea by the environmentalists, right after feeding babies with orange juice instead of milk. Btw, human DNA contains 50% of proteins obtainable only from meat. Make your own conclusions.

<comment><USER16> This _is_ a dumb idea, but you're being just as ideological and silly as they are. It's quite possible for modern humans to be healthy without eating meat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >"New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact"

Not nearly as much impact as not having kids.

</comment><comment><USER24> Meat vs. non-meat is not the right lens through which to judge the environmental impact of your diet. Cost per calorie is.

For instance, whole chickens provide about about 1200 calories/dollar, whereas leafy green vegetables all provide under 100 calories/dollar. That means there is a 12x difference in the amount of resources required per calorie provided. You can go on about the externalities of meat all you want, but a 12x difference almost certainly makes up for them.

So if you switch from eating lots of meat to eating lots of leafy green vegetables and berries, you probably aren't making much of a difference. The better heuristic to follow is to just pay attention to how much your food costs. Less money spent on food = lower environmental impact.

If you're interested, I go pretty deep down this rabbit hole here: [http://www.thinkfundamental.org/why-kale-is-actually- terribl...](http://www.thinkfundamental.org/why-kale-is-actually-terrible-for- the-environment/)

<comment><USER12> What? No. This ignores subsidies, markup, shelf space, and that you probably shouldn't be going for the cheapest calorie per dollar anyway. Following your argument, we should all just eat pure sugar and butter.

I read your site, and it's all just FUD. You mention in passing how you'd need to grow agriculture to feed animals anyway, and then completely ignore that fact through the rest of your writing. You don't cite any actual environmental numbers, pull some out of your ass, and then hand wave your way through your position.

<comment><USER24> Look, calories per $ is a crude metric that I would not put forward as useful for food items which are within 2x of each other in terms of calories per $. But when you're talking about a 12x difference, I think you have to engage in serious denial to dismiss it.

> You mention in passing how you'd need to grow agriculture to feed animals > anyway, and then completely ignore that fact through the rest of your > writing.

I'm not sure what you think I should have addressed about this, but I have had people try to claim that meat cannot possibly be easier on the environment than plants, since animals consume plants and there is energy loss in that process, so I'll assume that's your objection. And the answer is that animals are fed plants which provide a lot of calories per $. If you were to base your diet on those plants (grains, essentially), then, yes, it would be better for the environment than eating meat. But I was specifically pointing out that there are classes of plants (leafy greens and berries) which are worse for the environment than some meat (chicken). There are also classes of meat (red meat; 50-400 calories per $) that are worse than certain classes of plants (potatoes, grains, and nut & vegetable oils; 800-3000 calories per $).

<comment><USER4> The argument is thermodynamic: meat will never provide more calories than it requires.

<comment><USER25> In the case of leafy greens, most of the energy will be tied up in cellulose that will pass straight though a human digestive system undigested.

Any model that treats a human body as a perfectly efficient bomb calorimeter will produce such inaccurate results as to be virtually useless.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Monte – Intelligent workflow, designed for websites - <AUTHOR> https://onmonte.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey there,

We built an awesome CMS for about a year now. We launched, but got a pretty low conversion. Therefore, decided to pivot aggressively, from a site-builder towards a user-centred environment.

We still use Monte CMS, but in a different workflow. The client requests a website, the developer makes it in 5 days, and afterwards if he likes everything.. he can sign-up for a monthly subscription, for the hosting, CMS, co-pilot.

It's an entirely new system, and would really love to know what you guys think.

All the best!

</comment><comment><USER2> The reason we pivoted is that we understood that people aren't usually ready to build their websites, due to their lack of design skills. Therefore, we decided that we can add co-pilots which are developing websites for clients in 5 days, using our product, Monte CMS.</comment>


Show HN: A toolbar you actually want to use (No download, no registration) - <AUTHOR>

http://www.dashler.com/toolbar/
Dashler Toolbar is a bookmarklet that opens up a toolbar of shortcuts to various webpages, and allows for super easy bookmarking.  You can open the toolbar, highlight content, then open up a floating window of the results on any of (currently) dozens of websites, like Wikipedia, IMDb, various dictionaries, translate, etc.  Some shortcuts use the URL or Domain of the page you are at.  For example, you can jump to Quantcast/Alexa results for the page you're viewing, shorten the URL, or search within the site with Google and ilk.  [Advanced: For shortcuts that use a URL, you can drag and drop links onto them to activate that shortcut.  While dragging a URL, eligible shortcuts will turn green.]
The toolbar is customizable via drag and drop. You can drag and drop to re-organize the toolbar and/or add shortcuts and tools.  Use "Quick Find" to find shortcuts for sites you're interested in, or related to the page you're viewing.  For example, there are some neat HN tools (threaded comments, sort by hotness, etc) that I use daily.  To add them, search for "HN" in quick find, or open the toolbar at a HN page and click "find related shortcuts".  You can create folders / subfolders and organize your toolbar to your hearts content.
Dashler Toolbar also works well for managing bookmarks.  You can bookmark the current page from the Main Menu, or you can drag and drop any links on the page you're viewing.  Title and tags will automatically be pulled from Delicious, and you can instantly search for anything you've bookmarked by URL, title, or tag.
Finally, it works on all modern browsers.  Create an account in seconds (no e-mail required, just username and password), and have a synchronized toolbar across all computers and browsers.
Let me know what you think. <comment><USER2> This is way cool and a good MVP. Congrats on getting this far. Some notes which may or may not already be on your todo:

You need to spend some time/money on design/designer. The top left icon should always be clickable. Ouch, favicons scaled up that large are terribly pixelated, especially Wikipedia's. (Also, no reusing icons, but you knew that)

On the toolbar itself, the Google category looks poor (align those boxes!).

The toolbar itself should have an 'add bookmark' button for the current page.

On the page itself home vs. toolbar is too confusing a distinction at this stage (it seems the toolbar is really the point right now).

The intro page could actually have the toolbar loaded, and point at it, and describe things you can do with it, starting with the 1-step install procedure (Drag [this] to your bookmarks bar, and point to where the bookmarks bar is by default).

The 'windows' that come up, green vs red square top right is a bit confusing, also should have a button to actually go to the page inside the iframe. (extra credit if you detect browser OS, and copy that on the fly). Actually, the window/iframe feature shouldn't be a separate function (eg. why is clicking 'search my bookmarks' different, menu/window-wise, compared to the google menu.) Closing the toolbar itself should close the iframe in any case.

Also confusing is clicking on the icon on the toolbar vs. floating and having the menu come up anyway.

I would be less conservative about using screen real-estate if the toolbar has already been activated. (Eg. instead of clicking reference, then urban dictionary and _then_ entering the word, clicking reference should allow me show me a box for urban dictionary). The user has expressed intent to see the toolbar, take advantage of it.

The analytics section should be redone (have the name somewhere, tooltips shouldn't all be the same...)

Maybe have a split button for tools? eg: [ Readability | (cfg icon)] Clicking readability on the left would activate it, so it's 2-clicks to run it instead of 3. Clicking on the right would bring you to arc90's config page for it.

Maybe the bookmarklet could toggle the toolbar?

The page timer is cool and all, but too noisy on an already busy page?

"Customization: Intuative drag and drop interface." (Spelling)

You need a punchier tagline, something like Dashler: Your web, when you want it, wherever you want it.

Also, push that the customization of the toolbar, and the shared-ness: "Add your own toolbar to any page. Includes tools and bookmarks you choose, and is shared between your computers. What's more, it's free!"

The 'Useful Shortcuts' section (<http://www.dashler.com/toolbar/>) mentions stock quotes and weather, but neither of those are actually on the linked page (also those section headers should be links if possible).

Are you planning on running your own bookmarking backend?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! A lot of great stuff here.

Yeah, I need a better design. That's for sure. The scaled icons are going to have to stay, for now, because I don't have the time or resources to go through and custom design about 60 different favicons. It's "good enough" to have them automatically generated. I can't re-use favicons? Are you sure?

How could I fix the Google category? I could add a line break before each textbox, which would align all the textboxes, but then it would cause more vertical space to be taken up. Any suggestions?

You can bookmark the current page! It's in the main menu, the first item. Just click it, or drag and drop it anywhere into your Toolbar.

I will absolutely make dashler.com be all about the toolbar.

I'm working on a new frontpage right now. I think I may ditch the video, and start off with something you're describing, that gets users more involved and impressed straight-away. One problem I'm encountering is that there is so much stuff this toolbar does, I don't know where to start.

The green vs. red square on the windows could use icons. And the browser detect idea is absoutely awesome! Though, that might actually cause some confusion...

Clicking an icon on the toolbar "locks" the menu, so that you can highlight text or drag and drop something into the menu.

In terms of real estate, that's a good suggestion. However, I think if it takes up too much space it could end up getting in the way. Per your UD problem, everything in the toolbar can be moved. Go to reference -> urban dictionary -> and drag the shortcut by it's icon. You can place it outside of the subfolder if you want.

The bookmarklet did originally toggle the toolbar... however there's one use case which made me want to change it to reloading the toolbar: You can log in via the main menu, but then you need to reload the toolbar in order to see your personal toolbar. There is a menu item in the main menu that says "reload toolbar" but I figured most people would just press the Dashler button again. It turns out nobody is using this thing anyway, so I suppose anything I do won't matter much anyway.

I'll get rid of the page timer.

Thanks for the spelling heads-up.

To sum things up... I'm finding it incredibly difficult to come up with a way to explain what the toolbar can do to people in a sensible way. It's starting to bother me quite a bit. How do I explain an abstract concept like "a toolbar that goes on top of anyway webpage you are viewing, which connects highlighted content with other webpages. Oh, and the thing that connects highlighted content with other webpages is called a shortcut. You can add more shortcuts, and drag and drop them to customize your toolbar. Also, you can access your customized toolbar from any computer! And by the way, you can bookmark pages and it automatically fills in tags from delicious so that later on you can instantly search your bookmarks. Oh yeah, and there are "tools" which can modify the page you're viewing, like greasemonkey"

Thank you so much for your feedback! I appreciate it. Also, thanks for the "great work". I'm about ready to give up on this idea. It's just too complicated. Le sigh.

<comment><USER2> > I can't re-use favicons? Are you sure?

Sorry, I didn't mean you couldn't reuse favicons - I meant to point out that the icon for 'social media' is the same as for 'search my bookmarks'.

> How could I fix the Google category? I could add a line break before each > textbox, which would align all the textboxes, but then it would cause more > vertical space to be taken up. Any suggestions?

Yeah - take up the vertical space, or take up more horizontal space. Either way, it's not an unacceptable amount. Alternately, have 1 box (that auto-grows vertically to handle addresses) and have 4 different submit buttons.

> You can bookmark the current page! It's in the main menu, the first item. > Just click it, or drag and drop it anywhere into your Toolbar.

That, specifically, is unclear. I know what page I'm already on; don't show me the title. Have it be an 'add' button instead; at least have the word 'add', if not 'add bookmark' in that menu. My less specific complaint is that _so_ much really cool functionality is 3 clicks away(1 for the bookmarklet, 1 for the menu, and 1 for the actual action), when it could be 2-clicks. Especially if there's only one child item; eg in the UD category, the only choice is UD define.

> One problem I'm encountering is that there is so much stuff this toolbar > does, I don't know where to start.

Who is Dashler for? More specifically, do you have any clue what bookmarklet penetration is? (I have no idea how I'd even go about gauging that. Maybe arc90 stats or something?) One possible approach would be 'the bookmarklet to end all bookmarklets' if users are at all familiar with the concept.

> Clicking an icon on the toolbar "locks" the menu, so that you can highlight > text or drag and drop something into the menu.

Yes, it does and it's kinda cool - but I'd consider the click-activated locking a droppable feature, just have the menu not close so automatically instead. Same goes for the 'windows'. I get that it's an iframe and does have some reason for being differentiated from a menu, but for user's ease of use, I would not have the iframe be different than any other menu.

> In terms of real estate, that's a good suggestion. However, I think if it > takes up too much space it could end up getting in the way.

You could go overboard, and implement a 'dashboard' level takeover of the page. That would be a slightly different product with a slightly different focus.

> Per your UD problem, everything in the toolbar can be moved. Go to reference > -> urban dictionary -> and drag the shortcut by it's icon. You can place it > outside of the subfolder if you want.

Thats cool - but again, the minimum number of clicks is still 3, when it could be 2.

> The bookmarklet did originally toggle the toolbar... however there's one use > case which made me want to change it to reloading the toolbar: You can log > in via the main menu, but then you need to reload the toolbar in order to > see your personal toolbar. There is a menu item in the main menu that says > "reload toolbar" but I figured most people would just press the Dashler > button again. It turns out nobody is using this thing anyway, so I suppose > anything I do won't matter much anyway.

It seems you could code around that - the login form submission sets a flag. If the bookmarklet is re-activated and that flag's been checked, reload the toolbar instead, and clear the flag.

> To sum things up... I'm finding it incredibly difficult to come up with a > way to explain what the toolbar can do to people in a sensible way. It's > starting to bother me quite a bit. How do I explain an abstract concept like > "a toolbar that goes on top of anyway webpage you are viewing, which > connects highlighted content with other webpages. Oh, and the thing that > connects highlighted content with other webpages is called a shortcut. You > can add more shortcuts, and drag and drop them to customize your toolbar. > Also, you can access your customized toolbar from any computer! And by the > way, you can bookmark pages and it automatically fills in tags from > delicious so that later on you can instantly search your bookmarks. Oh yeah, > and there are "tools" which can modify the page you're viewing, like > greasemonkey"

Explain to me what a computer can do for me. Explain to me what Excel can do for an accountant.

Taking another look at it, I'd break the functionality into two groups. Group one is 'cool tools for the current page'. Readability, any of the analysis, some other bookmarklet tools (like one to change all references to  into ) - basically anything without an text input field. Make this the user's 'dashboard'. (Whether or not you chose to take over all of the user's browsers window is orthogonal to dividing functionality.)

Start by imagining pushing only the dashboard features. Push arc90's Readability to the masses: no ads, no distractions. Push the ability to run analytics. Hell, you could make a list of url shorteners and make an entire category out of that.

Or, to go another direction, just push the fact that you can share bookmarks between two computers with a such a simple and easy bookmarklet. No special browser needed (past not using IE), no need to even restart your computer, or even your web browser.

Make a user page, which is just a list of all of my bookmarks, newest first, and productize that. Offer up arc90 et al from a 'default' set of bookmarks in the (eg) tools category. If you want to go down the social route, see other people that bookmarked that page, let them comment on it, etc.

The other large piece of type of functionality is to act on selected text. There's definitely use-case here; Safari, Firefox and Chrome all have 'Search in Google' as the only option, you've extended that quite far. I don't know how best to implement it - as part of the existing bookmarklet if there is text already selected or as a separate bookmarklet; but on activation, grey out the rest of the browser window, show the selected text in big, and offer up a slew of buttons to operate on it. If I've selected "Abraham Lincoln" I want to be able to, in two clicks, to be able to look it up on wikipedia _or_ urban dictionary, or any number of any other sites. (IMDB - what actors have played him in movies? Dictionary? Thesaurus?)

That alone would be kinda awesome, actually.

All of my other comment's aside, I'd say stop coding for a while and work on polishing the rest of the site

But I think most importantly - Don't forget to add the Asteroids bookmarklet to Dashler!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's novel and somewhat useful. I've added it and will see if I continue to use it. It's the first time I've seen the the bookmarklet applied like this, so that's cool.

It could benefit from some UI design - the icons are rough and there is too much stuff crammed on the menus.

I hope you're tracking which buttons people actually click and use. Use that analysis to streamline the UI and remove underused items.

<comment><USER3> I also suggest making it possible for me to extend it/customize it. You can then get a community around it to further develop 'plugins' to your toolbar. Your advantage is in the 'toolbar bookmarket' platform - esp if you make it easy to plug in javascript snippets to do other interesting things.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is definitely something I've been considering, but I first wanted to see if it's even worth investing more time into it.

It would be pretty easy to allow users to create their own shortcuts and tools. A shortcut is just a url that contains special keywords, like %url%, %text%, %domain%, and a corresponding text "Search Google %text%" (%text% gets converted to a textbox). The hard part, in my opinion, is explaining this, and providing an interface for the user to make it.

Javascript snippets is a whole other world. I wanted the toolbar to be able to use any GreaseMonkey script, but there are some things I can't make the toolbar do, since it's just javascript on a document (like cross domain POST). There are a large variety of GreaseMonkey scripts that would work on it, though, and I was thinking about allowing them to be easily integrated into the toolbar.

It was fun hacking together a few HN tools, like "sort by hotness" which I use _all the time_ now. It looks at the stories of the frontpage and sorts them by how much activity (points + comments) they've received per unit time. To find it, search "HN" in Quick Find. So, I agree, there's potential for opening it up as a platform much like GreaseMonkey.

<comment><USER3> The HN tools are neat. I would use some of them. That's similar what I had in mind. I shouldn't have to type HN though - it should have showed up automatically based on the page I am on. It doesn't find tools for news.ycomb... but you probably already know that.

I played around with Greasemonkey scripts a few years back but then abandoned them. I just looked into it again and spent 4 minutes trying to figure out how to use them on Chrome and then abandoned the search. I guess it supports it but it failed the 2 minute test for me. I even went to userscripts.org and then got even more lost. In my opinion, if you make that experience easier with your tool and show the top 5 scripts for the current URL then that would be a huge win. You could do top 5 based on how often they are clicked on.

<comment><AUTHOR> In "Quick Find" there's a button that says "Find shortcuts related to news.ycombinator.com". When I click it, it does show HN tools. You're right though, there should be some sort of indication that there are tools available for the page you're viewing. Even better would be "most common tools/shortcuts used on this page" ... that might make you want to check the toolbar at each interesting page you view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the things that really stood out to me was the site design and how cluttered everything is. I've noticed something about people; they can't assimilate information when it reaches a certain density and I think that's the case with your site.

At first glance, I was taken aback by the sheer amount of info you've stuffed into the landing page. The bottom panel really should be a learn more drop down. As it takes away the main message of what you're trying to get across; simplicity.

Moreover, the theme feels a bit depressing to me, but that's just a matter of tweaking the color.

I have a feeling that all of this might have something to do with dashler being a bootstrapped startup. Is there anything I can do to help?

[ego edit: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1783930> :) ]

<comment><AUTHOR> The advice in your edit is exactly the feedback I'm looking for. It's admittedly difficult for me to come up with an easy to digest pitch for the toolbar. Marketing is just not my thing, at least not when the format is HTML. What you've just written is better than anything I could come up with, and I'm grateful for it.

In short, yes, there is a lot you could do to help. But there's not a lot I can offer beyond a share in whatever is to become of Dashler. If you believe that I have a good product here and are interested to work on it with me, shoot me an e-mail. The address is in my profile.

In the meantime... any chance you could throw out some more freebies? :)

<comment><USER4> Wow.

Thank you. I had no clue that you would find that useful. I just wrote the fist thing that came into my head.

Of course, I like helping people out. :)

Oh and check your inbox. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been thoroughly absorbed by this project, and have lost the ability to see it from a fresh perspective. Any ideas anybody has about how to explain this thing, or what their immediate impressions were, are extraordinarily helpful.

Oh, I replied :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Multiple "About" pages are confusing:

"Dashler is a bookmarklet. When clicked, it opens up a toolbar on top of the webpage you viewing."

"Dashler builds things that make browsing the web faster, easier, and more productive."

"Dashler is a bootstrapped start-up founded by Sam Mati."

"Dashler is not a search engine, encyclopedia, dictionary, social network, URL shortener, video website, news aggregator, website analytics provider, blogging service, stock analysis tool, e-mail provider, etc."

"Dashler is content to let others innovate in these areas."

"Dashler is a bookmark. There's no download."

Also, the hovering toolbar gets in the way of sites using top nav. I'd recommend trying it more like the Digg bar or Reddit bar, glued to the top of the window, and styled to match the detected browser's default chrome.

</comment><comment><USER6> As I mentioned in another thread, the actual toolbar seems kind of obtrusive.

But you may want to consider reworking the splash page (or the others too, but definitely the splash page).

<http://yobiz.com> has a nice splash page. Headline, subhead, video on the left, benefits on the right, all above the fold.

<http://icontact.com> has a smart layout. The first thing you see is social proof in the form of testimonials + actual, non professional pictures and real benefits for real people on each slide.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. What could be done, in your opinion, to make it less obtrusive?

<comment><USER6> Maybe it's not too obtrusive. I can't sit around at work and watch full videos (especially one with lots of random stops). So I tried to make some guesses about the toolbar.

One thing I would certainly do is get some audio in the video and remove the pauses.

<comment><USER7> How about a gallery of screenshots with captions at the bottom?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just a minor point, you really should add a voice over to the video. Even if you don't like your own voice, it's way better than nothing. I spent the first 30 seconds trying to figure out what was wrong with my sound.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right, it's something I need to fix, and I'm definitely losing a lot of potential engagement and clarity by not having a voice over.

I used YouTube annotations, since I have no experience at editing videos. With YouTube annotations, the sound would pause as well... so I opted to just have no sound at all. It sucks, I know.

<comment><USER8> I'm new to making promotional videos too. If you have a Mac, give iMovie a shot, it's _fantastic_. For Windows, I've had good success with CamStudio for doing screencasts with voice. Even better CamStudio is open source and free.

The major difference is iMovie is a nice movie editing platform, where CamStudio is just about recording, so if you only have CamStudio, you have to get it all correct in one take.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used Camtasia to do the screen recording, and I think it worked great. The zoom and pan features are really cool. If you watch the video without the annotations, it's a pretty neat demo. I was fearful it would be too confusing without explaining what was going on though, so I added those annotations.

I'll definitely be making a better version of the video. One very difficult part of doing the take was scripting it. There are quite a few awesome features of the toolbar that I wanted to show off, but jumping right into them could be confusing.

<comment><USER8> It's amazing how seemingly little things can be so difficult. I'm currently working on a landing page for a product idea I have. The product itself is actually really simple and trivial to get if you see it in the flesh, but explaining in the confines of a landing page has proven extremely difficult.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like they say: "The little things... there's nothing bigger."

It's really difficult deciding on things when every single word matters. I spend a lot of time and energy either being stuck in analysis paralysis, or trying to avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few things:

1) no download, no registration - but I still have to enter a username and password. So I don't understand why you say 'no registration' when I still have to register a username

2) there is no compelling reason for me to install this - it took a while to find this which I guess is the main reason I would install it: 'Synchronized: Access Dashler from any computer and browser.'

3) When I clicked on 'Home' I expected to go to <http://www.dashler.com/toolbar/> \- I did not realise that the toolbar was not the main thing about Dashler. Then it also took me a while to work out how to get back to the toolbar page again.

4) I agree with a previous poster that I would have loved to see screenshots as I can't view videos at work

Lastly - looks like fun and an interesting idea, but it's not completely clear to me why I should want it. Perhaps you need to make that more clear on the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't have to enter a username and password, it's optional. If you don't provide an account, it will create a temporary Guest account, and use a cookie. It's entirely an optional process to type in a username and password. If you want to use your Toolbar across multiple browsers, or if you don't want your toolbar to reset if your cookie is destroyed, then you need to make an account.

You can try the toolbar without installing it by clicking "try it out".

I've found it very difficult to describe what the toolbar does without showing it. Perhaps you are right, I may need screenshots or a slideshow instead of a video.

You're absolutely right, the navigation is odd. The Toolbar might just become all of Dashler. I wanted to offer a start page that allowed you to search multiple sites, as well as instantly search anything you've bookmarked with Dashler. I might scrap it and make the whole focus the toolbar.

The compelling reason to use it is that it ties together the page you are viewing with a variety of shortcuts and tools. I frequently use it to reference a URL I'm viewing against, for example, Reddit. There's a shortcut called "is this on reddit?" which shows me reddit submissions for the URL I'm viewing. There's a shortcut to find which pages link to the page I'm viewing. A shortcut to find conversations across all social media sites for the URL I'm viewing (via BackType). I can search within the site with Google, or get traffic ratings from Quantcast, or see how it's been tagged on Delicious.

On top of that, it's an easy way to bookmark things, and manage your bookmarklets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had to spend a good deal of energy trying to figure out a) what it is your product actually does, and b) why I'd want to use it over my default built in google search box. Maybe you should try having a landing page with the example already launched and a video with sound nearby to make it quicker for users to 'get it'.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a huge issue that I've been trying to overcome. I've found it extremely difficult to explain what the toolbar does, and usually resort to just showing a demonstration of it. Once people see me use it in person, then they love it. If they don't see me use it in person, then they are generally very confused.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to explain what this toolbar does in a concise, easy to digest manner?

<comment><USER4> How about this?

Dashler is an attempt to re-imagine the toolbar minus all of the frustrations.

[Screen shot of dashler]

 _Be more productive:_ Using dashler is like putting a swiss knife in your pocket. You just whip it out when you need it. Get your job done quickly and easily inside of it. Smile and whip it back in. All without leaving the page and other messy stuff.

[Screen shot of search inside dashler]

and so on...

(I used this analogy because I'm using it with my bookmarks bar)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Splash page: <http://www.dashler.com/toolbar/>

How to use it: <http://www.dashler.com/toolbar/howto.php>

Browse shortcuts, drag and drop them into toolbar: <http://www.dashler.com/toolbar/browse/>

<comment><USER5> You may want to check your use of apostrophes.

For example, "to let" means "to allow": "The product lets you do stuff."

The word "let's" means "let us": "Let's install this today!"

To build trust, grammar and spelling should be impeccable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out the spelling mistake. It was a spelling mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel like I am doing something wrong here. Of the 150+ people that have so far opened the toolbar, only _five_ people have modified it in any way. Just five people have reordered the icons, added something, or deleted something. Why is this? Is it really _that_ bad? Is nobody curious enough to play with it?

<comment><USER11> It wasn't obvious to me how to delete icons. A permanent "trash" icon rather than a context sensitive "trash" icon might help. Also, you could add a note to the Dashler menu letting users know they can drag icons to reorder them.

Annotated screenshots might be more useful than a video. I think most HN users want to jump right in and use a tool rather than watch a video. Screenshots can be absorbed more quickly.

By the way, I like the pulsating "Get Dashler" button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'Dashler Toolbar is a bookmarklet that opens up a toolbar of shortcuts to various webpages, and allows for super easy bookmarking. '

I have a very limited attention span. You need a better opener than that - 'shortcuts to various webpages' is vague and doesn't give me anything beyond my existing browser bookmarks.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right. The most difficult thing I'm dealing with is explaining this thing. I'd be grateful if you could give it a test drive, or watch the video, and let me know of a better way to explain it.</comment></comment>


Crypto CEO Dies Holding Passwords That Can Unlock Millions in Customer Coins - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/crypto-exchange-founder-dies-leaves-behind-200-million-problem <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dies%20-explodes%20-Everest%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dies%20-explodes%20-Everest%20-Wright%20-Adams%20-Eating&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060985)

</comment><comment><USER4> Better get that brain into cold storage, may be worth a lot one day.

</comment><comment><USER5> How many more times can this be reposted?

The jig's up - the coins are moving around despite being in "chilly, but warming" conditions (cold storage private keys are creating new live transactions).

I believe he faked his death and the circumstances surrounding this episode continue to strike me as very suspicious.

<comment><USER6> Can you point at any of the addresses?

<comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060985)

<comment><USER7> This is not an answer to his question.

<comment><USER8> Click on the subreddit link in the comments...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Dunning-Krugerrands"</comment>


More Than Half of Doctors Get Industry Payments/Meals - <AUTHOR> https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/922816 <comment><USER2> As a doctor, this is disheartening. I think it's also important that people know that nurses and nurse practitioners don't have to disclose their payments/meals, and anecdotally it's much more pervasive in those groups.

<comment><USER3> I'm not convinced that meals are the issue. Payments/kick-backs are the issue. Meals are an exchange of "please listen to me for 30 minutes talk about our {product/solution} to these problems", and anecdotally, it's a time when these groups can question/challenge their product. I work in software, and I will listen to a vendor talk about their product for a "lunch and learn". It's a time to also get your questions answered amongst your peers.

> anecdotally it's much more pervasive in those groups.

I feel like that needs a source, but I know you mentioned it's an anecdote.</comment></comment>


PeerTube stable 1.0.0 - <AUTHOR> https://fediverse.party/en/post/peertube-stable-1.0.0/ <comment><USER2> Several similar posts recently, unfortunately not much discussion yet about why 1.0 is important.

[dupe] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196255)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=PeerTube%20points%3E20&sort=by...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=PeerTube%20points%3E20&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great, sadly I don't know how to push my favorite content creator to move from Youtube to Peertube.

<comment><USER4> It's probably not wise to move, but cross posting between YouTube and a personal PeerTube instance should be the route that content creators go at first.

Eventually with services like PeerTube, Patreon, Drip, it'd be nice if we one day saw more people in the general public not going to YouTube and instead to specific PeerTube instances to get their content.

I'd like to see YouTube turn into MySpace, and Google have to eat all their advertisement focus, false copyright claims, censoring content bullshit.

<comment><USER5> Anything that gets large enough to matter will have to deal with false copyright claims and censoring content bullshit, without the help of the Google legal department. Your future is a future of hosts constantly disappearing, due to copyright claims, child pornography, and not wanting to deal with the bullshit drama of running a server anymore. With a couple of surviving, but being way locked down and moderated. 21st century phpbb message boards, ephemeral as hell.

Not to say I don't approve of the software. A self hosting video platform that doesn't die at the first viral video is a powerful thing. But Youtube is Youtube because of network effects and monetization, not technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if video publishing is a great use-case for federated stuff like that. The pain points in video are streaming, storing and (maybe) following. There isn't so much discussion and replies and sharing going on on YouTube, for example, so this seems the wrong way to go.

I would think something in which each publisher hosts its own video on its own IPFS instance (of course, IPFS-powered viewers will rehost) and there's some basic indexing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've recently gone on somewhat of a Google purge in the last few weeks, but the one thing I can't seem to shake is YouTube.

These platforms are made and broken by their content. Even though I absolutely support the "federate all the things" mentality (I'm a Mastodon user), I fear that YouTube will remain the default platform for the foreseeable future until PeerTube offers something other than "federated YouTube".

I also worry that what will inevitably happen is that one service will become the de-facto standard for video sharing, and effectively monopolize the thing anyway, such as with Gmail.

I built a prototype system based on Kademlia that addressed the second point, but I don't know how I'd convince anyone to actually use it.

<comment><USER8> YouTube just needs to become worse. During adpocalypse and the censoring hype people were desperate to move and only vid.me was there. Now there's PeerTube. Some things still have to be done to make the user experience as smooth as possible, but simply being a competitor to YouTube is already quite powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The import through youtube-dl is the most awesome new feature recently added.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cheers to a decentralized world!</comment>


Benchmarking the AWS Graviton2 with KeyDB – M6g up to 65% faster - <AUTHOR> https://docs.keydb.dev/blog/2020/03/02/blog-post/ <comment><USER2> ~50% increase in performance at 20% reduction in cost / hr.

So ARM on Server all of a sudden went from a FAD to actually delivering cost / performance benefits that no one should ignore them.

Unfortunately that means DO and Linode will have an even harder time to complete.

<comment><USER3> The AWS Graviton2 is definitely something special, but its CPU cores are off- the-shelf ARM Neoverse N1 cores that anyone can license - Linode and DO can just buy e.g. the Ampere Altra for the same result.</comment></comment>


Do AI, Automation and the No-Code Movement Threaten Our Jobs? - <AUTHOR> https://www.i-programmer.info/programming/artificial-intelligence/12647-do-ai-automation-and-the-no-code-movement-threaten-the-software-developers-job.html <comment><USER3> While I love the idea of the "no-code" movement and I think it's important to lean on 3rd party services as much as possible for start-ups, it doesn't keep me up at night about my job security.

There are always new implications when we go up a layer of abstraction in software development. An AI can be trained to do what it's trained to do (within limits), but it can't see the big picture. It doesn't have human context. Never mind the technical complications of teaching an AI to understand the hundreds of tools, libraries, frameworks, platforms, and languages out there. A software developer also needs domain knowledge to be useful (domain knowledge, by the way, is mostly tribal and not represented by code).

AI will replace software developers once we develop General AI and no sooner.

</comment><comment><USER4> Articles like this are always popular. I think the rest of us know though that code isn't really the important part, its the way that developers think. After all... Most of us use IDEs or Code editors that do a lot of the coding for us, and yet you never hear "IDEs are replacing programming jobs"

</comment><comment><USER5> We should hope so, though it's hard to see it happening soon. Anything automatable should be, and a lot of "programming" today is really just simple assembly of building blocks -- a wonderful democratization of programming!

It will be a while before the high end of programming goes away. But that's been a minority since the 1970s at least.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, I think our jobs (as software developers) are threatened but the technologies that will replace what we do are still off the radar.

</comment><comment><USER7> Considering there's a viable business in Wix consulting, as in talking to customers and building the Wix site for them, I'd say we're still good.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I'm not too worried - programming as a profession may disappear, but it will be the very last profession to disappear. I'm not sure if that will happen in my lifetime or whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing - <USER2> I'm one of the last people working while everybody else collects UBI, I'm not sure I'm going to consider my life choices the correct ones.</comment></comment>


PilotPDG Procedural Dependency Graphs from SideFX - <AUTHOR> https://www.sidefx.com/products/pdg/ <comment><AUTHOR> To add a bit of background, this is a new 'Top' (for 'Task Operator') context in Houdini, a new class of licensing from SideFX and eventually it will be a new standalone application as well.

Currently you can try out PDG by installing Houdini 17.5. You can get apprentice (a free, non-commercial Houdini license) which is only limited in what resolution you can render, or generate render-intermediate files for (in other words it stops you from using a render farm but does not stop you from evaluating or learning almost anything about Houdini).

PDG is designed to be able to automate any processing task using a network/graph of nodes where the connections describe the dependencies between tasks, including complex dependencies. It can also be used to distribute the tasks to a renderfarm/network of computers.

PDG ships with nodes that can call on imagemagick, as well as ffmpeg, maya, etc and has readers for json/css/xml/etc (to help with turning random files into sets of tasks). The main language you would use with PDG would be Python.

There are several examples where it has been used to generate/prepare Neural- Net training pairs to feed into pytorch, and also to co-ordinate hyperparameter wedges and training rounds followed by network performance evaluation. See the Houdini17.5 launch video(s), the section where they make a terrain generator that is 50,000x faster than solving an erosion model (that also ships with Houdini).</comment>


Ask HN: WHy did you break mobile browsing? - <AUTHOR> Reading comments is impossible without constantly swishing the page left and right just to read the long lines of text.
Please undo this change, or fix it so we can read comments on our phones the way God intended.
Sheesh. <comment><USER2> Comments have become a flat list for me. It is no longer indented....

It is hard to follow a conversation now through threading.

Running Palemoon on Android with Phony plugin set to Desktop Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER3> This can be overcome (at least on my Nexus 6) by zooming out. Unfortunately it appears that you have to zoom out every time you enter the comment section.</comment>


Japanese researchers develop see-through goldfish - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091229/wl_asia_afp/sciencejapanbiologyanimal <comment><USER2> Even if you make the animal see through you can't see behind organs that block other organs. What would have to occur is to change the pigmentation of all of the organs also.

</comment><comment><USER3> You view breeding an animal to have certain traits and then selling it for personal profit more moral than dissecting a frog to help children understand more about life?

Disgusting in my opinion. You are clearly willing to put a price on life (selling the animal) but you care whether the animal stays alive or not?

The "You" refers the the animal right activists who are happy with this solution. Also to the "breeders"

<comment><USER4> Cutting up a goldfish or breeding in transparency are amoral. Whether you find it disgusting or not is a personal matter.

Unless of course I wanted to sell you something. At which point it would take prime importance, as it clearly did to these scientists.

(If they made a goldfish that glowed (like a night light) they would also have me in their market.)

<comment><USER5> "Prolume" is a biotechnology company whose core business is based upon newly discovered genes from deep water marine bioluminescent organisms. This has broad applications for biomedical research, drug discovery, and entertainment.

<http://prolume.com>

Not glowing goldfish but their BioToy division has some wickedly-cool science gifts.</comment></comment></comment>


Zoning Laws Transfer Wealth in the Wrong Direction - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-12/zoning-transfers-wealth-in-the-wrong-direction <comment><USER2> An unsurprising conclusion but I thought the primary purpose of Zoning Laws wasn't to transfer wealth in the right direction either?</comment>


Buying a Google Nexus One Unlocked is a Terrible Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.charleshudson.net/buying-a-google-nexus-one-unlocked-is-a-terrible-experience-fix-it-is-easy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CharlesHudsonsWeblog+%28Charles+Hudson%27s+Weblog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> This really has nothing to do with the Nexus One, or even Google Voice. It's simply a restriction T-Mobile places on the kind of account he has. Yeah, welcome to cell-phone service in the US. (I'm shocked we even have GSM providers here at all.)

Personally, I think this problem falls completely outside the scope of Google. He wants people calling a non-Google Voice number to get to his Google Voice voicemail. This is a feature that has to be provided by the network, because it needs to work when your phone is off. T-Mobile does not provide this feature unless you pay them money. He doesn't want to pay them money, so he doesn't get the feature.

It's an annoying arbitrary limitation (because T-Mobile's network supports this just fine; call my "real" T-Mobile number and you get my Google Voice voicemail), but it's not Google's fault. It's just how cell phone service works in the US; it's based around subsidized devices or really cheap featureless devices. Nobody has a featureful unsubsidized smartphone, so it's not a case that the providers handle. They disable features on the cheap subsidized phones because they want to upsell you to a subsidized phone, guaranteeing revenue for 2 years.

Anyway, if the author is setting up a new number for this phone, he can avoid the whole problem by only telling the new number to Google. Everyone else can call his Google Voice number directly, and then it doesn't matter where his real voicemail forwards to. (I stopped telling everyone my real number about 6 months ago, and now it gets no calls.)

Sadly, short of moving to another country, I don't think there's any way the author can get what he wants. (AT&T doesn't even allow the possibility of data use unless you have a multi-year contract.)

Edit: Since the author makes the inevitable iPhone comparison, it's worth pointing out that "Buying an unlocked iPhone is an impossible experience."

<comment><USER3> What about caller-id? Can you make it show your google voice number?

<comment><USER4> The Google Voice app on any android phone will do this.

The original post is about one really specific feature, completely under T-Mobile's control (and restriction in this case), and has nothing to do with Google or the Nexus or Google Voice, or anything else mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds like his trouble is with T-Mobile not supporting voicemail forwarding on FlexPlay plans, not anything to do with the Nexus One or even any unlocked phone.

It sucks, but T-Mobile not supporting call forwarding on FlexPlay plans isn't exactly a secret, he could have easily found this out before buying the phone (or before contacting support):

<http://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm23888.xml>

<comment><USER6> If it had occurred to him to look. Without already knowing, I can't think of any reason he should have figured out he should search for call forwarding options on FlexPay... the default assumption would be that everything would work fine, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps, but then after spending two minutes Googling and finding out the network he chose didn't support a feature he wants, he could have just called and gotten an RMA. Lesson learned and only a little time/money wasted.

I fail to see how this is the fault of his phone being unlocked, Google, Android or even T-Mobile. No phone in the world would have done what he wanted with the plan he got. It's like saying buying a Google Nexus One unlocked is a terrible experience because there's no free weekend calling.

<comment><USER6> I agree that this has nothing to do with the phone or Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand the point of this article. It sounds like the problem has nothing to do with the Nexus One, and everything to do with limitations in the TMobile pre-paid plans. Wouldn't he have the same problems trying to use Google Voice on _any_ phone while using the TMobile pre-paid plans?

</comment><comment><USER8> The author mentions that you still need a contract if you supply the device - is this true? I thought the whole point of the Even More Plus plan was to provide monthly service without a contract.

<comment><USER6> It is, but it's not exactly the same. They provide prepaid service (which Even More Plus is), but they seem to prefer that you sign a contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have Google Voice forwarding working perfectly on AT&T on my Nexus One. The problem must definitely be that the FlexPay plan has restricted voicemail, as everyone else is saying.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was thinking that I'd be able to buy a Nexus One and just seamlessly use Google Voice w/o having all the messy forwarding, etc. I guess not.

<comment><USER2> Don't tell people your phone's real number. Then you won't have to forward those calls.

<comment><USER10> I'm talking about the sms forwarding and the way it dials an inbound call when you use google voice to dial out... would have thought Google would merge in google voice features so when I received the nexus one in the mail I'd "log in" with my google credentials and the phone would then have my gv number.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that would be nice. But it's two clicks and 10 keypresses in the web interface to setup a new phone, so it's not a major loss.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A 1982 Commodore 64 web server, 64k RAM, 1 MHz CPU, running Contiki - <AUTHOR> http://c64web.com/

<comment><USER2> Due to the 1541 Floppy drive taking four seconds to display a page and hit's coming in every second or so, It's not able to send a page before another is requested. The C64 is still up and once the demand lessens web pages will be displayed.

Shane. cbm8bit.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Kids today forget that actually kids back the day ran BBSs with C64s which wasn't quite the internet but still pretty cool: <http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/07/my_commodore_64.html>

I also have very fond memories of dialing up Quantum Link which eventually became AOL: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link>

<comment><USER4> The first real programming I did was writing games and mods for the Color64 BBS I ran when I was about 12. It was actually an interesting and modern design, I now realize...its main loop was in assembly while the apps and forum and other stuff was in BASIC, making it, effectively, a scriptable system (live scriptable, even, since you could change things on the running system). It was also a somewhat multi-user system, in that a sysop could interact with users while they were on the system. The reason it wasn't all written in BASIC was that BASIC wasn't fast enough to serve a 2400 baud connection (I believe disk routines also had some reason for being in assembly, as well), much less the 38,400 modems supported by Swiftlink.

That old C64, and the BBS culture, shaped me and my life profoundly. I should probably send Greg Pfountz (the author of Color64) a nice thank you email, if I can figure out how to reach him.

The source and manual for Color64 were released years ago, and the manual is an interesting read in terms of understanding the architecture and seeing how advanced a system could be on such a tiny machine.

<comment><USER5> I wrote a full VT/ANSI BBS client for the C64 using 6502 assembler and it was one of the fastest around. I never commercialised it, but it became something of an underground hit in the UK at the time.

The software was noteworthy because it ran in graphics mode with its own set of fonts and also (just about) managed to juggle printing AND still handling the serial comms, which was made super-difficult by the way port interrupts and I/O were handled on the C64.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cache of the website from google. [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NI9QZ6s...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NI9QZ6sXecAJ:www.c64web.com/+http://c64web.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug: I interviewed Contiki's creator Adam Dunkels recently - [https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/438327/contiki_an_o...](https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/438327/contiki_an_operating_system_internet_things_/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised that there isn't a league table of tiny web servers out there on the Internet. Surely there's a subculture out there who are crazy enough to make a hobby of eking the last little bit of performance out of a Z80, 6800 or 6502? Tightly optimised assembly loops and hand crafted packets competing for the glory of surviving for the longest under a Slashdotting...

<comment><USER9> It is tough for many hackers to get their hands on the machines you mention there, but I could see something like that taking off with all the Raspberry Pis that are being delivered as we speak.

<comment><USER10> The Pi is a veritable supercomputer when compared to, say, the Sinclair ZX81 - A handful of kilobytes of RAM max, ~3MHz Z80 chip...

There is a ZX81-based web server public on the web, I won't link it here for obvious reasons. (Search for "Siggis ZX81 web server" if you really wish to see it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hackers love tiny web server devices.

Hackers are also great at overloading them.

<comment><USER12> ([http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~fuh/fcourse/norton4/paper/Got%20...](http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~fuh/fcourse/norton4/paper/Got%20a%20Match.htm))

> _It is based on the world's smallest implementation of a TCP/IP stack -- > which is implmented on a small 8-pin low-power microcontroller .. using a > mere 512 words of program ROM. If IPic can fit in a PIC, it can fit in just > about anything._

> _The TCP/IP code itself fits in about 256 bytes (12-bit), and the rest is > some extra salt-and-pepper and miscellaneous code._

> _The chip is a PIC 12C509A, running at 4MHz (Internal RC clock)._

> _implementing the IPic tiny TCP/IP stack,_

> _a HTTP 1.0 compliant web-server,_

> _a simple telnet server (for editing files on the chip),_

> _an 24LC256 i2c EEPROM_

I think someone has done something smaller by now.

\--- EDIT

Here are some other tiny devices.

(<http://d116.com/ace/>) - "the webACE: a Fairchild ACE1101MT8 microcontroller programmed as a Web server and containing two tiny web pages in its on-chip memory. Since the ACE1101MT8 is the smallest available microcontroller, I believe that this really is the World's Smallest Web Server."

(<http://www.magic-1.org/>) big, but home built CPU. "This web page is being served by a completely home-built computer: Bill Buzbee's Magic-1 HomebrewCPU. Magic-1 doesn't use an off-the-shelf CPU. Instead, its custom CPU is built out of ~200 74 series TTL chips."

(<http://kl.net/atari/>) no longer serving pages, this was a web server on an Atari 800

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Allow me to pimp my own small web server, built in 25k of RAM on top of the .NET Micro Framework. I put it in a robot so that I could control it from Safari on my iPhone. The web server serves a JS-heavy page which sends REST- like commands to the robot via Ajax.

Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtornTFcIfk>

</comment><comment><USER14> Should I find it ironic that it's down?

<comment><USER15> You would if you were Alanis Morissette. Otherwise, no.

<comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony>

Dramatic Irony seems to fit.

> Dramatic irony is a disparity of awareness between actor and observer: when > words and actions possess significance that the listener or audience > understands, but the speaker or character does not, for example when a > character says to another "I'll see you tomorrow!" when the audience (but > not the character) knows that the character will die before morning.

"I set up a web server!" when the audience (but not the character) knows that the web server will die before morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IIRC, you got something like a 10%-20% speedup on the C64 by turning off the video. Wonder if this setup has support for that?

<comment><USER18> If my memory serves me well this worked only with the PAL version of the C64. Because the video chip (VIC) was so tightly coupled with the main processor and RAM, the video refresh rate determined clock speed. The PAL C64 was clocked at 0.98 MHz, the NTSC version was 1.25 MHz, so US C64's were faster per se.

If you had a PAL version you could switch between both frequencies with a switch soldered to some place on the board (or maybe it was the user port), but of course you then lost video output as long as the switch was in the NTSC position.

 _EDIT: Wikipedia says the NTSC version was only 1.023 MHz, so I remembered that number incorrectly. Maybe you were referring to another trick that would give you a 10%-20% speed increase?_

<comment><USER19> The VIC-II "steals" CPU cycles every 8th scan line in order to load sprite & color data, what C64 folks call "bad lines". It has a BA (Bus Available) pin that's fed into the address decoder PLA. When BA is low, the PLA tells the CPU that memory is only available for writing.

If you disable the VIC-II's output with a poke, it doesn't need any "bad lines" to fetch data. The CPU then gets 25 scan lines' worth of time to crunch data each screen refresh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 341000 visitors since January last year?

</comment><comment><USER21> lol, "This webpage is not available"

<comment><AUTHOR> It was going strong when I submitted the link, albeit a bit slow, but I would guess the poor server is now taking quite a beating from being on the Hacker News front page.</comment></comment>