Three Vacation Policies - <AUTHOR> https://www.xaprb.com/blog/three-vacation-policies/ <comment><USER2> The RAND Corporation studied their own 2000 academic quality statisticians and researchers, and they found that even with generous vacation time (through the traditional accrued vacation days practice), most researchers were so engrossed in their work that they still didn't take their vacation.

They then analyzed their people and found that those who did take their vacation performed better than those who didn't.

Subsequently, they wanted to figure out how to incentivize people to take vacation, so they instituted sabbatical pay. Specifically, they pay employees a bonus to take vacation.

In contrast, I work at a startup with unlimited vacation, and plenty of employees are at risk of burnout because they rarely take their vacation -- ultimately hurting the company along with themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the financial sector, vacation is a fraud control. Reshuffling job duties makes it easier for others to discover your misconduct, and temporarily suspending your access makes it harder for you to cover it up.

<comment><USER4> it would seem this would mostly only work if the vacation was imposed randomly. otherwise you have plenty of time to plan it.

<comment><USER5> Even limiting the scope to things that can be covered up with some lead time is a benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> LinkedIn does this and it is great. Christmas week and July 4th week, the majority of the company shuts down.

This is addition to "unlimited" vacation. I don't tend to account for the shutdowns as coming out of my mental pool of vacation time that I like to take every year.

What people don't usually realise though, is that a shutdowns is very refreshing because you are not missing decisions and meetings etc. It means you can truly disconnect for 2 weeks. When vacationing at other times, the business it leaping forward and like it or not there is a draw to keep a finger on it.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the issues with 'unlimited' vacation is that when you leave your employment you don't have any carryover anymore so the company doesn't pay you for unused vacation.

<comment><USER8> that's a design goal - not taking vacation is an _intended_ (not unintended as this article claimed) byproduct.

I know this because my wife worked at a "unlimited time off" company, and even though she gave them a heads up before accepting that she took a month or more vacation a year, when she did that they turned around and had an all hands about it was being abused.

My opinion on unlimited time off: if I can't say "I'm taking a year long vacation" you need to give a finite limit. Nom company would agree to this because unlimited time off is deliberately to avoid liability for earned income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > What about the person who heard your explanation of "just get your work > done" as "if you're highly productive, this is a part-time job with full- > time pay?"

What about them. Maybe they are highly productive because they are "part- time"?

Sounds like a good problem to have to me.

<comment><USER10> Agree. Are you hiring to get work done, or to warm your office chairs for a set amount of time?

<comment><USER3> Presumably you sought out and paid the premium for a highly capable employee because you wanted their above-average capabilities. If they're just going to meet the baseline and go home, the employer is wasting time and money relative to someone cheaper and easier to find.

If the company hired a highly capable employee by _accident_ , or the employee deliberately took a low-salary low-expectation position to "coast" in, then maybe this line of reasoning holds up.

<comment><USER11> Well, the manager sets the targets. If the employee is above average, just increase their targets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok, so how would "forced time off" be the middle ground between unlimited time off and tracked time off. Isn't "forced time off" just tracked time off but they require you to take it?

The only problem it solves is burned out employees, and I would argue that it doesn't even fix that problem. The reason is that you can't force people to take their minds off work, even if you force them to not physically be at work.

<comment><USER13> It could be done as a minimum vacation policy, instead of a maximum vacation? As in, you must take this many days off, but if you need more they're available?

<comment><USER14> I've seen it done as a "maximum accrued vacation time" policy. Once you got 30 days accrued, you had to book enough time off to reduce it to less than 30 days within the next three months.

Everybody hated that too. Being forced to take time off when you didn't particularly want to, and not being able to "save up" enough vacation for a really good ling trip away...

And, of course, those rules were regularly "bent" when it suited management, but rigidly enforced otherwise...

(We typically accrue 20 days per year here in .au, so that pretty much means after 18 months, if you haven't taken any vacation at all yet, you need to take at least a week off in the next three months, and a week off every three months thereafter.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a fan of unlimited vacation because I don't have to track it on the B/S but the "people think that means they shouldn't take _any_ " problem is real!

Worse, I had a candidate whose wife was worried that was what it really meant (games industry, horrible QoL in most cases). Luckily he brought it up that way, and as this was an internal referral we had her call people she knew already in the company to verify that we weren't jerks.

<comment><USER16> I don't know, in theory it sounds fine, but I really don't know how much I'd take.

But coordinating with family, stuff that comes up and so on.. this is the first year I've not spent 3 days from my (not unusual for Germany) 28 days from last year and have to take them before the end of March so they don't get lost... In other years I had 30 and could've easily used 10 more.

TLDR: I prefer the German model of 24-33 days and you're encouraged to take them. Wouldn't hurt to increase the number, as long as they're really taken 90% of the time.

<comment><USER15> The benefit of unlimited for employees is less the long vacations, but the ad hoc needs for the off due to kid being sick, yourself being sick, etc.

<comment><USER17> That would better be covered by unlimited sick leave. Which, for example, Germany has. Sick leave is covered to some extend (70% up to 30 days, fully afterwards) by the health insurance. There's a clear separation between sick leave and holidays, the first is a medical need, the second is for recreation. (which leads to the interesting case that you can call in sick during your holidays and get the days back)

Folding sick leave and holidays together is weird IMHO, as you personally don't control the first, but do control the second.

<comment><USER15> Just having undifferentiated "paid time off" means you don't have to look into the employee's personal life. It preserves your colleague's privacy, has fewer bureaucratic entities involved (insurance co, HR, usv) and you don't get into any argument about the legitimacy of an illness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If people aren't taking enough vacation, your company's culture is shit. They are afraid they will lose their jobs. Unlimited vacation is bullshit. A European might expect to take six weeks while your shitty company expects them to take two. Those differences cannot be resolved and eventually someone will get fired. It should be illegal to claim unlimited vacation unless one could literally be on vacation 100% of the time. Corporate assholes who coined this term and put such practices into existence should go fuck themselves. It's only there to look good on paper and save the company having to pay out vacation. Once again, American workers getting fucked over so their bosses can save a little money. In the long run, however, it's the business that gets fucked by burnt out, unmotivated employees. Deservedly so considering the scum who run most businesses. Those morons can't even see they are shooting themselves as well as everyone else in the foot. Such stupidity is the norm rather than the exception.

<comment><USER19> I'm in favor of treating workers better as much as anyone, but I'm dubious about claims that European-style pro-worker policies are actually better for the bottom line. The US has higher productivity than most EU states. Given broadly similar capital and infrastructure, it would seem at least some of this gap is due to people being more afraid to lose their jobs in the US than in the EU.

Not only that, but couching pro-worker policies in terms of benefits for ownership obscures the issue, and implicitly makes the argument that we should only have pro-worker policies when they are also pro-ownership. That's nonsense, since there are millions and millions of workers and we ostensibly have a democracy.

<comment><USER18> Most but not all EU states. And many other EU states are very close to US productivity while they're working less [http://time.com/4621185/worker- productivity-countries/](http://time.com/4621185/worker-productivity- countries/) So threatening worker's lives and not having a single day of vacation or sick time are clearly not the reason for higher productivity. They're just there to make people's lives more miserable and continue a culture obsessed with control and enslavement. Anyway, productivity only matters to business owners. Workers couldn't give a shit. They just can't get their concerns addressed because we live in a plutocratic oligarchy which hardly qualifies as a democracy.

<comment><USER19> Yes, this was exactly my point. We shouldn't care about productivity: we want affordable childcare, as much sick time as a doctor tells us to take, and guaranteed vacations. Making the argument that ownership should give us these things because it will make them richer is a losing game. They should be forced to give us these things because we want them, and we're the ones in charge.

<comment><USER18> I totally agree with everything except the part where "we're the ones in charge." Popular support for things like national healthcare and time off hasn't yet made those things happen. As long as representatives take money from the rich, it's dishonest to say that regular people have a say in a republic like ours. By the rich, for the rich is more like it. Even the Supreme Court agrees. What chance does popular support have against billions of dollars spent on corruption... Oops I meant lobbying. Like there's a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> European perspective: Of my legally mandated 4 wks of vacation, I have to take at least one consecutive two-week chunk.

Obviously, I as the employee have to put in the request for that, and it 100% depends on the company if they actually care enough about labor laws to force/enable me to do so.

<comment><USER21> Really? Which country mandates that? Or do you mean it's employer-mandated?

<comment><USER22> This is mandated in Article 8 of this ILO convention: [http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO...](http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312277#A8) [http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11300:0::NO:11300...](http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11300:0::NO:11300:P11300_INSTRUMENT_ID:312277)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't forget that regardless of your other vacation policies, people in finance should be required to take multi-week vacations each year, at different times each year.

</comment><comment><USER23> _How do you handle the person who's taking a lot more time off than others?_

I don't understand miscommunications like this between employer and employee.

I think the employer needs a more specific solution than "unlimited vacation" if the concern about fixed-allowance leave was a lack of flexibility for shit- happens situations.

I'd be curious about "compensated for work done".

</comment><comment><USER24> Not taking paid vacation you're allowed to take is so weird. I mean, it's like not taking your whole paycheck and leaving it to your employer.</comment>


Tesla says it has health official's OK to run California plant - <AUTHOR> https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/mobility/2020/05/17/tesla-approval-california-plant/111790978/ <comment><USER2> So, Tesla can legally open according to the original county timeline, before Elon's hissy fit, even though in actuality they've been producing cars for Europe and China for a week.

<comment><USER3> It's unclear that the county was planning to follow this "original" timeline until after public pressure brought about by Elon's tweets. At this point it's impossible to tell if that are simply saving face.

<comment><USER4> This is a false narrative.

The original timeline was always to reopen certain businesses May 18th, since the first extensions of the lockdowns were to expire on May 15th, and as demonstrated by the _entire rest of the state_ opening up according to that schedule without anyone else throwing a tantrum.

Also, the county doesn't need to do anything to save face. They have nothing to prove. The elected officials can always say they were acting on the information of health experts, and the health experts can always point to the CDC, China, and even the re-emerging outbreaks in Wuhan, Italy, and Germany as reasons for not allowing Tesla to restart operations ahead of schedule and before Tesla had demonstrated they were willing to protect their workers.

<comment><USER5> But throwing a tamptrum and making yourself look like you won feels so powerful, so ...

<comment><USER6> Not much different that what you're doing right now ...

<comment><USER5> Nice try, but no. Criticizing someone is not throwing tantrum, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Alameda County has announced they're moving into Phase 2 this week, which means basically everyone other than restaurants and public gathering spaces can reopen.

<comment><USER8> Alameda County is also dropping faster than other parts of California:

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/17/coronavirus-new- cases...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/17/coronavirus-new-cases-drop- in-alameda-county-rise-elsewhere-in-bay-area/)

33 cases today, region of 1.6M people.

<comment><USER9> A single day means nothing - there's high daily variance just from reporting issues and test sites not being open on weekends.

Alemada County is alright by California standards, but is the worse performing Bay Area county (hospitalizations are flat for a month, rather than dropping like its neighbors). And 33 a day for 1.6m people is actually on the high side by northern California standards. (As a point of comparison, Santa Clara is at about 15 a day for 1.9 million)

<comment><USER10> Do you happen to have any ideas why Alameda county is performing worse?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm kinda wondering _why_ he wants to reopen the factory.

Car demand is sure to plummet with a long economic depression coming, and electric cars moreso since the price of fuel is the lowest it's been for decades.

Considering that, if I were in Elons position, I'd prefer the state to be paying my employees salaries, and leave most of my factories closed. Keep the R&D department going so I have some awesome new products in a year's time when the economy starts recovering.

<comment><USER12> Paying employees is a blip on the OPEX that company deals with. If they don't crank out cars they will need to raise even more money.

Until the upper middle class and up start losing jobs, Tesla will still have plenty of demand. Their core customer wasn't line cooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone else out there surprised to see Elon "zag" so badly on COVID, including this?

I've always been impressed by his agility with ideas, zigging and zagging and I've been there cheering him on. But on this one it seems like he....went off the cliff, Wiley E. Coyote style.

<comment><USER14> I think part of it might be that he's a really high energy kind of person, working 12-18 hour days everyday. Being forced to stay quarantined, to stop his life's work, probably drives him insane. He really wants to progress on his projects, which he considers to be very important for the future of mankind (which, let's face it, they could be).

Besides that, he's a contrarian. With COVID, we're faced with a situation where there is an extremely strong pressure to conform. There's one narrative being pushed and there's no real dialogue. Elon has a contrarian narrative: our basic human rights have been taken away (freedom of movement, etc) in the name of the greater collective good. He argues that people should be given the tools to help protect themselves but that the government should leave it up to individuals to decide how they manage this.

I tend to agree with him. We're told a vaccine could be two years away (or may never come). The fatality rate in my age group is about the same as the flu. I happen to be single, and at the moment, where I'm living, if I have a date with someone, I could technically be fined $1500 (and there have been a few reports of people going on tinder dates who have been). Since when has it been the government's business to legislate in these sorts of matters? I have been making efforts to socially isolate, but it's pushed me into a depression, I started taking antidepressants a month ago. I know two of my friends have done the same.

<comment><USER15> It is interesting to read this. So let me say something as someone:

\- who is respecting isolation

\- been in depression for a decade and have been in 8 or 9 sessions of counseling

Shut up! You are being so selfish that I can not imagine. The only reason I am not moving is because if I learn that I caused even one person to die by being asymptomatic - my life will completely derail.

I have killed exactly 1 cat under my running car once (8 years back) and I still remember that incident when I could not act fast enough, it brings me into tears sometimes even now.

The emotional burden will break my life into pieces. Depression my ass man, you have no clue what these mental issues are and to live with consequences.

<comment><USER16> It's been really interesting(and frustrating, I'm trying my best to not argue lol) to see some people so intensely defend their selfishness online.

Pretending to be psychologist for a second, I wonder if these people know it's wrong, but trying to make them selves feel better about it. Otherwise if you truly think you're in the right, why defend your self so intensely to so strangers online

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read 'california plant' as a euphemism for weed. Do these really cramped titles also read very ambiguous for native english speakers at times?

<comment><USER18> LOL .... gave me a good chuckle. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There seems to be more going on here.

The Tesla California plant has a very bad record when it comes to safety issues. California helped Tesla by looking the other way because they knew the company was starting and that they are very valuable for California.

And then Elon called them fascist because he could not open up the factory due to the virus. Of course officials then would like to approve the safety standards before opening up the factory again.

On the other hand nothing is going on here. The county already wanted to open up the businesses.

Elon lost a lot respect in all this. Maybe he has a lot on his mind like becoming a father again, the virus, selling all his properties, wanting to go to mars earlier than possible, his brain implant project, and so on. To me he sounds a little exhausted. In the latest Joe Rogan he also looks very tired and dim.

<comment><USER20> I'd say the evidence is mounting Elon probably has some type of undiagnosed (because lol money) mental health condition he'd benefit from treatment for. His latest episodes on twitter have looked like a bipolar's manic phase except he hasn't been able to (I presume) talk the ear off employees at one of his companies.

<comment><USER21> People really need to stop with the armchair psychology nonsense. Not everybody who send an angry tweet is now biopolar. And not everybody who disagrees with your opinion is psychologically damaged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If health care workers can't avoid getting themselves infected, even though they have expertise and training, there is no way that Tesla will be able to prevent the virus from spreading within the factory. It's a ticking time bomb at this point, just like the meat packing plants and the other factories that have spread the disease. Once a single person with COVID-19 comes into the Tesla plant, it's guaranteed to spread like wildfire. Things like social distancing is merely a tactic to slow the spread down, but it won't actually help you if someone 6 ft from you has COVID-19 and is breathing vigorously or is eating lunch 6 ft from you.

If Musk isn't right there on the factory line among the workers and endangering his life along with the workers that he is forcing to come work for him, then I will lose a tremendous amount of respect for him. If anything, this should be a good opportunity for the factory workers to unionize and demand better treatment.

<comment><USER23> He's not "forcing" anyone to come in IIRC. Workers can remain furloughed if they'd like. It's just that out in the real world, people need to work in order to survive.

<comment><USER24> "Come in or lose your unemployment benefits" isn't a choice in any sense of the word. It's a shame we've done so poorly at managing this virus and have provided so little support for people who choose to prioritize their health.

<comment><USER25> Staying at home is not in any way prioritizing health, if, like most people, they themselves or any household members continue to go out to shop for food and other things. If anything, the clean factory environment should be safer than most stores and households.

<comment><USER24> This is asinine. They _still have to go to stores and shop for food_ , going to a work at a factory is just one more place to get infected. And as demonstrated by the meat-packing plants, a much higher risk of infection than most everyday locations.

<comment><USER25> Look at which two types of factories/plants you are equating, as if it's not apples to oranges. Tesla factory versus meat packing plant. And then look at what adjective you used at the start of your post. I could be forgiven for thinking your introductory sentence is meant to apply to the rest of your comment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


viaCycle (YC S12) Brings Shared Bikes to SF Powered by SMS and Voice - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/08/viacycle-brings-shared-bikes-to-san-francisco-powered-by-sms-and-voice.html

<comment><USER2> Glad to see this coming to SF. It's one of the things that I miss the most from Mexico City, where the EcoBici ([http://thecityfix.com/blog/mexico-city- launches-ecobici-bike...](http://thecityfix.com/blog/mexico-city-launches- ecobici-bike-sharing-program/)) program its one of the best ways to get around on the upscale neighborhoods.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can see the bikes on GT campus from my desk all day. As someone who likes to ride a bike I think the idea is neat, but I wonder who actually uses them..? Maybe they do well, but it seems they just sit there all day.

Plus are people supposed to carry a helmet around or just forgo brain protection?

<comment><USER4> In the beginning things at GT were quiet because we didn't do a good job of marketing, but they're picking up. We've seen 30% monthly usage growth since we launched, and that growth has continued into summer, despite 1/3rd the normal campus population. Even the busiest bike systems in the world only have about 30% of their fleet in use at any given time - any more than that just becomes chaos.

It's difficult to offer helmets with each bike trip, but we do offer ways for users to get subsidized helmets, and are always working to educate and improve safety. As the system becomes more popular, we hope users consider keeping helmets at their desk or at home for easy access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Large discussion about this, approx. 5 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4386766>

</comment><comment><USER6> I love the photo of you guys in suits with the bikes. No one would mistake you for bike loving hippies - you look more like superheroes in disguise</comment>


Synchronization of files between Google Docs, Basecamp, and Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudhq.net/ <comment><USER2> A paid service to merely move files between the proprietary storage containers of all the different services you use?

Decades after the concepts of filesystems were established, we're stuck in an ecosystem where our new tools can't easily get to generic storage without paying, thanks to the fact our platform du jour only exists because of years of pounding a square peg into a round hole?

I FUCKING LOVE THE CLOUD.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The point of moving to the cloud is that your are giving your data to company X, company Y, etc. Of course, both company X and company Y would like all your data, so company X will make super hard to move data to company Y and vice versa. So you are stuck.

And cloud services are mixing "storage service" and "software as a service" so in order to use service of company Z (like project management or something like that) you need also give data to company Z. Which is hard because your data is with company X.

Long story short: I also fucking love the cloud: we kinda went backward in time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our business uses all 3 services - altought Google only for email,calendar etc. and we have a small pain of having files in Dropbox but not integrated with Basecamp. Looking through your website I am not sure I would use your product.

Here are the reasons:

\- Looking at the 60 second video got my head spinning without actually figuring out how it works

\- I am not sure if I could trust you with touching my data

\- I am not sure what are the advantages of having file synced between basecamp and dropbox

\- don't want to commit to using platform which will be paid service if I don't know pricing yet

<comment><USER5> > I am not sure if I could trust you with touching my data

That's the part that kept me from signing up for a trial account, too. For example, I'm sure there's a good reason why the 37Signals login is required instead of the API key, but I couldn't find an explanation for it anywhere.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback.

I completely understand your concern about trust. As of now, we are small (just two of us). But we worked in small and big companies handling very sensitive customer data with integrity and professionally. If nothing, you can check out our linkedIn profiles. Also, you can always call us or email us to learn more how we operate. We hope that trust in our company will come with time.

Regarding 37signals requiring login/password, our service does realtime continuos synchronization and that cannot be achieved using only the API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi, This is Senad. Founder of cloudHQ.

We also have Chrome extension which embeds Dropbox/SugarSync/Basecamp into your Google Docs interface: <https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search?q=cloudHQ> Kinda cool (useful if synchronization is not really what you want)

Regarding pricing, we will have a free version - my idea is that cloudHQ will be free if services used are free (i.e., if you don't pay 37signals, you don't pay us).

</comment><comment><USER7> Obviously the best solution to this kind of problem is a third-party backend storage service that all services will back up to. However, everyone wants to "own your data" so that's never going to happen. What if someone wrote an open source cloud filesystem that anyone could run on their own servers, so that you could basically point Dropbox, Google Docs, etc. to your personal "storage box" that you rented from AWS and all your storage was mounted in all SaaS apps that you use?

</comment><comment><USER8> The service looks great! In what format are the google docs stored on Dropbox/Basecamp?

<comment><USER9> Files are converted to MS Office format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> not the best i've found... [http://www.squealingrat.org/word/a-quest-to-sync- google-docs...](http://www.squealingrat.org/word/a-quest-to-sync-google-docs- with-computer/)

</comment><comment><USER11> BusyFlow (accelerated by GammaRebels) does the same thing (although it's still in closed Beta) - <http://www.facebook.com/busyflow></comment>


Marijuana legalization will be on California ballot - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62O08U20100325

<comment><USER2> This is also an important states' rights issue. The federal government technically says that California can't actually legalize marijuana. But they're going to do it anyway.

I hope this works out for them, if only because it will show the diminishing power of the federal government... which is the way it should be.

<comment><USER3> The last time a state really pushed hard on states rights' and on counteracting federal law, it didn't turn out well: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_Crisis>

<comment><USER2> Not bad at all. Just think: all the military equipment that California used to use to harass the pot-smoking hippies can be put to use fighting another civil war.

All over a mildly-psychoactive plant.

<comment><USER4> Similar to the revolutionary war being fought over a bunch of dried up leaves used to color and flavor hot water.

<comment><USER2> Turns out "Give me liberty or give me death" was catchier than "Give me tea or give me death".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this news item. However, I'm curious how this falls under the HN guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

California isn't the first state to have such an initiative on the ballot, so I don't see how this is an interesting new phenomenon.

And for the record, I didn't flag this. I'm just playing devil's advocate.

<comment><USER6> There are other flat-out legalization initiatives? Where?

I'm aware of numerous "for medical use" initiatives which have passed, which of course we all know is _de facto_ legalization ("Hey, doc, my, uh, eyes, uh, hurt a lot." "Oh, well, there's only one cure for that. Here, have a scrip.") But who else has done flat-out no jokes legalization yet?

I'm not trying to ask a gotcha; I'm open to the possibility I haven't heard of them. It's an honest question.

<comment><USER5> There have been in the past that failed. In particular, I recall one in Nevada. This isn't the best reference for it, but it was the easiest to find: <http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/326/nevadaII.shtml>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This story may be off topic but I love hearing hn readers take on pretty much anything.</comment>


Instead of eating lunch out every day, buy 4 iPads - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/how-much-is-your-lunch-habit-costing-you

<comment><USER2> There is a stigma to bringing your own lunch. If you have to bring it, it means you cannot afford to go out, so it is used as a status symbol. Like most status symbols, it's about wasting money to prove that you have the money to waste.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't have said it better.

<comment><USER3> very true. the funny thing is that americans have no problem taking food they haven't finished from restaurants "to go." in russia, this is seen as a faux pas...you don't have food at home you can eat?

<comment><USER4> Well we wouldn't want to be seen as wasteful would we?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why, do they taste better? I'm pretty sure I could only eat one or two iPads for lunch.

</comment><comment><USER6> How about instead paying for a better VPS or someone to turn caching on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. Working on both. :)</comment></comment>


Study finds US air traffic control vulnerable to cyberattack - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/05/07/study-us-air-traffic-control-vulnerable-cyberattack

<comment><USER2> Word on the street is that someone has acquired a top secret CIP device and has reconfigured the subcircuit board to connect to the FAA subchannel. Jack Bauer is on the case.

<comment><USER3> They created a GUI interface in Visual Basic to hack the mainframe.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Blogic for WordPress, instantly create a WP theme matching your website - <AUTHOR> http://blog.blogic.com/instantly-create-a-wordpress-theme-that-matches-your-website

<comment><USER2> I am happy that you added the ability to generate WordPress themes...

This is going to kick ass once it's polished.

\--

Adding an example of the two different options on the pricing page (or somewhere) would help a bit. People would have a better idea of what your blogging platform has to offer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Founder of Blogic here. We did a "Review my startup" on HN a few weeks ago. Based on the feedback and requests, we pivoted to generate WordPress themes instead of just hosting our own custom blogging platform. I hope this provides as much value as I think it will.

<comment><USER3> Amazing product. Very good example of a product that solves a real problem. Cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome work Sean! This is going to rock, especially for startups.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sweet and simple hack. Nice work fellas.</comment>


Developing Computer Self-Reliance - <AUTHOR> https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/computer-self-reliance.html <comment><USER2> I've noticed a sort-of orthogonal trend: To ditch the computer entirely and use mobile devices exclusively. I've seen a combo of an iPhone and a low-end iPad do everything many not-so-technical people ever do on their computers, while being a lot more secure, relatively inexpensive, and very easy to use, or rather, it tends to be very hard to actually break things inadvertently on those systems, and being able to transfer muscle memory from one's phone helps.

iPads can still feed video to a TV, you can use a cheap bluetooth keyboard for writing letters (and, recently on iPadOS, even mice), lots of USB devices with an adapter, and they're highly mobile, have great accessibility features (increasingly popular with age), the higher-end iPad displays are actually kinda nice for reading, even. New-ish printers seemingly tend to just work over wifi (at least with iOS – so I'm told; I still have a hard time believing it.)

I think that's actually another way of attaining more self-reliance. It's a way to avoid having to learn most of the things mentioned in TFA and still be able to not depend on others so much, without things getting crazy expensive or insecure. Software failure modes tend to be a lot easier to fix, and for hardware – same as with phones, even most knowledgeable people can't fix those themselves, but there are straightforward options to have it done (e.g. take it to an Apple Store), and even as a non-technical person, you can set up a new device without help with very basic skills.

Maybe that kind of self-reliance isn't the most helpful kind in a pandemic or SHTF scenario, or the very cheapest way to solve one's computing needs, but it's viable and way easier than what TFA outlines.

<comment><USER3> Newer printers absolutely Just Work over wifi, at least with iOS and macOS devices. iOS automatically detects the printer on the network, no installation needed. MacOS is also about as seamless.

On the other hand I recently acquired a Windows 10 PC due to work-from-home and it was trouble-ridden. The auto-detect failed and I had a hard time installing drivers when it did fail. I have an easier time printing from my old Thinkpad running an out-of-date Debian. Hard to believe that Windows is still this primitive. It's disappointing.

<comment><USER4> > Newer printers absolutely Just Work over wifi, at least with iOS and macOS > devices.

Not my experience at all.

<comment><USER5> Same here. I have a year old Cannon laser printer. While I've never had issues getting it to connect to WiFi, it's useless if multicast isn't enabled on the network. This lowers my speeds significantly. Without it the printer refuses to cooperate, even if I manually enter the IP address into a client. My network equipment is Ubiquiti which serves a mixture of Mac and Windows clients. Disabling multicast with an exception for the printers MAC address doesn't work either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm making my final computer:[http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235](http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235)

<comment><USER7> I don't understand what you're trying to describe there. A raspberry-pi as your computer? It's too vague and pictures seem to not correlate with this short text.

<comment><USER6> Basically, the rasperry 4 has 2 GFlops/watt and that's as good as it will get. So I'm transitioning to raspberry that powers it's own screen for a 15W computer that can run 40 hours with a 50Ah lead-acid battery.</comment></comment></comment>


Mona Lisa genetically drawn from Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/05/25/mona-lisa-genetically-drawn-scheme/

<comment><USER2> I'm implementing this right now in processing.org. You can get terrific speedups if you keep your drawing/fitness-scoring canvas very small, and only render the larger image when you want to save a copy of it.</comment>


Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts - <AUTHOR> https://www.plasma.io <comment><USER2> Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about?

I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen came away less convinced than ever of their theoretical utility for anything but a tiny fraction of users.

In short, adding a decentralized network of paid/incentivized actors to any existing potential cryptographic problem space (a fair rough summary of the smart contract notion?), in particular the subset relevant for most businesses, doesn't seem to solve anything particularly well and typically decreases critical measures of engineering elegance such as simplicity, comprehensibility, predictability, etc. while increasing negative measures such as technical lock-in to piles of rapidly evolving technologies for which hiring and building is expensive and error-prone.

<comment><USER3> What about Kickstarter? A $500 million+ company that takes a 5% vig on all transacted funds can effectively be replaced with a few lines of code.

If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.

<comment><USER4> Then why has nobody done that then?

It blows my mind how so many people proliferate how useful blockchain companies can be yet despite all of the different blockchains, ICO's..., practically none [1] have taken off because they are technologically and economically worse than current market products and services.

[1]: Illegal markets are the only market I have seen that do like it because companies/governments have specifically made it harder for illegal transactions to take place over traditional currencies.

<comment><USER5> Nobody has done it because it's inefficient right now, and the ecosystem is still only trusted by a relatively small minority of nerds like myself and others here. This proposal is a solution to one of those problems.

<comment><USER4> When will it ever be efficient?

All blockchains rely on re-computing the same transaction across many different entities due to mistrust. However, despite the common sentiment that computers are cheap; at scale, the are definitely not. Every additional computation to validate something increases the cost of business and 99% of businesses are cutthroat when it comes to cost.

Add in the other downsides/costs of crypto.* (my insights on the downsides of blockchain specifically: hard to use, one way transactions, high transfer costs due to low block size, super easy to get hacked and lose all your money...) and it's no wonder they are all failing.

99.999% of the time, the costs outway the benefits.

<comment><USER6> There is proof of stake algos coming that make it efficient.

<comment><USER7> Proof of stake is something that "has been coming along" for years now. Sounds like vaporware to me.

<comment><USER5> Proof of stake is implemented in tons of coins already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Instead, we seek to design a system whereby computation can occur off- > blockchain but ultimately enforcible on-chain

This seems to be the direction that blockchain and smart contract tech needs to go if it aims to be scalable. Conduct the vast majority of your business off-chain, and resort to the blockchain in the event of a dispute.

Kind of like how two parties in a business relationship will generally act on good faith, but may choose the nuclear option of legally enforcing a contract if the relationship sours.

</comment><comment><USER9> As far as I can see, a billion tx/s blockchain can never work if the P2P network is sufficiently large.

Imagine a 10,000-node network, where each node has to handle 1 billion messages per second. Firstly, if we assume a single VM can handle 1 million messages per second, it would require that each node rent ~1000 VMs (for a total of 10 million VMs for the entire P2P network), which they obviously can't do without compensation. And if you introduce compensation, you need to pay the same fee to each node, which makes it inherently 10,000 times as expensive as a centralized network.

So the question is not whether it's possible, the question is whether it's worth it: in how many cases would a user prefer a system that's 10,000 times cheaper, albeit requiring some trust?

Merchants all over the world are willing to accept VISA credit in exchange for goods and services, but they _could_ — in theory — demand trustless payments in the form of international bank transfers, which are _less_ than 10,000 times as expensive as a VISA transaction.

<comment><USER10> Plasma is not for payments. It is a counterpart of Lightning Network, but for code. With LN you can do a lot of extremely cheap payments. With Plasma you can do the same for arbitrarily complicated code. Idea is - take some tokens to domain specific plasma chain, do your interaction with possibly byzantine actors, settle on parent chain when you are done.

Today even timestamping is expensive in decentralized world. Plasma actually allows you to do that cheaply.

<comment><USER9> > With LN you can do a lot of extremely cheap payments.

The cost of transactions on a Lightning Network has yet to be determined, because no working LN (with merchants accepting payments) exists yet. We all agree than LN is pretty fast, but the ultimate test is cost per transaction.

Allow me to remind you that if you want to send 1 BTC through 10 LN nodes, each of these 10 LN nodes need to bind 1 BTC in a payment channel (totaling 10 BTC in capital costs to transfer 1 BTC). And if just a single of these channels/hops are exhausted, and thus need to touch the blockchain, the LN payment is no cheaper than an on-blockchain one.

<comment><USER11> Right, LN nodes will eventually become big speciallized hubs, with great BTC capacity to attend as many channels as possible. Each channel is a source of revenue for the LN node, so LN nodes will try to become as big as possible (both technically and BTC-wise) to cope with greater audience.

Think that in a LN-node the profit will be proportional to capacity of open channels, so its very probable that we will see very-big-BTC-LN-nodes appear to serve demand

The reputation of LN-nodes will play a very important to the users (as it already happens with BTC exchanges - do you use a unknown-fishy-exchange or do you use a big-known-stable-exchange ?), and so that will incentivize LN-nodes to avoid/solve problems with channels to avoid teardown-to-the-blockchain (which as you mentioned, is abnoxious to the user for its fee and lock-time)

<comment><USER9> Let's imagine an LN network with 1,000 payers all connecting to one, single LN hub, which routes all payments to a single payee (merchant).

How will the on-blockchain settlement transaction look like? It needs to redeem all 1,000 outputs provided by the payers, because each payer creates a new output when it funds a channel, which creates a huge settlement transaction (1,000 inputs) with a correspondingly huge fee.

How does LN get around this issue?

<comment> iso-8859-1 A channel is committed to using one unspent transaction output (UTXO), settling it consumes only that UTXO and all of the other channels a given party might have are completely unrelated.

What is the use of the hub? You can just connect the merchant directly, even if you are just an occasional customer. You don't need the entire blockchain to use LN, so more users will be running Lightning nodes than Bitcoin nodes.

If you have an intermediary node (you call it a hub), there is no requirement for it to close its channel with the merchant, once you close your channel with that intermediary node.

Credits: Yoghurt on Bitcoin Core Slack

<comment><USER9> > If you have an intermediary node (you call it a hub), there is no > requirement for it to close its channel with the merchant, once you close > your channel with that intermediary node.

As far as I can see, merchants receiving payments over payment channels is unrealistic, because it requires:

1) the merchant to predict what its revenue will be this week/month

2) the merchant (or someone else) to lock up this entire amount for the revenue period (week/month)

So, if a merchant wants to receive payments over a payment channel, the effective supply of BTC is halved, because 1 BTC needs to be deposited in the merchant's payment channel for every 1 BTC a customer sends.

Most merchants simply don't have that kind of capital and, even if they did, they wouldn't be able to compete on price with other merchants who don't demand trustless payments (merchants receiving payments over payment channels need to adjust their prices to account for the fact that they need to borrow a week/month's worth of revenue, and have it sit idle in a payment channel). It's very poor use of a scarce resource (bitcoins).

<comment><USER12> Who says the merchant needs to do that work? Specialized companies run like exchanges (or payment networks) could run the nodes on behalf of the merchants, much like bitpay does today. Of course, then you're just back where you started, with a banking institution controlling payments. But perhaps it would be more decentralized than four big payment companies, and that could be a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER9> It's not about work. Borrowing money isn't time-consuming. It's about the cost of capital, and the inefficiency of requiring a scarce resource to be locked up with no other purpose than lowering the risk of losing a week's revenue from 0.1% to zero.

<comment> iso-8859-1 Why do you think the merchant needs to lock up funds? If his exchange supports Lightning, the merchant would never need to worry about the fact that transactions won't hit the blockchain (if nobody is cheating or losing connectivity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are already ETH based projects that are trying to take this one, like this one [https://www.agrello.org/](https://www.agrello.org/)

Looking forward to seeing results

<comment><USER14> It says "US Citizen cannot be registered"

<comment><USER15> Probably because of the SEC warnings on ICOs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did anyone read the paper? I tried to, and it's a mess. There isn't nearly enough technical detail there to actually implement this system, and the incentives are so complex that game theory experts could be analyzing it for decades without finding all the potential issues. This is nothing like the Bitcoin white paper, which was very clear and complete.

Vitalik has created Ethereum of course, and he's not asking for investment, so this is better than your garden variety ICO scam. But right now this is more of a wishlist of desired features than a roadmap to implementation.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I was struggling to understand the implementation details also.

Given: "Draft is in-progress and may be frequently updated in the next week(s)." I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and just look forward to it getting more specific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is there never a shred of evidence in these blockchain-related papers? It all sounds like a cool idea, so why not test it and run the numbers?

<comment><USER19> Because it takes too long, and everybody wants to get rich quick (or while they try to implement their idea).

Also, on bitcointalk it seems all you need is a whitepaper and a great(!) team (of 1 developer and hundred marketing strategists, financial directors and whatnot.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Perhaps I've been wrong. Perhaps cryptographically-secured smart contracts have uses and are powerful. Perhaps the scalability challenge can be met with MapReducable computations committed into merkle proofs. Perhaps enforced execution of smart contracts are potentially scalable to billions of state updates per second. ....... Nahhh!"

\- Medieval barber, Theodoric of York

</comment><comment><USER21> Plasma is already the name of KDE's desktop interface. Reusing the name of an already known project is confusing.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I just click thinking that was something about KDE. Bad feeling give mes, someone that "steals" some popular opensource name for his business.

<comment><USER23> Yeah it really sucks when people do that. Glad it's not very often.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=plasma+company](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=plasma+company)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there a resource/tutorial so that I can learn how to implement Plasma? Apparently Omise GO has already implementing it. There should be an open source project that shows Plasma's implementation.

</comment><comment><USER25> Community at HN does not like Wolfram; on the issue of Oracles/Human input @ cryptosystems, he is spot on on the solution as he has had first hand experience with Wolfram|Alpha being used as an oracle by smart contracts (the whole post is amazing btw):

[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law- sym...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-symbolic- discourse-and-the-ai-constitution/)

And so it is with bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. The idea is that some particular thing that happened ("X paid Y such-and-such" or whatever) is shared and recorded in so many places that there can't be any doubt about it. Yes, it's in principle possible that all the few thousand places that actually participate in something like bitcoin today could collude to give a fake result. But the idea is that it's like with gas molecules in a room: the probability is inconceivably small. (As it happens, my Principle of Computational Equivalence suggests that there's more than an analogy with the gas molecules, and that actually the underlying principles at work are basically exactly the same. And, yes, there are lots of interesting technical details about the operation of distributed blockchain ledgers, distributed consensus protocols, etc., but I'm not going to get into them here.) It's popular these days to talk about "smart contracts". When I've been talking about "computational contracts" I mean contracts that can be expressed computationally. But by "smart contracts" people usually mean contracts that can both be expressed computationally and execute automatically. Most often the idea is to set up a smart contract in a distributed computation environment like Ethereum, and then to have the code in the contract evaluate based on inputs from the computation environment. Sometimes the input is intrinsic—like the passage of time (who could possibly tamper with the clock of the whole internet?), or physically generated random numbers. And in cases like this, one has fairly pure smart contracts, say for paying subscriptions, or for running distributed lotteries. But more often there has to be some input from the outside—from something that happens in the world. Sometimes one just needs public information: the price of a stock, the temperature at a weather station, or a seismic event like a nuclear explosion. But somehow the smart contract needs access to an "oracle" that can give it this information. And conveniently enough, there is one good such oracle available in the world: Wolfram|Alpha. And indeed Wolfram|Alpha is becoming widely used as an oracle for smart contracts. (Yes, our general public terms of service say you currently just shouldn't rely on Wolfram|Alpha for anything you consider critical—though hopefully soon those terms of service will get more sophisticated, and computational.) But what about non-public information from the outside world? The current thinking for smart contracts tends to be that one has to get humans in the loop to verify the information: that in effect one has to have a jury (or a democracy) to decide whether something is true. But is that really the best one can do? I tend to suspect there's another path, that's like using machine learning to inject human-like judgment into things. Yes, one can use people, with all their inscrutable and hard-to- systematically-influence behavior. But what if one replaces those people in effect by AIs—or even a collection of today's machine-learning systems? One can think of a machine-learning system as being a bit like a cryptosystem. To attack it and spoof its input one has to do something like inverting how it works. Well, given a single machine-learning system there's a certain effort needed to achieve this. But if one has a whole collection of sufficiently independent systems, the effort goes up. It won't be good enough just to change a few parameters in the system. But if one just goes out into the computational universe and picks systems at random then I think one can expect to have the same kind of independence as by having different people. (To be fair, I don't yet quite know how to apply the mining of the computational universe that I've done for programs like cellular automata to the case of systems like neural nets.) There's another point as well: if one has a sufficiently dense net of sensors in the world, then it becomes increasingly easy to be sure about what's happened. If there's just one motion sensor in a room, it might be easy to cover it. And maybe even if there are several sensors, it's still possible to avoid them, Mission Impossible-style. But if there are enough sensors, then by synthesizing information from them one can inevitably build up an understanding of what actually happened. In effect, one has a model of how the world works, and with enough sensors one can validate that the model is correct. It's not surprising, but it always helps to have redundancy. More nodes to ensure the computation isn't tampered with. More machine-learning algorithms to make sure they aren't spoofed. More sensors to make sure they're not fooled. But in the end, there has to be something that says what should happen—what the contract is. And the contract has to be expressed in some language in which there are definite concepts. So somehow from the various redundant systems one has in the world, one has to make a definite conclusion—one has to turn the world into something symbolic, on which the contract can operate.

<comment><USER26> So we basically have to put our faith and trust into machines that by doing computational expensive operations just for the sake of making them hard to break, will trade wasting a lot of energy for a little more trust.

The point is always "make it hard so it will be too expensive to crack it". but what if some country (or group of countries) really try to temper with the clock of the internet? Are we sure the won't succed and make all of us use it?

If consensus is only established by powerful AIs, the ones with the most powerful AIs are creating the truth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Blockchain mentioned. Please explain me how it would ever work in the long run, if it scales extremely badly ?

<comment><USER23> The whole point of this is to move computation off the main chain and enable it to scale better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The emperor has no clothes, or at very best is parading around the street in a loincloth made up of cryptocurrency whitepapers.

<comment><USER29> I'm very glad to see this is being recognized more and more. Technically strong people can see it, but there are legions of ethereum fans who cannot.

<comment><USER30> Why does every crypto thread have these vacuous comments? Normally adding a "I agree" comment is met with "use the arrow".

Maybe we could come up with a "HN law of crypto" that states all articles must be met with "paper money works just fine" or "just another tulip scheme".

It seems asking for constructive criticism is out of the question due to the ideological motivations behind the criticisms.

<comment><USER31> I think it's because it is both hard to understand and hard to explain cryptocurrencies at the moment. It's like discussing email or social networks based on papers and ideas without really ever having seen it in action. We tend to get a bit aggressive or impatient when we find it hard to explain something.

Also, crypto skeptics realise that the crypto fans literally have money at stake so they are not unbiased. Maybe crypto skeptics are also a bit worried that perhaps there is something they didn't get. Perhaps they miss out on the next big thing.

<comment><USER28> "Crypto" isn't binary. There's a gold nugget in there somewhere buried under a literal mountain of (occasionally willful) disinformation, flimsy whitepapers and opportunistic ICOs that can best be described as Ponzi schemes. Spend any amount of time on bitcointalk or any of the altcoin subreddits to see what I'm talking about.

That - IMO - is what "crypto skeptics" are actually skeptical of.

<comment><USER30> "The internet will never work because Pets.com is stupid" \- would be a perfectly valid position to hold after the dot com bust. But those unable to separate HTTP from Pets.com are the real suckers. I guess that's why some people get rich and others sit on their hands and complain.

<comment><USER28> > "The internet will never work because Pets.com is stupid" \- would be a > perfectly valid position to hold after the dot com bust.

No it wouldn't

> I guess that's why some people get rich and others sit on their hands and > complain.

I honestly don't know what your point is. There's a lot to criticize in the crypto space right now. There's also a lot of money to be made. Those aren't in any way mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER30> > I honestly don't know what your point is

I think you do. It was the sentence before the one you quoted

<comment><USER28> > But those unable to separate HTTP from Pets.com are the real suckers.

Ok. That's a bit contrived but is easy enough to agree with.

> I think you do.

Are we aggressively agreeing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's my right to be stupid

<comment><USER9> Not according to the SEC.

<comment><USER32> It's a self correcting mechanism evolution.</comment></comment></comment>


Crashlytics now serves over 1M apps - <AUTHOR> http://crashlytics.com/blog/milestone-achieved-over-1-million-apps

<comment><USER2> The problem with Crashlytics is that you can't get your data out besides through their pretty website. Their search is limited and there's no adhoc querying. There's no API so you can't integrate with any of your other tools. Also, you have to trust Twitter with your app's data.

<comment><USER3> They also need to add proper alerting. Telling me that my app with 1m users has reached "Impact Level 2" for a particular bug because it's affected 50 people is basically useless.

<comment><USER2> If they had a proper querying API you could build your own alerting and integrate it with PagerDuty or whatever system you might use.

<comment><USER4> We actually integrate with PagerDuty and a bunch of other services already (users can submit integrations too) :-)

Existing integrations: [http://try.crashlytics.com/integrations/](http://try.crashlytics.com/integrations/)

Submit integrations using: [https://github.com/crashlytics/crashlytics- services](https://github.com/crashlytics/crashlytics-services)

<comment><USER2> The only thing those integrations do is handle the existing Crashlytics- defined alerts. I'm not allowed to define my own alerts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is no way this is calculated on a 'fair' basis. There are around 3 million apps total between different platforms for mobile. This 1M number must be calculated counting versions of apps as new apps.

<comment><USER6> Many apps have come and gone as well. I know my enterprise app from 2011 is no longer in the app store after they failed to maintain it, but is likely still active in Crashlytics.

Excellent product by the way. Very polished even from early beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Excellent! It's my favorite bug catcher on both platforms :).

Question: How Crashlytics (or Fabric) lives? It's free, but how are they making money to survive?

I'm asking because it's an awesome service, and I want to know if they will be free forever, or in some point (like how did happen with Pivotal Tracker) they will charge with an ugly and useless free option.

<comment><USER8> According to their privacy policy, Crashlytics aggregates the data that's being collected in every app.

"Crashlytics does aggregate information across Developers in a non-personally identifiable way. Such aggregate and anonymous information is used by Crashlytics to (i) improve the Services, (ii) create analysis of trends or behaviors and (iii) other similar uses, but always in an aggregate and anonymous way."

Knowing what apps are trending probably helps Twitter to make decisions on what to focus on next (like with the Meerkat / Periscope apps, and their acquisition of Periscope). That data should probably be enough for Twitter to keep it free for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Crashlytics as part of Twitter's Fabric.io suite is awesome. It's our goto for simple things like monitoring crashes/errors, DAU/WAU/MAU and associated ratios across our apps.

It also knocks TestFlight right out of the water for beta testing.

<comment><USER4> Thanks ksar! Wait until you see what we've been working on ;-)

<comment><USER6> something something video?

<comment><USER4> [CENSORED] [REDACTED] [CENSORED] :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wanted to do some estimation on what kind of revenue 1M apps could bring but their pricing page consists of "enter your email and we'll contact you shortly".

Seems weird they haven't passed the invite only phase at 1M apps served.

<comment><USER11> It's not "invite only". It's just a trick to seem exclusive. They have an automated email go out a few minutes after you request an invite that gives you instructions on how to sign up that seems like it's coming from an actual person (unless I'm mistaken, in which case whoever is managing these invites is superhuman).

<comment><USER12> Yup: [http://blog.benhall.me.uk/2015/01/making-users-feel- special-...](http://blog.benhall.me.uk/2015/01/making-users-feel-special- invite-fabric-invite-email)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This may be a good place to ask: Now that Testflight is gone, what do you recommend for getting crash reports (incl stack trace) in iOS apps? Crashlytics?

<comment><USER14> Yes, I can heartily recommend Crashlytics/Fabric.io. I used it for my just- released music game app ([http://www.reddit.com/r/FlamingNotes](http://www.reddit.com/r/FlamingNotes)) on iOS and Android. Slick integration.</comment></comment>


Python ' =' Is Not 'Is Not': Comparing Objects in Python - <AUTHOR> https://realpython.com/python-is-identity-vs-equality/ <comment><USER2> Title is misspelled. It should be '!=', not ' ='.

<comment><USER3> Easier said than done! As I learnt when trying to submit a !!Con talk once.. I guess it's a headline-desensationalizer 'feature'.</comment></comment>


Building a million-dollar empire with an army of high school graduates - happy-go-lucky https://qz.com/1029316/zoho-corporation-is-building-a-million-dollar-empire-with-an-army-of-high-school-graduates-in-india/ <comment><AUTHOR> The average value of a house in Palo Alto is now 1.4 empires.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there really anything such as 'intelligence'? - <AUTHOR>

Or is it a unified term that we like to use for a concept with lot more factors at work than we care to acknowledge? say like the way we use the word "God" to explain anything that we can't explain, don't know yet or not ready to examine further in depth?
Could it be actually the curiosity gene that researchers should look for instead of intelligence gene? or is it the impatience gene?
Without curiosity, what would be the chance of one accumulating enough knowledge that one can connect as a complex idea to 'show intelligence'?
Or is it the obseessive observation gene? without that tendency to look at things longer and deeper than the average looker, would one be able to observe things beyond the superficial that most people seem satisfied with?
It is said that intelligent people get easily bored, could it be the other way round? Could it be that bored people can tend to keep digging deeper or keep digging around more, keep discovering more knowledge/information that way, which they can connect later? And the more connections they make or hold in their brains and present them to the world, the more intelligent they are percieved?
Or is it an adventurouse gene? the readiness to break traditions and look at things in a way different than what is considered the 'norm'? the readiness to connect thigns in a way different than the norm and see how the result looks?
Any thoughts?
(Edit: in a way can't adventurousness be called being curious? the curiousity to see what happens when one tries something that they have never tried, whether in terms of beliefs, trains of thoughts, ideas, food, places, actions or whatever?) <comment><USER2> Probably not. See <http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html> for an explanation of why intelligence probably does not exist.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.savagechickens.com/2008/12/iq-test.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> That was very funny!</comment></comment>


Branding and distributing swag like a BOSS - <AUTHOR> http://startupshirts.org <comment><USER3> Are you seriously just selling your collection of conference swag T-shirts? For twelve bucks apiece?

<comment><USER4> If they are, wow. That heroku one is definitely one of their swag shirts - <USER2> got one at an Amazon event.</comment></comment>


Show HN: StubOnWeb – Stub HTTP server to test API integrations - <AUTHOR> http://stubonweb.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> This is super cool! I'm going to start using this -- your project looks great too (thanks for making it open source!).

You should totally get a real domain for this, as well as some SSL certs to protect info flying over the wire.

If you want some sponsorship, hit me up, we might be able to work something out! email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. You can access it via SSL as well [https://stubonweb.herokuapp.com/](https://stubonweb.herokuapp.com/)

It is currently running on heroku and mongolabs free tier. I'm glad to see more people find it usefull. I'll work on getting a domain and better server. I'll get in touch with you in case I need help. Thanks

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure my company would be happy to cover your hosting costs / etc. Hit me up if you're interested! <33

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this for writing tests against? Won't the tests fail if this service is not available? If you need a static response why not save it as a file and have a local temp server respond?

<comment><USER4> I use a similar system when building mobile app features.

Sometimes (almost always) an app feature is developed parallel to the API service.

It's useful to return a mock response so you can build the entire feature including networking. This way you don't need to wait for the server side component to finish.

A temp server takes time to set up and maintain. It's like any tool. Why use Dropbox if you can just save your file to a usb drive and carry it around everywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. We are building a product with micro services architecture, more often we finalise the API contract with other service teams and develop our service against stubbed response till the other teams complete their development

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks like a cool easy to use tool, nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. Glad it is useful for more people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good one!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


A way to decide which political candidate has the most grassroots support - <AUTHOR> http://tipacandidate.com/

<comment><USER2> pg, I just left them a comment on their page, and I'm hoping you might be able to clarify this over here:

"TipJoy folks, while I think this experiment of yours is interesting, it contains a serious flaw. Campaign contributions must meet certain requirements, which a contributor must agree to.

From Ron Paul's campaign site:

1\. This contribution is made on a personal credit or debit card for which I have the legal obligation to pay, and is made neither on a corporate or business entity card nor on the card of another.

2\. I am a United States citizen or a lawfully-admitted permanent resident.

3\. I am making this contribution with my own personal funds, and I will not be reimbursed by anyone for this contribution.

4\. I am not a federal government contractor.

5\. I am at least 18 years of age.

From Barack Obama's campaign site:

1\. I am a United States citizen or a lawfully-admitted permanent resident.

2\. I am at least 16 years old.

3\. This contribution is not made from the general treasury funds of a corporation, labor organization or national bank.

4\. This contribution is not made from the funds of a political action committee.

5\. This contribution is not made from the treasury of an entity or person who is a federal contractor.

6\. This contribution is not made from the funds of an individual registered as a federal lobbyist or a foreign agent, or an entity that is a federally registered lobbying firm or foreign agent.

7\. The funds I am donating are not being provided to me by another person or entity for the purpose of making this contribution.

If TipJoy donates these funds in whole on behalf of those who donate here, they violate several of the above requirements. If TipJoy is simply holding these funds until the candidates "pick them up", it's denying tippers the opportunity to see and agree to the requirements for donation, which means no candidate's campaign committee would be able to accept them. If TipJoy in that case follows it's stated policy regarding unclaimed tips: "Since tips are not refundable, as long as the money remains 'unclaimed' it will remain with us indefinitely", then you are knowingly soliciting money from users that you cannot deliver and keeping it for yourself.

I don't think that's what you're trying to do. But some clarification would be nice."

Has TipJoy considered these requirements? Or are they in some way donating via a loophole?

<comment><USER2> Awww... "Banned by the FEC".

Sorry guys.

<comment><USER3> Heh. It's barely a surprise. I called the FEC and there is no scheme I could think of around the restrictions.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: spaceuncharted.com - <AUTHOR>

I was tired of games like Mafia Wars and wanted a phone-based MMO Strategy game where hundreds of players could actually engage each other on a 2D map, so I made one.
I track the state of the game each night so we can display a visual timeline of territory controlled by each alliance. (example: http://bit.ly/q5CFhU)  I use jQuery mobile for the front end so it runs on most phones (via Phonegap) as well as modern web browsers.  The server side is handled by Java Servlets and MySQL.
This started as a hobby - I'm not a developer by training - so I am very interested in feedback, suggestions, and ideas for improvements. <comment><USER2> This caught my eye because I'm a lurker here on Hacker News who actually plays this game! I'm super excited you are posting here because I really want to learn more about your server architecture. Can you provide more info on your java stack as well as the kind of hardware is running the site? Previous games had 300+ users, so scalability shouldn't be an issue yet, but have you planned for that?

Once criticism: For the time I've been playing, the game has been evolving rather quickly, and new features seem to have taken precedence over client stability.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've actually taken a pretty homebrew approach and aren't using any external frameworks - just Tomcat and MySQL. On the hardware side we're using Linode shared servers so that we can quickly and easily scale up or down as needed. The game code is pretty efficient - we've run tests with thousands of players and had no problems, on modest hardware, so we're looking forward to growing quickly!

It's true that we've had some stability issues at times, but we're trying to cover a lot of platforms (Android, iOS, webOS, web) and add a lot of new features to improve the game. Now that we've officially launched (on 10/1) stability will definitely our #1 priority, though.

<comment><USER2> Interesting - since this started as a hobby, any thoughts on open sourcing the client or server code or documenting the client/server communication so the community could build clients? I figure folks would be able to pretty easily reverse engineer it with the web client now, anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a bit late to the party but this looks like an interesting way to release a mobile game.

Would you be interested in chatting over email? We'd love to throw you support from PostageApp. :) Let me know!</comment>