Oracle's Java 11 trap - <AUTHOR> https://blog.joda.org/2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles-java-11-trap.html <comment><USER2> Is this actually a trap? The "trap" page has a huge warning section that clearly tells you license has substantially changed and how to get open JDK, and what license it has.

> With JDK 11 Oracle has updated the license terms on which we offer the > Oracle JDK. The new Oracle Technology Network License Agreement for Oracle > Java SE is substantially different from the licenses under which previous > versions of the JDK were offered. Please review the new terms carefully > before downloading and using this product.

> Oracle also offers this software under the GPL License on jdk.java.net/11

[https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk...](https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk11-downloads-5066655.html)

This information is either deliberately or accidentally missing in the post. If we assume the author did his research before writing this piece, I can only believe this was done with purpose.

<comment><USER3> Not everybody reads warnings. Many will go to that page and just go straight to the download. In addition, the warning doesn't say "not for commercial use" \- you have to click through and read a long legalese to find it. Oracle could still choose to make it clearer...

<comment><USER4> It's just another license to ignore. I'll personally do whatever I want regardless of what is in the EULA.

<comment><USER5> Not sure where you live or what sort of company you work for but in my country & our company we cannot just have a fuck all attitude towards software licenses.

<comment><USER4> The USA and I've been doing it for two decades, honestly copyrights and licenses are not important to me. I have taken a fuck all attitude without consequence and will continue to do so forever.

<comment><USER6> Haha the plethora of GPL violations that exist without consequence sort of illustrate your point quite well.

<comment><USER5> You think if Oracle's legal team is after your company you get a free get out of license violation card?

<comment><USER6> Haha, I'm not playing that game because I'm lawsuit averse but I'm not surprised people are successful at it. This JDK includes telemetry so it just got a lot more dangerous to play but otherwise I'd guess license violations are pervasive at small shops.

<comment><USER7> even at big ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Download Oracle JDK (because that is what you've always done, and it is what > the web-search tells you)

What I've always done is install OpenJDK from the system's package manager :P

<comment><USER9> And that's good that package managers ship only openjdk. When I migrated to Linux I didn't know better but as "openjdk" was easier to install than Oracle JDK I used "openjdk". It turns out it works very well, actually I can't tell the difference.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, many people add a repository with Oracle JDK to their package managers and install the JDK from there, due to some perceived better compatibility and/or extra bug fixes. (And in my experience, this is true for the Java plugin; the "official" plugin seems to work better than the IcedTea plugin.)

<comment><USER11> Confluence is an example of a piece of software that wouldn't run correctly at all under OpenJDK.

Even today on the Atlasian docs, they provide a Docker image of Confluence to evaluate, but if you buy a production license, you are required to build an OracleJRE Docker container (they provide instructions) for production.

It's been years and they still can't support OpenJDK ... it makes me wonder what weird proprietary crazy reflection shit they're doing in there.

<comment><USER12> Last time I tried to run Jira with OpenJDK, I stumbled upon some encryption algorithm not supported in OpenJDK. I didn't research further. But that was a long time ago, nowadays I bet that OpenJDK will work just as well.

<comment><USER13> The encryption algos are not supported with Oracle java either. The stronger algos have a separate licence and needs to be downloaded manually for either java sdk

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> An interesting thing about AdoptOpenJDK is that it seems they may provide builds with DCEVM + HotswapAgent integrated, in the future [0]! And maybe become a very good and easy to use alternative to the way too expensive JRebel.

[0] [https://github.com/HotswapProjects/HotswapAgent/issues/218#i...](https://github.com/HotswapProjects/HotswapAgent/issues/218#issuecomment-403580956)

<comment><USER15> That's great news! Properly working code reloading would improve the development experience enormously.

Why wouldn't it be integrated directly in the upstream OpenJDK source, though? It sounds like it would be a separate patched build that I'd have to download, and wouldn't be available if I just "apt-get install openjdk-11-jdk" in Debian?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is not new, and as per: [https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license...](https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html) it was put in place in 2017 already. Seeing that the "LICENSE" of Java 8 simply points to their website, it means that they effectively changed it for Java 8 as well.

So that means that even if you're running Java, you have three options: (1) Continue using it illegally, it will probably be a low risk. This is not advisable especially for larger corporates. (2) Purchase JDK license (3) Switch to OpenJDK

<comment><USER17> The situation is confusing but not that confusing.

Java 8 has commercial features that are locked by default. You can unlock them by passing a command line flag that looks like -XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures, so pretty hard to miss.

If you use those in production, you're meant to pay. But virtually nobody does use them. In fact Oracle open sourced them all for Java 11, perhaps because of that fact.

Now in Java 11 there are two JDKs, that are virtually identical. OpenJDK and Oracle JDK. The latter is the same as the former but commercially supported. If you use it in production at all, you're meant to pay. But the only reason to do that is you want commercial support, from what I understand. There are no longer any special features. If you can support yourself (like most can) you just switch to OpenJDK as part of your Java 11 upgrade.

They have not changed the license for Java 8 users "on the fly", I'm not even sure that's legally possible.

<comment><USER18> The difference is that OpenJDK N will stop receiving security fixes the moment OpenJDK (N+1) is released. LTS releases are only LTS for Oracle JDK.

So no, OpenJDK by itself is not suitable for production use. To put a Java app in production securely you now need to either pay Oracle or find someone to provide security fixes to OpenJDK beyond what Oracle provides for free.

<comment><USER3> Security patches will be available for Java 11 via Red Hat, IBM and others (who have promised to do so). And the binaries will be built and made available here [https://adoptopenjdk.net/](https://adoptopenjdk.net/) as well as via other OpenJDK build farms (eg. Azul Zulu).

<comment><USER19> Is there any path for security updates/LTS for deb based linux distros?..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I notice that the OpenJDK build is only available as a .tar.gz and not as .rpm

This means that to upgrade from Oracle JDK10 -> Open JDK11, you'll have to write a script yourself to modify the symlinks e.g. to redirect the existing "/etc/alternatives/java -> /usr/java/jdk-10.0.x/bin/java" to the new installation. There are 46 of these symlinks that need changing (for javac, jstack, etc etc).

I hope that's the only change that is required and that I'm not missing something. Anyone know if there is anything else necessary?

Edit: here is the script I just wrote to print out the commands required to change the symlinks:

      #!/bin/bash

      existingJdkBinPath=$(dirname `readlink /etc/alternatives/java`)
      newJdkPath="/opt/jdk-11"

      find /etc/alternatives -type l | while read link; do
        target=$(readlink "$link")
        targetPath=$(dirname $target)
        targetFile=$(basename $target)

        if [[ $targetPath = $existingJdkBinPath ]]; then
          newTarget="$newJdkPath/bin/$targetFile"
          echo ln -snf "$newTarget" "$link"
        fi
      done

<comment><USER11> The OpenJDK build is GPL and should find its way into official package repositories. Oracle may have stopped creating the rpms for that reason.

Most distros use the IceTea builds for OpenJDK. Hmm . IceTea3 is Java8. There's no Java9 IceTea4 build yet. I can't find any roadmap info on their site ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is surely no mistake on Oracle's part.

Remember, this is the same company that for years grossly knowingly overcharged the US government for licenses, resulting in hundreds of millions later paid in fines.

Their focus is pure bottom line. If that means cheating, so be it. If it means the equivalent of a bait and switch, sure why not.

It's really a shame that circumstances are what they are now. Sun may have had warts, but in comparison it was highly admirable.

<comment><USER3> Maybe. But they have also provided a $free alternative. This is solely a battle of getting Java users weened off Oracle JDK and onto an OpenJDK build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Java 11? At work we haven't even started to look at the migration from Java 8...

<comment><USER23> We just made it TO Java 8.

<comment><USER24> Java 8 is EOL in January for public support/security patches. Java 7 was EOL in 2015. What have you been doing for 3 years?

I could guess, because I've been at companies doing the same. Active development and support on the product, but no time for tech debt.

Java 9 and up I understand people getting frustrated with a more frequent LTS release and these weird microreleases every year.

<comment><USER25> Red Hat and AdoptOpenJDK will be supporting OpenJDK 8 for quite some time yet. Oracle's JDK and JRE will stop getting public support, yes, but OpenJDK 8 will be alive and well for many years to come.

<comment><USER24> I was not referring to that. I was referring to the matter that they weren't ready to jump TO JDK 8 when JDK 7 was EOL, nor the next year, nor the next year after that.

What did they do with security updates when they were available for the version they were on?

Questions.

Don't get me wrong, they're not the only ones ice skating uphill on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's really simple: Don't use Oracle's JDK 11 in production. Use one of the open source distributions. Commercial software really isn't that complicated.

</comment><comment><USER27> >You may not: use the Programs for any data processing or any commercial, production, or internal business purposes other than developing, testing, prototyping, and demonstrating your Application;

From what I understood, I as a student could still use java 11 from Oracle, as I wouldn't be using it for "production". Is that correct? Or are there other implications that I am missing here?

<comment><USER28> I suspect you're right, but does Oracle JDK really add any appreciable value over OpenJDK, for a student?

I'd go for OpenJDK simply to form good habits.

<comment><USER11> Yea ... and if you do start to build something and decide to release it commercially, you don't want to run into any weird Oracle/OpenJDK weirdness at that point .. so best to start with OpenJDK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oracle seriously needs to be fought in court about this and their other actions.

They're actively hostile to the whole tech community and their entire business model is based on trapping people into paying for things by not making their licenses clear or changing their licenses.

I don't know why anyone would use any software made by Oracle these days, the alternatives and open implementations of their own systems tend to be faster - and their "unbreakable Linux kernel" is a joke and a legal disaster waiting to happen.

<comment><USER30> > by not making their licenses clear

How is that? The license is pretty clear, as stated in the article:

> You may not: use the Programs for any data processing or any commercial, > production, or internal business purposes other than developing, testing, > prototyping, and demonstrating your Application;

If you cannot understand that language you should not download or use the JDK.

<comment><USER31> Of course an Eldritch Horror apologist is going to take Oracle's side. Have you ever considered being eaten first isn't all it's made out to be?

<comment><USER32> I downvoted and flagged you for this comment. Then I caught the GP's user name, and undid both...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I believe the article is mistaken. Their License says:

>"Program(s)" refers to Oracle software provided by Oracle pursuant to this Agreement and any updates, error corrections, and/or Program Documentation provided by Oracle.

Not programs you create using the JDK

<comment><USER34> I thought that too: this just affects companies running JVMs, not companies that ship Java software, right?

<comment><USER32> Well, if you ship Java software, it has to run on a JVM. You often ship the JVM you want with the software, or else help the customer get the JVM installed. If you install or help them install Oracle's JVM, you may still have a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This sounds like total FUD. Sure the terms have changed but oracle has been open about it and told people to download openjdk. If you are going to run a commercial business and not pay any attention to the software you depend on and it's licenses then you have another problem.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm not sure Java is worth the effort at this point. If I'm going to have to keep updating every 6 months, I would rather use Go, which seems to have all that Java has to offer + the backing of a huge corporation.

<comment><USER37> > I would rather use Go, which seems to have all that Java has to offer

Really ? What is the Go equivalent of J2EE ? Do Go appservers exist that offer all the features that something like Payara (Glassfish), JBoss or WebSphere does ?

<comment><USER38> What's the point of J2EE or an application server? You can get functionality such as templates, management, monitoring, persistence through other means as well.

<comment><USER39> Think the point is that the Java ecosystem is vastly greater than Go. And ecosystem mattes.

<comment><USER40> That may change in a few years. Currently, a ton of new software is built with Go.

Kubernetes, Istio, Prometheus, All the Hashicorp stuff, hyperledger, traefik , kong you name it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> as long as openjdk remains open i dont mind

<comment><USER42> OpenJDK used to have some incompatibilities that tended to blow up in production (rare case "enjoyment") - is it now 100% compatible with original Oracle SDK? Otherwise companies would be forced to use commercial one in order not to disrupt their legacy systems.

<comment><USER43> Not 100%. There's still some weird edge cases having to do with the swing and crypto libraries. But the big performance regressions that we used to see are gone and with the release of flight recorder in Java 11, the last major commercial feature is now in openJDK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> interestingly, openjdk is the top link on google for me for "java 11" search.

did google do that?

<comment><USER45> It's been like that for years. OpenJDK had been the site that all development and JEP news goes through for a long time now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> As many have pointed out, you can argue if this is a trap or not and you can make the case for both sides. But I think that discussion in itself clearly begs the question: do you want to deal with a company that makes it easy to make a potentially immensely expensive mistake?

If anything, Oracle have demonstrated that if they feel you owe them something, they will take you to court.

I changed what primary programming language I use as a conscious decision that took years to make. First I had to find a language that was a good replacement and then I had to make the switch. Both require care.

It was easier than I had thought though. And I'm very happy I did.

Am I sure the my new primary language won't grow these problems? No. But I do know that I'd do it again if needed. There is no shortage of programming languages. There is a shortage of programming languages that have a sufficiently good ecosystem around them though.

<comment><USER47> Which language did you pick?

<comment><USER46> It was down to Rust and Go and I picked Go.

(I mostly write server software, command line utilities and embedded software (embedded software in C/C++). If I wrote more embedded software on Cortex-M than server software om AMD64 I think I'd really like to use Rust.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is going to come off sounding a bit like victim blaming, but seriously, any business large or small must have a person or people whose responsibility it is to audit all installed software so that nobody gets into a situation such as described in the article.

A business cant afford to let devs just install software willy-nilly like.

<comment><USER49> Yet "willy-nilly" installations happen.

It remains to be seen whether they'll "go after" the whales who can actually afford compliance staff (but screwed up anyway), or after the small-fish companies that just stood up a web-app to get started, or businesses in between.

<comment><USER50> It's not really the developers installing their own toolchain you have to worry about here, though. The folks working on the official builds and deployment should be far more aware of what's happening, because that's what has to be supported. If you're letting B&D do things willy-nilly, that's a serious business problem.

I aware they're often the same folks (DevOps), but your senior engineer and/or project manager should be watching what's going out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What about compatibility? Recently I installed PDFsam on Windows 10 that required a JRE. I installed OpenJDK but the application didn't start. With Oracle JRE it did work. I didn't bother to debug the startup problems, though.

</comment><comment><USER51> there is a GPL2 version of jdk11 here, does it make any difference?

[http://jdk.java.net/11](http://jdk.java.net/11)

<comment><USER49>
        > http://jdk.java.net/11

That's an "OpenJDK" build provided by Oracle.

But it is easy to get mixed up since it doesn't ACTUALLY say "OpenJDK" on that page.

<comment><USER52> All the links say and point to OpenJDK if you hover over them. It doesn't seem that obscure.

<comment><USER49> One would expect that the page provided by Oracle from which one could download OpenJDK would have the word "OpenJDK" in a header in 16+ point font-- and not visible only in link hover text box.

It's just weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Question : this implies that Oracle 'knows' that you're using their JDL in production. Which implies a spy of some sort. Which is barely legal, is it ? unless it's at least duly stated in the licence. Is it so ?

</comment><comment><USER54> How much control Oracle has on OpenJDK development & support? Can they control some features which will never be shipped with OpenJDK?

</comment><comment><USER55> Are there any substantive differences between the GPL and proprietary licensed versions of Java 11?

<comment><USER56> One requires you to pay money to Oracle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Currently happy about Azul OpenJDK.

<comment><USER28> 'Zulu', right? What's their angle?

<comment><USER15> They originally built it for Microsoft to run Java apps on Azure: [https://www.azul.com/successstories/microsoft/](https://www.azul.com/successstories/microsoft/)

I guess they later figured it could be more generally useful and they could sell support for it.

<comment><USER28> I had no idea Azure used it.

From the article: _They wanted to offer Java on the Microsoft Azure Cloud, unencumbered by complex licensing or end-user restrictions._

What are Oracle doing that their shiny enterprise offerings just have too much baggage attached even for Microsoft?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> If you're relying your business on something, you'd better read the damn license.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's unfortunate Java is turning into modern day COBOL.

<comment><USER60> Really I think the best thing for Java at this point is getting it out of Oracle's greedy clutches. They are debasing the ecosystem of the language as a whole at this point.

<comment><USER61> I'd love to see the Java community fork OpenJDK and just leave Oracle behind. I wonder if the licensing of OpenJDK makes this possible? If so, the only (albiet huge) problem is getting a critical mass of support behind one particular effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> My hat is off to Larry E. with respect to his business prowess. But. ding ding ding. alarm bells. Run away. Don't mess with that guy.

The dude owns an island:

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

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-04-13/four- seas...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-04-13/four-seasons- manele-bay-lanai-hawaii)

Stick with free/open source. Vendor lock in is a nightmare. _edited_ for clarity.

<comment><USER63> You should clarify that you are referring to Larry Ellison, the head of Oracle, and not Stephen Colebourne, author of the article.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I definitely don't own an island!

<comment><USER62> sorry, I was not clear. I am also not knocking owning an island. Thats a great situation to be in. If I am successful full enough in life, I will buy one! I am just saying don't mess with the dude. He tends to win.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clojure Grimoire: an up-to-date ClojureDocs alternative - <AUTHOR> http://grimoire.arrdem.com/

<comment><USER2> I've been using Clojure Cheatsheets from Andy Fingerhut at [http://jafingerhut.github.io](http://jafingerhut.github.io) and particularly happy with the color PDF versions (link below).

Andy actively keeps up with issues and pulls to make sure the output stays well formatted for easy printing on both US Letter and A4 as well as of course an HTML online reference.

His cheatsheets traditionally linked to ClojureDocs, but just yesterday Andy accepted a pull request to merge in targeting Grimoire, while Reid mashed up Andy's work into the Grimoire homepage:

        arrdem commented 2 days ago
        Thank you. I'm working on mashing the Grimoire linked version up to be
        part of 0.2.0's homepage :D
        …

        On 07/11/2014 02:52 PM, Andy Fingerhut wrote:

         Thanks! I'll try generating HTML and PDF cheat sheets with these
         changes, and if everything goes well I will publish Grimoire-linked
         HTML versions at http://jafingerhut.github.io and announce on the
         Google group.

\-- [https://github.com/jafingerhut/clojure- cheatsheets/pull/10](https://github.com/jafingerhut/clojure- cheatsheets/pull/10)

I appreciate clojure community collaboration and it's great these two projects sync'd up:

[http://jafingerhut.github.io](http://jafingerhut.github.io) \- various versions of cheetsheet

[http://grimoire.arrdem.com](http://grimoire.arrdem.com) \- cheatsheet + docs

Or go here for the PDFs:

[https://github.com/jafingerhut/clojure- cheatsheets/tree/mast...](https://github.com/jafingerhut/clojure- cheatsheets/tree/master/pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really awesome, thanks for building it. I was just working on a toy clojurescript project yesterday and while clojuredocs is very useful it's sad it hasn't been updated in forever. I've found examples to be incredibly helpful in composing functional-style code. For instance, compare assoc: [http://clojure.github.io/clojure/clojure.core- api.html#cloju...](http://clojure.github.io/clojure/clojure.core- api.html#clojure.core/assoc) and [http://grimoire.arrdem.com/1.6.0/clojure.core/assoc/](http://grimoire.arrdem.com/1.6.0/clojure.core/assoc/).

The architecture choice OP made is clever - a completely static page linking to github for the CMS part. Would you consider writing a server-backed version at some point in the future? Clojuredocs was originally written in rails and is being re-written in clojure, but that's going slowly. I would absolutely _love_ to see a well-written clojure backend for this type of site as a reference. I've been really enjoying using clojure for standalone things, but I can't yet imagine how I'd build a web server with all the production features something like rails gives you ootb (asset compilation, csrf, sessions, db connections, orm, testing w. transaction-based fixtures, etc).

Now if I could just integrate this with dash ([http://kapeli.com/dash](http://kapeli.com/dash))!

<comment><USER4> Author here. After maintaining a blog built around a "real" CMS, and a "real" CMS that I built myself, I'll say that my existing blog is built atop Jekyll and Git, the same stack I chose for Grimoire. It's simply the most basic thing that could possibly work, and it doesn't demand that I run a JVM on my inexpensive DigitalOcean instance. For all that I enjoy using Clojure, a "real" Ring server with a "real" database backend simply doesn't add anything to this project beyond complicating it further. As such I don't expect that a database rewrite of Grimoire is on the cards for some time to come.

To "how you build such a site in Clojure" the answer is that the entire Clojure ecosystem shies away from monolithic web frameworks and prepackaged solutions ala rails. Instead, Clojure libraries tend to pick a single feature or some small set of fetures, cover them well, expose a simple API and make composition trivial rather than trying to solve all possible problems.

Dash integration... Dash only makese sense for languages for which the documentation isn't trivially introspected such as Java. Clojure has the clojure.repl library ([http://grimoire.arrdem.com/1.6.0/clojure.repl/](http://grimoire.arrdem.com/1.6.0/clojure.repl/)) which is designed to solve this problem by exposing Clojure documentation to users in their interactive development (REPL) sessions. As I explain at some length in the Grimoire announcement post ([http://arrdem.com/2014/07/12/of_mages_and_grimoires/](http://arrdem.com/2014/07/12/of_mages_and_grimoires/)) Grimoire seeks to fill a fumdimentally different niche than Dash. Clojure already has docs, and those docs are already handy for users aware of clojure.repl. Grimoire seeks to solve the problem of documenting the various ins and outs of the standard library which do _not_ appear in the official Clojure docs and which are currently spread out across any number of other low PageRank score community sites.

<comment><USER3> I definitely wasn't trying to say this project would be better served by a "real" CMS, just that I'd like to see how someone would put one together. I've heard the idea of your second paragraph repeated in a bunch of places, and it speaks to me on an intellectual level, but I'd like to read through examples of non-trivial apps to put it in concrete terms.

About dash - presumably users will want your content inside whatever editing environment they have going (I know I do!). I find myself jumping between the built-in Emacs thing for clojure (shows function signatures in the minibuffer, let's you jump to official docs and source in other buffers) and dash for ruby (pretty html rendering, loads all my library docs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Author here. Holy cow. Thanks for all the kind words guys! I'm primarily a back end dev interested in hardware, compilers and operating systems. As a long time HN reader I can't begin to express how amazing it is that a my first "real" web service which I started less than a week ago made the front page.

I hope that for those Clojure users among you Grimoire proves a useful resource and I welcome any feedback or other commentary you may have on the site and its usability. Stay tuned, there's plenty more in the works from me and I'm reading the feedback with interest.

</comment><comment> dj-wonk Cool. One limitation I've seen is a lack of destructuring examples. So, for those who get a little hung up with some of the more complicated destructuring permutations, I made a walkthrough here: [https://github.com/xpe/clj- destruct/blob/master/src/destruct...](https://github.com/xpe/clj- destruct/blob/master/src/destruct/core.clj)

<comment><USER4> Author here. I'm definitely aware that there are many pitfalls to Clojure than just the standard library docs. There's an open issue for adding a syntax guide and a macro guide, I'd be delighted to add a destructuring guide.

<comment> dj-wonk Great! Do you think my example code (linked above) would be a good fit? It is mostly example-based.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat. Apart from the bright red color of the search field, it's great! I just started playing around a little with Clojure and having the docs right at your fingertips definitely helps.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. It should just change the text colour and there is also a bug where if the text field is blank it still shows as red. Otherwise brilliant site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks great! Especially I like the clean design.

I'm waiting for DevDocs.io support for Clojure thought because there's nothing better than all docs in one place.

</comment><comment><USER8> Have to use landscape in Chrome on Android. This is really really great!! I have a friend that knows C and wonders how the heck Clojure actually does anything. I've tried but anyone have any good links?

</comment><comment><USER9> Very neat. Particularly like that you've included instructions for running locally. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ah, thank you. I get frustrated by clojuredocs out of dateness, but I do like their comments.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic, also has much better examples than clojuredocs.org!

<comment><USER4> Author here: It's funny that you say this because as of right now there is only one example on Grimoire that isn't on Clojuredocs :P

<comment><USER11> Haha, that's surprising. Maybe the better presentation makes the examples look more plentiful.</comment></comment></comment>


Buzz Monitoring Widget: Empower You Page With Recent News - <AUTHOR> http://www.mybuzzmonitor.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Check this out. You can build your own news and blogs monitor according to your keywords and urls and embed into websites and blogs.</comment>


Sandia's Robots Pull Apart Warheads to Recycle Thousands of Micro-Grenades - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/sandia-robots-pull-apart-warheads-to-recycle-thousands-of-microgrenades <comment><USER2> I don't want to diminish how good it is, to see robots able to do this kind of finicky stuff, and anything which improves the safety of working on munitions has strong upsides, but lets not forget: the worldwide landmine, and anti- personnel bomb problem is huge, and it is causing extreme, life-long agony for women and children in disadvantaged places, and russia, america and britain have a massive un-met burden here, selling the weapons almost indiscriminately.

I don't expect Sandia to own this, but I do expect Sandia to recognize they are part of the problem. dismantling these bomblets to re-construct the parts into more modern bomblets is _NOT HELPING_ in the sense I mean.

But it is very fine application of robotics: Great engineering, terrible ethics issues.

<comment><USER3> Women and girls makes up about 14% of all casualties of mines and explosive remnants of war. Why are you excluding male victims in regard to landmines and anti-personnel bombs that is left around after wars?

<comment><USER2> Children is gender neutral. But thanks for correcting my misapprehension about the relativities. What's the source so I can understand distribution to kids?

<comment><USER3> I honestly just took the first google hit that gave the ratio, but digging a bit more and here is numbers from 2017 which was the most recent that I could find: [http://www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/reports/2017/landmine- monit...](http://www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/reports/2017/landmine- monitor-2017/casualties.aspx)

It bumps the number to 16% for women and girls. Children are 42%.

Landmine and anti-personnel bombs are a major problem, especially for the poor which is more likely to be working farms or forests. An theory is that because of gender roles men and boys are more likely to be working in such areas while women in those nations tend to be more at home or in the village.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hey tech startups: Winter is coming - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/17/technology/startups/winter_is_coming/index.htm

<comment><USER2> So let's have a laugh :) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899691></comment>


How To Find Product/Market Fit — A Step By Step Guide - <AUTHOR> https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Founded Rapportive (YCS10, acquired by LinkedIn) and now Superhuman. AMA!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a great blog post. If you want to know more, this is Rahul speaking on the subject at Business of Software Conference USA. Video, transcript, slides and an excellent Q&A.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18533535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18533535)</comment>


NSA's Information Assurance Directorate releases "goSecure" vpn made easy - <AUTHOR> https://iadgov.github.io/goSecure/ <comment><USER2> Disclaimer of Warranty

This Work is provided "as is." Any express or implied warranties, including but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the United States Government be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services, loss of use, data or profits, or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this Guidance, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note that they give the webapp sudo root access on the Raspberry Pi that runs the access point's captive portal. This is borderline security incompetence: [https://github.com/iadgov/goSecure/blob/master/scripts/pi_mg...](https://github.com/iadgov/goSecure/blob/master/scripts/pi_mgmt.py)

</comment><comment><USER3>
        userPasswordHash = hashlib.sha256(str(stored_salt) + password).hexdigest()

Should I have expected better of the NSA?</comment>


SearchYC Performance Enhancements - <AUTHOR> http://blog.searchyc.com/#searchyc-performance

<comment><USER2> How come pg links to webmynd and not searchyc?

Searchyc is a lot more useful, and you don't need to install anything to use it.

<comment><USER3> Isn't webmynd YC? I dunno why, but the guy seems to have a bias towards YCombinator-funded companies.

<comment><USER2> I think so, although nowhere on their website do they say this

<comment><USER3> <http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>

It's in the cloud of names.

<comment><USER2> I meant on webmynd's website

<comment><USER3> Is there a reason for them to display their funders?

<comment><USER4> Credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've found SearchYC to be very helpful. I use it quite a bit to look up old information I only vaguely remember or to find people. Glad to see it's only going to get better - congrats Mike and Jerry.

</comment><comment><USER6> I always love hearing about behind the scenes updates, thanks for posting.

As a more dev-heavy optimization, it might be possible to return cached results (user-search:PG), and then trigger a backend server to refresh the cache, possibly even using ajax to inject the new results.

Thanks for the site, it's my top choice for searching HN.

As an aside, I'd love to see a standard for integrating site-specific search into a larger search engine. Imagine if you could go to Google, and type in

"Site:News.ycombinator.com user:e1ven" and it would send those as post- requests to the search engine designated by robots.txt on the host?

That would make search dramatically "deeper", by letting google act as a front-end to each site's results.

-CPD

<comment><USER7> There's the "OpenSearch" protocol, which just tells your browser "to search this site go to [someurl]?search={SearchTerms}" SearchYC could certainly add this, though I think it may be limited to 1 search only, and not something like: "I have two types of searches, one for everything, and and another for users."

But beyond that, OpenSearch it's pretty limited. I expect this area of semi- semantic searching to explode, which is why I'm investing my own time into it.

So, hang tight for a couple of weeks, then the problem will be solved :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is a feature request that is relevant only because you are already archiving hackernews:

Send a notification to my email __________ whenever:

(checkbox) Someone replies to a comment from user _________

(checkbox) User _________ makes a submission/comment

(submit button)

<comment><AUTHOR> Notifications was one of the original motivations for creating SearchYC, but there are a couple of fundamental flaws:

1) How would we know if you've already read a comment/submission? It would get spammy really quick unless we did some kind of periodic digest. We decided that creating RSS feeds for search terms (e.g. username) is a happy medium for this, but we're open to suggestions.

2) New items can take quite a bit of time to get indexed (usually 0-2 hours depending on the number of new items and position in the queue).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like SearchYC a lot, but when it's slow I tend to use Google site search:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+sea...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+search+term)

<comment><USER9> Google gives more comprehensive results too. But there is a time lag with either. I was mining my bookmarks tonight to find links worth posting, and searched to see if one had been posted before. Search YC indicated it had not been, so I posted it, only to discover to my chagrin that someone else had just submitted it just before I did. (My submission is now deleted, to avoid duplication.) I try to search before I submit, so accurate and timely search is helpful.

<comment><USER7> I haven't done a lot of submitting myself.. I usually just do "Ask HN" type stuff. Hacker News doesn't automatically tell you that the URL you're submitting has already been submitted? Or was the URL slightly different?

<comment><USER9> HN automatically upvotes the previous post if you submit an EXACT duplicate URL. But some webpages live under more than one URL, and not everyone submits the canonical URL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> searchyc seems to be down for me, is this related to the improvements or is it just that I can't reach it and everybody else can ?

edit.

thanks to the people that tested it, ok so that seems to be my problem then, here is a traceroute of the last steps before it stops responding:

11 * pos-1-4-0-0-cr01.mclean.va.ibone.comcast.net (18.104.22.168) 251.887 ms 252.502 ms

12 pos-1-11-0-0-cr01.atlanta.ga.ibone.comcast.net (188.8.131.52) 267.698 ms 268.398 ms 234.520 ms

13 pos-1-13-0-0-cr01.dallas.tx.ibone.comcast.net (126.96.36.199) 227.691 ms * 153.851 ms

14 pos-0-13-0-0-cr01.losangeles.ca.ibone.comcast.net (18.104.22.168) 202.909 ms 204.094 ms 204.818 ms

15 * pos-0-14-0-0-cr01.sacramento.ca.ibone.comcast.net (220.127.116.11) 215.876 ms 216.499 ms

16 pos-0-15-0-0-ar01.oakland.ca.sfba.comcast.net (126.96.36.199) 219.741 ms 220.384 ms *

17 po-30-ur02.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net (18.104.22.168) 222.161 ms 223.248 ms 222.742 ms

18 te-8-4-ur04.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net (22.214.171.124) 224.225 ms 224.801 ms 225.416 ms

<comment><USER11> <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/searchyc.com>

up for me.

<comment><USER10> nice link by the way, thanks !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for developing and maintaining this, I use it several times a week to get context on news.yc posts and comments.</comment>


Try diffoscope online: one of the tools behind reproducible builds - <AUTHOR> https://try.diffoscope.org/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991094)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm getting error 500 when uploading 2 files (~500kb, rar). Probably got slammed with high traffic already.

<comment><USER4> Apologies for that. The machine ran out of disk space as I wasn't garbage- collecting containers properly.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you invest a spare $50k? - <AUTHOR> Mostly interested in the EU market/options but general advices are welcome. <comment><USER2> Under no circumstances should you invest in options. Options are risk hedges, not investments. You can't make money buying options for the same reason you can't make money buying insurance. (You can make money _selling_ options, just as you can make money selling insurance, but not as an amateur, and not with a piddling $50k in capital.)

Index funds are your best bet if you just want to put the money away and watch it grow without having to work at it. There are some other reasonable choices, like investing in your own education or startup. This doesn't necessarily mean paying tuition or hiring someone. It might mean using the money to pay for living expenses while you spend N months working on a project of your own. You will most likely not see a direct return, but you'll learn a lot, and you can leverage that knowledge in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER3> Vanguard index funds.

</comment><comment><USER4> iShares by Blackrock has a huge variety of country-specific and regional index funds available as ETFs (exhange-traded-funds):

[https://www.ishares.com/us/products/etf-product- list#!type=i...](https://www.ishares.com/us/products/etf-product- list#!type=ishares&tab=overview&view=list&fac=43511&fc=43537|43538|43539|43540|43541|43543|43544|43545|43550|43558|43561|43562|43568|43570|43571|43576|43577|43578|43579|43582|43583|43592|43593|43595|43605|43606|43607|43609|43612|44070|43614|43616|43617|43618|43621|43622|43624|43628|43629|43630|43631)

</comment><comment><USER5> "spare" : Choose a company that is undervalued that you think will be more valuable in a medium to long period of time. (You know, like Facebook or Tesla.)

"my savings" : A few index funds.</comment>


Can Oregon's first nano-satellite, OreSat, get students interested in space? - <AUTHOR> http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2018/01/oregons_first_nano-satellite_o.html <comment><USER2> I always wonder why articles like this are written from the perspective that things are done to get children/students/people to be interested in space. Perhaps I surround myself by a weird circle of people that are very interested but also lack the immediate opportunity to go do anything about it.

One figure we could look at is sales figures for games like Kerbal Space Program. It was one of the top selling games on Steam and has sold over 2 million copies [1] on that platform alone.

Don't get me wrong, I love that these ventures get media coverage, but I dislike that there is a stigma that people aren't interested in space.

[1][https://steamspy.com/app/220200](https://steamspy.com/app/220200)

</comment><comment><USER3> On the same topic, in just under 13 hours there will be a launch of another amateur cubesat, FOX-1D. You can follow the live launch blog here: [https://www.amsat.org/fox-1d-launch-live- blog/](https://www.amsat.org/fox-1d-launch-live-blog/)

<comment><USER4> That link is currently returning 404, because amsat.org is down:

> AMSAT web services are degraded due to emergency security maintenance. We > apologize for the outage.

([https://www.amsat.org/](https://www.amsat.org/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would hope so.

Program like STEM and STEAM are gaining popularity starting at a very young age and this is driving the increased popularity and attention.

[https://latechnews.org/raymond-ealy-founder- steamcoders/](https://latechnews.org/raymond-ealy-founder-steamcoders/) [https://latechnews.org/stem3-academy-open-house- november-4/](https://latechnews.org/stem3-academy-open-house-november-4/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if Free Geek can refurbish and donate some useful parts?

<comment><USER7> Its good to know my donations would have atleast some purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > NASA will give OreSat a free ride to the International Space Station. From > there, it will be shot out of the side of the space station to begin its > orbit. OreSat will begin falling back toward Earth, but moving at such a > high speed that it will pass some 4,000 times around the globe before it > descends and burns up in Earth's denser atmosphere.

Anyone know how they propel it out the side?

<comment><USER9> They use spring. Really, as simple as that

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

<comment><USER8> Ah, that makes sense. I figured they wouldn't have anything blasting out of the ISS, so I was wondering if it was some sling shot or mini-trebuchet apparatus.

<comment><USER10> Might be hard to make/use a trebuchet in space ;)

(Or at least low gravity)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that wasn't that brightest thought I've had. I guess I should have said catapult.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thesis Survey: The digital future of flying experience? - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1D3fw0U6aRxyyVqB-9-ghvooCs1anyacTfMnU-C4P5EY/viewform <comment><AUTHOR> As a student, I'm making a research on the behaviors and needs of air passengers while using digital technologies on board of airplanes.

Understanding needs and expectations is the best way to build solid drivers for digitization of airlines and cabin experience.</comment>


CIA to launch 'app store' for intelligence operatives via AWS - <AUTHOR> http://thestack.com/cia-aws-app-marketplace-270215

<comment><USER2> Anyone else wondering what a CIA SDK kit looks like? It must be awesome!</comment>


Attack on Australian Census site didn't register on global DDoS sensors - <AUTHOR> http://www.cso.com.au/article/604910/attack-australian-census-site-didn-t-register-global-ddos-sensors/ <comment><USER3> Turnbull is now hanging it on IBM:

[https://www.theguardian.com/australia- news/2016/aug/11/censu...](https://www.theguardian.com/australia- news/2016/aug/11/census-2016-malcolm-turnbull-shifts-blame-to-ibm-for- predictable-attack)

<comment><USER4> I've had the displeasure of working with IBM Global Services as a partner in several occasions. In one instance where we had a connectivity issue, it took weeks of discussions before we finally got everyone on a conference call including some of their senior engineers. We were simply trying to make a call to a web service as part of an integration with another company. IBM managed their network. We had supplied our IP addresses and the client had put through a firewall change request to the IBM support staff.

We just couldn't get our requests through. Finally on that last conference call, one of their engineers piped up. "Is this white list rule supposed to be bidirectional? All traffic going back to you is blocked.".

"No shit Sherlock, or how can a HTTP request get a response back", was my answer, or words to that effect in a more polite manner.

"But the change request form only mentioned incoming traffic" said the IBM project manger. I internally screamed.

This kind of thing has now happened several times with IBM on projects I've worked on. I know they charge amazingly large amounts of money for what they do. They appear to have an brilliant sales team, and a bunch of under qualified junior engineers that can't deliver. Over sell and under deliver. Maybe I've just been unlucky, but I don't have a high opinion of them.

<comment><USER5> >"No shit Sherlock, or how can a HTTP request get a response back", was my answer.

Aren't they configured on the basis of inbound/outbound connections? If they allowed inbound traffic you should still be able to get a response back.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't privy to their firewall configuration. But that's what their engineer said, made a change, and everything started working. I'm guessing the firewall configuration was non standard.

<comment><USER5> More likely they forgot or screwed up and tried to put the blame back on you.

<comment><USER4> God only knows. Whatever it was, my opinion of them remains the same. They're generally incompetent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Patrick Gray from the Risky Business podcast appears to have the inside scoop on what actually happened. Here's his latest sequence of tweets (link references below):

 _" The things I'm hearing about #CensusFail are absolutely mind boggling. I'll be on @theprojecttv tonight talking about it.

Geez, ya'know, rebooting your firewall when you haven't sync'd your ruleset to your secondary is kinda dumb, ABS. Also, relying exclusively on geoblocking from your ISP instead of actual, you know, REAL DDoS mitigations is also pretty fail.

As is declining your upstream provider's offer to help with said mitigations to save money.

The funniest part? They detected exfil, thought the DDoS was a distraction. That's when they pulled the pin. Was a false positive.

This also explains why ASD are involved -- they're running incident response on a fucking false positive! This can't get any more hilarious!

.@OaaSvc There was no exfil. It was their own reporting traffic to offshore that tripped the alerts. You can't make it up.

There's more: that "router" that went down for a few minutes? That was likely the firewall reboot. Secondary didn't kick in b/c no rules.

They didn't need to fix it.They needed to clear the state table because they had a whopping 2gbps of ICMP and DNS reflection traffic inbound

Please, oh please, read this sequence of Tweets all at once. Then sit back and let your mind BOGGLE."_

[https://twitter.com/riskybusiness/status/763581261487091712](https://twitter.com/riskybusiness/status/763581261487091712)

[http://risky.biz/censusfail](http://risky.biz/censusfail) // [https://twitter.com/riskybusiness/status/763605906047107073](https://twitter.com/riskybusiness/status/763605906047107073)

</comment><comment><USER7> The current running joke is that the DDoS was not detected as all the traffic originated from inside of Australia, primarily via home connections.

</comment><comment><USER8> So much fail from the Australian government technology wise recently. This is all despite supposedly having a "tech focused Prime Minister".

Ditching FTTP for FTTN while increasing in price and managing to slow down the rollout (copper is the future!). 25 mbit for everyone by 2016! No upgrade path! Actually make that 2020, and we don't care if you only get 25mit for 2 seconds at 3am and otherwise get 1kb that's good enough for us! (for the record, I believe FTTP would have been late and over budget as well, but at least you delivered FTTP's highway to FTTN's goat path)

An innovation push which cut funds to organisation's such as the CSIRO (invented usable WiFi etc...) and failed to mention the afore mentioned rollout at all, presumably because they know it is a waste of taxpayer money.

Followed by a promise that the Census website would not go down, which promptly crashed and burned instantly.

Then the blame game started with claims of a hack, followed by DDOS, followed by faulty hardware, followed by claims of all three. All the while, the Minister in charge, a security expert and the ABS all contradicting each other over what had happened. This for the low low price of 20+ million dollars [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cph9c4aUkAAyyuZ.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cph9c4aUkAAyyuZ.jpg:large)

In short the technology sector in Australia has been wrecked for the next 20 years along with the reputation of the ABS which was held in high regard by many. But its OK! We have a plan to dig more stuff out of the ground and sell it to China/Vietnam/Indonesia, and we promise next time it will work, especially when we move to online voting!

<comment><USER9> > Ditching FTTP for FTTN while increasing in price

This claim is very misleading when you consider that FTTP NBN's price was never properly realized. In their last progress report they were over budget and behind schedule despite hiring contractors to work overtime in the months before the election.

When you also consider they already moved the goalposts back a few times, it would be ludicrous to believe that FTTP would have been completed without going well over budget.

<comment><USER8> Actually I agree with you, on the basis that all large government projects are over budget and late.

However, when you sell an election on 29+ billion, fully costed ready to go, everyone online with 25 mbit by 2016 and then once in power, adjust to 56+ billion by 2020 you should be hit with the same laws that apply to bait and switch advertising.

Updated my original comment to reflect this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They designed the system to support 1,000,000 users per hour over 24 hours.

Of course the census is Tuesday evening so it's more like 20,000,000 users in one hour.

Politicians would argue that this sounds like a good test, but technology doesn't do political word games.

<comment><USER11> It's not every citizen (~23M) but rather per household (~10M) that would use the system. Not everyone is online or choose the online option so it'd be less than 10M users total but even a conservative back of a napkin estimate would show that in the after dinner hours on census night they'd have to be dealing with closer to 3M to 4M users per hour peaks.

Very badly planned. They even gloated that the 1M/hour peak the system was designed to deal with was twice what they needed and it'd all be fine even when lots of experts were pointing out that that wasn't going to cope.

<comment><USER12> I think every Australian has two weeks to complete the Census. Why they advertised August 9 as "Census Night" I don't know.

<comment><USER13> You're supposed to answer with respect to August 9 - it's a snapshot of every person in Australia as of that night.

<comment><USER12> [http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/getonli...](http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/getonline)

"Get online on August 9"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Slightly off-topic but I've been having an argument with my friend around the security of census data. I wonder if anybody on HN might be able to shed some light...

I made the comment that, potentially, a data breach could result in a flat table containing names, addresses, household incomes, etc being released online. This has obvious potential for easy identity theft, stalking, etc. Mainly due to the existence of name and address (since without these fields an abuser cannot target individuals or individual addresses).

My friend insists that it is impossible for a breach to release all of the census information in a denormalised form, as the names and addresses are "unlinked" from the rest of the data and stored in a separate table in a separate system.

This does not make sense to me. Do the ABS seriously remove the address column from their data? Wouldn't this cripple their ability to do spatial analysis on anything more granular than a suburb level? Security concerns aside, do they seriously pay 300m for data and then throw it away?

I wish the ABS would be a little more clear about exactly what they do with the data...

<comment><USER15> My understanding was that that was what they _used_ to do - <USER2> information would be used to aggregate data to Statistical Area 1, 2, 3 etc levels (see [http://nationalmap.gov.au/#share=s-fg7dcWhKqOxxyqyfbS43YsSKE...](http://nationalmap.gov.au/#share=s-fg7dcWhKqOxxyqyfbS43YsSKEkY)) which would then be kept. Starting around 2005 they started keeping address- specific data if you opted in, then from this census onwards they stopped giving you the choice.

[http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/privacy](http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/privacy)

<comment><USER14> Right, that makes more sense now. Great links, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's an obvious lie. Par for the course for the totally dysfunctional Coalition government, which hasn't even managed to pass a budget in three years.

<comment><USER17> As opposed to the previous, completely dysfunctional Labor/Green government, which turned a sizeable surplus into a huge deficit within the space of 5 years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Should add "Like most other attacks, " in front of the title.</comment>


My disabled son's gaming life in the World of Warcraft - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/disability-47064773 <comment><USER2> Previously posted two days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19104044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19104044)

<comment><USER3> This shouldn't be deleted, the title on this one is much better.

<comment><USER4> linking previous discussions is useful for those that might have missed the previous discussion. Like me :)

<comment><USER5> In particular, this comment from the other discussion is worth calling out (no, I didn't write it): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106955)

<comment><USER6> Is it? It's a complementary opinion, but a rather obvious one. I think the main reason why a reader may just dismiss that point of view is that the article simply doesn't give enough information about that (the relation with his parents, or the rest of his life in general), so thinking about it the way the comment presents it is just unsettling and in no way revealing. The article gives you the information to connect with the touching aspect of the story, and I don't feel like there's enough info to understand anything else of it.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the opinion expressed in that comment is as obvious or valueless as you say.

The article successfully manipulated me to only consider the heart-warming side of the situation, even though I have a disability myself (albeit a milder one, visual impairment with no impact on life expectancy). As I was growing up, the need to be independent was repeatedly emphasized to me. If the commenter's complementary opinion wasn't obvious to me, I expect it would be even less obvious to many readers.

Now, consider the negative consequences of a widely read article like this one for future people with that kind of disability. Will their parents or other involved adults even think about encouraging them to pursue a job or independence? I think not. That's why a comment like the one I pointed out here needs broader exposure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have more than 400 days of playtime (the actual time logged into the game) in World of Warcraft, mostly between being 15 and 22 and I don't regret a single second of it.

Most people not familiar with gaming don't understand that, but I have very fond memories, found friends I'm still in contact with and even achieved a level of competitiveness I'm still proud of today and mention it in my full CV (Arena #1 and Top3 world raiding guild for whose curious). And that for ~12€ a month in a time where I and my family had little money.

I still went out two to three times a week to do sports and occasionally met with friends apart from sports, but my fondest memories are about the time spent in this other world with a big circle of friends and a place in my guild, where I was appreciated.

My fondest memories about my earlier childhood are not only vacations or building wooden airplanes with my dad, but also beating Zelda Ocarina of Times.

Most people I met outside of IT and gaming don't understand that and even think it's sad. But I'm just glad I grew up in the time I did and had this amazing opportunity games and online gaming gave us.

</comment><comment><USER8> A moving article. I had a similar experience, although on a different scale, as I had lost most of my hearing at age 12. It was liberating for me to converse with people by writing in the chat in World of Warcraft, whereas I dreaded conversations in person, as they made me feel stupid and like a burden. I can only imagine how liberating it must've been for Mats. Rest in peace, Mats, I'm sure your friends will remember you for the rest of their lives.

</comment><comment><USER9> Poignant and touching story.

I met my wife on World of Warcraft 8 years ago, now we live together with our big family. We stopped playing a while ago but still have a close friend from our guild we see most years.

WoW has brought so many people together, sometimes in life changing ways.

</comment><comment><USER10> What a time to be alive. Amazing how we manage to create environments in which people with such severe physical conditions are able to find pleasure and belonging. While for so long, such a physical state would have rendered this impossible.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article went viral in Norway, helping lots of parents see the value gaming can have. Very touching how he was confined to a chair, but through RPing online could be whoever he wanted and had a positive impact on many people.

</comment><comment><USER12> I suppose they're good if you really do need to escape the reality you're in. But I regret the amount of time I spent playing MMO's as a child/teenager. I invested all my time in virtual worlds instead of the real one, and had no friends because of it. I grew out of it, but I wonder how different my life would be now if I had done so earlier.

<comment><USER13> Maybe you would have gotten into drugs, been seduced by a crazy person and ended up with a baby, or become rich. Cest la vie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A very touching story. Yet somehow I feel happy for him, that he had found his friends online.

I used to play a lot of MMO games when I was a teenager, not WoW exactly. I wish more kids played that genre nowadays. I think all the competitive games nowadays like dota2/lol/fortnite don't have the same feeling like MMOs. Obviously, you can find many friends in them too, but the culture is so much different. In MMO games you could just spend hours chatting with people and doing nothing else.

I'm sure there are many more cases like that and I think that MMO games are really one of the best experience in gaming. You can meet people from all over the world. It's a bit like traveling, but focused solely on people not on food/history, etc. Ofc, that's my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER15> Like other peers on this thread, I have at least a couple hundred days of playtime between the ages of 13 and 16. I played 9pm-2am m/t/w/f as a dwarf paladin main tank through ICC heroic 25 man-mode and as a pvp healer in 2v2 and 3v3 arenas on weekends.

Nearly every belief I now hold about what it means to be a team member, to commit to a shared and ambitious goal, I originally felt while working through the game with my fellow 24 guild mates. So much work is required to plan and coordinate with people, to re-invent new strategies after unrelenting defeat by bosses for many many months with no progress, etc.

Many of whom were my closest friends during those years!

Thanks very much for sharing :)

</comment><comment><USER16> I spent a lot of my 20s playing City of Heroes. I made a lot of good, if virtual, friends there and even met my wife. If you came to my house and looked at all the family pictures hanging on the wall, among the pictures of our kids, wedding, and grandparents you'd find a screenshot of our characters[1] which we refer to as "our first picture together."

[1][http://pharylon.github.io/uploads/fire_and_ice.jpg](http://pharylon.github.io/uploads/fire_and_ice.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER17> This hits close to home to me. I am disabled now (but I still work, of course!), but I wasn't then.

However I spent 10000s of hours on an online MUD called Godwars Apocalypse. I spent nearly all of my time helping people, finding and exploiting bugs, helping the game designers and programmers and just playing the game.

Then for reasons I can't at all recall, I had stopped playing the game for a while. In the interim, someone had accessed my account (seemed to have been from my main computer in fact. Cute practical joke :\ ) and told everyone that I had died.

I came back months later to play some more and I found out there were vigils, an entire area created for and named after me as if I was the in-game lore itself. Players were incredibly confused when I said it was me, and able to prove it by logging into all of my accounts and discuss previous private interactions in an intimate manner with a variety of players.

I was _incredibly_ touched. I didn't realize anyone cared that I existed. I just played the game and tried to make it a better place for the few hundred people that also enjoyed sitting in front of a black zMUD screen for 12+ hours a day.

That day that I came back truly changed my life. Outside of the game I was an in-compassionate jackass. I was crass and heartless. After that day I realized that every little thing you can do can mean something to a lot of people. It really did form my life (and my eventual hobbies and profession as an adult).

BUT.

I also learned something unfortunate.

Days later, when it was found out that "I had lied" (I did not! I didn't even know anything about me "dying") because "the IPs matched", everything was torn down. My characters were gutted. I was made fun of and I lost real life friends.

I became completely ostracized from the game, the community and 2 other gaming communities close to it. I was destroyed. I lost everything. Quite literally everything that mattered to me in my adolescent life.

Nobody believed me that I did not try to deceive them (and was wholly unaware of the situation until I logged back in). Nobody cared about the 10000s of hours I spent building the community, helping newbies (with in-game items I spent 100s of hours farming myself) or how much time I spent working testing the game so others could have a better experience.

I've always held this as a moment of, "They don't care about you until you're gone, but when you're back they go back to not caring again."

It did lead to my first programming job that really mattered to a group of people (another MUD, Cursed Lands), and my first major teaching experiences. Guess what my profession is now?

Fast forward to my mid-20s and I was diagnosed with a rather terrible chronic disease (I will likely die because of it, but not from it). I once again manage a community (of 10000s) of people as a hobby and after reading this article I can see what happened to Mats happening to me.

It makes me about as happy as it makes me sad. Hopefully I do a good enough job in enriching people's lives to matter as much as Mats did, or even as I did at one time.

And hopefully my brother/father/mother/friend doesn't decide to play a prank on me again.

<comment><USER17> As an extension to this, I'd like to clarify on the part where I mentioned that I lost real life friends.

Someone online went out of their way to 'dox' me (in the early 90s no less!) and contact everyone they could that may know me.

Awful things were said. A wide variety of things from me being a practicing satanist (with a screenshot of me role playing in game) to some strange elaborate claim that I had tried to defraud people online.

Quite the rollercoaster for someone that just wanted to go home and MUD every day after school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Man, this brings back memories of telling my mother's Runescape family of her passing...

</comment><comment><USER19> Brought tears to my eyes. What a great story.

I too have made a number of friends on WoW, and met some in person. You can truly meet some of the best people in that game.

\- Epicgrim @ Area 52 (currently)

</comment><comment><USER20> Very touching story.

I'm remembering one of the first touching stories of an influential MMORPG gamer disappearing because of her dead: A story known as "A Story About a Tree":

[https://www.raphkoster.com/games/essays/a-story-about-a- tree...](https://www.raphkoster.com/games/essays/a-story-about-a-tree/)

<comment><USER21> It's in the linked page, but the story was not actually true

<comment><USER20> Wow. Never realized that. I remember reading about this on the official site and there was actually a tree with a memorial in the game.

But perhaps it was unrelated.

:-(

<comment><USER21> I was a bit unclear. There was an actual memorial created. There was no evidence found that the user Karyn was a real woman who passed away. (The theory put forth in the news article was that it was a male role playing as a female).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is far more moving and touching than my own experience with WoW, but I did get my job through WoW - [https://ckluis.com/wow-landed-me-a-job-hobby- networking-work...](https://ckluis.com/wow-landed-me-a-job-hobby-networking- works-1405d7200dc5).

<comment><USER23> That is awesome. I've been raiding with the same hardcore guild since vanilla. It's amazing how many players are developers, sys admins, infrastructure, and even other professions like doctors and lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is someone cutting onions? What a beautiful story. RIP Mats. My condolences to your IRL and online family.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, I didn't expect to be taken on such an emotional ride. Great article, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER26> It reminds me of this year's Microsoft super bowl commercial, which focused io the Xbox adaptive controller: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM2QJO2IDFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM2QJO2IDFo)</comment>


My experience with a 'negative review' scammer. - <AUTHOR> http://westiseast.co.uk/blog/weird-seo-twitter-scam/

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't even worry about a subjective review like "this tea tastes like shit". Even if it's the finest quality tea in the world, someone is going to think it tastes like shit.

I would worry about reviews like, "ordered, never received product, called owner and he told me to 'fuck myself with a pointy stick'". That is significantly more damning, since it reads like an account of a factual event, rather than an uninformed opinion.

<comment><USER3> You have a good point there, it is impossible to define what is good and what not in flavors. It is like asking what is the best dog bread? And yes, the review about service is more important.

This guy (Brian) at the end admitted that he did what he did just because he was unfollowed in twitter. What a guy!

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely - good and bad is subjective, and I'm happy to accept that. My real anger came from the fact that these people were masquerading as professional tea reviewers, but then don't even have the decency to back up a negative review. If they'd written a long blog post slating my tea after ordering it, trying it fairly etc., then I would have been much more concerned with their opinions...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sad (though sometimes good) fact of the Internet: there are lots of oddballs out there.

Just as there are people who cut you up on the road or hit people for no reason in real life, there are people who'll randomly try to ruin your day with seemingly no motivation (even some people on HN!). Keep your head held high, gracefully conduct yourself, and let them enjoy steeping in their own bile (ooh, a tea joke!)

</comment><comment><USER5> Did you watch their tea review videos? OMG my 8 yr old could articulate a better description - like watching dumb and dumber. Maybe this was a case of professional jealousy. See what I mean here... [http://healthyprofessionals.teatra.de/2011/07/26/the-tea- sho...](http://healthyprofessionals.teatra.de/2011/07/26/the-tea-show- episode-23-suffuses-mixed-berry-red-rooibos/)

<comment><USER6> Wow, I really assumed you were exagerating but you were actually pretty accurate, they clearly know absolutely nothing about tea, or how to even have a semi-interesting conversation.

<comment><USER7> Plus, they just look plain shifty.

He seems unable to maintain eye contact with the camera and his gaze darts around. She seems agitated and keeps desperately staring at him.

I don't encourage anyone here to watch and increase their ad impressions. But in summary, they don't look like people you would ever want to spend time with voluntarily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for the warning. To be fair, even big "companies" like yelp.com have been running extortion rackets for years and are still the darlings of the technical press.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any more info on how yelp.com has been running "extortion rackets"?

I don't know much about yelp, and don't use it much, but have generally been led to believe that they are a good company (admittedly, by the tech press) so it'll be interesting to hear if you have actual examples of people getting scammed.

<comment><USER10> I personally don't know of anyone who owns a company that has been apart of any Yelp Extortion, but there has been several cases brought against them.

[http://www.google.com/search?aq=0&oq=yelp+exto&sourc...](http://www.google.com/search?aq=0&oq=yelp+exto&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=yelp+extortion)

<comment><USER11> It seems that everything is one year old or older, so there is a hope that they don't continue this behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a consumer I pretty much rule out negative reviews where the company in question responds sensibly.

Sometimes it gives me a more favorable view of the company in question, actually.

The only time I really pay attention to stuff like this is when there is a bunch of negative reviews and the company never responds to any of them.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, methinks the general rule is: You don't really know a company until you see their reaction to shit happening. Deflecting blame and stonewalling are the worst kinds of response.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I kind of agree - honest answers, acceptance of criticism etc. are key, especially when your talking about small companies that can't hide behind their size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Should have gone here instead. I'm pretty sure that extortion is against Twitter's TOS.

<https://support.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/15789>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link glimcat - I'm going to see how it pans out after a few days. Tweets fade fast, and if this scammer doesn't continue posting negative reviews, then I'm happy with that.

<comment><USER15> This is sometimes the best way. If you get them blocked from Twitter they may take that as meaning "the fight is on" and register many fake accounts to continue posting the reviews from.

<comment><USER16> Not doing the right thing for fear of retribution? Staying quiet essentially allows them to do the same to others.

Fear should never dictate the decision process. They need to be reported.

<comment><USER15> If the damage done is somewhere between zero and negligible and you don't know you are not the only one affected, inaction is sometimes the best policy. The idiot will get bored from getting no reaction and fade away. Reporting them won't stop them doing the same thing to others and more and inaction will - they can do the same thing to others using new accounts just as well as they can re-hound you with new accounts.

It is the same as arguing with idiots, as the old saying goes: they will drag you down to their level then "win" through a mix of experience and perseverance. (please note: this is a general comment, I'm not intending to call you an idiot at all here!). I dealt with bullies as lot in earlier life and random fools on the Internet are absolutely no different (aside from getting their apparent confidence due to relative anonymity rather than size of fighting experience). Sometimes ignoring them is the best policy for all (though, of course, use your judgement).

Of course if they are causing appreciable damage, the picture is different. And don't just report them to twitter. If they are trying to extort money from your business, report them to the relevant legal authority (if one is clear, this unfortunately can be difficult to determine).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't think the negative reviewer fully understands how Twitter works. In the thread you link to he says that he didn't delete the tweet, and that they "disappear after a certain number of days". They don't. Here's the tweet you're referring to (28 Jul):

[http://twitter.com/#!/FoodBlogTeaShow/status/966666235864719...](http://twitter.com/#!/FoodBlogTeaShow/status/96666623586471936)

and here's another from 14 hours ago:

[http://twitter.com/#!/FoodBlogTeaShow/status/981033271197696...](http://twitter.com/#!/FoodBlogTeaShow/status/98103327119769601)

I can't tell if that second one is supposed to be sarcastic or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd made the mistake on Twitter originally - I didn't see the tweet in my "Mentions" page, but it was still there on his feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _I've also learned a valuable lesson - however angry you are, openness and honesty will always win over in the end. Structure a logical argument, stand your ground, and idiots/scammers like Brian DiVita will expose themselves without you needing to lift a finger._

I fear you've reached the wrong conclusion. Haters gonna hate, and there is no way you can answer them all. The more you sell, the more crazy people will be among your "customers" and some of them will have a bad day and take it out all on your tea and you. The victory over one hater may make you happy for a day, but you can't scale it.

Focus on encouraging public praise from your happy customers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Haha! Now I get it "My angry tweet at wasn't directed towards you in first place.You Unfollowed me. I insulted your tea. Now go away. " /bigfacebrian

So he insulted the tea itself (which he hasn't even tried) because he was unfollowed on Twitter. That's illegal and you can send him a cease or desist letter telling him to unpublish any unfounded slander. However, just carry and selling your tea any ignore this douche bag.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's a good lesson to 'assume good faith' where possible, even with negative reviews. Otherwise it may flare up a PR blunder. eg getting personal with the reviewer rather than responding with class like this guy did.

<comment><AUTHOR> thankyou. I don't think I responded with too much class actually, and after I'd starting posting publicly about this, I felt like a douchebag myself. It could have easily backfired, so I think you're right. Assume good faith first, be very polite all the time, get your facts together, and then make your case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's a shame the OP doesn't ship to the US. Hacker News US people would probably buy a lot of tea and this is good exposure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep - I will be shipping to the US very soon, but we're a new business. I've been testing supply chain, quality and bedding in the business before I take on the world :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately your experience is not something new and I've heard of considerably worse involving pointing dodgy links at competitors sites, "review" sites that charge to rebut a negative review, etc. It really sucks that people behave like this but good on you for the outing, maybe it will help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - I can't be the first person whose had this "give me cash or I'll post negative reviews" scam. What can you say - the world is full of disreputable people.

Part of the blog post was about setting the record straight, and part of it was also to remind other people in similar situations they're not alone when this kind of thing happens. It's effectively bullying, and the worst part of bullying is suffering in silence.

<comment><USER22> Totally agree, as I say: well done for getting it off your chest. If people don't speak up about it things are unlikely to change. Though obviously if there is any justification whatsoever to the claim scratching that itch may be bad news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Perhaps make a blog post about this (more detailed, with proof of this scum attempting to extort you) and let the tea lovers know to not follow their recommendations.

I'd like to think if anyone ever tried to do that to me, I'd be replying back with a response 10x fold.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, you've now nicely turned a negative review into some positive attention. Bookmarked for next time I run out of tea.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think you did the right thing in defending yourself.

Suppose I was to stumble across an argument like that about any product/startup/business/whatever I'll almost certainly believe the one who argues in good grammer, without spelling mistakes and without vulgar tones. I think you did the best one can do.

</comment><comment><USER25> What this kind of scammers don't realize is that internet and subsequent proliferation of social media networks has leveled the playing field to a large extent. So, if people who are being arm-twisted become more vocal about it, it might come back to bite the scammers.

</comment><comment><USER26> Kudos to the author. His research/due-diligence in tracking this guy illuminates to the community his nefariousness. If everyone took this type of a pro-active defense in injustice, the frequency would be much reduced.

</comment><comment><USER27> "406 Following 350 Followers"

is not exactly a position of great influence.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, you're right. However, most of those followers are other tea bloggers, tea companies and tea industry people. It's a small community. I'm new to the business, so an 'established' tea blogger posting lies about my company can have a really negative impact.

<comment><USER27> I see. It does seem that this guy is blatantly an idiot, which hopefully limits his influence... not that being so prevents one from being taken seriously in politics and other realms these days, I suppose. Bringing this extortionary behavior to public attention is exactly the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting story. Well, this Brian guy is an idiot ("You unfollowed me. I insulted your tea. Now go away!"). Really?? But what I like most is the last comment on teatra: "Reviewers who judge about a tea quality from the point of someones followunfollow in twitter is… well such people earn 5bucks a week. Period." Nuff said :)

By the way, I need to try that stuff. Cheers from Hong Kong.

</comment><comment><USER29> This isn't particularly on topic so I'll keep it brief. On your site you mention delivering via Amazon UK; I was curious how this works or if you had any links that explained the process better? I'm currently dabbling with the idea of a simple site and this isn't something I've seen before as a way of handling deliveries. Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> there's positives and negatives to using Amazon FBA shipping service. I'd be happy to help you with a bit of information about my experience with them so far. There's contact details here: <http://westiseast.co.uk/about/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This scammer has a scary bplan. I mean what would you do if the scammer sets up a bunch of twitter accounts and posting negative reviews and then demands money?

<comment><USER31> But if he becomes more than a very minor irritation he'll get sued or even arrested. I can't imagine what he's doing is legal, and his emails are evidence. Extortion in the flesh works a lot better because you can threaten someone and lie about it later. This guy is banking on the fact that it's just not worth the money and time to squash him like a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> (Just because you don't ship to the US doesn't mean he hasn't tried your tea, just that it's unlikely). But I like the rest of the post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right - it's extremely unlikely. The fact is, as a small business, I make it a point of communicating with my first treasured customers, so I know almost all of them by name. In almost all cases, I know how they've arrived at my business via friends, recommendations, family etc. And given the situation, I made a very confident guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The site appears to be down for me and could not find any cache links. Anyone else facing this problem?

<comment><USER34> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://westiseast.co.uk/blog/weird- seo-twitter-scam/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This concerns me because I can see it reaching an even bigger scale across all markets, especially in light of these new "reputation monitor" rackets where companies try to improve small b/m reputation online in places like Yelp & Urban Spoon.

Right now, there isn't any easy way to defend against it.

</comment><comment> Mr-Swiss Wow, all this over some tea? I must try your tea.

</comment><comment><USER36> "You unfollowed me. I insulted your tea. Now go away!" These kinds of people make me loose all hope in humanity.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think you are righht to stand up for yourself, but in practical terms, it is doubtful his tweet wouldve ever been seen by any of your potential customers. It's not like Yelp, where the business listin serves as a repository for reviews and is often the first Google result.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, you're right. In retrospect, for my own sanity and sleep, I would have left this alone. But I guess the anger rises and emotions get the better of us all, and so I fought back. The business is something I've poured my heart and soul into, so I really responded poorly I think. Anyone who has been in a real fight (physical or mental) knows, even when you win, it doesn't feel good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Not too dissimilar from the BBB, which is a total scam/protection racket... You have an "F" rating... now pay us $1000 to "rate" you again and review that rating. 3 days later Boom you have an A.

More: <http://feefighters.com/blog/the-bbb-is-a-scam/>

<comment><USER39> For anyone else interested in this topic (or doubtful about the claim) 20/20 did an cover story on this: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw&feature=player_embedded)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I give you a hint. His domain is German, but he is in the USA. To be able to do so, he needs an Admin in Germany responsible to receive any complaints and legal actions. <http://denic.de/domainbedingungen.html> Read §3. Don't have the time to translate, I used google: "If the domain holder is not domiciled in Germany, he appoints a Germany-based administrative contact shall also be the person authorized by § 184 of the Zivilpro-zessordnung, § 132 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, § 56, paragraph 3 of the Administrative Procedure Code and § 15 of the administrative procedure Act and the relevant provisions of the Administrative procedure law of the countries."

I doubt he has one, and our laws are very strict about scamming. The keyword here is "Abmahung", which can become very expensive ..

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a shared community site, with hosted blogs. The maintainers of that site and other bloggers all seem fine, and I think there's possibly some connection with Germany, hence the hosting. I contacted the owners, so they should be aware of what one of their bloggers is doing. It's up to them if they take further action.

<comment><USER40> There is no connection to Germany. <http://www.whois.net/whois/teatra.de> "www.teatra.de (22.214.171.124) located in United States" <http://teatra.de/about/>

And in fact they violate the German law about telemedia. <http://www.gesetze- im-internet.de/tmg/__5.html> Just an email adress and no phone number, no registrar of companies or entry in the commercial register in Germany and I'm very sure the admin won't be able to reply in German.

This means they will have to pay for the Abmahnung/warning from a lawyer between 800 and 1.000 € or if they don't provide the information within a given time a fee of 50.000 € for violating § 16 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 TMG (TMG = telemedia law).

The German law doesn't tolerate "unavailable" internet commerce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Chinese Tea from the Min River Tea farm tastes like shit. Yeah I said it.

<comment><AUTHOR> crap....I lost enough sleep last night over this :)

<comment><USER41> glad you have a sense of humor about all this. sounds like your tea business is ultimately coming along. What business doesn't start with customers that are friends of friends...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask 37signals: Numbers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/749-ask-37signals-numbers

<comment><USER2> I have 3-4 accounts with them, only 1 active. I'm sure there are other people who have multiple inactive accounts.

EDIT:

I don't mean to dis-credit them. They have a steady income from those who like to use their web-apps. They are also becoming the "role-model" for small web- dev shops.

<comment><USER3> every free webapp has inactive/fake accounts. do you think myspace has 100M+ active users? i have a friendster account that's been collecting dust since 2003.

<comment><USER2> MySpace posted unique users registered, traffics, pageviews etc. So out of those 100M+ users, I'm sure they have higher rate of active users.

The other thing to consider is the limitation of 37signals product might raise the number of users. For example: you can only have 1 project in Basecamp. A solution for this would be to create another account.

<comment><USER4> That restriction is only for the free version.

<comment><USER2> Excuse me for not pointing out the limitation is there for "free account". Either way my point stands still. There are people who don't want to pay for their service thus they chose this way. Once they're done with the project, they just don't bother login-in anymore. Kinda one-off situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But Rails doesn't scale!

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious to see some hacker discussion on this, though I can't think of anything to contribute myself...

<comment><USER7> Me too. The numbers look good. I presume they must be nicely profitable for those numbers. Unless the hardware and energy costs are too high (rails is a bit power hungry).

I wonder why they took on investment from Jeff Bezos - maybe it really it just to have involvement of Jeff Bezos (which would be entirely sensible) not to do with money.

Good on them I say.

<comment><USER8> It's probably not about the money.

Nice numbers that they have there, much more than I expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Stupid follow-up question for everyone (with no right answer):

Of all of your resources (time, knowledge, attention, focus, energy, passion,...), what would you say is the "split" between application development and infrastructure building/maintenance?

For me: 90% app dev, 10% infrastructure. I didn't realize people spent so much resource on the latter.</comment>


Apply HN: Synchrony – A peer-to-peer hyperdocument editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Psybernetics/Synchrony
This is a caching proxy that lets people get on the same page and edit together.
It features a distributed friends list and easily configurable overlay networks so people can create private filesharing networks just by picking a name.
Should also feature WebRTC teleconferencing as part of the encrypted chat RPC.
It decentralises HTTP /IN PLACE/ with no substituting existing URLs for content hashes. It should be able to utilise fseek to retrieve hypermedia objects at specific start bytes after dividing the reported file size to effectively torrent
CC-BY YouTube videos or other sizeable objects from anyone else who's already retrieved the object and decided they're OK with serving the data.
Just needs porting to Golang and lots of testing.
The revenue model I have in mind is similar to the mainline Bittorrent client with an optional ad in the installer. <comment><USER2> This is very interesting.

Couldn't it work a browser extension that propagates changes to other connected clients via WebRTC?

Obviously the caching proxy is genius, but I'm just thinking loud here.

<comment><AUTHOR> It could. I've considered integrating it directly into Chromium but feel it's more helpful to vendors to provide them with a reference implementation in a readable language without welding it to a specific browsers' internals just yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a cool technology

> Just needs porting to Golang

What will that give you? If it's working now, why rewrite it?

How will you get users? How will you make money?

What could I use this for besides filesharing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Statically compiled binaries. Runtime support for Android and iOS. Faster transfer rates.

Word of mouth and routine advocacy. Small fee in the app store (2 dollars or so). It will always be open source. The cost is for the convenience of a pre- compiled copy.

Browsing and editing the web with your family. Never really forfeiting domain names. Never ever needing to pay for static site hosting. Never having to fear censorship from well resourced actors.</comment></comment>