The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/moviepass-economy-startups.html <comment><USER2> > The king of money-losers, of course, is Amazon, which went years without > turning a profit. Instead, it plowed billions of dollars back into its > business

The key difference with Amazon is that Amazon could choose to be profitable at any time- just raise prices ever so slightly, reducing growth in customer demand, and the stop building out its enormous logistics empire and new businesses. Amazon could have had profits for a very long time, but Bezos understands that re-investing money in the company grows the value quickly. Plus, you only pay taxes on profits.

MoviePass can't really do that. They don't have potential profits that they can just stop re-investing. They aren't spending money on investments- they just don't have income high enough to cover the costs of their product. And lots of other start-ups have the same problem right now.

<comment><USER3> Raising prices would solve lots of problems for Amazon. They'd lose some market share, reducing the monopoly accusations. Most likely companies are going to face increasing pressure to do something about inequality levels, so maybe a $5 / hour (hopefully more) pay raise for their 28k a year warehouse workers could also be in the store.

<comment><USER4> I'm not a lawyer, but I think if you are accused of being a monopoly, suddenly increasing your prices is a bad legal strategy because it proves you have pricing power, which is the classic sign of a Sherman-style monopoly that regulators like to break up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > But it also reflects the willingness of shareholders and deep-pocketed > private investors to keep fast-growing upstarts afloat long enough to > conquer a potential "winner-take-all" market.

That's the gamble. Destroy competition, get lock in, become a monopolist and the free market is your money printing machine. If regulators had teeth to break up such monopolies, we wouldn't be seeing these gambles, and maybe more honest competition.

<comment><USER6> This strategy only works if you can effecticely build new habits that are sticky enough to persist when the friction increases. Even better is if the new behavior has interesting interactions with other things.

The reason enterprise tools tend to be "worse" is because the stickiness is arbitrarily enforced instead of being rooted in reality. Uber/lyft are non- sticky because theyre basically the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Enjoy It While You Can

I love the conclusion of this article. As someone who has participated in the online "deals" community for 10+ years, I have definitely benefitted from many of the opportunities.

However, I do spend a considerable amount of time wondering what will happen when this house of cards comes falling down.

But you know, I think that for every one person like me taking advantage of these "arbitrage" scenarios, there are like 10 people paying full price. They keep this economy going.

<comment><USER8> > But you know, I think that for everyone person like me taking advantage of > these "arbitrage" scenarios, there are like 10 people paying full price. > They keep this economy going.

That seems contrary to what the article is saying, which is that for every person taking advantage, there are _zero_ people paying full price, because it's the investors who are keeping this economy going.

As such, it may never end without a regulatory end to the winner-take-all scenario, as a different comment suggested.

<comment><USER9> All it would take for it to end is for investors to stop investing in money- burners.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that a tautology, though?

My point is that actual[1] investors have an incentive to pour their money into money-burners because if _just one_ of those initially money-burning is the next Google, Facebook, Amazon, or whatever overwhelming winner-take-all breakout profitable company, they will have more than justified dumping all that cash into the losers.

[1] for lack of a better term. I've never quite understood why it's considered "investing" to buy stock in a company if someone other than the company itself previously owned the stock. That cash isn't going into company coffers. This activity seems more like asset ownership/speculating than asset allocation (which is what I think of when I hear the word "invest").

<comment><USER9> Your point is well taken.

I think I just don't agree that government stepping in is the only way to end the cycle. Seems to me it can/will die of natural causes when the "bubble" bursts.

<comment><USER8> But what bubble? Where's the irrationally increasing asset values at a macro level? Where's the "greater fool" that's buying it all up?

Without that, there's nothing to burst.

Moreover, this has been going on for _so_ long, at least since (before) the dot-com boom, and we've had quite a few economic downturns. It's not very credible that any bubble would survive that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of _VC Fund My Life_. It's an index of discounts offered by startups, which you more or less know they're taking a loss on. Clever name.

[http://www.vcfml.com/](http://www.vcfml.com/)

<comment><USER11> That site seems like it's all fake promotion - e.g. coinbase is on their and last I looked coinbase's fees were monstrously high compared to Gemini and other exchanges. It's definitley not saving you anything choosing them.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, and Gemini is not well known enough... it's basically no fees for most users moving between USD and BTC, and it's legit, based in NYC and follows all of the NY state regulations on crypto.

<comment><USER13> Gemini recently increased fees to 1% so it's now far more expensive than GDAX.

<comment><USER11> Wow, that's insane. I can no longer recommend retail buyers use Gemini if they're charging 1%. Very disappointing.

<comment><USER12> Guess it's Robinhood then. Free to buy BTC.

<comment><USER13> Note that you can't transfer BTC into or out of Robinhood so you may be stuck if they increase fees in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty much. Seated was another gravy train. You got a $15 Amazon or Uber gift card just for going to restaurant with a second person. There were no minimums. you just had to show up and had to order food. There was a 2-3 month period where my girlfriend and I were getting good meals for a net $15-$20 total. It was awesome, but I knew it wouldn't last. Then they put in restrictions - to qualify for the $15, you needed at least 4 people or spend $X. It's no longer even a "good" deal, so now I don't use it anymore.

<comment><USER15> I got an even better deal: I cook my own meals, or eat at even cheaper restaurants. I'm also looking in to joining a community garden and growing some of my own food.

Amazon restaurant deals are not worth it for me, even with their discounts. But I understand that a certain segment of the population doesn't think much of such an expense, and that's who Amazon is targeting.

<comment><USER16> That sounds like a different product, not a better deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am curious if this will end with a "bubble-burst" or a slow burn like twitter has experienced. Surely the money has to dry up sometime? It is too bad that none of these companies create any kind of net good for society like a startup that pays you over minimum wage to clean up a park or sort recycling.

<comment><USER18> > _Surely the money has to dry up sometime?_

Why? A bit simplified, but think of the money as coming from the profits from the companies that have been successful. It's just how investment works. And when you add up all the gains and losses, it's still a net positive as the economy grows a little bit more year after year.

And what do you mean no net good? The companies create jobs which create huge amounts of income taxes (always) and corporate taxes (when profitable) that pay the salaries of the people who, for example, maintain our parks, or manage a city's recycling systems.

<comment><USER19> Jobs aren't intrinsically good. These startup jobs might be, but it's an insanely complex system you're trying to suss a value judgement out of.

If these startups didn't exist, the money going into them would be seeking returns elsewhere. There would probably be jobs involved there too, and the people working those jobs might be doing something better for society than building a short-lived money-losing consumer product.

If the mysterious "elsewhere" didn't create jobs with the money say because it was spent on capital assets, that's still not the end of the story. Wherever it went, someone else has it now and they're probably spending it, perhaps hiring some people with it ie creating jobs.

The simple interpretation of your second line is the broken window fallacy, which is false. The grasping-at-straws interpretation is that paying software engineers to work on junk is a better than average way to route capital through our economy - measured in terms of how much real value the capital produces for people as it changes hands from company to coder + tax man, coder to shopkeeper + tax man, and tax man to public works employees, etc forever. I don't think we could possibly measure the latter interpretation, but I don't believe it.

<comment><USER20> These companies losing investor money isn't anything like the broken window fallacy.

If I pay a company $0.75 for a $1 widget with a $0.25 VC subsidy, I get the $1 widget and I'm ahead a widget. Nobody had to destroy a widget to make me buy a new one.

The underlying widget suppliers still get the full price so the money is flowing into the economy. The VCs are the only ones losing anything.

So paying people to clean parks is not better for the economy than VC subsidizing blue apron meals.

The mistake you are making is assuming that a company losing money cannot provide more value to society than it loses.

<comment><USER19> You're right it's not quite the fallacy in that there isn't any destruction going on. It's something adjacent though:

The whole point of markets is that people decide where to spend their money based on the value they can get for it. When 3rd parties subsidize services like Moviepass or Blue Apron, they break the pricing mechanism that's supposed to lead us to efficiently use limited resources eg seats in a movie theater or space on mail trucks.

If a company losing money is providing more value to the customer than it costs to operate, they don't need to be losing money and they should raise prices. Otherwise, you're arguing these companies have a beneficial externality of some kind, and society at large gains in the transaction even though the company is burning more value than the customer gains from its product. I don't think that's the case for Moviepass or Blue Apron.

It's Bastiat's idea of the unseen alternative, except we're talking about LP money channeled through VCs instead of taxpayer money through the government.

I'm not blindly against VC-, cross-business, or any other kind of subsidies. If positive externalities exist they're a good thing. Eg, Amazon was "losing money" or barely breaking even on its physical goods business for a long time, but that money was strengthening our logistics network (both internal to Amazon and in USPS, FedEx, UPS) so they could be profitable later at the same or lower price points. Healthcare probably ought to be a money-losing business because a healthy labor force has huge positive externalities. I just don't think leisure or mild convenience/lifestyle products are positive on the balance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> VC bucks creating discounts is about the only form of wealth redistribution we [the U.S.] can count on these days.

<comment><USER22> Not quite. The US is currently undergoing a renaissance of successful government programs that have massively cut poverty and homelessness over the last 15 years.

"Child Poverty Falls to Record Low [nearly a 50% reduction since 1967], Comprehensive Measure Shows Stronger Government Policies Account for Long-Term Improvement"

[https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and- inequality/child-p...](https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and- inequality/child-poverty-falls-to-record-low-comprehensive-measure-shows)

"The U.S. Social Safety Net Has Improved a Lot. ... Its social safety net is only a couple of percentage points below the OECD total, and larger than that of Canada, Australia and South Korea."

"Furthermore, U.S. government transfers have been increasing over time. The U.S. system of taxation and spending has become more progressive during the past two decades. Per-capita government transfers were about $8,567 a person in 2016, up from about $5,371 at the turn of the century (adjusted for inflation) — an increase of 60 percent"

"After 16 years of expansions in the safety net under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, the U.S. has a much more robust welfare state than people seem to realize."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-16/the-u- s-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-16/the-u-s-social- safety-net-has-improved-a-lot)

The National Alliance to End Homelessness, reports that total US homelessness declined by 27% from 2005 to 2017. The drop was from 763,000 to 553,000 for all forms of homelessness (while the US simultaneously added 30 million people to its population).

"the rate per 10,000 people is at its lowest value on record."

[https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in- america/homeless...](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in- america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-report/)

(their 2013 report which gives figures back to 2005):

[https://b.3cdn.net/naeh/bb34a7e4cd84ee985c_3vm6r7cjh.pdf](https://b.3cdn.net/naeh/bb34a7e4cd84ee985c_3vm6r7cjh.pdf)

<comment><USER23> Given how much larger our population is, what would be shocking would be if our social safety nets were _smaller_ than those of Canada, Australia, or South Korea.

<comment><USER24> The relative measure used in the linked article is a percent of GDP used on social welfare programs.

It's not an absolute value comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hmm you laugh, but if you could sell dollar bills at $0.75 but you limited the amount any person could buy. And you made them look at advertising, and collected all sorts of personal info on them. You could easily quite a bit of money off them. More then what you lose in selling the dollar bills at a loss.

<comment><USER26> My economics professor auctioned $1. Someone bought it above par.

<comment><USER27> The lesson your class was supposed to learn is that people aren't always rational. Did they?

(And did your economics class then go on to assume everyone is perfectly rational and understands their own utility functions, anyway?)

<comment><USER28> Rational doesn't mean valuing every dollar exactly the same. Buying a $1 for more than $1 from an economics professor is funny, maybe a good story, maybe a good keepsake, and plausibly worth more in utility than what they paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The entire economy.... Talk about an extreme click-bait headline.

Their fraudulent premise is extracted from this single setup:

"Over all, 76 percent of the companies that went public last year were unprofitable on a per-share basis in the year leading up to their initial offerings"

There were a whopping 30 tech IPOs in 2017 (tech & biotech IPOs substantially tilt the percentage of unprofitable listings; there has been no change in the number of unprofitable biotech listings, they overwhelmingly tend to be unprofitable across all years). You see, that's the entire economy. By comparison there were 370 tech IPOs in 1999, 12x more.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the S&P 500's profits are at record highs.

Small business profitability is also booming per the National Federation of Independent Business survey (a survey going back to 1973), which is registering sales & profit growth levels rarely seen in the last five decades.

"NFIB: A 'record level' of small businesses are growing their profits"

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small- business/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small- business/wp/2018/05/08/nfib-a-record-level-of-small-businesses-are-growing- their-profits/)

"Small business profits are at a 45-year high: NFIB survey"

[https://finance.yahoo.com/video/small-business- profits-45-hi...](https://finance.yahoo.com/video/small-business- profits-45-high-144509636.html)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-13/u-s- small...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-13/u-s-small- business-optimism-index-rises-to-highest-since-1983)

<comment><USER29> > The entire economy.... Talk about an extreme click-bait headline.

I don't think the headline meant to imply that literally the entire economy is MoviePass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One thing I found interesting is that MoviePass Ventures has started acquiring rights to movies. From an article on IndieWire:

Just five days after MoviePass declared that it would acquire films through a new subsidiary, MoviePass Ventures, the company has made good on the promise. Partnering with The Orchard, MPV will share the reported $3 million bill for North American rights to "American Animals," the first narrative feature from BAFTA and Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentarian Bart Layton ("The Imposter"). A U.S. Dramatic Competition contender at Sundance, "American Animals" premiered there January 19, hours after the MoviePass announcement.

Full article: [http://www.indiewire.com/2018/01/moviepass-the-orchard- acqui...](http://www.indiewire.com/2018/01/moviepass-the-orchard-acquisition- american-animals-sundance-1201921511/)

Trailer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKvPVvy2Kn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKvPVvy2Kn8)

I saw the trailer for that movie and had to pause it to make sure it said MoviePass. The movie looks like something I'd like and I'm looking forward to seeing it in the theater with MoviePass. I like to see MoviePass movies with MoviePass, dawg.

I think the $10/month thing is a marketing stunt. Don't forget they hired Mitch Lowe who was an executive at Netflix and Redbox as CEO in 2016. I would say there's some method to the madness here. They're gaining a lot of insights and a lot of users. I would still pay $10/month even if they limited it to 4-5 movies per month.

Also, don't forget about the tech. MoviePass has built out a system that I am still fascinated by where you can check in for a movie and your pre-paid debit card is instantly funded for enough to cover the price of a ticket. I know it's nothing earth shattering but as a nerd I get a little giddy thinking about it whenever I use it.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. I think they're playing a long game.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's kind of too obvious to even point out, but why act surprised that a company, each of whose customers causes a net loss, gets poorer, faster, as it grows?

 _Spotify, the popular music streaming service based in Sweden, lost $1.5 billion last year, even as_ [because] _it continued to add millions of users._

 _On Tuesday, Helios reported that MoviePass lost $98.3 million in the first quarter, " despite adding_ [because it added] _more than a million net subscribers._

FTFY.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's called "predatory pricing", and it's illegal in many places.

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

</comment><comment><USER33> Central banks are pumping out new money in form debt of close to zero interest rates. This is below market rate interest rates if the market would freely choose the interest rate would be higher. The new money flows to automation in startups that makes processes cheaper. Thus the central banks are not creating inflation through salary inflation they are creating deflation through automation. Robots on average replace 5.7 humans. Software is also a form of automation.

Thus the central banks keep printing new money in hope for inflation but the process where the money flows are creating deflation.

<comment><USER34> Interesting.

I've long thought that the ZIRP policies of the last ten years had the exact OPPOSITE effect of what was intended. The idea of ZIRP was that the Fed would inflate house prices, and this would keep homeowners from defaulting on their mortgages.

But the truth was that many homeowners only "owned" a tiny fraction of their home. Often as little as 5-10% of what they paid for it. _So if their home price dropped by even 15%, they were underwater._

This created a cascade of defaults. Then gasoline was added to the fire, when the government began to forgive the capital gains of walking away from a home that was underwater.

This created a scenario where thousands of people walked away from their homes, and then large hedge funds scooped up thousands of properties for pennies on the dollar.

Naturally, prices recovered eventually, but then the former homeowners were now renters, and the rent was prohibitively expensive. To a large degre because the value of the dollar had been devalued to prop up prices in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This dude stole my startup idea: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945451)

<comment><USER36> 'MoviePass inspired me to start my $20 bill club where you send me $10/mo and I send you a $20 bill in the mail.'

Hey - that just might work - once you've shown enough traction and proven demand for DollarPass monthly membership subscriptions, then you should be able to go to USA.gov and negotiate a bulk pricing on $20 bills at a sig-ni- fi-cant discount. Plus if you had a payment app so the end user could pay for stuff with the $20, you could show the user ads and charge a fee of every transaction. You could also track their GPS location 24/7 and sell that.

It's all about leveraging and fully monetizing your captive user base!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "The fact that Google and Facebook were able to generate such enormous profits and growth does give hope to some companies," Mr. Ritter said. If start-ups can figure out to convert a large user base into paying customers, he added, "it can be enormously profitable."

Did Google or Facebook "convert a large user base into paying customers"?

Is that what enabled them to "generate such enormous profits"?

</comment><comment><USER38> Yeah, I am a bit sad to see those Ofo, limebike, Bird going all out in the streets, they are trying to outspend each other for the winner to raise the price. I just want a sustainable shared transportation system.

<comment><USER39> Ofo has been free to use for many months now, at least in Dallas. Are they counting on the competitors to all fold and leave them the sole market owner? Such weird economics!

<comment><USER40> 1\. Yep, they're funded by Alibaba and they've been buying out bankrupted bikeshare companies.

2\. Alibaba and Tencent both own competing bikeshare services, so it's a cash- burning contest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is why I think we don't have inflation. Very low loans, and for managers _personal_ careers it is actually beneficial to do this. The more of this is done, the more others are forced to do the same. This then results in lower interest rates, which ironically make it cheaper to do this, and results in more below-cost and more capacity, making the problems worse.

But in reality many companies are producing/exporting under cost, because it results in cashflow. To "conquer market-share".

It also means that at some point interest rates will rise ever-so-slightly and _boom_ the whole thing will stop in a matter of a few months and we'll see 10% inflation in quite a few products and an absolute disaster in the stock and bond markets.

But in reality inflation is already here. The money has been printed. Governments have given it to their favorite banks, and financed their own careers _ahem_ I meant government programs with it. Banks have given this in loans to everyone (because governments demanded they do this), and those managers have "invested" it in growth.

In reality of course, the vast majority of those managers and governments have no idea how to grow the economy (in fact, according to secular stagnation theory it hasn't really grown, for individuals, since ~1980-1990 depending on where you are in the world). So it's just been invested in unnecessary capacity expansion, making products they have no hope in hell of selling at the normal price, or just outright into financial constructions.

These things will have to be paid, and they will have to be paid by the customers. So the cause for price increases has occurred in the past, but people have used loans to stave off the consequences of their decisions on a large scale. So inflation is already here, and done, it's just suddenly it will need to explode.

</comment><comment><USER42> How do startups that don't network well with VCs survive in this kind of an ecosystem? Doesn't this make VC money the kingmaker to penetrating a market? I'm not sure having to be well-connected enough to be favored by VCs is a good thing in the long run for the economy, but maybe this isn't such a different situation from the pre-VC status quo.

</comment><comment><USER43> Positive cash flow is actually way more important than profit, although you should have both ideally. If you are running a positive cash flow business with good growth and accurate depreciation numbers on fixed assets, you are in a better position than a profitable microbusiness in a small market. Amazon's breakthrough wasn't realizing this, it was realizing how big the ecommerce market was and how to grow to be able to address the whole market using cash flow to invest. They also used a large pile of investment to get there along the way too. (Four negative cash flow years in their history according to this)): [https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/08/12/2016/comparin...](https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/08/12/2016/comparing- amazon-then-tesla-now)

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm curios the impact VC subsiding goods happens on traditional players in industries -- they can't compete because they don't have the luxury of operating at a loss.

</comment><comment><USER45> > So, back to the 75 Cent Dollar Store. Are you in?

Anyone care to share great examples of these MoviePass-like businesses right now so we can enjoy the savings?

</comment><comment><USER46> Consumers are wising up to this and just turning the tables on companies, exploiting them for the first reduced month or whatever the unit of service is and then jumping ship immediately.

Hey if you want to lose money on the transaction I'm happy to help you out.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's just basic economics. Let's say you are CEO of a company. Your CFO informs you that you are going to make $1B in profit this quarter. You will be a fool to leave the money on table and give it back to shareholders. That doesn't buy you anything. You don't gain any competitive advantage or significant stock price boost (because market keeps going up _anyway_ ). From the eyes of CEO, you are simply throwing away your profit money in to a garbedge bin. Instead, you would take out another billion dollar in credit at tiny interest rates based on your growth. Use all that up in expansions, building moat, acquisitions, long term projects and then show $1B in loss to get full tax credits. Market would love you even more because you are building up expectations for even bigger things to come as well as becoming safer bet by gaining bigger moat.

Taking losses and burning cash to aquire customers also makes sense when mountain of cheap investment money and credit lines are easily available. Remember, IPO is the major event for cashing out for most investors. Balance sheets before or after don't matter too much as long as you can cross that proverbial finish line called IPO. Once that event happens, you take a dip in so-called "river of money" fueled by massive trillion dollar funds like Blackrock (which are in turn fueled by our 401Ks) and all your sins are washed away over night.

Current economy and business models wouldn't make sense to people who are still living in past when money wasn't cheap and companies were valued for dividends they returned. In a way, new way is actually all good. This is what allows taking on high risk bets. Without these models, we wouldn't have massive cloud infrastructure built up so fast without worrying about chicken- and-egg problem. We wouldn't have app based taxies available so fast virtually all of the world without worrying about establishment. We also wouldn't have such massive investments in AI research without worrying about actual impact. All these stuff simply wouldn't be possible in 60s and 70s because companies would be reluctant to do investments on such massive scale without being extremely confident and diligent. Most likely these stuff would have gotten killed right away. Hype is good. Cheap money is great.

</comment><comment><USER48> I do not accept putting Amazon and places like Moviepass in the same comparison. I would not even accept Moviepass is comparable to Airbnb/Uber/etc.

I never understood the allure of Moviepass to the investor. So basically you want to buy another companies product and resell it to another party and expect the source company to cave to your demands of partnership? What service are you providing and to who? It is similar to all those attempts to deliver groceries but they mostly failed because they were buying from a source who could care less who bought their product at full price as long as they were paid.

</comment><comment><USER49> Joel Spolsky addressed this, much more insightfully, in one of his early strategy letters:

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy- letter-i-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben- and-jerrys-vs-amazon/)

There are real reasons why companies like MoviePass exist, why companies like Snap lose money, and why investors back them. It's just a land grab where you have to move fast to establish dominance.

<comment><USER50> Snap I can understand, but MoviePass not. People can easily switch to another subscription.

<comment><USER51> People can easily switch, maybe so, but generally they don't. That is one of the reasons subscription revenue is highly prized. Many businesses are sustained on long forgotten subscriptions landing on credit card bills every month.

<comment><USER52> This is so true. Less true for me since I have my credit card email me about every transaction, and every time I get one I must decide if I wish to keep that subscription.

Here's an idea for a business. Monitor customers credit card transactions for subscriptions, and do bulk negotiation with the service provider to knock down the price based upon how much service the customer is actually using. Take 10% of the savings.

Each time one of these subscription payment emails arrives, the user would be shown a few extra buttons: 1. cancel my subscription, 2. Offer service $X/month to keep me as a customer, 3. No change.

Just the "one click cancel" would be useful, but the "get me a better price" should be real popular.

<comment><USER23> What would the incentive be for the service provider to participate in this? Most of these customers aren't going to cancel anyway.

<comment><USER52> There are lots of business that are in the business of negotiating better prices. It's arbitrage - assuming that a service provider with list price of $25/mo would still be happy to get $20 as opposed to losing the customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Buy HNMY @ $0.65 if you have the cajones. If there was ever a case of "be greedy when others are fearful" this is it. There's a good chance you'll lose it all but the potential is there if they can get it right. I like that they're adding more services like a premium for 3D/IMAX and front-row seats.

</comment><comment><USER54> What exactly happens the entertainment industry when MoviePass fails? When Netflix stop deciding to lose colossal sums of money each year and their competitors get to scale back as a result? When a large number of people don't have enough disposable money to justify paying $10 a month on Patreon to a podcast they can get for free?

I do feel like the free movie ticket business in general is a bit of a mad bubble that's gonna burst in a big way. A huge number of people currently going to the cinema seem to be going on things like this instead of directly paying the huge ticket prices themselves. I get free tickets weekly from my health insurance to a cinema that shows stuff I'd never dream of paying to see, you'd have to imagine the chain and distributor are getting some reasonable kind of kickback from each time I go though.

<comment><USER55> It's not really all straight forward though. Whilst it's true that it's cheaper to get a MoviePass for a month than to buy 2 tickets in that month I can't remember the last time I paid full price for a movie ticket anyway. The cinema industry is basically a chaotic experiment in price discrimination. The most successful Cinema is the one that can get the 50 people willing to pay full price to pay it whilst also giving heavy discounts to the other 200 people to make sure the cinema is full.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I think of MoviePass as very similar to Groupon. Their business model eventually eats itself and the growth in unsustainable, but at the end of the day they are still ok.

Sure Groupon's stock went from $30 to $5, but the company still exists, and is a solid part of the marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER57> > Over all, 76 percent of the companies that went public last year were > unprofitable on a per-share basis

How is this the entire economy? I bet if you added the revenues (or market caps) of all those companies together, they would pale in comparison to Apple.

</comment><comment><USER58> I misread the author as Kevin Rose, which would have been fitting. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Rose#Startups](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Rose#Startups)

</comment><comment><USER59> This business model makes sense for some products, like Snapchat. Get as many users as possible and maybe eventually the advertising revenue will pay off.

Focusing on monetization early makes for successful businesses, but good products happen because they fix or solve a problem --not because they make money.

</comment><comment><USER60> thank goodness so many people are smarter than those darn goofy VCs. Businesses competing for customers! It's flagrant hubris. Those Silicon Valley guys who became billionaires doing this still have no idea what they are doing. I am pretty sure they have a big comeuppance due to them.

<comment><USER61> The number of internet only SV companies that regularly pull in 100+ million in actual profit each year and are thus _stable_ billion dollar companies is surprisingly small. The companies that shoot past that into 50+ billion dollar territory are a large part of why SV has so many billionaires.

<comment><USER62> The number of people who became billionaires through venture capital– as opposed to becoming a VC after you were already independently wealthy through family or another business– is also quite small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Not every one of the half dozen "MoviePasses" in a given market category can come out on top to dominate (by definition, one -- at most two -- can) but every one is funded/priced like it will. This thing will come crashing down, it's just a matter of time.

</comment><comment><USER64> I wonder if this is a bubble that's going to burst eventually. With so many ships sinking and so much optimism being for naught, investors might grow tired of the game and stop investing so aggressively, perhaps shifting things too far to the other side of the spectrum.

<comment><USER22> The article implodes when you actually start comparing the scale of what the article is basing itself on to anything else.

The US economy will hit $20 trillion in GDP this year. The article is built heavily upon a few dozen IPO listings for just one year.

With US business profitability at essentially record highs for all sizes of business, the article is going to comical lengths to present a false headline.

If we had 500 unprofitable tech companies pulling an IPO in 2017, that would mean something. 30? That's not even a rounding error in the US economy and it obviously says nothing about the ability of those companies to reach profitability.

One year also does not make a trend. The number of unprofitable tech listings in 2015 and 2016 was similar to: 2001, 2005, 2007, 2011, 2013.

<comment><USER65> Looking at the original analysis, it looks like 108 IPOs, where did you get 30?

[https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/2018/01/IPOs201...](https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/2018/01/IPOs2017Statistics_January17_2018.pdf)

<comment><USER22> In that PDF it breaks out the number of tech and biotech IPOs.

66% of the "other" category (ie everything else) reported being profitable. Something the article goes out of its way to not mention.

The 30 tech IPOs and the 32 biotech IPOs dramatically tilt the number of unprofitable listings as a percentage.

If you only have 108 IPOs and 32 are biotechs, which are almost always unprofitable, you start with an extreme tilt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Comparing MoviePass to Amazon is like comparing Michael Scott Paper company and Dunder Mifflin.

</comment><comment><USER67> > So, back to the 75 Cent Dollar Store. Are you in?

Yes, of course. (And thinking: «only as a customer»).

</comment><comment><USER68> DELETED as a misreading of the OP.

<comment><USER65> _The author 's thesis is that all unprofitable business are the same._

This is not the author's thesis. The author's thesis appears to be:

 _" An economy full of unprofitable companies has risks."_ and we should be concerned about the rise of so many unprofitable companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Non-paywalled: [http://outline.com/ctYCuP](http://outline.com/ctYCuP)

Perhaps this is the redistribution of wealth we've been waiting for.

Can I look forward to the AptPass Startup that will pay my rent in Park Slope so they can study my consumption patterns?

</comment><comment><USER70> so i guess the first thing i think is: where does the money go? i think it mostly goes to employees and contractors of the company, who get paid a lot usually. it doesnt go to the consumers of the product, they just get a better deal on things- not the same as getting money. in movie pass' case, i guess it goes to the theaters? i guess its just interesting to try and pin down where the money ends up going in lots of the these vc backed money losing endeavors. seems like the kind of article pricenomics would do a really good job on- taking 10 or so big money losers that ultimately kicked the bucket, and seeing where the cash all ultimately went.

</comment><comment><USER71> This is such a stupid and uninsightful analysis. You can tell just by the terms they use.

A company that isn't profitable isn't necessarily "losing money". Sure the amount of cash on hand can be declining, but if the business is building long- term assets such as a consumer brand, recurring transactions, differentiating IP, etc., that's hardly bad business management.

In order to really understand this you have to look company-by-company at what's really going on with the financials. If someone wants to give away for 75 cents something that costs a dollar, sure, that's a fast lane to bankruptcy. But there are tons of other cases, including aggressive new customer expansion, trying to create winner-take-all network effects, development of core IP, etc. that really will create long-term benefits for their owners.

Using "profit" as a metric is such bullshit. Ask Amazon. They focused on creating as much free cash flow as they could for two decades, and look where they are now. Why someone would insist a company earn an accounting profit, or even worse, pay cash dividends, in an environment with a sub-2% fed funds rate and near-zero returns on cash to investors is silly. I would much rather have a company with 10-15% return on equity "lose my money" than hand it back as relatively useless cash.

tl;dr read Ks and Qs, this stuff isn't amenable to sound bites.</comment>


Ask HN: Rate my weekend project. - <AUTHOR> http://stolenmemes.com

<comment><USER2> Can anyone explain to me why I find 99.9% of memes boring as hell?

I have an extremely immature sense of humour, I spend a hell of a lot of time on the internet, they ought to be perfect for me. And they can be so popular that there must be something I'm missing.

Who else just doesn't care about memes?

<comment><USER3> Depends what you mean by memes. The things on this site aren't really memes in the original sense of the word. The reason these things are boring is probably that as humor they fall on the far billboard end of the billboard-Shakespeare continuum: they are designed for quick (but inevitably shallow) appeal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good idea, but the site is a little slow. Also, it'd be nice if you could get rid of all the visual noise around the photos, it's distracting.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's quite fun. There's something strangely addictive about these click-on- one-of-the-two=pics sites.

Are you just scraping the icanhascheezburger network for the images?

<comment><AUTHOR> naw, some are from that site, but a lot of them are just collected over time from the internet in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is so funny - it's great. I bet you can find people who will spend a whole afternoon on this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Your site claimed 11 minutes of my life...

It was worth it ;)</comment>


Goodbye, IPv4 IANA Starts Allocating Final Address Blocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/05/goodbye-ipv4-iana-starts-allocating-final-address-blocks/ <comment><USER2> There are unallocated /8's that are privately routed. A lot are controlled by the U.S. DoD. But every time they come up, the response is always "so what? use IPv6!"

I generally agree. Putting those in circulation would actually be a bad thing. It would allow IPv4 to continue to zombie-walk for another couple years, maybe another decade, and in so doing to become more deeply entrenched, harming us in the long-run. IPv4 is technical debt.

It's also important to consider _why_ DoD (and some large corps too) likes to sit on these address spaces. The problem with IPv4 isn't just that there isn't a big enough address space for every device on the Internet. IPv4 also lacks enough address space to permit the easy allocation of non-conflicting private address spaces. Ask any large-scale enterprise network engineer what happens when two companies merge or want to interconnect corporate networks and both use 10.0.0.0/16 as their address space. The answer is a visit to the bottom- most circles of NAT hell where sinners are boiled in firewall port remapping rules for all eternity. Either that or one of the merging/linking entities must renumber their entire network, which is often even more painful.

It really, really pains me that so many cloud providers are taking so damn long to support IPv6. Does Amazon even support it yet? I heard Digital Ocean was _finally_ doing a limited beta. Jeez.

<comment><USER3> The cloud provider problem is definitely real. I have an idea for a service that requires both IPv4 and IPv6, but Linode and Rackspace were the two I found that both support native IPv6. Otherwise, it's something involving a HE.net tunnel, which I'm not comfortable with for more than experimental use.

<comment><USER4> A note on Rackspace: we see about 2–3% of the VMs we allocate come with only an IPv4 address. We have no idea why — we suspect it's a bug on Rackspace's side (we allocate everything automatically, through the same code path, so it isn't us!).

We currently only use the IPv4 address (I know, I know!), but it does present a bit of a problem when/if we decide to move.

<comment><USER5> Hi there!

I work at Rackspace and I'd love to get our product engineers involved and review this issue for you. Would it be possible for you to email your account number and any pertinent server information (hostname/IP address/etc) to firstname.lastname@example.com so that we can investigate?

Thanks! Andy Pape Social Media Support @Racker_Andy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Steve Reeding, one of the creators of IPv6, shares his crucial insight on how some networks adapt, survive, and impose themselves [1]:

"I have a different take on that. Yes, a lot of people were dissing tunnels yesterday. I'm actually a big fan of tunnels. I think the way the IPv4 Internet was built originally was basically by tunneling over the phone system. Ignore, you know, getting leased lines, putting computers on the end, building a network with no cooperation at all from the phone company. In fact, I once saw a phone company memo that referred to the Internet as a 'hostile overlay'. You know, and we basically, you know, demolished their billing plans and everything, and built this network in spite of the desires of the carriers. And, as I see the IPv4 Internet getting more and more like the phone company, I thought one way to deploy IPv6 is basically tunnel over all that junk. Iterate the same thing again. And I gather, you know, some people, you know, who are concerned about this are looking at other ways of sort evolving the Internet, where you, you know, tunnel over HTTP or whatever you have to do to basically get over all that cruft and build a new network on top of it. So that, to me, was one possible way, you know, as the IPv4 Internet rotted the underneath. We would tunnel over it and then we would throw away the rotted bits and replace them with wires."

[1] "Internet as a 'Hostile Overlay'" -> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwRVNwa6nJc#t=11m07s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwRVNwa6nJc#t=11m07s)

<comment><USER7> That's a very interesting view and the closest thing that I've seen to date for a practical, workable solution to the current mess.

I really like that.

How are RBLs and other useful internet institutions that work on the basis of IPv4 addresses along the way with their IPv6 adoption?

<comment><USER8> I also wondered about this and any throttling-based protection / rate limiting based on IP. With IPv6 the address space is huge and makes blacklists far less effective (or much more memory consuming and slow, but that's something that can be resolved with things like Bloom Filters I imagine).

It would take some time to adapt implementations. I speculate this gives attackers some opportunities to use old-style hacks that were largely mitigated, but suddenly re-appear with IPv6.

<comment><USER9> My guess is blacklistings will just expand netblock size if ineffective, much like they do on IPv4 in a limited manner now, just on a larger scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be nice if certain websites we all use every day supported v6 better...

        firstmillion:~▻ host -t AAAA news.ycombinator.com
        news.ycombinator.com has no AAAA record
        firstmillion:~▻ host -t AAAA twitter.com
        twitter.com has no AAAA record
        firstmillion:~▻ host -t AAAA cloud-images.ubuntu.com
        cloud-images.ubuntu.com has no AAAA record
        firstmillion:~▻ host -t AAAA ubuntu.com
        ubuntu.com has no AAAA record

...

<comment><USER11> It sure would be. Here's a list that does: [http://www.worldipv6launch.org/participants/?q=1](http://www.worldipv6launch.org/participants/?q=1)

BTW, there is a nifty Chrome extension that tells you whether the site is doing IPv4 or IPv6. Always nice to see a green 6 in the address bar.

<comment><USER12> In case anyone's interested, the Chrome extensions is IPvFoo [0], a similar one for firefox is IPvFox [1].

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffngcegjmadlcijfolapggal) [1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/ipvfox/](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/ipvfox/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the recovered pool that's finally running out, so short of reclaiming something drastic like the class A block 10 (you know, a really really bad idea), dang.

Anyone know what IPv6 adoption is looking like these days? Google is showing like 3% of their connections are native to it [1], which does not look promising.

1: [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption)

<comment><USER14> > …short of reclaiming something drastic like the class A block 10 (you know, > a really really bad idea), dang.

10/8 is off limits, but there are a bunch of /8 blocks which could likely be reclaimed if we really needed to, including:

\- About half a dozen which were allocated to the US military in the early 1990s, most of which aren't even publicly advertised at all

\- 44/8, reserved for amateur radio

\- A number of other /8 blocks owned by corporations, which could potentially sell or return chunks of them if properly convinced

<comment><USER11> Obligatory: [http://xkcd.com/195/](http://xkcd.com/195/)

Edit: I wish there was an updated version.

<comment><USER15> What is that way of ordering numbers called? If I knew the name I could google it but that's what I'm missing.

<comment><USER16> It's called a Hilbert Curve.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've seen headlines like this for literally 5 years at least. "IANA finally out of IPv4 addresses", "IANA allocates last X block", etc.

When will it finally be impossible to buy an IPv4 address?

<comment><USER18> It becomes more and more impossible every day.

Last time I tried to acquire a new IPv4, the distributor (my VPS host) required a technical reason for the request. If the request wasn't up to par, you would be denied an IPv4 + given an IPv6.

<comment><USER19> 15 years ago I had to fill out an IP justification form - the justification was I had multiple SSL sites that all needed separate IP addresses. Wasn't a big deal, but was told it was standard practice (it was a smaller server center). And then I've had other dedicated server companies give me a block of 8 (5 usable) as just part of the monthly price.

What seems so wasteful is the "3 unusable" out of the 8 that are allocated. I have a vague understanding that those 3 are used for some routing/addressing stuff internally, but it's always felt incredibly wasteful.

<comment><USER20> You can actually use two of these addresses (network & broadcast) - but you cannot really call it a proper /X block anymore. You will also have to make sure to disable the broadcast address you've used up on all of your hosts.

This is all very fuzzy and some admins will look at you weird for doing this - but sometimes you've gotta do what you've gotta do.

The third address (router) is actually used by your ISP's router's to reach your subnet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So what exactly is the "IANA IPv4 Recovered Address Space"? Today's news sounds almost exactly like February 2011 when the IANA announced that it finally allocated the last remaining blocks: [http://www.nro.net/news/ipv4-free-pool- depleted](http://www.nro.net/news/ipv4-free-pool-depleted)

<comment><AUTHOR> The announcement in Feb 2011 was that IANA had allocated the last IPv4 address blocks from the planned allocations. IANA (ICANN) and the RIRs then worked to recover some blocks of unused IPv4 addresses. These became the "recovered IPv4 pool" and the agreement was that allocations from this pool would begin once one of the RIRs reached the last /9 of their available IPv4 address space.

LACNIC hit that mark and triggered ICANN's policy to start allocating out of this recovered address space pool. The NRO has an announcement up about this, too:

[http://www.nro.net/news/iana-allocates-recovered- ipv4-addres...](http://www.nro.net/news/iana-allocates-recovered- ipv4-addresses-to-rirs)

Basically, after this recovered pool of IPv4 addresses is allocated by IANA, there aren't any more IPv4 addresses to give out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So there is a lot of sentiment that I've been hearing over time about when exactly will IPv6 become a thing. Here's how I see it:

Step -1: We started running out of IPv4 addresses. The internet is IPv4-only for all practical purposes. Nobody is doing IPv6 because it's still experimental. Your weird neck-bearded friends are talking about it, that's about it.

Step 0: Inception! IPv6 is now a standard and you can route IPv6 over the tubes. Two networks have connected!

Step 1: Dual stack is a thing. Now you can set up both IPv4 and IPv6 on the same network and they co-exist. Some hosts (goole.com, facebook.com) try this and finally turn it on for good in 2012.

Step 2: Dual stack intensifies. This is where we are now. You cannot yet run a full blown IPv6-only network that you want to talk to the Internet and do anything practical with it, but all your cleanly shaven friends are now telling you that you should support IPv6 first, then add IPv4 for compatibility. Google sees as much as 3.5% of their traffic over IPv6.

Step 3: The cost of any single IPv4 address rises dramatically. For an end user it's already roughly $1/month. Buying in bulk is much cheaper, but not free like it used to be. ISP's and other service providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Digital Ocean) are going to start noticing the costs on their bottom lines. Severe restrictions are imposed by IPS's and service providers on anything but the bare minimum of IPv4 usage.

Step 4: The future. The first IPv6-only networks start to pop up. They use special network translation to talk to IPv4-only internet. (You can do this at home now! It's called NAT64: [http://www.litech.org/tayga/](http://www.litech.org/tayga/)).

Step 5. The number of IPv6-only networks is growing rapidly. IPv4 is now a legacy protocol. All your friends are telling you that they cannot believe we are still using IPv4 and how much of a pain it is to support it. Sales of T-shirts with "There is no place like 127.0.0.1" drop dramatically.

Step 6. The same people that put together IPv6 World Launch Day put together an IPv4 funeral. Major companies turn off IPv4 presence.

The crucial point here is not that someone demands IPv6 by calling their ISP, etc. It is fun to play with and you should at least get a tunnel set up through Hurricane Electric if you are reading this, but the demand here _does not matter_. What matters is supply: supply of IPv4 that is. Once that goes to nil, the cost rises and some executive at every ISP and service provider has a bright idea to save the company millions by switching everyone to IPv6. That's it. We, the people in the trenches, cannot affect this. We cannot speed it up and we cannot slow it down. The invisible hand of the market will make IPv6 happen all on its own.

<comment><USER22> > Sales of T-shirts with "There is no place like 127.0.0.1" drop dramatically.

The nerdy t-shirt industry experiences a boost in margins, as they can now save ink by printing the much shorter "::1".

<comment><USER23> The sad part about IPv6 is that there's only one loopback address; ::1.

In IPv4, you have an entire /8 at your disposal, just for talking to yourself!

<comment><USER24> Aside from ::/128 (undefined address) and ::1/128 (local loopback), the entirety of ::/96 was reserved for ipv4-compatible addresses and had been deprecated for a while [1]

It is safe to assume that they won't be allocated in the future. You can easily assign them to your loopback interface. e.g. on linux:

      $ ip addr add ::2/128 dev lo

You will then be able to use them over loopback just like ::1, and can populate your /etc/hosts file accordingly.

      $ ping6 -c 1 ::2
      PING ::2(::2) 56 data bytes
      64 bytes from ::2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.078 ms
      1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
      rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.078/0.078/0.078/0.000 ms

[1] [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4291#section-4](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4291#section-4)

EDIT: formatting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It feels like I've been reading this exact headline once a week for a couple of years.. I started to believe that there is an infinite reserve of ipv4 blocks and we'll be just fine.

</comment><comment><USER26> Easy problem to solve, so many entire /8 blocks are owned by single corporations, which should either be forced to sell or give up this outdated privilege. Does Xerox really need all of 13.x.x.x? Or Ford Motor Company all of 19.x.x.x?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addres...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks)

<comment><USER27> Between 2008 and 2010, IANA was allocating 10 /8s per year. In 2010, they allocated 20 /8s. There are only 256 total in the system, and not all of those are even usable.

Rapidly-developing Asia already has about as many people as there are IP addresses by itself.

Where are you going to find enough /8s, how are you going to recover them fast enough to do any good, and who's going to pay the massive legal bills from the ensuing litigation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Isn't IPv4 good for privacy? My IP address doesn't uniquely identify me unless you get records from my ISP. But wouldn't I be more likely to keep the same IPv6 address consistently?

It also makes it hard for websites to block users based on IP without also blocking lots of legitimate users sharing that IP. I think this is a good thing to keep the internet more equal and anonymous.

<comment><USER29> IPv6 provides temporary addresses and privacy extensions - check your operating system for support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The quickest way to gain mass adoption to IPv6 is if facebook, twitter and google+ collectively decide to disable their IPv4 and leave only IPv6 as a connection option.

I figure the subsequent avalanche of user pressure on isps will solve the problem in a week or so. Added bonus: during that week productivity will be at an all time high.

</comment><comment><USER30> Ive been given a static ipv4 and a big ipv6 range from my isp, problem is despite getting the latest and best router [http://www.asus.com/Networking/RTN66U/](http://www.asus.com/Networking/RTN66U/)

I cant get ipv6 to work with this router, tho if i connect laptop directly to the wan cable i get an ipv6 address without issues and can use google via ipv6 etc

If a slightly unshaven geek like me cant get ipv6 to work easily what hope is there for rest of the world :(

</comment><comment><USER31> We've been saying goodbye to IPv4 for years and years. No one will care unless money is lost by not running IPv6. That is when adoption rates will go up.

</comment><comment><USER32> Time to start auctioning IPv4 ranges. Is there anything in the terms that prevents such an auction? Putting a price on ranges should redistribute IPv4 ranges to those who need them. It's certainly simpler than coming up with a set of rules for usage.

<comment><USER33> I have the feeling that fighting this is about as important as protecting net neutrality. I wouldn't like a world where only those who can afford to buy expensive IPv4 addresses can serve their content without any obstacles, especially when the issue would be completely solved by wider IPv6 adoption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My provider (Suddenlink) support rep responded to my question about IPv6 support with "No, we do not support it since almost no one uses it currently." S

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps you can point them to sites like [http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/](http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/) and show them some of the stats on networks that _are_ using it. You can also point them to the fact that Facebook, Netflix, Wikipedia and all of Google's sites are available over IPv6. So the "almost no one uses it" doesn't quite fly.

<comment><USER34> I am pretty sure they are well aware of that. It is just boilerplate response for reps to respond to IPv6 inquiries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meanwhile, most ISPs have done sod all about IPv6 and will probably only start when they start getting complaints from users that foo site doesn't work.

</comment><comment><USER35> PDF Warning! [https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/2geoff-2014-02-26-ipv6-...](https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/2geoff-2014-02-26-ipv6-measurement- bof_1393236812.pdf)

Am on phone so not read 100%

</comment><comment><USER36> Peak ipv4!</comment>


Show HN: Embrayce, Better Online Communities - <AUTHOR> http://embrayce.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN! My friend and I have been working on this for the past month or so, to solve the problem of community overgrowth. Basically we feel there is a problem with all good online communities where they grow exponentially and this massive growth has large negative impacts on the overall feel of the community.

So we're introducing embrayce. Our solution is that the platform manages your communities so that they always stay small and personal. This helps you build actual relationships and friendships with the people in your community. We'd really love it if you gave it a try and let us know what you thought. We're totally open to building the platform that people want, and we'd love to work with everyone who's interested in making the best platform for online communities.

TL;DR: we made embrayce and we'd love feedback!</comment>


Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians' drinking water - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-10-08/firefighting-foam-leaves-toxic-legacy-california-water <comment><USER2> I grew up approximately 2.5 miles from a major rocket manufacturer. We're talking R&D and manufacturing of jet propulsion and rocket systems since the 80s.

They totally polluted the water tables in the area with by-products of rocket fuel and other industrial chemicals used to clean engines.

They were fined in the 90s and supposedly worked with local water authorities to setup a filtration system... but decades later, they're still finding the pollutants are actually SPREADING to adjacent water tables in communities miles from the original location.

Even worse... many women from the community I grew up in have developed strange autoimmune disorders in their 40s and 50s. Like, a truly abnormal number of them. Many of these women are upper middle class, health conscious, non-smokers, including many athletes. Among those disorders, one of the common ones is issues with their thyroid.

Turns out that one of the major byproducts of rocket combustion - if consumed - is known to fuck up your thyroid.

Am I saying that I know for sure that the pollution of the water tables caused all these women to develop these strange disorders? I can't say for sure. I respect the scientific process and I certainly don't want to jump to any unfair or drastic conclusions, but it seems likely.

As recently as 2011 the area was again hit with a $60 million fine for cleanup. A slap on the wrists for the level of ecological damage they've caused. The water basin in this area is permanently damaged, and seems (even after decades or rain fail) to still be seeping into surrounding areas.

EDIT: For those wanting more specifics...

Aerojet / Rocketdyne is the company. Rancho Cordova is the city.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet#EPA_Superfund_sites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet#EPA_Superfund_sites)

<comment><USER3> Are you talking about the Santa Susana Labs that was used by Rocketdyne for a period of time? Or is there another area with a similarly screwed up story?

I live in the area (about 5 miles south of the former lab) and didn't hear anything about it until I moved here. Since then I've read stories about how people living in Simi Valley used to be able to watch some of their rocket tests.

Those labs are also the site of one of the worst nuclear power incident in the US - but this was in the 50s. There are also reports of Rocketdyne shooting barrels of chemicals until they exploded into the 90s. Apparently they regularly and illegally disposed of contaminated materials by burning them in open air pits. That's a little insane.

<comment><USER4> Bethpage NY has issues with the groundwater near the old Grumman facility.

I would venture to bet there are probably dozens of such sites across the country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like everyone thinks Flint and Erin Brockovich were the only two water incidents in the country. If you look for water pollution news - you'll find that places near garbage dumps are coming up highly toxic, all over the country. Everyone seems to think the administration has it under control. They don't. There is benzene, hexavalent chromium and thousands of pollutants found in our water all over the country. There are literally millions of properties on well water in the country that are not checked but once every 20 years (if that). The only fix is rain catchment, before it goes into the ground. Soil remediation and stopping people from contaminating!!!! In all political parties groundwater and soil contamination is going to come to a head soon.

<comment><USER6> Our future has really been stolen from us. Decades of pollution from greed and decadence and excess, as Thunberg says "fantasies of eternal economic growth", have totally destroyed our future (speaking as a young person). Climate change robs us of a stable world, robots rob us of our livelihoods, and decades of 'economic growth' have poisoned our bodies and minds from birth through polluted water, air, and food.

Everything is an ecosystem. You can't have wild growth without paying for it, and the people of the past 75 years have stolen our bright futures from us and stuck us with the bill. Your comment reminded me of just how fucked up everything is. I think the 21st century will be consumed by the efforts to clean up the giant mess the 20th century left us. Goodbye economic growth. They stripmined the timeline and left us nothing.

<comment><USER7> Cleaning all that stuff up is an opportunity for growth. Entire industries will need to be involved in order to pull it off.

<comment><USER6> That's like saying poisoning is good for people because the sicker people are, the more hospitals and doctors you'll need. The money has to come from somewhere. There is no profit in cleaning up messes, just loss reduction. The money, trillions of dollars just for climate change alone, has to come from somewhere. If past generations had not been so greedy, that money would be in our pockets. Instead, it will be burned because we have to clean up the unfathomable messes older people have created.

<comment><USER8> No, it is saying that it is worth it to clean up after ignorance and folly.

And there are eventually gains to be had.

Those clean areas are worth more, the money paid to labor means demand, growth, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Filter your water if you live anywhere near an airport or military base anywhere, it's not just California.

In Satellite Beach, Florida, the contamination from Patrick AFB was discovered after a group of Satellite Beach High alumni realized they all developed cancer around the same time and decided to start digging. [[https://pfasproject.com/2018/08/08/satellite-beach- florida-f...](https://pfasproject.com/2018/08/08/satellite-beach-florida- finds-cancer-causing-chemicals-in-groundwater/)]

They dumped everything in a trench...not realizing there was an underground waterflow there. :/

<comment><USER10> > not realizing there was an underground waterflow there

I'm amazed whenever I see this. (A) what makes it okay to just dump stuff in a ditch? (B) are these people really clueless that no leaching through soil occurs?

<comment><USER11> > _what makes it okay to just dump stuff in a ditch?_

Lack of accountability. They did a calculation, and decided the risk of lawsuits several decades down the line is worth not paying to properly dispose their waste today.

<comment><USER12> There's a big difference between accountability and having to base your actions around what makes you the least sue-able and I think we can all agree that the latter has some serious side effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm grateful to those who have fought and sacrificed for our rights. I think somewhere up the chain things get wonky. With our astronomical military budgets it should be easy to earmark two things: veterans' benefits and ecological cleanup

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a big deal here in Michigan as well, due to various other industries using PFAS-laden chemicals in industrial settings. Around here it's mostly tanneries that used these chemicals and then wantonly dumped them in municipal dumps or the companies bought land and just dumped the chemicals there. Entire communities are now being discovered to be polluted.

</comment><comment><USER15> The same problem exists with PFC foam used at military and civilian airports in Germany (and probably around the world): [https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/report- muenchen/bunde...](https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/report- muenchen/bundeswehr-pfc-101.html) (in German)

<comment><USER16> It's a worldwide problem. I would safely guess just about every airfield in America is dealing with this issue, even if there hasn't been a specific article written about it yet.

<comment><USER17> There have been many articles written about it, google "PFAS contamination".

I moved into a new house last year near 2 closed down USAF military bases (known to have been previously contaminated by firefighter foam) and did a ton of research on the issue since the house water comes from a well (free water!). I ended up getting a professional water filtration system installed in our basement (carbon tanks, UV light filter, reverse osmosis). Cost me $5k+ for install and ~$1500 year to swap out the tanks and service the system. It's pricey but you can't put a price on clean water.

<comment><USER18> There's gotta be a cheaper ongoing way to do this. For the carbon, should be possible to buy it by the barrel. Germicidal UV lights should be cheap (they're mainly uncoated fluorescent lamps) and dunno about the RO membranes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone recommend a consumer water testing kit that covers things like this?

<comment><USER20> No, you can't test for PFAS with consumer kit, it's dangerous at 70 parts-per- trillion levels and is tricky to handle without contamination. The test itself is expensive, too. I'm in the part of Rockford, Michigan contaminated by Wolverine/Hush Puppies/Caterpillar shoe leather tannery scraps, and they've paid Rose & Westra GZA to send techs to my house every 6 months. A friend just outside the supposedly affected area paid $300 to have a test performed, which came back with <5ppt (to my house's 35-45ppt).

And that's just one possible issue. You can't feasibly test for every possible exotic contaminant.

In my case, however, a pair of 48"x10" granular activated carbon filters (with auxiliary sediment filters, water softener, and UV light) have proven completely effective at removing PFAS from my water.

<comment><USER21> Those sound like big filters. Where are they installed, and how often do you replace? Or is that just pitcher volume?

<comment><USER20> They're in my unfinished basement. Culligan (on Wolverine's dime) handles the service, had one replacement in almost 2 years. They just disconnect,install refurbished units, and bring my old ones back to contain the chemical waste and repack with fresh carbon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How can people in the US live with this level of poison in the water? I would think that the government would pick up on it and get it fixed. It is an essential element for life. Even before we start talking to damage to the environment.

<comment><USER23> The US government is the biggest polluter of them all. The US government does not care about human health or environmental preservation. Yet Americans in general cling to some deep belief that their government cares for them, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

<comment><USER24> This is the argument that I use against more taxation. If you pay more taxes it will be spent by these guys who as many example shows will commit enormous crimes against humanity without real consequences.

<comment><USER25> Exactly. It's mind boggling to constantly hear, "The Government does so many bad things! We need to give them more money so they'll stop!"

Huh??

Case in point: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gI- RbqHEKQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gI-RbqHEKQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The EPA fact sheet on PFAS : [https://www.epa.gov/pfas/basic-information- pfas](https://www.epa.gov/pfas/basic-information-pfas)

Can be filtered out of your drinking water with a reverse osmosis filter. If you live in the Bay Area its a useful thing to have, and if you're concerned about your tap water you can send a sample here: [https://torrentlab.com/drinking-and-storm-water-quality- test...](https://torrentlab.com/drinking-and-storm-water-quality-test-kit/)

</comment><comment><USER27> This kind of reminds of when we dump tons of salt on the roads when winter storms come around the east coast. It solves one problem but what other problems is it causing?

It would be incredibly naive to think dumping all these chemicals on the ground wouldn't cause some type of negative externality.

<comment><USER28> It rusts cars for one. It could make the soil too salty for growing if runoff accumulates in one place, but usually it will be diluted too much to matter. I don't know if chemicals other than salt are used commonly on roads, that could cause other issues.

<comment><USER29> Zeolites are one of the widely used alternatives developed specifically to replace salt use. They are an oil derivative, so I am not hopeful of their long term effects. They are also very expensive comparatively.

<comment><USER30> Zeolites are used as catalysts in _processing_ oil, but they're not oil derivatives.

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

<comment><USER29> Yes, I was wrong due to lack of research. I knew someone who had worked a lot on them at Chevron when i was a kid and just presumed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It reminds me of the flame-retardant chemicals used widely in furniture in the UK: [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-49000966](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-49000966)

</comment><comment><USER32> EPA Superfund sites --- ok I did not know about this until this thread... omg!

I just recently found out the Shoreline Park in Mountain View used to be a landfill for most of bay area and SF. Today it is open to enjoy like it's some natural bird sanctuary.. yet there are pipes underground extracting methane 24x7 and I think I found a methane release valve last weekend right next to a jogging path... Can anyone confirm plz? => [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq3CnXU5OtU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq3CnXU5OtU)

<comment><USER33> Methane outgassing is a known issue within the Shoreline Amphitheatre itself! It's built on a former dump.

During the earliest events there in the 1980s, concertgoers seated on the lawn set it afire when trying to smoke!

(And, yes, it's misnamed. It's a theatre, not an amphitheatre.)

There are EPA Superfund sites all over the valley. One of the worst was across the street from the Ice Center and Spartan Stadium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sad that we live by the contaminate now and see what happens later montra

</comment><comment><USER10> I was always told that this foam wasn't toxic

<comment><USER34> Well if the choice is between getting sprayed with burning jet fuel or sprayed with fluorinated foam I will take the foam every time.

Maybe we should save the good stuff like halon and PFAS foam for emergencies and use something more eco for training.

<comment><USER35> In principle, but otoh it makes a lot of sense to train with the same stuff you use for real.

That being said, recently non-flourinated firefighting foams have been developed (based on some sugars IIRC), so there's hope these will be able to replace the old stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> NE Michigan is suffering from the pollution of PFAS as well. Been aware of it for about 9 years now but really only in the past year, maybe two, has the cleanup and awareness gained traction. It's still used in firefighting foam and any area near an Air Force or Army base likely has high risk of exposure to it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, I wasn't expecting to see the airport I'm sitting at in the news today...

Slightly related, but there is a big issue with new aircraft hangar fire suppression systems because of the regulation of foam now. Regulators don't want anyone to use foam but there isn't a better solution out there yet.

</comment><comment><USER38> This happened here in Sweden too. Same chemical, same problem. A huge scandal especially among concerned parents where children had grown up with it. In our case it happened due to its use on a nearby Air Force base.

</comment><comment><USER39> Contamination concerns surrounding Air Force and other military sites span far beyond PFAS as well. Disused military sites fall under the purview of the Defense Environmental Recovery Program/Formerly Used Defense Sites (DERP FUDS, what an acronym) administered by the Corps of Engineers, which has a long list of sites (hundreds per state generally) and is not very transparent about the disposition of these sites, with the records usually being shipped to the district ACE headquarters from which they can be difficult to retrieve. The sheer number of sites is also a challenge to effective public oversight.

Active sites generally fall under the purview of an environmental permitting program, so there are dual problems that the level of rigor to which the operation is held varies by the permitting authority (state environment department or EPA depending) and that the military branches in general and it seems Air Force in particular have drug their feet and, in general, gotten away with the least effort possible to satisfy their permit obligations (which are virtually always negotiable with the permitting authority, a negotiating process in which the Air Force holds a large portion of the power).

Other common groundwater contamination concerns around Air Force installations include jet fuel (often leaked from underground tanks and piping and may have gone undetected for decades) and residues of high explosives resulting from munitions testing and disposal. Smaller groundwater plumes may result from photographic processing chemicals and solvents used in cleaning aircraft parts. Generally all of these will be grouped into one or more "operable units" or OUs for administrative purposes and a series of reports issued as the contamination is characterized and a remediation program is designed and implemented. Depending on the regulating agency, these reports may be more or less difficult to find. For DERP FUDS it usually requires a FOIA to the correct USACE HQ wih a lot of followup as they frankly don't seem to have their records in order internally and take a while to find them - the FOIA officers are generally helpful but will keep coming back to you needing more info/clarification as they try to track down the right OU and reports. Fortunately I have never had them ask for a fee, even when their "secure file transfer" solution was broken for months and they had to mail me burned CDs.

Permitting processes and the DERP program both require public information meetings and a (modest) public outreach program. If you live near a military site, pay attention to notices in the newspapers and posted around the community for these meetings, and contact the public information office of the relevant military branch to inquire. The public meetings often include a surprising amount of technical detail on the concern and remediation plans, and because they are also attended by permitting officials represent an opportunity to put some city council meeting-style public pressure on the process.

</comment><comment><USER40> [http://archive.is/HXsuL](http://archive.is/HXsuL)

</comment><comment><USER41> So does this mean San Franciscans should avoid drinking tap water?

<comment><USER42> City of San Francisco is one of the exceptional ones since it secured the best water from Hetch-Hetchy many generations ago, and the worst that is likely to ever happen is bad pipes, and possibly contaminants in the specific areas that saw military use(i.e. Hunter's Point, Treasure Island, Presidio). Other towns in the Bay Area have something bigger to worry about, OTOH, even tech workers at the major SV campuses. The South Bay is dotted with industrial Superfund sites and there are a lot of unknowns about when and where they'll leak out.

<comment><USER43> You basically need to keep your windows open in SV. That and live up in the hills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > The Air Force delivered free five-gallon jugs of water to the Mendez home > for more than two years. In 2018, it paid to have the house connected to the > municipal water system. Ruben Mendez said he now pays $100 a month for water > he used to get for free.

Sorry, what? 100$ a month for _residential water_? Either this guy is running a farm operation or something is seriously broken.

<comment><USER45> As incredible as it is, $100 appears to be below average monthly cost nowadays for a 4 person family[0] using 150 gallons / person / day [based on a random study that quick search found].

I am not sure who would use 150 gallons a day though. Even 50 gallons (~189 liters) seems a lot to me. If you factor in irrigation system, etc. then maybe you would get to these gallon volumes.

[0] [https://www.circleofblue.org/2018/water- management/pricing/p...](https://www.circleofblue.org/2018/water- management/pricing/price-of-water-2018/)

<comment><USER46> The big consumers are stuff like toilets (~2 gallons/flush), showers (2-3 gallons/minute), and lawn care.

So you have 3 people who take a 10 minute shower, and flush the toilet 4 times each, that's 112 gallons/day right there.

<comment><USER47> 112 gallons a day is not a lot. We have exactly this and our water bill is $25/month in the SF Bay Area. Our SERVICE CHARGE just to have water is about $30/month whether we use water or not.

Lawn care is the most expensive part, that can be hundreds of dollars a month, depending on how much water you use.

When I lived in Vancouver, BC, our house had a flat water rate of $40/month. My parents would use water until the cows came home, would leave the faucet running while walking around the house, etc. When they came to visit here, I made sure they broke themselves of that habit very very quickly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Yahoo Pipes Engine v2 announced - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pipes.yahoo.net/2010/06/09/yahoo-pipes-v2-engine/

<comment><USER2> Nice to see there is still a little bit of innovation going on at Yahoo. Really sad to see how far they have fallen in the tech world.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if they have fallen or if this is just a matter of perception. Obviously something positive is going on there.

<comment><USER4> I think they fell for a while, but in the last few years they seem to be doing very well.</comment></comment></comment>


Columnal: a fluid CSS grid, that scales from widescreen laptops down to phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.columnal.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm really trying to understand whether grids are relevant to me as a web dev. I've been looking for good boilerplate code for a long time now and haven't been able to extract any from my own work as all the sites I've worked on differ quite significantly.

Why would anyone want presentational classes in their html? The whole point of the semantic/presentational separation of html/css is so that I don't need to touch the html when I want to make a presentational change. This is a backwards step.

Does anyone know of a responsive css framework that doesn't require me to mess with my html?

<comment><USER3> Of course grids are relevant to you as a web dev - they are basic graphic design principles. Whether you should use any of the grid "frameworks", is another matter all together.

Once you learn how grids work (ie in the layout of graphics and text elements) - you can make your own grids and not bother with the frameworks or template code, etc.

<comment><USER2> I meant to say "grid frameworks".

Of course grids are highly relevant to design. My problem is with the grid frameworks that are bulky with preset classes that expect me to use in my html.

I don't think it's relevant in my html whether a div is 2 columns or 8, that's presentational. Why can't someone make a framework that has clean standard html and a css file with lots of boilerplate grid code that I can use to apply to certain divs in my html?

When I want to make a change to the appearance of my page then I go into the CSS file, not mess around applying classes to my div's in my HTML file. That was kind of the point of CSS in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just curious, what's the currently most popular responsive CSS framework that scales down to phones like this one?

<comment><USER4> To answer my own question, it's looking like 1440 (<http://cssgrid.net/>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh great, a responsive CSS framework...

Could elaborate on why you created yet another one instead of going with MQ, Less, AnonAnon, Cabin, Gravity, 1140grid, Sass/Susy, Inuit or Skeleton?

<comment><AUTHOR> First, I didn't write this, I just found it and submitted it because I thought it was cool.

I didn't have time to check all of them to see how this differs, but I compared it to 1140grid and found that Columnar uses numerals instead of spelled-out numbers (i. e. 8 instead of eight) in class names and that it has more IE6 hacks. That's enough difference IMO to write a new one, and I'm sure I could find more material differences in a more thorough examination.

Also the market isn't saturated for fluid CSS frameworks (not even close) so if someone makes a nice website for one and can get more people to use it, I think it's a good contribution to the web!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get why they all invent different naming conventions. We all grew up on 960gs, _container_12_ and _grid_1_. It worked well so just extend it. I don't want to have to switch to _col_1 end_ , _column_one_ or _fivecol_ for something so fundamentally simple.

</comment><comment><USER7> The code looks clean, it's easy to use, and most importantly it really works.

And it works really well on my MacBook Pro 17" with Safari in full screen down to my iPhone.

Looks like I'm gonna try it on my next blog.

<comment><USER8> No code with stuff like

      class="col_1"

will ever be "clean" to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hooray, another responsive CSS grid framework. Not being negative, but most of them are very similar, and I often prefer rolling my own depending on the site's content and needs.

It's however very interesting to study these frameworks' underlying code to see how they solve things.

<comment><USER10> Why roll your own everytime? Doing the same thing over and over, seems like a problem these type of frameworks solve.

<comment><USER9> Since it often gives me the great level of control I want. As I stated, CSS frameworks often works the same way, and I've yet to find one that is good enough to convince me to spend time using it. "Hell is other people's HTML and CSS", you know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds very interesting, and I like the site. Excited to try it out in the upcoming week and test the "responsive design" aspect on my tablet and mobile phone.

</comment><comment><USER12> This most certainly looks interesting. Currently been experimenting with Adapt.js and this looks like a much better solution for my needs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for posting this. I'm still using 960, but the ability to scale down to phones sounds nice. I'll have to check this out.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does responsive design still suck on phones I hear [0]? eg downloading desktop-aimed images even though it's set to display:none.

[0] [http://www.cloudfour.com/css-media-query-for-mobile-is- fools...](http://www.cloudfour.com/css-media-query-for-mobile-is-fools-gold/)

<comment><USER15> That'll be the case if you put all your css into one file. Here's a suggestion - \- Separate your css into layout and style files. \- Further separate your style into ones targeted for - different targets - dektop, mobile, IE-specific (so you can use MHTML if you want, etc) \- Use a script to compile these together into packages. \- Use a line of javascript to load the specific target based css.

Sure it sounds like some extra work, but if you're looking to optimize what gets loaded, it might be worth it.

HTH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> how come the text doesnt resize as i zoom in and out?

<comment><USER17> because body { -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; }, now the question is, why apply this rule?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Of the fluid frameworks, I've only used 1140grid. My quick reading of columnal suggests that it has a similar concept (".col_1" instead of "onecol") but has the extra functionality of prefix and suffix styles from 960 <http://www.columnal.com/#markupcode>

<comment><AUTHOR> I've looked into lessframework.com and played with it, but stopped short of building something with it. I really like how columnar simplifies it, by having two layouts. One is the 12-column layout that scales up and down within a desktop screen range where the difference is just small enough that it's acceptable. The other is single-column mobile layout. Less Framework, on the other hand, can show different layouts based on whether it's a wide screen, a tablet, or a phone. I didn't really know where to begin. Looking back, I think that was the main reason I didn't decide to use Less Framework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Simply doesnt work on android/SGS.

<comment><USER20> I tried it on 3 different Android phones, with various resolutions, and it worked nicely. Did not use a Samsung, but HTC and LG phones seem to display it fine.</comment></comment>


A new email startup says Apple's shaking it down for a cut of its subscriptions - <AUTHOR> https://www.protocol.com/hey-email-app-store-rejection <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542937)</comment>


How to buy a domain - <AUTHOR> http://fbfund.com/how-to-buy-a-domain/ <comment><USER2> I think it is interesting that slide 15 of the presentation suggests buying a domain with equity as a possible option. The comments at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813774> (rightly, I think) suggest that this is a bad idea.

<comment><USER3> It's a terrible idea. If you're not creative enough to come up with a name that costs you $8.95 on Godaddy, what're you doing in a startup?

<comment><USER4> I don't see how "being available" can be a prerequisite when choosing a domain name, unless you're bootstrapping. In which case you might not really have a choice.</comment></comment></comment>


How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/politics/family-separation-trump.html <comment><USER2> How do other countries solve the problem?</comment>


Prerequisite for learning assembly - <AUTHOR>

can someone tell me what's the prerequisite to learn x86 assembly language. <comment><USER2> I'd start by buying a reference manual somewhere.

Then go and implement some algorithm that you can follow completely in C, and use whatever flag your compiler uses to spit out the assembly code.

Then take that reference manual and go through the instructions one by one to see how a stack frame is built up under the hood and how your algorithm was translated from the high level 'readable' representation to the lego blocks of assembler.

That should give you a bit of a start, after that when you think you have a good enough understanding of how all that works try making that code faster.

For best understanding of the generated code and a fair chance at achieving some optimization you should probably do all this with your compiler optimizations off.

Good luck and have lots of fun, you will definitely benefit from learning assembler.

edit: Make sure you take lots of time for this, learning assembler is not like learning other languages, there are no friendly error messages, most of the time what you write will produce an executable but it will crash horribly in the beginning.

Single stepping through your code and watching the registers and flags change is an invaluable tool.

I wished I had a half decent debugger when I first learned assembler, it would have probably saved me a year.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, pretty much a desire to learn it and not get too frustrated if things don't go your way at first. I'm still learning too, but there are some good tutorials out there. Here are a few links:

<http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AoA/> [http://dennishomepage.gugs-cats.dk/BASM- filer/BASMForBeginne...](http://dennishomepage.gugs-cats.dk/BASM- filer/BASMForBeginners.htm)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thank you so much for all your advice .i'am curious to know if companies like microsoft and a couple of hardware companies still use it.

</comment><comment><USER4> a brain

</comment><comment><USER5> UCBerkeley CS61C MIPS

[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/stream.php?type=download&web...](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/stream.php?type=download&webcastid=20770)

</comment><comment><USER6> asperger's syndrome?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome>

lol j/k</comment>


Http://laterbro.com/ - <AUTHOR> http://laterbro.com/ <comment><USER2> From FAQ:

>Will you guys spam my twitter accounts with commercial notifications?

>No, unlike some other tweet scheduling services we don't and will not ever use your account for spammy commercial stuff! (and neither should you).

Is it mentioning Bufferapp?</comment>


12 Cloud Startups You Should Know About - <AUTHOR> http://www.fullcontact.com/cloud-startups-2012

<comment><AUTHOR> What other cloud statups should be added to this list? Any ideas?

<comment><USER2> Don't know if MailGun (<http://mailgun.net/>) counts as a 'cloud' company, but they definitely provide a really cool service.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say it definitely counts as a cloud company. To me a 'cloud company' is a web service that enables or leverages IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.</comment></comment></comment>