Ask HN: My Startup is in talks with the first customer. How do I charge them? - <AUTHOR>

I have been working on an SAAS system over the last months. I put the demo online, and now I am in talks with the first company who ist interested in using it. I am not sure how I should charge them. I am in Europe and they are in the USA. I heard bad things about PayPal, so I guess it's not a good idea to tell them to send the money to my PayPal account? Should I just give them my IBAN and SWIFT code and tell them to wire the money via bank-2-bank transfer? <comment><USER2> We've used Stripe + [https://plasso.co/](https://plasso.co/) for the first SaaS customers. Zero coding, invoices look professional, supports recurring subscriptions. The customer data remains in Stripe so nothing keeps you from building a full system around the Stripe API (or other tools) in the future.

Bank transfer should work. Be prepared that questions about the full bank postal address come up. Not all US banks are used to intl transfers it seems. Some banks, well credit unions, don't do intl transfers at all.

Have a look at [https://transferwise.com/](https://transferwise.com/) as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would recommend using Stripe and keeping the interface for billing as simple as possible. From working with directly with the people that have to make the payments the easier it is for them to pay, see last payments and generate previous invoices and see if they were paid the happier they are.

If you are using Stripe and Plasso or any of the other companies that make your work look professional, the companies should also feel comfortable using a credit card and subscribing or doing manual payments for your SaaS. Just remember as your SaaS grows, if the money people are happy and the SaaS is great they will normally keep coming back.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am too building a SaaS app in europe and are looking at getting us customers, here in europe we charge by invoice but in the us we will use either stripe or cleverbridge as payment provider.

Edit: The nice about cleverbridge is that they handle all vat and EU Vat moss - Stripe is faster to setup.

</comment><comment><USER5> Off topic but I am curious to know - how did you manage to land your first customer? Sales has always been an enigma for me

</comment><comment><USER6> Stripe. It's super quick to implement.

</comment><comment><USER7> most americans can barely send a wire. go with stripe or something easier.</comment>


NASA confirms amateur astronomer has discovered a lost satellite - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/amateur-astronomer-discovers-revived-nasa-satellite <comment><USER2> Most recent updates are here, on NASA's blog dedicated to IMAGE recovery: [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image- confirm...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image-confirmed)

This is quite an outdated post, as NASA has updated as recently as last month. This article that's posted was updated in January. A lot has changed.

<comment><USER2> Also, this a really good read if you have the time: [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/a-detailed- timelin...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/a-detailed-timeline-of- the-image-mission-recovery)

It reads as if it's from Andy Weir's "The Martian"

Favorite quote from that article: `Burley adds a closing question: "Does anyone happen to have a 4 mm tape cartridge reader that will work on a modern Linux workstation and a 16-year-old data tape and not disintegrate it?"`

<comment><USER3> Agreed - it's the personal touches that make the story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why someplace where I work there is a computer in a closet that has Windows XP service pack 1, and all the software required to build the code we were working on then. I work in embedded systems, there is always the possibility that we will decide to fix a bug in some old controller that we last sold 12 years ago. I don't think anybody who knows the code is left, but the computers sit, just in case.

NASA should take that to heart and make sure they keep a few old computers in a closed until the last satellite is confirmed de-orbited. Note that this advice only applies to believed dead satellites, satellites that are still in use presumably have a team porting software to something more modern as needed.

Better yet NASA should do what we are attempting: repeatable builds in a container. If I can install a Ubuntu 10 container on whatever the latest linux is and build, I can throw away the Ubuntu 10 computer. This test can be automated with reasonable confidence and low cost.

<comment><USER5> Look up the crazy stuff that happened with ICE/ISEE-3. NASA had disposed of the high power transmitter that was originally used for communication with it (and other satellites of that era). When it came back around, it fell to civilians to try and reach out to it. The initial contact was made with Arecibo Observatory and a high power amplifier built out of repurposed cellular tower equipment. Fun times :)

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explore...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer#Reboot_effort)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nasa is receiving a signal intermittently from the satellite, and has attempted to send commands, but it is not responding to all of those commands. [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image- confirm...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image-confirmed)

</comment><comment><USER8> According to the astronomer's later blog dated 27th Feb 2018, IMAGE went silent again.

[https://skyriddles.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/space-strikes- ba...](https://skyriddles.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/space-strikes-back-image- returns-to-silence/)

<comment><USER2> [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image- confirm...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image-confirmed) Communication has been re-established, however they are having difficulty sending commands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This news is from a few months ago?

<comment><USER10> > Update, 31 January, 11:20 a.m: [...] Efforts to command IMAGE will likely > take another week or two, as the satellite's old control software is adapted > to modern systems.

An update to that update _would_ be interesting!

<comment><USER11> In case you didn't see it, this blog was posted further up and has more updates: [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image- confirm...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image-confirmed)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the news here: astro trash, big-org responging? Amateur going a long way? Everybody loves a success story.

</comment><comment><USER13> What would be the cost of launching a micro-sat into an orbit that could perhaps act as an intermediate link?

</comment><comment><USER14> The growing level of amateurism in this field is astounding!

<comment><USER15> You can say they are reaching for the stars.</comment></comment>


A Utopia of One's Own - brown9-2 https://medium.com/weird-future/e6fa8f16f92b <comment><AUTHOR> Fly your own flag.

Non-Billionairism's:

Semi-sovereign anchor-out afloat community in the fabulous great Northwest over a century:

<http://www.againstthetidemovie.com/>

...and we're still here.

Billionairism's:

<https://medium.com/weird-future/e6fa8f16f92b></comment>


Parse Domains from URLs easily with Domainatrix (Ruby) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pauldix.net/2009/12/parse-domains-from-urls-easily-with-domainatrix.html <comment><USER2> The conversation in the comments about how to name libraries is amusing. Who knew that by reading a post about Domainatix, I'd also hear about something called HookR?

<comment><USER3> Don't forget the very-quickly-renamed Shemail library!

[http://blog.purifyapp.com/2009/12/30/mailstyle-a-html- email-...](http://blog.purifyapp.com/2009/12/30/mailstyle-a-html-email-plugin- for-ruby-on-rails/)</comment></comment>


Let's Encrypt: How It Works - <AUTHOR> https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/ <comment><USER2> Which browsers will trust Let's Encrypt certificates out of the box? There may be a major backwards compatibility gap here.

<comment><USER3> We'll have very broad compatibility from day one via cross-signing by IdenTrust.

<comment><USER2> Great, thanks -- I'm looking forward to your release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area Great project to smooth out the really painful process at present for acquiring certs. How about an FAQ page or a few clarifications?

Things I wanted to know which were not immediately apparent:

Will it be broadly accepted from day one? Yes, apparently, though see the identrust issue below.

Will it generate a keypair but keep the private key on your server? Yes.

Will it work without having to babysit an interactive prompt? Yes.

Will it just let you generate key,csr,crt and do your own config changes? Yes.

Questions I still don't know the answer to:

Will it provide wildcard certs? No idea. I'd love it to be true as this is the part of current CA's which really irks me - the price gouging over something which costs them nothing more to provide. Can't see anything on the website about it.

How does it auto-renew, does it have to run all the time?

Why is the cert for identrustssl not trusted in Chrome or Safari? That doesn't inspire confidence : [https://www.identrustssl.com/](https://www.identrustssl.com/)

Can every CA support issuing certs this way please? :)

<comment><USER4> We're working on an FAQ. This thread has been really helpful in clarifying which Qs are FA :)

With regard to your questions:

> Will it provide wildcard certs?

Not initially, but possibly in a future iteration.

Note that having an automatic CA addresses some of the use cases for wildcard certs. Namely, if you're using a wildcard cert just to avoid having to manage individual certs for foo-1.example.com through foo-N.example.com, you can just have them each automatically get a specific cert.

> How does it auto-renew, does it have to run all the time?

That will depend on the software running on the web server. The current "node- acme" and "lets-encrypt-preview" implementations in the Github repo are examples. Ultimately, in addition to these tools, it would be great to have ACME / LE support built into web server platforms, which are already running all the time.

> Why is the cert for identrustssl not trusted in Chrome or Safari? That > doesn't inspire confidence : > [https://www.identrustssl.com/](https://www.identrustssl.com/)

I don't know what the story is with that site, but I believe the Let's Encrypt CA will be cross-signed under the same IdenTrust CA that issued the cert for [https://letsencrypt.org/](https://letsencrypt.org/). So Let's Encrypt certificates should work wherever that site works (which includes Chrome and Safari, at least on my MacBook).

> Can every CA support issuing certs this way please? :)

I can't speak for other CAs, but we are definitely open to other CAs re-using technologies from Let's Encrypt to automate their operations. It would be even better for them to collaborate in developing the protocol. That's why we wrote ACME up using the IETF's document format, so that it can be developed in the IETF's open process with many stakeholders involved.

<comment> grey-area _Not initially, but possibly in a future iteration._

OK, good to know.

 _Ultimately, in addition to these tools, it would be great to have ACME / LE support built into web server platforms, which are already running all the time._

I see, thanks, hence the emphasis on protocol not product. Great idea, let's hope it takes off, it'd be really nice to be able to just add a config for ssl_on and let the server deal with the rest. I suppose it's early days for discussions with server providers?

 _I don 't know what the story is with that site_

It's weird how old and busted CA sites are, almost without exception, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a place selling certs doesn't even use them properly, but as you point out, they've issued letsencrypt.org, and that works fine. Good to know.

 _So Let 's Encrypt certificates should work wherever that site works_

This would be a great line for your how it works, rather than browser-trusted, which could mean anything really.

Thanks again for this great idea, looking forward to trying it out.

<comment><USER4> > I don't know what the story is with that site

Turns out they had the wrong certificate chain provisioned. Seems to be fixed now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What kind of impact is Let's Encrypt going to have on the CA industry? I'm not that familiar with the current state of the CA companies, nor do I understand this industry well enough to know if this is going to be a major hit to them or not.

Is there any reason why a company would prefer a CA other than Let's Encrypt?

<comment><USER6> The impact depends largely on their ability to get their root certificate into all of the browsers. It'll be interesting to see what happens with older versions of browsers as well, since if they start with a brand new root certificate then I'm not sure what happens with the older browsers.

If they can get their certificate into all of the browsers then it's possible they could achieve broad adoption for domain-verified certificates. There will still be a market for other validation types (organization validated and extended validation, for example) though.

<comment><USER7> > since if they start with a brand new root certificate then I'm not sure what > happens with the older browsers.

IdenTrust will cross-sign Let's Encrypt root cert. I imagine they will keep it cross-signed, for backwards compatibility, once LE has their root cert in all the browsers.

<comment><USER8> You can't exactly undo cross signing without creating a new root CA - at some point they'll probably stop sending their root CA with the handshake (which is required when cross signing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry for the newbie question....

So if I have apache running [http://example.com](http://example.com) on port 80 and I follow the instructions ($ lets-encrypt example.com)

Will Apache now be correctly serving encrypted traffic on port 443 with a cert for [https://example.com](https://example.com) ?

<comment><USER10> That's the idea. It assumes you are using an OS with a package manager, and letting it manage your software and (to some extent) config files.

<comment><USER11> And if you don't, or if you don't want to, it is easy to configure Apache or any web server manually.

All you really need are three things:

* the letsencrypt command line tool that will do the API dance to request the certificate

* a file in your web site root with a ownership verification token or a DNS record with said token

* a configuration file snippet for your server

I'm sure all of this will be documented very well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great project! Please also provide a yum repository and instructions (and any others you feel are popular enough). You may want to look at the way SSLMate does it, with an operating system drop down selection (Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, Arch, Mac, Other).

<comment><USER13> We are actually hoping to have packages shipping from the official OS repositories, so you won't even have to get the package from us. (If anyone wants to help with this aspect, please get in touch.)

<comment><USER14> Is it possible to get new packages into Jessie post-freeze?

<comment><USER13> I don't think it would make sense to start shipping this package in operating systems before public cert issuance starts, which is currently expected to be around next summer. It would be fairly confusing to web developers to be encouraged by the OS to run the client, only to have it immediately inform them that there are no CAs yet able to issue certs to them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this kill the business model for normal CAs, or is there something worth going to another CA for?

Also, how trivial/hard will it be for a state agent to generate its own certificate-signing traffic and use the Let's Encrypt CA to sign arbitrary domains of their choosing?

<comment><USER16> I'm thinking someone could spoof a DNS entry for the signing server and prove that they own any domain they want, is that prevented somehow?

<comment><USER17> If an attacker can spoof DNS, they can just create A records that point to their own server, and MITM from that.

Public key pinning would protect against that class of attacks: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/SecurityEngineering/Public_Key_Pinn...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/SecurityEngineering/Public_Key_Pinning)

<comment><USER16> Whose DNS layer? If they own the user's, no. If they own the server's, maybe, if they could convince the CA to sign a certificate they control. Otherwise, they couldn't really do anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can someone clarify whether LE will check if there is already a signed SSL cert for the domain, and it contains the same information? For example, via the SSL Observatory?

Doing this would prevent a point in time vulnerability in DNS (temporary mitm showing a different IP for the domain) or direct mitm of the connection to the webserver. Otherwise the attacker could get a signed cert for [https://peacenik.org](https://peacenik.org), and then present that to activists that it mitms.

<comment><USER4> Yes, we plan to apply a few mitigations of this type. Part of the idea of the "Proof of Possession of a Prior Key" challenge is so that if a web server requests a cert for a domain with an existing certificate, we can ask them to prove that they hold that certificate.

[https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme- spec/blob/master/draft-b...](https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme- spec/blob/master/draft-barnes-acme.md)

<comment><USER8> This is a horrible idea... I have numerous certs for my domain and collecting them all to prove to you I own them is not going to be fun.

<comment><USER18> You wouldn't be in a very good position to revoke them then, would you? For example, if we had another heartbleed.

<comment><USER8> I have access to manage them, however the private keys are either in various services or non exportable with AWS...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Automatically prove to the Let's Encrypt CA that you control the website

If something could "just" prove identity without worrying about MITM we would not need the whole RSA stuff.

<comment><USER20> I had a hard time un-packing this for a minute so I want to try and clarify.

The part about proving to Let's Encrypt is problematic for sites that do not already have TLS on the example.com domain. Any plain HTTP request that Let's Encrypt makes to example.com to validate that you've put up some content on the server is susceptible to a MITM attack. I guess that means for users setting up certs for the first time they can't just put some content up on example.com and need to use DNS or something else to prove ownership.

The MITM problem with requests to example.com doesn't exist if example.com is already set up for HTTPS, which is probably why the examples on the technical description show requests for [https://example.com/8303](https://example.com/8303). I was confused about that at first because Let's Encrypt is largely targeted towards people without any TLS encryption yet.

<comment><USER8> > I guess that means for users setting up certs for the first time they can't > just put some content up on example.com and need to use DNS or something > else to prove ownership.

FYI, CAs do this already (HTTP validation), but an easy fix is to generate a self signed cert and pass the fingerprint of it to the CA.

<comment><USER21> Not sure how the self-signed cert would make things better. Couldn't an MITM attacker do the exact same thing? Presumably, the MITM attacker would already be the party making the (fraudulent) request to the CA, so they could submit their own fingerprint.

<comment><USER8> I suppose you're correct, I wasn't thinking that the attacker would also submit the request. I guess if you're MITMing CA requests you're screwed anyhow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why caring at all about OCSP/CRL revocations that don't work anyway ([https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/04/29/revocationagain.ht...](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/04/29/revocationagain.html))? If you have an agent running on the webserver, you're 99% close to simply use short-lived certs. Just issue 1-week certs and be done with.

<comment><USER4> Getting to short-lived certificates is a goal, but the reality for now is that OCSP and CRLs are what implementations require, and what the CABF Baseline Requirements require. So we'll need to start with those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I really like this and I am excited by the sponsor list. The self-signed cert notification in browsers is becoming more obnoxious every year.

</comment><comment><USER24> How is this not really bad?

Suppose I somehow get control of a machine on the same network as a server that doesn't use Let's Encrypt. I can probably ARP spoof it pretty easily. If it has a signed certificate from a different CA, I can't MITM it without people noticing. Or I couldn't, until now! Because I can now "control" the server's responses, I can easily get Let's Encrypt to authorize a new key pair giving my control over that domain. I can now generate valid certs for my MITM keys.

If the server were already using Let's Encrypt, I couldn't create a new controlling key pair. The "How It Works" doesn't talk about that, but search the RFC for "recovery token". But if the server isn't using Let's Encrypt, what would stop me from doing this?

Of course, I'm actually on the other end of it. To project myself, do I really have to at least register a controlling key pair with Let's Encrypt and any other browser-supported CAs that adopt this protocol?

</comment><comment><USER25> Will using a certificate from letsencrypt.org require any kind of agreement on the part of web site administrators or visitors to their web sites?

The CA's I've looked at have these agreements. I'd like to avoid binding myself or the visitors to my website to any legal requirements from a third party.

</comment><comment><USER26> Note to self: Donate to EFF

<comment><USER27> Why leave for tomorrow what you can do today?

[https://supporters.eff.org/donate](https://supporters.eff.org/donate)

<comment><USER4> See also:

[https://sendto.mozilla.org/](https://sendto.mozilla.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Apparently they will use the same certs as implemented on letsencrypt.org, so the free certs will work without error on every client which trusts the "DST Root CA X3" CA. Can we collect a definitive list of clients which include this CA certificate? Similar to the list for StartSSL ([https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802](https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802)).

Firefox: Mozilla added the certificate in NSS 3.11.9 on 2008-01-31, see [http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/nss...](http://www- archive.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/nss-3.11.9/nss-3.11.9-release- notes.html) and [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411299](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411299) So Firefox starting with 3.0 works

Chrome: When the first Chrome came out it used Mozilla NSS which already included the certificate. Now Chrome uses the OS key store: [http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/root-ca- polic...](http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/root-ca-policy)

Microsoft: The certificate is trusted by default since at least IE8 ([http://www.herongyang.com/PKI/HTTPS-IE-8-Trusted-Root-CA- Cer...](http://www.herongyang.com/PKI/HTTPS-IE-8-Trusted-Root-CA-Certificate- Authorities.html)) and Windows automatically updates the certificates, see [http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc751157.aspx](http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc751157.aspx)

Apple: Since iOS 2 (2008-07-11) ([http://support.apple.com/en- us/HT2185](http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT2185)) and at least since OS X Mavericks ([http://support.apple.com/en- us/HT203120](http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203120)), but probably way earlier.

Java: Yes: [https://gist.github.com/saltlakeryan/8479238](https://gist.github.com/saltlakeryan/8479238)

<comment><USER8> Chrome does not use NSS. It uses the underlying OS root store.

<comment><USER28> Sure, fixed it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Unfortunate choice of wording. From the web page:

> Obtain a browser-trusted certificate and set it up on your web server

From the "RFC" on github:

> In the background, the web server contacts the CA and uses ACME to request > that a certificate be issued for the intended domain name(s).

> Once the CA is satisfied, the certificate is issued and the web server > automatically downloads and installs it, potentially notifying the operator > via e-mail, SMS, etc.

This really sounds like they are generating the key pair, not just signing it. I think (hope) that's not the case, but clarity on this issue is pretty important.

<comment><USER24> They're generating the certificate, not the keys. Those are different things. You can probably think of the certificate as the computer equivalent of photo ID for the server.

They both show who you are (Driver's License: your name, cert: hostname), what you look like (DL: photo of you, cert: the key's fingerprint) and provide proof that they are genuine (DL: difficult and illegal fake, cert: practically impossible to do the math to forge a signature).

Note that they mention certificate singing requests. If the CA generated the keys, it wouldn't also need a CSR. It could just generate and send you the public and private keys and the signed certificate for them. However, it does need some information about the keys it's signing. You provide that information in the form of a CSR.

<comment> grey-area Looks to me like it generates the keys locally OR you can specify the keys if you like. But since the private key doesn't leave your server, it doesn't really matter either way.

[https://github.com/letsencrypt/lets-encrypt- preview/blob/mas...](https://github.com/letsencrypt/lets-encrypt- preview/blob/master/letsencrypt/client/client.py)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does it deal with the case of SaaS apps for customer domains? Eg. Customer example.com rocks up to my SaaS app and wants to use myapp.example.com - currently creating

<comment><USER31> Yes. As the service provider, you can create a DNS record to verify "myapp.example.com", which is sufficient to get a certificate issued for it.

For a setup like this, you may still be better off getting a single wildcard certificate for "*.example.com", which (as far as we know currently), isn't possible through Let's Encrypt. But it's certainly possible to get these certificates through Let's Encrypt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's a question I haven't seen anyone ask: What about email servers (SMTP/IMAP)? I need a good cert for that more than I do for https, personally. I could obviously have a web server up _just_ to succeed at the challenge/response and get a certificate, but I actually just try to avoid running webservers at all these days, to be honest. I'm also not 100% that certificate would work.

<comment><USER33> The technical overview mentions that there can be various different kinds of challenges, so presumably you could use a DNS based one or even an email based one if it's implemented.

<comment><USER4> That's correct. Also, if you've got an A/AAAA record for the domain name in question, you could run an ACME client on that box that spins up a temporary web server. That's what the node-acme demo client does.

[https://github.com/letsencrypt/node- acme/blob/master/lib/acm...](https://github.com/letsencrypt/node- acme/blob/master/lib/acme.js#L174)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am somewhat excited about letsencrypt, but isn't ownership verification via DNS not a bit, hmm, strange? After all, a proper certificate should defend against MITM attacks; so if an attacker would be able to take control over the target's DNS, he could easily create a certificate, which looks legit for all intended purposes. Or do I miss something in that regard?

<comment><USER35> Ownership verification is already done via DNS by existing CAs. If an attacker has full control over your DNS, he can already change the DNS records and trick a CA into delivering him a genuine certificate.

This isn't really a MITM attack.

<comment><USER14> What existing CA's offer this?

The ones i've used (godaddy, startssl, namecheap/ssls.com rapidssl/positivessl) all wanted email verification iirc.

EDIT: of course that's equivalent to verifying the MX. Never mind!

<comment><USER35> Gandi offers three validation methods:

* DNS: you need to add a specific record to your DNS zone * File: you need to add a specific file to the root of a HTTP server listening on the domain name * Email: they send an email to admin@ on the domain

All three are pretty much ways to check that you are the person in control of the associated DNS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The problem with their "howto" is that it completely ignores the fact that things like NAT and PAT need to be set up. Sure, the public IP's port 80 could be PAT-ed to the internal IP's port 80, but running "lets-encrypt example.com" can't magically PAT port 443 straight out of the package manager like that.

Still, this is a great idea...

</comment><comment><USER37> Is this a wildcard certificate and will it cover subdomains that way? Couldn't find anything on the site clarifying that.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is super awesome. It will help drive a better and secure web. Hats off to LetsEncrypt team.

</comment><comment><USER39> So is this something I can use in place of an auto-generated self-signed certificate for that headless linux box that I have running in the back of my closet and which I optimistically refer to as "my web server"?

<comment><USER40> You can use startssl for that right now. They provide one year free noncommercial certs. By the time that one expires letsencrypt will be live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wouldn't it be much easier if lets-encrypt just created the .crt .key files!? Rather then set it up automagically.

You could have it run once a year via crontab.

I would like to keep the control of my .conf files.

<comment><USER42> That will be an option.

Also, the current implementation only changes the SSLCertificateFile directive if you provide your own --key, --csr and already have an SSL vhost for the domain. (This one change is logged.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems like the one thing this doesn't/can't address is the IP shortage. Does help much if example.com is virtual hosted on the same IP address as 100 other sites?

<comment><USER43> The SNI stuff ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication)) helps with this if you can do without XP support.

<comment><USER44> It's not really XP that's the problem, but IE6. Firefox and Chrome support SNI even if you run them on XP.

<comment><USER45> All IE versions on XP, alas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Can it be used with tor to sign .onion hidden sites?

</comment><comment><USER47> Really excited about this!

</comment><comment><USER48> _Keep track of when your certificate is going to expire, and automatically renew it._

Or, all you have to do is let this new piece of software run periodically on your secure server. What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER49> I take it you've read the source code of Apache and Nginx then and confirmed that they aren't doing anything malicious as well? :)

In any practical security system you are always going to have to trust that certain components are doing what they say they're doing. Fortunately, Let's Encrypt is from a reputable group, and sponsored by organizations with good reputations (Mozilla, EFF, etc.), which is about as good as you can hope for.

<comment><USER29> Many people draw a line between one time trust and continuous trust. If this thing can update the certs on my server whenever it likes, that's substantially more trust than permitting it to install a cert exactly once. If, for example, it has a bug that permits a malicious upstream to overwrite arbitrary files, the window of vulnerability expands from "the CA is pwned this instant" to "the CA will at any future time ever be pwned".

<comment><USER21> Easy fix: Run the tool as its own user, give write permission to cert & key files to that user. If you're really paranoid, run it in a jail that only has access to those files. No different than proper security for any other system process.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Goes Semi-Pro (Part One) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2010/06/apple-goes-semi-pro-part-one/

<comment><USER2> Apple has a history of skating to where they think the puck will be.

That's not likely viewed as servers and even as desktops.

Likely mobile clients and clouds and ubiquitous communications.

The section of the D8 interview that Cringley has linked specifically targets how the enterprise market operates; hardly supporting the rest of the discussion in the article. Apple hasn't and doesn't aim at the enterprise market. Duh.

In that same D8 interview, Jobs comments on how his view of a migration away from traditional desktops gives him pause; it's been a familiar computing model for many years for many folks, though the replacement clients are clearly often better options. That he sees desktops around and available for the foreseeable future, but that they're not going to be the platform for the majority of users.

There will still be folks that need a desktop.

Video editing is one of those needs-a-desktop applications, but for how long? How long until you're either rendering on the client, or rendering on hosted services? And until then, yes, there will be boxes to deal with this.

The center of computing moved from IBM and UNIVAC mainframes in glass-walled raised-floor computing centers, to VAX superminis, to Unix workstations, to PCs running various operating systems to PCs running Windows, to bigger and denser data centers and more capable and more mobile clients and now-massively improved communications...

Welcome to computing.

Where's the puck headed?

Boxes for video editing?

I don't think so.

<comment><USER3> _Apple has a history of skating to where they think the puck will be._

And a history of being right -- exactly what the shareholders would want.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if I'd say they have a particularly impressive history of "being right". There are some things they do right, and of course the last several years have been huge for Apple, but success now doesn't translate to historical success. They had a pretty hard time through the 90s, and I think that most of their stuff from that time was inferior to the competition.

<comment><USER5> They didn't have Steve Jobs for most of the 90s.

<comment><USER4> That's cool, but the parent didn't say Steve Jobs had been right, he said Apple had been right.

<comment><USER5> And I'm saying that Apple's rightness has a lot to do with Steve Jobs being an influential part of the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here comes Cringely again, giving truly cringe-worthy predictions. His main prediction seems to be that there will be no more future Mac Pro releases because the iMac now has four cores and can run anything including Final Cut Pro.

He is totally wrong. There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market? They've had a lot of success breaking into the movie business and taking over from expensive Avid video editing workstations; there is no way they would lose this market.

The high-end market definitely needs features like PCI-express slots to connect real hardware to, 8 cores or as many as you can throw at it, and lots of internal and external storage options. Hell, a lot of those Mac Pros are connected to Fiber channel storage arrays that store terabytes of media. And he is seriously predicting that we replace all of this with a USB 3.0 connection on our iMac? Get real.

<comment><USER7> "There are still a huge number of video, audio, and design professionals that need the power of a Mac Pro and are willing to pay for it. Why would Apple intentionally drop this market? "

Are we talking about the same company? Apple is known for focusing on a few things and ignoring others that many believe would be "profitable".

I think Cringley is making a significant point, apple may lose focus on what we think of as computers.

<comment><USER8> Search for my down voted response on this page. It refers to another HN post where Steve says Apple will continue to make the best computers in the world, meaning he hasn't lost focus on that market.

<comment><USER7> he also said these things.

"There are no plans to make a tablet," Jobs was quoted saying to Mossberg. "It turns out people want keyboards…. We look at the tablet, and we think it is going to fail."

and

"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read any more."

Steve jobs is famous for misleading people with public statements

<comment><USER6> Steve Jobs is famous for not talking about or acknowledging future products until they are released.

This says nothing about cancelling existing products, and you should not extrapolate it as such.

Can you name one example where Apple has cancelled a successful product? By all accounts, the Mac Pro is a successful and profitable product, so why cancel it? It makes no business sense.

<comment><USER7> "By all accounts, the Mac Pro is a successful and profitable product, so why cancel it?"

By what accounts exactly? Cringely gave revenue numbers that show that their consumer electronic business is far larger than their pro computer business. This is a basis, you may disagree with the conclusion, but you are exaggerating at best.

Also, I'm not too concerned with them outright canceling it, but I am concerned that they won't particularly care about their computer business. Snow leopard was a very minor update, and I haven't heard anything about the vision for the mac in a long time. I think it's clear that Steve's focus has moved on to the consumer electronic side of their business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know the most disappointing thing about WWDC this year, for me, was the nearly total absence of anything Macintosh from the keynote.

<comment><USER10> "Nearly"? Off the top of my head, I don't remember anything about Macs at all in the keynote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _What I wonder is whether that version will be more — or less — capable than the current? Remember how they've dumbed down iMovie? Expect more of the same._

I don't follow. iMovie is a consumer app. It's supposed to be simple and easy to use. Same goes with Garageband/Logic -- the last update to Logic released 8 months ago or so didn't simplify anything or remove features. I don't see why they'd go that route with FCP either. There's a big difference between a $500 pro app and a consumer app that comes for free with your new Mac.

 _though I'd much prefer Apple embrace eSATA, but probably not._

Maybe on desktops. eSATA is a terrible solution for mobile. It's storage only so you have to dedicate space to a single function port at the cost of more multi-function USB ports. The eSATA connector/port are not very rugged. I've never seen eSATA with power so in a mobile environment you'll have to track down 12V of power to use the eSATA port. There is apparently a spec for eSATA + power though I've never seen it in the real world. USB3 is just a much better solution at this point. (whenever Intel gets around to integrating it into a chipset we'll probably see widespread support)

<comment><USER12> I think the next new connector will be Light Peak and if the transceivers are inexpensive it will become "the" interface for all your devices.

If Light Peak is too expensive, then USB-3 will obviate eSATA in any event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Actually a good story, I hadn't thought about this but yes, clearly, Apple is slowly abandoning the professional video/design market. If there is still a market there (not a sure thing), someone else could step in.

<comment><USER11> I don't really see that myself. Apple released Final Cut Pro 7 and Logic 9 less than a year ago. Aperture 3 less than 6 months ago. It's kind of unreasonable to expect these apps to be updated every 6 months or something. In both cases there were a few major features and lots of clean-up which was definitely needed. Both are very mature applications so I wouldn't expect FCP8 or Logic 10 to radically change anything.

As for hardware -- even most professionals don't need Mac Pros. The high end workstation market just isn't what it used to be.

<comment><USER14> Hum, what about upgrading FCP to Cocoa and 64 bits, for instance?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just noticed that they don't even feature the Xserve on their main store page anymore.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is this story #3 on Hacker News? The guy is probably wrong about the Mac Pro. Of course Apple is going to lead the way with USB3. The HN story where Steve says Apple will continue to make the best computers in the world is more interesting.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1457680></comment>


Microsoft mocks Google with 'Gmail Man' spoof to push Office 365 - <AUTHOR> http://dvice.com/archives/2011/07/microsoft-mocks.php

<comment><USER2> Posted several times, some with relevant comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818407> : 3 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819411> : 2 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820611> : 0 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821072> : 2 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821210> : nothing relevant

</comment><comment>==

ADDED IN EDIT: I've started a poll about this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822041></comment>


Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhyIsntPeopleCentricUIDesignTakingOff.aspx <comment><USER3> Communication tools that people use heavily enough to care about acquire a context beyond just "Who I can communicate with". As the recipient, for the majority of my routine communications I get information from medium > sender > content, even though all ways of reaching me just make my phone jingle.

The series of decisions that results in me calling someone is so radically different than the one that results in IMing them that I'd never find it useful to start with a person and then decide to IM or call.

I'm about as often in the task-oriented position of thinking "I should call someone" or "I wonder who's awake on jabber" as the person-oriented position anyway.

tl;dr: The medium is the message

<comment><USER4> I see no reason that the OS can't support both flows.

<comment><USER5> Which, incidentally, Android does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing about computers is that yeah, they're awesome at communication, but they do a lot of other stuff too that has nothing to do with person to person transmission of information. IMHO _task_ -oriented UI makes the most sense because I use my computer as a general-purpose _tool_ to get stuff done. In all use cases I find myself performing a type of task. Only in a subset of cases do I find myself communicating with a person.

I guess I'd call myself more of a power user, but when I look at what I've got going on my computer at night it typically looks like this:

\- playing a video game

\- talking to arbitrary group of friends on skype over headset

\- streaming video to twitch (to whomever is watching)

\- programming my side project on my laptop during downtime (waiting for people to connect in-game, etc.)

\- browsing the web (looking up game items, watching funny videos, researching some kind of programming thing I'm figuring out)

\- monitoring my inbox

\- monitoring my twitter feed

Talking to my friends on Skype is definitely direct person to person communication. But even then, I think more along the lines of "1\. I want to have a group conversation with Friend A, B, and X, 2. I'd like to communicate with them through the medium of Skype, 3. open Skype 4. add the specific friends I want to talk to to my conversation, 5. go ham". There's no one friend in particular I would "open" first, and subsequently open other friends into. That seems backwards. It's more about _what_ I want to do, not necessarily _who_ I want to talk to.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. I think the obvious answer to the author's question is that apps are verbs and people (and documents) are nouns, and when people are trying to use a tool it's the verbs that start the process.

The real problem, which the author does _not_ discuss even though it's implicit in some of his examples, is that many of the apps on a typical phone (or desktop computer, for that matter) aren't the _right_ verbs; they're verbs that were easy for the programmer to program, not verbs that are easy for the user to use. You fix that by making better apps, not by switching from app- centric to people-centric design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article brings up a good point, sometimes it makes more sense to start with the person. For example, let's say I need to get in touch with my friend to quickly inform them of a change to our plans.

Open Skype? Not online. Check Facebook, nope, they're not on. Messenger? Nope. Ok, I'll open my contact book, and get their number to call.

Wouldn't it make more sense to simply select the person I'm trying to reach, and see what platforms they're online, so I can choose my contact method?

Or what if I want to see what's new with one friend? I should be able to click their name, and see their facebook changes, new tweets, status updates, etc.

Of course, this isn't always the case, I might want to open Facebook without plans to browse a particular person, or I might open Skype just to see who's online that I can video call.

So, there are times when I need to take both routes. They should both be available so I can choose either. It's complicated to aggregate content from a variety of sources into a single page, so it's not a surprise why this option isn't frequently available. You would almost need a new standard, so HN could provide an API for a user's comments, posts, etc, and Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc, all do the same. Then I can build an app that merges all of this information together. So a user opens the app, and creates a page for John, enters John's Facebook profile, Twitter/Reddit/HN handles, and everything appears in a single place. However, these sources then get less direct traffic, and therefore less revenue, so it's unlikely they would jump on- board.

<comment><USER9> From the platform provider's point of view, it doesn't make business sense to offer features like this to an OS or to other apps. Someone like Facebook wants you to have to come to the experience (app, website) that they control, and that they monetize. Want to know if someone is online? Come to our app and find out. And maybe while you're here you'll browse your feed and see an ad or 2 (probably more like 10).

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's why I said they'd get less traffic, and not likely provide the information. However, you might be able to achieve the opposite.

Let's say on the iPhone, you could click a person's name, and attach their Twitter and HN handle. Now, you click their name a few dozen times a day when you go about your usual stalking to see all the new tweets and HN posts. You then follow these links to both Twitter and HN when something catches your eye. Facebook is now missing out. They didn't want to take part, because they wanted you to visit their app directly, but now, people are not taking the time to open their app. I can get 10 sources of information on my friend by clicking their name. Will I make a completely separate visit to Facebook to get their info? It's kind of a hassle, I might check those 10 sources with a simple click every hour, but only visit Facebook once a day because it's now more work. If Facebook was integrated, and I now had 11 sources of information just by clicking someone's name, I might start visiting Facebook more often by following these links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _click a picture of your friend and then contact them in any possible way using any enlisted app from there_

Absolutely not! Not to scream and shout, but absolutely NOT!

I have contacts who are both friends and coworkers or business partners or customers. I do NOT want to get in touch with them with "any app at all", I want the app that supports the workflow or information sharing pertinent to the context at hand. For a friend context, that might mean facebook. For a partner context, that might mean email - or our CRM - or something else entirely - but NEVER facebook.

The context comes first, then the people.

People-centric UI might work, but only once machines are far more sensitive to context.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that he meant that the computer would use any way possible to contact the person, but rather that you'd be presented with the option to contact the person with any known/configured method.

I'm not saying that I like that method, but I don't think that it would be an automatic thing.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. I show this flow in the Screenshots. I see a merged view of one individual and it says "text fred" or "skype fred" or "tweet fred." Clean. Any app can enlist with their verb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is our world particularly people-centric? It may be just what we are used to. If I want to mail something to someone, I go to a post office or a post box and mail it. If I want to have dinner with the family, I go to the dining room or the kitchen with food. If I want to talk face to face with someone, I physically walk to the location that "contains" them (office/room/house) and talk to them.

People are not instantly available objects that we interact with in the real world, so I imagine the "block" is somewhere in there.

</comment><comment><USER14> Say I want to browse the web. Or check my inbox. Or read Hacker News. Or get a file off of my Dropbox. Or read an ebook.

None of those things are "people-centric", e.g. they aren't tied to a single (other) person. People-centric UI doesn't make sense because I use my computer for interacting with many users at once simultaneously through websites, mail, etc. If I'm not doing that, I may be interacting with my personal data. And probably least commonly, I am interacting with a single person. So "person- centric" (not people-centric", despite what the title claims) design isn't taking off because I'm not interacting with one single person for the majority of my time when I use technology.

<comment><USER15> Add yourself as a people in the people centered UI.

We've already had "My Documents" "My music" "My videos" "My pr0n" and similar such default directories in new OS installs for some time. Just kidding about the fourth one?

I would imagine you'd have under Person "25cf" an option for dropbox, ebook, etc. In fact for shared stuff this could be kind of cool, click on my wife and here's our shared dropbox folder (well actually we're more a google drive family, but whatever, I assume dropbox supports semi-private sharing of folders between users, etc). Or click on my wife and then her ebook collection to toss her a copy of a free (libre) ebook.

<comment><USER16> Given that it is first and foremost my device, or at least a UI oriented at me, I shouldn't have to go inside my self to find my stuff.

People centric design is great if all you do is communicate with a set group of people, however if you're more asocial, then it's just sort of sad and hard to use.

<comment><USER15> I justify my sorta-bright idea by being an old married guy with two dressers in the bedroom, mine and hers. Do any married couples randomly intermix clothing, like all shirts go here, mine and yours, even the non- heteronormative couples? So it feels "natural" much as there's his and hers dressers to store clothes (and each kid, too) then the phone would have his and hers phone icons to store clothes, err, to store contact info for apps as per the article.

VLM does accept that this could be highly annoying to some people because VLM knows that some people consider it unholy annoying when other people refer to themselves in third person so VLM feels their pain and accepts that as a perfectly valid style disagreement.

<comment><USER17> > Do any married couples randomly intermix clothing, like all shirts go here, > mine and yours, even the non-heteronormative couples?

Yes, and not even sorted by type. This is due more to limited space and getting bored half way through sorting things out and just shoving it all in rather than some thought through philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> On my phone I have about 20 apps that I use frequently, 200 people that I need to contact, and about 2000 documents in the form of media files and notes.

It seems obvious to me that application-centric design is the simplest way to organize my computing device. I think pinning people or documents to the main menu would make things way too cluttered and confusing.

<comment><USER19> But if those people are your spouse and best friend? The apps on your main menu are the everyday workhorses, not the niche utilities. It would be the same with documents and people

I think the article author has a great point, but it isn't a paradigm to overturn all others. Just a position that people-centric should be a first- class use case, up there with people-centric and app-centric.

Let's put it another way - do you frequently open Acrobat or Excel then use File -> Open to navigate to a file? I am absolutely positive that most people click on the file most of the time. In the same way as OSes have favoured apps - phone main screens, the OSX dock, desktop icons, pin to taskbar - there is usually a selection of often-used, easily accessible documents - <USER2> icons, document stacks, recent files, favourites etc. Why not have your favourite people in the most-accessible areas?

Of course, one answer is that we are still most of all still _file_ -centric, and there isn't a common container for person-with-all-their-contact-details. (And not just their contact details: the person container could have all kinds of indicators of their status and recent activity, at whatever level they have shared with you). But phones are busily trying to squash the file metaphor as it is, and the 'main screen tile' is a general kind of container that can be, already has been, extended to have person-centred features.

I think we will see more of this, and we won't all like all of it, but as a whole it will be a step forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the issue has more to do with siloed communication than with how people want to interact with each other. Take the Google Hangouts app for example. It uses a similar approach to what the post advocates: click on a person, then select text or gchat as a medium. But I don't really care if I'm using text or gchat, I care that the recipient gets the message that I send without a duplicate message arriving in another medium. Which is how Apple messages works within their closed garden, but it's not going to find my friends on email or Facebook message or gchat or whatever other medium.

So we go to a dedicated texting app or dedicated email app because we assume the recipient is going to get the message from that medium in a convenient and timely fashion. Whatsapp, Snapchat, FB Messenger, Hangouts, etc etc all contribute to the app-centric model by creating new silos. See [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/).

</comment><comment><USER21> "Even on my iPhone or iPad I can't have an icon that represents a document."

You can do that easily on Android, using a file manager, and on a desktop you can do it too. There's nothing difficult about this, it's just not on iOS. It is an interesting point though, I wonder if a people widget for Android would be useful. I seem to remember having a most contacted or similar by HTC a while ago, but there's nothing for stock Android atm. There are of course some on the store, but it just doesn't seem particularly useful. I guess it just doesn't seem easier to me, the task context seems useful.

Edit: Contacts widget = widget for People :)

<comment><USER22> > I wonder if a people widget for Android would be useful

Is the contact widget what you are looking for?

<comment><USER21> Yep! Thanks, I hate the Android widget menu so I just guessed it'd be called People since the app is now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fundamentally, it's because we're tool-using primates. For most of human history we've created things to use on other things to do things.

Selecting an app isn't any different than selecting the right tool for the job at hand. In this analogy, your phone' s homescreen is your toolbox - here are all the things you can do. Personal preference and the specifics of the task count for a lot which is why there's many types of hammers and apps with similar functionality.

From a toolbox perspective, performing an action on a contact - e.g. calling or texting - only involves a few out of the many tools available and therefore shouldn't be the sole way to navigate the system.

However some contexts a person-centric UI is great, and one of iOS' failings. I should be able to go to a person in the contacts app and see all the available ways I have of contacting them depending on what apps are installed.

Maybe when AI becomes so good it knows what I want to do before I do, or when we've evolved to the point we no longer feel the need to hit things with other things, a tool approach won't be necessary. But I think it will until then.

</comment><comment><USER23> Because the UI community has not yet found the perfect universal way to represent people, and it probably never will.

I've often imagined how great it would be if operating systems were a little more opinionated about how data is represented, and how data and tools interact. Wouldn't it be great if every photo on your computer had the same rich capabilities? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to text your friend right from the browser when you see them mentioned in a news article?

But over the years I've seen how UI innovation happens, and the way this plays out is always "constrictive OS UI principles from several years ago" vs "new hot app that does one thing awesomely in a way that's incompatible with the UI toolkit".

And in the end, it's more valuable to people to have a really nice whatever- it-is than to have consistency and interoperability across all of their apps.

For that reason I think data will probably always be represented by a proper name first (Instagram, etc) and then the actual thing second.

<comment><USER12> Faces?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is an interesting article. And you will not find many like that one around. For starters, why I think Apple approach is also People Centric. Because software that solves a specific problem, deserves an icon. One solution - one set of documents. You can drag images here and there with Apple API form one app to another if you like to do something specific with them and they are kept under that specific icon. Camera+ is a good example. iAWriter is a good example for texts. You have your documents _for writing_ in the app that does exactly the thing - writing. And I like that. And no one asks why I cannot Open With another program. No orphaned documents in Apple model.

</comment><comment><USER25> One thing is that different communication programs are different "spaces" \- you tend to associate one with one kind of thing for certain people, another with another. People-centric is really just one instance of document-centric, the "people" just being the data associated with the person. I suppose these icons on windows phone with different apps that can be opened from them are basically Windows's "open with". Android's dialog you get when opening a data url is the same letting you choose what app to open it with, such as if multiple apps are associated with phone numbers and you open a phone # from your contacts app.

</comment><comment><USER26> Because it feels creepy. I don't want to "pin" a person to my home screen because it just seems too attached.

</comment><comment><USER27> I did have a windows phone and very much liked having my wife pinned to the home screen but she was the only one who made it. I wasn't interested in having a whole heap of other (less attractive) heads burning my retina all the time.

I am probably unusual but I find the whole social media/Skype scene quite tedious and I have closed all those accounts as time goes by. Excluding my wife, replies and others contacting me, I send about 2 personal emails a week, about 5 SMS a week, make about 10 personal phone calls a week and that's it. It simply doesnt justify a people centric UI.

</comment><comment><USER28> Thinking about it, this is a weak variation of a much earlier failed paradigm. The original idea, document-centered UI, would not have apps at all or rather would have one huge app that was somehow powerful enough for all the users needs, light-weight enough to load quickly and flexible enough to let you link any document to any other document.

If you have that, of course you'd want to start with documents and people.

The problem is you won't find this single app, Google Wave was a failure, etc.

So if you have apps, well of course you do want to decide which to open first.

</comment><comment><USER15> I met two "new" sysadmins the hard way today (fixing a problem).

People centered would work with people you already know. But the mode switching impedance jump would be icky when you inevitably need to go into search mode. So I'm totally used to clicking on my people centered UI boss contact icon, but now I need some other mode to look these guys up in company email.

Even worse I'm not sure how to represent social distance and rapid changes in social distance in a people centered UI. Yes I've never talked to these friends of friends of friends before today, but this morning, oh boy were they ever the most important people in my social network.

Finally talk about degrading non-gracefully. "John Smith is broken" What does that mean? Then you've got to do the whole "ignore the man behind the curtain" to break thru the abstraction to figure out twitter is down again. Its going to feel very fake when it works and helpless when it breaks. Ah I know just make sure no service ever fails (LOL).

PS am I the only person who looked at the "modern" UI and winced? That is an utter abomination. Hurts my eyes hard to read. Side by side I would never select the "new" UI over the "old" UI. More cluttered than a hoarders basement. More garish and clashing colors than a 1995 webpage or a 1985 color desktop publishing memo. At least the ancient UI could be decoded and read as a text menu with visually annoying cruft, the new one is unusable.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think that part of it is that the thought process is closer to "I want to send an email to my friend Bob" than "To Bob I want to send an email".

I realize that sounds contrived, but I think activity/tool/app centric experiences are more closely tied to "solving a problem" and people centric experiences are more obscure/less obvious in what you can do.

Perhaps the problem is that people think more about what they want to do than who they want to do it with.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is also a representation of where the power and profit sits within the industry. If apps were subservient to people in the UI, it would be trivial to replace them. However, successful businesses are built through preference over competitors. These businesses pay the wages of people who design systems and services that achieve this. The app stores continue to feed the platform makers and that's where we end up.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't have any friends or know any people. This wouldn't help me much.

<comment><USER15> You could still list people you stalk, or give machines anthropomorphic names, the ever so stereotypical pr0n star name or star trek character name for each server, etc.

<comment><USER32> "In a shocking turn of events, it looks like Jenna is, erm, down again...?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> without getting into too much about how I can put icons to documents and people right on my Windows desktop and Android start screens, my amateur psychologist thinks that the reason people-centric UI design hasn't taken off is that we subconsciously associate functions with people. In other words, our interface with another person centers around the functions that person supplies us with. For example, I have a few friends that I only ever play online games with, so my functional connection to them is via games or game- centered social networks. I think "play games with..." first before I decide on a person to play with.

This is why it's natural to chart out social relationships as entities/nodes for people and relations as modes between the nodes. Navigating to another person involves traversing this graph over a selected relation.

I think this is the reason I go to facebook before I think about posting something on a friend's wall, or open up my email client, or picking up a phone _first_ , before finalizing my internal decision on who to call.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think only because it's harder for the host environment to actually succesfully pull off in a consistent and reliable way.

Which is, I think, the same reason that iOS went so far back from 'document centric' to 'app centric' at first -- because it was easier for them to pull off and make work consistently, both in terms of technology and UI.

</comment><comment><USER35> > The "story" around People Centric is that you don't think "go to twitter and > tweet my friend" or "go to Skype and call my friend,"

Yes. Yes, I do. I use Twitter or Tweetcaster for tweeting. I use Google hangouts for video calls. I use Chrome to view websites. Implementation details not only matter, they matter a great deal.

</comment><comment><USER36> The market leaders cannot/will not implement large breaking features taken from market losers. It's the same reason why most of WebOS's innovations haven't been adopted, and those that have have done so in a much more muted way.

</comment><comment><USER37> All of the Android phones I've had in the last few years already do this. Unless I'm missing something? I usually set it up with my favorite contacts on the home screen even I first get a phone and then don't use it much.

</comment><comment><USER38> The issue is that texting, with a few interesting exceptions, completely dominates most people's daily personal communication. I mean, the "People" app on my Android phone can do what he describes, but 99.99% of the time, my most recent text conversations are all I want to see when I pick up my phone to communicate. Both Hangouts and iOS's messages have convenient links to their phone app, making this pretty much a solved problem.

The only notable exceptions are the privacy-oriented messengers like Snapchat... but I imagine having the messages be silo'd is more of a feature than a bug for a lot of the users.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't see this "people-centric UI" idea as anything more than a glorified address book. And I never use address books, so I don't see why I'd be attracted to a people-centric UI.

</comment><comment><USER40> The way he is talking about interaction is not people-centric, it is person- centric. If you are only ever communicating with one person at a time, then yes, opening up an individual person's contact details is probably the way to go, and for one-on-one text messages or phone calls this is how I communicate.

If I'm dealing with more than one person at a time, which is most of the time, I open up the application, whether it is facebook, twitter, email etc, and it allows me to view and communicate with multiple people in the medium that I choose.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the semi-obvious reason mobile OS's are "applicaiton-centric" and not "document-centric" is the monetization of mobile applications. Apps are the big cash cow on these operating systems, whereas "documents" or people or files can't really be monetized in the same way.

The downside of the app-centric thing is an odd sort of discretization of the user-experience via apps. PC's now feel much more free-form in that user interaction is still largely driven by files (i.e. "documents").

</comment><comment><USER42> "click a picture of your friend and then contact them in any possible way using any enlisted app from there"

First, I think this is a good idea. We already do this with documents on our computer. Sometimes we launch Photoshop first, but other times we right-click on a document first, and choose "Open With...", then pick an application.

But I'd imagine third party developers wouldn't really like the idea of People equivalent of "Open With...", because that takes eyeballs away from their own contact list.

</comment><comment><USER43> This works for devices that are primarily communication devices, i.e. ~2008-era phones. Today I use my phone to browse the web, check the weather, read the news and tweets, trade some stocks, post a few pictures to facebook, and maybe send an email or text. Oh, and occasionally make a phone call. Of these, only 3 activities are 'people'-centric. The rest are activity-centric and apps are the modern smartphone's encapsulation of an activity.

</comment><comment><USER44> Collecting the information of the various ways that Alice can talk to Bob is a righteous bitch ATM. However, if we make it easy for people, we also make it easy for machines, and that leads to massive privacy issues.

I like that my profiles are available to people I want to communicate with. I don't like that they are also potentially available to siding salesmen (I live in an apartment).

</comment><comment><USER45> The pinning feature on WP8 is great, and I wish I could do it on my iOS device. It allows you to create deep-links within apps.

</comment><comment><USER46> Because those are not real people, they are contacts. Also, computers are tools, they have functions, not people in them.

</comment><comment><USER47> "In Windows Phone and Windows 8+ I can pin People to the Start Screen. It's a killer feature that no one talks about."

This isn't new, my android gingerbread (2.3) phone does this. FWIW I'm going to upgrade this year . . . maybe.

</comment><comment><USER48> Yet another attempt at reinventing the wheel, and one that's wondering why people don't like Metro, no less.

Talk about the blind leading the blind. Perhaps everyone hates Metro because it's a bad idea, badly executed?

</comment><comment><USER49> Because we're still in the stage of figuring out the different and optimal ways of communicating with each other, let alone presenting all choices to a sender.

</comment><comment><USER50> Because devices are tools and we use tools to do something.

</comment><comment><USER51> Because it's too German in syntax. I think "call Michele" not "Michele anrufen" or whatever. Verb first.

</comment><comment><USER52> Well, my activities are not people or document centric. Most of my icons are games, or various other apps.

</comment><comment><USER53> I could pin people to my desktop on my n900. windows 8 didn't invent this...

<comment><USER12> That was a great phone. Wasn't saying it was invented by Win8, just that no one is using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Because apple hasn't released it yet. _rimshot_

</comment><comment><USER55> He's essentially describing Android.

<comment><USER56> Yeah, I use an Android phone. When I type in my wife's name (or click on her face on my home screen), I can choose to SMS her, Skype her, Whatsapp her, email her, Facebook Messenger, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Because who cares? I think most people just have things they want to do with their device, they learn how to do those things, and that's it. What does being 'people-centric' actually do for me? Does it even save any clicks? How many, one?

</comment><comment><USER58> It has.

It's called touch screens.

Thats the big UI/UX improvement.</comment>


Show HN: Hacker News with categories and popularity - <AUTHOR> http://newshack.io/ Did you want to know topics of the news or popularity of posts? "Hacker News Hack" helps you to find news based on some categories and importance or popularity.
It tagged news with 9 categories with a natural language processing technology and supervised learning for categorizing news.
It also calculates a speed of number of comments in each posts as popularity based on term, that is 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year. <comment><USER2> It's a sad commentary on the current demographics here that there is no "entrepreneur" category at all. And that the next closest thing, "business" has only 3 articles, none of which are related to running a business.

I'd noticed myself finding less and less to click on on the front page over the last year, but this has really driven home why.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that the "business" category means what you or I expected it to mean. It's certainly nothing to do with being an entrepreneur - as I write this there are four articles:

DEA redacts tactic that's more secret than parallel construction

Jamaican Bobsledders Ride Dogecoin Into Olympics

Swiss police: Screen in Tesla cars is too large

Ask HN: What will you pay for?

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

I guess maybe that last one could be somehow related but IDK. Seems that important things are missing from the categories (like entrepreneurship or running a business, which are not the same thing). In another comment on this thread, it was mentioned that these are auto-tagged - maybe they can train it a bit better. Those are, to me, off-topic for 2008 HN but right in the wheelhouse for 2014 HN.

<comment><USER4> > Those are, to me, off-topic for 2008 HN but right in the wheelhouse for 2014 > HN.

The guidelines haven't actually changed any since then.

<comment><USER3> haha yes, but would they have made the front page in 2008? I think you know the answer to that one!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could you please add a category "All but NSA"

<comment><USER6> Isn't that just news.ycombinator.com?

<comment><USER7> Nope, I see NSA news every other day on HN and it is getting rather annoying

<comment><USER8> Supposedly there is a filter already on HN for NSA articles, each vote only counts as 1/3 of a vote if the title contains the string "nsa", severely penalizing those articles.

<comment><USER9> If that's true, I understand why I don't understand the HN sort order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be useful if each article could have its tag displayed. In that way when looked at "all" I could start to get an idea of what the tags mean to the system. At the moment I'm reasonably often finding things tagged other than I would expect. Showing tags next to items would help me recalibrate.

Other than that - good job. Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

You're right. That's nice idea! I will add that feature shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tagging of links (mostly hn), without the NLP. [http://gcdc2013-hackerio.appspot.com/](http://gcdc2013-hackerio.appspot.com/)

<comment><USER12> What's the difference from the online bookmarks such as del.icio.us?

<comment><USER11> 1) Tech/HN centric links and tags/categories 2) Besides bookmarking and tagging, it also support list (a collaboratively editable list on topic such as SEO tips)

[http://blog.gcdc2013-hackerio.appspot.com/what-is- hackerio](http://blog.gcdc2013-hackerio.appspot.com/what-is-hackerio)

<comment><USER12> You are doing something very similar to what I've done for two years. But I'm running a serious business and startup company with patent pending solutions.

Another similar thing between us is that when we showed HN for our projects, we both got 0 comment from the HN community.

So the question is why they are not more welcomed than OP's NLP solution, even if we provide more tools to save and share?

Do you have any idea? If you are interested in further discussion, I can be reached at danmark.clara _at_ yahoo.com.

<comment><USER11> Because NLP is more interesting? We suck at community building? Not enough content? No HN Luck? Perhaps it's neither interesting or good enough yet :)

<comment><USER12> Now the new search engine algorithms are gearing towards NLP led by Google's Hummingbird, see the article here:

[http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/02/search-today-beyond- op...](http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/02/search-today-beyond-optimizing- semantic-web/)

The direction is right because we all need to improve the web towards Semantic Web which is more meaningful. However, the first round of Semantic Web effort is dead: [http://bit.ly/JP3KQO](http://bit.ly/JP3KQO)

Now it's the second round. Still the machine intelligence is not comparable with human intelligence. So what I believe is the way we are applying: organize the web with human interaction and automated it with some facilities.

I don't think we suck. It takes time for others to dive into this world. So I'll continue to make this effort and push forward. The problems for yours and mine are also pretty common: UI is not appealing, lacking of data.

I know you are running it for fun. But if there is any chance for us to work together, I think it's the best, because you understand this area and solution so well. Check out my failed Kickstarter project here [http://kck.st/JNqv8z](http://kck.st/JNqv8z) and give a try of my existing website: [http://bingobo.com](http://bingobo.com). I'll appreciate your feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very nice, would it be possible to have a larger selection of categories, and the option to exclude certain categories for a more fine grained front page?

Also, I believe you haven't escaped the time field properly server-side, I see "item.time_str" where I imagine the item time should be dynamically displayed.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pretty neat!

FYI: I just noticed your time calculations aren't working. Search for "item.time_str" on your indexes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will fix it shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very nice. How you determine categories?

<comment><AUTHOR> Using natural language processing and supervised learning, it automatically tagged news with 9 categories.

<comment><USER16> That's really interesting. Will you open-source the NLP algorithm?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am planning to open source it in several months. (Our codes have not been well-commented and well-structured yet...

Our implementation and algorithm detail is followings.

Its categorizing process is written in Python.

Using nltk, it makes corpus with TFIDF model from HN topics and comments. And it generates classifiers from this corpus with SVM algorithm using scipy and numpy.

FYI, its web interface is written in Clojure and ClojureScript.

<comment><USER17> presumably you've trained it with hand annotated content, or bootstrapped from a few choice hn searches (like ?q=jquery will give you a web tech category)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. You are right.

I trained classifiers with hand annotations (about 1000 contents or so)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very useful! Would be good if you could adjust the time-range with respect to the category i.e. for a popular category, 1 day of news is great but something like jokes - currently there's just an empty page - [http://newshack.io/by- categories?category=9&term=day](http://newshack.io/by- categories?category=9&term=day) \- here a month is more interesting - [http://newshack.io/by- categories?category=9&term=month](http://newshack.io/by- categories?category=9&term=month)

</comment><comment><USER19> It would be useful to have a category for startups. I find that's the content I most look for here.

</comment><comment><USER20> Out of all third party UIs for Hacker News I've seen (and have since forgotten the URL for) you probably have the best domain name. It's clever and memorable.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting. But it's not quite sync with the News on the first page. What do you sort by? If it works well, I'd like to use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

It crawls HN topics every one hour. So news in our application would delay up to one hour.

<comment><USER21> If you're hitting HN's access thresholds, you might consider incrementally parsing data from [http://hnstream.com](http://hnstream.com)

That may help with analyzing comment content at least. Not so much with news rankings though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. hnstream is really cool.

You're right. I have limited frequency of crawling due to HN's access thresholds.

hnstream will help me. I will try it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great! I would also love the ability to collapse entire threads, this is something I never understood why it doesnt exist.

</comment><comment><USER9> I never got the original HN sorting algorithm. Looks quite arbitrary. So, any alternative is likely to be an improvement.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just a thought - how about having the categories "toggle" rather than "select"?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's nice idea. I will try it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like this alot. BUG: item.time_str isn't evaluating when I select a category.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Updated.

1\. fix some bugs (e.g. "item.time_str")

2\. support responsive design (currently optimized with iPhone)

</comment><comment><USER25> looks like a lot of data have not been indexed yet, the concept is extremely useful, and would like to see psychology as one of the categories, they are my favourite type of content on HN.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks awful on mobile would be great if you could make it responsive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I will support responsive design in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Awesome! Too bad jokes category does not have a lot of content, pity.

<comment><USER28> I think something needs to be done about that.

But, humour is almost universally subjective. There are some aspects of Obama- Care that I thought were highly amusing, especially the "500 million lines of code" gag.

Here is a very serious article about the C programming language.

[http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/C_programming_language](http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/C_programming_language)

<comment><USER29> "Lisp - C for parentheses who want to meet other parentheses."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find the font uncomfortably small - make the styling more like HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will support responsive web design. It maybe solve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It is very useful, although I do love simplicity!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Updated.

* fix some stylesheet issues (support Chrome on Android)

</comment><comment><USER32> Brilliant work thanks!

</comment><comment><USER33> This is super useful!

I have been forcing myself off HN lately. One thing that I miss the most due to this is the SHOW:HNs of really cool products and hacks that hit the front page. This gives me a great month-to-month access to those great stories at one place.

Bookmarked!

<comment><USER34> _I have been forcing myself off HN lately_

You might want to checkout my newsletter which includes the best "show hn" links each week - [http://hackernewsletter.com](http://hackernewsletter.com). It also helps with the HN addiction.

<comment><USER35> I've been subscribed to it for some time and while it didn't cure my HN addiction, it lowered it a bit, and it also helps me find interesting articles I missed during "more work, less procrastination" periods. I just want to say, thank you for your work!</comment></comment></comment>


Fearing United plane was hacked, FBI pulls security expert off flight - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/17/technology/security/fbi-plane-hack/index.html

<comment><USER2> Reposting my opinion on this from a previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9390480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9390480)

"Harmless pranks" like this can have bad results... however they highlight how insecure flights can be in a way that will grab attention in ways that would otherwise be ignored. There needs to be more available venues for PenTesters and white/greyhat hackers to be paid for their line of work. But security is often overlooked because the masses aren't educated on the subject. The number of companies that have lied about "your information is totally secure" is beyond belief. This is one of the reasons why.

E:

Adding on.

>Roberts said he took to Twitter out of frustration that Airbus and Boeing (BA) - the world's two largest plane manufacturers -- aren't listening to warnings he's made for years.

No surprise here. This is why I'm not sure how I feel about stuff like this. It _does_ raise more awareness and maybe airlines will stop dragging their feet when they start getting bad publicity for being insecure.

E:

>Mark Turnage, the firm's CEO, said they met with two FBI agents in Denver on several occasions -- and was told to never hook up his laptop to a plane again.

So people are going to have to wait until an incident results in death for them to fix this? That's what it sounds like.

</comment><comment><USER3> nice. the companies don't have to fix a obvious security issue, but we can't take a bottle of water or shampoo on board?

despite this being a publicity stunt by the firm trying to get paid, hired, it's a much needed one!</comment>


Poor Connections: A long history of videotelephony - <AUTHOR> http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/tollmann_vera_1_september_2020.php <comment><USER2> Yeah, this is all interesting in relation to a collectively shared idea of the future.

Growing up in the 70s, video phones were like flying cars and jet packs. Things right around the corner but never to arrive over the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Could be seen on The Jetsons, represent progress, a progress we saw clearly on TV, a recent invention itself.

And now, unlike flying cars and jetpacks, video phones have arrived. Not with a bang but with a whimper - no one actually looks forward to a video call, I'd guess.

And flying cars and jetpacks? They're not impossible, just absurdly dangerous and less likely because of this.

And video phones are similarly not actually desirable, just less extreme. Between 70s and the 2000s, I think most people figured out that video phones didn't exist 'cause unlike TV, they would be weird and awkward and unpleasant.

The big thing is that, very roughly, ~1850~1950 saw an incredible transformation of the infrastructure of daily life. The gas/electric stove, the gas/electric light bulb, the train and the automobile and beyond saw an incredible transformation of the physical environment in which people lived. After this period, technology has continued but the modernized items are improvements rather than fundamental innovations (with the exception of the Internet, which didn't change physical space).

It seems like the "science fiction world" of Robert Heinlein and others was very much a linear extrapolation of this earlier period of changing physical infrastructure - from sea ports to star port. Now, it's more obvious that if the physical structure of daily life changes, it's going to be following a different curve and transforming different things. The Internet, for example, was a vast change but it augmented, not supplanted, earlier tech.

Here, I think the main thing that hasn't caught up are certain kinds of imagination. The proponents of "Fermi's paradox" still imagines every intelligent species will "reach for the stars" despite the lack of evidence of any having done so.

But still it's interesting to consider.

<comment><USER3> > with the exception of the Internet, which didn't change physical space.

Well, I would argue a lot changes due to the internet, physically. Apart from the infrastructure needed for it, it surely has an impact on commerce. Larger and smaller stores vanish, the shopping experience of many changed drastically.

Due to information being accessible all time and from around the world it has an impact on libraries, print related industries.

I am sure that there are even more examples.

<comment><USER4> Someone from 1960 who suddenly showed up in 2020 wouldn't have to learn much for operations of day-to-day life (they might not even have to change their sartorial tastes).

Someone from 1900 who suddenly showed up in 1960 would have much more to learn about household electrification and individual transportation[1][2] (and would definitely have to change their sartorial tastes).

I'm typing this on a writing desk in a room with bookshelves. The internet vastly decreases the latency of our correspondence and vastly increases the amount of reference material to which I have access, but what we're doing isn't qualitatively much removed from what Erasmus or Montaigne presumably did with colleagues in their spare time.

[1] An amusing anecdote from a biography of the Irvine family: the younger members all adapted to the motor vehicle readily enough (1880-1920 having only been 40 years), but one of the older ones, instead of turning the key off, insisted on stopping cars by putting them in high gear and turning them uphill, treating them as if they were runaway broncs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company)

[2] At least, assuming they do any of that stuff themselves. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he4WPvKGGR0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he4WPvKGGR0) is set ca. 1970 (despite precociously using Zoom?) but they still (1:06) have household help.</comment></comment></comment>


Screenhero Shares Your Screen with Others, Gives Each Person Their Own Mouse - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5988888/screenhero-shares-your-screen-with-others-gives-each-person-their-own-mouse <comment><USER2> This service made it to the top of HN a few months ago when it was called Powwow. I've been using it since then and it's been continually improved into a very solid collab tool. Keep it up guys!

</comment><comment><USER3> Ironically, the techcrunch article had much better info[1]. The discussion on HN from 4 weeks ago was pretty good too[2]

[1] <http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/11/screenhero-yc/>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5202486>

<comment><USER4> That is quite _coincidental_.

<comment><USER5> I believe irony's the right term. You'd expect techcrunch to give you the hyped-up start-up journalistic drivel, but instead you find good quality content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Screenhero is amazing. The people behind Screenhero are amazing as well. We are using Screenhero (formerly Powwow) since it came out. Beside some issues that were resolved very fast, Screenhero is perfect. When we had a few problems with the service we wrote them an email and they responded very quickly and actually fixed the problem within a week or so. Those guys rock. Now they are planning a tour to some of their users to talk to them in person and they are planning a pro service:

<http://screenhero.com/pricing.html>

Screenhero boosted our productivity substantially and I will be one of the first ones to try our their pro service. If you are working in a team you should definitely look into Screenhero.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Bummer... if this was on Lifehacker two weeks ago, Yahoo! could have avoided having to call all their troops back to the office."

<comment><USER8> Pretty sure she knows about it...

<http://screenhero.com/img/email.png>

<comment><USER9> She might want to get her domain spelled correctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just tried it with my mom. She has a Mac laptop, and lives outside US. I was using a fairly crazy setup, involving VNC on my firewall box (running pfSense), and she had to remember how to connect using Viscosity. Once connected, I would connect to her screen using VNC. When connected through VPN her own access to Internet was severely limited because of VPN routing tables. With ScreenHero she points with her mouse where she has issues, and I can use mine to show her things on the screen. And no need to VPN anymore, yay!

</comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic tool. We've used it a bunch for remote collaboration and it really adds an element of 'togetherness' that really isn't possible with other tools.

</comment><comment><USER12> We've been using this instead of Skype and it's definitely better. Having your own mouse is awesome.

<comment><USER13> I haven't tried this yet, so forgive this ignorant question:

I don't see the full value of just my own mouse cursor...

Wouldnt it also be great if there wasa quick-fading text box that becomes opaques when I type something, then fades back to transparent with some delay?

Is the assumption that everyonre is on a con call with the mouse?

(I am not saying I don't see the value of a mouse cursor - I am just not seeing JUST A MOUSE CURSOR as a business)

<comment><USER14> Most of my team works remotely and we use this for pair programming all the time. It shares both the mouse and full keyboard control.

We use it in conjunction with Skype for voice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why is this a link to Lifehacker instead of the actual product?[0]

[0] <http://screenhero.com/>

<comment><USER16> Because this was already on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to do screen sharing through iChat (Mac to Mac) but this was always a hassle when I was using multiple external monitors (the screen/text was too small and nearly unreadable if the person I was sharing with was on a laptop). There could exist some fix for this but I never found it.

Screenhero handles this much better and I can just share an application (e.g. VIM, Chrome, etc.) and the distortion is minimized. At first I didn't think the multiple mouse feature was that big of a selling point, but I've actually found it quite useful; when working on a remote team you can't physically point that the screen with your finger so the mouse does the job :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I do this all the time with VNC on linux.

I use vncserver to setup a background vnc X session, then connect to it as many times as needed with vncviewers.

</comment><comment><USER19> I spent 4 months working in an all pair programming-all the time dev shop and was frustrated on a daily basis not being able to start and stop pairing seamlessly. This looks absolutely killer for solving that problem. I love collaborating on code, but having to both jump on the same workstation on and off again can really be a bummer. Looking forward to trying this out with a few of my co-workers.

<comment><USER20> May I ask at what point do you say "hey everybody, this is not working". But rather spend 4 months at a task which you were frustrated daily?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this any improvement over Teamviewer? I'll check it out tomorrow, but we like Teamviewer's install method that is easy for clients.

</comment><comment><USER22> I needed this so bad recently that I considered building it myself. Glad I don't have to.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is great for pair programming, especially for lazy people like me!

</comment><comment><USER24> Didn't microsoft have a tool out about 4 years ago where each person had their own mouse (which they shut down for no obvious reason)?

</comment><comment><USER25> Per app sharing is great. I found myself wanting the sound coming from the app to be shared as well.

<comment><USER26> Thats actually possible right now! Well system sound is. Its disabled in the release version as its a little painful to setup but if you are interested you can email us and we can guide you through it. everyone (at) screenhero (dot) com

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pretty handy, I've always wanted remote access where two people can move the mouse separately.

</comment><comment><USER28> We use iMessage for this. Its awesome for remote teams & makes pair programming easy.

<comment><USER29> Can you elaborate please? How can you use iMessage to share screen and interact remotely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Shame, does not support Linux!

</comment><comment><USER31> This is nice, way better for giving support than TeamViewer or Mikogo</comment>