Ask HN: Should I stick or twist? - <AUTHOR> I spent the last year developing a web application in my spare time and now I'm ready to market and sell it.  Of course, I realize I've done things completely the wrong way around and have no idea if there's even a market for my product. I even have trouble describing exactly what it does because it seems to clash with loads of other web applications in a crowded marketplace.  Not the best use of my time you might agree...
However, I'd hate to have wasted the time spent building this product, and therefore am tempted to try selling it for a while.  The desire to do so decreases when I realize I could be spending time on some other, more promising product rather than wasting it on a lost cause.
I've been going back and forth on what to do for a while now and so have come to HackerNews to ask for help and advice.
What would you do in my situation?
PS. It might help to add that as of next month I will be unemployed and able to focus 100% of my time on selling the old product, or developing a new one. <comment><USER2> Who would benfit from your product the most? Get it in front of a couple of users. If they like it great, start from there. Find out what they'd pay for it. Next, find out what they think needs changed. I think it's about finding a target customer first then finding a product that fits their needs. But, you might as well use your current product as testing ground. If you don't have a target market try looking to your contacts to help find one.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, it needs to be in front of people. Marketing it will be tough, I guess it will start with some cold calling/emailing and go from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "...The desire to do so decreases when I realize I could be spending time on some other, more promising product rather than wasting it on a lost cause."

This is just the shiny appeal of a new idea. If you spend as much time on any of these new ideas as you have on your original, the shine would also eventually wear off. Focus on trying to sell your original idea. Even if it fails, you will learn invaluable lessons.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight. I do have a lot to learn about the sales process so I might as well use what I've already worked on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Being unemployed next month will not help you - even if you have a decent runway.

1\. Find a consultancy or contract job if possible starting six weeks out. Take the intervening six weeks to get a pipeline going

2\. The white label seo idea is pretty good - spend a little time making that easy to create a new domain and try us domains like hair.bookingmadeeasy.com

3\. It's a side project - keep it that way till its paying you to work on it

<comment><AUTHOR> The unemployed part was of my own devising :) I have plenty saved up and wanted to take some time away from working on other peoples projects to focus on my own. I've got enough to cover me for 12 - 18 months if I so desire.

<comment><USER4> That's impressive, but I would honestly suggest you block out something - maybe a holiday to a beach, and aim to release and have customer feedback before you feel sand between your toes - even 12 mths can fly past with no real customers to keep you on the straight and narrow

Oh, and remember - life != other plans.

Have fun

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I say go and sell the heck out of it. Even though you already built it before doing validation, it of course will be a waste if you don't even try to do anything now. Look at the bright side, you already have something to show. instead of asking "I am working on xyz that _will_ do abc for you", you can now say "I have xyz that _can_ do abc for you"

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I have something to show which will definitely help my sales efforts!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can you share anything specific about what you've built?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've built a booking system for companies that run group based events, such as dive schools, outdoor adventure companies, dance classes and so on. The application itself helps manage those bookings as well as assign staff members and equipment to the events and will ensure no double bookings etc.

I've been doing keyword research and have found it very difficult to describe. Searches like "booking software" bring up many different types of business mostly unrelated.

I'm trying to put myself in the head of potential customers and what they would search for but so far that's proving quite difficult!

<comment><USER7> You have the option of branding it for each of those main usages that you mention. Make a website like "ScubaBooking.com" and "OutdoorAdventureBooking.com" and just slightly customize the website for each one. People like the idea of having a piece of software specifically for their business. Plus, it probably improves your SEO.

Not exactly the same thing, but WebHosting companies seem to do this. They have a solution and just rebrand and resell the shit out of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something I considered a while ago actually. I'll keep it in mind as it might be the way to go. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tracking Mobile Apps in a World Without UDID - <AUTHOR> http://www.hasoffers.com/blog/tracking-mobile-ads-world-udid/

<comment><USER2> Anonymous fingerprinting sounds like a more sensible solution than something that allows advertisers to build a profile about the user of a phone over time like UDID.</comment>


Why the new iPads are delayed (10nm yields) - <AUTHOR> https://techspecs.blog/blog/2017/4/5/why-the-new-ipads-are-delayed <comment><AUTHOR> If there's sufficient interest, would like to write more about foundry in the future. It's an educational problem because almost no one writes about these things on the internet.</comment>


LXD – next generation system container manager 4.3 released - <AUTHOR> https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxd-4-3-has-been-released/8303 <comment><USER2> Are there pointers to why LXD is loosing mindshare to docker?

Are there pointers to where LXD, Docker, Byhve and Jails sit with respect to each other (post 2019..)

<comment><AUTHOR> Docker is application container, LXD container is lightweight virtual machine. Bhyve is virtualisation layer similar to KVM for BSD kernel like FreeBSD and MacOS. Jails is similar to chroot in Linux providing process isolation.

Docker is more popular due to marketing and VC money pouring, in spite of being insecure compared to LXC until very recently. Kubernetes picked docker because it was popular, now there are many alternatives supporting CRI specification. Kata containers are similar to LXD containers but more complex. Now LXD supports VM management too, and provide direct access to hardware in performance critical deployments where kubernetes is not a choice. Indeed kubernetes can run inside LXD containers.</comment></comment>


The piracy paradox at Udemy (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/the-piracy-paradox-at-udemy/ <comment><USER2> Quote: "those who would seek to pirate my security content are probably more likely to do evil things with it "

Everytime I see this indoctrination, i can't help but to set the record straight.

People who commit "Piracy", or te be more precise: Copyright infringement, because "Piracy" actually means large scale infringement with a commercial motive; are NOT more or less "moral" or "ethical" than people who do not commit copyright infringement. ( And strictly speaking, they almost don't exist. )

This is also why mindsets that can be portrait as "Why don't we just give the consumer what it wants? " actually works in practice, not just in theory. Look at the succes of Spotify & Netflix for example.

"Piracy" is about convenience and market failure. It's not about money and certainly not about immoral people or ethical superiority.( But it sometimes IS about rentseeking. )

Even if you disagree with this statement and think that "Because Money" , you should not only look up what a freeloader problem is; but also what deadweight loss in economics means as this effectively means that copyrightholders are stealing welfare and money from everyone, if you'd interpret the concept with the hardline type of thinking often associated with "Anti Piracy" type of people.

<comment><USER3> I generally agree with the statement that "piracy" is usually about market failure, but it seems to be pretty clearly about money here. Someone stole and edited that content and was subsequently selling it elsewhere...

<comment><USER2> If we as two individuals or "we" as society at large ever wish to have a non- political thus solution focussed debate or discussion on piracy; one of the first preconditions would be the need for understanding the ontological nature of things and therefore for example not using emotionally loaded descriptions such as "Theft". It's not only factually incorrect, it's also misleading to masses of intellectually less gifted people. In fact, it even makes some of them agressive, totally destroying whatever rational thinking processes that might have been going on. You'll probably agree when i claim that's not constructive at all.

<comment><USER4> No, I don't agree. If someone spends time creating course content, someone else steals it and sells it, "theft" is exactly the correct word.

If you do this in Kindle World - copy words from a book, and sell them as your own in a different book with your name on it - you get taken down and thrown out, and the author may sue for lost income.

Online course content is no different.

It's theft. There is no other word for it.

<comment><USER2> The law disagrees with you virtually all over the world. What you call "theft" in the case of your example is called copyright infringement, and in the case of large scale infringement with a commercial motive it's called piracy. (Yet not within a UN or EU setting, due to actual seafaring pirates being mentioned in various treaties.)

These are facts I just presented to you, now please take into account that sensible people tend to discuss facts, and debate opinon; not the ohter way round because that would seem ehhwr, you probably get the point.

Besides the legal reality contradicting your statement, both ontological and metaphysical reality also contradicts you. One of the characteristics or nature of "theft" is that the (previous) owner is being left empty handed... Due to the nature of a copy, this is clearly not the case.

Enough words spend on the ludicrous "theft" hollywood spindoktering "word". Let's be adults here.

Due to existing legislation, the so called rights holder has a reasonable expectation regarding the amount of income he can generate due to copyright legislation. In almost every country, it's a legal _principle_ to be able to draw certainty from the law. This works out pretty well in almost every field of law yet it absolutely does not in the case of copyright legislation due to the fact that virtually everyone commits copyright infringement with incredible ease plus the fact that compelling people to comply with the law can basically only be properly executed post instating a surveilance/police state.

What we see here, is legislation dictating how we run our business, almost drafting complete businessmodels; followed by "promises" granted by this very same legislation not being uphold and potentially costing us a lot of money. This is a problem, and obviously undesireable. Business should decide on their business models within the boundaries of the law. Not legislators. From this notion forward we might actually be capable of finding a solution that works for everyone.

Dropping words like "Theft", and criminalizing humanity while assaulting their associated rights and proclaiming that the current situation should be uphold is going to get us nowhere besides more of the same problems. By now, 2016, it would no longer be strange to conclude that both friend & foe, citizen & creator, are done with that type of Sh _t and desire real solutions on the table a.s.a.p !

So please, i beg you. Next time in a similair situation; explain to people how potentially lost income plays a role in someone his daily life and how unfair this can be, add appropriate details, arguments, facts, whatever you like! But _please* cut the "theft" crap. Thank you in advance!

<comment><USER5> When you put your name on someone else's work, I am comfortable calling that theft. That is an issue completely separate from copyright. You're barking up the wrong tree.

<comment><USER2> You are totally right when you say it's not about copyright, especially if you are currently residing in the United States where the origin of copyrights are to be found in a really nice and sensibe constitutional clause. In France however it's the moral rights of the author being what the copyright legislation is being centerd around, so there it would be about copyright. In the UK copyright originates from allowing the Throne to commit censorship, so that's neither about moral rights nor about economical rights. It's about political rights.

Plagiarism however, is plagiarism. Theft is Theft, and infringement is infringement. All three totally different "things", that's the tree i'm barking up.

<comment><USER6> The "it can't be X because it's Y" claim, when Y does not exclude X, is such a common bogus argument that there is probably a name for the fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems that Udemy doesn't give automatic refunds to ripped off customers either. I unknowingly bought Troy's pirated course on Udemy (for between 10-20 money units during a sale period) and hadn't yet got round to starting it. If you follow the link he gave :[https://www.udemy.com/draft/671248/](https://www.udemy.com/draft/671248/) you find you have to do the work. This is what you get:

'The course: Learn Ethical Hacking: Hack Web Applications has been removed from the Udemy platform. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have already purchased this course, please log in to your Udemy account and contact Support.'

<comment><USER8> Wow. That honestly might be the most bothersome part of this whole thing. Udemy is essentially stealing from their customers at that point. That would be like buying a game on Steam, and then Steam deleting the game from your library and only refunding you if you email and complain about it.

<comment><USER9> This sounds like a class action suit. There are sites for starting them, maybe the victims should start posting on them.

<comment><USER10> This is egregious and unnecessary, IMHO. If you're someone who wants a refund, request one and get one. The lack of automatic processing here is annoying, sure, but they have clearly provided a method to get your money back.

<comment><USER11> Udemy is profiting from piracy here in a way not unlike some Torrent sites. This is not some minor thing ethically or legally.

<comment><USER5> This is much more serious than torrent sites. Udemy is selling and serving pirated content, albeit as a middleman. Torrent sites serve metadata and ads.

<comment><USER11> I agree but I think the comparison still makes sense in light of how torrent sites are treated. If you go by that, Udemy shouldn't really exist much longer unless they fundamentally change how they operate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> (Bear with me while I try to bring this closer to the topic at hand) In my observation, Udemy is like a discount retailer for courses, where most of them would come down to $10 or so at some points in time with "a sale". I have bought some courses on it (originally published ones) and have had the somewhat famous author sell me on more courses at $10 or so frequently. I stopped at that when I realized the author would not enable downloading of course videos on desktops and rather have buyers resort to some other means (Udemy does support this on mobile devices, but those are not easy to transfer). On a similar vein, I do not support Pluralsight either, because it does not allow download of course videos and transferring them to a device of your choice (the only choice is using a limited "offline cache" tied to its proprietary DRM filled player). Pluralsight applies this model to most of its acquisitions too. In both cases, I don't feel like supporting the authors on these platforms because the authors and/or the platforms make it actively inconvenient for paying users to use the content in ways that are convenient to the buyers. Instead, if I'm interested in a topic, I look for and buy easily downloadable DRM free video courses from large publishers like O'Reilly and Packt, some medium sized ones like Pragmatic Programmers, Pragmatic Studio and some smaller one person initiatives who're very supportive of their customers and don't start with the premise that paying customers are thieves.

Sometimes I wonder if there are people who're frustrated with the restrictions and/or DRM and upload the content believing it to be some kind of karmic retribution. I'd be interested in knowing any comparisons of piracy in relation to revenues across these two kinds of platforms - the restrictive/DRM filled ones and the unrestricted DRM free ones.

</comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately, nothing much changed since the blog post and I don't believe that it's going to. They are not willing to invest anything into a solution and rather will take a little bit of negative publicity every once a while.

At least this is what they told us [0] the last time we spoke with them ~2 months ago.

[0] [https://pexe.so](https://pexe.so)

</comment><comment><USER12> Piracy is not an easy problem to deal with for any platform like this (especially one that's being compared to YouTube). In the example given at the beginning of this article, even the watermark was removed from every single frame of the videos. If the pirate author took more attempts to make it even cleaner, how could anyone say it's pirated? If Pluralsight complains and Udemy creates a list of Pluralsight courses to compare with for each new course uploaded on Udemy, would Udemy also be expected to do so for every other publisher in the entire world and track who's uploading pirated material and all the tweaks they do to remove traces of the original creator? Unless Udemy has the finances and resources like Google or another large company, I'd say it would continue being bad at detecting pirated content.

</comment><comment><USER14> I hope that Pluralsight files for legal copyright on the works in question, then outright sues Udemy for the profits of all of the works in question since first notified of the copyright violations. Given the profit drive of Udemy, it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to charge a non-refundable $100 review fee for each course uploaded... that would cover the cost of a real person reviewing said content.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't it be better to refund, say $80 of the $100 deposit if there is no violation?

<comment><USER14> No... the review fee should be regardless of weather violation is found or not... the cost is there either way, so it should be covered either way. For a paid course that's legitimate it's a trivial fee... for someone uploading stolen content, it becomes a loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Udemy basically has a similar piracy to YouTube. If someone reports the content as copyright, Udemy looks into it and takes it down. They also now actively check for copyright infringement when approving a course for their marketplace. As far as any money exchanged, it just gets refunded (in the case posted here, only free coupons were used, so no money was exchanged).

The CEO posted a blog on this event: [https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the- integrity-of-our-udem...](https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of- our-udemy-community/)

Basically Troy's course got posted on Nov 18th,it was reported on Thanksgiving Day, and it was taken down the next day.

<comment><USER17> That wasn't the blogs main criticism... It was that the site advertises itself as a place for high quality educational content but does no review of the content at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Admittedly I don't have a lot of context, but the only allegation I see here of actual unethical behavior on Udemy's part is that one embedded tweet which claims that they don't respond in a timely manner to DMCA takedown notices. I think that if they want to be a free-for-all platform without human review like YouTube rather than a curated one like Pluralsight, that's their prerogative; there's room for both in the marketplace and consumers have plenty of choice. And if they're a free-for-all platform, they don't have an obligation to proactively police user-uploaded content for copyright infringement, only to respond to DMCA notices.

<comment><USER19> The DMCA safe harbour doesn't protect companies who sell copyright-infringing content as Udacity is doing.

<comment><USER20>
        > Udacity

What?

<comment><USER21> [https://www.udacity.com/](https://www.udacity.com/)

<comment><USER20> The question is why Udacity - it is not named anywhere! You didn't actually READ the article either, but you downvote people who did? Great job.

<comment><USER21> Might be a simple confusion by the author; the sites have similar names and server similar functions.

Edit: Sorry, who downvoted whom? :-o

<comment><USER20> Which is what I pointed out! So what's the point of _your_ response to my question? Again: Udacity is not involved _at all_!

<comment><USER21> Sorry, but your post wasn't pointing out anything, it was just a single question which could be interpreted in many ways. I interpreted it as your confusion over what Udacity is and tried to help.

<comment><USER20> Only someone who _didn 't read the article_ could misinterpret my comment.

        > and tried to help.

That is probably even true! As I said in my previous reply, YOU SHOULD HAVE READ THE ARTICLE! People like you writing comments without knowing the topic - the bane of Internet discussions.

<comment><USER21> Why do you keep saying saying that? My comment has had nothing to do with the article itself, it was simply intended to answer what I interpreted as a confusion in the comment.

<comment><USER20> As I already said, only an asshole like yourself that didn't read the article could misinterpret my comment.

I get it that some people have trouble admitting they are wrong, but you take cognitive dissonance to new heights. I bet you _still_ didn't read the article, because you could not care less about the topics. You just want to "participate". You poor, poor little man.

<comment><USER22> > _You poor, poor little man._

Says one of the two participants of a pointless Internet argument that no one else cares about (as is evident by all of the downvotes in this exchange).

How's that saying go? "Arguing on the Internet ... you're still retarded"?

<comment><USER20>
        >  that no one else cares about

LOL - says the guy who responds in the thread!

Or did I just catch you using your other account?

       > as is evident by all of the downvotes

What downvotes? I can't see what votes you got. You can't see what votes I got - they are all perfectly black. I see gray on two of the comments that replied to me.

So this is a very interesting comment that you leave here... long after anyone else comes to this entire thread, which has long disappeared from the homepage (and no new comments except for in this thread)... why would you think I got downvotes unless it was _you_ who tried?

.

Pro-tip: Those people who _really_ don't care about a discussion ignore it, at most they cast a vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What stuns me are some of the comments on

[https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from- pi...](https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from- piracy-5638b929ffca)

which accuse Rob Conery of ranting.

How can they not see that this is wrong?

<comment><USER24> Isn't that what a personal site is for (or at least is allowed on)?

Ranting in a more public space might be frown-upon-able (I apologize for that word) but if it's your own space, spew vitriolic screeds until eternity, yo.

(In my defense, it's right at lunch and I'm a bit lightheaded)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's funny how those authors get defensive when someone duplicates their work. Yet at the same time most of them demand from developers to release their software as free (both beer and freedom - but it's mostly about the beer) open source and shame devs when they try to go the commercial route.

But I guess babbling into a camera for a few hours if far more protection- worthy than months of programming. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER26> "Those authors"? There's only one author here. Can you point to where Troy Hunt "demands" that developers "release their software as free"? Or is this just you inventing a group of people, assigning a universal opinion to them, and going ham on them because of it?

I'm pretty sure it's _that one_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think they've done a few things since then. 1) Better training to their reviewers to recognize the main sources of piracy like PluralSight 2) Requiring ID from many new and existing instructors to prove they are who they say they are 3) It's easier for anyone to report copyright infringement they see, since they've added a flag icon (report this course) on every course.

They follow the DMCA process, and it's pretty easy to get your content taken down. Sure, if you report something on Thanksgiving day, you might have to wait until Monday as the legal department isn't standing by 24/7\. But I've reported piracy to Youtube and it's taken them 3 or 4 days to reply as well.

In short, it's the Internet. Yes, people steal your digital stuff. Yes, it's up to content creators to police that. Yes, it's tiring as a content creator to chase your stuff all over the Internet. But it's the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER28> It seems to me that digital piracy has different qualities. Making a copy without permission is stealing. Distributing copies without permission, but for free isn't as bad as actually reselling them without permission, or is it? The same laws apply here as to thievery and acceptance of stolen goods. Those laws exist since millennia. It's not only illegal to sell stolen goods, it's also illegal to buy them, with no regard of circumstances. I learned from my parents to watch out for shady characters at market places. But the problem at Udemy seems that even they can't check whether resellers and their posts are genuine. Is that an unintentional aid for acceptance of stolen goods, due to lack of controls, or... intentional aid of acceptance of stolen goods to aid the business idea of Udemy, being an "open platform for education"?

<comment><USER29> > Making a copy without permission is stealing.

Do you still keep the original? Do you also see art forgery as theft?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is about 8 months old. Anyone know if Udemy cleaned up?

<comment><USER16> Yes, in fact they took down the course in question the next day after it was reported: [https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our- udem...](https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udemy- community/)

<comment><USER17> The blog post itself says that... I think the person you responded to is asking if they have done anything to change the fact that their is zero review of any content posted, neither for accuracy of content nor ownership.

<comment><USER16> Udemy does do copyright reviews for approval to the marketplace but I think they are just contractors though, so I can definitely see how courses could slip by, with someone being unsure if it was a copyright infringement or just licensed content.

<comment><USER31> In my experience, the review process effectively just checks to see if you meet the technical requirements (at least 720p, at least 4h video content iirc), I uploaded four hours of a bbc miniseries(black mirror) and still had my course approved, though it was taken down around 6 months later (never published, was doing market research).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm pretty sure Udemy is going the route of Yelp!. Both need a ton of user- generated content. So they throw ethics out the door. !00% marketing. And finally when there's enough content, they start being ethical and claim to be the hip and trusted website. And today Yelp! is the most popular place to check out if some restaurant / store / etc is good.

</comment><comment><USER33> I only know them from spamming my inbox.

And when I mention it on Twitter I get automatically followed by companies who produce videos for Udemy.

No, I'm not a Udemy user. Never was. I haven't subscribed to anything.

</comment><comment><USER34> New TOS prompted a deletion of my account: [https://twitter.com/sprkyco/status/770242306678988800](https://twitter.com/sprkyco/status/770242306678988800)

</comment><comment><USER35> Can somebody actually recommend these courses?</comment>


AI assistants like Siri and Alexa are perpetuating sexist stereotypes, UN says - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/22/tech/alexa-siri-gender-bias-study-scli-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> This is something that I suspect could never be won. Female voices perpetuate the stereotype of a servile woman. Male voices perpetuate the stereotype of a man being more authoritative. A Gender neutral voice will have people queuing up to claim it's not neutral enough, with a long list of specific sounding edge cases arguing that it falls into either of those camps.

FWIW In my language (British) Siri is male by default, as it is apparently in Arabic, Dutch and French also.

<comment><USER3> If Siri used a female voice in some countries/kingdoms, it would possibly be a punishable offense. I'm unaware of cultures where the reverse may be true. It's quite a quirk.

Why doesn't Siri et al have a circular slider like some of the digital music synths have, where the sound coordinates are wood, string, glass and metalic, along with other timbre controls on the side to allow emulation of just about every instrument you can imagine.

One axis for voice pitch, and the other for softness. Done. Everyone's happy then.

<comment><USER4> Siri is default male for Arabic, French, Dutch and British English.

From countries where those languages are used, how many do you think have laws that make a female Siri illegal?

Arabic, French, Dutch and British English speakers are a rather large portion of the total customer of devices with Siri. If we don't count the US market, male is likely the default in the majority of sold apple devices.</comment></comment></comment>


Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/386BSD-...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/386BSD-0.0-Snapshot-Development/usr/src/sbin/reboot/reboot.c)

        void
        dingdong()
        {
         /* RRRIIINNNGGG RRRIIINNNGGG */
        }

        setalarm(n)
         int n;
        {
         signal(SIGALRM, dingdong);
         alarm(n);
        }

:)

<comment><USER3> I haven't written C in a bit, so I'm a little confused about the second part of that snippet; is `setalarm` a macro? It doesn't look like a function declaration, as there's no return type, and the presence of `int n;` after `setalarm(n)` makes it seem like it would be shadowing `n` if `n` were a parameter rather than an argument (not to mention the fact that `int n;` is outside of the braces. Given that `setalarm` doesn't seem to be declared/defined anywhere in that file, can anyone who's a bit more familiar with the codebase point out to me what's going on here?

<comment><USER4> it's pre-ANSI C function definition

<comment><USER5> There was a time when "I haven't written C in a bit" was a reason for _immediately recognizing_ code such as this. (-:

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, this way of function definitions is "still" the way subroutines/functions are defined in (modern/all time) Fortran (if one ignores the syntactic differences). Also, at "old" C, declarations only may come at the beginning of a block -- just as it still is with Fortran. Out of curiosity, is there any reason for the similiarity?

<comment><USER7> At least for the declarations at the beginning of the block, that allows for very simple compiler design as it is very easy to split the code and data sections. Start off allocating space for all the variables it sees, and then when it reaches something not a declaration or definition, start emitting assembly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The good news is that all commit times fit in the unix timestamp which started in 1970 :)

<comment><USER9> I mean, that's not a coincidence.

<comment><USER10> thatsthejoke.jpg

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a piece of history and source for research, this is simply amazing. They show an example of `git blame` on `pipe.c` that includes names like Ken Thompson and Bill Joy; pretty cool.

<comment><USER5> It is important to realize that it does have some gaping holes, though.

For example: I was recently unable to unearth from it exactly when the BSD ps command changed to using getopt() and minus signs for arguments. The entire history of the FreeBSD repository back to the original 4.4BSD commits has ps using getopt(), and minus signs have been the only option syntax documented in the ps(1) manual page for all of that time, too.

* [https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/ps/ps.c?revision=15...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/ps/ps.c?revision=1556&view=markup#l133)

* [https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/ps/ps.1?revision=15...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/bin/ps/ps.1?revision=1556&view=markup#l42)

This repository, alas, does not yield very much further information.

<comment><USER5> For the curious: The furthest back that I have managed to trace it so far is 1986, using Usenet archives. A patch that was posted to mod.sources on 1986-08-01 (v06i083, Michael A. Callahan) apparently references getopt() argument parsing and mentions "ps -U", implying that 4.2 BSD ps was using getopt() by then. (Although there's no direct mention of getopt and this may be wrong.)

* [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mod.sources/H-shkbdVIbs/VJUI...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mod.sources/H-shkbdVIbs/VJUIw_L2hb8J)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The repository unearthed the long lost source code of the original _style_ and _diction_ tools by Lorinda Cherry: [https://github.com/dspinellis/unix- history-repo/tree/BSD-4_1...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/tree/BSD-4_1_snap-Snapshot-Development/.ref-BSD-4/usr/src/cmd/diction) GNU _style_ and _diction_ are their faint copies.

</comment><comment><USER13> Found it interesting someone has created a GitHub account for Dennis Ritchie: [https://github.com/dmr-1941-2011](https://github.com/dmr-1941-2011)

Note how the year selector on the right of "Contribution activity" is broken - seems it can't fit 1970-2019. Same happens with Ken Thompson's profile.

</comment><comment><USER14> As linked in the repository: [https://youtu.be/S7JB0mhrGCQ](https://youtu.be/S7JB0mhrGCQ)

For this alone, all the work paid off.

On a more serious side, I wonder what we can learn from this data. Its not a question for the field of computational social science, but social science of computation!

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish someone would do this for legal code, starting with federal law with hashes for all representatives

(way I envision it is that their committees being their own branches, along with the chambers of congress

even though its not part of the git protocol, the GUI element of the Pull Request feature could have continuous integration that showed when a threshold of votes were passed to get something into to the next branch like out of committee and onto the floor

then after whichever path was taken to get something codified into law, it is merged into the master branch where the agencies have their own process to update the code of federal regulations)

<comment><USER16> > even though its not part of the git protocol, the GUI element of the Pull > Request feature could have continuous integration that showed when a > threshold of votes were passed to get something into to the next branch like > out of committee and onto the floor

I'm wondering if Fossil would be more suited to this than Git.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It would be interesting to do this for one of the open source Solaris distros and for plan9 to then compare the three.

<comment><USER18> It's missing those specifically, but [http://fxr.watson.org](http://fxr.watson.org) has quite a few kernels

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The main product I work on started in RCS, moved to CVS then to git. I have continuous history going back to 1988.

<comment><USER20> What is it?

<comment><USER19> Closed source language product, though parts are open source, like this:

[https://github.com/franzinc/clim2](https://github.com/franzinc/clim2)

First commit 1991.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _> This repository will be often automatically regenerated from scratch, so this is not a place to make contributions. To ensure replicability its users are encouraged to fork it or archive it._

I've run into this with source code archeology projects. Git is ill-suited to integrating newly discovered pre-history/missing intermediary history steps. Any new historical change, out of necessity, alters all subsequent commit hashes. This means collaboration and permalinks can't happen like with "normal" Git repos.

Does anyone know of any tooling or an alternate vcs which has the ability to integrate new pre-history or alternate history (e.g. original branch commits alongside a squash and merge commit) without requiring completely breaking/re- writing the entire tree?

<comment><USER22> Git has a mechanism to declare two commits equal and replace one with the other: man git-replace

This comes at the cost of having intentionally multiple histories and is not well-suited for complicate cases, but for the common case of "we want to stitch this old CVS-history to this commit", it does a good job.

Usability-wise, replace refs are not cloned automatically and some web-based tools lack support for it.

<comment><USER23> You can also use the 'magic empty tree object' to make your repo more amenable to joining disparate histories of other trees. It requires both the source and destination repo to abide by this practice, but I do this on all of my repos...

Immediately after `git init`, do `git commit --allow-empty -m"initial empty commit"`. Now you have an empty commit, and any other repo which has this empty commit has some history in common with your repo.

The SHA-1 hash is well-known and there are plenty of articles you can find about it, if you search for 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904

Here's one for example:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9765453/is-gits-semi- sec...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9765453/is-gits-semi-secret-empty- tree-object-reliable-and-why-is-there-not-a-symbolic)

I'm not sure this helps for projects which have a shared development history, but not a shared commit history. But within an organization, where you have projects which may split and/or merge, it can help to bridge some gaps.

<comment><USER24> You can have unrelated commits and roots in a single git repo. No need for empty root commit.

<comment><USER23> I think the payoff is for merging unrelated histories, that you can then rebase one history on the other, and present a new unified history.

Is the really only reason why people do this, so that you can rewrite your initial working commit in a rebase? I think that might be it. (You can't easily rewrite the initial commit with a rebase.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For some other github accounts, see [https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/320133/5132](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/320133/5132) .

</comment><comment><USER25> Linked from the README is the tooling: [https://github.com/dspinellis/unix- history-make](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make)

</comment><comment><USER26> Git wasn't released until 2005, so what did they use before then? I know it says they pulled the history from 24 snapshots.

<comment><USER27> RCS [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_Control_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_Control_System) then SSCS [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System) before 1972 I'm not sure..

<comment><USER28> I assumed this history was meticulously reconstructed with a lot of hard work, but apparently Unix was one of the first systems maintained in SCCS.

I guess the part from before SCCS was still meticulously reconstructed?

<comment><USER27> Poking around a bit in the repo, I think the history prior to SCCS is just release snapshots. e.g. there is no history for the cat command in the PDP-7 Unix : [https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/commits/Rese...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/commits/Research-PDP7-Snapshot-Development/cat.s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Legacy code.

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't believe they used git even in the 70s and they managed to do it all in just 4 commits. Incredible engineers and astounding geniuses.</comment>


Job dissatisfaction has negative health effects by age 40 - happy-go-lucky http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312458.php <comment><AUTHOR> I guess this shouldn't be too surprising considering the fraction of our waking lives that we spend in work, driving to or from work, or lunching at work.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great now my job is ACTUALLY trying to kill me...

<comment> happy-go-lucky We've almost known it for a while. I think that article is just trying to alert us as to what may go wrong if things go wrong when we're young enough to ward them off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So they're telling us that people who had worse jobs in their 20s-30s were worse off in their 40s? No way!

<comment> happy-go-lucky Look around. There is something called example-based learning. Don't we already know that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Silicon Valley don't they equate this with just "dying of old age"?

<comment> happy-go-lucky Dying young of a Silicon Valley syndrome :-)</comment></comment>


What is the Coolest piece of code you have ever seen? - <AUTHOR> https://codl.dev <comment><USER2> Fun idea. The Full Cycle entry definitely tickles my fancy. This could easily become part of my regular reading.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I launched the app yesterday, so the content is a bit limited...</comment>


Show HN: Tabco – Mac Like Spotlight Search Inside Chrome (⌘ + Shift and L) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabco-search-between-open/gdlfpemlflmabfaaldihflcbokikbcgk <comment><USER2> Very Efficient!There is more scope of improvement in search though..

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the UI. Navigating is so much faster

</comment><comment><USER4> A must have Extention. Great Work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It will be open-source soon.

</comment><comment><USER5> looks very interesting. What other feature set are you targeting at?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now we are working on better search. Future plan is, You can search between tabs and create a workspace for use it later time.</comment></comment>


MS Windows Once Caused Second Life To Break An Inkjet Printer - <AUTHOR> http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2018/06/windows-second-life-yoz-linden-lab.html <comment><USER2> There's a fun story out there about software physically breaking a hard drive. At the time, this was actually quite difficult for drivers to _avoid_ doing. So, when a certain manufacturer came out with a drive it finally considered safe against driver errors, it proclaimed a bounty for anyone who could prove them wrong.

The winner put the drive on a table, connected with a cable, but not attached to a case. Then he wrote a routine that slammed the read head to one side, then slowly moved it back. Each time the routine looped, the drive would scoot across the table until it finally fell off the edge.

<comment><USER3> That reminds me of the IBM "Black Team" QA group story where a guy writes a perfect tape drive driver, formally verified and everything. The "Black Team" was annoyed they couldn't find a problem with it, so they wrote a program to spin the tape at the cabinet's resonant frequency, until the cabinet eventually fell over.

[http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html](http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html)

<comment><USER4> That's a hardware issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is easy to "physically break" a thermal printer. Simply stop the servo motor while continuing to provide the power to the printer element heater. Your printer will soon catch fire. I've done it a few times myself while writing printer drivers.

<comment><USER6> So you're the guy:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire)

<comment><USER7> > In the event of a printing stall, and occasionally during normal operation, > the fusing oven would heat paper to combustion. This fire risk was > aggravated by the fact that if the printer continued to operate, it would > essentially stoke the oven with fresh paper at high speed.

Ouch. Talk about failing open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a fabulous article from Raymond Chen about EXE headers in general: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060130-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060130-00/?p=32483)

>A Win32 executable file begins with a so-called "MZ" header, followed by a so-called "PE" header. If the "PE" header cannot be found, then the loader attempts to load the program as a Win16 executable file, which consists of an "MZ" header followed by an "NE" header.

>If neither a "PE" nor an "NE" header can be found after the "MZ" header, then the loader attempts to load the program as an MS-DOS relocatable executable. If not even an "MZ" header can be found, then the loader attempt to load the program as an MS-DOS non-relocatable executable (aka "COM format" since this is the format of CP/M .COM files).

</comment><comment><USER9> How exactly is this a bug in Win32? We can argue about whether or not this was a good design choice, but it wasn't Win32 that opened an HTTP connection, wrote the response stream to disk and then executed the file without any kind of validation.

<comment><USER10> Linden probably deserves the bulk of the blame, but it is a little weird that, if Windows sees a file with an .exe extension that but no PE structure, it will just happily take whatever bits it gets and run them directly. But I guess if COM executables genuinely had no structure than there was nothing else that could be done. Yet again, back-compatibility is Microsoft's savior and curse at once.

<comment><USER11> As much as I want to blame Windows for it, this seems like reasonable behavior if the updater software is passing bytes straight from the HTTP stream. Unfortunate that the 404 page happened to have a byte sequence that would be interpreted as a COM, but the Updater should have been validating the downloaded exe in the first place. Not just for 404 but for actual .exe files that may be malicious

<comment><USER12> > Unfortunate that the 404 page happened to have a byte sequence that would be > interpreted as a COM

That's the thing. _Any_ byte sequence which didn't have an EXE header was interpreted as a COM executable. And in the (NT)VDM environment, there aren't a lot of illegal operations, so executing random data (like an HTML error page) can cause quite a bit of unpredictable behavior before it crashes or gets caught in a loop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you run arbitrary code from the internet arbitrary things can happen.

<comment><USER14> This is also true for running arbitrary non-code.

<comment><USER15> Most arbitrary data is actually valid x86 code.

<comment> Const-me Random data is very likely to give you e.g. "invalid instruction" runtime error when executing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nothing quite as fun as piping a postscript to a printer in you college Unix lab and watching garbage being spewed out. Meanwhile due to misconfigured permissions, you cannot cancel the job. So you quietly shut of the printer and walk out of the lab.

<comment><USER17> I tried to teach myself postscript by writing directly to the new laserprinters at school .. and was met the next day by a very angry grad student sysadmin waving two reams of mostly postscript error pages. Something about not being in his accounting budget since I was an undergrad annoyed him. Fortunately, he decided that the only solution was to give me access to his departments new Sun workstations running NeWS.

<comment><USER18> You should have installed the PostScript error handler that prints up giant posters of your error messages and stack dumps scaled and tiled across many pages in a gargantuan font. Maybe they would have given you a really big printer instead of a Sun running NeWS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So disappointing. I was expecting a story about a bug in both 2nd life and Windows that somehow caused an action in the virtual world to affect he host one a la 13th floor. Maybe next time. [Please fix the title.]

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm curious what actually happened to physically break that printer.

<comment><USER13> Didn't you see the picture? It smashed itself to pieces!

<comment><USER21> That was a stock image...

<comment><USER22> That's the joke

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When I was 13 I wrote a C program that wrote random data to a file. I had the idea to try executing these files. Most of them did nothing, but I remember that one did end up causing the printer to print out pages of gibberish.

Years later I found myself wondering how that even worked in the first place. Surely the chance of generating a valid executable was basically zero. Now I know why.

I wish I had kept that executable, it would've been interesting to disassemble it.

</comment><comment><USER24> We had 8086 IBM machines in our typing class. I remember writing a program to send random bits to the big dot matrix printer. I'd keep a buffer and when the printer did something strange I'd save the buffer and replay it till I isolated the sequence. When a substitute would show up the printer would put on a show ;)

</comment><comment><USER25> Was it really necessary to add to the article the picture of a printer that clearly had been smashed by a sledgehammer or fell from the third floor?

</comment><comment><USER26> If true, we can add this to the infamous PET race condition as the second way that software can physically break a computer setup.

<comment><USER27> Can you provide a little more info? I'm find it difficult to come up with sufficient search terms to look that up myself

<comment><USER28> I think that's the "killer poke" [http://www.6502.org/users/andre/petindex/poke/index.html](http://www.6502.org/users/andre/petindex/poke/index.html)

XF86Config used to come with similar dire warnings about not overdriving monitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At one point, HP2000's would crash if you tried to rewind the disk drive.

</comment><comment><USER29> Where's the original tweet?

<comment><USER30> Looks like a slack screenshot

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> TLDR:

-lets eval() this random piece of bytes we got from non secure connection

-lets curl | sudo sh</comment>


Parallelism /= Concurrency - <AUTHOR> http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/parallelism-concurrency/ <comment><USER2> As a computer scientist, this article is very frustrating to me. I don't understand why parallelism is not equal to concurrency.

Let's look at the definitions given:

 _A concurrent program is one with multiple threads of control._

 _A parallel program, on the other hand, is one that merely runs on multiple processors_

Well, you have to have multiple threads of control to run on multiple processors simultaneously. And if you're running on multiple processors simultaneously, you have multiple threads of control.

So what's the difference?

If anybody can enlighten me on why parallelism != concurrency (a claim I've seen often), I'd appreciate it.

By the way, to me, _all_ programming languages can be concurrent because ultimately it's all just opcodes; and the word "non-determinism" is problematic anyway. So there's some context for you.

<comment><USER3> I find it easier if I disassociate the English meanings of the words from really how the words are used to mean different things in computer science. To me, concurrency is only in the programmers mind. That is, a programmer writes concurrent programs with different threads of control, say, one to process the user input, one to process the network packets etc. In reality, the multiple threads of control could really be running SEQUENTIALLY. That was the case when there was only one core. Remember, pthreads predates multi-cores.

Parallelism is something more concrete, it REALLY exists in the real world. A programmer could just imagine and write a sequential loop, but if the compiler deemed it to be really parallel, it could really run parts of the loop in parallel. Of course, a programmer could write a concurrent program, as in, multiple threads of control, and the system could really run it in parallel, say on different cores of a multi-core processor. So remember, concurrency is abstract, parallelism is concrete.

<comment><USER2> OK, I'm seeing this explanation being brought up, and it makes sense. Thank you. I wish the original poster had actually stated it this way.

<comment><USER4> This is one of those times where not being able to see comment points really hurts my ability to read this thread.

Lots of people saying slightly different things, and no way for me to know where consensus lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My personal definitions, based on my experience in systems and high performance computing research:

Parallelism: simultaneous calculations executing in the service of a single problem, usually with the goal of improved performance.

Concurrency: executions in the same time granularity, but not necessarily simultaneous. Also not necessarily in the service of the same problem, but some form of synchronization is required.

(Admittingly repeating myself: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387067>)

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't != the canonical programming form of "not equals"?

<comment><USER7> This article is in the context of Haskell/GHC. [http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/standard- prelude.html#$t...](http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/standard- prelude.html#$tEq)</comment></comment>


TraceTogether: Install an app to track Covid contact via Bluetooth - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sg.gov.tech.bluetrace <comment><AUTHOR> I just contacted the developer account with the following text. In my mind this has huge potential to help the world find the right level of isolation and potentially leverage powerful adaptive learning algorithms. I don't know why this approach is not getting more mindshare in the current climate:

Is there a way you can enable other countries to also use this app? Even if it means you can't validate the users mobile telephone number (until that country's government negotiates a means to paying for SMS verification), allowing is to install it would allow collection of contacts to start immediately and raise awareness of this game changer.

Personally I would allow users to opt in to pushing the collected data online as that allows far more powerful analysis and the ability to continue to refine the algorithms to infer level of risk based on multiple "hops" of contact in the preceding days. For example carrier X overlaps with Y on day 1, then Y overlaps with Z on day 2. As soon as X is diagnosed Y gets a high risk rating and Z gets a moderate one. The exact criteria can evolve as we learn more and the data can be used to help train the model. The more people use it, the better it will be for everyone.

If you want me to help I can, but either way you could save millions of lives with this app if it is adopted globally.</comment>


A thought experiment: how do you feel about whatever it is you're doing? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bookofjoe.com/2019/03/a-thought-experiment-to-help-you-decide-how-you-really-feel-about-whatever-it-is-youre-doing.html <comment><AUTHOR> "Work is what you're doing when you'd rather be doing something else."—Anonymous

"I'm in search of a lifestyle which doesn't require my presence."—Kinky Friedman, Washington Post interview, circa 1983</comment>


AMD Not Conducting Further Technology Transfers of x86 IP to China JV - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-license,39573.html <comment><USER2> Zen 2 is designed for a 7nm process, which limits its production to TSMC or Samsung. There is nowhere to build AMD's newer chips in China (unlike 14nm Ryzen), stopping them from using the tariff bypass they did through this JV. This lack of bleeding edge fabs in China is unlikely to change soon.

<comment><USER3> I don't think there's tariff on CPUs due to an international agreement of zero tariff on IT goods. Edit: [https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/inftec_e/inftec_e.htm](https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/inftec_e/inftec_e.htm)

<comment><USER2> Hrm, citation? I'm just reiterating what I heard from an AMD employee that took me out for drinks. AMD needed the $200 million to survive and thought there were market segments they could not access in China, but a JV would not be encumbered in that manner.

By the time the JV's chips would be in volume production, it would be 2 generations behind, thus not eating AMD's existing Chinese customer base.

Edit: Nice un-noted edit...

<comment><USER3> I didn't mean to throw you off. Added "Edit" to make the thread coherent.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Free Entity Extraction Service for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://entity.thatneedle.com <comment><USER2> What is the point? I type in "thirteen" and get back NUMBER:thirteen. If I got back 13 it would be useful, but just identifying that it is a number is ho hum.</comment>


All Things Digital shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20131231/you-say-goodbye-and-we-say-hello/?

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one in here who used to find AllThingsD extremely boring? I specifically didn't like Kara's attempts to make gossip an essential part of our industry. Yes we happen to have quite a few billionaires in this market but nobody cares about the way they spend their money. We're here for the innovation part.

<comment><USER3> I agree and came here to share a similar thought. I know a bit about journalism and how the sausage is made, and it's a tough market for tech journalism. Lately, that segment of the industry has been in a race to the bottom in terms of viable financial models for success.

I would simply say to the people trying to make a go out of serious tech journalism: I'm a nerd. Let me geek out with high quality coverage of technical issues and tech politics. Please, no more billionaire gossip. That's not what I want to read. If I did, I would be reading TechCrunch or Valleywag. And if your new news site is going to be called "Re/code", then it had better have news related to _actual code_ and computer programming, instead of just re-warmed Apple intrigue (that John Gruber does better anyway) and rich-guy gossip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Walt and Kara's new site is Re/code, which will launch tomorrow: [http://recode.net/welcome/](http://recode.net/welcome/)

<comment><USER5> So they're not exactly shutting down, as much as they are changing brands?

<comment><USER6> Yes and No. Essentially Kara/Walt and WSJ/Dow Jones/NewsCorp "divorced".

The "divorce" left Kara/Walt with the writers (as they were employed by them) and WSJ/Dow Jones/NewsCorp the AllThingsD brand, website and conference business. However, it appears the AllThingsD site is being completely shut down and redirected to [http://wsj.com/tech](http://wsj.com/tech) \- probably because NewsCorp who struck the original deal with Kara/Walt don't want a situation like this to happen again.

Recode is a completely new business (site and conference business; WSJ/NewsCorp/Dow Jones still owns the D Conference) albeit with the same writers from AllThingsD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given the histories of these 2 writers, I'd have hoped for a bit more substance in such an important post for them.

They don't mention anything specific about the new site, and given how many other good tech sites there are, the vagueness doesn't make me curious enough to come back.

And in terms of journalistic integrity with full disclosures; I learnt more about what has really happened from the comments here than I did in that post. Surely they should have disclosed that a need to "refresh, reimagine, remake and reinvent" wasn't the _only_ thing in play here.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does archive.org need to grab the site before WSJ break all the links?

<comment><USER9> Too late. The whole domain is gone.

<comment><USER10> Direct links still seem to work: [http://allthingsd.com/20131231/you-say- goodbye-and-we-say-he...](http://allthingsd.com/20131231/you-say-goodbye-and- we-say-hello/)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So is this possible because California doesn't recognize non-competes?

Because basically Walt/Kara seem to have borrowed Newscorp backing until they didn't need it anymore, after which they announce a new URL and continue on their own.

<comment><USER12> They lost the content of their successful website and there is no guarantee that the completely new one will be successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sadly it looks like / is 301 to WSJ already.

This was posted last night and still available:

[http://allthingsd.com/20131231/some-of-our-fave-d- conference...](http://allthingsd.com/20131231/some-of-our-fave-d-conference- videos-before-allthingsd-signs-off-in-3-2-1/)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's the news-blog equivilant of "pivot."

</comment><comment><USER15> I liked the name, I liked the content. I'll be following their new site.

All the best. Happy new year!

</comment><comment><USER16> Why are they doing this? Are there any good resources out there on the split with WSJ?

<comment><USER17> If I had to guess, I would assume it's similar to the Verge/Engadget situation. Splitting from a stodgy corporation that doesn't want to change or update anything.

Eventually they collectively realize that nothing is going to change and they could run a much better site without their parent corporation, and it goes from there.

Of course, this is complete speculation based on zero actual evidence. But it would hardly surprise me if the WSJ and AOL had a reluctance to be proactive in common.

<comment><USER18> Your assumption is incorrect. Wsj decided not to renew its contract with allthingsd. Wsj has launched a new technology section today which replaces the old stale section.

<comment><USER19> And to bring it full circle, the WSJ employed a former The Verge writer (that had left The Verge for ABC).

I'm actually excited to see where the WSJ tech section goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am looking forward to the 'The Verge' moment.

</comment><comment><USER21> The new site looks nice, the bold fonts and red and black

</comment><comment><USER22> GG</comment>