Consumer Product Safety Commission Issues Official Recall for the Galaxy Note 7 - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/15/consumer-product-safety-commission-issues-an-official-recall-for-the-galaxy-note-7/ <comment><USER2> Finally. Jesus, 97%? I've seen people say they're "taking precautions" but if it's 97% don't touch that thing!

"This recall involved the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone sold before Sept. 15. U.S. officials said that 97 percent of the Note 7 phones sold in the United States have the type of batteries that have caused the fires."

<comment><USER3> Those are the vulnerable phones; the article said 2.5 million are being recalled, but only 92 are known to have caused problems in the US so far. Pretty obviously not all of them are lit bombs with a short fuze.</comment></comment>


Minnesota's burgeoning tech scene sparks demand for coders - <AUTHOR> https://techli.com/2017/08/minnesotas-burgeoning-healthcare-tech-scene-sparks-huge-demand-for-coders/ <comment><USER2> I miss the idea of buying a house outright for the amount that a down payment is going to cost me in Seattle, but I do not miss the cold. When I visit my family in the winter, it amazes me when my eyeballs hurt from stepping outside. You think I am exaggerating, but I assure you: I am not.

All that said, I wish Minneapolis and St Paul all the best. It's a great area, minus the cold: affordable, highly livable, friendly, welcoming, cosmopolitan.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me, or is this article using two different meanings of "coder" interchangeably when it shouldn't?

Seems like searching Indeed for "medical coder" would lead to data entry jobs and the boot camp is software development.</comment>


Servers Deleted - <AUTHOR> http://blog.olark.com/servers-deleted

<comment><USER2> Well this is a given right? I've seen this tip given time and time again, dont scale before you have to. Some may completely object to that but if you are a startup and just trying to get going, grab a server or some resources in the cloud, write your minimum viable product and launch. If you cant handle the load, then scale. Yes you should have a "plan" but that doesnt mean you have to execute it until necessary.

I began my life at a startup 1 year after launch. 3 Servers, 1 web server, 2 app/db servers. As load increased and our needs changed we moved to a more complex structure, 2 load balancers with failover, 2 web servers and still 2 app/db servers but beefier. When life got harder we started optimizing web servers software and the database. When traffic grew past that along came another server cluster scaling us to an even greater degree.

Do we deal with hardware ourselves? No, managed hosting with dedicated servers. Why? Because we want to let someone else deal with the hardware problems. The cloud doesnt have the resources we need. We scale when we HAVE to, as in the site is going down every day because we cant handle the traffic. We run leaner than some of our competitors and we know this because some of them have gone public with their costs, number of developers and server architecture.

1\. Have a plan 2\. Find a hosting company you can scale with easily 3\. Use the minimal resources necessary 4\. When you have to scale determine the cost of optimization vs just adding more hardware. 5\. Be Lean

<comment><USER3> I guess what I was trying to say was don't worry about over scaling. But take some time to make sure you aren't over scaling for 6 months in a row :-).

So I'd argue.

for #3

3) Don't stress out about the minimal resources necessary from day one. Figure out what the minimal resources are over time, and just take advantage of the fact you can delete servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The expense of going with a cloud solution is huge if you have a complicated deployment stack and large hardware requirements. my startup will easily grow into the single 8gig/1tb quad core box we are colocating, and far exceed it when we start seeing some real traffic. From what I expect to need in hardware, I would be sitting at over $3k a month in expense moving to Rackspace Cloud. Ignoring upfront cost of the servers, around $10k, colocating will only run me about $300 a month. I understand you don't have to worry about hardware issues, but I could literally hire a sysadmin to worry about hardware issues for that kind of money. It just doesn't make sense outside of well funded startups or established businesses.

<comment><USER5> _Ignoring upfront cost of the servers_

Assuming perfectly spherical cows..

Actually, I agree with you, being the sysadmin you mention. Unfortunately, the up-front cost seems to be a barrier to many a startup founder. To me, this suggests a lack of good leasing options, though it could be that's because it's not worth making a business out of it.

 _I understand you don't have to worry about hardware issues_

I've always found this assertion to be misleading at best. One still suffers the consequences of hardware failure (both inherent and human error), yet one has very little, if any, ability to prevent them. You're at the mercy of the providers.

 _It just doesn't make sense outside of well funded startups or established businesses._

I'm not sure it makes sense inside them, either. I've found that the break- even point for buying versus cloud is consistently around 10 months. The rule of thumb for when the transition from cloud to colo makes sense for a startup that doesn't yet have any of their own hardware is about $10k/mo, assuming they're growing at a rapid clip.

The only situation where it would make sense is compute-heavy (but light on memory and I/O) loads that peak much higher than the average. I have yet to encounter such a one, since it's tough to meet the parenthetical requirement, thereby bypassing the Deutsch distributed computing fallacies.

<comment><USER6> So if you don't ignore the upfront cost, you break even at the 3 month point using his numbers. His argument is every bit as strong regardless of the shape of your cows.

<comment><USER5> I do agree with the OC, but I also think his situation leans unusually in favor of the colo option.

That is, 3.7 month break-even is a much stronger argument than 10 months, so I'd be interested in hearing what others have found to be the break-even point with various cloud providers.

<comment><USER6> I use boxes in the cloud for various things, but not yet for hosting. We have a couple big fast machines in a cage, of the sort that would cost a grand a month if they were on EC2, that we run all our sites from.

Once you have a single project that justifies the colo box, the marginal cost of starting a new project with a new website is zero. No need to configure a $20/month slicehost box and cross your fingers that it can handle a Redditting. You just put it on the monster box that can handle anything you throw at it until it demonstrates that it needs a big machine of its own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I keep meaning to blog about something like this.

After my old web host made me really mad the other month I decided to grab a load of virtual servers and be my own web host (hosting client sites, projects etc.)

So now I have DNS, database/web servers etc. all under my control on shares that I can chop/change at will.

It's turned out to be phenomenally cheaper! Than having 1 dedicated server and a shard hosting package.

<comment><USER8> I'd be very interested in seeing a blog post detailing that. That would be very useful for hosting client projects. I'm working on a project that aims to be similar to Heroku but runnable on a handful of virtual servers from any VPS service.

<comment><USER9> Phusion Passenger 3 is going to have a feature similar to that: [http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/01/the-road-to- passenger-3-te...](http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/01/the-road-to- passenger-3-technology-preview-3-closing-the-gap-between-development-and- production-rethinking-the-word-easy/)

> _Imagine having a directory full of Ruby web apps, e.g. ~/Sites. To deploy > an app, just drop your application's directory into ~/Sites. To undeploy it, > remove the application's directory. The application directory's name is used > as the domain name. No manually signaling the web server for a restart._

<comment><USER8> While that sounds very useful, what I'm working on is more along the lines of Heroku's distributed dyno model. In their terminology, a dyno is a Thin web application server process. When an app needs to be started up, it will be possible to determine how many dynos are needed, and they will be automatically started up across the grid of virtual servers and balanced using a custom load balancer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can only imagine the horror of running a hosting company. If you want to do it properly, there is no end to complexity. Not to mention the money part.

I've always dreamed about running my own niche hosting business, running on dead-stripped Slackware custom boxes for actual serving/hosting and OpenBSD for routers/firewalls/spamd daemons (actually I would not deal with email at all as it is a separate business in itself) etc. All it takes is few seconds thinking about it and then realizing what a crazy talk that is.

So hats off to providers with a clue! As for the 99% of cookie-cutter companies/resellers, do a favor to everyone and close your doors.

<comment><USER3> Running a hosting company was actually a pretty profitable business back in the 90s. (It probably still can be if you have a really solid niche). I should write some blog posts on our experience (there were many positives).

<comment><USER11> I've been vaguely speculating to myself lately that two good niches might be:

* email * good customer service for a price

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> or just lease servers from a "dedicated hosting" company. you get all the benefits of a colocated server (customizability, security, performance) and you can let them deal with hardware failures, upgrades, and obsolescence.

<comment><USER13> Even this grows into a nightmare. I've been moving dedicated servers to cloud / virtual solutions for the last 4 months.

I'm in love with Rackspace Cloud stuff and their support, and will end up saving thousands while providing my clients with a state of the art email system and more redundancy. Plus, with their cloud servers I can replicate and backup easily.

<comment><USER12> you didn't explain how it "grows into a nightmare". just pricing or what? i just used rackspace's pricing tool to price out what a virtual server would cost with the same amount of ram and bandwidth i get from one of my dedicated servers; the cloud solution was about $40/month higher.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sparklin Wars, multiplayer Web shooter I built over 2 nights - <AUTHOR> http://wars.sparklinlabs.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I built this little Web game with Node.js, Three.js, Socket.io and various other libs. I wrote an overview of the tech used here: [http://sparklinlabs.com/2013/04/craftstudio-beta-release- dat...](http://sparklinlabs.com/2013/04/craftstudio-beta-release-date- sparklin-wars/)

If you have any particular questions about how anything was built, I'd be happy to detail it.

EDIT: By request, I just made the repository public. It's not open source but feel free to check it out if you want to see how it was made - <https://bitbucket.org/sparklinlabs/sparklinwars/>

<comment><USER2> Nice job, thanks for opening the repo.

Simple though the gameplay is, and knowing very little little about {Node,Three}.js, I have to admit the game changed my mind a little about what is possible in "only" javascript.

<comment><USER3> Another game in a similar vein that came up on HN a couple months ago is <http://bombermine.com/> \-- that's the game that changed my perspective about the possibilities for javascript MMOs.

Bombermine's source code is not open though, so it's nice the source code for this one is open, to dig in and see the mechanics behind it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most people just ran around team killing, and I suggest this is because they didn't realize it's a team game at all.

Some suggestions:

* At the beginning of the screen show a message that tells the player 'You are on team RED'

* Add a message for players who are team-killing - like a huge 'TEAMKILL' popping up on their screen.

* Also add a penalty to prevent people from team-killing (like a 10 sec respawn delay)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair points. I already started mitigating this by disabling friendly fire for players with -1 score (that is, as soon as a player has team killed once and made no valid kills, they won't be able to teamkill again until they make one legit first).

Instead of hurting players (-20 health) with friendly fire, I thought it would be fun for teamkillers with -1 score to actually give their teammates +1 health by shooting them. I think some players have started using it as a way to have a "healer class", which is kind of a fun emergent behavior.

<comment><USER4> Oh I see. I was pretty confused why some people wouldn't hurt me with their friendly fire and others would.

It's hard to tell whether the guys shooting at me were really trying to heal me though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quite funny, but (being in asia) it lags. It is visible when pressing a key and have somthing like 500ms delay before my avatar move. Maybe should you cheat me a little and make me believe my avatar has moved (even if he will continue to be in the butllet trajectorie and take damage).

I love the simple easy-zelda-top-view: it is easy to understand what's going on. It has also a very good cooperative feeling: when you meet a teammate, follow him, you will be stronger together. It's easy to understand :)

May I suggest to add a 2nd shoot (as in Realm of the Mad God). A shoot on right click (or space) that start a a basic shoot, but finish on an explosion. This super shoot would be limited by a long cooldown or a mana bar (or any kind of limitation).

<comment><AUTHOR> The server is located in France and it's all TCP (because WebSockets) so the lag might get pretty bad. Like you say, client-side prediction would help a lot with hiding that. Right now I'm just doing some interpolation on the position (no extrapolation at all) so any latency > 200ms becomes quite noticeable.

A secondary weapon would be nice indeed :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the lack of communication, and that people have to interact and learn through "body language". That captures one of my favourite aspects of multiplayer gaming for me, cooperation between total strangers without any detailed planning beforehand, so I wish there was more game elements to apply this to and more rewards for cooperation than just killing and not being killed (capturing a flag that spawns in the middle maybe?). But I enjoyed it very much already, I like the lack of guide & tutorial, the learning by doing, even the friendly fire, and hope you keep that minimalism :D

</comment><comment><USER7> That was a fun start of the day, thanks so much for making this!

I always wanted to make something similar on an RPG basis but never got around to do it...

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you had fun with it! :) - Speaking of Web-based multiplayer RPG, did you try Mozilla's BrowserQuest? <http://browserquest.mozilla.org/>

<comment><USER7> No, I didn't. Ah the tragedy: everything I want to do has been done before ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Make your own anyway and have fun doing it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well... the server is getting hammered and the player list is like... more than full. Going to add some player limit to avoid ruining the game for everybody.

EDIT: OK, server restarted, game is now limited to 20 active players, should help with lag a bit.

EDIT: Lowered the limit to 16, improved some inefficiencies in the network code. Looks like it's running fairly well now.

<comment><USER8> > EDIT: Lowered the limit to 16, improved some inefficiencies in the network > code. Looks like it's running fairly well now.

Might be a fun excuse to play around with an Erlang port:-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I spent a lot of years using wasd and the mouse, but I no longer have a mouse. Anything you can do for us trackpad users?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid the game is pretty much designed to be played with a mouse as it requires precise shooting. I'd love to add gamepad support later on though, should work well with dual sticks ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/API/Gamepad/Using_G...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/API/Gamepad/Using_Gamepad_API))

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very cool, my biggest issue with the game play was just catching on corners. I think it could be very successful with a lot of iteration, richer graphics, and storyline. The basic fun factor is there, which isn't true of many commercial games.

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

I hope to do something more serious with it in the coming months. If anyone cares to be updated, you can follow me on Twitter at <http://twitter.com/elisee>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can tell the ex-counterstrike players who bait their teammates.

</comment><comment><USER12> It took me 3 kills to realise I was team killing! Nice game

</comment><comment><USER13> I really had wayyyy too much fun playing this, for how "simple" it is. I'm very impressed with what was possible in just two nights. Thanks a lot for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for the kind words! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome! Now just add first-person view, and a 3D map, and different weapon loadouts, and classes, and... I may be getting carried away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha yeah, there's a lot I could do: Capture the Flag mode, player skins, Twitter/FB authentication to keep scores across games, various weapons, more powerups, ... I'll see how it goes :)

<comment><USER14> > Twitter/FB authentication to keep scores across games

This is a tech demo of open web standards. Persona! :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice work, amazing that you could crank this out in a couple of nights. Inspirational!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :). I spent a huge amount of time working with those techs lately so I'm pretty familiar with them. It's not like I could have done that from scratch.

Over the last few weeks I wrote a Web player with Three.js / Lua.js to be released with the Beta of my cooperative game-making platform (next week) - <http://craftstud.io/>, and last year I wrote a Google Wave-like thing with Socket.io.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for releasing the source code. Could you give some background info on what the important files do? Such as the ones in the lib folder. Some methods can be guessed from code, but it would be nice to hear an overview from you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This doesn't seem to work well on my MBP. I can't rotate with my trackpad...

</comment><comment><USER18> I love simple games like this, reminds me of the good ol' days. =)

</comment><comment><USER19> Good job for this little game, really funny and addictive continue the good work !

-sequel

A.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very cool!

</comment><comment><USER21> rip trackpad users</comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with narcolepsy - <AUTHOR>

Has anybody here dealt with narcolepsy? Any advice? <comment><USER2> Modafinil seems to be the standard treatment. <http://www.guideline.gov/content.aspx?id=12111> It's only available in patended form now, and so is very expensive. Some insurance plans might cover it. A generic, cheaper version should be available in May 2012. [http://investors.cephalon.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=81709&p=ir...](http://investors.cephalon.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=81709&p=irol- newsArticle_print&ID=802466&highlight=)</comment>


Ask HN: Why does page 2 of HN have discussions from 2 years ago? - <AUTHOR>

Here is a screenshot page 2 of HN's current stories as of today (May 25th, 2012) 11:00 PM CST:
http://i.imgur.com/5u2Q6.png
Discussions # 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 and 56 on page 2 are from several days ago (some even 2+ years old).
What kind of ranking algorithm is being applied? Is there some kind of personalization of stories?
And here's one as of 11:08 PM CST:
http://imgur.com/515ki
Was there some switch announced on the purpose of the More link on the HN front page? <comment><USER2> A bug. Things should improve now.

<comment><USER3> PG you're so fucking cool.

<comment><USER4> I am fairly new here but I think aimless fanboyism is frowned upon here.

<comment><USER5> I also frown upon aimless recital of the "rules" of what's frowned upon "these here parts".

<comment><USER6> No. It's not aimless. HN is a place to share links and discuss things that hackers would find interesting. It's a carefully run community, and we try to keep in cordial and respectful, all while being entirely relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably the server was restarted. Odd things tend to happen when things aren't cached as expected.

</comment><comment><USER8> I experience it often on the ask page.

Since the old threads often have a meaningful number of upvotes and can address topics in which I am interested, sometimes find these threads relevant.

It's not a bug, it's not a feature, it's a side effect.

</comment><comment><USER9> Bottom of page 1 had a year-old story a couple days ago, too. Definitely interesting and unusual.

</comment><comment><USER10> Only on HN will people think a bug that has appeared several times is an unannounced feature.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had noticed that stories where lasting several days in the front page. I thought that some kind of weird traffic plumbeting was happening.

It is an old bug or a recent change that caused this?

</comment><comment><USER12> Check your ping time. Try a traceroute.</comment>


Google has 45 accounts on Twitter: why not just buy them? - <AUTHOR> http://deals.venturebeat.com/2009/07/11/google-has-45-accounts-on-twitter-why-not-just-buy-them/ <comment><USER2> Spammers have thousands of accounts each on Twitter. I don't see anyone suggesting that they should spend a billion dollars to buy the service.

What reason would Google possibly have for ever buying Twitter? I would hope they're gun-shy on large acquisitions after picking up the money sink they call YouTube. At least YouTube has some kind of revenue.

A purchase of Twitter just comes with a huge spam/junk problem and a reputation for technical problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm honestly not sure if this is a brilliant parody of TechCrunch style "journalism" or just the echo chamber that produces quotes like "Google, which probably wants to buy Twitter just because it's hot".

</comment><comment><USER4> Does Twitter even make money? Buying them would end up just like youtube.</comment>


Hybrid Memory Cube nears engineering sample milestone - <AUTHOR> http://www.electroiq.com/articles/sst/2013/07/hybrid-memory-cube-nears-engineering-sample-milestone.html

<comment><USER2> 2 or 4 GB seems quite low in terms of capacity, even if the bandwidth is excellent, and especially for the mentioned HPC applications, where you'd usually expect about that amount of memory _per core_. Does anyone know if DRAM just takes up too much space, or is it realistic to expect commercial devices to have something like 32GB of this type of memory in-package?</comment>


Flying mobile base stations are coming to the UK - <AUTHOR> https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/26/flying-mobile-base-stations-are-coming-to-the-uk/ <comment><USER2> sounds RAD!</comment>


Apploitation in a city of instaserfs - <AUTHOR> https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/apploitation-city-instaserfs <comment><USER2> Of course an article like this would be dead on HN.</comment>


"Please stay at home" and soon "Please install the Covid app" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@legfranck/the-good-and-the-bad-of-apple-googles-privacy-preserving-contact-tracing-744806450be9 <comment><USER2> Never waste a crisis, eh?

Now this disease is the excuse to completely obliterate any remaining fragments of liberty.</comment>


E-waste mining could be big business – and good for the planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44642176 <comment><USER2> The real innovation here is pollution reduction and avoidance with the technique while being profitable. One can technically recycle with more primitive techniques and make a profit if willing to pollute.

Environmentalism like many things in life is about trade-offs.</comment>


Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard' - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-temperatures/evidence-for-man-made-global-warming-hits-gold-standard-scientists-idUSKCN1QE1ZU <comment><USER3> Judea Pearl should have written "The Book of Why" about the millions of preventable deaths attributed to global warming.

Instead, he wrote about, what appears to be the same phenomena, the "cigarettes are bad deniers" of the 1900s.

<comment><USER4> The Book of Why _DOES_ have a section on climate change toward the end - <USER2> actually uses climate change to illustrate the idea of counterfactuals and even provides an example about how to calculate how much man-made carbon emissions X can be a "sufficient" / "necessary" cause of storm Y... GIVEN we can agree on a model.

Among other (likely more polarizing) reasons for why folks remain so obstinate regarding climate change, it certainly is possible that not every involved party may agree to the same model of how climate affects weather</comment></comment>


Top 5 tips to become a productive student entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.college-startup.com/college/top-5-tips-to-become-a-productive-student-entrepreneur/ <comment><USER2> > I've proved to myself that it's entirely possible to have decent grades, a > healthy social life, run your own business, and get ample rest X all during > your college years.

Being in a startup completely destroyed my social life. Also, soon I will begin to feel the full effect of passing up the best opportunities for building a relationship with a good woman.

Perhaps if I had funding then it could have been a little better, maybe not. Having to do the very best in anything is very expensive.

Oh, and you're majoring in painting? Man, I really wish I had that luxury. (seriously, I'm not trying to talk down.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a bit skeptical about this - the about page doesn't make it clear what actual startup the author is involved in if any.

Edit: Now I am even more skeptical about them -- they are selling blog posts (here: <http://www.college-startup.com/products/>).

</comment><comment><USER4> 6\. Straight As in college didn't make anyone a good entrepreneur.</comment>


Stop Fabricating Travel Security Advice - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@thegrugq/stop-fabricating-travel-security-advice-35259bf0e869#.fnbxys6c5 <comment><USER2> Not a fan of "don't do $Things" followed by a;

"Good travel advice to follow in a later post…"

Especially when coupled with bullshit statesments like " A wiped device indicates that you are deliberately hiding something from CBP, who will want to know what it is."

I don't think any of the half-competent suggestions for device security have ever suggested a completely blank device, but even if so, theres absolutely nothing wrong with carrying for travel security purposes, say, a laptop without a hd and only booting from a live-usb. Having plausible deniability could be useful, but since the truecrypt debacle I'm not aware of a good FDE that offers a similar system as easily.

Point being, this just seems like a lazy article cherry-picking particularly bad advice and doesn't even offer better alternatives, indicating an attempt at driving traffic more than providing value in the form of information.</comment>


Ask YC: RFP for carbon calculator ecommerce site? - <AUTHOR>

I work for a renewable energy company that wants to start selling carbon offsets on the internet.  The site would basically consist of a calculator to figure out the carbon emissions from a flight, etc., and would then allow you to "retire" an equivalent amount by purchasing offsets from us.  I have programming experience but frankly this whole ecommerce world seems very complicated.  What would it take to put a site like this together, what resources do you guys use (e.g., not spam baiting), and is anyone out there looking for work? <comment><USER3> Try Scriptlance or RentACoder.

If you're looking for examples of implementations, greenmountainenergy.com has a good one, the EPA has calculator (and data tables for download), sterlingplanet.com has one, nativeenergy.com has one, carbonfund.org has one, terrapass.com is another. Some of the data they're using comes from the transportation energy data book (or digital versions thereof), WRI GHG calculations or ISO 14000 series environmental management methods.

The rest of the problem is the credibility of the verification of the demonstration of additionality of the offsets. Try to adhere to The Gold Standard.

Hopefully you knew most of that already.

</comment><comment><USER4> How about you actually help the environment, rather than sell indulgences? [http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/02...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/02/do_carbon_offse.html)

Perhaps you could setup a social network where engineers doing research into making alternative energy viable post profiles. Users hoping to reduce their footprint could help support the research -- something like kiva.org for the first world.

Funding a few post-docs to make an efficient solar cell will matter more in the long run than all carbon offsets combined.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. While I agree that carbon offsets can seem like a guilt-eraser, I believe they're just another "wedge" in trying to reduce our impact. As I mentioned above my company is a renewable energy consultancy - <USER2> help clients get more efficient with their energy use, and then cut their use of fossil fuels through solar and wind technologies. We even make biodiesel from waste cooking oil. Until we can fly jets without burning petroleum products, I think offsetting is a great way to supplement all the other efforts.

<comment><USER4> The marginal dollar spent to help the environment is best spent on research to make alternatives cheaper than carbon producing fuels.

This means that a reasonable consultancy would always advocate simply spending money on such research.

Things like compact florescent light bulbs are becoming popular. Why? Because there is a cost savings in power over regular light bulbs, NOT because they are good for the environment. Reuse and reduction of unnecessary energy is a good thing. Money spent on alternatives that don't scale into a global solution is money wasted.

But I didn't actually answer your question: what is involved in building such a site?

Briefly, software engineers build up a back end in a language like Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. They are supported by databases like mysql or sqllite. They run on servers rented in a hosted configuration or purchased and installed at a co-location facility like an ISP. The front end involves HTML, javascript, and maybe some Flash. It also involves work to ensure the interaction design makes sense so people know how to use your site.

I answer so generally because your site isn't doing anything too difficult. Lots people could make it.

You'll want to hire people to get this done. Job boards like dice.com might be the way to go, but hiring good people is generally a hard problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> "The Nobel Peace prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report yesterday summarizing over 5 years of scientific research on the impacts and future predictions of climate change. It is not an uplifting read but important that everyone understand the scientific consensus.

"What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." \- Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who heads the IPCC

The paragraph from the report that I found most revealing was the following:

"Climate change is likely to lead to some irreversible impacts. There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature increase exceed 1.5-2.5 degrees C (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5 degrees C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe."

The IPCC's economic analyses say that trend can be reversed at reasonable cost. Indeed, it says, there is "much evidence that mitigation actions can result in near-term co-benefits (e.g. improved health due to reduced air pollution)" that may offset costs."

While I agree that research is necessary, it takes a long time. There are already a lot of grants and VC money going into greentech, but more money doesn't always correlate to faster progress (as all of you know).

<comment><USER4> Subsidizing alternative energy that isn't cost effective won't make it more cost effective.

Also, it will increase the supply of energy, and increase the demand of cheap carbon-producing energy to match. Total energy consumption will increase.

My point is not that climate change is unimportant.

My point is that carbon offsets that invest in the current generation of hopelessly expensive alternative energy approaches will NOT help the situation.

While you think research takes a long time, how long will a net harmful solution take to solve the problem?

Investing in research will help. It is the only long term solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi,

I have looked into writing something like this before. In my case the technology was not difficult to do. The problem we had was regulation, auditing and the fact that no-one could agree which formulas to use. Different studies take different approaches and in our case it was a constant fight between scientists and the government. Banking these credits was also an issue.

If you have above 3 problems sorted out, writing something like this won't impossible.</comment>


Scalable Is Awesome, Literally – Garrett Smith – Erlang User Conference 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://erlangcentral.org/scalable-is-awesome-literally-garrett-smith-erlang-user-conference-2015/#.VY7k9nU4Z4s

<comment><USER2> Author also made [1] and [2], FYI.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs)</comment>


The Atlantic: How One Magazine Became Profitable by Going 'Digital First' - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/12/19/the-atlantic-digital-first/ <comment><USER2> If UPS existed 110 years ago: "After years of horse drawn cartage, we're going petroleum first, and we're very excited about it."

Of course digital first should be the first inclination. Succeed where the success is, not where the past has died.

Good for the Atlantic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Many pubs claimed to go 'digital first' in the mid-2000s (e.g. InfoWorld, a 25 year old publication even dumped print entirely). But the cost of unique content creation often still far outweighed the cost of production. And online, it's still easier to run a "story" about an iPhone rumor to generate traffic than real hard news or investigative journalism. Soon, all pubs start to re-publish the same tired crap in the race for pageviews and everything gets watered down.

Content _can_ be a lot cheaper to produce and promote if you aren't the content originator (e.g. Associated Press is literally everywhere now) but it's death by a thousand cuts more often than not for publishers that go this route.

Unless one has simply massive online traffic, the advertising model that propped up print for so long is broken online. Print is mostly free from delivering hard metrics with the exception of circulation numbers. Online, pure visits and ad impressions are never enough. Thus, an impossible slippery slope forms creating a paradox of expectations between "engagement" with vendor content and "real content."

In all reality, the "digital first" strategy is impossible for many publishers as the subscription dollars are almost free money for them. The lure of another $20 annual subscription is too great. And the growth necessary to survive, so hard.

</comment><comment><USER4> I bet The Guardian is looking very closely at this - they have been losing money for years, and they're going "digital first" too. Let's hope it works out as well for them.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Atlantic has certainly been promoting itself heavily here and on reddit this past years, and catering its content to interests of the net-savvy reader:

[https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=url%3Aycombinator.com+...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=url%3Aycombinator.com+theatlantic.com#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+%22%28theatlantic.com%29%22&fp=1)

<http://www.reddit.com/domain/theatlantic.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Where does it say that the "digital first" part led to profit?

From my point of view the quality of the journalism online made me fork over money, but I don't see how "digital first" comes into this.

<comment><USER7> There's a bunch of stuff about the huge increase in online ad revenue. I think it's a reasonable to assume that this was driven by their "digital first" approach.

Personally, having been a past subscriber to the Atlantic but given up on it owing to never having time to read magazines and only being interested in a subset of the articles in a typical issue, I like being able to read interesting stories when the mood takes me rather than piling the magazines up in the unread pile and then feeling stupid when I realize I missed a really compelling article. (I often found out about articles in my unread magazines on NPR or online.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Glad to hear! The Atlantic Monthly is the only magazine I subscribe to. The content is absolutely worth it, and I feel like I'm supporting something truly needed in society today.</comment>


The Funded Publishes "Ideal First Round Term Sheet" For Founders - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/23/the-funded-publishes-ideal-first-round-term-sheet-for-founders/

<comment><USER2> I really enjoyed reading about some of the common terms and actually finding out what they mean. Anyone got some good resources on pursuing this kind of stuff further for someone with startup interests but little to no investment/finance background?

<comment><USER3> The Venture Hacks archives have a lot of good reading material:

<http://venturehacks.com/archives>

<comment><USER4> I second the Venture Hacks recommendation.

In fact, that entire site should be read by any entrepreneur who wants to grok term sheets. Possibly the best resource to dive into the material, from an entrepreneur's perspective.

Read the blog start to finish, then go buy the Pitching Hacks PDF.

Once you want to gain an understanding of the subtleties of terms, and see different terms considered, check out TheFunded.com.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: 2015 Macbook Experience - <AUTHOR>

What has been your experience with the Macbook? When have you hit practical limitation in your day-to-day coding and hacking around?<p>I have a 13" rMBP, 16GB, but would love to give the Macbook a whirl if it's not completely unpractical. <comment><USER2> I've played with the new Macbook and really like it but haven't actually made the purchase. I have a 2014 rMBP, 16GB and it's a beast. I do a lot of programming and run a lot of builds/test suites and CPU/Memory intensive processes so having the horsepower available is important to me.

The 2015 Macbook pack less of a punch in the name of portability and a sleek design. I think if you are not doing anything "heavy" like running a bunch of VMs or doing heavy computation/builds you should be fine for day to day usage as an average coding folk.

It's my opinion that the new Macbook is a way to get a higher-end machine into the hands of many. It also looks like the Macbook with it's slim design and lighter weight could put some pressure on the MacBook Air line to up its game or could possibly eliminate it entirely.

The 12" Macbook is nice and if I had the money I'd probably buy one, but I'm spoiled to my rMBP 15 even though it weighs a metric ton.

</comment><comment><USER3> My previous laptop was a late 2006 15" macbook pro, so I find my 12" Macbook to be fast enough.

I hope for a suitable external display some day.</comment>


Twitter tells Clearview AI to stop using site's photos - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/technology/clearview-ai-twitter-letter.html <comment><USER2> There, that should stop them.

<comment><USER3> i was gonna say gee i always follow a sites TOS</comment></comment>


Build Uber-for-X within a day using HyperTrack - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hypertrack.com/2017/08/24/build-uber-for-x-hypertrack/ <comment><USER2> If you're considering building an Uber-for-x, why not incorporate as a co- operative - a business model where there is either 1 worker 1 vote or 1 consumer 1 vote (as opposed to 30% of shares being a result as 30% of capital investment)? The reason for this is I think there's a lot of 'bullshit jobs' but this way at least people have ownership over what they are getting involved in and can elect a board etc. Could be a great experiment! There's also unique instruments for fundraising in this sector and opportunities for government funding. There's still a board of directors (elected) and a usual employee hierarchy stemming down from there. Founders can take all that they need to reasonably live on (and retire) in the form of some salary compensation package, with a legacy that creates a social enterprise and goodwill & a recession proof business model (when times are hard - co- opertives are more resilient because of this shared ownership & goodwill. When times are good, profits can be distributed - in addition to everyone's usual pay etc).

<comment><USER3> Co-ops aren't a new idea, and they certainly can survive. But in the two forms I've really seen them in action, they have been a mess.

Form 1: Freelance designer and coder co-op. Top players were continually dissatisfied with performance of their peers and the bargain-basement rates that would result. And their only remedy was to go join a normal company.

Form 2: An employee-owned taxi company with a 100-person board whose response to Uber was, "Oh, we just need an app." However, they couldn't agree to change any of their practices, resulting in people still not being guaranteed service when booking through the app. And no customer feedback or punitive mechanisms for drivers not following through. The system is: Cabbie clicks in on the radio and says "I'll take that fare." After that, if they see an easier-made buck on the way, they divert and grab that instead. The customer doesn't get service.

This is not to say that any given co-op is doomed, but consider this: A community, of which the customer is not part, making decisions in a mostly democratic fashion, will frequently devolve into each member acting and voting in self-preservation within the organization. And with no one to wield a hammer on behalf of the customer, eventually killing the entire organization with a thousand paper cuts.

Were I to attempt something approaching a co-op today, from the ground up, I would want to think very hard about how to create a governance structure that could prevent the organization from cannibalizing itself. Can it be done? I'd like to think so, but I also think it would be very difficult. And dangerous to get wrong.

<comment><USER4> I co-own a grocery store with ~16,000 other people (FoodCoop.com). We've been around since the 1960s and do about $50MM a year in revenue. It certainly has crazy political issues -- there has been a political war within the org for the last few years surrounding just getting together to _vote_ on boycotting certain products, but we offer the freshest, most local and most affordable food in NYC (and this is in one of the most sought after neighborhoods in the city -- Obama once lived in a brownstone down the street from me).

I've been pushing to get our data exposed via API for developers to build apps and one of them I'd like to see built is a delivery service for owners to use.

<comment><USER3> Hello, fellow Park Slope yuppie!

Y'all have a good thing going. I just don't think the co-op model necessarily translates to that many scenarios. Park Slope Food Co-Op depends a lot upon volunteer hours, and operators are customers. I think that's been the distinction in every co-op or co-op-like that anyone has cited as successful. They're customer-owned as much as they're employee-owned.

<comment><USER4> Very true.

All of our owners also must work 2.75 hours a month, and you can't shop at our coop without being an owner.

I have seen some other coops where they have separate pricing for owners vs. members vs. regular folk, but I don't know how successful they are.

About half the reason I joined the coop was to get a look under the hood of how a coop like this works - so far I've been fascinated and learned a lot about human psychology and politics.

In some sense, Uber drivers are also customers, in that they are buying the leads and software from Uber corporate.

I also think if there are ways to have customers also be owners that can be a really great set up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the recent past there had been a burgeoning of startups that wanted to be the uber-for-x, specially in India. HyperTrack was created to address this segment of the market. However, many of these Uber-for-X hyperlocal vendors died a quick death after burning pile loads of investor money.With other startup's providing more end-to-end solutions in terms of route-scheduling and freight packaging(locus.sh) and also the downfall in the number of startups trying to be Uber-for-X, it surely will be interesting to see if HyperTrack's offerings are still relevant.

Btw in 2016, at my previous startup we had used HyperTrack services for tracking of sales personnel on the field. We had issues with accurate location reporting and also there were quite some bugs. We then decided to stop using their API's. I hope that by now these issues are resolved.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback. I am the HyperTrack founder. The customer you are referring to is still using us and volumes are growing. We pushed out a major re-architecture in March 2017. The release added a key dimension to the accuracy model - activity. Activity is computed based on non-location sensors on the device - accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, pedometer, etc. Please give us another shot with your new employer and tell us what you think.

Uber-for-X and on-demand have become bad words just like ecommerce and dot com did in 2000/01\. We are long on the Uberification of every industry out there. And are seeing forward thinking companies of all shapes and sizes use the power of the smartphone location/activity to build awesome features to grow revenues and reduce costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug: I'm one of the founders of TalkJS, which is essentially the HyperTrack of messaging.

If your brand new Uber-for-X needs great user-to-user chat (like Uber itself recently added), consider adding TalkJS within the same day. [https://talkjs.com](https://talkjs.com)

<comment><USER7> Oh wow, HN changed! A few years ago, posts like this were frequent and well appreciated. Are my downvotes just some lone angry people or am I losing a sense of the community rules?

<comment><USER8> i don't think i'm lonely or angry. i'm just not super fond of irrelevance _or_ self promotion. so using one as a platform for the other kind of rubs me the wrong way.

on one hand, who am i to arbitrate relevance? on the other hand, i really think you're pushing it.

"HyperTrack of messaging" \-- you are using "HyperTrack" here, the proper noun, as an analogy for "SaaS". TalkJS is "SaaS of messaging". and i think "hey i have a SaaS product too!" is too broad to be contextual.

a similar scenario would be an employee of Stripe posting in this thread, promoting Stripe. sure they could argue it is relevant. i'd argue they are trying a _little too hard_ to make it so.

forgive me if i've missed something.

<comment><USER7> I see your point, and I very much appreciate your candor.

That said, there's more commonalities between HyperTrack and TalkJS than just that we're both SaaS - both products help you build a marketplace type platform faster. HyperTrack makes it easy to build location sharing between your users, we make it easy to build message sending between your users. Most SaaS products, even most chat products, don't have that dynamic. You can't use Intercom or Slack to build user-to-user messaging on your platform, just like you can't use Google Maps or Mapbox to (easily) build realtime location sharing on your platform.

About your Stripe example: I agree about Stripe in general, but as a matter of fact their Stripe Connect product happens to be a miraculously great fit, becaue it's a service for _user to user_ payments. HyperTrack + Stripe Connect + TalkJS means you can have a functional Uber with all bells and whistles in just a few days.

I felt it was on-topic because this article isn't just about HyperTrack, it's about building an "Uber for X" in a single day.

<comment><USER6> Hey Egbert, found your post useful. I have worked with the good folks at Stripe Connect as an early user (Pay with OpenTable). The Uber-for-X in a day package makes a ton of sense. Needs location, messaging, payments, perhaps an order management framework. What could the next steps be to put this together?

<comment><USER7> Cool! I've sent you a DM on Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great example of using this API.

Seems like a no-brainer for HyperTrack to make a template app so that this becomes even simpler. Their example setup seems very agnostic to the system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. We did open source an example app for service-visit use case ([https://github.com/hypertrack/service-visit-example- android](https://github.com/hypertrack/service-visit-example-android)) some time ago. To make it even simpler, we developed a walkthrough ([https://dashboard.hypertrack.com/onboarding/](https://dashboard.hypertrack.com/onboarding/)). Do you think the walkthrough is what's required?

P.S. There are a few more example apps (that use HyperTrack) that we open- sourced. Do check [https://github.com/hypertrack](https://github.com/hypertrack). Would love to get your thoughts.

<comment><USER10> Awesome idea!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess they're selling shovels ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> This comment is slightly OT, but this post prods at something I've been thinking about lately. Pessimistically, most programming is just writing a CRUD app with a layer of business logic over the top. Why haven't we been able to abstract or at least vastly accelerate that? Does anybody have any related reading/longform articles on this idea?

<comment><USER13> I've been irked by this issue for quite some time.

My temporary conclusion is that the MVC pattern and defining constraints in a text-based programming language (as opposed to the visual drag-n-drop languages commonly used in software generation systems) is the best abstraction we can come up with without making the framework so rigid it suffers from leaky abstractions and hence comes apart rapidly.

It might seem like mostly clerical work and it isn't exactly accessible to non-programmers but the tools and frameworks commonly used for creating CRUD apps already abstract away a lot of the plumbing code that used to be necessary to do this.

Although on the surface most CRUD apps at least conceptually look exactly the same the devil often is in the details: Legacy databases, weird interfaces and data formats, data has to be imported from Excel, you name it.

Regenerating / modifying an app upon model changes can become particularly arduous depending on how frequently those changes occur.

If your data model conforms to some constraints though creating a run-of-the- mill CRUD app with tools like Spring Boot, Swagger and a generic, declarative UI is both fairly easy and robust.

As soon as the UI has to accommodate more specific use cases or you want to provide a more focused, less one-size-fits-all UX a mostly automatically generated UI however will fall apart rather quickly again.

By the way, at its core Uber is a CRUD app, too, isn't? Perhaps we don't need a generalised CRUD app generator but rather very specific app generators like this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A logistic version would be way more beneficial. Basically an pick up a container and deliver it option.

A lot of effort is spend on just contacting either individual drivers or many small companies just to see who can pick up 1 container. This often done via multiple phone calls.

This "Uber-for-X" assumes you need it right now. Usually in logistics you don't; it's just the hassle or figuring out who can do it ahead of time.

<comment><USER15> [https://freight.uber.com/](https://freight.uber.com/)

Seems Uber is looking at tapping into the larger logistics market itself

<comment><USER6> Yea sure is. There is only so much of the world that Uber will capture even as the largest in the space. For everything else, the world would need a way to use a location stack that can compete with the might of Uber, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just two months ago was I looking for something like this! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600873)

</comment><comment><USER17> Would it be possible to move away from HyperTrack at some point, without losing all your customers to HyperTrack?

Iow, do they "control the gates"?

<comment><USER18> Arjun from HyperTrack here. We are building a developer tool that integrates with your in-house stack. Here's how some one can move away from HyperTrack.

\- HyperTrack does not store any information about your end customers, or reach out to them. We empower you with information that can be sent to them. Eg, "your order is being delayed by x mins" is available as a webhook, which you can potentially use to fire a notification to your customers.

\- In addition, all data that is collected and visualised is accessible via APIs. Developers can retrieve data, and store it in-house.

\- The HyperTrack mobile SDKs will be open source, and it will be possible to hook it up with a different backend. This will allow you to utilise the robustness of the SDK without relying on our backend.

Does that answer your concerns?

<comment><USER17> Yes, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tried looking at their FAQs link off that page but it doesn't open to any page, static or not static.

I'm guessing it's a course or tutorial for a tool or a service but if the FAQs don't show up from the outset, not sure I could take it to my bosses at this time.

<comment><USER6> Ouch! A recent content reorg led to the trailing html getting nuked. Use this: [https://www.hypertrack.com/faq](https://www.hypertrack.com/faq). Fixing it on the blog... Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just a hint: [https://www.hypertrack.com](https://www.hypertrack.com) on iOS Firefox (current version) is just a white page for me.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is super cool. I've been looking at HyperTrack for the last couple of weeks. I'm curious what other use-cases or features others might imagine with this platform?

<comment><USER6> Thanks Chris. This is Kashyap, HyperTrack's founder/ceo. Your work with Uber APIs and Trip Experiences was awesome and remains an inspiration. I would love to see an integration between HyperTrack and Trip Experiences.

When we started, we imagined that apps for work would find us most useful. We have been surprised with the number of apps for consumers who tinker with our stack for building live location sharing and geofencing use cases. For example, a messaging app used us so groups that were meeting up (for beer, say) could track each other in the same map fragment. Another developer used us to profile the places (bars, say) where a user's social graph hangs out. They used it to make better recommendations. Do you think stuff like that has room to grow?</comment></comment>


Space Monkey: Taking the cloud out of the datacenter - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-taking-the-cloud-out-of-the-datacente <comment><USER2> Without much more technical detail, it's hard to say if this is technically sound, but I've never seen a tech project better suited to Kickstarter. Here's a product that absolutely depends on having lots of early adopters, and using Kickstarter means that unless it has those adopters, you won't be investing in its inevitable failure.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it. How does it work?

How big is the hard drive in there? Judging from the price, the disk inside can't be much bigger than 2TB. That means if I have 1 TB of data and all the other have 1TB of their own data, it can only "replicated" exactly once (unless there are dedicated "cloud" servers involved), Which means, if my device breaks all devices which received a portion of my data need to be online for me to restore the content.

How does the encryption work? Surely the AES key can't be stored on the device - if it breaks your data is lost. If it's stored in the cloud it's not any safer than cloud storage.

<comment><USER4> also getting multiple levels of redundancy doesn't necessarily need 1 X redundancy_level physical storage. see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasure_code> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Comparison>

<comment><USER5> Does this work with encrypted data, though? Properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data...

<comment><USER4> yes, the concept of erasure codes just works with the raw bits. so it would work equally for encrypted/unencrypted data from the wikipedia page, it "transforms a message of k symbols into a longer message (code word) with n symbols such that the original message can be recovered from a subset of the n symbols"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is a step both in the right direction, and the wrong direction. This attempts to mitigate issues with cloud storage by giving you hardware to keep (actually a really good idea! It reduces latency and allows for file recovery) but the service is still controlled by a company/central hub. If the hub fails, the system fails. We need a system that works fully distributively (and preferably open source so anybody can add more nodes)

<comment><USER2> Also, there's really no reason for this to be a special device. It easily be a blob on your computer's hard drive. An availability problem for laptops, but you'd best have that problem solved anyway since residential internet connections aren't exactly 100% uptime affairs.

<comment><USER7> _Also, there's really no reason for this to be a special device._

It will vastly increase reliability, though. I can think of many reasons why having it on a general purpose hard drive is a really bad idea (turned off accidentally, freezes due to bad apps, virus infection, etc, etc).

<comment><USER2> Come to think of it, there's really no reason you couldn't do both, and I wonder if this system does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> File stores like this have been pretty common place for a long time now actually -- systems like Freenet, WASTE, etc.

Interesting to see someone stepping up and delivering a consumer-friendly experience on top of such technology. It's incredibly useful but reliant on a healthy network of peers. A plug-in-and-forget solution with good clients that integrate well into the ecosystem of devices we use today, I think, is very clever.

I'd prefer to see something open-source but this is definitely a step in an interesting direction. Personally I limit my use of "cloud," services because I don't trust other people hosting things like my contacts list, calendar appointments, etc. I do see the benefit and convenience of such services though and if this device/service is capable of synchronizing more of that data from my applications between my devices I would buy into it in a heartbeat.

I hope the kickstarter goes well and this thing takes off (or something similar... again, open source is preferable).

<comment><USER9> It isn't quite obvious from the kickstarter, but it doesn't seem to be decentralized and anonymous like Freenet (dont know about WASTE), which I thought was the main point of Freenet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How much of your terabyte is yours? The duplication seems to be at least three times (more?), so that would be 333GB. Note: it doesn't matter how finely you cut it up, you need duplication to avoid loss.

It can be ameliorated by the cloud tricks of compression and git-like copy- detection across nodes (people downloaded the same movie, music, image, document, software etc) giving aggregate savings.

Of course, most people won't use their full quota initially, and meanwhile more adopters come online with fresh excess capacity... a kind of ponzi- scheme/chain-letter (to be fair, as drive prices fall over years, units will likely become 2TB, 4TB etc).

<comment><USER11> except you can't deduplicate against what other people have backed up (multiple people backing up the same movie, etc) and encrypt your backups. If my backups are being put on a device owned by someone else, I want that encrypted so they can't read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I met these guys when they launched at either Calacanis' Launch.co or Arrington's Disrupt. I remember them winning the event too.

Good idea, but I question the scalability of the solution. How does deduplication work on remote devices if you have a lot of them. Is there a checksum of the file against a central server? Curious.

<comment><USER13> They launched and won the Launch Conference. That doesn't necessarily de-risk their plans from a technical perspective, but they got some validation from those who vetted the team and product already on the conference and judges panel side of things.

<comment><USER12> They also had already raised funding prior to going on stage :/. I like this idea but there's a lot of technical hurdles that I never hear answers to :(.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Peer to peer backup? Reminds me too much of Skype Supernodes. The premise is sound but in reality you're paying $10 a month to help distribute other people's data via your own bandwidth? This goes both ways, of course, but how long until someone finds a way to make their SpaceMonkey exclusively a network leecher, only fragmenting owner's backup but not delivering other people's data?

I could be entirely wrong, of course, someone correct me please.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't need to be "hacked" - you just need to constantly churn your 1TB while someone else puts 500MB up and adds a photo a month. Effectively you are leeching.

Correct me if I am wriong but this is storing data as torrents and each device is a torrent client and store box?

<comment><USER14> You're right. People could do that to save their upload bandwidth, because unless you route your network through the device it can't know how much of your bandwidth it's stealing and if you're currently using it etc. I suspect most of the target audience doesn't have QoS properly setup in their routers.

I'm not sure how valid the torrent analogy is in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's really no question about whether or not it will get funded in my mind; the early-bird option alone (which is half sold out) will take them to 50K - half of their goal. I bet this funds today.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this just a fancy interface to Tahoe-LAFS? <https://tahoe- lafs.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html>

<comment><USER17> I suspect this as well - the part where they talk about "even if half of the remaining nodes disappeared" makes me think that a Tahoe (or tahoe style) technology is behind this.

Interestingly, the Tahoe people have their own product to offer:

<https://leastauthority.com/>

... although I have no idea what state of production that is in ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm waiting for the day that a hacker takes over their central update server and bricks all devices worldwide and makes them non-upgradable (or makes them into bots). How would you deal with that? Ask them all to send it in?

Not sure if I like this. $10/month for a TB is the same as Amazon glacier. Sure that's not the same since Glacier is for archival but still... It's not THAT cheap.

<comment><USER19> (a) I think that's the same problem that all consumer devices have that "phone home" for updates; game consoles, TiVos, smart TVs, VoIP phone adapters, etc.

(b) If all you need is archiving of your stuff, and you don't want ongoing fast access to your movies, music, photos, etc., then sure. Glacier is probably a better fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why would I want this? I can use CrashPlan to backup my files to the 'cloud' safely. I don't care where it's stored, as long as it's safe. For fast access and high availability I could just buy a hard drive instead of a device that acts like a hard drive but instead stores other people's files on it.

<comment><USER21> If all you want are backups, then no, I don't imagine this is very compelling.

The idea is to actually access these files regularly from more than one computer. Hence the web interface and the emphasis on mobile devices. It could also serve as a media library for various devices, not just in your home, but presumably anywhere.

Dropbox and plenty of others basically do this already, but $10/mo at Dropbox only gets you 100GB. And I don't think it does streaming, though I could be wrong.

Personally, I'm curious how they access the files externally. The device must act as a server, I suppose, but it seems like firewalls would present an issue to less technical people. Maybe they just assume those people would never buy this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really like the design. What I'd like to see is a device with a design like this that also has:

\- options to pair up with specific other devices for the backups (family, trusted friends etc)

\- a web app for posting status updates etc (implementing tent.io?)

Basically the things social networks offer now, but with you owning your own data.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why is this a subscription pricing model?.. if all the data is stored on peers Space Monkeys, then the only ongoing cost of keeping it running is electricity for the unit and bandwidth for the connection.

Unless it's a way to draw out more money over time from the user?

<comment><USER19> Yeah, Space Monkey is a business, and we hope to be able to make at least some money off the whole deal in the end.

But also yes, there are nontrivial ongoing costs to keeping the network working and working right. For example, we need dedicated online servers to allow NATted devices to talk to each other, coordinate storage use, and deploy security patches and bugfixes, and we want to add more features over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So if I'm interacting with other users' devices, why am I paying $10/month?

This seems like a great (nay, genius) idea if you just buy a device that accepts a standard 3.5 inch HD, half the space is yours, half is for distributed backup, no monthly fees, just the upfront $ for the box itself..

</comment><comment><USER25> While engineer in me loves edge distributed and duplicated shards of encrypted data, does the business model hold up against the economies of the giant cloud providers doing it all in a few of their data centers?

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds interesting, but I'd want to know what the estimates are for up/down bandwidth monthly. US data caps are common and tech like that could suck them up pretty quickly...

<comment><USER27> Both upload and download can be capped in the Preferences.

Upload, where bandwidth limits are the worst, is almost entirely based on replicating data you've added to Space Monkey.

(I have an alpha Space Monkey device.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The early-bird option is already selling like hot cakes.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is actually a really interesting device. I wonder how it works for a household though. Can there be different accounts setup per user?

</comment><comment><USER30> It'd be nice if this was paired with BTC microtransactions for paying the owners of the devices that your blocks are on.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does this use <http://ceph.com/> ? Seems to take a similar approach.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone know the Seagate device they used for their 'Alpha Test Network'?

<comment><USER33> Seagate Goflex Home. [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148614)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Where is the encryption done and who has the keys?

How reliable is the network - will you be able to cope with Sandy style blackout?

Will there be a software component in which I designate a hard drive on my (always on) pc and skip the external device entirely?

How many times the data will be backuped?If only twice than if my home device get stolen/eaten by a rabbit/simply breaks then it is needed only one hardware failure somewhere else in the system to have stuff lost forever.

<comment><USER19> The encryption is done on the device. Other people's devices (obviously) won't have your encryption key, but since Space Monkey will have a web interface to get at your files, you can tell that Space Monkey will have access to your key.

Regarding durability, the Kickstarter page mentions:

        Q: Is my data safe?

        A: Yes! Super safe. Here's why: when you put files in
        Space Monkey, you not only have a copy of everything on
        your Space Monkey device, but each file is chopped up into
        tiny pieces, encrypted, then stored to dozens of locations
        outside of your home, in such a way that even if half of
        those locations were destroyed, all your files would still
        be safe.

We (yeah, I work there) are gonna be taking the reliability and privacy of the network VERY seriously; no one would want to use a storage service that loses your data.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if I may suggest the book:

_Normal Accidents_ by Charles Perrow

Please, please read this book RE: complex, tightly coupled systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> tl;dr Space Monkey is a subscription-based Dropbox with a home NAS that replicates data offsite.

They require hardware/software/network engineering, manufacturing, support, sales, and more scaling to support these products.

I still don't understand how exactly they store all the data since this is supposed to be removing datacenter overhead, not adding to it. From what i've read it sounds like the home devices themselves are the redundant storage for all the other customers. Which sounds terrible.

<comment><USER16> It doesn't just replicate data off-site, it duplicates and distributes your data to other spacemonkey users. It's like P2P cloud storage.

<comment><USER35> ...Yeah, that's what I said. Still sounds bad, for three reasons: bandwidth, redundancy and availability.

Bandwidth is a simple consideration. In America we really haven't caught up to the bandwidth of most other 1st-world nations. Some reports give the average download speed of American broadband users at 7.1Mbps. Netflix reports the highest average broadband speed is with Google Fiber, at 3.45Mbps. Large swaths of the country still operate on 1.5Mbit connections or less, with upload caps being more like 256Kb for those users. Due to the disparity in speeds we can assume most of our transfers from home users would be limited to relatively slow speeds, not to mention (supposedly) using idle bandwidth.

If you need your files, how long is it going to take to get them? Assuming something like 2.5Mbps down, and if there were five copies of your data transferred at 256Kbps, that's 160KBps. Downloading at that speed would take 77.6 days to download the entire archive.

Then there's redundancy to consider. Disk drives are limited in capacity. Currently 4TB drives are available, with 5TB by the end of the year. To give each customer 1TB of storage while still storing other customer data on the device, you have to decide first how redundant you want the data.

If you have a fancy algorithm you can store hundreds of clients' data on the device. Maybe they only have a couple small files, so they can be replicated in lots of places in a small amount of space. But eventually the files will grow in size, so you'll have to remove some redundant copies to make room for maximum capacity. Let's assume they use something like RAID-6, because RAID-5 is shitty for large capacity small arrays. Since we assume a 4TB hard drive, we can have N-2 storage, so for 4TB that's 2TB; make it N-3 storage and you can fit 1TB of user data and 3TB of random customer parity.

With maximum capacity use, if three replicated copies of your data go away, your data goes away. How likely is this to happen? This[1] article explains how as drives increase in capacity they aren't increasing in reliability, which results in faster unrecoverable errors. As time goes by it's more likely your data will be lost.

This is assuming your data is available. If their software engineers are smart they might develop an algorithm that can take into account actual used space and add or shrink the number of replications across the network based on availability. So even if you have used 1TB of data, as long as other people have extra free space, you can keep replicating copies of your data to more devices. Sounds good!

Let's say your data is replicated on five devices. One device holding your data fails and is sent in for repair. Another is taken offline because the owner's internet connection is taken offline by a storm. Yet another is available, but is on a very slow connection. Your data is now on two devices. Sounds fine.

In the event that your device is unavailable, you will be able to replicate your 1TB from the two people who hold parity copies of your data. How much data that is, and how long it takes to recover, and whether or not that transfer puts one of their devices over the limit for a URE, is subject several factors.

Of course, there's many more factors to consider here, and i'm not an expert in any of them. But before you trust your data to a $10-a-month service, ask yourself: How reliable is the drive, how fast is the connection, and how much do you really need your data?

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-6-stops- working-i...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-6-stops-working- in-2019/805)

<comment><USER33> 1\. Each node is paired with nodes that are "alike", and bandwidth is considered. You should only be paired with other nodes that have bandwidth similar to you.

2\. Restoring backups takes a while. It's just the way it is. But the client should be smart enough to get prioritized data first -- if you need to open a picture, it should fetch that first, so you can open it right away.

3\. Files are broken apart and stored in chunks, so "growing size of files" is irrelevant.

4\. The probability of your data being lost doesn't increase over time. The node is constantly checking the status of your backups. If a chunk is missing over a long period of time, it will back it up again. Redundancy is only part of the solution -- some missing chunks are recoverable through erasure encoding (like in the article you mentioned). Your node backs up to hundreds of other nodes, reducing risk of failure. Think of having 200 drives in an array instead of 7.

5\. The article is somewhat FUD. Making projections for 2019 based on hardware speed where we're at now? Many embedded devices are already replacing ARM processors with dual core intel. As data sizes increase, our processing power will also increase.

<comment><USER36> 3\. I think he was referring to aggregate file size (total amount stored) not a single file. If that's the case, his point still stands.

4\. He was probably saying that, as the average age of the nodes in the network goes up, the chance of them failing goes up. Also, the duplication you say (hundreds of copies) is in direct opposition to usable space (hundreds of copies means you can only use 1/100 of the space on your node. Because of this, I don't think your files will ever be duplicated on the order of "hundreds", probably less than 10. Also, it's important to keep clear: My node will backup to hundreds of other nodes, but each individual file fragment will only be duplicated to 3 (or whatever) nodes. That smaller number is the important one that keeps getting discussed.

<comment><USER19> There won't be hundreds of copies. A device may back up data to hundreds of other devices in total, though.

Space Monkey data will be resilient to considerably more than 3 nodes failing.

<comment><USER35> Hundreds of devices storing small files on your one hard drive could be more iops than the device can handle. Does Space Monkey account for other users potentially killing the performance of a single device?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bridging analytics and data science workflows with GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://www.omnisci.com/blog/announcing-omnisci-4.8 <comment><USER2> A few comments:

1\. I'm usually down on dark-mode but this looks clean as hell 2\. The JupyterHub integration looks nice! It was mentioned in the article it was the "tip of the iceberg" I'm wondering how hard it would be to integrate with a tool like Observable.

Observable: [https://observablehq.com/](https://observablehq.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We're big Observable fans, and you can find quite a few examples here: [https://observablehq.com/search?query=mapd](https://observablehq.com/search?query=mapd) and [https://observablehq.com/search?query=omnisci](https://observablehq.com/search?query=omnisci). But imagine we could do something deeper, any thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Mike Bostock's notebook here is a great starting point, showing how to import and use mapd-connector [1] in an Observable notebook and then feed its data into a vega-lite chart:

[https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/hello-mapd- connector](https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/hello-mapd-connector)

[1]: The Javascript client for connecting to OmniSci, [https://github.com/omnisci/mapd-connector](https://github.com/omnisci/mapd- connector)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The support for JupyterLab looks great and +1 for Dark Mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @jonbaer, and lot's more exciting stuff to come!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dark Mode looks amazing. So clean.

I'm looking forward to exploring the integration with Jupyter.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does it scale?

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out this example crunching 1.45 billion rows on my 32GB Macbook Pro (CPU-only). [https://twitter.com/ToddMostak/status/1162067442081751040?s=...](https://twitter.com/ToddMostak/status/1162067442081751040?s=20) With a GPU cluster it's very possible to handle 100+ billion rows with sub- second response times.</comment></comment>


Overjustification effect - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

<comment> mark-r Reminds me of the children's book "Something for Nothing" which took the principle a step further. When some cats started trashing a dog's house just for fun, he offered to pay them to do it. The next day he paid more but made them work harder for it. And again etc. Finally he said he had no more money, and the intrinsic motivation of the rogue cats was gone - he never saw them again.</comment>


Ask HN: Paid to go to a conference, but forced to take a day off what to do? - <AUTHOR>

A friend works for an rather successful Italian startup.
As a developer, he'll be sent to a good conference this year. They'll pay him hotel and flight ticket. So far so good. But... They force him to take that day off, (holiday!)
I wonder how is it with USA/UK startups? If you're paid to go to a conference, will you have to get holiday for that day? What will you do if that happens to you ? <comment><USER2> I'd say take it. It is a nice thing to go to a nice conference if it's not an usual thing. In any case the fact that this is happening from an italian startup doesn't surprise me. As an italian I have seen worse things.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a total cost to the company of sending your friend to the conference. It consists of the conference, flight & hotel costs _and_ your salary costs for that amount of days.

This is simply the company offering to pay your friend for the former but not the latter. It's of course nicer to have everything paid, but it's also a better offer than having to pay for the conference _and_ take days off.

As you will be expected to pay for part of this (through taking days off) this is an _offer_ however and he/she can't/shouldn't be forced to accept it.

P.S. Keep in mind that this structure is the most tax-efficient way to sponser said trip to the conference in most European countries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, he could just say no, it's true.

Surely what he could learn from a conference will also be very useful to the startup too.</comment></comment>


Firefighters attempt to contain blaze ahead of the winds expected Thursday night - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-southern-california-wildfires-live-firefighters-attempt-to-contain-bel-air-1512605377-htmlstory.html <comment><AUTHOR> The article mentions that police are asking people to avoid using navigation apps because the apps are recommending the low traffic roads in burning neighborhoods.

I submitted it mostly because I'm curious if anyone has direct experience implementing geofencing for such situations (which seems like a fairly straightforward feature for a heavily used navigation app).</comment>


Show HN: Visualize your life - <AUTHOR> http://lifetimeofweeks.com/
Just created this over the weekend.  Would love any feedback, bugs, thoughts, enhancement ideas, etc. <comment><USER2> I like the idea and had some fun play around with OP's website. I like the footnote on not collecting any data. Hope OP get more attraction.

</comment><comment><USER3> please use dd/mm/yyyy format, or provide calendar picker

<comment><USER4> Absolutely not. ISO 8601 exists to facilitate international information transfer, and if you are working in any context which remotely requires that, it should be your first and only choice.</comment></comment>


Internet mob justice is out of control - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9074865/cecil-lion-palmer-mob-justice <comment><USER2> Whenever I see the Internet Hate Machine in full spin I'm reminded of the following quote:

 _" The sage of Toronto [Marshall McLuhan] had formerly spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by the 'global village' instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity."_ \- Guy Debord, Comments on The Society of the Spectacle, 1988

I'm not very familiar with Debord or _The Society of the Spectacle_ but the analogy always struck me as well suited to the darker, more banal side of the modern Internet.

<comment><USER3> Somewhere in this amazing 1967 documentary, McLuhan defines the global village as "everybody minding everybody else's business". It's astonishing how much he got right.

[http://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan](http://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The point of the article—that it's important to remember that mob justice is no more appropriate when directed against a deserving than an undeserving target, precisely because the mob can't be trusted to decide who's 'deserving'—I think is well taken, but this seems a bit much:

> His dental practice is closed at the moment, and his harassers are gleeful > that they are denying him an income. But this also inflicts harm on people > who did not kill Cecil the lion. Palmer's family presumably relies on his > income. So do his employees, whose livelihoods are now threatened as well. > When a Reddit user pointed this out, over 1,500 users voted in support of > the response that "His employees are better off working elsewhere." The mob, > naturally, has shown no intention of helping to find new jobs for the > innocent dental employees it is seeking to put out of work.

Presumably, the same, or almost the same, outcome (of his dental practice being closed, not the other harrassment) would occur if he were, say, imprisoned for his actions after a lawful trial, but no-one would claim that it was the court's responsibility to "find new jobs for the innocent dental employees it is [putting] out of work."

EDIT: I know downvote-complaining is out of place, but silent downvotes in response to serious argument is a pain. I certainly could be wrong, but I intended my contribution to be a constructive part of the discussion; please explain to me what's wrong or why you disagree!

<comment><USER5> maybe the rise of internet "mob justice" is in part due to the masses losing faith in traditional forms of justice. Doesn't make it right or wrong, just a reflection.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's about losing faith, so much as formalized careful justice being contrary to human nature.

I remember learning that ancient Athens had the same problem, with demagogues stirring up emotions to talk the assembly into doing all sort of stupid shit.

The more available group over-emotionality is, the more effort is required to suppress it in favor of reasoned responses.

<comment><USER7> This. 100% this. The left over ape in U.S. Yells "get um!" When it's angry. Formalized justice exists to mitigate this. The internet has just made it so much easier for mobs to organize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since most Mobs don't even bother to verify their Information, People have gotten harassed, received death threats and lost their jobs on purely fictional Information. Or committed suicide, like Sunil Tripathi [1].

This is inacceptable.

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

<comment><USER9> I just read the Wikipedia page and nothing in it said he committed suicide due to being harassed on fictional information from online.

In fact, he had already been missing a month when he was accused. And his body was found shortly after.

<comment><USER8> Then take german model Claudia Boerner instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It isn't mob justice, it's media justice. Without enough money or reporters to report on serious news, they report on irrelevant outrage like this -- and then claim it's popular outrage, when they themselves fanned it.

<comment><USER7> Honestly no one but people over their 30s watches the news anymore. These are not the primary members of these mobs. The classical media is more or less over.

<comment><USER11> The media also include web journalists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gamergate, as far as I can tell, is not an "online harassment campaign". I can see a lot of things that could be considered online harassment campaigns directed _toward_ that group(and anyone they can claim to be associated with them), for certain.

It has not been a movement of targeting women in technology, only people who seek to upset it for speaking fees and nervous group applause.

Sounds like a bit of doublethink, if you ask me.

<comment><USER13> So what does Gamergate _do_?

<comment><USER12> In short, "Gamergate" doesn't "do" anything, because it has no physical manifestation. Not only does it fail to be a noun, it fails also to be an adjective.

#GamerGate is actually just a hashtag, the context for the hashtag was(and for the most part continues to be) that some (gaming-related) rags, for example Kotaku, are deeply unethical and don't seem to care until it hurts their bottom line.

This is why for example, in response to the support drummed up in association with the #GamerGate hashtag, the Society of Professional Journalists is actually hosting an debate series on it (the event is called AirPlay, and will happen mid-August).

Because some of the people involved in the breaches of ethics surrounding media sites like Gawker-run Kotaku were "feminists", and as a result of the association of feminism as an ideology with women as a people: some people can't help but see #GamerGate as an affront to women because "feminists" are involved in the controversy, and on the other side.

Worse still, the typical #GamerGate poster is so consistently well-behaved that opposing commentators have relied on false-flag campaigns, one famously by a Gawker Media employee.

All the while, there's that tingling sensation of your brain realizing that it really is just a hashtag, and not an ideology.

<comment><USER13> > I can see a lot of things that could be considered online harassment > campaigns directed _toward_ that group(and anyone they can claim to be > associated with them), for certain.

> #GamerGate is actually just a hashtag

Well, if Gamergate is merely a hashtag, and so didn't do anything—then opponents of Gamergate aren't an online harassment campaign either, since they're merely the _lack_ of a hashtag!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The formal justice system derives it decision-making from written laws and generations of precedent; it is adjudicated in a highly formal and regulated environment. It is often flawed, but is at least designed with the goal of fair and consistent treatment for both the accused and the accuser."

So if it fails while having had good intentions, there's nothing more to be done?

<comment><USER4> > So if it fails while having had good intentions, there's nothing more to be > done?

I think that that is not what the article is saying at all; rather it is saying that your dissatisfaction (not you personally!) with the course of justice does not excuse your taking justice into your own hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that Vox is the platform on which this article appears. They are as much a part of the internet justice mob as Facebook or Twitter. Several articles on their front page have clickbait articles and are designed to get people riled up. Look at "It's shockingly easy to exploit legal immigrant workers" and "How Planned Parenthood became Republicans' public enemy no. 1" as examples.

I don't think the internet mob is "out of control". I think it is working as intended. The media has always fabricated stories as distractions or as character assassinations against certain people. The internet mob is the next evolution of that. Cecil the lion is the latest mass distraction.

</comment><comment><USER16> When is a mob 'in control'? In what case is a mob a good idea?

<comment><USER17> In what case is a government a good idea?

<comment><USER13> Well, if you have an army bearing down on you. Or if you might have an army bearing down on you. Or if you have something that someone wants. Or if you are in a place that someone wants to be. Or if people don't like you. Or if there's a natural disaster. Or if you want to do something that you can't afford, that will help other people too. Or if you want to walk around at night safely. Or if you want to have educated children. Or if you want to have an educated community. Or if companies are doing something bad. Or if companies are treating people poorly. Or if companies are selling dangerous products. Or if you ever want something accomplished, but don't have the money or power or people do get it done. Or if

<comment><USER17> Notice how none of these things requires a government to be fullfilled, much less the kind of governments we have now.

Merely coordinated action, which could also be spontaneous in some cases (we need X, we get together and build X), or constrained to the desired goal in others (we need an army, we devote some of our resources to that goal alone).

> _Or if companies are doing something bad. Or if companies are treating > people poorly. Or if companies are selling dangerous products._

In the real world, they mostly do those things in cohorts with governments.

Besides "companies" are a legal entity, their existence pressuposes a government (and a whole capitalist/market based ecosystem).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Vox's garbage clickbait articles are out of control.

<comment><USER4> This seems like a thoughtful piece, not clickbait at all; the headline hardly seems inflammatory or sensationalistic to me.

<comment><USER19> It ignores death threats, doxxing, bomb threats and mail threats that came from Vox's group of anti-gamergate supporters, while saying that we shouldn't endorse these things when it's 'our side' that does them.

<comment><USER4> Being wrong or one-sided is different to being clickbait.

<comment><USER20> Or: The brazen partisanship involved in the selection of the examples amused me but didn't detract from the argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


22-Year Old (lying) Start Up CEO: It's Not About Getting Hammered and Laid - <AUTHOR> http://www.nuts.co.uk/video/search/all/22/play/tR7RNugQIJs

<comment><USER2> this was helpful</comment>


Ask HN: What should I do with $10k? - <AUTHOR>

Kind of reaching a new point in life. I (will) have some cash saved up soon. Looking for ideas... <comment><USER2> Leave it in the bank/taxable account for a rainy day/opportunity/blood-in-the- water scenario.

10K is not really enough to create a "Balanced" portfolio of stocks. You could buy mutual funds or bet on a few stocks but that's not as valuable as having 10k sitting in the bank at the ready.

If you are not already, start automatically saving cash and automatically contributing _something_ to an 401k/IRA. Pro tip - Make sure it's automatic and the money gets saved before it hits your regular bank account. If you have the opportunity to contribute to a 401k do that - especially if they match. If you don't then get an IRA. [1] You could create one and stick 5k in there this year and deduct it from your taxes and continue to build up that war chest again.

Also, see if you are eligible for a ROTH IRA[2] instead of a regular IRA.

[1] <http://goo.gl/vFXKs> (All of you do this now!) You probably want an IRA and a "Taxable Account" so you can buy CDs (and one day stocks)

[2] <http://goo.gl/EJIUS>

[3] I am not a professional financial advisor your results may vary etc...

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to invest it in something besides yourself or your business, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" ( <http://amzn.to/fxzgVU> ) is a good read.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. And if you want the elevator pitch version instead of reading that awesome-but-very-long book: "buy index funds".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.daveramsey.com/new/baby-steps/>

Go step by step

</comment><comment><USER6> Buy a guitar. Learn to play it.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't spend it or invest or anything. Leave in the bank or a CD and just feel secure enough to leave your job if you start hating it. The economy is bad.</comment></comment>