PayPal buys credit card reader startup iZettle for $2.2B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/17/paypal-confirms-that-it-is-buying-payments-startup-izettle-for-2-2b-in-an-all-cash-deal/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone think iZettle is a bad brand name? Compare it with Stripe, Square, Clover, etc.

I can't imagine using it - "Yes, I use my iZettle to process payments."

<comment><USER3> It appears to be very popular in Latin America. So the pronunciation of iZettle by a Spanish speaker most likely sounds like "e-settle".

Which makes a bit more sense and Def sounds better.

It's a Dutch company, so not sure how it sounds when pronounced in the Netherlands

<comment><USER4> It's a swedish company and the name is more "I settle". Like I will pay for dinner, let me handle it :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> iZettle is huge in LatAm. Almost every small business I know that is starting to accept credit cards (taco stands, coffee shops, small stores) is using it.

Like WhatsApp, I imagine the company wasn't really on the radar for most people in the States.

<comment><USER6> Seen plenty of iZettle devices in the UK lately. Mainly new retail businesses and cafes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's considered good traction for a startup / idea? - <AUTHOR>

A startup I'm working on is seeing a > 10% conversion rate and we're excited about that. But I've recently started to wonder, what is considered a good conversion rate by other startups and/or money people?
Then with the recent number of startup traction / promotion related posts to HN, I see that it's not just a conversion rate question, but also a number of users question.
Obviously market plays a big part in what's considered a good number of users. 100 might be good for a niche market. 1000 might be good for a general hobby. 10k might be good for a general consumer product.
So that brings me back to the conversion rate bit. Of the people that land on a startup's site, what is considered a good conversion rate for signups? Is it different when you actually have a product vs just a landing page / invite list?
Thx <comment><USER2> Typically 2-3% is considered average/good. You're doing great at 10%.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on the industry but that sounds great - are those paying conversions, signups to email, something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> signups to an invite list. I don't want people to think i'm using this post to generate traffic, but check my submissions for a URL if you're curious.

<comment><USER4> if its general traffic, you're a rockstar and I want your autograph. if its linking in from a niche traffic source/audience, you're still doing very well and the product has a high stickiness factor. congrats!</comment></comment></comment>


Nouncer post-mortem - <AUTHOR> http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/04/the-last-announ.html

<comment><USER2> <http://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1230356535>

<comment><USER3> Except this is an actual post-mortem. The company's folded.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Did Ellentube rip-off YouTube? - <AUTHOR>

So I noticed today that Ellen launched her new video platform/app to share her own video content[1] - however it looks an awful lot like YouTube, even with 'tube' in the name.
Does anyone know if there is a commercial/strategic relationship between Google/YouTube and Ellen? The player and site UI look really similar.
[1] http://www.ellentube.com/ <comment><USER2> kaltura.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one, thanks!</comment></comment>


Screencast: SmartOS Setup - <AUTHOR> http://substantiality.net/smartos-setup/

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW, my apologies for the length of the screen-cast (almost 13 minutes). My editing could have definitely been better.</comment>


Reference Note on Russian Communications Surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://csis.org/publication/reference-note-russian-communications-surveillance <comment><USER2> Q: "Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?"

A: Putin denied Russian mass surveillance, saying "Thank God, our special services are strictly controlled by the state and society, and their activity is regulated by law."

===== "Putin denied..."?

He didn't deny anything.

He avoided answering the question by making generic statement about special services being controlled.

<comment> brown9-2 Here is a fuller quote, from [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/20/snowden- s-c...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/20/snowden-s-camp- staged-putin-q-a-was-a-screw-up.html)

 _Putin's answer was predictable. "Of course, we know that criminals and terrorists use technology for their criminal acts and of course the special services have to use technical means to respond to their crimes," he said. "But we don't have a mass-scale, uncontrollable efforts like that…Our special services…are strictly controlled by the society and the law, and are regulated by the law."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So basically Russia doesn't bother pretending it's not doing domestic surveillance. They don't need to join something like a Five-eyes partnership to get around their own legal limitations. They don't need other countries hacking into their routers or tapping fiber (therefore increasing the insecurity of their domestic networks), instead they are installing their own monitoring devices, albeit at probably a much wider scale than a foreign SIGINT partner could achieve.

<comment><USER4> If the law says they can do it, and that's what they do, then they still have the moral upper hand over USA where the law says they can't or at least is gray area yet they still do it.

<comment><USER5> Not really. They don't have a way to change their laws. It's Putin's Russia.

<comment><USER6> Neither does the USA according to the Oligarchy Report being reported across the Western media.

[http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/21/americas- oli...](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/21/americas-oligarchy- not-democracy-or-republic-unive/)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10769041/The- US-is-an-oligarchy-study-concludes.html)

[http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...](http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf)

<comment><USER5> If that were strictly true, then SOPA would have passed.

<comment><USER6> How is the temporary shelving of SOPA proof that on over 1700 policy issues US citizens have essentially zero chance of affecting the outcome of the legislation?

As for SOPA - say hello to SOPA 2.0 [http://www.uspto.gov/news/publications/copyrightgreenpaper.p...](http://www.uspto.gov/news/publications/copyrightgreenpaper.pdf)

<comment><USER7> How is that SOPA 2.0?

<comment><USER6> Try reading it. Or at least searching for the report which is commonly referred to as SOPA 2.0 by various opposition groups.

In essence however, SOPA in some form _will_ pass and this document represents a new approach.

As someone posted before - it does not matter if it is SOPA 14.0 or SOPA 22.0 - it just needs to pass once. Very few examples of legislative repeal exist outside of social equality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Directly to the source: [http://csis.org/publication/reference-note-russian- communica...](http://csis.org/publication/reference-note-russian- communications-surveillance)

<comment><USER9> Thanks—fixed.

The original url [1] was blogspam—that is, it was a knock-off (or excerpt) of some other, more original source. In such cases HN strongly prefers the original source.

Submitters: blogspam is usually easy to recognize. Please check for that and post the original instead.

1\. [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/info_on_russi...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/info_on_russian.html)

<comment><USER10> Calling Schneier "blogspam" means you don't read his blog.

You really really should.

<comment><USER9> Funny, I had a line that said "Schneier's original, substantive pieces are fine, of course" which I deleted as unnecessary. Perhaps I'll err the other way and write too much.

"Blogspam" is an attribute of an article, not an author [1]. I defined it above, and even included "or excerpt" to cover the current case.

I enjoy reading Schneier. Many of his articles are on-topic for HN. But the more lightweight ones often aren't (because there are more solid sources and we only want so many about a given topic). As for as a mere excerpt like this, there shouldn't even be a question.

None of this means these pieces aren't appropriate on Schneier's site. It's natural for his blog to be a clearinghouse for stuff he didn't write, but wants to share. Not all of it, though, is perfect for HN, where (a) the front page is space-constrained; (b) we want the most substantive pieces on a given story; (c) we prefer original sources.

1\. Had I said "spamblog", you'd have had a point. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well we all knew that the Russians didn't care about privacy ... what was shocking about Snowden revelations is that this kind of surveillance happens in a nation that presents itself as a free country.

<comment><USER12> There's no single "Russians" entity that has a solid opinion on this matter.

Many Russians do generally care about communications privacy, many don't know a thing about how telcos work (so they're genuinely unaware on the whole matter), and many don't care about privacy as long as they're not confronted with privacy issues directly (i.e. _their_ private conversations suddenly getting public).

<comment><USER11> Off course I was talking about the Russian government.

I guess the average Russian citizen has enough fear left from the soviet era (or the current one for that matter) to know that it would be unwise to question how the government handle surveillance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Everyone should really be on a VPN. We built an easy way to get your own personal VPN during Sochi, but lots of people are still using it now: [https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn)

The interesting part about this is that the ISPs pay for it. I didn't know that. Forcing someone to pay for you to spy on them is ballsy.

<comment><USER12> VPNs do protect against rogue networks like a hacker sitting on the same open hotspot and listening for credentials.

In a more global way, unless you're fine with one high-grade adversary spying on you, but not others (i.e. good with NSA, but not so happy with FSB), VPNs don't provide any real security.

<comment><USER13> Right. I tend to trust my country with my data more than a foreign country. That may be wrong, but it's how I currently feel.

Not sure why my earlier post is being downvoted =\

<comment><USER14> * I tend to trust my country with my data more than a foreign country.*

That's probably a misguided attitude. Your own country is in a much better position to persecute you than some random foreign power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What a news. One better ask about manufacturers of the collector and implementors of the necessary features.)</comment>


Option Pricing with Fourier Transform and Exponential Lévy Models [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://maxmatsuda.com/Papers/2004/Matsuda%20Intro%20FT%20Pricing.pdf <comment><USER3> Being a geophysicist, I got sucked into this by the mention of the Fourier Transform.

I found this paper to be very wordy and littered with mathematics that was at times impenetrable. Thank God for the Appendix to help decipher some of the non-geophysical industry symbology. I'm familiar with the derivations of the equations used but it's been several decades since I had taken differential equations so there is a lot left for me to absorb.

I understand this is an old paper but I am cursed with an eye for detail and some of the little things ended up grabbing my attention more than they should have. I found myself wondering if, prior to publication, anyone had bothered reading the full text with an eye for identifying simple spelling errors or whether they had used a spell checker or other tool to maintain consistency of spelling of uncommon words or terms. I think not. Just in my own reading these things popped out at me:

p. 92 in the sentence just after Figure 6.1 sock is used instead of stock.

p. 153 just after Eq 9.8 is defined Meron is used instead of Merton.

p. 166 the page has all but one mention of Black-Sholes spelled as Black- Shoels.

p. 244 the third sentence uses Bronwian instead of Brownian.

Also, they made a typical math funny on pages 190-191. On p.190 the second sentence reads:

>Because the CF of VG process cannot be obtained by simply substituting 0 α = in (11.23), we need to do this step-by-step.

So now they promise me some interesting step-by-step derivations in their algebra. Instead I get the standard upper-level math statement on p. 191 after Eq. 11.28:

>After tedious algebra:

You're almost to the appendix and you find the first mention that some of the math got hairy. Fun stuff.

I expected the last page to read "This page intentionally left blank."

<comment><USER4> >I found this paper to be very wordy and littered with mathematics that was at times impenetrable.

don't understand this comment. if someone asked you to read a QFT paper would you claim it were "littered" with impenetrable mathematics? or vice versa: if a cond mat physicist read a geophysics paper would they be justified in claiming the same? you're reading a paper outside of your domain of expertise; expect to be challenged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> The answer is that these three models are special cases of more general exponential Lévy models. Options cannot be priced with general exponential Lévy models using the traditional approach of the use of the risk-neutral density of the terminal stock price because it is not available.

Does this mean there is no hedging strategy in these general exponential models? My understanding is the Black-Scholes gives the price, such that if the price was different, there would be an arbitrage strategy (under some assumptions on the variance). And this arbitrage strategy is used for hedging.

<comment><USER6> That's right, in the Black Scholes model for any option you can construct essentially a portfolio of money market+stock that _replicates_ the option. So if you sell the option and buy and track the replicating portfolio, there is no hedging error. But you can't hedge perfectly when there are jumps, there is no replicating portfolio, only ways to minimize the hedging error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the abstract

>Merton jump-diffusion model (1976) which is an exponential Lévy model with finite arrival rate of jumps,

This is funny because my graduate thesis is about models based on Hawkes processes, that is, jump with a path-dependent and self-exciting intensity process. Instead of taking the arrival time of jumps (often the parameter lambda) to be constant, in a Hawkes process a jump increases the probability of another jump (positive feedback), leading to clusters of jumps we often see in crises.

I love how this paper might seem "magic" and voodoo and most importantly "true" to people who don't know much about mathematical finance. The point is that the models here are most likely wrong and have GLARING flaws in them, yet are still used to price REAL things in REAL life. All models are wrong, some are less wrong than others. The point is, how wrong do our models have to be before we get some really bad consequences (2008 financial crisis, anyone?)

P.S. Please rewrite this in LaTeX, posting a 250 page document written in Word makes me 90% less likely to read it (compared to something written in LaTeX)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure whose voting up such a technical paper. I could understand if the subject was control theory or robotics, but economics with engineering-level math seems out of most of our purviews.

I'm not complaining - I'm happy to see more math on HN. I'm just wondering about HN's demographics.

<comment><USER9> Especially since the result is not new (it was written in 2004). Even though the topic is within my interests I'm confused that this is on the front page of HN.

<comment><USER10> I guess it's interesting to see an alternative to Black Scholes. Fourier transform (FFT) is a common topic in advanced algos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that this got voted up. Anyway, here a few notes:

1\. Mostly, the goal is not to "price options". There's a liquid market for basic calls/puts, and those prices are used to calibrate a model and then interpolate/extrapolate as well as price more exotic things. So the goal is to "fit the market".

2\. Black Scholes is a well defined bijection between a Call price C(K,T) and a BS vol sigma: C(K,T) = BS(K,T,F,df,sigma). However, prices are such that calls at different strike K have different BS vol, thus the vol can't be a description of the underlying stock price. BS is just "the wrong formula to plug in the wrong number (BS vol) to get the right price". In particular, you can't evolve a stock (in Monte Carlo, going forward, or in a PDE, going backward) using BS vol and reprice all options correctly.

2b. But already, BS gives you a means to interpolate and hedge.

3\. The next huge step forward was local vol (Dupire), LV. Instead of assuming fixed vol, it assume that the vol is a deterministic function of stock price S and time t. Now you can evolve a stock (in MC or PDE) and reprice vanilla options correctly, by and large. However, two problems remained:

4a. Forward smile. Take prices as they look today, fit a local vol model, and evolve it forward 2 years. You've hit all the 2yr option prices correctly, and you'll hit all the 3yr option prices. However, the 1yr options IN 2 YEARS will look all wrong (in particular, the smile will have decayed unrealistically).

4b. Very short term smile. A gaussian will basically never go more than 3 std devs from its mean, right. So, short term out of the money options should be really worthless. But they aren't, because stock prices in the real world do jump (or move 10 std devs). So, we require enormously high "lognormal" BS or local vols to reproduce observed option prices correctly.

4a. is solved with stochastic vol models, SV. Mix SV and LV and you reprice options perfectly, and go a few years forward, and your forward smile still looks reasonable.

4b. is solved incorporating jumps, JD (jump diffusion).

Mix SV, JD, LV and you get a nice model that fits the market, and evolves reasonably.

5\. Most exotic products you price have additional features that preclude closed form pricing. If there's path dependency, you often just use Monte Carlo. If there's calculability, you try and use PDEs. If there's both, you have to use advanced methods: either carry state variables with you in the PDE, or use Longstaff-Schwartz like Monte Carlo methods.

6\. However, in the last decade or so, after the financial crisis, all the fancy stuff receded in the background, and there was more focus on the basics: rates. Different counter parties have different credit risk, different currencies have different credit, giving rise to cross-currency basis, different LIBOR maturities are at different levels, giving rise to intra- currency basis, etc. All that stuff needs to be captured properly.

<comment><USER12> Naive question from a computational physicist with no quant experience - <USER2> you forgo closed form pricing anyway, there doesn't seem to be any obstacle to including all of the things you mention in your last paragraph (and more) and just building more sophisticated numerical models to fit the market. There's certainly no shortage of data or computational power at the scale we're talking about. Given that, why has the "fancy stuff" receded in the background?

<comment><USER11> Two things, really.

The models needed to be updated to incorporate all the rates stuff. That takes time. So the focus wasn't so much on innovation on the product front, but on getting all existing models and products to play along with the new reality. (That's a huge undertaking, btw... you need the market data, someone responsible for marking it, put it in the databases, have it flow through the infrastructure, take it into account in the models, etc.)

Second, previously there were many fancy products that allowed you to trade, say, vol, mean reversion, correlation, etc.

However, trading this rates stuff is fairly straightforward (in particular, you don't need optionality/convexity; linear products (such as forwards or swaps) are enough).

Maybe I shouldn't say "recede" \- but in the earlier decade the focus was more on fancy exotic products (with huge margins), while in the more recent decade the focus was on simpler products, but modelling them really precisely.

(There was also some focus on systems and ops and front-to-back processing.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know if techniques like these are applicable to betting in baseball games?</comment>


California lawmakers agree to health benefits for immigrants - <AUTHOR> https://www.sacbee.com/article231373418.html <comment><USER2>
      State officials estimate that group will be about 90,000 people at a cost of $98 million per year

They can't provide even Medi-Cal coverage for less than $100/month per person.</comment>


Building Cloudflare TV from Scratch - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-cloudflare-tv-from-scratch/ <comment><USER2> It's an interesting experiment, albeit one that doesn't make much sense to me from a product perspective. I guess producing the content at a loss is something Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to do. And it's probably a good chance to dogfood some video delivery products.

Personally, I would almost always prefer a blog format over a live segment. If it is a live segment, then I'd hope I can at least watch the recording later.

I'm curious about engagement. Is anyone watching this? Does anyone seem to actually care?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm not sure what are they thinking... i have some calendar reminders popup from time-to-time on an interesting _broadcast_, but not once i actually sit down to watch it. Shame, as there're 4-5 programs every week i would be happy to watch on-demand

<comment><USER4> I asked about this, they're working on making them available on demand :)

src: [https://twitter.com/cloudflarehelp/status/127293910658317107...](https://twitter.com/cloudflarehelp/status/1272939106583171072?s=21)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the original motivation for the project:

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/ladies-and-gentlemen- cloudflare-...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/ladies-and-gentlemen-cloudflare- tv/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Very cool for multiple reasons! The first is that it seems a lightweight and straightforward approach to launch first and thereafter iteratively improve, e.g. using Zoom to push live video to Cloudflare. Secondly the content, while all Cloudflare-related, seems useful to learn about internet infrastructure, etc.

Perhaps the elephant in the room is "what's next"? Seems like it could at least become a Twitch competitor, if not also to YouTube if Cloudflare is able to figure out the monetization, privacy and copyright aspects.

</comment><comment><USER7> Given all the important things sitting behind Cloudflare, how do you justify having Zoom installed on employee machines?

</comment><comment><USER8> > When the live programming ends at 1100, the video experience would break and > the user would need to hit refresh to see the next show on the schedule.

If that was the only problem, why wouldn't changing the stream with a small amount of JS have worked rather than having to add a muxing layer in front of the streams?

<comment><USER9> I wonder if they have plans to expand to non-browser viewports?

<comment><USER10> They do. From the last section of the article, entitled "Thinking Ahead..."

> Bring Cloudflare TV to platforms like Apple TV and Roku

</comment></comment></comment><comment> anonms-coward Is cloudflare at a scale where it would be possible for them to provide cheap enough prices on video hosting and bandwidth to enable someone to build a profitable YouTube alternative on top of that? Assuming that a youtube competitor can get to similar scale and make similar revenue.

<comment><USER6> The competitive advantage of YouTube isn't really in video storage or bandwidth, but rather in its creators community and ad revenue sharing/monetization. Also copyright, regulatory compliance, content moderation are non-trivial.

These are the causes (among many others) that sunk Microsoft's Mixer and potentially Facebook Watch...

<comment><USER11> youtubes competitive advantage is search... that plus the simple scale of users and content.

<comment><USER12> > youtubes competitive advantage is search

How? YouTube videos aren't all that prominent on Google and its search features are rather terrible.

What they do have is a semi working recommendations system. How hard would that be to replicate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't wait for this to become available as part of Cloudflare Stream!

I need a simple API that would allow both a basic user with browser and a webcam, or an advanced one with OBS (RMTP...) to just live-stream as part of my product. And building everything at scale is just super painful.

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems very close to "rolling your own (internet) TV station using open source and Zoom".

That's exciting that it's become so accessible.

Of course the hard part then is having a producer running the content all day + getting enough content.

<comment><USER15> > the hard part then is having a producer running the content all day + > getting enough content

If I'm managing a local access/community TV/open studio system right now, I'd be pulling as much inspiration as possible from this post and working to deploy something similar ASAP. Those places already have the content, and their cable and broadcast reach is either less viable or actively reduced each year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hmmm.. works in Chrome but not Firefox for me. Firefox plays the live stream but not recorded videos.

</comment><comment><USER17> Will there be any support for DRM or video protection?

<comment><USER18> It's 2020, shouldn't we have learned by now that DRM software is pointless in almost any situation?

<comment><USER17> If it is pointless in 2020, why does Netflix have DRM then?

<comment><USER19> Wild guess (I really have no idea): Because otherwise they wouldn't get the licenses for their bought content to begin with?

Netflix themselves probably couldn't care less; they know that everything they offer for streaming will be available for pirating the second its released, with or without DRM; people have Netflix because its convenient, not because they cannot pirate their content.

<comment><USER18> That only shifts the blame to the contenc owners though; they still hold on to the idea that DRM will somehow keep their content unpirated while it really has the opposite effect.

<comment><USER20> Yes, and I blame bureaucracy for making it hard to say no to ineffective ideas. "You mean you want it to be easy for people to steal our content‽" I think the world has a hard problem saying no to ideas because they cost too much. Even if it has a minor effect it must be done!

But there is one real benefit of DRM, cracking it is illegal. Of course my understanding is that they would get the exact same legal protections here if they just XORed every byte with 0x42 so it doesn't justify the spend, user inconvenience and complexity of current DRM systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Cloudflare TV is a 24x7 TV channel that takes you behind-the-scenes and > let's you hear directly from the builders working on your favorite > Cloudflare products.

So 24x7 monitoring of developers' screens overseen by the _world_? RIP devs X_X

<comment><USER4> No, not that at all.

Has anyone online ever done a "so what you mean is.." and got it right?</comment></comment>


SpaceX Backtracking on Satellite Internet Puts Future Profits in Doubt - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/article/4254917-spacex-backtracking-satellite-internet-puts-future-profits-doubt <comment><USER2> I find LEO satellite constellations hard to believe.

If you think there is an urban/rural problem with optic fiber or terrestrial wireless, consider building a system which has to cover oceans and the vast uninhabited and uninhabitable wastes on land.</comment>


How Goya brought ethnic food to white America - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/23/how-goya-brought-ethnic-food-to-white-america/?hpid=z1 <comment><USER2> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_cuisine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_cuisine) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cuisine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cuisine) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_cuisine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_cuisine) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_cuisine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_cuisine)

etc times 100. I'm sure we all appreciate Goya for helping to keep the dying Washington Post alive with their paid-for articles, but the headline is absurd on its face. I mean, I have distinct memories of eating Mexican food long before I heard of Goya corporation. And I'm pretty sure black beans and kidney beans were not unheard-of as well.

To be fair, the reporter's original headline might have been, "A short corporate biography of Goya Foods", only to be changed by the editor to something more eye-catching.

<comment><USER3> It's a caled "othering" or "exoticification". Yes there is English, German, etc. cuisine, and all of these are 'ethnicities'. But sometimes people treat ethnicities of 'The Other'[1] as 'ethnic' or 'exotic'.

[1] Us vs. Them stuff here. Who is 'Us', and who is 'Them'/'The Other' depends on where you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now who will bring white ethnic food to Han China? Seriously, I get depressed whenever I have to settle for expensive frozen sausage from Nick's or Jenny's in Beijing (our only chance t ethnic food). And let's not even get started on high quality flower needed for real baking. At least they sell green curry packets and jasmine rice at Carrefour.

<comment><USER5> Haha. When I was in China, one of my American friends there freaked out because he couldn't find a bottle of ranch dressing anywhere. Of all things, ranch dressing. He apparently liked to dip everything he ate in it back home.

About a week before I left, they opened up the first Subway restaurant in the city. I went on the first day it was open, and there was a line of white people coming out the door. I used to take Subway (and cold cuts and sandwiches in general) completely for granted, but a year in China will make it sound pretty damn good.

<comment><USER6> Ranch dressing, peanut butter, and root beer: 3 staples you might not find outside of the USA.

<comment><USER7> Here in Italy, peanut butter is actually surprisingly available. Ranch dressing can be found here and there, and root beer is of course completely unheard of because it's an acquired taste that most people who haven't grown up with it dislike.

I'm going to be back in the US in a week, and I can't wait to eat:

* Mexican

* Bagels

* Barbecue

* Thai

* Mexican

* Mexican

* Mexican

<comment><USER5> I've lived in China and Korea, and surprisingly, pretty good Mexican food was available in both places. Somewhat less surprisingly, good Thai food was also available.

Good cheeses, breads, and wines, however, were not. And if you did manage to find them somewhere, the price was double what you'd pay in the US.

<comment><USER7> Heh - good cheeses and wines are already expensive in the US compared to here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is very east coast biased. For someone that grew up in Northern California I always found Goya is too Spanish and not as common out here than it is in the East Coast. I tend to opt for El Mexicano products, especially since it has a more Mexican flavor and it is a Bay Area company.

One of the great things about the Bay Area is that there are a ton of ethnic grocery stores, such as Mi Pueblo and Ranch 99.

<comment><USER9> Definitely, but the paper it was in was the Washington Post. If they printed that in the Chron or LA Times, people would take it for a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I went to the nearby Western Beef I was very surprised to see all kinds of sections, and then a Goya section. Over time I learned that I could find things there that I couldn't find for recipes elsewhere. But there wasn't a General Mills section. This article helps explain it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I asked for directions from a fellow who was restocking in a local market. He deferred, explaining that he worked for Goya, not for the store. He was responsible for all the Goya products in the store (and other stores) and that the aisle we were in was dedicated solely to Goya products.

I worked for a supermarket when in high school and only store employees handled goods inside the building. Here the store allowed control of an entire aisle to Goya. And believe me, shelf space is at the very core of retail sales.

<comment><USER12> Currently hacking away on the food industry:

It's common practice for a distributor to handle stocking of product in some/many locations, it's referred to as 'merchandising' in the industry, it's often limited to speciality products. Given the comment I think the interesting thing is that either Goya is doing their own distribution or has subcontracted that out or has a special distributor relationship in some way. It's relatively uncommon for products which are in the supermarket 'core' (true for Goya at least of my local stores) to get this treatment, so that seems to say something about Goya.

This is also very common in the alcohol industry, e.g. the huge Bud Light displays you'll see in stores are usually setup by distributors, not the store owner.

<comment><USER13> Kellogg and Nabisco often stock the shelves themselves as well. And the Asian/International aisle is stocked by the vendor sometimes as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good thing I live in a place where people of different cultures talk to one another, exchange food ideas, and with some hunting you can get the ingredients you need. Specialty ethnic food stores help as well. Maybe it is the willingness to explore and not shop at places like Safeway and the other big chains?

I've purchased a Goya product or two when it was the only variety available. That said, if I need asafetida (a spice) for an Indian dish I'm not going to look to Goya. When I need tortillas for tacos, I'll buy locally made instead of Goya or Mission. (tortillas are a silly example given the diversity in the bay area...but I don't know what the big chains actually carry...)

I'm not afraid to pickup a random cookbook (be it southern cooking to pakistani to peruvian) and attempt to cook something. If ingredients aren't available, be creative and substitute.

This seems like one more "homogenization" of the US.

<comment><USER15> How, exactly, does getting tamarind and nopalitos into the aisles of Safeway count as "homogenization"?

<comment><USER16> I think he means: everyone eats the same thing

Meaning, we all eat the same brand "diverse" foods, rather than seek out the originals from locals of that cuisine.

<comment><USER15> Mexican people do not as a general rule go into the fields to pick tomatillos. We're talking about the raw materials of ethnic recipes, not freezer-pak reheatable Mexi-meals.

<comment><USER16> What tedunangst said. If everyone can access the same thing in the same stores, then there is homogeneity in what is available.

I don't think homogeneity ought to have any negative connotation, used in this way. I'm also not sure the OP meant it negatively, though he might have.

<comment><USER15> I took his comment as snark.

<comment><USER16> I couldn't get a clear tone from it. But downvotes of the comment indicate I am in the minority.

What makes the comments on HN small? Yours currently is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm confused. I posted this a day ago....why has it reappeared?

<comment><USER18> you didn't include the sweet ?hpid=z1 tracker at the end of the url.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr: they put it in cans.

</comment><comment><USER20> And here I thought immigrants did. Silly me, forgetting to thank our corporate overlords.

<comment><USER21> How'd you get that out of the article?

The whole thing was about Goya, an immigrant-founded and immigrant-owned enterprise, relying heavily on immigrant populations to break into predominantly-White areas, and expanding into non-Latino immigrant populations through diversification of products.

There's even the bit about continuing to employ and appeal to new immigrants in order to maintain authenticity in the product lineup. There's also the bit about rejecting traditional distribution models typical of a large food producer and instead favoring a distribution model that allows tailoring the inventory mix with independent retailers (immigrant-operated, like the Korean grocer the article names as an example) in local immigrant communities.

TIL immigrants are no longer immigrants if they demonstrate entrepreneurial spirit.

<comment><USER15> Every damn thread on this site has at least one and often many comments just like the one you responded to. Telltale signal: it could have been written without even reading the article.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists eye unusual swarm of Yellowstone quakes - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081230/ap_on_re_us/yellowstone_quakes <comment><USER2> Not unusual.

From <http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/activity/>

_Swarms of this nature are relatively common in this part of Yellowstone Park._

<comment><USER3> I think people are concerned because of this part: "This December 2008 earthquake sequence is the most intense in this area for some years."

Of course, I think it's all much ado about nothing; but people are kind of tuned in to looking for disasters like this. It's human nature.</comment></comment>


SEO: 4 things huge sites are allowed to do but you're not. - <AUTHOR> http://nenadseo.com/big-dogs/ <comment><USER2> The most egregious example of a huge site doing things that smaller sites are not allowed to do is ...

GOOGLE!

Recently, I've seen its "survey wall" cropping up on more and more sites.

It works like this:

You do a Google search. You see a link to an article you want to read. You click through.

You're met with a message that tells you that if you want to actually read the page, you have to complete a survey.

And the whole thing is powered by Google: [http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/10/31/googles-latest- conten...](http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/10/31/googles-latest-content- paywall-experiment-pay-with-an-answer/)

Remember back when Experts Exchange tried to pull the same nasty tactic -- have its cake (get indexed in Google search results) and eat it too (hide that content behind a paywall)? Remember how slimy it was, and how Google penalized it several times, as it tried various other ways to cloak its content?

Well ... Google is doing exactly the same thing.

<comment><USER3> I've actually noticed Chegg doing the _exact_ same thing experts exchange did.

For example, if I'm looking up homework help for second order differential equations, I'd see something like this[1] in the Google results. Does anyone know why is this not being penalized?

[1] – [http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and- answers/1-f...](http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and- answers/1-find-particular-solution-nonhomogeneous-differential- equation-y-10y-25y-e-5x-2-find-gene-q3701548)

<comment><USER4> Same as Quora. I can google it and clcik the link to it, but then it's blurred and I need to login to see answers: "You must be signed in to read this answer."

<comment><USER5> In my experience Quora ranked a LOT higher before these shenanigans. I do not think Quora is getting the best of both worlds here: High organic rankings and many user sign-ups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When Google replaced other search engines like Altavista back in the last century, one thing that made it so special was that it was fully automated and didn't seem to favor anyone. Nowadays, post-Panda, things seem to have become a lot more murky, and I am not sure whom to thank for that (overzealous SEO folks perhaps who had tried to game Google's algorithm?). I mean seriously, have you ever received one of those "Please remove the link to our website from your website because the link hurts us" requests? At the same time as this article pointed out the new rules don't seem to apply equally, making things even more murky. Curious where we're heading with that...

<comment><USER7> silly question: how do you know a link hurts you?

<comment><USER8> I would like to know as well.

<comment><USER9> you kind of don't...that's one of the issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is clickbait. The last story they had on HackerNews was shortly after the RapGenius drama. According to someone smeared in that story they tried to blackmail him: Pay us and we won't publish. Tweets from them collaborate this: "It is a report on Expedia BH (Blackhat) SEO, check your G+ account Martin, anyone in charge can contact us back. Yes, my husband contacted you there, please keep communication with him.". I usually do not mind an agenda, but in this case I do not want any HN readers burned by this company. This post will give them 1000s of visitors and perhaps a few clients.

So there definately is an agenda. Google banned a few of these people's sites. They are not happy about that. But they still have something worthwhile to say right? Wrong. This is only written to create uninformed controversy and a difficult PR problem for Google.

They are not insiders leaking how big sites do shady SEO. They were creating spammy small sites and sometimes were sourced to write linkstuffed articles for bigger sites. They can see just as much as we can see.

We don't know if these tactics are even working. Maybe Google already discounted any links, through algorithmic detection, spam reports or manual spam fighters. Who knows? Certainly not the spammers that were caught time and time again: Proving Google is way ahead of them. Google can't ever say: These guys are right, we favor big sites. But that is the popular sentiment they are exploiting. One does not have to feel sorry for Google, but I hope people realize the position they're in here.

If you want to know more about how Google fights spam (they probably dinged a few major sites during the time it took me to write this post): [http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-s...](http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting- spam.html)

If you want actionable SEO advice for your startup: [http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound- marke...](http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing- for-startups/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM)

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry but you are incredibly misinformed. As someone that has sold sponsored posts for a very long time with some of the biggest websites on the internet, I can confirm to you that it is happening at a much larger scale than you can ever imagine. For those that know, this story is not really news and has been going on for several years. Google has indeed been fighting spam and has done a decent job at it but in many cases the smaller sites are the ones affected the most and the big name sites get away with it.

"We don't know if these tactics are even working." They are working. Google is catching up but it's still FAR from being ahead in fighting these blackhat SEO practices. What you mean is that Google WON'T be saying "these guys are right, we favor big sites" but the reality is they do.

I made a fairly large comment on here with the last report. Many of the comments said "show me proof!" which then I came along and did just that. Matt Cutts reached out to me shortly after and I forwarded over emails received from Expedia. The funny thing is, a few weeks after that I STILL got emails from Expedia BUT it wasn't from Expedia.com. "Only Expedia.com was affected so we're still going to sell links for Expedia.co.uk". It amazes me sometimes how blind everyone is about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1 thing you're allowed to do: Ignore google completely. Build your business in such a way that it works, with or without google sending you traffic. That way you don't need to lose sleep over your rankings and you don't need to panic every 6 months when google updates their algorithms in a major way.

Just treat them like you would treat the weather, enjoy it when it's nice but make sure your business runs even when it is raining. If you're dependent on Google for your traffic _you are doing it wrong_.

<comment><USER12> You can build your business in such a way that it works with or without Google, but it's going to work a lot better with Google than without it.

People do lose sleep over rankings, because in some industries, the amount of traffic and business generated by organic search is substantial. If you're relying almost entirely on Google search traffic, you are doing it wrong, but if you're ignoring organic optimization, you're also doing it wrong. Telling people who may be making many millions of dollars in revenue from organic search to just "treat it like the weather" is horrible advise. I think I know what you're saying, build up other traffic channels, but the way you're phrasing it makes that harder to see. At some point as marketing grows, most websites start branching off into many, many different areas -- paid, social, email, etc. -- but organic search is still a big part of the mix.

Panda and Penguin finally backed up what Google had been saying for years. The problem is that there is always a gap between what Google says to do and when Google chooses to specifically enforce what it had been saying. In the meantime, lot's of people exploit that gap.

The best long-term move is to do what's right, but when you see cases like this, you really lose trust in how Google is treating websites.

<comment><USER13> The trouble is, anything you do to try to gain favour with a search indexer:

a) Is going to distract from the quality of your content, unless you should be doing it anyway

b) Is going to be irrelevant (at best) or counter to your original intent (at worst) when the indexer's algorithm changes, and Google are changing their algorithm all the time, with far more resources behind it than you have to keep up with it.

<comment><USER12> You "A" point is why we've seen the rise of "content marketing" over the past few years.

Of course, that practice gets exploited a lot, with people using word mixers, automated article writing, low quality writing, etc. as a means to just fill up their websites.

However, there are lots of businesses that do content marketing in such a way that it benefits the company's search rankings, but also provides high value content to interested person. Since we're talking SEO, look at Moz. They sell premium tools to help companies improve their search rankings, but also offer a wealth of free, quality information to people interested in online marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> the hypothesis here is that: big sites do shitty SEO but they are still big sites, that is why google is evil.

this hypothesis if flawed: just because they are big site - and are still big and show up in google - does not mean that they get away with it.

google's response - from algorithms, mini algorithms (which just target a specific vertical of sites) and spam actions - are most of the time subtle and seldomly targeted at a whole site (especially if the site overall delivers some value)

i have consulted websites - market leaders in their markets and vertical - which had major SEO issues from their technical setup (shooting themselves in the foot) + manual penalties + (user generated) spam issues on their site. still they were the market leaders from brand perception and overall site traffic. they were performing well compared to the competition, they were not performing well compared on how well they could (and later did) perform without these issues.

my recommendation of loves looking at crappy SEO at other sites: And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? - in general a better use of your time and ressources

</comment><comment><USER15> I've also noticed sites like TheVerge do native advertising in a way that's very hard to tell until you actually see the article. And I don't think I've seen any "Sponsored" or similar tag anywhere close to the article, which I believe is in Google's policy.

Google itself seems to be doing this, too (not properly labeling ads), while telling everyone else not to do it and penalizing them.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, Google Ads now look exactly like search results, dark pattern!

<comment><USER17> Aside from the bright yellow "AD" lozenge right next to those, you mean. And the separation between them and the rest of the results..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My first impression on reading this article is that the sites he names (techcrunch, careerrookie, etc.) have hundreds of thousands of indexed pages of actual content. They may be being practicing black hat seo (or just wasting marketing dollars), but their content is actually relevant, and their referral traffic from these links probably outweighs any SEO penalties they are receiving for these practices.

It should be pretty obvious that you can't spend a weekend creating an SEO link farm and expect to get to the front page of Google... Try bankrolling a professional editorial staff for a year and generate actual content in whatever niche you want and then run your anchor text experiment. Post a link to HN with those results!

</comment><comment><USER10> The solution to this: penalize sites for 3-6 months regardless of how big or small they are. I see far too often big sites getting a small slap on the hand then get fixed up real fast back to where they were before. They gain much more out of it by doing blackhat SEO and risking becoming penalized for a few days. Most sites I've seen get penalized go right back to selling and buying links not long after they've been fixed up.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wrote about this sort of thing back in May [http://www.whitehatseo.org/ethics/cnet-news- storm](http://www.whitehatseo.org/ethics/cnet-news-storm)

</comment><comment><USER20> Seeing recent Top news related to SEO on HN it seems like backlinks is the key to rank in Google.

Quality of content and Quantity doesn't matter all what matters is backlinks!

</comment><comment><USER21> All of bad, big sites spent tons of cash of Adwords.

No one at google is going to penalize the "giving hand"

</comment><comment><USER22> I know Matt Cutts is a HN user would love to see him way in as he did on the Rap Genius controversy

</comment><comment><USER23> I didn't read the whole article but from the first example it's not particular strong. Google discourages widget back-links but that's far from considering it black-hat.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence suggesting that Google treat widget back-links differently depending on who the widget is from.

<comment><USER24> It gets much stronger

EDIT: Though the vitriol does go off the rails a bit toward the end...</comment></comment>


Start a blog - <AUTHOR> Which CMS platform is best to start a blog? <comment><USER2> Ghost, Grav, Hugo...WordPress, if you must.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm aware 75% of new web developers use WP. But, with what believe the other CMS platforms exists and what advantages do they offer?</comment></comment>


PowerDrive– A Mega USB Drive and Charger for iPhone and iPad - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/229973091/powerdrive-a-mega-usb-drive-and-charger-for-iphone

<comment><AUTHOR> Afraid of being hacked in iCloud,why not try this PowerDrive exclusively for iPhone and iPad.</comment>


Show HN: ParticleField.js, make gorgeous particle fields easily - <AUTHOR> http://nickhs.github.com/particlefield

<comment><USER2> Awesome!</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for SSH key management of teams? - <AUTHOR> Everyone uses ssh keys to manage access to their servers, but so far I haven't found a great (ideally open) solution to manage those keys.
Manual management is tedious and error prone.
In particular, I want to be able to add and remove keys and assign user's access rights to certain servers.
If I remove a key, the access to all servers should be revoked.
What do you use for this? <comment><USER2> If you're willing to entrench yourself deeper into the AWS ecosystem you can go completely keyless and manage access solely through IAM by inventorying your instances in AWS Systems Manager - then you can start SSH sessions right from the AWS CLI itself[1].

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems- manager/latest/userguide...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems- manager/latest/userguide/session-manager-working-with-sessions- start.html#sessions-start-cli)

<comment><USER3> This still requires an SSH key.

From the link:

 _To start a session using SSH, run the following command:

ssh -i /path/my-key-pair.pem username@instance-id_

<comment><USER2> No, the aws start-session command does not require a keypair - you're reading further down in the instructions about other ways to connect.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Okta (scale-ft) at work, evaluated gravitational teleport in the past.

In the past (company with <1000 employees), I set up nss-cache and a saltstack system on a timer to regularly deploy new keys from LDAP (we used bastion hosts to control for any dangers of config drift and I wanted zero SPOFs during steady state). I would say this is the least likely to fail under all scenarios and is therefore the best choice unless it is somehow untenable (large number of employees, or extremely dynamic user creation/deletion)

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't used any of these myself, but you might want to take a look at Facebook's approach to the problem[0]. It's rather different and innovative.

You might also find Smallstep [1] and SSH Lockbox [2] interesting.

[0] [https://engineering.fb.com/security/scalable-and-secure- acce...](https://engineering.fb.com/security/scalable-and-secure-access-with- ssh/)

[1] [https://smallstep.com/blog/diy-single-sign-on-for- ssh/](https://smallstep.com/blog/diy-single-sign-on-for-ssh/)

[2] [https://github.com/half-cambodian-hacker-man/ssh- lockbox](https://github.com/half-cambodian-hacker-man/ssh-lockbox)

</comment><comment><USER6> Are you on AWS? If not, probably skip this.

The other answer about AWS Systems Manager is good. I recommend it.

Other way is piggybacked off of AWS IAM and CodeDeploy[0]. Users load their personal keys into CodeDeploy and you manage them through IAM. Every container/SSH machine syncs keys from CodeDeploy every 10 minutes (whatever you set the cron to).

Lastly, you can connect EC2 Instance Connect[1]

[0] [https://github.com/widdix/aws-ec2-ssh](https://github.com/widdix/aws- ec2-ssh)

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Connect-...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Connect- using-EC2-Instance-Connect.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use SaltStack. I run the state setting the keys fairly often and enforce the presence of only the keys I set. This also prevents people from having the impression that they can add their own.

I think I remember reading somewhere that there's a way of using LDAP / ActiveDirectory (I'm pretty much the only guy running Linux on my machine) but I haven't looked into it yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> we use signed certs with authorized principals to manage access [1] and sign the certs after successful MFA. if you need a non-interactive connection you can use token authentication to fetch a cert.

[1] [https://engineering.fb.com/security/scalable-and-secure- acce...](https://engineering.fb.com/security/scalable-and-secure-access-with- ssh/)

<comment><USER8> Signed certs for ssh is IMHO the best solution for managing this problem in larger orgs. Nice to see Facebook published their process around it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://gravitational.com/blog/how-to-ssh- properly/](https://gravitational.com/blog/how-to-ssh-properly/)

Signing certificates for hosts and users. Never deal with authorized_keys files ever again.

<comment><USER10> > Never deal with authorized_keys files ever again.

For servers with an access to multiple users via SSH with PKI auth you have to use AuthorizedPrincipalsFile anyway. edit: and to avoid gazillion issuing CAs for managing group access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://gravitational.com/teleport](https://gravitational.com/teleport)

</comment><comment><USER12> Teleport ([https://gravitational.com/teleport/](https://gravitational.com/teleport/)) has been fairly useful, basically a ssh bastion solution with short term (hours) keys. They have an open source tier. Downside is that the company is really small, support is scarce after the check clears, and all their future development seems geared towards kuberneetes and IOT. So if you just want a reliable bastion with key management they aren't really interested in your demographic.

</comment><comment><USER13> We centralize everything in openldap and developed a simple django app to centrally manage them.With a combination of sudo-ldap and a custom schema (OpenSSH-LPK) and using the openssh configuration AuthorizedKeysCommand we manage authentication and all sudo permissions.

</comment><comment><USER8> We use the Keybase SSH CA. It's secure, removes the need for individual ssh keys, a d moves things over to chatops.

[https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-ssh-ca](https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-ssh- ca)

</comment><comment><USER14> how do you manage the other parts of their identity? LDAP is a common choice..

</comment><comment><USER15> AFAIK a SSH CA can be a good solution for this.

See e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615307) for some more info.

</comment><comment><USER16> Standard PKI infrastructure can be used as a reasonable way to manage SSH access. Can issue signed certificates and revoke them as per usual.

</comment><comment><USER17> We simply put all the team's keys in an S3 bucket. Each server regularly syncs the bucket and updates the authorized_keys file.

</comment><comment><USER18> Host inventories modelled with ansible. For user X to gain access to ansible host group Y, you just need to make a merge request with your key and host group. CI syncs ansible configs with the hosts.

There is also a cron that checks authorized_users vs git and sends email when something is out of sync.

</comment><comment><USER19> In the past I've used Hashicorp Vault to handle this kind of situation. Granted, it's an additional piece of infrastructure to manage but Vault has been pretty solid for this kind of situation and others where you need to safely manage secrets.

<comment><USER20> If you dont mind, how did you set it up? I have vault right now but I dont know exactly how to use it for ssh'ing.

<comment><USER19> The process is pretty simple but their documentation is pretty good. When I was starting out I found this video which helped me get started: [https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/manage-ssh-with- hashicor...](https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/manage-ssh-with-hashicorp- vault/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Couldn't you just use whatever you already use to manage your infrastructure? They are just files on a server so you would manage them with a deploy just like anything else. Initial keys can be added through userdata at instance launch.

</comment><comment><USER22> You can store the keys in a database, ldap or whatever and set the AuthorizedKeysCommand of your ssh server to a command that looks up the keys given the user. The keys store can be the same as your user database (eg: AD etc)

</comment><comment><USER23> I use jumpcloud ([https://jumpcloud.com](https://jumpcloud.com)). Works well, free for small teams. Not open.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would strongly suggest you evaluate KMS. While not open, it has the support and development behind it to make it secure. This is going to get you IAM control of your users and allow group roles.

It also integrates with AWS well, and of course your own applications.

"AWS Key Management Service (KMS) makes it easy for you to create and manage cryptographic keys and control their use across a wide range of AWS services and in your applications."

[https://aws.amazon.com/kms/](https://aws.amazon.com/kms/)

<comment><USER24> KMS is part of secure managed solution: "The secrets in Secrets Managers are encrypted with AWS Key Management System (KMS), and every version of the secret is encrypted with a unique data encryption key." [1]

[1]: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-aws- secrets...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-aws-secrets- manager-securely-store-rotate-ssh-key-pairs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Whatever configuration management you already use.</comment>


U.S. Visitors May Have to Hand Over Social Media Passwords: DHS - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/amp/us-visitors-may-have-hand-over-social-media-passwords-kelly-n718216 <comment><USER2> "Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told Congress on Tuesday the measure was one of several being considered to vet refugees and visa applicants from seven Muslim-majority countries."

This is rhetoric coming directly from the head of the Department of Homeland Security and is rhetoric which should be sufficient to call into question his leadership. Every single thinking person in the security field knows that such a proposition is patently absurd. As just one example, which social media account password? I'm not a bad guy and I have more than one Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., account, each of which looks reasonably legitimate on their own. Once an attacker knows that the US requires their "social media" password they'll either maintain a clean account free from their terrorist friends or they'll create a clean account. It's trivially easy to do and doesn't take long at all to get a legitimate looking network of friends.

</comment><comment><USER3> And if you don't use social media, and they don't believe you?</comment>


How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/151903/2010/06/stevejobs_presentations.html?lsrc=rss_main <comment><USER2> I saw Jobs give a presentation of NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework (an early, even pioneering ORM) at a trade show in Chicago... during the presentation one of his NeXT machines crashed, and the audience got to see the system reboot on the big projection screen. I don't recall any real wisecracking... he just said "oops!" and maybe a little banter but did remain very calm and continued the presentation without really missing a beat.

</comment><comment><USER3> A friend of mine has a great line for whenever something unexpected happens in a demo: "I'm glad this happened and I'll tell you why..."

<comment><USER4> I actually hate this line.

I've heard it a few times and it provides the impression that you weren't going to explore something important in your planned presentation which is a bit of a slap to the audience. I prefer "This gives us an opportunity to talk about..."

Your presentation shouldn't be an accident, you shouldn't be _glad_ you would have failed to tell us something important had things gone right, you should be glad to react to changing circumstances and explain something off the cuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also believe that one of Steve's biggest advantages is that he _loves_ the products and features he is presenting; the videogame demonstrations in particular seem to summon his inner child.

There are many dubious claims such as the "factual" remarks about the superlative qualities of the products (thinnest, cheapest, greenest), but I am sure he believes it when he starts the talk by saying that "we have some great things to show you".

<comment><USER6> >I also believe that one of Steve's biggest advantages is that he loves the products and features he is presenting

He's a very good salesman. He clearly sold you on his pitch. I'm a little more cynical, and hardly expect the head salesman of the company to be anything but over the moon with the revolutionary new watchamacallit that changes the rules and introduces a whole new aspect to living that no competitor could ever hope to achieve, setting new benchmarks of stuff that wasn't important when we didn't have it but have become a mandatory element that will change you world now that we do.

<comment><USER7> Spot on. He's clearly too smart and too critical to love all his products as much as he pretends. He can probably tell you thirty things he would fix about the 4G iPhone. (Or you can just wait until he releases the next version.) The mark of an innovator is perpetual dissatisfaction.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about that. If he worked for AMD/ATI or nVidia, he might have gone bonkers, as the innovations over the previous ones seem so intangible, since the platform is basically an incrementalist arms race: benchmark scores, umpteenillion transistors, superthreading. The mobile market could have been the same, but Steve Jobs stepped up the PR game. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that the people in the graphics industry could apply the same communication strategy, but I won't go into that.

A lot of people on this site often tout the Android phones' hardware specifications' superiority over the iPhone, since X has Y GHz or MB more. What a lot of these people do not understand is that this is not at all what the beauty of the iOS PR is about: it is about features and achievements. These represent tangible milestone that do not come across as uninterest incremental updates: "why would I want a 2GHz processor over a 1GHz" the average consumer asks himself. "It is Xer", the other bloke says. Faster, bigger, better, but to what end; to use the same logic of comparative adjectives as arguments, it's also more expensive. This is why buying a complete desktop Windows computer is incarnate nightmare of an average user.

I mentioned features and achievements and how the constitute tangible milestone and selling points; nobody gives a damn about three-hundred- something DPI (what is DPI?!). The current iPhone has a number of DPI, and this new number is obviously higher, big deal. But there is an achievement; the pixel density surpass the resolution of average human vision, so the screen will be like a physical object---not a digital one. You could go on about a "post-pixel era" or something like that, but the point is that we have a feature and not a number anymore. This is a milestone to prospective users as well as the employees at Apple who have now breached a frontier and defeated a barrier in digital computing.

You are feel to chalk up his views on the larger products as "dissatisfaction", but if his focus is in the features and achievements, there is much to be ecstatic about.

... if you do not lapse into the world of nonsensical numbers and incrementalism.

(Sorry if any of it is incoherent, but my allergy is killing me today.)

<comment><USER7> _But there is an achievement; the pixel density surpass the resolution of average human vision_

And how many Apple users (let alone Steve Jobs) consider their perception to be merely "average?" ;-)

<comment><USER5> "Average" was misleading and a poor choice of word: most people if not everyone. I do not have statistics about human vision, but I take this guy's work for it: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/re...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving- the-iphone-resolution/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He wasn't ad-libbing. A network or remote service being unavailable is a common occurrence in presentations. I can't say I have a scripted response for every common contingency, but I'm not Steve Jobs. If he's a rehearsal freak, I'm sure he rehearsed the common problems and didn't just repeat the ideal case over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER8> Humor is a great strategy. Once you have people laughing, you can get away with a few minor hiccups.

It reminds me of a rafting trip I took. The buses being used to transport us from the office to the rafting location were really old and almost falling apart. The guides had a brilliant story about how the buses went from high schools->some backwater in mexico->some other really random places and were finally bought by the rafting company. The funny story had people laughing all the way there than crib about how crappy the buses were.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is all well and good -- and a similar post a few months ago relating how Malcolm Gladwell practices his lectures had much of the same information -- but to be completely honest, with the amount of multitasking most people do these days, almost none of the presentations we give are much more than information sharing via PowerPoint/Impress/Pages. The extra time spent rehearsing and preparing backup plans would be a complete waste.

It would be smarter for most people to practice their public speaking more generally so that when they're giving these innocuous, boring presentations they at least don't come off as buffoons (whether the demos work or not).

<comment><USER8> +1

I have realized that having an overview of what's on the agenda aka the bullet points is the most helpful thing. Just talking about those bullet points instead of reading from a script makes the presentation more of an engaging/interactive conversation with the audience rather than a prepared speech/lecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This made me remember how awkward the Froyo/google tv hiccups at google I/O felt in comparison, completely different story.

</comment><comment><USER11> this reminds me of the old interview tip "turn weaknesses into strengths" Being able to flip a hiccup into a fluid teaching point is good for any kind of teaching not just power point presentations.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to find startup partners? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I have been trying to find someone to create a start up for the past 2-3 years while in college. I'm a cs student and know probably about half of the students in my program but I have found few that really learn anything outside the classroom. I've tried working with a few students but find it frustrating because most of them simply are not passionate about what they do.
So I was wondering are there any sites to help find startup partners? I've nearly given up hope on finding anyone to work with, but I would love to find someone to work with before I start on a few of my ideas.
Also are there any HN meetups in NC? Thanks. <comment><USER2> Are you a member of any user groups? I find them invaluable for networking local peers with the same interests. And, by definition, members are going to be passionate about what they do. I've also come across <http://collabfinder.com/> recently, might have been on HN actually.</comment>


Covariance and contravariance in C++ - <AUTHOR> https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2019/01/20/covariance-and-contravariance/ <comment><USER2> Some things are better left to the subconscious. Otherwise one might find themselves in a position of a centipede who lost the ability to walk as soon as it started wondering which leg to move first.

<comment><USER3> Any pattern involving "callbacks" or similar make one wish for contravariance, though in my experience it is not an intuitive idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > C++'s classical OOP system supports "covariant return types," but it does > not support "contravariant parameter types."

The problem in the authors "Animal doctor" example is that the universe of all possible animal types is practically unbounded, or "open".

What you want here are "open multimethods": something Bjarne Stroustrup has wanted in C++ for a long time[0] but have been implemented in library form[1].

Of course, the thing to remember is that, as soon as you go to an open multiple dispatch arrangement, you will lose much of the static safety guarantees that the type-system affords us. There will always be runtime/dynamic type checking, and a runtime failure case.

If you don't want an open system, then some combination of templates for static polymorphism and strategic type-erasure will get the job done. e.g. use boost::variant and multivisitation [2], and the compiler will instantiate all O(n^2) methods for you.

[0] [http://www.stroustrup.com/multimethods.pdf](http://www.stroustrup.com/multimethods.pdf) (2007)

[1] [https://github.com/jll63/yomm2/blob/master/examples/asteroid...](https://github.com/jll63/yomm2/blob/master/examples/asteroids.cpp)

[2] [https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_69_0/doc/html/variant/tutor...](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_69_0/doc/html/variant/tutorial.html#variant.tutorial.multi- visitation)

<comment><USER5> I've learned about multi-dispatch from Common Lisp, and back then was prototyping a turn-based game, where I can have multi-method working:

        Outcome attack( RangeBaseUnit attackingUnit, MeleeBasedUnit defendingUnit )

and also

        Outcome attack( MeleeBasedUnit attackingUnit, RangeBasedUnit defendingUnit )

it was the most elegant approaches I've seen. Not that you can't do it in C++, but not as straightforward as it was in CLOS.

<comment><USER6> In OOP, isn't that essentially just overloading? In many OO languages, you could write both of those lines as-is (with corresponding method bodies) and have valid code. They'll typically be treated as two separate methods that just happen to have the same name.

<comment><USER7> The main difference is that overloading is resolved at compilation time whereas multi methods are resolved at runtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems pretty unrelated to the idea of covariant and contravariant four- vectors in relativity and electromagnetism. I wonder if there's some clever and insightful connection, or if it's more that the words just mean "varies together" and "varies oppositely".

<comment><USER9> In this case the terminology is by way of, roughly speaking

       type theory <- domain theory <- category theory

Perhaps one can draw a link from the latter to the operators in electromagnetism.

<comment><USER8> Cool. It looks like the one place I'd seen these terms used is a subcategory of one of a few different but related uses.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > C++'s classical OOP system supports "covariant return types," but it does > not support "contravariant parameter types."

Interestingly enough, std::function correctly supports contravariant parameters; it also correctly handles co/contra variance correctly via smart pointers (as long as the smart pointers support it themselves of course).

</comment><comment><USER11> Is the "obvious" behavior mentioned in the article what the standard specifies? Because it's surprising to me that the compilers are so broken in these cases…</comment>


Let's find something better then LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/hoffmann/lets-find-something-better-then-latex <comment><USER2> Unconvincing.

To address just 2 of the issues noted, you can certainly get packages to make well-formatted, but not bland, documents from LaTeX markup. Just because most people use "article" and Computer Modern fonts doesn't mean you have to. And, it's easy to change the LaTeX float placement parameters to make floats "not float away" in most cases.</comment>


Pinstagram Cofounder – "Its gotta be worth a lot more to put them together" - <AUTHOR> http://oobly.com/?p=812/

<comment><USER2> disclaimer: they said this jokingly</comment>


Mylar - Web applications with end-to-end encryption - <AUTHOR> https://css.csail.mit.edu/mylar/ <comment><USER2> > Mylar addresses three challenges in making this approach work. First, Mylar > allows the server to perform keyword search over encrypted documents, even > if the documents are encrypted with different keys. Second, Mylar allows > users to share keys and encrypted data securely in the presence of an active > adversary. Finally, Mylar ensures that client-side application code is > authentic, even if the server is malicious.

> Results with a prototype of Mylar built on top of the Meteor framework are > promising: porting 6 applications required changing just 36 lines of code on > average, and the performance overheads are modest, amounting to a 17% > throughput loss and a 50 ms latency increase for sending a message in a chat > application.</comment>


Goodbye, Apple - <AUTHOR> http://mdeslaur.blogspot.com/2009/07/goodbye-apple.html

<comment><USER2> I continue to be amazed at how people are willing to give Apple a pass on cutting off the Pre. Paticularly this guy who says he can "understand" Apple cutting off the Pre but then balks at Apple cutting off his music software.

Monopolistic greed is understandable when it doesn't affect me seems to be the attitude (On that note I'm pretty sure Apple makes way more off iTunes than it does off the hardware at this point)

As a customer who is paying for this music I should be able to sync it with whatever I want. I don't expect Apple to support the Pre but I think it's reprehensible to actively try to cut it off.

(For the record I'm an iPhone 3GS owner who doesn't even like the Pre. I just don't want to be forced to use Apple products for the rest of my life just to keep my music)

<comment><USER3> You're not forced to use Apple products to keep your music--none of it is DRM'd anymore so you can use your non-Apple software to sync it with your non- Apple devices on your non-Apple computer. It's even plainly available in the file system--and Apple doesn't even require you to let it reorganize your music files into its preferred folder hierarchy.

If Apple supports interoperability, they have a mess on their hands and they're dealing with interoperability issues instead of making a better product. If they don't support interoperability, people write angsty blog posts about them breaking whatever hackish unsupported software they were using to interface with their iPod. (As for the Pre, anything that allows arbitrary devices to pretend to be an iPhone and sync jeopardizes email account information--which can be synced to the iPhone--and is a security flaw. So I'm sure Apple did intentionally lock out the Pre. But I don't think they care about gtkpod enough to intentionally lock _it_ out.)

"On that note I'm pretty sure Apple makes way more off iTunes than it does off the hardware at this point"

Why stop at "pretty sure"? They're a publicly traded company. It's not hard to get their financials.

Here's some numbers from their Q3 report a couple days ago:

"Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter, producing $1.689 billion in revenue..."

"About 10.215 million iPods were sold this quarter, resulting in $1.492 billion in revenue..."

"Apple's "Other Music Related Products and Services" segment was responsible for $958 million in revenue..."

Cite: [http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/07/21/notes_of_inter...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/07/21/notes_of_interest_from_apples_q309_quarterly_conference_call.html)

<comment><USER4> Not supporting interoperability is one thing. Going out of your way to prevent it is another.

<comment><USER5> Well, take a look from Apple's perspective. They spent time and money developing a platform for their iPods. Why would they want to allow their free (for consumers) music platform to seamlessly work with a direct competitor's product?

So Apple gets to support iTunes and polish it for years and then Palm gets to leech off their hard work and use it for free without repercussion?

I think by disabling the Pre they're saying to Palm, "Hey, Palm, why don't you go spend your own millions of dollars and build your own damn app." When you look at it that way I can't really fault them.

What I suspect will happen is that Apple and Palm will battle back and forth for a few revisions over a few months and then Palm will cave and throw some money at Apple (or something else they want) and we'll hear about some sort of partnership and suddenly hey, look, the Pre will be supported officially. Either that or Palm will give up and make their own music uploader.

<comment><USER6> And that is why I never buy Apple. I continue to be amazed that a company which is responsible for such cutting edge technology and engineering excellence maintains such an old school attitude to business, its customers and its developers. Apple just doesn't get the concept of openness. It's stuck in the 80s.

<comment><USER7> > Apple just doesn't get the concept of openness. It's stuck in the 80s.

Apple's attitude is incredibly modern; just not open.

Do we HAVE to be 100% open all the time now, really? That makes no sense. Apple have killer products all the way from distribution to consumption; they've marketed them and sold them with effectiveness other companies only dream of!

I certainly cant fault them for wanting to keep that success to themselves :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apple has evidently made a decision to prevent iPods from working without iTunes, and to prevent iTunes from working with non-iPod audio players. We must assume that Apple's executives have weighed the pros and cons of this decision, and have decided that the pros (maintaining a reputation for a seamless experience) outweigh the cons (losing some sales to Linux owners, Palm owners, etc.). That's an ordinary business decision.

"You'd think they would _want_ to sell more iPods, not block a certain percentage of their market out," says mdeslaur in this post.

Maybe the Apple executives have made the wrong decision for their company's bottom line, and maybe mdeslaur, and many of the commenters here, would have made a better decision that would have increased Apple's profits. But given that (a) they have access to a lot of data that you don't have, and (b) they're executives at Apple and you're not, I wouldn't bet on it.

<comment><USER9> Good point. There is a difference between saying "Apple made a bad business move here" and "Apple crossed the line in my opinion and I will not buy from them in the future."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Synopsis: Apple has never supported or particularly wanted third-party software or hardware to be able to interface with their systems. In the running skirmish that is trying to get said devices to work with said systems, Apple has once again made a change that breaks the jiggered compatibility. This guy doesn't use an Apple system, so he's not gonna buy another iPod.

Well, that, plus a lot more drama and dramatic linebreaks.

<comment><USER11> That's a rather bad synopsis.

Here's a better one:

In a misguided attempt to lock people in, apple is blocking linux users, (and anyone else) from accessing their data on an iPod.

Don't support 3rd party software? Fine.

Actively block them? Not so fine.

<comment><USER12> How is this misguided? This behavior looks entirely rational from where I stand. Apple wants to lock people in to iTunes, iTMS, and the iPod/iPhone. They make more money when people use the product suite.

I think people are afflicted with the misapprehension that product bundling is unlawful. It is not. It is unlawful to use bundling as a device to maintain or extend a monopoly. Saying Apple has a monopoly on the iPod is like saying Kimberly-Clark has a monopoly on Huggies.

<comment><USER11> I never said it was unlawful. I also didn't say it not rational. I said it was a bad idea.

It's a bad idea because it's hurts their own customers. It's a bad idea because it causes some people not to buy their product.

Huggies is a ridiculously bad example.

A better example is the Michelin PAX run flat wheels (rims) that require special (expensive) tires. Nothing illegal there, it's a great lock in. Except customers refuse to buy it, and not just refuse to buy the wheels, they won't even buy a car with those, and car manufacturers started having to add an option to not have run flat tires.

With the tires, it's just a bad idea, but with an iPhone apple is blocking access to a customers data. It's MY iPhone apple - not yours.

<comment><USER12> There are classes of customers that some businesses don't want. It's also rational to ward off customers who are pains in the ass.

As for the "it's MY iPhone argument", I sympathize with it, but I see the other side of the argument too: I also want companies to be free to create any reasonable business model they'd like. Apple _very specifically and deliberately_ didn't sell you an iPhone as a general-purpose computing platform you could do anything you want with, and you can't claim that you bought it expecting to use it as a Linux box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand what the big deal is. If you don't like Apple's policies regarding their products there's a simple solution: buy something else. It's not like Apple has changed overnight. Just like Nintendo, Apple has been doing this for decades; this isn't some new shocker like the Kindle.

In this day and age I have no idea why someone who primarily uses Linux would even bother using an iPod when there are good alternatives to Apple's "circle of one" products.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm a big fan of Apple, but this is ridiculous. Going to such extreme lengths in the name of what boils down to decreasing their customer base seems rather silly. God forbid someone use Linux _and pay Apple for iPods_.

<comment><USER10> This decision is exactly the same as dozens of decisions they've made in the past, all decried as patently ridiculous and self-destructive. Apple likes to sell self-contained systems, in order to make sure that everything works really well. In the iPod's case, they have an interest in being sure that iPods are only used with iTunes, because then they can ensure that it works well -- and so people won't complain about how lousy iPods are when they use it with other people's potentially lousy software.

That's unfortunate for Linux users, because it's clearly not worth it to Apple to build a version of iTunes for GNU/Linux. But, you know, the iPod also doesn't play ogg files. So what are Linux users doing buying them in the first place?

<comment><USER11> I run linux, and I don't have a single ogg file for my music.

Your argument about self contained would be good, except that it's not a case of apple not supporting other things, it's apple deliberately blocking them.

<comment><USER10> I don't want to start any flamewars, but the assumption that the market leader can engage in a kind of mutualism and 'not support' a given device or OS while still leaving them open to interoperability displays the sort of cavalier attitude towards user experience that hobbles Apple's competitors.

How many hacks that muck around in Apple's UX space do you think it would take for Apple to just sort of turn a blind eye to, before users starting accidentally wiping their iTunes libraries or bricking their iPhones? And how many proponents of said hacks do you think would argue that's an acceptable state of affairs?

<comment><USER15> Do you want your TV manufacturer to build a steel cage around your TV because they're afraid that users will complain if they mess up their own TV. That would be ridiculous.

<comment><USER16> _Do you want your TV manufacturer to build a steel cage around your TV because they're afraid that users will complain if they mess up their own TV._

Bad metaphor. Suppose I lived in a world where, if my TV malfunctioned, it could break my phone and my web browser, send random emails to my relatives, riffle through my address book, and delete all the music I've bought over the last five years.

Oh, and there are international criminal gangs who employ networks of botnets to attack my TV every fifteen seconds.

In that world, I'd see a real use case for the steel-cage-equipped TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I got a Nokia N810 recently. With a hefty SD card it plays media very adequately for my needs -- and it does a whole lot more too! My iPod is starting to gather dust.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For a company that started off with the motive of making the cheapest and most usable computers, and that believed in sharing its design [from iWoz: the APPLE-1 architecture was made public], Apple has come a long way. They are successful, yes. Their products are good, yes. But now they make exhorbitantly expensive products [an iPhone 3gS with contract can cost you ~1000$ in the long run], which they force to not work with anything else [WHY?] and are closely guarded. Apple, you make great products, but I am never gonna buy them, cuz then you'll want me to buy music just from you, use only your software, and pay you for software upgrades [iPod touch] !

<comment><USER18> _But now they make exhorbitantly expensive products_

Their profitability demonstrates that this is false. People (lots of people) can and do afford their products.

 _which they force to not work with anything else [WHY?]_

To be able to dictate a minimum standard of user experience and to keep you tied into their ~$250/second profit supply.

 _you'll want me to buy music just from you_

Want you to, yes, but you don't have to - iTunes has offered to import your CDs for ages, and you can put other music files into its library with click- and-drag simplicity.

 _use only your software_

No - if they did there would be no iPhone app-store. It doesn't make sense - they want you to buy a Mac, so they want a compelling ecosystem of high quality programs of all kinds - from Omnigroup and Circus Ponies to FireFox and the gnu Utils.

 _and pay you for software upgrades [iPod touch]_

Which take employees time and effort to develop - why should they be free?

<comment><USER19> @jodrellblank, I guess mrlebowski made those points(expensive, not work with anything else etc) not to claim they are intrinsically bad (which point you seem to be addressing) but as a contrast to how Apple used to work when it was founded.

In other words, Apple's present behavior may be justifiable(like you say) _and_ a change from how it used to work in the past (mrlebowski's point).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow, I don't get all of this. I use Ubuntu and have an iPod touch, it doesn't sync at all, total brick. But, obviously, I have a windows partition (or, sometimes, virtual machine) which I use to test in IE or play games, etc... So I just use iTunes there. Do people really add music to their libraries every day or something? I sync mine probably once a month, but I can see myself not being upset even if I had to do it once a week. Let's put things like this in perspective, shall we?

<comment><USER21> My perspective is: I do not have Windows on any of my computers (yes, that was, of course, my choice.)

So your solution doesn't work.

My solution is to not upgrade the OS on my generation 1 iPod Touch and use gtkpod. Not very sustainable in the long run, but almost acceptable.

<comment><USER20> Hey I'm no fan of Windows, but I really don't see what's so wrong with having a 2-3GB virtual machine around on an external hard drive or something so you can sync your iPod. Perhaps if you're that against Windows on some sort of fundamental level then the iPod is not an appropriate product for you? Or maybe it's time to get a Mac mini for a media center or something and it's problem solved from another angle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Goodbye, Linux Hacker.</comment>


Tips from a Production MongoDB Deployment - <AUTHOR> http://attachmentsme.tumblr.com/post/5168114317/tips-from-a-production-mongodb-deployment

<comment><USER2> I wonder what the purpose of the linux firewalls is if there are already AWS security groups in place?

Seems like a lot of extra complexity to track the IPs of every EC2 instance whenever they launch/start.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nixe article! As much as I love mongoDB, when reading articles like this I really get the urge to think about how my data might fit into riak, cassandra or elastic search.

I really dislike architectures that force the setup and monitoring of those "specialized" roles onto the user although they seem to belong to the internal protocols

<comment><USER4> We avoid all that headache by letting MongoHQ take care of the details, it literally reduces my work down to just making sure I have sane indexes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would love for someone else to take care of our headache for us :) Unfortunately, we have enough data that our service doesn't fit well within 3rd party hosting services' pricing plans -- there are other concerns with offloading such an important part of the business as well: availability, data- security, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for the article.

Have you considered writing a 'control' program that you can provide a list of mongo servers, and allow the control program to configure the replica sets etc?

May help a little, it's something I would consider myself if I ever need it.

Even naming replica sets etc is a bit cumbersome.</comment>


Deterministic Bitcoin Address Generator (for PHP and Ruby) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/prusnak/addrgen

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope this will enable all of you to create your own tipping platforms, eshops and crowdfunding pages. (Most of the software dealing with deterministic wallets was written in Python up to now).</comment>


Android P launches today in public beta - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17320826/android-p-beta-public-download-link-opt-in-sign-up-io-2018 <comment><USER2> Kinda impressed it launched on multiple manufacturers and devices, this is something Google's been unable to accomplish for the past nine years. I assume this is a Project Treble perk.

<comment><USER3> That's right, they specifically credit Treble for making this possible: [https://developer.android.com/preview/devices/](https://developer.android.com/preview/devices/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me my Nexus 5X is now two years old.

Because that's all the updates I got. Yay. At least it was cheap.

<comment><USER5> It's an absurd situation. After starting what's arguably the most successful phone hardware program ever (Nexus), Google has stopped making Nexus phones. The only phone they're selling at all right now is the $650 Pixel 2 with a gigantic 6 inch screen and no headphone jack. And even at that price they're only guaranteeing 3 years of updates.

After getting great and steadily improving hardware like Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 5X, we're now in a place where you can't get a high quality 5 inch phone with a simple rectangular display and headphone jack running vanilla Android at the $300 price point. Exactly the thing Nexus promised to provide.

I fear the day that my 5X dies. I guess I'll end up with something like a Mi A1.

<comment><USER6> The $650 model is 5 inches, its $850 for the 6 inch model.

Don't forget the 3 year clock started 6 months ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ng-user Favourite feature: When you place your phone face down on any surface it is automatically set to DND (Do-not disturb) mode.

<comment><USER7> My Android One Moto x4 has that feature now. It's awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Noticeably absent from that list of partners is Samsung.

<comment><USER9> I love my Galaxy S7 but my next phone will definitely not be a Samsung based on the direction they seem to be heading.

<comment><USER10> Too bad Google's lost interest in making good phones people can actually afford to buy. Still rocking my Nexus 5 and I can already tell you my next phone is going to be at least two years old and used.

<comment><USER11> Maybe there will be an affordable version of the upcoming Pixel 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's P? Pudding? Pecan pie?

<comment><USER8> Peppermint</comment></comment>