Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company - <AUTHOR> https://ramgrid.com <comment><USER2> Since other people have ripped apart your site already I'll focus on the good. I like the marketing towards dev teams, I've been thinking about this for sometime. B2B industries are strong and provide secure streams of money.

I started a virtual server service in the past and of course marketed it as such, unfortunately they're a dime a dozen. Your marketing approach might be the edge you need. The $49/month plan ain't bad either, I might grab that just for myself ^-^

One thing to focus on, I think, is to explain what we'd be getting for a CPU, I use Virtual Servers/Machines for everything..even have a few servers at my house for my development needs. Some are old and still usable, while some are razor sharp off the shelf stacked with the latest Xeon's. What I'm getting at is that I don't really care what's in the thing, but I'd like to know what I can run on it efficiently.

For example I buy the $49/12GB package. Do I get more CPU's if I split it up into 6x2GB vs 12x1GB? Or is that a flat rate item of 1vCPU per machine?

<comment><USER3> In general, how does the splitting thing work? I guess I buy 12 GB RAM + some storage and then can create virtual machines using it up piecemeal?

If so, I quite like that model: It's not overpriced and splitting everything up into individual VPS is useful, esp. if it comes with an API. A single 12 GB VPS is cheaper, but getting 12 1-GB VPS would probably be more expensive, at least at a provider with an API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Running a hosting business is hard work, I did it for over 10 years. It's under-appreciated, users complain about everything, nobody wants to trust you, and many of the customers you do remain want to bleed your support dry. Some of the most successful hosting companies have succeeded by eliminating SLAs and making support hard to reach. Others such as Rackspace make support easy to get, but make sure the customers pay for the privilege. All of the problems with trying to start a hosting company are clear from the responses here.

One of the problems in this space is that it's a mature market. Developers are accustomed to Amazon, Digital Ocean, Linode, Azure, and GCE. These are mature products and yes, users are skeptical of new entrants that don't do as much, don't have a complete product, or even have put effort into their website. For HackerNews, it's ironic, but clearly this audience is expecting a mature product not a lean approach. (Self-provisioning while now industry-standard requires a significant effort to prevent fraud & abuse, and slow-provisioning is completely in-line with Lean methodologies)

So, some advice:

* Don't give up just because of the bad feedback. Iterate!

* Focusing on devs is probably wrong if you don't have a plan to leverage individual sales to enterprise sales. Individuals pay less and you need more of them. More customers usually equals more support, they're more fickle, and less likely to be retained. Perhaps surprisingly, they're also traditionally seasonal, with dev-based buy-in being strongest during summer.

* Find a hook. Something you do better, or different. For my hosting company, it was virtual servers for only $6/mo, when at the time the lowest priced alternative was $20/mo. We adopted an architecture that allowed us to radically compete on price. It doesn't have to be price, and honestly, it's better that it's not. Also make sure the hook is understood by the market, one of my company's problems was that our low price had us compared to shared hosting or container-based solutions, because virtual servers at that price was too unbelievable.

* Hack trust. Some people here mention trust. Now, I think this is over-valued. People put data with companies they really don't know much about all the time. At some point, nobody knew who Dropbox, Docker, or Digital Ocean were. If, however, this proves to be a problem - and it could be in the current surveillance state - then look at ways to hack trust. For instance, a service such as AWS Lambda has a different threat (and trust) model than EC2, based solely on how developers use these products. If you stick with VM-based hosting, then develop partnerships, get reference customers, bring on staff that the community already knows, loves, and trusts.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Just a note to the makers of ramgrid -- while many of these comments may be harsh, it is probably not in your best interest to respond in anger/defensively.

This page is a trove of feedback from potential users of your product.

I personally chose a cloud hosting company called INIZ (that I'm extremely happy with) based on comments and a mention on HN -- just trying to let you know, this is your crowd, and they're angry/confused about your site. Find a way to fix it.

<comment><USER6> just another note.

i'm in the infrastructure business.

people are incredibly, incredibly cynical about infrastructure, because there are so many bad hosting companies out there. even the good ones are bad.

also, people expect top tier services for free or close to free. you can thank amazon for that.

your #1 challenge will be to overcome trust issues.

<comment><USER7> Bunnie Huang had a really interesting take on the evolution of the markets. It was just a 30 second quip, a mere nugget falling from the ingot which was the lecture. This won't do it justice but to paraphrase him he basically said (w/r/t Shenzhen where effectively every retailer is selling a commodity, eventually they bottom out in price-competition) - the way that merchants differentiate themselves is via being "the guy" who can provide services in a reliable fashion. He goes to the same guy every time to pick up his 10k spools of resistors to throw into the pick'n'place even if its a few cents more on the bottom-line to the BOM[1] because he has developed a relationship and reputation with those vendors. I've had some catastrophic failures with Rackspace but even with proof of concepts with one tiny 400/mo box[0] they spent easily 12-15 hours with high-level engineers to help resolve some pretty obscure WAS stuff. I'm pretty sure they ended up bringing in software guys to help, or those Rackspace IT guys had some of the most in-depth _and_ wide- range knowledge I've only seen in people like Brad Fitzpatrick[2]. They really went above and beyond - which is why I don't mind paying 4x what an OVH box might cost.

There are so many shitty engineers, shitty lawyers, shitty automotive mechanics, doctors and hosts out there that your market differentiation can literally be phrased in a sentence: "Be just a little bit more competent & reliable than your lazy competition". I'm not the smartest guy, but being dependable to your customers is certainly worth paying the premium.[3]

[0] I've got a lot of equipment with them so I'd expect that kind of treatment if I was operating under my own account but this was off a brand-new account where a speculator bought an energies trading platform from a distressed company. His IT partner didn't have much WebSphere experience so he brought me in, gave me the company card and asked me to get it to work

[1] Even the high priced merchants in Shenzhen are significantly cheaper than what we get at Digi-key and Mouser :(

[2] In that, you'd be very hard pressed to find an engineer who can code "high level Perl" (it was as high level as web-apps went during the LiveJournal days), could write Memcached, could write kernel patches for network drivers, do UI (though things were admittedly far more simple then), all the while taking care of the physical IT ops (see: Coders at Work, for a fantastic account)

[3] And any client you have who doesn't recognize this, you should choose to fire as soon as possible. They don't see the value in the services you deliver and you surely aren't being compensated appropriately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Marketing page copy: "Unlimited 1GB servers"

FAQ when signed in: "Each plan has a maximum capacity for the amount of servers its allowed to create. Due to the significant amount of dedicated resources we provide, we can't literally give you unlimited servers. However, you could upgrade your plan whenever you'd like."

So your marketing page is LITERALLY a lie. Good job.

<comment><USER9> When you click the refund link in the footer, you are presented with a page not found error: [https://ramgrid.com/legal/refunds](https://ramgrid.com/legal/refunds)

Is this supposed to be scam or a joke?

<comment><USER10> Edit: I take it back. It seems to be serious and not just a test. I found the creator's LinkedIn.[1]

Previous comment: _Probably a landing page to test a concept before the concept is developed. It 's done frequently, but this person has done it rather sloppily._

1\. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasondecastro](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasondecastro)

<comment><USER11> From a self-written description of his previous project:

 _" I know what you're thinking. FkPaying is a brand new way to watch movies, download books, and download music. I built out a really nice website that's very intuitive and user friendly. Yeah... if you're reading this, the website might have been taken down by the FBI. It was a good run, folks. I hope I don't get taken to jail for this."_

Yeah, seems proud of being taken down by the FBI. I'm not really comfortable with people that take such pride in pushing the limits of the law and it doesn't bode well for the reputation of this current venture.

<comment><USER12> Wow, really? I might need to report my card "lost" so that I can get a new number. Stripe protects that information from the vendor, right?

Though I doubt this kid is going to try to be that brazen, especially since he is using his real name to do this (assuming this isn't a fake identity).

Might request a new number just in case. I really don't trust this asshole anymore.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't be too hasty to call him an asshole. Based on his LinkedIn, I think he's just a kid without any work experience and, consequently, without much understanding of professionalism. "FuckPaying" seem to be not that different from one of us wanting to start some kind of Napster when we were young, and I think a lot of grown HN users are probably PopcornTime users...

<comment><USER11> He's an "assistant instructor" at at least one school/program, and others. This isn't a "kid" if he's teaching other people.

We can't and shouldn't blame potential fraud on simple "youth" for someone who is obviously of an age that he is teaching other people to do these things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a lot of information missing from your page that I'd want to know before even considering becoming a customer...

Where is/are your datacenter(s)?

What virtualization technologies are in use?

What type of hardware is in the physical hosts?

What operating systems are supported?

Minor complaint: clicking "Enterprise" or "Education" in the footer opens up a new mail message. That's not what I wanted nor what I expected.

<comment><USER14> And if you don't have a mailto: program, the "Enterprise" and "Education" links do nothing.

To add to your suspicions, the website layout is exactly the same as one of the new bootstrap v4.0 themes, and is just as vague about it's product. ([http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing](http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing))

<comment><USER13> > _... the website layout is exactly the same as one of the new bootstrap v4.0 > themes ..._

Wow. Yeah, that's bad.

<comment><USER15> Why is this bad? Is there a licensing issue?

Otherwise, re-using a known layout will not play into my purchasing decisions.

<comment><USER16> It's a carbon copy!

Even the pricing $9, $45 and $119 are the same and the footer text is the same too.

" _We've been working on Go Analytics for the better part of a decade and are super proud of what we've created. If you'd like to learn more, or are interested in a job, contact us anytime at email@example.com._ "

" _We've been working on RamGrid for the better part of the last couple of years and are super proud of what we've created. If you'd like to learn more, or are interested in a job, contact us anytime at email@example.com._ "

Is this some kind of MVP to test the water? Probably not, and just a silly joke...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This appears to be a half-functioning project by an inexperienced but enthusiastic young person that has gotten way more attention and been taken more seriously than he imagined.

I can see myself having done something like this when I was 13 or 14, meaning well and just wanting to be involved in a startup. But I think he used a bootstrap template that made the page and product look just good enough that people here are giving it a serious evaluation as a hosting business. It is clearly not ready for serious use, but it is an interesting lesson about how wide open tech is for anyone to come along and create a business.

<comment><USER12> Good assessment. As someone who paid for the personal plan, and watched it implode from the inside, I get the exact impression you do.

The problem was the number of mistakes made:

* Offering the support line as a "literal" replacement for emergency services.

* Including a racial slur in a 503 page.

* Falsely advertising the number of servers you can create as "Unlimited", when the limit is actually 2.

* Use of a generic bootstrap theme with minimal modification.

* 404'd refund and legal pages.

* Not established as a LLC.

* No way to manage billing profiles (in violation of Stripe TOS)

* Broken and untested remix of Ubuntu Server.

* No account management portal - You can't change or reset your password at all.

* Advertised as a finished product for use by businesses, when it appears to have barely been tested in-house.

This is how you lose your business, and then get sued into bankruptcy. This kid should be happy he just lost a couple thousand dollars in server hosting and refund fees, rather than millions and the loss of his credit reputation for life.

Learn a lesson from this, would-be entrepreneurs of HN. Don't do what this kid did.

<comment><USER17> The fact that the pricing plans were taken as-is from an HTML template (that had nothing to do with hosting) is a pretty good sign that the project is a bit rough around the edges.

A good lesson indeed, if you pretend to be serious and do a decent job, people are quite likely to take you seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a little leery when the "refunds" link is dead and there is no "contact" page for a business. Hard to vet the legitimacy of a company without that information in my opinion. A lot of the site seems very cut-and-paste as well with several "coming soon" features and very little descriptive information. I would have thought this to have been worked out given this has been in the works "for a couple years" per the owner(s).

I also don't see how this stands out from the thousands of other companies out there offering "cloud hosting" of some sorts - do you own your own facilities? Lease them? Use other providers? What type of equipment is this and where are you located? etc. Not nearly enough information to determine a unique competitive advantage from what I can see.

What type of security measures do you use? The only "description" I see is "top notch" which doesn't tell me anything. Any compliance info you can share? Security audit results? Something? Anything?

Just my first instinctual opinion here, trying to offer some constructive feedback.

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems a self-written description of the owner's "previous projects" include an FBI Takedown on one of them - and he's seemingly proud of it. This doesn't bode well for the legitimacy of the current venture:

 _" I know what you're thinking. F_ _kPaying is a brand new way to watch movies, download books, and download music. I built out a really nice website that 's very intuitive and user friendly. Yeah... if you're reading this, the website might have been taken down by the FBI. It was a good run, folks. I hope I don't get taken to jail for this."_

Couple that with the overwhelming issues others have brought up here and I have doubts this is a serious business at all.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, I wouldn't trust that site with even a single cent, even the prices are the same as the ones on the bootstrap template O.o

I like the name though

Edit: Also the about talks about there's been spent years on this, while the website looks like something slapped together in a couple of minutes at best.

<comment><USER19> Do you mean you _wouldn 't_ trust that site?

I for one like it, and would rather have my a company of this nature spend years on their product, rather than their website copy.

<comment><USER18> Damn, I always write "would" instead of "wouldn't" ...

I'm just saying, that I don't actually think years was spent on it the product simply because the site is lacking, could be external web developer making it cheaply, I wouldn't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm usually not opposed to trying out new services and tools but this one I'm not so sure.

For a cloud hosting company, there are few basic essentials:

* Support - live, tickets, email, phone etc.

* DevOps work

* Marketing

* Documentation

* and more...

I'd be little hesitant if everything for so called "cloud hosting" company is done by a single "I".

</comment><comment><USER21> Some feedback for you: I read your webpage and I'm unclear as to why you are better than, or even different from, Amazon.

And glancing at your pricing, I think Amazon is cheaper too.

I'd suggest adding a grid or a bullet list enumerating how you are different.

Also, something to keep in mind -- when launching a new product that replaces the functionality of another, you can't be just as good, or even slightly better, you need to be _significantly_ better to get someone to move. So you should focus on showing why you would be _significantly_ better than your competitors that you're trying to displace.

</comment><comment><USER22> Good to see that there's room for some competition in this space!

You are loading two HTTP assets on your landing page, resulting in security warnings for mixed content.

The pricing model is interesting but the wording isn't very clear: what does "monthly RAM kick-start " mean? How does it relate with "Unlimited 1GB or 2GB RAM servers" ?

<comment><USER23> There really isn't much room at all. If anything, the room is a race to the bottom.

There's room in niche hosting services, like WordPress or Magento, and you can make a pretty penny off it. But your typical shared, VPS, or dedicated? Yeah, good luck competing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, I'll be honest... I'm not too sure about this service, or the idea behind it. I mean, hosting (both in the 'cloud' and non cloud sense) is a really competitive, cut throat industry with players able (and willing) to spend millions of dollars on advertising and services.

And people kind of want stability in this type of thing. So if you want Ramgrid to do well, you're gonna have to prove you can keep the company going for at least a few years in order to convince people you're reliable. Remember, many hosting companies are fly by night operations (there's even jokes about some of them being set up by high school kids in the summer holidays), and people are hence more than a tad wary of new ventures in this space. Especially when they don't have a big name like Amazon's behind them.

But hey, good luck with the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER25> What differentiates this from AWS or other known providers and why should companies choose to trust a new service over the incumbents?

<comment><USER26> I _think_ it's trying to play in the same space as [http://wable.com](http://wable.com)

That is to say, you pay for a bundle of resources (x cpu cores, x gb memory, x gb disk, x ipv4) at a fixed price. Then, you can subdivide that into however many VPS instances as you want (well, within reason).

As for trusting it, well...it looks like there might not be much of actual service behind the front page. It's possible it's just a tweaked version of this bootstrap theme: [http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing](http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing)

That said, the Wable business model seems to be popular, and they don't appear to have much competition using the "resource bundle" model.

<comment><USER27> I've checked out Wable - are there any other providers that you know of that provide resource bundling like Wable? I really like Wable but I don't see an API, and for what I'm doing would have to have an API to control creation/deletion of servers. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area Looks interesting and a nice landing page, but your main problem will be trust. Probably for that reason needs a lot more detail (datacentre, tech, investments). I'd remove the word unlimited from both plans as it is highly misleading.

An API is probably not going to gain you customers before the above.

</comment><comment><USER28> It seems like they're just renting OVH dedicated servers ([https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated- servers/hosting/](https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/hosting/)) and selling virtual machines on them. You could get cheaper pricing and more reliable servers by purchasing VPS from OVH directly, or going through a more reputable provider that resells OVH like My Custom Hosting or Luna Node.

<comment><USER12> As someone who just tried to use OVH, I have to say, it was way easier to pay for RamGrid.

Just tried to rent a VPS from OVH. Payment failed three times. Three new $3.49 pending transactions on my bank card - No VPS...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why was this launched before these "Powerful and seamless APIs"?

</comment><comment><USER30> "Never experience the hassle of ... while saving a bunch of money"

Wait, you mean that if I don't use your service then I'll have hassles but at least I'll save money? That's how it reads. You seem to expect that people will parse it like this.

        (never-experience X) while Y

Unfortunately, most people parse it like this.

        never-experience (X while Y)

Try each one out on "never experience burning your hand while cooking breakfast". Do you see the difference, and why the front-page copy might make some people giggle?

<comment><USER31> Was going to comment something like this, but you've said it very well. But yeah... The site's grammar is a bit sketch across the board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> 1) Datacenter[s]? Locations?

2) Virtualiztion technology being used?

3) Hardware + Customer Density [ I'm guessing its commodity 32GB nodes with 1 TB disks based on your configuration offerings ]

4) Bandwidth costs????

</comment><comment><USER33> Newbie here. How can I bet on your service? What happens if 6 months ahead the service close?

</comment><comment><USER34> Good on you for trying something. I hope you learn from this. I can only imagine the trouble I would have gotten into if the internet/social media were around when I was a teenager or even in college.

</comment><comment><USER35> Sign up for a plan: "Still unactivated! Give us a bit more time and then you'll be free to peek around however you'd like."

I don't think this is acceptable in 2016.

<comment><USER35> Hmmm.. still not activated, and I received an email offering a refund.

Too bad, I was looking forward to launching a server, and running the IP address through ARIN. I suspect the service is just software running atop Digital Ocean or AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sounds interesting, but you should have someone edit your copy. Below is a sample of some issues I found.

> We are the first to do this.

Have cheap prices? Not really a selling a point.

> We care about not only the privacy

"the" is unnecessary here

> we guarantee that our interface is top of the notch

The expression is just "top notch"

> so that you could easily spin up and deploy new servers

"can" easily spin up

> every month you'll receive discounts and other prop

What is a "prop"?

</comment><comment><USER37> I was signing up and had some questions right off the start. What is included in standard support and how is it different from 9-5 support? You have DDoS protection for $10 extra. If I buy the DDoS protection but others on your network do not, am I still protected from their potential DDoS attacks?

</comment><comment><USER38> The API is interesting; looks more like a natural language versus syntax. I'm actually working on something that would be able to create that syntax for you though it's not something you'd be able to integrate anytime soon however I do see the value in it!

</comment><comment><USER39> Boy, I read through and thought this was a parody.

"Security: We guarantee top notch security from the minute you're on the payment page to the second you start creating servers." Meaning that the security ends the moment you start creating a server?

<comment><USER12> Well, to be honest, the security of the server is your responsibility. They aren't managing your instances for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Can someone explain how this differs from just server hosting?

<comment><USER26> It looks like they are trying to use the same model as [http://wable.com/](http://wable.com/).

They sell you a monthly subscription to a resource bundle (some # of cpus, ram, disk space, ipv4s) that you can then run as 1 large VPS, or 3 medium ones, or 4 smalls + 1 medium, etc.

Wable is fairly popular because of this approach, and they are relatively unique in doing it that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems shady at best.

[https://i.imgur.com/QTpBGJT.png](https://i.imgur.com/QTpBGJT.png)

<comment><USER41> What's the webmail are you using? It looks good.

<comment><USER42> That's fastmail!

<comment><USER9> Yep: [https://www.fastmail.com](https://www.fastmail.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> You should really put a lot more info on your page. How does it all work? You need to build some trust.

</comment><comment><USER44> First question: what are you running on? AWS? Openstack private data center? Google cloud?

</comment><comment><USER45> what is your SLA?

</comment><comment><USER46> aws is the new microsoft and openstack is the new linux. API lock-in is real and outliers will suffer.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is the link broken, or is just me?

</comment><comment><USER12> Christ, this is a total shitshow.

Enjoy the free $9. Your service is unusable, so I'll never really be using it. It'll be the only $9 you ever get from me.

My first step with any VPS is to run "sudo apt-get update". This generates a ton of checksum errors.

I figured I would get around to that later, so I updated what I could. Then I tried to install Asterisk, but it appears that you stripped all the default repositories out of apt, because that package isn't available.

Oh well, I guess I'll compile it from source. Nevermind, make and gcc aren't installed! I was able to install make using apt-get, but not gcc!

I shouldn't have to go through this many hoops. The OS shouldn't come broken like it is. Just push out server-core like you should have to begin with!

It's like you tried to make this service as intentionally bad as you possibly could.

EDIT:

This is so stupid I can't even begin to understand why you would do this:

"If the emergency is completely life threatening and our instant messaging support isn't appearing right now, do not hesitate to call us at: [redacted]. However, you will only weaken relations if you called and the problem is something that literally wasn't life threatening. Like, you actually seriously need to be dying in order to call us."

Don't EVER suggest that someone should call you in a life-threatening situation. I understand you're exaggerating, but you could be sued for millions if anyone ever called that number and they were in an actual life-or- death situation. The only acceptable number to call in a life-threatening situation is 911 (or 999, or whatever you call in your home country).

If you don't want people to call you, don't give out your phone number. It's very simple.

Your site isn't just bad. You could ruin your life with serious legal issues over all of this stuff.

Please, for the love of God, tell me you established an LLC and aren't the sole-proprietor of this monstrosity...

EDIT2:

I just spoke to the founder over support chat, and he's being very humble and apologetic over the problems. He's disabled all recurring billing so that he can end this experiment gracefully and continue working out the kinks before the actual launch. We overwhelmed him a little.

I'll give him credit where credit is due: Half-baked or not, he's taking this seriously and trying to right wrongs. I look forward to seeing what the next four weeks have in store, and I am going to work with him to be the best beta- tester I can.

It isn't a scam, so don't worry. I wouldn't suggest signing up for this for any reason other than to experiment and help him beta-test. It's not stable enough for use with production servers. Hopefully he'll clarify that to potential customers before they sign up, because unlike me, some people may have intended to do real-world things with this service.

EDIT3:

Oh nevermind. Founder is clueless. He stopped responding to me when I told him that I had completely lost control over my services, and when I tried to open a support ticket, this happened:

[https://i.imgur.com/G7yAlAc.png](https://i.imgur.com/G7yAlAc.png)

I cannot stress enough that there is nothing on Earth that you handle this way. I am putting 3/1/16 on my calendar, because I'm almost certain I'm going to need to dispute a credit card charge on that day. I don't think I can take his word when he says he disabled recurring payments...

<comment><USER48> Morbid curiosity: you want to install and run _Asterisk_ , the PBX software, on a $9 VPS from a provider that just announced with a Bootstrap template today?

<comment><USER12> It was cheap and Stripe is secure. I could part with $9 to play around with a potentially shitty service. I was going to run an instance of Lenny on Asterisk, so it's not like I was doing anything important with this.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Things to consider in an acquisition - <AUTHOR>

(It was suggested I submit this again - thanks!)<p>Long story short - a large multinational has proposed purchasing my startup (me and my wife essentially with a couple of part time guys). We'll be lawyering up before signing anything. But I wonder if hackers here who have successfully been acquired can provide any down to earth advice? We'll have enough cash to do anything we want for the rest of our lives. We may or may not be pushed out of the company (its ok if we are given the size of the check!). <comment><USER2> For legal factors to consider in selling a small business, see <http://www.grellas.com/faq_small_business_007.html> (you may find some of this helpful even if yours is not a "small business" sale).

For more sophisticated deals, some random thoughts (from a lawyer who has represented many hackers, not a hacker as such):

1\. Avoid earn-outs if at all possible - if you go with an earn-out, plan as if all you will see will be what you get at the initial closing.

2\. No-shop clauses are fine but keep them short and make sure they can only be extended by mutual consent.

3\. Talk with your law firm/CPA firm about tax and structural issues up front, _before_ you do a term sheet. If you have a C-Corp with low-basis assets, an asset sale will leave you with a potential double tax hit. A stock sale or tax-free merger (A, B, or C type) is preferable in such situations but each has limits and restrictions on it - understand the structural points up front, it will help considerably in how you negotiate the deal.

Term sheets may be legally non-binding but, you can bet, they will shape your deal all the way through to closing. Structure it right in the term sheet, then, and you will not be haunted by inadvertent blunders up-front that prejudice your deal throughout.

4\. Watch out for duplicity. Use NDAs and limit due diligence to protect against a buyer's gaining a lot of info about your company and then using it competitively against you after dropping the acquisition.

5\. In dealing with acquisition teams, make sure to do the primary negotiating with the key decision-makers so as to avoid getting the "two step" shuffle.

6\. Try to limit trailing liabilities on the deal. Limit the size of hold- backs. Keep the reps and warranties as narrow as you or your lawyers can negotiate. Make sure they have a short-term expiration date (e.g., 1 year from the date of closing).

I am sure others will have more significant practical points to make. Many other items might be added to this list.</comment>


Stern Talk from Chief of FCC on Open Net - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/business/media/fcc-chairman-says-broadband-competition-is-lacking.html?mabReward=RI%3A1&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&region=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=Blogs

<comment><USER2> "Let me be clear," he said.

What is it with these guys and that phrase? Obama and John Kerry say it all the time as well. Unneeded phrase that, to me, indicates deception.</comment>


Google Hires Silicon Valley Tech Blogger Louis Gray as Google+ Evangelist - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/18/google-hires-silicon-valley-tech-blogger-louis-gray-as-google-evangelist/

<comment><USER2> He's also top Android supporter that I've ever known. Great hire by Google.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats Louis!</comment>


Alex Limi is Ruining Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873709 JavaScript is now a required component in almost all modern web applications (GMail, Apple.com, Facebook, etc.) and this preference option is no longer applicable and should be removed. If anything, keep it in about:config.
Having this option probably causes more harm than good when someone accidentally disables JavaScript and then the web stops working for them in Firefox.
Reproducible: Always <comment><USER2> Firefox made sure the "break the entire Internet" button is not easy to find.

Those bastards!

<comment><USER3> I think your comment just about covers this issue. There are very few reasons for a less technical user to disable JavaScript. For those that do need to disable it, the about:config solution is fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a good decision and something that should be handled by an extension.

<comment><USER5> It's a great decision. JavaScript is now about as common as HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Add ons are evil[1] and should be avoided.

I'm happy for sane defaults and hidden options, but hiding the option for turning javascript on or off seems a bit much. Maybe they have numbers showing most people leave it turned on?

It's interesting that Javascript has a dialog box in the browser options, but other stuff (flash; etc) doesn't.

[1] evil is perhaps hyperbole, but I don't like extensions.

<comment> james-skemp Why? In my experience and opinion add-ons are optional and enhance the experience for those who opt to use them.

<comment><USER6> I've seen people who have huge lists of not well programmed add ins that do Weird things.

It is a personal preference and I probably can't justify it if pushed.

Specifically for javascript: that's part of the browser, it's not an extension. So configuring it should really also be part of the browser. I prefer Firefox's approach to settings than Google's.

<comment> james-skemp Weird issues with add-on are definitely a problem, and with poor performance, one of the reasons I switched to Chrome. But when it comes to JS, and I'm willing to bet my bias as a web developer and website owner influences this, I don't think this should be easy to change.

Maybe Firefox needs a better warning when someone goes into the config; it wouldn't be the first time. But JS is not only a part of the browser, it's a core part of the web, good and bad.

For this reason, I don't believe that it needs to continue to be easy for someone who doesn't understand that to switch it off because of false or misleading information. The web has grown since JS really started being used, and won't be going away anytime soon.

<comment><USER7> Most people turn off JS because of security, because loading a web page should not always lead to code (besides rendering) being run on your machine.

<comment><USER8> "Most people" don't turn it off, those who do are sophisticated users and can easily download and use NoScript (and probably already do), which is a far smarter solution allowing for you to use the modern web on sites you trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do you know it was his decision?

Also, devil's advocate, why is it a bad thing for non-technical users not to be able to disable javascript? Do you know of any non-technical users who disable javascript?

<comment><USER10> I can only assume your definition of 'technical users' includes all people who might want to disable javascript?

<comment><USER9> No. I don't personally know anybody who turns off javascript, and through the internet I only know of technical people (as in, the kinds of people who understand how browsers and the internet work) who disable it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: iPad web app ideas? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
I want to get up to speed on developing iPad apps using WebKit, but I just don't know what would be a worthwhile app. I would release it free, but I want to do something worthwhile to learn, not just some cheesy app that nobody will use.
Ideas? <comment><USER2> How about a usable recipe-database, diet tracker, fitness tracker, ...

I am serious. I know that there are tons of those, but it always strikes me how even the most basic/obvious apps still suck usability and design-wise. I believe that somebody who's good at designing easy UIs could easily outinnovate these and take some pretty good markets. And one of these days, I will.

<comment><USER3> I havent used this, but the one by Epicurious looks good. <http://www.epicurious.com/services/mobile/ipad>

<comment><USER4> It's ok, but really not what you'd hope for. Searching is impossible and a good portion of the screen is taken up by "Missing image" images. Very hard to find new stuff (in my brief experience).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The iPad's app library basically breaks down into two categories. Games and Date Front Ends. If you don't want to write a game than what I'd do if I were you is to find a website that doesn't have a good iPad experience and write a parser for it (icombinator.net is a good example of this type of thing)

</comment><comment><USER6> An awesome PivotalTracker.com interface. When multitasking comes out, I want to be talking to my team on Skype while I move around stories and check stuff off.

</comment><comment><USER7> What app would you use? That's the best kind to write.

<comment><USER8> Scratch an itch, and build something you'll use, because if you don't use it, it's much less likely that anyone else will!

I do have one suggestion, that I'd use... a really minimalistic Twitter web client, with beautiful typography and some balanced whitespace.

Watch Rick's List on CNN for when they show the Tweets for what I mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the Google app's feature that transcribes spoken search requests and Stumbleupon's app that unifies the "go to semi-random page" experience. Creating a specialized browser that uses a clever mechanism to find content (as opposed to URLs, bookmarks, and an address bar) could be a great project.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had considered making an app to create decision trees, but decided against it.

</comment><comment> adam-_- Do you need a developer license to make apps with WebKit?

<comment><USER11> You need the license to sell in the app store. No license needed to put up a website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Drag and drop scrum board

</comment><comment><USER13> I thought of three great ideas but I realized I just want to make those apps :) Good luck. I'll try to post more later.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah! I am the cofounder of a startup HiNii <http://hinii.com> Have you ever asked your self: "What I can do today?" or with some friend "Where we can go to have fun?" HiNii give you some proposals to have fun into your leisure time. You can realize the HiNii iPad app! We have private Apis, but we can give you access to them.

Give it a try!</comment>


Show HN: Sawmill.io – Make actionable work items from app logs for Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://sawmill.io/

<comment><USER2> This is something I've often wanted (I think) but your landing page doesn't quite give me enough to envision how _I_ might use it. I'd love to see a few, solid examples of the types of typical log content you'd see and how you'd expect sawmill to handle them. The one screenshot you do have is way too tiny and verbose for me to quickly digest..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment and I agree, the landing page needs some serious work. I wasn't sure if I was addressing a problem other people felt too.

So Just in case it doesn't come across. You log to the sawmill library which then posts to a rest api. sawmill the groups similar error logs into work items and alerts the team to new or previously thought fixed issues. The tickets can then be worked on and closed when fixed.

It's trying to wrap some intelligence around the logs that you receive from an application.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts on the concept or problems would be greatly appreciated!</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best online SQL reporting/BI tools for SMBs? - <AUTHOR>

We need to grant access to our marketing team to run simple SQL queries against our database (e.g., how many customers bought in the last month). Ideally, this would be a SaaS reporting/analysis tool so we all we need to do is grant read privileges to a new user. <comment><USER2> Do you really want them to have to write SQL queries? There are tons of modern tools that solve this issue including the latest version of Excel (personal bias :)).

A simple tutorial on how to use PivotTables would probably get them 90% there.</comment>


Grafana Labs launches new Grafana.com site - <AUTHOR> https://grafana.com/blog/2017/03/13/we-are-now-grafana-labs/ <comment><AUTHOR> Today is a momentous day for the Grafana project and for raintank, the company behind Grafana. We're rebranding as Grafana Labs, and announcing something we've been working on for the better part of a year: GrafanaCloud. We are also merging our website sites into [https://grafana.com](https://grafana.com) We are also launching a community site for everything metrics & monitoring related on [https://community.grafana.com](https://community.grafana.com)

<comment><USER2> Great work. All the best !</comment></comment>


Every wish you could order a date on order? Well now you can - <AUTHOR> http://www.consocial.co.uk <comment><USER2> "Design You're Companion" lel</comment>


StageXL: A Flash-like Dart Library Ready for Production Level Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.stagexl.org <comment><USER2> I don't and never did use much Flash/AS, but wouldn't Haxe be a more logical choice? It is already battle tested and it is a lot more like AS/Flash than Dart? Not sure what experienced Flash devs would think; any here?

<comment><USER3> Plus, with Haxe and openFL, you will be able to ship native c++ build of your game for free (same code).

If only Haxe could add something more uptodate for multicore concurrency than thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What api do you use ? canvas ? webgl ? svg? do you use 1 canvas , or multiple canvas for the object graph ect... How do you handle rich text? do you handle 3D ? filters ? ...

that's the kind of info i'd like to see on the homepage ,HTML5 doesnt mean anything today without the details.

<comment><USER5> "The Stage class represents the main drawing area and is a wrapper over the HTML5 Canvas element"

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dart w/ StageXL maybe a logical next step for developers stuck with legacy Flash applications (and I think of all Flash application as legacy moving forward).

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks nice :D</comment>


LightCloud adds support for Redis - <AUTHOR> http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19458

<comment><AUTHOR> Includes benchmarks of Redis vs. Tokyo Tyrant</comment>


Event-driven investing: How I made 33x my money in two weeks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JorgenVeisdal/event-driven-investing-inflection-points-and-how-i-made-33x-my-money-in-two-weeks-de6afe3eb9f6 <comment><USER2> I thought your were going to talk about a straddle options strategy.

A straddle is simply the purchase of an at-the-money call option and an at- the-money put option with the same strike and expiry date. It is a net debit transaction that a trader enters in should they expect a large move in either direction in the near future.

Read more: Trading Volatility? Don't Trade Stocks, Trade Options | Investopedia [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/active- trading/032515/...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/active- trading/032515/trading-volatility-dont-trade-stocks-trade- options.asp#ixzz5TkLdOAvu) Follow us: Investopedia on Facebook

</comment><comment><USER3> I did some brief work in a hedge fund on special situations, which I think is just a synonym for event-driven? It's been awhile and I'm no longer in finance, wonder if any experts have insight to share here.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you for sharing! Congratulations on your bet.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment></comment>


AskHn:Why hasn't a text-to-mediawiki converter been created? - <AUTHOR>

I'm wondering if there is some deep technical reason why a text-to-mediawiki markup converter hasn't been created...yet.
Or a conversion extension that sits "inside" mediawiki so to speak and lets users type using a WYSIWYG window and then does the conversion after the user hits submit.
I was watching a video at the singularity university website and the the person giving the talk challenged anyone to create this in passing.
I know there is a mediawiki "usability" initiative but the editor is still a stretch away from people using microsoft word or other similar programs they are accustomed to <comment><USER2> It's been considered, but nobody has come up with a really good implementation which doesn't mangle the markup on existing pages when you hit "edit". There is a FCKEditor extension ([http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FCKeditor_%28Officia...](http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FCKeditor_%28Official%29)), but I'm not sure if it fully satisfies this requirement yet.</comment>


How much of a line of text do we need to be able to read it? - <AUTHOR> https://lucb1e.com/rp/js/read.html

<comment><AUTHOR> What I gathered from some previous testers:

        562 points
        501 points x2
        461 points
        410 points
        401 points x2

It seems we could save almost half the line height and everyone would still get it!</comment>


Show HN: DayJot – Another open-source alternative to OhLife - <AUTHOR> https://dayjot.com

<comment><USER2> Just curious more than anything - what's the rationale for going with the GPL? Is it because you both open sourced the app and run it as a hosted service? (not quite sure how it helps this scenario, but again, curious)

<comment><USER3> You might also want to consider the AGPL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An idea. I have several "things" I want to log. One of what I did at work, and one for personal things like a diary. It would be neat to have the ability to receive multiple emails per day, at different times. I'd probably pay another $1 per "email".

<comment><AUTHOR> It does accept multiple emails per day, however it doesn't distinguish within a day. If you send it more than one email per day it will append the text of the email to the existing entry for that day.

Perhaps you could create an account with your work email, and one with your personal email? I hope I understood you correctly!

<comment><USER4> I see, although doing that I would have to go back and find that email again to reply again.

Multiple accounts, maybe. I'd just prefer to have it all in one account. The work notes are still personal, so I guess a mix would work. Like email@example.com should do the trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So very close to what I want! I'd like to record short notes about my kids as they grow up (not necessarily daily) and ideally attach a single photo every now and then. Is there anything around like that?

Otherwise I'm tempted to get forkin'.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can choose which days of the week, and at what time each day, the service send you reminder emails. As for photos, that's next on the list of features!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are the other alternatives? I never got to try OhLife. I was planning on making something similar, so it's cool that these things already exist, although i'd want a few more features so maybe i'll look into forking this!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm open to anything you'd want to contribute, so long as it doesn't compromise the private nature of the service. Fork away! I'm available if you have any questions about the codebase, or need help getting started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks great - forked it and look forward to submitting some tests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Looking forward to seeing what you put together. Are you working on the Rails side or the Ember side (or both)?

<comment><USER7> For now on the Rails side - I'm interested in learning Ember but it's a bit more of a project for the future.</comment></comment></comment>


Google planning to launch thousands of satellites - <AUTHOR> http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/02/16/google-planning-son-teledesic/

<comment><USER2> As an avid sailor I hope this to make a new kind of low earth orbit satellite internet. Current plans are stupid expensive. 5,000 to 15,000 is a lot for a harden receiver. But its a one time cost. The 150-500 a month for 150-350kb/s internet WITH a ~20GB monthly data cap is outrageous.

Also low 'earth' internet would fix a lot of the latency issues involved with the 1 second latency tax for GEO satellites.</comment>


Optical Effects in User Interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://medium.muz.li/optical-effects-9fca82b4cd9a <comment><USER2> Good article in general but mixed with many fallacies.

1\. Size is obviously not height. It's the area of the shape. There are complications though, e.g. negative space often adds weight. Blurring shapes is a terrible idea here.

2\. Aligning shape edges is also an optimization problem to equalize overshooting areas.

3\. Finding a visual center has nothing to do with the circumcircle in a general case. It's a well-known centroid. But, again, there are lots of complications.

4\. A circle is perfectly circular. There are other reasons for the "O" adjustments in typography. It's even mentioned later on with no connection to here.

5\. The round corners is another story. In this case G2 fillets are most pleasing. It's hard to make this adjustment by hand, that is why the examples look bad and unnatural. Squircle, Lamé curve, has nothing to do with the iOS icon shape.

Most of these adjustments can be done with mathematical precision. The rest can be approximated well enough with mathematical models. Ideally, design tools should guide these adjustments. There is definitely interest. My most successful plugin for Sketch happened to be the one for optical adjustments [http://designplugins.com/optically](http://designplugins.com/optically).

<comment><USER3> Re 3. the centroid seems wrong in the article (the one on the right is supposedly 'good') [https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*3VebDJ3XSt3g3syHY...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*3VebDJ3XSt3g3syHYru3FQ.png) . Both look uncomfortably off-center, too far to the left or right. There must be a better way than 'draw a circle around it' (imagine with Portlandia voice.)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, having spent a bit of time in Photoshop, for _that particular problem_ I think the solution is an average of shape centre-of-mass and bounding rectangle centre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Regarding optical size of icons... for _years_ I've wished that icons were sized (in the dock, in Finder, etc.) to consistent maximum _area_ on top of maximum height/width, so that applications with square icons wouldn't look bigger than the circular or irregular ones. It would make everyone's dock look _so_ much better.

For example, a 32 x 32 icon has 1,024 pixels. If we declared than any icon can only use 2/3 of the available area, then square icons would be reduced to 26 x 26, circle icons to 29 x 29, and more irregular shapes like a printer or magnifying glass would presumably get the full 32 x 32. It's trivial to sum up and calculate from the amount of transparency, and would leave rows of icons _so_ much more optically balanced.

(More advanced -- to deal with hollows, you can "shrink wrap"/"gift wrap" the icon before calculating area.)

<comment><USER6> Visual weight is not just about number of non-blank pixels. The author has a few good examples of how strong colours add weight to otherwise identical icons, and so dark icons look better being a bit smaller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fun fact, the google logo is not a circle: [http://i.imgur.com/lBk99be.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/lBk99be.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Although I'm not a designer, I'm a bit OCD about design/geometry - and I imagine designers are even more so. Aside from the non-perfect circle, why wouldn't they align the edges (left and right respectively) of the green and red arcs! That is going to annoy me every time I see that logo now.. It really ought to be reported as a bug/issue.

<comment><USER9> Because the "center" of the G is not the optical center. Same reasons as everything else in the original article. Take a look at the image at the top of this page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface_anatomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface_anatomy). The crossbar of the E (and R) are higher than vertical middle. And they differ from the x-height.

Despite your affinity for geometry, geometric fonts are the exception, not the rule. And even geometric fonts often have tweaks that make them less "perfect" geometrically but look more correct. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans- serif#Geometric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#Geometric)

<comment><USER8> I found some hints - straight from the source, Google's design team - to the reasoning behind the "G" design, and why the alignment of colored arcs turned out that way.

A short video that demonstrates the intention of the lines: [https://g-design.storage.googleapis.com/production/v6/assets...](https://g-design.storage.googleapis.com/production/v6/assets/article/evolving- the-google-identity/g-letter.mp4)

It came from this article, Evolving the Google Identity ([https://design.google/library/evolving-google- identity/](https://design.google/library/evolving-google-identity/)) under section "Google G Construction".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the optical effect where 1/4 of the article is obscured by two banners.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for putting this to words. Now that you mention it, it is incredibly annoying, though the content was really interesting. I looked for an 'x' button on the banners more than once but then gave up and continued plowing through.

What is interesting is that I didn't get anywhere near the thought of commenting on this (or opening the chrome debugger or something to turn it off manually). So it's interesting that such visual noise can be a low-level annoyance without becoming a conscious thought. (Until your comment.)

Visual designers must be trained to notice what to people who aren't doing it is just noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me the circle in the diagram which is supposed to be "equal visual weight" looks larger than the square, while the ones in the first example appear about the same.

But if I zoom the page out to 50%, or look at it on my phone, then things do work the way the author expects them to.

So I fear it may be difficult to correct for these effects as long as people use different screens.

</comment><comment><USER13> > What is bigger: a 400-pixel square or a 400-pixel circle? Geometrically > speaking, their width and height are equal.

The area of a circle isn't width * height though, obviously. If you plug pi * r^2 = 400^2 into WolframAlpha, you get a diameter of 2*r = 451.35 pixels, very close to the 450 pixels the author came up with.

For the icons too, maybe you could just count the pixels (ask Photoshop the amount of filled in pixels?) and make sure every icon has a similar amount.

</comment><comment><USER14> Things like weight, continuous first and second derivatives in other words.

</comment><comment><USER15> Inscribing something in a circle isn't good enough. Use the image center of mass to really balance icons. Are there any design tools that provide center of mass?

Here's a minimal python/scipy script to measure the image centroid (of a b/w image):

        from scipy import ndimage

        im = ndimage.imread(args.input)
        com = ndimage.measurements.center_of_mass(im)[:2]
        size = im.shape[:2]

        print("positive x is right, positive y is up")
        print("image centroid is offset from image center by x:{0:.1f} pixels by y:{1:.1f} pixels".format(com[1] - size[1]/2, -(com[0] - size[0]/2)))

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it safe to assume that pixels are perfectly square?

<comment><USER17> It's still possible to set non-square video modes on many PCs. But, it's extremely rare for anyone to make that their default intentionally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> s/weight/area/

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea This makes me think of optical margins which are used in some typesetting software (like LaTeX with the microtype package). The thing is when it comes to geometry for human consumption the only thing that matters is how it _looks_. My Dad actually taught me this a long time before I knew about typography. He told me that while a spirit level is an important tool, it's a mistake to put a shelf up level if it doesn't _look_ level next to the ceiling.</comment>


Elon Musk: Tesla solar roof will likely cost less than a normal roof - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-solar-roof-cost-less-than-normal-roof-2016-11 <comment><USER2> Elon, please focus all of your time and energy on delivering the Model 3. Nothing else should matter to Tesla right now. Solar shingles can wait. -Mom</comment>


Personal 'learn to code' project: Make every website beautiful - <AUTHOR> http://rayhano.com/post/36734197669/make-every-website-beautiful

<comment><USER2> <http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/30936334.jpg>

before talking about "beautifing" the web, please make your font bigger it's hard to read

<comment><AUTHOR> :) Gotta love the irony.</comment></comment>


Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/i-had-one-night-to-invent-interstellar-travel-b2466882ef5c#.ie10oyemi <comment><USER2> This is a duplicate of Wolfram's original blog post:

[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might- the-a...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien- spacecraft-work/)

The previous discussion (about two months ago):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364)

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem with interstellar travel in general is that it is so expensive, in terms of energy usage. I speculate that even for Kardashev type 3 civilizations, shipping matter around will be impractical.

The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.

All that is needed is that the destination be prepared appropriately. So that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination.

I haven't seen any indications yet with physics that something more practical is in the offing. There's still a lot we don't understand (GUFT, dark matter / energy), but there doesn't seem to be much hope for life as we know it to flit around the universe faster than light.

<comment><USER4> > The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and > aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, > "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical > method.

Sure, but for entities that live purely as software the concept of "being" in a "place" is probably completely unimportant.

There's no reason to assume that software entities would have any reason to want to interact with meatspace, especially when they can conjure every possible world (and every impossible world) out of nothing.

<comment><USER5> Once you've maxed out your abilities with the resources available in one place, then you'd probably start specializing for different abilities in different places to the extent you can gain additional value through comparative advantage. With that in mind sharing the unique results of the different specializations means location is still important in the absence of instantaneous communication over arbitrary distance.

P.S. Your name seems strangely familiar. /s

<comment><USER4> I'm the evolved-into-a-software-being version of you, of course

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It always seems to involve mastering gravity yet gravity is so incredibly weak compared to magnetism. Plus "alien spacecraft" aka UFOs always seem to output a huge amount of light so maybe gravity and light are linked in the process or mechanism for whatever makes the thing operate.

I like the article how it mentions getting the science believable or at least not terrible wrong. But what I dislike as much as that is whenever the science parts are dismissed. Usually a scientist in a movie or TV show tries to explain something the lead character rolls their eyes as if it were boring everyone laughs.

How can we encourage kids that science is interesting if it's treated as a bore or a joke and ridiculed? I know it's meant as a writing method to make the lead person seem dumb compared to the smart scientist but it sends a bad message that science is boring.

<comment><USER7> Using gravity as a propulsive force may be silly given its relative strength, but having a way of blocking gravity would make a tremendous difference in getting out of our gravity well. It's not so much help for achieving orbit, but if you want to go beyond the Earth or even beyond the Solar System it would be a whole new game.

<comment><USER8> If you can block gravity you can achieve orbit at walking speeds if you turn of your anti-gravity machine some tiny fraction of the time you're spending in orbit.

Similarly with going outside the solar system, you could just jump on the planet Earth and press the "anti-grav" button, and in a few hundred thousand years you'd be outside the solar system.

<comment><USER9> I think you can dispense with the "jump". Just press the "gravity off" switch at midnight. You will be on the far side of the earth from the sun, as the earth is pulled to the sun in its orbit, you will drift away on a tangent line at 30km/s relative to the sun.

Google says "9 billion miles divided by 30km/s" is a little over 15 years and you are out of the solar system.

(I'm ignoring the milky way here, The sun is whizzing around the milky way at 230km/s, but it isn't very near the center so the "chord near the center is simplified to radius" which I snuck by you in the previous paragraph isn't valid. But you should definitely work this out before flicking the switch. Depending on the relative gravity/velocity magnitudes and the time of year, you could drive yourself through the sun on your way out of the solar system, which voids your warrantee.)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I didn't do any of the math, but I should have remembered better from this counteractive fact: You're already at 30km/s, it takes more energy to fall into the Sun than escape the Solar System.

Even if you press the "gravity off" button at some random time during the day the odds of you hitting anything are _tiny_ , even if you fly towards the sun most of the time you'll just fly right past it and be no worse off. Except for the part where there's no oxygen and you can't breathe of course.

<comment><USER10> "gravity off" is a lofty term to toss around so freely. Consider an omnipresent force or curvature vanishing one spot. I can't imagine gravity but the effects in an ocean would obviously be to fill the hole with massive force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yesterday, I watched Bruno Vassel fly his glider in the Rocky Mountains for nearly 2 hours on Youtube. I hypothesize someday we will be able to extract energy from the Ether to power our own spaceships in a similar way to gliding. That's not to say we won't need to add our own energy to get somewhere specific!

<comment><USER12> Well, our space crafts do "glide" on gravity.

<comment><USER13> Also see the Interplanetary Transport Network, a network of routes through the solar system that take the lowest energy paths, using Lagrange points to change direction. They aren't the fastest routes, but if you want to glide around the solar system this is where you travel.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Net...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network)

<comment><USER14> I suspect one of the best ways to travel around the solar system is to find an asteroid with a very eccentric orbit. Land on the asteroid, and while it won't save energy, the asteroid will offer a radiation shield and raw materials to use on the journey. The asteroid can be slowly transformed into a "cruise ship" for the journey and subsequent ones.

<comment><USER15> You could say that is what happened to earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well this article kills my pet theory, but I'll inflict it on the world anyway because this sort of stuff is fun to think about.

Before I go on, a couple of key points.

Also, spoilers ahead.

1\. We don't see the space craft arrive. 2\. Their choice of locations on Earth goes unexplained. 3\. We don't actually see them leave. They just disappear.

I posit that the "aliens" aren't actually from "outer space". They're higher dimensional beings that exist in our 3D space (or 4D if you count time), but we simply cant perceive them in the same way a two dimensional being would not be able to perceive anything in the third dimension.

The "ships" aren't ships. They're something the "aliens" have created to project themselves into a 3D dimensional space so that we can perceive them. They're basically windows. When Amy Adams' character goes behind the "window", she can do this because her brain has acquired the capacity to perceive the higher dimension, and she no longer needs the window.

Their locations on Earth may mean nothing to us, but they are convenient places for them as they perceive the universe. A 2D being would not be able to fathom the reason 3D being makes marks on a 2d plane unless they could perceive the 2D plane form a 3D perspective.

Anyway, that was my theory. This article blows pretty much destroys it, but I like it anyway.

</comment><comment><USER17> Asking someone with better understanding of physics. Wolfram talks about space as a network. But would not that mean that there is an absolute reference frame? Relativity theory does not need it (not sure if it disproves that there is no such thing), and from what I know no such frame was found. How does that reconcile?

<comment><USER18> Until some people for whom theoretical physics is more than just a hobby start to take seriously Wolfram's crazy theories, you and I would be well served to ignore them.

<comment><USER19> They mostly ignore them too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The movie-makers were giving Christopher raw data, just like in real life, > and he was trying to analyze it. ... > In the final movie, the screen > visuals are a mixture of ones Christopher created, ones derived from what he > created, and ones that were put in separately.

I wonder -- did he synthesize the handwriting samples under analysis or was that from the film's conventional creative team? I read Chiang's story after having seen "The Arrival" and IIRC the descriptions weren't anywhere near as clear about the circular nature of the sentences.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Gauss suggested back around 1820 that one could carve a picture of the > standard visual for the Pythagorean theorem out of the Siberian forest, for > aliens to see.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_Pythagorean_right_tria...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_Pythagorean_right_triangle_proposal)

Radio waves? Golden discs? Nah son, colossal geometric wheatfields and a few big hedges is what you want!

</comment><comment><USER22> There have been a number of posts about this movie on HN, many of them interesting [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Arrival&sort=byDate&prefix=fal...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Arrival&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Some of them address the linguistic side of the movie.

</comment><comment><USER23> I like the blog post's window title better than the article caption: "I had one night to invent interstellar travel".

</comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone looked at the CIA declassified documents that appeared a few days ago?

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/ufo%20ph...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/ufo%20photo)

It does have pictures of UFO for reference

Edit: added details

<comment><USER25> CIA does not want the CIA or former CIA talking about UFOs to the public.

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA- RDP68-00046...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA- RDP68-00046R000200090003-6.pdf)

The CIA wants to keep UFOs out of public discussions, to not cause people to panic. Or alternatively, there is a conspiracy or collusion with the aliens to keep the government from panicking the public about UFOs ;)

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517565....](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517565.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Infinite Improbability Drive, of course!

</comment><comment><USER27> Direct reality manipulation. A chorus of magicians dictating the next millisecond, then the next and so on.

As with any technology there are easy ways and hard ways. Thus the spaceship.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why not create worm holes to travel through? How it does this? Old God knows.</comment>


Github is down - <AUTHOR>

$ git pull
ssh_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset by peer fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists. <comment><USER2> [http://go.perfmode.com/github-down](http://go.perfmode.com/github-down)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ouch. They crashed hard. Can't access the website either. Simply no response.

</comment><comment><USER4> Working fine here.

$ git pull Already up-to-date.

$ git push Everything up-to-date

The website is also working fine for me, albeit very slowly.</comment>