Ask HN: Startup only has 2800 users after a year, should I do more marketing? - <AUTHOR> I committed the first code to Readlang (http://readlang.com) a year ago and have been working on it solo since then. It's a freemium webapp for reading texts and watching videos. So far I have 2800 signed up users, 70 of whom are paying a $9.99/year subscription.
My marketing strategy so far has consisted of:
- Blog feature updates (http://blog.readlang.com)
- Occasional tweets (https://twitter.com/Readlang)
- An intro video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntVQ2L5s6FI) and tutorial screencasts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10qWoQEi5U&list=PLIGa-eWCssj9K_PpNGLnIs8vcENanVx3_)
- Posting to How-to-learn-any-language forum (http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=35462&PN=2) and Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1m5ymj/short_demo_video_of_readlang_my_webapp_for/)
- Uservoice page (https://readlang.uservoice.com/)
- Emailing every user, and being responsive to any requests
Apart from the above, I've relied on word of mouth, with enthusiastic users blogging and sharing it.
People advise me that I should do more marketing. But I feel uncomfortable spending more time than I already do on this stuff. My instinct is to just make the product awesome and let it market itself. I enjoy announcing new features, but it feels like having a prominent presence on online communities and social media to spread a product requires more effort than I'm willing to spend.
Perhaps I need to find a partner to help out with marketing and community management, perhaps there are more efficient ways that I can manage this myself, perhaps I need to integrate vitality into the product somehow, or perhaps I should just carry on as I have been. Any ideas or thoughts would be very appreciated! <comment><USER2> From my handy "Copy writing for Geeks Checklist":

Is your copy about them, not you?

Did you position your product? eg.: Copywriting For Geeks. Sweeps is a mixer, not a soft drink.

Do you focus on the single most powerful desire of your market?

Do you promise one large, unique and competitive benefit?

Do you mention that benefit in your headline?

Do you present the benefits of your product, not its features?

Are you making your product remarkable, ie. worth making a remark about?

Do you prove that other people bought and enjoyed your product?

Do you associate your product with things people like?

Can you limit the availability of your product (time or quantity)?

Do you compare your product with a more expensive solution?

Do you remove all the risks that could prevent your prospects from buying?

Do you answer the most common objections?

Do you offer a guarantee?

Do you force prospects into action?

Do you have a clear call to action?

Can you introduce urgency, ie. set a deadline?

Did you setup conversion tracking?

I highly recommend the whole package: [http://copywritingforgeeks.com/](http://copywritingforgeeks.com/)

By the way - on a completely unrelated note: Did you know that we're 2nd cousins :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's a very useful list.

2nd cousins?! Are you serious?

<comment><USER2> Yep, I met Helen at my Dad's house a couple of months ago and she mentioned you. In fact I believe your folks are going round to Dad's (Chris's) place soon. Small word huh?!

<comment><AUTHOR> Really, that's crazy. So is your dad the Chris that went to visit my dad in Asturias, Spain earlier this year?

<comment><USER2> Yep :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, well nice to meet you :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A commendable result that you have launched and gained some traction not just with users but customers (paying users). Well done. However, if we take in to account the major levers associated with a subscription businesses:

\- traffic

\- conversion

\- price

\- churn

\- lifetime value

The easiest one for you to change right now is price. This will have a noticeable effect on your revenue and your profit. At the moment, $700/year gross is not enough to retire on (I'm making some broad assumptions about your lifestyle as well as the costs of the business); it's also much less than the opportunity cost of offering your services to employers. I'm not dissuading you from running your own business, far from it. I'm suggesting that you should see greater value in your work - it's likely that others see it as well and would happily pay for it.

A few things to try:

\- increase your prices until your gross revenue starts to drop

\- a monthly subscription with a discount for paying for a year upfront e.g. 12months for the price of 10.

\- price tiers for different 'dimensions' of the product e.g. x articles for $y, 5x articles for $3y, 100x articles for $10y

With regards to marketing, you may find better traction and traffic (which hopefully results in more sales) through education. Perhaps highlight how you and your existing customers can best use the app to actually learn languages i.e. what are the best methods, what techniques work well etc. I'm sure that you've got enough material for a blog post and even for a free mini-course in exchange for an email address.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very true. I was planning to revisit the pricing once the product is a little more polished and I remove the beta label. Your suggestions make a lot of sense.

I think the most important focus for now should be to grow the userbase, and I do worry a little about restricting growth with an increased price and also the current usage restrictions on the free tier.

Education as a form of marketing is a great idea, but takes a considerable investment of effort to do well. I'd need to hone my skills at writing and teaching to attract a large audience and it could easily turn into a full time job all by itself. Will give it some thought though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _My instinct is to just make the product awesome and let it market itself._

The "build it, they will come" strategy. It has _never_ worked as a strategy for marketing, ever, in the history of ever. Viral marketing, the "network effect", call it what you like, is only successful if it's backed by a pretty huge advertising budget. Not necessarily traditional advertising, but behind pretty much every successful "viral" campaign that's selling something there's an agency who are pushing the right buttons to get things shared.

If you don't have the budget for that, you have to put in the legwork in traditional marketing and _selling_. It's a horrible, hateful reality of startup life - the fun coding stuff actually comes a distant second to being a salesperson, especially at the beginning before you can afford to pay someone else to do that stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know some marketing is necessary just to get an initial user base. But after that, with a sufficiently awesome product, wouldn't the strategy of spending your effort converting existing users into superfans who promote it for you be effective? This approach appeals to me, especially given my limited resources.

It would be nice to have someone in charge of community management and marketing, but I don't have the money to pay for it without taking investment, which up until now I've been resisting.

<comment><USER4> That's one approach. There are many. All of them require work. The reality of life is that no app, _no matter how good it is_ , will sell itself. No _anything_ will sell itself. You have to be willing to get out there and sell if your company is going to make money.

FWIW, my last startup died because my co-founder and I didn't do it. We wanted to write code. And consequently we failed. I learned this lesson the hard way.

If you've not read it, Seth Godin's "Bootstrapper's Bible" is worth a look: [http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/8.BootstrappersBible](http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/8.BootstrappersBible) (and it's free at the moment)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks for the link! I love Seth Godin's philosophy in the few talks of his I've watched, will give that a read.

Just checked out your current project [http://pitcher.io/](http://pitcher.io/) which seems relevant to the discussion - classy move on not trying to promote it in your comments! Looks like it might be useful to help manage a social media presence, I've just signed up to your mailing list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> \- Are you doing anything to convert the 2,730 free users into paid subscriptions? It's much easier to sell to existing users than to new visitors.

\- Are you tracking conversions and conversion rates from different sources? If your time is limited you can spend it on driving more traffic from sources that lead to more conversions (not necessarily more visitors).

\- Are you testing different layouts, copywriting, and sign up processes? Use your Analytics data to spot issues like high bounces or low conversion rates to find things that are worth testing. For example, if a lot of people are clicking "Start Now" but leave as soon as the demo loads, maybe the demo is confusing/overwhelming to them (personally I was surprised because I was expecting a sign-up form), so you can test that hypothesis by sending 50% of the clickers straight to a sign-up form and see who converts better. You can use something like Optimizely to do this very easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've sent out a couple of emails with updates of new features to encourage existing users to stay engaged, another one is due pretty soon actually. And I'm in the process of adding an opt-in daily email reminder service which may also help with engagement. The more engaged users are the more likely they are to convert to paying customers.

I'm not tracking conversion rates from different sources, I'll look into that.

More testing of UX choices sounds like a good idea, so far I've just gone by gut instinct and user feedback. Was the fact that "Start Now" landed you straight into Trial Mode a _bad_ surprise, would you have preferred a signup form at that point? Or perhaps a walkthrough tutorial?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Marketing is essential and the biggest problem with most startups. And I'm a founder in a startup that suffered for a while from lack of new users.

If you have the money, you should try advertising in places you feel that will bring you customers. But you probably knew that and don't have the money ;)

Well, having a partner that has some background on marketing would be good. Also, posting on hackernews and similar sites can give you a small boost shorterm. But you've obviously thought of that :P

<comment><AUTHOR> You're correct that money is a problem, I can't afford to spend a lot of money on ads until I reach the point where they generate enough subscription revenue to be profitable. Polishing the product to bring it out of beta and then raising the price could help here.

I actually did run a tiny experiment with $20 on Google adwords, but I wasn't impressed because:

\- I had to pay over ¢30 per click. \- It gave me a high proportion of users using IE <= 9 on which the site doesn't work properly.

I'll probably work on a new ad in future. Do you have any suggestions apart from Google Ad-words that may be appropriate?

<comment><USER7> Facebook advertising has always appealed to me. The amount of parameters you can filter users to display your ads to is so specific, you can really squeeze it down to your exact target demographic. e.g. Only to users that are over 18 (so they can pay for your service), under xx age (whichever age you expect people won't be interested), by interests (language learning!), by current location and birthplace (might be able to figure out some combinations that would be ideal for language learners. E.g. if they were born in the UK but living in France) and so on. It defaults to CPM, but I'd definitely go for CPC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, funnily enough I started a tiny Facebook ad campaign to familiarise myself with it just yesterday. Need to put in some work to make the facebook page and ad more attractive before drawing any conclusions about its effectiveness though.

I agree the amount of targeting you can do is very cool.

<comment><USER5> Marketing guy here. Word of caution: FB ads are notoriously bad at getting clicks. Usually worse than AdWords. It's always great to test, but don't bet the farm on a FB ad campaign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I say read: [http://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business- Practices...](http://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practices- Salesforce-com- ebook/dp/B005ERYEGU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385496999&sr=8-1&keywords=predictable+revenue)

Also your website reminds me of [http://www.businessinsider.com/jessica- beinecke-teaches-chin...](http://www.businessinsider.com/jessica-beinecke- teaches-chinese-american-slang-on-her-youtube-channel-omg-meiyu-2012-5)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think +1000 users is a pretty nice number to find your business model, in your case, what are your customer acquisition cost and your churn rate? is your model sustainable?

If your numbers are fine...so go ahead!

<comment><AUTHOR> I really should dig into my analytics to determine the churn rate.

My acquisition costs are basically free for a base line of about 10 signups per day plus sporadic increases from blog or forum posts. But this is nowhere near enough to generate significant revenue.

In future I'll experiment again with advertising and with optimising my site for revenue to know whether I can make advertising profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have you tried adding affiliate links or email blasts for rosetta stone or similar services?

I feel like that could be a bigger money maker than subscriptions for you.

Learning a language consists of 2 parts. Grinding out vocabulary which your app helps with. And learning the structure of the language which rosetta or pimsleur can help with. If you can drive traffic to providers of that 2nd part, it would be valuable.

<comment><AUTHOR> My traffic is probably too low to earn significant referral income right now, but it may be a decent idea in certain cases.

One place where I've considered adding affiliate links is dealing with copyright violations. People have shared translations of Harry Potter in different languages which I've removed, and I thought that it would be cool to leave the first few pages and put an affiliate link to amazon to buy the item _. And in future it would be awesome to actually sell novels and graded readers directly via Readlang.

I wouldn't email my customers to advertise another service since it seems way too spammy, but I could imagine referring to another service if I thought it was really useful. I've been thinking of pointing beginner learners to Duolingo since I think it could complement Readlang, but since it's a completely free service it's not exactly a revenue generating idea!

_ You can upload whatever you like for your own private use, but publicly sharing copyrighted content is obviously not allowed.</comment></comment>


Show HN: NewTabNotes – A synchronized markdown notepad for Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab-notes-alpha/dnghgncclglnalfilefbdpoflgajhdpo <comment><USER2> Is there any way I could increase the font-size? It is difficult to read on big screens.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently no, but that is certainly something I could add as options to customize. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looking for some honest feedback on this idea I had for a new tab page replacement where I can keep some notes.

Currently alpha as I have not cleaned up all of my original hacks from a prototype and there is currently no version control.

Source can be found here: [https://github.com/kkamperschroer/NewTabNotes](https://github.com/kkamperschroer/NewTabNotes)</comment>


Amazon unveils futuristic plan: Delivery by drone - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-unveils-futuristic-plan-delivery-by-drone/

<comment><USER2> I'm just not a fan of drones. In any context. They are 4th amendment eradicators for people like me who live very tall buildings with tall glass windows. It won't be snooping when I'm walking around naked at night, it'll be "why haven't you installed anti-drone screens, you should know better".

First they came for my ability to hang out with my thang out...

</comment><comment><USER3> What's more compelling to me than any particular use of drones for delivery is the idea of drone delivery infrastructure ("dronenet" or "dronet") with well- defined protocols: TCP/IP for physical objects.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems kind of weird to imagine lots of drones flying over urban areas and not hitting each other falling out of the sky and hurting people.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is big. This is an excellent use of drones, and I'm actually morally okay with this. I'd love to see how this goes down.

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually, i think, a drone could carry a human. Like a taxi.

</comment><comment><USER7> Was thinking about this yesterday. If you link up a drone to a mobile, you don't have to wait anywhere for a parcel delivery.

Of course the risk due to shenanigans would be pretty high, so you would have to have some way of only revealing location information to trusted sending parties, rather than it being used for general mail.

edit - is inspired slightly by Bill Hicks' idea of 'smart-fruit' in his Iraq war rant [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4CQ_1GWn4w](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4CQ_1GWn4w)</comment>


KairosDB: Fast Time Series Database on Cassandra - <AUTHOR> https://kairosdb.github.io/ <comment><USER2> No decent performance data? The only thing i found was this 132k/sec of reads. Seems rather underwhelming. TS databases aren't difficult. People just make them difficult by having little mechanical sympathy in their programming.

</comment><comment><USER3> Might get mixed up with these guys[1] because of the name.

[1][https://kairosplanet.com/](https://kairosplanet.com/)</comment>


Rust's Object System - <AUTHOR> http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/04/09/rusts-object-system/

<comment><USER2> C++, of course, has the same choice between virtual methods and templates, "interfaces", inline and external method implementation syntax, etc, although the separate vtables are a nice trick and traits look interesting. So I'm curious about one thing (which would be obvious if I'd used Rust, but isn't apparent on Google):

What's the compilation speed like?

C++'s tendency to stick template functions in header files is a curse on compilation speed compared to C. Rust's solution is apparently to compile all modules in a crate together, which at least avoids instantiating the same templates more than once when compiling from scratch, but sounds like it would make incremental compilation times even worse. I am interested in Rust, but slow compilation drives me crazy.

(And what are the rules for importing classes between crates - how do template functions work, are there any guarantees for changes to a class that won't prevent code that was compiled with an old version from working?)

<comment><USER3> Compilation speed is not as fast as we would like yet. A lot of that is simply due to generating too much code, which largely is an artifact of the way we implement unwinding. We're working on redoing that to improve code size and reduce compilation times. The monomorphization pass (which is the analogue to template expansion in C++) is pretty fast, because we operate on largely precompiled, serialized ASTs instead of reparsing and typechecking everything from scratch. (Also, we only bother to deserialize the functions you actually use.)

You can draw the boundaries between compilation units however you'd like. If you want incremental compilation, use many crates; if you want easier dependency management, use fewer crates. By default, crates are loaded dynamically at runtime, but you can statically link crates together and inline across crates for production.

The Rust compiler tracks breaking API changes and updates your crate UUID automatically. You can change private APIs and dynamically linked code as you'd like without causing dependent crates to be recompiled, but changing an inlined template function will cause your crate UUID to change, which triggers recompilation of dependent crates. The UUID is essentially just a large hash value derived from the signatures of all the public items in your crate.

At the moment, this is unimplemented, but it's intended that you be able to change the bodies of non-inlined generic functions without causing recompilation of your callers. This works because a non-inlined generic function can only be called with pointer types, which means we can generate one piece of code for the generic function and use that. Inlined generics can be called with any value and the code is duplicated for each value you called it with, so changing the body of one of those does trigger recompilation of dependent crates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks interesting, but to be honest there is nothing new here. If you take a look at D, it also has both runtime and compile time polymorphism for a long time. The former is implemented with Java-style interfaces, while the latter is done through templates. Traits are also possible via template mixins: you define a template like so: template ExtraStuff { int someData; void someMethod() { someDate = 5; } }

and then you mix it into the class in question: class SomeClass { mixin ExtraStuff; }

It also gives you a lot more flexibility: you can mix it not only in classes but in structs(in D those are different types), to the global scope and even inside the functions(in that case someData becomes a local variable and someMethod() an inner function).

<comment><USER3> The part that's new (as far as we know anyway) is the unification of typeclasses with OO (bounded polymorphism; e.g. fn foo<T:MyInterface>(x : T)). Mixins and traits are definitely not new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I haven't read up a lot on Rust but I feel that it is similar to Go and perhaps Ceylon. Can someone explain why there is a sudden "renaissance" in such memory-managed systems programming languages?

Edit: Oh, and also the D programming language. There are quite a few of these!

<comment><USER6> _...I feel that it is similar to Go..._

Rust seems a different level of complicated to Go. Go seems quite minimalist. Rust seems more like it's trying to include the essentials of everything, but in as concise a fashion as possible.

<comment><USER7> For me, the killer feature of Rust is the support for RAII and explicit, deterministic memory management (if you want it).

RAII and the ability to deterministically manage resources has always been C++'s killer feature IMHO.

There have been lots of improvements that could be made to C++ once you were willing to eliminate backwards compatibility - but all of the options up to now (e.g. D, Go), forced a GC on you, with no language support for explicit resource management.

I'm very pleased with direction "Rust" seems to be taking in this respect.

<comment><USER4> "but all of the options up to now (e.g. D, Go), forced a GC on you, with no language support for explicit resource management."

That's a lie. D supports both RAII(via scope stament which is a lot more flexible that C++ approach as well as using structs) and deterministic memory management.

<comment><USER7> "That's a lie." -> it's been a while since I looked at D so maybe it's changed since I last looked - but I remain unconvinced that the GC in D will deterministically call your destructors for you (which is my point) and runs in the same thread.

As I understand it, the Rust GC uses reference counting precisely for this reason. To be honest, I'd be happy even if it did not detect cyclic references as I never found these to be a problem when writing C++ code (could always re- factor to avoid them).

Maybe I should have said "deterministic destruction by the GC" instead of RAII.

Whatever, my intention was not to mislead. Please don't call me a liar just because you disagree with something I state with honest intentions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, I think they had an object system that they removed in favor of type classes, but objects have returned.

</comment><comment><USER9> does anyone else have the feeling the idiosyncratic keywords in rust ("iface"? really?) are there to distract the casual reader from talking about the important stuff?

<comment><USER6> Such keywords should be designed to decrease typing and reduce collisions in prefixes of other keywords. (Also in the context of code completion.)

<comment><USER10> Decreasing typing (of keywords) is exactly the wrong way to go when designing a programming language. A program will be read far more times than it is written; the optimization should be towards reading and understanding rather than typing. How long it takes to type should be a distant consideration, if at all.

Often times, a language construct that can be defined in the fewest lines will be more readable. So the end result will generally be a more compact representation. But things like "iface" for interface strikes me as the result of designers who have their priorities mixed up. It's not even an abbreviation, it's just awkward (fn on the other hand has a long history of being an abbreviation for function).

<comment><USER11> I agree that there are legitimate concerns with some of Rust's keywords, such as the visual similarity between `let` and `ret` (which arguably could just be `return`).

      > But things like "iface" for interface strikes me as the result of designers who have their priorities mixed up.

Disagree with you here. `iface` is no harder to visually parse as "interface" than `&&` is to visually parse as "logical and". You should try using the language and see if it's still a concern after ten minutes. If so, make a posting to the developer mailing list (<https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev>) and let them know. The developers _do_ care about pleasing syntax, but be warned that the language is still in such a larval state that they don't really spend much energy bikeshedding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, they reinvented existential types?</comment>


What Really Happens When You Get Shot - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/12/what-really-happens-when-you-get-shot/ <comment><USER2> fuck wired and their "disable adblock" nonsense. Really want to read this but cant.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever done an apprenticeship? How was it? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I used to work for a company that had students come in for a few months. In most areas they were treated as glorified secretaries. In my group we were so short handed on developers that I had them do real work. In my time I had 10. 4 were offered and took jobs, one would have been offered a job but he never applied, 1 was a complete waste (did not speak English), one never finished his degree.

From a team lead perspective I loved working with the kids because they challenged me. They made me validate what I knew. Although they would accept 'because I say', the next week they asked again. They also took a lot of my time, and if I did not meet with anyone of them regularly they tended to go sideways and generate crap. In hindsight, each day I should have spent 15 mins with each.

As for the students, it provides a good grounding in what real life is. Warning, do not do more than 6 months without 6 months of schooling. We had a few who started working full time, and part time with school. Many of those never graduated. When layoffs came the students were early victims.

My boss really liked the students because they did not come out of his budget. HR paid for the, as they saw it as a recruiting tool.

</comment><comment><USER3> yeah, that was my first commercial experience. It was paid one, not much, but still a nice addition to my wallet while being an University student.

They even not required me to show every day in the office but I did anyway. I've learned there many things I haven't used before (or got to know at the University) like git, open source contributions/culture, getting used to linux terminal etc.

I think it had very significant impact on where and who I am today.

It was a great summer.</comment>


Suits Up, Geeks Down: The Latest Tech Hiring Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/jobwire/2008/12/geek-hiring-stats.php <comment><USER2> am I misunderstanding something...or is this just a list of new jobs that were reported to them? If so why is there so much surprise that there are more announcements of hiring a CEO or VP and not some low level developer?

<comment><USER3> Vaksel - we scour the web far and wide to report on every hire we can find, from the execs that put out press releases to the low level developers who post on twitter or their blogs about getting hired.

<comment><USER4> I can confirm this. I am a web developer and the day after I updated my LinkedIn profile to reflect my new job they wrote a short article about my employer hiring me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome site. I like what you guys are doing with jobwire a lot.</comment>


Stunning Future iPhone with Wraparound Display Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2013/03/stunning-future-iphone-with-wraparound-display-revealed.html#.UVQh1vd_cyV.hackernews <comment><USER2> _"This is certainly one of Apple's hottest inventions of the year"_

Well lets just say it is innovative because the concept is not new.

Here for example a Blackberry concept with wraparound display: [http://s3images.coroflot.com/user_files/individual_files/ori...](http://s3images.coroflot.com/user_files/individual_files/original_134802_yAV2XjGoPq1WV1ITZMrAbDn9X.jpg)

Edit: I think this Samsung is also looking great: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGra_9kvnBI>

</comment><comment><USER3> One handed operation of this would be a nightmare. If there's one thing my Nexus 4 has taught me, it's that any kind of beveled edges pick up the base of your thumb (as a press) when reaching over with the tip of your thumb.

(like when you hold the phone in your right hand and try to click a top left icon with your right thumb)

</comment><comment><USER4> I really can't see a good reason for this (and I'm love my iDevices). It looks like it would be awkward to hold and use.

I'd much rather see second screen on the back, even better if the secondary screen was e-ink, like that case that was on kick-starter a while back.</comment>


Find YC'ers: SoCal (LA/OC/SD) - <AUTHOR>

I know I've posted something like this before, but since this site seems to be getting a lot more users, I thought I'd try again.
I think it'd be very cool if we could get a nice group down here going. I've tried several times before and the people down here seem to all go work for Broadcom, biomedical companies, etc., and the incubator community here (OCTANE) has proven to be pretty useless as far as bringing together young individuals with fierce drive. And most of the scene down here is heavily focused in bio/biomedical/pharmaceutical technologies and companies.
So hopefully there are a few here who reside in SoCal that'd like to network and perhaps get together, and hopefully this post will motivate some lurkers to come out of the woodwork as well.
I mean, what's better than sunny, cool, chic, southern California, right?
If you want to chat, you can catch me at firstname.lastname@example.com
(If someone could give this an upvote to keep it afloat, it'd be much appreciated. And if thousands of you would like to upvote this to feed my karma fetish, that'd be nice too.) <comment><USER2> Hey Kyro,

I can empathize with your experience trying to network in SoCal. Hopefully, your post encourages more local entrepreneurs to join the effort.

Peace.</comment>


Using prescription stimulants as study aids - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/A-Ban-on-Brain-Boosting-Drugs/126523/

<comment><USER3> Ignoring for a moment the large number of distinct issues raised in the article I want to focus on just how ridiculous to consider the use of such drugs as cheating.

Before I present my argument - ask first why you might think it cheating? It only makes sense to think of it as cheating if you think that education is a competitive activity, and that in competitive activity you should only be able to avail yourself of your god given abilities.

My argument then relies on the belief that seeing education as a competitive activity is heinous in the extreme. Yes - it IS treated as a competitive activity. Your grades reflect your standing relative to other students in your class as enforced by bell curves which academics are made to apply after the fact. It is ridiculous. What makes me really angry is the way universities then force course co-ordinators to give a clear statement of learning outcomes in course descriptions - as if they fucking matter. For if the point of education was to achieve a learning outcome - then YOU WOULD BE GRADED ACCORDING TO WHETHER OR NOT YOU MET THAT LEARNING OUTCOME - not according to your relative standing.

Education should be about learning outcomes. I want to know - who has this skill... etc... not, who was the best in year X. Because even if I only ever accept the best - it's still a crap shoot as to what I really get.

And now they want to restrict people's access to drugs that could help them meet learning outcomes? Because they are so enamoured of their perverted education paradigm that they can't see the forest for the trees. I work in a university and I honestly wonder if the people above me who make these decisions can count to three. No doubt on reading this the first question they'll ask is how they'll determine who should get the scholarships if they can't rank competitively.

To which I answer - rank competitively all you want. Just don't confuse this process with grading.

This brings us to the second aspect of cheating - that you can only use your god given abilities in a competitive environment. If we assume that grading has now been separated from the ranking process - for the purposes of finding the best students - one still has to ask if it's fair to use drugs to get an edge. The answer (and as far as I'm concerned this answer goes equally for sports and everything else) is an easy yes but only if the following conditions hold.

1) Access is universal 2) cost is negligble 3) health risks are negligble

You don't, for instance, want to award your scholarships to folks that end up dying of heart attacks at 30. But dexamphetamines and the like have been around for over 100 years. These are well understood drugs. The only problem is 1) - but as the author seems to demonstrate - this isn't actually a problem since it's apparently so easy to get them.

<comment><USER4> A phony ADD/ADHD diagnosis is cheating because getting diagnosed as a "learning disability" entitles you to special accommodation. You're also a party to a felony, since you are either committing insurance fraud from the bogus prescription or are an accessory to fraud by illicitly purchasing the pills from someone.

When I was in college 15 years ago, I personally knew of at least a half dozen people who managed to get themselves diagnosed with late onset ADD or ADHD. Getting the diagnosis was trivially easy -- drug ads in major magazines at the time often included "quizzes" that happened to be very similar to whatever the doctor was told to ask by the pharmaceutical sales chick.

The reason? You got "special accommodation" for your "disability" (ie. you get to take tests alone in a comfy chair in a private office without time limits) and you could easily sell or abuse the drugs that were prescribed. Many classes in the engineering programs were open-book exams -- being able to use a book for an unlimited period of time instead of the 60 minute window that you normally had was a tremendous advantage.

I really don't care about the "learning outcomes", but I do care that we're creating a culture where casual abuse of medical diagnoses and health insurance for personal gain is acceptable.

<comment><USER3> You don't care about learning outcomes?

Sorry - I'm gonna have a hard time caring about the rest of your argument until you justify that a little.

I'm not arguing that people should fake ADD to get scripts. I do think this is a wrong and bad thing to do - but not because it makes them "academic cheaters" - it's because it forces up costs on the drug that genuine ADD people need just to be level with ordinary people. I know - because I genuinely am one - believe it or not. And I'm gonna be pissed if I have to start paying 100 bucks a bottle because the government's budget gets blown on a-holes who are faking it. But that's a different issue to what we're talking about here.

Having said that - I think the solution to both problems is to throw open the market with certain controls to limit substance abuse - and let the free market bring down costs (since the larger market will allow greater economies of scale in production).

<comment><USER5> The learning outcome is irrelevant. It's irrelevant to the cheaters and to the poster above. Someone taking amphetamines to cram is doing exactly that. They aren't learning, they are just cramming to get through the next set of exams. So to them the learning outcome is irrelevant if the only thing that matters is the grade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do not know if I have undiagnosed ADD. Occasionally I wonder, especially those times when I go to put on my shoes to leave the house and discover that 30 minutes have passed and I've only managed to put one of them on because somehow I've started doing something else.

Either way, I've used Adderall while programming (for which I do not have a prescription), and even small amounts make a significant difference in number of levels of abstraction and detail I can hold in my head at once, and how quickly I can both initially reach and drop back into 'flow' when interrupted. The best analogy I've come up with is that increases your mental RAM - so I'm not having to write anything to swap. Got a really nasty pile of code you need to refactor, or even completely rearchitect? Adderall lets you fit a whole lot more of the problem space in your head at once.

 _Sometimes_ on very rare occasions, I can somehow hit that sweet spot with caffeine and get the same effect as Adderall. But it happens very rarely - <USER2> easy to under or overshoot the caffeine dose, and even when I do manage to pull it off, the perfect mental RAM increase only seems to last about 45 mins. With Adderall, it happens every time, and I can can stay in that state for 12 hours or more.

I don't use Adderall frequently. It's kinda a pain in the ass to get, and a little pricey. But when you're just _stuck_ on something, it can really help you break through that mental wall.

</comment><comment><USER7> This does not surprise me. I regularly use 200-500mg caffeine in a day, and I did more while I was in college. (some) prescription stimulants and (some) stimulants that are victims of prohibition would do the same job better and with less severe physical side effects, but I can't be bothered getting them. It's not that I respect the law; it's just more convenient to use the inferior-but-legal option.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm currently (as in right now) using Modafinil as a brain-booster to keep me awake for an exam this afternoon.

With regard to this: "If, for example, students use such drugs to mitigate the consequences of procrastination, they may fail to develop mental discipline and time-management skills.", as lots of HN readers may know, procrastination's a bitch. There are infinite methods to counteract it, yet we (I) keep falling through the cracks and not doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Not saying this drug suddenly eliminates that (I've been brain-boosted while procrastinating -hey, isnt' writing on HN hours before an exam procrastination?-), but it buys me time and a little edge in my gray matter to keep me going.

"Instead of ferreting out and punishing students, universities should focus on restoring a culture of deep engagement in education, rather than just competition for credentials"

Well, here in Argentina, and this college particularly, although I'm doing it for credentials mostly, the main problem is not "the culture", but how contents are delivered by proffessors in the classroom. My studying plan is from '95, and little has changed since then in it (System's engineering, btw). Some proffesors are like mummies from the 70's, talking about Algol and Ada like it's the next hot technology. On the other hand, education's free, there are lots of jobs, and IT is one of the fastest growing areas of work nowadays (where is it not?). I currently have a job working for a company that develops products for MS and some other clients, using MS tools.

That said, I'm a bit concerned about my health, and will be taking routine medical checks. Nevertheless, I'm not an addict (no, really). Although I use it now and then, I don't crave for it, nor I need it all the time. It's just an extra help for certain situations, like taking coffee when you're asleep, or ibuprofene when you have a mild headache (that perhaps could be solved by going to bed for a couple hours, but you have to keep working/stuying).

Prohibition, like on many other things, won't do any good to anyone, except maybe the ones that sell the drugs.

<comment><USER9> I've never used any of these drugs myself, but arguments like "if you use this, you'll never learn <some skill which author thinks is important>" always seem a bit dull to me:

Isn't the main value of new technologies/drugs/utilities that people don't have to do things the 'old way' anymore? Nobody is using a slide rule these days, but why should they?

<comment><USER10> There's a difference in kind, it seems to me, between acquiring proficiency in a particular technology - like using a slide rule or an abacus or a scientific calculator or JSON serialization on a REST interface - and developing habits of planning, working and time management to maximize productivity in any technical context.

These days, my job requirements throw lots of new technologies my way, but my basic approach to learning a technique, incorporating it into my workflow and completing a project remains more or less consistent.

By all means, eliminate busywork and seek efficiencies that get you to your solution more quickly; but don't fall into the trap of thinking an all-nighter on bennies is a viable replacement for organization and self-discipline.

<comment><USER11> Although you can use drugs to enable an all-nighter to learn a certain technology _just before_ you need it, you can also use drugs during the daytime hours to enable you to concentrate on learning material _far before you need it_.

The former solution is what I've seen preferred by students who don't prioritize school, and the latter is what the so-called "nerds" use.

<comment><USER8> Of course. That's my M.O. as well. Don't let my previous post and the fact that I was sacked at today's exam make you think otherwise. :(

I get another chance in 2 weeks. I better go back to stuying..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there any direct empirical evidence that these drugs improve intellectual function? Apples-to-apples IQ tests, or something like that?

</comment><comment><USER13> Fat chance of discouraging people from abusing anything routinely described with a straight face as a "cognitive enhancer".

<comment><USER14> Yes, I'm bothered by this term, too. On the other hand, what term should we use, that is easy to understand and broadly (if not to the highest level of detail) describes a wide range of drugs with widely varying effects? Something like 'intellectual performance enhancer' is longer, sounds more pretentious and isn't much more accurate, either.

Then again, if all my problems were as severe as this one, I'd be a happy camper ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nescafé and Methylphenidate (prescribed, of course) are your friend.

<comment><USER16> True, but when used at the same time they are a nightmare. Methylphenidate has a pretty severe crash (at higher dosages) and caffeine makes it much much worse.

<comment><USER15> You're quite right. In fact, I avoid all caffeine (even Tea) when taking it. Had some nasty crashes on Concerta.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you need that big of a crutch then you shouldn't be attending university in the first place.</comment>


In case SOPA passes: IP addresses of popular websites  - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_list/ <comment><USER2> I think we should stop viewing this as a bad thing and start viewing it as a huge opportunity. Phone your congress person or senator and encourage them to vote for it.

As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians.

With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system.

Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity.

While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights.

Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.

<comment><USER3> Why do people wish really bad things happen so that people will do the really right thing?

We should be doing the really right thing in the first place, not wait for really bad things to happen.

<comment><USER2> Because mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

<comment><USER4> But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their [the people's] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

<comment><USER5> please speak modern english, son :)

<comment><USER6> Sorry friend, but english has been modern since around the sixteenth or seventeenth century, depending on how you look at it. The language of shakespeare is literally the language of today. The changes since then have been minor when compared to the history of the language.

<comment><USER5> I know, I just was joking around :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0.

That said, a lot of these "solutions" that people are coming up with just end up getting closer and closer to what the DNS already accomplishes.

The _worst_ case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD. The "doomsday" scenario here is that DNS servers stop trusting the root servers, and don't take updates from them.

This is a gigantic headache for network and system administrators. It is not the end of the internet.

If you guys really really care that much, here: [http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and- services/domai...](http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and- services/domain-name-services/grow-your-domain-name-business/analyze/tld-zone- access/index.xhtml?loc=en_US)

Apply for access to the .com zone files, download them, and up your own DNS servers. Don't accept any updates from anybody ever and you'll have a much, much, much more complete, much more "you can query this as a daemon" version of these silly lists.

<comment><USER8> _"The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD."_

That is the best case scenario.

<comment><USER9> By fragmented DNS, do you just mean distributed? Because DNS is already distributed and consistent. We don't have to trade one to get the other.

<comment><USER10> No by fragmented DNS he means DNS servers in Europe would route you perfectly fine to Megavideo.com but US servers wouldn't. So all you'd have to do is change your DNS address to a European one and bingo.

It's one thing to pass PATRIOT or SOPA, but try passing legislation to create a multi-billion dollar firewall to effectively block other DNS servers and block offending IP addresses.

<comment><USER11> Isn't this already the case for sites that have been "seized" by the ICE?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i'm as big a hater of SOPA as the next guy, but this fearmongering is getting a bit silly. as if SOPA is going to pass and overnight all of those popular commercially-run websites are going to vanish with no notice or court hearings.

and from a technical standpoint, most of those websites listed use CDNs for static assets, so unless you list the constantly-changing IPs of akamai and other servers for all of the weird random-looking hostnames used by those CDNs, many of those sites will not even load to a usable state. (and porn sites? really?)

also, from the reddit thread:

 _As some posters suggested, you can use another DNS server. The two server I'm reasonably certain about are OpenDNS and Google DNS. Both of them are US based but I think Google will move it's server to Europe if SOPA passes._

using a resolver in the EU from the US would be frustratingly slow due to the latency. you're better off showing users how to setup their own caching servers to bypass their ISP (i've always run my own caching server just for technical reasons).

and do you really think google cares about SOPA? they have done practically nothing to stop it; no notice on their homepage, no public awareness, only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing, etc. this is the same company that partnered with china and supported their censorship just to make some additional ad revenue.

<comment><USER13> There's no need to worry about porn sites. One of the amendments proposed yesterday was to instruct the AG to not use any resources protecting the copyrights of pornography producers. I suppose their legal rights aren't as important as the industries that backed this bill.

<comment><USER14> I missed that, so thanks for highlighting that one. And that's pretty interesting, because I'd imagine that pornography producers are amongst those whose IP is most often stolen. But you're right: according to Forbes, "The [Porn / Adult Entertainment] industry is tiny next to broadcast television ($32.3 billion in 1999 revenue, according to Veronis Suhler), cable television ($45.5 billion), the newspaper business ($27.5 billion), Hollywood ($31 billion), even to professional and educational publishing ($14.8 billion)." <http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html>

<comment><USER13> The porn industry has grown a lot since 2001. The rationale given for the amendment was that without it, the AG would spend all its time working pornography cases, as they'd be the majority of copyright infringement occurring.

<comment><USER11> How did they justify it, though? Did they explicitly say that "our industry is more important"?

<comment><USER15> They just asserted that the government should not be working towards helping pornography producers because the material is distasteful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The BoingBoing link is a worthless waste of time.

Use this one to go there directly:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_l...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_list/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I would recommend against using these IP addresses for large sites. Most of them (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) use geographic load balancing to redirect users to servers as logically close to them as possible. Using this list could result in accessing much slower services via server clusters on the other side of the world.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like the eventual outcome of this is a dark/grey net DNS system. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this already existed, but now it will be much more useful and interesting to everyday people.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's not the popular websites that will get hit. The public will flip out if their bread and Facebook, er, circuses, go away, and SOPA will not be in effect for very long.

The trouble will come when websites get blocked that do _not_ have enough public support to bring them back again.

As long as Facebook and Gmail are up, it's only nerds like us who will care.

</comment><comment><USER20> Please, adopt Namecoin. There are already open source DNS servers available I believe. :) Using google document or hosts file do not scale at all, while namecoin now have all hashing power of bitcoin thanks to merged mining.

</comment><comment><USER21> SOPA is definitely having the opposite effect because I just found a couple of great sites that I didn't know about

</comment><comment><USER5> If SOPA passes, can lots of people call the financial companies, ad companies and others doing business with the RIAA, MPAA, and so forth, and "allege" that they are "facilitating" copyright and trademark infringement. According to the SOPA law as it is now, they will have to be shut down.

At the very least it will tie up the system

Or it might actually show these guys what kind of monster they have brought about ... kind of like Sarcozy's household being disconnected from the internet

[http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence- busted-f...](http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence-busted-for- bittorrent-piracy-111215/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter)

[http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog- post/2011/10/04/g...](http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog- post/2011/10/04/german-politician-violates-own-two-strikes-out-bill.html)

But it's OK when THEY do it, right?

However, if there are only foreign sites (registrar is abroad), then I doubt any major sites are hosted there, besides

<http://bit.ly> <http://t.co> <http://youtu.be> <http://goo.gl>

Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the current SOPA, only FOREIGN SITES can have their financials cut off, right? I thought the Operation In Our Sites is able to already seize domain names registered locally. So it seems to me that the SOPA simply adds provisions to censor sites registered abroad, in American DNS only, because their registrar is beyond US jurisdiction.

For example Russians use vkontakte.ru to listen to any song. What would SOPA do about this?

However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.

So I think the threat is more to the purity and security of the worldwide DNS system, as well as to the costs of the ISPs, than it is to social networking sites. At least, I hope. Does SOPA override the DMCA for locally-registered sites, or did Operation In Our Sites just give carte blanche to the government to take out sites?

<comment><USER22> > However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could > have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor protection is for? They can't just pull their domain if they are responding in a timely manner to reasonable DMCA takedown requests.

Or am I missing a point you're making? Entirely possible. It's 4:55. I'm burnt out.

<comment><USER5> I think the point is that they are looking to give greater remedies than DMCA. You would now be able to complain about a website to those doing business with it, and they are supposed to stop doing business with it. If it's foreign, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> On a surface level, most of the items on this list are pretty absurd. Sites like Facebook, Amazon, and Youtube aren't immediately going down as soon as SOPA passes, except the torrent sites. There's a good chance they won't be affected at all by SOPA.

However, this list is interesting because it draws attention to the fact that these huge sites COULD legally vanish without a trace. Although I doubt anyone's going to seriously try to take down Facebook or Amazon using SOPA, it's still scary to imagine.

</comment><comment><USER24> Facebook (and, probably, some others too) redirects you from IP address to the domain anyway, so...

</comment><comment><USER25> The list saddens me, to be quite honest. Yes, SOPA is morally wrong and technically stupid, and I don't think the government can or should fight piracy like this. But I think it devalues the cause if such a large portion of the "emergency list" is porno and piracy web sites. Seriously? The real reasons this is dangerous is because of civil rights and the damage that's already been caused to legitimate businesses by government incompetence (e.g. erroneously changing the DNS of small businesses to forward to an accusation of child sex crimes because they happened to share infrastructure with the real criminal).

The fact remains that piracy is dishonest, and only serves to legitimize the claims of Big Media. Say what you want about DRM, copyright law and ridiculous terms of service, but if you're really someone who believes in free government and the important role of the Internet in preserving it, I hope you join with me in rolling your eyes at people who torrent illegal media and worry about the effect of SOPA on their porn viewing. There are plenty of ways to buy inexpensive, DRM-free music, and plenty of ways to actually support the artists who make the music.

</comment><comment><USER26> wonder if it's time to code an FF extension that aggregates and stores IP addresses of sites i visit and bypasses the resolver/DNS from this DB.

<comment><USER12> bypassing DNS is going to break the internet as much as SOPA is. content distribution networks rely on DNS for load balancing. legitimate sites moving to new servers rely on being able to push out records with low TTLs. by statically caching things for long periods of time, you are going to cause more problems with legitimate sites than you are going to fix to get to "rogue" sites that get taken down by SOPA.

a better approach would probably be to just hit that non-DNS cache for sites that don't resolve, or push out a list of known "killed" sites. if SOPA makes sites given the "death penalty" resolve to an ICE-style page, then the extension could just store the IP addresses of those government-run servers and consult the cache for sites that resolve to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If people have serious concerns, would it not be possible to build a Google Chrome/Firefox Plugin that acted as a sort of DNS service? It would be a lot easier for the average user to install one of these in one click than it might be for them to change their DNS settings.

Just a thought.

<comment><USER28> It is probably easier to just run your own DNS caching server on your machine.

No need for a browser extension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone notice the irony... back when the internet was new, dns was just a bunch of dns/ip mappings in a text file... then we went to a big distributed system... now the US government is going to force us to go back to distributing text files.

</comment><comment><USER26> maybe google in their fight against SOPA can come to the rescue and release a database publicly of all its crawled websites, which can be syndicated somehow via p2p. i mean they gotta have this info.

<comment><USER30> This is a horrible idea. What more could a cracker want than a list of IP addresses that are known web servers. Sure, the big guys are safe. But what about the mom and pop shop that pays $20 a month to host their website on a server that is running a 3 year old version of apache.

EDIT: Can someone show me specifically what I said that is objectively technically incorrect?

You may disagree with security through obscurity, and I agree with you that obscurity isn't a very strong defense mechanism, but that doesn't change the technical merit of it.

<comment><USER31> Sorry, what?

What is preventing any 'cracker' from a list of IP addresses of webservers? You can _VERY_ easily find out the IP address of anything you please...

<comment><USER30> There is nothing preventing a cracker from getting a list of IP addresses. There are a number of ways to get an IP address of a specific server: whois on the domain, even pinging the domain on a *nix OS kicks back an IP address. Doing a trace route same thing.

That's not what I'm talking about though. If google released a list of all crawled websites and their IP addresses, if I was inclined I could then take those IP's and scan them for known vulnerabilities. Essentially what you're giving an attacker is a prequalified list of IP addresses to attack instead of attacking a specific range.

<comment><USER32> whois or ping are not a good way to find the ip of a hostname. Use either a dns library or dig.

<comment><USER30> Thanks. I've never had issues with using whois or ping. The point still stands, there are plenty of ways of getting an ip address without needing google's help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I thought blocking IP addresses itself was a part of the proposed law. If that happens, this wont help. Using proxies is a solution, but this will make things much slower, especially for videos.

</comment><comment><USER34> HN's IP, just in case: 188.8.131.52

</comment><comment><USER35> I have often wished for a way to see a history of what IP addresses domains are resolved to, from my system's resolver or a DNS server. This, in contrast, seems awfully primitive.

</comment><comment><USER36> i wrote a small python script that helps handle DNS updates like this. if anyone is interested it's at <https://github.com/ghettonet/GhettoNet>

it allows for dated updates, distributing in web pages, etc, but it's only a command line interface. i hoped someone might add a gui...

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm sure we could come up with some sort of host file synchronization application to circumvent the DNS changes. It would be awful compared to DNS, but at least it would be more workable than remembering and saving IP addresses.

<comment><USER38> HOSTS.TXT anyone?

<comment><USER39> Just hosts, actually.

It's: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

not C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.txt

<comment><USER38> Not even. You misunderstood what I was referring to: <http://goo.gl/6iXui>

<comment><USER39> Oh, I see. I'm sorry. Carry on :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> <2012> Hm, that Reddit thread and the corresponding Google Doc both link to sites with illegal and pirated content on them.

Call your local representative and get them to shut down Reddit and Google Docs via SOPA! </2012>

</comment><comment><USER41> I really hope that the internet anthropologists of the future will someday read this thread and have a hearty laugh on our behalf in the knowledge that all our worries were for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm not sure why this is being up-voted so much. It won't work. SOPA works by not routing specific IPs, not by failing to resolve domains (which is why it fundamentally breaks the internet). Additionally, a single IP won't work for a major site like YouTube or Facebook, which work off multiple data-centers and CDNs (which also complicates how to "block" a site served by 50 IPs that may also be distributing content for another major brand). This is bigger than a hosts file.

<comment><USER39> SOPA works by failing to resolve domain names, it does nothing to stop a user from entering a particular IP address.

Like everyone has been saying, it. does. nothing. good.

<comment><USER42> I don't think that's true. According to [http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57328045-281/sopas- latest-...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57328045-281/sopas-latest- threat-ip-blocking-privacy-busting-packet-inspection/)

Cary Sherman, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, wrote in a guest column for CNET that SOPA could be used to force Internet providers to block by "Internet Protocol [IP] address" and deny "access to only the illegal part of the site." The RIAA, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, strongly supports the legislation.

[...]

An aide to the House Judiciary committee -- chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), SOPA's principal sponsor -- did not dispute that IP address blocking and deep packet inspection could be required. It would be up to a judge to determine the nature of the court order that would be needed to block the site, the aide told CNET this afternoon.

They are definitely looking to block by IP, not just DNS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Don't fix your hosts files, fix your broken political system!

</comment><comment><USER44> Flagged. Up-voters should be ashamed perpetuating scaremongering propaganda.

The sky is not falling. Shame to see the "I need to be outraged by something, regardless of whether it's true or not" spilling over here from Reddit.

<comment><USER45> The people who designed important pieces of its infrastructure (tcp/ip, dns, http, and so on) seem to be very concerned about what SOPA would allow politicians to do to the internet. Do you know something they don't?

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors- war...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against- sopa-and-pipa)

<comment><USER44> There's being against proposed legislation, and there's "OH no! soon DNS will not work, we need to quickly collect IP addresses. Lets build an alternate DNS system. Lets overthrow the government!".

Do you really think the DNS entry for wikipedia.org will be removed? In the stupidly ridiculously rare event that it did, obviously they'd quickly remedy it, or we'd all just proxy through other countries etc, or it'd get mirrored onto other domains.

We had the same "The sky is falling" for the UKs "Digital Economy Bill". It's a ridiculous law, and is now being revised/investigated. ISPs are against it, and it'll never be enforced. People again wasted hours of their lives worrying about it.</comment></comment></comment>


The Problem With APIs and a Possible Solution - <AUTHOR> https://supportbee.com/devblog/2012/10/23/app-platforms-and-not-apis/

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry but your API is not what I would call RESTful nor a step in the right direction. I have spotted 3 issues after only 30 seconds on your doc:

1) HTTP features the "Accept" header which allows the user-agent to specify the format of the response. The "*.json" thing is not standard and breaks HTTP.

2) "tickets/search" endpoint is not a resource. It's a different projection of the "tickets" collection. It's basic filtering. Rule of thumb is whenever you're about to use a verb to name an API endpoint, you can guess you're probably about to do something wrong.

3) A RESTful API needs hyperlinks. Resources must point to each other to help the developer navigate the API tree and access every single point it contains. The API origin (company.supportbee.com) should be the only information I need to discover the structure of your API.

The WWW is an example to follow. It's the most RESTful "service" out there.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your feedback. A Few questions/comments.

> The "*.json" thing is not standard and breaks HTTP. It's more of a Rails > convention and so we just followed it in the docs. Everything works fine > without .json using the HTTP Accept header.

> "tickets/search" endpoint is not a resource. It's a different projection of > the "tickets" collection. It's basic filtering. Rule of thumb is whenever > you're about to use a verb to name an API endpoint, you can guess you're > probably about to do something wrong.

Interesting. How would you approach it? Extend the /tickets endpoint to include some search parameters?

> A RESTful API needs hyperlinks.

I agree. However at this point it just seems a lot more work and also I have never really seen anyone use it (except for a few often quoted examples). We should change our documentation to use the word RESTlike.

Thanks once again for your feedback. We will improve the documentation soon.

<comment><USER4> > I agree. However at this point it just seems a lot more work

It's a lot more work for the end user to have to assemble URLs themselves instead of you providing them in the response.

Let's say someone does a GET request on /tickets. The response should include URLs for each ticket that gets returned, e.g. something like:

        {
            "tickets": [
                {
                    "ticket_id": 1337,
                    "url": "/tickets/1337"
                },
                {
                    "ticket_id": 1336,
                    "url": "/tickets/1336"
                }
            ]
        }

Again, the analogy of the WWW itself is instructive. When you browse to the home page of a website, that page has links to the other pages on the site.

Similarly, the home page of a REST web service should have links to the other resources on the web service, e.g.

        {
            "resources": [
                {
                    "resource_name": "Foos",
                    "url": "/foos"
                },
                {
                    "resource_name": "Bars",
                    "url": "/bars"
                },
                {
                    "resource_name": "Tickets",
                    "url": "/tickets"
                }
            ]
        }

That is simple, predictable, discoverable and self documenting for the end user.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for explaining this simply and concisely. I was aware of "Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State", but I'm not sure I fully understood it until now.

A question about resource discovery using links. In practice, does anyone write web service clients that use, and are driven by, link discovery? It seems to me that in a b2b scenario, an organisation that is going to be investing time and money in developing a client for an api will probably want some documentation to work against.

Also, is there a standard way to make discoverable the http methods that can be applied to a resource?

<comment><USER6> > Also, is there a standard way to make discoverable the http methods that can > be applied to a resource?

HTTP OPTIONS method is exactly that. Mind your response headers, they can convey plenty of information about your resources: allowable methods, request and response types mime-types (you can rank type preference as well).

> In practice, does anyone write web service clients that use, and are driven > by, link discovery? ...

Documentation is always useful. But HTTP can almost be self documenting for well thought out and linked resources. For link discovery, maybe a standard like HAL (<http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html>) or similar would be of interest. There is another proposed way as well, I can't think of it at the moment but will add an edit if/when it comes to me.

EDIT: I had poor wording, there are several 'json hypermedia specifications'. Another would be (Collection+JSON <http://www.amundsen.com/media- types/collection/>). Hope that helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's worthwhile pointing out that the article specifically deals with web APIs.

Regarding the content, I'm puzzled as to why versioning a web API should be a hard problem when you can just include the version number in the URL. Sure, you need to maintain this code path forever afterwards, but that's true of any platform with ambitions of backward compatibility.

<comment><USER3> One issue is that many services deprecate API endpoints over time. For example - <https://github.com/blog/1160-github-api-v2-end-of-life>

<comment><USER7> Like I was saying, it depends on how much backward-compatible your vendor wants to be. I just don't see how a hosted app is going to protect you from this kind of thing. The only difference is that the hosted app is presented with a "native" API as opposed to an RPC API, but it's just as vulnerable to deprecation, and will remain so as long as you are a third-party.

Except that the cost in term of infrastructure and ongoing maintenance (code review, etc) is higher, which IMHO makes it likely to be phased out sooner than a web API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having read the article, I'm still not really sure what a 'Hosted App Platforms' _actually_ is, or how it solves the problems listed.

I wonder if a better solution is something like Yahoo Pipes [1].

[1] <http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Does somebody know a good resource about sandboxing and running foreign code safely?

<comment><USER3> Here is one such Gem - <https://github.com/c42/secure></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to communicate basic security protocols to parents, non-techs - <AUTHOR>

I've been writing an email to my family (mostly 65+ parents, retired, etc.) about how to protect themselves from email scams, etc., especially in light of the heartbleed fiasco.
There's often no distinction between a systemic bug (e.g. heartbleed) and an actual corporate security breach (e.g. Target). Everything is a "hack" to them. I'm not looking for "general" advice, e.g. make sure you're using https, etc. And I'm afraid this will devolve into "any non-technical user", no matter what the age. If so, that's fine.
Here's what I'm asking...How do you communicate this stuff to your non-tech people, whether parents, grand-parents, colleagues, etc.? Without being overcome with technical descriptions. How do we help them stay safe? Everything from social engineering (a la Kevin Mitnick) to clicking on emails from their "bank."
Is there a protocol, or set of "rules" you place on your loved-ones? The last thing you want is for them to call you at 2am asking for help because they've been "hacked." What strategies are you using to prevent the "2am call because they've been hacked?" <comment><USER2> My streategy eventually became refusing to deal with it, and prodding them to develop a relationship with a local computer store - if I can't answer something in a single sentence or two, I say it's too complex to explain and they should have someone look at it. This didn't go down that well at first, until I got them to agree that they wouldn't try to fix their car this way if I was a mechanic, and trying to fix their computer without being able to see it was just as inefficient.</comment>


A Short, Simple Introduction to Information Theory - <AUTHOR> http://knol.google.com/k/ryan-moulton/a-short-simple-introduction-to/3kbzhsxyg4467/7#view

<comment><USER2> I think one of the problems that people have with entropy is understanding the concept of fractions of bits, and it would help to have a deeper explanation. It's somewhat easy to understand in a probabilistic sense, but it still sort of defies intuition that you can have less than one bit. You want to say, well you have to round up, right? A more intuitive explanation is that with an ideal encoding scheme, 100 non-vowel die rolls would take, on average, 258 bits to encode. This is still somewhat probabilistic, but it makes a bit more sense, because it's no longer necessary to have a direct relationship between die rolls and bits. And this idea of encoding a sequence leads naturally to the topic of compression, which is one of the most useful and most natural applications of entropy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone else commented on this too, and I'm not sure exactly where to go with that. Discussing block length and compression is deeper into that particular issue than I was really hoping to go in this, but I don't know of an easier way of explaining it. Any ideas?

<comment><USER2> It may be "deeper," but for me information theory only really clicks in my head in the context of compression. Without compression, I see some voodoo hand-waving with logarithms and I don't even know what it means for an event to have X bits of entropy, or why I should care, or if I should believe the result. With compression, the entropy is suddenly a concrete measurable value with real-world import, and it's cool that you can prove hard lower bounds like that. So it may be deep, but at least to me it makes the whole thing make sense, rather than just adding complication.

You may be able to dodge the issue by not mentioning compression explicitly. It's nonsensical that a single die roll takes 2.58 bits, but it's perfectly believable that 100 die rolls could fit in 258 bits. Then with a little work, you can show that 258 is the smallest expected value of any encoding. That uses the concept of compression as an intuitive model, without having to formally define it or call it by name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, check it now. I added a little bit about that, though I'm sure I could still improve the wording.

 _Now we have something whose unit is "bits" but whose value includes fractions of a bit. What can we do with this? After all, if we're only storing one roll, we still need 3 bits to store 6 possibilities. The trick is that we can use fewer bits if we are storing more rolls at once. There are 2 wasted possibilities in those 3 bits we used for the first roll, and if you're clever, you can use those to encode some information about the next roll. If we're clever enough, and storing enough, 2.58... is the lower bound on the number of bits required per roll that you'll converge to with an optimal compression scheme._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's worth emphasizing that information and entropy are _subjective_ , in the Bayesian sense. The more you know and understand something, the more you can encode it in a small number of bits.

Consider the sequence:

31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

Most people would have a hard time remembering it because it looks random... But of course, it really is "All the primes between 30 and 100". That's _much_ easier to remember, because the brain (at least, the average brain on HN) already has concepts for "prime number", "30" and "100".

Compression has a strong connection to AI. In fact, Occam's razor is perhaps AI's most fundamental theorem: if you have derived many programs which can perform the same task, which one is the smartest?

A: _The shortest one_.

I would also recommend MacKay's book. It's awesome.

<comment><USER4> Even if the smallest wouldn't complete in the lifespan of the universe, and a slightly bigger one would take 5 minutes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Halfway through the article this encoding / data compression algorithm I learned last semester came to my mind:

Huffman coding <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding>

It was really simple, based on a file with a given number of symbols, it would rewrite those symbols as length-variable unique binary codes, so that the symbol with highest number of occurrences would become the code with the smallest possible bit-length, and so on with the other symbols so that it would spend most bits on the symbols that occurred less times.

<comment><AUTHOR> Huffman coding is very very related to this. If you have a capped block length, huffman coding is optimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're looking for a good read, I enjoyed Jeremy Campbell's "Grammatical Man" quite a bit, it ties together information theory and linguistics. Obviously not the most in-depth book on either topic, but fascinating nonetheless.

[http://www.amazon.com/Grammatical-Man-Information-Entropy- La...](http://www.amazon.com/Grammatical-Man-Information-Entropy- Language/dp/0671440616)

</comment><comment><USER7> Shannon's original paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", is still a good read: [http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...](http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: DOs and DON'Ts of collaborating with an NGO as a startup - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
We have developed a technology that is very interesting for NGOs that work in low connectivity areas. We'd love to start a project to help improve people's communication conditions but, as startup first-timers, we have no idea as to what we should expect, costs in both time and money, and even how to get in contact with them.
As a HN user, I have read some articles about Watsi, but none that I remember regarding founder experiences. We'd love to get some first hand advice from startups who worked with NGOs, some tips, DOs and DON'Ts, how to approach them, etc.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Charities often don't value work if it's provided to them for free. If you are providing any kind of discount, make sure you show the full price of your time on your invoices, then any discounts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> By the way, I purposely omitted most of the details, even the URL, since I really don't want this to be interpreted as spam. If anybody is curious, please check out my profile or drop a comment here for more information.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious as to what the product does?

<comment><AUTHOR> We can deliver short texts and audio for free, by tweaking an Asterisk installation. It's not super convenient, but can provide an information channel for some isolated communities, and get news on weather, market prices, health, etc.

<comment><USER3> What is Asterisk?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I was being too technical. Asterisk is a PBX (the machine that routes calls) that you can install on your own server. By using it, you can control a most of the communications channels on a phone call, and do pretty advanced stuff.

<comment><USER3> Is Asterisk installed at the remote location?

<comment><AUTHOR> Asterisk can be installed anywhere, for example on a VPS.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MessageMe: 3 UX Wins That Drive Retention - <AUTHOR> http://thoughts.heatdata.com/post/51009449880/messageme-3-ux-wins-that-drive-retention <comment><AUTHOR> Some of these UX moves, to be fair, have been used by an increasing number of mobile and messaging apps. MessageMe is just one example of comprehensive implementation alongside effective design.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you use the stories format in other context than Instagram? - <AUTHOR> Currently working on an experimental project, I believe stories could be used in a work environment to replace presentation (powerpoint) that are not being presented.
I think stories is a great way to engage your audience or to transmit a specific message.
Check out the prototype I made and let me know how you would use it. https://tldr.one <comment><USER2> Your website gives a certificate warning eh.

> This server could not prove that it is tldr . one; its security certificate > is from mailconfig . ovh . net . This may be caused by a misconfiguration or > an attacker intercepting your connection.</comment>


How did you or do you get to know a group of users and their problems? - <AUTHOR>

Everyone's always saying get to know a group of users and solve their problems with software...but what if I need help with doing that? yes, I know it's kind of odd thing to ask but when I tried going to a few emetups for a technology that I think is neat I don't think they're so receptive to what I asked about (probably means that I don't have a good solution).<p>So please tell me the story of how you did it. I want to hear your war story or how you got into a group and the glorious victory! :) <comment><USER2> Eat your own dog food, as they say. I'm not a developer, but I'm writing a book for a piece of audio equipment I know and love which has an enthusiastic user base but a rather cryptic manual. After yet another day of informal product support on the forums I asked if anyone would be willing to throw down a few bucks for an e-book and the response was overwhelming.

I'm skeptical about stories of parachuting in and solving problems on a short timescale. It's possible but but you need to build your credibility first. I've been using synths and audio FX for ~15 years and only now am I beginning to feel that I have mastery of this particular craft.

</comment><comment><USER3> Be in that user group (i.e. solve your own problems), then see if that applies to others in said group. You could also research the hell out of that group, join the group and learn the business from the ground up, or befriend a person in said group and shoulder surf (watch for dumb issues or ways to streamline the process). My father is in property management, and their entire industry is starting to go online, this is a good example of where I'm able to offer advice.

See [http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> The best thing you can do is embed, like a journalist in a war zone. Or maybe the better metaphor is an anthropologist, studying humanity by observation and interaction.

Of course, best may not be feasible. So contact and talk to your target group. Find people in it, and ask about pain points. Then make a minimally viable product that addresses one tiny part of it, build a user base, and interate.

<comment><USER3> Just talking to people might not be enough. The people are used to putting up with pain and/or BS process, and they might not see an opportunity starting them in the face.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Go utility to convert numbers from base 10 integers to base X strings - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/enricofoltran/baseconv <comment><USER2> So why don't we just use basecon.py?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi bradknowles, baseconv.py is a python module included in the django web framework, this post is about a standalone library written in Go.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please review my new website - <AUTHOR> http://onesentencereview.com

<comment><USER2> I like the concept, but the site design is really over the top for something that should ideally be very minimal. An entire screen of real estate barely holds 3 "one sentence reviews".

<comment><USER3> Additionally the reviews underneath the movies further down the page are light grey and non-obvious.

That would strike me as something to make obvious - over the film blurb.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this will definitely be on my list of things to fix. When you've been working on something for so long the non-obvious stuff tends blur as you know the site like the back of your hand. Getting a fresh pair of eyes on it really makes a difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great idea, this is typically how people review films and albums to their friends - a short sentence. It will be interesting to see how it develops with more content.

The short sentence format sounds compatible with some sort of Twitter interaction. Have you considered allowing users to tweet their review and use a hash tag to reference your site and the film in question? Or have it the other way round - they can sign in with their Twitter account (or use OAuth) and their review gets tweeted. Those are just quick ideas - there must be something that can be done in this space.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. It's already possible to tweet a review by hovering over it. This should display a few different ways of sharing it. If you select twitter then it will shorten the permalink to the review, add a #onesentencereview hashtag and populate the status with as much of the review comment as can fit in the remaining space.

I have certainly thought of reversing this this by checking for the #onesentencereview hashtag and populating the review that way. Might be a cool weekend project for me to do while watching the Oscars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This site reminds of MG Siegler's (the TC writer) site Reviews in Haiku: <http://reviewinhaiku.com/>

While I like the idea of your site, I think the minimalist approach of Reviews in Haiku is ideal for micro-reviews. I was a little distracted by everything on your site.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> :) That's fantastic. I haven't seen that site before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If your goal for now is to let us give you feedback, you should put in some reviews for movies that everyone has seen.

I haven't seen those three movies, which makes it harder for me to gauge whether the reviews are any good.

On the other hand, some of the music reviews are transparently bad.

I'm not sure if the ratings apply to the movies, or to the reviews. And since the people doing the rating are probably also not sure, that makes the ratings less useful.

Will you have the ability for multiple users to compete to provide different reviews, which then are ranked as they (the reviews, not the items being reviewed) get rated by the community?

I could see this evolving into a cool resource, but it's hard to tell from what you've got so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. The goal is definitely to cover a wider range of movies, not just new releases but new releases seemed like a logical place to start as these would be fresh in peoples minds.

The ratings apply to the movies/music and not the actual reviews themselves so maybe that's something I need to make clearer.

Voting on reviews is something I definitely want to incorporate so that might get pushed up further in the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great looking site.. And that's a really good idea to contain it to a single sentence.

</comment><comment><USER8> What does this do that Rotten Tomatoes doesn't do better?

<comment><USER9> A few years ago, when Rotten Tomatoes began, it was beautiful in its simplicity. Now it's a bloated slow-loading mess. Just a few days ago, I was looking for a simple b.s. free site like this--and here it is!

<comment><USER10> Agree about how Rotten Tomatoes lost its way. But Metacritic does a very good, clean quick aggregation of movie, TV, and game reviews:

<http://www.metacritic.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heh, it's a decent concept, but this site, however, is essentially MetaCritic with less staff.

I actually have a regular feature on my blog (<http://shortformblog.com/>) that's got some stuff in common with this. I call it "One-Word Album Reviews."

Here are a few samples:

[http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-we- for...](http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-we-forgot-the- mainstream-bands-this-week)

[http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-now- we...](http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-now-we-do-them- when-we-feel-like-it)

[http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-no- vam...](http://shortformblog.com/music/one-word-album-reviews-no-vampire- weekend-sophomore-slump)

<comment><AUTHOR> While we may draw some similarities to metacritic we also have the social aspect that they don't. Namely, you can follow other users on the site and see their reviews in your dashboard. You can filter based on people you follow so you only get the reviews from people who's opinions you care about etc...

<comment><USER11> If that's the case, it'd be nice to see a look that was a bit less like theirs. To me, the site feels a little close to its inspiration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Way too complex landing page.

It's like shopping in a grocery store. If you present them with 25 different types of strawberry jam, they become less likely to buy any at all. Because the mental cost of weighing options to make a decision outweighs the expected value.

Same goes for employee savings plans. Employees given too many options for saving plans become less likely to choose a plan at all.

View your user interface as a decision tree. At each level, don't make me decide between more than 5 elements at a time.

Using this logic, I would chunk your Recent Movie Reviews and Recent Music Reviews into one Recent Reviews element to reduce complexity, to move decisions to a lower tree.

But make sure they don't keep deciding between Music\Movies in a bunch of child nodes, they should only make that decision once: Do-No-Repeat yourself philosophy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, great advice. I'll be reviewing the current design and will certainly take this into account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd drop the description on the Music/Movies overview page and add a recent/popular review. get the content of the site one step closer. when the user drills in then give them the description/synopsis.

Have faith in your content! Thats why you want people to visit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's some good advice. I might experiment around with that. "Have faith in your content!", I like it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some of the reviews of movies were two sentences, unlike this review of your website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it used to be that it would check for a period in the users review and prevent them from entering any more text once that was encountered but people started getting around it by-writing-their-reviews-like-this or using commas everywhere a full stop should have been, in the end I just went with the 140 character rule ala twitter. This made more sense since we would be heavily integrating with twitter.

<comment><USER15> onefortyreview.com ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Those feature sentences are so complex that I would have less trouble scanning the information out of a paragraph of easy english.

I love the idea though!

</comment><comment><USER17> "If it fits in a tweet, I don't want to see it anyway."

<comment><USER18> You should tweet that, people would like to see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great idea.

But: what I see there are not reviews, they're summaries. One-sentence reviews would be great, but a review should help me decide if I should see the movie, not summarize the plot. "Intertwining couples and singles in Los Angeles break-up and make-up based on the pressures and expectations of Valentine's Day." is not useful to me at all.

<comment><USER19> Ah hang on.

I see now that you _do_ have reviews. The reviews should be front-and-center on the homepage (and make it simpler), NOT the summaries. I wouldn't even show the summaries, they just get in the way.

Overall, the design is slick but there's too much going on, conflicting with your goal of simplicity in 1-sentence reviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. I can't see the woods for the trees having worked on the site morning, noon and night so it's easy for me to miss these kinds of things. To me they seem obvious, but then they would since I implemented it. I'll be changing this very soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very slick. I only ever read one sentence (from Rotten Tomatoes) anyway, so this fits my usage pattern for reviews.

Are you planning to harvest tweets and other social media to help beef up your review base?

I've bookmarked your site for next time I look up film reviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. One area I feel similar sites are lacking is linking in to the the social space so that's definitely something I'll be doing. Thanks for the bookmark :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://www.opinbot.com/reviews/show/agdvcGluYm90chwLEhVyZXZp...](http://www.opinbot.com/reviews/show/agdvcGluYm90chwLEhVyZXZpZXdzX3Jldmlld3JlcXVlc3QYkk4M)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this the site you were asking about in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622042>

What did you choose ?

<comment><AUTHOR> :) That was for another website. In the end I used the advice I got here and told them to up the offer or to forget about it.

They didn't up the offer enough so it never went any further. It's been about 8 months now and I don't believe they have done anything with their idea so I guess I made the right decision. If you're interested the site mentioned in that link is this one: <http://www.lost.ie>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sorting of reviews maybe? and you should make more stuff clickable -- like your logo for starters.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with with you about the logo. I'll need to fix that. Reviews should be sorted in descending order. Do you mean having an option to change the sort order?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> it's a bit like <http://blippr.com> but no reason there can't be two (or three) similar.

I like the layout, and colours, looks easier to find media than Blippr. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree that the design is a bit overdone, but I don't think it's too bad.

The most annoying thing to me is that several of the snippets are more than one sentence long. :(

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice!</comment>


WeChat ban would be a devastating blow to Chinese families in the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/07/trump-banning-wechat-would-be-devastating-blow-to-some-chinese-families.html <comment><USER2> And how did they survive before WeChat? "Devastating" seems rather hyperbolic. There are multiple alternatives too WeChat. Maybe "inconvenienced" would be a better term.

<comment><USER3> People survived fine without automobile. Taking away their automobiles is "devastating" seems rather hyperbolic. There are multiple alternatives to automobiles, such as bicycles. "Inconvenience" would be a better term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not only to Chinese families in the US, but to anyone internationally with personal connections in China.

Everything revolves around WeChat, from social chats to interacting with interest groups/hobbyists, shops, banks/money transfers of different sizes...

Not to mention foreigners that are long-term residents in China, like myself.</comment>