Amazon Is Now Worth More Than Wal-Mart - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/24/amazon-now-worth-more-than-wal-mart/?mod=ST1 <comment><USER2> I am surprised this is not talked about more:

Amazon Full Time Employees: 154,100

Walmart Full Time Employees: 2,200,000

(Based on Yahoo Finance Company Profile Stats)

There is a growing need for Human's to work Lesser Hours going forward rather than more Hours.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if it's funny or sad. Remember how economists predicted that productivity increase would lead to everyone being richer and having to work fewer hours?

Yeah...

<comment><USER4> It will happen, just don't expect "the invisible hand of the market" to do it. The mechanism for bringing about these benefits will be political in nature.

<comment><USER5> I don't know if you missed it, but everyone(for the most part) are far better off than 10, 20, 30 etc years ago. I'd say in spite of the politics.

<comment><USER6> This is demonstrably false, and speaks of the "tyranny of averages". Yes, worldwide, huge reductions of poverty, largely in Asia, have let to increases. For the average middle class worker in the US, however, things have barely budged in decades. When you take into account growing inequality, and the fact that limited resources (like housing near city centers) will always go to the wealthiest, it's easy to argue the average middle class worker is substantially worse off.

See [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most- wor...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real- wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/) , and this quote: "In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today."

<comment><USER7> If real waves dropped, you should be able to name a good or service (besides obsolete ones like land lines) which we consume less of today than in the past. In fact, most goods/services should satisfy this.

So please, name them.

<comment><USER6> _Hourly_ wages have dropped. Household wages have risen, mostly due to women entering the work force.

<comment><USER7> Real household income has moved around, but no clear trend: [https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N](https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N)

Real hourly compensation has risen: [https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRNFB](https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRNFB)

Anyone pushing _wage_ numbers is playing a game of hide the salami, and ignoring the trend towards a larger portion of income being given in forms other than money.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but "forms other than money" mostly means healthcare, which has skyrocketed - despite the fact that other developed nations with longer live expectancies have much lower healthcare costs.

More importantly, though, the Fed graph you show is an average (the real hourly compensation one). With growing inequality, using the average hides the fact the improvement for the median worker is much lower.

<comment><USER7> _Yeah, but "forms other than money" mostly means healthcare, which has skyrocketed - despite the fact that other developed nations with longer live expectancies have much lower healthcare costs._

If you feel consumers are overconsuming medicine and driving up the price, there are lots of great ways to fix that. The most effective is high deductibles (currently illegal).

I know you are aware that life expectancy is minimally related to health care consumption, so why do you bring it up?

If you have data showing that median real compensation per hour is lower, show it.

And again, since household income has not moved much (according to figures I cited), you still need to provide an explanation for why we don't seem to consume less. (Hint: the basket of goods in CPI changes and $1 of chained-CPI adjusted wages today buys more than $1 of chained CPI adjusted wages 30 years ago. I.e., CPI != inflation in the long run.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> WalMart revenue: $482bn.

Amazon revenue: $89bn.

Amazon is only worth its current market cap if it can increase sales by at least 5x. Which it probably can, but it will take some years.

Wal-Mart is expanding into grocery stores, with their "Neighborhood Markets". (They mean big supermarkets, not convenience stores. Typical size is 45,000 square feet.) Wal-Mart has 40 square miles of floor space worldwide.

<comment><USER9> Direct revenue comparison between Wal-mart and Amazon makes no sense. Amazon revenues are a lot more diversified than Walmart.

Portions like AWS, Digital and 3P/FBA service revenues will have much higher margins than first party retail revenues (which is the most like Wal-mart revenues, except the margins are completely different due to no having brick- and-mortar stores.). Additionally, Amazon is a lot more international than Wal-mart so comparison is even harder.

All of this completely ignore the growth rates of these two companies.

<comment><USER10> > Amazon revenues are a lot more diversified than Walmart

Diversified into lots of "nice to have" items. In a really bad economic downturn, Amazon would be wiped off the map. People would still be buying bread and milk at Walmart.

<comment><USER11> Amazon sells groceries now, too. I usually buy things from Amazon that I used to buy at Walmart. I think Amazon will be around for a long time, and Walmart's margins will shrink as competition becomes ever more fierce at the bottom end of the market.

<comment><USER12> When I need groceries and household supplies such as laundry detergent or toilet paper the last place I think of is Amazon. It seems absurd to have these things boxed, and trucked to my house in a UPS van that probably gets 5mpg when I drive right past a supermarket and a walmart every day.

<comment><USER13> Depends on what you need. You can buy olives at a supermarket olive bar for $9 a pound (wet weight), or you can buy 5 lbs for $4/lb dry weight (8 lbs wet/shipping weight, so $2.48 per lb measured equivalently) on Amazon and have them there in 2 days. There's also many goods you just can't buy in suburban/rural locations - my wife makes fabulous miso, but good luck finding 2 different kinds of seaweed and bonito flakes at your Walmart. If you don't have an Asian market in proximity Amazon is literally your only choice (and they're actually not cheap there). For pet supplies they drastically beat the selection of a Wal-Mart and drastically beat the prices of a real pet store (eg stuff like Feliway or Nature's Miracle).

Yes, for certain commonly-consumed heavy or bulky goods, i.e. anything that's either mostly air (like toilet paper) or mostly liquid (like detergent) they aren't your best choice. That's not all goods by any means.

Also you're comparing the mileage of a bus (the UPS truck) to a passenger vehicle. The UPS truck is delivering goods for a hundred other people on his run today, the gas spent transporting your package is an absolutely insignificant fraction of that. If you're really worried about _~my carbon emissions~_ then you should really be thinking about ditching that car and getting yourself to work on one of those 5 mpg busses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not if you include debt, in addition to equity.

[http://blogs.ft.com/lex-live/2015/07/24/no-amazon-is-not- mor...](http://blogs.ft.com/lex-live/2015/07/24/no-amazon-is-not-more- valuable-than-wal-mart/)

WARNING: paywall

<comment><USER15> I don't know why this is getting down-voted. Amazon's enterprise value is about $220 billion, Walmart's about $275 billion. I.e. Walmart is worth about $50 billion more than Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One interesting thing is that Amazon is almost approaching Walmart's bad reputation in terribleness for employees. (Maybe not software devs, but perhaps warehouse contractors.) Is this kind of ruthlessness essential for such a huge company to be so profitable?

<comment><USER17> It's not so great for software devs, actually.

1) Zero paternal leave. This may lead to subconscious hiring bias for men b/c you know they can't take paid leave. I'm surprised the S-team permits this, but I think they're all male anyway.

2) No free lunch ever. Facebook and Google both have them. Microsoft has free snacks I think. Several Seattle companies have catering on Friday. The Amazon Silicon Valley office has them only because there would be a revolt if they didn't. (Oh sorry, there's rumor of free ramen noodles on some floor in Blackfoot maybe)

3) On-call for all devs.

I think reddit had a thread series last year showing off what interns got at Microsoft, Google, etc. At Amazon, interns get to keep their backpack when they leave.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that's fair. Free lunch isn't 'free', it's just part of your compensation package. At least some SV companies don't have it - I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't.

If someone asked you if you'd prefer an additional $500 per month or free meals, what would you say? I imagine it'd be at least a toss-up.

On-call and paternal leave aren't great, but again, it's a factor into a job decision.

I guess my tacit assumption is that most people who get dev job offers from Amazon also get job offers from other places (or could if they so chose) because the job market for CS is so good. So if they take the Amazon job, they must think that the lack of niceties is outweighed by either the pay or the work they'll do.

This probably won't be the case for their warehouse workers, who might in many cases have a choice between Amazon and unemployed.

<comment><USER19> The food doesn't come out of the pay. Jesus, they don't bargain during hiring by saying we have free food...

<comment><USER18> I don't know about you, the last offer letter I got had on page 1 the specific details (salary, options, whatnot) and on page 2 the perks (which included meals).

It's implicit. When you weigh up job offers, you look at what the job gives you; the busywork and the compensation. Perks are a clear part of that compensation package; the perks are part of the pay.

Yes, you should absolutely view a company that offers free meals as giving you an extra $ _amount you spend on food_ each day, or you should subtract the same amount from a company that doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This was a long time coming. 20% growth on a business that is approaching $100B revenue (and probably 2-3x that in terms of GMV, a better measure of its size and dominance), and AWS continues to grow as does the digital side of the business. The crazy thing is that they still have low market share in several of the retail categories that its in (apparel, grocery, several product lines even in home, health & beauty, electronics, etc.)

Their achilles heal though continues to be browsability and searching. It is obviously a great place to go if you know exactly what you want, but continues to be a poor experience if you are browsing for an item or don't know what you want. There continues to be duplicate listings for the same items (some listed by 1st party and some by 3rd party), and it is very tough to browse items. Once they actually figure this out and implement, that's when this will really become game over (at least domestically)

<comment><USER21> One thing I note is that their recommendations aren't terribly smart.

I mean, I bought a coffee table through Amazon a few months ago. After buying the table, for several weeks it kept showing me coffee table recommendations. I would think Amazon would be smart enough to try and sell other living room furniture or things to put atop the coffee table I just bought, rather than trying to sell me more coffee tables.

<comment><USER22> Their recommendations feel to me like the recommendation engine is still more or less the one they had when they were mainly an online bookstore. So they assume you want things similar to the item you bought: other novels in the same genre, nonfiction books on similar subjects etc. Works fine for books, less well for coffee tables.

<comment><USER23> Hmm, I think it's smarter than that.

Every year around burning man time it "notices" that I'm buying supplies for burning man, and starts recommending me things like baby wipes, which are completely unrelated (naively) to things like lag screws, rebar pullers, etc.

<comment><USER24> I suspect that's the impact of other burners also shopping, generating a good list of "people who bought A and B also bought C, D, E...". As soon as you hit A & B, you trigger the rest, while the average person doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Of course, the headline is wrong. Walmart is worth about $50 billion more than Amazon. Compare their enterprise value, not their market cap.

<comment><USER25> So Walmart's operating assets are worth more than Amazon's. I still think the headline is fair. Usually when we speak of a company's value, we mean the entire company including non-operating assets and liabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am finding myself using Amazon less and less. For years it's been my goto for long tail items and books, but over the last few years it's algorithms have segmented me into the "show high margin prices" bin to the point where I pretty much see prices that are competitive with my local big box _and_ Amazon jacks up the shipping on anything in the first few pages. I guess I shouldn't have used that $30 credit for getting one of their credit cards a few years ago...or paid it off each month, because now Amazon's first order of business appears to be clawing all my previous savings back.

Not that I take it personally. Amazon went down the path to breaking trust when they came up with Prime. What does it say other than give us money so we won't charge you more. Time, gravity and a slippery slope mean that logic ultimately becomes dominant without heroic efforts of corporate culture. Sponsored ads don't create a culture to help anyone within who might be trying to fight the slide. Hell, Amazon is even in the textbook rental business screwing college students.

The problem for Amazon is that they don't have good locations locked down. Six letter .com domains aren't prime real-estate. All they have is the quality of the sales experience, and the more convoluted shopping for value becomes the better competition looks.

<comment><USER27> I value Amazon for the reviews and the hassle-less ordering for years now. I seen prices in local stores sometimes be competitive and sometimes be twice as much.

I use the Amazon mobile-app to check reviews or compare prices of local items (it uses phone camera and is very fast), and I use [http://camelcamelcamel.com/](http://camelcamelcamel.com/) to sanity check the items I wanna buy from amazon.

<comment><USER28> >I value Amazon for the review

Same here, but I've always wondered if they manipulate reviews. Obviously, crappy reviews on high margin items and good reviews on a different brand of the same item but with low margins are bad for Amazon. I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe they remove reviews but having 100% honest reviews could be hurting their business. I hope to hell and back they never compromise the integrity of their reviews, but I wonder if it's something they've thought about or are currently doing without our knowledge.

<comment><USER26> Amazon doesn't have to remove reviews. They can just show the five most productive one's on the product page. Given that for many items Amazon has multiple listings of the same thing, they can just put the one's most to their advantage upfront. Amazon can create (price . review rating) anchor points by ordering the listing on the search results page.

To put it another way, if you're shopping the most relevant result for ten listings of X is the one with the lowest price. That's not however what "sort by revlevance" seems to mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just don't understand why Amazon.com stock is so high. Bezos has stated time and time again that he intends for Amazon.com to never make a profit and to never pay a dividend, always folding all of the earnings back into the company for future growth. There is no logic to its value.

<comment><USER30> The company can't grow forever in a finite universe. "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop", despite what Bezos says now.

Someday Amazon will either be out of business or paying a dividend.

<comment><USER31> Isn't this true for all companies? And if so, why is this meaningful in particular for Amazon

<comment><USER32> Not necessarily. Amazon aspires to have 100% of market share where it competes, or very close to.

Other companies don't aspire to even 50% of market share. See Apple for example. They are happy to have the premium segment locked in and reap the profits out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 1997 "Lee Scott, the future Walmart CEO who was then running logistics told Dalzell (who Amazon was hiring) that Amazon was a novel idea but that it had limited potential. Don Soderquist, Walmart's COO, said that because Amazon didn't store its own iventory--at the time, it just ordered it from distributors and then quickly shipped it back out-- the model would hit a wall once it got to $100M in sales.

(from "The Everything Store" Bezzos' biography)

</comment><comment><USER34> Wal-Mart's Q4/2014 net income was 16,363,000 and they have a P/E of 14.6.

Amazon's Q4/2014 net income was -241,000 and they had a P/E of, well, they didn't.

I think Amazon has been one of the most innovative companies of the last decade, but Amazon is going to be a much less attractive consumer option as they start transitioning to business models that require them to actually profit.

I could steal all the lawn mowing business in town if I were willing to mow lawns for free...

<comment><USER35> Do you realize that their lack of profit is not because they can't profitably sell things at current price points? The lack of profit is due to reinvestment in the business.

It would be more like if you were mowing lawns at a very small profit and using that profit to continually buy more lawnmowers and trucks and eventually investing in developing my own, more efficient lawn mowing technology. Each summer you lose a little money but after 50 years you now are mowing 50% of the lawns in the US and doing it more efficiently than anyone else is capable of.

<comment><USER36> Accounting doesn't work that way. You can have huge profits and reinvest them, but your income statement will show the profits in any case.

Yes, Amazon could be more profitable with different price points, but sales would take a hit, and thus their growth prospects.

FWIW, I think Amazon valuation is fair.

<comment><USER9> Software R&D (especially for new initiatives) is typically not capitalized so if a lot of investment is in software than it would show up as operating expenses rather than capex.

<comment><USER37> I got an idea: build the software, synthesize it into a chip with almost no mask cost, buy the chip, run it in production (as a standby), use the "software version of the chip" for production, and write it off as hardware investment (capital).

Wonder if that would work in some form...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This has been writing on the wall for a while.

While both companies have their pitfalls, it's certainly interesting to continue to watch e-commerce's rise.

</comment><comment><USER39> Call me old fashioned, but I "value" profitable companies more than unprofitable ones. Amazon had a net loss of $241m last year[1], while Walmart had a net profit of $16b[2].

[1] [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN+Income+Statement&annual](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN+Income+Statement&annual)

[2] [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=wmt+Income+Statement&annual](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=wmt+Income+Statement&annual)

<comment><USER40> Cool. Go buy Walmart stock.

Seriously, guys, all this "Oh, well, _I_ disagree with the valuation of this company" stuff isn't very interesting. We all know that sometimes the market gets the value of companies wrong. Probably if Amazon's next quarter is not very good, its valuation will go back down.

And trying to make a virtue of extremely simple analyses of company valuation is also silly. It's not like you're revealing a deeply held secret that Amazon is very low-margin and often runs a loss. It's not like people don't get that. They've decided that Amazon has other virtues. Maybe they're right and maybe they're wrong, but I'm really confident that looking only at net profit as your sole method of valuation is a losing stock market strategy.

<comment><USER41> > I'm really confident that looking only at net profit as your sole method of > valuation is a losing stock market strategy.

I'm not sure investing only in highly profitable companies would result in a "losing stock market strategy" (assuming "losing" means underperforming the S&P 500). Just looking at the ten most profitable[1] eight of them (all but Chevron and Walmart) are among the most weighted in the S&P 500 (in fact they're the top eight), Apple alone makes up 3.84% of the index. Combined these eight seem to account for about 15% of the index[2][3].

That's only looking at _eight_ highly profitable companies in an index of 500 and it's 15% of the index! I can't imagine a portfolio of the 20 or 30 most profitable underperforming the index considering they would make up such a large part of the index itself. [Though it would be interesting to see historically what the performance would be of such a portfolio].

[1] [http://fortune.com/2015/06/11/fortune-500-most-profitable- co...](http://fortune.com/2015/06/11/fortune-500-most-profitable-companies/)

[2] [http://portfolios.morningstar.com/fund/holdings?t=SPY](http://portfolios.morningstar.com/fund/holdings?t=SPY) (this is actually looking at the ETF but it's presented better then [3], which is provided to show they don't differ much)

[3] [http://slickcharts.com/sp500](http://slickcharts.com/sp500)

<comment><USER40> Here are the 10 most profitable companies (also according to F500 ([http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/03/news/companies/mostprofitabl...](http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/03/news/companies/mostprofitable_f500_fortune/?cnn=yes\))) of 2005:

1\. Exxon Mobil (2005 price: 61.05, 2015 price: 79.95)

2\. Wal-Mart (2005 price: 51.60, 2015 price: 71.58)

3\. GM (Went into bankruptcy, I don't really understand what happened to its stockholders, which thank god I was not)

4\. Chevron (2005: 61.71, 2015 price: 90.62)

5\. Ford (2005: 12.40, 2015: 14.39)

6\. ConocoPhillips (2005: 42.38, 2015: 52.08)

7\. GE (2005: 36.12, 2015: 25.76)

8\. Citigroup (2005: 497.80, 2015: 58.72)

9\. AIG (2005: 1317.20, 2015: 63.64)

10\. IBM (2005: 94.10, 2015: 159.76)

S&P500: 2005: 1191.17, 2015: 2079.65

<comment><USER41> That's not "a portfolio of the 20 or 30 most profitable" companies vs the S&P 500. That's a portfolio of ten companies that were _at one time_ the most profitable and then not regularly adjusted compared to an index that was updated regularly (only 312 companies in the index in 2005 were still in it in 2015[1]).

A realistic portfolio to prove/disprove your theory that investing in highly profitable companies is a losing strategy would be to take the 25 most profitable companies (I said 20 or 30 so let's just go with the middle) and update it every year.

With only the eight most profitable making up ~15% of the weight a portfolio of 25 is probably going to approach 30%. It's hard to imagine the largest components representing nearly a _third_ of the index weight are going to move completely and drastically divergent to the index as a whole.

[1] [http://marketcapitalizations.com/changes-in- sp-500-component...](http://marketcapitalizations.com/changes-in- sp-500-components-during-the-past-ten-years/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> As someone who shops at both Amazon.com and Wal-mart, this makes me happy. Now, I don't know if their worth translates to more success but all I know is that my experience with amazon is always pleasant and convenient whereas my experience at Wal-Mart is almost always unpleasant and inconvenient.

<comment><USER22> I have mixed opinions. I find dealing with UPS/Fedex delivery attempts almost as infuriating as dealing with traffic and the Wal-mart store. On other angles: Wal-mart's browsability and prices are better, but Amazon's selection and ability to find specific items are better. In some specific areas the contest is much clearer: Amazon is much better for books, Wal-mart is much better for household supplies, etc.

<comment><USER24> I'm in a strange circumstance where the USPS won't normally deliver packages to my house (I'm on a major road). UPS and FedEx both will. The exception is on Sundays, when the USPS normally doesn't deliver to anyone, except Amazon pays them to. On Sunday, they'll deliver packages to my door. So to have true convenience, I actually TRY to get my Prime packages delivered on Sundays. That's just weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This article I found linked in the side bar reflects my thoughts on Amazon's valuation pretty well:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/07/24/amazon-and- apple-t...](http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/07/24/amazon-and-apple-take- part-in-a-keynesian-beauty-contest/)

</comment><comment><USER44> I think AMZ's endgame is to own the whole pipeline end to end. Using third party sellers has been a good way to get the scale underneath them but 10, 15 years down the road I fully expect the most profitable and in demand items will be sold direct by amazon itself.

</comment><comment><USER45> On a side note currently three biggest companies by market cap are Apple, Google and Microsoft leaving behind the likes of exxon and berkshire. This is truly a rare event when all top three are tech.

Either a glimpse of a bubble in making or tech truly is the new oil.

</comment><comment><USER46> Well, it is no longer true as of now. AMZN stock went down a bit after a day of trading.

</comment><comment><USER47> Amazon should try their hand at brick and mortar. I would love to see less Wal-Marts

</comment><comment><USER48> I wonder if amazon would look like a walmart if it had a physical store.

</comment><comment><USER49> All thanks to the fire phone...

</comment><comment><USER50> Is it worth more than walmart + walmart.com? I doubt it.

<comment><USER51> Walmart.com is wholly owned by Walmart (it is merely a division of Walmart, actually, and not a separate entity of any sort), and we're talking about market cap, so...according to this article, Amazon is worth more than Walmart and Walmart.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Is Amazon's wealth more concentrated ( as in just in bezos ) than Wal-Mart (the walton family)?

I think it's unfortunate if it is.

<comment><USER53> The Walton's own a lot more of Walmart, closer to 50%. Bezos less than 20%.

<comment><USER16> Also, Bezos has far more influence (and responsibility) over Amazon than the Waltons do over modern-day Walmart.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ward – Minimalistic Server Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/B-Software/Ward <comment><USER2> Cockpit:

[https://cockpit-project.org/](https://cockpit-project.org/)

Less fancy but gets the job done. Happy user.

<comment><USER3> Note that ward is in Java and gets data via an abstraction layer[1] and should work on Windows, Linux, macOS, Unix (Solaris, FreeBSD).

[1] [https://github.com/oshi/oshi](https://github.com/oshi/oshi)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ward is a simple and and minimalistic server monitoring tool. Ward supports adaptive design system. Also it supports dark theme. It shows only principal information and can be used, if you want to see nice looking dashboard instead looking on bunch of numbers and graphs. Ward works nice on all popular operating systems.

<comment><USER4> Pretty neat tool Pabyzu. I like how you layed out the different blocks that show the master info and then a few more details, like RAM used being large and then small total amount of RAM and processes. What are your future plans?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> First thought after seeing the screenshot was that if this is what is called minimalistic these days the next gen must have come. Fancy ui,

</comment><comment><USER6> looks cool!

I see "dark mode" as a top-3 feature in more and more software these days. I know people feel pretty strongly about it, but it always feels out of place to me - or is it really one of the top-3 things people think about when choosing whether to try something.

<comment><USER7> Top three requirements when trying to find something to prototype with / test out / see if it will work? No.

However, once you start using it regularly, probably a reasonable chunk of the population wishes there was a dark mode when you're wanting to check the server stats at 11pm when you're about to go to bed and don't want to shine bright light in your (spouse's) face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice use of Chart.js! If you run into performance limits with v2, I would recommend trying out v3 (we're close to a 2nd alpha release) as it has a lot better performance.

Docs on the latest dev code: [https://www.chartjs.org/docs/master/](https://www.chartjs.org/docs/master/)

<comment><USER9> I tried to render a couple hundred thousand datapoints with Chart.js and it froze my browser. Will v3 make a meaningful difference? Don't get me wrong, I love chart.js. It's a great library.

<comment><USER8> There's a set of benchmarks with ~166k points. Chart.js v3 is listed as "Chart.js-next". [https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/#performance](https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/#performance)

It should also be possible to render the chart in a WebWorker via the OffscreenCanvas API.

To be honest though, the data should be decimated before being sent to the chart. Some notes on it [https://www.chartjs.org/docs/master/general/performance#data...](https://www.chartjs.org/docs/master/general/performance#data- decimation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After browsing the GitHub readme, I'd like to know more about how well supported it is to add your own metrics.

<comment><USER11> Not sure about Ward, but maybe NetData is more what you're looking for?

[https://github.com/netdata/netdata](https://github.com/netdata/netdata)

<comment><USER3> Not if they want cross platform support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shameless plug: If you want a very minimal, highly configurable dashboard to monitor your Windows servers from the terminal, you can use mon: [https://github.com/soheilpro/mon](https://github.com/soheilpro/mon)

</comment><comment><USER13> Would have been very handy back in the day when I had lots of baremetal servers to manage - seems a bit less useful in the day of virtual machines and auto scaling.

Still handy for many I am sure!

</comment><comment><USER14> took me less than 2 minutes to download and have running on my mac. This is really good as a more 'consumer grade' type of server monitoring. The nerds and hardware geeks may feel more at home with netdata but if somebody who isnt tech-literate just wants to watch a server or threee then this is one of the easiest and fastest ways to have a pleasant, usable tool.

</comment><comment><USER15> Displaying 7% as 007% is hardly minimalistic.

<comment><USER16> The leading zeros threw me off as well. At first I interpreted 020% as 0.20% due to the coloring. For something information-centric like this, I think clarity over stylistic choices should be the foremost concern.

<comment><USER17> I just realized the point is to show values above 100%, but yes that leading 0 for hundreds sounds like a bad UX choice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do you have some intructions on how to use it? I am confused, it is asking for a server name and application port.

</comment><comment><USER19> I would also add network traffic and GPU load to the dashboard.</comment>


Bitcoin Is Unstable Without the Block Reward - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/10/21/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-reward/ <comment><USER2> Bitcoin is dying a slow death.</comment>


Uber CEO Backtracks After Comparing Khashoggi's Killing to an Accident - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/business/uber-ceo-jamal-khashoggi.html <comment><USER2> Surely everyone puts their foot in their mouth once in a while, or tries an analogy that doesn't quite mean what they want. Yet, it's downright weird to be comparing yourself and your own company to a brutal murderer.

<comment><USER3> To me it says that in his circles people are currently talking to downplay the Uber killing, likely worried about consequences for what was ultimately senior management pushing to disregard safety in the name of hitting milestones for investors, and on the other side people downplaying the brutal killing of an American journalist, likely to ease the minds of those taking blood money from the man who ordered the murder to fund their ventures. They are feeling the heat, so they keep reassuring themselves that really it's all nothing, to the point that in his mind, equating the two made perfect sense, because really they where both just silly small mistakes....</comment></comment>


User vs. Customer: Does It Matter? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/katelee/2012/10/18/user-vs-customer-does-it-matter/

<comment><AUTHOR> "User requests are what computers are for!" "DOING OUR BUSINESS is what computers are for." \--Tron, 1982</comment>


Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-mail-is-becoming-gmail-in-uk.html "Since "gmail" is 50% fewer characters than "googlemail," we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!" <comment><AUTHOR> From the post:

"Since "gmail" is 50% fewer characters than "googlemail," we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!"

But seriously, glad this trademark dispute finally got sorted out.

</comment><comment><USER3> We've always been able to give our email as @gmail.com (I have), but any email we send comes from @googlemail.com, which is obviously always a headache for support tickets and such.

I'm glad they've finally got this dispute sorted out.

<comment><USER4> What happens if you add a "Send mail as" address with @gmail.com?

<comment><USER3> 'You cannot send e-mail from *@gmail.com.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few notes here (AFAIK):

\- All gmail.com and googlemail.com addresses are (and have always been) interchange-able (go on, try it out)

\- The only noticeable impacts this will have is what gets displayed in the Gmail logo on the top of the window, and what gets displayed as the email address in your Gtalk profile popup

\- I've noticed that regardless of where (geographically) I log in from, if the system locale is set to _en_GB_ , it redirects to a Google Mail page.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm affected by this -- can't find the page where I can change to @gmail.com though. Any ideas?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not becoming available until later this month. I'm sure Google will send UK users an e-mail about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hang on, what's the story here?

Did they formerly detect signups from the UK somehow, and force them to use @googlemail, whereas international signups were allowed @gmail?

If so, how bizarre.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it was a trademark dispute. I believe the same is true in Germany (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10096107.stm>)

<comment><USER9> so what happens now if you're in germany?

<comment><USER10> Germany isn't a part of the UK, so things will work exactly as before. There's an existing mail service in Germany called G-mail, and the agreement (after a court case in 2007) is that the owner of that trademark can use it in Germany, Monaco, Norway and Switzerland, but nowhere else.

The English trademark was owned by someone else, and wasn't in active use, afaict.

Update: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/03/gmail-uk/> says Google reached a settlement after "engaging in legal proceedings at the trademark office" (read: pointing out that it wasn't in use, in order to get it revoked).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using both on my (UK) account without any difficulty, does this only change what's displayed in the upper right corner?

</comment><comment><USER12> What happens when someone has a name on a googlemail account, and that name was already taken in the gmail beta on the original gmail rollout in the US?

I'd be really interested if someone from Google could address this.

<comment><USER12> At the risk of losing even more karma, I took a look at the google help, and someone in the UK has been occasionally using my email (his full name - <USER2> as mine) instead of his proper email address (shortened version of name).

Google actually are addressing this by annotating emails to you with (yes, this is you), when a non-primary email address for your account is used.

Thanks Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> if your in the UK using @gmail.com has always worked in the past so it makes no real difference, its just that they can tell people about it now.

<comment><USER6> Has always worked for _inbound_ mail, not outgoing.

Posterous, for example, doesn't have an account verification email process. Outgoing gmail is sent from @googlemail.com so that's the email address you have to sign in with to the posterous site, and not '@gmail.com' which confused the hell out of me for a little while.

<comment><USER14> Also if you sign into Google talk (Jabber), you have to first figure out if your email address is @gmail.com or @googlemail.com

If you use the wrong one, it won't sign you in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> firstname.lastname@example.com = firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Ask HN: So I want to start a health insurance company - <AUTHOR>

There are so many annoyances and problems w/ modern health insurance that surely someone can do better. After reading PG's crazy startup ideas I've been thinking more and more that its worth a shot. Something like:
Setting up a health insurance company for only SF or NYC and focus on making it data driven, and the pricing completely transparent to the customer. They can easily pull up an app in the doctors and see exactly how much things will cost, and why. Focus on simplicity and taking the pain out dealing with providers.
What do people think the biggest hurdle (and there are many). Is it:
- Negotiating rates w/ doctors and service providers. - Getting round the legal red-tape. - Having enough money to actually run an insurance company. - Something else? <comment><USER2> _"Something else?"_

Re-insurance.

That may stand in for a raft of domain expertise.

An insurance company doesn't stand alone. It is integrated into vast financial networks in the same way that a bank depends on being part of an industry from providers like appraisers to institutions like the Federal Reserve.

Insurance companies have to operate in ways that interface with the rest of that system. You can't set one up that goes bankrupt if the 1:1000 chance of four people getting cancer occurs - or rather doing so is not likely to be successful across common definitions of what it means to be a successful insurance company.

Insurance and the startup mentality of fail fast are keenly at odds.

Finally, Insurance is the wrong problem to work on. Healthcare is the problem, and one which might be disrupted. However, once you try to solve it with insurance you are neither disruptive nor likely to get something radically dissimilar to the current system.

Swapping buggy whips doesn't make a Model T.

</comment><comment><USER3> The one thing you have going for you is that health insurance tends to be localized anyway, not necessarily at the city level, but at the state. One thing you have going against you is many people will want coverage beyond this local region.

The "knowing how much things will cost" is probably the biggest problem. I would love it, unfortunately it is completely different than how medical providers are used to working. That will make it very difficult to negotiate with doctors. And you will be new. Meaning that you have no current members. Meaning that they have absolutely no incentive to negotiate with you.

Then there's the fact that insurance in the US will change in unknowable ways on January 1. Have you looked at how you can interact with the health exchanges in these states?

</comment><comment><USER4> Insurance is a very complicated business. Given you've listed negotiating rates with doctors as your first bullet, I imagine you should do some reading first on just how complicated the financial and regulatory side of the business is.

You can't just "charge more in premiums than you pay out". That is how insurance USED to work. Nowadays it's all about carry on people's money. If you are posting on hacker news about insurance I think you are in over your head :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I certainly am in over my head but I look at Stripe as an example of how everyone knew PayPal integration sucked for years but everyone thought it would be 'too hard' to compete. They came a long and took a developer focussed approach and have hit out of the park.

Certainly starting a health insurance company is an even greater challenge, but everyone acknowledges what currently exists is painful for the end-user and because it's so hard the rewards are potentially massive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd imagine #3 would be the root of all difficulties: Having enough money/resources to solve other legal, logistics, and credibility issues.

We're working in the finance/investing space and we hear "$1B in management" thrown out as an example entry threshold. I'm guessing getting a legal review of our idea alone could also cost a large amount of money -- not exactly a lean startup fit. I'd be interested in hearing how you overcome this issue.

</comment><comment><USER6> Insurance is naturally a ponzi scheme (which isn't a bad thing). You hope people pay you more in premiums than they claim. The hard part is getting the math right. You want to be able to cover all claims AND offer the lowest premiums AND still profit.

<comment><USER7> While people generally look for the lowest insurance rates, do you think that the OP's idea may warrant charging a higher premium?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd pay higher premiums if I knew I was going to get the least painful and most transparent experience when I actually USED the insurance. Knowing how much things will cost and why ahead of time would be fantastic, among other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've thought about doing this too. I'd be curious to know you're thoughts or any resources you've found.</comment>


Measuring the performance of Wikipedia visitors' devices - <AUTHOR> https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2020/05/07/measuring-the-performance-of-wikipedia-visitors-devices/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if this could rather be down to browser updates, perhaps postMessage being optimized (faster) or something similar?</comment>


Tesla Quality Falls Short in J.D. Power Car Survey - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-quality-falls-short-in-j-d-power-car-survey-11593014428 <comment><USER2> This has been common across all the markets that Tesla is a part of. Norway, which used to be Tesla's second largest market, has had Tesla's brand perception fall precipitously.

[https://thenextweb.com/cars/2020/01/14/norwegians-tesla- sati...](https://thenextweb.com/cars/2020/01/14/norwegians-tesla-satisfaction- model-3-consumer-ratings/)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do after you finish your work during a sprint? - <AUTHOR> I'm a remote worker and I have a heavy guilt when I don't do anything after I complete all my sprint work.  It's actually happening right now - we have a full day of "spring planning", but since I am shifted in time zones, not physically in the office, and free of real work, I feel guilty just using this day as a day of leisure.<p>Is it fair to start on the next sprint's work? <comment><USER2> I work on a side project that's designed to improve the projects we work on.

I strongly believe everyone (literally everyone, including support and admin staff) should have side projects that are aligned with the future goals of the business they work in. It doesn't need to be code; it could be developing better processes to improve the way things are done, to document _everything_ , to automate away boring things, to test other people's projects, to just learn something useful, whatever. If you have a side project then you're never left doing nothing and you have a sense of being a more integral part of the company culture.

</comment><comment><USER3> go to the gym for a couple of hours and wear out your muscles, and let your mind rest.</comment>


Three Major Physics Discoveries and Counting - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/sau-lan-wus-three-major-physics-discoveries-and-counting-20180718/ <comment><USER2> A intriguing remark near the end: _We are also very excited about the near future, because we plan to start using quantum computing to do our data analysis._

<comment><USER3> It was nice to see this comment, because to me it means that she is always looking to the future & optimistic.

One of the near-term applications of quantum computing is for machine learning. For example, the D-wave chip is for optimising a binary fitness function. We will soon see if it works out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, she mentions using machine learning for analysis of the Higgs Boson data. Does anyone here know more about this?

<comment><USER5> In my opinion, CERN is one of the few groups out there that can call their data set "big data" without talking out of their ass. (If it can fit in RAM, it ain't Big Data. Multiple TBs fit in RAM) Their detectors produce something on the order of a petabyte _per second_ which is then pared back immensely to become something that's actually storable. Most of the machine learning I've heard of involving CERN is in reducing that data stream and then highlighting "interesting" things for researchers to take a look at.

<comment><USER6> Although LHC experiments are toward the top of the heap in terms of data rates, many particle and astronomical experiments produce "big data". One quarter of the DUNE experiment will acquire about 50 EB/year (that's exabyte), outputting about 10 PB/year to tape. LSST will produce data in the few PB/year range.

<comment><USER7> Not to belittle your examples, but in a historical context the LHC held a specific position. Remember that the ATLAS/CMS/ALICE/LHCb experiments started recording data at 10 GB/s back in 2008. Now, ten years later it is only natural that large data rates are becoming the norm.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tiny robots climb walls carrying more than 100 times their weight - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27413-tiny-robots-climb-walls-carrying-more-than-100-times-their-weight.html#.VT74aqNVhBc <comment><USER2> The 12g robot moving 2000 times it's weight, if it does, is pretty impressive. That's 24kg so you'd only need about four, weighing less than an iPhone, to drag furniture or people around.

Another related video with Geckos and synthetic 'geckskin':

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZJYbcG0Ts0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZJYbcG0Ts0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Horizontal tests are meaningless without data on the coefficient of friction between the load and the surface it is on. With sufficiently low friction a very large mass could be moved with virtually no effort:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uRql1fjZQf0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uRql1fjZQf0)

</comment><comment><USER4> Square-cube law. That is all.

<comment><USER5> I think you're right, even though you didn't explain what you meant.

Yes, a 12 gram robot can carry 2,400 grams of weight but this does not necessarily mean you can build a 12 kg robot that will carry 2,400 kg up the side of a building because it would require drastically more stickiness/surface area friction.

I think this is what you meant by "Square-cube law."

<comment><USER6> This is what I was thinking when they said "This is the same as you pulling a blue whale" because I don't think that's accurate. The whale would have a LOT more surface area causing a lot more friction and taking a lot more force.

Though I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was thinking about a roomba that washes windows on office buildings.

<comment><USER8> I was thinking about entering the bank when a tiny roomba with a dead battery crashed on the pavement in front of me, leaving a crater of rubble and plastic.

<comment><USER9> Tiny Roomba would probably have such low terminial velocity it may just blow away or land like a feather.

Tiny Roomba, like the robot in OA, won't require power to stay stuck to window.

Tiny Roomba, like Roomba's today, will know it's power reserves and be able to return to charging station before shutdown.

Tiny Roomba will be solar powered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how long until the adhesives wear out?

<comment><USER11> One of the most interesting properties of gecko technology is they are not like traditional 'sticky' adhesives. They are powered by sub-atomic attraction and are self cleaning with use. Pretty bizarre :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_setae](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_setae)</comment></comment>


You Suck (On web apps that mismanage text) - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html

<comment><USER2> I just tried to sign up for Notifo and wasn't allowed to use my real name because it has a - in it. So now I'm waiting for that to be fixed.

And don't get me started on how profanity filters consider my last name profane. Years ago I had a Hotmail account registered to the name Ivana C. Teens-Give-Head because they wouldn't accept John Graham-Cumming.

edit: Notifo telling me this will be fixed shortly.

<comment><USER3> We should start a club of people whose names vex software.

I could talk your ear off with how many ways I've broken systems in Japan, but one of my Asian American friends takes the cake. Her name is not Kim Kim, but it could be. Apparently some systems check to make sure you don't enter your first name twice...

<comment><USER4> Can't find the reference, but Caterina Fake has complained about her name being rejected as, well, fake.

<comment><USER5> Penenberg: Fake is real, right?

Fake: Yes. I can't tell you how many times I've booked an air ticket only to get to the airport and find out they killed my ticket because it goes into the system and the program tosses a ticket that says "fake" on it. Twice I've gone to the counter for a KLM flight through Northwest and have been rejected. They say, "You don't have a ticket." I give them a confirmation and after some investigation I learn my ticket has been cancelled because the system deleted it. For a while I couldn't join Facebook because of my last name. During the registration process I was asked for my real name and when I wrote "Fake" it rejected me. Finally a friend working for Facebook took care of me.

[http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/adam-penenberg/penenberg- pos...](http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/adam-penenberg/penenberg-post/flickr- co-founder-caterina-fake-value-viral-loops-exclusive-qa)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For any "human" data: trim and escape, and you're done. If you want to validate it, just ask the party that knows for sure (send an email, run a transaction, visit the URL).

This includes names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, URLs, CC/account numbers, user names, passwords (maybe tell them that caps-lock is on or any other weird keyboard state if you can).

<comment><USER7> As long as you wait until you know where the data is going, escaping is always a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes! For years I thought _I_ was the crazy one for telling our clients, "we don't really need to validate names. if they give you the wrong name, it's their problem; and it's more work for us; and we'll probably fuck it up and make someone mad". The answer was always "do it anyway, it's what we agreed on." The client feels like we are screwing them if we make the work easier, even though the end result is a higher-quality more usable website. Sigh.

The comment about developers making work for themselves is also spot on. I answer a lot of programming questions, and the questions are always asked because the programmer has reached the end of a twisty maze of his own creation. Turn around, walk, spin around, and try again. You'll find a better solution.

And oh yeah, I do this all the fucking time. Pick any random github project of mine, and you'll see 8 revisions of the API before I finally pick one that's not retarded. Even then. (Side note: I don't change the API after I release.)

Anyway, best rant ever.

<comment><USER9> > The comment about developers making work for themselves is also spot on. I > answer a lot of programming questions, and the questions are always asked > because the programmer has reached the end of a twisty maze of his own > creation. Turn around, walk, spin around, and try again. You'll find a > better solution.

This deserves to be repeated a thousand times.

How many times bad code and bad ideas stick around simply because those that came up with them can't even _imagine_ that they could do without them.

I have run into this many times with people that try Plan 9, ' _where is my pet unix "feature"?!?_ ', guess what? It was not a 'feature' and it causes untold pain, and that is why it is not in Plan 9.

Just last week somebody was in the Go mailinglist asking why there is no preprocessor! _sigh_

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> // from appendix B of rfc 3986 (<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt>)

'&^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#] _))?([^?#]_ )(\?([^#] _))?(#(._ ))?&'

The above regular expression is meant to match URI's. Since almost anything can be a URI, the re also matches almost everything.

<comment><USER3> You know you have done too much work with regular expressions when you think "Hey, wait a second, that can't possibly work" and start trying to debug it in the Ruby console for 10 minutes prior to realizing "Oh, HN is italicizing it because of the asterixes it is silently stripping."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had this booking a flight. The system mangled a hyphenated surname, so the "pay now" page was wrong. With no way to go back and modify it, we had to return to the start and try all over again. On the third failed attempt the clever system had detected a certain interest in our flights, and socked up the price by $200!

<comment><USER8> _On the third failed attempt the clever system had detected a certain interest in our flights, and socked up the price by $200!_

Or the inventory you were trying to buy was no longer available. Seats are not all the same price; they are divided into "fare buckets" that are usually lettered. There are very few cheap fares on each flight, more medium fares, and even more full-fares. You should check the code as you are booking; if the fare code changed, they ran out of inventory. If the fare code stayed the same, then they raised the price of that inventory.

Just saying -- it wasn't some conspiracy. Someone just bought them out from under you. Most airlines let you hold a reservation for a few hours, so if this ever hits you again, just hold the reservation, call the web services desk (not the general reservations desk), ask web services to fix your name, and then continue the ticketing process online.

(This is the procedure for AA, anyway. Dunno about other airlines, as I've never used them.)

Personally, I always hold, triple-check my plans, and then buy. So I have never had inventory disappear out from under me, and I have never needed to change a non-changeable fare :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dammit, Reg -- I thought you were back in business when I saw this. Call me a greedy bastard if you must, but I've been suffering major withdrawal and the methadone I've found out there just ain't cuttin' it anymore.

<comment><USER13> He's still publishing, at least as of February 2010: <http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just went through a website sign-up yesterday, and got my password e-mailed to me in cleartext. These anti-patterns will always exist.

<comment><USER15> Hacker News emails passwords in plain text :-)

<comment><USER10> Not if you use your own OpenID.

<comment><USER8> Pretty sure that if I use an OpenID, Hacker News still emails passwords in cleartext.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Meta-comment: The comments on the OP and here are far, far better than the post itself.

<comment><USER8> Very interesting. Normally I don't read blog comments, because usually they're dumb, but these aren't too bad. I think you wrote a rant that everyone can agree with. We have all been burned by validation before, and we have all been forced to write it. It's boring and annoying for everyone. (Watching the clients test the website usually consists of them typing stuff to test the validation rules. They don't check the spelling, they don't check that it works as they specified, but they do check that they can't put 999999 as their zip code. Sigh!)

You also have the right readership -- the people that will disagree with your post don't even know what a "raganwald" is.

A perfect storm, if you will, for constructive blog comments :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's another thing that needs to stop: Asking people for their first name + surname.

Not every culture has the concept of a surname. If you need to ask people for their names just do so via _one_ one text field.

</comment><comment><USER17> waybackwhen, I added additional code to validate s Swiss ZIP code to an application, thinking that the 8000 area must be the highest number area

Of course it is 9000 and ever since the ZIP code field is a non-validated text field in all applications I have done since :-)

<comment> a-priori Not only that, but they're only called ZIP codes in the US (this is a peeve of mine). In Switzerland they're "post codes" ("code postal" in French, don't know the Swiss German name). They also write addresses in a different order. As an example, here's the address of a Kebap shop I used to frequent:

      Avenue de la Sallaz 29
      1010 Lausanne
      Suisse

1010 is the post code, identifying La Sallaz (or a part of it?), in Lausanne. My point? All this stuff is very local and if you want to do it right you should just ask for addresses free-form and if you need to extract information from it then you should use a geocoding library (e.g. <http://geocoder.rubyforge.org/>) to normalize it for you.

<comment><USER18> My pet peeve is the field labelled "State or province" which can't be left empty. This is surprisingly common.

Most countries on Earth are not federations; dozens of nations are small enough that dividing into "provinces" would be meaningless; and even larger countries that do have regions may not include their names in mailing addresses.

<comment><USER8> Clearly the country is "European Union" and the state is "France".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If the email address was literally "foo+bar@domain", they may not have gone out of their way to screw you; there are lots of web apps that treat "+" as a special character, so all they had to do was pass it over another HTTP connection.

<comment><USER20> I use these as labels to auto-file registrations in Gmail, and I've seen a few anti-patterns:

1\. Reject at data entry even though they make me type it twice and they're going to do a round-trip click-to-verify. Too many to name fail this way.

2\. Accept at data entry, convert it to a space (+ on URL means space). Pray that the login routine accepts an email address with a space (it probably won't). Tirerack fails this way.

3\. Accept at data entry, then fail to create the account in other internal systems. Allow login using the +, but once logged in, data from internal systems is unavailable, and the portal errors in unusual ways. VMWare fails this way.

Failing using anti-pattern 1 is preferable to pattern 2 (replace with space then fail login) or 3 (accept and allow login but fail to interoperate with other systems internally).

After 45+ emails and calls about anti-pattern 3 over 18 months, VMWare still hasn't successfully delivered a VMWare license to me. By now they're on version 3 (a free upgrade if v2 was bought recently) but still haven't delivered me version 2 or 3. Next email, perhaps I should send them raganwald's article.

// EDIT: Added Tirerack.

<comment><USER19> This is pretty close to an argument for writing the extra line of code to reject email addresses with "plus" characters in them: the front-end team might not know how the backend team will screw up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The problem is that the actual spec for validating email addresses is preposterously long and complex, and can't even be implemented as a regexp since it requires nested parsing. So everyone just writes /^\w+@\w+\\.[\\.\w]+$/ or something lame.

<comment><USER22> No, the problem is people trying to validate email addresses when they shouldn't. Similar to the credit card name example in TFA, you're trying to save a call to the MTA, when in reality, a user that doesn't want to be contacted will enter email@example.com, and you have to send it anyway.

<comment><USER23> You want to validate email addresses, because a surprising number of users is incapable of typing their email address correctly in one try. Validation saves a lot of rework.

<comment><USER24> What I do is validate and warn if it looks bad, but not prevent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I cannot include my middle name on my twitter profile because they have a limit on how long a name can be.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ragan is totally right about this being wrong and needing to be fixed.

However, the idea that websites should use the bank's payment gateway for validation is misguided. Your fee's will be increased (or your account will be suspended) on many payment gateways if you do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it depends on what you're validating. If you are trying to validate a name, you had better get it right! For example, my Visa still says Reginald Braithwaite-Lee, but I might register on your site as Reg Braithwaite. Did I misspell my name or is that what's on my Visa? Is the hyphen a typo?

OTOH, some things seem to be more certain, like rules about check sums. I like the approach suggested by many folks: Use JS to validate on the client, and put up a "Are you really, really sure?" message for things that seem unusual like a single name or a funny character.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how much you could get out of their support as an apology, ie free flights and so on? I never really try that, but I hear some people extract bonus offers routinely.

<comment><AUTHOR> REDDIT MODE=ON

Apology? Mwahahaha! What happened was that they sent me an email saying the electronic ticket would follow by email within 24 hours. This was on a Friday for a Monday morning flight at 8:00. When no ticket arrived by Sunday morning, I called them to discover their office was closed. I called again at 5AM on Monday morning and they were still closed, so I waited until their office opened at 8:00.

Wrong move. They charged me for the flight, saying that even though they promised an e-ticket and didn't send it, and even though their offices were closed, I should have shlepped out to the airport where the airline would have resolved my problem. I appealed to Visa but lost.

<comment><USER8> This reminds me -- I never look for my e-tickets in my email. I just show up at the airport and print it there.

I have never _needed_ email to fly on an airplane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Isn't the sure fire way of validating an email address to connect to the mail server and see if the address exists?

<comment><USER29> Many mail daemons will "accept" mail no matter who the recipient is. Internally, unmatched mail may be discarded or forwarded to a "catch-all" account, but all the sender sees is "Recipient ok"

I think this started as a response to SPAM bots that used to "RCPT TO:" random strings and save a list of valid address.

<comment><USER30> Pretty sure that's a MUST NOT in the RFC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the era of server-side JavaScript, there's no excuse for not using the exact same validation code everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER32> ...and that's why I have a simple email address: only letters and numbers (plus the @ sign).

</comment><comment><USER33> tl;dr, couldn't get past the absurdity. Did this post have a point?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was not one of my best, so I forgive your snarky tl;dr :-)

Here's an even longer but (IMO) much better article about much the same thing: [http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control- of-...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of- apparatus.html)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Videobolt – Creative platform for video branding - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/videobolt-3-0 <comment><AUTHOR> Our team of 5 created Videobolt to help you promote your personal or business brand with professional motion graphics. On Videobolt you create custom motion graphics in a streamlined online editor, export and download your project as .MP4 and then repurpose as you see fit.

Our current offer consists of logo intros, cinematic titles and a few slideshows. We are mainly targeting at twitch streamers, vloggers, and bloggers. We wish to build a tool useful to anyone who wants their brand to look like a million bucks, but also have money left over to sustain both their cat and their business.

The whole thing is free to use and you can also grab freebie videos from select templates by sharing on social media. For those that need more, we have affordable monthly packages.</comment>


What are your hobbies? - <AUTHOR>

As a hacker, I can't seem to enjoy any thing for a prolonged period other than coding, learning and building systems. Is majority of the hackers like me or have other interesting hobbies? <comment><USER2> I don't do it much lately due to school, but I spent several years learning to be a weaver. I've done everything from belts to blankets, and even tried my hand at spinning yarn. Weaving is actually a lot like programming (the Jacquard loom was one of the first machines to use punchcards) in that you set the system up with a set of rules and then run it. Different systems give you different languages to express the pattern in, just like programming languages. The awesome thing about looms is that they're bootstrappable technology: give me some wood and tools and I can build a loom that I can then weave on. On top of that, the potential patterns you can create with these simple programs are innumerable, many of them quite beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do weightlifting and photography. The weightlifting gives me something physical to do which is a nice change from sitting still all day. I like photography because I like being visually creative. The work I do is creative but not visually as I write Linux device drivers.

My first manager programmed all day, all night and all weekend. I thought that was a bit much but he ended up doing very well in the industry.

I'd go with your strengths, with what you enjoy and with what interests you.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nice, I tried photography for a while and that kinda went to backlogs. Only thing I really seem to enjoy is coding.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hard bop and champagne.</comment>


How Tower Bridge Changed My Relationship With Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2011/06/how_tower_bridge_changed_my_relationshi/

<comment><AUTHOR> seem it wasn't handled the best way by Twitter, but really, the whole brand/identity holders thing is a long standing valid thing on the internet..(re: domains etc)...so I dunno, shouldn't be that much of a surprise?

Word of the day has to be: Spime <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spime>

<comment><USER2> the company is Tower Bridge Exhibitions and doesn't have a trademark on "Tower Bridge", kicking people off to give a company a shorter handle is wrong.</comment></comment>


Cyber Attack Management for Metasploit - Meet Armitage - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastandeasyhacking.com/ <comment><USER2> "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."</comment>


Ask HN: What's the end game for Covid-19? - <AUTHOR> When we first started taking precautions against the virus, I figured the goal was to halt its spread. However, the more recent consensus seems to be that we are doing this to "flatten the curve". Ie, we know that the virus cannot be contained, but we can slow down its spread, so that our hospitals do not get overwhelmed.
Somewhat paradoxically, the more successful we are at flattening the curve, the longer we will need to be in a state of shutdown. The estimates I've been hearing from experts is that 20-60% of Americans will eventually get infected. And that if we're successful in "flattening the curve", it will take 12-18 months before the virus plateaus off. Which is roughly when a vaccine will be ready for mass-use as well.
Assuming that the current shutdown measures are successful and we flatten the curve over a 12-18 month period, what exactly is our end game here? Are we going to sustain our current lockdowns for the entire upcoming year?
As a tech worker who is happily working from home, I don't mind at all. But what about all the people working retail, dining, entertainment, tourism, and similar industries? Are we willing to accept putting them out of work for an entire year? The shutdown has barely been in place for 2 weeks, and people are already suffering under the financial burden. The $1000 payout being considered will certainly help... but only temporarily. Can we really handle extending the status quo for an entire year? <comment><USER2> Literally nobody knows. Assuming that as an epidemic it will burn itself out (perhaps killing many, with most of the survivors gaining immunity), the enormous economic dislocation and disproportionate demographic impacts will likely result in political turbulence, as those who were less well off under the rapidly disappearing status quo have no reason to assist in its re- establishment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lockdowns do not have to last that long.

Once the epidemic is under control they can be lifted, but precautions and strict procedures must remain, which depend on the people being diligent and with a strong civic sense.

See China, Korea, etc.

<comment><USER4> What percent of each of these populations is infected? Wuhan has been in lockdown for six weeks, its not lifted. And obviously they still have many millions older than 65 who haven't been infected, they have no immunity. Lift the lockdown with even one infected person escaping, and the epidemic ignites again.

And this is way more problematic in the U.S. are we going to have lockdowns everyone there's a flare up? How's that going to work?</comment></comment>


A security robot is being used to shoo away homeless people in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1154649/a-knightscope-security-robot-is-being-used-to-shoo-away-homeless-people-in-san-francisco/ <comment><USER2> This is a nonsense clickbait title with no evidence to back it up.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure I'm the 1,000,000th person to say this, but that's a dalek v1 if I ever saw one.

I don't have any issues with a company having a security camera to monitor and respond to loitering or criminal activity but this crosses some weird line for my tastes.

<comment><USER4> > I don't have any issues with a company...

This isn't just a _company_. This the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), an organization dedicated to preventing the mistreatment of pets, buying or renting a robot to mistreat humans. How messed up is that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sweet, sweet vengeance has been unleashed upon the Dalek: [https://www.dezeen.com/2017/12/13/k5-knightscope-security- ro...](https://www.dezeen.com/2017/12/13/k5-knightscope-security-robot-sfspca- san-francisco-bullied-off-street/)</comment>


Can you divide a sandwich between three people fairly? - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envy-free

<comment><USER2> Don't use the metric system. A 12 inch sub can easily be divided into three four inch sections. A yard long sub can be sliced into three foot longs. A 100 cm sub, on the other hand, by definition cannot because the result is irrational.

</comment><comment><USER3> Flip a three-sided coin to decide who gets the whole sandwich. It will be envy-free before the coin flip (but not after). In general, eg for utility functions with diminishing returns, this solution will not yield the highest utility.

</comment><comment><USER4> All depends on the trimmings, and what kind of sandwich. Seriously.</comment>


Not a tablet person? HP's 2730p may change that - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/review-hp-elitebook-2730p-notebook-2008107/

<comment><USER2> So in which ways is it better than IBM X series?</comment>


Implant to 'Plug' Brain into Supercomputers - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/implant-to-plug-brain-into-supercomputers-161021.htm <comment><USER2> I am surprised they are revealing this one.</comment>


Ads/ Promoted posts on HN front page?  - <AUTHOR>

Just spotted something interesting on HN front page page. What I consider as an advert or a promoted post.
http://i.imgur.com/T5U60Oh.jpg
Is this something that happens often on Hacker News? <comment><USER2> It is interesting to me, given the age of your profile, that you just noticed this. I'm about as old as you are, and its been noticeable for a while and happens frequently.

If you click the "jobs" link next to "ask" and "submit" you'll see a filtered list of links including the one in your screenshot.

</comment><comment><USER3> You must be new here. YC companies get limited advertising.

<comment><USER4> Treskot's profile is four times as old as yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes. YC companies are allowed to frequently submit job postings. They start out at the top of the front page and decay at a fixed rate.</comment>


What would happen if a Japan-like earthquake hits Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR>

I thought about this some years ago and the recent earthquake in Japan brought it up again.
What would happen if such an earthquake would hit Silicon Valley? Many data centers seem to be out of the Valley for this reason, but what about all the offices of tech companies and the homes of their employees?
How hard would this hit the tech industry? <comment><USER2> HN traffic would drop suddenly...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think one major thing is that SV is not exposed to giant tsunamis. Does anyone know for sure if the narrow entrance to the bay would prevent the kind of devastation caused by a tsunami? Could a tsunami be generated inside the bay? It seems to me that a lot of the damage in Japan (including the nuke plants) was from the tsunami not the earthquake itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326075>

</comment><comment><USER4> The cool thing about building on the internet, is that you can build from anywhere!</comment>


Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com - <AUTHOR> https://heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all :) creator here (and yes, you can reach me at firstname.lastname@example.com).

Was talking with a friend last night and I bought this domain on a whim because I thought it would be funny. And then spent a couple hours making this landing page and it's since turned into this elaborate joke. Hope it added something to your day~ haha

<comment><USER2> If I may make a suggestion, redirect the Rickroll link through a "/reserve" link on your site so it's not immediately obvious on mouse hover.

<comment><USER3> I saw on hover where it would lead to, but I clicked anyway because the site deserved it. I listened to the whole song.

<comment><USER4> How can you _not_ listen to the whole song, that's the point, it's awesome xD

<comment><USER5> The song is awesome, but the clip is cringy as can be.

From the awkward dancing, nonsensical acrobating and sunglassing to Rick himself. Even though the song's got a good beat, he can't seem to move to it no matter how hard the editor tries to cut or how cool he tries to look. And I'm always surprised by such a deep voice coming from such a skimpy guy, which contributes to the joke.

<comment><USER6> I prefer this version of it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQoA_wjmE9w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQoA_wjmE9w)

<comment><USER7> You may have missed an opportunity there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi, I can't register. Each time I click, a weird old video opens. Can someone help me ? I tried to contact the creator of the site to tell him that he messed up with his register link.

<comment><USER9> Unlike other email startups, this one promises to never give you up or let you down. I expect them to resist every attempt at acquisition.

(I miss you, Mailbox, Sparrow...)

<comment><USER10> The promises explicitly included 'no customer support'. I'd say Linus is already close to the line here with his answers in this thread.

<comment><USER11> PoissonVache is not a customer yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Enjoyable to see these mockery sites. The original Hey marketing was just asking to get mocked. Hopefully they take it in good spirit. The lesson learned I think is, don't act like God unless you want to get mocked for it.

<comment><USER13> I like this parody, but I don't understand what you are saying about Hey's original marketing. What's particularly arrogant about product designers saying they've identified and solved a problem?

Here's what they originally put up, for reference: [http://web.archive.org/web/20200207101953/https://www.hey.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200207101953/https://www.hey.com/)

<comment><USER14> My biggest gripe about Hey is that it's marketed as an email client, but it's actually a proprietary database you get access to through something that looks like an email address.

I'm exaggerating a bit. But I don't understand why they built a service and not a client.

For me, email is about being not locked into a specific client. And Hey requires a separate client than the one for my existing email addresses.

<comment><USER15> > But I don't understand why they built a service and not a client.

Some of the core features aren't feasible with a simple client. For example screening new contacts by default, merging/renaming threads only for you, adding notes to a thread, save bits of content…

<comment><USER12> > screening new contacts by default

A client could certainly handle this, but it may not translate to other instances of the client.

> merging/renaming threads only for you

An advertised feature that did not even work on their release. Maybe they fixed it by now, I don't know, I did not end up buying the product. The initial release was quite buggy.

<comment><USER13> Anecdotally, I've renamed and merged several threads between the initial release and now.

<comment><USER12> I know that feature was on their internal list of bug fixes, so it sounds like they got through at least that far on the list!

<comment><USER13> Yes, I don't think they're proceeding in order of report. I've had any significant reported bugs fixed within hours. A couple minor ones are persistent. I assume whatever issue you saw with thread management was fixed quickly as it's a core feature in the marketing, and demonstrated live by Jason in his product demo streams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought this would be [https://heeeeeeeey.com/](https://heeeeeeeey.com/)

<comment><USER17> I hoped it would be HeyYeYaaeYaaaeYaeYaa.com which once used to show this important piece of Meme History: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO- An4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO-An4)

<comment><USER18> Sadly it's now a parked domain :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment> hunter-2 Rickrolling is no longer fun with a pre-roll ad

<comment><USER19> Install an adblocker so you can still be rickrolled like old times.

<comment><USER20> This is the sole reason for me to keep uBlock installed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Check out [https://cock.li](https://cock.li) for domains such as @national.shitposting.agency

<comment><USER22> The one below your suggestion is concerning..

<comment><USER23> Yeah this is the edgy far-right hiding behind "free speach"

<comment><USER24> The channel "Counter Arguments" made a great video about why I would consider this kind of joke A-ok.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm739aB98-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm739aB98-M)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Another great parody here: [https://bye.fyi](https://bye.fyi)

<comment><USER26> Too bad it is broken:

> Your message wasn't delivered to email@example.com due to an error. > > The > response was: > > write EPROTO 140451178456960:error:14094438:SSL > routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert internal > > error:../deps/openssl/openssl/ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:1544:SSL alert > number 80 > > > If you need help, forward this to firstname.lastname@example.com > or visit [https://forwardemail.net](https://forwardemail.net).

<comment><USER25> it's not supposed to be a real product either

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm actually sad I can't really get a heyyyyyyyyyyyy email.

<comment><USER28> just register your own domain with varying amount of Ys. At this point there is no meaningful difference between 12 Ys and 13 Ys.

<comment><USER27> I am now the proud owner email@example.com. Looks like I was a bit slow 17ys!

<comment><USER28> Haha I wonder if basecamp people would get mad and start throwing out cease and desist letters once a bunch of people start using variation of heyyyyyy...yy.com domains for their email addresses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting. The source code for the Useless Web[0] lists `heeeeeeeey.com`

        var sitesList = [
        "http://heeeeeeeey.com/",
        "http://corndog.io/",

But not [https://heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com/](https://heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com/)

Source:

[https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/js/ac60b9af5090596957c...](https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/js/ac60b9af5090596957c418e9096d00818e70b13b/js/uselessweb.js)

[0] [https://theuselessweb.com/](https://theuselessweb.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> So psyched! Had to leave my billing details in the comments of the reserve page. Fingers crossed.

</comment><comment><USER31> Heyy anyone got an invite code to share please?

<comment><USER32> Sure, please explain your life to me and amuse me in some way, and I'll send you an invite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33>
        [Reserve Now]
        (31/200 left in stock)

Considering the activity of HN users, I found these numbers highly suspicious. (But a good try anyway.) I wonder what is the best number for tempting a click. Maybe you should increase these as the site popularity grows?

<comment><USER34> Now that the post has more than 500+ upvotes, better give a number beyond 1000 for a conservative and believable value. I almost felt it was not true before clicking it, but clicked any wa. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If this doesn't disrupt current markets, idk what will.

</comment><comment><USER36> I found a bug: If I resize the window to cover both my screens the title bar, I run out of Ys. Unacceptable!

[https://i.imgur.com/Jw0NTxf.png](https://i.imgur.com/Jw0NTxf.png)

<comment><USER37> weird flex but ok

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is fucking comedy gold, absolutely brilliant.

Signed up for my heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com email account and I'm thrilled to find out that I'm user #15!!! My life is officially complete.

</comment><comment><USER39> One perk of being friends with Linus is that he gives you email addresses...

Send memes to firstname.lastname@example.com (this actually works)!

</comment><comment><USER40> I thought that was going to be: [https://heeeeeeeey.com/](https://heeeeeeeey.com/), and wondered what it's doing at HN's top...

[Content Warning: contains audio, loops, might be annoying, rip your browser history]

</comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone remember the exact domain for that joke website that had the picture of the wire spring doorstopper that would just play the BOINGGGGG sound when you clicked on it?

It was something like boinnnnnngggggg.com but I can't remember it or find it in my old bookmarks.

<comment><USER42> That's the downside with a name like that. It's not very memorable.

Clearly they should have removed the vowels to make it easy to remember and named it bnnnnnngggggg.com :)

Sarcasm aside, if you do end up finding it, post here: that sounds like a hilarious one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ok you got me xD A great example of this silly thing called social engineering.

</comment><comment><USER44> @"I have L5 disposable income".com

</comment><comment><USER45> Similar to omg.lol

I actually have an email with them. I use it when I have to give an email, specially in person. It's so much fun when people see this sort of email address!

</comment><comment><USER46> Hmm, is that better or worse than Heyyyyyyyyyyy.com?

</comment><comment><USER47> While we're here, can anyone who's been using Hey for a little while share how it's been? I did the trial and liked it, but it felt a little bit micromanagey and I just didn't know if it'd get better after changing all my accounts and using the screener for a month or more.

<comment><USER48> A month or so in and it's still a lot of micromanaging. My biggest sticking point is that I'm unsure of which email address may be used for important notifications and the like so I'm hesitant to screen things out a lot of the time unless they are basically spam.

<comment><USER47> Oh yeah, that was a problem I had. My health insurance uses the same email to send marketing spam as they do to send test results, so I couldn't screen them out. Maybe they'll add some IF fields on the subject line in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Jokes on you, I really wanted an email.

</comment><comment><USER50> Thumb up from me for the potential archaeoclonal side play.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=da+vinci+duke+of+milan+lette...](https://www.google.com/search?q=da+vinci+duke+of+milan+letter&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER51> I, for one, miss uselessaccount.com and feel that this product fills an important niche.

</comment><comment><USER52> I expected it would link to this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32FB- gYr49Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32FB-gYr49Y) instead of a rick roll! Nice one.

<comment><USER18> There used to be a website for that, but it looks like the domain registration expired :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is pretty great. I think DHH will get a kick out of it.

My favorite parody site made fun of web frameworks and called them "crystal node grunt gems for ninjas". The whole website was genius, but I can't seem to find it anymore. :(

Does anybody else have any more parody sites? (Or know the one I'm referring to?)

<comment><USER54> [http://www.coboloncogs.org/](http://www.coboloncogs.org/)

(cf. early versions of the Rails site: [https://web.archive.org/web/20060101025821/http://rubyonrail...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060101025821/http://rubyonrails.org/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Bravo ! Making the world a better place one y at a time !

</comment><comment><USER56> With so many parodies popping up regularly I consider this an accidental(?) growth vector for the original product. Let's see what comes next.

</comment><comment><USER57> Change the href of the "Reserve now" button to "/signup", and _then_ redirect to the page it's sending users to.

</comment><comment><USER58> I was completely ready to sign up for an account.

</comment><comment><USER59> got the actual sign up page at the 2048th click

</comment><comment><USER60> Ads on YouTube broke Rick rolling.

</comment><comment><USER61> > Interested? Reach out to email@example.com

Missed an opportunity to double the silliness here

</comment><comment><USER62> Suggestion: Rick roll plays in the background 3 seconds after opening the page.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm surprised that Gmail team hasn't created a HEY theme yet.

</comment><comment><USER64> I see you, XcQ…

Clever site, tho. Gonna see how many do-workers will click.

</comment><comment><USER65> Just want to say thanks. This made my morning. :D

</comment><comment><USER66> I have been rickrolled...thrice. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER67> Yeah well I fell for it. Well done. :)

</comment><comment><USER68> :'( Got Rick Rolled :'(

</comment><comment><USER69> Race to the end of the page.....

</comment><comment><USER70> Meh I'll wait for the TLD

</comment><comment><USER71> I laughed out loud, well done

</comment><comment><USER72> this made me crack up. impressive amount of work for a joke. love it

</comment><comment><USER73> Quite funny, but I think it needs to take a bigger dig on hey.com's pricing and offering.

> $100 for each "y"

Ah, flipping hey.com's model of charging more for shorter addresses. Genius!

> So expensive, you'll never forget to cancel

This should be right at the top! And it applies to hey.com too (for many people)! :)

</comment><comment><USER74> Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.com

</comment><comment><USER75> It is what it is

</comment><comment><USER32> Most startups on HN would be far more honest if they just came full circle and made an email app like hey.com.

But anyway, looking forward to the Microsoft Word, errr, Notion clones in the coming months.

<comment><USER22> Don't forget my new business that lets you make websites from Google sheets for some reason

.. what do you mean they revoked our API key?

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> >Video unavailable This video is not available.

Unacceptable!

</comment><comment><USER77> Ughhhhhhh.

Nice one.

</comment><comment><USER78> Is DHH's Hey doing well? I couldn't really see the value in it because I handle my emails quite decently.

</comment><comment><USER79> Signed up and reserved my email.

</comment><comment><USER80> hilarious... well done

</comment><comment><USER81> It's for horses.

</comment><comment><USER82> got me

</comment><comment><USER83> haha this is funny

</comment><comment><USER84> Why is this flagged? This is great and, for better or worse, pretty on point.

<comment><USER38> I know!! I mean like, come on, take a joke, internet

<comment><USER22> You know what makes a great timing joke?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> The fact that hey.com ignored the precedent of ignoring periods within emails will make hey.com emails rife with fraud when they open up. Pretending phishing and email phishing doesn't exist won't make it go away. And I certainly won't spend 2x the amount for an email subscription to reserve my email@example.com vs. email@example.com

Setting email back 10 years, 1 step at a time

</comment><comment><USER86> Hey.com isn't interesting and this isn't funny. :(

</comment><comment><USER87> Ah, so facetious comments are beyond the pale but not low-effort facetious links.

</comment><comment><USER88> What, pray tell, is intellectually stimulating or useful to curiosity about this website?

<comment><USER89> For me it's watching all the responses from the likes of people who don't get the satire Kvetching right here in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> First mock that showed up shortly after Hey's introduction was funny, I have to admit that even as a user. Not sure if it did fit on HN but whatever. But this is not only low effort, but what's there to discuss? Is it really that interesting?

<comment><USER91> Do you have a link?

<comment><USER90> [https://bye.fyi/](https://bye.fyi/)</comment></comment></comment>


Will You Welcome Your New Silicon Valley Emo-Choad Oligarch Government? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theawl.com/2013/05/will-you-welcome-your-new-silicon-valley-emo-choad-oligarch-government

<comment><USER2> TFA adds absolutely nothing to the article to which it links.</comment>


We Shouldn't Be Scared by 'Superintelligent A.I.' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/opinion/superintelligent-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> It's not the AI that I worry about, it's the people that control it.</comment>


Google Does a Barrel Roll - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Do+a+Barrel+Roll

<comment><USER2> I dont understand what the point of this is? at all</comment>


Show HN: Remained.io list of available .io domains - <AUTHOR> http://remained.io/
I was looking for a new domain but found a lot which I'm not going to use. Take them for your next project if you need them, they are cool, uberhip io domains.
I'm going to update the list regularly with new domains. <comment><USER2> looks cool! I run the service at park.io which is similar, but for domains dropping out of expiration

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, park.io was kind of the reason I've created it. Wanted to get my feet wet in the domain area. ::D</comment></comment>


Pyproject.toml: the future of Python packaging – Brett Cannon (podcast) - <AUTHOR> https://testandcode.com/52 <comment><AUTHOR> Brett Cannon discusses the changes afoot in Python packaging as a result of PEP 517, PEP 518, starting with "How did we get here?" and "Where are we going?"

Discussed:

flit Poetry tox Continuous Integration setup.py, MANIFEST.in, etc. pipenv what's with lock files applications (doesn't go on PyPI) vs libraries (goes on PyPI) workflows dependency resolution deployment dependencies vs development dependencies will lock files be standarized multiple lock files requirements.txt</comment>