Ask HN: You were and entrepreneur and now you're not. Why? - <AUTHOR>

Success and retirement? Gave up? Different path opened? Decided having a family was important? <comment><USER2> I started Textfyre in 2007. At first I was just trying to build Interactive Fiction (text story games, also known as IF) games and sell them. Once I realized there was no captive audience for such things, I nearly quit. But then I noticed my kids elementary school textbooks. They sucked. I also noted how stressful the entire testing regiment had become.

So I thought maybe IF could solve the problem. So I pivoted to an ed-tech firm and though selling games to schools was a better model. This led to actually getting a team together. I had a CEO, CFO, teachers, marketing help, testing expert, and many supporters. We had the basics of an "embedded testing" web application built. We actually managed to get the attention of The Gates Foundation and talked with them for several months.

In the end, The Gates Foundation focused their efforts at the big players (like Pearson) and we were left out in the cold. My team disbanded and I gave up.

Of course now "embedded testing" is all the rage (there was just an NPR story about it), but unless you're one of the big players, you're not getting anywhere.

I have another idea I'm researching, but I'm much more pragmatic about it than I was with Textfyre. I'll build it on my own, spend as little money as possible, test it, and see what happens.

It's very hard to be a first-time unproven entrepreneur. If you manage to succeed and get one exit, you're golden and investors will hand over money without really asking any questions. Once they know you can "execute", they will support you 100%.

The trick is to learn how to execute. I'm still learning.

</comment><comment><USER3> The grind is quite difficult and long. It can take 1-3 years for a good idea and a good product to gain traction. In the mean time, you have to reduce your spending and work crazy hours in order to stay afloat. The previous comment about it being lonely as a founder is very true. Typically founders and other corporate leaders have no one to discuss their problems with and few people who understand their unique challenges.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't speak for myself, but I've done quite a few one-off MVPs for people who stopped being entrepreneurs.

The most common reason is that they weren't willing to sacrifice the time/money involved in starting up, and then they quit. They typically had high-paying corporate jobs and weren't willing to give up the income.

A lot of people have an "if you build it, they will come" attitude about _any good idea_ , not just the ones that people are truly clamoring for.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am an entrepreneur still.

It is a hard long lonely slog. You spend most of your daylight hours working and most of your weekends working too. When your friends are all out partying you are catching up on sleep. BUT you obviously have a far greater chance of the big payout than they do...

My company is semi passive income so thinking of a "normal job" on the side just to interact with others.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's lonely.

I'm looking for a job so I can have coworkers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Personally, I came to believe that the expected payout of entrepreneurship is not anywhere near break even. Just like a roulette wheel is expected to pay out .97 for every dollar over that long haul (.03 house cut), accounting for all possible outcomes, including "jackpots", I started to feel like the expected payout of any given entrepreneurial effort wasnt worth the investment. Sure, some end up like Uber or Paypal. But the vast silent majority are failures.

There is some nonmonetary value in giving it a shot, I guess, but that value diminishes with each successive failure, even as the chance of success increases as a function of one's previous experience.

A friend and I were remarking recently that for all our entrepreneurial effort {10+ years each) and meeting with other entrepreneurs, we don't know _anyone_ who has "made it". (A guy from my class in college sold a company for 170 mil, but I didn't know him before.) That's dozens or hundreds of people trying and zero successes.

In short, I think the odds are much longer than most are willing to believe, and that sapped my motivation to keep trying.</comment>


The way we think about charity is dead wrong (TED Talk) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html?awesm=on.ted.com_Pallotta&utm_content=awesm-publisher&utm_medium=on.ted.com-static&utm_campaign&utm_source=facebook.com <comment><USER2> Interesting talk about how the role of growth and non-profits. But I was put off by the very weak argumentation and the reactions by the sympathetic audience to unwarranted claims.

This case is suitable for a debate, rather than a monologue.</comment>


Beyond Ajax: Software Development, Two Years from Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.cio.com/article/160650/Beyond_Ajax_Software_Development_Two_Years_from_Now

<comment><USER2> The article screams "Enterprise" out loud. Every other sentence has "IT department" or "infrastructure" in it. What a boring space, who cares where they are moving...

Besides, since when Laslo, Sun and CodeGear became experts on where technology is moving? Everyone on their list, with a notable exception of Adobe, has NO solid reputation for being an expert in future software trends. Just don't mention Java please - it did not become what Sun wanted it to be.

Without someone from Google or Microsoft, true software technology trend setters of the past couple of decades, that interview has little value.

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh? There are three people from Microsoft quoted in the article.

Of course the article has a tilt towards the interests of CIOs and IT managers -- it's on CIO.com. But I'm surprised that you don't recognize that's less about "does this individual really have the ability to predict the future" than "these are the guys building the most commonly used development tools." If a dev tool makes it easy for most developers to do something simply without the need for deep domain knowledge (i.e. follow a wizard), then by golly that'll be something that's commonly done. If the people who control the next round of dev tools think something is unnecessary, it will be left for programmers to do manually, "the hard way."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ug, another one of those n-page articles with about 100 words per page, and no single-page option. I gave up after the first page.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Linux distro for an old Laptop - <AUTHOR>

So I'm looking for a simple and possibly lightweight Linux distro to run on my old laptop. (32-bit, 1Gb RAM, crummy processor)  It runs like a dog these days, and I'm in the market for something that isn't Ubuntu.  (for no real reason other than I've used Gnome, Unity, and now KDE on my desktop, and I like trying new things. And I'd prefer something that doesn't tax my struggle factory of a computer too much)<p>I also kicked around the idea of making it a server, and just letting it run, but I don't really have the need for that now, and the fan on this thing is like a helicopter taking off kind of annoying. <comment><USER2> I have a similar laptop: 32-bit, 1Gb RAM, 1.6Ghz atom, purchased years ago on the cheap. I run the latest Ubuntu desktop edition and am able to run everything that I need (mostly Rails + remote services over SSH tunnels). I can even stream Hulu, though the video does sometimes lag.

I don't have personal experience with any other distros, but a friend of mine has an equally antiquated laptop running the latest Fedora which he claims is better than an abacus. YMMV.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. One reason I didn't want to go that route was that the Unity bar on the left of the screen takes up too much space on a 13in screen, and I'm not confident I can get the resolution to run right, cuz I can never quite get my graphics card drivers sorted out right in Ubuntu.

<comment><USER3> From the user login screen, select the classic desktop from the bar at the bottom. This works well on my machine with roughly the same spec.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I think I heard they'd removed this in Ubuntu 11.10. It's there on 11.04, at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's in 11.10 too, it's the gear right in the login box, as opposed to the bottom of the screen.

edit: I've become a fan of KDE recently, and I've been able to get it looking and working the best, so that's what it is for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have had good success with tinycore linux on underpowered machines</comment>


Procedural Textures in HTML5 Canvas - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.ca/2012/01/procedural-textures-in-html5-canvas.html

<comment> adam-a This looks pretty cool, Perlin noise is used all over the place in procedural content generation. I recall Minecraft's terrain is generated using it.

I have no idea why the author didn't include a usable demo though. It would be nice to try out the texture generation without copy-and-pasting, saving and running the code.

</comment><comment><USER2> Threw it up at <http://www.simcop2387.info/texture.html> since there isn't a demo that I found on that page. Seems to be a bit slow but interesting idea still.</comment>


Why a cocktail of microbes could give protection against disease - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/30/children-leukaemia-mel-greaves-microbes-protection-against-disease <comment><USER2> Your tummy contains a micro system that is essential to your health. That is why eating food which have nutrients for those microbes are good for your health. There is also link between these microbes and your brain.

This is also why eating food feed with antibiotics is bad for you because it kills the good bacteria in the tummy.

</comment><comment><USER3> discussion 7 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120082)

</comment><comment><USER3> "A causal mechanism for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (Mel Greaves)"

Nature Reviews Cancer volume 18, pages 471–484 (2018)

(paywall) [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41568-018-0015-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41568-018-0015-6)

PDF(free): [https://www.tuseb.gov.tr/enstitu/tacese/yuklemeler/ekitap/cs...](https://www.tuseb.gov.tr/enstitu/tacese/yuklemeler/ekitap/cshastaliklari/all.pdf)

Latest from cancer scientist Mel Greaves: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=Mel%20Gr...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=search&term=Mel%20Greaves)

</comment><comment><USER4> The actual title is "'For 30 years I've been obsessed by why children get leukaemia. Now we have an answer'", but the submitter's choice of title is more succinct and descriptive.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why not use existing probiotics like Kefir in the clinical trials rather than reinvent a new mix.

<comment><USER6> Reasons not to include: How do you know the particular mix in a particular batch of Kefir is appropriate for Leukaemia? How do you control batch-batch variance to get a large enough _n_ to power the study adequately.

Of course you may have picked the wrong assortment in your study -- oops. Then again people _do_ get leukaemia, some of whom have presumably drunk Kefir. It would need its own study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reads a bit like snake-oil yakult.

The article presents hypothetical causes of leukaemia as fact, when they are not evidenced by current science.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if all the vaccinations in the first year wouldn't qualify as a "sickness" or several sicknesses as far as the immune system is concerned?</comment>


Attacking machine learning with adversarial examples - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/blog/adversarial-example-research/ <comment><USER2> "attackers could target autonomous vehicles by using stickers or paint to create an adversarial stop sign that the vehicle would interpret as a 'yield' or other sign"

yeah, this article needs to go to the top of HN and stay there for a while

<comment><USER3> I wonder if such "patterns" could find use in clothing or as bumper stickers. I can envision this sort of thing taking off as a counter-culture, or anti- technology social weapon. It certainly wouldn't be hard to produce and iterate on.

I imagine it would be hard to enforce, let alone legislate against subtle visual cues that trigger machine vision signals.

Interesting times lie ahead...

<comment><USER4> People have been using a similar idea to counter facial recognition.

[https://cvdazzle.com/](https://cvdazzle.com/)

<comment><USER5> More recently, CMU made glasses that can make you show up as someone else. [http://qz.com/823820/carnegie-mellon-made-a-special-pair- of-...](http://qz.com/823820/carnegie-mellon-made-a-special-pair-of-glasses- that-lets-you-steal-a-digital-identity/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Adversarial examples are just one way to prove that deep learning (deep convolutional nets) fail at generalizable vision. It's not a security problem, it's a fundamental problem.

Instead, ask yourselves why these deep nets fail after being trained on huge datasets -- and why even more data doesn't seem to help.

The short answer is that mapping directly from static pixel images to human labels is the wrong problem to be solving.

Edit: fixed autocorrect typo

<comment><USER7> "Adversarial examples are just one way to prove that deep learning fail at generalization"

Do you know what proof is? Adversarial examples demonstrate that there is one esoteric failure mode of current deep learning models, one that for all we know is present in human vision (we can't take derivatives with respect to the parameters of our own neurons). It will likely be solved in the next few years. At a minimum you start training on adversarially generated examples.

This response is absolute hyperbole and clearly devoid of any factual knowledge of the nature of deep conv nets and their properties.

<comment><USER6> Training on adversarial examples doesn't solve the fundamental problem, it merely tries to plug the holes. But in such high dimensional spaces there are many many holes to be plugged. :)

Agreed the failure mode may seem esoteric, but note that OpenAI is making a big deal about them.

A non-esoteric way to demonstrate the lack of generalization is to feed a deep conv network real world images (from outside the dataset). Grab a camera and upload your own photo. Roboticists who try to use deep conv nets as real world vision systems see these failures all the time.

<comment><USER7> FYI, @OpenAI:

"At OpenAI, we think adversarial examples are a good aspect of security to work on because they represent a concrete problem in AI safety that can be addressed in the short term."

[https://openai.com/blog/adversarial-example- research/](https://openai.com/blog/adversarial-example-research/)

Hardly proof that deep learning is fundamentally flawed.

Regarding real world issues, these issues come up when you don't separate training and test (and real world) sets properly. My worries would be with implementation.

<comment><USER6> I'm certainly not saying that deep learning is fundamentally flawed. It's a great method, very powerful. (Excellent algorithm.)

I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect good generalization in deep convnets that learn mappings from static images to human labels. (Wrong problem.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm actually wondering how much the no-free-lunch theorem for data compression affects adverserial examples. A neural network can be conceptualized as an extremely efficient compression technique with a very high decoding cost[1]; the NFLT implies that such efficiency must have a cost. If we follow this heuristic intuitively we're led to the hypothesis that an ANN needs to expand its storage space significantly in order to prevent adversarial examples from existing.

[1] -- consider the following encoding/decoding scheme: train a NN to recognize someone's face, and decode by generating random images until one of them is recognized as said face. If this works then the Kolmogorov complexity of the network must exceed the sum of the complexities of all "stored" faces.

</comment><comment><USER9> So what features are those networks actually learning? What are thy looking for? They can not be much like features used by humans because the features used by humans are robust against such adversarial noise. I am also somewhat tempted to say that they can also not be to different from the features used by humans because otherwise, it seems, they would not generalize well. If they just learned some random accidental details in the trainings set, they would probably fail spectacularly in the validation phase with high probability but they don't. And we would of course have a contradiction with the former statement.

So it seems that there are features quite different from the features used by humans that are still similarly robust unless you specifically target them. And they also correlate well with features used by humans unless you specifically target them. Real world images are very unusual images in the sense that almost all possible images are random noise while real world images are [almost] never random noise. And here I get a bit stuck, I have this diffuse idea in my head that most possible images do not occur in the real world and that there are way more degrees of freedom into direction that just don't occur in the real world but this idea is just too diffuse so that I am currently unable to pin and write down.

<comment><USER6> > I have this diffuse idea in my head that most possible images do not occur > in the real world and that there are way more degrees of freedom into > direction that just don't occur in the real world but this idea is just too > diffuse so that I am currently unable to pin and write down.

Yes! You're on the right track! The number of degrees of freedom of images of pixels and textures is HUGE. There is not enough data to practically learn directly from those images. So the deep networks are starved for data -- even with the big datasets they are trained on. (It's only thanks to the way they are set up they do well when tested on very similar images, like sharp hi-res photos. But they fail to generalize to other kinds of images.)

So how can you reasonable reduce these degrees of freedom?

It turns out that the continuity of reality itself provides a powerful constraint that can reduce the degrees of freedom. See, when a ball rolls along, this physical event is not just a collection of textures to be memorized. It's an ordered sequence of textures that vary in a consistent and regular way because of many learnable physical constraints (like lighting).

So, it turns out you can reduce the dimensionality by making a particular kind of large recurrent neural net learn to predict the future in video. Our very preliminary testing shows it works shockingly well.

<comment><USER10> That sounds very interesting is there somewhere I can keep up with the progress?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was a presentation at defcon 2016 about another software package that attacked other deep learning models. See

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAGDpJFFM2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAGDpJFFM2A)

[https://github.com/cchio/deep-pwning](https://github.com/cchio/deep-pwning)

</comment><comment><USER12> Are there any examples of these kinds of adversarial patterns that don't look like noise?

While it is pretty easy to add noise to another image, it isn't exactly easy to do it to a real object. The noise wouldn't remain the same as you change perspective with respect to the sign, which would likely change its effectiveness.

<comment><USER13> [https://cvdazzle.com](https://cvdazzle.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't see that image without thinking of Snow Crash. This is almost literally Snow Crash for neural nets.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone want to make a mobile app that emits 'noisy' light so when you use your phone in public CCTV facial recognition fails?*

I'd be interested to know if this is a viable concealment strategy. It might only be effective at night or low light situations, so sunlight doesn't wash out the noise. It would be pretty subtle to use as well, how many people do you see walking around with their noses stuck to a screen?

* For research purposes only, of course.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've also been interested in using adversarial examples in extracting sensitive info from models. Both extracting unique info from the training set (doesn't seem feasible but I can't prove it) or doing a "forced knowledge transfer" when a competitor has a well trained model and you don't.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if adversarial examples can be deliberately used as a kind of steganography? Kind of like a hidden QR code. On the surface, the product looks a panda, with deliberately added signal. Under the hood, it is classified as gibbon. It could be used to verify the authenticity of a particular product.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a defensive measure, why can't random noise just be added to the image prior to classification attempt?

<comment><USER19> The issue is essentially due to the curse of dimensionality. Since your input is very high dimensional, you can find some direction where you don't have go very far to maximize some other output. You can find a few of these adversarial examples and add them to the training set, but there are going to be an exponential number of other directions where you only have to go a little farther. So you can't just add all these perturbations to your training set because there are too many of them. It's a hard problem. (I've been thinking about this issue a lot for my research...)

<comment> m-j-fox I think she means you can add white noise to the front end making the output a little bit non-deterministic. Since it won't give the same confidence number twice, it frustrates gradient descent.

<comment><USER19> Just adding white noise won't work. If you add white noise to an image the NN will make almost exactly the same prediction. The issue with adversarial images is that you add a _very particular_ perturbation to the image, not just any perturbation at all.

<comment><USER20> I think the idea proposed is that if you add white noise on top of the adversarial perturbation, it will destroy that very particular perturbation.

<comment><USER21> It won't destroy the perturbation. There is a low dimensional manifold along which the cost function will decrease/increase. The adversarial perturbation lies on that manifold, but random white noise (which is a random high dimensional vector) will have close to zero length with high probability when projected onto the manifold and hence won't affect the cost function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's like 'fake news', but for computers.

<comment><USER23> You're right. Like fake news, it's sometimes hard to identify an adversarial example because it exploits weaknesses in perception or judgement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Without knowing much about ML, it seems that using two (or more) very different methods could be a reasonable defense; if the methods are sufficiently different then it will get exponentially harder to find a gradient that fools all the methods; what to do when the outputs strongly disagree is a good question, but switching to a failsafe mode seems better than what we have now.

<comment><USER25> These adversarial inputs have been shown to generalize to separately trained models.

<comment><USER24> I was thinking use the same training set but different ML techniques; It's been almost 20 years since I took an AI class, but RNNs weren't the only thing in there...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Every example provided in the article is model and training data specific, it only tells one thing, your data is not telling the truth, so why not getting better data.

<comment><USER25> These adversarial inputs have been shown to generalize to separately trained models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is going to be the SQL injection in the AI age

</comment><comment><USER28> Adding high frequency noise "fools" ML but not the human eye. It feels like this is a general failure in regularization schemes.

Why not try training multiple models on different levels of coarse grained data? Evaluate the image on all of them. Plot the class probability as a function of coarse graining. Ideally its some smooth function. If it's not, there may be something adversarial (or bad training) going on.

<comment><USER25> This seems like an obvious thing to try, but technically the convolutional structure already looks at different scales (in a way similar to mipmaps).

<comment><USER28> I've built a CNN before and that's not my understanding of it. The high frequency noise changes the output of the first layer on the CNN. This is what gets pooled as you go deeper into the net. Coarse graining is like getting rid of the weights you have for the first layer and replacing them with something uniform (average the smallest details together).</comment></comment></comment>


Wine 2.0 RC1 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.winehq.org/news/2016120901 <comment><USER2> Wine is a godsend for the still very lackluster linux desktop experience.

I just started listening to music locally rather than relying on streaming music again.

I used to do curate my music on Windows with MP3Tag, which lets you import data from 3rd party services, has an amazingly fast and efficient UI, and lets you quickly batch rename files based on their tags. I looked at all the Linux alternatives and none of them even come close.

I used to use foobar2000 to listen to music. Again, on Linux, nothing comes close.

Both worked out of the box at native speed on wine. Hats off to the devs.

<comment><USER3> Of all the things you could use wine for.. an mp3 player, really? I can name maybe a dozen that do all that foobar2000 does

<comment><USER4> _I can name maybe a dozen that do all that foobar2000 does_

Do it.

Be sure to show how the mass tagger works in each one of them. Especially the pattern matching to extract data from filenames, I really like that feature.

<comment><USER5> Why use MP3 tags anyway? I don't understand, they're so burdensome to manage. I just do:

./Artist/Year - Album/Track - Title.mp3

It'll work with any music player and you can organize it even on a toaster, as long as it has coreutils. I use plain old mplayer to listen to music, just cd into the directory I want and call a script I made which is basically a glorified `find | xargs mplayer` (actually outputs the filenames to a playlist and makes mplayer read from it in slave mode so I can control it with keyboard shortcuts - from other workspaces, etc).

<comment><USER6> And by that you lose quite a lot of flexibility. How do you listen to all the classical music that was composed in the 19th century, and was added during the last month to your library? With foobar2000 (or other players) this can be done in a matter of seconds, and you can create an auto playlist based on those criteria which updates automatically when you add new songs or songs no longer match.

<comment><USER5> Well if you _need_ that then use mp3 tags. I never had that need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wine was extremely helpful during my PhD to get a few weird win32 programs running on Debian. Pleased to see they're continuing the effort!

<comment><USER8> I've seen some crazy binary-only, extremely niche products used in academia / sciences. I could not be happier that, at least for new stuff, Linux is very much becoming a first-class citizen for work that academics do. Sadly, device manufacturers ("We sell a device for measuring methane emissions from squirrels!") aren't quite there yet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The conformance test page[0] is always a good one to play with if you're interested in what parts of Wine are working well.

[0] [http://test.winehq.org/data/](http://test.winehq.org/data/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it possible to run Wine on Windows (without resorting to Windows 10 and WSL)?

<comment><USER11> Would this be for running 16 bit programs on 64 bit Windows, or is there another use case I'm not thinking of?

<comment><USER10> There are quite a few older Win32 games that won't run on modern Windows systems despite the built-in compatibility modes.

<comment><USER12> If these games say they need "*.dll" to run, you can copy it from Wine into the game folder and the game will run. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What people use Mono for on Wine, which is mentioned in release notes?

<comment><USER14> A lot of games require .NET, so integrating mono allows a .NET runtime. Personally I've used this to run Skyrim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> did anyone have success with lightroom 6 on wine

</comment><comment><USER16> wine + mingw cross compiler = native Windows apps development on Linux.

I still couldn't find how to do the reverse without VM....

 _update_ Just found coLinux. seems to be stagnant, though.

<comment><USER17> Out of curiosity, how do you test your builds?

<comment><USER18> Wine ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why not 1.10?

<comment><USER19> > It marks the beginning of the code freeze period.

Some parts of the code are getting frozen: [0]

> This means that from now on, new features or code redesigns won't be > accepted; only targeted bug fixes that don't look too dangerous will be > allowed in. The freeze will get increasingly more strict...

[0] [https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine- devel/2015-November/11...](https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine- devel/2015-November/110369.html)

Edit: My bad. See below.

<comment><USER20> Wine, the last time I used it, was no where near done. Is this the mark of major compatability with certian portions of the system that they've finally hammered out?

<comment><USER21> When was that, and for what? 'Cos in my experience - including using it to run commercial Windows software on a Linux box rather than use yet another standalone Windows box - it's surprisingly good and works more often than not.

(The commercial use we were putting it to: part of a compiler chain for the red button functionality on satellite TV. Remember: if you're selling crufty proprietary vertical market software for $10k/seat/year, always put "Open" in the name.)

I realise this is anecdote wars, but nevertheless it'd be interesting to know where it falls down.

<comment><USER22> WINE works very well for most software that primarily utilizes common and mature APIs, which covers a lot of really great software, especially small, specialized utilities for niches that don't get a ton of commercial attention.

It's generally the more complex and cutting-edge stuff that makes use of newer pieces of .NET, DirectX, or rarely-used components of obscure APIs that WINE struggles with.

Unfortunately, a large amount of the interesting Windows-only software incorporates some of that stuff in one way or another. That's especially the case with games, which usually require very specific hand-optimization that invokes a lot of tricks. Then, to improve performance on AAA releases, driver vendors release updates that stack hacks-on-hacks. That makes gaming pretty tricky to successfully execute at performance-parity in WINE.

I don't mean any of this critically, just addressing the issue. It's absolutely amazing what Alexandre et al have done so far. WINE is one of the most impressive software projects in the world, IMO. I was lucky enough to be able to contribute to it in a small way myself (patches to a prior generation of the audio engine). For many years I refused to play any game that didn't run well in WINE.

Just this May, after 10 years on Linux desktop full-time, I switched back to a Windows desktop to get native performance out of my photography pipeline -- VMs just weren't cutting it, and WINE was a long way off from good support. Definitely a sad thing for me on a personal level.

<comment><USER21> > It's generally the more complex and cutting-edge stuff that makes use of > newer pieces of .NET, DirectX, or rarely-used components of obscure APIs > that WINE struggles with.

Yeah, this is why Wine tends to use the "get the application to work" method. Thankfully a lotta the guys at Codeweavers are gamers who want their stuff to work too ;-)

.NET is a friggin' nightmare IME, even after you've installed over half a gigabyte of Microsoft downloads.

<comment><USER23> Net should get better over time with native Linux support no?

<comment><USER24> The "open" .NET is only the server components, for WinForms and WPF you're still screwed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Japanese Retrofuturism and Chrono Trigger - <AUTHOR> http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/party-like-its-1999-japanese-retrofuturism-and-chrono-trigger <comment><USER2> I think "Japanese Retrofuturism" might be as much a symptom of Western culture rather than Japanese culture.

It seems most JRPGs are set in a world that combines science fiction (advanced gadgets) and fantasy (magic, swords) whereas the western world keeps the two entirely separate.

I don't know if this represents anything fundamental, or just the influence of a few people like Tolkien and Gygax and how people responded to their works initially. Certainly in real life there was a period where guns and swords competed that lasted 500 or so years in the west and east.

<comment><USER3> > _It seems most JRPGs are set in a world that combines science fiction > (advanced gadgets) and fantasy (magic, swords) whereas the western world > keeps the two entirely separate._

One of the two most directly influential series for early JRPGs is _Ultima_ , which for its first three incarnations (especially the first two) liberally combined science fiction with fantasy.

In America, the early '80s was a time where mixing fantasy and science fiction was popular. You had products like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Thundarr the Barbarian, for example. Perhaps these influenced Richard Garriott (creator of _Ultima_ ).

<comment><USER4> Might and Magic series also always combined fantasy with sci-fi.

<comment><USER5> I still remember finding a frickin' blaster in a chest in some demon-infested hive-like structure in M&M7. I didn't have much use for it at this point in game, but I was really surprised and thought it was very interesting twist in the plot... Which actually existed in 7 (not so much in 6 I'm told) too! Good times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a great read, though I think the author could have dove a little deeper into the apocalyptic bleakness of 2300AD. (As mentioned, though, he wrote an entire book on the subject (www.amazon.com/Chrono-Trigger-Boss-Fight- Books- ebook/dp/B00J9VYD72/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407430124&sr=8-1&keywords=Chrono+Trigger+book), which is definitely worth checking out if you're a SNES RPG nerd like I am.)

If I were to throw the term 'retrofuturism' at a SNES game, though, I think I'd have to pick Earthbound/Mother 2 -- the 'juvenile future' described by the author fits perfectly in this world of star-shaped robots and perfectly spherical flying saucers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Paragraphs 23 on are pretty interesting. The author talks about preserving outmoded technology for posterity. Surely, he must be aware of the emulation/rom scene, and online communities like AssemblerGames which are pertaining to do just that.

Sure, there is Satellaview content lost to time, and that is exactly where we are going to be 10 years from now when our current consoles' DRM servers go offline and we have no way of playing that WiiWare or XBLA exclusive game that is tied to specific machines. Remember how much phones preloaded with flappy bird were selling for on ebay?

And his takeaway is thought provoking. We're doing this to ourselves. In a way this is bad - if we don't understand our past mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them. But then again, like so many time traveling heroes in our stories, sometimes it takes ignoring the past or ignoring tradition to build a better future.

<comment><USER8> A friend and I recently tried to get a LAN game of Battlefield 1942 going. It was only possible with hacks and [available, well-trodden] anti-piracy circumvention.

This made me very sad. I'm not overly sentimental for that game, but it still has a lot of merit, and my computer can still play it. Should I have to wait for EA to repackage it in some kind of virtual console store? (No.)

<comment><USER9> >Should I have to wait for EA to repackage it in some kind of virtual console store?

EA was giving away Battlefield 1942 on Origin last time I checked. Why is anti-priacy circumvention required?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Japanese Retrofuturism?

Are people forgetting that Star Wars was a _long time ago_ in a galaxy far far away?? Star Wars takes place in the _past_.

There is a major scene in Episode 6 where a primitive band of Ewoks takes on Empire Walkers using nothing more than sticks, spears, and logs. Light-Sabers are melee weapons based on an ancient religion (very fantasy-esque). Beyond all the space future stuff, there is a lot of "retro-combat" and high-fantasy elements going on here.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

Even Star Trek has its "retrofuturism" if you squint hard enough. Elves have pointy ears and are good at magic. I mean... space elves (Vulcans) have pointy ears and are good at science.

Orcs are generally evil and have deformed faces. But they're super strong. I mean... Space Orcs (Klingons) are generally evil with deformed faces.

Watch out for the undead (Borg). They might turn you into a zombie / assimilate you.

</comment><comment><USER11> FYI, link to book he mentions on amazon, had to look it up as a huge fan of the game, and was a bit dissapointed by the reviews. [http://smile.amazon.com/Chrono-Trigger-Boss-Fight-Books- eboo...](http://smile.amazon.com/Chrono-Trigger-Boss-Fight-Books- ebook/dp/B00J9VYD72/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407430656&sr=8-1&keywords=chrono+trigger+book)

Has anyone read and enjoyed it?

(no referal, but is a smile link)

<comment><USER12> Most of the Boss Fight series is good in general, but folks with knowledge about the topic of any given game may feel it's a little too high-level. I found the Chrono Trigger one basic, but acceptably-written[1] and mostly engaging. I'd recommend it if you're not very familiar with the genre and the game.

Outside of the CT one--I recommend the Earthbound one unreservedly, but I'd call the ZZT one in the series its (flashing red) weak point. a lot of research went into it and I appreciate the effort but it's hugely self- indulgent (which, to be fair, is pretty clearly tipped off in the Amazon summary so you _do_ know what you're getting into) and it suffers from a really weak narrative voice[2]. It is also incomplete--I feel like Anthropy's desire to combine a discussion of ZZT with her personal evolution does a hatchet-job to the history of the ZZT community.

[1] - This is about as high a praise I give for games meta-writing. I don't think game journalism has many (any?) _good writers_ , folks whose stuff I'd read even if I knew everything about the topic they were writing about. (Joe Posnanski fits that bill for sportswriting, I don't know of anybody similar in games writing.)

[2] - Weak even for games writing, so calibrate accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ah, my childhood. Summer of 93, Link to the past. Summer of 94, Secret of mana. Summer of 95, FFIII. Summer of 96, Chrono Trigger. Summer of 97, Lufia II. Chrono trigger was and still is definitively the height of classical console RPGs. And never will a block of years will ever produce the technical vision and artistry that the Japanese developers put forth.

</comment><comment><USER14> Blink and you'll miss it, but Chrono Trigger actually showed what the inside of the 1999 domes was like pre-apocalypse. It's in one of the secret endings; you can see it here starting around 4:10: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WR0AmpABjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WR0AmpABjk)

</comment><comment><USER15> FYI Chrono Trigger is available on iOS [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrono- trigger/id479431697?m...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrono- trigger/id479431697?mt=8)

<comment><USER16> Can anyone comment on how saving works on the iOS version? If I get a call or switch apps, does it reliably save or am I liable to lose my progress?

<comment><USER15> When minimized the app goes into 'pause' -even mid battle. Also, they've added a 'bookmark' feature which is a single-load save anywhere. so when you have to go, you can bookmark without finding a save point (just not mid battle). If your party dies, you cannot reload the bookmark point. you can't bookmark and continue, its bookmark & exit to main menu - i guess think of it as a longer term pause? where state is saved in your save game list?

<comment><USER17> Thanks, that was a much more detailed answer than I could have given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Satellaview, a satellite modem launched in 1995 that could receive new game > data as it was broadcast. Although the cost of the system and the monthly > subscription fees were high, the system was successful—it enjoyed a five- > year run before it was discontinued in 2000.

I would never imagine such thing - games via satellite - ever existed, let alone for Famicom!

Living in Japan in the 90's might be have been pretty amazing, it was like living in a retro version of the future. I remember when my friend came back from Japan and brought payphone cards, something I would only see again 10 years later in my country.

<comment><USER19> So, it was before Satellaview, but I lived in Japan in 1993 when I was sixteen, and it was the best time in my life. But I also was a giant f*ing nerd. Here are some things I remember, with regard to "retrofuturism": a Blockbuster video VHS kiosk that rented you movies, ala Redbox (in 1993!); Minidisc everywhere; waitstaff with wireless "notepads" that looked like old TI calculators, to type in your order that would send it back to the kitchen automatically. Akihabara was literally like being in a cyberpunk novel, I would drift past a salvage electronics part store, squeeze between some shops and up a darkened, narrow staircase and wander into a backroom stuffed to the ceiling with laserdiscs and commercial 8MM video cassettes.

On the other hand, most places didn't take credit cards and I saw very few personal computers compared to the USA at the time. So it really was a strange, uneven retrofuturism.

<comment><USER20> Japan in the 80s and into the 90s was like a vision of a an alternate future where technology could keep growing and happening infinitely. Some _really_ interesting features from that time period. If people in the West thought all the 8-bit micro computers was hard to deal with, in Japan there were nearly countless models by many companies, sometimes competing with themselves! This went on into the 16 and 32-bit eras even. Japan really had a stunning alternative view of the future.

Do you want to buy a NEC PC-9801 or a Sharp X68000? How about a nice FM Towns from Fujitsu, the first home computer with a built in optical drive? But all my friends have a MSX computers! Okay, should I get the MSX 2+ or the turboR, from which manufacturer? I like Panasonic's model, but I heard Yamaha's has a good music interface. My friend has an old Fujitsu FM-7, but _man_ the X1 Twin looks cool with it's integrated PC Engine! [http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/JPNcomputers/Japanesecomput...](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/JPNcomputers/Japanesecomputers.htm)

Amazingly, not a single one of these machines made it to the U.S. Commodore and Atari were simply far too dominant. Jack Tramiel even addresses keeping the Japanese out of the U.S. market as a principle concern. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gmODkpnjO0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gmODkpnjO0)

Also, not a single one of these architectures lives on today. I think the FM- Towns (an _almost_ PC clone) and the Sharp X68k series went on the longest. But it's a tremendous surprise that _so_ many personal computers were available, in a country that's never really been known for personal computer ownership. Even today, the typical Japanese office space is piled full of file cabinets and paper. It's like something right out of the 1970s and 80s. [http://www.accountant-tokyo.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/J...](http://www.accountant-tokyo.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/Japanese-Office-Space.jpg)

All of the basic system architectures dead-ended. Most were using Z80s, which never evolved beyond the 16-bit-ish R800. 6502 variants were common, the NES ran on this, the SNES ran on a 16-bit variant 65C816. But that's it. The X68000 series ran on the Motorola 68k chips, which as we all know dead ended with the switch to the PowerPC line (which BTW, still powers all sorts of consoles _today_ ). The only system which picked up on the Intel lines was the FMTowns, but architecturally deviated from normal PCs enough that it's not compatible.

Japan during during and right after the bubble was _amazing_.

[http://www.thebubblebubble.com/japan- bubble/](http://www.thebubblebubble.com/japan-bubble/)

<comment><USER19> I played games on an FM-Towns Marty :-) I never met anybody who had any of those other systems, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A minor nit about Chrono Trigger's plot. It was actually based on the Chicxulub asteroid impact [1], which caused the K-Pg extinction event [2] and was followed by a severe impact winter. The game itself masterfully explores this event with a perfect dose of fictional flair.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater)

2\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_ex...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event)

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm a huge fan of Chrono Trigger, I've played through it multiple times, I just loved it. The author of this article states that he wrote a book about the game. The book can be found here: [http://bossfightbooks.com/products/chrono-trigger-by- michael...](http://bossfightbooks.com/products/chrono-trigger-by-michael-p- williams)

I hadn't heard about this before, but I may actually order it, because I like the game so much :)

<comment><USER23> I had no idea that such a book existed for one of my favorite games of all time (perhaps the only game where I've actually played through all of its New Game+ mode). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone recognize the CAI setup in the upper right inset of Williams4.jpg?

Edit: I think it's an IBM 1500¹ station, in which case the left-hand display is a mainframe-controlled 16mm film projector².

¹ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1500](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1500)

² Buck & Hunka, _Deveopment of the IBM 1500 Computer-Assisted Instructional System_ [http://digitallearning.ualberta.ca/-/media/digitallearning/i...](http://digitallearning.ualberta.ca/-/media/digitallearning/ibm-1500.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER25> The Japanese retro-future consists of white people of European descent, immersed in a world full of katakana/hiragana/kanji signeage.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think the most poignant part of this article is one no one has addressed here yet:

> I have trouble accepting a disappointing truth of human progress—there are > things that have been forgotten, and they will never be re-remembered.

Thinking back on the millennia of our existence, how much of our experiences as a species have vanished forever, never to be rediscovered?

<comment><USER27> If we preserved everything, who'd have the time to experience it all?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What is the purpose of the paragraph numbers that hide/appear with mouseover? I found it to be a distraction.

<comment><USER29> Probably to help someone know what paragraph you're referencing if you're having a discussion. I could see it working better if it only appeared when you hovered over to the left of the paragraph.

<comment><USER28> Makes some sense. Seems excessive.

Not trying to being entirely negative... This is a really great article!

<comment><USER30> To be fair it did catch my attention as well, it´s just uncommon.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wait till you have a child of your own.  - <AUTHOR> http://katgleason.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> Please use permalinks. If after your next post, someone finds this link from HN, they're not going to see the same article you're referring to.

Permalink: [http://katgleason.tumblr.com/post/27175271183/wait-till- you-...](http://katgleason.tumblr.com/post/27175271183/wait-till-you-have-a- child-of-your-own)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much, sorry I did not think of that myself.</comment></comment>


Siraj Raval's Apology - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zZZjaYl4AA <comment><USER2> That's a courageous apology! I hope he can start publishing actual ethical content.</comment>


Show HN: Light Web-Pages, a "free" alternative to AMP, Instant Articles et al - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/boramalper/light-web-pages <comment><USER2> Maciej Cegłowski's static AMP alternative: [http://www.idlewords.com/amp_static.html](http://www.idlewords.com/amp_static.html)

"Requiring a readable version of these sites is a great idea. Let's take it one step further and make it the only version."

His talk on website obesity: [http://www.idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://www.idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have the same opinion with Cegłowski and I too prefer plain web-sites, but I especially tried to avoid controversy. People, or rather developers, seem to happily exchange lightweightness for more features and media-rich web-sites.

I think Google was right in suggesting AMP, since web-pages were becoming increasingly inaccessible to people with bad/slow Internet connection, but Google was also wrong in restricting it to mobile devices. Lastly, as Cegłowski also said, AMP depended far too much on Google rather than being an open standard that works across browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is what AMP should've been.</comment>


Ask HN: Best book (or resource) for learning Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> I recently stumbled across some odd results from a sysinternals tool that let me know I don't know Windows 10 as well as I thought I did. I'm looking for tips as to the best books, or other resources, for learning the inner workings of this operating system and I would like it to cover as much as possible. Ideally, it starts at the boot process and works forward from there.<p>Additionally, any recommendations on books that contain other commonly used OS are welcome. I'm not willing to spend as much money on them but they would be a handy reference when I do come across different systems. <comment><USER2> There's the Windows Internals books[1]. Two book series, second book has not been updated. You'll find some good results for other operating systems if you just search "{name of os} internals book"

1\. [https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/windows- internals-...](https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/windows-internals- part-1-system-architecture-processes-9780735684188)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it seems that's the best recomendation

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Windows Internals is the bible for Windows OS Internals.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/) is also a gold mine of information.</comment>


Rhapsody scoffs at Apple's new subscription plan; Contemplates legal action - <AUTHOR> http://www.edibleapple.com/rhapsody-scoffs-at-apples-new-subscription-policy-contemplates-legal-action/

<comment><USER2> Ha, good luck with that.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Promised a Clear History Tool Almost a Year Ago - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-privacy-optics-clear-history-zuckerberg <comment><USER2> Also, the "View As" functionality has been "temporarily" disabled months ago because of a security issue, never to appear again.

"View As" was a vital tool to assess what data is shared with whom, and guarding one's privacy is harder without it.

<comment><USER3> I even just wish they had a simpler "View As non-friend" feature.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be surprised if FB doesn't have a concept of "non-friend." People are either friends or friends you haven't met yet.

<comment><USER5> FB does have a concept of enemy, though. Which is implemented as communication embargo.

<comment><USER6> Nah, those are "old friends".

<comment><USER5> You can also block people who are not your friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Taking the approach of a scientist, i.e. a data scientist, this is a hard problem to solve. Not only does Facebook have to implement the simple user.delete.all.data(), but think about the number of internal products that are machine learning based. In order to preserve the usefulness of those models and the hundreds of millions in R&D spent to develop them, you have to carefully understand exactly what products and algos will be affected by just deleting a single record.

The sheer number of records per user is probably astounding, and facebook has to figure out a way to understand exactly how thousands of records per user, being deleted, will affect it's models.

Thought experiment: Imagine, all of the hacker news community and other privacy minded people go right into the tool and delete everything. That is an entire community and classification of people that facebook has to figure out how to reconcile the loss of data for, and fix its machine learning models. The difficult part is since so much current AI logic is based on historical data, a user deleting data, will be nearly impossible to untrain from the model.

I know there are more nuances here, but I think there are some challenges Facebook has in implementing this, and business wise it's a drain on resources that will hurt them. It's easy to think it would be so simple for FB to just call user.delete.all.data(), but the reality is the loss of data could seriously mess up their algos.

<comment><USER8> > In order to preserve the usefulness of those models and the hundreds of > millions in R&D spent to develop them, you have to carefully understand > exactly what products and algos will be affected by just deleting a single > record.

My answer to that is 'who cares?'

It's not my problem, let me delete all my data.

In fact it's required by law in some places.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. The ability to delete user data should have been something engineered from the ground up. They are paying the penalty of technical debt and hopefully learning some tough lessons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can I propose that we start on a "noise" tool/browser plugin for these suveillance captialism companies? Not only would this be very interesting to implement it woud help to mess up their profitability by training the algorithm in arbitrary stuff that no-one is interested in.

It seems more sensible than trying to block them - instead give them loads of bad data ruining their business model?

For instance you could pick which set of noise you wanted to feed Google i.e. convince Google you are single mother from Lithuania... or Facebook you're a 63 year old man from Italy or Instagram you are a Teenager from Korea.

Every time a tracker or data point is sent to them to "know" you it could be a lie. This would lead you out of your search bubble too so political ads by Russians being bought to undermine Hillary's black vote might be more clear to everyone.

Trusting Facebook or Google to do the right thing against their financial interest won't work will it.

<comment><USER11> If you don't like Facebook/Google/etc., wouldn't you be better off just not using them rather than spending time trying to hurt them? How will data vandalism make your life better?

<comment><USER12> You can't meaningfully opt out of Facebook/Google/etc. They're embedded in tons of websites, and your friends will almost certainly give your information to those companies.

<comment><USER11> You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites. You'll probably be a happier person if you just don't visit foo.com than spending any portion of your brief time on Earth trying to trick an ML model into thinking you're a single mother from Lithuania.

Also, if your friend gives someone else information about you, do you expect that you should be able to control it? I'm pretty sure many of the details of my life appear in other people's emails, voicemails, journals, etc. that will never have a "forget me" button.

I'm mainly suggesting that there are lots of ways to improve this situation, from market forces to legislation, and it's sad to see people wasting time on things that won't work.

<comment><USER13> > You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites.

And since they're buying data from non-internet data brokers such as credit card companies, retailers that track you in their stores, etc., blocking the trackers and avoiding the websites doesn't actually stop the spying.

To stop them from spying on you pretty much requires that you stop engaging in large swaths of real-world society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is a great interview with him that was recorded a couple days ago where he talks about the status of the history tool: [https://youtu.be/WGchhsKhG-A](https://youtu.be/WGchhsKhG-A)

<comment><USER15> Any highlights or links to specific segments from that 1 hour and 43 minute video?

<comment><USER16> He starts talking about it at 1:04:08: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGchhsKhG-A&t=1h4m8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGchhsKhG-A&t=1h4m8s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's clearly not a priority. Such a tool was a nice rhetorical device to deflect some heat during the congressional hearings, but there's no way to monetize it or use it to "increase engagement" so it's languishing in some Facebook backwater. I think it was naive to think that it would turn out otherwise.

And to be clear, I'm not saying that Facebook has necessarily been malicious or lied. It's just that a product manager faced with the choice to prioritize this vs. some new engagement enhancing widget is going to pick the widget every time unless there's constant pressure from above.

Edit: This is why legislation is required. So privacy issues can't be ignored simply because they don't contribute to the bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Recode article in December touched an important point about the name "Clear History" [0]

> There's a reason that Clear History isn't called "Delete History": Using the > feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your > specific account but it won't be erased from Facebook's servers completely, > Baser said. Instead it's just "de-identified," which means it's stored by > Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it.

[0] [https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear- hi...](https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-history- update-privacy-targeting-data-collection)

</comment><comment><USER19> Zuckerberg did promise Winklevoss twins to build their social network as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> From the FB statement generator:

We promised a history tool and have not delivered it. We are deeply sorry. We founded Facebook to connect the world and facilitate relationships. We remain committed to doing things.

<comment><USER21> They really like to do the BP oil spill apology approach, it's getting old though. You can only continuously say sorry so many times before people get sick of hearing it.

<comment><USER3> The vast majority of the user base that they care about doesn't even know there's anything to say sorry for. If you would use this tool, you're worth much less to them anyway.

addendum: If this bothers you, I would strongly recommend just jumping ship now. There's almost no incentive for them to change and no sign of one on the horizon. If you're not getting enough value from them right now to accept the data they keep on you, you'll be happier just giving up and moving on early.

<comment><USER13> But how are those of us who already don't use their services supposed to protect ourselves?

<comment><USER3> My point is to stop holding your breath that Zuck is going to be the one to do anything for you. Do you think that's any less true if you don't even use his service?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> FB won't change unless major advertisers do. And even then, there are plenty of fly-by-night companies selling utter garbage (think tshirts/hoodies with dynamically generated text labels) that will continue to find customers on the platform because of FB's targeting ability.

I hate to say it, but it's probably too late anyway. FB has billions in the bank and are likely working on much bigger-picture projects with their surveillance tech. Why bother with a B2C product that brings tons of PR grief when you can enter billion-dollar contracts with militaries and governments where secrecy is the default MO?

</comment><comment><USER23> In the all hands meetings they would talk so much about establishing or re- establishing trust, and I always wondered why they don't just have a "clear everything from high school and college" option. People would _love_ that option, and it would make so many more people comfortable with using the platform again.

Their loss.

<comment><USER24> A few months ago I went through and deleted all of my Facebook content from 2005 through 2010, except for a few pictures. It took 5+ hours to delete each item individually. A tool to assist this would be very helpful! I'm sure I'm not the only one who wrote a lot of stupid posts and uploaded a lot of embarrassing (and some slightly incriminating) photos to Facebook in college that they don't want saved forever.

<comment><USER25> You're looking for: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book- post-m...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post- manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae?hl=en-US)

<comment><USER24> That would have been helpful!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pardon my ignorance here, never worked on this kinda program before, but isn't is actually hard on complex databases like Facebook to actually remove data, better just to mark it as unviewable?

<comment><USER27> It's not just complex databases, but any database that uses indexes (basically any production database).

Deleting a record from a table can cause a re-index, which is very intensive. It's much easier to flag a column in a record as "deleted" or whatever, and then run a cleanup during off-peak hours.

I'm sure there are clever ways around that with proper knowledgeable DBAs on your team, but as I'm a web dev for smaller audience projects, I don't touch solutions that require those types of optimizations that I'm sure Facebook has implemented.

<comment><USER28> 》Deleting a record from a table can cause a re-index

As will adding new data and FB loves the story of adding to their profiling DB.

This is not an indexing issue but a "we love adding data but hate removing it" issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Oh, we actually meant advertisers/governments/Bing and other partners will have a tool which will provide a clear view of your internet history"

</comment><comment><USER30> It probably just takes a long time to develop! I mean, keep in mind, Facebook's app doesn't even support landscape mode. It's hard to find the development bandwidth for advanced features.

</comment><comment><USER31> My biggest issue with metrics and general "data" focus, is that it's incredibly hard to generate data about goodwill. eg we can prove that call to cancel reduces cancelations by 20%, but we have no way to measure how many customers now hate your company and tell their friends never to use your company, how many people would have returned but now won't, how many people just cancel 3 months later.

In Facebook's case, we know they're seeing huge hits in active, engaged users, but their whole metrics ecosystem is built to optimize micro-engagement. Taken as a whole, those micro-optimizations are killing goodwill and turning off users, but it's much harder to measure that.

So many decisions are made because variant b "won", without any discussion of the layers upon layers of factors that aren't easy to measure.

</comment><comment><USER32> There's also the issue of 100s, if not 1000s of random businesses having added my contact information for advertising purposes, and I can't remove them all without manually clicking each and every one. Anyone should be able to remove these advertisers who have no business having my info (random car dealerships and real estate agents 1000s of miles away, typically). Questions asked in the help forum have gone unanswered for months.

</comment><comment><USER33> What exactly are engineers and designers at Facebook doing? There are thousands of them! I've seen teams of 10 ship more (granted, no one is delivering on Facebook's scale)...

I know most of them are likely working on backend stability and performance... but come on.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's in Development™

<comment><USER35> > It's in Development™

Probably somewhere in the backlog :-)

<comment><USER36> Move fast and break things. It's mostly in the "break things" phase, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I probably wouldn't be amongst the first in line for any 'tool' facebook would be offering to completely own your data. I feel as if there would be something that would be underpinning the tool which would make in itself useless.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, like the "delete your account" option. It's hard to find (disabling is easy to find, but also completely reversible, so useless), and I'm sure it doesn't actually delete anything, but it made me feel better than just leaving my Facebook account active/disabled. I didn't have much of value there anyway.

I would _love_ more transparency here, but we're not getting that without government intervention, and that's unlikely to come anytime soon (and what gets passed may be worse than the current situation).

<comment><USER39> A few days ago my fiancée asked me to delete her Instagram profile. There's no user friendly way to do it. You have to go to help.instagram.com or search Google to find the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This gets me wondering. What kind of incident would be required to provoke public outrage over Facebook? Something that would bring public awareness re their data collection policies? Or is Facebook Just Too Big To Fail™ anymore?

<comment><USER41> Massive public attention has already been brought to Facebook and its policies. If the public isn't as outraged as you expect them to be, that's because they don't think Facebook's data collection is a big deal, not because they're somehow unaware.

<comment><USER13> > Massive public attention has already been brought to Facebook and its > policies.

Not so much, really. Outside of techie types, my experience is that very few people are aware of this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Anyone with a background at Facebook definitely needs to be spoken with regarding their integrity. Obviously only a small subset of FB employees make the shitty decisions we see in the news, but it's very concerning to me that engineers still go to work there. There are at 2 or 3 other BigCos that pay comparably, and many others that pay a level down that don't require you to be complicit in unethical behavior of this scale.

<comment><USER13> > it's very concerning to me that engineers still go to work there

Me too. And, although it may be unfair, I have to admit that I view engineers who are still willing to work for them as suspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> When Facebook releases a tool to clear your history, how will you know it's really cleared? It will probably work as well as these instructions you can _already_ use to remove your digital fingerprint from Facebook and several other sites: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0](https://youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0)

<comment><USER44> As someone else said, if you're in Europe you can send a subject access request after sending the deletion request.

That will tell you what data they still have about you.

You can't _know_ they've deleted everything if the subject access request comes back empty, but it puts then in the position of having to actively break the law to lie about whether they've deleted your data.

<comment><USER13> > it puts then in the position of having to actively break the law to lie > about whether they've deleted your data.

True, but I don't think Facebook is too bothered by that sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I made one: github.com/spieglt/fb-delete

</comment><comment><USER46> Question to the HN crowd : Would having event data & PII-ish data decoupled be an acceptable compromise to privacy granted that you can wipe the PII stuff and the only data left is completely anonymous (just a UUID that leads to nothing in case of deletion)?

Is anonymity in the eye of the beholder?

<comment><USER13> > Would having event data & PII-ish data decoupled be an acceptable compromise > to privacy

That depends on how you define "event" and "PII" data. The normal industry and legal definitions of PII leave out huge swaths of actual PII, after all.

Personally, I'm not even at the point where I can consider what is or is not acceptable for companies like Facebook to keep. I'm still stuck at the point of stopping them from collecting data about me without my permission in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think "big data" companies realized that people simply were unaware of the extent of the tracking and showing them how much they're being tracked would make for terrible PR, potentially much worse than any publicized data leak. It turns the tracking from some abstract concept into a very tangible list of actions being recorded potentially forever.

Take that guy who managed to get a dump from his Spotify data thanks to the GDPR for instance: [https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1025024813889478656/](https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1025024813889478656/)

I'm sure we all knew Spotify tracked us but seeing how _much_ they track is pretty crazy to me even though I'm pretty sensitized to these privacy issues.

I expect that a full dump from Facebook would be at least as verbose if not more. I don't think they want the users to see how the sausage is made.

</comment><comment><USER48> The problem is that privacy tools like this will severely hurt Facebook's business.

Facebook uses its pixels to track purchase and browser history. This purchase and browser history is a crucial part of their lookalike audience technology, which in turn is one of the most critical components of their advertiser tool suite. Without this data, advertisers will be less effective at targeting their ads, which means lost ad revenue.

It's not surprising to me that Facebook is backtracking on this and vying for other privacy improvements that don't hurt their fundamental business as much (like letting users view how advertisers got their contact info, or letting users view page ads).

<comment><USER49> Building shadow profiles for people who don't use your service is inexcusable.

Perhaps their "business" would need to be rescaled if they were honest about serving ads to their users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> You have to do it manually. I did it using a plug in and meticulously doing each section at a time. likes, comments, posts, pictures, etc...

</comment><comment><USER51> What the king says is what the king says, but what [facebook] stands for is undying opposition to [clear history tool].

</comment><comment><USER52> the memories feature makes for a nice deletion tool, but i know the posts are just being hidden

</comment><comment><USER53> Well, you see, people didn't leave Facebook in the numbers anticipated, so the project got deprioritized.

</comment><comment><USER54> When beta testing, they used that tool to clear Zuck's history. Thus Zuck forgot about it.

</comment><comment><USER55> One really shouldn't believe anything that man says.

</comment><comment><USER56> Facebook's behavior is highly analogous to, and best viewed in terms of, narcissistic personality disorder. Thus when people bring up their legitimate concerns about how FB screwed them in one way or another, Facebook thinks the problem is the "beating" they're taking in the press.

I really don't want to read a single word about the "beating" they're taking. It helps Facebook by exaggerating the harm done to them, and it pats the press on the back for its supposed effectiveness. Facebook keeps growing and doing the same shit, that's how effective it is. "Maybe if we just had more facts!" says the well-meaning fool who then loses to a Zuckerberg or a Trump. Dream on, the world doesn't run on facts and virtue. By way of contrast, if Facebook executives had to suffer an _actual_ beating, Rodney King style, things would be fixed in a hurry. I confess I would love to be holding one of the night sticks too.

<comment><USER57> Your larger point is caught in the hyperbole but the point of 'the world doesn't run on facts' (meaning, I think, political world) is a good one.

FB get the appearance of pain and attrition. Press get more views and plaudits. Nothing changes.

They need actual pain to their organization (not violence to individuals of course) before a proper change will come. Think Microsoft pain in the 90's. It seems Europe will again lead the charge on this.

<comment><USER56> Yes, the political world, the one in which Mark Zuckerberg is a player and in which almost none of us commenting here are players, unless maybe we were to unite into one bloc. That world (and to the extent that "that world" runs "the world," "the world" too) has little use for facts. I'm not saying it's great or that we should give up. (Or that they can escape the facts permanently.) But it is a fact. And each downvote of that fact, proves the world doesn't run on facts!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> A Clear History Tool was tested and it cleared itself from the history. So...</comment>


Lightpack – Ambient backlight for your displays - <AUTHOR> http://lightpack.tv/

<comment><USER2> Some Sony TV's have this ... I like the effect during films, but I don't know _why_ I like it... intuitively it feel like it should reduce the apparent contrast of the picture, but it instead feels like I'm watching a larger screen or that there's more going on in my environment.

I'm going to hypothesise something to do with how brains process our peripheral vision.

Anyway, not sure how much fun it would be to to run it on a monitor that has vim/consoles 90% of the time... maybe it would encourage me to tab certain syntax highlighted code to the far edges of the screen and go wild :)

<comment><USER3> I like this effect, but not because of changes to the perceived contrast. Often people turn off the lights during movies and this always bothered me because I lose my point of reference. It actually tends to give me nausea to have the only light coming from the TV. Having some sort of light whether its this, a nightlight, or a soft light from a different room tends to prevent this nausea.

<comment><USER4> > It actually tends to give me nausea to have the only light coming from the > TV. Having some sort of light whether its this, a nightlight, or a soft > light from a different room tends to prevent this nausea.

Finally, someone else! People always give me strange looks when I complain about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft Research took the ambient background idea a little further with some cool IllumiRoom demos. [0]

[0] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2w-XqW7bF4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2w-XqW7bF4)

<comment><USER6> Oh man that looks amazing... It'd be something interesting to follow and see how it goes. Even just watching the video got me excited and curious to see how it all works!

Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's great to see the Philips Ambilight concept democratized (I hope Philips doesn't have any applicable patents here), but the fact that this requires the video source to be a Mac / Windows / Linux PC is going to cut the potential audience way, way down.

<comment><USER8> I actually made a Standalone version of my own. All it needs is a composite video signal, so you can use it with any type of video source.

<comment><USER9> that doesn't really help me - I have an HDMI-only home setup - multiple HDMI sources switched by the AV receiver drive a single TV, I'd have to somehow create a parallel composite switch from all the video sources - Bunnie Huang's NeTV can almost do this (and with a nod and a wink one could hack the fpga to do it) so the technology is available to an enterprising hacker - whether you can make a commercial product that does this without licensing HDMI (or licensing and still making it open source) and without getting sued is debatable

<comment><USER8> All the devices that connect to my TV are HDMI as well. Put a splitter/converter after your AV receiver and you're good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jeff Atwood wrote a piece on bias lighting[0] for computer displays. I've been a fan of the idea and have been using the Ikea Dioder[1] colored, also in plain white[2], LED strips mounted behind my monitors both at home and work. It really makes things easier on the eyes when you aren't in a completely pitch-black room, not to mention the color effects are rather soothing. The Ikea strips are easy enough to mount to the back of monitors with a bit of velcro tape.

[0] [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/11/bias- lighting.html](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/11/bias-lighting.html) [1] [http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50192365/](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50192365/) [2] [http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20119418/](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20119418/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have the DIY version [0] of this on the back of my monitor right now, and the effect is quite nice, especially when playing games. The total DIY cost was $30 in components, namely a Teensy 2.0 microcontroller and a WS2801 RGB pixel string from eBay (unfortunately, I don't have nice mounting hardware so they're just stuck in cardboard strips).

[0] [http://learn.adafruit.com/adalight-diy-ambient-tv- lighting/o...](http://learn.adafruit.com/adalight-diy-ambient-tv- lighting/overview)

</comment><comment><USER12> Ack, it looks like a nice product but they need some help with their copywriting.

> " _So, you can 't use Lightpack with your PlayStation 4 out-of-the-box cause > you unable to run Prismatik in SONY ecosystem_"

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I agree and I noticed several other errors. As you could tell from the video I believe they are Russian along with other nationalities.

<comment><USER12> They certainly aren't English speakers. It's a pity because they've a really solid product, just not showing it off well to an international audience. The rest isn't full of mistakes as much as just being informal and inconsistent, I suppose it's quite a difficult language if you're not accustomed to writing it.

<comment><USER13> Didn't dig much, but the "146% open source" line might be a reference to Putin.[0]

[0][http://gawker.com/5864945/putin-clings-to-victory-as- russias...](http://gawker.com/5864945/putin-clings-to-victory-as-russias- voter-turnout-exceeds-146)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> interesting product, but really weird/poor choice in demo content at 22s in their video...

The YT link they have on their marketing page (above the video) is even set up to take you to the creepy part: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UP7SmUqkxc#t=22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UP7SmUqkxc#t=22)

<comment><USER15> Yikes! Trigger warning: bondage/terrorized young woman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've wanted to make my own version for a while, but using a RBP (which I use for my media consumption anyway) was previously a deterrent.

I think you should make a HDCP pass-thru box because the easy of installation and practicality makes it more desirable to consumers (myself included). I have previously written software that breaks HDCP encryption as well as does a slew of other work arounds that other companies -- despite saying they do not -- actually employ to make input switching faster.

If you need to talk to anyone about HDCP let me know; I can either help or get you in touch with some people who can.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interestingly, the BlinkyTape people also used the Futurama intro to demo a similar use of their product:

[http://blinkinlabs.com/ambitape/](http://blinkinlabs.com/ambitape/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks brilliant. I've put my email in the preorder form... I'd buy one right now if it was available. I hope they deliver to the UK.

</comment><comment><USER19> This might be good for a computer screen running full screen images or even HD video running full frame 1.78 content, but what about movies that are at a wider aspect ratio like the common 2.35 that must appear letterboxed? Add this to the fact that an HDMI license seems unreasonable, this doesn't look this will be very viable for non-computer monitor situations.

</comment><comment><USER20> All this talk about being easy on your eyes, and their body copy is 13px. Typography goes a long way toward easing eye strain.

</comment><comment><USER21> Exactly how is it protecting my eyes?

</comment><comment><USER9> The question that didn't get answered for me was "will it work with encrypted HDMI?" one hopes it does use one of the leaked keys and sniffs the stream .... if it does I want one .... otherwise it's not useful for me

<comment><USER22> I don't believe this works standalone with a TV. It needs an app running on your computer from the looks of it. I'm still waiting for an HDMI pass-through version myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was looking at building one of these a while back for my computer. It seams pretty easy with an Arduino, a $15 roll of RGB LED strip and some computer software. Though going beyond computers, it gets quite complicated.

<comment><USER24> Adafruit has a tutorial about how to build something similar using an Arduino and set of RGB LED Christmas lights: [http://learn.adafruit.com/adalight-diy- ambient-tv-lighting/o...](http://learn.adafruit.com/adalight-diy-ambient-tv- lighting/overview)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Simpler solution: Put mirror in front of the TV ;)

I'm just kidding but mirrors in front of the bezels can have some similar effect but probably much weaker then the LEDs.

</comment><comment><USER26> No mention of the price?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe I saw somewhere it was $80

<comment><USER27> They're finishing up a kickstarter[0], so it might be a while before they take any actual orders from their site

[0] [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/woodenshark/lightpack- am...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/woodenshark/lightpack-ambient- backlight-for-your-displays)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice! Ambilight on non-philips tvs

Too bad you need a HTPC..

<comment><USER11> There's other versions [0] of the same idea that uses a Raspberry Pi and a USB video grabber to do the same thing with any HDMI signal (you only need an HDMI splitter and an HDMI to composite adapter).

[0] [https://github.com/gkaindl/ambi-tv](https://github.com/gkaindl/ambi-tv)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It makes me sad that Philips don't have any Ambilight TV on the US market. Now I'm tempted to order one from Amazon UK and ship it over internationally.

</comment><comment><USER30> "146% Open Source"

ok.</comment>


Build a super fast deep learning machine for under $1,000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/learning/build-a-super-fast-deep-learning-machine-for-under-1000 <comment><USER2> He should have gone with an AMD processor. They multithread better, have better on chip GPU processing and would be a better choice for machine learning setups.</comment>


How We Became Profitable in 3 Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.plivo.com/blog/three-key-lessons-on-how-we-became-profitable-in-3-years/?hn=true

<comment><USER2> Per Lesson 3. Opening a Restaurant. I've spent 4 years in the restaurant business. I did not own a restaurant but I did pretty much everything else. I would highly caution anyone going into the restaurant business. The profit margins are very low and requires a lot of manual labor (even if you are a manager).

If you want to be successful in food I would offer this advice 1) Understand your food niche so that you can market it effectively. There is so much competition. Know what your customers will want. 2) Minimize labor impact. I really like the family-owned model as all your labor is family members. They will have the best interest of the restaurant at heart too. 3) Have a sound business plan. Estimate costs, revenues, and food inventories. Plan for short term and long term. Setup goals and when you don't reach those goals make changes. Always continuously improve your brand.

<comment><USER3> Would you suggest doing a brewery or food truck instead? Food truck seems like much less capital at risk, and a brewery has much, much higher margins.

<comment><USER4> I would suggest reading through these articles. Brewing and Food trucks each have their pros and cons, but there's a lot more to both of them than you may think.

Brewery: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375043) Food Truck: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5376402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5376402)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The three key lessons all seem to come down to chest-bumping with one's fellow bros after another raging all-nighter.

<comment><USER6> Not really seeing where you got this from. So far, what I got out of this is mostly inline with many other start-up/business advise: \- Passion is very important and helps you succeed by not letting you give up too soon. \- Team cohesion is extremely important, doubly so in remote teams. \- If you provide value to customers, customers will pay

None of these are new and groundbreaking, but they are sound insights and sharing ones story about it helps others relate to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The story of dumplings and potatoes is intriguing.

I've always been curious, what happens to waste vegetable oil in India?

Is it simply thrown down the drain?

</comment><comment><USER8> Inspiring read Venky! Good that your Momo store didn't took off :-)</comment>


How to make your startup launch a success - <AUTHOR> http://theagni.com/2011/07/17/how-to-make-your-startup-launch-a-success/

<comment><AUTHOR> Are there other tips in launch marketing that could be added?

<comment><USER2> What about basic legal issues on starting a startup? Any info in how to register brand name? If you have a good domain name, can it be lost if brand name is not legally registered ? Needs to be registered somewhere (like in Delaware) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Trademarks are the way to protect your brand name. Here is the link to get you started in the US - <http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most interesting tip here is using visually to create infographics.</comment>


How to Know Your Value a Freelancer - <AUTHOR> http://www.100kfreelancing.com/0118-positioning-professional-value-wphilip-morgan/ <comment><AUTHOR> I know you're listening, I can see the downloads traveling through the series of tubes comprising the internets. :)

If anyone has any questions about this episode, or the show in general, feel free!</comment>


Amazon Introduces WebStore - <AUTHOR> http://webstore.amazon.com/

<comment><USER2> You can simply multiply your estimated revenue * .07, and see exactly how much you pay in fees. You'd have to be earning quite a lot before it becomes worth building the website in house.

Here is something else to consider: If you make a million/year, you pay 70K/year for the whole shopping website. Now, if I were earning that much, I'd rather spend my time becoming a 2 million/year business than saving 70k.

Perhaps there are equivalent products that take less money, and if the two are really apples to apples, one might pick the lower commission rate. However, if amazon were the only one out there, I think the fees could be justified for a large number of customers.

<comment><USER3> But what if your markup wasn't all that high to begin with? That's 7 points off your _gross margin_ , which is nothing to sneeze at.

Assuming a 30% gross margin-- to get that $2m, you'd have to spend $1.54m in COGS, for a gross profit of $462k. Add the 70k in amazon fees, and that's starting to seriously affect your balance sheet.

<comment><USER2> Very good point. The pricing model probably assumes a high (at least 2x) gross margin. I've heard that specialty goods (i.e. made by small shops) tend to have high margins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surprisingly expensive. 7% of the merchant's revenues is very high.

<comment><USER5> Its actually not, if you analyze all the costs. You get a very SEO friendly store, access to Amazon's recommendation engine, review system, and a few more pretty good things. You can sell Amazon products, if you need to fill out some areas of your store, and you don't have to worry about shipping those. You also don't have any hosting fees or bandwidth fees, no matter how many visitors you get or how big you grow. The credit card processing fees are included, and there's no need to get a merchant account either, which for some people with bad credit is hard. And besides that, it saves a person who might not have a lot of programming skills a heck of a lot of time, which I think would also be worth a lot to some people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are a lot of competitors in this area; I don't see what makes Amazon better than Yahoo stores and the like.

I do wish that there was an online store provider that didn't take a fixed percentage of revenue.

<comment><USER7> The Amazon version appears to be a lot prettier than the Yahoo version.

That's gotta be worth something, though probably not an extra 5% of gross revenues.

<comment><USER6> <https://app.shopify.com/services/signup> is very Web 2.0 pretty and reasonably priced

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's hard enough convincing people that the 1% to 2% that Shopify charge is worth it.

However, it is a slight sweetener that this seems to include all credit card processing fees.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wait, why is this news? This has been out for a very long time. Has anything changed about it?

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks like an excellent way to acquire customers if you already have your own site. 7% of the _initial_ purchase is actually pretty cheap for a recent single buyer. If you purchase a list, rent a list, or use SEO, then junk mail or email blast (for shame), by the time you figure out your conversion rate, you'd be way ahead with WebStore.

Unless I'm reading the docs wrong, your items appear in the search results for amazon.com. This is very powerful because these are active buyers at the world's largest on-line retailer.

The trick is, once you convert a buyer (who is now _your_ buyer), you want to direct them to your site from now on so you only have to pay the 7% once. You also want to put your loss leaders on WebStore and keep your high margin items on your own site. After all, 7% of a lower price is a lower commission.

</comment><comment><USER10> _7%_ commission?

<comment><USER11> They take 7% of your profit as a commission or you keep 7%? I'm guessing the former.

<comment><USER12> "$59.99 per month + 7% commission"

So they keep 7%, not 93%

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that's what I said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This story is a perfect example of why this site should have downvotes.

A) It's old B) Therefore it's not news C) Even if it was new, it's so amazingly un-exciting that it's not news anyways.</comment>


Higher Lethality Outside of China - <AUTHOR> Numbers from https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/
As of March 4th. 6:22 pm eastern standard
In China:
Deaths: 2,981
recoveries : 49,856
Death/recovery : 5.98%
Outside of China...
Deaths: 272
Recoveries : 1205
Deaths/recoveries :  22.6% <comment><USER2> Yep, that's the account that no one aren't doing: d death/recoveries. Everyone is doing deaths/infections what's doesn't make sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> To be fair, doesn't China have a head-start in recovery rates?

<comment><USER4> Yes, and the US (at least) is far behind on testing sick people, let alone people who are only showing mild symptoms.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update 8:30 eastern..

Outside of China : 273/1259

Inside China: 3,012/52,045

<comment><AUTHOR> 7am 297/1260 3,012/52,045

<comment><AUTHOR> 8am 297/1263 3012/52045

<comment><AUTHOR> 10am 297/1263 3,012/52,045

<comment><AUTHOR> 1:30 pm 339/1401 3,012/52,045

<comment><AUTHOR> 5pm 344/1401\. 3,012/52,045

China not updating numbers

Very high death/recovery ratio outside of China</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do employees send emails from company domain using SES? - <AUTHOR> So I'm kind of curious on how do employees send emails company domain addresses using a service like AWS SES since I'm guessing most companies save costs and use AWS instead of GSuite for managing employees and more. I might be wrong here. But let's assume if I were to assign employees in my company with email addresses so they can send and receive emails, how would I do that? <comment><USER2> Does AWS SES do spam filtering, email rules, aliases, out-of-office, large email attachments, POP/IMAP etc?

You could use other email providers. Fastmail, mailbox.org, runbox.com and more, plus all those who offer domains that include email. Instead of 6 USD/month/employee you'd then pay half. I'd argue company's highest overhead is salary, not spending a couple of USD/month for the most essential communication tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, I was framing more of a "is this possible situation"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I'm guessing most companies save costs and use AWS instead of GSuite for > managing employees and more.

You are incorrect.

SES isn't a substitute for GSuite. It's a substitute for other mail delivery services like SendGrid or Mailgun -- a tool for _programmatically_ sending emails, typically to customers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So this is my design and proposal :

This is applicable for mostly startups that don't have a lot of employees and this can help them cut costs to some extents in the beginning by not getting GSuite or other similar services.

\- The company's admin on AWS verifies their domain on AWS SES.

\- Employees create an account on GMail exclusively for work.

\- Admin creates a Lambda function to map emails to employee email addresses.

\- Each email address is verified and then SMTP server is set up.

I'm not saying startups should use this since GSuite is cheap in itself but in theory, this is doable unless I'm missing something and sounds like a good workaround I guess.</comment>