YC Series AA Equity Financing Documents - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html <comment><USER2> Will be nice when they release the new convertible notes they've been talking about and Paul G promised to release soon here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1657906>

</comment><comment><USER3> These are awesome but also not new-- YC released them a couple years ago. Here's some discussion on them, for example:

[http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/08/23/how-do-the- sa...](http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/08/23/how-do-the-sample-y- combinator-series-aa-financing-documents-differ-from-typical-series-a- financing-documents-or-whats-the-difference-between-seed-and-venture- financing-terms/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Releasing "standard financing documents" like this is a win in two ways -- it saves you from the legal costs of creating documents from scratch each time, AND provides an "objective" "standard" set of documents, so people are less likely to waste a lot of time and energy negotiating. Or, if they do negotiate, at least there is a fair starting point.

If foreign countries wanted to try to recreate Silicon Valley (as the Startup Chile people are doing), they should create equivalent financing docs under their own national laws and publish them. A well-understood legal environment with lawyers/etc. familiar with the process is one of the big advantages of Silicon Valley and the US.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a very good initiative.

A small note, what's the license terms of those documents? "Open-sourcing them" doesn't mean anything and all author rights are still reserved for those documents.

It would be more appropriate to add the terms of the licensing for the documents. For example, the CC-PD (to put them in public domain), GNU FDL or CC-BY-SA or CC-BY.

<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/> <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> A brief summary of important terms (IANAL, this is just a quick read):

\- This has 1x preference and no participation.

\- Pro-rata rights are available to some shareholders.

\- Ditto information rights.

\- The preferred has a veto over selling the company that can be exercised with a simple majority.

\- Lots of stuff not included: board seat, drag along, antidilution, redemption rights, employee option pool (!), restriction on sales, or a no- shop.

Overall mostly VERY favorable to the entrepreneurs, mostly by virtue of what's been left out. The one notable exception is the prefered's veto over an exit, which is a big ouch.

</comment><comment><USER7> We used these for our AA, helped save a lot of money.

<comment><USER8> Can you please explain how/why did it save you money?

<comment><USER7> It saved money since our lawyers (who were probably the same ones who wrote these) didn't have to start from scratch.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon now requiring Prime membership to buy popular Blu-rays - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1UE1R6VSVMXK7&cdThread=Tx2BC0NP5Y2RKMW <comment><USER2> Some interesting data about prime:

\- Estimated at 40 - 50 million members(1)

\- Estimated at $4 - 5 billion in revenue (1)

\- That revenue = ~15.5% of Amazon's total revenue, incidentally this is just subscription revenue, not the money spent by the customers on purchases(1)

\- Prime is growing 50% year over year (2)

\- Prime members spend almost 3x a year vs. average customer (2)

So in that light you have to imagine that:

a) Prime members are dramatically more profitable than the average customer.

b) Acquiring more prime members > some pissed off shoppers that don't want to take a free trial

So in that light it doesn't seem like a huge stretch that Amazon starts packaging Prime with discounts on certain products, especially on razor-thin margin products to push the model.

And of course you also have Jet.com getting huge press for essentially being a "subscription only" ecommerce site.

(1) [http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/prime-turns-amazon- profi...](http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/prime-turns-amazon-profitable- again/#.VVotWPlVhBc)

(2) [http://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-prime-memberships- grow-5...](http://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-prime-memberships- grow-53-percent-2014-despite-20-price-hike/)

(3) [http://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-jet-coms- goal-20-billion...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-jet-coms- goal-20-billion-volume-by-2020-1429752930)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure this is less painful for people who still have the 30-day trial available to them. To everyone else, it's a $99 minimum cost to buy a $10 product.

But it definitely seems like this, combined with the new Prime commercials I've been seeing is a big push to get their regular customers moved over to Amazon Prime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This does seem counterproductive to sales and conversion... I can understand wanting to offer different prices to Prime customers, but wouldn't you want to up-sell them with a discount?

      Divergent on Blu-Ray - $17, or sign up for Prime and get it for $13 with FREE SHIPPING!

How is this not a universally better offer?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For selected Blu-rays, the Buy button has entirely been removed in favor of a "Get Prime" button.

Currently you can see this at: Wreck-It Ralph, Divergent, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Expendables 3, Red 2, and more.

<comment><USER4> I am a Prime member and find this rather unpleasant - on Divergent, a DVD releases 9 months ago (viewed when signed out of my Amazon account): [http://i.imgur.com/EqPn2Dw.png](http://i.imgur.com/EqPn2Dw.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean, I get the exclusive pricing, which they've done on their hardware before. But to not even let you buy it from them unless you have Prime, even at a higher price? That irks me. And most users don't know where to find the third party sellers (which in most cases won't support super saver shipping and such).

<comment><USER5> It might be different out of the USA, but when I got into incognito mode and look at the Wreck-It Ralph Blue Ray I see this when clicking on more info:

[http://i.imgur.com/tFz75kd.png](http://i.imgur.com/tFz75kd.png)

The last line is a link to other sellers.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't require incognito mode. You can buy any of those "prime only" Blurays from other sellers new, and even fulfilled by amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would think they would be more effective if they let people add items to their cart, but didn't force the 'Get Prime' on them until they went to select delivery options.

'Get Prime' means I'll get it in 2 days (or sooner). Or, I can 'Get Prime' and stream it now.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like a good dark pattern, classic godaddy. Let them think they can do something until they've become highly invested in the process, then bait and switch for the real gotcha.

[http://darkpatterns.org/](http://darkpatterns.org/)

<comment><USER7> I didn't mean it to be a bait and switch, where they couldn't buy the product without Prime. I meant that seems like the step they should try to upsell.

The customer is already thinking "How fast can I get it?", so that's the time to say "You can get it tomorrow if you had a Prime account". Or, you wait 5 days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems to be similar to the Costco / Sam's Club membership model, but only on certain items. Costco's profits are largely from memberships, as items are sold close to cost. I imagine Amazon is selling these items at lower margin to the Prime members.

</comment><comment><USER10> And I thought the local cinema here in Kyoto was crazy for only allowing paying members to buy a movie ticket more than 2 days in advance!</comment>


Nearby stellar explosions could have killed off large animals - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/did-supernovas-kill-off-the-monster-shark-megalodon-20190115/ <comment><USER2> And passing through a local galaxy spiral arm...

[http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/55-our-solar- system...](http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/55-our-solar-system/the- sun/the-sun-in-the-milky-way/207-how-often-does-the-sun-pass-through-a-spiral- arm-in-the-milky-way-intermediate)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, so they're saying[1] 1 Sv every 30 years. That's 33 mSv a year. Meanwhile, according to [2], "160 mSv: chronic dose to lungs over one year smoking 1.5 packs of cigarettes per day, mostly due to inhalation of Polonium-210 and Lead-210". I'm pretty sure heavy smokers are still reproducing successfully.

Even if the muon-dose theory is true, it doesn't amount to an extinction-level event for a single species. Cancer takes time to develop; sometimes it doesn't. When the muon flux goes away, life would resume as normal. It might contribute to an extinction event already in progress, but that is not the same thing. And there is a lot of if, if, if in this hyopthetical.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09367.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09367.pdf)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Dose_examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Dose_examples)

<comment><USER4> "Larger and longer-lived organisms will experience a greater relative increase in radiation dose" 30 mSv does not have that high of a risk to a human, but with 50+ times as much tissue the cancer risks would be vastly higher for whales. A 1% risk in humans might be a 50% risk in a whale species.

Further, specific tissues receiving radiation only increases the risk to those tissues. A sunburn does not increase your risk of lung cancer. Making a x mSv exposure to your lungs less risky than that same exposure to your entire body.

PS: Heavy smokers also don't start in infancy. If they did they would be dying ~20 years sooner.

<comment><USER3> If your conjectures were true elephants would be dying of cancer all the time. In fact elephants are much more cancer resistant than humans due to differing biology. The whole "more tissue, more disease" part of this is bunkum.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree, but we lack direct evidence for how resident these animals where to radiation.

Water is a great shield vs most kinds of radiation as is their bulk which means these animals may have significantly lower resistance. Worse they would still be getting ~1SV over 30 years at ~1km below the oceans let alone the few feet of their bodies. Which is vastly above background radiation levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > mutations killed megalodon and other big animals

Well, first of all sharks are famous for being extra-resistent to developping cancer. They are superconservative in its structure and did not changed practically its shape in the last 100 millions of years. If there are a creature that is practically un-mutable are sharks.

Second, the theory claims that big sharks where killed by muons but whales where somehow respected. Why the animals able to find refuge in deep waters (that stop muons) were wiped, but the animals that need to remain in the ocean surface are alive?

Third, trees are also huge organisms, for some reason weren't wiped. Why?

and fourth, big animals trive in Chernobill even with radiation.

I think that as hypothese is interesting but it has a lot of loose ends to explain.</comment>


Seattle City Council Members Visit New York to Warn About Amazon HQ2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-07/seattle-city-council-members-visit-nyc-to-warn-about-amazon-hq2 <comment><USER2> How common is it for City Council members to travel to cities across the US? As a Seattleite I find it a massive waste of taxpayer money to go fund Lisa Herbold's NY homecoming (she is from NY).

<comment><USER3> I was expecting it to be Sawant out preaching the evils of Amazon... That said, it seems especially silly for Seattle to think Amazon's impact on NYC will be anything like what happened in Seattle.</comment></comment>


Portugal drug law shows results ten years on, experts say - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/portugal-drug-law-show-results-ten-years-experts-180013798.html

<comment><USER2> This policy should make sense to anyone who has ever had any involvement with someone with an addiction. Generally the addiction is a symptom of other problems, often mental illness, that if treated appropriately would help prevent a slide back into addiction.

I would be interested to see a comparison of the total cost of this policy contrasted against, for example, the US style. Certainly I would expect the initial outlay to be greater in the Portuguese style system but as it gets people out of the system for good the lifetime cost should be lower. While I don't like to have everything measured with a monetary cost, social and moral duties are important, it would make it an easier sell to law makers and their constituents.

<comment><USER3> If you talk to an economist, they'll find a way to put monetary values on "social and moral duties"; there are all sorts of tricks for teasing them out. Money is just a score, a way of measuring and quantifying things (and of course, if you're not measuring, it's not science, in so far as social science is ever science).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read this recently:

> That fewer young people are trying drugs in Portugal may be the case > ("Radical drug law could be imported to Britain", April 22). But this simply > reflects a Europe-wide trend, nowhere more evident than in the United > Kingdom. The alarming Europe-wide increase in young people's illicit drug > use between 1995 and 2003 has come to a halt and is decreasing — in Portugal > by rather less than the European average.

[http://dpnoc.ca/2011/05/01/portugal-drug-direction- praised-f...](http://dpnoc.ca/2011/05/01/portugal-drug-direction-praised-for- all-the-wrong-reasons/)

Now I'm fairly skeptical of any article of this sort written by someone from an organization who has "oppose legalization of drugs" as one of their principles, but I've checked some of their facts against the UNODC World Drug Report and they seem sound. Now either I'm missing something, or the UNODC report is wrong, or there's something else not being taken into account. Can anyone shed some light?

</comment><comment><USER5> Not really surprising. Rehabilitation and re-socialization are common for treatment of other criminals in Europe too. It makes much more sense than "getting revenge" by locking people up to "punish them", especially if the crime they committed is largely victim-less (in case of drug abuse its the offender who is actually the victim at the same time).

<comment><USER6> Why should drug users even have to be forced to take medical 'treatment' if they have not otherwise committed any other crimes.

The problem with rehabilitation is that it places people at the mercy of subjective assessment for _unlimited time_. In the case of prison at least there is a definite term, but those undergoing rehabilitation may never be released (they may simply never be deemed 'cured').

But note that we are talking about an otherwise victimless crime here.

<comment><USER7> Doing illegal drugs may be victimless, but I can pretty much guarantee that an addict has at committed other crime to support their habit (like theft or prostitution).

Furthermore, study the organizations that supply the drugs (Hell's Angels for instance), and consider the amount of crime they perpetrate, directly related to the drug trade. For instance, murder (turf war), theft, various building code violations (grow ops are typically fire hazards), etc.

Bottom line, it takes a lot of crime to support a single addict.

<comment><USER8> There are millions of prescription drug abusers living in upper middle class suburbs; are they overwhelmingly guilty of prostitution and supporting a crime infrastructure too?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I live in Portugal and know many doctors. The fact that drug addicts are now able to use public health services without fear of arrest is huge.

</comment><comment><USER10> The problem with exuberant cries--otherwise gratifyingly progressive--to import this tactic into the US is the implication that such policies can be transplanted hermetically, in an acontextual (and perhaps ahistorical) way.

The feasibility of successfully recasting habitual hard drug use as a medical problem would, in reality, depend on a huge constellation of other independent features of socioeconomic policy and culture. I think these features are not present here as they are there, or in the necessary proportion.

For one, without a government healthcare sector and universal coverage, a question will immediately arise in the US that does not arise quite so readily or with such urgency in Portugal: "Who is going to pay for these addicts' treatment?"

I think that's just one example. There are many other things about the somewhat more raw and brutal existence in America as a mentally ill--or otherwise chronically ill--person that might yield unsuccessful, or at least orthogonal results.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Who is going to pay_

Treating people costs less than imprisoning them.

<comment><USER11> Definitively. These places (I know on of them) have almost no expenses with personnel; the people interned there do all the work - including growing vegetables for food, although they obviously get other kind of food from outside - and there are no guards or anything like that.</comment></comment></comment>


Connect Your App to Multiple Messaging Channels with the W3C Open Standard - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/broidHQ/integrations <comment><AUTHOR> Broid integrations unify 18 messaging plateforms integrations with W3C standard (Activity Streams 2.0). All the features (location, image, video, diaporama) are supported. We would really appreciate if you have any feedback on it.</comment>


Show HN: I made an app that brings smiles to everyone - <AUTHOR> http://trollaroid.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> PS: If anyone has tips on mobile marketing, I have open ears. I've done everything from design to development myself, and now I'm trying to figure out how to get it sold.</comment>


Daily Mail Used My Photos Without Permission and Without Payment - <AUTHOR> http://gakuranman.com/daily-mail-used-my-photos-without-permission-and-without-payment/

<comment><USER2> Oddly enough I'm one of the photographers listed in one of BJP articles (Kate Middleton related). My experience of the situation was that they were willing to negotiate but admitted no blame, I priced high and negotiated down to a reasonable settlement.

The interesting thing is I'm in favour of copyright review, I believe the current system as it stands is inherently flawed, for the single reason that it favours the biggest boy in the gang rather than the creator, so whilst the law is _technically_ on your side it can be tricky to navigate.

<comment><USER3> That's pretty much what happened to me as well. At first they wanted their standard fees per photo of £40 for the first, £20 for the second and £10 for any after that. Those fees were terrible, and I was successful in getting a lot better rate. I ended up waiving my unauthorised usage fee and setting for a a reasonable amount that I would have been happy with if they had contacted me in the first place. Still, several people are saying that I should have stuck to my guns and demanded my original invoice and that I was too lenient. Perhaps a learning experience for me...

<comment><USER2> I was also successful in getting a better rate, but I invoiced very high (£1k) and negotiated down to a reasonable rate for both parties, but I was told afterwards I could probably have pushed my luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is strange that he is counting on the support of HackerNews which usually isn't a strong supporter of copyright. Maybe things are different because the victim is a small independent artist and the offender is big company, and a tabloid on top of that?

Maybe the underlying pattern simply is supporting David against Goliath?

Edit: For those who downvote me, please take the time to write a reply.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> It is strange that he is counting on the support of HackerNews ..._

I find it a continuing source of confusion that people can't distinguish between a person who submits an item, and the author of the item being submitted.

I submitted this item. I did not take the photos.

The person who took the photos did not submit this to HackerNews.

<comment><USER5> TBF to the GP, the author updated the post with the following:

> Please keep up the support by spreading the word, especially to large social > media sites like HackerNews, Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon and any other media > outlets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah - noted. I've seen this confusion many, many times, and possibly jumped the gun in the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it odd that the photographer started to complain when the article was apparently pulled. If I ran a publication and there was a copyright dispute relating to one of my author's articles, then I would pull it offline until the author could prove the content was licensed.

<comment><USER7> Where are you seeing this? From what I read in the blog entry, they pulled the article at least two hours after he published the original complaint.</comment></comment>


Plan for 5 Years of Lockdown - <AUTHOR> https://boffinism.com/covid-19-lockdown-plan-for-5-years-of-lockdown/ <comment><USER2> I don't think so. The world at large will much rather take the death count than five years of mass unemployment, no one getting basic medical services and cancer screenings … and there is the whole part where economic output is sorta needed to pay for things (like rent and food for the 20%+ unemployed).

My own mother still needs urgent dental surgery. It's going on two months now.

You hear the trite content free version of this tradeoff in people whining "you just want to protect your 401(k)". Imagine after five years, all 401(k)s are wiped out, most hospitals are bankrupt for lack of running any profitable procedures, and the US is throwing together some emergency single-payer system ... but it is struggling with recruitment because there's not enough tax revenue to get the budget to pay enough doctors. (You want to sell bonds? Who has money to buy bonds?) How many die in this scenario?

<comment><USER3> > most hospitals are bankrupt for lack of running any profitable procedures

That's a very American problem due to having private hospitals...

<comment><USER4> It's still a problem, though. "Haha, told you so." is not a solution.

Besides, publicly funded hospitals and healthcare systems in general need money, too. If there's hardly any tax income anymore because there's hardly any taxable income anymore funds for publicly funded hospitals will dry up, too.

<comment><USER5> In the American case, we might have to end one or two of the many foreign wars that we are waging, but we would get by.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A 2020 A.D. blog post. Title has nothing to do with the content and the content itself is a bunch of speculations and pessimistic predictions that are so far not based on any scientific evidence.

<comment><USER7> Without commenting on the merits of the article content...

> Title has nothing to do with the content

You might be misparsing the title in the same way that I originally did. It's not "[this is the] plan for 5 years of lockdown", but "[you should] plan for 5 years of lockdown" which is a correct summary of the position argued by the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think humanity is going to learn to accept coronavirus, just like we have accepted pneumonia or the flu. There will always be some cases and some deaths every year. The uncomfortable question is when those numbers are low enough that its not worth it to quarantine anymore.

Lockdown has very real costs. We are seeing crazy unemployment, a huge spike in calls to suicide hotlines, and very likely an increase in all-cause mortality as people are unable to get regular preventative care. Someone who would have had that weird lump checked out last year isn't going to right now.

We are already seeing protests pop up all over the place. And as most places have seen daily new cases start to fall, lockdown will become unenforceable as people get too restless.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why should anyone trust an article like this written by someone who knows nothing about infectious diseases?

</comment><comment><USER10> Great job with a sensationalist unrealistic title. This isn't a scenario grounded in fact and it's written by a speculative software engineer. Not a medical professional or epidemiologist.

<comment><USER11> Sooo this post is flagged, but patio11's conspiratorial epic gets a long day of front page discussion. I'd prefer hn flagged _any_ amateur covid19 policy discussion, it's just a bit embarrassing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The thing about viruses, especially Corona viruses is that they mutate. The chance of mutation grows with infection rates.

So letting the virus run its course is not as simple as people would like to believe. If we do let the virus infect 60 to 70% of the population, we vastly increase the risk of a much worse pandemic.

Personally I think that the people who want to re-open the most are rich people who realize that they stand to lose a lot of money both by not getting the income from an active economy and secondly by higher taxes and asset nationalization from governments who are going to have to support lost income and social services.

My final thought is that many people now perceive the virus as mainly targeting elderly, poor, frail, drug addicted and ethnic communities; which sadly many people consider to be acceptable losses.

<comment><USER13> It could mutate to become less deadly although I'm not sure what pressures would cause that. The Spanish flu got worse in the second wave, it killed many more otherwise healthy 25-35 year olds.

<comment><USER14> The evolution dictates that it should become less deadly because dead host mostly means dead virus and live host may mean more live viruses.

<comment><USER15> Except it's showing to mutate pretty damn fast and some of the mutations are way deadlier, don't know which 'came first' or how that proves one way or the other that it'll get worse or better.

The are currently > 30 known mutations: [https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/coronavirus-has-mutated- into-a...](https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/coronavirus-has-mutated-into-at- least-30-different-strains-study/)

But a lot of deadliest viruses kill fast and are less viral, so only way to spread is become less lethal.

This virus has the luxury of being both deadly AND extremely viral (because it takes it's time killing people).

Even if you don't die, nobody knows the long term effects of the virus on lungs, kidneys, heart, etc...

So, while a lot of diseases do mutate to be less severe, that doesn't need to be the case with Sars-cov-2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Countries that end their lockdowns early will be seen as a problem and we will see travel bans.

<comment><USER17> In the 80s, the USA was an exporter of HIV because Reagan refused to address the "gay plague".

I'm laying odds that the USA will be an exporter of COVID cases around the world. Assuming the rest of the world will accept travelers from the USA without mandatory quarantine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't be ridiculous. There's no way the country could afford that, nor would people agree to it.

There's no way a lockdown like this will go on for more than a year _even if it means more people die_.

<comment><USER19> You've been down voted but I agree with your position. Humans will prioritize their well-being over others survival; this is an unpleasant truth. I think everyone has a different threshold of what they will accept & rationalize, but at some point they will no longer shoulder personal hardship for the greater good. They will collapse their support to a sub-tribe, like country, community or family and choose "us" over "them", even though the differentiation is very recent.

<comment><USER20> I think this is not true and lot of people are living out of moral superiority, fake altruism, based on the ego. They want to be a cultural hero by saying stuff that imply moral superiority and people with other opinions are evil!

There are good reasons to be sceptical about locking down a complete economy, but everybody is afraid to speak out, because they know they will be destroyed by the moralists!

The communists believed in altruism... they thought they were right and people around them evil. The human mind is corrupt. Some people simply live in a fantasy world. The christians, communists and fascists had 1 thing in common... they thought they were right and used the truths as a weapon against other people.

Speaking about other people as "evil", is sometimes projection or an egoic illusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Five years is not realistic. More likely is one to two years of lockdowns broken up with periods of 'relief' to allow a degree of economic recovery.

The supply chain will just disintegrate otherwise.

<comment><USER22> I actually think the supply chain largely has been upended. That's the real story here...

I tried to buy a part for my dryer two weeks ago and it was going to take >2 months. I ended up then trying to buy a dryer and the only one I could purchase was already in store. If I tried to order one again it was >2 months (on an unknown timeline).

China is having massive production issues, there are import fees/inspections and now a 2 week quarantine on incoming goods.

It's all kinds of messed up and now there's a good reason to change production location.

<comment><USER23> Rumor has it that power plants are having a hard time getting replacement parts, too.

I expect, though, that these sorts of things will get sorted out. For one, no government is going to be keen on letting people who are confined to home and dependent on computers and the Internet to keep their little corner of the economy going go without power for long just because it's suddenly next-to- impossible to get some special precision bracket from the overseas factory that got the contract to make it back in 2005, while at the same time the domestic economy has hordes of ex-machinists who aren't _quite_ ready to retire yet yet, and would be more than happy to quit their jobs as greeters at the local big box store in order to return to a job that pays more _and_ reduces their risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

Worst case scenario, perhaps we won't return to the "easily availability of basically everything so everything's basically disposable because the global supply chain is so fluid that it's easier to buy new broken crap than replace old broken crap" that we enjoyed so far this millennium. But I doubt it'll get much worse than the level of availability that developed economies enjoyed when I was a kid. Which is still pretty good. It would take a bit longer to rejigger the design of consumer products so that they return to using more standardized parts that can easily be stocked locally instead of all this fragile, disposable, special snowflake industrial design. But I could see that shifting fairly quickly, too, if things are still looking bad in 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This author is asserting 5 years of lockdown but gives no reasons why specifically 5 years. They talk about the possibility of no vaccine working and herd immunity not working if the immune window is too small, etc. But how does that equate to 5 years of lockdown? Why 5 years and not just say indefinitely then? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER25> Also I don't think the global economy can afford 5 year lockdown, it will cause starvation among with other cause of death, which might end up 'killing' more than covid-19

<comment><USER26> No idea why it would be 5 years. But a lockdown would not result in starvation. Why would it? We "only" lock down social life (bad enough with all kinds of negative impacts on people, society and economy), but the food supply won't brake down. Why would it? All necessary things will be kept open.

<comment><USER27> > All necessary things will be kept open.

Worldwide, that's not to be taken for granted. Here in Russia, the police is sometimes stopping agricultural workers from planting their crops because of the lockdowns. (Source in Russian: [https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4311038](https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4311038))

<comment><USER13> We've had a few incidents of idiocy in the far reaches of the state but it soon gets dealt with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So how about 2months of lockdown every 6mths? How sustainable is that? How about 2mths every year?

How long before we realise its not going away? At the 3 year mark when no successful vaccine is found???

</comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for sharing and thinking through the worst case which will possibly help to think what other measures we can take in order to keep ourself survive through this pandemic

</comment><comment><USER30> Sign me up for early vaccine trials then.

<comment><USER13> I don't think I'll be rushing to volunteer. Things done in a hurry have a tendency to go wrong.

<comment><USER30> Those developing vaccines are professionals and are going through all the necessary steps. Phase I human clinical trials are already 6-7 weeks in for the Moderna vaccine. By the time there's enough vaccine for Phase III trials, I'll be comfortable enough with the risk. Besides, by volunteering early, I'm doing a service to others. Any additional risk I'd be taking would be buying- down risks for others later, so I'd be happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sorry to be saying this but the post seems so smug and smarter-than-thou.

> I know. I know. No one wants to hear this.

> But, but… vaccine?

Would this kind of antagonism really convince anyone?

</comment><comment><USER31> At some point you have to assume people get sort of religious satisfaction out of being pessimistic.

God ("nature"?) is punishing us, because we have sinned.

There are so many variables in play right now, which we don't know about.

Things that could help us are:

* unrecognised infections make the mortality compute to flu levels

* we find a vaccine timely

* we find treatment timely

* we find specifics about transmission and can avoid it with low-impact responses instead of lockdown

* there are explanations for why it's so regionally different (NYC/Italy vs. Singapore/Germany)

* some sort of seasonality

* we find more specific risk factors which can be remidiated (air pollution?)

Probably more.

Why point out it could all go bad? That seriously can't count for an intelligent assessment of the situation. It's an expression of fear. Why don't you read the optimistic reading more often? It's almost like people think fear was virtuous.

<comment><USER32> > Why don't you read the optimistic reading more often? It's almost like > people think fear was virtuous.

Being pessimistic is not the same thing as being afraid. Being cautious is not the same thing as being afraid. Acting on negative prediction does not mean one is acting out of fear.

<comment><USER31> Being pessimistic just means having negative bias.

Being cautious is emotionally neutral, we should strive for it, for sure.

Acting only on negative predictions without weighing in positive predictions or the uncertainty of the original prediction is stupid and unscientific, and likely the result of fear. That you see all the time right now.

Where do people discuss the postponed cancer operations and their casualties, what is the cost of livelihoods destroyed, like yoga studios and hair dresser small businesses? How do you even measure it? Who's stating their opinion on coronavirus lockdown, while also adding the disclaimer about their steady and safe monthly salary as a conflict of interest? People who want to reopen don't care about the "money," they care about economical survival, most probably in most cases.

<comment><USER32> I can do this too. Being optimistic just means having positive bias.

My point was about optimistic bias you get when you frame every discussion about negative aspects of something as fear. Which is exactly what you was doing there. This rhetorical trick:

> Why point out it could all go bad? That seriously can't count for an > intelligent assessment of the situation. It's an expression of fear. Why > don't you read the optimistic reading more often? It's almost like people > think fear was virtuous.

Buying this, there is no way to rationally point out that things could be bad. You just ruled out arguments of the people you disagree with without engaging with them. Only optimistic prediction or information is allowed in rational discussion.

> Where do people discuss the postponed cancer operations and their > casualties, what is the cost of livelihoods destroyed, like yoga studios and > hair dresser small businesses? How do you even measure it?

I distinctively remember those being discussed. You can discuss them. I am not saying that these should not be discussed.

But they are not optimistic. They are pessimistic and if I wanted to frame them as "fear", I could. And it would be equally dishonest rhetorical trick.

<comment><USER31> The "rhetorical trick" is your construction here, possibly even unaware. I didn't argue for taking only positives into account. I could go on an say you use the straw man fallacy against me now, but let's skip that part and talk like grownups.

I'm arguing for balanced assessment of risk and opportunities.

Because that's what is meant with "why point out it all go bad" part. The lack of counter arguments. You created the "only good" bit in your mind.

I'd challenge you to perceive opposing views not as bad faith, deceptive or dishonest. The world has far less of those types than current media and political climate makes you think.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Retina MacBook Pro review as a Mac Pro owner - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2012/08/26/retina-mbp-review <comment><USER2> "The long-standing performance gap between the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro is now effectively moot"

That's what happens when the Mac Pro product line is allowed to stagnate and run 2-3 year old parts. The difference is infact moot, and that's a damn shame. =[

<comment><USER3> A good friend of mine that really wanted a modern OS X workstation went the Hackintosh route. He built a machine that's not only much more powerful than the current line of Mac Pros but also considerably cheaper.

I can understand why Apple is neglecting this segment for financial reasons but I do think they're slowly losing their exclusive cachet with the creative set.

Edit: misspelling.

<comment><USER4> Check out this guide, it's got a full walkthrough for purchasing the parts for and assembling Hackintoshes of various calibers: [http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2012/08/building-customac- buy...](http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2012/08/building-customac-buyers- guide-2012.html)

<comment><USER3> I assumed that building and maintaining a hackintosh machine would be a pretty major pain in the ass but my friend says it was no more difficult than building a bespoke Windows machine as long as you did a tiny bit of up-front research on parts.

<comment><USER4> It's no different from building any other PC, except for the restrictions on parts, like you said.

Nowadays you don't even have to worry much about that - there are high quality, in-depth guides that will walk you through the entire process step- by-step, if you need them: [http://lifehacker.com/5841604/the-always- up+to+date-guide-to...](http://lifehacker.com/5841604/the-always-up+to+date- guide-to-building-a-hackintosh)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently picked up a retina MBP for work-related purposes, and it's a good machine, but I wouldn't review it nearly as breathlessly as this particular review does.

It's attractive, it's got a great build quality, and it's decently fast. I can't really tell the difference (in terms of "omg, teh pixels are invisible") between the Retina display and my HP Envy's 1920x1080 screen, but that might be because I don't sit with my face six inches from the screen. Text looks better on the MBP, but I credit most of that to the fact that OS X's font engine just blows Linux's (I run Fedora 17 on the Envy) out of the water.

Despite that, my daily driver is still my Windows desktop, running an i5 at 4.3GHz, with an SSD for my OS and programs, 2TB of magnetic storage, and 16 GB of RAM. That particular setup ran me well under $1k. My actual dev happens on a Fedora whitebox on my LAN, again with an i5 and 16GB of RAM, which I built for about $400.

The retina MBP is a nice piece of tech, but it's not the orgasm-inducing Jesus-box that some people seem to think it is. I probably couldn't justify the cost of one versus the competitors if I were buying it for personal use.

<comment><USER6> Well yes, of COURSE you could build a desktop for less money than a laptop. Unlike some people I've seen at Starbucks though, I don't feel comfortable lugging desktops from place to place. Not to mention it'd take up a bunch of space while I'm trying to get work done on the flight in economy class.

<comment><USER5> There are plenty of comparable laptops for far less money, too. It's not like the only options in the laptop market are $2200+ MBP or nothing.

I like the MBP. It's a great piece of hardware. I don't think the retina display is the quantum leap in laptop technology that it's made out to be. I don't feel any particular need to justify my purchase by citing the need to have top-end specs, because if I need maxed out specs, I can get them in my desktop for an order of magnitude less money. I enjoy working from the comfort of my desk with my big monitors and my mechanical keyboard and my nice speakers (and frankly, dislike working elsewhere without them), so laptop vs desktop is a moot point for me.

<comment><USER7> > There are plenty of comparable laptops for far less money, too.

What do you mean by "comparable"? The only decent quad core laptops in the same weight class are the Vaio Z, Panasonic CF-B11, and 14" EliteBook -- and with those (or any heavier modern computer) you have a 16:9 aspect ratio. If you need maxed out specs and don't want to work from a desktop, these are the kinds of computers you want to get. Take a Thinkpad T520, remove the optical drive, give it a 1920x1200 screen and the X1 Carbon's trackpad and you'll have a comparable laptop. Or if Panasonic would just go for the 16:10 screen ratio, you wouldn't even have to drop the optical drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For another unbiased review, we go live to John Gruber!

<comment><USER9> Indeed! "Scrolling sucks but here's a quote from another review on why that's OK". I'm not saying competitors' offerings are better, nor am I failing to realize that's just _his opinion_ but come on, this is clearly from someone who's only bought Macs for years. Just saying, lets stick to the larger grains of salt, and upvote actual professional reviews instad.

<comment><USER10> Where did someone say it was OK? As far as I can tell they just explained the reasons it occurred.

<comment><USER9> That's really not the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm always intrigued by these claims that you can get something basically the same as a Mac for much cheaper. When I've investigated in the past (but in the OS X era---it seems generally accepted that Macs were sold at a hefty premium in the 80s and 90s), I've generally found the price difference to by in the ~10% neighborhood.

I just priced out a grossly-similar laptop to the Macbook Pro Retina at Dell's website, and came up with a Latitude E6520 with a price of $1931. Less than a Macbook Pro Retina by about 15%. The Latitude has a slightly faster processor, a graphics chip with half as much video memory, no retina display, weighs ~1.5 lbs more, and (I suspect) lacks Apple's all-around build quality.

However, a System 76 laptop with similar specs as the MBPR costs $1153. But that's with only the Intel HD 4000 graphics (no NVIDIA chip), and, again, no retina display.

So, I don't know. Can anyone offer some insight into why the System 76 system is so inexpensive compared to the base-model MBPR and the Latitude above?

I know that Dell sells, for instance, Inspirons, which are much cheaper than Latitudes, but my understanding is that these machines are essentially composed of whatever components can be bought most cheaply this week, and so they pose maintenance headaches, because it may be difficult to obtain a component that dies a year after purchase. Also, my personal experience with Inspirons is that they have very poor build quality.

</comment><comment><USER12> Intel's roadmap for how long it'll take for everything to go retina: (png)

[http://media.bestofmicro.com/M/F/333879/original/Intel- Roadm...](http://media.bestofmicro.com/M/F/333879/original/Intel-Roadmap- to-4K.png)

</comment><comment><USER13> I just recently got hold of an older MacBook pro after years of Windows/Linux laptops and I got to say that I've been really impressed by the both the hardware and the user experience that's created through the amazing touchpad.

I feel that the OS itself might be a bit too heavy/slow for what I'm used to, and so I'd love to have the option to install Ubuntu on a MBP Retina and still have that awesome user experience. It's my understanding that getting any distro to work perfectly with Apple's laptops has been a neverending uphill battle.

I read that Gnome and Unity don't quite scale properly for the new resolution and I also don't think you get quite the same awesome gesture-based navigation you expect from every app running on OS X.

One can dream though. It would be unfortunate to let such wonderful hardware go to waste. I've always been that guy, carrying a wireless mouse around with me because all of the laptop trackpads were absolutely atrocious, always in the way, always accidentally clicking for me when my palms would be over them. After trying a MBP, I finally figured out why I would never see Apple customers carry around mice.

</comment><comment><USER14> This.

"I used it at the scaled "1680 × 1050" resolution the entire time, since the native "1440 × 900" resolution isn't enough space..."

Now, granted, I've only used it for 15 minutes at the store and not a week straight, but the poor IMHO software scaling required to get more "usable" space is a huge bummer for me. (I went for the high-res 1680 × 1050 display when I bought my latest MBP last year to get the greater screen real estate.)

<comment><USER15> This is my main issue too, but I played around at the Apple Store with scaled resolution and decided to go for it.

<comment><USER14> And how is it in day to day use? What display settings are you using?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe you should get another MacBook Pro Retina and use it as an external monitor.

</comment><comment><USER17> $2,200 for a laptop? Post-purchase rationalization anyone?

<comment><USER18> I spent 4k for maxed out ram and a larger SSD. I'll spend more time interfacing with this machine than with anything else in my life over the next 3 years. I advocate spending a lot on your Computer, chair and bed, and spending little on your car.

<comment><USER19> It seems a good portion of the HN crowd is obsessed with spending more money than necessary. I totally get the "Put money into things that matter" idea, but overpaying for outdated specs is not some honorable trait.

<comment><USER20> Because a computer is nothing more than a list of specs right? It's the same quality logic behind "My number is bigger than his, so therefore my computer is better."

<comment><USER19> > Because a computer is nothing more than a list of specs right?

What else would it be? If my computer is faster, cheaper, and lets me accomplish the same things in the same amount of time, how could it be worse?

<comment><USER21> Oh. There are a thousand ways it could be worse.

<comment><USER19> Could you share some? I use a MBP at work, and if I'm not "doing it right", I'd like to know how I can get the most out of my machine.

<comment><USER22> It's all about getting the most of _your time using the machine_ , unless you're doing CPU-intensive work (and why wouldn't you offload that to a server farm?). Convenience, reliability, usability, efficiency, etc.

After obsessing over pc parts since childhood, these days I don't give a shit about specs and am happier for it - unless I'm trying to play Counter-strike, even then I only wish I could use my PS3 and forget about it :)

<comment><USER19> My work MBP is fast enough for what I do. I don't need 16gig 2133 DDR3, or an i7. My problem, though, is that you're paying PC i7 level price for an i3/5, for example.

<comment><USER20> That's like saying by buying a Smart Car you're paying V6 price for a four cylinder engine. In other words, you couldn't be missing the point more.

<comment><USER19> I guess I just view things from a different perspective, not having the disposable income of the average HNer (where 2200 is a "rounding error", as seen in this thread)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd go for a lower resolution one now that I read about the slow scrolling thing, that would really bother me...

</comment><comment><USER24> Before I clicked the link to read the review I worked out in my head what his review would be like. I figured it would be gushingly positive with minimal criticism.

What a joy it was to read the first sentence of that second paragraph. Vindication.

</comment><comment><USER25> And of course he leaves out the far more damning day to day problem with the rMBP right now -- many popular non-Apple programs including Word and Photoshop look _worse_ than they do on a non-retina display. Anandtech has the story [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook- pro-w...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with- retina-display-review/6)

<comment><USER26> "We're obviously in the middle of two awkward transitions: toward all-Retina screens…"

Maybe you didn't read the same review I saw. In what _I_ read, he chose the right resolution for different uses, his unique choice out of many potentials. Yes, I'd rather that apps for Macs be written to be apps for _ALL_ Macs. But life has a way of sorting that out.

<comment><USER25> Maybe you didn't read the same link? Arment did not mention that text in some apps looks worse on the rMBP than on a non-retina screen, which is true regardless of the chosen resolution on the rMBP and is a pretty big issue right now if you use one of those apps frequently -- stopped me dead in my tracks when I saw it at the Apple store. He was using the lower resolutions to avoid the lagginess problem. Eventually this will be sorted out -- although Microsoft's early signals and Mac track record indicate it might be a long wait. But it's relevant information that many potential buyers would want to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> or, you could buy an AlienWare Aurora mid-range, where $2200 gets you the following:

4.1 Ghz 4 cores. 16Gb 1600Mhz memory Dual 1.5 GB Nvidia 660's 1TB SATA. If you want to spend $75 more you can get a 1TB RAID0 SSD/HD hybrid.

Of course, if you're willing to spend about $4000, you can build a Linux PC that will smoke any Mac product by a 2:1 margin in performance. This is coming from a Mac Pro user, Apple's neglect of this line has disappointed me. When I bought my 2005 Mac pro, it was the best quad-core system you could buy from a cost/performance. Now high-end rigs are ridiculously overpriced.

The only thing you lose with a high end Linux PC is the Retina display and portability, but I do most of my coding at my desk, and I'll take a 30" non- Retina display any day of the week until someone can ship a 30" Retina display. I prize actual number of readable windows I can cram onto the screen over minor improvements in e-Book reading.

Honestly, I'd buy two machines. The cheapest MacBook Air for moving about (or just use an iPad), but a Linux Desktop for real work.

<comment><USER28> > The only thing you lose with a high end Linux PC is the Retina display and > portability

This is far, far from the truth, based on my current experiences trying Linux from an OS X/Windows world. Other things you lose: sane GUIs and desktop environment, quality font rendering (both Mac and Windows do it better), reasonable design sensibilities out of the box, stability, just general freedom from constant frustration.

I'm working on a post about my experiences that will provide more details about my experiences (and for what it's worth, I have not given up on Linux yet), but if you're used to OS X or even Windows, switching to Linux is _not_ an easy trade off. I'm trying to remove the angry from the post so that it can be more constructive, which is proving to be difficult :).

<comment><USER27> I've been developing on Unix for 20 years, I don't have many frustrations with it, about the same level as OSX, certainly not "constant frustration"

There are two things I like to do with a powerful computer:

1) Play high end performance sensitive games like Battlefield 3. Apple gets crushed in gaming performance.

2) Write code. The slower my computer is, the less productive I am.

I spend 99% of my time in the command line, IDE, and in the web browser.

Look, you are talking to someone who is a big fan of OS/X (but HATED non-Unix Apple OS). OS/X was the Unix I always wanted. But Apple simply is not competitive at the bleeding edge of computing power, they are making devices for consumers, overpriced devices. I care about buying the most amount of computing power I can for a given $. I like getting under the hood of my hardware. With the generic PC, I can build my own systems to spec, I can tune it the way I want.

I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but if you are someone who owned a Mac Pro, a Retina MacBook is not a replacement when other desktops with far more power for the $ are available, and the Retina screen is mostly irrelevant when people with Mac Pros typically had giant monitors attached.

I'm not saying the Retina MacBook is not a good laptop, in fact, it is a great, if not the best laptop. But I don't believe in desktop replacements. Portability trades off power due to weight, size, battery, and heat constraints. People with highend desktops usually don't want to make those tradeoffs, in fact, they typically make the opposite ones: 1000W power supplies, liquid cooling, ultra heavy heatsinks, etc.

<comment><USER28> I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I have some extra requirements, and Linux doesn't come anywhere close to meeting them, at least not out of the box. I suspect that many OS X users have similar expectations to me.

I do the same things as you with my computers, except with the addition that I am very picky about aesthetics and usability. The reason I wanted to use Linux was because I wanted to use my powerful gaming system as a development machine, and didn't want to go the hackintosh route, but my experience seems to indicated that it's going to take a lot of work to bring the Linux install to an acceptable standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One thing to keep in mind for prospective buyers that already have a MBP is that the keyboard is really quite different. The travel is a _lot_ shallower. I loved the MBP's keyboard, so for me the redesign was a bit gratuitous. You do get used to it, but it may be best to try before you buy.

</comment><comment><USER30> How's the Retina MBP heat-wise compared to prior generations of the 15" MBP? That's my only complaint with my 2011 MBP - the thing is an oven on my lap - even with a laptop cooler attached, it's warm.

<comment><USER31> I multitask pretty heavily (Eclipse, lots of browser tabs, XCode and such) and haven't noticed it getting hot at all.

I've only noticed it getting warm when the NVIDIA card kicks in when a game is running (not an uncomfortable level however).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Oof, here's a list of things I can buy with $2200: A $600 1080p tablet, a $1200 slightly-heavier-but-beefier laptop that runs Linux, a small telescope with the rest.

Give me a break.</comment>


Bliss lets you book flights instantly and pay for them over time - <AUTHOR> https://www.bliss.flights/?mwr=5313-21a1a785 <comment><USER2> Hmm, interesting. Nice looking site too.

Why stop at just flights? I can buy lots of things on my credit card and then pay them off over time.

How do you judge the ability of someone to pay you back?

Are flights chosen because they attract a certain type of customer (usually millenials, who are more creditworthy than others?)

Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Hey, one of the cofounders here. You're exactly right - we're focusing on younger people who don't necessarily own credit cards but still need to travel. Rather than making a generic micro-loan platform, we want to target one very specific vertical and make the experience really smooth.

<comment><USER2> Cool, I really appreciate the quick and open feedback.

I sincerely wish you guys the best of luck with executing against a cool idea :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow—didn't expect to land here, thanks for the share kaushikk. Other co- founder here, happy to answer questions :-)

<comment><USER5> Your Design language and concept is hot. Eagerly waiting for access to use the system. Many Congratulations to the team.

<comment><USER4> Thanks so much! I worked ultra hard on the design so it's incredible to hear that! Please stay in touch :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: idea for a multiplayer programmable A.I. space game, anyone interested? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/yNw25zd.png

<comment><USER2> This implies that each space ship will have full details about the world state. I think that makes the game too simple. It would be better IMO if the inputs to the ship were the values from some "sensors" (e.g. "distance to nearest object" from a bunch of different angles, and what they objects are, and maybe some "GPS-like" input if relevant).

It would also be cool if the world were really really big, and I could leave my spaceship running while I'm not at the computer and see how many points I've acquired by the time I get back.

</comment><comment><USER3> you could try making a prototype. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Launched the MVP for my new Android app.  Any feedback? - <AUTHOR>

I recently released an Android app to track and manage sales lists for small businesses.  It will track your call queue, log previous calls and notes, and will allow you to report on past performance.
It's a basic MVP right now.  I'm working on a few requested features and getting a presence on the web so customers can find me.  Since my user base is small, I'd appreciate any feedback I can get for design, features or marketing.
Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lyote.coldcall
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Congrats on shipping!

A couple thoughts:

* It looks _very_ iOS'y. I'd be much more aggressive about embracing a 'native' Android look and feel.

* CRM integration is a must, but it's hard to say which ones are most important. I'd put the equivalent of a SaaS MVP landing page into the app that shows the logos for the top 5 (or whatever) CRM systems and records which ones users click on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. For the CRM integration, do you think that is needed? My original thought was this could be used by small, one person sales "teams" to keep all of their contacts directly on their phone, rather than needing a data connection to pull from.

That said, I'll look into some of the more popular CRMs and look at integrating them. Thanks again.

<comment><USER2> You know better than I do :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, I don't know about that. I'll try to do some more research and see if there are enough users for my original model. Either way, thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> First and foremost, congrats on shipping - that's the hard part. As per the product, the UI looks pretty good for a MVP - I would probably polish it up a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, shipping did feel good but I still have work in front of me. I'll take a second pass on the UI and see what I can polish up. I have a few notes already I'm hoping to get rolled out in the next week or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks nice, it should integrate with CRM's

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Like I mentioned above, my original thought was to have this as a stand alone app. Still, I'll take a look at some of the larger CRMs and see what it will take to integrate them.</comment></comment>


How do you make money from your free applications? - <AUTHOR> http://codejustin.com/how-do-you-monetize-your-free-applications/

<comment><USER2> _With today's economy I don't see much hope in releasing an application that cost money._

I strongly disagree with this. Consumers and companies still use money, they just use less and, importantly, use it differently. B2B markets are particularly interesting right now. There are thousands of companies looking to cut down on their IT spending, trying to locate better and cheaper options for their expensive solutions.

Make a cheap standardised Intranet to replace the corporate behemoth that costs thousands of dollars every year, make a helpdesk application that can cut down on support costs, offer a cheap hosted VOIP solution that saves on phone bills.

The possibilities are endless, and if you call up a company telling them that they can save money using your product they'll listen.

<comment><USER3> Excellent advice! This is exactly what I'm doing and I'm busier than ever. As budgets tighten, companies are looking for better (cheaper) ways to get the same work done. It's times like this that enable major shifts. OP has it exactly backwards. I can't imagine releasing a free app right now when the pickins' are so good.

A couple of recent examples:

One company has a lot of clerical work but a hiring freeze. I automated their intranet-->fax function, freeing up enough time to get more work done with the same number of people.

Another company had to push out all of their purchase orders for the next 18 months because their revenue stream was slowing down. A nice little 3 week project for me.

Another company had planned on getting a new Oracle product for $500K until I showed them how to get the same output from their existing system for one fifth that amount. (Hopefully they'll have me do that work.)

Notice the pattern: slowing economy --> _more_ IT work --> everybody happier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not just build something people will pay for?

Quit building little one-day hobby projects that don't do anything useful, and instead build software that people with money will pay for. It's not that difficult a concept to understand, yet every day you see another half dozen unjustifiable little web startups appearing with no hope of ever making money.

      - Build something good.
      - charge money for it.
      - Sorted.

<comment><USER5> Although I agree entirely, the direct answer to your question is: Because that's much more difficult.

<comment><USER4> Actually I suspect the real answer is: Because it's not as much fun.

S3stat pays my rent, and it took a weekend to build. It's dead boring, but there's a market for it so people pay money.

Blogabond is still fun to play with 4 years in, was technically hard when I built it, and thousands of people use it and love it. When I tried putting ads on it, it brought in maybe two bucks a day.

So yeah, boring stuff makes you money, even if it's not that difficult.

<comment><USER6> Seems like you managed to find some time for fun while working on S3stat :)

<http://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan.ashx>

<comment><USER7> That's actually a great idea for a simple, low-tech affiliate scheme

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know it's currently in-fashion to give everything away for free but I personally think most reasonable people (that is to say, the ones you actually want on your site) don't mind paying for something of value.

Create a product. Charge a fair amount. Provide outstanding value.

It has worked for us. I'm no billionaire but I'm doing a hell of a lot better than 99% of the other 35 year-olds around me doing something I love and providing a product I can stand behind.

<comment><USER9> > doing something I love and providing a product I can stand behind.

... but not link to in your profile? Sorry, but I'm curious about things people do that work out for them:-)

Also, yes and no. Sometimes the economics of these things don't work out to be quite so simple. Solaris is a great product in some ways, but it's not _that_ much better (and in other ways is worse) than things that are available for free like Linux and *BSD.

In other words, it's important to find a niche where people aren't going to rush out and create free competitors...

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, the industry we provide a service to is mired in local authority politics, so I can't disclose here. I'd like to be able to say "fuck, that is ridiculous" without someone picking up on it someday and killing my business as a result. We're proud of the product but the industry itself is very cutthroat with only a few players. It was hard enough to carve out the market we have. So, this is my personal account. That being said, it's a great market for some of the same reasons. Our current contracts are 8-10 years (but it takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get them.)

Having said all that, I still disagree with your Solaris vs. open source argument in principal. You don't have to have a huge amount of customers to be doing well to me. If 95% of the people are using an open source product but you still have 5% clinging to you because they love it and you're profitable...is it really so terrible?

Of course, if you build a business, you want to be mutable anyway. You can't just sit around hoping product X will feed you and your employees without some sort of proactive business development. As part of that, you always have to be prepared for someone smarter and more agile. You play to your strengths. If you have market share, you leverage it. If you have agility, you leverage that instead.

Edit - One of the things that doesn't get discussed around here often enough, is the ability to form and execute as proper business. Your product is not (or more accurately perhaps, should not necessarily be) the entire definition of your business. Any business that expects to be around in the future must generate income. Competition is always going to be there in one form or another. If that competition happens to be people who like to work for free making open source products, it could be a mountain to climb to compete directly. The business may have to adapt in other ways.

I'll give an example of that. Everyone in our industry used to provide an embedded software component that required an OS that had a license associated with it. One of our competitors pitched an idea to build the same software using Linux. It very likely could have crippled us had they managed to deliver something at a much lower cost. So, we went through negotiations and tried to acquire them. Those negotiations failed but we realized that they really weren't close to that open source solution at all. We jumped at the chance to develop our own open source product and it is now in pilot locations. Nobody else in the industry has even blinked and we can suddenly cut some really outrageous costs out of our equation.

So, the beauty of open source, is that it's open to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm probably crazy for trying to breach this topic on a forum. It probably would take a very well thought out blog post to get my point across. But, this topic touches on a very important issue in software we face right now. Over the lifetime of the software industry we've experimented with lots of interesting business models. Some have panned out better than others. My suspicion is that selling software has been the most profitable. Preliminary evidence from iPhone app store has seemed to agree this as well.

Prior to 2000 IT industry was making large sums of money mainly from selling software. After the dot com bubble lots of companies selling software took a hit too. The bust wasn't limited to the web. Lots of customers realized they weren't getting the ROI from the software they purchased. Since then the industry fundamentally shifted.

The rise of open source software started to replace previously commercial software. In many respects were much better in quality than commercial software. Linux was making serious advances towards Microsoft's dominance in the server market. And, since then open source software has matured and has advanced rapidly into markets previously dominated by commercial software vendors. Once open source software options come into these markets they exert serious downward pressure on the ability for commercial companies to stay viable.

Take for example BEA. In early 2000's BEA was a market leader with it's Java application server. In fact BEA was the fastest growing software company ever, and I think that's still true. Over $1 Billion in sales in under 5 years. Amazing. Then JBoss showed up. In many respects JBoss' application server was superior to BEA's. Once JBoss came in they created serious pressure on BEA's ability to sell their server. Why purchase BEA when you can get a better server for free? In the end both companies were sold. Red hat bought JBoss for around $350-$400 million. Oracle snapped up BEA for $7 Billion.

Open source has proven itself as the best way to build software. However, it's the worst way to monetize it. Selling software works.

<comment><USER11> The question is now, how to sell open source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can make okay money with ads. I don't make "quit my other work and just live off the ads" money, but I do make "buy a nice new german sports car and have the ads pay for monthly payments" money. Which is nice. And that's just with one site.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't. I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of people. In the end, I decided there wasn't enough money in it to make it "worth it". I figured I could make a few k a year, and the amount of hassle it would have taken would be well less than me just contracting out at normal rates for the same period of time.

So, instead of risking alienating users with various money making schemes, I just give it away, and try to use torrent networks as much as possible to keep bandwidth costs down. I'll just be happy with high user numbers and the fun of writing the program (obj-c/mac), which is kind of why I started in the first place.

<comment><USER14> Sorry but there is something that wrong here. If your product really helps someone, and is worth more than the $ you are asking to them in terms of time, pain or effort, why wouldn't they pay again?

<comment><USER15> There are several categories of application that are useful, even essential but that are very difficult to monetise.

Basic utilities like ls, or jpeg which people expect to come with the platform are difficult to charge for. And then there is grey market software it may be that non-commercial distribution is not subject to the same degree of opposition that a commercial distributor would face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Using the last.fm business model: for me it is the perfect example of service quality + pr + revenue.

You cannot find a better music service on the web, you cannot find worst communication strategy than they have (negative promo is better than positive promo, the first rule of pr!) and soon the press will be flooded by their success story.

<comment><USER17> last.fm is a pain in the ass. you simply cannot use it to find a single song and then listen to it.

<http://www.last.fm/music/Mastodon/_/Divinations> I want to listen to divinations, tell me the sequence of clicks for doing this on last.fm.

<comment><USER18> If Last.fm had the rights to let you play that track, you could play it using the big "Play" button in the top right corner. Here's a song that is playable: <http://www.last.fm/music/Mastodon/_/Iron+Tusk>

But it's up to the rights-holder to decide whether to license the music to Last.fm. It looks like this band has only a few playable tracks: [http://www.last.fm/music/Mastodon/+charts?rangetype=week&...](http://www.last.fm/music/Mastodon/+charts?rangetype=week&subtype=tracks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Charge your paid competitors 2.00 CPM so that they can earn 80.00 from same users.

Well, thats what my competitors do, anyway...Trust me, I wish them outlandish success.

Anyhow, I use free stuff as a friendcatcher for organic SEO, etc, and then turn rankings into money via paid apps. Also have a free trial, consider it a no brainer.

</comment><comment><USER20> Stop being afraid of the market and put a price on your applications. It's tempting to give stuff away so you feel like people want your applications, but the real test is whether people will pay for your application. Or maybe deep down you think your code isn't good enough, or you don't want to support it, so you want to keep it free.

'The Economy' is a lousy excuse to not charge for it. Maybe you'll sell 20% less than in boom times, but you'll still sell if your product is good enough. Finish your product (includes documentation and marketing), put a price on it and start charging.

</comment><comment><USER21> What's wrong with charging money for a good product? We geeks are a vocal minority that loves for everything to be free.

Guess what! 90% of the population doesn't care. If it solves a problem and is reasonably priced, then it's a no-brainer and they'll get their credit card out of their wallet. It's not extortion. It's about providing value and charging a _fair_ price.

For desktop software, you can be nice and still charge money. Offer a free download and trial period. Or offer a free version with some limitations and an unlimited version for a price.

For online services, the same applies. Craigslist is free for almost everything except job ads. That works.

 _Gratis_ vs. _Libre_ : that may just be the next big thing in the evolution of the Internet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Share you ideas and thoughts about how to generate revenue from releasing free apps/games/software!

<comment><USER22> Donations.

If you are employed to write software that solves a problem your company is willing to pay for, you receive money.

If you are self-employed to write software that solves a problem many people are willing to pay for, you receive money.

If you are self-employed to write software that doesn't solve problems, or solves problems people aren't willing to pay for, you will NOT receive money, and any means that you deploy to try and extract value out of people will be seen as a nuisance.

Free apps, especially online games, are like a street performer's music:

-they make you smile when it's good, and not look back if it's bad

-they're free

-you didn't plan for it, or travel far just to hear it, you likely happened upon it

-you may return to the street corner on your way home

-you will not return if you do not have time

-you will not return if the performer pestered you for money

-you may decide to tip the performer

-you will decide not to tip the performer if he seems dangerous, aggressive, or otherwise inquisitive about your private life

TO be fair, apps do these advantages:

-you don't have to physically return for a repeat experience

-24/7 performance

-very easy to spread by word-of-link

Use these to your strength, not to boost your ego to think that you are a "totally different" revenue model.

So how do street performers make money?

-receive donations

-not pester listeners for donations

-not being scary perv/stalker, or looking like one

-sell content not available for free

-sell content collected in a nice, convenient package/album

A lot of sites will list all the content they have, and when you click on certain ones, tell you that they are for "premium customers only". Why wait till the user clicks on it? To go back to my street-performer analogy, it's as if he asks if you'd like him to play you Pachelbel's Canon, and you say, yeah that'd be awesome, and he stretches out his hand. You feel deceived. You may pay out of guilt in real life, but in cyberspace, you just leave and go download the equivalent, from a well-reputed/professional/famous source, for free. Always tell the user this is paying content before wasting his time.

Anyone else?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for all your great feedback guys! You are all right too! I crunched the realist numbers and assuming I can get 1/10th of a percent of my visitors to buy one of my software products at an average price of $10 than I will make lots more than using an ad program with a 4%CTR and a heck of a lot more than an ad program doing cpm!</comment>


Canadian Postmedia's Right Turn - <AUTHOR> https://www.canadalandshow.com/the-conservative-transformation-of-postmedia/ <comment> core-questions Why is it so unreasonable that Canadians should have any newspaper that shows a right-leaning viewpoint? It's not like you can call the National Post "extreme" by any stretch of the imagination. This irrational bias against anyone having any competing political ideas is going to backfire bigtime when eventually people become deeply tired of their ideas and culture being suppressed.

<comment><USER2> I have to agree. I'm definitely left leaning, but I've occasionally read NP when nothing else was around. It's written a bit too "simple" for the style of writing I prefer reading, so it's clearly a different demographic than mine anyway. But even though they present a definite more-righty-than-me bias, I never thought it was bashing their readers in the head with their political ideals. And I do read Metro in transit most of the time, even though it is also more-righty-than-me.

I can't be so kind towards The Sun, though. That's more like the Canadian Fox. The National Enquirer is more informative. The Sun is all about strong opinions, regardless of content and facts.

Speaking of Metro, where did 24 Hour go? It just up and disappeared in the most silent way. I preferred their Crossword since it wasn't American. We don't have "paper ones" in the till, and we have a lot of -our and -re type spelling differences. A lot of the clues are things only Americans deal with, like SAT scores, etc. Why wouldn't a Canadian paper use Canadian crosswords?</comment></comment>


Why Is My Perfectly Good Shellcode Not Working? Cache Coherency on MIPS and ARM - <AUTHOR> https://blog.senr.io/blog/why-is-my-perfectly-good-shellcode-not-working-cache-coherency-on-mips-and-arm <comment><USER2> "Shellcode" in this sense is the small number of instructions that initiates the exploit, i.e. its contained in the data you overflow the buffer with.

The intention is that you tricking the firmware into executing your shellcode to ramp up the exploit.

The shellcode is "executable data" and the typical prevention for this type of exploit is execution-prevention on data (and stack) regions (for processors that support it).

<comment><USER3> but there is always return-to-libc style attacks which defeat executable stack protection...

<comment><USER4> And hence we have ASLR to prevent against _those_ attacks…

<comment><AUTHOR> only for 64-bit, but disclaimers might apply in (32-bit) IoT land:

 _> Our results suggest that, for current 32-bit architectures, address-space randomization is ineffective against the possibility of generic exploit code for a single flaw; and brute force attacks can be efficient, and hence effective_

[1] [https://web.stanford.edu/~blp/papers/asrandom.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~blp/papers/asrandom.pdf)

edit: also ROP

<comment><USER4> 32-bit IoT usually has a lot more problems that are easier to exploit than being able to brute force ASLR, but yes: if you are able to run attacks quickly, it's pretty easy to get lucky and find the offset. There really isn't much you can do on 32 bit to fix this, unfortunately, unless you start doing fancy things like reordering functions themselves to increase the number of bits of entropy (and even then, you're not getting much…)

<comment><USER5> Since IoT is somewhat less tied to existing architectures, it's not completely out of the question that somebody could produce a microcontroller that keeps separate stacks for return addresses and function arguments/results. If the former stack is not directly modifiable, that removes most of the need for ASLR.

<comment><USER6> Major selling point of most modern microcontroller architectures is that they don't have separate hardware return address stack, and are thus "C compatible". Many early microcontrollers had exactly that as it also typically means simpler hardware implementation.

<comment><USER5> "C compatible" strikes me as a very overblown way of describing the consequences of choosing whether to have a separate return address stack. In practice, I don't see it actually amounting to anything more than a need to use privileged instructions to implement setjmp, which is perfectly reasonable for a high-security environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note: This is talking about not talking about exploiting buffer overruns, not about BASH scripts. I was very confused for a moment there.

<comment><USER8> shellcode vs shell-code.

Shellcode traditionally meant binary that would do something like exec("/bin/bash") (i.e. code that launches a shell). When abusing a buffer overflow, you would usually want to somehow get this code to be executed. Later, the term expanded to mean any kind of user-provided bytes an attacker wants to be interperted and executed as machine instructions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The post seems to be slightly confused about the Arm DSB and ISB instructions. These don't affect the caches at all -- they are barriers, which affect ordering and pipelining. DSB says "don't go any further until all memory accesses made by instructions before this one have completed", and ISB says "flush the pipeline so the next insn is reread from the cache" (among other things). So self-modifying and other tricky code needs to consider these insn ordering issues as well as cache manipulation, and barrier insns aren't a substitute for doing the cache maintenance.

<comment><USER10> Pipeline control certainly does effect caches. That's where the memory access being controlled goes. I mean, it's tempting to try to understand them as an orthogonal thing, but in fact memory hierarchies and CPU pipelines (and other stuff like store forward buffers) are tied at the hip and it's pointless to try to "understand" them in isolation.

At best it's an exercise in specification pedantry. The only reason instruction barriers, fences and serialization instructions seem to make sense in docs is that someone at the architecture sat down and wrote a memory and execution model that can be abstracted by whatever API it is they present to the user.

And someone doing performance or exploitation work at the level of the linked article really needs to understand that model, not the API. (Though you're absolutely right that this particular article seems to be a bit mixed up about both)

<comment><USER9> I meant that it doesn't affect it in the sense that it doesn't change the way the cache behaves or ask it to flush or invalidate any of its contents. You can have a pipelined CPU which needs the barrier insns but which has no cache at all (most likely in embedded). And if the problem you're having is that your data is in the dcache but not the icache then the barrier insns won't help, because they're not architecturally defined to do that.

I certainly agree that you need to understand the architectural model to write reliable (and cross-cpu portable code) -- and the architectural model for Arm does distinguish barriers from cache maintenance -- though if you're writing exploit shellcode then "works most of the time and we can't do better given the way the bug we're exploiting to get code execution" is sometimes what you're going to end up with, at which point knowing what the specific hardware is doing can help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The same principles probably apply to Power ISA (isync, hwsync, icbi, etc.), and for that matter SPARC. Lots of PowerPC chips still turn up in embedded applications.

</comment><comment><USER12> it's so perfect that it doesn't work. great stuff. instantly lost interest.

</comment><comment><USER13> I had issues with my own shell script this past week or two. But my issue was colliding hypervisors. Fun times. I'm not savvy enough with Bash as it is, it was frustrating.

Edit: I guess my shell code breaking frustration is somehow irrelevant to this issue. I mean running into the issue in the article is a rarity these days, at least on standard / mainstream hardware.

<comment><USER14> Different kind of "shell" code maybe? :)</comment></comment>