EFF sues the NSA Over Illegal Surveillance - grey-area https://www.eff.org/node/75009 <comment><AUTHOR> The EFF is doing some great work... here's a reminder to setup a monthly donation, even if small, to help them keep it up.

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

<comment><USER2> And if you can't afford to donate money, maybe you could donate some of your skills and time, or help spread the word about the good work they're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Happy to see the EFF leading this initiative for change, one of the few companies I would trust to do all they can and not to be commercially influenced or leveraged into accommodating the wishes of the NSA/US Govt.

I've always thought the EFF was driven by tin-foiled paranoia, but recent events are now showing that our worst big-brother fears that were initially inconceivable, are now from the limited info we're allowed to know, closer to reality.

The secret courts where "justice" and misinterpretations of the constitution are decided behind closed doors and suppressed, puts in-place about the most corrupt framework I can think of.

This is not the country I want to participate in, so I'm doing my bit and have just shown my support by donating to their cause: [https://supporters.eff.org/donate](https://supporters.eff.org/donate)

<comment><USER4> >I've always thought the EFF was driven by tin-foiled paranoia

Somehow this surprises me. Is it just me, or have EFF always been the Good Guys?

<comment><USER5> I may have disagreements with their policy at times, but both the ACLU and the EFF seem to do an amazing amount of good work. I'm surprised that people perceive the EFF that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious how this will turn out. It's obvious that the State will try to assert state secrets, but we've already seen another court say that now that the information is public, they can no longer assert that privilege.

When Snowden first came out, I was skeptical that the information leaked would actually cause any real change to occur within governmental institutions. If lawsuits like this continue to pop up, we may begin to see the courts restraining the executive in a significant way.

A big problem here is that people in the executive firmly believe that these programs deter terrorism in the same way they believed that torture would provide actionable intelligence. They need to stop and re-evaluate whether other tactics may be as or more effective than blanket surveillance.

<comment><USER7> It's not about terrorism anymore, but instead these broad-sweeping and baseless spying programs are integrated in their regular intelligence briefings regardless of whether they're terrorism-related.

I wouldn't be surprised if they can cut a significant amount of their intelligence infrastructure because of the operational efficiency, I'd even go a step further and say that the DHS has been coaxing all of the state local law enforcement to pool all of their data centrally to the NSA -- so now all levels of law enforcement rely entirely on the NSA's data processing capabilities.

The amount of data-gathering by the local and state law enforcement agencies is massive and they likely have very little/no infrastructure to handle this data, so they'd pass it off to the federal government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have never been disappointed to see how my contributions to the EFF are being spent. I have just renewed my membership for the second time in less than a month and am thankful that I am fortunate enough to do so.

I understand that not everyone who wants to contribute is able to do so, financially. If that's you, please review the EFF's list of "Ways You Can Help EFF" (without spending a dime): [https://www.eff.org/helpout](https://www.eff.org/helpout)

</comment><comment><USER9> They're playing this smart. Among the plaintiffs are three religious groups and three gun-related organizations.

The standing issue is going to be a little challenging for Count I (1st amendment). The EFF's argument is basically that these organizations' expression has been chilled by the general knowledge that their communications are being collected. Laird v. Tatum seems like challenging precedent to overcome: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laird_v._Tatum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laird_v._Tatum) (Court held that the fear that the army might cause some harm in the future with information collected pursuant to surveillance was an insufficiently concrete injury to support standing).

The Due Process claim is iffy because it does not seem that any plaintiff has actually been prosecuted pursuant to a vague legal interpretation. If some poor sap got prosecuted in a case involving that legal interpretation, that would be a much better basis for a lawsuit.

I hope they make some progress with this, but I'm not optimistic because of the standing issues.

 _As an aside:_

I personally don't think litigation is the best way to approach privacy issues. I strongly recommend watching this documentary on Prohibition: [http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Ken_Burns_Prohibition/7019...](http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Ken_Burns_Prohibition/70199184?locale=en- US). Carefully pay attention to the section describing the Anti-Saloon league, and specifically this guy: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Wheeler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Wheeler).

When you think about it, the 18th amendment is a marvel. Prior to the 18th amendment, the federal government derived 30-40% of its revenues from liquor taxes. The beer barons had paid off plenty of political types. The nation was full of Irish and German immigrants who loved to drink. Yet, in 1919, the Anti-Saloon league and associated lobbyists got the 18th amendment passed to ban liquor. It was an incredible political maneuver.

They didn't accomplish this via litigation. They accomplished it via single- minded politics: Wayne Wheeler would lend the League's support to anyone who was in favor of Prohibition, regardless of their stances on other issues. He drew on the Protestant community, anti-Catholic sentiment, and the womens' vote (the suffrage movement in the U.S. was heavily driven by the desire of womens' groups to ban alcohol). They had a singular, clear, if ambitious, end- goal: the banning of alcohol.

If people are interested in electronic privacy, I think there is a lot to be learned from the success and methods of the Anti-Saloon league.

<comment><USER10> "If people are interested in electronic privacy, I think there is a lot to be learned from the success and methods of the Anti-Saloon league."

I agree, but I would add that the key difference here is that the Anti-Saloon League had a clear, concise, understandable goal. Privacy and anonymity advocates are all over the place.

<comment><USER9> > Privacy and anonymity advocates are all over the place.

They are not only all over the place, but they're often idealists who are unwilling to put aside their other political viewpoints to focus on the issue of privacy. This dooms them to political impotency and irrelevancy.

Which is why I'm so encouraged by the EFF's bringing religious organizations and gun associations on board. There are some very powerful organizations (the anti-abortion lobby, religious organizations, gun rights folks) who have a lot to lose from government surveillance, and also can be scared into action by the idea of someone like Obama snooping on their communications. I think it would be politically foolish not to capitalize on that state of affairs.

<comment><USER11> For that matter, the pro-abortion^wpro-life movement could be in here as well, do we really want everyone to know that the GF you had on the side was emailing to/from an abortion clinic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure the EFF will now be branded a terrorist organization by people who don't deserve to call themselves Americans.

</comment><comment><USER13> The state as an institution is the final arbiter in judgments against itself. So it often surprises me that folks think they can achieve any kind of success against the state by litigating in this way. The grade school civics class that Americans are taught as children that there are separate branches of government competing with each other and keeping each other in check is an incredible caricature of what actually happens. These "branches" of government are all part of the same institution - the state - and the only competing they do is which of them can arrogate as much power to themselves as possible at the expense of the population, not at the expense of each other.

<comment><USER14> You're probably right to be skeptical, but the hope is that the hunger to power and greed will in part help us out here.

Very simplistically, the power of the judicial branch of government is diminished by the executive branch flaunting their control. Hopefully they will want to recover some of that power by reigning in the executive branch.

However, of course, if all the branches are benefiting too much from the military-industrial complex, then the system could easily fall apart.

<comment><USER15> Hopefully, any of the justices use Verizon.

<comment><USER16> It's likely. Verizon provides landline services for the entire Washington DC area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know this isn't exactly adding to the discourse but... YAY! Thanks EFF.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how much better this would be for an NSL receiver to publicly challenge it; at least they would have standing to contest the whole idea of a secret request.

<comment><USER19> It's happening. My article from May disclosed that Google is litigating two NSL cases against the Justice Department: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/justice- depart...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/justice-department- tries-to-force-google-to-hand-over-user-data/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Clickable link to PDF:

[https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/firstunitar...](https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/firstunitarianvnsa- final.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER21> Guys, pardon my ignorance as I do not have extensive knowledge on US law, I could not see EFF among the plaintiffs. Are they referred to under another name?

<comment><USER22> This article on the EFF page[1] states that EFF represents them.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/cases/first-unitarian-church-los- angeles...](https://www.eff.org/cases/first-unitarian-church-los-angeles-v- nsa)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd personally be surprised if a court even agreed to hear this.</comment>


VISA Api: The Power of Visa Network Delivered as an API - <AUTHOR> https://developer.visa.com/ <comment><USER2> It doesn't seem like any of these products actually process payments, or is there something I'm missing?

Checkout:

> "Depending on your configuration, you will process the actual payment > through your own system, a payment processor, or an e-commerce partner as > you normally do."

( [https://developer.visa.com/products/visa_checkout/guides](https://developer.visa.com/products/visa_checkout/guides) )

CyberSource:

> Before moving to production and running real transactions, you must have a > merchant account from an acquiring (merchant) bank that can process the > credit card payments.

( [https://developer.visa.com/products/cybersource/thingstoknow](https://developer.visa.com/products/cybersource/thingstoknow) )

Visa Direct APIs:

> However, in order to use the Visa Direct APIs in production, the Originator > must either be a Visa client financial institution (issuer or acquirer), a > third-party Originator that has been granted a Visa acquirer POS license > (geographical restrictions apply), or a third-party Originator that has > established an acquiring relationship for that purpose with a Visa client > financial institution.

( [https://developer.visa.com/products/visa_direct/thingstoknow](https://developer.visa.com/products/visa_direct/thingstoknow) )

The token and transaction services are very interesting and it's cool to see Visa jumping into decent modern payment UX, but I don't think they're gunning for Stripe just yet...

<comment><USER3> This product is essentially a gateway. The same that Stripe or Braintree are gateways. They just do a much better job of abstracting the confusion that is payments.

You will still need a merchant account and a processor. A processor is the party that actually handles authorization/settlements between the issuing bank and acquiring banks.

<comment><USER2> Right - but Square/Stripe/Braintree supply the merchant account and the processor for me, so I can sign up, pay a transparent/upfront fee schedule, and get payments delivered to my (standard checking) account.

<comment><USER3> Correct. They're definitely not targeting people that are just beginning to process payments.

Their intention is to likely attract really large merchants/platforms, one way or another.

<comment><USER4> VISA is still living in the 20th century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://developer.visa.com/images/cybersource.png](https://developer.visa.com/images/cybersource.png)

[https://developer.visa.com/products/cybersource/reference#cy...](https://developer.visa.com/products/cybersource/reference#cybersource__cybs__v1__authorize)

Ugh. Using this means that your application is in scope for PCI controls, since card data will be transmitted across your network into your application.

One of the reasons that Braintree and Stripe, for example, are so popular is because of the tokenization that they do prior to sending the card data to your systems, thereby putting your application out of scope for PCI.

If Visa added that _one_ detail, this would be a fantastic solution.

<comment><USER6> Stripe bypassing PCI is still really questionable, if someone hacks you stripe isn't gonna stop them from stealing your customers credit cards.

<comment><USER7> Stripe does not bypass PCI. Stripe does not transmit any credit card information to your servers and if there are no CC info on your server then you don't have to deal with PCI compliance.

If your server gets hacked you don't have any customer info stored on it. All you have is a stripe token.

<comment><USER6> But generally the credit card data is in fact transmitted via your website to stripe.

While not over the network, the user enters his credit card into the form ON YOUR WEBSITE that POSTs it on to stripe. This means your site has full access to the credit card info, choosing whether or not to store is up to you (or in case you get hacked, up to the hacker).

<comment><USER8> No. You embed Stripe's iframe, which posts to Stripe. The iframe has a separate _origin_ from your own website, which creates a mutual isolation boundary between your site and that iframe: neither can read or modify the contents of the other. It's just as secure as e.g. Paypal's workflow of redirecting to the Paypal website and back.

<comment><USER6> I'm aware, but I was talking more in the practical sense.

The attacker can replace the iframe with his own and proxy it, or perhaps simply display an error and ask the user to re-insert his payment info into the actual stripe form.

<comment><USER8> The attacker can replace the server's response with his own form that pretends to be Stripe's, too. In the end, there's no real defense against phishing.

<comment><USER9> That's not strictly true.

Flow 1: User visits shop.com, selects some items, hits checkout, enters his credit card details into a form on shop.com, hits submit, gets emailed a receipt.

Flow 2: User visits shop.com, selects some items, hits checkout, is redirected to a form on processor.com, enters his card details, hits submit, gets email a receipt.

Now flow 1 and flow 2 _could_ be the same internally if the form in flow 1 was actually from processor.com, just embedded into an iframe displayed on shop.com. But the key is that _the user has no idea if it is or not_.

The form in frame 1 could be in an iframe from anywhere, or it might actually be embedded directly into the page and posting, again, to anywhere. You just have to take it on faith that shop.com hasn't been compromised, and isn't now sending your details to malware.com.

In flow 2, you only enter your details into a form on processor.com; you no longer need to worry if shop.com has been compromised, you just need to verify that you're actually at processor.com, and not proccesor.com or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome.

Wonder if VISAs exposes the BIN #.

BrainTree exposes the BIN number. Built this at a hackathon last year.

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

You can reverse engineer the BIN Number offered by BrainTree's API to calculate the species of a credit card, thus the minimum credit score.

I have a payments entrepreneur group on facebook. It has about 50 folks in it. if you want in and have built payments stuff message me.

<comment><USER11> That seems like a pretty fickle data source to build a product around.

I have multiple credit cards. I only use one of them for online purchases. It happens to be my oldest card, the one I got when I was 18 years old. Therefore it qualifies as an "introductory" card available with little/no credit history. Would you assume anyone paying with their oldest card has a low credit score?

There are so many factors that go into a credit score that it seems asinine to base an estimate of it on the specific card used for a particular purchase.

Sure you can get the "tier" of a card and know that the issuer only grants that card to someone meeting a minimum credit score. But you know nothing else. Some people have a 750 credit score but have never applied for a second card. You don't know how the age of the credit line, its utilization, its size, its payment history...

This "reverse credit score" estimate seems like complete snake oil. If credit checks are actually an important part of your business, factor them into your costs and just pay the $50.

<comment><USER12> You might find this unfair, but if you're using an introductory card for your normal purchases, you're being financially stupid.

Myriad higher tier cards offer many rewards that you're actually paying for anyway on marked up costs of items merchants have to charge to pay card processing fees. So I would say, yes, you deserve a low credit rating.

<comment><USER13> Somebody who is actively seeking to get every nickel and dime they can from credit card purchases seems more like a marginal customer to me - warranting a lower score rather than higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Weird caps in the title, "Visa API" would better match how these two words are usually written, in my opinion.

"Visa" is a name, so it should have title caps (I know their branding calls for "VISA" but such is often ignored in non-corporate reporting), and "API" is an abbreviation so it should be all-caps.

I know, I should go back to work.

<comment><USER8> I think they try to use "VISA" to distinguish it from a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_(document)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_\(document\)). I would expect a "Visa API" to have something to do with immigration.

<comment><USER15> yeah that's fair, but then they wrote "Api", and now I'm convinced they're deliberately trying to piss off pedants like myself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This thing is a total disaster.

Some of their example code: [https://github.com/VisaDeveloperProgram/SampleCode/blob/mast...](https://github.com/VisaDeveloperProgram/SampleCode/blob/master/SampleCode/VisaAPICalls/Ruby/CybersourceSample.rb)

Docs are incoherent in just so many ways - and their quick start drops you right into like a 9 page guide for generating two-way ssl docs. Not exactly a quick dev onboarding path.

Request docs list attributes as required that aren't in their examples or runnable sidebar thing (the only cool part). Returns an error body with no error messages, codes, or info. You use some "correlation-id" (called "correlationId" in other places) to apparently get your error messages for a failed request.

Final rating: 1/7, would not play with again.

<comment><USER17> I worked at Visa. You don't know the half of it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Banks are still the gatekeepers of this network. Unless you've negotiated deals with VISA partner banks, these APIs are pretty much useless. Companies like Marqueta on the issuer side and Stripe on the acquirer side have relationships with banks that let them move money from your VISA cards. (And even in ACH land, which is lightyears behind the card companies, SynapsePay for example has a bank partner who provides a license for their charter).

Don't think you're gonna be able to write a script to move money from your credit card to your friend. This is still a tightly controlled network of banks. If you're looking to innovate in the payments space, take a look at Bitcoin and other digital currencies.

<comment><USER19> I don't think I understand. Why would they go to the trouble to launch this API, make claims of being able to process payments, etc. if it is "useless"?

<comment><USER20> You have no idea of the plethora of CIO/CTO digital transformation initiatives being kicked off at fortune 100s.. Everybody needs an API, even if they serve no purpose. Oh yes, and agile too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nothing here that would encourage me to switch from Stripe or Braintree. Both those companies handle all the insane edge cases, recurring payments, and refunds.

<comment><USER22> Well, it's not meant to. Unless you want to process the credit cards yourself. You are comparing chalk and cheese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I see a lot of comparisons to Stripe. While I'm sure this API has it's warts, the reasons for it to exist center around cost and control. At a certain scale, companies want the lower cost and higher control associated with having their own merchant account.

Cost: Stripe's 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction, if you do enough transactions per month, is very high. How much better you can do depends on some variables like average transaction size, debit/credit mix, etc. You can easily shave it down to around 1.9% in most cases, or better. Again, at a certain scale, giving up 1% or more of your incoming revenue just isn't smart.

Control: Lots of areas here. Removing "STRIPE" from the charge listing on the customer's credit card statement. Direct control of chargebacks. Routing to different payment gateways based on card type. Better integration of card- present and online transactions.

You do, of course, lose the advantages that Stripe provides, so your scale would have to be such that replicating that functionality is justified. There are solutions in the middle. Authorize.net, for example, will let you use your own merchant account and pay just for the gateway services. They provide some of benefits/features that you would lose doing it from scratch.

<comment><USER24> The thing is, there doesn't seem to be a clear benefit to this over say, Authorize.net.

<comment><USER23> I agree, but that doesn't seem to be the discussion here :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> But what does it cost?

<comment><USER26> This is the real question- I can't find anything on their page saying how much it costs to use their API. No such thing as a free lunch...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe I understood it wrong ... but you don't know how much it will cost to use their API before you submit your application to them?

Why would anyone invest any nontrivial amount of resources on developing something for which they don't know what the cost of running it is going to be?

What is lacking is a clear business overview of what their product is, its costs and benefits.

<comment><USER16> Once your application is completely functional, you email them (lol) and then they go through contract negotiation and application/security/etc. review where you get your terms.

<comment><USER28> Isn't this just a way to filter out the type of clients they don't want. If you do not have the time or resource to go through these bureaucratic scenarios, then you aren't a good fit.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but they're not going to even tell you if you're a good fit until you go through the entire expense of building for their gateway. I'd think one would spend that effort integrating with any number of other gateways that have some clear requirements. There's just no clear advantage here that I can see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think it's cool that VISA is trying to innovate in the space, but I'm not sure of the target audience for these APIs. For most businesses, you're probably better off integrating to Stripe and not having to deal with Gateways or Merchant Accounts.

Speaking of which, VISA should just buy Stripe.

<comment><USER30> Maybe high volume processors looking for reduced fees?

<comment><USER29> Right. That was my thought, but that's going to be a diminishingly small set of customers. Why go through the hassle of opening it up to everyone? I suppose it's "hip" to have a cool bootstrappy website and an API that anyone can use, but it's just not super useful for most businesses.

<comment><USER30> Granted it may be a diminishing set, but regardless of the size of the set it seems they would be a large portion of the business? Some sort of 90 10 rule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Blog post announcing new developer initiative [https://community.developer.visa.com/t5/Blogs/Hello- World/ba...](https://community.developer.visa.com/t5/Blogs/Hello- World/ba-p/5402)

</comment><comment><USER32> Their ATM locator API doesn't really work in France, I just tried for the Paris suburb and the nearest ATM found was miles away. There are dozens of them between the test location and the closest one returned.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why bother putting so much time and effort to release something this bad?

Because the executive committee has no understanding of why they need a "good" API, and no appetite for the difficult journey they need to embark on to create one, but they just have to do "something", and they're happy with "anything". That's my bet.

The largest player in the market just entered the API arms race, years late and with pockets deeper than any of their rivals. Yet two brothers from Ireland are still the best game in town.

</comment><comment><USER34> Master Card has been doing this for a while, and I think they do it better: [https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/dashboard.action](https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/dashboard.action)

They've had hackathons, and they have a few sample ideas. My favorite is checking local restaurants and the zip codes of users. This gives you a listing of places that are popular with locals.

</comment><comment><USER35> does anyone know what's the pricing for this service?

<comment><USER36> You have to submit your app for approval to get pricing.

"Once you're ready to move forward and submit your app for approval, contact firstname.lastname@example.com and work with our team to complete risk reviews, contracts, system configurations, pricing, and billing arrangements."

[https://developer.visa.com/vdpguide#get-started- overview](https://developer.visa.com/vdpguide#get-started-overview)

<comment><USER37> I dunno if this is kosher, but if someone who qualifies wants to go through the process of applying and posting the rates, there would be a wealth of gratitude in it for you.

<comment><USER38> It sounds like the rates they offer one business will not necessarily be the same as the rates they offer another business.

This is kind of Visa's whole business model - assessing and pricing credit risk. There isn't too much point in learning the rates they offer somebody else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm building a gem for it [https://github.com/GildedHonour/frank_visa](https://github.com/GildedHonour/frank_visa)

An beta version should be ready pretty soon.

</comment><comment><USER40> MasterCard also has an API: [https://developer.mastercard.com/](https://developer.mastercard.com/)

Just as the VISA API, this requires you to be a "verified partner" or be sponsored when going to production.

</comment><comment><USER41> While this is great (although very late) it's biggest issue is that I have to implement this and another service if I care about the other credit card companies. Merchants would be fools to just accept Visa.

<comment><USER42> That's why Bitcoin's great! It's an electronic payment system, and the underlying currency.

<comment><USER43> I don't see how it's different at all in this respect. If you want to support other payment systems or currencies, you need to implement Bitcoin and another service. Just like the GP was saying about Visa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Reahhh but there's no ruby gem how am I supposed to use it??

</comment><comment><USER45> Took you long enough.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder if their funds transfer service will support payroll or rent payments, and if so, what fees are negotiable based on volume.

</comment><comment><USER15> > VISA Api

why would you ever capitalize those words that way goddammit there's no way this wasn't deliberate

</comment><comment><USER47> At one of my previous companies, once we reached significant volume, Cybersource asked us for a material percentage of our transaction volume as a reserve, otherwise they would shut us down. I would never use them again as a processor.

<comment><USER48> I've used them for a customer processing more than 20 million dollars/year and we didn't have that. The merchant account does take a small percentage as a rolling reserve though (3% if I remember correctly).

In term of programing, I much prefer dealing with Braintree but Cybersource is not too bad (not the worse gateway I've dealt with, less issues tha Authorize.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> this is great!

sadly all the cool fraud api stuff can only be used by issuers (e.g., banks) in production :(

</comment><comment><USER50> Your move, MasterCard. :)

<comment><USER51> [https://developer.mastercard.com/](https://developer.mastercard.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> who is providing api management solution for VISA?

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder how much of a role Bitcoin played as an impetus for finally coming out with this. Sure, it should have been done way before Bitcoin, but I bet that gave them a reason to put the peddle to the metal.

<comment><USER53> Visa's product is almost entirely orthogonal to Bitcoin. It has a fairly high service fee, which provides a (worthwhile) service of insuring both the customer and the merchant against misdoings by the other, that is, offering payments that can be reversed in the far future. It's centralized, and humans can reverse payments. It discriminates strongly on what fields they're willing to serve payments for. It requires not only identities but background checks of both customers and merchants, and can permanently shut down a customer or merchant they don't want to serve any more. It provides credit.

If they really felt threatened by Bitcoin, they would have changed any one of those things. Bitcoin doesn't even have an HTTP API, so adding one doesn't help you compete.

<comment><USER17> Visa does not provide credit. The banks with which they contract do.

<comment><USER42> I think he's referring to a different kind of 'credit'.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


There's a battle brewing between Uber and Google. Here's why Google will win - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/02/03/theres-a-battle-brewing-between-uber-and-google-heres-why-google-will-win/ <comment><USER2> I was going to create an uber for escorts, but it already exists... tinder^H^H^H^H^H^Hmixxxer.</comment>


Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything - <AUTHOR> https://workstream.paperspace.com/ <comment><USER2> I was pretty excited to give this a try because it might be a good fit for some frustrations I've had with running a GPU-dependent task on my laptop without discrete graphics.

Onboarding experience is terrible. Registered for an account from the Workstream page linked here, and was taken to a console with absolutely no mention of Workstream. Went back and forth a few times trying to figure out if auth provider had redirected to the wrong page after registration only. Ultimately searched through comments here to find out that Workstream is a variant of the CORE product. Having figured that out, went to the Core product, was rejected on creating an instance due to no payment on file. Not a huge issue, but would have been nice if I was prompted up front to complete this. Once I'm past that hurdle, I go back to the CORE product and find out that I'm not allowed to create GPU instances until I put in a ticket.

I'm hoping that this was some accident where this landing page ended up on HN when it wasn't supposed to be public knowledge yet, otherwise the lack of thought on just the setup process here is pretty concerning. I'm also pretty confused at the requirement that I put in a ticket to have GPU instances enabled when they've already taken payment info, and it seems like a test auth would be a better anti-fraud measure than the half-sentence I typed in.

Man, my excitement here sure was short lived.

Edit: got an email that I had been enabled. went to look. Three of the GPU types still show as locked but one no longer shows the lock icon, so I guess approvals are per-type? But I can't select the "unlocked" GPU type, it's disabled. There's no explanation of why. A couple of minutes of trying different combinations and I find out that it's due to the DC, if I choose a different DC I can select it. So I guess they're only available in one DC, at least right now? It would have been nice to be told that.

Edit: got the machine to provision, installed the client from another HN comment. I logged into Paperspace using a Google account. The client does not list this as an option. Only email, github, AD, and SAML. I give up. Except for the machine is still provisioning and I have paid $10 for storage. Great.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if it has anything to do with this announcement (e.g. some malicious actor taking advantage of a dormant vulnerability), but just a few days ago someone managed to almost invade my Paperspace account. Fortunately the system detected it as suspicious, but it seems they managed to get the password right.

The weird thing is I haven't used this thing since years ago when I registered and used it, like, twice? And I used a unique, secure password which I'm pretty sure I've never shared with anyone or typed anywhere else or in any unsafe devices. No Google login either (but I've logged out of all devices and removed authorization for all external services just to be sure).

So I emailed them asking what happened and how I could cancel my account (because there's no way to do it via the website). They didn't give any detail except say someone did manage to "semi" sign in, more than once, in a few separate days recently. At least they responded quickly and deleted my account.

<comment><USER4> I had the exact same experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've used Paperspace's Gradient product (hosted Jupyter notebooks), and while it is cheaper than most other options, I can't recommend it. The service has a very janky feel. When I first started, there was an issue where my instance was was stuck "shutting down" for half an hour or more and I couldn't access my code. Then there was a weird issue where some kind of geographical split between different types of instances resulted in my code getting lost (I think it happened twice). It has the feel of a product held together by duct tape and chewing gum with a thin veneer of slick graphic design. I recently tried using their CORE product (GPU heavy VMs), but for some reason instances with GPU's are not enabled until you write them a message (I did, and they haven't responded in a week).

My advice would be to use the cheap, high performance machines (VC subsidized?) if it makes sense, but never ever store data with them without backing up to a different service (git or Dropbox maybe?)

<comment><USER6> CEO of Paperspace here. I'm really sorry about this. That is not the experience that we are striving for and FWIW, since leaving beta, Gradient is much more mature at this point (many millions of hours of runtime and lots of developer work). We have been aggressively stabilizing (and building out new features) over the past few years and continue to improve the product every release. My sincerest apologies for your negative experience early on I hope you will give it another try.

<comment><USER7> Hey, I'm old and operate in a space where most things run at single Mhz speed (but have to work underwater, in a vacuum, and other interesting places).

What does your service do? Is it like VNCing into my dev box in the shop, except (I hope) more responsive?

<comment><USER8> That sounds really interesting. Where do you work?

<comment><USER9> I'd guess he's a spacecraft engineer who does work in a neutral buoyancy tank. In the Us that usually means NASA/Johnson. That or he's a spacecrqft engineer at a contract firm that picks up side projects doing underwater automation work, which is not that uncommon in this small field. Oceaneering Space Systems, for example.

<comment><USER7> The second one. I've done a couple things at NASA/Ames and it has been generally fun, although there have been a couple of weird episodes (Like me not being authorized to check out stuff from my own repository due to not being a US citizen, and being told that it wasn't a unique case).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Was going to try their Free account, until I signed up and the discovered the big black "Free" had a tiny light grey "\+ Machine Utilization Charges" beneath it. Everything is "Free + Charges".

<comment><USER11> I'm waiting for my honest business practices to pay off.

No cookies, no ads, donations only.

It hasn't paid off aside from about 1k per year in revenue and lots of thank you emails.

<comment><USER12> No cookies, no ads, source code always available, pay for a prebuilt version, user names price ... in excess of $100k/year (after 20 years :) ... ardour.org

<comment><USER13> Thinking about going open source but too afraid of hostile forks. How do you prevent people from stealing the business?

<comment><USER14> By hostile you mean stolen GPL and included into proprietary tech? Or another, competing GPL product?

<comment><USER13> Lets say some of the contributors want a piece of the cake, they make their own website, SEO, and actively tell everyone that their fork is better.

The GPL license give you better protection then say MIT in this regard though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm just going to state again what I want, which is only tangentially related to the topic...

1) I go on Github and configure a service

2) I make a wallet that people can donate to

3) I start up a virtual machine, aimed at the Github, using the wallet to pay for the time on the machine. The virtual machine host _guarantees_ that the code at that Github is what's really running.

I can imagine lots of other things I want, too, but this is the bare minimum. I think it'd be really useful in a lot of scenarios.

<comment><USER16> This—the ability to audit what's running on the backend you're talking to—is in large part what people get out of smart contracts on e.g. Ethereum. You can take the contract source code from GitHub, compile it (deterministically), and validate that the deployed-on-chain smart-contract binary is the same. The blockchain nature of the platform then ensures that the contract will do exactly and only what you "expect" it to do (i.e. it'll do the same thing "in production" that it does when you test it on your own machine, since any node that tries to execute the code differently would diverge its state from the consensus, and be ignored.)

In essence, a Turing-complete smart-contract blockchain _is_ a deterministically-trustworthy compute-hosting service. It's one that has the disadvantage of all the overhead distributed auditability requires; but at least has the advantage (compared to centralized compute-hosting with remote- attestation) that it already exists and is usable right now for real-world use-cases.

(And you can also reduce the blockchain-y overhead by moving whatever backend business logic you can out of the "trust kernel" into untrusted regular machines, and then just having the "trust kernel" do the important stuff. CryptoKitties is a good example of this: the only thing their smart contract does is track who owns what kitty, because that's what people would try to dispute by forging transactions. The rest of the stuff is state in a regular centralized RDBMS, because it's dictated by the service, rather than by user input, and so is not under dispute.)

<comment><USER17> Ethereum is basically one big cloud computer, with a shared runtime.

Everyone gets a copy of the code AND all the data/state, and can execute all instructions.

Problem is that it's too slow/expensive to do anything useful.

But perhaps the killer app for blockchain is buried somewhere in this concept.

<comment><USER18> Just because you dont understand how to do something useful using ethereum doesnt mean that no one knows how to do something useful with ethereum.

Please investigate ethereum name system(ENS) and Handshake name system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think there is a market here. I don't use this service, but instead use an EC2 instance as my developer box (for personal projects) and I do like being able to easily move between multiple machines, no matter where I am and easily spin up another instance when I want to start fresh or try out other setups like having a more powerful machine or something with a GPU. At work (I work at AWS) most people do the same for their developer machines and don't have physical desktops, just using their laptops for access or lightweight local development.

A service that makes setting up and managing those developer machines easier for folks who don't want to learn or fiddle with AWS options would be valuable.

<comment><USER20> > learn or fiddle with AWS options

AFAIK if you only want a box to act as a dev environment, that would not be much work beyond ec2:run-instance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?

<comment><USER19> standard installations (set yourself up with the tools you want running on the machine), keeping track of and managing the security parts (security keys/access credentials), mapping to any static IP or domain name you may want to use for ease of access, and other niceties could make the process smoother if you were purely focused on the developer workflow

<comment><USER19> also when you're testing things out on the machine you have to know how to change security settings for opening ports and providing access externally. These aren't too complicated to do, but just generally having simple tools/UI for making this simpler could be useful. for example, if you're a flask dev you may want to just run a site "locally" and make a few setting changes before being able to access your site. i've helped friends with how to do that before

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lots of red flags. These guys apparently have very little clue what they're talking about.

I mean "fast + virtual" already makes me doubtful. And I'm sure that with the internet being overloaded by everyone working from home, using remote desktop is going to be even more painful than usual.

But when they claim "Get a new computer in less than 5 minutes, zero configuration required." and then mention 3ds max, I am 100% convinced that they are clueless. Pretty much nobody uses the stock 3ds renderer, so you'll need to install something like Redshift or V-Ray, too. And setting up the plugin licensing alone will take you hours. Plus you have to re-do it every time the underlying hardware of your virtual instance changes.

Oh, and then there's pricing. "P6000 For extreme 3D apps, rendering" starts at 50GB SSD? WTF? I have a 8TB storage raid here to keep the scene files around. And then "Only pay for what you use" but "For hourly plans, if your machine is powered off, you will only be billed for your storage."

OK, so you pretend to cater to 3D professionals, but you fail to mention licensing, the number 1 cloud issue, you provide too little storage to load even a hobby-sized rendering project, and your on-demand service will bill me for storage unless I download and re-upload terabytes of data every time I switch projects.

I'd say you can greatly improve your pitch by NOT promoting it as a professional solution. It's probably great for hobbyists and gamers, so I would focus on them with the marketing.

Oh and how are you going to be "Delivering every frame in less than 16.6 ms" when there's 50ms of latency (due to speed of light) between me and your closest server?

<comment><USER22> This is so true. I've done GPU heavy High performance rendering on remote VNC- like connections, something which requires lot's of preparation time -- and evventually you will be frustrated by working remotely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I used paper space for remote gaming via Parsec. I also purchased one of their machines for remote development purposes. While I was waiting for parts to fix my laptop.

The service was really good. The machine was fast, with RDP it felt close to local. They also offered very powerful hard ware.

I moved on because it was a bit pricey at that point. This was about a year, year and a half ago. I think it was about 50 a month for me. I moved onto a dedicated server that I used KVM and LibVirt to manage.

That worked but it's obviously a lot of over head.

<comment><USER24> Signing up right now for this - glad to hear it worked well. I have a Mac at home (not ideal for games) and at most a couple hours a week to do any gaming (so it's not worth buying a PC). For the absolute best machine they have, my outlay will be less than ten bucks a month. An easy sell.

<comment><USER25> But won't the latency kill gaming tasks?

<comment><USER24> On the off chance you see this, I'm pleased to report that the answer is, no! It works brilliantly as long as you use the free "Parsec" service's client to access the desktop and your games. Browser access to the Paperspace desktop is fine for normal app use but no good for gaming.

Setup wasn't quite push-button but I got it up and running by dumbly following the instructions. Parsec was the most confusing part. Trust the docs, and it'll work.

<comment><USER25> What kind of games are you playing? I'm guessing for something like Quake, particularly if you're good, even 50msec can throw things off...

<comment><USER24> Mostly older FPS multiplayer games against friends. Garry's Mod, the Source version of Counterstrike. Haven't seen any issues at all, really feels like it's on local desktop (other than the quite obvious graphical degradation in fast-moving play). I have a hardwired ethernet connection to my router though; I bet it'd stink over Wifi.

Also - am not good. :)

EDIT the latency figures are nothing like 50ms though. Low tens maybe, total. This isn't a huge surprise though: on the same machine and connection I've also (using JamKazaam, not over Paperspace) had decent success doing online realtime music jam sessions with local friends too, where the latency tops out around 25ms - can't really get into the pocket playing funk, but just fine for rock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Better known as 'Desktop Virtualization'. Established competitors in this space are Citrix/XenDesktop, Microsoft/HyperV, Oracle/VirtualBox, VMware/HorizonView used in combination with remote desktop clients like X11 and Remote Desktop Connect. Is there an angle here that is new and interesting?

<comment><USER27> This is specifically "desktop as a service" so while there may be Xen or Horizon in the mix it is abstracted away from the customer. The established competitors are Amazon Workspaces and Azure Virtual Desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Curious what folks think the outlook on this technology is. Rather, will there be any significant shift towards centralized compute in the next decade?

Currently, a large institution/corporation has to manage thousands of individual machines. Say a physical component fails, now a technician must go to the location of the machine and give the user a temporary replacement. Alternatively, in a centralized compute environment, they could just allocate a new machine, and work entirely out of a data center.

And what about software updates and upgrades?

In the centralized model, both software updates and hardware upgrades can be managed more easily. Sure, we have good software tools to update all networked devices, but if that fails, the admin still sometimes needs physical access.

One market I see this potentially taking off in is academia and hospitals. (Though I'm biased because I'm employed by a Medical School)

Much of the record keeping is already done with a centralized infrastructure. Liberal use of active directory and low powered clients is the norm.

And particularly for research, there's the added benefit of being able to allocate more resources without any physical action. Say I'm trying to run a script to fold proteins on my lab workstation. Usually, I'd be limited to the hardware on hand, but in the centralized model I could request or allocate a more powerful machine. Sure, the current solution is to spin up your own VM and move your program. Often, academic institutions have their own on-prem compute for this purpose. However, both still require technical ability on part of the user.

How close are we really to the model of giving all users a dummy client (think Chromebook) and centralizing The real compute? What challenges, disadvantages am I missing?

<comment><USER29> Depends on latency requirements. Data analysis? Yep. Creative pros? Nope.

<comment><USER30> Why? People are ok to play online via stream. Why shouldnt for work also be ok?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This looks like a consumer targeted product. If so, they should use a "per month" pricing instead of the per hour pricing which only caters to nerds who will go through the trouble to calculate.

I hope it's actually an affordable option overall compared to any other options out there.

<comment><USER32> Clearly this is a product targeted to professionals, designed for using heavy application while mobile.

Gaming is a also a use case, but gamers that run heavy games tend to be nerds anyway.

Per month pricing would make it very hard to price competitively for users who work 6+ hours a day vs. users who need to work with CAD files a couple of times per month.

I don't know what kind of every-day consumers need to to run heavy CAD software.

<comment><USER33> I get mixed messages. The front page says

> Moving your workflow into the cloud gives you the best hardware and > networking performance possible, and helps you work on the tough stuff a > normal computer just won't do.

This is then followed by their "Advanced" specs @ 6vCPUs, 16GB RAM and 2GB VRAM. That's a mid-range laptop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anybody used it for gaming? I was a beta user of the Nvidia service which is dedicated to gaming and while overall acceptable, lag spikes would render the use of the platform really frustrating. Everything would be smooth for 30s and then "lag" or freeze for up to 1-2s and then resume. Fine if playing the sims, but when you are in a fight in fast paced games it's a deal breaker. To my knowledge, so far, no platform has figured out the proper streaming/input lag management to make the experience truly seamless. Is this one different?

<comment><USER35> Yeah. I use it for work (healthcare, 3D simulations, GPU, our own custom apps for treatment planning) and also for gaming. Would recommend with Parsec.

<comment><USER36> I agree. Parsec makes it excellent. I really like the Paperspace vm combo there. Super easy to setup and I've noticed no issues. It's more expensive than Nvidia's service (to which I also subscribe), but you can play whatever game you want or do anything else you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "How does pricing work? For hourly plans you are charged a flat rate(depending on machine type) per month to cover storage and access.

Am I charged when my machine is off? For hourly plans, if your machine is powered off, you will only be billed for your storage."

Are those charges listed anywhere? They don't seem to be on the Workstream pricing page.

<comment><USER38> Here's a link to the storage pricing. There are links on that page to pricing details for just about any scenario.

[https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en- us/articles/36000380433...](https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en- us/articles/360003804333-Storage-Pricing)

The lowest level is 50GB for $5 per month

<comment><USER39> I wish there was a way to automatically nuke the image on shutdown, and then spend 15 minutes to have a script auto-populate a few games in my steam library at next boot. It'd save $5/month, and also solve the OS update problem.

<comment><USER40> You can use the CLI to create/destroy instances, so what you could do is write a script that has Chocolatey (or boxstarter, which is a bit more for this purpose) install Steam, run it when you login, and then have another script destroy the instance using the cli command.

A bit fiddly, but it'd work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So I read through the whole landing page and I don't really understand what this is. It sounds like it's just another virtual private server? How is this different from getting a VPS on any hosting provider and remote desktoping into it? I guess since it's paid by the hour rather than pay by month, but generally a service like this charges you for every hour your virtual machine exists, not just when it's running. So unless you want all your data deleted you're going to be paying longer-term anyway. Or maybe that's not the case, they certainly don't go into any detail to explain it one way or the other.

<comment><USER42> The benefit here is you pay a smaller fee for the storage and the machine itself is created on demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> First, that is a pretty nice web site. The notion of this sort of virtual computer goes back a ways, the one thing I keep expecting to see but haven't yet is a fully encrypted experience where the "cloud" bits don't work unless the user's local display has a security token attached.

My first experience with type of architecture was in the 80's with something called an "X terminal". All the same elements, a machine with a display / keyboard /mouse that had a network protocol to talk to some hardware acting on my behalf in a machine room. I could sit down at any station and open up my desktop, just as I had left it. It is a pretty decent experience even with only a 10mbit Ethernet network.

The second time I got to experience this architecture was in the Citrix days (late 90's early 2000's) Now the OS was always Windows and the network protocol was proprietary, but you could bring up an entire enterprise without all that pesky installing/rebooting that was the life of an early Window's system administrator. Also gave you control over employees trying to put bogus software on the computer. No Netscape Communicator for you! Work work work. :-)

Somewhere after Citrix imploded with all the problems that come with a walled garden with razor wire on the walls, we started seeing deployments using virtual machines and VNC. That gave you the "what you see is what is happening" feel of Citrix but now you had a different choice of operating systems and better vendor flexibility. VNC over a SSH SOCKS proxy replaced X11 over SSH as a more "universal" way of implementing this architectural design pattern.

Of course Google gave us "the browser is the computer" with ChromeOS and now the machine as a browser target where the browser is something more standard.

I like the architecture but in the previous iterations there was always some big problem it was addressing, X terminals addressed mobility, Citrix addressed enterprise configuration management, VNC/VM addressed multiple OSes other than Windows while retaining enterprise configuration management, and ChromeOS went for a better security model, mode-less configuration, and minimal cost of entry.

What problem does Workstream address either better or differently than what the above solutions address/addressed?

<comment><USER44> Citrix imploded? That's news to me. It's pretty much an industry standard in US healthcare.

<comment><USER45> I would like a minute of silence for all sysadmins working in healthcare. Having to deal with COVID on top of a Citrix infrastructure (if it can be called that) must be... well need I say more. Working with Citrix.

(PS: I'm joking, I hope the product has become stellar. It very much was not back in the day when I had 200 users on it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Looks quite interesting. I could really use a Windows box that I could use for a few games while I'm isolated not at home with only my Macbook Pro.

<comment><USER47> Why use this over GeForce Now? Really curious, I don't see a lot of advantages.

<comment><USER48> Paperspace supports* Linux client, GeForce Now does not.

* allegedly. Tried to set up Paperspace and Parsec without result.

<comment><USER49> If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much? If anything I would think this would be for someone who has a Linux setup but wants to access games that aren't available.

<comment><USER50> _" If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much?"_

It really depends on the game.

For instance, Factorio, which is enormously popular on HN, has a perfectly functioning Linux version. Many other games do too, and some games even perform better on Linux than on Windows, not to mention having a better user experience on Linux (especially if you are technical and know what you're doing).

I have an old Linux laptop, and Factorio performs well enough in single player, but I run in to serious performance issues on multiplayer. It's be nice to be able to run this Linux game on a more performant Linux machine, without shelling out the $$$ for a new gaming rig.

Further, I'd like to avoid Windows as much as possible, where it can be avoided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It doesn't look like this is launched yet, at least I don't see it when I log in. I've been happy with their notebook product Gradient though, and it will be interesting to see if latency is good enough for this to replace some local desktop usage.

<comment><USER52> Sorry for the confusion here, we are in the midst of separating out the two products and this is not reflected everywhere yet. Under the CORE section of the interface, you'll find these instances and you can download the desktop app here: [https://paperspace.com/download](https://paperspace.com/download)

<comment><USER53> How's native peripheral support? I've been looking for a cloud solution that would act as a virtual rig for VR. However, from everything I read there's hardware limitation on memory to support meaningful peripheral throughput. I'm curious about what you and DTE have come across!

<comment><USER54> What kind of VR hardware are you using? I'm working on a cloud based virtual computer solution that leverges google's additive GPUs (You can add as many as you want to facilitate what you need to do).

<comment><USER53> That sounds awesome! I don't have a VR rig set up and am looking to build a PC and have some spec I can share. How do you hook up VR peripheral with the cloud?

<comment><USER54> The idea is that the VR hardware would have a companion software, and that this software can be run on the could-computer (where all the heavy lifting is done) and displayed through a browser on the basic device that you already have.

So in your case - instead of personally fronting the costs for a whole lot of VR ready hardware, you can just pay for a powerful virtual computer (with as much Ram and GPU power as you want for your task).

Connecting your own assets/files to the cloud-computer can be done via cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> What I wonder, is there a special cloud service for compilation? Compilation is a spike in IO and CPU and most of the time nothing (and I don't mean a build server, but an exported file system I can edit on my computer and compile very fast in the cloud).

</comment><comment><USER56> I've been using Paperspace Air machine since they first launched (still paying early bird prices too) and their basic Windows VM is pretty amazing.

I'm mostly a Linux/Mac guy, but I spend a few hundred hours per year logged into my Paperspace machine and almost always have it doing something for me.

It's perfect for getting access to your own toolchain on any computer. And it's got plenty of resource to give it time-consuming jobs to do. It has just enough GPU to give it an edge over some of my cheap VPS options.

It was perfect when I was contracted out to a highly restrictive corporation and couldn't access my own employer's tools due to firewall policy. The browser-based remote desktop always worked.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm curious what others here are paying for a cloud VM for dev tasks. My current favorite VM size on Azure is Standard_NC6_Promo that includes a K80 GPU, 56GB RAM with 8 vCPUs for $0.39/hour.

<comment><USER25> When you say dev tasks, are you talking about machine learning? What dev tasks do you need 56G of ram for?

I'm trying to figure out who these products are for. 0.39/h * 8h = $3.20/day, or approx $70/working month. And that's on top of buying the computer you have to connect to this, with the annoyance of extra latency in all tasks. I can see the use of occasional demanding tasks using very large VMs on inexpensive computers, but I don't see how it works out in the long term if that's your man machine that you always live out of.

<comment><USER57> Sorry - yes ML tasks. The pricing is on par with a D8v3 but offers more RAM and a GPU, but likely with slower CPU perf (though I haven't benchmarked the machine).

My laptop doesn't have a discrete GPU, so I can't do any ML tasks on it so running a Jupyter server on a remote VM is my way of doing those tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Does it support snapshotting a machine after you configure it and install all your custom software then create a new machine from the snapshot?

<comment><USER59> Yes! Sorry this isn't more obvious: [https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en- us/articles/236402867-T...](https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en- us/articles/236402867-Templates)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Not a heavy user, but I've been using Paperspace a few times for gaming. They make it really easy. They have a "template" you spawn a new instance from, or use a blank windows install. Their template is handy since it has Steam and Parsec already installed.

What they seem to be doing here is saying you don't need Parsec and can just use their browser implementation instead.

Sounds great!

<comment><USER61> Is gaming well supported with controllers working over the air?

<comment><USER39> I've had good luck. The biggest hiccup was that you need to pay extra for a public IP.

Super Meat Boy is about as twitchy as I get, and the latency for that is fine (at least in the SF bay area).

Obviously, the GPU can do more than that, but I haven't tried pushing in that direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Any chance for more zones for paperspace? Wanted to use them for a cloud gaming host, but they don't have any regions in Los Angeles

</comment><comment><USER63> I use Paperspace's core compute machines for my IDE and dev machines. It's great not having to run everything local, can use a cheap low end laptop locally but still have a beast dev machine. If I end up hosing my dev I can just start it from the last snapshot.

Granted could probably do this with any host/cloud infrastructure. But I'm happy with it.

<comment><USER64> That's also how I use it. I tried other hosters but for dev use, theirs is particularly nice because it's much cheaper. Also I like the user interface ;) Unfortunately I didn't try Gradient yet but Core already has so many possibilities...

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> As a computer-savvy dev, i feel like its hard to beat building your own given how cheap & powerful desktops are today, and how good software is.

Workstream specs are - 6 CPU, 16GB RAM, 2GB graphics card, 256GB SSD.

You could build a desktop beating that for around $800 today - including a Ryzen 3600, motherboard, case, better GPU etc. At $0.18/hr for Workstream, that means after just 44 hours you breakeven on building your own machine.

With a little extra work on setting up VNC/RDP/Parsec you can then access this desktop from anywhere. I already do this and it works great for the most part. The streaming app/protocol is key, and thanks to teams like Parsec and Moonlight we have high quality software doing this for free.

\----

But given their target market, this does look really cool. Amazon Workspaces costs 3x-4x more for comparable machines with Windows. Paperspace looks like its offering OSX and some good bundled software for designers, VFX etc.

<comment><USER66> $800 / $0.18 per hour = 4444.4 hours

I think you did: $800 / $18 per hour = 44 hours

Pretty big difference! Curious, does this change your value assessment?

<comment><USER65> Oh good catch! That works out to 185 days so it won't change anything, my pc will last a lot longer than that.

But then again, even a much lower cost wouldn't change things for me. For one I completely own my pc and can do anything I want on it, second I know it's secure & private and my data won't be used in ways i might not know about, and third there's no internet latency on input/output which is nice for gaming etc. I could go on but yeah I feel like it's clear owning is generally better than renting for many reasons

<comment><USER67> 185 days of continuous use.. for many 4000 hours is easily a decade worth of gaming

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is a new world to me... I'm looking to learn a GPU intensive application like Davinci Resolve before committing to a new machine to run it locally -- would this be an appropriate solution, and would it obviate the need for the local machine, i.e. can I do everything on this that I could do locally?

</comment><comment><USER69> Would something like paperspace be a good platform for software development? My slow computer doesn't handle IntelliJ that well. Instead of buying a new PC I could rent this for a few hours at a time.

</comment><comment><USER70> > How does pricing work?

> For hourly plans you are charged a flat rate(depending on machine type) per > month to cover storage and access. Additionally, you are charged an hourly > rate when the machine is running. Monthly plans are offered at a flat rate > for unlimited access.

Then the pricing page doesn't list the flat rate, when looking at hourly pricing - but does show an hourly price for monthly billing? Possibly monthly/(30 * 24)?

Ed: looks like hourly for monthly plan is calculated as monthly/(365÷12×24)

</comment><comment><USER71> I really like the idea of Paperspace and I've tried to get going a few times on the free plan but I hate notebooks. I didn't fully understand the server + gpu offerings, which is what I want. I would love it if I could just get an IP to scp some scripts to, then ssh in and run them. I don't think it's possible to get billed only for GPU time when you're running it this way though, so it would be pricey to keep the server up.

</comment><comment><USER72> Hi. Developer and part-time computer science high school teacher here. Does Workstream support graphical desktop linux machines, or only terminal? Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER73> Vagon[1] is another interesting solution tackling to solve a similar problem.

1\. [https://www.vagon.io](https://www.vagon.io)

</comment><comment><USER74> I use Paperspace for running Fusion360 which is a CAD application. I use a Linux laptop and there are no really good CAD applications in Linux space(I tried FreeCAD but Fusion 360 is so much easier to use though). Works like a charm and extremely light on the wallet(I bill roughly 15 ~ 20 USD per month with around 40 to 60 hours of usage). It's been a godsend so far.

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm curious about something because I'm working on a side project that's "in the area".

How does workstream, or indeed any remote computing provider, handle the possibility of people using their service to attack other computers, or to store/transfer extremely illegal data? They're not exactly running KYC identification.

<comment><USER76> There are probably easier and cheaper way to do that.

All sorts of player offer storage without kyc and for attacks this isn't really what you'd want either

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Can somebody highlight the difference between this new "workstream" product, and their regular "core" VMs?

</comment><comment><USER78> This actually seems like a game changer. Access to machine learning / developer rigs at incredibly cheap prices?

</comment><comment><USER79> Do Workstream VMs come pre-installed with the pro software they mention in the blurb? If so, this sounds compelling.

</comment><comment><USER80> Is there something like this that's self-hosted?

My ideal scenario is something like this that's $20/month for unlimited usage, with the caveat that you have to have the server in your own house with your own internet, but the service is that it provisions your machine and proxies it for fast speeds everywhere.

<comment><USER81> If the goal is gaming, GeForce Now and Moonlight are amazing. You can also get a remote desktop via GeForce Now but probably better just to use remote desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I have to recommend [https://shadow.tech](https://shadow.tech)! It is a Windows VM intended specifically for (but not limited to) gaming! And it works extremely well, I am playing games on it for ~ 2 years by using their client app on Linux.

<comment><USER83> I only recently got mine last week and I love it. The CPU is a bit underpowered but the GPU is so much better than what I have in my PC and I've been able to play a bunch of more recent games that I wasn't able to before. Also much prefer the freedom to install what I want over services like GFN or Stadia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Signed up for a paper space account about a year and a half ago, they had a dark UI pattern to stop people from deleting their VMs, and it kept charging me every month with no method to stop it. After a month or too, they changed their UI to allow deleting the VM.

</comment><comment><USER85> Another interesting solution for this is : [https://shop.shadow.tech/usen/pre- order](https://shop.shadow.tech/usen/pre-order) . They are currently expanding to some countries including the US.

<comment><USER86> +1 on Shadow!! - I would definitely recommend Shadow. You get a full instance of Windows 10 to do anything you want (I primarily game). I wrote a quick review of it, including 3dmark scores for the base version here: [https://medium.com/@ec822/playing-in-the- cloud-d0c023b77bdd](https://medium.com/@ec822/playing-in-the- cloud-d0c023b77bdd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> I created an account to try some gaming (I'm on a Mac), but they require writing a message to access any GPU enabled machines.

Is [https://www.paperspace.com/gaming](https://www.paperspace.com/gaming) deprecated?

</comment><comment><USER88> I've used perforce in the past both for work & gaming. Gotta say, awesome experience!

</comment><comment><USER89> Are there services like these that also "rent" the software (aside from the OS) licenses to you? I wouldn't mind paying a pro-rated license for sharing photo or video editing software for example.

</comment><comment><USER90> I think the pricing section has a few mistakes under Monthly

$1343 / hour

$1.84 effective hourly price

<comment><USER52> Nice catch, typo (the values are correct but the text said "/hour" instead of "/month").

Disclosure: I work on Workstream

<comment><USER33> I really wish that the monthly flat rates were included when hourly prices are quoted on the pricing page and with "only pay for what you use" on the front page. Right now it's very easy to get a first impression of feeling misled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> This is a really great idea!

I wish you a lot of luck in this endeavor!

Any plans for a free, ultra-lightweight tier of service? You might be able to get more paid subscribers over time that way...

</comment><comment><USER92> What is the min mbps upload speed required for success here?

</comment><comment><USER93> this works out to ~$375/yr for their advanced plan if you figure 8 hr work days and 261 working days per year ([https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+work+days+per+year](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+work+days+per+year)). How does this compare vs an equivalent instance with some kind of remote desktop running on a cloud service?

</comment><comment><USER94> Can someone clarify something for me please?

Is this (and others like it) just a new Citrix-type system? Or is this actually something new that changes the game?

</comment><comment><USER95> Whats not clear is do I still pay for it when i'm not using it, but can restore processes and provisioned apps when I need to get back on?

</comment><comment><USER96> Are there solutions that don't care about user location? Getting "not available in your country" from Shadow and Nvidia Now.

</comment><comment><USER97> How is this different from virtual windows or Linux machine. You can run software remotely this way without having to buy a new computer

</comment><comment><USER98> With all those websites preventing you to use tor, you can use tor to connect to this, and this to connect to whatever you need.

<comment><USER99> You can also set up a SOCKS proxy on a much cheaper basic VPS as well, giving you the advantage of using a web browser on your local computer instead of dealing with the overhead of a completely virtualized desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> While interesting, it would've been great if they had a simple test no signup instance to evaluate responsiveness.

</comment><comment><USER101> I've looked around the site but im still confused - It looks like its a windows OS? Is there an iPad client?

<comment><USER77> You can use it in the browser, or install any RDP/VNC Server you want on the Windows system. So yes, there are probably multiple iPad clients.

<comment><USER101> oh yeah, I didnt consider youd connect to it through standard RDP clients. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Is this a look at our future? Everybody will just connect to a more powerful computer in the cloud?

<comment><USER103> Probably. I even saw Xbox being used as a cloud computer rather than console. [1]

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

<comment><USER102> I actually play my playstation games online with PS Now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> What about software licensing? Today I need Office, tomorrow I might need 3DStudio.

</comment><comment><USER105> There's no cloud it's _literally_ someone else's computer

</comment><comment><USER106> No RTX/Turing GPUs?

My first thought was "Hey - I can try out Minecraft RTX!"

</comment><comment><USER107> It is nothing other than being a fat client that works in the browser.

</comment><comment><USER108> For people who have used it: is credit card the only payment option?

</comment><comment><USER109> I'm relishing the switch back to the thin client / main frame model, but I want to own my main frame. Even if it physically sits in a company's data center. With 5G we are getting closer to disposable glass thin client interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER110> I only see Gradient and Core. Where is Workstream? Neat idea!

<comment><USER111> Same here, signed up but the only choices are Gradient or Core. What is, or where is, Workstream?

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> this looks awesome. I wish i could rent machines preloaded with the applications i use. but i guess the incentives for the licensers aren't aligned there.

<comment><USER113> My thoughts exactly. If I could just rent photoshop for a few hours that would serve my needs perfectly. But it looks like I'd need to buy a license, load it on, and pay monthly for storage, so I might as well just pay for just the application and use it locally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> What's the AWS equivalent to their biggest instance?

<comment><USER115> I'd like to see a cost comparison across different providers. A comparable v100 machine on Google Cloud is $2.015/hr, while Paperspace seems to charge 2.30/hr for a dedicated v100 ([https://www.paperspace.com/pricing](https://www.paperspace.com/pricing))

<comment><USER52> Google Cloud is very sneaky with their pricing as they don't include the instance itself in the advertised GPU pricing. Here's an instance very comparable in specs (8 vCPU, 30GB RAM, 1 V100, 50 GB SSD): [https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=a9fbcab5-cb...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=a9fbcab5-cbce-4a2c-b2a4-765a2bafd92a) It's $3.19/hr. The Linux version is $2.87/hr.

<comment><USER115> Thanks for this link, I've been going by the estimated cost on the Google Cloud VM deployment page which seems to give significantly lower prices than your link. With GC I always seem to end up paying a lot more than I planned to...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> Is there a service like this for Linux desktop users?

<comment><USER117> AWS Workspaces supports both Windows and Linux desktops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Back to the future.

</comment><comment><USER119> Maybe some benchmarks?

<comment><USER120> Well, "super fast" would seem to imply at least 10 terahertz...

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> Anything?

</comment><comment><USER122> laughs in tmux

</comment><comment><USER123> I already have a fast computer

</comment><comment><USER124> Why do you need to use a Virtual Computer when you already have a laptop/desktop you use to connect to this Virtual Computer? What am I missing? Is it only for folks connecting from Chromebooks?

<comment><USER125> Its a subscription service. People want subscriptions.</comment></comment>


Performance of URL shorteners - <AUTHOR>

Hiya.  I'm answering my own question.  Being disappointed with how slowly TinyURL ran, I asked HN about the performance of others:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421552
I just spent a few minutes timing alternatives:
TinyURL: 0.44s/req
bit.ly:  0.19s/req
is.gd:   0.07s/req
That's a pretty big spread! <comment><USER2> One of the reasons is.gd is fast is because it uses sequential URLs for each request, so it doesn't have to do multiple collision tests. tinyurl used to do this eons ago, but stopped because of abuses (actually somewhat NSFW): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL#Early_abuses>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Are there others that should be tested?

<comment><USER2> <http://ri.ms> but we didn't optimize the server as much as the algorithm for creating a url.

Depending on algorithm, some of these will sites vary their performance based on database size. So it might be that is.gd is just not as large as the others and/or has less traffic.

Edit: There're also others like:

<http://tr.im/>

<http://metamark.net/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How did you make your time tests?

<comment><AUTHOR> It ain't pretty, but:

require 'mechanize'

      class Tinyurl
      def self.make_tiny(big_url)
        url = "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=#{big_url}"
        agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
        agent.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari'
        results = agent.get(url)
        return results.body
      end

      def self.test(base="http://www.google.com?q=sanjay", iterations = 10)
        t=Time.now
        (0..iterations).to_a.each do |i|
          puts make_tiny("#{base}#{i}:#{rand(100000000)}")
        end
        puts Time.now-t
      end
     end

     Tinyurl.test

<comment><USER4> I could be wrong as I'm not that familiar with Ruby, but I imagine to get more meaningful results (not saying that the results will be different), I would run the tests many more times than 10, as well as not printing to stdout inside of your testing loop.

<comment><AUTHOR> 100 iterations instead of 10, removed puts:

TinyURL: 0.43s/req

bit.ly: 0.22s/req

is.gd: 0.05s/req

That's close enough to my original values to not matter. It appears that the time is all spent waiting for the site to return.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Slack Platform Roadmap - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/the-slack-platform-roadmap-34067b054177#.8hh8m4s4c <comment><USER2> No away message support? Is Slack allergic to this for some reason? I cannot fathom why this basic functionality hasn't been added yet without requiring awkward contortions of adding custom fields to your profile.

<comment><USER3> When is the away status insufficient?

<comment><USER2> For purely remote scenarios, it is an important indication of whether you will be back soon or if you are afk for an extended period of time. Without it you are left broadcasting your status ("going afk for an hour to run an errand, etc") on channels, or having to hack up your profile each time and assume that other users will know where to look to determine when you will be back.

Just about every messaging system has support for this: ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and now Google Hangouts, HipChat, etc. Even with IRC there are cheap ways to simulate it. It's really hard to get used to not having it after making good use of it for almost 2 decades.

<comment><USER4> I think the "2 decades" thing is relevant here. Most of the products you mention were created before people were almost always physically in contact with an internet-enabled device.

I never used any of those much, but starting using Slack when I joined a company where it was ubiquitous. I never saw anybody care about declaring an away message. People at any point could be busy and might not answer, but they were rarely "away". The culture was just to assume that people were available, and if not that they'd reply when they could.

<comment><USER5> 100% agreed.

I work for a slack competitor that has away messages, and I'm jealous of Slack's willingness to ignore the old interface patterns and implement the simplest solution possible that makes the most sense for larger group users, new users, ignoring the expectations of the smaller group of users, old-time users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish they'd put a bit more effort in making it faster (outside the US/EU) (and feel more native)

</comment><comment><USER7> The actual roadmap is here:

[https://trello.com/b/ZnTQyumQ/slack-platform- roadmap](https://trello.com/b/ZnTQyumQ/slack-platform-roadmap)

<comment><USER8> There is not much here. Real roadmaps look bit more complex than this. This seems like a roadmap created for hiring purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't see anything about fixing screen hero. This sucks for those of us in multiple professional organizations.

<comment><USER10> I don't think they have any plans to fix it, they're just going to integrate some of its technology into the new Calls feature in Slack that's been available for a while now.

I actually prefer Slack's Calls than any other group calling services out there now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really enjoyed this presentation about platforms and power over their lifetime: [http://www.lostgarden.com/2011/03/gdc-2011-game-of- platform-...](http://www.lostgarden.com/2011/03/gdc-2011-game-of-platform- power.html)

In the framework of this presentation, slack is currently in the 'Engage' phase of the platform. They're all about openness and building something great.

But code is law, and eventually their APIs will be used for something they dislike. Building on a platform is always going to be like snatching pennies from in front of a steamroller.

</comment><comment><USER12> That is the most abstract and confusing roadmap I've ever seen... Two improvements before rocket.chat eats your lunch...

1 - Give devs the option to extend the UI via fly-in panels (like rocket.chat does)

2 - Update API to support comms with 1

</comment><comment><USER13> So, why can't I view the roadmap?</comment>


Ask HN: Why do newsletters not work? - <AUTHOR> I run a small site to teach people to code (https://enlight.ml).
It has ~600 email subscribers. I usually send an email every week or so linking the user to any new projects which have been posted. These emails are relatively short, however, they don't drive many clicks towards the site. Why is this? Over half of them open the email, but only 8% of the list actually clicks on the links.
I've tried making the subject stand out with emojis and such, but I'm not seeing much of an interest of the site through these emails. On the other hand, however, less than 15 people have unsubscribed from the list since the site launched.
What's an alternative way to spread the word to your users? How do you guys do it? <comment><USER2> 8% isn't a bad click through rate, especially if you're sending newsletters weekly. I don't see anything about frequency next to the subscribe button on your homepage, so people may have been expecting something different, which would drive down the click through rate.

I've also seen enlight.ml posted here before, so my guess is quite a few of the subscribers came from HN or sites like it. Typically the users you get through these kinds of postings aren't all in your target audience. This might also be resulting in a lower click through rate.

The key to getting a high click through rate is delivering a lot of value. There aren't any good shortcuts.

Here are some things that may help you figure out and boost your perceived value:

* Send a survey to your users asking them what types of updates they want to get from you, and how often.

* Figure out if the same 8% engages each time, and what the patterns of click throughs are (do some people click through every single time?).

* See if anyone on your list would be willing to chat with you about the value they get from your newsletter/site.

* Do some content marketing/promotion to attract a more targeted audience.

* Make sure you're selling the benefits of doing the lesson in your emails.

* Have some clearer messaging around the signup box for the list.

I run a site to teach people data science, and I've learned a lot of marketing lessons along the way. Happy to chat further if you want -- my email is in my profile.

<comment><USER3> This is a great post^^.

I've had a similar size list as high as 55% open rate and 22% click through. The key is high quality content that tailors to the subscribers on your list, and preferably that is low on spam.

Surveying the users is a great start, I'd also check out what competitors are doing for some ideas.

</comment></comment><comment> mickael-kerjean To give a few numbers out of nearly 12000 subscribers with one newsletter a month we used to do between 2,5% and 4.2% of people actually clicking a link.

I have no idea about the average but if you get those numbers weekly its actually better than what we do (and the person who is creating the content for the newsletter is a pure marketing person).

</comment><comment><USER4> > I've tried making the subject stand out with emojis and such

The only emails I've ever received with emojis in the subject field have been spam. But, maybe I'm not your target audience. You could try split testing this.

<comment><USER5> This! So much this! If you want to test how effective things are, always make A/B tests. And as stated before 8% click rate is pretty impressive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point - will test out on the next email

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > I usually send an email every week or so linking the user to any new > projects which have been posted. These emails are relatively short, however, > they don't drive many clicks towards the site. Why is this? Over half of > them open the email, but only 8% of the list actually clicks on the links.

Doesn't that just tell you that only 8% of the list were actually interested in viewing the new project? My guess is that if you made projects that interested more people then more people would click?

</comment><comment><USER7> Your title suggests that due to your own experience that _all_ email newsletters do not work. I believe that might be a bit of a narrow view. In fact, I'm sure there are expert marketers which would strongly disagree with this.

Perhaps a better way to phrase things would be "how to make my newsletters more engaging?". Have you tried researching the topic? There are lots of resources online about "growth hacking" and email marketing.

Perhaps I'm a bit cynical but this seems like a clickbaity contrived effort to promote your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry you thought this way. Will try and better rephrase next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure what is happening, but the low unsubscribe rate may be because in gmail it's much easier to mark a message as spam than unsuscribing.

<comment><USER9> Assuming there's a _List-Unsubscribe_ header present, Gmail will also (offer to) unsubscribe the recipient from the list when marking an e-mail as spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Over half of them open the email, but only 8% of the list actually clicks > on the links._

Maybe only 8% of them or so really care, and it's not about the medium used to reach them?

</comment><comment><USER11> People are busy. When checking their email, they probably are doing something else and not looking for educational code projects at that that moment.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you verified that 8% is actually a low conversion rate?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, this. 8% is actually a very, very high conversion rate for what amounts to an email ad (granted one that was asked for, so it's not spam).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I am using mailchimp but I wasn't aware that this number was pretty impressive compared to others...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I tried that way as well, and did not yield the expected results. And some readers of my site really prefer the good old RSS.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I keep working on this project? - <AUTHOR> Hello! I have been working on a platform for displaying arbitrary API points from around the web on one dashboard. Despite very excited reception whenever I show it somewhere, pretty much no one uses it. I think people like the idea of it, but simply don't need it. I am trying to decide if I should keep working on promoting it or if I should move on to a new project.
HN is pretty much my target market or so I think, so I am looking for honest opinions on whether or not it seems like a good concept at its core. I have got a lovely backlog of really great features however if the core idea is not something people genuinely need and will pay for, then I would be best moving on.
https://apiblocks.com is the site,  so if you would be so kind, let me know your thoughts!
For what it's worth I really do love the idea, and I am not just looking for validation in stopping. I just know that time is finite and not every idea is a winner (this is my third major side project) <comment><USER2> I think you could get there. If I'm being frank, I think your data points are relatively boring to most people.

The point is to provide data that people want to know. And a lot of the appeal of data is in the visualization.

If you could "rice" it, to borrow a term from /r/unixporn, I could see it being a lot more appealing. And then get a dash that is really easily relevant to someone, like:

* Local Weather high/low/precipitation * Leading breaking news headlines * New blog post headlines for blogs I monitor * New craigslist hits on a given search * I don't know, you decide.

This is stuff that I probably wouldn't want flooding my email. I might check this in the morning for the weather, and during downtime to occupy a few minutes with some light reading. It might be my "home" page (which isn't nearly as relevant as it used to be, given chrome's 'new tab' interface).

I also very much like the idea of shareable dashboards, mentioned in another comment, though that would probably mostly depend on APIs that were less specific to individuals. But hey, maybe even then I could have an automated "city of xyz" type of dashboard and share that around.

Once you have enough data sources, you have a really interesting ability to tie things together and make templates.

People love cool dashboards, I think you just need to find the right combination of data and visualization, and you are lacking that currently.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you need to focus on your why? If you're building a portfolio piece, there's an amazing power that comes with "I built a finished product." If you're looking to start a business, there's no sense throwing good money after bad.

Try filling in the blanks here: This product helps ___(type of person)_____ achieve ____(desired result)______ by ____(what the software does)_____.

Here's my first thought: make dashboards shareable via URL, and then create specialized dashboards for people to view, share and bookmark.

Imagine that you made one specifically for surfers in San Diego. Surfers would tell all their friends that apiblocks.com/sandiego-surfing is the page to use to find out wave height, temperature, water quality, UV levels, jellyfish levels and everything else they need to know in order to decide whether or not to go surfing. If you want to make some money, add some ads - you'll have a geographically condensed, topic focused audience (that's like gold). Repeat for a bunch of other geographic areas, maybe do similar things for other interests and you might be a winner. As a bonus, much of the work could be accomplished by automated means (passing in different zip codes and other inputs).

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmm...

While I personally don't see much use in the particular endpoints you have integrated with, what I do see the need for on a daily basis is API endpoint monitoring.

Modern applications depend on a huge quantity of APIs and this becomes even more true as everything moves to micro services. One endpoint/service going down can break a lot of things as a chain reaction.

There are website monitoring services such as Pingdom but I haven't seen anything dedicated to APIs. You can create a poor man's API monitor with Pingdom (if REST) but once you get inside a corporate network or you need specific authentication, these services don't work anymore.

I can maybe see repurposing what you have built into an API monitoring service which using a dashboards and alerting quickly spots API failure...perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd move on... a) people have a good, free way to get this type of information (from MacBook notifications or Google Now, for example) so it's not "wow" or a "must have"; b) your "setup cost" is too high; c) even if you solved these problems, there's no obvious path to revenue..

Consumer plays are hard - for someone to use your app, they'd have to give up their precious time... so unless it's a "WOW! I NEED THIS" and "I NEED TO TELL MY FRIENDS ABOUT THIS" it won't get scale...

I'd recommend reusing this code to make some "fully baked" ideas where users see content without doing anything.. something like techmeme.com for a niche area, amazon product watch, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> > HN is pretty much my target market or so I think

Can you think up any real-world use-cases? Definitely try to think outside of the HN crowd, dashboards and data points are very general. Who could this be useful for?

Ask around in different communities, find a few in this list for example; [http://promotehour.com/free-list-of-places-to-promote- your-s...](http://promotehour.com/free-list-of-places-to-promote-your- startup.php)

Try to really ask the right questions, instead of asking "what do you think?", ask "would you use this?" and if not, "why?"

Perform market research, why would someone even want this?

</comment><comment><USER7> I honestly love this and was thinking of doing the same exact thing. I wanted to make this because it was something I wanted for myself. After bringing it up with friends I found out that they were into it too. The difference with my idea is that you'd be able to 'subscribe' to the info you're interested in and receive an email at preset intervals. To answer taprun'so question, for me I can see this product helping busy/easily distracted people view their daily digest all in one place to save time and prevent link-tangents which waste time.

I always thought of it as a 'Playlist' of information you want to receive. hi/low temperatures for day/forecast, currency/crypto prices, Metro/traffic delays, stock prices, tweets, specific news titles/links, amazon/ebay item price, deal websites item of the day(like woot), today/upcoming holidays, airline price from x to y, job postings, FDA/CPSC warnings/recalls, horoscopes, etc.

As for monetization, you can present adds related to what they're searching for. If their looking up weather, present local ads, stock prices can correspond to trading software/newsletters/funds, deal of the days and flights could be affiliate links, for holidays you can offer affiliates for presents, etc</comment>


What Do Jay Z and Warrenn Buffett Have in Common? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@findbridge/what-do-jay-z-and-warren-buffet-have-in-common-c5acd7292384#.gbwmdl7t5 <comment><USER2> They are both:

1\. Human beings 2\. Americans 3\. Popular 4\. Males 5\. Parents</comment>