Ask HN: Facebook canvas app vs. FB Connect/Platform? - <AUTHOR> Given the latest Facebook announcements affecting developers, how would you weigh the pros/cons of betting on doing a Facebook canvas app as your user's primary means of interacting with your application (as opposed to going to your own domain which would then use FB Connect for login and other the FB API for other features such as friend picker, constant auth, profile sharing, etc.)? Some context: we're a social advice & reputation game.
By my calculation, it seems that the only a few benefits for developers in doing FB canvas apps anymore:
1) User doesn't have to open another browser window/tab to a site whose domain/brand they're not immediately familiar with.
2) If the user bookmarks the app, the app appears in the upcoming left profile/nav bar.
3) Presumably, I'd expect the new "secret sauce" FB newsfeed algorithm to include some preference towards native FB canvas app stories that can then be "liked" & commented upon from within the user's newsfeed/live feed.
A very prominent FB app company (top 20) told me that they're deprioritizing their native FB canvas app in lieu of their own site with FB Connect given they expect a "40-60% decline in native FB canvas app user activity with Facebook's recently announced changes". They think that Facebook can't be trusted to do well by developers since they're primarily interested in users.
Please mention if you're currently actively preparing or have already deployed a FB Connect &/or canvas app. Thanks!! <comment><USER2> This is all from first-hand experience. I've been intimately involved with the Platform since its first launch and know most of the companies in the top 20.

Facebook has the destination site they want. You are not going to help them build it. The second you become even marginally inconvenient they will pay attention to everything you do and shut down your app without a second thought if they think it's in their interests.

They did it to Slide (Top Friends) and Zynga (FishVille). They will do it to you as soon as you even approach that level of success.

This isn't a condemnation. It's just the cost of doing business on the Facebook Platform. I like the fact that Facebook's motives are so transparent because (unlike Google) it makes it easy to anticipate how they'll react. They're completely rational and self-interested (for the most part -- the original live feed was a mistake, as was Beacon).

It's clear that Facebook has cared more about Connect than the Platform for a long time; at least a year. This latest change just formalizes it and finally incentivizes developers to build on Connect rather than the Platform.

See Scott Rafer's presentation "The Facebook Platform is Dead" from last October, where he predicts all of this.

But keep in mind, once Facebook has the Network they want, they're going to do the exact same thing they did on the Platform.

You are not safe there. If you're building on Facebook Connect you need an escape plan from Day 1.

Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh, and they will take.

<comment><USER3> Yep. Every developer/company that attaches itself to a larger platform (Apple Appstore, Facebook, etc) needs to ask "What would I do in the future if I were <platform company>?" and then build a strategy to account for that.

Company-sponsored platforms are self-interested moving targets just like everything else in business.

Just something to think about when you're coding iFartVille 3000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a couple things to consider (having learned the hardway recently).

The company I work for, <http://theinsider.com>, uses Facebook Connect on our site. Before I started there, they had a fairly basic implementation of FB Connect that was put in place when that program was first made available. About 2 months ago I went through and re-wrote the entire FB Connect implementation our side to bring it up to date because the FB Connect API had changed a bit.

Within 2 weeks after we pushed my changes live, FB changed the 0.4.0 API we built against which resulted in some breakage on our side. This was pretty much without notice. So in the past week, I had started going through my code to update it again when I found that there is a completely new FP Connect JS api that is being released.

I got excited about it because the new api is much simpler to use, the js library is 10x smaller than the old one(which could pull in at close to 200kb at times), and its much better documented than the old one. However, its still alpha and we're having a couple of minor problems implementing it. That's mainly do to a change in the cookie structure, which is a problem we're addressing on our end.

The point of this is that in my experience, FB doesn't document much of their APIs in a consistent or well-organized manner. This is especially true on the FB Connect side of things. They can make sudden changes on their end that adversely affect companies and websites that are using their systems.

On the plus side, using FB Connect on our site has been really successful. We're getting more user interaction, more engagement, and higher page views at least in part of utilizing it.

The question of whether to use Connect or build a Facebook app isn't either/or. It depends on what kind of experience you're trying to build. The downside of FB apps is that they've been around for a while and have lost their luster. They really just clutter up a user's profile. Its much more difficult for users to find apps on Facebook now than it was a year ago, due to the constant changes that FB is making.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm currently building a flash game, that is primarily aimed at Facebook users. I plan to start it off as a FB canvas app, in order to establish trust with users, and after I have reached a critical momentum, I plan to switch over to FBConnect.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've had a much harder time with Iframe apps (more bugs, less solutions) than FBML ones, for php implementations. Unless you have all the gotchas figured out for connect, you should go with FBML.

As for 2), doesn't this happen with XFBML, too?</comment>


Embryo-like structures created from human stem cells - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02654-w <comment><USER2> So is this the start of the road towards human cloning?

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20963492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20963492)</comment>


Ask HN: Lost my appetite for software development, any recommendations? - <AUTHOR> So I am in my mid 30s and started a new and interesting job about a year ago. A company I wouldn't have dreamed working for even a few years ago.
Now I am in a team with about 10 super eager software developers who constantly try to improve the code base and know the ins and outs of the libraries they are using. Some are very highly respected in their fields.
That's generally great, however I can't connect emotionally and mentally with them. I mean I wanted to work there, bought books and was so excited to dig deeper into this new topic.
Now I am one of two in the team who has a wife and kids. I chip away my tasks, do them fairly well, but everyone around me brings out new solutions and general improvements to the code base. This is a) intimating, b) I wouldn't even know how to start to catch up on them and c) I feel like I lost the lust to constantly keep up with new tools other bored developers wrote.
I feel like I lost this special "I am unstoppable" gene and don't actually want to tinker and hack in my free time anymore. Every time I want to help out with a project of a friend, and something is not working, I am thinking "why should I fix this stupid problem when I could read a book or just chill".
I feel generally less excited about programming and actually don't know what to do. I tried to apply for engineering manager positions, since this is what I did in the past year (although not on my resume) but I made people do the work for me somehow because I just couldn't bring my hands to write that piece of code needed.
Did this ever happen to some of you? What direction should I take? <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing, and it's quite refreshing to hear your situation because.. you are not alone. I often feel that way.. dead end jobs, useless projects, lost of energy, lost of ambitions, I can go on all day. My remedy to this is just to realize that this is a wave, a phase in which you're at the bottom of that wave, a sort of "life recession" where you get forced to question a few things. Ten years ago, I was so fed up of foking programming that I never thought I'd get the buzz back. Today, I'm still buried in projects, but my outlook changed somehow, I find this interesting again. It's funny, because it kind of coincided with my kids outgrowing the diaper years :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is possibly partially burnout, it could also be part of "growing up", or perhaps you shifted priorities. I used to work 50-60 or even 80 hours a week, people praised me that I would respond within minutes on a Sunday evening - and I would be proud of it, too.

But that was 10 years ago. Now I don't have work email on my phone, I work freelance, so I get to decide on what I want to do next; and work in general just doesn't take up that high a priority anymore (being a freelance contractor has helped me develop this trait of "I'm here to do work for your company, and you pay me").

I enjoy working on side projects and learning new stuff, and one side project I started 8 years ago is still profitable to this day, but I wouldn't have started it anymore today, the motivation and naivite just don't exist anymore, plus since I have a family to support, it would be too risky to start that big of a side project.

Maybe it's time to just take a step back and assess what your long term goals are and in general what you want to achieve in life.

And it also reminded me of this: [http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html)

"I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm? The fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game. Only one idea at a time can be the top idea in your mind. Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it will less often be some project you're working on."

<comment><USER4> > "I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my > identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that > sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But if there weren't something > real there, why would I squirm? The fact is, once you have kids, you're > probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And > attention is a zero-sum game. Only one idea at a time can be the top idea in > your mind. Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it > will less often be some project you're working on."

To some extend cutting back on work to spend more time with kids is result of stable and wealthy society. Growing up back home, I had heard so many people worked harder and longer hours after their first child was born. Many people even left their families to work overseas so that they can create better future for their kids.

So depending where you are from or on your current circumstances, kids may make you less ambitious or more.

EDIT: to OP, as father in late 30s, I also question if I want to do programming long-term or something else. I used to think how I want to be remembered, but now I ask myself how I want my son to remember me. I don't know the answer yet, but this question help me refocus when I feel lost.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it depends on the circumstances, of course. But I've seen myself make different (maybe perhaps smarter?) choices as well and so to have both a successful career and be with my family.

Yes, I could've taken a contract in a different city and earn a bit more. I used to take longer periods of time off to work on my own personal projects.

But nowadays, instead of working many late nights for 8 months, so I can take 4 months off to work on my personal projects, I usually work 10-11 months, but less hours per week. So I'm home earlier every day and I'm not exhausted every night.

I ask recruiters and colleagues 1-2 months before the end of the project (sometimes I take a few weeks off between projects) and plan for the next project early - so I have more choices and am less under pressure. And in the past years I've been able to work only in local projects that don't require travel outside my city.

Instead of learning niche-y tech because it looks cool on my resume (e.g. Svelte, Elixir / Phoenix or Clojure) I use my time to learn Python or React instead. Why? Because it increases my general market value as a freelancer better. My employed colleagues with no spouse and kids will use their free evenings to program in Golang to create a game that has not launched after a year. They're doing it just for fun. Me? Should I have a some spare time for side projects, I will try to learn something like Python with Flask or Django to create a side-project that will hopefully launch within a few weeks and perhaps I can even make some money off of it a few months down the road. "Worst case" I learnt Python and have a portfolio project to show off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Talk to your manager and see how they think you are doing. You might be too hard on yourself and/or in awe of co-workers.

It sounds like you are in a good spot to soak up knowledge from people that are highly respected in their fields. Try to understand what these improvements and new solutions offer to the product. It is possible that the eager devs are just spinning their wheels and/or reinventing wheels because of new shiny libraries. If they truly are very advanced in their fields, I can't imagine your manager has the same expectations of you and them. Maybe your role is to bang out awesome work that helps them keep their brains engaged in the very advanced work they do (you didn't describe what it was but it sounds more than CRUD apps).

Another approach is to recognize you are a professional and that there are times where you simply aren't motivated. I'm sure this happens in other professions. There are days/weeks I just am bored doing what we do. Software development of business applications just isn't terribly exciting. Figuring out problems and creating things in code is fun though. Think about what brought you into software development, maybe there is an ember still there you can slowly get burning again.

</comment><comment><USER6> Family and maturity change your perspective. While younger developers are chasing the next "shiny new thing", you just want to put your time in and go home. That's nothing to be ashamed of. To satisfy "getting home faster", I suggest you concentrate your effort and attention on improving the development process. What rote work or common functionality can you make easier to build/deploy? Ask yourself what the last coding project that you were enthusiastic about was and try to work on something similar. Or, pick something completely different so that the process of learning reminds of why you used to think coding was worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, it has happened to me. For some reason, I totally lost interest and people who knew me were surprised I moved away from technology.

This phase is generally difficult to deal with. Somehow we have a strong identity with our career and leaving that feels bad for whatever reason. And when people are surprised, it almost makes you feel guilty. But when I got over that I realised if we take these temporary emotions out of equation it makes sense to move on and start over. Our analytical mind would always come handy in whatever we do.

In my case what helped me was while I was clear I lost interest in technology I had to do some soul searching to find out on what I wanted to do instead. This took some time for me to figure out. And some more time to figure out on how to monetise it. But the effort is worth it.

But I think it would be difficult for anybody to tell you what direction you need to take. It depends on what actually you want to do.It could be managing, consulting on domain, freelancing, taking up a different route, anything else you always liked but were not thinking as a career choice.It also depends on the compromises you can make.

Some deep introspection helps. Maybe this phase goes away as well. Give it sometime and watch what you think about often. That might give a clue. If it is a new journey, talk to people who have done that, chart out a plan before taking a plunge. All the best.

</comment><comment><USER8> They say coding is a young man's game for a reason - many, many people burn out after 5-10 years. Normally when they do, they either plod along at decreased speed or move into business and managerial roles.

</comment><comment><USER9> Career wise, it comes down to 2 things: Your own expectations of how you are doing AND your manager/team's expectations of how you are doing. It seems like you are struggling with your own expectations of how you THINK you should be doing. I suggest you look at how your team thinks you are doing. If they are happy with you, that's great. You definitely want that first.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe look for related tasks that no one else wants to do? I enjoy polishing, hardening, fixing, and optimizing existing code. Turns out a lot of "great" programmers can't be bothered to check error statuses, document their stuff, handle unusual cases, etc.

Just an idea. But yeah, can relate.

</comment><comment><USER11> it sounds like you could be a really good manager because you wouldn't assign stupid tasks that don't really need to be done

</comment><comment><USER12> Check biohacking or biofabrication.</comment>


AT&T's network rocks, it's iPhone's problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/business/13digi.html

<comment><USER2> This seems like a poorly reasoned article to me.

I don't think anybody argues the point that AT&T has the fastest 3G network. You can have the fastest network. It can have slightly more signal bars. It can also be the one that drops calls the most. These things are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER3> There is also more than signal bars. AT&T works fine at and near my home, but it works awfully at one city I travel to. I get full 3g signal bars there, but websites time out, except at night time, and many incoming calls don't get through to me (going straight to voicemail).

So yes, technically I get great 3g signal there, but their network there simply can't handle it.

<comment><USER4> Also, AT&T may have more places with 75%+ signal strength, but who has more places with 50%+ signal strength, or more places with any signal strength?

All available evidence points to Verizon having better coverage, especially in outlying areas, including this article's focus on speed rather than coverage, and AT&T's commercials saying "What do you mean we don't have coverage? Pick any city. We have coverage in Boston. We have coverage in San Francisco..." Lame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there even a single other country where the iPhone has the problems it does on AT&T? I've been using my 3G on Rogers here in Canada since it was released. I've never seen a dropped call and Rogers' network is consistently faster than the phone.

<comment><USER6> I've had exactly the same experience over here (Toronto, Canada, and also on Rogers' 3G network).

I can't remember having ever dropped a call on my iPhone 3G and the network is absolutely rock solid, and very very fast (using the Xtreme Labs speed test app, for example).

The logic of this article in compelling at first but doesn't stand up to evidence that the iPhone is quite good outside of AT&T.

<comment><USER7> I'm on Fido (Rogers 3G Network) and my experience is the same. I've never had a dropped call, and the phone is almost always fast.

I've also used it in Montreal with similar experiences. So either the Canadian 3G networks are especially good, or AT&T's network is crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Surely, someone has asked people _in other countries_ what their experiences are with their iPhones on their carriers. Given that the rest of the world is on GSM (Korea excluded), we should pretty well know whose fault it is.

<comment><USER9> Here's my anecdote. I'm an iPhone user in Canada o the Rogers network. My signal is very strong everywhere. I rarely see any less than a perfect signal, except when far away from metropolitan areas. Usually five bars, indoors and out. I may have had a dropped call over the last year, but I couldn't tell you when.

Last week I visited mountain view for Campfire One. In the three days I was there, I had two calls dropped on me. One of them was dropped while walkig around outside at the Googleplex. My signal often wavere between zero or two bars and five bars for no explicable reason. I would occasionally lose signal entirely inside buildings (my hotel room for one).

In my experience, a perfectly working iPhone in Canada becomes unreliable in California. Take from that what you will.

<comment><USER10> But who was your roaming provider while in California? Was it AT&T? T-Mobile?

<comment><USER11> I can't speak for mmastrac, but in general Rogers devices roam onto AT&T as their first choice. I've noticed similar lameness in AT&T's network while traveling...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know how much AT&T's network "rocks".

I have a blackberry bold and most calls get dropped at least once during my conversation (obviously this isn't true for calls that are <2-3 mins).

The 3G coverage is also dreadful. The phone will say "3g", but will time out when opening webpages with the blackberry's browser, using google maps, or trying to run the blackberry twitter app.

I get absolutely no service at my house. AT&T has been talking about a portable cell station that you can buy, then pay a monthly fee to use (wtf, at&t? You're going to offload traffic to _my_ network connection at home, then charge me for the privilege of it?) for about a year now, but it hasn't materialized (if it has, I haven't seen it).

I live in Phoenix, which is a pretty large city. I would understand these things if I lived in a small town, but i don't. AT&T's coverage and their unwillingness to admit that there is a problem and that they are fixing it is unacceptable.

<comment><USER13> From the review martey linked (<http://paulstamatiou.com/review- att-3g-microcell>), it looks like the price is currently either a one time $150 payment or $50 + $20/month for unlimited calls while connected to the femtocell. That seems really reasonable to me, and I'd love to get one of them (in my apartment in SF, where I have extremely spotty reception from AT&T).

<comment><USER12> If it were $150 one-time I would buy one today. Sadly, they are not available in my area (from what the link you supplied says).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ahem.

"AT&T is a client and Verizon is not, he added."

So much for objectivity.

</comment><comment><USER15> iPhone user for 2 years, in the UK, on O2. Never had a single dropped call or issue.

I've been to the US several times, and each time I'm amazed at the unreliable nature of both mobile cellphone networks, _and_ landlines :/ The infrastructure simply isn't there yet.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are areas where I get great data service when nobody else is around. Then during peak hours data service is very slow or intermittent even though my signal strength stays the same. I'm not a telecom engineer, but it seems like they have too few towers for the number of subscribers in some areas or they don't have enough bandwidth in their backhaul.

Maybe both AT&T and the iPhone are bad, at least in my case.

When I travel to less populated cities, 3G data is always extremely fast; still I'd rather have a consistent 800 Kbps than 1500 when I'm lucky and 50 when I'm not.

</comment><comment><USER17> But it's not just iPhone users. Wireless users _in general_ are unhappy with AT&T's service. So if it's not the network, but a problem with the phones, AT&T must have a uniquely awful line-up of hardware. That sounds like just as big a problem for AT&T as network issues.

</comment><comment><USER18> >He explained that his company's tests of AT&T's data network were done with handsets other than the iPhone, which does not allow non-Apple programs like his to run in the background.

Wow, that's a huge error.

The iPhone doesn't allow non-Apple programs to run in the background either. This is a big issue for app development actually and we've been clamoring for a background task API forever.

We get interrupted, and rerun fresh when a call comes in or a person leaves an app for any reason (such as "executing" a URL such as a tel: or twitteriffic:)

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow. This is so contrary to my own personal experience. I have a droid and a non-iphone at&t phone. The quality of verizon over the at&t one is significant, and the coverage in the chicagoland area is vastly in favor of verizon. If this weren't NYT, I would think there is some astroturfing going on.

</comment><comment><USER12> Somebody is asleep at the wheel at nytimes. The video that they linked to for "there's a map for that" is _awful_.

Here is a better version: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCbYTrYD5y8>

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm an iPhone user in the Netherlands, locked into T-Mobile. I frequently experience dropped calls. I give T-Mobile the fault... hmmmm

<comment><USER21> I get not signal in the house of my parents, my girlfriend and the most part of the village I'm from (which is in the middle of the 'Randstad'). T-Mobile's network sucks.

<comment><USER18> That's ironic, it's great here (for iPhones) in the states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It doesn't matter if there are any shortcomings with the iPhone or not. ATT went into partnership with Apple over this and, if they can't handle what it delivers, they should have discovered this beforehand.</comment>


Rich Kids of Instagram Epitomize Everything Wrong with Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/rich-kids-instagram-epitomize-everything-wrong-instagram/54744/ <comment><USER2> The process of making art ought to die the same death as the author in literature. A work should stand on its own merits; whether you spent months learning how to process a particular ancient film stock or pushed a button in a program is really irrelevant to the artistic value of the end product.

<comment><USER3> I would actually argue the exact opposite – sometimes the process makes all the difference for the level of respect one should accord to the piece.

For example: <http://www.deviantart.com/#/d57smxx> – that is a piece of vector art. If I didn't know that it was an image produced over 90 hours by an artist in a vector environment, I'd probably just say "decent portrait" and move on. Instead, I am floored and my respect for the creator of the piece is multiplied hugely.

How, exactly, do we separate the act of creativity from the product of it? The two are so intertwined that I think it's often hard to do.

In any case, I don't agree with the author of this piece. Technology advances and always resets the bar for technical achievement. That's a good thing – it challenges us to go beyond, to explore further, while opening new worlds to those who wouldn't or couldn't.

Instead of looking down one's nose to prove superiority, they ought to get out and make something _better_ , harder, more interesting.</comment></comment>


U.S. Venture Capital Industry Must Shrink to be an Economic Force - <AUTHOR> http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/venture-capital-industry-must-shrink-to-be-an-economic-force-kauffman-foundation-study-finds.aspx?utm_source=Alerts&utm_medium=Opticast&utm_campaign=Right-sizing-VC-industry

<comment><AUTHOR> Though I am curious to hear from an actual investor, I'm inclined to think that most VC's who read this are probably thinking "Great article, but I'm not going to do anything different."

<comment><USER2> LPs, however, might.</comment></comment>


Brikstarter - <AUTHOR> http://brikstarter.com/ <comment><USER2> I work at Brikstarter and we're slowly getting some good ideas/projects coming in from the British public. Thanks for the post.</comment>


Review: Duke Nukem Forever Shoulda Stayed Vaporware - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/06/duke-nukem-forever-review/ <comment><AUTHOR> Another cogent reminder about over promising and under delivering</comment>


Gravity's Oldest Puzzles - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/gravity-s-oldest-puzzles-68c40889cac4 <comment><USER2> It's nice to read an article that's balanced and does not try to hype everything up, like so much modern media is doing today. Nice find.

<comment><USER3> possibly the best article I've read for a long time in terms of "knowledge gain/required knowledge". totally agreed

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> rounding errors, machine errors, so many possibilities for such a tiny discrepancy. Reminds me of the neutrino anomaly that supposedly disproved relativity, until it was later discovered faulty wiring was to blame.

<comment><USER5> This is a bit different. The neutrino error was when the only data-collection system was reporting surprising results, which can't really be invalidated without, well, getting another data-collection system and comparing.

These errors are surprises in the data itself: since the position of the object can be measured by multiple systems, it's considerably less likely that they would all make the same mistake. Of course it's possible that there's a 'single point of failure', like the data published back from the probe, that causes all the calculations to be off by the same amount.

On the other hand, the fact that these same probes/instruments can report everything _else_ with extraordinary accuracy discounts that theory somewhat. It's still possible (perhaps the bug / cosmic-ray-induced bit flip only affects one particular data collection code path..) but it's less likely.

Altogether, my intuition for the neutrino result was "this is probably a broken experiment", but my intuition for this is "there's an effect that's not being accounted for". That effect could easily be forgetting to account for thermal radiation reflection or something else that's relatively uninteresting, but, I still think there's _something_ going on.

<comment><USER6> Thermal expansion?

<comment><USER5> I can't tell what your actual question is.

<comment><USER6> It was in response to the parent wondering about overlooked phenomena. Perhaps sunlight or even earthlight heat the surface of the moon and cause thermal expansion. That could easily displace things by several millimeters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great article, there's something I didn't quite understand though. Why would the Sun's gravity make the probe go _slower_ as it moves _away_ from it?

<comment><USER8> Because the sun attracts the probe (and vice versa). Or equivalently the probe is climbing out of the gravity well of the sun loosing kinetic energy in exchange for potential energy in the sun's gravitational field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Pioneer anomaly was solved IIRC. The likely culprit was identified as heat being emitted in a particular direction, accelerating the probe due to radiation pressure.

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

<comment><USER10> So if the spacecraft could be stationary, it would pick up 400km/year acceleration via nuclear power?

<comment> david-given ITM 0.1 km/h/year, and yes. The Pioneer Anomoly is a photon drive: the RTG gets hot, infrared photons get emitted preferentially in a particular direction (because the body of the spacecraft blocks them), and it's a simple reaction drive. Nothing fancy there.

You could make it loads more efficient by putting the RTG at the focus of a parabolic reflector. Now all the photons are being emitted in a single direction, which means you get much more thrust.

According to this article:

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

...a perfectly collimated photonic rocket runs at about 300MW/N. Assuming you're New Horizons, you have a mass of about 500kg and a 4kW RTG, so you'll get a thrust of 0.1mN, which means an acceleration of 5x10^-8 m/s^2. Assuming my arithmetic is correct (a totally unwarranted assumption!), then over a year this adds up to a velocity change of 1.5 m/s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This rambling reminiscence missed a few of the bigger gravity study missions, such as GRACE.

<comment><USER5> Do you mean for the word 'rambling' to take its negative connotations here?

<comment><USER12> 'Starts With A Bang' is generally lowest-common-denominator physics writing. I'd imagine any negative connotations to be well earned.

<comment><USER5> "I'd imagine"? Did you read the article?

I know a lot of physics, and have strong opinions on physics writing, but I still think this was a pretty interesting and entertaining article. If we have problems with it can we say what they are instead of just assuming everyone agrees that it's bad?

<comment><USER13> It's a mediocre article. It glosses a bunch of history adequately and then points out a completely different anomaly. By "completely different" I mean "has all the signatures of an instrumental or analysis artefact." It's intermittent (huge red flag) and while the article doesn't say so (additional red flag) close to the threshold of observation.

There are completely mundane explanations (upper atmosphere models slightly wrong, unaccounted-for EM effects) so while there may be a fundamental cause (gravity is doing something exciting) the odds are that it's a boring effect, just like the superluminal neutrino observations.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps you should write a textbook like the author has. [http://www.amazon.com/Astrophysics-Through-Computation- Mathe...](http://www.amazon.com/Astrophysics-Through-Computation-Mathematica- Support/dp/1107010748)

I didn't find the writing misleading at all. It didn't overstate the likelihood that there is actually new physics to be found in these anomalies and gave a specific example where an anomaly was explained by known physics that was merely unaccounted for.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dual Uprisings Show Potent New Threats to Arab States - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This article includes astounding details about how Arab democracy movement activists used new technologies to organize their movement internationally. It also mentions little-known connections to writers and movements in other, non- Arab countries. The phenomena described could sweep the world.

<comment><USER2> _This_ is the twenty-first century I signed up for.

<comment><USER3> Don't count your eggs too early, this has yet to play out fully. The Iranian uprising is either still simmering or largely ineffectual. Algeria has apparently degenerated back to despotism. And it's too soon to see how Egypt will develop.

On the whole though, these are positive signs. People in the Arab world are taking an active role in their governance. They are having discussions about the role of government and of liberty. They are being more and more exposed to reporting and information from other countries. Compared to the state of things a mere decade ago, this is a vast improvement.

<comment><USER2> I don't care - those honking horns on Friday will make me happy for months. Just let me assume we're headed into the Kim Stanley Robinson future I so very much want, OK? I haven't felt so hopeful about this lump of wet rock since the Berlin Wall came down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Mr. Obama ended the call, the official said, with these words: "I respect my elders. And you have been in politics for a very long time, Mr. President. But there are moments in history when just because things were the same way in the past doesn't mean they will be that way in the future."_

I can't recall a single dictator in the modern history of the world which would fall down without US interference. People's engagement and activism is hard to undervalue and for sure the revolution is in their hands, but when I came across lots of such comments <http://i.imgur.com/7u8xk.png> I was really disappointed how people tend to easily forget history.

<comment><USER5> The Shah of Iran was a dictator who only came to power because of an American/British orchestrated coup. He was overthrown against American wishes, and the government that came to exist in Iran is reactionary and hostile to the West as a direct result.

This is a case of a homegrown movement to overthrow a dictator. The resultant government is not necessarily what the West would prefer, but that is a consequence of being (rightly) seen as the funders and supporters of both the previous dictator _and_ the instigators of the war waged by the next-door neighbor (Saddam Hussein's Iraq, whose military was entirely funded by Western powers and was once among the most powerful in the world).

<comment><USER6> Do you have a citation for the claim that Saddam's military was 'entirely funded by Western powers'? To my knowledge there was never any direct funding of Iraq's military by any Western state during the Saddam era.

The West was certainly not averse to selling weapons to the country, though neither was the Soviet bloc. During the 1980s the Iraqi air force was equipped mostly with French aircraft, and the army mostly with Soviet tanks, vehicles and weapons in addition to a smattering of weapons from other sources such as 100 G5 155mm howitzers from South Africa.

But it need not be said that selling weapons to a country is very different to funding its military.

<comment><USER5> Here's somebody else's research on the subject:

<http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/arming_iraq.php>

It seems pretty well cited. That citation itself came from this Wikipedia article:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Iraq_War#U.S._support_for_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Iraq_War#U.S._support_for_Iraq)

<comment><USER6> Neither of those sources contains a claim that Western states directly funded Iraq's military, so they don't represent a citation for the claim that you made.

As I mentioned before, the fact that Western countries and the Soviet bloc happily sold Iraq weapons and dual-use items during the 1980s is not in question. We know that happened, it has been public knowledge for quite some time.

Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but I feel that accuracy matters. There is a vast and important difference between directly funding a country's military and merely selling it weaponry.

Besides, if we're referring solely to the issue of arming Iraq, then the statement that Western countries were solely responsible for that is incorrect too. As I said before, most of the Iraqi army's equipment was purchased from the Soviets.

<comment><USER5> American and Soviet policies supported the Iraqi prosecution of the war while funds to Iran were frozen and embargoes were placed.

I believe you're being overly specific in your definition of what constitutes something more than mere partisanship. I think it's a reasonably safe statement that the war would likely not have happened without American blessings.

It is, of course, more complex because of the involvement of the Soviets, but I think in this case both the Soviets and the West wanted to contain Iran and both politically and materially encouraged Iraq to wage war.

<comment><USER6> I think you're missing the point. The only thing I have questioned is a very specific claim that you made in your original post, which was: _Saddam Hussein's Iraq, whose military was entirely funded by Western powers_

All I've asked for is a citation for that claim. There really isn't much more to this than that.

<comment><USER5> I posted to a sibling of this comment, but here's the link again just in case you miss it:

If you are nitpicking over the use of my quantifier "entirely" I'll retract that. The evidence, though, is pretty clear:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran–Iraq_war)

<comment><USER6> Still no evidence of direct Western funding of the Iraqi military, 'entirely' or otherwise.

Again, selling Iraq weaponry, turning a blind eye to its actions and providing it with intelligence information are all not the same thing as directly funding its military. This is really such a simple issue that I'm surprised it has gone on for this long.

<comment><USER5> Really? Are we reading the same article? Here are some direct quotations.

* The "Iraqgate" scandal revealed that an Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying heavily on U.S. government-guaranteed loans, funneled over US $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989.

* Saddam's elite troops received instruction in unconventional warfare at Fort Bragg

* The United States assisted Iraq through a military aid program known as "Bear Spares", whereby the U.S. military "made sure that spare parts and ammunition for Soviet or Soviet-style weaponry were available to countries which sought to reduce their dependence on the Soviets for defense needs."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I noticed about the recent Egyptian events that few have mentioned. Folks in Egypt gather in Tahir Square and protest for almost 3 weeks, Mubarak still in power. Obama administration on Thursday then basically gives an ultimatum to the senior Egyptian military leadership, and bang, the next day Mubarak has "resigned".

Lesson: huge props to the Egyptian people. But also give credit to the US administration. They didn't have to do what they did. Also, the follow-in issue being that probably the biggest reason why we had such strong leverage over Egypt was the billions in military aid we give them annually. To a government run by a dictator. Leverage is good, but backing dictators is bad in the long run, despite short term benefits.

<comment><USER8> Seems to be correlation does not equal causation here. What if Mubarak needed 18 days to move his money offshore or a myriad of other reasons? Obama administration could have simply saw the government deteriorating and joined the crescendo of calls.

Joining the bandwagon doesn't give them any more credence than the many other countries and people in the world demanding Mubarak to resign. They all deserve as much credit.

<comment><USER7> > Seems to be correlation does not equal causation here.

True, not necessarily. But likewise, speculation does not equal evidence. The actual evidence suggests that the US ultimatum to the Egyptian military was a strong force toward Mubarak stepping down, and it correlates more highly timeline-wise than the protestors actions. I could plot it on a graph and it would make it more apparent. Obviously the Egyptian military leadership also had a strong say in what happened. Many things probably had to be a certain way for things to happen like they did. But to imply that the actions of say, the government of New Zealand or Lichtenstein somehow played as strong a role and deserve as much credit as the the US government (or the Egyptian military leadership or the Egyptian protestors) I think is not reasonable based on the reality of it.

Giving billions to a dictatorship may be bad but it also gives the giving country a lot of political leverage when they want some kind of change on the receiving end. To somehow hand wave that away as not being significant is not realistic I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully the events in Egypt will serve as a model for people in all the other Middle East, Arab and Muslim dictatorships. If they don't want a foreign country or coalition to come in and topple their regime then, well, they need to do something domestically to make it happen. Otherwise it's hard to whine. Pick your poison.</comment>


The JOBS Act has failed - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/71129/the-jobs-act-turns-one-and-lets-be-honest-its-a-failure/

<comment><USER2> What JOBS act? Most of it has been buried in SEC bureaucracy since the act was made official.</comment>


Arm Is Said to Attract Nvidia Interest - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/softbank-s-chip-company-arm-is-said-to-attract-nvidia-interest <comment><USER2> Incredible opportunity for the US to consolidate its tech dominance further. I expect both China and the EU to try to block Nvidia from acquiring ARM.

Nvidia's stock is comically overvalued like most things in this market (~74 times operating income). They should hand SoftBank 16% of their very inflated market cap in an all-share deal, if they'd go for it (I'm guessing SoftBank will want a lot of cash though, given their financial desperation right now).

In terms of partisan positions, this would at least be far better than Intel or Qualcomm eating ARM. It's just hard to imagine China or the EU being ok with Nvidia extending their current quasi-monopoly position in GPUs into another critical monopoly position. China won't want to see ARM in US hands under any scenario; the EU for its part would tolerate that only if those US hands are not someone like Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

<comment><USER3> >I expect both China and the EU to try to block Nvidia from acquiring ARM.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-20/softbank-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-20/softbank- s-arm-fired-china-ceo-wu-for-starting-competing-fund)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The mere possibility of this underlines the relevance of RISC-V.

<comment><USER5> ARM is more than just an ISA.</comment></comment>


Google Chromium Bug: Huge amount of goats teleported - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=31482

<comment><USER2> The comments are priceless.

      I am concerned about the risk of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease being transmitted between
      teleported goats. At the speed they are being teleported, one can hardly expect the
      biofilters to be able to keep up with filtering out prions. What precautions have been
      taken to avoid cross-contamination of goat matter streams?

<comment><USER3> _either bug or egg, but it realy teleports goats too fast._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a hidden pop culture reference here (goats teleporting), or is the humor random?

<comment><USER5> I think it's in reference to the goats that Google rented to graze their front lawns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They don't do bounds checking, so the number of goats teleported can overflow. I noticed when I was at -2,089,949,091 goats teleported.

<comment><USER7> That's what happens when you cross the goat transport streams. Goats just start disappearing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This comment by email@example.com makes me think there's a puzzle to be solved here:

 _The teleportation rate is actually a linear function of the number of tabs you have open. Each tab has to teleport a certain number of goats to operate, although as dank points out we were able to optimize it during the Linux port and reduce the number of goats required. I have some further optimizations in mind if we'd like to reduce it more to address the issue mentioned in comment #11._

Without looking at the code, what could that column really be measuring?

<comment><USER9> My guess was that it was some kind of count of the number of messages passed between the different chrome processes - but it probably grows way too fast for that to be the case.

I found this post: <http://www.sorcerers- isle.net/article/goats_teleported.html> which does take a look at the source code. Although that doesn't reveal the intention behind the counter, my guess is that it was perhaps done to test the updating of the task manager.

<comment><USER8> _// See design doc at<http://go/at-teleporter> for more information._

I believe //go/... is an internal Google URL. The plot thickens!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If I were a cynical <insert_competitor> fanboy, I would speculate that they just make up humorous bugs so they can pretend to provide customer service.

<comment><USER11> Chromium is the open source project, not the browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Developers should know better than to use a GET request for teleportation.

</comment><comment><USER13> Aww it doesn't work in Chromium 3 :(</comment>


Iridium will become a paid extension - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ParticleCore/Iridium/releases/tag/0.2.5 <comment><USER2> > This was the result of users reporting the extension as not working, users > that have low tolerance for bugs and can't wait for them to get fixed.

I always wanted to convert one of my chrome extensions that has close to 100k active users to paid.[0] If we do the Math, if we sell it 0.99c, it would be close to $100,000 and would be good motivator to keep maintaing the project. However, a part of me wants to make this free to contribute to the community and also a way to be thankful for other things we get for free in return.

[0]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie- inspector/j...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie- inspector/jgbbilmfbammlbbhmmgaagdkbkepnijn?hl=en)</comment>


Guidance on the FCC Sunshine Period in the Restoring Internet Freedom Proceeding [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0511/DA-17-454A1.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The EFF have set up a timelocked page[0] that holds your comments until after the "Sunshine Period" has ended and automatically posts them for you.

[0] [https://dearfcc.org/](https://dearfcc.org/)</comment>


Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/park-io-1 <comment><USER2> I don't understand some of the negative comments here. This guy built a million dollar business in a year providing a service that people want to pay for. He did it all on his own with no other co-founders or employees. I say "Congrats!"

<comment><USER3> I think it has more to do with the fact that we've all wasted countless hours cycling through domain names only to encounter landing pages from squatters like park.io.

<comment><USER4> Squatters are the ultimate douchebags of the Internet era. I there should be some sort of tax for squatting a domain name. I.e first 10 domains names are cheap then they get expensive.

<comment><USER5> If ICANN charged $5 a month for all domains perhaps it would not be so lucrative to sit on domains.

Though it would still be profitable for some domains.

The money could pay for ICANN or whatever.

<comment><USER6> Right now, a .io domain is ~$30/year which is $2.5/month. Doubling that wouldn't be _that_ much more of a deterrent.

<comment><USER5> Good point.

Maybe they could set a 'holding price' that is a function of the likely value of the domain name. I'll bet at $30 a month - a huge basket of names become completely untenable to 'sit on' whereas it would mean little to the business owner, possibly.

This is an age old problem concerning how to deal with public goods. Real estate is the prototypical problem ... we don't consider those buying and selling land - and not using it - to be a problem to the system, whereas we could make the argument they are. In Vancouver and London, they've introduced a tax on housing spaces that are empty, i.e. if you don't live in it, you have to rent it or get hit with a tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I might get downvoted for this, but here's a story. We just finished picking a brand name, after 2-3 months of intensive work.

Being fond of .io's I naivly googled my <brandname>.io, and found that park.io owns it - this happened last week. I immediately sent an email to inquire. We considered the price, and then when I came to buy it today, a week after, the price is tripled. This was a fixed price domain, NOT bid.

That's clever price manipulation. Detect when someone wants something, let it sit, and when they're ready - triple the price. Maybe that's a hint for how he made so much money? In any way we'll just do the get<brandname>.io or something like this, as a compromise. Thanks for being a douche, park.io!

And then, magically, this is now on HN :)

<comment><USER8> If you buy a domain from a squatter, you encourage domain squatting. Domains are not that important as most browsers send the url to a search engine. So just register brand-name.com instead of brandname.com. Or pick another TLD.

<comment><USER9> This reads like: If you buy good real estate from someone who has a parking lot, you are encouraging people to buy good real estate. Better to buy a swamp an hour out of town and build your business there.

<comment><USER8> More like someone occupying lots of parking spots outside the mall, then charging many times the price for you to park there. Or take up many seats in public transportation, then charge people extra to sit, or hold seats until their friends come aboard.

<comment><USER10> Buys up deeds from people who missed paying their mortgage by a day, evicts the owners, offers to sell it to them - or anyone - at triple the price.

<comment><AUTHOR> More like renting an apartment after someone neglected to pay their rent, and then continued to not pay day-after-day for the next 75 days. And afterwards, creating a fair bidding process to allow interested parties an actual chance to get that apartment for themselves without having to own sophisticated technology to be the first person there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> NIC.IO now has backordering. In order for park.io to continue being successful with landing and selling premium domains, he must be appraising the value of the domain and his chance of selling it in one of his auctions. Then weighing that against the NIC.io backorder price of 60EUR (67.35USD) + 60EUR registration fee and finally backordering it himself far enough in advance before someone else does (because only 1 backorder can be placed on NIC.IO).

Interview here: [http://www.domainsherpa.com/mike-carson-parkio- interview/](http://www.domainsherpa.com/mike-carson-parkio-interview/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Mike Carson has put park.io up for sale. Asking price is $1.5M.

[https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/8340-platform- doma...](https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/8340-platform-domain- sales-42k-net-mo)

<comment><USER13> Yearly revenue is $818,600 profit round $500k which is _very_ nice but if "makes" in the title means "makes profit" as I assumed then the numbers are not correct.

Profit of 500k / 12 = 41.7k per month, not 125k.

<comment><USER14> It is growing fast - avg of last 3 months is $125k. Yes it is revenue, not profit

<comment><USER15> Might I ask why you are trying to cash out so quickly? Do you not feel the business is sustainable?

<comment><USER16> Everyone's motivations are different, but seeing as though domains are always going to become available, it seems like a cash cow that requires minimal upkeep.

<comment><USER17> He cloned a business model known as drop catching that has been around for a long time with other TLDs most notably for .com domains. If you look at how those markets evolved, there is an initial burst of profitability and then intense competition which leads to commodification and margin compression, which is what I predict will happen here as well. The smartest operators made most of their money by selling off the premium domains they were able to drop catch early, which seems to be what he is doing also (& kudos to him for what seems to be excellent tactical execution) - but the drop catching service itself has steadily less value over time and of course, even in the absence of competition from peers, is wholly dependent on the .io registrar's particular rules regarding drop catching which can change at any time.

<comment><USER18> Exactly, which is why the asking multiple is too high. Fragile model with declining future revenue

<comment><USER6> 3x profit is a pretty standard multiple.

<comment><USER18> If you have a moat and growth. Not the case here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find it shocking that you would post on HN; "Hey guys, I make $125k/mo making other peoples lives harder".

Given the way your current infrastructure is configured (vulnerabilities and all)... somebody could probably cost you ~$30-70k/mo in AWS resource utilization at a cost of ~$600/mo. The moment you park on the domain of someone who shares your internet ethics, that will be an interesting day for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> How is it unethical to provide a platform that allows people get domains that they'd otherwise have almost no chance of getting?

<comment><USER20> If park.io hadn't bought it, someone else would have. So how does the park.io client deserve it any more than that person?

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends on your definition of "deserve". With domain names, the system is pretty clearly first-come, first-served. If Park.io didn't get domain name X, then the next fastest person would get it, and so forth. Many other systems are similar: renting apartments, claiming land, patents, trademarks, etc.

Obviously, first-come, first-served doesn't ensure that a resource goes to the people who would use it "best". But what system does?

Park.io gives the average person an actual chance to win the race for a .io domain -- a chance they otherwise probably wouldn't have -- so I'd rather live in a world with Park.io than without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm getting S3 access denied errors.

Here's the cached version if you need it: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3O7YG0J:https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/park- io+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER22> This couldn't be more click baity if the title involved "this one weird trick".

</comment><comment><USER23> This thread is a great example of why not to publicize your revenue or internal systems.

At best, you'll get hate and resentment. At worst, you'll get hate, resentment, and a new competitor.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree. Lots of the founders behind companies who've shared on Indie Hackers have reached out to me with good stories about getting more users, positive feedback, relationships, etc. And I know a few people personally who've given Park.io their business in the past few days, too.

Every community is different. Park.io received nothing but love on Twitter earlier this weekend ([https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/779330003829944320](https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/779330003829944320)). The HN crowd is particularly cynical and prone to outrage/judgment in the comment section.

I got a similar response when I launched Indie Hackers itself in August. But despite some negative comments, most visitors loved it and 99% of the feedback I've gotten since then has been positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Doh.. this guy recently came to me and swooped an up .io I owned. I gave it to him for what I paid for it thinking it was just an individual, should of asked for more lol.

/me facepalms

<comment><USER25> He paid me $500 for a two letter .io I owned. I hope you got market value!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> He gives some good advice for indie developers if you manage to get over the "self-promotional" aspects of the article and read to the end.

<comment><USER27> Ehn, his advice is pretty generic and survivor-bias-y. "Do what you like", "adapt", etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't understand how this can survive in the long run - what's stopping someone else from setting up an identical service at lower prices? There is literally no lock in because users can sign up for multiple services and potentially pay a lower price (depends on which one snags the domain).

Or is the technology behind that unique?

<comment><USER29> If you think such a thing that easy, you should do it. But it aint.

<comment><USER28> I'm not trying to be dismissive of his impressive project, but from my perspective, or from a business point of view, it doesn't make sense. While I have no doubts that this was nontrivial to create, history has shown that raw technology alone is rarely enough. Isn't trying to gain some form of lock-in an oft repeated point on HN?

Also, could you elaborate? I do wish to understand why, if I was wrong.

<comment><USER30> What kind of lock-in do you get from starting a convenience store? A repair shop? A McDonald's franchise? Those can all be quite profitable and provide an excellent living.

Simply because competing with him may be "easy," doesn't make the business model any less valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reading this article reminds me of a story that got me on the path of Linux, open source and away from Windows career path years ago. I was starting out my IT career as a Windows tech at a company. One guy that was obviously smart, Linux literate, and given a lot of responsibility at the company mentioned that he had scripted a tool to check constantly if a domain that he wanted became available or not. He wanted to make sure he grabbed it as soon as it became available.

It was the first example I saw of someone automating something with some scripting. Coming from Windows side, I was like what~~? Scripting can do that?

This was when Yahoo was the king. (I'm not THAT old).

The thing is this kind of scripting is NOT new. It was done before by others. But with proper execution, park.io is able to generate a million dollar a year. Good for him.

</comment><comment><USER8> this guy has found the secret recepy for making money: make a service for something where users direcly earn money or spend money. Then automate it in order to scale.

</comment><comment><USER32> Slightlyy OT and probably naïve: what is the attractiveness of the .io TLD? If the .com isn't available, why is .io more desirable than any other? Is there a hard reason or is .io just fashionable?

<comment><USER33> Guessing here, but I think it's just fashionable. Has been for a few years, from what I've been seeing. zato.io was one of the first I noticed - a Python ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), got to know the founder, chatted a bit. That was a few years ago. Geek chic, so to speak. Probably because of the term I/O (Input/Output) being a tech term - a signalling mechanism to other geeks, maybe - as in: I am a geek, come do biz with me. Playing psychologist here, but hey, it's fun to ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> lmao, man i liked when the term "hacker" was directed toward blackhats. This whole "im a hacker" gig is hilarious.

<comment><USER35> > lmao, man i liked when the term "hacker" was directed toward blackhats.

Well, that usage was incorrect, but I agree that nowadays everyone's calling themselves a hacker of some sort.

<comment><USER36> Enlighten us with the proper usage of the word hacker?

<comment><USER37> [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame His main advice is to just "flow" on your own natural interests and success will come.

The problem is that many people's interests have zero business potential. As technical people, we tend to have pipe dreams about what computers could achieve. Lone wolf AI directions, weird functional programming styles, utilities based on incredibly niche processing, continuing retro computing interests, custom OSes, etc.

Sure, some people have interests that happen to align with a commercially exploitable audience, but "pursue your interest" is not a globally applicable direction to recommend starting a business venture. Flexibility within your interest will not help you swing a profit if your interest isn't widely shared.

<comment><USER38> I still think it's a great starting point. You may find that it's hard to get info about custom OSes and after a year decide to sell a book with all the information you found.

The point is keep an eye out for problems you run into, instead of making one up. Usually if you find it interesting, someone else will too. Plus it makes it easier to justify spending the hours necessary turning it into a product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "so I wrote a script that checked the domain every second and sent me an email if it was available."

Whats the use of checking it _every second_ if you still need to manually act upon your email?

<comment><USER40> That's what he thought, so he build park.io. Did you finish reading the article?

<comment><USER39> Yes and it quickly sidetracks to other things that the parts that are actually of interest, company goals etc. Not so much about automating tasks as the title would suggest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The interview mentions parked domains as the major lead generator... are those domain names owned by park.io or by its clients?

<comment><USER14> Mostly clients

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just to clarify: Why does he call it "backordering"? I mean the domains didn't expire yet or does he park them?

</comment><comment><USER43> Why the .io domains for everything?

</comment><comment><USER44> For some reason the URL doesn't work unless I remove the '-1' at the end.

</comment><comment><USER45> His hn profile:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ca98am79](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ca98am79)

Other projects, including what appears to be an initiative to start a new religion? ([http://consciousness.io/](http://consciousness.io/))

[http://humb.ly/projects.html](http://humb.ly/projects.html)

<comment><USER14> Haha yes - that's my new religion based on consciousness. I thought there needed to be more innovation in religion, so I started one

<comment><USER46> As far as religions go it doesn't seem too bad at first glance.

I like it.

My current favorite quote about religion is from the pianist Seymour Bernstein (in the latest Documentary about him, from Ethan Hawke, titled "Seymour: An Introduction):

"I don't call it god, I call it a spiritual reservoir. Most people don't tap that resource of the god within. What upsets me about religion is that the answers always seem to be apart from us, in the form of a deity and we depend on the deity for salvation, but I firmly believe it is within us."

The externality, taking someone's individuality and telling them that it's something apart from them, that they don't control it, is also my largest concern with religion and the thing that needs to innovated on. I _think_ your conciousness.io fits that bill ... Would be curious to hear if my assessment is incorrect though.

<comment><USER47> GK Chesterton:

> That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean > that Jones shall worship Jones.

<comment><USER46> Yes, this is not good? Better than the alternative?

<comment><USER46> I can see why a reasonable person would downvote my reply, it's short and adds no value.

I don't know what else to say until I know where you're coming from though, I'm honestly asking what do you mean by that quote?

<comment><USER48> I don't understand what is hard to understand about the Chesterton quote. If someone thinks the answers to life and meaning and purpose lie within himself, he effectively becomes his own god, and therefore effectively worships himself.

Then he dies. What of his meaning and purpose then? If meaning and purpose lie within ourselves, then when we die, meaning and purpose die as well. But that would mean that there is no meaning and no purpose, for how can a being create itself before it has created itself?

Therefore, if we have purpose, if life has meaning, it must come from without, not from within. This is not to say that we don't possess "seeds" of truth and meaning and purpose within us--but they exist only to point us toward the truth, to motivate us to seek answers.

A search for truth that only looks within ourselves is doomed to failure, for we cannot provide answers that we do not have. And if we had the answers, we wouldn't need to search for them. Those who claim that the answers lie within ourselves are deceiving themselves and others with vague platitudes, merely taking a detour on the journey toward the truth--but how tragic a detour if time runs out along the way.

<comment><USER46> You think there are answers?

The search for meaning is a poorly formed question.

42.

<comment><USER48> > You think there are answers?

Yes.

> The search for meaning is a poorly formed question.

"Why are we here? What are we meant to do? Where are we going next?" These are not poorly formed or useless questions.

<comment><USER46> "Why are we here" and "where are we going" are vastly better questions than "what are we meant to do".

Do you see the difference?

"why are we here" can mean "how did we get here, how did we come to be here" ... but if it means "for what purpose are we here" than it turns problematic again, no?

<comment><USER46> The search for purpose and meaning assumes there is one. It's hard to understand how one can ask that question with presupposing that there is some thing as an "objective meaning and purpose" and it's just really confusing to me. If you don't see how the pasting of that quote is confusing, that's what I meant by confusing.

The search for reasons and hows and what happened and what's next seems a lot more interesting of questions, to me personally.

<comment><USER48> Well, whether "for what purpose are we here" is useful depends on the answer to "by what means did we get here" or "what caused us to be here". If we are here merely because of chance occurrences, then of course there is no objective meaning or purpose. But if we are here because something or someone put us here, then it's a good question to ask why we were put here and for what purpose.

<comment><USER46> Yes that's perhaps our disagreement as well, the odds of a being being involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those getting a 502, I'm working on the server, Elastic Beanstalk didn't scale fast enough >.<

Cached version here: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3O7YG0J:https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/park- io+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

Or if you refresh a few times, it should come up.

<comment><USER49> Yeah you usually need to warm it up if you're about to expect a lot of traffic because it can't really deal with that.

That really shouldn't be an issue for a site like this though, because you can just host it on a CDN...

<comment><USER50> Top of HN traffic peaks at maybe 50-100 visitors per second. Unless you're serving a bunch of data, it really shouldn't be an issue. One problem I've run into is (I suspect) running out of sockets because they weren't getting recycled fast enough. This went away when I switched to Snap or Happstack. I used to have to "fix" this by killing and restarting my server every five minutes.

<comment><USER51> Do you see a lot of connections in TIME_WAIT? If so I'd just bump up the ephemeral port range via: /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range (or sysctl -w)

But if you're not getting recycling of TIME_WAIT, you can start to change the reuse/recycle attributes (caveat emptor) with: net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse or net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle

I know I have been benchmarking a servant app by throwing 2048 concurrent connections at it and just bumping up the ephemeral range has been enough for my needs.

I tend to run out of socket FD's or just FD issues a lot quicker than ports.

Just a thought, but 50-100requests/second doesn't sound like too big of a deal. I did a quick bench of what i have setup and I get this:

        # wrk --latency -c 128 -t6 http://10.0.2.15:8080/foo/bar/
        Running 10s test @ http://10.0.2.15:8080/foo/bar/
          6 threads and 128 connections
          Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
            Latency     3.46ms    5.25ms 137.42ms   90.23%
            Req/Sec     9.84k     2.13k   19.67k    69.50%
          Latency Distribution
             50%    1.65ms
             75%    4.40ms
             90%    8.59ms
             99%   22.17ms
          589624 requests in 10.07s, 476.28MB read
        Requests/sec:  58560.86
        Transfer/sec:     47.30MB

Note, this is a static end point so take all these figures with blocks of salt. But by tuning what I said I can have wrk do 2048 concurrent connections reasonably with just a fair increase in overall latency. YMMV

<comment><USER52> tcp_tw_recycle is _not_ what you want. It is only applicable to outgoing connections (i.e. not people connecting to your server), and even in that case provides little benefit over tcp_tw_reuse.

I like pointing people here for the explanation: [https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2014-tcp-time-wait- state-l...](https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2014-tcp-time-wait-state- linux.html)

<comment><USER51> True enough, but its hard to diagnose what people are having problems with with such vague wording. Some apps might have to open connections to a backend, or not, etc...

But you're quite right on recycle for outgoing. To be honest I tend to shy away from adjusting either unless I really need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Remember when ticketmaster and their ilk bought, ahem bot, tickets within seconds of release, and then sold it to you at inflated prices. all while marketing it as a service to humanity?

Well, nothing different in this business plan either. Automating price gouging and domain squatting might be commercially viable and legal, but it isn't the right thing to do!

</comment><comment><USER54> Mirror: [http://archive.is/BngRx](http://archive.is/BngRx)

</comment><comment><USER55> Jealousy and cognitive dissonance. This guy is more successful than them, so clearly he's done something bad.

Welcome to HN: home of the insecure narcissists who like to argue over programming languages, humblebrag about their gifted childhoods, and prove that they're superior to anyone more successful than them.

<comment><USER56> I agree with you on the prevalence of envy in human nature (the real "hn" at work here), but using this community to diss the rest of the community is reliably a marker of a bad comment on Hacker News. Picking "humblebragging" and "prove that they're superior" as the points of dissage seems extra ironic.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576182) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER55> So your solution to these problems that I raised is to sweep them under the rug.

<comment><USER56> You didn't raise any problems; you postured above others. I don't know if the bottom of the thread counts as 'under the rug', but it's a reasonable place for that sort of comment, since it's so off-topic, common, and generic. (I'm talking about just the second paragraph btw.) Snark is also deprecated.

I understand how frustrating HN can sometimes be, and how easy it is to get stuck on a picture of the community as a super-annoying arch-enemy, but it's incongruent to use HN to comment that way, since if you're commenting here, you're as much a part of the community as anyone else is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Domain squatting as a service.

<comment><USER58> Technically, it's called 'domain drop catching': [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching) Common service, so I wonder how park.io is so successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> congratulations :)

<comment><USER60> it also drops considering his 'business' is selling a ridiculously expensive domain back ordering service

<comment><USER61> Park.io isn't indiehackers.com, and it's currently up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> FYI dang censored my comment about how HNers react to these stories with a jealous and insecure attitude:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576210)

<comment><USER62> Re-read your post - do you _really_ think that's why you were downvoted?

<comment><USER55> I said censored, not downvoted. My original post was at 47 points when it was censored. If it was so bad, then why did so many people agree?

<comment><USER63> No one censored your comment. It is right here on the page for anyone to read. Dan merely moved it down on the page, and it's far from the bottom.

He even took the time to write two very polite and friendly explanations of the action, even in the face of your hostile attitude toward him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> So this guy is a domain squatter?

And all you need to do to become one is add a script? I always assumed there was special access to top tier domain snatchers or they had some sort of high- speed trading thing with a fast uplink.

<comment><USER61> No, a squatter buys domains and holds them. Park.io lets you buy a domain that's going to expire before it expires and transfer it to you and charge you if and only if it registers it before it gets sold.

Some of these domains ([https://app.park.io/domains/view/algorithmic.ly](https://app.park.io/domains/view/algorithmic.ly)) actually look pretty neat, and I could totally see this being a good market to be in.

<comment><USER65> So it mostly services domain squatters.

<comment><USER66> Isn't it the opposite? Rather than buying from the squatters, it encourages people to "wait out" the squatters using Park.io. To me, it seems that damages the squatting business model.

<comment><USER67> No, the gp was saying it's a perfect tool for squatters to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> _You backorder the domain. If we get it and you are the only bidder, you pay $99 and the domain is yours._

lol then why bother paying $99. just pick it up from any registrar for $9 after it drops

<comment><USER68> I think the point is that he picks it up before anyone else does in your behalf.

He's doing the equivalent of standing in line for you outside the Apple store on iPhone 7 release day and then charging you a premium for his services.

<comment><USER60> yeah but this can be done for much less and if the domain is actually worth anything (it has backlinks, age, and traffic) you will pay for more than $99 since you will be competing with many other bidders. This is a huge industry and you're competing with Russians , eastern Europeans and others who scan for domains thousands of times a minute and check them for rankings and other factors...Very seldom does a good domain drop unnoticed, unlike years ago before this industry took off. Either you pay too much for a worthless domain in or you pay the full price in auction.

<comment><USER2> I suppose that is why he is making $125,000/month running this business and you aren't. You see no business model here but he obviously did and is benefiting from it.

This is the perfect example of why it is not always good to listen to the many naysayers. There are a ton of single purpose things that can be turned into a service. Most people overlook those things because building the next unicorn sounds so much sexier.

<comment><USER69> well said</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>